sPRING 2022 GRADUATE COURSE LISTINGS

ALL COURSES ARE RESTRICTED AND REQUIRE AN ACCESS CODE TO REGISTER.
If you are NOT an SCA graduate student, but wish to enroll in a course, you must FIRST contact the professor requesting permission to enroll and then the graduate program coordinator: jt133@nyu.edu.
SCA graduate courses (unless otherwise noted) are located at 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor.

AFRS-GA 2000.001 - africana proseminar

Tuesdays 4:55-7:40 PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 SEM
(Requirement for Africana MA students)

This course is an in-depth overview of the major areas of research in black history and culture. It is intended to introduce incoming Africana Studies M.A. students to the significant areas of research, research questions, as well as the primary methods of inquiry that have defined the study of black culture and history since the mid-nineteenth century. Topics include: Negritude, The Harlem Renaissance, Pan-Africanism, Race & Urban Poverty, Black Feminism, Black Social Movements and Literature and Decolonization. It will be a course that is led and directed by one of our faculty members, but will feature guest lectures/presentations by Africana specialists.

AMST-GA 3303.001 Strategies for Social and Cultural Analysis

Sophie Gonick

Wednesdays 9:30AM-12:15PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 SEM
(Requirement for PhD Students)

This course examines the practice and theory of research methods that are commonly used in social and cultural analysis. We will study a range of methods, from the analysis and production of images, to interviewing and ethnography, to oral history and archival research. Each class will combine two elements: 1) Discussions of finished research projects that have taken the form of books and 2) Hands-on investigations. The first will develop skills in reading like researchers. This means probing the framework of each study and examining how the authors have posed and gone about finding answers to their questions. Each of the authors that we will read is especially reflective or creative about the process of research and their books will help guide us in “reverse engineering” their work. The second half of each class will take the form of a workshop. Some days we will select and analyze primary sources together; other days visitors will come to class to discuss their research process with us. Over the course of the semester, we will come to know research as a craft and assemble insights and techniques for developing future projects.

AMST-GA 3310.001 SCA Pro-Seminar: The Art of Research

Emmaia Gelman
Wednesdays 2:00PM-4:45PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 SEM
(Requirement for Africana and SCA MA Students)

What is research? What kinds of methods might we employ critically to interrogate emergent social and cultural questions? How do academics move from research to writing? How do we elaborate an argument? These questions will animate the course, which is designed to teach Masters-level students to the tools and techniques of sustained and self-directed research. Through in-class discussions, guest lectures, readings, and assignments, students will gain an understanding of the kinds of methods currently deployed for social and cultural analysis. The course will be designed around the East Village, in order to allow the class to apply diverse modes of inquiry to local contexts and dilemmas. The course will focus particularly on methods related to ethnography, archival research, discourse analysis, and material culture, with readings drawn from across the critical humanities and social sciences.

AMST-GA 3213.001 - Going Public: Taking Humanities into the World

Caitlin Zaloom
Mondays 11:00PM-1:45PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 SEM

This course is for graduate students who want to develop skills in the practice of public scholarship. The class will be project-based, relating to the overarching theme of debt. Debt is a capacious concept, with many specific forms, such as student debt or climate debt, and just as many remedies, from reparations to cancellation. During the semester, each student will develop a writing project that explores debt from an angle of their choosing. Collectively, we will build an editorial project designed to enhance public engagement around the problem of debt, informed by research on a variety of topics, across disciplinary specializations and fields. Course readings will focus on exploring our theme and on the history and current media practices of critical publications.

AMST-GA 2329.001 - work, LABOR, AND POWER

Andrew Ross
Thursdays 9:30AM-12:15PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 471 CONF

This seminar is an examination of changing attitudes toward work and labor, and it is designed to give students an overview of labor history and the sociology of work. The course covers patterns of agrarian, industrial, and post-industrial production, gendered and racialized segmentation of labor, and the record of worker organization. Its historical scope runs from colonial/Indigenous agriculture to the digital labor landscape of today, and the overarching framework is one in which work is utilized as a medium of power (and counter-power) in society. Primary readings are the central learning material, but students are encouraged to make connections to real life events and experiences in today’s world of work.

AMST-GA 2901.001 - Finance, Race, and Gender in the Early Modern Atlantic World

Jennifer Morgan
Mondays 3:30PM-6:10PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 471 CONF

In recent years, a host of new scholarship exploring the relationship between slavery and capitalism has emerged. How might this new canon be reconfigured by a thorough consideration of race and gender in tandem with histories of fungibility and value? Interrogating early Modern notions of finance by asking how they intersected with, shaped, and were shaped by categories of race and gender will garner new understandings of these interrelated processes. Late medieval and early modern modes of accounting cohered around notions of enslavability, and the hereditary mark of race became embedded in how gender produced categories of freedom and slavery—all of which are crucial to the study of economy and race in the Atlantic world. This seminar will explore those intersections between histories of race, gender, and finance that culminate in early modern Atlantic slavery. We will treat the Atlantic world as the dynamic space that it was, attempting to balance engagement across continents and empires.

AMST-GA 3212.001 - urban uprisings

Thomas Sugrue & Sophie Gonick
Tuesdays 9:30AM-12:15PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 471 CONF

Since 2011, cities across the globe have been gripped by numerous protest movements. These uprisings have challenged race and racism, housing justice, democratization, austerity and economic inequality, and immigration. This course puts recent uprisings in their long-term global context, with attention to such themes as the relation between politics and the urban, collective action and coalition building, populism, theories of race and ethnicity, labor and capitalism, imperialist extraction, and urban democracy. It will draw on readings and theories from across the spatial social sciences and humanities, including geography, history, urban planning, social movement studies, and sociology.

CROSSLISTED COURSE

AMST-GA 2304.001 | span-GA 2967.001 - On Gendered Thought: Feminisms in the Americas
(2 SPOTS)

Licia Fiol-Matta
Tuesdays 11:30AM-1:30PM
19 UP 223

Is Latin American feminism different from other feminisms, whether in North America, Europe, or other regions in the Global South? What has been its impact on Latinx and other US feminisms? This course will consider such questions through an initial examination of the forgotten/rejected feminisms of the 1980s, such as that of the Chilean, Julieta Kirkwood. It will then review the present-day return to 1970s feminist thinkers and to socialist feminisms of the 1970s (for example, in the contemporary feminist insurgency of May 2018 in Chile). We will devote most of the course to a sustained analysis of contemporary forms of gendered thought, responding to pivots like #niunamenos, movements against disaster capitalism, digital activism, and BIPOC feminism. We will interrogate the allocation of certain feminist knots of concern to specific Latin American regions or countries; the social subject designated by the signifier “woman,” while not discounting it; the binary understandings of gender which are in evidence in full force with the turn to the right, the reaffirmation of the nationalist family and cis separatist movements which proclaim themselves as feminist; and regional rejections of certain feminist and queer keywords (seen in linguistic alterations like “cuir” or “cuerpa”). The thread will be an intensive consideration of gender and knowledge grounded in what cultural theorist Nelly Richard refers to as the “disordering of the sign of woman.”