Fall 2019
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9111, Quantitative Reasons: From Data to Discovery
[Staff] (NYU Accra)
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9203, Physical Science: Energy & the Environment
[Staff] (NYU Tel Aviv)
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9306, Life Science: Brain and Behavior
[Staff] (NYU Prague)
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9400, Texts and Ideas: Topics - Children and Childhood
Prof. Wolff (History) & Prof. Klass (School of Medicine & Journalism) (NYU Florence)
How are children and childhood viewed in different texts from different cultures and centuries? To whom do children really belong—the parents, the state, the world? Whose responsibility is it to educate, feed, and care for children? Is a child a “blank slate” or a prepackaged set of emotions, intellectual abilities, and behaviors? Emphasizing historical, medical, and cultural perspectives on childhood, we explore common themes and cultural variations, as reflected in literary texts and artistic representations in America, Europe, and China: Confucian analects, Song dynasty poetry, Ming ceramics, Italian European Renaissance painting, Persian and Mughal miniatures, Montaigne’s essays, John Locke’s philosophy, Rousseau’s educational ideals, English Romantic poetry, German Romantic Lieder, Freud on the dynamics of childhood, parenting advice texts from classical Chinese pediatrics to Dr. Spock, and children’s literature texts from Puritan tracts to Dr. Seuss. We consider the history, medicine, and sociology of childhood, including issues of infant and child mortality, education and pedagogy, child labor, children in cities, children and war, and the changing historical nature of the family in China, America, the Middle East, and Europe with a particular focus on Italy, with field trips to local Italian schools, progressive education centers, and the Ospedale degli Innocenti (one of Europe’s first foundling homes).
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9515, Cultures and Contexts: Latin America
Prof. Palmeiro (NYU Buenos Aires) [Syllabus]
Over the last 50 years, millions of Latin Americans have experienced extraordinary shifts in their social, political, and cultural landscape, a result of the transformative effects of revolution or insurgency, state repression, popular resistance and social movements. We focus on events that had continental, hemispheric, and even global impact, including the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the military coups of the 1970s, and the Zapatista uprising in 1994. Drawing on a range of primary sources and cultural forms, we listen carefully to the voices of the major social actors of the time. Our sources are drawn from a wide range of media: newsprint, television broadcasts, transcripts, testimony, essay, documentary and feature film, art, and music. We deliberately mix artistic representations with documentary evidence to understand how the arts—music, visual art, literature, film—do not just reflect the reality around them, but are themselves vital sites for shaping and changing that reality and our imagination of it, both then and now.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9534, Cultures and Contexts: The Black Atlantic
Prof. Baku (NYU Accra) [Syllabus]
We consider the Black Atlantic as a socio-cultural and economic space from the fifteenth-century first arrival of Africans in the ‘New World,’ through the rise of slavery in the Americas, continuing on to slave emancipation and decolonization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and conclude with contemporary black life in the Atlantic world. We trace the origins and importance of the concept of the Black Atlantic in the context of European imperial expansion and the transformation of indigenous structures of governance in the Americas, paying special attention to shifting social relations that shaped community formation among people of African descent and laid the foundations for political and economic institutions. Topics include civilization, slavery, colonialism, capitalism, freedom, and justice. We approach these broad concerns through focused engagement with African enslavement and settlement in Africa and the Americas; the development of transatlantic racial capitalism; variations in politics and culture between empires in the Atlantic world; creolization, plantation slavery and slave society; the politics and culture of the enslaved; the Haitian Revolution; slave emancipation; and contemporary black Atlantic politics and racial capitalism.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9544, Cultures and Contexts: Spain - At the Crossroads of Europe, North Africa & America
Prof. Suarez-Galban (NYU Madrid) [Syllabus]
Analyzes the ways in which historical, geopolitical, cultural, artistic, and popular views function to constitute and continuously transform a national culture. Concentrates on epistemological constructions of Spain—the idea of Spain—that emerge from competing external and internal perspectives. Students examine how this national culture is constructed, first analyzing Spain from North African perspectives through Sephardic nostalgic poetry and the Hispano-Arabic literary traditions. The American perspective pits notions of Spanish imperial power and grandeur against the Black Legend, a term that Protestant circles in Europe and the United States promoted to attack the legitimacy of Spain’s New World empire. A final focus on European views analyzes the depiction of Spain as the embodiment of German and French Romantic ideals beginning at the end of the 17th century and the reemergence of the same notion during the Spanish Civil War (1933–36). Throughout, students examine principal textual and visual images that contribute to the historical and contemporary construction of a national culture that emerged at geographic and cultural crossroads.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9549, Cultures and Contexts: Multinational Britian
Prof. Woods (NYU London) [Syllabus]
The idea of British national identity has been built around a sense of united statehood within the confines of the four nations comprising the United Kingdom, ruling overseas territories. As such, it conveyed a sense of a multi-national empire ruled by monarchs, but developing over time into a benign, democratic, constitutional monarchy, generally through peaceful, not revolutionary change. The British have seen themselves historically as freedom-loving, independent, industrial, tolerant, Protestant and individualistic. These myths of national image have been forged partly through conflict with other nations over many centuries and reflect a nationalistic pride in military success and the maintenance of the largest empire the world has ever seen. Changes since 1945 have seen the collapse of that empire, membership in the European Union, large-scale immigration, changing gender politics, and the devolution of power to Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales. This has inevitably led to major challenges to traditional British views of their national identity. Includes fieldtrips to key sites.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9554, Cultures and Contexts: Modern Italy
[Staff] (NYU Florence) [Syllabus]
Examines how Italian identity has been transformed through encounters with foreigners. These were not only invading armies and colonizing powers but also artists and scholars, travelers, and tourists. We explore how the Greek, Arab, Byzantine, and Jewish presences reshaped Italian civilization up to the Renaissance, focusing on their cultural consequences from a number of perspectives, from science to language, to political thought, to art and architecture. A field trip to Ravenna (capital of the Western Roman Empire, then of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, and later of the Byzantine Exarchate) offers a vantage point to appreciate the many layers of Italian cultural history. Florence is used as a primary source for the history of Grand Tour as well as the recent development of mass tourism in Italy, and is the setting for a fieldwork project to chart the cultural impact and memory of foreigners in the city.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9720, Expressive Culture: Images
Prof. Cherry (NYU London) [Syllabus]
Contemporary Art in Britain. Contemporary art raises vigorous debate and criticism. But what is contemporary about contemporary art? We consider some key issues in dealing critically with contemporary art with a focus on work on display in exhibitions in London, both major national collections and private galleries, exploring art produced since the late 1950s through case studies of the work of individual artists and through themes which include photography, representations of the body, gallery display, video practice, and installation art. Topics include how contemporary art came to look as it does, with a focus on British art; the different forms of material and presentation artists have employed; why and how diverse audiences are addressed; and how markets, national prizes, and private collections shape the kinds of art produced and inform public taste. We also look at the collection and display of contemporary art, on a private and a public scale; dealer galleries, and issues of curation. Critical and historical writings by artists and theorists will be considered.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9722, Expressive Culture: Architecture in London Field
Prof. Powers (NYU London) [Syllabus]
The history of London architecture as exemplified by surviving buildings, which can be seen and visited, principally from the 17th to the 20th centuries, considered through an equal mixture of classroom lectures and field study visits to the sites and buildings, and types of buildings, discussed in the lectures.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9731, Expressive Culture: Music in Prague Field Study
Prof. Ackerman (NYU Prague) [Syllabus]
The unique power and magic of music explored by informed participation in live music experiences and in connection to other phenomena in its surrounding culture, encountered through architecture walks, sound walks, and experiences with other art forms, such as photography and film. Combines lectures and listening sessions with attendance at seven music performances in difference styles, at venues of special cultural significance.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9732, Expressive Culture: Opera in Florence
Prof. Varon (NYU Florence)
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9750, Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Herzovich (NYU Buenos Aires) [Syllabus]
Argentine cinema from the 1950s to the present, understood within the larger cultural space of history and society and of Argentine culture in a regional and global perspective. Topics include: debates about film as art, political weapon, and/or entertainment; complicity and resistance under conditions of political repression; filmic forms of remembrance and of activism; and the complex relationship between aesthetics and politics. We look at the model of the “film studios” and its decline after the Second World War, followed by the rise of film festivals, film criticism, and an emphasis on filmmakers as “authors”—thus of films as individual artworks—as well as the rise of groups who made films more or less collectively and distributed to advance a political goal. In the years following the military-civil coup of 1976, and the bloody political persecution that it unleashed, we discuss the effects of violence and repression in filmmaking and film culture through forms of complicity and resistance, as well as contested memory works produced in the agitated “democratic spring” of the 1980s. Toward the end of the neoliberal 1990s, we see the emergence of a New Argentine Cinema in the films of young filmmakers who devised new ways of making films and of engaging with social reality, memory, and politics.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9750, Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Azulys (NYU Paris) [Syllabus]
By putting the films into their social, historical and philosophical context, the students will get to study, across a diverse range of examples, the relation existing between French films and French culture. It deals for example with the formal and thematic relationships among the Avant-garde artistic movements (futurism, cubism, expressionism, surrealism, etc.) and the cinematographic Avant-garde (Buñuel, L’Herbier, Cocteau), those between the cinema of Renoir and classical French theatre (Marivaux, Beaumarchais, Musset), the troubled period of the occupation and the filmmakers who deliberately chose to stay in France to work there (Clouzot, Carné) and the influence of Saint Germain des Prés’s existentialism (Sartre, Camus) on the Nouvelle Vague, etc. The students will thus discover that cinema is a cultural agent that reflects a period all the while produces a critical point view on said period.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9750, Expressive Culture: Film: Cinema and Culture of the Weimar Republic
Prof. Bangert (NYU Berlin) [Syllabus]
Examines the relation between cultural narratives and radical shifts in German national identity, focusing on the 20th century, which is shaped by both the diversity of modern art and the violent politics leading to Auschwitz. How did the World Wars change art and literary forms? What divides art from propaganda? What kind of cultural identity does Modernism construct in opposition to dominant culture? Berlin offers an ideal context to study the complex relations between Modernism and politics. We consider the “scandalous” past of texts and art considered canonical today, with special attention to modes of socio-political censorship as well as the subversive power of art and literature. Includes walking tours and visits to museums and art galleries.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9750, Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Noble-Olsen (NYU Washington D.C.)
Cinema has been infatuated with the city since its earliest days, but in the context of American film Washington, D.C. is uniquely underrepresented in comparison to such paragons as New York, Los Angeles, or San Francisco. While it appears often in film and television, Washington serves primarily as a backdrop for political drama or national security crisis while ignoring the specific character of the city that has been so central to the depiction of other cinematic cities. To introduce the critical study of film, our focus on the filmic and televisual representation of Washington emphasizes this specific feature of the city’s depiction in American film and examines iconic counterexamples such as Spike Lee’s Brooklyn and Jean-Luc Godard’s Paris. We study film’s technical evolution and cultural impact over its history, looking at how different film technologies affect movies’ social and political significance and how changing viewing patterns, such as the introduction of television and digital technologies, transform cinema and our understanding of it. In addition to reading important texts and learning key concepts of film studies, we examine how filmic and televisual representations of Washington, and cities generally, have expressed concerns about war, race, gender, sexuality, and nation.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9750, Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Vela (NYU Madrid) [Syllabus]
Almodóvar and Buñuel. Analyzes the films of the two most well-known Spanish filmmakers, Luis Buñuel and Pedro Almodóvar, from the standpoint of grotesque expression. Despite their differences, there are things they share that allow us to investigate very different moments in the cultural history of Spain with a specific focus: both were born and received their first sentimental education in rural areas, under strong religious influence (and religious repression), and in their works we can see a strong use of the grotesque. Both repression and grotesque expression are related in our analysis of the films, since grotesquery is a way of degrading and decentralizing what is considered the center of social authority. Two museum field trips are included for students to explore the grotesque in Spanish artistic history since the Middle Ages. Concern is also given to the formal techniques of cinematic art.
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9750, Expressive Culture: Film
Prof. Barnes (NYU Sydney) [Syllabus]
How has Australian cinema engaged with significant and often contested historical, political and cultural events in the nation’s past? We take a critical perspective on the history of colonisation in Australia, the legacies of the Stolen Generations, the controversies surrounding Australia’s role in World War One and the Vietnam War, as well as Australia’s relationships with its Pacific Asian neighbors, through films that have marked significant shifts in public consciousness about the past such as Gallipoli (1981), Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and Balibo (2009). We also consider films that have employed innovative narrative and aesthetic strategies for exploring the relationship between the past and the present such as Two Laws (1982) and The Tracker (2002). Students develop their understanding of the basic methods and concepts of cinema studies and a critical vocabulary for analysing how filmmakers have approached the use of memory, testimony, re-enactment, researched detail, allegory, and archives across a diverse range of examples, including restorations, revivals, and re-imaginings of Australian cinema history such as the controversial restoration of Wake in Fright (1971) as an Australian classic; the reconstruction of Australia’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906); and the revived interest in Ozploitation after the release of Not Quite Hollywood (2008).
FALL 2019 CORE-UA 9764, Expressive Culture: Art and Culture in Contemporary Israel
Prof. Livnat (NYU Tel Aviv) [Syllabus]
The location of Israel at the geographic junction between the West and the East, between the Arab world and the Western world, against the background of the long historical complexity of this piece of land provides a panoramic view of Israeli culture and art by examining thematic crossroads and ideas, via problems and social conflicts which lie at the heart of those art works and are reflected by them. Themes include: religion and secularism, universalism/globalism versus localism, Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazic and Sephardic cultures, multiculturalism in Israel, Zionism and Post-Zionism, right and left political world views, questions of gender, historical perspectives on war and peace and the Holocaust. Students explore the way different forms of art—visual, literary, and performance—reflect and shape the understanding of the “Israeli mosaic” while learning about the way the artists and writers internalize, consciously and unconsciously the complex Israeli reality.