Category Archives: Expressive Culture

Elective Courses in Liberal Arts & Sciences

Interdisciplinary Art Practice I (ART-UE 22)

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.

Studio Art (Undergraduate)
3 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

ART-UE 22-000 (17931)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Mon9:00 AM – 12:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Das Gupta, Priyanka

ART-UE 22-000 (17932)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Mon9:00 AM – 12:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Graves, Anthony

ART-UE 22-000 (17933)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Thu1:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Baile, Shobun

ART-UE 22-000 (17934)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Thu1:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Herr, Johannah

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Undergraduate

Artists & Audiences in Historical Context (REMU-UT 1203)

Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Tue

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.

Recorded Music (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Expressive Culture Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2025 Spring 2026 Undergraduate

Theatre and Medicine: From the Greeks to the Modern Stage (HEL-UA 134)

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.

Hellenic Studies (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2025)

HEL-UA 134-000 (5784)01/21/2025 – 05/06/2025 Mon2:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Taxidou, Olga

Expressive Culture Spring 2025 Texts and Ideas Undergraduate
Spring 2025

What is Art History? (HIST-SHU 102)

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.

History (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2025)

HIST-SHU 102-000 (21294)02/03/2025 – 05/16/2025 Mon,Wed3:00 PM – 5:00 PM (Late afternoon)at ShanghaiInstructed by Kong, Hyoungee

Expressive Culture Undergraduate

The Art of Play (ARTS-UG 1110)

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

Arts Workshops (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

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

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Undergraduate

Film, Race and Representation (IDSEM-UG 9650)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Thu

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.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Expressive Culture Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate
Fall 2024

Speaking Our Minds – Narrating Mental Illness (CAMS-UA 192)

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.

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

Expressive Culture General Elective Societies & the Social Sciences Undergraduate

Fashion, Culture & the Body (IDSEM-UG 9254)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Thu

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.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate

Writing London (SCA-UA 9886)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon,Wed
Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Mon,Wed

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.

Social and Cultural Analysis (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Texts and Ideas Undergraduate
Fall 2020

Bodies in Cultural Landscapes (OART-UT 706)

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.

Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Expressive Culture IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Seminar/Studies) Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate
Spring 2024

Arab Theatre & Film: (MEIS-UA 747)

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.

Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2024)

MEIS-UA 747-000 (13271)01/22/2024 – 05/06/2024 Mon,Wed12:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Atrach, Naila

Expressive Culture Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate

Ruins, Fragments, and Archives (IDSEM-UG 1748)

Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Thu

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.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Expressive Culture Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate

Fashion as Art: Contemporary Collaborations (ARTS-UG 1437)

Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Fri

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.

Arts Workshops (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Expressive Culture Spring 2026 Undergraduate

History of Italian Cinema (ICINE-UT 1103)

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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 4377
Section #: F01
Meets: M 3-5:45p; F 3-5:45p


Class #: 19235
Section #: F02
Meets: M 6-8p

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2025 Spring 2026 Summer 2025 Summer 2026 Undergraduate

The Gardens and Landscapes of Tuscany (ARTH-UA 9653)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Thu

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.

Art History (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Expressive Culture Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate

Global Fashion Industry: Italy (PRACT-UG 9200)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Wed

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.

Practicum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Cultures and Contexts Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate
Spring 2024

Zine Scenes (OART-UT 24)

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.

Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Expressive Culture General Elective Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate