Courses
American Studies Courses
Approaches to American Capitalism
Gender, Race, and Imperialism
Group Research Seminar
Historicizing American Literature
Individual Research Seminar
Marxist Thought and Critical Practice
Queer Historiographies
Race and Nation in the Americas
Roots of Race Thinking
Seminar in American Studies
Studies in Work
Technology and Nature
U.S. and the Long 20th Century
U.S. Ethnography: History, Topics, and Theory
Urban and Suburban Studies
Affiliated Courses
Africana Studies
Anthropology
Asian/Pacific American Studies
Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Cinema Studies
Comparative Literature
Culture and Communication
English
History
Journalism
Mideast Studies
Performance Studies
Politics
Religious Studies
Sociology
Consortium Course Information
Race, Slavery, and Freedom in the Atlantic World – G13.2015
Jennifer Morgan
This seminar is designed to introduce students to the key historiographical issues in the study of race and slavery in the Americas. The readings are clustered around topics/methodologies that have generated on-going scholarly debates and conversations and are designed to bridge the gap between the foundational and the most current academic work. In the context of the newly expansive possibilities of The Atlantic or the African Diaspora as analytic and interpretive interventions, we will also work to carefully locate the scholarly contributions of these readings in these new academic spaces. In other words, how does the foundational scholarship contribute to or impede questions rooted in shifting geographic modalities?
Topics: Forensics of Capital - G13.2304.001
Michael Ralph
This course examines forensics as a police technology and as a method for managing breaches in modern civil society. In the process, we will pay special attention to the way people grapple with alterity (with human difference) through the presence of DNA traces that are inscribed in a crime scene and through patterns of criminal behavior that are attributed to a particular population or demographic. This will prepare us to study how forensic procedures deploy accelerated technologies to determine guilt or innocence in a criminal case, and to assess damages in a civil suit, but we will also push beyond this rather more familiar use of the term to deploy forensics as a lens for analyzing and adjudicating emergent forms of economic and symbolic value. This course examines strategies for assessing the value of a human life, with specific reference to the role that mechanisms of colonial exploitation, enslavement, and incarceration have played in shaping modern economic systems, political institutions, and financial instruments.
The Commodity - AMST-GA 2331.001
Michael Ralph
You can buy one, sell one, borrow one, trade one, or become one. This course uses ethnography, social theory, and literature to analyze the commodity as we explore the proposition that the twenty-first century is a time of heightened commodity production. As we examine the ways people become like objects—and vice versa—we will pay special attention to the way commodification proceeds in urban contexts.
Feminist/Queer Theories: Queer Emotions - G13.2305
Gayatri Gopinath
This seminar examines the recent turn within queer studies to questions of affect and sentiment. We will read the works of Sarah Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetcovich, Lisa Duggan, Jonathan Flatley, Elizabeth Freeman, Stuart Hall, Jose Esteban Munoz, Karen Shimakawa, and others; as well as the nonfiction prose of Saidiya Hartman and Minal Hajratwala. Some of the questions we will consider include the following: why are some emotions granted political saliency and linked to possibilities of social change, while others are deemed inherently apolitical and antithetical to collective action? How does an understanding of “political emotions” complicate notions of private and public space? What is the place of love, shame, hope, disgust, nostalgia, in producing racial/gender/class/sexual subjectivities? In reframing the meaning of negative forms of affect, in particular, how have queer scholars simultaneously reframed understandings of the political inherited from Marxist thought?
Afro-Latino Culture and History - G13.2802
Juan Flores
Latinos are now called “the nation’s largest minority,” outpacing African Americans and thereby signaling a benchmark in the changing meaning of what it means to be American. In public accounts of this dramatic shift, Latinos are commonly counterposed against African Americans in mutually exclusionary terms: either you are Hispanic or you are black. Little if any attention goes to the huge though uncounted black Latino population, the group that fits neatly in neither the Hispanic nor the black category and yet may play a decisive role in the emerging cultural configurations and political alignments of our times. In this course we will examine the profound sociological and cultural implications of the growing Afro-Latino presence in light of recent theorizing on race and diasporas. After an overview of the historical background of African-descendant peoples in the Spanish-speaking Americas, we will then trace the longstanding social experience of black Latinos in the United States. Along with a discussion of migration patterns and community formations, there will be a focus on narrative accounts of Afro-Latino life and on the traditions of cultural expression; special attention will go to Afro-Latino poetry and to the rich history of Afro-Latino music through the generations, from rumba, mambo and Cubop to salsa, Latin soul and hip-hop. Finally, we will turn to the possible theoretical and political consequences of this increasingly self-conscious transnational identity formation.
America Studies Seminar - AMST-GA 3301.001
The purpose of this course is to provide students with an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of American Studies. Through both primary and secondary readings, we will explore the historical, political and intellectual formation of American Studies as a domain of knowledge production. The second half of the semester will be dedicated to reading a number of exemplary works of recent American Studies scholarship. Throughout we will pay close attention to questions of methodology and to the intersections (even constitutive relationships) between contemporary American Studies discourse and practice, and a broader range of institutionally insurgent interdisciplinary fields, including (but not limited to) women, gender and sexuality studies, labor studies, queer studies, comparative ethnic and diaspora studies, environmental studies and dis/ability studies. This course is intended as an introduction and overview and is thus not exhaustive. Students will have opportunities in their independent work for the course to think about potentially new and unanticipated "iterations" of the field.
Tpcs: Culture & Consumption - G14. 3392
Arlene Davila
This seminar explores the intricate, and highly debated relationship between culture and consumption. We explore the ways in which culture (comprising material culture, spaces, ideas, social relations and practices) is commodified and consumed in everyday life, as well as how processes of commodification and consumption affect and shape different aspects of contemporary life, from notions of race, class, identity to urban infrastructure and the workings of the neoliberal cultural economy. Some questions we will investigate include the ways in which individuals and groups define their identity in relation to consumption; how the media may help shape the making of ethnic, racial and gender identities; whether the market serves as a space for self-expression, or alternatively as a space for limiting ideas of identity and citizenship; class identities under neoliberalism, consumption in relation to cultural geography and urban economies; and finally, different meanings of consumer citizenship in relation to contemporary social movements.
Tpcs: Cultural Citizenship - G14. 3394
Renato Rosaldo
Cultural Citizenship concerns the right to be different and belong, in a participatory democratic sense. The term citizenship concentrates on the ordinary language definition found in the phrase full citizenship as opposed to second-class citizenship. The term cultural refers to vernacular definitions of what confers entitlement. Entitlement in this sense ranges from economic factors to notions of dignity and respect. How do such issues vary from national to transnational contexts? From urban to indigenous settings? How can one strive to create a society where differences based on gender, ethnicity, and racialized identities confer a sense of solidarity, value, and respect, rather than stigma and subordination?
American Fiction Since 1945 - G41. 2843
Phil Harper
This course examines works of prose fiction produced in the United States since the end of World War II in 1945. Because this stage of the nation’s history is characterized by the increasing complexity of its social and cultural formations, we will be concerned throughout the term not with tracing an easily defined, coherent trajectory of literary-historical “development,” but rather with sampling the highly disparate types of literary production that emerge during the period in question, which together give some indication of that very complexity. In the relatively abbreviated context of a single semester, the course will strive to do justice to this intricate late-century literary-cultural landscape through the review of the novels listed above and of short fictional pieces by Raymond Carver, Shirley Jackson, Jamaica Kincaid, Gish Jen, Tillie Olsen, and Grace Paley. We will also read a selection of recent critical articles focused on some of the assigned primary texts, so as to identify the preoccupations and analytical methods of scholars working in the field.
Family & Sexuality - G93. 2451
Judith Stacey
When Tolstoy penned the memorable opening lines of Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” he could not have anticipated the family composition of the vice-presidential nominee at the 2008 Republican Party Presidential Nominating Convention, or the throngs of same-sex couples in California who were busy rushing to tie the knot before Prop 8 withdrew their brief access to the altar. Most likely, Tolstoy was not imagining happy polygamous families, commercial surrogacy, sperm banks, polyamory, or a cyber-marketplace for transnational arranged marriages, mail-order brides, and hook-ups. Few second-wave feminists, Stonewall era gay liberationists, or Cold War era family scholars conjured these scenarios either. This seminar, however, will consider happy and unhappy aspects of such unanticipated developments. It explores some of the historic and global transformations of intimacy that underlie the paradoxical and polarizing politics of family and sexual diversity in the contemporary world. We will examine social forces behind the rise and fall of the modern Western family system based on monogamous heterosexual companionate marriage, male breadwinning and intensive motherhood. We will compare ways in which different cultural constructions of family and sexuality (including monogamy, polygamy, arranged marriage, queer families of choice, and polyamory) attempt to navigate tensions between eros and domesticity. Whose needs and interests are served and thwarted by these distinctive arrangements, and what is the appropriate role of law, public policy, and politics in shaping our families and sexualities?
Approaches to American Capitalism (G13.2304)
This is a course about imagining capitalism – about the interplay of social relations of exchange and exploitation and the way that people have imagined, engaged, and resisted those social relations over the last two centuries or so. The structure of the course is methodological rather than historical: the course is designed to expose students to a variety of approaches which they can use in their own research and writing rather than to exhaustively survey “the history of American capitalism.” Among the topics covered will be property, personhood, justice, deviance, self, work, money, exchange, commodification, exploitation, ideology, consciousness, race, gender, class, sexuality, politics, resistance, globalization, space, time, and, finally, history itself. Always, the focus of our discussions will be upon the efforts of historians and historical actors (including ourselves) to come to a systemic understanding of the social practice of the marketplace, and on the liberatory possibilities and inherent limitations of thinking through the market.
Gender, Race, and Imperialism (G13.2303)
In this American Studies research seminar, we will focus on the analysis of gender, race, class, sexuality and nation in relation to the history of U.S. imperialism. We will closely examine methods and theories at the boundaries of cultural, social and political theory, alongside literary historicist scholarship and interdisciplinary historical work in the “New American Studies” and in cultural studies. What are the political and scholarly stakes in differing methods, theories and languages for historical scholarship? Who are the audiences, what are the central debates and why are these different sites for research and writing often separated, analytically and politically? What might we learn by placing these overlapping modes of scholarship in conversation? Students will be responsible for two in-class presentations and one research paper (25-40 pages) due at the end of the semester. The research paper will be proposed and developed in consultation with the instructor, and shared with the class. This course counts toward the historical analysis methods requirement in American Studies.
Group Research Seminar (G13.2319)
The purpose of the course is to provide a setting in which students will produce an article of publishable quality, a paper for presentation at a professional conference, or a dissertation proposal or chapter. Students will produce a research proposal at the beginning of the semester and a completed draft for circulation and discussion in class at the end of the course. Weeks in between will be devoted to individual consultations with instructor and periodic class meetings devoted to questions of research methods and other issues germane to student’s projects.
Historicizing American Literature (G13.2312)
This course will consider post-war US novels–and in particular works written after 1975–with the aim of situating them in relation to three significant elements within the context of their emergence: contemporary urbanism, cultural paranoia, and historical retrospection. We will pursue our inquiry along a dual track, entailing a thorough review of recent full-length critical studies of contemporary fiction, and research in the relevant archives of the Fales Special Collection at NYU’s Bobst Library. Thus we will arrive at a fuller understanding of both the theoretical modes by which contemporary US fiction is currently engaged, and the circumstances to which it responds. We will read books of criticism by Madhu Dubey, Amy Elias, Timothy Melley, Patrick O’Donnell, and Elizabeth Wheeler. Among the fiction writers who may be considered are Kathy Acker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Truman Capote, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, John Okada, Thomas Pynchon, and Susan Sontag.
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Individual Research Seminar (G13.2306)
The purpose of this course is to provide a setting in which students will produce an article of publishable quality, a paper for presentation at a professional conference, or a dissertation proposal or chapter. Students will produce a research proposal at the beginning of the semester and a completed draft for circulation and discussion in class at the end of the course. Weeks in between will be devoted to individual consultations with the instructor and periodic class meetings devoted to questions of research methods and other issues germane to student projects.
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Marxist Thought and Critical Practice (G13.2313)
Marxist thought is a central—if often implicit—element in much contemporary U.S. cultural criticism. This course will review key aspects of that thought as elaborated by such theorists as Marx, Lukacs, Benjamin, Adorno, and Althusser, and as engaged by such critics as Judith Butler. John Guillory, Fredric Jameson, Andrew Parker, Tricia Rose, and Cornel West, to name but a few authors whose works may be included on the syllabus. Proceeding roughly in three phases through the semester, we will examine founding texts in Marxist cultural theory, consider more-or-less straightforward critical “applications” of Marxist thought, and, finally, review recent interventions loosely intelligible as instances of “cultural studies” in order to determine what Marxist principles are at stake within them. Course requirements: one 10-15 minute presentation; and 15-20 pages of written work, submissible in one, two, or three installments over the course of the term.
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Queer Historiographies (G13.2314)
This course is (a) the pilot course for the new grad certificate in gender & sexuality studies, and (b) being co-taught with Ann Pellegrini in Performance Studies, where it is also listed under one of their general topics rubrics. It will focus on multi-disciplinary approaches to child sexuality, intergenerational sex, and sexual abuse. *American Studies students will need Professor Duggan’s permission to register, and should meet with her first. All other students should meet Professors Duggan or Pellegrini only during the week before classes start. You will not be admitted until then, space permitting.
Roots of Race Thinking
This seminar considers race thinking’s constitution of modern thought and society, within the U.S. and beyond. Beginning with the Haitian Revolution, it moves through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, addressing the racial dimensions of modern arrangements of authority, agency, and value (nationalism, sexuality, gendered citizenship, production and consumption, cultural identity, creolization, segregation, civil law, social and therapeutic sciences, immigration policy, beauty, and virtue). The aim of the seminar is to survey analyses of race thinking’s scope, origins, and object, and to identify points of clarity – and confusion –regarding its importance as a social logic.
Race and Nation in the Americas: Ethnographic Perspectives (Modes of Inquiry)
This course parts form three interrelated premises:† First, that race and nation--as constructs, concepts, and objects of ideologies, movements and identifications--cannot be studied unless in intimate relation to one another; second, that while shaped and informed by global processes affecting dominant understandings of blood, substances, character, and subjective identifications,†these constructs have regionally specific permutations that respond to particularities of place and history.† And thirdly, that ethnographic analyses can help expose the nuance operations of these processes, helping to reformulate common understandings around these highly debated and contentious constructs. The course will also pay particular attention to the processes involved in the creation of cultural symbols and views of national identity for political mobilization, while considering U.S., Latino and Latin American ethnography broadly, examining works that span the reflexive to the empirically based yet not founded on actual fieldwork.
Seminar in American Studies (G13.3301)
This seminar will focus on key topics in areas of social, political, and cultural history; science and technology; law and social movements; popular culture; urban and community studies; cultural analysis; indigenous America; nationalism and transnationalism; media studies. Students must complete a research paper. Note: This is an American Studies core course. All new entering students must register for this course.
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Studies in Work (G13.2329)
This seminar is designed to offer students an introduction to the field literature in studies of work and labor. It combines literature from several disciplinary areas: labor history (both old and new): sociology of work; political economy, and cultural analysis. Beginning with a survey of theories of work and leisure from the ancient world to modern times, the seminar proceeds more or less chronologically through American history, starting from the Jeffersonian debate about agrarianism and ending with the latest casebook of writings about “precarious” labor. Attention will be given to different kinds of workplace and income status, especially in respect to class, gender and race. The goal of the seminar is to provide an overview adequate to coverage in a field exam, and to stimulate research in specific areas of the curriculum.
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Technology and Nature (G13.2310)
This seminar focuses on the interplay between technology and nature – two dominant themes in American social and cultural history. It begins in New World pastoral and Native conquest, and then covers the settlement of the West and the transition from the age of entrepreneurial invention to that of corporate techno-science. But the scope of the seminar falls mostly within the 20th century. Seminar participants discuss such topics as the career of Taylorism, the Cold War research state, developments in reproductive technologies, the history of technological disemployment, and the emergence of digital capitalism. We will also survey the spectrum of positions within the environmentalist movement, examine the politics of race and environmental justice, and assess the claims for environmental security in the “risk society” that has supplanted Cold War state paradigms of conflict.
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U.S. and the Long 20th Century (G13.2307)
This course is a survey of major themes and controversies in the history of the United States since Reconstruction. It is also an introduction to the intellectual movements, methodologies and approaches that have helped constitute the area of “American Studies,” and the study of American culture and society in the latter half of the 20th century. The reading is drawn from the fields of social history, sociology, literary and cultural history and cultural studies. The course is broadly organized around questions pertaining to the rise of the modern American nation-form, including the development of social relations and cultural identities mediated by state institutions, and the effects of state power at home and abroad. Major topics include: political democracy, socialism and the problem of American exceptionalism; the frontier, manifest destiny, and the question of empire; the rise of the national-social state, and the modern corporation; class, race, gender and ethnic formations; the culture industries, the “new social movements,” and the contemporary transformations of the American Studies project. The course assumes a general knowledge of modern U.S. history and a working familiarity with many of the “keywords” that have defined American political culture during the relatively short span of U.S. history.
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U.S. Ethnography: History, Topics, and Theory (G13.2322)
Urban and Suburban Studies (G13.2320)
This seminar will offer a broad survey of the history of urban and suburban development since the mid-nineteenth century. It will look at some of the major movements, in planning and in architecture, and will examine several schools of thought associated with urbanism over that period of time. Urban forms will include streetcar, suburbs, high-density cores, garden cities, greenbelt towns, planned communities, urban gentrification, edge cities, ghettoes and barrios, historical preservations, the suburban subdivision, gated community, and neo-traditional development. Close attention will be given to the relationship between these urban forms and modes of industrial production, transportation, and communication.
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Reading in American Studies (G13.3309)
Restricted ordinarily to matriculated doctoral candidates.
Research in American Studies (G13.3310)
Restricted ordinarily to matriculated doctoral candidates.
Typical Cross-Listed Courses
Africana Studies
New Directions in African-American Literature (G11.3212)
This course will examine a number of new compelling directions that the African American novel has taken, along with its attendant social, historic contexts, and aesthetic arguments. We will cover such developments as the rise and importance of black women writers; the anti-mimetic conventions of the ‘neo-slave' narrative; black explorations in horror and science fiction; the black post-modernist novel; strategic, generational shifts in narrative convention ranging from post-Civil Rights to Hip Hop. We will read works by such influential novelists as Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed, among others.
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Proseminar in Black History and Culture (G11.2000)
Introduces incoming Africana studies Masters 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-19th century. Topics include Pan-Africanism, Harlem Renaissance, black migration, and black feminism. Requires permission from the Africana Studies Program.
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Afro-Latino Culture and History (G11.2000)
Latinos are now called “the nation’s largest minority,” outpacing African Americans and thereby signaling a benchmark in the changing meaning of what it means to be American. In public accounts of this dramatic shift, Latinos are commonly counterposed against African Americans in mutually exclusionary terms: either you are Hispanic or you are black. Little if any attention goes to the huge though uncounted black Latino population, the group that fits neatly in either the Hispanic nor the black category and yet may play a decisive role in the emerging cultural configurations and political alignments of our times. In this course we will examine the profound sociological and cultural implications of the growing Afro-Latino presence in light of recent theorizing on race and diasporas. After an overview of the historical background of African-descendant peoples in the Spanish-speaking Americas, we will then trace the longstanding social experience of black Latinos in the United States. Along with a discussion of migration patterns and community formations, there will be a focus on narrative accounts of Afro-Latino life and on the traditions of cultural expression; special attention will go to Afro-Latino poetry and to the rich history of Afro-Latino music through the generations, from rumba, mambo, and Cubop to salsa, Latin soul and hip-hop. Finally we will turn to the possible theoretical and political consequences of this increasingly self-conscious transnational identity formation.
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Exodus: The Politics of Black Liberation (G11.2610)
Seminar on the struggle for cultural and political autonomy in the United States among African Americans, primarily in the urban North, who rejected the church-based nonviolent Civil Rights Movement. Focuses on the “Negro” or African side of what W.E.B. DuBois called Afro-American “double-consciousness.”
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Topics in Postcoloniality: Exile, Engagement and Errancy: Haitian Novel (G11.2645)
Explores and interrogates the notion of the “postcolonial” in relation to certain key aspects of contemporary African and/or Caribbean societies, cultures, and histories. Individual areas of investigation include theories of Africa and Africans, Caribbean literary theory, modern postcolonial theory and its applicability and relevance to recent developments in the African continent and its diaspora, new identity formations, African and Caribbean cultural studies, nationalism and the nation-state, creolization, and theories of resistance.
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Anthropology
Culture and Media I (G14.1215)
This course will examine a number of new compelling directions that the African American novel has taken, along with its attendant social, historic contexts, and aesthetic arguments. We will cover such developments as the rise and importance of black women writers; the anti-mimetic conventions of the ‘neo-slave' narrative; black explorations in horror and science fiction; the black post-modernist novel; strategic, generational shifts in narrative convention ranging from post-Civil Rights to Hip Hop. We will read works by such influential novelists as Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed, among others.
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Culture and Media II: Ethnography of Media (G14.1216)
This course will examine a number of new compelling directions that the African American novel has taken, along with its attendant social, historic contexts, and aesthetic arguments. We will cover such developments as the rise and importance of black women writers; the anti-mimetic conventions of the ‘neo-slave' narrative; black explorations in horror and science fiction; the black post-modernist novel; strategic, generational shifts in narrative convention ranging from post-Civil Rights to Hip Hop. We will read works by such influential novelists as Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Ishmael Reed, among others.
Culture and Media II: Ethnography of Media (G14.1216)
In the last decade, a new field — the ethnography of media — has emerged as an exciting new arena of research. While claims about media in peoples lives are made on a daily basis, surprisingly little research has actually attempted to look at how media is part of the naturally occurring lived realities of people’s lives. In the last decade, anthropologists and media scholars interested in film, television, and video have been turning their attention increasingly beyond the text and empiricist notions of audiences, (stereotypically associated with the ethnography of media), to consider, ethnographically, the complex social worlds in which media is produced, circulated and consumed, at home and elsewhere. This work theorizes media studies from the point of view of cross-cultural ethnographic realities and anthropology from the perspective of new spaces of communication focusing on the social, economic and political life of media and how it makes a difference in the daily lives of people as a practice, whether in production, reception, or circulation.
Department Seminar: Genes (G14.3210)
This course brings together the tools and texts of biological and cultural anthropology to examine what genes are and do. Genes are both objects and tools of scientific study; they figure centrally in biocultural explanations of human variation, and are "cultural icons", as well. Yet the gene is a contested entity, its status is in dispute in molecular biology and critiques of biological reductionism. The tools of genomic analysis hold out the possibility of transforming theory and practice in biomedicine and more broadly in evolutionary thought. At the same time, contemporary genetic knowledge develops under the historical shadow of biological determinism. In order to understand current debates and practices surrounding forensics and racial profiling; prenatal testing and reproductive selection; the possibilities of individualized genetic medicine; the human genome diversity project; or comparative evolutionary genomics, course participants will acquire both a basic background in human genetics/ genomics, and engage in a social and historical analysis of these complex and contested subjects.
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Comparative Diaspora (G14.3395)
This is a graduate seminar that explores the theoretical and methodological issues in the study of comparative diasporas. Diaspora describes the process by which immigrants and their descendants create home community, and identity as they sustain cultural and social ties with their homeland (real or imagined), place of residence, and other coethnic living elsewhere. In the past two decades, diaspora has reemerged as a provocative and highly contested analytical concept across both humanities and social sciences. Why has diaspora drawn so much attention? What makes it such a seductive yet controversial concept? What are the analytical possibilities and limitation of the concept of diaspora? This seminar will address these questions, among others, by evaluating the current uses of and debates about diaspora. Through close examination of several case studies, we will discuss diaspora as both anaritudelytical concept and empirical process. Students will explore the political-economic conditions that engender diasporic formations, the particular cultural-social dimension that facilitate their reproduction, and the symbolic significance of “diaspora” to the communities involved. These foci will help us examine these issues of identity and subjectivity as well as their construction and representation, while analyzing the histories and cultural formation of diasporic communities.
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Constructing America: Seminar on the Anthropology of the U.S. (G14.1330)
Ethnographic research in and about the United States is relatively new in anthropology, the relevant literature one might read on the subject is vast. This course will take a sociology of knowledge approach to the field. The first few weeks will address the creation of the US as an ethnographic object in the context of the development of anthropology as well as the changing character of American society and culture. Organized chronologically and topically, it will explore both how anthropologists study American culture and, in that process, how we as well as our subjects are simultaneously engaged in constructing it. After the first four weeks, we will be reading an ethnography every week. The course is designed for graduate students in Anthropology and American Studies who are involved in research in/about the United States. Anyone who does not fit that description must have permission of the instructor to take the course. Students are expected to keep up with the readings, contribute to seminar discussions, and make class presentations. Formal work includes two critical book reviews with oral and written presentations (8-10pp.); and a term paper (15-20pp.) which can be submitted in the form of a research proposal.
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Cultures of Biomedicine (G14.3391)
Over the last 100 years, biomedicine as a sphere of ideas and practices has made increasingly powerful claims to define the conditions of human life and death. How did medical authority get established? This seminar will look at the many historical processes through which biomedical power is constituted by addressing topics such as: the discovery/invention of bodies, systems, populations; public health and governance; the material culture of scientific medicine; the emergence of diagnostic categories and pharmacologies; the role of biostatistics. This course is located on the intersection of science studies and anthropological approaches to biomedicine.
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Personhood (G14.3393)
An historical and comparative exploration of the concept of personhood in anthropological approaches to culture. Topics will include: the role of the nation state in defining persons; rites of passage in the life cycle of persons; interiority and emotions in historical and comparative context; pharmacology and enhancement of persons and minds; psychiatry and mind/brain locations of personhood; gender, race, class, illness, imprisonment and disability in relation to “degrees’ of personhood. Works in progress will be discussed with their authors: Bambi Schieffelin, Fred Myers, Rayna Rapp, Don Kulick, Lorna Rhodes, Elizabeth Lunbeck and (visits pending) Louis Sass, Allan Horwich.
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Topical Seminar: Cultures of Biomedicine (G14.3391)
Over the last 100 years, biomedicine as a sphere of ideas and practices has made increasingly powerful claims to define the conditions of human life and death. How did medical authority get established? This seminar will look at the many historical processes through which biomedical power is constituted by addressing topics such as: the discovery/invention of bodies, systems, populations; public health and governance; the material culture of scientific medicine; the emergence of diagnostic categories and pharmacologies; the role of biostatistics. This course is located on the intersection of science studies and anthropological approaches to biomedicine.
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Asian/Pacific American Studies
Theorizing Practices: Underground Archives (G13.2304)
As a first offering, I’d like to focus on “Underground Archives” among minoritized groups. As part of the “hidden” organizing work of groups excluded and marginalized from dominant normalizing political cultures, collectors and their collections are a foundational yet largely unrecognized group of cultural activists. This course will interview collectors (thereby building it’s own oral archive to be deposited at Tamiment Library), visit their collections, and examine extant critical writings related to collecting, making presence, and the political culture of knowledge-making. Books, essays, and the interviews will serve as the background readings to critically examining actual collections and the contexts from which they were formed. Readings will likely include: Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003), Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (2001), Walter Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (2000), Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, eds., Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899-1999 (2002), and Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003).
Center For Latin American and Caribbean Studies
Theorizing Practices: Underground Archives (G10.1001)
This course begins with a history of the emergence of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and continues as a wide-ranging survey of the various disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to the area. Some of the readings are included as a means to explore the boundaries of the established disciplines. The purpose is not only to present studies of Latin American and Caribbean realities but to review the scholarly, intellectual, and political frameworks according to which these realities are discerned. Latinamericanist and Caribbeanist faculty from throughout the university will be invited to speak about the history of the disciplinary and interdisciplinary frameworks for the study of region, as well as the prevailing methods in the present moment.
Topics Seminar: Movements & Media in Latin America (G10.1020)
This research-oriented seminar introduces students to the major theories of social movements and contentious politics, including perspectives on resource mobilization, political process, collective identity and expression. Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between movements and media in the production of political cultures in their often uneasy transition from 'cultures of fear' to 'cultures of participation.' Special consideration will be given to the economics of movement-media dynamics. Some dynamics. Some of the main questions the course will address include: How do movements emerge and on what conditions does their success depend on? What role do movements play in transitions to and consolidations of democracy? How do movements relate to and create public and counter-publics, and what does their efficacy depend on? Which strategies do movements use for communicating with the larger society and how are the different types of media being employed (e.g. mass demonstration, street theater, music, mouth-to-mouth propaganda, graffiti, flyers, newspapers, radio, television, video, phone, fax, email, web sites)? How do the structure and operative logic of different media types impact movements? How do the conditions for movements change with the decoupling of media from state control and the dedifferentiation of media and market? The aim of the course is to provide students with an introduction to movement theory, recognition of its relations to broader questions of social, political, and cultural transformation, and an opportunity to develop a research project of their own.
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Neoliberalism and its Discontents in Contemporary Latin America (G10.1022)
This course will examine the background to and main concepts surrounding the recent period of neoliberal political economy in Latin America: free market capitalism, globalization, free trade, the privatization process and the role of the state. The class will examine the reasons for adopting its prescriptions over the past two decades and analyze the economic, social and political consequences of neoliberal programs in various countries. Through readings and classroom debates we will construct a balance sheet of the successes and failures of these policies in order to understand and assess the current array of problems that many lat at the door of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the so-called "Washington Consensus." The second half of the course will explore the nature of resistance and protest movements at the popular, grassroots level as well as opposition generated at the highest levels of formal politics in contemporary Latin America. The latter focus would include the significance of the recent elections of Jose Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil and Col. Lucio Gutierrez in Ecuador, who join the vocal populist, Col. Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.
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Cinema Studies
Television: History and Culture (H72.1026)
Examines the background, context, and history of radio, television, video, and sound. Topics include: politics and economics of media institutions, audiences and reception, cultural and broadcast policy, aesthetic modes and movements.
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Comparative Literature
Topics in African Literature: Cultural Studies and African Diaspora (G29.3630)
How have African writers come to terms with colonial legacies of language, literature, and indeed, modes of defining self and continent? In what ways has attention to vernacular languages and literary form, translation, and African philosophy sought to overcome and transform these legacies in postcolonial Africa? In exploring these questions, some of our key focal points will be the following: Achebe and Ngugi on the politics of linguistic choice; Négritude and its critics; the colonial and postcolonial construction of race and ethnicity in the context of the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath; rights, responsibility, and the legacy of apartheid in testimony before South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Authors from among the following: Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Jaques Derrida, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Wole Soyinka, Frantz Fanon, A.C. Jordan, S.E.K. Mqhayi, Alexis Kagame, V.Y. Mudimbe, Mahmood Mamdani, Achille Mbembe, Boubacar Boris Diop, Jean-Marie Rurangwa, J.M. Coetzee, Njabulo Ndebele, Antjie Krog, and Zoë Wicomb. Written as well as audio-visual documents from South Africa and Rwanda will supplement works by these authors.
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Culture & Communication (Steinhardt School of Education)
Media, Memory and History (E38.2025)
This course examines the relationship of visual media to the production of historical narratives and cultural memory. It defines media in a broad sense, looking in particular at photography, film, television and forms of new media in relation to the scholarship on historiography and memory studies. The course will address questions such as: What role has the photograph played in concepts of modern history? How are historical narratives told through the media of film & television? What issues are raised by the form of the historical docudrama? How is cultural memory produced and circulated through television and film and photography? What is the difference between history and cultural memory?
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English
Media, Memory and History (E38.2025)
This course examines the relationship of visual media to the production of historical narratives and cultural memory. It defines media in a broad sense, looking in particular at photography, film, television and forms of new media in relation to the scholarship on historiography and memory studies. The course will address questions such as: What role has the photograph played in concepts of modern history? How are historical narratives told through the media of film & television? What issues are raised by the form of the historical docudrama? How is cultural memory produced and circulated through television and film and photography? What is the difference between history and cultural memory?
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Topics in Modern Literature: New Approaches to Urban Literature (G41.2917)
This course offers a series of new and sometimes speculative approaches to exploring contemporary urban literature. Drawing upon but also moving beyond the accepted canon of city theorists (Harver, Soja, Sasken et alii), we will explore the more chaotic, ghostly, kitschy works of graphic novelists such as Alan Moore and Ben Katchor; the sci-fi dystopias of JG Ballard and James Herbert; the hybrid ‘cronicas’ of Mexico City. Topics to be considered include detective fiction, psychogeography, hauntology, ruinationalism, refugeedom, gentrification, gastro-urbanism, (techno-surveillance, stalking, squatting, audio culture, wild nature, noctambulation, the politics of verticality, polemical walking. The secondary texts, which are as likely to be sonic or visual as printed (we may well look at the socio-cartographics of computer games such as The Getaway and Sim City), will have an international dimension: Rafi Segal’s radical analyses of the spatial dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; Rem Koolhaas’s work on the ‘exploding city’ of Lagos; the Raqs Media Collective’s attempts to remap boom-time Delhi. Part-historical-template, part-field-of-study, part-intellectual-scavenging territory, downtown New York will play a crucial role during the semester. There will be guided tours and site-specific lectures. Students will be encouraged to formulate independent and creative projects that apply the ideas discussed during the semester to loci or topics of their own choosing.
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Topics in Modern Literature: Seduction in the Age of Revolution (G41.3802)
The late-eighteenth-century Atlantic world was awash in seduction narratives. Often imposed on actual events—from local sex scandals to the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions—seduction plots, though invariably reductive and clichéd, carried extraordinary explanatory and interpretive force. Libertines and coquettes—staple figures of traditional seduction novels, plays, and poetry—took on new political significance in revolutionary contexts, written and rewritten with many variations in a variety of genres. In this seminar we will explore this narrative proliferation, including such contexts as the history of the novel, the laws of marriage, the politics of revolution, the fear of conspiracy, the culture of sensibility, the allegorization of female and male sexuality, the circum-Atlantic circulation of feminist thought, the dangers and seductive pleasures of reading, and the relationship between literary writing, broader print and knowledge cultures, and the public sphere. With seduction tropes drawn so readily from a variety of discursive contexts, understating “seduction” as a cluster of images and ideas demands a peculiarly literary history: novels, plays, and poetry throughout the eighteenth century not only represent seduction scenarios with extraordinary redundancy, but also stand accused of rendering audiences—especially female readers—vulnerable to seducers’ arts. Through a theoretical orientation toward book history and reception study, the seminar will be primarily concerned with American readers from 1788 to 1807, but the texts and contexts will be trans- and circum-Atlantic. In spite of a recent spate of criticism on seduction novels from this period, some of which we will consider together, much remains to be explained about the broad appeal of the seduction scenario at the intersection of gender, state, and literary politics: what relationships do figures of seduced heroines and seduced publics, libertines and coquettes, have to the age’s revolutions in politics and manners? In public discourse throughout the Atlantic world at the turn of the nineteenth century, sexual libertines become political conspirators, and Jacobins scheme to seduce the wives and daughters of the virtuous political leaders they aim to subvert. We will aim together to understand the reasons why.
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Topics in Postcolonial Studies: Postcolonial Marxism (G41.3900)
Apart from a few exceptions such as Cedric Robinson's classic Black Marxism (1983), most discussions of Marxist theory present Marxism as an overwhelmingly Western or European-oriented body of thought. This has marginalized what might be termed an alternative tradition within Marxism that developed from Marx's own writings on colonialism and Lenin's on imperialism, in the context of the anti-colonial struggles of the twentieth century. Postcolonial theory has been one product of this dissident tradition, but its relation to Marxism 'proper' has remained the subject of much debate and critique. In this course, we will be reconsidering this question by bringing a postcolonial perspective to bear on Marxism, emphasizing the development of forms of Marxism outside Europe that were developed specifically to engage with the problems of the political and social realities of the non-Western world. Writers to be studied will include Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Mao, Roy, Mariátegui, James, Fanon and Cabral.
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History
Intellectual & Cultural History (G57.2025)
Examines modes of cultural history, particularly newer ones. Explores recent theoretical and historiographical discussions of cultural history.
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Reform and Radicalism in the United States (G57.2608)
Examines the origins, motives, and achievements of dissenting movements in America, from 17th-century English backgrounds to the present. Emphasizes individuals and groups interested in changing the existing system toward greater equality for the individual. Topics: nonconformist dissent of the Puritan revolution, reform and radicalism of the American Revolution, Jeffersonian and Jacksonian Democracy, antebellum perfectionism, populism, socialism, progressivism, communism, the New Deal, and the 1960s New Left.
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Slavery, Colonialism & Revolution in the Caribbean (G57.1809)
This course is an introduction to the major themes and debates of colonial Caribbean history. We begin the semester reading general works on the Caribbean: selections from major texts and classic essays by historians, anthropologists, and literary critics arguing the case for the study of the Caribbean as a unit of analysis. From here, we go on to consider the central themes of the region and the period: slavery, capitalism, and emancipation; colonialism, revolution and imperialism; nationalism and race. Themes will be studied from a variety of approaches and perspectives, from very local microhistorical studies, to comparative ones, to more sweeping global treatments. Throughout we will attempt to bridge the vertical lines that often separate the study of the different linguistic and imperial Caribbeans.
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Journalism
Cultural Conversation (G54.1181)
The primary purpose of this course is to inculcate habits of thinking that are vital to informed and intelligent cultural reporting and criticism. This does not mean that students will be taught "theories" of cultural writing, which they can then apply to their "practice." Rather, the point is that your thought process-as you write a piece, as you prepare to write it, or even before that, as you go through your daily life in a world full of potential subject matter-is an integral part of your work as a writer. We all carry on some kind of conversation with ourselves, and with the people we know, about the culture we live in. As writers, however, our task is to self-consciously translate that private conversation into a public one that connects with readers. In this course I ask you to address two questions that bear on this translation. One is historical: what has been said in the cultural conversation before you came to it? To find your place in the conversation (just as you would have to do if you joined a roomful of people talking) you will need to grapple with cultural issues and debates that go back half a century-debates about the nature of art and criticism, technology and mass media, high culture versus mass culture, art and politics, social groups and cultural difference. The second question is personal: what experiences, ideas, emotions, and prejudices do you bring to the conversation? While conventional news writers are simply expected to put their own attitudes aside, cultural journalists must be conscious of their standpoint and its impact on their observation and judgment. Your credibility and the power of your literary voice depend a good deal on your ability to develop this capacity for self-reflection.
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Middle Eastern Studies
Media of Displacement: Gender, Nation and the Postcolonial (G13.1730)
"We are here because you were there" has become a common slogan for postcolonial diasporas in the metropolitan "centers" of the West. With the growing numbers of immigrants and refugees from the Middle East/North Africa in cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, and Sao Paulo, the construction of "us" versus "them" can no longer correspond to one geography, simplistically imagined as "over there." This seminar will study questions of displacement as represented, mediated and narrated in the cinema/media, confronting exclusionary and essentialist discourses with a rich cultural production that foregrounds a complex understanding of such issues as "home," "homeland," "exile,” "hybridity" and "minorities." We will look at the past few decades of films/video practices within the larger context of post-independence and globalization politics as well as in relation to other forms of cultural practices (e.g. beur cinema in relation to rai music and the Algerian-French novel). We will mainly look into the ways films/videos have represented dislocations that have come in the wake of colonial partitions, and of regional, ethnic and religious conflicts; as well as into the ways they challenge traditional genres about immigration, transcending the neat divisions among the social documentary, the ethnographic media, the experimental autobiography, and the fictional narrative. We will also examine these films/videos in relation to contemporary cyber diasporic practices, problematizing especially such issues as "nostalgia" and "return" in the context of new communication technologies.
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Performance Studies
Interracialism: Performing Mixed Race (h42.2090)
This course will survey the emergent field of 'critical mixed race studies' with a particular emphasis on the black experience in the Americas. How have people of African descent been alternately excluded from and incorporated into discourses of miscegenation and mestizaje? What role has performance played in the construction of racial categories like 'the mulatto' and 'the one-drop rule'? How have black people sought to alternately challenge and exploit those constructions? Has the trope of 'passing' helped preserve an essentialist concept of race amidst widespread racial mixing? Do recent developments around the performance of identity point toward a moment in black cultural politics that is leading us 'beyond passing'? We will read broadly and interdisciplinarily, examining the law, politics, performance, visual culture, literature, critical theory, statistics, sociology, philosophy and anthropology as various sites in which interracialism has historically been staged.
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Foucault Seminar (h42.2745)
An intensive advanced seminar grounded in close critical engagement with Foucault. The main focus in on texts by Foucault, but we will also be engaging, necessarily partially, selected secondary works on Foucault. A question throughout: how has Foucault been taken up and circulated (sometimes against the grain of his texts) in political projects and intellectual debates? Another way to put this: How has Foucault himself been "redeployed"? What do we mean when we say "Foucault," and who are "we" to say it?) Special attention to the following: Foucault, bio-power, and the politics of sex and race; Foucault on religion; genealogy as critical practice.
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Introduction to Marxist Cultural Theory (h42.2214)
This course is an introduction to Marxist cultural theory, grounded in the writings of Marx. Effort will be made to historicize Marx’s thought by showing its relationship to the intellectual, political, and cultural currents of the nineteenth century. Substantial time will be given to three twentieth century schools of cultural Marxism: the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Buck-Morss), the Birmingham School (Williams, Hall, McRobbie, Gilroy), and Black Marxism (DuBois, Robinson, James, Davis).
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The Politics of Culture (h42.2312)
What are the institutional, discursive, and ideological contexts that shape the objects, images, sounds or texts we call art?What are the links between cultural spaces--the museum, the movie-theater, the gallery, the music/dance hall, the bookstore, the fashion runway, the public street, television, cyber space--and the larger realm of politics? And how do these relationships impact, implicitly or explicitly, the ways we create, curate, or study the arts? How do consumers play an active role in the reception of cultural products? What is the relation between formally promulgated cultural policy and the tacit knowledge that artists call upon to get their work into the world? What dimensions of the broader cultural terrain are made legible through artistic practice? What are the means through which art intervenes in the political arena? Artwill be studied as a site of contested representations and visions, embedded in power formations--themselves shaped by specific historical moments and geographical locations. Given contemporary global technologies, cultural practices will also be studied within the transnational travel of ideas and people. Such germane issues as the legal and constitutional dimensions of censorship, the social formation of taste, the consumption of stars, the bio-politics of the body, transnational copyrights law--will all pass through an intersectional analyses of gender, race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, and nation, incorporating the insights of such areas of inquiry as multiculturalism, feminism, post-colonialism, and queer studies.
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Postcolonial Theory and Performance (h42.2695)
This course will offer students a survey of theoretical and conceptual tools in social and aesthetic theory that speak from, through and about the experience of colonization and its afterlife. The topics addressed will include globalization, exile, modalities of flexible and nomadic citizenship, translocalisms, diaspora and the post-colony. Questions of gender, class, sexuality and racial formations as they relate to postcolonial studies will also be addressed. Class readings will include Gramsci, Fanon, Cesaire, Glissant, Spivak, MBembe,Canclini. Joseph, Gopinath , Eng and Gilroy.
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Foundations Of Visual Culture (Steinhardt School of Education) (E90.2120)
This course offers incoming and current graduate students the foundations required for study in the interdisciplinary field of visual culture. Students will first be introduced to techniques of visual, textual and on-line research; and the requirements of interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research. The core of the class examines the histories and theories of visuality that are central to the field, as well as the “ways of seeing” that are specific to visual culture. The class also prepares students for the specific engagement with methodology and research topics offered in the subsequent “core” classes for the MA in Visual Culture. The class will in practice engage with art, cinema, visual media and everyday life encounters with the visual, whose definition and display will be one of our objects.
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Politics
Communism (G53.2140)
Fundamentals of modern communist thought; writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and their major critics. Emphasis is on communism as the unrealized potential of capitalism and therefore more on what in capitalism suggests this potential and less on the precapitalist societies that called themselves "communist."
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Religious Studies
Theories and Methods in the Study of Religion (G90.1001)
We will explore fundamental theoretical and methodological issues for the academic study of religion, including some of the more important theories of the origin, character, and function of religion as a human phenomenon. We’ll cover psychological, sociological, anthropological, dialectical, post-colonial and feminist approaches. We will explore some problems for the study of religion today including issues of secularization, the relation between popular culture and religious life, and the intersection of religion and media.
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Sociology
Culture & Society: Founders, References, Debates (G93.2414)
This is a lecture and discussion course aimed at students throughout the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Its theme is the relationship between culture and society, a theme which took its contentious, modern form in the Enlightenment. Debate about these two realms have in time addressed the meaning of craftsmanship; the use of new tools like the camera for artistic ends; the relation of high art to mass society; the structures of language which might or might not unify all cultures; the sociology of bodily behavior; the aesthetic value of social differences; the artist-architect as a maker of social spaces. In other words, a sprawling terrain of ideas and practices. The course divides into three kinds of investigation: Founders, References, and Debates. In the Founders section, I present three people whose work serve as a touchstone, for me, in understanding the relations between culture and society. The References section explores how these relations have been variously explored in social science and humanistic disciplines. The Debates section invites to the class people outside the university engaged in trying to understand, or indeed to forge actual connections between culture and society. The course will meet for 14 weeks, usually once a week, though when guests come to NYU, we might want to work with them more informally as well. The course requirement is a paper of 4000 words. Because discussion matters to the project, the course is limited to 30 students. Before registering, a student should apply to me, sending a description of interests and if possible a piece of writing. The course will be particularly valuable preparation for students who want then to join NYLON, the cultural research group which joins advanced students at New York University to young researchers at the London School of Economics.
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Sociology of Knowledge (G93.2422)
Reviews and evaluates important perspectives on the relationship between knowledge of social structure. Focuses on a number of research strategies concerned with types of knowledge and knowledge-systems, codes and symbols, the manipulation of knowledge for social and political purposes, the study of ideologies, and the major factors in knowledge production.
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Consortium Course Information
The Inter-University Doctoral Consortium (IUDC) offers eligible GSAS students the opportunity to take graduate courses at distinguished universities throughout the greater NY area. The IUDC is open to doctoral students who have completed at least one year of full-time study toward the PhD. Terminal masters students and non-Arts & Sciences students are not eligible.
Participating Schools are:
Columbia University-GSAS
CUNY Graduate Center
New York University-GSAS
Fordham University-GSAS
Graduate Faculty, New School University
Princeton University-The Graduate School
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Stony Brook University
Teachers College, Columbia University
Qualified students must complete an Inter-University Doctoral Consortium Registration Form
Or contact:
Allan Corns
GSAS - Office of the Vice Dean
New York University
6 Washington Sq. North, 2nd Fl
gsas.consortium@nyu.edu
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