The following First-Year Seminars are specially-designed to meet the goals of the FYS program. These seminars are open to first-year CAS students only, and offer a special opportunity to build a community of fellow first-year students, develop core academic competencies, and be mentored by an Arts & Science faculty member.
Click the titles below for a description of the seminar and an instructor bio.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Examines the intersection of policy, politics, media, and government, focusing on issues including: income inequality, justice, health, education, and the environment as we look for implementable ideas to improve lives and speed our recovery.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
Note: reserved for Residential College students.
“Anthropocene” is a new and still unofficial term, but a mind-blowing one. It signifies we are living at a moment both exhilarating and terrifying: The dawn of a new historical epoch in the 4.5 billion-year history of Earth. For the first time, just one of the 8.7 million species on this planet will determine (though not necessarily “control”) the fate of all the rest. We humans are not only reshuffling the kaleidoscope of life forms on Earth, we are also altering the chemistry of its sky and oceans, and terraforming its surface as easily as if it were made of Play-Doh. All of this is occurring at an accelerating pace that has now overwhelmed the various non-human forces that shaped our planet until now, forces like natural selection, plate tectonics, glaciation, volcanism and orbital variation. Yet the scientists, philosophers, essayists and activists who have looked deeply at the concept of the Anthropocene (most of them, anyway) tell us that this is not about apocalypse. The end is not near, if by “end” we mean the imminent destruction of our planet and ourselves. The Anthropocene is a transformation, and where it will lead is both unknowable and entirely dependent on the choices we humans make, both individually and collectively. Our inability to know our future does not leave us powerless, however, because a rich body of scholarly and popular work has already scouted this terrain, and can assist us in our own explorations. In this class, we will mine this work, approaching the Anthropocene as both a scientific and cultural construction. We will read, research and write, and most of all we will think—all with the goal of understanding how we got here, and where we might go next.
DAN FAGIN is a science journalism professor at New York University. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who writes frequently about environmental science. His bestselling book, Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, was awarded the 2014 Pulitzer for General Nonfiction, as well as the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, the National Academies Science Book Award and the Society of Environmental Journalists’ Rachel Carson Environment Book Award, among other honors. He has recently been published in The New York Times, Scientific American, Nature, and Slate. His new book project is about monarch butterflies and the future of biodiversity in the Anthropocene.
Note: reserved for Residential College students.
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.
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.
Homer's Odyssey, Vergil's Aeneid, and Dante's Inferno are key foundational texts of the West. These works span two millennia and very different cultures—archaic Greece at the dawn of literature, pagan Rome of the first century BCE, and Florence during the Christian Middle Ages. Reflecting very different social, political, and religious values, they explore very different visions of what it means to be human, particularly with regard to the individual's role in society and the individual's relationship to the divine. But for all their differences, the three poems self-consciously engage with one another, building on, competing with, and correcting their predecessors' visions. Thus, all are cast as journeys by a hero, and these journeys are both literal and metaphorical. All three also involve a descent into the underworld, from which the hero is, in a sense, reborn with a greater understanding and a new sense of purpose. As if to underscore the way in which these texts talk with one another, the Homeric underworld in the Odyssey is actually Vergil's model for the underworld that his hero, Aeneas, will visit; and Dante goes even further by making Vergil a character in his poem, the pagan spirit who will guide him through and out of the Christian hell. This course will involve close reading and discussion of the three poems. In addition, the seminar aims to develop students' research skills. These skills include how to ask the right questions about a text, how to conduct an internet search of relevant scholarship, how to write up a literature review, and, finally, how to build on that work to produce a paper that sets forth one's own conclusions. No prior knowledge of these texts and no familiarity with research skills are required. What is required is intellectual curiosity and a commitment to work hard and collaboratively.
MATTHEW S. SANTIROCCO is Professor of Classics and Angelo J. Ranieri Director of Ancient Studies at NYU; he is also Academic Director of NYU Washington, DC. He served as Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science from 1994 to 2011, and then as NYU’s Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs from 2011-2017, and Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Science 2021-2022. His interests range widely from ancient Greek and Latin literature and thought to issues in American higher education. He founded and directs NYU’s Center for Ancient Studies, which promotes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of the past. Among his many publications are a book on the Roman lyric poet, Horace, and several edited volumes, the most recent of which is an issue of Daedalus on new approaches to the study of Greece and Rome; in addition, he currently edits the Palgrave-Macmillan monograph series, The New Antiquity, and is working on a book on the poetics of patronage in Augustan Rome. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009, and served as President of the Society for Classical Studies in 2022.
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.
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.
Note: reserved for Residential College students.
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.
Note: reserved for Residential College students.
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.
In several archaeological arenas, legitimate controversies among scientists about what is known and knowable grade into speculations about the past that go beyond any possibility of documentation. Sometimes these frontiers between the legitimate and the mythical are the most dynamic and interesting of all. This seminar takes a critical look at some of the most intriguing—yet widely misunderstood—topics in the archaeology of human evolution that make popular subjects for television shows, magazine articles, books, and the web—interpretations typically described as “pseudoscience.” Specifically, we consider how and why archaeologists use scientific methods to evaluate evidence put forth to explain historical events and cultural achievements around the world. To this end, we bust a series of 14 “myths” that often attract pseudoscientific claims such as: The Nazca Lines in southern Peru were made by aliens; the first Americans came from Europe; the people of Atlantis were the source of civilizations around the world; and Ancient astronauts help the Egyptians and Mayans build their pyramids. Students leave this seminar armed with the critical thinking skills necessary to evaluate these and other claims—that is, the archaeological myth buster’s toolkit. They will learn about world cultures of the past and participate in interactive exercises aimed at enhancing understanding of some of their greatest accomplishments. In dissecting academic debates alongside mythical claims, students will gain appreciation for the scientific process, and the difference between intriguing mysteries of the past and falsehoods and myths spread to advance agendas.
JUSTIN PARGETER is an Assistant Professor in Anthropology and a paleolithic archaeologist whose research centers on understanding human biocultural evolution (how our technologies and bodies co-evolve) through the archaeological record in sub-Saharan Africa. His methodological expertise in ‘lithic [stone] technology’ includes powerful tools to track human technologies and cultural evolution that tell us about how people learnt to make and use material objects in the past. Over the past decade, Justin has worked at a number of archaeological sites in southern Africa to study changes in stone tool technologies, especially large cave sites in South Africa, and the impacts of climate and environmental change on human decision making over the past hundred thousand years. Justin’s work also involves several community outreach projects designed to dispel myths about archaeology and to promote and encourage a more diverse and equitable generation of future archaeologists. In his seminar courses, Justin strives to bring the excitement of “the field” to campus through inquiry-based and experiential learning that gets students first asking critical questions about relations among people, things, and places, and then moving to address these questions through hands-on activities and in-class debate.
“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.
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.
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).
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.
The films of Steven Spielberg – many of which are award-winning blockbusters that have been watched by millions of people – are often dismissed (rightly or wrongly) as mere entertainment, films to be watched on a summer holiday or a Saturday evening with friends, consumerist products fabricated by an industry for immediate and unproblematic consumption — and to make money. In this course, with the goal of honing a whole host of skills essential to success in college — close-reading of images and texts, exploration of critical responses, research methods, application of various theoretical models of interpretation — we will watch representative selection of Spielberg’s films with a critical eye. We will thus watch these films “pen in hand,” taking notes, and pressing the “Pause” button when necessary (i.e. often!), in order to train ourselves as active reader-spectators. We will also read texts of various genres (from newspaper reviews of films to theoretical texts from various fields in the humanities), all the time asking ourselves all sorts of questions about what we as movie-goers are being shown (or not shown) on the screen, how our attention and emotions are being steered, why this is happening, and with what consequences for our own understanding of the world around us.
PHILLIP JOHN USHER is a Professor in NYU's Departments of French Literature, Thought, and Culture and of Comparative Literature. His research and teaching focus on the complex ways in which literature and film create meaning. In particular, he is interested in the interaction between signs (in texts and images) and space, cartography, ecology, and the world around us. For this first-year seminar, he is especially excited to be exploring the films of Steven Spielberg, whose E.T. captivated him (like many others) as a child. A (former!) first-gen college student himself, he is mindful of what a leap it can be to arrive in college with all of its written (and unwritten) rules, customs, and expectations; he looks forward to spending a semester watching and discussing Spielberg's films and demystifying academic life.
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.
We will be reading a wide-ranging selection of works from different cultures and chronological periods that have framed in memorable, though often contradictory, ways some basic questions about what it means to be a human being faced with death. How, for example, should my death affect the way I live, and what kinds of attitudes should I hold toward it? Should I just ignore thinking about it? Or if it is an evil and to be feared, how is it evil, and when does my death harm me? We will also consider the view that death is not the end of our lives. Could we in some sense be immortal and would that be desirable? More generally, what exactly does it mean to say that someone has died and how significant to me is the continuing existence of others after my death.
PHILLIP MITSIS is A.S. Onassis Professor of Classics and Hellenic Studies. He teaches a wide variety of undergraduate courses that focus on ancient, medieval, and modern philosophical, historical, and literary texts. His primary research interests are in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy and literature, especially Hellenistic philosophy and its subsequent influence. He also directs the American Institute for Verdi Studies, whose archives are in Bobst Library. Author or editor of some twenty books, he currently is working on the morality of hate in the history of philosophy, especially the arguments of those who think that one has moral reasons to hate things that are evil.
In this first year seminar, we will explore how writers and activists employ the medium of radio to further their political and artistic goals. Radio was first invented as a technology for colonial rule: a key infrastructure for military operations and espionage. Quickly, however, radio evolved for journalism, and then was used as a medium for black and anticolonial dissent, employed by poets such as Langston Hughes, Miguel Hernández, Nancy Cunard; thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Walter Benjamin, and feminist activists such as Women Rising Radio, Una Marson, Ilse Barea-Kulscar and Olive Shapley.
In four of our sessions, we will go to NYU Libraries Special Collections to explore, with Curator Shannon O'Neill, the library's own archival materials including historic radio broadcasts. Students will work on guided independent projects in these sessions, aimed towards a final research project that may take the form of a final paper, audio, or podcasting project. The wealth of collections in the library include everything from the progressive public radio station WBAI, the first ever listener funded radio station launched by the pacifist Lew HIll; to dissident radio stations of the Vietnam War; to WNYU, NYU’s own student run radio station. How does radio seek to create community, and imagine utopias, even in the context of mainstream media? What is different about radio to other media? How did authors translate strategies from writing, film, music, and other media into their radio practice? The course will be in English. Where there are Spanish language materials, such as Isabel Cadenas Cañón’s ‘De eso no se habla’, they will have English language translations too. There’s a wealth of contemporary radio and podcasting material which students may analyze within the wider historical context of the course.
AMEYA TRIPATHI is Assistant Professor of Modern and Contemporary Spanish Literatures and Cultures. His book project, Documents of Revolution: Literacy, Translation and Internationalism in the Spanish Civil War explores how anarchism, feminism, and black internationalism transformed documentary writing, photography, radio and film. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Modernist Cultures, Modernism/modernity, George Orwell Studies and The Space Between. Ranging between English and Spanish language authors such as George Orwell, Langston Hughes, Miguel Hernández, María Teresa León, and others, his research explores working-class cultures, race, dissident internationalisms, and related cultural studies themes to combine social history and movements from below with the discipline of comparative literature.
Note: reserved for Residential College students.
MICHAEL BECKERMAN is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Music, Collegiate Professor of Music, and Chair of the Department of Music at NYU. A composer, pianist, and scholar, he writes on such subjects as nationalism, film music, music and war, opera, and popular song. He lectures regularly throughout North America and Europe, writes for the New York Times, and during the corona crisis has curated a series of online musical postings for DAHA (the Dvořák American Heritage Society) titled “From DAHA with Love."
Note: reserved for Residential College students.
Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro, Havana. The names stand for an experience of Latin America that is at once familiar and seductive. We imagine the malecón of Havana, the favelas or beaches of Rio, the cafés of Buenos Aires, the contradictions of skyscrapers and Aztec sites in Mexico City. We watch films that drop us into the cityscape. We think we can anticipate what we find on arrival because we have learned the legends of cities, and because these global cities have colonized our imaginations through their culture, their art, their imagery. But the culture of Latin American cities disclose remarkable contradictions, in part because Latin Americans started living big city life before the explosion of urbanization across most of the globe. This course surveys the life of very different cities from Latin America whose identities, culture, politics, and everyday life have been shaped by colonization, revolution, empire, capitalism and cold wars, by urban migration, global and local uneven development, and by the resistance and resilience of its inhabitants. Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio De Janeiro/São Paulo, and Havana have a long history of grand ambitions and grand inequities, modern transformations and modern dislocations, and each reveals a specific national and political context. This course will be devoted to their recent past. Through non-fiction, literature, journalism, photography, digital media, and film, we will consider how these cities exploit their status as modern cultural capitals and negotiate political struggle, financial and ecological disaster, violence, inequality, and urban viability.
ANA DOPICO is Director of the Hemispheric Institute, as well as Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University (NYU). Professor Dopico is a comparative scholar of the Americas, Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Global South. She has published widely, including the book Cubanologies, Altered States of the Nation, and a new book project, Cold Civil Wars: Black and Cuban Miami, 1960-2000, which takes up the volatile cultural history of race politics, civil rights, anti-blackness, and segregation in Miami, from the arrival of Cubans to Jim Crow Miami through the Elián González affair.
Please check again soon for a course description and instructor bio.
The following courses are departmental seminars which have been determined to meet the same goals as the First-Year Seminar. You may enroll in any of the following FYSEM-UA-coded seminars and it will satisfy the First-Year Seminar requirement, but note that your class will also include sophomore, junior, and senior students.
Click the titles below for a description of the seminar.
Cross-listed with MUSIC-UA 901.001
In recent years, the “material” turn within the humanities has brought along many new and exciting ways to think about musical instruments. Long the purview of the specialized field of “organology,” musical instruments have become a rich site for conversations between scholars of various disciplines, including music and sound studies, media studies, museum studies, history of science, science and technology studies, anthropology, environmental history, and Indigenous studies. Drawing on this growing collection of scholarship, combined with regular visits to different music venues, museums, and instrument workshops across the city, this class will explore some of the most innovative questions that surround musical instruments today, including: What can instruments teach us about sound and music that other material sources (whether archives, scores, or interviews) cannot? What are some of the emerging methodologies being used to approach the study of instruments? And how do these new insights on musical instruments translate across diverse professional practices, including curation, performance, and composition?
Cross-listed with MUSIC-UA 111.001
This course will introduce students to Cuban music, from traditional popular music to the more contemporary sounds of Havana today. The course will take a close look at the major events and factors that shaped the arts and culture in Cuba historically and the influences that led to the unique sound of Cuban music and its aesthetics. An understanding of Cuban music requires familiarity with clave, and we will analyze the 6/8 clave, rumba clave and son clave. Through exercises of clapping and singing, and by using hand percussion instruments students will develop an understanding of beat, syncopation, and melodic counterpoint. In addition, we will explore some of the more well-documented genres like Danzon, Son, Rumba, Mambo, Cha-cha-cha, Bolero, and arrive at Timba. Class work will include readings, DVD's, contemporary recordings, and field trips to experience first-hand Cuban music performed live in NYC. No previous instrumental training is required but, of course, is helpful.
Note: Formerly taught in Italian, in Fall 2023 this will be taught in English. No prerequesites.
Cross-listed with ITAL-UA 177.001
This course will be structured around reading Igiaba Scego’s 2020 novel, La linea del colore [The Color Line]. The novel weaves together the story of a present-day Afro-Italian art history student and the story of African American woman Lafanu Brown, living in Rome in the late 1800s. Using this story as our touchstone, we will explore how conceptions of race have converged and diverged between Italy and the US from the late 1800s to the present day, through supplemental readings of primary and secondary sources.
Cross-listed with ITAL-UA 180.001
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, a drama queen is “a person who is prone to exaggeratedly dramatic behavior.” While drama queens exist in real life, opera is their ideal environment. Echoing back to their tragic fates, the powerful voices of opera’s heroines never ceased to affect their empathetic public. In fact, excess and overreactions are key to the operatic experience both on stage and in the audience. By focusing on the ways in which drama queens are brought to life, the course explores the social, political, and gender dynamics that inform the melodramatic imagination. Along with a broad introduction to the development of opera from 1600 to 1900, the course offers a theoretical background across literature and musical culture, reception, voice/sound and gender studies. Case studies include works by Monteverdi, Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccin. No musical skills required.
Cross-listed with ITAL-UA 303.001
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 has 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.
Cross-listed with ITAL-UA 172.001
This course will examine the ideas and actions of Italian anarchists in America during the late 19th - early 20th centuries and their impact on the social and political landscape of the United States. We will begin by exploring the philosophical and historical underpinnings of anarchism, tracing the roots of Italian anarchism and discussing its relevance in the context of Italian immigration. The course will then examine the emergence of Italian anarchist communities in America, focusing on their organizational structures, cultural expressions, and political activities — such as their role in the labor movement and their struggle for equality. We will also explore the ways in which Italian anarchist ideas influenced American society, including their impact on literature, art, and popular culture. Students will analyze the works of Italian anarchist writers and artists, such as Errico Malatesta, Pietro Gori, and Carlo Tresca, as well as documents related to the Sacco and Vanzetti case, a landmark cause célèbre that brought the issues of anarchism and immigrant rights to the forefront of American consciousness. Through an appreciation of the significance of Italian Anarchists in America, the course aims ultimately to provide a nuanced understanding of anarchism's historical development, key concepts, and contemporary relevance.
Note: Taught in French, prerequisite is FREN-UA 30, a 4 or a 5 on the AP French Language and Culture Exam, or at least a 55 on the online placement test
Cross-listed with FREN-UA 150.001
Fabulous Versailles, the synthesis of baroque and classical aesthetics and the cult of kingship, serves as an introduction to the study of major aspects of 17th- and 18th-century culture and French influence on European civilization. This course views the intellectual, artistic, and social complexities of the period through the works of contemporary philosophers, dramatists, artists, memorialists, and historians from Descartes to Voltaire. Films, field trips, and multimedia presentations of music and art.
Note: Taught in French, prerequisite is FREN-UA 30, a 4 or a 5 on the AP French Language and Culture Exam, or at least a 55 on the online placement test
Cross-listed with FREN-UA 163.002
Retrospective and introspective view of French civilization from the early period to 1900 through the interrelation of history, literature, fine arts, music, and philosophy. Study of major historical forces, ideas, and tensions; the formation of collective identities (territorial, religious, political, and so on); France's diversity and formative conflicts; the Republican model; France and the outer world; and the relationship between state, nation, and citizenry. Primary sOffered in the fall. 4 points. Retrospective and introspective view of French civilization from the early period to 1900 through the interrelation of history, literature, fine arts, music, and philosophy. Study of major historical forces, ideas, and tensions; the formation of collective identities (territorial, religious, political, and so on); France's diversity and formative conflicts; the Republican model; France and the outer world; and the relationship between state, nation, and citizenry. Primary sources and documents such as chroniques, m?moires, journaux, revues, and correspondances.
Note: Taught in French, prerequisite is FREN-UA 30, a 4 or a 5 on the AP French Language and Culture Exam, or at least a 55 on the online placement test
Cross-listed with FREN-UA 563.001
What is the meaning of existence, and of life in society? This is the question the principal thinkers of “French Theory” attempted to answer in the second half of the 20th century. This important moment of intellectual life continues to influence thinkers today around the world. The principal questions and intellectual movements studied in this course include: existentialism (Sartre), structuralism (Levi-Strauss), deconstruction (Derrida), the intersection of power and sexuality (Foucault), sociology of culture (Bourdieu), feminism (Beauvoir, Cixous), postcolonial identities (Glissant), animalism, political ecology (Serres).
Cross-listed with FREN-UA 865.001
War cries, bird songs, city noises, nonsense poetry, love laments, divine invocations: this class will cover a thousand years of such sounds and songs from the pre-modern world (from the Middle Ages to the Revolution). While offering a survey of the basic idioms, genres and forms of early Western music (troubadour and trouvère, plainchant, madrigal, early opera, etc.), this class will question how textual, musical and spatial textures were used to create artistic dialogues and render a wealth of sonic experiences. This course is taught in English. No previous knowledge of music is required.
Cross-listed with IRISH-UA 182.001
Examines the English conquest of Ireland from the reign of Elizabeth I to the last meeting of the Irish Parliament. Key themes include the plantation of Ireland with settlers from England, Scotland, and Wales; the decline of the Gaelic political order and culture; the religious reformation and Counter-Reformation; Ireland as a site of English and European wars; the imposition of a penal code; and the vain attempt to rebel against British rule in the late 18th century, resulting in the Act of Union, which disestablished the Irish Parliament in Dublin.
Cross-listed with IRISH-UA 187.001
From the seventeenth century to the present, Irish people have been crossing the Atlantic to North America. They are one of the most significant ethnic groups to ever migrate from Europe to the United States. Their impact has been disproportional to their numbers but this only partially explains our contemporary understanding of “Irish America.” Ethnicity is an imprint and defining feature of American life yet the Irish experience with it over the past four centuries is a story complicated by multiple generations, diversity of class, continuing immigration, and rapid changes in both the homeland and the receiving country. This course will consider the factors affecting emigration from Ireland; examine the impact of the Irish on the development of the United States since the colonial period, particularly on its cities; study the changing Irish image in American popular culture; and consider what the Irish can teach us about the evolution of ethnic identity. The ultimate goal of this course is to learn to think historically.
Cross-listed with IRISH-UA 208.001
Just as the United States received more immigrants than any other country, Ireland and Italy are among the classic nations of emigrants. This course will examine the origins, character, and impact of two of the world’s great migrations. Why did so many people leave Ireland and Italy? What were the economic, political, religious, and personal motivations? How were people able to leave in such large numbers, given their poverty? Where did they go? How did they travel? And what effect did they have on the societies – England, Scotland, Australia, Latin America, and especially North America – where they settled? The focus will be global, but with a particular emphasis on the immigrants’ main destination, the United States, which attracted more than 5 million Irish immigrants and more than 5 million Italian immigrants.
Cross-listed with IRISH-UA 307.001
From Roman claims of human sacrifice to tales of shape-shifting goddesses and from heroes that live for hundreds of years to journeys to Otherworlds and magical creatures, the world of Celtic myth and its interpretation presents us with a rich panorama. This class explores what we know about non-Christian religions in the Celtic regions, drawing on archaeological evidence and examining literary sources for medieval perceptions of paganism. In the first part of the class we will define what we can really know about the ‘religious’ beliefs of the wider Celtic world before and during the Roman conquests before turning to the literary tales that survive from the Middle Ages that are set in the non-Christian past of Ireland and Wales. We will question what can be defined as ‘myth’ and how stories of pagan gods and heroes are treated in a medieval Christian world. This course will take a critical approach to the material and continue to question how much we can know about these early belief systems and what our surviving literary texts meant to their various audiences.
Cross-listed with IRISH-UA 624.001
Although this seminar will trace Irish poetry beginning in the 1930s with the influence of W.B. Yeats, the emphasis will be on later twentieth-century poets (including Seamus Heaney, Louis MacNeice and Alan Gillis) and poetry by women (like Eavan Boland, Colette Bryce, Ailbhe Darcy, Vona Groarke, Leontia Flynn and Sinead Morrissey). We will discover new writers publishing poems and books in contemporary magazines and poetry journals and dip into contemporary Irish language poetry (read in translation). Reading these poets will allow us to grapple with some of the most pressing issues facing poetry criticism in the Irish Studies field and beyond: the struggle with Yeats’s commanding example; the relation of poetry to national partition and the civil crisis in Northern Ireland; the confining and liberating aspects of lyric tradition; the use of translation as a means of finding voice; the agency of poetry in forcing change within a conservative cultural climate; the arrival of prosperity in Ireland and the consequent need to revise our conceptions of Irish culture.
Cross-listed with RELST-UA 991.001
This course traces the theories and practices of Buddhist meditation across different traditions and cultures, from the time of the Buddha down to the mindfulness meditations of the present day. We will begin with concentration and insight meditations that were common in early Buddhist communities, followed by the wisdom and compassion meditations of the Greater Vehicle (Mahāyāna) and the subtle body and open awareness meditations of Tantric Buddhism (Vajrayāna). Throughout the course we will also consider the relationship between meditation and Buddhist ethics, philosophy, ritual, and narrative, as well as the scientific study and secularization of meditation in the modern world.
Cross-listed with IRISH-UA 700.001
A study of the rich dramatic tradition of Ireland since the days of William Butler Yeats, Lady Gregory, and the fledgling Abbey Theatre. Playwrights covered include John Millington Synge, Sean O?Casey, Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Brian Friel, Tom Murphy, Frank McGuinness, and Anne Devlin. Issues of Irish identity, history, and postcoloniality are engaged alongside an appreciation of the emotional texture, poetic achievements, and theatrical innovations that characterize this body of dramatic work.
Cross-listed with SPAN-UA 201.001
This course explores the Iberian Atlantic world, from Al-Andalus (Moorish Spain) and Anahuac (indigenous America) to the era of Spanish and Portuguese conquest and colonization that closely tied the Iberian Peninsula, Western Africa, and the Americas to one another in a vast oceanic inter-culture and political economy.
Cross-listed with SPAN-UA 403.002
We live in an age of self-design. In a life shaped by the pressures of self-design (the pressure of self-definition, for instance) the person you are now and how you see yourself becoming are often quite different things. This gap is a usual source of trouble. For those who fear that who they are is getting in the way of who they would like to be, narrowing this gap can be a momentous task.
A common way to make it narrower is by refining your self-descriptions: this is the topic of this course. (Another way, which takes more time if no less work, is to change your life in certain ways for reasons never entirely clear to you in advance. ‘Agency’ is a name philosophers give to this work: the noble, rational, route.) Not every life is a philosophical project, however. Puzzling out self-definitions is not (usually) like reaching conclusions following premises. It is often describing one’s life in a light that it justifies certain choices. A self-definition can be criticized for being an undemocratic move in a language-game (by which the aspirant expects to dictate how to be perceived by others), or for being a gimmick (a harmless lie). But it can also be a valuable leap in self-understanding: an insight reconciling who one is and what (provisionally) one can say about oneself without lying. It can be a poetic achievement or a shortcut of aspiration. Imagine a culture structured by systematic incentives to provide self-descriptions which no one asked us to give. In such a culture the writing of self-descriptions becomes a source of self-examination and performance, and may gradually sediment into minor genres. Styles begin to form; conventions ossify; the line between public life and private self-questioning becomes blurry; self-creation becomes self-curation. In this course we will try to test this hypothesis about contemporary life, and consider some implications of an aesthetics of aspiration. Our corpus will include short bios from social media, artist’s statements, self-interviews, interviews, prefaces, etc., side by side with examples from Iberian and Latin-American literature and art, and philosophical texts from various provenances.
Cross-listed with SPAN-UA 411.001
Culturally as well as economically and politically charged ideas of space and place have been key to the mapping of the New World since the beginnings of Western colonial expansion. The ‘New World’, from this point of view, has in fact often functioned as a heterotopia of the Old. Heterotopias, in Michel Foucault’s coinage, are counter-sites that exist within the fabric of social or even natural space but that also contest, challenge and invert it. Museums, gardens and hospitals but also boats and colonies are examples of such places that stand out from the surrounding spatial order, thus also making the latter ‘readable’ from a marginal point of view. In the Americas, the colonial organization of space also triggered a proliferation of ‘heterotopic’ sites: from the ‘frontiers’ crossing cities and regions that render transparent the violent and contradictory foundations of American societies, to slave cemeteries and prison islands, to clandestine torture camps and strip-mined mountains. Yet heterotopias are also sites of radical experimentation and freedom, from Thoreau’s cabin at Walden Pond to urban hangouts of counterculture and sexual dissidence from Tango to Camp. The methodology of this course is highly participative, encouraging students to explore physical as well as virtual places and to contribute to the production of a dynamic, online-based archive of locations under analysis.
Cross-listed with SPAN-UA 461.001
As Rome expanded during its imperial period, epic poetry became a literary space for authors such as Virgil, Ovid, and Lucan to explore evolving concepts of empire and identity from complex perspectives. Just as these authors looked to the Greek epic tradition for models to legitimize their projects, so too would the writers of the Spanish empire look to Roman epic as a genre to emulate during its colonial expansion. This engagement with Latin epic served in many cases to promote Spain as true heir to Rome through the metaphorical transfer of imperial power (translatio imperii). However, just as importantly, epic modeled on the Roman tradition became resonant space for writers in colonized zones to negotiate, interrogate, reimagine, and invert new identities shaped by colonization. This course will explore how a variety of authors from the Spanish Atlantic world dialogued and continue to dialogue with these ancient texts. It will center the voices of writers underrepresented in the canon and in particular, those from marginalized communities past and present. Students will engage in a program of parallel readings: relevant selections of Roman authors will be analyzed alongside epic works from the early modern period to today, ranging from the Neo-Latin works of Afro-Spaniard Juan Latino and the Guatemalan Jesuit Rafael Landívar to Manuel Zapata Olivella's postmodern epic novel of the Black diaspora and Giannina Braschi's epic of the Nuyorican experience. Students will consider not only how ancient works inform readings of these later epic transformations, but conversely how reading such works from the Spanish-speaking world, often overlooked in histories of the classical tradition, informs our readings of Roman epic in turn. Texts will be read in translation, no Latin or Spanish required (although opportunities will be available for students with knowledge of one or both languages to read selections in the original languages).
Cross-listed with HBRJD-UA 177.002
What’s love got to do with it? This is a question that has been debated by Jewish writers since the inception of modern Jewish literature. For decades, Jewish authors, artists, and intellectuals have negotiated the status of romantic and sexual love within Judaism, often as a troubling, at times alien, subject matter in the context of Jewishness and the Jewish tradition. With the rise of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literatures in particular, writers articulated new modes of conceiving desire, love, sex, and gender, especially as they related to Jewish society and politics, and these issues continue to be debated within the different avenues of Jewish culture today. This course is devoted to exploring the transforming status of eros and sexuality in Jewish culture by focusing on a diverse selection of literary works, alongside drama, film, and academic essays. Building on feminist and queer theory, our discussion will revolve around issues such as sexual politics and nationalism, love and religion, border-crossing, constructions of femininity and masculinity, and queer love. All materials are available in English translation.
Cross-listed with HBRJD-UA 949.001
This course engages the reality that the Bible pervades public media and discourse even where it is not named or acknowledged. The ultimate interest of the course is the Bible itself, how it is read (or not read, but still used) today in relation to the purposes and contexts of its writing in ancient time.
Cross-listed with HBRJD-UA 185.001
This course explores the social, cultural and political histories of Jewish women in modern Europe and the United States from the French Revolution through World War II, focusing on the era of Emancipation, the bourgeois 19th century, both World Wars, and the Holocaust. We will examine the options women had, the boundaries against which they pushed, and the roles they created for themselves in public and in private. Students will read secondary sources as well as memoirs, diaries, and letters.
Cross-listed with ITAL-UA 172.002
Italian Romanticism was the expression of a culture that was both literary and philosophical as well as scientific and technical. It was the product of a society in which elements of revolt, conservation, and tradition coexisted. Romanticism is the result of a great cultural change that enhances the value of the history transmitted by Giambattista Vico. It inherits the teachings of French philosophers like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu, and grafts them on its own tradition, as testified not only by the Lombard and pragmatic Enlightenment of intellectuals such as Pietro Verri, Cesare Beccaria, and Carlo Cattaneo, but also by the Neapolitan illuminists as the legal scholar Gaetano Filangieri and the economist Ferdinando Galiani. The most visible effect of this culture was the creation of Italian unity, which transformed a country divided into different states with different traditions and laws into a nation, created a Parliament, and assigned to a part of its citizens the right to vote—a right which, though limited, marked the beginning of a new era. The creation of Rome as the new Capital of the new Realm and the emergence of new social classes are all aspects that European Enlightenment and the French Revolution favor together with the Napoleonic era. In Milan, this era led to the creation of the Cisalpine Republic, whose presidency will be that of Napoleon himself and the vice-presidency of the enlightened aristocratic Francesco Melzi d’Eril. A Lombard primacy was thus established that the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria had certainly favored, as well as the corrosive criticism of the nobility made by Parini. This played an important role in the formation of a new social awareness and conscience. In this culture, the word is conceived in conjunction with the action it must carry out, where rhetoric has a social and political purpose, and where technique enters to improve society. Here sentiment feeds on great reforming ideals, often conflicting ideologies, and the turmoil of reforms. Intellectuals and poets of bourgeois or noble extraction, and women of the nobility but also of humble origin, participate in such movement. The course traces a sort of map of Romanticism, its background and origin, as it first manifests itself in the work of Ugo Foscolo, The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, in his lyric poetry, in his inaugural oration pronounced in Pavia. We will then read a selection of Manzoni’s romance, The Betrothed, and theoretical texts, followed by the reading of several Cantos by Leopardi and selections from The Discourse of an Italian on Romantic Poetry, Operette morali, and Zibaldone. We will then read selections from Ippolito Nievo’s novel, Memories of an Italian, and from the correspondence and writings of Cristina di Belgioioso and Enrichetta Caracciolo. The course will also introduce some of the debates in which these poets participated, among them the one promoted by the Swiss-French Madame de Stael. Topics to be discussed include the secret societies, the contrasts between republican and monarchical ideology, the conversations of the post-revolutionary Parisian salons, and those of Milan and Naples, the activity of literary-political magazines and newspapers, their contribution in the creation of the movement. The participation of women like Jessie White Mario, Clara Maffei, Cristina di Belgioso, Enrichetta Cattaneo and others in the movement and their active collaboration in the creation of the nation is one of the contents of the course. The course will be given in English and is conceived as a seminar.
Cross-listed with ITAL-UA 172.003
Cross-listed with ITAL-UA 145.001
Offers the opportunity to study two of the greatest works of Italian literature, Lodovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1532) and Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581). Looks at these poems in their historical context and in relation to the rich literary traditions of romance and epic that converge in them. Thematic focuses include the construction of gender and the representation of religious and racial “otherness.”
Cross-listed with GERM-UA 202
Nothing is more common than getting worked up about politics. But what is it about politics that riles the passions – and what role do the passions play in shaping politics? Why are some expressions of emotion valorized in political culture, while others are dismissed as irrational, illegitimate, or pathological? Starting around the time of upheaval brought about by the French Revolution, this course will explore through the optic of literature and film the whole scale of political affect from the “righteous passion” of Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas to the peculiar impassivity of Melville’s Bartleby. For passion in politics can express itself in moments of revolution, rebellion, or outrage, but equally in apparently more “passive” attitudes of disaffection, apathy, or depression. Discussion will be supplemented by readings in political theory from Hobbes to Butler. Literary texts may include Hölderlin, Kleist, Kafka, Melville, Jelinek, Coetzee, Lorde, Dangarembga; films by Chantal Akerman, Michael Haneke, Béla Tarr, and Claire Denis.
Note: it is recommended that students who enroll in this seminar are familiar with contemporary European politics and society.
Cross-listed with EURO-UA 950.001
This course will explore the changing meaning of Europe, European unity, and European identity over the last century, with an emphasis on the formation of the European Union during the last 65 years and current European Union issues today. After a brief introduction that explores the deeper history behind the geographical and cultural concept of Europe, this course will trace the emergence of a European identity in contrast to national identities, as well as the emergence of a desire to integrate Europe from the late nineteenth century to the present. Class readings and discussion will focus on four main questions. What has Europe meant to intellectuals, politicians, and citizens in the past 100 years, as a concept, as a locus of identity, and as an alternative or counterpart to the nation state? What has been the geography of Europe, and how has this changed over time? How and why have European leaders and citizens fashioned an integrated continent, and how have the obstacles to integration evolved over time? Finally, how have Europe's recent crises—from refugees to the problems of the Euro—led people to reevaluate European integration, national identities and institutions, and globalization more generally?
Cross-listed with ENGL-UA 415.001
This course introduces students to the theory and practice of world literature by asking the question, “Why and how do some works leave behind their local origins and become pieces of global cultural heritage”? Using the plays of William Shakespeare as a case study, the course considers the playwright both as an exemplar of Western literature and also as a world author whose influence—whether as inspiration or antagonist—can be felt throughout many cultures. We will approach the study of Shakespeare through three different sets of questions: 1) In what ways was Shakespeare a “global” author in his own day, adopting a “worldly” approach that transcends his English context? 2) How does the history of the publication, performance, and criticism of his plays transform “Shakespeare” into a global cultural commodity? 3) What is the cultural legacy of Shakespeare’s work throughout a variety of global media forms, including plays, films, novels, operas, and works of visual art?
We will begin by looking at four plays—Othello, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and The Tempest—that together capture many of the dynamics of the spread of Shakespeare’s work through a variety of cultural contexts and genres. We will then devote a number of classes to a closer investigation of the global spread of Shakespeare’s most famous play, Hamlet, from 1603 to the present. The course concludes with a creative project inspired by Shakespeare’s lost play, Cardenio, based on an episode from Cervantes’s Don Quixote. An abiding question of the course will be: What does the study of "world literature" add to a major in “English” or “Dramatic Literature”?
Cross-listed with RUSSN-UA 810.001
Marx (and Engels) died without leaving a clear understanding how their theories would apply to literature and culture. Ever since, cultural producers and critics have been grappling with this question. Moving chronologically over the last 150 years and shifting in and out of Russia, this course will examine the answers given by such canonical authors, texts, and movements as Plekhanov, Gorky, the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, the socialist realism of the 1930s, Brecht, Adorno, Raymond Williams, Mao and Latin American Third Cinema, and as well as by such contemporary Russian leftist artists as the Chto Delat’ collective, Kirill Medvedev, Roman Osminkin, and Victoria Lomasko.
Cross-listed with RUSSN-UA 850.001
An examination of the history of Russian cinema from its beginnings. The main focus is on landmarks of cinematic art and on the cultural specificity of Russian cinema. The survey also includes questions of cinema and politics (cinema as a propaganda tool), and cinema and the market. Artists discussed include Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Barnet, Shub, Kozintsev, Trauberg, and Tarkovsky. Topics include cinema and revolution, the cinema of the Russian avant-garde and constructivism, cinema and totalitarianism, and socialist realism in film.
Cross-listed with GERM-UA 244
This course offers a slow and steady probe into positions taken by rival camps—philosophy and psychoanalysis as they conduct raids into each other’s territories with various attitudes of defiance, resistance, and furtive takeaways. Each discursive empire reverts to literary example and relies on poetry to score points for its side.
We shall look at case studies beginning with Lacan and Derrida’s dispute over Edgar Allen Poe’s crucial story of power, loss, the Power Queen and “Idiot” King, destination and phallus as they are positioned in The Purloined Letter. We shall also analyze selected works of Freud, Melanie Klein, Winnicott and others with a view to phenomenological protocols of reading. I am still improvising on the trajectory, which will be modified and customized according to students’ levels of reading knowledge and experience with texts that require guided tours rigorously plotted. We may take a serious look at Hamlet in psychoanalysis and philosophy, ending with Derrida’s Specters of Marx and Lacanian takes on Shakespeare.
Cross-listed with SCA-UA 380.002
One in six New York residents identifies as Asian, making Asian Americans the fastest growing demographic group in the city. This course examines the history and culture of Asian/Pacific/American communities in New York, with an emphasis on Asian Americans. Students will learn how New York’s Asian communities formed in the 19th century, how they organized politically in the 20th, and their ongoing struggles in the 21st. We will explore New York as a site of creativity and expression for Asian American and Pacific Islander artists and cultural producers. Course will include field trips to sites and events with historic and contemporary importance to New York’s Asian American communities. Assignments will include research on a contemporary Asian American political issue or community space.
Cross-listed with SCA-UA 541.001
Examines the experiences of Central Americans in the United States with a thematic focus on migration and borders, racial and ethnic identity formation, and contemporary social movements. Provides students with a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective of the Central American experience that attends to the impacts of colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism. Emphasizes Central American voices, epistemologies, and cultural expressions in the form of testimony, oral history, music, film, poetry, and memoirs. Throughout, we consider Central American experiences in relation to other Latina/o groups and consider how Central Americans have shaped our understanding of Latinidad and the Latina/o experience.
This course explores “Dark Academia” as a literary genre. Throughout the semester students will read–and analyze–a wide variety of Dark Academia texts, ranging from Carmilla (a Victorian novella about lesbian vampires) to Mona Awad’s recent Bunny (body horror meets Mean Girls). Together we will consider how and why these texts use academic settings to explore transgressive, and often anti-institutional, ideas. Topics covered will include: the relationship between the gothic and the Dark Academia novel; the transgressive aesthetics of the genre; friendship; gender and sexuality; horror; body horror; and the ontological relationship between body and material world (particularly in the novel Catherine House). At the end of this reading- and writing-heavy course, students will have strengthened their skills in critical thinking, critical reading, and analytical writing.
This course asks students to consider the relationship between science fiction and the European Middle Ages. Through a diachronic approach, the course will approach this relationship through both pre-modern and modern sci-fi. Together we will consider questions like: how do we define sci-fi?; what does pre-modern sci-fi look like?; who wrote pre-modern sci-fi--and why?; and, finally, how does modern sci-fi deploy myths about medieval Europe–and to what end? Students will explore a diverse array of both pre-modern and modern texts–including selections from the Canterbury Tales; Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World; Octavia Butler’s Patternmaster; and Frank Herbert’s Dune. At the end of this reading- and writing-heavy course, students will have strengthened their skills in critical thinking, critical reading, and analytical writing.
The following First-Year Seminars are specially-designed to meet the goals of the FYS program. These seminars are open to first-year CAS students only, and offer a special opportunity to build a community of fellow first-year students, develop core academic competencies, and be mentored by an Arts & Science faculty member.
Click the titles below for a description of the seminar and an instructor bio.
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.
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.
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 choic
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.
The epics of Homer (Iliad and Odyssey) and Vergil (Aeneid) are key foundational texts of the West. But they also represent competing narratives of what it means to be human, particularly with regard to the individual’s role in society. Moreover, not only do these texts offer starkly different paradigms, but they are also acutely aware of their differences and subtly engage with one another. Thus, the Odyssey questions the heroic assumptions underlying the Iliad, and the Aeneid imitates Homer while, at the same time, drastically reworking the Greek myth to explore contemporary Roman concerns. This course will read these texts with particular attention to changing concepts of the individual (a/k/a “hero”)—e.g., the Greek warrior Achilles, who is alienated from his society not only by pride in his military prowess, but also because he makes moral demands out of step with the prevailing values of his society; his comrade Odysseus, more cunning than brave, whose difficult homecoming represents the recovery of a self defined by the domestic joys of family and friends; and, finally, the Trojan Aeneas who also wanders after the war, but as a refugee, for his home has been destroyed, and whose piety (rather than bravery or cunning) compels him to lead his people to a new promised land which, like Moses, he will not live to see. The catastrophic losses suffered by both sides in war, the mass migration and displacement of peoples, the tension between political expediency and ethical choice, and the achievement of public good at great personal cost—these themes are as relevant today as they were in Greece of the 8th century BCE or the Rome of the emperor Augustus. No prior knowledge of these texts or of the ancient world will be assumed. Students who have never read these “great books” will delight in encountering them in the company of other smart readers; and those who are familiar with the works will deepen their understanding of their richness and enduring relevance.
MATTHEW S. SANTIROCCO is Professor of Classics and Angelo J. Ranieri Director of Ancient Studies at NYU; he is also Academic Director of NYU Washington, DC. He served as Seryl Kushner Dean of the College of Arts and Science from 1994 to 2011, and then as NYU’s Senior Vice Provost for Academic Affairs from 2011-2017, and Interim Dean of the College of Arts and Science 2021-2022. His interests range widely from ancient Greek and Latin literature and thought to issues in American higher education. He founded and directs NYU’s Center for Ancient Studies, which promotes interdisciplinary and cross-cultural study of the past. Among his many publications are a book on the Roman lyric poet, Horace, and several edited volumes, the most recent of which is an issue of Daedalus on new approaches to the study of Greece and Rome; in addition, he currently edits the Palgrave-Macmillan monograph series, The New Antiquity, and is working on a book on the poetics of patronage in Augustan Rome. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2009, and served as President of the Society for Classical Studies in 2022.
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.
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 Clinical Assistant Professor 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.
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.
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.
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.
In his late work, A Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche seeks to interrogate the “value of our moral values,” finds they have exhausted their purpose, and imagines a hopeful vision in which we are able to transcend this nihilism. To appreciate how he understands his thought in a distinctively Western European tradition of moral thought, readings include works from the ancient Near East, Greece, and North Africa, upon which he draws or which illustrate his thinking, including Book of J, Genesis, Exodus, Matthew, Galatians, Euripides’ Medea, Plato’s Apology and Republic, and Augustine’s Confessions; and contrasting views on morality from near-contemporary’s of Nietzsche: Kiekegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto, and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
VINCENT RENZI is Clinical Professor in the Foundations of Contemporary Culture and of Classics, and is also Director of the Foundations of Contemporary Culture component of the College Core Curriculum. A scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, he also has interests in the arts and aesthetics and in 19th- and 20th-century philosophy. He is a recipient of the College's Golden Dozen Award for Teaching Excellence.
“Not only is the Egyptian climate peculiar to that country and the Nile different in its behavior from other rivers, but the Egyptians themselves in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind.” When the Greek historian Herodotus then began to list ancient Egyptian peculiarities to support his conclusion, five of his first seven examples involve gender roles that were seemingly the reverse of what a Greek would expect. Modern study of the ancient Egyptians’ assumptions about gender have uncovered other surprising reversals, including the unusual rights and social roles of ancient Egyptian women, the responsibility of men for fertility and infertility, the number women who ruled as pharaohs, and the rarity of prostitution—only two examples, which in both cases involved women offering payment to men. In this seminar we will examine different types of evidence about gender in ancient Egypt—textual, archaeological, and artistic—and attempt to reconstruct the ways Egyptians viewed and performed gender roles, and how this changed over the roughly 3000 years of ancient Egyptian history.
ANN MACY ROTH is a Clinical Professor of Egyptology in the Departments of Art History and Hebrew & Judaic Studies. A graduate of the famously language-based University of Chicago doctoral program, she has since turned her hand to Egyptian archaeology, religion, and art, as her teaching positions at the University of California, Berkeley, Howard University, and New York University have required. In Egypt, she has worked on the recording of several ancient Egyptian tombs and temples and directed six seasons of archaeological fieldwork in the shadow of the Giza pyramids, supported by grants from the NEH and from the American Research Center in Egypt. That project investigated mortuary monuments of officials of the Pyramid Age, as does her project to publish three Old Kingdom mastaba chapels in the Metropolitan Museum. She is currently working on a book collecting her twenty-five years of research on ancient Egyptian conceptions of gender.
This first year seminar introduces students to the theories, methods, and analytical approaches of Black girlhood studies. Students will interrogate Black girlhood as a political category and address topics such as the foundations of the field, the categories of “girl” and “woman,” and representations of Black girlhood in both academic literature and popular culture. Themes explored in this course include, but are not limited to, literature, hip-hop, education, criminalization, and sexuality. Working within, and perhaps beyond, Black feminist frameworks our collective goal is to make sense of and unpack the ever-expanding concept of Black girlhood.
ANDREA Y. ADOMAKO is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at New York University and a Research Associate in the Department of African Literature at the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Her current research examines how Black writers in Ghana and the United States use friendship to question and rework theories of race, gender, and intimacy through figurations of Black girlhood. She argues that the politics of Black friendship plays out in the creative relationships brought to life by Black authors. Her research is featured in Feminist Formations, The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, and Rethinking African Childhoods: An Anthology. Working with youth organizations such as the Akoma Institute, a pop-up school for Afro-Indigenous girls in Brazil, the UK, and Ghana, Andrea Y. Adomako is committed to relationship building as a political commitment and an intellectual practice.
Writing can be defined as the process of using symbols to communicate thoughts and ideas, and it is today a skill that we learn from the very beginning of our school path. Despite the essentiality of writing in our daily lives, one doesn’t usually reflect on the way writing has been created and how it changed through time. This course provides an overview of the history of writing in Ancient Western Asia and is organised into three main sections: (i) First, we will set the scene with a brief introduction to both the regions and the periods subject of the course, and the main theoretical approaches to writing and writing systems in the field of archaeology. (ii) We will then concentrate on the invention of writing and its original purpose, its diffusion, and its shift in use. This analysis will lead to a discussion on the ways and the whys of writing adoption and adaptation in Ancient Western Asia, whose understanding is essential in order to examine the case studies proposed in the last section of the course. (iii) A survey of different types of scripts will introduce the three suggested case studies for a closer examination of the history of single writing systems, with a focus on the cases of cuneiform, hieroglyphic, and alphabetic scripts.
ANNARITA BONFANTI is a visiting assistant professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. She completed her PhD at the University of Pavia studying the history and culture of the Urartian state, a political entity that emerged on the Armenian Highlands during the Iron Age; she is currently researching the transmission of cuneiform writing from Assyria to Urartu, studying its use and reception by the Urartian monarchs. She participated in archaeological fieldwork in Italy, Turkey, and Armenia.
Prerequisite: Mathematics at the level of introductory algebra will be needed, or willingness to learn this math.
This course will present quantum mechanics, quantum computing, and communication in a non- technical manner, focusing on basic concepts. It will cover the foundations of quantum mechanics, Einstein's objections to the interpretation of quantum measurement, quantum entanglement, and present-day potentially revolutionary applications of quantum mechanics in information technology.
ANDREW KENT is a Professor of Physics and the Founding Director of the Center for Quantum Phenomena at New York University. He received a B.Sc. with Distinction in Applied and Engineering Physics at Cornell University and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in Applied Physics. His research interests are at the intersection of the physics of magnetic nanostructures, nanomagnetic devices, and magnetic information storage. He is a fellow of the American Physical Society (APS) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). He received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Lorraine, France, in 2013, the French Jean d'Alembert Research Fellowship in 2017, and was named professor at the University of Lorraine in 2018 and 2023.
What happened after the Roman Empire disappeared from the map of Europe? This class delves deep into the creation and vanishing of kingdoms, the forging of identities and the impact of invasion by sea and by land. The transition from the Roman Empire to the period that gave us King Arthur, Charlemagne and the Vikings presents the student with an opportunity to examine a transforming world that provided both forms of continuity and intense innovation as ambitious peoples carved out political space, developed new modes of living and writing and both expanded and defended lands and narratives of belonging and conquest. This class will explore how identities were constructed in Europe and how different peoples shaped their relationship to the past and present. It will examine the spread of Christianity and Islam, the rise and fall of the Carolingian Empire and the voyages and impact of the Vikings. Text-based classes and discussions focusing on particular sources, individuals and events will give students a grounding in critical thinking and how to approach historical texts and offer the chance to gain an in-depth understanding of this exciting period of change, conflict, creation and co-existence.
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.
What is a university? You have dedicated the next four years of your life to learning and living in the context of a university. What IS this place, this institution? What is its history and what is its future? What is the mission of a university and what is your place in it? This course will explore such questions by probing broadly and deeply what the university has been, what it has become, and what it might yet be. We will start with classical cultures, which did not have universities as such; note the rise of the influential medieval university; then trace the expansions of the modern university, including its efforts at diversity and confronting and questioning its core mission. Students will be exposed to an array of readings and film that span the disciplines of philosophy, sociology, law, arts, and humanities. The university is an interdisciplinary enterprise. Among the authors you will encounter are Plato, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and Martha Nussbaum. We will find patterns and continuities in the ideas and practices of the university, changes to its core values and vision, and vigorous debates over what we as students and faculty in the university are here to do and become. By the end of the course, students should see NYU, and themselves, in an entirely new light.
ELISHA RUSS-FISHBANE is a historian of Jewish culture in the medieval Islamic world. His work focuses on Jewish-Muslim encounters and on the breadth of medieval Jewish culture - philosophy, mysticism, literature, and law - with an emphasis on the life and legacies of Maimonides. Among his many interests are the roots and reception of classical ideals of education and the formation of higher learning in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic civilizations.
As today’s climate crisis increasingly decouples future and past ecosystems, archaeology’s unique vantage point–the longue durée of human-environment interactions–lends significance and relevance to the discipline unlike any time before. Environmental archaeology, in particular, combines more traditional archaeological methods with the bio and geosciences to better understand how ancient societies adapted to, utilized, and modified their surrounding environments and how those environments, in turn, shaped human behavior and culture. This seminar will introduce students to the identification and interpretation of archaeological “tipping points,” past social responses to environmental events like sea level rise, temperature shifts, and prolonged drought. We will explore these dynamics across time and space through readings and discussions, including their impact on socioeconomic inequalities, political systems, and demographic transitions throughout the ancient world. Finally, we will consider broader epistemological issues relating to archaeology’s contribution to climate change discourse and its adoption by competing stakeholders for future policy decisions.
REED GOODMAN is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. As an anthropologically trained archaeologist, he specializes in geoarchaeology, using geoscience techniques to characterize, date, and relate past environments to the archaeological record. His current project, an extension of his doctoral research, considers the environmental context of city and state formation in Mesopotamia. Reed received his Ph.D. from the Graduate Group in the Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently the Assistant Director of the Lagash Archaeological Project (LAP) in southern Iraq.
Many courses on Black Britain begin in 1948, the year in which a ship brought many Black Caribbeans to Britain. They came to rebuild a country that had been bombed to rubble in many places, and which had a critical shortage of skilled workers—from carpenters to nurses. But there has been a significant Black presence in Britain since the Roman Empire: Moors served in armies that conquered England. This course will start in the eighteenth-century, with letters and musical compositions of Ignatius Sancho, a grocer whose son started the first Black press in Britain. Mary Prince, the first woman in the “new” world to relate her history as a domestic slave and salt-raker, has left us a narrative of individual struggle and collective grief. A free Jamaican, Mary Seacole, went to Crimea and wished to work with Florence Nightingale. Nightingale rebuffed Seacole, and sadly her knowledge of herbal remedies was not adopted in Western medicine. She opened a hotel, which was essentially a convalescent home. In it, she nursed soldiers back to health, fed them, and comforted them. Seacole’s Adventures in Many Lands chronicles the virtues of the “Creole,” leading to a version of race theory about which we will undoubtedly argue. Cricket and the Haitian Revolution are the subject of two major works by CLR James, a Trinidadian historian and Marxist: we will examine the paradox of a Trinidadian intellectual who goes to London to report on cricket for the Manchester Guardian, who is also a strong force for the independence of Caribbean colonies. The Lonely Londoners is a classic novel of the Windrush generation, in which each Caribbean migrant to Britain takes responsibility (willingly or not) for the friends and family who follow. Finally, Nadifah Mohammed’s The Fortune Men is the story of the last man to be executed in Britain, a British-Somalian from Cardiff, Wales. If time permits, we will read more contemporary fiction—by Zadie Smith and Louise Hare. Cardiff is one of the many port cities that had considerable Black populations: we will study these communities too. We will look at scholarship on Black “tars” or “salts”—the sailors who made the British Navy and commercial shipping industry possible. We will study Black British art and music, and we will delve into social and political problems that are woefully familiar to Americans: police brutality, racism, poverty and erasure.
ELAINE FREEDGOOD is the author of three scholarly studies of the literature and culture of nineteenth- century Britain and its empire, including work on Victorian balloon travelers, mountaineers, the meanings of colonial objects (mahogany, tobacco, gingham) in the novels of the metropole. She has been developing courses on Black Britain for the past three years, learning something new about this vast cultural network all the time.
Nature writers are natural rhetoricians who employ language to express their wonder and appreciation for our surroundings but also to persuade us to think about the natural world, environmental protection, and change. Why do they take on this task? What motivates them to write about plants, animals, rivers, mountains, streams, the air we breathe, and the ongoing, dynamic relationship between humanity and the earth? How do they envision, create, and shape arguments to deepen our awareness of the world we inhabit and shift our perspective on the environment? In this course you will learn how nature writers both function within but also transcend the economic and aesthetic to alert us to the ethical dimensions of our relationship to nature. You will read and respond to a range of personal, literary, and scientific writing about the natural world as well as texts on classical rhetoric that will help you consider how writers craft rhetorical discourse to test ideas, build arguments, and influence public opinion to bring about radical change.
GITA DASBENDER is a Clinical Associate Professor at NYU’s Expository Writing Program and holds a Ph.D. in English Education from NYU. Her research and scholarship focus on writing assessment, second language writing, metacognition and writing transfer, and writing program administration. She is the author of Language: A Reader for Writers (OUP, 2013) and her writing has appeared in the WPA Journal, Writing and Pedagogy, and several edited collections. Prior to joining NYU, Gita was the Coordinator of Second Language Writing at Seton Hall University where she also served as the Director of Prestigious Fellowships and Scholarships. In 2013 she received a Fulbright Specialist award to Vietnam.
Long before Nathaniel Hawthorne complained to his publisher, in 1855, that “America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women,” writers, readers, and publishers have grappled with the difference that women writers make. In this seminar, we will read books written by and for women, from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf to Gillian Flynn, as well as literary criticism and work in feminist and gender theory, to consider what (if any) difference sex and gender make in the production of literature. What use has the category of “Women’s Literature” (or “Chick Lit”) served? Do we believe in such a thing as “women’s writing” (or what the French theorist Hélène Cixous termed écriture feminine)? How does fiction at times reinforce, and at other times radically destabilize, notions of sex and gender? How might Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality allow us to complicate or pluralize the definition of “women writers”? Creative and reflective writing exercises will accompany two longer, research-based writing assignments, and guest speakers from the worlds of writing and publishing will give students insight into their professional fields. Anyone interested in reading and writing—as well as the marketing and publishing sides of literary production—is encouraged to enroll, regardless of gender identity/expression. All are welcome.
COURTNEY CHATELLIER holds a Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at NYU and, beginning in the Fall 2023 semester, will be a Faculty Affiliate for the Paulson Center Residential College. Her research in the field of early American literature has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and her articles have appeared in the journals Early American Literature and Early American Studies. In the summer of 2023, she will be a Visiting Faculty Fellow at NYU’s Global Research Institute at NYU Florence. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories about mothers and daughters.
According to the Sentencing Project, “LGBTQ+ people experience high rates of homelessness, poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and violence—factors which drive their overrepresentation in the criminal legal system. In both adult and youth facilities, imprisoned LGBTQ+ people face physical, sexual, and verbal harassment and abuse, as well as a lack of gender-affirming housing, clothing, personal hygiene products, medical care, and mental health treatment.” This course will examine diverse representations and core human rights issues in the stories of incarcerated LGBTQ+ people. How do fact-based and fictional narratives inform our discourse about the complexity of this often invisible and silenced population? What links exist between the historical criminalization of queer sexuality and the current overrepresentation of queer people behind bars? Texts for discussion will include From the Pen: A Prison Memoir; Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex; and Orange Is the New Black; and TV series and movies such as Orange Is the New Black, Oz, Wentworth, Caged, and I Love You, Phillip Morris.
MICHAEL TYRELL is the author of three books, most recently The Arsonist’s Letters. With Julia Spicher Kasdorf, he edited the anthology Broken Land: Poems of Brooklyn. His poems have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Agni, The Best American Poetry,The Iowa Review, The New England Review, The New Republic, The New York Times, The Night Heron Barks, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and The Yale Review. The former book review editor of the literary magazine Chelsea, he has published book reviews in Boston Review, The Common Review, Harvard Review, The New Yorker, and elsewhere. Michael teaches writing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ruin is all around us. Daily life is flooded with stories, images, and sounds of destruction, disorder, and decay. Narratives of loss abound in the information age, amplified by growing existential threats of environmental crisis and ecological collapse. And yet, American culture reserves a special fascination, even obsession with ruins. In New York City, crumbling buildings and abandoned warehouses are favorite sites for wedding photographers. Twisted lengths of steel–remnants of the 9/11 terrorist attacks–are installed as sculptures in parks and museums. Why do ruins captivate our attention? Why is it painful to look and yet hard to turn away? What does it mean for something to be altered so badly for the worse that it is no longer stable, useful, valuable or enjoyable? In this course, we will investigate how art of the 20th century has engaged with this tension, and used ruins as sites and instruments of mourning, activism, and protest. Our goal is to think critically about how society determines “value” and “integrity,” to engage, challenge, and reframe what is useful and what is not. Along the way, we will interrogate the ethical problems of aestheticizing ruins, commodifying failure, and the violence of representation. Through writing and reading assignments and dialogue in small sections, this course will explore themes of loss, nostalgia, anxiety, agency, anarchy, tradition and revolution, and encourage students to examine these broad issues in relation to their own personal relationships with material and figurative ruin.
ROBIN E. PREISS is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the College Core Curriculum at New York University. She earned her Ph.D. from the department of Music at NYU in 2023 with her experimental dissertation “Ear to the Ground: Auscultation at the Threshold of Mortality” which combines academic and creative writing. At the intersection of sound studies, written arts, and the environmental humanities, Robin's work explores how writers conjure sounds with words, and how written sound is heard and felt in the minds of readers. Some of her research interests include media and organic decay, soundscapes of mortality, subterranean music venues, and listening practices in the contexts of animal husbandry and palliative medicine. At NYU, she has taught classes on the role of music in social justice movements, with a particular emphasis on Indigenous American sound cultures.
Beginning with the 13-minute British documentary film Housing Problems (1935), which features interviews with tenants about their meager housing conditions, this seminar focuses on documentary as well as narrative films which thematize having a roof over one’s head. We will discuss the visual storytelling techniques filmmakers use and the moral questions they engage in movies such as The Prison in Twelve Landscapes (2016), The Florida Project (2017), Shoplifters (2018), and The Body Remembers When the World Broke Open (2019), among others. Our discussions will be informed by texts and films which situate the individual films historically, aesthetically, and politically, as well as theoretical works designed to offer tools and models for thinking and writing about film. Some questions guiding our conversations will include: What are the stories about family and kinship that arise from these films? Do the filmmakers capture or fail to capture the struggles of life at the margins? Is narrative or documentary film better suited to elucidate the stakes of having a place to call home? What ethical challenges arise when poverty and misery are aestheticized through film?
DANIELLA GITLIN is a Core Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the College of Arts and Science at NYU, where she earned a Certificate in Media and Culture and a PhD in Comparative Literature. Gitlin has an MFA in Nonfiction Writing from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. In 2013, Seven Stories Press published her English translation of Argentinian author Rodolfo Walsh’s classic 1957 nonfiction work, Operación Masacre. Gitlin’s writing and translations have appeared in the London Review of Books blog, Huffington Post, CineAction, Senses of Cinema, and Asymptote Journal, among others, and her documentary shorts have been screened in film festivals in New York and South America. Gitlin is an active collective member and board president of Word Up, a nonprofit bilingual community bookshop and arts space based in Washington Heights, NYC.
From ancient myth to contemporary pop culture, the sea has inspired humans to rethink the limits of imagination, creativity, and critique. Across cultures and media, the world’s great bodies of water, and the creatures that inhabit them, have formed the backdrop to some of the most radically strange and questioning works ever produced. This seminar navigates the sea’s protean appearances in folklore and fairy tales from around the world; Homer’s Odyssey; Romantic opera; hip hop; Moby Dick; science fiction; Afrofuturism; and films from Disney, Netflix, Hollywood, and beyond. Over the course of the semester, we will encounter authors, filmmakers, and musicians who turn to the sea to probe the farthest outskirts and deepest abysses of human experience. At the same time, we will witness how the sea—once terrifying, alien, and full of monsters—has taken center stage in the global fight for environmental and social justice.
BENJAMIN D. SCHLUTER earned his doctorate from the department of German at New York University in 2023. His dissertation, which explored sea imagery in German Romantic thought and culture around 1800, was supported through grants from NYU, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), and the Goethe Society of North America. Benjamin’s publications have appeared or are forthcoming in the Goethe Yearbook, the Routledge Companion to Early Modern Music and Literature, and the Goethe-Lexicon of Philosophical Concepts.
Disobedience: rebellion, revolution, resistance, insurgency, insurrection, anarchism, conscientious objection, civil disobedience, naughtiness, waywardness, defiance, rudeness, insubordination. This seminar will examine the relationship between disobedience and political authority by engaging with a range of texts in literature, philosophy, politics, law, and the arts. Do we have an obligation to obey the laws of the state we belong to? If yes, then why? Will the absence of such obligation lead to chaos and violence? When is disobedience of authority morally justified? Can disobedience of authority be legally justified? What is the difference between violent and nonviolent disobedience? Faced with an ecological crisis on a planetary scale, how can we re-imagine collective action in the face of persistent inaction? We will probe such questions by reading and discussing the work of novelists, poets, critical theorists, philosophers, jurists, anticolonial thinkers, anarchists, hacktivists, and climate-change activists. The course will begin with classical texts such as by Sophocles, Plato, and the Bible. It will go on to read important twentieth century texts and thinkers, including Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Hannah Arendt, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and end with contemporary debates on the place of disobedience in radical politics.
Trained in law, philosophy and literature, RAJ SAIKUMAR is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow and Lecturer in the College Core Curriculum. He has a PhD from the Department of English at New York University. His research and teaching bridges literary studies with law and political thought. His articles have appeared in journals like Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry and South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, in edited volumes like Human Rights in India (Routledge), Death Penalty in India (Cambridge University Press), Laws of Transgression: The Return of Judge Schreber (University of Toronto Press) and several op-eds and book reviews in leading newspapers and online portals.
Do maids and prostitutes have a history? This course seeks to help students understand and discuss how trans and non-trans women negotiated and resisted gender stigmatization, exclusion, and criminalization produced over time. In the first few weeks of class, we will discuss how categories of women and marginalization are historically formed and culturally framed. Halfway through the course, students will be introduced to historical discourses and cultural representations across these categories, paying close attention to the particularities of the Italian context and the experiences it has generated. By providing a transhistorical and transnational framework for our considerations, we will then more broadly examine the importance of reading women and their marginalization through these figures of the prostitute and the maid, thinking about how this directed attention can provide a better understanding of agency, space, marginality, and subjectivity; and how to read them historically. Through the careful analysis of a robust body of different primary texts (literary texts, photographic, and filmic) and secondary sources we will finally ask: How have marginalized women negotiated their space in society and in culture? What strategies can women enact to resist dominant narratives of victimization and marginalization? And lastly, how are collective identities subjected to time?
GIULIA SBAFFI is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She received her Ph.D. in Italian Studies from NYU. Their research and teaching incorporate 20th century Western European culture, literature, and film, with questions from gender and sexuality, oral history, and urban studies. Their research has appeared in The Italianist, Modern Italy, and Zapruder: Journal of Radical History. Their dissertation, A Spunciare Le Pulle: the politicization of sex work in Italy (1982-1986), investigates the forms of political organizing adopted by sex workers in Italy in the 1980s. It draws on original interviews with sex workers and protagonists of that moment of activism while also making use of archival material from archives in Cambridge (MA), Geneva, London, Paris, and Rome. It enmeshes questions of labor justice, access to public health, and housing rights while reading transgender identities within the history of radical politics and militancy in Western Europe. She is translating Italian sociologist Massimo Prearo’s recent book, L’Ipotesi Neocattolica (Anti-Gender Mobilizations, Religion and Politics).
In light of the recent upsurge of populist tendencies worldwide, scholars and the general public are increasingly examining the strategies authoritarian agitators use to mobilize their audiences. People often associate agitation with fanatical manipulators who rile up crowds into violent frenzies. However, agitation is not only a tool for populist demagogues. Leftist activists, such as the Suffragettes, the Civil Rights Movement, and Occupy Wall Street, have also used agitation as a method to propagate their causes and provoke political transformations. In this course, we examine both the dangers of agitation as well as its potentials in struggles for social equity and justice. We ask: What are the differences between agitation and propaganda? What rhetorical methods and aesthetic techniques do agitators use to reach their audiences? How do we protect ourselves from the dangers of agitation, and how can we employ it for the betterment of society? To this end, we analyze historical and fictional examples of agitation from a range of political directions and in a variety of media. We study propaganda film and theater, satire, farce, agitprop, political performance, protest rhetoric, left-wing and right-wing militant groups, civil rights activism, feminist agitators, culture jamming, digital mobilization, and online radicalization. By the end of the course, students will be able to explain the history, technique, and function of agitation in various cultural contexts, and understand how it might threaten or protect modern democracies.
LEONIE ETTINGER is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at NYU. She earned her PhD in German from NYU in 2023. She also holds an MA in Performance Studies from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a BA in Anthropology and Media from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Leonie researches 20th and 21st-century theater and literature, especially Expressionism and Brechtian Epic Theater; cultural history; Frankfurt School critical theory; authoritarianism; and trauma theory, particularly transgenerational Holocaust trauma. She has held fellowships at NYU’s Global Research Institute in Berlin (2019) and the Free University of Berlin (2019); her scholarship has also been supported by Mainzer Summer Fellowship (2021) and the Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship (2021-2022). She is the recipient of NYU’s Outstanding Teaching Award (2019).
Leonie’s writing has been published in Marxism in the Age of Trump (2018), Expressionismus (2020), and The Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies (2022), with another article forthcoming in Concepts of Culture: New Directions in Conceptual History (2023). For her essay “Speaking Past: Ruth Klüger’s weiter leben: Eine Jugend,” she was awarded the Alpine Fellowship Academic Writing Prize (2020).
According to the protagonist of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando (a Renaissance poet who changes sex from man to woman and lives across centuries), poetry is a “secret transaction, a voice answering a voice.” By taking Orlando’s thoughts at face value, this class explores the ways in which poetry (and literature more broadly) manages to bend time, voices, desires as well as notions of sex and gender. While the class centers on Renaissance poetry, including Dante, Petrarch, Michelangelo, Ariosto, Shakespeare, among others, it will also consider its classical and medieval roots as well as provocative modern reimaginings by queer authors such as Vernon Lee, Virginia Woolf, Benjamin Britten. Special attention will be given to poetry in performance today, including theatrical adaptations and music (students will have a chance to attend live performances). No prerequisites needed, just tons of curiosity.
The family is an institution with a dynamic history: it is both object and agent of historical change. The family is a site for the reproduction of social, economic, and political relations in society. Family is also the space in which many people experience the unfolding of major historical events and forces—war, conquest, colonialism, revolution, migration, genocide, incarceration, terror and poverty. To study families, then, is to open up new ways to think about how the large-scale processes of history are lived on the ground, day-to-day, by ordinary people.
This course begins with a brief study of the family as an important unit of history across time and space. In the second and longest part of the class, we will examine the way scholars and memoirists have written about their own families and located those personal histories within (and against) other broader histories. In the third unit, students will have the opportunity to do sustained research on their own families and to link those histories with broader local, national, and international histories. Students who prefer not to research their own families will work the instructor to select another project related to family history.
ADA FERRER is Julius Silver Professor of History and Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is the author of two prize-winning books, Insurgent Cuba: Race, Nation, and Revolution, 1868-1898, and Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2022 for her book, Cuba: An American History.
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.
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.
Italy has historically been seen as an in-between space situated within the crossroads of the Mediterranean. It is a place of both immigration and emigration, of cultural mixing and hybridity as diasporic communities come, go, or pass through. In this course, we will examine the work of contemporary writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians who are members or descendants of diasporas to or from Italy. We will focus on how they explore and express cultural hybridity and the experience of diaspora by working between and across languages (multilingualism) and media (multimediality). Students will sharpen their critical thinking skills through active learning in structured class discussions. They will also improve their communication and presentation skills in multiple modalities: through speaking, writing, and other media, since students will develop their own multilingual and/or multimedial project as a final assignment. This course will be taught in English; no prior knowledge of any other language is necessary.
ISABELLA LIVORNI is a scholar and teacher of Italian language and literature, as well as comparative literature. Her research and teaching focuses on ideas of cultural, racial, and linguistic hybridity in postwar Italy and its diasporas.
Making knowledge visible was one of the great Renaissance endeavors. Some of the period's most characteristic products were born out of the conviction that concepts could be turned into images and organized into a visual language, more profound and universal than discursive logic. Egyptian hieroglyphs and dream visions were considered typical vehicles of this advanced mode of communication. The desire to emulate their symbolic density is reflected both in literature and in art, often in ways that challenge common distinctions between visual and verbal communication. In this course you will be introduced to an assortment of works representative of such interplay between text and image: emblem books, dream books and dream-centered works, hieroglyphic inventions and studies, collections of proverbs, iconology manuals, etc. Among the books examined are some widely considered as the finest examples of design in the history of printing. Early modern and recent theory of emblems will also be discussed. As a present-day counterpart of Renaissance emblems, the course will conclude with a survey of corporate logos and Russian criminal tattoos.
The 1960s and 70s in Italy saw an eruption of protest across a wide social spectrum, from workers and students to women and gay men, and against dysfunctional or oppressive institutions, from schools to factories to prisons and mental asylums. What caused these protests and why did they take such radical and sometimes violent forms? Why was Italy considered a terrorist danger zone by some observers and a laboratory of political creativity by others? This course examines a cross-section of protest movements through the close study of documents in translation, as well as visual and sound documents: photographs, nonfiction films and music.
This course examines a variety of sound artifacts and sound related texts from the period between WWI and the 70s — between the early noise machines of the Futurists and the experiments of maverick singer Demetrio Stratos. Yet the focus will not be exclusively on music proper: we will examine sound in a range of manifestations and contexts — propaganda, magic-religious rituals, oral poetry, folklore, commercial sound design, prison songs, soundtracks, etc. The course will touch upon issues such as the relationship between music and other arts; the development of Italian media; Fascist sound politics; prison songs; the discussion on technology for sound production/ consumption in Italian cultural circles; the survival of (largely non-textual) oral-aural art forms. The course is in English, no Italian required.
Italian identity, culture, and economy remain deeply connected to fashion as both an institution and industry. Examines how fashion played a key role in the construction of national style and courtly life from the Middle Ages and Renaissance to the twentieth-century design houses, which not only reshaped commercial and aesthetic trends, but also solidified Italy’s association with post-war design culture more broadly.
Covers the tumultuous period from the fall of Charles Stuart Parnell, through the Easter Rising in 1916, and into the early years of national government in the 1930s. Readings in various genres (poetry, short story, novel, drama). Writers may include Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien.
Eighteenth century Ireland remained calm under a repressive penal code that deprived the Roman Catholic majority access to political power. By the 1720s, the seeds of Irish nationalism had been planted by the ruling Anglo-Irish minority as it challenged British economic and political dominance over Ireland. Emboldened by political rhetoric imported from America in the 1760s and 1770s, Ireland was convulsed, leading to a new constitutional relationship with Great Britain, but there was little change in the status of Irish Catholics. News of the French Revolution gave rise to a radical movement in Ireland that would settle for nothing less than full civil rights for Catholics and the establishment of an Irish Republic. The government’s bloody suppression of the United Irishmen in 1798, passage of the Act of Union in 1800, and the legacy of Robert Emmet’s abortive rising in 1803 colored Ireland’s political agenda for more than a century.
We will survey the remarkable literary production of modern Ireland, seeking to place the phenomenon of Irish writing in contemporary Irish and world literary history. What are the features of Irish writing in the wake of what has been called the Second Irish Renaissance? What have been the concerns of Irish writers in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement? How have the legacies and endowments of Irish rural life, Irish economic stagnation, Irish emigration, and Irish resignation been represented in the wake of Irish prosperity and resurgent poverty? What do the different genres of Irish writing carry of the traditions forged in the 19th and 20th or earlier centuries? What remains of “Irishness” that is useful to Irish writers? We will explore these and related questions by reading the work of living Irish writers, primarily texts published since 2000. Along the way, we shall examine the concept of the contemporary and the meaning of identity in national, ethnic, economic and literary terms.
Eduardo Galeano has observed that; “In the colonial and neo-colonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.” This is certainly true of the experience of Indigenous peoples around the globe where the colonial moment of violence, dispossession and death was grounded in the accumulation and exploitation of Indigenous lands and resources. In this course we will consider the continuities of the original violence in the (post) colonial moment. The course will examine how Indigenous peoples have responded to the current-day demands of government and resource companies for access to their lands and its wealth. Drawing from a range of examples in the USA, Canada, Latin America, Australia and south Asia students will reflect upon how the contemporary recognition of Indigenous rights has not always translated into any benefits for the traditional owners (the so-called ‘Resource Curse’) and how different marginalised communities and Indigenous Peoples have responded to attempts to exploit their lands.
In recent times there has been increasing pressure on nations and corporations and broader society to acknowledge and address the harms caused by past deeds, policies, and laws to marginalised and oppressed communities. Mark Gibney observes that there has “been the near-universal realization that a society will not be able successfully to pass into the future until it somehow deals with the horrors of its past”. This class will consider the nature of truth commissions in a range of different nations and other mechanisms whereby nations have sought to reconcile with their past. In addition, we will consider the efficacy of measures such as apologies and whether reparations can provide a meaningful path to national reconciliation.
In this seminar, we will explore the different meanings and uses of queer history. These histories will be critically examined within a global context, and related to histories of modernity, capitalism, and imperialism. Students will also consider the significance of historical hierarchies of race, gender, class, and nation, in interaction with histories of sexuality.
This course is an overview of social science approaches to the study of environment and society. Students will be introduced to key theoretical debates in critical environmental studies such as the relationship between nature and culture, the politics of knowledge, economy and environment, and development and conservation. The class focuses on applying an ethnographic lens to contemporary environmental issues, one that centers on an analysis of power and process, in topics ranging from natural resource extraction, environmental justice, climate change, science and technology, toxicity, pollution, disaster and infrastructure. Articles will be supplemented with film and documentaries throughout the course.
While the publication of a new complete translation into English and accompanying annotation of Karl Marx's magnum opus, entitled Das Kapital (Capital), is imminent, this intellectual and political moment in time is as good as any to revisit the theoretical (metaphysical) and pragmatic (ethical) premises, next to the renewed and still growing influence, of this author's most important work. In addition to proposing an integral rereading of Capital as a founding document of so-called historical materialism and a resounding critique of classical political economy, special attention will be paid to the most original and rigorous among Marx's 20th and 21st century philosophical interpreters.
For more than five centuries, Portuguese cultural history has relied on heroic motifs to frame its colonial enterprise. This narrative gave rise to a national self-image of “discoverers” and “explorers” of the Atlantic Ocean with a corresponding literary canon, in which “the discovered world” as well as the “heroes’” supposed artistry and superiority are sung and lauded to this day. In this course, we will look deep into narratives and literary works in the Afro-Luso-Brazilian counter-canon that question this heroic narrative, with the premise that we should look for what lies beneath the Ocean. What did that heroic narrative sacrifice? What stories did it conceal? What are we to do about the stories that are forever missed? How can we rescue them? And, more importantly, what if the Ocean once “discovered” is in fact an ocean haunted by precisely those untold, forever forgotten, stories? To address these and other topics, we will read novels, stories and poems in the counter-canon from Portugal, Luso-Africa and Brazil along with critical texts that challenge the European-centered account of Portugal’s colonial enterprise. Readings include works from: Maria Velho da Costa, António Lobo Antunes, Joaquim Arena, Amílcar Cabral, Sousa Jamba, Raquel Lima, Aline Motta, among others.
This course examines novels and shorter texts by Lev Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky in the context of Russian history and culture. Additional topics include: modernity and the rise of the novel; philosophy of history; theory and history of the novel; literature and social critique; principles and limits of literary representation. Alongside a selection of novels and contemporaneous critical and theoretical texts, we will discuss contemporary and more current theories of literature, culture, and representation. Readings and discussions in English. Willingness to read a lot and participate in discussion required. No prior background in Russian literature and culture required.
This course follows the musical creativity and pathways of Yoko Ono, who brought vibrant creative milieus into contact from Tokyo to London to New York. We will trace an alternative history of late 20th-century music genres and communities via Yoko Ono's pathways of connection. Musical scenes under consideration include opera in World War II-era Tokyo; the postwar downtown New York music scene; Fluxus; free jazz; the British Invasion and Swinging London; and New York cabaret, punk, and new wave.
Being in tune, setting the tone, speaking in unison: musical sounds have served as the basis for some of the most common metaphors of social and political harmony. But they have also been at the center of actual negotiations between practitioners from different musical worlds for the last two hundred years. Throughout this class, we will examine the controversies that have, and continue to surround tuning and musical pitch, from Western classical musicians’ efforts to create a unified standard for musical practice to the production of alternative tuning standards in various subcultures, and from transcultural endeavors around the definition of scales to the design of software aimed at decolonizing electronic music. In so doing, we will go beyond specific genres and repertoires to explore the potential of sound itself to deepen our understanding of the relation between music and politics.
This course introduces students to the general theory of digital sound signals, and the techniques to synthesize and transform them. The main objective of the course is to create the skills that allow students to design and program computer music applications, compositions, and art works. The open source programming language Pure Data (Pd) is introduced and taught extensively, though these techniques can be programmed in any programming language/environment. Broadly, the course includes the following topics: sampling theorem and sine waves; samples, reading/writing arrays; additive synthesis; filters and subtractive synthesis; frequency shifting, and amplitude and frequency modulation; delays, pitch-shifting, and reverb; and brief introductions, to video and graphics in GEM, MIDI interfacing, and physical computing. At the end of this course, the student should be able to use Pd to replicate classic devices such as synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, and effects processors, as well as design their own interactive music systems. Students must also register for one of the two listed RCT sections.
Studies representation of Italian history through the medium of film from ancient Rome through the Risorgimento. Issues to be covered throughout include the use of filmic history as a means of forging national identity.
The discussions surrounding the securitization of borders, migration control, and their impact on the European Union have profoundly influenced political debates and governance policies at various levels. This undergraduate course will focus on the bordering processes in Europe and the criminalization of immigration and solidarity, as well as their surrounding narratives. It will explore and critically analyze the legal, social, and political aspects of migration and solidarity. Using case studies and a comparative lens, the students will gain a comprehensive understanding of migration processes and the role of civil society and international organizations in border contexts.
"This Book is Killer": Crime fiction and the creation of justice How does literature conceive of crime? Since its advent in the mid-19th century, the genre of crime fiction has risen to one of the most successful publishing genres of the 20th and the 21st century. But what attracts us about crime in literature? How does literature conceive of, and create criminals? How do detective narratives shape the criminal justice system, and the way our society polices and punishes its citizens? How does the portrayal of crime intersect with issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality? And at a time when society is rethinking the role of the police, prisons, and crime, how has crime literature evolved - if at all? In this class, we will examine how writers have grappled with crime throughout recent literary history by looking at the rich tradition of crime fiction, from locked room mysteries, to Sherlock Holmes, to true-crime podcasts, and abolitionist writings. Our goal is to discover how literature grapples with crime, why the genre is so enduringly popular, and how it affects real-world policy. Units may include Russian gulag novels, Ming-dynasty detective fiction, the crime fiction bestseller, the rise of true crime, piracy and censorship, and fiction by and about incarcerated peoples. Authors may include Angela Davis, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sister Souljah, Seishi Yokomizo, Agatha Christie, K'wan, Robert Louis Stevenson, Michael Nava, Sarah Marshall, and Bryan Stevenson
