Spring 13

• Academics, Research Centers, & Initiatives
• Certificate Programs
• Women's Studies
• Courses

The Certificate in Women’s Studies is available to students matriculated in the Ph.D. programs at The Graduate Center.  Women’s  Studies is an interdisciplinary approach to research and scholarship that draws on various disciplines, while challenging disciplinary boundaries.  The general aim of the program is to offer critical reflection on the experiences of both women and men in terms of differences of gender, sexuality, race, class, ethnicity and nation.  Students are prepared to teach courses and to do research in Women’s Studies and related critical approaches to the disciplines, such as those developed in Queer Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Cultural Studies.  Besides focused course work and guidance in research, Women’s  Studies offers participation in a wide range of graduate students and faculty activities, including lecture series and forums.  Students are also invited to participate in the research programs and seminars at the Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center. 
 

WSCP 81601 -Topics in Women’s and Gender Studies: Motherhood: Body and Citizenship 
GC W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3309, 3 credits, Prof. Barbara Katz Rothman  [20651]  [Cross listed with Soc. 82800]

Motherhood is the universal human relationship: every person begins life embodied within the maternal body; and up until the last few decades, that relationship defined the placement, or the citizenship, of the new being. New technologies, but even more, new marketing, calls the obviousness of motherhood into question, as maternal relationships are fragmented and commodified. This course will offer a sociological and feminist analysis of motherhood in its many old and new variations. The focus will be on the United States and its particular racial, class and gender politics and eugenic history, with an awareness of the global context in which Americans enter into and live motherhood.  

Specific topics to be covered will include: Infertility and the new technologies and marketing of procreation such as the donation and sale of gametes and ‘gestational services;’ Contraception and abortion, including prenatal testing and selective abortion;The medicalization and demedicalization of childbirth practices, with attention to the midwifery and homebirth movements; Child bearing and rearing within gay and lesbian families; Child care arrangements and services, including ‘transnational mothering’; Adoption, with particular attention to the issues of foster care, international and ‘transracial’ adoptions; Other topics to be agreed upon by members of the seminar. 

WSCP 81001 – Feminist Texts and Theories:
GC W 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 3207, 3 credits, Prof. Kyoo Lee [20652] [Cross listed with MALS 72200] 

A required course for Women’s Studies Certificate Program at the Graduate Center, this course aims to introduce students to a broad range of foundational texts and contemporary classics associated with Women’s Studies, Feminist/Gender/Queer/Transgender Theories. We will use an interdisciplinary approach to consider some of the central questions, dilemmas, methods, and findings of this evolving scholarship. We begin with the discourse of crises over the very possibility of a field demarcated as such, when the sign of woman or perhaps gender itself has been deconstructed or diversified, if not destabilized. The rest of the material is organized into three broad themes: Being/Becoming (Ontology), Knowing/Unknowing (Epistemology), and Doing/Undoing (Praxis).  

WSCP 81000 – Topics in Modern Art: Women’s Art/Feminist Art
GC W 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room 3421, 3 credits, Prof. Anna Chave [20653] [Cross listed with Art Hist.76020]

The emergence of feminist discourses has colored art practices broadly in the contemporary era. Beginning with a chronological review of key feminist art-critical texts, this course proceeds through a thematically organized look at art practices by women (contrasted at times with related practices by male artists). Topics include, for example, ‘Crafty Women: Fiber and the Problem of the Decorative' and 'Self-Representation and/in Photography: Performance, Masquerade, and Issues of Positionality’.  The shifting stakes attached to the adoption of feminist ideologies will be reviewed. Artists who refuse feminist alignments will be addressed, as will the evolving feminism of artists who were or are self-identified as such. A class interview with a practicing artist may supplement other modes of investigation.

Requirements: a short paper, a research paper, an oral report, and class participation.  Students regularly enrolled in the Art History program at the GC are welcome to audit; all others by permission.

Preliminary Readings: N. Broude and M. Garrard, The Power of Feminist Art, 1994.

WSCP 81000 –Autobiography, Archive, Lyric Time
GC W 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room 8202, 3 credits, Prof. Meena Alexander [20654] [Cross listed with Engl.87500]
Using a range of texts -- poetry, prose, theory -- we will explore questions of autobiographical writing and the shifting sands of subjectivity, what Beckett in his essay on Proust spoke of as `the perpetual exfoliation of personality’. What is the task of temporality in making up a self? How to make sense of the tension between the claims of narrative and intricate movements of lyric? How might we connect archival knowledge in its sometimes ruined materiality with the intensely personal task of textual self-construction?  And what of the `I’, whether singular or multiple, as it emerges in writing, and stands in the face of the unsayable?

To reflect on these and other issues of subjectivity and aesthetic form, the archive and its silences, we’ll read Derrida’s `Archive Fever’, Spivak’s `The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives’, `Merleau-Ponty’s `Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence’, Anne Stoler’s `The Pulse of the Archive’; statements by artists such as Renee Green and the RAQS Collective in Delhi;  reflections by Agamben, Benjamin, Foster, Foucault, Freud, Glissant, Guha and others.

Our studies in poetry and memoir will include V. Woolf’s `A Sketch of the Past’, Anne Carson’s Nox, Theresa Cha’s Dictee ,  poetry and prose by Kamala Das, Arun Kolatkar, A.K.Ramanujan. Other postcolonial readings include the short stories of Mahasveta Devi, V.S.Naipaul’s  Enigma of Arrival and Assia Djebar’s `Forbidden Gaze, Severed Sound’ – the essay in which she imagines Delacroix in Algiers preparing to paint `Women of Algiers in their Apartment`. Questions of body and sexuality, archival control and erasure, the nation and its others emerge in writings produced in the aftermath of the Partition of India: Urvashi Butalia’s first person narrative The Other Side of Silence, short stories by Sadat Hasan Manto,  poems by Faiz Ahmed Faiz.

This course will be run as a seminar with weekly readings and presentations, a short mid- term paper and a final research paper. If they wish, for this final paper, students may draw directly on archival materials (for instance from the NYPL Berg and Schomburg collections or the Morgan Library). Books will be available for purchase at Book Culture, 536 West 112th Street New York, NY 10025: Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, Anne Carson, Nox, Theresa Cha, Dictee, Mahasveta Devi, Imaginary Maps, Sadat Hasan Manto, Kingdom’s End and Other Stories (if this book is still out of print, used copies may be available), Charles Merewether, The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, V.S.Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival. Other readings will be uploaded onto the web and selected material put on reserve at the Mina Rees Library. (Students may contact me with questions concerning this course: meena.alexander@gmail.com).



WSCP 81000 – Character, Caricature, and the Novel’s Progress               
GC T 11:45- 1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rachel  Brownstein  [20655] [Cross listed with Engl.83200] CANCELLED

We will begin with Byron’s and Thackeray’s belated satirical sketches of Regency high life (in the English cantos of Don Juan, and in Vanity Fair), then consider Hogarth’s early narratives of the rake’s and the harlot’s “progress.” But for most of the term we will read the satirical fiction of what one art historian calls the Age of Caricature (1760-1820): Charlotte Lennox’s Henrietta (1760); Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-67); Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771); Burney’s Evelina (1778); and Austen’s juvenilia and Lady Susan, and at least two of her six novels.  Looking at prints by Gillray, Rowlandson, and others while we read the novels, we will consider ways of mocking human types and human nature, and relations between the mockers and the mocked.  (See, especially, prints portraying crowds in front of print-shop windows.)  We will worry the distinctions between satire and comedy, wit and irony and facetiousness—as well as those between types and individuals, flat and round characters. Issues to be discussed include shaping ideas of the city and the country, the family and the nation, and, of course, the power of print culture.  But the joy is in the details.

WSCP 81000- Mystic Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Religion in the Middle Ages 
GC W 4:15- 6:15 p.m., Room 3305 , 3 credits, Prof. Marlene Hennessy [20656] [Cross listed with Engl.70700 ]

This seminar will examine a broad range of texts written on the topic of sex and gender in the Middle Ages.  From the scandalous fabliaux to the orthodox lives of the saints, from mystical writings to medical treatises, the texts read in this course will be used to explore some of the dominant ideas about gender and sexuality, as well as the often paradoxical discourses of medieval misogyny, present in medieval literature and religious culture.  Texts to be read include works by major authors such as the women troubadours, Marie de France, Heloise and Abelard, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Richard Rolle.  In addition, we will read several anonymous texts, including women’s weaving songs (chansons de toile), “The Ballad of a Tyrannical Husband,” and (in translation) the Anglo-Latin Book of Monsters.  Topics to be studied include: blood, body, and Christian materiality; chaste marriage and clerical sexuality; the erotics of courtly love; transgender persons and hermaphrodites; the sexuality of Christ and other issues of iconography and visual representation; and masculinity in the earliest Robin Hood texts.  Throughout the course we will engage with recent developments in criticism (including historical, literary, feminist, queer, and art historical approaches) by authors such as Judith Bennett, Glenn Burger, Caroline Walker Bynum, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Carolyn Dinshaw, Dyan Elliott, Ruth Mazo Karras, Sarah McNamer, and Leo Steinberg, among others, as well as theoretical approaches by Judith Butler, Michel de Certeau, and Judith “Jack” Halberstam. In addition, we will consider how the topics of sex, gender and religion in the Middle Ages intersect with affect theory and the history of the emotions.  Requirements: one research paper (15-20 pages); and 20 minute oral report based on one of the optional readings for the week on the syllabus.

WSCP 81000 –Truth and Fiction: Authentication and Novelization in Nineteenth-Century American Writing                 
GC T 6:30-8:30 p.m., Room 4422, 3 credits, Prof. Hildegard Hoeller [20657] [Cross listed with Engl.75500]

William Andrews notes in his essay “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative" that the most "radical vocal experiment in nineteenth-century black American writing [was] that which introduced the fictive voice into the tradition of African-American narrative." This course will look at the complicated tensions between truth claims, credibility, and the use of  a “fictive voice”  in the works of African-American writers such as Williams Wells Brown,  Hannah Crafts, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Wilson, as well as white writers such as Martha Griffith Browne (who authored the fake Autobiography of a Female Slave), Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and  Theodore Dwight Weld (who compiled Slavery As It Is) in order to explore authenticating and novelizing strategies in their narratives. How did African-American writers negotiate the boundaries between truth and fiction and what were the payoffs and stakes of moving from the slave narrative into fiction or using fictional devices within the genre of the slave narrative?  And how did white writers such as Martha Griffith Browne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville negotiate their fictions’ relation to truth and rely on authenticating moves? Our discussion will include critical readings surrounding these questions and their literary, cultural, and political contexts—which made them both urgent and complicated--, as well as, whenever possible, multiple texts by one writer such as, for example, the three autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and his fictional piece “The Heroic Slave,” Williams Wells Brown’s 1847 slave narrative and his novel Clotel, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.     

WSCP 81000 –Britain in the Thirties: The Spanish Civil War              
GC W 11:45- 1:45 p.m., Room 4433, 3 credits, Prof. Jane Marcus [20658] [Cross listed with Engl.76000]

Beginning with Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) written as a response to propaganda sent to her by the Republican Spanish Embassy of posters and photographs of “dead children and ruined houses,” we will study her anti-fascist text and photographs and posters that prompted it. In addition we will look at the last volume of Woolf’s essays. Other texts will include Nancy Cunard’s “Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War,” her poems on the topic and her journalism as well as the journalism and poetry of other writers: Sylvia Townsend Warner, Valentine Acland and the poets included in Cunningham’s “Spanish Civil War Poetry” and “Spanish Civil War Prose.” Special attention will be given to W.H. Auden’s controversial “Spain” written for a series of pamphlets edited by Cunard and Neruda. Orwell’s “Homage to Catalonia” will be paired with Colm Toibin’s “Homage to Barcelona” and his novel, “The South.” Other fiction by Merce Rodereda, “The Pigeon Girl,” Carmen Laforet, “ Nada,” and Xavier Cercas, “Soldiers of Salamis,” along with histories by the British historians Paul Preston and Helen Graham. Students will be encouraged to work in the archives at Tamamint Library at NYU.

WSCP 81000 –American Renaissance                
GC W 4:15- 6:15 p.m., Room 8202, 3 credits, Prof. David Reynolds [20659] [Cross listed with Engl.75100]

The literary flowering that occurred in the United States between 1835 and 1865 constituted one of the richest periods in literary history.  Known as the American Renaissance, this period saw dazzling innovations in literary style, philosophy, and social criticism brought about by Emerson and Thoreau; the metaphysical depth and cultural breadth represented by the novels of Melville and Hawthorne; the breathtaking poetic experimentation of Whitman and Dickinson; and the psychological and artistic achievement of Edgar Allan Poe.   The issues of race and chattel slavery were powerfully depicted by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Political struggles and class conflict were dramatized in popular novels by George Lippard and George Thompson, and women’s issues in the fiction of Sara Parton and others.  In addition to reading central works of the American Renaissance—among them Moby-Dick, “Bartleby,” The Scarlet Letter,  Leaves of Grass, Walden, Poe’s tales, Emerson’s essays, Dickinson’s poems, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Douglass’s Narrative, and several noncanonical works--we shall discuss key theoretical and critical approaches to their writings.  An oral report and a term paper are required.

WSCP 81000 –Familiar Marriage 
GC M 2:00- 4:00 p.m., Room 4422, 3 credits, Prof. Talia Schaffer [20660] [Cross listed with Eng. 84500]

In the nineteenth century, the traditional practice of companionate marriage with a candidate approved by one’s community, began to compete with a newer notion, the idea that one should marry solely on the basis of one’s own romantic/erotic passion. This cultural change provoked immense anxiety. A single feeling, ‘love,’ displaced the many pragmatic reasons for which marriages could have previously been contracted: shared work, child care, nursing, political alliances, property consolidation. Moreover, fidelity to the private feelings of the participants now took primacy over parental vetting of the suitor’s credentials. Thus women who married for love could be particularly vulnerable, as they consigned their legal and economic futures to a possible stranger, based solely on a mutual attraction. In this course, we will see that the Victorian marriage plot frequently interrogates changing marital ideas by posing rival suitors against one another, each embodying a different rationale for marriage. The romantic suitor is often charismatic but risky, a stranger who may be up to no good. His rival, the ‘familiar suitor,’ is safe but not erotically exciting. He may be an endogamous, a disabled, or a vocational suitor; he may offer kin consolidation or bodily familiarity or meaningful work; but what he offers is something powerfully attractive that is an alternative to romance. This course will trace the ‘familiar suitor’ through these different configurations and uses in the Victorian marriage plot. Novels may include Mansfield Park, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Lady Audley’s Secret, Can You Forgive Her?, David Copperfield, Phoebe Junior, The Portrait of a Lady, and The History of Sir Richard Calmady. We will look at Victorian anthropological theories of primitive marriage by Henry Sumner Maine and John McLennan, journalism about women's employment and marriage reform by Frances Power Cobbe and Margaret Oliphant, and  disability and ethics of care theory by Rosemarie Garland Thomson and Joan Tronto, along with histories of marriage and the family including Stone, Perry, Macfarlane, Coontz, Davidoff, and Dabhoiwala. Our aim is to embed the Victorian marriage plot in a rich nexus of theoretical, historical, and critical readings that help us understand what was at stake as the central transaction of women's lives slowly changed its fundamental meaning between 1800 and 1900, how painful and difficult that shift really was, and how that process shaped the novel form. Research paper, presentation, and blog.

WSCP 81000 –Black Visual Culture
GC R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3305, 3 credits, Prof. Michele Wallace [20662] [Cross listed with  Eng.85500]

The field of visual culture, which encompasses but is not limited to traditions of art history, has become increasingly central in a digital age in which the inventory of available images from the past continues to expand via the many museums and archives online, as well as the many artist’s websites. Black visual culture, as I am defining it, takes up related topics in the context of racial images, which are drawn from visual art history, and the history of human display, as well as stereotypes from the mythological to the forensic (i.e. The Venus Hottentot).  It would be impossible in the space of a single semester to do justice to the potential of such a field.  Alternatively, I have constructed herein for our perusal a sampler composed of the following segments: 1. European and American Art: 17th through 19th century, taken from The Image of the Black in Western Art (Harvard UP and Belknap) The magi in the Renaissance; Abolitionist images in the 18th and 19th century. 2. African American Art: 20th Century;Jacob Lawrence’s The Photographer (1942) Romare Bearden’s The Block (1971),Faith Ringgold, Street Story Quilt {1985),

“Modern Storytellers: Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Faith Ringgold” Metropolitan Museum of Art Website

The Jacob Lawrence and Gwen Knight Virtual Resource Center

3. Photography: 20th Century;Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton Album, Johnston (Frances Benjamin) Collection, Library of Congress

WEB DuBois, Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition

“African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition”

Library of Congress and the NAACP’s The Crisis,  

“The Modernist Journals Project: The Crisis 1910-1922” Brown University & The University of Tulsa Collection

James VanDerZee and black portraiture, 

Gordon Parks and FSA Photography, Library of Congress

Contemporary Afro-American Women Photographers: Carrie Mae Weems;Lorna Simpson;Renee Cox  

WSCP 81000 –Black Postmodernism: AfricanAmerican Fiction Since the 1970s
GC T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 7395, 3 credits, Prof. Barbara Webb [20661] [Cross listed with  Eng.75600]

A study of the poetics and politics of postmodernism in the fiction of African American writers since the 1970s. Although the last three decades of the twentieth century were undoubtedly the most productive and innovative period in the development of African American literature and literary criticism, it was also a period of extreme social and cultural fragmentation in African American communities. In this course we will examine how African American writers have addressed the problems of literary representation when faced with increased commodification of culture and knowledge, the proliferation of new forms of literacy and orality, and the breakdown of traditional forms of community. Our readings will also include some selections not usually considered postmodernist but that address similar concerns about identity, culture, writing and possibilities for social change. We will read selected essays by theorists of postmodernism such as Hutcheon, Jameson, Harvey and Bhabha as well as essays by literary critics and cultural theorists who have been involved in ongoing discussions about the relevance of postmodernism for African Americans at the turn of the 21st century such as bell hooks, Cornel West, W. Lawrence Hogue, Wahneema Lubiano, and Madhu Dubey. Requirements: Oral presentations and a term paper (15-20 pages). The course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussions of assigned readings and oral presentations each week. Texts: Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo; Clarence Major, My Amputations; Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters; John Edgar Wideman, Sent for You Yesterday; Charles Johnson, Middle Passage; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Gayle Jones, The Healing; Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist; Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. 

WSCP 81000 –Reading George Eliot
GC W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 4433, 3 credits, Prof. Nancy Yousef  [20663] [Cross listed with Eng.84200]

This course will center on a close and attentive reading of all the principal novels of George Eliot (Marian Evans), along with some of her shorter fiction, and essays.  Such an immersion will allow us to address consistency and variation in thematic concerns across her career, recurrent stylistic patterns and the evolution of her distinctive novelistic idiom. Central issues explored in her fiction include the growth and disintegration of character, the complex dynamic between will and circumstance, spiritual striving and worldly ambition, marriage and community. Two questions that I expect to keep in mind are the diverse forms and ethical implications of Eliot’s realism, as well as the place of “sympathy” (predictable and not) both in her work and more broadly in contemporary discussion of aesthetics and affect in literary studies.  Our study of Eliot will be supplemented by important recent critical work in nineteenth century fiction and culture, including Amanda Anderson, Neil Hertz, Andrew Miller, Adela Pinch, and Rachel Ablow.  Requirements: Bi-weekly response papers, one presentation, and a 20-page essay. N.B. Students enrolling in this course should make sure that their schedules can accommodate demanding weekly readings.   

 WSCP 81000 –Foucault and Butler(in English)
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 4202.11, 3 credits, Prof. Domna Stanton [20664] [Cross listed with French 70500]

This seminar will focus on the works of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler as emblems of the critical practice (praxis) of intellectuals over the past fifty years.  We will concentrate on the conceptions of power/knowledge and agency, and examine the ways in which Butler rewrites (“re-cites”) constructs from Foucault to develop theories or gender and of (queer) subjectivity.  Our critical readings will center on both primary works by Foucault --from The Birth of the Clinic to History of Sexuality vol 1 and 2.-- and by Butler -- from Gender Trouble to Parting Ways: Zionism and the Critique of Jewishness-- and their shifts and change of foci; we will read as well some important seminars, articles and interviews that inscribe other emphases in Foucault. Ultimately, our readings will be determined by what the members of the seminar have and have not read in the corpus of these two major theorists. The syllabus will include some critical texts on Foucault. The seminar will be conducted in English; texts may be read in either French or English. The syllabus will be posted before the beginning of the Spring term. Work for the course involves intensive,  critical  reading and class participation; an oral presentation on one of Foucault’s or Butler’s texts; and in consultation with the instructor, the development of a 25-page paper on one or both critic/theorists. 

Any questions/queries should be addressed to domna stanton (dstanton112@yahoo.com).

WSCP 81000 –Readings in African-American History after 1863 
GC T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 3308, 3 credits, Prof. Judith Stein [20665] [Cross listed with Hist. 75900]

This course explores major historical subjects in post-emancipation African-American history. We will examine recent literature, and assumptions underlying such work, on the following topics: Reconstruction, Jim Crow, migration, class structure and ideology, nationalism, culture, New Deal, civil rights movement, "black power," and what is often called the "post-civil rights" world.

WSCP 81000 –Gender & Sexuality in the 20th Century  U.S. 
GC R 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room 5212, 3 credits, Prof. Daniel Hurewitz [20666] [Cross listed with Hist. 75700] 

This class is an opportunity to discuss recent work in the history of gender and sexuality in the U.S. As a field, this is a wide and still expanding area of historical research, including studies in women's history, gay history, histories of sexual behavior, abortion, masculinity, femininity, dating, marriage, transgender identity, and more. Additionally, historians have been approaching this already wide array of topics from a mix of cultural, social, and political perspectives. As a result, there is a lot of interesting work for us to investigate. We'll focus in on a different book each week to get a sense of how this field has emerged and is continuing to grow. The sequence of books is roughly chronological, starting from the late 19th century and going to the late 20th century. My hope is that, in addition to learning about the field, we'll also be developing some narratives about how ideas about gender and sexuality changed over the last century or so.

WSCP 81000 –Madame de Staёl and the Problem of the Female Intellectual 
GC M 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room 7395, 3 credits, Prof. Helena Rosenblatt [20667] [Cross listed with Hist. 72100 & French 74000] 

What were the Enlightenment’s notions of womanhood? How did these interact with  ideas of genius and intellectual or artistic creativity? These are questions we will explore before delving into Madame de Staël’s life and work, from her great novels, Delphine and Corinne, to some of her more overtly political texts. To what extent did Madame de Staël imbibe and reflect reigning notions of gender, and to what extent did she subvert them? After reading some of the best and most recent scholarship on 18th century attitudes toward the female intellectual, we will turn to a consideration Madame de Staël’s own literary and political productions to see how she navigated the constraints and opportunities

 WSCP 81000 –New York Fashion: The Fabric of Cultures 
GC R 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room 3421, 3 credits, Prof. Eugenia Paulicelli [20668] [Cross listed with IDS 82300 & MALS 71200]  

The seminar will focus on New York and the birth of American fashion, covering a time span from the sweatshops of the second half of the nineteenth century where Jewish and Italian immigrants worked, to the gilded age, department stores, the emergence of the “American Look” in the 1930s and 1940s, on to the subsequent shifts that occurred in the 1960s, up until the present of the New York Fashion week and New York as a global fashion capital. We will focus on the major role played by women who have worked in the industry as designers, stylists, and journalists (such as the New York-based Claire McCardell, Elizabeth Hawes, Diana Vreeland, Jo Copeland and others). We will go on to examine the New York socio-cultural context out of which these women emerged, the relationship the city has with fashion and modernity, with fashion’s role as a creator of national and local identity, and image.  Fashion in New York will be studied as an industry, an economic force, a phenomenon that creates and performs identities and fosters interplay between gender, the body and sexuality. Particular attention will be given to those periods of great transformation in the history of the city when fashion played an important role in shaping the city’s culture and identity, and had an impact on lifestyles and gender perception in the workplace and in other social and private spaces. Visits to museums and archives will be scheduled during the semester to complement the topics covered in class. Readings will be drawn from theoretical and historical texts as well as novels, magazine articles, memoirs and films. 

Authors  will include W. Benjamin, R. Barthes, D. Harvey, S. Buck-Morss, N. Rantisi, C. Millbank, V. Steele, N. Green, P. Stallybrass, D. Soyer, D. Gilbert, C. Breward, Rebecca Arnold, Edith Wharton, Lois Gould (a memoir about her mother, the fashion designer Jo Copeland,) short films by D.W. Griffith on fashion, consumption, modernity, documentaries on the garment district, Bill Cunningham and others. Students will be encouraged to conduct original research and use the museum and clothing archives in the city as well as the libraries for their final project. Should you have any questions, please contact the instructor: Eugenia Paulicelli (email: epaulicelli@gc.cuny.edu)

WSCP 81000 -American Social Protest Movements 
GC R 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room 5417, 3 credits, Prof. Frances Fox Piven [20669 [Cross listed with Pol. Sci. 72410]

This course has three main parts.  We will begin with an examination of the major theories that purport to explain social movements, including the conditions that give rise to the movement, the forms movement action takes, and the consequences. In particular we will be searching in this literature for the understandings of power implicit or explicit in the theory.  I will suggest that the literature neglects the question of power from below, and suggest some directions for inquiry into the admittedly infrequent occasions when power is exercised from below.

The second and third parts of the course are historical and empirical.  We will look at the history of social protest movements in the United States, from the mobs of the revolutionary war era, and including the abolitionists, the populists, the labor movement, civil rights, and the LBGT movements.  Finally, we will (as best we can given that the literature on recent events is somewhat sparse) look at contemporary movements, including the global justice, environmental, and Occupy movements, as well as anti-austerity protests, and try to glean insights into the conditions that give rise to these movements, and the factors that account for responses to them.

 WSCP 81000 –Special Topics in American Political Development : Neos and Isms
GC T 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room 3305, 3 credits, Prof. Ruth O’Brien [20670] [Cross listed with Pol. Sci. 82001 & ASCP 82210]

This 8000-level political-science seminar prepares students for the major or minor in both the required National Institutions track and the Electoral Process track in American politics of the approved American Politics Comprehensive Reading List.* This course, while theoretical and historical, is an American-politics seminar that crosses intradisciplinary divides by relying on PD (political development, or historical institutionalism, as it is known in comparative) as a methodology with two analytical axes of the role of ideas (stemming from a radical feminist interpretation of monism). The seminar, in other words, is informed by American Studies and Women’s Studies literature, given its emphasis on difference as the United States built a relatively strong nation-state and became a global hegemon.** It pays particular attention to nation-building in juxtaposition with the recurring, crosscutting conflicts of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

WSCP 81000 –Core Seminar in Political Science (read Power, Resistance  & Hegemony) 
GC T 2:00 -4:00 p.m., Room 3305, 3 credits, Prof. Ruth O’Brien [20671] [Cross listed with Pol. Sci. 71000]

 All incoming students pursuing a Ph.D. or an M.A.* in political science are strongly encouraged to take this seminar for the purpose of knitting us all into a lifelong community or collectivity of intellectuals who are passionate about politics. Every student in political science studies some aspect of power. They examine power in abstraction (political theory), or power from the perspective of our nation-state (American politics), among foreign nation-states (comparative politics), or between nation-states (international relations). As a global hegemon, the United States also exerts formal and informal influence, manifested formally as American foreign policy or informally as American cultural or economic hegemony (American Studies, Women’s & Gender Studies). This seminar explores theoretical questions associated with culture and resistance, particularly involving political identity, and inciting American or global social movements that protect vulnerable populations. Finally, it refers to the American exportation of the rule of law in terms of the Americanization of Europe (neo-classical capitalism, neo-liberalism, new empires, fundamentalism) or the European Union (EU), as well as the exportation of the Anglo-Saxon and Enlightenment culture(s) of civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights, manifested in the Yoo brief, the Gitmo Supreme Court cases, and the Veil controversy, and the use of Shari’a tribunals at home and abroad. (1-credit tutorials also available with my permission & EO permission.)
*Required for MA students, and this seminar is strongly encouraged for all Ph.D. students.
 

WSCP 81000 –Ethnic Politics in the Comparative Perspective 
GC W 6:30 -8:30 p.m., Room 5383, 3 credits, Prof. Lisa George [20672] [Cross listed with Pol. Sci. 87800]

This course focuses on the politics of ethnicity and nationalism, with a comparative focus. We will investigate theoretical arguments regarding the roots and power of ethnic identity and the ways that such identification enters into the political sphere. We will analyze arguments about whether and how ethnic diversity might affect political competition and conflict. The course will examine general theories and then also hone in on identity politics in particular geographic regions including, but not limited to postcommunist Europe and Eurasia, Latin America, and South Asia. Students will also have an opportunity to read further on geographical areas of their own scholarly interest. In addition to being a course on the subject matter of identity, students will hone their analytical skills through close readings of texts and examination of how authors construct and implement their research agenda.

Students will read the equivalent of a book per week as well as prepare written reading analyses and questions. Students will lead the discussions. There will be two exams in the course.

 WSCP 81000 –Critical Social and Environmental Policy 
GC R 11:45 -1:45 p.m., Room 6493, 3 credits, Prof. John Seley[ 20673] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103]

This seminar is an introduction to the issues and methods of policy analysis.  We start with a comprehensive overview of the many facets of understanding policy making in order to differentiate the approaches to policy analysis.  Using a series of exercises, we examine issues like the market versus the polis, equity and efficiency, and the use of numbers.  Subject areas are chosen by the class (each student chooses at least one) and may include education, economic development, health care, gender issues, the economy, or any relevant current concern. For each, we will ask what researchers have done, why, and with what "success." 

The next part of the course is devoted to more direct policy analysis exercises conducted by students. We will examine concerns like the collection of data and the use of best practices.  The last third of the class is devoted to environmental policy.  How are environmental concerns understood by the public and policy makers?  How do we overcome the built-in constraints of status quo media and corporate influence?  How does an understanding of policy lead to action?  

By the end of the course, the student is expected to have a basic understanding of different approaches to policy and policy analysis and the important questions used to interrogate policy solutions.  There will be a series of assignments/exercises as well as a final paper on a topic of the student’s choosing. A special guest for one class will be State Senator Liz Krueger, a well-known progressive and the sponsor of many critical pieces of legislation, including the Marriage Equality Act (see www.lizkrueger.com).  She represents the east side of Manhattan and parts of Chelsea and the West Side. The Graduate Center is in her district. 

WSCP 81000 –Social  Injustice 
GC T 2:00 -4:00 p.m., Room 5382, 3 credits, Profs. Michelle Fine & Susan Opotow [20674] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103]

This course will move through interdisciplinary frameworks to theorize and study the structures, relations, dynamics, and lives situated with conditions of social (in)justice.  The course will examine questions that ask us to consider the conditions that give rise to, perpetuate, and deter injustice, including: How can we understand histories, sites, dynamics and relations of injustice? How can we theorize the dynamics of domination and power? Does spatializing and historicizing injustice clarify the nature of injustice? What constitutes evidence of injustice? How does the making and remaking of “identities” produce or reproduce (in)justice? How does collective memory inform our understanding of (in)justice? What is the relationship of consciousness and privilege? When does resisting and deterring injustice gain traction?

WSCP 81000 –Gender, Psychology, and Law 
GC R 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Maureen O’Connor & Julie Goldscheid [20675] [Cross listed with Psych. 85603]
1/2 classes at the Graduate Center, 1/2 at CUNY Law (Long Island City)

This interdisciplinary course will explore the relationship between gender, psychology and law through a hands-on study of selected legal issues relating to gender.  Virtually every law that is passed and every regulation that is promulgated rests on assumptions about how people behave, or how people will behave, once a law is enacted.  Those assumptions may or may not be supported by what psychologists know about human behavior.  Lawyers and advocates harness psychological research and social science data to surface and, in many cases, challenge those assumptions.  Law students and graduate students will gain a working fluency in one another’s discipline and will examine the role of psychology and social science data in the shaping of legal policies that bear on gender, such as gender discrimination and identity, gender based violence, family law and access to justice.  Students will work in interdisciplinary teams to draw on psychological research to prepare direct and cross examinations of an expert witness.  The course will culminate in a final project of drafting an amicus brief in an area of individual interest that will demonstrate interdisciplinary competence.