New York University

Course Description

Why is beauty so powerful? What attracts us to someone or something beautiful? In this course, we will begin with the most fundamental question of all: What is beauty? To explore this question, we will explore how philosophers, artists, writers, and psychologists have understood the term. We will then consider the fate of beauty in the twentieth century leading up to the present. Of critical importance is the question of how beauty fits into our lives and whether beauty is an objective feature of things or a feature determined by context. In addition to museum and gallery trips, students will compose essays and work on a research project. Texts may include works from Plato, Kant, Baudelaire, Mann, Arthur Danto, and Nancy Etcoff.

Course Description

This course looks at the way the modern and post-modern city has been—and is being—imagined by writers, artists, urban planners, architects, philosophers, and historians. Our focus will be on concepts of the city and theories of urban experience, especially in relation to ideas about modernity. We will read, discuss and write about urban environments of the past, present, and future, including real cities like New York, Paris, and L.A., and cities dreamed up by urbanists like Paolo Soleri and Le Corbusier. We will consider the urban phenomena of the crowd, the neighborhood, notions of public and private space, and the cultural mix of the modern city. Students will conduct research projects on cities in their areas of interest. Texts may include essays by writers and philosophers Poe, Baudelaire, Barthes, and Benjamin; by urbanists Jacobs, Mumford, Mike Davis, and Matt Gandy, as well as visual sources.

Course Description

How do we shape the stories we tell ourselves about our lives? And, conversely, how do the stories we tell ourselves about our lives shape us? At the interface of what lies on the printed page and what lies within individual memory lies a process of interpretation and manipulation—the process of writing. This course will explore how memories are "written" in order to help students sharpen their own writing. The process of writing a series of critical papers over the course of the semester will serve as background for the final research paper. Readings and film will include Plato, Kurosawa, Sigmund Freud, Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and Italo Calvino.

Course Description

Myths, fables, folk tales, and fairy tales are universal. Their heroes, villains, gods and monsters are as old as storytelling and as new as the latest award-winning film. In this class we will examine some of these stories and their histories, watching the shifts in emphasis as they are retold and adapted, but also considering why certain mythic figures, such as the vampire, gain greater currency in contemporary tales. Our research will focus on old and new versions of tales, their cultural construction and the critical discourse surrounding them. It will serve as the springboard for a series of exercises focused on research methods, several short writing assignments, and a major research paper. Sources will include, but not be limited to, selections from works by: J.R.R. Tolkien, Disney, Ovid, Apuleius, Charles Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Angela Carter, Bruno Bettelheim, Joseph Campbell, Jack Zipes, and Nina Auerbach.

Course Description

Can language affect politics? How have writers and activists sought to change society through changing language? How is rhetoric used politically, in essays, oratory, propaganda, and poetry? We will read arguments about the relationship of language and the political, examine political rhetoric, and look at literary works. We will write about rhetoric's power to form and criticize political movements, such as movements for civil rights, rights for women, human rights, workers' rights, and animal rights. We will explore how language participates in our ideas about rights, ethics, political action, and social justice. In the course of our inquiries, students will write three papers and one longer project, in which students research an area of social justice vital to them. Our sources may include passages from Plato, Thomas Jefferson, Mary Wollstonecraft, Thomas Paine, Karl Marx, Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Martin Luther King, Jr., Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Spike Lee, and Ursula LeGuin.

Course Description

We love food and it haunts us. We indulge in it and abstain from it. It makes us sick and it heals us. We worry over where it comes from and serve it during our religious rituals. We pay a fortune for it and we give it away. Its preparation is a science and an art. With a major focus on crafting the research essay, this course asks students to consider the many, often contradictory, roles food has played, and continues to play, in culture. And through a process of writing, workshopping, and the all-important rewriting, students will have their own hand in the kitchen of the essay writer. Readings require a consideration of a variety of food writing—from primary sources, cookbooks, newspapers, magazines, and journals—and include works by David Foster Wallace, M.F.K. Fisher, John McPhee, Ruth Reichl, A.J. Liebling, and Michael Pollan.

Course Description

What is the connection between sleeping and waking life, between dream visions and creativity? Are dreams prophetic or aesthetic? Do they fulfill desire or endlessly frustrate it? Do they reveal or conceal our truest selves? Taking these issues as our starting points, we will consider a variety of texts—scientific, religious, philosophical, literary, visual, and film, as well as our own dreams—as we explore the connections between sleep and aesthetics, between nightmares and trauma, between dreams and beauty. We will think too about the possibilities art offers for reconciling the many paradoxes of dreaming. Using writing as a way of thinking and reading critically, students will produce a dream journal, three analytical and literary critical essays, and a research paper. Readings may include works by Aristotle, Sigmund Freud, André Breton, Ralph Ellison, Jack Kerouac, Luis Borges, Lewis Carroll, Emily Dickinson, Anne Sexton, and Walt Whitman. We may also consider art by Surrealists, Dadaists and Kara Walker, as well as the films of Luis Buñuel, David Cronenberg, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Course Description

In this course we will examine the complex and varying experiences of recent immigrant populations. We will explore the perspectives of immigrants who see themselves as outsiders and the experiences of immigrants who see themselves as insiders within a relocated immigrant ethnic culture. We will consider what these perspectives show us about belonging and alienation, about being part of a group or being the "Other." This course asks: What does it mean to be an immigrant today? What logistical, legal, emotional and psychological issues does it entail? What differences are there between 20th century immigrants' experiences and the lives of 21st century transnational immigrants? We will read and discuss fictional accounts drawn from actual immigrants' experiences and will supplement these with numerous historical, anthropological, autobiographical, literary critical and journalistic works. Students will write several essays throughout the semester, which will prepare them for the research paper. Readings may include fiction by Samuel Selvon, Jamaica Kincaid and Jhumpa Lahiri, in addition to theoretical and historical texts by Benedict Anderson and Roger Daniels, among others, as well as social criticism by Barbara Ehrenreich.

Course Description

The Surrealist movement sought to transform the self and the world, each one by way of the other. The world was to be remodeled in the image of the liberated psyche, alienation and repression overcome by a passionate exchange between the self and its environment. Inside and outside would continually change places as the psyche discovered its own desires written in the cipher of material things and assimilated these fragments of reality into its language of dreams. Inanimate objects would come to life, speaking the language of the self, while the self would take its place among them as a fellow thing of the world. This class will explore Surrealism as a method of perceiving the material world and a model for living in it. Students will write essays based on close readings of literary and theoretical texts, as well as a research essay. Readings may include texts by Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Rosalind Krauss, Mary Ann Caws, Fredric Jameson, and James Clifford; poetry and prose by André Breton, Louis Aragon, Aimé Césaire, Claude Cahun, Djuna Barnes, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery.

Course Description

In Three Guineas, Virginia Woolf refers to photographs as "statement[s] of fact addressed to the eye." Because of their unique claim to realistic representation, photographs are a potent form of polemic at work in our everyday world. But what exactly is the relationship of the image to the things it seems to document? How does it indicate what has been? Through a series analytical essays and a research essay we will explore the space between images and what they represent (and evoke). We will consider works by Andre Breton, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Guy Debord, and Lev Manovich among others, for whom reflections on the act of looking and thinking are just as important as descriptions of images themselves.

Course Description

A blindfolded woman holding scales aloft: the classic allegory of Justice might suggest that justice is an abstraction. It also represents justice as tied to a state of equilibrium, which can be completely restored. Yet justice itself is very difficult to define, shifting its meanings over time, between cultures and among individuals; can we presume such a balance? Is justice really only an effect of power, the right of the strong to define the terms under which the weak live? How are law and justice connected? While these seem to be questions for political philosophers, they have also been addressed by literary writers. In this course, our focus will be on how literary texts take up these problems at different junctures primarily in the Western tradition. We will also read some jurists and critical theorists on what constitutes justice—and for whom. Readings may include Plato, Aeschylus, Herman Melville, Bertolt Brecht, Richard Wright, Immanuel Kant, John Rawls, Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Martha Nussbaum, and Nadine Gordimer. Assignments will include a variety of forms of writing, including a research essay in which students will seek to integrate their thinking with that of our authors.

Course Description

W.G. Sebald contended that our lives are decisively shaped by "slight inner adjustments" of which we are barely conscious. History is also radically changed by things of apparently trivial size—the rise of a degree Fahrenheit that remaps the globe, the splitting of an atom that destroys a city—our perception of consequence often turns on a paradox of magnitude. Attention to seemingly minor matters will be both the methodology and the subject of this seminar; through rigorous close reading and writing practices we will develop a keen attention to the details of our own work, and also move toward an informal philosophy of small things. How does Freud read an entire psyche from a slight, seemingly inconsequential tic? How does Proust's Remembrance emerge from crumbs in the shallow bowl of his teacup? We will read fiction, history, memoir, and theory, all devoted to small coincidences and minor figures, and we will view art that attends to those tiny things that can utterly reinvent our lives. Students' research may focus on anything from nanotechnology to Gertrude Stein's critique of the comma, but with the aim of discovering what makes the small matter so much. Readings will include works by Franz Kafka, Genevieve Jurgensen, Sigmund Freud, Carlo Ginzburg, Marcel Proust, and Susan Stewart among others.

Course Description

George Orwell wrote that one of the "great motivations" of all writers is "political purpose." At the same time, Orwell highlighted the inherent tensions between political and artistic writing, especially writing about contemporary international politics. In this course, we will explore the many and sometimes conflicting aims and effects of writing in response to contemporary international conflicts and crises. In addition to reading novels, memoirs, and scholarship that responded to or became implicated in the Cold War and Islamist jihad, we will explore the role of human rights journalism in stopping recent genocides, as well as the writings of presidential advisors and speechwriters who helped formulate international policies of the Cold War and the War on Terror. Readings will include Norman Mailer, Azar Nafisi, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Anderson Cooper, Susan Moeller, George Kennan, and George Ball. These texts will be the focus of several critical essays that students will write over the course of the semester, culminating in a final research paper in which students will integrate their own analysis with that of other scholars and critics.

Course Description

Ideology is a system of ideas that shapes politics and society, and in so doing transforms people as well. In this course, students study the lived experience of ideology, contemplating what it means to contend with conflicting ideologies, and how those ideologies shape an individual life. We will explore different disciplinary approaches to the study of ideology, reading philosophy, literary criticism, history, and critical theory, at the same time examining the incorporation of political and moral ideas into everyday life. By bridging the gap between the theoretical and the practical, we will study how ideology changes a person's understanding of the self. Readings will include key works on capitalism, fascism, and communism, including Adolf Hitler, Karl Marx, and Leon Trotsky, as well as memoirs, poems, letters, and other accounts that capture the subjective experience of ideological conflict, including Horatio Alger Jr., W. H. Auden, Pasha Angelina, and Tommaso Marinetti. Students will conduct research projects on ideologies connected to their areas of interest. Readings may also include Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Frantz Fanon, Betty Friedan, Henri Lefebvre, Georges Perec, and Slavoj Zizek.

Course Description

While the novel has been regarded as a vehicle for the highest artistic achievement, it has also been derided as a repository of empty, time-wasting fantasy. It has been seen as the quintessential modern literary form, crucial in the shaping of Western identity, but its origins are ancient and novels have been written in most languages within cultures throughout the world. It is a form much favored by scholars of literature, and yet it has often been appropriated for extra-literary purposes—as fonts of philosophical insight, sources of historical and anthropological information, and models for psychological and sociological writing. In this class we will approach these paradoxes and other problems having to do with the uses of the novel. Students will research, draft, and write three papers on topics such as: Where and when did the novel originate? Why are some novels considered "genre fiction" and others considered "art"? Do novels have particularly powerful psychological and didactic effects? Do novels reflect and disseminate ideas? What makes novels autobiographical? Historical? Philosophical? Readings may include novels by authors such as Defoe, Dickens, Emily Brontë, Dostoevsky, Wharton, Fitzgerald, and Joyce, as well as works from outside the Western canon, popular fiction, and essays on the history of publishing and readership.

Course Description

American religion, historian Nathan Hatch writes, has "less to do with the specifics of polity and governance and more with the incarnation of the church into popular culture." Although Hatch was writing about the nineteenth century, this complex relationship between the popular and the liturgical continues to shape and define America today. In this course, we will study and write about ways in which film, television, advertising, music, sports, and the news media present, negotiate, and affect religious issues, and, conversely, how religion changes popular culture. We will "read" primary texts of popular religion and popular culture, such as Billy Graham's sermons, Mormon pageants, Madonna videos, baseball games, and the Left Behind novels, films and video games, as well as theoretical works by Jean Baudrillard, Elaine Graham, Peter Williams, Kate McCarthy, Eric Mazur, Susan Mizruchi, Richard Santana and Gregory Erickson. Students will be encouraged to explore topics of their own interest, and assignments will include reaction papers, various essay forms, and individual research projects.

Course Description

How was the concept of environmental sustainability born? How did the idea of sustainability transform into the goal of sustainable development? Is innovation helping or hindering achieving the aims of sustainable development? These are some of the questions we will address in this course. While working to define sustainability within various contexts, students will explore how the complexity of a particular system can complicate the task of sustaining it. Building off of a diverse set of texts, we will examine the concept of sustainability from many different perspectives including agriculture, economic development, health care, international law, urban planning, engineering, and religion. Readings may include texts by Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Elinor Ostrom, Norman Borlaug, Kirkpatrick Sale, Sally Goerner, Richard Norgaard, Sharachchandra Lélé, David Pearce, Janis Birkeland, and Geoffrey Heal. Students will write several critical essays throughout the semester culminating in a final research paper.

Course Description

In this course, we will examine several questions that arise for students interested in the relation of theory to interdisciplinary study. What is theory essentially? How does it help us to develop approaches and shape questions for study? What are some influential theoretical schools and theoreticians? What do they say and how might they be related to one another? We will proceed through readings from Structuralism to Post-structuralism, focusing on language, feminism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction and interpretations of power and discourse. Authors considered may include Levi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray.

Course Description

What kinds of people are scientists? What can we learn by studying their lives? How, if at all, do scientific lives differ from other lives? Do scientists possess unique insights that justify their privileged position in our society? How has the relationship between scientists and society changed over time? This course explores the nature of science, its history, and its place in our culture through a selective study of the lives of scientists. Our main sources will be biographies and autobiographies. Emphasis will be placed on the process of the creation of scientific knowledge, the relationship between science and politics, economics, philosophy, and religion, and the dissemination and application of scientific knowledge. There will be some attention paid as well to issues involving women and minorities in the sciences, to scientific biography as a genre, and to studies of science as a profession. Readings may include Gleick, Isaac Newton, Darwin, Autobiography, Segrè, Faust in Copenhagen, Watson, The Double Helix, Wilson, Naturalist, and Shapin, The Scientific Life.

Course Description

The Arabian Nights (The Thousand and One Nights) is one of the most fascinating "world" texts. Since its translation to and publication in European languages it has captivated the imagination of countless writers and artists such as Poe, Joyce, Borges, Mahfouz, Rushdie, and Pasolini. It continues to plays a disproportionate role in constructing and perpetuating an essentialized and imaginary East, populated by violent and hypersexual beings. The narratives of the Nights and the cultural archive they have spawned have had a fascinating influence on literary and artistic production, popular culture and political imagination. The course introduces students to this important world masterpiece and the debates surrounding it. We will start out by briefly tracing the genealogy of this collectively authored and anonymous text, its collection and versions and the cultural context of its translation and popularity in the west. We will then explore the literary structure and narrative strategies and dynamics of the Nights, read some of its most famous cycles and discuss how they have been read from a variety of perspectives, focusing primarily gender and sexuality, power and politics, and otherness and boundaries. In the last part of the course we will read some of the modern literary works inspired by the Nights (Borges, Mahfouz, and Rushdie) and will watch how the Nights fared in adaptations in Hollywood, Bollywood, and elsewhere and will end with a film by the Italian director Pasolini. All readings will be in English. In addition to the Nights, readings may include Said, Mahfouz, Borges, Rushdie and others.

Course Description

The premise of this course is that there is no great political philosophy in the American tradition—the Federalist Papers do not rival Plato or Marx—but that profound thinking about politics does occur—in the literary art of Melville, Faulkner, Ellison, Mailer, and Morrison among others. Moreover, formally "political" writers, like Madison and Hamilton, present a world that seems antithetical to the world presented by, say, Melville and Morrison: one depicts rational bargaining and self-interested contracts among men in markets and legislatures, whereas the other depicts racial and sexual violence, rape and slavery, in claustrophobic domestic spaces or in nature on frontiers. One depicts rationality and progress, the other madness and tragedy. The literature thus makes visible what is made invisible by prevailing forms of political science and American political thought, not only the constitutive power of race, gender, and sex, but also the deep narrative forms structuring the culture. We therefore ask several basic questions. First, what accounts for this difference and how shall we understand it? Second, what can we learn about (American) political life if we read literature as a form of political theory? But third, do we lose what is precious about literary art if we reduce it to an argument about politics? Or is the literary/aesthetic character of a work—the ways it uses language and narrative to create both ambiguity and meaning—an important part of what it can teach us about politics and political theorizing? To pursue these questions we focus on Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Herman Melville's Moby Dick, and Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark and Beloved.

Course Description

This course examines Shakespeare's Mediterranean plays in relation to the cultural geography of the early modern period. It also provides a brief introduction to the new field of "ocean studies" and includes readings in marine environmental studies. We focus on the ways in which the various cultures around the Mediterranean opened emotional, physical, imaginative and political possibilities for English subjects, as exemplified in Shakespeare's plays and other contemporary readings. But that also means considering the sea as a space of economic and political possibility and threat; exploring the differences created by intermingling gender, genre and diverse geographies; analyzing romance and comedy and their relation to travel writing; tracing how early map making relates to other kinds of representation; examining the attraction, fear, and representation of what is considered exotic or foreign. Our work will link this past to our present in two ways especially: how do early modern travel accounts and literary art, as well as maps and prints, represent divisions between the Christian and Muslim worlds in ways that remain powerful? How does this maritine past create an environmental history that continues to affect us? Our readings begin with Mediterranean comedies by the classical Greek playwright Plautus, as well as classical geographies and selections from Vergil's Aeneid. We then turn to late medieval/early modern fictional accounts of the Mediterranean, such as Boccaccio's Decameron, and Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, Othello and other plays. Lastly, we read "the captive's tale" in Don Quixote, historical accounts of captivity including pirate narratives, and texts by Arab travelers about Europe in this period.

Course Description

Baseball As a Road to God aims to link literature about our national pastime with the study of philosophy and theology. This seminar aims to blend ideas contained in classic baseball novels such as Coover's Universal Baseball Association, Kinsella's Iowa Baseball Confederation, and Malamud's The Natural with those found in such philosophical/theological works as Eliade's Sacred and Profane, Heschel's God in Search of Man, and James' Varieties of Religious Experience. It discusses such themes as the metaphysics of sports, the notions of sacred time and space, and the idea of baseball as a civil religion. Not for the faint-hearted, this course requires students to read over two dozen works of varying lengths in addition to supplemental readings as they might arise. Weekly papers are also required. As with any serious commitment of one's time, the rewards of taking a seminar such as this can be great.

Course Description

Pass/fail only. Open to Gallatin juniors and seniors who plan to take their colloquium between Fall, 2010, and Spring, 2011. In this class we will survey methods of interdisciplinary study and ask you to consider how they operate within your own concentration. By the end of the semester you will have drafted, revised, and completed your colloquium rationale. The Symposium will be organized in three phases. In phase I, we will survey conceptual frameworks that help expose recurring concepts and methods of individualized study. These include frameworks for 1) finding the history of your topic and ideas, 2) understanding how you have learned to compare ideas or practices (i.e. across cultures, belief systems, disciplines), 3) analyzing the forms (i.e. media, rhetoric, genre, etc.) of representation and expression pertinent to your topic, 4) reflecting upon the relevance of your non-classroom, experiential learning. The first phase of the course will include several faculty guest lectures and opportunities to form students working groups organized around common concentration interests. In phase II, the class will not meet as a group; rather, students will meet with their working groups, advisers, and course instructors as they draft a rationale that precipitates and anticipates the inquiry to be undertaken in the colloquium. In phase III, the class will resume as a group to share rationales and booklists, develop strategies for the colloquium, and continue the exchange of ideas within student working groups.

Course Description

We are in the midst of a revolution. Computers permeate nearly every aspect of our life, yet we understand relatively little about how they work, their historical development, and their impact on our selves and society. Computing is transforming our economic and political landscape, bringing with it new possibilities and problems. In this course we will explore this ever changing and rapidly expanding terrain, paying special attention to how computers and the Internet are transforming how we experience and understand identity and community, control and liberation, simulation and authenticity, creation and collaboration, and the practice of democracy. Authors whose works we will read include: Plato, Lewis Mumford, Jorge Luis Borges, Lawrence Lessig, Henry Jenkins, Jean Baudrillard, the Critical Art Ensemble, Bill Gates, Donna Haraway, Ellen Ullman, Clay Shirky and Yochai Benkler.

Course Description

This seminar focuses on the study of literature and literary criticism. Through close reading of a range of literary forms, including short stories, novels, plays, and narrative essays, we identify the conventions that characterize each genre and that invite various strategies of reading. In addition to the formal analysis of each work, we will consider theoretical approaches to literature—for example, historical, feminist, and psychoanalytic—that draw on questions and concepts from other disciplines. Attention will be given to the transaction between the reader and the text. The aim of the course is to encourage students to make meaning of literary works and to hone their skills in written interpretation. Authors may include Chekhov, Hawthorne, Wharton, Bellow, Beckett, Baldwin, Woolf, Morrison, Gordimer, and Erdrich.

Course Description

This seminar examines the tradition of poetic protest in the African Diaspora. From the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude to the Black Liberation Movement of the 60's and today's Hip-Hop/Rap explosion, poets, lyricists and rap/hip-hop artists have sought to reclaim and reshape images of themselves and their communal experiences. Through comparative and critical analysis of historical works, songs, and poetry, we will come to a deeper understanding of the common thematic and aesthetic approaches of these movements as they continue to alter the discourse on race and liberation. Texts may include Michael Richardson, ed., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean; David L. Lewis, ed., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader; Tricia Rose, Black Noise; films such as Euzhan Palcy, Sugar Cane Alley, and Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant, Style Wars; and samples from Langston Hughes, NWA, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, KRS-One, OutKast, Dead Prez, Public Enemy, and Tupac Shakur.

Course Description

Embodiment, or the fact that we live "in," "through," or "as" bodies, has profound implications for our experience of existence. The course builds on the assumption that this human body is meaningful, symbolic, and questionable; it is therefore important and worthy of reflection and study. We look first at the philosophical roots of Western mind-body dualism, reading Plato and Descartes, and explore Susan Bordo's analysis of the effects such a perspective may have on our lives (Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body). We then pursue some alternative understandings, both non-Western and Western, including the Dao De Ching and Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind.

Course Description

The role of the gods in human affairs inevitably raises the question of fate and free will. The epics, from the ancient world to the Renaissance, frequently reflect and define this debate. This course examines how the epics of Homer, Vergil, Dante and Milton not only mirror the philosophical and theological perceptions of the period, but sometimes forecast future debates on the issue. Readings may include the Epic of Gilgamesh, Iliad or Odyssey, Aeneid, and Divine Comedy, as well as selections from Plato's Protagoras or Aristotle's Ethics, Cicero's De Fato, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and Fromm's Escape From Freedom.

Course Description

The cultural legacy of the Middle Ages continues to challenge and enchant us: its soaring architecture, its large philosophical and theological questions, its magnificent art, literature, and music. This course explores the genius of the medieval mind and its transcendent vision of life. A major focus of the course will be a study of the Realist-Nominalist controversy spurred by Aquinas and Ockham and its effect on writers such as Chaucer and Dante, as well as on the painting, music, and architecture of the period. Readings may include selections from Dante's Inferno, Aquinas' Summa Theologica, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the writings of the Pearl Poet. The course may include field trips to the Cloisters, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a performance of medieval music.

Course Description

The tension between free expression and social control has shadowed the Great American Conversation since the birth of this country. The constitutional ideal that our government "shall make no law" abridging free speech has given way, in fact, to laws that limit discussion, ostensibly for the public good. Likewise, new media technologies advance our ability to access and exchange ideas and information, but raise new questions as to the limits of such dialogue. This course, then, addresses the delicate balance between free speech and democracy, guided by our readings of Plato's Republic, Lippmann's Public Opinion, and McChesney's Our Unfree Press. We also examine important Supreme Court decisions that have shaped First Amendment rights in regard to hate speech, pornography, corporate control of mass media, and the rights of journalists. With this foundation, we ask: Are there any forms of free speech that should be restricted? If so, which? And, who should decide?

Course Description

Long before Socrates discovered that the philosopher's life is a rehearsal for death, before priests and doctors in Medieval and Renaissance Europe practiced ars moriendi (the art of dying), before the German Romantics penned lyrics of lamentation at the loss of love, and before Sigmund Freud proclaimed that the goal of life is death—the pagan world honored death as a god and created rituals to honor the god's presence in life. In this course we enter into rituals of death and renewal, both ancient and modern, to guide us through our own death experiences in the midst of life. The experience of death-in-life is met only by taking the threatened discontinuity into a higher continuity that tradition calls the "culture of soul." Pagan mysteries of initiation, Greek tragedy and myth, the transformative operations of alchemy, and the modern psychoanalytic rituals of Freud, Jung and Winnicott give voice to the culture which soul has crafted out of its own deep and timeless wounds. Texts may include: Burkert's Ancient Mystery Cults, Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, Freud's Beyond The Pleasure Principle, Von franz's On Dreams and Death, readings from Buddha's teaching on "Impermanence" and Marlan's Black Sun.

Course Description

This course examines the concept of culture through its forms of communication. The shift from orality to literacy and on to electronic processing has important consequences for the social, political, and economic structures within a culture. If we take as axiomatic that every culture wishes to preserve itself through its forms of communication, we then need to ask ourselves which forms of communication are best suited for this purpose. What happens to cultures when traditional forms of communication are forced to compete with the newer technologies? What do we mean by "knowledge" in the age of information? The impact of written narrative on orality will be discussed as well as the changes brought about by the invention of the printing press. We will examine the development of electronic media including the newer technologies such as the Internet and analyze their effects on individual and cultural levels. Readings may include Plato's Phaedrus, Ong's Orality and Literacy, Achebe's Things Fall Apart, McLuhan's Understanding Media, and selected readings on Internet culture.

Course Description

How does narrative create a sense of identity and give value to our lives? What are the ethical implications of looking at knowledge as a construction of narrative? The concept of narrative is currently used across disciplines to describe how people, texts, and institutions create meaning. This course will explore the idea that stories organize our thinking and our lives. We will begin with Plato's ideas on tragedy and Aristotle's Poetics, which later narrative explorations emulate and challenge. Our reading of Cervantes's Don Quixote, Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist, and Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting will investigate the ways fictional texts radically reinvent literary forms and question social conventions. The works of critics such as Bakhtin, Chatman, Schafer, and Iser will reveal how narrative has been adopted as both a theoretical model and a methodology within a variety of fields. Students will carry out projects that explore narrative trends within their particular areas of interest.

Course Description

This course will focus on an eclectic group of mostly contemporary, politically-directed writers and artists from various ethnic or racial minority backgrounds. We begin with performance proper, and then narrow our focus to discuss what elements of performance are incorporated into narrative text to produce "performative writing." Does minority positioning affect the content, structure, and manner in which these artists perform or write, and in turn, how they are received? How might sexual/gender politics nuance that positioning? Rather than seeking division under the rubric of "national literature," or the multicultural versions such as "African-American" or "Asian-American" writers/artists, the course will look for structural and contextual models that cross these categories—concern with oral histories and family-community genealogies, for example. We will also analyze how specific power politics inform these artists' activities across their broadly diverse sociocultural, ethnic, and geopolitical contexts. Artists and texts may include: Amiri Baraka, Ruth Ozeki, Japanese butoh dance and the Takarazuka all-women theater troupe, Ntozake Shange, William Faulkner, Brecht, Foucault.

Course Description

Ecological science and environmentalism appear to be relatively recent developments, but they have long and deep roots in our culture. Their interrelated histories, their connections to broader intellectual, cultural, social and political trends, their sometimes tenuous relationship to one another over the past century, and their continuing interactions in the discourse over the fate of nature constitute the subject of this course. Topics include the Protestant roots of both ecology and environmentalism, myths of the primitive (biological, anthropological, etc.), the transfer of metaphors between social theory and ecology, changing views of equilibrium and balance in nature, conservative and postmodern critiques of ecology, and recent debates over biodiversity, global warming, and environmental justice. Readings may include Paul Colinvaux, Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare, Rachel Carson, Silent Spring, Michael Lewis, Inventing Global Ecology, Vandermeer and Perfecto, Breakfast of Biodiversity, and DiMento and Doughman, Climate Change, as well as selections from Linnaeus, Darwin, Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, and a variety of contemporary ecologists and environmentalists.

Course Description

This course is about dissent in a double sense: criticizing accepted ethical values, and criticizing old ways of philosophical thought about ethics. It is about affirmative ethics, not just criticism. Topics will grow from student questions and concerns, as well as the professor's. Suggested topics include viewpoints and skills to: (1) Criticize unjust ethical standards, e. g. sexist ones, and invent fair ones; (2) Choose ethical careers and life paths; (3) Recognize responsibilities to the larger community; (4) Resolve ethical dilemmas; (5) Justify visions of a better world; (6) Dialogue productively with adversaries; (7) Respect different ethical positions without "anything goes;" (8) Learn, and question, and still have principles; (9) Get beyond dead-end debate on idealism/realism, egotism/altruism, objectivism/relativism? (When is it justified to defeat adversies politically, as with civil rights laws? Is force justified, as in the American Civil War?) Readings from feminist, pragmatist, existentialist, ecological, nonviolence and conflict resolution, neo-classical, Marxist, and humanistic and developmental psychology approaches—as alternatives to mainstream Kantian and utilitarian ethics. Authors include de Beauvoir, Dewey, Emerson, Gandhi, Gilligan, James, Kohlberg, Marx, Maslow, Nietzsche, Nussbaum, Rogers, Sartre.

Course Description

In this class we will take a visit to London in the years 1590 to 1616, in search of Shakespeare and the London in which he lived and wrote. During this period, London at the height of its Renaissance power, was a center of dramatic arts unparalleled in the rest of Europe. Volumes of plays were written, theaters were built all over London, and each day, during the season, those theaters were filled with audiences who were drawn from every social and economic class and both genders. Theater was a craze. It was the center of cultural life in London. And in the center of this remarkably, vibrant creative world, Shakespeare was a superstar. We will examine the city of London, Shakespeare, and theater from literary, historical, political and cultural perspectives. Our consideration of the theater will be in relation to the roles women played as performers and to other forms of popular entertainment, such as dancing and mountebank performances. We will read a selection of plays written by Shakespeare such as As You Like It, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, Othello, and The Tempest. We will also see film versions of some of the plays and go to the New York theatre.

Course Description

This course is intended as an exploration of language as vehicle for processes of globalization. What role did language play in the changes wrought by early capitalist transformations and the colonial expansion? Conversely, how have these global changes affected localized communities and the languages that identifies them? And why should we care? To answer these questions we will examine how the colonial experience has given rise to value-laden linguistic practices that mirror and sustain the racializing of privilege; and how the experience of language-loss encountered by voluntary and involuntary migrants can attack the integrity of the self. While ultimately concerned with language, our discussions will have a wide scope ranging from issues of political economy to collective consciousness and individual psychology. Readings will include Achino-Loeb's Silence: The Currency of Power, Anderson's Imagined Communities, Wolf's Europe and the People Without History, Hoffman's Lost in Translation, Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions, as well as selected excerpts from Edward Sapir's Culture, Language and Personality and Jameson and Miyoshi's The Cultures of Globalization.

Course Description

The body has always been a productive site for the construction of meanings, boundaries, and hierarchies. Taking the trope of the body in pre-modern Arabo-Islamic tradition(s) as its starting point, the course will examine the modes in which various discourses have inscribed themselves unto the body and competed for it. Readings and discussions will revolve around a number of interrelated questions: How was the body gendered and constructed in the early texts of the tradition? How were these representations appropriated and altered in later periods? How were desire and pleasure regulated, contained and/or celebrated ? How were religious representations of the body as a reflection of the divine appropriated by profane poetry and mystical writings? What boundaries and laws existed for the body's movement in space (particularly female), and what were the implications and punishments for violating them? How did rituals of purity deal with blood and bodily fluids? How did religious and legalistic discourses deal with otherized and marked bodies of religious and sexual minorities? Readings (in translation) will range from excerpts from the Qur'an, hadith, (Prophetic tradition) poetry, Islamic law, philosophy, and erotica.

Course Description

This seminar will investigate the cultural contributions of Africans in the formation of the contemporary Americas. There will be a particular focus on the African religious traditions that have continued and developed in spite of hostile social and political pressures. Because of their important roles in the continuations of African aesthetics, the areas of visual art, music and dance will be emphasized in the exploration of the topic. This seminar will also discuss two important African ethnic groups: the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria, and the Bakongo of Central Africa. It will highlight the American religious traditions of these cultures, e.g., Candomble Nago/Ketu, Santeria/Lucumi, Shango, Xango, etc., for the Yoruba, and Palo Mayombe, Umbanda, Macumba, Kumina, African-American Christianity, etc., for the Bakongo and other Central Africans. In the course discussions, the Americas are to include Brazil, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, the United States and numerous other appropriate locations. There will also be a focus on visual artists like Charles Abramson, Jose Bedia, Juan Boza, Lourdes Lopez, Manuel Mendive, etc., whose works are grounded in African based religions. In addition, we will explore how African religious philosophy has impacted on every-day life in the Americas, for example in the areas of international athletics, procedures of greeting and degreeting, culinary practices, etc.

Course Description

In the period of the American and French Revolutions, theater and theatricality took on powerful political significance. This course explores the convergence between theatre and politics during the Age of Revolution, while seeking parallels to the theatricality of our own political culture. Partly, we examine the historical conditions and cultural innovations that fueled writers and artists during this volatile and dynamic period between 1770 and 1850. Partly, we examine dramaturgy and theatre aesthetics exploring the links between history, and theories of drama, playwriting and stage practice, performance styles and critical reception. In addition to class discussions, students will be responsible for an extensive research project (paper and presentation). Course materials may include works by such figures as Voltaire, Rousseau, Sheridan, Blake, Schiller, Byron, Goethe, Stendhal, Robespierre, Washington, Pitt, and Paine; the music of Mozart and Beethoven; and the art of Piranesi, David, Ingres, and Delacroix.

Course Description

Course Description

How do we understand racial identity? How is race represented in popular culture and how has that representation changed over time? In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will answer such questions by focusing intensively on the black cultural studies approach to understanding race. Paying particular attention to the writings of Stuart Hall and those who have been influenced by him, we will introduce to or deepen students' knowledge of this important school of thought that has arisen out of an Afro-British context—a context that has been deeply influenced by African American experiences and political discourses. We will historicize this work, exploring antecedents to black cultural studies and the contexts in which it arises. In the process, we will be asking questions about black identities and their relationships to gender, class, and sexuality and about the African diaspora. Taking this opportunity to study the way that non-Americans look at race will help us break from commonsense and misleading notions of ethnic identity in our own country. At the end of the course, we turn our attention to the United States. Throughout, we will pay particular attention to how race plays out in popular culture. Writers to be studied will include, W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Hazel Carby, Kobena Mercer, Paul Gilroy, Isaac Julien, and Zadie Smith.

Course Description

This course examines the conceptual art movement, the hopes that shaped its political and aesthetic stratagems, and its legacy. We will begin by revisiting some of the major assumptions and conditions that catalyzed conceptualism, including the cultural climate of the 1960s, the critique of the object-status of art, concerns about the broader social function of the artist, as well as commodity culture. We will then take up our topic from various thematic vantages: the historical and philosophical question of language; the notions of "dematerialization" and documentation, particularly as aesthetic strategies aimed at "suppressing the beholder"; the practice of institutional critique and the broader idea of the world as system; the relationship between art, "information," and the technological imaginary of the times. A few seminar meetings will be dedicated to focusing on a single artist or artwork. As we proceed we will also keep an eye on the question of why and in what ways conceptualism has persisted beyond its founding moment in the late 1960s, and what its more recent iterations in artistic production—as 'global-', 'neo-', and 'post-conceptualisms'—have to offer.

Course Description

Are the outcomes of capitalist exchanges fair or unfair? Is capitalism supportive or detrimental to democratic virtues? Does the welfare state rectify the problems of capitalism or exacerbate them? John Rawls' work A Theory of Justice has greatly shaped these considerations of the welfare state. His theory refined many of the debates concerning the fairness of capitalist economic outcomes and the effects capital accumulation has on democratic virtues. According to Rawls, the welfare state in some form was necessary for capitalism to have morally acceptable outcomes. But, critics of Rawls have called into question welfare state interventions, many finding them economically inefficient and detrimental to democratic virtues. Other critics have founds Rawls' theory to be too limited in its impact, thereby supporting more extensive interventions into capital accumulation. In this course we will try to answer questions about the morality of capitalist accumulation by study ing theoretical conceptions of Rawls' work and the responses of his critics. The main texts of Rawls' critics we will consider are Nozick's Distributive Justice and Cohen's Rescuing Justice and Equality. These theoretical conceptions will be contrasted with the case studies contained in Esping-Andersen's The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism.

Course Description

As Japan entered its modern period around the turn of the twentieth century, a new literary trope appeared, into which a variety of premodern and ancient archetypes were collapsed. This is what I am calling the "dangerous woman," a powerful, sexy, and intimidating female figure who was reminiscent of, although not a replication of, earlier frightening females of the literary and dramatic tradition. This course will begin by reading a selection of premodern and ancient texts featuring various archetypes of witches, shamanesses, and female demons. Then we will examine how these figures are transformed with modernity, and what literary, social, gendered and other functions they serve as objects of male desire and fear. We will read a selection of relevant feminist literary theory alongside the fictional texts. Texts will include: Excerpts from Buddhist sutras, a Noh play, selections from The Tale of Genji, fiction by Izumi Kyoka, Enchi Fumiko, Sakaguchi Ango and Nakagami Kenji, and feminist theory by Elizabeth Grosz, Luce Irigaray, Cixous and Clement.

Course Description

In the world of political moralists, intermingled New York has and still represents the epitome of danger and evil about the American experiment—the public intermixture of classes, genders, races, sexualities, spiritualisms, and the-devil-knows-what-else!#? As elite Protestants created a refined European-affected "high brow" culture, they also created myriad "others"—a transgressive, lowly polyglot city of shadows, miscegenation, and impurity. The docks, the Bowery, The Five Points, Greenwich Village, LES/Loisaida, Chinatown, and Harlem were all forged against the repressed imaginings of the powerful and the distinguished. This peoples' Gotham, this disdained intertwined underworld of music, slang, jokes, songs, stories, foodways, and marvels of people will be the focus of this advanced research seminar. Course materials will include: Wallace & Burrow's Gotham, Burn's documentary New York, Smith's Decolonizing Methodologies, and a course reader. Research walks and visits off campus will be held during lab hours on Fridays. Students will learn how to conduct a case study using primary sources.

Course Description

Paradise or plantation? Spring break, honeymoon, or narcotics way station? First World host or IMF delinquent? Where do we locate the Caribbean? From Columbus' journals to Terry McMillan's How Stella Got Her Groove Back, the Caribbean has been buried beneath the sedimentation of imagery by and large cultivated by non-Caribbeans, including colonial governments, settlers, international tradesmen, tourist agents and their clients. Caribbean peoples have had to re-member the islands which they eventually called home—haunted by a history of slavery and still a site of consumption and exploitation. A unifying trope, Caribbean landscapes function as metaphor, emblem, symbol, or even character. This course takes an interdisciplinary (history, literature, anthropology and sociology) and transnational approach by examining the themes of race, freedom, gender, tourism and consumption in the Caribbean. As a conglomeration of nationalities, languages, and cultures, what are the connections between the historical legacy of slavery, European colonialism and migration to the Caribbean's current realities of inequality? Some of the texts we will engage are Mimi Sheller's Consuming the Caribbean, Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, and Denise Brennan's What's Love Got to Do With It: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic.

Course Description

Equating Latin America and revolution seems almost a truism. From Zapata to "Ché" to Chávez, the region's modern history is a tale of one movement promising epic change to the next, each more dramatic than the last and collectively giving rise to an image of Latin America as a cradle of firebrand leaders and riotous masses leaving in their wake endless cycles of unrest. But to look deeper into this history is to find a world of complexity, of peoples pursuing radical change but also gradual reform, at times taking up ballots and at times taking up arms, at times in the factory and at times on the farm, at times from the left and at times from the right. All of it "revolución," yes, but what kind? And through what means? And for what ends? And at what cost? This course traces the evolution of revolution in twentieth century Latin America, from the final collapse of Spanish colonialism in 1898 to the rise of chavismo in 1998. Authors may include, among others, Mariano Azuela, Eva Perón, Gustavo Gutierrez, Omar Cabezas, and Subcomandante Marcos.

Course Description

Puppets and objects used in performance collectively fall under the term "performing object." In this course we will study the history of performing objects and consider their practices in a variety of contexts including religious ceremony, political activism, and popular theatre. We will examine several "case studies" from a variety of perspectives including folklore, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and performance studies. These case studies will include the Javanese wayang kulit shadow plays, Japanese bunraku, Peter Schumann's Bread and Puppet Theater, the English Punch and Judy tradition, and Victorian toy theatres to name a few. In each study we will examine the aesthetics of the objects as well as the relationship of the manipulator to the objects and how these values and dynamics change depending on the culture and circumstance of performance. Finally we will consider contemporary performance and the use of puppetry in the work of major downtown New York theatre artists including Basil Twist, Lee Breuer, Theodora Skipitares, Great Small Works, Ralph Lee, Julie Taymor, and Dan Hurlin. Readings may include texts by John Bell, Eileen Blumenthal, André Breton, Edward Gordan Craig, Martin Heidegger, Wassily Kadinsky, Heinrich von Kleist, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Filippo Marinetti, Frank Proschan, Richard Schechner, Steve Tillis, and George Speaight.

Course Description

The idea of an America/América has been diffracted but reconstituted by a number of theorists, policymakers, (forced) laborers, artists and revolutionary activists. Each of these actors sought to craft a new existence that distinguished itself from "Old World" tyranny and tensions, particularly through the creation of imagined communities of identity (i.e. racial, political, religious or sexual). America/América proved to be an extraordinarily malleable idea that liberated, united and modernized. Yet, the narrative of "Our America" also revealed its internal contradictions and fissures (the underside of modernity) within institutions and social phenomena it helped to perpetuate such as slavery, race, sexuality, diaspora (exile), and empire. This undergraduate course examines the cultural and political investments that have characterized the American Hemisphere and its components. The matrix of race, class and gender has been a useful lens to analyze the systems and structures in place that both benefited and suppressed American peoples and their contributions to the construction of America/América. Yet, the themes of migration, nationalism, sexuality, creolization, and empire-building also serve as essential tools to untangling and mapping the roots and routes of American development. Through a diverse set of materials (primary documents, secondary readings, films, music, and art) that utilize a multimedia and interdisciplinary approach to a range of anthropological, historical, literary, political and economic questions central to American experience(s), this course will critically engage the writings of thinkers (José Martí Walter Mignolo, Amy Kaplan, Toni Morrison) who have helped us better understand the "contact zone where Anglo and Latin America meet up, clash and interpenetrate."

Course Description

The topic of clothing and adornment embraces a broad spectrum, from the need for protective covering to the desire for individual expression to the profit of international industries. Encompassing the history of civilization, clothing epitomizes the way a fundamental necessity has been transformed by cultural construction—as well as desire and creativity—into a complex social indicator, a matrix of culture, class, and gender identity. But it is also about aesthetics and the love of beauty. This course looks at the topic from varied perspectives including: sociology, art, social history—and above all, literature, including early texts from ancient Mesopotamia, the Roman Empire, Elizabethan England, and writers up to the twenty-first century, including current fashion magazines. In order to establish a critical grid and vocabulary to use with which to discuss clothing/fashion our writers may include: art historian Anne Hollander, sociologist Diana Crane, fashion expert Fred Davis and Vogue editor Diana Vreeland. We will look at the way ancient, medieval and Renaissance writers use clothing as indicators of civilization, guilt, individuality, sensuality, polymorphous gender, and conspicuous consumption. Literature will include Gilgamesh, Genesis, and works by Longus, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Zola. We will also visit at least one costume collection exhibit.

Course Description

This course will examine the rise and fall of New Deal liberalism as the dominant political and social order of mid- twentieth century America. It will begin with the onset of the Great Depression as the event which sets in motion profound transformations in the economy, in the balance of political power, in the role of the State, and in the relations between social classes and ethnic/racial groups. It will explore the rise of the labor movement and the creation of the welfare state. It will analyze the impact of the Cold War on domestic politics. Discussions will probe the emergence of the civil rights, anti-war, and counter-culture movements. The class will analyze the conservative reaction against the New Deal culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Students will analyze primary documents, novels, and films such as the Grapes of Wrath and Dr. Strangelove, as well as read secondary works including Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal by William E. Leuchtenberg, America in Our Time by Godfrey Hodgson, and Coming of Age in Mississippi by Anne Moody.

Course Description

By exploring a variety of source materials, including museums, memoirs, historic sites, and written textual evidence, we will begin to consider the ways in which our uses of the past have contemporary social and political impact. Today in the Fatih district of Istanbul, the fifteenth century Roma (gypsy) neighborhood of Sulukule is under threat of demolition as the city begins the process of urban renewal and gentrification. Meanwhile, in Nottinghamshire, England, the Workhouse Museum documents and interprets the brutality of the nineteenth century British "welfare system" within the dreary walls of an actual, landmarked workhouse. Such conflicting projects prompt us to ask: How do we choose to destroy certain places while preserving—or recreating—others, and what are the consequences of making these choices? What are the ethical problems we face when we save or demolish historic sites, and how are they tied to questions of individual, community, and national identity? These questions derive from political discourse that imagines how nationhood is created and sustained, as well as historical and anthropological inquiry, which so often attempt to locate the "truth" of the past and the meaning of place. Texts will include selections from Orhan Pamuk, Dolores Hayden, Benedict Anderson, Susan Slyomovics, and Christopher Mele.

Course Description

This course looks at historical and contemporary representations of the Middle Eastern cultures and societies in the modern Western imaginary. We will examine shifting representations of the Middle East in pre- and post-enlightenment European political and intellectual discourses, Western literary texts and travel literature, and contemporary US popular culture (films, advertising, thrillers, spy novels, romance fiction, etc.). We will also consider the interrelationship between popular cultural representations and the manner in which the Middle East is conceptualized in the academy and in "high culture" in general (e.g., theorized as Orientalism). It is an assumption of the course that a "post colonial" framework is key to interpreting not only the Middle East, but also the "West."

Course Description

What is the relationship between Africa's colonial past and its postcolonial present? How do we talk about this past and present without falling victim to the dominant discourse on Africa that stems from western domination of the African continent? Through film, literature, historical documents, and theory, we explore the evolution of postcolonial societies in Africa. This is primarily a history course but we will use a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to this history. Works we explore may include the films and writings of Ousmane Semebene, the literature of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, and the theories of Mahmood Mamdani.

Course Description

This seminar will provide an overview of the history of the environmental science from early to current times. We will explore ways in which scientists came know the natural world and in what ways they mobilized their social authority. With a focus on the history of the environmental and medical sciences, we will survey different ways of knowing nature from the ancient Greeks, Middle Ages, to colonial and post-colonial experiences. Where did the idea of nature as "designed" come from? How did people over time experience the "influence" of nature? And in what ways has our human agency changed the face of the Earth? These broad questions will guide us in our readings of both primary and secondary sources, including Plato, Hippocrates, St. Francis, Bacon, and Voltaire, as well as more recent writings on the moral authority of nature such as Darwin and Huxley.

Course Description

Modern western civilization has frequently sought its origin and inspiration in the classical world. Ancient cultures, too, maintained an intimate connection to their own cultural history. This course will investigate the role of perceptions of the past in the shaping of Greek and Roman cultural identity, and the use of texts and images to communicate and perpetuate certain legacies. We will explore the role of monuments, literature, histories, and mythologies in the shaping of Greek and Roman perceptions of their own past, and we will examine how they were used to establish, maintain, or undermine contemporary relationships. We will also investigate the impact of these classical civilizations in Renaissance, and modern Europe and America. Readings may include Homer The Iliad or The Odyssey, Virgil The Aeneid, selections from Livy, Plutarch, and Suetonius, Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Antony and Cleopatra, Edward Gibbon, Lord Byron, and Heinrich Schliemann.

Course Description

This seminar proffers a glimpse into the historically contingent relationships between machines and humans from the Enlightenment through the Industrial Revolution to the twentieth century. We shall underscore the ways in which those interactions helped define aesthetics, particularly but not exclusively in music. In essence we hope to use machines and music to trace the history of creativity over the past three centuries. Immanuel Kant famously defined "genius" in his Third Critique as "a talent for producing something for which no determinate rule can be given, not a predisposition consisting of a skill for something that can be learned by following some rule or other; hence the foremost property of genius must be creativity." By this definition mimicry and imitation are the antitheses of the creative genius, while mechanical skill and machines were deemed inferior to it. During the later stages of the Industrial Revolution, however, there arose an aesthetic of mass production. Quantity—as Lenin would famously remark a century later—had a quality all its own, and a new aesthetics celebrated how an artifact could be perfectly copied thousands of times over, with unprecedented speed, precision, and efficiency. Central questions and debates follow from this development: How "creative," if at all, are machines? Are mechanical musical instruments superior to performers? How are humans different, if at all, from machines? Readings include Kant's Third Critique, Jackson's Harmonious Triads, Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Essinger's Jacquard's Web, Standage's The Turk, Riskin's (ed.), Genesis Redux, Katz's Capturing Sound, and Théberge's Any Sound You Can Imagine.

Course Description

The historical epoch starting in the early 1970s and stretching up to the present has been referred to as the "age of Reagan," the era of neoliberalism, and the decline of capitalism's Golden Age. This interdisciplinary history class will look at the 1970s and 1980s as decades that mark the beginning of many of the problems that we confront today: the rise of economic inequality; the origins of globalization; the first awareness of an "energy crisis;" the birth of social movements like feminism, gay rights, and black power; the deepening of urban poverty and the expansion of the criminal justice system; the ascendance of the stock market and financial deregulation; the transition to a service economy; the growth of new forms of art and music like hip-hop and punk; the rise of evangelical Christianity as a political force; the emergence of a conservative movement; the end of Soviet Communism. The class will ask students to consider how the social problems of the 1970s and 1980s anticipate those of the present day, and also how America today is different than in this earlier period. We will use political speeches, manifestos, poetry, film, and novels as well as works of historical scholarship in order to try to understand the period. Readings may include Garry Wills, George Gilder, Jerry Falwell, Kwame Ture, Tom Wolfe, Thomas Frank and Alice Echols.

Course Description

Until 2008 we took for granted that in the fifty years following World War II, the industrialized Western World experienced unprecedented economic expansion, and the United States was geopolitically the dominant superpower, indeed, the primary coordinator and beneficiary of the post World War II period. Only a few keen observers detected economic flaws or geopolitical vulnerability. Over the past two decades, however, new forms of violence, major economic shifts, and geopolitical reversals have seriously threatened world order. Recently, the self-destruction and breakdown of the U.S. financial system triggered a deep global destabilization and recession. To many, Amerrican life is becoming similar to the severe dislocations of the Great Depression. With this broad historical arc in view, this seminar offers a critical history of the Post World War II period, focusing especially on major social changes and world-historical economic collapse. Readings will include sociologists C. Wright Mills, Barrington Moore Jr. and Arthur J. Vidich; as well as economic thinkers as diverse as Milton Friedman, J.K Galbraith, Paul Krugman. Overall, our approach is influenced by the work of the great unsung American radical, Thorstein Veblen.

Course Description

In the development of Christianity the definition of "heresy" was crucial to defining "orthodox" belief and worship. Indeed, every faith seems to struggle over what is deemed heretical as part of defining what is deemed normative, and it is hard to imagine any ideology (even an anti-ideology ideology) that does not draw a boundary to mark what is subversive or unacceptable to it. This course pursues these ideas by asking two central questions: Can there be any form of (religious or secular) faith without such boundaries? What does the study of these boundaries reveal about some of the basic assumptions that have formed (and still form) our society? In the first part of this course we use primary texts to study several of the most divisive theological moments in Christian history: debates over the nature of Christ and God in the fourth century, the reemergence of arguments over heresy in the twelfth century, the Protestant Reformation, and several nineteenth century American sects. In the second part we read literary art that uses and wrestles with the idea and ideas of heresy. We conclude by considering how theological arguments over orthodoxy and heresy are rescripted and reenacted in current debates about censorship, education, constitutional interpretation, the environment, crime and punishment, and torture. Readings will include letters and sermons by Athanasius, Arius, Eusebius, and Augustine, Luther's 95 Theses, the Book of Mormon, poems by William Blake, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dostoevsky's 'Grand Inquisitor' Parable, and sections from Ulysses, Moby Dick, Doctor Faustus, and Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Contemporary theorists will include Mark Taylor, Harold Bloom, and Slovoj Zizek.

Course Description

Energy makes the world work. Originally an obscure concept of natural philosophy, energy has become the foundation for our international economy, social structures, political policy, and everyday life. Energy explains how cars run, the sun shines, and our cell phones ring, but also why Saudi princes are wealthy and Iowa corn farmers receive massive government subsidies. This course examines the gradual realization of energy as a physical concept, its materialization in the engines of the industrial revolution, the construction of an energy infrastructure for electricity and oil, and the emergence of energy as the focus of economic and political conversation. We will use simple equations and math to learn what energy is and the laws that govern it, and how those simple equations help us understand the amazingly complex industrialized world in which we live. We will discuss energy production, transmission and use, and grapple with the problem of alternative energy in technical, social, and political detail.

Course Description

Who is white and how has the definition of whiteness changed over the past five centuries? How is our definition of whiteness dependent on gender and other racial and ethnic categories? What are the benefits of being white in American society? How has American culture shaped, challenged, explored and redefined whiteness? Though often invisible or unacknowledged, whiteness has played a significant role in shaping American society, politics and culture. For those who at various times could claim whiteness as a racial category, it offered what W.E.B. DuBois termed a "psychological wage" and social privileges. For racial and ethnic minorities however, whiteness often served as a justification for their oppression and marginalization within American society. This course will examine the social category of whiteness and its role in shaping modern society from a variety of historical, cultural and disciplinary perspectives, drawing upon the works of historians, legal scholars, literary critics, playwrights, filmmakers, novelists and social scientists. Possible readings include William Shakespeare's The Tempest, Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, Norman Mailer's "The White Negro", Dalton Connelly's Honky, Matthew Frye Jacobson's Whiteness of a Different Color, as well as works by W.E.B. DuBois, Kim Hall, George Lipsitz, Adam Mansbach and Danny Hoch.

Course Description

Ethnography has been narrowly construed as the research methodology that defines the discipline of cultural anthropology, but this course explores ethnography as both a mode of inquiry and a genre of writing through we grapple with the experience of Self and Other at the intersection of overlapping cultural worlds. We begin by linking modern ethnographic writing to early travel narratives, to missionary accounts, and to colonial reports serving evolving imperial formations.We then examine the consolidation of an "ethnographic" perspective in the emerging discipline of anthropology, as well as more recent critiques of this genre. Our own method will be reading classic and contemporary ethnographic works. These reveal ongoing tensions between the scientific and the literary; between abstract "theory" and ethnographic "practice;" and between the claim to truth-telling and the power and limits linked to the positioning of the author. In response to these tensions we also trace the textual experimentation that mixes ethnography, poetry, memoir, and travel writing, fiction, and film. Our goal is to develop a self-reflective ethnographic imagination, open to the possibilities and difficulties in cross-cultural understanding, as we consider the complexities in encounter and contact, looking and describing, representing and translating. Possible texts include travel writings from the period of early European expansion, Conquest of America by Todorov, Argonauts of the Western Pacific by Malinowski, Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead; Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography by Clifford and Marcus, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment by J. Biehl, In an Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh, and the films of Trin Minh Ha.

Course Description

This seminar explores shifts in film analysis and cinematic reception, as initiated by new digital technologies and the growing popular consumption of global cinemas. We will track the development of film aesthetics and critique in relation to other visual mediums, including photography and the computer. How has the specificity of film changed with the speed and mobility of digital media? The course will also speculate on the links between the cultivation of formal film analysis and the increased circulation of images of racial, sexual, and ethnic difference. How have transnational economies of production and viewing impacted cinematic reception? Readings may include excerpts from: Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, America on Film; David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction; Kara Keeling, The Witch''s Flight; Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media; and Jim Pines and Paul Willeman, Questions of Third Cinema. Screenings may include: Alejandro González Iñárritu, Babel; David LaChapelle, Rize; and Alain Resnais, Hiroshima Mon Amour.

Course Description

Food can be both physical sustenance and a form of cultural expression. As with comedy and pornography, this too direct tie to the body problematizes the appreciation of food as a purely aesthetic pleasure. This interdisciplinary seminar will examine food and foodways as they appear in literature, film and painting. These cultural artifacts will be contextualized through readings in the social sciences and the new politics of food. We will try to discover how attitudes about the enjoyment and preparation of food change and reflect different historic eras and cultural milieus. Why are gluttony and abstention tied to morality? Where do our ideas about taste and aesthetics come from? Can we separate an aesthetic appreciation of food from current concerns about sustainability, food safety, and human and environmental health? Texts will include Epicurus's writings, Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, Brillat-Savarin's The Physiology of Taste, E.A. Burtt's Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, Gabriel Axel's Babette's Feast, Juzo Itami's Tampopo, Francis Bacon's meat paintings, and Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Course Description

What is the relationship between human rights and social justice? Do both always operate in conjunction? Are they ever mutually exclusive—one sacrificed at the expense of the other? This course explores key questions around the theory and practice of human rights promotion, surveying specialized literature and founding documents to consider the promise and challenge of existing human rights frameworks as they work for, but sometimes clash with, the promotion of social justice. We ask, are there universal rights? If so, how are these defined, and by whom? What is the relationship between "political" and "human" rights, between individual and collective rights? Can human rights be in conflict, and if so, how are such conflicts to be resolved? In regions rife with inequality—political, social, and economic—is promoting a global human rights agenda unrealistic, or more necessary than ever? After exploring these general questions, we will focus on Latin America, in particular on Argentina, Guatemala, Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico. How do human rights struggles in these countries change our view of the prevailing human rights regime? How do legacies of colonialism in these countries affect both the protection and violation of human rights in the present? Do these countries reveal a political tension social justice and human rights? Readings will draw from Bartolomé de las Casas, Ariel Dorfman, Elena Poniatowska, Alison Brysk, and Greg Grandin, among others.

Course Description

This course will examine intersections between historical memory and representations of wartime experience in mediums ranging from art and literature to museums and textbooks. We will consider: What is history, what is memory, and what is the relationship between the two? How is the experience of war translated into different art forms like film, fiction, photography, and documentary? What constraints--historical and ethical—may limit the representation of past traumatic events? We will explore such questions with respect to the Japanese experience in World War II while creating comparisons with war memories elsewhere, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. After exploring the background of the Pacific War and the allied occupation of Japan, students will read historical and social theories of memory written by Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Nora, and others. Theory will serve as a launching pad from which to explore accounts and representations of Japan's wartime past in fiction, anime, manga, oral histories, visual arts, and documentary. Finally, we will address the use and abuse of history while discussing controversies over the history textbooks, the military "comfort women," the Smithsonian exhibit on the Enola Gay, and the Rape of Nanking.

Course Description

Consumerism—the linking of happiness, freedom, and economic prosperity with the purchase and consumption of goods—has long been taken for granted as constitutive of the "good life" in Western societies. Increasingly, global economic shifts have made it possible for some developing countries to engage in patterns of consumption similar to those in the West, such that one quarter of humanity now belongs to the 'global consumer class.' At the same time, however, nearly 3 billion people struggle to survive on less than $2 a day. This course takes an international and interdisciplinary approach to examine consumption in different societies, and we do so by asking several central questions: What are the key determinants of patterns of consumption, and how are they changed or reshaped over time? In turn, how do patterns of consumption shape racial inequality and identity, class formation, aesthetic sensibility, and international boundaries? At the same time, how do practices of consumption inform the ways that people understand their values and individuality, imagine success and failure, or conceive happiness? By reading widely in sociology, anthropology, history and literature we will develop a framework for analyzing the ethical, environmental and social justice implications of consumerism. Readings include case studies from the US, China, India, Europe and Africa, but some likely texts are: Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class; Mauss, The Gift; Bourdieu, Distinction; Marx, "Commodity Fetishism;" Twitchell, Lead Us Into Temptation; Bill McKibben, Deep Economy; Colson Whitehead, Apex Hides the Hurt; Van Jones, Green Collar Economy.

Course Description

Can a dance step be considered "private property?" What about the genetic sequences that are part of what makes you who you are? How do we strike a balance between the rights of the author/artist and the rights of the community to engage with works of art? In this course, we will deepen our understanding of the cultural and ethical implications of copyright and patent law by placing the concepts of ownership and authorship in historical and global context. In addition to scholarly essays drawn from the fields of history, anthropology and sociology, this course will also draw on a range of texts from the visual arts, music, and literature. Course requirements include a research essay and research-based creative projects. Texts studied will include: Siva Vaidhyanathan's The Anarchist in the Library and Kembrew McLeod's Freedom of Expression®. Visual and audio sources from Girl Talk, Negativeland, DJ Spooky and Joy Garnett will also be included.

Course Description

The Vietnam War occupies a special place in American history and foreign relations. It was America's longest war, the only war it ever lost, a war that shattered Americans' faith in their government and spawned a culture of protests that divided one generation from another. It has been said that Vietnam was the "most traumatic experience for the United States in the twentieth century." In this course, we will examine the Vietnam War through the lens of literature, film, official documents, memoirs, and historical analysis, under the premise that each of these sources offers different, yet important insights into the cause, experience, and effect of the war. Texts will include novels, films, and poetry of Eugene Burdick, Norman Mailer, Yusef Komunyaaka, and Michael Cimino, official documents written by Robert McNamara, George Ball, and Walt Rostow, and scholarship by David Halberstam, Erik Logevall, and Leslie Gelb.

Course Description

Long before the current vogue for eco-living, recycling, repurposing, and 'cash for your trash,' there have been people surviving with little fanfare on other people's leftovers and discards, and theorists meditating on the revolutionary possibilities of refuse and junk. This seminar is designed to introduce students to the work of Walter Benjamin, who is both a crucial figure in critical theory and an early and powerful commentator on the politics and aesthetics of the cast-off. We will begin the course with Agnes Varda's film The Gleaners and I, and we will continue to explore the relation between theory and the collecting and recycling of ideas, images, and objects, especially those that have been overlooked or abandoned. What, if anything, do ragpickers or dumpster divers have to teach us about subjects as large as theory, history, modernity, and the city? Our primary text will be Benjamin's expansive and unfinished work of citations and brief commentaries, The Arcades Project (1927-1940), but we will also consider other modern collectors and archivists, including Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams), Aragon (Paris Peasant), Atget (photographs), Braque (collages). What did Benjamin and these moderns make of junk, and what can we glean from their thought for our own times?

Course Description

Ancient Greek tragedies, particularly those detailing the events of the Trojan War and its aftermath, are obsessed with the plight of women who have been taken prisoner in war. The songs in which they lament their fate, recall their past happineses, and wonder about their new lives and homes are some of the most beautiful and moving in Greek poetry. In the non-fictional world of 5th-century Greece, however, these enslaved and foreign women would be all but voiceless. The reality of war and of its female captives was one of slavery and sexual violence, and the female captive herself became a poetic metonym for a fallen city. This course will explore the role of these captive women both within tragedy—their speech and actions and the agency they create for themselves—as well as within the society that produced these plays— the social anxieties revealed by tragedy's focus on the female captive and the Greek relationship to political realities such as slavery and imperialism. Readings may include plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, as well as historical writings of Herodotus and Thucydides, and philosophical and critical writings by Aristotle, Said, Scott, and Foucault.

Course Description

The conceptions of people outside of one's own culture are complex and multi-layered, and this was as true in the ancient world as it is today. From the conquered Elamites that were depicted on the palace walls of the Neo-Assyrian Assurbanipal, to the mythical Ethiopians of Homer's epics, or to the Gauls with whom Julius Caesar did battle, representations of other kinds of people serve as a backdrop against which a distinctive sense of cultural identity is clarified or reinforced. This seminar explores the representation of "foreign" peoples in the visual arts and literature of the ancient Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman worlds. Using visual (reliefs, vase-painting, sculpture, mosaics, and wall-painting) and written (inscriptions, epic poetry, drama, histories, novels) sources, we pursue the following questions: What role do local ideals play in the construction and definition of another culture? What are the political or social motivations for the representations of foreigners in ancient art and literature? To what extent does the definition of an "other" reflect an already defined identity, and to what extent is identity constituted by imagining difference? Readings may include Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-Paul Sartre, Aeschylus The Persians, Herodotus, Caesar The Gallic Wars, Heliodorus Aethiopika (The Ethiopian Romance).

Course Description

What is the difference between law and morality? Is positing a higher moral order that supervenes over positive law an invitation to chaos or the only way to hold governments to account? To what extent is a legal system undergirded by background moral understandings? And when judges elaborate moral principle rather than black letter law does this undermine judicial legitimacy? Is it ever legitimate to legislate morality, from the bench or through legislative acts? How can civil disobedience be justified? Through questions such as these this course explores the various ways in which law and morality are both clashing and complementary in legal discourse, which also entails examining the relationship between law and religion. We will read canonical political theory and legal texts that discuss the debate between legal positivists and natural law theorists. Readings are likely to include landmark Supreme Court cases and primary texts such as Hobbes' Leviathan, Locke's Two Treatises, Kant's Second Critique, HLA Hart's The Concept of Law, and Dworkin's Taking Rights Seriously.

Course Description

Plato and Freud offer especially interesting and plausible accounts of intrapsychic conflict in terms of the psyche's having parts. In this course, we will look at the theories of the composite psyche in the dialogues of Plato and in various works and case histories of Freud. Our first theme concerns whether they conceive psychic division differently, and for different purposes. A second and closely related theme concerns the ways that Plato and Freud both posit love as a fundamental force in human life; indeed, Freud explicitly identified his concept of libido with Plato's eros. But is this claim credible? Our third theme concerns Plato's way of addressing these issues not by telling but by showing us, by writing not a treatise, but a philosophical drama with characters interacting by dialogue. Lastly, we will explore the implications of Plato's and Freud's psychological arguments for philosophical and political practice. Texts include Plato's Gorgias, Republic, and Symposium; and Freud's Ego and Id, Three Essays on Sexuality, and case studies.

Course Description

This course will examine the mythic and narrative traditions of Homeric Greece, the cultural dynamics of the interactions between them, and finally the ways in which modern narrative can transform such traditions. The course will begin with a consideration of the central structures and emphases of the Greek mythological system, and then move on to a close reading of the Homeric Iliad, with a focus on the ways in which the interactions between mythic and narrative traditions can result in fundamental challenges to a culture and its traditions. The course will then leap forward to the late twentieth century and Derek Walcott's Afro-Caribbean/American, Nobel Prize-winning poem Omeros with its seemingly impossible union of mythic and narrative traditions, its mythic scope extending from Greece to West Africa to Native America as it brings together narrative traditions ranging from the Homeric to the post-colonial. This course explores the relationship between religion and literature by focusing on literary depictions of the afterlife: How are changing beliefs about the afterlife reflected in literary treatments, and how does such literary art affect beliefs and practices? The 'visit to the underworld' is a traditional theme already in the oldest ancient Greek literary texts and we begin with the rich cultic and ritual background of the Homeric underworld visits (nekuiai) and their afterlife in Greek literature. From Homer, we explore how the afterlife theme is taken up in Latin poetry (most notably Vergil's Aeneid), and in turn how Vergil becomes the poet for the Western Middle Ages and is re-imagined by Dante as the guiding poetic model for his own vision of the beyond. At the same time, Dante's Divina Commedia shows striking parallels with literary visions of the afterlife composed in Arabic and Middle Persian. Is the connection a literary manifestation of an experience common to revealed religions, or another indication that literary constructions of imaginary other worlds are readily transmissible across cultures? Indeed, what accounts for the immense popularity of such accounts across cultures? Readings include: Homer, Pindar, Plato, Lucian, Vergil, the Middle Persian Arda Viraz Namag, and Dante's Divina Commedia.

Course Description

Course Description

Pass/fail only. Open to Gallatin juniors and seniors who plan to take their colloquium between Fall, 2010, and Spring, 2011. In this class we will survey methods of interdisciplinary study and ask you to consider how they operate within your own concentration. By the end of the semester you will have drafted, revised, and completed your colloquium rationale. The Symposium will be organized in three phases. In phase I, we will survey conceptual frameworks that help expose recurring concepts and methods of individualized study. These include frameworks for 1) finding the history of your topic and ideas, 2) understanding how you have learned to compare ideas or practices (i.e. across cultures, belief systems, disciplines), 3) analyzing the forms (i.e. media, rhetoric, genre, etc.) of representation and expression pertinent to your topic, 4) reflecting upon the relevance of your non-classroom, experiential learning. The first phase of the course will include several faculty guest lectures and opportunities to form students working groups organized around common concentration interests. In phase II, the class will not meet as a group; rather, students will meet with their working groups, advisers, and course instructors as they draft a rationale that precipitates and anticipates the inquiry to be undertaken in the colloquium. In phase III, the class will resume as a group to share rationales and booklists, develop strategies for the colloquium, and continue the exchange of ideas within student working groups.

Course Description

Films can hold a special place in the imagination of communities and their history. This course examines how films have functioned as representational mediums from where to negotiate collective understandings of the past, specifically of the past of the Americas. It further explores how films interact with other historical narratives, at times pushing forth and at other times defying and complicating official histories. Some of the questions guiding the study of the relationship between film and history in the Americas focus on how different communities: cope with the legacies of violent pasts, envision change and revolution, contest the meaning of places and negotiate racial and gender identities. To approach the subject, the course builds upon films like Luis Puenzos La historia oficial and Rea Tajiris History and Memory. The course also builds on texts from directors and film scholars such as Toms Gutirrez Alea and Natalie Zemon Davis.

Course Description

Few intellectuals have been so universally embraced as Italian Marxist and social theorist Antonio Gramsci. His political writings—most of them written from prison under Mussolini almost eighty years ago—continue to shape and inspire the way we think about society today. Yet the implications of his theories for our understanding of political change and its relationship to theory are far from settled. Using David Forgacs' The Gramsci Reader as our primary source—and with the help of secondary sources—our job for this course is to: 1.take a close look at Gramsci's ideas on intellectuals, power, and the State; 2. historically contextualize his theoretical framework within the Marxist tradition; and 3. explore the potential relevance of his analyses in our current state of affairs today.

Course Description

This course focuses on a single, extraordinary work of fiction, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow—Pynchon's vision of modernity, and important themes in the history of science and in philosophy. Topics include clashing accounts and explanation of the weaponization of science in the twentieth century. How does one explain the world of V2 rocket-bombs exploding around London in World War II? Do we learn about the location of future detonations from the past, as Pavlov might have had it? Or are events utterly independent one from the other as Poisson would say? Such reflections on the world—and they extend through identity, love, war, and materiality—feed back into the very nature of writing itself, and in the final sessions of the seminar, we will turn to literary-philosophical questions: How, in the absence of causality and continuity, does narrative itself function? What might be a postcausal (postmodern) novel? Along with Pynchon's text, we will read widely in the history of technology, warfare, science, literary theory, and philosophy.

Course Description

"Home," Spengler wrote in The Decline of the West, "is a profound word." This course examines the concept of home as it has been studied in literature, philosophy, psychology, and art. It examines the issues of home as a place in which we dwell, a place where we find our center. It examines the idea of home in relation to the physical world, cultural ties, and a changing world, a world where homelessness and exile are common. Readings may include: The Odyssey, King Lear, E.M. Forster's Howards End, and selections from the works of Frost, Freud, and Jung.

Course Description

Why the utter lack of awareness in New York City of the Pacific? - of our own collecting, literary representations, missionary work, and "manifest destiny" expansionism systemically imagined and formulated in America's Pacific? How is environmental justice foundational to Oceanic worldviews and our global futures? We will reformulate this historical absence of presence. Help us deconstruct King Kong on the Empire State Building and other New York City-generated representations and formations of scholarly, museological, and pop culture about Pacific places, peoples, goods and ideas! We're adapting the formulation of Atlantic Worlds to understand the Pacific; what Fijian philosopher Epeli Hau'ofa calls "Oceania, a sea of islands." Sessions, on and off campus, will include Herman Melville's port culture novels, the Lincoln Center's restaging of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'South Pacific' based on James Michener's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, written in New York City; Margaret Mead and the American Museum of Natural History; Michael Rockefeller and the wing named in his memory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pacific Missions to the United Nations; Pacificana kitsch— from tiki lounges to Halloween hula costumes. Through indigenous-grounded epistemologies, and the Pacific renaissance of cultural, linguistic, artistic and scholarly studies, we critically unpack the production of an imagined Pacific and global environmental policies.

Course Description

Despite being heralded after his death in 1991 as the most prolific French intellectual of the twentieth century—he wrote more than seventy books!—the fact is that few theorists have had such as bad a rap as Marxist philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre. Scolded by the Althusserian establishment during the 1960s and 1970s for his rejection of structuralist epistemology; chastised by the French Communist Party for his contempt for dogma and orthodoxy; and ignored by academia for his irreverence toward disciplinary boundaries, Lefebvre's ideas were never fully embraced until recently. In this course we focus especially on his writings about urbanism—with special emphasis on his concepts of everyday life, social reproduction, and the right to the city—as we explore why his ideas are becoming so popular today. Primary readings include The Urban Revolution, The Survival of Capitalism, Critique of Everyday Life (volume three), and chapters from State, Space, World: Selected Essays.

Course Description

This course provides grounding in how to create short, compelling biographies of intriguing people. We will explore the form by reading examples drawn from classical and contemporary literature, discuss research methods including the use of archival sources and interviews, and investigate the techniques of various writers. Students will write two short papers and one long one using different approaches to biography, including one based on interviews. Readings include Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey, The Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm, Footsteps by Richard Holmes, and profiles by Lawrence Weschler, Susan Orlean, and others.

Course Description

In contemporary America, we have a multicultural and racially diversified population; our national image is no longer dominated by people of European descent. This is easily evidenced in our mass media and in the last U.S.Census Report where the statistics demonstrate that our African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and "Other" populations are rapidly growing and developing. We are interbreeding, intermarrying, interracial, and interlocked. In this writing course, we will increase awareness of the phenomenon of our multicultural identities by writing personal essays, biographies, and autobiographies. We will focus on exploring our own racial and ethnic backgrounds, as well as exploring this theme in readings and in a variety of films. Readings include Race and Remembrance: A Memoir by Arthur L. Johnson and Brown: The Last Discovery of America by Richard Rodriguez.

Course Description

Creative nonfiction marks the intersection between journalism and literature, and bears the hallmarks of both. Stories feature strong character development, well-developed, nuanced scenes, and a tangible narrative arc. But they also privilege thorough research, live reporting and a writer's quizzical, intelligent stance. In this course, students will not only learn the components of a good story, but what makes an idea compelling to a diverse audience to begin with. Students will choose their own topics, but we'll all write and revise one profile and one long investigative-style piece of researched and reported literary nonfiction. We will workshop these longer stories in sections, and students will learn effective editing strategies for their own writing by working closely with their peers. We'll read masters of the genre like Joseph Mitchell, Katherine Boo, and Alex Kotlowitz as well as some newer or more experimental voices like Pumla Gobodo—Madikizela and Lauren Slater. We'll also look at broader ethical questions like going undercover, cloaking source identities, and writing outside of one's own experience.

Course Description

In this course we will consider the personal essay as an art of narrative, a mode of storytelling that gives rise to questions about both the nature of writing and of factual reporting. How does narrative arise from observation and reportage? What sort of warrant as to strict truthfulness should the reader expect from the essayist? To what extent ought the writer's viewpoint be grounded in the voice of personal reflection, the "I," and to what degree does even that commitment shade into fiction? Reading and writing essays on subjects that range from the mundane to the autobiographical to political, literary critical, and philosophical meditations, we will consider how writers tell nonfictional stories about themselves and others by selecting certain events and images, how writers use their writing to come to self-awareness, and how writers may cover up or omit important facts in the construction of a literary persona. Readings may include selections from works by such authors as Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Virginia Woolf, Junichiro Tanizaki, Walter Benjamin, C. G. Jung, Janet Malcolm, Jorge Luis Borges, Wole Soyinka, Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Joan Didion and Alice Walker.

Course Description

How can one tell the "truth" about one's life in narrative form? In this course we will explore the pleasures and dangers of telling stories about our lives through writing autobiographical essays, as well as through reading the autobiographies of selected others. Readings may include texts by Janet Frame, Nancy Mairs, Mary Karr, and David Sedaris. We will analyze the way in which self-narrative is constructed from the tangled materials of real life, how we read and understand the life writing of others, and how others' stories can influence our own. Topics include authenticity, memory, identity, voice, point of view, and relationships.

Course Description

This course will examine "borderline cases," those types of writing that balance precariously between one genre and another, for example, between fiction and non-fiction. We will look into such literary hybrids as the prose poem (Baudelaire et al.); journalistic-fiction (J. Barnes, Didion, D.F. Wallace); fictional journals (Rilke, Nin); such literary imposters as the faux-autobiography (Stein/Toklas), the discovered manuscript (Borges) and the imaginary portrait (Pater). We will attempt to distinguish and work with what Virginia Woolf calls (in her essay on biography) the truth of fact and the truth of fiction. Students will have the opportunity to engage in various borderline writing exercises and to bring one original borderline case to conclusion by the end of the course.

Course Description

This workshop will give students the opportunity to practice elements of creative nonfiction through a multi-faceted approach to writing on ancestry and cultural heritage. The main goal will be a written exploration of the self to consider wider issues of history, community, identity, place, and family. The major assignments will be structured around various tasks: a personal essay will help to define themes and set scenes in the present; memoir writing will involve mining your memories of family to identify possible leads into the past; a reported piece will entail interviews of family members, historical research, and/or a visit to an ancestral site. These essays will be developed gradually with the help of shorter at-home assignments and in-class exercises on style, structure, and strategy. Revision will be built into the process, and we will read each other's work and give supportive feedback throughout the semester. Likely authors to be read and discussed for inspiration will include Ian Frazier, Honor Moore, Lawrence Weschler, Sarah Vowell, Bliss Broyard, Brenda Lin, Tara Bray Smith, and D.J. Waldie.

Course Description

This course guides students in writing fiction for readers age ten through adolescence. While writing, workshopping, and revising, students consider both theoretical and practical issues of writing for young people. We explore the history of children's literature and examine the academic journal Children's Literature, the newsletter of the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, the American Library Association's Newbery Awards and various bestseller lists. Each student presents an analysis of a favorite book. Texts we read and analyze as models will likely include such "contemporary classics" for younger readers as Lois Lowry's Anastasia Krupnik, Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice, Walter Dean Myers's Monster, and Francesa Lia Block's Weetzie Bat; and recent works that are both popular and critically acclaimed, such as Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and E. Lockhart's The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks. We may attend a reading by a writer or editor of fiction for young readers; a writer and/or a publishing professional will be our guest speaker.

Course Description

From the Gothic mansions of Poe to the gleaming hovercrafts of Gibson, genre fiction is often a craft of extremes: extreme imagination, extreme emotion. Do the trappings of "literary fiction" sometimes feel constraining to you as a writer? Do the settings feel too familiar, the conventions too tame for the story you want to tell? Could your story use a cowboy? A flesh-eating zombie? In this course, students will examine and write in different genres, from mystery to science fiction, western to horror. While the course will include close, textual readings of works by authors such as Stephen King, Kelly Link, Ursula K. Le Guin, Koji Suzuki, Walter Mosley, Karen Russell, Elmore Leonard, and Max Brooks, the majority of each class will be spent workshopping student fiction.

Course Description

This workshop is dedicated to the oft-repeated observation that all writing is re-writing. Each writer will focus their efforts on only one or two short stories, rather than starting many new stories and abandoning them in favor of yet another new beginning. Students will take each of their stories through a number of drafts and revise them in response to (though not necessarily in accord with) questions and comments raised by other members of the workshop. The objective is to learn ways of staying with such challenges as maintaining the story's voice, determining the order of experience, and arriving at an ending that satisfies the design of the story as well as the intentions of the writer. Workshop members share their stories in class throughout the semester and comment in detail on one another's work. Participants should have some experience writing short stories.

Course Description

A piece of fiction can be constructed in an unlimited number of ways and each week we will explore the formal possibilities that are available to us. We will study the choices we can make as writers—of narrative point of view, beginnings, resolutions, dialogue, description, pacing, plot and character development. We will isolate and inspect strategies that published authors have used. Students will produce and workshop their own fiction from exercises. In the conversation between student writing and the studied literature there will hopefully be a greater sense of writers as shapers, sculptors of the raw material of story. Readings: Mishima, Ha Jin, Russell Banks, Charles Baxter, C.J. Hribal, Carver, Flannery O'Connor, Isaac Babel, George Saunders, James Joyce and others.

Course Description

This course provides students interested in writing fiction an opportunity to explore and discuss various forms of fiction writing in a workshop environment. The main objective of the course is to help students develop and revise at least one complete work of fiction, and in the process hone individual styles and voices. One route to this goal is an inquiry into a range of techniques available to contemporary fiction writers. Emphasis is on characterization, structure, and narrative cohesion, and a variety of the craft aspects of fiction writing will be explored through exercises. These include point of view, narrative voice, plot, tension, time, sequence, dialogue, symbolism, and so on. Students will present their own fiction, respond to the writings of others, and pose questions about literature, editing, and publishing, all within the supportive and responsive environment of the workshop group.

Course Description

The aim of this course is to fathom why fiction works when it works, and why it doesn't when it doesn't. We will attempt to teach ourselves to read like writers, so we can learn from those who have come before, so we can began to write like writers. We will engage all the elements that give a fiction a chance at success--obsession, seduction, evoking of the senses, the removal of filters, scene and summary, theatre of the mind, et cetera. Students--and the teacher--will turn in three first drafts of fiction, each 10-14 pages long, to be critiqued in a workshop setting. The critiques will be rigorous but constructive; no nastiness allowed. We will also complete short, extemporaneous, writing exercises. Readings taken from The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and others.

Course Description

In this workshop poets will focus on the foundations and intricate dynamics of poetry as a writer's process. A weekly reading of a poem by each poet in the circle will serve as point of departure for discussions of the relationships of craft and expression. The emphasis is on inhabiting the quality of language; some time is spent at defining clarity, aesthetics, elegance, and eloquence. The course also covers a brief review of some of poetry's history, including metric and syllabic measures of writing.

Course Description

A workshop designed for serious poets, this class will teach students how to take their writing to another level both intellectually and artistically; depth of theme, imagination, and craft will be discussed. Emphasis will be placed on developing and strengthening one's personal style and voice. Through work-shopping, students will further refine their critical eye as poet and reader. The class will include exercises and readings. Submission of work will be discussed and encouraged.

Course Description

This class will approach acting from the belief that an actor's job is learning how to rehearse. During the semester we will investigate what makes for joyful, effective, and exciting rehearsal, striving to develop a process that is as powerful as any performance. How do we make the events of the play happen "in the room"? How do we take responsibility for what our character says and does from the first read-through? How do we connect with poetic or complicated language? How do we speak and listen from the same "place"? What is the purpose of "table work"? How do we make authentic physical choices? As we pursue these questions, we will engage with several of the actor's technical and artistic challenges and focus on developing the acting instrument through voice and speech, physicality, and style work. We will begin with Shakespearean monologues to build a common vocabulary, and move to modern and contemporary scene work that will culminate in a public presentation—giving each student the chance to share his/her work with an audience. Students must wear appropriate rehearsal clothes and will be asked to rehearse outside of class time.

Course Description

Oral History is a complex process in the creation of artistic projects across the disciplines: documentary film, theatre, book arts, exhibitions, web art, public radio, etc. This course offers training in interviewing and editing techniques, and looks at the impact of "truth-telling" on the people we interview, their families and friends, ourselves and the culture at large. Research explores the balance in accurately reflecting the realities and integrity of the people represented while staying true to the vision of the artist/creator and addresses some of the following questions: Who has a right to a story? How do we represent people with different experiences than our own? What are the nuances in understanding needed for representing people in our own culture and identity or those from a different cultural or class background? Readings include (but are not limited to): Greg Halpern's Harvard Works Because We Do; Art Spiegelman's Maus I & II; Ira Berlin, et.al (eds) Remembering Slavery; Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan's Crossing the BLVD; Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn's Oral History of Hip-Hop's First Decade Yes Yes Y'all; as well as works by Studs Terkel, Anna Deveare-Smith, and articles and theory on oral history as a field of study. Guest lectures by filmmakers, book artists, theatre artists as well as viewing of films and listening to public radio projects will be included in the weekly class sessions. For final projects students create collaborative or solo work in the discipline of their own training; theatre, artist books, photography, poetry, music, radio, audio art, film or video.

Course Description

In this course we will create characters inspired by history, memory, dreams and world lore through challenging exercises that fuse Eastern contemplative tradi­tions and Western theatrical improvisation. Students will learn how to access different aspects of themselves to enhance their own creative process and create a uniquely authentic theatre. Each session will begin with vocal exercises and physical warm‑ups, based on Taoist exercises and Western dance techniques. Our character work starts with meditations and visualizations employing the Buddhist tradition of "mindfulness/awareness" practice, in which we place ourselves totally in the present moment. We will work in solos, duos and groups, gradually adding costumes, props and music. Open to theater students, dancers, musicians, visual artists, writers—all those interested in discovering their own source of deep invention. Readings will include Chögyam Trungpa's Shambhala: The Sacred Path of the Warrior and Dharma Art, Louise Steinman's The Knowing Body, Ethan Nichtern's One City and John Welwood's Ordinary Magic.

Course Description

Mind/body awareness techniques increase one's ability to strip away any physical and mental interferences which often appear as stiff, held muscles, poor body habits and impaired concentration. These methods are vital to the creative process and help students to honor inner knowledge. In this workshop, performance will be viewed in terms of concentration, breath, tension/effort, energy/presence, body behaviors/habits, and mind/body integration. Students must be prepared to perform a solo piece of their chosing (or an activity to be observed) by the third week of class and work on it throughout the semester. Kinetic Awareness, the Alexander Technique, meditation, visualization, and energy work will be learned and applied to student's performance piece. Open to performing arts students who wish to deepen their relationship to their bodies, increase awareness, and draw on inner reserves. Readings will include Knaster's Discovering the Body's Wisdom, Steinman's The Knowing Body, Crow's The Alexander Technique as a Basic Approach to Theatrical Training, and Kohnlein's Listening from the Physical Body.

Course Description

This workshop explores the uses of drama, dance, visual arts, music and poetry within the health care professions, serving children to geriatric populations. Against a theoretical background of the psychological needs of mentally and physically ill individuals, the creative processes of the arts are experienced as they can humanize, sensitize, ameliorate, and liberate expressive capacities. Activities drawn from each art form are tried out, sometimes blended, and adapted for diverse age groups and needs. The workshop provides substantial background for artists, artist-educators, leisure studies majors, as well as others interested in exploring an ancillary or major career in the arts therapies. Employment possibilities are discussed, as well as professional organizations and registry requirements for further in-depth training. The workshop also includes selected books and visits by working arts therapists.

Course Description

Dance composition is, simply, the process through which an artist selects and organizes movements. Less simply, it encompasses not only the interaction with other art forms but the expression of and resistance to cherished, or at least familiar, personal and cultural beliefs about how the body makes meaning. What is "the body"? What are the relationships of our movements, our experiences, our philosophies, our aesthetic frameworks and choices? In this workshop, we will grapple with these questions in the archive and the studio. We'll read works by and about twentieth— and twenty-first—century choreographers and make dances that take off from their concepts, strategies, and actions. We'll welcome students' explorations of principles outside Western concert tradition; we'll welcome however they wish to move, however they wish to move us. Readings may include essays by Lawrence Halprin, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Dunn, Elena Alexander, and others.

Course Description

Dance reflects cultural heritage and is a key to understanding diverse societies. In this arts workshop, students will explore dance as it appears on six continents. Dance can be seen seen as encoded forms of a society's religious, artistic, political, economic, and familial values. Readings cover issues of globalization, fusion and authenticity. Migration, missionaries, trade routes and the diaspora have led to the creation of new dance forms like "Bollywood" and "Tribal" that are a synthesis of earlier forms. Each week students will be introduced to a different dance form through selected readings and a rich collection of video footage. After a brief warm-up, the class will learn simple steps, floor plans and rhythms from the music and dance of the culture being studied. The students chose a dance form as their project and themselves become researchers, performers and creators of new forms.

Course Description

This course is designed for those who want to learn how to make music together with others. The course work combines a study of contemporary popular music in terms of form, style, and instrumentation, with a review of practical music theory and the development of musicianship skills. Students have the opportunity to apply their skills by performing in class on their own compositions as well as on compositions written by their classmates and the course instructor. In addition, each student undertakes an independent research project focusing on an area or period of popular music in which the student has a particular interest. This course is appropriate for any student interested in furthering their understanding of music in general and contemporary popular music specifically. Access to a keyboard or guitar is recommended. [$35 fee]

Course Description

This workshop is designed for student musicians with the knowledge and skills of basic musicianship who want to learn to play jazz or extend their present ability to play jazz. Students will learn the fundamentals of improvisation: scale and chord structures, modes, chord progressions, rhythmic applications, song forms and options for organizing an improvisation such as creating a melody out of melodic fragments, scale fragments, and sequences. We will listen to great jazz performers to hear examples of good improvisation, proper phrasing and jazz styles. Students attending the workshop will gain a working musical vocabulary in the language of mainstream jazz. This workshop will offer students a solid starting point, whether they want to play professionally, for personal enjoyment or simply to broaden their knowledge of what it takes to play jazz. [$35 fee]

Course Description

This workshop is designed to provide both beginning and advanced students with studio experience in drawing and painting. The human figure will be the primary focus of this studio, although still life and other sources will also be used. A variety of drawing and painting media will be a part of the studio as well as discussions of required gallery and museum visits. An important part of this course will be the exploration of the problem of visual form and the development of mature aesthetic judgment. Students with extensive experience in painting or drawing, will have an opportunity to select their media in the studio. Selected work produced during the semester will be exhibited at the Gallatin School.

Course Description

This workshop explores images of New York City as envisioned by various schools of modern art, including Ashcan, Bauhaus, Futurist, Dadaist, and High Tech, and by the artists of the modern period, including Sloan, Mondrian, Hopper, Marin, Brancusi, O'Keefe, Duchamp, Grooms, and Nam June Paik. In response to studying these visions of New York, students will create their own art works—sketching in Times Square with the garrulous attitude of Reginald Marsh, drawing a skyscraper in an ecstatic John Marin breath, creating a collage by rifling through bins with Arman and Duchamp. The workshop concludes with a collaborative mural project and a final paper analyzing various strategies of expression whereby modern artists discovered the meaning of Manhattan. Through a process of appropriation, imitation, and parody, students are thus encouraged to re-enact the process of "discovering Manhattan," to engage in a dialogue with the city, and thereby to discover their own artistic voices. Readings include E.B.White's ineffable "Here is New York," Alan Ginsberg's outrageous Howl, Robert Henri's Art Spirit, as well as excerpts from Arthur Danto, Harold Rosenberg, and Irving Sandler.

Course Description

A rich landscape of art and culture flourished in Mexico for thousands of years beginning with the Olmec civilization at around the second millennium before Christ. With the arrival of the Spaniards in 1519, a new hybrid culture resulted from the fusion of two different worlds, the Iberian and the Native American: a fusion which continues to exist and grow to the present day. This interdisciplinary workshop will closely examine the art, culture and mythology of Mexico, both before and after the conquest, and combine our study of it with hands on art making. The course will begin with a brief overview of the major Mexican muralists, Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros, and American artists who were influenced by them such as Guston, O'keefe, and Pollock. It will then move chronologically from the Olmec culture occurring 4,000 years ago; Teotihuacan, or the City of the Gods; the Toltecs of Tula, from which emerged Quetzalcoatl the "Feathered Serpent", a figure that inspired art for centuries; the hyper-religious Aztecs; the large and complex Mayan culture; and lastly, the new hybrid art formed by the synthesis of Spanish and Native American cultures. Topics to be covered will include: astrology/astronomy; religion and shamanism; mythology; and human sacrifice. Museum trips, slide shows, videos, and the reading of rare texts such as the Popul Vuh will also be scheduled.

Course Description

As the Museum capital of the world, New York City offers students a unique opportunity to explore the roles and cultural meanings of "the museum." In this course, students will investigate the historical, philosophical, theoretical, and practical aspects of the collection and exhibition of art and artifacts in museums. Using some of the leading museum/art institutions in New York as examples, this course will begin with a survey of the history of the museum, followed by topics such as audience and community outreach, curatorial strategies for exhibition and collection development, conservation issues, and museum architecture. Course readings will include such works as Introduction to Museum Work by G. Ellis Burcaw; Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries by David Carrier; and Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift edited by Gail Anderson. There will be two museum visits and one gallery visit scheduled outside of class time as well as an in-class presentation by each student.

Course Description

This course is open to students actively engaged in art practice (photographic, painterly, sculptural, videographic, or otherwise) and interested in developing a theoretical framework for their work. We will begin by developing a common vocabulary. Then through texts, museum, gallery and studio visits as well as studio practice, students will be challenged to define what they believe to be the place of art in contemporary society and, more specifically, where they believe their work fits within this context. Ultimately, the goal of the class will be the development of a work or a body of work that will be critiqued in group discussion and individually, and will be addressed on theoretical, formal, and technical grounds.

Course Description

By giving us a sense of place, the city we inhabit recreates us. This documentary photography course explores New York City as the ever-changing environment in which we are involved. Embarking on a photographic project of their design, students will depict a highly visible urban space (viewed as a world financial, cultural, artistic capital) through their own relationship to it: their ways of interacting, acting, and being moved. Classes prepare students to work on their position as photographers: as they make pictures in the streets of New York, they will determine their own perception (vantage point, angle, point of view, framing) and establish a particular relationship with the audience (through scale, rhythm sequence, position, color). Exploring the boundaries between public and private space, feeling space and scale with the body (and not only with one's eyes) and creating a personal color palette will be strongly encouraged. Students will also explore a photographer's power to change audience perception, for example, through large scale installations inciting viewers to inhabit particular vantage points. Though documentary imagery is traditionally considered to establish a transparent relation to 'reality,' this course challenges students to recognize its created character and to recreate the city by influencing with their photographic intervention the ways it is perceived. Classes will offer technical instruction, critiques of student work, debates on street photography, visual analysis and discussions with invited artists, and will be highly collaborative. Open to highly motivated students with or without experience in documentary photography; digital or film cameras welcome.

Course Description

This workshop focuses on the writer as an individual in the often daunting, sometimes humbling "collaborative" world of TV writing. In this workshop, we will work on capturing the voices, rhythm, and style of varied classic TV hits, while executing class writing assignments. Students will test their discipline, motivation, and ingenuity as they complete their very own "spec script" of a show of their choice, presently on the air. Readings may include How to Write For Television by Madeline Dimaggio and selections from Story by Robert McKee, Screenplay by Syd Field, Comedy Writing for Television and Hollywood by Milt Josefsberg, and How to Write a Movie in 21 Days by Viki King. Students will be required to work in Final Draft software for class projects.

Course Description

Gropius once described architecture as a combination of "form, function, and delight." In this workshop, students are introduced to the experience of designing buildings. The first project is an exploration of the design process. Students create sketchbooks of diagrams and drawings, analyzing issues of form, function, technology, site, and environment. Drafting techniques are also presented through preparation of plans, sections, elevations, and renderings. In the second project, students design a residential loft. They begin with a program and a basic design concept. Planning theories, such as function, circulation, massing, and spatial organization are discussed. Visual concepts, such as symmetry, axis, and proportion are also introduced. Methods for developing designs through models, perspectives, and isometric drawings are also presented. Prior drafting experience is helpful, but not required.

Course Description

The ever-inventive world of arts publications encompasses a dazzling range of subjects, mediums, and materials: from ancient illuminated manuscripts, political manifestos, and one-of-a-kind artists books to handmade zines, high-end glossies, poster and print multiples, CD and DVD covers, and the infinitely reproducible pages of the internet. This workshop will introduce and explore many of these forms through guest lecturers, field trips to specialized collections and museums, directed readings, and hands-on work, which will culminate in final group and individual projects. Readings may include New Master's of Poster Design: Poster Design for the Next Century, A History of Illuminated Manuscripts, Stylepedia: A Guide to Graphic Design Mannerisms, Quirks, and Conceits, The Printed Picture.

Course Description

This class in performance composition is for those who want to discover and uncover what emerges when they participate in this process, and for students who are interested in the history of performance art. Participants will develop a solo performance through a series of exercises that utilize various strategies for generating and structuring material. (Strategies that can also be used in creating devised group work.) These performance works will emerge from a process involving improvisation (movement and text), writing and composing, and revision of material. Readings include performance texts by prominent artists, essays on performance, and video viewings. (Required texts include Jo Bonney's Extreme Exposure and Lenora Champagne's Out from Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists.) Attendance at and written analysis of solo and other edgy performances that occur during the semester and an oral presentation and research paper on a significant performance development or performance artist are also required. This class in performance composition is for those who want to discover and uncover what emerges when they participate in this process, and for students who are interested in the history of performance art. Participants will develop a solo performance through a series of exercises that utilize various strategies for generating and structuring material. (Strategies that can also be used in creating devised group work.) These performance works will emerge from a process involving improvisation (movement and text), writing and composing, and revision of material. Readings include performance texts by prominent artists, essays on performance, and video viewings. (Required texts include Jo Bonney's Extreme Exposure and Lenora Champagne's Out from Under: Texts by Women Performance Artists.) Attendance at and written analysis of solo and other edgy performances that occur during the semester and an oral presentation and research paper on a significant performance development or performance artist are also required.

Course Description

How does a story change when re-imagined for a new medium? Why are some film adaptations more successful than others? What is the screenwriter's responsibility to the work being adapted and to its author? Should one always strive to be "true" to the source? How do screenwriters contend with elements of prose such as first person narrative, point-of-view, authorial voice, and non-linear time? We will examine novels, short stories, memoirs, graphic novels—and the screenplays they inspired—from a screenwriter's perspective, as we consider various adaptation strategies. We will also analyze the writing choices behind what might be called "faux adaptations"—original screenplays written as if they were adaptations. A guest speaker from Volunteer Lawyers For The Arts will explain how to correctly secure rights to underlying material. Students will keep a journal, part of which may include, with instructor's approval, a short film screenplay adaptation, if the student holds the necessary rights. How does a story change when re-imagined for a new medium? Why are some film adaptations more successful than others? What is the screenwriter's responsibility to the work being adapted and to its author? Should one always strive to be"true" to the source? How do screenwriters contend with elements of prose such as first person narrative, point-of-view, authorial voice, and non-linear time? We will examine novels, short stories, memoirs, graphic novels—and the screenplays they inspired—from a screenwriter's perspective, as we consider various adaptation strategies. We will also analyze the writing choices behind what might be called "faux adaptations"—original screenplays written as if they were adaptations. A guest speaker from Volunteer Lawyers For The Arts will explain how to correctly secure rights to underlying material. Students will keep a journal, part of which may include, with instructor's approval, a short film screenplay adaptation, if the student holds the necessary rights.

Course Description

This history of architectural attempts to live in harmony with nature starts with turn of the century admirations for the health of primitivism and ends with the cyber punks designing new environments online. The course will first review philosophers' arguments in favor of healthy living in primitive huts, back-to-nature lovers' efforts to live according to their teaching, and the wilderness tourist industry's ability to benefit from it. The next meetings focus on various modernist schemes for healthy homes in harmony with nature, and why these attempts often failed. The rest of the course is devoted to topics such as building ideal ecosystems for astronauts in outer space, efforts to bring space technologies (such as solar cell panels) back to Earth, alternative environmental designs of the counterculture, cyber environments, sick building syndrome, biomimetics, earth art, and other attempts to design with nature. The class will study film and artwork, and include readings by designers such as Walter Gropius, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Ian McHarg, Jon Todd, as well as scientists and commentators such as Julian Huxley, Eugene Odum, and Stewart Brand. This history of architectural attempts to live in harmony with nature starts with turn of the century admirations for the health of primitivism and ends with the cyber punks designing new environments online. The course will first review philosophers' arguments in favor of healthy living in primitive huts, back-to-nature lovers' efforts to live according to their teaching, and the wilderness tourist industry's ability to benefit from it. The next meetings focus on various modernist schemes for healthy homes in harmony with nature, and why these attempts often failed. The rest of the course is devoted to topics such as building ideal ecosystems for astronauts in outer space, efforts to bring space technologies (such as solar cell panels) back to Earth, alternative environmental designs of the counterculture, cyber environments, sick building syndrome, biomimetics, earth art, and other attempts to design with nature. The class will study film and artwork, and include readings by designers such as Walter Gropius, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Ian McHarg, Jon Todd, as well as scientists and commentators such as Julian Huxley, Eugene Odum, and Stewart Brand.

Course Description

Where do forces of gentrification intersect with grassroots efforts to preserve the cultural identity of a marginalized community? How are demographics used as a tool by political activists to organize campaigns? How is mapping being used in campaigns to affect social change? This course explores how to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a powerful application in mapping technology, as a tool for cultural documentation, community engagement, and public policy analysis. We will explore the effectiveness of GIS as a mapping tool to help understand historical patterns of demographics, and empower community members to become informed citizens in the decision-making process. Specific skills we'll learn include how to geocode addresses, do a spatial analysis, and use census data to map the racial and income composition of New York neighborhoods. You will also work with local community based organizations to understand how community non-profits are using GIS mapping as a tool for research and strategic planning.

Course Description

From the taping of the police beating of Rodney King, to online advocacy, and the explosion of YouTube, video has become an essential tool for social and political actors. This course will be a hands-on class in video production in the service of political and community organizing. Class time will be used to: examine the biases of corporate-controlled media; learn the theory and history of video activism; develop basic camera and editing skills; and reflect on lessons learned in the field. Outside of class students will break into groups and collaborate with local community organizations in the conception and production of a short video piece, and subsequently strategize with those organizations about how to most effectively use video in their particular struggles. Readings will include selections from Noam Chomsky, Robert McChesney and Thomas Harding.

Course Description

Two questions inspire this course. First, what determines urban policy in New York City? What are the political and economic forces shaping the priorities and policies of the City of New York? Second, how do NYC neighborhoods—especially poor and minority ones—influence public policy in a context where the dominant "expert-knows-best" model of city planning makes it harder for those community members, not already conversant in the language of public policy, to make their voices heard? Using specific NYC neighborhoods as case studies—the Lower East Side, East Harlem, and the South Bronx—our goal is to develop a nuanced account of how urban and economic development works at the local level, and to deepen our understanding of the opportunities and challenges confronting community organizations that work on policy advocacy issues. Readings include: Harvey Molotch's Urban Fortunes, Tom Angotti's New York for Sale, Arlene Dávila's Barrio Dreams, Evelyn González's The Bronx.

Course Description

This course combines volunteer work in New York City adult literacy and English as a second language programs with an academic introduction to the philosophy, history, and current issues of basic education. Students will work as volunteer teachers of reading and writing oral English or mentors at such institutions as the University Settlement, Turning Point, International Rescue Committee, and Fortune Society. In class they will read about and discuss such key issues as which "basic skills" U.S. adults now need, which adults lack these skills and why, the implications for our economy, families, communities, and democracy, the instructional approaches developed for adults, and the steps that might be taken to build support for high-quality, adult basic-skills programs. Throughout the course, students will relate such issues to their own on-site experiences in class discussion and role-playing, and create a portfolio of writing that includes on-site observations, lesson plans, reflections, and a policy brief. Readings may include Auerbach's Making Meaning, Making Change; Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed; and the journals Focus on Basics and The Change Agent. This course combines volunteer work in New York City adult literacy and English as a second language programs with an academic introduction to the philosophy, history, and current issues of basic education. Students will work as volunteer teachers of reading and writing oral English or mentors at such institutions as the University Settlement, Turning Point, International Rescue Committee, and Fortune Society. In class they will read about and discuss such key issues as which "basic skills" U.S. adults now need, which adults lack these skills and why, the implications for our economy, families, communities, and democracy, the instructional approaches developed for adults, and the steps that might be taken to build support for high-quality, adult basic-skills programs. Throughout the course, students will relate such issues to their own on-site experiences in class discussion and role-playing, and create a portfolio of writing that includes on-site observations, lesson plans, reflections, and a policy brief. Readings may include Auerbach's Making Meaning, Making Change; Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed; and the journals Focus on Basics and The Change Agent.

Course Description

Intended to introduce policy, this course will include an internship at a policy and /or advocacy organization. Community building, service integration and child welfare will be featured in readings, discussion, and internships. Through examples such as ethnic matching placements in foster care, zero tolerance approaches to drug abuse, or public financing of political campaigns, students will come to understand how government, schools, gangs, religious institutions and families can, with varying degrees of explicitness and formality, all make policy. Students will at the course conclusion be able to: identify policies within their lives; argue all sides of a policy question; appreciate the importance of evidence; and distinguish implementation from formulation. Readings will include Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, and The Lost Children of Wilder, by Nina Bernstein. Students will be helped to connect meetings they attend and the policy concepts taught and discussed in class. The goal is to leave no student unaware of the importance of policy in their own and their community's life. The course will focus on policies that are empowering. Assignments will include an internship journal.

Course Description

In this course we explore the imaginative process at work in personal narrative, political essay and journalism, and how these genres in turn relate to advocacy and community building. We will work from the premise that creating social justice relies on community building, and that to build community we need to voice our own stories as well as listen to the stories of others. As we explore expression and collaboration we will critically examine definitions of identity, ideas of authentic voice, the relationship between the individual and collective imaginations, the way that power is leveraged in media and popular culture, and the possibilities of democratizing information in the twenty-first century. During the semester, there will be guest speakers, field trips, and group projects. Readings include authors who traverse genres, such as Martin Espada, June Jordan, Eduardo Galeano, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Joy Harjo, Suheir Hammad, Sinan Antoon, Mahmoud Darwish, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison.

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Internships offer Gallatin students an opportunity to learn experientially at one of New York City's many social institutions in the arts, media, government, business, non-profit or community action sectors. Students gain first-hand work experience and develop skills and knowledge that will help them to explore the relationship between practical experience and academic theory, as well to pursue career options. Gallatin provides an extensive list of available internships; students may pursue their own as well. Internships are typically unpaid positions, although students in paid positions are permitted to receive credit. Students work anywhere from 8 to 24 hours each week; for each credit, students are expected to devote three to four hours per week during the fall and spring semesters, and at least seven to nine hours per week during the six-week summer sessions.

Course Description

Internships offer Gallatin students an opportunity to learn experientially at one of New York City's many social institutions in the arts, media, government, business, non-profit or community action sectors. Students gain first-hand work experience and develop skills and knowledge that will help them to explore the relationship between practical experience and academic theory, as well to pursue career options. Gallatin provides an extensive list of available internships; students may pursue their own as well. Internships are typically unpaid positions, although students in paid positions are permitted to receive credit. Students work anywhere from 8 to 24 hours each week; for each credit, students are expected to devote three to four hours per week during the fall and spring semesters, and at least seven to nine hours per week during the six-week summer sessions.

Course Description

Deadline for submitting proposal is Monday, January 25.
In an independent study, students work one-on-one with a faculty member on a particular topic or creative project. Often the idea for an independent study arises in a course; for example, in a seminar on early 20th-century American history, a student may develop an interest in the Harlem Renaissance and ask the professor to supervise an independent study focused exclusively on this topic during the next semester. Students may also develop creative projects in areas such as music composition, filmmaking, or fiction writing. Independent studies are graded courses, the details of which are formulated by the student and his or her instructor; these specifics are described in the Independent Study proposal and submitted to the Dean's Office for approval. The student and instructor meet regularly throughout the semester to discuss the readings, the research, and the student's work. Credit is determined by the amount of work entailed in the study and should be comparable to that of a Gallatin classroom course. Generally, independent studies, like other courses, are 2 to 4 credits. Meeting hours correspond to course credits; a 4-credit independent study requires at least seven contact hours per term between the teacher and the student.

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Tutorials are small groups of two to five students working closely with a faculty member on a common topic, project, or skill. Tutorials are usually student-generated projects and like independent studies, ideas for tutorials typically follow from questions raised in a particular course. Students may collaborate on creative projects as well, and some titles of recent tutorials include "Creating a Magazine," "Dante's Literary and Historical Background," and "Environmental Design." Tutorials are graded courses, and students work together with the instructor to formulate the structure of the tutorial, the details of which are described in the tutorial proposal and submitted to the Gallatin School for approval. The tutorial group meets regularly throughout the semester, and students follow a common syllabus: all participants complete the same readings, write papers on similar topics, etc. Students in the same tutorial must register for the same number of credits. Credit is determined by the amount of work (readings and other types of assignments) and should be comparable to that of a Gallatin classroom course. Tutorials range from 2 to 4 credits. Meeting hours correspond to course credits: a 4-credit tutorial requires at least fourteen contact hours per term between the teacher and students.

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