Archives

History of Documentary Film (OART-UT 1701)

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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 13472
Section #: 001
Meets: T 6:20-9:20p

Fall 2025 Fall 2026 General Elective Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Spring 2027 Undergraduate
Fall 2021

Climate Change and Environmental Justice (SCA-UA 632)

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.

Social and Cultural Analysis (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2021)

SCA-UA 632-000 (10318)09/02/2021 – 12/14/2021 Tue,Thu2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Ross, Andrew

Physical Science OR Life Science Societies & the Social Sciences Undergraduate

Introduction to the Study of Literature (ENGL-UA 9101)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates:

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.

English (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Texts and Ideas 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
Spring 2024

Media History of NY (MCC-UE 1151)

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.

Media, Culture & Communication (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2024)

MCC-UE 1151-000 (20991)01/22/2024 – 05/06/2024 Tue,Thu12:00 AM – 1:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Ramirez, George

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives 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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 13529
Section #: 001
Meets: R 1:30-4:30p

Expressive Culture IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Seminar/Studies) Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2027 Undergraduate
Fall 2021

Portrait of an Artist: Walter Murch (OART-UT 901)

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.

Open Arts Curriculum (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2021)

OART-UT 901-000 (15488)09/02/2021 – 12/14/2021 Tue5:00 PM – 8:00 PM (Late afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Zivkovic, Brane

IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Seminar/Studies) Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate
Spring 2021

Poetics of Witnessing (OART-UT 829)

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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 13462
Section #: 001
Meets: M 3:30-6:30p

Fall 2026 IMA Electives IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Seminar/Studies) Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2027 Undergraduate
Spring 2022

Topics in Africana Studies (SCA-UA 180)

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.

Social and Cultural Analysis (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Seminar/Studies) Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Societies & the Social Sciences Undergraduate

Science of Movement (DANC-UT 1605)

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.

Undergraduate

Class #
Section #
Meets

Class #: 17380
Section #: 001
Meets: TR 12:30-1:45p

Fall 2025 IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Seminar/Studies) Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Physical Science OR Life Science 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
Spring 2024

Science in Our Lives: Environmental Issues (SCIED-UE 212)

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

Science Education (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2024)

SCIED-UE 212-000 (18146)01/22/2024 – 05/06/2024 Mon,Wed8:00 AM – 9:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Milne, Catherine

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Physical Science OR Life Science 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

History of French Philosophy (PHIL-UA 9026)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Thu

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.

Philosophy (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Societies & the Social Sciences Spring 2026 Texts and Ideas Undergraduate
Spring 2021

Senior Seminar: (JOUR-UA 401)

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.

Journalism (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate

Global Media Seminar: Media Activism and Democracy (ITAL-UA 9513)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue

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.

Italian (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Fall 2025 IMA Electives IMA Electives (Legacy Structure - Seminar/Studies) Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate