Archives

Spring 2022 Spring 2023 Spring 2025

Art and Archaeology of Race in Ancient Mediterranean (IDSEM-UG 2132)

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

Sections (Spring 2025)

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

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate

History of British Fashion (IDSEM-UG 9252)

Credits: 4
Duration: 14 Weeks
Dates: Tue

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.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

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

Sexualities of the Middle East: A Cultural History (IDSEM-UG 9550)

Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Thu

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.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate
Spring 2022 Spring 2024

Novels of Youth In and After Colonialism (IDSEM-UG 2040)

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

Sections (Spring 2024)

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

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate

History of Italian Fashion (IDSEM-UG 9200)

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

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.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Fall 2025 Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate
Spring 2022 Spring 2023 Spring 2024 Spring 2025

The Novel and Society: Victorian Secrets (IDSEM-UG 1726)

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

Sections (Spring 2025)

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

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate
Fall 2024 Spring 2022 Spring 2025

The Modern Arabic Novel (IDSEM-UG 1478)

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

Sections (Spring 2025)

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

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate
Spring 2022

Narrative Investigations II: Realism to Postmodernism (IDSEM-UG 1289)

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

Sections (Spring 2022)

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

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Undergraduate

The Cultural Poltics of Bad Taste (IDSEM-UG 1738)

Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Fri

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.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Liberal Arts & Sciences - Electives Spring 2026 Undergraduate

Hearing Difference: The Commercial Music Industry and the American Racial Imaginary (IDSEM-UG 1802)

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.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

IDSEM-UG 1802-000 (9620)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Tue,Thu2:00 PM – 3:00 PM (Early afternoon)at Washington SquareInstructed by Coleman, Kwami

Fall 2025 Undergraduate

Media and Fashion (IDSEM-UG 1618)

Credits: 4
Duration: 15 Weeks
Dates: Fri

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 .

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

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

Consumerism in Comparative Perspective (IDSEM-UG 1586)

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.

Interdisciplinary Seminars (Undergraduate)
4 credits – 14 Weeks

Sections (Fall 2025)

IDSEM-UG 1586-000 (9400)09/02/2025 – 12/11/2025 Tue8:00 AM – 10:00 AM (Morning)at Washington SquareInstructed by Dacosta, Kimberly

Fall 2025 Societies & the Social Sciences Undergraduate