Spring 2020 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.

The Commodity - AMST-GA 2331.001

Michael Ralph
Thursdays 2-4:45PM
Seminar Room - 485

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. Of particular interest, we will analyze contexts where people assume qualities usually reserved for objects—and vice versa.

Finance, Race, and Gender in the Atlantic World – AMST-GA 2901.001 | HIST -GA 2035.001 (7 seats)

Jennifer Morgan
Mondays 4:55-7:35PM
Seminar Room - 485

In recent years, a host of new scholarship exploring the relationship between slavery and capitalism has emerged. How might this new canon be reconfigured by a thorough consideration of race and gender in tandem with histories of fungibility and value? Interrogating early Modern notions of finance by asking how they intersected with, shaped, and were shaped by categories of race and gender will garner new understandings of these interrelated processes. Late medieval and early modern modes of accounting cohered around notions of enslavability, and the hereditary mark of race became embedded in how gender produced categories of freedom and slavery—all of which are crucial to the study of economy and race in the Atlantic world. This seminar will explore those intersections between histories of race, gender, and finance that culminate in early modern Atlantic slavery. We will treat the Atlantic world as the dynamic space that it was, attempting to balance engagement across continents and empires.

Strategies in Social & Cultural Analysis - AMST-GA 3303.001

Heijin Lee
Mondays 2-4:45PM
Seminar Room - 485
(Required for PhD students)

This course examines the practice and theory of research methods that are commonly used in social and cultural analysis. We will study a range of methods, from the analysis and production of images, to interviewing and ethnography, to oral history and archival research. Each class will combine two elements: 1) Discussions of finished research projects that have taken the form of books and 2) Hands-on investigations. The first will develop skills in reading like researchers. This means probing the framework of each study and examining how the authors have posed and gone about finding answers to their questions. Each of the authors that we will read is especially reflective or creative about the process of research and their books will help guide us in “reverse engineering” their work. The second half of each class will take the form of a workshop. Some days we will select and analyze primary sources together; other days visitors will come to class to discuss their research process with us. Over the course of the semester, we will come to know research as a craft and assemble insights and techniques for developing future projects.

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

Sophie Gonick
Wednesdays 2-4:45PM
Seminar Room - 485
(Required for 1st year 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.

Migration, Displacement, and Containment - AMST-GA 3701.001

Thuy Linh Tu
Tuesdays 12:30-3:15PM
Seminar Room - 485

The movement of people, goods, and capital has been central to the formation of modern life. In this course, we will examine how scholars have understood these processes and their cultural effects through readings of foundational texts in the history of migration, as well as interdisciplinary and emerging scholarship on war, labor, ecology and other forces of displacement. We will examine the institutions, technologies, and practices that have encouraged, denied, and governed mobility. We will consider in particular the distinctions and continuities between "forced" and "voluntary" migration;" "fugitivity" and "capture;" dispersal and settlement, among other concepts, in order to think about the ways migration and mobility are co-constituted by containment and incarceration.

CROSS-LISTED COURSES

New Directions in LatinX Studies – AMST-GA 2304.001 | ANTH-GA 2304.001 (8 seats)

Arlene Davila
Tuesdays 3:30-6:10PM
Seminar Room – 485

This seminar examines the growth and development of Latinx Studies from the 1960s onwards and reflects on its potential and future in the U.S. academy. It analyzes major trends of analysis developing within the field including political economy, decolonial perspectives, transnationalism, and new approximation to analyzing multidvierse identities, and unrecognized groups and topics, from LBGTQ and Afro-Latinx communities to transnational Latinx studies beyond the U.S. We will examine the development of Latinx studies within different discipinary and methodological approaches, while considering how Latinx studies transforms and expands traditional “disciplinary” spaces and methodologies. Throughout students will be encouraged to identify areas, debates and topics where they can contribute to expanding the conversation through their own original research. The course will also feature guest speakers discussing different approaches and methodologies to Latinx studies to expand student’s exposure to the field.

Lat American/Latinx New York: Reporting the City AMST-GA 3302.001 | LATC-GA 1020.002 (5 seats)

David González
Thursdays 2-4:30PM
KJCC 404

New York has been shaped by its Latin American and Latinx residents from the era when the city was home to Caribbean exiles plotting to overthrow Spanish colonizers, through the mid-century boom of Puerto Rican New York and the growth of various Latin American immigrant communities. This course will examine how these groups have influenced the city’s culture, politics, and religion – and more - through in-class lectures as well as site visits with immigrant organizations, community groups, artists and musicians. The course will also look at how critical issues of representation and agency have been challenged and redefined by Latinx activists and artists. Graduate students with an interest in journalism and/or photography are also welcome to apply.

Human Rights and Cultural Politics - AMST-GA 2330.001 | ENGL-GA 2917.001 (3 seats)

Crystal Parikh
Wednesdays 2-5:00PM
244 Greene Street, Room 306

Is it possible to consider human rights discourse as an interpretive framework for literary and cultural production? What might such a human rights methodology entail? This course will introduce students to the histories of human rights and consider the significance of the juridical and political projects of rights for the cultural politics of literary and cultural studies. We will survey a genealogy of human rights, consider the various critiques of human rights (especially those forwarded by critics in the global south), and also query the relationship between civil, natural, and political rights and struggles for social, political, and economic justice. Grounded particularly in American literary and cultural studies, we will consider whether human rights provide an alternative site of critique for U.S. hegemony in the “new world order,” as well as for the articulation of emergent political subjectivities by people of color in the Americas.