SPRING 2021 CORE-UA 9306, Life Science: Brain and Behavior
[Staff] (NYU Prague)
SPRING 2021 CORE-UA 9400, Texts and Ideas:
[Staff] (NYU Buenos Aires)
Texts and Ideas introduces students to the ideals of liberal education and the central role of humanistic study in the liberal arts and fosters appreciation of the importance of humanistic learning for society at large. Students become acquainted with some of the literary and philosophical works that have been most influential in shaping the contemporary world and with significant instances in which the ideas in these works have been debated, developed, appropriated, or rejected. Texts and Ideas is not a survey but, rather, an examination of how texts influence subsequent thinking, create traditions, and reflect societal ideals. Texts and Ideas thus aims to provide a richer understanding of how cultures are constructed, modified, and represented.
SPRING 2021 CORE-UA 9400, Texts and Ideas:
[Staff] (NYU Sydney)
Texts and Ideas introduces students to the ideals of liberal education and the central role of humanistic study in the liberal arts and fosters appreciation of the importance of humanistic learning for society at large. Students become acquainted with some of the literary and philosophical works that have been most influential in shaping the contemporary world and with significant instances in which the ideas in these works have been debated, developed, appropriated, or rejected. Texts and Ideas is not a survey but, rather, an examination of how texts influence subsequent thinking, create traditions, and reflect societal ideals. Texts and Ideas thus aims to provide a richer understanding of how cultures are constructed, modified, and represented.
SPRING 2021 CORE-UA 9500, Cultures and Contexts: Greece under Western Eyes
Prof. Theodoratou (NYU Athens)
This course will explore the various ways in which the West has conceived of Greece—how it has represented it, how it has glorified and idealized its past, how it has thought of it in relation to Europe and America and even as the crossroads between the West and the East. Considering a range of literary, critical, historical, and philosophical texts, it will include materials on classical humanism, classical philology, philhellenism, orientalism, aesthetics, Romantic nationalism, gender politics, and the long history of Western travel narratives to Greece that, together, create variations of “Greece.” Especially during the last two centuries, Hellenism has written the history of a promise—a promise of modernity, of democracy and identity—but not necessarily the history of Greece. The course will also analyze how those who call themselves “Greeks” have received these different ideas of Greece and how these ideas—and even inventions of Greece—have influenced their perception of themselves, even to this day, something that is legible in modern Greek appropriations of, and resistances to, these ideas. This dual perspective will permit us to explore the way in which the aesthetics of art and the political existence of a nation become bound indissolubly one to another.
This Cultures and Contexts course fulfills the College Core Requirement. It seeks to foster an appreciation of the dynamics of cultural interaction and influence and to examine the ways cultures have interacted through trade, colonization, immigration, ideological appropriation and dispersion, and media representation; how groups define themselves against internal and external difference; and how the dominant perspective of Western modernity affects comprehension of the ways in which people outside that position understand, experience, and imagine their lives. In this way, it hopes to challenge traditional European conceptions of national identity and to suggest a more plural and relational manner of thinking identity in general.
SPRING 2021 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.
SPRING 2021 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.
SPRING 2021 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.
SPRING 2021 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.
SPRING 2021 CORE-UA 9700, Expressive Cultures: Film
[Staff] (NYU Paris)
SPRING 2021 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.
SPRING 2021 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.
SPRING 2021 CORE-UA 9722, Expressive Culture: Architecture in Paris Field Study
Prof. Wick (NYU Paris)
For all of the staid elegance and grandeur of Paris today, for much of its history the city developed in an ad-hoc manner, in fits and starts, beset by adversity, invasions, repression and want. We retrace this history through field study in the city’s different quarters, examining how the city’s urban form developed, and studying celebrated works of architecture, as well as the workaday structures that have defined daily life here. We explore how innovations in building, landscape design, and urbanism have sought to give the city a more livable, sustainable form, to inspire and create a sense of shared purpose and identity, but also how these arts have been used to suppress and control an often restive population. Throughout, we also consider contemporary questions facing Paris today: how can the city maintain the rich architectural and urbanistic heritage that has made it famous, while also remaining vital, sustainable, and providing quality of life and opportunities for all its residents?
SPRING 2021 CORE-UA 9723, Expressive Culture: Museums in Washington Field Story
Prof. Grossman (NYU Washington D.C.)
With its vast array of institutions dedicated to distinct cultural groupings and its formation inextricably linked to the halls of power, the museum culture in our nation’s capitol unique. Taking advantage of behind-the-scenes access to some of the most prestigious museums in the world and their staff, students explore various approaches to interpreting art and develop tools for appreciating their aesthetic experiences. We also look critically at the ways in which museums—through their policies, programs, exhibitions, and architecture—can define regional or national values, shape cultural attitudes, inform social and political views, and even affect one’s understanding of the meaning of a work of art.
SPRING 2021 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.
SPRING 2021 CORE-UA 9732, Expressive Culture: Opera in Florence
Prof. Varon (NYU Florence)
SPRING 2021 CORE-UA 9765, Expressive Culture: Artists and Authors of the Italian Renaissance
Prof. Edelstein (NYU Florence)
The profound changes in artistic production that characterize the art of Renaissance Italy were accompanied by an equally extraordinary series of developments in the literature of art. Indeed, modern art history, art criticism and art theory can all trace their origins to literary forms that developed simultaneously with, affected, or were influenced by contemporary developments in artistic practice. We take an interdisciplinary approach to visual and textual analysis.
SPRING 2021 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.
SPRING 2021 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).
SPRING 2021 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.
SPRING 2021 CORE-UA 9760, Expressive Culture: Visual Arts and the Arts of Healing in the Italian Renaissance
Prof. Edelstein (NYU-Florence)
Of all of the scientific fields that were essential to the development of new artistic ideas in Italy during the Renaissance, none was more closely related than medicine. We examine the intersection between developments in art and health during the Italian Renaissance, from the artistic response and the urban transformation of the city of Florence during the global pandemic of the bubonic plague, to the study of optics and anatomy, and the emergence of syphilis, which probably arrived following Columbus’s first voyage. How were new ideas about the body and the soul, health and sickness, life and death reflected in the visual arts? What traces of these new diseases and new medical approaches can be seen in the streets and buildings of the city itself? Special attention is given to the role of women and their representation in art as protagonists of healthcare, as both recipients and caregivers, as mothers, midwives and wetnurses, and as practitioners of dissection and anatomical study. Finally, the gardens of Villa La Pietra themselves offer an opportunity to consider the garden as a space of both art and medical science in the Renaissance.