To declare a major/minor with us please email european.studies@nyu.edu

SPRING 2021 COURSES

EURO-UA 982 Political Parties on the Edge: Green, Populist and Radical Parties in Europe

Seminar | 4 points
Christian Martin| Thu, 12:00-2:00

Online

This seminar will discuss political parties in Europe that are different from mainstream socialist, social democratic, Christian democratic and conservative parties. We will analyze the political platforms of radical left and right wing, as well as green and populist parties in addition to separatist and anti-system parties and relate these parties to structural changes in the economies and societies of Europe.

Assessment:
- Active participation (20 percent)
- Presentation (15 mins max) (20 percent)
- Midterm (20 percent)
- Final paper (about 10-12 pages) (40 percent)

EURO-UA 983.001 Crisis of Europe

Seminar | 4 points
Hadas Aron | Thurs, 10:00-12:00
Blended

In the past decade the countries of Europe, and the European Union as an organization, have been facing multiple challenges. The 2008 financial crisis hit several countries and generated a crisis in the shared Eurozone; Euroscepticism has given rise to populist movements throughout the continent; waves of migration were met with struggle and backlash; Western European countries have been threatened by terror; Russia is increasingly aggressive; and recently the US is increasingly indifferent and even hostile toward its European allies. In this course we will attempt to evaluate the following questions: Do these challenges amount to a crisis? Is the integrity of the EU in danger? What can be done to face these multiple challenges? The course explores the dimensions of the European crisis: sovereignty, democracy, economy, security, and culture. We will explore these questions in the EU, in its relationships, and in key individual cases such as Britain, Germany, Greece, Poland, and Hungary.

EURO-UA 983.004 Aliens since 1897

Seminar | 4 points
Alexander Geppert | Tue, 2:00-4:45
Blended

Humankind’s self-understanding as a species is defined, tested and exposed when confronted with radical alterity, be it real or imagined. Located at the intersection of European and American cultural history, the history of science and technology, literary studies and film, this class charts the manifold figurations of the alien since its modern invention in 1897. Sessions examine alleged invasions from Mars and Venus, H. G. Wells, Liu Cixin and Ted Chang, UFO sightings and alien encounters but also the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI), the making of astrobiology into a scholarly discipline, NASA’s Voyager missions, the so-called Plurality of Worlds, Ancient Astronauts and Rare Earth controversies and many other aspects of twentieth-century extraterrestrialism.

FALL 2020 COURSES

EURO-UA 915 Europe in the News

Seminar | 2 points
Professor Tamsin Shaw | Mon, 12:00-2:00
ONLINE

PLEASE NOTE: THE COURSE WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE FOR FALL 2020 SEMESTER

In the past several years Europe has stumbled from crisis to seemingly existential crisis. Refugees, populism, the euro, Brexit, cyber threats, Russian election meddling—all of these have tested the ability of the European Union to cohere as a political organization. Does it have a future, and if so, in what form? This course is designed to help students better understand the many challenges that Europe faces today by thinking historically and contextually. The events that we read about in the news all have a background, and are often the product of a long-running developments or trade-offs that European leaders and their publics have been navigating for years, sometimes even decades or longer. After an introductory session that briefly traces the recent history of the European Union, each week we will consider a different pressing challenge by reading select news articles, long form journalistic pieces and/or academic thought pieces. After a lecture that provides the historical and contextual background behind the given topic, we will discuss in a seminar style approach how the news articles and essays we’ve read handle the matter, paying particular attention to how different interpretations arise over the same event.

The ultimate goal is to enable students to more critically engage with the information they receive from traditional news media, and also from less conventional that have recently started to structure how large segments of the population think about the world around them.

EURO-UA 950 Contemporary Europe

Seminar | 4 points
Professor Hadas Aron | Thu, 10:00-12:00
Room: TBA

PLEASE NOTE: THIS COURSE WILL TAKE PLACE IN PERSON, LOCATION TBA

Please note: This is a required course for all CEMS majors.

The course examines the liberal order in Europe that was formed after WWII, its institutional design, the challenges it has been facing, and the implications of the liberal order for politics, society, and culture in Europe. The first part of the course reviews the social, economic, and security concerns Europe faced in 1945, and the institutions that were constructed to respond to these concerns. We will also explore the Cold War and its consequences for the politics, and the realities of people throughout Europe. The second part of the course explores the integration of Europe into a social, economic, and identity community, and the expansion of European institutions and identity first to Southern Europe and then to the former Soviet Bloc. The third part of the course addresses the current "Crisis of Europe" from the 2008 financial crisis through the surge of refugee migration and the rise of populism. We will ask whether and to what extent the current crisis threatens the system formed after 1945.

The course is interdisciplinary in nature. To explore political change and continuity in contemporary Europe we will combine theories from international relations, political science, sociology, and economics, as well as readings of historical primary and secondary resources. In addition to scholarly literature we will use contemporary media outlets, cultural resources and video, when available.

EURO-UA 982 The Future of European Democracies in a Global Age

Seminar | 4 points
Professor Christian Martin| Tue, 10:00-12:00
ONLINE

PLEASE NOTE: THIS COURSE WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE FOR FALL 2020 SEMESTER

Democracies around the world have come under stress with the recent surge in populism, nationalist authoritarianism, and the challenges to a rules-based liberal  international order that these forces present. This seminar will explore how democracies in Europe have reacted to these challenges and ask what lies ahead for the European Union and other international institutions.

Specifically, we will ask how globalization challenges established democratic practices by straining the link between the locus of legitimacy and the locus of decision making. We will analyze how a functionally adequate shift to trans- and international decision making can be at odds with the demands of (parts of) the citizenry for controlling these decisions.

We will think about concepts of transnational democracy and expanding the arena of democratic discourse beyond the nation state. In doing so, we will critically challenge some of the assumptions that go into concepts of transnational democracy.

Empirically, we will focus on decision making in international organizations, regional integration arrangements such as the EU and their relation to democratic decision making in the nation state. 

FYSEM-UA 777. 001  Beyond Athletics: Sports, Politics and Belonging in Europe and the U.S.

Freshmen Seminar | 4 points
Professor Jasmine Samara | Wed, 2:00-4:30
LOCATION TBA

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?