Course listings and room numbers subject to change. For the most up-to-date course listings, visit CUNY's course listings: Show
DYNAMIC COURSE SCHEDULE In some cases, MALS core courses will be cross-listed with other programs. Students who would like to have these courses satisfy the core course requirement for their chosen concentration must register for the MALS course number. Please keep this in mind as you register. Click to Open MALS Core Courses Africana Studies
American Studies
Approaches to Modernity
The Archaeology of the Classical, Late Antique, and Islamic Worlds
Childhood and Youth Studies
Fashion Studies
Film Studies
Genocide, Mass Violence, and Crimes Against Humanity
Global Early Modern Studies
International Studies
Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies
Law and Society
Literary Translation
New York Studies
Social and Environmental Justice Studies
Urban Education
Western Intellectual Traditions
Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Click to Open Full MALS Course Catalog All courses are 30 hours plus conferences, 3 credits, unless otherwise noted. MALS students may also take courses in other programs.
Current and Upcoming Course SchedulesClick to Open Spring 2023 MALS 70000 Seminar in Interdisciplinary Studies, 3 credits This seminar will introduce students to a range of methods, theories and concepts in humanistic scholarship and public debate. The seminar will focus on questions of cultural ownership and identity, in particular in contexts of cultural contact in both past and present times. Historians of the premodern world increasingly acknowledge the hybridity of cultures and critique stable and homogeneous notions of cultural identity and authenticity. They disaggregate conventional concepts such as ‘the West’, ‘Europe’, the ‘Middle East’ or ‘Asia’ and construct new, emphatically hybrid spaces such as the Mediterranean as analytical alternatives. Recent scholarship has shed light on the transmission of knowledge across cultures, on shared cultural traditions across linguistic, religious and political borders, and on individuals who embodied this hybridity. In contemporary public debates, on the other hand, concerns are frequently voiced about cultural ownership, representation and authenticity, especially about cultural appropriation. Many of these contributions, academic, academic public-facing and public, are animated by similar efforts to challenge hegemonic concepts and narratives of cultural identity and ownership. In this seminar, we will explore key concepts, theories and approaches in this field, using the example of the Arabian Nights. A literary tradition with roots in India and Persia, the Arabian Nights in its preserved written form dates back to ninth-century Iraq. The text evolved over centuries in Arabic and assumed a global dimension after its translation into French in early eighteenth-century Paris. The translator, Antoine Galland, combined stories preserved in an Arabic manuscript with material presented to him orally by Hanna Diyab, a Syrian traveler. Subsequent to the French translation, Arabic manuscripts reproduced the Arabian Nights in more extensive versions, responding to the interest of Orientalists. The global spread of the Arabian Nights stories is accompanied by a rich tradition of illustrations and adaptations on screen and stage. As the seminar explores the various examples of the evolution of the Arabian Nights corpus, we will be discussing concepts such as canon, world literature and Orientalism, and ask throughout the semester how concepts of cultural ownership and authenticity can be applied to this global literary tradition and how, conversely, the example of the Arabian Nights complicates these concepts. In addition to a selection of Arabian Nights stories and scholarship, we will be considering illustrations, literary adaptations, and cinematic representations such as the 1992 and 2019 Disney versions of Aladdin. MALS 70100 Narratives of New York: Literature and the Visual Arts, 3 credits New York City is considered a global epicenter with a million and one stories that contribute to its history. In this seminar, we will explore the seldom-told narrative of Hip Hop culture. We will survey this musical and cultural art form from its birth in 1973, to its ascension in becoming global popular culture. In 2023, Hip Hop culture will turn 50 years old; thus, it is a good time to think about Hip Hop culture’s music and influence not only on the five boroughs, but also on the globe over the past half century. This exploration will require us to think about a 50-year time frame: from the late 1960s (thinking about the socio-cultural and political landscape that led to Hip Hop’s birth) through the 1970s and 1980s (thinking about Hip Hop’s origins as sub-/counterculture) and into 2010 (when we see Hip Hop culture explode in popularity at the turn of the century, solidifying its position as global popular culture). We will use a series of books, readings, movies and documentaries, as well as other visual, sonic and artistic contributions to make sense of how “the Hip Hop Sounds” came to life and rose to prominence from the Bronx, NY and into the global zeitgeist. Students will participate in weekly online discussion forums, written and audio reflections to various readings. The final course project asks students to synthesize the depth of cultural richness explored during the semester. MALS 70500 Consent: Medieval Legacies from Europe and the Islamic Worlds in Comparative Perspective, 3 credits With the #MeToo movement and the introduction of new Title IX regulations at US institutions of higher education, the definition of consent in sexual encounters has become the subject of public controversy. Activists, legal scholars, university administrators and other participants in these debates discuss the conditions of voluntary affirmation and its expression, personal autonomy and responsibility, and the multiple ways in which imbalances of power shape relationships. At the center of many of these debates are the conventions of binary gender roles which assign a passive position to women and which validate pursuit and persuasion on the part of men. Just how much ideals of sexual encounters and gender relations prevalent in the medieval west have shaped these conventions, whether empirically or in the public imagination, is obvious in modern representations such as Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel (2021). At the same time, a comparison of responses to the #MeToo movement across the globe, even within the west, reveals very different attitudes to concepts and principles of consent. Muslim feminists, scholars and activists have engaged Islamic legal and ethical traditions in order to promote their values and principles of sexual autonomy. In the proposed course, we will explore case studies from both western Europe and the Middle East during the premodern period in which consent in sexual encounters plays a significant role. We will be discussing these examples in two sets of comparative perspectives. On the one hand, we will discuss how historical authors thought of consent and the implications of a lack of consent in sexual encounters in comparison with the way that these issues are approached in present-day debates. On the other hand, by considering material from western Europe and the Islamic world, we will be identifying some of the cultural, social and legal variables which defined and reflected historical realities and maintain an impact on present-day discussions. Our sources will be documentary and literary, legal, religious, historical and poetic. We will be discussing the larger philosophical, legal, cultural and social categories which shaped representations of consent and disagreements surrounding it. Aspects for consideration include the importance of domestic slavery in the Islamic world as well as economic rights of women in both cultural spheres. Apart from familiarizing themselves with a variety of sources from diverse areas of premodern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, students will be encouraged to reflect on the significance of these sources for modern debates. We expect to consider a balance of western and Middle Eastern material. This course does not require any prior knowledge of medieval history or Middle Eastern studies. MALS 70800 Transformations of Modernity, 1914-present, 3 credits The twentieth century was a time of contradictions. Science revolutionized our understanding of the world, and the universe. Industrial manufacturing promised unlimited plenty. The evolution of mass politics seemed the dawn of greater equality and freedom. New art forms began to expand consciousness in previously unimagined ways. There was renewed belief in the ability to achieve a utopian transformation of society. Reality proved very different. New ideologies - Communism, Fascism, Nazism - won the fanatical support of millions. Two World Wars, massacres and genocide revealed the dark and malevolent passions that continued to rule many. Although peace and prosperity had begun to be achieved after mid-century, this has since become threatened again. A Chinese industrial revolution is creating an uncertain economic future for the world. Russian aggression against Ukraine threatens war on a level unknown since 1945. As the hopes and sorrows of the past continue to inform our world today, where we have been, and where we are going can be better understood through MALS 70800 Transformations of Modernity,1914-present. MALS 72000 Thesis Writing Course, 3 credits If you would like to sign up for the thesis writing course, permission of the department is required. To express your interest in taking this course, please fill in this form This course assists students in making significant progress with their thesis and capstone projects through weekly reading and writing activities. Students will research and write their thesis/capstone projects throughout the semester, sharing substantial sections of their work with the class on at least two occasions. All participants will also provide weekly feedback on their classmates’ work in written and oral formats. These highly practical, hands-on workshop sessions will be framed with discussions of writing practices, disciplinary conventions, and practicalities, such as working with your advisor and the depositing process. MALS 72200 Contemporary Feminist Theories, 3 credits This fully online synchronous course explores Contemporary Feminist Theories through feminist work about racial, economic and sexual justice, and in terms of “bodies with gender.” We investigate what it means to “have” gender and to “be female” with a focus on the United States. Making use of the frame offered by Patricia Ticineto Clough’s book, Feminist Thought, we consider contemporary feminist theories on differences and similarities in the experiences of women and other gendered bodies across lines of race, class, sexuality, species and ability. We examine how gender defines human experiences and how feminists resist these definitions. Sigmund Freud once called work and love the central arenas of human life. We examine contemporary feminist thought on what it means to have gender in love and to be gendered at work; on the representation of women and gender in the larger culture; and about violence in the lives of gendered bodies particularly queer bodies, those of color, and those gendered female. We make use of a variety of texts in exploring feminist thinking on race; the “nature” of gender, love and sexuality; so-called women’s work; the expectations “experts” have of diversely gendered bodies; (dis)ability; nonhumans; and the representation of gender in the mass media. MALS 72800 Topics in Environmental Social Science: Social, Cultural and Environmental Theories of Space and Place, 3 credits This seminar focuses on the production, social reproduction, and unequal distribution, of environmental benefits and burdens. It traces theoretical lineages in the social sciences and applies them to the study of environmental problems. Students read classic social theory as well as contemporary scholarship in environmental social science with a focus on how human societies understand, respond to, and produce environmental injustices. Substantive content includes theories and practices of political ecology, environmental and climate justice, and the production of nature across the disparate geographies of north and south and at several scales. MALS 73100 American Culture and Values, 3 credits What is American studies and what does it do? Perhaps as importantly, how might American studies inform your interests and projects? To answer the first question, our course will consider the histories, theories, and practices of American studies as an academic discipline. We will especially contemplate concepts thinking through racial capitalism, enslavement, and empire. We’ll consider a range of texts that represent major fields and topics within American Studies, including Asian American studies, Black marxism, gender and queer theory, Africana studies, native/indigenous studies, and abolition geography (among others). To press our scholarly inquiries into dramatic directions, we’ll contemplate Black cultural expressions by Octavia Butler, Billie Holiday, Paul Robeson, and James Baldwin. We will apply our learning in part by asking how our readings and conversations challenge received political wisdoms in the present. We’ll further mine the contradictions of past crises both for how they anticipate our current moment, and for how their anomalous elements could provoke speculative knowledge that unform assumptions about the U.S. nation(s), its culture(s), and its values. Our class projects will be flexible enough to coincide with different student interests, tracks, and projects. Students will read from the “Keywords” project in American Cultural Studies by New York University Press, and write one of their own. They will read some event reviews from American Quarterly, and compose one. They will also digest conference papers and write an abstract based on their interests and projects. Students will leave the class with writing and notes that catalyze their studies and tracks with the questions and methods of American studies, and thus hopefully take a new set of ideas, questions, and concerns to propel their creativity and time in Liberal Studies at the Graduate Center. MALS 73500 Africana Studies - Global Perspectives Existence in Black, 3 credits This course examines problems of existence and freedom posed by black life. We will explore how the racialization of people of African descent through the means of violence and oppression translates into an existential predicament addressing the human confrontation with hope and hopelessness, freedom and human degradation, being and non-being. We will discuss the existentialist implications, challenges and possibilities of blackness in Africana literature, film and music. How do cultural expressions of black people simultaneously engage being acted upon by the external forces of enslavement and racism, while acting against those forces? Through critical analyses of music, film, fiction, and contemporary events, this class will generate theoretical interventions embedded in the poetics and politics of (self) representation, freedom, and social constructions of black existence. MALS 73700 Special Topics in Genocide, Mass Violence, and Crimes against Humanity: As the subtitle suggests, this course will deal with the popular memory of wars and atrocities in a comparative frame – starting with the First World War and the Armenian genocide, and going on to look at such events as the Second World War and the Holocaust, the violencia in Colombia, the Algerian war, and the present war in Ukraine. A key premise of the course is that memory of the past, especially of violence, tends to be closely connected to ideas about sexuality and gender, and that popular memory tends to reflect this pre-occupation: for example, the famous postwar German film The Marriage of Maria Braun deals with the memory of Nazism through the love life and ambition of its female protagonist; the film The Battle of Algiers focuses in particular on young Algerian women who are able to plant bombs in French establishments because they can so easily evade checkpoint scrutiny by flirting with French soldiers. This course, then, will deal with the popular memory of traumatic violent events by looking at the ways in which the memory has been recorded and coded: in poetry, novels, films, and music, as well as in historiographic literature. MALS 74000 Special Topics in Translation Studies: Literary Translation, 3 credits The field of translation studies has grown exponentially over the last few decades generating active debates among translators, scholars, and publishers throughout the world. This course will introduce students to certain vital aspects of the discipline and its intersection with other fields including various national literatures and area studies, linguistics, sociology, philosophy, and others. The course will focus on a specific topic related to the practice of literary translation including the history and theory of translation, linguistic approaches to translation, intermedial adaptation, the politics of world literature, and other emergent areas of scholarship in translation studies. MALS 74500 Great Digs: The Archaeology of Late Antiquity and Early Byzantium, 3 credits An introduction to the archaeology of the era c. 300-650 CE, referred to interchangeably as Late Antiquity, or the Late Roman or Early Byzantine periods, in the Eastern Roman Empire, also called the Byzantine Empire, focusing on urban sites in modern-day Turkey, the ancient Asia Minor or Anatolia, and the new imperial capital of Constantinople, the modern Istanbul. This course draws upon the first-hand expertise of your professor, a Byzantine archaeologist and historian who has worked at numerous late Roman and Byzantine sites, and who from 1994-2009 served as the assistant director of the excavations of the important Byzantine city of Amorium in Turkey. After first surveying the modern history of the field, students are introduced to archaeological methods of survey, excavation, site recording, and the interpretation of archaeological evidence, as well as the preparation of archaeological publications. The rest of the course is focuses on key sites, identifying questions and issues in late antique and early Byzantine urban archaeology, exploring how cities and urban life changed between the 4th and 7th centuries. Weekly topics include: the new imperial capital of Constantinople; the evolution of the late antique city; city walls; streets, public space, and civic ceremony; ecclesiastical, monastic and pilgrimage archaeology; palaces and palatine archaeology; elite residences and housing; baths, bathing culture, and water supply; the archaeology of ports, trade and economy; funerary archaeology and the Justinianic Plague. MALS 74700 Special Topics in Global Early Modern Studies: Topics in Material History -- Early Modern Objects and Material Culture Methods, 3 credits This class will explore methods for working with surviving early modern objects as historical sources. Students from all disciplines with an interest in the early modern period are welcome. We will examine a variety of objects, which will include textiles, illuminated manuscripts (and their bindings), prints, polychrome sculpture, paintings, ceramics, and other functional and decorative objects. Students will work directly with surviving objects as much as possible. Most class meetings will take place off-campus at museums, libraries, and private art galleries around Manhattan. The class will focus on objects made in and for the Iberian world; students are welcome to develop projects based on objects from other cultures. Readings will include key texts in material culture theory and methods as well as case-studies and other models of scholarly writings that use objects as evidence. One highlight of the semester will be a class meeting with a curator of the exhibit “Juan de Pareja: An Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 77200 Film Histories & Historiography: Does the digital era mark, for better or worse, an end or the beginning of an end to a certain form of cinema history (naturally, a lament filmed in 35mm)? This course will consider what pressure the digital puts on the concept of cinema in its history. We will examine, for instance, changes at the level of production, distribution, exhibition, and critique. All of these dynamics are enmeshed with questions of globalization, national cinema, and technological access. Who, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, would have envisaged companies like Netflix, Amazon, and Apple becoming the largest production providers in film history? Rather than indulge in the joys of technological determinism, the course will follow a series of case studies delving the dialectical impress of digital and cinema that has profound implications for both. Think, for instance, of the economies of scale achievable with digital, such that a contemporary iPhone ad can trumpet how one can shoot 4K cinema with a smartphone (admittedly, smartphone cinema is long-standing—Khalili’s Olive, shot on a Nokia N8 [Nokia!!] was released in 2011). The wonder of antinomy in digital cinema is that anyone can now make a movie with decent production values, but the value of production is principally held by the aforementioned trillion-dollar oligopolists. At the level of aesthetics (a significant schism between film and digital), we will investigate the ways in which vfx and cgi mediate meaning, affect, and the bottom line (all of which changes the content and style of moviemaking). What is the art of acting in green screen? You may not be ready for your closeup in UHD, but beauty is in the eye of post-production (much more than cosmetic surgery). What is an actor, digitally (some of this course is a sequel to my course on cyborgs)? How many digital subscriptions make a Cinema Collection (apologies to Criterion)? Despite the hegemony of mega-corporations over digital, it has proved a boon to local and regional cinematic production. What happens to Third World Cinema in the age of digital? Is state cinema the appropriate arbiter of autonomy in the Global South? Is new cinema not just digital but provocatively non-Western? The course will also take up the thorny question of what constitutes a cinema experience. Are VR goggles just Imax on your head? Does it matter if home theater is a theater or not? Surely watching on a Pixel is cinema, too? And Fortnite is more social than Fortress. Is it ok to be watched, watching? And, if digital means that cinema is becoming everywhere, does that mean it is becoming, in its own way, nowhere? Each week a movie will be assigned alongside one or more of the kinds of questions hinted at above. There will also be associated readings drawn both from histories (like McKernan’s Digital Cinema, Willis, Hassan/Thomas, etc.) and from theoretical interventions (Baudrillard, Deleuze, Elsaesser/Hagener, Manovich, Trinh). MALS 77300 Film Theories and Films of Childhood, 3 credits Film Theories provides students with a survey of theoretical writings on film, ranging from “classical” to contemporary texts, concerned with the aesthetic, social, cultural, political, and psychological aspects of the cinematic, audio-visual medium. Of primary concern will be questions about the structure and function of cinematic and televisual media, the nature of audio-visual representations, their relationship to other art forms, and theories of spectatorship, especially as these questions are raised by the various schools of thought, including feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, phenomenology, Marxism, narratology, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. Students will focus on the analysis of primary theoretical texts in relation to weekly screenings. This course will provide a strong introduction into many areas of debate in film theory. We will spend the first five weeks covering foundational theoretical texts, and then we will take a deeper dive into four areas of film theory: narrative theory, race and ethnicity in film, gender and sexuality in film, and non-fiction film. Our screenings will focus on children or adolescents. These include films such as The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), Little Fugitive (1953), Where Is the Friend's House (1987), Tomboy (2011), and the Up Series of documentaries. These films span the history of motion pictures as well as a few different national contexts and distinct perspectives: filmmakers from all around the world and from the medium’s birth have captured childhood on screen. We will read these films with and through our theoretical texts, testing and challenging their arguments about what films are, what they do in the world, and how they create meaning for their makers and audiences. The majority of our readings will come from the most recent edition of Corrigan and White's Critical Visions in Film Theory: Classic and Contemporary Readings. MALS 78100 Issues in Urban Education, 3 credits This course will examine some contemporary issues in Urban Education through the lens of advocacy and activism. We will explore historical, sociological, philosophical and political roots of contemporary educational problems. We will gain deeper understanding of the ways education policy shapes practice in American public schools through a combination of field experiences and scholarly reflection. We will critically examine approaches to school reform and explore potentially emancipatory alternatives. Together, we will investigate how policymakers, teachers, parents and students can negotiate inequities and work to create more just and inclusive schools. MALS 78500 Race and the Geopolitics of Fashion, 3 credits Fashion is a multi-billion-dollar global industry. Often when we study fashion, we focus on the clothes, the trends, and the big-named designers. We pay less attention to the economics of the industry, or how that money matrix connects to domestic and international politics. In this course, we will hold both things in tension, exploring how the clothes we wear everyday are an extension of the geopolitical systems that bolster the fashion industry. We will ask questions about why certain designers become household names while others do not, the role of social media, how fashion supply chains function, and debates about ethical fashion. The course will center on the African continent, examining its vibrant fashion scene, which has undergone many geopolitical shifts in the past two decades. We will compare and contrast Africa with fashion markets in Asia and Europe. Ultimately, we will confront the ways in which racial capitalism has always been deeply entangled with our own desires, personal style, and taste cultures. MALS 78500 Economics for Everyone, 3 credits This may, or it may not be, your first economics course, but it can reasonably be your last. “Economics for Everyone” is specially designed to meet the needs of students in all disciplines and walks of life who may have had only limited exposure to economics. You will learn the fundamental vocabulary and grammar of a subject central to many public policy debates—the big issues ranging from globalization to climate change, from inequality to unemployment—but also the smaller concerns central to everyday life, like why does my cappuccino cost so much? Upon completion of this course you will have the skills and knowledge to be a more informed and engaged citizen. Our study of the subject moves through three themes. The first examines the method and scope of economics, introducing some fundamental principles, and by appealing to some important historical examples illustrates how the definition and methods of the subject have evolved. The second focuses on the “theory of value,” the micro-economics of perfectly competitive markets to illustrate the efficiency of markets and how economists think about the role of public policy when markets “fail.” The third theme introduces national income accounting and macroeconomics, the revolution in thinking in the aftermath of the Great Depression of the 1930s, and how this remains useful in understanding both the Great Recession of the last decade and the COVID pandemic. Along the way you will be introduced to some of the great thinkers and writers who have contributed to the development of economics as a social science. MALS 78500 - Post-Colonial Perspectives: Classical Adaptations in the African and Hispanic Diasporas, 3 credits The literatures brought to new parts of the world by European colonizers did not lose their influence when the colonial period ended. Indeed, some of the most remarkable adaptations of Greek and Roman works can be traced to post-colonial eras in Africa and in the African and Hispanic Diasporas. In this course we will explore the unique experiences of post-colonial civilizations as different as those of Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, Barbados, St. Lucia, Peru, and the United States. What was the relationship of the post-colonial society to the colonizers? How is change accommodated? How did the liberation from colonizing powers affect divisions within the groups that made up the newly free nations? How were gender relations and concepts of gender affected? What new roles did the arts play in society? Readings will focus on dramatic adaptations of the Oedipus myth and the three Sophocles plays that grew out of it but will extend to other genres and works based on other classical material. They will include such works as Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame, dealing with ethnic tensions in Nigeria; Ali Salim’s The Comedy of Oedipus, which focuses on the cult of personality fostered by Gamel Abdel Nasser; The Island by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, written under apartheid in South Africa and set in a prison clearly modeled on the prison on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held; Derek Walcott’s Omeros, an exploration of race and culture in the Caribbean in the context of the Homeric poems; Lee Breuer and Bob Telson’s musical The Gospel at Colonus, which explores the Oedipus story in the context of African-American Christianity; Rita Dove’s The Darker Face of the Earth, which focuses on race and slavery in the ante-bellum US South; and plays by a variety of authors in the Hispanic diaspora: Puerto Rican playwright Cristina Pérez Díaz’s Western: A Play Starring Antigone and Her Brothers; Peruvian playwright José Watanabe’s Antígona, edited by Pérez Díaz (formerly a student at the Graduate Center); and the Greek trilogy of Chicano playwright Luis Alfaro. Click to Open Possible Electives This list is just a partial sample of courses; to view full course offerings, please visit the websites for the doctoral, master’s, and certificate programs at the Graduate Center. Please note that courses included in this list are subject to change; please contact the program or faculty members involved for additional details. ENGL 84200: Writing Of A Revolution: P.B. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley. In 1819, the year England arguably came closest to a revolution, P.B. Shelley wrote The Mask of Anarchy, an openly political poem that calls for non-violent resistance and civil disobedience in response to the infamous Peterloo massacre; The Cenci, a play in which extra-legal violence remains the only recourse against a brutally oppressive patriarchal theocracy, and where all attempts to escape the violent dynamic of oppressor and oppressed seem doomed to failure; and he completed the first three acts of Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama in which poetic language emerges as the only means to create a utopian opening in the “empty time” of history and its unending cycle of violent subjugation. Using these different poetic positionalities as entryways, this seminar will investigate P.B. Shelley’s poetry, prose, and drama as a series of attempts to envision the relationship between poetry and history in the wake of the failed French Revolution and the catastrophe of the Napoleonic wars. To guide our investigation, we will also consider the political prose and fiction of Shelley’s literary and philosophical heroes, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, written in response to the French Revolution in the 1790s, and his wife Mary Shelley’s revolutionary novel Frankenstein, first published in 1818. The course will include an opportunity to visit the Carl H. Pforzheimer Library of Shelley and his Circle at the New York Public Library, one of the foremost Shelley archives in the world, only a few stones’ throws away from the GC. Course Readings:
Additional primary and secondary readings will be available via the course e-reserve page. The work of Frantz Fanon has influenced Middle Eastern studies for two main reasons. First, Fanon was a participant in and theorist of the Algerian Revolution, and much of his later writing, including his most famous book, The Wretched of the Earth, focuses on Algeria. Second, Fanon’s essay “Algeria Unveiled” has been at the center of a number of debates—some of them productive, some less so—around gender, sexuality, and Islam. But more recently, Fanon’s first book, Black Skin, White Masks, has been central to the important move to consider race, racialization, and racism in/and the Middle East and North Africa. We will consider Fanon’s work from all three of these directions, as well as others related to the history, culture, and politics of the Middle East and North Africa. In this course, we will focus on Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, as well as Fanon’s other writings (including excerpts from A Dying Colonialism, Towards the African Revolution, and the recently published Alienation and Freedom), alongside a variety of classic and contemporary texts from and about the Middle East and North Africa. Our approach will be interdisciplinary, and texts will be drawn from literary and cultural studies, political theory, Africana studies, visual culture, gender studies, queer studies, anthropology, sociology, and social psychology. While we will consider the applicability of Fanon’s work to the field of Middle Eastern studies, particularly the complex question of race in the MENA region, we will also think about how his work challenges many aspects of the field—including the colonial division between “North Africa” and “Sub-Saharan Africa” (Fanon sarcastically described this as the European vision of “White Africa” and “Black Africa”), which continues to determine the political geographies of our disciplines today. HIST 72100/ PSC 71902: Comparative Revolutions: From 1688 to the Arab Spring 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 Revolutions of 1848, the Russian Revolution of 1917, and the Arab Spring. 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”? PHIL 77600: History of Western Philosophy of Art 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, Plotinus, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Tolstoy, and others. There are no prerequisites for the course. The course requirement is a final paper. Recommended reading: Noel Carroll, Classics in Western Philosophy of Art: Major Themes and Arguments (Hackett, 2022). PHIL 77700: Art and Morality This seminar examines a series of relationships between art and morality from a philosophical point of view. We will examine historical positions such as those of Plato, Augustine, Rousseau, Kant, Tolstoy, and Brecht, among others. We will consider the debate between defenders of the doctrine of artistic autonomy versus various forms of moralism. The nexus of art, emotion, and morality will be a recurring topic. Special attention will also be directed to the issue of art and learning – particularly ethical learning. In addition, time permitting, various topical issues will be addressed including pornography, cultural appropriation, racist humor, and the cancellation of artists. There are no course prerequisites. Grading will be based upon class participation and the final research paper. FRENCH 87400: Critical Refugee Studies: History and Law, Narrative, Testimonial, Film Why are we still in the midst of a global refugee crisis that now involves 80 million people? Such dislocations and displacements have occurred since the late 17th century, when the term “refugee” 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 or as stateless victims? What are the micro and macro socio-political and cultural contexts that contribute to a widespread refusal to welcome the stranger? This course in critical refugee studies will begin with history and jurisprudence, then focus on the development, successes - and failures - of the human rights regime, humanitarian law, and regional instruments. We will examine transnational North-South disparities as drivers of migration, and lastly, current ideological and nationalist trends that promote securitization, the closing of borders, and authoritarianism in the post 9/11 world. We will study particular cases: the Holocaust; the Palestinian nakbah; the Democratic Republic Congo as one of ten critical cases in Africa; the failures of Europe and the USA; and we will end with the present crises of the Ukrainian diaspora and the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Our approach will be interdisciplinary: critical studies in history, theory and law will combine with close readings of novels, memoirs/testimonials, and documentaries that represent/construct the figures of refugees, their double-voiced consciousness, along with the themes of (be)longing, remembering and return. This course is taught in English. Click to Open Fall 2022 MALS 70000 – Seminar in Interdisciplinary Studies All the World’s a Fair: Culture, Politics, Economics, Art, and Architecture at America’s World’s Fairs This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of World’s Fairs, starting with the early European Fairs and then primarily focusing on specific World’s Fairs and Expositions in the United States. While the Columbian Exposition of 1893 is undoubtedly the most famous of all of the American fairs, it was one of many; cities such as St. Louis and Buffalo held such fairs. Using the fairs, this course will introduce students to graduate-level research, reading, and writing. Students will learn how to write (and demonstrate competency) in different academic genres, including the book review, annotated bibliography, and seminar paper. They will also learn how to investigate and use archival materials and primary sources. Contributions to the course website, discussion forum, and/or other digital platforms will serve as venues where students can exchange their ideas and engage in a reflective, writing process.
Arts, Imperialism, and U.S. Cultural Policy, 1940–Present
This interdisciplinary course will explore New York City’s rise and role as the nation’s metropolis, examining several key themes in the city’s development. The syllabus does not offer a comprehensive historical and sociological survey of New York City. Rather, it draws together a collection of noteworthy explorations of the city’s past and present that open up some larger questions. For example, which people and forces have defined and shaped New York City? How, in turn, has the city itself shaped the social, spatial and cultural worlds of its inhabitants? How has New York been a site of political and economic struggle, and how have such struggles played out differently across different times and spaces? Where is the city headed, and what, if anything, do we want to do or say about that? Students will explore such questions by engaging with the work of historians, sociologists, geographers, and others. Through close reading, discussion, presentations, weekly writing and a longer research project, students will hone the skills, knowledge and critical approaches that will help them to succeed in their interdisciplinary graduate studies.
Cross listed with WSCP 81000 Globalizing the Enlightenment
This course will explore a wide range of significant intellectual, historical, scientific, political, religious, art historical, and creative works of the period as well as recent or contemporary texts considering the era. We will begin with Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France," De Tocqueville's "Democracy in America," Mary Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Women," and John Stuart Mills's "On Liberty." Turning to fiction, we will examine Jane Austen's "Emma," Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady," Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray," and Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice." The class will consider, as well, central poems of the British Romantic movement in the writing of Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth as well as the American writings of Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Other texts (or excerpts from texts) include Soren Kierkekgaard's "Fear and Trembling," Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Judgement," Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species," William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience," Karl Marx's "Capital," Olive Schreiner's "Women and Labour," W. E. B. Du Bois's "The Souls of Black Folk," Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams," Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution," E.P Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class," T.J. Clark's "The Painting of Modern Life: Paris and the Art of Manet and His Followers," Charles Rosen's "The Romantic Generation," and George Dangerfield's "The Strange Death of Liberal England." Class presentations, mid-term paper, and a final paper that may be adapted from the mid-term paper.
Cross listed with WSCP 81000 From labor politics, raced and gendered power struggles, the quest for selfhood, and urgent issues of globalization and sustainability, fashion is a major cultural force that shapes our contemporary world. At the same time, fashion’s history and aesthetics provide a fascinating cultural backdrop within which to examine issues of power, nation building, technology, and meaning making, especially in terms of the impact of modernity on concepts of self, body, and agency within the complex relations of symbols and exchange that make up the fashion system. Starting with a brief grounding in theories informing a conceptual approach to fashion and culture, we will explore the politics, technologies, and aesthetics of the fashion system and its histories, by closely reading foundational texts, case studies, and cultural analyses that engage fashion’s ever-changing landscape, especially as it inflects and is inflected by race, class, gender, and power. The course will explore attitudes toward the body as they vary by historical period. We will also consider the technologies of fashion, working through innovation’s impact on fashion’s design and making, from the use of ground up beetles to produce the rarest of reds, through to new developments in biodesign, which employ sea kelp to make fibers woven into clothes, or incorporate living organisms into the clothing’s design. The course will draw on writings from cultural studies, fashion studies, sociology, feminism, critical theory, media studies and communication scholarship. We will welcome guest speakers, and view and analyze media pertaining to the course themes and those dictated by students’ interests. The course will cover the works of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Thorsten Veblen, Pierre Bourdieu, Georg Simmel, Dick Hebdige, Caroline Evans, Judith Butler, and Deleuze, among others.
If you would like to sign up for the thesis writing course, permission of the department is required. To express your interest in taking this course, please fill in this form. This is a 3-credit course and it is not a substitute for MALS 79000. MALS 72000, Thesis Writing Course, is designed to provide students with the time, space, and tools needed to complete their thesis or capstone projects. This, of course, does not mean that students will be expected to complete an entire project in the span of a single semester, or even to complete anything that might resemble a complete first draft. Rather, this class is meant to get students into the practice of regularly writing, reading, and researching in order to make the process of completing the thesis/capstone project easier, perhaps even enjoyable. The course will be run like a writing workshop, with students sharing work every week and participating in class discussions. Assigned readings by authors such as Eric Hayot, bell hooks, Fred Moten and others will interrogate the nature of academic discourse and what it means to write in an academic setting. There will be shorter assignments due throughout the course of the semester.
In Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us Kate Bornstein writes, “The first question we usually ask new parents is: ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’” Bornstein recommends the response, “We don’t know; it hasn’t told us yet.” This course explores the ways in which gender and sexuality are pronounced, embodied, and negotiated within specific historical and cultural contexts. Through a close reading of interdisciplinary, foundational, and recent scholarship the class will examine and theorize the ways in which categories of gender and sexuality inform and shape our understanding of the world. Investigating the intersections and collisions of gender and sexuality with race, class, ability, nationality, ethnicity, and age, the class will consider societal and institutional systems of power, privilege, oppression, and marginalization. Course requirements include an oral presentation, two 4-6 page response papers, and a 15-20 page, staged researched essay.
This seminar is the first part of a three-course sequence introducing students to the multidisciplinary theoretical bases and substantive concerns of Environmental Social Science. Environmental Psychology grew out of a desire among scholars and practitioners to work across disciplines on real world problems of people and the environment. From the start, research was conducted in naturalistic settings and often with an applied orientation. CUNY’s program, which was founded in the late 1960s, has been interdisciplinary in orientation since its inception and, for that reason, we introduce the field within a larger context than psychology alone, hence the designation “Environmental Social Science”. The term is meant to embrace a wide field of study that addresses and seeks to understand the nature of the complex relationships between people and the physical environment. As such we will survey a range of disciplines that comprise the field.
Mode of Instruction: In-Person Cross listed with WSCP 81000 This class will examine American Studies through the lens of social, cultural, political and other kinds of institutions. We will begin by exploring what we mean when we say “institution.” We will think together about why this may be a productive lens for assessing and interrogating the world around us. What does it offer? And what might it elide? How do studies of institutions help expose the myriad ways that power functions in culture, society, and politics? How do institutions, themselves, shape these power relations? And how do different approaches to understanding institutions give us different sorts of answers? American Studies scholars have been asking these questions for decades. We will turn to their texts as sites for exploring them. We will put questions about inequality and how it operates at the core of our inquiry. Thus, we will ask how institutions help amplify and/or mitigate the often-crushing hierarchies that have been (and continue to be) based on racial, gender, sexual, national, and other forms of difference. The class will be organized thematically. Each week, we will take a specific institution or idea about institutions as our starting point. We will examine how scholars from different American Studies subfields have developed approaches for exploring each institution. The work we examine uses both creative and conventional scholarly tools to explore questions about life, infrastructure, health, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, transnationality, borders, architecture, foreign relations, language, politics, economics, literature, art, music, work, social movements, and more. Finally, we will discuss how these institutions may help offer us strategies for imagining new, and possibly better futures MALS 73400 – Africana Studies: Introduction Cross-listed with AFCP 70100
MALS Major Only/Department Permission Required
Cross listed with MSCP 80500 &ART 83000 Placed by many medieval maps at the center of the word, Jerusalem is a city triply sacred: to Jews as the capital of the kingdom of Judah and the location of the Temple until its destruction in 70 CE; to Christians as the city in which Jesus instituted the Eucharist, suffered, and was buried; and to Muslims as the site of the “farthest place of prayer,” al masjid al aqsa, visited by Mohammed on his night journey. Throughout the holy city and its environs, sites were marked with monuments to their spiritual significance that were in turn remodeled and re-interpreted over the centuries. The figural arts—painting, sculpture, textiles, metalwork, and the arts of the book—similarly played a role in configuring and reconfiguring this landscape of holiness. Jerusalem presents a remarkable series of case studies on the integration and diffusion of artistic and architectural models, the changing discourses around key monuments, the role of pilgrimage and relics, and interreligious competition through artistic patronage. Covering the period from the reign of Constantine (312–337) to the city’s conquest by the Ottomans (1516), the course will consider both the artistic production of Jerusalem itself and arts intended to reproduce the holiness of Jerusalem elsewhere.
Cross listed with GEMS 72100 & HIST 71000 Transculturation in the Atlantic world will be the focus of our study of encounters between Europeans and Africans, peoples of the Caribbean, and the Americas in texts from Portuguese, Spanish, Nahuatl, French and English authors. Topics to be discussed include political versus economic interpretations of the encounter, slavery, and colonization; the geography of empire; visual narration in Meso-American codices; the intersection of gender, class and race in the creation of mestizo cultures; monsters and cannibals in maps and ethnographic writing; the construction of race before race (the pseudo-science of the 18th and 19th centuries). All texts can be read in the original language and in English. Readings will be available on Blackboard. Readings will be from: The Asia of João de Barros; Columbus, Diario; We People Here: Nahuatl Accounts of the Conquest of Mexico; Hernán Cortés, The Second Letter; Las Casas, A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies; Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas; Sor Juana Inés de a Cruz, Response to the Very Eminent Sor Filotea de la Cruz; Montaigne, ‘On Cannibals,’ ‘On Coaches,’ Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil; Hakluyt, Voyages and Discoveries; Shakespeare, The Tempest. Theoretical and contextual frameworks include Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint; Herman Bennett, African Kings and Black Slaves; Nicolás Wey Gόmez, The Tropics of Empire; Diana Magaloni Kerpel, The Colors of the New World: Artists, Materials, and the Creation of the Florentine Codex; Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire; Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human; Kim Hall, Things of Darkness, Nicholas Jones, Staging Habla de Negros. There will be guest appearance by the authors of some of the works we will read including Herman Bennett, Amanda Wunder, Surekha Davies, among others.
Cross listed with FSCP 81000, THEA & ART HIST Cinema Aesthetics 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.
Many of the most treasured works in film history have been made in a studio environment, but what is a studio exactly? How does it work? Does the regular presence of hundreds of contracted actors, designers, editors, and directors under a single, centrally managed roof stimulate or discourage cinematic creativity (or maybe a little of both)? In this course, we will study the intersections of art and industrialism in a number of studios throughout the world across the last hundred years from Metro-Goldwyn Mayer and Paramount in the early twentieth century US, to UFA and Cinecitta in Fascist Europe to Toho and Shaw Brothers in midtwentieth century Asia to India’s Mehboob Studio and Nigeria’s Rok Studio in the recent, global past. Each of us will prepare an annotated bibliography and 15-to-20-minute presentation (to begin one week’s discussion of a specific film studio) and will end the semester with a 5000-word essay on a topic related to any aspect of global film history that sheds light on the influence—positive or negative—of the studio system of production. No prior knowledge of any of our weekly subjects is assumed, but curiosity is heartily encouraged.
This course provides an overview of major issues and controversies in the politics of urban education policy. Through a historical, sociological, and political analysis of educational problems, the course explores a variety of policy initiatives and reforms, including access, 21st century skills, curriculum and learning standards, standardized testing, educational partnerships, and school reform. Students will develop a deep understanding of the ways in which urban political realities impact experiences within schools.
This course introduces students to the problem of mass violence in different global contexts from roughly the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Through case studies we will focus on the origins, nature, and aftermath of colonial violence, genocide and ethnic cleansing, “permanent security,” the concept of “slow violence,” ecocide and environmental warfare, international law and human rights activism, and memory and restitution. Students will develop their reading, writing, and speaking skills and develop their own final project in a format of their choosing.
Cross listed with WSCP 81000 The Caribbean is a geographical and multilinguistic space where the blending of the Indigenous People of the Americas with more recent arrivals -- the colonial heritage (British, French, Dutch, Spanish) and the African and South Asian legacies -- created unique, hybridized and in short creolized societies. Marked by the doctrine of discovery, the genocide of indigenous people, settler colonialism, slavery and the making of the post-colonial state, the Caribbean challenges the dichotomy of local versus global. It is a place where foundational violence shifted the geography of reason. This course will provide an overview of the social, cultural, political, and economic history of the Caribbean from 1492 to the present. The course will combine a variety of disciplines such as anthropology, art, economics, literature, music and political sciences. It will emphasize transdisciplinary approaches to historical events and contemporary issues that have shaped the Caribbean as a way to reflect on racial capitalism, domination and freedom.
MALS 78500 Introduction to Literary Translation Studies 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.
In this course, we will examine how concepts of childhood and youth have changed over time, responding to historical and economic forces. We will explore the lives and experiences of a variety of children across time and geography, from enslaved children to child workers to children at play, from children regarded as sinners to children seen as angels. Although we’ll primarily be looking at the development of the categories of childhood and adolescence in the United States we’ll also venture into the experience of children around the globe. Along the way we’ll draw on literary, historical, and theoretical texts to ask a number of questions: how have children and the idea of childhood been deployed to define national identity? How are children raced, classed, and gendered? Are children property, and what does that mean? How have young people participated in cultural and political movements? What does it mean to see children and adolescents as historical actors? Past Course SchedulesClick to Open Summer 2022 MALS 72000 – Thesis Writing Workshop (Department Permission Required) Mode of Instruction: Online This course is designed to help students with the process of writing, researching and working towards completing a thesis or capstone project. As indicated by the course's title, the course is primarily run as a workshop with students sharing and commenting on writing in different stages of development. There will also be readings and discussions on the nature of academic discourse and how writing and research methods differ according to academic disciplines, thus replicating the department's interdisciplinary ethos. We will also work on writing strategies for different stages of the thesis-writing process. Students in all stages of their thesis and capstone projects are encouraged to take the course. If you would like to sign up for the thesis writing course, permission of the department is required. To express your interest in taking this course, please fill in this form. This is a 3-credit course and it is not a substitute for MALS 79000.
MALS 78500 – Introduction to Race and Ethnicity Mode of Instruction: Hybrid Coming together in opposition to police brutality and the killing of George Floyd, protesters stood side by side in the streets of America and across the globe. The powerful impact of the 2020 summer social uprisings marks a turning point in the struggle against anti-black racism. In order to make sense of the current racial reckoning, this course provides an overview of the politics of race and racism in the U.S. Focusing on the longue durée of imperialism since 1492 and accounting for the consequences of the Native American genocide, racial slavery, settler colonialism, historical violence and the reactionary opposition to ongoing struggles for social justice and freedom, we will unearth the roots of white supremacy and systemic racism in the U.S. The course explores the relationship between race and power while analyzing how it shapes American citizenship and identity. We will draw from a variety of disciplines, spanning the Humanities, Social Sciences and the Arts, in order to think critically about race, racism, identity formation, everyday experience and American history. We will address the following questions:
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
MALS 78500 – Critical International Studies -- CANCELLED Mode of Instruction: Online This course provides both a broad theoretical as well as a case specific introduction to some of the most pressing issues surrounding critical international studies today. It introduces the subject matter through a series of key concepts, including: violence; new wars/conflict; peace and new forms of international cooperation and diplomacy; borders and migration; critical security: human, environmental, cyber; development and critical international political economy; post-colonialism and de-colonialism; indigeneity and race; gender and feminism, using related case-studies to underline how these concepts and the theories that utilize them affect contemporary events. Through these concepts and case-studies, the course offers a complex and well-rounded introduction to rising challenges in today’s inter-connected world. Learning objectives: By the end of the course, students are expected to be able to:
MALS 78500 – Art, Modern, Anti-colonial: Where Now? Mode of Instruction: In-person This course is designed to introduce students to epistemological and methodological questions about modernity, community, and artistic practice through case studies from the Middle East (particularly Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco, Turkey, and Iran). The course bridges art history and anthropology to examine the material and imaginative ways that Middle Eastern communities produced the modern, experienced it, and became progenitors of it, yet often from its “outside.” How did modernity become an urgent time frame and a call for social change? What did decolonizing communities want from “art,” and why was art important to many sociopolitical mobilizations of the 1920s-1960s? What new types of community, identity, economy, and spirituality did artists proffer? How do these relate to the maps, timelines, and categories we rely on to understand globalization and the contemporary today? What obstacles did artists face in their projects for social relevance, and what new entanglements did their negotiations create? The course will provide students with original materials (translated for those unfamiliar with the languages), and non-canonical artwork to prompt discussions of how we think about modernity cross-culturally and the stakes in art research today. Thus, it will also encourage students to reflect on what modernity and art mean to them and how they locate themselves in our unequally shared political world. Click to Open Spring 2022 Please note that this schedule is subject to change. SPRING 2022 COURSE DESCRIPTION
This course is one of the two required courses for the Social and Environmental Justice Studies concentration in MALS.
Designed as a companion course with a research methods, capstone or thesis course, this course will enhance students’ familiarity with and use of citational practices in interdisciplinary contexts. Rather than a punitive and meaningless exercise in mastery of format, this course enables students to view citation as an extension of scholarly practices: a way to ensure as broad and inclusive a net as possible of relevant publications in review of literature, while understanding citation as a meaningful means of attribution and construction of scholarly social networks. Recent requests from students indicate that citation is an area of confusion and anxiety for research active students. As a one credit course, this course will be largely centered on the practice of citation. Click to Open Fall 2021 * Due to the ongoing pandemic, courses will be offered in a mix of hybrid and fully-online models. All indicated modalities are subject to change. MALS 70000 - Seminar in Interdisciplinary Studies Welcome Video All the World’s a Fair: Culture, Politics, Economics, Art, and Architecture at America’s World’s Fairs This course will take an interdisciplinary approach to the study of World’s Fairs, starting with the early European Fairs and then primarily focusing on specific World’s Fairs and Expositions in the United States. While the Columbian Exposition of 1893 is undoubtedly the most famous of all of the American fairs, it was one of many; cities such as St. Louis and Buffalo held such fairs. Using the fairs, this course will introduce students to graduate-level research, reading, and writing. Students will learn how to write (and demonstrate competency) in different academic genres, including the book review, annotated bibliography, and seminar paper. They will also learn how to investigate and use archival materials and primary sources. Contributions to the course website, discussion forum, and/or other digital platforms will serve as venues where students can exchange their ideas and engage in a reflective, writing process. MALS 70000 – Seminar in Interdisciplinary Studies This seminar will introduce students to a range of methods, theories and concepts in humanistic scholarship and public debate. The seminar will focus on questions of cultural ownership and identity, in particular in contexts of cultural contact in both past and present times. Historians of the premodern world increasingly acknowledge the hybridity of cultures and critique stable and homogeneous notions of cultural identity and authenticity. They disaggregate conventional concepts such as ‘the West’, ‘Europe’, the ‘Middle East’ or ‘Asia’ and construct new, emphatically hybrid spaces such as the Mediterranean as analytical alternatives. Recent scholarship has shed light on the transmission of knowledge across cultures, on shared cultural traditions across linguistic, religious and political borders, and on individuals who embodied this hybridity. In contemporary public debates, on the other hand, concerns are frequently voiced about cultural ownership, representation and authenticity, especially about cultural appropriation. Many of these contributions, academic, academic public-facing and public, are animated by similar efforts to challenge hegemonic concepts and narratives of cultural identity and ownership. In this seminar, we will explore key concepts, theories and approaches in this field, using the example of the Arabian Nights. A literary tradition with roots in India and Persia, the Arabian Nights in its preserved written form dates back to ninth-century Iraq. The text evolved over centuries in Arabic and assumed a global dimension after its translation into French in early eighteenth-century Paris. The translator, Antoine Galland, combined stories preserved in an Arabic manuscript with material presented to him orally by Hanna Diyab, a Syrian traveler. Subsequent to the French translation, Arabic manuscripts reproduced the Arabian Nights in more extensive versions, responding to the interest of Orientalists. The global spread of the Arabian Nights stories is accompanied by a rich tradition of illustrations and adaptations on screen and stage. As the seminar explores the various examples of the evolution of the Arabian Nights corpus, we will be discussing concepts such as canon, world literature and Orientalism, and ask throughout the semester how concepts of cultural ownership and authenticity can be applied to this global literary tradition and how, conversely, the example of the Arabian Nights complicates these concepts. In addition to a selection of Arabian Nights stories and scholarship, we will be considering illustrations, literary adaptations, and cinematic representations such as the 1992 and 2019 Disney versions of Aladdin. MALS 70000 – Seminar in Interdisciplinary Studies Refuge: Seeking Haven and Creating Sanctuary in the United States MALS 70200 - Metropolis: A Political, Historical, and Sociological Profile of New York This interdisciplinary course will focus on learning ethnographic research methods by completing a field school within the course and doing a close literary review of narratives from the Black community in Brooklyn that led to the city's rise and role as the nation's metropolis. These narratives will be ones that focus on 20th and 21st-century Black migration to the city from the US South and from Latin America and the Caribbean through the study of shifts in the development and evolution of hip hop, poetry, and other spoken-word traditions. The course will especially highlight narratives of the forgotten, erased, and hidden artists, and ask questions about how scholars today can work to make the archive more inclusive, especially of LGBTQIA+ narratives. Student work will culminate in an oral history project of their own or work in the archive of the Central Brooklyn Oral History and Atlas project, an interactive digital humanities project at Medgar Evers College. Through this work, students will also have the opportunity to develop their own research-based performance practice or social art practice and present creative work (rap song, spoken word poems, literary poems, etc...) as an outcome of their research or archive work or write a traditional final paper. MALS 70400- Interdisciplinary Topics in Law This course is about law and literature in these senses: how literature-as-a-discipline and law (especially as a practice) employ in parallel and at cross-purposes, similar, overlapping and distinct methods of reading and interpretation; how literature and law each give meaning to the other within a legal system. The intellectual history of law and humanities in the United States as it has so far been written, includes a chapter on the so-called law and literature movement. Its chronology: sprouting and growth in the 1970s, branches and applications in 1980s, slow-down and dissipation in the nineties. This neat proto-history is of course oblivious to the schools of thought, scholars, institutions that continue to engage questions of law, interpretation and meaning with the help of literary fields, especially in Western Europe. This blind spot of academic history has its Rorschachian reflection in the way some practitioners (lawyers, judges and even legal scholars) approach law and its interpretation, valorizing particular historical methods as eternal truths. This chronology also reduces law and literature to a fashion of 20th century American academia, denying the lessons of classical writing. Within the “western canon,” rhetoric is an obvious meeting point of law and of literature. There are myriad other examples of the necessity of this relationship in ancient documents we might consider “literary” or “legal” but which are necessarily inter-dependent. This course will attend to aspects and examples of all these phenomena, as well as turning back to the American legal academic context to examine the contemporary debates over “textualism” and statutory interpretation—both examples of uses if the literary that sometimes betray ignorance of the nuances of these tools, their histories, their utility within and beyond the law, therefore affording them an unwarranted authority and final judgement. Readings include works by Peter Berger, Cleanth Brooks, Benjamin Cardozo, Robert Cover, Ronald Dworkin, Han-Georg Gadamer, Barbara Johnson, Greta Olson, Quintilian, I.A. Richards, Antonin Scalia, James Boyd White, as well as statutes and judicial decisions in U.S. law, Roman Law and the Bible. MALS 70500 - Medieval Culture Cross-listed with MSCP 70100 This course provides an introduction to medieval culture and society, from the fifth to the fourteenth centuries, as well as an introduction to the discipline of Medieval Studies. The course will be interdisciplinary in nature, drawing on approaches from history, literature, art history, and gender studies to explore both scholarly analysis and also the material and textual sources of medieval Europe. We will focus on how scholars have defined the Middle Ages, both temporally and geographically, major people and events in the Middle Ages, as well as emerging fields in medieval studies, such as the study of race. Topics include the end of antiquity, conquest and colonization, and the interaction of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle Ages. MALS 70700 - The Shaping of Modernity, 1789-1914 Making a Modern Self: Modernity and the Individual in Ideas, Art and History MALS 71200 - The Culture of Fashion: Theories and Practices From labor politics, raced and gendered power struggles, the quest for selfhood, and urgent issues of globalization and sustainability, fashion is a major cultural force that shapes our contemporary world. At the same time, fashion’s history and aesthetics provide a fascinating cultural backdrop within which to examine issues of power, nation building, technology, and meaning making, especially in terms of the impact of modernity on concepts of self, body, and agency within the complex relations of symbols and exchange that make up the fashion system. Starting with a thorough grounding in theories informing a conceptual approach to fashion and culture, we will explore the politics, technologies, and aesthetics of the fashion system and its histories, by closely reading foundational texts, case studies, and cultural analyses that engage fashion’s ever-changing landscape, especially as it inflects and is inflected by race, class, gender, and power. The course will explore attitudes toward the body as they vary by historical period. We will also consider the technologies of fashion, working through innovation’s impact on fashion’s design and making, from the use of ground up beetles to produce the rarest of reds, through to new developments in biodesign, which employ sea kelp to make fibers woven into clothes, or incorporate living organisms into the clothing’s design. The course will draw on writings from cultural studies, fashion studies, sociology, feminism, critical theory, media studies and communication scholarship. We will welcome guest speakers, and view and analyze media pertaining to the issues at hand. Off campus site visits will be part of the course. The course will cover the works of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Thorsten Veblen, Pierre Bourdieu, Georg Simmel, Dick Hebdige, Caroline Evans, Anne Hollander, Judith Butler, and Deleuze, among others. MALS 71400 - Introduction to International Studies In-Person Class Meeting Dates: 8/30, 9/13, 9/27, 10/18, 11/1, 11/15, 11/29, and 12/14 (Weeks 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, and 14). The two main purposes of this course are to introduce you to theoretically informed historical analyses of international relations (IR) and to help you apply one of the theories of IR to an international subject of your choice. While the historical contexts and theories of IR will help you engage in further studies in IR, your paper will enhance your understanding of how you may gain social scientific knowledge by reviewing relevant theoretical literature, conceptualizing your subject matter, developing research questions, figuring out how to answer them, gathering information about them, organizing the research result as evidence for your answer to the research question, and developing your answer as an argument about a particular phenomenon or relationship on the chosen topic in the context of existing theoretical arguments. MALS 72000 - Thesis Writing Course MALS 72300 - Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies In Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us Kate Bornstein writes, “The first question we usually ask new parents is: ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’” Bornstein recommends the response, “We don’t know; it hasn’t told us yet.” This course explores the ways in which gender and sexuality are pronounced, embodied, and negotiated within specific historical and cultural contexts. Through a close reading of interdisciplinary, foundational, and recent scholarship the class will examine and theorize the ways in which categories of gender and sexuality inform and shape our understanding of the world. Investigating the intersections and collisions of gender and sexuality with race, class, ability, nationality, ethnicity, and age, the class will consider societal and institutional systems of power, privilege, oppression, and marginalization. Course requirements include an oral presentation, two 4-6 page response papers, and a 15-20 page, staged researched essay. MALS 72700 - The Political Ecology of Social and Environmental Justice MALS 73200 - American Social Institutions This class will examine American Studies through the lens of social, cultural, political and other kinds of institutions. We will begin by exploring what we mean when we say “institution.” We will think together about why this may be a productive lens for assessing and interrogating the world around us. What does it offer? And what might it elide? How do studies of institutions help expose the myriad ways that power functions in culture, society, and politics? How do institutions, themselves, shape these power relations? And how do different approaches to understanding institutions give us different sorts of answers? American Studies scholars have been asking these questions for decades. We will turn to their texts as sites for exploration. The texts that we will explore together will put questions about inequality and how it operates at their core. Thus, we will ask how institutions can help amplify or mitigate the often-crushing hierarchies that have been (and continue to be) based on racial, gender, sexual, national, and other forms of difference. The class will be organized thematically, arranged around a series of inquiries drawn from recent scholarship. Each week, we will take a specific institution as our starting point. These institutions may include (but will not be limited to) the family, the state, courts, race, colonialism, hospitals, prisons, schools, the military, libraries, social networks, media, the corporation, capitalism, etc. We will examine how scholars within a range of American Studies subfields have developed different approaches for exploring institutions. They have used both creative and conventional scholarly tools to explore questions about life, infrastructure, health, race, ethnicity, indigeneity, gender, sexuality, transnationality, borders, architecture, foreign relations, language, politics, economics, literature, art, music, work, social movements, and more. Finally, we will discuss how these institutions may help offer us strategies for imagining new, and possibly better futures. MALS 73400 - Africana Studies: Introduction MALS 74500 Great Digs: Important sites of the Ancient, Late Antique and Islamic worlds MALS 74600 Introduction to Global Early Modern Studies The field of global early modern studies operates with the interdependence of two elements, one related to geography, the other to periodization. The period of early modernity gains its distinctive quality by virtue of a new quality of global connections. These connections in turn evoke an interconnected world where regions separated by religion, language and political rule are subject to the same or similar economic, political or cultural processes. A key challenge this field faces is the Eurocentrism potentially inherent in the notion of early modernity and in the legacies of imperialism and colonialism. Related challenges define the concept of the Global Renaissance. This course will provide an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of global early modern studies. The course will combine two components. Several faculty members of the certificate program in Global Early Modern Studies at the Graduate Center will discuss their research in visits to the course. Students will gain an impression how scholars of different disciplines who focus on different periods, geographical and cultural areas and source material approach the idea of a global early modernity. In a second component we will explore select examples of recent scholarship on Middle Eastern cultural and political history in larger regional, hemispheric or global contexts. These readings will offer insights into different modes of globalization, how global connections were established and how they became manifest. Examples range from similar aesthetic or literary tastes across cultural borders to pandemics. Topics in this component include Ottoman imperial ambitions in the Indian Ocean world, the relationship between the Renaissance and the Islamic world, diplomatic and cultural connections between early modern England and Morocco and different forms of networks (e.g., trade or the pilgrimage). The course does not require any previous familiarity with Middle Eastern history. MALS 77200 - Film Histories & Historiography 1930-present: “Tradition and the Individual Talent” As we travel through such distinct cinematic terrain, our course will consider the interplay between tradition and individualism, taking the poet T. S. Eliot’s famous essay on the subject as our point of departure. Eliot suggests that there is much porosity between the seeming monolith of “tradition” and individual expressions of aesthetics and ideology, leading us to question the alternate genealogies of film that we will study. We will take a similarly porous approach to our considerations of media beyond the strictly filmic—into photography, web artifacts, and streaming video, for instance. Students will be asked to contribute weekly discussion questions, to lead one seminar session along specified guidelines, and to produce a final research project developed in consultation with the instructor. While academic writing is welcomed, students will be encouraged to consider culminating responses to the course beyond the 15-20 page research paper, for instance by centering pedagogy in annotated syllabus design, creative projects like video essays, or researched non-academic writing. MALS 78100 - Issues in Urban Education MALS 78400 - Introduction to Latin American Studies MALS 78500 - Introduction to Literary Translations Cross-listed with FREN 78400, SPAN 78200, Comparative Literature 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? 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. The class is taught in English, but students should have working knowledge of at least one other language. MALS 78800 - Introduction to Childhood and Youth Studies MALS 78500 - Introduction to Caribbean Studies The Caribbean is a geographical and multilinguistic space where the blending of the Indigenous People of the Americas with more recent arrivals -- the colonial heritage (British, French, Dutch, Spanish) and the African and South Asian legacies -- created unique, hybridized and, in short, creolized societies. Marked by the doctrine of discovery, the genocide of indigenous people, settler colonialism, slavery and the making of the post-colonial state, the Caribbean challenges the dichotomy of local versus global. It is a place where foundational violence shifted the geography of reason. This course will provide an overview of the social, cultural, political, and economic history of the Caribbean from 1492 to the present. The course will combine a variety of disciplines such as anthropology, art, economics, literature, music and political sciences. It will emphasize transdisciplinary approaches to historical events and contemporary issues that have shaped the Caribbean as a way to reflect on racial capitalism, domination and freedom. Learning Goals/Outcomes:
MALS 78500 - Mass Violence in Modern Europe This course explores instances of unprecedented mass violence in modern Europe during the twentieth century. It is based on several case studies, including events in German South-West Africa, Germany, Ukraine, the Soviet Union, and Chechnya. By analyzing some of the most recent scholarship on genocide and ethnic cleansing, the course examines the short-term and long-term causes for mass violence, assessing the extent to which, in different contexts, it resulted from political ideologies, colonialism, bureaucratic pressures, or ethnic and religious hatred. The course will also focus on the repercussions of mass violence, including acts of revenge, changes in international law and human rights, and attempts to create sites of memory in those places where atrocities were committed. Finally, this course aims at tracing how such unprecedented violence against civilians was experienced by ordinary citizens of European countries, and how it transformed and affected their everyday lives, political choices, and social attitudes during and after the events. Click to Open Summer 2021 These courses are provisional. Details about registration will be forthcoming. * Due to the ongoing pandemic, all summer courses will be offered online. MALS 72000 – Thesis Writing Workshop (DEPARTMENT PERMISSION REQUIRED; ONLINE COURSE) This course is designed to help students with the process of writing, researching and working towards completing a thesis or capstone project. As indicated by the course's title, the course is primarily run as a workshop with students sharing and commenting on writing in different stages of development. There will also be readings and discussions on the nature of academic discourse and how writing and research methods differ according to academic disciplines, thus replicating the department's interdisciplinary ethos. We will also work on writing strategies for different stages of the thesis-writing process. If you would like to sign up for the thesis writing course, permission of the department is required. To express your interest in taking this course, please fill in this form. This is a 3-credit course and it is not a substitute for MALS 79000. This course will focus on a series of American icons as a way to explore broader issues in American Studies. As a starting point, we will look at what defines American icons, juxtaposing the “Accidental Napalm” photograph with the late 1960s image of Jackie Onassis to compare icons that were formed spontaneously in a particular historical and political moment with those formed intentionally through the lens of celebrity and the circulation of cultural representations. We will use these icons as touchstones to consider more recent permutations of American Icons, such as the ways in which images of George Floyd have been used in struggles for racial justice and the ways in which social influencers have used social media to sustain different kinds of attention and fame. We will also consider why the term “American,” which is typically questioned in an American Studies context, seems to go largely unremarked when coupled with “icons,” using the particular case of James Baldwin and his questioning of foundational national narratives to consider why this might be so. To broaden our discussion, we will also examine how American icons have recently been canonized, in a sense, in mainstream venues like PBS’s American Experience and the American Icon series presented by the radio program Studio 360. Using these examples to understand the popular appeal and critical possibilities of American icons, we will recast American icons in wider and more pointed critical and conceptual frameworks, including a questioning of any methodology that takes as its starting point a singular artifact. Along the way, we will incorporate current permutations of American Icons in popular culture and public discourse, and students will have the opportunity to incorporate their own research interests into our discussions by identifying generally recognized American icons that are worth reexamining and by proposing new icons that may be emerging from our uniquely digital and disruptive age. This will allow us to address a wide-range of American Icons, drawn from monuments, photographs, fashion, literature, film, television, music, and staged and spontaneous events, while developing a shared vocabulary of critical keywords relevant to current scholarship in American Studies.
Learning Outcomes
Click to Open Spring 2021 SPRING 2021 Course Schedule
Please note that this schedule is subject to change.
Click to Open Fall 2020 FALL 2020 COURSE SCHEDULE
Please note that this schedule is subject to change.
FALL 2020 COURSE DESCRIPTION
MALS 70000 – Seminar in Interdisciplinary Studies (ONLINE COURSE) MALS 70100 - Narratives of New York: Literature and the Visual Arts (ONLINE COURSE)
From labor politics, raced and gendered power struggles, the quest for selfhood, and urgent issues of globalization and sustainability, fashion is a major cultural force that shapes our contemporary world. At the same time, fashion’s history and aesthetics provide a fascinating cultural backdrop within which to examine issues of power, nation building, technology, and meaning making, especially in terms of the impact of modernity on concepts of self, body, and agency within the complex relations of symbols and exchange that make up the fashion system. Click to Open Spring 2020 Please note that this schedule is subject to change. MALS 70000 -- Seminar in Interdisciplinary Studies (MALS students only)
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.
Click to Open Fall 2019 Please note that this schedule is subject to change. MondayTuesdayWednesdayThursday11:45 – 1:45 MALS 70400 - Suk, Julie and McDougall, Sara – 6:15 MALS 70600 - Rosenblatt, Helena Rm 3207 MALS 73400 - Battle, Juan Rm 3309 MALS 70200 - Garland, Libby Rm 3207 MALS 78500 - Grier, Miles Rm 3212 MALS 78500 - Saegert, Susan Rm 8202 MALS 78500 - Hart, Roger Rm 5383MALS 70000 - Chopra, Samir Rm 5383 MALS 70800 - Miller, Karen and Morrell, Andrea Rm 3309 MALS 72700 - Imamichi, Tomo Rm 44194:15 – 8:15 MALS 78500 - Alsop, Elizabeth Rm C415A MALS 78500 - Dolan, Marc (4:15-7:15 PM) Rm 3416 6:30 – 8:30 MALS 70000 - Zarour Zarzar, Victor Rm 3309 MALS 71400 - Hattori, Tomohisa Rm 4419 MALS 78400 - Tovar, Patricia Rm 6495MALS 70000 - Grasso, Linda Rm 5383 MALS 72000 - Eversley, Shelly Rm 3309 MALS 72200 - Halley, Jean Rm 3207 MALS 73100 - Rogers-Cooper, Justin Rm 4419 MALS 72500 -Kavey, Allison Rm 4419 MALS 74500 - Macaulay, Elizabeth Rm 3207 MALS 78100 - Forbes, David Rm 3309MALS 71200 - Wissinger, Elizabeth Rm 5382 MALS 78800 - Hintz, Carrie Rm 4419
FALL 2019 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Click to Open Summer 2019 The MALS program is delighted to offer a summer session with four courses. Courses will start the day after Memorial Day on Tuesday, May 28, 2019. Courses that meet twice a week will end the week of June 24, 2019, whereas courses that meet once a week will end the week of July 22, 2019. MALS 70000 Intro. to Grad. Liberal Studies4:00 – 8:00 Prof. Anderst MALS 70000 Intro. to Grad. Liberal Studies 6:00 – 9:00 Prof. Schmidt MALS 72000 Thesis Writing Course Prof. Schmidt MALS 72000 Thesis Writing Course6:00 – 9:45Prof. Fox MALS 72300 Intro. to Gender and Sexuality Studies Prof. Fragopoulos MALS 70700 The Shaping of Modernity SUMMER 2019
Click to Open Spring 2019 SPRING 2019 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
In this course, students will become familiar with the major themes relevant to the study of Latinxs in the United States including historical Latinx communities, migration patterns, push and pull factors for migration to the United States from Latin America and the Caribbean and the challenges faced by Latinx immigrants and U.S. born Latinxs in the United States. Students will develop a working knowledge of social theoretical concepts such as racialization, assimilation, agency, structure, cultural shift, and more. They will read materials from various disciplines and practice a range of qualitative, quantitative and mixed research methods. Students will explore and practice interview techniques, narrative and visual analysis, fieldwork, archival work, and how to frame research questions. Participatory Action Research, collaborative research, and other methods for decolonized or subject-centered research will be discussed. Click to Open Fall 2018 FALL 2018 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
MALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies CRN # 64147 "Guns in Society" Attitudes towards guns reflect social, cultural, and political values; appropriate management of gun use requires social and political action. This course will examine the history, culture, and politics of gun ownership and use in New York City and the United States, bringing in international comparative cases. The aim of the course is to generate new perspectives on contemporary “gun culture” and novel policy recommendations for the management of guns in our community. With an ethnographic focus on New York City—but placed in national and international comparative perspectives—this course will introduce students both to foundational, interdisciplinary literature that is crucial to understanding contemporary contexts of guns in society, as well as to advanced methods in ethnographic research and social analysis. Students will integrate their original research with secondary literature—scholarly materials as well as policy papers and reports from the “gray” literature—to develop a robust understanding of gun issues in New York City, the U.S., and in international comparative contexts.
"Object Lessons: Learning from Waste and Other Matter" Why are some objects enchanted, while others are considered “junk” and “trash”? Do you worry about where your garbage travels—and who carries it—as it moves from the realm of private property into public waste management? What happens when human life and object life merge, and whole classes of humans are stigmatized and treated as expendable? MALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies CRN# 64146 Thursdays, 6:30 - 8:30 PM, Rm. 4419, 3 credits, Prof. Libby Garland ([email protected]) How has the demarcation of spatial boundaries both reflected and shaped the social divisions that have defined the United States? How do different kinds of borders—the formal and informal lines between nations, regions, states, jurisdictions, electoral districts, neighborhoods, and properties, for example—delimit economic and political possibilities? How have these different kinds of spatial borders produced racial, class, and ethnic divides in new ways over time? When and how have people challenged the boundary lines designed to contain them? In this course, students will explore these questions by engaging with the work of historians, sociologists, geographers, anthropologists, urban planners, and artists. Students will present on and lead discussion regarding a text in class. They will also design, workshop and complete a final research project, which may be a traditional article-length piece of writing or a digital project of comparable sophistication. MALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies CRN# 64148 "Peaceful Conflict Transformation" MALS 70200 - Metropolis: A Political, Historical, and Sociological Profile of New York CRN# 64153 - CANCELLED Tuesdays, 4:15 - 6:15 PM, 3 credits, Prof. Cindy Lobel ([email protected]) This interdisciplinary course will explore New York City’s rise and role as the nation’s metropolis, examining several key themes in the city’s development. In particular, we will look at Gotham as a center of work, culture and residency as well as at the diverse populations that have called the city home through its four-century history. We will examine New York City from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science. MALS 70300 - Law, Politics, and Policy CRN# 64154 Tuesdays, 4:15 - 6:15 PM, Rm. 6421, 3 credits, Prof. Leslie Paik ([email protected]) This seminar examines the relationship between law and society, considering how the law shapes social life and how social change affects law and legal institutions. The seminar takes a “law in action” approach to studying law that focuses on the social, political, economic, and cultural contexts of law. We will discuss readings about classic sociological theories of law, the limits and power to “rights” discourses to lead to social change, peoples’ perceptions and experiences of the law (e.g., legal consciousness) and the everyday workings of law. We then will apply those concepts to consider how the law has defined and evolved from our experiences and understandings of race, family and immigration in the US. This seminar will provide a broad socio-legal foundation for students working on those substantive topics, as well as for those interested in social control, social movements and social change. MALS 70500 - Renaissance Culture: Global Renaissance CRN# 64155 Mondays, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m., Rm. 3212, 3 credits, Prof. Anna Akasoy ([email protected]) The Renaissance has been considered the period in which Europe or the West more generally came into its own. Having recovered the classical Greek heritage from its Arab custodians after the ‘dark ages’, Europe, led by Italian humanists, prepared itself for Enlightenment, secularization and modernization. In this course, we will explore this historical narrative critically, focusing on two aspects: MALS 70800 - Transformations of Modernity, 1914-Present CRN# 64156 Wednesdays, 6:30 - 8:30 PM, Rm. 4419, 3 credits, Prof. David Gordon ([email protected]) Modernism, and modernity can be discussed in terms of bureaucracy, rationalization, secularization, alienation, commodification, individualism, subjectivism, objectivism, universalism, chaos, mass society, homogenization, diversification, hybridization, democratization, centralization, mechanization, totalitarianism, and many, many more. The meanings of “Modernity” and “Modernism” have been debated to a great extent in scholarship and are often applied differently in history, prose, philosophy, art, music, theater or poetry. Its counterpart “Postmodernism” also provides important juxtaposition and meaning to the terms. There are a myriad of ways in which one can discuss the transformations of modernity in the twentieth century: this course will look through the lens of intellectual history. Starting with the viewpoint of Marshall Bermann’s seminal discussion of modernity, “All that is Solid Mets into Air,” this course will look at the challenges of modernity in the intellectual history of the twentieth century: The modernity and postmodernity of: Totalitarianism; Existentialism; anti-Colonialism and the challenge of Human Rights; etc. Among others, we will read authors such as Hannah Arendt, Michael Foucault, Edward Said, Walter Benjamin, Franz Fanon, Joseph Conrad, etc. MALS 71000 - Forms of Life Writing CRN# 64157 Mondays, 6:30 - 8:30 PM, Rm. 4419, 3 credits, Prof. Brenda Wineapple ([email protected]) "To live over people's lives," wrote Henry James, "is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensity of the same-- since it was by these things they themselves lived." This course will interrogate various forms of so-called "life writing" (biography/fictional biography/memoir) to investigate the meaning, aims, ethics, pitfalls, and possibilities of the genre as practiced in literature. We will therefore examine a wide range of topics: the relation between fact and fiction; the significance of politics and historical context; the impact of individual psychology; point of view in narration; the function of imagination; the use or exploitation of marginal figures. And to the extent that biographical narratives depend on the creation of character, this course looks closely at how such characters are created from real people: how a living, breathing person seems to arise out of a mass of sometimes contradictory “facts”; how characters are made to change, that is, if they do; how characters can make a story move; and of course how or if traditional forms of biographical writing might be liberated from its brick-like borders. Writers/books will likely include such authors as Lytton Strachey, Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre), Virginia Woolf, Richard Holmes (Footsteps), Janet Malcolm (on Sylvia Plath biographies), Henry James, The Aspern Papers, Adam Phillips on Freud and biography, Julia Blackburn and her biographical inventions about Daisy Bates, Robert A. Caro on Lyndon Johnson, Hilton Als. MALS 71400 - Introduction to International Studies CRN# 64158 Mondays, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m., Rm. 3212, 3 credits, Prof. Tomohisa Hattori ([email protected]) The two main purposes of this course are to introduce you to theoretically informed historical analyses of international relations (IR) and to help you apply one of the theories of IR to an international subject of your choice. While the historical contexts and theories of IR will help you engage in further studies in IR, your paper will enhance your understanding of how you may gain social scientific knowledge by reviewing relevant theoretical literature, conceptualizing your subject matter, developing research questions, figuring out how to answer them, gathering information about them, organizing the research result as evidence for your answer to the research question, and developing your answer as an argument about a particular phenomenon or relationship on the chosen topic in the context of existing theoretical arguments. MALS 72000 - Thesis Writing Course CRN# 65098 Mondays, 6:30 - 8:30 p.m., Rm. 3309, 3 credits, Prof. George Fragopoulos ([email protected]) MALS 72000, Thesis Writing Workshop, is designed to help students with the process of writing, researching and working towards completing a thesis or capstone project. As indicated by the course's title, the course is primarily run as a workshop with students sharing and commenting on writing in different stages of development. There will also be readings and discussions on the nature of academic discourse and how writing and research methods differ according to academic disciplines, thus replicating the department's interdisciplinary ethos. Students in all stages of their thesis and capstone projects are encouraged to take the course. MALS 72300 - Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies CRN# 64159 Thursdays, 6:30 - 8:30 PM, Rm. 3207, 3 credits, Prof. James Wilson ([email protected]) In Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us Kate Bornstein writes, “The first question we usually ask new parents is: ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’” Bornstein recommends the response, “We don’t know; it hasn’t told us yet.” This course explores the ways in which gender and sexuality are pronounced, embodied, and negotiated within specific historical and cultural contexts. Through a close reading of interdisciplinary, foundational, and recent scholarship the class will examine and theorize the ways in which categories of gender and sexuality inform and shape our understanding of the world. Investigating the intersections and collisions of gender and sexuality with race, class, ability, nationality, ethnicity, and age, the class will consider societal and institutional systems of power, privilege, oppression, and marginalization. Course requirements include an oral presentation, two 4-6 page response papers, and a 15-20 page, staged researched essay. MALS 72700 - The Political Ecology of Social and Environmental Justice CRN# 64160 Wednesdays, 9:30 - 11:30 AM, Rm. 4419, 3 credits, Prof. Rebio Diaz Cardona ([email protected]) Cross-listed with PSYC 79100. This seminar is the first part of a three-course sequence introducing students to themultidisciplinary theoretical bases and substantive concerns of Environmental Social Science. The will survey a range of disciplines that comprise the field, encompassing historical and theoretical overviews as well as contemporary analyses concerning people’s engagements with the environment from the fields of anthropology, sociology, geography, urban planning, architecture, landscape architecture, environmental design and management, and psychology. Topics include environmental perception, ecological approaches to the city, place identity and attachment, meanings of home, housing, gentrification, environmental justice, sustainability, and the psychology of climate change action.
MALS 73100 - American Culture and Values CRN# 64161 Tuesdays, 6:30 - 8:30 PM, Rm. 3212, 3 credits, Prof. Justin Rogers-Cooper ([email protected])
Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman begin the introduction to their collection States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (2009) with a deceptively straightforward question: “What is the object of American studies?” They continue by unpacking the ramifications of that question by noting its imbrication in two corollary questions: “What does ‘American studies’ study, and what does it want?” For all of its centrality, after all, American studies remains an anomaly in the academy - as a program and not a department, it resides somewhere between (or, perhaps, outside) normative disciplinary boundaries. The object of our course is to explore these questions by considering the histories, theories, and practices of American studies from its inception as an academic discipline to the present. We will consider how American studies transformed from a movement into an institution (marked by one of the largest annual academic conferences in the United States). We will address the present state of the field – particularly inquiry into the politics of American exceptionalism – and whether the field is best understood in tension with an emergent vocabulary of keywords (such as “transnational”), and/or perhaps as a constellation of converging sub-fields or critical orientations, such as indigenous and postcolonial studies, critical race and ethnic studies, queer of color feminism, and/or black Marxism. In addition to discussions, we will compose writing assignments based on key genres of the discipline, including the book review, the event review, the keyword, and the conference abstract. MALS 73400 - Africana Studies: Introduction CRN# 64170 Mondays, 4:15 - 6:15 PM, Rm. 3207, 3 credits, Prof. Juan Battle ([email protected]) Cross-listed with AFCP 73100. MALS 75400 - Introduction to the Digital Humanities CRN# 64171 Tuesdays, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m., Rm. 6417, 3 credits, Profs. Matthew Gold and Stephen Brier ([email protected]) What are the digital humanities, and how can they help us think in new ways? This course offers an introduction to the landscape of digital humanities (DH) work, paying attention to how its various approaches embody new ways of knowing and thinking. What kinds of questions, for instance, does the practice of mapping pose to our research and teaching? When we attempt to share our work through social media, how is it changed? How can we read “distantly,” and how does “distant reading” alter our sense of what reading is?
MALS 77100 - Aesthetics of Film CRN# 64176 Tuesdays, 4:15 - 8:15 PM, Rm. C419, 3 credits, Prof. Leah Anderst ([email protected]) Film Aesthetics provides students with the basic skills necessary to read and analyze the formal and stylistic components of film, both historical and contemporary. This course introduces the student to various genre of narrative cinema and categories of film (for example, silent comedy, melodrama, film noir, documentary, animation, and experimental, among others) produced in the United States and internationally. As students survey the work of important film theorists and apply it to films screened in class, they will master the fundamental vocabulary of film analysis and will learn to recognize the techniques and conventions that structure the cinematic experience – narrative systems, mise-en-scène, cinematography, editing, sound, genre – in order to understand how these various components combine to yield film form and have developed over the history of the form. MALS 77300 - History of Cinema II CRN# 64179 Tuesdays, 11:45 AM - 3:45 PM, Rm. C419, 3 credits, Prof. Michael Gillespie ([email protected]) MALS 78100 - Issues in Urban Education CRN# 64180 Wednesdays, 6:30 - 8:30 PM, Rm. 3309, 3 credits, Prof. Susan Semel ([email protected]) This course provides an overview of major issues and controversies in urban education in the United States. Through a historical, sociological, philosophical and political analysis of educational problems, the course explores a variety of progressive and traditional approaches to improving urban education in the 20th century. The course focuses on current neoliberal reforms to reduce educational inequality, including curriculum and common core learning standards, teacher education reform, school choice, tuition vouchers, charter schools, privatization, whole school reform, small schools, and value added models of teacher evaluation. Finally, the course examines the limits and possibilities of these reforms in improving urban education and reducing racial, ethnic and social class based educational inequalities. MALS 78400 - Introduction to Latin American Studies CRN# 65001 Mondays, 6:30 - 8:30 PM, Rm. 4422, 3 credits, Prof. Patricia Tovar ([email protected]) This seminar surveys five centuries of Latin American history, culture and politics from an interdisciplinary perspective, and introduces students to some of the most important issues, problems and debates in the region at large and the sub-regions within it. The course explores the rich diversity of peoples, geographies and histories that distinguish the region, and the experiences that have shaped it. By looking at the symbolic and political configurations of the region through a wide spectrum of materials (film, music, art, fiction, essays, and photography), students will think critically about major landmarks in the field of Latin American studies including the legacy of European colonialism, national fictions, modernity, social movements, conflict, memory, gender politics, religious beliefs, and the ways race, class, and gender intersect. MALS 78500 - The United States in a Global Context CRN# 64182 Thursday, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m., Rm. 4419, 3 credits, Prof. Karen Miller ([email protected]) This class will explore the role of the US in the world. We will examine transformations in the meanings and material consequences of U.S. power from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present. We will also consider the experiences of a wide range of American and non-American subjects as they manage their often-vexed relationships to various aspects of the United States. One of our tasks will be to interrogate U.S. global power and international relations, to understand how they changed over time, to examine their dynamics and contradictions, to consider their limitations, failures, and challengers. We will also explore how global engagements have transformed both U.S. citizens and the United States’ domestic terrain: just as the U.S. helps shape the world, the world also reshapes the United States, through immigration, culture, commerce, and a myriad of other connections. Our interdisciplinary study of these questions will be organized both chronologically and thematically. Students will be asked to write frequently and to produce a final paper. MALS 78500 - Mind the Gap: Technologies, trends, and policies that will shape the future of work CRN# 64183 Tuesdays, 6:30 - 8:30 PM, Rm. 3309, 3 credits, Prof. Ann Kirschner ([email protected]) Mind the Gap will study the future of work. We will address this question: As we think about the range of possibilities for the future of work -- from the utopian to the dystopian -- what are the policies, technologies, and social systems that should be anticipated today to ensure positive outcomes? We will take an interdisciplinary approach to developing our skills as analysts and policy-makers, looking at trends in technology, globalization, and demographics, and evaluating alternative interventions by government, industry, educators, and other stakeholders. The course will also bring in distinguished speakers to share their experience and ideas. Fridays, 8:45-10:45 a.m., Rm. 6494, Profs. Miki Makihara and Patricia Tovar ([email protected]) MALS 78800 - Introduction to Childhood and Youth Studies CRN# 64184 Tuesdays, 4:15 - 6:15 p.m., Rm. 3305, 3 credits, Prof. Roger Hart ([email protected]) This seminar offers an introduction to how childhood and youth is investigated across the different disciplines of the social sciences, psychology and the humanities. Beginning with the recognition that concepts of childhood and adolescence are socially constructed and vary across culture and historical periods, we will examine how our shifting conceptions of childhood both align and clash with the way children actually live. We will examine how different institutions, discourses and systems shape how childhood is experienced: including family, school, the juvenile system, media and consumer culture. While attending to the force of structural inequalities in cultural and economic arrangements, we will not risk rendering children passive or invisible. We consider what young people do, how they live their lives and imagine their futures. In doing so we will discuss alternative theories to what has been called the “socialization” of children in order to recognize that children participate actively in society, not only constrained by the existing social structures and processes whereby society is reproduced but also contributing to it and changing it. Click to Open Summer 2018 SUMMER 2018
Click to Open Spring 2018 MALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies CRN #38132 This course will explore a wide range of significant intellectual, historical, scientific, political, and creative works of the period as well as recent or contemporary texts considering the era. We will begin with Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France," De Toqueville's "Democracy in America," Mary Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Women," and John Stuart Mills's "On Liberty." Turning to fiction, we will examine Jane Austen's "Emma," Gustave Flaubert's "Madame Bovary," Henry James's "The Portrait of a Lady," and Edith Wharton's "The House of Mirth." The class will consider, as well, central poems of the British Romantic movement in the writing of Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Wordsworth. Other texts (or excerpts from texts) include Darwin's "The Origin of Species," William James' "The Varieties of Religious Experience," Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams," Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution," E.P Thompson's "The Making of the English Working Class," T.J. Clark's "The Painting of Modern Life: Paris and the Art of Manet and His Followers," and Charles Rosen's "The Romantic Generation." Class presentations and a final paper.
Click to Open Fall 2017 MALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies CRN# 36294 “Decoding Celebrity: Georgia O’Keeffe as Case Study” Mondays, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 4419, 3 credits, Prof. Linda Grasso ([email protected])
MALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies CRN# 36295 “Envisioning the Body” Thursdays, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 4419, 3 credits, Prof. Elizabeth Wissinger ([email protected])
What do the Kardashians have to do with contemporary race and gender politics? How do fashionable images play into world power relations? How is today’s explosive availability of images affecting concepts of selfhood, agency, and bodily worth?
This course will explore theories of visualization technologies and bodies, taking students from classic approaches to ways of seeing through an interdisciplinary trajectory encompassing media, feminist, cultural, and sociological studies of how the body is performed and iterated through evolving technological frames. Representation, always a thorny issue, has philosophical, sociological, scientific, and political implications. These implications are urgently in need of interrogation as digital culture has pushed the primacy of the image in social life to the extreme, where a picture can speak a thousand words (or launch a thousand tweets).
Using curated readings to guide our thinking, we will make use of the vibrant visual culture of online and social media, as well as visit key examples of the cultural institutions, built environment, and streets of NYC, to explore how the body is constructed by the gaze of cinema, diced and sliced by the glance of television, and shattered into bits by the digitization of the internet and social media. Throughout, we will consider the role of the malleable body, artifice and authenticity, gender politics, and the rise of self-branding as it feeds into neoliberal values and biopolitical frames.
MALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies CRN # 36296 Thursdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 4419, 3 credits, Prof. Karen Miller ([email protected])
Is the United States an empire? If so, what might that mean? If not, what other metaphors can we use to explain U.S. global relations? We will examine transformations of U.S. global power and international relations from the middle of the nineteenth century to the present. Clearly, the United States does not hold political sovereignty over a broad range of colonies. Aside from the 50 United States, the U.S. holds Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands of the United States, the Northern Marianas, and American Samoa. But, the U.S. has the largest military in the world, sustains the world’s biggest economy, and has unparalleled political power. That power is constantly shifting, under continuous challenge, and never as complete as U.S. leaders would like. Our task in this class is to interrogate that power, to understand how it emerged and changed over time, to explore its relationship to other forms of global power and other colonial projects, to examine the dynamics and contradictions that animate it, to consider its limits, and to understand its challengers. We will also explore how global engagements have transformed the United States’ domestic terrain: just as the U.S. helps shape the world, the world also changes the United States, through immigration, culture, commerce, and other connections. Our interdisciplinary study of these questions will be organized both chronologically and thematically. Students will be asked to write frequently and to produce a final paper. MALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies CRN # 36297 This course assesses tragedy across time, from its roots in classical Greece through to the contemporary moment. In a broad sense, we will read tragedy over the long arc of Western (literary) history in order to think through the politics and history of the genre. Through an analytic frame linking postcolonial and poststructural theories, we’ll ask why has tragedy seen a resurgence in recent times? Why is it this genre, particularly, that intercepts, interrupts and inspires the postmodern and postcolonial literary imagination? And why is intertextual writing so often linked to earlier tragedies? Also interesting is to explore why tragedy is a creative structure and motif to which writers turn in conditions of political strife—situations of intractable conflict or eras of substantial social change. Tragedy is deeply political, a type of work that compels our interrogation of its ‘exalted’ canonical legacy while also impelling us to ask how, as Robert Williams Jr. argues in Savage Anxieties, it has functioned (along with the Homeric epics) as agent, establishing and maintaining the ideology of Western civilization and consolidating imperialist and patriarchal discourses. Equally and paradoxically, why do the concerns of tragedy—justice, revenge, ethics, heroism, the private and the public—make it serviceable to writers who are critical of those very discourses? That is, contemporary authors of Africa, Asia, Ireland and America—figures like Tom Paulin, Marina Carr and Colm Toíbín, Michael Ondaatje and Wole Soyinka, Spike Lee and Toni Morrison. Starting with an examination of tragedy’s genesis, we’ll read a number of Greek plays followed by looking at the early modern form and how it changes (and doesn’t) in the hands of Renaissance dramatists working in a quite different moment and milieu. Lastly, we’ll read contemporary tragedies in the genres that hold sway in late modernity (fiction and film, with theatre continuing). Each tragedy will be paired with theory and criticism. We’ll look at tragedy theory, the long-established interpretations (Aristotle, Nietzsche, Miller, George Eliot, Hume, others), the Marxist treatments (Lukács, Benjamin, Williams, others) and responses by contemporary thinkers who find in tragedy a new (political, poetical) urgency (Eagleton, Cleary, Butler, others). Students in this seminar will actively participate in the production of knowledge; they will write and share weekly reflections, make a presentation on at least one reading, and write a comprehensive term paper with clear methodological grounding. MALS 70200 – Metropolis: A Political, Historical, and Sociological Profile of New York CRN# 36298
This interdisciplinary course will explore New York City’s rise and role as the nation’s metropolis, examining several key themes in the city’s development. In particular, we will look at Gotham as a center of work, culture and residency as well as at the diverse populations that have called the city home through its four-century history. We will examine New York City from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science.
MALS 70300 - Law, Politics, and Policy CRN# 36299 Tuesdays 4:15-6:15pm, Rm. 3207, 3 credits, Prof. Monica Varsanyi ([email protected])
With a focus on immigration (as opposed to immigrants), our primary task is to interrogate and explore the ways in which the state mediates and controls the membership and movement of people across national boundaries and within the territory of the nation-state, both historically and in the contemporary era. In exploring the changing relationship between migrants and the state, we will define “state” broadly to include the local, national, and supranational. Topics include, inter alia, the changing landscape and rescaling of immigrant enforcement, the construction of migrant illegality, the role of discretion in immigration enforcement, deportation and detention, debates over immigration and criminality, and the expanding “crimmigration” system. While the class focuses most specifically on the US context, international examples will also be discussed and papers based on international case studies are welcome. "To live over people's lives," wrote Henry James, "is nothing unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the varying intensity of the same-- since it was by these things they themselves lived." This course will interrogate various forms of so-called "life writing" (biography/fictional biography/memoir) to investigate the meaning, aims, ethics, pitfalls, and possibilities of the genre as practiced in literature. We will therefore examine a wide range of topics: the relation between fact and fiction; the significance of politics and historical context; the impact of individual psychology; point of view in narration; the function of imagination; the use or exploitation of marginal figures. And to the extent that biographical narratives depend on the creation of character, this course looks closely at how such characters are created from real people: how a living, breathing person seems to arise out of a mass of sometimes contradictory “facts”; how characters are made to change, that is, if they do; how characters can make a story move; and of course how or if traditional forms of biographical writing might be liberated from its brick-like borders. Writers/books will likely include such authors as Lytton Strachey, Natalie Zemon Davis (The Return of Martin Guerre), Virginia Woolf, Richard Holmes (Footsteps), Janet Malcolm (on Sylvia Plath biographies), Henry James, The Aspern Papers, Adam Phillips on Freud and biography, Julia Blackburn and her biographical inventions about Daisy Bates, Robert A. Caro on Lyndon Johnson, Hilton Als.
MALS 71400 - Introduction to International Studies CRN# 36301
The two main purposes of this course are to introduce you to theoretically informed historical analyses of international relations (IR) and to help you apply one of the theories of IR to an international subject of your choice. While the historical contexts and theories of IR will help you engage in further studies in IR, your paper will enhance your understanding of how you may gain social scientific knowledge by reviewing relevant theoretical literature, conceptualizing your subject matter, developing research questions, figuring out how to answer them, gathering information about them, organizing the research result as evidence for your answer to the research question, and developing your answer as an argument about a particular phenomenon or relationship on the chosen topic in the context of existing theoretical arguments.
MALS 72300 – Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies CRN# 36302
In Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us Kate Bornstein writes, “The first question we usually ask new parents is: ‘Is it a boy or a girl?’” Bornstein recommends the response, “We don’t know; it hasn’t told us yet.” This course explores the ways in which gender and sexuality are pronounced, embodied, and negotiated within specific historical and cultural contexts. Through a close reading of interdisciplinary, foundational, and recent scholarship the class will examine and theorize the ways in which categories of gender and sexuality inform and shape our understanding of the world. Investigating the intersections and collisions of gender and sexuality with race, class, ability, nationality, ethnicity, and age, the class will consider societal and institutional systems of power, privilege, oppression, and marginalization. Course requirements include an oral presentation, two 4-6 page response papers, and a 15-20 page, staged researched essay.
MALS 72600 - Social Impacts of Science and Technology: Case Studies CRN# 36304 Online, 3 credits, Prof. Joseph Dauben ([email protected]) This course will examine some of the great discoveries in science and inventions of technology that have changed the course of human history, with a view to assessing their origins, impact, and eventual consequences, both foreseen and unintended. Through individual case studies, from the origins of agriculture and exploitation of the arch to atomic energy and genetic engineering, we will investigate human ingenuity across time and in particular parts of the world, including studies of such individuals as Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, or such comparative contexts as ancient Greece versus Han-dynasty China, or modern societies contrasting the roles of science and technology in modern Britain and Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union and communist China. MALS 72700 - The Political Ecology of Social and Environmental Justice CRN# 36779 Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 4419, 3 credits, Prof. Michael Lamb ([email protected])
This course introduces various social science approaches to problems of social and environmental justice drawn from environmental psychology, anthropology, geography and critical studies. Using a multidisciplinary framework that emphasizes both a scientific and ethical commitment to social justice and to understanding human/non-human-environment interactions, students will participate in constructing an integrated model of current social and environmental problems that will aid them in their future research and application. A series of social justice and environmental issues will be surveyed each exploring different approaches and concepts so that students emerge with the ability to make effective and thoughtful choices about the constructs they employ when framing problems. The course will require extensive reading and discussion in class concluding with a final fieldwork or literature review project in preparation for their later coursework. The objective of this course is to provide a broad, intellectual base to the understanding of social and environmental justice as a values position as well as a form of practice to be employed in student’s ongoing research and work.
MALS 73100 - American Culture and Values CRN# 36305 Tuesdays, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 4419, 3 credits, Prof. Justin Rogers-Cooper ([email protected])
MALS 73400 - Africana Studies: Introduction CRN# 36306 Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room 6114, 3 credits, Prof. John Mollenkopf ([email protected])
This course introduces students to archaeological methods and important archaeological sites from the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds. The course assumes no previous knowledge of archaeology. The two primary methods of archaeological inquiry—excavation and survey—are first introduced, discussed and problematized in this course. We will then consider specific sites – cities, towns and, in certain cases, residences – to understand how archaeology has contributed to our knowledge of these sites. Sites, such as Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Palmyra, Jerusalem and others, will each be the focus of a lecture or seminar. By the end of the course students will gain a knowledge of the principles of archaeological excavation and survey; an understanding of major classes of archaeological evidence and key archaeological theories; some of the important issues and challenges, such as war and cultural destruction, confronting archaeologists today; and a knowledge of important archaeological sites from the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds.
MALS 75400 - Introduction to Digital Humanities CRN# 36309 The dramatic growth of the Digital Humanities (DH) over the past half dozen years has helped scholars re-imagine the very nature and forms of academic research and teaching across a range of scholarly disciplines, encompassing the arts, the interpretive social sciences, and traditional humanities subject areas. This course will explore the history of the digital humanities, focusing especially on the diverse pioneering projects and core texts that ground this innovative methodological and conceptual approach to scholarly inquiry and teaching. It will also emphasize ongoing debates in the digital humanities, such as the problem of defining the digital humanities, the question of whether DH has (or needs) theoretical grounding, controversies over new models of peer review for digital scholarship, issues related to collaborative labor on digital projects, and the problematic questions surrounding research involving “big data.” The course will also emphasize the ways in which DH has helped transform the nature of academic teaching and pedagogy in the contemporary university with its emphasis on collaborative, student-centered and digital learning environments and approaches. Along the way, we will discuss broad social, legal and ethical questions and concerns surrounding digital media and contemporary culture, including privacy, intellectual property, and open/public access to knowledge and scholarship. Students will be expected to participate actively in class discussions and online postings (including on blogs and wikis) and to research and write a final multimedia presentation on a key topic in the digital humanities. Students completing the course will gain broad knowledge about and understanding of the emerging role of the digital humanities across several academic disciplines and will begin to learn some of the fundamental skills used often in digital humanities projects.
Note: this course is part of the "Digital Praxis Seminar," a two-semester long introduction to digital tools and methods that will be open to all students in the Graduate Center. The goal of the course is to introduce graduate students to various ways in which they can incorporate digital research into their work.
MALS 75600 - Sustainability and Human Ecodynamics CRN# 36308
Sustainability for environments, economies, and societies (the triple bottom line) has become a central objective that unites disciplines in sciences, arts, and humanities; engages educators, activists, policy makers, NGO’s and indigenous rights organizations; and is prioritized by multiple international organizations. However, the term and concept have acquired a range of interpretations and understandings–some mutually incompatible–and there is an ongoing need to provide a common knowledge base and vocabulary, and to effectively connect education and activism for sustainability with cutting-edge method and theory in resilience, robustness, vulnerability. This course will provide a grounding in the basic literature and vocabulary of sustainability science and education, expose students to a range of interdisciplinary case studies, and engage them directly with cutting edge resilience and sustainability scholars and ongoing field research and cross-disciplinary integration.
The intensive course will provide students with multi-disciplinary perspective on sustainability (on a variety of temporal and spatial scales), tools for assessing resilience and vulnerabilities in linked social-ecological systems (SES), an extensive set of readings/on-line resources on different aspects of sustainability research and introduce them to scholars and organizations engaged in sustainability science and education. The course will present case studies in interdisciplinary human ecodynamics research as focal points for readings and discussion, and will include interactions (live or virtual) with scholars directly involved in the case studies, NGO representatives, and active field researchers. This course establishes a common vocabulary and knowledge base, bibliography, and scholarly contacts for further work and specialization by students intending to pursue studies focusing on sustainability approaches in biosciences, geosciences, social sciences, environmental history, policy and development studies, environmental activism, and education for sustainability.
MALS 77100 - Aesthetics of Film CRN# 36310 Cross listed with FSCP 81000 and THEA 71400
This course emphasizes a formal approach to viewing, interpreting, and critically engaging with film. We will organize the semester around a single provocation. How do the formal aspects of film (and media) make blackness comprehensible? In other words, how did audiences learn to recognize blackness, in a visual as well as in a thematic sense, beginning with early cinema? And, what are the formal elements that have since become synonymous with blackness on screen? In order to answer these questions, we will examine a wide array of film and media texts and analyze how mise-en-scene, narrative, cinematography, editing, sound, and genre invented the codes of cinematic blackness. We will also look at the ways that Black filmmakers and performers have used aesthetics to directly interrogate and challenge the limiting tropes typically associated with the black image on screen. We will use the eleventh edition of David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson’s textbook, Film Art: An Introduction, as the primer for the course, and we will also read several other books that explicitly address the relationship between aesthetics and race. These include Richard Dyer’s White, Nicole Fleetwood’s Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness, Krista Thompson’s Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice, and Phillip Brian Harper’s Abstractionist Aesthetics: Artistic Form and Social Critique in African American Culture. Screenings will consist of a mix of classic and newer titles, films produced in Hollywood as well as those made by independent filmmakers. Some of these include Birth of a Nation (D.W. Griffith, 1915), Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming, 1934), Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (Stanley Kramer, 1967), Daughters of the Dust (Julie Dash, 1990), Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (Spike Lee, 2014), and Moonlight (Barry Jenkins, 2016). Students will complete weekly reading reports and a final paper on the topic of their choice.
MALS 77400 - International Migration CRN# 36314 “Undocumented, Illegal, Citizen: The Politics and Psychology of Belonging in the United States” Thursdays, 4:15-6:15pm, Rm. 3309, 3 credits, Profs. Colette Daiute and David Caicedo ([email protected]) Cross-listed with IDS 81620 , PSYC 80103, U ED 75100
This course will focus on the recent history of citizenship challenges, as related to contemporary migration and higher education. The current movements of people fleeing violence and injustice worldwide have been met with some innovative policies, yet also with fences, detentions, travel bans, and other means. After reviewing such migration patterns and reactions, we focus, in particular, on the politics and psychology of what it means to belong in the U.S. today, officially and unofficially. Interestingly, much of this process has been mediated in public higher education, especially the community college. Course topics include history of 21st century migration, the Dream Act, DACA, DAPA, state policies, social movements, human rights treaties, and critical education programs as mechanisms of change. We also consider diverse perspectives on the issues, such as by generations of refugees, unaccompanied children, sanctuary movements, and relevant contexts, primarily higher education but also agricultural and domestic employment, child/family detention centers, and public media. As an offering in the “Futures Initiative,” the course design will be adaptable to students’ interests. Pending student goals, for example, we will focus on projects such as a) considering different ways of thinking about contemporary migration and citizenship; b) examining databases of narratives, survey responses, and conversations by students and faculty reflecting on the role of the community college for belonging in America; c) developing methods for examining discriminatory language and action; d) curating debates in blogs about migration and human rights; e) interacting with initiatives like “CUNY Citizenship Now!” and Dreamer clubs; f) developing a tool kit of analytic methods sensitive to social science and humanities inquiries. The course involves reading scholarly articles, policy documents, reporting on relevant innovations, writing reflection papers, and designing practice-based research projects.
MALS 78100 - Issues in Urban Education CRN# 36311 “” Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 3309, 3 credits, Profs. Ann Kirschner and Gilda Barabino ([email protected]) Cross-listed with UED 75100, IDS 81660, and SOC 84503
What does it take to prepare students for success in the 21st century? This graduate seminar will explore innovations in higher education, with a special focus on technology and new pathways that lead to lifelong learning. The course will be interdisciplinary in its approach, and will look at the web of assumptions about democracy and social mobility that underlie the American system of higher education. It is appropriate for future faculty members, administrators, or anyone who plans a career in education or public policy, or is interested in innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship in education. Leaving aside the philosophical question of what constitutes “success,” we start with a set of observations:
And a set of questions, intended to be broad and provocative:
Imagine a child of six today, graduating from high school in 2028. What do we think college will look like and how do we get ready for that student? The course will be conducted in a seminar format, emphasizing class presentations and participation. There will be visitors drawn from leaders in higher education and technology. Students will interview students and leaders at other universities, as well as corporate leaders. Each seminar meeting will include a weekly lightning round, where each student will present an article/new study. Some may elect to be embedded with companies for group strategy projects. As a final assignment, students will choose an area of innovation and present a case for CUNY adoption.
Click to Open Summer 2017 SUMMER 2017 COURSE DESCRIPTIONS This course offers a critical engagement with our contemporary understanding of security, closely engaging with a series of key concepts - violence, resilience, (in)security, emergency - within the context of an increasingly expanded conceptualization of security that goes well beyond traditional associations with military and defense, as well as the overarching agency of the state. New discourses such as the 'Islamic threat', 'migration waves', or 'cyber warfare' combined with revived fears of 'nuclear warfare' and new forms of extinction, including environmental extinction, provide a rich background against which to assess our ability, or in some cases lack thereof, to deal with new and old threats.
History of Cinema I is an intensive examination of film history before 1930 that introduces students to international silent cinema, to the scholarly literature on early cinema, and to the practices of researching and writing film history. Subjects covered will include the emergence of cinema, the cinema of attractions, the narrativization of cinema, theater and early film, sound, color, and the “silent” image, the industrialization of film production, national cinemas of the 1910s, the Hollywood mode of filmmaking, women and African-American filmmakers, and film movements of the 1920s. Students will study the work of such filmmakers as Lumière, Méliès, Porter, Paul, Bauer, Christensen, Feuillade, Weber, Micheaux, Murnau, Dulac, Eisenstein, and others while considering the ways that silent films were exhibited and received in diverse contexts. MALS 78500 - Readings on Fascism, CRN # 36004 Understanding the nature and practice of Fascism has become vital in recent years, reaching an urgency in Europe and the US not felt since the 1920s and 30s. A product of modernity and its contradictions, Fascism’s mix of nationalism, national-rebirth, rejection of democratic liberties, cult of the leader, etc. has seen a dramatic resurgence. Through a look at the rich literature on fascism and authoritarianism, this course offers a deeper understanding of a thoroughly modern phenomenon with contemporary wide reaching impact. Click to Open Spring 2017 SPRING 2017 COURSE DESCRIPTIONSMALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies, CRN # 35161 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? A final learning objective is to help you develop your scholarly craft. The steps in this involve learning the following:
MALS 73100 American Culture and Values, CRN # 35888 [CANCELLED]
MALS 75500 - Digital Humanities: Methods and Practices, CRN # 35168
The class will hold a public launch event at the end of the semester where students will present their proofs-of-concept, and receive feedback from the broader community.
Click to Open Fall 2016 FALL 2016 COURSE DESCRIPTIONSMALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies CRN# 32249
MALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies CRN# 32250 This course introduces students to critical thinking and techniques of academic reading and writing related to cross-cultural and international studies through a critical evaluation of the concept of Asia in the Euro-American intellectual discourse. Asia is much more than a geographic location. The understanding we generally have of Asia and things Asian has evolved from a continuing re-assessment of this designation within a Euro-American intellectual framework. Where did this framework come from, under what circumstances was it created? What is its appeal? A multi-cultural and interdisciplinary approach is employed to help answer these questions. Central to this course is an exploration of the representation of Asian cultures and “Eastern traditions” in the intellectual discourse of Europe and America.
MALS 70000 - Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies CRN# 32252
MALS 70600 - The Enlightenment and Critique CRN# 32254
MALS 71400 - Introduction to International Studies CRN# 32258
MALS 71800 - Cross-Cultural & Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives on Work & Family Issues CRN# 32566
MALS 72300 – Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies CRN# 32260
MALS 78100 - Issues in Urban Education CRN# 32267
Click to Open Spring 2016 MALS 70000 Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies Click to Open Fall 2015 FALL15 MALS Course ScheduleIn some cases, MALS core courses will be cross-listed with other programs. Students who would like to have these courses satisfy the core course requirement for their chosen tracks must register for the MALS course number. Please keep this in mind as you register.
Click to Open Spring 2015 In some cases, MALS core courses will be cross-listed with other programs. Students who would like to have these courses satisfy the core course requirement for their chosen tracks must register for the MALS course number. Please keep this in mind as you register.
MALS 78200 The Politics of Contemporary Urban Education [27477] MALS 78500 Analyzing Cultural Data [27936] Click to Open Fall 2014 In some cases, MALS core courses will be cross-listed with other programs. Students who would like to have these courses satisfy the core course requirement for their chosen tracks must register for the MALS course number. Please keep this in mind as you register. MALS 70000 Intro to Grad Liberal Studies [26107] Is the United States an empire? If so, what might that mean? If not, what other metaphors can we use to explain U.S. global relations? This course examines the transformations of U.S. global power and international relations – from the end of the nineteenth century to the present – as a way to engage these questions. The United States does not hold political sovereignty over a broad range of colonies. Aside from the 50 United States, the U.S. holds Puerto Rico, Guam, the Virgin Islands of the United States, the Northern Marianas, and American Samoa. But, the U.S. has the largest military in the world, sustains the world’s largest economy, and has unparalleled power throughout the globe. Our task in this class is to interrogate that power, to understand how it emerged and changed over time, and to explore the dynamics and contradictions that animate it. We will also examine how global engagements have transformed the United States’ domestic terrain: just as the U.S. helps shape the world, the world also changes the United States. Our interdisciplinary study of these questions will be organized both chronologically and thematically. Students will be asked to write frequently and to produce a final paper. The Politics of Excess, Ambiguity, and Laughter in 20th Century Culture We will spend the first four weeks of the term reading and discussing the four life stories in Michael Hulse’s translation of The Emigrants (1996), a book by W.G. Sebald originally published as Die Ausgewanderten in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1992. (We will also read some reviews and essays about the book; students will do some reports and writing.) During this time, we will list, discuss, and develop possible subjects for research papers, which will be due at the end of the term. (Areas in which subjects might occur include: translation; exile; butterflies; Manchester Jews; candlewick bedspreads; photographs as evidence; mountain climbing; charcoal as a medium. The trick of course is to find and choose your own particular subject, argument, and voice.) The next three weeks will be devoted to working on the research paper: in class we will discuss methods, databases, and bibliographies; outlines, paragraphs, sentences, punctuation, etc. In the last segment of the course, students will share and discuss one another’s papers, preparatory to rewriting the final draft. MALS 70000 Intro to Grad Liberal Studies [26134] |
The decree most clearly illustrates which of the following changes in the period 1450–1750 ?
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