All Liberal Arts Elective Courses: Quantitative Reasoning, Physical Science OR Life Science, Societies & the Social Sciences, Expressive Culture, General Liberal Arts Electives
Advanced Writing Courses (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
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.
Advanced Writing Courses (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
WRTNG-UG 1260-000 (14201)09/02/2021 – 12/14/2021 Wed3:00 PM – 6:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Gladstone, Bret
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.
Advanced Writing Courses (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
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.
Advanced Writing Courses (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
WRTNG-UG 1230-000 (19855)09/05/2023 – 12/15/2023 Mon3:00 PM – 6:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Agabian, Nancy
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.
Practicum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
PRACT-UG 1550-000 (10413)01/21/2025 – 05/06/2025 Mon3:00 PM – 6:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Tolisano, James
Practicum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Please check the departmental website for description
College Core Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
CORE-UA 725-000 (19742)09/01/2022 – 12/14/2022 Mon,Wed8:00 AM – 9:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Cohen, Jean-Louis
CORE-UA 725-000 (19743)09/01/2022 – 12/14/2022 Fri8:00 AM – 9:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by
CORE-UA 725-000 (19744)09/01/2022 – 12/14/2022 Fri9:00 AM – 10:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by
CORE-UA 725-000 (19745)09/01/2022 – 12/14/2022 Fri11:00 AM – 12:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by
CORE-UA 725-000 (19746)09/01/2022 – 12/14/2022 Fri12:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
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.
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 6 Weeks
IDSEM-UG 1239-000 (3086)05/20/2024 – 07/02/2024 Tue,Thu5:00 PM – 9:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Rutigliano, Antonio
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.
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
IDSEM-UG 1788-000 (22039)01/23/2023 – 05/08/2023 Tue4:00 PM – 7:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Lewis, Bradley
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.
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
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.
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
IDSEM-UG 2132-000 (10478)01/21/2025 – 05/06/2025 Tue,Thu8:00 AM – 9:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Kim, Patricia
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
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.
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
IDSEM-UG 2040-000 (21100)01/22/2024 – 05/06/2024 Mon,Wed9:00 AM – 10:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Vargo, Gregory
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks
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
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
IDSEM-UG 1726-000 (10251)01/21/2025 – 05/06/2025 Wed2:00 PM – 4:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Foley, June
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.
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
IDSEM-UG 1478-000 (10038)01/21/2025 – 05/06/2025 Tue3:00 PM – 6:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Antoon, Sinan
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.
Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks
IDSEM-UG 1289-000 (20665)01/24/2022 – 05/09/2022 Tue,Thu9:00 AM – 10:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Pies, Stacy