Course Descriptions

PIC 550P/COLI 691R: Insurgencies [Haver R 4:25 – 7:25PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In the wake of radical practical, political, and philosophical critiques of modern political subjectivity there have been a number of attempts to theorize entirely other possibilities for political agency and praxis. We approach these questions through a patient reading of three works by Antonio Negri: MARX BEYOND MARX, THE SAVAGE ANOMALY, and INSURGENCIES, with particular attention to Negri’s development of concepts of production, constituent power, and democracy.

PIC 550Q/PHIL 488J: Tops-Social & Political Philosophy [Weiss T R 10:05- 11:30AM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In this semester's version of this course, we will concentrate on Hegel and Marx as theorists of history. We will explore the meaning of the "dialectical" approach common to both; compare Hegel's "idealist" historical dialectic with Marx's "materialist' view; and contrast their differing treatment of the question whether world history is destined to reach a kind of pinnacle or final realization. We will closely consider to what extent violence has played an essential role in history, as both thinkers believe, and whether human progress is conceivable without such bloodshed.

PIC 550R/PHIL 550M: Kant’s Groundwork [Zinkin T 1:15 – 4:15PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course will be an in depth study of the most influential of all of Kant's writings on morality, The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals. We will also read some of the new work in moral theory that is based on Kant's Groundwork; Herman's "The Practice of Judgment," Korsgaard's "Creating the Kingdom of Ends," and a work that argues against Kant's view, Bernard Williams' "Moral Luck."

PIC 570A/ARTH 500: Theory and Methods [McDonough M 9:40 – 12:40PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: COMING UP SOON !!

PIC 604A/AFST 385E: African American Heritage/Poetry & Jazz [Okpewho T R 4:25 – 5:50PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course traces the parallel development of two art forms that enable us to explore African American history by way of its cultural achievements. Essentially, we shall read the poems, hear the songs and the music (in CDs and tapes), and watch the videos that trace the growth of black poetry and jazz through the key moments of black history. The aim of the course is to understand the intersection of artistic forms as they reflect the social and political climates around them. Special attention will be given to the contributions of African American women to these art forms as well as the growing phenomenon of "jazz poetry." In this seminar course, students will be encouraged to shape and articulate their individual as well as group responses to the poetry and the music. Graduate students taking the course should expect to do, as a final paper, a substantial and well researched treatment of a key theme as revealed in the arts of a chosen era: e.g., through an exploration of the careers of at least one poet and one jazz musician.

PIC 604H/ARTH 580C: Re: Thinking Photography [Tagg ]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: It is almost twenty-five years since the collection Thinking Photography was first published, as a challenge to the presiding orthodoxies of photographic practice and photographic criticism. Already, the coming anniversary has been marked by a major international conference––evidence, perhaps, both of how much the field has changed and of the surprising role in this of one relatively slim book. If we are going to recast photographic history and theory, we might do well to know more precisely how its beginnings were framed. This seminar will take Thinking Photography as its object, pull it apart and then try to glue it together again. Working collectively to pool our research, we will re-examine its contents and its contributors, relocate it in its peculiar moment in the cultural politics of Britain and France at the end of the 1970s, and ask whether it is still serviceable as a model for the possibilities of the new field it worked to open.
The seminar will follow weekly readings, with regular student presentations and a variety of research tasks designed to develop specific critical and research skills. The seminar assignment will involve the preparation of a detailed syllabus on an agreed topic, including a synopsis, structured outline, readings and full bibliography. This assignment satisfies the requirement of the Master’s Comprehensive examination.

PIC 606A/COLI 541Y: Yeats and Valery [Gaddis Rose M 1:10 – 4:10PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Reading W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) and Paul Valery (1871-1945) as the apotheosis of High Modernism. While linking them to the poets they inherited (e.g., Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud), paralleled (e.g., Rilke, Eliot, Stevens), and transmitted (e.g., Beckett, Saint-Jean Perse, Heaney). Projects welcomed on contemporaries from other languages, e.g., Lorca, Pessoa, Tsvetaeva.

PIC 606E/AFST 373: The African Novel [Okpewho T R 11:40 – 1:05PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION:Course will explore development of the novel in Africa both historically and thematically. On one hand, we shall trace formal growth of genre, beginning with its emergence from oral narrative traditions of the continent, through its attachment to certain European trends and techniques, to its present achievement in blending various traditions (African and non African) in articulation of key problems in contemporary African socio political life. On the other hand, we shall examine some of the key concerns that have engaged one generation of writers after another: e.g., confrontation with European presence, critique of postcolonial leadership, Apartheid, and the place of women in African society. FORMAT: This course will be based partly on teaching and partly on group presentations by students. Regular class attendance is mandatory and will count in the overall assessment. There will be one midterm and one final examination: each is a take home paper of at least 10 pages in length. Graduate students taking this course will be expected to submit a substantial, well researched final paper on a chosen issue from the course.

PIC 606R/COLI 531E: Modernisms II [Brinker Gabler T 1:15 – 4:15PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An exploration of some experiences and experiments of 20th century literature, art and theory, with focus on movements like Cubism, expressionism, dadaism and surrealism, some shorter works of different genres: essays, short stories, novellas, lyrical dramas, letters, art criticism, manifests. There will be specific discussions e.g. on the relationship of women and modernism(s), the relations between visual and verbal modernism(s), and the (dis)juncture of modernism/postmodernism. In this second course of the sequence the focus is on movements and works after WWI. Authors and artists will include F. Kafka, R.M. Rilke, V. Woolf, M. Loy, G.B. Shaw, E. ONeill, D. Barnes, M. Moore, M. Ernst, A. Breton, W. Benjamin, B. Brecht, R. Ellison.

PIC 607C/PHIL 433: Epistemology [Dietrich T R 4:25 – 5:50PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In this course, we will ask "What, if anything, do we know?" Surely, the big questions are answered: There is an external world and people inhabit it. But this is not known, for we could be dreaming. What, then, are we to do with radical scepticism? Perhaps we are bested by it. But then, perhaps it is not important to know anything?.

PIC 608N/COLI 535N/LA&C 480Y: Radical Politics [Lugones W 6:00 – 9:00PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The seminar focuses on a politics of resistance with a strong an-archist bend. We will explore collectivism in the face of fragmentation, criminalization, racist heterosexualism and racist sexism within the colonial legacy of modernity. It is the resistant understandings and the praxical theoretical disposition that will characterize the work as radical. The guiding question: Can we shift from a praxical radical politics that emphasizes mass movement against domination to a more dispersed, fragile, heterogenous, multi-voiced, multi-gendered, poli-logical, sexually and communicatively complex, transformations of collective engagements.

PIC 608R/PLSC 663O: Political Change in Postcolonial Africa: [Mazrui ]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: COMING UP SOON !!

PIC 608S/HIST 501S: Media, History & Visual Culture [Kansteiner R 2:50 – 5:50PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The graduate seminar will provide a critical survey of the methods and themes of media history. The topics will include the history of mass media communication, especially the rise of visual culture, the study of film, photography, television, and internet as historical sources, and the methodological challenge of reception analysis, including questions of visual literacy.
Format: The course is open to specialists in any field of history and adjacent disciplines and offers many interdisciplinary excursions, especially into media and communication studies. Students are required to write a research paper involving media based source material. Special efforts will be made to identify readings and essay topics that are relevant to the participants' individual research interests.

PIC 612B/TRIP 573: Translation Workshop: Literary [Arrojo T R 11:40 – 1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: COMING UP SOON.

PIC 612C/TRIP 573: Translation Workshop: Non-Literary [Arrojo T R 11:40 – 1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: COMING UP SOON

PIC 612H/TRIP 580D: Translation and Ideology [Arrojo W 1:10 – 4:10 PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An examination of the main consequences of postmodern textual theories for a reflection on translation. On the basis of a deconstruction of traditional notions associated with the so-called “original” and the translator’s invisibility, the seminar will address interfaces such as the following: translation and postcolonial studies, translation and gender, and translation and psychoanalysis.

PIC 616E/MASS : Exploring Whiteness [Crowley M 6:00 – 9:00]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Includes readings from Critical Race Theorist, autobiographical essays, history of race and colonialism, etc. It is designed for students who have not been exposed to ideas drawn from Critical [Race] Theories, colonialism, or social constructivist perspectives.

PIC 620C/PLSC 663O: POLITICAL CHANGE IN POSTCOLONIAL AFRICA [Mazrui R 1:15 – 4:15PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The precolonial roots of postcolonial politics. Power and political participation in Africa. The colonial background and its political consequences. Ethnicity and allegiance in the African polity. The monarchical tendency in African political culture. From the warrior tradition to the military coup in the post-colonial era. From the elder tradition to presidential gerontocracy. From the sage tradition to intellectual meritocracy. Class versus ethnicity in African politics. The one-party versus the multiparty state. Can there be a ?no-party state?? Socio-cultural versus socio-economic ideologies. The gender question in African politics. The soldier and the state. The politics of HIV/AIDS. The African political experience in a global context, including the debates on reparations and about counterterrorism. Africa in the era of globalization.

PIC 636B: Medieval Colonialisms [Desmond T 6:00 – 9:00PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Post-colonial theory, which is based almost entirely on modern cultures and modern global politics, seldom addresses the culture and activities of Europe before 1492. This course will investigate the formation of colonizing discourses and desires in late medieval European culture. We will consider the orientalizing constructions of the crusades and crusade literature, as well as the development of extensive trade routes and the circulation of travel literature. We will read extensively in modern theory and in a variety of medieval texts (historical narratives, historiography, romances, etc.)

PIC 645K/AAAS 486D/AFST 480S/COLI 512I/PHIL 480N/647L/WOMN 480Q: In Transit: 21st Century Remappings and Exchanges [Allen M 3:30-6:30PM]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: At the beginning of the twenty-first century we find cinematic representations of Africa in Iceland. New Vietnamese cinema crosses Senegal and the Milky Way. Shanghai, Beirut, and Lagos are encountered as linked cities in proximity to exotic triangulations that confabulate the marrying of Buddha. Beauty may reign supreme, but can it be recognized?
Recent African and Asian visual productions, literatures, and theorizings that drift away from continental thinking to the peripheries and centers that remap exchanges of capital, culture, power, and identities are the focus of the class. Our points of departure include Abderrahmane Sissako’s Life on Earth, Trinh T. Min-Ha’s Night Passage, Isaac Julien’s True North, Yong Soon Min and Allan de Souza’s Xen: Migration, Labor, and Identity.
Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Wei Hui’s Marrying Buddha, and Caribbean and Black British performance poetry will be studied in conversation with Arjun Appadurai’s “Globalization and Area Studies: The Future of a False Opposition,” Bill Mullen’s “Afro-Orientalism,” and Francoise Verges’ “Peripheries, Flows, Capital and Struggles in the Indian Ocean,” and Dorothy Ko’s “Revisionist History.” Such works thematize 21st century remappings, not as responses that assume the primacy of Orientalist and Eurocentric discourses, but as movement that revisits the ruins of history, memory, space and time, in transit.

TRIP 580B/PIC 612H Translations and Ideology/ARROJO
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An examination of the main consequences of postmodern textual theories for a reflection on translation. On the basis of a deconstruction of traditional notions associated with the so-called "original" and the translator's invisibility, the seminar will address interfaces such as the following: translation and postcolonial studies, translation and gender, and translation and psychoanalysis. (Undergraduates interested in enrolling should meet with the instructor first.)

Other Semester Offerings