The following courses are listed by schools and departments as potential offerings. Actual offerings vary by semester.
Fall 2009 - Graduate Seminar
Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese
Performance and Human Rights-G95.2978
Professor Jill Lane
This course focuses on the different uses of performance in human rights advocacy and activism in Latin America, from contexts of transitional justice (in Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, Argentina), commissions for truth and reconciliation (in Peru, Chile, Argentina), and the ongoing debates and legacies of these projects. We consider the production of political truth in contexts of art, international law, and the public sphere, and focus particularly on the work of embodied performance in these settings. Our course will interact with the visiting photographic exhibit at the King Juan Carlos Center, Yuyanapaq: Para Recordar, produced as part of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We will attend a planned symposium on the legacy of Latin American truth commissions at KJCC,and will attend regular film screenings on related topics. Students will write and present a final research project for the course. Taught in English, but reading knowledge of Spanish is strongly recommended.
Advanced Honors Seminars in GSAS
Varieties of Religious Experience Revisited-- V28.0144
Professor Gilligan
Utilizes but also updates William James’s pioneering approach to interpreting and understanding religion in psychological rather than theological terms. Examines how the term “religion” is more confusing than helpful when it fails to differentiate between a wide variety of utterly incompatible beliefs and practices at different stages of cognitive and emotional development. Discusses the phenomenon of “political religions” (nationalism, totalitarianism, apocalyptic fundamentalism) as attempts to reject modernity (the modern scientific mentality), in order to fill the vacuum that Sartre called “the God-shaped hole in the soul of modern man” that resulted when the traditional sources of moral, legal, and political authority (God, religion, pure reason) lost their credibility as sources of knowledge. Considers that political religions result from psychological regression and contrasts them with the current moment in the evolution of religious consciousness, in which the challenge is to find progressive forms of religious expression, understanding, and experience consistent with the modern scientific mentality, while not being reducible to it. Concludes by examining whether this is the context in which the next major step in the evolution of both culture and personality will need to occur.
Africana and American Studies
Topics In Caribbean Lit: Sycorax Aesthetics- G11.2651
Prof Brathwaite
Cross listed: G29.2650, G11.2651, G41.1764.001
Human Rights & Cultural Politics -- G13.2312 Professor Crystal Parikh
Africana Anthropology
Anthropology In and Of Museums -- G14.3391
Professor Haidy Geismar
This course takes as its starting point the importance of museums and collecting in the foundational period of the discipline of anthropology and traces the role that cultural objects have had in thinking about cultural difference, and within cultural analysis. We will also examine the role of museums as sites of fieldwork and as generators of research methodologies focused on material culture. The ways in which museums consolidate emergent theories of material culture will be elicited through a series of workshops at the American Museum of Natural History. Students will investigate the history and nature of the anthropology collections, as well as thinking through the forms of knowledge engendered by artifacts. Working in the Science galleries, we will examine the status of anthropology as a natural science and consider the public representation and materialization of science -- students will be required to undertake their own mini-ethnography in the museum. Other topics will include global trends in the emergence of new museums of culture, cultures of dealing and collection, and the place of anthropological collections in art museums. Please note that many classes will meet at the AMNH and a significant amount of assignment research will take place at the museum.
Constructing America: Seminar on the Anthropology of the United States – G14.1330
Professors Dávila, Ginsburg
Focuses on ethnographies of and about the United States, examining the epistemology of fieldwork in a society where “the natives read what we write,” as well as on the imperative of linking structure and action and local knowledge with larger processes. More generally, takes a sociology of knowledge approach, relating what anthropologists have written about American culture to both the context of the development of anthropology as well as to the changing character of American society and culture. Explores chronologically and topically how anthropologists studying American culture are simultaneously engaged in constructing it.
Topics: Cultures Of Biomedicine - G14.3393
Professor Rapp
Over the last 100 years, biomedicine as a sphere of ideas and practices has made increasingly powerful claims to define the conditions of human life and death. How did medical authority get established? This seminar looks at the many historical processes through which biomedical power is constituted by addressing topics such as the discovery/ invention of bodies, systems, populations; public health and governance; the material culture of scientific medicine; the emergence of diagnostic categories and pharmacologies; the role of biostatistics. This course is located on the intersection of science studies and anthro-pological approaches to biomedicine.
Art and Art Professions
Postcolonial Practices in Studio Art - E90.0051
Exploration of post-colonial theories of identity, representation, & culture as they are expressed in contemporary art. Students will meet regularly with visiting African painters, sculptors, & designers in intimate workshop settings for lectures, critiques, & demonstrations. The class will include field trips to galleries as well as artists’ residences & studios in urban & rural settings.
Art History
North American Indian Arts - V43.0570
Professor Corbin
Major traditions in painting, sculpture, and architecture of the native peoples of North America, Mexico, Central America, and Andean South America. Material from pre-contact times through the 20th century. Deals with questions of theory and differences between indigenous and Western world views; the relationship of the arts to shamanism, priesthoods, guardian spirits, deities, and beliefs regarding fauna and flora; and the impact of European contact on indigenous arts and civilization.
Art and Public Policy
The Media of Displacement: Postcolonial Culture - H48.1055
We are here because you were there” has become a common slogan for postcolonial diasporas in the metropolitan “centers” of the West. With the growing numbers of immigrants and refugees from the Middle East/North Africa in cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, and Sao Paulo, the construction of “us” versus “them” can no longer correspond to one geography, simplistically imagined as “over there.” This seminar will study questions of displacement as represented, mediated and narrated in diverse cultural realms, especially cinema, media, visual culture and writing. How such texts have confronted exclusionary and essentialist discourses with a rich cultural production that foregrounds a complex understanding of such issues as “home,” “homeland,” “exile,” “hybridity” and “minorities.” We will look at the past few decades of artistic work within the larger context of post-independence and globalization politics. We will mainly look examine the ways films/videos, novels, memoirs, and visual work have represented dislocations that have come in the wake of colonial partitions, and of regional, ethnic and religious conflicts; as well as into the ways they challenge traditional genres about immigration, transcending the neat divisions among the social documentary, the ethnographic media, the experimental autobiography, and the fictional narrative. We will also examine these texts in relation to contemporary cyber diasporic practices, problematizing especially such issues as “nostalgia” and “return” in the context of new communication technologies.
Seminar in Arts Activism
Professor Karen Finley
This seminar will focus on developing our work, theory, and art into a realized production. Each student will start with presenting his or her ideas and goals of creating a public project. This may take the form of public art, exhibition, performance, narrative but bringing it to a goal of actualizing the work out of the school student world. But the class is more than just bringing the art into the public light. We will scrutinize and examine intent and where to bring a production. Media, reviews, current events, intent, audience, controversy, economics, politics and other issues and challenges that is vital to a successful professional life. These connections and awareness of the outside world out of school will be a reality check of all the responsibilities of participating in culture.
The class is interested in original and dynamic thought, provoking associative thinking and awareness. The class is designed to transform and consider challenging your process and opinion. You are encouraged to bring awareness of different approaches to create new and borrowed strategies in cultural activism. The class is considered process oriented and the professor is encouraging conceptual principles. Process is encouraging original thought over guaranteed knowns.
Urban Ensemble - H48.1100, H48.2100
Chris Chan Robertson
This course affords opportunities to learn how to teach in community-based arts settings. Class meetings will be devoted to expanding students' knowledge of teaching methods; exploring techniques and strategies for working with people in diverse situations; reading about and discussing selected collaborative and community projects; and brainstorming responses to challenges that arise at the internships. Emphasis is give to interdisciplinary tools-the combined use of photography, theatre, video, dance, and writing-although one form is usually prominent in a given situation. Guest lectures will be given by artists working with theater, photography, storytelling, and video.
In addition to a weekly class session, students participate once or twice a week in an arts-based internship with a community-based artist or organization. Internships are available in all disciplines with opportunities for students to lead their own groups or assist a practicing artist in the field. Sites include an after-school program for kids at a housing project, institutions that use the arts for healing, an arts for literacy project, programs dedicated to self- growth and community building, and local NYC public schools. A once a week internship for 10 weeks is required for 2 credits. To receive more than 2 credits, a more intensive internship must be arranged.
The Media of Displacement: Postcolonial Culture - H48.2055
Professor Ella Shohat
“We are here because you were there” has become a common slogan for postcolonial diasporas in the metropolitan “centers” of the West. With the growing numbers of immigrants and refugees from the Middle East/North Africa in cities such as London, Paris, Berlin, New York, Los Angeles, Montreal, and Sao Paulo, the construction of “us” versus “them” can no longer correspond to one geography, simplistically imagined as “over there.” This seminar will study questions of displacement as represented, mediated and narrated in diverse cultural realms, especially cinema, media, visual culture and writing. How such texts have confronted exclusionary and essentialist discourses with a rich cultural production that foregrounds a complex understanding of such issues as “home,” “homeland,” “exile,” “hybridity” and “minorities.” We will look at the past few decades of artistic work within the larger context of post-independence and globalization politics. We will mainly examine the ways films/videos, novels, memoirs, and visual work have represented dislocations that have come in the wake of colonial partitions, and of regional, ethnic and religious conflicts; as well as into the ways they challenge traditional genres about immigration, transcending the neat divisions among the social documentary, the ethnographic media, the experimental autobiography, and the fictional narrative. We will also examine these texts in relation to contemporary cyber diasporic practices, problematizing especially such issues as “nostalgia” and “return” in the context of new communication technologies.
Cinema Studies
Documentary Traditions - H72.1400
Professor George Stoney
Examines documentary principles, methods, and styles. Considers both the function and significance of the documentary in the social setting and the ethics of the documentary.
Cultural Theory and the Documentary - H72.2001
Professor Jonathan Kahana
This class applies forms of anthropological, historical, gender, and cultural studies theory to a range of genres: countercolonial, cinema verité, direct cinema, ethnographic, instructional, historical, and auteurist documentaries. It is designed for cinema studies graduate students interested in documentary film or working toward the Ph.D. exam in cultural theory and/or history of the documentary and for students in the M.A. Certificate Program in Culture and Media.
Community Learning (Wagner)
Cultural Mapping for Social Change - K45.1422
Professor Martinez
Where do forces of gentrification intersect with grassroots efforts to preserve the cultural identity of a marginalized community? This course explores how to use Geographic Information Systems (GIS), a powerful application in mapping technology, as a tool for cultural documentation, community engagement, and public policy analysis. We will analyze how changing demographics and market forces are redefining the cultural landscape and boundaries of ethnic communities in New York. We will explore the effectiveness of GIS as a mapping tool to help reclaim cultural identity, uncover historical patterns of segregation and displacement, and empower community members to become informed citizens in the decision-making process. Specific skills we’ll learn include how to geocode addresses, do a spatial analysis, and use census data to map the racial and income composition of New York neighborhoods.
Shifting Focus: Video Production and Community - K45.1445
Professor Read
From the taping of the police beating of Rodney King to the burgeoning growth of Independent Media Centers around the world, video has become an essential tool of social struggle. This course will be a hands-on class in video production in the service of progressive social change. Class time will be used to: examine the biases of corporate-controlled media; learn the theory and history of video activism; develop basic camera and editing skills; and reflect on lessons learned in the field. Outside of class students will break into groups and collaborate with local community organizations in the conception and production of a short video piece, and subsequently strategize with those organizations about how to most effectively use video in their particular struggles. Readings will include selections from Noam Chomsky, Robert McChesney and Thomas Harding.
Comparative Literature
Special Topics In Theory: Difference & Totality - G29.2610
Professor Mikh Iampolski
Cross-listed: G29.2610, G65.2609
Drama
Theatre Genres: Postcolonial Theatre - H28.0732
Awam Amkapa
Institute for Fine Arts
Environmental Effects on the Preservation of Cultural Property
Professor Baer
The course incorporates two integrated components. In the first, a study is made of the environmental agents causing physical and chemical changes in cultural property. Included are the separate and joint actions of heat, humidity, light, pollutant gases, and biological agents. The mechanisms of degradation and possible mitigative strategies are investigated. The second focus of the course is the decision-making process in collections management, including assessment and management of risk associated with museum display, traveling exhibitions, adaptive reuse of historic structures and cultural tourism at archaeological and historic sites. Legal and ethical questions such as those associated with the restitution of cultural property and the preservation of Native American sites are considered. An oral report accompanied by an outline, a bibliography and an extended abstract are required. Students must have the permission of the instructor before registering for this course.
Collecting and Displaying as Art History: The Case of Latin America - G43.2534
Professors Sullivan and Basilio
Many of the current intellectual directions of research into the history of modern and contemporary (as well as earlier) Latin American art have been determined or influenced by patterns of collecting, museum display, and curatorial practice. This seemingly anomalous phenomenon is examined in this colloquium in which individual case studies are analyzed for the ways they have both reflected and shaped aesthetic taste and academic discourse. Students work in small groups on projects involving the history of museum collecting; analysis of major exhibitions from c. 1908 to the present and the socio-economic ramifications of major private collections of Latin American art.Students must have the permission of the instructors before registering for this course.
English
Source Of The Hudson: Landscape, Theory, History - G41.2958
Professor Lytle D Shaw
Environmental Studies
Environment and Society -- V36.0101
Professor Rademacher
Film Studies
Topics in Film and Literature: Romanticism and Cinema: Werner Herzog - H72.0386
Professor Richard Sieburth
The “ecstatic” (as he calls it) cinema of Werner Herzog will provide the visual—and existential—occasion to re-examine some of the major themes and tropes of (German) romanticism: Genius and Society, Madness and Vision, Children of Nature, Landscapes of the Sublime, the Author and his Doubles, War and Trauma, Irony and its Discontents, All Art Aspiring to the Condition of Music, etc. In addition to viewing a substantial selection of Herzog’s full-length feature films and “documentaries,” we will read relevant texts by Burke, Goethe, Hölderlin, Achim von Armin, Kleist, Büchner, etc. Enrollment limited to 40, with preference given to majors in Comparative Literature, German, and Cinema Studies
Film and Television
Storytelling Strategies - H56.0020
Storytelling Strategies is an introduction to models of dramatic structure spanning over a thousand years. The course, part lecture and part screenwriting workshop, is designed to acquaint the student with universal principles of storytelling and to provide them with a common vocabulary of dramatic terms, which can be built on and refined in subsequent classes. Choosing a story from a collection of classic myths, fairy tales, and personal stories, students will write and re-write their choice in the recitation section of the class.
Traditions in Narrative
Professor Antonio Monda
This course surveys narrative forms and representative works from literature that employ them—contributing to a familiarity with the literary tradition inherited by film, television, and radio. It examines the various strategies of narrative structure and its principal components (e.g., plot, theme, character, imagery, symbolism, point of view) with an attempt to connect these with contemporary forms of media expression. The course includes extensive readings, selected from English, American, and world literature, which are examined in discussion.
Food Studies
Food in the Arts: Performance - E33.1204
Professor Raviv
This course will examine the affinity between food and the idea of performance, and the use of food in live performance – mostly in theater and performance art. We will analyze specific performances to understand the relationship between food and art, and the many variations in the ways artists may incorporate food into their performances or be inspired by it. We will also explore briefly extreme cases of food as performance. The class will read performance texts, watch video documentation of live performances, and go to see performances and visit appropriate sites. The majority of discussions will revolve around the analysis of actual performances and artist’s work.
Food and Society - E33.1051
Professor Berg
History
Transnational Construction of Race -- G57.2008
Explores the social, cultural, and political meanings and consequences of racial constructions, with attention to such topics as law, sex, gender, science, and empire. Interrogates North American racial systems in transnational contexts.
People, Politics & Performance: Art and Ideas From Sergei Diaghilev to Edward Said - G57.2707, G42.2070, G29.2707
Professors Judt & Homans
Permission of instructor only.
This course engages two intersecting themes in modern intellectual and cultural history. The first theme concerns the use and problems of use of biography, autobiography and memoirs. The second concerns the challenge of relating political events and intellectual trends to the history of the performing arts. What can be said, for example, of the relationship between modernism in dance, expressionism in cinema and radical political dissent in public life? The answers are not always self-evident.
In this course we shall be investigating four chronologically consecutive moments of twentieth century intellectual and cultural history, loosely grouped around a national setting. The first ‘unit’ will address art and politics in a revolutionary age, in the context of France and Russia between 1910-1930, and looks at the life and works of Sergei Diaghilev and Victor Serge. The second topic, covering ‘the Englishness of England’, deals with English society, social thought and high culture in the era of Maynard Keynes and Frederick Ashton. The third topic addresses culture and politics during the Cold War and is centered around the work of Jerome Robbins on the one hand and the writings of Sidney Hook and Arthur Koestler on the other. The final segment in the course takes on the theme of exile and art, looking at the work of George Balanchine and Edward Said.
Course participants will read materials about the major figures in each of these four units, as well as excerpts from their own writings and background material. In addition we shall be watching documentaries and recordings of performances, and - depending on programming - seeing live performances as well.
Local And Community History - G57.1752
Students are introduced to theories and methods for studying localities and communities. Special emphasis is placed on new approaches to urban history and the development of communities in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Space & Power In American History - G57.2756
Professor Todd Needham
In 1989’s Postmodern Geographies, Edward Soja accused historians of ignoring space, of writing history as if it took place on the head of a pin. That accusation certainly would not hold today. Over the past twenty years, historians have combined their usual interest in change over time with a new focus on the transformation of space. This course will explore what some historians have called the spatial turn in American history. It will combine theoretical readings by spatial theorists including Soja, David Harvey, Henry Lefebvre, and Jurgen Habermaas, with recent historical writing that places space at the center of its narrative and analysis. The course will emphasize the application of theory to the writing of historical narrative, the writing of work informed by theory that retains the centrality of the narrative form to argument and analysis.
The course will be split into two segments. The first eight weeks will familiarize students with various theories of space and historians’ application of those theories. The second section will be a writing workshop in which students develop and write a research paper. Assignments for the course will include weekly commentaries, one class presentation, and the research paper.
Interactive Telecommunications
Social Facts: Trust - H79.2518
Professor Clay Shirky
The world abounds with social facts, things which are true because society has decided to behave as if they are true. If you were to turn to a fellow student and say 'I do' or 'I sentence you to 5 years in prison', your listener would not become your spouse, nor be hustled off to Rikers. Nothing happens during a wedding or a sentencing hearing; those events are just special forms of talking. Yet talking, in those circumstances, creates real change in the world. There are two nested effects here -- the inner one is the conditions under which speech becomes action, and the outer one is the ways we give groups the power to enforce those actions. Social Facts is an exploration of things that are true because we all agree they are true, and of what difference our media networks make in the construction and use of those facts. The class is centered around weekly readings and class discussions of primary materials, some historical, some current, revolving around three questions: How do social facts become part of group life? What particular social facts are necessary to let members of a group trust or transact with one another? How do mediated communications change how we deal with trust and transactions?
Interdisciplinary Research Studies
Historical Research - E10.2135
Professor Jona Zimmerman
Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry - E10.2140
Professor Lisa Stulberg
Interview and Observation - E10.2142
Professor Niobe Way
Participatory Action Research - E10.2143
Professor Gary Anderson
Journalism
Journalism and Society: Minorities in the Media --V18.0702/V54.0016
Professor Newkirk
Latin Amer-Caribbean Studies
Beginning Quechua and Intermediate Quechua - G10.0011
Language Lecturer Odi Gonzales
Topics: Hauntings: Memory, Patrimony And The Contested Past In Contemporary Post-Violence Spaces In Spain And Spanish America - G10.2590
Professors Joseph Labanyi and Thomas Abercrombie
The course will be taught in English, but a good reading knowledge of Spanish is required. Students interested in registering for the course should contact both Profs. Abercrombie and Labanyi, providing a brief statement explaining how the course fits in with their interests and/or research projects. Since there is a cap on the number of students we can accept, we will select those students who we feel will best benefit from and contribute to the course, bearing in mind the distribution across disciplines (students from departments other than those where the course is cross-listed are welcome, numbers permitting).
The course examines how memory relates to history and politics, developing a concept of history that goes beyond the empirical, taking into account subjectivity, affect, and the afterlife of the past in the present. A central theme is the relation of memory to citizen action and sovereignty, through notions of political and social engagement based on patrimony, inheritance and generational transmission. The concept of transindividual personhood (filiative, social, corporate, and juridical) will be explored throughout. Central to the course will be a critique of liberal modernity’s view of emancipation as a rupture with the past and neo-liberal late modernity’s compulsory obsolescence, both of which discredit memory as reactionary or, at best, irrelevant. A key issue will be the role of memory in democratizing societies with a violent past, recognizing that memories can be divisive as well as reparative, and are always subject to contestation. We will be concerned with social memory as a transindividual phenomenon, and with historical memory as the expression of demands for justice. A particular interest will be the role of (often enforced) forgetting in creating phantoms which return to demand reparation. This course bridges the disciplines of ethnography and urban history (Abercrombie) and textual criticism and cultural studies (Labanyi). The course will assume that interdisciplinarity does not mean ironing out disciplinary differences, but working through the productive tensions between them. Students will be encouraged to reflect on these differences, by being exposed to unfamiliar materials, methodologies, and reading, while sharing with their fellow students their respective disciplinary strengths. The course will bring together case studies from Spanish America and Spain, rarely done beyond the colonial period. The materials studied will include commemorative events, folkloric performances, reenactments, museums, monuments, legislation, political and historical debates, citizen groups, web sites, testimonies, film, fiction, photography, comics, video games. We will be concerned particularly with the role of narrative in giving form to concepts of transindividual and transgenerational personhood; other expressive modes to be explored are embodiment, visuality and materiality. Of considerable importance to the course will be understanding the relationship between performance and patrimony, between embodied surrogation of the dead—their embedding in living persons—and the embedding of memory in materiality—in architectural spaces, landscapes and objects.
Memory And Violence In Spain And Latin America - G10.3100
Media, Culture, and Communication
Introduction to Human Communication and Culture - E59.0005
Theories of communication: fundamentals of spoken communication with projects in discussion, speaking, reading, & dialogue; oral & nonverbal factors; principles & practice in listening; interpersonal & group interaction
Communication and Cultural Contexts - 59.1400
Examines the theories & evidence of cultural & political transformations underway in the era of media proliferation, multinational conglomerates, & cyberspace. The course will pay particular attention to the international flows of media & cultural products & examine their impact on local & national differences.
Intercultural Communication - 59.1735
Consideration is given to verbal & nonverbal communication processes in United States culture as compared & contrasted with other interacting cultures; stereotypes resulting from differences in communications’ & intervention strategies designed to strengthen effective intercultural communication
Museum Studies
Topics in Museum Studies: Museums and Indigenous Peoples - G49.3330
Professor Stampe
This course examines changing relationships between indigenous peoples and museums as well as other display institutions. We will begin by positioning the representation of indigenous peoples in terms of imperialist and nationalist histories, and to move on to an examination of movements to reclaim objects, identity, and rights through efforts at self-representation. We will consider both independent and cooperative self-representation projects, focusing particularly on cases in the Americas and the Pacific, but taking on other geographic regions as student interests and available materials allow; we will attend to both the possibilities and limits of projects to reorganize practices, products, and expectations of representation. Topics will include globalization, multiculturalism, and nationalism; colonial-era display in museums and world's fairs; the critique of primitivism; decolonizing methodologies; self-determination, land claims, and economic development; repatriation and intangible cultural heritage; and contemporary art and public culture. Assignments will include weekly reading assignments, group and independent museum visits, a critical exhibition review, and a final paper or planning project.
Topics in Museum Studies: Cultural Property, Rights and Museums - G49.3330
Professor Geismar
What does it mean to own or have a culture? Are all cultures the same? Is owning your culture a basic human right? This course will investigate the growing discussions about cultural property rights that have emerged in the context of museum practices, from collection and display to conservation and archiving. A general analysis of concepts of culture, property, and rights related to these materials and social domains, will be offset by sessions that examine how different understanding of entitlements may be negotiated within museum spaces and how museum objects (broadly defined) may be understood as cultural resources. Special focus will be the impact of legislation; political events such as war; indigenous rights movements; international conceptions of intellectual and cultural property; and the commodity transaction and the marketplace, and on their impact on museum practice.
Topics in Museum Studies: Museums and Political Conflict - G49.3330
Professor Feldman
In contemporary Museum Studies, it is often said that museums are inherently political institutions. But how do politics actually happen in museums? What has "politics" meant for key exhibitions and collections and what avenues of political theory emerge from the museum in general? In this seminar, we will move beyond the general to examine how specific political concepts took shape in historic exhibitions and museum practices from the 1930s to the present. As such, our challenge will be twofold. On the one hand, we will consider how political movements have used the museums as an implement for advancing power and influence. On the other hand, we will consider how museum practices have "taken up" various kinds of politics: how museum objects and officials have engaged and advocated the agendas and outcomes of political parties, governments, policies, revolutions, and elections. Case studies will include: Degenerate Art (1937), Paris World Exhibition (1937), Rivera's "Man at the Crossroads" (1934), The Guggenheim Museum (1959), Yad Vashem (1965), Harlem on my Mind (1969), The Perfect Moment (1990), The Last Act (1994), The Jewish Museum of Bologna(1998), Sensation (1999), The Apartheid Museum (2001), Holocaust Cartoons (2006), among others. Through these case studies, students will examine the museum's role in the public sphere and the process whereby exhibitions contribute to -- or undermined -- key aspects of deliberative democracy.
Historic Houses, Cultural Landscapes And The Politics Of Preservation - G49.2223
Professor Jeffery Trash
This course will examine the cultural politics that influence reuse of historic spaces for museums and other public purposes. Through course readings, site visits and individual archival research, students will explore sites ranging from historic houses and period rooms presented as museum installations to restored villages and communities to dramatic reuse of historic space for cultural tourism. Students will pay particular attention to the social and political contexts in which original use and subsequent reuse took place, and analyze primary documents that illustrate both motivations and strategies for interpretation.
Performance Studies
Tourist Productions - H42.1041
Professor Pegi Vail
A booming multinational industry, tourism is a powerful medium of transnational encounter. There is hardly a place on earth not part of the recreational geography of tourism. This course will undertake a performance analysis of tourist productions, especially early and contemporary travelogues. The political economy and cultural impact of tourism will be explored through an ethnographic examination of actual sites, incorporating segments of the tourism industry ranging from backpackers to luxury travelers. An exemplary case of cultural invention and commodification, tourism is implicated in the histories of pilgrimage, travel, colonialism, and ethnography, retracing their itineraries and replicating their discourse. Particular emphasis will thus be placed on travel stories, from word-of-mouth tales to those circulating in print and media, and their role in shaping experience and destination perspectives.
Subcultural Performance - H42.2122
Professor Tavia Nyong'o
What is this “sub” in subcultural? How does it interact with other cognate terms of socio-spatial specificity, terms like underground, underworld, demi-monde, bohemia, and scene? This course will look at performance styles and formations construed as subcultural, as well as at the performativity of “subculture” as a category of cultural analysis. Tracing contemporary fascinations with the urban margins back to the eighteenth century, the course will consider social epistemologies of coded and decoded behavior, slumming and passing, jargon, cant, and slang. Of key interest will be the critical turn in subcultures and post-subcultures studies since the 1970s, a turn towards questions of fashion, style, and youth culture as sites of resistance and resignification. Also considered will be queer, feminist, and minority subcultural analyses. Throughout, an attention to how subculture is performed -- particularly through music and other vivid arts like graffiti, body modification, postering, zines, dress and social dance/movement -- will be emphasized.
Intercultural Performance: Ways Of Seeing - H42.2860
Professor Karen Shimakawa
This course will examine the concept of "interculturalism" in terms of audience and performer: how do we see or perform across cultures? And what is the efficacy of the term (or genre) in the current, transnational economy? Using Japanese contemporary performance and dance as our jumping-off point (some of which might conventionally be seen as "intercultural," some of which might not) we will consider theories of (culturally-embedded) watching, alongside theories of interculturalism and transnationalism. What does it mean to conceive of the "intercultural" (either as a performance genre or mode of seeing)?
Course requirements: reading and weekly Blackboard postings; 1-2 book report/bibliographic exercises; final research paper.
Memory, Trauma, and Performance - H42.2216
Professor Diana Taylor
Cross-listed with the Spanish and Portuguese Depts.
This course explores the interconnections between trauma, memory, and performance through two major 20th c. events, the Holocaust and Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ and the theoretical questions they raise. Do they each have their own unique structure and idiom, or can we think about individual and collective trauma through a translocal, cosmopolitan lens? Topics include: the performance of state power and state sponsored terror; the individual and collective nature of trauma; the study of embodied practices such as testimony and witnessing; the construction of archives of testimony; testimony, its use in literature, museums, and pedagogy, its the dramatizations by others, its archivization; the social role of sites of memory (Auschwitz, Club Atlético, etc.); theaters of justice such as trials, tribunals and truth commissions; performances of protest and resistance.
This course draws from classic and recent readings at the juncture of trauma, memory, and performance studies. To build on the paradigms suggested by the Holocaust and Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ students will be encouraged to extend the topics explored in class to other sites—slavery, the Gulag, Hiroshima, 9/11, TRC, Tlatelolco, etc.
Verbal Art as Performance: The Performed Story in Culture And Society - H42.0340
Professor Kay Turner
In his The Law of Genre, Derrida says, " as soon as genre announces itself, one must respect a norm, one must not cross a line of demarcation, one must not risk impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity." But just as quickly, he announces the impossibility of the law of genre because every genre contains the seeds of its own contamination. Both of Derrida's claims are useful for studying the performed story. For once we've learned something of generic distinctions, we'll proceed happily to generic impurities. Contagion spreads from storyteller to storyteller in acts of performing narrative.
Anthropology and folklore- based collections of myths, folktales, fairy tales, and legends provide resources for our discussion of the ways in which different types of stories and the context of their telling shape peoples’ identities and world views. We discover ways in which important social concerns--among them gender construction, sexuality, marriage, family, status, ethnicity, and religious belief--are raised and appraised through the occasion of traditional storytelling performances. We review "old-school" resources for interpreting elements of performance in stories, including structuralism and oral-formulaic theory. But we soon move on to the "new school" impurities of post-structuralist and performance studies understandings of the storyteller's art as it has been reformulated in personal experience narrative, testimony, journalism and in other media: film, theater, performance art, and so on. Story is the jewel of performance; performance is largely about the necessity of telling stories and the motivation to perform is often story-based.
A portion of this course is field-based: students will be assigned a collecting project and short transcription, and we also attend at least one story performance. Reading, two short papers and class participation round out requirements. Readings include all or selections from, Derrida, "The Law of Genre," Benjamin, "The Storyteller;" Levi-Strauss, "Elementary Structures of Kinship;" Roman Jakobson, "Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics;" Brothers Grimm, "Household Tales;" Julie Cruikshank, "Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters and Social Imagination;" Richard Bauman, "Verbal Art as Performance;" Patricia Sawin, "Performance at the Nexus of Gender, Power, and Desire.
Photography and Imaging
Directed Projects: Narrative and Identity - H82.1030
Professor Wafaa Bilal
The pictorial narrative is one of the oldest forms of expression, from the cave painting to graffiti to today's new media and virtual platforms. These visual narratives demonstrate the timeless human exploration of identity or a positioning of ones-self in the world.
This course will employ pictorial narrative through still images, moving images, and new media to cultivate stories of political, personal, and artistic identity. The course will also address issues that often appear such as gender, national, and racial identity. Students will explore the history, philosophy, and theory of narrative in relation to identity.
This is a multi-level studio course where problem-solving is encouraged, with an emphasis on developing conceptual creative practices and strategies to convey identity through narrative.
Community Collaboration - H82.1220
Professor Lorie Novak
COMMUNITY COLLABORATIONS is a Photography & Imaging and Art and Public Policy Course where the NYU students collaborate with teens in Lower Manhattan to create photo stories about their lives. Working in teams of two or three, the NYU students co-facilitate small workshops with teens from the Lower East Side Girls Club, East Side Community High School, and Norman Thomas High School. Digital cameras will be provided for the teens to photograph their families, friends, and communities to create photographic essays exploring their day-to-day lives, dreams, concerns, and social-political challenges. During the course time for NYU students, focus will be on workshop development, discussion of challenges, collaboration and supervision from the instructor. There will also be guest speakers and visits to other community-based art programs. Each group will create an online exhibition that will be added to the Community Collaborations website: http://photoandimaging.net/coco.
Groups with the teens meet two afternoons a week in addition to the course time. When you plan your schedule, make sure you have a minimum of two afternoons a week free from 3:30-6. (Saturdays may also a possibility.) Once you have a sense of your schedule, please email lorie.novak@nyu.edu.
Politics of Portrature - H95.0826
Professor Donna Cameron
This course explores the pictorial articulation of individual human likeness and its fiction in the public forum. The art of portraiture has survived its own origins in myth making and archetype building. The human image, or icon, forever landmarks the voices, textures, physicality, spirituality, symbols, politics, aesthetic concerns and military contexts, religious rituals, government, calendar ceremonies, daily functions, heroic acts and social disorders of diverse cultures throughout recorded history. It is the history of creation, the story of romance, the mark of progress, the record of royalty and the profile of democracy. It is the revolution of fine art and a catalyst of discipline. Imaging the individual in the public eye is the story of humankind. This course bridges the worlds of the oral and written mythologies which inhabit and empower us and the creative manifestation (conscious and unconscious) of these ancient archetypes into contemporary art, media and design. Students will critically rethink the implied and material presence of portraiture in everyday life. Students will gain practical knowledge and insight into the origins and potential power of the archetypes which permeate our collective unconscious.
Politics
Power and Politics in America -- V53.0300
This course has two aims. First, it is a survey of political institutions and behavior in the United States focusing primarily at the national level, which aims to demonstrate the connection between the guiding principles of the American Constitution and the role of politics and government in contemporary American life. Second, it introduces students to a variety of analytical concepts and approaches to the study of domestic politics.
Minority Representation in American Politics --V53.0380
Offered every year.
Explores whether and how racial and ethnic minorities are able to organize effectively and press their demands through the American political system. Specifically, focuses on the political behavior of minority citizens, the relative strength and effect of these groups at the polls and in political office, the theory and practice of group formation as it applies to minority groups, the responsiveness of elected officials, and the legal and constitutional obstacles and instruments that provide context and shape these phenomena.
Wealth, Power, and Status: Inequity in Society - V93.0137
Offered every year.
Sociological overview of the causes and consequences of social inequality. Topics include the concepts, theories, and measures of inequality; race, gender, and other caste systems; social mobility and social change; institutional supports for stratification, including family, schooling, and work; political power and the role of elites; and comparative patterns of inequality, including capitalist, socialist, and postsocialist societies.
Inequality: Social Stratification in a Changing World -- V93.9137
Professor Rulikova
Seminar: Authoritarian Regimes & Reversal - G53.3501
Professor Kancha Chandra
Performance Studies
Verbal Art as Performance: Performance Story in Culture
Professor Turner
Professional Development
Cultural Diversity in Business - Y10.0501
Professor Tansey
Examines the dynamics of a multicultural society and its impact on the world of business. The nature of intercultural relations and commonly shared perceptions of various cultures are studied. Students learn the advantages and challenges of interacting in multicultural contexts through historical research, role-playing, and simulation.
Spirituality in the Workplace - Y26.2251
Professor Merson
This course will look at the trends that have led to an interest in spirituality in the workplace, and will explore its definition separate from religion. We will analyze the application of spirituality in organizations on four levels: individual, group, organizational and societal. Topics covered will be work and individual meaning, leadership and spirituality, spirituality and innovation, and systemic approaches to creating enlightened organizations.
Social and Cultural Analysis
Concepts in Social and Cultural Analysis --V18.0001
Offered every semester.
A gateway to all majors offered by SCA. Focuses on the core concepts that intersect the constituent programs of SCA: Africana Studies, American Studies, Asian/Pacific/ American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Latino Studies, and Metropolitan Studies. Surveys basic approaches to a range of significant analytical concepts (for example, property, work, technology, nature, popular culture, consumption, knowledge), each one considered within a two-week unit.
Research Methods in Metropolitan Studies -- V18.0651
Open to juniors and seniors only.
This course explores the theory and practice of methods commonly used in social and cultural approaches to metropolitan research. Through investigating a variety of methods and applying them to a multiplicity of sites we will consider not only how urban research is conducted, but also how particular methods produce different kinds of knowledges. We begin from the premise that there is no single or universal ‘truth’ of the city and that its reality is the product of contesting practices. Thus rather than identifying one method that fits all, we develop a comparative perspective, considering how particular methods inform research from the beginning as well as effecting conclusions that can be drawn at the end: or, as stated otherwise by David Harvey, “The language of any question has an awkward habit of containing the elements of its own response.” Each method will have advantages and disadvantages. The purpose of the course is to assist you in determining which method best suits the research question you choose to investigate. An important goal of the course is to work individually and collaboratively to produce a multiplicity of site-generated knowledges that facilitate informed praxis.
Transnational Politics of Love, Intimacy & Family -- V18.0481-003
Over the past decade, political campaigns for same-sex marriage, lesbian and gay parenthood, transgender rights and recognition of diverse family bonds have achieved astonishing gains and unleashed inflammatory passions in many parts of the world. This seminar will examine some of these conflicts over radically different conceptions of love, intimacy and family. We will explore the contributions of different regimes of gender, sexuality, race, economy and national interests to recent transformations and struggles over intimacy in three distinct political contexts--the United States, South Africa and among an unusual ethnic minority culture (the Mosuo) in southwestern China. The U.S. and South Africa present almost opposite legal and social responses to same-sex marriage and polygamy. The unique, ancient Mosuo matrilineal family system separated love and sexuality from domesticity and traditionally did not include marriage, After surviving coercive Cultural Revolution campaigns to impose marriage, the Mosuo have turned their family system into a lucrative tourist attraction.
Students will design individual or group research projects that explore conflicts over the changing meaning and value of marriage, parenthood, family or intimacy among members of diverse social and racial groups and sexualities in the US, South Africa, and/or China, or in another society about which a student already has sufficient background. Students will present their research projects during the final sessions of the course.
Community Empowerment -- V18.0613
Professor Brettschneider.
Offered every spring.
Empowerment is defined as those processes, mechanisms, strategies, and tactics through which people, as well as organizations and communities, gain mastery over their lives. It is personal as well as institutional and organizational. Addresses these issues in a wide variety of community settings. Designed to be challenging and rewarding to those students interested in helping people work together to improve their lives.
Cultural Politics of Food -- V18.0380
Everyone eats, but we all have different tastes. How is food a form of cultural expression and cultural practice? Why do certain foods gain notoriety while others are forbidden or deemed inedible? How is "taste" constructed and transformed over time, and how does it differ across communities? This course examines food as a site of social formation and cultural production and consumption. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will explore the ways in which gender, class, ethnicity, and cultural difference intersect in food.
Dangerous & Intermingled: Subaltern New York -- V18.0380.004
Permission of instructor (via email) and prior research experience required
Same as Gallatin K20-1480.001.
In the world of moralists, intermingled New York has and still represents the epitome of danger and evil about the American experiment-the public intermixture of classes, genders, races, sexualities, spiritualisms, and devil knows what else!#? As elite Protestants created a refined European-affected "high brow" culture, they also created their "other"-a transgressive, lowly city of shadows, miscegenation, and impurity. The docks, the Bowery, the Five Points, Greenwich Village, LES/Loisaida, Chinatown, and Harlem were all forged against the repressed imaginings of the powerful and distinguished. This people's Gotham, this disdained intertwined underworld of music, slang, jokes, songs, stories, foodways, and marvels of people, from different cultures and subcultures seeing, touching, smelling, tasting, speaking/listening, and living amongst each other will be the focus of this advanced research seminar. Prior original research experience required.
Urban Environmentalism -- V18.0631
Professor MacBride
This course examines some of the many environmental issues facing people living in cities and towns around the world. It focuses on the practical, everyday realities of these issues, why they exist, and what can and should be done to change them. It uses these particularities to consider larger questions about the relationship between human society and the natural world in the urban context. Employing the analytic tools of sociology, the course grapples with ideas from economics, political science, philosophy, geography, and natural science to develop a theoretical framework for understanding environmental issues facing cities today.
Spanish
Topics: Performance and Human Rights in Latin America -- V95.0550
Professor Lane
Wagner
Oceania Vs. King Kong's New York: Decolonizing Pacific Worlds - K20.1547
Jack Tchen & Susana Lei’ataua
Two Credits, seven week beginning March 11 2009
Why the utter lack of awareness in New York City of the Pacific? - of our own collecting, literary representations, missionary work, and “manifest destiny” expansionism systemically imagined and formulated in America’s Pacific? How is environmental justice foundational to Oceanic worldviews and our global futures? We will reformulate this historical absence of presence. Help us deconstruct King Kong on the Empire State Building and other New York City-generated representations and formations of scholarly, museological, and pop culture about Pacific places, peoples, goods and ideas! We’re adapting the formulation of Atlantic Worlds to understand the Pacific; what Fijian philosopher Epeli Hau’ofa calls “Oceania, a sea of islands.” Sessions, on and off campus, will include Herman Melville’s port culture novels, the Lincoln Center’s restaging of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘South Pacific’ based on James Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book that was written in New York City; Margaret Mead and the American Museum of Natural History; Michael Rockefeller and the wing named in his memory at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Pacific Missions to the United Nations; Pacificana kitsch – from tiki lounges to Halloween hula costumes. Working with indigenous-grounded epistemologies and the Pacific renaissance of cultural, linguistic, artistic and scholarly studies offers invaluable counterpoints to critically unpack the production of an imagined Pacific and global environmental policies.
Poets in Protest: Footsteps to Hip Hop - K20.1072
Professor Dinwiddie
This seminar examines the tradition of poetic protest in the African Diaspora. From the Harlem Renaissance and Négritude to the Black Liberation Movement of the 60’s and today’s Hip-Hop/Rap explosion, poets, lyricists and rap/hip-hop artists have sought to reclaim and reshape images of themselves and their communal experiences. Through comparative and critical analysis of historical works, songs, and poetry, we will come to a deeper understanding of the common thematic and aesthetic approaches of these movements as they continue to alter the discourse on race and liberation. Texts may include Michael Richardson, ed., Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean; David L. Lewis, ed., The Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader; Tricia Rose, Black Noise; films such as Euzhan Palcy, Sugar Cane Alley, and Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant, Style Wars; and samples from Langston Hughes, NWA, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, KRS-One, OutKast, Dead Prez, Public Enemy, and Tupac Shakur.
Writing Seminar II: Truth or Fiction? Memory and Storytelling -- K10.0634
Professor Greenberg
How do we shape the stories we tell ourselves about our lives? And, conversely, how do the stories we tell ourselves about our lives shape us? At the interface of what lies on the printed page and what lies within individual memory lies a process of interpretation and manipulation—the process of writing. This course will explore how memories are “written” in order to help students sharpen their own critical writing. The process of writing a series of papers over the course of the semester will serve as background for the final research paper. Readings and film will include Plato, Kurosawa, Sigmund Freud, Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, and Italo Calvino.
Writing Seminar II: Coming Home: Contemporary Narratives of Return -- K10.0652
Professor Lemberg
The enormous and often violent upheavals of the twentieth century have led to massive shifts in human populations through immigration and displacement, experiences that have come to be central to man contemporary narratives. In particular, the theme of returning to places from which one’s family or ethnic group originated has emerged as an important topic in recent literature and theory. In this course, contemporary depictions of going home in the aftermath of personal upheavals and major historical events will serve as the impetus for the development of critical reading, writing, and research skills. Through exploratory writing and formal assignments culminating in a research paper, we will interrogate the notion of “home” and consider the possible meanings of return. Our close readings and essays will consider how the concept of home encompasses spaces known briefly or well, deeply familiar or merely imagined, and how our understanding of home reflects our ideas about personal and collective identities. We will read essays, memoir, and fiction by authors who may include Erdrich, Hoffman, Kogawa, Naipaul, Offutt, Satrapi, and Silko, among others.
Philosophy of Medicine: An Interdisciplinary Approach -- K20.1294
Models of health and healing dramatically shape medical research and medical practice. Depending on which medical model you use, you create radically different solutions for key questions like: What is disease? What is health? What is the role of healthcare? What is the core knowledge base for healthcare? And what is the best way to pursue medical inquiry? In addition, medical models also shape the way the broader culture understands bodies, race, age, gender, sex, sexuality, desire, death, disability, biotechnology, and care of the self. In this class, we introduce students to the world of medicine through fictional and documentary portrayals of illness. We consider several medical model approaches to illness, suffering, and bodies. Plus, we use a range of interdisciplinary scholarship for context and reflection. Topics covered include philosophy of medicine, phenomenology and existentialism, psychoanalytic theories of loss, Buddhist philosophy, narrative theory, sociology of medicine, gender studies, and disability studies.
Open to gallatin students only. formerly titled “medical science and philosophical inquiry” (course is not repeatable).
A Sense of Place -- K20.1181
Professor Hutkins
This course examines the places in which we work, travel, play, and dwell—the office tower and the suburban house, the city street and the superhighway, the small town and the megalopolis, the shopping mall and the theme park. Synthesizing insights from several fields, including cultural geography, urban studies, and architectural history, we explore such questions as: How do our values and worldview affect the way we experience places? How do places shape our attitudes and behavior? What are the qualities, both good and bad, of the places we inhabit, and what could we do to design and build better places? Readings may include J. B. Jackson’s A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time, James Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere, Yi-Fu Tuan’s Space and Place, and Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
Language, Globalization, and the Self -- K20.1342
Professor Loeb
This course is intended as an exploration of language as vehicle for processes of globalization. What role did language play in the changes wrought by early capitalist transformations and the colonial expansion? Conversely, how have these global changes affected localized communities and the languages that identifies them? And why should we care? To answer these questions we will examine how the colonial experience has given rise to value-laden linguistic practices that mirror and sustain the racializing of privilege; and how the experience of language-loss encountered by voluntary and involuntary migrants can attack the integrity of the self. While ultimately concerned with language, our discussions will have a wide scope ranging from issues of political economy to collective consciousness and individual psychology. Readings will include Achino-Loeb’s Silence: The Currency of Power, Anderson’s Imagined Communities, Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History, Hoffman’s Lost in Translation, Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions, Rodriguez’s Hunger of Memory, as well as selected excerpts from Appiah”s In My Father’s House and Appadurai’s Modernity at Large
Consuming the Caribbean -- K20.1482
Professor Polyne
Paradise or plantation? Spring break, honeymoon, or narcotics way station? First World host or IMF delinquent? Where do we locate the Caribbean? From Columbus’ journals to Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, the Caribbean has been buried beneath the sedimentation of imagery by and large cultivated by non-Caribbeans, including colonial governments, settlers, international tradesmen, tourist agents and their clients. Caribbean peoples have had to re-member the islands which they eventually called home—haunted by a history of slavery and still a site of consumption and exploitation. A unifying trope, Caribbean landscapes function as metaphor, emblem, symbol, or even character. This course takes an interdisciplinary (history, literature, anthropology and sociology) and transnational approach by examining the themes of race, freedom, gender, tourism and consumption in the Caribbean. As a conglomeration of nationalities, languages, and cultures, what are the connections between the historical legacy of slavery, European colonialism and migration to the Caribbean’s current realities of inequality? Some of the texts we will engage are Mimi Sheller’s Consuming the Caribbean, Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, and Denise Brennan’s What’s Love Got to Do With It: Transnational Desires and Sex Tourism in the Dominican Republic.
Hemispheric Imaginings: Race and Ideology - K20.1503
Pforessor Polyne
In September 2006, Hugo Chávez’s address at the United Nations con- demned U.S. imperialism and militarism. Reminiscent of Fidel Castro’s fiery speech in front of the UN General Assembly in 1960, Chávez stated that there is a movement of the south to save the planet from the imperialist threat. What is this southern movement and its history? Who are its participants? This course examines U.S. and Caribbean/ South American relations through the lens of Pan-Americanism, a political ideology that celebrates the equality and interdependence of Western hemispheric nation-states. Traditionally, scholars have understood it to be a tool of U.S. imperialism. This course provides students with the opportunity to consider the multiple imaginings, meanings, and uses of Pan-Americanism and its historical formulations (e.g., Monroe Doctrine) by U.S. and non-U.S. foreign policymakers, intellectuals, and institutions such as the Pan- American Union (OAS). Through primary document analysis and secondary sources, students further assess the sig- nificance of race, nation, and hemispheric relations in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Place and Memory: A Usable Past - K20.1537
Professor Amato
By exploring a variety of source materials, including museums, memoirs, historic sites, material artifacts, and documentary evidence, we will begin to consider the ways in which our uses of the past have contemporary social and political impact. Today in the Fatih district of Istanbul, the 15th century Roma (gypsy) neighborhood of Sulukule is under threat of demolition as the city begins the process of urban renewal and gentrification. Meanwhile, in Nottinghamshire, England, the Workhouse Museum documents and interprets the brutality of the 19th century British “welfare system” within the dreary walls of an actual, landmarked workhouse. Such conflicting projects prompt us to ask: How do we choose to destroy certain places while preserving – or recreating – others, and what are the consequences of making these choices? What are the ethical problems we face when we save or demolish historic sites, and how are they tied to questions of individual, community, and national identity? These questions derive from political discourse that imagines how nationhood is created and sustained, as well as historical and anthropological inquiry, which so often attempts to locate the “truth” of the past. Texts will include selections from Van Wyck Brooks, Orhan Pamuk, David Thelen and Roy Rosenzweig, Susan Slyomovics, and Christopher Mele.
Writing your Ancestry - K30.1336
This workshop will give students the opportunity to practice elements of creative nonfiction through a multi-faceted approach to writing on ancestry and cultural heritage. The main goal will be a written exploration of the self to consider wider issues of history, community, identity, place, and family. The major assignments will be structured around various tasks: a personal essay will help to define themes and set scenes in the present; memoir writing will involve mining your memories of family to identify possible leads into the past; a reported piece will entail interviews of family members, archival research, and/or a visit to an ancestral site. These essays will be developed gradually with the help of shorter at-home assignments and in-class exercises on style, structure, and strategy. Revision will be built into the process, and we will read each other's work and give supportive feedback throughout the semester. Likely authors to be read and discussed for inspiration will include Ian Frazier, Honor Moore, Lawrence Weschler, Sarah Vowell, Bliss Broyard, Brenda Lin, Tara Bray Smith, and D.J. Waldie
Oral History, Cultural Identity, and the Arts - K40.1045
Professor Sloan
Oral History is a complex process in the creation of artistic projects across the disciplines: documentary film, theatre, book arts, exhibitions, web art, public radio, etc. This course offers training in interviewing and editing techniques, and looks at the impact of "truth-telling" on the people we interview, their families and friends, ourselves and the culture at large. Research explores the balance in accurately reflecting the realities and integrity of the people represented while staying true to the vision of the artist/creator and addresses some of the following questions: Who has a right to a story? How do we represent people with different experiences than our own? What are the nuances in understanding needed for representing people in our own culture and identity or those from a different cultural or class background? Readings include (but are not limited to): Greg Halpern's Harvard Works Because We Do; Art Spiegelman's Maus I & II; Ira Berlin, et.al (eds) Remembering Slavery; Warren Lehrer and Judith Sloan's Crossing the BLVD; Jim Fricke and Charlie Ahearn's Oral History of Hip-Hop's First Decade Yes Yes Y'all; as well as works by Studs Terkel, Anna Deveare-Smith, and articles and theory on oral history as a field of study. Guest lectures by filmmakers, book artists, theatre artists as well as viewing of films and listening to public radio projects will be included in the weekly class sessions. For final projects students create collaborative or solo work in the discipline of their own training; theatre, artist books, photography, poetry, music, radio, audio art, film or video.
Fire and Blood: Art-Making, Culture and Mythology of Mexico - K40.1431
Professor Arrendondo
A rich landscape of art and culture flourished in Mexico for thousands of years beginning with the Olmec civilization at around the second millennium before Christ. With the arrival of the Spaniards in 1519, a new hybrid culture resulted from the fusion of two different worlds, the Iberian and the Native American: a fusion which continues to exist and grow to the present day. This interdisciplinary workshop will closely examine the art, culture and mythology of Mexico, both before and after the conquest, and combine our study of it with hands on art making. The course will begin with a brief overview of the major Mexican muralists, Rivera, Orozco, and Siquieros, and American artists who were influenced by them such as Guston, O’keefe, and Pollock. It will then move chronologically from the Olmec culture occurring 4,000 years ago; Teotihuacan, or the City of the Gods; the Toltecs of Tula, from which emerged Quetzalcoatl the “Feathered Serpent”, a figure that inspired art for centuries; the hyper-religious Aztecs; the large and complex Mayan culture; and lastly, the new hybrid art formed by the synthesis of Spanish and Native American cultures. Topics to be covered will include: astrology/astronomy; religion and shamanism; mythology; and human sacrifice. Museum trips, slide shows, videos, and the reading of rare texts such as the Popul Vuh will also be scheduled.
Artist/Ethnographer Expeditions: Rediscovering NYC Cultures - K80.2048
Professor Talmor
Open to qualified undergraduates with the permission of the M.A. Program Advisor, Sharon Friedman (sf2@nyu.edu).
It is said of anthropology that one studies the other in order to understand the self. In this seminar/workshop, we will explore the zone where art and anthropology meet. Art, film, writing and other students who wish to learn how to conduct fieldwork in NY and how to create projects in their chosen medium based on this research are welcome. Media include oral history writing, photography, music, video, web design, and multimedia. The course is roughly divided into 3 parts: 1) Conceptualizations: Through the work of artist-ethnographers such as Richard Fung, Coco Fusco, Jean Rouch and others, we will explore the possibilities and conceptualize class projects. 2) Fieldwork and Method: excerpts from key texts in anthropology and related disciplines will provide a crash course in fieldwork methods while students conduct fieldwork and gather material in their community of choice. 3) Representations: Experimental ethnography, art and other work will serve as examples of poss ible representations. Meanwhile students will put together their final projects, presenting and discussing their progress in class.
