Category Archives: Fall 2025

The Art of Play (ARTS-UG 1110)

We know that for children play is more than just fun; it is the work through which they develop. But what about when adults play? Through play we find our freedom, spontaneity, and our aesthetic. What is there in human beings that enables us to play? Why is play considered an innate capacity of people from the beginning of recorded history? What qualifies as play? When does play become art? In this course, everyone plays and in doing so examines the historic and contemporary uses of play as a potentially universal impulse of humans, across generations, time and space. Play’s capacity to create and sustain community will be considered. We will examine play as it is reflected through theories of child development, dramatic improvisation, fine art, politics, social construction and identities, music, religion and spirituality, literature and social media. Students will examine the necessity of play in their own child and adult lives—the creative spirit, the adventurer, the empathic connection with humanity, and laughter, too. Books may include: Nachmanovitch’s Free Play, Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment, Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, and selected readings from Lorca, Nietzche, Piaget, Postman, Solomon.

Arts Workshops (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

ARTS-UG 1110-000 (9410)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Thu8:00 AM – 10:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Hodermarska, Maria

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Undergraduate

History of Biotechnology (IDSEM-UG 2111)

What becomes of life when researchers can materially manipulate and technically transform living things? In this course, we will historically investigate biotechnology in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, paying attention to how efforts to engineer life are grounded in social, cultural, and political contexts. Topics include reproductive technologies, genetic engineering and cloning, genetically modified foods, bioprospecting, genomics, stem cells, and biosafety and biosecurity. The course is organized around five crosscutting domains in which we will explore the ethical, legal, and social impacts of biotechnology: (1) food, (2) property and law, (3) sex and reproduction, (4) disease and drugs, and (5) genomic identities. We will read and discuss historical and anthropological accounts of biotechnology, primary scientific publications, legal cases, and speculative fiction. We will learn to evaluate the social constitution and impact of biotechnology on daily life, as well as how to place contemporary issues and debates about biotechnology in sociopolitical and historical contexts. Case studies cover topics such as the Green Revolution, the Recombinant DNA controversy, BRCA gene patents, egg freezing, the Mexican Genome Project, and CRISPR-Cas9. Secondary sources include articles and book excerpts from historians, anthropologists, and sociologists of the life sciences, including but not limited to Cori Hayden, Sarah Franklin, Ruha Benjamin, Kim TallBear, Alondra Nelson, and Amade M’Charek.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Fall 2025 Physical Science OR Life Science Undergraduate

Asian/American Labor: Past, Present, and Future (IDSEM-UG 2923)

This interdisciplinary seminar will explore the role of labor in the making of Asian America. Much of the course will connect the past to the present, paying close attention to historical analyses and community-engaged research. Using a site-based approach, this course will use our surroundings in New York City, to investigate Asian American labor. Each week, we will study interdisciplinary themes around work as it relates to Asian communities, such as “food and migration,” “race-making in New York’s nail salons,” “care work,” etc. Through close readings and film screenings, we will discuss the ways in which laboring Asian Americans have organized, resisted, created, and mobilized from the bottom-up, challenging their bosses and the state. How have Asian/American workers shaped, pushed back against, and transformed New York? How can we understand racial formation and immigration in New York’s labor movements? And what about transnational contexts? Through discussions of the readings and films, we will reflect questions that unpack “work” and “labor.” Students will study and write OpEds, making arguments with evidence to comment about the past, present, and future of Asian/American labor. Texts by scholars of Asian American Studies and labor histories, such as Lisa Lowe, Vivek Bald, and Miliann Kang, will guide students and encourage their writing. Film screenings will include From Spikes to Spindles (1976) and Nailed It (2019), which capture the stories of garment and nail salon workers (respectively), to facilitate our discussions about Asian/American labor studies.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

IDSEM-UG 2923-000 (9718)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Mon,Wed12:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Bae, Minju

Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate

Documentary Traditions (FMTV-UT 1032)

14 sessions will be devoted to a history of the genre, screening essential films both inside and outside the canon, with a focus on the changes in style, technique, and subject matter which influenced the form from its earliest beginnings to the present. Undergraduates who take the course for three points are required to keep journals in which they respond to each session and compare observations with those made when viewing at least one documentary of their choice seen outside class, as well as in response to critical essays provided at each session and references in the text.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 16647
Section #: 001
Meets: R 6:20-9p

Fall 2025 Fall 2026 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate

DEVELOPING ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGY (DM-GY 7053)

This multidisciplinary course allows students from a variety of backgrounds to work together to learn about and develop assistive technology, as well as cultivate a better understanding of the people being served. Students will work in teams to identify clinical needs relevant to their chosen client and learn the process of developing an idea and following that through to the development of a prototype product.

Integrated Digital Media (Graduate)
3 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

DM-GY 7053-000 (15751)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Tue5:00 PM – 7:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Brooklyn CampusInstructed by

Fall 2025 Graduate IMA Electives

The Basics of Social Entrepreneurship (REMU-UT 1269)

This introductory course is targeted to all students who have a strong sense of their individual purpose and are motivated to change the world through music. In this course, students learn about social entrepreneurs, how they think, the problems they address, the business tools they leverage and the strategies they employ to create social change. Through readings, participatory class discussion, class activities, self-reflection and occasional guest speakers, students examine current issues, opportunities and challenges that social entrepreneurs and their ventures face. In addition, they acquire skills, actionable tools, and practical approaches to help advance their social change agenda now and in the future. Ultimately, the aim is to inspire and empower students to put their ideas for social change in to action and to start manifesting the change they wish to see in the world.

Recorded Music (Undergraduate)
2 credits – 7 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

REMU-UT 1269-000 (18011)10/22/2025 – 12/11/2025 Thu5:00 PM – 8:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Davis, Lauren

Fall 2025 General Elective Undergraduate

Intro to Television Writing (FMTV-UT 1017)

This course, aimed at second semester sophomores, is the launch pad of Television Writing in the department. Before taking any other TV writing courses, students must take Introduction To Television Writing. The course will introduce sophomores interested in TV writing to all aspects of what goes into the creation of a script for a TV program. It is also recommended for non-writers who wish to learn the fundamentals of TV writing as preparation for creating shows and working with writers. The course will also prepare students for other TV-writing courses in the departmental Television Progression. The course is also open to seniors with an interest in television writing who haven’t taken other TV writing courses. This course allocates as Film & TV, Scriptwriting for Film & TV majors.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 12913
Section #: 001
Meets: M 12:30-3:15p


Class #: 12914
Section #: 002
Meets: T 6:20-9p


Class #: 12915
Section #: 003
Meets: R 9:30a-12:15p


Class #: 12916
Section #: 004
Meets: W 3:30-6:10p

Fall 2025 Fall 2026 General Elective Spring 2025 Spring 2026 Summer 2026 Undergraduate

Topics in ITP (ITPG-GT 2379)

Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates:
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu,Wed
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu,Wed,Mon
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu,Wed,Mon
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu,Wed,Mon
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu,Wed,Mon
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu,Wed,Mon
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu,Wed,Mon,Fri
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu,Wed,Mon,Fri
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
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Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu,Wed,Mon,Fri
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu,Wed,Mon,Fri

This course will cover a variety of academic topics within the field of Interactive Telecommunications. For further details, please refer to the individual class section notes and topic subtitle.

Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
2 credits – 15 Weeks

Fall 2025 Graduate IMA Electives Spring 2026
Fall 2024

Universe in a Blender (COART-UT 508)

Blender is a dynamic tool that can be used to design real world sets, physical objects and virtual assets for various media and live performance. It can render robust animations and impose visual effects on recorded video. It has the capacity to interface easily with interactive softwares like Unity and Unreal, while having the potential to output hi-fidelity renders for print. But beyond that it’s just a software. The ability to create any believable world comes from you. In this class we will explore a variety of techniques to create living, breathing fictional worlds while honing the skills in Blender to bring them to life. Students will be asked to create food, buildings, clothing, people and traffic signs from their fictional universe – building consistency of aesthetic, narrative allusion, and the fine details that make any world “believable”. The class will involve dissecting and discussing media on this world building, technical tutorials and instruction in Blender, and hands on workshops that tackle the conceptual questions of world building while exploring how to interface Blender with an outside medium: (3D printing, Pattern Making, Asset Development, Unity, Unreal, After Effects, recorded video). Students will be expected to watch technical tutorials and read short pieces on these topics for homework. Students will also complete weekly deliverable assignments.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 18719
Section #: 001
Meets: R 5-8p

Fall 2025 Fall 2026 IMA Electives IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Media & Entertainment) Undergraduate

Morality in Childhood (CAMS-UA 9145)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates:

How do children come to know right from wrong? Do we enter the world as blank moral slates who must learn right and wrong, or are we born with an innate moral sense? How do parents, peers, school, culture, and the media influence and shape our moral development? To answer these questions, this course explores the science of morality, a burgeoning field that has emerged at the intersection of developmental, social, and evolutionary psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience, and now forms a core component of the scientific study of human nature. In this course, we first define morality and learn about how it is studied scientifically. We then talk about babies, beasts, and brains, and what research with each of these can tell us about morality, where it comes from, and how it develops during childhood. Next, we consider in more detail the role of parents, peers, school, and society in shaping moral development from infancy to adulthood. We will consider how today’s youth negotiate the challenges of the modern world, including bullying in school and on the Internet, the influence of the media and popular culture, and hate and prejudice.

Child/Adoles Mental Hlth Stds (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate

Food, Culture & Globalization: London (FOOD-UE 9184)

Credits: 2
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon
Credits: 2
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon

This course investigates current transformations in the food systems and cultures of London under conditions of globalization. A people’s diet is dependent on their geography, although no people on earth eat everything edible in their environment, and they seek distant stimulants that their locales cannot support. Through lectures, readings, field trips students will master established facts and concepts about contemporary urban food cultures and produce new knowledge of the same.

Food Studies (Undergraduate)
2 credits – 14 Weeks

Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Societies & the Social Sciences Spring 2026 Undergraduate

Adv Sem: Global Persp in Child & Adolescent Mh (CAMS-UA 9202)

Children and adolescents suffer worldwide from significant mental health stressors, but how mental health and illness are perceived and addressed varies greatly around the world. The first part of the course will provide a brief overview of human rights, child development, social determinants of mental health, trauma and resilience, and the global public health significance of mental illness. Using this framework, the impact of selected salient cross-cultural factors affecting mental health (i.e. poverty, war and conflict, and gender-based exploitation) on children’s development and wellbeing will be studied. Throughout the course, various perspectives will be considered, while dominant paradigms will be recognized and critically examined. Lastly, the course will conclude on a pragmatic level—deliberating specific settings, available resources, barriers, and preventative proposals. Selected case studies from the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East will be used to illustrate key concepts. Through lectures, readings, documentaries, and active discussion this course will provide an engaging forum to consider and debate child and adolescent mental health issues globally.

Child/Adoles Mental Hlth Stds (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 13 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

CAMS-UA 9202-000 (19900)09/01/2025 – 12/04/2025 Thu5:00 PM – 6:00 PM (Late afternoon)at NYU London (Global)Instructed by

Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Societies & the Social Sciences Undergraduate

The Contemporary Literature Lab (ENGL-UA 9995)

Credits: 2
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Wed

This course bridges scholarly and professional training by providing students with an intensive introduction to the world of contemporary literature: its writers, its communities, and its organizations and institutions. Built around the English Department’s Contemporary Literature Series (CLS), which brings noted authors who are on course syllabi that semester to the NYU campus, the focus of the CLS Lab varies each semester depending on the featured authors. Some of the topics to be explored include: literary publishing, forums for literary discussion and criticism, literary organizations and institutions, and the possibilities and challenges of writing scholarly literary criticism about contemporary literature. By the end of the CLS Lab, students will have a firm grasp of the contemporary literary landscape and they will be better prepared to translate their interests and skills as English majors into the intellectual and professional contexts of the literary world.

English (Undergraduate)
2 credits – 14 Weeks

Fall 2025 General Elective Spring 2026 Undergraduate

Intro to Urban Agriculture (FOOD-UE 1030)

Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Wed
Credits: 2
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Wed

This course provides a practical introduction to urban agriculture. Students will learn horticultural skills while performing tasks at the NYU Urban Farm Lab. They will also learn about the biological processes that these tasks manage & how they fit together in a system. Through visits to other sites around the city, students will be exposed to a wide variety of strategies for practicing horticulture in the urban environment.

Food Studies (Undergraduate)
2 credits – 15 Weeks

Fall 2025 General Elective Spring 2026 Undergraduate
Fall 2024

Playful Performance Props (COART-UT 505)

In this class, we’ll learn TouchDesigner, a powerful software hub for live audiovisual content, and control it with DIY props and digital interfaces that we’ll build to connect to our art directly from the stage. With a cutting-edge buffet of inputs and outputs at our disposal, what new, evolved, or remixed types of performance can we create? If you’re a musician, you’ll build and play instruments that didn’t exist before. If you’re a dancer, your movements will become the music and visuals, instead of the other way around. If you’re a filmmaker, you’ll shoot a real-life scene with a virtual camera or light a physical set with real-time VFX. If you’re a visual artist, you’ll warp color, distort images, and push pixels to the brink of destruction. If you’re all of the above, you’ll have fun in this class. To connect to TouchDesigner, we’ll build hardware props using Arduinos, tiny computers that we can hook up sensors, buttons, and LEDs to, and create unique thematic interfaces that augment our performances and interactive installations. Weekly assignments explore AI tools, electronic circuits, fabrication, camera input and livestreams, 3D models and procedural animation, and more. Midway through the semester we’ll begin performing live using our connected props for DJ/VJing and projection-mapped interactive spaces, with the class culminating in a final public performance bringing together the best of student work. No previous coding or performance experience necessary. There is a lab fee for the hardware we’ll use to build our devices.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 18696
Section #: 001
Meets: T 5:30-8:30p

Fall 2025 Fall 2026 IMA Electives IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Media & Entertainment) Undergraduate

Innovations in Arts Publications (ARTS-UG 1655)

The ever-inventive world of arts publications encompasses a dazzling range of subjects, mediums, materials, and methods: from ancient illuminated manuscripts, political manifestos, and one-of-a-kind artists books to high-end glossies, handmade zines, posters and print multiples to the infinite possibilities of the digital realm. This workshop will introduce and explore many of these forms through guest lecturers, field trips to specialized collections and museums, directed readings, and hands-on work, which will culminate in final group and individual projects. Readings may include Posters: A Global History; Action Time Vision; and Design: the Invention of Desire.

Arts Workshops (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

ARTS-UG 1655-000 (9415)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Mon2:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Friedman, Lise

Fall 2025 IMA Electives IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Art & Design) Undergraduate