FALL 2022 GRADUATE COURSE LISTINGS

ALL COURSES ARE RESTRICTED AND REQUIRE AN ACCESS CODE TO REGISTER.
If you are NOT an SCA graduate student, but wish to enroll in a course, you must FIRST contact the professor requesting permission to enroll and then the graduate program coordinator: Rosa Báez, rab718@nyu.edu.
SCA graduate courses (unless otherwise noted) are located at 20 Cooper Square, 4th Floor.

AFRS-GA 2000.001 - Proseminar in Africana Studies

Tuesdays 4:55PM-7:35 PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 471 CONF
(Requirement for 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. Each class will be in three sections. The first part will be lecture based by leading or guest professor, the second will be an open student discussion, while the third returns to the lecturer contextualizing debates within the larger academic remit of the course.

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 Beltran
Wednesdays 4:45PM-7:35PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 471 CONF
(Requirement for American Studies PhD and SCA MA students)

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

AMST-GA 2100.001 - Topics in Critical Theory: Queer Theory and Psychoanalysis

Prof. Ann Pellegrini
Tuesdays 03:45PM-6:45PM
721 Broadway RM 613

If queer theory has never been of one mind about psychoanalysis, this may be because psychoanalysis has never been of one mind about homosexuality, let alone queerness. Rather than resolve this tension, this seminar seeks to stay with this ambivalence, asking what resources each of them might offer the other. “Sex” and “sexuality” are key concepts for both psychoanalysis and queer theory. Both also share an interest in the limits of identity, the ways lived experience so often exceeds our capacity to name—let alone classify—desires, pleasures, relations, embodiments. Nevertheless, queer theory alerts us to how the categories we are called to think with, in the classroom and consulting room, may carry with them unexamined assumptions and biases. This class will examine key texts in psychoanalysis and queer theory as we together explore this crosspollination, the history of power it is embedded in, and implications for both theory and practice, including clinical practice

AMST-GA 2301.001 - Colloquium in American Studies: Race, Inequality & Urban Space in Modern America

Prof. Thomas Sugrue
Mondays 4:55PM-07:35PM
SILV RM 504

This course explores how notions of race have shaped U.S. cities over the last 150 years. We will explore such topics as immigration, the rise of residential and educational segregation, discrimination and deindustrialization, urban poverty, urban uprisings, suburbanization, and the experiences of Latinx, African American, Asian American, and indigenous populations in cities. We look at a wide variety of urban and suburban spaces where race is constructed in the built environment, including Chinatowns, "ghettos," suburbs, school districts, public housing and private developments, "red-light" districts, and "skid rows." We will pay special attention to how public policies shaped cities and suburbs and how activists and social movements challenged and reinvented urban life.

AMST-GA 2901.002 - Formations of Native/Indigenous Studies

Prof. Lou Cornum
Mondays 11:00AM-01:45PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 485 CONF

What is the object of study and horizon of possibility for Native American Studies? How have these changed over time? These are the preliminary questions for an intellectual and socio-political history of the field. This course brings together materials related to the emergence of NAS, considering how scholarly inquiry responds to various political moments in the 20th century across the United States and subsequent transformations in theorizations of sovereignty, land, and decolonization. We will read broadly across various approaches, including works by Ella Deloria, Vine Deloria, Elizabeth Cook-Lynne, Robert Warrior, Audra Simpson, Jodi Byrd, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Tiffany Lethabo King and others. The various sources and formations of Native American Studies will be analyzed in the context of its relation to Ethnic studies, Black Studies, Latino Studies as well as the larger global category of Indigenous Studies.

AMST-GA 3213.001 - How to Be a Critic

Prof. Caitlin Zaloom
Wednesdays 9:30AM-12:15PM
20 Cooper Sq - Rm 471 CONF

This class is for those interested in practicing public scholarship as future academics, journalists, editors, curators, podcasters, and cultural programmers. Readings will introduce students to writing that makes academic ideas available to a broad readership. Through weekly seminar discussions, assignments, and workshops, as well as visits with leading public scholars and editorial professionals, students will learn how to develop, pitch, draft, revise, and publish long-form review essays that make rigorous scholarship engaging and accessible. Genres to be analyzed include the profile, the personal essay, the critique, and, of course, the review. Topics span both the humanities and social sciences and include digital economies; visual culture; contemporary film and television; and technologies of the self. Models and resources will be drawn from publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Conversation, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books, a magazine of ideas, art, and scholarship.

AMST-GA 3302.001 - Latinx Visual Culture

Prof. Arlene Dávila
Wednesdays 9:30AM-12:15PM
25 Waverly, RM 706

Course description pending.

CROSSLISTED COURSE

AFRS-GA 2901.001 - Africa -- In Theory

Prof. Mark Sanders
Mondays 11:00AM-01:45PM
25 West 4th RM C-14

Recently there has been an explosion in “theory from the South.” Some of the most exciting interventions have come from African theorists such as Ato Quayson, Achille Mbembe, Jean and John Comaroff, and Mahmood Mamdani. Taking recent works by these theorists as our starting point, we will explore the application and adaptation of metropolitan thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Schmitt, in order to theorize “necropolitics,” genocide, and xenophobia, among other burning issues. We will also take stock of earlier endeavors by Africanist and Afro-Americanist thinkers such as Du Bois, Senghor, Mudimbe, and Ngũgĩ to define critically Africa’s specific contributions to the making (and making sense of) the world that all of us inhabit. Since a number of these thinkers are also writers and/or literary theorists, we shall also be analyzing key recent texts by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Ahmadou Kourouma, Phaswane Mpe, and Antjie Krog.

AMST-GA 2304.001 - The Hemispheric Imaginary: Soverignty, Place-making, and World-Making in the Americas

Prof. Ana Dopico
Tuesdays 11:00AM-01:45PM
45 West 4th RM B01

This course takes up cultures and theories of the American hemisphere to think beyond imperial cartographies and logics and center texts, art, music and performance that articulate modes of sovereignty beyond the state. We will consider works and cultural histories that challenge dispossession through placemaking (palenques, urban and rural autonomous territories, social rupture) and the retaking of home environments. Thinking with blackness, indigeneity, migration, and ecologies in the Americas, we consider how struggles over sovereignty and territoriality are accompanied symbolic and cultural practices, or world-making, that challenge the finitude of the present and the hegemony of capital. Works will include a conventional canon of "Americas" articulation (Whitman, Martí, Darío, Neruda, etc) but will move on to narrative, prose, film, music and performance in English, Spanish, French, Kreyol, and Portuguese (also perhaps in Garifuna and other nation languages).

OTHER RELATED COURSES

To learn more about potential courses of interest at the Public Humanities Initiative, read their Fall 2022 Course List.