FYSEM-UA 701
Adventures in Interviewing: Oral History Theory and Practice
Fall 2021
Instructor: Miriam Nyhan Grey
Tuesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues
Oral history is a very important tool for a historian. It is compelling in its ability to bring forward the voices of those who were frequently excluded from more typical sources and it often leads to new interpretations of history. As a method it presents both challenges and rewards, as the sources are not confined to the library or an archive. In the process of interviewing, the historian is confronted by sources that speak, think, remember, forget and recount—human beings. This course will explore theories of memory, how memory is constructed and forgotten, and how historians contend with this type of source. Preparing for and conducting an oral history interview will be a significant portion of the work for this course. The goal is to uncover the richness of oral history in complicating our explanations of the past.
MIRIAM NYHAN GREY is Associate Director of New York University's Center for Irish and Irish-American Studies, where she is also Director of Graduate Studies for the Master of Arts in Irish and Irish-American Studies. With an interest in the intersections of migration, race, and ethnicity, she focuses primarily on migrant experiences in comparative frameworks. Oral history is a central methodology in her research, and she has served as a collaborator for the Archives of Irish America’s Oral History Collection since 2008. She has been on the faculty at NYU since 2009, teaching an array of classes on Irish history and migration, oral history, and comparative migration.
FYSEM-UA 743
Archaeology of Ireland--Land of Saints and Scholars
Fall 2021
Instructor: Pam J. Crabtree
Monday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
Note: conflicts with Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (M 3:30-4:45 p.m.).
Archaeology uses material culture, including artifacts and structures, in order to understand the daily lives of people in the past. Large-scale excavations carried out in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries have shed new light on Irish history, from the island’s initial settlement at the end of the Ice Age through the nineteenth century. This course will explore how archaeology can be used to reconstruct Irish history. Particular emphasis will be placed on the Irish “Dreamtime,” the Iron Age and early medieval periods (ca. 600 BCE to 1100 CE). We will also examine the role that the Irish monastic tradition played in perpetuating and passing on to posterity many of the classic texts of Western civilization.
PAM J. CRABTREE is an archaeologist and Professor in NYU’s Department of Anthropology, where she also serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies. She is a field archaeologist who has worked on historic and prehistoric sites in Europe, the Near East, and eastern North America, and she is particularly interested in how archaeological data can be used to illustrate the daily lives of people who lived in the past. Her area of expertise is zooarchaeology, the study of animal bones as a way of reconstructing ancient hunting practices, animal husbandry patterns, and diets. Crabtree is currently the co-director of the excavations at Dún Ailinne, an Irish Iron Age site located in County Kildare. She teaches courses on prehistoric and medieval archaeology, archaeological methods, and agricultural origins.
FYSEM-UA 900.013
Asia’s Megacities
Fall 2021
Instructor: Gaurav Garg
Thursday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 4:55-6:10 p.m.
Theme: The City: Longstanding Challenges and Dynamic Change
In the past century, Asia has urbanized more rapidly than any other region in the world. In 2020, as many as 17 out of the world’s 30 megacities (in terms of population) were in Asia—almost all of them in East and South Asia. Most of Asia’s megacities have long and deep roots in the pre-colonial or colonial era. It is therefore natural to ask what global, regional, national and local forces have combined over time— through history—to produce the Asian megacity of the twentieth-century? What explains their resilience, growth and diversity? Further, how have Asia’s cities, governments and its people coped with this unprecedented concentration of people and capital? And what is so Asian about the largest and most dynamic cities of the world’s largest continent? It is only by exploring such questions can we truly begin to understand how Asia’s megacities have become what they are today and how they are shaping the new Asian century.
This seminar will engage with these questions though a focus on some of the following themes— colonialism, migration, segregation, slums, infrastructure, industrialization, labor and politics, de-industrialization, neoliberalism, gentrification and globalization. Readings will center mainly (but not exclusively) on select Asian megacities— Tokyo, Shanghai, Beijing, Manila, New Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Bangalore, Dhaka, Karachi, Lahore and some paradigmatic ones such as Singapore and Dubai. Students will learn how to appreciate the diversity of Asia’s megacities, the historical forces that produced them and at the same time find that if we scratch beneath the surface, there lies a “deep order” that connects such cities—capitalism.
GAURAV C. GARG is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, History Department, NYU. He is a historian of modern South Asia and is an urbanist. The core of his intellectual and research agenda lies in thinking how historical research and historical case-studies, especially from the global South, can be situated at the heart of a fresh and truly global social theory. After defending his dissertation in summer 2021, he will work on his book manuscript which will examine the roles and responses of locally entrenched economic elites and global development agencies in the making of what in the 1960s and 1970s was considered to be the “world’s worst city”, Calcutta. When he is free, he loves to think and talk about mountains and mountaineers.
FYSEM-UA 822
Bioethics: Life and Death
Fall 2021
Instructor: Jeanne Proust
Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Required Writing the Essay: Science and Society: Spring 2022 Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Health and Society
Note: if you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this paired seminar and EXPOS-UA 1 course.
This course applies the ethical insights of philosophy to issues about life, death, bioethics, and medicine in an introductory way. Technological advances in health care made it possible to sustain biological life beyond the moment when the patient would have died without such intervention. As patients, their families, physicians and clergy were drawn into the end of life decision-making process, it became clear that more philosophical work needed to be done to provide guidance in these situations. The objective of this course is to expand students’ knowledge of issues related to death, dying and life in applied ethics. It examines various questions regarding the ethical, legal, and social implications of advances in biotechnology and biomedicine, and aims at providing a foundation in historical, philosophical, and socio-scientific
approaches and frameworks to address bioethical challenges. Students will learn to read philosophy articles critically, as well as discovering how different philosophers have approached ethical issues and applied them to prominent debates in bioethics. The course will examine the major ethical theories on what is morally right and wrong, and the meaning of fundamental moral concepts. Focus, however, is upon ethical problems associated with the practice of medicine and biomedical research. Topics will include topics like abortion, issues about the rights of the unborn, euthanasia and Physician-assisted Suicide, Genetic Testing, Genetic Therapy and Discrimination, Infertility and In Vitro Fertilization, Surrogate Parenting, and Cloning.
JEANNE PROUST earned her PhD at the Sorbonne and studied philosophy and the arts in Bordeaux and Berlin as well as Paris. She has taught courses in philosophy (specifically critical thinking and ethics), as well as art history, visual arts, and French literature, at NYU, Pace University, the City University of New York, Miami Dade College, and Marymount Manhattan College. She brings philosophy to the world outside academia by giving numerous talks about interdisciplinary subjects related to moral questions for ThinkOlio, an association that organizes lectures in public spaces throughout New York City. She co-wrote The Feeling of Injustice in Popular Songs with Professor Charles Ramond of Université Paris 8.
FYSEM-UA 900.014
Classical Music in the Shadow of Covid and George Floyd
Fall 2021
Instructor: Michael Beckerman
Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Identity and Society
Note: conflicts with spring General Chemistry I Lecture (TR 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
Forty-five years ago, when I first taught classical music courses in the university, the whole thing seemed pretty unproblematic. In our Music Humanities course at Columbia University we mostly offered a historical survey of great works from the Middle Ages to John Cage (which we called “from chants to chance”), and sharing with our students the history, context and content of “masterworks” seemed like the proper way to approach the subject. Fast forward to 2020. Covid shut down virtually all the classical music venues in the country, while the murders of George Floyd and others reignited discussions and debates about structural racism, inequality and decolonization. This course outlines the history of the idea of classical music, and explores what the events of the last year mean for it--as taught, performed and engaged with. The course will draw heavily on our recently published volume Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges (Open Book Publishers 2021) and will feature many guests, some of whom are contributors to the volume. Pending health recommendations from the CDC, the State of New York, and NYU, we will also study the subject in a first-hand manner by attending performances at key venues in the city.
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."
FYSEM-UA 379
Doctor’s Dilemma: Being Both Correct and Right
Fall 2021
Instructor: Michael E. Makover
Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Required Writing the Essay: Science and Society: Spring 2022 Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Health and Society
Note: conflicts with Physics II Lecture (TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.).
Note: if you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this paired seminar and EXPOS-UA 1 course.
Dr. Saul Farber, former Dean of the NYU School of Medicine, frequently cautioned that just because an action or conclusion was correct did not mean that it was right. Ethics, laws, and religious and cultural beliefs intersect in every medical encounter and healthcare issue, affecting patients’ options and care. The challenging issues to be studied and debated in this seminar include the following: Should doctors help terminal patients die to relieve intractable suffering? Should doctors participate in executions or in the interrogation of terrorists? Do we want to know so much about our genetic makeup that we are faced with terribly difficult consequences of that knowledge? Is “alternative medicine” a reasonable alternative? What makes a good doctor good? Who should pay for your healthcare? The course aims to teach students how to address such questions by learning to think like doctors and scientists, to apply logic tempered by human values and experience, to analyze information critically, and to present ideas effectively and honestly.
MICHAEL E. MAKOVER is Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at the NYU School of Medicine and Attending Physician at the NYU Medical Center. He is also the Chief Medical Officer for a major union. An internist and rheumatologist, he is the author of Mismanaged Care, as well as articles on healthcare quality, ethics, and economics, and is currently writing another book entitled 120 Years Young. He was an aide to Senator Robert F. Kennedy and a spokesman for the American Cancer Society and the New York Heart Association.
FYSEM-UA 900.011
The Economy of the Ancient World: Money, Markets, and Labor
Fall 2021
Instructor: Rhyne King
Wednesday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
Note: conflicts with spring General Chemistry I Lecture (TR 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
Thousands of years before economics became a field of academic study, ancient peoples were exchanging goods at markets, investing in businesses, and training workers. In this course, we will study the economic history of the ancient world in three separate time periods: the time of the earliest states in Egypt and Mesopotamia; the interconnected worlds of democratic Athens and the powerful Persian Empire; and the contemporaneous superstates of Rome and Han China. Through ancient written sources and archaeology, we will discuss how the economies of the ancient world operated on the ground. We will also consider how contemporary economic theories, including Marxist and institutional, can or cannot explain the development of economic systems in ancient civilizations. In this course, students will learn to think critically about primary sources, gain the skills to apply theoretical models to evidence, and develop an appreciation for the diversity of cultures across the Afro-Eurasian world.
RHYNE KING is a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. He researches the impact of ancient imperialism on ordinary people and the ways ordinary people resisted imperialism. Rhyne specializes in the social, political, and economic history of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (559-330 BCE). He received his PhD from the department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago and his BA in Classics from Duke University.
FYSEM-UA 900.012
Empires and Scriptural Traditions in the First Millennium
Fall 2021
Instructor: Valentina Grasso
Tuesday and Thursday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
Islam did not emerge from the crossroads of the ancient world as an alien intrusion but was rather the result of the intertwining of first millennium cultures. By incorporating Islam, this course will focus on the interactions between empires and Scriptural traditions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) within the historical frame of the first millennium. The first lectures will investigate the socio-political history of Rome and Iran and their cultural milieux and will be followed by lectures dedicated to the Syriac world, pre-Islamic Arabia, Early Islam and the Caliphate, the Silk Road (touching on Manichaeism and Buddhism) and the shaping of the Medieval ‘Social Network’. The course will highlight the formation and exegesis of scriptural canons as well as the role of philosophy and law in the formation of communal identities by applying a historical perspective to religious material and by reading the rhetoric of otherness in a critical way.
VALENTINA A. GRASSO is a Visiting Assistant Professor at New York University's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge where she completed her doctoral dissertation on the history of pre-Islamic late antique Arabia. Her current research explores the interactions between Arabia and Ethiopia during Late Antiquity in a project titled "Red Sea Empires: Arabia and Aksūm before Islam”. The project aims to contribute to the study of geographical areas still largely underrepresented in gatherings on late antique history such as Black African history, by constructing a coherent historical narrative out of fragmentary evidence through the integration of literary and archaeological material. In a similar fashion, her teaching seeks to support the voices of historically underrepresented communities and to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the late antique world outside of a Eurocentric framework.
FYSEM-UA 900.009
The Epic Tradition
Fall 2021
Instructor: Stephanie Crooks
Tuesday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Literature Through the Ages
This course provides a wide-ranging introduction to the genre of epic. We will study several ancient examples of the literary form (including the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Ramayana, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid), while considering the societies for which and by which they were created. Later in the semester, we will work to identify the conceits and themes that are characteristic to these examples of epic literature, and we will track what changes - if any - the genre undergoes in subsequent epochs and cultures. To that end, we will also read excerpts from Beowulf, the Chanson de Roland, and Paradise Lost, among others. Epic, we will find, deeply explores human nature – our desires and our flaws – while often posing difficult questions about national identity, imperialism, and conquest. What makes an individual a hero? How do heroes respond to the tasks that are imposed upon them? By whom are those tasks imposed, and, perhaps most important, why do tales of heroes continue to appeal to us today?
STEPHANIE CROOKS is an Adjunct Instructor in the College of Arts and Sciences with research interests in death, material culture, and landscape in Greek and Latin poetry. She has published on Vergil’s Eclogues and has an article on Catullus forthcoming in Classical Philology. She is currently preparing a manuscript on the image of the poet’s tomb in Latin elegy.
FYSEM-UA 900.001
Epics, Sagas and Cycles of the Medieval North Sea
Fall 2021
Instructor: Sarah Waidler
Wednesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
Note: conflicts with spring General Chemistry I Lecture (TR 9:30-10:45 a.m.) and Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (R 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
Northern Europe produced a number of long-form literary pieces during the Middle Ages, such as the Old English Beowulf, the early Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge and its associated tales, the Middle Welsh Mabinogion and the Old Norse sagas. This course will explore these tales and others and question the definition of this genre (or genres) of literature, examining connections between the different types of tales and what we can know about their composition. Students will investigate the connections between these tales and earlier examples of epic literature, such as Virgil’s The Aeneid, and examine what we know regarding the transmission of earlier forms of heroic tales from Late Antiquity and the ancient world to medieval Western Europe. Major themes such as violence, heroism and the role of women in these stories will be discussed throughout the course and students will be expected to engage with both questions presented by the individual examples of these forms of literature as well as to compare across cultural and literary boundaries. The reception of these tales in both the medieval and modern worlds will be discussed in the conclusion to the course. This class will give students a grounding in critical thinking and an appreciation of different approaches to literary texts and the environments in which they were created. By engaging with some of the foremost medieval literary productions of the European Middle Ages, this course will chart a journey through some of the greatest written achievements of the cultures of the Celts, Vikings and early English and question students’ understanding of literature as well as the cultural construction and portrayal of the heroic past.
SARAH WAIDLER earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge, and was an O’Donovan Postdoctoral Scholar at the School of Celtic Studies, Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, in 2016–2018. She works on medieval Celtic literature and history and the cult of saints in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. She is particularly interested in the overlap between the literature of saints and “secular” literature. Her work also explores the intellectual environment of learning and the interplay of ideas between Ireland, Wales, and the wider medieval world.
FYSEM-UA 900.004
Experimentalism in Music, 14th c to the present: Meanings and Methods
Fall 2021
Instructor: Elizabeth Hoffman
Monday and Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts
Note: conflicts with Introductory Experimental Physics I (M 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.).
This course will survey selected historical moments of stylistic change in music and ask how these musical junctures embody artistic intervention that is often also social change—through the form of the creative practices, the sounds themselves, and the presentational manner of the musics. We’ll consider experimentalism as practiced by groups of contemporaneous composers sharing practices, and experimentalism invoked by singular iconoclasts. What motivated these conscious departures from existing traditions? How were they received, and what constituted the experimental aspects of the practices? Is ‘experimentalism’ synonymous with ‘innovation’? Does ‘experimentalism’ imply a teleology of progress? In a sense then, this course seeks to define the notion of the ‘experimental’ in art, and to consider how it has arisen and contributed to artistic culture—across a wide historical swath in Western (and selected non-Western) art and pop music canons.
After completing this course students will be able to think deeply about these questions, which will be informed by many case studies. Students will be able to form their own opinions about attributes of musical practices in the present, including hybrid genres and borrowings, and about intentions artists may harbor that shape deliberate rebellion or discovery. Students will be encouraged to think philosophically about these ideas such that they will be able to apply them to observations about other art forms, including the visual arts and dance, or mixed media.
ELIZABETH HOFFMAN teaches courses in music composition, computer music, and music theory and history in the Department of Music at NYU. She is a composer of music for traditional instruments and for instruments that she designs in computer software. She has also built experimental percussion instruments which explore unique tunings and timbres. Her compositional interests include a focus on spatialization as a means of creating signification and immersive sound worlds, and she has written a number of experimental works for high-density loudspeaker arrays which utilize over a hundred channels. Her fixed media music appears on the empreintes DIGITALes label and others. Recognition has come from the Bourges, Prix Ars, and Pierre Schaeffer competitions, the Seattle Arts Commission, ICMA, the Jerome Foundation, The MacDowell Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A permanent algorithmic sound installation that she designed (RETU(R)NINGS) plays daily in NYU’s Bobst Library Atrium since 2019. Prof. Hoffman has been the recipient of NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award.
FYSEM-UA 506
Game Theory and the Humanities
Fall 2021
Instructor: Steven J. Brams
Wednesday, 4:55–7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Mathematics and Modeling in Understanding of the Physical World
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.
Note: conflicts with Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (M 3:30-4:45 p.m.).
Game theory is a mathematical theory of strategy that has been applied to the analysis of conflict and cooperation in such fields as economics, political science, and biology. In this seminar, we discuss more unusual applications—to history, literature, philosophy, the Bible, theology, and law. We discuss Abraham’s decision to offer his son Isaac for sacrifice; the choices made by accused witches and their persecutors in medieval witch trials; Lady Macbeth's incitement of her husband to murder King Duncan in Shakespeare’s play; several strategic games played by presidents and their antagonists in domestic crises (e.g., the Civil War) and international crises (e.g., the Cuban missile crisis), and coping mechanisms used by characters in catch-22 games (including those in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22).
STEVEN J. BRAMS is Professor of Politics at NYU. He is author, co-author, or co-editor of 19 books and about 300 articles. He has applied game theory and social-choice theory to voting and elections, bargaining and fairness, international relations, and the Bible, theology, and literature. He is a former president of the Peace Science Society (1990-91) and of the Public Choice Society (2004-2006). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1986), a Guggenheim Fellow (1986-87), and was a Visiting Scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (1998-99).
FYSEM-UA 781
Happiness in Film
Fall 2021
Instructor: Ludovic Cortade
Friday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts
This seminar investigates the representations of happiness in film, drawing on a variety of sources and disciplines including cinema studies, history, philosophy, positive psychology, ethology, and cultural studies. We will discuss the notion of “happiness” through the lens of different historical and cultural contexts, and consider how film techniques are used in those contexts to convey positive emotions. Topics include: the transformation and rebirth of heroes in myths and fairy tales in film; the building of the self away from social determinisms; “happy-endings” in classical Hollywood cinema, including comedies and musicals; the politics of happiness, race, class, and gender in world cinema; happiness and the practice of frugality; the building of common ground across communities, nations, and species.
Professor LUDOVIC CORTADE is Associate Professor in the Department of French and Associate Faculty in the Department of Cinema Studies. His books include Le Cinéma de l’immobilité. His research fields include film history and theory. Professor Cortade has previously taught at Harvard University, the University of Toronto, Brown University, the Ecole normale supérieure, and the Sorbonne. He was twice awarded Harvard’s Derek Bok Certificate of Distinction in Teaching.
FYSEM-UA 900.006
Histories of Childhood
Fall 2021
Instructor: Patricia Crain
Thursday, 8:00-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Literature Through the Ages
Note: conflicts with Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (R 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
What is “childhood” and who counts as a child? Childhood as a concept has a history, which powerfully shapes historical children and sets the foundation for how we think of children today. This seminar explores that history, especially in the United States eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, through readings in educational theory, social history, early children’s poetry and fiction, and children’s diaries, among other materials, with special attention to the production of race, class, gender and sexuality. How do chattel slavery and Native American genocide shape the experience of childhood for Black, Native, and white children? In addition to anonymous children’s literature, readings will include works by John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, William Wordsworth, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Zitkála-Šá, Louisa May Alcott, and Horatio Alger, among others. Students will research the popular poetry and fiction of gift books, magazines, and anthologies, in Fales Special Collections (pandemic permitting), will write weekly blog posts, two short essays, a personal essay, and a final research or creative project, and will present reports on weekly topics in class.
PATRICIA CRAIN teaches, researches, and writes about nineteenth-century American literature and culture, the history of print culture and literacy, the history of childhood, and the relation between words and pictures. Her most recent book, Reading Children: Literacy, Property and the Dilemmas of Childhood in Nineteenth-century America (University of Pennsylvania, 2016; Early American Literature book prize), offers a history of the relationship between children and books in Anglo-American modernity, exploring long-lived but now forgotten early children's literature, discredited yet highly influential pedagogical practices, the property lessons inherent in children's book ownership, and the emergence of childhood itself as a literary property. The Story of A: the Alphabetization of America from The New England Primer to The Scarlet Letter (Stanford, 2000; MLA first book prize) relates the history of the alphabet as a genre of image-text for children and of alphabetization as a social practice in America, from early modern reading primers to the literature of the American Renaissance.
FYSEM-UA 801
History of Italian Opera
Fall 2021
Instructor: Roberto Scarcella Perino
Monday, 8:00-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts
Note: conflicts with Principles of Biology I Lecture (MW 9:30-10:45 a.m.) and General Chemistry I Lecture (MW 8:00-9:15 a.m.).
The course covers the evolution of opera from Monteverdi to the early 20th century. The genres analyzed in this course are favola in musica, intermezzo, opera seria, opera buffa, grand opera, dramma lirico. Operatic production styles are considered with regard to the recordings used in the course; class discussion is meant to help students develop a critical approach to opera appreciation. No specific musical training is required.
ROBERTO SCARCELLA PERINO is Composer in Residence at the NYU Casa Italiana Zerilli-Marimò, Assistant Clinical Professor in Italian Studies at NYU, and a Scholar in Residence at the American Institute for Verdi Studies. He has written five operas: Verdi, Merli e Cucú; A Caval Donato; Blackout; Furiosus; and A Sweet Silence in Cremona.
FYSEM-UA 497
How We See
Fall 2021
Instructor: Marisa Carrasco
Thursday, 9:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Required Writing the Essay: Science and Society: Spring 2022 Monday and Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Cognitive and Neural Science
Note: conflicts with PhysicsI/ II Lecture (TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.)
Note: if you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this paired seminar and EXPOS-UA 1 course.
Do we see the world the way we do because we are the way we are or because the world is the way it is? This course looks at what we know about vision from multiple scientific perspectives: perceptual psychology tells us about the process of seeing and provides important insights into the workings of visual mechanisms; neuropsychology shows us what happens to perception when these mechanisms malfunction; and neuroscience tells us about processes at the level of cells and neural systems. At the same time, we discuss modes and techniques of scientific inquiry from these different perspectives. How do vision scientists learn? What kinds of experiments do they conduct? How has the development of new neuroimaging techniques (fMRI, for example) shaped the field?
MARISA CARRASCO is Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neural Science and a Collegiate Professor, as well as a former Chairperson of the Department of Psychology. Born and raised in Mexico City, she received her licentiate in Psychology from the National University of Mexico and her PhD in Psychology (with an emphasis on cognition and perception) from Princeton University. She conducts research in cognitive neuroscience, exploring the relation between the psychological and neural mechanisms involved in visual perception and attention. Her papers have been published in the leading scientific journals in the field, and she has won numerous prestigious awards and fellowships throughout her career, such as a National Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation, a Cattell Fellowship, an American Association of University Women Fellowship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
FYSEM-UA 900.008
The Idea of Human Rights
Fall 2021
Instructor: Sonali Thakkar
Tuesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Philosophical and Political Thought
This course investigates the historical and contemporary cultural significance of human rights, and asks how human rights have been imagined and articulated across a range of texts and historical contexts. We will consider three broad, overlapping questions: First, what are some of the histories of human rights? Are human rights a uniquely postwar and contemporary phenomenon, or do they have a longer history? If so, how is this history related to pre-20th century revolutionary struggles against monarchical power as well as against colonialism, racism, and slavery? Second, what are some of the genres of human rights? How have human rights been articulated through declarations and conventions; and how have human rights violations been represented—and perhaps repaired, in part—through practices of testimony, witnessing, and narrative? Third, what are some of the central political problems or preoccupations that the postwar human rights regime has sought to manage, or out of which it has emerged? How have activists, scholars, and cultural critics of human rights understood problems of statelessness, the enduring legacies of colonialism, and the relationship between the universalism of human rights and cultural difference or particularism?
To answer these questions, we will pay particular attention to the early postwar period, which produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other crucial legal and cultural documents in an era of racial violence, genocide, and widespread statelessness. We will also consider the historical antecedents of this moment, as well as cultural artifacts that emerge from contemporary human rights activism and representation. We will examine everything from charters, declarations, conventions, petitions, and manifestos, to novels, memoirs, film, reportage, poetry, and philosophy. We will draw on the disciplinary resources of cultural history, literary criticism, and political theory, and—pandemic permitting—we will make use of some of NYC’s archival and institutional resources in the field of human rights.
SONALI THAKKAR is Assistant Professor of English at New York University. She is new to NYU, arriving here in fall 2021 after several years on the faculty at the University of Chicago. She researches and teaches in the areas of postcolonial literature and theory, critical race studies, Jewish studies, gender and sexuality studies, and human rights. Her current book project is titled The Reeducation of Race: Jewishness and Plasticity in Postcolonial Politics, and tells the story of how postwar attempts to redefine race in the aftermath of the Holocaust made ideas about Jewishness and Jewish difference central to anticolonial and postcolonial thought. Her writing has appeared in Social Text, the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, WSQ, the Cambridge History of World Literature, and other venues. At the University of Chicago, she helped develop a new core curriculum in human rights for the College; she was also the recipient of the Neubauer Faculty Development Fellowship, for excellence in teaching.
FYSEM-UA 900.010
Illicit Drugs in the Americas
Fall 2021
Instructor: Brittany Edmoundsen
Wednesday, 8:00-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics
Note: conflicts with General Chemistry I Lecture (MW 8:00-9:15 a.m.).
This course explores the history of the drug trade, drug control, and drug cultures in the Americas from the late nineteenth century to the present. It aims not only to contextualize the drug wars of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but also to explore alternative historical attitudes and approaches toward drugs. Thinking about the history of drugs on a hemispheric scale opens up a comparative framework, making it possible to consider how the status of a drug as licit or illicit changed over time and in different national and regional contexts. More significantly, a hemispheric scale allows us to think about political, economic, and cultural connections across national borders, tracing how illicit drugs, ideas regarding drugs (and drug control), and influence circulated throughout the Americas.
BRITTANY EDMOUNDSON is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in the Department of History. She specializes in the history of the United States and Latin America in the twentieth century, and her current research examines the ideologies and mechanisms of U.S. foreign intervention through a study of U.S. policies to eradicate coca leaf production in Bolivia during the late cold war period. Her broader research and teaching interests include empire and foreign relations, political economy, the history of policing and militarization, Indigenous and Native American history, environmental history, and transnational and global history. She received her PhD in History at NYU and her BA in History at Columbia University.
FYSEM-UA 503
In Search of Lost Time
Fall 2021
Instructor: Marcelle Clements
Wednesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Literature through the Ages
Note: This intensive course requires a minimum of 350 pages of reading a week.
We read Marcel Proust (in translation) as he should be read: hedonistically—with respect and admiration but also with delectation. At about 4,000 pages, In Search of Lost Time is one of literature’s most challenging and pleasurable reads, still unparalleled in how it combines finesse and wit with raw emotion, self-examination with social history and a scathing portrait of the French beau monde at the outset of modernity. Although Proust (1871–1922) is often cited as France’s greatest novelist, many readers never move past the first fifty pages of his work, reading the same gorgeous sentences again and again. However, as its architecture cannot be appreciated until it has been read once in its entirety, we move at a brisk pace through all six volumes. When we read the final volume, we begin to understand the extraordinarily intimate and imaginative relationship Proust sustains with his reader, and, most importantly, how the vast structure of In Search of Lost Time reveals the intertwining of life and art to create literature. In-class creative writing exercises and wide-ranging class discussion are designed to assist with the reading and to articulate an expressive, personal response.
MARCELLE CLEMENTS is a novelist, essayist, and journalist. Her fourth and most recent book is a novel, Midsummer. She has written prizewinning essays and articles for numerous publications, including the New York Times, Esquire, Elle, and Rolling Stone. Since 1999, she has taught a seminar each fall on Proust's In Search of Lost Time at NYU's College of Arts and Science, where she is a Collegiate Professor. Each spring, she leads an Advanced Fiction Workshop and an Advanced Non-Fiction Workshop in the Creative Writing Department. She is a recipient of NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award.
FYSEM-UA 722
Italy and North America: Contact, Conflict, and Exchange
Fall 2021
Instructor: Rachel Love
Wednesday, 4:55 p.m.-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
We consider how Italy’s diaspora has affected its conception of itself and examine five hundred years of North America as artistic inspiration, as cultural and political influence, and even as a source of existential anxiety. For example, how did European discovery of a “new” continent impact Renaissance authors like Ariosto and Tasso and destabilize the center of their known world? How did American literature like Hemingway and Steinbeck offer twentieth-century Italian writers new possibilities of literary expression and political resistance? We consider literature of immigration and travel in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as Italians documented their journeys to North America (and New York City) in poetry and prose. We investigate how Fascism, war and recovery—as well as the physical presence of American soldiers on Italian soil—shifted the political and social stakes of this relationship. Finally, we explore American cultural influence throughout the increasingly globalized 20th century, as US models permeated Italian politics, film, television, music, and food, and pop singers teased teenagers who tried to “fa’ l’americano.” Throughout, we take advantage of our location in New York City to explore aspects of cultural exchange within our urban environment, including an excursion to the Italian American Museum and Little Italy.
RACHEL E. LOVE earned her PhD from NYU in Italian Studies in May 2018. Her essays on 20th-century Italian politics and culture have appeared in the journals Popular Music, Modern Italy, and Interventions. Her current book project, Songbook for a Revolution: The Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano, Popular Culture, and the Left in 1960s Italy, analyzes the political use of folk music through the history of a leftist musical collective, the Nuovo Canzoniere Italiano (NCI). Her interdisciplinary research interests move between contemporary Italian history and literature, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and oral history. Most mornings, she can be found riding her bike across the Manhattan Bridge.
FYSEM-UA 384
Journalism of War, Revolution, Genocide, and Human Rights
Fall 2021
Instructor: Susie Linfield
Wednesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics
This seminar will focus on some of the extraordinary political events that made, and changed, the political (and moral) realities of the past century, and that created the world that we now inhabit. Throughout the term we will return to certain questions, including the changing nature of violence and the emergence of disputed concepts such as "crimes against humanity" and "human rights." We'll consider the ways in which "the face of war" in the 20th century (and early 21st) has changed—and the ways in which the journalism that described those wars also changed. We will start with the Russian Revolution and the Spanish Civil War and then study the journalism of, among other events, the Holocaust, the Iranian Revolution, the fall of Communism, the genocide in Rwanda, the war in Bosnia, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, 9/11, and the Arab Spring.
SUSIE LINFIELD is Associate Professor at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute and writes about the intersection of culture and politics for a wide array of publications. Recent essays have addressed Syrian torture photographs (the New York Times), war photography (Aperture and The Nation), the Zionist Left in Israel (the Boston Review), and an anti-Vietnam War classic (Bookforum). Professor Linfield’s book The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism. Prior to joining the NYU faculty, Professor Linfield was the editor in chief of American Film, the deputy editor of the Village Voice, and the arts editor of the Washington Post; she also spent six years as a critic for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. She serves on the editorial boards of Dissent and Photography and Culture, and is a member of the New York Institute of the Humanities. Professor Linfield received her B.A. from Oberlin College, where she studied American History, and her M.A. in Journalism from NYU (minor: Documentary Film). From its founding in 1995 until 2014, Professor Linfield was instrumental in building NYU’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program, first as Associate Director and then as Director.
FYSEM-UA 772
The Journey of Journalism
Fall 2021
Instructor: Charles J. Glasser Jr.
Wednesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics
This course is more than a survey of important journalism of the twentieth century. Through intensive reading and discussion, we will explore both how significant historical events affected journalism and how journalism helped shape those events. If journalism is truly “the first draft of history,” then looking at significant cultural and political moments through the eyes of contemporaneous journalism yields new insight on who we are as a nation—for better or worse. We examine such historical events and movements as the robber barons of the Gilded Age and their antagonists the Muckrakers; the early Anarchist and labor movements; the coverage of the World Wars and government censorship; the role of the press in the civil rights movement; and the golden age of investigative journalism. We will read and discuss the work of a wide range of media notables, including Ida Tarbell, Jacob Riis, H. L. Mencken, Walter Winchell, Edward R. Murrow, Sy Hirsch, Woodward and Bernstein, Tom Wolfe, Matt Taibbi, Amanda Bennett, Judith Miller, and Glenn Greenwald.
CHARLES J. GLASSER JR. is a former journalist and covered spot news and combat photojournalism in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the late 1970s and 80s. He spent several years as a copy editor at Time Inc. and then studied first amendment law at the New York University School of Law. After earning his JD he started his legal career at NBC News, and then moved on to several law firms representing Gannett, the New York Post, the Portland Press-Herald, and other regional and national newspapers and publishers. He served as the founding global media counsel of Bloomberg News for more than a dozen years and is the author of The International Libel and Privacy Handbook. In addition, he appears frequently as an expert on free speech and media law in a variety of news outlets and writes about media for Reuters, the Washington Examiner, and several not-for-profit free-speech organizations. He is also a regular contributor on media ethics for The Daily Caller.
FYSEM-UA 456
Laboratories for Democracy: Making American Cities Better
Fall 2021
Instructor: Eric Gioia
Thursday, 4:55–7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 4:55-6:10 p.m.
Theme: The City: Longstanding Challenges and Dynamic Change
This course examines the intersection of ideas, politics, and action. We study best practices from around the country (and the world), evaluate their effectiveness, and determine whether and how successful programs can be replicated. The seminar asks students to not only think critically about issues of public policy, but also to think anew about the role they play in shaping it. Cities, states, and municipalities serve as what Justice Brandeis called “little laboratories for democracy”—where ideas flourish and problems get solved. From fighting crime in the streets of New York City, to banning smoking in bars and restaurants, to making the power grid more efficient, to encouraging the arts and culture in urban environments, innovations in American cities have spread across the globe. Topics for student projects are drawn from current issues and problems facing decision-makers and elected officials in America today.
ERIC GIOIA is an attorney with extensive experience in business, law, and government. He joined J.P. Morgan in January 2010 after serving for eight years on the New York City Council. Prior to serving on City Council, he practiced law at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, and served in the White House under President Bill Clinton. Professor Gioia holds a BA from New York University and a JD from Georgetown University Law Center.
FYSEM-UA 210
Language and Reality in Postclassical Science and Postmodern Literature
Fall 2021
Instructor: Friedrich Ulfers
Tuesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Philosophical and Political Thought
This seminar explores the possibility that there exists a common ground between the so-called two cultures of science and the humanities. It posits the hypothesis of a correlation between postclassical science (e.g., quantum theory) and “postmodern” literature and philosophy. Among the key notions examined are Werner Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” Niels Bohr’s “principle of complementarity,” and Jacques Derrida’s notion of “undecidability” in deconstructive theory. The discussion of these theories and their implications for literary works revolves around their effect on classical logic, the referential function of language, and the traditional goal of a complete explanation or description of reality. The seminar also asks whether this paradigm change leads to a form of posthumanism/transhumanism. Readings include works of Borges, Kundera, Pirsig, Pynchon, and Virginia Woolf, among others, and texts on modern scientific theories.
FRIEDRICH ULFERS is Associate Professor of German at New York University. He has received NYU’s Distinguished Teaching Medal and Great Teacher Award, and has twice won the College of Arts and Science Golden Dozen Award for Excellence in Teaching. In 2013 he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (The Federal Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) for his support of transatlantic cultural relations. His specific teaching and research interests are German Romanticism and 19th and 20th century German literature (with specific emphasis on Nietzsche and Kafka). He is also affiliated with the European Graduate School in Switzerland, where he offers an intensive summer seminar on Nietzsche and gives a variety of lectures; from 2006 to 2009 he was Dean of the Media and Communications Division of the School. Professor Ulfers has published extensively, with a recent focus on Nietzsche.
FYSEM-UA 900.002
Language Policy and Linguistic Human rights in Education
Fall 2021
Instructor: Gillian Gallagher
Monday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues
Note: conflicts with Introductory Experimental Physics I (M 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.).
This seminar centers on the concept of linguistic human rights, in the context of educational policy and design. We'll begin with an overview of human rights theory and its intersection with language, looking at how language is implicated in both group and individual identity. Bilingual education models in the United States are then reviewed through summary articles, case studies and longitudinal, large-scale evaluative studies of outcomes, with a critical eye on the available metrics and discourse around educational 'success'. The course then shifts to language practices in and around schools through a more ethnographic approach, with detailed descriptions of specific communities and/or individuals. The last section of the seminar will focus specifically on indigenous populations in North and South America. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed on the connection between a community's history, group identity, and language use practices with the goals of educational structures.
GILLIAN GALLAGHER is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, where she has been since 2010. As a phonologist and cognitive scientist, her research focuses on the sound systems of human languages and seeks to understand how humans extract systematic generalizations from messy data. Gallagher's interest in bilingual education and language policy has grown out of years working with speakers of Quechua, an indigenous language of Bolivia, and observing the public controversies and personal reactions to standardization and language maintenance movements.
FYSEM-UA 306
Latin America at the Start of the Twenty-First Century: Coming of Age or Continuing Chaos?
Fall 2021
Instructor: Jorge G. Castañeda
Monday, 9:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics
Note: conflicts with Introductory Experimental Physics I (M 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.).
This seminar focuses on Latin America’s longstanding problems and possible solutions to them. It takes up such topics as the absence of orderly, peaceful, and steady democratic governance following independence from colonial rule, and the consolidation of representative democracy today; the slowdown of economic growth in the last 20 years and prospects for a new economic takeoff; the phenomenon of widespread violence at a time of growing respect for human rights; and how the traditional weakness of civil society is being overcome. For each topic, there are readings dealing with its political, economic, and cultural dimensions in both past and present.
JORGE D. CASTAÑEDA is a renowned public intellectual, political scientist, and prolific writer, with an interest in Mexican and Latin American politics, comparative politics and US-Mexican and U.S.-Latin American relations. He was Foreign Minister of Mexico from 2000 to 2003. He taught at Mexico’s National Autonomous University (UNAM), at Princeton University, and the University of California, Berkeley, and at NYU. Castañeda was a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (1985-87) and a John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Grant Recipient (1989-1991). He is the author of, among other books, Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War; Compañero: The Life and Death of Che Guevara; Perpetuating Power; Ex-Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants; Leftovers: Tales of the Latin American Left (with Marco Morales), and most recently America Through Foreign Eyes. He is a regular commentator for CNN and an occasional writer of Guest Essays at The New York Times.
FYSEM-UA 799
Mapping the Literary Mind of New York City
Fall 2021
Instructor: Anton Borst
Monday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: The City: Longstanding Challenges and Dynamic Change
New York City has inspired many great writers, past and present. In this course, we’ll explore some of their works, as well as the actual locations they map, to find our own inspiration as readers, writers, and inhabitants of the city. We’ll think about the layers of history and imagination that overlay the streets, parks, and neighborhoods around NYU and across Manhattan. How has the city’s contours and currents, diversity and density, shaped the way authors have experienced and imagined life? Engaged discussion, frequent writing, and field excursions will focus our critical appraisal of the city and its texts. The culminating project of the semester will ask you to plot your most meaningful engagements on a digital map, as part of a collaborative class essay. We’ll be reading a selection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, from the 19th century to the present day.
ANTON BORST is an instructional consultant with the Teaching and Learning with Technology group at New York University, where he conducts workshops and consultations on best teaching practices, writing across the curriculum, and digital pedagogy. He received his Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and has taught literature and writing at Hunter College, Baruch College, and Pace University. His research and teaching have focused on 19th-century American literature, Romanticism, and creative nonfiction. He is co-author of The Craft of College Teaching: A Practical Guide and co-editor of Critical Reading Across the Curriculum, Volumes 1 and 2.
FYSEM-UA 810
Mechanical Minds in History and Philosophy
Fall 2021
Instructor: Joseph Lemelin
Monday and Wednesday, 8:00-9:15 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Philosophical and Political Thought
Note: conflicts with General Chemistry I Lecture (MW 8:00-9:15 a.m.).
The idea that mental processes are mechanical is pervasive in contemporary thinking about what minds are and how they work, serving as a guiding principle behind artificial intelligence research. How did this notion arise and what assumptions underlie it? What past debates are embedded in present conceptions of the mechanical mind? This course tracks the emergence of analogies between minds and machines in early modern philosophy and science, and explores artificial intelligence’s philosophical lineage. To this end, we will examine the work of Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, G. W. Leibniz, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing, among others, together with historical investigations of the machines that inspired their thinking.
JOSEPH LEMELIN’S work centers on the philosophical history of the distinction between the natural and the artificial. He earned a doctorate in philosophy from The New School for Social Research, writing on the emergence of the concepts of nature and artifice in Aristotle’s physics. Joseph’s current research addresses ways that contemporary technologies such as artificial intelligence transform self-understanding, and his work draws from the philosophy of technology, philosophy of mind, and critical theory. He has been the Onassis Lecturer at the New School for Social Research and Humanities and a Science Postdoctoral Researcher at NYU’s Center for Data Science. In addition, Joseph has taught philosophy and literary studies at Eugene Lang College and Parsons School of Design, and was a Mellon fellow at the Graduate Institute for Design, Ethnography, and Social Thought.
FYSEM-UA 545
Media and Communication in the Medieval World
Fall 2021
Instructor: Brigitte Bedos-Rezak
Thursday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
Medieval tools of communication and methods of transportation circulated news, rumors, propaganda, and revolutionary ideas; permitted contact with the supernatural; equipped governments with bureaucratic powers of local subjugation and global interaction; and enabled people to travel far away from their homes on pilgrimages, diplomatic missions, entertainment tours (jongleurs, troubadours), commercial ventures, explorations, and conquests. With a focus on Western Europe, we will consider modes and means of communication: languages, speech and writing, gestures, fashions, rituals, images, artifacts, and maps. Assessing the breadth of medieval mobility will elucidate a pre-modern world system that extended across Eurasia, including the Mongol Empire, the Middle East, and China. Weekly readings will be presented by one student and then discussed by all. A research paper will be prepared through several intermediary shorter essays, each dealing with material relevant to the paper’s topic.
BRIGITTE M. BEDOS-REZAK is Professor of History at NYU. Trained in France at the Sorbonne and at the Ecole nationale des Chartes (Paris), her teaching and research interests cover medieval Europe, in particular its urban life and secular elites. She is particularly interested in the ways that increasingly material communicative practices shaped concepts of identity and forms of governance. Her publications include Les sceaux de villes; When Ego Was Imago: Signs of Identity in the Middle Ages; “Semiotic Anthropology: The Twelfth-Century Experiment,” in European Transformations 950-1200, T. Noble and J. Van Engen, eds.; “Seals and Stars: Law, Magic, and the Economy of Rulership (France, 13th-14th Centuries),” in Seals and their Context in the Middle Ages, P. Schofield, ed.; and “The Ambiguity of Representation. Semiotic Roots of Political Consent in Capetian France,” in The Capetian Century, 1214-1314, W.C. Jordan and J. Phillips, eds.
FYSEM-UA 312
Memoirs and Diaries in Modern European Jewish History
Fall 2021
Instructor: Marion Kaplan
Tuesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Genres of Writing
This seminar uses memoirs, diaries, and letters to analyze modern Jewish history. These sources, sometimes called ego-documents, offer an abundance of detail about the political, economic, social, and religious worlds of individuals. They provide valuable, often rare, glimpses into the motivations and expectations of a minority group regarding those who control or oppress them. Moreover, these ego-documents reveal often concealed thoughts and emotions. They depict the full human being as well as her or his attitudes and behaviors within the family, friendship networks, and the religious community. These documents also allow us to delve into relations between parents and children, spouses, generations, neighbors, and friends. Finally, memoirs, diaries, and letters offer us clues as to how people thought they should write about their lives and the ways they fashioned their own images in relation (or opposition) to their societies. Our readings begin with one of the earliest memoirs we have, written by a seventeenth-century rabbi, and continue through the Holocaust and postwar generations. They include the autobiography of Glückl of Hameln, a businesswoman and widow who was born circa 1646; Pauline Wengeroff, a traditional Jewish woman in nineteenth-century Russia; and twentieth-century diaries and memoirs.
MARION KAPLAN is the Skirball Professor of Modern Jewish History at NYU. She is a three-time National Jewish Book Award winner for The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family and Identity in Imperial Germany; Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany; and Gender and Jewish History (with Deborah Dash Moore), as well as a finalist for Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua. Her other monographs include The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany and (as editor) Jewish Daily Life in Germany, 1618-1945. She has edited several other books on German-Jewish and women’s history and has taught courses on German-Jewish history, European women’s history, and both German and European history, as well as European Jewish history and Jewish women’s history. Her newest book, Hitler’s Jewish Refugees: Hope and Anxiety in Portugal, 1940-45 was published in 2020.
FYSEM-UA 900.005
A Millennium Miracle: The Roman Empire
Fall 2021
Instructor: Katherine Welch
Thursday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
Note: conflicts with PhysicsI/ II Lecture (TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.).
At its greatest, the Roman Empire extended from Scotland to Syria and from the Black Sea to Morocco. Rome exercised power over this area for many, many centuries, with the result that Roman art and architecture exerted a fundamental influence on the art of later art cultures within this vast geographical sphere. The course examines the art and architecture produced in lands under Roman rule, analyzing it in terms of medium and category (building, statuary, relief, wall painting); social level of production (emperor, elite, middle and lower classes); and display context (public, private, funerary). Students consider questions of quality, as well as issues of originality in Roman art and of dialogue with authoritative Greek artistic models. Utilizing practical and theoretical methods, students learn to 'read' Roman monuments, in terms of iconography, style, and the different levels of meaning (ancient and modern) that the works of art may have carried. Finally, we shall address the following: what was the ‘secret’ of the Roman Empire’s longevity? The course will involve a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
KATHERINE E. WELCH is Associate Professor of Fine Arts at NYU Institute of Fine Arts. Her scholarly research interests lie in the ancient Mediterranean, specializing in the pagan Roman Empire, which lasted nearly one thousand years. She is an art historian with an ardor and long-standing dedication to archaeology; art history and archaeology are inextricable in Greek-Roman studies. She teaches art and archaeology of the Roman Republican and Imperial periods (particularly in Rome itself, Bay of Naples, Italy, Turkey, Greece, Southern France, Syria, and Spain), as well as Hellenistic Greek art (late 4th century BCE to late 1st century BC). As a youth, having majored in Science in university, preparing to apply to medical school, she switched to Classical literature and received a B.A. in Classics.
FYSEM-UA 564
Modern Poetry: Craft and Revolution
Fall 2021
Instructor: Matthew Rohrer
Wednesday, 8:00-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 12:30-1:45 p..m.
Theme: Genres of Writing
Note: conflicts with Principles of Biology I Lecture (MW 9:30-10:45 a.m.), General Chemistry I Lecture (MW 8:00-9:15 a.m.), and PhysicsI/ II Lecture (TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.).
This course thrusts students headlong into the dark cobwebby interiors of the modern poem. We’ll look closely at how modern poems became modern, examining several revolutions as we think about what poems are—beginning in England in 1798, coming to Walt Whitman’s and Emily Dickinson’s America in the 1850s, stopping in Harlem in the 1920s, and ending up in today’s online world. We’ll consider how modern poems are actually put together, considering such elemental concerns as image, voice, structure, etc. And we’ll also write our own poems, sometimes with these examples as our models. Students will leave this course with a deeper understanding of the lineage of the modern poem and what makes the modern poem go. And, thanks to the generous and critical attentions of the workshop, students will come to the same understanding of their own work.
MATTHEW ROHRER is Clinical Professor in the Creative Writing Program at NYU, where he teaches both undergraduate and graduate students. He is the author of nine books of poetry, was a founder of Fence Magazine and Fence Books, and has participated in residencies and performances at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC) and the Henry Museum (Seattle). His poems have been widely anthologized, and he has appeared on NPR’s All Things Considered and The Next Big Thing.
FYSEM-UA 732
Nature vs. Nurture: The Neurobiology of Individuality
Fall 2021
Instructor: Margarita Kaplow
Wednesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Required Writing the Essay: Science and Society: Spring 2022 Monday and Wednesday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Cognitive and Neural Science
Note: conflicts with PhysicsI/ II Lecture (TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.).
Note: if you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this paired seminar and EXPOS-UA 1 course.
Psychologists, biologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists have historically questioned the impact of heredity vs. the environment in shaping the uniqueness of individuals. Modern scientists have arrived at a consensus whereby both genes and experience contribute to distinct behaviors. Indeed, “nature” and “nurture” are not isolated components. Understanding the constant and complex interaction between the two is the key to unlocking the mysteries of animal and human behaviors. We examine the nature vs. nurture debate over time by studying Darwin and Lamarck, as well as novel genetic tools that explore the interaction between DNA and the environment and papers treating the topic of genes and behavior. Group assignments will involve case studies that require students to gather evidence, propose solutions, or offer possible explanations for specific intrinsic vs. extrinsic situations. Students will also write research papers on topics and in a style accessible to the general public. Examples of paper topics include: inheriting trauma; the genetics of neurological disorders; the microbiome and your brain; and the science of addiction.
MARGARITA KAPLOW is Clinical Associate Professor at NYU’s Center for Neural Science. Her research interests focus on studying the cellular and molecular programs that instruct the development and assembly of chemosensory circuits. Her work has appeared in Genetics, the Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Neurogenetics, and eLife. She is also investigating the relationship between art and science and has implemented such pedagogical methods as Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics (STEAM) and Consider, Read, Elucidate the hypotheses/interpret the data, and Think of the next Experiment (CREATE) in the undergraduate classroom. Before coming to NYU, she was a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia University and also taught at the City College of New York. She has received an NIH MBRS graduate fellowship, the Julius Axelrod Award, and the CUNY Graduate Center Science Fellowship.
FYSEM-UA 476
Political Theater
Fall 2021
Instructor: Eric Dickson
Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Philosophical and Political Thought
Note: conflicts with Introductory Experimental Physics I (M 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.).
This interdisciplinary seminar offers a survey of political theater from the ancient Greeks to the present. How have dramatic depictions of politics changed over time? In what ways have political plays been used to advance political agendas, both by the powerful and by dissidents and protest movements? To what extent can we understand political speeches and political campaigns as essentially theatrical productions? In a typical week, students will read one full-length play, accompanied by appropriate readings from political science or social psychology. Through these readings, writing assignments, and class discussion, we address the development of different dramatic techniques and forms throughout the history of theater; the co-evolving relationship between politically-themed spectacles and changing ideas about citizenship and political legitimacy; and the political psychology of speeches and campaign techniques.
ERIC S. DICKSON is Associate Professor of Politics and a faculty affiliate in the Department of Psychology. His research interests include political communication, election campaigning, political leadership, and identities in politics. His work, which uses both game theory and social-scientific experiments, focuses on the interface between political strategy and political psychology. He is also an installation artist with an extensive background in theater.
FYSEM-UA 900.007
Shaped by Human Hands: Studying the Ancient World through Past Technologies
Fall 2021
Instructor: Catherine Klesner
Tuesday and Thursday, 8:00-9:15 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
Note: conflicts with spring General Chemistry I Lecture (TR 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
Many of the important questions in archaeology and history deal with the study of technology. Who made the objects found in archaeological sites, and what materials did ancient craftspeople use to make them? Where did they find these raw materials? How did they produce pottery, stone tools, and weapons, and how did they share that technological knowledge within and between their communities? Where did they trade raw materials and finished products, and what was their assigned value? In this seminar, we will attempt to answer those questions through the study of common classes of artifacts found in the archaeological record: lithics, ceramics, and metals. In the process, we will cover the theory of technology, the development and evolution of complex technologies, and learn how reconstructing technologies can inform us about cultural change and exchange in the ancient world. We will discuss the social, cultural, economic, and functional reasons for the development and adoption of new technologies through the discussion of distinct artifact classes and through overviews of important case studies.
CATHERINE KLESNER is a Visiting Assistant Professor at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World. Her research focuses on reverse engineering ancient ceramic technology, and how technological knowledge was transmitted, adopted, and adapted in the past. Having a background in both the sciences and social sciences, she approaches the study of archaeology from the perspective of archaeological science, and studies artifacts using modern, analytical instrumentation. She has studied a wide variety of materials including ceramics, lithics, and rock art from across the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Her current work examines low-fired, lead glazed pottery from Central Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean. She received her Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Arizona, and her B.A. from Grinnell College.
FYSEM-UA 900.003
Socialist Culture
Fall 2021
Instructor: Rossen Djagalov
Monday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Philosophical and Political Thought
Note: conflicts with spring General Chemistry I Lecture (TR 9:30-10:45 a.m.) and Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (R 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
The left, as a political concept, originated only during the French Revolution, over two centuries ago. Leftist (as opposed to working people’s) culture is even more recent. In this course, we will examine its evolution over the last 150 years, focusing on some of the best-known leftist imaginative works in a variety of cultural forms: the original Communist Manifesto and numerous later manifestoes; the novels of Emile Zola and Maxim Gorky; the revolutionary poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky and Nazim Hikmet; the plays of Bertolt Brecht and the Living Theater; the songs of Hanns Eisler, Pete Seeger, and Victor Jara; the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Patricio Guzman, Michael Moore, and Ken Loach. The diverse geographies where these texts originated—Western Europe and North America, the Soviet Union and the Third-World project—will help us think of the larger question of socialist internationalism, of how these cultural forms travelled across the globe, how they were translated, and received far away from their birthplace. In each case, we will place the work in the dual context of the history of the left and contemporary aesthetic practices.
ROSSEN DJAGALOV is an Assistant Professor of Russian at New York University. His interests lie in socialist culture globally and, more specifically, in the linkages between cultural producers and audiences in the USSR and abroad. His first book, From Internationalism to Postcolonialism (2020), reconstructs the Soviet genealogy of postcolonial literature, film, and ultimately, theory. His second book project, The People’s Republic of Letters: Towards a Media History of Twentieth-Century Socialist Internationalism, examines the relationship between the political left and the different media (proletarian novel, political theater, singer-songwriter performance, political documentary film) that at different times played a major role in connecting its publics globally. He is a member of the editorial collective of LeftEast.
FYSEM-UA 779
Socrates and His Critics
Fall 2021
Instructor: Vincent Renzi
Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Literature through the Ages
Note: conflicts with Introductory Experimental Physics I (M 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.).
That Socrates remains one of the most—if not the most—influential figure in the Western tradition is due in large part to the emergence in the years following his death of a new literary genre, the Socratic discourse, and the output especially of the two most prominent Socratic authors, Plato and Xenophon. Extending in the next generation through the distinctive rhetoric of Diogenes of Sinope, and through him into the figures of the Cynic philosopher and the Stoic sage, Socrates provides the literary precursor of a character tried and executed for idiosyncratic political and religious views four centuries before the presumed time of Jesus. Already in his own lifetime, Socrates’ literary influence is apparent in Aristophanes and other writers of comedies. In modernity, the image of Socrates both fascinates and repels the attention, notably of Nietzsche. Apart from the rough outlines of his biography, it is all but impossible to recover any sense of the “historical Socrates”; at the same time we must ask whether Socrates’ influence is not the result of his intellectual contributions, but rather an artifact of the doxography itself. Even though he did actually live, isn’t what we have of him really just literary fiction?
VINCENT RENZI is Clinical Professor in the Foundations of Contemporary Culture (FCC) and of Classics, and is also Director of the Foundations of Contemporary Culture in the College Core Curriculum. A scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, he also has interests in arts and aesthetics and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy. He is a recipient of the College's Golden Dozen Award for Teaching Excellence.
FYSEM-UA 218
Supreme Court and the Religion Clauses: Religion and State in America
Fall 2021
Instructor: John Sexton
Tuesday, 6:00-8:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics
Note: Most students consider the workload for this course very heavy; please do not select this seminar unless you are willing and eager to perform at a high and demanding level.
Should members of the Native American Church be allowed to smoke peyote at religious ceremonies? Can a public high school invite a rabbi to give a benediction and convocation at graduation? Should a state legislator rely on his or her religious convictions in forming a view about the legality of capital punishment or abortion? The course divides these questions into three subject areas: religious liberty; separation of church and state; and the role of religion in public and political life. It focuses on how the Supreme Court has dealt with these areas and, more important, invites students to construct anew a vision of the proper relationship between religion, state, and society in a twenty-first-century liberal constitutional democracy. Most students consider the workload for this course very heavy; please do not select this seminar unless you are willing and eager to perform at a high and demanding level.
JOHN E. SEXTON, President Emeritus of New York University, was the Dean of the NYU Law School from 1988 to 2002 and President of NYU from 2002-2016. He has taught courses on the Constitution and the courts, and has led seminars on the intersection of religion and the law. Before he came to NYU, he served as law clerk for Chief Justice Warren Burger of the US Supreme Court, and has testified frequently before the US Congress. In addition to his law degree, he holds a doctorate in the history of American religion.
FYSEM-UA 9905
Topics: Art in the City: Buenos Aires, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City
Fall 2021
Instructor: Florencia Malbrán
Monday and Wednesday, 9:30-10:45 a.m. (EST)
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: The City: Longstanding Challenges and Dynamic Change
This course will be taught online.
Note: conflicts with Principles of Biology I Lecture (MW 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
This course studies modern and contemporary art and architecture through a strategic focus on the cities of Buenos Aires, New York, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City. We consider key artworks and architectural movements, approaching art history in urban, sociohistorical and contextual terms. Emphasis is placed upon the city as a hub for the production and reception of art. Our speculations on the urban environment will bring up multiple questions that point back to and extend beyond the mere physical structure of the city, discovering arenas of social action. How does art exploit the characteristics of the metropolis? How is art distributed and consumed throughout the dense fabric of the city? We will explore the city art as the context and staging ground for art. Developing comparative perspectives on Buenos Aires, New York, Rio de Janeiro and Mexico City will illuminate the particularities of the places under investigation, albeit with reference to aesthetic trajectories as well as broader technological, economic, and social-political changes. New York is included in our selected network of Latin American cities, acknowledging its critical importance as a center of cultural experimentation where artists (including Latin American artists) share ideas in a global context. The course features lively conversations with invited artists and architects.
FLORENCIA MALBRAN is a faculty member at New York University in Buenos Aires, and was Craig M. Cogut Visiting Professor in Latin American and Caribbean Studies at Brown University in Spring 2017. She holds a Ph.D. from Rosario National University, Argentina, and a M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, New York, where she was a Bruce T. Halle Family Foundation Fellow. Specializing in Latin American art history, contemporary art, curatorial studies, and critical theory, Malbrán has served on the faculties of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in New York City and Universidad de San Andrés in Buenos Aires. Also a curator, she has organized exhibitions in Argentina, the United States, Canada, Brazil, Colombia, and Paraguay. She has been in residence in France, Switzerland, and Spain, and was the Hilla Rebay International Fellow at the Guggenheim Museums in New York, Bilbao, and Venice. She has held curatorial positions at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires and the Pinacoteca do Estado in São Paulo. Her shows have been reviewed in Clarín and La Nación in Argentina, O Globo in Brazil, El Tiempo in Colombia, and Artforum in the United States. Selected catalog writing includes essays on Guillermo Kuitca and on Pablo Siquier for Argentina’s La Nación book series on seminal national artists, on Ernesto Neto for the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, and on Ragnar Kjartansson for the Icelandic Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale.
FYSEM-UA 371
Welcome to College: The Novel
Fall 2021
Instructor: Carol Sternhell
Tuesday, 12:30-3:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Prerequisite: A score of 4 or 5 in AP English Literature (or equivalent international exam) OR permission of the instructor. Note that this seminar requires reading one full book every week.
Note: conflicts with Physics I Lecture (TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.) and Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (M 3:30-4:45 p.m.).
Starting college can be exhilarating—and terrifying. A chance for intellectual enlightenment—or intense loneliness. An escape from a stultifying small town of narrow-minded people—or a riot of alcohol, sex, and drugs. In this class we read a selection of college novels from different historical periods, spanning about 100 years. We discuss these novels from a variety of perspectives: literary, historical, and journalistic. In addition to presenting biographical and historical and cultural reports on at least two of the authors and their novels, students write about their own experiences as first-year students at NYU in several genres, including fiction and nonfiction. Together we explore this important life passage, examining life as we live it. This is a class for people who love to read fiction—we read a full novel every week, and some of them are long—so please don’t sign up for it if that doesn’t sound like fun.
CAROL STERNHELL is Associate Professor of Journalism and a Director of the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute’s Studio 20 graduate program. She created the department’s study away programs in London, Prague, and Accra and was also a founder of the Women’s Studies major (now Gender and Sexuality Studies). She has written extensively about feminism, motherhood, and literature for a variety of publications. Before coming to NYU, she worked as an editor at Newsday, a general assignment reporter for the New York Post, and a freelance magazine writer. She received the College’s Golden Dozen Award for Teaching Excellence in 2005.
FYSEM-UA 474
What is College For?
Fall 2021
Instructor: Trace Jordan
Monday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Theme: First-Generation Cohort
Note: FYSEM-UA 474, What is College For? and FYSEM-UA 806, State of a Country: Writing about Photography Made in the U.S. are strongly recommended for first-generation students. They provide an excellent opportunity to join a close-knit community of your peers who also identify as the first in their families to pursue higher education.
Note: conflicts with Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (M 3:30-4:45 p.m.).
Why did you decide to attend college? To broaden your intellectual horizons and become a more open-minded person? To gain specialized knowledge? To achieve a more successful and financially rewarding career? To make new friends? To become an engaged participant in a democratic society? To satisfy your parents’ plans for your future? Or perhaps some combination of these reasons that you are still figuring out? This seminar examines historical and contemporary discussions about the personal and social goals of higher education and studies issues that have the potential to profoundly transform the college experience in coming years. It also prompts students to be more reflective and purposeful about their own academic choices at NYU. We ask: what is the optimal balance between a “liberal arts” education, usually provided by a core curriculum, and the pursuit of specialized study within a major? How can professors and students cultivate deep learning instead of rote memorization? How is technology impacting education, and what further changes may occur in the future?
TRACE JORDAN is Clinical Professor and Associate Director of the College Core Curriculum. His research interests and publications include the role of science education in a liberal arts curriculum, the use of computer simulations for teaching and learning chemistry, and the impact of interest and motivation on educational engagement and achievement. Professor Jordan is a two-time winner of the College’s Golden Dozen Award for Teaching Excellence.
FYSEM-UA 449
Wiseguys, Spies, and Private Eyes: Heroes and Villains in American Culture, Film, and Literature
Fall 2021
Instructor: Eddy Friedfeld
Thursday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 4:55-6:10 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts
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.
EXPOS-UA 1
Writing the Essay: Science and Society
Note: if you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this course.
Writing the Essay: Science and Society is the foundational writing course, which provides instruction and practice in critical reading, creative thinking, and clear writing. The course stresses exploration, inquiry, reflection, analysis, revision, and collaborative learning. Our section of Writing the Essay will focus on the role of science in the contemporary world. We will learn to read, think, and write critically as we investigate how science, medicine, and technology are used to evaluate, characterize, and politicize elements of human behavior and society—and how social institutions challenge and complicate our behavioral and social norms. We question common conceptions of science and society as separate spheres, as well as examining the many paradoxes therein: how science can be simultaneously progressive and destructive, connecting and isolating, liberating and oppressive. As we progress, you will find that writing is not only a method to communicate ideas but also a process that generates new ones. The ultimate goal: for you to write and communicate confidently, to rely on writing as one of the best tools for developing fresh perspectives and appreciating subtle complexities, and to develop your own unique and more complex understanding of science, medicine, and technology.
EXPOS.UA 1.001
Fall 2021
Instructor: Joseph Califf
Tuesday and Thursday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 11:00 a.m. -12:15 p.m.
Note: conflicts with Physics I Lecture (TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.).
EXPOS.UA 1.002
Fall 2021
Instructor: Noelle Mole Liston
Monday and Wednesday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 11:00 a.m. -12:15 p.m.
EXPOS.UA 1.006
Fall 2021
Instructor: Matthew McClelland
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 11:00 a.m. -12:15 p.m.
EXPOS.UA 1.007
Fall 2021
Instructor: Joseph Califf
Tuesday and Thursday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 11:00 a.m. -12:15 p.m.
FYSEM-UA 741
Staging Power: Political Ceremonies and Pageantry
Spring 2022
Instructor: Benoît Bolduc
Wednesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Participants in this seminar will investigate how displays of lavish ceremonies and pageantry have been used in history to legitimize political power. Sessions will focus on a series of political figures from the Western tradition such as Caesar, Charlemagne, Elizabeth I, Louis XIV, and Napoleon. Students will be encouraged to research political figures from other traditions as well as more recent ceremonial practices. Our main goal will be to deepen our understanding of the role artists and writers have played in the fabrication of political leaders. The reading list will include works of political theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and fiction. Emphasis will be put on the mediation of the events through monuments, images, print, and audio-visual recordings.
Professor BENOÎT BOLDUC teaches in the Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture and is the Faculty Director of Honors for the College of Arts and Science. A scholar of early modern literature, visual culture, music, and performance, he has published extensively on French and Italian theatre, opera and court festivals. His latest book, La Fête imprimée: Spectacles et cérémonies politiques (1549-1662), is the first comprehensive study of early-modern illustrated fête books. It shows how these carefully crafted printed objects shaped enduring cultural and historical narratives while transforming their readers into ideal spectators.
FYSEM-UA 771
The Art of Doing Nothing in Literature and Film
Spring 2022
Instructor: Michael Krimper
Meeting time: Tuesday & Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 3:30-4:45 p.m. (Fall), Tuesday, 8:00-9:15 a.m. (Spring)
Theme: Literature Through the Ages
What would it take to stop working? To refuse work? Give it up? To do something else, besides productive activity and labor, or nothing at all? And how might doing nothing introduce radically different senses of freedom than what we’re used to? In this seminar, we’ll think about some of the ways that modern literature and film reflect on the art of doing nothing, frequently turning the city or its outskirts into a locus for personal and collective struggle, resistance, and transformation. Our aim will be to examine strategies for breaking free from the dominance of work, as illustrated by figures like the slacker, idler, cruiser, fugitive, drifter, ambler, streetwalker, and the so-called flâneur/flâneuse primarily but not exclusively within the urban topographies of New York, Paris, and London from the nineteenth century onward. We will pay special attention to the critical potentialities of unmanaged and wayward lives at the intersection of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender. Throughout we will read fiction and poetry by Baudelaire, Bataille, Beckett, Boyer, Breton, Calle, Delany, Jacobs, Kafka, Melville, Poe, and Woolf; and theoretical work by Barthes, Benjamin, Federici, Hartman, and Weeks. We will also view films by Tsai, Varda, and Chalfant/Silver (namely, the classic hiphop documentary Style Wars).
MICHAEL KRIMPER teaches in the Department of French, Gallatin, and Liberal Studies at New York University, where he received his PhD in Comparative Literature not so long ago. He specializes in francophone and anglophone literature from the nineteenth century to the present, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of aesthetics and politics in transatlantic modernisms. His current book project examines how work becomes a problem across a wide array of literature, art, and philosophy in postwar Europe and the Americas. His articles, reviews, and translations have been published New Literary History, SubStance, the Journal of Italian Philosophy, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among other venues. Before joining NYU, he worked as a music journalist in California.
FYSEM-UA 900.020
The Body in Horror
Spring 2022
Instructor: Andrew Ragni
Meeting time: Wednesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Literature Through the Ages “Horror” derives from the Latin verb horreo, a bristling of hair on the body while paralyzed with revulsion. This etymology underscores the body as the site upon which horror is registered. Texts and films within the horror genre unsettle the body’s integrity through vivid depictions of brutality or disfigurement, but they also raise important questions about the body’s subjection to forms of gendered, racist, and class-based violence: how do texts encode histories of horrific oppression within bodies? How do we interpret and contextualize this “body language” within its representative history, between literature and film? Why is the horror genre an effective vehicle for the transmission of inaccessible and painful knowledges about our collective histories? We explore the dimensions of these questions by reading and viewing international works of hair-raising horror as well as a rich tradition of literary and film criticism. Texts and films include The 120 Days of Sodom (Sade & Pasolini), Frankenstein (Shelley), The Masque of the Red Death (Poe), The Kreutzer Sonata (Tolstoy), Dracula (Stoker & Coppola), Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon), Rosemary’s Baby (Levin & Polanski), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper), Suspiria (Argento & Guadagnino), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman), Candyman (Rose), Horrorism (Cavarero), Hereditary (Aster), and Get Out (Peele).
ANDREW RAGNI is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. He earned his Ph.D. from NYU in Comparative Literature. He researches colonial modernist literature, travel writing, and queer/psychoanalytic theory, and has published in Differences, philoSOPHIA, and Performa. His book project, Encrypted Resistances: Anticolonialism and Psychoanalysis, situates the work of Sigmund Freud and other psychoanalytic thinkers within a nexus of anti-colonial critique generated by proto-queer intellectuals from the early twentieth century.
FYSEM-UA 787
Born, Not Made? (Mis)understanding Genius
Spring 2022
Instructor: Amanda Kotch
Meeting time: Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Philosophical and Political Thought
The concept of “genius” celebrates originality and the advancement of ideas across the arts and sciences (there’s even a grant for it), but it has also been associated with inaccessible material, personal suffering, and perceptions of an unstable mind. This seminar explores genius as a cultural category used to understand knowledge production and artistic achievement from the romantic period to the present. Engaging with a wide range of texts from a variety of genres—philosophical treatises, artists’ notebooks, essays by and about scientists, plays, poems, musical recordings, and more—we’ll trace the ways genius transforms from a category mediating between earthly and spiritual realms into one that celebrates intellectual and creative labor while simultaneously rendering it rare and precarious. Some questions we’ll take up together include: How did “genius” become associated with individual creators in the first place? What is the relationship of genius to intelligence, talent, labor, and perseverance? Does genius have a gender? What stories do we tell about genius, and why is the narrative of the tragic genius, in particular, so persistent? And what is our role as consumers of the work of so-called geniuses?
AMANDA KOTCH is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Expository Writing Program at NYU. She received her PhD in Nineteenth-Century British Literature from Rutgers University, where she also previously taught. She is interested in the relationship between art, death, curiosity, and writing, with an emphasis on literary biography and site-specific narratives (cemeteries, death houses, libraries, museums, artists' studios, theatres, etc.) Her writing has appeared in Studies in English Literature (SEL), Biography, and The Morbid Anatomy Online Journal.
FYSEM-UA 666
Battle of the Sexes: Love, Desire, and War on the Stage and Beyond
Spring 2022
Instructor: Olga Taxidou
Meeting time: Wednesday, 8:00-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Literature Through the Ages
The theme of love is possibly one of the oldest in world literature. This course examines the ways this theme has been manifested on the stage and in poetry, spanning the period from antiquity to today. From the classics onwards what we may today consider as primarily a private expression and activity transpires as deeply embedded in broader historical and political narratives. For example, we examine the constitutive relationships between private desire and public politics. The family unit and all its multiple manifestations acts as a microcosm that mirrors but also challenges dominant power structures. The relationships between the genders, between siblings, and between parents and children all provide a fertile ground that helps to shape our personal subjectivity, but also our civic identity. The seminar looks at the ways great plays and poems have approached the theme of love in both its private and public dimensions, and also examines the formal and aesthetic experiments that resulted from this engagement. Authors covered will include: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Gertrude Stein, Lillian Hellman, Caryl Churchill, and Tony Kushner.
OLGA TAXIDOU is Professor of Drama and Performance Studies at the University of Edinburgh, and since 2015 she has been a Visiting Professor in Hellenic Studies at NYU every spring semester. She works on the relationships between “the ancients and the moderns” and the ways this dialogue has helped shape modernity. She has written extensively on modernist theatre and on theories of tragedy. Her books include The Mask: A Periodical Performance by Edward Gordon Craig; Tragedy, Modernity and Mourning; and Modernism and Performance: Jarry to Brecht. She has co-edited Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents and Post-War Cinema and Modernity. She is Series Editor of Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernism, Drama and Performance. She also writes adaptations of Greek tragedies, some of which have been performed. She is a founding judge of the James Tait Black Drama award, and has served as Edinburgh University’s Festivals coordinator with the Edinburgh International Festival.
FYSEM-UA 777
Beyond Athletics: Sports, Politics and Belonging in Europe and the U.S.
Spring 2022
Instructor: Jasmine Samara
Meeting time: Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Identity and Society
Note: conflicts with Introductory Experimental Physics I (M 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.).
This course examines sports as politics, exploring sports as a site for debating national identity, rights, and citizenship across Europe and the U.S. From Greek NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo to the “multicultural” French and German World Cup soccer teams, athletes find themselves as political symbols at the center of public debates on immigration and multiculturalism, racial justice and gender equity. Sports can be a site for negotiating changing gender norms: for example, the use of sex testing to determine who can compete in gender-segregated competitions shows how ideas about culture and biology intersect with the legal regulation of identity. Sports shape international relations, from Cold War diplomacy to boycotts, in ways that reflect national ideas about gender and race. And in the U.S., athletes have used celebrity status to protest histories of racial injustice. We will examine these cases to explore: How is belonging determined, based on what criteria? How are cultural norms, political systems and ideas about the nation reproduced or challenged through sports? What is the potential, and what are the limits, of sports as a site for rights activism?
JASMINE SAMARA is a Faculty Fellow at New York University's Center for European and Mediterranean Studies. She is a legal scholar and social anthropologist whose work explores debates on law, rights and identity politics in contemporary Europe.
FYSEM-UA 900.015
Busting 14 Myths about the Archaeology of Human Evolution
Spring 2022
Instructor: Justin Pargeter
Meeting time: Tuesday & Thursday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 3:30-4:45 p.m. (Fall), 4:55-6:10 p.m. (Spring)
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
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.
FYSEM-UA 900.032
Cities and Countryside: Past and Present
Spring 2022
Instructor: Mitra Panahipour
Meeting time: Thursday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
This course explores cities and their surrounding hinterlands across different temporal and spatial scales to discuss how the city, as a distinctive form of social organization, became the dominant feature of landscapes. What is the urban-rural dynamic about, how can we compare urban and non-urban landscapes through time? This course provides students with the understanding and skills for addressing environmental, political, and socioeconomic histories and longer-term patterns of human-environment interactions, settlement, resettlement, and abandonment. It also develops necessary skills in spatial understanding. With an interdisciplinary approach - including hands-on training in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other geospatial analysis tools - we will look at archaeological and historical sources and practice computational methods to investigate the transformation of places in their wider natural and built contexts. We examine contemporary as well as historical landscapes from different regions, particularly the Near East, and learn how understanding ancient landscapes can help us address current and future issues such as environmental and climatic change and issues of sustainability. The course combines lectures, weekly readings, class discussions, and some of the sessions will include in-class computer lab activities.
MITRA PANAHIPOUR is an Adjunct Professor at New York University’s College of Arts and Science. Previously, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York University, in 2019-2021. As an anthropological archaeologist, her research focuses on the dynamics of settlement, land use, and social organization across diverse microenvironmental zones in the Near/Middle East. She is particularly interested in interdisciplinary approaches and applies landscapes surveys, geospatial analysis, remote sensing, and environmental and ethnographic data in understanding the longer-term patterns of change.
FYSEM-UA 900.031
Cities on Edge: Capitals, Culture, and City-Worlds in Latin American Fiction, and Film
Spring 2022
Instructor: Ana Dopico
Meeting time: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Identity and Society
Note: conflicts with spring General Chemistry I Lecture (TR 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
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.
FYSEM-UA 805
College Students Studying College
Spring 2022
Instructor: Ethan Youngerman
Meeting time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 12:30-1:45 p.m. (Fall), Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. (Spring)
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues
This seminar will examine student experiences in and outcomes of college; because college is such a multi-faceted area of study, and because the field of Higher Education is an interdisciplinary field, our work will draw not only on education research but also on such disparate traditions as psychology, writing studies, statistics, and documentary filmmaking. Reading and employing both quantitative methods (including survey design and statistical analysis) and qualitative methods (including focus groups, interviews, and document analysis), we will aim to describe true college experiences, while staying deeply attuned to the reality that collegians may have different experiences depending on what identities they hold.
ETHAN YOUNGERMAN is a Clinical Associate Professor in NYU's Expository Writing Program and is also a playwright. He won the CAS Golden Dozen Teaching Award in 2013. Ethan's research interests include integrative learning, composition, and residential learning environments; he's the founding director of the College Students Studying College undergraduate research team, run through NYU's VIP program. His research on undergraduate experiences and outcomes has appeared in AERA Open, Learning Communities Research and Practice, New Directions for Higher Education, and The SAGE Encyclopedia of Higher Education, among others. He's worked on the Assessment of Collegiate Residential Environments and Outcomes, ACREO (formerly the Study of Integrated Living Learning Programs) since its launch and, in that capacity, has contributed to the technical reports for 17 different institutions across the country; he's also involved in residential education through his appointment as a Faculty Fellow in Residence in University Hall. He received his B.A. from Yale, his M.F.A. from NYU Tisch's Department of Dramatic Writing, and his Ed.D. from NYU Steinhardt's Higher Education Program.
FYSEM-UA 714
Crystallization in Life: Stories about Shells, Bones, and Kidney Stones
Spring 2022
Instructor: Zhihua An
Meeting time: Tuesday, 8:00-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 12:30-1:45 p.m. (Fall), Monday, 4:55-6:10 p.m. (Spring)
Theme: Molecules of Material and Living Systems
Prerequisites: a score of 4 or 5 on the Chemistry Advanced Placement exam, and a score of 4 or 5 on either Calculus or Biology AP (or equivalent international credentials).
Note: conflicts with PhysicsI/ II Lecture (TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.) and Introductory Experimental Physics I (M 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.).
This seminar introduces students to the world of biomineralization, the branch of chemistry that deals with crystal formation under the influence of biomolecules. Through readings, lectures, research projects, and assignments, students learn and study the fundamentals of crystal formation, crystal properties, and the structure of crystals surrounding us. We begin with solution chemistry, crystallization theory, and various aspects of the crystallization process in nature and then move on to the specific case studies of the title, with attention to biomolecules (proteins, lipids, etc.) and their roles in controlling the crystallization process. Understanding the biomineralization process in the formation of kidney stones can lead to preventative drug development, which illustrates a practical application of the field in biomedical science. In addition, studying the crystallization process in nature can lead to new bioinspired materials, such as optical fibers.
ZHIHUA AN is Clinical Associate Professor of Chemistry at New York University. Prior to joining NYU, she was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Columbia University, and at New York University. She holds a Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Professor An’s research interests are biomaterials self-assembly, biointerface functionalization and engineering, and pathological biomineralization. Her work has appeared in Science, Journal of the American Chemical Society, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cancer Letters, and more than ten other journals.
FYSEM-UA 900.025
Dance and the Big Apple
Spring 2022
Instructor: Laura Quinton
Meeting time: Wednesday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 4:55-6:10 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts
An introduction to the history of dance and culture in New York City since 1900. Moving from vaudeville in Midtown and Lindy Hop in Harlem to the New York City Ballet, experimental downtown dance, tango milongas, and hip hop, we explore how theatrical and social dance practices have shaped and responded to the life of the city for over a century. We consider how dances in this context express ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and identity, and interrogate how dance operates simultaneously as art, entertainment, and a medium for self-expression, social commentary and activism, and political critique. In class, we analyze and discuss different media, including dance films, images, performance reviews, and interviews with artists. We also attend live performances at venues such as St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, 92nd Street Y, Lincoln Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Harlem Stage, among others. Readings include historical, theoretical, and critical texts on dance and New York. For written assignments, students interpret the dances we study and reflect on how they speak to the city’s history and culture
LAURA QUINTON is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She received her PhD in History from NYU in 2021. Her current research explores the unexpected entanglements of ballet and British state politics from the early twentieth century to the present. Her writing has appeared in The Historical Journal, Twentieth Century British History, and the Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism.
FYSEM-UA 814
Democracy and Science in the Year of the Pandemic
Spring 2022
Instructor: Paul Romer
Meeting time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, Thursday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Law, Justice, and Economics
This seminar explores the complex interactions between science, politics, and our quality of life. Many examinations of these interactions highlight the positive and skip the political by looking at examples where a new scientific insight seems to improve the quality of life, but without any intervention by policymakers or the voters they represent. The events we lived through during 2020 give us a unique opportunity to step back and ask the hard but essential question: How can a society take advantage of scientific expertise without ceding the control that voters have to exert, through the politicians they elect, over the course that the nation will follow?
PAUL ROMER is an economist and policy entrepreneur and co-recipient of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. He has spent his career at the intersection of economics, innovation, technology, and urbanization, working to speed up human progress. He is currently a University Professor at NYU. Paul previously taught at Stanford, and while there, started Aplia, an education technology company he later sold to Thomson Learning. He earned a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and a Doctorate in Economics from the University of Chicago.
FYSEM-UA 783
DNA: From the Double Helix to Nanotechnology
Spring 2022
Instructor: Yoel Ohayon
Meeting time: Tuesday, 8:00-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Molecules of Material and Living Systems
Note: conflicts with Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (M 3:30-4:45 p.m.).
DNA from the basics to some of today's sophisticated applications. We begin with the experiments that first identified DNA as the molecule of heredity and read The Double Helix by James Watson, which gives a lively (and biased) first-person account of the discovery of this crucial building block of life. The seminar then moves on to technical issues and considerations: how does DNA store genetic information, and how does a cell process this information using the genetic code? At the end of the seminar, we build on these foundations and learn about DNA nanotechnology and its many potential applications in science and healthcare.
YOEL OHAYON is a professor in the Department of Chemistry at New York University. He received his B.A. in biochemistry from New York University (2000), his M.Phil. in chemistry from New York University (2008) and Ph.D. in chemistry from New York University (2010). He joined the faculty of New York University in 2011. His research interests include DNA topology and self-assembled 3D DNA crystals.
FYSEM-UA 900.026
Drawing Ecological Thought: Climate Crisis and Graphic Narratives
Spring 2022
Instructor: Christine M. Martínez
Meeting time: Monday & Wednesday, 8:00-9:15 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 12:30-1:45 p.m. (Fall), Monday, 4:55-6:10 p.m. (Spring)
Theme: Environmental Studies
We consider the challenges of narrating contemporary climate and ecological crises while reading and discussing comics that portray these issues, building the skills to read and analytically discuss graphic narratives and, more importantly, think critically about 21st century solutions to climate and ecological crises. We discuss what differentiates comics from other media forms (novels, film, television news reports) and explore the potential of graphic narratives to represent non-human life or ecological phenomena that develop over wide geographies or scales of time. Our transnational corpus reflects the planetary scale of contemporary social and environmental crises, while it foregrounds a number of texts that engage southern European and Latin American thought on sustainability and climate solutions, notable for their critique of global capitalism and advocacy of community-driven alternatives. Some of the most important ecological critiques of capitalist society and economy to emerge from marginalized groups directly threatened by capitalist development and from scientific and activist circles since the 1960s; and texts address climate change, plastics pollution, mass extinctions and climate-provoked wars and migrations, and include the early environmentalist comic book series Slow Death Funnies (USA), Phillipe Squarzioni’s (France) graphic novel Climate Changed, Susie Cagle’s (USA) comics reporting on plastics pollution, Joe Sacco’s (Malta, USA) illustrations of communities marginalized by US American economic development, and Miguel Brieva’s (Spain) vignettes that illustrate the sustainable regeneration of urban communities.
CHRISTINE M. MARTÍNEZ is a Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She earned her Ph.D. from NYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literature. She studies how cultural narratives of consumer society contribute to global ecological devastation and social injustice, with a particular focus on how contemporary southern European artists and communities imagine social alternatives to the unsustainable practices of global capitalism. Her research on socioecological activism and Spanish comics has been published in various book anthologies and in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Her dissertation, Living Finitude in an Age of Growth: Spanish Late Capitalism and its Discontents, studies photographic, cinematic, literary and journalistic critiques of twenty-first century Spanish speculative development. It traces a lack of long-term and ecological vision in such critiques, which limits these critiques of Spanish capitalism from proposing more lasting and desirable social alternatives.
FYSEM-UA 900.017
The Dynamic Teacher: Unconventional Educators in American Culture
Spring 2022
Instructor: Jackie Reitzes
Meeting time: Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 12:30-1:45 p.m. (Fall), Monday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. (Spring)
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues
From Miss Jean Brodie to John Keating, we are fascinated by teachers who break the rules and the students who are activated by them. In reading novels, stories, and plays as well as watching films and TV episodes with big-personality teachers, we’ll ask ourselves the ways in which our education can shift shapes in unexpected ways-- how the influence of a powerful teacher can both create and erode our sense of self, redefine knowledge beyond the typical classroom, and question the limits of how radically we want our education to challenge the core of who we are. Through reading, writing, reflecting, posting, discussing, questioning, and researching, we’ll examine the complicated power dynamics that occur in the space between students and teachers. By investigating the methods of instruction and the implications of what gets passed down, we’ll chart the evolution that transpires as students come to define knowledge for themselves.
JACKIE REITZES is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program. Her short fiction has been published in Epoch, The Nashville Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and The Madison Review. Her essays and book reviews have appeared in ESPN: The Magazine, The Huffington Post, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and elsewhere. She was a 2012 Center for Fiction Emerging Writers Fellow, and she holds an MFA from Cornell University and a BA from the University of Michigan. She is currently at work on a short story collection.
FYSEM-UA 900.030
l Adaptations: Literature, Film and Media Franchise Culture
Spring 2022
Instructor: Priyanjali Sen
Meeting time: Wednesday, 8:00-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 3:30-4:45 p.m. (Fall), Wednesday, 4:55-6:10 p.m. (Spring)
The relationship between literature and film has undergone significant transformations, from the privileged position held by literary classics to the cultural capital of film that enables cinematic versions to capture readers’ imaginations of literary works. Multimedia franchises, by way of television series, videogames, vlogs, and interactive new media, have recast adaptations as transmedia storytelling prioritizing the process of reception and interaction. Taking into consideration adaptation theory, history, and the socio-cultural processes through which adaptations are produced, this course will engage with debates on authorship, artistic originality, and dialogic intertextuality; analyze key concepts and tropes such as appropriation, transmutation, remediation, and transcoding that have informed our understanding of adaptations as cultural artifacts; trace interconnections between texts across national, cultural and historical contexts; and examine adaptation in relation to media franchise culture, which includes media convergence, brand identity, and merchandising. Film include: Throne of Blood, The Birds, The Leopard, Love and Death, Star Trek: episode “Chain of Command,” The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life, The Hunger Games, The Lizzie-Bennet Diaries, and Deadpool.
PRIYANJALI SEN is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She earned her Ph.D. from the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University and was a recipient of the Jay Leyda Award for Academic Excellence (2020). Her current book project, The Literary Poetics of Bengali Cinema (1947-67), demonstrates how the strong relationship between Bengali literature and film reached its pinnacle in the two decades post India’s independence and partition, as a response to the socio-political currents of the moment and a means of consolidating the high artistic possibilities of the filmic medium. She has published peer-reviewed articles, book chapters and book reviews in BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies; Studies in South Asian Film and Media; Adaptation, Awards Culture, and the Value of Prestige; and La famille au cinema: Regards juridiques et cinématographiques. She has taught courses on Indian Cinema, International Film History, Language of Film, Bollywood, Hollywood Adaptations, and Global Science Fiction Films at NYU as well as Baruch College, CUNY. Her research interests include literature, film and transmedia storytelling; World cinema; Bengali cinema; South Asian cultural studies; Indian indigenous film & media; and film historiography in relation to digital archival practices.
FYSEM-UA 900.027
The Global Sixties
Spring 2022
Instructor: Cos Tollerson
Meeting time: Monday 3:30-6:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues
Note: conflicts with Principles of Biology I/II Lecture (MW 9:30-10:45 a.m.) and Introductory Experimental Physics II Lecture (M 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
Across the globe, the 1960s are remembered as a time of dramatic cultural, social, and political tumult. This seminar examines several of the phenomena associated with the decade: from “Third World” liberation movements and the emergence of Rock ‘n Roll to brutal state repression. How did anti-imperial struggles throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America influence protest movements in the U.S. and Western Europe and vice-versa? In what ways did the “sexual revolution” impact ideas about masculinity and femininity and attitudes toward non-normative sexuality? How did governments respond to activists challenging hierarchies within nations and between them? What defined “the counterculture”? To explore these and other questions, we’ll analyze the transnational, multi-directional flow of ideas, styles, and structural forces throughout the era. This will involve moving between cities including Algiers, Chicago, Jakarta, Mexico City, Paris, São Paulo, and Tokyo, while analyzing “texts” that range from political pamphlets and philosophical essays to commercial music and experimental cinema.
COS TOLLERSON is a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow in New York University’s History Department. His research focuses on post-colonial Latin America, with particular emphasis on twentieth-century Brazil. He also has expertise in the study of the U.S. Empire and the Global Cold War. His book project examines the interdependent ideas about race, development, and democracy circulating among civilian and military elites who coordinated the 1964 coup d’état in Brazil.
FYSEM-UA 728
How We Learn
Spring 2022
Instructor: Anamaria Alexandrescu
Meeting time: Thursday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Required Writing the Essay: Science and Society: Fall 2021 Tuesday and Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Issues in Cognitive and Neural Science
Note: conflicts with PhysicsI/ II Lecture (TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.).
Note: if you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this paired seminar and EXPOS-UA 1 course.
How do humans and other animals learn, and how do we study this in the laboratory? What is the neurobiological basis of learning and memory? What are the genetic and environmental factors that have shaped the learning process throughout evolution? What other cognitive processes influence learning, and how can we apply this knowledge to our own studies? In trying to address these questions, this seminar gives an overview of modern neuroscience and psychology research on learning and memory, and illustrates how cognitive science can be used to develop strategies for effective learning, while also discussing implications for societal issues, disorders, and artificial intelligence.
ANAMARIA ALEXANDRESCU is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She received a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from NYU in 2020 for research examining the neurobiology of learning and memory; in particular, her graduate work focused on the molecular mechanisms that contribute to synaptic plasticity underlying long-term memory formation. Her current research interests are centered at the intersection between neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and education.
FYSEM-UA 800
I, the Author
Spring 2022
Instructor: Chiara Marchelli
Meeting time: Thursday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Genres of Writing
Note: conflicts with PhysicsI/ II Lecture (TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.)
This course will focus on identity and the autobiographical experience as narrated by a selection of contemporary American and European authors, with a particular attention to Italian examples. Through the analysis of their work, it will focus on how authorship and the identity/presence of the author have evolved in contemporary times, and how this evolution reverberates beyond national borders. We will investigate what moves these authors, what aspects of their experience they choose to narrate and how they relate to their own subjectivity and the world. We will explore thematic differences and convergences, social and historical influences, the relationship between the self and society, the evolution of narrative languages and purposes. The selection of readings is representative of the emergence of a new literary genre that blends memoir, autofiction and fiction, and describes the changing intellectual, cultural and social landscape of a literature that can no longer be contained within its national boundaries, but is inspired by a quest for a new identity or new identities, ignited by and reflected in today’s globalized world.
CHIARA MARCHELLI holds a degree in Oriental Languages from the University of Venice and an M.A. in Literary Translation from ISIT, Milan. In 2003, she published her first novel, Angeli e cani, which won the Premio Rapallo Carige Opera Prima. It was followed by a collection of short stories Sotto i tuoi occhi and three novels L’amore involontario, Le mie parole per te, and Le notti blu. Her latest novel, La memoria della cenere, was published in 2019 by NNE. She has taught contemporary literature, Italian, translation, and creative writing at New York University since 2004.
FYSEM-UA 900.023
Just Friends: Friendship, Desire and Italy from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century
Spring 2022
Instructor: Katherine Travers
Meeting time: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 3:30-4:45 p.m. (Fall), 8:00-9:15 a.m. (Spring)
Theme: Literature Through the Ages
Everyone knows what a “love story” is—but what kinds of literatures are driven by other forms of desire? We explore what role friendship—from the erotic to the Platonic— plays as a force in literature, from the ancient to the modern. Drawing from the discipline of the history of emotions, we ask: When does friendship morph into another kind of desire? How do understandings of gender and sexuality define the boundaries of friendship? How do friendships between writers shape the course of literary history? Often cast as a land of passion and sensuality, Italy and Italians connect the texts we consider, as the story of friendship and desire in Italian literature can tell the history of Italy itself. We begin with theoretical examinations of friendship and affection, from Jacques Derrida and feminist theorist and activist bell hooks. With these conceptual tools at our disposal, we move to a chronological exploration of friendship, from Cicero and Augustine in antiquity to Elena Ferrante in the 21st century. We also discuss scenes from TV and film, and how “friend” became almost synonymous with “lover” in Romance languages.
KATHERINE TRAVERS is a Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She earned her Ph.D. in Italian Studies at NYU. A specialist in medieval literature, she focuses on how gendered identities emerge from manuscript anthologies of lyric poetry. She is an assistant editor for the journal gender/sexuality/italy and has also published on contemporary Italian poetry.
FYSEM-UA 900.021
Language, Power and Activism
Spring 2022
Instructor: Dr. Carlos Yebra López Meeting time: Thursday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Language is a powerful tool. While some use it to inspire and connect, others weaponize it to deceive and manipulate. This course will explore the political nature of language, as well as how to capitalize on it to make a difference in the world at large. Together we will explore the following questions: What counts as a language? What is the relationship between colonialism and modern linguistics? How are the limits of my language the limits of my world? Don’t we all have an accent? Do native speakers even exist? What is the difference between postcolonial and decolonial linguistics? How can we further inclusive language? Can grammar be fascist? How can we empower endangered linguistic communities from a grassroots perspective? Throughout we will read essays by Chomsky, Voloshinov, Davis, Wittgenstein, Foucault, Blommaert, and Deleuze, as well as fiction by Karinthy, and watch films like Arrival, amongst others.
CARLOS YEBRA LÓPEZ is a postdoctoral lecturer in NYU’s Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures. His research focuses on the intersection between language and ideology. He is the director of a number of public outreach initiatives concerning language activism and the revitalization of endangered languages, including Ladino 21 (devoted to the documentation and revitalization of Judeo-Spanish in the 21st century) and The Hyperpolyglot Activist (focused on raising public awareness on multilingualism and linguistic ideologies, as well as putting forward emancipatory alternatives, including language activism, allyship and inclusivity).
FYSEM-UA 900.018
Listening and Composing With Bob Dylan
Spring 2022
Instructor: El Glasberg
Meeting time: Thursday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts
In this class we will be listening to the music of Bob Dylan as it connects us to history, sound, musical and cultural traditions, to each other, and to ourselves, to the earth, and to the spiritual realm. Maybe you want to find out about his legend. What was all that 2016 Nobel Prize fuss about? What happened at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965? Did he really find Jesus? Is he a great author or a greater plagiarist? There’s so much material by Dylan himself: over 50 albums, thousands of songs, interviews, music videos, a memoir, liner notes, visual art, radio shows, and nearly 3,000 evenings (and counting) of the Never Ending Tour begun in 1989. We’ll familiarize ourselves with key albums and eras in his long career, of course. Yet the intent of this course is neither to introduce nor to exhaust Dylan as a topic (no one is a novice, nor will we become so-called experts). Rather, we’ll take up his most pointed question, aimed directly at his audience: “How does it feel?”: To be a member of a nation? To consume or produce popular music? To be (forever) young? Disenfranchised? A lover or a beloved?
As we listen and watch performances, films, documentaries, and interviews we will discuss questions of American musical genres and of authenticity: personal, cultural, and in performance. We will encounter American culture at its elemental oral roots and through routes across the Atlantic/Carribean extending across the entire world. If this course swirls around Dylan, it is not to deify him. Rather, it is to place Dylan in a world that he has had such a large part in creating. That world, ultimately, is the one we are all in the midst of creating.
EL GLASBERG pecializes in places without people and people without place, teaching and writing on US culture in transit at American University in Beirut, Princeton University, Duke University, and California State University, Los Angeles before coming to NYU’s Expository Writing Program in 2011. Glasberg’s book, Antarctica As Cultural Critique: The Gendered Politics of Scientific Exploration and Climate Change was published in 2012 by Palgrave. Glasberg’s writing has appeared in The Journal of Popular Music Studies, Journal of Historical Geography and Women’s Studies Quarterly on Survival.
FYSEM-UA 733
Looking back a century: New York from 1912 to 1922
Spring 2022
Instructor: Miriam Nyhan Grey
Meeting time: Tuesday, 8:00-10:30 a.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: The City: Longstanding Challenges and Dynamic Change
For historians, the centennial of an event or period can hold a special significance or inspire new writings. We divide the courses of history into distinct borders of periodization which is contrary to how we actually live our lives or experience historical events often. In this seminar, we will self-consciously take the viewpoint of one hundred years to explore the history of New York City from 1912 to 1922. New York, in this period, was being shaped by issues like the suffrage movement, the Great War, the growing presence of the automobile and the arrival of almost one million immigrants, among many other things. We will explore the New York of a century ago using a wide range of sources in an effort to grasp how New Yorkers experienced the city circa 1920.
MIRIAM NYHAN GREY is Associate Director of New York University's Center for Irish and Irish-American Studies, where she is also Director of Graduate Studies for the Master of Arts in Irish and Irish-American Studies. With an interest in the intersections of migration, race, and ethnicity, she focuses primarily on migrant experiences in comparative frameworks. Oral history is a central methodology in her research, and she has served as a collaborator for the Archives of Irish America’s Oral History Collection since 2008. She has been on the faculty at NYU since 2009, teaching an array of classes on Irish history and migration, oral history, and comparative migration.
FYSEM-UA 791
NeuroStories: Narratives of the Brain, Mind, and Heart
Spring 2022
Instructor: Justin Warner
Meeting time: Thursday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Health and Society
What if you lost the ability to read, but could still write? What if your family members suddenly seemed like sinister replicas of their real selves? What if you were fully conscious, but could move and communicate only by blinking one eye? Can a person who can’t experience empathy lead an honorable life? Our brains are infinitely complex, which means they can be infinitely altered or divergent from what we think of as “typical.” In this seminar, we examine neurological conditions and differences as they appear in stories, from case studies and popular nonfiction to theatre, film, and television. We ask what the existence of these conditions teaches us about the link between our neural architecture and what we might otherwise call spirit, essence, heart, mind, or soul, and what people with neurological differences might understand in a way neurotypical people can’t. We also examine how people with neurodivergent profiles are represented in popular media, in part through the lens of the rapidly growing neurodiversity movement. Throughout the semester, we will reflect on the incomprehensible power of this spongy tissue in our skulls, and how everything we learn about it opens up new mysteries.
JUSTIN WARNER is a Clinical Associate Professor at New York University, where he currently teaches writing in the Tisch School of the Arts. He holds an M.F.A. in Playwriting and a B.A. in Neural and Behavioral Psychology. He is a playwright and musical theater librettist, and is currently working on an adaptation of Andrew Solomon’s bestselling book Far from the Tree. His first full-length play, Impostors, was produced in NEUROFest, New York’s first (and only?) festival of plays inspired by neurological conditions. Prior to teaching at NYU, he was a writer, editor, and audio producer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is a recent finalist for the Kleban Prize in Musical Theatre, the Jonathan Larson Grants, and the Sundance Theatre Lab, and has written for New Scientist, Popular Science, Newsday, McSweeney’s, and American Theatre, among others.
FYSEM-UA 804
Climate Change and Cities
Spring 2022
Instructor: Kimberly Bernhardt
Meeting time: Thursday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 12:30-1:45 p.m. (Fall), Monday, 4:55-6:10 p.m. (Spring)
Theme: Environmental Studies
After years of denial in the US, today conversations about the impact of climate change are a regular feature of mass media reporting. From fires in the west, to flooding in the south and east, everyone seems ready to discuss climate disasters, but we hear fewer discussions of how to understand—and help others understand—the many sides of this complex issue and, in particular, its effect on cities. That’s the work we will do together in this course.
We’ll begin with a general introduction to climate change science gathered through accessible articles, films, a tour of the American Museum of Natural History’s climate exhibit, local events and activities, and discussions with guest speakers. We’ll consider US and global political and societal responses to current climate science to better understand the debates in the media and popular culture. Our approach will be both analytical and personal: Your first project for the class will focus on the impact of climate change on a location of your choice, one that matters to your life and to the lives of those who matter to you. Then, we will turn our attention to the impact of climate change on cities and city dwellers, starting with representations of these impacts in fiction, film, art, and in the media. We will also look at efforts being made by cities—New York City in particular—to mitigate the impacts of climate change. We will tour Brooklyn's 110-million-dollar recycling facility, learn more about street trees, subway protection, and assess the city's BIG U proposal to protect lower Manhattan against rising sea levels. For your final project for the course, you will examine the impact of climate change on a city of your choice, focusing on how politicians, environmental groups, and community members are responding.
Throughout the course, our work will be grounded in our own responses to climate change and our evolving knowledge of what is to come. We will explore the ways that our expectations for comfort and choice are challenged by scientists’ prognoses, as we consider issues of responsibility, ethics, and justice. Major assignments include a personal essay, a multisource essay, and a multimodal project
KIMBERLY BERNHARDT is a Clinical Associate Professor currently teaching Writing the Essay and International Writing Workshop I and II at both Washington Square and Tandon. She received her Ph.D. in literature from Rutgers University. Her research interests include modern and contemporary poetry, literary theory, composition, student learning and success, student mental health, and representations of crises. She spent three years as a Faculty Affiliate, working with residents in the Outdoor and the Serve the City communities. She has previously taught at Rutgers University, Western Washington University, and Montclair State University, and has been teaching at NYU since 2006.
FYSEM-UA 789
Power Hungry: Food as a Tool for Social and Political Change
Spring 2022
Instructor: Suzanne Cope
Meeting time: Tuesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
In this seminar we examine the role of food in social and political change, with an eye toward how historic events can provide a model for understanding how change can be made today. We begin with an historic overview of riots, initiatives, marches, and boycotts, considering how food was crucial to movements for social and political change in the United States and around the world. Then we move to present-day New York City and beyond, considering activism in the field of food justice as well as activism that uses food as a tool for broader justice initiatives. If scheduling permits we will visit some locations where this work is taking place across New York City and invite guest speakers to tell us about their efforts.
Dr. SUZANNE COPE teaches in the Expository Writing Program, and her research and writing focus on the intersection of food and political and social change. Her narrative journalism has been featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, BBC, and The Atlantic, and her forthcoming book is POWER HUNGRY: The Story of Two Women Who Fed the Civil Rights Movement, and the Government's Quest to Stop Them. Dr. Cope has published and presented her scholarly work on food studies and writing pedagogy around the world, and she is the 2019 recipient of the Culinary Historians of New York grant for her research on POWER HUNGRY. She is also the author of the book Small Batch: Pickles, Cheese, Chocolate, Spirits, and the Return of Artisanal Food.
FYSEM-UA 900.028
“Red Vienna”: A Case Study in Social Democracy
Spring 2022
Instructor: Lauren Wolfe
Meeting time: Mondays, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 9:30-10:45 a.m. (Fall), 8:00-9:15 a.m. (Spring)
Theme: Philosophical and Political Thought
Note: conflicts with spring General Chemistry I Lecture (TR 9:30-10:45 a.m.) and Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (R 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
“Red Vienna.”—that city’s early-20th century experiment in social democracy—was developed in response to the devastation of war, epidemic, the dissolution of empire, and emergent new social identities. We look to Red Vienna to explore social democracy as a way of facing the compounding global crises of the 21st century. We ask, What exactly is social democracy? What are its fundamental claims and tenets? On what material and ideological foundations does it stand—or fall? We examine the utopian vision of Red Vienna, its practical accomplishments, theoretical foundations, internal ambivalences, aesthetic innovations, the civil war that ended its political reign, and its social legacy in the 21st century as a model for thinking critically about our own present. We take a broad survey of new methodologies in the arts and sciences, new ways of working and living based in economic justice and gender equity, and new forms of public spectacle and social expression emerging from mass workers’ movements. Students engage with an array of genres and disciplines, from sociological analysis to film and dramatic performance to political economy; and a primary aim is to understand the interactions and collaborations among artists, scientists, urban planners, and philosophers in this unique historical moment, in order to develop models and imagine horizons for interdisciplinary work and collaboration.
LAUREN K. WOLFE is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She earned her PhD from NYU in Comparative Literature in 2021 with a dissertation on translation theory and method. Her translation practice and research are focused on 20th Austrian literary culture and social history. Her book project, The Subject is an Axis, is an exploration of how the work of interlingual translation can reshape our ethical orientations at a time when our traditional categories of identity and belonging are no longer reflective of our lived realities.
FYSEM-UA 900.024
Revolutionary Women
Spring 2022
Instructor: Amy Obermeyer
Meeting time: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. (Fall), Tuesday, 8:00-9:15 a.m. (Spring)
Theme: Philosophical and Political Thought
Women have been at the forefront of social protest and political revolution—a fact that often seems lost on the news media and in history textbooks, all of which tend to treat women’s activism as limited exclusively to so-called “women’s issues.” Overlooked are not just women’s contributions to political change, but also how much of women-oriented activism builds on communication networks and protest strategies first developed fighting on other fronts, as for example, many leaders of the United States’ women’s suffrage movement were first active in the slavery abolition movement; and before Margaret Sanger was agitating for birth control, she was agitating for workers’ rights in textile mill strikes. We examine editorials, political cartoons, advertisements, news segments, fictional depictions, and new media sources such as social media and blog posts, looking at social movements and the women who participated in them, and also the way these women are imagined and remembered in then-contemporary as well as present-day media.
AMY OBERMEYER received her Ph.D. from NYU’s Department of Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on gender and literary subjectivity in Japanese and Latin American literature from the late 19th through early 20th century, particularly as manifest in the Japanese shishôsetsu and modernismo in Latin America. Her work appears in The Journal of Intercultural Studies and Feminist Studies (forthcoming), and she is currently at work on her book project titled Worlded Women: Women, Subjectivity, and World Literature in Turn-of-the-century Japan and Latin America.
FYSEM-UA 255
School and Society: NYU in the Sixties and Seventies
Spring 2022
Instructor: Arthur Tannenbaum
Meeting time: Tuesday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Contemporary Social Issues
Note: conflicts with Principles of Biology I/II Lecture (MW 9:30-10:45 a.m.) and Introductory Experimental Physics II Lecture (M 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
The 1960s and 1970s brought profound changes in American society, changes mirrored in the history of the nation, academe, and New York University. It was a time that witnessed the struggle for civil rights, assassinations, war abroad and riots at home, and a youth-led revolution in music, dress, and values. This course aims to develop an appreciation of those years by examining events and reactions to them as they affected campuses and students across America. Students prepare reports on different aspects of the era and work on group projects. In both cases, and in the spirit of the times, the topics are self-chosen with the approval of the group and the seminar leader.
ARTHUR TANNENBAUM is Associate Curator and Social Work Librarian in the Bobst Library, and has also taught in the English Department. First as a student and then as a faculty member, he has been at NYU for more than thirty years. In 1992 he received the University’s Distinguished Teaching Medal in recognition for his work with students.
FYSEM-UA 780
The Sea in History
Spring 2022
Instructor: Thomas Truxes
Meeting time: Wednesday, 3:30-6:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Thursday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
Note: conflicts with spring General Chemistry I Lecture (TR 9:30-10:45 a.m.) and Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (R 9:30-10:45 a.m.).
Over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is water, most of it residing in the planet’s great seas and oceans. But how have those vast watery spaces, together with the world’s lakes and rivers, shaped the millennia? Have these bodies of water been connective tissues bringing peoples together or barriers pushing them apart? They have, of course, been both, providing highways for commerce and migration, life-sustaining fisheries, battlefields that determined the fate of civilizations, and powerful stimulants to the advancement of technology on a broad front. This seminar will explore the many—and often surprising—faces of the sea in history. It will, likewise, ask students to contemplate their own responsibility in preserving the rivers, lakes, seas, and oceans that have shaped the destiny of mankind.
THOMAS M. TRUXES is Clinical Professor of Irish Studies and History. He has written extensively on the Irish in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic economy and the overseas trade of British America. Recent books include an edited volume of essays, Ireland, France, and the Atlantic in a Time of War: Reflections on the Bordeaux–Dublin Letters, 1757, and Defying Empire: Trading with the Enemy in Colonial New York, a finalist for the Francis Parkman Prize in American History. At NYU he teaches courses on early modern Irish history, piracy and seaborne terrorism, and the history of world trade.
FYSEM-UA 802
Sex and Gender in Philosophical Focus
Spring 2022
Instructor: Laura Franklin-Hall
Meeting time: Friday, 9:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Health and Society
What is it to be a female or male animal? Or to be a female or male human being? What is it to be a woman? To be a man? Or to have some other gender? And how are all these questions connected? This course will explore answers to these and other questions about sex and gender from a philosophical perspective, drawing along the way on relevant research in biology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology. We begin by considering how the sexes evolved across the living world, i.e., in both animals and plants. With this history in hand, we ask, given persisting disagreement about their nature, how the categories 'male' and 'female' should be understood and evaluated, both in humans and other living things. Next we explore the gender categories such as woman, man, boy and girl. How are American gender categories similar to or different from those found in other cultures? And how are gender categories generally related to, or distinct from, the sex categories previously investigated? Having considered a variety of philosophical approaches to gender--some tying gender directly to sex, others to social characteristics like oppression--we conclude by evaluating these options for ourselves.
LAURA FRANKLIN-HALL, Associate Professor of Philosophy, trained both as a biologist and as a philosopher. Her research and teaching interests include the nature of scientific explanation, scientific modeling, and classification; the structure of evolutionary theory and the tree of life; and the relationship between evolution and our ethical commitments. She has published articles on the functioning of the hippocampus, microbial species, the “scientific method,” scientific explanation, and the nature of the sexes—male and female—across the animal world. She is presently working on a book project on the Philosophy of Pregnancy. It tackles metaphysical, ethical, and evolutionary questions surrounding pregnancy, both human and non-human.
FYSEM-UA 900.016
Social Media and Fiction: Technologies of Imitation and Desire
Spring 2022
Instructor: Geoff Shullenberger
Meeting time: Tuesday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. (Fall), 12:30-1:45 p.m. (Spring)
Theme: Technology and Society
“We want what other people want because other people want it.” So the writer Dayna Tortorici has characterized the phenomenon of mimetic desire: desire not motivated by the intrinsic value of an object, but by the fact that other people also desire it. Advertisers have long tapped into this deep impulse, and recent years, social media has allowed us to observe other people’s consumption habits instantaneously, filling us with near constant “FOMO” and envy. However, this is the latest evolution of the modern experience of desire, which has been shaped for centuries by cutthroat social competition and consumer capitalism. Long before the rise of social media, the technology that revealed this sort of conflict most vividly was the novel, which came to prominence alongside urban consumer societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
In this course, we will explore the relationship between imitation, competition, and human wants. Informed by the ideas of the late René Girard, the most prominent theorist of mimetic desire, we will read a series of novels from the nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries that dramatize these phenomena, by authors including Jane Austen, Stendhal, Elif Batuman, and Tao Lin. We will also examine the evolution of social media platforms in counterpoint with these literary works, which will enable deeper insight into social dynamics that now shape culture and politics.
GEOFF SHULLENBERGER is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at NYU. He has written for a variety of scholarly publications, magazines, and online media about topics ranging from literature and critical theory to conspiracy theory and contemporary online subcultures.
FYSEM-UA 806
State of a Country: Writing about Photography Made in the U.S.
Spring 2022
Instructor: Alexandra Falek
Meeting time: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
Theme: First-Generation Cohort
Note: FYSEM-UA 474, What is College For? and FYSEM-UA 806, State of a Country: Writing about Photography Made in the U.S. are strongly recommended for first-generation students. They provide an excellent opportunity to join a close-knit community of your peers who also identify as the first in their families to pursue higher education.
This course offers students an opportunity to look, think, read and write critically and creatively about photography made throughout the US in the last few decades. In the photographs, photo essays and photobooks we’ll explore, the photographers expose the state of a country, making visible what they’ve chosen to see. While their subjects, conceptual inquiries, approaches and technical practices vary, each photographer responds uniquely to the people, places and ideas that have captured their attention and shaped their intentions. A deep examination of these works will set in motion a larger conversation about writing on photography. Throughout the semester we’ll look and read closely, and practice different modes of writing, from short exercises to an extended research paper. A guest photographer and a writer whose work focuses on photography will join us in two class meetings, and students will see photography work on display at museums and/or galleries in New York City. Students will come away from the course with a new appreciation for the practice of making photographs, photo essays and photobooks and for the craft of writing meaningful texts that respond to them.
ALEXANDRA FALEK is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. She has been teaching at NYU since 2002, where she taught for many years in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese Languages and Literatures (teaching Latin American literature, cultural history, cinema and more) and where she currently teaches on the faculty of EWP (teaching reading and writing). She received her Ph.D. in Latin American Literatures and Cultures from NYU and her B.A. from UC Berkeley.
FYSEM-UA 792
Streaks and Coincidences
Spring 2022
Instructor: Michael Shum
Meeting time: Thursday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Monday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Mathematics and Modeling in Understanding of the Physical World
Note: conflicts with Opportunity Programs Freshman Colloquium (M 3:30-4:45 p.m.).
This seminar will explore the connections between and among events that cannot be explained by probability and causality—hot and cold streaks, coincidences, recurring or repetitive series, and other related phenomena—with the goal of transforming and expanding students' consciousness and sense of wonder at an interconnected universe that exists beyond the strictures of rationalism. Students will record and investigate their own experiences of such connections, vigorously engage with seminal texts in this speculative and under-researched field, and conduct their own individual and group explorations into these phenomena.
MICHAEL SHUM serves as a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Expository Writing Program. His first novel, Queen of Spades, based on his experience dealing poker in a dead-end casino in rural Washington State, was published in 2017. He holds a Ph.D. in Psychology from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Tennessee.
FYSEM-UA 788
Technology vs. Democracy: Can the American Experiment Survive American Innovation?
Spring 2022
Instructor: Alexander Landfair
Meeting time: Monday, 4:55-7:25 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. (Fall), 12:30-1:45 p.m. (Spring)
Theme: Technology and Society
From the Founders to the Facebook generation, Americans have regarded technological progress as an existential threat to American democracy. In this seminar, you will explore a range of texts—written by scientists, novelists, and religious and civic leaders—questioning whether the American experiment can survive American innovation, and whether its institutions can, or even should, evolve with its technologies. As citizens and apprentice scholars, students will devise their own possible answers to these questions (and related questions they generate themselves) and share their ideas using a range of modes and genres: class discussions, blog posts, research proposals, and formal research projects.
ALEXANDER LANDFAIR is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Expository Writing Program. He has written about technology for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Guernica Magazine, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. He has held various editorial positions at Narrative Magazine, Guernica Magazine, and the New Yorker. He is now writing a study of Congress’s efforts to mitigate technology’s negative impacts on democracy.
FYSEM-UA 900.029
The Violence of Data: Wall Street and Slavery in Old New York
Spring 2022
Instructor: Thomas Augst
Meeting time: Wednesday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: The City: Longstanding Challenges and Dynamic Change
This seminar explores nineteenth-century connections between Wall Street and slavery, as well as its legacies for us in the twenty-first century, in the age of Big Data and #BlackLivesMatter. What can the records of one prominent bank teach us about the historical development of Wall Street and the role of Northern finance in the slave economy before the Civil War? What can the history of data teach us about the accounting of human life and the cultural consequences of these management practices? The seminar will explore these and related questions through reading, discussion, and research exercises related to slavery in New York City; the history of banking, accounting, and finance; data formats and ethics; and storytelling for social justice, among others. Depending on their interests, students will have the opportunity to participate in the Brown Brothers Collection Project, a research collaboration between NYU and the New York Public Library.
THOMAS AUGST is Associate Professor in the Department of English. His scholarship focuses on American literary and cultural history of the nineteenth-century, exploring libraries and the organization of knowledge, advanced literacy and self-cultivation, archival research and project-based learning in the digital humanities. He is the author of The Clerk’s Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in 19th Century America (Chicago, 2003), co-editor of Institutions of Reading: The Social Life of Libraries in the United States (UMass, 2007), and co-editor of Cultural Agencies and American Libraries (2001). He earned his doctorate from Harvard University, and has received research fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities. He is a faculty co-director of NewYorkScapes, a research collaborative dedicated place-based learning and research-led teaching exploring the documentary record of the city.
FYSEM-UA 803
Ways of Thinking and Knowing
Spring 2022
Instructor: David Ellis
Meeting time: Monday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 9:30-10:45 a.m.
Theme: Philosophical and Political Thought
This seminar introduces students to fundamental epistemological questions and concepts, both historical and new: what do we know and how do we know it? The academy has long divided knowledge and its pursuit into the Arts and the Sciences. Likewise, popular notions of the human brain suggest that those fissures run through individual minds: the analytical, science-minded "left brained" and the artistic, philosophical-minded "right brained." It is thought that the so-called left brains—analytical, logical, objective—become engineers, biologists, and bankers while right brains—intuitive, thoughtful, subjective—are the painters, philosophers, and social workers of the world. In practice, both in the science lab or in the artist's studio, these distinctions are more porous than we popularly believe. This seminar explores the interplay between reasoning, knowledge, belief, discovery, and creativity, the various acts of mind common to all fields in the academy and, essentially, all human endeavors. As we wrestle with conundrums which resist easy solution, whether presented to us in the "real world," the sciences, the arts, or philosophy, we will simultaneously be thinking about thinking. What “habits of mind” promote problem solving? Which of these habits limit innovation and novel insight? We’ll traverse many fields—logic, physics, neurology, psychology, artificial intelligence, literature, film, visual and performance art—as we hunt for approaches to understanding that we then put into practice. We will work towards the goal of "understanding our understanding," as the artist and essayist Matthew Goulish phrases it, in order to exploit the twinned powers of rationality and creativity. Trips to MoMath (Museum of Mathematics), MoMA, and other outings are planned. Readings to include Martin Heidegger, David Hume, Thomas Kuhn, Lynda Barry, Oliver Sacks, Nassim Taleb, Daniel Dennett, and others.
DAVID ELLIS is a faculty member in the Expository Writing Program, where he has taught for more than twelve years and received a Golden Dozen teaching award. His work in the Writing in the Disciplines initiative at NYU has exposed him to the myriad approaches that different fields utilize to discover new knowledge and insights. His research interests focus on the intersections between cognition, creativity, learning, and writing.
FYSEM-UA 790
"We are Not in a Post-Fact World": Wikipedia and the Construction of Knowledge
Spring 2022
Instructor: David Cregar
Meeting time: Monday, 2:00-4:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. (Fall), Thursday, 9:30-10:45 a.m. (Spring)
Theme: Technology and Society
Where do you get your information? Do you trust it? How do you assess the credibility and reliability of what you read, see, and hear? We interrogate these questions through the hands-on work of writing, editing, and commenting on articles in Wikipedia. We join arguably the largest collaborative writing project in history, comprising 309 language editions and with more than 38 million registered users in the English language version alone. This work (and play) allows us to investigate key issues in research methods: identifying gaps in existing knowledge, locating and accessing public records and archival materials, and assessing and attributing sources. Perhaps most important of all, we will write to an authentic audience of readers who, as they say in Wikipedia, will “speak back” to what you write and edit. We also address some perennial themes of rhetoric and composition: genre, audience, style, structure and organization, and more. Alongside this work, we examine the larger question of how knowledge is constructed. Who has access to information? How is access to information controlled or “disciplined”? What perspectives are overrepresented or underrepresented in the texts (written, visual, audible) we encounter and engage with? How does a particular knowledge source shape or influence public knowledge or culture?
DAVID CREGAR is a Clinical Associate Professor and Senior Assistant Director in the Expository Writing Program. In his teaching and research, he focuses primarily on the experiences of English Language Learners as readers and writers in the academy. His teaching career began in the Educational Opportunity Fund Program at Montclair State University (NJ) and he has been on the faculty at NYU since 2000.
FYSEM-UA 900.019
Wikipedia?
Spring 2022
Instructor: Lisa Gitelman
Meeting time: Wednesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Friday, 11:00 a.m.-12:15 p.m. (Fall), Thursday, 9:30-10:45 a.m. (Spring)
Theme: Technology and Society
Let's agree that consulting Wikipedia is the opposite of going to college, that looking things up (always helpful!) does not an education make. Can we use a proposition like this as a launching pad for inquiry into the ways that knowledge is organized online and otherwise, as well as into the ways that new knowledge gets produced, preserved, and passed along? This seminar will consider the assumptions that have been baked into Wikipedia and then explore their origins and alternatives within the (mostly) Western intellectual tradition. Discussions of readings-in-common will focus on topics such as encyclopedism, objectivity and bias, the commons and open access, classification systems, and knowledge formats ranging from the humble file folder to the World Wide Web.
LISA GITELMAN is a professor in the NYU departments of English and Media, Culture, and Communication. Her teaching and research interests involve media technologies and the histories of knowledge. She is the author of Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture and Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents. She edited a scholarly collection entitled “Raw Data” Is an Oxymoron and is interested in so-called Big Data and AI.
FYSEM-UA 900.022
Writing the Blue Note: Jazz, Literature, Art and Diasporic Identity
Spring 2022
Instructor: Rachel Watson
Meeting time: Tuesday, 11:00 a.m.-1:30 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 3:30-4:45 p.m.
Theme: Visual and Performing Arts
Sometimes, poems sing; paintings swing; and novels bop. A line of poetry can achieve the effect of a jazz melody through assonance and alliteration. A painting can, like a trumpet, blow hot and cold using alternating color fields. And a prose phrase can beat with syncopation, playing with stressed syllables and sibilance, like the rhythm section of a bebop group. Jazz musicians have long taken inspiration from literature; writers and painters have likewise borrowed strategies from jazz and blues music. Indeed, this borrowing and exchange is so prevalent that Brent Hayes Edwards writes: “Whether it is composers finding formal inspiration in verse or a poet invoking the sound of music, hearing across media is the source of innovation in black art.” We learn to perform the practice of “hearing across media” by examining the jazz and blues aesthetic that permeates the art of various African and Afro-descended artists. Immersing ourselves in work from Africa and the diaspora, we analyze literature, visual art, and music to trace the transfer of these aesthetic strategies across media and genres and to understand how these artists, finding connectivity beyond national borders through reference to American jazz, utilize this music to figure improvisation, non-fixity, multivocality, and elusion/subversion as central to diasporic identity. Inspired by the concept of the blue note—the microtonal flattening of certain pitches on a scale, a note in between notes, disruptive in its “in-betweenness”—we investigate how these artists practice a liberating aesthetic, calling on the subversive qualities of jazz to create space for challenging convention, creating and recreating the self, and claiming a belonging to the diaspora. We examine how diasporic work becomes a social and cultural performance, how—vibrating with the blue note, a sonic metonymy for the situation of dispersal, exile, and longing of slaves in the New World and their descendants—this art mourns while also celebrating the freeing potential of artistic techniques that deviate playfully from the conventional structures of their media. Some of the writers, artists, and musicians we examine include James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, and Suzan-Lori Parks; the négritude poets Léopold Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas; Francophone writers Dany Laferrière and Koffi Kwahulé; painters Basquiat and Romare Bearden; musicians John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, and Miles Davis. We also engage with theories of race, identity, postcoloniality, transnationalism, and aesthetics.
RACHEL WATSON is a College Core Curriculum Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow. She earned her Ph.D. in NYU’s Department of French Literature, Thought and Culture. She specializes in 20th and 21st century French and Francophone theater and performance, with a particular focus on the roles of memory and the body in political theater. A confluence of praxis and scholarship informs her work, as she trained as an actor at Dartmouth College, the National Theater Institute, and the École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq. Her current book project takes up embodied memory and intermediality in works by Wajdi Mouawad, Koffi Kwahulé, and the Théâtre du Soleil, and argues for theater as a site of socially and politically engaged practices of collective counter-memory. She participated in the translation of Le Théâtre du Soleil: The First Fifty-Five Years, and her articles have been published in The Drama Review, Arab Stages, and Routledge Anthology of Women’s Theatre Theory and Dramatic Criticism (forthcoming).
FYSEM-UA 514
Xenophon of Athens
Spring 2022
Instructor: Vincent Renzi
Meeting time: Tuesday, 9:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m.
Required cohort meeting: Tuesday, 12:30-1:45 p.m.
Theme: Past Cultures and Societies
Note: conflicts with Physics I/ II Lecture (TR 12:30-1:45 p.m.).
The greatest ancient you’ve never heard of, Xenophon of Athens (c. 425-355 B.C.E.) was a brilliant general, a student of Socrates, and a renowned author. When knowledge of Greek was still required for admission to college, his fame was ubiquitous, as his writings formed the basis of the college preparatory curriculum. Particular attention is given to Xenophon’s literary style and technique, his invention of new literary genres and innovations as a writer of Socratic discourses, and issues of adaptation, as well as to his characterization of Socrates, depictions of women and non-Greek peoples and slaves, theory of leadership, and political thought. Readings, in English translation: Apology of Socrates, Symposium, Memorabilia, Cyropaedia, Cavalry Commander, Anabasis, and the film based on the latter, The Warriors—with a CAS connection—set in 1979 C.E. New York City.
VINCENT RENZI is Clinical Professor in the Foundations of Contemporary Culture (FCC) and of Classics, and is also Director of the Foundations of Contemporary Culture in the College Core Curriculum. A scholar of ancient Greek philosophy, he also has interests in arts and aesthetics and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy. He is a recipient of the College's Golden Dozen Award for Teaching Excellence.
EXPOS-UA 1
Writing the Essay: Science and Society
Note: if you were placed into EXPOS-UA 3 International Writing Workshop: Introduction, or EXPOS-UA 4 International Writing Workshop I, you will not be able to enroll in this course.
Writing the Essay: Science and Society is the foundational writing course, which provides instruction and practice in critical reading, creative thinking, and clear writing. The course stresses exploration, inquiry, reflection, analysis, revision, and collaborative learning. Our section of Writing the Essay will focus on the role of science in the contemporary world. We will learn to read, think, and write critically as we investigate how science, medicine, and technology are used to evaluate, characterize, and politicize elements of human behavior and society—and how social institutions challenge and complicate our behavioral and social norms. We question common conceptions of science and society as separate spheres, as well as examining the many paradoxes therein: how science can be simultaneously progressive and destructive, connecting and isolating, liberating and oppressive. As we progress, you will find that writing is not only a method to communicate ideas but also a process that generates new ones. The ultimate goal: for you to write and communicate confidently, to rely on writing as one of the best tools for developing fresh perspectives and appreciating subtle complexities, and to develop your own unique and more complex understanding of science, medicine, and technology.
EXPOS.UA 1 (Spring 1)
Spring 2022
TBD
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
EXPOS.UA 1 (Spring 2)
Spring 2022
TBD
Required cohort meeting: Wednesday, 2:00-3:15 p.m.
