spring 2021 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 2303.001 - BLACK BODY & THE LENS

Deb Willis
Tuesdays 12:30PM-3:15PM
Course will be held REMOTELY

This seminar explores the range of ideas and methods used by critical thinkers in addressing the body in photography, print, video, film and exhibition spaces. Central to our discussions will be a focus on how the presence of the black body affects how we see and interpret the world. Using a series of documentary films, invited guest speakers, and readings, we will consider the construction of beauty and style, gendered images, identity, race, black women activists as icons in music and popular culture. The historical gaze has profoundly determined the visual construction of black women in contemporary society such as figures like Angela Davis, Carrie Mae Weems, Lorna Simpson, Ida B. Wells, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth and Beyonce. Historical images of injustices and protests during the 19th century and more recently during the BlackLivesMatter movement illuminate a long history of black peoples’ collective fight against racism. This course is designed with two objectives: to introduce students to the theory and practice of the field of black visual studies and to familiarize them with the work of activists, scholars and artists working in this area. The practice of black visual studies entails the critical evaluation of images in multiple realms of culture: migration, art, new media, activism, medical humanities, and politics. Another aim is to develop students’ critical thinking about exhibitions and to learn directly from leading practitioners in the field of modern and contemporary art. Students will investigate formal and conceptual components of images, as well as issues of image-reception and agency. The interplay between the historical and the contemporary, between self-presentation and imposed representation--all are fundamental to our discussions within a global landscape. As we explore these experiences through images, we will draw on a diverse range of texts, primary sources, and guest speakers in order to grapple with key questions.

AMST-GA 3310.001 - SCA PRO- SEMINAR: THE ART OF RESEARCH

Sophie Gonick
Thursdays 9:30AM -12:15PM
20 Cooper Sq, Rm 401 (Flex Space)
Course will be held BLENDED
(Requirement for SCA & AFRS 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.

Afrs-GA 3213.001 Policing while black

David Dent
Mondays 6:20PM-9:00PM
Course will be held REMOTELY

Sixty percent of the nation’s 25 largest police forces are led by African Americans--three of them have black women at the helm. Last September, The New York Times explored “Faces of Power” in America, creating lists of leaders in the corporate and public sectors. Police leadership was the only one of those lists in which the presence of blacks was not embarrassingly low. In addition, a growing number of blacks in the south are holding the role once held by Bull Connor--sheriff. Yet as more African Americans take leadership roles in the world of policing, the problem of police violence against blacks only grows. Black police officers exist at a central space of this national racial conflict in America. This course will explore that space of the criminal justice system through readings and extensive interviews with black police officers. Zoom speakers will include black sheriffs in the deep south as well as officers. Students will write two short essays or magazine articles and conduct one longform project of original research on the topic that can be delivered in the form of a multimedia presentation, an essay, magazine article, or podcast. The course will be taught by Professor David Dent, who holds a joint appointment in the departments of Journalism and Social and Cultural Analysis.

AMST-GA 2100.001 TOPICS: The Commons

Julie Livingston & Miriam Tickton
Tuesdays 03:30PM-6:10PM
Course will be held REMOTELY
(Email JL6877@nyu.edu to enroll in course)

We live in a world that is overwhelming structured by private property. Yet hiding in the interstices of this dominant political-economic and legal formation are a set of commons, forms of mutual responsibility or commoning that escape, challenge or subvert the limits of private property. From air and ocean to radical forms of mutual aid to open source science, as the Marxist feminist theorist Sylvia Federici notes, “not only has the commons not vanished, but also new forms of social cooperation are constantly being produced, including in areas of life where none previously existed like, for example, the Internet.” Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the commons, as we grapple with the tremendous social, political, and environmental fallout from four decades of neoliberalism and rampant privatization. This course will examine how the commons have been organized and debated, paying close attention to how feminist, indigenous, critical race, and postcolonial thinkers and actors have theorized forms of commoning necessary for remaking community in a violent and rapacious world. We will ask how social reproduction is enacted in the interstices of privatization and in new experimental domains.

AMST-GA 2100.002 - TOPICS: Bodies and Ecologies: Readings in Feminist Science

Thuy Linh Tu
Mondays 2:00PM-4:45PM
Course will be held REMOTELY

Drawing on the field of feminist science studies, and its intersection with critical race, postcolonial, disability studies, and other fields, this course will examine, broadly, the cultural politics of science. It will consider how science’s claim to unmediated knowledge shaped our view of “the body” and “the world,” and how these have been challenged by interventions from such sources as feminist philosophy, decolonial critiques, and indigenous epistemology. Reading from multiple disciplines, we will ask: How has scientific knowledge been forged in relation to colonial expansion, capital accumulation, war making, among other forces? How have these efforts shaped ideas of humanity and habitability? What are the stakes of reconceptualizing matter, technology, nonhuman agency, ecology, toxicity, and embodiment as socially embedded and relational processes?

AMST-GA 2901.001 - TOPICS: The American Literatures of Transnational Feminism

Crystal Parikh
Thursdays 2:00PM-04:45PM
Course will be held BLENDED

This course will consider women’s authorship in American literature by way of a transnational feminist methodology. Do the politics of transnational feminism have an aesthetic practice? How can a transnational feminist perspective offer a critical lens for reading American literature? How does such a critical perspective allow us to read women’s literary production across national borders as well as generate alternative historical frameworks for thinking feminism? What insights do such aesthetic and critical practices shed on family, labor, war, migration, empire, ecological catastrophe, and a host of other urgent social and political thematics? This course will introduce students to key works of transnational feminist theory. We will also read contemporary fiction, drama and poetry (published since 2000) by authors such as Kiran Desai, Valeria Luiselli, and Toni Morrison, asking how the aesthetic practices of women’s publications in the United States call for transnational feminist conceptions and scales of time, place, geography, history and so on.

AMST-GA 2304.001 Seminar: Settler Colonialism & Critical Indigenous Theory

Dean Saranillio
Mondays 11:00-1:45PM
Course will be held REMOTELY

This seminar is open to all graduate students at different levels of familiarity with settler colonial and Critical Indigenous studies. Organized by sets of readings framed by specific debates and/or thematics that partly comprise these movements and fields, this seminar examines Indigenous critiques of capitalism and Indigenous resurgence; statist and non-statist forms of decolonization/deoccupation; queer settler colonialism; the violence of state recognition; food sovereignty; debates on Native/Settler/Migrant subjectivities; and creole indigeneities.

AMST-GA 3212.001 - MAKING BLACK URBANISMS

Kim Johnson
Wednesdays 9:30AM-12:15PM
Course will be held BLENDED

Making black urbanisms investigates the modes of inhabiting, imagining and making the urban through the critical lens of race. We ask whether notions of “blackness” or difference can offer new and perhaps overlooked understandings of the form and function of the contemporary city. Black urbanisms is interrogated through a multitude of approaches ranging from the sociological imagination to popular culture.

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

Caitlin Zaloom
Wednesdays 2:00PM-4:45PM
Course will be held REMOTELY

This course is for graduate students who want to develop skills in the practice of public scholarship. The class will be project-based. Students will work closely with the professor and members of the Public Books editorial team to develop original content for the magazine and podcast. This could be inaugurating an editorial series, designing and implementing an episode of the Public Books 101 podcast, initiating a novel publicity strategy, fostering a set of lectures with one of our partners, or another project. As a class, we will decide on a theme to unite these projects. Course readings will focus on exploring our theme and on the history and current media practices of critical publications.

PERF-GT 2745.001 - Foucault (5 SPOTS)

Ann Pellegrini
Thursdays 3:30PM-6:15PM
721 Broadway, Room 613
Course will be held BLENDED
(Email ann.pellegrini@nyu.edu to enroll in course)

Foucault’s multi-volume History of Sexuality underwent major changes in shape and focus between the first published volume, The Will to Knowledge (1976), and the two subsequent volumes published in Foucault’s lifetime: The Use of Pleasure (1984) and The Care of the Self (1984). The fourth volume in this series — Confessions of the Flesh —was published posthumously, in 2018. An English-language translation of that text will be published in February 2021. In view of that eagerly anticipated volume, this seminar will be organized around this series of studies, which we will read in their entirety. In addition to working patiently through these texts and their arguments, we will also use the series as a whole, in particular, changes between what Foucault anticipated doing when he set out on the series and what he came to do, to get a sense of his unfolding intellectual project, and what he came to understand as the history of thought and the work of critique.