Category Archives: Expressive Culture

Elective Courses in Liberal Arts & Sciences

Photography through the Lens of Magnum (IDSEM-UG 2930)

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.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
2 credits – 7 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

IDSEM-UG 2930-000 (9720)09/02/2025 – 10/21/2025 Wed2:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Walsh, Lauren

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate
Fall 2023

Journalism Ideas & Practice (JOUR-UA 25)

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.

Journalism (Undergraduate)
2 credits – 14 Weeks

Expressive Culture Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate
Fall 2024 Spring 2023

Film, Literature and Mental Health (UNDSW-US 89)

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.

Undergrad Social Work (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2024)

UNDSW-US 89-000 (16283)09/03/2024 – 12/12/2024 Mon11:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Michaels, Vera

Expressive Culture Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Societies & the Social Sciences Undergraduate

Dancing in the Here and Now: Making Dances, Knowing Bodies (ARTS-UG 1221)

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.

Arts Workshops (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

ARTS-UG 1221-000 (9703)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Wed11:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Satin, Leslie

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Undergraduate

Concepts of Film and New Media (FILMM-UH 1011)

Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates:

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.

Film and New Media (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Spring 2026 Undergraduate

History of Editing (FMTV-UT 1003)

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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 12778
Section #: 001
Meets: R 12:30-3:15p

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

The Art of Sound (FMTV-UT 1007)

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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 12782
Section #: 001
Meets: W 3:30-6:10p

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Fall 2026 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2025 Spring 2026 Undergraduate
Spring 2022

American Cinema: 1960 to Present (FMTV-UT 324)

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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 8182
Section #: 001
Meets: T 6-10p


Class #: 8188
Section #: 002
Meets: R 9:15-10:30a


Class #: 8203
Section #: 003
Meets: R 10:45a-12p

Expressive Culture Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2025 Undergraduate

The Black Image in Cinema (FMTV-UT 1216)

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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 12936
Section #: 001
Meets: R 3:30-6:10p

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

Feminist Filmmakers (FMTV-UT 1156)

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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 12875
Section #: 001
Meets: T 3:30-6:10p

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Fall 2026 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Societies & the Social Sciences Spring 2025 Summer 2025 Summer 2026 Undergraduate
Summer 2022 Summer 2023 Summer 2024

Traditions in Narrative: Comedy in America (FMTV-UT 1231)

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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 2436
Section #: 001
Meets: TR 6-9:15p


Class #: 2437
Section #: 060
Meets: TR 6-9:15p

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

Traditions in Narrative (FMTV-UT 1031)

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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 12803
Section #: 001
Meets: W 2-5:10p

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

Hollywood Auteurs (FMTV-UT 1154)

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).

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 12905
Section #: 001
Meets: R 2-5:10p

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Fall 2026 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2025 Spring 2026 Undergraduate
Spring 2023

Arts & War Seminar: (ASPP-UT 1046)

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.

Ctr for Art, Society & Pub Pol (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2023)

ASPP-UT 1046-000 (22204)01/23/2023 – 05/08/2023 Mon12:00 AM – 3:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Hebert, Patrick

Expressive Culture Undergraduate
Spring 2023

Film: A Transformative Process, a Vision Beyond Technology (OART-UT 140)

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.

Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Expressive Culture General Elective Undergraduate
Spring 2023

International Cinema: 1960 to Present (CINE-UT 56)

This course surveys key historical movements and production moments in international cinema since 1960. Through close readings of exemplary films, the course will familiarize students with significant aesthetic, industrial, and technological developments that have occurred internationally over the past half-century. Emphasis will be placed on how social, political, economic, and cultural factors impact modes of production as well as film form and style in various contexts. Studies of historically innovative movements in particular national cinemas will be complemented with transnational perspectives that seek to trace lines of influence across borders. Students will encounter works from a diverse spectrum of filmmakers, including Agnès Varda, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Andrey Tarkovsky, Stephen Frears, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Jane Campion, and Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 15384
Section #: 001
Meets: R 6-10p


Class #: 15385
Section #: 002
Meets: T 9:15-10:30a


Class #: 15386
Section #: 003
Meets: T 10:45a-12p

Expressive Culture Spring 2025 Undergraduate
Spring 2019

Reading in French Lit: The Modern Era (In French) (FREN-UA 9121)

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.

French (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2019)

FREN-UA 9121-000 (10584)02/04/2019 – 05/16/2019 Tue,Thu1:00 PM – 2:00 PM (Early afternoon)at NYU Paris (Global)Instructed by

Expressive Culture Undergraduate

Studies in Prose Genres: Postcolonial Readings of Classic Texts (FREN-UA 9833)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue,Thu

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.

French (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Expressive Culture Fall 2025 Spring 2026 Undergraduate
Spring 2023

Contemporary Art and Theory in North America and Europe (HUMN-SHU 231)

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).

Humanities (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2023)

HUMN-SHU 231-000 (20180)01/30/2023 – 05/12/2023 Fri1:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)at ShanghaiInstructed by Kramer, Maya

Expressive Culture Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate
Spring 2023

Foundations of Art History (ARTH-UA 10)

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.

Art History (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2023)

ARTH-UA 10-000 (9715)01/23/2023 – 05/08/2023 Mon,Wed9:00 AM – 10:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Flood, Finbarr

ARTH-UA 10-000 (9716)01/23/2023 – 05/08/2023 Thu12:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by

ARTH-UA 10-000 (9717)01/23/2023 – 05/08/2023 Fri9:00 AM – 10:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by

ARTH-UA 10-000 (9718)01/23/2023 – 05/08/2023 Fri11:00 AM – 12:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by

ARTH-UA 10-000 (9719)01/23/2023 – 05/08/2023 Fri2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by

Expressive Culture Undergraduate