Courses

NOTE: CTCP 71088, Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices, will be offered in the SPRING 2023 semester

ELECTIVE COURSE Listings
 

ANTH 70300: Foundations of Social Theory, GC: TH. 11:45am - 2:45 pm, 4 credits, Rm. TBA, Prof. Gary Wilder

Open to GC Level 1 Cultural & Linguistic Anthropology doctoral students only, OR by instructor’s permission.
ANTH 71100: Global Feminisms [HYBRID], GC: TH. 6:30-8:30pm, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Profs. Saadia Toor and Chaumtoli Huq

Open to GC Anthropology doctoral students only. Crosslisted with WGS 71701/WSCP 71700; seats limited.
ANTH 72900: US Political Cultures: Polarization, Populism, and the Problem of Democracy, GC: W.  2:00-4:00pm, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Prof. Ida Susser

ANTH 73000: Ethnographies of the Black Atlantic, GC: TH. 4:15 – 6;15 pm, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Prof. Jacqueline Brown
ANTH 81200: Transnational Social Movements, GC: TH.  9:30-11:30am, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Prof. Marc Edelman

ANTH 81300: Security and Surveillance: The Production of Fear and Anxiety [HYBRID], GC: TH. 11:45am-1:45 pm, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Prof. Setha Low

Open to GC Anthropology doctoral students only. Crosslisted with PSYCH 80301 & EES 79903; seats limited.

ANTH 81800: Theory and Practice of Contemporary Capital, GC: T. 4:15pm – 6:15pm, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Profs. David Harvey and Donald Robotham

ART 76020: Art in Europe 1848-1900: from Realism to the end of Impressionism (lecture), Professor Romy Golan, Thursday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits

ART 81000: Unseen and Unspoken: Gender, Sexuality, and Cultural Alterity in Mughal India (seminar), Professor Molly Aitken, Wednesday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, in person

ART 85010: A Feminist History of Italian Renaissance Art (seminar) Professor Maria Loh, Tuesday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, in person

ART 87300: Remapping the Art of the Americas via Mobility Professor Katherine Manthorne, Thursday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, online

ART 87400: Visual Geographies of Mexico City (seminar), Professor Anna Indych-López, Tuesday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, hybrid

ART 79400: Aesthetics in Film​, Professor Nicole Wallenbrock, Thursdays 4:15-6:15

CL 85000: Understanding the Radical Right, GC: Mondays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin/ cross listed with HIST 72100 and PSC 80607, 3 credits

(The course is intended for PhD students; master’s students must receive permission of the instructor)

CL 85500: Intro to Literary Translation Studies, cross listed with MALS 78500 Introduction to Literary Translation Studies, GC: Wednesday, 6:30 – 8:30 PM, 3 credits, Prof. Esther Allen

CL 85500: Middle Eastern Explorers: Time, Space and Travel Literature, GC: Thurs, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Anna Akasoy/cross listed with MES 78500, 3 credits

CL 86500: Beyond Adaptation: Transmediality, Narrative Ecosystems and Spreadable Media, GC: Tues, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Giancarlo Lombardi / cross listed with FSCP 81000, 3 credits, fully in person.

CL 88500: Italian Fascism: History and Interpretations, GC: Tues, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Eugenia Paulicelli/ cross listed with WSCP 81000, 3 creditsCL 89000: On Passions, Emotions, Affects: in Theory, History, Texts, GC: Tues, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Domna Stanton/ cross listed with FRE 87000, In-Person, Taught inEnglish

CL 89100: History of Literary Theory & Criticism I, GC: Thursdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 4 credits, Prof. Julie Van Peteghem

CL 79500: Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism, GC:  Thurs, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 4 credits, Prof. Bettina Lerner

CL 80100: Reflections on Psychoanalysis, GC: Wed, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 2,4credits, Prof. Vincent Crapanzano/ cross listed with Anthro 81000, 3 credits

ENGL 86700: Literature and the Police. Tanya Agathocleous. Fridays 2 PM - 4 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.

ENGL 80600: Entanglements of being, history, aesthetics. Kandice Chuh. Mondays 2 PM - 4 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.

ENGL 89010: Stacks, Sounds and a Record a Day: Hip Hop Literacies, DJ Rhetoric and Sonic Happenings. Todd Craig. Wednesdays 11:45 AM - 1:45 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.

ENGL 82100: Queering the Renaissance, 2022. Mario DiGangi. Mondays 11:45 AM - 1:45 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.

ENGL 86100: Young Adult Literature: Theory and Method. Carrie Hintz. Mondays 4:15 PM - 6:15 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.

ENGL 76200: Utopian Fictions: Literature and Human Rights. Sonali Perera. Tuesdays 2 PM - 4 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.

ENGL 88000: Women Writing Witness. Nancy K. Miller. Thursdays 4:15 PM - 6:15 PM. 2/3/4 Credits. 

ENGL 87300. Soundworks/Phonographies. Eric Lott. Tuesdays 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM. 2/3/4 Credits. (Cross-listed with ASCP 81000).

ENGL 86800. The Global South as Politics and Aesthetics. Peter Hitchcock. Wednesdays 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.

FRENCH 87000: On Passions, Emotions, Affects: in Theory, History, Texts
Professor Domna Stanton, Tuesdays, 4:15 - 6:15 pm. In-Person, Taught in English

PSC 73100: Social Movements and Public Policy (CP/PP), Prof. John Krinksy, Tuesdays, 2:00PM-4:00PM
PSC 80607: Understanding the Radical Right (PT) (Cross listed with CL and HIST), Prof. Wolin, Mondays, 6:30PM-8:30PM.

(The course is intended for PhD students; master’s students must receive permission of the instructor)

PSC 80304: Modern Social Theory (PT), Prof. Mehta, Wednesdays, 2:00PM-4:00PM.
PSC 71906: Politics of the Image (PT), Prof. Buck-Morss, Wednesdays, 4:15PM-6:15PM

SPAN 70200: Critical Theory Seminar, GC: Tuesday, 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m., Prof. Fernando Degiovanni (Hybrid)

SPAN 78200: Introduction to Literary Translation Studies, GC Wednesday, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m., Prof. Esther Allen (In Person)

THEA 80300: (Seminar in Theatre Theory & Criticism) Translating (Contemporary) Theatre and Performance: Theories and Practices, Wednesdays 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., Professor Jean Graham-Jones

WGS 71601/WSCP 81601 – Topics in Women’s and Gender Studies: “Gender and the Archive: The History, Theory, and Practice of Victorian Feminist Criticism, GC: WED, 2:00PM-4:00PM, 3 Credits, Prof. Talia Schaffer, Fully In-Person. Cross-listed with English.

**WGS 71601 is open to WGS students only. To enroll in WSCP 81601, you must be a WSCP student, or have instructor permission. Please email APO, Eileen Liang-Massey, at eliang@gc.cuny.edu. We will verify if you have registered for the certificate, and grant you permission to enroll accordingly.**

Course Descriptions
 

ANTH 70300: Foundations of Social Theory, GC: TH. 11:45am - 2:45 pm, 4 credits, Rm. TBA, Prof. Gary Wilder
Open to GC Level 1 Cultural & Linguistic Anthropology doctoral students only, OR by instructor’s permission.
Course Description: TBA

ANTH 71100: Global Feminisms [HYBRID], GC: TH. 6:30-8:30pm, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Profs. Saadia Toor and Chaumtoli Huq
Open to GC Anthropology doctoral students only. Crosslisted with WGS 71701/WSCP 71700; seats limited.
Course Description: TBA

ANTH 72900: US Political Cultures: Polarization, Populism, and the Problem of Democracy, GC: W.  2:00-4:00pm, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Prof. Ida Susser
Course Description: TBA

ANTH 73000: Ethnographies of the Black Atlantic, GC: TH. 4:15 – 6;15 pm, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Prof. Jacqueline Brown
Course Description: TBA

ANTH 81200 – Transnational Social Movements, GC: TH.  9:30-11:30am, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Prof. Marc Edelman
Course Description: TBA

ANTH 81300: Security and Surveillance: The Production of Fear and Anxiety [HYBRID], GC: TH. 11:45am-1:45 pm, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Prof. Setha Low
Open to GC Anthropology doctoral students only. Crosslisted with PSYCH 80301 & EES 79903; seats limited.
Course Description: TBA

ANTH 81800: Theory and Practice of Contemporary Capital, GC: T. 4:15pm – 6:15pm, 3 credits, Rm. TBA, Profs. David Harvey and Donald Robotham
Course Description: TBA

ART 76020 Art in Europe 1848-1900: from Realism to the end of Impressionism (lecture), Professor Romy Golan, Thursday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits
This class will examine a range of methods to art historical research that have shaped the discipline, as well as methods of inquiry currently changing the trajectory of today’s art history. A portion of the syllabus is structured around a selection of weekly readings that illustrate the different ways scholars approach the same keyword or concept, work of art, institution, or archive of materials. It will ask students to contemplate the efficacy and the larger stakes and implications that inform each study. Topics explored will include navigating absences in the archive, debates in the field across chronologically broad areas of study, citational practices, decolonizing art history, the limits and possibilities of autoethnography, and a selection of transgender and nonbinary methods featured in Art Journal’s Winter 2021 issue. Class time will also be dedicated to discussing the methodological approaches modeled by the Fall 2022 Rewald Seminar invited speakers. Such a critical and reflective look at research will inform each student’s intellectual development as they continue to articulate their relationship to the discipline of art history and the kinds of scholarship to which they hope to contribute, upend, or address anew.

ART 81000 Unseen and Unspoken: Gender, Sexuality, and Cultural Alterity in Mughal India (seminar), Professor Molly Aitken, Wednesday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, in person, no auditors
The visual arts in South Asia make wondrous play of seeing and blindness and of the iconic and aniconic. Image ontologies turn on the illusory, on veiling, and on insight as what lies beyond sight. Images in South Asia were seen to be efficacious with thrilling powers, able to harness the unseen to change matter and confound intellects. The act of seeing was transformative. While early modern South Asia did not imagine a human unconscious, its visual arts hint in their inconsistencies and refusals at chaotic passions, violence and horror. Scholarship on South Asia’s arts has tended to focus on the connoisseurship of surfaces and on iconographies that submit to translation into word with reasonable certainty. This is a class about the hermeneutics of what eludes the naked eye and troubles capture in language. The topic is Mughal South Asia—then called Hindustan, literally the “land of Hindus”—and the focus is themes of gender, sexuality, class and cultural difference.  We will think about how images signaled the unseen and at how the dynamics of making, gifting, looting, copying and innovating yielded tensions that the poets did not acknowledge in their panegyric. Our scholarly frame is an historiography of colonial silencing. What did the British Raj and a Euro-centric world view in the humanities render unspeakable and how do we access the life that animated Mughal image-worlds without risking hermeneutic excess?  Or, worse, without burying Mughal South Asia’s image-worlds under our own preoccupations?

ART 85010 A Feminist History of Italian Renaissance Art (seminar) Professor Maria Loh, Tuesday, 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, in person, no auditors
This seminar seeks to answer the intertwined questions: what a feminist history of Italian Renaissance art might look like and why such a history matters now more than ever before. Students will learn how to make sense of the ideological stratagems at play in a range of different types of images. Portraits of women with dyed blonde hair plucked back high on their foreheads. Mythological and folk tales in which women are brutalized by gods, princes, and sometimes other women. Formidable, towering iconic women who offer comfort to the afflicted and down-trodden. Wise, self-made women who curate their own public image. Prints of female reproductive organs turned inside out. What affective communities engaged with these images in the past and why should these images continue to matter to us today? The course will introduce the student to a set of key readings that have shaped the field of Renaissance art history. Students with no prior knowledge of pre-modern art are encouraged to participate. The primary learning outcome will be to learn how to read historiographically rather than just gleaning readings for content.

ART 87300 Remapping the Art of the Americas via Mobility Professor Katherine Manthorne, Thursday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, online
Globalism has swallowed nationalism. The imperative to think globally that arose in the politico-economic realm has impacted every field in the humanities. This approach is shedding new light on the study of Art of the Americas, especially when we replace the nation state as the unit of study with mechanisms of mobility of people, goods, artwork and ideas. Building on recent scholarship, we explore a selection of the following topics: Atlantic Triangle Trade; Pacific coast routes; Port cities of New Orleans, Callao, Rio de Janeiro, San Francisco; impact of the Panama Canal and Pan-American highway; Riverine arteries (Mississippi, Amazon); circulation of artworks, especially works on paper; Artists’ travels and relocations; Diasporas, immigration and nomads; Settling of frontiers and displacements of Native peoples; and Scientific, ethnographic and archaeological exploration. Students engage with weekly readings through discussions and create a personal project via several short, written papers.

ART 87400 Visual Geographies of Mexico City (seminar), Professor Anna Indych-López, Tuesday, 11:45-1:45 pm, 3 credits, hybrid
This seminar explores the visual cultures and economies of Mexico City, one of the cultural capitals of Latin America, across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Muralism to the street interventions of Los Grupos, and from Surrealist exiles to international artists who make the city their base today, CDMX has been the nexus for a wide array of artistic networks, approaches, and movements.  The material, aesthetic, and social-cultural remains of the histories of colonization and slavery as well as the living presence of Indigenous communities, creoles (criollos), Afro-Mexicans, and mestizos (people of mixed descent) make Mexico City a unique, critical locus for such artistic imaginaries. In the twentieth century, the capital transformed from a modest and essentially agrarian locale, attracting (primarily Indigenous) workers from across the nation, into a contemporary megalopolis (the third largest city in the world).  From paintings and photographs in the early and mid-century that directly figured the city’s marginalized, racialized bodies and colonias within broader efforts to define race and nation in Mexico, to contemporary spatial practices that are rooted in the formal logic of Mexico City’s margins, artists have drawn upon and enacted urban sites to reveal the city’s racial and social tensions and inequities. Covering a wide range of material, including performance, video, architecture, graphics, photography, public sculpture, murals, film, popular/mass art, and urbanism, this seminar asks how has this city inspired and impacted artistic practices?  How are urbanism, the built environment, and the lived realities of the metropolitan area reflected in modern and contemporary artistic production? This discussion-based seminar encourages students to think through the open-ended potential of art to shape global cities and their futures and the role of the city in structuring distinct forms of being, knowing, and making.  In the early weeks of the semester, students will present on and discuss readings. Students are encouraged, in consultation with the instructor, to take on interdisciplinary approaches to their research paper topics and to explore connections to other cities and cultural capitals, by framing their analyses in global and transregional contexts, with Mexico at their center. Papers engaging Latinx and Chicanx communities in the United States are especially welcomed. Projects will be presented in class followed by group discussions.

ART 79400 Aesthetics in Film​, Professor Nicole Wallenbrock, Thursdays 4:15-6:15
Aesthetics of film is an essential course for graduate students of any field who wish to write with expertise about film and film matter. In this course students will learn the very specific vocabulary needed to communicate the way in which film generally, and a film specifically, functions—for this reason, Film Art by David Bordwell and Karen Thompson will be our primary text. We will screen films together that will serve as primary examples of one film element under discussion. Articles by film scholars and theorists in Dropbox will supplement our study, such as Robert Stam and Louise Spence, "Colonialism, racism and representation," and Linda Williams, “Mirrors without Memories.”

We will begin with a study of film narration (Carol Todd Haynes, 2016). We will next do a thorough study of how elements of film, such as lighting (Passing, Rebecca Hall, 2021) composition, camera movement (Power of the Dog, Jane Campion, 2021), set design/location (Opening Night, John Cassavetes, 1971), color, duration, editing, sound/music (Sorry to bother you, Boots Riley, 2019), and casting (Wanda, Barbara Loden, 1971) impact the narrative and alter our perception of characters and events. We will constantly question why (and when) a film is canonized and what might represent a disruption (for example the experimental shorts Meshes in the Afternoon Maya Deren, 1941 and Scorpio Rising Kenneth Anger, 1963). Class discussions may at times highlight depictions of race and gender, but also incorporate the effect streaming and small screens have on filmmaking styles and reception.

CL 85000: Understanding the Radical Right, GC: Mondays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin/ cross listed with HIST 72100 and PSC 80607, 3 credits
Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen in France, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and so forth: the world is awash in authoritarian populism. In order to better understand the origins and efficacity of these “soft dictatorships” or “illiberal democracies” (Orbán), we will pursue a twofold approach. First, we will review the leading theories of dictatorship and the authoritarian state as outlined by luminaries such as Carl Schmitt (The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy; 1923)), Horkheimer and Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment; 1947), and Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism; 1951). Second, we will investigate the leading ideologues of fascism and the “total state,” thinkers who have recently experienced an enthusiastic revival among conservatives and reactionaries worldwide: Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt (again), Julius Evola, and the American paleocon Samuel Francis (1947-2005). In conclusion, we will examine the origins of “population replacement” ideology (Renaud Camus, Generation Identity, the Alt-Right) among representatives of the European “New Right”: Alain de Benoist and disciples such as Vladimir Putin-advisor and Steve Bannon-intimate, Alexander Dugin.
(The course is intended for PhD students; master’s students must receive permission of the instructor)

CL 85500: Intro to Literary Translation Studies, cross listed with MALS 78500 Introduction to Literary Translation Studies, GC: Wednesday, 6:30 – 8:30 PM, 3 credits, Prof. Esther Allen
Course Description: TBA

CL 85500: Middle Eastern Explorers: Time, Space and Travel Literature, GC: Thurs, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Anna Akasoy/cross listed with MES 78500, 3 credits
Since the early days of Islamic history, Muslims traveled for a number of reasons, including trade, education and the pilgrimage. Some traveled on diplomatic missions. While most remained within territories under Muslim rule, others such as Ibn Fadlan or Ibn Battuta ventured well beyond these boundaries into the African, European and Asian continents. Like a small number of other medieval and early modern travelers of the Middle East, they left behind accounts of their journeys which provide important insights into the ways these authors experienced the world and their underlying geographical and ethnographic taxonomies. In some cases, these travel accounts have become critical sources for the regions the authors described (e.g., Ibn Fadlan for human sacrifice among the Vikings, or Ibn Battuta for the early history of Islam in the Maldives).

In this course, we will be reading samples of medieval and early modern Arabic, Persian and Turkish travel literature in English translation. While most of these accounts were written by Muslim travelers, we will be including Jewish and Christian authors from the Middle East as well. We will discuss these texts against the backdrop of biographical, political and religious contexts, but also compare them with contemporaneous geographical and ethnographic literature and cartographic sources as well as travel accounts which can be described as more mythological or fantastical in nature. In order to identify and analyze the distinctive features of these texts, we will also be reading more recent accounts by western travelers such as Richard Francis Burton describing the same regions. We will be discussing the extent to which concepts such as imperialism or Orientalism can be applied to diverse historical and literary contexts. Medieval and early modern travelers have sometimes become iconic in their own right and inspired a literary afterlife – to explore this, we will be considering Naguib Mahfouz’ The Journey of Ibn Fattouma (on Ibn Battuta) alongside Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (on Marco Polo).

In addition to introducing participants to the historical context and literary features of this body of travel literature, this course will offer an opportunity to consider travel as a mode of exploration in a more general sense. We will be considering journeys as sites and facilitators of plots (e.g., in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express or the travel account of Hanna Diab, the ‘author’ of Aladdin). Taking our cue from L.P. Hartley’s description of the past as a foreign country, we will be discussing ways in which explorations of both past and future times constitute forms of travel in which unknown worlds are constituted and described to a variety of ends (e.g., nostalgia or utopia). Premodern Middle Eastern accounts of travel in history will be read alongside modern Middle Eastern literature about time travel and examples of Middle Eastern-themed sci-fi literature. Here, otherness and wonder are a function of difference in historical time rather than geographical distance.

This course will be using principles of collaborative syllabus design in order to reflect the interests of course participants. Students with an interest in the course are welcome and encouraged to contact the instructor at any time before the beginning of the fall semester in order to discuss their interests and expectations.

CL 86500- Beyond Adaptation: Transmediality, Narrative Ecosystems and Spreadable Media, GC: Tues, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Giancarlo Lombardi / cross listed with FSCP 81000, 3 credits, fully in person. This course will focus on the theoretical and practical study of narrative storyworlds depicted across different media and platforms. It will be divided in three modules. In the theoretical module, we will depart from Linda Hutcheon’s seminal study of adaptation to discuss Henry Jenkins’s theorization of transmedia storytelling and spreadable media as well as Guglielmo Pescatore and Veronica Innocenti’s definition of narrative ecosystems.

In the second module, our theoretical understanding of transmedia storytelling will be applied to two case studies, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels and Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah, which will be analyzed in great depth through their ability to engage readers and viewers through compelling narratives that morph across media and platforms in ways which will be gradually teased out and interrogated. Sharing the same location, the city of Naples defined by Walter Benjamin as ‘porous’ for its theatrical architecture and for its ‘inexhaustible law of life’, the transmedia storyworlds originated by Ferrante and Saviano will be investigated for their diverse ability to establish setting not merely as background but as actual protagonist.

In the final module, students will conduct their own independent analysis of transmedia ‘chains’ of their choice, across a wide variety of ‘texts’. Examples include the cinematic, operatic, and televisual adaptations of Henry James’s Turn of the Screw; the many revisitations across time and visual arts of Marcel Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin and Allain and Souvestre’s Fantomas; the retelling of Aldo Moro’s kidnapping in theatre, cinema, tv, and fiction; the fictional portrayal of the Banda della Magliana in Giancarlo De Cataldo’s Romanzo criminale and its many adaptations;  the Marvel, Star Wars, Walking Dead, and Star Trek universes; the complex multimedia diegetic worlds of Lost, 24 and, more recently, Game of Thrones; the many multimedia ‘origin stories’ reinventing the birth of western society via popular historical novels, films and television series.

CL 88500: Italian Fascism: History and Interpretations, GC: Tues, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Eugenia Paulicelli/ cross listed with WSCP 81000, 3 credits
On October 28, 1922, fascist squads headed by Benito Mussolini organized “the march on Rome.” One hundred years later (but also in the last two decades), debate on fascism has again taken center stage. Fascism is a term that often comes back in conversation in several historical epochs and political and cultural contexts. Questions have been asked about its origin and its different declinations throughout the years and in various countries.

But how historically accurate is it to talk about fascism as a recurring political and cultural phenomenon? When and how did fascism come to the fore in its earliest incarnation in Italy? How did the political, social and cultural terrain in Italy before 1922--the year in which fascism came to power—foster the advent of the regime? What are the implications of Umberto Eco’s notion of “ur-fascism” and of Susan Sontag’s “fascinating fascism”?

Starting from the questions emerging from this intense historiographic debate, the course will focus on how Italy was changed by fascism, a regime that took its distance from and drew on the past to realize its ambitions to transform Italy’s institutions and the Italian people. How successful was the regime in achieving totalitarism? How was antifascism organized and what forms did it take (political, armed, existential etc.)?

The course focuses on specific themes such as violence, empire, gender, race, war, culture and the arts, antifascisms, propaganda and the impact of fascism abroad.

These are today crucial topics in the history and interpretations of fascism. It is in this light that we will investigate the resurgence of neo-fascist groups, nationalism and threats to democracy.

The last part of the course will be dedicated to cinematic and interpretations of fascism in films such as “Allarm siam fascisti!” (To Arms, we are fascist!)” (Cecilia Mangini, Lino Miccichè); “A Special Day” (Ettore Scola); “The Night of the Shooting Stars” (The Taviani Brothers); “Salò and 120 days of Sodoma” (Pier Paolo Pasolini).

CL 89000: On Passions, Emotions, Affects: in Theory, History, Texts, GC: Tues, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Domna Stanton/ cross listed with FRE 87000, In-Person, Taught in English
How are passions and emotions different from affects? How do bodies perform passions, sensibility, feelings, emotions and affects? What do affects do and how do they do it? How are they shaped by their contexts?  What is the meaning and significance of the “affective turn”?  Does it mark a rejection of the idea(l) of rational self-control? How is this turn connected to studies of women (and the feminine) and to work on gender and racial embodiments and sexualities?

This course will be structured around three areas: first, theories of affect and in tandem, a study of the cultural politics and ethics of specific affects, including anger, disgust, shame, compassion and happiness. Which emotions mobilize spectators/readers into collectives/communities. Are passions both a source and an obstacle to struggles for freedom and justice? How do they include and exclude? Among the theorists: Ahmed, Artaud, Berlant, Clough,  Cvetkovich, Deleuze and Guattari, Ghandi, M. Hardt, A. Lorde, Massumi, Scheer, Sedgwick, Stewart, M. Warner. Second, we will grapple with the treatment of passions and emotions through history, especially in philosophy: from Aristotle and Cicero, Descartes, Pascal, Lebrun, Spinoza, and Kant to Darwin, W. James, Freud, Klein, and R. Williams. And third, in conjunction with this philosophical and historical work, we will read texts (verbal, visual and musical) to see how they inscribe emotional content and how they generate affective responses from readers even when their semantics and narratives do not depict strong emotions. Is feeling as a response to cultural forms different from a human emotion? We will consider the cultural politics of emotion in the work of  Margerie of Kempe, Montaigne,  Gentileschi (Portraits of Judith) , Racine (Phèdre),  Goethe (Sorrows of Young Werther), Wagner (“Leibestod”) , H. Jacobs (Life of a Slave Girl), H. James (Beast in the Jungle),  Woolf  (Mrs. Dalloway) , A. Nin (“Incest” Diary),  Lanzman (Shoah),  Beckett (Happy Days), C. Churchill  (Far Away) , Irigaray (“When our Lips Speak Together”), Morrison (Beloved),  Darwish (Poems),  Labaki (Capernaum), Moore (Watchman, 2019).

CL 89100: History of Literary Theory & Criticism I, GC: Thursdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 4 credits, Prof. Julie Van Peteghem
This course will examine the history of literary theory and criticism in the classical, medieval, and early modern periods, with readings from Plato, Augustine, Dante, Sidney, and Dryden, among others. We will explore fundamental notions such as genre, imitation, nature, and art, as well as the dynamic relationship between form and content. This course will also explore the legacy and limitations of these topics and their effect and influence on criticism today.

CL 79500: Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism, GC:  Thurs, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 4 credits, Prof. Bettina Lerner
Over the last three decades, the field of Comparative Literature has gone through a period of rapid and radical expansion. What we study as comparatists is commonly (if problematically) held to be world literature, but now also includes a wide array of non-traditional media and new forms of self-expression. At the same time, how we study and interpret these texts has moved away from a well-established hermeneutics of suspicion toward distant, surface, reparative and other forms of reading, while increasingly embracing affects, objects and ecologies that exert significant pressure on discourses of race, gender, and sexuality. What defines the work that comparatists do and how might we continue to think about relationality when faced with modes of storytelling that seem unrelatable, untranslatable or illegible? This course considers what it means to read and write critically as comparatists today by engaging with current debates about the state of the discipline, the fate of the humanities in our universities, and the place and purpose of criticism and interpretation in our social and political landscapes as a whole. Through its written assignments and oral presentations, it also provides a space from within which to practice some of the key rhetorical exercises that have become, for better or worse, the benchmarks of professionalization including abstracts, conference presentations, project proposals, and a 20-25 page paper.

CL 80100: Reflections on Psychoanalysis, GC: Wed, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 2,4credits, Prof. Vincent Crapanzano/ cross listed with Anthro 81000, 3 credits

This seminar attempts to gain a critical perspective on psychoanalysis as both a therapeutic practice and a theory of interpretation that reflects prevailing notions of the psyche. Through close readings of texts by Freud, Winicott, and Lacan. Emphasis will be placed on the underlying epistemological assumptions of psychoanalytic hermeneutics, on the discursive transactions that it presumes and figures in terms of transference and counter-transference, and on its notions of time, truth, and revelation. Special attention will be given to the rhetoric of the unconscious, to trauma (as a mode of psychic punctuation), and on the application of psychoanalytic interpretation to literary texts, rituals, and other cultural phenomena. Readings will inlcude Freud’s interpretation of dreams, several of his case histories, and various metapsychological essays (e.g “the unconscious,” beyond the pleasure principle, “the uncanny,” and civilization and its discontents; Winnicott’s playing and reality and holding and interpretation: a fragment of analysis; and selections from Lacan’s Ecrits and seminars (notably  “The function and field of speech and language in psychoanalysis,” four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, and the ethics of psychoanalysis). As a starting point we will read several chapters of Foucault’s “Wrong-doing/truth-telling: the function of avowal in justice”.

ENGL 86700. Literature and the Police. Tanya Agathocleous. Fridays 2 PM - 4 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.

This course traces the relationship between literature and policing across the period of Anglo-American empire. From eighteenth century vagrancy law and nineteenth-century imperial obscenity and sedition law to the CIA’s contribution to numerous literary magazines and cultural institutions across the global South in the mid-twentieth century, the law and its application through policing have both circumscribed and inspired literary form and content. As well as considering arguments such as D.A. Miller’s early and influential take on the novel as a disciplinary form; Sal Nicolazzo’s book on the forms of sovereignty negotiated in textual form during the rise of the police as an institution; and Bryan Wagner’s work on policing and the black vernacular tradition, we will consider the way different genres—the novel, the colonial and world literary periodical, the political pamphlet—have navigated questions of the law and of their own legality. These questions will take us across different periods, national contexts (the U.S., Britain, India, South Africa, among others) and literary traditions.

ENGL 80600. Entanglements of being, history, aesthetics. Kandice Chuh. Mondays 2 PM - 4 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.

In this discussion-driven and reading-intensive course, we'll be studying how entanglement names a condition of, variously, "being with," non-sovereignty, compresence, and multiplicity -- a condition that refuses and refutes understanding of such matters as being, history, and aesthetics as discrete and separable entities. We'll engage work that unfolds in difference from the compartmentalization of knowledge that regularly organizes the academy, with the aim of understanding how such an approach aligns (and doesn't) with such efforts to remediate the legacies of liberal-colonial modernity as unfold under the rubrics of decolonial, de-imperial, anti-racist, and queer of color feminist critique. What critical approaches and pedagogies correlate with the study of entanglement? What aesthetics help attune us to such conditions? Readings by Lisa Lowe, Chris Patterson, Katherine McKittrick, Jodi Byrd, Manu Karuka, José Muñoz, Erica Edwards, among others, as well as an array of primary (aesthetic) objects to be determined collectively, will help us address such questions. Students taking the course for 2, 3, and 4 credits will have writing assignments increasing in number and kind, to include such things as blog posts, writing for non-academic audiences, annotated bibliography, and writing toward presentation at conferences and the like. Students should read Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being in advance of the first class session. No auditors.

ENGL 89010: Stacks, Sounds and a Record a Day: Hip Hop Literacies, DJ Rhetoric and Sonic Happenings. Todd Craig. Wednesdays 11:45 AM - 1:45 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.
This course aims to take participants through an exploration of Hip Hop literacy and culture. Oftentimes, courses rely solely on academic readings to think about the living and breathing culture we call Hip Hop. In “Stacks, Sounds and a Record a Day” we will upend this mindset…

The main question this course aims to address is how do we understand the rhetoric, literacy and discourse of Hip Hop? Our answer is simple: through listening. In order to interrogate this question, we must do so in the same way Hip Hop was formed. The DJ is the key figure in the formation of Hip Hop, studying records, manipulating breaks and moving the crowd at parties through a sonic journey. Thus, the first component of this class will be establishing a “code of listening conduct”: identifying the elements of a song or album, and how they help us to quantify and qualify our sonic sensibilities. The DJ ushered the emergence of the emcee; from interlude-enchanter to stadium stage-rocker, the greatest emcees have always loved the language of the culture. The second component of this course will be charting the literacy and discursive patterns of Hip Hop culture by following the lyrical flashbacks and rhetorical savvy of great emcees such as MC Lyte, Nas, Queen Latifah, Rakim, Prodigy, Camp Lo, Rapsody, Black Thought, K. Dot and others.

We will use sonic scholarship from Hip Hop’s greatest organic intellectuals, while also pulling from a variety of disciplines (including Comp/Rhet, Sound Studies, Sonic Rhetoric, New Literacy Studies and Hip Hop Studies) to examine Hip Hop literacy and sonics. Scholarship from academics including Elaine Richardson, H. Samy Alim, AD Carson, Joseph Schloss and Jeff Chang will help us paint a picture of how the rhetoric and literacy of an urban underclass’ subculture evolved from counterculture, to a national trend, and then to global popular culture.

ENGL 82100: Queering the Renaissance, 2022. Mario DiGangi. Mondays 11:45 AM - 1:45 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.
Thirty years ago, LGQ early modern scholarship arrived with the publication of four monographs—Bruce Smith’s Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England (1991), Gregory Bredbeck’s Sodomy and Interpretation (1991), Valerie Traub’s Desire and Anxiety (1991), and Jonathan Goldberg’s Sodometries (1992)—and one anthology, Goldberg’s Queering the Renaissance (1993). What did “queering the Renaissance” mean in the early 1990s? What does it mean today? In this seminar, we will explore the origins, development, present state, and possible futures of queer early modern studies. We will begin by establishing the galvanizing influence upon the field of Alan Bray’s Homosexuality in Renaissance England (1982), Foucault’s History of Sexuality: An Introduction (1976; tr. 1978), and feminist Shakespeare criticism of the 1980s; and we will consider what might still be generative in the methodologies that Smith, Traub, Bredbeck, and Goldberg offered for reading early modern sexuality. We will also explore how queer early modern scholarship has since expanded into other fields and subdisciplines such as postcolonialism and globalism (Freccero, Arvas), critical race studies (Ian Smith, Sanchez), adaptation/appropriation studies (Chedgzoy, Burt, Geddes and Fazel, Patricia), disability studies (Nardizzi, Hobgood), rhetoric and philology (Menon, Masten, Rubright), ecological studies (Nardizzi), animal/posthuman studies (Dugan, Rambuss, Raber, Varnado), trans studies (Chess, Gordon), and material studies (Fisher, Blake, Bailey, Lin). Finally, we will address the emergence of, and controversy over, “queer unhistoricism” (Menon, Goldberg, Freccero, Traub, Friedlander, Bromley, DiGangi). Primary readings (from Shakespeare, Marlowe, Middleton, et al.) will be selected to illustrate critical methods and controversies.

ENGL 86100: Young Adult Literature: Theory and Method. Carrie Hintz. Mondays 4:15 PM - 6:15 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.
Our seminar will consider how scholars of YA (Young Adult) literature develop their research—and their methodological and theoretical underpinnings as they do so. We will consider YA’s use of formal experimentation, its role in popular culture, and its construction of an adolescent audience. We will look in detail at how the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement is transforming YA publishing, reviewing, and instruction in multiple ways, as well as YA’s role in facilitating political reflection and change (in both realist and speculative modes). Primary sources will include works from the postwar period to the present, with an emphasis on contemporary works by Angie Thomas, Jack Gantos, M. T. Anderson, Meg Medina, Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Gene Luen Yang, Neal Shusterman, Cece Bell, Jerry Craft, and others. Critical methods might include historicism, critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, psychoanalysis, visual and sound studies, disability studies, the new formalism, affect theory, postcolonial theory, popular culture approaches (esp. film and television), and youth studies scholarship.

ENGL 76200: Utopian Fictions: Literature and Human Rights. Sonali Perera. Tuesdays 2 PM - 4 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.
What does it mean to invoke human rights in an age where, as one theorist puts it, “the banalization of human rights means that violations are often committed in the Orwellian name of human rights themselves, cloaked in the palliative rhetoric of humanitarian intervention?” What can the study of literature teach us about the paradoxes and enabling fictions of human rights? How do we understand the emergence of the Human Rights novel as a literary genre—as “popular” fiction? What do we make of the interpretative turn towards discourses of utopia and fictions of dystopia in our age of statelessness, internal displacement, and border wars? Where and how does literature as cultural practice intersect with the activism of international civil society groups and local human rights initiatives? By way of addressing these questions, in this course we will study the formal, historical, and ideological conjunctions between human rights and particular world literary forms.

Over the course of the semester, towards framing the question of how we produce the concept of human rights in historical and literary studies, (1) we will read historical scholarship tracking the origins of the United Nations and International Law. (2) We will also consider alternative genealogies for internationalism opened up in postcolonial feminism, critical race studies, the literature of social movements, and other forms of world literature.

We will view film clips from Dheepan (2015). Via Zoom, we may also have the opportunity to hear from guest speakers (interdisciplinary scholars, activists, and cultural workers) from South Asia and Europe.

Required Texts May Include: J.M. Coetzee, Disgrace; Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost; Sinan Antoon, The Book of Collateral Damage; Bessie Head, A Question of Power; Lynn Nottage, Ruined (play); Edward Said, After the Last Sky; No Violet Bulowayo, Glory; Sujatha Fernandes, Curated Stories: The Uses and Misuses of Storytelling.

ADDITIONAL REQUIRED READINGS WILL BE AVAILABLE ON BLACKBOARD. THEY MAY INCLUDE: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Righting Wrongs”; Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument”; Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism and We Refugees (selections); Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights” from Means Without End; Walter Benjamin “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and other selections; T. Shanaathanan, The Incomplete Thombu; Sophocles, Antigone; Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim and Precarious Life (selections); Ariel Dorfman, Widows; Saadat Hasan Manto, “Toba Tek Singh” from Khalid Hasan trans. A Wet Afternoon (short story); Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera (selections); Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How it Ends and Lost Children Archive (selections); Aime Cesaire, A Discourse on Colonialism (selection); Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (selections); Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World; Jacqueline Rose, “On the Universality of Madness” and “Apathy and Accountability”; Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (selections) ; David Greig, “The Miniskirts of Kabul” (play); Crystal Parikh, Writing Human Rights (selection) Joseph Slaughter, “Novel Subjects and Enabling Fictions: The Formal Articulation of International Human Rights Law” from Human Rights, Inc; Juliana Spahr, Du Bois’s Telegram (selection); Samuel Moyn, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World and The Last Utopia (selection); Oxford Amnesty Lecture series (selection)Text of the UDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights)

Course Requirements vary by 2,3, or 4 credits. (As a frame of reference, 4 credit requirements are included below):

1.) A 15 minute oral presentation on one or two of the weekly readings (in combination with a pre-circulated 3 page presentation paper) (20%)

2.)  A 1 page prospectus for the final paper/or in lieu of a written prospectus, we might have a meeting during office hours to discuss tentative theses and research directions (10%)

3.) A 15-20 page final paper. (40%)

4.) Engaged class participation. (30%)

ENGL 88000: Women Writing Witness. Nancy K. Miller. Thursdays 4:15 PM - 6:15 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.
The seminar will explore feminist texts from a range of genres that all bear witness to violence, injustice, and the aggressions of everyday life. Memoir, poetry, essay, or fiction, in each case the “I” records circumstances that are not simply singular, but also collective. What literary strategies do these writers deploy to make connections between “I” and “we,” story and life, aesthetics and politics, trauma and testimony? Readings include: Anzaldúa, Brison, Delbo, Ernaux, Hartman, Jacobs, Menchú, Lorde, Nestle, Rich, Una, Williams.

ENGL 87300. Soundworks/Phonographies. Eric Lott. Tuesdays 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM. 2/3/4 Credits. (Cross-listed with ASCP 81000).
This seminar will offer an introduction to the field and intellectual genealogies of American Studies by way of a range of issues arising from the last couple of decades in sound studies.  The field has long been preoccupied with sound—the work of George Lipsitz, Gayle Wald, Daphne Brooks, Robin Kelley, and current American Studies Association president Shana Redmond come to mind—a preoccupation that has only intensified in the last several years.  If, as Henri Lefebvre wrote, “sovereignty implies ‘space,’” how does sound produce space and intervene in the power relations that define it?  Who has the right at any given moment to legislate and regulate sound, either juridically or critically?  How does it take up the everyday soundscape of its location—clipped speech, screeching industry, the sound of the street, crickets chirping—and give it significant form?  Sound as exclusionary, and as a mode of self-possession: music and music-making take up space—organize and announce new collectivities, confer rights, produce obstructions and transgressions, the latter also known as “noise.”  The cultural history of sound might be written by observing who at any given moment has the right to say “you are hurting my ears.”  We’ll survey some of the most provocative theoretical work on sound, soundscapes, sound technologies, and music’s relation to space, politics, and the body, including thinkers such as Ralph Ellison, Amiri Baraka, Roland Barthes, Jacques Attali, Ellen Willis, Wayne Koestenbaum, Christopher Small, Jean-Luc Nancy, Alexandra Vazquez, Suzanne Cusick, Emily Lordi, Karen Tongson, Alexander Weheliye, José Esteban Muñoz, and Fred Moten.  Theoretical readings will be paired with apposite musical and sonic examples, from John Philip Sousa to K-pop, sonic warfare to sonic booms.  We may delve into certain classics of pop music scholarship—Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train (1975), Tricia Rose’s Black Noise (1994), Tim Lawrence’s Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor (2016). We’ll investigate the “writing of sound” by way of phonography and its successive apparatuses from the wax cylinder to the player piano, shellac discs on Victrolas to hi-fi vinyl albums, magnetic tape to compact disc to the digital formats that surround us now.  Part of our project will entail considering the sonic dimensions of literary, photographic, and cinematic forms.  And we’ll examine lived, contested spaces of sound, whole vibrational ontologies—bustling “urban crisis” New York and racially segmented pop capital Los Angeles, cotton belt soul studios and “Chicago School” blues lounges and house dance floors—collective, and therefore spatial, world-making (and –breaking) interventions performed by American musics.

ENGL 86800. The Global South as Politics and Aesthetics. Peter Hitchcock. Wednesdays 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM. 2/3/4 Credits.
Of course, the Global South is not a geographic referent, and yet reading the South globally is a vital heuristic in postcolonial and decolonial critique. Rather than ask “south of what?” or “global where?” this course is designed to interrogate the critical grounds for thinking the Global South as a decolonial “worldliness.” Eschewing the lure of cartographic consciousness, we will instead explore the parameters of the Global South as forms of political and aesthetic transnationalism and postnationalism (in theoretical as well as literary expression). Globalization itself is often rendered as a scene of combined and uneven development, one in which vibrant struggles against colonialism and coloniality simultaneously confront the systemic demands of capitalism as a world system. While it is true certain versions of world literature as subject and archive cleave quite closely to a logic of commodification and circulation, we will examine how the Global South can be thought of as, whatever else it is, an injunction about the terms of a global literary (“global Anglophone,” “global novel,” “postcolonial exotic,” etc.). How might this shed light on the Global South’s primary identity as a political genealogy, one inflected by the Bandung Conference (1955), the Non-Aligned Movement, Pan-Africanism, Tri-continentalism, and Third World solidarity? Literature does not simply express the new political grammar of these events and processes, but reading the world is a way of writing it otherwise and this can be understood as very much a postcolonial problematic (on political identities of race, gender, sexuality, and class for instance, but also around abstractions of space and time, territory and temporality). The conceptual framework developed is avowedly interdisciplinary and comparativist and the course in general can be considered both an introduction to the global study of literature and a specific investigation of what we might call postcolonial prerogatives in that endeavor, a politics and aesthetics for which the term “Global South,” while easy to misconstrue, seethes with hermeneutical possibility. Texts will address how the Global South is theorized at the intersection of anti-colonial practices and literary imaginaries (Spivak, Prashad, Mbembe, Simone, Mishra). Rather than being an effect of postcolonial and decolonial autonomy, literature will be thought of as active in that process, with the Global South refusing the map in favor of mentality, a discrepant “worldmentality” to borrow from Diawara on Glissant (other examples may include Mohamed, Hamid, Apostol, Aw). Course requirements will vary according to credits and will range from a term essay to a class presentation on an individual work or theme.

FRENCH 87000: On Passions, Emotions, Affects: in Theory, History, Texts
Professor Domna Stanton, Tuesdays, 4:15 - 6:15 pm. In-Person, Taught in English
How are passions and emotions different from affects? How do bodies perform passions, sensibility, feelings, emotions and affects? What do affects do and how do they do it? How are they shaped by their contexts?  What is the meaning and significance of the “affective turn”?  Does it mark a rejection of the idea(l) of rational self-control? How is this turn connected to studies of women (and the feminine) and to work on gender and racial embodiments and sexualities?

This course will be structured around three areas: first, theories of affect and in tandem, a study of the cultural politics and ethics of specific affects, including anger, disgust, shame, compassion and happiness. Which emotions mobilize spectators/readers into collectives/communities. Are passions both a source and an obstacle to struggles for freedom and justice? How do they include and exclude? Among the theorists: Ahmed, Artaud, Berlant, Clough, Cvetkovich, Deleuze and Guattari, Ghandi, M. Hardt, A. Lorde, Massumi, Scheer, Sedgwick, Stewart, M. Warner.

Second, we will grapple with the treatment of passions and emotions through history, especially in philosophy: from Aristotle and Cicero, Descartes, Pascal, Lebrun, Spinoza, and Kant to Darwin, W. James, Freud, Klein, and R. Williams.Emotions, Affetcs: History, Texts

And third, in conjunction with this philosophical and historical work, we will read texts (verbal, visual and musical) to see how they inscribe emotional content and how they generate affective responses from readers even when their semantics and narratives do not depict strong emotions. Is feeling as a response to cultural forms different from a human emotion? We will consider the cultural politics of emotion in the work of  Margerie of Kempe, Montaigne,  Gentileschi (Portraits of Judith) , Racine (Phèdre),  Goethe (Sorrows of Young Werther), Wagner (“Leibestod”) , H. Jacobs (Life of a Slave Girl), H. James (Beast in the Jungle),  Woolf  (Mrs. Dalloway) , A. Nin (“Incest” Diary),  Lanzman (Shoah),  Beckett (Happy Days), C. Churchill  (Far Away) , Irigaray (“When our Lips Speak Together”), Morrison (Beloved),  Darwish (Poems),  Labaki (Capernaum), Moore (Watchman, 2019).

The syllabus will be uploaded onto Blackboard by the beginning of the spring semester; all course materials will be on blackboard, except for one or two complete texts which will be indicated on the syllabus.

Work for the course: Whether the course is taken for 2, 3, or 4 credits, all students will be responsible for doing the assigned texts closely and for engaging consistently in class discussion.

• students who take the course for 2 credits will present in class a reading of one primary text, which will also be submitted in writing (c 5-7 pp); these students will also take the final exam.   
• students who take the course for 3 credits, will do all of the above, but instead of the 5-7 page paper, they will do a 10-13-page paper on a topic they select, after consultation with the instructor. They will also submit a thesis statement, a bibliography, an outline and the introduction (the schedule will be indicated on the syllabus).
• students who take the course for 4 credits will do all of the above, but instead of a 10-13 page paper, they will do a 20-25-page paper on a topic they select, after consultation with the instructor. They will also submit a thesis statement, a bibliography, an outline, and an introduction (the schedule will be indicated on the syllabus).

PSC 73100: Social Movements and Public Policy (CP/PP), Prof. John Krinksy, Tuesdays, 2:00PM-4:00PM
Course Description: TBA

 

PSC 80607: Understanding the Radical Right (PT) (Cross listed with CL and HIST), Prof. Wolin, Mondays, 6:30PM-8:30PM.
Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Marine Le Pen in France, Matteo Salvini in Italy, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, and so forth: the world is awash in authoritarian populism. In order to better understand the origins and efficacity of these “soft dictatorships” or “illiberal democracies” (Orbán), we will pursue a twofold approach. First, we will review the leading theories of dictatorship and the authoritarian state as outlined by luminaries such as Carl Schmitt (The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy; 1923)), Horkheimer and Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightenment; 1947), and Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism; 1951). Second, we will investigate the leading ideologues of fascism and the “total state,” thinkers who have recently experienced an enthusiastic revival among conservatives and reactionaries worldwide: Oswald Spengler, Carl Schmitt (again), Julius Evola, and the American paleocon Samuel Francis (1947-2005). In conclusion, we will examine the origins of “population replacement” ideology (Renaud Camus, Generation Identity, the Alt-Right) among representatives of the European “New Right”: Alain de Benoist and disciples such as Vladimir Putin-advisor and Steve Bannon-intimate, Alexander Dugin.

(The course is intended for PhD students; master’s students must receive permission of the instructor)

PSC 80304: Modern Social Theory (PT), Prof. Mehta, Wednesdays, 2:00PM-4:00PM.
This seminar will consider the following broad questions with respect to Edmund Burke, Alex de Tocqueville, Franz Fanon, and Ashis Nandy.

1) What is the cement of society i.e., what makes society a coherent unit of experience and analysis? Relatedly what are the conditions that threaten the cohesiveness of the social? Through what institutions does the social get articulated? Linked to these questions is the issue of the relationship between the social and the political vision of society and the detritus produced in by latter in the former and by the former in the latter.

2) How do social institutions change, develop, and come apart and how do they respond to changing circumstances?

3) What is the role of ideas, as distinct say from the role of interests, in the cohesion and development of societies?

4) What normative constraints do the answers to the above questions place on societies and on the political vision associated with them?

PSC 71906: Politics of the Image (PT), Prof. Buck-Morss, Wednesdays, 4:15PM-6:15PM
This is a course on the image as political representation and historical revelation. The image will be analyzed as the capture of transitory (historically specific) experiences of the political, that can be (re)viewed in another time, at another place, by others.  Everything we deal with will be as image, even when these are of existing objects (photos, paintings, films, even texts). Topics include Political Theology (Sovereignty as Representation, Sovereignty and Cinema) Seeing the Truth of the World (Capitalism, Globalization, Imperialism): Politics through the Image (Resistance, Critique, Liberation). Readings/Viewings include: Kantorowicz, Skinner, Foucault, Velasquez, Riefenstahl, Sontag, Sokurov, Debord, Baudrillard, Benjamin, Eisenstein, Fassbinder, Farocki, Sekula, Trinh Minh-ha, Azoulay, Arendt, and others.

SPAN 70200: Critical Theory Seminar, GC: Tuesday, 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m., Prof. Fernando Degiovanni (Hybrid)
Students will be introduced to the main concepts, debates and currents within contemporary theory central to the study of literary texts and other cultural objects. We will discuss and contextualize the latest developments with regard to the Memory and Human Rights, Performance and Subjectivity, Empire and Coloniality, and State and Nation--the four critical areas of our graduate program’s required First Examination--exploring the fundamental assumptions at stake.  Our studies may include theorists and thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Marianne Hirsch, Pierre Nora, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Diana Taylor, among others.  The course attempts to give students the tools to continue their own explorations in this field of study.

SPAN 78200: Introduction to Literary Translation Studies, GC Wednesday, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m., Prof. Esther Allen (In Person)
In lieu of a welcome video, you’re invited to explore the 2020 online conference “Translating the Future:https://www.centerforthehumanities.org/programming/translating-the-future

Literature is unimaginable without translation. Yet translation is a disturbing, even paranormal practice, mysteriously conferring xenoglossy upon unwitting or suspicious readers. The literary cultures of English, in particular, have often been resistant to, even contemptuous of translation, or have used it as a tool of colonialism. The problem may lie with prevailing concepts of the original, but translation has often taken the blame. Among the aesthetic, ethical, and political questions it raises — questions increasingly crucial to practitioners of literature worldwide— are: Who translates? Who is translated? What is translated? And—yes—how? And also: what does it mean to think of literature prismatically rather than nationally? What constitutes an anti-colonial translation?

In this seminar, we’ll discuss theoretical and literary readings and engage with the contemporary translation sphere, both in the digital realm and in New York City. We’ll also welcome the perspectives of some notable guest speakers. Students will work towards and workshop a final project, either: 1) a discussion of a specific translation theory or set of theories; 2) an analysis of a specific translation, or comparison of multiple translations, or 3) an original translation into English (of a previously untranslated work) accompanied by a critical introduction and annotation.  For an example of a successful final project from a previous iteration of the class, see Nancy Seidler's "Language is a Foreign Language." The class is taught in English; students should have working knowledge of at least one other language.

THEA 80300: (Seminar in Theatre Theory & Criticism) Translating (Contemporary) Theatre and Performance: Theories and Practices, Wednesdays 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., Professor Jean Graham-Jones
This seminar takes a “translational” view of translating for the stage, expanding upon Walter Benjamin's acknowledgement of relationality in textual translation to consider not only the linguistic-cultural text—the play-script or so-called source and target texts—but also the many other challenges faced when translating, translocating, adapting a play or performance.  To do this, we will study theatre and performance translation’s multiple cultural constraints and constructs in relation to one another--translationally--as part of the translation process itself.  We will begin historically, considering general theories and practices of theatrical translation, as well as the roles of the translator in the theatre.  After this general introduction, we will examine the myriad challenges, limitations, and opportunities specific to translating for the contemporary stage.  These challenges include dramaturgical logic and theatrical genres; actor training, casting and rehearsal practices, and performance styles; choreography, gesture, and embodiment; surtitling and other in-performance translation practices; and performance aesthetics and reception.  Finally, we will look at contemporary performance translation as a political practice: the refusal to (self) translate, the translational potential of the decolonial gesture, and alternative approaches to translating performing bodies.  There will be a practical component to the seminar: students will work throughout the semester with a performance or text that they wish to consider translationally.  Possible projects might be individual in-progress translation work, but they can also involve a critical engagement with one or more extant translations or performances.  The final result of this semester-long project will be a 12-15-page seminar paper.  The course will be taught in English, but reading knowledge of at least one other language is encouraged.  Students will be evaluated on in-class participation and short writing assignments as well as the final seminar paper.

WGS 71601/WSCP 81601 – Topics in Women’s and Gender Studies: “Gender and the Archive: The History, Theory, and Practice of Victorian Feminist Criticism, GC: WED, 2:00PM-4:00PM, 3 Credits, Prof. Talia Schaffer, Fully In-Person. Cross-listed with English.

**WGS 71601 is open to WGS students only. To enroll in WSCP 81601, you must be a WSCP student, or have instructor permission. Please email APO, Eileen Liang-Massey, at eliang@gc.cuny.edu. We will verify if you have registered for the certificate, and grant you permission to enroll accordingly.**

The seminar will explore feminist texts from a range of genres that all bear witness to violence, injustice, and the aggressions of everyday life. Memoir, poetry, essay, or fiction, in each case the “I” records circumstances that are not simply singular, but also collective. What literary strategies do these writers deploy to make connections between “I” and “we,” story and life, aesthetics and politics, trauma and testimony? Readings include: Anzaldúa, Brison, Delbo, Ernaux, Hartman, Jacobs, Menchú, Lorde, Nestle, Rich, Una, Williams.

Course Listing

Elective Courses

*More courses will be added soon.*

ANTH 71100: Liberalism
[In-Person], GC: Mondays, 11:45am- 1:45pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Leo Coleman

ANTH 81100: The Social Life of Time
[Fully In-Person], GC: Thursdays, 11:45am-1:45pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Gary Wilder

ANTH 82500: Rumor and Conspiracy
[Fully In-Person], GC: Tuesdays, 4:15pm - 6:15 pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. John Collins

ART 86040: Attention/Internet: Spectatorship Today
Prof. Claire Bishop, Thursdays, 2:00PM-4:00PM, 3 credits, in person, auditors by permission, cross-listed with Theatre and English, 12 students max

CL 80100 (2, 4 credits)/FRE 85000(2-4 credits): Sentiment, Affect, Sensation: Forms of Desire in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel
Mondays, 4:15-6:15pm, Prof. Bettina Lerner

CL 89000 (2, 4 credits): Memory and Temporality: Erich Auerbach and, Walter Benjamin, and their Legacy in Fiction, Mondays, 2:00pm-4:00pm (ONLINE)
Prof. Martin Elsky

CL 89200: History of Literary Theory & Criticism II
Tuesdays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 4 credits, Prof. Charity Scribner

ENGL 85800. Sense and Sensuality: Queer of Color Critique.
Prof. Amber Musser. Tuesdays, 11:45AM – 1:45PM. 2/3/4 Credits. (Cross-listed with WSCP 81000). In-person.

ENGL 80500: Gender and the Archive: The History, Theory, and Practice of Victorian Feminist Criticism
Prof. Talia Schaffer, Wednesdays, 2:00PM – 4:00PM. 2/3/4 Credits. (Cross-listed with WGS 71601/WSCP 81601). In-person

ENGL 85500: Film Blackness
Michael B. Gillespie, Mondays, 11:45AM - 1:45PM., 2/3/4 Credits. (Cross-listed with FSCP 81000). In-person

ENGL 87500: The Essay Film: Portraits and Self-Portraits
Wayne Koestenbaum, Wednesdays, 4:15PM – 6:15PM, 2/3/4 Credits. (Cross-listed with BAM 70500, section 2). In-person

French 87400: Queer Africa: Foreign Bodies/Forbidden Sexualities
Professor Nathalie Etoke, Thursdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Taught in English (2/4 Credits), Fully In-Person

French 87400: Queer Africa: Foreign Bodies/Forbidden Sexualities
Professor Nathalie Etoke, Thursdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Taught in English (2/4 Credits), Fully In-Person

PHIL 77800: Aesthetics and Society
Prof. Prinz, Tuesdays, 2:00PM – 4:00PM, In person.

PSC 80608: The Law and Politics of Emergencies
Prof. Feldman, Tuesdays, 2:00 PM-4:00PM, 4 credits

PSC 71906: Politics of the Image
Prof. Buck-Morss, Wednesdays, 4:15 PM-6:15PM, 3 credits

PSC 82505: Critical Urbanisms and Just Cities: Reimagining Social Infrastructures and Politics from Below
(Crosslist with PSYC/UED/EES), Prof. Su, Tuesdays, 2:00 PM-4:00 pm, 4 credits (Online)

SOC 82800/PSC 70200: Intersectionality in the Social Sciences
Prof. Leslie McCall, Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15pm, 3 credits

SOC 70200: Contemporary Theory
Prof. Lynn Chancer/Lucia Trimbur, Mondays, 2:00-4:00pm, 3 credits

SOC 82901: The "New Capitalism"
Prof. Charles Post, Tuesdays, 6:30 - 8:30 pm, 3 credits

SOC 86800: Sociology of Culture
Prof. David Halle, Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30pm, 3 credits

THEA 70600: History of Theatrical Theory
Professor David Savran, Tuesdays, 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

THEA 86000: Festive and Ritual Performance
Cross-listed with Global Early Modern Studies Certificate Program GEMS 83100, Prof. Erika Lin, Thursday, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

 

Course Descriptions
 

ANTH 71100: Liberalism
[In-Person], GC: Mondays, 11:45am- 1:45pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Leo Coleman

Liberalism is “the most dominant ethic of our age” (according to Saba Mahmood) and has long been an “all-penetrating element of the life-structure of the modern world” (according to late Victorian thinker LT Hobhouse). More than a narrow political ideology, a theory of property, or a legitimating set of fictions, as an ethic and a “code for living” liberalism has traces and tentacles in all departments of culture from the arts to ordinary ethics, from high constitutional politics to technical calculations of private need. This seminar will focus on theoretical discussions about and anthropological encounters with liberalism, primarily in the past five decades of Anglophone social thought and intellectual life. We will explore how various social and political purposes have been pursued through a formal liberal program of law and a tacit—but governing—social philosophy of individual freedoms and countervailing rights. Primary readings will focus on self-identified theorists and proponents of liberalism, from political theorists to the lawyers and NGO actors who populate ethnographies of liberalism, and the underlying commitments that animate liberal politics, from notions of equality and freedom to theories of subjectivity and calculations of interest. We will analyze the claims and arguments of several historical varieties of liberalism, from imperial liberalism to postwar European liberalism—as a technology for ordering economic relations and forces (neoliberalism) and a political philosophy that challenged overwhelming and totalitarian state power (Cold War liberalism, or neoconservatism). We will further investigate how liberalism takes shape today as a politics of minority rights and protection of the powerless (legal liberalism and human rights). We will assess critical approaches that seek to uncover the unequal and uneven ground beneath liberal legal fictions of personhood and rights, and explore anthropological studies that set other ways of regulating exchange or organizing belonging alongside liberal theories of contract and obligation, usually to the detriment of the latter. Thus, readings will range across intellectual history, formal political theory, political and legal anthropology, and economic anthropology. The goal is to be better informed about the sources and complexities of liberal arguments, what projects they underwrite—in terms of equality, freedoms, rights, development, and indeed democratic participation—and how they are wielded as political common sense in a range of global locations.

ART 86040: Attention/Internet: Spectatorship Today
Prof. Claire Bishop, Thursdays, 2:00PM-4:00PM, 3 credits, in person, auditors by permission, cross-listed with Theatre and English, 12 students max

Online: clickbait, pop-ups, pageviews, likes, upvotes, web-blockers, filter bubbles, information overload. Offline: ADHD, mindfulness, distraction, willpower, being “woke.” All these terms indicate the centrality of attention to contemporary life, but the quality and quantity of our gaze has never been more sought after or contested. This interdisciplinary seminar seeks to identify changes in looking and reading that have arisen in tandem with digital technology and the Internet, and how these shifts impact upon the reception and consumption of contemporary art, performance and literature since the 1990s. A strong aspect of this course is methodological: attending to theories of looking and reading that pit depth (the traditional model of the humanities) against surface and speed (associated with online consumption). A range of texts from Art History, Psychology, Cultural Studies, Philosophy, English, and Theatre will be juxtaposed with cultural objects selected by the participating students.

CL 80100 (2, 4 credits)/FRE 85000(2-4 credits): Sentiment, Affect, Sensation: Forms of Desire in the Nineteenth-Century French Novel
Mondays, 4:15-6:15pm, Prof. Bettina Lerner

This course construes desire as constitutive of modern narrative and of the nineteenth-century French novel in particular. We will examine how sentimental, realist, and decadent novels configure desire differently through character and plot. We’ll also see how these configurations are challenged by a range of affects that emerge, often within the same texts, to reveal the mediated and constructed dimensions of attraction and longing. The course also asks us to consider not just the forms of erotic desire that are developed in these novels but, in a period marked by revolution and social change, we will pay close attention to texts that explicitly tie desire to political aspiration. These explorations may ultimately help us address the question of the century’s desire for the novel and the sensations it provokes over and above all other literary forms. Novels and novellas will likely include Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir; Claire de Duras’s Ourika; Honoré de Balzac’s La Fille aux yeux d’or; Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale; Jules Vallès’s L’Enfant; and Rachilde’s Monsieur Vénus. Our definitions of desire will be informed and challenged by theorists and critics including Roland Barthes, Leo Bersani, Peter Brooks, Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, René Girard, and Raymond Williams and will engage with recent debates associated with the work of Lauren Berlant and Joan Copjec among others.

CL 89000 (2, 4 credits): Memory and Temporality: Erich Auerbach and, Walter Benjamin, and their Legacy in Fiction
Mondays, 2:00pm-4:00pm (ONLINE), Prof. Martin Elsky

The conceptual starting point of this course is the intellectual exchange and friendship between Erich Auerbach and Walter Benjamin that began in the Staatsbibliothek of Berlin in the 1920s. The course brings their widely influential work into focus in relation to contemporary memory studies, on the one hand, and twenty-first century memory (auto-)fiction, on the other. We will examine the idea of multi-layered temporalities of memory and trauma in personally and culturally disruptive historical moments, as in the work of Jan Assmann, Yifat Gutman, and Andreas Huyssen.  We will explore how these notions appear in the seminal literary-historical work of Auerbach and Benjamin: we will consider how Auerbach conceives of overlapping and displacing temporalities at junctures of historical change from Jewish, Christian, and secular eras, and we will consider the various ways the past uncannily disrupts the present in Benjamin’s messianically inflected thinking. Finally, we will look at how these trends influenced a new genre of fiction begun by W. G. Sebald and  in two writers who share his legacy -- Jenny Erpenbeck and Teju Cole.

CL 89200: History of Literary Theory & Criticism II
Tuesdays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 4 credits, Prof. Charity Scribner

This course is a study of the thought about literature as it has developed from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Readings range from Kant to Horkheimer and Adorno. This course will examine the evolution of modern aesthetics as well as current critical methodology. Conducted in English. Students may choose to read assigned texts in their original languages or in translation.

ENGL 85800. Sense and Sensuality: Queer of Color Critique
Prof. Amber Musser. Tuesdays, 11:45AM – 1:45PM. 2/3/4 Credits. (Cross-listed with WSCP 81000). In-person.

That sensation orders knowledge is one of the primary arenas of exploration within queer of color critique. This course will explore different sensational arenas, the different possible critiques that they produce, and what this means for thinking about sexuality, gender, and queer theory. Throughout the course of the semester, we will explore sensation in multiple ways 1) as a diagnostic tool for understanding some of the different ways that race, gender, and sexuality intersect 2) as a way to trouble the dichotomy between interiority and exteriority to understand the ways in which orders of knowledge become imprinted on the body 3) as a mode of producing alternate forms of knowledge about gender, race, and sexuality. In addition to reading about different sensations and their relationships to politics and sexuality, this course will ask students to examine sexuality and sensation as collections of embodied and politicized experiences and to think about sensuality as a method in queer theory. Students will also be required to participate in an end of year symposium on queer theory. Readings may include: Aberrations in Black, Rod Ferguson; Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable, Eric Stanley; Sense of Brown, José Muñoz; Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance, Sandra Ruiz;  The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire, Erica Edwards; After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life, Joshua Chambers-Letson; Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left, Malik Gaines; Minor China: Method, Materials, and the Aesthetic, Hentyle Yapp; and A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South, LaMonda Horton-Stallings. 

ENGL 80500: Gender and the Archive: The History, Theory, and Practice of Victorian Feminist Criticism
Prof. Talia Schaffer, Wednesdays, 2:00PM – 4:00PM. 2/3/4 Credits. (Cross-listed with WGS 71601/WSCP 81601). In-person 

In this course we will attempt to outline a contemporary feminist approach sensitive to global, trans, queer, disability, and digital phenomena, while exploring the history of academic feminist work in Victorian studies. We will start with the first wave of feminist recovery work of the 70s and 80s by Showalter, Spacks, Gilbert and Gubar, Poovey, Spivak, using “Cassandra” and Jane Eyre as case studies. Middlemarch and Miss Marjoribank will take us into the cultural feminist criticism of the 90s, Armstrong and Gallagher, and use Mansfield Park to look at the 21st century queer, ethical, and digital turns of feminist work in criticism by Marcus, Ehnenn, Ahmed, Manne, Nowviskie, Berlant. In assessing fifty years of Victorian feminist criticism, we will be looking at race, empire, bodies, and sexuality, but we will also be interrogating what kind of feminist criticism might be appropriate to a decentralized, gender-fluid, digital contemporary mode. Students will find and present their own feminist case studies, which may include interrogating the place of feminist criticism in environmental humanities, critical race theory, disability studies, animal studies, postcolonialism, affect studies, Latinx, graphic narratives, etc. Presentations will introduce the rest of the class to the current state of feminist work in this area, and the final paper will aim to craft a new form of feminist criticism for your chosen field. At the end of the course, we will work collaboratively to craft a joint ‘keywords’ project for feminist criticism in the 21st century.

ENGL 85500: Film Blackness
Michael B. Gillespie, Mondays, 11:45AM - 1:45PM, 2/3/4 Credits. (Cross-listed with FSCP 81000). In-person 

This course is devoted to the study of the idea of black film as an enactment of black visual and expressive culture. With attention to the critical and creative capacities of film blackness, the course considers new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, historiography, intertextuality, and pleasure. Avoiding reductive considerations of the idea of black film in terms of authenticity/truth, a fixed category, or by way of a representational politics of positive and negative images, the course instead advocates for greater attention to film as art and the discursivity of blackness.

ENGL 87500: The Essay Film: Portraits and Self-Portraits
Wayne Koestenbaum, Wednesdays 4:15PM – 6:15PM. 2/3/4 Credits, (Cross-listed with BAM 70500, section 2), In-person 

In this seminar, we will explore portraits and self-portraits that might be called “essay films.”  A perplexing category; a fruitful category; a pretext for flight, for immersion, and for an end to naysaying.  Critic Tim Corrigan argues that “although for many the notion of an essay film remains less than self-explanatory, this particular mode of filmmaking has become more and more recognized as not only a distinctive kind of filmmaking but also, I would insist, as the most vibrant and significant kind of filmmaking in the world today.”  (Corrigan, The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, Oxford U. Press, 2011).  Some of the films we will study resemble paintings; some resemble monologues, stand-up comedy, intimate encounters, documentaries, surveillance footage, collage.  All do the work that is historically the province of the literary genres of autobiography and biography, and the visual media of photography, drawing, and collage.  Artists studied may include such unclassifiables as Agnès Varda, Shirley Clarke, Isaac Julien, Werner Herzog, Jonas Mekas, Ja’Tovia Gary, Andy Warhol, Peggy Ahwesh, Tourmaline, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Su Friedrich, Kalup Linzy, Chantal Akerman, Barbara Hammer, Cheryl Dunye, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Sky Hopinka, William Greaves, Albert and David Maysles, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.  Suggestions welcome.  We will read some theoretical texts:  Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, André Bazin, Alexandre Astruc, Hito Steyerl, and others. For a final project, students may write a work of biography or autobiography, make a short film, or write a critical essay.

French 87400: Queer Africa: Foreign Bodies/Forbidden Sexualities
Professor Nathalie Etoke, Thursdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Taught in English (2/4 Credits), Fully In-Person

According to a report by Amnesty International, homosexuality is still illegal in thirty-eight African countries and is punishable by the death penalty in four. Despite these repressive laws, sexual subjectivities beyond the heteropatriarchal stranglehold are no longer taboo to name. They are a part of public debates. 
This course explores sub-Saharan African LGBTQI+ subjectivities while highlighting several trends that expose tensions between local and global dynamics in the day-to-day existence of these countries’ citizens. Such trends include the overlapping of European colonization and discourses on African sexual identities, the hate-driven influence of American far-right evangelicals on the African Christian church, sexual democratization, homonationalism and state-sponsored homophobia.
We will examine current conflicting discourses on sex, gender, and subjectification within the domains of law, anthropology, art, literature, documentary cinema, social media, and journalism. Our analysis will bring out the tension between local and global dynamics at stake in the struggle for queer freedom in sub-Saharan Africa.
Course taught in English.

PHIL 77500: Philosophy of Art
Prof. Gilmore, Mondays, 4:15PM-6:15PM, In person.
 
This course treats major theoretical questions about artistic forms and practices, among them literature, film, performance, music, and the visual arts.  We will address historical and contemporary concepts of art; evolutionary approaches to art, pretense, and creativity; internal relations among a work’s aesthetic, moral, cognitive, and political dimensions; why we respond with genuine emotions to what is only fictional or imagined; why we take pleasure in painful or distressing aesthetic forms; artistic meaning and medium-specificity; the nature of representation and depiction; the substance and rhetoric of autonomy; the aesthetics of body modification; originality and forgery in the age of mechanical and virtual reproducibility; censorship; high art/low art, taste, and kitsch; aesthetics and discrimination; and, of course, beauty.  Readings will be drawn from diverse fields, including philosophy, cognitive psychology, art history, and criticism.

PHIL 77800: Aesthetics and Society
Prof. Prinz, Tuesdays, 2:00 – 4:00, In person.
​
The seminar explores social, political, and cross-cultural aspects of art.  Relevant topics include: cultural variations in taste, perception, aesthetic values, and what counts as an art; conceptions of realistic depiction across culture and history;  the relationship between art and personal/social identity (as in musical subcultures); political art and the use of art as propaganda; the way museums enshrine colonialism; issues relating to race (e.g., who gets to depict Black pain?), gender (e.g., the pervasiveness of cis female nudes); class (e.g., lowbrow taste, elitism, and street art); and disability (e.g., associations between creativity and mental illness).  Students will have the option of doing creative work for course credit.

PSC 80608: The Law and Politics of Emergencies
Prof. Feldman, Tuesdays, 2:00 PM-4:00PM, 4 credits

This course will explore emergencies and emergency powers as central elements of contemporary political life. Topics and concepts explored include the state of exception and necessity, "models” of emergency powers, the political and legal dynamics of particular kinds of emergencies (natural disasters, pandemics, economic crises, humanitarian emergencies, terrorism), the development of emergency rule in settler colonialism, racialized policing as a state of exception, and the political dynamics of constituting a phenomenon as an emergency. Authors will include: Locke, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Schmitt, Benjamin, Agamben, Rubenstein, Dyzenhaus, Gross and others.

PSC 71906: Politics of the Image
Prof. Buck-Morss, Wednesdays, 4:15 PM-6:15PM, 3 credits

This course deals with the image in its relation to political theory. Topics include: visibility and truth (Plato and Moses); The King’s two bodies (Kantorowitz), Hamlet’s doubt (Benjamin); Las Meninas (Foucault); Hobbes’ Leviathan (Schmitt); book of Revelation (John of Patmos and Toussaint-Louverture); the invisible hand (Smith and Malthas); seeing capital (Manet and Mapplethorpe); constructing a world (Beatus’ T-O maps and Aponte’s picture book); commodity and fetish (Marx and Pietz); culture industry (Adorno and Baudrillard); society of the spectacle (Debord); Family of Man (Steichen); photos from Little Rock (Eckford and Arendt); Husserl and the movies; Sokurov on sovereignty (Lenin, Hitler, Hirohito); the earth from the moon (Heidegger), ecosystems and lines in the sand (Ristelheuber, Mosher, Denes, and others)

PSC 82505: Critical Urbanisms and Just Cities: Reimagining Social Infrastructures and Politics from Below
(Crosslist with PSYC/UED/EES), Prof. Su, Tuesdays, 2:00 PM-4:00 pm, 4 credits (Online)

This seminar examines histories of spatialized inequities and case studies of current mobilizations for alternative futures and more just cities. What might alternatives to housing financialization and hypergentrification, pervasive segregation in schools and neighborhoods, and slow violence and environmental injustice look like? Drawing upon academic literatures in urban studies and planning, political science, critical geography, urban education, and other disciplines, we interrogate various social justice-oriented models and theories of urban planning and policy-making (including participatory, insurgent, pluriversal, and decolonial models), dissecting their implicit criteria and prescriptions for action. We do so by focusing primarily not on city administrations and official public policies, but on different forms of politics from below. Our readings include comparative and emergent case studies of community-driven attempts to create and sustain structures and spaces for sociability, care, and solidarities. These span from attempts at school community control and community land trusts, to rent strikes and environmental justice campaigns, to abolition and disability justice campaigns. We pay particular attention to how various social struggles are entangled (and try to grapple) with intersecting structures and axes of power, including but not limited to race, class, gender, sexuality, settler colonialism, and disabilities.

SOC 82800/PSC 70200: Intersectionality in the Social Sciences
Prof. Leslie McCall, Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15pm, 3 credits

This course will begin with an overview of key original texts by intersectionality scholars in and connected to the social sciences in the United States, such as texts by Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Evelyn Nakano Glenn. This will be followed by readings of key later texts that introduced and amplified on the concept within different social science disciplines (e.g., Ange-Marie Hancock in political science; Elizabeth Cole in psychology), and also raised questions over the definition and scope of the term (e.g., Jennifer Nash). For the remainder of the course, we will examine intersectional research on a wide range of topics, including intersectional inequalities in political representation, income, education, family, health, and criminal justice. We will also consider different approaches to the topic across the globe, and I will welcome suggestions for readings on other aspects of intersectionality related to students’ areas of interest and expertise.

SOC 70200: Contemporary Theory
Prof. Lynn Chancer/Lucia Trimbur, Mondays, 2:00-4:00pm, 3 credits

This graduate seminar is the second course in a two-course series examining important social theorists and their contributions to the development of American sociology. We focus on the projects that most contribute to an analysis of the contemporary world, especially Marxism, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, feminist theory, queer theory, and postcolonial theory. Our overarching goal is to understand how theoretical arguments are made: their logics, underlying assumptions, contradictions, and use of evidence. To do this, we will (1) look closely at contemporary theorists’ ideas, (2) historically situate the authors of these ideas, and (3) consider how their ideas relate to past and current social circumstances. We also spend time connecting contemporary theories to those we studied in Classical Social Theory.

SOC 82901: The "New Capitalism"
Prof. Charles Post, Tuesdays, 6:30 - 8:30 pm, 3 credits

Over the past forty years, capitalist societies in the global North have experienced profound changes. In what is often referred to as the era of neo-liberalism, many analysts have argued that the most profound structural and institutional features of capitalism have been permanently altered. These attempts to analyze the “new capitalism” focus on three transformations: 1) “de-industrialization”—the decline of manufacturing employment in the global North; 2) “precarity”—the growth of part-time, temporary and unstable employment; and 3) “financialization”—the financial sectors’ displacement of industry as the driving force of the modern economy. This course will seek to critically interrogate these three trends, both conceptually and empirically. Has manufacturing actually disappeared in the global North? How do we account for the declining percentage of manufacturing workers in the total labor forces? What is the actual extent of “precarious” employment? Does the distribution of stable and precarious employment vary from sector to sector? To what extent has financial profitability become independent of profitability in the ‘real economy’? What is the relationship between the growth of finance and the radical reorganization of productive activity over the past forty years? Readings will be substantial, varied and historical in perspective.

SOC 86800: Sociology of Culture
Prof. David Halle, Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30pm, 3 credits

We will study the main theoretical approaches (classical and contemporary) to understanding the cultural dimension of social life, and will do so by seeing how far they can illuminate a range of case studies of cultural areas. The theoretical perspectives include: Veblen and status theory, Marxism, the Frankfurt school, Durkheim, the mass culture school, “creative culture” approaches; consumption theorists, the British school of cultural studies (e.g. Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall), Modernism and post-Modernism, the “popular culture” versus “high culture” debate, cultural capital theory, the sociology of boundaries and cultural identity theory, Richard Florida and “creative class”/creative production approaches, Internet and Social Media theorists, debates over public policy towards the arts including theories of cultural controversy, and students will be encouraged to develop new theories. We will see how far these theories can illuminate a range of case studies of cultural areas that include film/movies; music; political views/attitudes;  museums/concert halls/theme parks; theater/Broadway; fashion; art; religion; sports; night life, clubs, bars-restaurants;  architecture; the internet/online entertainment/social media; television; literature, food; the Coronavirus.

THEA 70600: History of Theatrical Theory
Professor David Savran, Tuesdays, 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.

This course has two objectives: to introduce students to theatrical theory and to examine other theories that have influenced contemporary theatre and cultural studies. The course will begin with a discussion of what constitutes theatrical theory and then proceed modularly to examine such key theatrical and performance concepts as representation, mimesis, character and identity, genre, and audience response. A modular structure will allow us to follow and create ongoing dialogues about these concepts as they have evolved. The second objective of the course will be met through, again, a modular approach to the presentation and discussion of such influential critical/cultural theories as formalism and structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, feminism, and post-colonialism, as well as other disciplinary approaches—coming from, for instance, anthropology, sociology, and psychology—that have transformed theatre studies.  Assignments will include two written projects (either two annotated bibliographies or one annotated bibliography and a research paper) as well as in-class presentations and a final examination.

THEA 86000: Festive and Ritual Performance
Cross-listed with Global Early Modern Studies Certificate Program GEMS 83100, Prof. Erika Lin, Thursday, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

This course will examine theories and practices of festive and ritual performance in a range of times and places and will explore their implications for theatre as both an aesthetic object and an efficacious performative enactment. Topics for discussion may include: religious ritual and popular devotion; dance, gesture, and movement; games and sports; roleplaying, especially in relation to race, gender, sexual identity, and class; icons and objects; magic, astrology, and witchcraft; birth and funeral rites; nonlinear temporalities; ritual space and place; holidays and calendar customs; animals and environment; food and drink; violence and combat; erotics and sexuality. Each class session will bring together disparate theatre and performance practices by centering on a particular theme. For instance, we might consider Mardi Gras and Carnival in relation to racial impersonation; movement and religious space in Christian and Hindu processional drama; audience participation and community formation in contemporary queer theatre; site-specific performance, ecocriticism, and the history of modern pagan witchcraft; poverty and charity in mumming and other holiday begging customs; mock combat, blood sports, and dramas of ritual sacrifice; and animal masks and puppetry in diverse dance traditions. Culturally specific theatre and performance practices will be analyzed in relation to theoretical work by writers such as Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, Max Harris, Claire Sponsler, Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Mikhail Bakhtin, Catherine Bell, Kay Turner, Marina Warner, Johan Huizinga, Brian Sutton-Smith, Carlo Ginzburg, Peter Burke, and Ronald Hutton. Evaluation: active class participation, short weekly response papers, possible brief in-class presentation, research proposal with annotated bibliography, and a final paper.

Course Listing

CTCP 71088: Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
GC, Mondays, 2:00 PM-4:00 PM, Sorin Radu Cucu, 3 credits (Permission of Program Coordinator Required; Not open to 1^st year students)

Elective Courses

CL 79500: Approaches to Comparative Literature
GC, Wednesdays, from 4:15pm-6:15pm, Caroline Rupprecht, 4 credits

CL 89100: History of Literary Theory & Criticism I
GC, Wednesdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, Monica Calabritto, 4 credits
 
CL 88500: Race, Writing, and Comparison
GC, Tuesdays, 2:00pm- 4:00pm, Sonali Perera, 2/4 credits
 
ENGL 76200.  Decolonizing the Novel in Theory and Practice
Peter Hitchcock.  Wednesdays 4:15PM – 6:15PM.  2/4 Credits.
 
ENGL 76000.  Detonating Modernism
Nico Israel.  Tuesdays 11:45AM – 1:45AM.  2/4 Credits.  
 
ENGL 80600.  Cheap Aesthetics
Mary McGlynn.  Wednesdays 11:45AM – 1:45PM.  2/4 Credits.
 
ENGL 85500.  Black Feminisms and the Flesh
Amber Jamilla Musser.  Wednesdays 2:00PM – 4:00PM.  2/4 Credits.  
 
ENGL 80200.  Meaning and/as Moaning: Somatic Discourses and Aesthetic Affections
Joan Richardson.  Thursdays 2:00PM – 4:00PM.  2/4 Credits
 
ENGL 80600.  Anthropocene Investigations
Alexander Schultz.  Mondays 2:00PM – 4:00PM.  2/4 Credits.
 
FREN 79130 : Contemporary issues in Post-colonial Literatures and Films
Prof. Nathalie Etoké, Thursday, 4:15-6:15pm, Taught in French, Mode of instruction: on-line
 
SPAN 72000: Contemporary Latin American Cultural Theory
GC: Wednesday, 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m., Prof. Degiovanni
 
SPAN 80100: Language in Late Capitalism
GC: Tuesday, 11:45 a.m. – 1:45 p.m., Prof. José del Valle
 
SPAN 87100: Visualidad, "Mujeres", y Archivo
GC: Thursday, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., Prof. Donoso Macaya
 
MUS 83500: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: (Ethno)musicology and Social Theory Preferences
Wednesdays, 10 a.m-1 p.m, [Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission], ROOM 3389 Jane Sugarman, 3 Credits
 
MUS 83200: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Social Life of Technologies
Mondays, 2 p.m.-5 p.m, [Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission], ROOM 3389, Eliot Bates, 3 Credits
 
PHIL 77000: Emotion
Mondays, 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m., Prof. Prinz, Room TBA, 4 credits
 
PHIL 77500: Race, Racism, and Racial Justice
Mondays, 4:15 p.m. -6:15 p.m., Prof. Mills, Room TBA, 4 credits

PHIL 77700: Rethinking Democracy, Socialism, and Feminism
Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15, Prof. Gould, Room TBA, 4 credits
 
PHIL 77800: Aesthetics and Nature
Thursdays, 11:45 a.m-1:45 p.m., Prof. Shapshay, Room TBA, 4 credits
 
PSC 80609: Rethinking Democracy, Socialism and Feminism (Crosslist with PHIL 77700/WSCP 81000)
Tuesdays, 4:15pm – 6:15pm, Gould (PT), Hybrid, 4 credits
 
PSC 80601: Global Political Theory
Wednesdays, 2:00pm – 4:00pm, Mehta (PT), 4 credits
 
PSC 80603: Theory as Method
Wednesdays, 4:15pm – 6:15pm, Buck-Morss (PT), 4 credits
 
PSC 70100: Ancient and Medieval Political Thought
Wednesdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, Fontana (PT), 3 credits
 
SOC 72500: Urban Sociology
Thursdays, 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m., Prof. Richard Ocejo, 3 credits
 
SOC 70100: Development of Sociological Theory (Theory I)
Trimbur, Tuesdays, 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m., 3 credits
 
SOC 74600: Capitalism and Crisis
Prof. Bologh, Tuesdays, 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., 3 credits
 
THEA 80300: Theatre, Performance and Time
Cross-listed with English, Art History and Critical Theory Certificate Program (exact course numbers will be posted shortly), Professor Maurya Wickstrom, Mondays, 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
 
UED 72100: Co-constructing Theory with Data
Thursdays, 4:15PM - 6:15PM, Collett
 
UED 71100: Black Visuality, Black Performance
Tuesdays, 2:00PM - 4:00PM, Musser & Gillespie
 
UED 72100: Critical Discourse Theory and Analysis
Thursdays, 4:15PM - 6:15PM, Daiute

Course Descriptions

CTCP 71088: Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
GC, Mondays, 2:00 PM-4:00 PM, Sorin Radu Cucu, 3 credits (Permission of Program Coordinator Required; Not open to 1^st year students)

Do we really live in a post-truth world, the age when unreason and magical thinking seem to have returned with a vengeance?
 
This course addresses this question and the urgency it poses not only because critical theory has been accused as being complicit in the ‘attack’ against facts and science but primarily because we need to reflect critically on the often-confusing relation of reality to fiction in a variety of media and genres. Furthermore, this course will draw on the interdisciplinary approaches of both social sciences and the humanities to as whether digital algorithms are transforming our sense of shared reality and threaten the fragility of modern democratic institutions and practices. What does it means to think of reality as a complex network of discourses and practices rather than as a unitary concept? The underlying question of the interplay reality-irreality will be explored at the outset with reading together but against each other a few foundational figures: Husserl (on the crisis of the European sciences), Freud (on dream interpretation), Weber (on ‘ideal type’) and Arendt (on truth and lying).
 
We will examine a range of possibly irreconcilable theoretical approaches, as we re-read Kant’s “conflict of the faculties” in order to frame our conversations along the lines of distinct research approaches and terminologies rather than simply from the viewpoint of a conflict of interpretations. We will discuss how philosophical anthropology (Blumenberg), sociology of systems (Esposito, Luhmann), narratology/semiotics (Barthes, Genette, Patron), aesthetics (Eco, Krauss, Rancière), and media philosophy (Debray, Groys, Engel)  deal with the tension between universality and particularism, connect to everyday reality by a variety of rhetorical devices, and conceptually navigate aesthetic as well as religious experiences of reality.
 
Texts: Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (Nebraska), Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Northwestern), Hans Blumenberg, History, Metaphors, Fables: A Hans Blumenberg Reader (Cornell), Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power (Polity)
 
Excerpts and essays by Elena Esposito, Roland Barthes, Sylvie Patron, Rosalind Krauss, Boris Groys,  others will be provided via Google Classroom.

Elective Courses

CL 79500: Approaches to Comparative Literature
GC, Wednesdays, from 4:15pm-6:15pm, Caroline Rupprecht, 4 credits
 
This proseminar introduces students to the discipline and methods of Comparative Literature. We will read and discuss a range of essays from Cultural Studies, Gender Studies, and Postcolonial Studies. We will address basic questions, such as: How does one decide what should be the focus of a comparative inquiry? What is the relationship between a close reading and its theoretical frame? What is the role of context, as derived from the study of national literatures? How can historical approaches help or hinder comparisons aimed to be grounded in differentiation?
 
The class is taught online via zoom. It is not a lecture class, your participation will be required. We will use breakout rooms and the discussion board on Blackboard. Formal requirements include at least one presentation and several short papers, based on the readings on the syllabus. Registration is for PhD students only (MA students must ask for instructor’s permission).
 
Reading List:
Adorno, Theodor W. “Cultural Criticism and Society,” Prisms (1951)
Apter, Emily. Introduction, Against World Literature (2013)
Bachner, Andrea. “Found in Translation,” Shu-mei Shih, ed. Sinophone Studies (2013)
Baer, Elizabeth. Introduction, The Genocidal Gaze (2017)
Bhabha, Homi. “The Other Question,” The Location of Culture (1994)
Butler, Judith. “Violence, Mourning, Politics,” Precarious Lives (2004)
Chen, Mel. “Lead’s Racial Matters,” Animacies (2012)
Glissant, Edouard. “The Road to Rowan Oak,” Faulkner, Mississippi (1994)
Hayles, Katherine. ”Speculative Aesthetics,” Speculations V (2014)
Hartman, Saidiya, “So Many Dungeons,” Lose your Mother (2008)
Herling, Bradley. “Either a Hermeneutical or a Critical Consciousness,” Comparatist 34 (2010)
Heschel, Susannah. “German Jewish Scholarship on Islam,” New German Critique 117 (2012)
Huyssen, Andreas. “Rewritings and New Beginnings: W.G. Sebald,” Present Pasts (2004)
Jullien, Francois. “On Human Rights,” On the Universal (2017)
Latour, Bruno. “Agency at the time of the Anthropocene,” New Literary History 45 (2014)
Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011)
Liu, Lydia. “Shadows of Universalism,” Critical Inquiry 40:4 (2014)
Love, Heather. “Emotional Rescue,” Feeling Backward (2007)
Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50:2 (2008)
Pang-White, Ann. “Nature, Interthing Intersubjectivity, and the Environment,” Dao (2009)
Sedgwick, Eve. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Touching Feeling (2002)
Silverman, Kaja. “Photography by Other Means,” Flesh of my Flesh (2009)
Tobin, Robert. “Thomas Mann’s Queer Schiller,” Lorey, Pews, eds. Queering the Canon (1998)
Wang, Ban. “Aesthetic Humanity and the Great World Community,” ACLA (2015).
 
CL 89100: History of Literary Theory & Criticism I
GC, Wednesdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, Monica Calabritto, 4 credits
 
Course Description : TBA
 
CL 88500: Race, Writing, and Comparison
GC, Tuesdays, 2:00pm- 4:00pm, Sonali Perera, 2/4 credits
 
Course Description : TBA
 
ENGL 76200.  Decolonizing the Novel in Theory and Practice
Peter Hitchcock.  Wednesdays 4:15PM – 6:15PM.  2/4 Credits.  
 
Cultural processes of decolonization are multiple and disjunct and vary considerably by region, history, and form.  Rather than simply provide a description of cultural decolonization at large, this course will focus on a specific genealogy of genre in order to address contemporary difficulties in decolonial critique.  Whether world literature has become the supercanon of literary study in the last twenty-five years is not without challenge or significant dissent, but the major question of genre for postcolonial and decolonial studies seems to have produced a notable consensus around one genre.  This genre is the novel.  Why is this so?
 
We know that the novel is deeply implicated in the rise of particular class interests and most certainly mediates Western projects of colonialism and imperialism.  Is it precisely because the novel is contaminated and coterminous with these histories that it is so radically contested from within by counter-narratives?  To the reader primed to refract the political conditions of decolonization, does the novel provide disciplinary and/or aesthetic solace from all the “real” work of anti-colonialism, anti-capitalism, and anti-racism within the methodological prerogatives of the social sciences, or does it reimagine the reality of these vital concerns as the very substance of its intervention?  Does the novel embrace a logic of knowledge, novelization, that makes it particularly adept at representing the frisson of genre in its own name?  To what extent does a sub-genre like the postcolonial novel betray the absorption of critique by the niche-marketing of yet one more monetized exception?  How does the novel in theory and practice inhibit or exceed the work of decolonization itself?  What would it mean to suggest that the novel is the last of colonialism as currently construed?  How could the withering of one possibly imply the deracination of the other?
 
With these questions in mind the course will attempt to plot three necessarily conflictual trajectories.  We will explore several examples of novels that contest the terms of conventional literary history by narrating a decolonial imperative.  We will then cast this genealogy against pertinent and disputed peculiarities of the novel in theory.  We will also consider what lessons the novel thus provides for interdisciplinary research on decolonization (In what language, in what region, in what history, in what environment?).  Do writers consider the nub of knowledge in the novel decolonial avant la lettre?  Where does praxis lie in the theory and practice of the novel?
 
In the main, this course encourages an interdisciplinary approach to literary decolonization that does not eschew the terms of literary hermeneutics themselves.  It can thus serve both as an introduction to postcolonial/decolonial studies and as a serious engagement with the limits and possibilities of the novel in that endeavor.  Readings will be drawn from but not limited to Spivak, Marx, Roy, Lukacs, Mukasonga, Bakhtin, Buluwayo, Bofane, Chamoiseau, Mukherjee, Said, Vera, Conde, Hamid, Lazarus, Brouillette, Ganguly, Gopal, Krishnan, Collins, and Ngugi.
 
 
ENGL 76000.  Detonating Modernism
Nico Israel.  Tuesdays 11:45AM – 1:45AM.  2/4 Credits.  
 
The Nobel Prize in Literature was one of five prizes set up in the will of the Swede Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, a major supplier of armaments throughout the later 19th century, and, somewhat later, a generous supporter of the arts. Nobel’s 1895 will stipulated a literary prize to be given for a work “in an ideal direction” (“i idealisk rikning” in Swedish). What Nobel intended by “idealisk rikning” has long been open to question: did the word mean something akin to a residual romanticism, a universal humanism, or simply inventive literature (in the way the physics prize rewards “outstanding contributions in physics”)? Given the historical context of the earlier twentieth century—the persistence of massive war, colonialism and imperialism, and fascism (themselves undergirded by weaponry)—is literature to be perceived as an “ideal” antidote to violence (hence the connection to the Nobel peace prize), or itself a reflection of and response to that violence? 
 
This seminar explores the history of the prize and some examples of the writing of its early winners--Kipling, Tagore, Bergson, Hamsun, Yeats, and Pearl S. Buck—as well as losers--Rilke, Kafka, Proust, Mann, Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, Pessoa, Musil, Williams, Moore, Hughes, Mandelstam, and Celan. We will occasionally dip into the Nobel’s archives to see how decisions were rationalized. (The rejection and then, later, acceptance of Samuel Beckett is particularly instructive). While thus acknowledging the micropolitics of prize committees, the seminar’s central focus will be on assessing the determination of literary “value,” a conception that is easy to deride but not possible to entirely explode. Critical reading to include works by Kant, Benjamin, Sartre, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, Rancière, Guillory and others.
 
ENGL 80600.  Cheap Aesthetics
Mary McGlynn.  Wednesdays 11:45AM – 1:45PM.  2/4 Credits.
 
Jason Moore and Raj Patel argue in A History of the World in 7 Cheap Things that “the modern world has been made through seven cheap things: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives” (3).  Crossing this idea with Sianne Ngai’s framing of aesthetic categories, this class will consider cheap as an aesthetic category to explore the complicated relationship of capitalism, the commodity, and the object. We will consider the processes and practices by which we arrive at aesthetic judgments and categories (Kant, Adorno, Bourdieu, Ngai); the interrelation of the aesthetic with formal techniques, particularly in the representation of agency, powerlessness, and precarity, as well as in the activation of “minor” affects; and the way that the cheap in particular is a feature of contemporary literary and media production, from the publishing industry to greenwashing to viral spread.
 
ENGL 85500.  Black Feminisms and the Flesh
Amber Jamilla Musser.  Wednesdays 2:00PM – 4:00PM.  2/4 Credits.  
 
Black feminisms have persistently been entwined with theorizations of the flesh—that difficult to define materiality that is not quite the body. Flesh speaks to commodification, state-violence and histories of enslavement and settler-colonialism. Flesh has been used to reference the non-linguistic, pre-discursive, queer, and maternal. From this often-marginalized locus, black feminist theory has created many different possibilities. This course will look at several of different genealogies of fleshiness. First, focusing specifically on Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and Hortense Spillers before moving to the way these theories have radiated outward to inflect performance studies, literary theory, and aesthetics more broadly. Just as the specifics of enfleshment matter, we will investigate the differing contexts for these deployments of flesh to tell us how blackness, feminism, and black feminism are functioning in these different theoretical arenas. Potential readings from: Samantha Pinto’s Infamous Bodies, Shana Redmond’s Everything Man, Jayna Brown’s Black Utopias, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human, Alvin Henry’s Black Queer Flesh, C. Riley Snorton’s Black on Both Sides, Jillian Hernandez’s Aesthetics of Excess, Tiffany Lethobo King’s The Black Shoals, Uri McMillan’s Embodied Avatars, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley’s Ezili’s Mirrors, Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sensual Excess, and Jessica Marie Johnson’s Wicked Flesh.
 
ENGL 80200.  Meaning and/as Moaning: Somatic Discourses and Aesthetic Affections
Joan Richardson.  Thursdays 2:00PM – 4:00PM.  2/4 Credits.  
 
Key questions and themes of this seminar will amplify the common etymological root of “meaning” and “moaning” to explore when and how the mind-body split emerged in language and how writers have attempted to repair or overcome it. As 18th-century minister Jonathan Edwards—considered by many to be both America’s first philosopher and first psychologist—observed, “The mind feels when it thinks.” We will sample pages/texts from a diverse array of voices spanning various periods and cultures to search out how what Stanley Cavell beautifully termed “passionate utterance” is made; a partial list might include, i.e., Heraclitus, Augustine, Tu Fu, Ibn ‘Arabi, Emerson, Dickinson, William James, W. E. B. DuBois, Wallace Stevens, Zora Neale Hurston. The samplings will be considered against a background of readings in current cognitive science, affect theory and neuroaesthetics. Active participation in discussion and a term paper or project (for those registered for 4 credits) will be required; for first-year students the project could be a version of a component of the First “Portfolio” Examination.
 
ENGL 80600.  Anthropocene Investigations
Alexander Schultz.  Mondays 2:00PM – 4:00PM.  2/4 Credits. 
 
The term “Anthropocene,” first introduced by the chemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Stoermer twenty years ago, has by now become the most widely used designation for the current period of global, human-induced environmental catastrophe in both scholarly and public discourse. The appropriateness of the term (though of course not the global crisis it seeks to highlight) has, however, been subject to vigorous critique in the social sciences and the humanities, mainly due to its problematic naturalization of the human and its erasure of crucial questions of human difference and responsibility. From the perspective of the humanities in particular, a return to a species narrative, with an undifferentiated anthropos writ large as the protagonist, can seem to erase in one fell swoop decades of scholarly work in critique of essentialist conceptions of “the human.” A range of alternatives, from Capitalocene to Chtulucene, have been proposed in an effort to alter the narrative parameters in order to call anthropocene grand narratives into question.
 
At the same time, a growing number of scholars in the humanities take seriously the challenge of the “Anthropocene” to rethink what viable narratives about and representations of the relationships of human beings to their environments might look like at a moment of global crisis where human and natural history can no longer be thought of as disentangleable. Such attempts include a newly framed engagement with literature and art more broadly as modes of representation that might allow us to bring the contemporary human predicament into view in different ways than scientific data and public policy debates.
 
To address these overlapping discussions, this seminar will offer a two-fold investigation. On the one hand, we will attempt to take stock of the disciplinary discussion surrounding the “Anthropocene” and examine a range of critical perspectives and proposed alternatives in naming and timeline. At the same time, we will also turn our attention to emergent transdisciplinary approaches in the environmental humanities, as well as to the creative practice in literature and the arts, in order to investigate what a poetics for the “Anthropocene” might look like. Our theoretical interlocutors will include Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yussof, and T.J. Demos, among others.
 
Portions of this course can be used to fulfill the requirements for the first-year portfolio exam.
 
Course requirements: 3 short position papers; 15-minute conference presentation at the in-class, end-of-semester course conference; final 15-20 page research paper.
 
Course readings:
 
Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia. Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime. Cambridge: Polity, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-7456-8434-5
Yussof, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-5179-0753-2, available for free online: https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/a-billion-black-anthropocenes-or-none
Demos, T.J. Against the Anthropocene. Visual Culture and Environment Today. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-3-95679-210-6
Bilodeau, Chantal. Sila. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2015. ISBN: 978-0-88922-956-3
Bilodeau, Chantal. Forward. Vancouver: Talon Books, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-77201-183-8
Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. Minneapolis: Milkweed, 2013. ISBN: 978-1-57131-356-0
 
Additional primary and secondary readings will be available via the course e-reserve page.
 
FREN 79130 : Contemporary issues in Post-colonial Literatures and Films
Prof. Nathalie Etoké, Thursday, 4:15-6:15pm, Taught in French, Mode of instruction: on-line
 
2010 marked the 50 years of ‘African independences’. This course will explore various dimensions of the francophone post-colonial experience in Sub-Saharan Africa.  We will reflect on the legacy of colonialism and current challenges facing former French colonies. The focus will be on the failure of the postcolonial state, violence, memory, gender, sexuality and immigration. We will also address current debates in Francophone Sub-Saharan African literary criticism.
 
SPAN 72000: Contemporary Latin American Cultural Theory
GC: Wednesday, 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m., Prof. Degiovanni
 
This seminar will address key theoretical and critical texts that have defined the field of Latin American cultural studies in recent decades. By analyzing the politics of academic knowledge in the global theoretical market, our goal will be to reconstruct both the genealogical lines as well as the epistemological frameworks that have played a crucial role in the region’s current intellectual production. The first part of the course will focus on a corpus of canonical authors that, since the 1980s, contributed to the definition of notions of modernity, coloniality, globalization and the role of the popular in Latin America. The second part will explore paradigms that have emerged over the last decade, in particular regarding notions of gender and sexuality, human and animal rights, cosmopolitism, as well as ecocultural criticism and theories of the sensible. In this final section, the course will function both as a seminar and as an academic writing workshop, and will focus on the theoretical interests of the students. The objective here will be to help them position their own research interests within contemporary theoretical currents.
 
 
SPAN 80100: Language in Late Capitalism
GC: Tuesday, 11:45 a.m. – 1:45 p.m., Prof. José del Valle
 
In this seminar, we will examine language´s involvement in the development of late capitalism by using Monica Heller and Alexandre Duchêne’s (2007 and 2012) proposal to analyze the deployment of linguistic ideologies around the 'pride' and 'profit' tropes, Marnie Holborow´s (2015) overview of language´s relevance to neoliberalism, Thomas Ricento´s (2015) study of the political economy of language policy, and Monica Heller and Bonnie McElhinny´s (2017) approach to language from a political economy perspective. These studies will be placed in dialectic relation with each other and with alternative sociological and political views of language (e.g. Blommaert, Crystal or Phillipson) and they will be tested through the analysis of specific sociolinguistic spaces. These will include, but not be limited to, normalization policies on behalf of minority languages in Europe, language revitalization processes in the Americas, and the politics of language and ethnic and national identity in the United States. The core readings will be extracted mainly from: David Crystal, English as a Global language (2003); Monica Heller and Alexandre Duchêne, Discourses of Endangerment (2007) and Language in Late capitalism (2012); Norma Mendoza-Denton, Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practices among Latina Youth Gangs (2008); Jan Blommaert, The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (2010); Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism Continued (2010); Jacqueline Urla, Reclaiming Basque: Language, Nation, and Cultural Activism (2012) ; H. Sami Alim and Geneva Smitherman, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (2012); Angela Reyes, Language, Identity, and Stereotype among Southeast Asian American Youth (2012); Marnie Holborow, Language and Neoliberalism (2015); Serafín Coronel-Molina, Language Ideology, Policy and Planning in Peru (2015); Thomas Ricento (2015) Language Policy and Political Economy: English in a Global Context; Kathryn A. Woolard, Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia (2016); Monica Heller and Bonnie McElnihhy, Language, Capitalism, Colonialism (2017). [The seminar will be conducted in various forms of English]
 
SPAN 87100: Visualidad, "Mujeres", y Archivo
GC: Thursday, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., Prof. Donoso Macaya
 
What is rendered (in)visible when “women” are rescued from/in the archive? What does the category “women” name and erase? What does the gesture of “rescue” reproduce? Is it possible to articulate forms of feminist criticism that do not attend to the politics of identity and representation, to develop methodologies that do not reinforce patriarchal paradigms and discursive tropes? These questions are the starting point for this course (taught in Spanish), which proposes to critically reflect on the notions of “visuality,” “women,” and “archive,” as well as to consider theoretical and methodological problems that emerge when addressing these notions together. The reflection will be guided both by academic studies that intersect archive, historiography, visuality and a critical perspective of gender—Licia Fiol-Matta, Donna Haraway, Saidiya Hartman, Andrea Noble, Ann Stoler, among others—as well as by literary essays and theoretical and activists texts by South American (trans)feminist authors—Panchiba Bustos, Alejandra Castillo, Jorge Díaz, Val Flores, Verónica Gago, Olga Grau, Marlene Guayar, Julieta Kirkwood, Lina Meruane, Julieta Paredes, Nelly Richard, and Alia Trabucco Zerán, among others.
 
MUS 83500: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: (Ethno)musicology and Social Theory Preferences
Wednesdays, 10 a.m-1 p.m, [Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission], ROOM 3389 Jane Sugarman, 3 Credits
 
MUS 83200: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Social Life of Technologies
Mondays, 2 p.m.-5 p.m, [Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission], ROOM 3389, Eliot Bates, 3 Credits
 
PHIL 77000: Emotion
Mondays, 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m., Prof. Prinz, Room TBA, 4 credits
 
This seminar investigates the nature and the roles of emotions from an interdisciplinary perspective.  We will begin by investigating competing theories of emotions, and related.  Are emotions embodied?  Do they require cognition?  Are they ways of seeing or ways of acting?
 
We will also look at where emotions come from.  Are they innate?  Are they shaped by culture?  Do they change over historical time?  In addition, we will look at debates about emotions and rationality.  Are emotions rational, irrational, or arational?  What makes an emotion inappropriate?  Why do emotions linger?
 
There are related questions about emotions in psychiatry.  When is an emotion unhealthy?  When are they excessive or deficient?  Along with these general questions, we will consider specific emotions, such as anger and disgust, as well as epistemic emotions, such as boredom and interest.  This will raise questions about the role of emotions in various domains such as ethics and aesthetics.  Though philosophical readings will outnumber the rest, we will also read perspectives from several other fields including, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, and history.
 
PHIL 77500: Race, Racism, and Racial Justice
Mondays, 4:15 p.m. -6:15 p.m., Prof. Mills, Room TBA, 4 credits
 
This course will look at the interlinked themes of race, racism, and racial justice. The timing is particularly appropriate given the summer of 2020’s massive national and global protests sparked by George Floyd’s killing by the Minneapolis police, and the new Biden Administration’s declared commitment to making the achievement of racial equity a central policy. We will consider such issues as the history of racism, the “metaphysics” of race, and competing analyses of racism, before turning to the central theme of institutional and structural racial injustice. How should they be understood, and what normative framework is best suited for conceptualizing and remedying them?
 
Recent work by political theorists such as Iris Marion Young, Tommie Shelby, Andrew Valls, Charles Mills, Christopher Lebron, Shatema Threadcraft, and others will be canvassed, but we will also take a look at some popular/grassroots framing of the issues. If there is time, we may also glance at some of the legal literature, and how “equal protection” has historically been interpreted.
 
PHIL 77700: Rethinking Democracy, Socialism, and Feminism
Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15, Prof. Gould, Room TBA, 4 credits
 
This course will explore the interconnections that can be discerned within and among democratic, socialist, and feminist theories and will analyze some of the central questions that arise at their intersection. Some of the liveliest questions in contemporary political philosophy concern whether it is possible to forge a unified approach that pulls together core elements of these three diverse traditions of thought which, together with anti-racist and postcolonial perspectives, could serve to guide fundamental social and political transformations.
 
The course will investigate these potentials by first considering some readings from democratic theory that incline in a socialist direction (J. S. Mill, Dewey, Macpherson, Pateman, Gould, Christiano), and then some classical socialist theories that are explicitly or implicitly democratic (e.g., Marx, Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simone, Louise Michel, Lucy Parsons, E. Bernstein, Emma Goldman, Volarine de Cleyre, G.D.H. Cole), followed by feminist approaches to democracy that are compatible with socialism, e.g., Tronto's "Caring Democracy," or that extend the account of domination and exploitation to encompass the phenomenon of group oppression (Iris Young, Nancy Fraser, Ann Ferguson).
 
The course will go on to take up some key conceptual issues for a possible democratic socialism, delineated with all three theories in view. These problems will include the role of the market and democratic self-management at work (G. A. Cohen, Gould, Schweickart, Carens, Vrousalis); varieties of inclusive political participation, deliberation, and representation (Mansbridge, J. Cohen, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor); and models of mutual aid and cooperative care (e.g., Kropotkin, Selma James, S. Federici, Incite! Women of Color against Violence, Dean Spade). Attention will be paid to areas of substantive (dis)agreement in regard to new institutional and social forms, and also to the differences in methodologies and emphases that the various theoretical perspectives would bring to the development of a more unified approach to social and political change.
 
PHIL 77800: Aesthetics and Nature
Thursdays, 11:45 a.m-1:45 p.m., Prof. Shapshay, Room TBA, 4 credits
 
“Aesthetics and Nature” takes up two main clusters of questions: First, what constitutes appropriate aesthetic appreciation of nature? Is it importantly different from appropriate art appreciation?  Second, to what extent are aesthetic values important for environmentalism? That is, are aesthetic values too weak, too ‘scenery-obsessed,’ too elitist, or generally, too anthropocentric to outweigh human-welfare based reasons to exploit nature as a resource? Given the alarming effects and acceleration of anthropogenic climate change, these guiding questions feel especially urgent today.
 
To investigate these questions, we’ll start with some historical treatments of the three main aesthetic categories to emerge in 18th c. European aesthetics (predominantly but not exclusively with respect to nature): Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Immanuel Kant’s The Critique of the Power of Judgement (1790), and Uvedale Price’s “Essay on the Picturesque as Compared with the Sublime and Beautiful” (1794). Then we’ll consider the increasing turn toward aesthetics as philosophy of art in the 19th c. (due in large part to Hegel), before turning to the (re)birth of environmental aesthetics around the social movements of the 1970s up to the present.
 
Contemporary readings will be grouped thematically and will include:
 
Allen Carlson. 2009. Nature and Landscape: An Introduction to Environmental Aesthetics Columbia University Press.
Noël Carroll, 1993. “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History” in Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell eds. Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts. Cambridge UP, 244-266.
William Cronon, 1995. “The Trouble with Wilderness” in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 69-90.
Yuriko Saito, 1998. “Appreciating Nature on Its Own Terms” Environmental Ethics 20: 135-149.
Andrew Brennan, 1984. “The Moral Standing of Natural Objects.” Environmental Ethics 6: 35–56.
Janna Thompson, 1995. “Aesthetics and the Value of Nature.” Environmental Ethics 17: 291–305.
Holmes Rolston, III. 2002. “From Beauty to Duty: Aesthetics of Nature and Environmental Ethics.” In Environment and the Arts: Perspective on Environmental Aesthetics, edited by Arnold Berleant, 127–141. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Elliott Sober. 1986. “Philosophical Problems for Environmentalism.” In The Preservation of Species, edited by Bryan G. Norton, 173–194. Princeton University Press.
Robert D. Bullard. 1994. "Environmental Blackmail in Minority Communities." In Reflecting on Nature: Readings in Environmental Philosophy, edited by Lori Gruen and Dale Jamieson, 132–141. Oxford University Press.
Ned Hettinger, 2005. “Allen Carlson’s Environmental Aesthetics and the Protection of the Environment.” Environmental Ethics 27: 57–76.
———. 2008. “Objectivity in Environmental Aesthetics and Environmental Protection.” In Nature, Aesthetics, and Environmentalism: From Beauty to Duty, edited by Allen Carlson and Sheila Lintott, 413–437. Columbia University Press.
Glenn Parsons, 2018. “Nature Aesthetics and the Respect Argument” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism special issue “The Good, the Beautiful, the Green” eds. Sandra Shapshay & Levi Tenen.
Robert Stecker. 2012. “Epistemic Norms, Moral Norms, and Nature Appreciation.” Environmental Ethics 34: 247–264.
Nick Zangwill. 2000. “In Defence of Moderate Aesthetic Formalism.” Philosophical Quarterly 50: 476–493.
Jennifer Welchman. 2018 “Aesthetics of Nature, Constitutive Goods, and Environmental Conservation” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism special issue “The Good, the Beautiful, the Green” eds. Sandra Shapshay & Levi Tenen.
Sandra Shapshay. 2013. “Contemporary Environmental Aesthetics and the Neglect of the Sublime” British Journal of Aesthetics.
Katie McShane. 2018. “The Role of Awe in Environmental Ethics” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism special issue “The Good, the Beautiful, the Green” eds. Sandra Shapshay & Levi Tenen.
 
PSC 80609: Rethinking Democracy, Socialism and Feminism (Crosslist with PHIL 77700/WSCP 81000)
Tuesdays, 4:15pm – 6:15pm, Gould (PT), Hybrid, 4 credits
 
Course Description: TBA.
 
PSC 80601: Global Political Theory
Wednesdays, 2:00pm – 4:00pm, Mehta (PT), 4 credits
 
Course Description: TBA.
 
PSC 80603: Theory as Method
Wednesdays, 4:15pm – 6:15pm, Buck-Morss (PT), 4 credits
 
Course Description: TBA.
 
PSC 70100: Ancient and Medieval Political Thought
Wednesdays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, Fontana (PT), 3 credits
 
Course Description: TBA.
 
SOC 72500: Urban Sociology
Thursdays, 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m., Prof. Richard Ocejo, 3 credits
 
This course will introduce students to a variety of sociological theories and approaches for studying cities and urban life. The aim is to cover as much of the canon as possible and expose students to current explanations and debates. We will start with early theorizing and empirical research on the relationship between modernity and urbanism and proceed to discuss some of today’s most important discourses and studies for understanding space, inequality, segregation, and growth in an era of extreme globalization. The course will look at such topics as urban political economy, race and space, racial capitalism, gentrification, cities and climate change, culture and placemaking, housing, and global urban sociology. It will also consider sociology’s contribution to the larger field of urban studies.
Finally, since City & Community, the official journal of the Community and Urban Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association, is now based at the Graduate Center, it will serve as key source for many of our readings and discussions. Students will also gain meaningful insight into the backstage workings of an academic journal, learn how to frame their work as an article, and engage in some journal-related activities. 
 
 
SOC 70100: Development of Sociological Theory (Theory I)
Prof. Trimbur, Tuesdays, 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m., 3 credits
 
Course Description: TBA.
 
SOC 74600: Capitalism and Crisis
Prof. Bologh, Tuesdays, 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., 3 credits
 
Course Description: TBA.
 
THEA 80300: Theatre, Performance and Time
Cross-listed with English, Art History and Critical Theory Certificate Program (exact course numbers will be posted shortly), Professor Maurya Wickstrom, Mondays, 2:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m.
 
This course is an exploration of contemporary thought on temporality, with a particular focus on theatre, performance, and theatre scholarship as important mediums for new temporal or alternative experience and thought. The class takes as a central point the problematic of linearity and modernist and teleological narratives of progress, with Walter Benjamin as a central provocation. We will also explore the relation between history and time, dominant modes of temporality in neoliberalism, and key philosophical interventions in time such as those by Giorgio Agamben. Importantly, the class will also consider our recent intense experience of Covid-time and Black uprising. Zoom productions like Richard Nelson’s new Apple family plays, or Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting for All, were early explorations of this pandemic temporality. The time of Black uprising has foregrounded how much Black people have generated, and lived in, temporalities alternative to Euro/North American linear capitalist times. This is articulated in an abundance of Black scholarship and practice on time that expresses the fullness of what the uprisings offer to living differently. Further, this time is marked by the publication of Race and Performance After Repetition (2020). The volume emerged from an ASTR José Esteban Muñoz Targeted Research Working Session and is the theme of the rescheduled ASTR conference in Fall 2021. It will be a central organizing structure for the course. The volume, grounded in Muñoz’s thought, directs itself to moving elsewhere from the fascination with the temporal signature of repetition that has often been dominate among performance scholars thinking about time. In so doing, it opens up especially into evocations of, for instance, Black futurity, afterlife, the wake etc. as significant and active experiential concepts for a livable life for those who have battled “racial time” for centuries
 
Performance work might include, for instance, An Octoroon (Branden Jacobs-Jenkins), The B-Side (Eric Berryman/Wooster Group), We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly known as South West Africa (abbreviated title - Jackie Sibblies Drury) in conjunction with The Refusal of Time and The Head and the Load (William Kentridge), Moneymaker (the Covid-time live durational performance by Holly Bass performed in the window of Live Arts), Architecting (The TEAM), and performances by Cassils, Andrew Schneider and M. Lamar. Theorists may include, in addition to those included in Race, Repetition and Performance, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, W.E.B. Dubois, Fred Moten, Alexander Weheliye, Bruno Latour, Gary Wilder, Lisa Lowe, Saidiya V. Hartman, Alain Badiou, Giulia Palladini, Nicholas Ridout, Christina Sharpe, and Sarah Jane Cervenak.
 
Course Requirements: one short presentation, one short paper (5-8 pages), and one long paper (10-15 pages).
 
NOTE: All THEA courses are listed as hybrid given ongoing uncertainties about COVID-19; there may be unexpected changes in instructional mode.
 
 
UED 72100: Co-constructing Theory with Data
Thursdays, 4:15PM - 6:15PM, Collett
 
This course is designed to help students understand the intersection of theoretical frameworks and the process of data analysis.  It is designed to support second and third students to use theoretical frameworks dominant in education [e.g. sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978); positioning theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999); Dialogism (Bahktin, 1981)] to create data analysis tools of layered coding (Saldana, 2013) to elucidate important findings across educational settings.  Students will analyze and deconstruct different theoretical approaches to understand how to create methodological tools to identify novel findings and conclusions.
 
UED 71100: Black Visuality, Black Performance
Tuesdays, 2:00PM - 4:00PM, Musser & Gillespie
 
The class will be an interdisciplinary consideration of blackness and the art of black cultural production with attention to framing art as an enactment of black visual and expressive culture. We will focus on the aesthetic, political, historiographic, and cultural instantiations of the idea of race as discourse. The narrative of the class is structured around various epistemological and aesthetic themes/tendencies that inform black visuality and performativity in the arts (e.g. film, television, literature, music, new media, photography, dance, painting, installation art).  Students will be required to complete and present their own projects on black visuality/performance. Course readings may include: Tina Campt’s Listening to Images, Uri McMillan’s Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance, Emily Lordi’s The Meaning of Soul: Black Music and Resilience Since the 1960s, Huey Copeland’s Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America, Amber J. Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, and Michael Boyce Gillespie’s Film Blackness: American Cinema and the Idea of Black Film.
 
UED 72100: Critical Discourse Theory and Analysis
Thursdays, 4:15PM - 6:15PM, Daiute
 
This course focuses on expression as activity and subjectivity in processes of social change and learning. Expressive media, like personal narratives, policies, laws, images, interviews, and curricula occur in tension, synergy, and transformation. We review research focused on how individuals, cultural groups, and institutions use those and other discourse genres to share/impose/resist/innovate ways of knowing and living, especially at moments of major change such as in social movements and displacements. Drawing on social sciences and humanities, we consider research designs within naturally occurring practices and craft detailed analytic strategies to learn about interactions among and within diverse participants, privileging especially the voices of people who have been marginalized, discriminated against, and excluded in other ways, while also shining a light on those with resources and power. Topics organizing our work include literary readings of everyday interactions, the language of microaggressions, silences in policy reports, and multiple voices in interviews. The course features discourse analysis workshops, with previous data sets and as applied to students’ projects. We also work with computer software such as Atlas ti, Nvivo, and others). Students are invited to bring their own projects and data to the course.  No prerequisite.

Course Listing

CTCP 71088 : Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
GC: Wednesdays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, Vincent Crapanzano, 3 credits  (Not open to 1st year students)

Elective Courses

ANTH 70700: Contemporary Social Theory
GC: F. 9:30am - 12:30 pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mandana Limbert

ANTH 81800: Reading the Grundrisse
GC: T. 4:15-6:15pm, 3 credits, Prof. David Harvey.Cross listed with EES 79903.

CLAS 82600: Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Ancient World
GC: Thu 4:15 PM-6:15 PM, 3 credits Prof. Jennifer Roberts

CL 80100: Nietzsche for Fun and Prophet
GC: Mondays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, Richard Wolin, 2 or 4 credits (also HIST 7240; PSC 8064) (M.A. students will need permission to enroll from Instructor)

CL 89000: Philosophy of Literature
GC: Tuesdays, 11:45am-1:45pm, Noel Carroll, 2-4 credits (also PHIL 77600)
 
CL 89200: History of Literary Theory & Criticism II
GC: Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, John Brenkman, 4 credits (required course for 1st year doctoral students)

ENGL 86800: Commoning
Ashley Dawson. Fridays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits

ENGL 80600: Disability Studies, Bodies, and Care Relations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Talia Schaffer. Wednesdays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits (cross-listed with WSCP)

ENGL 84200: Romantic Concepts of Nature
Alexander Schlutz. Mondays 4:15PM-6:15PM. 2/4 credits.

ENGL 80600: Reason, Freedom, and Animality
Karl Steel. Mondays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits.

ENGL 89000: Resisting Institutional Methodologies
Amy Wan. Mondays 2:00PM-4:00PM. 2/4 credits.

HIST 72400: Nietzsche for Fun and Prophet
Mondays, 6:30-8:30 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin
Class number 55379. (Open only to PhD students)

SPAN 80000: Language & Identity
GC: Monday, 2:00 – 4:00 pm., Prof. Cecilia Cutler

SPAN 87100: New Directions in Latinx Literary Studies
GC: Thursday, 6:30p.m.-8:30p.m., Prof. Vanessa Pérez Rosario
 
MUS 86500: Seminar in Musicology: Critical Approaches
GC, Tuesdays, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Prof. Scott Burnham, CN61078, 3CR

MUS 83100: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Music, Gender, Sexuality
GC, Wednesdays, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Prof Jane Sugarman, CN61068, 3CR [Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission]

MUS 78200: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Analyzing Musics of the World
GC, Fridays, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Prof Eliot Bates, CN61059, 3CR [Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission]

PHIL 77600: Philosophy of Literature
Tuesday 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Prof. Carroll, 4 credits

PHIL 76700: History and Philosophy of Psychopathology
Wednesdays, 9:30-11:30, Prof. Greenwood, 4 credits

PHIL 76600: Memory
Mondays, 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m., Prof. Khalidi, 4 credits
 
PHIL 77100: Social Construction
Tuesdays, 2:00 P.M.-4:00 P.M., Prof. Prinz, 4 credits
 
PHIL 77300: Reading Wittgenstein and Heidegger
Tuesdays, 4:15 p.m. -6:15 p.m., Prof. Priest, 4 credits

PHIL 78500: Climate Change and Social Change
Thursdays, 4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m., Prof. Brownstein, 4 credits

PHIL 76000: Critique of Pure Reason
Mondays, 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., Prof. Teufel, 4 credits

PHIL 77000: Continental and Decolonial Epistemology
Tuesdays, 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., Prof. Alcoff, 4 credits

PSC 82601: Race & Ethnic Politics
Wednesdays, 2:00pm–4:00pm, Prof. Tien, 4 credits

PSC 80302: Marxism
Mondays, 11:45am-1:45pm, Prof. Jacobs, 4 credits

PSC 80606: Gandhi as Political Philosopher
Tuesdays, 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., Prof. Mehta, 4 credits

PSC 71906: Critical Reasons – The Basics
Wednesdays 2:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m., Prof. Buck-Morss, 3 credits

PSC 70200: Modern Political Thought
Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Prof. Accetti, 3 credits

PSC 73907: Intersectionality in the Social Sciences
Wednesdays, 4:15 p.m.–6:15 p.m., Prof. McCall, 3 credits (Crosslist: SOC 83100)

PSC 80604: Nietzsche for Fun & Prophet
Mondays, 6:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Prof. Wolin, 4 credits (Crosslist: HIST 72400/C L 80100)

PSC 72410: Power, Resistance, Identities & Social Movements
Thursdays, 6:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Prof. O’Brien, 3 credits

SOC 80000: Producing sociological theory:  The Role of Gendered Colonialism, Culture and Revolution in Bourdieu’s theory
Mondays, 4:15-6:15pm, Prof. Marnia Lazreg, 3 credits

SOC 81004: Sociology Meets History
Tuesdays, 2-4pm, Prof. John Torpey, 3 credits

SOC 86800: Culture and Politics: Subjects, Identities, and Characters
Thursdays, 11:45-1:45pm, Prof James M. Jasper, 3 credits

SOC 85800: Race and Ethnicity
Mondays, 4:15-6:15pm, Prof. Philip Kasinitz, 3 credits
 
SOC 70200: Contemporary Theory
Mondays, 2:00-4:00pm, Prof. Lucia Trimbur, 3 credits.

THEA 70600: History of Theatrical Theory
Mondays, 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m, Professor Peter Eckersall

THEA 81500: Performing Blackness from Stage to Screen
Professor Racquel Gates TBA

Course Descriptions

CTCP 71088 : Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
GC: Wednesdays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, Vincent Crapanzano, 3 credits  (Not open to 1st year students)
 
The focus of this seminar will be on the relationship between various conceptions of and attitudes toward language and recent theories of interpretation and hermeneutical practices in the human sciences and literary study.  We will consider the effect of the stress on reference over other language functions – the pragmatic, poetic -- on notions of text, genre, and rhetoric. How does this stress configure meta-critical understanding? How does it foster the often promiscuous play of divergent, at times analytically incompatible, approaches to interpretation so characteristic of contemporary theory? Readings will include works by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and/or Gennette, Foucault, Michael Silverstein and his school, Bakhtin, Lacan and Deleuze.

Elective Courses

ANTH 70700: Contemporary Social Theory
GC: F. 9:30am - 12:30 pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mandana Limbert
Course open to GC Level 1 Cultural Anthropology & Linguistic Anthropology doctoral students only.

ANTH 81800: Reading the Grundrisse
GC: T. 4:15-6:15pm, 3 credits, Prof. David Harvey.Cross listed with EES 79903.
Seats are limited. Meets at PEOPLE’S FORUM – additional info TBA

CLAS 82600: Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Ancient World
GC: Thu 4:15 PM-6:15 PM, 3 credits Prof. Jennifer Roberts
 
This interdisciplinary course will explore concepts of race and ethnicity in the ancient world in  readings in English in both primary and secondary sources, with emphasis on the Greek, Roman, and Hellenistic worlds. No knowledge of Latin or Greek is required, although students who can read either or both of those languages may periodically wish to meet with me for close analysis of a particular text. 
 
Greek and Latin literature is full of references to groups that the authors felt were “not like us.” The Greeks developed the term “barbarians” (people whose incomprehensible speech sounded like bar, bar, bar) for non-Greeks; their feelings about them were mixed, but for the most part they enjoyed articulating their own superiority. In addition, the individual Greek city-states were exclusive about their citizenship, not enfranchising immigrants or the children of immigrants, and a number of them had elaborate myths designed to explain the special characteristics they possessed that set them apart from, and above, others. Matters were more complicated in the later Greek world (the Hellenistic period of 323-30BCE) when the conquests of Alexander had spawned sprawling multi-ethnic empires, and the people we call “the Romans” were a very diverse group faced with a founding legend that painted them as the descendants of criminals and slaves.  The Roman elite was increasingly multi-ethnic as time went on; the emperors Trajan and Hadrian were both from Spain, and reign of the African emperor Septimius Severus—who spoke Latin with an accent--ushered in an era in which emperors came from all over the Mediterranean world. Despite this diversity, Roman authors enjoyed lobbing ethnic slurs at other “nationalities.”
 
Profiting from our own diverse backgrounds and training, we will examine the very complex picture presented by ancient notions of race and ethnicity, and students will pursue projects that grow out of their particular backgrounds and interests.
 
Readings will include:
 
Herodotus, The Histories (any translation)
Tacitus, Germania (any translation)
Rebecca Futo Kennedy, C. Sydnor Roy, and Max Goldman, Race and Ethnicity in the Classical World: An Anthology of Primary Sources in Translation (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2013
Denise McCoskey, Race in Antiquity and Its Legacy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2012)

CL 80100: Nietzsche for Fun and Prophet
GC: Mondays, 6:30pm-8:30pm, Richard Wolin, 2 or 4 credits (also HIST 7240; PSC 8064) (M.A. students will need permission to enroll from Instructor)
 
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche – never paralyzed by excessive self-modesty – exulted, “I am no man, I am dynamite.” He described his books as “assassination attempts,” rather than literary works, and he felicitously characterized his intellectual method as “philosophizing with a hammer.” Nietzsche joyfully prophesied the advent of “Great Politics,” which, in his eyes, meant “upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys . . . as well as wars the like of which have never yet been seen on Earth.”
 
Nietzsche was, unaccountably, the “court philosopher” of the Third Reich as well as the intellectual progenitor of French poststructuralism (Foucault, Derrida, etc.). In interrogating Nietzsche’s legacy, our central question will be: how did it come to pass that generations of intellectuals felt obligated to define themselves and to plot their course forward through a confrontation with Nietzsche’s work?
 
In order to better understand Nietzsche and his titanic philosophical influence, our seminar will be divided into two parts. In the first half of the course, we will read and assess major texts by Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, the Will to Power, Twilight of the idols, and the Antichrist. In the second half, we will focus on the major stages in the European and American reception of Nietzsche’s work: the political reception of Nietzsche in Germany, the deconstructionist reading of Nietzsche (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault), the aesthetic interpretation of Nietzsche, and finally, recent Anglo-American studies reassessing Nietzsche’s attitude toward Darwinism.
 
CL 89000: Philosophy of Literature
GC: Tuesdays, 11:45am-1:45pm, Noel Carroll, 2-4 credits (also PHIL 77600)
 
In this course, we will canvass major topics in the philosophy of literature including the ontology of literature, the nature of narrative and that of fiction, philosophical ideas regarding the novel (and possibly lyric poetry), the relation of literature to cognition, to emotion, to morality, to society and politics, and issues of the interpretation and evaluation of literature.
 
There are no prerequisites for this course. Grading will be based on class participation and a final term paper.

CL 89200: History of Literary Theory & Criticism II
GC: Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, John Brenkman, 4 credits (required course for 1st year doctoral students)
 
This course is a study of the thought about literature from the late 18th century to the present, with an emphasis on the evolution of modern aesthetics as well as current critical methods. The primary texts of aesthetic theory will be Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful and Analytic of the Sublime in the Critique of Judgment, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and Heidegger’s “What Are Poet’s For?” Two units will allow us to examine the methodological and ideological antagonisms that animate modern criticism and theory. (1) Baudelaire and Criticism: Benjamin, Auerbach, Poulet, Blanchot, Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, de Man, Jameson, Jauss, Kristeva. (2) Antigone and Theory: Hegel, Heidegger, Szondi, Steiner, Lacan, Zizek, Butler, Honing.
 
Texts: Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer and trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge); Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Vintage); Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language,Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (HarperPerennial); Peter Szondi, An Essay on the Tragic, trans. Paul Fleming (Stanford); Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du Mal, trans. Richard Howard (David R. Godine); Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays, trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin); Sophocles I, ed. and trans. David Grene and Richmond Lattimore (Chicago); Judith Butler, Antigone’s Claim (Columbia); Bonnie Honig, Antigone Interrupted (Cambridge).

ENGL 86800: Commoning
Ashley Dawson. Fridays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits
From Chiapas to Occupy, from the Gezi Park uprising to disaster communism during the pandemic, acts of commoning have been central to new political imaginaries and formations over the last decades. Capitalism was born, Marx famously argued, when peasants were forcibly torn from their means of subsistence and hurled onto urban labor markets as free and “unattached” proletarians. As Marx evocatively put it, “the history of this expropriation is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Recent theorists of capitalism have asserted that the process of violent dispossession not only has continued unabated for the last five centuries but has been intensifying during the neoliberal age. Indeed, for many, today’s enclosures are the leading edge of contemporary capitalism. We live in a period of violent land grabbing and resource extraction that is pushing planetary systems towards terminal breakdown. 
 
This seminar will explore contemporary processes of – and resistance to - capitalist and neocolonialist enclosure. Our conversations will be oriented around three key theoretical and political interventions. The first is the assertion that enclosure and extraction pertain not just to material things like land and minerals but also to relatively immaterial social resources such as information, culture, and even affect. The commons is thus a social form that is constantly created and recreated. The corollary of this, and the second key theoretical hypothesis of the seminar, is the idea that the commons is not solely a thing but a social practice. The commons, in other words, is the space of social relation created in and through acts of mutual aid and solidarity. Lastly, we will explore the extent to which commoning presents political possibilities beyond the stale opposition between the vampiric free market and top-down state power.
 
The seminar will excavate experiences of commoning, and of capitalist extraction and decomposition, across six key sectors: land, water, cities, social reproduction, social media, and energy. We will track how these contested processes manifest in the letters of blood and fire through which today’s acts of dispossession are recorded. How does commoning affect literary fabulation, and, conversely, how does representation affect struggles over the commons? Does commoning require or catalyze new genres of expression? Is there such a thing as a common or commoning voice or mode of narration? 
 
We will read and discuss work by the following authors, activists, and theorists: Chris Abani, Sarah Brouillette, Octavia Butler, Pierre Dardot & Christian Laval, Bernadine Evaristo, Silvia Federici, Matthew Gandy, Amitav Ghosh, Guerrilla Media Collective, Jennifer Haigh, Mohsin Hamid, Garrett Hardin, Fredric Jameson, Michael Hardt & Toni Negri, Peter Linebaugh & Marcus Rediker, Justin McGuirk, Sandro Mezzadra & Brett Neilson, Timothy Mitchell, Fred Moten & Stefano Harney, José Esteban Muñoz, Elinor Ostrom, Arundhati Roy, Raja Shehadeh, Olivia Sudjic, Latife Tekin, Siva Vaidhyanathan, Alys Weinbaum, Eyal Weizman.

ENGL 80600: Disability Studies, Bodies, and Care Relations in Nineteenth-Century Fiction
Talia Schaffer. Wednesdays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits (cross-listed with WSCP)
 
This course investigates the burgeoning field of disability theory, with special attention to the nineteenth century as the period when an older idea of disability gave way to the modern medical model. Up to the 1850s, people accepted an 'ordinary bodies' model in which they expected long-term intermittent suffering, managed through social amelioration. But in the 1850s, the new medical professionalism emerged, with its diagnosis/treatment/cure dynamic. How did this shift affect bodies and minds, and how did it play out in the novel? In this course we  we will start with some of the formative disability studies theoretical texts, by Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Alison Kafer, Tobin Siebers, Robert McRuer, Martha Stoddard Holmes, and Melanie Yergeau, along with historical work on nineteenth-century disability by Maria Frawley, Miriam Bailin, Martha Stoddard Holmes, Erika Wright, and Jennifer Esmail. We will also interrogate ethics of care as a philosophy that might explain 'ordinary bodies' in the nineteenth century, reading Daniel Engster, Nel Noddings, Eva Feder Kittay, and Virginia Held to see how care theory might lead us to think performatively rather than diagnostically about disability, and how it might alter ideas of gender and community. The course will focus on recent disability studies work in particularly interesting fields: neurodiversity (particularly around autism), sensory issues (including blindness and Deaf culture), and social conditions (including the built environment and the gaze). We will pair these studies with Austen's Persuasion, Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and Eliot's Middlemarch.

ENGL 84200: Romantic Concepts of Nature
Alexander Schlutz. Mondays 4:15PM-6:15PM. 2/4 credits.
 
The reception of Romantic concepts of nature has played an important role in the development of ecocritical discourse. Since the rise of ecocriticism and green Romanticism it has become commonplace to present Romantic writers as anticipating contemporary environmentalist concerns and to (re)mobilize for contemporary ecological debates the Romantic critique of nascent processes of industrialization and a Cartesian, mechanical, view of the natural world. At the same time, ecologists and environmental writers perceive the “romanticization” of nature – the projection of imaginary, aesthetic and cultural constructs onto a material world fundamentally alien to them – as one of the main obstacles to a fruitful understanding of our relationship to the environment. And more recently, as ecocritics embrace Donna Haraway’s call to “stay with the trouble” of a ravaged planet where natural history and human activity can no longer be clearly kept apart, Romantic desires to draw on a natural world untainted by human influence as a source of healing or resistance have come to be seen as themselves problematic. Consequently, in the contemporary discussion, one can see the Romantics being lauded for writing against the objectification of nature, critiqued for neglecting the difference between the products of the writer’s consciousness and affect and the material Other he or she confronts, or one may see Romantic poetics and concepts of nature discarded altogether as no longer truly of use for avant-garde ecologically-informed literary production.
 
To position ourselves with respect to such conflicting assessments, we will investigate what a variety of Romantic-period concepts of nature – a plurality rather than a single position – looked like concretely. We will examine two of the central philosophical positions on the relationship of the human mind to the natural world Romantic-era writers could draw on, those of Baruch Spinoza and Immanuel Kant, and discuss the writings and philosophical positions of Mary Wollstonecraft, William and Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and John Clare. Throughout, our goal will be to ascertain the answers the texts of these writers can offer to questions about the place of human beings in the natural world, the relationship of mind and matter, and of human and natural history, central philosophical questions they indeed share with contemporary environmentalist thinkers.
 
Portions of this course can be used to fulfill the requirements for the first-year portfolio exam. 
 
Course requirements: 4 short position papers, including a “conference abstract”; 15-minute conference presentation, to be delivered at the in-class, end-of-semester course conference; final 15-20 page research paper.
 
Course readings:
Spinoza. Ethics. Ed. And Trans. G.H.R. Parkinson. Oxford: OUP, 2000. ISBN: 9780198752141
Kant. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. and Trans. Paul Guyer. Cambridge: CUP, 2001. ISBN: 9780521348928
Mary Wollstonecraft: Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Ed. Ingrid Horrocks. Peterborough: Broadview, 2013. ISBN: 9781551118086
Coleridge's Poetry and Prose. Ed. Nicholas Halmi, Paul Magnuson, and Raimonda Modiano. New York: Norton, 2004. ISBN: 0393979040
William Wordsworth The Major Works. Ed. Stephen Gill. Oxford: OUP, 2008.ISBN: 978-0-19-953686-3.
Dorothy Wordsworth. The Grasmere and Alfoxden Journals. Ed. Pamela Woof. New York: OUP, 2002. ISBN: 978-0-19-953687-0
John Clare. Major Works. Ed. Eric Robinson and David Powell. Oxford: OUP, 2008. ISBN 978-0-19-954979-5
 
Additional primary and secondary readings will be available via the course e-reserve page.

ENGL 80600: Reason, Freedom, and Animality
Karl Steel. Mondays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits.
 
Humans, as Porphyry influentially defined us long ago, are “the rational mortal animal”: an animal, because a living thing; mortal, because we are not gods; and rational, because we – alone among mortal things – have reason. Or so holds a standard taxonomy, which separates humans from a homogeneously irrational mass of dogs, horses, crows, oysters, apes, and so on. The claim to having reason is also the claim to have free will: to be morally responsible, to be a legal subject, to be a citizen, and to have ownership over oneself and one’s actions. And the corollary claim that other things lack reason offers them up to supposedly rational subjects as objects, as property, as chattel, as things to be cultivated, perhaps, but never really to be cared for.
 
“Reason, Freedom, and Animality” will lean on the question of humans as the rational form of life, examining texts ranging from ancient Greeks to (at least) the early modern period, lingering mostly in the Middle Ages, but always with engagement with later 20th and 21st century philosophical texts. We will explore how the claims to the possession of reason and freedom underlay debates about enslavement, gender hierarchies, racialization, and other ways of denying certain human populations resources and exposing them to premature death. Dominant humans tend to judge subordinated groups as wanting in reason, and therefore as more animal than human, which opens them up to being treated, as the common phrase goes, ‘like animals’: at best, as a dependent form of life, and, at worst, as a life made to be used by others, with all this implies in terms of exposure to captivity and abuse, so that being treated “like an animal” means nearly the opposite of being treated “like a living thing.
 
Because the question of the possession of reason accompanies the claim to freedom, we will also explore critical habits of praising freedom where it can be found. How does the hunt for “agency” or the praise of categorical strain, instability and openness encode an at least vaguely supersessionary logic, that accords to some favored objects and groups the liberation from the law that “grace” provides? How do our critical habits participate in a language of freedom inherited from, among other places, the Christian scriptures?
 
The ideal set of primary texts is still being assembled. Course organization will be roughly chronological, looking first at questions of freedom, reason, and logos in some foundational philosophical and political documents, then moving into medieval narrative and theology, and concluding with some skeptical work, perhaps by Margaret Cavendish. Theoretical readings will be some classics in posthumanism, critical animal theory, feminist care ethics, and disability theory, with generous reference to more recent work, like Zakiyyah Iman Jackson’s Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. I will aim to connect course themes to the participants’ individual research interests. Each student will be responsible for a weekly presentation; you will also write a book review; and, in the end, produce a seminar paper, or a conference paper with very thorough notes. We will conclude the class with a mini conference.

ENGL 89000: Resisting Institutional Methodologies
Amy Wan. Mondays 2:00PM-4:00PM. 2/4 credits.
 
In some form, we are all participants in the institution of higher education. This course is an examination of the terms of our participation through a consideration of the institution and our own methodological and intellectual choices. Recent work on decolonial methods, anti-racism, and abolitionist university studies will be centered as we consider how we might make connections between our theoretical goals and our everyday practices. The main goal of the class is to provide a space for students to make connections between scholarship that questions traditional methodologies and their own research and professional goals. Some of the class will be spent exploring the efforts to decolonize universities/the syllabus/institutions in light of work such as Tuck and Yang’s “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” This class would be structured in a way that acknowledges that exigency has created fast-paced conversations that aren’t always consistent with decolonial methods. Following this, members of the classroom community would be expected to co-construct knowledge in this class and no one needs to be a specialist about decolonizing methods and theories, anti-racism or abolitionism before entering the classroom.

HIST 72400: Nietzsche for Fun and Prophet
Mondays, 6:30-8:30 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin
Class number 55379. (Open only to PhD students)
 
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche – never paralyzed by excessive self-modesty – exulted, “I am no man, I am dynamite.” He described his books as “assassination attempts,” rather than literary works, and he felicitously characterized his intellectual method as “philosophizing with a hammer.” Nietzsche joyfully prophesied the advent of “Great Politics,” which, in his eyes, meant “upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys . . . as well as wars the like of which have never yet been seen on Earth.”
Nietzsche was, unaccountably, the “court philosopher” of the Third Reich as well as the intellectual progenitor of French poststructuralism (Foucault, Derrida, etc.). In interrogating Nietzsche’s legacy, our central question will be: how did it come to pass that generations of intellectuals felt obligated to define themselves and to plot their course forward through a confrontation with Nietzsche’s work?
In order to better understand Nietzsche and his titanic philosophical influence, our seminar will be divided into two parts. In the first half of the course, we will read and assess major texts by Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, the Will to Power, Twilight of the idols, and the Antichrist. In the second half, we will focus on the major stages in the European and American reception of Nietzsche’s work: the political reception of Nietzsche in Germany, the deconstructionist reading of Nietzsche (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault), the aesthetic interpretation of Nietzsche, and finally, recent Anglo-American studies reassessing Nietzsche’s attitude toward Darwinism.
Full description here.

SPAN 80000: Language & Identity
GC: Monday, 2:00 – 4:00 pm., Prof. Cecilia Cutler
The course explores the relationship between language and identity by introducing students to the theoretical, methodological, and ideological developments in sociolinguistics for studying how subjects construct, project, and perform different aspects of their identities in interaction. How much agency do people have in choosing and projecting their gender, sexual, racial, ethnic, class, and identities through linguistic, discursive, and other semiotic devices in interaction? How do individuals linguistically and discursively contest the ways in which they are imagined, defined and labeled by others? How can we bring in multimodal semiotic analysis to the study of how individuals construct and project identity? The course will analyze how speakers enact, project, and contest their culturally specific subject positions through communicative interactions and discourses. Topics to be explored include theories and methods for studying language and identity and contemporary topics such as embodiment, racialization and transracialization, stylization, passing, crossing, multilingual identities, second language learner identities, post-coloniality, indigeneity, and race.

SPAN 87100: New Directions in Latinx Literary Studies
GC: Thursday, 6:30p.m.-8:30p.m., Prof. Vanessa Pérez Rosario
 
What are the contours of the field of Latinx literary studies? What are the newest trends and theoretical moves in the field? Which critical journals publish the most exciting work in the field.  In this course we will read a selection of recent books of Latinx literary criticism to understand new directions in the field of Latinx literary and cultural studies.  We will look at recent books published by literary critics such as Yomaira Figueroa, Ralph Rodríguez, Cristina Pérez-Jiménez, and Dixa Ramírez, among others, alongside some of the literary works they examine, to understand new theoretical turns and critical directions in the field.  Some of the trends that emerge are the engagement of critical race studies and its relationship to Latinx bodies.  Scott Burnham Together we will think about where this still relatively young field has been and where it is headed. The course will be taught in Spanish.

MUS 86500: Seminar in Musicology: Critical Approaches
GC, Tuesdays, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Prof. Scott Burnham, CN61078, 3CR
TBA. Class Online.

MUS 83100: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Music, Gender, Sexuality
GC, Wednesdays, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Prof Jane Sugarman, CN61068, 3CR [Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission]
 TBA. Class Online.

MUS 78200: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Analyzing Musics of the World
GC, Fridays, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Prof Eliot Bates, CN61059, 3CR [Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission]
TBA. Class Online.

PHIL 77600: Philosophy of Literature
Tuesday 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Prof. Carroll, 4 credits
 
In this course, we will canvass major topics in the philosophy of literature including the ontology of literature, the nature of narrative and that of fiction, philosophical issues regarding the novel (and possibly lyric poetry), the relation of literature to cognition, to emotion, to morality, to society and politics. and issues of the interpretation and evaluation of literature. There are no prerequisites for this course. Grading will be based on class participation and a final term paper.

PHIL 76700: History and Philosophy of Psychopathology
Wednesdays, 9:30-11:30, Prof. Greenwood, 4 credits
 
In this course we will critically explore the history, theory, and philosophy of psychological disorders. We will consider the general question of what constitutes a psychological disorder (reviewing neurological, phenomenological, social constructionist, latent variable, dysfunction and network accounts) and examine theoretical accounts of individual psychological disorders such as depression, mania, schizophrenia, paraphilia, addiction, dissociative disorder, autism, and psychopathy (if time permits, we may consider other disorders), and their implications for agent autonomy, moral and legal responsibility, personal identity and social psychology. We will also explore evolutionary psychological explanations of psychological disorders, the possibility of genuine cultural and historical variance in psychological disorders, and the nature of placebo effects and their role in the evaluation of forms of psychological therapy.
 
All students will give a class presentation and lead a class discussion, and submit a final paper on the general concept of a psychological disorder or a particular psychological disorder (although I am open to alternative paper topics).

PHIL 76600: Memory
Mondays, 2:00 p.m.-4:00 p.m., Prof. Khalidi, 4 credits
 
The topic of memory has not been as popular among philosophers of mind and psychology as topics like: perception, concept, belief, emotion, and consciousness.  But the philosophical problems and puzzles surrounding memory are at least as compelling as those involving these other mental constructs.  In the past decade or so, there has been an uptick in philosophical interest in “episodic memory”: the capacity to retain information from experiences pertaining to events that occurred in one’s own personal past.  This interest has been fuelled by a body of empirical evidence that points to memory’s constructive nature and its proneness to being distorted or its tendency to incorporate information that derives from other sources.  This raises philosophical questions about the very nature of episodic memories: must they be causally connected with past experience, and are they true by definition (is the verb ‘remember’ factive)?  It also raises questions about the dividing line between memory and imagination, to the point that some philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists have argued for rejecting the distinction altogether, lumping them together as forms of “mental time travel.”  Can we maintain that memory is a distinct capacity in the face of this challenge?  If so, what individuates it?  Moreover, can we be assured that it is a reliable source of knowledge about the past?  Is the function of memory to provide such knowledge, or to strengthen social ties, to enhance self-understanding, harbor grudges, reduce boredom, reminisce about dead loved ones, teach lessons to young people, cope with thoughts of mortality, or foster our sense of personal identity?  Finally, does episodic memory have a distinctive phenomenology, and is that part of its functional profile?
Some topics that may be discussed:
 
Memory: episodic vs. semantic memory
Causal theory of memory
Memory traces
Phenomenology of memory and “autonoetic consciousness”
Memory errors and “false memories”
Constructivism about memory
“Mental time travel” and imagination
The function of memory
Memory, truth, and factivity
Memory and personal identity
Readings will be drawn mainly from the recent literature in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, but we will also read a few classic papers in both the philosophy and science of memory (e.g. Martin & Deutscher 1966, Tulving 1972, Loftus & Palmer 1974).

PHIL 77100: Social Construction
Tuesdays, 2:00 P.M.-4:00 P.M., Prof. Prinz, 4 credits
 
The idea that aspects of our world are socially constructed has been defended within a number of domains. Defenses of social construction can be found in philosophy of science, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, philosophy of psychiatry, Foucauldian genealogy, and other subfields. It also has defenders in fields outside of philosophy, including sociology, social psychology, anthropology, gender studies, and disability studies.
 
The goal of this seminar is twofold: to better understand social constructionist claims and to explore controversies about social construction in several domains. With respect to understanding, a number of questions will be considered: how does the idea of social construction relate to relativism, nominalism, and anti-realism?  Is social constructionism a thesis about norms, concepts, causation, or constitution?  How does social construction take place?  Does it apply to all kinds of categories (e.g., both social kinds and so-called natural kinds)?
We will consider a number of domains where debates about social construction have taken place: biological and chemical kinds, emotions, mental illness, sex/gender, sexual orientation, race, and racism. In each case, there are questions about whether the phenomenon in question is natural, cultural, or some combination of the two.  Along the way, we will consider a range of constructivist perspectives, as well as some opposing views.

PHIL 77300: Reading Wittgenstein and Heidegger
Tuesdays, 4:15 p.m. -6:15 p.m., Prof. Priest, 4 credits
 
Wittgenstein and Heidegger are two of the most influential philosophers of the 20th Century.  Both were charismatic figures who influenced those around them, as well as many philosophers from subsequent generations. The similarities do not end there. Both were concerned with central issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and being embedded in the social world. Moreover, the thought of both evolved considerably over their lives. Wittgenstein came to reject the Tractatus; and though Heidegger never rejected his earlier work, it took a quite different direction after the Kehre (turning). However, the evolutions in the philosophy of the two thinkers went in somewhat opposite directions. Wittgenstein moved from the apparent mysticism of the last parts of the Tractatus to the importance of people being embedded in forms of life in the Investigations.  Heiddegger, on the other hand, went from a story of how people are thrown into the (social) world in Being and Time to the apparent mysticism of some of the later writings.
 
The secondary literature on both of these writers is enormous. However, in this course we will concentrate on the primary texts, reading and discussing them each week. We will consider not only the thought of each philosopher, but the relationships between the two. For Wittgenstein will read the Tractatus, and at least Part 1 of the Investigations. For Heidegger we will read at least Division 1 of Being and Time, and a selection of the post-Kehre writings.

PHIL 78500: Climate Change and Social Change
Thursdays, 4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m., Prof. Brownstein, 4 credits
 
Climate change will be among the most influential forces shaping human life in the 21st century and beyond, if not the most influential force. It is not just a technical problem, an environmental issue, a moral challenge, or a political quandary. Rather, as environmental engineer Costa Samaras put it, climate change is the landscape on which our future unfolds. While there is well-developed philosophical literature on some aspects of climate change, this course focuses on topics in need of more attention from philosophers. As such, the course presents an opportunity for graduate students to begin work in areas that likely will, and should, gain prominence over time.
 
We will consider some of the cultural, political, psychological, economic, and conceptual changes needed in the face of the climate crisis. Specifically, we will discuss (1) the political psychology of climate voter behavior; (2) the history and recent growth of authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and “eco-fascism;” (3) climate justice and the relationship between prejudice, inequality, and decarbonization; (4) and “individual” vs. “structural” approaches to social change. While no specialist knowledge is required, students should expect readings to draw widely from the social and behavioral sciences, and thus to become familiar with multi-disciplinary literatures and methods by means of which they can make their own work relevant to the climate crisis. Most classes will have a guest speaker, and the course will conclude with a student-led workshop as well as a one-day conference.
 
Confirmed guests for the course include John Broome (Philosophy, Oxford), Nikhar Gaikwad (Political Science, Columbia), Sally Haslanger (Philosophy, MIT), Jennifer Jacquet (Environmental Studies, NYU), Daniel Kelly (Philosophy, Purdue), Robert Keohane (Political Science, Princeton), Alex Madva (Philosophy, Cal Poly Pomona), Leigh Raymond (Political Science, Purdue), David Roberts (Vox Media), Samy Sekar (Analyst Institute), Olúfémi Táíwò (Philosophy, Georgetown), and Robin Zheng (Philosophy, Yale-NUS).
 
PHIL 76000: Critique of Pure Reason
Mondays, 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., Prof. Teufel, 4 credits
 
In his three seminal works, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/7), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), as well as in dozens of other influential publications, Immanuel Kant changed the course subsequent philosophy would take—determining many future philosophers’ positions as either (implicitly or explicitly) Kantian, or as (implicitly or explicitly) opposed to Kant’s or Kantian views, or (not infrequently) as a combination of both.
 
In order to understand these classifications (which often come with the force of accusations), we must first understand the views that give rise to them. In this course, we will be paying particular attention to Kant’s theoretical philosophy in the Critique of Pure Reason. Our starting point will be Kant’s famous ‘Copernican Revolution in Philosophy,’ announced in the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, which proposes a fundamental change in philosophical perspective and method: from a naïve form of realism (aka ‘dogmatism’) to a more complicated (namely, ‘critical’) view of the nature of reality and our way(s) of knowing it. This moment in the history of philosophy is of more than merely antiquarian interest. A variety of ‘non-critical’ realisms (naïve and otherwise) have over the years made a resurgence and inform much of Anglo-American analytic philosophy today, even as that same analytic tradition is arguably predicated on some of Kant’s most fundamental concepts and distinctions.
 
The preponderance of the course will be devoted to a detailed look at the mechanics of Kant’s views as presented in the Critique of Pure Reason. Throughout, we will, where suitable, make connections to contemporary philosophical thought. We will end by looking at the internal tensions Kant’s critical system is prone to and at some of the ways in which Kant himself later sought to remedy those tensions.

PHIL 77000: Continental and Decolonial Epistemology
Tuesdays, 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., Prof. Alcoff, 4 credits
 
There is a widespread skepticism about many sorts of knowledge claims today, and this skepticism has been promoted from both the right and the left. The skepticism is largely based on the realization that there are variable frameworks that can play a significant role in whether or not a claim becomes accepted as true, and the further realization that some of these variable frameworks may be connected to nationalist projects, corporate interests, social movements, etc.  Such skepticism needs to be met not with a retreat into overly simplistic notions of knowledge but with more realistic accounts that include both critique and reconstruction.
 
This course will cover recent work on the relationship of knowledge, power, and cultural differences. Continental philosophy – especially critical theory, hermeneutics, and post-structuralism – has thematized the way in which knowledge is always embedded in cultural history and social institutions. This work has advanced the discussion about how to strengthen inadequate self-correcting measures in the production of knowledge and science. We will begin with some key texts from this tradition, from Habermas, Gadamer, and Foucault.
 
Yet this work in continental philosophy has all but ignored issues of colonialism and racial domination. This course will stage an imaginary conversation/debate between the continental problematics and new decolonial ones.
 
The effort to decolonize epistemology is a growing field that takes up the ways in which some mainstream theories of justification and methodologies of inquiry carry implicit colonialist assumptions that call for critical analysis and reconstruction. We will read a variety of work in this new area that takes up the following themes: 1) Eurocentrism, how to define it precisely and what the solution to it might look like; 2) Critiques of core concepts in the European (including Anglo-American) tradition, such as the category of the ‘human,’ the ‘anthropocene,’ ‘religion,’ ‘science,’ and others; 3) Debates over a way forward, from interculturality, delinking from western paradigms, pluriversality, and other models of dialogic knowing that can accommodate multiple frameworks of analysis.
 
This section of the course will include works by David Haekwon Kim, Manuel Vargas, Edward Said, Leopoldo Zea, Muhammad Ali Khalidi, Nassim Noroozi, Ofelia Schutte, Omar Rivera, Sandra Harding, Kyle Whyte, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Walter Mignolo, Inkeri Koskinen, Kristina Rolin, and Stephanie Rivera Berruz.
 
PSC 82601: Race & Ethnic Politics
Wednesdays, 2:00pm–4:00pm, Prof. Tien, 4 credits
 
This course examines critical questions and debates in race and ethnic politics in America. We will highlight political science approaches to the study of race and ethnicity in American politics. Primarily, the course will investigate theories of race and racism, and how race and ethnic politics interacts with American political and social institutions.
The goals of this graduate seminar include 1) acquainting students with some of the scholarly literature on race and ethnic politics in America; 2) formulating research questions to be answered with a research paper; 3) writing scholarly research papers suitable for presentation and publication in academic outlets.

PSC 80302: Marxism
Mondays, 11:45am-1:45pm, Prof. Jacobs, 4 credits
 
At the turn of the century, there were pundits who proclaimed the end of history – and of Marxism. But in recent years, a spectre has been haunting Europe (and the USA). This course, which will be conducted as a seminar, will be devoted to discussing and critiquing the ideas of Karl Marx and some of the major thinkers who have been influenced by Marx. We will begin by exploring Marx’s analysis of alienation, his understanding of history, and his notions of the state and of class. We’ll turn next to discussing both Marxism in the era of the Second International, with particular attention to debates between Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg, and the political ideas of Vladimir Lenin. I intend, in a somewhat later section of the course, to devote sustained attention to the development of Western Marxism, including the contributions of figures like Lukács, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, many of whom attempted to explain why the revolution predicted by Marx had not (yet) taken place. Finally: we will end this course by examining Marxist thought in the latter portions of the 20th century, and the first decades of the 21st. I expect that we will cover a work by Louis Althusser, and hope to also discuss relevant portions of the thought of Slavoj Žižek or Michael Hardt or a writer of particular interest to those enrolled in the seminar. Throughout the semester, we will engage in a close examination of key texts, and will debate the extent to which the ideas we will discuss (and the controversies which they generated) can be explained by knowledge of the contexts in which they arose. We will also explore the degree to which the ideas of the thinkers whose works we will read help to illuminate contemporary issues.

PSC 80606: Gandhi as Political Philosopher
Tuesdays, 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m., Prof. Mehta, 4 credits
 
Depictions of Mohandas Gandhi are routinely limited to the saintly Mahatma (“Great Soul”) and freedom fighter. Few thinks to ask how a saint can simultaneously be a freedom fighter, a fully engaged participant in the political arena. This course takes Gandhi seriously as a rigorous and creative thinker whose work touches on a remarkable range of topics including liberty, equality, constitutions, civil disobedience, non-violence, religion and politics, social hierarchies (caste, race), identity, and modernity. The course work will consist close readings of primary writings by Gandhi and selected secondary readings by leading thinkers who have explored Gandhi as philosopher. Special attention will be given to the complex relationship between “religion” and “politics” in Gandhi’s life and thought. The course will be team taught by John Thatamanil (Union Theological Seminary) along with two of the most prominent Gandhi scholars of our time, Uday Singh Mehta (CUNY Graduate Center) and Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia Philosophy).

PSC 71906: Critical Reasons – The Basics
Wednesdays 2:00 p.m.–4:00 p.m., Prof. Buck-Morss, 3 credits
 
This seminar understands “Political Theory” in a way different from much of the theory canon. Rather than dealing with philosophical writings about politics, Critical Reason reflects on the production of knowledge itself. The insight that our method of conceptualization matters for politics, that it loads the dice for political judgments made, is deeply indebted to the foundational texts that we will read together this semester. The course deals with basic concepts and problems of Western Critical Theory. The readings focus on two foundational authors, Kant, Hegel and several commentaries on them (Adorno, Marx, CLR James, Buck-Morss). Philosophy is considered from the perspective of the political. Concepts include: critical reason, transcendental claims, phenomenology, dialectics, non-identity, materialist metaphysics, history, causality, and freedom. Students are encouraged to read difficult texts with the goal of developing critical capacities for concrete, historical analyses of political, social and economic life. The challenge is not to master systems of thought, but to make the concepts of the readings and the insights they provide meaningful for contemporary projects of critical analysis. Seminar requirements: sustained, active seminar participation, one short midterm paper, and one final paper (or exam option).

PSC 70200: Modern Political Thought
Wednesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Prof. Accetti, 3 credits
 
This course offers a graduate-level introduction to modern political thought. It focuses on the work of several classical authors between the 16th and the 19th centuries: Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles-Louis Secondat de Montesquieu, and Karl Marx. The approach is very much text-based in that it will seek to situate close readings of these authors’ main writings in their specific historical contexts while also relating them to larger themes that run across the western tradition of modern political thought. Students will be required to give one in-class presentation about an assigned text and to work on a 8,000 word final paper to be completed before the end of the semester.

PSC 73907: Intersectionality in the Social Sciences
Wednesdays, 4:15 p.m.–6:15 p.m., Prof. McCall, 3 credits (Crosslist: SOC 83100)
 
This course will begin with an overview of key original texts by intersectionality scholars in and connected to the social sciences in the United States, such as texts by Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Evelyn Nakano Glenn. This will be followed by readings of key later texts that introduced and amplified on the concept within different social science disciplines (e.g., Ange-Marie Hancock in political science; Elizabeth Cole in psychology), and also raised questions over the definition and scope of the term (e.g., Jennifer Nash). For the remainder of the course, we will examine intersectional research on a wide range of topics, including intersectional inequalities in political representation, income, education, family, health, and criminal justice. We will also consider different approaches to the topic across the globe, and I will welcome suggestions for readings on other aspects of intersectionality related to students’ areas of interest and expertise.

PSC 80604: Nietzsche for Fun & Prophet
Mondays, 6:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Prof. Wolin, 4 credits (Crosslist: HIST 72400/C L 80100)
 
In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche – never paralyzed by excessive self-modesty – exulted, “I am no man, I am dynamite.” He described his books as “assassination attempts,” rather than literary works, and he felicitously characterized his intellectual method as “philosophizing with a hammer.” Nietzsche joyfully prophesied the advent of “Great Politics,” which, in his eyes, meant “upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys . . . as well as wars the like of which have never yet been seen on Earth.” Nietzsche was, unaccountably, the “court philosopher” of the Third Reich as well as the intellectual progenitor of French poststructuralism (Foucault, Derrida, etc.). In interrogating Nietzsche’s legacy, our central question will be: how did it come to pass that generations of intellectuals felt obligated to define themselves and to plot their course forward through a confrontation with Nietzsche’s work? In order to better understand Nietzsche and his titanic philosophical influence, our seminar will be divided into two parts. In the first half of the course, we will read and assess major texts by Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy, the Will to Power, Twilight of the idols, and the Antichrist. In the second half, we will focus on the major stages in the European and American reception of Nietzsche’s work: the political reception of Nietzsche in Germany, the deconstructionist reading of Nietzsche (Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault), the aesthetic interpretation of Nietzsche, and finally, recent Anglo-American studies reassessing Nietzsche’s attitude toward Darwinism.

PSC 72410: Power, Resistance, Identities & Social Movements
Thursdays, 6:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., Prof. O’Brien, 3 credits
 
This course focuses on individual forms of socially constructed identity (e.g., gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and humanness or bodies), intersectional forms of identity (e.g., gender and bodies), and collective forms of identity (e.g., citizen, worker or labor, and anarchist collectives or horizontal non- state civil movements, referred to as social movements in American politics). Several social movements will be explored as case studies. First, we will consider the worldwide struggle to end political and social violence against women (including #MeTooism), and if/how it is having global impact. We will examine, for example, the Combahee River Collective — an organization of Black feminists who attained international reach by coining the term “identity politics” — and assess the movement’s global impact, as seen for instance in “Women’s Internationalism against Global Patriarchy,” by Dilar Dirik (and PM Press). It explores how identities in American social movements affect power and resistance, as understood by social theorists and contemporary philosophers such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Judith Butler, who in turn draw upon Gilles Deleuze, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, Antonio Gramsci, Karl Marx, and G. W. F. Hegel, among others.

SOC 80000: Producing sociological theory:  The Role of Gendered Colonialism, Culture and Revolution in Bourdieu’s theory
Mondays, 4:15-6:15pm, Prof. Marnia Lazreg, 3 credits
 
In recent years scholars have called for a “decolonization” of knowledge or advocated a “decolonial” approach to academic disciplines. They argue for greater awareness of the imperial context within which the social sciences emerged, and attempt to identify the conscious and unconscious ways in which this context shaped theoretical concepts.
 
Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology provides an opportunity to assess these claims conceptually as well as empirically.  Bourdieu formulated his key sociological concepts (such as symbolic violence, habitus, or masculine domination) and developed a “scientific” method during his fieldwork in villages in Eastern Algeria.  His formative years as a sociologist were spent in colonial Algeria during the war of decolonization as a draftee as well as a researcher, and references to his fieldwork recur in many of his books until the end of his life.  Besides, there were times when he perceived himself as a surrogate native.
 
This course examines Bourdieu’s struggles with colonialism as a political and cultural system of domination, and traces the process through which colonial fieldwork becomes productive of concepts applicable to a non-colonial (but colonizing) society.  Relatedly, the course explores Bourdieu’s conceptualization of revolution in light of his misgivings about Frantz Fanon’s theory.  Of special interest will be the differences between two empirical observers, a trained sociologist and a trained psychiatrist turned revolutionary.  Finally, the course will probe Bourdieu’s construction of culture in a non-Western milieu in view of his attempt to bridge the gap between anthropology and sociology.  Throughout, discussions will be guided by a concern for the complex relationship between Bourdieu’s interest in a scientific method, his recurring references to his biography, and his unresolved attitude toward the colonial situation.
 
The course will be run as a seminar open to the unfettered exploration of significant facets of Bourdieu’s work.
Readings will include, in addition to sections of Outline of a Theory of Practice, Pascalian Meditations, The Bachelors’ Ball, In Other Words, Sociology in Question, Sketch of Self-Analysis, and a selection of secondary literature.
 
Requirements: Active class participation and a substantive term paper.
Open to all students

SOC 81004: Sociology Meets History
Tuesdays, 2-4pm, Prof. John Torpey, 3 credits
 
This course examines the historical roots of contemporary patterns of social inequality at a variety of spatial levels -- global, national, and regional. It seeks to make sense of the historical origins of patterns of inequality in state-building, slavery, colonialism, and capitalism. The course will explore diverse times and places in order to understand the background to contemporary patterns of inequality as well as efforts to overcome historical injustices.

SOC 86800: Culture and Politics: Subjects, Identities, and Characters
Thursdays, 11:45-1:45pm, Prof James M. Jasper, 3 credits
 
This course will examine meaning in the construction of political subjects, actions, and institutions, taking culture (including morality, emotions, and cognition) as an aspect of all social life. Its purpose is to encourage publishable research, and for that reason it focuses more narrowly on the construction of subjects, stigma, reputations, and public characters.

SOC 85800: Race and Ethnicity
Mondays, 4:15-6:15pm, Prof. Philip Kasinitz, 3 credits
 
In 1903 Dubois predicted that the problem of the Twentieth Century would be “the problem of the color-line.” It now appears that race may be the problem of the 21st century as well. Race and ethnicity they remain among the most persistent and virulent forms of structured social inequality in the US and around the globe. Yet, ironically, race and ethnicity do not figure prominently in much of classical social theory. Focusing on the United States, but with reference to other multi-ethnic societies, we will examine the evolution of the concept of “race” and its relationship to racism; the heritage of slavery and segregation and their impacts contemporary life; the origins of modern racism and anti-Semitism, why and how the salience of ethnic identity increases and decreases at particular historical moments and the relationship of race and ethnicity to migration, nationalism, colonialism and class. We will look at how racial boundaries change and how “racialized” minorities are (or are not) incorporated into different societies. Readings will include works by W.E.B. Dubois, George Fredrickson, Michelle Alexander, Ibram V. Kendi, Patricia Hill Collins, Douglas Massey, William Julius Wilson, Franz Fanon, Jean Paul Sartre, Min Zhou, Eddie Telles, Isabel Wilkerson, Alejandro Portes and Richard Alba.

SOC 70200: Contemporary Theory
Mondays, 2:00-4:00pm, Prof. Lucia Trimbur, 3 credits.
 
This graduate seminar is the second course in a two-course series examining important social theorists and their contributions to the development of American sociology. We focus on the projects that most contribute to an analysis of the contemporary world, especially Marxism, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, feminist theory, queer theory, and postcolonial theory. Our overarching goal is to understand how theoretical arguments are made: their logics, underlying assumptions, contradictions, and use of evidence. To do this, we will (1) look closely at contemporary theorists’ ideas, (2) historically situate the authors of these ideas, and (3) consider how their ideas relate to past and current social circumstances. We also spend time connecting contemporary theories to those we studied in Classical Social Theory.

THEA 70600: History of Theatrical Theory
Mondays, 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m, Professor Peter Eckersall
TBA

THEA 81500: Performing Blackness from Stage to Screen
Professor Racquel Gates
TBA
 
Given early cinema’s connection to stage performance, it should come as little surprise that many of the tropes and representational strategies that the cinema adopted to portray blackness bore, and continue to bear, close relation to minstrelsy and blackface. This seminar will examine the ways that “performing blackness” has played a crucial role in the evolution of cinema, whether from the perspective of Jewish artists trying to establish their racial identities in early Hollywood, or African American artists attempting to subvert dominant representational modes. While the course will focus heavily on Hollywood cinema and mainstream media, it will also incorporate discourses from performance studies, critical race studies, and gender studies. Screenings will cover a large range of genres and historical periods.
 
Course Goals:
 
To critically engage with the history and theories of American minstrelsy and its impact on cinema and contemporary media
To develop an understanding of the ways that cinema represents race, particularly categories of black and white.
To apply theories of racial representation to a wide range of cinematic and media texts.
To produce a research paper grounded in the scholarship and discourses of racial representation and cinema.
Required Texts:
Jake Austen and Yuval Taylor. Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2012.
Ashley Clark. Facing Blackness: Media and Minstrelsy in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled. Raleigh, NC: The Critical Press, 2015.
Arthur Knight. Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and American Musical Film. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.
Eric Lott. Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, Race and American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Michael Rogin. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.
Nicholas Sammond. Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015.
Linda Williams. Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001.

Course Listing

CTCP 71088: Critical Theory:  Foundations and Practices
GC,Thursdays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, Prof. Leo Coleman, 3 credits. This course is not open to first year students and requires permission from Prof. Brenkman

Cross-Listed Courses

ANTH 70700: Intro to Social Theory
Prof. Gary Wilder, GC, Thursdays, 10:45 A.M. -1:45 P.M., 3 credits (Course open to GC Level 1 Cultural Anthropology & Linguistic Anthropology doctoral students only)

ANTH 72000: Politics and Poetics of Climate Change
Prof. Melissa Checker, GC, Mondays, 4:15 P.M.-6:15 P.M., 3 credits (Cross listed with EES and PSYC)                

ANTH 81500: Anticapitalist Thought & the Politics of Dispossession
Prof. David Harvey and Christopher Loperena, GC, Tuesdays, 4:15 P.M. – 6:15 P.M., 3 credits (Cross listed with EES 79903. Seats are limited.)

ANTH 82000: Spaces of Security: Infrastructure, Governance, and Affect
Prof. Setha Low, GC, Fridays, 11:45 A.M.—1:45 P.M., 3 Credits (Cross-listed with PSYC 80103. Seats are limited)

ART 80010: Empathy Theory from Art Nouveau, Fauvism, Expressionism to the Bauhaus
GC: Wed. 2–4pm, 3 credits, Prof. Romy Golan

CLAS 81800: What is Hellenistic Religion? (Texts, Archaeology, Epigraphy)
Prof. Barbara Kowalzig, Wed. 4:15 PM-6:15 PM, 3 credits, NYU, Silver Center, Room 503A

CLAS 81900: Matter and Gender in Classical Antiquity
Prof. Emanuela Bianchi, Wed. 4:55 PM-7:35 PM, COLIT-GA 2502/CLASS-GA 2502, 19 University Place, 318

CL 79500: Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism
GC; Thursdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Prof. Bettina Lerner, 4 credits

CL 88500: Gender and Genre: Writing the Self
GC:, Mondays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, Prof. Charity Scribner, 2/4 credits

CL 89100: History of Literary Theory & Criticism I
GC; Tuesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Prof. Andre Aciman, 4 credits

CL 80100/FREN 83000: The Nation and Its Others: France and Frenchness in The Age of Louis XIV
Prof. Domna C. Stanton, Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m., (CL version of this course, 2/4 credits, FREN version of this course, 3 credits)

ENGL 80600: Orientalism and the Project of Decolonization
Prof. Kandice Chuh, Mondays, 2:00PM – 4:00PM. 2/4 Credits

ENGL 80700: Racial, Religious, and Sexual Queerness in Medieval Literature
Prof. Steven Kruger, Thursdays 11:45AM – 1:45PM, 2/4 Credits

ENGL 86700: Feminism and Globalization
Prof. Sonali Perera, Tuesdays 2:00PM – 4:00PM. 2/4 Credits

FREN 83000/CL 80100: The Nation and its Other: France and Frenchness in the Age of Louis the XIV
Professor Domna Stanton, Tuesday, 4:15-6:15pm, Taught in English (2/4 credits)

HIST 72300: Psychoanalysis and Politics: History and Theory
Professor Dagmar Herzog, Tuesday, 2 PM - 4 PM, 3 credits (Instructor permission is required to enroll in this course. Please write to DHerzog@gc.cuny.edu with a cc to mweber@gc.cuny.edu)

HIST 75200: Slavery and Capitalism
Professor James Oakes, Thursday, 11:45 AM - 1:45 PM, 3 credits

HIST 72800/PSC 71908: Neofascism: from the New Right to the Alt-Right
Professor Richard Wolin, Monday, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM, 3 credits (Instructor permission is required to enroll in this course. Please write to RWolin@gc.cuny.edu with a cc to mweber@gc.cuny.edu)

HIST 71000/ MALS 78500/ PSC 71902: Comparative Revolutions: From 1688 to the Arab Spring
Professor Helena Rosenblatt, 3 credits, Thursday, 2 PM - 4 PM, Professor Helena Rosenblatt

SPAN 70200: Critical Theory
Prof. Carlos Riobó, GC: Thursday, 4:15 p.m.-6:15 p.m

SPAN 80000: Glottopolitical Approaches to Latin America
Prof. José del Valle, GC: Tuesday, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m.

SPAN 87000: Theorizing Latin American Masculinities
Prof. Silvia Dapía, GC: Monday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

LING 70100: Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics
Prof. Sam Al Khatib / Jason Kandybowicz, Wednesday, 4:15-6:15pm, 3 credits

MUS 84300: Seminar in Theory: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Studying Musical Performance
Prof Johanna Devaney, Mondays, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., Room 3491, 3 credits

MUS 71200: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Research Techniques
Prof Jane Sugarman, Wednesdays, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., Room 3389, 3 credits (Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission)

MUS 84200: Seminar in Theory/Analysis: Comparative Analysis
Prof. Kofi Agawu, Thursdays, 10 a.m.- 1 p.m., Room 3491, 3 Credits

MUS 82500: Seminar in Theory: History of Music Theory I
Prof. Ruth DeFord, Fridays, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., Room 3389, 3 credits

MUS 88200: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Sound in Society
Prof. Eliot Bates, Mondays, 2 p.m. – 5 p.m., Room 3389, 3 Credits (Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission)

MUS 85900: Seminar in Music Theory: Adv Schenkerian Analysis
Prof William Rothstein, Wednesdays, 2 p.m. – 5 p.m., Room 3491, 3 credits

PHIL 77600: Philosophy of Motion Pictures
Profs. Carroll & Prinz, Tuesdays, 2:00 P.M. -4:00 P.M., Room TBA, 4 credits

PHIL 77700: Critical Social Theory
Prof. Gould, Tuesdays, 4:15 P.M.-6:15​ P.M., Room TBA, 4 credits

PHIL 76200: Africana Philosophy
Prof. Mills, Mondays, 4:15 P.M. -6:15 P.M., Room TBA, 4 credits

PHIL 76100: Hegel’s “System” of Philosophy
Prof. Nuzzo, Mondays, 11:45 A.M. -1:45 P.M., Room TBA, 4 credits

PSC 71902 (Crosslist with HIST 71000 & IDS MALS 78500): Comparative Revolutions: from the English Revolutions of 1688 to the Arab Spring
Prof. Rosenblatt, Wednesdays, 6:30pm–8:30pm, 3 credits

PSC 71908 (Crosslist HIST. 72800): Neofascism: from the New Right to the Alt-Right
Prof. Wolin, Mondays, 6:30pm–8:30pm, 3 credits

PSC 71904 (Crosslist PHIL 77700): Critical Social Theory
Prof. Gould, Tuesdays, 4:15pm–6:15pm, 3 credits

PSC 80603: Democratic Socialism
Prof. Buck-Morss, Tuesdays, 2:00pm–4:00pm, 4 credits

PSC 80608: Political Theory of Police
Prof. Feldman, Wednesdays, 4:15p.m. -6:15 p.m., 4 credits

PSC 80607: Global Political Thought
Prof. Mehta, Wednesdays, 2:00 p.m.–4:00p.m., 4 credits

SOC 70100: Development of Sociological Theory (Theory I)
Prof. Trimbur, Tuesdays, 2:00 P.M.-4:00 P.M., 3 credits.

SOC 85600: Social Movements in Latin America
Prof. Jack Hammond, Thursdays, 2:00-4:00pm, 3 credits

SOC 86800: Culture and Politics
Prof. James M. Jasper, Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15, 3 credits

SOC 84600: Within-National Inequalities: From Pareto to Piketty
Prof. Branko Milanovic, Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30pm, 3 credits

THEA 85700: Contemporary Performance and Public Space
Professor Bertie Ferdman, Wednesdays, 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.

THEA 86000: Festive and Ritual Performance
Professor Erika Lin, Tuesdays, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

UED 71200 (De)Constructing Black Girlhoods
Prof. Deckman, Tuesdays, 4:15 PM-6:15 PM, 3 Credits

UED 72100 A Critical Exploration of Educational Ideologies
Prof. Gonzalez, Thursdays, 4:15 P.M.- 6:15 P.M., 3 Credits 

UED 71200 Co-constructing Theory with Data in Educational Research
Prof. Collett, Thursdays, 6:30 P.M. – 8:30 P.M., 3 credits

Course Descriptions

CTCP 71088: Critical Theory:  Foundations and Practices
GC,Thursdays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, Prof. Leo Coleman, 3 credits. This course is not open to first year students and requires permission from Prof. Brenkman

Every interpretive act requires a set of interpretive standards and assumptions.  To say that an artifact is beautiful, to offer but one example, implies that there is such a thing as beauty, that the critic knows what it is and can identify its constitutive elements in a way that is defensible. “Theory” names the critical sophistication that comes of making the interpretive act knowledgeable and reflexive: carefully to select the lens through which we view a text, to know the clarifying and distorting properties of that lens, and to grind it into a fit for the frames of our own critical and intellectual aims.

The critical enterprise is especially fraught, and so especially fascinating, when it contemplates that genre placing interpretation, choice, and misapprehension at the center of its concerns: tragedy. Throughout the European tradition, tragedy emerges time and again as the most compelling object of philosophically-inflected inquiry into literature.  We shall mirror that focus in this course by looking at philosophical takes on tragedy, and the various critical movements with which they might be associated, ranging from Aristotle, to Hegel, to Nietzsche, to Walter Benjamin, to Julia Kristeva.  The course will end with The Incident at Antioch, a tragedy composed by the most important living philosopher, Alain Badiou.

Students will be responsible for a conference-style presentation, which will give rise to a formal paper and final research paper of approximately sixteen pages.

Cross-Listed Courses

ANTH 70700: Intro to Social Theory
Prof. Gary Wilder, GC, Thursdays, 10:45 A.M. -1:45 P.M., 3 credits (Course open to GC Level 1 Cultural Anthropology & Linguistic Anthropology doctoral students only)

Course Description TBA


ANTH 72000: Politics and Poetics of Climate Change
Prof. Melissa Checker, GC, Mondays, 4:15 P.M.-6:15 P.M., 3 credits (Cross listed with EES and PSYC)                

This seminar re-considers anthropological approaches to climate change by approaching it from multiple angles. We will draw on oral narratives, literary texts, and social media campaigns as well as political ecology, ethnography, and science and technology studies (STS) to analyze how people respond to, and understand, climate change and environmental risk more generally. We will view climate change not just as a global environmental crisis but as a site of power, politics, and meaning making.           


ANTH 81500: Anticapitalist Thought & the Politics of Dispossession
Prof. David Harvey and Christopher Loperena, GC, Tuesdays, 4:15 P.M. – 6:15 P.M., 3 credits (Cross listed with EES 79903. Seats are limited.)

The corona virus pandemic sweeping the world is revealing much about the vulnerabilities of neoliberal capitalism. This lecture and discussion-based seminar will seek to bring together critical perspectives of political economy, race and gender politics and postcolonial theory in relation to the contemporary crisis. Limited seating for this seminar; ANTH and EES crosslisting. May require instructor approval.

ART 80010: Empathy Theory from Art Nouveau, Fauvism, Expressionism to the Bauhaus
GC: Wed. 2–4pm, 3 credits, Prof. Romy Golan

As Wilhelm Worringer argued in his book of 1908, the two poles of artistic volition—the urge for abstraction (which he related to self-alienation and agoraphobia) and the urge for empathy (Einfuhlung—the desire to project onto the object of perception)—are inextricably linked. From the 1880s to the 1920s, painters, architects, art historians, psychologists, and pedagogues alike were captivated by what has been called Empathy Theory. Providing new ways to think of form and space Empathy Theory crossed both medial and national divides. In the face of encroaching capitalism, it countered the alienation of labor on the assembly line. And yet it also provided, paradoxically, forms of pedagogy where body language was programmed by a series of exercises endlessly rehearsed not so much by the body as on the body with the aim of developing that elusive thing called experience. Primary sources will include: Willhelm Worringer, Heinrich Wöllflin, Aby Warburg, Theodor Lipps, Robert Visher, August Schmarsow, Henri Bergson, Max Weber and others. Secondary sources will include: Zeynep C. Alexander on “kinaesthetic knowing” from Munich Jugendstil architecture to the Bauhaus; Spyros Papapetros on the “animation of the inorganic” 1 from Warburg to Fernand Léger; Deborah Silverman on Art Nouveau in Fin de Siècle France, but also on the specter of the Congo in the whiplashes of Belgian Symbolism; Jean Claude Lebensztejn on the false distinctions between French Fauvism and German Expressionism; Rémi Labrusse, Robin Schuldenfri and others on ornament.


ANTH 82000: Spaces of Security: Infrastructure, Governance, and Affect
Prof. Setha Low, GC, Fridays, 11:45 A.M.—1:45 P.M., 3 Credits (Cross-listed with PSYC 80103. Seats are limited)

Course Description TBA

CLAS 81800: What is Hellenistic Religion? (Texts, Archaeology, Epigraphy)
Prof. Barbara Kowalzig, Wed. 4:15 PM-6:15 PM, 3 credits, NYU, Silver Center, Room 503A

Course Description TBA

CLAS 81900: Matter and Gender in Classical Antiquity
Prof. Emanuela Bianchi, Wed. 4:55 PM-7:35 PM, COLIT-GA 2502/CLASS-GA 2502, 19 University Place, 318

In the face of the rising popularity of “new materialisms,” this class examines the emergence of the notion of “matter” in classical antiquity. In short, matter, from the Latin ‘materia’ (related to mater,mother) is transmitted from Aristotle’s Greek innovation hulê (literally, wood). We will undertake close readings of key ancient primary texts, including various Presocratics, Plato’s Timaeus, Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, and Generation of Animals, and Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, tracing the discourses of materiality that arise in concert with tropes of sex and gender. The guiding question here is: what can matter’s genealogical ties to the feminine tell us about the materialization of bodies and genders? At the same time, we will attend to the topographies and texture of ancient thinking about nature and materiality more broadly. Alongside a narrative of “emergence” we will also consider hermeneutic questions – what are the ethico-political stakes of a “retrieval” of antiquity and how can we determine our relationship to these distant texts? And how does a consideration of ancient modes of thought help to enrich contemporary discourses of matter and gender? To help orient our study we will draw on contemporary thinkers including Irigaray, Kristeva, Loraux, Sallis, Cavarero, as well as critically engaging Bachofen’s 19th century conception of Mutterrecht. Some background knowledge of psychoanalytic theory is advised, as is knowledge of Greek, however all readings will be in translation.

CL 79500: Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism
GC; Thursdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Prof. Bettina Lerner, 4 credits

Over the last three decades, the field of Comparative Literature has gone through a period of rapid and radical expansion. What we study as comparatists is commonly (if problematically) held to be world literature, but now also includes a wide array of non-traditional media and new forms of self-expression. At the same time, how we study and interpret these texts has moved away from a well-established hermeneutics of suspicion toward distant, surface, reparative and other forms of reading, while increasingly embracing affects, objects and ecologies that exert significant pressure on discourses of race, gender, and sexuality. What defines the work that comparatists do and how might we continue to think about relationality when faced with modes of storytelling that seem unrelatable, untranslatable or illegible? This course considers what it means to read and write critically as comparatists today by engaging with current debates about the state of the discipline, the fate of the humanities in our universities, and the place and purpose of criticism and interpretation in our social and political landscapes as a whole. Through its written assignments and oral presentations, it also provides a space from within which to practice some of the key rhetorical exercises that have become, for better or worse, the benchmarks of professionalization including abstracts, conference presentations, project proposals, and a 20-25 page paper.

CL 88500: Gender and Genre: Writing the Self
GC:, Mondays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, Prof. Charity Scribner, 2/4 credits
The question of autofiction has become dominant in the study of contemporary literature and culture, and it is particularly germane to the subject of gender.  Writing of the self spans from autobiography to the novel, crossing into the subgenres of the memoir and the roman à clef.  Its production establishes an interplay between the documentary and the aesthetic; its critique analyzes the dialectic between authority, authorship, and identity.  This seminar reads these literary forms together in order to open new lines of inquiry into sexual politics.  Beginning with psychoanalysis, the course puts a German accent on signal moments of European modernity, from the late eighteenth century to the present.  They include:  masterworks by Goethe, Proust, Kafka, and Nabokov; experiments in political philosophy (Rousseau, Engels, Hitler, Butler); modern and contemporary literary fiction (Beauvoir, Handke, Sebald, Cusk, Knausgaard); and autotheory (Woolf, Barthes, Cixous, Nelson).  Focusing on the body in time, the seminar also considers the relationship of autofiction to recent tendencies in cinema and performance art.

CL 89100: History of Literary Theory & Criticism I
GC; Tuesdays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, Prof. Andre Aciman, 4 credits

With readings from Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus to Dante, Sidney, Boileau, Dryden, and Lessing, this course will examine the history and evolution of literary theory in the classical, medieval, and early modern periods. It will also examine such fundamental terms as truth, beauty, nature, and artifact with which pre-Romantic Western critics have attempted to understand literary works of art. This course will also explore the legacy and limitations of these and other terms and their impact on criticism today.

CL 80100/FREN 83000: The Nation and Its Others: France and Frenchness in The Age of Louis XIV
Prof. Domna C. Stanton, Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m., (CL version of this course, 2/4 credits, FREN version of this course, 3 credits) (Course taught in English)

This course will begin by questioning the view that the nation is born after l789. We will consider a set of criteria for nationhood and examine the efforts of Louis XIV and his ministers to transform France into a nation state with one monarch, one law and one faith; a centralized political and cultural structure; physical boundaries/borders, and a dominating linguistic idiom.

However, our principal focus will be the idea that a nation forges an inside by creating an outside, that is, by excluding a set of groups or people. To be sure, that enterprise is doomed to fail since the outside (the other) invariably mixes with or constitutes the necessary supplement to the inside, contrary to proclaimed ideology.  Moreover, in late 17th-century France, even insiders, such as members of the noblesse d’épée, felt marginalized in an absolutistic monarchy, and invoked the idea of the nation over and against tyrannical Louis XIV.

The seminar will be devoted to considering five different others: the others within – a religious other (Jews); the gendered other (women); a sexual other (the sodomite) in a nation of reputedly virile Franks. The two others outside we will study are the oriental/Ottoman Turk; and the African slave transported to the French Caribbean.

Readings will include work on the nation by Anderson, Foucault and Balibar; on the early modern nation by Hampton, Bell, Sahlins and Yardeni;  historical documents, such as Salic Law and the Black Code; and primary readings by Corneille, Molière, Louis XIV, Perrault, Picard, Racine, Saint Simon;  Prideaux, Baudier and Tavernier on the Ottomans; Dufour, du Tertre, and Labat on slaves; and relevant critical texts.

Over and beyond readings and class participation, work for the course will include a presentation in class on a primary text. Those taking the course for 4 credits will also produce a 25-page research paper on some aspect of early-modern nationhood and othering to be determined in consultation with the instructor. For those taking the course for 3 credits, the paper will be no longer than 10-13 pp. Those taking the course for two credits will prepare a written version of the presentation they do in class (5-7 pp.). All students will take the final exam.

For any questions, please contact Domna Stanton (dstanton112@yahoo.com)

ENGL 80600: Orientalism and the Project of Decolonization
Prof. Kandice Chuh, Mondays, 2:00PM – 4:00PM. 2/4 Credits

Since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1978, orientalism has served as a key concept across a wide variety of fields and discourses.  Afro-Orientalism, Techno-orientalism, Cold War orientalism, American orientalism, and even Asian orientalism are formulations peppering the contemporary critical landscape.  In this class, we’ll survey this range of formulations and the formations out of which they emerge, with an eye toward apprehending the heterogeneity of critical, political, and aesthetic valences of these various invocations of orientalism.  How do these formulations of orientalism engage the broad project of the address of coloniality, or in other words, the project of decolonization?  In what ways are de-orientalization and decolonization aligned and not?  What kinds of geographies and temporalities are implied or produced by both orientalist discourses and efforts to defunction them?  These are some of the key questions motivating and organizing this course.

Those enrolling in this course will please read Edward Said’s Orientalism in preparation for the first class meeting.  Students should expect substantial reading loads in this discussion driven course.  Those enrolled for 2 credits will be asked to write short essays or the equivalent to fulfill the writing requirements of the course.  Students registered for 4 credits will be asked to produce a seminar project in addition to these short essays.  No auditors, please.

ENGL 80700: Racial, Religious, and Sexual Queerness in Medieval Literature
Prof. Steven Kruger, Thursdays 11:45AM – 1:45PM, 2/4 Credits

Medieval religious difference often involves constructions that, in modernity, might be thought of as more strictly racial. When the Muslim Sultan in the Middle English King of Tars converts to Christianity, his black skin becomes white. And boundaries between religious-racial communities are often policed through the categories of gender and sexuality. Canon law prohibits intermarriage, and it insists that Christian families not employ Jewish or Muslim nursemaids. From at least the thirteenth century on, Jewish and Christian masculinities are sharply differentiated from each other, with (for instance) a myth of Jewish male menstruation and/or anal bleeding being one strong way in which Christian and Jewish bodies are kept ideologically separate. “Sodomy,” too, is often strongly associated with racial-religious others—Mongols, Jews, Muslims, heretics.

In this course, our readings will focus on how racial, religious, gender, and sexual differences—and their intersections—are represented in (mostly) English texts of the Middle Ages. Readings will be drawn from a wide range of writers and works—for example, Marie de France, Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate, Henryson, Christine de Pisan, Malory, The King of Tars, The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Mandeville’s Travels. Alongside such primary texts, we will read queer, postcolonial, and critical race theory, and recent medievalist work that explicitly takes up such theory in its analysis of medieval culture. And we will read at least one post-medieval text (Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida? Octavia Butler’s science fiction? Ishiguro’s the Buried Giant?), to consider how the medieval constructions we have been analyzing are taken up and modified in later literature.

Students will present orally as part of the seminar structure. Those taking the course for 4 credits will pursue a semester-long writing project. First-year students in the English program will have the opportunity to use the writing project to work on one element of their first-examination portfolios.

ENGL 86700: Feminism and Globalization
Prof. Sonali Perera, Tuesdays 2:00PM – 4:00PM. 2/4 Credits

A significant document in the official annals of globalization and development, the 1980 Brandt Report titled North-South: A Program for Survival maps the world in the simplest, starkest terms—divided between the rich nations (the North) and the poor (the South). In his concluding reflections to Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said, among other critics, finds such “global thinking” to be reductionist—if well intentioned—unwittingly reifying the very terms it proposes, in the name of poverty alleviation, to erase. And yet, beyond the Brandt Report, “the global South” retains value as an interpretative framework—as a metaphor or strategy, rather than precisely demarcated territory—for Marxist, and especially Marxist-feminist writers and theorists across the international division of labor. Antonio Gramsci called our attention to the “Southern Question.” How is the (global) “Southern question” negotiated in our age of globalization and food insecurity? What is at stake in making claims for feminism predicated not on comfortable solidarities, but based on an avowal of difference?

In this class we will enter into the debates on gender and globalization by focusing on the texts of feminist, counter-globalist, and anti-colonial writers and theorists of the Global South. We will also read a range of interdisciplinary material drawing from examples of working-class literature, subaltern studies, Marxist theory, feminist theory, activist journalism as well as selected UN and World Bank documents. While texts from the global South provide us with our departure point, we will constantly place these writings in conversation with a range of theorists of neoliberalism and globalization. How do feminist cartographies of labor complicate the North-South divide? What might feminism as both a social movement and as knowledge-politics have to teach us about institutionalized concepts of “comparative racialization” and “critical regionalism”? What ethical models of socialized labor—of “an impossible un-divided world,” of “fractured togetherness”—are represented in the literature of labor and of radical ecology? What does it mean to invoke “working-class literature” in an age of outsourcing and neoliberal scarcity? These are some of the questions that I hope will direct our inquiries over the course of the semester. Literary texts may include works by Bessie Head, Tayeb Salih, Tillie Olsen, Diamela Eltit, Mahasweta Devi, Toni Morrison, Gloria Anzaldua, Valeria Luiselli, Lynn Nottage, Saidiya Hartman, Nuruddin Farah, and Arundhati Roy. Theory texts may include writings by Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Angela Davis, Hortense Spillers, David Harvey, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Silvia Federici, Kathi Weeks, Arturo Escobar, Maria Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Lila Abu-Lughod, Chandra Mohanty, Chela Sandoval, Sara Ahmed, Sarah Brouillette, Aren Aizura, Lisa Lowe, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Sylvia Wynter. (Where time permits, we may also consider shifts in framework and nomenclature put forward in the recent Progress of the World’s Women UN Report: Transforming Economies, Realizing Rights.)

Course Requirements:

1.) A 10 minute oral presentation on one or two of the weekly readings.*

2.)  A 2 page prospectus for the final paper.

3.) A 15-20 page final paper.

4.) Engaged class participation.

*Serving as a respondent to a presenter: In addition to signing up for your own presentation, you must also select a date where you will serve as respondent to a presenter.

FREN 83000/CL 80100: The Nation and its Other: France and Frenchness in the Age of Louis the XIV
Professor Domna Stanton, Tuesday, 4:15-6:15pm, Taught in English (2/4 credits)

This course will begin by questioning the view that the nation is born after l789. We will consider a set of criteria for nationhood and examine the efforts of Louis XIV and his ministers to transform France into a nation state with one monarch, one law and one faith; a centralized political and cultural structure; physical boundaries/borders, and a dominating linguistic idiom.

However, our principal focus will be the idea that a nation forges an inside by creating an outside, that is, by excluding a set of groups or people. To be sure, that enterprise is doomed to fail since the outside (the other) invariably mixes with or constitutes the necessary supplement to the inside, contrary to proclaimed ideology.  Moreover, in late 17th-century France, even insiders, such as members of the  noblesse d’épée, felt marginalized in an absolutistic monarchy, and invoked the idea of the nation over and against tyrannical Louis XIV.

The seminar will be devoted to considering five different others: the others within – a religious other (Jews); the gendered other (women); a sexual other (the sodomite) in a nation of reputedly virile Franks. The two others outside we will study are the oriental/Ottoman Turk; and the African slave transported to the French Caribbean.

Readings will include work on the nation by Anderson, Foucault and Balibar; on the early modern nation by Hampton, Bell, Sahlins and Yardeni;  historical documents, such as Salic Law and the Black Code; and primary readings by Corneille, Molière, Louis XIV, Perrault, Picard, Racine, Saint Simon;  Prideaux, Baudier and Tavernier on the Ottomans; Dufour, du Tertre, and Labat on slaves; and relevant critical texts.

Over and beyond readings and class participation, work for the course will include a presentation in class on a primary text. Those taking the course for 4 credits will also produce a 25-page research paper on some aspect of early-modern nationhood and othering to be determined in consultation with the instructor. For those taking the course for 3 credits, the paper will be no longer than 10-13 pp. Those taking the course for two credits will prepare a written version of the presentation they do in class (5-7 pp.). All students will take the final exam.

For any questions, please contact Domna Stanton (dstanton112@yahoo.com)

HIST 72300: Psychoanalysis and Politics: History and Theory
Professor Dagmar Herzog, Tuesday, 2 PM - 4 PM, 3 credits (Instructor permission is required to enroll in this course. Please write to DHerzog@gc.cuny.edu with a cc to mweber@gc.cuny.edu)

This is a course in intellectual history and theory; but it is also, and above all, a course in the history of ideas about human selfhood, motivation, and behavior – and the endless mystery of the relationships between fantasy and reality. The course arcs from Freud’s and his contemporaries’ writings in the 1890s-1930s through WW2, Cold War and decolonization to the post-postmodern present. Themes explored include: trauma, aggression, anxiety, destruction, and prejudice; obsession, love, desire, pleasure, attachment, dependency; models of selfhood (conflict vs. deficit vs. chaos), compulsion, neurosis, perversion, narcissism, psychosis; therapy, including neutrality, interpretation, holding, transference, and countertransference; and the myriad relationships of psychoanalysis to politics. Most of the texts focus on Europe and the U.S., but we will explore as well examples from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.

Our aim is not only to acquire a deepened understanding of the interactions between individual subjectivities, social conditions, and ideological formations (and to consider how psychoanalysis-inspired commentators have theorized these interactions), but to inquire into whether and, if so, how the mechanisms of these interactions may perhaps themselves have changed over time (and this will require situating the assigned texts contextually, but also often reading them against their own grain).

Requirements include careful reading of assigned materials and active and informed participation in class discussions; one final paper on a psychoanalysis-related topic relevant to the student’s dissertation or related intellectual development. The final week is reserved for student presentations to the class; drafts will be circulated ahead of time; students are expected to provide helpful written responses to their peers.

HIST 75200: Slavery and Capitalism
Professor James Oakes, Thursday, 11:45 AM - 1:45 PM, 3 credits

No scholar seriously doubts that there was a strong relationship between the development of capitalism and the emergence of New World slave plantations.  Where they disagree is over the nature of that relationship.  Was slavery itself a form of capitalism, or was the master-slave relationship fundamentally different from capitalist social relations?  Did slavery give rise to capitalism, or did capitalism give rise to slavery?  This course will address these questions, beginning with a survey of the way scholars have addressed them.  Then, with a particular focus on the United States, we will address the theoretical and empirical question of whether the slave economy of the Old South was or was not capitalist.  Finally, we will shift to the very different question of the relationship between southern slavery, especially the cotton economy, and the industrialization of the North.

Tentative Readings:

Eric Williams, Slavery and Capitalism

Seymour Drescher, Econocide

Robin Blackburn,

Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power

Eugene D. Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital

Robert Fogel

HIST 72800/PSC 71908: Neofascism: from the New Right to the Alt-Right
Professor Richard Wolin, Monday, 6:30 PM - 8:30 PM, 3 credits (Instructor permission is required to enroll in this course. Please write to RWolin@gc.cuny.edu with a cc to mweber@gc.cuny.edu)

How did the far-right reestablish political legitimacy after its crushing defeat in 1945? How did it recertify the discredited ideas of race, hierarchy, anti-parliamentarism, autocracy, and patriarchy after seemingly hitting rock bottom? To what extent – and by what methods –   have its efforts to counteract the intellectual hegemony of left-wing thought by popularizing a “Gramscism of the right” been successful? To what extent have New Right ideas influenced the political self-understanding of the leading authoritarian populist parties, whose proliferation has been one of the hallmarks of twenty-first century global politics? Finally, to what extent have the depredations of “neo-liberalism” prepared the terrain for the New Right’s success?

Here, it is worth noting that the slogan, the “Great Replacement,” which was invoked by the mass murderers in Utoya, Norway, Christ Church, NZ, El Paso, and Pittsburgh, was originally a New Right slogan.

One explanation for the New Right’s success pertains to its successful rehabilitation of German conservative revolutionary thought from the 1920s: the political doctrines of Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, etc., while cleansing their work of its ties to Nazism.

Finally, at what point in time did the New Right worldview cross the Atlantic to provide ideological support for the Alt-Right? In what ways do the New Right and the Alt-Right differ from the traditional Right?  Did the Alt-Right contribute to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election? Is the Alt-Right still a force in contemporary American politics, or was it merely a passing political fad?

Readings:

C. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy

M. Heidegger, Nature, History, and State

A. de Benoist, View from the Right

A. Dugin, The Fourth Political Theory

T. Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?

Y. Camus and N. Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe

Woods, Germany’s New Right as Culture and as Politics

K. Belew, Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement

T. Mann, The Rise of the Alt-Right

Boggs, Fascism: Old and New

HIST 71000/ MALS 78500/ PSC 71902: Comparative Revolutions: From 1688 to the Arab Spring
Professor Helena Rosenblatt, 3 credits, Thursday, 2 PM - 4 PM, Professor Helena Rosenblatt

What makes a revolution a revolution? Scholarship has recently moved away from social-scientific, Marxist-inspired explanations to approaches that explore how revolutionaries themselves understood what they were doing, how they interpreted their contexts, and how their ideas shaped their actions. With such questions in mind, we will look at and compare a number of revolutions, including the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, the American, French and Haitian Revolutions, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the recent Arab Spring. In the eyes of their participants, what characteristics did these revolutions share? What might they have learned and borrowed from each other? Is there something we can call a revolutionary “script”?

SPAN 70200: Critical Theory
Prof. Carlos Riobó, GC: Thursday, 4:15 p.m. -6:15 p.m

Students will be introduced to the main concepts, debates, and currents within contemporary theory central to the study of literary texts and other cultural objects. We will discuss and contextualize the latest developments with regard to Memory and Human Rights, Performance and Subjectivity, Empire and Coloniality, and State and Nation--the four critical areas of our graduate program’s required First Examination--exploring the fundamental assumptions at stake. Our studies may include theorists and thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Linda Alcoff, Aleida Assmann, Judith Butler, Enrique Dussel, Roberto González Echevarría, Marianne Hirsch, Pierre Nora, Anibal Quijano, Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Diana Taylor, among others. We will use Latin American literary texts and other cultural objects to test the theories under discussion. The course attempts to give students the tools to continue their own explorations in this field of study. 

SPAN 80000: Glottopolitical Approaches to Latin America
Prof. José del Valle, GC: Tuesday, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m.

In this seminar, we will examine the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of glottopolitical studies. We will follow the pathway drawn by works such as Guespin / Marcellesi (1986), Elvira Arnoux (2000), Burke, Crowley / Girvin (2000), Joseph (2006), Del Valle (2007 y 2013), Del Valle / Arnoux (2010), Arnoux / Nothstein (2013) in order to examine how research in the humanities and social sciences may benefit from taking a glottopolitical perspective on society and social change. The seminar will focus on Latin America (though we will make some incursions into the US and Spain) in order to identify and analyze the glottopolitical dimensions of phenomena such as the spread of neoliberalism, neo-nationalism and neo-colonialism, processes of regional integration, the political activation of indigenous cultures, the advancement of feminism, and the tactics of social revolt against capitalism.
 

SPAN 87000: Theorizing Latin American Masculinities
Prof. Silvia Dapía, GC: Monday, 6:30-8:30 p.m.

Framed within new materialism, posthumanism and the affective turn, we will study diverse theoretical approaches to masculinity informed by feminist, queer and other critical gender scholarship (Amícola, Archetti, Bourdieu, Connell, Foucault, Halberstam, Kiesling, Molloy, Mosse, Muñoz, Preciado, Reeser, Rocha, Salessi, Sedgwick, Sifuentes-

Jáuregui, Viveros-Vigoya, etc). Within this framework we will explore young masculinities, fatherhood, rural masculinities, military masculinities, revolutionary masculinities, gay masculinities, and trans masculinities, among others—all of them complicated by race, class, and sexuality—as they appear in 20th and 21st century Cuban and Argentine works of literature and visual culture. We will discuss the transformation of “el hombre nuevo” as a normative notion of heterosexual masculinity in the works of Edmundo Desnoes, Abel González Melo, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Eduardo Heras León, Senel Paz, and Virgilio Piñera, while the works of César Aira, Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, Copi, Witold Gombrowicz, Osvaldo Lamborghini, among others, will serve as the basis for an investigation of problematic masculinities. In addition, tango lyrics and films such as De cierta manera by Sara Gómez (1997) and Memorias del Desarrollo (2000) by Miguel Coyula will also be discussed.

LING 70100: Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics
Prof. Sam Al Khatib / Jason Kandybowicz, Wednesday, 4:15-6:15pm, 3 credits
 
Led by Carolina Fraga
 
Course Description TBA

MUS 84300: Seminar in Theory: Quantitative and Qualitative Approaches to Studying Musical Performance
Prof Johanna Devaney, Mondays, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., Room 3491, 3 credits

Course Description TBA

MUS 71200: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Research Techniques
Prof Jane Sugarman, Wednesdays, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., Room 3389, 3 credits (Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission)

Course Description TBA

MUS 84200: Seminar in Theory/Analysis: Comparative Analysis
Prof. Kofi Agawu, Thursdays, 10 a.m.- 1 p.m., Room 3491, 3 Credits

 Course Description TBA

MUS 82500: Seminar in Theory: History of Music Theory I
Prof. Ruth DeFord, Fridays, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m., Room 3389, 3 credits

Course Description TBA

MUS 88200: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Sound in Society
Prof. Eliot Bates, Mondays, 2 p.m. – 5 p.m., Room 3389, 3 Credits (Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission)

Course Description TBA

MUS 85900: Seminar in Music Theory: Adv Schenkerian Analysis
Prof William Rothstein, Wednesdays, 2 p.m. – 5 p.m., Room 3491, 3 credits

Course Description TBA

PHIL 77600: Philosophy of Motion Pictures
Profs. Carroll & Prinz, Tuesdays, 2:00 P.M. -4:00 P.M., Room TBA, 4 credits

In the PHILOSOPHY OF MOTION PICTURES we will canvass major topics in the field; these may include: the ontology of motion pictures (including television and video); the question of medium specificity; the objectivity of nonfiction cinema; the nature of the motion picture image; how emotions are conveyed and aroused in motion pictures (including the role of attention); motion picture narration; motion pictures and morality (including questions of race and gender, the attraction to villains and antiheroes, and the impact of violence); cultural differences in motion pictures; motion pictures as art; the philosophy of video games; the relation of philosophy and motion pictures; and evaluating the moving image. The course has no prerequisites. The course requirement is a research paper due at the end of the semester.

PHIL 77700: Critical Social Theory
Prof. Gould, Tuesdays, 4:15 P.M.-6:15​ P.M, Room TBA, 4 credits
 
Theorists across various traditions have put forward critical perspectives to disarm or deconstruct oppressive modes of theory and practice. Constructively, they have sought forms of knowledge with an “emancipatory” dimension, which is in accordance with positive norms like justice or equal freedom and undistorted by the ideas and interests of powerful economic or social agents or institutions. However, the notion of what is “critical,” or what is involved in offering an effective critique, has remained insufficiently analyzed. Efforts to embed knowledge and norms in social and historical contexts pose philosophical challenges of their own, such as how to avoid having normative critiques devolve into mere historicism or relativism.

This seminar will explore the notion of critique and attempt to achieve some clarity on the parameters of critical social theory: first, by considering the origins of this project in Marx’s dialectical method, its development in Lukacs and Gramsci (in regard to ideology and power), and in the critical theory of Horkheimer, Marcuse, and the early Habermas, and more recently in Jaeggi. We will go on to consider the distinctive approach to revolution and critique found in Arendt, and the original features introduced by feminist thought, especially by standpoint theory (Hartsock et al), along with the provocations of Foucault and the recent call to “decolonize” theory by Allen. Contemporary efforts in analytic political philosophy to appeal to nonideal theory instead of, or in addition to, ideal theory also bear scrutiny. As we proceed, we can consider some possibilities for integrating these diverse approaches in new ways. The course will then turn to a focus on how norms and forms of knowledge emerge and change with transformations in social practices (Wartofsky), as an enterprise of political and historical epistemology (beyond existing social epistemologies). Through all these various analyses, we will explicitly confront the questions of how normativity can persist without wholly devolving to social context, and also how we can develop critical perspectives while avoiding imperialist critiques from above.

Finally, the course will take up three current practical challenges as test cases for effective social theoretical response. The first concerns the need for a critical democratic theory that takes the political economy of capitalism seriously, investigating how economic and political power can distort or diminish democracy (Gould), and relatedly how to make room for oppositional consciousness (Mansbridge), counterpower, and resistance. The second challenge arises in regard to the cross-cultural understanding and critique of practices confronting women (from femicide to sex trafficking to the #MeToo movement), where deference to those affected is obviously important but insufficient for social and political transformation. A final issue is how to differentiate negative uses of solidarity, as in contemporary white supremacist and nationalist movements, from the constructive solidarities that may characterize liberatory social movements, as in the cases of mutual aid efforts in the United States and refugee support networks in southern Europe and elsewhere.
Throughout the seminar, students will be encouraged to relate the course materials to their ongoing research through an oral presentation and an analytical term paper and will be expected to be active participants in class discussions.

PHIL 76200: Africana Philosophy
Prof. Mills, Mondays, 4:15 P.M. -6:15 P.M., Room TBA, 4 credits
 
“Africana Philosophy” is the term that has been coined to designate philosophy in Africa and the African Diaspora (primarily the Caribbean and the two Americas, North and South, but in principle extending to Europe and Asia also), both in the pre-modern and modern periods. In modernity, this philosophy will be fundamentally shaped by the experience of transnational racial subordination: racial chattel slavery in the Atlantic world, colonialism, and then continuing diasporic racial oppression in nominally post-slavery and post-colonial societies. Thus, it is arguably in modernity that a subset of Africana Philosophy becomes “Black” Philosophy. As such, black philosophers have played a crucial role in pioneering what is now known as Critical Philosophy of Race: the philosophical examination of race from a “critical,” anti-racist perspective. This course will focus on modern Africana Philosophy, as it has developed over the past few hundred years, looking at classic figures from the past (Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, and others) as well as contemporary thinkers of the present, as they have grappled with both traditional and non-traditional philosophical questions arising from the challenge of understanding modern society’s actual social ontology, dealing with existential trauma, developing an emancipatory political theory, and formulating appropriate epistemologies, ethics, and aesthetics for a racialized world.

PHIL 76100: Hegel’s “System” of Philosophy
Prof. Nuzzo, Mondays, 11:45 A.M. -1:45 P.M., Room TBA, 4 credits

The course offers an introduction to Hegel's idea of philosophy as "system." We will study his "dialectic" as the "method" responsible for articulating the "system" of philosophy in the Logic, the Philosophy of Nature, and the Philosophy of Spirit. The course will be based on close readings of selections from the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Logic, the Philosophy of Spirit (Encyclopedia), and the Lectures on Aesthetics and the History of Philosophy.

PSC 71902 (Crosslist with HIST 71000 & IDS MALS 78500): Comparative Revolutions: from the English Revolutions of 1688 to the Arab Spring
Prof. Rosenblatt, Wednesdays, 6:30pm–8:30pm, 3 credits

What makes a revolution a revolution? Scholarship has recently moved away from social-scientific, Marxist-inspired explanations to approaches that explore how revolutionaries themselves understood what they were doing, how they interpreted their contexts, and how their ideas shaped their actions. With such questions in mind, we will look at and compare a number of revolutions, including the so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, the American, French and Haitian Revolutions, the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the recent Arab Spring. In the eyes of their participants, what characteristics did these revolutions share? What might they have learned and borrowed from each other? Is there something we can call a revolutionary “script”?

 

PSC 71908 (Crosslist HIST. 72800): Neofascism: from the New Right to the Alt-Right
Prof. Wolin, Mondays, 6:30pm–8:30pm, 3 credits

How did the far-right reestablish political legitimacy after its crushing defeat in 1945? How did it recertify the discredited ideas of race, hierarchy, anti-parliamentarism, autocracy, and patriarchy after seemingly hitting rock bottom? To what extent – and by what methods – have its efforts to counteract the intellectual hegemony of left-wing thought by popularizing a “Gramscism of the right” been successful? To what extent have New Right ideas influenced the political self-understanding of the leading authoritarian populist parties, whose proliferation has been one of the hallmarks of twenty-first century global politics? Finally, to what extent have the depredations of “neo-liberalism” prepared the terrain for the New Right’s success?

Here, it is worth noting that the slogan, the “Great Replacement,” which was invoked by the mass murderers in Utoya, Norway, Christ Church, NZ, El Paso, and Pittsburgh, was originally a New Right slogan. One explanation for the New Right’s success pertains to its successful rehabilitation of German conservative revolutionary thought from the 1920s: the political doctrines of Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, etc., while cleansing their work of its ties to Nazism. Finally, at what point in time did the New Right worldview cross the Atlantic to provide ideological support for the Alt-Right? In what ways do the New Right and the Alt-Right differ from the traditional Right? Did the Alt-Right contribute to Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election? Is the Alt-Right still a force in contemporary American politics, or was it merely a passing political fad?

PSC 71904 (Crosslist PHIL 77700): Critical Social Theory
Prof. Gould, Tuesdays, 4:15pm–6:15pm, 3 credits

Course Description: This seminar will explore the notion of critique and attempt to achieve some clarity on the parameters of critical social theory: first, by considering the origins of this project in Marx’s dialectical method, its development in Lukacs and Gramsci (in regard to ideology and power), and in the critical theory of Horkheimer, Marcuse, and the early Habermas, and more recently in Jaeggi. We will go on to consider the distinctive approach to revolution and critique found in Arendt, and the original features introduced by feminist thought, especially by standpoint theory (Hartsock et al), along with the provocations of Foucault and the recent call to “decolonize” theory by Allen. Contemporary efforts in analytic political philosophy to appeal to nonideal theory instead of, or in addition to, ideal theory also bear scrutiny. As we proceed, we can consider some possibilities for integrating these diverse approaches in new ways. The course will then turn to a focus on how norms and forms of knowledge emerge and change with transformations in social practices (Wartofsky), as an enterprise of political and historical epistemology (beyond existing social epistemologies). Through all these various analyses, we will explicitly confront the questions of how normativity can persist without wholly devolving to social context, and also how we can develop critical perspectives while avoiding imperialist critiques from above.

Finally, the course will take up three current practical challenges as test cases for effective social theoretical response. The first concerns the need for a critical democratic theory that takes the political economy of capitalism seriously, investigating how economic and political power can distort or diminish democracy (Gould), and relatedly how to make room for oppositional consciousness (Mansbridge), counterpower, and resistance. The second challenge arises in regard to the cross-cultural understanding and critique of practices confronting women (from femicide to sex trafficking to the #MeToo movement), where deference to those affected is obviously important but insufficient for social and political transformation. A final issue is how to differentiate negative uses of solidarity, as in contemporary white supremacist and nationalist movements, from the constructive solidarities that may characterize liberatory social movements, as in the cases of mutual aid efforts in the United States and refugee support networks in southern Europe and elsewhere. Throughout the seminar, students will be encouraged to relate the course materials to their ongoing research through an oral presentation and an analytical term paper and will be expected to be active participants in class discussions.
 

PSC 80603: Democratic Socialism
Prof. Buck-Morss, Tuesdays, 2:00pm–4:00pm, 4 credits

Course Description: This seminar focuses on Democratic Socialism as it is understood today. In this election year, we will consider not only what it means as policy, but also how to get there. What does socialism have to do with freedom? If socialism necessitates equality (of classes, races, genders), how is equality to be democratically achieved? Is revolution meaningful in this context? What is the role of social movements and/or political parties? What is the role of self-interest? Class interest? Disinterest? Is the overthrow of capitalism necessary for democratic socialist goals? How does one educate for socialism? What has art/music/performance to do with democratic socialism, and how do internet practices and (social) media become its ally? How does the aesthetic avant-garde relate to the political vanguard? What is the role of legislation for democratic socialism? Green new deal? Universal health care? Food Security? How does democratic socialism respond to national borders vs. open borders? What is socialist trans-national solidarity? What is democratic socialism’s response to the actuality of global pandemics?

Topics include: State socialism; anarcho-socialism; socialism as social justice; socialism as the antidote to neo-liberalism; socialism as ownership of the means of production; surveillance and socialism; media and mediations; cultural Marxism and its critics.

Readings include: Thucydides on civil war; Georg Lukács on class consciousness; Judith Butler on Assemblage; Jodi Dean on Crowds and Party; Naomi Klein on Corona Capitalism. And much more.

PSC 80608: Political Theory of Police
Prof. Feldman, Wednesdays, 4:15p.m. -6:15 p.m., 4 credits

Course Description: This course will explore both how police is conceptualized in different approaches to political theory, and how different theoretical traditions can contribute to an understanding of institutionalized police forces. Topics will include: the extent to which police constitutes a distinct kind of power and formation of state violence, deeply implicated in social hierarchies; policing’s relation to the institutions, norms and practices of law, of democracy and of war; the “procedural justice” approach to police reform; and the police abolition movement. We will examine some foundational accounts of police power broadly construed, including work by Michel Foucault and the “new police science”, recent studies of the transnational nexus of war/police/counter-insurgency within US empire, normative democratic theory work on deliberative encounters between officers and members of the public, and contemporary political theory work on police and other street-level bureaucrats incorporating ethnographic methods. This is a research seminar, and students will complete a semester-long research project. Grades will be based on that project, participation in seminar discussion, and a paper/presentation on one of the week’s readings.

PSC 80607: Global Political Thought
Prof. Mehta, Wednesdays, 2:00 p.m.–4:00p.m., 4 credits

Course Description: This seminar will consider the debates, thought and ideas of thinkers from various parts of the world – mainly in the 20th century, but not exclusively. The thinkers will include Gandhi, Nehru, J.S. Mill, Leopold Senghor Aime Cesaire, Martin Luther King Jr. It will also consider the context which may have informed them – such as colonialism, the late 19th century Victorian consensus, struggle for civil rights and issues of identity, but in the main it will be organized around texts.

SOC 70100: Development of Sociological Theory (Theory I)
Prof. Trimbur, Tuesdays, 2:00 P.M.-4:00 P.M., 3 credits.

Course Description TBA

SOC 85600: Social Movements in Latin America
Prof. Jack Hammond, Thursdays, 2:00-4:00pm, 3 credits

This course will examine social movements in Latin America since the wave of democratization following the authoritarian period of the 1970s and 1980s. We will highlight the period of democratization, neoliberalism and austerity and the following period a return to developmental populism the 21st century, emphasizing the Pink Tide, horizontalism, resistance movements, digital organizing, globalization and transnational movements. In studying these movements, we will examine the applicability of North- based theories of social movements and the alternatives which have been proposed or may be needed.

SOC 86800: Culture and Politics
Prof. James M. Jasper, Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15, 3 credits

This course will examine meaning in the construction of political subjects, actions, and institutions, taking culture (including morality, emotions, and cognition) as an aspect of all social life. We will also examine interpretive methods as especially appropriate to cultural-political analysis. It focuses more on the culture of politics than on the politics of culture.​

SOC 84600: Within-National Inequalities: From Pareto to Piketty
Prof. Branko Milanovic, Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30pm, 3 credits

The objective of the course is to review and analyze different theories about the forces that influence inter-personal income distribution within a single policy-making unit (that is, within a nation-state).

The first such theory was developed by Vilfredo Pareto more than 100 years ago. Pareto believes that income distribution does not change regardless of a social system and level of development. Simon Kuznets, in the 1950s, posited, on the contrary, a theory where income inequality evolves as societies get richer. Jan Tinbergen, in the 1970s, argued that the level of inequality is determined by the two opposing forces of education and technological change. More recently, Thomas Piketty argued that low growth combined with high returns to capital predisposes advanced economies to high levels of inequality. In 2016, Milanovic introduced “Kuznets waves” claiming that structural transformations (from agriculture to manufacturing, and more recently from manufacturing to services) are associated with increases in inter-personal inequality.

These theories will be considered on the real-world examples of inequality changes in the United States and other rich OECD countries, China and Brazil. The class shall focus especially on the recent evolution of income and wealth inequality in the United States and Piketty’s analytical contributions.

The class is empirical, and at times mathematical, but does not require any prior specific knowledge of the issues nor techniques. It is recommended for students of economics, political science, and sociology.

THEA 85700: Contemporary Performance and Public Space
Professor Bertie Ferdman, Wednesdays, 4:15 p.m. – 6:15 p.m.

This course will explore contemporary performance practices that take place outside traditional theatre buildings and that engage with the experience of space and/or situation as an integral component to the content and structure of the work. Through visual art, theatre, and performance studies, we will address the inherent interdisciplinarity of such site-situated performance practices, and we will pay special attention to those that take place in urban public spaces.

We will look at examples from the United States to lay out the main theoretical challenges in analyzing site-situated performances. We will then turn to examples from urban centers in France, Germany, Chile, Peru, and Mexico, locations that provoke the central questions of the course: What are approaches to site-based performance dramaturgies, and how have these changed over the last four decades? What constitutes “public space”? Who is included/excluded in notions of “the public”? How do such practices navigate the ethics associated with performance actions in public spaces? How do these performances engage with the different kinds of publics they encounter? Performance examples will be primarily from the 1980s to the present, but we will also consider historical precursors from the ’60s and ’70s, including Happenings, Situationists International, and political street theatre.

To approach such live performances, which we will read about and/or view through documentation, we will use theoretical readings on the public sphere, spatial politics, historical reenactment, social practice, gentrification, and urban aesthetics by the following authors: Christopher Balme, Claire Bishop, Rosalyn Deutsche, Susan Haedicke, David Harvey, Jen Harvie, Shannon Jackson, Henri Lefebvre, Michael McKinnie, Rebecca Schneider, Neil Smith, Kim Solga, Cathy Turner, and Nicolas Whybrow, among others. Course requirements will include a class presentation and a research paper.

THEA 86000: Festive and Ritual Performance
Professor Erika Lin, Tuesdays, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.

This course will examine theories and practices of festive and ritual performance in a range of times and places and will explore their implications for theatre as both an aesthetic object and an efficacious performative enactment. Topics for discussion may include: religious ritual and popular devotion; dance, gesture, and movement; games and sports; roleplaying, especially in relation to race, gender, sexual identity, and class; icons and objects; magic, astrology, and witchcraft; birth and funeral rites; nonlinear temporalities; ritual space and place; holidays and calendar customs; animals and environment; food and drink; violence and combat; erotics and sexuality. Each class session will bring together disparate theatre and performance practices by centering on a particular theme. For instance, we might consider Mardi Gras and Carnival in relation to racial impersonation; movement and religious space in Christian and Hindu processional drama; audience participation and community formation in contemporary queer theatre; site-specific performance, ecocriticism, and the history of modern pagan witchcraft; poverty and charity in mumming and other holiday begging customs; mock combat, blood sports, and dramas of ritual sacrifice; and animal masks and puppetry in diverse dance traditions. Culturally specific theatre and performance practices will be analyzed in relation to theoretical work by writers such as Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, Max Harris, Claire Sponsler, Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Mikhail Bakhtin, Catherine Bell, Kay Turner, Marina Warner, Johan Huizinga, Brian Sutton-Smith, Carlo Ginzburg, Peter Burke, and Ronald Hutton. Evaluation: active class participation, short weekly response papers, possible brief in-class presentation, research proposal with annotated bibliography, and a final paper.

UED 71200 (De)Constructing Black Girlhoods
Prof. Deckman, Tuesdays, 4:15 PM-6:15 PM, 3 Credits
 
This course will examine the shifting constructions of Black girlhood(s) and the emerging field of Black girlhood studies, including theories derived from critical race and Black feminisms, methods, and analytical approaches to the study of Black girlhood. Further, the class will interrogate Black girlhood as a political category of identity and symbol of agency, addressing such topics as foundations of the field, utility of the categories of “girl” and “woman” and representation of Black girlhood in academic literature and popular culture. As such, we will consider the multiplicity of the Black girlhoods as embodied and experience through, for example, gender, sexuality, and geography. This course will aim to think through and embody theories and practices—emancipatory, humanizing, radical acts—as produced by Black girls, artists, and scholars.  Class members will apply their theoretical understandings to final projects in which they either propose a research design informed by Black girlhood studies or conduct preliminary analysis of data drawing on related theories.

UED 72100 A Critical Exploration of Educational Ideologies
Prof. Gonzalez, Thursdays, 4:15 P.M.- 6:15 P.M., 3 Credits 
 
In this course we examine commonly held/socially constructed beliefs about the nature of teaching and learning as well as our respective disciplines/areas (ie. mathematics, social studies, bilingual education, museum education). That is, we consider how educational ideologies get thickened over time and explore how these drive student’s developing academic identities as well as decisions concerning teaching, learning, educational reform, curriculum, and educational policies.  Using critical theory and intersectionality as theoretical lenses we unpack and challenge these beliefs as we widen what it means to teach and learn in our respective fields. We pay particular attention to the impact on students from traditionally marginalized communities as well as on urban areas and social justice education.
 
As an example, the instructor’s own prior research shows that individuals from all walks of life and all levels of educational and career success, openly admit they are bad at math. In contrast, most would be embarrassed to say that they cannot read. This seemingly trivial admission has a profound impact on mathematics education. Our well-meaning discussions about improving mathematics achievement are tempered by the socially accepted belief that failure in math is to be expected. That is, this phrase normalizes failure and, further, places failure squarely on the individual ensuring a narrowing of the conversation that keeps us from considering what larger social forces may be responsible for the reality that many do not excel in the subject.
 
After an introduction to the theoretical frameworks that will be used, the instructor will provide additional readings that will be used to facilitate a discussion around a specific social construct with respect to mathematics education, her research area. In much the same way, students will be expected to propose readings and lead a class discussion for their specific disciplines.

UED 71200 Co-constructing Theory with Data in Educational Research
Prof. Collett, Thursdays, 6:30 P.M. – 8:30 P.M., 3 credits

This course is designed to help students understand the intersection of theoretical frameworks and the process of data analysis.  It is designed to support second and third students to use theoretical frameworks dominant in education [e.g. sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 1978);  positioning theory (Harré & van Langenhove, 1999); Dialogism (Bahktin, 1981)] to create data analysis tools of layered coding (Saldana, 2013) to elucidate important findings across educational settings.  Students will analyze and deconstruct different theoretical approaches to understand how to create methodological tools to identify novel findings and conclusions.

Course Listing

CTCP 71088: Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
GC:, Mondays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 3, credits,  Prof. John Brenkman

Elective Courses

ANTH 72300: Ethnography of Space & Place, GC: Wednesday, 11:45 am – 1:45 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Setha Low  

ANTH 77200: Narrative & Political Economy, GC: Tuesday, 11:45am-1:45pm, 3 credits, Prof. Sara Muir

ANTH 81800: Reading the Grundrisse, GC: Tuesdays, 6:30-8:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. David Harvey  

ANTH 82100: The Ethics and Politics of Care, GC: TH. 4:15-6:15pm, 3 credits, Profs. Jeff Maskovsky and Danilyn Rutherford

ANTH 85000: Archaeological Theory, GC: Tuesdays, 11:45-1:45pm, 3 credits, Prof. Alexander Bauer

ART 81000: Love, Metaphor and the Image in Mughal India GC: Wed. 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Molly Aitken
 
ART 86020: Magic, Socialist, and other Realisms GC: Wed. 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Romy Golan
 
CL 80100: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, GC: Monday, 6:30-8:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin

CL 89000: Reading Benjamin Reading Baudelaire, GC; Mondays: 4:15pm-6:15pm, Prof. Joshua Wilner, 2,4 credits
 
CL 89200: History of Literary Theory & Criticism II, GC:  Tuesday, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 4 credits, Prof. Martin Elsky

CLAS 75200: Aristotle and Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, GC: Monday and Tuesday, 4:15-6:15 PM, 3 credits, Prof. Vasiliou

EES 79903: Critical Geographies of Human Rights [62246], GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Carmalt, Course open to EES Students only
 
EES 79903: Ethnography of Space and Place [62250], GC: R, 11:45-1:45 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Low, Course open to EES Students only
 
EES 79903: Constructing Urban Futures [62247], GC: T, 11:45 am – 1:45 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Stabrowski, Course open to EES Students only
 
EES 79003: Reading the Grundrisse [62283], GC: T, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30, The People’s Forum, 3 credits, Prof. Harvey, Course open to EES Students only
 
ENGL 80600. Theory of Lyric. John Brenkman. Wednesdays 4:15PM-6:15PM. 2/4 credits.
 
ENGL 89000: Introduction to Engaged Teaching and Transformative Learning in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Cathy Davidson and Eduardo Vianna. Thursdays 2:00PM-4:00PM. 2/4 credits.
 
ENGL 86800: Biopunk and other Speculative Fictions. Ashley Dawson. Fridays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits.
 
ENGL 82100. Early Modern Embodiment: Race, Gender, and Sexuality. Mario DiGangi. Wednesdays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits
 
ENGL 89500: Knowledge Infrastructures. Matt Gold. Wednesdays 4:15PM-6:15PM. 2/4 credits
 
ENGL 84200. Romantic/Moving/Break: Migration and the Worldly Imagination. Olivera Jokic. Tuesdays 4:15PM-6:15PM.
 
ENGL 82100. Death to Tyrants! Feisal Mohamed. Thursdays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits.
 
ENGL 80500. Feminist Criticism in Victorian Fiction: Recovery Feminism, and After. Talia Schaffer. Monday 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits
 
ENGL 84200. Anthropocene Investigations. Alexander Schlutz. Mondays 4:15PM-6:15PM. 2/4 credits.
 
ENGL 79010. Language, Literacies, and Citizenship. Amy Wan. Mondays 2:00PM-4:00PM. 2/4 credits.
 
French 87000 : On Affect (Passion, Sentiment, Emotion): In Theory, History, Texts, Professor Domna Stanton, Tuesday, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2 or 4 Credits.
 
French 71000 : Espaces, exclusions, identités de la fin du Moyen Âge jusqu’au XVIe siècle (taught in French), Professor Francesca Sautman, Wednesday, 6:30pm-8:30pm,  2 or 4 Credits.
 
HIST 75500 : Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: Slavery and Freedom in North America and the Indian Ocean, GC: Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Gunja SenGupta 
 
HIST 74900: Race, Gender and American Political Development, GC: Tuesdays, 11:45 am - 1:45 pm, 3 credits, Profs. David Waldstreicher & Ruth O’Brien
 
HIST 72400: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, GC: Mondays, 6:30-8:30 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin
 
HIST 72100: Key Concepts in the Western Tradition, GC: Mondays, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Helena Rosenblatt
 
SPAN 87000: The Neoliberal Promise of Happiness and Ugly Feelings: Post-Utopic Fiction and Film from Central America, GC: Tuesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Prof. Magdalena Perkowska
 
SPAN 87000: Raiding the Archive: Strategies from the Latin American Narrative Tradition, GC: Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Prof. Carlos Riobó

MUS 83100: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Readings in Musical Ethnography, GC: Wednesdays, 10 a.m.- 1 p.m., 3 credits, Professor Jane Sugarman

MUS 84200: Seminar in Theory/Analysis: Studies in Musical Semiotics, GC: Wednesdays, 10 a.m. - 1 p.m., 3 credits, Professor Kofi Agawu

MUS 84300: Seminar in Theory/Analysis: Schenker II, GC: Wednesdays. 2 – 5 p.m., 3 credits, Professor William Rothstein

MUS 84100: Seminar in Theory/Analysis: Analysis of Pop and Rock Music, GC: Mondays, 6:30– 9:00 p.m., 3 credits, Professor Mark Spicer

MUS 86100: Seminar in Musicology: Adorno on Music, GC: Tuesdays, 2:00 – 5:00 p.m., 3 credits, Professor Chadwick Jenkins

PHIL 78600: Decolonial Feminist Ethics and Epistemology, Profs. Alcoff & Khader, 4 credits. Mon. 4:15-6:15
 
PHIL 77700: Neglected Topics in the Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Prof. Carroll, 4 credits, Tues. 11:45-1:45
 
PHIL 77300: Linguistic Pragmatism, Prof. Devitt, 4 credits, Tues. 6:30-8:30

PHIL 77600: Contractarianism and its Critics, Prof. Mills, 4 credits, Mon. 6:30-8:30
 
PHIL 76600: Philosophical Issues in Archaeology, Prof. Neale, 4 credits, Mon. & Tues. 4:15-6:15 [NOTE: This course meets twice a week for half the semester, from January 27 to March 16.]
 
PHIL 77200: Emotion, Prof. Prinz, 4 credits, Tues. 2:00-4:00
 
PHIL 76100: Hobbes & Spinoza, Prof. Steinberg, 4 credits, Weds. 11:45-1:45
 
PHIL 76000: Aristotle and Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, Prof. Vasiliou, 4 credits, Mon. & Tues. 4:15-6:15
 
PSC 72009: Gender, Race and American Political Development (AP), O’Brien & Waldstreicher, 3 credits, Tuesday 11:45am–1:45pm
 
PSC 71901: Contemporary Political Theory (PT), Prof. Marasco, 3 credits, Monday 11:45am–1:45pm (Cross list with WSCP 81000)
 
PSC 80602: Benjamin as Method (PT), Prof. Buck-Morss, 4 credits, Tuesday 2:00pm–4:00pm

PSC 80304: Ancient Greek Political Thought (PT), Prof. Mehta, 4 credits, Wednesday 2:00pm–4:00pm
 
PSC 71906: Machiavelli (PT), Prof. Fontana, 3 credits, Thursday 6:30pm–8:30pm
 
PSC 71908 (Crosslist with HIST. 72400): The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (PT), Prof. Wolin, 3 credits, Monday 6:30pm–8:30pm
 
SOC 85200: Transnational Social Movements, Prof. Carolina Bank Muñoz, 3 credits, Thursdays, 2:00- 4:00pm
 
SOC 82800: Capitalism, Race and Class, Prof. Charles Post, 3 credits, Mondays, 6:30-8:30 pm
 
SOC 8000: Foucault, Bourdieu and Baudrillard: Culture, Power, and Sexuality in the Global Era, Prof. Marnia Lazreg, Mondays, 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits
 
THEA 70600: History of Theatrical Theory, (Professor Peter Eckersall), Tuesdays, 4:15 p.m. to 6:15 p.m, 3 credits.
           
THEA 71400: Aesthetics of the Film (This course is sponsored by Film Studies Certificate Program), Professor Jerry Carlson, Wednesdays, 4:15 p.m. to 6:15 p.m., 3 credits.

THEA 81500: Seminar in Film Studies: Film/Media Theory Strategies of Resistance, Prof. Amy Herzog, Thursdays, 11:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., 3 credits.
 
UED 75200: Critical Perspectives on Hope, Love and Care in Urban Schooling, Prof. Rivera-McCutchen, 

UED 75200: What’s Foucault Got To Do With It?: Race, Gender and Neoliberalism As Educational Spaces, Prof. Sonu, Thursdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m.

UED 75200: Race/ism and Intersectionality in Urban Education: Theory, Praxis, and Transformation, Prof. Deckman, Tuesdays, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

UED 75200: Approaches to Discourse Analysis in Language and Literacy Research, Prof. Schieble, Tuesdays, 4:15 – 6:15 p.m.

UED 75200: Critical University Studies, Prof. Brier, Mondays, 4:15 – 6:15 p.m.

Course Descriptions

CTCP 71088: Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices, GC:, Mondays, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 3, credits,  Prof. John Brenkman

Starting from the tension between Marx and Weber, the seminar will explore debates and developments that inform critical theory today, focused around salient conflicts in modern and contemporary thought: 
(1) How do conflicting paradigms of society as system (Luhmann), as norm-governed institutions (Habermas), as symbolic-institutional habitus and practices (Bourdieu), or as actor-networks (Latour) bear on interdisciplinary research? (2) How to conceptualize the aesthetic and ethical dimensions of everyday life in contemporary affluent societies (Bourdieu, Sloterdijk, Habermas, Fraser, Crenshaw, Ngai)? (3) How does the Anthropocene, as concept and actuality, open concepts of the human, nature, and technology to new questioning (Chakrabarty, Latour, Sloterdijk, Descola, Arendt, Morton, Colebrook,Jonas)? 
Texts: Garth and Mills (eds.), From Max Weber(Oxford); Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life(Polity); Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations(Stanford); Philippe Descola, The Ecology of Others(Prickly Paradigm). 
Excerpts and essays by Marx, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour, Nancy Fraser, Kimberle Crenshaw, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sianne Ngai, Hans Jonas, Timothy Morton, Claire Colebrook, and others will be provided via Blackboard.

This course requires special permission to enroll by contacting the certificate coordinator, Prof. John Brenkman. Not open to First year students.

Elective Courses

ANTH 72300: Ethnography of Space & Place, GC: Wednesday, 11:45 am – 1:45 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Setha Low  

This section open to Anthropology students only; course is cross-listed with PSY and EES.
Introduction:  The study of the city has undergone a transformation during the past 20 years integrating ever wider theoretical perspectives from anthropology, cultural geography, political economy, urban sociology, and regional and city planning, and expanding its attention to the city as physical, architectural and virtual form.  An emphasis on spatial relations and consumption as well as urban planning and design decision-making provides new insights into material, ideological and metaphorical aspects of the urban environment.  Reliance on ethnography of space and place allows researchers to present an experience-near account of everyday life in urban housing or local markets, while at the same time addressing macro-processes such as globalization and the new urban social order.

This course sketches some of the methodological and theoretical implications of the ethnographic study of the contemporary city using anthropological tools of participant observation, interviewing, behavioral mapping, and theories of space and place to illuminate spaces in modern/post-modern cities and their transformations.  In doing so, I wish to underscore links between the shape, vision and experience of cities and the meanings that their citizens read off screens and streets into their own lives. It begins with a discussion of spatializing culture, that is the way that culture is produced and expressed spatially, and the way that space reflects and changes culture. The subsequent weeks explore different theoretical dimensions, embodied space, the social construction of space, the social production of space, language and discursive space, and digital or ambiguous space. The course also explores a number of special topics including how urban fear is transforming the built environment and the nature of public space both in the ways that we are conceiving the re/building our cities, and in the ways that residential suburbs are being transformed into gated and walled enclaves of private privilege and public exclusion.  The privatization of public space first signaled the profound changes that American cities are undergoing in terms of their physical, social and cultural design.  Currently, however, increased fear of violence and others particularly in urban areas is producing new community and public space forms; locked neighborhoods, blank faced malls in urban areas, armed guard dogs on public plazas, and limited access housing developments are just some examples of how the cultural mood is being “written” on the landscape.       

ANTH 77200: Narrative & Political Economy, GC: Tuesday, 11:45am-1:45pm, 3 credits, Prof. Sara Muir
Fulfills Linguistic Anthropology subfield core course requirement.

ANTH 81800: Reading the Grundrisse, GC: Tuesdays, 6:30-8:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. David Harvey 
Cross listed w/EES; seats are limited.
Meets at The People’s Forum, 320 West 37th Street. See https://peoplesforum.org/ for more info.
The course entails a close reading of Marx's Grundrisse.

ANTH 82100: The Ethics and Politics of Care, GC: TH. 4:15-6:15pm, 3 credits, Profs. Jeff Maskovsky and Danilyn Rutherford

Instructor’s permission required. Please email jmaskovsky@gc.cuny.edu with a brief statement explaining your interest in the course.

ANTH 85000: Archaeological Theory, GC: Tuesdays, 11:45-1:45pm, 3 credits, Prof. Alexander Bauer

Required for students in the Archaeology subfield who have not yet taken the First Exam.

ART 81000: Love, Metaphor and the Image in Mughal India GC: Wed. 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Molly Aitken
 
This is a class about what images made possible for South Asia’s polyglot, multiethnic, religiously diverse society under Mughal imperial rule (1556-1858). The pervasive theme of love in Mughal fine arts suspended cultural differences in poetics, intellectual play, and mysticism to result in a distinctive Indian aesthetics that emphasized emotional affect. We will follow the theme of love as it circulated through the closely interrelated mediums of painting, poetry and music. Gender and sexuality will be front and center of our discussions, along with self-fashioning and the homosocial bonds fostered through connoisseurship. We will look at the staging and restaging of desire, often through metaphor and beauty, as well as through fantasies about what images are and how powerful they can be. Throughout, we keep in view the fate of Mughal arts and aesthetics in the colonial period, and we revisit twentieth-century art histories for a deeper understanding of how the discipline has engaged with South Asia’s non-western, premodern visual traditions. Class discussions and assignments encourage students to ask new questions and to explore new methods, especially with a view to globalizing the discipline.
 
Auditors allowed with permission
 
ART 86020: Magic, Socialist, and other Realisms GC: Wed. 2:00-4:00 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Romy Golan
 
Figurative painting stood in a false position after abstraction and photomontage in the 1920s. But it registered like no other art form both the condition of painting as a medium, and its relation to the politics of its times. From the 1920s to the 1960s artists on opposite ends of the political spectrum recruited realism for their cause. A new reading of realism might, for instance, throw some light on an episode such as this: in 1930, the French Surrealist writer Louis Aragon penned the essay In Defiance of Painting to accompany a Parisian exhibition that revisited, radically, the entire history of the first three decades of the century via collage. Less than two years later Aragon was speaking in Moscow at a conference on Socialist Realism. Primary sources will include texts by Franz Roh, Massimo Bontempelli, Louis Aragon, André Breton, Roger Caillois, Berthold Brecht, Andrei Zhdanov. Secondary literature will include Erich Auerbach, Mimesis; Helmut Lethen, Cool Conduct; Devin Fore, Realism after Modernism; Jacques Rancière, The lost Thread; and Frederic Jameson, Antinomies of Realism.
 
No auditors allowed

CL 80100: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, GC: Monday, 6:30-8:30pm, 3 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin
 
In the annals of twentieth-century political thought, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) carved out a unique and enduring niche. Today, some 40 years after her death, her political philosophy seems more relevant than ever. In 1951, she wrote the first important book on totalitarianism, perhaps the central political problem of the twentieth century. Seven years later, Arendt published her landmark contribution to European political thought, the Human Condition, in which she seeks to probe and to delineate the existential bases of human freedom. Avoiding the liberal political idiom of "rights," Arendt broaches this theme in terms of the ontological values of "plurality" and "action" – constituents of human distinctiveness that Arendt traces back to the glories of Periclean Athens. Nevertheless, she also found important modern political corollaries to "action" in the fleeting experience of direct (that is, non-representative) democracy: in the notion of "local democracy" that flourished in pre-revolutionary America and in the emergence of "workers consuls" in the course of the European revolutions of 1905, 1918, and 1956.   Our main thematic focus will concern Arendt’s central contributions to twentieth century political thought: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),The Human Condition (1958),andOn Revolution (1962).However, as preparation for this encounter, attention to Arendt’s formative philosophical and political influences is indispensable. Therefore, in conjunction with these works, we will also selectively read a number of background texts that will assist us in clarifying the conceptual framework that Arendt develops in her mature political works. Essential in this regard are key texts by Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) and by Arendt’s legendary German mentor, Martin Heidegger (Being and Time). At specific junctures, Arendt’s voluminous correspondence with another celebrated mentor, Karl Jaspers, will also guide us.   Finally, the “Arendt renaissance” of recent years has been punctuated by important cinematic representations of her life and thought – a dimension of the international Hannah Arendt reception story that we will analyze and reflect upon in conclusion.
  
CL 89000: Reading Benjamin Reading Baudelaire, GC; Mondays: 4:15pm-6:15pm, Prof. Joshua Wilner, 2,4 credits
 
The latter phase of Walter Benjamin's critical work seeks to amalgate a highly individual understanding of literary language - itself the heterogeneous product of an esoteric hermeneutics and a concept of criticism derived from early German Romanticism - with a Marxist historical materialism. Central to this project were the writings and figure of Charles Baudelaire, "A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism" in Benjamin's formulation. Benjamin's engagement with Baudelaire begins with his 1923 translation of "Tableaux Parisiens," for which his essay on "The Task of the Translator" was written as a preface, and continues through the unfinished Arcades Project, of which "convolute J" on Baudelaire is by far the largest section. In this course we will trace the evolution of Benjamin's reading of Baudelaire, beginning with his 1923 translation of Tableaux Parisiens, which his essay on "The Task of the Translator" was written as a preface, and continuing through the unfinished Arcades Project, of which "convolute J" on Baudelaire is by far the largest part. Our aim in doing so will be two-fold: to take Benjamin as a guide to reading Baudelaire, of course, but also to use the work on Baudelaire as a way of studying Benjamin's critical procedures. Readings in Baudelaire will include all of the poetry and prose poetry, and much of the critical writings. Readings in Benjamin will include the materials collected in The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire, edited my Michael Jennings, and sections of the Arcades Project.
 
CL 89200: History of Literary Theory & Criticism II, GC:  Tuesday, 6:30pm-8:30pm,  4 credits, Prof. Martin Elsky
 
A study of the development of thought about literature in nineteenth and twentieth centuries criticism and philosophy. The course will start from attempts to incorporate literature into patterns of aesthetic, moral, cultural, and historical coherence, and will move to the specter of incoherence, force, and trauma as the underlying impetus of literature. Readings will include Hegel, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Eliot, Brooks, Auerbach, Benjamin, Levinas, Derrida, Foucault, Bhabha, Casanova.

CLAS 75200: Aristotle and Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, GC: Monday and Tuesday, 4:15-6:15 PM, 3 credits, Prof. Vasiliou

[NOTE: This course meets twice a week for half the semester, from March 23 through May 12.]
According to most standard accounts, modern virtue ethics begins with Elizabeth Anscombe's essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" in 1958 and develops over the second half of the twentieth century as an alternative to deontological and consequentialist moral theories.   Rather than obligation as the centerpiece of moral theory, it is commonly held that virtue ethics focuses on human flourishing and the virtues of character that constitute it.  Aristotle is the patron saint of this movement.  Over the last twenty years, some have begun to question what virtue ethics is, how and whether it differs from other types of ethical theory, and even to what extent Aristotle should be called a virtue ethicist.  Some now avoid the term “virtue-ethics” and prefer to speak instead of “Neo-Aristotelian” ethics; under this label one might include the work of Julia Annas, Phillipa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, Alasdair MacIntyre, John McDowell, Martha Nussbaum, and Michael Thompson.  While all of these philosophers discuss virtue, only some would identify their positions as belonging to “virtue ethics.”
 
We shall examine what sort of ethical theory contemporary Neo-Aristotelian ethics is and how it fits with what we actually find in Aristotle.  What does it say about the relationships between agents and actions?  How does it contrast with deontology or consequentialism? What does it mean for ethics to be "virtue-based", "character-based" or "agent-based/centered", as opposed to "rule-based" or "act-based/centered"?  What is the role of (human) nature in Neo-Aristotelian ethics? Does practical reason operate differently in Neo-Aristotelian ethics than in other types of ethical theory?
 
We will do a close reading of major parts of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, including his discussions of eudaimonia, the virtues of character, practical reason, moral psychology, decision and deliberation, voluntary action, and the unity of virtues.   We will interweave this with readings from secondary literature on the Ethics as well as from the “Neo-Aristotelians” mentioned above.
 
It will be important for us to work from the same translation of the Nicomachean Ethics.  For various reasons, we shall use Terence Irwin's translation, second edition, Hackett Press; I ask you all to acquire a copy.  We will also consult the Rowe/Broadie translation from Oxford, and the "Revised Oxford Translation" by Ross and revised by Urmson, published in the Complete Works of Aristotle (ed. J. Barnes, Princeton University Press). 
               
Please read Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics for the first class. First class will meet on 3/23, not 3/17 (there will be a make-up class, TBA). The seminar fulfills Distribution Area C or D-Ancient.  Philosophy students wishing to satisfy Distribution Area D-ancient with this seminar must write a term paper that focuses on Aristotle’s ethics.

ENGL 80600. Theory of Lyric. John Brenkman. Wednesdays 4:15PM-6:15PM. 2/4 credits.
 
The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (2014) and Jonathan Culler’s Theory of the Lyric (2015) will be used to survey a wide range of theoretical and interpretive approaches to poetry. Poems from various literary periods will be discussed in conjunction with the theoretical readings. Students will develop a semester project on a poet of their choosing through whose work they can test and contest, amplify and enrich, theories of lyric encountered in the course of the seminar.

 
ENGL 89000.  Introduction to Engaged Teaching and Transformative Learning in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Cathy Davidson and Eduardo Vianna, Thursdays 2:00PM-4:00PM. 2/4 credits.
 
What does it mean to “introduce” a student to a field? This course is intended for any graduate student in the humanities or social sciences who is thinking seriously about the deepest “why” and “how” questions about their discipline and how those apply to their own research and teaching. We will begin with theoretical questions about disciplines, fields, foundations, pedagogy, research, aesthetics, and institutional structures alongside issues of equity, diversity, inclusion, social justice, engagement, and transformation. In each class and in final projects, we will encourage students to transform critique into engaged practice. Students will work collaboratively on analyzing and then designing: (1) a standard anthology or textbook in their field; (2) key articles or critical texts in their field; (3) standard syllabi of introductory or “core” courses in their field; (4) keywords in their field. Students will leave the course with a deeper understanding of the assumptions of their field and new methods for transformative learning that support diversity, inclusion, and a more equitable form of higher education. Our aim is to work toward “research with a transformative activist agenda” and teaching and mentoring as a “collaborative learning community project” that, in the end, contributes to education as a public good and a more just and equitable society.
Readings will be chosen from: Lev Vygotsky, Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Audre Lorde, Anna Stetsenko, Michelle Fine, Ira Shor, Stuart Hall, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, José Munoz, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Judith Butler, Peter Galison, Sara Ahmed, Alfie Kohn, Christopher Newfield, John Warner, Kandice Chuh, Roderick Ferguson, Kurt Lewin, Lisa Lowe, Tressie McMillan Cottom, Sara Goldrick-Rab, Michael Fabricant, Stephen Brier, Cathy Davidson, Eduardo Vianna, as well as authors included in the crowdsourced “Progressive Pedagogy” bibliography being developed on hastac.org:
(https://www.hastac.org/blogs/ckatopodis/2019/01/11/progressive-pedagogy-public-working-bibliography)
 
ENGL 86800: Biopunk and other Speculative Fictions. Ashley Dawson. Fridays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits.
 
The ideologies that have supported modern liberalism’s purported “end of history” are wearing thin. The unsustainable nature of the current social order is becoming increasingly apparent. With the old social democratic left sullied by their embrace of neoliberalism, popular dissent is drifting towards the new right. We seem to be on the cusp of a whole series of radical changes. Climate chaos is already scrambling weather systems, melting glaciers that provide drinking water for hundreds of millions of people, and making urban life around the world increasingly difficult for all but the most wealthy. Entire ecosystems are being levelled by the inexorable drive of capitalism to expand at compound growth rates. Robots and AI are taking over jobs around the world and in every sector of the economy. Genetic editing and synthetic biology are radically altering existing life forms and may soon be employed on human populations to eliminate disease and prolong life, but who will be able to afford such post-human perks? Can we look forward to a world of unprecedented plenty powered by ubiquitous solar energy technologies, or will we descend into a Hobbesian war of all against all?
 
This course engages some of the most pressing questions of the present and near future through examination of three genres of speculative fiction: cyberpunk, biopunk, and solarpunk. Each of these genres ruptures the hegemony of what Mark Fisher called “capitalist realism,” the grating but nonetheless ubiquitous belief that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The guiding assumption of the course is that these and related genres of speculative fiction provide what Fredric Jameson called “archaeologies of the future,” toolkits for imagining tomorrow otherwise and instruction manuals to guide the work of activism and community-building for which the trying circumstances of the present call out.
 
The course very consciously engages with efforts to represent possible futures articulated from a variety of geographical locations around the world and from heterogeneous subject positions. In addition, the course toggles constantly between speculative fiction and nonfiction in an effort to assess the capacities of various genres to mobilize different affects (hope, fear, revulsion, etc.) in relation to possible futures.
 
Works we are likely to discuss, in full or in part, include:

• Neel Ahuja, Bioinsecurities
• Margaret Atwood, The Year of the Flood
• Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl
• Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism
• Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share
• Lauren Beukes, Zoo City
• Elly Blue, Biketopia: Feminist Bicycle Science Fiction Stories in Extreme Futures
• Ryan Coogler, Black Panther
• Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus
• Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism
• William Gibson, Neuromancer
• Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement
• Donna Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto
• Michael Hardt & Toni Negri, Commonwealth
• Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman
• Walidah Imarisha and Adrienne Brown, Octavia’s Brood
• Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future
• Larissa Lai, Salt Fish Girl
• Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, ed., Solarpunk
• Andreas Malm, Fossil Capitalism
• Andrew Niccol, Gattaca
• Alex Rivera, Sleep Dealer
• Boots Riley, Sorry to Bother You
• Sophia Roosth, Synthetic: How Life Got Made
• Hermann Scheer, The Solar Economy
• Shelby Streeby, Imagining the Future of Climate Change
• Shoshona Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

 
ENGL 82100. Early Modern Embodiment: Race, Gender, and Sexuality. Mario DiGangi. Wednesdays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits
 
In this seminar we will explore race, gender, and sexuality as overlapping and intersecting modes of embodiment in the literature and culture of premodern England. While our focus will be sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, we will consider continuities and differences between medieval and early modern European discourses of race/gender/sexuality. Drama will be at the center of our investigations, but we will also examine a variety of texts from multiple genres, including love poetry, visual art, prose romance, court masque, and travel narrative, in an effort to understand the tropes and formal conventions through which racial, gender, and sexual differences were made to signify. Readings will cluster around five major topics: 1) Race/Gender/Sex and the Color of Beauty; 2) Race/Gender/Sex and Courtly Culture; 3) Race/Gender/Sex and Travel; 4) Race/Gender/Sex and Religion; 5) Race/Gender/Sex and the Global Circulation of English Honor. Readings will include Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Sonnets; Jonson, The Masque of Blackness; Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum; Massinger, The Renegado; Fletcher, The Island Princess; Dekker, Lust’s Dominion; Heywood, The Fair Maid of the West; and Day, Rowley, and Wilkins, The Travels of the Three English Brothers. Through the work of scholars such as Abdulhamit Arvas, Dennis Britton, Kim Hall, Geraldine Heng, Carol Mejia LaPerle, Arthur Little, Ania Loomba, Joyce Green Macdonald, Jeffrey Masten, Jennifer Morgan, Carmen Nocentelli, Melissa Sanchez, Ian Smith, and Valerie Traub, we will also consider how different theoretical and historical approaches have produced varying accounts of race/gender/sex as objects of inquiry in the premodern and contemporary eras.​
 
ENGL 89500: Knowledge Infrastructures. Matt Gold. Wednesdays 4:15PM-6:15PM. 2/4 credits
 
Infrastructure is all around us, rarely remarked upon. Indeed, the latent state of infrastructure is part of what marks it as such; as Susan Leigh Starr has noted, infrastructure studies involves the examination of "boring things."
 
This class will explore the emerging nexus of critical infrastructure studies and critical university studies, focusing on the infrastructure of scholarly knowledge. From our libraries to our journals to our conferences to our operating systems to our use of social media, scholars communicate through an entanglement of corporate and commercial interests. Beyond the obviously problematic commercial infrastructures built by predatory publishers and corporate conglomerates such as Elsevier, scholars routinely depend on for-profit publication venues and commercial journals to disseminate their work.
 
As a set of alternatives to the commercialized infrastructure of knowledge dissemination in the academy, the course will consider open access publication models, free software development, and university press publishing. Even as we explore such alternatives, we will critique them, considering the ways that such alternatives themselves depend upon commercial technical stacks, and considering whether these alternatives are equally available and accessible across the globe.
 
Among the scholars we will study are: Susan Leigh Starr; Alan Liu; Kathleen Fitzpatrick; Christopher Kelty; Christopher Newfield; Stephen Brier and Michael Fabricant; Benjamin Bratton; Shannon Mattern; Nicole Starosielski; Trebor Scholz; Brian Greenspan; and Yarimar Bonilla and Max Hantel. Topics to be explored include: introductions to critical infrastructure studies and critical university studies; the environmental impact of the cloud; the free software movement; academic publishing models; constructing open platforms. Students in the class will explore publishing platforms collaboratively created by CUNY and other partners, including the CUNY Academic Commons and Manifold, as well as others such as Humanities Commons and Zotero. The goal of the class, in the end, is to ask students to consider how and where their own scholarly knowledge is distributed, and by whom and under what terms.
 
ENGL 84200. Romantic/Moving/Break: Migration and the Worldly Imagination. Olivera Jokic. Tuesdays 4:15PM-6:15PM.
 
Starting from the disorienting fractures of American, French, and Haitian Revolutions and their relationship to modern European empires, this course considers how mobility (possible, permitted, desired, required, forced) reconfigures conceptions of communal life, elasticity of selfhood, and the affect appropriate to shifting social relations. What some historians of society have called the “age of revolution” neatly encompassed what literary historians have called the “Romantic” period. The canonical texts of Romanticism aspired to create a new kind of reading public: to devise a new kind of moving writing that would disrupt the uniformity of taste and feeling circulating in the reading market. How does an intervention in poetic language (to get us closer to vitality of “the language really used by men,” said William Wordsworth in 1801) bring about political change? What is the relationship between “Romanticism,” moving, and radical social change?
 
“Romanticism” will be a category for thinking about literary periodization along other modern forms of thought, from nationalism and public feeling, empire and linguistics, to liberal capitalism, historiography, and race. Considering how notions of movement and instability have defined modern life organized around elastic nation states, the course will examine how interpretation and “literary” text can operate as privileged instruments of knowing and communion. Who are the “men” and other figures whose language and feelings appeared unadulterated by the society changed by print and reading? How do some forms of writing and interpretation acquire ideological and political power in particular historical contexts, and how do some accounts of human transformation and relocation elicit affective response or become historical documentation? Attention to such histories of form and genre will get us to consider how “Romanticism” engages with eighteenth-century and earlier writing traditions; how gendered legacies of thinking about writing and Literature include “women’s writing” in the literary canon; and how histories of writing overlap with emergent conceptions of human interiority and possibilities of a life narrative.
 
To think about what it means to move and be moved in the world as we know it, we will ask what it means to treat national, geographic, or disciplinary boundaries as relevant markers of movement; how states and fields of scholarship shape their “imagined communities” around conceptions of writing, reading, and political intervention; and how the idea of moving towards or away from “one’s own people” says something about what kind of world we live in, where we know to look for relevant others, what they mean to us, and how we learn to have feelings. Using these materials we will speculate about the possibilities of translation and of a “world literature,” in order to think about how “literature” operates now as one of the fields that shape individual, historical, and political imagination.
 
The writing exercises that emerge from our conversations will include workshops in which we experiment with some dominant genres of academic writing and communication. From this practice students could come out with a sample of their own work nearly ready to circulate: to propose as a presentation at an academic conference, submit to a peer-reviewed publication, or to create a syllabus promising an exciting course in their professed field of interest or expertise.
 
ENGL 82100. Death to Tyrants! Feisal Mohamed. Thursdays 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits.
 
“There can be slain no sacrifice to God,” Seneca’s Hercules declares, “more acceptable than an unjust and wicked king.” The statement epitomizes much classical thought on the subject. Aristotle in the Politics praises the killing of a tyrants, and emphasizes the right of citizens to seek a public life leading to the good. Cicero is more emphatic still. Tyrants show the exact opposite of the spirit of fraternity that should govern human interactions, and so, as he puts it in De officiis, “that pestilent and abominable race should be exterminated from human society.” The Reformation’s white-hot religious controversies, and humanist re-engagement of classical thought, lead the question of tyrannicide to bubble to the surface of early modern thought. Philipp Melanchthon quoted Seneca in expressing a hope that “some strong man” would kill King Henry VIII to avenge the death of Thomas Cromwell. John Milton quotes the passage in his vigorous defense of the execution of King Charles I, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Melanchthon and Milton thus help to forge a Protestant tradition of thought on tyrannicide that includes François Hotman, John Knox, and George Buchanan, a tradition finding 20th-century expression in the thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the pacifist Lutheran minister who conspired against Hitler. We must also recognize, however, that immediately after killing the tyrant Lycus, Seneca’s Hercules is visited by a madness that leads him to kill his wife and children. Noble and necessary as it might be, tyrannicide is also symptom and expression of a deep wrench in right order. So it is in especially in early modern tragedy, that genre obsessed with ills spanning human and cosmic realms, that we see tyrannicide explored in all of its complexity.
 
At bottom, early modern engagements of tyrannicide are also engagements of the foundations of political society, and meditations on the proper relationship between subject and sovereign. Here we find leitmotifs of early modern political thought that continue to be revolutionary in late modernity: sovereignty is delegated from the people, not transferred to the sovereign, and so can be revoked when the people so choose; citizenship must include the right of resistance, otherwise political life is a form of slavery. We will explore the engagement of these ideas across English and Continental, Protestant and Catholic thinkers, in literary and non-literary texts.
 
Students will be expected to deliver a conference-style presentation that will form the basis of a ten-page paper, and to develop that paper into a final research essay of 16 pages.
 
Preliminary list of readings: Seneca, Hercules furens; George Buchanan, Jephtha; John Ponet, A Short Treatise of Politike Power; François Hotman, Francogallia (selections); Brutus, Vindiciae, contra tyrannos; Christopher Marlowe, The Massacre at Paris; Juan de Mariana, De rege; William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, and Macbeth; John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Paradise Lost, and Samson Agonistes.
 
ENGL 80500. Feminist Criticism in Victorian Fiction: Recovery Feminism, and After. Talia Schaffer. Monday 11:45AM-1:45PM. 2/4 credits
 
In this course we explore the history of academic feminist work in Victorian studies since the 1970s, intertwining critical work with literary texts, evaluating the ‘recovery feminist’ approach of second-wave feminism as we try to outline a contemporary feminist approach. We will, for instance, cover the first wave of feminist recovery work of the 70s and 80s by Showalter, Spacks, Gilbert and Gubar, Poovey, Spivak, along with “Cassandra” and Jane Eyre. We will then look at cultural feminist criticism of the 90s Armstrong and Gallagher with Middlemarch and Miss Marjoribank, and look at the 21st century queer, ethical, and digital turns of feminist work in criticism by Marcus, Ehnenn, Ahmed, Nowviskie, Berlant, with Mansfield Park. In assessing fifty years of Victorian feminist criticism, we will be looking at race, empire, bodies, and sexuality, but we will also be interrogating what kind of feminist criticism might be appropriate to a decentralized, gender-fluid, digital contemporary mode. We will read Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life and Kate Manne, Down Girl, and students will find and present their own feminist case studies, which may include interrogating the place of feminist criticism in environmental humanities, critical race theory, disability studies, animal studies, postcolonialism. Presentation, blog, and final paper.
 
ENGL 84200. Anthropocene Investigations. Alexander Schlutz. Mondays 4:15PM-6:15PM. 2/4 credits.
 
The term “Anthropocene,” first introduced by the chemist and Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Stoermer nearly twenty years ago, has by now become the most widely used designation for the current period of global, human-induced environmental catastrophe in both scholarly and public discourse. The appropriateness of the term (though of course not the global crisis it seeks to highlight) has, however, been subject to vigorous critique in the social sciences and the humanities, mainly due to its problematic naturalization of the human and its erasure of crucial questions of human difference and responsibility. From the perspective of the humanities in particular, a return to a species narrative, with an undifferentiated anthropos writ large as the protagonist, can seem to erase in one fell swoop decades of scholarly work in critique of essentialist conceptions of “the human.” A range of alternatives, from Capitalocene to Chtulucene, have been proposed in an effort to alter the narrative parameters in order to call anthropocene grand narratives into question.
 
At the same time, a growing number of scholars in the humanities take seriously the challenge of the “Anthropocene” to rethink what viable narratives about and representations of the relationships of human beings to their environments might look like at a moment of global crisis where human and natural history can no longer be thought of as disentangled. Such attempts include a newly framed engagement with literature and art more broadly as modes of representation that might allow us to bring the contemporary human predicament into view in different ways than scientific data and public policy debates.
 
To address these overlapping discussions, this seminar will offer a two-fold investigation. On the one hand, we will attempt to take stock of the disciplinary discussion surrounding the “Anthropocene” and examine a range of critical perspectives and proposed alternatives in naming and timeline. At the same time, we will also turn our attention to emergent transdisciplinary approaches in the environmental humanities, as well as to the creative practice in literature and the arts, in order to investigate what a poetics for the “Anthropocene” might look like. Our theoretical interlocutors will include Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Kathryn Yussof, and T.J. Demos, among others.
 
Course requirements: 3 short position papers; 15-minute conference presentation at the in-class, end-of-semester course conference; final 15-20 page research paper.
 
ENGL 79010. Language, Literacies, and Citizenship. Amy Wan. Mondays 2:00PM-4:00PM. 2/4 credits.
 
In January 2019, an email from an administrator in the Duke University biostatistics program in their medical school went viral. In it, the administrator warns Chinese international students about the unintended consequences of their use of Chinese in social settings in the college’s common areas. This email (and its backlash) reflects how institutional power can be yielded at the intersection of race, language, and literacy. This class will explore such intersections with a focus on the ways literacies are used to define, restrict, confine and cultivate citizenship.
 
Readings will range from histories of race, civil rights, and immigration in the US, theories on literacy and citizenship, and rhetorics of institutions, public policy, and social movements in order to analyze the complexities of these moments. While US education and citizenship will be a common example in some of the readings, the course material also takes into account the transnational movement of people and the global economy, as well as questions the value, ideal, and construct of citizenship itself. Additionally, students will also be asked to interrogate their own positions as educators who work for or who hope to work for institutions. Drawing from L.A. Paperson’s A Third University is Possible, part of the work of the class will be to identify spaces where resistance and transformation are possible. Assignments will include the opportunity to practice academic genres such as an annotated bibliography, book review essays, and conference proposal/presentation. Students are encouraged to bring their own projects and interests to the class (although a specific project is not necessary), and all disciplines and specializations are invited to join.
 
Students will read an average of 100 pages per week and will likely be drawn from from Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira’s The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent, Candace Epps-Roberton’s Resisting Brown: Race, Literacy, & Citizenship in the Heart of Virginia, Haivan V. Hoang’s Writing Against Racial Injury: The Politics of Asian American Student Rhetoric, Scott Richard Lyons’s X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent, Ersula Ore’s Lynching: Violence, Rhetoric, and American Identity, L.A. Paperson’s A Third University is Possible, Jonathan Rosa’s Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistics Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad, Kate Vieira’s American by Paper: How Documents Matter in Immigrant Literacy, Shui-Yin Sharon Yam’s Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (I am also open to suggestions, particularly those that interrogate positionalities and perspectives other than the ones represented here).
 
EES 79903: Critical Geographies of Human Rights [62246], GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Carmalt, Course open to EES Students only
 
This course looks at how injustice, geography, and law relate to one another. It is interdisciplinary, and organized around three sets of literature: (1) critical human geography (including political ecology) literature that examines how injustices are created and sustained through spatial processes, (2) socio-legal scholarship that focuses on understanding law as a social construction, and (3) public international law scholarship that provides a doctrinal counterpart to social science explanations of injustice. We will draw on case studies ranging from race and urbanization in the United States to historical definitions of belonging for minority populations in Myanmar. Students will be expected to lead class discussions and write a paper on a relevant topic of their choosing.
 
 
EES 79903: Ethnography of Space and Place [62250], GC: R, 11:45-1:45 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Low, Course open to EES Students only
 
Introduction:  The study of the city has undergone a transformation during the past 20 years integrating ever wider theoretical perspectives from anthropology, cultural geography, political economy, urban sociology, and regional and city planning, and expanding its attention to the city as physical, architectural and virtual form.  An emphasis on spatial relations and consumption as well as urban planning and design decision-making provides new insights into material, ideological and metaphorical aspects of the urban environment.  Reliance on ethnography of space and place allows researchers to present an experience-near account of everyday life in urban housing or local markets, while at the same time addressing macro-processes such as globalization and the new urban social order.
This course sketches some of the methodological and theoretical implications of the ethnographic study of the contemporary city using anthropological tools of participant observation, interviewing, behavioral mapping, and theories of space and place to illuminate spaces in modern/post-modern cities and their transformations.  In doing so, I wish to underscore links between the shape, vision and experience of cities and the meanings that their citizens read off screens and streets into their own lives. It begins with a discussion of spatializing culture, that is the way that culture is produced and expressed spatially, and the way that space reflects and changes culture. The subsequent weeks explore different theoretical dimensions, embodied space, the social construction of space, the social production of space, language and discursive space, and digital or ambiguous space. The course also explores a number of special topics including how urban fear is transforming the built environment and the nature of public space both in the ways that we are conceiving the re/building our cities, and in the ways that residential suburbs are being transformed into gated and walled enclaves of private privilege and public exclusion.  The privatization of public space first signaled the profound changes that American cities are undergoing in terms of their physical, social and cultural design.  Currently, however, increased fear of violence and others particularly in urban areas is producing new community and public space forms; locked neighborhoods, blank faced malls in urban areas, armed guard dogs on public plazas, and limited access housing developments are just some examples of how the cultural mood is being “written” on the landscape.        
Course Requirements:
1. Weekly reading and discussion in class.  Each student will be assigned a week to present a reading review and act as the discussion facilitator.
2. Book review of an ethnography–both oral and written presentation. Oral presentations will be integrated with the theoretical and methodological content of weekly discussions.
3. Fieldwork project–both oral and written presentation. Students will participate in a fieldwork project related to the course using data collected and analyzed as part of the course content. The analysis will be presented at the conclusion as part of the final requirement to write a paper. Students will be asked to use theoretical materials from the course to recast or rethink their fieldwork projects for their final papers.
 
EES 79903: Constructing Urban Futures [62247], GC: T, 11:45 am – 1:45 p.m., 3 credits, Prof. Stabrowski, Course open to EES Students only
 
This seminar examines the urban development process under capitalism, paying particular attention to how visions of the future are constructed and harnessed for urban development projects, and how these visions intersect with capitalist processes of accumulation and dispossession. Grounded in urban geography, yet drawing from a wide range of disciplines, the seminar will explore how competing notions of the ideal city have shaped how urban areas are planned, built, governed, and inhabited. Each week, students will read monographs on particular urban futures such as: the military city; the green city; the creative city; the infrastructural city; and the migrant city. Case studies will draw from cities throughout the world. Participants will be expected to write a research proposal and to participate actively in reading and responding to each other’s work.
 
EES 79003: Reading the Grundrisse [62283], GC: T, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30, The People’s Forum, 3 credits, Prof. Harvey, Course open to EES Students only
 
The course entails a close reading of Marx's Grundrisse. 
 
French 87000 : On Affect (Passion, Sentiment, Emotion): In Theory, History, Texts, Professor Domna Stanton, Tuesday, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 2 or 4 Credits.
 
How are passions and emotions different from affects? How do bodies perform passions, sensibility, feelings, emotions and affects? What do affects do and how do they do it? How are they shaped by their contexts?  What is the meaning and significance of the “affective turn”?  Does it mark a rejection of the idea(l) of rational self-control? How is this turn connected to studies of women (and the feminine) and to work on gender and racial embodiments and sexualities?
 
This course will be structured around three areas: first, theories of affect and in tandem, a study of the cultural politics and ethics of specific affects, including anger, disgust, shame, compassion and happiness. Which emotions mobilize spectators/readers into collectives/communities. Are passions both a source and an obstacle to struggles for freedom and justice? How do they include and exclude? Among the theorists: Ahmed, Artaud, Berlant, Clough,  Cvetkovich, Deleuze and Guattari, Ghandi, M. Hardt, A. Lorde, Massumi, Scheer, Sedgwick, Stewart, M. Warner.
 
Second, we will grapple with the treatment of passions and emotions through history, especially in philosophy: from Aristotle and Cicero, Descartes, Pascal, Lebrun, Spinoza, and Kant to Darwin, W. James, Freud, Klein, and R. Williams.
 
And third, in conjunction with this philosophical and historical work, we will read texts (verbal, visual and musical) to see how they inscribe emotional content and how they generate affective responses from readers even when their semantics and narratives do not depict strong emotions. Is feeling as a response to cultural forms different from a human emotion? We will consider the cultural politics of emotion in the work of  Margerie of Kempe, Montaigne,  Gentileschi (Portraits of Judith) , Racine (Phedre),  Goethe (Sorrows of Young Werther), Wagner (“Leibestod”) , H. Jacobs (Life of a Slave Girl), H. James (Beast in the Jungle),  Woolf  (Mrs. Dalloway) , A. Nin (“Incest” Diary),  Lanzman ( Shoah),  Beckett (Happy Days), C. Churchill  (Far Away) , Irigaray (“When our Lips Speak Together”), Morrison (Beloved),  Darwish (Poems),  Labaki ( Capernaum), Moore (Watchman, 2019).
The syllabus will be uploaded onto Blackboard by the beginning of the spring semester; all course materials will be on blackboard, except for one or two complete texts which will be indicated on the syllabus.
 
Work for the course: Whether the course is taken for 2, 3, or 4 credits, all students will be responsible for doing the assigned texts closely and for engaging consistently in class discussion.
 
a, Students who take the course for 2 credits will present in class a reading of one primary text, which will also be submitted in writing (c 5-7 pp); these students will also take the final exam.
 
b, Students who take the course for 3 credits, will do all of the above, but instead of the 5-7 page paper, they will do a 10-13-page paper on a topic they select, after consultation with the instructor. They will also submit a thesis statement, a bibliography, an outline and the introduction (the schedule will be indicated on the syllabus).
 
c, Students who take the course for 4 credits will do all of the above, but instead of a 10-13 page paper, they will do a 20-25-page paper on a topic they select, after consultation with the instructor. They will also submit a thesis statement, a bibliography, an outline, and an introduction (the schedule will be indicated on the syllabus).
 
Please contact Domna Stanton with any questions (dstanton112@yahoo.com). 
 
French 71000 : Espaces, exclusions, identités de la fin du Moyen Âge jusqu’au XVIe siècle (taught in French), Professor Francesca Sautman, Wednesday, 6:30pm-8:30pm,  2 or 4 Credits.
 
Comment, entre la fin du Moyen Age et la Renaissance, les communautés et les individus qui en émanaient ou disaient les représenter, articulaient-ils les notions d’espace et d’identité au sein de l’écriture, provoquant des tensions avec les limites imposées par les contextes socio-politiques et avec d’autres référents expérientiels—ceux du genre [gender] par exemple ?
Parmi de nombreuses articulations possibles, certaines soulignent combien la conscience du soi, impliqué dans des identités historiquement précises ou dans les exclusions qui en dérivent (pour fait de religion, entre autres), est intimement reliée à la conscience des espaces (naturels, intérieurs) ou de lieux (quartiers, villes, régions, pays—soit eaux, mers, forêts, élévations, jardins…) et au poids qui leur est accordé dans ces écrits.
Ce sont les questions essentielles abordées par ce cours.
 
Dans sa Recepte véritable de 1563, le céramiste et savant autodidacte Bernard Palissy écrivait que le bois massacré par la coupe hâtive devrait crier d’être ainsi meurtri, se ressentant charnellement de sévices infligés par les exploiteurs humains, et de même, que la terre constamment maltraitée devrait se révolter contre ses meurtriers.
Cette vision de la nature, menacée, mutilée, souffrante et devant être protégée, était sans aucun doute originale et ne cesse de surprendre aujourd’hui— Palissy était pourtant aussi de son temps à bien des égards et en particulier, par une vision de la nature et de l’environnement rattachée à son identité de Protestant fidèle et persécuté. 
Le cheminement vers une telle pensée ne s’est pas effectué soudain, ni, à plus forte raison, le développement d’une perspective envers espaces et lieux marqués par une histoire individuelle ou collective, indissociables d’intégrations ou d’exclusions identitaires : lentement, et par des détours en eux-mêmes passionnants, ces idées ont pris forme depuis le Moyen Age.
 
Un texte comme la description du jardin dans la première partie du Roman de la Rose, celle de Guillaume de Lorris, situe bien la problématique de ce cours : évocation du lieu idéal, à la fois allégorique et poétique, son enjeu est de mettre en place un système d’adhésions et d’exclusions rigides—jeunesse-vieillesse, richesse-pauvreté—à travers une codification de l’ordre social entier où manque de pouvoir égale négativité morale. Autre exemple : Le Jeu de la Feuillée d’Adam de la Halle, œuvre majeure du théâtre ancien, déjà innovatrice, où la notion médiévale de congé poétique, marquant le seuil d’une séparation dramatique (comme la séquestration pour cause de maladie) est contiguë à l’évocation de lieux familiers et étranges et de multiples formes d’altérité sociale. Avec Villon, on tourne le dos à la nature, et l’espace est nettement urbain, marqué par des lieux précis, historiques ou métaphoriques, mais bel et bien occupés par les identités de la marge. Avec Marguerite de Navarre, nous considérons la violence des espaces intérieurs, leurs liens aux affects et à une nature reconnue mais hostile, et comment ils formulent une identité à la fois personnelle et communautaire.
Le cours vous propose donc d’explorer cette pensée de l’espace/identité, ses écarts et ses tendances, ses théories, ses avancées, ses manques et ses contradictions, depuis le Moyen Age central jusqu’à la fin du 16e siècle, à travers une douzaine de textes tant littéraires que polémiques ou didactiques.
 
Textes étudiés : Chrétien de Troyes ( ?1130-1194), Perceval ou le conte du Graal ; Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1200-c. 1240), Roman de la Rose 1, introduction ; Adam de la Halle, Le Jeu de la Feuillée (entre 1285 et 1288) ; Christine de Pizan (1364-c. 1430) Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune (sections) ; François Villon (1431-c. 1463), Le Testament ; Clément Marot (1496-1544), L’ Enfer ; Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549) Miroir de l’âme pècheresse ; Bernard Palissy (1510-c. 1590) Recepte véritable par laquelle tous les hommes de la France pourront apprendre à multiplier et augmenter leurs thrésors; Guillaume Postel (1510-1581) L’Histoire memorable des expéditions depuys le deluge faictes par les Gauloys ;  Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), sections du Journal de Voyage, et deux essais, « De l’Exercitation » et « Des Cannibales »; Agrippa d’Aubigné (1552-1630), sections du Livre I des Tragiques.
La durée d’un semestre limitant le choix de textes possibles, les textes principaux seront encadrés de manière à vous fournir un contexte plus vaste, par les lectures critiques, notes de préparation des cours, outils bibliographiques et documents visuels.
 
L’approche aux textes est fondée à la fois sur 1) les travaux critiques récents d’écocritique, d’études du concept de nation et des faits de colonisation, et sur la formation de la conscience de soi au Moyen Age et à la Renaissance; 2)  et sur un ensemble de textes théoriques et philosophiques modernes, dont Jane Bennett (« vibrant matter ») ; Patrick Boucheron (histoire globale et comparée), George Didi-Huberman (culture visuelle, identités, mémoire de la souffrance), Michel de Certeau (histoire et délégitimiser le pouvoir) ; Maurice Merleau-Ponty (perception, affect, environnement) et Emmanuel Levinas (éthique, nature, environnement).
Travail requis : pour 4 crédits, devoir écrit de mi-trimestre ; une préparation orale (à préciser en fonction du nombre d’inscrits dans le cours) ; un travail de recherche final substantiel, 25 pages environ. Participation : en classe et aussi électronique, « blog » à travers le site Blackboard du cours ; vous serez invité-e-s à y partager avec les autres membres du cours vos réactions, des idées sur les discussions du cours ainsi que des détails sur votre propre projet (vous avez le choix de ce que vous voulez bien mettre en ligne pour la classe).
 
2 crédits : un midterm (version courte), et soit une préparation orale, soit un 2e devoir écrit court,
Students outside the French Program on a 3-credit system ­ their own program: see 4 credits, but final paper can be 15 to 10 pages, and blog is optional.
 
Students outside of the French Program: students in programs other than French are welcome in the course but must be able to do most (not all) of their readings in French and follow class presentations and discussions in French. They may, however, do all their work (including oral presentations and interventions in class conversations) in English.
 
A pre-syllabus (course work details, class meeting topics and main readings, some bibliographical tools) should be available by the end of the Fall semester so that you can read during January. Please check Blackboard site for early postings.
 
HIST 75500 : Sojourners, Sultans, and Slaves: Slavery and Freedom in North America and the Indian Ocean, GC: Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Gunja SenGupta 
 
        As the 19th century dawned, global systems of capitalism and empire knit the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds into international networks of trade and travel, and conquest and colonization, of labor and capital, and politics and ideology. The controversies over slavery,colonialism, and freedom’s meanings that resulted from this integration, offer U.S. scholars an analytical framework for “cross-fertilizing” national histories, historiographies, and epistemologies, with the burgeoning scholarship on the Indian Ocean. This course introduces students to transnational and comparative perspectives that illuminate the interoceanic scale of the Anglophone contexts in which Americans engaged with the politics and representations of slavery, abolition and empire.
           Such engagements emerged in a moment of transition between empires in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds during the 18th century. The backdrop against which they occurred, however, was shaped by developments that date as far back as what European historians would consider early modern periods in the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.  So we will begin there, reflecting, as we proceed to the 19th century,  on questions like:  how exceptional was “American” slavery, and its relationship with notions of freedom? How did British colonial traditions of legal pluralism translate in the Indian Ocean world? How do we theorize “agency,” “diaspora,” and “difference,” in African diasporic history, and evaluate scholarly debates over the boundaries between law and practice, family and the market, and nation and empire within that history? In what ways did “subaltern” migrations remake identities and produce change? How did free labor experiments in British Asia influence debates over sectionalism in the U.S.? What do the struggles of American slaveholders in Indian Ocean Sultanates over land, labor, cultural politics, and international power rivalries tell us about comparative slavery histories?
We will  grapple with these questions by placing U.S. historiography in dialogue with scholarship and multinational archival materials on slavery and freedom in the Indian Ocean, comparing, for instance, the Atlantic slave trade with human trafficking on the Trans-Saharan and Arabia Sea routes; considering the ways in which tropes of difference (race, religion, class, caste, gender, sex) and ideas about dependence (especially kinship) shaped ideologies and practices of “master-slave” relationships; discussing the workings of the state, law, political economy, religious institutions, and demography, in constructing systems of bondage,  hierarchy and patronage; considering how formal institutions and informal customs influenced marginalized people’s material conditions, and regulated their access to community membership/citizenship; examining the dynamics of “subaltern” family, culture, community, and resistance; tracing the transoceanic circulation of debates over slavery and poverty, and abolition and empire; and contextualizing emancipation in the U.S, within the framework of comparative chronicles of freedom.
 
HIST 74900: Race, Gender and American Political Development, GC: Tuesdays, 11:45 am - 1:45 pm, 3 credits, Profs. David Waldstreicher & Ruth O’Brien
 
This course explores persistent binaries that have arguably structured political thought and practice in the United States. On the one hand, the U.S. has been imagined as a place where people can rise through merit and opportunity, unconstrained by the oppressions of the past and of other places. Geographic mobility – settlement, migration, immigration – is mapped on to social mobility in the accepted meaning of the phrase “American Dream.” Yet U.S. history is marked by war and violence, to such a striking extent that scholars and pundits have periodically diagnosed the culture as peculiarly, even uniquely violent. Given the recent resurgence of angry and martial rhetoric at the center of national politics, how might we understand the relationship between the revolutionary or Enlightenment dreams of progress on the one hand, and the recurrent dread or nightmare of decline and oppression, as shaping facts of specifically political traditions? To what extent, in what ways, are exceptionalist understandings of U.S. political traditions a problem or a solution? Do accounts that stress race, or gender, or the confluence of the two, provide a necessary or sufficient theory or counternarrative of political development? Do frameworks developed in European politics, in critical theory, postcolonial thought, or in domestic vernaculars comprehend the dream/dread in the past and present? What kinds of analytical scholarship and storytelling have been adequate to the task?
 
HIST 72400: The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, GC: Mondays, 6:30-8:30 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin
 
In the annals of twentieth-century political thought, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) carved out a unique and enduring niche. Today, some 40 years after her death, her political philosophy seems more relevant than ever. In 1951, she wrote the first important book on totalitarianism, perhaps the central political problem of the twentieth century. Seven years later, Arendt published her landmark contribution to European political thought, the Human Condition, in which she seeks to probe and to delineate the existential bases of human freedom. Avoiding the liberal political idiom of "rights," Arendt broaches this theme in terms of the ontological values of "plurality" and "action" – constituents of human distinctiveness that Arendt traces back to the glories of Periclean Athens. Nevertheless, she also found important modern political corollaries to "action" in the fleeting experience of direct (that is, non-representative) democracy: in the notion of "local democracy" that flourished in pre-revolutionary America and in the emergence of "workers consuls" in the course of the European revolutions of 1905, 1918, and 1956.
 
Our main thematic focus will concern Arendt’s central contributions to twentieth century political thought: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and On Revolution (1962). However, as preparation for this encounter, attention to Arendt’s formative philosophical and political influences is indispensable. Therefore, in conjunction with these works, we will also selectively read a number of background texts that will assist us in clarifying the conceptual framework that Arendt develops in her mature political works. Essential in this regard are key texts by Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) and by Arendt’s legendary German mentor, Martin Heidegger (Being and Time). At specific junctures, Arendt’s voluminous correspondence with another celebrated mentor, Karl Jaspers, will also guide us.
 
Finally, the “Arendt renaissance” of recent years has been punctuated by important cinematic representations of her life and thought – a dimension of the international Hannah Arendt reception story that we will analyze and reflect upon in conclusion.
 
HIST 72100: Key Concepts in the Western Tradition, GC: Mondays, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Helena Rosenblatt
 
In recent decades there has been a new development in the academic study of political and social thought. Much attention is now being paid to “key concepts” and their historicity. The so-called “linguistic turn” has played an important role in this process.
By “key concepts” we mean the big ideas and indispensable terms without which it would be virtually impossible to engage in any meaningful political discussion. We use such concepts daily to make sense of our world and communicate with others. And yet, as scholars today are increasingly realizing, the meanings of these concepts are not static or timeless. They are constantly evolving and being contested. Key concepts can be seen as tools and weapons wielded at specific times for specific political purposes.
In this course we will examine the meaning and evolution of a number of key concepts essential to our current vocabulary, among which “democracy”, “populism” and “liberalism,” as well as “happiness,” “fear,” “genius” and “woman”. We will consider questions such as the following: What did “democracy” mean to the ancient Greeks and what does it mean to us today? How does our notion of “genius” compare to that of the Renaissance? When and why was the word “liberalism” coined and how has its meaning changed over time? Has our understanding of “woman” remained the same across the centuries?
 
SPAN 87000: The Neoliberal Promise of Happiness and Ugly Feelings: Post-Utopic Fiction and Film from Central America, GC: Tuesday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Prof. Magdalena Perkowska
 
In The Promise of Happiness (2010), Sara Ahmed critically addresses the promise of happiness that circulates in globalized society, defining people’s attitudes and expectations. She argues that, as on object of individual and social desire, happiness may mean agreement, going along or even willfully submitting to social norms. In this way, happiness can be used as a shield against the recognition of and engagement with political and social alternatives. In contrast, unhappiness and negativity are affective points of disagreement and, as such, judgmental and non-conforming.
Ugly feelings, as defined by Sianne Ngai in her eponymous study (2005), are “minor and generally unprestigious” emotions of a strong, diagnostic nature, because they have capacity of shedding light on “a real social experience and a certain kind of historical truth.” Central American cultural texts (novels, short stories and films) produced during the last two decades are full of such feelings: disenchantment, bitterness, anguish, anxiety, fear, disdain, frustration, sorrow, pain, melancholia, loss, and confusion are signifiers of disappointment with past utopias and present neoliberal restoration or reaffirmation of market capitalism. This course explores a selection of Central American fictions and films which will be read in conjunction with theoretical approaches to affect and emotions (Phillip Fischer, Sianne Ngai, Sara Ahmed, Ann Cvetkovich, Lauren Berlant, Ruth Leys, Martha Nussbaum, among others), neoliberalism (David Harvey, Wendy Brown), and politics and aesthetics (Rancière).  We will examine unresolved tensions articulated through affects and emotions, and will fathom what commitments, if any, are encoded in these ‘feeling texts.’
 
SPAN 87000: Raiding the Archive: Strategies from the Latin American Narrative Tradition, GC: Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Prof. Carlos Riobó
 
In this course, we will analyze major theories concerning the archive (such as those by Foucault, Derrida, Guillory, González Echevarría, and those relating to biological and digital media--by Žižek, Lanier, and applications of Badiou) in order to understand how the archive figures in modern Latin American narrative. We will first examine passages from canonical works, such as Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab, Rivera’s La vorágine, Gallegos’s Doña Bárbara, and García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad, to understand the major intertexts embedded in our main corpus. We will then study eclectic notions of the archive as both repository and threat, in our main corpus of texts: archival dangers in Carlos Fuentes’s Aura, Kijadurías’s “De hijos suyos podernos llamar,” Ferré’s “La muñeca menor,” Sarduy’s Colibrí, and Borges’s “La biblioteca de Babel”/“El idioma analítico de John Wilkins”; archive of memory in Bolaño’s Nocturno de Chile and Padura Fuentes’s Adiós, Hemingway; and writing as punishment/pleasure in the archive in Puig’s El beso de la mujer araña and Sarduy’s Maitreya and “Omítemela más.” The course will be conducted in Spanish but students may participate in class and write their papers in English.

MUS 83100: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Readings in Musical Ethnography, GC: Wednesdays, 10 a.m.- 1 p.m., 3 credits, Professor Jane Sugarman

In this seminar we will read a selection of recent monographs in ethnomusicology in occasional alternation with pertinent background readings. One course goal will be to take a measure of current topics and approaches in the field and evaluate the state of ethnomusicological research. Another will be to use these monographs to consider approaches to researching and writing a book- (AKA dissertation-) length study, including research design and theoretical framework, analysis of materials gathered during research, writing strategies and authorial “voice,” and issues of representation and ethics. Before the course begins, I will circulate a list of monographs from which we will select the final reading list. Students will be asked to respond to each week’s reading assignment by posting on a Blackboard discussion thread. The final project will consist of drafting a mock (or real) research proposal. Permission of instructor required.

MUS 84200: Seminar in Theory/Analysis: Studies in Musical Semiotics, GC: Wednesdays, 10 a.m. - 1 p.m., 3 credits, Professor Kofi Agawu

A brisk introduction to the field of musical semiotics followed by a series of analytical exercises and critical commentaries. Topics include music and/as language, iconicity, introversive versus extroversive semiosis, paradigmatic analysis and musical narrative. A final paper will be required.

MUS 84300: Seminar in Theory/Analysis: Schenker II, GC: Wednesdays. 2 – 5 p.m., 3 credits, Professor William Rothstein

A practicum on Heinrich Schenker’s analytical method, focusing on instrumental music from Bach to Chopin and Brahms. Weekly analysis assignments will be supplemented by readings. In the last weeks of the semester, each student will make an oral presentation on a piece chosen by the student and approved by the instructor

MUS 84100: Seminar in Theory/Analysis: Analysis of Pop and Rock Music, GC: Mondays, 6:30– 9:00 p.m., 3 credits, Professor Mark Spicer

This seminar will offer an intensive study of the myriad stylistic trends in pop and rock music that have emerged over roughly the last sixty years, what might be described as the “postBeatles” era, with particular focus on the 1970s and 1980s. A wide range of issues in the analysis of recorded popular music will be addressed, including: (1) the inadequacies of traditional music notation in conveying this music graphically; (2) the pros and cons of applying techniques normally reserved for the analysis of Western art music to popular music; and (3) the problems inherent in locating “meaning” in pop and rock songs. Our central text will be David Temperley’s The Musical Language of Rock (Oxford, 2018), but along the way, we will explore the rapidly growing body of scholarship in popular music analysis. Coursework will involve weekly reading and listening assignments, weekly short papers in response to the reading and listening, and a substantial final conference-style paper (which may take many shapes or forms, but typically students will present close analyses of a song or group of songs of their own choosing). Limited to doctoral students in music, or with special permission of the instructor.

MUS 86100: Seminar in Musicology: Adorno on Music, GC: Tuesdays, 2:00 – 5:00 p.m., 3 credits, Professor Chadwick Jenkins

This course will examine the writings and thought of critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno. While the emphasis will be on his many monographs and essays pertaining to music, we will read those works within the context of the larger scope of his thought. Thus, we will also read substantial portions of the Dialectic of the Enlightenment (co-authored with Max Horkheimer), and a few passages from Negative Dialectics, and Aesthetic Theory. Our emphasis, chronologically, will be on his work from the 1920s to the 1940s. Topics of discussion will include: the nature of "truth content" as a heuristic for understanding and evaluating musical works; the social nature of musical material; the role of form (in both the Kantian sense and with respect to structure); the political use (and abuse) of music; Adorno's understanding of mimesis and mediation; the role of musical analysis in Adorno's thought; the position of music within the administered society; the problems surrounding the image of music as an emblem of emancipation; and the notion of "failure" as a critical tool for investigating music. In conjunction with the writings of Adorno, we will also examine excerpts from the works of Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Karl Marx, GWF Hegel, and György Lukács insofar as Adorno draws on and critiques their ideas. Selected essays and books from the secondary literature will also be assigned. Students will be asked to prepare short responses to selected readings that will be shared and discussed with the class as a whole. Furthermore, students will write one short paper that presents an "Adornian" critique of a piece of music of the student's choosing and one long paper on a topic chosen by the student in conference with the instructor.

PHIL 78600: Decolonial Feminist Ethics and Epistemology, Profs. Alcoff & Khader, 4 credits. Mon. 4:15-6:15
 
This course explores the influence of regimes of colonization, racialization, and imperialism on conceptions of gender justice. It begins from the understanding of decolonial feminist philosophies as including both critical and constructive projects: the former involve exploring the ways Western concepts and histories promote a congruence between Western feminism and Western imperialism, and the latter involve constructing alternative visions of solidarity, as well as local and global gender justice.
 
Developing feminist solidarity and coalition requires an analysis of epistemic justice, or the roadblocks to mutual engagement with respect and reciprocity between differently situated groups. Feminist solidarity also requires thinking through the narrow definitions of rationality found sometimes in the West, in which, as an example, secularism is assumed to be more rational in an a priori way, and the political history and economic context of scientific inquiry are ignored. Hence, this course will pursue both epistemological and ethical aspects of transnational feminism.
 
We will also discuss and analyze links between gender formations and colonial conquest and settlement, changing patterns of violence against women, and racializing discourses and knowledge regimes, to challenge dominant understandings of knowledge and law, agency and politics. We will also explore the philosophical theories for pluralizing a vision of women’s liberation. Some of the topics we will discuss include: the influence of the concept of modernity on conceptions of transnational justice and gender justice, the role of the concept of culture in feminist discourses, the difference between decolonial, postcolonial, and transnational feminist theoretical approaches, how to overcome racist and sexist patterns of epistemic prejudice, the idea that gender itself is a colonial imposition, and the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction.
 
PHIL 77700: Neglected Topics in the Philosophy of Art and Aesthetics, Prof. Carroll, 4 credits
Tues. 11:45-1:45
 
As in virtually every other area of philosophy, in aesthetics certain topics dominate the spotlight while others are neglected. Among the arts literature, music, and perhaps film receive the lion’s share of attention, while architecture, dance, theater, and television are discussed less. In terms of genre, tragedy is pre-eminent, while horror, melodrama, and comedy remain more in the shadows. And so on. This course will explore a selection of certain of these less examined topics.
 
For roughly the first half of the semester, discussion will be led by the instructor who will introduce classes on humor, theater, dance, and architecture. The second half will involve student presentations on neglected topics drawn either from a menu of suggested topics or on topics of the student’s own interests in consultation with the instructor. The course requirements include a participation in discussion, a class presentation, and a final paper that may be based on the class presentation or a topic of the student’s own design in consultation with the instructor.
 
Warning: the course will be highly disjunctive; there will be no overarching thesis knitting all the topics together. There are no prerequisites.
 
PHIL 77300: Linguistic Pragmatism, Prof. Devitt, 4 credits, Tues. 6:30-8:30
 
An exciting development in recent philosophy of language has been the debate surrounding “linguistic pragmatism” and “linguistic contextualism”. Paul Grice is the founding father of this movement. Its seminal work is Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s Relevance. Contributions to the debate to be examined in the seminar include those by Kent Bach, Robyn Carston, François Récanati, John Searle, Stephen Neale and others. The course aims, first, to look critically at competing methodologies at work in the debate, and second, to tackle substantive issues about the semantic properties of a range of linguistic expressions and constructions.
 
The folk distinguish what a person says in uttering something from what the person means, from the intended message. Almost everyone thinks the folk are on to something with this distinction. Grice’s distinction between what is said and what is implicated is based on it, as is Sperber and Wilson’s distinction between explicature and implicature. And there are other similar distinctions. These distinctions raise many questions. What is the principled basis for putting something on one side rather than the other? Is it appropriate to rely on intuitions in making judgments of this sort? If not, what? Is a distinction of this sort to be found in nonlinguistic communication? How much truth is there in claims that what is said constituted by things other than linguistic convention—for example, context, common ground, conversational maxims, nonlinguistic norms, and the contents of beliefs and intentions relevant to resolving potential lexical, structural, referential, and anaphoric ambiguities and potential cases of underspecification? What substance is there in the claim made by some pragmatists that “truth-conditional semantics” should be replaced by “truth-conditional pragmatics”? What hangs on this difference between “pragmatics” and “semantics”? Most important of all: Why is any distinction in question theoretically interesting? What role does it play in theoretical explanations of linguistic phenomena?
 
This is not an introduction to the philosophy of language. Anyone wishing to enroll who is not a philosophy graduate student or who is new to the philosophy of language should consult with me beforehand.
 
Requirements
 
A brief weekly email raising questions about, making criticisms of, or developing points concerning, matters discussed in the class and reading for that week. 50% of grade.
 
A class presentation based on a draft for a paper (topic chosen in consultation with me).
 
The draft to be submitted by the Monday prior to the presentation. 20% of grade.
 
A 2,500 word paper probably arising from the draft in (ii). 30% of grade.
 
PHIL 77600: Contractarianism and its Critics, Prof. Mills, 4 credits, Mon. 6:30-8:30
 
This course will look at classic social contract theory—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant—which was dramatically revived as a result of John Rawls’s 1971 A Theory of Justice. We will try to get clear on both the important commonalities in their divergent versions of the “contract” as a way of understanding the creation of society, the polity, and people’s resulting obligations, and the crucial differences among their versions. We will then turn to some of the criticisms of the contract idea, whether the classic “communitarian” critique or critiques oriented by gender, racial, and disability concerns.
 
PHIL 76600: Philosophical Issues in Archaeology, Prof. Neale, 4 credits, Mon. & Tues. 4:15-6:15 [NOTE: This course meets twice a week for half the semester, from January 27 to March 16.]
 
Work in archaeology and palaeoanthropology raises questions in the philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, cognitive science, linguistics and the philosophy of language, aesthetics, ethics, law, and political theory. These include questions about archaeological evidence, inference, explanation and interpretation; scientific realism; laws and generalizations; notions of artifact, context, site, archaeological record, and culture; typology and classification; chronology, measurement and calibration; the emergence of intentional, symbolic, and communicative behavior; looting, dealing, and collecting; ownership, cultural property and public policy.
 
Even with a good spread of topics, we can address only a few of these in one semester and for the second half of the semester the topics selected will depend upon the composition of the class. In the past, enrollment has been split evenly between philosophy and archaeology PhD students, and the (revisable) starting assumption will be that students are not well-versed in one another’s fields.
 
Phil 77200: Emotion, Prof. Prinz, 4 credits, Tues. 2:00-4:00
 
This seminar investigates the nature and the roles of emotions from an interdisciplinary perspective.
 
The first unit surveys competing theories of emotion, including biologically-based theories, embodied theories, cognitive theories and constructionism. Through this unit, we will also consider the question of the status of emotions as natural kinds.
 
The second investigates work on specific emotions. We will consider emotions that are thought to play roles in evaluative contexts, including morality and art, emotions alleged to be culturally specific, and some neglected emotions, ones that play epistemic roles such as doubt, interest, boredom, confidence, and wonder.
 
The third unit examines ways in which emotions can be assessed: Are emotions ir/rational? Are they appropriate or not? And according to what criteria? Should some emotions be abandoned (such as shame and anger), regulated, and how? How long should they last?
 
The fourth unit questions the relationships of emotions with other cognitive states. Are emotions some types of perception? What is the intentionality of emotions? Are they always directed at objects? Of what kind? Are they always conscious? What would be an unconscious emotion?
 
The final unit examines emotional deviance and psychopathology. We will consider several possible ways in which some emotional processes can qualify as pathological, including emotional disorders, such as phobias, post-traumatic stress, depression, and social anxiety. as well as conditions that have been characterized as involving emotional deficits such as psychopathy and autism. Though this lens, we will explore processes of emotion recognition, emotional understanding, emotion regulation, and emotional consciousness.
 
Though philosophical readings will outnumber the rest, we will also read perspectives from several other fields including, psychology, neuroscience, and sociology.
 
This seminar will be conducted together with Sarah Arnaud, an emotion researcher and postdoc in the Philosophy Program.
 
PHIL 76100: Hobbes & Spinoza, Prof. Steinberg, 4 credits, Weds. 11:45-1:45
 
Thomas Hobbes and Benedict Spinoza occupy antipodal political positions: the former is the preeminent seventeenth-century defender of absolute monarchy, while the latter is a champion of democracy and civil liberties. Nevertheless, they share a lot in common. They both seek to articulate accounts of cognition, emotion, moral motivation, authority, and social ontology within the constraints of an anti-teleological naturalism. And they even share many specific theses concerning the metaphysics of desire, the ground of moral judgments, and the natural limits of obligation. This is no accident. Spinoza was a careful reader of Hobbes who often adopted Hobbesian premises in order to draw conclusions that he could wield against his revered predecessor. In this seminar, we will study the chief works of these two thinkers, seeking to understand how their respective accounts of metaphysics, psychology, and politics are supposed to hang together. We will pay special attention to their views on causality, the nature of mind, the affects, moral judgment, liberty, power, law, and the conditions of citizenship.
 
PHIL 76000: Aristotle and Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, Prof. Vasiliou, 4 credits, Mon. & Tues. 4:15-6:15
 
 [NOTE: This course meets twice a week for half the semester, from March 23 through May 12.]
 
According to most standard accounts, modern virtue ethics begins with Elizabeth Anscombe's essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" in 1958 and develops over the second half of the twentieth century as an alternative to deontological and consequentialist moral theories. Rather than obligation as the centerpiece of moral theory, it is commonly held that virtue ethics focuses on human flourishing and the virtues of character that constitute it. Aristotle is the patron saint of this movement. Over the last twenty years, some have begun to question what virtue ethics is, how and whether it differs from other types of ethical theory, and even to what extent Aristotle should be called a virtue ethicist. Some now avoid the term “virtue-ethics” and prefer to speak instead of “Neo-Aristotelian” ethics; under this label one might include the work of Julia Annas, Phillipa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, Alasdair MacIntyre, John McDowell, Martha Nussbaum, and Michael Thompson. While all of these philosophers discuss virtue, only some would identify their positions as belonging to “virtue ethics.”
 
We shall examine what sort of ethical theory contemporary Neo-Aristotelian ethics is and how it fits with what we actually find in Aristotle. What does it say about the relationships between agents and actions? How does it contrast with deontology or consequentialism? What does it mean for ethics to be "virtue-based", "character-based" or "agent-based/centered", as opposed to "rule-based" or "act-based/centered"? What is the role of (human) nature in Neo-Aristotelian ethics? Does practical reason operate differently in Neo-Aristotelian ethics than in other types of ethical theory?
 
We will do a close reading of major parts of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, including his discussions of eudaimonia, the virtues of character, practical reason, moral psychology, decision and deliberation, voluntary action, and the unity of virtues. We will interweave this with readings from secondary literature on the Ethics as well as from the “Neo-Aristotelians” mentioned above.
 
It will be important for us to work from the same translation of the Nicomachean Ethics. For various reasons, we shall use Terence Irwin's translation, second edition, Hackett Press; I ask you all to acquire a copy. We will also consult the Rowe/Broadie translation from Oxford, and the "Revised Oxford Translation" by Ross and revised by Urmson, published in the Complete Works of Aristotle (ed. J. Barnes, Princeton University Press). Please read Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics for the first class. First class will meet on 3/23, not 3/17 (there will be a make-up class, TBA). Philosophy students wishing to satisfy Distribution Area D-ancient with this seminar must write a term paper that focuses on Aristotle’s ethics.
 
PSC 72009: Gender, Race and American Political Development (AP), O’Brien & Waldstreicher, 3 credits, Tuesday 11:45am–1:45pm
 
Cross list: HIST 74600, WSCP 81000
 
This course explores persistent binaries that have arguably structured political thought and practice in the United States. On the one hand, the U.S. has been imagined as a place where people can rise through merit and opportunity, unconstrained by the oppressions of the past and of other places. Geographic mobility – settlement, migration, immigration – is mapped on to social mobility in the accepted meaning of the phrase “American Dream.” Yet U.S. history is marked by war and violence, to such a striking extent that scholars and pundits have periodically diagnosed the culture as peculiarly, even uniquely violent.
 
Given the recent resurgence of angry and martial rhetoric at the center of national politics, how might we understand the relationship between the revolutionary or Enlightenment dreams of progress on the one hand, and the recurrent dread or nightmare of decline and oppression, as shaping facts of specifically political traditions? To what extent, in what ways, are exceptionalist understandings of U.S. political traditions a problem or a solution? Do accounts that stress race, or gender, or the confluence of the two, provide a necessary or sufficient theory or counter narrative of political development? Do frameworks developed in European politics, in critical theory, postcolonial thought, or in domestic vernaculars comprehend the dream/dread in the past and present? What kinds of analytical scholarship and storytelling have been adequate to the task?
 
PSC 71901: Contemporary Political Theory (PT), Prof. Marasco, 3 credits, Monday 11:45am–1:45pm (Cross list with WSCP 81000)
 
This course provides a rigorous introduction to major works of political theory in the twentieth century. Our seminar will proceed as close readings of whole books and essays, on the assumption that political theory is best digested in non-excerpted form and that a different group of interpretive muscles are flexed when we linger on a work in its (exhaustive and exhausting) entirety.
 
Readings will include works by Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, CLR James, Theodor Adorno, Louis Althusser, Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, John Rawls, Catherine MacKinnon, and Jacques Ranciere. This seminar is designed primarily for Political Science graduate students preparing a concentration in political theory, but it is also open to students in Philosophy, Anthropology, Sociology, Women’s Studies, and related fields. This seminar will be especially useful for students preparing for their comprehensive exams in political theory.
 
By the end of the semester, you should expect to:
 
• Distinguish among various approaches to contemporary political theory and the traditions upon which they build.
• Develop reading & writing skills and, especially, the capacity to build compelling, arguments on major thinkers and topics in contemporary political theory.
• Acquire the foundations for preparation of the contemporary political theory portion of your comprehensive exam in political theory.
 
 
PSC 80602: Benjamin as Method (PT), Prof. Buck-Morss, 4 credits, Tuesday 2:00pm–4:00pm
 
In-depth readings of a wide range of Walter Benjamin’s writings in historical-political context, from World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, to World War II and the Vichy Regime. We will focus on philosophical method. What in his way of working escapes certain modern and post-modern dead-ends of theory? Excerpts from all five volumes of his Selected Works will be consulted.
 
PSC 80304: Ancient Greek Political Thought (PT), Prof. Mehta, 4 credits, Wednesday 2:00pm–4:00pm
 
This course will offer an introduction to the political thought of Plato and Aristotle; it is organized around important and classic texts of the Western philosophic tradition. The questions that will structure this course will include: Why is the study of politics and ethics something about which we need and can have general theories? What is the status of an “ideal” polity with respect to actual polities? What do the thinkers take to be the original motivation underlying the formation of political society? How do these motivations conform to the normative prescriptions that they propose? How do notions such as friendship and virtue relate to the understanding of citizenship? What are the justifications underlying the various proposed institutional arrangements and under what conditions can these arrangements be legitimately suspended? Finally, does the organizing of political life of necessity do violence to a more noble conception of human potentiality?
 
PSC 71906: Machiavelli (PT), Prof. Fontana, 3 credits, Thursday 6:30pm–8:30pm
 
This course will focus on Machiavelli and his interpreters. It will engage his thought through a close reading of his major political works, The Prince, the Discourses and The Art of War, as well as some of his minor works, The Life of Castruccio Castracani, A Provision for Infantry, Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence, the Tercets on Ambition and On Fortune. There is no need to underline the importance of such a course for a student of politics and of political theory. That he has had a broad and profound influence on political thought cannot be denied. He has been called teacher of evil, founder of modernity, partisan of republicanism, defender of tyranny, discoverer of a new science of politics, amoral realist and impassioned idealist. The very ambiguity (and popularity) of the term “Machiavellian” testifies to the range and depth of this influence. In addition, the course will examine different interpretations, or different ways of reading, Machiavelli—such as reason of state, republican, democratic, Straussian, rhetorical and revolutionary. In effect, the course will offer a reading of several of Machiavelli’s writings, and it will at the same time delve into the various approaches to, and interpretations of, his politics and thought.
 
PSC 71908 (Crosslist with HIST. 72400): The Political Thought of Hannah Arendt (PT), Prof. Wolin, 3 credits, Monday 6:30pm–8:30pm
 
Since her untimely death in 1975, Hannah Arendt’s stature as a political thinker has increased exponentially. In 1950 she authored the first important study of totalitarianism – a work that, today, among scholars remains an indispensable point of reference. In the late 1950s and early 1960s she published, in rapid succession, a series of path breaking works that consolidated her reputation as one of the twentieth-century’s most significant and innovative political philosophers: the Human Condition (1958), On Revolution (1962), and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). During the 1920s she studied philosophy with the two titans of German existentialism, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, and she played an indispensable role in introducing their ideas to the English-speaking world. During her Paris exile, she befriended the literary critic Walter Benjamin and helped to introduce his work to an American public. Arendt also excelled as a letter writer and as a public intellectual, contributing regularly to Partisan Review and the New York Review of Books. She has been the subject of numerous biographical and academic studies. Plays and films have been devoted to her fascinating intellectual itinerary.
 
In Germany there are not one, but two think tanks devoted to her work (Hamburg and Dresden). And during the 1990s, also in the country of her birth, she received the ultimate accolade: a high-speed train was named in her honor. As a thinker Arendt never shied away from taking risks – “thinking without bannisters,” she called it. Aspects of her work have proved controversial: above all, her employment of the epithet, “the banality of evil,” to describe Adolf Eichmann’s role in the Final Solution. In our course, we will focus primarily on Arendt’s contributions as a political thinker, in major works such as Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and On Revolution. But we will also consider her status and role as a flashpoint for some of the major intellectual controversies and debates of her time – and ours.
 
SOC 85200: Transnational Social Movements, Prof. Carolina Bank Muñoz, 3 credits, Thursdays, 2:00- 4:00pm
 
In this course, we will explore the global response to the rise of neoliberalism and austerity politics. While social movements in the U.S. are significantly weaker than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, there has been an explosion in global and transnational movements.  We will largely focus on labor, human rights, climate change and anti-globalization movements.  In analyzing transnational social movements, we will consider such questions as: How did these movements arise?  Are transnational social movements effective responses to globalization and neoliberalism? What are the limitations of transnational social movements? How do transnational social movements negotiate race, class and gender? And how have the rise of South-South movements challenged the power imbalances in transnational organizing?
Over the past decade, the global population of forcibly displaced people – as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations – grew substantially from 43.3 million in 2009 to 70.8 million in 2018, reaching a record high. This course is designed to give students an understanding of the major causes of contemporary migration and population displacement. Global, regional, and national processes contributing to and driving refugee and migration flows will be examined. Students will consider a range of critical issues and factors contributing to displacement, particularly under conditions of poverty, uneven development, competition for resources, political instability, weak governance, violence, environmental degradation, and natural disasters. International challenges including human rights, human trafficking, citizenship, and statelessness will be addressed as well.
 
SOC 82800: Capitalism, Race and Class, Prof. Charles Post, 3 credits, Mondays, 6:30-8:30 pm
 
The dominant “common sense” in the United States holds that this country, unique among all industrialized capitalist countries, has no fixed and permanent social classes and affords equal opportunity for social advancement to all its citizens. However, the reality is quite different. Social class divisions and racial inequality have marked US society from its birth in the 17th century, and these divisions grow sharper today. The problem of the relationship between these two fundamental forms of social inequality and power in the US has long been the subject of theoretical and historical controversy. In this seminar, we will assess some of the extensive literature on race and class in the US. Among the questions we will grapple with over the course of the year will be: What is the theoretical status of “race”? How do different sociologists understand social class? How were the racial categories “black” and “white” socially constructed alongside plantation slavery during the 17th and 18th centuries? How were these racial categories preserved and transformed as slavery was abolished, new immigrants arrived in the US and new forms of class inequality evolved over the course of the 19th century? How have racial categories been transformed as African-Americans have become an overwhelmingly urban people who compete as legal equals for jobs, education and housing with European-Americans? What is the current relationship of race and class in the US? Readings will be substantial, varied and historical in perspective.
 
SOC 8000: Foucault, Bourdieu and Baudrillard: Culture, Power, and Sexuality in the Global Era, Prof. Marnia Lazreg, Mondays, 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits
 
Bourdieu as well as Baudrillard expressed reticent admiration for, and skepticism about Foucault’s critical theoretical insights.  They both struggled with the same issues that are central to Foucault’s work: power, changing cultural practices as well as sexuality.    By the same token, they sought to distinguish themselves from Foucault’s approach.  Have they, as sociologists, transformed or extended Foucault’s analyses in grappling with the global contemporary challenges of culturalism, identity politics, social and racial strife, and sexual diversity?
 
    Using methods borrowed from the history of ideas as well as the sociology of knowledge, this course examines Bourdieu’s and Baudrillard’s efforts to build a critical sociology with practical applications for social change as they struggled with Foucault’s conceptual innovations. Special attention will be given to the meanings and articulations of key concepts and issues, including structure and event/history; language, rules and discourse; power and subjectivation; body, sex/sexuality and gender; biopolitics and racial supremacy; (non-Western) revolutions and political spirituality; security/war and self-defense.  The course will further examine the degree to which the concrete socio-political activities in which each author engaged informed his theoretical commitment.  
 
    The class will be conducted as a seminar that encourages an in-depth exploration of the multifaceted relationship between culture, power, and sexuality in various settings.  It will emphasize reading primary sources as much as possible, and thinking critically and boldly.  Students are expected to immerse themselves in the works of these authors, and write a paper focusing on two critical issues with which one of them engaged. Selecting current socio-political events or issues as testing ground for the three theorists’ ideas is strongly encouraged. The paper will be elaborated in stages to be discussed in class until its completion.
 
Main Texts: 
Foucault, excerpts from a selection of Lectures at the College de France, “Security, Territory and Population,” (1977-78); Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79); “On the Government of the Living” (1979- 1980);  History of Sexuality, II and II; Herculine Barbin.
Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice; Masculine Domination; Acts of Resistance; The Bachelors’ Ball; excerpts from On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989-1992.
Baudrillard, Seduction; Symbolic Exchange and Death; Simulacra and Simulation.
 
THEA 70600: History of Theatrical Theory, (Professor Peter Eckersall), Tuesdays, 4:15 p.m. to 6:15 p.m, 3 credits.
 
This course will introduce students to theatrical theory as a research discipline and will examine theories that have influenced contemporary theatre and performance studies. We will begin with a general discussion of what constitutes theory and then proceed modularly to examine such key theatrical and performance concepts as representation, mimesis, dramaturgy, and audience response. A modular structure will allow us to follow and create ongoing dialogues about these concepts as they have evolved. The second objective of the course will be met through, again, a modular approach to the presentation and discussion of such influential critical and cultural theories as formalism and structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, and cultural theory, as well as other disciplinary approaches—coming from, for instance, anthropology, sociology, and psychology—that have transformed theatre and performance.
 
           
THEA 71400: Aesthetics of the Film (This course is sponsored by Film Studies Certificate Program), Professor Jerry Carlson, Wednesdays, 4:15 p.m. to 6:15 p.m., 3 credits.
The movies – that is, narrative feature films – have always been recognized as a powerful medium for storytelling. Indeed, a century of censorship attests to the fears provoked by film’s seductive spell. FSCP 81000 will explore how that spell is created by the many strategies and tactics of storytelling, some shared with other media, others unique to cinema. To do so, we will engage with the history of narrative theory (or, narratology, as Tzvetan Todorov coined it in 1969). What explanatory powers do different theories offer? Our survey will move from Aristotle’s foundational Poetics to pre-cinematic theories of fiction (for example, Henry James), from the Russian Formalists to French high theory (Barthes, Genette, et al.), and from Neo-Formalist explanations (Bordwell) to ideologically positioned interventions from Marxism, psychoanalysis, queer theory or other approaches. We will put each theory in conversation with a pertinent feature film. The range of screenings will be global and diverse in narrative forms. Filmmakers may include, among others, Buster Keaton, Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Nicolas Roeg, Raul Ruiz, Chantal Akerman, Wong Kar-wai, and Tomas Gutierrez Alea. A number of questions will recur as we explore different theories. What is plot? How can the effects of plotting be explained? What are the options for cinematic narration? What is in common with other media? What is medium specific? How can narratology explain the nature of cinematic authorship? How does cinema create characters? How can it place them in social context or explore their subjectivity as they journey through the plot. The precision of our answers will help explain the spell of the movies in their social, cultural, historical, and emotional impact.
 
THEA 81500: Seminar in Film Studies: Film/Media Theory Strategies of Resistance, Prof. Amy Herzog, Thursdays, 11:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., 3 credits.
 
This course will provide a survey of Film and Media Theory, with a particular focus on activist media and strategies of resistance.  The seminar will be organized historically, spanning Soviet revolutionary films, 1960s newsreel collectives, Third Cinema movements, labor organizing media, activist television, contemporary anti-gentrification media, and digital and social media production. Each session will juxtapose mainstream fictional and non-fictional representations with contemporaneous media produced by independent resistance groups, as well as studies of the labor conditions and economic structures that shape the media industries during that period. Each student will research their own “constellation” of historical media texts, and media-based creative projects will be encouraged.
 
Questions of intersectionality and power will be core to this course. What formal strategies have emerged at different historical moments, and toward what ends? How do industry structures, distribution networks, and exhibition contexts impact the meaning of media texts? Who performs what labor within the media technology industries, and how is access determined? What historical forces impact the evolution of film and media theories? How can spectatorship theorized in relation to diverse media audiences and transforming sites of consumption?
 
Readings and screenings will include readings and media works by Sergei Eisenstein, Walter Benjamin, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Third World Newsreel, Chicana Por Mi Raza Media Collective, Racquel Gates, DIVA TV, Electronic Disturbance Theater, Mariame Kaba, Cardi B, and Lisa Nakamura. Student research projects will culminate in a final paper and multimedia dossier. Project proposals and field notes will be shared via a course website, and findings will be presented in class.

UED 75200: Critical Perspectives on Hope, Love and Care in Urban Schooling, Prof. Rivera-McCutchen, 4:15 – 6:15 p.m.

Neoliberal “high stakes” accountability measures come at a high cost in urban schools, where low-income Black, Latinx and other minoritized youth are often concentrated. Schools become sites of transactions, rather than sites of transformation. In this course, we will explore a more humanistic approach to urban schooling, focusing specifically on critical conceptions of care, love, and hope. Beginning with the premise that schooling must be explicitly focused on creating equitable and socially just learning environments where educators must actively work to disrupt structural inequality, this course will explore scholars whose work examines (theoretically and empirically) these concepts.

UED 75200: What’s Foucault Got To Do With It?: Race, Gender and Neoliberalism As Educational Spaces, Prof. Sonu, Thursdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m.

This course will take a Foucauldian approach to understanding power/knowledge and governmentality as it relates to racialization, gender-making, neoliberalism, and subjectivity. Readings will be theoretical as well as empirical and will take up education broadly. Assignments include small research activities and scaffolded writing projects intended for future journal publication.

UED 75200: Race/ism and Intersectionality in Urban Education: Theory, Praxis, and Transformation, Prof. Deckman, Tuesdays, 6:30 – 8:30 p.m.

This course will engage class members in a semester-long exploration of intersectionality in education, using race/ism as the starting point. Together we will probe the foundations and central tenets of intersectionality, from its origins in Critical Legal Studies and Black feminism, to current applications, debates, and evolutions in education. We will ask: How are racism and other systems of power and oppression (such as ableism, sexism, and heterosexism) mutually constitutive in educational contexts and to what end? How has educational research and practice responded and contributed to these dynamics? In addition, how have communities engaged in transformational, intersectional praxis in educational contexts? Finally, as an act of critical practice within the context of this course itself, students will co-construct the curriculum—determining course materials and co-facilitating one course meeting—and apply theoretical understandings to self-designed inquiry projects.

UED 75200: Approaches to Discourse Analysis in Language and Literacy Research, Prof. Schieble, Tuesdays, 4:15 – 6:15 p.m.

Discourse analysis is a study of the relationship between the form and function of talk and text and the social world. This course will explore various approaches to discourse analysis as both theory and method. Starting with theories about language and literacy as social practice, the course will move into an exploration of multiple approaches to discourse analysis based on scholarly tradition and including emerging approaches such as temporal and positive discourse analysis. Practices including the construction of a multimodal transcript and ways to engage in researcher reflexivity and social action will be addressed. The course will place particular emphasis on critical approaches to discourse analysis for engaging in language and literacy research that is oriented to investigating systems of oppression, liberation, structure, and agency. 

UED 75200: Critical University Studies, Prof. Brier, Mondays, 4:15 – 6:15 p.m.

This seminar on Critical University Studies (CUS), offered in the Urban Education program and cross-listed in MALS, will explore the role of higher education, especially public universities, at the intersection of issues of race, class, gender, culture, political economy, and politics, with a particular emphasis on the City University of New York. CUS is a relatively new field of interdisciplinary inquiry, drawing theoretical inspiration from the fields of Cultural Studies and Critical Legal Studies. It focuses on the critical examination of the institutional structures, ideologies, histories, and changing curricular forms and methods of scholarly inquiry and teaching in higher education institutions in the United States and beyond. It analyzes the neoliberal attacks over the past four decades on public universities by politicians and business interests and the oppositional responses of college faculty and staff as well as undergraduate and graduate students and the larger communities they serve to the savage funding cuts and ideological and intellectual critiques faced by public higher education systems around the country. We will read deeply in recent and landmark literature on CUS and seminar members will conduct scholarly research and writing on relevant CUS topics or areas of interest in public higher education, with a special emphasis on the historical development and contemporary situation of the City University of New York.

The seminar will:
•  explore the history of public university systems (especially, though not exclusively, CUNY);
•  analyze recent and current efforts to transform public higher education institutions and systems across the country.
•  hypothesize about where the public university is headed in the coming decades in the midst of austerity and neoliberal politics and policies as well the unrelenting impact of new technologies and the rise of contingent forms of academic labor.

We will read both classic and contemporary studies of public universities, explore available physical and digital university archives (including the CUNY Digital History Archive [CDHA] currently being developed at the Graduate Center), and undertake new research and scholarly and public publication projects on CUS. Graduate student participants will be expected over the course of the semester to conceive and launch individual and/or collaborative research and publication projects in CUS, with a special focus on CUNY.

The seminar is open to all GC PhD students in social science and humanities disciplines, as well as MALS and other Master’s students interested in exploring the changing nature and role of public higher education in contemporary society. The course is taught by Professor Stephen Brier, faculty member in the PhD program in Urban Education and in the MALS and M.A. in Digital Humanities programs and the certificate programs in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and American Studies. Brier recently co-authored (with Michael Fabricant) a CUS-themed book, Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2016). The seminar sessions will include presentations by several GC and outside presenters active in the CUS field.

We will make full use of the digital affordances of the CUNY Academic Commons to extend the reach of the seminar, including developing our own public-facing blog on CUS- and CUNY-related issues (similar to the “Remaking the University” blog developed by faculty in the University of California system, which everyone in the seminar should subscribe to and read).

The course focuses on a series of key questions that have roiled American society over the last century and a half (and especially since the end of World War II) about the nature and meaning of public education:

•   What is the purpose/role of public higher education in a democratic society?
•   Is the role of public higher education solely practical (i.e., job training to assure national economic progress and individual social mobility)?
•   Or is the role of education broadly political and/or ideological (educating students for their role in a democracy and teaching them how to be critical thinkers vs. providing students with tools to help them become productive members of and advanced capitalist society)?
•   How should those who work and learn in institutions of higher education respond to efforts to transform the mission of the public university in the face of increasing uses of technology and contingent labor?

Course Listing

CTCP 71088 Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
GC: Prof. John Brenkman, Wednesdays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm, 3 credits

Elective Courses

ANTH 71700: Theoretical Approaches to Nature & Environment
GC: Mondays, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Melissa Checker
Cross-listed with Psych; this section open only to Anthropology students.

ANTH 72900: Critical Anthropologies of the US
GC: Wednesdays, 4:15 – 6:15pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ida Susser
Fulfills area course requirement for students in the Cultural subfield. Cross-listed with WSCP.

ANTH 81000: Perspectives on Life Histories: From Memory through Imagination to Narration
GC: Thursdays, 2:00-4:00 pm, Rm TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Vincent Crapanzano
Cross-listed with Comp Lit.
 
ANTH 81600: Race, Space, and Autonomy
GC: Thursdays, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Rm TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Christopher Loperena
Cross-listed with WSCP.

ANTH 81800: Reading the Grundrisse
GC: Mondays, 4:15-6:15 pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. David Harvey
Cross listed with EES.

ART 86010 [class section 56678] Modern Art & Mass Culture
Wednesdays, 9:30-11:30, Prof. Michael Lobel

ART 86020 [class section 56852] Postwar Painting
Wednesdays, 2:00-4:00, Prof. David Joselit

ART 89000 [class section 56875] Decolonizing Gender between Image and Text
Mondays, 4:15-6:15, Profs. Siona Wilson (Art History) & Tanya Agathocleous (English), cross-listed with ENG 80500

CLAS 71800 Thucydides, Politics, Philosophy
Prof. Jennifer Roberts, Thurs. 6:30-8:30 PM, 3 credits

CLAS 81100 Aristotle’s Rhetoric
Prof. Laura Viidebaum, Thurs. 4:15-6:15 PM, 3 credits
NYU, Silver Center, Room 503A

CL 79500 Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization
GC: Tues, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 4 credits, Prof. Sonali Perera

CL 88400 Machiavelli and the Problem of Evil
GC: Tues, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Paul Oppenheimer

CL 89000 The Outcome of Classical German Philosophy: From Hegel-Adorno
GC: Mon, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin

CL 89100 History of Literary Theory & Criticism I
GC: Wed, 4:15-6:15pm, 4 credits, Prof. Paola Ureni

​ENGL 80500 Decolonizing Gender between Text and Image.[cross-listed with Art History].
Mondays 4:15PM - 6:15PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Tanya Agathocleous and Siona Wilson.

ENGL 80600 Il/liberal Aesthetics
Mondays 2:00PM - 4:00PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Kandice Chuh
 
ENGL 86600 Migrations and the Literary: Decolonizing Borders in Theory and Practice
Wednesdays 2:00PM - 4:00PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Peter Hitchcock

ENGL 76000 Aestheticism, Decadence, Modernism, 1880-1930
Tuesdays 6:30PM - 8:30PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Richard Kaye

ENGL 87400 The Essay Film
Wednesdays 4:15PM - 6:15PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum

ENGL 85500 Racial Hauntologies
Thursdays 4:15PM - 6:15PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Eric Lott

ENGL 89020 Queer Literacy and Its Discontents (or Discovering Oppressive Power Brokers of Education)
Mondays 4:15PM - 6:15PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Mark McBeth

ENGL 84200 Thinking in Pieces: Pascal, Dickinison, Wittgenstein
Tuesdays 11:45AM - 1:45PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof Joshua Wilner

FREN 79130: Contemporary Issue in Post-Colonial Sub-Sharan Francophone Literature and Film
Thursdays, 6:30-8:30, Prof. Nathalie Etoke, 2 or 4 Crédits

FREN 70500: Writing the Self: From Augustine to Selfies
Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15, Distinguished Prof. Domna Stanton, 2 or 4 Credits

HIST 70310 Thucydides, Politics, Philosophy
Monday, 6:30-8:30 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Jennifer Roberts, Crosslisted with Philosophy, Political Science and Classics

HIST 72400 The Outcome of German Classical Philosophy
Monday, 6:30-8:30 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin

​HIST 72300 History and Theory II
Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Samira Haj

​LING 76100 Introduction to Sociolinguistics
Monday, 2:00pm - 4:00pm, Prof. Cecelia Cutler

LING 70100: Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics
Tuesday, 4:15pm – 6:15pm
Prof. Christina Tortora (ctortora@gc.cuny.edu) & Jason Bishop (jbishop@gc.cuny.edu)

MUS 74500: Seminar in Theory/Analysis 1: Schenkerian Analysis 1
Monday, 10am -1pm, Prof. Poundie Burstein, Room 3491, 4 Credits

MUS 84100: Topic Theory: Analytical and Critical Issues
Wednesday, 10am- 1pm, Prof. Kofi Agawu, Room 3491, 3 Credits

MUS 83500: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: (Ethno)musicology and Social Theory
Wednesday, 10am -1pm, Prof. Jane Sugarman, Room 3389, 3 Credits [Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission]

MUS 84200: Current Trends in Music Theory
Thursday, 2pm-5pm, Prof. Joseph Straus, Room 3389, 3 Credits

MUS 86400: Seminar in Musicology: Sonic Rubble: Music after Urban Catastrophe
Tuesdays. 2pm-5pm, Prof. Abby Anderton, Room 3389, 3 Credits

PHIL 77600: Contemporary Problems in the Philosophy of Art
Tuesdays, 11:45 am-1:45 am, Room TBA, Prof. Carrol
 
PHIL 77000: Consciousness: Neuroscience and Philosophy
Thursdays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, Room TBA, Profs. Rosenthal and Ro

PHIL 76300: Marx and Marxism
Mondays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm, Room TBA, Prof. Mills

PHIL 76100: Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century: Kant and his Predecessors​
Mondays, 6:30 pm- 8:30 pm, Room TBA, Prof. Wilson

PSC 80304: Classics in Modern Philosophy
Wednesdays, 2:00pm–4:00pm. Prof. Uday Mehta, 4 Credits

PSC 80601: BioPolitics
Mondays, 2:00pm–4:00pm, Prof. Paisley Currah, 4 credits

PSC 80607: Beyond the Canon: Recent Trends in Political Theory
Mondays, 6:30pm–8:30pm, Prof. Susan Buck-Morss, 4 credits

PSC 71902: The Outcome of Classical German Philosophy
Mondays, 6:30pm–8:30pm, Prof. Richard Wolin, 3 credits

PSC 71903: Thucydides, Politics, Philosophy
Mondays, 6:30pm–8:30pm, Prof. Jennifer Roberts, 3 credits

THEA 80300: Seminar in Theatre Theory & Criticism: German Theatre/Theory
Tuesdays, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., Professor David Savran
 
THEA 80300: Seminar in Theatre Theory & Criticism: Theorizing the Oceanic from Antony and Cleopatra to John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea
Wednesdays, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., Professor Maurya Wickstrom

THEA 81600: Seminar in Film Theory: Theories of the Cinema
Cross listed with FSCP8100 African Film History and Theory, 1950-1990
Mondays, 4:15 p.m. – 8:15 p.m., Instructor Boukary Sawadogo

THEA 85700: Seminar in Contemporary Performance Theory and Technique
Cross listed with ART86040 Cage & Cunningham
Wednesday, 11:45-1:45 PM, Profs. Claire Bishop (Art History) and David Grubbs (Music)

SOC 73200: Gender & Globalization
Mondays, 2:00 PM- 4:00 PM, Prof. Eisenstein
 
SOC 70100: Development of Sociological Theory (Theory I)
Wednesdays, 6:30 PM -8:30 PM, Prof. Hammond

SPAN 70200: Critical Theory
GC: Monday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Prof. Silvia Dapía
 
SPAN 80100: Climate Change and Discursive Framing
GC: Tuesday, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Prof. José del Valle and Prof. David Lindo Atichati
 
SPAN 87100: Periodismo narrativo y ficción literaria en el México neoliberal: Políticas escriturales, estado de excepción y la industria cultural trasnacional
GC: Monday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Prof. Oswaldo Zavala

Course Descriptions

CTCP 71088 Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
GC: Prof. John Brenkman, Wednesdays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm, 3 credits
 
Starting from the tension between Marx and Weber, the seminar will explore debates and developments that inform contemporary theory, focused around salient conflicts in social theory, philosophy, and aesthetics.

(1) How do conflicting paradigms of society as system (Luhmann), as norm-governed institutions (Habermas), as symbolic-institutional habitus and practices (Bourdieu), or as actor-networks (Latour) bear on interdisciplinary research? (2) How to conceptualize the artwork or literary text in its difference from other objects and practices, its immersion in institutions and social networks, its hermeneutical instability and variability, its relation to prevailing forms of “communication” (Heidegger, Deleuze, Luhmann, and others)? (3) How does the Anthropocene, as concept and actuality, open to new questioning  concepts of the human, nature, and technology (Chakrabarty, Agamben, Latour, Sloterdijk, Arendt, Žižek, and others)?

Texts: Garth and Mills (eds.), From Max Weber; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?; Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought; Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air. Excerpts and essays by Marx, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour, Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser, Giorgio Agamben, Graham Harman, Dipesh Chakrabarty, François Jullien, Sianne Ngai, and others will be provided via Blackboard.

ANTH 71700: Theoretical Approaches to Nature & Environment
GC: Mondays, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Melissa Checker
Cross-listed with Psych; this section open only to Anthropology students.

ANTH 72900: Critical Anthropologies of the US
GC: Wednesdays, 4:15 – 6:15pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ida Susser
Fulfills area course requirement for students in the Cultural subfield. Cross-listed with WSCP.

ANTH 81000: Perspectives on Life Histories: From Memory through Imagination to Narration
GC: Thursdays, 2:00-4:00 pm, Rm TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Vincent Crapanzano
Cross-listed with Comp Lit.
 
ANTH 81600: Race, Space, and Autonomy
GC: Thursdays, 4:15 – 6:15 pm, Rm TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Christopher Loperena
Cross-listed with WSCP.

ANTH 81800: Reading the Grundrisse
GC: Mondays, 4:15-6:15 pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. David Harvey
Cross listed with EES.

ART 86010 [class section 56678] Modern Art & Mass Culture
Wednesdays, 9:30-11:30, Prof. Michael Lobel

While early critical approaches often framed vanguard artistic practice in opposition to the ostensibly facile forms of popular culture, the ongoing dialogue between the two has actually been central to the development and function of art in the modern age, prompting widespread debates about their relationship. This course will consider episodes in the interaction between art and popular culture from around 1850 to the present day, focusing on the thematics of classification, circulation, and transformation. Topics to be covered may include: Courbet and the burgeoning culture of publicity in the nineteenth century; developments in mass printing like wood engraving, halftone, and chromolithography; the Index of American Design in the 1930s; gender, craft, and fabrication; Latin American responses to Pop; and recent research on Warhol, the archive, and queer identity. We will attend to various theoretical approaches at the same time we consider how technique, materials, and medium are central to these discussions as well.

ART 86020 [class section 56852] Postwar Painting
Wednesdays, 2:00-4:00, Prof. David Joselit
 
This class will address major tendencies in painting worldwide between 1945 and the present. Emphasis will be placed on broadening the treatment of movements like Abstract Expressionism and Pop beyond Europe and the United States. Other practices, such as Concrete art whose practice was largely rooted in Latin America, will also be considered. Broad surveys of such movements will alternate with focused sessions on individual artists whose works may be seen in person in New York during the period of the course. Does not accept auditors.

ART 89000 [class section 56875] Decolonizing Gender between Image and Text
Mondays, 4:15-6:15, Profs. Siona Wilson (Art History) & Tanya Agathocleous (English), cross-listed with ENG 80500
 
The politics of colonial resistance and egalitarian feminism arose alongside each other and share an overlapping history and vocabulary. The notion of liberation is central to both and in its service the two movements have intersected, interrupted, aided and undermined each other. As feminist postcolonial theorists such as Lila Abu-Lughod and Gayatri Spivak have argued, colonialism has instrumentalized feminism and vice versa. We want to read the historical intersection of feminism and anti-colonialism through the relationship between image and text, with close attention to phenomena such as harem photography, political cartoons, photo albums, and instances of Third Cinema (e.g. The Battle of Algiers). Tracing a long durée from the colonial period to the present, the class will be divided into four sections.
Part 1, “Colonial Spectacle,” addresses the intersection of knowledge, display and fantasy in relation to Orientalism, World’s Fair exhibitions and political cartoons. Part 2, “Psychoanalysis, Sexology and Colonialism,” looks at the rise of psychoanalysis and sexology alongside colonial epistemologies and studies particular instances of clinical practice in the colonies (Frantz Fanon, Marcus Hirschfeld and Freud Free Clinics). Part 3, “Insurgency and the Veil,” takes up the role of women in anti-colonial struggles and the ongoing difficulties of attaining political agency when “woman” becomes the symbol of the postcolonial nation state. Part 4, “Sexual Citizenship,” addresses the relationship between sexuality and citizenship in a series of historical and contemporary examples including “pink washing” in Israel. The class is aimed at students with literary, art historical and historical training who seek to deepen their theoretical knowledge of postcolonial and feminist theory and develop new frameworks for analyzing the relationship between image and text.

CLAS 71800 Thucydides, Politics, Philosophy
Prof. Jennifer Roberts, Thurs. 6:30-8:30 PM, 3 credits
Graduate Center, Room TBA

This interdisciplinary course will be guided in part by the particular interests of the students who choose to enroll in it: historians, classicists, archaeologists, political scientists, philosophers.  Although there will be common readings, students are encouraged to pursue their own perspectives on Thucydides while at the same time coming to appreciate his relevance to other disciplines.  The text will be read in English, but I am happy to meet separately with students who would like to read selections in the original Greek.
 
A masterpiece of both narrative and analysis, Thucydides’ account of the war between the Athenian Empire and Peloponnesian League also merits study as a work of profound philosophical import.  The work of a man filled with a plangent sense of the sorrows of the human condition, Thucydides’ history offered a non-fiction counterpart to the tragic drama of his contemporaries Sophocles and Euripides. 
 
The father of political science, Thucydides has often been labeled the father of political realism.  We will explore in what ways this is and is not accurate.  Thucydides has been co-opted by one generation after another, on one continent after another, as a spokesman for its own society and identified as the one person who best understood the problems of the day.  From monarchists to republicans in Europe to 20th and 21st century American neoconservatives, his readers have proudly cited him in defense of their ideologies. Today students of international relations wring their hands over the newly dubbed menace, “the Thucydides trap,” a concept that draws parallels between the diplomatic situation that led up to the Peloponnesian War and America’s growing tensions with China.  Both Thucydides and his legacy will be the subjects of this course.

CLAS 81100 Aristotle’s Rhetoric
Prof. Laura Viidebaum, Thurs. 4:15-6:15 PM, 3 credits
NYU, Silver Center, Room 503A

Aristotle’s Rhetoric is a fascinating work that is as complex and influential as it is controversial. Despite unsolved questions about its actual composition and difficult afterlife, the Rhetoric continues to serve as the starting point for theoretical reflections on rhetoric, oratory and prose writing. In this course we will aim to get an overall idea of the Rhetoric and delve into questions about its language, composition, subject matter, and position within Aristotle’s corpus. We’ll think about the commentary tradition and will also look at the impact and afterlife of the Rhetoric, particularly in the way in which it has contributed to discussions about ancient emotions. We will read the work in the original Greek, though students should have a read through the whole of the Rhetoric in translation before the start of the semester. For the original, we’ll work with W. D. Ross’ edition of Aristotle’s Rhetoric (OCT, 1959). We’ll have weekly reading assignments, comprising of passages of the Rhetoric and relevant secondary literature, a midterm and a final assignment, which will highly likely be a summary effort to produce a commentary of Book 3 of the Rhetoric.

CL 79500 Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization
GC: Tues, 2:00pm-4:00pm, 4 credits, Prof. Sonali Perera

As a range of comparatist scholars have noticed, Marx observes in the manifesto (of all unlikely places) that world literature “arises” as the by-product of exploitative, even imperialist, designs. Where world literature is defined narrowly as literature of global circulation, its market driven, cosmopolitan character might be deemed to be the happy accident of capital movement guided by its cultural and economic custodians. But what happens when we expand and complicate our frame of reference? What of other methods and models for conceiving/reconceiving world literature as literary internationalism? What concepts and ideologies of comparison derive from a theory of value in a global and unequal world? And how do we understand the relationship between comparative literature and world literature—as antagonistic or supplementary?
 
Since Marx’s thoughts on the subject, in recent years, literary theory scholars find themselves returning to consider the problems and possibilities of world literature. The past two decades have seen a surge of publications agitating for and against both a revitalized Weltliteratur and a newly re-tooled comparative literature. WReC (The Warwick Research Collective) proposes a new world-systems theory approach which conceives of world-literature (with a hyphen) as a “re-making of comparative literature after the multicultural debates and the disciplinary critique of Eurocentricism.” In a recent issue of the PMLA journal devoted to “Literature in the World,” Simon Gikandi keeps the question alive: “But if world literature takes us everywhere and nowhere, are we better off with comparative literature, a disciplinary formation driven by the idea that literatures can be studied in their distinctive languages, across national and linguistic boundaries, without abandoning the languages and grounds that gave rise to them?” And yet, if in minimal terms, the study of comparative literature is distinguished from that of world literature on the grounds that the former requires specialized knowledge of multiple languages whereas world literature is merely literature in translation and generally studied in English, do we agree with how this academic sub-division of labor is coded and institutionalized? What is at stake in constructing the difference between world literary approaches and comparative literature in this way? Is it the case, as has been argued, that the turn to world literature has prompted a new strain of scholarship in comparative literature?
 
In our class, we will engage with some of these questions, as we take the measure of the state of the field debates. Throughout our course, you are encouraged to consider how these debates might shape the way that we think of research and writing in literary studies today.
 
Simply put, then, this course offers us a chance to study the resurgence of world literature as an interpretive paradigm against and through the perspective of new scholarship on the theory and practice of comparative literature. While we will study touchstone texts (by Goethe, Marx, Heidegger, Arendt, Auerbach, Said, Cesaire, Moretti, Damrosch, Spivak, Federici, Amin), we will also familiarize ourselves with recent scholarship including works by Casanova, Apter, Melas, Lowe, Ahmed, Robbins, Moten, and WReC. We will ground our discussions by “applying” theory to literary works by Woolf, Manto, Devi, Coetzee, and Salih. If time permits, alongside selections from theory and literature, we may also read excerpts from one or two of the ACLA’s emblematic state of the discipline reports.
 
Course requirements: 1.) A 20 minute presentation on one or two of the weekly readings. 2.)  A 2 page prospectus for the final paper. 3) A 15-20 page final paper. 4.) Engaged class participation.

CL 88400 Machiavelli and the Problem of Evil
GC: Tues, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Paul Oppenheimer

Niccolò di Machiavelli (1469-1527) is not only recognized as the first modern political scientist, distinguished by his empirical approach to political and historical questions, but as the first and possibly foremost investigator of the role of treachery in politics as well as the problem of evil. This course examines along these lines his ideas about politics, history, Fortuna, destiny and chance, together with his influence on the history of drama (through his Mandragola), considering especially his The Prince, The Discourses, and assorted selections from other works. Machiavelli’s influence on philosophy, fiction, drama, and film will be taken up in terms of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Nietzsche, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will, and Orwell’s Animal Farm. The instructor’s biography, Machiavelli: A Life Beyond Ideology, is recommended but not required, as is his Evil and the Demonic: A New Theory of Monstrous Behavior. — One research paper, plus a brief in-class presentation. 

CL 89000 The Outcome of Classical German Philosophy: From Hegel-Adorno
GC: Mon, 6:30pm-8:30pm, 2,4 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin

In 1886, Friedrich Engels wrote a perfectly mediocre book, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, which nevertheless managed to raise a fascinating and important question that is still being debated today: how should we go about evaluating the legacy of German Idealism following the mid-nineteenth century breakdown of the Hegelian system? For Engels, the answer was relatively simple: the rightful heir of classical German philosophy was Marx’s doctrine of historical materialism. But, in truth, Engels’ response was merely one of many possible approaches. Nor would it be much of an exaggeration to claim that, in the twentieth-century, there is hardly a philosopher worth reading who has not sought to define him or herself via a confrontation with the legacy of Kant and Hegel.
 
Our approach to this very rich material will combine a reading of the canonical texts of German Idealism (e.g., Kant and Hegel) with a sustained and complementary focus on major twentieth-century thinkers who have sought to establish their originality via a critical reading of Hegel and his heirs: Alexandre Kojève, Georges Bataille, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. But we will also seek acknowledge the importance of the contemporary North American Hegel renaissance, as exemplified by the work of philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Robert Pippin, Michael Forster, Terry Pinkard, and Allen Wood.
 
In his “Discourse on Language” Foucault warns us appositely that, “Truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge that permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. Thus we have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.” Foucault’s insightful caveat will, in many respects, function as our interpretive watchword as we seek to decode and reconstruct German Idealism and its innovative contemporary legacies.

CL 89100 History of Literary Theory & Criticism I
GC: Wed, 4:15-6:15pm, 4 credits, Prof. Paola Ureni

A study of the major statements in literary theory during the classical, medieval, and early modern periods, the course will focus on issues related to the nature of literary representation and transmission. As much of the course deals with the absorption of ideas by one culture from another and the migration of texts from one linguistic, geographical and religious center to another, we will introduce translation theory and histoire croissé as methods. Topics will include the various ways the following have traveled from setting to another from period to period: mimesis and imitation; literary truth and beauty; genre and structure; figurative language; affectivity. Classical readings will include Plato, Aristotle, and Horace; medieval readings will include Augustine and Dante; early modern readings will include Valla, Tasso, Sidney, and Milton. Course requirements: oral report and seminar paper.
 
ENGL 80500 Decolonizing Gender between Text and Image. [cross-listed with Art History].
Mondays 4:15PM - 6:15PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Tanya Agathocleous and Siona Wilson.
 
The politics of colonial resistance and egalitarian feminism arose alongside each other and share an overlapping history and vocabulary. The notion of liberation is central to both and in its service the two movements have intersected, interrupted, aided and undermined each other. As feminist postcolonial theorists such as Lila Abu-Lughod and Gayatri Spivak have argued, colonialism has instrumentalized feminism and vice versa. We want to read the historical intersection of feminism and anti-colonialism through the relationship between image and text, with close attention to phenomena such as harem photography, political cartoons, photo albums, and instances of Third Cinema (e.g. The Battle of Algiers). Tracing a long durée from the colonial period to the present, the class will be divided into four sections. Part 1, “Colonial Spectacle,” addresses the intersection of knowledge, display and fantasy in relation to Orientalism, World’s Fair exhibitions and political cartoons. Part 2, “Psychoanalysis, Sexology and Colonialism,” looks at the rise of psychoanalysis and sexology alongside colonial epistemologies and studies particular instances of clinical practice in the colonies (Frantz Fanon, Marcus Hirschfeld and Freud Free Clinics). Part 3, “Insurgency and the Veil,” takes up the role of women in anti-colonial struggles and the ongoing difficulties of attaining political agency when “woman” becomes the symbol of the postcolonial nation state. Part 4, “Sexual Citizenship,” addresses the relationship between sexuality and citizenship in a series of historical and contemporary examples including “pink washing” in Israel. The class is aimed at students with literary, art historical and historical training who seek to deepen their theoretical knowledge of postcolonial and feminist theory and develop new frameworks for analyzing the relationship between image and text.

ENGL 80600 Il/liberal Aesthetics
Mondays 2:00PM - 4:00PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Kandice Chuh
 
This course occasions the study of the relationship between politics and aesthetics.  How and with what effects is that relationship organized by and in service of the liberal-colonial-racial capitalist order that is modernity?  How and with what effects is that relationship elaborated in difference from that order?  We'll spend some time historicizing aesthetics but will emphasize throughout the aesthetic expressions and theorizations of politics and aesthetics emerging out of the intellectual and artistic-literary genealogies that are disidentified with the aesthetics of liberalism.  We'll attend to the role of aesthetic education, as well as those of pleasure and discomfort, as we collectively undertake consideration of the meaningfulness of thinking aesthetics and politics together.  Women of color feminism, queer of color critique, Black studies, ethnic studies, Native American studies, settler colonial and postcolonial critique, and performance studies, constellate to form the center of gravity of this course.  Students should expect a substantial reading load in addition to biweekly short writing assignments.  Students taking the class for 2 credits will fulfill the requirements of the course with those short assignments.  Students taking the class for 4 credits will submit a longer essay or equivalent project at semester's end.  Everyone is expected to be actively engaged and present throughout the course.

ENGL 86600 Migrations and the Literary: Decolonizing Borders in Theory and Practice
Wednesdays 2:00PM - 4:00PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Peter Hitchcock
 
In a lecture at the University of Cape Town in the early Nineties, Edward Said suggested "Our model for academic freedom should [therefore] be the migrant or traveler: for if, in the real world outside the academy, we must needs be ourselves and only ourselves, inside the academy we should be able to discover and travel among other selves, other identities, other varieties of the human adventure." Said's positioning here is complex and not unproblematic but refers simultaneously to his life and politics, to his sense of the world (for which he often used the terms "worldliness" or "circumstantiality"), and to his concern for an academy that had recently been berated by Allan Bloom. Said's understanding of the migrant, or "traveler," is certainly idiosyncratic, yet it opens up a pertinent and prescient argument not just about the place of the migrant in academe, but about the shifting borders of migrancy in the contemporary period. Rather than being an introduction to migration and migration studies (a huge area of research and contention, not least because 1 in 7 people on the planet are currently defined as migrants), this course will consider what Thomas Nail terms "the figure of the migrant," both as a narrative mode and as an eminently postcolonial problematic. Instead of reading the migrant as primarily imperialism and colonialism's signal effect, we will study migrant literature and theory as agential in their own right, as a set of racial, sexual, and gendered provocations about how we think through literary knowledge as decolonization. On the one hand, the salience of Gloria Anzaldua's elaboration of borderlands continues to pick away at any state identity that pivots on exclusion in the name of protection; on the other hand, the intensification of migratory movement, as refugee, as asylum seeker, as exile, as worker, extends her critique in new ways, and both literature and theory grapple with such dynamism. Using specific examples of writing, we will examine migration as an entangled logic of decolonization, one that offers critical terms within border crossing, interdisciplinarity, and aesthetic engagement.
 
The course will begin with some basic questions. What is migrant literature? Is it a theme, the writer's biography, a state of mind, a form of cultural capital? Are all borders decolonized by crossing them? What about internal migration in the othering of identity? Doesn't migrant literature homogenize as much as differentiate? What if the writer migrates from the norms of migrancy? And what of disciplinary border crossing in readings of the migrant? As we delve deeper into representative literature and theory throughout the term, should we think of genres of literary migration, rather than forms? What makes migrant literature count? Does migrant literature permit the undocumented to document? What does it say about the politics and poetics of translation, and of world literature in the current conjuncture? As you can tell, the course offers several research avenues, but in general the idea is to take migration literature and theory as an opening to postcolonial critique, and to an interdisciplinary understanding of the literary in the world system as such. Readings in literature and theory may include Fanon, Patel, Lowe, Said, Salih, Unnikrishnan, Deleuze, Federici, Sassen, Anzaldua, Benjamin, Luibheid, Bhabha, Mukherjee, Spivak, Farah, Nguyen, and Adichie.
 
ENGL 76000 Aestheticism, Decadence, Modernism, 1880-1930
Tuesdays 6:30PM - 8:30PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Richard Kaye
 
This class explores the relation between the aestheticist and decadent movements as well as their determination of modernist aesthetics. We will begin with late-nineteenth-century British, American, and French works by Hardy, Wilde, James, and Huysmans. The fin de siècle was a time of pervasive fears and fantasies dominated by such figures as the New Woman, the urban detective, the homosexual bachelor, the Anarchist, the Oriental, the overreaching colonialist, the self-preening aesthete, the vampire, and the femme fatale, the latter reaching an apotheosis in Wilde’s Salome. In the diverse writings of Pater, Olive Schreiner, Vernon Lee, and Wilde, aestheticism emerged as a theoretically coherent and varied movement absorbed in exquisite surfaces, tantalizing ambiguities, and useless artifice. For decadent writers and artists, scientific theories of “degeneration” could be recalibrated as erotically charged, non-teleological experiments, while Freud drew on “decadent” scenarios for his proto-modernist narratives dealing with hysteria and sexual disorder, preeminently in Dora: Fragment of a Case of Hysteria, Women writers, meanwhile, struggled to find a place within the male-defined coteries of aestheticism and decadence, a theme dramatized in Henry James’ tale “The Author of Beltraffio,,” narrated by a decadent acolyte, in which the aestheticist project must be sequestered from female readers, who can only misconstrue its aims as immoral. Yet there were also alliances between male decadents and feminist writers (Wilde promoted Schreiner’s novel The Story of an African Farm because of its bold challenge to realist conventions and depiction of colonialist malaise.)  In France, the woman writer Rachilde publishes Monsieur Venus (1884), a symbolist/decadent novella concerning a dominatrix noblewoman, Raoule, who gradually transforms her working-class lover Jacques into her mistress by emptying him of all his “masculine” traits.
 
In the class’s section part we will explore how the fin outlasted the siècle, maintaining an intense afterlife in the Anglo-American modernist writing of Yeats, James, Eliot, Conrad, Joyce, Lawrence, and Djuna Barnes.  The morbidity, subjectivism, sexual experimentalism, and excesses of literary technique characteristic of 1890s sensibility foment modernist revisions that seek to repress their origins in decadent poetics. Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, with its hero who cannot "develop," inspires modernist counter-bildungsromanae. We consider Joyce’s Stephen Hero, an early version of Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, arguably a satire of aestheticism as well as a novel with an explicitly Paterian protagonist. The keenly observing, detached bachelor familiar from James also narrates Rilke’s lyrical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (arguably the first modernist novel) and that helps to form the paralyzed solitary consciousness of Eliot’s “Prufrock.” Arguably the narrator of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness adopts decadent techniques for his coiled narrative of colonial tragedy.  We will consider, too, Eliot’s absorption in the figure of the Jew as an emblem of a malevolent decadent cosmopolitanism versus Djuna Barnes’ depiction of the decadent Jew in her novel Nightwood as a more positively transformative cultural agent. Our class concludes with James’ The Golden Bowl, a novel of twinned adulteries that is one of James’ most topical, aesthetically difficult, and decadent works of fiction. Among the works we will read: Hardy, Jude the Obscure, Huysmans, Against Nature; Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome; Schreiner, Story of an African Farm; Freud, Dora: Analysis of a Fragment of a Case of Hysteria; Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Joyce, Stephen Hero, Yeats, Selected Poems; Lawrence, Selected Short Fiction; Eliot, Selected Poetry; James, The Golden Bowl; Barnes, Nightwood; Showalter, Elaine, ed., Daughters of Decadence.  We will read relevant critical and theoretical texts, including Walter Pater, “Conclusion” to The Renaissance; Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature”; Mario Praz, from The Romantic Agony; George Bataille, from Literature and Evil; Richard Ellmann, “The Uses of Decadence”; Richard Gilman, from Decadence: The Strange Life of an Epithet; Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and The New Woman”; Michael Riffaterre, “Decadent Paradoxes,” Leo Bersani, from The Culture of Redemption; Regenia Gagnier, “Individualism, Decadence, and Globalization,” Vincent Sherrry, from Decadence and the Reinvention of Modernism”; Matthew Potolsky, from The Decadent Republic of Letters.  A mid-term paper as well as a final paper that may be drawn from the mid-term essay. This class can be adapted to parts of the New Portfolio Examination.

ENGL 87400 The Essay Film
Wednesdays 4:15PM - 6:15PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Wayne Koestenbaum
 
This seminar offers a chance to delve into visual works that might be called “essay films.”  A perplexing category; a fruitful category; a pretext for flight, for immersion, and for an end to naysaying.  Critic Tim Corrigan argues that “although for many the notion of an essay film remains less than self-explanatory, this particular mode of filmmaking has become more and more recognized as not only a distinctive kind of filmmaking but also, I would insist, as the most vibrant and significant kind of filmmaking in the world today.” (Timothy Corrigan, The Essay Film:  From Montaigne, after Marker, Oxford U. Press, 2011.)  Artists studied will include such unclassifiables as Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Werner Herzog, Marlon Riggs, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Isaac Julien, Jonas Mekas, and Ja’Tovia Gary, among many other possibilities.  We will read some theoretical texts about the literary essay and the essay film:  Georg Lukács, Theodor Adorno, André Bazin, Hito Steyerl, Laura Mulvey, Nora Alter, and others.  As an ancillary aim, the course will consider how essayistic modes of filmmaking cast light on the contemporary practice of the literary essay (Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, and others).  Students will have the opportunity to write about essay films, and, if desired, to experiment with the making of an essay film.  No auditors.
 
ENGL 85500 Racial Hauntologies
Thursdays 4:15PM - 6:15PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Eric Lott
 
This course plays with Jacques Derrida’s coinage in Specters of Marx, ontology haunted by a pun on haunting, to propose a course of study or series of case studies in overdetermination itself: the ways racial formation suffuses and delimits other vectors of social dominance.  Race, articulation, and societies structured in dominance give us our marching orders as we examine revealing moments of revolutionary conflict from the U.S. Reconstruction period to the present.  We will take up theoretical coordinates, cultural dossiers, and textual instances of many kinds—forms and formations, bases and superstructures, sudden advances and lockdown retrenchments.  The course will require at least as much attention to social and political theory and debate (Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, V.N. Vološinov, Angela Davis, Saidiya Hartman, José Muñoz, Tavia Nyong’o, Joshua Clover) as to literary and cultural articulation (Abraham Lincoln, Lucy Parsons, Langston Hughes, Ornette Coleman, Samuel Delany, Arthur Jafa, Carrie Mae Weems, Princess Nokia) as we explore recombinant social formations, riots, strikes, crowds, parties, and utopias and the textual forms that arise from and address them.  Engagements with various kinds of social-activist-intellectual practice is an assumed and built-in aspect of the course.

ENGL 89020 Queer Literacy and Its Discontents (or Discovering Oppressive Power Brokers of Education)
Mondays 4:15PM - 6:15PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof. Mark McBeth
 
In this course, Queer Literacy, we will focus upon how literacy sponsorships played a role in the dynamic power play between heternormative/homophobic public discourses and queer subject formation,. In "Sponsors of Literacy," Deborah Brandt lists a group of "figures who turned up most typically in people’s memories of literacy learning: older relatives, teachers, priests, supervisors, military officers, editors, influential authors. [These sponsors of literacy,] as we ordinarily think of them, are powerful figures who bankroll events or smooth the way for initiates” (167, emphasis added). For Gay, Lesbian and Trans individuals who lived through the twentieth century, these prevalent figures of sponsorship-- who would presumably “smooth the way for initiates”--in fact, constrained the literacy of queer learners. Ellen Louise Hart has claimed that "the acts of reading and writing are acts of creation, not peripheral but essential to all education and all learning" and, moreover she adds, for LGBTQ students, who navigate through patriarchy, heterosexism, and homophobia, literacy often takes on special roles for their survival ("Literacy and the Lesbian/Gay Learner" 31). The adverse confluence of these societal forces--an intradependent set of discourses that reified each other--kept queer initiates in identificatory check under an unspoken platform of heteronormative literacy sponsorship so that for most of the twentieth century the Queer community could not gain an affirmative foothold of self-worth through the literate practices that normally allow for such growth and development.
 
While this course will focus its analytic attentions on heteronormative discourses and the counter-normative measures twentieth-century queers took to upend them, students could (in fact, should also) investigate the primary sources of public media, archival artifacts, and other “traceable” materials to discover how over-deterministic discourses shaped the literacy potentials/capabilities/futures of other marginalized communities.  Participants in this course will visit various archives and special collections around the city.
 
Potential Reading List
Brandt, Deborah.  “Sponsors of Literacy.”  College Composition and Communication 49.2 (May 1998): 165 -185.
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.”  New York, NY: Routledge, 1993.  
Foucault, Michel.  The History of Sexuality, Volume 1:  An Introduction.  New York, NY: Vintage Books, Random House, 1978/1990. Print.
Gee, James Paul.  Literacy and Education.  New York, NY: Routledge, 2015.
Hart, Ellen Louise.  “Literacy and the Lesbian/Gay Learner” The Lesbian in Front of the Classroom: Writings by Lesbian Teachers. (Eds. Sarah-Hope Parmeter and Irene Reti)  Santa Cruz, CA: HerBooks, 1988.  Print.
Minton, Henry L.  Departing from Deviance: A History of Homosexual Rights and Emancipatory Science in America.  Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
Mortenen, Peter.  “The Work of Illiteracy in the Rhetorical Curriculum.”  Journal of Curriculum Studies 44.6 (2012): 761-786.
Pratt, Mary Louise.  “Arts of the Contact Zone” Profession.  (1991): 33040.
Pritchard, Eric Parnell.  Fashioning LIves: The Politics of Black Queer Literacy.  Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2017.
Terry, Jennifer.  An American Obsession: Science, Medecine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society.  Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.
_____.  “Anxious Slippages between ‘Us’ and ‘Them’: A Brief History of the Scientific Sear for Homosexual Bodies.  Deviant Bodies (Ed. Urla, Jacqueline and Terry, Jennifer). Bloomington, IL: Indiana University Press, 1995. 129-169.
Warner, Michael.  Publics and Counterpublics.  Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2002.
Wilder, Craig Steven. Ebony & Ivy.  New York, NY: Bloomsbury Press, 2013.

ENGL 84200 Thinking in Pieces: Pascal, Dickinison, Wittgenstein
Tuesdays 11:45AM - 1:45PM. 2/4 Credits, Prof Joshua Wilner
 
That the immediate historical and cultural contexts in which Pascal, Dickinson, and Wittgenstein wrote differed widely as did their intellectual and imaginative projects scarcely needs pointing out: Pascal was a mathematician turned religious controversialist in 17th Century France, Dickinson a reclusive 19th Century American poet, and Wittgenstein a Viennese 20th Century philosopher of language who lived much of his adult life in Cambridge. The obvious differences harbor numerous grounds of comparison, however: each lived in a period of acute historical crisis that was intensified in each case by some sense of spiritual crisis and personal asceticism. Each left as his or her primary legacy a posthumous collection of pieces of writing that both call for and resist being gathered into wholes; correlatively, the compositional methods of all three involved processes of assembling and reassembling those pieces of writing - Pascal's bundled pensées; Dickinson's similarly bundled "fascicles" of poems; the fragmentary remarks that Wittgenstein arranged and rearranged in different boxes and manuscripts. For each, the relationship of "inner experience" to the body, to language and to the other is a central question. Each writes and thinks in ways that draw on while radically concentrating the signifying power of everyday language. In each the mathematical imagination - comparing and manipulating quantities, working with proportions, performing calculations, undertaking proofs - plays a central role, though always in the service of demonstrating its limits. Each conducts an on-going dialogue between the voicing of belief and the voicing of doubt. In some cases, a pre-occupation may be shared by two writers that is not by a third: thus, for example, Christianity and the Bible are central to an understanding of Pascal and Dickinson but not (it would seem) of Wittgenstein; the nature of philosophy and scientific thinking are explicit questions for Pascal and Wittgenstein in ways that they are not for Dickinson; fantasies of mental privacy haunt Dickinson and Wittgenstein in ways they do not Pascal (or not as obsessively). In other cases, similar issues surface in each writer in a different way: how does Wittgenstein's emphasis on language-games, for example, relate to Dickinson's serious playing with language, or to Pascal's famous use of probability theory to argue for belief in God as "a good bet" or to his extended meditation on custom and "divertissement"?
 
Our aim in this course will be to familiarize ourselves with each writer on their own terms while also exploring some of the numerous points and areas of intersection among them, always through careful attention to individual pieces of writing.
 
Principle readings: Pascal's Pensées, the corpus of Dickinson's poetry, and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.

FREN 79130: Contemporary Issue in Post-Colonial Sub-Sharan Francophone Literature and Film
Thursdays, 6:30-8:30, Prof. Nathalie Etoke, 2 or 4 Crédits

2010 marked the 50 years of "African independences." This course explores various dimensions of the francophone post-colonial experience in Sub-Saharan Africa. We will reflect on the legacy of colonialism and current challenges facing former French colonies. We will also look at the interplay between colonial discourse, identity formation, decolonization, emigration and the failure of the post-colonial state.

FREN 70500: Writing the Self: From Augustine to Selfies
Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15, Distinguished Prof. Domna Stanton, 2 or 4 Credits

How is the self written, visualized, constructed? What different forms and shapes do such texts take over time, in different genres? What purposes do they serve, for the several selves inscribed in a text and for others (including the self) who will read it.This course will begin by examining several theoretical texts on writing the self (Lejeune, Smith, Derrida, Glissant, Stanton), then trace self-writing from the Middle Ages (Augustine, Kempe, Pisan) through the early-modern periods, focusing on both the global (travel narratives on conquest --Columbus, La Casas, Equiano), and on various forms (letter and diary, for instance) of gendered interiority (Cavendish, Gentileschi, Sévigné, Westover). Signal texts on post-Enlightenment confession and memoir (Rousseau, Sand) will be followed in the second half of the seminar by a more thematic approach to issues of modernity, including slavery and liberation always deferred (Jacobs, Douglass, Wright, Coates); modernism and the limits of experimentation (Woolf, Nin, Kafka, Cahun); autofiction (Colette, Joyce, Stein); dislocated, traumatized selves in wars and holocausts (de Beauvoir, Sartre, Anne Frank, Levi, Henson [comfort women]); testimonio, the indigenous (Hurston, Levi Strauss, Menchu) and human rights narratives (Eggers); and French post-structuralism and the psychoanalytic (Barthes, Kristeva, Cardinal, Louise Bourgeois, Lacan). Our last two seminars will lead to a discussion of contemporary inscriptions of sexual and medical bodies, featuring birthing, AIDS, cancer and transgender selves (Arenas, Guibert, Bornstein, Leonard, N.K. Miller), and end with digital/virtual self-writing and the selfie (Smith, Giroux, Nemer and Freeman). Throughout, we will consider what the enduring obsession with confessing/revealing/ concealing; constructing and deconstructing selves might mean; and finally, whether, at bottom, all writing is self-writing
 
Work for the course: Whether the course is taken for 2, 3 or 4 credits, all students will be responsible for doing the readings closely and for engaging consistently in class discussion.
a, Students who take the course for 2 credits will present in class a reading of one primary text, which will also be submitted in writing (c 5-7 pp); these students will also take the final exam.
b, Students who take the course for 3 credits, will do all of the above and in addition, they will do a 10-13 page paper on a topic they select, after consultation with the instructor. They will also submit a thesis statement, a bibliography and an outline, and the introduction (the schedule will be indicated on the syllabus).
c, Students who take the course for 4 credits will do all of the above, but will do a 20-25-page paper on a topic they select, after consultation with the instructor; they will also submit a thesis statement, a bibliography and an outline, and an introduction (the schedule will be indicated on the syllabus).
Please contact Domna Stanton with any questions (dstanton112@yahoo.com).
 
The syllabus and the course materials to be downloaded will be posted on Blackboard by August 15, 2017.
 
The class will be conducted in English; readings are in English and French; all French readings will be listed in the syllabus along with their translations.

HIST 70310 Thucydides, Politics, Philosophy
Monday, 6:30-8:30 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Jennifer Roberts, Crosslisted with Philosophy, Political Science and Classics
 
This interdisciplinary course will be guided in part by the particular interests of the students who choose to enroll in it: historians, classicists, archaeologists, political scientists, philosophers.  Although there will be common readings, students are encouraged to pursue their own perspectives on Thucydides while at the same time coming to appreciate his relevance to other disciplines.  The text will be read in English, but I am happy to meet separately with students who would like to read selections in the original Greek.
 
A masterpiece of both narrative and analysis, Thucydides’ account of the war between the Athenian Empire and Peloponnesian League also merits study as a work of profound philosophical import.  The work of a man filled with a plangent sense of the sorrows of the human condition, Thucydides’ history offered a non-fiction counterpart to the tragic drama of his contemporaries Sophocles and Euripides.
 
The father of political science, Thucydides has often been labeled the father of political realism.  We will explore in what ways this is and is not accurate.  Thucydides has been co-opted by one generation after another, on one continent after another, as a spokesman for its own society and identified as the one person who best understood the problems of the day.  From monarchists to republicans in Europe to 20th and 21st century American neoconservatives, his readers have proudly cited him in defense of their ideologies. Today students of international relations wring their hands over the newly dubbed menace, “the Thucydides trap,” a concept that draws parallels between the diplomatic situation that led up to the Peloponnesian War and America’s growing tensions with China.  Both Thucydides and his legacy will be the subjects of this course.

HIST 72400 The Outcome of German Classical Philosophy
Monday, 6:30-8:30 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Richard Wolin
 
            In 1886, Friedrich Engels wrote a perfectly mediocre book, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, which nevertheless managed to raise a fascinating and important question that is still being debated today: how should we go about evaluating the legacy of German Idealism following the mid-nineteenth century breakdown of the Hegelian system? For Engels, the answer was relatively simple: the rightful heir of classical German philosophy was Marx’s doctrine of historical materialism. But, in truth, Engels’ response was merely one of many possible approaches. Nor would it be much of an exaggeration to claim that, in the twentieth-century, there is hardly a philosopher worth reading who has not sought to define him or herself via a confrontation with the legacy of Kant and Hegel.
                Our approach to this very rich material will combine a reading of the canonical texts of German Idealism (e.g., Kant and Hegel) with a sustained and complementary focus on major twentieth-century thinkers who have sought to establish their originality via a critical reading of Hegel and his heirs: Alexandre Kojève, Georges Bataille, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. But we will also seek acknowledge the importance of the contemporary North American Hegel renaissance, as exemplified by the work of philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Robert Pippin, Michael Forster, Terry Pinkard, and Allen Wood.
                In his “Discourse on Language” Foucault warns us appositely that, “Truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge that permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. Thus we have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.” Foucault’s insightful caveat will, in many respects, function as our interpretive watchword as we seek to decode and reconstruct German Idealism and its innovative contemporary legacies.

HIST 72300 History and Theory II
Wednesday, 4:15-6:15 pm, 3 credits, Prof. Samira Haj
 
The question of the relationship of theory to history is laden with problems. The objective of the seminar is to explore more deeply the theoretical and analytical concerns that have haunted historians since History established itself as a discipline. The course is de facto thematically-organized as well as interdisciplinary, which by implication means that it will be drawing on different bodies of knowledge, including philosophy, political theory, anthropology, gender and legal studies with possibly some written narratives and accounts drawn from the field of history itself.
 
This course is a follow-up of the first History and Theory seminar and is a continuation rather than a repeat. While it might cover similar themes in more depth, it will not repeat the reading material covered in the first seminar.  The course is therefore open to students that have already taken the first and to all other students interested in the topic.
 
Tentatively, the reading list might possibly include:
Reinhart Koselleck, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories (2018).
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx.
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject.
--------------------, On the Government of the Living.
Kerwin Lee Klein, From History to Theory, 2011.
David Scott, Refashioning Futures.
Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique.
Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History and Forgetting
Arnold Davidson, The Emergence of Sexuality.
 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History.
Colin Dayan, History, Haiti, and the Gods.
Walter Benjamin, Critique of Violence.

LING 76100 Introduction to Sociolinguistics
Monday, 2:00pm - 4:00pm, Prof. Cecelia Cutler (CECELIA.CUTLER@lehman.cuny.edu)
 
This course explores contemporary questions facing the field of sociolinguistics: What is the purpose of sociolinguistics? What theoretical and sociocultural questions does it address? What theories and new forms of data are sociolinguists analyzing in order to answer these questions? Should sociolinguists take an activist role in sharing their findings with the public? In seminar style discussions, participants will engage with these questions through a series of readings and develop a research paper (or student-devised project) based on data, theories, and methodologies discussed in class.
 
LING 70100: Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics
Tuesday, 4:15pm – 6:15pm
Prof. Christina Tortora (ctortora@gc.cuny.edu) & Jason Bishop (jbishop@gc.cuny.edu)

MUS 74500: Seminar in Theory/Analysis 1: Schenkerian Analysis 1
Monday, 10am -1pm, Prof. Poundie Burstein, Room 3491, 4 Credits

An introduction to the practice of Schenkerian analysis, including discussion of its notation,
terminology, and techniques. Assignments will involve intensive analyses of works and excerpts of works from the tonal repertoire, along with some readings from the scholarly literature. Students entering the class should have a strong background in harmony and counterpoint.

MUS 84100: Topic Theory: Analytical and Critical Issues
Wednesday, 10am- 1pm, Prof. Kofi Agawu, Room 3491, 3 Credits

Topic Theory is the outcome of a collective research enterprise in which notions of topic
(“subjects of musical discourse,” according to Leonard Ratner, the originator of modern topic
theory) shape the interpretation of individual works. Rejecting the ostensible neutrality of
musical material, topic theorists seek out sedimentations of style, history, pedagogy, convention and affect in music’s sounding forms and consider the syntactical implications of their piece-specific disposition. This seminar will explore some of the analytical and critical issues raised by topic theory. Readings will be drawn from the writings of Ratner, Allanbrook, Hatten, Sisman, Monelle and Mirka, among others. A substantial final essay on an aspect of topic theory will be required.

MUS 83500: Seminar in Ethnomusicology: (Ethno)musicology and Social Theory
Wednesday, 10am -1pm, Prof. Jane Sugarman, Room 3389, 3 Credits [Prerequisite: Instructor’s permission]

MUS 84200: Current Trends in Music Theory
Thursday, 2pm-5pm, Prof. Joseph Straus, Room 3389, 3 Credits

A survey of recent developments in the field of Music Theory. Topics may include
• transformation theory,
• neo-Riemannian theory,
• atonal voice leading,
• theoretical approaches to jazz, rock, pop, non-Western, and early music,
• theories of tonal form,
• topic theory,
• partimenti,
• chromatic harmony,
• race, gender, sexuality and disability,
• analysis and performance,
• perception and cognition.
The course will feature guest lectures from within and outside CUNY

MUS 86400: Seminar in Musicology: Sonic Rubble: Music after Urban Catastrophe
Tuesdays. 2pm-5pm, Prof. Abby Anderton, Room 3389, 3 Credits

Rubble is generally thought of as a material to be worked through, not as a catalyst for artistic
production. Yet recent scholarship on the aftermath of urban destruction—ranging from postwar Germany to the Syrian Civil War—has documented an array of contexts in which musical life continues in spite of, and sometimes even inspired by, physical devastation. These ruined cityscapes profoundly alter the way in which music is transmitted, received, and composed. This course will focus on the aftermaths of war and natural disaster in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries, as we explore the relationships between the body, trauma, and postapocalyptic soundscapes. Through readings from Musicology and Sound Studies that focus on gender, race, class, and disability, we will listen at the links between music and rubble in various contexts including (but not limited to): post-industrial Detroit, post-earthquake Port-au-Prince, post-9/11 New York, atomic ruins, and the ruins of the Syrian Civil War.

PHIL 77600: Contemporary Problems in the Philosophy of Art
Tuesdays, 11:45 am-1:45 am, Room TBA, Prof. Carrol

Contemporary Problems in the Philosophy of Art begins with the discussion of recent answers to the question "What is art?" Some authors, among others, to be studied include Gary Iseminger, Dominic McIver Lopes, and Nick Zangwill. Relatedly, we will examine the nature of aesthetic experience and questions about the evaluation of art, including formalism and functionalism. Time permitting, we will explore the relations of the emotions and morality to art.
 
There are no course pre-requisites. Students are expected to participate in seminar discussions and to write a final paper. The aim of the course is to prepare students to publish in the area of contemporary aesthetics and to teach in it.
 
[Counts towards course satisfaction of Group C]

PHIL 77000: Consciousness: Neuroscience and Philosophy
Thursdays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, Room TBA, Profs. Rosenthal and Ro

The course will combine a focus on dominant theories of consciousness in the current literature in philosophy with an examination of a number of especially revealing neuroscientific and related experimental findings. A major goal will be to evaluate theories of consciousness by appeal to empirical findings. We will also keep in mind possible directions for fruitful research suggested by the interaction of current findings and theoretical explanations.
 
The discussion of theoretical approaches will rely on the contrast between what have come to be called higher-order theories and first-order theories. According to higher-order theories, the consciousness of a mental state, such as a perception, thought, or feeling, consists in one’s being aware of that state. First-order theories, by contrast, deny that any awareness of a state figures in that state’s being conscious. We will consider the variety of theories in each group, and their advantages and disadvantages.
 
Much of the evaluation of such theories will engage with a detailed consideration of empirical work on psychological phenomena such as unconscious priming, binocular rivalry, blindsight, neglect and extinction, anosognosia, Balint’s syndrome, split brain, and other conditions and dissociations that shed light on consciousness or its absence. We will want to understand in some detail the nature of these conditions in psychological terms, their neural underpinnings, and their significance for the understanding and explanation of consciousness.
 
There are no prerequisites, since this is a course offered jointly in philosophy, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.
 
[Counts towards course satisfaction of Group B]
NOTE: This course is also listed as Psychology 87203 and Cognitive Neuroscience 70602.

PHIL 76300: Marx and Marxism
Mondays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm, Room TBA, Prof. Mills

Widely judged to be dead in the heyday of neo-liberalism and the seeming global post-Cold War triumph of market ideology, left theory has made an impressive comeback in recent years. Witness the concern about the growing chasm between rich and poor in Western nations, and the spectacle of a self-proclaimed socialist drawing huge crowds on the U.S. campaign trail. Karl Marx’s ideas about macro historical patterns, globalization, economic tendencies within capitalist society, commodification and alienation, the power of the privileged classes, the role of dominant ideologies, and the possibility of a radically new social order are thus arguably as relevant as ever.
 
In this course, we will focus on trying to get clear on some of the key concepts within Marx’s thought, how they have been interpreted and developed by others and how well they stand up today, and the complex relationship (sometimes involving both critique and appropriation) between Marxism and other bodies of radical “oppositional” political theory (feminism, critical race theory, postcolonial theory).

[Counts towards course satisfaction of Group C or D-Modern]

PHIL 76100: Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century: Kant and his Predecessors
Mondays, 6:30 pm- 8:30 pm, Room TBA, Prof. Wilson

This seminar will study the formation of Kant's Transcendental Idealism as a reaction to the problems posed by his predecessors, including not only Descartes, Leibniz, and Locke, but also Buffon, Rousseau and Hume. Among the issues to be considered are: Atoms or monads? God as pathological idea, or as Nature itself, or as a person? An incorporeal soul or an organized material brain? Free will and responsibility or mechanism? Moral feeling or objective duties? Political hope or fatalistic resignation? Readings to be drawn from the above and from the secondary literature. The aim is to acquaint students with these important controversies and to understand and appreciate, but also to evaluate Kant's 'critical philosophy' as an attempted solution to them.
 
[Counts towards course satisfaction of Group A or D-Modern]

PSC 80304: Classics in Modern Philosophy
Wednesdays, 2:00pm–4:00pm. Prof. Uday Mehta, 4 Credits
 
This course is an introduction to the study of modern Western political philosophy. The course is organized around five classic texts. The orientation of the course will be mainly textual and not contextual. We will be concerned with the broad structure and the details of the arguments made in these texts regarding the basis of political society, the authority of government and the rights of citizens. Some of the recurring questions that inform these works are the following: What is the original motivation underlying the formation of political society? How do these motivations conform to the institutional arrangements that are proposed? What are the limits of legitimate political authority, and what are the philosophical justifications for these limits? What are the justifications underlying the various proposed institutional arrangements and under what conditions can these arrangements be legitimately suspended? Finally, does the organizing of political life do violence to other conceptions of human potentiality and social order?
 
PSC 80601: BioPolitics
Mondays, 2:00pm–4:00pm, Prof. Paisley Currah, 4 credits
 
In this course we will spend the first few weeks reading Foucault’s 1975-76, 1976-77 and 1977-78 lectures at the Collège de France, which collectively lay out the foundations for understanding what Foucault calls biopolitics (biopolitique). Foucault’s lectures on war, race, the pre-history of sovereignty, pastoral power, biopower, security, governmentality, liberalism, and neoliberalism upend traditional ways of thinking about politics and provide a model of the genealogical method, even as he moves from year to year to new problems and new ways of looking at them. While Foucault never got around to elucidating the detailed account of biopolitics he had planned, his work has generated an enormous literature on the topic.
 
After reading the lectures, we will turn to applications, reappraisals, and re-deployments of biopolitics in light of contemporary techniques for disassembling the individual and convening populations, and for refiguring the relation between death and power. Centering feminist, anti-racist, queer post-colonial, left, and post-Marxist perspectives, readings in the last part of the course may cover: population racism; Afro-Pessimism; neoliberal governance; biomedical citizenship; gender, nationalism, and the policing of bodies and borders; the new queer and trans normativities; the securitization of risk; the carceral state; and necropolitics. Students will be encouraged to apply the theoretical and empirical work on biopolitics to their own research interests.

PSC 80607: Beyond the Canon: Recent Trends in Political Theory
Mondays, 6:30pm–8:30pm, Prof. Susan Buck-Morss, 4 credits
 
How might the canon of political theory be thought/taught differently? This seminar is an experiment, a Spiel-raum for considering what canonical readings might say to us today. Rather than adding on to the white-male-western-canon some supplemental readings on race, gender, or non-western thought, we will consider, without prior categorization and concepts, some of the most basic problems and paradoxes of our discipline. Juxtapositions of texts will be unorthodox: theories of the state (Hobbes, Wynter on witchcraft, Caesaire on solidarity,); the paradox of the General Will (Rousseau, Lenin, and Daigne on African Socialism); The good life and the City (Aristotle, al-Farabi, and David Harvey on Gentrification); Fortune and/as Rape (Machiavelli, John of Patmos, and Agamben on kairos); Constitutions as fate (Federalist Papers, W. Benjamin, and Max Tomba on Insurgency); Oppression as Freedom: (Marx, Federici, and Fred Moten on performance).
 
PSC 71902: The Outcome of Classical German Philosophy
Mondays, 6:30pm–8:30pm, Prof. Richard Wolin, 3 credits
 
In 1886, Friedrich Engels wrote a perfectly mediocre book, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, which nevertheless managed to raise a fascinating and important question that is still being debated today: how should we go about evaluating the legacy of German Idealism following the mid-nineteenth century breakdown of the Hegelian system? For Engels, the answer was relatively simple: the rightful heir of classical German philosophy was Marx’s doctrine of historical materialism. But, in truth, Engels’ response was merely one of many possible approaches. Nor would it be much of an exaggeration to claim that, in the twentieth-century, there is hardly a philosopher worth reading who has not sought to define him or herself via a confrontation with the legacy of Kant and Hegel.
Our approach to this very rich material will combine a reading of the canonical texts of German Idealism (e.g., Kant and Hegel) with a sustained and complementary focus on major twentieth-century thinkers who have sought to establish their originality via a critical reading of Hegel and his heirs: Alexandre Kojève, Georges Bataille, Jean Hyppolite, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas. But we will also seek acknowledge the importance of the contemporary North American Hegel renaissance, as exemplified by the work of philosophers such as Charles Taylor, Robert Pippin, Michael Forster, Terry Pinkard, and Allen Wood.
In his “Discourse on Language” Foucault warns us appositely that, “Truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge that permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. Thus we have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.” Foucault’s insightful caveat will, in many respects, function as our interpretive watchword as we seek to decode and reconstruct German Idealism and its innovative contemporary legacies.
 
PSC 71903: Thucydides, Politics, Philosophy
Mondays, 6:30pm–8:30pm, Prof. Jennifer Roberts, 3 credits
 
This interdisciplinary course will be guided in part by the particular interests of the students who choose to enroll in it: historians, classicists, archaeologists, political scientists, philosophers. Although there will be common readings, students are encouraged to pursue their own perspectives on Thucydides while at the same time coming to appreciate his relevance to other disciplines. The text will be read in English, but I am happy to meet separately with students who would like to read selections in the original Greek.
A masterpiece of both narrative and analysis, Thucydides’ account of the war between the Athenian Empire and Peloponnesian League also merits study as a work of profound philosophical import. The work of a man filled with a plangent sense of the sorrows of the human condition, Thucydides’ history offered a non-fiction counterpart to the tragic drama of his contemporaries Sophocles and Euripides.
 
The father of political science, Thucydides has often been labeled the father of political realism. We will explore in what ways this is and is not accurate. Thucydides has been co-opted by one generation after another, on one continent after another, as a spokesman for its own society and identified as the one person who best understood the problems of the day. From monarchists to republicans in Europe to 20th and 21st century American neoconservatives, his readers have proudly cited him in defense of their ideologies. Today students of international relations wring their hands over the newly dubbed menace, “the Thucydides trap,” a concept that draws parallels between the diplomatic situation that led up to the Peloponnesian War and America’s growing tensions with China. Both Thucydides and his legacy will be the subjects of this course.

THEA 80300: Seminar in Theatre Theory & Criticism: German Theatre/Theory
Tuesdays, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., Professor David Savran
 
This course will study leading figures in German playwriting, dramaturgy, theatrical theory, and mise en scène from the late eighteenth century to the present. Focusing on a number of key artists, it will analyze both their historical situations and their persistent relevance and vitality on the German-language stage. These include playwrights and composers Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Richard Wagner, Bertolt Brecht, Marieluise Fleisser, Kurt Weill, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Heiner Müller, and Elfriede Jelinek; directors Christoph Marthaler, Barrie Kosky, Yael Ronen, and Herbert Fritsch; and the collective Rimini Protokoll. Studying a number of plays and music theatre pieces in translation, the course will survey signal twentieth and twenty-first century productions as well as radically reconceived adaptations of classic texts. It will focus additionally on a number of key concepts that have impelled the work of both artists and theorists, such as Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), epic theatre, the aura, defamiliarization, commitment, post dramatic, and post-migrant. Evaluation: four short written reports, class participation, and a final paper.

THEA 80300: Seminar in Theatre Theory & Criticism: Theorizing the Oceanic from Antony and Cleopatra to John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea
Wednesdays, 2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., Professor Maurya Wickstrom
 
This class explores the possibilities of the oceanic as an emergent theatre and performance practice, dramaturgy and politics. Paul Gilroy (of The Black Atlantic) has recently made a passionate argument for “sea-level theory.” We will practice this through adopting a “watery” perspective comprising a historical and theoretical constellation of white Enlightenment and modernity’s instrumentalization of the ocean; the imperial and colonial ocean-dependent production of what Sylvia Wynter calls genres of the human; the ocean of the slave trade; and, in opposition, the oceanic produced in the hold; in the Atlantic revolutions; in outer-national, interracial and multilinguistic oceanic labor, in the oceanic in Melville and the oceanic sublime; in the oceanic in archipelagic thought; in de-continentalization and more. Readings will include Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, Sarah Jane Cervenak, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Paul Gilroy, Cesare Casarino, Michelle Ann Stephens and others. Theory will be combined with plays and contemporary performance examples including Shakespeare, Derek Walcott, Naomi Wallace, Amiri Baraka, August Wilson, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Kennedy, Lina Issa and others. Ultimately the class will draw from this constellation and its vocabularies to theorize what theatre and performance imagined and structured by “wet ontology” (Philip Steinberg) - the oceanic as a dramaturgical theory - might be or how the oceanic might structure theoretical and/or historical thinking about theatre and performance.

THEA 81600: Seminar in Film Theory: Theories of the Cinema
Cross listed with FSCP8100 African Film History and Theory, 1950-1990
Mondays, 4:15 p.m. – 8:15 p.m., Instructor Boukary Sawadogo
 
The birth and development of African cinema in the 1950s started against the backdrop of the discourse of othering in colonial cinema. This is evident in the underlying civilizing mission of documentaries (education, health, agriculture) and travelogues. In addition, there is the quest for exoticism in Hollywood adventure/action film subgenre that prominently feature the three figures of the blonde, the safari hunter, and the native. African cinema started gaining international attention and recognition in the 1960s, with the works of pioneer filmmakers such as Ousmane Sembène, Med Hondo, and Moustapha Alassane. The historical development of African cinema until 1990 is marked with liberation struggle, appropriation of the gaze, and cultural nationalism. From a theoretical standpoint, African cinema can be regarded as a form of oppositional cinema in the vein of anti-establishment movements of the Italian neorealism, French New Wave, Cinema Novo, and Third Cinema.

THEA 85700: Seminar in Contemporary Performance Theory and Technique
Cross listed with ART86040 Cage & Cunningham
Wednesdays, 11:45-1:45 PM, Profs. Claire Bishop (Art History) and David Grubbs (Music)
 
Composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham began collaborating in the early 1950s, giving rise to a half decade of productive and disruptive innovations in music, dance and visual art. This research seminar will take Cage and Cunningham as a starting point to address broader interdisciplinary themes in performance from 1950 to 2010, including scoring, collaboration, improvisation, duration, and chance. The class is designed to facilitate the development of students’ own research papers, and is timed to take advantage of the Cunningham centenary in 2019.

SOC 73200: Gender & Globalization
Mondays, 2:00 PM- 4:00 PM, Prof. Eisenstein
 
SOC 70100: Development of Sociological Theory (Theory I)
Wednesdays, 6:30 PM -8:30 PM, Prof. Hammond

SPAN 70200: Critical Theory
GC: Monday, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Prof. Silvia Dapía
 
SPAN 80100: Climate Change and Discursive Framing
GC: Tuesday, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Prof. José del Valle and Prof. David Lindo Atichati
 
SPAN 87100: Periodismo narrativo y ficción literaria en el México neoliberal: Políticas escriturales, estado de excepción y la industria cultural trasnacional
GC: Monday, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Prof. Oswaldo Zavala

Course Listing

CTCP 71088 Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
GC: Prof. Vincent Crapanzano, Wednesdays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, 3 credits.

Elective Courses

ANTH 81700 Reading Capital, Volume 1
GC: Prof. Harvey, Tuesdays, 6:00 pm-8:00 pm

ART 86040 Art, Attention,Technology
GC: Prof. Claire Bishop, Tuesdays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm

ART 87300 Eco-Art History: Ecological Turn in the Visual Arts
GC: Prof. Katherine Manthorne, Wednesdays, 11:45 am-1:45 pm

ART 89000 Time and Timing: Photography’s Histories
GC: Prof. Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Thursdays, 11:45 am-1:45 pm
 
CL 80100 Adventures in Marxism
GC: Prof. Richard Wolin, Mondays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm, 2-4 credits. 

CL 89200 History of Literary Theory and Criticism II
GC: Prof. John Brenkman, Wednesdays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm, 4 credits.
 
ENGL 86800 Politics/Violence/Terrorism
GC: Prof. Siraj Ahmed, Tuesdays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm, 2-4 credits.

ENGL 80600 What is (a) body?
Prof. Kandice Chuh, Mondays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, 2-4 credits

HIST 72400 Adventures in Marxism
Prof. Richard Wolin, Mondays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm, 3 credits.

SPAN 87100 When Narrative and Image Interact: Intermedial Spaces in Latin American Writing and Photography
GC: Prof. Magdalena Perkowska, Tuesdays, 2:00-4:00 p.m.

SPAN 87100 Cuerpos letrados: Intelectuales, Política y performance
GC: Prof. Fernando Degiovanni, Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m.

SPAN 87200 Human Rights and Literature in the Americas
GC: Prof. Vanessa Perez Rosario, Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m.

MUS 86600 Seminar in Musicology: Critical Approaches to Race and Music
GC: Prof. Emily Wilbourne, Thursdays, 10 am-1 pm, 3 credits.

MUS 82500 History of Theory I: Aristoxenus to Zarlino
GC: Prof. Ruth Deford, Thursdays, 10 am-1 pm, 3 credits.

MUS 83200 Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Social Life of Technologies
GC: Prof. Eliot Bates, Tuesdays, 2 pm-5 pm, 3 credits.

MUS 84300 Seminar in Theory/Analysis: Schenker II
GC: Prof. William Rothstein, Wednesdays, 2 pm-5 pm, 3 credits.

MUS 84600 Seminar in Theory: Analysis of Post-Tonal Music II
GC: Joseph Straus, Thursdays, 2 pm-5 pm, 3 credits.

PHIL 77500 Liberalism and its Discontents
GC: Prof. Prinz, Tuesdays, 9:30 am-11:30 am, 4 credits.

PHIL 77600 Classics in the Philosophy of Art
GC: Profs. Carroll and Pappas, Tuesdays 11:45 am-1:45 pm, 4 credits.

PHIL 76100 The Philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois
GC: Prof. Mills, Mondays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm, 4 credits.

PHIL 77700 Bernard Williams’ Ethical Philosophy
GC: Prof. Fricker, Tuesdays. 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, 4 credits.

PSC 80606 The Philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois
GC: Prof. Mills, Mondays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm, 4 credits, Cross listed with PHIL 76100.

PSC 80602 Walter Benjamin
GC: Prof. Susan Buck-Morss, Mondays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm, 4 credits.
 
PSC 80601 Marxism
GC: Prof. Jack Jacobs, Wednesdays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, 4 credits.

PSC 80608 Political Interpretation: On Meaning and Power
GC: Prof. John Wallach, Wednesdays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm, 4 credits.

PSC 80300 Feminist Political Theory
GC: Prof. Alyson Cole, Thursdays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, 4 credits.
 
SOC 80000 Foucault on Power, Religion & Sexuality
GC: Prof. Lazreg, Mondays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm
 
SOC 83300 Self & Society: Feminist Theory and Psychosocial
GC: Prof. Chancer, Thursdays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm

THEA 70600 History of Theatrical Theory
GC: Prof. Jean Graham-Jones, Wednesdays, 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm.

THEA 85600 Studies in Theatre Aesthetics: Japanese Theatre and Performance: A Study in Theory and Practice
GC: Prof. Peter Eckersall, Tuesdays, 4:15 pm to 6:15 pm.

THEA 81500 Studies in Film Theory: Documenting the Self: Performance in Nonfiction Media
GC: Prof. Edward Miller, Wednesdays, 4:15 pm-8:15 pm

UED 71100 The Hidden Curriculum of Gender, Sexuality and Race in Schools
GC: Prof. Deckman, Tuesdays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm
 
UED 71100 Critical University Studies with a Special Emphasis on CUNY
GC: Prof. Brier, Wednesdays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm

Course Descriptions

CTCP 71088 Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
GC: Prof. Vincent Crapanzano, Wednesdays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm
The focus of this seminar will be on the relationship between various conceptions of and attitudes toward language and recent theories of interpretation and hermeneutical practices in the human sciences and literary study.  We will consider the effect of the stress on reference over other language functions – the pragmatic, poetic – on notions of text, genre, and rhetoric. How does this stress configure meta-critical understanding? How does it foster the often promiscuous play of divergent, at times analytically incompatible, approaches to interpretation so characteristic of contemporary theory? Readings will include works by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and/or Gennette, Foucault, Michael Silverstein and his school, Bakhtin, Lacan and Deleuze.   

ANTH 81700 Reading Capital, Volume 1
GC: Prof. Harvey, Tuesdays, 6:00 pm-8:00 pm

ART 86040 Art, Attention,Technology
GC: Prof. Claire Bishop, Tuesdays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm
 
This seminar examines theories of attention and spectatorship in relation to the three dominant visual technologies of the twentieth century—cinema, television, and the Internet—and their restructuring of human perception. There is now a substantial literature on attention that either draws on art history (Crary, Beller, Groys) or is pertinent to it (Kittler, Terranova, Hayles). Together they provide a foundation for examining the construction of audience attention in contemporary art, and for drawing out the differences between these technological innovations and their reformulation of our perceptual field.
 
Students will develop and present an original research paper on a topic related to the seminar. Auditors by permission.

ART 87300 Eco-Art History: Ecological Turn in the Visual Arts
GC: Prof. Katherine Manthorne, Wednesdays, 11:45 am-1:45 pm
 
This seminar explores the challenges and potential gains of utilizing eco-criticism as an emerging interpretive tool for art history. With its definition still in flux, it is broadly conceived as the study of culture and cultural production that link human beings with the natural world, and has taken on special urgency with the environmental crisis. Born of literature and cultural studies (with key figures Lawrence Buell, Greg Garrard and others), eco-criticism is inherently interdisciplinary and asks questions such as the following: How is nature represented in this artwork? Do men depict nature differently than women do? How has the concept of wilderness changed over time? In addition to race, class and gender, should place become a new critical category? Destruction too is part of this discourse. The recent exhibition Damage Control: Art and Destruction Since 1950 (Hirshhorn, 2013/14) highlighted the efforts of conceptual artists to incorporate destruction as an aesthetic technique and comment on contemporary social phenomena including urban renewal and ecological devastation. Artworks from earlier periods such as Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire (1836) are equally deserving of investigation. Initial seminar meetings combine theoretical readings with case studies of specific artists and artworks that embody social and environmental concerns. Students’ projects may focus on any related theme, historic period and region.

Seminar members are encouraged to view the exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art & the Environment at the Princeton University Art Museum, Oct. 13, 2018- Jan. 6, 2019.  Accepts auditors with advanced permission
 
ART 89000 Time and Timing: Photography’s Histories
GC: Prof. Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Thursdays, 11:45 am-1:45 pm
 
The history of photography has often been discussed according to core thematics of indexicality and immediacy. Hence the photograph has been perceived as a mute testimony whose relationship with the flow of time is unconditional and irrevocable. The scope of this lecture course is to break away from the rigidity of these parameters that have marked much of the writing on photography. In an attempt to unpack the relationship between photography and time, we will aim to blur the disciplinary boundaries of photographic studies, considering modalities of vision across media. For example, how does Daguerre’s recording of ghost figures in a Parisian boulevard relate to the perception of panoramas and dioramas? How do photographic illustrated travel books and stereoviews transmit an experience of temporality that is aligned to early tourist packaging How do war photographs memorialize and narrate history differently or similarly to painted tableaux? Can we read traditional photo-essays in Life magazine against the narrative strips of comic books? What happens to the fixed temporality of the still image when the photograph is revisited and interrogated by a community according to both personal and political accounts? Has the continuous flow of images of the digital screen transformed the current perception of photography as stillness? What is the meaning of transience for contemporary photographers and media artists? These questions will be posed as we revision the most important theories about time and photography according to Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, together with most recent contributions in film studies, periodical studies, and literary studies. The course wants to open up the multiple definitions of time in photography, exploring the fluidity and malleability of this recording experience as we understand it today.
 
Auditors by permission only
 

CL 80100 Adventures in Marxism
GC: Prof. Richard Wolin, Mondays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm, 2-4 credits.
 
  "Je ne suis pas Marxiste!” - Karl Marx, cited by Engels, 1882
 
In his “Theses on Feuerbach” (1846) Marx, seeking to free himself from Hegel’s tutelage, famously declared that, “Heretofore, philosophers have only interpreted the world; however, the point is to change it!” At the time, little did Marx realize the immense historical influence his ideas and doctrines would have. For decades to come, Marx’s theories would inspire intellectuals and political activists in Europe, Latin America, and Asia – although, often in ways that would have undoubtedly astonished Marx himself. After all, the first “successful” communist revolution occurred not in a highly industrialized society, as Marx had prophesied, but instead in Tsarist Russia: a nation that had only recently freed its serfs and that was still largely agrarian. Although as late as 1956, Jean-Paul Sartre could still refer to Marxism optimistically as, “The unsurpassable philosophy of our time,” following World War II, with the rising tide of decolonization, the torch of World Revolution had clearly passed (in the words of Franz Fanon) to the “wretched of the earth” – to the denizens of the so-called “Third World.” To add to this litany of well-known paradoxes: in contemporary China, one of the few remaining communist nations, Marxism has paradoxically become the reigning ideology of a society that is unabashedly oriented toward exponential economic growth and conspicuous consumption. (Or, as Deng Xiaoping proclaimed during the early 1980s: “To get rich is glorious!”) Looking back from 1989 – the watershed year in which the Marxist regimes of Eastern Europe unraveled with breathtaking rapidity – intellectuals and pundits openly wondered whether the time had finally come to write Marxism’s epitaph. However, in light of the rise of neo-liberalism and the prodigious rise of social inequality, forecasts concerning Marxism’s demise would seem premature.
 
Our primary focus will be the legacy of Marxist thought. As such, we will begin by examining the way in which Marx’s youthful confrontation with Hegel prepared the ground for the development of his notion of “historical materialism.” But very quickly, under the tutelage of the later Engels and the Second International, this conception congealed into a dogmatic body of received truths, precipitating what some have called the “crisis of Marxism.” At the time, one of the main responses to Marxism-in-crisis was “Leninism”: the idea that, since the European proletariat seemed increasingly lethargic, a vanguard party was required in order to focus its attention on the long-term goal of world revolution.
 
Under the guise of a “return to Hegel,” and as an antidote to Soviet Marxism, the interwar period witnessed an efflorescence of philosophical Marxism. Among the highlights of this movement were Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness as well as the work of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School – a renewal of Marxist thought that has been largely responsible for the postwar renaissance of “critical Marxism.” More recently, in books such as Revolution at the Gates, Slavoj Zizek has encouraged a “return to Lenin.” Similarly, the French Maoist, Alain Badiou, in part inspired by Sartre, has sought to resurrect Marx’s theory of the “subject.” Insisting that, as a critique of capitalism, Marxism has lost none of its historical relevance, Badiou claims that, by learning from its past defeats, Marxism can be resurrected.


CL 89200 History of Literary Theory and Criticism II
GC: Prof. John Brenkman, Wednesdays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm, 4 credits.
 
This course is a study of the thought about literature from the late 18th century to the present, with an emphasis on the evolution of modern aesthetics as well as current critical methods. The primary texts of aesthetic theory will be Kant’s Analytic of the Beautiful and Analytic of the Sublime in the Critique of Judgment, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, and Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art.” We will look at a range of critics who wrote major essays on Baudelaire in order to discuss the methodological and ideological antagonisms that animate modern criticism: Benjamin, Auerbach, Sartre, Poulet, Blanchot, Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss, de Man, Jauss, Kristeva. We will read reflections on tragedy and the tragic by Frye, Szondi, Girard, and Steiner. And instances of the philosopher as critic: Derrida on Mallarmé, Deleuze on Michel Tournier, Nussbaum on Henry James, and Cavell on Shakespeare.

ENGL 86800 Politics/Violence/Terrorism
GC: Prof. Siraj Ahmed, Tuesdays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm, 2-4 credits.
 
One of liberalism’s founding tenets is that the political sphere and physical violence are categorically distinct. From this tenet follows the understanding of non-state violence (in other words, ‘terrorism’) that pervades popular discourse today: it enters history either ab nihilo or from religion’s—particularly Islam’s—propensity for fanaticism.
 
In diametric opposition to this line of thought, postcolonial scholars—Talal Asad above all—have argued that terrorism was birthed by liberalism itself. From this perspective, contemporary non-state violence is scarcely distinguishable from the early modern civil and international conflict that originated the liberal order—the lawless violence at the roots of ‘liberty.’ Violence outside law was necessary not only to found this order but also, of course, to preserve it. Max Weber feared that if liberal states could no longer exploit other lands, they would import the illiberalism they practiced there back home. The economic and environmental crises of the last forty years—and the erosion of democracy and civil liberties that have accompanied these crises—might demonstrate how well-founded Weber’s fears were.
 
Liberalism turns on an internal contradiction: politics and violence are supposed, on one hand, to be mutually exclusive; yet states must not only monopolize violence but also, on the other hand, continuously exercise it. Liberalism conceals this contradiction by distinguishing between ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ violence. The former term refers to any violence, however extreme, that preserves liberal societies, the latter to practically any act, movement, or event that threatens them. But if violence is justified only when it defends liberal societies, the war on terror serves an essential function: like the militarization of police forces, it implies that those societies remain in constant danger and hence have little choice but to use exceptional violence both within their borders and beyond.
 
This course will test such hypotheses by studying the continuity between colonial war; ‘low-intensity conflict’ after decolonization; and the war on terror over the last two decades. It hopes, as well, to provide a genealogy of terrorism much older than our own political era—as old, indeed, as the belief, common to the Abrahamic religions, that homicidal and even suicidal violence becomes sacred when it founds a new social dispensation, preserves collective identity, or reproduces one’s own way of life. Perhaps this genealogy will shed light on a pervasive, but nonetheless paradoxical, characteristic of academic as well as popular debate in the West: whereas the endangerment of certain lives here precipitates widespread horror, the mass killing of innocents elsewhere generates almost none.
 
Theoretical texts may include Asad, On Suicide Bombing; Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror; Faisal Devji, Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality, Modernity; Hobbes, Leviathian; Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit; Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Walter Benjamin, ‘Critique of Violence’; Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros; Hannah Arendt, On Violence; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Malcolm X, ‘The Ballot or the Bullet’; René Girard, Violence and the Sacred; Pierre Clastres, The Archeology of Violence; and Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism.
 
Fictional texts may include Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz; J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians; Yasmina Khadra, The Swallows of Kabul; Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist; and Kamila Shamsie, Home Fire.
 
ENGL 80600 What is (a) body?
Prof. Kandice Chuh, Mondays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, 2-4 credits.
 
In this course, we will study a variety of ways in which "body" is made meaningful as a philosophical, political, social, cultural, and economic concept and entity.  How (by what mechanisms, through what procedures) does "body" signify humanness?  What are the limits of such signification?  How do such meanings index political economic and socio-cultural conditions?  Our readings will draw from fields and discourses that have taken up "body" as object and analytic, including performance studies, disability studies, transgender studies, Black and ethnic studies, and feminist and queer of color critique. 
 
Students taking the course for 2 credits should expect to post short responses on a bi-weekly basis to our course blog.  Students taking the course for 4 credits should expect to produce a seminar project (essay or equivalent) at the end of the semester, in addition to the bi-weekly blog posts.

HIST 72400 Adventures in Marxism
Prof. Richard Wolin, Mondays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm, 3 credits.
 
     In his “Theses on Feuerbach” (1846) Marx, seeking to free himself from Hegel’s tutelage, famously declared that, “Heretofore, philosophers have only interpreted the world; however, the point is to change it!” At the time, little did Marx realize the immense historical influence his ideas and doctrines would have. For decades to come, Marx’s theories would inspire intellectuals and political activists in Europe, Latin America, and Asia – although, often in ways that would have undoubtedly astonished Marx himself. After all, the first “successful” communist revolution occurred not in a highly industrialized society, as Marx had prophesied, but instead in Tsarist Russia: a nation that had only recently freed its serfs and that was still largely agrarian. Although as late as 1956, Jean-Paul Sartre could still refer to Marxism optimistically as, “The unsurpassable philosophy of our time,” following World War II, with the rising tide of decolonization, the torch of World Revolution had clearly passed (in the words of Franz Fanon) to the “wretched of the earth” – to the denizens of the so-called “Third World.” To add to this litany of well-known paradoxes: in contemporary China, one of the few remaining communist nations, Marxism has paradoxically become the reigning ideology of a society that is unabashedly oriented toward exponential economic growth and conspicuous consumption. (Or, as Deng Xiaoping proclaimed during the early 1980s: “To get rich is glorious!”) Looking back from 1989 – the watershed year in which the Marxist regimes of Eastern Europe unraveled with breathtaking rapidity – intellectuals and pundits openly wondered whether the time had finally come to write Marxism’s epitaph. However, in light of the rise of neo-liberalism and the prodigious rise of social inequality, forecasts concerning Marxism’s demise would seem premature.
     Our primary focus will be the legacy of Marxist thought. As such, we will begin by examining the way in which Marx’s youthful confrontation with Hegel prepared the ground for the development of his notion of “historical materialism.” But very quickly, under the tutelage of the later Engels and the Second International, this conception congealed into a dogmatic body of received truths, precipitating what some have called the “crisis of Marxism.” At the time, one of the main responses to Marxism-in-crisis was “Leninism”: the idea that, since the European proletariat seemed increasingly lethargic, a vanguard party was required in order to focus its attention on the long-term goal of world revolution.
     Under the guise of a “return to Hegel,” and as an antidote to Soviet Marxism, the interwar period witnessed an efflorescence of philosophical Marxism. Among the highlights of this movement were Lukács’ History and Class Consciousness as well as the work of Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School – a renewal of Marxist thought that has been largely responsible for the postwar renaissance of “critical Marxism.” More recently, in books such as Revolution at the Gates, Slavoj Zizek has encouraged a “return to Lenin.” Similarly, the French Maoist, Alain Badiou, in part inspired by Sartre, has sought to resurrect Marx’s theory of the “subject.” Insisting that, as a critique of capitalism, Marxism has lost none of its historical relevance, Badiou claims that, by learning from its past defeats, Marxism can be resurrected.

SPAN 87100 When Narrative and Image Interact: Intermedial Spaces in Latin American Writing and Photography
GC: Prof. Magdalena Perkowska, Tuesdays, 2:00-4:00 p.m.
 
Since the discovery of photography in 1839, and despite its long association with the mechanical reproduction of reality, the photographic image has increasingly assumed the role of participating in or indeed embodying literary projects. This course explores different modalities of interaction between photography and literary texts in contemporary Latin American writing, and between photography and narrativity in mixed works: fictional questioning of photographic practice, meaning, and ethics (Rodolfo Walsh, Julio Cortázar, Roberto Bolaño, Norah Lange), fiction with photographs (Eduardo Belgrano Rawson, Mario Bellatín), the photographic essay (Diamela Eltit, Eduardo Lalo), the photo-book and the photographic narrative (Susan Meiselas, Juan Manuel Echavarría), a photograph as (a source of) narrative (Marcelo Brodsky). We will examine these intermedial spaces in conjunction with theoretical readings on photography and literature in relation to affect, memory, ethics, and politics (Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, W.J.T. Mitchell, Jacques Rancière, Marianne Hirsch, Ariella Azoulay). The crossing of medial boundaries produces an imagetext  (Mitchell) or sentence-image (Rancière), a site of tension, slippage, transformation, displacement or interference, which impugns the notion of a single, fixed meaning; challenges representation, revealing its inescapable heterogeneity; reorganizes textual-visual visibilities and hierarchies;  and  posits questions about ethics of reader- and spectatorship.

SPAN 87100 Cuerpos letrados: Intelectuales, Política y performance
GC: Prof. Fernando Degiovanni, Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m.

Este curso se propone explorar la noción de intelectual más allá de su producción escrita. Trabajando aspectos usualmente marginalizados en el abordaje de su figura, como sus intervenciones en espacios públicos y masivos, nos planteamos la posibilidad de pensar la actividad del escritor como una práctica corporizada, dependiente de la voz y el gesto y formulada para un público que ve y oye. Esta historia del cuerpo letrado se puede rastrear en salones y cafés, tours de conferencias, discursos en asambleas masivas, entre otros espacios, y plantea interrogantes distintos a los que presupone su análisis como productor de textos destinados a ser leídos. Nociones tales como espectacularización, populismo y género serán claves en este curso. Entre los eventos que trabajaremos se encuentran la campaña presidencial de Macedonio Fernández, el tour latinoamericano de Manuel Ugarte, los banquetes de Norah Lange, y las performances de Ramón Gómez de la Serna y Omar Viñole. El seminario supone el abordaje de estos cuerpos letrados desde la teoría contemporánea como desde la investigación misma de los archivos en los cuales se documentaron sus prácticas. El curso dedicará especial atención a las intervenciones de Omar Viñole, figura sobre la cual convergen algunos nombres citados más arriba. Entendido como un seminario dentro del seminario, el estudio de la producción de Viñole (quien a mediados de la década de 1930 realizó numerosas intervenciones escandalosas en Buenos Aires y Montevideo acompañado por una vaca) permitirá explorar los desafíos específicos que plantea el análisis de la performance en circunstancias históricas y culturales atravesadas por la política de masas, la institucionalización letrada y la emergencia de nuevos debates sobre el cuerpo y la sexualidad.


SPAN 87200 Human Rights and Literature in the Americas
GC: Prof. Vanessa Perez Rosario, Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m.
 
Human Rights carry one set of popular meanings, that their protections will safeguard the human person from abuse, torture, pain, suffering, and other corporeal deprivation. Despite their immense promise, human rights discourses and norms remain fraught with paradox. Virtually since their inception, critics have decried the many contradictions that trouble human rights and the mechanisms of their internationalization and application. Although some of these paradoxes ensue from legal and other practical challenges of rights enforcement, the philosophical architecture of human rights norms and the definition of the human that organizes them are also composed of structural tensions and inconsistencies. Over the course of the semester, we will explore the convergence of human rights and theories of the human, violence, feminicide, dissent, censorship, vulnerability and precarity, and migration and mobility in theoretical and literary texts. We will think about the politics of reading, literature’s relationship to social justice, and the relationship between aesthetics and politics. Some theoretical readings will include works by Hannah Arendt, Homi Bhabha, Judith Butler, Edward Said, Elaine Scarry, Achille Mbembe, Lauren Berlant, and Giorgio Agamben, among others. We will read literary texts by Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx authors such as Los rendidos (2015) by José Carlos Agüeros, “Las orquídeas negras de Mariana Callejas”(1998) by Pedro Lemebel, Tell Me How it Ends (2017) by Valeria Luiselli, Fuera del juego (1968) and La mala memoria (1989) by Heberto Padilla, The Water Museum (2018) by Luis Alberto Urrea, and Under the Feet of Jesus (1995) by Helena Viramontes, among others.

MUS 86600 Seminar in Musicology: Critical Approaches to Race and Music
GC: Prof. Emily Wilbourne, Thursdays, 10 am-1 pm, 3 credits.

MUS 82500 History of Theory I: Aristoxenus to Zarlino
GC: Prof. Ruth Deford, Thursdays, 10 am-1 pm, 3 credits.

MUS 83200 Seminar in Ethnomusicology: Social Life of Technologies
GC: Prof. Eliot Bates, Tuesdays, 2 pm-5 pm, 3 credits.

MUS 84300 Seminar in Theory/Analysis: Schenker II
GC: Prof. William Rothstein, Wednesdays, 2 pm-5 pm, 3 credits.

MUS 84600 Seminar in Theory: Analysis of Post-Tonal Music II
GC: Joseph Straus, Thursdays, 2 pm-5 pm, 3 credits.

PHIL 77500 Liberalism and its Discontents
GC: Prof. Prinz, Tuesdays, 9:30 am-11:30 am, 4 credits.

PHIL 77600 Classics in the Philosophy of Art
GC: Profs. Carroll and Pappas, Tuesdays 11:45 am-1:45 pm, 4 credits.

This course comprises close readings of classics in the history of the philosophy of art in the Western tradition, beginning with Plato and extending to the early twentieth century. Some figures to be explored include Plato, Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and others. There are no prerequisites for the course. The course requirement is a final paper.

PHIL 76100 The Philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois
GC: Prof. Mills, Mondays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm, 4 credits.
 
Few American intellectuals of any race have surpassed the achievements of W.E.B Du Bois, who over a long (1868-1963) and remarkably productive activist and scholarly life made invaluable contributions across a wide variety of fields. Long recognized as black America’s towering thinker, he has only recently begun to get his due from the mainstream “white” academy, in disciplines ranging from sociology and history to literature and international relations theory (IR). In this course, we will look specifically at his pioneering role in helping to establish Africana Philosophy as a distinctive oppositional philosophical worldview in Western modernity.

PHIL 77700 Bernard Williams’ Ethical Philosophy
GC: Prof. Fricker, Tuesdays. 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, 4 credits.
 
Bernard Williams was one of the most influential voices in the moral philosophy of the past half-decade—a voice at once central and dissident. A staunch critic of the ‘morality system’ that he diagnosed in Kantianism, and a skeptic about the whole enterprise of ethical theory, he argued in favor of ways of doing ethics that would be a proper part of philosophy considered as a ‘humanistic discipline’.
 
We will focus on a number of interconnected themes in Williams’ thought, exploring both his critical project and also the positive, constructive philosophy that particularly characterized his later work. We will explore key themes in his meta-ethics (anti-objectivism, relativism, cognitivism, internal reasons), his moral psychology (shame, regret, agent-regret), his philosophical method (anti-theory, State of Nature genealogy), and most generally of all his conception of philosophy’s relation to history.
 
Classes will be mainly exercises in collective discussion prompted by short student presentations on set papers.
 
Some key indicative readings by Williams:
 
1972 Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1981 Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973-1980. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
1985 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. London: Fontana Press.
1993 Shame and Necessity Berkeley: University of California Press.
1995 Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers 1982-1993 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
2002 Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
2006 Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline.. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

PSC 80606 The Philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois
GC: Prof. Mills, Mondays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm, 4 credits, Cross listed with PHIL 76100.
 
Few American intellectuals of any race have surpassed the achievements of W.E.B Du Bois, who over a long (1868-1963) and remarkably productive activist and scholarly life made invaluable contributions across a wide variety of fields. Long recognized as black America’s towering thinker, he has only recently begun to get his due from the mainstream “white” academy, in disciplines ranging from sociology and history to literature and international relations theory (IR). In this course, we will look specifically at his pioneering role in helping to establish Africana Philosophy as a distinctive oppositional philosophical worldview in Western modernity.

PSC 80602 Walter Benjamin
GC: Prof. Susan Buck-Morss, Mondays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm, 4 credits.
 
In-depth readings of a wide range of Walter Benjamin’s writings in historical-political context, from World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, to World War II and the Vichy Regime. We will focus on philosophical method. What in his way of working escapes certain modern and post-modern dead-ends of theory? Excerpts from all five volumes of his Selected Works will be consulted.

PSC 80601 Marxism
GC: Prof. Jack Jacobs, Wednesdays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, 4 credits.
 
At the turn of the century, there were pundits who proclaimed the end of history – and of Marxism.  But in recent years, a specter has been haunting Europe (and other parts of the globe).  This course, which will be conducted as a seminar, will be devoted to discussing and critiquing the ideas of Karl Marx and some of the major thinkers who have been influenced by Marx.  We will begin by exploring Marx’s analysis of alienation, his understanding of history, and his notions of the state and of class.  We will turn next to discussing both Marxism in the era of the Second International, with particular attention to the Revisionist Debate between Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg, and the political ideas of Vladimir Lenin.
 
I intend, in a somewhat later section of the course, to devote sustained attention to the development of Western Marxism, including the contributions of figures like Lukacs, Korsch, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, many of whom attempted to explain why the revolution predicted by Marx had not (yet) taken place.  Finally: we will end this course by examining Marxist thought in the latter portions of the 20th century, and the first years of the 21st.
 
I expect that we will cover a work by Louis Althusser, and hope to also discuss relevant portions of the thought of Slavoj Zizek.    Throughout the semester, we will engage in a close examination of key texts, and will debate the extent to which the ideas we will discuss (and the controversies which they generated) can be explained by knowledge of the contexts in which they arose.  We will also explore the degree to which the ideas of the thinkers whose works we will read help to illuminate contemporary issues.

PSC 80608 Political Interpretation: On Meaning and Power
GC: Prof. John Wallach, Wednesdays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm, 4 credits.
 
The recent, radical partisanship that now promotes dysfunctional logjams in American politics calls into question the meaning and character of political knowledge. Concomitantly, it jeopardizes the value of public discourse. This problem is exacerbated by intellectual trends that have undermined the stability of natural or social scientific and moral knowledge – even knowledge itself – during the past generation, despite the often illuminating value of the arguments put forth in these trends.
 
A gap in political understanding has emerged from the waning interest in intuitive frames for girding political ethics – such as conservatisms (Strauss, etc.), liberalisms (Rawls, etc.), and Marxisms (the collapse of the dysfunctional Soviet Union
and Warsaw Pact), and the delegitimation of political theory itself that stems from Foucault’s power/knowledge perspective. The manipulation of publics by corporations, authoritarian populisms, and states, the tools for which have been enhanced by the internet (despite its value), and growing socio-economic inequality, extend and deepen the challenge.
 
Drawing on Dewey, Popper, Arendt, Skinner, Foucault, and Wolin for conceptualizing political knowledge, the seminar addresses political interpretation as a problem of meaning and power, a practice that is dedicated to exposing common worlds even as its practice changes them. This problem and its associated practices evidence a kind of indeterminate knowledge and worldly engagement that calls for our attention. Material from classic texts in political theory, philosophy, practices of interpretation (e.g., journalism, social media, blogs), spheres of socioeconomic
practice (e.g., health care, education), recent articles, and contemporary political/public discourse form bases of our interrogations and explorations.
 
This seminar satisfies the program’s “methodology” requirement. It will be useful for graduate students at any level and particularly those who have backgrounds in Western political thought and/or theories of social science. It is intended to aid political and democratic understanding as well as research projects (e.g., dissertations) – particularly in political theory but potentially for those mostly writing in other “sub-fields.” Writing requirements include a mid-term assignment and a final research paper, based on but not limited to course readings.
 
PSC 80300 Feminist Political Theory
GC: Prof. Alyson Cole, Thursdays, 2:00 pm-4:00 pm, 4 credits.
 
Feminist political theory attempts to reimagine political life by scrutinizing our understandings of sex, sexuality, and gender. In doing so it provides new perspectives on the meanings and limitations of salient political concepts such as rights, equality, identity, and agency, as well as the scope and content of politics itself. At the same time, feminism continually confronts questions regarding its own boundaries, agendas, and even its subjects (as Simone de Beauvoir asked, “what is a woman”?). How does the category of gender illuminate or eclipse power dynamics involving other categories of difference, such as those of culture, race, and class?
 
This course introduces students to central questions, approaches, and quandaries in contemporary feminist political thought. We begin by surveying the notable uptick in feminist activism, such as #MeToo and other forms of “hashtag feminism.” We then turn to investigate how traditional political theory has viewed women, and how feminists have theorized the political. Next, we attempt to think more comprehensively about what “sex” and “gender” are, and how they might be relevant to politics and to theorizing. The course ends with a range of texts addressing the intersection of gender with other forms of subjection, exploitation, and discrimination.
 
Students will be expected to write short weekly reflections on the readings, make one or more class presentations, and write a final paper. Texts will include work by Sara Ahmed, Linda Martin Alcoff, Gloria Anzaldúa, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Cathy Cohen, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Simone deBeauvoir, Mary Dietz, J. Jack Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Mary Hawkesworth, Bonnie Honig, Luce Irigaray, Catherine MacKinnon, Saba Mahmood, Kate Manne, Chandra Mohanty, Kelly Oliver, Carole Pateman, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, Gayatri Spivak, Iris Young, Linda Zerilli, among others.

SOC 80000 Foucault on Power, Religion & Sexuality
GC: Prof. Lazreg, Mondays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm
 
This intensive seminar focuses on a close reading of a small number of texts to understand what Foucault exactly wrote (and said) about power, its articulation with religion and sexuality, and its effects on the physical as well as social body.  Did Foucault elaborate a coherent theory of power that incorporates politics, religion and sexual identity? What is the explanatory potential of such a theory when compared with existing sociological conceptions of power?
To answer these questions, the seminar examines the nature, forms, technical methods and consequences of power in the various settings Foucault evoked, such as the state, the economy (capitalism), and revolutions.  The interface between sexuality and religion is studied through a number of key concepts, including “political spirituality,” “political life,” “liberalism,” “biopolitics” and “biopower;”  “governmentality,” “pastoral power,” “mysticism,”   “rupture” and “subjectification.”
 
The seminar further explores the relevance of Foucault’s thought to understanding some major contemporary issues, including the emergence of religion as a political force in developing countries; the state use of security as a tool of population control; the rise of neo-conservative leaders to power in Europe and the United States; and the backlash against feminism and gay rights.
 
Main texts:
Lectures at the Collège de France: “Society must be defended” (1976); “Security, Territory and Population,” (1977-78); Birth of biopolitics” (1978-79); “On the Government of the Living” (1979-80).
History of Sexuality and selections from Discipline and Punish
 
Students will be expected to engage in a sustained commitment to the readings and write a term paper on one of the theoretical issues covered in the seminar with a view to assessing its applicability to a current event.
 
Open to all interested students

SOC 83300 Self & Society: Feminist Theory and Psychosocial
GC: Prof. Chancer, Thursdays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm

THEA 70600 History of Theatrical Theory
GC: Prof. Jean Graham-Jones, Wednesdays, 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm.
 
This course will introduce students to theatrical theory as a research discipline and will examine theories that have influenced contemporary theatre and performance studies. We will begin with a general discussion of what constitutes theory and then proceed modularly to examine such key theatrical and performance concepts as representation, mimesis, dramaturgy, and audience response. A modular structure will allow us to follow and create ongoing dialogues about these concepts as they have evolved. The second objective of the course will be met through, again, a modular approach to the presentation and discussion of such influential critical and cultural theories as formalism and structuralism, semiotics, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminism, and cultural theory, as well as other disciplinary approaches—coming from, for instance, anthropology, sociology, and psychology—that have transformed theatre and performance.

THEA 85600 Studies in Theatre Aesthetics: Japanese Theatre and Performance: A Study in Theory and Practice
GC: Prof. Peter Eckersall, Tuesdays, 4:15 pm to 6:15 pm.
 
This course will investigate theatre and performance in Japan.  It will introduce students to classical performance forms of noh, kyôgen, kabuki and bunraku and consider their aesthetic formation and social context in history as well as today.  It will further consider the ways that theatre has responded to modernization and explore in detail the development of contemporary theatre after the 1960s up to the present day.  We will consider Japan’s encounter with modernity in the early 20th century when aesthetic developments in Japanese theatre occurred in dialogue with European avant-gardism.  Radical theatre and performance during the 1960s will be discussed in relation to the rise of student protest and we will consider how contemporary theatre and performance in Japan coopts and resists experience of globalization. The course will study plays, documentation of performances and the historical and contemporary contexts for notable performance groups.  As such, a selection of plays will be examined alongside the work of theatre directors and performance makers including artists working to develop interdisciplinary and intercultural forms of expression. A particular focus of the course will be the study of Japanese Theatre through reading and discussion alongside an exposure to training regimes and practical exercises.  To this end, the class will include a workshop component that will introduce the training and practices of three contrasting forms, kyôgen, Suzuki method and butoh. Students are therefore invited to ‘learn through doing’ alongside their studies of the history of plays and performance. To accommodate this, the subject will proceed with alternating fortnightly blocks of seminar and workshop based study. No previous experience is required to participate in the training and students who are not able to undertake the workshop component will be asked to observe and document the process. Assessment will be in the form of a research paper on an aspect of Japanese theatre (60%) and a reflection and/or presentation on and/or response to the training component of the course (40%).
 
THEA 81500 Studies in Film Theory: Documenting the Self: Performance in Nonfiction Media
GC: Prof. Edward Miller, Wednesdays, 4:15 pm-8:15 pm
 
This seminar examines theories of nonfiction media and performances of the self. We begin by looking at depictions of the self in cinéma vérité and direct cinema in the 1960s. Filmmakers such as D.A. Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers, and Fred Wiseman eliminated the artifice of voice-over, interviews, archival footage, and incidental music and made use of new lightweight equipment to create a new mode of documentary. They were especially drawn to capturing backstage views of rock stars (such as Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie) as well as gaining access to interactions of ordinary people in extraordinary situations (such as in mental institutions, on the road selling bibles, working in political campaigns). In their attempt at recording life as it occurs, an unintended consequence emerged as an aspect of these films--theatricality. This theatricality arises not from the staging of situations per se, but in the freedom the filmmaker gives subjects to act out and to pretend as if the filmmaker was not there. Indeed this contradiction generates riveting performances of self as the presence of the camera motivates and frames conscious and unconscious techniques of playing a role.

UED 71100 The Hidden Curriculum of Gender, Sexuality and Race in Schools
GC: Prof. Deckman, Tuesdays, 6:30 pm-8:30 pm
 
This course explores the role of gender, sexuality, and race, and the intersection of these facets of identity, in contributing to young people’s schooling experiences, opportunities, and outcomes, and to the social context of schools more broadly.  In many ways, the course is about the “hidden curriculum” of racialized heteronormativity, or the subtle practices in schools that privilege particular heterosexual, gendered, and raced identities and ways of being.  In the course, we will engage with a variety of texts including theoretical works, qualitative and quantitative, empirical research, and applied, practical texts in analyzing how social differences are fundamentally entangled, and enmeshed with the making of identities. We will also engage the concept of the hidden curriculum and the lens of critical race theory as analytic tools for studying, understanding, and responding to how gender, sexuality, and race intersect with other social constructs with regard to schooling, and how these intersections contribute to shaping students’ identities. In particular, we will examine how these identities shape—and are shaped by—marginalized students’ experiences with inequity in schools. Lastly, we will apply our theoretical understandings to inquiry projects that will provide opportunities to ground the theoretical understandings that will be cultivated.
 
 UED 71100 Critical University Studies with a Special Emphasis on CUNY
GC: Prof. Brier, Wednesdays, 4:15 pm-6:15 pm
 
This doctoral seminar on Critical University Studies (CUS), offered in the Urban Education program, will explore the role of higher education, especially public universities, at the intersection of issues of race, class, gender, culture, political economy, and politics. CUS is a relatively new field of interdisciplinary inquiry, growing out of theoretical developments in the fields of Cultural Studies and Critical Legal Studies and focused on the critical examination of the institutional structures, ideologies, histories, and changing curricular forms and methods of scholarly inquiry in public higher education in the United States and beyond. It analyzes the neoliberal attacks over the past three decades on public universities by politicians and business interests and the oppositional responses of college faculty, staff and undergraduate and graduate students and the larger communities they serve to the savage funding cuts and ideological and intellectual critiques faced by public higher education systems around the country. We will read deeply in recent and landmark literature on CUS and seminar members will conduct scholarly research and writing on a relevant CUS topic or area of interest. The seminar sessions will include presentations by several GC and outside presenters active in the CUS field. The seminar is open to all GC PhD students in social science and humanities disciplines, as well as MALS and other Master’s students interested in exploring the changing nature and role of higher education in contemporary society. The course will be taught by Professor Stephen Brier of the PhD program in Urban Education and a faculty member in the MALS and M.A. in Digital Humanities programs and the certificate programs in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and American Studies.

Course Listing

ANTH 70300  History of Anthropological Theory
Profs. Dana Davis and Donald Robotham Wednesdays 10:45am-1:45pm   

ANTH 71700  Theoretical Approaches to Nature & Environment
Prof. Melissa Checker Mondays 2:00pm-4:00pm

ANTH 80900  Existentialism/Phenomenology
Prof. Vincent Crapanzano Wednesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm

ANTH 81300  Thinking About the State Through Foucault and Beyond
Prof. Talal Asad Mondays 11:45am-1:45pm

ANTH 81700  Anti-Capitalist Thought and Action
Profs. David Harvey and Jeff Maskovsky Wednesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm

ANTH 81900  Heterodox Marxism 
Prof. Gary Wilder Thursdays 11:45am–1:45pm

ART 70010  Exoticisms
Prof. Judy Sund Thursdays 2:00pm-4:00pm

ART 86040 The Global Readymade
Prof. David Joselit Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm

CLAS 71900  Divinity, Commodity and Sea in the Mediterranean World
Prof. Barbara Kowalzig Wednesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm

CLAS 81800  Modern Views on Ancient Historiography 
Prof. Liv Yarrow Thursdays 4:15pm-6:15pm

CL 79500  Theory and Practice of Literature: Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization
Prof. Sonali Perera Tuesdays 6:30pm-8:30pm

CL 80100  Existentialism/Phenomenology: Philosophy, Literature and Critique
Prof. Vincent Crapanzano Wednesday 2:00pm-4:00pm

CL 89100  History of Literary Theory and Criticism I
Prof. André Aciman Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm

CL 80900  Clues, Evidence and Conjectural Paradigm: A Comparative Investigation of Early
            Modern Narrative
Prof. Monica Calabritto Wednesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm

ENGL 89000  Theories and Fictions of the Archive
Prof. Tanya Agathocleous Fridays 11:45am-1:45pm

ENG 86900  Writing the World: Multiple Modernities, Women and the Archive
Prof. Meena Alexander Mondays 11:45am-1:45pm

ENG 71800  Renaissance Sex
Profs. Mario DiGangi and William Fisher Tuesdays 11:45am-1:45pm

ENG 86800  Global South and Decolonization in Literature and Theory
Prof. Peter Hitchcock Wednesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm

ENG 75500  Readings in African-American Literary/Cultural Criticism
Prof. Eric Lott Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm
 
FREN 87200  Refugee Crises: History and Law, Narrative, Poetry and Film
Prof. Domna Stanton Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm

FREN 87400  Globalizing the Enlightenment
Prof. Helena Rosenblatt Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm

HIST 72400  Authoritarian National Populism and the Crisis of Democracy
Prof. Richard Wolin Mondays 6:30pm-8:30pm

HIST 72800  Global Perspectives on the Enlightenment
Prof. Helena Rosenblatt Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15 pm

HIST 72200  The Geopoliticization of Sex: Histories and Theories
Prof. Dagmar Herzog Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm

HIST 78400  Sociology of Knowledge and Science
Prof. John Torpey Tuesdays 2pm-4 pm

HIST 72300  Contemporary Theory and History
Prof. Samira Haj Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15 pm 
 
SPAN 70200  Hispanic Critical and Cultural Theory
Prof. Oswaldo Zavala Mondays 4:15pm-6:15 pm

SPAN 80000  Language, Identity and Political Economy
Prof. José del Valle Tuesdays 11:45pm-1:45pm 
 
MUS 74500  Seminar in Theory/Analysis
Prof. Poundie Burstein Mondays 10am-1pm

MUS 84000  Seminar in Music: Disability, Culture, and Society
Profs. Joseph Straus and Julia Miele Rodas Wednesdays 2pm-5pm

MUS 82502  History of Theory II: 1590-1950
Prof. William Rothstein Wednesdays 2pm-5pm
 
LING 70100  Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics
Profs. Dianne Bradley and Christina Tortora Mondays 4:15pm-6:15pm
 
PHIL 77800  Interpretative Practices
Profs. Noel Carroll and Stephen Neale Tuesdays 11:45am-1:45pm

PHIL 78600  Decolonial Feminisms
Prof. Serene Khader Thursdays 11:45am-1:45pm

PHIL 77850  Social Ontology: Between Theory and Practice
Prof. Carol Gould Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm

PHIL 76200  Simone Weil (1909-43): Life, Work, Thought, Influence
Prof. Stephen Grover Mondays 4:15pm-6:15pm

PHIL 77600  Critical Philosophy of Race
Prof. Charles Mills Mondays 6:30pm-8:30pm

PHIL 77900  Ideology and Propaganda
Prof. Graham Priest Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm

PHIL 77700  Aesthetic Psychology
Prof. Jesse Prinz Tuesdays 9:30am-11:30am
 
PSC 72000  American Politics: Theories and Core Concepts
Prof. Brian Arbour Mondays 6:30pm-8:30pm

PSC 87800  Politics of Identity
Prof. Julie George Thursdays 2:00pm-4:00pm

PSC 71902  Authoritarian National Populism and the Crisis of Democracy
Prof. Richard Wolin Mondays 6:30pm-8:30pm

PSC 80304  Perspectives on Modernity
Prof. Uday Mehta Mondays 2:00pm-4:00pm

PSC 80609  Race, Nation & Narrative
Prof. George Shulman Thursdays 2:00pm-4:00pm

PSC 71908  Machiavelli
Prof. Benedetto Fontana Thursdays 6:30pm-8:30pm

PSC 80605  Social Ontology: Between Theory and Practice
Prof. Carol Gould Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm

PSYC 80103 Critical Methods in Contentious Times 
Prof. Michelle Fine
 
SOC 74600  Political Economy & Social Change
Prof. Roslyn Bologh Mondays 6:30pm-8:30pm

SOC 86800  Cultural Sociology
Prof. James Jasper Thursdays 2:00pm-4:00 pm

SOC 70100  Development of Sociological Theory
Prof. Julia Wrigley Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm

SOC 73200  Global Feminism
Prof. Hester Eisenstein Mondays 2:00pm-4:00pm

SOC 82800  Sociology of Knowledge and Science
Prof. John Torpey Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm

Course Description

ANTH 70300  History of Anthropological Theory
Profs. Dana Davis and Donald Robotham Wednesdays 10:45am-1:45pm  

ANTH 71700  Theoretical Approaches to Nature & Environment
Prof. Melissa Checker Mondays 2:00pm-4:00pm

ANTH 80900  Existentialism/Phenomenology
Prof. Vincent Crapanzano Wednesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm

ANTH 81300  Thinking About the State Through Foucault and Beyond
Prof. Talal Asad Mondays 11:45am-1:45pm

ANTH 81700  Anti-Capitalist Thought and Action
Profs. David Harvey and Jeff Maskovsky Wednesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm

ANTH 81900  Heterodox Marxism 
Prof. Gary Wilder Thursdays 11:45am–1:45pm

ART 70010  Exoticisms
Prof. Judy Sund Thursdays 2:00pm-4:00pm
This course surveys the processes by which non - European peoples and production have been reimagined and repurposed in a variety  of modern Western media (from painting and architecture to advertising, performance and body modification) – in the service of projects ranging from  the propagandistic and commercial to the escapist and erotic. Although exoticist practices are age - old, this course focuses on those that burgeoned in the Age of Discovery and flourished in tandem with 18 th - and 19 th - century colonialism and imperialism, and surging tourism. Theories of the exotic – as outlined by Victor Segalen, James Clifford, Tzvetan Todorov, Roger  Célestin, Deborah Root,  Peter Mason, et al. – and considerations of parallel developments in literature inform discussions of chinoiserie and japonisme; Orientalism; portrayals of the Noble Savage; and Western constructions of race and its hierarchies.  

ART 86040 The Global Readymade
Prof. David Joselit Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm
We can note three phases in the tradition of the readymade and appropriation since Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel of 1913. First, they include early enactments in which the readymade posed an ontological challenge to artworks through the equation of commodity and art object. Second, practices in which readymades were deployed semantically as lexical elements within a sculpture, painting, installation or projection as in many mid-twentieth-century practices ranging from those of Robert Rauschenberg to Carolee Schneemann in the American context alone. A third phase, which will be the main subject of this seminar, most directly encompasses the global, where the appropriation of objects, images, and other forms of content challenges sovereignty over the cultural and economic value linked to things that emerge from particular cultural contexts ranging from Aboriginal painting in Australia to the appropriation of Mao’s cult of personality in 1990s China. This course will consider the most recent phase of the readymade drawing on a wide variety of artists from around the world.

CLAS 71900  Divinity, Commodity and Sea in the Mediterranean World
Prof. Barbara Kowalzig Wednesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm
This seminar will examine how Greek polytheism engages the economic sphere. How is the divine world implicated in production, supply and economic exchange in the Mediterranean? In particular, it will address the relationship between individual gods or sets of gods and the ‘product’ they are commonly associated with, such as Demeter and the grain, Dionysos and the wine, Athena and the olive etc. A fundamental question will be how a god’s power (‘mode of action’), such as Demeter’s ability to effect ‘production’ and ‘growth’, comes to bear on economic activity and institutions, shaping a city’s political economy, or maritime networks of supply. The course will start by introducing students to the methods used in the study of Greek polytheism, to relevant approaches in economic anthropology and economic theory and to recent work on the Mediterranean as an interconnected historical space. A number of sessions will then be dedicated to the divine world involved in agricultural production, that is to say cult, myth, and ritual associated with the Mediterranean ‘triad’ (grain, olive, wine); followed by mining and metallurgy, slave labour and slave trade; luxury commodities, such as textiles, spices and perfumes. A final part will tackle the mechanisms of divine intervention in economic transactions, i.e. examine the ‘gods of the market place’ (theoi agoraioi); and ‘gods of trade’ and ‘exchange’ such as Hermes and Aphrodite. This course will start on Wednesday, 12 September.

CLAS 81800  Modern Views on Ancient Historiography 
Prof. Liv Yarrow Thursdays 4:15pm-6:15pm
Ancient historians were self-conscious creators of narrative. This course will explore themes traditionally associated with the genre of history in the Greco-Roman world, including, but not limited to: universalism, local histories, the role of speeches, use of sources, intersection with other genres, the role of the historian in society, intrusion of authorial voice, narrative focalization, and explanations of historical causation. The course will simultaneously examine how these themes and related issues have been treated by both classicists and modern historical theorists. All general course materials provided in digital format. Students will each select a different ancient historian on which to focus their individual work for the semester.

CL 79500  Theory and Practice of Literature: Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization
Prof. Sonali Perera Tuesdays 6:30pm-8:30pm
As a range of comparatist scholars have noticed, Marx observes in the manifesto (of all unlikely places) that world literature “arises” as the by-product of exploitative, even imperialist, designs. Where world literature is defined narrowly as literature of global circulation, its market driven, cosmopolitan character might be deemed to be the happy accident of capital movement guided by its cultural and economic custodians. But what happens when we expand and complicate our frame of reference? What of other methods and models for conceiving/reconceiving world literature as literary internationalism? What concepts and ideologies of comparison derive from a theory of value in a global and unequal world? And how do we understand the relationship between comparative literature and world literature—as antagonistic or supplementary?
Since Marx’s thoughts on the subject, in recent years, literary theory scholars find themselves returning to consider the problems and possibilities of world literature. The past two decades have seen a surge of publications agitating for and against both a revitalized Weltliteratur and a newly re-tooled comparative literature. WReC (The Warwick Research Collective) proposes a new world-systems theory approach which conceives of world-literature (with a hyphen) as a “re-making of comparative literature after the multicultural debates and the disciplinary critique of Eurocentricism.” In the latest issue of the PMLA journal devoted to “Literature in the World,” Simon Gikandi keeps the question alive: “But if world literature takes us everywhere and nowhere, are we better off with comparative literature, a disciplinary formation driven by the idea that literatures can be studied in their distinctive languages, across national and linguistic boundaries, without abandoning the languages and grounds that gave rise to them?” And yet, if in minimal terms, the study of comparative literature is distinguished from that of world literature on the grounds that the former requires specialized knowledge of multiple languages whereas world literature is merely literature in translation and generally studied in English, do we agree with how this academic sub-division of labor is coded and institutionalized? What is at stake in constructing the difference between world literary approaches and comparative literature in this way? Is it the case, as has been argued, that the turn to world literature has prompted a new strain of scholarship in comparative literature?
In our class, we will engage with some of these questions, as we take the measure of the state of the field debates. Throughout our course, you are encouraged to consider how these debates might shape the way that we think of research and writing in literary studies today.
Simply put, then, this course offers us a chance to study the resurgence of world literature as an interpretive paradigm against and through the perspective of new scholarship on the theory and practice of comparative literature. While we will study touchstone texts (by Goethe, Marx, Heidegger, Auerbach, Said, Jameson, Ahmad, Wallerstein, Moretti, Damrosch, Spivak, Saussy, Amin), we will also familiarize ourselves with recent scholarship including works by Casanova, Apter, Melas, Mufti, Robbins, Cheah, WReC. We will ground our discussions by “applying” theory to literary works by Woolf, Manto, Pamuk, Devi, Coetzee, and Salih. If time permits, alongside selections from theory and literature, we may also read excerpts from one or two of the ACLA’s emblematic state of the discipline reports.
Course requirements: 1.) A 20 minute presentation on one or two of the weekly readings. 2.)  A 2 page prospectus for the final paper. 3) A 15-20 page final paper. 4.) Engaged class participation.

CL 80100  Existentialism/Phenomenology: Philosophy, Literature and Critique
Prof. Vincent Crapanzano Wednesday 2:00pm-4:00pm
This seminar will be devoted to readings in the philosophy, literature, and literary criticism influenced by phenomenology and existentialism. We will consider such questions as intentionality of consciousness, the priority of consciousness over existence or existence over consciousness, other minds, being/Being, nonbeing, bad faith, guilt, freedom, commitment, ethical responsibility, care, and despair. Particular attention will be given to the problem of language in phenomenological description and existential hermeneutics.  Readings will include selections from Husserl, Sartre, Heidegger, Binswanger, and Merleau-Ponty, Bachelard, and Poulet as well as (but not limited to) novels by Blanchot, Sartre, Sarraute, Camus, and Robbe-Grillet.” Students will be encouraged to consider the relationship between phenomenology,  existentialism and social and cultural description.

CL 89100  History of Literary Theory and Criticism I
Prof. André Aciman Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm
With readings from Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus to Dante, Sidney, Boileau, Dryden, and Lessing, this course will examine the history and evolution of literary theory in the classical, medieval, and early modern periods. It will also examine such fundamental terms as truth, beauty, nature, and artifact with which pre-Romantic Western critics have attempted to understand literary works of art. This course will also explore the legacy and limitations of these and other terms and their impact on criticism today.

CL 80900  Clues, Evidence and Conjectural Paradigm: A Comparative Investigation of Early
            Modern Narrative
Prof. Monica Calabritto Wednesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm
The term “conjectural paradigm” is inspired by an essay entitled “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” (It., 1970) authored by Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg, in which he argues that physicians, detectives and historians have in common a way of investigating their subjects that is based on clue and traces, the gathering of which develops into a conjectural knowledge.
 
Taking its cue from this definition, the seminar will discuss narratives constructed in early modern Italy and Europe, emerging not only from literary works, but also and mostly from medical and legal documents/artifacts—medical reports on cases of insanity and poisoning, and trials of witches, murderers and grafters. Through and along with the reading of these narratives, we will discuss theoretical and methodological issues such as the notions of conjecture, paradigm and evidence applied to the legal and the scientific sphere; the relationship between macro- and micro history; the tension between narrative and social dimension in micro historical accounts; the investigation of people on the margins, like women, drifters, sexual deviants, mad people, workers; the relationship between historical account and historical fiction; the relevance of micro history in the age of global history, individual and collective agency.
 
All students who take the course are required to attend all the sessions of the seminar. Students who take the seminar for 4 credits are required to write a 18-page term paper to be submitted the last day of class; 2-page weekly reflections on the readings and on class discussion; a 15-minute oral presentation. Students who take this course for 2 credits can either give a 15-minute oral presentation + written report, or write the weekly reflections.
 
What follows is a provisional list of the texts we are going to discuss during the seminar:
 
Archival manuscript documents of sixteenth- and seventeenth century criminal trials held in Bologna on criminal insanity, homicide, stalking
G. Brucker, Giovanni and Lusanna: Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence
Thomas V. Cohen, Love and Death in Renaissance Italy (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2004)
Natalie Zemon Davis, Fictions in the Archive  (Stanford University Press, 1990)
Id., Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Belknap Press, 1997) (sections)
Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudon (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1996)
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms; The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller tr. J and A. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992)
Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed (sections)
Thomas Robisheaux, The Last Witch of Langerburg. Murder in a German Village (New York & London: WW Norton & Company, 2009)
Stendhal, Italian Chronicles
Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (Yale University Press, 2012)
 
On theoretical and methodological issues (also provisional):
 
Roland Barthes, “L'Effet de Réel”, Communications, n. 11, Mars 1968, Pp. 84-89
Roger Chartier,  “History, Time, and Space,” Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 2, no. 2 (June 1, 2011): http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/100
Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, tr. J and A. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) (selections)
Id., Threads and Traces. True False Fictive, tr. J and A. Tedeschi ( Berkeley: U of California Press, 2012) (selections)
Siegfried Kracauer and Paul Oskar Kristeller, History-The Last Things Before the Last (Markus Wiener Publishers, 2013)
Thomas Kuehn, “Review: Reading Microhistory: The Example of Giovanni and Lusanna,” The Journal of Modern History, vol 61, n. 3 (Sept. 1989) 512-34
Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985)
Jill Lepore, “Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 88, No. 1 (Jun., 2001), pp. 129-144
Sigurđur Gylfy Magnússon and István M. Szijártó, What is Microhistory? Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2013)
Matti Peltonen, “Clues, Margins, and Monads: The Micro-Macro Link in Historical Research,” History and Theory, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Oct., 2001), pp. 347-359
Andrew I Port, “History from Below, the History of Everyday Life, and Microhistory”, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 11 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-08-097086-8.62156-6, pp. 108-113
Lawrence Stone “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History,” Past & Present, No. 85 (Nov., 1979), pp. 3-24
Francesca Trivellato, “Is There a Future for Italian Microhistory in the Age of Global History?” California Italian Studies, 2(1), 2011

ENGL 89000  Theories and Fictions of the Archive
Prof. Tanya Agathocleous Fridays 11:45am-1:45pm
This course will use a broad range of literary and theoretical writings on archives as a way to think through the implications, methodologies and problems posed by archival research. What counts as an archive and how are archives constituted, imaginatively, materially, and politically? What is their relation to institutions, corporations, and states? What makes archives accessible or inaccessible? How do material archives deal with questions of curation, restoration, preservation and representation? What kinds of affects do archives have and what kinds of affects do we bring to them?
We will focus in particular on nineteenth-century colonial and imperial archives as well as on a range of NYC archives, which we will visit. Final projects will be grounded in original archival research and can take the form of a conventional seminar paper or a digital archive, built individually or collaboratively. Readings will include works by Anjali Arondekar; Walter Benjamin; Jorge Luis Borges; Antoinette Burton; Jacques Derrida; Charles Dickens; Michel Foucault; Paul Fyfe; Meredith Martin; Helena Michie and Robyn Warhol; Claudia Rankine; W. G. Sebald; and Ann Stoler, among others.

ENGL 86900  Writing the World: Multiple Modernities, Women and the Archive
Prof. Meena Alexander Mondays 11:45am-1:45pm
What might it mean to write the world and in so doing dream of remaking it in the text? How does the notion of modernity play out in the Global South? How  might we make sense of the claims of cultural memory, and inescapable issues of body sexuality and race? In this regard, what are the ethical and aesthetic implications of Bandung (the Asian-African conference of 1955)  documented by Richard Wright in Beyond the Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Conference?  Drawing on a range of materials we will explore these and other questions that surface in twentieth and twenty-first century acts of inscription. Issues of gender and the archive, aesthetic form and cultural translation will be key. We will study several women poets of the North American continent and the key questions issues of race and embodiment, setting them by the side of  writers from the global South. Some of the writers we will discuss-- Kamala Das, Joy Harjo, Qurratulain Hyder, Arun Kolatkar, Audre Lorde, Sadat Hasan Manto, Virginia Woolf, A.K. Ramanujan, Claudia Rankine, Adrienne Rich, Richard Wright. We will explore elements of visual culture through the work of two woman artists of  the modern era --the Brazilian painter Tarsila do Amaral and the notion of cultural cannibalism --`Antropofagia’ -- central to the creation of an indigenous modernity; and the Indian-Hungarian painter Amrita Shergill who created her startling `Self Portrait as Tahitian’ (1934) and wrote " Europe belongs to Picasso, Matisse, Braque.... India belongs only to me". Theoretical materials from Agamben, Arondekar, Berlant, Derrida, Djebar, Guha, Kalliney, Merleau-Ponty, the RAQS collective, Spivak, Stoler, and others. Students will be encouraged to bring their own special interests into play and consider archives based in New York City, including the Berg Collection at NYPL and the Morgan Library.The course will be run as a seminar with weekly readings and discussions. One short mid-term paper, based on our evolving discussions and one long final paper. Some course materials will be uploaded onto dropbox. Other texts will be on order at a local bookstore.

ENGL 71800  Renaissance Sex
Profs. Mario DiGangi and William Fisher Tuesdays 11:45am-1:45pm
This seminar will explore the repertoire of scholarly methods that have been used for understanding sex and sexuality in early modern literature, with an eye to current debates and future directions in the field. We will consider how different theoretical and historical approaches have produced varying accounts of sex as an object of inquiry; we will engage various reading strategies for elucidating sexual meaning in literary and non-literary texts; and we will reflect critically on questions of evidence, language, genre, theatricality, and periodization.
 
The following kinds of questions will guide our discussions: What are the consequences of emphasizing historical alterity or historical continuity in the study of sex? Are concepts such as sexual identity, subjectivity, or community useful in analyzing early modern modes of eroticism? How was sex itself depicted? Which acts feature regularly in texts from the period, and which appear to have been unknown? How were sex acts and erotic discourses structured by social categories such as race, gender and class? How were phenomena like consent and sexual violence conceptualized? How might the field ultimately move beyond familiar sexual paradigms and taxonomies (i.e., homoeroticism/heteroeroticism) and access alternative forms of erotic knowledge, practice, and relationality in early modern culture? How do particular textual and performative elements (i.e., puns, soliloquies, gestures, costumes, voices, metatheatrical moments, offstage actions) convey or confound sexual meaning?
 
Readings:
In addressing these questions, we will be examining a wide range of primary materials, from plays and poetry to court cases and pornography. First, we will be reading a number of canonical literary texts such as Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Othello, Marlowe’s Edward II, Barnfield’s The Affectionate Shepherd, Donne’s “Sappho to Philaenis” and the poems of Katherine Philips and Aphra Behn. In addition, we will be exploring “pornographic” texts like Rochester’s Sodom, The School of Venus, Nashe’s Choise of Valentines and other poems featuring dildos like Seignor Dildo’s Adventures in Britain. Finally, we will study an array of non-literary texts including medical treatises (such as John Henry Meibom’s The Use of Flogging in Venereal Affairs and Giles Jacob’s Treatise of Hermaphrodites) and court cases (such as the infamous Castlehaven trial).

ENGL 86800  Global South and Decolonization in Literature and Theory
Prof. Peter Hitchcock Wednesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm
In 1884 an international conference made Greenwich the locus for the Prime Meridian, basically confirming what the world already knew about the projected centrality and global reach of the British Empire.  The imperial hubris of meridians has been thoroughly decolonized but the world order remains striated by the geopolitics and geocultures of imperial desire.  How does the conceptual framework of the Global South, a discrepant latitude to be sure, challenge and interrogate the deleterious implications of such will to power?  Under actually existing globalization, doesn’t decolonization persist almost everywhere?  Isn’t socioeconomic and cultural hegemony just as discernible beyond the Euramerican axis?  Or, with the “flattening” of the world (Friedman) and occasional attempts to “end” history (Fukuyama) could we not argue that the decolonizing and decolonial instincts of the Global South have been overreached in the last quarter century?  Are we so “woke” with appropriate cosmopolitanism that the cosmopolitics of appropriation have themselves been eclipsed?  Does location decide perspicacity and world view (like the Greenwich Meridian) or is scale itself (particularly space and time) a primary scene of decolonizing literature and theory?  This course will explore how literature and theory imagines the Global South decolonizing.  Linking the Global South to decolonization is not a methodological curiosity but is a powerful heuristic for understanding both the dreams and dead ends of postcolonial projects in the current conjuncture (Smith).  Crucial genealogies of subaltern studies have undermined Eurocentric cartographies of thought and yet some have also been criticized for harboring Western philosophy in that very process.  The invocation of the Global South does not settle such arguments in advance but instead encourages a critique of the cultural logics in play.  While the course will begin with some prime examples of decolonizing the mind from the social sciences (Comaroff, Ness) and philosophy (Dussel), its main aim is to pose the Global South as an imaginary challenge for writers and thinkers, particularly as they broach what has not happened since the victories against imperialism and the formation of postcolonial states (Larsen, Lazarus).  If the Global South is less secure in its spatial coordinates (south of what?) does it not remain counter-hegemonic when it comes to imperial legacies and pretentions, including those of academic disciplines and specific traditions of thought?  How do writers resist the idea decolonization is just another niche market, a world literature as global cultural capital?  While some grounding in both postcolonial and decolonial thought would be useful (we will reference Spivak, Bhambra, and Mignolo in this regard), for the most part course readings will help coordinate postcolonial parameters, meridians that challenge the orthodoxies of latitude and longitude (as in modernity itself).  In this way, a literary and theoretical appreciation of the Global South helps hone vital critical tools in reading the work of decolonization today.  In addition to some of the theory already invoked, we will consider pertinent examples of materialist theory on globalization and, of course, key literary provocations from among Adichie, Hamid, Roy, Vladislavic, Mahajan, Kadare, and Patel.

ENGL 75500  Readings in African-American Literary/Cultural Criticism
Prof. Eric Lott Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm
This seminar will introduce students to some of the more significant recent critical and theoretical trends within the study of African American literature and culture. The course will be run colloquium style, with frequent visiting lecturers and co-instructors in the field. Participants will discuss the formation of Black American identity as it is manipulated, challenged or perhaps even erased within “peculiar” aesthetic, performative, spatial, theoretical, or political contexts. At the same time, the course will examine how African American Studies intersects with and challenges Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies. Students will be asked to write several short papers during the course of the semester. They will also do at least one in class presentation. Works we will read include: Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. 2016; Brittney Cooper: Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, 2017; Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation, 2017; Fred Moten, Black and Blur, 2017; C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, 2017; Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 2014; Tina Campt, Listening to Images, 2017; Brent Hayes Edwards, Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination, 2017; Jennifer Lynn Stoever: The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening, 2016; and Andre Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. 2016.
 
FREN 87200  Refugee Crises: History and Law, Narrative, Poetry and Film
Prof. Domna Stanton Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm
Why are we in the midst of an unparalleled refugee crisis that involves 65 million people? Such dislocations and displacements have occurred since the late 17th century, when the term was first coined; and they have proliferated over the past century, notably since 1915. Who is a refugee? Who qualifies for asylum, why and why not? What about unaccompanied minors; victims of forced migrations? What is the status of economic migrants; of internally displaced persons? How should we classify those fleeing climate catastrophes? Are these others viewed as human?
This course in critical refugee studies will begin with history (and histories), then focus on the development, successes –and failures--of the human rights regime, humanitarian law and regional instruments, such as those of the European Union. We will examine transnational North-South disparities as drivers of migration, and lastly, the current ideological and nationalist trends that have led to securitization, the closing of borders, and authoritarianism in the post 9/11 world.
We will consider particular cases: the Armenian genocide; the Holocaust; the aftermath of the Vietnam war; the intractable Palestinian problem; persecutions in Darfur and South Sudan; the flight from dictatorships, gangs and failing economies in the Americas (including Haiti); the European Union’s integrity. We will end with the present crisis catalyzed by the Syrian war.
Our approach will be interdisciplinary: critical studies in history, theory and law will combine with close readings of novels, including graphic texts, poetry, memoirs/testimonials, and documentaries that represent/construct figures of refugees as well as themes of longing, remembering and return in refugee art.
Authors/film makers include Abdelrazaq, Agamben, Ai Wei Wei, Arendt, Balibar, Bauman, Butler, Dandicat, Darwish, Derrida, Dummett, Eggers, Erpenbeck, Hisham, Lanzmann, Said, Viet Than Nguyen
Work for the course will involve, beyond close readings of assignments, a class presentation (and write-up) of a case study with other members of a team; a 20 page paper on a topic developed in consultation with the instructor; and a final exam. Course materials will be uploaded to Blackboard cAugust 15, 2018.
Please direct all questions about the course to Domna Stanton (dstanton112@yahoo.com).

FREN 87400  Globalizing the Enlightenment
Prof. Helena Rosenblatt Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm
The Eighteenth Century European Enlightenment is widely seen as a transformative moment in Western culture, one which gave birth to many of our most cherished ideals. We are often told, for example, that it is to the Enlightenment that we owe our modern notions of human rights, representative government, and liberal democracy. However, the recent “global turn” in scholarship has led historians to ask some new and often unsettling questions. How, for example, did eighteenth-century European thinkers perceive the world beyond their own borders? How did they get their information and to what purposes was that information put?  Did regions outside of Europe experience an Enlightenment too? With the help of both primary and secondary sources, we will ask how adopting a “global” perspective on the Enlightenment might change our view of it. Is it even correct to call the Enlightenment European?

HIST 72400  Authoritarian National Populism and the Crisis of Democracy
Prof. Richard Wolin Mondays 6:30pm-8:30pm
With communism’s unexpected demise in 1989, optimistic forecasts concerning the worldwide triumph of democracy proliferated. During the 1980s and 1990s, authoritarian regimes unraveled not only in Europe, but also in Asia, Latin America, and South Africa, spurring hopes that a long overdue “Third Wave” of democratization was underway.
Recently, it has become painfully evident just how premature and naïve these prognoses were. Over the last ten years, instead of the triumph of liberal democracy, we have witnessed the global ascendancy of authoritarian national populism.
In part, these developments signify a defensive response to the depredations of globalization and neoliberalism. But they also represent a rejoinder to problems that, historically, have been endemic to modern democracy – problems such as: (1) how to determine who counts as part of the demos (women? those without property? religious and ethnic minorities?); and (2) which institutional mechanisms ensure that that the “will of the people” is adequately reflected by the representatives who purportedly govern in its name.
Today, the disturbing rise of political authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism reflects diminished confidence in the capacity of parliamentary democracy to remedy the acute social disequilibrium – economic, cultural, and political – intrinsic to political liberalism. Our approach to these problems will be threefold: (1) historical, (2) theoretical, and (3) political. Among the noteworthy theorists of political authoritarianism that we will discuss are: Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and leading representatives of the Frankfurt School (T. W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, etc.)

HIST 72800  Global Perspectives on the Enlightenment
Prof. Helena Rosenblatt Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15 pm
The Eighteenth Century Enlightenment is widely seen as a transformative moment in Western culture, one with radical consequences for almost all aspects of Western thought. But how did eighteenth century thinkers perceive the world outside of Europe? Did regions outside of Europe experience an Enlightenment too? Finally, was there a cross-fertilization of ideas between the regions and, if so, how did it happen and how did it manifest itself? With the help of both primary and secondary sources, we will investigate the Enlightenment from a global perspective.

HIST 72200  The Geopoliticization of Sex: Histories and Theories
Prof. Dagmar Herzog Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm
In the early twenty-first century, sexual matters saturate high politics: from the giving or withholding of billions in development aid to the preoccupations of supranational human rights treaties and juridical institutions to the reasons given for nations to intervene in wars to the shapes taken by welfare states or their dismantling to transnationally organized activism and social media-fueled social movements across the ideological spectrum. We are living through an era of “the geopoliticization of sex,” involving levels of imbrication of sex with global politics to an extent that Michel Foucault could not have imagined when he was writing in the 1970s about sex as “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power.” We confront as well the double fact that, on the one hand, sexual rights of all kinds turn out to be fragile and contested, not just at state levels and within revitalized religious traditions but also popularly (as they are the focus of apparently considerable ambivalence for many people) while, on the other, the so recently hard-won ideals of sexual rights can, it turns out, be misused for other purposes entirely. Meanwhile, we encounter new questions about what exactly “sexuality” or “sex” even is, as well as recurrent skepticism about the very concepts of “rights,” “individual autonomy,” and “self-determination.”
The legacies of multiple pasts hang over all the current struggles. This is evident whether we are considering the ravages of HIV/AIDS or Zika or family planning programs or novel reproductive technologies, the persistence of sexual aggression and harm in war and peace, the instrumentalization of either support or hostility to LGBT individuals for other political agendas, the international concern with sex trafficking at the intersection of prostitution and wider migration processes, the growing affirmative visibility of individuals with disabilities concomitantly with the onslaught of neoliberal austerity projects, or the centrality of sexualized themes in the resurgence of xenophobia and right-wing populism worldwide.
This course will combine historiography and scholarship from adjacent disciplines (from military history and the history of economics to the histories of emotions and of the modern self, and from the histories of human rights law and NGOs to the sociology and anthropology of violence, of religion, and of disease and public health) with relevant theoretical readings with the pursuit of exploratory independent projects presented either as conference talks or as research papers. The theoretical readings will include texts concerned with psychoanalytic and decolonial approaches as well as epistemology, ontology, temporality, and causation. Foucault, in short, will be supplemented not only with Freud but also with Guattari, Laplanche, Koselleck, Moyn, Gessen, Stoler, Shepard, Scott, deLauretis, and Descola.
Together we will consider: What has changed even in the last five years in the questions we pose to the past? How can we make sense of recursive returns, deferred effects, and unexpected repercussions between different moments in time? And above all, a conceptual puzzle relevant to all historians: What should count as the pertinent backstories to which subsequent developments? We will thus spend significant time exploring the intersections of aspects of the history of sexuality with the histories of slavery, colonialism, Cold War conflicts, and past wars and genocides.

HIST 78400  Sociology of Knowledge and Science
Prof. John Torpey Tuesdays 2pm-4 pm
This course examines the development of the sociology of knowledge and science from its nineteenth-century origins to the present day.  It seeks to convey an understanding of a) the ways in which knowledge has been grasped in sociological terms and b) the ways in which science and knowledge have affected social life in the past two centuries or so.

HIST 72300  Contemporary Theory and History
Prof. Samira Haj Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15 pm
The question of the relationship of theory to history is laden with problems. While it is obvious that historians carry their research in archives, it is not obvious what analytical or theoretical frameworks historians utilize to make sense of the past, its relationship to the present and its potential relevance to the future. Obviously, the question of what is particularly historical about the discipline of history is central to the debate. The objective of this seminar is to explore some of the concerns that have haunted historians since history established itself as a modern discipline, including the notions of historical temporality, historical memory, conceptual history, periodization, historical materialism, genealogy and others that are more conceptual rather than historical per se. The course is de facto thematically-organized as well as interdisciplinary, which by implication means that it will be drawing on different bodies of knowledge, including philosophy, political theory, anthropology, religion and gender studies with some recent written narratives and accounts drawn from the history field itself.  
 
SPAN 70200  Hispanic Critical and Cultural Theory
Prof. Oswaldo Zavala Mondays 4:15pm-6:15 pm

SPAN 80000  Language, Identity and Political Economy
Prof. José del Valle Tuesdays 11:45pm-1:45pm 
In this seminar, we will examine language´s involvement in the contemporary construction and mobilization of ethnic and national identities as well as in the development of late capitalist forms of economic organization. The sociolinguistic objects and specific case-studies examined throughout the seminar will include, but not be limited to, language revitalization processes in Latin America, the politics of language and ethnic and national identity in the United States, the promotion of Spanish in global linguistic markets, and normalization policies and discourses on behalf of minority languages in Europe -mainly in Spain-.
 
The seminar´s narrative and theoretical footing -anchored in critical sociolinguistics and glotopolítica- will be established through Monica Heller and Alexandre Duchêne’s proposal to analyze the deployment of linguistic ideologies around the 'pride' and 'profit' tropes (Language in Late capitalism, 2012). The studies and the interpretive frameworks put forth in this book will be placed in dialectic relation with each other and with other sociological and political views of language´s interface with capital and labour, identity and citizenship, and politics and power. Various approaches to language and identity will be introduced through John E. Joseph´s Language and Identity (2004); critical approaches to language and political economy will be discussed through Marnie Holborow´s Language and Neoliberalism (2015) and Monica Heller and Bonnie McElnihhy´s Language, Capitalism, Colonialism (2017); and the articulation of language and politics will be studied through John Joseph´s Language and Politics (2009) and Bentivegna, del Valle, Niro and Villa´s Anuario de Glotopolítica 1 (2017).
 
As the seminar proceeds, discussion of each topic will be informed by the following readings among others: José del Valle, La lengua, ¿patria común? (2007); Norma Mendoza-Denton, Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practices among Latina Youth Gangs (2008); Jan Blommaert, The Sociolinguistics of Globalization (2010); Robert Phillipson, Linguistic Imperialism Continued (2010); H. Sami Alim and Geneva Smitherman, Articulate While Black: Barack Obama, Language, and Race in the U.S. (2012); Angela Reyes, Language, Identity, and Stereotype among Southeast Asian American Youth (2012); Jacqueline Urla, Reclaiming Basque: Language, Nation, and Cultural Activism (2012); Elvira Arnoux and Susana Nothstein´s Temas de glotopolítica: Integración regional sudamericana y panhispanismo (2014); Serafín Coronel-Molina, Language Ideology, Policy and Planning in Peru (2015); Kathryn A. Woolard, Singular and Plural: Ideologies of Linguistic Authority in 21st Century Catalonia (2016); Jonathan Rosa, Looking like a Language, Sounding like a Race: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad (2018). [The seminar will be conducted in various forms of Spanish and English; so, receptive knowledge of both languages is required; class participation and papers may be in any language or languages I think I can understand.]
 
MUS 74500  Seminar in Theory/Analysis
Prof. Poundie Burstein Mondays 10am-1pm
An introduction to the practice of Schenkerian analysis, including discussion of its notation, terminology, and techniques. Assignments will involve intensive analyses of works and excerpts of works from the tonal repertoire, along with some readings from the scholarly literature. Students entering the class should have a strong background in harmony and counterpoint.

MUS 84000  Seminar in Music: Disability, Culture, and Society
Profs. Joseph Straus and Julia Miele Rodas Wednesdays 2pm-5pm
Like the fictions of gender and race, disability is a cultural and social formation that sorts bodies and minds into desirable (normal) and undesirable (abnormal, sick) categories. Regimes of representation in literature, art, music, theater, film, and popular culture—the ways that bodies and minds constructed as disabled are depicted—both reflect and shape cultural understandings of nonconforming identities and extraordinary bodies, affecting the lived experience of people understood as disabled, often in negative ways. Drawing on examples from the arts and popular culture, this course will interrogate the many ways disability identity has been confined to rigid and unproductive social, political, and aesthetic categories. It will also explore a significant counter-tradition in which disability is seen as a significant artistic resource and a desirable way of being in the world. Topics will include: the medical and social models of disability; narratives of disability; disability and performance; disability writing (memoir and fiction); narratives of overcoming; the histories and cultures of autism, deafness, blindness, intellectual disability, and madness. We will pay particular attention to the intersection of disability with other more familiar tropes of human disqualification, including race, gender, and sexuality.

MUS 82502  History of Theory II: 1590-1950
Prof. William Rothstein Wednesdays 2pm-5pm
This seminar covers roughly 350 years of music theory, from the pupils of Zarlino (d. 1590) to the middle of the twentieth century. Within this period, students will gain a broad knowledge of those disciplines that today are grouped together, somewhat arbitrarily, as “music theory.” They will read extensively in primary and secondary sources (all in English) and will consider these sources from both present-day and, so far as is possible, historically situated perspectives. Requirements include several short papers, a translation exercise, a final exam, and a term paper.
 
LING 70100  Introduction to Theoretical Linguistics
Profs. Dianne Bradley and Christina Tortora Mondays 4:15pm-6:15pm
An introduction to the intellectual foundations, methodologies, and motivations of linguistics.  What kinds of questions do linguists ask?  What do some of the answers look like?  And why?

The course will cover fundamental concepts in the core areas of linguistics, i.e., phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Their role in fields such as first and second language acquisition, sentence processing, language change, sociolinguistics and pragmatics, may be explored depending on faculty specialization.

A substantial component of the course will be the discussion and demonstration of analytical techniques used in contemporary linguistics and applied to problem sets.  A practicum will be attached to this course, taught by graduate student assistants.
 
PHIL 77800  Interpretative Practices
Profs. Noel Carroll and Stephen Neale Tuesdays 11:45am-1:45pm
Meaning and Interpretation is a course in which we examine meaning and the interpretation of meaning across various disciplines with their different emphases and methods.  We begin with the philosophy of language with particular stress on the Gricean approach to meaning.  Next we look at the notion of interpretation in literature and the arts paying particular attention to the so-called intentional fallacy and the debates surrounding it.  The notion of interpretation in the law -- including the interpretation of statutes and constitutions -- will occupy a segment of the course.  We will also consider interpretation in archaeology, in history and even jokes.  Students will be required to lead a discussion in class and to submit a final paper.  There are no prerequisites.  

PHIL 78600  Decolonial Feminisms
Prof. Serene Khader Thursdays 11:45am-1:45pm
This course explores the influence of regimes of colonization, racialization, and imperialism on conceptions of gender justice. It begins from the understanding of decolonial feminist philosophies as including both critical and constructive projects: the former involve exploring the ways Western concepts and histories promote a congruence between Western feminism and Western imperialism, and the latter involve constructing plural visions of solidarity, as well as local and global gender justice. Developing feminist solidarity and coalition requires an analysis of epistemic justice, or the roadblocks to mutual engagement with respect and reciprocity between differently situated groups. Hence, this course will pursue both epistemological and ethical aspects of transnational feminism. Some of the topics we will discuss include: the influence of the concept of modernity on conceptions of transnational justice and gender justice, the role of the concept of culture in feminist discourses, the difference between decolonial, postcolonial, and transnational feminist theoretical approaches, how to overcome racist and sexist patterns of epistemic prejudice, the idea that gender itself is a colonial imposition, and the ideal/non-ideal theory distinction.

PHIL 77850  Social Ontology: Between Theory and Practice
Prof. Carol Gould Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm
Does a social or political collective exist over and above the individuals who comprise it?  Are individuals constituted by their social relations or are they free to choose the relations they have with other people? What are collective intentions and actions? Are gender and sex socially constructed or are they natural kinds? And do the answers to these questions have important normative implications for contemporary politics? These and related questions arise at the intersection of metaphysics and political theory and have garnered interest in both Anglo-American and Continental traditions of thought. It can be suggested, too, that social and political theories operate (however tacitly) with conceptions of the entities that make up social reality—of the nature of individuals and of their relations, where these conceptions range from radically individualistic to fully holistic ones of a community or body politic within which individuals gain their identities. Moreover, philosophical theories themselves, however abstract, may reflect ways of thinking rooted in forms of practical life, which in turn delimit their universality or reach. These various issues form the core of the project of social ontology.
 
This seminar will begin by analyzing this project as it emerges in the work of Hegel, Marx and Lukacs, and as it has developed in contemporary analytic theories such as those of Margaret Gilbert and Michael Bratman. It will consider notions of alterity, plurality, and the second-person perspective in Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Stephen Darwall, and will take up feminist relational ontologies and care approaches (e.g., in Seyla Benhabib and Virginia Held). The course will then focus on key topics in social ontology, including collective intentionality (Raimo Tuomela and the Bratman-Gilbert debate), the nature of institutions (John Searle, Steven Lukes), and of structures (Anthony Giddens and Sally Haslanger), moving to the ontology of groups in both continental and analytic frames (Jean-Paul Sartre, Iris Young, and Philip Pettit). The seminar will then consider some of the normative and practical implications of social ontological perspectives, including the vexed question of collective responsibility (e.g., Larry May), the metaphysics of sex and gender (Carol Gould, Asta Sveinsdottir), the ontology of race (Anthony Appiah, Philip Kitcher, and Charles Mills), and finally, feminist notions of relational autonomy and intersectional group identities and their import for understanding contemporary social and political life (Jennifer Nedelsky and Diana Meyers, among others).
 
Seminar members will be encouraged to relate the course materials to their ongoing research projects through oral presentations and analytical term papers, and will be expected to be active participants in the seminar discussions.

PHIL 76200  Simone Weil (1909-43): Life, Work, Thought, Influence
Prof. Stephen Grover Mondays 4:15pm-6:15pm
Simone Weil died 75 years ago, at 34. Well-known in left-wing intellectual and activist circles in France in the ‘30s, her influence has grown steadily since her death through her unpublished writings, including notebooks, journals, and correspondence, and through the efforts of admirers, including T.S. Eliot, Albert Camus, Pope Paul VI, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Carson, and Iris Murdoch.

Weil packed a lot into a short life: brilliant student, committed teacher, militant trade-unionist, critic of Marxism and Leninism, revolutionary syndicalist, factory worker, political journalist, pacifist, fighter in Spain, philosopher of work, grape-picker, social theorist, and an idiosyncratic Christian Platonist and mystic who refused baptism. The course will cover the historical and intellectual background to Weil’s life and thought, examine her principal political, philosophical, and theological writings (in translation), and assess her influence.

Among the writings covered: Weil’s dissertation on Descartes; Lectures on Philosophy; articles on Germany, Marxism-Leninism, and revolutionary politics from the early ‘30s; On Liberty and Oppression; ‘Factory Journal’ and other writings on work; anti-war writings from the mid- and late ‘30s; essays on Ancient Greece, including ‘The Iliad; or the Poem of Force;’ the theological papers and letters collected in Waiting for God; and her radical blueprint for the post-war reconstruction of France, The Need for Roots.

PHIL 77600  Critical Philosophy of Race
Prof. Charles Mills Mondays 6:30pm- 8:30pm
Race, once a marginal subject in philosophy (excluding, that is, the racist writings of many of the classical figures of the modern canon), has become increasingly respectable in recent years. Critical philosophers of race have produced a growing and exciting body of work in such areas as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics, phenomenology and existentialism, and the rewriting of the history of philosophy itself. This course will provide an overview and guide to some of this literature, and its implications for the teaching of the traditional canon.

PHIL 77900  Ideology and Propaganda
Prof. Graham Priest Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm
This course is about ideology, what it is and how it functions, the techniques of propaganda that can be used to promote it, and how these might be resisted. We will start by looking at some of early texts: Marx, Gramsci, Mannheim. Then we will look at Edward Bernay’s classic on the manipulation of mass opinion, Propaganda. Next, we will turn to Sandra Bartkey’s Femininity and Domination, on ideology and patriarchy, and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, on education and oppression. Finally, we will look at Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and Jason Stanley’s How Propaganda Works.

PHIL 77700  Aesthetic Psychology
Prof. Jesse Prinz Tuesdays 9:30am-11:30am

PSC 72000  American Politics: Theories and Core Concepts
Prof. Brian Arbour Mondays 6:30pm-8:30pm
This seminar surveys the major scholarly debates in the study of American politics today. It draws on prominent theoretical perspectives for understanding empirical issues regarding: (1) the history of American political development; (2) the constitutional and institutional structure of American government in its contemporary form; (3) the structure of power and the behavior of political elites; and (4) ordinary people’s political behavior as manifested in studies of public opinion and political participation broadly construed. As a seminar, the course emphasizes dialogue about assigned readings. Students are to be active participants in the conversation. The course is designed to help students prepare for the doctoral exam in American politics and to acquire the background to teach American politics at the undergraduate level. The course will regularly address issues in contemporary American politics and how the literature on American politics addresses these issues.

PSC 87800  Politics of Identity
Prof. Julie George Thursdays 2:00pm-4:00pm
Identity helps shape how people understand their interests, how they interpret the world around them, and how they interact with power. Likewise, governments and societies interact with identity groups variously, often constructing hierarchies that either open or limit outcomes and opportunities. This class investigates the politics of identity and identity salience. It highlights the main theoretical frameworks that have come to dominate the scholarly discourse, focusing particularly on the politics of ethnicity, nationalism, race, and religion.
The course will take a geographically comparative approach, closely examining identity politics in Eurasia, Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. Students will also have an opportunity to read on areas of their own geographical or identity interest. The course will have a paper component and focus on research design components that underpin scholarly inquiry. In engaging the readings, we will pay attention to the arguments and findings therein, but also in the underlying structures of the study, the evidence considered, and the effectiveness of the choices made by the author. We will likewise engage with literature of varied methodologies. Students will write a research paper during the course, as well as short reading analyses. Students will read an equivalent of a book a week and will lead the discussions.

PSC 71902  Authoritarian National Populism and the Crisis of Democracy
Prof. Richard Wolin Mondays 6:30pm-8:30pm
With communism’s unexpected demise in 1989, optimistic forecasts concerning the worldwide triumph of democracy proliferated. During the 1980s and 1990s, authoritarian regimes unraveled not only in Europe, but also in Asia, Latin America, and South Africa, spurring hopes that a long overdue “Third Wave” of democratization was underway.
Recently, it has become painfully evident just how premature and naïve these prognoses were. Over the last ten years, instead of the triumph of liberal democracy, we have witnessed the global ascendancy of authoritarian national populism.
In part, these developments signify a defensive response to the depredations of globalization and neoliberalism. But they also represent a rejoinder to problems that, historically, have been endemic to modern democracy – problems such as: (1) how to determine who counts as part of the demos (women? those without property? religious and ethnic minorities?); and (2) which institutional mechanisms ensure that that the “will of the people” is adequately reflected by the representatives who purportedly govern in its name.
Today, the disturbing rise of political authoritarianism and ethnic nationalism reflects diminished confidence in the capacity of parliamentary democracy to remedy the acute social disequilibrium – economic, cultural, and political – intrinsic to political liberalism. Our approach to these problems will be threefold: (1) historical, (2) theoretical, and (3) political. Among the noteworthy theorists of political authoritarianism that we will discuss are: Hannah Arendt, Carl Schmitt, and leading representatives of the Frankfurt School (T. W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, etc.)

PSC 80304  Perspectives on Modernity
Prof. Uday Mehta Mondays 2:00pm-4:00pm
This seminar will consider several accounts of what constitutes modernity, along with the hopes and challenges associated with it. It will draw on thinkers such as Kant, Hegel, Marx and J.S. Mill and others who challenged the technological, economic and broadly progressive and optimistic accounts given in favor of modernity. As part of this latter group the seminar will consider the writings of various religious thinkers and others who had a more skeptical understanding of modernity. The seminar will conclude with a consideration of contemporary thinkers with a special focus on issues relating to democracy and the environment. The readings for the seminar will draw on the writings of both western and non-western thinkers.

PSC 80609  Race, Nation & Narrative
Prof. George Shulman Thursdays 2:00pm-4:00pm
This course uses social analysis, political speeches, and artistic fictions to explore the relation of race making, nation building, and narrating in the case of the United States. Our broadest premise is that collective subjects (nations, peoples, classes, religions, races) are formed and reformed through narratives joined to collective action. Our specific premise is that “American nationhood has been formed by racial domination and opposition to it, as represented in and through contesting narratives.” The first half of the semester therefore uses social theory to explore the intersections of settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and immigration restriction -and of social movements and counter-narratives opposing them- in shaping imagined (national) community and conceptions of democracy.
The second half of the course attends to and explores idioms of critique: what difference does it make to contest racialized nationalism by a scholarly treatise, by a political speech, or by a work of literary or cinematic fiction? What can and cannot be said (and thereby done) through these different genres of expression? How do we assess the rhetorical and literary dimensions of theoretical texts and how might we discern the theoretical implications of literary and cinematic fictions? Texts of theory include Michael Rogin, Glenn Coulthard, Mae Ngai, Loic Waquant, Hortense Spillers, Saidiyah Hartman, Frank Wilderson, Fred Moton. Authors include James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, Claudia Rankine; Films include Bamboozled, GET OUT, and Black Panther.

PSC 71908  Machiavelli
Prof. Benedetto Fontana Thursdays 6:30pm-8:30pm
This course focuses on Machiavelli and his interpreters.  Machiavelli is one of the most contentious and protean thinkers in the history of Western political thought. That he has had, and continues to have, a broad and profound influence on political thought cannot be denied. He has been called teacher of evil, a founder of modernity, partisan of republican government, defender of tyranny, defender of the liberty and equality of the people (the many), discoverer of the autonomy of politics and of a new science of politics, amoral realist, impassioned idealist and ardent patriot. In his thought and action he combines simultaneously ferocity and cold calculation. It seems that one cannot discuss politics without confronting and coming to terms with his thought.
The course will examine different interpretations, or different ways of reading, Machiavelli-—such as reason of state, republican, democratic, Straussian, feminist, rhetorical and revolutionary. What is striking about Machiavelli is his complexity—-of ideas, levels of historical reflection, motivations, methods and style. Benedetto Croce long ago observed that Machiavelli is an enigma that can never be resolved, and his resistance to simple categorization makes him perennially open to controversy and reinterpretation. The course explores the various stands of the densely textured web that is his thought. In effect, it offers a reading of several of Machiavelli’s writings, and at the same time looks at the various approaches to, and interpretations of, his politics and thought.
The major political works and some of the minor writings will be read. The former are: The Prince, the Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius, and the Art of War. The latter are: The Life of Castruccio Castracani, A Provision for Infantry, Tercets on Ambition and On Fortune, A Pastoral: the Ideal Ruler, An Exhortation to Penitence, Description of the Method Used by Duke Valentino in Killing, Discourse on Remodeling the Government of Florence. The critically trenchant comedy Mandragola will also be read.
Course requirements: One take-home final examination and one paper on a subject chosen by the student, both due at the end of the semester.

PSC 80605  Social Ontology: Between Theory and Practice
Prof. Carol Gould Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm
Does a social or political collective exist over and above the individuals who comprise it? Are individuals constituted by their social relations or are they free to choose the relations they have with other people? What are collective intentions and actions? Are gender and sex socially constructed or are they natural kinds? And do the answers to these questions have important normative implications for contemporary politics? These and related questions arise at the intersection of metaphysics and political theory and have garnered interest in both Anglo-American and Continental traditions of thought. It can be suggested, too, that social and political theories operate (however tacitly) with conceptions of the entities that make up social reality—of the nature of individuals and of their relations, where these conceptions range from radically individualistic to fully holistic ones of a community or body politic within which individuals gain their identities. Moreover, philosophical theories themselves, however abstract, may reflect ways of thinking rooted in forms of practical life, which in turn delimit their universality or reach. These various issues form the core of the project of social ontology.
This seminar will begin by analyzing this project as it emerges in the work of Hegel, Marx and Lukacs, and as it has developed in contemporary analytic theories such as those of Margaret Gilbert and Michael Bratman. It will consider notions of alterity, plurality, and the second-person perspective in Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, and Stephen Darwall, and will take up feminist relational ontologies and care approaches (e.g., in Seyla Benhabib and Virginia Held). The course will then focus on key topics in social ontology, including collective intentionality (Raimo Tuomela and the Bratman-Gilbert debate), the nature of institutions (John Searle, Steven Lukes), and of structures (Anthony Giddens and Sally Haslanger), moving to the ontology of groups in both continental and analytic frames (Jean-Paul Sartre, Iris Young, and Philip Pettit). The seminar will then consider some of the normative and practical implications of social ontological perspectives, including the vexed question of collective responsibility (e.g., Larry May), the metaphysics of sex and gender (Carol Gould, Asta Sveinsdottir), the ontology of race (Anthony Appiah, Philip Kitcher, and Charles Mills), and finally, feminist notions of relational autonomy and intersectional group identities and their import for understanding contemporary social and political life (Jennifer Nedelsky and Diana Meyers, among others). Seminar members will be encouraged to relate the course materials to their ongoing research projects through oral presentations and analytical term papers, and will be expected to be active participants in the seminar discussions.

PSYC 80103 Critical Methods in Contentious Times 
Prof. Michelle Fine
With a transdiscipliniary commitment to decolonizing methodologies, "public science" and participatory policy work, the course readings include critical scholarship on epistemology, methodology and ethics, moving between quantitative, qualitative, visual, performative and auto-ethnographic methods. The arc of the course commits to a deep interrogation of critical classic texts (e.g. The Philadelphia Negro and Marienthal) as well as a contemporary "assemblage" of social science methodologies that center questions of power and possibility, particularly participatory policy projects hatched between university and community. The course has been designed for students in psychology, geography, sociology, urban education, public health and social welfare.
 
SOC 74600  Political Economy & Social Change
Prof. Roslyn Bologh Mondays 6:30pm-8:30pm
How do the dynamics and relations of political economy affect social life, and how can they be changed?  From interpersonal relations to international relations, from rankings of happiness among countries and among migrants within countries to rates of suicide, from race and ethnic relations and inequalities to gender relations, from interpersonal violence to international violence, from militarization of policing to privatization of prisons and mass incarceration, from types of education to urban and suburban life, from Manhattan rents and real estate prices to segregation, political economy is shaping social life.
Part of the appeal of Thomas Piketty’s acclaimed book on inequality, Capital in the Twenty First Century, lies in his emphatic rejection of the narrow economistic approach of economics and his espousal of the more comprehensive, sociological, cultural and historical perspective of political economy  – employing sources as unorthodox as Jane Austen’s novels. We will examine theorists from Marx to the critical theorists of today in order to understand the dynamics and direction of our changing world.  Students (even beginning graduate students) will be encouraged to develop a draft of a publishable article.

SOC 86800  Cultural Sociology
Prof. James Jasper Thursdays 2:00pm-4:00 pm
This course will examine the construction of meaning across many social institutions, taking culture as an aspect of all social life; it is not a course about the production of art and literature. We will read mostly theory, but many of the arenas we examine will be political. The “argument” of the course will be that we cannot understand meaning without understanding emotions.

SOC 70100  Development of Sociological Theory
Prof. Julia Wrigley Tuesdays 4:15pm-6:15pm
In this course we will read and discuss the works of the classical theorists, including, particularly, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, DuBois, and Wollstonecraft to discern their theoretical insights and also to understand how and why they became shapers of our field, with their work still influencing contemporary sociologists generations later. We will explore their distinctive ideas about power, unity, and division within societies and how societies change and will also consider the intellectual and historical context in which they developed their work. We will read some contemporary works that draw upon their ideas.
We will proceed through reading and discussion. To foster lively and informed discussion, each week you will be asked to prepare a question about the readings. The questions will be distributed before the class to stimulate thought in advance.

SOC 73200  Global Feminism
Prof. Hester Eisenstein Mondays 2:00pm-4:00pm
In this course we will take a look at what has come to be known as global feminism.  Feminism usually refers to the movement by women for full citizenship, in the wake of the strict gender rules inherited from the Victorian era in western countries.  In the United States, the “first wave” from 1848 to the 1880s and 1890s eventually produced the right to vote in 1920; labor feminism in the 1930s and 1940s expanded work roles for women and developed concepts such as sexual harassment and maternity leave; and the “second wave” expanded the agenda for women’s rights to include reproductive self-determination, sexual choice, access to all areas of paid work, and a common sense notion that the similarities between women and men vastly outweigh the differences attributable to biology.  In the wake of the globalization of the world economy since the 1970s, a highly visible form of feminism has emerged in the form of state or official feminism: “femocrats” emerged from Australia and entered governments throughout the world, and a fairly standard ideology of women’s rights has been developed which preaches equality for women, access to capitalist work and markets, and a critique of patriarchal cultures.  But is this global feminism what women all over the world really want and need?  We will take a look at this series of debates, reading texts by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Valentine Moghadam, Sara Farris, Tithi Battacharya, among others.

SOC 82800  Sociology of Knowledge and Science
Prof. John Torpey Tuesdays 2:00pm-4:00pm
This course examines the development of the sociology of knowledge and science from its nineteenth-century origins to the present day.  It seeks to convey a) an understanding of the ways in which knowledge has been grasped in sociological terms and b) the ways in which science and knowledge have affected social life in the past two centuries or so.

Course Listing

Core Course

CTCP 71088 Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
Prof. Vincent Crapanzano Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [38068]

Elective Courses

ANTH 72300/PSYC 80103 Ethnography of Space & Place
Prof. Setha Low Thursday 2:00-4:00 [38546]

ANTH 81500: Black Atlantic Political Imagination
Prof. Gary Wilder Thursdays 11:45-1:45 [38552]

ART 76020 History and Theory of the European Avant-garde: 1905-1945 and Postscript
Prof. Emily Braun Thursdays 4:15-6:15 [38159]

ART 86030 Urban Episodes: 1900-1961
Profs. Romy Golan & Marta Gutman Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38163]

ART 86040 Media/Art
Prof. David Joselit Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [38164]
 
CLAS 81100 Presocratic Philosophy
Prof. David Sider Mondays 6:30-8:30 NYU [38169]

CL 80100 Theory and History of Translation
Prof. Bettina Lerner Thursdays 4:15-6:15 [38097]

CL 89000 Nietzsche Lévinas Blanchot
Prof. John Brenkman Wednesdays 4:15-6:15 [38095]
 
CL 89200 History of Literary Criticism II
Prof. Charity Scribner Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38096]

CL 80100/HIST 72400/71902 Existentialism:  From Dostoevsky to Satre
Prof. Richard Wolin Mondays 6:30-8:30 [38101]

ENGL 86600 Politics of the Refugee
Prof. Siraj Ahmed Mondays 6:30-8:30 [38197]

ENGL 86600 Race, Capital, and Culture in the Transpacific
Profs. Kandice Chuh & Thuy Linh Tu Tuesdays 4:15-6:15PM NYU [38198]
 
ENGL 82100 Early Modern Trans History and Theory
Prof. Will Fisher Tuesdays 11:45-1:45 [38201]
 
ENGL 84300 Brontës, Hardy, Lawrence
Prof. Richard Kaye Wednesdays 6:30-8:30 [38205]
 
ENGL 82100 Sovereignty
Prof. Feisal Mohamed Wednesdays 11:45-1:45 [38208]

ENGL 80600 Theorizing Celebrity Culture
Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [38209]

FREN 71110 French Literary History: The Novel
Prof. Domna Stanton Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [38019]
 
HIST 72100/PSC 71902 The History of Liberalism from Locke to Rawls
Prof. Helena Rosenblatt Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [38105]

HIST 72800 Slavery and the Disciplines
Prof. Herman Bennett Thursdays 6:30-8:30 [38117]
 
IDS 81660 The Culture of Fashion: Theories and Practices
Prof. Eugenia Paulicelli Wednesdays 6:30-8:30 [38135]

SPAN 87000 Ugly Feelings: Post-Utopic Fiction and Film from Central America
Prof. Magdalena Perkowska Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38055]
 
MUS 86500 Critical Approaches: Music Aesthetics
Prof. Scott Burnham Tuesdays 10:00-1:00 [38081]
 
MUS 86400 Musicology Seminar: Medievalism and the Modernist Musical Imagination
Prof. Anne Stone Fridays 10:00-1:00 [38080]

PHIL 76100 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
Prof. Angelica Nuzzo Mondays 9:30-11:30 [38423]

PHIL 77500 Philosophy of Feminism: Gender and the Body
Prof. Linda Alcoff Mondays 2:00-4:00 [38245]
 
PHIL 77600 Rawls, Race, and Gender
Profs. Charles Mills & Siybl Schwarzenbach Mondays 4:15-6:15 [38246]

PHIL 77700 Art, Morality, and Politics
Prof. Noel Carroll Tuesdays 11:45-1:45 [38247]
 
PHIL 77100 Subjectivity and Objectivity in Morality
Prof. Miranda Fricker Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38249]

PSC 71901 Critical Reason: The Basics
Prof. Susan Buck-Morss Mondays 4:15-6:15 [38393]
 
PSC 80303 Political Theory of Capitalism
Prof. Corey Robin Mondays 6:30-8:30 [38381]
 
PSC 73100 Modern Social Theory
Prof. Uday Mehta Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38384]
 
PSC 82001 Ancient & Medieval Political Thought
Prof. Benedetto Fontana Thursdays 6:30-8:30 [38393]

PSYC 79102 Environmental Social Science II: Ecological and Contextual Concepts in Psychology
Prof. Susan Saegert Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38470]

SSW 85000 Fueling Critical Race Scholarship and Undermining Whiteness in Academia
Prof. Michelle Billies Mondays 11:05-1:00 [38031]

SOC 80000 Social Theory and Islam
Prof. Mucahit Bilici Thursdays 2:00-4:00 [38743]
 
SOC 82800 Food, Culture, and Society
Prof. Barbara Katz Rothman Wednesdays 6:30-8:30 [38289]
 
THEA 85700: Seminar in Contemporary Performance Theory and Technique: Dramaturgy and the Reinvention of Contemporary Theatre
Prof. Peter Eckersall Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [38563]

THEA 81600 Film Theory
Prof. Jerry W. Carlson Mondays 2:00-6:00 [38561]

UED 75200 The Hidden Curriculum of Gender and Sexuality in Schools: A Critical Race Theory Perspective
Prof. Sherry Deckman Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [38126]

UED 71200 Critical Urban Literacies
Prof. Adriana Espinosa Thursdays 4:15-6:15 [38123]

Course Description

CTCP 71088 Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
Prof. Vincent Crapanzano Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [38068]
The focus of this seminar will be on the relationship between various conceptions of and attitudes toward language and recent theories of interpretation and hermeneutical practices in the human sciences and literary study.  We will consider the effect of the stress on reference over other language functions – the pragmatic, poetic -- on notions of text, genre, and rhetoric. How does this stress configure meta-critical understanding? How does it foster the often promiscuous play of divergent, at times analytically incompatible, approaches to interpretation so characteristic of contemporary theory? Readings will include works by Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, de Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and/or Gennette, Foucault, Michael Silverstein and his school, Bakhtin, Lacan and Deleuze.             
 

ANTH 72300/PSYC 80103 Ethnography of Space & Place
Prof. Setha Low Thursday 2:00-4:00 [38546]

 
ANTH 81500: Black Atlantic Political Imagination
Prof. Gary Wilder Thursdays 11:45-1:45 [38552]
 
 
ART 76020 History and Theory of the European Avant-garde: 1905-1945 and Postscript
Prof. Emily Braun Thursdays 4:15-6:15 [38159]
This lecture course addresses key movements of the historical avant-garde in France, Germany, Italy, and Russia, from pre-WWI through the rise of totalitarian regimes. The material covered includes the main protagonists, group manifestos, and multi-media artistic production, as well as a focus on issues of gender politics, nationalism, mass culture, elitism, “primitivism” and colonialism, transnational networks, the so-called return to order, and strategies of irony and cultural disruption. While constructed as a deep and selective historical survey (with close readings of material objects), the course simultaneously digs into discursive and ideological frameworks. A subtheme is the theorization of the neo-Marxist “aporias” of the avant-garde begun in the late 1930s and in earnest in the 1960s. The course will end with a look at the ways in which the historical avant-garde proved a model for post-colonial artistic practices through the 1980s.  Though given as a lecture course, there are substantial weekly readings and a portion of each class will be dedicated to class discussion.  Accepts auditors.

 
ART 86030 Urban Episodes: 1900-1961
Profs. Romy Golan & Marta Gutman Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38163]
This seminar examines artists and architects in Vienna, Barcelona, New York, Paris, Moscow, Mexico City, Algiers, and Berlin (east and west), from 1900- 1961. Expect to examine the intersection of art and architecture with politics, culture, and place. Accepts auditors.


ART 86040 Media/Art
Prof. David Joselit Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [38164]
Focused around recent art-historical scholarship on time-based media, as well as selected texts from media theory and media archaeology, this course will span the invention of cinema in the late 19^th century to the rise of the Internet.  Issues will include media art’s redefinition of publics; questions around the changing agency of images during the long twentieth century; how architecture and media converge in infrastructure, and how image worlds may affect the nature of citizenship. No auditors.
 
 
CLAS 81100 Presocratic Philosophy
Prof. David Sider Mondays 6:30-8:30 NYU [38169]
In this course we shall survey the path of Greek philosophy from its beginnings until just short of Plato. Most of this will be on natural science (such as evolution, the big bang theory, and subatomic particles, to be anachronistic) and the attempts to grapple with the concept of existence, but what little remains of early philosophical ethics will also be examined. Since all of early Greek thought is known primarily from later sources who quote (not always consistently), paraphrase (often tendentiously), and interpret (often erroneously), it must be approached in the first instance philologically fragment by fragment before being put into historical and then philosophical contexts.
 

CL 80100 Theory and History of Translation
Prof. Bettina Lerner Thursdays 4:15-6:15 [38097]
This seminar explores the history and theory of translation in the West. We will read and discuss major theoretical texts that have shaped the field of translation studies from Cicero and St. Jerome to Du Bellay, Dolet, Schlegel, Schleiermacher, Goethe, Benjamin, Jakobson, Borges, Venuti, Derrida, Berman, Spivak, Kilito and Apter among others in order to work our way through the various aesthetic, ethical and political questions raised by the practice of translation. Alongside these theoretical essays, we will examine key translations of literary and other texts as case studies that test the limits of these theories. At the end of the term, each student will redact a discussion of a specific translation theory or set of theories, an analysis of a specific translation or an original translation accompanied by a critical introduction. The class will be taught in English, but participants should have working knowledge of at least one language other than English, preferably French, German or Spanish.

 
CL 89000 Nietzsche Lévinas Blanchot
Prof. John Brenkman Wednesdays 4:15-6:15 [38095]
The friendship between Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Lévinas has fascinated, and often baffled, commentators on these major literary and philosophical thinkers of the 20th century. This seminar will explore the relation between Blanchot’s thought and Lévinas’s through the lens of their respective relation to a set of themes inaugurated by Nietzsche’s writings, in particular: the symbolic-affective connections of morality and power, the multiple facets of nihilism in the modern age, and the philosophical status of the human and otherness.
Primary texts: Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals; The Will to Power; Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Lévinas, The Levinas Reader; Otherwise than Being; Proper Names. Blanchot, The Space of Literature; The Infinite Conversation.

 
CL 89200 History of Literary Criticism II
Prof. Charity Scribner Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38096]
A study of the development of thought about literature from the eighteenth century to the present, with readings from Kant, Schiller, Wordsworth, Arnold, Woolf, Tolstoy, Bakhtin, Lukács, Benjamin, Barthes, and Kristeva. This course will not only address issues pertaining to the evolution of modern aesthetics, but it will also examine current critical methodology.
 

CL 80100/HIST 72400/71902 Existentialism:  From Dostoevsky to Satre
Prof. Richard Wolin Mondays 6:30-8:30 [38101]
Existentialism revolutionized twentieth-century thought and culture. Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) established the movement’s contours and tenets, although Karl Jaspers and Simone de Beauvoir also made essential contributions.

Existentialism challenged Western metaphysics by rejecting the notion of “essence” as a conceptual straitjacket that restricted the notion of human possibility. Its watchword may be succinctly summarized as: existence is prior to essence. As an intellectual current, existentialism followed in the wake of Nietzsche’s critique of European nihilism: since traditional Western values had lost their cogency and meaning, a “transvaluation of values” was required.

Nineteenth-century developments provided the backdrop for existentialism’s emergence. Both Schelling and Kierkegaard lamented traditional philosophy’s trafficking in lifeless abstractions and lack of concern with “lived experience.” Theories of “alienation” in the work of Marx, Durkheim, and Simmel provided existentialism with a grounding in contemporary social theory and critique.
 
Existentialism also derived inspiration from major works of literature: Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground,” Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” and Flaubert’s Madame Bovary became indispensable points of reference. According to one witness, Heidegger’s constant companions while composing Being and Time were Dostoevsky’s novels and a recent edition of van Gogh’s letters. Sartre’s novels and plays, Nausea and No Exit, are often treated as exemplars of literary existentialism.
 
Finally, existentialism has often been criticized from the left for glorifying alienation and (bourgeois) decadence. During the late 1940s, the Frankfurt School philosopher and ex-Heidegger student, Herbert Marcuse, wrote a landmark critique of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. During the 1960s, Theodor Adorno accused Heidegger’s approach of smoothing over the tensions of late capitalism by offering a “pseudo-concreteness” in place of a critical social theory.
 
Booklist:
 
Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
Kierkegaard, A Kierkegaard Anthology
Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilych
Nietzsche, The Will to Power
Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life” + “The Tragedy of Culture”
Lukács, Soul and Form
Kafka, “Before the Law,” “An Imperial Messenger”
 
 
Heidegger, Being and Time
Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy
Sartre, Nausea
Sartre, Being and Nothingness
Sartre, “Existentialism is a Humanism”
Adorno, “Understanding Endgame”
 
 
ENGL 86600 Politics of the Refugee
Prof. Siraj Ahmed Mondays 6:30-8:30 [38197]
In a brief Word War II period essay entitled ‘We Refugees’ published in a Jewish-American journal, Hannah Arendt claimed that each of Europe’s refugee populations constitute the vanguard of its people—and diasporic Jews that of humanity in general. Exactly fifty years later, in the immediate wake of the Oslo I Accord, Giorgio Agamben returned, in an essay entitled ‘Beyond Human Rights,’ to Arendt’s argument. He suggested that the practice European states developed during the twentieth century of denationalizing their own citizens reveals the truth of contemporary politics. One enjoys political protection only by virtue of one's citizenship, and even those who possess this virtue no longer possess any guarantee they will continue to do so. Agamben attempted consequently to imagine a politics based no longer on citizenship but instead on the ancient and medieval principle of refugium, the provision of sanctuary to exiles.
           
The refugee crises now besetting Europe’s borders have once again occasioned calls—from Alain Badiou to Slavoj Zizek and beyond—for a politics of the refugee. But perhaps the figure of the refugee encompasses not merely those fleeing civil war in the Middle East and Africa. Climate change and ecological collapse may soon place a humanity much more universal than even Arendt imagined into flight. The need to imagine a politics of the refugee has thus become more urgent than ever.
           
In response to that need, this class will explore the hypothesis that refugees are natural by-products not of any particular political order—pace Arendt, Agamben, Badiou, et al—but of our concept of politics as such. This concept’s modern roots lie in the creation of the European interstate system (conventionally dated to 1648 Peace of Westphalia), which began to replace religious dynasties with secular nation-states and thus inaugurated the political order to which we remain wedded today. But the rarely acknowledged raison d’être of the interstate system was to redirect European sovereigns’ war-making powers from inside the new ‘lines of amity’ to its outside, where violence (and primitive accumulation) could occur without limit. In other words, the very point of modern politics was, originally, to displace environmental destruction—the conquest of territory, the dispossession of indigenous populations, the exhaustion of natural resources—from Europe to the rest of the world. Refugee-making might, therefore, be much more fundamental to our political way of life than Western philosophy has yet acknowledged. According to Carl Schmitt, the sovereign is the one who has the power to declare a state of emergency. But perhaps it would be more precise to say that from its modern origins, Western sovereignty has lain, instead, in the power to make environments so unlivable, life so precarious, that a different politics becomes practically impossible. 
 
We will read early modern political thinkers such Grotius and Locke and contemporary critical theorists such as those listed above. But we will also turn to those postcolonial authors—such as J.M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, and Mahmoud Darwish—most attuned to the interrelationship of politics and refugee-making and most concerned to imagine a way out of this vicious cycle.
 
This class will help first-years students in the English Ph.D. Program draft the annotated bibliography and/or the review essay components of their portfolio examinations.

 
ENGL 86600 Race, Capital, and Culture in the Transpacific
Profs. Kandice Chuh & Thuy Linh Tu Tuesdays 4:15-6:15PM NYU [38198]
Major contemporary shifts in American policy towards the Pacific, from those that address the region as crucial to U.S. economic and political interests, to the intensely antagonistic stance of the current administration, which sees it as a military and industrial threat, renew the longheld and constitutive ambivalence of the U.S.'s attitude toward the Pacific.  In this course, we will explore how these views have long been intertwined and have been shaped by the histories of war and empire, and by contemporary flows of images, ideas, feelings, bodies, capital and commodities across the Pacific, Americas, and Europe.  We will address such questions as: how do race and racialization operate in a Transpacific context? In what ways are they meaningful, and how do they overlap with and diverge from Atlantic world racial formations?  What do the specificities of their operations tell us about capitalism and culture past and present?   How do these specificities key us into the contemporary conjuncture and the apparent return of Cold War geopolitics?  To engage such questions, we will examine a range of historical, theoretical, and aesthetic work that focus critical attention on the Transpacific and help us understand not only the importance of this concept and geography to apprehending how race and capital function, but also that of the inextricable relationship between culture and political economy.  Written requirements of the course include short response papers and a longer seminar paper. 
 
This team caught course is offered across the CUNY Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in English and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at NYU. 
 
 
ENGL 82100 Early Modern Trans History and Theory
Prof. Will Fisher Tuesdays 11:45-1:45 [38201]
This class will offer a broad survey of possible sites of inquiry for transgender (trans) scholarship on early modern English texts, and explore the intersections between the fields of early modern studies and trans studies. It will address questions like: How might gender-variant characters and historical figures speak to contemporary trans inquiries? What are the major premodern trans texts? How do recent developments in trans studies impact the way we read early modern texts, and vice versa? What are the methodological issues involved in understanding gender variability before the introduction of terms like trans, genderqueer, nonbinary, genderfluid, pangender, agender, and cisgender? How does early modern thinking about sex/gender and the body compare with contemporary thinking about these topics as articulated in trans studies?
 
READINGS:
Literary texts will include canonical works like Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl, John Lyly’s Gallathea (along with other early modern iterations of the Iphis and Ianthe story), and Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, as well as lesser-known works like Francis Beaumont’s Salmacis and Hermaphroditus and seventeenth-century broadside ballads about gender-variant individuals.
 
In addition, we will be examining a range of non-literary sources, including the court cases of individuals like Eleanor/John Rykener and the “female husbands” of the late-seventeenth century like Amy Howard/James Howard. We will also study early modern medical writing about gender and the body, including the accounts of spontaneous gender transformation from the period and the discussions of intersexed individuals, in order to consider whether – or how – this material might help contest assumptions about the historical dominance of binary models of gender identity.
 
Finally, trans theorists like Susan Stryker, Jack Halberstam, Joanne Meyerowitz, Cheryl Chase, and Dean Spade will be read alongside the work of early modern scholars like Simone Chess, Colby Gordon, M.W. Bychowski, and Leah DeVun.

 
ENGL 84300 Brontës, Hardy, Lawrence
Prof. Richard Kaye Wednesdays 6:30-8:30 [38205]
This course considers an important strain in British fiction in the writing of four major Victorian novelists and one innovative modernist writer. In the novels of the Brontës and Hardy, the setting is invariably a harsh rural landscape, in which crises of class, social restriction, female choice, mental discord, psychological derangement, bigamy, romantic love, and erotic desire dominate the narratives.  We begin with Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, ignored on publication and saturated in stark, unresolved dualities, violent clashes, and Romantic archetypes, as we test Leo Bersani’s landmark “queer” reading that argues that Brontë’s novel represents two radically opposed works of fiction, one an asocial, anarchic narrative and the other a tame, convention-bound Victorian text.  We will consider Jane Eyre, a bestseller on both sides of the Atlantic, as we consider Brontë’s self-consciously anti-Austenian conceptions of desire, individual psychology, and the novel form. The class will discuss the novel’s paradigmatic standing as a feminist work as well as its enduringly controversial status as an unconsciously colonialist text. In Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, adultery, addiction, and marital abuse are central themes, with the rakish Arthur Huntington representing Anne’s more skeptical (arguably norm-preserving) version of the figures of Heathcliff and Rochester.  We will consider, as well, the “Brontë Mystique” as it was formed in such influential accounts as Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1857 biography, Muriel Spark’s 1951 critical/biographical study of Emily, Daphne Du Maurier’s speculative 1960 biography of Branwell Brontë, Sylvia Plath’s several poetic tributes to the Brontë sisters, and Douglas Martin’s 2006 lyrical novel Branwell. Noting Hardy’s early start as a “sensation” writer, the class will explore the novelist’s absorption in the thematics of sexual scandal, working-class consciousness, tragic determinism, female transgression, and besieged masculinity in Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure.  Brontëan and Hardyesque concerns permeate Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love, and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.  Like Hardy, Lawrence struggled in his fiction to undermine Victorian sexual norms and class divisions as he registered historical trauma (the end of the Industrial Revolution, the catastrophe of the First World War) in direct and indirect terms. In Lawrence’s book-length essay Study of Thomas Hardy, the writer developed a major statement of his own modernist aesthetic, revealing, as well, his conflicted relation to Hardy as Lawrence insists on a more visionary conception of the novel and a non-deterministic conception of individual destiny.  Greed, overreaching, the experimental excitement in human relationships (sometimes expressed as a male or female homoerotic sublime)--as well as the value of an “animal self” in an undestroyed natural landscape--emerge as Lawrence’s central preoccupations.  We discuss, too, Hardy and Lawrence’s relatively neglected poetic work. Given that the Brontës, Hardy, and Lawrence have generated some of the most successful adaptations of British fiction in film, we will view clips of film adaptations of Wuthering Heights (including Andrea Arnold’s recent adaptation of Wuthering Heights in which Heathcliff is racialized as Black) and Jane Eyre as well as John Schlesinger’s “Far from the Madding Crowd,” Roman Polanski’s “Tess,” Michael Winterbottom’s “The Claim” and “Jude,” Ken Russell’s “Women in Love,” and Michael Almeyreyda’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner.” Critical readings and theoretical readings will be drawn from a variety of perspectives—-among them, Marxist, Feminist, Psychoanalytic, Humanist, Post-Humanist, Post-Human, Queer, Formalist, Post-Colonial, New Formalist, and Eco-Critical approaches. Among the critics we will consider: Virginia Woolf, R.P. Blackmur, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Irving Howe, Gayatri Spivak, George Levine, Nina Auerbach, Scott Sanders, Marianna Torgovnick, Christopher Craft, James Wood, Elaine Showalter, John Bayley, and Terry Eagleton. Oral presentations and a final paper.

 
ENGL 82100 Sovereignty
Prof. Feisal Mohamed Wednesdays 11:45-1:45 [38208]
“The theory of sovereignty,” Foucault declares in Society Must be Defended, was “the great instrument of the political and theoretical struggles that took place around systems of power in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” If one were to revise this observation, it would be only to add that the theory of sovereignty continues to be at the center of struggles around systems of power. In recent months we have certainly been reminded in thunder of the political charge of sovereignty in our own moment: with Britain’s decision to leave the European Union, with the rise of strongman politics in countries where democracy had always been precarious, such as the United States, Russia, Turkey, and India, to name but a few examples. Depersonalized authority, rule of law, proceduralism and overlapping consensus all seem especially now to be self-deluding liberal fantasies.

This course will thus focus on English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with an eye to later theoretical approaches to the questions of sovereignty. In exploring early modern material, we will pay attention to constitutional debates on the role of the sovereign, but also to the role of England’s rising imperial ambitions and to the complex political self-positioning of the period’s women writers. We will take into account recent scholarship on political theology, and examine how writers of this tumultuous period reinscribe the political imaginary implicit in various literary modes, epic, tragedy, satire, and pastoral. Especially important to the theoretical content of the course will be the cluster of theorists witnessing up close the collapse of liberal order in the Weimar Republic: Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and Leo Strauss. We will also read theorists of our own moment of anxiety on sovereignty, such as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Wendy Brown. Seminar participants will be expected to make a conference-style presentation leading to a research paper of 14-16 pages.
 
Preliminary list of literary texts:
William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, The Tempest, Macbeth
Ben Jonson, Sejanus
Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book 1; View of the Present State of Ireland
John Donne, Satyres
Aemilia Lanyer, The Description of Cooke-Ham
Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World
John Milton, A Masque, Lycidas, Paradise Lost (selections), Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes
Lucy Hutchinson, translation of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (selections); Order and Disorder, cantos 1-5
Andrew Marvell, Upon Appleton House, An Horation Ode, The First Anniversary, the Advice-to-a-Painter Poems
Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave

 
ENGL 80600 Theorizing Celebrity Culture
Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [38209]
We will work in this seminar both to track the ways that celebrity, especially literary celebrity, has developed in the United States since the Second World War as well as the ways in which the basic ideological structures of celebrity—and celebration—are imagined as at once obvious and omnipresent, innocuous and inconsequential.  As a consequence, the key role that celebrity plays in not only our cultural lives but also our political and social lives is often deeply misunderstood.  Indeed the inability of cultural critics to understand the attraction of vulgar forms of celebrity demonstrates a continued incapacity, particularly among so-called cultural elites, to recognize the importance of celebrity to the reproduction of the basic, if hotly contested, ideological and discursive structures that allow for the maintenance and reproduction of a common American society.  Texts that we will examine include: Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste; Anne Anlin Cheng, Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin/White Masks; Nicole Fleetwood, On Racial Icons; Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America; Loren Glass, Literary Celebrity in the Modern United States, 1880 – 1980; Stuart Hall,  Familiar Stranger: Life Between Two Islands; Leonard J. Leff, Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribner’s, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture; Norman Mailer, Marilyn; P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame and Contemporary Culture; Joe Moran, Literary Celebrity in America; and Michelle Stephens, Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis, and the Black Male Performer.

 
FREN 71110 French Literary History: The Novel
Prof. Domna Stanton Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [38019]
This course on the history and theory of the novel will begin with a set of readings (Scholes, Bakhtin, Brooks, Genette, Barthes, Sedgwick) on aspects of narrative and narratology. We will then read closely six novels beginning with La Princesse de Clèves (Folio Classique, 2000) and Les liaisons dangereuses (Petits Larousse Classiques, 2007), followed by Mme de Duras' Ourika (Folio Classique 2007) and Madame Bovary (Folio Classique 2001) and ending with Du côté de chez Swann (Folio Classique, 1988) and Djebar's Ombre sultane (Livre de Poche, 2006) . [These editions will be on reserve in the GC Library, but if you purchase your own texts, please make sure to buy the same editions so we are all on the same page.] Our discussions will be informed by critical readings for each text, listed in the syllabus, and available on Blackboard.
Goals of this course include: gaining an understanding of the sweep of the French novel; reading novels intensively for their narratological, thematic, stylistic, ideological/political and gender scripts; writing analytical papers on literary texts; doing literary research; reading critical theory critically; and improving spoken and written literary/critical French (or English).
Work for the course, over and above class preparation and engaged participation, involves for those taking the course for 4 credits: two short papers 5-7 pp), one of these a class presentation of a critical text,  a final 15-page paper (topic developed in consultation with the instructor ), and a final exam; for those taking the course for 2 credits: there will be the class presentation of a critical text (written up into 5-7 pp); and the final exam, in addition to class preparation and participation.
 
The course will be conducted in French; written work will be in French for students in French; students from other departments may write their papers in English.
For further information and all questions, please contact Domna Stanton (dstanton112@yahoo.com).
 
 
HIST 72100/PSC 71902 The History of Liberalism from Locke to Rawls
Prof. Helena Rosenblatt Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [38105]
This course is an in-depth introduction to some of the founding thinkers and texts of the liberal tradition. We will read canonical texts and works of interpretation in an effort to answer questions such as:  What do we mean when we speak of liberalism? What if any, are its core principles and values? What is alive and what is dead in the liberal tradition? We will focus on works by Locke, Wollstonecraft, Rousseau, Constant, Mill, Green and Spencer, and conclude with an examination of Rawls.  Main Themes: Property and the Role of Government; Women’s Rights and Roles; Social Contract and the Individual; Morals and Empire.

 
HIST 72800 Slavery and the Disciplines
Prof. Herman Bennett Thursdays 6:30-8:30 [38117]
At its core, this course takes up concerns animated by both the persistent and emergent focus on slavery in the disciplines.  It asks how and why distinct disciplines are suddenly approaching the study of slavery?  Obviously this dynamic portends to far more than an engagement with the study of slavery solely as an economic system or as a technique of power.  Slavery, as a result, is no longer restricted to the domain of historians and the study of the enslaved past.  For this reason, the course“Slavery & the Disciplines” offers a wide-ranging examination of slavery’s presence and impact on disciplinary formation.  In discerning the work of slavery in various disciplines, notably Anthropology, English, Philosophy, Political Theory, Religion, and Sociology, this course explores how scholars of distinction disciplinary formations employ the study of slavery to press on the extant cultural logic but also framings of the past, present and future. 
 
Robert Reid-Pharr has recently written that “even as we joyously celebrate the victories of our enslaved ancestors, even as we take satisfied stock of how far we have come, we must studiously avoid the triumphalist narratives that are the hallmarks of humanist discourse.” Reid-Pharr’s trenchant critique is not alone.  A variety of intellectuals and scholars have leveled a similar broadside against the epistemology configuring Western thinking and its enduring legacy.  Rather than reduce this to a generational critique framed as an inquiry into the history of the present, we might be better served asking how and why this engagement with slavery and its legacy arises at this precise moment among a range of scholars in various disciplines?  What, in other words, does this engagement and critique say about our historical moment, previous representation of the slave past, and slavery’s sublimated presence in contemporary life?  What might be conveyed by invocation of slavery’s enduring afterlife?  What are the implications for the University and its constituent elements—disciplines?
 
Over the course of the semester, the seminar participants will deliberate over slavery and freedom as these subjects have been broached and now are treated by distinct disciplines.
Syllabus here

 
IDS 81660 The Culture of Fashion: Theories and Practices
Prof. Eugenia Paulicelli Wednesdays 6:30-8:30 [38135]
The course will take the form of an interdisciplinary exploration into the art of making, craftsmanship and technology in today’s globalized world. In particular, we will call attention to the larger systems that influence the state of fashion, craft and aesthetics constantly under development and in flux. The course will focus on specific case studies such as the Made in Italy, Made in New York etc. within a transnational context and in relation to gender, race, class and labor.
 
Bringing to the fore new systems developing within the industry, the course will emphasize the intersection of tradition, sustainability, social justice, ethics and beauty as they influence new collaborative modes and design and production.
 
The course will draw on writings from critical theory, history, fashion studies, material culture, literature, and the objects that are part of a digital archive project and exhibition at the Art Center, Queens College (October-December 2017). In addition, the course will feature guest speakers, field work and a research lab component that requires students to carry out a creative project. A visit will be scheduled to the Brooklyn/Pratt Fashion + Design accelerator and other sites. Major authors to be studied will include Richard Sennett, Pierre Bordieau, Peter Stallybrass, Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, David Harvey, Jane Schneider, Roland Barthes and others.
 
 
SPAN 87000 Ugly Feelings: Post-Utopic Fiction and Film from Central America
Prof. Magdalena Perkowska Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38055]
Ugly feelings, as defined by Sianne Ngy in her eponymous study, are “minor and generally unprestigious” emotions of a strong, diagnostic nature because they have the capacity to shed light on “a real social experience and a certain kind of historical truth.” Central American cultural texts (novels, short stories and films) produced during the last two decades are full of such feelings: disenchantment, bitterness, anguish, anxiety, fear, disdain, frustration, sorrow, pain, melancholia, loss, and confusion are signifiers of disappointment with past utopias and present neoliberal restoration or reaffirmation of market capitalism. This course explores a selection of Central American fictions and films which will be read in conjunction with theoretical approaches to affect and emotions (Phillip Fischer, Sianne Ngy, Sara Ahmed, Ruth Leys, Martha Nussbaum, among others), neoliberalism (David Harvey, Wendy Brown), and politics and aesthetics (Jacques Rancière).  We will examine unresolved tensions articulated through affects and emotions, and will fathom what commitments, if any, are encoded in these ‘feeling texts.’  
 

MUS 86500 Critical Approaches: Music Aesthetics
Prof. Scott Burnham Tuesdays 10:00-1:00 [38081]
The course will focus on several predominant aesthetic issues at play in contemporary musical thought.  Chief among these will be the contested role of Beauty in music.  After a quick survey of music aesthetics starting with Hanslick’s On the Beautiful in Music, we will examine recent treatments of beauty by philosophers Elaine Scarry (On Beauty and Being Just) and Alexander Nehamas (Only a Promise of Happiness:  The Place of Beauty in a World of Art), as well as musicologist Karol Berger (Theory of Art).  Other themes in the seminar will include Presence (Gumbrecht, Production of Presence and Steiner, Real Presences) and Materiality.  Whenever possible, we will take up specific musical works in conjunction with each of these themes.

 
MUS 86400 Musicology Seminar: Medievalism and the Modernist Musical Imagination
Prof. Anne Stone Fridays 10:00-1:00 [38080]
The list of composers who have engaged in some way with medieval music reads like a who’s who of musical modernism in Europe and the United States: Benjamin, Berio, Birtwistle, Britten, Hindemith, Maxwell Davies, Messiaen, Pärt, Perle, Saariaho, Stravinsky, Tavener, Webern, and Wuorinen, just to name a few.
 
This seminar will explore the intersections between selected modernist composers and the specter of the Middle Ages. Is the relationship merely one of numerous isolated references, a collection of case studies, or is there a deeper affinity between the project of modernist music and the collective notion of the medieval? What do modernist composers think they are doing when they allude to medieval musical processes or literary themes? Is there a coherent "medievalism" discernible in modern music akin to that of neoclassicism or exoticism?
 
We will start by considering two recent operas that take troubadours as their subject: Kaija Saariaho’s L’amour de loin (2000) and George Benjamin'sWritten on Skin (2012). Later topics will include Paul Hindemith’s direction of the Yale Collegium Musicum, George Perle’s analysis of Machaut, Luciano Berio’s collaboration with the medievalist Edoardo Sanguineti, and medieval-ish works by Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle.
 
Requirements: weekly reading and written response, posted to Dropbox the Wednesday before each class; a short presentation and 5-page paper early in the semester; and a longer presentation and paper (15 pages) at the end; the longer paper may be an elaboration of the earlier paper, or on a different topic.
 
 Readings will include two recent books from art history and English respectively: Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art out of Time (London: Thames and Hudson, 2012); Bruce Holsinger, The Premodern Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); other reading will include articles and essays by Walter Benjamin, Luciano Berio, Bertold Brecht, Umberto Eco, Paul Hindemith, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Ezra Pound, George Perle, and Kirsten Yri.
 

PHIL 76100 Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
Prof. Angelica Nuzzo Mondays 9:30-11:30 [38423]
This course will give a comprehensive account of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787). In this fundamental work Kant proposes the new idea of “transcendental philosophy,” offers his critique of traditional metaphysics and a new idea of metaphysics beyond the rationalist and the empiricist tradition, and provides the foundation of his critical epistemology. We will address issues such as Kant's idea of transcendental philosophy, the meaning of the Copernican Revolution in philosophy, the nature of space and time and the status of the a priori, the function of the transcendental unity of apperception.

 
PHIL 77500 Philosophy of Feminism: Gender and the Body
Prof. Linda Alcoff Mondays 2:00-4:00 [38245]
The question of the relation of gender identity to embodiment has been central in feminist theory and received sustained analysis since Simone de Beauvoir. Bodies are not all the same, and their differences have been accorded various cultural meanings with political effects. Today there is a lot of focus on the plasticity of bodies and the need to reduce the importance of bodily difference, even while the “delusions of gender,” as Cordelia Fine call them, continues to play a strong role in the sciences. Phenomenological approaches to embodiment offer a corrective to some the extreme views today, so this course will focus on these readings. What role do (or should) bodies play in identity, social roles, or laws? Are female bodies inherently limiting, with increased dependence? How should we understand the role of embodiment in regard to sexual violence? What is the role of reproduction in the formation of gender identity? This course will primarily focus on gender but consider also embodiment issues in relation to race, sexuality, disability, intersex, and trans identities. We will also consider the relation of women and of feminism to the practice and discipline of philosophy.

 
PHIL 77600 Rawls, Race, and Gender
Profs. Charles Mills & Siybl Schwarzenbach Mondays 4:15-6:15 [38246]
The seminar will be an in-depth study of the philosophy of John Rawls, and will focus on central analyses and criticisms of his work primarily from two directions: feminist and critical race theory perspectives. In the first half of the semester we will grapple with basic concepts and themes of A Theory of Justice, -- with ideas such as the basic structure of society (as the subject of justice), the method of reflective equilibrium, ideal versus non-ideal theory, the original position, its resulting two principles of justice, the constitutional convention, Rawls’s moral psychology, and so forth. In each case, we will ask whether such notions can be salvaged and adapted for progressive (race and feminist) purposes or must be jettisoned altogether. Attention will also be given to Rawls’s later Political Liberalism and Justice as Fairness, as commentaries on his main argument and with their new notions of public reason and the burdens of judgment. The seminar will end with a discussion of Rawls’s work on international justice, The Law of Peoples, again asking to what degree this work can be helpful or simply obfuscates.

 
PHIL 77700 Art, Morality, and Politics
Prof. Noel Carroll Tuesdays 11:45-1:45 [38247]
This seminar is an overview of the several of the relations between art, morality, and politics. We will look at some classic texts on the topic (Plato, Augustine, Rousseau, Kant, Bell, Brecht) as well as contemporary debates between autonomism and various forms of moralism. The diverse ways in which moral norms are circulated and readjusted by the arts will be explored from several perspectives, including non-western ones and from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. The nexus of art and morality as mediated through society will also be addressed through several political themes including state patronage, censorship, propaganda, ideology, and social criticism. There are no course prerequisites. Students are expected to participate in class discussions, to make a class presentation, and to write a term paper.

 
PHIL 77100 Subjectivity and Objectivity in Morality
Prof. Miranda Fricker Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38249]
In this class we will explore both historical and contemporary views of morality that advance either a subjectivist (sentimentalist) or an objectivist (rationalist) conception. The arc of the course will originate with David Hume’s moral sentimentalism, including his notions of natural and artificial virtue, and Adam Smith’s distinct but not dissimilar picture. This will give us a clear idea of the historical roots of more current ways of approaching morality from the point of view of moral emotion. The more current approaches we shall discuss take their direct inspiration from P. F. Strawson’s ‘moral reactive attitudes and feelings’, and build upon that foundation to work up a theory of responsibility (R. Jay Wallace, Angela Smith), or a theory of the complex interpersonal normativity found to be implicit in these attitudes (Stephen Darwall).

We will then discuss moral luck (Bernard Williams, Thomas Nagel) and notions of ‘penumbral agency’ (David Enoch, Susan Wolf) as a bridge to thinking about a diametrically opposite conception of morality from that which is grounded in the moral emotions. Indeed the conception of morality we shall now turn to is one that excludes emotion altogether from the moral frame, just as it excludes moral luck: Kantian objectivism. We will focus on Kant’s Groundwork in order to get clear about the mechanics of his view, and then perhaps look to the work of Christine Korsgaard for a modified contemporary Kantian moral philosophy. And we will consider the most powerful critiques of Kant’s view – such as Williams’ attack on it as embodying ‘the morality system’, which saddles us with falsely purified ideas of moral obligation and practical necessity, of the nature of moral deliberation and agency, and of the place of luck in moral life.
 
What are the implications for morality of this staunch attack on the morality system and the objectivist conception of morality that it embodies? In the last phase of the course we shall look closely at Williams’ contributions to positive possibilities on this score—in particular his cognitivism and argument for (non-objective) moral knowledge with the use of ‘thick’ ethical concepts; and his vindicatory use of State of Nature genealogy—much inspired by Nietzsche’s debunking genealogy, but closer in spirit to Hume’s positive mini-genealogy of (the artificial virtue of) justice, which we will have looked at right at the start. The arc of the course thus lands not too far from where it originated, namely with the moral emotions and a naturalistic idea of virtue; however these virtues are now theorized as divisible between those that grow from absolutely basic human-cultural needs on the one hand (i.e. in the State of Nature), and on the other, those that are formed or re-formed by more contingent pressures of history and culture. We shall draw our own conclusions as to how far this picture leaves us with sufficiently balanced measures of subjectivity and objectivity in moral life to deliver a satisfying philosophical view.
 
 
PSC 71901 Critical Reason: The Basics
Prof. Susan Buck-Morss Mondays 4:15-6:15 [38393]
This course deals with basic concepts and problems of Western Critical Theory. The readings focus on three key authors: Kant, Hegel and Adorno. Philosophy is considered from the perspective of the political. Concepts include: critical reason, transcendental claims, phenomenology, dialectics, non-identity, materialist metaphysics, history, causality, and freedom. Students who are non-specialists are encouraged to read extremely difficult texts (Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Hegel’s Phenomenology, Adorno’s Lectures on History and Freedom) with the goal of developing critical capacities for concrete, historical analyses of political, social and economic life. The challenge is to make the concepts of the readings meaningful for contemporary projects of critique. Seminar requirements: sustained, active seminar participation, one short midterm paper, and one final paper (or exam option).

 
PSC 80303 Political Theory of Capitalism
Prof. Corey Robin Mondays 6:30-8:30 [38381]
In ancient Greece, the dominant political form was the city-state. In Rome, it was the republic and the empire. After the fall of Rome, it was the Church. In the early modern era, it became the state. Today, it is capitalism. But where Greece, Rome, the Church, and the state all produced their own distinctive political theories, capitalism has not. Indeed, it’s greatest—and, with the exception of Hayek, perhaps only—political theorist devoted his attentions to capitalism solely in order to bring it to an end. For many, capitalism is not a political form at all; it is strictly a mode of economic organization. What is entailed in that distinction—between the political and the economic—and whether and how it can be sustained will be a central preoccupation of this course.

Through an examination of the classics of political economy, as well as some less canonical texts, we will assess whether capitalism has (or can have) a political theory, and if so, what that theory is. Rather than assume that the political question of capitalism is exhausted by the state’s relationship to the economy, we will examine how capitalism produces a distinctive and independent political form of its own, with its own rules and values. Readings will be drawn from some combination of the following thinkers: Aristotle, Locke, Hume, Smith, Hegel, Malthus, Ricardo, Marx, Jevons, Weber, Keynes, Schumpeter, Arendt, Hayek, Becker, Friedman, Foucault, Brown, Harvey.

 
PSC 73100 Modern Social Theory
Prof. Uday Mehta Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38384]
This seminar will consider the following broad questions with respect to Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim and Weber: 1) what makes society cohere as a unit of subjective, social and political experience. 2) How do societies change, develop, and come apart? Relatedly, how does one understand social change? 3) What is gained and lost in conceiving of societies in terms of the material interests of its members or groups of members, as distinct from viewing them in terms of the values and beliefs of its members? 4) What is the relationship between social and political institutions and the cohesion of societies? What, for instance, makes societies prone to revolutionary transformation? 5) What is the role of ideas in development and transformation of societies? 6) What is the standing of “traditions” in societies that are wedded to the idea of individual freedom?


PSC 82001 Ancient & Medieval Political Thought
Prof. Benedetto Fontana Thursdays 6:30-8:30 [38393]
The course focuses on basic texts of selected political thinkers, from the ancient Greeks to the Renaissance, namely, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli. In the process, central political ideas (for example, liberty, equality, law, justice, community, property, meaning and change in history) are examined and related to the writers’ political and theoretical projects. In addition, it considers the relation between the nature of rule and the forms of rule (types of government or regimes): monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, tyranny, despotism, oligarchy, dictatorship, constitutionalism, republicanism, and the master/slave (domination/subordination) relation.


PSYC 79102 Environmental Social Science II: Ecological and Contextual Concepts in Psychology
Prof. Susan Saegert Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [38470]
This course is the first of two theory courses designed to prepare doctoral students to understand and be able to deploy theoretical positions across the social sciences. This course focuses on the psychological level of analysis. The theories explored lend themselves to accounts of psychology that can mesh with other levels of analysis. The course also covers some of the historically important thinkers in environmental and critical social/personality psychology. The overall objective of the course is for each student to develop a reasoned and reasonably satisfying answer to the following question: How is the psychologically experienced self related to the social and physical context? Achieving this objective requires answering another question: What is the unit of analysis of psychology? Some of the positions prominent in psychology assume the answer would be either particular psychological processes or the biological substrate/determinants of experience and behavior.  This course introduces an alternative approach in which we see selves as socially and materially contingent and knowledge of selves as contingent.  In the latter approach a student must develop an answer to the question “Contingent in what way?”


SSW 85000 Fueling Critical Race Scholarship and Undermining Whiteness in Academia
Prof. Michelle Billies Mondays 11:05-1:00 [38031]
This interdisciplinary course creates an incubator for students seeking support and inspiration for their analyses of race. Readings span critical race theory and methods; transnational feminisms; Black geographies and Caribbean philosophies; indigenous studies and critical ethnic studies; critical whiteness studies; disability studies; social welfare history; and activist scholarship. Students may use assignments to deepen an understanding of a particular theorist or body of work; self-reflexive thinking/feeling through internalized dominance or internalized racism and its relationship to the student’s scholarly work and/or activism; retooling the philosophical or theoretical underpinning of the student’s research; collaborating with each other to generate theory; or other experiments. Students will be invited (not required) to contribute a reading to the syllabus.
 

SOC 80000 Social Theory and Islam
Prof. Mucahit Bilici Thursdays 2:00-4:00 [38743]
In this course, we will begin by identifying and critiquing the scope and nature of treatments of Islam in the writings of classical theorists (Marx, Weber, Durkheim). In the second half, we will focus on some classical Islamic concepts that have gained popular notoriety in our contemporary culture for various political and intellectual reasons. Chief among these concepts are jihad, caliphate, and sharia. Each of these concepts will be held up as theoretical entities to be approached in a way that makes them both legible to and relevant for western social theory.
 

SOC 82800 Food, Culture, and Society
Prof. Barbara Katz Rothman Wednesdays 6:30-8:30 [38289]
This course explores major issues in foodways—food habits from production through consumption—through readings and discussions as well as through primary research in food and society.  The scholarly study of food invokes issues of gender, class, labor, and cultural identities and demands an interdisciplinary approach.  Theoretical frameworks include the food voice (Hauck-Lawson), cultural studies, political economy, and symbolic interactionism.

The key focus in the course is going to be the application of theory and methods from the disciplines represented by students, faculty and invited guests in the course, to Food Studies.

Rather than a standard paper, each student will, in consultation with the professor and the other students, develop a project that best fits in with her/his own work –for example,  a food-focused dissertation chapter, an internship, a series of published book reviews, or a paper presentation at a professional conference in the student’s home discipline.
 

THEA 85700: Seminar in Contemporary Performance Theory and Technique:Dramaturgy and the Reinvention of Contemporary Theatre
Prof. Peter Eckersall Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [38563]
This course is an examination of the theories and practices of dramaturgy as a critical tool in devising contemporary performance. We will preface our study with consideration of the development of dramaturgy in historical and modern times, including discussions of the foundations of dramaturgy in Aristotle’s ‘The Poetics,’ G. E Lessing’s ‘Hamburgische Dramaturgie,’ and writing on modern theatre and dramaturgy by Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, among others.  We will further investigate dramaturgy as a perceptibly transforming agency in the construction, presentation, and reception of contemporary performance. Hence, we consider the provocation that contemporary performance has an intrinsic dramaturgical aspect and that the proliferation of dramaturgical practices has led to a substantial reinvention of contemporary theatre. We will consider how the practice of ‘new dramaturgy,’ a term coined by Marianne Van Kerkhoven to describe the work of dramaturgs in aiding the development of interdisciplinary performance, has led to this awareness.  Her work was predicated on dramaturgy as the basis for an emergent hybridity in theatre that we will examine with reference to case studies. Moreover, dramaturgy has revived an interest in how live performance engages with social contexts and political themes, and we will consider how the field of contemporary performance has grown as a result of this.  Theories of dramaturgy now engage with the theme of cultural transformation and we examine notions such as dramaturgy and ecology, new media dramaturgy, and dramaturgies of place. In this situation, dramaturgy has become what Van Kerkhoven described as ‘a means to handle complexity’ and we consider the nature of this complexity, how it has evolved and the implications of this for theatre and society. Finally, the course will examine the changing work of dramaturgs in this expanded territory.  What do dramaturgs now do in rehearsal studios and how is their work perceived by other artists?  We will investigate these questions through examination of documentation of production processes, published interviews, and writing by dramaturgs. 
 
Student evaluation for this course will be:

• A long research essay of 15-20 pages that will consider an aspect of historical, modern, or contemporary dramaturgical practice.
• A dramaturgical analysis of a piece of contemporary performance either seen live or from documentation that considers how the ideas and inspiration of the performance are translated into artistic practice. This should be written-up in 5-6 pages.
• A group exercise to develop and present a dramaturgical activity.

THEA 81600 Film Theory
Prof. Jerry W. Carlson Mondays 2:00-6:00 [38561]
FSCP 81000 will offer an analytical survey of film theory from its classical period to its multiple voices in the 21st century. The course will explore the robust and never predictable conversation between film theory and film practice. Different film theories perform different functions. Each theoretical position will be examined in its historical context and for its own claims of purpose. To what degree are theories prescriptive, descriptive, practical, analytical, or some dynamic mixture of functions?  Theorists under consideration, among others, may include Arnheim, Balázs, Barthes, Bazin, Deleuze, Deren, Fanon, Eisenstein, Hall, Jameson, Kracauer, Metz, Mulvey, Naficy, Rich, Shohat, and Stam. In addition, each theoretical position will be examined next to a film from the period of the theory and a film from another historical moment. What do theories tell us about films? But, equally important, what do films tell us about theories? The repertoire of films will reach beyond Hollywood and Europe to the riches of global cinema. The key textbook will be Critical Visions of Film Theory: Classic & Contemporary Readings by Timothy Corrigan & Patricia White with Meta Mazaj
 
 
UED 71200 Critical Urban Literacies        
Prof. Adriana Espinosa Thursdays 4:15-6:15 [38123]
This course engages participants in examining the possibilities that literacies offer for the development of identities, the role of agency, examination of social justice issues, and democratic participation in society. It considers literacies as social practices. It examines the role of literacies from different perspectives: socio-cultural approaches, feminist and poststructuralist orientations, Freirean-based critical pedagogy, new literacy studies, notions of racial literacies and approaches to analyzing texts from a phenomenological perspective. This course also critically examines contemporary literacy policies and programs, as well as other literacy campaigns worldwide. Participants will engage in analysis of texts created by youth and for youth.         
 
 
UED 75200 The Hidden Curriculum of Gender and Sexuality in Schools: A Critical Race Theory Perspective
Prof. Sherry Deckman Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [38126]
This course explores the role of gender, sexuality, and race, and the intersection of these facets of identity, in contributing to young people’s schooling experiences, opportunities, and outcomes, and to the social context of schools more broadly.  In many ways, the course is about the “hidden curriculum” of racialized heteronormativity, or the subtle practices in schools that privilege particular heterosexual, gendered, and raced identities and ways of being.  In the course, we will engage with a variety of texts including theoretical works, qualitative and quantitative, empirical research, and applied, practical texts in analyzing how social differences are fundamentally entangled, and enmeshed with the making of identities. We will also engage the concept of the hidden curriculum and the lens of critical race theory as analytic tools for studying, understanding, and responding to how gender, sexuality, and race intersect with other social constructs with regard to schooling, and how these intersections contribute to shaping students’ identities. In particular, we will examine how these identities shape—and are shaped by—marginalized students’ experiences with inequity in schools. Lastly, we will apply our theoretical understandings to inquiry projects that will provide opportunities to ground the theoretical understandings that will be cultivated.

Course Listing

Core Course

CTCP 71088 Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
Prof. John Brenkman Wednesdays 4:15-6:15 [36437]

Elective Courses

ANTH 78500/SPAN 80100 Language Ideologies & Practices
Prof. Miki Makihara Thursdays 2:00-4:00 [36176]

ANTH 71700/PSYC 79103 Environment Sciences III and Cultural Theory
Prof. Melissa Checker Mondays 2:00-4:00 [36333]

ART 77200 Circles of Collaboration in US Art: from Ashcan School to Black Mountain
Prof. Katherine Manthorne Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36024]

ART 86010 Afterlife of the 19th century: Art in Europe 1900-1925
Prof. Romy Golan Thursdays 2:00-4:00 [36025]

ART 86020 Modern Painting
Prof. David Joselit Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [36026]

ART 86040 Art History and the Subject of Biography
Prof. Michael Lobel Wednesdays 9:30-11:30 [36027]

CLAS 71300 Selections from Plato
Prof. Peter Simpson Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36060]
 
CLAS 75200/PHIL 76100  Special Topics in Classics: Philosophy and Its Rivals in the Platonic Dialogues
Prof. Nickolas Pappas Mondays 11:45-1:45 PM [36516]

CL 79500 Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism:  Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization
Prof. Sonali Perera Thursdays 4:15-6:15 [36064]

CL 80100/HIST 72400/PSC 71902 The Outcome of German Classical Philosophy
Prof. Richard Wolin Mondays 6:30-8:30 [36069]

CL 80900 Intro to Renaissance Studies: Neoplatonism Across Faith and Time
Profs. Clare Carroll and Feisal Mohamed Wednesday 2:00-4:00 [36066] 

CL 84000 Memory, Political Thought and Italian Destiny in the Works of Foscolo and Leopardi
Prof. Morena Corradi Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [36062]

CL 85000 Lyric, Prose, Modernity
Prof. Joshua Wilner Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [36065]

CL 85000 Neapolitan Narratives from Ferrante to Gomorra: Literature, Cinema, Television
Prof. Giancarlo Lombardi Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36067]

CL 89100 Literary Theory & Criticism I
Prof. Martin Elsky Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36063]

ENGL 84500 Disaffection in Colonial Law and Literature
Prof. Tanya Agathocleous Fridays 11:45-1:45 [36088]

ENGL 76200 Identities
Prof. Meena Alexander Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36089]

ENGL 86600 “The Poorer Nations”: Postcolonial Theory and World System
Prof. Peter Hitchcock Wednesdays 6:30-8:30 [36092]

ENGL 79020 Writing with an Attitude: Navigating/Negotiating Voices within Critical Experimental Writing
Prof. Mark McBeth Mondays 4:15-615 [36095]

ENGL 75500 Readings in African American Literary and Cultural Criticism
Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [36099]

ENGL 83500 Romanticism and Revolution: Literature, Philosophy and the Politics of Terror
Prof. Nancy Yousef Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [36103] 

FREN 70500 Writing The Self: From Confession to Life Writing
Prof. Domna C. Stanton Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36085]

FREN 70700 Myth in French Literature and Film
Prof. Royal Brown Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [36086]

SPAN 70200 Spanish Literary Theory
Prof. Fernando Degiovanni Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36174]
 
SPAN 85000 Contagious Affectivity: Body-Affect in Gombrowicz
Prof. Silvia Dapía Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36172]

SPAN 87100 Mexican Narcoimaginaries: State Power & Cultural Mediations of the Drug Trade
Prof. Oswaldo Zavala Wednesdays 6:30-8:30 [36175] 

SPAN 87400 Jose Martí en dos mundos
Prof. Esther Allen Wednesdays 4:15-6:15 [36179]

HIST 71200 The Intellectual Politics of the French Revolution
Prof. Helena Rosenblatt Wednesdays 4:15-6:15 [36115]

HIST 77950 Islamic rulership: the caliphate in theory and practice
Profs. Anna Akasoy and Chase Robinson Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36112]

HIST 70900 Human Rights and Nation-States: A Global History
Prof. Eric Weitz Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [36111]

MUS 83500 (Ethno)Musicology and Social Theory
Prof. Jane Sugarman Wednesdays 10:00-1:00 [36143]

MUS 88200 Musicology: Sound in Society
Prof. Eliot Bates Mondays 10:00-1:00 [36148]

MUS 86300 Musicology: Renaissance Musical Humanism
Prof. Chadwick Jenkins Mondays 2:00-5:00 [36146]

PHIL 77600 The Philosophy of Literature
Prof. Noel Carroll Tuesdays 11:45-1:45 [36205]

PHIL 76000 Mind, Matter, and Experience in Early Modern Philosophy
Prof. Catherine Wilson Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [36210]

PHIL 77900/PSC 80302 Socialism and Democracy
Prof. Carol Gould Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [36206]

PHIL 76900/PSYC 80104 Philosophy of Social Science
Prof. John Greenwood Thursdays 9:30-11:30 [36214]

PSC 72100 American Political Thought
Prof. Ruth O’Brien Tuesdays 11:45-1:45 [36607]

PSC 80302 Marxism
Prof. Jack Jacobs Mondays 2:00-4:00 [36244]

PSC 80602 Walter Benjamin
Prof. Susan Buck-Morss Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [36250]

PSC 70200 Modern Political Thought
Prof. Leonard Feldman Wednesdays 4:15-6:15 [36253]

PSYC 74003 Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Critical Psychology
Prof. Susan Opotow Wednesdays 9:30-11:30 [36423]

PSYC 80103 The Study of Lives
Prof. Jason VanOra Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36430]

SOC 80000 Foucault, Bourdieu and Baudrillard:  Power, Culture and Social Change
Prof. Marnia Lazreg Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36219]

SOC 83101 Populism, Authoritarianism, and Dictatorship
Prof. John Torpey Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [36225]

SOC 74600 Political Economy and Social Change
Prof. Roslyn Bologh Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [36231]

SOC 86800 Sociology of Culture
Prof. David Halle Mondays 6:30-8:30 [36222]

THEA 80200 Seminar in A Dramatic Genre: Critical Perspectives on U.S. Musical Theatre 
Prof. David Savran Tuesdays 1:00-4:00 [36191]

THEA 80400 Seminar in Theatre Theory:  Extending Queer:  Theory and Performance/Theorizing Performance  
Prof. Sean Edgecomb Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36192]

THEA 86000 Theatre and Society: Transatlantic Theatre and Performance: Golden Age Spain and Pre-Conquest/Colonial Latin America
Prof. Jean Graham-Jones Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [36194]

U ED 72200 Using Multilogical Frameworks in Research on Emotions
Prof. Konstantinos Alexakos Thurdsays 4:15-6:15 [36320]

U ED 75100 Authentic Inquiry in Urban Education
Prof. Kenneth Tobin Thursdays 6:30-8:30 [36321]

U ED 75100 Learning, Development, and Pedagogy: Sociocultural, Critical, and Dialectical Approaches
Prof. Anna Stetsenko Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [36480]

Course Description

CTCP 71088 Critical Theory: Foundations and Practices
Prof. John Brenkman Wednesdays 4:15-6:15 [36437]
Starting from the tension between Marx and Weber, the seminar will explore debates and developments that inform contemporary theory, focused around salient conflicts in social theory, philosophy, and aesthetics. (1) How do conflicting paradigms of society as system (Luhmann), as norm-governed institutions (Habermas), as symbolic-institutional habitus and practices (Bourdieu), or as actor-networks (Latour) bear on interdisciplinary research? (2) How does the encounter between philosophy and cultural studies illuminate or obscure the political purport of cultural analysis (Žižek, Sloterdijk, Habermas, Laclau, Butler)? (3) How to conceptualize the artwork or literary text in its difference from other objects and practices, its immersion in institutions and social networks, its hermeneutical instability and variability, its relation to prevailing forms of “communication” (Heidegger, Deleuze, Luhmann, Harman, and others)?
 
In the course of addressing these three blocs of critical theory, we will reflect on such fundamental concerns as the “linguistic turn” and the “affective turn”; alternative conceptions of “critique” as normative, utopian, or dialectical as well as rejections of critique as a model; the longstanding difference regarding the task of theory to change the world or to interpret it in various ways; and what is meant by “world” in the age of globalization.
 
Texts: Garth and Mills (eds.), From Max Weber; Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy?; Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought; Pierre Bourdieu and Roger Chartier, The Sociologist and the Historian; Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality; Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital. Excerpts and essays by Marx, Jürgen Habermas, Niklas Luhmann, Bruno Latour, Seyla Benhabib, Brian Massumi, Graham Harman, and others.
 
 
ANTH 78500/SPAN 80100 Language Ideologies & Practices
Prof. Miki Makihara Thursdays 2:00-4:00 [36176]
Studies of language in its sociocultural context highlight the role of language ideologies and cultural conceptions of language in reproducing and transforming social dynamics and power relations as well as language use and structure. In this seminar, we will explore linguistic anthropological and other theoretical frameworks and case studies to examine the relationship between language ideologies and social processes and their linguistic and social consequences. The topics considered include modern linguistics, colonialism, missionization, nationalism, globalization, citizenship, identity formation, indigenous movements, sociolinguistic hierarchies, racialization, language standardization, shift and revitalization. We will also examine different research traditions, theoretical issues, and data sources and collection methods, and how they relate to the understanding of language ideologies and language use and structure.

 
ANTH 71700/PSYC 79103 Environment Sciences III and Cultural Theory
Prof. Melissa Checker Mondays 2:00-4:00 [36333]
This course traces theoretical lineages in the social sciences and applies them to the study of environmental problems. Each week, we will read the work of an influential theorist and pair it with the work of a more contemporary scholar who studies how human societies understand, respond to and produce environmental change. In this way, we will not only become familiar with classic social theory, but also how that theory gets reformulated to shed new light on present-day environmental issues. Ultimately, students will gain a better understanding of how to usefully apply social theory to their own research findings.
The course will be conducted as a seminar:  work will be focused mainly on independent reading and writing, supported by class discussions. Students will be encouraged to apply their own intellectual and analytical skills to understanding (and connecting) a set of challenging but significant pieces in contemporary anthropology and social theory. Assessment will emphasize preparation, participation in open debate, and perceptive critical engagement as demonstrated in both oral and written work.

 
ART 77200 Circles of Collaboration in US Art: from Ashcan School to Black Mountain
Prof. Katherine Manthorne Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36024]
Myths of genius and individualism still cast a shadow over the study of modern art, but in reality many artists do their most creative work within a collaborative circle of like-minded associates. They experimented together, challenged one another and join in rebellion against established traditions. Drawing upon the sociology of art, this course explores the “lives” of a series of circles that help to define the course of modern art in the US. Class meetings cover: Ashcan School (The 8), Stieglitz Circle, Dadaists/Arensberg Circle, Katherine Dreier and Societé Anonyme, Harlem Renaissance, WPA/FSA, Mexican Muralists, American Abstract Artists & concluding with Black Mt. College.We investigate each circle via its contributors, particular works that bear traces of collaboration, exhibition strategies & the nature of gender dynamics.
 
Several museum visits are included. This course provides good orals preparation. Requirements include a midterm, final, short (10 page) research paper & weekly reading assignments.

Auditors by permission of the instructor only, maximum of five (5).


ART 86010 Afterlife of the 19th century: Art in Europe 1900-1925
Prof. Romy Golan Thursdays 2:00-4:00 [36025]
This seminar will examine the footprint of the 19th century on the early decades of the 20th century. We will touch on questions such as: the Belle Epoque as the subject of media theory; Art Nouveau/Jugendtil/Stile Liberty/Arte Joven and the animation of the inorganic; Futurism as a post-Symbolist style; the history of artificial darkness as a modern form; the Bauhaus as the end of empathy theory; the Call to Order as return of the non-same; Surrealism and the outmoded; Aby Warburg as art historical model; the exhibition as palimpsest; the heyday international fairs in Paris and elsewhere.
 
Historiographically we will pay attention to two different narratives: that of European scholars and curators for whom modernity is rooted in the 19th century, and the American approach which tends to be predicated on radical rupture. One example: Aux origines de l’abstraction 1800-1914 at the Musée d’Orsay (2004) vs. Inventing Abstraction 1910-1925 at MoMA (2013).

 
ART 86020 Modern Painting
Prof. David Joselit Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [36026]
This course will focus on important formal and theoretical issues in painting of the 20th and 21st century. While not a survey, it is designed to give an historical account of modern painting, through issues such as "non-objectivity;" painting and mechanical reproduction, and gesturalism. Coursework will include close readings of canonical art-historical texts, and intense exercises in close looking and formal analysis. No auditors.

 
ART 86040 Art History and the Subject of Biography
Prof. Michael Lobel Wednesdays 9:30-11:30 [36027]
Biography is a fraught topic in current art historical practice. It is simultaneously everywhere— in artist monographs, exhibition catalogue essays, and interviews—and nowhere, in that it is routinely dismissed in wide swaths of the discipline. In addition, it has often been deemed crucial to the recuperation of certain categories of artistic practice, including the careers of women artists and those from historically underrepresented or marginalized groups.
 
In this course we will tackle this problem head-on. We will read major critical texts on the subject—by such figures as Sigmund Freud, Roland Barthes, and Rosalind Krauss—in order to better understand the stakes of the discussion. We will also consider case studies in which biography offers a useful yet conflicted approach, as in feminist and queer interventions in the field, which often posit a stable artistic subject while simultaneously challenging that very notion. We will consider these issues in both methodological and practical terms, as in those cases in which the artist’s stated wishes—often categorized as “intention”— work against the interests of curators and art historians.
 
Questions to be addressed will include: Why is it that well-respected academic historians regularly write biographies, while the same isn’t true in the field of art history? Is it a coincidence that biography became widely dismissed at roughly the same moment certain groups began to assert their agency in the art world? How do we weigh the narratives that artists create about their lives against the scholarly commitment to provide an accurate account of the historical record? Our discussion of these questions will inform students’ approaches to their own individual research projects.
 

CLAS 71300 Selections from Plato
Prof. Peter Simpson Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36060]
The course will take the form of a study of the works of Plato through selected readings from them, including in particular parts of the Republic and Apology. A large question in Platonic scholarship, however, is the order of the dialogues and whether a chronological ordering (usually favored today) is better than some other or thematic ordering. Ancient authors, Neo-Platonists in particular, favored thematic orderings. They also regarded most Platonic works that have come down to us as really by Plato (including all the letters), while modern scholars tend to reject some at least of what the Neo-Platonists accepted (e.g. most of the letters). The course will begin with some discussion of the authenticity and ordering questions and then proceed to specific selections.


 
CLAS 75200/PHIL 76100  Special Topics in Classics: Philosophy and Its Rivals in the Platonic Dialogues
Prof. Nickolas Pappas Mondays 11:45-1:45 PM [36516]
As repository of wisdom, teacher, sage counsel to life; something serving the soul in the way that medical science serves the body; philosophy presents itself in Plato’s dialogues as an enterprise surrounded by competitors. Sophists and poets claimed to teach the public, and orators promised to lead. What did philosophers have to offer that was different?
Although this question can be entertained at a general level, it also leads into specific topics associated with Plato’s dialogues, such as
 
    the method of division and collection
    myths in Platonic dialogues and how to read them
    material in the dialogues (e.g. the story of Gyges) that has been reworked from other sources
    the representation of rival disciplines in Plato’s Symposium
 
Taking the question of rivals to philosophy as its guide, this seminar will familiarize itself with some Platonic works, paying special attention to how those works identify philosophy against drama, the interpretation of poetry, mythography, rhetoric, and sophistry.
 
Readings will include Ion, Sophist, Statesman; selections from Republic; and (time permitting) some or all of Phaedrus, Symposium, and Theaetetus. The seminar will make use of secondary literature in its reading assignments and in class presentations.
 
 
CL 79500 Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism:  Comparative Literature in the Age of Globalization
Prof. Sonali Perera Thursdays 4:15-6:15 [36064]
As a range of comparatist scholars have noticed, Marx observes in the manifesto (of all unlikely places) that world literature “arises” as the by-product of exploitative, even imperialist, designs. Where world literature is defined narrowly as literature of global circulation, its market driven, cosmopolitan character might be deemed to be the happy accident of capital movement guided by its cultural and economic custodians. But what happens when we expand and complicate our frame of reference? What of other methods and models for conceiving/reconceiving world literature as literary internationalism? What concepts and ideologies of comparison derive from a theory of value in a global and unequal world? And how do we understand the relationship between comparative literature and world literature—as antagonistic or supplementary?

Since Marx’s thoughts on the subject, in recent years, literary theory scholars find themselves returning to consider the problems and possibilities of world literature. The past two decades have seen a surge of publications agitating for and against both a revitalized Weltliteratur and a newly re-tooled comparative literature. WReC (The Warwick Research Collective) proposes a new world-systems theory approach which conceives of world-literature (with a hyphen) as a “re-making of comparative literature after the multicultural debates and the disciplinary critique of Eurocentricism.” In the latest issue of the PMLA journal devoted to “Literature in the World,” Simon Gikandi keeps the question alive: “But if world literature takes us everywhere and nowhere, are we better off with comparative literature, a disciplinary formation driven by the idea that literatures can be studied in their distinctive languages, across national and linguistic boundaries, without abandoning the languages and grounds that gave rise to them?” And yet, if in minimal terms, the study of comparative literature is distinguished from that of world literature on the grounds that the former requires specialized knowledge of multiple languages whereas world literature is merely literature in translation and generally studied in English, do we agree with how this academic sub-division of labor is coded and institutionalized? What is at stake in constructing the difference between world literary approaches and comparative literature in this way? Is it the case, as has been argued, that the turn to world literature has prompted a new strain of scholarship in comparative literature?
In our class, we will engage with some of these questions, as we take the measure of the state of the field debates. Throughout our course, you are encouraged to consider how these debates might shape the way that we think of research and writing in literary studies today.

Simply put, then, this course offers us a chance to study the resurgence of world literature as an interpretive paradigm against and through the perspective of new scholarship on the theory and practice of comparative literature. While we will study touchstone texts (by Goethe, Marx, Heidegger, Auerbach, Said, Jameson, Ahmad, Wallerstein, Moretti, Damrosch, Spivak, Saussy, Amin), we will also familiarize ourselves with recent scholarship including works by Casanova, Apter, Melas, Mufti, Robbins, Cheah, WReC, and Llowe. We will ground our discussions by “applying” theory to literary works by Woolf, Manto, Pamuk, Devi, and Salih. If time permits, alongside selections from theory and literature, we may also read excerpts from one or two of the ACLA’s emblematic state of the discipline reports.

Course requirements: 1.) A 20 minute presentation on one or two of the weekly readings. 2.)  A 2 page prospectus for the final paper. 3) A 15-20 page final paper. 4.) Engaged class participation.


CL 80100/HIST 72400/PSC 71902 The Outcome of German Classical Philosophy
Prof. Richard Wolin Mondays 6:30-8:30 [36069]
In 1886, Friedrich Engels wrote a perfectly mediocre book, Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy, which nevertheless managed to raise a fascinating and important question that is still being debated today: how should we go about evaluating the legacy of German Idealism following the mid-nineteenth century breakdown of the Hegelian system? For Engels, the answer was relatively simple: the rightful heir of classical German philosophy was Marx’s doctrine of historical materialism. But, in truth, Engels’ response was merely one of many possible approaches. Nor would it be much of an exaggeration to claim that, in the twentieth-century, there is hardly a philosopher worth reading who has not sought to define him or herself via a confrontation with the legacy of Kant and Hegel.

Classical German Philosophy – Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling – has bequeathed a rich legacy of reflection on the fundamental problems of epistemology, ontology and aesthetics. Even contemporary thinkers who claim to have transcended it (e.g., poststructuralists such as Foucault and Derrida) cannot help but make reference to it in order to validate their post-philosophical standpoints and claims.

Our approach to this very rich material will combine a reading of the canonical texts of German Idealism (e.g., Kant and Hegel) with a sustained and complementary focus on major twentieth-century thinkers who have sought to establish their originality via a critical reading of Hegel and his heirs: Alexandre Kojève, Martin Heidegger, Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, and Jürgen Habermas.

The course will primarily focus on the nexus between philosophy, reason, and, autonomy. We will also examine the substantive arguments that the school’s leading representatives have set forth, with special attention to the “healing” role of both reason and the aesthetic dimension. If thought and being are sundered in real life, art and reason offer the prospect of making the world whole once more. Thus, in German Classical philosophy, aesthetic consciousness often plays what one might describe as a redemptory or reconciliatory function.

In his “Discourse on Language” Foucault warns us appositely that, “Truly to escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. It assumes that we are aware of the extent to which Hegel, insidiously perhaps, is close to us; it implies a knowledge that permits us to think against Hegel, of that which remains Hegelian. Thus we have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us.” Foucault’s insightful caveat will, in many respects, function as our interpretive watchword as we seek to decode and reconstruct German Idealism and its innovative contemporary legacies. ****


CL 80900 Intro to Renaissance Studies: Neoplatonism Across Faith and Time
Profs. Clare Carroll and Feisal Mohamed Wednesday 2:00-4:00 [36066] 
Engaging in questions of Platonic influence may seem to support a traditional view of the Renaissance as reviving and redoubling a unitary sense of Western culture tracing its roots to ancient Greece. This course poses a strong challenge to that narrative. By focusing on the Platonism of late antiquity, we in fact engage in a profound re-mapping of the period’s engagement with classical and medieval locales, one less centered on Athens and Rome and taking into its ken Alexandria, Damascus, and Baghdad.
 
The Neoplatonic tradition was the philosophical limgua franca of the Renaissance: the rediscovery of Plotinus and Proclus achieved in no small measure through the prodigious influence of Marsilio Ficino was a spark generating widespread interest. And as was recognized in the period, it is a tradition that spans all three Abrahamic faiths: the great wellspring of biblical Neoplatonism is the Jewish scholar Philo of Alexandria, whose influence can be discerned in the seminal Christian mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius and in the Islamic tradition of falsafa. These interests certainly display themselves in literature, though this course will ask whether such engagements constitute thick intellectual engagement or a merely ornamental embellishment.
 
We will see in the course how Neoplatonism continues to provide a common philosophical language to theologians of all three faiths, as in the work of the twentieth-century Shi’a philosopher Henri Corbin and of the member of the “Radical Orthodoxy” school Simon Oliver.
 
Preliminary list of primary texts:
Ariosto, Ludovico. “Voyage to the Moon” from Orlando furioso.
Corbin, Henri. “Mundus Imaginalis” and selections from History of Islamic Philosophy
Crashawe, Richard. Poems.
Donne, John. Metempsychosis and Anniversaries.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Mystical Theology.
Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love  and selections from Platonic Theology.
St. John of the Cross. Poems.
Al’Kindi. Selections from On First Philosophy.
Leone Hebreo (Judah Abrabanel). Dialoghi d’Amore.
Michelangelo. Sonnets.
Nicholas Cusanus. Selections from On Learned Ignorance, Dialogue on the Hidden God, and De pace fidei
Oliver, Simon. Selection from Radical Orthodoxy.
La Pléiade
Plotinus. Selections from Enneads
Porphyry. Against the Christians [fragments]
Proclus. Selections from Platonic Theology and Commentary on Plato’s “Parmenides”
Tullia d’Aragona, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love.
Smith, John. Selections from Dialogues.
Spenser, Edmund. The Fowre Hymnes and Mutabilitie Cantos
Pernette du Guillet. Rymes
Wroth, Lady Mary. Pamphilia to Amphilanthus.
Vittoria Colonna. Sonnets for Michelangelo.
 
There are good English translations of the Italian and French texts:
Tullia d'Aragona, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love, ed. and trans. Rinaldina Russell and Bruce Merry, introd. and notes Rinaldina Russell (1997)
 
Vittoria Colonna, Sonnets for Michelangelo. A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Abigail Brundin (2005)
 
Pernette du Guillet. Complete Poems: A Bilingual Edition. Ed., Karen Simroth James. Trans. Marta Rijn Finch (2010). 


CL 84000 Memory, Political Thought and Italian Destiny in the Works of Foscolo and Leopardi
Prof. Morena Corradi Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [36062]
Foscolo and Leopardi are among the most prominent literary figures who passionately addressed the social and political questions vexing their homeland in the 19^th century. Their distress and indignation for Italy’s moral and political situation inevitably affected both their poetics and their interpretation of the role of poetry within society.

The course will focus on the works of the two authors which better express their views as well as hopes with regard to the Italian nation, its customs, and its destiny. While addressing the peculiarities of Italian Romanticism as expressed in some of the best examples of patriotic literature, we will trace the trajectories of the two authors’ political thought and its relations to the Italian national character. Particular attention will be given to the function of poetry in recollecting as well as enhancing memory. Our analysis and discussion of Foscolo’s and Leopardi’s oeuvres will be conducted in the light of their most relevant historical, philosophical, and biographical sources.


CL 85000 Lyric, Prose, Modernity
Prof. Joshua Wilner Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [36065]
In one of Baudelaire’s late prose poems, a poet tells of losing his halo while dodging traffic on a crowded boulevard: “It slipped from my head into the mire of the pavement, and I didn’t have the courage to pick it up - better to lose my insignia than to break my bones.” In this allegorical sketch, Baudelaire propels the desanctified language of the lyric poet into the busy, crowded world of prose.

The cultural condition Baudelaire evokes and its connection with a changing sense of the relationship between poetry and prose will be the subject of this course. We will begin by examining a group of romantic texts (some pages from Rousseau’s Reveries, some fragments by Schlegel, the debate over “poetic diction” between Wordsworth and Coleridge) which more or less directly challenge neo-classical genre theory and adumbrate formal possibilities which will emerge more distinctly over the course of the century. We will then turn to another group of romantic texts, including writings by Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Mary Shelley, to study the gender sub-text which informs this history:  a sub-text in which the figure of poetic election is male and the matrix of prose female. Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, which was a self-conscious experiment in “impassioned prose,” and the prose poems of Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen, a number of which are directly influenced by De Quincey, are at the historical center of the course. These writings will provide a bridge between the romantic writers with whom we began and the late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers of experimental prose with whom we will conclude, among them Rimbaud, Stein, Woolf, and Benjamin.

Requirements: 4 credits – a weekly reading journal, informal class presentations, a term paper; 2 credits – a weekly reading journal.


CL 85000 Neapolitan Narratives from Ferrante to Gomorra: Literature, Cinema, Television
Prof. Giancarlo Lombardi Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36067]
Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan tetralogy shined a spotlight on an Italian city which had long exercised the imagination of philosophers, literati and visual artists. Called by Walter Benjamin a porous city for its theatrical architecture and for its ‘inexhaustible law of life’, Naples is not merely setting but protagonist in recent literary, cinematic, and televisual texts. Starting from the critical reflections of Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci and Franco Cassano, this course will discuss the complex portrayal of contemporary Naples in three different modules: the first will center exclusively on Elena Ferrante’s entire literary production, while the second will analyze the cinematic works of a group of directors known as Scuola Napoletana (Mario Martone, Pappi Corsicato, Antonio Capuano, and Antonietta De Lillo). The seminar will conclude with a module that will focus on Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra and on its adaptations: Matteo Garrone’s film and the SKY Italia series Gomorra La Serie. The course will be conducted in English.


CL 89100 Literary Theory & Criticism I
Prof. Martin Elsky Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36063]
A study of the major statements in literary theory during the classical, medieval, and early modern periods, the course will focus on issues related to the nature of literary representation and transmission. As much of the course deals with the absorption of ideas by one culture from another and the migration of texts from one linguistic, geographical and religious center to another, we will introduce translation theory and histoire croissé as methods. Topics will include the various ways the following have traveled from setting to another from period to period: mimesis and imitation; literary truth and beauty; genre and structure; figurative language; affectivity. Classical readings will include Plato, Aristotle, and Horace; medieval readings will include Augustine and Dante; early modern readings will include Valla, Tasso, Sidney, and Milton. Course requirements: oral report and seminar paper.


ENGL 84500 Disaffection in Colonial Law and Literature
Prof. Tanya Agathocleous Fridays 11:45-1:45 [36088]
In 1890, in response to a burgeoning print culture and steadily increasing criticism of imperial policies, the colonial government in India began to prosecute writers, editors and publishers for sedition. In order to broaden the scope of existing sedition law, prosecutors made the term “disaffection” central to their arguments; any negative affect aimed at the government might thus be deemed illegal. This course will use the criminalization of negative affect as a tactic of press censorship as the occasion to investigate the relationship between affect, politics, and the imperial public sphere. What effect did the prosecution of “disaffected” speech have on journalism and literary production in late nineteenth and early twentieth century India? On the idea of critique? On the form and content of public writing? How did the differential application of British law in India help to shape debates about empire, free speech, and the role of the critic in Britain? We will also consider the ways in which affect remains central to the constitution of publics and counterpublics today and the changing valences of disaffection in political discourse. As well as writing from colonial periodicals, primary readings may include Mulk Raj Anand, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sarah Jeannette Duncan, E.M. Forster, M.K. Gandhi, Sarojini Naidu, Rabindranath Tagore, Oscar Wilde; secondary readings may include Sara Ahmed, Homi Bhabha, Lauren Berlant, Wendy Brown, Deborah Gould, Ashis Nandy, Sianne Ngai, Jacques Ranciere, Peter Sloterdijk.  

ENGL 76200 Identities
Prof. Meena Alexander Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36089]
"No one ever told us we had to study our lives, make of our lives a study..." writes Adrienne Rich in her poem "Transcendental Etude'". Through selected postcolonial and feminist texts of poetry and prose we will examine the splintering and refashioning of identities, migrant memories, desire and sexuality, embodiment and dislocation. We will study what Derek Walcott in Omeros calls the `radiant affliction’ of language and with it the complications of  self inscription in the face of a fluid world. Questions emerge, how are archives shaped over time through autobiographical acts? What connections exist between lyric time and the time of history? And what of migration—how are new geographies illuminated, selves created?

We will study the poetry and prose of Derek Walcott, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde and Kamala Das. Das evoked her body in ways that startled her readers – she composed poetry in English and prose in Malayalam her mother tongue. We will turn to other writings from the Indian subcontinent including M.K. Gandhi’s classic text An  Autobiography-- the Story of My Experiments with Truth, a groundbreaking text where confronting the violence of race laws, both in India and in South Africa, Gandhi struggled to remake both himself and the world. We will also read Theresa Cha’s Dictee, a long experimental poem that focuses on exile and dislocation, impossible identities, multiple languages and the failure of translation. Other readings will be uploaded on the dropbox, drawing on drawing on phenomenology, feminism, affect and postcolonial theories (Arondekar, Berlant,  Bhabha, Cesaire, Fanon, Merleau-Ponty, Spivak, Taylor, Weheliye, Wynter etc). The course will run as a seminar with weekly readings, students presentations and a final term paper.

ENGL 86600 “The Poorer Nations”: Postcolonial Theory and World System
Prof. Peter Hitchcock Wednesdays 6:30-8:30 [36092]
This course has two major aims: first, to introduce some of the key contributions to the emergence of postcolonial theory in the writings of Fanon, Cesaire, James, Said, Spivak, and Bhabha (these might be expressed as a “core”); second, to register and explore thought that both extends and deepens this rich tradition and to come to terms with contemporary theory that in some measure breaks with the founding principles of postcolonial knowledge in the current conjuncture, including Mbembe, Cheah, Lazarus, Prashad, Scott, and Bonilla (these might be articulated as a “periphery”). The idea is to present both an appreciation of pivotal postcolonial theoretical texts and to provide some research avenues into the ways in which postcolonial analysis is being reconceptualized. In a sense, it is the limits of the core/periphery model (a mainstay of world systems theory, particularly in Wallerstein) that yet reveals an alternative matrix for inquiry. The “poorer nations,” borrowed from Prashad, is a way to mark the combined and uneven developments within modernity and to think alternative modes of polity and solidarity than those offered by West/rest binaries (another work by Prashad, The Darker Nations, will also be used to deconstruct in this manner). Postcolonial theory has been marked not by evolution but by involution, a process that finds the far away a good deal closer than traditional geopolitics and mapping would permit. This is the challenge of thinking postcolonial theory in relation to history and politics, but it also underlines new interpretive possibilities in the face of gestural “endism” (the end of history, the end of colonialism, the end of communism and, of course, the end of postcolonialism itself). How is postcolonialism defined by the fate of nation as a concept? Does postcolonialism linger because colonialism haunts? What elements of criticism characterize a postcolonial methodology today? Do these influence, and are they influenced by other critical approaches? In literary studies, how useful is it to speak of postcolonial genres?   Does world literature supersede what we understand of postcolonial writing? These and other questions will set the scene for our discussions. We will also take up some specific examples of contemporary literature to help ground our dialogue.

A class presentation and term paper are required.

ENGL 79020 Writing with an Attitude: Navigating/Negotiating Voices within Critical Experimental Writing
Prof. Mark McBeth Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36095]
I have long struggled to link individual stories to larger histories, to make tangible with words those points of connection between self and the world that often seem so difficult to grasp. 
--Alisse Waterston, My Father's Wars, xvii.

 … to be human is to be concerned with meaning, to desire meaning. … Without desire, there is no real motivated question.  As in the case of a love I desire, it makes me go back time and again to seek its meaning.  
--Max van Manen, Researching Lived Experience, 79

Being in love with writing, with language, with one's own movement into writing.
--Nancy Miller, Getting Personal, 8.

Academic writing often prescribes stringent parameters of tenor and voice according to its traditions, its disciplines, and its genres.  Student writers must often understand these “rules” intuitively because instructors teach them tacitly. As a result, our usage and teaching of language delves into privilege, politics, and "politeness." Yet, increasingly, the intellectual labor and the means by which authors express their ideas take on alternative forms through the integration of multiple genres, the textures of language, and the usage of multimodal technology.  Contemporary meaning-making then relies upon a variety of semiotic systems and capabilities that writers must learn, practice, and apply.  In this course, we investigate and analyze these conventions, yet also explore how contemporary writers push the boundaries of their intellectual work and creative expression: how they integrate multiple talents and sensibilities into the act of composing for particular audiences and rhetorical situations.  

Participants in this seminar unpack how critical experimental writers achieve these new hybrid forms and then rehearse their own productions of the multivalent, multi-vocal, and multi-vernacular.  Writing in this course becomes an exercise in discovering what voices lie within us, what registers of prescriptive grammars “control” us, and how we navigate the complex negotiations of self-expression, identity, and collective exchange.  Additionally, we also consider how we, as instructors, impel students to explore the sense of self in their composing abilities through our pedagogical approaches. In this course, we collectively evaluate what we’ve been told about writing (and literacy), what audiences we want to reach with our writing, and how to communicate (and teach) in innovative ways. 

A Potential (Yet Not Fully Decided) Reading List:
Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words.

Bechdel, Allison. Fun Home.  

___. Are You My Mother?

Cicero.  Rhetorica ad herennium

Danberg, Robert.  Teaching Writing While Standing on One Foot. 

Elbow, Peter. "Being a Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals"

Gee, James.  Literacy and Education.

Kynard, Carmen. "'I Want to Be African': In Search of a Black Radical Tradition/ African-American-Vernacularized Paradigm for 'Students' Right to Their Own Language,' Critical Literacy, and 'Class Politics'".

___.  "From Candy Girls to Cyber Sista-Cipher: Narrating Black Females' Color-Consciousness and Countersotries in and out of School."

McLuhan, Marshal.  Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.  

Mavor, Carol. “Touching Netherplaces: Invisibility in the Photographs of Hannah Cullwick" in Pleasures Taken

Miller, Nancy K.  Getting Personal:  Feminist Occasions and Other Autobiographical Acts. 

Nelson, Maggie.  The Argonauts.

Ocejo, Richard.  "Sociology's Urban Explorers" in Ethnography and the City: Readings on Doing Urban Fieldwork

Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy. New York: Routledge, 1982/2012

Perl, Sondra and Schwartz, Mimi. Writing True: The Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction

Pratt, Mary Louise. "Arts of the Contact Zone"

Preciado, Paul B (nee Beatriz).  Testo Junkie

Pritchard, Eric Darnell.  Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy.  

Schatz, Kate and Stahl, Miriam Klein.  Rad American Women A-Z.  

Sedgwick, Eve  “Teaching Experimental Critical Writing" in The Ends of Performance (Ed. J. Lane Phelan)

Shipka, Jody.  Toward a Composition Made Whole. Togorvnick,  “Experimental Critical Writing”

Sousanis, Nick. Unflattening.

 Trimbur, Lucia.  "Tough Love: Mediation and Articulation in the Urban Boxing Gym" in Ethnograph and the City

Waterston, Alisse, My Father’s Wars: Migration, Memory, and the Violence of a Century. 

Young, Vershawn Ashanti. "Should Writers Use They Own English?"

___. "Your Average Nigga"

van Manen, Max.  Researching Lived Experience: Human Science for an Action Sensitive Pedagogy. 

Vygotsky, L. S. Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes.

ENGL 75500 Readings in African American Literary and Cultural Criticism
Prof. Robert Reid-Pharr Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [36099]

This seminar will introduce students to some of the more significant recent critical and theoretical trends within the study of African American literature and culture. Participants will be asked both if it is possible to produce a specifically black literary and cultural criticism and whether Black American identity is manipulated, challenged or perhaps even erased within “peculiar” aesthetic, performative, spatial, theoretical, or political contexts. At the same time, the course will examine how African American Studies intersects with and challenges Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies. Students will be asked to write several short papers during the course of the semester. They will also do at least one in class presentation. Works we will read include: Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. 2016; Philip Brian Harper, Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture. 2015; Aida Levy-Hussen, How to Read African American Literature: Post-Civil Rights Fiction and the Task of Interpretation. 2016; Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. 2012; Jeremy Glick, The Black Radical Tragic: Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution. 2016; Mary Helen Washington, The Other Blacklist: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s. 2015; William J. Maxwell, F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover's Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature. 2015; Erica R. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership. 2012; Nicole Fleetwood, On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination. 2015; and Andre Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction. 2016.

 
ENGL 83500 Romanticism and Revolution: Literature, Philosophy and the Politics of Terror
Prof. Nancy Yousef Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [36103]
With the radical convulsion and trauma of the French Revolution as a focal point, this course will serve as an introduction to issues, texts, and controversies central to the Romantic period. We will pay particular attention to rapidly shifting cultural moods of the era: progressive optimism, idealism, disillusionment, reaction, paranoia, and anxiety. Interrogation of the foundations and possibilities of community (social contract, civil rights, conjugal and filial bonds) is pervasive in the period, both in speculative theory and in affectively charged literary writing.  The course will be divided into three parts, beginning with the intellectual and cultural background of the French Revolution and its immediate impact in England.  We will trace conflicting and anguished reactions to the rapid devolution of revolutionary promise and the reign of terror in France, political repression in England, and the onset of war during the 1790’s. The aspirations, challenges, and disappointments associated with the Revolution continued to exercise an influence on the work of important writers whose careers extended into the nineteenth century. The latter part of this course will explore how political and ethical questions become recast and reshaped in new aesthetic practices and through the emergence of aesthetics itself as a field of philosophical investigation. Authors to be studied will include Rousseau, Burke, Wollstonecraft, Kant, Godwin, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Keats, and Austen. Recent theoretical approaches will be addressed throughout, as well as the long critical tradition that has made romanticism so contested a period of study. Course requirements: short weekly response papers, one oral presentation on a theoretical or historical topic relevant to the week's reading, and a final 20-25 page paper. Students may consult with me on assignments appropriate for the portfolio exam.


FREN 70500 Writing The Self: From Confession to Life Writing
Prof. Domna C. Stanton Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36085]
How is the self-written, constructed? What forms and shapes does this writing take over time, in different genres, and what purposes does it serve, for the several selves inscribed in the text and for others (including the self) who will read it. This course will begin by tracing self-writing from the Middle Ages to today, in primary and theoretical texts, beginning with confession (St Augustine, Rousseau); then early-modern memoirs and discursive forms of interiority (Abbé de Choisy); and steadily enlarging both the scope of self-writing and the figures of the self. We will consider the long passage that women's autogynography and the self-writing of persons of color and other others took to be recognized -- from Julian of Norwich and Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz; to slave narratives (Harriet Jacobs; Douglass); and letters, diaries and journals (Virginia Woolf, Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir). Our readings will culminate with the proliferation of forms in the twentieth century:  from holocaust memorials and trauma narratives (Primo Levi); testimonials (Rigoberta Manchu); human rights narratives (Dongala; Beah), AIDS memoirs (Arenas, Guibert, ) and transgender  texts (Bornstein, Stryker ) that highlight transformations and rebirth. We will end by considering what the continued obsession with revealing/inscribing the selves might mean (N. Miller; J. Leonard; M. Nelson); and finally, whether, as auto-fiction implies,  all writing is self-writing?

Work for the course: Whether the course is taken for 2, 3, or 4 credits, all students will be reponsible for doing the readings closely  and for engaging consistently in class discussion.
a Students who take the course for 2 credits will present in class a reading of one primary text, which will also be submitted in writing (c 5-7 pp); these students will also take the final exam.
b Students who take the course for 3 credits, will do all of the above and in addition, they will do a 10-13 page paper on a topic they select, after consultation with the instructor. They will also submit a thesis statement, a bibliography and an outline and the introduction (the schedule will be indicated on the syllabus).
c Students who take the course for 4 credits will do all of the above, and will also do a 20-25 page paper on a topic they select, after consultation with the instructor; they will also submit a thesis statement, a bibliography and an outline, and an introduction (the schedule will be indicated on the syllabus).
Please contact Domna Stanton with any questions (dstanton112@yahoo.com).  Suggestions for readings are welcome especially for translation from languages other than French; the syllabus and texts will be posted on Blackboard by August 15, 2017.
 
Office Hours by appointment Tuesdays 3-4 and 6:30 to 7:30.

 
FREN 70700 Myth in French Literature and Film
Prof. Royal Brown Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [36086]
The course will focus first of all on the very phenomenon of myth: how it relates to the cultures that produce it, and the ways in which it communicates. Various specific myths, such as the myth of Orpheus, will be examined, along with their manifestations in two films, Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), which is based on a French novel, along with various other works found in French literature and film. The course will also focus on various contemporary theories of myth from writers such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes, René Girard, and Mircea Éliade as well as on several non-French theorists such as Joseph Campbell and Carl-Gustav Jung. Works of French literature and film will be studied as illustrations of these theories.​
 

SPAN 70200 Spanish Literary Theory
Prof. Fernando Degiovanni Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36174]
 
 
SPAN 85000 Contagious Affectivity: Body-Affect in Gombrowicz
Prof. Silvia Dapía Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36172]
In an interview Aernout Mik, a contemporary Dutch artist, internationally known for his installations and films, referring to his interest in Gombrowicz, says: “What appeals most strongly to me about Gombrowicz, and what became a very active force in my work is what might be called a ‘traveling’ from one object or person to the other through connections that are created almost by accident. This also happens in my work when the camera travels from body parts to objects and objects to other objects or when people assume each other's compulsive movements and emotions. There is an action of contamination or spreading out that becomes an independent force.” It is precisely this “contamination” or transmission of affect/emotion as it operates in Gombrowicz’s work that constitutes the subject of this course. In the first half of the course we will explore work in affect theory by Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Teresa Brennan, Gilles Deleuze, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ruth Leys, Brian Massumi, William Ian Miller, Sianne Ngai, and Elspeth Probyn. In the second half we will discuss selected works by Gombrowicz such as Bacacay, Ferdydurke, Trans-Atlantyk, Pornographia, The Marriage. Particular attention will be given to the way in which his work performs nationalist emotions (such as patriotism), humiliation, shame, embarrassment, queer feelings, and disgust.
 
 
SPAN 87100 Mexican Narcoimaginaries: State Power & Cultural Mediations of the Drug Trade
Prof. Oswaldo Zavala Wednesdays 6:30-8:30 [36175] 
The present course will explore the political dimension of what is known as narco in the last two decades of cultural productions mediated by hegemonic discourses on organized crime. We will trace the recent history of literary works, cinema, television, conceptual art and music as they either reproduce or resist such hegemonic discourse on drug trafficking. For such a purpose, we will examine cultural objects produced in the 1990s and 2000s through an interdisciplinary theoretical framework drawing from the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Badiou, Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière, Carl Schmitt, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Antonio Gramsci, and Antoine Compagnon, among others. We will incorporate as well the most updated work by key sociologists, journalists and literary critics studying the phenomenon of the drug trade, including Luis Astorga, Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo, Dawn Paley, Carlos Montemayor, Charles Bowden, Terrence Poppa and Gary Webb. Beyond the recurrent mythical aspects of narconarratives, we will approach the intersection of culture, state power, hegemonic discourses and the geopolitics of organized crime. This course will be conducted in Spanish. 


SPAN 87400 Jose Martí en dos mundos
Prof. Esther Allen Wednesdays 4:15-6:15 [36179]
Which works are translated, why and how are they translated, and what is the impact of their translation? These questions thread through both the theoretical and practice-oriented branches of translation studies. This course focuses on the work of José Martí—canonical across Latin America but  yet to be widely accorded that status in the United States, where Martí spent most of his adult life—to address all three questions both theoretically and through the practice of translation. As a grounding in the rigorous exegetic and investigative skill translation demands, we begin with a collective translation of several of Martí's extraordinary crónicas, the documentary texts he published in newspapers across the Americas. We will also scrutinize Martí's own practice as a translator, of Victor Hugo's Mes fils and Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona among other texts, as well as his writings about translation. And we'll assess the history of the translation of Martí's work into English and other languages.  The figure of Martí himself has also been subjected to intra-lingual, interlingual and intersemiotic translations, to adopt Jakobson's three categories, which have varied widely across historical periods and national and ideological contexts.  Viewed in the light of Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital, as elaborated by Pascale Casanova, Martí remains a paradox. Drawing on the analyses of Susana Rotker, Julio Ramos, Oscar Montero, Carlos Ripoll, Antonio José Ponte, Mauricio Font, Rafael Rojas, and others, this course integrates the study of a fundamental transnational figure with that of the transnational practice of translation. 
 

HIST 71200 The Intellectual Politics of the French Revolution
Prof. Helena Rosenblatt Wednesdays 4:15-6:15 [36115]
This course is an in-depth introduction to the French Revolution and the heated debates it has engendered. We will privilege political/cultural/intellectual perspectives, focusing on the Revolution's relationship with "modernity" and its various ideologies (socialism, liberalism, totalitarianism, feminism, etc.) Scholarship on the French Revolution will be placed in historical and political context in an effort to answer the question: "what is at stake when scholars adopt certain methodologies and perspectives on the French Revolution?"

 
HIST 77950 Islamic rulership: the caliphate in theory and practice
Profs. Anna Akasoy and Chase Robinson Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36112]
This class offers an introductory survey to Islamic political theory and practice. Readings and discussions will address origins and development of principal themes and institutions of the Islamic political tradition, including prophecy, caliphate, imamate, jihad, messianism, sharia, revivalism and modernism. We will be reading a combination of primary and secondary sources, including scripture, history, poetry, political theory, coins, and philosophical literature. Both Sunni and Shiite traditions will be covered. No background in Middle Eastern history required.

 
HIST 70900-Human Rights and Nation-States: A Global History
Prof. Eric Weitz Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [36111]
We live in a world of 195 independent, sovereign states. Virtually every one of them has a constitution that proclaims the rights of its citizens – even when those rights are only a veneer, below which the jailer, the torturer, the censor reign supreme. Only as members of particular nations do we become rights-bearing citizens; we never have rights simply as individuals, and global citizenship is rhetoric or ideal, not something that represents any kind of realistic possibility. Rights based in national (or racial) belonging are inherently limiting: only citizens may partake of the full panoply of rights, others are pushed to the margins, granted lesser rights or excluded altogether through policies like forced assimilation, ethnic cleansing, and, ultimately, genocide. The central questions that drive "Human Rights and Nation-States: A Global History" are:  Who, in fact, constitutes the nation, and by what criteria? And who, therefore, has the “right to have rights,” as Hannah Arendt, and, before her, the German Enlightenment philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte proclaimed? The course will combine theoretical and empirical readings and move to different cases around the globe from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries to explore the entwined phenomena of nation-states and human rights and all their accompanying achievements, paradoxes, and disasters.
 

MUS 83500 (Ethno)Musicology and Social Theory
Prof. Jane Sugarman Wednesdays 10:00-1:00 [36143]
An introduction to some classic and contemporary schools of social thought that music scholars have drawn on in recent decades. Theoretical writings in sociology, anthropology, philosophy, history, cultural studies, feminist and postcolonial studies, and related fields will be paired with case studies that situate the creation, performance, circulation, and reception of music, and of sound more broadly, within the unfolding of societal processes.   Writings that have been of particular interest  to ethnomusicologists will be emphasized, but the case studies illustrating them will be drawn from all branches of music scholarship.  We will begin with Marxist and Marxian approaches, continue with structuralism and semiotics, interpretive anthropology, and poststructuralism, and conclude with a selection of topics of current interest.  Formal knowledge of music is helpful but not required.

 
MUS 88200 Musicology: Sound in Society
Prof. Eliot Bates Mondays 10:00-1:00[36148]
This seminar provides an introduction to the field of Sound Studies, including both the conceptual framework as well as practical techniques. We will begin with an overview of the field and its formation in 2004 through a consideration of the work of Trevor Pinch, Karin Bijsterveld and R Murray Schafer. Subsequent weeks will cover topics such as historical soundscapes, sounding the animal world, noise and silence in philosophy, the engineering of sound, sound and radio art, mobile listening, architectural acoustics, and synaesthesia research in cognitive psychology.

Assignments for Sound in Society include weekly reading notes, a final research essay, oral presentations on the readings, and a critical soundscape recording (based on recordings that you capture and edit).

 
MUS 86300 Musicology: Renaissance Musical Humanism
Prof. Chadwick Jenkins Mondays 2:00-5:00 [36146]
In some ways, the very notion of the “renaissance” as a descriptor for the period in music roughly spanning 1450-1600 is predicated on cultural movements collectively described as “humanism.” And yet there are several concerns that arise when applying either of these terms to music. If the Renaissance in general is a “rebirth” of concerns, aesthetic and ethical, deriving from Antiquity, then in what sense can that apply to music when the actual music of Antiquity remained terra incognita (and the only explicit attempts to recuperate something of the ancient style come at the very end of this period)? If musica moves from its medieval position in the quadrivium to some satellite position within the studia humanitatis, then what is gained and lost by that shift? Indeed, music occupies a fundamentally ambiguous position in Renaissance thought, partly because of the Renaissance’s continued efforts to reconcile Platonic and Aristotelian concepts.

This course will examine Renaissance musical humanism by taking a fairly broad look at musical scores, descriptions of musical practice, music-theoretical writings, and philosophies of music. We will focus on specific moments and repertoires that bring to light the richness and complexity of music’s relationship to Renaissance humanism. We will also concern ourselves with the various ways in which the Renaissance has been represented in historical writings (both musicological and outside of that field). Topics will include: Josquin and the humanists; Luther as humanist and the music of early Lutheranism; Music and the Renaissance individual; Ficino’s philosophies of music as well as Neo-Pythagoreanism more broadly; the French humanist tradition and musique mesurée à l’antique; Aristotelianism and Platonism in Renaissance music theory; the Petrarch project of the Madrigal and Bembism; the 1589 Intermedi as humanist projection; and the earliest formulations of opera as a simultaneous marker of proximity to and distance from the concerns of the ancients. Participants will be asked to submit short response papers every other week and the course will culminate in a more extended research paper.
 

PHIL 77600 The Philosophy of Literature
Prof. Noel Carroll Tuesdays 11:45-1:45 [36205]
This course is a seminar in which we will survey the basic concepts in the philosophy of literature, including, among others, the very concept of literature itself, narrative, poetry, fiction, interpretation, metaphor, authorial intention, and the novel as well as the relation of literature to the emotions, theater, morality, politics, feminism, race and ethnicity and more, depending upon the interests of the students.  There are no prerequisites.  Students will be expected to make a class presentation and to produce a final paper. 

 
PHIL 76000 Mind, Matter, and Experience in Early Modern Philosophy
Prof. Catherine Wilson Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [36210]
Descartes proposed that the world that science investigates is purely corporeal, consisting of aggregates of corpuscles in motion obeying the laws of mechanics. Animal and human bodies, on his view, are machines. Human bodies alone are inhabited by minds that experience emotions and perceptions and that can innovate, grasp meanings and truths, and initiate movement, all in ways that cannot be scientifically understood. In this seminar, we will examine the reactions to this proposal, including a variety of extensions of, and alternatives to this basic scheme, in early modern philosophy. Topics will include: the materialisms of Gassendi and Locke, the animism of Margaret Cavendish, the phenomenalism or idealism of Leibniz and Malebranche, and the quasi-pantheistic systems of Spinoza and Newton.
 

PHIL 77900/PSC 80302 Socialism and Democracy
Prof. Carol Gould Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [36206]
An exploration of core issues at the intersection of socialist theory and democratic theory, and of the prospects for rethinking democratic socialism for the 21^st century. The seminar will draw on literature from the history of both Marxist/socialist and liberal democratic thought and will go on to consider leading critiques of both traditions. We will then focus on key conceptual problems in delineating new democratic and cooperative forms of social, economic, and political organization, including worker self-management; structural injustice and ecological justice; the question of markets, coordination, and distribution; the problem of scale (local, national, and global); and the role of feminist notions of reproduction, recognition, and care. Readings will include, among others, works by Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Kautsky, Hannah Arendt, Franz Fanon, Robert Dahl, C. B. Macpherson, Carole Pateman, Andre Gorz, Erik Olin Wright, Jane Mansbridge, G. A. Cohen, Nancy Fraser, and Elizabeth Anderson.

 
PHIL 76900/PSYC 80104 Philosophy of Social Science
Prof. John Greenwood Thursdays 9:30-11:30 [36214]
This course will focus on a number of philosophical and meta-theoretical questions concerning the nature of social phenomena and social scientific explanation. We will cover topics common to most social sciences, such as the debate between so-called holists and individualists, the nature of structural and functional forms of explanation; and the place of social values in social science. We will also cover topics specific to particular social scientific disciplines, such as problems associated with the anthropological understanding of alien cultures, the role of isolative experimentation in social psychology, the presumed autonomy of historical explanation, and the instrumentalist conception of theory in economics. We will also consider the historical evolution of the social sciences, including their institutional development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
Throughout the course, a continuous attempt will be made to provide a general philosophical characterization of social phenomena. We will try to explicate what is held––by both lay and professional theorists––to be the ‘common characteristic(s)’ (Durkheim) of the varied phenomena classified as social in nature, such as social action, social cognition, social groups, social structures and the like, and the relations between them (but without presupposing that there is a single characteristic or set of characteristics common to them all).  It is hoped that the working analysis of social phenomena developed will enable us to get a better conceptual grip on the fundamental philosophical questions of social science. It will also hopefully shed some light on the pretensions of new disciplines such as sociobiology, social epistemology, social neuroscience, and evolutionary social psychology, and familiar but puzzling claims to the effect that our identities and emotions are socially constructed, and thus the appropriate subject of social scientific research.
 
Contemporary philosophy of social science is in an exciting state of flux, since many of its traditional guiding assumptions and contrasts, derived from logical positivist/scientific empiricist philosophy of science, have been abandoned or qualified in recent years. By returning to the core philosophical questions about social phenomena and social explanation, it is hoped that the course will be able to shed some fresh light upon traditional problems and debates, and to identify some emerging contemporary issues.
 
Social sciences considered will include sociology, anthropology, social psychology, political science, economics and history. No detailed background in social science is assumed, although any background would be an undoubted asset and a positive source of course enrichment.
 
Readings will be based upon book chapters and papers, which will be posted electronically. 
 
 
PSC 72100 American Political Thought
Prof. Ruth O’Brien Tuesdays 11:45-1:45 [36607]
American Political Thought is one of the core subfields in the American Politics field. It can also be counted as part of the political theory concentration. This seminar asks the big questions: What is justice? What is equality? What does it mean to be free? It does so in historical perspective, breaking the periods down into perspectives provided by the revolution; founding, civil war; Social Darwinist; bourgeois individualist; progressive; industrial capitalist, New Deal; and identity politics periods. Original texts ranging from: James Madison’s Federalist Papers; John Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems; Malcolm X’s Autobiography to Gloria E. Anzaldua’s This Bridge Called my Back will be read. In addition, to concentrating on the standard interpretations of these texts, some radical interpretations will be emphasized, particularly black feminist thought. In addition, the seminar gives more weight to the latter half of American political thought written about capitalism and identity politics in the late-19th and 20th centuries rather than the founding or the civil war eras in the 18th, early, and mid-19th centuries.

 
PSC 80302 Marxism
Prof. Jack Jacobs Mondays 2:00-4:00 [36244]
This course, which will be conducted as a seminar, will be devoted to discussing and critique the ideas of Karl Marx and some of the major thinkers who have been influenced by Marx. We will begin by exploring Marx’s analysis of alienation, his understanding of history, and his notions of the state and of class. We will turn next to discussing both Marxism in the era of the Second International, with particular attention to the Revisionist Debate between Eduard Bernstein and Rosa Luxemburg, and – on the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution of 1917! The political ideas of Vladimir Lenin. I intend, in a somewhat later section of the course, to devote particularly sustained attention to the development of Western Marxism, including the contributions of figures like Lukacs, Korsch, Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin, and Marcuse, many of whom attempted to explain why the revolution predicted by Marx had not (yet) taken place. Finally, we will end this course by examining Marxist thought in the latter portions of the 20th century, and the first years of the 21st. I expect that we will cover a work by Louis Althusser, and hope to discuss relevant portions of the thought of Slavoj Zizek. Throughout the semester, we will engage in a close examination of key texts, and will debate the extent to which the ideas we will discuss (and the controversies which they generated) can be explained by knowledge of the contexts in which they arose. We will also explore the degree to which the ideas of the thinkers whose works we will read help to illuminate contemporary issues.


PSC 80602 Walter Benjamin
Prof. Susan Buck-Morss Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [36250]
In-depth readings of a wide range of Walter Benjamin’s writings in historical-political context, from World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution, to World War II and the Vichy Regime. We will focus on philosophical method. What in his way of working escapes certain modern and post-modern dead-ends of theory? Excerpts from all 5 volumes of his Selected Works will be consulted.


PSC 70200 Modern Political Thought
Prof. Leonard Feldman Wednesdays 4:15-6:15 [36253]
This course will examine key texts of modern Western political thought and the different ways they have been interpreted by contemporary political theorists. We will concentrate on works by Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Mill and Nietzsche. Some questions that will guide us include: If the period we loosely and contentiously describe as modern places stress on the problem of value, how do modern political systems gain and maintain legitimacy? What particular institutions are justified and on what basis? What are the affective dimensions of political order and political disorder? How are visions of political subjectivity linked to political orders and who is excluded from political subjectivity? Does modernity signify an age of progress in terms of knowledge about the world and freedom for human beings or a new kind of violent containment?

In addition, we will engage two to three important contemporary readings of each primary text, coming from Straussian, Cambridge School, feminist, post-colonial and post-structuralist perspectives. The goals here are (a) to gain new insight into the primary texts under consideration, (b) develop a familiarity with the core assumptions, commitments and methods of key interpretive approaches, and (c) evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of those approaches. The primary texts will come from the department’s political theory reading list and the seminar will be useful for students in preparation for their comprehensive exams in political theory. But it is by no means limited to that goal or that group of students.


PSYC 74003 Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Critical Psychology
Prof. Susan Opotow Wednesdays 9:30-11:30 [36423]
This is a required course for all first year Critical Social/Personality students. We read and discuss materials that exemplify: (1) the link between the intellectual concerns of personality and social psychologists; (2) the need to approach human behavior through a variety of levels of analysis from the individual to organizational and societal levels, and (3) the importance of an
historical, theoretical, and critical approaches in to research. Students are introduced to classic and contemporary texts in critical social/personality psychology.

The course is designed so that students will:

·        Recognize the personal, cultural, political, and historical influences in the work we do
 
·        Be aware of the variety of theoretical approaches in the field and to develop personal strategies for working with and selecting among them
 
·        Understand how theory connects with diverse psychological methods and societal contexts
 
·        Develop a way of working in critical social/ personality that includes the use of historical and theoretical perspectives
 
·        Attend to the interplay among micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis
 
·        Be aware of the influence that physical and social contexts make to attitudes, beliefs, and behavior and, in turn, the influence of attitudes, beliefs, and behavior on these contexts.
 
To register, permission of the professor is required. Contact sopotow@jjay.cuny.edu for permission to enroll.


PSYC 80103 The Study of Lives
Prof. Jason VanOra Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36430]
A course in the study of lives invites students to grapple with the uniqueness, challenges, and wisdoms of the individual person.  A number of readings spanning both the social sciences and humanities will introduce students to the following central ideas within this interdisciplinary field of study:
 
1)     Individual lives must be studied and understood within their larger social, cultural, and political contexts.  The study of one person often includes many, many others.

2)     One can study lives for the purpose of addressing a variety of research questions, illuminating the ways in which findings from large-scale research studies particularize within the life stories of individual persons, embracing individual complexity and distinctiveness, and learning more about the particular time and place within which an individual lived.

3)     The study of lives utilizes a variety of methods, which include interviewing, archival analyses, naturalistic and participant observation, and the narrative analysis of memoirs, biographies, and other life histories.
In addition to reading some seminal life studies, including those of people who contend with various forms of injustice and struggle, we will also reflect on the theories, methodologies, interpretive strategies, and ethical issues connected with the study of lives.  We will focus much of our energies this semester on the "doing" of the work as students sketch the life of another person and draw on these sketches to address a research question of interest.  

 
SOC 80000 Foucault, Bourdieu and Baudrillard:  Power, Culture and Social Change
Prof. Marnia Lazreg Mondays 4:15-6:15 [36219]
Like Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu as well as Jean Baudrillard addressed issues pertaining to the transformations of French-qua-Western culture.  Yet they also sought, directly or indirectly, to distinguish their sociology from Foucault’s social philosophy.  In 1977 Jean Baudrillard wrote that Foucault’s conception of power is a “mythic discourse” rather than a discourse that purportedly reveals the truth about the nature of power relations.  In 1968, Bourdieu, a one-time former student of Foucault, turned Foucault’s question “What is an Author?”  into “How to read an Author.”  However, Baudrillard also shared with Foucault a rejection of the core concepts of Cartesian rationalism and a “poststructuralist” orientation, while Bourdieu intended to stake out a sociological perspective that incorporated a number of Foucault’s critical theoretical insights.  What historical, philosophical, political and biographical factors account for these French sociologists’ mixture of reticent admiration for, and skepticism about Foucault’s ideas and political engagements?  Did they resolve the ambiguities and antinomies present in Foucault’s theoretical orientation and methodology? To what extent sociology transforms or is transformed by Foucault’s social philosophy?

Using methods borrowed from the history of ideas as well as the sociology of knowledge, this course examines Bourdieu and Baudrillard’s efforts to build a critical sociology with practical applications for social change as they grapple with Foucault’s conceptual innovations. Special attention will be given to the meanings and articulations of key concepts and issues, including structure and event/history; language, rules and discourse; power and subjectivation; body, sex/sexuality and gender; biopolitics and liberalism; revolution and political spirituality; security/war and self-defense.  The course will further examine the concrete socio-political activities in which each author engaged as a result of his theoretical commitment.  
Although students are encouraged to read each author’s seminal works, special attention will be given to Foucault’s Lectures at the College de France in addition to the Order of Things, and Madness and Civilization; Bourdieu’s Pascalian Meditations, Practical Reason, Acts of Resistance, and Masculine Domination; Baudrillard’s Seduction, Simulacra and Simulation, Symbolic Exchange and Death.

Students are expected to immerse themselves in the works of these authors, and write a paper focusing on three critical issues with which one of them grappled. Selecting current socio-political events or issues as testing ground for the three theorists’ ideas is also encouraged. The paper will be elaborated in stages to be discussed in class until its completion.

 
SOC 83101 Populism, Authoritarianism, and Dictatorship
Prof. John Torpey Tuesdays 2:00-4:00 [36225]
This course explores the nature of undemocratic regimes in the modern world.  We will explore different forms of non-democracy against the background of a growing expectation since the time of the democratic revolutions of the late 18^th century that democracy should be the normal form of political regime.  In order to achieve our analytical objectives, we will read political and social theory, historical treatments of non-democratic regimes, and comparative assessments of contemporary undemocratic government.  The course should therefore be of interest to those in the political and social sciences and in history who wish to understand the variety and distinctiveness of undemocratic regimes in the modern period.

 
SOC 74600 Political Economy and Social Change
Prof. Roslyn Bologh Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [36231]
Political economy causes social changes that have major consequences for social life – including education, urban life, family life, immigration, ethnic and race relations, and gender relations as well as international relations.  The enormous success of Thomas Piketty’s book on income inequality, Capital in the Twenty First Century, and the cross-disciplinary, international, academic and lay interest and acclaim it has garnered, speak to the significance of political economy.  Part of the appeal of Piketty’s book lies in his emphatic rejection of the narrow economistic approach to questions of political economy that he encountered in the U.S. and his espousal, in its stead, of a more comprehensive, sociological, cultural and historical perspective – employing sources as unorthodox as Jane Austen’s novels! What are the changes that have occurred in political economy since the 1970s? How should we analyze these changes (sometimes conceived as globalization, financial capitalism, monopoly capitalism, neo-liberalism or post-industrial high tech and service economy) and their consequences for social life and politics today and in the coming years?  We will examine different analytic perspectives from Marx to contemporary critical theorists to see which one(s) seem most compelling. An aim of this course is for students (even beginning graduate students) to be able to develop a draft of a publishable article, research proposal or book prospectus.         

 
SOC 86800 Sociology of Culture
Prof. David Halle Mondays 6:30-8:30 [36222]
This course approaches the study of culture via innovative case studies and theoretical thinking. We examine empirically interesting case studies of different aspects of culture, and consider which cultural theories best help us understand each case study and whether, for each case study, new theories are appropriate. “Culture” is defined here both in the narrow sense as “the arts”—music, literature, journalism, film, television, art (painting, sculpture, etc.), architecture, dance, and so on—and more broadly to include political beliefs, social attitudes, and religious beliefs, and the Internet and social media. 
 
 
THEA 80200 Seminar in A Dramatic Genre: Critical Perspectives on U.S. Musical Theatre 
Prof. David Savran Tuesdays 1:00-4:00 [36191]
Developed in the United States in the late nineteenth century, the Broadway musical has long been the most influential, adaptable, and category-defying theatrical form. This course will trace its genealogy and analyze its role in mediating between popular and elite cultures. We will pay special attention to the musical’s relationship to other genres and media, its role in consolidating U.S.-American identities, its seemingly magical power to thrill and enrapture, and its status as a lightning rod for anxieties swirling around cultural legitimation in the U.S. We will also consider musical theatre as a global practice, looking at its European connections in the early twentieth century and its status today as world theatre. The readings will focus on the history and historiography of the musical, from The Merry Widow(1907) and Show Boat (1927) to the works of Stephen Sondheim and Hamilton (2015), with critical analyses of music, text, performance, and reception. New scholarship—on the sociology of performance, orientalism, critical race theory, gender, and queer spectatorship—will be emphasized. The course will highlight musicals that have been particularly adept at challenging generic boundaries, including Lady in the Dark, Street Scene, South Pacific, West Side Story, and Sunday in the Park with George. Final grades will be determined by participation in seminar, three written reports, and a final paper.


THEA 80400 Seminar in Theatre Theory:  Extending Queer:  Theory and Performance/Theorizing Performance  
Prof. Sean Edgecomb Tuesdays 4:15-6:15 [36192]
This seminar presents a comprehensive and pluralist study of queer theory as it may be applied to critically analyze performance, both theatrical and lived.  Moreover, this course will consider queerness (as theory/identity, performance and way of being/doing) as it continues to develop in a global context. A deep engagement with text that is often dense, esoteric, and even contradictory will be essential. The course is divided into three sections: 1) First Wave: Foundations.  2) Second Wave: Expansions. 3) Globalization and Transexions. It begins with an investigation of queer theory through its post-Foucauldian origins, including the foundational theories of Butler, Sedgwick and Berlant and considers early queer performers from gay liberation onward. The second unit traces what Ann Pelligrini deems queer theory’s “affective turn,” considering the anti-identitarian and minoritarian work of key scholars including Muñoz, Freeman, Dolan and Halberstam.  Theatre and performance artists considered will be selected from contemporary North American locations and in regional contexts. The third unit of the course introduces a second wave of queer theory, focusing on a global approach to queer and trans performance that traces queer theory’s recent non-Anglophone developments in places such as Southeast Asia, France, the Balkans, Brazil, China, Australia, and beyond.  Artists selected will represent a wide and diverse group of LGBTQ perspectives in a global context. Final evaluation will be based on active class discussion, a 30-minute in-class oral presentation on an assigned topic and a final 20-page research paper on a preapproved queer artist (in terms determined in the seminar) that applies at least two of the theorists studied in class. Students will be encouraged to independently engage with queer performances taking place throughout NYC.


THEA 86000 Theatre and Society: Transatlantic Theatre and Performance: Golden Age Spain and Pre-Conquest/Colonial Latin America
Prof. Jean Graham-Jones Wednesdays 2:00-4:00 [36194]
This course focuses on theatre and performance produced in Spain and Latin America during, primarily, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Rather than treating Latin America as a colonial extension of the Spanish-speaking metropolis, we will study the two regions through their nearly constant (albeit often conflicted) dialogue with each other. To do this we will discuss, apply, and critique the sociocultural, political, linguistic, literary, theatrical, and performance theories of coloniality. After a transatlantic introduction to the period, we will first look at theatre / performance practices in place in both regions before the arrival of the Spanish to the Americas and then proceed to an examination of Spain's "Golden Age" of theatre as well as colonial theatre and performance in Latin America. We will read autos sacramentales in addition to entremeses and comedias from both sides of the Atlantic; study accounts of Corpus Christi processions in Madrid and Cuzco in addition to reconstructions of pre-Hispanic performance-scripts in Meso-America and Canada; and seek out specific examples of cultural encounter, such as the translation of a Spanish evangelical drama into Nahuatl or a colonial loa intended for a madrileño audience. Among the authors whose texts we will study are Rojas, Lope de Rueda, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina, Calderón de la Barca, Cervantes, Ruiz de Alarcón, sor Marcela de San Félix, and sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Evaluation will be based on in-class participation, online Blackboard discussions, small-group activities, and a final research paper (15-20 pages).


U ED 72200 Using Multilogical Frameworks in Research on Emotions
Prof. Konstantinos Alexakos Thurdsays 4:15-6:15 [36320]
Through a bricolage of multiple conceptual frameworks (neuroscience, sociology, psychology, etc.)  and knowledge systems (Western and Eastern), this course will explore theories on emotions and doing research on emotions in teaching and learning. Topics will include both Western and Eastern understandings of emotions, emotional styles, laughter, radical listening, cogenerative dialogue, coteaching and the physiological expression of emotions. These will be investigated with a focus on identity, gender, sexuality, class, and race. In addition to providing a theoretical synthesis for such research and using examples from practice, we will develop designs and str ategies that could be used to research emotions and emotional climate such as the creation of heuristics.  Discussions will include how to carry out such research, methodologies, methods of data collection and analysis as well as emotional wellness issues and challenges.

Students are expected turn in weekly summaries of readings, and do several co-presentations. The final paper will be on a method/methodology and/or knowledge system of the student’s choice. 


U ED 75100 Authentic Inquiry in Urban Education
Prof. Kenneth Tobin Thursdays 6:30-8:30 [36321]
In this course we explore contingent and emergent methodologies that embrace learning from difference and use of multiple frameworks while seeking complex solutions to social problems. The approaches we study are grounded in multiple theoretical frameworks (i.e., they are multilogical); accepting polysemia, adopting practices that have the goal of social justice and beneficence for all participants. Research designs seek to produce new theory and transformative practices. We examine the ethics of doing research within critically subjective frameworks that employ multiple methods (e.g., narrative, video and audio analysis, auto ethnography, physiological expressions of emotion, interventions, cogenerative dialogue, heuristics, and co-teaching).

In ongoing fashion we critique published research in Urban Education, addressing ethical issues, crises of representation, and generalizability. Special attention is directed toward the salience of theoretical generalizability and user oriented criteria for critiquing the authenticity of research. Collaborative research methods are explored with a focus on reciprocal and supporting roles of all participants. Participants must be provided more than opportunities to be involved. Instead, what we learn from research must be used to benefit all participants, not only those who are well positioned to succeed. From the standpoint of equity, we will use theories with a critical orientation to examine labels (e.g., sexuality, religious affiliation, poverty) to ensure that both the design and enactment of research benefits all, including those who may not be well placed to “help themselves.”

Dissemination will be addressed with an emphasis on writing for publication in refereed journals, dealing with critical feedback, reviewing others’ work, and producing a manuscript style dissertation and/or book.
 
 
U ED 75100 Learning, Development, and Pedagogy: Sociocultural, Critical, and Dialectical Approaches
Prof. Anna Stetsenko Tuesdays 6:30-8:30 [36480]
This course concentrates on theories and research at the intersection of human development and learning with a focus on contemporary developments in this interdisciplinary area. Objectives include gaining an understanding of the major philosophies, theories, methodologies, and contexts of research on learning and development and how they shape various approaches to pedagogy.