FYSEM-UA 203
The Nazi Racial State: Jews and Other Minorities 1933-1945
Fall 2022
Instructor: Marion Kaplan
Monday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m. 
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Identity and Society

Note: Conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 71 Introductory Experimental Physics I lecture (Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.)

The destruction of European Jewry has been a central focus in studying Nazi extermination policies. This course will look at Nazi policies towards the Jewish people and examine how the “racial state” (or racist state) dealt with those it deemed “racially unfit” to belong to the German Volk. It will analyze the ways in which the Nazis sought to create a nation based on blood and race. By studying policies towards the so-called “enemies” of the Third Reich—including Jews, Sinti and Roma (Gypsies), the physically and mentally disabled, homosexuals, Afro-Germans, “asocials,” etc.—the course will also highlight how these policies interacted with each other. It will examine measures that the government enacted to delegitimize, isolate, rob, incarcerate, sterilize, and/or murder many of these minorities, as well as measures intended to increase the “Aryan” population. The course will also examine theories that attempt to explain why many German perpetrators and bystanders participated in discrimination or murder, or allowed it to happen.

MARION KAPLAN is the Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at NYU. She is a three-time National Jewish Book Award winner for The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany; Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany; and Gender and Jewish History (with Deborah Dash Moore), as well as a finalist for Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua. Her other monographs include The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany and (as editor) Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945. She has edited several other books on German-Jewish and women’s history and has taught courses on German-Jewish history, European women’s history, and both German and European history, as well as European Jewish history and Jewish women’s history. Her newest book, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-45 was published in 2020.


FYSEM-UA 210
Language and Reality in Postclassical Science and Postmodern Literature
Fall 2022
Instructor: Friedrich Ulfers
Tuesday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Literature Through the Ages

This seminar explores the possibility that there exists a common ground between the so-called two cultures of science and the humanities. It posits the hypothesis of a correlation between postclassical science (e.g., quantum theory) and “postmodern” literature and philosophy. Among the key notions examined are Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” Niels Bohr’s “principle of complementarity,” and Jacques Derrida’s notion of “undecidability” in deconstructive theory. The discussion of these theories and their implications for literary works revolves around their effect on classical logic, the referential function of language, and the traditional goal of a complete explanation or description of reality. The seminar also asks whether this paradigm change leads to a form of posthumanism/transhumanism. Readings include works of Borges, Kundera, Pirsig, Pynchon, and Virginia Woolf, among others, and texts on modern scientific theories.

FRIEDRICH ULFERS is Associate Professor of German at New York University. He has received NYU’s Distinguished Teaching Medal and Great Teacher Award, and has twice won the College of Arts and Science Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2013 he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (The Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) for his support of transatlantic cultural relations. His specific teaching and research interests are German Romanticism and 19th and 20th century German literature (with specific emphasis on Nietzsche and Kafka). He is also affiliated with the European Graduate School in Switzerland, where he offers an intensive summer seminar on Nietzsche and gives a variety of lectures; from 2006 to 2009 he was Dean of the Media and Communications Division of the School. Professor Ulfers has published extensively, with a recent focus on Nietzsche.


FYSEM-UA 306
Latin America at the Start of the Twenty-First Century: Coming of Age or Continuing Chaos?
Fall 2022
Instructor: Jorge G. Castañeda   
Monday, 9:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics

Note: conflicts with BIOL-UA 11 Principles of Biology I in the fall (MW 9:30-10:45 a.m.) and fall PHYS-UA 71 Introductory Experimental Physics I lecture (Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.)

This seminar focuses on Latin America’s longstanding problems and possible solutions to them. It takes up such topics as the absence of orderly, peaceful, and steady democratic governance following independence from colonial rule, and the consolidation of representative democracy today; the slowdown of economic growth in the last 20 years and prospects for a new economic takeoff; the phenomenon of widespread violence at a time of growing respect for human rights; and how the traditional weakness of civil society is being overcome. For each topic, there are readings dealing with its political, economic, and cultural dimensions in both past and present.

JORGE D. CASTAÑEDA is a renowned public intellectual, political scientist, and prolific writer, with an interest in Mexican and Latin American politics, comparative politics and US-Mexican and U.S.-Latin American relations. He was Foreign Minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003. He taught at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM), at Princeton University, and the University of California, Berkeley, and at NYU. Castañeda was a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1985-87) and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant Recipient (1989-1991). He is the author of, among other books, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War; Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara; Perpetuating Power; Ex-Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants; Leftovers: Tales of the Latin American Left (with Marco Morales), and most recently America Through Foreign Eyes. He is a regular commentator for CNN and an occasional writer of Guest Essays at The New York Times.


FYSEM-UA 371
Welcome to College: The Novel
Fall 2022
Instructor: Carol Sternhell
Tuesday, 12:30 p.m.-3:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Literature Through the Ages

Prerequisite: A score of 4 or 5 in AP English Literature (or equivalent international exam) OR permission of the instructor. Note that this seminar requires reading one full book every week.

Note: Conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.)

Starting college can be exhilarating—and terrifying. A chance for intellectual enlightenment—or intense loneliness. An escape from a stultifying small town of narrow-minded people—or a riot of alcohol, sex, and drugs. In this class we read a selection of college novels from different historical periods, spanning about 100 years. We discuss these novels from a variety of perspectives: literary, historical, and journalistic. In addition to presenting biographical and historical and cultural reports on at least two of the authors and their novels, students write about their own experiences as first-year students at NYU in several genres, including fiction and nonfiction. Together we explore this important life passage, examining life as we live it.  This is a class for people who love to read fiction—we read a full novel every week, and some of them are long—so please don’t sign up for it if that doesn’t sound like fun.

CAROL STERNHELL is Associate Professor of Journalism and a Director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute’s Studio 20 graduate program. She created the department’s study away programs in London, Prague, and Accra and was also a founder of the Women’s Studies major (now Gender and Sexuality Studies). She has written extensively about feminism, motherhood, and literature for a variety of publications. Before coming to NYU, she worked as an editor at Newsday, a general assignment reporter for the New York Post, and a freelance magazine writer. She received the College’s Golden Dozen Award for Teaching Excellence in 2005.


FYSEM-UA 384
Journalism of War, Revolution, Genocide, and Human Rights
Fall 2022
Instructor: Susie Linfield
Wednesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics

This seminar will focus on some of the extraordinary political events that made, and changed, the political (and moral) realities of the past century, and that created the world that we now inhabit. Throughout the term we will return to certain questions, including the changing nature of violence and the emergence of disputed concepts such as "crimes against humanity" and "human rights." We'll consider the ways in which "the face of war" in the 20th century (and early 21st) has changed—and the ways in which the journalism that described those wars also changed. We will start with the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War and then study the journalism of, among other events, the Holocaust, the Iranian Revolution, the fall of Communism, the genocide in Rwanda, the war in Bosnia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 9/11, and the Arab Spring.

SUSIE LINFIELD is Associate Professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and writes about the intersection of culture and politics for a wide array of publications. Recent essays have addressed Syrian torture photographs (the New York Times), war photography (Aperture and The Nation), the Zionist Left in Israel (the Boston Review), and an anti-Vietnam War classic (Bookforum). Professor Linfield’s book The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Professor Linfield was the editor in chief of American Film, the deputy editor of the Village Voice, and the arts editor of the Washington Post; she also spent six years as a critic for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. She serves on the editorial boards of Dissent and Photography and Culture, and is a member of the New York Institute of the Humanities. Professor Linfield received her B.A. from Oberlin College, where she studied American History, and her M.A. in Journalism from NYU (minor: Documentary Film). From its founding in 1995 until 2014, Professor Linfield was instrumental in building NYU’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program, first as Associate Director and then as Director.

 

FYSEM-UA 449
Wiseguys, Spies, and Private Eyes: Heroes and Villains in American Culture, Film, and Literature
Fall 2022
Instructor: Eddy Friedfeld        
Thursday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 4:55 p.m-6:10 p.m.
Theme: Genres of Writing

This seminar explores the ways in which specific American archetypes and themes are perceived and articulated—from the rugged Old West individualist, to the persevering underdog who becomes a boxing champ, to the Cold War era superspy. We examine representations of heroes and villains in modern American popular culture and how the great films and novels of three particular genres, the detective, the gangster, and the spy, influenced our understanding of these archetypes. From the early influences of Hamlet and Macbeth to Sherlock Holmes, Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, Mario Puzo’s (and Francis Ford Coppola’s) The Godfather, James Bond, and Batman, we look at the mythology and evolution of heroes and villains through popular and high culture icons, the genesis of the genres and how they developed over time, and how great directors, actors, and writers influenced audiences worldwide and were themselves influenced by culture and history.

EDDY FRIEDFELD is a film and entertainment journalist and historian, as well as an attorney specializing in corporate restructuring. He is the co-author of Caesar’s Hours with comedy legend Sid Caesar, and is working on a book on the history of comedy in America. He was the senior consultant for the PBS documentary Make ’Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America; has appeared on Fox News, PBS, and WOR and Bloomberg Radio; has written and lectured extensively on entertainment and film; has produced and hosted tributes to Dick Van Dyke, Eric Idle, Dick Cavett, Alan King, Robert Altman, George Carlin, and Paul Newman, among others; and has worked with Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Billy Crystal. He received his BA from Columbia College and his JD from NYU Law School. He also teaches at Yale College and The Tisch School of the Arts.


FYSEM-UA 456
Laboratories for Democracy: Making American Cities Better
Fall 2022
Instructor: Eric Gioia
Thursday, 4:55 p.m.–7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: The City: Longstanding Challenges and Dynamic Change

This course examines the intersection of ideas, politics, and action. We study best practices from around the country (and the world), evaluate their effectiveness, and determine whether and how successful programs can be replicated. The seminar asks students to not only think critically about issues of public policy, but also to think anew about the role they play in shaping it. Cities, states, and municipalities serve as what Justice Brandeis called “little laboratories for democracy”—where ideas flourish and problems get solved. From fighting crime in the streets of New York City, to banning smoking in bars and restaurants, to making the power grid more efficient, to encouraging the arts and culture in urban environments, innovations in American cities have spread across the globe. Topics for student projects are drawn from current issues and problems facing decision-makers and elected officials in America today.

ERIC GIOIA is an attorney with extensive experience in business, law, and government. He joined J.P. Morgan in January 2010 after serving for eight years on the New York City Council. Prior to serving on City Council, he practiced law at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, and served in the White House under President Bill Clinton. Professor Gioia holds a BA from New York University and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center.


FYSEM-UA 474
What is College For?
Fall 2022
Instructor: Trace Jordan  
Monday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Theme: First-Generation Cohort

Note: conflicts with Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (Monday, 3:30 p.m-4:45 p.m.).

Note: FYSEM-UA 474, What is College For? and FYSEM-UA 598, After The End: Post-Apocalypse Novels in the 20th & 21st Centuries are strongly recommended for first-generation students. They provide an excellent opportunity to join a close-knit community of your peers who also identify as the first in their families to pursue higher education.

Why did you decide to attend college? To broaden your intellectual horizons and become a more open-minded person? To gain specialized knowledge? To achieve a more successful and financially rewarding career? To make new friends? To become an engaged participant in a democratic society? To satisfy your parents’ plans for your future? Or perhaps some combination of these reasons that you are still figuring out? This seminar examines historical and contemporary discussions about the personal and social goals of higher education and studies issues that have the potential to profoundly transform the college experience in coming years. It also prompts students to be more reflective and purposeful about their own academic choices at NYU. We ask: what is the optimal balance between a “liberal arts” education, usually provided by a core curriculum, and the pursuit of specialized study within a major? How can professors and students cultivate deep learning instead of rote memorization? How is technology impacting education, and what further changes may occur in the future?

TRACE JORDAN is Clinical Professor and Associate Director of the College Core Curriculum. His research interests and publications include the role of science education in a liberal arts curriculum, the use of computer simulations for teaching and learning chemistry, and the impact of interest and motivation on educational engagement and achievement. Professor Jordan is a two-time winner of the College’s Golden Dozen Award for Teaching Excellence.


FYSEM-UA 476
Political Theater
Fall 2022
Instructor: Eric Dickson      
Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Philosophical and Political Thought

This interdisciplinary seminar offers a survey of political theater from the ancient Greeks to the present. How have dramatic depictions of politics changed over time? In what ways have political plays been used to advance political agendas, both by the powerful and by dissidents and protest movements? To what extent can we understand political speeches and political campaigns as essentially theatrical productions? In a typical week, students will read one full-length play, accompanied by appropriate readings from political science or social psychology. Through these readings, writing assignments, and class discussion, we address the development of different dramatic techniques and forms throughout the history of theater; the co-evolving relationship between politically-themed spectacles and changing ideas about citizenship and political legitimacy; and the political psychology of speeches and campaign techniques.

ERIC S. DICKSON is Associate Professor of Politics and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Psychology. His research interests include political communication, election campaigning, political leadership, and identities in politics. His work, which uses both game theory and social-scientific experiments, focuses on the interface between political strategy and political psychology. He is also an installation artist with an extensive background in theater.


FYSEM-UA 484
Globalization and its Discontents
Fall 2022
Instructor: Ulrich Baer
Monday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues

Note: Conflicts with Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (Monday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.) and cohort conflicts with BIOL-UA 11 Principles of Biology I (Monday/Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

For several decades, globalization promised a new way of interconnecting the world economically, politically, and culturally. This period was marked by optimism about the potential for globalization to achieve increased equality, stability, and prosperity for more people in the world. But there is a dark underside to globalization, which has prompted local resistance to the erasure of cultural specificity and calls for watchdog organizations and legal institutions that hold global actors accountable. Is there a structural problem inherent in any project that makes universal claims? Do all people, cultures, and countries share a commitment to the same basic rights and responsibilities—or do some strike a different balance between protecting individuals while maintaining the common good? This course examines issues and problems in the globalization of technology, economics, and culture today by studying key theoretical texts and via behind-the-scenes visits to New York City-based institutions with a global mission (including the United Nations, leading museums, charity organizations, cultural institutions, and corporations).

ULRICH BAER, University Professor of Comparative Literature and German in FAS and Photography and Imaging in the Tisch School of the Arts, was awarded the College’s Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1998 and 2004. He hosts the podcast Think About It, and is the author of What Snowflakes Get Right: Free Speech, Equality, and Truth in the University; The Dark Interval: Letters on Loss, Grief, and Transformation by Rainer Maria Rilke; Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan; Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma; 110 Stories: New York Writes after September 11; and of new introductions to canonical books such as Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, Mrs. Dalloway, and others.

FYSEM-UA 497
How We See
Fall 2022
Instructor: Marisa Carrasco
Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Cognitive and Neural Science

Note: Conflicts with CHEM-UA 126 General Chemistry II (Tuesday/Thursday 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.) and Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (Thursday 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

Note: If you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this course.

Note: Students in this seminar will be automatically enrolled into a paired section of Writing the Essay: Science and Society in their first year.

Do we see the world the way we do because we are the way we are or because the world is the way it is? This course looks at what we know about vision from multiple scientific perspectives: perceptual psychology tells us about the process of seeing and provides important insights into the workings of visual mechanisms; neuropsychology shows us what happens to perception when these mechanisms malfunction; and neuroscience tells us about processes at the level of cells and neural systems. At the same time, we discuss modes and techniques of scientific inquiry from these different perspectives. How do vision scientists learn? What kinds of experiments do they conduct? How has the development of new neuroimaging techniques (fMRI, for example) shaped the field?

MARISA CARRASCO is Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science and a Collegiate Professor, as well as a former Chairperson of the Department of Psychology. Born and raised in Mexico City, she received her licentiate in Psychology from the National University of Mexico and her PhD in Psychology (with an emphasis on cognition and perception) from Princeton University. She conducts research in cognitive neuroscience, exploring the relation between the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in visual perception and attention. Her papers have been published in the leading scientific journals in the field, and she has won numerous prestigious awards and fellowships throughout her career, such as a National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, a Cattell Fellowship, an American Association of University Women Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.


FYSEM-UA 503
In Search of Lost Time
Fall 2022
Instructor: Marcelle Clements
Tuesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Literature through the Ages

Note: This intensive course requires a minimum of 350 pages of reading a week.

We read Marcel Proust (in translation) as he should be read: hedonistically—with respect and admiration but also with delectation. At about 4,000 pages, In Search of Lost Time is one of literature’s most challenging and pleasurable reads, still unparalleled in how it combines finesse and wit with raw emotion, self-examination with social history and a scathing portrait of the French beau monde at the outset of modernity. Although Proust (1871–1922) is often cited as France’s greatest novelist, many readers never move past the first fifty pages of his work, reading the same gorgeous sentences again and again. However, as its architecture cannot be appreciated until it has been read once in its entirety, we move at a brisk pace through all six volumes. When we read the final volume, we begin to understand the extraordinarily intimate and imaginative relationship Proust sustains with his reader, and, most importantly, how the vast structure of In Search of Lost Time reveals the intertwining of life and art to create literature. In-class creative writing exercises and wide-ranging class discussion are designed to assist with the reading and to articulate an expressive, personal response.

MARCELLE CLEMENTS is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. Her fourth and most recent book is a novel, Midsummer. She has written prizewinning essays and articles for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Esquire, Elle, and Rolling Stone.  Since 1999, she has taught a seminar each fall on Proust's In Search of Lost Time at NYU's College of Arts and Science, where she is a Collegiate Professor. Each spring, she leads an Advanced Fiction Workshop and an Advanced Non-Fiction Workshop in the Creative Writing Department. She is a recipient of NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award.


FYSEM-UA 506
Game Theory and the Humanities
Fall 2022
Instructor: Steven J. Brams
Wednesday, 4:55 p.m.–7:25 p.m.    
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Philosophical and Political Thought

Prerequisite: No mathematical background beyond high school mathematics is assumed, but a willingness to learn and apply sophisticated reasoning to analyze the interactions of players in games is essential.

Game theory is a mathematical theory of strategy that has been applied to the analysis of conflict and cooperation in such fields as economics, political science, and biology. In this seminar, we discuss more unusual applications—to history, literature, philosophy, the Bible, theology, and law. We discuss Abraham’s decision to offer his son Isaac for sacrifice; the choices made by accused witches and their persecutors in medieval witch trials; Lady Macbeth's incitement of her husband to murder King Duncan in Shakespeare’s play; several strategic games played by presidents and their antagonists in domestic crises (e.g., the Civil War) and international crises (e.g., the Cuban missile crisis), and coping mechanisms used by characters in catch-22 games (including those in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22).

STEVEN J. BRAMS is Professor of Politics at NYU. He is author, co-author, or co-editor of 19 books and about 300 articles. He has applied game theory and social-choice theory to voting and elections, bargaining and fairness, international relations, and the Bible, theology, and literature. He is a former president of the Peace Science Society (1990-91) and of the Public Choice Society (2004-2006). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1986), a Guggenheim Fellow (1986-87), and was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (1998-99).


FYSEM-UA 546
Travel and Communication in Antiquity
Fall 2022
Instructor: Raffaella Cribiore 
Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m          
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures & Societies

Note: Conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.) 

This course explores traveling, communicating, and spreading news in antiquity. Unlike us moderns, the ancients did not travel for leisure, and the notion of travel as “routine” would have been foreign to them; their journeys had mythic and epic significance and took place under precarious conditions. Likewise, whereas today we are able to communicate with each other in many convenient ways, sending letters and messages in the Greek and Roman worlds was cumbersome and time-intensive. Nonetheless, people did get in touch with each other and exchange news. Indeed, one of the goals of the course is to question what might be called a “progressive model” of understanding communication(s) that automatically assumes the superiority of modern technology.

RAFFAELLA CRIBIORE is Professor of Classics and an authority on education in antiquity. Her publications include Writing, Teachers, and Students in Greco-Roman Egypt; Gymnastics of the Mind: Greek Education in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, which won the Goodwin Prize in 2003; and Women’s Letters from Ancient Egypt, 300 BC-AD 800 (with Roger Bagnall). Her most recent book, The School of Libanius in Late Antique Antioch, is a study of an elite school of rhetoric in Syria.


FYSEM-UA 564
Modern Poetry: Craft and Revolution
Fall 2022
Instructor: Matthew Rohrer
Wednesday, 11:00am -1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Genres of Writing

Note: Cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 71 Introductory Experimental Physics I lecture (Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.)

This course thrusts students headlong into the dark cobwebby interiors of the modern poem. We’ll look closely at how modern poems became modern, examining several revolutions as we think about what poems are—beginning in England in 1798, coming to Walt Whitman’s and Emily Dickinson’s America in the 1850s, stopping in Harlem in the 1920s, and ending up in today’s online world. We’ll consider how modern poems are actually put together, considering such elemental concerns as image, voice, structure, etc. And we’ll also write our own poems, sometimes with these examples as our models. Students will leave this course with a deeper understanding of the lineage of the modern poem and what makes the modern poem go. And, thanks to the generous and critical attentions of the workshop, students will come to the same understanding of their own work.

MATTHEW ROHRER is Clinical Professor in the Creative Writing Program at NYU, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate students. He is the author of nine books of poetry, was a founder of Fence Magazine and Fence Books, and has participated in residencies and performances at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and the Henry Museum (Seattle). His poems have been widely anthologized, and he has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing.


FYSEM-UA 695
Gestures, Movement, and Literature
Fall 2022
Instructor: Lourdes Davila
Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts

Note: Conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.)

Working in the space of articulation between dance, literature, and politics, this seminar examines movement(s) and dance as a key element with which to read transformative moments of history, culture, politics, and philosophy. How do philosophers use the body dancing as a metaphor for thought? How do we read the body dancing before Columbus’ arrival as the first archive of knowledge and resistance? How does the dancing body enter the stage of race relations in 19th century Cuba? What impact does US modern dance have in the political history of the nation and how is it that a Mexican, José Limón, stands as one of the leading figures in US modern dance? Why is it that political movements use the term “movement” to speak of a politics, and what impact does that have on the political histories of bodies? The course will include texts by Cirilo Villaverde, García Lorca, Luis Palés Matos, Alejo Carpentier, Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortázar, Andrés Caicedo, Claudia Salazar and Mario Bellatin; the films of Almodóvar; and flamenco dance and the dances of José Limón, Martha Graham and Pina Bausch, Oscar Araiz and Alicia Díaz. The theoretical and philosophical bases will be provided by Nietzsche, Agamben, Ranciére, Marie Bardet, Lepecki, and Badiou, all of whom talk specifically about the art of movement, about movement and politics, or about movement and dance as metaphor for thought. The course understands as a premise that we can use the history of dance and movement as a way of understanding history and politics in Latin America.

LOURDES DÁVILA is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and a two-time Golden Dozen Teaching Award winner. Since the 1980s, she has written and published widely on Julio Cortázar’s writing. Her first book, The Image Arrives on a Verbal Shore, focuses on Cortázar’s use of visual language. She has published multiple articles on photography and literature and dance and literature, and is the editor of the essay collection La variable Bellatin. She has worked as a translator since the early eighties in the fields of art and literature. She is the managing editor of the undergraduate online journal Esferas, produced by Department of Spanish and Portuguese. She also worked as a professional dancer for 25 years and is now working on a book about the relationship between dance and literature.


FYSEM-UA 728
How We Learn
Fall 2022
Instructor: Anamaria Alexandrescu
Thursday, 6:20 p.m.-8:55 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Cognitive and Neural Science

Note: If you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this course.

Note: Students in this seminar will be automatically enrolled into a paired section of Writing the Essay: Science and Society in their first year.

How do humans and other animals learn, and how do we study this in the laboratory? What is the neurobiological basis of learning and memory? What are the genetic and environmental factors that have shaped the learning process throughout evolution? What other cognitive processes influence learning, and how can we apply this knowledge to our own studies? In trying to address these questions, this seminar gives an overview of modern neuroscience and psychology research on learning and memory, and illustrates how cognitive science can be used to develop strategies for effective learning, while also discussing implications for societal issues, disorders, and artificial intelligence.

ANAMARIA ALEXANDRESCU is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She received a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from NYU in 2020 for research examining the neurobiology of learning and memory; in particular, her graduate work focused on the molecular mechanisms that contribute to synaptic plasticity underlying long-term memory formation. Her current research interests are centered at the intersection between neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and education.


FYSEM-UA 746
Poetry and War
Fall 2022
Instructor: Liana Theodoratou
Wednesday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Genres of Writing

Note: Cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 71 Introductory Experimental Physics I lecture (Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.)

There can be no poetry that is not about destruction and survival, and this is especially the case in the poetry of war. We might even say that the poetry of war tells us what is true of all poetry: that it bears witness to the enigmatic relation between death and survival, loss and life, mourning and courage. The poetry of war often speaks of the death, if not the impossibility, of poetry. But what makes poetry poetry is its capacity to bear the traces of what it cannot say, to go on, in the face of this inability, to suggest its potential for speaking. What is at stake is the emergence and survival of a poetry that bears witness to what history has silenced, to all the vanished who, arising from the darkest nights of memory, haunt us, and encourage us to remember the deaths and losses for which we remain, still today, responsible. This is the lesson of twentieth-century poets who speak of war. Responding to the violence and trauma of war, to the deaths and suffering that result from wartime conflict, these poets seek to offer us a critical genealogy of war. They stage and enact their own troubled understanding of the capacities and incapacities of poetry in the face of disaster and catastrophe, even as they assert the necessity of remembering the uncertain traces and legacies of war, and of doing so without traducing or reducing the experience of war, without betraying the dead.

LIANA THEODORATOU is Clinical Professor in and Director of the Alexander S. Onassis Program in Hellenic Studies, and is also Director of the NYU in Athens Program. She is a recipient of the College’s Outstanding Teaching Award and of its Golden Dozen Award for Teaching Excellence. She has written widely on ancient and modern Greek poetry and has translated several works by, among others, Foucault, Althusser, and Derrida into modern Greek. She is currently completing a book on the politics of mourning in contemporary Greek poetry, entitled Mourning Becomes Greece.


FYSEM-UA 752
Vikings and Celts: Ireland, Scandinavia and the North Sea World during the ‘Long Viking Age’
Fall 2022
Instructor: Sarah Waidler
Wednesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies

Note: Cohort conflicts with Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (Monday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.)

Northern Europe produced a number of long-form literary pieces during the Middle Ages, such as the Old English Beowulf, the early Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge and its associated tales, the Middle Welsh Mabinogion and the Old Norse sagas. This course will explore these tales and others and question the definition of this genre (or genres) of literature, examining connections between the different types of tales and what we can know about their composition. Students will investigate the connections between these tales and earlier examples of epic literature, such as Virgil’s The Aeneid, and examine what we know regarding the transmission of earlier forms of heroic tales from Late Antiquity and the ancient world to medieval Western Europe. Major themes such as violence, heroism and the role of women in these stories will be discussed throughout the course and students will be expected to engage with both questions presented by the individual examples of these forms of literature as well as to compare across cultural and literary boundaries. The reception of these tales in both the medieval and modern worlds will be discussed in the conclusion to the course. This class will give students a grounding in critical thinking and an appreciation of different approaches to literary texts and the environments in which they were created. By engaging with some of the foremost medieval literary productions of the European Middle Ages, this course will chart a journey through some of the greatest written achievements of the cultures of the Celts, Vikings and early English and question students’ understanding of literature as well as the cultural construction and portrayal of the heroic past.

SARAH WAIDLER earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, and was an O’Donovan Postdoctoral Scholar at the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, in 2016–2018. She works on medieval Celtic literature and history and the cult of saints in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. She is particularly interested in the overlap between the literature of saints and “secular” literature. Her work also explores the intellectual environment of learning and the interplay of ideas between Ireland, Wales, and the wider medieval world.


FYSEM-UA 772
The Journey of Journalism
Fall 2022
Instructor: Charles J. Glasser Jr.
Wednesday, 11:00a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics

This course is more than a survey of important journalism of the twentieth century. Through intensive reading and discussion, we will explore both how significant historical events affected journalism and how journalism helped shape those events. If journalism is truly “the first draft of history,” then looking at significant cultural and political moments through the eyes of contemporaneous journalism yields new insight on who we are as a nation—for better or worse. We examine such historical events and movements as the robber barons of the Gilded Age and their antagonists the Muckrakers; the early Anarchist and labor movements; the coverage of the World Wars and government censorship; the role of the press in the civil rights movement; and the golden age of investigative journalism. We will read and discuss the work of a wide range of media notables, including Ida Tarbell, Jacob Riis, H. L. Mencken, Walter Winchell, Edward R. Murrow, Sy Hirsch, Woodward and Bernstein, Tom Wolfe, Matt Taibbi, Amanda Bennett, Judith Miller, and Glenn Greenwald.

CHARLES J. GLASSER JR. is Adjunct Professor of Media Law and Ethics at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is a former journalist and covered spot news and combat photojournalism in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the late 1970s and 80s. He spent several years as a copy editor at Time Inc. and then studied first amendment law at the New York University School of Law. After earning his JD he started his legal career at NBC News, and then moved on to several law firms representing Gannett, the New York Post, the Portland Press-Herald, and other regional and national newspapers and publishers. He served as the founding global media counsel of Bloomberg News for more than a dozen years and is the author of The International Libel and Privacy Handbook. In addition, he appears frequently as an expert on free speech and media law in a variety of news outlets and writes about media for Reuters, the Washington Examiner, and several not-for-profit free-speech organizations. He is also a regular contributor on media ethics for The Daily Caller.


FYSEM-UA 800
I, the Author
Fall 2022
Instructor: Chiara Marchelli
Thursday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Genres of Writing

This course will focus on identity and the autobiographical experience as narrated by a selection of contemporary American and European authors, with a particular attention to Italian examples. Through the analysis of their work, it will focus on how authorship and the identity/presence of the author have evolved in contemporary times, and how this evolution reverberates beyond national borders. We will investigate what moves these authors, what aspects of their experience they choose to narrate and how they relate to their own subjectivity and the world. We will explore thematic differences and convergences, social and historical influences, the relationship between the self and society, the evolution of narrative languages and purposes.

The selection of readings is representative of the emergence of a new literary genre that blends memoir, autofiction and fiction, and describes the changing intellectual, cultural and social landscape of a literature that can no longer be contained within its national boundaries, but is inspired by a quest for a new identity or new identities, ignited by and reflected in today’s globalized world.

CHIARA MARCHELLI holds a degree in Oriental Languages from the University of Venice and an M.A. in Literary Translation from ISIT, Milan. In 2003, she published her first novel, Angeli e cani, which won the Premio Rapallo Carige Opera Prima. It was followed by a collection of short stories Sotto i tuoi occhi and three novels L’amore involontario, Le mie parole per te, and Le notti blu. Her latest novel, La memoria della cenere, was published in 2019 by NNE. She has taught contemporary literature, Italian, translation, and creative writing at New York University since 2004.


FYSEM-UA 801
History of Italian Opera
Fall 2022
Instructor: Roberto Scarcella Perino
Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 4:55 p.m.-6:10 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts

Note: Conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30pm-1:45pm)

The course covers the evolution of opera from Monteverdi to the early 20th century. The genres analyzed in this course are favola in musica, intermezzo, opera seria, opera buffa, grand opera, dramma lirico. Operatic production styles are considered with regard to the recordings used in the course; class discussion is meant to help students develop a critical approach to opera appreciation. No specific musical training is required.

ROBERTO SCARCELLA PERINO is Composer in Residence at the NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Assistant Clinical Professor in Italian Studies at NYU, and a Scholar in Residence at the American Institute for Verdi Studies. He has written five operas: Verdi, Merli e Cucú; A Caval Donato; Blackout; Furiosus; and A Sweet Silence in Cremona.


FYSEM-UA 802
The Metaphysics of Race, Gender and Sex
Fall 2022
Instructor: Laura Franklin-Hall
Tuesday, 9:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m          
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Gender, Sex, and Sexuality

Note: Conflicts with CHEM-UA 126 General Chemistry II (Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.) and Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

What is it to be a female or male animal? Or to be a female or male human being? What is it to be a woman? To be a man? Or to have some other gender? And how are all these questions connected? This course will explore answers to these and other questions about sex and gender from a philosophical perspective, drawing along the way on relevant research in biology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. We begin by considering how the sexes evolved across the living world, i.e., in both animals and plants. With this history in hand, we ask, given persisting disagreement about their nature, how the categories 'male' and 'female' should be understood and evaluated, both in humans and other living things. Next we explore the gender categories such as woman, man, boy and girl. How are American gender categories similar to or different from those found in other cultures? And how are gender categories generally related to, or distinct from, the sex categories previously investigated? Having considered a variety of philosophical approaches to gender--some tying gender directly to sex, others to social characteristics like oppression--we conclude by evaluating these options for ourselves.

LAURA FRANKLIN-HALL, Associate Professor of Philosophy, trained both as a biologist and as a philosopher. Her research and teaching interests include the nature of scientific explanation, scientific modeling, and classification; the structure of evolutionary theory and the tree of life; and the relationship between evolution and our ethical commitments. She has published articles on the functioning of the hippocampus, microbial species, the “scientific method,” scientific explanation, and the nature of the sexes—male and female—across the animal world. She is presently working on a book project on the Philosophy of Pregnancy. It tackles metaphysical, ethical, and evolutionary questions surrounding pregnancy, both human and non-human.



FYSEM-UA 900.001
The Epic Tradition
Fall 2022
Instructor: Stephanie Crooks
Tuesday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m. 
Theme: Past Cultures & Societies

Note: Conflicts with CHEM-UA 126 General Chemistry II (Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.) and Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

This course provides a wide-ranging introduction to the genre of epic. We will study several ancient examples of the literary form (including the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid), while considering the societies for which and by which they were created. Later in the semester, we will work to identify the conceits and themes that are characteristic to these examples of epic literature, and we will track what changes - if any - the genre undergoes in subsequent epochs and cultures. To that end, we will also read excerpts from Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and Paradise Lost, among others. Epic, we will find, deeply explores human nature – our desires and our flaws – while often posing difficult questions about national identity, imperialism, and conquest. What makes an individual a hero? How do heroes respond to the tasks that are imposed upon them? By whom are those tasks imposed, and, perhaps most important, why do tales of heroes continue to appeal to us today? 

STEPHANIE CROOKS is an Adjunct Instructor in the College of Arts and Sciences with research interests in death, material culture, and landscape in Greek and Latin poetry. She has published on Vergil’s Eclogues and has an article on Catullus forthcoming in Classical Philology. She is currently preparing a manuscript on the image of the poet’s tomb in Latin elegy. 

FYSEM-UA 900.002
Cities and Countryside: Past and Present
Fall 2022
Instructor: Mitra Panahipour
Friday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Past Cultures & Societies

Note: Conflicts with CHEM-UA 125 General Chemistry I, CHEM-UA 126 General Chemistry II and BIOL-UA 11 Principles of Biology I.

This course explores cities and their surrounding hinterlands across different temporal and spatial scales to discuss how the city, as a distinctive form of social organization, became the dominant feature of landscapes. What is the urban-rural dynamic about, how can we compare urban and non-urban landscapes through time? This course provides students with the understanding and skills for addressing environmental, political, and socioeconomic histories and longer-term patterns of human-environment interactions, settlement, resettlement, and abandonment. It also develops necessary skills in spatial understanding. With an interdisciplinary approach - including hands-on training in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other geospatial analysis tools - we will look at archaeological and historical sources and practice computational methods to investigate the transformation of places in their wider natural and built contexts. We examine contemporary as well as historical landscapes from different regions, particularly the Near East, and  learn how understanding ancient landscapes can help us address current and future issues such as environmental and climatic change and issues of sustainability. The course combines lectures, weekly readings, class discussions, and some of the sessions will include in-class computer lab activities.

MITRA PANAHIPOUR is an Adjunct Professor at New York University’s College of Arts and Science. Previously, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, in 2019-2021. As an anthropological archaeologist, her research focuses on the dynamics of settlement, land use, and social organization across diverse microenvironmental zones in the Near/Middle East. She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches and applies landscapes surveys, geospatial analysis, remote sensing, and environmental and ethnographic data in understanding the longer-term patterns of change.


FYSEM-UA 900.003
Incarceration Nation: The Borders of Belonging
Fall 2022
Instructor:Aisha Khan
Monday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics

In the world today there are ten countries that have the highest numbers of imprisoned populations. The US is first on that list, with almost 2.3 million people incarcerated. One in thirty-one people in the US is under some form of correctional supervision—from prisons, jails, and immigration detention centers to forensic hospitals and juvenile detention treatment facilities. By the early 2000’s, over 2,500 children in the US had been sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. Almost half of Americans have family members who have been incarcerated. The magnitude of these and other similarly staggering statistics reveals what many today see as an American crisis.

In this course we will explore the phenomenon of mass incarceration in the US, looking into the ways that its manifestations and consequences have historically and culturally shaped American society. Our time frame will include the early 20th century, but we will emphasize the late 20th and early 21st centuries, which is the moment in the US when the “carceral state” and the “prison industrial complex” grew exponentially and also gained widespread scholarly, activist, and popular attention. 

We will begin with important foundational work that analyzes the ideology and aims of imprisonment and mass incarceration. This work will frame our exploration of more recent research, as we focus on key themes that mark what is now known as carceral studies. These themes include the “wars” on drugs, crime, and terror; the role of race, profiling, and poverty; the definition and enforcement of citizenship and its borderlands; gender and kinship; the arts and artistic expression; “re-entry” and restorative community-building; and the merging of scholarship and activism. Documentary films, social media materials, and interdisciplinary texts will provide the basis for lectures, class discussions, and assignments. 

AISHA KHAN is a cultural anthropologist in NYU’s Department of Anthropology. Her research areas focus on the Caribbean and its Asian and African diasporas. She has conducted ethnographic and archival research in Honduras, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, and Haiti. She is particularly interested in exploring the contradictions that may be generated by the Western concept of identity when it is simultaneously a foundation for social equality and an instrument through which social inequality is reinforced. She teaches courses on racial and religious hierarchies in the Americas, colonial and postcolonial societies, ethical questions that are connected to social activism, and Muslims in the Americas.


FYSEM-UA 900.004
A Short Introduction to Psychoanalysis
Fall 2022
Instructor: Juliet Fleming
Wednesday, 8:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Health and Society

Note: Conflicts with BIOL-UA 11 Principles of Biology I (Monday/Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.) and CHEM-UA 126 General Chemistry I (Monday/Wednesday, 8 a.m.-9:15 a.m.)

“I refer to those appetites that are awakened in sleep, when the rest of the soul, the rational, gentle and dominant part, slumbers, but the beastly and savage part, replete with food and wine, gambols and, pushing sleep away, endeavors to sally forth and satisfy its own instincts. You are aware that in such case there is nothing it will not venture to undertake as being released from all sense of shame and reflection. It does not shrink from attempting in fancy unholy intercourse with a mother, or with anyone else, man, god or brute. It is ready for any foul deed of blood; it abstains from no food, and, in a word, falls short of no extreme of folly and shamelessness.”  Plato, Republic, Book IX

Psychoanalysis is hard to classify: as a body of knowledge it does not fit smoothly into the criteria of science, social science, philosophy, literature, or art.  Freud, who was trained as a doctor, first used the term in 1896, to mean the scientific study of the mind and soul rather than of the brain. Freud was one of the great experimental thinkers: during a career that spanned 60 years he constantly evolved his thought and challenged his own conclusions.  But he never departed from the proposition that thoughts can exist in our minds, and guide our actions, of which we are unconscious.  As you can see by the quote from Plato, he was by no means the first to entertain this thought, or to speculate on the self-destructive tendencies that haunt us.  But he was the architect of a field, psychoanalysis, that now works to understand the procedures by which we distort or shut out intolerable thoughts, only to have them return to trouble us in new guises.  He showed how much communication passes below our conscious radar, or entirely outside language, and suggested ways of intercepting and hearing it.  In showing that we are always psychically divided, fractured within, and to some extent strangers to ourselves, he also demonstrated how interdependent people are: “In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent."

In this seminar we will not be reading about psychoanalysis, and the many things that can be said against it, or in its defense. Rather, we will be reading to understand the logic of psychoanalytic writing, particularly that of Freud and his contemporaries, as this turned the thought of the early twentieth-century on its head.  So if you already believe Freud is wrong, or alternatively right on all counts -- or if you are not prepared to devote a semester to reading some difficult, specialized, primary texts -- this is not the seminar for you!  

JULIET FLEMING is Professor in the Department of English, Faculty Fellow in Residence at the Palladium, and the recipient of a Golden Dozen Undergraduate Teaching Award. She is a literary theorist and translator of Derrida who specializes as a theorist of writing, and has worked on such topics as graffiti, tattooing, collaging, and taxidermy.

 

FYSEM-UA 900.006
Erotics of Representation: Embodied Memory, Censorship, and the “Obscene”
Fall 2022
Instructor: Zeb Tortorici
Thursday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Gender, Sex, and Sexuality

Please note: This course involves viewing graphic depictions of sex and the body alongside some texts labeled as “pornography,” which we will analyze as cultural and historical texts in a mature and scholarly way. If you find such imagery offensive, this might not be the best course for you.

Note: Conflicts with CHEM-UA 126 General Chemistry II (Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.) and Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

This seminar analyzes the erotics of representation through overlapping historical, cultural, and technological constructions of those bodies and desires that have come to be labeled (and both desired and loathed) as “erotic” or “obscene” in diverse temporal and geopolitical contexts. We will explore the many motives and impulses behind particular acts of censorship, thinking about how and why some textual, visual, and filmic “pornographic” representations are restricted, occluded, and even destroyed. Throughout the course, we will engage key theorists from the fields of critical race theory, queer studies, trans studies, gender & sexuality studies, archival theory, history, and cultural studies (among others) to explore—from the 1500s to the present—how the production of the erotic and the obscene are inherently linked to complex processes of colonization and racialization, while also locating sites and acts of resistance to such narratives. Pending availability, we engage with archivists, librarians, artists, and activists through institutions such as the NYU Fales Library & Special Collections; the New York Public Library; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; the Center for Puerto Rican Studies; the Lesbian Herstory Archives; and the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, among others. 

ZEB TORTORICI is an associate professor in Spanish and Portuguese at NYU, and is a historian by training. His research interests include gender, sexuality, and erotic religious devotion in colonial Latin America, and hist first book, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (2018), analyzed the "sins against nature" of sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation in colonial Mexico, Guatemala, and the Philippines. His current book and digital archiving project, Archiving the "Obscene," focuses on the production, distribution, preservation, and destruction of "pornography" in Latin America, from 1700 to 1955. This work regularly takes him to grassroots queer archives, flea markets, bookstores, and online auction houses in search of explicit visual and textual traces of those bodies and desires that are often underrepresented in institutional libraries and archives in Latin America (with key exceptions that our seminar will explore). Among his edited books are Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America (2016); Ethnopornography: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knowledge (2020); Baptism Through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire (2020); and Turning Archival: The Life of the Historical in Queer Studies (2022). 

FYSEM-UA 900.007
Democracy in the Digital Age
Fall 2022
Instructor: Tiberiu Dragu
Friday, 8:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Technology and Society

How will the use of digital technology by citizens, politicians, and governments affect core aspects of democracy and democratic representation? Will new technologies empower social movements, enabling them to demand human rights protections and even topple repressive regimes? Or will digital technologies bring newfound power to the state, facilitating mass surveillance and control? This seminar focuses on how the Internet and digital technologies shape political processes in democratic and non-democratic countries. The course will investigate how digital technologies affect political participation, electoral accountability, and political equality in established democracies. We will also explore how digital technologies impact the prospect of democratization and the future of human rights in non-democratic societies.

TIBERIU DRAGU is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics. His research focuses on political institutions, particularly in relation to questions of how to structure and constrain government power in both democratic and non-democratic countries. He specializes in political economy and applications of game-theoretic models to studying how to curb political violence and state repression and how digital technologies affect political processes in both democratic and authoritarian countries. He received his Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Stanford University and has been on the faculty at NYU since 2012, teaching an array of classes on political economy, rule of law, and technology and democracy.

 

FYSEM-UA 900.008
Are you mad yet? Why Haiti's fight for Black Freedom is both the Blueprint and a Cautionary Tale.
Fall 2022
Instructor: Wynnie Lamour
Wednesday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Identity and Society

In August 1791, in the French colony known as Saint Domingue, a group of enslaved people came together for a rasanblaj, a gathering, to plan one of the most important Black revolutions of our time. Since then, the country that we know as Ayiti (Haiti) has time and time again suffered for its relentless commitment to Blackness and Black Freedom. This course is designed to help students explore their relationship to Blackness using Haiti and the language of Kreyòl Ayisyen (Haitian Creole) as case studies. Students will learn the critical role that Haiti has played in Latin America and the Caribbean and in a larger global context. Readings will include works by C. L. R. James, James Baldwin, Felix Morriseau-Leroy, Edwidge Danticat, Gina Ulysse, and other Black & Haitian visionaries. The course will be supplemented by guest lectures, visits to Haitian cultural institutions in New York City, and more. Students will also learn how to make use of NYU's archival resources in the field of Haitian Studies.

WYNNIE LAMOUR-QUANSAH is the Founder and Managing Director of the Haitian Creole Language Institute of New York. She currently teaches Haitian Creole at NYU's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies through the Indigenous and Diasporic Language Consortium. Wynnie is an Educator with a focus on Language & Communication. She has spent over the last 10 years teaching Haitian Creole in the New York City metro area to a wide array of language learners. Her experiences growing up in Brooklyn as a Haitian-American have provided her with a unique perspective as an educator, allowing her an ease that comes when one is equally comfortable in both cultures and languages. Wynnie has a BA in Linguistics from Cornell University and an MA in Urban Affairs from CUNY Queens College. Both degrees have allowed her the flexibility to blend effortlessly into many different sectors. Wynnie’s philosophy of teaching is rooted in the idea of “Mindfulness”, which promotes community and connectedness, while establishing a sense of pride and respect for both the Haitian language and culture. Most recently Wynnie’s work has included a translation of an excerpt of the Franketienne novel “Dezafi” published in “The Haiti Reader: History, Culture, and Politics” published by Duke University Press, 2020.


FYSEM-UA 900.009
The State in History
Fall 2022
Instructor: Peter Baldwin 
Monday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies

Note: Conflicts with Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (Monday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.)

From before your birth until after your death, the state dominates your life.  Your birth was shepherded by state-certified medical personnel and promptly attended by official registration.  Your name may have been chosen in accord with its rules, and every other means of identification you must have is its.  Postmortem, your children will inherit the fruits of your efforts according to its rules.  Inbetween, you will spend scarcely a minute outside its orbit.  You will be prodded, poked, vaccinated, inspected, tested, certified, autopsied, and buried as it sees fit.  What you learn, how you are trained, by whom and where – it shapes all. 

Today, the state is all-powerful, omnipresent, ubiquitous.  But it wasn’t always that way.  It emerged for the first time some five thousand years ago, in the Middle East, supplanting the tribes, clans, and chiefdoms that were humanity’s first attempts to organize ourselves.  It has grown fitfully ever since.  After the fall of the Roman empire, it collapsed in Europe and had to be rebuilt starting in the late middle ages.  The absolutist monarchies of the 17C then trumpeted the king’s power in all its glory.  Hegel thought the 19C state – routinized, bureaucratic, modern – was the pinnacle of its development.  The totalitarian dictatorships – fascist and communist – of the 20C unleashed more raw, savage state power than ever before, combining autocratic decision-making with modern technology.  Our own era has tried to curb the state – whether as neoliberalism from the right, or through an emphasis on civil rights from the left. 

Nonetheless, the state is arguably more powerful than ever before.  A strong state can also be subtle.  Rather than rattling sabers and cages, the modern state insinuates itself into our psyches, reshapes our habits, and socializes us into the behavior contemporary society requires.  Like gravity, the state is everywhere, all-powerful – and often invisible.  It is the single largest, most ubiquitous, most powerful thing in history.  It knows all about you.  Shouldn’t you know about it?

PETER BALDWIN is Global Distinguished Professor in the Center for European and Mediterranean History at NYU.  When he is not at NYU, he is a professor of history at UCLA.  His work takes a comparative approach to modern history, looking at several European nations as well as the US.  His most recent books have dealt with the first phase of the Covid pandemic, and with the evolution of crime and its control over the past 3000 years.  He has a forthcoming book on the open access debate – why academic knowledge should be freely available to everyone.


FYSEM-UA 900.010
Betwixt and Between: Exploring Liminality in Individual and Collective Experience
Fall 2022
Instructor: Amira Pierce
Monday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Identity and Society

Note: Conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 71 Introductory Experimental Physics I lecture (Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.)

"Liminality" is a concept from mid-20th century anthropology used to explain the “betwixt and between” state an individual experiences during a rite of passage. More recently, "liminality" has been taken up in discussions about intersectionality of identity, as well as collective consciousness (think gender fluidity, transnationality, pandemic studies, virtual worlds). How can exploring the contours of liminality serve us in helping us give shape and substance to intersections that may provide hope for our futures? In this class, we will read narratives that explore liminal states written by social scientists, activists, religious teachers, psychologists, and creative writers. Through an interdisciplinary approach, we will use critical texts (including philosophical, anthropological, and legal studies) as lenses to help us interpret and explore our class readings, conduct further research, and formulate ideas that give power to the in-between. In addition to academic writing, students will have the opportunity to share findings through oral presentations and multi-modal forms.

AMIRA PIERCE got her MFA in Fiction from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2011. Since 2013, she has been a professor at NYU’s Expository Writing Program, where she specializes in working with International students and their instructors. She spent Spring 2019 teaching at NYU-Shanghai as part of a departmental exchange, and summer 2019 took her to Spain, with the support of a grant from NYU's Global Research Initiative to work on a project called "Reading the Quran in Madrid," which has now become "Reading Quran in the Time of Covid-19." She is also at work on a novel about finding beauty through brokenness. She has served as a literacy volunteer and writing mentor with various organizations across New York City, and she is a founding member of Inner Fields Sangha. She lives in Bushwick, Brooklyn and was born in Beirut, Lebanon. 


FYSEM-UA 900.017
Hysteria: Stories About Women, Medicine, and the Law
Fall 2022
Instructor: Dara Regaignon
Thursday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Literature through the Ages

Note: Conflicts with BIOL-UA 11 Principles of Biology I (Monday/Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

Originating from the Greek word for uterus (hystera), hysteria as a specific emotional-physiological disorder was for centuries credited to a woman’s “wandering womb.” Between 1700 and 1900, while the British Empire expanded across the globe, the disease was attached specifically to the bodies, minds, and experiences of elite white women. This diagnosis defined them as both fragile and precious—in need of medical care and legal protections that removed them from positions of authority. At the same time, it helped to code women of color—especially black women—as both strong and expendable (a coding whose implications continue to shape disparities today). In this seminar, we’ll investigate how hysteria was defined by medicine, psychology, and psychoanalysis starting in the eighteenth century as well as the legal implications of those definitions. We’ll juxtapose those medical and legal documents with fictional narratives that turn on questions of hysteria and female insanity, likely including Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw,” Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, and E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. 

DARA ROSSMAN REGAIGNON is an associate professor in NYU’s Department of English. Her research focuses on the material, conceptual, and rhetorical structures that shape experience, and she’s particularly interested in the ways medical and fictional genres make cultural norms seem natural. Her most recent book focused on the nineteenth-century emergence of maternal anxiety as part of the development of the medical specialty of pediatrics; she’s currently working on race and class in nineteenth-century British feminist rhetoric.


FYSEM-UA 900.018
Metal and Social Exchange in China
Fall 2022
Instructor: Dongming Wu
Monday/Wednesday, 4:55 p.m.-6:10 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures & Societies

This course will examine the history of metal exploitation and use in China. In this course, we will survey the archaeological, scientific, and textual evidence of mineral extraction, metal goods making, and metalwork construction in order to trace the development of metal production in China from the antiquity to the present. In addition to technological issues, this course will explore the social context of metal production by situating technology in an assemblage of political, economic, and cultural networks. We will also discuss how technological triumph has significantly transformed people’s lifeways, local society, landscape and environment, and state policy in pre-modern and modern China. The reading materials will all be in English. The objective of the course is to challenge the ideas about the autonomy of science and technology and encourage students to think about the relationship between technology, nature, society, and power.

DONGMING WU is a visiting assistant professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at NYU. He received his BA in Chinese Literature and MA in Comparative Literature from Sichuan University, and his PhD in Chinese History and Archaeology from Columbia University. His research interests include ancient economies, history of science and technology, and intellectual history. Dongming has participated in several archaeological projects in China and co-authored the archaeological report of the copper-smelting site Sujialong. Dongming is also interested and trained in Chinese paleography; he has published and translated book chapters and articles on bronze inscription and bamboo manuscript.


FYSEM-UA 900.053
American Political Development: Historical and Cultural Roots of American Politics
Fall 2022 
Instructor: Maya Kornberg
Tuesday, 6:20 p.m.-8:50 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics

Note: Most students consider the workload for this course very heavy; please do not select this seminar unless you are willing and eager to perform at a high and demanding level.

We are all affected by our nation’s political institutions. So where do they originate and how have our political institutions evolved? How was the growth of the American state over time influenced by the political institutions that already existed? How have race, gender, and other components of American society shaped institutional development? Are there patterns or cycles over time in American politics? How democratic is the United States? How has the American Congress developed, and how has this affected the current challenges witnessed today? These are all questions we will answer together in this course.

Dr. MAYA KORNBERG leads research for the elections and government program of the NYU Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law. Her work focuses on legislative politics, information and misinformation in politics, and the impact of money in the legislative process. Her research supports the advocacy of the center. She has worked on democratic governance issues at non-profits, international development organizations, and think tanks. She is the author of the forthcoming book Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in the Legislative Process (Columbia University Press, 2023.)


EXPOS-UA 1 (Fall)
Writing the Essay: Science and Society

Note: Students who take WTE: Science and Society must still take another course to fulfill the First-Year Seminar requirement, either during their first year or later in your CAS career. Reach out to your advisor for more information.

Note: if you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this course.

Writing the Essay: Science and Society is the foundational writing course, which provides instruction and practice in critical reading, creative thinking, and clear writing. The course stresses exploration, inquiry, reflection, analysis, revision, and collaborative learning.  Our section of Writing the Essay will focus on the role of science in the contemporary world. We will learn to read, think, and write critically as we investigate how science, medicine, and technology are used to evaluate, characterize, and politicize elements of human behavior and society—and how social institutions challenge and complicate our behavioral and social norms. We question common conceptions of science and society as separate spheres, as well as examining the many paradoxes therein: how science can be simultaneously progressive and destructive, connecting and isolating, liberating and oppressive. As we progress, you will find that writing is not only a method to communicate ideas but also a process that generates new ones. The ultimate goal: for you to write and communicate confidently, to rely on writing as one of the best tools for developing fresh perspectives and appreciating subtle complexities, and to develop your own unique and more complex understanding of science, medicine, and technology. 

EXPOS-UA 1.001
Fall 2022 
Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.

Note: Cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.) 

EXPOS-UA 1.002
Fall 2022
Monday and Wednesday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.

Note: Cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.) 

EXPOS-UA 1.003
Fall 2022 
Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.

EXPOS-UA 1.004
Fall 2022
Monday and Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.

Note: Conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 71 Introductory Experimental Physics I (Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.) and fall cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.) 

EXPOS-UA 1.005
Fall 2022
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.

EXPOS-UA 1.006
Fall 2022
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.

EXPOS-UA 1.007
Fall 2022
Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00 a.m.-9:15 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

EXPOS-UA 1.008
Fall 2022
Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 11:00 a.m. -12:15 p.m.

Note: Conflicts with CHEM-UA 126 General Chemistry II (Tuesday/Thursday 9:30-10:45 a.m.) and Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

 

 

 

FYSEM-UA 255
School and Society: NYU in the Sixties and Seventies
Spring 2023
Instructor: Arthur Tannenbaum   
Tuesday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.    
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues

Note: Cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 71 Introductory Experimental Physics I lecture (Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.)

The 1960s and 1970s brought profound changes in American society, changes mirrored in the history of the nation, academe, and New York University. It was a time that witnessed the struggle for civil rights, assassinations, war abroad and riots at home, and a youth-led revolution in music, dress, and values. This course aims to develop an appreciation of those years by examining events and reactions to them as they affected campuses and students across America. Students prepare reports on different aspects of the era and work on group projects. In both cases, and in the spirit of the times, the topics are self-chosen with the approval of the group and the seminar leader.

ARTHUR TANNENBAUM is Associate Curator and Social Work Librarian in the Bobst Library, and has also taught in the English Department. First as a student and then as a faculty member, he has been at NYU for more than thirty years. In 1992 he received the University’s Distinguished Teaching Medal in recognition for his work with students.


FYSEM-UA 379
Doctor’s Dilemma: Being Both Correct and Right
Spring 2023
Instructor: Michael E. Makover
Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Health and Society

Dr. Saul Farber, former Dean of the NYU School of Medicine, frequently cautioned that just because an action or conclusion was correct did not mean that it was right. Ethics, laws, and religious and cultural beliefs intersect in every medical encounter and healthcare issue, affecting patients’ options and care. The challenging issues to be studied and debated in this seminar include the following: Should doctors help terminal patients die to relieve intractable suffering? Should doctors participate in executions or in the interrogation of terrorists? Do we want to know so much about our genetic makeup that we are faced with terribly difficult consequences of that knowledge? Is “alternative medicine” a reasonable alternative? What makes a good doctor good? Who should pay for your healthcare? The course aims to teach students how to address such questions by learning to think like doctors and scientists, to apply logic tempered by human values and experience, to analyze information critically, and to present ideas effectively and honestly.

MICHAEL E. MAKOVER is Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the NYU School of Medicine and Attending Physician at the NYU Medical Center. He is also the Chief Medical Officer for a major union. An internist and rheumatologist, he is the author of Mismanaged Care, as well as articles on healthcare quality, ethics, and economics, and is currently writing another book entitled 120 Years Young. He was an aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and a spokesman for the American Cancer Society and the New York Heart Association.


FYSEM-UA 389
Living Off the Laughter: Comedy in America
Spring 2023
Instructor: Eddy Friedfeld  
Thursday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m.      
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts

Note: Cohort conflicts with fall CHEM-UA 126 General Chemistry II lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

The history of comedy in America is the history of America. Comedians have provided a funhouse mirror as well as a perceptive lens for American society and culture. Silent film comedians, for example, were instrumental in establishing the movie industry, while the physical nature of vaudeville’s humor reflected the linguistic diversity of its immigrant audience. An overview of American comedy, this seminar will be history with a laugh track, taking the significant periods and players of modern America and analyzing them against their historic context and their legacy, using their humor as the platform. We will examine how their comedy was shaped by and responded to American society, and how they in turn influenced and shaped American life. The great comedians and moments from film, radio, and TV to be studied in this seminar include Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, the screwball comedies of the 1930s and 40s, The Golden Age of Television, the Sitcom, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, George Carlin, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Jerry Lewis, Eddie Murphy, Sarah Silverman, Dave Chappelle, as well as new comedians and trends. We will also focus on how comedians and comedy built and builds bridges between gender, culture and racial and ethnic groups. Clips and segments from classic TV and movies will enrich our discussion of the evolution of comedy, its place in history, and its similarities in time.

EDDY FRIEDFELD is a film and entertainment journalist and historian, as well as an attorney specializing in corporate restructuring. He is the co-author of Caesar’s Hours with comedy legend Sid Caesar, and is working on a book on the history of comedy in America. He was the senior consultant for the PBS documentary Make ’Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America; has appeared on Fox News, PBS, and WOR and Bloomberg Radio; has written and lectured extensively on entertainment and film; has produced and hosted tributes to Dick Van Dyke, Eric Idle, Dick Cavett, Alan King, Robert Altman, George Carlin, and Paul Newman, among others; and has worked with Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, and Billy Crystal. He received his BA from Columbia College and his JD from NYU Law School. He also teaches at Yale College and The Tisch School of the Arts.


FYSEM-UA 500
Work and Family in the New Economy 
Spring 2023
Instructor: Kathleen Gerson
Monday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics

The rise of a globalized “new economy” has created jobs with more short-term flexibility but less long-term security. In a parallel way, the rise of more diverse options in intimate relationships has created similar uncertainties in the nature of commitments to partners and children. Taken together, these revolutionary shifts have left recent generations facing deepening conflicts between earning a living and caring for others. To explore the causes, contours, and longer-term consequences of these changes in economic and private life, this course will take a two-pronged approach. We first study cutting-edge research on these contemporary trends and, second, we draw on these readings as students develop and conduct original research projects on a relevant topic of their choice.

KATHLEEN GERSON is Collegiate Professor of Sociology and a recognized authority on the intertwined revolutions in gender, work, and family life in the United States and globally. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other awards, and the author of numerous books, including The Unfinished Revolution, an award-winning study of how new generations have responded to growing up in changing families. She is currently completing a book on “the science and art of interviewing” and is at work on another book about the gender strategies now emerging to cope with the growing work-care conflicts facing today’s workers and parents. 


FYSEM-UA 593
Rethinking Orientalism
Spring 2023
Instructor: Asli Igsiz
Monday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.

Scholars have argued that since the “fall” of Byzantine Constantinople to the Ottomans in the fifteenth century, Western European intellectuals have framed cultural difference in terms of the “East” and the “West.” Renaissance humanists, for example, resorted to ancient and medieval texts to create a religiously and culturally defined “other”—the “Ottoman Turks.” Their writings then spread across Europe and generated problematic conceptualizations of what the West ought to be, as different from the East. This is by no means an isolated case: in the nineteenth century, for example, we begin encountering systematic categorizations of peoples imbued with discourses of civilizations. Critic Edward Said identifies such problematic representations of the so-called East as “Orientalism” and offers a productive category to analyze how such representations have informed power relations and policies. This seminar will examine a wide variety of cultural representations pertaining to the modern Middle East that have contributed to the "East/West" divide conceptualized as Orientalism. We will explore politics of cultural representation in such fields as cinema, literature, visual culture, political economy, and humanitarianism. Some questions we will address: What are the politics of cultural representation over (at least) the last two centuries that have marked modern day politics? How do such representations lend themselves to problematic interpretations of East and West in general, and the Middle East in particular? What are the racial, historical, and cultural implications of these representations and the policies that they inform?

ASLI IGSIZ is Associate Professor of Culture and Representation in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. Her teaching and research interests include cultural representation and cultural history, narratives of war and displacement, and dynamics of alterity in the late Ottoman and contemporary Turkish contexts. Her publications span a variety of issues that include the politics of memory, nation branding, alliances of civilizations, law, neoliberalism, and the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey. Her current book project, Humanism in Ruins: Liberal Multiculturalism, Memory, and the 1923 Greek-Turkish Population Exchange in Contemporary Turkey, examines the implications of “liberal multiculturalism” and cultural memory as a mode of humanism in Turkey after the Cold War and the 1980 military coup.

FYSEM-UA 598
After The End: Post-Apocalypse Novels in the 20th & 21st Centuries
Spring 2023
Instructor: David Hoover
Thursday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m     
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Theme: First-Generation Cohort.

Note: FYSEM-UA 474, What is College For? and FYSEM-UA 598, After The End: Post-Apocalypse Novels in the 20th & 21st Centuries  are strongly recommended for first-generation students. They provide an excellent opportunity to join a close-knit community of your peers who also identify as the first in their families to pursue higher education. 

Many authors have speculated about what would happen if (most) humans were destroyed. Authors have removed humans by natural disasters like floods, fires, earthquakes, and mysterious poisonous clouds or rays. They have imagined alien invasions, plagues, epidemics, agricultural collapses, and reproductive failure. More recently, humans themselves have become popular as causes of apocalypses because global thermonuclear war, lethal pollution, disastrous over-population, genetic engineering, and climate change have become realistic possible scenarios for the collapse of our species. This seminar will examine a variety of apocalypses from the 20th century with special attention to ones that have implications for the nature of humanity and human society. Most of the novels we will read treat an apocalypse as a kind of thought-experiment: what would happen if . . . ? Some focus more on the collapse of human institutions, culture, morality, and religion, others on the challenges the survivors face, and still others focus on the potential for the re-creation of human society or the creation of an alternative kind of society.

DAVID L. HOOVER is Professor of English at New York University, where he has taught for thirty-five years in the areas of digital humanities, science fiction, Chaucer, history of the English language, and linguistic stylistics. His most recent publications include Digital Literary Studies: Corpus Approaches to Poetry, Prose, and Drama, with Jonathan Culpeper and Kieran O’Halloran; “Modes of Composition in Henry James: Dictation, Style, and What Maisie Knew,” in the Henry James Review; and “Text Analysis,” in Ken Price and Ray Siemens (eds.), Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology (the first digital-only publication of the MLA). The breadth of his interests are shown in his earlier books: Stylistics: Prospect & Retrospect (as editor), Language and Style in The Inheritors, and A New Theory of Old English Meter. He is currently writing a book on how modes of composition (handwriting, dictation, typing, word-processing) affect authorial style.


FYSEM-UA 714
Crystallization in Life: Stories about Shells, Bones, and Kidney Stones
Spring 2023
Instructor: Zhihua An
Tuesday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m. 
Theme: Molecules of Material and Living Systems

Prerequisites: A score of 4 or 5 on the Chemistry Advanced Placement exam, and a score of 4 or 5 on either Calculus or Biology AP (or equivalent international credentials).

This seminar introduces students to the world of biomineralization, the branch of chemistry that deals with crystal formation under the influence of biomolecules. Through readings, lectures, research projects, and assignments, students learn and study the fundamentals of crystal formation, crystal properties, and the structure of crystals surrounding us. We begin with solution chemistry, crystallization theory, and various aspects of the crystallization process in nature and then move on to the specific case studies of the title, with attention to biomolecules (proteins, lipids, etc.) and their roles in controlling the crystallization process. Understanding the biomineralization process in the formation of kidney stones can lead to preventative drug development, which illustrates a practical application of the field in biomedical science. In addition, studying the crystallization process in nature can lead to new bioinspired materials, such as optical fibers.

ZHIHUA AN is Clinical Associate Professor of Chemistry at New York University. Prior to joining NYU, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Columbia University, and at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Professor An’s research interests are biomaterials self-assembly, biointerface functionalization and engineering, and pathological biomineralization. Her work has appeared in Science, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cancer Letters, and more than ten other journals.

FYSEM-UA 722
Italy and North America: Contact, Conflict, and Exchange
Spring 2023
Instructor: Rachel Love
Thursday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues

Note: Fall cohort conflicts with fall BIOL-UA 11 Principles of Biology I lecture (Monday/Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

We consider how Italy’s diaspora has affected its conception of itself and examine five hundred years of North America as artistic inspiration, as cultural and political influence, and even as a source of existential anxiety. For example, how did European discovery of a “new” continent impact Renaissance authors like Ariosto and Tasso and destabilize the center of their known world? How did American literature like Hemingway and Steinbeck offer twentieth-century Italian writers new possibilities of literary expression and political resistance? We consider literature of immigration and travel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Italians documented their journeys to North America (and New York City) in poetry and prose. We investigate how Fascism, war and recovery—as well as the physical presence of American soldiers on Italian soil—shifted the political and social stakes of this relationship. Finally, we explore American cultural influence throughout the increasingly globalized 20th century, as US models permeated Italian politics, film, television, music, and food, and pop singers teased teenagers who tried to “fa’ l’americano.” Throughout, we take advantage of our location in New York City to explore aspects of cultural exchange within our urban environment, including an excursion to the Italian American Museum and Little Italy.

RACHEL E. LOVE earned her PhD from NYU in Italian Studies in May 2018. Her essays on 20th-century Italian politics and culture have appeared in the journals Popular Music, Modern Italy, and Interventions. Her current book project, Songbook for a Revolution: The Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, Popular Culture, and the Left in 1960s Italy, analyzes the political use of folk music through the history of a leftist musical collective, the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI). Her interdisciplinary research interests move between contemporary Italian history and literature, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and oral history. Most mornings, she can be found riding her bike across the Manhattan Bridge.


FYSEM-UA 735
Food for Thought: Narrating the Food System
Spring 2023
Instructor: Emily Stone
Wednesday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m. 
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues

Note: Fall cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.) 

Culinary traditions and culinary innovations alike are forged at the intersection of culture, agriculture, politics, policy, geography, and ecology. In the 21st century--amid animated conversations about social justice, climate change, and global supply-chain disruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic--we are increasingly aware of where our food comes from, and how our individual choices about what we eat connect us to our neighbors and the rest of the world. In short written responses to readings by Wendell Berry, Vandana Shiva, Rachael Carson, Peter Singer, Dolores Huerta, Michael Pollan, Winona LaDuke, Adrian Miller, and Paloma Martinez-Cruz, as well as today's farm workers and restaurant workers, students will consider different approaches to writing about our food system—which they will then apply to writing their own narratives based on original research into the food system in New York City or beyond.

EMILY STONE is a Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program at NYU. She was also once an undergraduate here (at the Gallatin School) before opening a small bookstore in Guatemala, working as a freelance writer in Australia, traveling to several other countries, writing a blog about chocolate, and ultimately earning graduate degrees in creative writing and food studies. Her work has appeared in AGNI, Fourth Genre, North American Review, and Tin House, and has been among the notable selections in The Best American Essays and The Best American Travel Writing. Before returning to NYU, Emily taught writing and literature in English at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China.

FYSEM-UA 743
Archaeology of Ireland: Land of Saints and Scholars
Spring 2023
Instructor: Pam J. Crabtree
Monday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies

Note: Fall cohort conflicts with fall Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (Monday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.)

Archaeology uses material culture, including artifacts and structures, in order to understand the daily lives of people in the past. Large-scale excavations carried out in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries have shed new light on Irish history, from the island’s initial settlement at the end of the Ice Age through the nineteenth century. This course will explore how archaeology can be used to reconstruct Irish history. Particular emphasis will be placed on the Irish “Dreamtime,” the Iron Age and early medieval periods (ca. 600 BCE to 1100 CE). We will also examine the role that the Irish monastic tradition played in perpetuating and passing on to posterity many of the classic texts of Western civilization.

PAM J. CRABTREE is an archaeologist and Professor in NYU’s Department of Anthropology, where she also serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies. She is a field archaeologist who has worked on historic and prehistoric sites in Europe, the Near East, and eastern North America, and she is particularly interested in how archaeological data can be used to illustrate the daily lives of people who lived in the past. Her area of expertise is zooarchaeology, the study of animal bones as a way of reconstructing ancient hunting practices, animal husbandry patterns, and diets. Crabtree is currently the co-director of the excavations at Dún Ailinne, an Irish Iron Age site located in County Kildare. She teaches courses on prehistoric and medieval archaeology, archaeological methods, and agricultural origins.


FYSEM-UA 771
The Art of Doing Nothing in Literature and Film
Spring 2023
Instructor: Michael Krimper
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts

Note: Fall cohort conflicts with fall CHEM-UA 126 General Chemistry II lecture  (Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.) 

What would it take to stop working? To refuse work? Give it up? To do something else, besides productive activity and labor, or nothing at all? And how might doing nothing introduce radically different senses of freedom than what we’re used to? In this seminar, we’ll think about some of the ways that modern literature and film reflect on the art of doing nothing, frequently turning the city or its outskirts into a locus for personal and collective struggle, resistance, and transformation. Our aim will be to examine strategies for breaking free from the dominance of work, as illustrated by figures like the slacker, idler, cruiser, fugitive, drifter, ambler, streetwalker, and the so-called flâneur/flâneuse primarily but not exclusively within the urban topographies of New York, Paris, and London from the nineteenth century onward. We will pay special attention to the critical potentialities of unmanaged and wayward lives at the intersection of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender. Throughout we will read fiction and poetry by Baudelaire, Bataille, Beckett, Boyer, Breton, Calle, Delany, Jacobs, Kafka, Melville, Poe, and Woolf; and theoretical work by Barthes, Benjamin, Federici, Hartman, and Weeks. We will also view films by Tsai, Varda, and Chalfant/Silver (namely, the classic hiphop documentary Style Wars).

MICHAEL KRIMPER teaches in the Department of French, Gallatin, and Liberal Studies at New York University, where he received his PhD in Comparative Literature not so long ago. He specializes in francophone and anglophone literature from the nineteenth century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of aesthetics and politics in transatlantic modernisms. His current book project examines how work becomes a problem across a wide array of literature, art, and philosophy in postwar Europe and the Americas. His articles, reviews, and translations have been published New Literary History, SubStance, the Journal of Italian Philosophy, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues. Before joining NYU, he worked as a music journalist in California.


FYSEM-UA 780
The Sea in History
Spring 2023
Instructor: Thomas Truxes
Wednesday, 3:30 p.m.-6:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies

Over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is water, most of it residing in the planet’s great seas and oceans. But how have those vast watery spaces, together with the world’s lakes and rivers, shaped the millennia? Have these bodies of water been connective tissues bringing peoples together or barriers pushing them apart? They have, of course, been both, providing highways for commerce and migration, life-sustaining fisheries, battlefields that determined the fate of civilizations, and powerful stimulants to the advancement of technology on a broad front. This seminar will explore the many—and often surprising—faces of the sea in history. It will, likewise, ask students to contemplate their own responsibility in preserving the rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans that have shaped the destiny of mankind.

THOMAS M. TRUXES is Clinical Professor of Irish Studies and History. He has written extensively on the Irish in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic economy and the overseas trade of British America. Recent books include an edited volume of essays, Ireland, France, and the Atlantic in a Time of War: Reflections on the Bordeaux–Dublin Letters, 1757, and Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York, a finalist for the Francis Parkman Prize in American History. At NYU he teaches courses on early modern Irish history, piracy and seaborne terrorism, and the history of world trade.


FYSEM-UA 783
DNA: From the Double Helix to Nanotechnology
Spring 2023
Instructor: Yoel Ohayon
Tuesday, 8:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 2 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Molecules of Material and Living Systems

Note: If you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this course.

Note: Students in this seminar will be automatically enrolled into a paired section of Writing the Essay: Science and Society in their first year.

DNA from the basics to some of today's sophisticated applications. We begin with the experiments that first identified DNA as the molecule of heredity and read The Double Helix by James Watson, which gives a lively (and biased) first-person account of the discovery of this crucial building block of life. The seminar then moves on to technical issues and considerations: how does DNA store genetic information, and how does a cell process this information using the genetic code? At the end of the seminar, we build on these foundations and learn about DNA nanotechnology and its many potential applications in science and healthcare.

YOEL OHAYON is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at New York University. He received his B.A. in biochemistry from New York University (2000), his M.Phil. in chemistry from New York University (2008) and Ph.D. in chemistry from New York University (2010).  He joined the faculty of New York University in 2011. His research interests include DNA topology and self-assembled 3D DNA crystals.

FYSEM-UA 900.020
Merit, Competence, and Privilege in the Ancient and Modern World
Spring 2023
Instructor: Mikael Papadimitriou
Monday and Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures & Societies

What allows one person to get a position over other candidates? What criteria are used to establish an individual’s competence or worth? We examine how different societies, both ancient and modern, determined an individual’s merit. In particular, we look at the role of letters of recommendation in that process and the forces of privilege that drive them. Our goal is for you to think critically about how society determines who is worthy, as well as the different mechanisms that privilege certain groups. We start with the ancient Roman world. Although Romans created an extensive bureaucracy to administer their empire, they never developed any kind of systematic examination or even a universal set of criteria for evaluating the competence of candidates. We then move to Imperial China and to the 20th century, where systems of examination are used to evaluate merit; but these more objective systems, however, hide multiple biases, which privilege some groups over others based on race, gender, and socio-economic status, among other aspects of identity.

MIKAEL PAPADIMITRIOU is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. He earned his Ph.D. from NYU in Classics. He researches social relations, power negotiations, and administrative structures within the Roman world. His book project, Measuring One's Worth: Letters of Recommendation and Appointments in the Roman Empire, is centered around the idea of merit and competence in Rome and explores the variety of biases held by appointing authorities within the Roman imperial administration.


FYSEM-UA 900.021
Letters of the Law: Reading the Law in and as Literature
Spring 2023
Instructor: Wendy Lotterman
Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics

We read representations of the law in literature and US Supreme Court opinions to clarify what Jacques Derrida calls the “mystical foundation of authority.” For instance, what authority does Andrew Cuomo summon when he tells protestors “The law is the law”? Or when King Creon tells Antigone “It is the law”? We ask how the breaking of the law reinforces its moral authority and look at instances in which that very authority breaks beneath the force of social movements and reinterpretations of the constitution. Borrowing from the fields of critical race studies and gender and sexuality studies, we denaturalize “legal fictions” as we examine themes such as personhood, intersectionality, property, privacy, and consent. Authors include Franz Kafka, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Saidiya Hartman, M. NourbeSe Philip, Giorgio Agamben, and Walter Benjamin.

WENDY LOTTERMAN is a Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She received her Ph.D. from NYU’s Department of Comparative Literature in 2022. Her book project, Lyric Interference, argues that both American lyric and US liberalism inherit a model of possessive-individualism articulated by John Locke and reinforced by an enduring dependence on identity as a dominant model for understanding social difference, and explores how lyric publics rooted in minor epistemologies might posit an alternative to liberalism. She is also a poet. Her chapbook, Intense Holiday, was published by After Hours LTD in 2016, and her full-length debut, A Reaction to Someone Coming In, will be published by Futurepoem in fall 2022. At NYU, her research has been supported by the Patricia Dunn Lehrman Fellowship, the Dean’s Dissertation Writing Fellowship, and a fellowship at the Center for the Humanities. She has taught previously in the departments of English, French, and Comparative Literature.


FYSEM-UA 900.023
Constructing Race in U.S. History
Spring 2023
Instructor: Michael Salgarolo
Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Identity and Society

We study “race” as a political and intellectual project that has developed over the course of five hundred years of North American history. From early modern origins to contemporary iterations, we seek to understand the development of “race” as a product of racism: a set of social, political, and economic inequalities structured by notions of human difference. What are the intellectual origins of “race?” How is “race” used to categorize human bodies and allocate political power? How does racial ideology intersect with notions of gender, sexuality, and citizenship? How are ideas about different racial groups related to each other? Why does racism persist in an age of “color-blindness?” We investigate these questions through analysis of relevant scholarship and primary sources.

MICHAEL SALGAROLO is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Fellow. He earned his Ph.D. in History from NYU in 2022. He is a historian of the modern United States, with a focus on race, migration, empire, and Asian American communities. His current book project examines relational race-making and transimperial histories through a study of Filipino communities in southern Louisiana. His research has been featured in articles in the Huffington Post and on CNN. He has given tours of New York City for organizations like Big Onion and the Black Gotham Experience and is a former stand-up comedian.


FYSEM-UA 900.024
Race and Gender in Afro-Latin America
Spring 2023
Instructor: Francisco Quinteiro Pires
Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics

Note: Fall cohort conflicts with fall BIOL-UA 11 Principles of Biology I lecture (Monday/Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

Focusing on Brazil, we explore a transnational circulation of ideas around the social construct of race after the official end of slavery, and the presence of women in the different modes of racial construction of the nation, historically based on a masculinist and nationalistic perspective. According to the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database, of the estimated 12.5 million Africans forcibly brought to the Americas, about 5 million arrived in Brazil. The country was the last in the region to abolish slavery and currently has the second largest population of African descendants, exceeded only by Nigeria. While authors from the region have formulated concepts such as miscigenação, transculturación, raza cósmica to address these complex questions, the more one tries to define these social constructs, the more they seem out of grasp. We also consider how the contrasting narratives of two neighboring countries—Brazil as a racial paradise and Argentina as a European, white nation in Latin America—have reinforced each other, and also ask what insights comparisons between racialization in Brazil and the “one-drop rule” in the United States reveal. Materials include novels, films, and theoretical texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Gilberto Freyre, Machado de Assis, Frantz Fanon, Lélia Gonzalez, Carolina Maria de Jesus, Patricia Hill Collins.

FRANCISCO QUINTEIRO PIRES is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures from NYU. His book project, The Violence of Miscegenation: A Critique of the Production of Senses, Spaces, and Identities in Afro-Luso-Brazilian Cinema, investigates the sensorial representation of racialized and gendered subjectivities in contemporary films from Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa. Also a journalist, his articles have been published in the Luso-Brazilian Review and Brasiliana: Journal for Brazilian Studies.


FYSEM-UA 900.025
Folk Tale and Fairy Tale
Spring 2023
Instructor: Christopher Wood
Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Identity and Society

In 1812 the German scholars Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first edition of their famous collection of fairy tales.  They aimed to recover the voices of simple people whose way of life was now imperiled by urbanization.  Read aloud by modern parents to their children, these stories became the shared substratum of modern culture:  Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel.  Grimm’s tales are the pre-history of Walt Disney.  Such stories communicate, in encoded form, the hard and not-so-innocent realities of the adult world:  conflict within families and between social classes, the ambiguities of sexual desire, the threats of poverty and violence.  Dense and mysterious, laden with symbols, the stories invite endless re-reading.  This course will follow interpretive paths opened up by psychoanalysis, mythography, Marxism, sociology, anthropology, and feminism.  

CHRISTOPHER WOOD is a professor in the German Department.  He is also an affiliate of the Department of Comparative Literature and the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU, and teaches regularly in the History of Art Department.  He has been at NYU since 2014, teaching courses on topics such as literary realism, popular and folk culture, Romanticism, and late medieval, Renaissance, and modern art.  He has previously offered a First-Year Seminar on the topic of Impressionist painting.

FYSEM-UA 900.026
Cognitive Film Theory
Spring 2023
Instructor: Gianni Barchiesi
Monday and Wednesday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 4:55 p.m.-6:10 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts

Cognitive film theory approaches film-watching as a complex, multifaceted experience to be studied by combining traditional paradigms from cinema studies with works and theories from cognitive psychology, perception studies, emotion studies, analytic philosophy, evolutionary psychology, and neuroscientific research. We explore selected works and trends in cognitive filmtheory to understand our relationship with cinema and moving images, and we map the possibilities and limitations offered by blending together research and knowledge from the humanities with tools and views from the so-called hard sciences.

GIANNI BARCHIESI is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. He earned his Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from NYU, and has taught both here and at CUNY Brooklyn College. His research addresses film theory through perception studies, detailing the applications and vantages offered by the actionist account of perception for the understanding of our experiences of moving images, and for an assessment of how we routinely and standardly differentiate among the media that embed such images.


FYSEM-UA 900.027
The Edible World: Studying Food in the Humanities
Spring 2023
Instructor: Julia Cheng
Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues

Note: Fall cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.) 

We study food and its contexts through a number of disciplines in the humanities, defamiliarizing and historicizing what is often an unquestioned aspect of everyday life. Taking critical approaches to our social and cultural realities, we examine food as more than a form of survival and nourishment, the ways it is embedded in political and economic systems, and serves as an index of our histories, geographies, values, and social statuses, as well as our national culture and global positionings. Beginning with scenes of Biblical feasting and Greek mythology, we note a historical relationship between food, meals, and philosophy. From sugar plantations to meatpacking plants to supermarkets, we examine food as a means of studying material history, tracking the expansion of empires and forces of globalization. We also focus on the symbolic and metaphoric functions of food associated with images of cooking, eating, and feasting in literary works. Readings are supplemented by films, documentaries, and visual art to help us to frame our discussion while expanding it toward contemporary food issues, such as sustainability, food security, and hunger.

JULIA CHENG is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She earned her Ph.D. in English from NYU. A modernist by training, she studies cuisine, consumption, and commodities across literary fields, with an eye towards their associated body politics. She is particularly interested in connections between literature and the senses, as well as the politics of material and readerly consumption, and is at work on a book manuscript examining the entanglements between food and aesthetics in modernity.


FYSEM-UA 900.028
(Re)Imagining Home in a World in Transit
Spring 2023
Instructor: Andrei Guruianu
Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Identity and Society

In his 1997 essay “Nowhere Man”, Pico Iyer writes of what he calls global souls, or perpetual “transit loungers”: “We pass through countries as through revolving doors, resident aliens of the world, impermanent residents of nowhere. Nothing is strange to us, and nowhere is foreign. We are visitors even in our own homes.” Today we travel more than ever before, visiting places both new and familiar; we spend more time in airports and hotels, in our cars, buses or trains commuting to and from work than at any time in history. We seem always to be on the move, always “in between.” At the same time, Iyer’s end-of-20th-century romantic ideal of a rootless existence is in tension with the reality of a world experiencing record numbers of people moving between countries, testing borders, displaced by conflict, famine, and climate change. In this course we will discuss what it means, in the face of increased movement on a local and global scale, to reimagine ideas of home and place, belonging and transience. What are the impacts on culture and community, language, family, and our sense of self? 

Weekly readings and discussions will consist of essays, articles, memoir, and film. Students should expect to read the equivalent of one book per week, write weekly reading response papers, and present on weekly topics. Major assignments will include a personal essay, a multi-source research-based essay, and a multimodal group project. 

ANDREI GURUIANU is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at NYU where he teaches Writing the Essay and Advanced College Essay. His critical and creative works explore such topics as memory and forgetting and the ability of place to shape personal and collective histories. His memoir, Metal and Plum (Mayapple Press, 2010), traces the history of his family’s immigration from Romanian to the United States in the early 90s. The book grapples with the trauma of dislocation and looks closely at the search for belonging and visibility through the lens of a third-culture kid. His latest book project, the collection of essays The Afterlife of Discarded Objects: Memory and Forgetting in a Culture of Waste (Parlor Press, Visual Rhetoric Series, 2019) is an attempt to explain and ultimately redeem our fascination with discarded material objects as a means to encapsulate and shape the socio-cultural imagination.


FYSEM-UA 900.029
Mindful/Full Mind: How Our Consumption is Consuming Our Ability to be Present
Spring 2023
Instructor: Megan Murtha
Thursday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m. 
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Theme:  Health and Society

Modern life is filled with distractions and habits that keep us from knowing and enjoying ourselves in the present moment. In this course, we will explore what being present really even means. From there, we will observe how being present can reveal the social and cultural forces at work against our ability to do so and we will notice what challenges and limitations result from being, or at least attempting to be, mindfully present. Students will be introduced to mindfulness practices—from its ancient origins to contemporary interpretations—through guided practice in the classroom and by visiting mindful movement centers in the city.

Our reflective, observational work will be considered through the lenses of texts that bring our attention to the nature of contemporary technological distractions; the psychological and cultural habits of consumption that work to keep us from being in the present moment; ancient mindfulness practices; and neuroscience studies that offer insight into the physical effects practicing mindfulness has on the brain. Through reading and experiential learning, students will identify a personal challenge to their practice that they will work to explore and understand more deeply through meditation and research.

MEGAN MURTHA (Clinical Associate Professor, Expository Writing Program) is a theater maker (playwright, director, composer, curator, performer) whose work has been performed at various NYC venues including The Tank, Dixon Place, The Bushwick Starr, and inside a 1999 Cadillac DeVille. She is a MacDowell Colony Fellow, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow, a Vermont Studio Center Fellow, and a former Artist-in-Residence at Target Margin Theater. She has been a Visiting Artist at Bucknell University, St. Mary's College of Maryland, and St. Joseph’s College, where she led object theatre workshops, a medium she has been working in since 2014. 


FYSEM-UA 900.030
The Aesthetics of Film: Audiovisual Thinking in the Movies and Visual Arts
Spring 2023
Instructor: Doug Dibbern
Monday and Wednesday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 4:55 p.m.-6:10 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts

This class will investigate how filmmakers articulate ideas and express emotions through audiovisual means differently than artists and intellectuals do in writing and other visual media. We will screen a movie together every week, and in class, we’ll primarily focus on the close analysis of film, studying the intellectual and expressive potential of cinematic techniques like editing, camera movement, narrative structure, set design, music, and sound effects, just to name a few. Our readings will come mostly from the field of cinema studies; we’ll study the writings of figures like the silent film directors Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, academic theorists of film style like David Bordwell, and scholars of third world cinema like the Ethiopian intellectual Teshome Gabriel. At the same time, in order to highlight the essential qualities of film as an art form, we’ll also pursue a secondary goal by contrasting movies with other visual media. Thus, in addition to movies, we’ll also study different modes of visual thinking by examining Cubist and Abstract Expressionist painters, the work of collage artists like Hanna Höch and Romare Bearden, and comic book artists like Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez. Our weekly screenings will cover a wide variety of national cinemas, from the silent cinema to the present day, in order grasp the breadth and depth of the medium, focusing on films by directors such as Wong Kar-wai, Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, and Yasujiro Ozu, among others

DOUG DIBBERN’s second book, Cinema’s Doppelgängers, a work of speculative fiction in the guise of a scholarly history of film, was published in 2021. His first book, Hollywood Riots: Violent Crowds and Progressive Politics in American Film, won the 2016 Peter Rollins Prize. He’s also published scholarly essays on classical Hollywood filmmakers, film criticism for The Notebook at Mubi.com, and literary essays for journals like Chicago Quarterly Review and Hotel Amerika. He has a Ph.D. in Cinema Studies from New York University and currently teaches essay writing at the Tisch School of the Arts.


FYSEM-UA 900.031
Historical Fictions
Spring 2023
Instructor: Abigail Joseph
Friday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Genres of Writing

In this seminar we will look at the representation of history in literature, as well as in other genres like film, theater, and opera. When we read works of historical fiction, we are sometimes looking at painstakingly researched, accurate depictions of past events; sometimes, on the other hand, we are looking at imaginative reconstructions that may have little relationship to what "really" happened. Both approaches, though, can tell us a lot not only about the past itself, but about our relationship to it: how we learn about it; how we feel about it; what fantasies or fears we project onto it; what conflicts exist between different ways of understanding and narrating it.

We will consider what the choices of authors and artists tell us not only about the historical periods in which they set their works, but about the concerns of their own times -- and about the relationship between past and present. We will pay particular attention to fictional accounts which try to excavate or imagine the experiences of people who have often been marginalized within history itself, including women, children, enslaved people, and LGTBQ people. In addition to practicing literary analysis, students will have the opportunity to try writing historical fiction of their own. 

ABIGAIL JOSEPH is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program. She is the author of Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style (Univ of Delaware, 2019), as well as a number of articles on 19th-century literature and fashion history. She is working on a historical novel about the designer Charles Robert Ashbee.


FYSEM-UA 900.032
The Drama of New York 
Spring 2023
Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Instructor: Ben Gassman
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts

Note: Fall cohort conflicts with fall CHEM-UA 126 General Chemistry II (Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

Featuring a diverse array of plays set and presented in New York City from across the 20th century and into these first decades of the 21st, this seminar will wrestle with the idealized notion of New York as the world’s foremost melting pot. We will read these plays alongside news and historical accounts of the momentous times represented, from First World War xenophobic violence in lower Manhattan to the disparate effects of the early AIDS crisis on different neighborhoods and populations, right up through the range of fight, freeze, and flee responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in contemporary, fast-gentrifying Bushwick, Brooklyn. Focusing on the relations between voice and place, and between structure, story, and city, we will investigate what the dramatic form can show us about the distribution of power and possibility in the ever-evolving city. We will also take a few short tours of the neighborhoods featured in the plays we read and attend a live production together. 

BEN GASSMAN is a playwright whose work often dwells in, and on, outer borough New York City, juggling idioms, accents, and vernaculars to explore small interpersonal rifts resonant with larger societal conflicts, but also to illuminate unexpected bridges. His plays celebrate hybrid identities and revel in the impolite cosmopolitanism, and living, layered histories of the diverse and dynamic neighborhoods beyond the center. His NYC plays include Botte Di Ferro (2021), Independent Study (2018), 40s & Chestnuts (2017), The Downtown Loop (2013), and A Queens Style Hobo Story (2006). At NYU, Ben is a Clinical Associate Professor in Expository Writing and a Faculty Affiliate for Goddard Hall, who also regularly teaches in the Dramatic Literature division of the English Department. A lifelong Queens resident and NYC theatergoer, he is also a licensed and practicing New York City tour guide with a focus on intimate neighborhood walking tours in Queens and Brooklyn.  


FYSEM-UA 900.033
Archives and Adaptations: The 1700s on the Screen
Spring 2023
Instructor: Bridget McFarland
Monday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 4:55 p.m.-6:10 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts

2020 may also be remembered for the incomparable popularity of Bridgerton, a lavish romance that, through inclusive casting and spectacle, awakened new passion for the long eighteenth century. As fascinating as it was, Bridgerton is hardly the only show to excite interest in the art, literature, and history of the period. During the past thirty years, innovative filmmakers have adapted narratives set in the eighteenth century, demonstrating how the distant past continues to speak to our present realities. 

To examine how the eighteenth century resonates in our present, the course pairs movies made in the last thirty years with art and literature made in the eighteenth century. The pairings will include Jane Campion’s Bright Star and the writing of John Keats, Amma Asante’s Belle and the history of the Zong massacre, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and printed ephemera about Marie Antoinette, Amy Heckerling’s Clueless and Jane Austen’s novel Emma.  We’ll ask how these films interpret the past and what their interpretations tell us about the past as well as the present.

In addition to analyzing the style, narratives, and visual imagery of the films, we’ll read, view, and interpret the art, literature, and history adapted by the films. Some of these texts will be discovered through our exploration of New York City’s archives, including Bobst’s Fales library, and the digital archives that make these texts more easily accessible.Through our adventures in the archives, we’ll ask how the preservation of these materials enhances our understanding of the films. How does our work with archival materials expand what we learned? Students can expect to visit a library and museum as part of the course. 

BRIDGET MCFARLAND is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Expository Writing Program. Her current research examines pantomime and cultures of performance in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. She has published in academic journals, including Theatre History Studies.

FYSEM-UA 900.035
Researching and Writing the Secret History
Spring 2023
Instructor: Tana Wojczuk
Monday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 4:55 p.m.-6:10 p.m.
Theme: Genres of Writing

Radical transformations in the way we think about American history have changed not only how we write but who we write about, and prompt us to ask why these figures were written out of history. Through learning to write a "secret history" that profiles a forgotten (or misunderstood) historical figure you will learn essential research skills, how to think critically about archival silences, and how to shape your  research into a story others will want to hear. 

Alongside our own work, we’ll read outstanding examples of world-changing secret histories that forever altered the way we think about ourselves. For example, a profile of Henrietta Lacks, a young black woman living in the 1950s whose cancer cells have been used (without her consent) to study human genetics, radiation, and whose HeLa cell line was instrumental in developing vaccines for polio and Covid-19. Other examples include a young freedom fighter, a queer 19th century actress who became America’s first celebrity, the hidden life of a beloved children's book author, and more.  

TANA WOJCZUK  is a LAMBDA Literary Award-shortlisted author and a contributing editor at Guernica Magazine. Her biography, Lady Romeo: The Radical, Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America's First Celebrity (Avid Reader Press) was an Amazon Editor's Pick and one of Get Literary's most anticipated reads of 2020. Her work appears in many publications, including The New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, North American Review, Tin House, The Believer, Vice, and Slate. She received her MFA in creative nonfiction writing from Columbia University and is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at NYU.


FYSEM-UA 900.036
Photography and New York
Spring 2023
Instructor: Peter Kayafas
Tuessday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts

Note: Cohort conflicts with CHEM-UA 126 General Chemistry II lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 9:30am-10:45am)

New York is one of the most photographed cities in the world. While in our media-drenched lives we may readily associate pictures of NYC with tourist trophies of city attractions, the mutually influential roles of our metropolis on the medium of photography and vice versa have produced an extraordinary and relevant history that is still present on our streets and in our cultural institutions, as well as in the broader social discourse around the subjects of justice, equity, and personal expression.

This class will explore aspects of the overlapping histories of New York City and photography. Students will gain insights into how the medium changed the city and how the city changed the medium, with an emphasis on access to local institutions and historic resources. Lectures, readings, guest visits, and field trips will introduce students to the contemporary vitality and relevance of the layers of history that make up the very soul of this most dynamic place. In addition, students will actively engage with these resources as a way of building understanding and conviction around their place in New York City.

PETER KAYAFAS is a celebrated photographer, publisher, and teacher who lives in New York City where he is Director of the Eakins Press Foundation. His photographs have been widely exhibited and are in the collections of Museum of Modern Art; Brooklyn Museum of Art; New York Public Library; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago, among others. He has lectured on art and photography nationally, and taught photography at Pratt Institute for twenty years. There are five monographs of his work in print, including the recently published Coney Island Waterdance. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019.


FYSEM-UA 900.037
Human Landscapes of the Ancient Aegean
Spring 2023
Instructor: Dominic Pollard
Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Past Cultures & Societies

Humans everywhere shape – and are shaped by – their landscapes. This course will provide a wide-ranging introduction to the societies of the Bronze and Iron Age Aegean, and the ways archaeologists have approached the study of their physical, economic, and religious worlds. At the heart of this course will be the fundamental relationships between the communities in question and the landscapes they inhabited – the seas, the coasts, the lowlands, and the mountains. From ancient history to archaeobotany, we will consider the development of different theories and methodologies for studying such landscapes, and examine how archaeologists today approach questions of subsistence, mobility, and territoriality in the past. Equipped with this understanding, we will tackle the complex question of how the human landscapes of the Aegean evolved from the palace societies of the Bronze Age, through a period of collapse and fragmentation, to the emergence of the city-states of the Classical era.

DOMINIC POLLARD is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He completed his PhD at University College London, examining the social landscapes of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Crete. His current project at NYU is a comparative study of the islands of Crete, Cyprus and Sardinia across this same chronological span. His work is particularly concerned with the relationships between human societies and the landscapes they inhabit, as well as the forms of mobility and interaction which connect communities across different regions. He has conducted fieldwork in England, Italy and Greece.
 

FYSEM-UA 900.040
The Dynamic Teacher: Unconventional Educators in American Culture
Spring 2023
Instructor: Jackie Reitzes
Monday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues

Note: Fall cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 71 Introductory Experimental Physics I lecture (Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.)

From Miss Jean Brodie to John Keating, we are fascinated by teachers who break the rules and the students who are activated by them. In reading novels, stories, and plays as well as watching films and TV episodes with big-personality teachers, we’ll ask ourselves the ways in which our education can shift shapes in unexpected ways-- how the influence of a powerful teacher can both create and erode our sense of self, redefine knowledge beyond the typical classroom, and question the limits of how radically we want our education to challenge the core of who we are. Through reading, writing, reflecting, posting, discussing, questioning, and researching, we’ll examine the complicated power dynamics that occur in the space between students and teachers. By investigating the methods of instruction and the implications of what gets passed down, we’ll chart the evolution that transpires as students come to define knowledge for themselves. 

JACKIE REITZES is a Senior Language Lecturer in the Expository Writing Program. Her short fiction has been published in Epoch, The Nashville Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and The Madison Review. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in ESPN: The Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and elsewhere. She was a 2012 Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow, and she holds an MFA from Cornell University and a BA from the University of Michigan. She is currently at work on a short story collection. 


FYSEM-UA 900.041
Listening and Composing With Bob Dylan
Spring 2023
Instructor: El Glasberg
Tuesday and Thursday, 4:55 p.m.-6:10 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts

In this class we will be listening to the music of Bob Dylan as it connects us to history, sound, musical and cultural traditions, to each other, and to ourselves, to the earth, and to the spiritual realm. Maybe you want to find out about his legend. What was all that 2016 Nobel Prize fuss about? What happened at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965? Did he really find Jesus? Is he a great author or a greater plagiarist? There’s so much material by Dylan himself: over 50 albums, thousands of songs, interviews, music videos, a memoir, liner notes, visual art, radio shows, and nearly 3,000 evenings (and counting) of the Never Ending Tour begun in 1989. We’ll familiarize ourselves with key albums and eras in his long career, of course. Yet the intent of this course is neither to introduce nor to exhaust Dylan as a topic (no one is a novice, nor will we become so-called experts). Rather, we’ll take up his most pointed question, aimed directly at his audience: “How does it feel?”: To be a member of a nation? To consume or produce popular music? To be (forever) young? Disenfranchised? A lover or a beloved? 

As we listen and watch performances, films, documentaries, and interviews we will discuss questions of American musical genres and of authenticity: personal, cultural, and in performance. We will encounter American culture at its elemental oral roots and through routes across the Atlantic/Caribbean extending across the entire world. If this course swirls around Dylan, it is not to deify him. Rather, it is to place Dylan in a world that he has had such a large part in creating. That world, ultimately, is the one we are all in the midst of creating. 

EL GLASBERG pecializes in places without people and people without place, teaching and writing on US culture in transit at American University in Beirut, Princeton University, Duke University, and California State University, Los Angeles before coming to NYU’s Expository Writing Program in 2011. Glasberg’s book, Antarctica As Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change was published in 2012 by Palgrave. Glasberg’s writing has appeared in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of Historical Geography and Women’s Studies Quarterly on Survival.


FYSEM-UA 900.042
Immigration and the American Experience
Spring 2023
Instructor: Robert S Huddleston
Thursday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues

Note: Fall cohort conflicts with BIOL-UA 11 Principles of Biology I lecture (Monday/Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

Immigration has been one of the defining features of American society since its origins. It remains today one of the most hotly contested topics of cultural and political debate. Yet much about the immigrant experience—and the social, cultural, and economic forces that shape it—have remained outside the confines of that debate and the stereotypes informing it. Immigration touches on the things we cherish most, those which both unite and divide us: identity, ethnicity, memory, trauma, and belonging. In this seminar we will read and discuss a selection of works from among the wide-ranging, diverse, and rich literature of immigrant experience of the past few decades, including novels, essays, and memoirs by authors such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Richard Rodriguez, Cathy Park Hong, Colm Tóibín, Valeria Luiselli, Francesco Pacifico, and Teju Cole. These works center on key themes of family loyalty, identity, migration, and the struggle for social acceptance.

ROBERT HUDDLESTON is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program. He holds both a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Chicago and an MFA in creative writing from NYU. His writing has been featured in numerous journals including American Literary Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Colorado Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Narrative Magazine. He has previously taught the First-Year Seminars "Reading Jane Austen" and "The Pursuit of Happiness."


FYSEM-UA 900.043
New York Intellectuals, Past and Present
Spring 2023
Instructor: Eric Banks
Monday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues

Note: Fall cohort conflicts with BIOL-UA 11 Principles of Biology I lecture (Monday/Wednesday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.)

The legacy of the New York Intellectuals, the self-styled coterie of thinkers whose writings on politics and art helped define the culture and style of mid-twentieth-century critical engagement in the city and beyond, has long been contested but has left an indelible mark on public culture since the group’s heyday. In this seminar, we will examine the particular contributions made by core and fringe members of the group and the specific role that New York City and its history played in its formation. How did their writings help to define the parameters of liberal and leftist thought in the middle decades of the century and to make New York central to artistic modernism? What was their impact on New York as a cultural center for publishing and intellectual ambition at the time and after? These questions and others will also lead us to examine the context of public intellectual culture in the city pre-existing and informing the New York Intellectuals’ involvement in public life as well as a host of public thinkers, from Susan Sontag to James Baldwin, who reimagined the role of the public intellectual in their wake and partly in response to their shortcomings. Finally, we will ask what remains of the notion of the public intellectual the group helped to author and how relevant it continues to be to critical practice and engagement in contemporary life.

ERIC BANKS is director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at the NYPL. A former senior editor of Artforum, Banks was editor in chief of Bookforum from 2003–2008. From 2011 to 2013, he served as president of the National Book Critics Circle and was a two-term member of the NBCC board of directors. Banks’s writing has appeared in numerous national publications, including Bookforum, the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Aperture, Town and Country, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He has contributed essays to monographs on a number of artists, including Franz West, Christopher Wool, and Grant Wood. Additionally, he has edited numerous catalogs and collections of artists writings and is the consulting editor of the ongoing Robert Rauschenberg Catalogue Raisonné.

 

FYSEM-UA 823
How to Build a Big Fat Fluffy Brain
Spring 2023
Instructor: Wendy Suzuki
Tuesday, 2:00 p.m.-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Molecules of Materials and Living Systems

Note: Fall cohort conflicts with Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (Monday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.)

The human brain is the most complex structure known to humankind. In this class we will discuss and implement together science-based approaches shown to maximize both the physiological and psychological strength of our brain.  We will be doing a series of experiments on ourselves, collecting data and observations with the goal of developing a strong individualized program to maximize your brain function during this critical first year at NYU.  

WENDY SUZUKI is Dean of the College of Arts and Science, and a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology in the Center for Neural Science. She received her undergraduate degree in physiology and human anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from U.C. San Diego. Her major research interest is brain plasticity, and she is best known for her extensive work studying areas in the brain critical for our ability to form and retain new long-term memories. More recently her work has focused on understanding how aerobic exercise can be used to improve learning, memory and higher cognitive abilities in humans. Wendy is passionate about teaching, about exercise, and about supporting and mentoring up and coming scientists.


FYSEM-UA 900.046
Counterculture in Italy, 1960s-1970s
Spring 2023
Instructor: Matthew Zundel
Monday, 8:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues

From the emergence of new avant-garde activity in the wake of World War II, the student and worker protests up to and after 1968, to the emergence of feminist, trans and queer politics throughout the 1970s, Italy had a thriving counterculture in the latter half of the 20th century. Yet, as the term counterculture was used with increased frequency in that period, its meaning came to be questioned, as Italian intellectual Umberto Eco asked: “Does counterculture exist?”

We address Eco’s question by analyzing the variety of cultural materials that came to be described as counterculture: literature, photography, cinema, performance, magazines, and manifestos, putting these materials in conversation with the historical and political concerns including the student and worker movements towards the end of the 1960s, the rise in terrorism from certain groups on the political left as a response to state-sanctioned violence, and the ascent of a new queer and feminist consciousness. While the geographical and temporal focus is we also incorporate a comparative research dimension, thus, providing students with the tools necessary to address question of counterculture and dissent more broadly.

MATTHEW ZUNDEL is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. He received his Ph.D. in Italian Studies from NYU. His research and teaching incorporate 20th century Italian culture, literature, and film, with questions from gender and sexuality, critical theory, queer theory, and aesthetics. His research and translations have appeared in gender/sexuality/italy, AG: About Gender, Soft Power, and Barricade: Journal of Antifascism and Translation. His dissertation, Perverse Dispositions: Sexual Dissidence in 1970s Italy, examines the formal dimension of performance, social theory, and literary fiction of the radical left in the 1970s, and demonstrates how some figures and collectives integrated perversion as a critical mode of resistance to normative prescriptions of gender and sexuality at a time when Italy was undergoing massive political and social upheaval. He is currently translating Italian queer philosopher Lorenzo Bernini's recent book, Il sessuale politico (The Sexual/Political).


FYSEM-UA 900.047
Utopia: From Thomas More to Octavia Butler
Spring 2023
Instructor: Tanya Schmidt
Tuesday, 8:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: The City: Longstanding Challenges and Dynamic Change

Note: Cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.) 

“Utopia” is an invented word, drawing on Greek roots, that puns on the tension between its two possible meanings of “no place” and “good place.” Through an imaginary world, a utopia claims to communicate significant truths about the real world. We examine how writers from antiquity (Plato, the Bible), the Renaissance (More, Shakespeare, Bacon, Cavendish, Milton), and in the 20th century (Le Guin, Jemisin, Butler) have imagined and illustrated utopias. As educational systems are often central to a utopian vision, we also consider the ways college is like and unlike a utopia.

TANYA SCHMIDT is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She earned her Ph.D. in English from NYU, with a dissertation on Edmund Spenser and Margaret Cavendish. She has held fellowships at NYU’s Global Research Institute in Florence and at the Remarque Institute, and her scholarship has been supported by the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Huntington Library, and the Shakespeare Association of America, among others. Her work has appeared in Persuasions, and she has been named a recipient of the NYU College of Arts and Science’s Outstanding Teaching Award.


FYSEM-UA 900.048
Utopia and the City
Spring 2023
Instructor: Isaac Hand
Monday and Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: The City: Longstanding Challenges and Dynamic Change

Note: Cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.) 

Philosophers and reformers have been drawn to the promise of the city as a vector for totalizing social, economic, and political change. Far from being pure fantasy, this corpus of utopian urbanism has often served as the foundation for wide-ranging social policy, whether in the form of public housing schemes (such as the Pruitt-Igoe Housing complex in St. Louis) or globalizing “New Towns” or “Garden Cities.” Through an interdisciplinary approach to the historical, aesthetic, and geographical breadth of utopian urban thought, we study the persistence of cities as media for top-down or bottom-up social re-imagining. Students become acquainted with utopian underpinnings embedded in the history of city planning and contemporary urban social movements and take field trips into their built environment to analyze the ways that urban infrastructure and planning continue to shape our shared social experience.

ISAAC HAND is a Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. He earned his Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies from NYU. Specializing in the intellectual history of municipalities and urbanism in the late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic, his research shows how, during a time period of single-party rule and the suppression of political opposition at a national level, Ottoman and Turkish cities were hotbeds of debate, dissent, and political imagination. His article “‘If the Municipality Cannot Do it!’ Negotiating the Boundary between State and Society in early Republican Turkish Cities” was recently published in the Journal of Urban History.


FYSEM-UA 900.050
Medieval Short Stories
Spring 2023
Instructor: Sarah Pearce
Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Literature through the Ages

Note: Cohort conflicts with fall PHYS-UA 91 Physics I lecture (Tuesday/Thursday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.) 

This seminar is all about short stories, or “frametales,” from medieval Spain. We will read about wizards, matchmakers, people telling stories about animals, animals telling stories about people, racy love affairs, good kings, bad kings, knights in shining armor, women who can outsmart everyone around them, and miracles that help literary characters question or affirm their faith. Some of these stories have even been adapted into modern versions by well-known writers such as Salman Rushdie, Jorge Luis Borges, and Yasmine Seale; we will also explore some of these modern retellings, as well, and ask questions about what the Middle Ages can offer to modern readers. We will address big themes in the texts while also paying close attention to the language in which they are written and spend time talking about the evolution of the Spanish language and the various regional dialects that were used to write medieval stories. We will start off the semester reading stories that have been adapted from medieval Spanish into modern Spanish, but by the end of the semester, students will develop skills and confidence in reading older and other forms of the language. Students will also have the opportunity to practice writing regularly in a variety of different forms related to the stories we will read.

SARAH PEARCE is an associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, where her teaching and research focus on the intellectual history and literature of Jews, Christians and Muslims in medieval Spain. Her first book, The Andalusi Literary and Intellectual Tradition: The Role of Arabic in Judah ibn Tibbon’s Ethical Will, examines the ways in which Jewish intellectuals in thirteenth century Spain and France understood Arabic to be a language of cultural prestige. She is the recipient of the Michael Camille Memorial Essay Prize (2014) and the John K. Walsh article prize awarded by the MLA Forum on Medieval Iberia and La Corónica (2015).


FYSEM-UA 900.052
The Archaeology of Food and Foodways in the Ancient World
Spring 2023
Instructor: Lorenzo Castellano
Friday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.

Food represents an omnipresent central aspect of human life and experience, being ultimately a requisite for life itself. Nevertheless, food is also more than diet and subsistence: social relationships are built and maintained through foodways – i.e., through eating habits and culinary practices. In these terms, food and foodways intersect social phenomena, such as gender, ethnicity, status, and religious beliefs. This course provides a multidisciplinary and comparative discussion of food and foodways in the Ancient World. The course is organized in three main sections: (i) we will discuss the main theoretical approaches to the study of food and foodways, as well as the methods that we can deploy in order to access the evidence of food and food consumption in the archaeological record; (ii) having introduced the main anthropological and archaeological approaches to ancient food studies, in the second section of the course we will analyze the main topics currently central in the field – e.g., subsistence and diet, feasting, food security, power and politics, race and ethnicity, and gender. Each topic will be discussed by means of case studies originating from different regions and periods; (iii) the last section of the course is a regional survey of food and foodways. In three different classes we will concentrate respectively on food and cooking traditions in the prehistoric and historic periods in Eastern Asia, the Mediterranean Basin, and Central America.

LORENZO CASTELLANO is a Postdoctoral Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He completed his PhD at NYU, studying the sociocultural history of agriculture in protohistoric and historic Anatolia. Prof. Castellano is an environmental archaeologist, specializing in the study of plant remains from archaeological sites. He has conducted fieldwork in Italy, Egypt, Turkey, and Uzbekistan.

FYSEM-UA 900.054
Computer Music: History, Theory, and Practice
Spring 2023
Instructor: Elizabeth Hoffman
Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts

Electronic music is so omnipresent that it is easy to overlook the complexity of the genre, its intricate history, and its particular impact on our artistic and larger sonic environments. Its technical features inter-relate with other diverse fields including computer science, electrical engineering, cognition, and architectural acoustics; and its history is interwoven with changes in music transmission and access; recording technologies; vocal transmission, encoding, and simulation; and sound iconography. This course will survey fixed media music, including early electronic analog instruments; but we will focus on the digital transformation since the 1960s. How do computers make sound and music? What are the paradigmatic ways of approaching DAW design? Coding design for music? Use of FFT analysis? Use of Data? And, finally, how do computer music techniques enable some of the most intriguing mixing and mastering in a wide range of musical styles today? How does computer music participate in what Baudrillard has called simulacra, and a blurring of realistic and simulated behaviors of sound?

ELIZABETH HOFFMAN is a composer of acoustic, electroacoustic, and computer music. She teaches composition, music theory, and computer music in the School of Arts and Science at NYU. Recognition for her electroacoustic music has come from the Bourges, Prix Ars, Pierre Schaeffer, and Sonic Circuits competitions; awards from the MacDowell Foundation, the NEA, and the Jerome Foundation. 


FYSEM-UA 900.064
Climate Change and its Consequences: The Scientific Basis
Spring 2023
Instructor: David Holland
Tuesday, 8:00 a.m.-10:30 a.m.

This seminar introduces undergraduates to the concepts and methods of the science of climate change.  It covers a broad range of topics that students have likely encountered in the media, starting with the greenhouse effect and looking into its impact on phenomenon such as disappearing ice to rising sea levels to hurricanes to fires and droughts and more.   The seminar will delve into each of these consequences of a warming world using basic equations of physics which are explored through statistical and mathematical solution techniques.  Hands-on laboratory and computational experiments will supplement and reinforce the theoretical foundations of the various aspects of climate science.

DAVID MICHAEL HOLLAND is a Professor of Mathematics and Environmental Science at New York University (NYU). His research focuses on using mathematics to understand mechanisms by which significant sea-level change could arise from the great ice sheets, Greenland and Antarctica, over the coming decades in an ever warming world.  He applies advanced applied mathematical techniques to data collected in remote environments.  A veteran of more than a decade of Greenland and Antarctic field expeditions, Holland continues to spend summer seasons collecting vital information about the state of the oceans and glaciers in those regions.  



EXPOS-UA 1 
Writing the Essay: Science and Society

Note: Students who take WTE: Science and Society must still take another course to fulfill the First-Year Seminar requirement, either during their first year or later in your CAS career. Reach out to your advisor for more information.

Note: if you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this course.

Writing the Essay: Science and Society is the foundational writing course, which provides instruction and practice in critical reading, creative thinking, and clear writing. The course stresses exploration, inquiry, reflection, analysis, revision, and collaborative learning.  Our section of Writing the Essay will focus on the role of science in the contemporary world. We will learn to read, think, and write critically as we investigate how science, medicine, and technology are used to evaluate, characterize, and politicize elements of human behavior and society—and how social institutions challenge and complicate our behavioral and social norms. We question common conceptions of science and society as separate spheres, as well as examining the many paradoxes therein: how science can be simultaneously progressive and destructive, connecting and isolating, liberating and oppressive. As we progress, you will find that writing is not only a method to communicate ideas but also a process that generates new ones. The ultimate goal: for you to write and communicate confidently, to rely on writing as one of the best tools for developing fresh perspectives and appreciating subtle complexities, and to develop your own unique and more complex understanding of science, medicine, and technology. 

EXPOS-UA 1.001 
Spring 2023
Monday and Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.

EXPOS.UA 1.002
Spring 2023
Monday and Wednesday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.

EXPOS.UA 1.003
Spring 2023
Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 2:00 p.m-3:15 p.m.

EXPOS.UA 1.004
Spring 2023
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.

EXPOS.UA 1.005 
Spring 2023
Tuesday and Thursday, 3:30 p.m.-4:45 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.

EXPOS.UA 1.006
Spring 2023
Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30 p.m.-1:45 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 2:00 p.m.-3:15 p.m.

EXPOS.UA 1.007 
Spring 2023
Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00 a.m.-9:15 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 4:55 p.m.-6:10 p.m.

EXPOS.UA 1.008
Spring 2023
Tuesday and Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-10:45 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 4:55 p.m.-6:10 p.m.