Travel Courses (TRAVL-UG)

This online course provides an opportunity for students studying abroad to reflect, analytically and creatively, on their travel experiences. We examine the art created by travelers—travel literature, photography, paintings—and consider how traveling can itself be viewed as an art, with its own conventions, styles, traditions, and opportunities for innovation. All of the course activities are conducted on the class website: students blog about their responses to the readings and their own travels, post photos, and comment on each other’s posts. Enrollment is limited to students studying at one of NYU’s study abroad sites. Reading assignments include Alain de Botton’s The Art of Travel as well as books relevant to the city and country of each study-abroad site. For more information, visit the course website: travelstudies.org.

London is a Victorian city: the years during which Queen Victoria reigned (1837-1901) marked its development as one of the first truly modern, global metropolises. Charles Dickens is the most important novelistic voice of that city, producing unforgettable images of its streets, its people, and its institutions throughout his writing career. In this course, we engage a study of the writer and his works through the exploration of London as a modern urban space. We'll begin the course with Dickens' journalism, setting it in the context of the rise and expansion of the periodical press, and focus our attention on some of the major urban issues that arose in the mid-century: slum clearance, policing, the rise of the middle class, education, and environmental issues, such as the need for a modern sewage system, that arose in a rapidly expanding urban space. We will then turn to two of Dickens' novels: Oliver Twist (1837-39) and Bleak House (1852-53). How does the novel "write" the city? How does the city shape the form of the novel? Punctuating and enriching our reading and discussion of these novels and the city they imagine and depict, we'll participate in guided walks, visit museums, and hear from guest speakers to learn more about Dickens' London and contrast it with the London of today.

The sport of football (soccer) has gripped the minds and hearts of billions across the world. From workers in a local rum shop to noted philosophers and writers, devotees of the sport have commented on the poetics and politics of football, arguing that it has the power to transform identities, space, and bodies. With a specific focus on post-World War I European history, nationalism, race, and gender, this course examines the way football has been used to shape national identity, to bolster ideologies of the state, and as a tool to publicly litigate national, racial and ethnic, and gendered myths. How does the evolution of the old Latin adage panem et circenses (bread and circuses) from pan y toro (bread and bulls) to pan y fútbol (bread and soccer) help us to understand the politics of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and the peculiar role of football in state governance? How are Catalan and Basque identities re-imagined through football clubs during Spain's transition to democracy? What role do literature and cinema play in this reconstruction of identity? By focusing on the spectacle of Spanish, English, and French football and its intersections with the histories of politics (national and colonial), media, and cultural production, this course examines the creation and reproduction of national narratives in the European and colonial sphere.

From the arrival of the Umayyids in 711 until the fall of the Emirate of Granada in 1492, Muslims created a vibrant and cosmopolitan civilization in Spain where arts, philosophy, science, and different communities of faith flourished. Al-Andalus emerged as a hub of cultural and intellectual exchange amongst Muslims, Christians, and Jews. The renowned Muslim philosopher Ibn Rushd, who wrote extensive commentaries of Aristotle, was born in Cordoba. So did Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher and Talmudic scholar. Ibn Rushd and Maimonedes joined a long list of philosophers, physicians, astronomers who contributed richly to the expansion of knowledge during Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula. " Europe"s relationship with Islam remains problematic as it often involves cultural essentialism and "othering." The arrival of increasing numbers of Muslim immigrants and refugees in Europe in recent decades has reinforced the negative perception of Islam. Islamic Spain offers useful and necessary historical context to explore the deep, productive, meaningful, and less antagonistic exchanges between Europe and Islam. Studying the Islamic past of the Iberian Peninsula will allow us to develop useful insights regarding a complex, multilingual, polyethnic, and pluralistic society. By situating Al-Andalus as a part of the European experience, we will move away from the Eurocentric and exclusivist notions of historiography that stress the Reconquista as a point of inflection. Instead, we will recover the dynamic society that existed before then. Islamic Spain defies Orientalist notions of Islam through its accommodation of diverse theological positions and pluralistic philosophies rooted within the Islamic tradition.

THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT N.Y.U. BERLIN. Application: http://gallatin.nyu.edu/utilities/forms/summersaapp.html   For more information: https://gallatin.nyu.edu/academics/global/travelcourses/berlin.html   Description: Some of the most thrilling, momentous, and terrible events of the 1900s occurred in Berlin, which present tales of warning and inspiration to the present century. This four-week interdisciplinary seminar tracks these major events and traces change through the study of primary materials (literature, film, art, buildings, music, political discourse) and secondary readings drawn from a range of disciplines including history, sociology, philosophy, and critical theory. Berlin's streets, buildings, memorials, and cultural monuments offer cautionary tales about the folly of nationalist ambition; inspiring sagas of intellectual and physical courage; cold testimonials of crime and retribution; lyrical ballads of brutal honesty; personal records of hope and despair. From one perspective, all of these narratives are episodes in an epic whose grand and central scene is World War II; this is the point of view to be adopted in this course. Students will take in many of the sights and sounds of old and contemporary Berlin but will focus on the involvement of twentieth-century, Berlin-based politicians, activists, artists, architects, bohemians, writers, and intellectuals with the causes, experience, and consequences of World War II. Our period of study begins just before the outbreak of World War I and ends during the astonishing building boom of the post-Wall 1990s and early 2000s.

This course explores the longstanding and complex relationship between the Irish and African diasporas as a means of engaging broader themes of ethnoracial groupmaking, post/coloniality, and inequality in multicultural democracies.  People of Irish and African descent have lived in close proximity for four centuries-- a result of transatlantic migration, forced and otherwise. Relations between the two groups have been marked by both conflict and collaboration, shaped by prevailing conceptions of identity, hierarchies of belonging, and access to pathways of upward mobility in “new” world societies. In the last two decades, however, Ireland has become the site of that encounter. A booming “Celtic Tiger” economy of the 1990s has transformed an emigrant society into an immigrant one, as migrants from around the world have relocated there. As a growing population of Irish citizens of African descent has come of age, the country is grappling with new questions about what it means to be Irish, be it by way of birth, passport, immigration, ancestry, or culture—in Ireland now. Given these changes, Ireland is an ideal site to engage some of the most pressing questions of our time: What is required to create a multicultural democracy? How can belonging that doesn’t depend on sameness be made real? What counts as “same” and “different”? How do societies manage the ordeal of integration?  The course takes place mainly in Dublin with short trips to the west of Ireland and Belfast. Site visits may include the EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Frederick Douglass Walking Tour and the Ulster Museum, among others.