Students should check a current class schedule each semester to see which courses are offered. Many meet in the evenings. All courses carry 4 points. The list below is representative, not exhaustive.

ART WORLDS

Introduction to Art Worlds I
G65.1106
The first of a two-course sequence designed to explore debates about the production, consumption, distribution, and interpretation of the arts. Incorpor-ating methods and insights from anthropology, history, philosophy, and sociology, this course introduces students to issues in and methods for cultural analysis. Readings include texts by Adorno, Benjamin, Becker, Bourdieu, Weber, Williams, and others.

Introduction to Art Worlds II
G65.1116
Focuses on questions of reception and interpretation, particularly on the distinctions between “high” culture and other cultural designations. How have avant-garde notions and systems contributed to the “culture wars”? What role do class distinctions have in the evolution of cultural controversies? How do notions of good and poor “taste” emerge, and how are they defined? To what extent do debates over cultural freedom serve as proxies for other political struggles?

Possession and Performance: Penetrable Selves
G65.2666
“Spirit possession” provides one model for reconsidering the delineations of individual identity. This course reconsiders the relationship between spirit possession as registered in diverse cultural contexts and the political demarcation of the individual and community. Students examine ethnographies, film, and psychological analyses of the significance of possession and try to tie this discussion to current debates surrounding the construction of national, racial, and sexual identity.

THE CITY

Introduction to the City I
G65.1108
Introduces the complex nature of the city and the local and global political, social, and economic forces that shape it. As these forces manifest themselves differently in different localities, students study various city types, including the global city, the modern metropolis, and the informal city. New York City is the main platform for exploration, revealing as it does the continuities and congruencies in the forms and processes that characterize contemporary cities.

Garbage in Gotham: The Anthropology of Trash
G65.1813
Traces changing definitions of value and worthlessness through Enlightenment, modern, and postmodern theory. Considers these through the perspective of trash, which is read as a reflection of contemporary social mores, time/space compression, and fragmentations of cultural identity, among other themes. Uses New York City as a case study.

The Contemporary City in Conflict: Militarization and Urban Warfare
G65.2099
Seminar about the contemporary city in low- and high-intensity conflicts since the Cold War era. Focuses on two main processes: militarization of urban space and urban warfare. As a site of civil, military, economic, and political importance, the city can play a strategic role in either intensifying or reducing conflict. Students develop an understanding of the contemporary city as both a platform for and a target in local and global contests for cultural diversification, economic liberalization, political change, and militarization.

Planning, Politics, and the City: The Rebuilding of Berlin, Beirut, and New York City
G65.2102
Seminar about planning and politics in the reconstruction of cities devastated by short- and long-term conflict. Explores themes of devastation, occupation, division, archaeology, and preservation, as well as collective memory and identity as they shape acts of reconstruction in Berlin, Beirut, and New York. Seeks to understand how war affects the political, social, and economic life of the city and transforms the urban environment through policies enacted by the state as it embarks on the process of clearing the ruins and launching reconstruction.

Introduction to the City II
G65.2108
Students learn various approaches for studying the city by transforming a topic of interest into a researchable question, developing a research design, and identifying the most appropriate methods for their chosen research project. An overview of qualitative research methods is provided, both through the examination of existing studies and the development of the students’ own projects.

GENDER POLITICS

Introduction to Gender Politics I
G65.1205
Investigates the relationship of the shape of the body to the shape of the self. Focuses on psychoanalytic discourse and its legacy in academic, artistic, and popular culture. Students read texts by Freud, Riviere, Fanon, Butler, Segwick, and others, and study material representations of sexuality in fiction, philosophy, photography, and dance.

Sexuality in Culture and Politics: The Explanation for Everything
G65.1207
Explores current critical literature that uses sexuality to engage important subjective, cultural, and political phenomena. What is “sexuality” and what can it explain? What tools can sexuality studies offer for thinking about modern life, about global politics, and about scholarly work? Topics include sex education; sexual geography; race, class, and the erotics of colonialism; and the queer renaissance of the 1990s.

Introduction to Gender Politics II
G65.1215
Focuses on Foucault’s thinking about sexuality, power, knowledge, and the body. Students read several of Foucault’s most influential works and discuss the critical reception of his ideas and their application by a range of scholars in the decades since his death.

GLOBAL HISTORIES

Introduction to Global Histories I
G65.1107
Surveys world historical trends by examining spaces and practices outside the normative expectations of national histories. Students read accounts from different historical periods of human encounters on and across the world’s major seas and oceans—“contact zones” that blur conventional territorial and cultural definitions—and review related concepts, tools, and methodologies adopted by world and global historians in their analyses.

History of the News
G65.1120  Identical to G54.0018.
Broadly examines the cultural foundations of modern journalism; explores assumptions built into the communication called “news.” Particular attention is paid to ways in which the medium affects content and perspective.

African Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade
G65.2051  Identical to G57.2555.
Examines the institution of servitude and slavery in tropical Africa since classical antiquity. Includes study of master-servant relationships, the Atlantic slave trade, and its impact on the political, social, and economic organization of Africa.

Introduction to Global Histories II
G65.2107
Studies colonialism from a comparative perspective. Examines the ways in which relations of power, subordination, and negotiation were constituted across time and space and poses questions about the most effective ways in which to understand the colonial “moment” in world history. Themes that are covered include race and classification, political subjectivity, and nationalism.

The “Cradle” of Globalization? History, Economy, Society, and Diaspora in the Indian Ocean
G65.2121
The history of the Indian Ocean is unique in its intensive indigenous commerce before the arrival of Europeans and in the coexistence of European and indigenous trade during the so-called modern era. This course explores the history of the peoples and societies who have “made” the world of the Indian Ocean over more than 5,000 years. The course pays particular attention to the transformations of economies and the movement of peoples and culture around the Ocean into modern times. It considers the nature of littoral or coastal societies, factors of unity and disunity (is there such a thing as an Indian Ocean “world”?), and the legitimacy of studying the Indian Ocean as the first “globalized” space.

Urban Blacks in 20th-Century America
G65.2714  Identical to G57.2714.
Considers black Americans within the transformation of wealth, power, and population in the United States during the 20th century. Provides background and historical context on blacks prior to the 20th century but concentrates on developments after the turn of the century.

LITERARY CULTURES

The Passions of the Mind: Affect, Literature, and Music in Europe, 1600-1850
G65.1005
Explores relations among affect, literature, and music in the theory and practices of early modern Europe. Examines the theory of the passions in explicit contrast with late modern constructions of emotion.

Introduction to Literary Cultures I
G65.1301
An intensive survey of foundational texts in contemporary literary theory. Reading literary works from antiquity through modernity, students investigate how language and the literary determine our various approaches, relations, and commitments to the “true” and the “real.” Touchstones for discussion include imitation, representation, subjection, transformation, resistance, and freedom.

The Ethics of Literary Interpretation
G65.1305
Explores the relation of “theory” to “practice” as the space of an ethics of interpretation. Focuses on the ethical implications of the performative act of interpretation itself with particular attention to the concurrent yet sometimes competing claims of text and context. Readings include texts by Kant, Levinas, Lacan, Duras, Douglass, Morrison, Kafka, and others.

Introduction to Literary Cultures II
G65.1321
Investigates the ethical and political dimensions of contemporary critical theory. Also explores the ways in which literary texts articulate and unfold the ethical and political paradoxes that traditional philosophical discourse too often characterizes as simply forms of error, unreason, contradiction, or transgression.

The Literary History of Sexuality
G65.1323
Explores the mutually shaping relationship between literature and sexuality. Investigates the ways in which Freudian and Foucauldian accounts of sexuality are themselves determined by the history of literary production, reception, and interpretation. At the same time, considers how the categories and protocols of literary creation and understanding are inflected by the vicissitudes of sexual desire.

Law and Mass Communication
G65.2070  Identical to G54.0011.
Acquaints students with basic protections and restrictions of the law as applied to the institutional press. Discusses First Amendment principles and issues of libel, privacy, copyright, obscenity, fair trial, free press, reporter’s privilege, and rules of broadcast.

Heidegger and Wittgenstein
G65.2192
“Philosophy is an age grasped in thought,” Hegel once said, and if the 20th century was grasped in thought at all, it was by Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein. If their thought is elusive, no wonder—for their age made the very idea of comprehension suspect. In Heidegger and Wittgenstein we meet two philosophers profoundly inclined toward the unity that metaphysics promises but forced to confront that promise as a receding possibility in an incomprehensible historical moment.

SCIENCE STUDIES

Science, Colonialism, and the State
G65.1105
Explores how science and technology have been used both to support and to subvert colonialist and nationalist projects. Examines political contests over the meaning of the “traditional” and the “modern,” focusing on technology, medicine, museums, schools, and weapons.

Introduction to Science Studies I
G65.1109
Surveys science from a variety of philosophical, sociological, historical, linguistic, anthropological, and critical perspectives. Explores debates over constructivism, relativism, and the uses to which scientific knowledge is put by examining how cultural boundaries between science and nonscience are constructed and maintained.

Introduction to Science Studies II
G65.1110
Examines how new and emerging knowledges and technologies, such as cold fusion, genetics, cloning, organ transplantation, and assisted conception, are problematizing boundaries that are assumed to be natural and fixed, while at the same time remaking the social structures that support science.

Modernism and the Alienation of Form
G65.2190
Since the French Revolution, the idea of progressive evolution gave Western culture a unified sense of its place in the great scheme of things, but the decades leading up to World War I saw the gradual decline of that paradigm. From the linguistic turn in philosophy to the professionalization of sociology, from symbolist poetry to cubism, from Bartók to Bauhaus, from the New Criticism to socialist realism, a preoccupation with form emerged as the defining characteristic of a modernism that could no longer rely on natural design. This course considers various examples of that preoccupation in a search for the roots of postmodern dissolution.

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