Category Archives: Liberal Arts & Sciences – Electives
All Liberal Arts Elective Courses: Quantitative Reasoning, Physical Science OR Life Science, Societies & the Social Sciences, Expressive Culture, General Liberal Arts Electives
This course is an introduction to visual methodologies and critical theory as well as contemporary practices in art and culture. Students use media and materials of their own choosing to explore and respond to the issues raised through readings, presentations, class discussions, writing assignments, and group critiques.
How does someone go about changing the world? What does social change theory suggest are the most effective tactics to change hearts and minds? What can we learn from the past about what it means to be an effective agent of change? How have social entrepreneurs created organizations that become engines of change? How has technology, social media and trends in mainstream media changed the rules of the game? This course will focus on social change theory and explore social movements in post-WWII America, including: the movement for Black civil rights, the LGBTQ Movement, Environment/Climate Activism, the Women’s Movement; the Conservative Movement, Corporate Social Responsibility and social entrepreneurship, Immigration, Healthcare, Journalism, Whistleblowing & Hacktivism, and the Free Speech movement.
Over the past forty years, China has transitioned from a poor, inefficient, and closed economy to an upper-middle income country and the world’s largest trading nation. This course introduces the key institutional and economic reforms of China since 1978 and their contributions to China’s economic development. We will examine the reforms in the pivotal sectors, including agriculture, industry, banking, and international trade, all of which are important steps to improve the overall efficiency and productivity of the Chinese economy. We will also discuss the current challenges facing China to maintain sustainable growth, such as problems regarding demographic structure, state-owned enterprises, government debts, etc. Prerequisite: This course assumes no prior background in economics. However, if you are already familiar with basic algebra and basic calculus, supply and demand curves, basic economics concepts, it will help you to understand this course better. Prereq: None. Fulfillment: CORE IPC; Economics Elective; Social Science Focus Political Economy 200 level.
This course utilizes multidisciplinary sources of evidence to address Arab-Islamic knowledge and culture, the influences that they had on medieval and early modern Europe, and that they continue to have today, while questioning why many Western scholars have minimized Arab-Islamic contributions in favor of “Western Exceptionalism” narratives. By exploring cross-cultural transmissions of knowledge, students are encouraged to think critically about how ideas and technologies evolve as they are adopted by individuals and groups in order to suit their personal and cultural needs. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Major Other Introductory Courses (18-19 Survey Courses).
This course will explore the macroeconomics and microeconomic foundations of economic development. We will discuss poverty, growth, development trap, distribution of income, demography and economic development, land and agricultural labor, health and nutrition, credit, insurance, intra-household allocation and gender, education. In these topics, we will ask: What determines the decisions of poor households in less-developed countries? What constraints do they face? What policies have been tried? What are the policy effect we have seen? Prerequisite: ECON-SHU 1 Principles of Macroeconomics or ECON-SHU 3 Microeconomics or ECON-SHU 202 Intermediate Macroeconomics or ECON-SHU 301 Econometrics. Fulfillment: Economics elective; Social Science Focus Political Economy 300 level.
This course examines the complexities of the bilateral relationship between the People’s Republic of China (China) and the United States (US), focusing on their historical rapport, major debates, and current relations. Topics include Sino-US economic relations, media reporting, variation in political systems, global politics, climate/energy issues, military affairs, and contested territories. Prerequisite: None. SOCS-SHU 160 is recommended, but not required. Fulfillment: Core SSPC or IPC; GCS China and the World/The Politics, Economy, and Environment of China; SS Focus International Relations/Political Science 200 level; HUMN 18-19 Topic.
The course focuses on the cross-currents of China’s encounters with the world, from the late 16th to the early 21st century. It proceeds from two assumptions: first, that China has long been engaged with the rest of the world rather than ever having been “closed”, as some would have it; and second, that impact and influence flow in multiple directions: into, through, and out of China, whether intentionally or involuntarily. Through a combination of lecture, discussion, and student research projects we will explore China’s encounters with the world chronologically and thematically, covering such broad topics as religion and philosophy; diplomacy; law; trade; war; revolution; political systems, and “soft power”. Pre-requisites: None. Fulfillment: CORE HPC or IPC; GCS China and the World; Humanities Introductory course (18-19: survey).
The course will provide a background study of all related areas of the multibillion-dollar music industry, including the evolution and operations of the record company, music publishing, artist management, live entertainment, copyright, business-to-business and consumer-facing digital services.
A follow-up complement to the first-year required Creative Entrepreneurs in Historical Context course that focused on entrepreneurs and producers, Artists and Audiences in Historical Context considers the history of popular (& semi-popular) music through the lens of iconic performers/recording artists and their audiences and communities, with special attention to issues of space and geography. Here are the central questions this class asks: Why do we have performing musicians and recording artists? What work do they do in the world, and how have our conceptions of the artist changed over time? And why do artists continue to need audiences? What role do fans and listeners play in our culture and politics? As we tackle these questions, we’ll look at how artists and audiences have been impacted over the decades by emerging media and technologies; we’ll look at auteur theory, crowd theory and cultural conceptions of musical genius; we’ll address taste and the rockism/poptimism debates; the pervasive role of stardom/celebrity as it determines what we might call today’s “pop industrial complex;” we’ll talk about issues of freedom of expression and political activism; we’ll think about the artist’s role in and against forces like war, terrorism and various forms of state and religious repression; and the artist’s struggle to reach audiences in, and against, categories of classification like genre and format. Artists and Audiences in Historical Context is an intensive reading and writing course, perhaps the most intensive one you will take at REMU: students read critical and historical writing about a diverse range of performers/recording artists, and then practice critical/creative writing themselves. Working with assistant editors/mentors as well as the instructor, students will be expected to learn how music writing improves through drafting, editing and stylistic refinement. Weekly audio/video playlists will supplement the reading and writing.
Open to students with no previous training in French. Not equivalent to FREN-UA 9010. Only by following FREN-UA9001 with FREN-UA9002 can a student complete the equivalent of FREN-UA9010 and then continue on to the intermediate level.
Data Science for Everyone is a foundational course that prepares students to participate in the data-driven world that we are all experiencing. It develops programming skills in Python so that students can write programs to summarize and compare real-world datasets. Building on these data analysis skills, students will learn how to draw conclusions and make predictions about the data. Students will also explore related ethical, legal, and privacy issues.
Evaluates, from the management point of view, marketing as a system for the satisfaction of human wants and a catalyst of business activity. Deals with the subject at all levels, from producer to consumer, and emphasizes the planning required for the efficient use of marketing tools in the development and expansion of markets. Concentrates on the principles, functions, and tools of marketing, including quantitative methods. Utilizes cases to develop a problem-solving ability in dealing with specific areas. Prerequisite: Not open to first-semester students. Fulfillment: This course satisfies BUSM Marketing Core, BUSF: Business elective, IMB Business Flexible Core or elective; Data Science concentration in Marketing; Count for CAS Business Minor, Count for Stern Business Studies Minor.
This module provides a rigorous introduction to topics in digital logic design. Introductory topics include: classification of digital systems, number systems and binary arithmetic, error detection and correction, and switching algebra. Combinational design analysis and synthesis topics include: logic function optimization, arithmetic units such as adders and subtractors, and control units such as decoders and multiplexers. In-depth discussions on memory elements such as various types of latches and flip-flops, finite state machine analysis and design, random access memories, FPGAs, and high-level hardware description language programming such as VHDL or Verilog. Timing hazards, both static and dynamic, programmable logic devices, PLA, PAL and FPGA will also be covered. Prerequisite: Intro to Programming or Intro to Computer Science or placement test or interaction lab. Fulfillment: Core Curriculum: Science Experimental Discovery in the Natural World Courses ; Major: CS Electives, CE Required, EE Required.
We are inundated by data, but data alone do not translate into useful information. Statistics provides the means for organizing, summarizing, and therefore better analyzing data so that we can understand what the data tell us about critical questions. If one collects data then understanding how to use statistical methods is critical, but it is also necessary to understand and interpret all the information we consume on a daily basis. This course provides these basic statistical approaches and techniques. This course may not be acceptable as a substitute for any other Probability and Statistics course. For Sustainable Urban Environments (SUE) students, please see your advisor. Note: Not open to math majors or students who have taken or will take MA-UY 2054 or MA-UY 2224 or MA-UY 3014 or MA-UY 3514 or ECE-UY 2233 or equivalent.
Critical discussion of alternative philosophical views as to what mathematics is, such as Platonism, empiricism, constructivism, intuitionism, formalism, logicism, and various combinations thereof.
This course examines the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable urban development. Some of the major themes explored include indicators of sustainability, urban demographic trends, environmental justice, green building, urban sprawl, sustainable energy and transportation, and global climate change. In addition, the role of information technology (IT) and social networks is discussed in the context of promoting ideas globally about sustainable development.
This course examines the long-standing and constitutive relationships between theatre and medicine. From the classical Greek plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, through Shakespearean drama to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the stage has offered a platform for the expression of illness, disability and trauma, both individual and collective. Throughout its history the stage has also offered the medical discourses metaphorical ways of conceptualizing ideas of deformity, normality, deviance and disability. At the same time, it teaches us empathy and affect and contributes to our physical and mental wellbeing. This course will examine this intertwined relationship between theatre and medicine from the Greeks to the contemporary stage, by looking at plays by, among others, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,mWilliam Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Larry Kramer and Tony Kushner.
This course introduces students to European history since 1750. It proceeds chronologically and thematically, integrating politics, ideas, society, and culture. Topics include the Enlightenment, French Revolution, industrialization, nationalism, imperialism, feminism, mass politics, communism, fascism, world wars, the Cold War, decolonization, and globalization. Readings feature such writers as Mary Wollstonecraft, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, and Simone de Beauvoir, and lectures make ample use of visual materials including visual arts, animations, newsreels, and film clips. The course assumes no prior knowledge, and welcomes students from all majors, schools, and years.
Qualitative introduction to our understanding of the nature and evolution of the universe. Topics include the creation of the cosmos; its explosive evolution, present structure, and ultimate fate; the nature of stars and galaxies; the structure and evolution of our Milky Way; the birth, life, and eventual death of the solar system; our place and role in the universe; and the relationship of modern astronomical ideas to other cultural disciplines.
The goal of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is to give an account of human knowledge and its limits. This requires a careful analysis of the structure of human experience, the foundations of scientific knowledge, and the ways in which we try (and often fail) to extend our knowledge beyond what experience can teach us. This course will involve a close reading of the entirety of the Critique of Pure Reason. Along the way, we will discuss topics including the nature of matter and mind, free will, and the existence of God. Prerequisite: One prior philosophy course Fulfillment: Humanities Advanced Course.
This course covers Passive DC circuit elements, Kirchoff’s laws, electric power calculations, analysis of DC circuits, Nodal and Loop analysis techniques, voltage and current division, Thevenin’s and Norton’s theorems, and source-free and forced responses of RL, RC and RLC circuits. Prerequisite: MATH-SHU 131 or MATH-SHU 201. Fulfillment: CE required; EE required; Core Curriculum Science Experimental Discovery in the Natural World.
This course introduces a range of theories that have influenced art history, which here refers to both the purported narratives of the history of art and the practice of re/writing such narratives. We will analyze biography as a mode of art history; connoisseurship, iconography, formalism, and post-structuralist theory; Marxist and feminist approaches; and queer and trans* methods. Recognizing the Eurocentrism in the texts considered foundational to the discipline of Art History, we will examine the ways that art history was conceptualized in East Asia. The aim is to acquire knowledge of key art historical approaches; to apply that knowledge to assess works of art and art historical texts; and to analyze the impact of the historically specific relationship between the visual text and the viewer/historian on our knowledge of art. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Foundations or Introductory Course.
What makes a “good death”? How do people imagine, interpret, and describe the processes of dying? How do individuals respond to, live through, and move beyond the death of others? How do beliefs, customs, material cultures, and social structures co-constitute the lived realities of death? Drawing on insights from medical anthropology, anthropology of religion, and anthropology of ethics, this course explores diverse perspectives on the “good death”. With a primary ethnographic focus on China, using an interdisciplinary and comparative approach, we will investigate: 1) the sociocultural constructions of death, 2) the processes of aging and dying, 3) the practices of end-of-life care, 4) debates about voluntary death, 5) how the living deal with the deceased, and 6) how people live with irrevocable losses. Prerequisite: GPS Fulfillment: CORE SSPC/IPC; GCS Major Elective: Chinese History, Society, and Culture.
This course introduces students to perspectives on contemporary Chinese political and social thought as presented in academic publications, media reports, social commentary and postings on the Chinese Internet. It covers selected key topics in the disciplines of political, social, and cultural studies. It examines and compares Chinese and Western views on major developments and current issues. The course also introduces students to a variety of styles of writing and research methods as well as skills of cultural translation relevant to the study of contemporary China and Chinese thought. Fulfillment: Core Curriculum Social Science Perspective on China/Humanistic Perspectives on China or Interdisciplinary Perspectives on China; GCS Elective The Politics, Economy, and Environment of China; Humanities Major Advanced Courses (old Topic Course); Social Science Major Focus Courses Political Science – 200 level.
In this course, we will see how people in China have used psychology to build a modern nation and promote modern values. Beginning in the early 20th century, we will encounter missionaries trying to replace superstition with science, reformers challenging gender relationships, and intellectuals who critiqued the Chinese character. As we move through the century, we will trace how various people have applied psychological techniques for very different purposes: creating healthy citizens for a new state, instilling a revolutionary spirit, managing corporate employees, and raising exemplary children. During the semester, each student will conduct textual and/or ethnographic research about an aspect of psychological expertise or mental health in contemporary China. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or above. Fulfillment: CORE STS; GCS Elective: Chinese History, Society, and Culture; Social Science Focus Anthropology 200 level.
How did people in ancient and modern China understand health and treat illness? Historically and now, has “Chinese medicine” been an insular or open system? What can health perceptions and healing practices tell us about historical changes in China and its changing relationship with the world? Drawing on insights from the history of medicine and medical anthropology, this course explores health and healing in China through five chronologically organized units and one diachronically comparative unit. We will consider the cosmological, philosophical, and sociological factors that shape different visions of health. We will examine how local and global political processes affect healing practices and their perceived legitimacy and investigate what illness and remedy-seeking experiences reveal about the wider contexts in which medical activities take place. Prerequisite: CCSF-SHU 101L GPS
Examples of complex organizations include hospitals, schools, places of employment, the government, the military, churches, and prisons. Where do those organizations come from? What accounts for organizational success and failure? How can we make organizations better for individuals and society? This course examines different types of organizations, organizational goals and outcomes, institutional authority and structure, organizational change, and organizational fields. Most importantly, the goal of this course is to expand your knowledge and understanding of the relationships between organizations and society. You will learn to develop a critical lens and an analytical framework that can apply to understand specific complex organizations. This course will help you to think about how you might better survive and thrive in our organizational world! Prerequisite: Sophomore Standing. Fulfillment: Social Science core or Sociology focus 300 level.
This course introduces urbanization in China in the context of the East Asian region and globalization. By examination of the development of selected cities and discussion of experimental urban themes, this course aims to depict prevalent patterns of urbanization at appropriate levels, such as neighborhood types, metropolitan areas, and regional urban agglomeration. We examine traditional forms of settlement and place more recent urban phenomena in a broader historical perspective. We explore relevant political traditions and forms of planning administration to reveal underlying social, economic, cultural and environmental circumstances at work, while learning tools and methods of spatial analysis that can be applied to the study of cities all over the world. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: CORE SSPC; Social Science Foundational course or Urban Studies 200 level; Humanities 18-19 Critical Concepts; GCS The Politics, Economy, and Environment of China.
This course invites students from diverse backgrounds and provides an accessible introduction to the burgeoning field of Computational Social Science (CSS). We aim to explore research design and data skills at the intersection of social sciences and digital innovations. This course emphasizes using big and rich social digital data to understand and explain societies and human behaviors. We introduce fundamental topics in CSS, including digital trace data collection, social network analysis, and text-as-data, using the R programming language. Besides discussing the new opportunities of CSS, this course also highlights critical topics, such as data ethics and data-driven bias. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Core AT; Social Science Foundational Course; Social Science Methods Course.
Examines both theoretical and applied aspects of research design, data analysis, and interpretation. Through readings, class discussion, guest lectures and written assignments, student will gain a thorough understanding of and practice in the components of good food-focused research. Topics include: articulating a research question, locating and using primary and secondary source information, conducting original research, and structuring and executing a research project.
This course is intended to develop students’ bilingual and bicultural fluency for those who aspire to work in culturally diverse settings. With a focus on China and the US, we will discuss the challenges and strategies to interact with and lead team members in culturally diverse settings.Through a combination of lectures, real-life case discussions, in-class activities, and hands-on practice, students will gain valuable insights into how cross-cultural differences are manifested in daily life and the workplace, and the challenges they create therein. You will acquire knowledge and skills necessary for more effective communication with individuals from cultures different from your own, particularly in a professional setting. Prerequisite: EAST-UA 206 (minimum third-year level Chinese) or equivalent with instructor permission. No business background is required.
4 points, discussion/seminar. First offered spring 2016, and every semester thereafter. Prerequisite (or co-requisite): Literary Interpretation (ENGL-UA 200). This seminar is a class in creative as well as critical reading. This class posits reading as an activity and explores reading and writing as reciprocal activities: no strong writers are not also strong readers. What can we learn from a text’s forms, modes, codes, and affects? What can we also learn from theories of literature (of poetry and poetics, or drama, of the novel or narrative in general)? How can we read both with and against the grain? And how can a profound engagement with criticism, commentary, and theory help us become better “makers” ourselves? This course assumes that writing is an effect of, and in a feedback loop with, reading: thus this seminar aims to strengthen your capacities for pattern recognition – i.e. sophistication about genre, style, mode. Regular assignments aim to provide a space for critical experiments in reading and writing; the syllabus offers models and goads for reflection and response. Students will direct and distill their inquiries into a substantial final paper (or project).
Sponsored by Steinhardt. Central themes, issues, and controversies in American education. What is the purpose of “school”? How did schools begin in the United States, and how have they evolved across time? How do children learn? How are they different from each other, and why and when should that matter? How should we teach them? And how should we structure schools and classrooms to promote learning?
This course will provide undergraduate students with an understanding of the political and governmental processes that influence New York City. The course will explore the structure of the municipal government, the role of the mayor and city council, the way in which state and regional agencies affect public services, and the role of the media in the political life of New York City.
Health care now constitutes almost 15f the U.S. economy. The broad range of issues involving health care and health care delivery are at the center of national and local policy debates: Disparities in access and outcomes for vulnerable populations; right to control decisions about treatment and about dying; medical malpractice; the adequacy of the evidence base underlying medical decisions; the pharmaceutical industry and its role in health care and politics; the impact of an aging population; and coping with accelerating health cost. This course is an introduction for undergraduate students to the major policy issues affecting health care and examines the role of government in the health care system. An important focus of the course is an assessment of the role of policy analysis in the formation and implementation of national and local health policy. Because much of government health policy relates to or is implemented through payment systems, several sessions involve some discussion of the policy implications of how government pays for care. The role of the legal system with respect to adverse medical outcomes, economic rights, and individual rights is also discussed. Proposals for health policy reform at the national and local level are examined throughout the course, with an emphasis on Medicare and Medicaid reforms currently being implemented or considered.
In the context of an increasingly polarized American society, this course seeks to train students to mobilize diverse faith communities together for the greater good. Unleashing the power of their own story, students will articulate their values and explore the ways it can be shared. The course will draw on case studies from historical and contemporary faith leaders who have achieved success in creating sustainable change, as well as interrogating relevant current affairs as they arise. Students will learn to recognize how stories are used to motivate action, to recognize the ways that race, power and privilege play a role in elevating and downplaying stories and to identify the role values play in motivating action.
In the context of a growing number of intersecting local, national, and global crises, each warranting political strategy, operational responses, and humanitarian planning across a range of states, agencies, movements, technical and political actors, this course focuses on exploring: the relationships between and among decision-makers and affected populations; the political economy of resource mobilization and distribution; the practical tools, frameworks, and blueprints used for response; questions of power in the context of emergency, and; historical determinants of humanitarian need, responsibility, and intervention. This course digs deeply into the political economy, politics, infrastructure, design, incentives, and dilemmas related to the current development and emergency paradigms, with specific exploration of what constitutes humanitarian action, aid, response, and ethics. Blending both practitioner and theoretical perspectives, this course takes a critical approach to the evolution of development concepts, slow and fast emergency, and structural inequality as they are shaped by historical events and processes, institutions, and ideologies – while simultaneously exploring the role of contemporary aid systems, political and social responses in perpetuating and remedying each. There is special emphasis on the perspectives and vantage points of people most directly affected by perpetual emergency. While not centered on or around the COVID-19 pandemic that has shaped our lives for the last three years, we will incorporate its context and reference it as an embodied case for better understanding the realities and power dynamics affecting “local populations” that we often speak about in this work, as well as a growing field of policy research and practice surrounding compounding crises, or “polycrises.” Throughout the course, which will utilize active learning modalities such as simulations, large and small group discussion, mapping and platform analysis, analysis of films, discussion of readings, guest speakers from other geographies, and individual reflection, we will engage (and often struggle with) fundamental (and technical) questions such as: • What are the political, social and economic underpinnings of contemporary development, emergency, and humanitarian discourse? • How does the design of development and humanitarian infrastructure and technical systems contribute to or alleviate structural inequality within and across societies as part of long-term development paradigms or short-term emergency response? • What does it mean to be an individual engaged in humanitarian, emergency, and development work as an affected population, as a decision-maker, as an insider or outsider? As an individual or as part of an institution? What are the historical and contemporary sources of these roles, norms, and practices? • What are the origins and starting points of an emergency? When can we say an emergency has ended? • How does a focus on underlying causes and power relations change our analysis of the problems and solutions? Should politics be removed from practice & intervention or amplified? • As people affected by an emergency are not a monolith, how can we define “local” and “sovereign” in mapping competing interests and power dynamics within communities affected by emergency? • Should we reform or abandon the current humanitarian/development aid system toward alternatives?
This course looks at the development of site-specific performance with a special emphasis on projects that engage with social issues and include activist agendas. “Site-specific” is a term frequently associated with the visual arts but since the Happenings of the ’60s and ’70s, a body of work termed “site-specific performance” has evolved as highly structured works of art that are designed around, for or because of place and associated communities. As site artists confront the matrix of social forces, changing political policies and overlapping communities that relate to a given site, their aesthetics, creative process and goals have shifted. How are they blurring the lines between art and activism, art and urban renewal, art and real life? This arts workshop will emphasize making site work by completing a progressive series of studies, using various artistic mediums. We will also be reading about and viewing site work by seminal artists in this field. This course is recommended to adventurous students with interests and some training in at least one of the following mediums: dance, theatre, spoken word poetry, media, photography and/or visual art. Readings include texts by Maaike Bleeker; Jan Cohen Cruz; Bertie Ferdman, among others.
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.
This course examines filmic representations of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and corresponding political, cultural, and social ideologies. Our aim will be to understand dominant and subversive storytelling techniques in films that focus on racialized subjects, sexual identity and class privilege in the US. The goal is to illuminate how meanings of race are constructed and can be read through filmic aspects. We will focus on contemporary films by diverse filmmakers paying particular attention to matters of film authorship, narrative and rhetorical strategy, and technologies of cinema. Our analysis will illuminate how operations of power function filmically to produce both conventional and transgressive gazes. Screenings include work by and about people of color in both historical and contemporary contexts.
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.
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.
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.
Family violence is an overarching term for many areas in the study of interpersonal abuse, aggression, and violence. This course will provide an introduction to the multiple aspects of the study of family violence and is intended to provide a foundational knowledgebase for further study in the context of social work practice, research, and policy. The course will cover both historical and current controversies and standpoints of family violence research, practice, and policy. This course is structured as a critical examination of family violence from a social work perspective. Family violence is a dynamic and complex issue, posing diverse challenges for clinical, legal, research, and policy professionals. A multidisciplinary approach to the study of abuse, aggression, and violence in the context of familial relationships including partner violence, child abuse, sexual abuse, elder abuse and sibling violence informs the basic structure of the course. Using a critical analysis framework that considers ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, disability, and sexual orientation in context, the course will cover topics including: the meaning, nature, and types of family violence; biological, psychological, and sociological theories that attempt to explain interpersonal abuse, aggression, and violence; the outcomes and consequences of violence; a range of family violence prevention and intervention strategies in clinical and judicial settings. The primary focus of the course is on the American family, though references will be made to other countries and cultures, particularly issues relevant to immigrant families.
In this course, we will explore different types and aspects of love and relationships and examine how our lived experiences, identities, worldviews, and sense of curiosity influence how we encounter, make sense of, and respond to love. While there is no greater determinant of happiness and health than our access to and engagement in loving and healthy relationships, our questions and dilemmas about how to define what love is, how to choose the “right” people to experience it with, and how to develop and maintain satisfying relationships persist. Though these core questions and challenges are undoubtedly centuries-old, the nature and complexity of them continue to evolve over time and many of their “answers” and “solutions” remain elusive. The primary objective of this course is to engage you in a process of inquiry and self-examination, critical dialogue, and reflection about your own ideas, beliefs, values, and experiences with love and relationships. Together, through your engagement with the course materials and our group discussions, we will wrestle with the following questions, share ideas, and generate possible answers (and likely more questions!): * Where do our ideas, beliefs and assumptions about love come from? How have they changed over time? * What determines or influences one’s capacity to give and receive love? Are these capacities different and/or related? * How do societal and cultural influences help or hinder our freedom and ability to love well and be loved? * What happens to us biologically, emotionally, and psychologically, when we are in love? * What determines satisfaction, resiliency, and longevity in relationships? How does this change across the lifespan? * What enables some to heal and move on after heartbreak, loss, or betrayal? * How do you want to show up differently in your relationships? What/Who might help you do so?
Stories of mental illness are all too often told from the perspective of those who study or treat it. By contrast, this course examines mental illness through the lens of those who experience it first-hand and creatively transform their experience into something that can be shared with others. Narrative has the unique ability to relate the felt experience of mental illness in a way that the conventional patient history, chart, or any strictly medical documentation cannot. Through close examination of video testimony, memoir, autobiographical fiction, theater and film, students will learn to receive and interpret the illness experience, with a focus on applications for public health, advocacy and social justice.
An inquiry into the ways that technology — mechanical, electronic, analog, and digital — shapes and is shaped by cultural, political, and social values. Students become acquainted with key concepts and approaches to understanding the interplay of technology and society (e.g. technological determinism, social construction of technology, actor networks, affordances) and how these have been applied to such cases as the clock, the automobile, the assembly line, household technology, the telephone, and more recent communication technology.
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.
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.
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.
Cities have long been viewed as the crucible of citizenship. “But over the last few decades, the rapid urbanization of the global South has recalibrated Western derived models of cities and citizenship. “This course draws on interdisciplinary readings from urban studies, geography, anthropology, and history to grapple with this global “urban revolution.” Rejecting the language of crisis, chaos, and exception that is so often used to characterize cities in the global South, it will provide theoretically informed perspectives on social, cultural, and political life in rapidly urbanizing places throughout the postcolonial world. Attention will be paid to histories and legacies of colonialism alongside novel forms of governance and claims to the city. “Though focused primarily on cities in the global South, the class is intended to probe how these cities reconfigure conventional understandings of being a citizen in the city (anywhere), and will also examine the global South within the “North”. “Topics may include the rights to the city, infrastructure and planning, gentrification, political ecologies, technologies of rule, informality and slum upgrading, and urban social movements. “”Selected authors may include Ananya Roy, James Holston, Mamadou Diouf, Nikhil Anand, and AbdouMaliq Simone.
The course is designed to provide students with a framework for understanding the entertainment, media and technology industries through the context and prism of history. Using the evolution of communication and media, students will explore how various formats, technologies and regulations have informed and shaped how we interact with entertainment and media today.
Principles and techniques of pure tone and speech audiometer; interpretation of ideograms; consideration of etiologies and auditory characteristics of major types of hearing impairment.
We are in the midst of a revolution. Computers permeate nearly every aspect of our life, yet we understand relatively little about how they work, their historical development, and their impact on our thought and actions. As with previous technological and communications revolutions like the rise of print and the ascendency of the image, computing is transforming our economic and political landscape, bringing with it new possibilities as well as new problems. In this course, we explore this ever-changing and rapidly expanding terrain, paying special attention to how computers and the Internet are transforming how we experience and understand identity and community, control and liberation, simulation and authenticity, creation and collaboration, and the practice of politics. Authors whose works we read may include Donna Haraway, Jean Baudrillard, Jorge Luis Borges, Yochai Benkler, Nicholas Carr, the Critical Art Ensemble, Galileo, Lawrence Lessig, Sherry Turkle, Lewis Mumford, Plato, the RAND Corporation, and Ellen Ullman.
Every professional businessperson must be aware of how legal systems work and affect business decisions. Furthermore, the interaction between law and business is multidimensional, involving international, ethical, and technological considerations. In this course, students examine how key areas of business law, including contracts, torts, and business organizations, influence the structure of business relationships. Students actively participate in legal studies designed to enhance business skills such as analytical thinking, written communication, oral presentation, conflict resolution, and teamwork problem solving.
The concept of sustainability is important in our current moment, yet we use the term in a variety of ways and via different frameworks of understanding. This course explores how we talk about and understand the concept of sustainability, including as environment and climate change, food production and consumption, and individual and community health. Students will examine the concept of sustainability through these different lenses, exploring the connections among them.
This course shows students how economic policy gets made, and should get made, at the highest levels of federal government. It draws upon almost fifty years of economic policy-making, and the challenges that have confronted the men and women who have sat in positions of power in the Treasury, the Office of Management and Budget, the Council of Economic Advisers, and the National Economic Council. These challenges include the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system and the transition to a predominantly floating exchange rate world, the era of rampant inflation, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the transition to market economies, the shock of 9/11, the financial crisis of 2008, and the Great Recession that followed. Lectures and discussions will lead to in-class exercises, in which students will role- play as advisers to US presidents from Richard Nixon to Donald Trump. What is it like to sit in the Oval Office and discuss policy with the president? To know that your input into his decisions will impact millions of people? To know that the wrong advice could be calamitous? Students will learn how to analyze policy problems and design solutions, taking into account the multi-dimensional aspects of making federal policy and the many constraints upon those decisions, including of course the influence of Congress. As part of the learning process, students will also have the opportunity to hear from guest speakers who have worked at the very top of economic policy-making in the executive branch of government, and played a role in the policy-making process through their work in the media.
This is a course that explores the relationship between ideas, the body and the way that fashion can be understood to mediate between the two. Through a range of disciplines and media this course considers the body as an aspect of not only medical and scientific exploration, but crucially as a vital element of culture and society. Bodies affect the ways in which the social world and power relations are organized, and they even arguably condition the way that we understand reality itself. Our physical form is constantly shaped according to both philosophies and fashions. Body ideals and broader ideals often interrelate strongly through bodily practices and with what we wear. There are meanings and fashions in all bodily forms (skinny, buxom, muscular, ideas of ’whiteness’) and body practices (dieting, hair management, cleansing rituals, plastic surgery and genital cutting). Over the sessions, we will take a conceptual approach to fashion, as a strident condition of modern life, that incorporates politics, science and aesthetics and we will closely read a number of cultural texts against a number of theoretical models. Attitudes towards the body can vary widely according to historical period, and this course will explore how, in different moments, and via different media, we have been preoccupied with the aesthetics of different body zones, with displaying identity (gender, class and ethnicity), and also with power. Different cultural forms (literary, visual, material etc) will provide the focus of our discussions as they all engage with the different ways that we make meaning out of our bodies. Students will be invited to investigate in their written work set texts from class in addition to primary material of their own choice.
THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-LONDON: The Global Fashion Industry and British Fashion aims to introduce fashion history and theory in its contemporary social and cultural context. The course will examine various aspects of the fashion industry and offer an understanding of critical concepts such as social identity, consumer culture and globalization. Students will explore aspects of the British fashion industry, including fashion media, retail environments, fashion exhibitions and the impact of sub and counter culture.
Students explore how science became a global form of knowledge making about the natural world, how European notions of science contributed to its growth as a form of systematic knowledge, how some people were excluded from this process, and how bias and discrimination were made real. By observing, measuring, analyzing and explaining data, students learn to produce and evaluate the quality of scientific knowledge and to recognize how science understanding helps to interrogate the construction of difference between facts and lies. Fulfills Life Science Core requirement.
The course traces the documentary film from its origins to the present day. Pioneer documentarians like Dziga Vertov and Robert Flaherty saw in documentary film the ability to portray life with a kind of truthfulness never before possible. Early Polish filmmaker Boleslaw Matuszewski wrote that while “the cinematograph does not give the whole truth at least what it gives is unquestionable and of an absolute truth.” Since those heady days, it has become all too clear that documentaries have no special access to the truth. Nevertheless, as this still-young art evolved, documentarians of different schools constantly sought new means to tell the human story. Documentary filmmaking has always been a blend of artistry and technical means and we will also explore this critical relationship. The course explores the development of the documentary and the shifting intentions of documentary filmmakers through the evolution of narrative approach and structure paying special attention to the documentary tradition’s relationship to journalism. Students examine how different filmmakers have gone about trying to convey “reality” on screen both through the use and avoidance of narration, through interviews, editing and dramatizations. Throughout the semester, students investigate how image-driven medium attempts to report stories and the ways an emotion-driven art can be problematic for journalistic objectivity. Finally, the ethical and journalistic responsibilities the documentary filmmaker are discussed. Special attention is given to dramatic re-creations, the filmmaker’s relationship to his/her subjects and the construction of narrative through editing.
This course examines modern statistical methods as a basis for decision making in the face of uncertainty. Topics include probability theory, discrete and continuous distributions, hypothesis testing, estimation, and statistical quality control. With the aid of computers, these statistical methods are used to analyze data.
This course examines modern statistical methods as a basis for decision making in the face of uncertainty. Topics include probability theory, discrete and continuous distributions, hypothesis testing, estimation, and statistical quality control. With the aid of computers, these statistical methods are used to analyze data. Also presented are an introduction to statistical models and their application to decision making. Topics include the simple linear regression model, inference in regression analysis, sensitivity analysis, and multiple regression analysis.
Readings from climatologists, economists, anthropologists, geographers, cultural analysts, and activists. Examines the natural and social impact of global warming in the context of the climate justice movement, which is modeled on American-derived principles of environmental justice in the 1990s and poses a legal and humanitarian challenge to those who place their faith in market-driven solutions. Examines how populations are unevenly affected by climate change, and how this imbalance is being addressed by advocates of decarbonization.
The ways in which writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers have used food as a theme or symbol for reasons of aesthetic, social, cultural, or political commentary.
Gateway course to the major that introduces students to the demands and pleasures of university-level investigation of English literature. Develops the tools necessary for advanced criticism: close-reading skills, knowledge of generic conventions, mastery of critical terminology, and skill at a variety of modes of analysis, from the formal to the historical. Also emphasizes frequent writing.
This course will study a variety of texts written at particular times in the history of London. The aims of the course are to encourage the student to think historically, in terms of the way London and representations of the city have changed and developed over time; and theoretically, in terms of the way the city is mediated through different forms and genres (e.g. poetry, novels, essays, film; satire, detective and crime fiction), and the interrelationship of literary and material spaces. We will also examine the significance of gender, the definition of the modern metropolis as a labyrinthine city of Babylon, the influence of metropolitan culture on Modernism and Modernity, assimilation versus multiculturalism, immigration, and the effects of new modern spaces on individuals.
New York has played a crucial role in the history of media, and media have placed a crucial role in the history of New York. New York has been represented by media since Henry Hudson wrote his reports to the Dutch. Media institutions have contributed centrally to its economy and social fabric, while media geographies have shaped the experiences of city living. This course explores media representations, institutions, and geographies across time and is organized around the collaborative production of an online guidebook to the media history of New York.
This course examines the Western fascination with the moving body in different cultural environments and throughout colonial and postcolonial historical periods until the present time. It will begin by investigating early images and artistic representation of the body in motion captured by European ethnographers at the turn of the 19th century, and continue tracing it to current trends of contemporary culture. The goal of this course is to develop a critical understanding of the culture built around the body as subject as well as a marker of otherness. This course will offer students an opportunity to study and articulate, intellectually and physically, the legibility of bodies in motion within different cultural landscapes. Bodies in Cultural Landscapes will provide an open forum in which to investigate human movement within the specific aesthetic system and cultural practice of early ethnographic representation to contemporary culture’s engagement with the moving body. It will offer insight into personal and cultural identity, stimulating an expanded recognition and appreciation of difference. This course offers students the opportunity to explore simultaneously their intellect (in class viewing, readings and discussions), as well as in the presentation of their own version of ethnographic research and representation based on a topic of their choice discussed with instructor. Students will engage weekly with exercises and assignments based on course material.
This course examines the artistic career and creative work of Walter Murch, Oscar-winning film editor and sound designer, and the first and only artist to win Academy Awards for both film editing and sound mixing on a single film (The English Patient, 1997). The class will provide an unprecedented inside look into Mr. Murch’s processes of sound designing, editing, mixing, writing, and directing on such acclaimed and memorable films as THX 1138, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, Return to Oz, The English Patient, Touch of Evil, and Cold Mountain. Through interviews, articles, and materials from his private archives never before publicly available, students learn about the creative world of an artist who has brought the importance of sound and editing to a new level. In addition to his work in film and his inventions used in the filmmaking process, two additional areas of interest of Mr. Murch will be examined: translations of Curzio Malaparte’s writings and his passion for astronomy. Mr. Murch will participate on several occasions in the course as a guest lecturer by visiting the class and/or via video conferencing.
Today, many documentarians consider themselves working within a well-defined human rights framework where images and film are used to raise awareness about social injustice. On the far edge of this movement, however, there are writers, photographers and filmmakers whose work calls attention to the traditional documentary ethics of bearing witness but whose modes of representation blur the lines between fact and fiction. This body of work is more open-ended to interpretation and multiple readings, which also include more personal themes such as loss and melancholy, the ephemeral nature of time and memory, nostalgia and change. While not a production course per se, most students create short poetic films for their midterms and finals. The course is a great opportunity for students to open this door on short-form media production for the first time even if they wish to shoot on their smartphones. We will study several different kinds of visual poetics such as combining documentary photos with literature, artists working with archives and found images, the essay film, the personal diary and journal film, the performance film, ethnographic poetics, and new trans-media platforms and webdocs. Some of the writers and artists we will study include Roland Barthes, W.G. Sebald, Chris Marker, Christian Boltanski, Forough Farrokhzad, RaMell Ross, Roland Barthes, Miguel Rio Branco Charles Burnett, William Greaves, Agnes Varda, Margaret Tait, Robert Gardner, Jean Rouch, and Jonas Mekas.
Explores specific issues dealing with the black urban experience, focusing on social and cultural institutions. Possible themes, which vary from semester to semester, include class and poverty, the police, urban development, education, sports, music, and art.
The Science of Movement will introduce students to the multidisciplinary field of how the human brain controls movements, how we learn new movements, and the rehabilitation of various movement disorders and injuries. This course is appropriate for undergraduate students with an interest in human movement, neuroscience and behavior, physical medicine, dance and/or athletics. No prior course of study in neuroscience is necessary to successfully engage with the course material. This course will count towards general education requirements for social science for Tisch undergraduate students.
This course unites the liberal arts experience with a specialization in food and nutrition. It contains three areas of focus: food and nutrition history; ethical issues in food and nutrition; and emerging technologies as they related to food and nutrition.
Examines recent trends in contemporary Arab theatre and film, contextualizing these within a broader history of Arab performance. Particular attention is given to how experimental practitioners have explored issues of human rights and the control of territories under the modern state. Strategies addressed include the conflation of the past and present as a means of exploring the persistence of the colonial power structure in the modern Arab world; the use of the parable to speak truth to power; the incorporation of the populist entertainment forms that directly engage the audience; and the use of familiar tales to explore new political realities.
Introducing the notion of citizen science, this course provides students with opportunities to use scientific information to solve real-world problems related to environmental & public health. By exploring the practices of science from observing & measurement to analyzing & explaining data, students learn to use data & produce scientific knowledge for the public. Liberal Arts Core/MAP Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Natural Sciences
Traces of time passing, ruins are time that has turned into space, duration ossified and broken up into fragments. Fragments are things we carry out of ruins, relics rescued from the abyss of lost time. We create archives to organize the rescued and the abandoned, compiling catalogs and designing systems that are often ruins themselves. Drawing on literature, painting, film, and installation art, this class will explore the entanglement of nature and history and of the recent and deep past in representations of architectural and social decay in stories and images of ruined cottages, “picturesque” abbeys and castles, partially buried woodsheds. We will examine representations of objects redeemed from the ruins of history as well as the ruined sites in which such objects find refuge (arcades, museums, libraries). And we will consider what it means for something to outlive its usefulness, to survive itself and live on in its own afterlife. Students will write several analytic essays, building toward a research project in which they will explore and interpret a ruin of their choice. Texts may include essays by Uvedale Price, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Douglas Crimp, Robert Smithson, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Hal Foster; engravings, films, and installations by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Jacques Tourneur, Chantal Akerman, Ilya Kabakov, Tacita Dean, and Pat O’Neill; poetry and prose by William Cowper, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, H.D., Louis Aragon, Susan Howe, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
Offered only at NYU Paris. An overview of important developments in French philosophy from the 16th century to the 1950s. We will look at the epistemological and metaphysical debates that followed the rediscovery of Ancient philosophy and the Copernican revolution, with Montaigne’s skepticism, Descartes’ rationalist theory of knowledge, and Condillac’s empiricism. We will then focus on developments in French political philosophy in the 18th and 19th centuries, closely intertwined with political events. We will read Rousseau, an important influence on the French revolutionaries, before turning to 19th-century debates about equality, with Proudhon’s anarchist criticism of property rights, and Tocqueville’s cautious liberal perspective on the political consequences of equality. Finally, we will look at two key movements in French philosophy in the first half of the 20th century, Bergson’s attempt at understanding the temporal duration conscious beings inhabit, and Sartre and de Beauvoir’s distinctive development of existentialism, a philosophy that grapples with the consequences of human freedom.
An elective for students who wish to explore concentrated issues such as sex and American politics, literary nonfiction, and photojournalism and war. Each section concentrates on a different topic chosen by the instructor, a member of the full-time faculty. Such offerings include Ethnography for Journalists; The Art of Opinion Writing and Polemic; and The Journalism of Empathy.
The course on “Media, Activism & Democracy” aims at, first, introducing students to the complex and fascinating topic of civil society activism; second, at illustrating them the linkages between activism and media; third, at showing them the impact of civil society’s advocacy on contemporary political systems. In a nutshell, the course aims at providing students with a closer understanding of the civil society activism-media-politics conundrums at the national and global levels.
This course will examine the origins, development, and meanings of so-called cultural conflict in the United States. Topics will include abortion, gay rights, bilingualism, and the teaching of evolution in public schools. Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Cultures & Contexts for Steinhardt students.
Presently, the distinctions between fashion and art have begun to fray, revealing a dynamic cultural nexus that has propelled new concepts, processes, materials and modes of presentation. Artists, designers, curators and critics alike recognize the wide-ranging appeal of locating fashion within Fine Art and vice versa. This malleable exchange between the two mediums is illuminated in landmark exhibitions like Alexander McQueen’s Savage Beauty and in the profusion of artist to brand collaborations that continue to transform the fashion world. In this arts workshop, students will have the opportunity to explore fashion as art through a range of material investigations. Questions that the course will engage include: how has the confluence of fashion and Fine Art both challenged and enriched the cultural significance of dress, shifting the industries course and altering the way the world sees value, gender and even identity? “Additionally, how can merging these mediums expand and enhance one’s own studio practice? Students can choose from a variety of mediums, including, but not limited to: illustration, painting, collage, textile design, sculpture, photography and performance. This course is open to students of all artistic backgrounds with an interest in expanding their experiences in visual culture and the visual arts.
The Italian Cinema is a good way to study the whole Italian history, society, ideology and behaviours. The students will have the opportunity to know such authors as Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Pasolini, Bertolucci, who are well known in the US. The course will also focus on the difference between auteur films and genre films (comedy, roman-mythological, western, melodrama); it will stress the gender point of view, the problem of a national identity, the role of the film industry. Strong attention will be paid to the relationship between Italian film and literature, art history, television and other disciplines.
To provide the student with an awareness and appreciation of gardens and landscapes of Tuscany from early Roman precedents to the 21st century. The design of the Italian landscape and garden is studied as a means of cultural communication–an expression of a society’s values, philosophy and understanding of the environment. Emphasis is placed on historic precedent, sustainable design techniques utilized in Italian gardens and classic Renaissance design concepts. The format includes lectures, class presentations and field trips.
This course introduces to the many villas surrounding the city of Florence. It aims at illustrating their origins, their history from the Middle-Age to the twentieth century, as well as their economic and ideological factors in the relationship with the city of Florence. The course draws on many disciplines, such as architecture, history, economy, social history, history of art, and landscape art.
THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-FLORENCE. Global Fashion Industry: Italy will provide students with a deep understanding of the contemporary fashion industry in Italy, as well as of Italy’s position in the global fashion arena. The course will drive students through the entire lifecycle of the fashion business, from forecasting trends to retailing, through design, sourcing, product development and production. Particular attention will be dedicated to different marketing aspects of the process, such as: identity building, brand positioning, merchandising, buying, costing, communication. All levels of retail, from luxury to mass market will be covered. The course will end with an analysis of the new challenges, such as sourcing globalization, emerging markets, sustainability and growing significance of technology. A strong effort will be put into organizing site visits to studios, showrooms and factories, as well as meeting with professional players. Each session will be structured to give students an overview of a particular stage of the Industry, through a mix of lectures from the course leader and visiting professionals, studio and showroom visits, walking tours, reading assignments and practical projects. Conducted in English.
Images depict, words describe. A picture of the cat of the mat depicts the cat as being on the mat. The sentence ’the cat is on the mat’ describes the cat as being on the mat. Both represent the world as being in a certain state, but they do so in different ways. What is the difference in these ways of representing? What does it take for an image to depict? This course covers most major theories of depiction, including resemblance, experience, recognition, pretense, and structural theories. We then expand the scope of inquiry to include topics such as systems of depiction, analog vs. digital representation, maps, film, comics, maps, mental imagery, and relations to the cognitive science of vision.
This is a 2-credit repeatable course designed for students who have completed Intermediate Chinese II or equivalent, and wish to get additional opportunities to further expand their vocabulary and grammatical knowledge with a focus on strengthening their conversational skills and/or get more chance to practice speaking outside of their regular Advanced Chinese I/II classes. Students will perform in various conversational tasks, such as presenting, discussing, debating, etc. and improve the description and narration skills that the advanced level learners are expected to have. Students will engage in conversation in a clearly participatory manner in order to communicate information on autobiographical topics, as well as topics of community, national, or international interest.
This course is designed for students whose levels of Japanese are EAST-UA 248 and EAST-UA 249. The overall goal of this course is to help students build reading speed, reading fluency, and vocabularies and expressions through experiencing the pleasure of reading in Japanese. The focus of the class will be individual reading activity and consultations with the instructor.
From Casablanca and A Clockwork Orange to Sophie’s Choice and The Matrix, popular films offer surprisingly perceptive insights into complex philosophical concepts. This course begins by exploring the nature of philosophical analysis, argument, and the relevance of thought experiments. “It will then draw on a wide range of films ” along with a diverse selection of historical and contemporary thinkers ” in order to explore many of the central areas of philosophy. “Some of the areas under consideration will include perception (the nature of perceptual experience and the status of perceptual data, in particular how they relate to beliefs about, or knowledge of, the world), philosophy of mind (the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness, and their relationship to the physical body), determinism (the philosophical idea that every event or state of affairs, including every human decision and action, is the inevitable and necessary consequence of antecedent states of affairs), and the philosophy of religion (the area of philosophy which considers questions about the existence of God and the nature of evil). By merging the cinematic and philosophical worlds, debates will also arise around ethics, free will, and the nature of time. “Readings will be drawn from Aristotle, Anselm, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Locke, Nagel, Pascal, Putnam, and Williams, among others.
Covers the basic concepts of probability. Topics include the axiomatic definition of probability; combinatorial theorems; conditional probability and independent events; random variables and probability distributions; expectation of functions of random variables; special discrete and continuous distributions, including the chi-square, t, F, and bivariate normal distributions; law of large numbers; central limit theorem; and moment generating functions. The theory of statistical estimation is introduced with a discussion on maximum likelihood estimation.
In this course you will attain an understanding of the key factors that contribute to organizational success and the role that managers play in helping their organizations become more successful. The better that you understand these issues, the more effective you will be in your future careers. More specifically, the course will explore how organizational leaders develop winning strategies, and then design their organization in a way that aligns structures, social relationships, tasks, human resource practices, and people to achieve those strategies. In exploring these issues, you will identify the challenges that organizational leaders and managers face as they try to make good decisions in the face of a constantly evolving industry environment, competing goals and agendas, and an increasingly diverse and global workforce.
Before the internet artists and enthusiasts found their communities through self-publishing niche small-circulation magazines, usually without profit, with a burning desire to communicate. We’ll discuss the continued relevancy of the culture as we look at zines scenes from the past. For each scene, we’ll have an “object lesson” in which we dissect historical zines with an eye on form, content, aesthetic, publisher motives, and technology required for production. Then we’ll make our own! We’ll learn about historical zine making methods by making our own small-run zines in the same fashion to circulate within class. In addition to this tactile learning, you’ll produce a small body of work and gain an instant collection from your peers.
With its vast array of institutions dedicated to distinct cultural groupings and its formation inextricably linked to the halls of power, the museum culture in our nation’s capitol is uniquely Washington D.C. Taking advantage of behind-the- scenes access to some of the most prestigious museums in the world and their staff, students will explore various approaches to interpreting art and will develop tools for appreciating their aesthetic experiences. We will also look critically at the ways in which museums—through their policies, programs, exhibitions, and architecture—can define regional or national values, shape cultural attitudes, inform social and political views, and even effect one’s understanding of the meaning of a work of art. Starting our class at The Phillips Collection, America’s first museum of modern art, we will visit other pioneering private and public museums both old and new and have the opportunity to meet with staff members actively involved in different activities. We will explore the collections, learn about the inner workings of the exhibition process, and investigate the diverse educational missions these museums fulfill. Against the backdrop of the Capitol Building where legislation is made influencing museums on the National Mall and beyond, we will examine the political sides of this cultural history and the unusual array of institutions that have been legislated into existence, specifically museums dedicated to defined constituencies.
Introduction to research and theory of human development across the life span. Seminal theories & basic research of individual growth & development are analyzed & critiqued. Emphasis is on the range in human development with discussion of normative & non-normative development. Emphasis is also placed on the importance of understanding the influence of normative & non-normative contexts of development, including the impact of culture, heritage, socioeconomic level, personal health, & safety. Relations between home, school, & community and their impact on development are also explored via readings, lectures, discussions, & weekly observations in the field. Interrogation of implicit folk theories as a foundation for exploration of formal knowledge of human development.
Learn the history of some of the most widely known works of journalistic and documentary photography over the last seventy years through the lens of a globally preeminent photo collective, Magnum Agency. Photographers at this collective have created iconic documentary images and helped define the field of photojournalism as we know it today, setting an influential tone for style and content. Students will examine this in a variety of topics, including the documentation of war, social justice concerns, women’s issues, and sex work. Along the way, students study the business model of this agency to grasp how its differences, from other photographic enterprises, influence the work produced. We use this agency as a lens through which to address a recent history of photography, the trajectory of visual journalism, and the place of advocacy in documentary photography. We also ask critical questions of this visual documentation, assessing power imbalances, ethical complications, and more. Our studies take us through time and around the world via the medium of photography. Specific photographers we may explore include: Robert Capa, Susan Meiselas, Jonas Bendiksen, Nanna Heitmann, Bieke Depoorter, and Eli Reed. Readings include theory, journalistic accounts, history, and other critical literature. Naturally, we spend a lot of time looking at photos, and may have the opportunity to meet some of these photographers. Students visit NYC galleries, write academic papers, and produce a photo project.
This course deals with the history of the art and science of cinematography. A working Director of Photography will relate a perspective that is unique and factual to a theoretical discussion, which is traditionally academic. Cinematography has a strong tradition of adapting its tools to enhance the storytelling experience. This course allocates as History & Criticism for Film & TV majors. COURSE SUBJECT TO DEPARTMENTAL FEES. “Non-majors must process a “Permission Notice for Non-Majors” form” to register for the course (subject to availability).
Food is all around us. It influences who we are and how we related to our surroundings. This course explores food in the city from multiple points of view. Students observe and analyze various aspects of food in the city, from personal experiences to large social issues such as gentrification and food insecurity, and examine the cultural, social, and political aspects of food systems. Students acquire familiarity with basic ethnographic skills and methods such as interviews, observations, visual ethnography, and virtual ethnography Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Society & Social Sciences for Steinhardt students.
With an emphasis on British and European news and journalism, this course explores globalization from a wide range of theoretical frameworks including political economy, cultural analysis, theories of representation, and critical race and postcolonial studies. It considers how technologies, diasporic and transnational communities, and international institutions impact global communications, and how these networks and organizations are challenging, re-imagining and re-shaping social, cultural and geographic boundaries via mediated discourse.
This course examines the imagery of science and technology, the role of visuality in the construction of scientific knowledge, artistic renditions of science, and the emergence of visual technologies in modern society. It looks at how visuality has been key to the exercise of power through such practices as cataloguing and identification; the designation of abnormality, disease, and pathologies; medical diagnosis; scientific experimentation; and the marketing of science and medicine. We will examine the development of the visual technologies in the emerging scientific practices of psychiatry and criminology; explore the sciences of eugenics, genetics, pharmacology, brain and body scans, and digital medical images of many kinds; the marketing of pharmaceuticals, and the emerging politics of scientific activism.
This intensive, once-a-week course is designed for students with a serious interest in writing about movies for print and digital media. Students practice various forms of film journalism while developing a deeper understanding of the art form through screenings and close readings of works by Brooks Barnes, Pauline Kael, Peter Bogdanovich, Ellen Willis, James Baldwin and Francois Truffaut. Planned class trips include a major film festival and a tour of the Criterion Collection, a film company specializing in art-house cinema. In addition to discussing individual films and film movements, we will cover essential journalism skills, with guest speakers offering guidance on specific topics like reporting and interviewing techniques. Classwork will include writing exercises, presentations and workshops. By the end of the course, students will have raised their cinema I.Q. and written a variety of film articles that inform and engage.
Why do some organizations succeed while others flounder? Whether it be as an employee within a traditional for-profit business, or within one of the wide spectrum of alternative career paths, all of us will ultimately be a part of organizations. This course will help illuminate the key processes and factors that determine why organizations function as they do, drawing upon the fields of management, strategy, sociology, and psychology in the process. Specific topics covered include: Corporate strategy and achieving competitive advantage, Organizational structure and design, Organizational and national culture, Leadership, Motivation and incentives, Groups dynamics, Power & politics within organizations, including a discussion of persuasion & influence and social networks, Judgment and decision-making.
This course evaluates marketing as a system for the satisfaction of human wants and a catalyst of business activity. It presents a comprehensive framework that includes a) researching and analyzing customers, company, competition, and the marketing environment, b) identifying and targeting attractive segments with strategic positioning, and c) making product, pricing, communication, and distribution decisions. Cases and examples are utilized to develop problem-solving abilities.
The media and entertainment industries (including professional sports) share a series of peculiar features: essentially, they (a) produce an intangible output (e.g., a music recording), which can be distributed in a variety of forms and (b) do so based on an input which is extremely idiosyncratic: the creative output of a person or group of persons (e.g., a singer or a band). Finally, (c) recent technological innovation has changed the balance of power between the various players and led various industry segments to re-invent their business model. This course provides an introduction to the businesses of media and entertainment: value chain, key players, significant trends, etc. It takes a distinctive economics perspective to understanding how the forces of supply and demand have changed the business model of various industry segments.
This two-credit course is about key legal aspects of the entertainment industry. Entertainment law is not a separate legal discipline. There is really no such thing as entertainment law. Instead, it lies at the intersection of several areas of law and applies those disciplines to the diverse entertainment industry of products and services. The course will involve a foundational coverage of the following areas: contract, advertising, protection of ideas by contract, copyright and trademark (including the concepts of parody and fair use), rights of publicity and privacy, defamation, and artist representation. This course should prepare you to analyze a wide variety of entertainment law issues at a general level. Entertainment law does not tend towards an orderly system because it lacks overriding organizational principles that would tie together its myriad facets. As such, this course will appear to lack a logical outline in its progression and instead, will examine this corner of law in separate pieces, which will cover doctrine, analytical problem-solving, practical skills related to law (e.g., analytical writing, reasoning skills, argument structure, etc.), and the particular contexts in which issues arise in the entertainment industry. Dealing with more narrow topics, such as constitutional concerns or union representation, or obtaining a much deeper knowledge of specific topics discussed in class, will require additional, specialized study. This class also helps students further develop their reasoning, communication, and listening skills.
Investigates religious developments in India within their historical context. Familiarizes students with the religions of the subcontinent—including Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, and Judaism—through secondary source readings and English translations of primary source materials. Rather than survey religious traditions as closed systems divorced from time or place, students grapple with the central theories and historiographical challenges pertaining to religion in India, especially those that impact our ability to understand everyday religious experience, both past and present.
This text analysis course is designed to provide a platform for an in-depth study of how the story of a film is presented, what choices are made by the author, how information is offered or withheld and what effect this has on the drama. This class will be an “anthology” of different works, each selected for a different aspect of storytelling, exploring how the stylistic choices, themes, and dramatic devices reveal themselves within the body of work. The course is designed to better help students organize their own narratives by analyzing the techniques employed by various screenwriters in constructing their screenplays. A selection of films will be screened and discussed in terms of continuity of theme; delineation of plot, development of structure, protagonist’s story purpose, dialogue as action and character. After each screening, the instructor will lead a group discussion and analysis of the film, focusing further on the techniques, conventions and devices employed by the screenwriter to both tell a good story and satisfy the demands of the audience.
In this course students explore the Earth as an integrated, dynamic system involving the material world and diversity of living things which we call biodiversity. Specifically, this course explores the flow of energy and materials through the Earth System and potential human impact on this system. Through the practices of science students learn to use data to produce scientific knowledge for themselves and the public while exploring the question of what it means to engage in citizen science.
Artists often explore powerful issues of mental health through literature and film. “No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul.” (Ingmar Bergmann 1918-2007) In this course, we will draw on classic examples from literature and film to highlight and understand aspects of mental health in ways that are more vivid and visceral than any text book can illustrate. Materials will be chosen from novels, poems, and films to illustrate various mental health issues, such as anxiety, depression, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), dissociative identity disorder (DID), and schizophrenia. We will look at how some of the disorders fare in psychological treatments that either succeed or fail. Guest speakers may be invited to highlight some topics.
Examines media images in relation to the making of ethnic and racial identities in the United States. Surveys some of the theoretical approaches to the study of images, paying particular attention to the intersection of history and ideologies or representation. Looks into the nature and politics of stereotypes; inquires into their reproduction through discourses, representations, and practices; and then moves to a comparative examination of media images in relation to the making of African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American images in the media, looking specifically at changes and continuities in the representation of these four minority groups in the media.
This course is designed to be accessible and approachable for people who will be future teachers of elementary school mathematics. It is also intended for people who want to broaden their knowledge in mathematics and experience it as a relevant, challenging, and enjoyable field. It is not intended for math majors. It will be taught as a problem-based course, that allows for students to explore and develop new ideas, and apply them to real life situations. The course builds on intuitive understandings of fundamental ideas of counting and chance and moves gradually to more formal knowledge of combinatorics and probability concepts and techniques. The learning experiences offered throughout the course are designed to facilitate student interactions and active role in the learning process. Liberal Arts Core/MAP Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Quantitative Reasoning for Steinhardt students.
This course provides an introduction to the fundamental topics in macroeconomics, the analysis of the economy as a whole. After an overview of introductory economic concepts, such as comparative advantage, opportunity costs, and supply and demand, the course focuses on the determinants of aggregate income, employment, and prices. Other topics include the study of long-run economic growth, the business cycle, the financial system, as well as monetary and fiscal policy. *ECI-UF 101 and ECII-UF 102 may meet some of the equivalent course requirements for the College of Arts and Science. Students may take ECI-UF 101 and ECII-UF 102 in any order; neither course is a pre-requisite for the other.
Through a focus on contemporary Paris, this course aims to explore the insights offered by anthropological approaches to cities and urban life. We will consider the relationships between urban spatial organization and an array of social, economic and political phenomena; the relevance of consumption and display to the shaping of urban identities; and the shifting dynamics of social groups and boundaries within the urban context. This will be accomplished through course readings and also through training in urban ethnographic research methods, supporting each student’s own systematic observation over the semester of one locus of everyday Parisian life. The final project for the course will be a piece of ethnographic analysis based on this field research.
Key questions: Does living well require acquiring knowledge and wisdom? What is the place of moral responsibility in the good life? Is the good life a happy life, or does it require sacrificing happiness? Does religion lead to living well or does it hinder it? What is friendship and how does it contribute to the good life? Study of primary texts by Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Avot, Maimonides, Spinoza, and Hermann Cohen.
What does it mean to say that Jesus Christ was both human and divine? How can the Christian divinity be one yet three? How are the sacraments such as baptism effective? Do we have freewill? These were some of the pressing questions the Church Fathers addressed in the early centuries of Christian history and their answers contributed to the Christian theological tradition for centuries to come. In this course we will examine some of the classic works of early Christian theology. Despite the often highly rhetorical and polemical character of their writings the Church Fathers nevertheless developed an intellectually rigorous field of knowledge, one that has had a significant intellectual historical as well as socio-political impact in the history of the Church. This is not a theological course but rather an introduction to some of the key texts in a historically significant mode of theological inquiry.
The course is focused on exploring Franz Kafka’s work – stories, novels, diaries and letters – in the context of fin de siècle Prague and the birth of modernism. We will take a closer look at the cultural and social context of Central Europe (literature and the arts, but also the Modernist architecture of Adolf Loos, Simmel’s sociology of the metropolitan life, Freud’s analysis of the unconscious, Brentano’s psychology, the resonance of Nietzsche’s philosophy, or the emergence of new media like phonograph and silent film) in the first two decades of the 20th century. In addition, we will discuss the adaptations of Kafka’s work and its impact on later art, fiction and film (Borges, Welles, Kundera, Roth, Švankmajer). The topics discussed through Kafka’s writings and other related works include: man and metropolis, family, estrangement, authorship, time, writing and media, travelling, territories and identities, languages, animals, art and pain. We will be especially interested in how these phenomena transform when represented in and through the medium of literary fiction.
Self-tracking. Biohacking. Personal informatics. Quantified self. The contemporary “quantified self” movement makes claims of “self-knowledge through numbers” and improving health and human welfare. There are clearly other elements to self-tracking culture that deserve critical investigation. What does the self become through the lens of data? What is the dark side of data that can be used against us, and without regard for social justice and equality? This multidisciplinary course takes both a theoretical and a practical look at the pressing issue of data aggregation about human beings. It looks to the past for historical forms of self-quantification and to the future of a rapidly expanding globalized landscape of app tracking and wearable technologies. With the question of human data in mind, the course examines the unsure futures of humanity in a variety of domains: medicine and aging, education, the arts, marketing, and the Internet of Things. Students will situate themselves critically within this increasingly dense data landscape by creating data about themselves that can be analyzed and interpreted using a variety of data visualization and storytelling frameworks.
Humanity has long imagined monstrous transformations of ourselves. What do these creatures mean to us, historically and today? What do we think we are becoming? Investigates the supernatural in popular culture through vampires and zombies. Places them in the context of our imagination of the divine through history and ethnography, and also alongside our intimate problems of managing sex, gender, race, and class. The archives of religions, psychologies, philosophy, film, TA, and novels provide rich source material, Requires a short midterm essay and a longer final project, while posting to a forum most weeks.
Both dancing and everyday movement offer continual opportunities for embodied experience. Those who regularly dance or engage in movement practices such as yoga, jogging, cycling, and walking typically develop an appetite, even a need, for moving and the breadth of experience it brings. Whether you already feel this appetite or want to explore embodied experience for the first time, this Arts Workshop offers the opportunity for deep investigation of movement, focusing on active and contemplative exploration of bodies in space and time. We will be guided by several research strands linked to the existence and power of embodiment, noting experimental choreographer Susan Rethorst’s term, “the body’s mind”: ways of knowing (individually, culturally) through our bodies. Through many movement options, including dancing and somatic practices, walking and other everyday actions, and personal/cultural/political movement histories, we will encounter or create relationships between what we do and who we are. In the studio and elsewhere, we will consider how our lives as movers, and our sense of ourselves as embodied, bring us into contact with others—walkers, dancers, friends and family—and with our spaces, places, and sociocultural worlds. In this course (open to anyone with/without previous training), our research-in-action will be supported by interdisciplinary scholarship engaged with dance, embodiment, space, everyday culture, phenomenology, environmental studies, and life writing. Readings may include works by Thomas DeFrantz, Anna Halprin, Victoria Hunter, Einav Katan, Marcel Mauss, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Andrea Olsen, Steve Paxton, Georges Perec, Yvonne Rainer, Susan Rethorst, Kathleen Stewart, and Yi-Fu Tuan.
What is “global heritage”? Is it simply our collective legacy as human societies – how we want to be remembered by future generations – or must we confront more difficult questions about identity, the ownership of culture, and conflicts between local and global stewardship of the cultural treasures and historical evidence? With time, negligence, and even military conflict working to erase the past, we must ask: Can a better understanding of our shared heritage assist us in addressing cultural differences in the present day? And how can science both help us understand the historic record and work to preserve it? This class examines ways in which scientific methods can help define “global heritage” and protect it for future generations. Students explore the history and the science behind the creation of paintings, frescoes, parchments, sculptures, ancient mummies, historical buildings, musical instruments, and other artifacts. They will also examine the methods used to differentiate between an authentic object and a fake and ask how some objects come to be valued more than others: distinctions that can lead, and have led, to cultural conflict in recent years.
Virtually unknown outside of academic discourse until recently, the term cultural appropriation has become a commonplace in social and popular media, as activists and public intellectuals have highlighted what they see as problematic uses (or abuses) of cultural symbols, artifacts, or expressive modes connected to marginalized groups. But what exactly is cultural appropriation, and under what circumstances can it be said to constitute a form of exploitation or violence? This course approaches these questions both philosophically and empirically, asking, on the one hand: What is culture, and how can it be “owned” or “stolen”? and on the other: How have practices of adopting or using culture been implicated in processes of social subjugation or marginalization? Course readings are drawn from a range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences, including cultural anthropology, art theory, music studies, and philosophy. By engaging with a rich corpus of ideas through in-class discussions, oral presentations, and written reflections, students will develop critical perspectives on cultural appropriation as well as the broader concepts of culture, race, and ethnicity.
Introduction to the fundamental principles of psychology, emphasizing both the unity & the diversity of a field that spans major theoretical & research areas, including biological bases of human behavior, learning, development, motivation, & social and abnormal behavior. Links between theory & classic as well as contemporary research are a recurrent theme. Liberal Arts Core/MAP Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Society & the Social Sciences
Explores the implications and meaning of having a disability in global contexts by introducing students to experts’ voices, especially disabled activists, as they seek to advance disability justice and inclusion and demand systemic change in spheres of influence including education, politics, healthcare, the arts, culture, social welfare, and everyday life. Examines how public (government) and private (outside of the government) policies and practices in these sectors affect the inclusion of persons with disabilities. Students explore and identify how international trends in disability and inclusion, local cultural beliefs, and biases influence inclusion.
This course is an introduction to the basic concepts of film and new media studies. The course provides an overview of the historical development of film as an art, technology, and industry and the role of new media as an extension to and reinvention of models for production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. Students are introduced to documentary, experimental, narrative, and new media within different historical and cultural contexts, comparative aesthetics, and the lines of critical enquiry that have been developed for film and new media in dialogue with other fields in the arts and humanities.
Contests between stalwart custodians of “tradition” and rebels searching for new, untested modes of expression pervade Western music history. This course surveys some of the most contentious debates on music’s past, present, and future waged between music theorists, critics, artists, and audiences, spanning the last five hundred years. Our focus is on the seemingly inevitable tension between what music is, what it should be, and what it can be. Starting with the Greek philosophers of antiquity, we explore debates on the music of Claudio Monteverdi, Ludwig van Beethoven, Richard Wagner, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Carmen Miranda, John Cage, Bob Dylan, and The Slits. We also examine the backlash against and subsequent defense of styles like jazz, rock and roll, punk rock, rap, and 2000s pop. Our goal is to better understand how culture is “made” precisely during these moments of charged debate, where a particular music”s perceived merits or transgressions serve as the pretext for larger often controversial ideological issues. Art in this sense–and music in particular–becomes a platform by which to observe how competing aesthetic value systems reveal deep social and cultural rifts. Each unit within this course has two parts. First, we scrutinize and discuss primary sources related to the debate: letters, scores, newspaper and magazine articles, journal entries, singles, albums, and films. Secondly, we read and discuss secondary sources by scholars, critics, and investigative journalists for context, using this new information as a way to think critically about the primary sources and our own aesthetic judgments. What we will see is that debating music in terms of what’s “good” and “bad,” classical and avant-garde, edifying and dangerous, traditional and innovative, is, in the Western world, a long-standing tradition in its own right.
Combining science and the art of storytelling, this course will tackle one of the most pressing issues facing the future of humanity: Abrupt Climate Change. In a unique collaboration with NYU physical climate scientist Professor David Holland, students will research and create work that bridges the divide between science and the public through accurate, creative science-based storytelling. This highly multidisciplinary, hands-on course welcomes students from all backgrounds and fields of study to imagine and invent creative ways of telling stories about this global phenomenon and to investigate solutions. Weekly assignments will lead to a final collaborative project and an exhibition open to the public.
Can oceans be the subject of historical inquiry? Maritime spaces help in thinking beyond nations and national borders that dominate modern global histories, leading us into a world of connected pasts. This course investigates the Indian Ocean’s long expanse from the early modern to the modern period from 1500 to the early 20 th century. What changed about movement and exchange across land and sea in the longer transition from empires to nation-states? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, despite growing European presence in the Indian Ocean littoral, pre-existing networks between East Africa, the Persian Gulf, the Indian sub-continent, and Southeast Asia remained resilient. Yet, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new shipping technologies, the monitoring of movement across borders, and the introduction of travel documents like the passport became crucial in the formation of nation-states that emerged from colonial empires. From sailors, moneylenders, and pilgrims to convicts and indentured laborers, cultures of mobility connected vast geographies, often defying the logic of nation-states and colonialism. In examining this history, we will cover themes ranging from encounters in port-cities, commodities, smuggling, piracy, and pilgrimage to documents of identity and travel. Readings may include: Broeze’s Brides of the Seas, Ewald’s Motley Crews: Indian and African Seafarers, Tagliacozzo’s Secret trades, porous borders , and Torpey’s The Invention of the Passport , and translations from Samarqandi’s Account of Calicut and Vijayanagar, Afonso De Albuquerque’s Letter from Aden , Linschoten’s Itinerario , Munshi Rahman Khan’s Autobiography of an Indian Indentured Laborer, and Nawab Sikandar Begam’s A Pilgrimage to Mecca .
The theory and practice of editing, from Griffith to Kubrick. The emphasis will be on experiments in narrative clarity and dramatic emphasis in storytelling. For many, editing is the unique source of the art of filmmaking. This course addresses this point of view. This course allocates as History & Criticism for Film & TV majors.
This is a critical studies course exploring the aesthetics and psycho-acoustics of sound: how sound works in art and life; how it affects emotions and stimulates the imagination; and how it is used in film, radio, television and other creative or artistic contexts, particularly its application as a key element in storytelling. This course examines the meaning and character of the soundscape (the acoustic environment) and the ways it has technically and aesthetically evolved throughout film history from the Kinetophone to the iPhone. The course includes reading in the theory of sound, and listening to examples of sound work by composers and sound designers. In previous semesters we have looked at the soundtrack in such films as: Playtime; Apocalypse Now, The Conversation, Aliens, The Evil Dead II, Saving Private Ryan, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Class meetings will be devoted to: 1) lecture and discussion based on assigned readings and listening and viewing assignments; and 2) screening of selected audio and video works. Students are graded on class participation, journals, a paper, and exams. This course allocates as History & Criticism for Film & TV majors.
Offered in the spring semester only. Course level: Intermediate. 4 points. No prerequisite. Over the last 50 years the American Cinema has produced a remarkably rich abundance of entertaining, exciting, and challenging films. This course is designed to provide a survey of the wealth of styles, forms, purposes, and approaches to filmmaking that developed and emerged in this era. While Hollywood has obviously served as the dominant mode of filmmaking in this country, a significant of other filmmaking practices have continued to operate and sometimes thrive outside of it. Beyond the attention paid to Hollywood narrative cinema as it has changed and evolved over this half-century, we will also consider documentaries, avant-garde and experimental works, independent narraive cinema, and “cult” films. Consequently, we will be screening a variety of films, including works by such notable American filmmakers as Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, George Romero, John Singleton, and Michael Moore.
This is a critical analysis of the Black image in cinema through film screenings, discussions, and selected readings. Film is an art form whose influence dictates how we see others and ourselves. It shapes our worldview and, yet, it is one of the youngest and most misunderstood art forms. On the surface, film viewing might seem like a passive form of learning, but effective films engage us on emotional, intellectual, spiritual, cultural, and political levels. Film is one of the most powerful mediums ever invented and since it’s invention, the Black image and experience has been distorted, demonized, romanticized, erased, appropriated as well as exalted and reified. So, it is our duty and responsibility to know its history, understand its present effects, so we can dictate its future and participate in how the Black image evolves and is treated over time. This course will survey and critically explore an historical range of the Black image on screen and Black films in relation to inspiration, narrative, a scene, set, and site of production. Screening will include a sampling of important Black independently made, and/or Black cast and narrative feature films. We will discuss and analyze specific technical elements (direction, editing, framing and composition, mise-en-scene, music, etc.) that reinforce and demonstrate these larger themes. Accordingly, our discussions and readings will cover the full range of current issues and debates in Black cinema studies, from independence vs. mainstream filmmaking; gender and sexuality; class and color caste; the ghettoization and upwardly mobile integration of urban zones; cooptation and the rise of the bourgeois story as genre, and so on.
Feminist Filmmakers examines gender constructs in narrative film and episodic work. We will explore how gender constructs in film and television influence societal views of gender roles, as well as contextualize gender in the era and cultures specific films were made. The vehicle through which this course will examine gender will be the history and work of female directors around the world. Screenings, critical reading in film and gender studies, articles and interviews on current debates regarding gender and diversity inclusion in the film industry, make this class valuable for everyone.
The history of comedy in 20th century America is the history of America itself. Comedians from all walks of life have provided a funhouse mirror as well as a perceptive lens for American society and culture. This course will examine significant periods and players of the 20th century comedic genre and analyze them against their historic context and legacy. Humor will be used as a platform to discuss how comedy was governed by and ultimately responded to the influence of American society. This course will observe how comedians in turn shaped American life, running the gamut from silent movies to Vaudeville; screwball comedies of the 1930s and ‘40s to the Golden Age of Television; from the sitcom to the political comedies of present day. Equally important, this course will analyze the genesis and evolution of the comedic persona in performance: what worked, what did not work, and why. Comprehensive analysis of performances will help this course determine how performers did what they did and why they made the choices they made. This course will assess how the work of the comedian has evolved and grown over the course of a career, what methods have withstood the test of time, and why.
This course surveys narrative forms and representative works from literature that employ them, contributing to a familiarity with the literary tradition inherited by film, television, and radio. It examines the various strategies of narrative structure and its principal components (e.g., plot, theme, character, imagery, symbolism, point of view) with an attempt to connect these with contemporary forms of media expression. The course includes extensive readings, which are examined in discussions, and selected from English, American, and world literature. This course may be allocated to either History & Criticism or Gen Ed Humanities for Film & TV majors.
This course will analyze the possibility of pursuing the ideals of an “author cinema” – a personal way of expressing ideas that can deal with Hollywood mainstream and also with the independents, but will never be considered an integral part of either one. The “author cinema” would be a cinema of personal expression that refuses the mainstream’s prison of “three acts, happy ending, stars, etc.”; and at the same time, refuses the trends and the limited scope of most of the independents: a cinema that shows not only how to make a film, but why. Films from all over the world will be analyzed, focusing in particular on the authors that are able to keep alive their personal vision while dealing with the studios (i.e. Stone, Lee, Scorsese, Kubrick), the ones that dared to fight Hollywood (i.e. Welles, Peckinpah, Cimino, von Stroheim) and the loose cannons independent at heart (Altman, P.T. Anderson, Coen brothers). A series of guests to the class will be comprised of critics, curators and cultural organizers, filmmakers and producers. This course allocates as History & Criticism for Film & TV majors. COURSE SUBJECT TO DEPARTMENTAL FEES. Non-majors must process a “Permission Notice for Non-Majors” form to register for the course (subject to availability).
A rival reportedly asked Walt Disney why Disney’s films were so much better. Disney replied, “I analyze.” His rival said, “So do I.” Disney answered, “I analyze better.” Film Analysis is an advanced course in film criticism taught by practitioners. We build upon the analytical skills developed in Language of Film, Storytelling Strategies and the various production courses in order to strengthen the students’ ability to critically assess the weave of narrative content, mise-en-scene, cinematic technique and structures. Through this in-depth examination of a wide range of films, students deepen their understanding of how filmmakers over the years and in various cultures have created meaningful experiences for their audiences.This course counts as History & Criticism for Film Majors.
This course presents a comprehensive, systematic, and practical conceptual framework for understanding people as consumers—the basic subject matter of all marketing. It draws on the social sciences to evaluate the influence of both individual and ecological factors on market actions. Students discuss relevant psychological and sociological theories and study how they can be used to predict consumers’ reactions to strategic marketing decisions. Basic methodologies for research in consumer behavior are developed and applied. Course emphasis is on developing applications of behavioral concepts and methods for marketing actions.
Art and War: Battle Lines of the Graphic Novel This course explores storytelling about war through the use of the graphic novel. Students will be introduced to both recent and historically significant comics about war. Our goal is to gain a deeper understanding of the interplay between image and text in sequential art, and the ability to critically analyze graphic novels that deal with challenging subject matter. What are the methodological and ethical issues that arise when constructing sequential narratives of war? What are the varying strengths between war narratives that are autobiographical, documentary or fictional? Is there something unique about the format of graphic novels that enables artists to tell a different kind of war story than filmmakers, musicians or performers? How do comic books circulate culturally, and how might this expand or limit their ability to inform our understandings of war? We will explore these questions through close readings, robust discussions and careful written analysis of well-known works by Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi and Joe Sacco, as well as graphic novels by Keiji Nakazawa, Jason Lutes, Gipi, Emmanuel Guibert and others.
This course emphasizes the content, the aesthetics, and the purpose of cinema as a truly distinctive and dynamic art form uncovering the inner vision of the filmmaker, and the organic and transformative process where filmmakers projects their original truth, not compromising or borrowing ideas and themes from other films. Students explore the use of technology as a valuable tool that enhances the vision of the filmmaker without diminishing the organic texture of the work by its overwhelming presence. The course brings to light the stagnant and repetitious formulae of commercial cinema, resulting in diluted mainstream films. The works of iconic filmmakers who embrace and use film as an original, vibrant and reflective art form are reviewed throughout the course. Extracts and readings from relevant filmmakers are given throughout the course.
Transgender and gender non-conforming (TGNC) youth are quickly becoming more visible in society. Parents of gender non-conforming children are coming to mental health providers in increasing numbers and are often met with stigma and bias and a lack of education on TGNC health. TGNC youth are turned out of their homes at disproportionate rates and harassed and bullied in school at higher rates than their gender conforming peers. They have higher rates of suicide, depression and substance abuse and face unique medical, legal and social barriers. They also have produced their own cultures and communities to face these challenges. This course will examine the scientific research on TGNC youth in the context of the practical challenges faced by these individuals and their families. Students will hear from experts in the field, receive personal accounts from TGNC teens and transgender adults, and take field trips to social services agencies and events produced by TGNC teens themselves.
In this course students read masterpieces of French literature from the French Revolution to the end of the twentieth century. Works are considered from various historical, aesthetic and theoretical perspectives. Texts include: Le Père Goriot (Balzac); Madame Bovary (Flaubert); Les Faux-Monnayeurs (Gide); La Nausée (Sartre); Le Ravissement de Lol V. Stein (Duras), and Du côté de chez Swan I (Proust), which will be the subject of a final essay. Conducted in French.
In this course we focus on four contemporary novels in which the world of the character, the narrator, or the author, is read through the lens of a literary classic. In each case, the reading and rewriting of the primary text involves temporal and spatial displacements (from the 18th to the 20th century, from Europe to the Caribbean and to the South Pacific) that generate shifting perspectives and a constant reshuffling of center and periphery. Between a reverential affiliation to the past and a creative misreading and rewriting of it, these intertextual encounters with « great » Western literary works insistently raise the questions of identity, originality, and “writing back”. Exploring these questions will therefore also involve drawing on comparative, translation, and postcolonial studies.
This seminar examines the causes and consequences of poverty and rising inequality around the globe. Students will study the ways in which poverty and inequality are shaped by multifaceted contexts; understand the theories underlying strategies and programs which address key poverty and inequality issues faced by many developed, developing and least developed countries; and learn about different countries’ experiences addressing their own poverty and inequality issues. We consider philosophies of global justice and the ethics of global citizenship, and students are expected to critically reflect upon their own engagements with poverty relief activities and aspirations for social changes. Students should be prepared to tackle advanced social science readings, analysis, and writing. Open to seniors, and to other students with instructor’s permission. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or above. Fulfillment: Social Science Focus Political Economy/Sociology 300 level.
Contemporary art can seem perplexing, yet when viewed as a progression of ideas and aesthetic strategies that respond to societal shifts, a certain logic emerges. This course traces movements in North American and European art from 1945 to the present through a study of primary and secondary texts, artwork examples, and historic context. In lectures, discussion and activities, we will investigate how artists went beyond primarily object-based works to explore expanded notions of what art can be and the interaction between the artwork and the viewer. The ways institutional frameworks, media and technology, politics, and social relations, informed contemporary art practice will also be examined. At the end of this course, students should be able to identify contemporary art movements, key artists, and relevant artworks and create compelling arguments around these works. They will also be able to articulate the conceptual and visual strategies employed in these pieces, recognize connections and differences across movements and have a basic knowledge of the milieu in which they were produced. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory course (18-19: survey).
This course examines how ideas of gender and sexuality have shaped the production and consumption of visual culture from the late nineteenth century. We will examine a variety of visual and material texts that shape, criticize, and/or negotiate with contemporaneous gender and sexual norms. Focusing on these expressions’ cultural and historical specificities, the students will assess gender and sexuality—and as an extension, the notions of normality, healthfulness, and self—as ideas that continuously evolve in response to social discourses. The course proceeds roughly chronologically. It starts with the nineteenth-century Euro-American context, in which modern ideas of gender and sexuality began to circulate authoritatively in medical and legal terms. It then moves onto more globalized contemporary perspectives that critique and/or expand the pronouncedly “Western” conceptions of identity and identity categories. Prerequisite: None.
The goal of the first half of the course is to build a basic understanding of how information about traits is encoded in our genes, how this “blueprint” is interpreted by cellular machinery to build a complex human being, and how our heredity has resulted in our evolution. In the senond half of the course, we will continue the exploration of how environment, experience and random errors affect the process of building our traits, what happens when these processes fail, and the promise and possible peril of genetic technologies for human life. Fulfillment: CORE ED (with CCEX-SHU 137)
How can a hamburger symbolize progress, an animated character provide comfort, and rock music define one’s identity? In this course we will study the role of consumer culture in the lives of Chinese youth, both today and in the past. By examining popular commodities including sneakers, coffee, backpacking, and celebrity idols, we will think about how young people use these things to find friendship and love, to seek success and happiness, and to define who they are. As we consider why people like particular commodities, we will learn about class, gender, ethnicity, and modernity in China. Reading about the history of commodities in China, we will consider what is new about consumer culture, and why people’s tastes change over time. Alongside studies of specific commodities, we will read key theoretical texts about shopping, advertising, media, identity, and fantasy: these texts will help us understand how commodities can be imbued with tremendous power to shape our desires and create our identities. During the semester, each student will conduct qualitative research about a commodity, including online research and offline interviews with people who buy and sell this commodity. At the end of the semester, we will gather your research together to produce a handbook of Chinese youth and consumer culture. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing. Fulfillment: CORE SSPC/IPC; GCS Elective: The Politics, Economy, and Environment of China; Social Science focus Anthropology 200 level.
This course aims to train students to think philosophically about our rapidly changing—and ever more intimate—relationship with machines. We focus in particular on the following subjects: artificial intelligence, robots, cyborgs, automation and science fiction speculation. Prerequisite: Global Perspectives on Society (GPS) Fulfillment: CORE STS; Humanities Interdisciplinary or Advanced course; IMA/IMB elective.
Introduces students to the skills and concepts they will need in order to develop a meaningful engagement with the visual arts and art history as a global discipline. Rather than providing a chronological survey of great works, it covers examples and perspectives from a wide array of regions, periods, and societies. Topics include materials and techniques of production; formal analysis; subject matter and iconography; historical and cultural contexts; the social role and formation of artists; and the history of art history as a discipline. Pitched for students who have little or no background in the study of art and architecture, this course provides a rigorous introduction to the foundations of the discipline. It is required of all art history majors.
Innovative solutions in education are emerging from the private sector every day. Business ventures from Teach for America to Khan Academy are changing the way teachers are prepared, the way students learn, and the way institutions use data. These ideas are started by “social entrepreneurs,” people who try to improve lives through solutions that have a market and customers. Students in this course learn about social entrepreneurship, how to identify critical issues in the education-related space, and how to develop their own entrepreneurial solutions accordingly.
Offered Fall Only. Required of all freshmen majors and highly recommended for incoming transfers. Students are required to register for the lecture and the recitation sections. No prerequisites for this course. The course will consist of a series of weekly lectures, discussions, readings and field trips to museums and galleries in the city. Lectures will present historic and contemporary art and photography and it’s ideation as a basis for understanding the work the students are viewing on their weekly field trips. Students will visit selected exhibitions chosen for their quality and relevance and arranged by geographic area of the city (One week the Whitney, the next Chelsea, etc). Students will be required to monitor the daily press and periodicals for reviews of work they’ve seen and to highlight exhibitions the class should see. Additional readings of historic material will be assigned and short papers will be required.
Open only to Photography & Imaging majors. Sophomore Standing. This class will chronicle the history of photography?s complex and symbiotic relationship to the other visual arts: painting, sculpture, architecture, installation and performance, among others. Beginning with the medium?s invention and the early fights of its practitioners to establish themselves as fine artists, the course will describe photographers? unique attempts to negotiate their relationships with both artistic movements and the media culture of which they are a part. Robinson, Cameron, Emerson, F. Holland Day, Stieglitz, Moholy-Nagy, Rodchenko, Weston, Alvarez Bravo, Lartigue, De Carava, Cahun, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Cindy Sherman (among others) will be seen within the context of their respective art worlds, so the impact of art movements, cultural attitudes and new technologies on photographers during different historical periods can be assessed.
The goal of this course is to introduce the students into nationalism studies and into a plethora of historical and present roots of national identities and manifestations of nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe. The course will examine how selected aspects of national histories have been used (and misused) in 19., 20. and 21. century to support/justify national political programs and leaders; specifically, how a romantic picture of national history influenced the development of national identity and what role its interpretation has had in political struggles and programs of Central and East European nations. The course focuses on forces that triggered many eruptions of ethnic hatred and atrocities in Central and Eastern Europe including Holocaust, post World War II expulsion of Germans, civil war in former Yugoslavia, and most recently the nationalist aspects of conflict between Ukraine and Russia. The course will focus on Ukraine and Russia, Poland, Hungary, former Czechoslovakia, present-day Czech Republic and Slovakia, on former Yugoslavia and on independent states on its territory, and it will motivate the students to formulate a positive and cooperative prospect for the region’s future.
The history of Germany in the twentieth century offers rich material to explore various approaches to organizing modern society. Beginning with Imperial Germany in 1900 and moving forward to today’s reunited Germany, we will look at different ways in which the relationship between the state and the individual, and relationship between politics, economy, and society developed over five different political systems. We will interrogate how these institutional arrangements were envisioned and structured and how they were experienced in everyday negotiations. In this course, principle narratives and events will be situated in a European and global context, allowing us to place the concept of German modernity in a comparative framework. Lectures will provide an overview of Germany in the twentieth century; readings and in-class discussions will explore different approaches to analyzing German history and society. During museum visits and walking tours, we will analyze contestations over the various attempts to integrate – both in concerted efforts to memorialize as well as to forget and erase – Germany’s oft-problematic pasts within the narrative of Germany’s present.
This course introduces students to the use of statistical methods. Topics include: descriptive statistics; introduction to probability; sampling; statistical inference concerning means, standard deviations, and proportions; correlation; analysis of variance; linear regression, including multiple regression analysis. Applications to empirical situations are an integral part of the course. Pre-requisites: None Fulfillment: This course satisfies the following: Major req: BUSF, BUSM, ECON, CS, DS Foundational course; Social Science: methods course; IMB Business elective.
What was it about Christianity that it made it so popular in the ancient world? Was it the martyrs volunteering for public execution? Monks’ sexual renunciation? The isolation of hermits living on the tops of columns in the wilderness? Or perhaps orthodoxy and its politically divisive anxieties about heretics and Jews? In fact, all these things (and more) explain how a small Jewish messianic sect from Palestine became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. This course will provide an introduction to the big questions in the history of early Christianity. The focus will be on early Christian literature, such as martyr texts, saints’ lives, and works of monastic spirituality and mysticism. Issues addressed will include the Christian reception of Greco-Roman antiquity, the origins of anti-Semitism, gender and sexuality in the early Church, and the emergence of Christian theology.
The key events you read about in your morning twitter feed or on your favorite news sites are usually not unique in world affairs. They have a background, a context, that makes them more understandable and often more interesting. History is about everything that happened before you started reading this course description. And thinking historically means trying to make sense of the new in the context of what human beings have done before. In this lecture series, NYU’s historians take you on a behind the scenes tour of current events you thought you knew, with the goal of making you a better observer and analyst of news about the world around you.
This introductory-level course is needed to provide students with a firm understanding of distinctively philosophical approaches to issues concerning race and racism. This course has two themes. The first is an exploration of the concept of race. This is a question in social ontology, which is the philosophical study of the nature of social entities. The second is an examination of some of the normative and conceptual issues surrounding the most morally significant of the ways in which “race” has mattered for social life, namely as the concept that defines the object of the attitudes, practices, institutions and beliefs we call “racist.” We shall ask what racism is, what sorts of things can be racist, and what makes racism wrong.
The principal aim of this course is to familiarize students with the history of British art from the Stuarts to the early Victorian era. Teaching will be conducted entirely on sites in London or its immediate vicinity. The course will begin with the elite patronage of the Stuart court and end with the development of public institutions of art from the mid-eighteenth century. The social significance of portraiture, the cult of antiquity, the art market and the rise of landscape will all be studied as themes. There will be a strong emphasis on the European sources of British visual culture and the emergence of a distinctive national tradition of painting from Hogarth through to Turner.
Introduces students to issues and themes in the history of the Jesus movement and early Christianity through a survey of the main texts of the canonical New Testament as well as other important early Christian documents. Students are given the opportunity to read most of the New Testament text in a lecture hall setting where the professor provides historical context and focus on significant issues, describes modern scholarly methodologies, and places the empirical material within the larger framework of ancient history and the theoretical study of religion.
Can we truly classify one’s personality, the very essence of an individual, as “disordered”? We explore the history, etiology, diagnosis, and treatment of personality disorders. We begin with an overview of personality and theories of personality development and then complete an in-depth review of each disorder. We consider the genetic, neurobiological, and developmental research supporting and refuting these diagnoses. We review various classification systems, observe how the media often portrays personality disorders, and challenge the notion that undesirable personality traits are always maladaptive. Finally, we utilize both research and clinical material and aims at a nuanced understanding of these disorders and their sustained impact upon affected individuals.
Addresses current problems facing our society and threatening our mental health, such as the opioid epidemic, gun violence, video game addiction, legal use of marijuana, and prolonged separation of children from their parents. Students contrast what is scientifically understood with what is commonly believed and learn critical reading and thinking skills as they parse fact from fiction, reality from supposition. Given the topical nature of this course, themes may vary by semester and instructor expertise (including a focus on social and cultural issues, novel neuroscience, digital health technology, etc.).
This course introduces object-oriented programming, recursion, and other important programming concepts to students who already have had some exposure to programming in the context of building applications using Python. Students will design and implement Python programs in a variety of applied areas.
This course provides an introduction to the making of modern Spain through the study of key cultural practices in literature, visual art, film, and performance from the 19th century to the present. The course is organized around key concepts, which may vary by semester and by instructor.
From the 8th century until the 17th century, Islam played a crucial role in the history of the Iberian Peninsula. Today this period is often portrayed as one of inter-religious harmony, while al-Andalus is simultaneously mourned in contemporary Islamist discourse as a lost paradise. While we look at the history of Al-Andalus and assess the importance of the contributions of Al-Andalus to Europe and America, we evaluate the significance of its legacy in modern Spain. Furthermore, we will study the protagonist role that Spain has played in relations between Europe and the Mediterranean Islamic countries during the Modern Age. Students will gain further understanding and contextualization of current Arab-Muslim geopolitics. As a case study, we will address the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, as well as its ensuing process of decolonization and the consequences that shape the current international relations between the two neighboring countries, Spain and Morocco.
In the last decade, many Latin American nations have witnessed decisive progress in the legal recognition of non-normative sexualities and gender identities. The conventional map of “advanced democracies” crafting models of democratization to be exported to “less developed” nations seems definitely challenged: a new understanding of the multiple temporalities of queer cultures in North and South America is even more necessary than ever. In order to explore this multi-layered landscape, this course is aimed at reconstructing the historical detours of queer cultures in Buenos Aires and New York, considered enclaves of queer cultures in Argentina and the US respectively. The course revisits the last three decades in order to question the dominant and frequently reductive narratives of lineal progress. Taught simultaneously in Buenos Aires and New York, the class includes critical readings of queer cultural production as well as work on local archives and interviews with activists and GLTTBI organizations.
SPAN-UA 9020.002 (Intensive Intermediate Spanish) is a six-credit course that continues and reviews the introductory level Spanish learned in SPAN-UA.1 and SPAN-UA.2, or in SPANUA. 10, while introducing literary readings, short films, and more complex composition exercises. The course involves an integration of the four basic skills: listening, speaking,reading and writing with the aim to improve communication in Spanish. Through this integrated approach, you will participate in a practical application of vocabulary, grammar,and culture. The course emphasizes mastery of language skills through specific contexts and dialogical situations.At the end of the course students will read a novel which will also be used to review many of the grammatical points covered in the textbook and class work, to improve analytical thinking and literary criticism skills, as well as to verbally express opinions about the situations presented in the novel. The goals of this course are to provide you with the opportunity to improve your oral and written communication skills in the language, by applying all the grammar rules you have learned and will be reviewing. You will be expected to substantially increase your working vocabulary and make solid progress in reading and writing skills.
This course provides an introduction to the making of modern Latin America through the study of key cultural practices in literature, visual art, film, and performance from the 19th century to the present. The course is organized around key concepts, which may vary by semester and by instructor
Readings and discussions of contemporary Hispanic texts and review of the main grammatical concepts of Spanish. Completion of this course fulfills the MAP foreign language requirement.
Open to students with some previous training in Spanish or another Romance language (one year of high school Spanish or the equivalent, or two years of high school French, Italian, or Latin) and to others on assignment by placement exam or in consultation with the director of the Spanish language program. This is a one-semester intensive course that covers the equivalent of one year of elementary Spanish (SPAN-UA 1 and SPAN-UA 2). 6 points. After completing this course, students may go into SPAN-UA 3, which is preparation for SPAN-UA 4. Students with high scores in the semester (B and up) or with permission from the Director of the Language Program may enroll in SPAN-UA 20. Completion of either SPAN-UA 20 or SPAN-UA 4 fulfills the Core requirement.
After completing SPAN-UA 2 or SPAN-UA 10 (see below), students who wish to continue studying Spanish at an intermediate level must take a qualifying exam. Students who pass the exam may enroll in SPAN-UA 3, which is preparation for SPAN-UA 4. Students who complete SPAN-UA 2 or SPAN-UA 10 and pass the qualifying exam with high scores may enroll in SPAN-UA 20, a 6-credit intensive intermediate course that is the equivalent of Intermediate Spanish I and II. Completion of either SPAN-UA 20 or SPAN-UA 4 satisfies the MAP foreign language requirement.
Review of grammar, language structure, and culture, concentrating on fluency and accuracy through listening, speaking, reading, and writing activities. After completion of this course, students take SPAN-UA 4 in fulfillment of the MAP foreign language requirement.
Following the 9/11 attacks, there has been much discussion of “terrorism” and political violence more generally by politicians, journalists, and scholars. But what exactly is “terrorism,” and how does it differ from other types of violence? This course addresses the following questions: How and for what purposes has the idea of “terrorism” been conceptualized and used by politicians, journalists, and scholars? How have scholars attempted to explain terrorism and political violence? Why and under what conditions does collective violence and terrorism in particular seem to arise? Are terrorism or other forms of political violence ever justified? And does terrorism or violence actually work? If so, how and under what circumstances? To answer these questions, we will examine a wide range of historical cases of terrorism and political violence in the modern world.
How statuses and behaviors come to be considered deviant or normal; theories of causation, deviant cultures, communities, and careers. Functioning of social control agencies. The politics of deviance. Consideration of policy implications.
The nature and dimensions of power in society. Theoretical and empirical material dealing with national power structures of the contemporary United States and with power in local communities. Topics: the iron law of oligarchy, theoretical and empirical considerations of democracy, totalitarianism, mass society theories, voting and political participation, the political and social dynamics of advanced and developing societies, and the political role of intellectuals. Considers selected models for political analysis.
Introduction to the sociology of family life. Addresses a range of questions: What is the relationship between family life and social arrangements outside the family (e.g., in the workplace, the economy, the government)? How is the division of labor in the family related to gender, age, class, and ethnic inequality? Why and how have families changed historically? What are the contours of contemporary American families, and why are they changing?
What forms does gender inequality take, and how can it best be explained? How and why are the relations between women and men changing? What are the most important social, political, and economic consequences of this ?gender revolution?? The course provides answers to these questions by examining a range of theories about gender in light of empirical findings about women?s and men?s behavior.
Social life in its different forms, from the delicate equilibrium of a triadic relation to the chaotic dynamic of a crowd, emerges from the interdependent behavior of multiple actors. By studying social networks – i.e., the web of relationships in which individuals and groups are embedded –, we will understand important collective dynamics, such as interpersonal influence, social diffusion, the origin of social norms, group cohesion and intergroup conflict, political participation, and market exchange. This course will offer an overview of basic social networks concepts, combining the theoretical tradition of structural and relational sociology with the analytical tools of graph theory.
To provide an understanding of the main immigration trends in Britain, France and Germany since 1850 To provide an understanding of the problems attending the social and political integration of immigrants in contemporary Western Europe To compare the experience and understanding of immigration in Europe with the experience and understanding of immigration in the United States To examine the ways in which the memory of immigration is represented in literature and contemporary culture.
This course provides an introduction to contemporary immigration to the United States, against the backdrop of immigration since the start of the Republic and rooted in socio-behavioral science. The first half of the course is devoted to understanding U.S. law and policy governing immigration, and the second to understanding the characteristics and behavior of foreign-born – especially immigrants – in the United States.
Examines the making of criminal laws and their enforcement by police, courts, prisons, probation and parole, and other agencies. Criminal behavior systems, theories of crime and delinquency causation, victimization, corporate and governmental crime, and crime in the mass media. Policy questions.
What is ’race’ exactly? Defining the concept presents a real challenge. This class explores what race and ethnicity mean, beginning with historical ideas about human difference. Comparing American beliefs and practices to those found in other societies, we will pay special attention to the particular notions and hierarchies of race that emerge in different times and places. The course also investigates the roles that institutions like the media, the arts, the state, and the sciences play in shaping our understandings of race and ethnicity. We will conclude by considering the predictions that scholars have made about the future of racial stratification in the United States.
Gives students in the social sciences (sociology, anthropology, political science, and metropolitan studies) an introduction to the logic and methods of descriptive and inferential statistics with social science applications. Deals with univariate and bivariate statistics and introduces multivariate methods. Problems of causal inference. Computer computation.
Prerequisite: one previous course in sociology, junior standing, or permission of the instructor. Brenner, Corradi, Ertman, Goodwin, Lukes. Offered every semester. 4 points. Examines the nature of sociological theory and the value of and problems in theorizing. Provides a detailed analysis of the writings of major social theorists since the 19th century in both Europe and America: Tocqueville, Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Simmel, Freud, Mead, Parsons, Merton, Goffman, Habermas, Giddens, Alexander, and Bourdieu.
The study of the intersection of key philosophical and ethical systems with the analysis of performing art works and the music industry. Students learn an “Eclectic Method” of analysis to holistically explore and study works of art from cultures from around the world while studying ethical complexities and analytical systems in relation to the performing arts industries.
One of the biggest challenges in medicine is to prevent disease and ensure personalized treatment. This is now becoming possible thanks to high-resolution DNA sequencing technology that can decipher our individual information. These developments are already impacting global health, but they raise global challenges such as equality. How will these new technologies blend into healthcare systems? What regulations are needed to ensure that personalized medicine reaches all layers of society? How do we prevent discrimination based on our genes? Through an inquiry-based approach we will examine the science, economics, and politics behind medicine and evaluate the ethical issues that arise in this fast-developing field.
City, territory and architecture have been, from the beginning of photography, privileged objects for its practice. Photography has become a tool to strengthen the understanding of architecture, to highlight aesthetic and design ideas and to critically interpret the space. This class focuses on architectural photography and the photography of urban space, both in relation to their historical roots and contemporary practice. Florence offers a perfect environment to develop one’s artistic talent while learning the art of photography and discovering the secrets of one of the most fascinating cities in the world. Assignments are designed to help explore options for technical control as well as visual experimentation and individual style. Keeping in mind the inseparability of photographic technique and expression, students are expected to articulate their particular choices in relation to the overall conceptual approach of the projects. Critiques of assignments are important to the progress of each individual in the class, to help verbalize visual concepts, and to learn to see actively. The final exam consists of the presentation of a portfolio of photographs and an artist’s statement. Students are expected to work on their projects to develop an aesthetic and coherent photographic language and a personal approach to the photographic medium in a different environment. An emphasis is also placed on refining craft in relation to ideas, and to research on an individual basis, since it is crucial in developing an artistic practice. The course includes lectures, shooting sessions and field trips, discussions and critiques of the photographs. Each student must have a camera with manually adjustable aperture and shutter speed.
Music is universal to all human cultures. This course will explore fundamental concepts of the psychological, emotional, and cognitive effects of music and what factors in the human body and brain are involved in producing them, with particular emphasis on cross-cultural study. Students will learn beginning methods of computational feature extraction and machine learning to explore simple artificial intelligence models that build on and articulate the conceptual frameworks of music and cognition introduced in the initial phase of the class.
This is a specialty marketing course designed to provide students with a framework for understanding the dynamics of Broadway and live theater, as an important business enterprise within the entertainment industry. The focus is on understanding the development and application of the economics, finance, structure, implementation and staging of performances, as well as the marketing strategies and tactics for gaining audience awareness and decision to purchase. The course will examine funding, marketing, branding, product positioning and the global distribution of live theatrical entertainment. The course will cover the history, venues, vocabulary, players, business and creative structures, budget development, supplementary revenue streams, successes and failures, relationship with the movie and music industries, the important figures and support systems that make the system work, global reach, and other topics. Lecture, discussions, site visits, and project work will be included.
Provides a framework for understanding the global expansion of media and entertainment companies. Examines the impact that the significant export growth of American leisure products and services has on the U.S economy. Analyzes the strategies of several leading entertainment and media multinational companies and the development of their entertainment businesses within the major world economic zones. International speakers, cases and readings are used in this course.
This course evaluates marketing as a system for the satisfaction of human wants and a catalyst of business activity. It presents a comprehensive framework that includes (1) researching and analyzing customers, company, competition, and the marketing environment; (2) identifying and targeting attractive segments with a strategic positioning; and (3) making product, pricing, communication, and distribution decisions. Cases and examples are utilized to develop problem-solving abilities.
This course applies microeconomic theory and econometric analysis to sports and explores some public policy issues that have arisen in the design of sports competitions. The course is divided into four main parts: the structure of sports leagues, labor market issues, college sports, and the market for sports betting.
Offered in the fall semester only. A chronological survey of the art and commerce of the animated film internationally over the last 100 years. Designed to expand students’ awareness of the origins of a significant 20th-century art form and to acquaint them with a wide variety of practical techniques and styles, from pre-film influences to computer-generated images; from “Golden Age” studio cartoon factories to today’s independent avant-garde animator-filmmakers. Designed to expand student aesthetic sensibilities and sharpen critical perceptions about this unique genre. This course allocates as History & Criticism for Film & TV majors. COURSE SUBJECT TO DEPARTMENTAL FEES. Non-majors must process a “Permission Notice for Non-Majors” form to register for the course (subject to availability).
This course explores image making, writing and their juxtaposition, as a method of thinking through and evoking ideas. At times, images lead, and text follows, providing descriptions of images, and at other times, text leads and images illustrate that text. In the realm of the contemporary American meme, just about every time images and words are present they have an effect upon each other in the mind of the viewer, which changes the meaning of both, producing something which is more than what is present in both image and text. That third and phantasmic image exists in the mind. The examples of Chinese Literati painting, and Surrealism will provide a historical point of departure, from which we to engage 21st century examples of image and word juxtapositions that create new ideas. This course will provide students with a general history of the relationship between the image and word, and a critical understanding of the composition and decomposition of image-word printed and digital matter. Along with skills in Lino-cut printmaking, Risograph printmaking, and publication design, students will also write poetry, short essays, and art criticism. Students will participate in the content production, design, and publishing of a book and magazine, zine and poster.
Giorgio Vasari defined Mannerism in terms still used today in Art History: in the wake of the Renaissance masters, copying became the standard way to learn. But what do we really learn by copying? Would a contemporary mannerism fit in today’s world, dominated by visual information? How then does creativity work? How does change happen? Why did we wait half a century before having personal computers in colors other than beige? Why do we seem oblivious to the manufactured filters mediating our observation of nature itself? What are the trade-offs when we delegate creative choices to Google’s algorithms? What separates the artists of the past and the brand consultants of today? This course addresses the role and limits of copying as students explore many facets of graphic design, visual communication, and artistic value. The vibrant visual culture-in-the-making of Abu Dhabi and the UAE provide an ideal background for such explorations. Students will elaborate on the tension (real or perceived) among today’s artists, designers, and scientists, while discussing why a multidisciplinary mind is fundamental for contemporary attempts to re-design the world around us.
An introduction to the fundamentals of computer programming. Students design, write, and debug computer programs. No prior knowledge of programming is assumed. Students will learn programming using Python, a general purpose, cross-platform programming language with a clear, readable syntax. Most class periods will be part lecture, part lab as you explore ideas and put them into practice. This course is suitable for students not intending in majoring in computer science as well as for students intending to major in computer science but having no programming experience. Students with previous programming experience should instead take Introduction to Computer Science. Prerequisite: Either placed into Calculus or at least a C in Pre-Calculus Fulfillment: Core Curriculum Requirement Algorithmic Thinking; EE Required Major Courses. Note: Students who have taken ICS in NY, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai cannot take ICP.
This course introduces students to various techniques and concepts that are essential for data scientists. It also provides an in-depth survey of the latest research methodology and topics that prepare the students to produce high quality research in Data Science. This seminar-based course will cover applications from different fields, such as sociology, psychology, network analysis, and artificial intelligence. In this context, the course will cover the use of computational techniques to model and predict various phenomena using real data. Students will be required to complete a course project, and to write up the results in a short article.
The course focuses on understanding lower-level issues in computer design and programming. The course starts with the C programming language, moves down to assembly and machine-level code, and concludes with basic operating systems and architectural concepts. Students learn to read assembly code and reverse-engineer programs in binary. Topics in this course include the C programming language, data representation, machine-level code, memory organization and management, performance evaluation and optimization, and concurrency.
Discrete mathematics concerns the study of mathematical structures that are discrete rather than continuous, and provides a powerful language for investigating many areas of computer science. Discrete structures are characterized by distinct elements, which are often represented by integers. Continuous mathematics on the other hand deals with real numbers. Topics in this course include: sets, counting techniques, logic, proof techniques, solving recurrence relations, number theory, probability, statistics, graph theory, and discrete geometry. These mathematical tools are illustrated with applications in computer science.
There are many cognitive tasks that people can do easily and almost unconsciously but that have proven extremely difficult to program on a computer. Artificial intelligence is the problem of developing computer systems that can carry out these tasks. We will focus on three central areas in AI: representation and reasoning, machine learning, and natural language processing.
This interdisciplinary course explores the evolution of American football into a mirror of black life and politics and a reflection of race relations in American culture. Students will examine the growth of black players since the NFL was integrated in the late Sixties. Student writing and research will explore the growth of football as a vehicle and model for black protest and support for movements such as Black Lives Matter. Students will go to two football games this semester. The focus will also include a study of the segregated American Football League and its integration of the NFL.
How queer is New York City? How do queerness and the city shape each other? This course crosses time and space, examining the history, politics and culture of the Big Apple. Ranging from Harlem to Times Square to Greenwich Village to Park Avenue, and beyond Manhattan to Queens, Brooklyn and Fire Island outposts, we follow people and money, high and underground culture, protests and politics. Materials include fiction and poetry, music, theater and performance, photography and film, and works of urban studies, history and ethnography. Assignments may include archival research and digital cartographic work.
Explores a set of principles that have guided Latino/a presence in the United States. These principles can be found in many but not necessarily all of the readings. They include urban/rural life, freedom/ confinement, memoir as source of voice/other sources of voice, generational separation and identity, and loss and healing. The course traces a movement through time from masculinist nationalism to the recognition of variations in gender, sexuality, race, class, region, and national origin. Other principles may be added to this list as the course proceeds.
A broad and interdisciplinary introduction to the field of urban studies, surveying the major approaches deployed to investigate the urban experience in the social space of the modern city. Explores the historical geography of capitalist urbanization with attention to North American and European cities, to colonial and postcolonial cities, and to the global contexts of urban development. Major topics include urban politics and governance; suburban and regional development; urban social movements; urban planning; the gendering of urban space and racial segregation in urban space.
Focuses specifically on the Asian American communities of New York and their histories. Presents filmmaking as a mode of community documentation and filmmakers as historians. Students meet as theorists and field researchers. The first phase is largely historical and theoretical, while the latter mainly deals with hands-on filmmaking. Students document various aspects of Asian/Pacific American communities in New York?sociocultural and political issues surrounding them, histories, personal stories, geodynamics of ethnic localities, domestic lives, professions, ethnic festivals and performances, etc. At the end of the course, students have made at least two collective documentaries (10 to 12 minutes each), which may be interrelated or on entirely different subjects.
Examines the connections between gender, racial ideology and history of medicine to consider the range of ways that reproduction—medically, culturally, and experientially—produces and troubles racial ideology. In this course we will explore issues in the history of race and reproduction, focusing primarily (though not exclusively) on North American contexts. Cross-cultural breadth will help us to consider the relationship between biological experiences (which are often portrayed as universal) and socio-cultural context. While questions about biology will be central to this history, we will also locate biology within a wider set of issues around social reproduction and the practices of motherhood. Through our readings we will consider how different disciplinary orientations (social history, medical anthropology, feminist theory, art history, etc.) help us to illuminate and problematize the connections between technologies and politics of biology and difference.
Yoruba is a language spoken in West Africa by approximately 20 million people. This course is an introduction to Yoruba language, people and culture and is designed for students without prior knowledge. The main goal is to develop elementary communicative competence in the language. It is designed to enable students read, write, listen to and talk about simple concepts, ensuring that they can minimally understand and be understood in the language, while developing a fundamental knowledge of the Yoruba culture. Emphases are on Yoruba as used by contemporary native speakers in the present day West Africa. Skills are developed through intensive interactive conversations, grammar exercises, and classroom activities designed for a learner to use the language in various daily activities.
Consumption of objects, images, and places is central to the culture and economy of metropolitan life. The class will explore how the relationship between consumption and cities has developed by examining three key moments—the late nineteenth century and the invention of urban commodity spectacles, post-war America and the rise of suburban consumer spaces, and contemporary America and the selling of the commodity city. The class addresses three questions: Why do we want things? How does landscape organize our consumer desires? How does place become an object of consumption? We will begin with an examination of classic theoretical works that probe the relationships between people, things, and cities. We will then embed these in discussions of changing forms and practices of consumption and urbanism. The empirical cases we will examine range from the development of the department store, to the fashioning of commodity home, to the work of shopping, and to the emergence of a thriving urban debt industry.
This course is a general introduction to the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS). The course will introduce students to the central questions and debates of NAIS, including but not limited to: Native American hidden histories and oral histories; comparative indigeneities; questions of “discovery” and colonialism; the politics and representations of lands, massacres, and museums; and questions of law, gender and sexuality. It begins by asking students to consider the history of the field and weaves throughout questions about the complicated and contested terrain of the term Indigeneity. It ends with discussions about decolonizing research and indigenous futures, thus preparing students to consider theories and methodologies they will encounter in more advanced courses for the NAIS minor. By the end of the semester, students will have gained both historical and ethnographic perspectives on how museums and other forms of representation help us to know and reproduce ourselves and “others,” and how institutions craft, control, and circulate cultural heritage in various social lives.
A historical and political inquiry into the French system of relations with Francophone Africa from the ‘race to Empire’ in the 19th century to the current day. The main goals of the course are: to describe the historical development of French-African relations from the colonial to the post-independence era; to investigate the political, economic and cultural mechanisms of French influence in contemporary Francophone Africa; to understand the consequences for France of complex developments subsequent to colonialism, such as African immigration in France. Conducted in French.
Empowerment is defined as those processes, mechanisms, strategies, and tactics through which people, as well as organizations and communities, gain mastery over their lives. It is personal as well as institutional and organizational. Addresses these issues in a wide variety of community settings. Designed to be challenging and rewarding to those students interested in helping people work together to improve their lives.
An advanced-level language and culture course following Elementary Cantonese. At this level, when the basic skills and working vocabulary have been mastered, emphasis is placed on the linguistic rules to enable students to communicate with more competence. The lessons focus not only on language, but also use a holistic approach and incorporate discussions on history, current events, literature, pop culture, and native values. Because language is key to connecting with community concerns, the course also includes field trips to Chinatown and to other Cantonese-speaking neighborhoods.
Examines how the American legal system decided constitutional challenges affecting the empowerment of African, Latino, and Asian American communities from the 19th century to the present. Topics include the denial of citizenship and naturalization to slaves and immigrants, government-sanctioned segregation, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the prison industry, police brutality, post-9/11 detention issues, and voting rights. Course requirements include attendance at a community function involving constitutional issues, a midterm, and an interactive oral and written final project comparing a present-day issue affecting racial minorities in New York City and proposing measures to collectively address the issue.
At this level, when the basic skills and working vocabulary have been mastered, emphasis can be placed on the linguistic rules to enable the student to communicate with more competence. There is also a focus on translation. Lessons use a holistic approach and incorporate discussions on history, current events, literature, pop culture, and native values. To observe and experience the language at work, the course includes field trips to Filipino centers in the New York/ New Jersey area, as well as invited guests who converse with students in Filipino about their life and work.
America is not always the answer. This class offers an introduction to the many and varied fictions that have been produced by diasporic South Asians across the globe over the last 150 years: in Australia, Africa, Europe, Caribbean. Our exploration of the poetics and politics of immigration will attend to different types of traveller (inc. soldiers, students, athletes, medics, cosmonauts) and draw on a wide range of media (inc. literature, cinema and music). Particular attention will be paid to the diverse geographies of Asian migration – be they plantations, dance Floors, restaurants, call centres. Themes to be addressed include coolietude, globalization, the impact of 9/11 and techno-servitude.
Provides students with an elementary understanding of Swahili, a Bantu language with a rich oral and written tradition that is spoken by about 100 million people from Somalia to Mozambique and Zanzibar. After a short presentation of Swahili?s history, codification, and relation to other languages, students are drilled in phonetics and grammar. They are also introduced to poems, songs, and oral narratives.
Few cities boast as rich a cultural life as New York City, with its plethora of neighborhoods, museums, galleries, theatres, concert halls, and alternative spaces. Through walking tours, attendance at cultural events, and visits to local cultural institutions, students explore the definition of urban culture. Sites include the familiar and the unfamiliar, the Village and the outer boroughs. Students examine the attributes that constitute culture and community from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Designed to interest and challenge both the student new to the study of gender and sexuality and the student who has taken departmental courses focusing on women, gender, and/or sexuality. Through a focus on particular issues and topics, explores the construction of sex, gender, and sexuality; gender asymmetry in society; sexual normativity and violations of norms; and the interactions of sex, gender, sexuality, race, class, and nation. This interdisciplinary course engages materials and methodologies from a range of media and disciplines, such as literature, the visual arts, history, sociology, psychology, and anthropology. Examines both feminist and nonfeminist arguments from a variety of critical perspectives.
This course examines fashion as both a product and expression of globalization. It explores fashion’s contested histories; its modes of production, consumption, and address; its relationship to colonial enterprises; its system of meaning-making. In this course, we will tackle such issues as the social uses of fashion; the fashion cycle (use, reuse, discard); the relationship between dress and the body; feminist critiques of fashion; the politicization of clothing (from ethnic dressing to green clothing); and the links between style consumption and garment production–and the relationship of all of these to the processes of globalization.
This course examines the history of Latinx contributions to the artistic vitality of the United States and will introduce students to some of the contemporary artists, debates and institutions that support Latinx art in NYC and beyond. We will pay especial attention to the relationship between Latinx and Latin American art and consider linkages between museums, private and governmental art stakeholders and communities. We will visit studios, speak to artists and also learn about the role of contemporary art markets in shaping Latinx art worlds.
Explores environmental issues in urban centers, their causes and impacts, and the rise of a movement that considers the “environment” not just as the term we use to describe the natural world from which most urban residents feel dissociated, but rather as the array of places where we live, work and play. Considers the relationship between society and public policy in the context of environmentalism. Introduces students to public policy analysis, with a focus on policy implementation and decision-making in New York City. Examines the powers of the NYC Council and explains the role of agencies, the private sector, and interest groups as critical parts of a bureaucracy through which environmental issues are shaped, managed and negotiated. Through a variety of case studies, increases students’ understanding of the political, legal, economic and technical and scientific constraints of the policy decision-making process and explores the path towards managing, using and protecting environmental resources in urban centers.
Historically, education has been the most accessible and effective means for groups to achieve social mobility in American society. However, access to public education has never been equal for all segments of society, and there continues to be considerable variability in the quality of education provided to students. As a result of both explicit and subtle discrimination, racialized minority groups have at various times been denied access to education or been relegated to inferior schools or classrooms. Yet education has also been the arena where the greatest advances in social justice and racial equality have been achieved. Understanding the contradictions created by the hope and unfulfilled promise of American education is a central theme of this course.
Introduces theories, methods, and political trajectories central to the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis (SCA). SCA 101 addresses how individuals and populations structure their worlds and navigate the resulting social, cultural, and political terrain. It privileges scholarly work with an intersectional approach, drawing on theoretical insights from such fields as social geography, feminism and queer studies, ethnic studies, urban and metropolitan studies, critical race theory, labor studies, and cultural studies.
What are the diverse ways in which New York City has been imagined on the silver screen? How does a cinematic perspective shape our understanding of urban spaces? This course analyzes films that portray New York as a site of local encounter and global exchange in both commercial and documentary films since the 1960s. We will investigate the dramatic mapping and remapping of urban space through works that articulate questions of gentrification, immigrant labor, organized crime, and sexual subcultures. In turn, we will examine how these stories have helped shape and contest the city’s image of itself–as a space of struggle, belonging, illegality, emancipation, and transformation. The goal is to see how each particular film captures a distinct moment both in the city’s history over the past fifty years as well as in the history of filmmaking. In so doing, we will blend the perspectives of urban studies, ethnic studies, and visual culture, placing films within their aesthetic, political, and historical context.
Marcel Mauss developed a concept of an alternative, non-market type of economy, based on a nonmonetary exchange of such symbolic values as social recognition, sovereignty, and political participation. Today, this concept has acquired a new relevance in relation to the economy of the Internet. Examines various theories of the symbolic that expand the original Maussian model and encompass multiple aspects of culture.
Iampolski. Offered every year. 4 points. An examination of the history of Russian cinema from its beginnings. The main focus is on landmarks of cinematic art and on the cultural specificity of Russian cinema. The survey also includes questions of cinema and politics (cinema as a propaganda tool), and cinema and the market. Artists discussed include Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, Kuleshov, Barnet, Shub, Kozintsev, Trauberg, and Tarkovsky. Topics include cinema and revolution, the cinema of the Russian avant-garde and constructivism, cinema and totalitarianism, and socialist realism in film.
Designed for students who speak some Russian at home but have virtually no reading and writing skills. Does not satisfy the College Core Curriculum language requirement.
Students work on pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary enrichment. Emphasis is placed on developing and enhancing listening, comprehension and oral skills. Additional hours are offered to improve pronunciation. Written and oral examinations required.
The course combines the traditional grammatical approach with a communicational, interactive method. Since the size of the classes is usually small we can put a great emphasis on oral drills and improving speaking in Russian on various subjects. Students will be given short topics to talk about at the beginning of every lesson and most written essays will have to be presented orally in class. The class also focuses on improving your writing skills and broadening your vocabulary. That is why the students are expected to keep a diary in Russian and write several compositions during the course. The students will also read several Russian short stories which will be discussed in class. We will review familiar grammar and study some advanced grammatical structures. The students will do considerable amount of grammar and vocabulary exercises in the Workbook as part of the home assignments. Several short lectures on various aspects of Russian culture and history will be given during the course and we will watch two Russian films that would be followed by the discussions.
The course combines the traditional grammatical approach with a communicational, interactive method. Since the size of the classes is usually small we can put a great emphasis on improving speaking in Russian on various subjects. Students will be given short topics to talk about at the beginning of every lesson and most written essays will have to be presented orally in class. The class also focuses on improving your writing skills. That is why the students are expected to keep a diary in Russian and write several compositions during the course. The students will also read several Russian short stories in original which will be discussed in class. We will review familiar grammar and study some advanced grammatical structures. The greater emphasis is also put on and broadening your vocabulary and the students will do considerable amount of vocabulary exercises as part of the home assignments. Several short lectures on various aspects of Russian culture and history will be given during the course and we will watch two Russian films that would be followed by the discussions.
Explores the relationship between religion and American identity. We will analyze the role of religion in American culture, politics, and law and question if the United States has a secular government, what the separation of church and state means, and if religious freedom exists for everyone. Considers the role of religion in slavery, settler colonialism, Native American and immigrant assimilation, and also how religion has influenced the U.S. political system. Examines the role of religion within movements for racial justice, reproductive choice, and LGBTQ equality.
Offered in the fall. 4 points. Focuses on fundamental theoretical and methodological issues pertaining to the academic study of religion. Exposes students to, and familiarizes them with, some of the more important theories of the origin, character, and function of religion as a human phenomenon. Students are given an opportunity to encounter and test an assortment of the main scholarly approaches to understanding and interpreting religious phenomena, including psychological, sociological, anthropological, and hermeneutical perspectives.
Students experience current thinking in hypothesis formulation, experimental design, data analysis and research communication. Experiments are performed in the fields of Cognition and Perception and can include visual processing, auditory processing, learning, memory, and decision making. Students complete research projects and gain experience in writing research reports that conform to APA guidelines.
The course provides instruction in methods and concepts employed in research in the area of clinical psychology. Students learn about these methods and concepts in a hands-on manner by completing a set of research exercises. Methods covered include correlational and experimental designs and observational procedures. Topics include psychotherapy process research, case formulation approaches to psychopathology and therapy, and several theoretical perspectives that are employed in both research and clinical practice. Prerequisites: PSYCH-UA 1 AND PSYCH-UA 10 AND (PSYCH-UA 30 OR PSYCH-UA 51 OR PSYCH-UA 81)
Personal, social, and environmental factors related to people?s attitudes and performance in industry and other organizations. Topics include personnel selection and evaluation, training and development, attitudes and motivation, leadership, group dynamics, organizational structure and climate, and job design and working conditions.
Students are acquainted with research methodology in organizational psychology. They then perform an original study, such as a laboratory experiment or research survey, in one of these areas.
The course provides an overview of the major theories and findings in research on motivation and volition. More specifically, we will address the history of research on motivation and volition, classic phenomena of being motivated versus lacking motivation and willpower, the psychology of goals (goal setting, goal implementation, effortful goal pursuits, disengagement, content and structure of goals, the mental representation of goals), disorders of self-regulation, and cognitive-neuropsychological research as well as the perspective of economics on motivation and volition. We will focus on understanding the interrelations and contradictions between the different approaches, and on designing research that promotes these different lines of thinking.
Methodology and procedures of personality and social psychological research and exercises in data analysis and research design. Statistical concepts such as reliability and validity, methods of constructing personality measures, merits and limitations of correlational and experimental research designs, and empirical evaluation of theories. Student teams conduct research projects.
The kinds, dynamics, causes, and treatment of psychopathology. Topics include early concepts of abnormal behavior; affective disorders, anxiety disorders, psychosis, and personality disorders; the nature and effectiveness of traditional and modern methods of psychotherapy; and viewpoints of major psychologists past and present.
In depth investigation of the methodological foundations of developmental psychology, in particular, behavioral methods with infants and children. Students will learn how to design experiments, create experimental stimuli, collect quantifiable measures from infant and child behavior, and analyze developmental data. Each week students will read ~3 primary research articles from a variety of domains in developmental psychology, but all focused on one methodological theme. Students will produce a thoroughly researched and creative proposed experiment and analysis plan for the course’s final project.
Part of a yearlong research training program. Students learn general methods for studying infant development and specific methods for examining infants’ perceptual-motor development. Students design and conduct laboratory research projects, code and analyze data, and prepare results for presentation and publication (grant proposals, conference submissions, and journal submissions).
Gollwitzer, Trope, Uleman. Offered every semester. 4 points. Introduction to theories and research about the social behavior of individuals, such as perception of others and the self, attraction, affiliation, altruism and helping, aggression, moral thought and action, attitudes, influence, conformity, social exchange and bargaining, group decision making, leadership and power, and environmental psychology.
Adolph, Johnson, Voloumanos. Offered every semester. 4 points. Introduction and overview of theoretical issues and selected research in developmental psychology. Focuses on infancy through adolescence. Lectures interweave theory, methods, and findings about how we develop as perceiving, thinking, and feeling beings.
AndersenAndersen. Offered every semester. 4 points. Introduction to research in personality, including such topics as the self-concept; unconscious processes; how we relate to others; and stress, anxiety, and depression.
Curtis, Davachi. Offered every semester. 4 points. Provides students with a broad understanding of the foundations of cognitive neuroscience, including dominant theories of the neural underpinnings of a variety of cognitive processes and the research that has led to those theories. In doing so, students also learn about the goals of cognitive neuroscience research and the methods that are being employed to reach these goals.
McElree, Murphy, Rehder. Offered every semester. 4 points. Introduction to theories and research in some major areas of cognitive psychology, including human memory, attention, language production and comprehension, thinking, and reasoning.
The notion of cannibalism is a recurring concern in the history of ideas regarding the primitive, the animalistic, the monstrous, or any of the other classifications frequently invoked to mark others, regardless of their actual culinary preferences. Reflection upon cannibalism as an intellectual phenomenon suggests how people eating people, or at least the possibility of it, says a great deal about those that do not. In some regions of the Caribbean and Brazil, ideas regarding cannibalism have made an important turn, such that the cannibal has become a provocative affirmation of self. The aim of this course is to think about cannibalism, not, as it often is, as a theme for anthropologists and ethnographers, but rather as an intellectual problem that has enjoyed a very long life in the history of ideas about self. In this course, we shall revisit a selection of texts regarding cannibalism from Columbus’ diaries to the present, and including works by, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Oswald de Andrade, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, and Suely Rolnik, in the company of some key notions involving postcolonial theory. Readings will be made available in Portuguese, Spanish, and English, and course papers may be carried out in any of the three languages according to student interest and ability.
Portuguese language courses PORT-UA 10, PORT-UA 3, and PORT-UA 4 are oriented toward achieving oral proficiency and are taught in the native language. The elementary-level course stresses the structures and patterns that permit meaningful communication and encourages spontaneous and practical proficiency outside the classroom. The intermediate-level courses aim to promote fluency in speaking, as well as proficiency in reading and writing. They include readings and discussions on contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian texts.
Concentrates on those socialist schools?Christian socialism, utopian socialism, Marxism, Fabianism, and anarchism?that have proved to be the most successful. Presents their major theories and examines the usefulness of such theories in helping us to understand and, in some cases, alter the world in which we live.
This course offers an introduction to contemporary African politics. Our goal is to introduce students to the most pressing problems African countries have faced since independence. Questions motivating the course include: (1) Why state institutions weaker in African than in other developing regions? (2) What explains Africa’s slow economic growth? (3) What can be done to improve political accountability on the continent? (4) Why have some African countries been plagued by high levels of political violence while others have not? (5) Can or should the West attempt to “save” Africa?
Offered every other year. 4 points. Examines legal, political, and economic issues in government regulation. Covers such classic debates and issues as the historical origins of regulation, the legal philosophy of administrative regulation, the relationship between courts and agencies, the political and social conflicts surrounding regulatory politics, and the role of law in state formation.
Provides an understanding of election processes in the United States through different theoretical approaches to the study of campaigns and elections and the testing of empirical hypotheses. Analyzes campaign strategies of political candidates, the use of polls and media in campaigns, and the effects of issues and personalities on election outcomes. Evaluates the role of presidential primaries and elections in the functioning of a democracy.
Offered every semester. 4 points. Interpretation of the Bill of Rights, the Civil War amendments, and other rights in the U.S. Constitution through the reading of Supreme Court opinions. Topics include freedom of speech and press; free exercise of religion and separation of church and state; the right of privacy; rights of the criminally accused; equal protection of the law against race, gender, and other discrimination; and the rights of franchise and citizenship. Cases are read and discussed closely for their legal and philosophical content.
This course is about using logic to think about issues of public policy and evidence to do the same thing. One way to think about this course is it is sabermetrics (logic and evidence applied to baseball, and in Moneyball) applied to vastly more important topics than baseball: making schools better, designing health policy and dealing with climate change (with tons of other policy applications possible, but we will focus on these three).
Why do we participate in politics? Who tends to participate? When are we most likely to participate? Political scientists have traditionally focused on factors such as demography, socioeconomic status, mobilization, electoral institutions, and social norms to answer these questions. However, scholars have recently begun to explore the possibility that genetic differences may, at least in part, help to explain individual differences in political participation.
Offered every year. 4 points. Theories of political strategy with emphasis on the theory of games. Uses of strategy in defense and deterrence policies of nations, guerrilla warfare of revolutionaries and terrorists, bargaining and negotiation processes, coalitions and the enforcement of collective action, and voting in committees and elections. Secrecy and deception as political strategies and uses of power, with some applications outside political science.
Detailed study of the nature, historical development, and basic principles of international organization. Emphasizes the structure and actual operation of the United Nations.
Comparative study of terrorism as a domestic political phenomenon. Examines foundational issues, economic, psychological, strategic, and social theories of terrorism as well as theories of the cessation of terrorist violence, government negotiation with terrorists, the relationship between terrorists and nonviolent political actors, and the internal political economy of terrorist organizations. Considers terror in the Middle East (especially emphasizing Hamas), nationalist terror (ETA and the IRA), and Maoist revolutionary terror (with emphasis on the Shining Path).
Prerequisite: V53.0300. Offered in the spring. 4 points. Poverty and welfare problems in the United States and the controversies aroused by them. Concentrates on the causes of poverty and dependency among the controversial working-age poor, the history of programs and policies meant to help them, and the enormous impact these issues have had on national politics.
Introduces the comparative politics of South Asia. Analyzes the politics of South Asian countries, including India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Nepal, individually and in a comparative framework. Readings are chosen from across disciplines, including political science, anthropology, economics, and history. The course also uses novels and films on South Asia to illustrate themes highlighted in the readings.
Origin, structure, functions, and dynamics of legislatures in the United States. Although some attention is given to state legislatures and municipal lawmaking bodies, the major emphasis is on the Congress. Readings include a textbook, official sources such as the Congressional Record and Congressional District Data Book, and the new behavioral studies and commentaries.
Examines the relationship between gender politics, legal theory, and social policy. Studies the role that the legal arena and certain historical conditions have played in creating, revising, and protecting particular gender identities and not others and examines the political effects of those legal constructions. Analyzes the major debates in feminist legal theory, including theories of equality, the problem of essentialism, and the relevance of standpoint epistomology. In addition to examining how the law understands sex discrimination in the workplace and the feminization of the legal profession, also addresses to what extent understandings of the gender affect how law regulates the physical body by looking at the regulation of reproduction and of consensual sexual activity. In light of all of the above, considers to what extent law is or is not an effective political resource in reforming notions of gender in law and society.
Study of American political ideas and debate from colonial times to the present. Topics include Puritanism, revolution and independence, the Constitution framing, Hamiltonian nationalism, Jeffersonian republicanism, Jacksonian democracy, pro- and antislavery thought, Civil War and Reconstruction, social Darwinism and laissez-faire, the reformist thought of populism, progressivism and socialism, legal realism, the New Deal and 20th-century liberalism, modern conservatism, civil rights, and war protest. Readings and discussion are based on original and interpretative sources.
Systematic study of the international politics of the Middle East, emphasizing the period since World War II. Emphasis on the relationship among patterns of inter-Arab, Arab-Israeli, and great-power politics, and on the relationship between domestic and external politics. Attempts to relate the Arab-Israeli conflict to interregional politics, the place and role of Turkey and Iran, and the problems in the Persian Gulf.
Study of the American presidency, its origins, and roles, including those of commander in chief; director of foreign policy; leader in legislation, administration, and party affairs; manager of the economy; and dispenser of social justice. The president is also viewed as a decision maker and compared with the heads of other governments. Readings include the works of presidents and their associates, analytical commentaries by observers of the presidency, and biographies.
Prerequisite: V53.0700. Offered every year. 4 points. Starting with the traditional arena of national security and U.S. military policy, students analyze how national security decisions are made in this country, as well as the past and current military strategies used to carry out those decisions. From there, students examine the particular national security concerns and policies of Russia, China, Germany, and Japan. This course also looks at new thinking on national security, asking to what extent international trade and competition, immigration, illegal drugs, and the environment should be considered national security issues.
Analyzes the theory and practice of diplomacy, with special emphasis on bargaining strategies that nations use to try to settle their differences and avoid wars, including the use of mediators, arbitrators, and institutions like the United Nations. Applies game theory to analyze the use of exaggeration, threats, and deception in bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. Supplements case studies of international negotiation, especially in crises, with studies of domestic bargaining used in the formulation of foreign policy.
Characteristics and conditions of war and peace and the transition from one to the other from the perspective of political and social science. Examines the role and use of coercion in global affairs, with emphasis on attempts to substitute negotiation, bargaining, market forces, politics, and law for the resort to massive violence in moderating disputes.
Democracy and dictatorships have traditionally been analyzed in terms of their apparently different institutional characteristics and legal foundations. Examines these traditional interpretations but leans heavily toward ideological and contextual factors. Challenges traditional distinctions between democracy and dictatorship.
Analysis of the sources of U.S. foreign policy and the major international problems facing the United States today. Considers the role of national interest, ideology, and institutions in the making and executing of U.S. foreign policy.
Provides students with the ability systematically to evaluate ethically controversial public policy issues using concepts from normative political theory. In the first half of the course, we consider the means by which policy is implemented: Under what conditions, if any, might we permit political actors to do bad in order to do good? In the second half, we consider the ends of public policy: What is it we want the state to accomplish, and at what cost? Substantive policy topics vary from semester to semester.
New research is the most exciting and important aspect of political science: we are able to pose novel questions, construct fresh theories, and provide new evidence about the way the world works. But before we start doing research, we have to learn how it is done. With this in mind, this class will introduce students to quantitative techniques used for research in the study of politics. Part of this task is conceptual: helping students to think sensibly and systematically about research design. To this end, students will learn how data and theory fit together, and how to measure the quantities we care about. But part of the task is practical too: students will learn a `toolbox’ of methods–including statistical software–that enable them to execute their plans.
Topics: analysis of mechanisms of influence (selection of sympathetic incumbents, the provision of incentives for public officials, and the provision of information); objects of influence (voter choices, legislative behavior, bureaucratic decisions); collective action; and organizational maintenance.
Study of the politics of Britain, Ireland, France, and Germany. Compares the historical origins of these systems and analyzes their institutions as manifestations of their social and political culture and traditions. Treats each country’s current politics and political trends. Attempts to introduce the basic concepts of comparative political analysis in developing cross-cultural theory.
The course description for this Topics in Politics course varies depending on the topic taught. Please view the course descriptions in the course notes section below.
Political economy is a field of inquiry that has made great strides in recent years in explaining political and economic behavior by characterizing the incentives of actors and the context in which these actors make decisions and influence outcomes. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to these theoretical approaches and show how they can be used to address contemporary policy questions.
Introduces students to social choice theory applied to political science. It focuses on (1) individual choice, (2) group choice, (3) collective action, and (4) institutions. It looks at models of individuals’ voting behavior, the incentive structures of interest groups, and the role of institutions. The emphasis is analytical, though students are not expected to have a background in formal mathematics.
Identical to V33.0770. Prerequisite: V53.0700. Offered every other year. 4 points. The relations of and between the principal Asian national actors (e.g., China, Japan, India) and the relationship of the Asian “subsystem” to the international system. Covers the traditional Asian concepts of transnational order, the impact of external interventions, the modern ideological conflict and technological revolution, the emergent multilateral balance beyond Vietnam, the changing patterns of relations in the Asian subsystem traced to the international evolution from bipolarity to multicentrism, and the U.S. role in Asia.
This course serves as an introduction to the workings of the contemporary international political-economic system and introduces students to some of the main analytical frameworks that political economists use to understand this system. Finally, the course familiarizes students with analytical tools that serve to gain a better understanding of the current problems and opportunities facing actors in today?s international political economy.
Offered every semester. 4 points. Analysis of state behavior and international political relations; how things happen in the international state system and why. Emphasizes the issue of war and how and in what circumstances states engage in violence. Topics include different historical and possible future systems of international relations, imperialism, the Cold War, game theory and deterrents, national interests, and world organization.
Offered every semester. 4 points. Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution through the reading of Supreme Court opinions. Distribution of constitutional power among Congress, the president, and the federal courts; between the national government and the states; and among the states. Constitutional law and American political and economic development. Cases are read and discussed closely for their legal and philosophical content.
This course will introduce you to the study of local and urban politics in the U.S. Municipal governments profoundly impact the day-to-day of citizens. Cities have substantial power over policy areas from education and public safety to transportation, and they also address basic needs: making sure the trash gets taken out, the water runs, and that people are safe from crime. And yet, cities are often quite constrained in their policy choices. For example, one of the central challenges facing municipal government is how to attract and maintain a middle class tax base while providing essential services for low-income residents. This course will explore patterns of city politics against the background of American social and cultural history, including the impulse toward reform and the effects of reform efforts on the distribution of power in the community. Additional topics will include issues related to voting, race and ethnicity, gentrification, and the relationship between cities and the federal government.
Offered every semester. 4 points. Major concepts, approaches, problems, and literature in the field of comparative politics. Methodology of comparative politics, the classical theories, and the more recent behavioral revolution. Reviews personality, social structure, socialization, political culture, and political parties. Major approaches such as group theory, structural-functionalism, systems analysis, and communications theory and evaluation of the relevance of political ideology; national character; elite and class analysis; and problems of conflict, violence, and internal war.
A survey of national political institutions and behavior in the United States, which introduces students to a variety of analytical concepts and approaches useful for the study of domestic politics. Concepts typically covered include public goods and collective action; preference aggregation and the median voter theorem; delegation, representation, and accountability; agenda control; inter-branch bargaining; and the mechanisms of private influence on public policy.
Offered every semester. 4 points. Introduces students to some outstanding theories of politics. The theories treated offer alternative conceptions of political life, and they are examined from both theoretical and historical perspectives. Among the theorists included are Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Mill, and Marx.
Introduction to modern astrophysical problems with an emphasis on the physical concepts involved?radio, optical, and X-ray astronomy; stellar structure and evolution; white dwarfs, pulsars, and black holes; and galaxies, quasars, and cosmology.
Introduction to Maxwell’s equations with applications to physical problems. Topics include electrostatics, magnetostatics, the solution of the Laplace and Poisson equations, dielectrics and magnetic materials, electromagnetic waves and radiation, Fresnel equations, transmission lines, wave guides, and special relativity.
Introduction to computational physics, with an emphasis on fields of current research interest where numerical techniques provide unique physical insight. Topics are chosen from various branches of physics, including numerical solution of ordinary and partial differential equations, eigenvalue problems, Monte Carlo methods in statistical mechanics, field theory, dynamical systems, and chaos.
The 20th century has been witness to two major revolutions in man’s concepts of space, time, and matter. Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity: implications of the special theory, for our understanding of the unity of space and time, and the general theory, for our understanding of the nature of gravity. Quantum mechanics: a new picture of the basic structure and interactions of atoms, molecules, and nuclei. Topics include the uncertainty principle, wave-particle duality, and the continuing search for the fundamental constituents of matter.
Designed to deepen the insights into quantum mechanics introduced in PHYS-UA 103, 104 and to provide an introduction to the more formal mathematical structure of quantum mechanics. The Schr?dinger and Heisenberg description of quantal systems; perturbation theory; spin and statistics; coupling of angular momenta; scattering theory; and applications to atomic, molecular, nuclear, and elementary particle physics.
Topics include conservation laws, central force motion, Lagrange’s and Hamilton’s equations, non-inertial frames, inertia tensor, rigid body dynamics, coupled oscillators and particles, eigenvalues, eigenvectors and normal modes.
Continuation of PHYS-UA 91. Topics include electrostatics; dielectrics; currents and circuits; the magnetic field and magnetic materials; induction; AC circuits; Maxwell’s equations.
With PHYS-UA 12, forms a two-semester sequence that must be taken in order. Lecture and laboratory-recitation. Not open to students who have completed PHYS-UA 91 with a grade of C- or better. Offered in the fall. 5 points. Begins a two-semester introduction to physics intended primarily for preprofessional students and for those majoring in a science other than physics, although well-prepared students may wish to take the physics majors sequence PHYS-UA 91, PHYS-UA 93, PHYS-UA 94, PHYS-UA 95, and PHYS-UA 96 instead. Topics include kinematics and dynamics of particles; momentum, work, and energy; gravitation; circular, angular, and harmonic motion; mechanical and thermal properties of solids, liquids, and gases; heat and thermodynamics.
Continuation of PHYS-UA 11. Topics include electric charge, field, and potential; magnetic forces and fields; resistive, capacitive, and inductive circuits; electromagnetic induction; wave motion; electromagnetic waves; geometrical optics; interference, diffraction, and polarization of light; relativity; atomic and nuclear structure; elementary particle physics.
Examines the characteristic method, positions, and themes of the existentialist and phenomenological movements and traces their development through study of such thinkers as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre.
Examines some of the most important philosophical ideas and developments in the “Continental” tradition in Europe in the twentieth century. After a review of some nineteenth-century developments, covers major works by Heidegger and Sartre, and some selection, determined by the instructor’s particular focus, of writings by such figures as Husserl, Gadamer, Arendt, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Deleuze.
Study of some of Immanuel Kant’s major works, including the Critique of Pure Reason, the Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, the Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and the Critique of Practical Reason.
We will investigate different approaches to understanding space and time, and how the account of space-time structure has evolved in physics. One of the main objectives is to have a clear and accurate understanding of the Special Theory of Relativity, detailed enough to allow the student to solve some physics problems. This will require a bit of mathematics, but not more than algebra. We will discuss the General Theory of Relativity in a more qualitative way, including an account of the structure of black holes. Philosophy students do not need any further background in physics or mathematics, and physics students will not benefit from greater mathematical sophistication. We will also study the relevant history of physics and philosophy, particularly the debate between Newton and Leibniz about the nature of space and time. There will be two lectures each week and a recitation section.
Examines some of the most important philosophical ideas and developments in Ancient Greece and Rome. Covers major writings by Plato and Aristotle, and a selection of writings by such thinkers as the Presocratics, Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics.
Examines some of the most important philosophical ideas and developments in Europe in the nineteenth century, preceded by a brief examination of some aspects of Kant’s philosophy. (Kant is examined in more detail in PHIL-UA 30.) Covers major writings by Hegel, and a selection of writings, determined by the special focus of the particular version of the course, from such thinkers as Fichte, Schelling, Feuerbach, Schopenhauer, Mill, Comte, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche.
Examines some of the most important philosophical ideas and developments in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Covers some of the major writings of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, and Hume, and concludes with a brief examination of some aspects of Kant’s philosophy. (Kant is examined in more detail in PHIL-UA 30.) May also include writings of Hobbes, Malebranche, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Conway, Berkeley, and Shepherd, among others.
Examines conceptual and empirical issues about consciousness. Issues covered may include the explanatory gap, the hard and harder problems of consciousness, concepts of consciousness, phenomenal concepts, the mind-body problem and neural correlates of consciousness, higher-order thought theories of consciousness, the inverted spectrum, views of phenomenality as representation, and arguments for dualism.
Examines various aspects of Plato’s philosophy: ethics, metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, and political philosophy. Aims to understand Plato’s ideas and to engage with them philosophically through careful readings of selected dialogues.
Examination of philosophical issues about the natural sciences. Central questions include the following: What is the nature of scientific explanation? How does science differ from pseudoscience? What is a scientific law? How do experiments work?
Introduces problems raised by the nature of art, artworks, and aesthetic judgment. Considers the expressive and representational properties of artworks, aesthetic attention, and appreciation, as well as the creation, interpretation, and criticism of artworks. Readings from classical and contemporary sources.
Discusses general questions concerning the nature of reality and truth. What kind of things exist? Are there minds or material bodies? Is change illusory? Are human actions free or causally determined? What is a person, and what, if anything, makes someone one and the same person?
Examines the nature and grounds of judgments about moral and/or nonmoral values. Are such judgments true or false? Can they be more or less justified? Are the values of which they speak objective or subjective?
Examines fundamental issues concerning the justification of political institutions. Topics may include democratic theory, political obligation and liberty, criteria of a just society, human rights, and civil disobedience.
Offered only at NYU Paris. Examines various philosophical and psychological approaches to language and meaning, as well as their consequences for traditional philosophical problems in metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. Discusses primarily 20th-century authors, including Russell, Wittgenstein, and Quine.
This course aims to accomplish two things. The first is to introduce three broad traditions of normative thinking about social issues from around the globe: a Confucian tradition, one based in Islamic legal traditions, and one derived from European liberalism. The second is to address three current areas of normative debate: about global economic inequality, about gender justice and human rights. We shall explore these first-order questions against the background of the three broad traditions. Our aim will be to understand some of differences of approach that shape the global conversation about these issues that concern people around the world.
Considers questions such as the following: Can I have knowledge of anything outside my own mind?for example, physical objects or other minds? Or is the skeptic’s attack on my commonplace claims to know unanswerable? What is knowledge, and how does it differ from belief?
Examines moral issuExamines moral issues in medical practice and research. Topics include euthanasia and quality of life; deception, hope, and paternalism; malpractice and unpredictability; patient rights, virtues, and vices; animal, fetal, and clinical research; criteria for rationing medical care; ethical principles, professional codes, and case analysis (for example, Quinlan, Willowbrook, Baby Jane Doe).
Modal logic is the logic of necessity and possibility and other such notions. In recent times, the framework of possible worlds has provided a valuable tool for investigating the formal properties of these notions. This course provides an introduction to the basic concepts, methods, and results of modal logic, with an emphasis on its application to such other fields as philosophy, linguistics, and computer science.
Examination of the relationship between the mind and the brain, of the nature of the mental, and of personal identity. Can consciousness be reconciled with a scientific view of the world?
Lecture and laboratory course that provides students with broad exposure to current questions and experimental approaches in cellular neuroscience. Lectures and laboratories are organized into three areas: cell structure aLecture and laboratory course that provides students with broad exposure to current questions and experimental approaches in cellular neuroscience. Lectures and laboratories are organized into three areas: cell structure and organization of the vertebrate central nervous system, mechanisms underlying neural signaling and plasticity, and control of cell form and its developmental determinants. Laboratory instruction in anatomical, physiological, and biochemical methods for investigating the biology of nerve cells.
Lecture and laboratory course that provides students with broad exposure to current questions and experimental approaches in cellular neuroscience. Lectures and laboratories are organized into three areas: cell structure and organization of the vertebrate central nervous system, mechanisms underlying neural signaling and plasticity, and control of cell form and its developmental determinants. Laboratory instruction in anatomical, physiological, and biochemical methods for investigating the biology of nerve cells.
Analysis of music of the late 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and the creation of imitative compositional models based on works studied as well as on principles acquired earlier in the sequence. Additional topics will include whole-tone and octatonic scale systems, atonality, serialism, and an introduction to post-modern and spectral techniques. Weekly lab sections are devoted to skills in musicianship and are required throughout the sequence.
This course is designed to take advantage of New York’s dynamic music community. There are in-class presentations by local musicians and scholars, and students regularly attend performances throughout the city. The focus is on the everyday practices of musical life in New York City by both performers and listeners in a number of the City’s musical constituencies: immigrant communities; amateur and professional music-makers; and popular, classical, and avant-garde scenes. Examination of these processes of music-making will be enhanced by a look at the histories of these different kinds of music-making. There will also be a historical discussion of the vibrant musical life of New York in the 19th and early 20th centuries, which will contribute to an understanding of why New York is seen, and sees itself, as a musical city.
Music Major Distribution Requirement. Chromatic harmony as developed and practiced by composers of the 19th century and beyond. Introduction to score reading and principles of musical analysis applied to larger musical structures. Continuation of species counterpoint and an introduction to invertible counterpoint and fugue.
Explores the underlying principles and inner workings of the tonal system, a system that has guided all of Western music from the years 1600 to 1900. It includes a discussion of historical background and evolution. Focuses on concepts and notation of key, scale, tonality, and rhythm. Related skills in sight-singing, dictation, and keyboard harmony are stressed in the recitation sections.
Students study principles of tonal music composition including 18th and 19th century harmonic, formal, and contrapuntal practices. Exercises in four-part voice-leading and species counterpoint are supplemented by analyses of music from around the world and from a variety of genres, including concert and popular music. Weekly lab sections are devoted to skills in musicianship and are required throughout the sequence.
Students acquire a basic vocabulary of musical terms, concepts, and listening skills in order to describe their responses to musical experiences. Considers the structure and style of influential works in the Western art music repertoire, popular music, or other musical cultures, with attention to the wider social, political, and artistic context. Course does not count towards the Music major. Can be counted toward the minor as an elective.
Historical-political background of the Middle East and its contemporary social and political problems, including the impact of the West; religious and liberal reactions; conflict of nationalisms (Arab, Iranian, Turkish, and Zionist); and revolutionary socialism. Specific social, political, and economic problems?using a few selected countries for comparison and analysis?including the role of the military, the intelligentsia, the religious classes, the legitimization of power, urban-rural cleavages, bureaucracy, and political parties.
Offers an overview of Indian culture via original texts and is designed to improve students’ advanced-level reading, as well as their written and oral discourse in Hindi. Emphasis is placed on the development of linguistic skills required for a close reading and in-depth analysis of complex texts. Introduction is learner-centered, and students have a choice in the selection of the texts and topics for their presentations. Taught seminar-style, the course combines classroom discussions, oral reports, and occasional background lectures. Students should have completed the two-year sequence of Hindi or have an equOffers an overview of Indian culture via original texts and is designed to improve students’ advanced-level reading, as well as their written and oral discourse in Hindi. Emphasis is placed on the development of linguistic skills required for a close reading and in-depth analysis of complex texts. Introduction is learner-centered, and students have a choice in the selection of the texts and topics for their presentations. Taught seminar-style, the course combines classroom discussions, oral reports, and occasional background lectures. Students should have completed the two-year sequence of Hindi or have an equivalent background.
As a part of a two-year curriculum, prepares the student for a high level of proficiency in Hindi. Through a variety of class, small-group, and paired activities, as well as language and computer lab sessions, students are expected to develop reading, speaking, listening, and writing skills. The instructor also takes into consideration individual needs.
Continues where Elementary Urdu leaves off. The students are introduced to literary texts. Along with specific language tasks, criticism and analysis now form part of the curriculum. Dictation, memorizing poetry, comprehension, and engaging in longer sessions of conversation form an important part of this course. By the end of this course, students should have achieved some fluency in reading literary texts, writing short essays, and carrying on a conversation.
Builds on the skills acquired in Elementary Arabic I and II, with increased emphasis on writing and reading from modern sources, in addition to aural/oral proficiency.
Surveys main political, social, economic, and intellectual currents of the 20th century. Emphasis on historical background and development of current problems in the region. Topics include imperialism, nationalism, religion, Orientalism, women, class formation, oil, the Arab-Israeli crisis, and the Iranian revolution.
Offerings (which may vary) focus on one or more Middle Eastern literary traditions and/or cultural traditions and/or genres of writing, using a thematic or theoretical approach.
Addresses the rich literary product of modern and contemporary South Asia. Offers more advanced undergraduates a window on a rich and culturally varied area of the world, as well as an understanding of aspects of South Asian history and society as represented in translations of modern prose writing (short stories and novels) originally written in South Asian languages.
Brief review of multivariate calculus: partial derivatives, chain rule, Riemann integral, change of variables, line integrals. Lagrange multipliers. Inverse and implicit function theorems and their applications. Introduction to calculus on manifolds: definition and examples of manifolds, tangent vectors and vector fields, differential forms, exterior derivative, line integrals and integration of forms. Gauss’ and Stokes’ theorems on manifolds.
Formulation and analysis of mathematical models. Mathematical tools include dimensional analysis, optimization, simulation, probability, and elementary differential equations. Applications to biology, economics, other areas of science. The necessary mathematical and scientific background is developed as needed. Students participate in formulating models as well as in analyzing them.
Many laws of physics are formulated as partial differential equations. This course discusses the simplest examples of such laws as embodied in the wave equation, the diffusion equation, and Laplace?s equation. Nonlinear conservation laws and the theory of shock waves. Applications to physics, chemistry, biology, and population dynamics. Prerequisite: prerequisite for MATH-UA 263
This honors section of Linear Algebra is a proof-based course intended for well-prepared students who have already developed some mathematical maturity and ease with abstraction. Its scope will include the usual Linear Algebra (MATH-UA 140) syllabus; however this class will be faster, more abstract and proof-based, covering additional topics. Topics covered are: Vector spaces, linear dependence, basis and dimension, matrices, determinants, solving linear equations, linear transformations, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, diagonalization, inner products, applications.
The scope of this honors class will include the usual MATH-UA 123 syllabus; however this class will move faster, covering additional topics and going deeper. Functions of several variables. Vectors in the plane and space. Partial derivatives with applications, especially Lagrange multipliers. Double and triple integrals. Spherical and cylindrical coordinates. Surface and line integrals. Divergence, gradient, and curl. Theorem of Gauss and Stokes.
Prerequisites: a grade of C or better in Honors Analysis I (MATH-UA 328), or a grade of A in Analysis (MATH-UA 325) and permission of instructor. Continuation of Honors Analysis I (MATH-UA 328). Topics include: metric spaces, differentiation of functions of several real variables, the implicit and inverse function theorems, Riemann integral on R^n, Lebesgue measure on R^n, the Lebesgue integral.
Prerequisites: a grade of C or better in Honors Algebra I (MATH-UA 348), or a grade of A in Algebra (MATH-UA 343) and permission of instructor. Principal ideal domains, polynomial rings in several variables, unique factorization domains. Fields, finite extensions, constructions with ruler and compass, Galois theory, solvability by radicals.
Prerequisite: A grade of C or higher in Calculus III (MATH-UA 123) or Math for Economics III (MATH-UA 213) (for economics majors). Recommended: Mathematical Physics (PHYS-UA 106). Fluid dynamics is the branch of physics that can describe the flow of blood in the human body, the flight of an insect, or the motions of weather systems. Key concepts include: the formalism of continuum mechanics; the conservation of mass, energy, and momentum in a fluid; the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations; and viscosity and vorticity. These concepts are applied to such classic problems in fluid dynamics as potential flow around a cylinder, the propagation of sound and gravity waves, and the onset of instability in shear flow.
This is an introduction to the rigorous treatment of the foundations of real analysis in one variable. It is based entirely on proofs. Students are expected to know what a mathematical proof is and are also expected to be able to read a proof before taking this class. Topics include: properties of the real number system, sequences, continuous functions, topology of the real line, compactness, derivatives, the Riemann integral, sequences of functions, uniform convergence, infinite series and Fourier series. Additional topics may include: Lebesgue measure and integral on the real line, metric spaces, and analysis on metric spaces.
Further topics in vector calculus. Vector spaces, matrix analysis. Linear and nonlinear programming with applications to game theory. This course will provide economics students who have taken MATH-UA 211 Mathematics for Economics I and MATH-UA 212 Mathematics for Economics II with the tools to take higher-level mathematics courses.
Prerequisite: A grade of C or higher in Calculus I (MATH-UA 121) or Math for Economics II (MATH-UA 212) (for economics majors), and General Physics (PHYS-UA 11). Simulations of such phenomena as orbits (Kepler problem and N-body problem), epidemic and endemic disease (including evolution in response to the selective pressure of malaria), musical stringed instruments (piano, guitar, and violin), and traffic flow in a city (with lights, breakdowns, and gridlock). Simulations are based on mathematical models, numerical methods, and Matlab programming techniques taught in class. Emphasizes use of animation (and sound where appropriate) to present the results of simulations.
Introduction to abstract algebraic structures, including groups, rings, and fields. Sets and relations. Congruences and unique factorization of integers. Groups, permutation groups, homomorphisms and quotient groups. Rings and quotient rings, Euclidean rings, polynomial rings. Fields, finite extensions.
Complex numbers and complex functions. Differentiation and the Cauchy-Riemann equations. Cauchy?s theorem and the Cauchy integral formula. Singularities, residues, Taylor and Laurent series. Fractional linear transformations and conformal mapping. Analytic continuation.
This course is an introduction to rigorous analysis on the real line. Topics include: the real number system, sequences and series of numbers, functions of a real variable (continuity and differentiability), the Riemann integral, basic topological notions in a metric space, sequences and series of functions including Taylor and Fourier series.
Introduces the student of biology or mathematics to the use of computers as tools for modeling physiological phenomena. The student constructs two computer models selected from the following list: circulation, gas exchange in the lung, control of cell volume, and the renal countercurrent mechanism. The student then uses the model to conduct simulated physiological experiments.
Topics include fixed points of one-dimensional maps; linear operators and linear approximations; stability and bifurcation; logistic maps. Cantor set, fractal sets, symbolic dynamics, conjugacy of maps. Dynamics in two dimensions. Introduction for students with little preparation to the recent discovery that, in certain regimes, fully deterministic mechanics can produce chaotic behavior.
Introduction to the mathematics of finance. Topics: linear programming with application to pricing. Interest rates and present value. Basic probability, random walks, central limit theorem, Brownian motion, log-normal model of stock prices. Black-Scholes theory of options. Dynamic programming with application to portfolio optimization.
In numerical analysis one explores how mathematical problems can be analyzed and solved with a computer. As such, numerical analysis has very broad applications in mathematics, physics, engineering, finance, and the life sciences. This course introduces the subject for mathematics majors. Theory and practical examples using Matlab are combined in the studying of topics ranging from simple root-finding procedures to differential equations and the finite element method.
Techniques for counting and enumeration, including generating functions, the principle of inclusion and exclusion, and Polya counting. Graph theory. Modern algorithms and data structures for graph theoretic problems.
Divisibility and prime numbers. Linear and quadratic congruences. The classical number-theoretic functions. Continued fractions. Diophantine equations.
Prerequisite: a grade of C or better in Calculus II (MATH-UA 122) or Math for Economics II (MATH-UA 212) (for economics majors) or equivalent. Not open to students who have taken Theory of Probability (MATH-UA 233) or Mathematical Statistics (MATH-UA 234). Combination of MATH-UA 233 and 234 at a more elementary level to acquaint students with both probability and statistics in a single term. In probability: mathematical treatment of chance; combinatorics; binomial, Poisson, and Gaussian distributions; law of large numbers and the normal distribution; application to coin-tossing; radioactive decay. In statistics: sampling; normal and other useful distributions; testing of hypotheses; confidence intervals; correlation and regression; applications to scientific, industrial, and financial data.
Introduction to the mathematical techniques of random phenomena occurring in the natural, physical, and social sciences. Axioms of mathematical probability, combinatorial analysis, binomial distribution, Poisson and normal approximation, random variables and probability distributions, generating functions, Markov chains, applications.
Prerequisite: a grade of C or better in Theory of Probability (MATH-UA 233) or equivalent. Not open to students who have taken Probability and Statistics (MATH-UA 235). Introduction to the mathematical foundations and techniques of modern statistical analysis used in the interpretation of data in quantitative sciences. Mathematical theory of sampling; normal populations and distributions; chi-square, t, and F distributions; hypothesis testing; estimation; confidence intervals; sequential analysis; correlation, regression, and analysis of variance. Applications to the sciences.
Prerequisite: MATH-UA.0122 with a grade of C or better, departmental placement exam, or permission of the department. Functions of several variables. Vectors in the plane and space. Partial derivatives with applications. Double and triple integrals. Spherical and cylindrical coordinates. Surface and line integrals. Divergence, gradient, and curl. Theorem of Gauss and Stokes.
Systems of linear equations. Gaussian elimination, matrices, determinants, and Cramer?s rule. Vectors, vector spaces, basis and dimension, linear transformations. Eigenvalues, eigenvectors, quadratic forms.
Techniques of integration. Further applications. Plane analytic geometry. Polar coordinates and parametric equations. Infinite series, including power series.
A first course in discrete mathematics. Sets, algorithms, and induction. Combinatorics. Graphs and trees. Combinatorial circuits. Logic and Boolean algebra.
Any one of the following: a score of 670 or higher on the mathematics portion of the SAT, a score of 650 or higher on the SAT Subject Test in Mathematics 1, a score of 650 or higher on the SAT Subject Test in Mathematics 2, an ACT mathematics score of 30 or higher, a score of 3 or higher on the AP Calculus AB exam, an AB subscore of 3 or higher on the AP Calculus BC exam, a score of 3 or higher on the AP Calculus BC exam, a grade of C or higher in Algebra and Calculus (MATH-UA 9), or a passing score on a departmental placement exam. Derivatives, antiderivatives, and integrals of functions of one variable. Applications include graphing, maximizing, and minimizing functions. Definite integrals and the fundamental theorem of calculus. Areas and volumes.
Prerequisite: Three years of high school math or permission of the department. An intensive course in intermediate algebra and trigonometry. Topics include algebraic, exponential, logarithmic, and trigonometric functions and their graphs.
Addresses painting north of the Alps, ca. 1380–1530, partly late medieval, partly Renaissance. Examines the connection of breathtaking technique and deeply religious aspects of the art to function, symbolic thought, patronage, and changes in the society to which painting was related. Also explains ways in which we write history when most of the vital written documents are missing or destroyed. Artists discussed include Jan van Eyck, the Master of Flemalle, Rogier van der Weyden, Jean Fouquet, Hugo van der Goes, Enguerrand Quarton, Jerome Bosch, Albrecht Dürer, Matthias Grünewald, and Hans Holbein.
Survey of English literature from its origins in the Anglo-Saxon epic through Milton. Close reading of representative works, with attention to the historical, intellectual, and social contexts of the period.
Introduces the syntax of Romance languages, primarily French, Italian, and Spanish, but also various Romance dialects. Considers what they have in common with each other (and with English) and how best to characterize the ways in which they differ from each other (and from English).
Introduces the syntax of languages quite different from English, from various parts of the world. Considers what they may have in common with English and with each other and how to characterize the ways in which they differ from English and from each other.
A state-of-the-art survey of the cognitive neuroscience of language, a rapidly developing multidisciplinary field at the intersection of linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience. Covers all aspects of language processing in the healthy brain, from early sensory perception to sentence-level semantic interpretation, as well as a range of neurological and development language disorders.
The methods of genealogical classification and subgrouping of languages. Examines patterns of replacement in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Focuses on internal and comparative phonological, morphological, and syntactic reconstruction. Considers phonological developments such as Grimm’s, Grassmann’s, and Verner’s Laws.
Introduces primary literature in syntactic theory and leads to an independent research project. Topics vary: binding theory, control, case theory, constraints on movement, antisymmetry, argument structure and applicatives, ellipsis, derivation by phase, etc.
Analysis (LING-UA 13), or permission of the instructor. Offered every year. Collins, Gallagher, Gouskova. 4 points. Students interview a native speaker of an unfamiliar language to study all aspects of the language’s grammar: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics. We evaluate and organize real, nonidealized linguistic data and formulate generalizations that serve as the basis for research.
Approaches from linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. Topics: the evidence for constructing grammars, the interpretation of grammatical rules as cognitive or neural operations, the significance of neo-behaviorist approaches to language and computational modeling for a cognitive theory of language, the connection between linguistics theory and genetics, and the importance of sociocultural and historical variation for understanding the nature of language.
Considers social forces that favor or inhibit bilingualism, as well as the educational consequences of bilingual education (and of monolingual education for bilingual children). Examines the impact of bilingualism on the languages involved. Special attention to code switching, with particular reference to its psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic aspects.
Introduces the field of cognitive science through an examination of language behavior. Begins with interactive discussions of how best to characterize and study the mind. These principles are then illustrated through an examination of research and theories related to language representation and use. Draws from research in both formal linguistics and psycholinguistics.
Focuses on the compositional semantics of sentences. Introduces set theory, propositional logic, and predicate logic as tools and goes on to investigate the empirical linguistic issues of presuppositions, quantification, scope, and polarity. Points out parallelisms between the nominal and the verbal domains.
Phonetic and phonological theory at an elementary level. Topics include the description and analysis of speech sounds, the anatomy and physiology of speech, speech acoustics, and phonological processes. Students develop skills to distinguish and produce sounds used in the languages of the world and to transcribe them using the International Phonetic Alphabet.
Focuses on phonology and phonetics (i.e., sound structure), but also addresses the structure of words and phrases. Topics: bilingualism, language contact, language loss, indigenous language education, literacy, orthography, and language policy. Emphasis on the Quechuan languages of the Andes in South America, spoken in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia.
The building blocks of words and sentences: the atomic units of word structure, their hierarchical and linear arrangement, and their phonological realization(s). An introduction to fundamental issues including allomorphy, morpheme order, paradigm structure, blocking, and cyclicity. Interactions of morphology with syntax, phonology, semantics, and variation.
An introduction to the morphosyntax of Russian. Students learn how to analyze the underlying structures of this language by using formal tools in syntactic theory. The core areas of Russian grammar: case, aspect, argument structure alternations, topic/ focus structure, negation, binding, control, and wh-movement. No knowledge of Russian required.
Introduces rules for composing words and sentences from the smallest units of linguistic combination (morphemes). Why can the same message be expressed in one word in some languages but require an entire sentence in others? Why do the shapes of prefixes, suffixes, and roots change depending on their semantic and phonological context? What rules do different languages use for forming new words? No previous background in linguistics is required.
How and why American varieties of Spanish and Portuguese differ from European varieties, as well as the distribution and nature of dialect differences throughout the Americas. Examines sociolinguistic issues: class and ethnic differences in language, the origin and development of standard and nonstandard varieties, and the effects of contact with Amerindian and African languages. Considers Spanish- and Portuguese-based creoles and the question of prior creolization.
Builds a solid command of predicate logic and elements of the lambda calculus. Introduces the principles of compositional model theoretic semantics. Analyzes constituent order and a set of specific phenomena, possibly varying from year to year.
How linguistic practices reflect and shape our gender identity. Do women and men talk differently? Are these differences universal or variable across cultures? How does gendered language intersect with race and class-linked language? What impact does gendered language have on social power relationships?
What determines the sequencing of words in a given language? How can we explain word-order variation within and across languages? Are there universal syntactic properties common to the grammar of all languages? Presents the modern generative approach to the scientific study of language and systematically develops a model that will account for the most basic syntactic constructions of natural language.
Psycholinguistics aims to understand the mental processes that underlie both the representation and acquisition of language. Topics include language acquisition, speech perception, lexical representation and access, sentence production, and the relationship between phonology and orthography.
How languages organize sounds into highly constrained systems. Topics: What do the sound systems of all languages have in common? How can they differ from each other? What is the nature of phonological processes, and why do they occur?
Language is a social phenomenon, but languages share elaborate and specific structural properties. Speech communities exist, exhibit variation, and change within the strict confines of universal grammar, part of our biological endowment. Universal grammar is discovered through the careful study of the structures of individual languages, by cross-linguistic investigations, and the investigation of the brain. Introduces fundamental properties of the sound system and of the structure and interpretation of words and sentences against this larger context.
This class is a guide through the works of choreographers who can teach us the elements of making dance and enable us to create our own movement identity. The psychological storytelling of Martha Graham, George Balanchine’s blazing neo-classicism, the chance field dances of Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp’s humorous inversions, the deconstructions of William Forsythe, Mathew Bourne’s gay Swan Lake, and the powerful Black gospel songs of Alvin Ailey are observed through video and readings. After a warmup of technique and improvisation, the student begins with small movement studies, leading to group studies of increasing complexity, with teacher and students responding with supportive feedback. New this semester will be a section, “Dance as Protest,” which explores texts such as Hot Feet and Social Change: African Dance and Diaspora Communities. We will study the movie In the Heights, where Afro-Caribbean dance, ballet, contemporary and hip hop convey ideas about community and representation. Texts include The Intimate Art of Choreography and “Dance in the Age of Black Lives Matter.” Students can have studied dance or simply wish to move and compose using their body and imagination. Student works in a final performance in the theater will be recorded.
A continuation of Elementary Haitian Kreyòl I, this course develops student’s speaking, reading, and writing skills in Haitian Kreyòl, also called Creole. Haitian Kreyòl is spoken by Haiti’s population of nine million and by about one million Haitians in the U.S. including over 190,000 in the New York City area. In fact, New York City has the second largest population of Kreyòl speakers after Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital. We use a communicative approach, balanced with grammatical and phonetic techniques. Classroom and textbook materials are complemented by work with film, radio, and music, as well as with visits to city museums and institutions related to Haiti. At the end of the course, students will be better able to conduct a conversation in Haitian Kreyòl and have a better command of Haitian vocabulary and grammar within a relevant cultural context.
This course aims to bring together diverse issues and perspectives in the rapidly evolving and changing area of international/global communication. Through a historical perspective, a framework will be established for the appreciation of the development of the immense scope, disparity, and complexity of this rapidly evolving field. Students will be encouraged to critically assess shifts in national, regional, and international media patterns of production, distribution, and consumption over time, leading to a critical analysis of the tumultuous contemporary global communication environment. Essential concepts of international communication will be examined, including trends in national and global media consolidation, cultural implications of globalization, international broadcasting, information flows, international communication law and regulation, and trends in communication and information technologies. The focus of the course will be international, with attention being paid both to Western-based multimedia conglomerates, as well as to the increasing global prominence of media corporations based in other regions, contributing to the reversal of international media flows and challenging the global hegemony of the Western media producers. Particular emphasis will be on the Czech Republic, as an empirical example of a national media system affected by global media flows.
The course focuses on combining the creative techniques of fiction with the rigor of journalistic travel writing to produce stories about Prague (not only) that move beyond the constraints of the news and feature story: stories that engage, resonate with readers, provide insight – stories which “produce the emotion”. The course proceeds by the reading and analysis of important contemporary journalism and classic travel pieces: examination of the narrative; fictional and literary devices used in travel writing; examination of and practice with various information gathering strategies; humor; point of view; unique voice. Distinguished Czech travel writers/journalists/photographers will be invited as guest lecturers.
This 14-week class is divided equally between ethics and the law. Through the weekly lecture and assigned readings, students are exposed to the various ethical and legal issues surrounding the field of journalism and come away with a clear sense of the role of the journalist in society and the issues that affect that mission today.
The following semester, honors students are required to take a specially designed honors senior seminar, which culminates in each student?s writing a large (6,000-10,000 word/15-20 minutes for broadcast) feature, completing the capstone. The student has to defend his/her work orally before at least two members of the faculty and perhaps a member of the profession.
Students study the Divine Comedy both as a mirror of high medieval culture and as a unique text that breaks out of its cultural bounds. The entire poem is read, in addition to selections from the Vita Nuova and other complementary minor works.
The course explores Italian American History since the age of mass migration at the turn of the twentieth century. It begins with an examination of the ways in which race, class, and gender have shaped the Italian American experience. It then moves on to discuss the role of consumption in identity formation, exploring themes such as the significance of immigrants’ encounter with the mass market in processes of acculturation and the symbolical function of the consumption of material and immaterial “things Italian” among subsequent generations of Italian Americans. Finally, the course deals with Italian American identities as objects of cross-cultural consumption, investigating issues such as the encoding of “Italian-Americaness” in the branding of products, images, and experiences (food, film, fashion, etc.), the marketing strategies of Italian American memory, and the uses and meanings constructed through the consumption of Italian American identities from Little Caesar to Jersey Shore.
Introductory-level literature course that, through a close reading of authors such as Alfieri, Foscolo, Leopardi, Manzoni, Verga, D?Annunzio, Moravia, and Calvino, focuses on how to understand a literary text in Italian. Covers Italian literature from the 17th century to the contemporary period.
Students entering the course should have mastered the fundamental structure of Italian. The course is designed to help students gain confidence and increase their effectiveness in writing present-day Italian. Conducted in Italian.
Students entering the course should have mastered the fundamental structure of Italian. The course is designed to help students gain confidence and increase their effectiveness in speaking present-day Italian. Through discussions, oral reports, and readings, students develop vocabulary in a variety of topics, improve pronunciation, and learn an extensive range of idiomatic expressions. Conducted in Italian.
This course introduces contemporary Italy in all its complexity and fascination. Reviewing politics, economics, society, and culture over the past two centuries, the course has a primary goal — to consider how developments since the 1800s have influenced the lives and formed the outlook of today’s Italians. In other words, we are engaged in the historical search for something quite elusive: Italian “identity”. Topics will include the unification of the country, national identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the First World War, and Italian fascism, World War Two and the resistance, the post-war Italian Republic, the economic “miracle”, the South, the Mafia, terrorism, popular culture, and the most recent political and social developments, including Italy and the European Union. Lectures combine with readings and films (taking advantage of Italy’s magnificent post-war cinema).
Identical to V41.0724. Hendin. Offered every two to three years. 4 points. A study of the fiction and poetry by which Italian American writers have expressed their heritage and their engagement in American life. From narratives of immigration to current work by “assimilated” writers, the course explores the depiction of Italian American identity. Challenging stereotypes, it explores changing family relationships, sexual mores, and political and social concerns.
Introductory-level literature course that, through a close reading of authors such as Dante, Boccaccio, Petrarch, Machiavelli, and Ariosto, focuses on how to understand a literary text in Italian. Covers Italian literature from its origins to the 17th century.
The inventor of modern political science, Niccolo Machiavelli is one of the most original thinkers in the history of Western civilization. In this course, Machiavelli?s political, historical, and theatrical works are read in the context in which they were conceived?the much tormented and exciting Florence of the 15th and early 16th centuries struggling between republican rule and the magnificent tyranny of the Medici family. The course also aims at dismantling the myth of ?evilness? that has surrounded Machiavelli through the centuries, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, through a close reading of such masterpieces as The Prince, The Discourses, and The Mandrake Root.
This course is a prerequisite for other advanced courses in language, literature, and culture and society. Systematizes and reinforces the language skills presented in earlier-level courses through an intensive review of grammar and composition, lexical enrichment, improvement of speaking ability, and selected readings from contemporary Italian literature.
Students entering this course should have mastered the fundamental structure of Italian. Aims to enrich knowledge of Italian language, culture, and society through screening and discussion of contemporary Italian cinema and detailed analysis of selected film scripts. Students are encouraged to use different idiomatic expressions and recognize regional linguistic variety. Special emphasis is placed on developing a more extensive vocabulary and an expressive range suited to discussion of complex issues and their representation.
Continuation of ITAL-UA 11. To fulfill MAP requirements and continue on to the postintermediate level, a student must complete both ITAL-UA 11 and ITAL-UA 12. This sequence is equivalent to ITAL-UA 20.
Open to students with no previous training in Italian and to others on assignment by placement test. Completes the equivalent of Elementary Italian I and II in one semester. Offered every semester. 6 points.
Not equivalent to ITAL-UAV 20. Only by combining ITAL-UA 11 with ITAL-UA 12 can a student complete the equivalent of ITAL-UA 20 and then continue on to the postintermediate level.
Continuation of ITAL-UA 1. To continue on to the intermediate level, a student must complete both ITAL-UA 1 and ITAL-UA 2. This sequence is equivalent to ITAL-UA 10.
This course introduces the principles and practices of management. Management is viewed as a system of tasks and activities, including environmental scanning, planning, organizing, leading and controlling. Within each major task, is a series of processes, which show how to do what has to be done. Management is a science and an art; both aspects of management are covered in this course. Areas covered are management history, philosophy and the theory and practice of management planning, decision making, organizing, motivating and leading. Special emphasis is on providing the technical and managerial challenges presented by emerging and transformative technologies. Particular consideration is given to the managerial options available to both legacy and entrepreneurial organizations.
This course offers a broad survey of American cinema from its beginnings (and even its pre-history) up to 1960. While the emphasis will be on the dominant, narrative fiction film, there will be attention to other modes of American cinema such as experimental film, animation, shorts, and non-fiction film. The course will look closely at films themselves — how do their styles and narrative structures change over time? — but also at contexts: how do films reflect their times? how does the film industry develop? what are the key institutions that had impact on American film over its history? We will also attend to the role of key figures in film’s history: from creative personnel (for example, the director or the screenwriter) to industrialists and administrators, to censors to critics and to audiences themselves. The goal will be to provide an overall understanding of one of the most consequential of modern popular art forms and of its particular contributions to the art and culture of our modernity.
“How do humans and other animals obtain knowledge about the world? It is easy to take perception for granted, but complex processes (only partly understood) underlie our ability to understand the world by seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling it. This is not because the scientific study of perception is new. In fact, perception has fascinated philosophers, physicists, and physiologists for centuries. Currently, perception is a central topic in psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and neuroscience. How do scientists approach perception? We seek to discover lawful relations between perceptual experiences and the physical world and to develop models of the processes and mechanisms in the brain that produce these connections. In this course, in the lectures, we will discuss fundamental problems in perception (primarily vision), and in the lab sessions, you will learn about standard experimental methods and their use in the study of perceptual processes and to give you first-hand experience in conducting original research. As part of these activities you will learn to write experimental reports and to think critically about the relation between theory and experiment. You will also be exposed to the use of computers in perception research. Indeed, there will be considerable use of computers in the course, with part of the goal being to provide you with basic computer skills.” Prereq: None Fulfillment: CORE ED
Offered every semester. 4 points. Survey of the field of sociology: its basic concepts, theories, and research orientation. Threshold course that provides the student with insights into the social factors in human life. Topics include social interaction, socialization, culture, social structure, stratification, political power, deviance, social institutions, and social change.
This course introduces non-majors to theatre as a live and performing art through a variety of experiences including attendance at live performances, readings of play scripts, and theoretical texts, and the creation of original plays. Through lectures, discussions, and written assignments, students will explore the roles of the playwright, actor, director, and designer in the production process, as well as examines the role of the audience in the live performance. Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Expressive Cultures
This seminar examines how sociology can help us understand the challenge of climate change. We will briefly overview the climate science and learn about the rise of “weird weather,” but the core themes of the course concern questions about communication and cognition, cultural values and material consumption, politics and persuasion, mitigation and adaptation, economics and social justice, power and social movements, and the possibility of creating new, more sustainable ways of living on earth. We will dedicate several sessions dedicated to Superstorm Sandy and its aftermath, with a focus on the question of how to rebuild a more resilient city and region in anticipation of more extreme weather events.
In 1959, the chemist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow delivered a lecture in which he decried a growing separation between the humanities and the sciences. In it, he argued that two intellectual “cultures” were developing, both of whose practitioners were increasingly incapable of engaging each other. Today, the notion of a divide between “the humanities” and “the sciences,” or, as some term them, “the arts” and “the sciences,” is rather commonplace. We often hear people self-identify as “more left brain,” for example, or “not a math person.” In this course, we will explore how and why different people have found it useful to distinguish the arts and the sciences. We will also consider why others have found it useful to blur the arts and the sciences. Participants will begin by reading and contextualizing Snow’s original lecture, after which we will trace both the historical origins of the key concepts involved as well as how their meanings have changed over time from early modernity to today. (Mathematics, for example, was deemed an “art” for much of European history.) Having done so, we will then consider contemporary assessments. All told, in their research and in their writing, participants will be asked to examine how different people have sought to distinguish, reconcile, or even move beyond the “two cultures.” Readings for the course may include works by: Francis Bacon, Lisa Jardine, Marwa Elshakry, Paul Kristeller, Yuval Levin, and Rueylin Chen.
How do social movements form in response to environmental concerns? What makes them effective or ineffective? This course analyses the various social movements that organized in response to environmental concerns. Both historical and sociological dimensions of environmental movements are covered, with particular attention given to how issues of environmental protection and social justice intersect. At NYU Berlin, the course includes American (I), European, and in particular German (II), as well as global movements (III).
This course concentrates on the culture, society, and politics of Renaissance and early modern Europe. The course explores several critical topics and themes, including the Italian and Northern Renaissance, the age of religious reform and religious wars, Europe’s “discovery” of other worlds and cultures, the origins and development of national states, the scientific revolution, the European enlightenment, and the origins of the French revolution.
Survey of the experience of African Americans to 1865, emphasizing living conditions, treatment, images, attitudes, important figures and events, and culture using a chronological and topical approach. Topics include African way of life, initial contact between Africans and Europeans, slave trade, early slavery, freedom and control in slave society, abolitionism, slave resistance, free blacks, and gender.
Emphasizes historical problems in Japan?s economic development, their challenge to political and social institutions, and their role in shaping foreign policy. Focuses on Japan?s transition from an agrarian economy to commercial capitalism, from hierarchical social organization to constitutional authority, and from isolation from the rest of the world to involvement with Western culture and diplomatic relations. Traces Japan?s development into an industrial giant fully engaged in world affairs.
An introduction to the basic techniques of sentential and predicate logic. Students learn how to put arguments from ordinary language into symbols, how to construct derivations within a formal system, and how to ascertain validity using truth tables or models.
The most basic questions about human life and its place in the universe. Topics may include free will, the relation of body and mind, and immortality; skepticism, self-knowledge, causality, and a priori knowledge; religious and secular ethical codes and theories; and intuition, rationality, and faith. Includes classic and current philosophers (e.g., Plato, Descartes, Hume, Russell, Sartre).
Mitchell. Offered every year. 4 points. Explores varieties of African American women’s experiences (including class, ethnicity, sexuality, region, and generation). Endeavors to go beyond the black/white binary by considering black women’s relationships to both intraracial and broader communities. Additionally, assesses how gender, race, and class have influenced black women’s work, activism, political involvement, and creative output in the United States. Takes an interdisciplinary approach by drawing from history, memoir, sociology, feminist theory, film studies, legal theory, and the popular press.
Wikileaks and Edward Snowden reveal the dark side of the secret world just as the actions of Vladimir Putin in Ukraine remind us of why we need good intelligence. Since World War II ushered in the modern espionage era, secret intelligence and intelligence services have shaped the course of international history. This course introduces the student to the great sweep of world history from 1939 to 2015 through the lens of the role played by spies, code-breakers, saboteurs, intelligence analysts and the organizations for which they worked. How much did all of this secret stuff matter? Why did countries set up organizations to undertake spying and covert action? Have these activities made them, especially the US, more or less secure? And what has been the cost to private individuals of these activities? Although the focus will mainly be on the activities of US, Russian (Soviet) and British intelligence, the class will also explore cases involving Chinese, Cuban, French, German, Iranian, Israeli, Jordanian, Saudi and Vietnamese intelligence.
Identical to V65.0111. Bedos-Rezak, Griffiths. Offered every other year. 4 points. Europe in the early Middle Ages was created out of a mixture of ingredients: the legacy of the Roman Empire; the growth and development of Christianity; invading peoples who settled within the boundaries of the former Roman Empire; and the clash of competing languages, religions, and legal systems. This tumultuous time forged a new entity, medieval Europe, whose development, growing pains, and creative successes this course examines. Uses the records and artifacts of the period itself as central elements for investigating the period.
Course examines developments in U.S. society within a global historical context. Topics: urbanization; industrialization; immigration; American reform movements (populism, progressivism, the New Deal, and the War on Poverty); and foreign policy. Beginning with the post-Civil War expansion of the U.S. into the American West, the course traces U.S expansion and increasing global influence through the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Cold War, Gulf Wars, and the War on Terror. Emphasizes broad themes and main changes in U.S. culture, politics, and society.
Focus is on advanced composition and oral practices, with the aim of refining an understanding and general facility with written and spoken Greek. Course work is designed to help students develop a comprehensive vocabulary, improve pronunciation, and increase their effectiveness, accuracy, and fluency in writing and speaking the language. Enhances and perfects reading, speaking, conversational, and writing skills through the close study of selected modern Greek literary texts, current newspaper articles and essays, films, advertisements, and comprehensive discussions of contemporary Greek society. Explores major facets and phenomena of Greek culture: current social and political issues, events, and controversies in Greece; Greece’s position “in the margins of Europe” and at the crossroads of East and West; gender politics; the educational system; the political landscape; discourses on the question of Greek identity; and topics in popular culture. Through individual projects, oral reports, class presentation, and written assignments, students are expected to pursue an in-depth “reading” of present-day Greece.
Designed for students already familiar with modern Greek. Students are expected to be acquainted with the most significant structures of grammar and syntax, and to have acquired the foundations for basic conversation in Greek. Introduces students to more complex linguistic and grammatical analysis, advanced composition, and graded reading. It also provides further practice in speaking and works to enrich the student’s vocabulary. Readings and discussions of selected works of prose, poetry, and theatre serve as an introduction to aspects of modern Greek civilization and as an occasion for comprehensive discuPrerequisite: V56.0104 for V56.0105, V56.0105 for V56.0106, or permission of the instructor. Intermediate I offered in the fall; Intermediate II offered in the spring. 4 points per term. Designed for students already familiar with modern Greek. Students are expected to be acquainted with the most significant structures of grammar and syntax, and to have acquired the foundations for basic conversation in Greek. Introduces students to more complex linguistic and grammatical analysis, advanced composition, and graded reading. It also provides further practice in speaking and works to enrich the student’s vocabulary. Readings and discussions of selected works of prose, poetry, and theatre serve as an introduction to aspects of modern Greek civilization and as an occasion for comprehensive discussions of contemporary Greek society.
Concentrates on the social, political, and cultural forces that shaped Jewish life in post-1945 Europe. Topics: reconstruction of Jewish communities, repression and anti-Semitic campaigns in the Soviet Union and Poland, the impact of Israel, emigration and migration, Jewish-Christian relations, and assimilation and acculturation. Students also learn about various reactions to the Holocaust.
What makes a life well-lived? Central questions to be explored include: Does living well require acquiring knowledge and wisdom? What is the place of moral responsibility in the good life? Is the good life a happy life or does it require sacrificing happiness? Does religion lead to living well or does it hinder it? What is friendship and how does it contribute to the good life? Thinkers to be studied may include: Aristotle, Seneca, Maimonides, Glikl, Spinoza, and Levinas.
Studies a selected section of the Hebrew and Aramaic text of the Babylonian Talmud, utilizing both traditional and academic methods of study. Emphasis is on mastering the themes and concepts while studying the text and its commentaries in depth.
Continuation of HBRJD-UA 1. Open to students who have completed HBRJD-UA 1 or who have been placed at this level through the placement examination. For description, see Elementary Hebrew I (HBRJD-UA 1).
Continuation of HBRJD-UA 3. Open to students who have completed HBRJD-UA 3 or who have been placed at this level through the placement examination. For description, see Intermediate Hebrew I (HBRJD-UA 3).
The course explores three-dimensional treatment of the kinematics of particles and rigid bodies using various coordinate systems, Newton’s laws, work, energy, impulse, momentum, conservative force fields, impact and rotation and plane motion of rigid bodies. | Prerequisite for Brooklyn Students: ME-UY 2213 | Prerequisite for Abu Dhabi Students: ENGR-UH 2011
The course centers on properties of pure substances; concepts of work and heat; closed and open systems. Topics: Fundamental laws of thermodynamics. Carnot and Clasius statements of the 2nd law; entropy and entropy production; heat engines, refrigerators, heat pumps; efficiencies, coefficients of performance.| Prerequisite for Brooklyn Students: MA-UY 1124 | Prerequisite for Abu Dhabi Students: MATH-UH 1020
Students in this course become familiar with atomic structure and bonding, atomic arrangement in crystals, crystal imperfections, mechanical behavior and failure of materials and binary phase diagrams. | Brooklyn Students: Co-requisite PH-UY 1013 | Abu Dhabi Students: Prerequisite ENGR-UH 2012
Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the German Department website at http://as.nyu.edu/german/courses.html <http://as.nyu.edu/german/courses.html>
Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the German Department website at http://as.nyu.edu/german/courses.html <http://as.nyu.edu/german/courses.html>
Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the German Department website at http://as.nyu.edu/german/courses.html <http://as.nyu.edu/german/courses.html>
Offered periodically. 4 points. Introduces students to the history, theory, and practice of translation through German and English texts taken from a variety of cultural backgrounds. While engaging in the craft of translation first hand, students encounter diverse grammatical, syntactical, and stylistic problems, thus gaining a deeper understanding of the German language. Also stresses the acquisition of vocabulary and complex idiomatic structures necessary for effective reading comprehension, as well as written expression.
Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the German Department website at http://as.nyu.edu/german/courses.html <http://as.nyu.edu/german/courses.html>
Composition & Conversation is designed for post-intermediate students of German who have a solid grasp of German grammar and vocabulary and wish to extend their knowledge of the German language, history, and culture through reading, watching films, discussions, and writing. Conversation & Composition is a reading- and writing-intensive course. Emphasis will be placed on refining written expression and developing the ability to express, discuss, and argue opinions.This course will give you an overview of recent German political, social and cultural history after 1945 and onwards. Focus will be placed on moments of social criticism and changes – from the youth cultures in the 50s and 80s to the women’s movement and ecological protests, from love happenings and terrorism to mass demonstrations and the fall of the wall. During the course, we will explore narratives that are related to our topics from a variety of genres: newspaper/magazine articles, TV/radio documentaries, music, film, photography, and other visual material. The class is taught entirely in German and emphasizes the language skills necessary to communicate effectively in a foreign language speaking, reading, viewing, writing, and listening.
Topics vary by semester. For current term course description, please see the German Department website at http://as.nyu.edu/german/courses.html <http://as.nyu.edu/german/courses.html>
Completes the equivalent of a year?s intermediate work GERM-UA 3 and GERM-UA 4 in one semester. Continuing emphasis on developing spoken and written communication skills. Students learn more-advanced features of the language and begin to read longer and more-complex texts.
Introduction to representative authors and works of German literature, with emphasis on the modern period. Students learn basic conventions of literature and literary interpretation, as well as strategies for the effective reading of shorter and longer prose works, drama, and poetry. Guided writing assignments focus on developing the language skills necessary for effective written analysis and interpretation of literary texts in German.
Open to students with no previous training in German and to others on assignment by placement examination or with permission of the department. Completes the equivalent of a year’s elementary work GERM-UA 1 and GERM-UA 2 in one semester. Emphasizes spoken and written communication skills. Introduces students to the basic conventions, idioms, and structures of contemporary spoken German.
Historically, the music business has generally relinquished the most significant inventions and innovations to third parties. And while many can recite the contemporary Pavlovian catch phrases of the moment, what about the next wave of science and thinking that will impact music? This class will seek to identify, understand and predict the latest advancements in science that will serve to influence and transform music consumption in the next 20 years.
Throughout the industry value chain, from content creation to distribution and consumption, technology has changed the way consumers view and use entertainment. Technology has also changed the advertising industry, which is a major source of revenue for the entertainment industry. This course explores the impact of technology, such as interactivity and VOD, on audience trends and fragmentation. The course provides a brief introduction to each of these industries and examines the impact that technology has had on them, including assessment of possibilities for the future.
This course provides students with a framework for understanding the economics and key strategic issues facing organizations in the entertainment industry. It establishes a basis for the formulation of marketing tactics and strategies for firms competing for consumers’ discretionary spending. Recent developments in major sectors of the entertainment industry are covered, including movies, television and cable, theatre, and sports. Issues that cut across all types of entertainment industries are examined, including licensing, promotion, and new technologies.
Study of the theatrical genre in France including the Golden Age playwrights (Corneille, Racine, and Moli?re); 18th-century irony and sentiment; and the 19th-century theatrical revolution. Topics: theories of comedy and tragedy, development of stagecraft, romanticism and realism, the theatre as a public genre, its relationship to taste and fashion, and its sociopolitical function.
Use of dramatic situations and readings to help students overcome inhibitions in their oral use of language. The graduated series of exercises and activities is designed to improve pronunciation, intonation, expression, and body language. These include phonetic practice, poetry recitation, skits, improvisation, and memorization of dramatic texts. Reading, discussion, and performance of scenes from plays by renowned dramatists. Extensive use of audio and video material.
Main expressions of existential thought in Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. Attention to the French existentialists? concern for commitment in political and social affairs of the times. Examines absurdist literature since the 1950?s in the ?theatre of the absurd,? in fiction, and in critical work of other contemporary French writers. Covers Ionesco, Beckett, Genet, Robbe-Grillet, and Barthes; precursors of the absurd such as Kafka and C?line; and practictioners of the absurd outside of France (e.g., Pinter, Albee, Barthelme).
When conducted in French, numbered V45.0778. Only counts toward the major if course work is done in French (permission of the director of undergraduate studies required). Offered every year. 4 points. For description, see History of French Cinema (V45.0778) above.
Designed for students who wish to learn the specialized language used in French business. Emphasis on oral and written communication and the acquisition of a business and commercial vocabulary dealing with the varied activities of a commercial firm (e.g., advertising, transportation, banking). Stresses group work in simulated business situations and exposure to authentic spoken materials.
Offered every year. 4 points. Examines literature from a network of French-speaking countries that form a Francophone space. Addresses the colonial past as well as the anticolonial and postcolonial situations in which French colonialism is replaced by more complex relationships and ideologies. Special attention is paid to language and the role of the writer in elaborating a postcolonial national identity. Writers studied may include Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau of Martinique, Jacques Roumain of Haiti, Ahmadou Kourouma of the Ivory Coast, and Assia Djebar of Algeria.
Continuation of FREN-UA 9001. To continue on to the intermediate level, a student must complete both FREN-UA9001 and FREN-UA 9002. This two-semester sequence is equivalent to FREN-UA 9010.
This course is designed to help students to develop vocabulary, learn new idiomatic expressions, and improve fluency and pronunciation. The emphasis is on the understanding and production of contemporary spoken French through a study of authentic documents such as radio and television interviews, advertisements, and spontaneous oral productions.
Designed to improve the student’s written French and to provide advanced training in French and comparative grammar. Students are trained to express themselves in a variety of writing situations (for example, diaries, transcriptions, narrations, letters). Focuses on the distinction between spoken and written styles and the problem of contrastive grammar. Emphasis on accuracy and fluency of usage in the written language.
Deals with the various currents of ideas and the transformations in values, taste, and feeling that constitute the Enlightenment in France. Particular attention to the personality, writings, and influence of the following authors: Montaigne, Descartes, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and Sartre. Significant works by these thinkers and others are closely read and interpreted.
Not equivalent to FREN-UA 20. Only by combining FREN-UA 11 with FREN-UA 12 can a student complete the equivalent of FREN-UA 20 and then continue on to the post-intermediate level. Offered every semester. 4 points.
Continuation of FREN-UA 11. In order to fulfill the MAP requirement and continue on to the post-intermediate level, a student must complete both FREN-UA 11 and FREN-UA 12. This sequence is equivalent to FREN-UA 20. Offered every semester. 4 points.
Open to students with no previous training in French and to others on assignment by placement test. Completes the equivalent of a year’s elementary level in one semester. Offered every semester. 6 points.
This course will explore the changing meaning of Europe, European unity, and European identity over the last century, with an emphasis on the formation of the European Union during the last 65 years and current European Union issues today. After a brief introduction that explores the deeper history behind the geographical and cultural concept of Europe, this course will trace the emergence of a European identity in contrast to national identities, as well as the emergence of a desire to integrate Europe from the late nineteenth century to the present. Class readings and discussion will focus on four main questions. What has Europe meant to intellectuals, politicians, and citizens in the past 100 years, as a concept, as a locus of identity, and as an alternative or counterpart to the nation state? What has been the geography of Europe, and how has this changed over time? How and why have European leaders and citizens fashioned an integrated continent, and how have the obstacles to integration evolved over time? Finally, how have Europe’s recent crises—from refugees to the problems of the Euro—led people to reevaluate European integration, national identities and institutions, and globalization more generally?
This course explores the arts from the late17th/early18th-century to the post-World War II era, examining how they define and reflect both local cultural views and rapidly shifting global understandings of the world. The course considers how the diverse conceptions and conditions of modernity both shaped and were shaped by the arts around the world. Many of the issues pertinent to the course — industrialization/urbanization; the dislocations, disasters, and opportunities that followed cross-cultural contact; colonialism, decolonization, conflicts of political ideology, and liberation struggles; fundamental redefinitions of mind, language, gender, and sexual identity — have had very different effects in various parts of the world; instructors encourage students to explore what it means to study the arts from global perspectives and what “globalization” itself has meant and means in the context of the arts.
The course examines some of the fundamental principles and processes of biological science. The primary focus is on evolution, genetics, and the physiology and molecular function of the cell, with special emphasis on the human species. Also included is a series of readings and discussions on how our knowledge of the life sciences has been put to practical use, the function and treatment of HIV infection, and other current frontiers and ethical issues in the discipline. The course takes a historical approach to the material: readings include some of the fundamental texts upon which our understanding of life is based, such as works by and about Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Oswald Avery, James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and Francis Crick. This course satisfies the requirement in Life Science.
Environmental philosophy encompasses questions in metaphysics, the philosophy of science, and the history of philosophy, as well as in such normative areas as ethics, aesthetics, and political philosophy. Presents basic concepts in value theory and introduces some major controversies.
Examines the array of environmental problems facing modern society, including global pollution and the impact of human population growth on land-use patterns, earth resources, energy supply and use, water, agriculture, and ecosystems.
This is an intermediate Environmental Studies elective about how societies understand and respond to climate change. We will analyze the values, assumptions, and perceptions that contribute to our understanding of climate change. The main topics are ethics, justice, and responsibility; definitions of nature; cost-benefit analysis and the precautionary principle; geo-engineering; contrarianism; framing and communication; social engagement; and education. Central questions include: Is climate change a technical or social problem? What makes climate change uniquely challenging to understand and respond to? Which ethical and perceptual frameworks are best suited for both understanding and responding to climate change? Who is responsible, and what moral implications does this have? What assumptions about values, behavior, economics, and nature do we make when discussing climate change? How does climate change challenge our conceptions of nature, morality, society, and economics? Does climate change pose a special challenge to society, or does it simply amplify existing challenges?
Readings from major modern American, British, and Irish poets from the middle of the 19th century to the 1920s?specifically, from Whitman?s Leaves of Grass (1855) to T. S. Eliot?s The Waste Land (1922). Poets considered generally include Whitman, Dickinson, Hardy, Hopkins, Yeats, Pound, Stevens, Frost, Williams, and Eliot.
Examination of representative works by contemporary novelists. Authors generally include Barthelme, Bellow, Ellison, Gaddis, Hawkes, Mailer, Malamud, Morrison, Nabokov, Oates, Pynchon, Roth, Updike, and Walker.
Introduction to Geoffrey Chaucer’s major poetry, with particular attention to The Canterbury Tales. General language training will be offered at the start of the course. Special attention will be given to Chaucer’s narrative skill, his techniques of characterization, style, varieties of formal invention, and particular thematic preoccupations. Students are also encouraged to explore Chaucer’s writing as a lens onto late medieval society and culture.
Covers the tumultuous period from the fall of Charles Stuart Parnell, through the Easter Rising in 1916, and into the early years of national government in the 1930s. Readings in various genres (poetry, short story, novel, drama). Writers may include Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, Lady Gregory, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, Samuel Beckett, and Flann O’Brien.
Examines the large variety of writing produced in North America between 1600 and 1800, from indigenous/European encounters through the American Revolution and its aftermath. Genres discussed in their cultural contexts include colonization, captivity, slave, and travel narratives; sermons; familiar correspondence; autobiographies; poetry; drama; and the novel.
Interdisciplinary introduction to late medieval culture, using Dante, its foremost literary artist, as a focus. Attention is directed at literature, art, and music, in addition to political, religious, and social developments of the time. Emphasizes the continuity of Western tradition, especially the classical background of medieval culture and its transmission to the modern world.
An introduction to the history of New York through an exploration of fiction, poetry, plays, and films about the city, from Washington Irving?s A History of New York to Frank Miller?s graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns. Two lectures and one recitation section each week.
Considers contemporary science fiction as literature, social commentary, prophecy, and a reflection of recent and possible future trends in technology and society. Writers considered include such authors as Isaac Asimov, J. G. Ballard, Octavia Butler, Arthur C. Clark, Samuel Delany, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Robert Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Ursula K. Le Guin, Neal Stephenson, and Bruce Sterling.
Emphasis on the major poems (Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes) with some attention to the early poems and the prose. Traces the poet’s sense of vocation, analyzes the gradual development of the Miltonic style, and assesses Milton’s position in the history of English literature, politics, and theology.
Survey of major autobiographies, fiction, and poetry from the early national period to the eve of the New Negro Renaissance. Writers considered generally include Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, and Harriet Wilson.
The nineteenth century was the great age of the English novel. This course charts the evolution of the form during this period, exploring texts by major authors including Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Close attention to narrative, questions of mimesis and publishing practices will combine with the exploration of a range of significant contemporary discourses relating to shifting conceptions of gender, sexuality, religion, science, class, and race. These varied contexts will help us to consider formal, stylistic and thematic continuities as well as discontinuities and innovations. Taking advantage of our local surroundings, we will also explore changing representations of London and trace the enduring legacy of this period in the twenty-first-century city.
Prerequisite: V41.0185 or V41.0230. Survey of major texts?fiction, poetry, autobiography, and drama?from Du Bois?s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to contemporaries such as Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, and Toni Morrison. Discussion of the Harlem Renaissance and its key figures, including Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, and Ralph Ellison.
Intensive reading of six to eight plays of Shakespeare chosen from among the comedies, tragedies, and histories, with attention to formal, historical, and performance questions.
Introduction to the prose and poetry of the 17th century, an age of spiritual, scientific, and political crisis. Readings in Jonson, Donne, Bacon, Herbert, Marvell, Milton, Browne, and others.
Study of theme and technique in the American short story through readings in Irving, Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, Hemingway, Faulkner, Porter, and others, including representative regional writers.
This course will allow students to understand the origin and evolution of financial crises. Various policy options that may prevent and mitigate financial crises and the restructuring of the global financial architecture to prevent or limit future crises will be examined. Although the course will focus mostly on the US and on the most recent financial crisis, it will also examine earlier financial crises in the US (such as the Great Depression) and past financial bubbles such as the 17th century Dutch Tulip mania and the 1997 Asian crisis.
This course will analyze the principles and practices underlying the privatization of public enterprises and governmental functions. After evaluating the criticism directed at public ownership, the course examines an alternative to privatization — reforming state-owned enterprises and public administration, using examples from the U.S., Great Britain, and New Zealand. Various issues of privatization such as the roles of ownership and competition in stimulating efficiency, the implications of separation of ownership from management in distinguishing between private and public enterprises, conditions for successful divestiture programs, privatization’s employment impact, and contracting out of government services are discussed both in principle and through the use of examples from industrial, transition, and less developed economies.
Discusses the conceptual foundations and empirical evidence concerning the effects of private ownership on corporate perfor-mance. The corporate control mechanisms in the United States, Germany, Japan, and the emerging market economies of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union are reviewed. Particular attention is paid to the role of capital markets (takeovers and other shareholder control devices), banks and other financial institutions, and various corporate institutions (such as boards of directors and meetings of shareholders) in facilitating or hindering corporate control and the efficient allocation of resources.
The objective of the course is to train students to write on economic topics and perform economic analysis efficiently and quickly, as well as to develop rhetorical skills. Once a week, two students each present a paper on an assigned topic that has been distributed previously to the other students. The students not presenting that week critique the paper and the presentation, as will the instructor. Each paper is to be revised and submitted to the instructor with a cover sheet that indicates how the student dealt with each of the criticisms.
Experimental economics is predicated on the belief that economics, like other sciences, can be a laboratory science where economic theories are tested, rejected, and revised. This course reviews the methodology of doing such laboratory experiments and investigates the use of experiments in a wide variety of fields. These include competitive markets, auctions, public goods theory, labor economics, game theory, and individual choice theory. The course functions as a research seminar in which students present their work as it progresses during the semester. Students also get exposure to the experimental laboratory in the Department of Economics and the research performed there.
Prerequisites for students in Policy Concentration: Intermediate Microeconomics (ECON-UA 10) and Intermediate Macroeconomics (ECON-UA 12). Prerequisites for students in Theory Concentration: Microeconomic Analysis (ECON-UA 11) and Macroeconomic Analysis (ECON-UA 13). Economic underdevelopment in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Macroeconomic topics: economic growth, income distribution, poverty, and underdevelopment as a circular, self-reinforcing trap. Microeconomic topics: markets for land, labor, and credit. Emphasizes market fragmentation, limited information, and incentive problems. Such international issues as trading patterns, capital flows, and global financial crises are studied from the viewpoint of developing countries.
Analyzes the functioning of the labor market in both theoretical and statistical terms. Examines the determinants of wage and employment levels in perfect and imperfect labor markets, including the concept of education and training as human capital. Models of labor market dynamics are also examined, including those of job search and matching. The role of public policy in the functioning of labor markets is highlighted throughout.
In alternate years, stresses policy implications and the development of the theory. Analysis of government economic policies and behavior. Normative and positive economics; the fundamental welfare theorems. What goods should the government provide (public goods)? When should the government tax private behavior (externalities)? Income redistribution and the welfare program. Who pays the tax (tax incidence)? The role of debt policy. On what should taxes be levied (optimal taxation)?
Introduction to noncooperative game theory. Focuses on a rigorous development of the basic theory with economic applications such as competition among oligopolists, how standards are set, auction theory, and bargaining. The formal topics include games in strategic form, Bayesian games, and games in extensive form.
How firms behave in imperfectly-competitive markets. Uses game theory to understand strategic decisions. Topics include price discrimination; peak load pricing; productivity; Bertrand, Cournot, and Hotelling oligopoly models; entry; mergers and merger regulation; monopoly regulation; patents; auctions; and two-sided platforms. Moves from theoretical and mathematical models to real-world data and problem sets.
Focuses on international trade in goods, services, and capital. It serves as an introduction to international economic issues and as preparation for the department’s more advanced course in ECON-UA 324. The issues discussed include gains from trade and their distribution; analysis of protectionism; strategic trade barriers; the trade deficit; exchange rate determination; and government intervention in foreign exchange markets.
Application of statistics and economic theory to problems of formulating and estimating models of economic behavior. Matrix algebra is developed as the main tool of analysis in regression. Acquaints students with basic estimation theory and techniques in the regression framework and covers extensions such as specification error tests, heteroskedasticity, errors in variables, and simple time series models. An introduction to simultaneous equation modes and the concept of identification is provided.
The city as an economic organization. Urbanization trends, functional specialization, and the nature of growth within the city; organization of economic activity within the city and its outlying areas, the organization of the labor market, and problems of urban poverty; the urban public economy; housing and land-use problems; transportation problems; and special problems within the public sector.
Money supply; banking as an industry; banks as suppliers of money; the Federal Reserve System and monetary control; monetary theory; and contemporary monetary policy issues.
Rigorous examination of consumer choice, profit-maximizing behavior on the part of firms, and equilibrium in product markets. Topics include choice under uncertainty, strategic interactions between firms in noncompetitive environments, intertemporal decision making, and investment in public goods.
Study of aggregate economic analysis with special attention paid to the determination of the level of income, employment, and inflation. Critically examines both the theories and the policies associated with them.
Examines the manner in which producers, consumers, and resource owners acting through the market determine the prices and output of goods, the allocation of productive resources, and the functional distribution of incomes. The price system is seen as a network of interrelated decisions, with the market process serving to communicate information to decision makers.
Emphasizes the theory and structures of covalent bonded materials and develops greater insight into reaction mechanisms, plus the challenges and creativity leading to scientific discovery. This course is designed for students intending to become chemistry and biochemistry majors.
This is a course on a new field of research, which has been growing exponentially since the start of the twenty first century. The field deals primarily with the control of molecular structure on the nanometer scale through programming it by means of DNA secondary structures. The course will consist of a series of lectures by the instructor and then a series of presentations of recent papers in the field. A nascent textbook will be used as appropriate.
This course focuses on structure and theory in organic chemistry with a particular emphasis on the application of stereoelectronic and conformational effects on reaction mechanisms, catalysis and molecular recognition.
This one-semester course covers topics such as nomenclature, conformations, stereochemistry, chemical reactions, and synthesis of organic compounds. Fundamentals of biochemistry are introduced, including carbohydrates, lipids, amino acids, peptides, and nucleic acids.
Selected principles and applications of chemistry, with emphasis on the fundamental nature of chemistry. Basic course dealing with concepts of atomic and molecular structure, chemical bonding, solution chemistry, equilibrium, reaction rates, and properties of gases, liquids, and solids.
Introduction to molecular analysis of biomolecules. Selected experiments and instruction in analytical techniques used in biochemical research, including chromatography, spectrophotometry, and electrophoresis; isolation and characterization of selected biomolecules; kinetic analysis of enzymatic activity; analysis of protein-protein and protein-DNA interactions that direct basic biochemical pathways.
Introduction to the principles and practices of experimental methods widely used in analytical and research laboratories. Emphasizes understanding of background physicochemical theory as well as capabilities and limitations of methods and interpretations of data. Covers instrumental methods, such as UV/visible spectroscopy, FT-IR, NMR, and fluorescence, for the systematic characterization of compounds and the use of interfaced computers for data collection and spreadsheet analysis. Studies also include an introduction to computer modeling of molecular properties. Optional experiments include fluorescence studies of protein denaturation and laser studies of excited state kinetics.
This course constitutes a continuation of the study of chemistry of organic compounds. The material is presented in the functional group framework, incorporating reaction mechanisms. Topics include structure and bonding of organic materials, nomenclature, conformational analysis, stereochemistry, spectroscopy, and reactions of aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons, alcohols, ethers, amines, and carbonyl compounds. Multifunctional organic compounds are covered, including topics of relevance to biochemistry, such as carbohydrates, amino acids, peptides, and nucleic acids. Laboratories provide training in the syntheses of organic precursors in high yields and high purity needed for multistep procedures. An extensive research project involving unknown compounds is conducted. The use of IR and NMR spectroscopy is explored.
See General Chemistry I and Laboratory (CHEM-UA 125), above. Laboratories are a continuation of CHEM-UA 125, with emphasis on the analysis of quantitative data rather than its collection. Experiments are selected to provide illustration and reinforcement of the topics covered in the course, including solution chemistry, kinetics, equilibrium, buffers, solubility, and electrochemistry.
This course constitutes an introduction to the chemistry of organic compounds. The material is presented in the functional group framework, incorporating reaction mechanisms. Topics include structure and bonding of organic materials, nomenclature, conformational analysis, stereochemistry, spectroscopy, and reactions of aliphatic and aromatic hydrocarbons, alcohols, ethers, amines, and carbonyl compounds. Multifunctional organic compounds are covered, including topics of relevance to biochemistry, such as carbohydrates, amino acids, peptides, and nucleic acids. Laboratories provide training in the basic techniques of the organic chemistry laboratory, including crystallization, distillation, extraction, and other separation techniques, such as column chromatography. Experiments involving the synthesis of organic compounds are introduced, as well as qualitative organic analysis.
Provides students with a good basic knowledge of molecular modeling and a computational laboratory workbench for computer-based discovery research. The computer laboratory provides access to cutting-edge molecular modeling techniques and software and a hands-on research experience. From the course, the students would not only develop a practical understanding of computational methods (strengths, limitations, applicability), but also develop competence in applying these computational methods to molecular modeling.
This course constitutes an introduction to inorganic and physical chemistry for science majors, engineers, and the prehealth professions. Emphasizes the fundamental principles and theories of chemistry. Topics include the theories of atomic structure; stoichiometry; properties of gases, liquids, solids, and solutions; periodicity of the properties of elements; chemical bonding; equilibrium; kinetics, thermodynamics; acid-base reactions; electrochemistry, coordination chemistry, and nuclear chemistry. The underlying unity of chemistry is a basic theme. Laboratories provide an introduction to basic techniques used in experimental chemistry. Many experiments use a computer interface to provide experience in modern methods of data collection and to allow thorough analysis of experimental results. Proper laboratory procedures, chemical safety rules, and environmentally sound methods of chemical disposal and waste minimization are important components of the course. Experiments are selected to provide illustration and reinforcement of course topics, including manual and automated titrations, basic chromatography, stoichiometry, thermodynamics, and colorimetry.
Continuation of V25.0651. Develops the close connection between the microscopic world of quantum mechanics and the macroscopic world of thermodynamics. Topics include properties of gases, elementary statistical thermodynamics, and thermodynamics of single and multicomponent systems.
An introduction to quantum mechanics–general principles and applications to important model systems. Covers electronic structure of one- and many-electron atoms, theory of chemical bonding in diatomic and polyatomic molecules. Includes principles and applications of molecular spectroscopy–rotational, vibrational, electronic, and nuclear magnetic resonance. Elements of photochemistry are also included.
This course explores unruly images, bodies, faces, spaces, aesthetics, and even feelings that exist at the margins of categorization, making these powerful subjects for artistic work. We will manipulate image-making tools and give form to expressions that reveal the hidden structures of power. Through lectures, discussions, workshops, and readings, we will look at topics such as memes and glitch art, cyberface and AR filters, monsters and glitched bodies, uncanny valley and AI images, as well as liminal space and collaborative world-building. We will pay particular attention to selected writings from Hito Steyerl, Legacy Russell, Rosa Menkman, and Adam Greenfield, and apply these critiques to emerging perceptual technologies (volumetric 3D capturing, machine learning, AR/VR, web-based 3D game engines) that students will use to create their projects.
An intense hands-on study of practical techniques and methods of software engineering. Topics include advanced object-oriented design, design patterns, refactoring, code optimization, universal modeling language, threading, user interface design, enterprise application development, and development tools. All topics are integrated and applied during the semester-long group project. The aim of the project is to prepare students for dynamics in a real workplace. Members of the group meet on a regular basis to discuss the project and to assign individual tasks. Students are judged primarily on the final project presentations.
Object-oriented programming has emerged as a significant software development methodology. This course introduces the important concepts of object-oriented design and languages, including code reuse, data abstraction, inheritance, and dynamic overloading. It covers in depth those features of Java and C that support object-oriented programming and gives an overview of other object-oriented languages of interest. Significant programming assignments, stressing object-oriented design.
This course looks at the terms and conditions of Japanese animation (primarily, though not exclusively, anime) as, in many ways, a new and unique mode of expression. The course is framed in which anime might, or might not, shift earlier modes of expression (both literary and animated): the prevalence of mythology in animation and the tension between mythology and ideology; the importance of genre; and the impact of ?old? and ?new? media on narrative structure and reception. Implications of these conditions for thinking about ?Japanese? culture are also considered.
This is a post-advanced level language course for students looking to pursue a career in the field of business or economics related to China. It is designed for students: (a) to develop conceptual framework to understand China’s economic reform, its integration into the global economy, and the subsequent challenges and opportunities for its economy, companies and society at large; (b) to learn the specialized vocabulary, phrases and syntax used for oral and written communication in authentic business settings. Course materials will include journal articles on various aspects of China’s economic developments, its evolving macro and micro economic policy, as well as genuine business case studies of both domestic and foreign companies operating in China. In addition to Advanced level proficiency in Chinese (completion of EAST-UA 206 or equivalent), this course also requires basic background in business and/or economics.
Examines key theoretical and methodological issues in the study of Japanese cinema, such as the connections between Japanese films and cultural traditions, the effect of Americanization and modernization, the formation of national identity and specificity, and the ?otherness? of Japanese cinematic form.
This course will provide a broad overview of social neuroscience. We will consider how social processes are implemented at the neural level, but also how neural mechanisms help give rise to social phenomena and cultural experiences. Many believe that the large expansion of the human brain evolved due to the complex demands of dealing with social others—competing or cooperating with them, deceiving or empathizing with them, understanding or misjudging them. What kind of “social brain” has this evolutionary past left us with? In this course, we will review core principles, theories and methods guiding social neuroscience, and research examining the brain basis of social processes, including theory of mind; empathy; emotion; reading faces, bodies, and voices; morality; among others. Overall, this course will introduce students to the field of social neuroscience and its multi-level approach to understanding the brain in its social context.
This course will focus on U.S. foreign policy in Asia since 1945. The ways U.S. global interests and concerns sought to shape Asian realities (and were shaped in turn by them) will be the touchstone for examining the Cold War in Asia. We will examine the following topics: the occupation of Japan and early US global economic visions; the US and the Chinese revolution before the Korean War; the Korean War and the isolation of China; the Vietnam War and the Kennedy/Johnson years; Nixon’s global geopolitical vision and his policies towards Vietnam, China, and Japan; Carter and the meaning of human rights diplomacy in Asia; Reagan and the Asian issues involved in an intensified Cold War against Russia; George H. W. Bush and Asia’s place in “a New World Order;” and finally, the Clinton and George W. Bush years. Throughout the course, we shall examine key de-classified National Security documents, interpreting their meaning and language, while carefully assessing the arguments used to justify American policy.
An introduction to this complex religion, emphasizing its history, teachings, and practices. Discusses its doctrinal development in India, then emphasizes certain local practices: Buddhism and the family in China; Buddhism, language, and hierarchy in Japan; the politics of Buddhist Tibet; and Buddhist art. Finally the course touches on Buddhism in the United States.
The aim of this introductory course is to develop a comparative understanding of the national independence movements in China, India, and Vietnam, as well as the context within which they unfolded, in the period 1885-1962. The course will introduce students to some of the figures in modern Asian history who played a major role in the transition of India and Vietnam from colonial subordination to independent nationhood and of China from its semi-colonial status to liberation. The principal figures whose writings will be studied and compared are Mohandas Gandhi, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh in order to develop a third angle of comparison. The course will give due attention to other relevant figures such as Gokhale, Tilak, Jinnah, and Nehru in the case of India; Li Hongzhang, Sun Yatsen, Chen Duxiu, La Dazhao, and Chiang Kai-shek in the case of China; Phan Boi Chau in the case of Vietnam.
Designed to help students understand and appreciate the linguistic and aesthetic features of Chinese language rendered in poetic form and to improve their ability to read and interpret authentic texts in general. Integrates language learning with poetry study, introduces the formal structure of Chinese classical poetry and surveys its stylistic variations at different historical conjunctures. Conducted primarily in Chinese. English translations of the poems are provided as references from time to time.
Designed to enhance Chinese proficiency through reading authentic materials rich in cultural connotations. Stresses primarily reading and writing. The objectives are: to develop speaking skills needed for semi-formal or formal presentation on academic topics; to develop specialized vocabulary; to further improve reading speed and develop skills needed to conduct textual analysis on and, on some occasions, translate texts with syntactical sophistication and stylistic nuance; to develop responsiveness to and ability to interpret linguistic features of different genres and writing styles; to advance strategies for autonomous learning of Chinese from an analytical perspective.
This course is designed to give students an introduction to basic syntax, grammar, and vocabulary of Classical Chinese through close readings of authentic texts. Almost all these texts are historically significant canon texts that are extremely rich in classical Chinese cultural connotation. They are selected from a wide variety of genres, such as historical literature, philosophical and political writings, written correspondence, poetry, essay, some of which are unique to Chinese culture. The course aims to develop the students’ reading and comprehension skills in this highly stylized form of written Chinese, acquaint students not only with the classic Chinese cultural heritage but also underlying working mechanism that is in many ways relevant to the form and usage of today’s Mandarin Chinese.
This intensive intermediate course covers the second-year Korean material in a semester. The course is designed for students with intermediate-level speaking proficiency but with reading and writing ability equivalent to a student who has completed elementary level Korean, who can understand, with near-standard pronunciation and without basic major grammatical errors, conversational Korean related to daily-life situations and simple sociocultural topics. It aims to further strengthen students’ correct pronunciation and intonation, grammatical accuracy, ability to understand differences in nuances and overall competence in reading and writing.
Close readings in contemporary Japanese writings in social commentaries, history and literature. Emphasizes furthering reading and writings skills, and to a lesser extent speaking and listening. Students develop further strategies for autonomous learning.
This intensive elementary course covers the first-year Korean material in a single semester. The course is designed for students with some Korean-speaking background, who can understand and speak basic to intermediate conversational Korean but do not have previous formal language training in reading and writing. It aims to develop students’ correct pronunciation, grammatical accuracy and overall competence in reading and writing.
This course is designed to assist advanced students of Korean language as they continue to learn skills in conversation, reading, and writing. Reading Korean newspapers and visiting Korean Web sites are integrated as part of the course’s instruction.
This course is designed to assist advanced students of Korean language as they continue to learn skills in conversation, reading, and writing. Reading Korean newspapers and visiting Korean Web sites are integrated as part of the course’s instruction.
The Korean language at the intermediate level: phonetics, grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. Emphasizes the development of communicative skills in speaking, reading, and writing. Develops the language’s major social and cultural contexts. Requires students to write about and discuss various topics.
Continuing study of Japanese at the advanced level. Stresses reading comprehension, spoken fluency, and composition; uses original materials, such as newspaper/magazine articles, TV news, and video. Introduces additional Kanji characters. Advanced use of Japanese and character dictionaries.
Continuing study of Japanese at the intermediate level. Stresses reading comprehension, spoken fluency, and composition, with materials organized around social and cultural topics; continues to introduce new Kanji characters.
Designed to further develop proficiency in speaking and writing through readings on and discussions of socio-cultural topics relevant to today’s China. Focuses on improving reading comprehension and writing skills. The objectives are: to further improve oral communicative competence by incorporating semi-formal or formal usages; to acquire vocabulary and patterns necessary for conducting semi-formal or formal discussions of socio-cultural topics; to increase reading speed of texts with more advanced syntax; to learn to make context-based guess about the meaning of a new word, conduct sentence analysis and solve textual problems with the aid of dictionaries; to write and present more fully developed narratives or reasoned and structured arguments in length; to learn to employ basic rhetoric methods; to learn to appreciate stylistic usage of Chinese language.
Designed to consolidate the student’s overall aural-oral proficiency. Focuses gradually on the written aspect of Chinese. The objectives are: to be able to obtain information from extended conversation; to both express and expound on, in relative length, feelings and opinions on common topics; to expand vocabulary and learn to decipher meaning of compound words; to develop reading comprehension of extended narrative, expository and simple argumentative passages; to solve non-complex textual problems with the aid of dictionaries; to write in relative length personal narratives, informational narratives, comparison and discussion of viewpoints with level-appropriate vocabulary and grammatical accuracy, as well as basic syntactical cohesion; to continue being acquainted with aspects of Chinese culture and society related to the course materials.
Designed to consolidate the student’s overall aural-oral proficiency. Focuses gradually on the written aspect of Chinese. The objectives are: to be able to obtain information from extended conversation; to both express and expound on, in relative length, feelings and opinions on common topics; to expand vocabulary and learn to decipher meaning of compound words; to develop reading comprehension of extended narrative, expository and simple argumentative passages; to solve non-complex textual problems with the aid of dictionaries; to write in relative length personal narratives, informational narratives, comparison and discussion of viewpoints with level-appropriate vocabulary and grammatical accuracy, as well as basic syntactical cohesion; to continue being acquainted with aspects of Chinese culture and society related to the course materials.
Designed to further develop proficiency in speaking and writing through readings on and discussions of socio-cultural topics relevant to today’s China. Focuses on improving reading comprehension and writing skills. The objectives are: to further improve oral communicative competence by incorporating semi-formal or formal usages; to acquire vocabulary and patterns necessary for conducting semi-formal or formal discussions of socio-cultural topics; to increase reading speed of texts with more advanced syntax; to learn to make context-based guess about the meaning of a new word, conduct sentence analysis and solve textual problems with the aid of dictionaries; to write and present more fully developed narratives or reasoned and structured arguments in length; to learn to employ basic rhetoric methods; to learn to appreciate stylistic usage of Chinese language.
Designed to develop and reinforce language skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing as it relates to everyday life situations. The objectives are: to master the Chinese phonetic system (pinyin and tones) with satisfactory pronunciation; to understand the construction of commonly used Chinese Characters (both simplified and traditional) and learn to write them correctly; to understand and use correctly basic Chinese grammar and sentence structures; to build up essential vocabulary; to read and write level appropriate passages; to become acquainted with aspects of Chinese culture and society related to the course materials.
Study of the drama and theatre of America since 1900, including Eugene O?Neill, Susan Glaspell, the Group Theatre, Thornton Wilder, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, Sam Shepard, David Mamet, David Rabe, Arthur Kopit, August Wilson, George Wolfe, David Henry Hwang, John Guare, and Maria Irene Fornes.
Explores the relationship between two kinds of theories: theories of meaning and theories of perfor-mance. Among the theories of meaning to be studied are semiotics, deconstruction, feminism, psychoanalysis, new historicism, and poExplores the relationship between two kinds of theories: theories of meaning and theories of perfor-mance. Among the theories of meaning to be studied are semiotics, deconstruction, feminism, psychoanalysis, new historicism, and postmodernism. Theories of practice include naturalism, Dadaism, futurism, epic theatre, theatre of cruelty, poor theatre, and environmental theatre. Theories are examined through theoretical essays and representative plays.
The study of African American dramatic traditions from early minstrelsy to turn-of-the-century musical extravaganzas; from the Harlem Renaissance folk plays to realistic drama of the 1950s; from the militant protest drama of the 1960s to the historical and experimental works of the present. Issues of race, gender, class; of oppression and empowerment; of marginality and assimilation are explored in the works of such playwrights as Langston Hughes, Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Kennedy, Charles Fuller, George C. Wolfe, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Anna Deavere Smith. The sociohistorical context of each author is also briefly explored.
This course (different each time) examines different traditions, innovations, representations, and locations of Asian theatre. The influence of major aesthetic texts such as the Natyasastra and the Kadensho is studied in relationship to specific forms of theatre such as Kagura, Bugaku, Noh, Bunraku, Kabuki, Shingeki, Jingxi, Geju, Zaju, Kathakali, Kathak, Odissi, Chau, Manipuri, Krishnattam, Kutiyattam, Raslila, and P?ansori. The dramatization of religious beliefs, myths, and legends is examined in a contemporary context. Different focuses include Middle Eastern performance, Japanese theatre, traditional Asian performances on contemporary stages, religion and drama in Southeast Asia, and traditions of India.
Combines the study of drama as literary text with the study of theatre as its three-dimensional translation, both theoretically and practically. Drawing on the rich theatrical resources of New York City, students see approximately 12 plays, covering classical to contemporary and traditional to experimental theatre. On occasion, films or videotapes of plays are used to supplement live performances. Readings include plays and essays in theory and criticism.
Introduction to the reading of Shakespeare. Examines about 10 plays each term, generally in chronological order. First term: the early comedies, tragedies, and histories up to Hamlet. Second term: the later tragedies, the problem plays, and the romances, concluding with The Tempest.
How do humans and other animals learn, and how do we study this in the laboratory? What is the neurobiological basis of learning and memory? What are the genetic and environmental factors that have shaped the learning process throughout evolution? What other cognitive processes influence learning, and how can we apply this knowledge to our own studies? In trying to address these questions, this seminar gives an overview of modern neuroscience and psychology research on learning and memory, and illustrates how cognitive science can be used to develop strategies for effective learning, while also discussing implications for societal issues, disorders, and artificial intelligence.
In this course we focus on four contemporary novels in which the world of the character, the narrator, or the author, is read through the lens of a literary classic. In each case, the reading and rewriting of the primary text involves temporal and spatial displacements (from the 18th to the 20th century, from Europe to the Caribbean and to the South Pacific) that generate shifting perspectives and a constant reshuffling of center and periphery. Between a reverential affiliation to the past and a creative misreading and rewriting of it, these intertextual encounters with « great » Western literary works insistently raise the questions of identity, originality, and “writing back”. Exploring these questions will therefore also involve drawing on comparative, translation, and postcolonial studies.
With extensive readings from Horace?s, Juvenal?s, and Persius?s satires, this class traces the development of the satiric mode from its earliest beginnings in Rome to its flowering under the Empire. The relationship of satire to the social world of Rome, including its treatment of money, women, political figures, and social climbers, is also examined.
A comparative course that encompasses vertebrate and invertebrate physiology. Extensive discussion of the anatomy and physiology of the human cardiovascular system, the human lung, the human kidney, and the human brain. There is a focus on the physiological integration of organ systems, underlying cellular/molecular mechanisms, and adaptation. Ventilation, organism scale and environment, blood, the cardiovascular system, acid-base regulation, osmoregulation, feeding, digestion and absorption, the nervous system and behavior, muscle, endocrine function, and reproduction are studied. Special topics include human physiology in extreme environments (high-altitude and diving), a detailed analysis of mammalian vision, animal sleep and hibernation, and the comparative physiology of animals that live at deep-sea hydrothermal vents. The laboratory includes traditional physiology experiments, as well as an introduction to bioinformatics.
Lecture and laboratory course that focuses on how the brain uses both sensory and stored information to generate behavior. Lectures and laboratories cover four main areas: sensory process, learning and memory, motivational and attentional mechanisms, and the motor system. Laboratories employ a range of electrophysiological techniques, lesions and pharmacological manipulations, and various behavioral techniques to examine the integrative processes by which the brain governs behavior.
This is an upper-level undergraduate course that will teach students about the environmental determinants of disease vectors, and the molecular techniques used to measure prevalence of a pathogen in these vectors. Students will partake in a semester-long research project on Lyme disease, the most prevalent vector-borne disease in the United States. The aim of the project is to determine the prevalence of Borrelia burgdorferi, the Lyme disease causative agent, in tick populations from selected New Jersey or New York forests. Students will collect ticks, bring them back to the lab and analyze them for the presence of the Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria. Then collected and analyzed data will be fed into epidemiological models to assess human risk of Lyme disease in the studied areas.
Cloning a gene. A practical course designed to provide the interested student with experience in basic molecular biology techniques, including gene amplification by polymerase chain reaction (PCR), DNA isolation and modification, bacterial transformation, preparation of plasmid DNA, and restriction enzyme analyses.
Introduction to the methodology used to study cell structure and function. In the laboratory, students study the fundamentals of cell biology and the experimental approaches used to examine the cell. Experimental topics cover cellular, subcellular, and macromolecule localization; biochemical analysis of the cell; and cell culture techniques.
Animals are one of life’s most successful lineages, occupying nearly every environment. This course provides an introduction to the diversity of animal form and function in the context of phylogeny and evolution, with a focus on the invertebrates, the majority of animals. Lectures will be devoted alternately to individual branches of the tree of animals and to common themes in the ways animals have evolved to fit and shape their environments. We will discuss morphology, physiology, reproduction, development, and ecology. We will discuss the unique genomic and molecular characteristics of each branch of animal life, with attention to the ways that nonmodel organisms can provide insights into core cellular and molecular processes, including cell-cell communication and biomineralization. We will also discuss the intersection of these animals with human interests, including economic zoology, ecosystem services, and medicine. In laboratory and field exercises, students will learn to collect and identify invertebrate animals and to form and test hypotheses about their attributes.
Introduction to human reproductive anatomy, physiology and endocrinology, conception, pregnancy and development of the human embryo, childbirth, and principles of human heredity. Related topics are contraception and sexually transmitted diseases.
Introductory lecture course covering the fundamental principles of neuroscience. Topics include principles of brain organization, structure and ultrastructure of neurons, neurophysiology and biophysics of excitable cells, synaptic transmission, neurotransmitter systems and neurochemistry, neuropharmacology, neuroendocrine relations, molecular biology of neurons, development and plasticity of the brain, aging and diseases of the nervous system, organization of sensory and motor systems, structure and function of cerebral cortex, and modeling of neural systems.
Prerequisite: Principles of Biology II (BIOL-UA 12) or Environmental Systems Science (ENVST-UA 100). Investigates the life and resources underneath New York, with a focus on energy, transportation, and water (potable and waste). Concludes with the biotic components of New York’s fascinating dendritic underground environment. Features hands-on data collection and field trips (including one all-day field trip).
Study of the evolutionary development of backboned animals, with emphasis on the mammals. Treats the major organ systems of vertebrate groups, with stress on structural-functional interpretations. Laboratory work includes detailed dissection of representative vertebrates. Field trips to the American Museum of Natural History help illustrate some of the topics.
We are currently living in a time where city residents outnumber rural residents. In addition, the projected expansion of human population growth is largely predicted to occur in urban areas. Urban Ecology is an interdisciplinary and emerging field of research focused on the consequences of urbanization on ecological processes. In addition to a physically transformed natural landscape, cities are unique from other systems in terms of hydrology, temperature, noise, air quality and many other abiotic factors. In this course we will investigate the consequences of urban constructs on ecological systems. We will discuss factors such as nutrient cycling, organismal behavior and phenology, disease, and the drivers and patterns of biodiversity in urban systems. We will also talk about green spaces, urban planning, and the future of these expanding manmade landscapes. A significant component of this course will involve discussion of current literature. This is an upper-level reasoning course designed primarily for students majoring in biology (ecology track) and environmental studies.
Due to recent advancements in High Throughput Genomics technology we are able to study the function of many genes. We have the ability to compare genes in normal vs. diseased cells, to help us better understand the molecular mechanisms of the different diseases. In this course students will learn how to program in R, a powerful statistical programming language, use statistical methods to analyze real biomedical data, and learn how to interpret the results.
This laboratory course applies concepts learned in the Molecular and Cell Biology course (BIOL-UA 21) to a molecular biology research project. The research project will introduce students to standard genetic and biochemical techniques common in a molecular biology lab, such as DNA isolation, agarose-gel electrophoresis, and transformation. The project also will provide students with a hands-on understanding of how modern DNA-sequencing technology, along with bioinformatic tools, can be used to discover genetic differences and understand cellular function.
Introduction to immunology, with attention to the genetics, molecular, and cell biology of antibody production; T-cell mediated immune responses; and innate immunity. Topics include the nature of antigens, hypersensitivities, transplantation, cytokines, autoimmunity, cancer, response to infection, and vaccines.
Students investigate the relationship between abiotic and biotic components of an ecosystem. Building upon an introduction to environmental factors, students examine the interplay between these components at the organismal, population, community and ecosystem levels. Throughout the course, we discuss current ecological applications and issues, such as habitat destruction, sustainability, disease, invasive species, and global climate change. Intended for students majoring in biology (ecology track) and environmental studies.
Introduction to the principles and experimental strategies of developmental biology. Covers the cellular and molecular basis for pattern in the embryo; the determination of cell fate; cell differentiation; the genes controlling these events; how they are identified and studied; and the cellular proteins that affect shape, movement, and signaling between cells. Special emphasis on the experimental basis for our knowledge of these subjects from studies in fruit flies, nematodes, frogs, plants, and mice.
Intended for majors and minors in biology as a comprehensive description of microbes, the most abundant and diverse organisms on the planet. Organized into four modules: the microbial cell, microbial genomics, microbial development and adaptation, and microbial interactions with the host and the environment. Through lectures and critical analysis of primary literature, students are led to realize how the advent of genomics has revolutionized microbiology, a scientific discipline that is more than a century old.
Prerequisite: Fundamentals of Ecology (BIOL UA-63) (may be taken concurrently). Students learn the skills needed to design and implement field experiments, interpret data and present ecological research. While investigating real habitats (forests, salt marshes, urban landscapes), students perform biological surveys and measure abiotic parameters. Ecological techniques are nested within questions in biodiversity and community structure, invasion biology, urban ecology, habitat alteration and climate change. During approximately half of the lectures, class meets at off-campus field sites. Students should not schedule meetings or classes either directly before or after class time.
In-depth study of cell biology, with an emphasis on the molecular aspects of cell function. Topics include protein structure and synthesis, gene expression and its regulation, cell replication, and specialized cell structure and function. The course provides an introduction to genomics and bioinformatics and examines developmental biology, evolution, and systems biology.
Introductory course mainly for science majors, designed to acquaint the student with the fundamental principles and processes of biological systems. Subjects include the basics of chemistry pertinent to biology, biochemistry and cell biology, genetics and molecular biology, anatomy and physiology, neurobiology, ecology, population genetics, and history and classification of life forms and evolution. Laboratory exercises illustrate the basics of experimental biology, molecular biology, biochemistry, and genetics, as well as the diversity of life forms and organ systems.
The transition to college is a multifaceted challenge for many students, as they encounter new academic, interpersonal, emotional, and financial pressures. One third of undergraduates report feeling depression, and over half report feeling overwhelming anxiety. This course is grounded in the current understanding of adolescent and young adult development, neuroscience, and positive psychology. Our aim is to teach undergraduates both theoretical and empirically informed means to moderate risk and enhance resilience, by building knowledge and skills in key areas proven to enhance wellness, including communication, executive functioning, social support, self-efficacy, emotion regulation, and sense of purpose. Students will learn about healthy exercise, nutrition, and sleep habits, and develop skills in core components of cognitive-behavior therapy, mindfulness, and organizational skills.
This course reviews typical children’s behavior problems in school settings and offers a primer in evidence-based behavior management tools. The class addresses common causes of disruptive behavior, such as Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and related conditions. Students will be instructed in effective behavior management strategies appropriate for settings, such as schools, camps, and sports programs. Techniques will include selective attention, behavioral daily report cards, token economies, and limit setting. The theoretical and research bases for these strategies will be explored. Students will practice skills with live coaching from the instructor. One required field trip to the NYU Child Study Center will allow students to view how these tools are used in real life clinical settings. This course is of particular interest to those considering careers in child psychology or psychiatry, pediatrics, or general or special education, especially those seeking experience as student aides, camp counselors, or Special Education Itinerant Teachers (SEITs).
Do parents always know what’s best for their kids? Should a child be allowed to refuse lifesaving treatment? Is it moral to include minors in research, or maybe morally necessary? When can a teen’s right to change gender outweigh parental permission? In this course, we study the doctor-patient relationship where the patient is a child – a child with family, a child with legal rights, and a child with a developing brain. We review the principles of medical ethics and the concept of informed consent, and focus on the child’s own development in her capacities to reason and make medical decisions in these contexts. We then join current debates on sexual health, psychiatric treatment, end-of-life care and research, and we raise new question about how doctor’s, kids, and families decide.
How do we conceptualize the elusive phenomenon of “play”? Is there a biological imperative to play? How does play influence child development and maintain psychological health as we mature? In this course we survey the historical, scientific, clinical, cultural, and artistic perspectives on the role of play through the life cycle. Is the play-element a catalyst for creativity and innovation? We explore various theories of creativity through the lens of neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and mysticism. We consider the use of improvisation and free play in life, art, clinical work, and scientific discovery. Topics include: exploration of play styles, observations of animal play, the role of play in child development and education, how play influences attachment and social bonding, the aesthetics and cultural value of play, the consequences of play deprivation, the art and science of creativity, and the relationship between creativity, mental illness, and genius.
What memories do you have from before you were three? Probably not many, but your early experiences continue to shape who you are today. This course takes an intimate look at the trajectory of human development from before conception, through birth and infancy, and continuing up to early preschool for children and their parents. At each stage we will consider influences that can push development off track. We will employ a clinical mental health perspective to inform assessment of social and emotional problems in young children and present current approaches to treatment. Course readings are pulled from clinical early childhood mental health and parent mental health sources and supplemented by documentary videos.
What makes a person successful? What contributes to failure? What do these terms really mean anyway? This course is designed for students who want to learn about processes known to contribute to success (and failure) in a wide variety of domains. Students will be introduced to an exciting area of study called Systems Science that offers a powerful and useful perspective to understand how success (and failure) happen. Throughout the course, we will consider the occurrence of success and failure in a wide variety of systems including biological systems, ecologies, families, peer groups, business organizations, and societies. Human beings are comprised of systems, and we grow up, live, and work as part of systems. This course will particularly emphasize human development and encourage students to apply the concepts and knowledge they have acquired to those systems they most want to understand and/or within which they most wish to succeed.
Have you ever wondered how society impacts mental health? In this class, we will take a public health approach to mental health, examining how social factors (e.g., discrimination, media, poverty, education, and trauma) influence mental health, and what it means to think about and measure a population’s health. We will consider the pros and cons of various methods to improve child, adolescent, and family mental health within the context of our current mental health system. Course readings mainly come from the field of public health, but also include popular media and Internet sources.
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.
How do different cultures view mental health and illness? Why do some ethnic groups readily accept mental health care while others generally avoid the psychiatrist or psychologist at all costs? How does bicultural or multicultural identity and minority status affect one’s psychological development? This course seeks to explore what we know about how culture, ethnicity, race and minority status affect the mental health of children, adolescents, and young adults in modern America. We will start by studying the process of acculturation and mental health issues specific to immigrant youth and children of immigrants. We will delve into the cultural aspects of identity development, family dynamics, parenting, stigma, and mental health disparities and then segue into stereotypes and intergroup bias. Readings will draw from the growing body of research literature, and examples from popular arts, media and entertainment will be incorporated as supplemental material for class discussion. Students will review current treatments and participate in class discussions. Students of all backgrounds will be encouraged to explore mental health and illness with a broadened cultural perspective.
Are 20-somethings really overeducated, afraid of commitment, self-centered, and spendthrift? It is a fact that people in most countries are marrying, having children, and becoming financially independent at a later age than in any previous generation. In the last 10 years a critical new developmental period between adolescence and adulthood has started to gain recognition. “Emerging Adulthood” has been characterized as the age of identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling “in-between,” and infinite possibilities. This course will analyze whether this theory has validity, explore the factors that contribute to diverging developmental pathways, review the typical life of the American 20-something, and uncover the truth behind the stereotypes.
How do children learn right from wrong? Today’s youth face an onslaught of mixed messages about morality. Parents and teachers champion honesty, integrity and empathy, while sports stars use steroids, music and video games glorify sexual violence, and politicians pander for votes based on prejudice and fear. At the same time, children are confronted with uniquely modern moral challenges, as they navigate bullying and privacy invasion on the Internet, easily accessible drugs of abuse, and gang and relationship violence. This course will examine how children negotiate these challenges and learn moral principles, using perspectives from developmental neurobiology, evolutionary biology, philosophy, and multiple theoretical frameworks within cognitive and social psychology. Topics will include gender, culture, socioeconomic status, education, and parenting and their influence on moral development from infancy through adolescence.
Complementary and alternative treatments comprise the most rapidly expanding segment of American healthcare. This course will examine the role of non-conventional care in the mental wellness of children, adolescents and young adults. We will survey the historical, clinical, and scientific aspects of mind-body treatments, biologically-based alternative therapies, spirituality, and the traditional medical systems of China and India. In addition, we will investigate the social, political, and economic forces influencing the role and status of complementary and alternative practices in America. Students will assess these practices by participating in class discussion, reviewing research literature, and engaging in several group experiential exercises.
Sexual identity is central to our sense of who we are and how we relate to the world. The development of this identity is essential to becoming a well-rounded, effective, and high functioning adult, and failure to develop a cohesive sexual identity can lead to dysfunction. Sexual development involves a complex interplay of biological, psychological and sociological components. Sexual differentiation begins in utero, as the fetus is exposed to hormones and growth factors. As children age, their primary and secondary sex organs develop, and their ideas about the function, use and meaning of these organs change. At each stage the environment, social milieu, and hormones, among other factors, influence the direction of these changes. In this course we will explore the impact of sexual identity development on the mental health of children and adolescents.
What is the impact of our upbringing? This course provides an overview of child development with the goal of understanding the complexity of human growth, adaptation, and responses to adversity. To this end, we will trace a variety of overlapping trajectories, including the development of cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, and moral capacities. The course reviews historical and modern-day developmental theories as well as more complex interpersonal constructs, such as family systems, peer relations, gender and sexual identity, and cultural variation. Special emphasis is placed upon examining the dynamic interplay between biology and environment. The course consists of two interactive lectures per week based upon introductory readings on child development. Students are also assigned one film to view at home each week to illustrate the myriad of ways in which human beings evolve and adapt through life’s transitions and challenges.
Every childhood is fraught with complications, but some children are exposed to traumatic experiences that have a lasting impact on their development and health. Many children in New York City are still reeling from the effects of September 11, yet these numbers pale in comparison to the more than three million reported cases of child abuse and neglect in the United States annually, in addition to the many more cases that go unreported. This course examines the neurobiological and psychological effects of trauma on children, adolescents, and their families. We investigate the impact of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse and neglect, war, terrorism, natural disasters, bereavement, and medical illness. In addition, we explore the concepts of vulnerability and resilience to discover why most affected children successfully traverse their trauma. Finally, we discuss the treatment modalities commonly employed with traumatized children, adolescents, and their families.
The independent study program offers upper-division students the opportunity to investigate an advanced topic with a faculty member in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Areas of study may include research methods, clinical interviewing, systems of care, and education and training.
Adolescence is a remarkable time of growth and development; in just a few years, children transition dramatically towards adulthood across multiple domains. While adolescence is physically the healthiest period of the lifespan, it is also marked by an enormous rise in morbidity and mortality. This seeming paradox can be explained, in part, by biological and psychological changes during puberty that affect emotion regulation, cognition, and consequent risk-taking behavior. At the turn of the twentieth century, adolescence was described as a developmental period inevitably filled with “storm and stress.” In what ways does this vision of adolescence still apply? How should current scientific findings inform our understanding of the propensity for risk-taking behavior during this period (including substance use, increasing sexual activity, and disordered eating)? In exploring the factors that shape emotions, behavior, and emerging identity during adolescence, this course will examine such questions from biological and psychosocial perspectives.
Considers children’s and adolescents’ literature as a rich, untapped source of insight into child development for students of psychology, child development, and related disciplines. Over the last century, a vibrant, many-faceted literature for young people has grown in tandem with our understanding of child and adolescent psychology to pre-sent young readers with an increasingly finely calibrated perspective on such basic developmental issues as the formation of trust, the emergence of a sense of autonomy, and the complexities of family and peer relationships. Students explore these and other topics as they read and discuss a wide range of picture books, longer fiction, and relevant professional literature.
Approximately 72 percent of youth in the United States report using alcohol at least once and 47 percent report using illicit drugs at least once by the time they reach 12th grade. While the majority of youth who use substances will not develop a substance abuse disorder, substance abuse and addiction are major public health problems affecting approximately 9 percent of the U.S. population age 12 and older. The majority of individuals with substance abuse disorders began using substances during adolescence or even childhood. This course briefly reviews the classes of psychoactive substances, including alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs and their basic neurophysiological effects before exploring the historical, social, and psychological factors related to substance use and abuse in adolescents and children. The second half of the course considers substance abuse prevention, treatment, and policy related to children and adolescents.
After spending our early lives with our parents, what can we say about how they influenced our personalities and development? How have our parents affected what we learn, how we act, and how we manage our health? Just as you have wondered about these questions, so have scientists and professionals. We study parenting styles in detail to identify qualities that foster healthy child development. The course reviews research on the importance of parenting practices within a family context. Students also learn how to interact effectively with parents, how to mobilize parents, and what efforts have been successful in changing detrimental parenting actions. This course is for the curious and those interested in careers in education, health, and mental health.
Consuming media has far outstripped reading storybooks or playing make-believe as the average American child’s favorite pastime. Children between the ages of two and 18 spend an average of five-and-a-half hours a day using some form of media. This course reviews the current literature on how media use affects children’s mental health, as well as their cognitive, emotional, and social development. Designed for those who wish to learn to think critically, this course provides a comprehensive, research-oriented review of how children and adolescents are influenced by the media. Discussions include an examination of controversial issues, such as media’s effects on children’s violent behavior and substance use, as well as the potential benefits of media.
This course covers the fundamentals of human brain development from birth to young adulthood. The focus is on normal brain functioning, but illustrative pathological development and dysfunctional conditions are reviewed as well, such as developmental dyslexia, autistic disorders, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Once students have developed a foundational knowledge of neurocognitive functioning, the course addresses three additional sections that reflect methods of examining brain-based activity: observation, assessment, and intervention. At the end of each section, students should have a greater understanding of the neurocognitive developmental perspective and be able to apply their knowledge of brain-based skill sets to understanding the environmental demands that children and teens confront, including learning in school, handling complex social interactions, remembering autobiographical experiences, and managing emotional reactions. Students read a sampling of research articles, relevant clinical materials, and textbooks chapters.
Clinical practice and public policy in child mental health is too often driven by the media, conventional wisdom, and prejudice rather than by scientific data. Evidence-based clinical care seeks to guide practitioners in the critical appraisal of data on risk factors, prevention, and treatment. This course is designed for those who wish to read the health research literature and draw their own conclusions. It provides a practical means to learn and apply research methods and focuses on the knowledge and skills needed to design, carry out, and evaluate a research study. Discussion of topical “hot-button” issues, such as the apparent “epidemic” of certain diagnoses, the influence of the environment or culture on child mental health, and the risks/benefits of widely prescribed medications, are combined with a systematic review of the existing evidence base on current empirically supported treatment for child mental health problems.
What makes kids do bad things? Who is accountable for their acts? How can we prevent childhood violence? In this course we will explore these questions and seek to understand the spectrum of “bad” behavior from biological, psychological, and sociological perspectives. We will address broad topics ranging from the nature vs. nurture debate to biased media reporting to medicating disruptive behaviors. We will examine the increased exposure to media violence and its influence on children and adolescents; how the criminal justice system responds to delinquent behavior; and gender differences in disruptive behavior. We will study atrocities perpetrated by children and adolescents, the growing scientific literature detailing neurodevelopment as it relates to behavior, and historical descriptions of disruptive behavior and delinquency. Students will analyze case studies, debate controversial issues (e.g., the influence of violent gaming), and review online discussion boards in an effort to determine sensible efforts aimed at prevention and treatment.
While psychopathology courses are commonplace among undergraduate psychology curricula, courses focusing on child and adolescent psychopathology are relatively rare. More novel still is the opportunity to receive instruction in child and adolescent psychopathology from practicing psychiatrists and psychologists at an internationally renowned clinical and research center. Through lecture presentations and discussions, this course focuses on disease etiology, epidemiology, phenomenology, nosology, and diagnosis. It engages students in a critical review of common child and adolescent psychopathology and challenges social and cultural assumptions of what constitutes ?normal? vs. ?pathological? behavior, cognition, and emotion. Students also complete one practicum by participating with a clinician (psychologist or psychiatrist) during the evaluation of a child or adolescent patient at the NYU Child Study Center.
The ability to understand “what makes a good story well told” is a skill that is crucial to your growth as a filmmaker whether you become a writer, director, producer, actor, editor, cinematographer, etc. Storytelling Strategies looks at how narrative stories work through an examination of the structural and mythic elements first established by the ancient Greek playwrights and recognized by Aristotle in his “Poetics” thousands of years ago. The course continues this examination up to and including such contemporary story models as Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” as well as the current Hollywood paradigm, “the three-act structure.” We will seek to find those principles that form the backbone of successful narrative screenplays and contribute to a film’s ability to resonate with an audience. The lecture is for analysis. The recitations are for applying what you have learned, through writing exercises and a completed short screenplay. This course allocates as Scriptwriting for Film & TV majors. Course may not be repeated.
Art of the “age of the cathedrals”—including architecture, sculpture, stained glass, manuscript illumination, wall painting, luxury arts, and tapestry—from origins of the Gothic style in the 12th-century Ile-de-France through the early 15th century. Considers artistic developments in light of religious, historical, political, social, and cultural contexts of their creation. Topics include: Gothic patrons, artists, builders, and art-making; lay literacy and the patronage and reception of art; the cult of the Virgin and the arts; the Gothic image as bearer of religious, political, and social values and ideologies; arts of chivalry and courtly love; naturalism and developments in portraiture; the roles of art in devotional and mystical experience; Gothic art and late medieval notions of vision and the self.
An introductory survey of the history of South Asia from 2000 B.C.E. to 1200 C.E., with an emphasis on the Indian subcontinent. From the Indus Valley culture to the present day, artistic production has played a critical role in the transmission of religious beliefs and the development of cultural systems in and around South Asia. Diverse regions were linked by trade, politics, and cultural relationships, and interaction can be charted through the changing forms and functions of art. We consider the historical circumstances surrounding the production of South and Southeast Asian art, as well as the problems that art historians face when trying to interpret the surviving evidence. We look at art in a variety of media, including, but not limited to, architecture, urban form, sculpture, painting, and performance.
Begins with El Greco in Italy and Toledo, Velázquez, Zurbarán, Murillo, Ribera, and Valdés Leal before moving to the 18th century (the Tiepolo family, Meléndez). Defines Spain in the 16th and 17th century as a global power by considering colonial-era art in such New World centers as Mexico City and Lima. The focus then shifts to the art of Francisco de Goya and the projection of Spanish art into the modern era.
As in ARTH-UA 91, students examine artistic centers from two vast adjoining regions, in this case South and Southeast Asia, both of which include a wide variety of cultures. Includes monuments of Pakistan, India, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Although the two courses use the same approach and are designed to be complementary, either one may be taken without the other.
Art of Western civilization between Constantine and the Renaissance (300 to 1500 in northern Europe, 1400 in Italy). Topics: Christian beliefs underlying medieval art; acceptance and rejection of classical tradition and the roles of non-classical traditions in medieval art; stylistic transformations in medieval art in the context of medieval society; development of abbey and cathedral, monumental sculpture and painting, mosaics, stained glass, and fresco, as well as manuscript illumination, ivories, metalwork, and panel painting.
Traces the evolution of the painted altarpiece in relation to its liturgical, devotional, and cultic functions, with consideration of artistic personalities such as Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti. Studies great fresco cycles in churches and chapels from the point of view of artists (including Giotto and Taddeo Gaddi), patron(s), and program. Surveys key monuments of religious and civic architecture and their painted and sculpted decoration within the historical and political contexts of the emerging Italian city-states. Topics include: mendicant orders and the arts; Black Death and art; status of the artist; gender and social class in representation and patronage.
Formerly ARTH-UA 80. Identical to SCA-UA 787. Survey of art of West and Central Africa and the South Pacific. Although art from these areas is popularly thought of in terms of its impact on the West, the art is primarily studied in relation to its meaning and function in its own society, where art socializes and reinforces religious beliefs, reflects male and female roles, and validates leadership. Films and field trips to a museum and gallery supplement classroom lectures.
Major traditions in painting, sculpture, and architecture of the native peoples of North America, Mexico, Central America, and Andean South America. Material from pre-contact times through the 20th century. Deals with questions of theory and differences between indigenous and Western world views; the relationship of the arts to shamanism, priesthoods, guardian spirits, deities, and beliefs regarding fauna and flora; impact of European contact on indigenous arts and civilization.
This course is intended as an introduction to the arts of Islam during a period of dynamic cultural and political change in the Islamic world. Beginning with the Mongol invasions of the 13th century, the course traces the development of Islamic art and architecture through the eras of Timur, the ?gunpowder empires? (the Mughals, Ottomans, Safavids) and European colonialism, to the art of the nation-state in the 20th-century.
Achievements of the chief painters of the 15th century with special attention to the Tuscan tradition. A brief introduction to Giotto and his time provides background for the paintings of Masaccio and his artistic heirs (Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Piero della Francesca). In the later 15th century, social and cultural changes generated by power shifts from Medici Florence to papal Rome also affected art patronage, creating new tensions and challenges for artists and fostering the emergence of new modes of visualization. Topics include the role of pictorial narrative, perspective, and mimesis; the major techniques of Renaissance painting; and the relationship of painting to the other visual arts.
Formerly ARTH-UA 91. Identical to EAST-UA 91. Offered periodically. 4 points. An introduction to the art and culture of the Far East. The materials are presented in a chronological and thematic approach corresponding to the major dynastic and cultural changes of China, Korea, and Japan. Teaches how to “read” works of art in order to interpret a culture or a historical period; it aims at a better understanding of the similarities and differences among the cultures of the Far East.
An overview of history and theory. Presents a series of lectures and case studies examining such issues as the birth of the museum, the role played by world’s fairs and biennials, the impact of collectors, the art market, and the gallery system. Visits to museums, galleries, and auction houses in New York.
Identical to MEDI-UA 1. Students who have taken ARTH-UA 3 or ARTH-UA 4 will not receive credit for this course. Introduction to the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture from ancient times to the dawn of the Renaissance, emphasizing the place of the visual arts in the history of civilization. Includes the study of significant works in New York museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cloisters, and the Brooklyn Museum.
Christian architecture, sculpture, painting, mosaic, manuscript illumination, and luxury arts in the Greek East and Latin West from 200 C.E. through ca. 950 C.E. Considers visual and material culture of Christianity in light of the religious, historical, political, social, and cultural contexts. Style periods: Christian, early Byzantine, barbarian, insular, Merovingian, and Carolingian. Topics include: the commemoration of the dead; art and theology; emergence of the cult of saints; early medieval patrons; arts of pilgrimage and early monasticism; word and image in early medieval culture; and iconoclasm and debates about the role of images in early Christianity.
This course is conceived as a focused study of the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael Sanzio and Michelangelo Buonarroti, the men whose careers largely defined the concept of Western artistic genius. Particular consideration will also be given to their Italian and European contemporaries and followers in order to take advantage of the opportunity to the study these original works on site. High Renaissance art cannot be divorced from its times; thus, much attention will be given to contemporary history, especially Florentine politics and politics in Papal Rome. Special attention will also be given to the evolution of drawing practice in sixteenth-century Italy, an essential development for the changes that took place in the conception of works of art over the course of the century. Themes such as patronage, humanism, interpretations of antiquity, and Italian civic ideals will form a framework for understanding the works of art beyond style, iconography, technique and preservation. As the high Renaissance works are often still in their original physical settings, during field-studies to museums and churches in Florence students will have a unique opportunity to experience the works as their original viewers did and as their creators intended.
Beginning by considering how impressionism refined and redirected the artistic aims of 19th-century realism, follows the development of progressive art to the brink of cubism and pure abstraction in the first years of the 20th century. Following impressionism and post-impressionism, close attention is paid to symbolism, aestheticism, art nouveau, the Arts and Crafts movement, fauvism, and expressionism. The aesthetic aims of these movements are analyzed in tandem with the social and cultural conditions that generated them.
Formerly V43.0085. Offered every year. 4 points. Provides an outline of Islamic material in its early and classical periods, from 650 to 1200. The period saw the initial formation of an Arab empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, a decline in centralized authority, and the rise to political prominence of various North African, Iranian, and Central Asian dynasties from the 10th century onward. These politicFormerly V43.0085. Offered every year. 4 points. Provides an outline of Islamic material in its early and classical periods, from 650 to 1200. The period saw the initial formation of an Arab empire stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean, a decline in centralized authority, and the rise to political prominence of various North African, Iranian, and Central Asian dynasties from the 10th century onward. These political developments are reflected in the increasingly heterogeneous nature of Islamic material culture over this time span.
In Flanders, Rubens overturned all previous concepts of painting and was the first to deserve the term “baroque.” Van Dyck, his pupil, took Rubens’s style to England. Dutch painters, including Hals, Rembrandt, and Vermeer, moved in a different direction, addressing every aspect of their country and society: the peasant, the quiet life of the well-ordered household, the sea and landscape, views of the cities, and church interiors.
Considers such subjects as currents on the eve of the First World War, new technology, and the impact of the war; architecture and politics between the wars; the rise of expressionist design; the international style and the concurrent adaptation of traditional styles; art deco design; mid-century glass curtain-wall architecture; brutalism; and reactions to modernism. Includes ideological and political considerations and works by Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, James Stirling, and Frank Gehry, among others.
Traces developments in the sculpture, painting, and architecture of ancient Egypt from pre-dynastic beginnings through the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms (3100-1080 B.C.). Special emphasis on Egyptian art in the context of history, religion, and cultural patterns. Includes study of Egyptian collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum.
Examines architecture, sculpture, painting, manuscript illumination, and treasury arts of the Latin West during ca. 950-1200 C.E., including Ottonian, Anglo-Saxon, Mozarabic, First Romanesque, and Romanesque art. Considers visual arts of Christianity in light of the historical, religious, political, social, and cultural contexts of their creation. Topics: the cult of saints and the arts; the art and architecture of pilgrimage and crusade; monasticism and the arts; Romanesque patrons, artists, and audiences; the Romanesque revival of monumental sculpture; Christian encounters with Islam and Judaism; secular themes in Romanesque art; word and image in Romanesque art; medieval attitudes toward the classical tradition.
History of art in the Western tradition from 20,000 B.C. to the 4th century A.D. From the emergence of human beings in the Paleolithic Age to the developments of civilization in the Near East, Egypt, and the Aegean; the flowering of the Classical Age in Greece; and the rise of the Roman Empire to the beginnings of Christian domination under the Emperor Constantine in the 4th century A.D. Study of the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum is essential.
Students who have taken ARTH-UA 5 or ARTH-UA 6 will not receive credit for this course. Offered every semester. 4 points. Introduction to the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture from the early Renaissance to the present day. Includes the study of significant works in New York museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Frick Collec-tion, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art.
The transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture and animal husbandry is often called the Agricultural Revolution. This change in human subsistence strategies led to changes in many other aspects of human life, including settlement patterns, demography, social organization, and religious practices. It also provided the economic basis for the development of complex urban societies in many regions of the world. Examines the archaeological evidence for the transition from foraging to farming on a worldwide basis.
Examines the global prevalence of gender violence and the varied meanings of violence against women and changes in terminology over time. Examines ways of theorizing gender and violence including performative ideas of gender. The creation of gender violence as a social problem is a product of social movements in the United States, Europe, India, and many other parts of the world. It is now understood globally as an important human rights violation. Also examines the forms of intervention that have been developed in the United States and globally for diminishing violence against women, including policing, prosecution, and punishment.
This course introduces the long-standing and complex connection between religious practices and various media. We’ll analyze how human hearing, vision, and the performing body have been used historically to express and maintain religious life through music, voice, images, words, and rituals. Time will then be spent on more recent electronic media such as radio, film, television, video, and the Internet. An anthropological/ historical perspective on studying religion is pursued.
Although they are no longer the dominant form of human sociality or adaptation, hunter-gatherers continue to play a pivotal role in anthropological theory. But who are hunter-gatherers? Some argue that the problem with trying to pigeon-hole hunter-gatherers is that this taxonomic unit holds little practical or evolutionary legitimacy. Others contend that people have evidently lived off the land without agriculture or animal husbandry, so at some level, hunter-gatherer is a meaningful category. Yet, few of the qualities assigned to hunter-gatherers hold up to detailed cross-cultural investigation. For example, hunter-gatherer subsistence is not inherently linked to peaceful coexistence, affluence, small group sizes or settlement mobility. Moreover, hunter-gatherer populations commonly thought to be deeply entrenched in evolutionary time are now known to result from complex historical processes of globalization and colonial expansion. This course will explore the diversity of lifeways subsumed under the banner of the hunter-gatherer. Drawing on a wide range of cross-cultural datasets, the course will unpack hunter-gatherer behavioral variability across broad topics, not paradigms. We will examine variations in hunter-gatherer subsistence, mobility, social organization, belief systems, landscape use, and material culture. Finally, we will ask to what degree the concept of the hunter-gatherer and the study of modern hunter-gatherers can help anthropologists understand and explore human behavior in the deeper past.
This course examines the social and political life of media and how it makes a difference in the daily lives of people as a practice – in production, reception, or circulation. It is organized around the following key questions: What is media? What role do media play in producing or shaping our sense of reality? What is the relationship between media and culture? How are media implicated in social change? It provides an overview of the increasing theoretical attention paid to the mass media by anthropologists, and focuses on concrete ethnographic examples.
Only open to majors in anthropology who have the permission of the director of undergraduate studies or the instructor. This seminar explores, theoretically and methodologically, selected key current issues and problems in biological anthropology. See the department?s internal catalog.
Introduces contemporary archaeology, its theories, practices, and early societies and cultures. Examines current methodological and theoretical viewpoints of archaeological scholarship within the discipline of anthropology. Focuses on key transformations in cultural evolution, such as the origins of modern humans, the emergence of food production, and the development of complex societies, urbanism, and early states. Explores gender roles, landscapes and settlements, technologies, art, cognitive systems, urbanism, and state formation.
This course seeks to assess the degree to which variations in human biology and culture can be understood as adaptations to varying external conditions. We examine the relationship of human systems of action and the natural world in order to understand the various forms of human adaptation. Case studies of several living peoples, contemporary and past biological communities, and prehistoric cultures provide the material for interpretation and evaluation of theoretical positions.
The Chinese word for ?religion? means ?teaching.? Explores what Chinese people ?taught? themselves about the person, society, and the natural world and thus how social life was constructed and maintained. Examines in historical perspective the classic texts of the Taoist and Confucian canon and their synthesis; Buddhist, especially Ch?an (Zen). Discusses the practices of filiality in Buddhism, Confucian orthodoxy, and in folk religion.
Examines human health and disease within an ecological framework, exploring the interactions of environmental, genetic, physiological, and cultural factors in the expression and distribution of human diseases. Develops pathology profiles for nonhuman primates; prehistoric human populations; and hunting and gathering, agricultural, and industrial groups, with emphasis on the expression of infectious disease in human history and newly (re-) emerging diseases.
This course offers an introduction to some of the classical and current issues in the anthropology of Indigenous Australia. The role of anthropology in the representation and governance of Indigenous life is itself an important subject for anthropological inquiry, considering that Indigenous people of Australia have long been the objects of interest and imagination by outsiders for their cultural formulations of kinship, ritual, art, gender, and politics. These representations—in feature films about them (such as Rabbit-Proof Fence and Australia), New Age Literature (such as Mutant Message Down Under), or museum exhibitions (such as in the Museum of Sydney or the Australian Museum)—are now also in dialogue with Indigenous forms of cultural production, in genres as diverse as film, television, drama, dance, art and writing. The course will explore how Aboriginal people have struggled to reproduce themselves and their traditions on their own terms, asserting their right to forms of cultural autonomy and self-determination. Through the examination of ethnographic and historical texts, films, archives and Indigenous life-writing accounts, we will consider the ways in which Aboriginalities are being challenged and constructed in contemporary Australia. The course will consist of lectures interspersed with discussions, student presentations, and films/other media; we may also have guest presenters.
Between the end of the Ice Age and the expansion of the Roman Empire, temperate Europe witnessed a series of social and economic transformations that represented a transition from a hunting and gathering way of life to urban chiefdoms. Along the way, these hunter-gatherers became agriculturalists and stockherders, learned to use metals, and developed social structures as complex as any found in Old World civilizations. Examines changes in later prehistoric Europe from about 8000 B.C. to the arrival of the Romans.
Analyzes medical beliefs and practices in African, Asian, and Latin American societies. Studies the coexistence of different kinds of medical specialists (e.g., shamans, herbalists, bonesetters, midwives, physicians trained in indigenous and cosmopolitan medicine), with particular reference to the structures of health resources available to laymen and problems of improving health care.
Humans are the most wide-ranging of all of the species on earth. Our evolutionary history and our ability to adapt to such a broad range of environments is dependent on the results in the patterns of human variability we see today. New techniques have been developed that allow us to explore the different levels of human variation. This course focuses on new data and methodologies, including molecular genetic techniques, and the hypotheses and controversies generated by these new perspectives.
Why do some primates live in large social groups while others are solitary and yet others live in pairs or cooperatively breeding families? Why are strong social hierarchies seen in some primate taxa but not in others? How do multiple species of primates often manage to coexist in the same habitat? Why are social relationships in some primate species characterized by strong bonds among females while such bonds are absent in other primates societies? Why do some species of primates show marked geographic variability in behavior and social structure? The answers to these and other questions lie in understanding the relationships between each species and its ecological and social setting and in understanding each species? phylogenetic history. In this course, students explore the diversity of primate social systems and the evolutionary relationships among the primates, and we discuss many of the general ecological laws that have been proposed by evolutionary biologists as the keys to understanding important features of primate behavior and ecology.
In this course, New York City is our archaeological site. The archaeology of New York City extends back some 10,000 years, from Native American societies, to the colonial encounter, into the industrial era, and through to the present day. In this course we will study the archaeological investigations that have taken place throughout the five boroughs of New York City. In doing so we will see how the city became a locus of global trade, in people, goods, and ideas. We will investigate how, as a nodal point in this global system, it came to develop its own cultures and ideologies. We will also learn about the federal, state, and local laws that mandate when and how archaeology is conducted in advance of construction activities and the extent to which Native American Tribes and local communities are involved in this process.
Surveys the mutual shaping of culture and biology in diverse contexts around the world. Starts with sociocultural theories of biocultural process and ends with ethnographies of disability, drugs, food, place, pain, and biotechnology. Examines the relationship between larger political economic structures and individual subjectivities, and examines biological experience as simultaneously material and socioculturally plastic.
This course examines the social and cultural forces that shape the construction of sex, gender, and sexuality. It takes these categories as nonbinary and fluid. Using an intersectional approach, it considers how various subject positions including race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, immigration status, religion, and ability impact gender and sex roles. It traces historical trajectories of foundational feminist anthropology, while also exploring queer theories and performativity. It seeks to interrogate social hierarchies based on sex, gender, and sexuality, exploring who has been traditionally excluded from positions of power and privilege. Topics such as race and porn, BDSM, asexuality, heteronormativity, transgender identities, queer coming out narratives, down-low sexual practices, polyamory, sex work, and queer kinship will be explored in order to challenge normative frameworks of sex and gender.
Biological anthropology examines the evolutionary history and adaptability of humans and our ancestors. Forensic anthropology is an applied subfield of biological anthropology that provides expert analysis of the skeleton in a medicolegal setting by utilizing methods developed in skeletal biology, archaeology, and the forensic sciences. Forensic anthropologists play critical roles in identifying victims of mass fatalities (such as World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings), in investigating homicides (such as identifying the Russian tsar?s family), and in distinguishing cause of death. We examine how forensic anthropologists approach modern and historic crimes in the laboratory and the field. Students are introduced to the underlying theory and the applied techniques that forensic anthropologists use to recover and identify individuals and assess cause of death.
This course offers an overview of the human rights system, looking at its basic elements and studying how it works. It focuses on the relationships between human rights and culture and between global ideas and practices and local ones. Human rights campaigns frequently encounter resistance in the name of protecting cultural differences. This is particularly common with issues concerning women, children, and the family. The course explores several issues that raise questions of human rights and culture, such as female genital cutting, trafficking of persons, food justice, and indigenous peoples’ rights to culture. Using these examples, the course considers how the human rights system deals with tensions between global standards and local ways of life. It examines the meanings of rights and of culture in these debates and shows the implications of adopting an anthropological analysis of these situations. The goal of the course is developing an understanding of human rights in practice.
Analyzes fossil evidence for human evolution and the paleoanthropological inferences derived from such evidence. Emphasizes methods of phylogenetic reconstruction, taxonomy, functional anatomy, and paleoecology.
Examines how primates communicate and why their communication takes the forms it does. Discusses general issues associated with the study of animal communication: potential functions of communication, different modalities by which communicative signals can be transmitted, types of information that can be conveyed via each of these modalities, and ways in which researchers go about studying animal communication systems. Examines ways environmental and sociological factors influence the evolution of forms of communication.
Integrates evolutionary biology, genetics, immunology, ecology, and behavioral ecology, along with sociocultural anthropology, politics, and economics, to better understand newly emerging and reemerging diseases as they affect human health. General evolutionary theory and an introduction to Darwinian medicine are provided before the course examines viral, bacterial, parasitic, and prion-based diseases along with their hosts, vectors, and other organisms. Particular attention is paid to how humans have purposely and inadvertently created both biological and cultural environments for the transmission of different diseases. Media representations and misrepresentations are examined throughout the course.
Explores how identity is a process of “becoming” rather than a mode of “being” by examining how speakers enact their gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, and socioeconomic class through everyday conversations, narratives, performances, literacy activities, and public debates. Also explores the moral and political consequences of people’s identification strategies by examining how their beliefs about language reinforce or contest normative power structures. Readings on the relationship between bilingual education and accent discrimination, multilingualism and youth counterculture, migration and code-switching, media and religious publics, linguistic nationalism and xenophobia, and literacy and neo/liberalism in different areas of the world.
What does it mean to think anthropologically? This course considers historically foundational practices of anthropological thought, its core method, fieldwork, and its most influential product, the ethnography, in order to think practically and creatively along the lines of what constitutes cultures, societies, translation, and difference. A central goal is to advance the concept of culture, with its attendant solidarities, hierarchies, and exclusions, in order to better understand continually changing systems of collective identifications.
This course examines the philosophy of cognitive ethology and comparative psychology. We begin by discussing the nature of animal minds. Are animals conscious? Do they experience pain? Do they have beliefs? Do they use language? Are they self-conscious? How can we know? This involves applying concepts from metaphysics and epistemology to research in cognitive ethology and comparative psychology. We then discuss more general questions like: Are animals agents? Do they have free will? Do they live meaningful lives? Do they have moral rights? This involves applying concepts from ethics, existentialism, and other areas of philosophy to our conclusions about animal minds. Finally, we also ask, along the way, how research on animal minds can affect our philosophical theories. For example, should we revise our theories of consciousness, language, agency, morality, and so on if they seem to have implausible implications about animals?
This class explores the role of literature in creating empathy – how can it help us imagine the lives of “others” & that of animals? By querying the politics of meat mainly through contemporary literature, we put three similar (yet often disconnected) disciplines in conversation with each other: food studies, environmental studies, and animal studies. Two key questions we will address are: 1. What relationship – if any – is there between what we eat and who we are? 2. How are the intimate spaces of both human and nonhuman bodies – and their cultivation – related to notions of ecological violence?
In this age of ‘non-facts’ sufficing as the basis for populist resistance to scientific ‘facts’, the ‘citizen skills’ needed to be able to read, understand and make reasonable ‘action decisions’—both for personal health as well as community health issues—are ever more important to acquire within a liberal arts education. The overall goal of this course is to provide the student with fundamental ‘citizen skills’ in assessing epidemiologic original research articles. The fundamental concepts which underpin the range of epidemiologic research designs will be presented first, followed by skill-building exercises that culminates in assessing published epidemiologic original research articles. Both lecture and seminar-of-the whole formats will be utilized. At the end of the course the students should be able to: understand the basic concepts of epidemiologic research design; critically evaluate published epidemiology research article using the Literature Analysis Form-for Epidemiologic Research (LAF-fER); contribute to their future communities as an informed member; and savor and reflect upon the description of epidemiologic outbreaks in literature, esp. in short story and ‘novel-like’ formats.
What can novels based on historic events tell us? What sorts of insights can they provide that journalism and works of pure history cannot? How much imaginative leeway should the author of a historic novel be allowed – and how closely should she stick to “true” events? In this course we’ll read a wide range of novels-looking at them both as literature and as keys to history-on topics that include slavery in the U.S., post-apartheid South Africa, McCarthyism, the 9/11 terror attacks, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This course dynamically engages students in the world of disability. As a member of a team including a guest consultant with a disability, students will discover that person’s interests, abilities, and desires and portray them with digital storytelling. This active learning approach, carefully guided by the instructor, is enhanced with readings, guest lectures, videos and field trips. Students will learn about disability history, assistive technology and universal design. The end-of-semester is celebrated with a formal presentation of the person-centered projects. The aim is to show the individual, making the “invisible visible.” Satisfies a HuSS Elective.
Organization and management of commercial and institutional food service facilities in hotels, restaurants, and educational and community program sites.
This course surveys the history and development of jazz music in America from the mid 1800s to current trends in popular music. Through a historical timeline, student will study jazz music’s range of styles as informed by social, regional, cultural, technological, and political trends. Realizing that all music is a reflection of historical events and the cultures they are informed by, students will analyze the close connection between jazz music and why it is known as America’s true original artform.
Dance is an integral & defining component of cultures throughout the world & throughout history. This course introduces students to dance as a live & performing art through a variety of experiences including attendance at live performances, examination of videos & theoretical texts, & physical participation in the practice & performance of dance. Through discussions, written assignments, & the creation of original dance compositions, students will explore the history & cultural relevance of a variety of forms of dance within their own lives, larger society, & the global community beyond. Liberal Arts Core/CORE-MAP Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Expressive Cultures for Steinhardt students.
This course explores the ways in which popular Hollywood films construct the historical past, the ensuing battles among historians and the public over Hollywood’s version of American history, and the ways such films can be utilized as historical documents themselves. We will consider films as products of the culture industry; as visions of popularly understood history and national mythology; as evidence for how social conflicts have been depicted; and as evidence of how popular understanding and interpretations of the past have been revised from earlier eras to the present.
In this course we will cover the varieties of Italian food in their past and present forms. First, we will explore the history of food from past civilizations, leading up to World War I, just after the great immigration to the New World. Time periods examined will be ancient Rome, Medieval, Renaissance, Risorgimento, leading to the modern era. This course includes topics ranging from Pellegrino Artusi’s famous cookbook in the contest of Italian unification to the relationship between Italian Futurism and food. The second part of the course will introduce students to the regional diversity of Italian food using mediums such as TV, art, and film. We will examine the ways in which food shapes contemporary Italian society, from the more intimate family kitchen to the most elegant Italian restaurant in New York City.
Why do fashion designers and brands exert such influence in contemporary society? What explains the trajectory from The House of Worth to Chanel to this season’s hottest label? This course investigates the interlocking forces shaping fashion: the designer system, celebrities, technology, politics, the arts and media. Through lectures and film viewings, readings, discussions, and individual research, students explore fashion as a crucial aspect of culture and how the fashion system evolved from roots in Parisian couture to become a global phenomenon. Liberal Arts Core/MAP Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Expressive Cultures for Steinhardt students.
This course shines a bright light on racial inequality in the United States by focusing on structural disparities in key areas of American life: Income, wealth and employment; the right to vote, health and wellbeing, education and juvenile justice. Vanguard leaders from across NYU and across fields of Law, Public Health and Allied Health fields, Education, Social Work, and Public Policy provide insights on key scholarly and community-based frameworks they use to confront problems of inequality in the United States. They share their expertise in designing and implementing policy solutions that offer the promise of a more equitable future.
Social justice and wellbeing are one and the same”- Dr. Sará Yafa King. How can you care for yourself while shaping change in a world that is overwhelmed with narratives, systems, and structures of oppression? In order to care for our communities, we must care for ourselves, self-regulating with the wisdom of the body. This course is designed to help you deepen your practice and share mindfulness with your community and with the world. We’ll begin with an introduction to mindfulness, examining the theory and science from its origins in wisdom traditions to the modern mindfulness movement, and move toward a meaningful practice that will allow you to better heal and serve.
The main goal of this course is to provide students with ways how to enhance traditional storytelling by new technologies without diminishing the role of the written word. We will examine every aspect of the craft of traditional fiction writing: plot, structure, point of view, narrative voice, dialogue, building of individual scenes, etc as well as the new techniques of the digital age: hypertext, visual and audio images, social media. We will learn how to balance the traditional with the new without overwhelming the written text with gadgets. The class will become a creative lab studying ideas by others, coming up with their own, presenting their fiction, responding to the writing of others, and discussing questions about literature, editing, and publishing in the digital age.Each student will create and present to class a work of fiction based on some of the ideas we will be discussing.The works don’t have to be in the electronic form, but the students will need to explain how they would work. Each student will create a basic website with a writer’s profile and portfolio of her works. Readings will include fiction by: Borges, Nabokov, Michael Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan.
How do fiction writers imagine the creative process, life and world of an artist? How do we write about the artistic process? What, if any, parallels may exist between writing and the creative process of a painter, composer, musician, dancer or actor? This course will explore these questions as students read and write fiction focused on artists working in different artistic mediums. We will read fictional portraits of artists both real and imagined, paying attention to the particulars of language associated with each art form and how the writers have incorporated elements of the art form into their work. Writing workshop will include a critique of the writing and story development as well as a critique of how well the world of the artist has been built within the bounds of the fictional realm. We will also delve into research—artist interviews, online performances and exhibitions—using the art and performance worlds of New York City as a resource, culminating in a final research portfolio and presentation to be submitted alongside the final work of fiction. Readings may include works by Baldwin, Bernhard, Bolaño, Hustvedt, Maugham, McCann, Ondaatje, Rushdie and Woolf. Readings will also include essays by artists, artist interviews and profiles, and art and performance criticism.
How does language make us see? From petroglyphs to internet memes, there are many points of intersection between written and visual modes of communication. This multigenre creative writing workshop begins with a close examination of literary images. Through a mix of creative writing assignments and readings, students identify and practice techniques by which writers have rendered the visual in language; explore ekphrasis (that is, literary descriptions of and responses to works of art); experiment with the wide array of traditions in which text and image are combined (e.g. concrete poetry, collaged text, and the comic panel); respond to visual arts that use language as a primary medium; and consider description as deception. At the heart of this course are fundamental questions of representation. What besides visual content do literary images offer? What are the mechanics of description, and what aesthetic and ethical questions can it pose for writers? Readings include works by Virginia Woolf, John Keene, Marjane Satrapi, Anne Carson, and Robin Coste Lewis, among others.
Some of the strongest nonfiction writing out there—whether cultural criticism, the reported personal essay, an historical nonfiction narrative, or piece of long-form investigative journalism—grew from the flimsiest of tendrils: a hunch, a spark, an enthusiasm. In this advanced creative nonfiction writing course, you’ll learn how to hack your own unique brain into an idea-generating machine, and pair each idea with the genre that best suits it. Course readings will include essays by great practitioners past and present, among them James Baldwin, Eula Biss, Barbara Ehrenreich, Darryl Pinckney, Richard Rodriguez, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Walker, Ellen Willis, and Virginia Woolf. We will analyze these works to figure out how each idea was brought to fruition, and learn tricks of the trade that will in turn fuel your idea-generator. The class will be a combination of class discussions, lectures, and workshops.
Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as a “subgenre of literary works characterized by the ambiguous presentation of supernatural forces.” Donald Antrim, on the other hand, regards the fantastic not as a genre, but as a condition shared between author and reader: “a potential state” in which “everything is vivid, yet nothing is clearly defined,” where “the fantastical and the real are equally questionable, equally challenged by one another.” Frankenstein’s monster comes to life. Alice goes down the rabbit hole. How can [an] author make these events seem not only uncannily plausible, but even expectable—the sudden eruption of some carefully encrypted logic operating beneath our conscious awareness? How do we ground the fantastic in enough realism to sustain the reader’s suspension of disbelief? This class will explore the fantastic as the strangest and most explicit demonstration of what literary technique can achieve in any genre. We will focus on various kinds of world-making, from magical realms to dystopias to refracted versions of “realism.” Special attention will be devoted to how writers use altered states of consciousness like trauma, intoxication, and psychosis to create a hallucinatory space between the supernatural and the deeply improbable. Readings will also span a wide spectrum of cultures and historical periods, from canonical works like Frankenstein to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities to contemporary novels like Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Joy Williams’ The Changeling, and Donald Antrim’s The Hundred Brothers. Assignments will include several creative writing prompts and longer pieces of original fiction for workshop.
In this course, students will create writing that traverses identities, borders and cultures, as well as genres, as they explore and deepen their understanding of issues of form, craft and ethics. The class will read and discuss a variety of texts that center around various modes of culture crossing, such as travel and study abroad; third culture and diaspora identities; immigration and escape, and historical and/or political clashes and conflicts. Through an ongoing examination of structural and craft issues in the exemplary texts, students will make creative decisions to help write three main assignments dealing with themes of Memory, Identity and Conflict. We’ll use our discussions of Memory to help focus on expository and reflective rhetorical strategies, Identity as a way to experiment with point of view and character development, and Conflict as a method for exploring structure and dramatic tension. In order to write cross-culturally about personal experiences, students will be encouraged to create texts along the spectrum between creative nonfiction and autobiographical fiction. Theoretical essays will help inform how we ethically position ourselves as writers observing cultures not (necessarily) our own in order to inform audiences and to challenge our own prejudices. Through it all, we’ll consider how formal experiments across genres may help illuminate experiences and confront perceptions. Authors to be read include Gloria Anzaldua, Edwidge Danticat, Randa Jarrar, Salman Rushdie, Amy Tan, and Ocean Vuong.
The past century of exponential population growth, infrastructure development, and inequitable resource uses has stressed nature”s systems to dangerous levels. We are losing cultural and biological diversity at unprecedented rates, and these threats are compounded by the associated challenges from severely disrupted climate systems. This Gallatin practicum will provide students with a forum to develop a cross-disciplinary 21st Century nature conservation toolkit – one that can create cutting-edge strategies to reduce the risks to species and ecosystem, adapt to a changing climate, and produce a healthier relationship to nature. Students will work in teams to select a site-based project from a menu of real-world options, and then design practical and achievable solutions to these risks and challenges.We will use tools from biology, earth sciences, anthropology, social psychology, economics, and business to determine the cause, magnitude, and urgency of risks. Each student team will then combine the results from these scientific and financial assessments with the skills, power, and insights from the arts and communication media to plan and implement practical conservation solutions, tell the story of conservation needs, and build commitment to get the work done.
Intended to introduce policy, this course includes an internship at a policy and/or advocacy organization. Community building, family well-being, early childhood education, health, juvenile justice reform, service integration and child welfare are featured in readings, discussion, and internships. Through examples such as ethnic-matching placements in foster care, zero-tolerance approaches to drug abuse, or public financing of political campaigns, students come to understand how government, schools, gangs, religious institutions and families can, with varying degrees of explicitness and formality, all make policy. Students at the course conclusion are able to: identify policies within their lives; argue all sides of a policy question; appreciate the importance of qualitative and quantitative evidence; and distinguish implementation from formulation. Readings include Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, The Lost Children of Wilder, by Nina Bernstein; The Oath and the Office; by Corey Brettschneider (Donated Copies) and Not a Crime to Be Poor by Peter Edelman . Students will be helped to connect meetings they attend and the policy concepts taught and discussed in class. The goal is to leave no student unaware of the importance of policy in their own and their community’s life. Policies that are empowering are emphasized, techniques doe for oral and written advocacy, persuasion and attitude change are embedded in a final project that r e quires using existing skills and talents and learning new ones. Assignments include an internship journal. “Films include Ethics in America and Waiting for Superman.
If “the past is never dead,” as Faulkner wrote, how does it continue to live on? How do its ghosts continue to haunt the political present? Can these ghosts be exorcised or does one have to learn to live with them? These questions become especially urgent and consequential in the aftermath of war and catastrophe, as writers and artists confront the legacy of violence and try to memorialize annihilated bodies and spaces. The aesthetic modes they choose to address both the dead and the living and the ways in which they narrate the past have political consequences for the future. We will explore and try to answer these questions by reading a selection of texts (fiction, poetry, film, and visual art) as sites and acts of mourning. We will read and view works from and about Armenia, South Africa, Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, and the US. Readings will include Benjamin, Boulus, Butler, Darwish, Derrida, Freud, Khoury, Morrison, and Youssef.
This course examines several ’classic’ texts to understand both their own intrinsic merit and their influence on society from their inception until our own time. Our emphasis, indeed, is on using these texts to understand our lives and world now. We explore classic texts in relation to contemporary life’s dilemmas of consumerism and spiritualism, individual rights and community rights, vocation and career, God and the afterlife, rebellion and escape from freedom. Readings may include Aeschylus’ The Oresteia, Sappho’s Poems, Plato’s Republic, Lucretius’ On the Nature of the Universe, Ovid’s Metamorphoses or Cicero’s On the Laws, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales or Cervantes’s Don Quixote.
The “sublime” evades simple definition. In everyday conversation, it is often synonymous with the wonderful or the excellent. But, in the arts, humanities and aesthetic theory, the “sublime” is a topic of deep and extensive writing and reflection amongst poets, artists, theorists, and philosophers. The sublime, in this context, goes back to classical times and forward to the present. Common examples of the sublime included natural or artistic representations mountains, avalanches, waterfalls, stormy seas, human ruins, or the infinite vault of the starry sky. This course examines theoretical and creative representations of the sublime in writers and artists from ancient to postmodern, including Aristotle, Longinus, Sappho, Kant, Schiller, Wordsworth, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Newman, Rosenblum, Du Bois, Lyotard, Battersby, Chopin, Freeman, Malick, Wagner, Viola, and von Trier.
How can we write about our past when memory can be so unreliable? Furthermore, to whom do we write when we write about ourselves and why? This course will investigate the variety of stylistic and formal choices that authors make when representing subjective experience, specifically past experience. We will examine a range of autobiographies and memoirs written in Europe, primarily Britain, and America from eras as diverse as the fourth century, the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, and today, and in forms as various as verse, prose, avant-garde language experiments, and graphic novels. We inquire into different ways in which authors understood memory and its relationship to language, with the support of theoretical texts on memory, including writings on trauma, confession, neuroscience, psychoanalysis, dreams, mnemonics and repetition, selective memory, somatic memory, marginalized identity, and the relationship between selfhood and narrative. Authors include St. Augustine, William Wordsworth, Thomas De Quincey, W.E.B Du Bois, Lyn Hejinian, and Alison Bechdel. Students will have a chance to practice both analytical and creative writing that responds to and draws inspiration from our course texts.
The goals of this course are twofold. First, students will learn about conceptions of race and ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean world (inclusive of North Africa and West Asia) through select examples of ancient art and texts. The course examines how racial and ethnic differences were conceptualized in the ancient world, while also considering the processes of racial formation in the context of ancient empires and kingdoms. Second, students will examine the ways that the study of the art, archaeology, and culture of the ancient Mediterranean has impacted modern/contemporary formations of race. Archaeological and historical disciplines centering around the ancient Mediterranean world (e.g. Classics, Egyptology, ‘Near Eastern’ Studies) have developed alongside western imperial projects and the construction of monuments to white supremacy in the United States. Redressing these histories, artists and writers of color (e.g. Edmonia Lewis, Yayoi Kusama, Kandis Williams, Fred Wilson) have likewise engaged with ancient art and myth in order to problematize and resist such racist legacies. In this seminar, students will become familiar with a range of primary source material alongside secondary sources that theorize and engage with race from different disciplines. The course will provide students with premodern, historical perspectives on race, illuminating the aesthetic, cultural, and political strategies by which power was distributed and administered along racial lines. Furthermore, students will learn about the stakes of studying the ancient world for contemporary debates around race.
How are environmental racism and environmental injustice related to belonging in”and exclusion from”local, national, and international communities? “How do questions about citizenship, rights, and rightlessness relate to environmental racism and environmental injustice? This course addresses questions about how numerous forms of environmental racism and environmental injustice impact people”s access to their human rights”universally guaranteed in principle but so frequently inaccessible in reality. These questions have newfound urgency amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as marginalized communities already subjected to environmental repression have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. Drawing on works from the realms of political theory, international law, literature, activism, and others, we will address relationships between race, class, gender, and environmental injustice. We will discuss fence-line communities. There are powerful connections between so-called “local” environmental injustice and the climate crisis”how are these connections overlooked by international law? We will focus on how communities of color, Indigenous communities, and stateless people are affected by and resist pollution inequity and differential access to healthcare. Historical and contemporary cases include denial of water access (e.g. Flint and Detroit, Michigan; the Palestinian West Bank and Gaza; and Cape Town, South Africa); forced exposure to toxins in armed conflict zones (ranging from the WWII bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War); poisoning from industrial pollution (such as in Minamata, Japan in the 20th century); and international examples of lead poisoning. Scholars, novelists, poets, theorists, and practitioners whose work will be read and discussed may include: Robert D. Bullard, Rachel Carson, Steve Lerner, Harriet A. Washington, Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Seyla Benhabib, Benedict Anderson, Antony Anghie, Tōge Sankichi, Ghassan Kanafani, and Yoko Tawada.
This seminar takes as its central topic the relationship between youth and empire. What does it mean to come of age in a world-system when the key decisions that shape your life might be made in far-off countries that you have never seen? And conversely, why have writers in societies that have recently achieved political independence been drawn to narrate that political transformation through the lens of stories about growing up? We will read a range of different texts and genres, including realist novels, modernist fiction and autobiographical narratives by formerly enslaved people. We will think together about the strengths and limits of these various forms, considering the ways that authors have attempted to reckon with the existential uncertainty of living in a global society. Likely readings will include Chinua Achebe, No Longer at Ease; Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre; Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea; Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm; and Indra Sinha, Animal’s People.
The course will tackle questions of sexuality in the Middle East from a historical perspective. Applying methodologies of queer theory, it will discuss the complex history of sexuality in the Middle East, and sketch the genealogy of Western attitudes towards both Arab and Jewish sexuality. Relying on theorists and historians like Michel Foucault, Robert Aldrich, Khaled El-Rouayheb, Samar Habib, and Joseph Massad, we will explore the essential role that the queer issue plays in the contemporary politics of the region.
THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-LONDON. This course offers a survey of key aspects of British fashion from 1500 to the present day, including womenswear, menswear, accessories, and more. We will examine selected features of producing, consuming, and representing dress, relating important shifts in fashion to historical developments in areas such as trade, economics, politics, and visual culture. Students will study examples of historical clothing as well as depictions of it, and become familiar with a variety of methodological approaches to its study. The majority of classes will take place in Bedford Square, London, and be formed of illustrative lectures, class activities, discussion of set readings, and student presentations. Each lecture is described in the syllabus and includes discussion questions, required as well as recommended readings, and recommended films. Several classes will take place on location, at museums and archives, and will explore important collections of British dress and of British everyday life and fashionable consumption.
THIS COURSE TAKES PLACE AT NYU-FLORENCE. The aim of this course is to explore the history of Italian fashion with an interdisciplinary approach focused on social, cultural, economic and political aspects. By focusing on select topics of key interest students will acquire a basic knowledge of the history of Italian fashion from the Renaissance to the present, understand the complex and multivalent clothing codes that help to order social interaction and learn to decode it. These abilities will provide students with a useful basis for understanding the capital role of the fashion of the past both as the origin of a ‘language’ of clothes still in use and as a boundless source of inspiration for contemporary designers. Conducted in English.
In the twenty-first century, the Internet arguably makes secrecy impossible, but the exposure of secrets is already an important theme in many 19th-century British novels. In part, this reflects a society in which identity seems increasingly malleable through greater social class mobility, the questioning of traditional gender roles, and imperialist opportunities. In these novels, fake identities conceal a murderer and a madwoman, among others. And the societal constraints inspiring the fictional secrets also led the authors to keep secrets of their own. Beloved author Charles Dickens, the father of 10, had a 13-year love affair with a woman who was 18 when they met. But does the novel genre, particularly the “realist” Victorian novel, with its emphasis on an omniscient narrator and intersecting plots, have a special relationship to secrets? We attempt to uncover the answer by studying Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte (1847), Great Expectations (1861), by Charles Dickens, George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871-2), and Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887). Theory and criticism include selections from Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism
Colonialism left indelible marks on the cultures and societies of its colonized subjects. While nation-states have emerged, the colonial legacy and its various effects continue to haunt post-colonial societies and the modes in which they represent their history and subjectivity. The novel is a particularly privileged site to explore this problem. This course will focus on the post-colonial Arabic novel. After a brief historical introduction to the context and specific conditions of its emergence as a genre, we will read a number of representative novels. Discussions will focus on the following questions: How do writers problematize the perceived tension between tradition and modernity? Can form itself become an expression of sociopolitical resistance? How is the imaginary boundary between “West” and “East” blurred and/or solidified? How is the nation troped and can novels become sites for rewriting official history? What role do gender and sexuality play in all of the above? In addition to films, readings (all in English) may include Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Naguib Mahfuz, al-Tayyib Salih, Abdelrahman Munif, Ghassan Kanafani, Elias Khoury, Sun`allah Ibrahim, Huda Barakat, Assia Djebbar, and Muhammad Shukri.
In this class we will continue to explore the concept of narrative and the way writers interrogate literary and social conventions. As we consider how stories shape our notions of history, love, social class, and sexual identity, we will examine how the thinking of readers, and stories, changed from the nineteenth century to the twentieth. We will follow the emergence of a new form of narration, whose protagonists include not only characters, but also time, place, the city, the reader, and language itself. We will read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, James Joyce’s Ulysses, as well as essays on film and narrative theory.
This workshop studies the new, groundbreaking formats and genres of television storytelling by experiencing the unique creative process through which an original series makes its way to the screen. Together, we will break down the early proposals developed by the original show creators to present the episodes, narrative arcs and character profiles of their series, and we will compare them with the fully produced pilot. In-class screenings will include Squid Game, Euphoria, True Detective, the end of the f*** world, Rick & Morty, Breaking Bad, Mr. Robot and Stranger Things. The participants will be guided through the process of creating a unique series proposal, which includes the pitching of a pilot episode, the development of a first season outline, and the establishment of the series’ visual and narrative tone.
Located at the intersection of songwriting, storytelling, creativity, and commerce, the Broadway musical is one of New York City’s most significant and singular cultural artifacts. While this art form has a long and storied history, it continues to evolve dramatically in terms of aesthetics, audiences, content, and economics. In this arts workshop (open to artists, producers, and fans), we will take a look at some of the most influential shows to play the Great White Way over the last twenty-five years, with a focus on both how they are constructed and how they have impacted the field (and society). How does a musical get made? How do librettists, composers, and lyricists synthetize their visions to speak with one creative voice? How does a show like Hamilton become a worldwide phenomenon, and what keeps a hot property like Spider-Man from reaching its potential? Shows examined will include: Rent and The Lion King (shows that serve as the unofficial gateway to this new generation); Passing Strange and In the Heights (and the ground-breaking 2008 season); The Book of Mormon (and its film precursor South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut); Spider-Man; Fun Home; and yes, Hamilton. Weekly responses will include original scenes (or songs), casting breakdowns, design proposals, and other creative output, as well as some traditional essays.
Since the terms Realism and Naturalism were first applied to plays by writers like Ibsen or Strindberg, the attempt to create a semblance of everyday life on stage has defined and sometimes dominated Western drama, even by inspiring other styles and movements in reaction. This course will explore the forms and purposes – the how and the why – of these “realistic” approaches to theater, both from a literary and a performance perspective. With the 19th Century movement in visual arts and literature as background, and contemporary equivalents in other media as context, we will ask what is particular about Realism as a way of seeing or defining the “real”? What perspectives and assumptions does it use to recreate the details of lived experience, and what does a theater audience experience? We will look at some classic 20th Century English-language theatrical examples (e.g. Miller, Hansberry), alongside contemporary pieces that draw from them (Baker, Hudes, Lee). Acting and directing texts from Uta Hagen and Harold Clurman, as well as writing about associated acting styles (such as “The Method”), will guide our work. Through rehearsing scenes and critical analysis, students will interrogate the techniques and their assumptions, asking what they now might offer us, in a culture suffused in “reality TV” and filmed recreations of the “real”. The class will then create and perform their own scenes inspired by and/or critiquing this tradition.
This workshop interrogates the relationship between art and activism by focusing on the following movements: (1) Occupy Wall Street; (2) Strike Debt and Rolling Jubilee, (3) Gulf Labor Artist Coalition and its direct action wing, Global Ultra Luxury Faction (G.U.L.F.); (4) the Direct Action Front for Palestine (5) Black Lives Matter and Movement for Black Lives, (6) No Dakota Access Pipeline, (7) #MeToo, and (8) Decolonize This Place. These case studies, alongside course readings and discussions, will help us to situate contemporary art in a historical and political context—a moment of rupture that is informed by ongoing histories of racism, colonialism, and debt. We will then move on to question how this moment might inform our own art practice, interrogating how, as contemporary artists, we might produce art that does not simply add flair to political work, but that engages in a dialectical practice—moving between theory and research, as well as action and aesthetics—and that considers how practice and process might become the work itself. A major component of the course will be a project that students plan and execute during the semester. Choice of practice and medium will be open, but possibilities might include work that is performative, visual, or conceptual, employing photography and/or digital media, text, film, painting, or sculpture. Readings will include: Berardi, After the Future; Cesaire and Kelly, Discourse on Colonialism; Hardt and Negri, Declaration; Tuck and Yang, Decolonization is not a Metaphor; and McKee, Strike Art! Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition.
Dance reflects the cultural heritage and is a key to understanding diverse societies. Each week the students are introduced to a different dance form through videos, reading and a dance class. There is a Capoeira teacher of this Brazilian martial art disguised as a dance, and guest lecturers of Indian, Middle Eastern or Bellydance, Irish, Russian, Balinese and African dance from their locations. Dance can be seen as encoded forms of a society’s religious, artistic, political, economic and familial values. We discuss globalization, fusion and authenticity. Migration, missionaries the diaspora have created new forms like “Bollywood,” “Tribal,” and “K-Pop.” The internet has brought further influence for dance as signifier of new values during the pandemic, but live performance and ethnic roots survive. The student’s project is to find their own world dance. They themselves become researchers in the field, performers and creators of new forms.
David Bowie’s life and work offer a template for how to survive and continue to evolve as a musical artist. David Bowie has kept the music industry, his fans and the world guessing throughout a career that spans over four decades. Bowie himself put his secret best in his prophetic 1972 song, “Ch-ch-ch-ch Changes”; a multi-talented performer, writer and visual artist, Bowie has played his career like an instrument, selecting trends of every generation to process, absorb and adapt into successive phases of his ever-evolving chameleon persona. In this day of ceaseless multiple media, Bowie’s most recent, and typically perverse, coup was keeping secret the recording of his 2013 album, The Next Day, over a two-year recording period. The manipulative bravado of knowing when and how to keep a star’s inaccessibility and mystery, or to expose oneself, as Bowie did on TV in his own darkest days, has given David Bowie a singular, enduring mystique, glamour and respect. Examining the arc of his work is a window into significant scenes of every decade since the 1950s, and offers insight into: the British Blues scene that produced the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; the hippy free festival counter-culture; r’n’b; futurism; electronica;glam and gender games, improvisation; soul; funk; dance; disco; minimalism; ambient; avant-garde theater; and above all, the endlessly evolving sound of US and UK young clubland, including recent jungle and garage, to which Bowie consistently returns to recharge and find a new direction to make his own.
In 2021, New Zealand pop star / singer-songwriter Lorde released a five-song EP of tracks from her Solar Power album, rerecorded in the indigenous Māori language. Five years prior, pop stars like Pharrell Williams, Dave Matthews, Radiohead, and Sia raised their voices at Standing Rock, North Dakota in support of the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline—one of many increasing threats to the sovereignty of Indigenous Nations. Their celebrity presence was key to attracting mainstream media coverage. However, those artists were largely following the lead of Native hip-hoppers like Supaman, Snotty Nose Rez Kids, and Prolific, who’d already been at Standing Rock since the start of the protests, rallying their own communities. This course will engage students around the growing globalization of Indigenous Peoples movements that intersects culture, politics, and economics. These days, Indigenous musicians like Aboriginal Australian rapper Baker Boy and Canadian First Nations vocalist Jeremy Dutcher are gaining in visibility, topping critics’ year-end Best-Of lists and taking home awards. This “Creative Natives” wave is being felt far outside of music, too: Tzotzil fashion designer Alberto López Gomez from Chiapas, Mexico was featured in New York Fashion Week; Māori filmmaker Taika Waititi won an Oscar for JoJo Rabbit; influential art critics heralded White Mountain Apache music performance artist and film scorer Laura Ortman at the 2020 Whitney Biennial, and Seminole/Muscogee Creek showrunner Sterling Harjo’s Reservation Dogs is the new hit on FX/Hulu. Over the course of seven weeks, students will engage with a wide range of international Indigenous performers and music(s) they may have never heard before—from Māori metal to Saami yoik-rap, Quechua huanyo-pop, Inuit throatsinging, Maasai hip-hop, Hawaiian reggae, Tokelauan dance-pop, and even Tuareg rock. Meanwhile, they will discover how Indigenous artists have not only achieved national, even international, acclaim in popular mainstream music genres, they are increasingly “indigenizing” them with languages, instruments, and vocal techniques from their own cultural traditions. We will also look at some Indigenous stars who broke barriers to achieve mainstream fame as singular personalities and cultural ambassadors: artists like Yma Sumac, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, and more. And also, we’ll survey the impact of Indigenous artists and music on the both the mainstream recording industry, as well as the growth of Indigenous-directed business entities doing things on their own terms. Through readings, lectures, and class discussions, students will be introduced to important scholarship on Indigenous identity, (de-)colonization, cultural appropriation, aesthetics, and so on. Any student interested in socio-cultural movements, roots music trends, arts-centered activism, and the ways in which music introduces audiences to the messages within each of these—especially regarding themes like climate justice, human rights, social inclusion, and sovereignty issues—will benefit from taking this class. Students can also expect to leave the course with a greater awareness of, and hopefully appreciation for, the growing global presence and popularity of Indigenous sounds, voices, and views.
The name “Taylor Swift” has become synonymous with a number of big ideas. To some in the music industry, the eleven-time Grammy winner (including three Album of the Year awards) defines 21st century country music’s pivot to pop radio. To others, Taylor Swift is the pop star of the 2010s (with the album sales and chart history to back it up— With sales of over 200 million records worldwide, Swift is one of the best-selling music artists of all time). When deployed pejoratively, however, the name “Taylor Swift” can signal anything from white privilege to white feminism to white taste in an era of intersectionality and Black Lives Matter conscientiousness. Taylor Swift may be a loaded phrase for some, but the career of Taylor Swift is more simply an embodiment of music’s American Dream. Raised on a Christmas tree farm in Pennsylvania, teenage Swift would move to Nashville and become one of the most lauded young songwriters in history. Her music was infatuated with love, innocence and romantic fantasias that would sour in the natural way those fairy tales do as a young woman grows up. By her early twenties, she was a full-fledged pop icon, having ditched Music Row for producers like Max Martin and Jack Antonoff, and tabloid fame. Along the way, there were feuds, squads and political discourses aplenty. Swift has encountered the type of controversies that would destroy most pop stars’ careers and acclaim. But at age 31, she has never been more awarded or acclaimed as a singer-songwriter. Meanwhile, her impact is felt in the success and style of younger singers/songwriters like Olivia Rodrigo, Conan Gray, Phoebe Bridgers and Clairo. This course proposes to deconstruct both the appeal and aversions to Taylor Swift through close readings of her music and public discourse as it relates to her own growth as an artist and a celebrity. Through readings, lectures and more, the class delves into analyses of the culture and politics of teen girlhood in pop music, fandom, media studies, whiteness and power as it relates to her image and the images of those who have both preceded and succeeded her. We’ll also consider topics like copyright and ownership, American nationalism and the ongoing impact of social media on the pop music industry.
Fortnite’s concerts with Marshmello and Travis Scott. Open Pit’s DIY music festivals in Minecraft. League of Legends’ K-pop and hip-hop groups. Indie label Monstercat’s deals with Rocket League and Roblox. Sony Music’s gaming imprint Lost Rings. Grand Theft Auto’s 75 billion minutes of in-game music listening. “Fantasy record label” apps like FanLabel that allow fans to assemble their own “brackets” of artists that they think will do best on the charts. These are just a handful of examples of how music and games are increasingly overlapping as industries, experiences and cultures. There are strong mutual incentives at play: Game developers are blooming into full-fledged media brands and are looking to the music business for both financial and cultural capital, while music companies are looking to diversify their revenue, experiment with more interactive technologies and tap into the power of highly engaged communities online. In the process, this merging of entertainment worlds is also rewriting conventional wisdom of what it means to be an artist, a performer, gamer and especially a fan. This course will give students the critical frameworks and vocabulary to dissect how games are being incorporated into every corner of the music industry — from the moment music is created, to the strategies that inform how music is then disseminated, marketed, monetized and performed. We will draw from a combination of theoretical readings and real-world case studies to dissect video games that center music in their player experience on the one hand, and musical projects that draw direct inspiration from games in their approaches to design, marketing, business and fan engagement on the other hand. Because this field is relatively new, many of these case studies may emerge in real time as the course unfolds. This course will be reading-, writing- and play-intensive, with required and suggested games and soundtracks for students to play, watch or listen to every week. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to workshop their own creative, marketing and/or business strategies for hybrid music/game projects, walking away with a concrete plan of action for incorporating the fast-paced gaming industry into their own careers.
This 14-week class introduces students to the history of innovative entrepreneurs and institutions in American recorded music. We recount the stories and make arguments about famous executives, managers, producers, performers, DJs, and journalists/publishers from the dawn of the music business until the present day. We study how and why the fields, fiefdoms, and empires built by these impressive and sometimes controversial icons have transformed the course of popular music. Along the way, students become well versed in the history of 20th and 21st century recorded music, and in various music genres and styles; and we place the art and business of creating and selling recorded music in historical, political, cultural and social context. Throughout, we look at approaches to crafting successful oral and written arguments about popular music with clear, compelling writing about sound.
In name alone, Led Zeppelin carries mountains of meaning: the most successful and arguably the most influential rock band of all time. The creators of a mythic, mystical, guitar-based style that gave birth to the sounds and iconography of heavy metal. Song-crafters whose studio mastery, utilizing recording technology of the day, generated some of the most enduring rock recordings of their era, establishing standards that still define a stylistic and emotional extreme of popular music. The four British musicians who came out of the electric blues scene of the late ‘60s, recording and touring as a unit for a mere twelve years, together achieved a legendary stature that requires much study to fully appreciate more than thirty years after their demise. This course will consider the history of Led Zeppelin from a variety of perspectives: social and stylistic context; the nuts and bolts of their music—live and in the studio; the hows and whys of the band as a business. Using books, articles, videos, and a generous sampling of music, the course will follow their arrival in the final, psychedelic heyday of swingin’ London of the ‘60s; through their roots in folk and acoustic blues and later experimentations with Indian and North African music, and their rise in an era that was hungry for a heavier, more bombastic sound. The course will include special focus on the group’s technical leader and visionary, guitarist Jimmy Page, who came with prior credits as a sessionman and guitarist in the blues-rock band the Yardbirds, as well as other major players in the Zeppelin story—engineer Glyn Johns, manager Pater Grant—who helped build the sonic and popular juggernaut that the band became. In-class guest speakers will be featured, many who participated or witnessed the Led Zeppelin phenomenon, as well as a screening of the group’s concert film The Song Remains The Same.
This course will be an introduction to studio art for students, to traverse both cultural and temporal barriers of visual arts. Students will examine the content of artwork, and build various skills to translate ideas into reality. Class time will be devoted to individual projects and critiques, lectures, and group discussions. This course is open to all students with or without an art background. Note that attendance in the first class meeting is mandatory, otherwise you will be dropped from the course. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: general elective
This seminar investigates the ideological, political and historical parameters of “taste” in popular culture. Through examination of media artifacts that exemplify “trash,” the course examines how “taste” is constituted as a cultural category that reflects, produces and maintains the social structures of American society. What is meant by designations such as “good” and “bad” media, “high and “low” art, “offensive” or “artistic” and who is empowered to make these distinctions? How do “bad objects” reveal the ideological basis of “taste,” and what is their relationship to “legitimate” art forms? Does “trash” pose a challenge to cultural standards of taste and “the mainstream?’ What is the relationship between “bad” art and spectatorship and why might audiences find “trash” so enthralling? Readings are drawn from Bourdieu’s Distinction , Glynn’s Tabloid Culture , Ross” No Respect , and the anthology Trash Culture , while screenings include cult films such as Freaks, Pink Flamingos, Plan 9 From Outer Space,South Park, and The Room , and a selection of reality TV programs, music and viral videos.
This course explores the pictorial articulation of individual human likeness and its fiction in the public forum. The art of portraiture has survived its own origins in myth making and archetype building. The human image, or icon, forever landmarks the voices, textures, physicality, spirituality, symbols, politics, aesthetic concerns and military contexts, religious rituals, government, calendar ceremonies, daily functions, heroic acts and social disorders of diverse cultures throughout recorded history. It is the history of creation, the story of romance, the mark of progress, the record of royalty and the profile of democracy. It is the revolution of fine art and a catalyst of discipline. Imaging the individual in the public eye is the story of humankind. This course bridges the worlds of the oral and written mythologies which inhabit and empower us and the creative manifestation (conscious and unconscious) of these ancient archetypes into contemporary art, media and design. Students will critically rethink the implied and material presence of portraiture in everyday life. Students will gain practical knowledge and insight into the origins and potential power of the archetypes which permeate our collective unconscious.
This course attempts to track the American entertainment industry from its plebian origins through its rise to becoming the predominant mass entertainment culture in the world. Students discover the origins of the production practices that are employed in the entertainment industry today by following the legendary characters, movie moguls, and media titans of the early 20th century and the companies they built. The emphasis is on the way the visionaries of the time impacted seemingly risk-averse systems to invigorate and sometimes completely revolutionize them. These innovative men and women include, but are not limited, to Louis B. Mayer, George Lucas, Maya Deren, Shirley Clark, Nam Jun Paik, Lucille Ball, Russell Simmons, Clive Davis, Julie Taymor, and Steve Jobs.
This course explores how films are vehicles for understanding business. In doing so, it also explores some key issues facing the business community. For example, the class examines the impact of business on society, the ethical obligations of firms, the power and role of firms as social organizations, the impact of the globalization of business and how different cultures come together in global firms. To better understand these topics, students view important films covering these issues, which are paired with scholarly or popular works focused on the same issues.
An introduction to philosophy through the study of selected moral, social, and political issues. Topics may include criminal justice and punishment; political authority and civil disobedience; toleration and free speech; racial justice.
Whether you are a filmmaker looking to better understand how to build a cohesive and productive film crew; a theatre maker excited about building a performance project or theatre company; a multi-media artist looking for ways to innovate your ideas for artistic work in collaboration with others; an artist looking for tools for building an artistic ensemble, or a multi-disciplinary artist looking to take your creative work out into communities as social practice, this combination lecture/activity-based class provides you with tools for better understanding how to enter into and engage others in collective creative work of purpose. Multi-Disciplinary Arts Practice with Community Groups: Theories and Practice explores the challenges and benefits of making artistic work with others and the tools needed to create meaningful collaborative projects. In this class we interrogate definitions of community and group, explore the balance between group process and producing an artistically excellent project, and examine the processes of creating artistic work with others to strengthen our own artistic voices while helping raise the creative voices of others. With its focus on social practice, this course provides a foundation for working with small group structures in a variety of community settings and professional creative work environments. The course satisfies a CA major requirement as well as a social science requirement for all other Tisch students.
Language of Film is an introduction to the craft, history and theory of filmmaking and film-watching. The main challenge facing all filmmakers is to show the story: in other words, to visualize the drama. Over the past century, narrative, experimental and documentary filmmakers have developed a variety of creative strategies and techniques designed to give their audiences compelling, multi-sensorial experiences. The goal of this class is to explore how filmmakers in different historical and cultural settings have contributed to the evolution of film as a powerful, complex and captivating art form.. This course allocates as History & Criticism for Film & TV majors.
Major texts in critical theory from Plato to Derrida, considered in relation to literary practice. The first half of the course focuses on four major types of critical theory: mimetic, ethical, expressive, and formalist. The second half turns to 20th-century critical schools, such as Russian and American formalism, archetypal criticism, structuralism, psychoanalytic criticism, feminism, reader theory, deconstruction, and historicism.
Painting is an incredibly versatile medium and its dynamic evolution across cultures and through millennia continues up until the present. The medium’s relevance and capacity for reinvention are evidenced in the work of a number of contemporary painters who have incorporated inventive materials and/or methods into their practice to both push its limits and explore contemporary concerns. In this class, students will get an introduction to the fundamental technical, formal, and conceptual principles of painting. Using watercolor, gouache, and acrylic, students will explore color theory, composition, texture, form, and surface using a wide range of techniques. Through selected readings, students will also examine the theoretical questions and historical precedents that have informed painting’s development, see how they relate to or have been challenged by the work of contemporary painters and be able to connect select concerns to their own practice. In addition to acquiring basic technical skills and conceptual know-how, students will also gain competency in art critiques and writing artist statements. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: general elective
The course is an introduction to microeconomics. It assumes no prior knowledge of the subject. The course examines the fundamentals of microeconomics needed by technologists, relying to a considerable extent upon mathematical expression and representation. The principle topics covered are price theory, production and cost theory, the theory of the firm and market theory, including the practical relevance of these to the management of technology-intensive enterprises. The role of the state and of government regulation will be considered as a special topic. Students who take this course cannot receive credit for ECON-UA 2 or FIN-UY 2003. | Prerequisite: MA-UY 1024 or MA-UY 1054 or MA-UY 1324 or an approved equivalent.
This class used to be called History of Dance. This course explores why and how dance acts as a vital participant in cultural practices around the world. Looking back through the perspective of present research, we will examine how dance is inherently a reflection of the culture it represents. A wide overview of dance and its myriad purposes will be covered, from a means of worship in India, Turkey, and Haiti; its inclusion in the rituals of Bali; noh and kabuki theatrical traditions of Japan; fertility and death ceremonies of the Wodaabe, Yoruba, and Dogon tribes of Africa; the healing zar dances of North Africa, and the rituals/activism of Native American tribes. The presentation of court dance as a symbol of power will be examined in Hawai’i, Java, and Cambodia, as well as in Catherine de Medici’s Renaissance pageants and in the French Baroque spectacles of Louis XIV’s Versailles and the Paris Opera. The inevitable impact of politics on dance will be examined in viewing the bloody genocide of Cambodia’s Royal Dancers; the propagandist works of China’s Cultural Revolution; the French Revolution’s influence upon Romantic ballets such as La Sylphide and Giselle; and how the repression of a Gitano culture led to the emergence of flamenco in Spain. In addition to written texts and video documentation, we will review examples of related art forms (visual arts, music, and drama).
No prerequisite. PSYCH-UA 10 and 11 may be taken in either order. Bauer. Offered every semester. 4 points. Students gain familiarity with data description, variance and variability, significance tests, confidence bounds, and linear regression, among other topics. Students work on psychological data sets, learn approaches to statistical prediction, and learn to interpret results from randomized experiments.
Through lectures, discussion, program viewing, projects, guests, and our own lives, this course explores the state of children’s media for pre-schoolers to adolescents. The goal is to understand how we all have been affected by the media and how we can determine change for the next generation. We will consider the role television, videos, and the internet play in regard to family and peer relationships, education and social issues. We will also examine the broadcasting and cable industry as well as the success and failure of the government and such media groups as ACT (Action for Children’s Television) in regulating content of children?s programs. Assignments will include interviews of pre-schoolers and adolescents, website presentations, critique of children’s programs, and a proposal for children’s media. This course allocates as History & Criticism for Film & TV majors.
Introduction to the foods of various world regions and the techniques used to prepare them through hand-on food preparation, demonstrations, lectures and field trips.
This course examines the social and political life of media and how it makes a difference in the daily lives of people as a practice – in production, reception, or circulation. It is organized around the following key questions: What is media? What role do media play in producing or shaping our sense of reality? What is the relationship between media and culture? How are media implicated in social change? It provides an overview of the increasing theoretical attention paid to the mass media by anthropologists, and focuses on concrete ethnographic examples.
Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing humankind today and most of the public discourse on this topic focuses on the future. And yet, all of our experience with the natural world lies in the past. This course will delve into some of the issues that arise from contemplating climate change in a historical and human evolutionary perspective: what is humans’ natural environment? How many times did the climate change significantly during human history? Did climate determine the course of human evolution and/or social change? When did humans first begin to tinker with the environment? And finally: what solutions for the future can we glean from our collective historical experience? The course will use primary literature from the fields of archaeology, paleoanthropology, and paleoclimatology to guide students toward a better understanding of climate change at the human scale.
Carrasco, Heeger, Landy, Pelli. Offered every semester. 4 points. How do we construct a conception of physical reality based on sensory experience? Survey of basic facts, theories, and methods of studying sensation and perception. The major emphasis is on vision and audition, although other modalities may be covered. Represen-tative topics include receptor function and physiology; color; motion; depth; psychophysics of detection, discrimination, and appearance; perceptual constancies; adaptation, pattern recognition, and the interaction of knowledge and perception.
Investigates the evolutionary origins of humans. The study of human evolution is a multidisciplinary endeavor involving a synthesis of concepts, techniques, and research findings from a variety of different scientific fields, including evolutionary biology, paleontology, primatology, comparative anatomy, genetics, molecular biology, geology, and archaeology. Explores the different contributions that scientists have made toward understanding human origins and provides a detailed survey of the evidence used to reconstruct the evolutionary history of our own species.
An introductory course designed to acquaint students with the great works of the ancient Indian literary tradition, a major part of which was written in Sanskrit. The earliest form of that language, called Vedic Sanskrit, is the language of the Vedic hymns, especially those of the Rig Veda. Sanskrit has had an unbroken literary tradition for over 3,000 years. This rich and vast literary, religious, and philosophical heritage is introduced in this course. In addition, students work with excerpts from the Jain and Buddhist canons written in Prakrits and examples of Tamil poetry. Selections from the Vedic literature, classical drama, epics, story literature, and lyric poetry are studied in English translation.
This course is an introduction to Renaissance Art by exploring in depth the historical, political and cultural evolution of Italy and Europe between the 14th and the 15th centuries. This overview will be not confined to works of art but will include social and patronage issues – i.e. the role of the guilds, the differences in private, civic and church patronage – that affected the style, form and content of the Italian rich artistic output, which reached a peak often nostalgically referred to by later generations as the “golden age”. Themes such as patronage, humanism, interpretations of antiquity, and Italian civic ideals form a framework for understanding the works of art beyond style, iconography, technique and preservation. The course analyzes the historical and social background of the beginning of the Renaissance during the 14th century and the impact of patronage on art. It then focuses on the early 15th century art in Italy and Europe and deals with the Medici Family’s age. Lastly it analyzes the ‘golden Age’ of the Renaissance, specifically focusing on Verrocchio, Botticelli, Perugino and Ghirlandaio. By the end of this course, students gain a thorough knowledge of the Italian and European Renaissance Age, developing practical perception and a confident grasp of the material, understanding the relationship between both historical and artistic events and valuing the importance of patronage. As the Renaissance works are often still in their original physical settings, during field-studies to museums and churches in Florence students will have a unique opportunity to experience the works as their original viewers did and as their creators intended.
The traditional understanding of media industries reminds us of mass media such as TV, radio, newspaper etc. Digital technologies, however have reshaped how media is made, consumed, and comprehended by increasingly fragmented audience groups. Self-made public accounts, search-based video streaming platforms, and social media apps refreshed our vision of media and challenged the existing ways of running a successful media. How to develop a thorough understanding of the rapidly changing market? This course is an introduction to the media industries, with a particular focus on the institutional forces (i.e., market structures, law and regulation, technological advancement, and audience dynamics) that shape the content and forms of emerging media. Combining lectures and guest talks, this class will make sense of the key concepts, professional terms, and business logics embedded in the production and operation of the global media industries. Furthermore, we will take case studies approach to examining the economic and social influences of media companies in specific contexts, particularly China, U.S., and U.K. These knowledge, together with the analytical skills that the students will acquire through in-class discussions, will allow them to comprehend and cope with the interplay among technology, market forces, and regulators in a wide array of media companies, including television, film, news, social media, video streaming, and the media-related tech businesses. Prerequisite: None. Fulfillment: IMB major Emerging Media Foundation course or IMB major IMA/IMB elective.
Topics: descriptive statistics; introduction to probability; sampling; statistical inferences concerning means, standard deviations, and proportions; analysis of variance; linear regressions; and correlation. Laboratory periods cover sample problems drawn primarily from economics. Meets three times a week, plus a lab session.
Can machines think? Do patterns in online searches predict the spread of the flu? Did Shakespeare really write that sonnet? Scientists use patterns in language to answer these questions, using the same concepts that underlie search engines, automatic translators, speech recognition, spell-checkers, and auto-correction tools. Focuses on the technological and linguistic ideas behind these applications and offers hands-on experience and insight into how they work. No programming experience required.
Why do so many high school students apply to study at expensive institutions when there are cheaper alternatives available? Who is able to attend, and who is excluded? Why do college costs keep rising so fast? Shouldn’t college be free? Students explore answers to these kinds of questions in this course. Students explore a range of economic concepts and empirical evidence that speaks to the value of Field available for additional information in footerhigher education for individuals and societies; state and institutional financial aid policies; and university budgets and spending priorities.
Students, teachers and schools exist within a larger political and economic ecosystem that shapes education institutions and opportunities. In this umbrella course, students learn how different social, political and economic forces shape education policies and practices as well as the choices that students and their parents make. Subtopic courses span a range of topics and case studies, including growing neoliberalism in education policy, the influence of the high cost of higher education, school choice and access, and trends in global education development.
Provides a comprehensive introduction to the traditional and contemporary music of the Celtic areas of Western Europe: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Brittany, and Galicia. Recordings and live performances present the extraordinary range of singing styles and the musical instruments employed in each culture, including harps, bagpipes, and a variety of other wind, free reed, keyboard, and stringed instruments. Forms and musical styles are explored in depth, along with a study of their origin, evolution, and cultural links.
The Renaissance, like classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, is a major era of Western civilization embracing a multitude of styles. It is, however, held together by basic concepts that distinguish it from other periods. Main developments of Renaissance art both in Italy and north of the Alps: the Early and High Renaissance; relation to the lingering Gothic tradition; and Mannerism. Emphasis is placed on the great masters of each phase. The survival of Renaissance traditions in Baroque and Rococo art is examined in art and architecture.
Prerequisite: Three years of high school mathematics or equivalent. No prior computer experience assumed. Students with any programming experience should consult with the computer science department before registering. Students who have taken or are taking CSCI-UA 101 will not receive credit for this course. Note: This course is not intended for computer science majors, although it is a prerequisite for students with no previous programming experience who want to continue in CSCI-UA 101. Offered every semester. 4 points. An introduction to the fundamentals of computer programming, which is the foundation of Computer Science. Students design, write and debug computer programs. No knowledge of programming is assumed.
Weed. Pot. Bud. Grass. Ganja. Reefer. Mary Jane. Skunk. Herb. Cannabis. It’s all marijuana – the most commonly used, in most states still illicit, drug in the United States. Calming for some, anxiety provoking for others, perhaps medicinal, always controversial, marijuana causes wonder and confusion among physicians, parents, teachers, adolescents, and lawmakers. After 50 years of debate, marijuana remains one of our most visible modern-day conundrums – is it “okay?” Is marijuana safe and therapeutic, or is it dangerous and a gateway to more harmful drugs? Through lecture, discussion, and a thorough analysis of the current research literature in neuroscience and human development, we will seek to answer these questions and identify marijuana’s role in psychology, medicine, culture, and government policy.
Is healthy media use possible? What does that look like? Most of us use our electronic devices more than we had planned, and a quarter of US college students are estimated to experience internet overuse. Electronic device overuse is associated with an increased risk of depression, anxiety, and loneliness, along with a host of neuropsychological changes. In this course, we will discuss the rise of internet overuse, its associated negative consequences and possible strategies to reduce excessive use.Specifically, the course covers: 1) the definition of internet and phone overuse, 2) the brain mechanisms and behavioral patterns which lead to excessive use, 3) how brain/behavioral mechanisms are exploited to make video-games, television programs, and websites as addictive as possible, and 4) what we can do to regain our balance at the personal and societal levels. Department of History Medieval France.
Grand Rounds are a traditional and effective teaching tool in medical education, where major research, education, and clinical problems and innovations are presented to an audience of medical students, residents, faculty, and the public at large. The NYU Child Study Center’s weekly Grand Rounds program is one of the foremost of its kind in the world, featuring invited thought leaders in the fields of child and adolescent psychiatry and psychology. This seminar course provides undergraduate students with a unique opportunity to attend the weekly Grand Rounds presentation and then discuss these topics in depth with CAMS faculty. Students will gain a deep and broad understanding of many challenges within the field of child and adolescent mental health, along with novel theories, research findings, and clinical treatments.
Introduction to nutrition science and its role in health and society: nutrient characteristics, requirements, and food sources, energy balance, weight control, dietary guides and food planning, and social and economic factors that affect food production and consumption. Liberal Arts CORE equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Natural Sciences for non-majors on an individual department basis-students should confirm with their Academic Advisor
A comprehensive survey of critical issues in environmental systems science, focusing on: human population; the global chemical cycles; ecosystems and biodiversity; endangered species and wildlife; nature preserves; energy flows in nature; agriculture and the environment; energy systems from fossil fuels to renewable forms; Earth?s waters; Earth?s atmosphere; carbon dioxide and global warming; urban environments; wastes; and paths to a sustainable future.
This course examines the morality of our treatment of nonhuman animals. We start by asking about the nature of moral rights and duties. What are rights, and where do they come from? How do we resolve conflicts among rights? Do animals have rights? Next, what are obligations, and where do they come from? What makes right actions right? Do we have special obligations to members of our own family, nation, or species? Is there a moral difference between killing and letting die? Do we have group obligations as well as individual obligations? We then ask how these issues apply to our treatment of nonhuman animals. Are we justified in treating animals as property under the law? Are we justified in using animals for food, clothing, entertainment, research, or companionship? Finally, what are the ethics of animal advocacy? Here we consider abolition vs. regulation, incrementalism vs. absolutism, and legal reform vs. direct action.
Considers how public policy is created, how social change occurs, and the influence of science, government, business, and non-governmental organizations on animal-related policies, legislation, litigation, and consumer campaigns, as well the meaning of “animal rights” and the impact of the modern animal protection movement.
The transition to college is a multifaceted challenge for many students, as they encounter new academic, interpersonal, emotional, and financial pressures. One third of undergraduates report feeling depression, and over half report feeling overwhelming anxiety. This course is grounded in the current understanding of adolescent and young adult development, neuroscience, and positive psychology. Our aim is to teach undergraduates both theoretical and empirically informed means to moderate risk and enhance resilience, by building knowledge and skills in key areas proven to enhance wellness, including communication, executive functioning, social support, self-efficacy, emotion regulation, and sense of purpose. Students will learn about healthy exercise, nutrition, and sleep habits, and develop skills in core components of cognitive-behavior therapy, mindfulness, and organizational skills.
Sleep is something akin to the ocean-it surrounds us, and we could not live without it, yet it remains a mystery, whose secrets we are only now beginning to unfold. Scientific research into sleep and dreams began in earnest about fifty years ago. Since that time, the small and burgeoning field of sleep medicine has taught us a great deal about how and why we sleep. This course will provide students with a comprehensive introduction to sleep and physiology, the evolution of sleep, circadian and biological rhythms, dreams, and the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders. Through exercises and assignments, students will learn the importance of sleep for mental and physical well-being and how to best establish a healthy sleep routine.
Taking off from the practices of medium-based art categories, this course is structured across key topics in contemporary art – “art of today, produced by artists who are living in the twenty-first century”. During the semester, via the framework of readings, projects and assignments, we will consider the importance of the visual arts in the larger context of society. Each week we will look at a different topic, which will be organized around key concepts, artists and artwork examples. The main goal is to allow us to contemplate the process of interaction between visual art, history, cultural, socio-economical, and technological forces. The stress of our gatherings will be on the artist as a thinker and a maker.
Examines the state of college-student mental health and wellness on a personal and systems level. As undergraduate university students approach the end of adolescence, they often reevaluate the beliefs, values, and assumptions with which they left home. Young adulthood is a time of great promise, but the transition from child to adult is never easy. We look at how individuals can create positive change by reinterpreting their goals and identifying steps toward a successful college experience. Key findings from the fields of neuroscience and positive psychology are referenced to inform our study of the biopsychosocial underpinnings of success and happiness. Through lectures and discussions, students learn about a variety of wellness topics that include mindfulness, relationships, and self-esteem. The final project requires students to promote an area of mental wellness on campus.
Students that successfully complete CSCI-UA 467 Applied Internet Technology are not eligible to take CSCI-UA 61 Web Development and Programming. Applied Internet Technology is a practical introduction to creating modern web applications. It covers full-stack (that is, every aspect of building a database driven web application: server programming, database implementation, frontend markup, styling and interactivity) web development. It includes topics such as database and data model design, web application architecture, separation of logic and presentation, handling user input and processing form data, managing asynchronous processes, strategies for creating real-time web applications, and handling client-side interactivity. Students will use current server and client-side web frameworks and libraries to build dynamic, data-driven sites. Various applications to support development will also be introduced, such as version control, static analysis tools, and build systems.
An introduction to the peoples, cultures, and histories of the Middle East from the rise of Islam to the 20th century, surveying the development of political and social institutions and exploring the emergence of key intellectual currents, political and religious varieties, and cultural trends within what is often wrongly construed as a monolithic regional culture. We explore a range of literary, architectural, artistic, and scientific sources from pre-modern and modern Islamicate societies and study of the daily lives and contributions of Muslims and non-Muslims alike, highlighting a multi-layered representation of complex and vibrant Middle Eastern societies.
Majors Only:This course will introduce incoming Master’s students to some of the concepts, terms, and theoretical genealogies that they can expect to encounter in Performance Studies. What makes performance studies performance studies, and why do it? In considering this question we will consider the specificity of performance as an object of study, a mode of inquiry, a practice of self-hood and sociality, and as an aesthetic practice; we will also focus on the specific challenges and potentialities in writing about/as performance.
Examines visual culture of the city, from the dynamics of visuality in the 19th-century modern cityscape to the mega cities of globalization. It addresses the visual dynamics, infrastructure, architecture, public art and design imaginaries of urban spaces, taking New York City and Paris as primary case studies and including other cities from the 19th century to the present. The course will examine the politics of urban design, the city as a site of division, disaster, memory, and political activism. Meets Liberal Arts Core requirement for Societies and Soc Sciences.
Considers the trajectory of changes in the production, circulation, and reception of Korean popular music from the turn of the twentieth century to the latest K-pop hits across successive political, social, and economic junctures, with regard for major themes such as nationalism, race, gender, technology, and globalization; and investigates music culture in relation to hybridity, authenticity, transculturation, cyber-culture, and fandom, among other subjects Prereq: None Fulfillment: Humanities Introductory Course (18-19 Topic Courses).
What exactly is this thing we call mysticism? As the general, secular public treats religion, so does the mainstream religious public treat mysticism, a special case, replete with mystery and the repository of great potential. Mysticism has served as the space for the bleeding edge of religion, where destabilizing forces have emerged but reactionary, regressive forces as well. Mystical religious communities have been both the most tolerant and the most exclusive, the most libertine and the most abnegating. Is there such a thing as mysticism? Can it be elicited from the religious frameworks in which it resides, or is it merely a modern, academic convention? In this course, we aim to work out some answers to those questions.
Designed for BFA (Studio Art) students, this course is an introduction to the global history of art, exploring the meanings associated with “art.” The class is a series of linked test cases involving specific art objects & the context of their creation. By working closely with a range of materials –– art history & theory, artist’s writings, & documentary film –– we will survey how artists have contributed to the history of art and question how this history matters for contemporary artists.
La Belle Époque, that period in the life of France’s pre-World War I Third Republic (1871-1914) associated with extraordinary artistic achievement, saw Paris emerge as the undisputed Western capital of painting and sculpture; it also was the most important production site for new works of musical theatre and, arguably, literature. It was during these decades that Impressionism launched its assault on the academic establishment, only itself to be superseded by an ever-changing avant-garde associated first with the nabis, then with fauvism and cubism; that the operas of Bizet, Saint-Saëns, and Massenet and the plays of Sardou and Rostand filled the world’s theatres; and that the novels of Zola and stories of Maupassant were translated into dozens of languages. Finally, this was the society that gave birth to one of the greatest literary works of all time, Marcel Proust’s Remembrances of Things Past, the first volume of which appeared just as the First World War was about to bring the Belle Époque to a violent end. Sources include reproductions of paintings, recordings of chamber music, opera and mélodies, and several of the most significant novels of the period.
A deep sense of a descending dystopian future has become more pronounced with the global pandemic, economic shutdowns, and the rise of extremism and authoritarianism. Scholars, novelists, journalists, filmmakers, and activists around the world have been writing and speaking about political systems and leadership classes incapable of addressing such issues for decades. Students explore dystopia through literature, film, and scholarly works, and examine strategies for resisting dystopia. Students participate in a social action project and create video projects.
The Black Atlantic considered as a socio-cultural and economic space from the 15th-century first arrival of Africans in the ’New World,’ through the rise of slavery in the Americas, continuing on to slave emancipation and decolonization in the 19th and 20th centuries, and concluding with contemporary black life in the Atlantic world. Traces the origins and importance of the concept of the Black Atlantic in the context of European imperial expansion and the transformation of indigenous structures of governance in the Americas, paying special attention to shifting social relations that shaped community formation among people of African descent and laid the foundations for political and economic institutions. Topics include: civilization, slavery, colonialism, capitalism, freedom, and justice, approached through focused engagement with African enslavement and settlement in Africa and the Americas; the development of transatlantic racial capitalism; variations in politics and culture between empires in the Atlantic world; creolization, plantation slavery, and slave society; the politics and culture of the enslaved; the Haitian Revolution; slave emancipation; and contemporary black Atlantic politics and racial capitalism.
The location of Israel at the geographic junction between the West and the East, between the Arab world and the Western world, against the background of the long historical complexity of this piece of land provides a panoramic view of Israeli culture and art by examining thematic crossroads and ideas, via problems and social conflicts which lie at the heart of those art works and are reflected by them. Themes include: religion and secularism, universalism/globalism versus localism, Jews and Arabs, Ashkenazic and Sephardic cultures, multiculturalism in Israel, Zionism and Post-Zionism, right and left political world views, questions of gender, historical perspectives on war and peace and the Holocaust. Students explore the way different forms of art—visual, literary, and performance—reflect and shape the understanding of the “Israeli mosaic” while learning about the way the artists and writers internalize, consciously and unconsciously the complex Israeli reality.
Over the last 50 years, millions of Latin Americans have experienced extraordinary shifts in their social, political, and cultural landscape, a result of the transformative effects of revolution or insurgency, state repression, popular resistance and social movements. We focus on events that had continental, hemispheric, and even global impact, including the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the military coups of the 1970s, and the Zapatista uprising in 1994. Drawing on a range of primary sources and cultural forms, we listen carefully to the voices of the major social actors of the time. Our sources are drawn from a wide range of media: newsprint, television broadcasts, transcripts, testimony, essay, documentary and feature film, art, and music. We deliberately mix artistic representations with documentary evidence to understand how the arts—music, visual art, literature, film—do not just reflect the reality around them, but are themselves vital sites for shaping and changing that reality and our imagination of it, both then and now.
The course examines how Italian identity has been transformed through encounters with foreigners. These foreigners were not only invading armies and colonizing powers but also artists and scholars, travelers and tourists. All contributed in fundamental ways to the evolution of Italian society and culture.Through the study of primary sources we will explore, for example, how the Greek, Arab, Byzantine, and Jewish presences reshaped Italian civilization up until the Renaissance. As well as outlining the historical circumstances for each of these encounters, our account will focus on their cultural consequences from a number of perspectives, from science to language, from philosophy to art and architecture. A field trip to Ravenna (capital of the Western Roman Empire, then of the Ostrogothic Kingdom, and later of the Byzantine Exarchate) will offer a vantage point to appreciate the many layers of Italian cultural history. As a case study, we will analyze a number of coeval reports on the sacks of Rome by the Visigoths (410 AD) and by the troops of Charles V (1527).Florence will be used as a primary source. The city and its surroundings will provide the most favorable context also to address the issue of tourism, from the Grand Tour to the most recent developments of mass tourism in Italy.
The course description for this Topics in CORE course varies depending on the topic taught. Please view the course descriptions in the course notes section below.
The history and culture of the ancient Israelite societies of biblical times and the Greco-Roman period seen from the perspective of the process of urbanization and the role of cities in the development of classical Judaism, covering the period from c. 1250 b.c.e. through the third century c.e. Surveys the history and achievements of these cities and their contribution to the development of law and social organization, prophetic movements, history of Israelite religion and early Judaism, and the background of Christianity. The Bible and ancient Jewish texts preserve much evidence for the history of ancient Israel; and archaeological excavations, as well as the discovery of ancient writings in Hebrew and related languages, have added to our knowledge. In addition, new discoveries in the Dead Sea Scrolls contribute greatly to our understanding of the history of Judaism and the emergence of Christianity. Throughout, we remain focused on the growth of cities and their role in the creation and development of ancient Israel’s culture and literature.
How many types of people are there? When and how will you die? Will you make money? Is the system fair? This fully online course introduces students to topics in data science, probability, and statistics through big life questions. Students learn to code in the R language and use simulation-based methods rather than equations for inference. Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equiv – Satisfies Quantitative Reasoning for some programs; check with your Academic Advisor
According to the World Health Organization, 6.5 million people will die prematurely this year due to air pollution. That’s more deaths due to breathing bad air than from AIDS, auto accidents, cholera, malaria, and war combined. Climate change, fossil fuels, lack of drinking water, over-population, GMOs, pollution, and the wholesale corporate campaign to discredit science are among the most critical problems of our time. Living in denial of these issues has become the West’s de facto cultural standard with only a fraction of the public taking action. How can artists, citizen-scientists, and storytellers intervene in existing narratives regarding some of humanity’s most life-threatening issues? How will you further important conversations and seize the potential to activate change? Green World explores contemporary environmental issues while guiding artists to create informed, responsible works of positive social change using technology as a force multiplier. This course is open to all NYU students interested in developing an activist’s artistic, social, and/or scientific leverage point to help save the world. This course features an optional research trip to Black Rock Forest Consortium.
Special topics in Sustainable Urban Environments at the 3000 level, to be decided by instructor. | Prerequisites: Completion of first year writing requirements. Notes: Satisfies a HuSS Elective.
Students learn how to design algorithms to solve problems and how to translate these algorithms into working computer programs. Experience is acquired through programming projects in a high level programming language. CSCI-UA 101 is intended as a first course for computer science majors, and for students of other scientific disciplines. Programming assignments.
This course provides an in-depth examination of the core economic conditions and various business models and practices that characterize the media industries. Special attention is paid to video and audio streaming, gaming, and social media platforms. This course is designed to track and assess current business trends and strategies in the US, as well as major markets and regions around the world.
The purpose of this course is to familiarize students with basic concepts, research findings and theories related to the way in which human characteristics, capabilities and limitations, including physiology and psychology, affect system design and performance. Students will develop a basic understanding of methods for studying and assessing human behavior and for analyzing human performance. It will introduce aspects of system, interface, organizational design and physical setting as they influence operators and performance. Satisfies an HuSS Elective. | Prerequisites: Completion of first year writing requirements.
This course looks at how people interact with their environments: how settings affect behavior; how people change environments to fit their needs; and how people can become an active part of the environmental-design process. The course discusses how people use space and the way environmental design meets (or fails to meet) human needs. These concerns are valid for very-small-scale design problems (as in human-factors engineering); mid-size spaces (architecture and interior design); large-scale spaces (communities, urban areas). | Prerequisites: Completion of first year writing requirements . Co-requisites: None. Notes: Satisfies a HuSS elective.
Limits of real and complex sequences and series; topology of metric spaces; continuity and differentiability of functions; definition, properties, and approximations of Riemann integrals; convergence of sequences and series of functions; Fourier series and other orthogonal systems of functions, approximations theorems. | Prerequisites: (MA-UY 2114 or MA-UY 2514) and (MA-UY 1044 or MA-UY 2034 or MA-UY 3034 or MA-UY 3054) and Junior level standing or above. | Anti-Requisite: MA-UY 4644
We are inundated by data, but data alone do not translate into useful information. Statistics provides the means for organizing, summarizing, and therefore better analyzing data so that we can understand what the data tell us about critical questions. If one collects data then understanding how to use statistical methods is critical, but it is also necessary to understand and interpret all the information we consume on a daily basis. This course provides these basic statistical approaches and techniques. This course may not be acceptable as a substitute for any other Probability and Statistics course. For Sustainable Urban Environments (SUE) students, please see your advisor. Note: Not open to math majors or students who have taken or will take MA-UY 2054 or MA-UY 2224 or MA-UY 3014 or MA-UY 3514 or ECE-UY 2233 or equivalent.
This course covers techniques of integration, introduction to ordinary differential equations, improper integrals, numerical methods of integration, applications of integration, sequences, series, power series, approximations of functions via Taylor polynomials, Taylor series, functions of two variables, graphs of functions of two variables, contour diagrams, linear functions, functions of three variables. | Prerequisites: MA-UY 1024 or MA-UY 1324 | Corequisite: EX-UY 1.
This course covers: Library of Functions, functions of one variable. Limits, derivatives of functions defined by graphs, tables and formulas, differentiation rules for power, polynomial, exponential and logarithmic functions, derivatives of trigonometric functions, the product and quotient rules, the chain rule, applications of the chain rule, maxima and minima, optimization. The definite integral, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and interpretations, theorems about definite integrals, anti-derivatives. MA-UY 1324 is for students who wish to take MA-UY 1024 but need more review of precalculus. MA-UY 1324 covers the same material as MA-UY 1024 but with more contact hours per week, incorporating a full discussion of the required precalculus topics. | Prerequisite: Placement Exam or MA-UY 912 or MA-UY 914. Corequisite: EX-UY 1.
This course MA-UY 1424 is for students who wish to take MA-UY 1124 but need more review of precalculus. MA-UY 1424 covers the same material as MA-UY 1124 but with more contact hours a week, incorporating a full discussion of the required precalculus topics. | Prerequisites: MA-UY 1022 or MA-UY 1024 or MA-UY 1324. Note: credit for this course may be used to satisfy the minimum credit requirement for graduation. Corequisite: EX-UY 1
Similar to MA-UY 2114 Calculus III, but at a faster pace and deeper level. Functions of several variables. Vectors in the plane and space. Partial derivatives with applications, especially Lagrange multipliers. Double and triple integrals. Spherical and cylindrical coordinates. Surface and line integrals. Divergence, gradient, and curl. Theorem of Gauss and Stokes. Students pursuing an honors mathematics degree are especially encouraged to consider this course. Prerequisite: (MA-UY 1124 or MA-UY 1424) with a grade of A- or better OR a 5 on the AP Calculus BC Exam and Department Permission. Anti-requisite: MA-UY 2114
This course covers: foundations of algebra, exponents, multiplication of algebraic expressions, factoring algebraic expressions, working with algebraic fractions, proportionality, rates of change, equations of lines, completing squares, the quadratic formula, solving equations, systems of linear equations, inequalities, domain and range of functions, exponential and logarithmic functions, compositions of functions, transformations of functions, right triangles, trigonometry of triangles.| Prerequisite: placement exam. Note: credit for this course may not be used to satisfy the minimum credit requirement for graduation. Corequisite: EX-UY 1
This course covers: Library of Functions, functions of one variable. Limits, derivatives of functions defined by graphs, tables and formulas, differentiation rules for power, polynomial, exponential and logarithmic functions, derivatives of trigonometric functions, the product and quotient rules, the chain rule, applications of the chain rule, maxima and minima, optimization. The definite integral, the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus and interpretations, theorems about definite integrals, anti-derivatives. | Prerequisite: Placement Exam or MA-UY 914 | Corequisite: EX-UY 1
Introduction to the mathematics of finance. Topics include: Linear programming with application pricing and quadratic. Interest rates and present value. Basic probability: random walks, central limit theorem, Brownian motion, lognormal model of stock prices. Black-Scholes theory of options. Dynamic programming with application to portfolio optimization. | Prerequisites: A grade of C or better in (MA-UY 2114 or MA-UY 2514) and a grade of C or better in (MA-UY 2054 or MA-UY 2224 or MA-UY 2414 or MA-UY 3014 or MA-UY 3022 or MA-UY 3514 or MA-UY 4114).
Techniques for counting and enumeration including generating functions, the principle of inclusion and exclusion, and Polya counting. Graph theory. Modern algorithms and data structures for graph-theoretic problems. | Prerequisite: C or better in MA-UY 1124 or MA-UY 1424.
This is an introduction to the rigorous treatment of the foundations of real analysis in one variable. It is based entirely on proofs. Students are expected to know what a mathematical proof is and are also expected to be able to read a proof before taking this class. Topics include: properties of the real number system, sequences, continuous functions, topology of the real line, compactness, derivatives, the Riemann integral, sequences of functions, uniform convergence, infinite series and Fourier series. Additional topics may include: Lebesgue measure and integral on the real line, metric spaces, and analysis on metric spaces. | Prerequisites: A grade of A- or better in (MA-UY 2114 or MA-UY 2514) and (MA-UY 1044 or MA-UY 2034 or MA-UY 3054) and Junior level standing or above. Recommended: MA-UY 2514 Honors Calculus III and MA-UY 3054 Honors Linear Algebra with a grade of B or better. | Anti-Requisite: MA-UY 4614
Introduction to abstract algebraic structures, including groups, rings, and fields. Sets and relations. Congruences and unique factorization of integers. Groups, permutation groups, homomorphisms and quotient groups. Rings and quotient rings, Euclidean rings, polynomial rings. Fields, finite extensions. | Prerequisites: A grade of C or better in (MA-UY 2114 or MA-UY 2514) and (MA-UY 1044 (formerly 3044) or MA-UY 3054 or MA-UY 3113). Additionally, it is suggested for students to have taken MA-UY 4614 or MA-UY 4644 as a prerequisite. Note: Cannot receive credit for both MA-UY 4044 and MA-UY 4054.
A first course in ordinary differential equations, including analytical solution methods, elementary numerical methods, and modeling. Topics to be covered include: first-order equations including integrating factors; second-order equations including variation of parameters; series solutions; elementary numerical methods including Euler’s methods, Runge-Kutta methods, and error analysis; Laplace transforms; systems of linear equations; boundary-value problems. Restricted to Tandon math majors and students with a permission code from the math department. Fulfills ordinary differential equations requirement for the BS Math degree. | Prerequisites: C or better in (MA-UY 2114 or MA-UY 2514 or MATH-UH 1020 or MATH-UH 1021 or MATH-SHU 151) and (MA-UY 1044 or MA-UY 3054 or MA-UY 3113 or MATH-UH 1022 or MATH-SHU 140 or MATH-SHU 141). Note: Not open to students who have taken or will take MA-UY 2034 or MA-UY 4254
Introduction to abstract algebraic structures, including groups, rings, and fields. Sets and relations. Congruences and unique factorization of integers. Groups, permutation groups, group actions, homomorphisms and quotient groups, direct products, classification of finitely generated abelian groups, Sylow theorems. Rings, ideals and quotient rings, Euclidean rings, polynomial rings, unique factorization. | Prerequisites:(A grade of A- or better in MA-UY 2114 or a grade or B or better in MA-UY 2514) and (a grade of A- or better in MA-UY 1044 (formerly 3044) or MA-UY 3113 or a grade of B or better in MA-UY 3054). Additionally, it is suggested for students to have taken MA-UY 4614 or MA-UY 4644 as a prerequisite. Note: Cannot receive credit for both MA-UY 4044 and MA-UY 4054.
This honors section of Linear Algebra is intended for well-prepared students who have already developed some mathematical maturity. Its scope will include the usual Linear Algebra (MA-UY 3044) syllabus; however, this class will move faster, covering additional topics and going deeper. Vector spaces, linear dependence, basis and dimension, matrices, determinants, solving linear equations, eigenvalues and eigenvectors, quadratic forms, applications such as optimization or linear regression. Note: Not open to students who have already taken MA-UY 1044, MA-UY 1533, MA-UY 2034, or MA-UY 3113. | Prerequisites: A- or better in MA-UY 1024 or MA-UY 1324 or MA-UY 1022
Divisibility and prime numbers. Linear and quadratic congruences. The classical number-theoretic functions. Continued fractions. Diophantine equations. | Prerequisites: C or better in MA-UY 1124 or MA-UY 1424.
Formulation and analysis of mathematical models. Mathematical tools include dimensional analysis, optimization, simulation, probability, and elementary differential equations. Applications to biology, sports, economics, and other areas of science. The necessary mathematical and scientific background will be developed as needed. Students participate in formulating models as well as in analyzing them. | Prerequisites: A grade of C or better in (MA-UY 2114 or MA-UY 2514) and (MA-UY 2034 or MA-UY 1044 (formerly MA-UY 3044) or MA-UY 3054).
Logic, proofs, set theory, functions, relations, asymptotic notation, recurrences, modeling computation, graph theory. | Prerequisite: Math Diagnostic Exam or MA-UY 914 (minimum calculus level required) | Prerequisite for Shanghai students: MATH-SHU 131. Note: This course and CS-GY 6003 cannot both be taken for credit.
Systems of linear equations, Gaussian elimination, matrices, determinants, Cramer’s rule. Vectors, vector spaces, basis and dimension, linear transformations. Eigenvalues, eigenvectors, and quadratic forms. Restricted to Tandon math and CS majors and students with a permission code from the math department. Fulfills linear algebra requirement for the BS Math and BS CS degrees. Note: Not open to students who have already taken MA-UY 1533, MA-UY 2034, MA-UY 3113 or MA-UY 3054. | Prerequisite: A grade of C or better in MA-UY 1022 or MA-UY 1024 or MA-UY 1324 or MATH-UH 1012Q or MATH-UH 1013Q or MATH-SHU 121 or MATH-SHU 201
This course provides a deeper understanding of topics introduced in MA-UY 2012 and MA-UY 2034 and continues the development of those topics, while also covering functions of a Complex Variable. Topics covered include: The Gram-Schmidt process, inner product spaces and applications, singular value decomposition, LU decomposition. Derivatives and Cauchy-Riemann equations, integrals and Cauchy integral theorem. Power and Laurent Series, residue theory. | Prerequisites: (MA-UY 2114 or MA-UY 2514) AND (MA-UY 2034). Note: Not open to students who have taken MA-UY 1533, MA-UY 3112 or MA-UY 4433.
In numerical analysis one explores how mathematical problems can be analyzed and solved with a computer. As such, numerical analysis has very broad applications in mathematics, physics, engineering, finance, and the life sciences. This course gives an introduction to this subject for mathematics majors. Theory and practical examples using Matlab will be combined to study a range of topics ranging from simple root-finding procedures to differential equations and the finite element method. | Prerequisites: A grade of C or better in (MA-UY 2114 or MA-UY 2514) and (or MA-UY 1044 or MA-UY 3034 or MA-UY 3054 or MA-UY 3113) | Anti-Requisite: MA-UY 4524
MA-UY 2034 is an introduction to ordinary differential equations and linear algebra. The course develops the techniques for the analytic and numeric solutions of ordinary differential equations (and systems) that are widely used in modern engineering and science. Linear algebra is used as a tool for solving systems of linear equations as well as for understanding the structure of solutions to linear (systems) of differential equations. Topics covered include the fundamental concepts of linear algebra such as Gaussian elimination, matrix theory, linear transformations, vector spaces, subspaces, basis, eigenvectors, eigenvalues and the diagonalization of matrices, as well as the techniques for the analytic and numeric solutions of ordinary differential equations (and systems) that commonly appear in modern engineering and science. | Prerequisite: MA-UY 1124 or MA-UY 1424. Note: Not open to students who have taken MA-UY 1044 or MA-UY 3054 or MA-UY 3083 or MA-UY 4204.
Vectors in the plane and space. Partial derivatives with applications, especially Lagrange multipliers. Double and triple integrals. Spherical and cylindrical coordinates. Surface and line integrals. Divergence, gradient, and curl. Theorems of Gauss and Stokes. | Prerequisite: MA-UY 1124 or MA-UY 1424. Anti-requisite: MA-UY 2514
Standard first course in probability, recommended for those planning further work in probability or statistics. Probability of events, random variables and expectations, discrete and continuous distributions, joint and conditional distributions, moment generating functions, the central limit theorem. | Prerequisites: MA-UY 109, MA-UY 2112, OR MA-UY 2114. Note: Not open to students who have taken MA-UY 2224 or MA-UY 3012 or MA-UY 3022.
This course examines the implications of ethical questions posed in works of poetry, drama, and fiction. Attention will be paid to historical context. This course satisfies HUSS elective requirements and 3000-level writing intensive requirements for all Poly majors. | Prerequisites: Completion of first year writing requirements
In this seminar/workshop, students read a wide range of poetic forms or structures and practice making poems, focusing on the reading and composition of poems as forms of design. | Prerequisites: Completion of first year writing requirements.
This online course examines how diverse authors of literature have approached and continue in critically evaluate developments in both science and technology. This course will introduce students to major works in the literary canon through the lens of scientific developments. The historical topics that we will address are the advent of the printing press, the Copernican revolution, Enlightenment thought, the impact of the Industrial Revolution, the rise of modern warfare, medical advances, and ultimately, the age of the Internet. In particular, we will study how writers portrayed the individual and society as well as examined social interactions in the scientific world. How did the introduction of literature of the “masses” ultimately transform plot, character development, and the objective of narrative fiction? Authors and works we will read include: Anonymous, Everyman, William Shaespeare’s Sonnets, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Voltaire’s Candide, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, George Orwell’s 1984, and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. | Prerequisites: EXPOS-UA 1 or EXPOS-UA 4
This course examines the implications of medicine, mental or physical illness, and death in works of poetry, drama and fiction. Some attention will be paid to historical context. This course satisfies HUSS elective requirements and HUSS writing-intensive requirements. | Prerequisites: Completion of first year writing requirements
The poems of John Ashbery and the art of Richard Serra confront the respective reader/viewer: find a methodology based upon the structural configuration of the poem and sculpture to enable a “reading” of the work. The works that will be addressed reject impressionistic, subjective commentary. The beauty of word or artifact is not applicable. Post-1900 non-referential sculptures and paintings will be juxtaposed with poems that disassociate themselves from narrative content, poems whose only subject matter is language configuration – even when there is apparent thematic material – poems of Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Amy Clampitt, Susan Howe, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, and Louis Zukofsky. The poets so listed complement preoccupations of artists such as Mark di Suvero, David Smith, Richard Serra, Anthony Caro, Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Vito Acconci, Robert Smithson, and Marcel Duchamp. | Prerequisite(s): Completion of first year writing requirements
Focusing on software engineering, the course introduces techniques to specify, design, test and document medium and large software systems. Design techniques include information engineering, object orientation and complexity measures. Also covered are testing methods, such as path testing, exhaustive test models and construction of test data. An introduction to software tools and project management techniques is presented. Student projects involve team software development and tracking. | Prerequisites: Juniors or higher majoring in Computer Science, Computer Engineering or Electrical and Computer Engineering. Co-requisite: CS-UY 3224
This course covers abstract data types and the implementation and use of standard data structures along with fundamental algorithms and the basics of algorithm analysis. Not open to students who have taken CS-UY 2134. | Prerequisite for Brooklyn Students: CS-UY 1114 or CS-UY 1121 (C- or better) | Prerequisite for Abu Dhabi Students: CS-UH 1001 or ENGR-UH 1000 | Prerequisite for Shanghai Students: CSCI-SHU 101 | Corequisite for all Students: EX-UY 1
This intermediate-level programming course teaches object-oriented programming in C . Topics: Pointers, dynamic memory allocation and recursion. Classes and objects including constructors, destructors, methods (member functions) and data members. Access and the interface to relationships of classes including composition, association and inheritance. Polymorphism through function overloading operators. Inheritance and templates. Use of the standard template library containers and algorithms. | Prerequisite: CS-UY 1134 (C- or better); Corequisite: EX-UY 1
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an important topic in computer science that has many diversified applications. It addresses one of the ultimate puzzles human are trying to solve – How is it possible for a slow, tiny brain, whether biological or electronic, to perceive, understand, predict, and manipulate a world far larger and more complicated than itself? And, how do we go about creating a machine (or computer) with those properties? To this end, researchers in the AI field have been trying to understand how seeing, learning, remembering, and reasoning could, or should be done. This course introduces students to the many concepts and techniques in artificial intelligence. | Prerequisite for Brooklyn Students: (CS-UY 2134 or CS-UY 1134) and (CS-UY 2124 or CS-UY 1124) (C- or better) | Prerequisite for Abu Dhabi Students: ENGR-UH 3510 or CS-UH 1050 (C- or better) | Prerequisite for Shanghai Students: CSCI-SHU 210 (C- or better)
This Laboratory course teaches students how to prepare, isolate and purify typical organic compounds. Experiments illustrate basic techniques. Lab fee required. | Co/prerequisite CM-UY 2213.
This course surveys modern biochemistry and emphasizes current areas of research. Also covered are structure-function relationships in proteins; enzymes and their mechanisms of action; bioenergetics principles and energy production; and biochemical theories and techniques. | Prerequisites: CM-UY 2213 or CM-UY 2214 or CM-UY 2234 or instructor’s permission.
This laboratory accompanies the lecture course BMS-UY 1003 Introduction to Cell and Molecular Biology. This laboratory course is required for BMS and CBE majors taking BMS-UY 1003, but is optional for other majors. | Co-requisite: BMS-UY 1003
The course covers the fundamentals of biology with emphasis on cell and molecular biology. The course material includes introduction to biomolecules and bioenergetics, basic organization and functioning of living cells and general principles of genetics and reproduction.
The course covers the genetics of bacteria, viruses and high organisms. Emphasis is on both the genetic and biochemical analyses of gene replication, heredity, mutation, recombination and gene expression. Included are comparisons of prokaryotic and eukaryotic genetics and regulation. Laboratory techniques are used to study genetic phenomena in prokaryotes, eukaryotes and viruses. The course emphasizes modern approaches to genetic research. A lab fee is required. | Prerequisite: BMS-UY 1004. Co-requisite: CM-UY 2213 or CM-UY 2214.
This course addresses the basic processes, as studied by the physical, biological sciences, and behavioral that determine the nature of the physical environment and how it affects life on earth. Topics include the physical environment (Lithosphere, Hydrosphere, Atmosphere, climate); the biological environment (biological systems, biodiversity, population dynamics, ecology) and modern environmental problems, including resource shortages (such as water and energy), diseases, soil, water and air pollution, climate change and their relationship to political and economic issues. Note: This course cannot be used to satisfy Humanities/Social Science requirements for majors outside of the TCS department. | Prerequisites: Completion of first year writing requirements.
This course continues CM-UY 2213 and emphasizes finding the principles of organic chemistry in industrial practice and biochemical mechanisms. It introduces instrumental methods of analysis and identification. | Prerequisite: CM-UY 2213. Co-requisite EX-UY 1
This course covers chemical thermodynamics with applications to solutions, phase and chemical equilibria. Molecular motion and transport properties are also covered. | Prerequisites: CM-UY 1004 or CM-UY 1024 and MA-UY 1124 or MA-UY 1154 and PH-UY 1013.
This is a one-semester introductory course in general chemistry. It covers chemical equations, stoichiometry, thermodynamics, gases, atomic and molecular structure, periodic table, chemical bonding, states of matter, chemical equilibrium, organic, inorganic and polymeric materials and electrochemistry. | Corequisite: EX-UY 1
This is a one-semester overview course in chemistry, providing examples of important discoveries and important chemical innovators, with a strong emphasis on cutting-edge research. Field opportunities are developed to allow students to contribute to the discipline. | Prerequisite: Only first-year students are permitted to enroll in this introductory level course.
This course covers chemistry of organic molecules: structure, nomenclature, properties and reactions of carbon compounds with emphasis on aliphatic compounds. It also introduces reaction mechanisms and stereochemistry. | Prerequisite: CM-UY 1004 or CM-UY 1024. Co-Requisite: EX-UY 1
This course covers states of matter, chemical thermodynamics and equilibria, kinetics, acid-base chemistry, electrochemistry, introduction to organic chemistry, natural and synthetic polymers. The course is required for students in the Biomolecular Science Program. | Prerequisite: CM-UY 1004 or CM-UY 1014. Corequisite: EX-UY 1.
This course continues Biochemistry I. It covers principles of intermediary metabolism: energetic membrane structure and transport; structure and function of DNA and RNA; principles of molecular biology; the immune system; and hormonal regulation and cancer. | Prerequisite: CM-UY 3314 or instructor’s permission.
This class examines the intersecting dynamics of media genres and geo-linguistic cultural markets in the configuration of global and regional media flows. It looks in particular at the way media genres travel and how their circulation raises issues about the cultural power of certain media narratives in specific historical, political and social conditions of consumption. We will examine the battle for national, regional, and global media markets as a struggle for the ’Slegitimate’ cultural and political view of the world expressed through information (news), scientific discourse (documentaries), and popular culture (films, tele novels, reality television, music) to understand the complex global flow of television programs and films.
This class is an overview of the field of games that approaches them from several theoretical and critical perspectives. No special theoretical background or prior training is needed to take the course, but to have had a broad practical experience with and basic knowledge of games is a distinct advantage. Also, an interest in theoretical and analytical issues will help. You are expected to actively participate in the lectures, which are dialogic in form, with ample room for discussion. The course will prepare the student to: Understand and discuss games from a theoretical perspective, as well as the components of a game; Apply new theories and evaluate them critically; Assess and discuss game concepts and the use of games in various contexts; Analyze games, and understand and apply a range of analytical methods.
Performance Studies — An Introduction explores the wide world of performance – from theatre, dance, and music to ritual, play, political campaigns, social media, and the performances of everyday life. Performance studies also ranges across cultures — Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, the Americas. And it spans historical periods from the art of the paleolithic caves to YouTube and the avant-garde. This course is devised by Richard Schechner, one of the pioneers of performance studies, in dialogue with more than a dozen expert scholars and artists. Performance Studies — An Introduction puts students in dialogue with the most important ideas, approaches, theories, and questions of this dynamic, new academic field. Performance Studies — An Introduction is a “flipped” course: students will read and watch lessons online, blog about the material, and participate in a weekly interactive seminar guided by Professor Erin B. Mee — a theatre director and scholar — who has worked with Schechner for years.
From Karlheinz Stockhausen and Kraftwerk to D.A.F. and the Euro disco of Snap! – the first seven weeks of class considers the history of German electronic music prior to the Fall of the Wall. We will particularly look at how electronic music developed in Germany before the advent of house and techno in the late 1980s. One focus will be on regional scenes such as the Düsseldorf school of electronic in the 1970s with music groups such as Cluster, Neu! And Can, the Berlin school of synthesizer pioneers like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Manuel Göttsching or Giorgio Moroder’s Sound of Munich. Visits will be made to experience Oskar Sala’s Trautonium – an early proto-synthesizer with which he created the sounds for Hitchcock’s The Birds – at the Musikinstrumenten Museum and the location of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab, an experimental club founded by Conrad Schnitzler and Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Students will be expected to competently identify key musicians and recordings of this creative period. The second half of the course looks more specifically at the arrival of Techno, a new musical movement, and new technology in Berlin and Germany in the turbulent years after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, up to the contemporary moment. Indeed, Post-Wall East Berlin, full of abandoned spaces and buildings and deserted office blocks, was the perfect breeding ground for the youth culture that would dominate the 90s and led Techno pioneers and artists from the East and the West to take over and set up shop. Within a short space of time Berlin became the focal point of a new culture, attracting enthusiastic followers from all over the world to clubs such as ‘Tresor’ and ‘E-Werk’. Among those early techno aficionados were writers, artists, photographers, musicians and fashion designers. Techno quickly developed into a lifestyle and mass movement, finding its most exhilarating expression in the Love Parade and, recently, the club/movement Berghain. As students consider Berlin’s slow transformation from divided city in those anarchic and pioneering days of the early 90s into the bustling, world-class nightlife capital it is today, they will also consider the changing and controversial cultural and socio-economic landscape of the city, and how Berlin continues to retain its uncompromising, avant-garde ethos. Students will be expected to write final research paper drawing on issues discussed in class and in the readings.
This interdisciplinary course examines the works of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, three German-speaking writers who pioneered radically different and influential interpretations of modern life, which continue to shape our contemporary understanding of society and individuality. The seminar not only delves into the origins of these prominent traditions of modern Western thought, but also underscores their relevance in modern social theories and poetics. Hence, the course will also include references to the writings of their contemporaries, as well as explications of the direct and indirect influences of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud on other writers.
This course introduces students to the central themes, issues, & controversies in American education. What is the purpose of “school”? How did schools begin, in the United States, & how have they evolved across time? How do children learn? How are they different from each other, & why & when should that matter? How should we teach them? & how should we structure schools & classrooms to promote learning? Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Society & Social Sciences for Steinhardt students.
In 1903, at the dawn of the commercial music industry, sociologist W. E. B. DuBois famously proclaimed that the foremost problem in twentieth century American society is “the problem of the color line.” Du Bois’s prescience sets the stage for this course’s exploration of racial identity in recorded, commercially available music. We will examine how racial performance has intermingled with music consumption in the United States since blackface minstrelsy in the 1830s. Our goal is to understand how deeply embedded race—both ascribed and claimed—is in American music culture, reverberating throughout the last century in debates on artists’ authenticity, propriety, and popularity. This course is organized chronologically; each week is devoted to a particular era and its corresponding musical genres leading up to the present. With the rising importance of visual media since the mid-20th century, a historically informed understanding of the confluences of race and ethnicity in American music culture through music media and technologies will offer an enhanced understanding of the past and our contemporary, internet-driven musical landscape.
’Art: Practice and Ideas’ examines key developments in the visual arts from modernity to the present. Focusing on the ways in which representations both create and reflect the values of a society, the course introduces students to the full range of expressive possibilities within the visual arts, covering painting and sculpture, as well as photography, film, video, conceptual art, and computer media. Topics to be covered include classical, modern, and postmodern relationships to politics, vision, the mind, the body, psychology, gender, difference, and technological innovation. Students will see and understand how artists have integrated perceptions of their historical moment, as well as physical and social space, into creative practices that have, in turn, had a significant impact on the culture of the time. Liberal Arts Core/MAP Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Expressive Cultures
Introduction to numerical computation: the need for floating-point arithmetic, the IEEE floating-point standard. Importance of numerical computing in a wide variety of scientific applications. Fundamental types of numerical algorithms: direct methods (e.g., for systems of linear equations), iterative methods (e.g., for a nonlinear equation), and discretization methods (e.g., for a differential equation). Numerical errors: How can you tell if you can trust your answers? The use of graphics and software packages such as Matlab. Programming assignments.
This course takes a mathematical approach in studying topics in computer science, such as: regular languages and some of their representations (deterministic finite automata, non-deterministic finite automata, regular expressions); proof of non-regularity. Context free languages and pushdown automata; proofs that languages are not context free. Elements of computability theory. Brief introduction to NP-completeness.
This course examines fashion both from its diffusion in a globalized society, and as a form of communication and culture. We will examine how fashion has been valued through social sciences – history and sociology on the one hand, and economy on the other hand, from its production to its consumption. The course will address fashion in terms of issues of consumerism and sustainability in a post-industrialized society.
This course examines the significance of technology to the definition and experience of disability; the relationship between disability and new media; the politics of representation; and debates between disability studies and media studies. Topics include biomedical technology; “assistive technology”; cyborgs and prostheses as fact and metaphor; inclusive architecture and design; visual rhetorics of disability in film and photography; staring and other practices of looking; medical and counter-medical performance; media advocacy, tactical media, and direct action.
Introduces students to the study of media, culture, and communication. The course surveys models, theories, and analytical perspectives that form the basis of study in the major. Topics include dialogue, discourse, mass and interpersonal communication, political economy, language, subject-formation, critical theory, experience, and reception.
Introduces students to several methods of analyzing the content, production, and contexts of media in society. Students explore the basic approaches of textual analysis, political economy, and ethnography. Students adopt, adapt and employ these methods in their own analyses, survey and data collection, and ethnographies. Students create their work by means of digitally mediated image annotation and manipulation, data collection and visualization, and audio/video production.
This course challenges us to foster a tactile understanding of the relationship between art and social change. How do artists address social issues? Can art transform lives? How can art serve as a force for encouraging ethical dialogue and action within the public sphere? How do we make our ideas and revelations actually matter within our collective place and space? To better facilitate our understanding of this relationship, and in an effort to get inside these key questions and others, this course will unfold in two parts. Part I (Conversations on Art and Social Change) will be run as an interactive seminar in which we will explore how the desire to change the world has led some artists to align themselves with wider social movements. Through lectures, discussions and presentations, we will set about to engage ourselves with the work of contemporary artists who have addressed issues related to the environment, racial and cultural identity, human rights, healthcare, and social justice. We will assume that understanding the work of others is necessary if we are to appreciate the potentiality of our own impact on the world. Part II of this course (A Collective Gesture Toward) will entail challenging ourselves to participate more fully in our immediate surroundings vis-à-vis the development and implementation of a work (or works) of art.
This course explores the scientific foundations of current environmental issues and their implications for public policy. The syllabus is divided into sections that each examines a current environmental theme in depth. The first sections investigate the composition of the atmosphere and the chemical processes that cause air pollution, ozone depletion, and global warming. Moving to the study of water, the course explores the properties of this unique solvent and the effect of various aqueous pollutants. The course also includes an investigation of energy from chemical reactions, our continuing reliance on fossil fuels, and the potential of alternative energy sources. The laboratory experiments are closely integrated with the lecture topics and provide hands-on explorations of central course themes. Throughout the course we also will examine how scientific studies of the environment are intimately connected with political, economic and policy concerns.
This course provides an overview of current research on divorce in American families. The instructor is a child and adolescent psychiatrist who has researched trauma and resilience and has worked clinically with children and families affected by divorce. The course emphasizes how divorce impacts children and their capacity to grow into loving, well-functioning, relationship-forming adults. Theories of attachment, intimacy, and communication are examined in the context of successful and failed marital relationships.
This course explores the practices, principles and aesthetics of comedic performance. Questions examined include: What makes something funny? Why do audiences laugh? What is the relationship between performer and audience in comedy? How does a performer get the laugh without ‘asking’ for it? How is humor specific to certain cultures, historical periods, genders or age groups? Are any elements of humor universal? Does the nature of performing comedy change from medium to medium? The course investigates these questions through readings, lectures, discussion and experiential exercises. Students are challenged to synthesize theory, historical traditions, and practical application into viable comedic performances. Students will experiment with this synthesis through discussing, analyzing, rehearsing and performing scenes/monologues drawn from major comic traditions including: masked forms (such as Greek Old Comedy and Commedia dell’Arte), high comedy (like the comedies of Shakespeare and Moliere), low comedy (such as the slapstick of Charlie Chaplin, Mel Brooks, as well as modern sketch, improv and stand-up comedy) and that which defies easy categorization (such as Monty Python or Sacha Baron Cohen). The course will culminate in a public presentation, allowing students to share select comedic performances with an audience. Students are expected to rehearse outside of class time.
This course is an introduction to the field of performance studies. In this course, performance will be broadly construed to include aesthetic performance (performance art, theater, music, dance, and visual culture) and everyday presentations of self. We will study the history of the field and its relation to other fields (anthropology, theatre studies, philosophy, dance studies, feminism, political science, critical race theory, legal studies, etc.) and ask questions of how the study of performance can help us to understand contemporary questions of aesthetics, politics, and social culture. We will study the theory and history of the field as grounded in documented performances in addition to attending live performances in New York City. This course will place particular emphasis on political performance (in the US and abroad), queer, and minority performance.
Art in the Western world from the late 18th century to the present. The Neoclassicism and Romanticism of David, Goya, Ingres, Turner, Delacroix; the Realism of Courbet; the Impressionists; parallel developments in architecture; and the new sculptural tradition of Rodin. From postimpressionism to Fauvism, Expressionism, Futurism, Cubism, geometric abstraction in sculpture and painting, and modernism in architecture in the 20th century. After World War I, Dadaism and Surrealism. Developments since 1945, such as Action painting, Pop art, Minimal art, and numerous strands of Postmodernism.
An introduction to philosophy through the study of issues in cognitive science. Topics may include the conflict between computational and biological approaches to the mind; whether a machine could think; the reduction of the mind to the brain; connectionism and neural nets. Gives training in philosophical argument and writing.
Viewed as a natural kind or socially constructed, “madness” was defined and treated, examined and controlled, diagnosed and cured according to the spirit of the time. This course follows the varied social imageries of “madness” throughout Western history, from the Hebrew Bible to the contemporary and controversial Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM), also known as “the bible of psychiatry”, in its most recent 5th edition. Students read primary and secondary texts by philosophers, physicians, theologians, jurists, tragedians, novelists, psychologists, social reformers, policy makers, journalists, historians and individuals who suffered madness, also known as “experts from experience.” They also observe art and watch films that portray different aspects of madness. Reading includes: the Bible, Plato, Hippocrates, Ibn Sina, Margery Kempe, Erasmus, Robert Burton, Freud, George Canguilhem, Foucault, Ian Hacking, Elaine Showalter, Ruth Leys among others. The course explores the interaction between the social, cultural, scientific, political as well as economic factors that have shaped the views of “madness” and its treatment while paying ample attention to the history of ideas that informed and, often, framed them.
In 1903, at the dawn of the commercial music industry, sociologist W. E. B. DuBois famously proclaimed that the foremost problem in twentieth century American society is “the problem of the color line.” Du Bois’s prescience sets the stage for this course’s exploration of racial identity in recorded, commercially available music. We will examine how racial performance has intermingled with music consumption in the United States since blackface minstrelsy in the 1830s. Our goal is to understand how deeply embedded race—both ascribed and claimed—is in American music culture, reverberating throughout the last century in debates on artists’ authenticity, propriety, and popularity. This course is organized chronologically; each week is devoted to a particular era and its corresponding musical genres leading up to the present. With the rising importance of visual media since the mid-20th century, a historically informed understanding of the confluences of race and ethnicity in American music culture through music media and technologies will offer an enhanced understanding of the past and our contemporary, internet-driven musical landscape.
This course will examine the roles fashion plays in film, television and digital media and their cultural and economic significance. As a signifying system in its own right, fashion contributes to the semiotics of popular forms. It can also operate as a means of authentication (especially in period films and TV) or reveal a variety of ways in which media plays with space and time, purposeful or not. Besides evoking specific temporalities and narrative tone, fashion plays an important role in the construction of gender, both in terms of representation and address. This course will examine the history of the intersection of the fashion and media industries from the free distribution of film-related dress patterns in movie theaters of the 1910s to the current trend for make-over TV, networks like the Style network, the increasing proliferation of fashion blogs and the construction of specifically feminine video games. How does fashion’s specific configuration of consumerism, signification and visual pleasure lend itself to the articulation of modern/postmodern cultures and their presentation of the self? Texts will include Stella Bruzzi and Pamela Church Gibson, Fashion Cultures: Theories, Explanations and Analysis ; selections from Roland Barthes, The Fashion System ; Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity ; assorted articles and selected clips from films and television shows including Marie Antoinette , What Not To Wear , The New York Hat, Fashions of 1934, Now, Voyager and Sex and the City .
This course examines the current developments in contemporary art over the past decade – the art of ‘now’ – from the viewpoint of an artist’s practice & working ideas, looking at current global art production in aesthetic, economic, & social contexts. The major movements in painting, photography, sculpture, installation & performance are examined. Readings will be drawn from first hand interviews & point-of-view accounts, reviews, & critique; a major emphasis on interviews & online studio visits will accompany the texts. Guest artist lectures & off-site museum & gallery viewings will complement the weekly visual presentations & theory conversations. Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Expressive Cultures
Consumerism—the linking of happiness, freedom, and economic prosperity with the purchase and consumption of goods—has long been taken for granted as constitutive of the “good life” in Western societies. Increasingly, global economic shifts have made it possible for some developing countries to engage in patterns of consumption similar to those in the West, such that one quarter of humanity now belongs to the “global consumer class.” At the same time, however, nearly three billion people struggle to survive on less than $2 a day. This course takes an international and interdisciplinary approach to examine consumption in different societies, and we do so by asking several central questions: What are the key determinants of patterns of consumption, and how are they changed or reshaped over time? In turn, how do patterns of consumption shape class formation, racial inequality, identity, aesthetic sensibility, and international boundaries? How do practices of consumption inform the ways in which people understand their values and individuality, imagine success and failure, or conceive happiness? By reading widely in sociology, anthropology, and history we will develop a framework for analyzing the ethical, environmental and social justice implications of consumerism. Readings include case studies from the US, China, India, Europe and Africa Some likely authors include: Keynes, Marx, Marcuse, Benjamin, Mary Douglas, Bill McKibben; Arlie Hochschild, Lizabeth Cohen.
Prerequisite: Algebra and Calculus (MATH-UA 9) or equivalent. Focuses on individual economic decision-makers—households, business firms, and government agencies—and how they are linked together. The emphasis is on decision making by households and firms and how these decisions shape our economic life. Explores the different environments in which businesses sell their products, hire workers, and raise funds to expand their operations; the economic effects of trade between nations; and the effects of various government policies, such as minimum-wage legislation, rent controls, antitrust laws, and more.
Survey a broad spectrum of visual art resources through guided lecture-tour visits to current exhibitions at leading museums, galleries and alternative art spaces located throughout New York City. Onsite meetings with art administrators affiliated with various organizations shed light on a wide range of career and management issues pertaining to the field and add to an understanding of the development and continued growth of New York’s exciting art world.
The course is geared toward the beginning health professional students. This physiology course will focus on how the human body works. Anatomy will also be discussed as the various physiological mechanisms are only possible due to its close interrelationship. Students will be introduced to both clinical and research methodologies and will be able to apply this knowledge in a laboratory setting.
Sociological perspectives on law and legal institutions: the meaning and complexity of legal issues; the relation between law and social change; the effects of law; uses of law to overcome social disadvantage. Topics: ?limits of law,? legal disputes and the courts, regulation, comparative legal systems, legal education, organization of legal work, and lawyers? careers.
This course introduces important issues, historical and contemporary, related to science and technology from a variety of social, political and philosophical viewpoints. The multidisciplinary approach helps students to understand the interaction between science, technology and society and to discover the conditions that foster technological innovation. The scientific and technological way of thinking becomes clear through historical examples, helping students to consider important issues of science and technology policy, such as how science and technology can be used to benefit society and how one can foster innovation in a society or an organization. | Prerequisites: Completion of first year writing requirements. Co-requisites: None. Notes: Satisfies a HuSS Elective.
Amodio, Coons, Marcus, Phelps. Offered every semester. 4 points. Fundamental principles of psychology, with emphasis on basic research and applications in psychology’s major theoretical areas of study: thought, memory, learning, perception, personality, social processes, development, and the physiological bases of psychology. Included in the class is direct observation of methods of investigation through laboratory demonstrations and by student participation in current research projects.
This course is a technical but elementary introduction to the modern understanding of cosmology, intended for non-science students. Proficiency with algebra is required. We will cover advances in cosmology over the last 100 years, with special emphasis on more recent developments in the field. We will cover topics ranging from the early universe to galaxy formation in the present day universe, through the lens of the theory of relativity and the expanding universe. We will cover the Big Bang, the Cosmic Microwave Background, dark matter, dark energy and the associated evidence for these phenomena. This class is mathematically-based; most topics will be explored both qualitatively and quantitatively. Homework and exams will require calculations.
This course is designed to improve students? understanding of written and spoken Korean through exposure to various media sources, such as newspapers, magazines, TV, and film. Class discussions help enhance the students? speaking proficiency as well.
Ah, love. L’amour. The very word stirs our imaginations and pulls at our heartstrings. This most fundamental of emotions has long been a source of creative inspiration – a muse for literature, song, and art. The importance of love and intimacy in human life is clear, but what can the latest observations and scientific discoveries about the brain tell us about this supreme emotion? Through discussions, papers, and projects, we will examine the concepts of love and intimacy through various lenses, including those of neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, culture, and art. Focusing on the development of love throughout the lifecycle, we will study how people seek intimacy, how love evolves over time, the influence of love on human behavior, and love and intimacy’s relation to psychological well-being.
This course provides an overview of the scientific study of the human language faculty, focusing on the cognitive & neural processing mechanisms that underlie linguistic knowledge & use. We describe contemporary approaches to delineating levels of language structure & review various scientific methodologies used to study language. Topics include language knowledge & use as well as language change & variation. Liberal Arts Core/CORE Equivalent – satisfies the requirement for Natural Science for non-CSCD majors
Focuses on the economy as a whole (the ?macroeconomy?). Begins with the meaning and measurement of important macroeconomic data (on unemployment, inflation, and production), then turns to the behavior of the overall economy. Topics include long-run economic growth and the standard of living; the causes and consequences of economic booms and recessions; the banking system and the Federal Reserve; the stock and bond markets; and the role of government policy.
Considers contemporary issues in the interaction of language and society, particularly work on speech variation and social structure. How social factors affect language. Topics: language as a social and political entity; regional, social, and ethnic speech varieties; bilingualism; and pidgin and creole languages.
Today’s technology enables us to collect massive amounts of data, such as images of distant planets, the ups and downs of the economy, and the patterns of our tweets and online behavior. How do we use data to discover new insights about our world? This course introduces ideas and techniques in modern data analysis, including statistical inference, machine learning models, and computer programming. The course is hands-on and data-centric; students will analyze a variety of datasets, including those from the internet and New York City. By the end of the course, students will be able to (1) apply quantitative thinking to data sets; (2) critically evaluate the conclusions of data analyses; and (3) use computing tools to explore, analyze, and visualize data. Throughout the course, we will also examine issues such as data privacy and ethics
This course explores the scientific foundations of current environmental issues and the impact of this knowledge on public policy. One goal of the course is to examine several topics of pressing importance and lively debate in our society – e.g., global warming, the quest for clean air and water, atmospheric ozone depletion, and the continuing search for viable sources of energy. A parallel goal is to develop the chemical, physical, and quantitative principles that are necessary for a deeper understanding of these environmental issues. The relevant topics include the structure of atoms and molecules, the interaction of light with matter, energy relationships in chemical reactions, and the properties of acids and bases. Throughout the course we also examine how scientific studies of the environment are connected to political, economic and policy concerns. The laboratory experiments are closely integrated with the lecture topics and provide hands-on explorations of central course themes. Overall, this course will provide you with the foundation to carefully evaluate environmental issues and make informed decisions about them.
The relationship of the brain to behavior, beginning with the basic elements that make up the nervous system and how electrical and chemical signals in the brain work to effect behavior. Using this foundation, we examine how the brain learns and how it creates new behaviors, together with the brain mechanisms that are involved in sensory experience, movement, hunger and thirst, sexual behaviors, the experience of emotions, perception and cognition, memory and the brain’s plasticity. Other key topics include whether certain behavioral disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder can be accounted for by changes in the function of the brain, and how drugs can alter behavior and brain function.
For more than four centuries, opera has made us cry and laugh, and it still speaks to us today about ourselves and our lives. It does so by telling us stories of love and death, of power and despair, through a unique way of combining words, music and stage action, and ever new styles of performance. This course is designed to develop an understanding of the details of such combination and the way they cooperate in making an opera work in general and for us today. It does not develop chronologically, but through exposure to a selection of major works by Monteverdi, Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. The presentations will be organised around individual operas, exploring their historical background, text and music, performing issues, reception history, and adaptation to other media (not necessarily in this sequence). Each opera will also be taken as a vantage point to explore one main thematic issue, while broader issues – such as genre, the development of formal conventions of librettos and music, Italian opera and its terminology, modes of production, cultural expression, social factors that give rise to certain narratives, how opera fits into the larger history of ideas in Western culture – will build up over the course.
This is a chance to immerse yourself in the musical culture of Prague. You will attend five music performances together with the class and two on your own. Each of the concerts will be in a different style, and performed in a different sort of venue. Each concert will be preceded by a lecture/listening session, often involving the actual performers; you will also be assigned a reading excerpt relevant to the music you will hear. The concerts, scheduled about once every two weeks on evenings between Mondays and Thursdays, will be supplemented by architecture walks and film showings, which will usually take place during class time. In addition, you will undertake a “Personal Connection Project”, in groups of two or three, in which you will choose a local genre, performer or composer to research. The research will include reading relevant contextual material, attendance at a live concert or rehearsal, and an interview with a performer. You will share your project with the class in an oral presentation, which will take place at the end of the semester. after which you will submit your conclusions in a final paper, in lieu of a final exam.
The course description for this Topics in CORE course varies depending on where the course is taught. Please view the course descriptions in the course notes section below.
Contemporary Art in Britian. Contemporary art raises vigorous debate and criticism. But what is contemporary about contemporary art? We consider some key issues in dealing critically with contemporary art with a focus on work on display in exhibitions in London, both major national collections and private galleries, exploring art produced since the late 1950s through case studies of the work of individual artists and through themes which include photography, representations of the body, gallery display, video practice, and installation art. Topics include how contemporary art came to look as it does, with a focus on British art; the different forms of material and presentation artists have employed; why and how diverse audiences are addressed; and how markets, national prizes, and private collections shape the kinds of art produced and inform public taste. We also look at the collection and display of contemporary art, on a private and a public scale; dealer galleries, and issues of curation. Critical and historical writings by artists and theorists will be considered.
A site to help IMA NY students find equivalent courses
For students joining IMA in Fall 2022 and beyond, our new program structure affects the categorization of courses on this site.
Classes listed in the “IMA Major Electives” categories refer to the old IMA program structure. If you’re under the new IMA program structure, these courses count as general IMA Electives for you. Your program structure is noted on your academic advising spreadsheet.
Students on the new program structure can search the Interchange for courses. If you’re looking for “IMA Major Distribution” courses, you'll find them listed here: