FALL 2023 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: Rosa Báez, rab718@nyu.edu.  
• SCA graduate courses (unless otherwise noted) are located at 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor. 

 

AFRS-GA 2000.001 - Africana Proseminar

Prof. Kimberley Johnson
Thursdays 4:55PM-7:35 PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 471
(Requirement for 1st Year Africana MA students)

Offering a topical exploration of key research themes and topics, the course is an introduction to contemporary historical, ethnographic, cultural and political discourses in Africana studies. The course frames Africana studies within an Atlantic prism as well as exploring other ‘hemispheric’ approaches to examining Africa and its diasporas by examining the various intersecting modernities within which Africana is constructed and contested.

AFRS-GA 2303.001 - Black Body & the Lens

Prof. Deborah Willis
Tuesdays 2:00PM-4:45PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 CONF

This seminar explores how the trope of "blackness" is mediated over a range of ideas, images, and expressions of social difference in cinema. Screenings and readings examine how popular cinema, ranging from black independence to the commercial "mainstream," deals not only with issues of race and color, but how these issues intersect, and interact, with other social categories of difference(s) mainly related to class, sexual orientation, and gender but including many others. The course explores such issues as seeing beyond the "black-white binary" model of race relations; gendered perspectives on "blackness" and black women's filmmaking; the cultural and political dynamic between blackness and gayness on the screen; and issues of class, caste, and "colorism" in cinema. The course also examines a number of ideas and theories related to the material, including passing, double consciousness, unmarked difference, and creolization.

AMST-GA 3301.001 - American Studies Seminar

Prof. Cristina Beltrán
Wednesdays 4:55PM-7:35PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 CONF
(Requirement for 1st Year SCA MA & PhD students)

In this introductory graduate seminar, we will review classic texts in American studies, models of intersectional scholarship, and new work addressed to new publics in the field of American Studies, broadly defined. We’ll examine the shifting intellectual parameters and political interventions of American Studies scholarship. Some of the questions we will address include: What theoretical frameworks and methodological approaches have shaped the field? How has the field intersected with other institutionally insurgent interdisciplinary fields, including (but not limited to) feminist and queer studies, labor studies, comparative ethnic and diaspora studies, environmental studies, native and dis/ability studies?

AMST-GA 2304.001 - Utopias, Past and Future

Prof. Nikhil Singh & Prof. Herman Bennett
Thursdays 9:30AM-12:15PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 471 CONF

Utopian thinking has been central to the project of critical theory in the West, but rather than identify and analyze Utopian experiments of the past, part of the motivation animating this course comes from both a discomfort and dissatisfaction with the ways training in critical theory in the academy often devolves into the pursuit of finer grained maps of domination, that is, ‘the critical theory of everything that is wrong.’ The concern here is not just a steady denuding of what Gramsci called the ‘optimism of the will’ (a condition of possibility for any viable politics and struggle), but also the decades of failure including on the left, to aerate intellectual creativity and institutional experimentation toward human flourishing.

“Utopian Possibilities” asks how might we begin to undo the constraints on our thinking and imagination that forecloses our sense of what is possible in today’s world socially, economically, politically, economically and emotionally. Such an endeavor as the theorist Nikhil Singh writes: “is about ideas (or ideology); in other ways, about the scales and horizons of thoughts (and how scale can be the enemy of possibility); and in a third sense, it is about the willingness to experiment with different ways of not just thinking, but also living."

It may be more than a bit counterintuitive, given all that we know is wrong with the world right now, to query if this is precisely the moment for an emerging out of these doldrums? It is in this sense we are particularly interested in exploring what Gary Wilder calls ‘concrete utopianism,’ what might be seen as a challenge to those who theorize new horizons of possibility as meaningless if not tempered with a “realistic” sensibility and empirical rigor (that many would deem anti-utopian). Such ideas are similarly explored by Erik Olin Wright in “Envisioning Real Utopias” project, which examines actual efforts (i.e., experiments) intent on different forms of politics and social life all around the world today. Finally, we are also keen to utilize this thinking to open up questions about how we might need to revise our sense of the past as well.

AMST-GA 3213.001 - Topics: Erotics in Colonial Archives and Contemporary Latin Am and Latinx Performance

Prof. Maria Saldaña & Prof. Zeb Tortorici
Wednesdays 2:00PM-4:45PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 CONF
(Public Humanities Certificate Elective)

This graduate seminar examines a diverse range of colonial Latin American archival records for the traces, visualities, and absent-presences of the subaltern subjects and "desires," in terms of performance, curation, political praxis, and other forms of memory registered within the archive(s). We will delve into vexed erotic worlds of colonial Latin American (Inquisition records; Indigenous-language confessional manuals; criminal records, chronicles, early texts by Indigenous authors, and the like!) to think about how contemporary knowledge production on and about sex comes out of coloniality, connecting past to present and future in Latin American and Latinx worlds. The course will be oriented around primary research with original sources and interdisciplinary methods to advance students' individual projects at their various stages. The course places Nahuatl- and Quechua-language traces of "desire" and Spanish-language colonial writings in dialogue with the art, performance, and activism of artists such as Xandra Ibarra, Carlos Motta, and Pêdra Costa, among others.

AMST-GA 3701.001 - Scale: Thinking Across Registers of Time and Space in the Anthropocene

Prof. Julie Livingston
Mondays 9:30AM-12:15PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 CONF

How do microscopic entities shape global historical events? How do we conceptualize life in geological time? How are massive systems like capitalism manifest in highly local landscapes and expressed in individual bodies? Climate change and ecological devastation have challenged conceptual tools and registers of spatial and temporal analysis. Meanwhile, certain forms of scalar reasoning (like economic modeling or progressive linear time) are constitutive of political power. In this course we will take up the question of scale as problem for making sense of and acting upon intertwined political, biological, climactic, economic and social dynamics. Readings will be drawn from across a range of humanities and social science disciplines and may include works by Vanessa Agard-Jones, Timothy Choy, Robyn D’Avignon, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Hannah Landecker, Arturo Escobar, Neil Smith, Anna Tsing, Joe Masco, Nick Estes, Adriana Petryna, Lucas Bessire, Kyle Powys Whyte, JT Roane, Jerry Zee, and M Murphy.

NYLON Seminar

Prof. Caitlin Zaloom & Prof. Sophie Gonick
Wednesdays 9:30AM-12:15PM
20 Cooper Sq - TBA

NYLON (New York: LONdon) is a year-long workshop series developing research related to culture, politics, and technology. NYLON connects doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows in New York, London, and Berlin with faculty support and participation. Our New York workshop will meet every other week to develop and discuss ongoing projects related to our theme. In the spring, the New York, London, and Berlin groups will join to hold a conference—likely in Berlin in Spring 2024—where participants will present their work.

Our theme is expansive: we welcome students working on a wide range of topics including AI and inequality, social media and misinformation, the circulation and uses of political rhetoric and rallies, infrastructural worlds, social movements and media, histories of technology and innovation, cultures of surveillance, and urban space, both virtual and real. NYLON participants will engage with others in a range of fields, including American studies, anthropology, business, history, media studies, politics, psychology, science and technology studies, sociology, and technology design. Our group will also cross cohorts, bringing together doctoral candidates writing theses, doctoral students developing projects related to the theme, and post-doctoral fellows advancing their written work.

We value the creation of a space for critical feedback. It is our goal to provide all participants the opportunity to discuss and evaluate dissertation chapters, journal article drafts, research designs, presentations, and more, across institutional, methodological, and disciplinary boundaries. By promoting broad-based intellectual exchanges, NYLON is a forum where new insights and theory can be developed, and where early-career researchers can refine their questions and approaches.

 

CROSSLISTED COURSE

AFRS-GA 1562.001 - Literature of the Field: African Diaspora

Prof. Michael Gomez
Mondays 4:55PM-7:35PM
King Juan Carlos Center - Room 607

This course is an investigation of the more critical, innovative, and influential secondary literature that concerns formation and development of the African diaspora, uncritically understood as the dispersal of people of African descent throughout the world.

 

OTHER RELATED COURSES

SPAN-GA 2977.002 – Memory as connection: montage, loss and insurgent temporalities in Latin America

Prof. Mario Rufer
Tuesdays 4:00PM-6:00PM
King Juan Carlos Center - 2nd Floor Library

Memory as connection: montage, loss and insurgent temporalities in Latin America

A main question frames the seminar: how are dissident memories of community and dentity constructed in Latin America? We will work on these axes: the connection of non- linear times as insurgent memories; the narration of continuous losses as patrimony of the dispossessed; affects and affections as "forms of the archive".

La memoria como conexión: montaje, pérdida y temporalidad insurgente en América Latina

Un interrogante articula el seminario: ¿cómo se forman en América Latina las memorias disidentes sobre comunidad e identidad? La trabajaremos en estos ejes: la conexión de tiempos no lineales como memorias insurgentes; la narración de las pérdidas continuas como patrimonio de los desposeídos; los afectos y afecciones como “formas del archivo”.

 

Public Humanities Initiative in Graduate Education

The Advanced Certificate in Public Humanities explores public engagement as a cornerstone in the careers of scholars, researchers, and teachers. In addition to opportunities for cross-disciplinary thought and collaboration, students meet and learn from practitioners, setting the groundwork for a diverse array of post-graduate careers.

The Advanced Certificate in Management and Leadership of Public Service Organizations prepares students to apply their humanistic training in public-facing careers. Courses offered by the Wagner Graduate School of Public Service complement a foundation in Public Humanities by the management and leadership skills in demand at wide-ranging public enterprises including museums, cultural organizations and non-profits.

For a comprehensive overview and a coursework checklist for both certificates, view the Public Humanities Advanced Certificate One Sheet.