SPRING 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.

AMST-GA 2306.001 - Dissertation Proposal Writing

Prof. Andrew Ross
Mondys 11:00AM-12:15 PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 403A
(Requirement for 3rd Year PhD students)

The Dissertation Proposal Writing seminar is a workshop, designed for students who have completed their field exams. The object of the workshop is to complete a dissertation proposal. The practicum involves study of previous proposals and dialogue about written drafts.

AMST-GA 2901.002 - Life & Debt

Prof. Caitlin Zaloom & Prof. Sophie Gonick
Wednesdays 9:30AM-12:15PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 CONF

Debt is a pervasive facet of contemporary life. From medical bills and college tuition to municipal coffers and central banks, it moves across scales and unites disparate sites, actors, and institutions. It also produces new subjectivities and induces political organizing. In this class, we ask: how does debt affect our social, cultural, and political worlds? How can it be both a tool for violence and an opportunity for collective action? We examine an array of conditions of indebtedness, drawing on scholarship from anthropology, history, feminist geography, carceral studies, critical urban studies, and political economy. We will consider theories of debt and indebtedness, case studies drawn from across the Global North and South, and emergent political projects that reject and rework indebted logics. Course readings will explore debt’s effects on the body, the household, the neighborhood, the city, and the polity, in addition to its transnational qualities, in order to understand life under the hegemony of debt.

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

Prof. Kimberley Johnson
Thursdays 9:30AM-12:15PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 471 CONF
(Requirement for SCA MA & Africana MA students)

(Requirement for 1st year MA Africana and SCA 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.

AMST-GA 3701.001 - Topics: Comparative Colonialisms: Latin America and the United States

Prof. Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo
Mondays 2:00PM-4:45PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 CONF

Comparative study of Spanish and British colonialism; examines forms of governmentality implanted by both in Latin America, U.S. & Canada, and legacies thereof. Examines how colonialism produced distinct racial formations in Hispanophone and Anglophone America, focused primarily on production of Indigenous Afromestizo identities. Colonial models race were accomplished through disciplining of gender and sexuality, thus course engages active entwining of race and sex. Purpose of comparison is to assist in addressing the different modes of political subjectivity that emerged as a consequence of distinct legacies of racial formation. We critically evaluate limits of comparativist methodology, and look for modes that move us beyond comparison. How is it that Indigenous identity came to organized itself around the principle of autonomy in Latin American and around the principle of sovereignty in the United States? How did different models of enslavement in the Americans produce different modes of Black and Afromestizo enfranchisement in their aftermath? How is whiteness lived in Latin American and the U.S.? What are the geographical limits of the "white settler colonialism" model in the Americas? In short, how does racial citizenship differ in the U.S. and Latin America? We examine colonial documents coupled with contemporary analysis of colonialism. Twin goals: to gain a better understanding of the contemporal, yet distinct racial geographies in the Americas, and, as scholars of race formation, to avoid universalizing one particular experience to all of the Americas.

AFRS-GA 2901.001 - Topics: African American Language: Politics and Identity

Prof. Renée Blake
Tuesdays 4:55PM-07:35PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 CONF

Language is foundational to human communication. And we all have deeply ingrained beliefs about how language is, or supposed to be spoken, by whom, when and under what circumstances. Thus, we use language not only to define our cultures, create our identities and communities, but also to ideologize about how our worlds are constructed.

This course is about African American Language (AAL) in the narrow sense of language predominantly spoken by the descendants of enslaved Africans to the United States, as well as in the broader sense of dialects of English spoken by and within African Diasporic communities across North America.

We explore what African American Language is, not just intuitively, but as a comprehensive linguistic system. Critical to this will be an understanding of how it is formed, how it has developed and what are its components. We pay attention to the language as words spoken, as well as words and phrases signed, gestured and expressed with and through the whole body.

We examine the multitude of ways that AAL varies in terms of race, ethnicity, class, age, sex and gender, as well as what it means to be a speaker of AAL, what it means to identify as African American or Black, and what is at stake in the body politic when language is used to engage in African Diasporic wars and stancetaking.

We lean into the notion of Black Language Matters, deeply considering the ways that African American Language has been and continues to be used as a proxy for racism to marginalize, condemn and criminalize its speakers. We delve into political economy at the intersection of AAL, and how resources are on one hand given in terms of cultural capital, and on the other limited in terms of social, political and economic capital.

In this class, we write, we create, and we work to heal through collaboration and sharing of knowledge. This work is facilitated through reading academic texts, watching and participating in performances that incorporate the body, words, music, sound and silence. Additionally, we work with data gathered from texts, ethnographies, autobiographies, digital media and personal stories. Students hone skills in the areas of critical thinking, constructive criticism, data analysis, social and linguistic analysis, and structuring arguments.

CROSSLISTED COURSE

AMST-GA 2102.001 - Topics: Seminar on Foucault

Prof. Ann Pellegrini
Tuesdays 3:45PM-6:45PM
721 Broadway, 6th Floor - Classroom 613

Enrollment Capacity: Instructor permission required to enroll. Contact ann.pellegrini@nyu.edu with a brief statement of intent.

On August 26, 1974 - the same day that Foucault completed Discipline and Punish - he began work on the first volume of the History of Sexuality, drafting that book’s famous final section on the “Right of Death and Power over Life.” This is the section where he first explicitly names and introduces the concept of “bio-power” and also indicates the fatal entanglement of discourses of sexuality in state racism. This seminar is organized around close patient readings of both Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, Volume I, both of which we will read in their entirety. We will supplement our engagement of these texts with additional readings from the large and still-emerging inventory of Foucault’s interviews, public lectures, and activisms around questions of confinement and exclusion. We will pay particular attention to his work with the collective Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons (Prison Information Group), which he helped found.

OTHER RELATED COURSES

PUBHM-GA 1001 - Theorizing Public Humanities

Prof. Crystal Parikh & Prof. Julie Livingston
Wednesdays 2:00PM-5:00PM

This course seeks to understand what constitutes the “public humanities,” by investigating forms of knowledge and critical inquiry that circulate between academic institutions and other public sites and contexts. We begin with theoretical investigations and genealogies of the “human” and the “public,” with particular care to understand how these have been structured by histories of colonialism, enslavement, and enlightenment forms of reasoning. What relationships constitute the human and the public, and from which perspectives do we conceive of these? What forms of creativity, responsibility, and activism are involved in sustaining, pluralizing and/or transforming our conceptions of the human and the public? We will pursue such questions together as a provocation for thinking about the possible meanings of the “public humanities.”

In the final weeks of the course, building on our discussions of the types of human entities and human endeavors that have shaped scholarly inquiry and practice, we will turn to what some have called the “crisis” in the humanities. We will consider the significance of pursuing humanistic inquiry in nonacademic settings. We will also examine the institutional forces that call the humanities into question and the alternate or unexpected places from which critical knowledges emerge, as well as methods for cultivating such spaces. We will hear from guest speakers whose work straddles academic scholarship and other sites of social and cultural analysis.

ELEC-GG 2870 - MÚSICA DE VAIVÉN: THE HABANERA DIASPORA

Prof. Sybil Cooksey
Mondays 2:00PM-4:30PM
King Juan Carlos Center Room 404

Permission required to register (sybil.cooksey@nyu.edu). The rhythm known as the habanera, recognized as the first written music based on an African motif, has zigzagged around the globe for centuries. In this course we will pay close attention to how and why this syncopation pattern, believed to originate in the premodern kingdom of Kongo, today manifests in a wide range of musics--from opera to afrobeats. Team taught by an Afro-Cuban musician and a black diaspora cultural historian, and offered in conjunction with a series of evening seminars featuring renowned scholars, musicians and DJs, this colloquium organizes a central question--what does it mean to hear diaspora? Master classes and listening assignments are designed to build proficiencies with respect to various genres (including, but not limited to ragtime, reggaeton, dancehall, tango, son, samba, zouk, kizomba, bolero and bachata) and encourage students to experiment with thinking through music. Readings and discussions foster cultural literacies and ask us to consider how contact, circulation, and commodification relay a rhythm that carries a place name to so many different places in the world. The transatlantic traffic in slaves, travel, trade, work, war, migration and music industry marketing figure prominently here. How does this va y ven of people and objects, ideas and sounds oblige us to seriously (re)think notions of intangible heritage and sharpen our awareness of the creative and affective forces that shape and sustain afro diasporic musical cultures?