Courses

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• American Studies
• Courses

FALL 2013

ASCP. 81000 – Introduction to American Studies  GC: R, 4:15-6:15pm, Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Entin [22187] Cross listed with MALS 73100. 
 

ASCP. 81500 - American Politics   GC:  T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jones, [22202] Cross listed with P Sc. 72000   

ASCP. 81500 - Black Stratification  GC:  M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Battle, [22207] Cross listed with SOC 74400

ASCP. 81500 - Constitutional Law   GC:  T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Halper, [22203] Cross listed with P Sc. 72300

ASCP. 81500 - Critical Childhood/Youth Studies  GC:  T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Luttrell, [22219] Cross listed with U ED 75100 and WSCP 81000  

Critical Childhood Studies (sometimes called the “new sociology/anthropology of childhood” understands youth as social actors who are “central informants of their own life worlds” (Christensen and James 2008). Not incomplete adults but human subjects who have insights, they contribute to as well as are shaped by social institutions. This course will examine the basic tenants of critical childhood studies, including the ways in which it contests the traditional socialization model, which emphasizes children as passive recipients of a unidirectional socialization process. A critical childhood studies approach understands child-adult relationships as existing within power relations-- therefore, Waksler’s (1996) argument that “children do not have the power to correct adults’ misunderstandings of them.” The new sociology of childhood critiques the “old” sociology of childhood that ignored the significant effects of adults always speaking for children, the ease of which “effectively silenced” children. Rejecting neither the idea that children develop nor that children are dependent on adults, the new sociology of childhood suggests, rather, that thinking of the relationship in terms of interdependence rather than deficiency, and acknowledging the lack of authority that children have in their relationships with adults, recognizes the differences in power relations and works toward understanding agency. As Lee (2001) asks, what does it mean to take children seriously? The dangers of romanticizing children’s voice will be considered as well. How does the new sociology of childhood intersect with critical theory, disability studies, feminist theory and critical race theory?

This class will examine the conceptual framework of the new sociology of childhood (and youth), and study its politics and implications for research. It will imagine generational difference as a border, and look at research that enables us to understand children and youth relative to power relations, authority, culture, education and punishment. It will also look at adults with whom children are in relationship, including parents, teachers, police, salespeople, and counselors, as well as the institutions, discourses and systems that shape how childhood is experienced. We will ask methodological questions about how to study children from the standpoint of the new sociology of childhood.

ASCP. 81500 - Critical Literacies/Education GC:  Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Garcia, [22218] Cross listed with U ED 71200   

This course engages with the possibilities that literacies offer for social change, economic equity, and political enfranchisement. It considers literacies as social practices related to broader social and political concerns that includes feminist and poststructuralist orientations, Freirean-based critical pedagogy, and text analytic approaches. Adopting a social approach to literacy and language, this course considers ethnographic studies of literacy in historical, social, and cultural contexts. It also surveys histories of literacy expansion and literacy campaigns worldwide, and evaluates contemporary literacy policies and programs. To do this work, we rely on concepts from and debates in anthropology, sociolinguistics, and applied linguistics, as well as critical studies of education.
 
ASCP. 81500 - Critical Reason: The Basics   GC:  W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Buck-Morss, [22201] Cross listed with P Sc. 71902
 
ASCP. 81500 - Environmental History of Urban America  GC:  R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rawson, [22196] Cross listed with HIST 75800

Americans often think of cities and nature as being mutually exclusive. “As the pavement spreads,” wrote the great urbanist Lewis Mumford, “nature is pushed farther away.” But in recent years, scholars in the growing field of urban environmental history have been challenging this view and arguing instead that cities and the natural world have deep connections and shared histories. With urbanization a central theme of the American story, and over eighty percent of present-day Americans living in urban areas, we cannot fully understand the American past or even the places that most of us call home today without understanding how nature and cities have shaped each other. Over the course of the semester, students will explore such topics as early reactions to industrialization and urbanization; relationships between cities and their hinterlands; urban interactions with water; moral environmentalism and the development of public parks and suburbs; concerns about pollution, public health, and environmental justice; and the consequences of contemporary urban sprawl. Readings will include William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Michael Rawson, Eden on the Charles; Mike Davis, Ecology of Fear; Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside; and others.
 
ASCP. 81500 - Experimental Selves/Graphic Subjects GC:  W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Miller, [22195] Cross listed with ENGL 87500 and WSCP 81000

“I do not know how far I differ from other people,” Virginia Woolf remarks in “A Sketch of the Past,” neatly summarizing the memoirist’s dilemma. In this course we will explore the process of self-representation in the works of twentieth and twenty-first century writers and artists for whom questions of identity have produced experiments in form.  In addition to literary and graphic memoirs, we will discuss photographs, visual essays, and critical issues in contemporary autobiography. Writers include: Roland Barthes, David B., Alison Bechdel, Zora Neale Hurston, Maxine Hong Kingston, Adrienne Rich, Marjane Satrapi, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf and others.  Work for the course: in class presentations and a final paper.
 
ASCP. 81500 - Gender/Media/Crime/Culture GC:  W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Chancer, [22212] Cross listed with SOC 82800 and WSCP 81000   

ASCP. 81500 - History & Aesthetics of Film Music  GC:  R, 1:30-5:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Brown, [22199] Cross listed with MUS 81502 and FSCP 81000

ASCP. 81500 - Humanism and the Animal Body  GC:  W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reid-Pharr, [22193] Cross listed with ENGL. 80600 and WSCP 81000

ASCP. 81500 - Literature of American History I  GC:  W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Burke, [22197] course open to Ph.D. students in History only. Cross listed with HIST 80000   

ASCP. 81500 - Performance Criticism in Neoliberal Time  GC:  T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wickstrom, [22214] Cross listed with THEA 80400

In October, 2012 Theatre Journal issued a volume concerned with objects in the theatre, with things. The Drama Review issued a volume on precarity. Through both volumes run the concurrent themes of labor, theatrical labor and otherwise, and time, all kinds of time. As a companion to the TDR issue, Women in Performance will be issuing a volume on performance and precarity in March, 2013. Along with the 2013 Performance Studies International conference that is focused on temporality, the emergence of these three special issues at the same time would seem to indicate something about the interface of theatre with precarity, things, labor, and temporalities that needs to trouble and inspire our work now. Further, the analytic term neoliberalism is becoming more and more ubiquitous in our scholarship, begging the question of what are the pressures and sensibilities of this neoliberal time that seem to be resulting in these particular trends and concerns among scholars and practitioners. This course is designed for students to travel through the scholarship and performances that are developing these trends, in order to weigh them, to evaluate them, and to test them for their potential value to each student. The journal volumes cited above will form the initial centerpiece of the class, which will be simultaneously a study of the function of the “special issue” in scholarship, the structure of such issues, and the kinds of inter-questions, or inter-ideas such issues can create. We’ll follow many of the “leads” in the two journals, seeing where these take us in terms of extending the discussion and source material. These will include reading some of the philosophy and political science that is informing “precarity, things, labor, and temporality”. We’ll also rely on other sources, including work by performance scholars, plays, and performances, which can extend, illuminate or illustrate particular applications of these themes. In addition to the journals listed above, material for the course may include work by Bruno Latour, Maurizio Lazzarato, Martin Welton, Jane Bennett, Bill Brown, Shannon Jackson, Giulia Palladini, Rebecca Schneider, Maurya Wickstrom, Nick Ridout, Nigel Stewart, Cary Wolf, Paolo Virno, Karl Marx, Graham Harman, Tidal: Occupy Theory, Occupy Strategy, Pig Iron Theatre, and others. An attempt will be made to include plays and performance from periods earlier than our own that provide interesting case studies of these themes. Students will be required to submit two 3-4 page response papers in the course of the semester, and complete a 15-20 page term paper at the end of the semester.

ASCP. 81500 - Seminar in American History I  GC:  W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Robertson, [22198] Course is open to Ph.D. students in History only. Cross listed with HIST 84900

This seminar is designed to train incoming graduate students in the craft of historical research and writing. Over the course of the term, each student will formulate a research topic, prepare a bibliography of relevant primary and secondary sources, write an historiographic essay, and present and defend a formal project proposal for the substantial research paper that is to be completed in the second semester seminar. Weekly meetings will discuss common readings, share and critique written work, and develop and refine the research proposals. We will also be devoting some time to methods and issues involved in undergraduate teaching.
 

ASCP. 81500 - Sociology of Gender  GC:  T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Eisenstein, [22206] Cross listed with SOC 73200 and WSCP 81000

ASCP. 81500 - The Black Pacific GC:  M, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Chuh, [22194] Cross listed with ENGL 80600 and WSCP 81000

This course takes as its point of departure Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness, first published in 1993, to open questions about space, race, and history.  In what ways are critical engagements with race subtended by naturalized or occluded spatial protocols?  Is blackness a meaningful category when located within the frame of the Pacific?  What is the relationship between blackness and Asiatic racialization when situated in this way?  What might we learn not only about geography and history as technologies of racialization by thinking and working through the construct of “the black Pacific”?  What kinds of politics and ethics emerge from thinking “the black Pacific”?  How do the insights garnered by thinking through this construct compel the rearticulation of the ways in which literary and other studies are divided by place and time, and in what ways?  Students enrolled in this course should read Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic prior to and in preparation for the first day of class.  Other texts for this course will include work by Brent Edwards, Christopher Connery, Saidiya Hartman, Edward Said, Joseph Roach, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Lisa Lowe, Bill Mullen, Lisa Yoneyama, Marc Gallichio, Taketani Etsuko, Yusef Komunyakaa, John Russell, Yasuhiro Okada, Langston Hughes, Velina Hasu Houston, Jessica Hagedorn, Monique Truong, and Martin Luther King, Jr. among others.  Students taking the course for 2-credits should expect to present to class a 10-page paper that addresses the issues of the class or to produce an equivalent assignment; students taking the course for 4-credits should expect to write one short papers and a 15-20 page paper.  Everyone is, of course, expected to participate fully in class discussions.

ASCP. 81500 - Urban Sociology GC:  M, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kasinitz, [22205] Cross listed with SOC 72500  

ASCP. 81500 - Women, Work & Public Policy   GC:  T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Gornick/Milkman, [22204] Cross listed with P Sc. 72500, SOC 83300 and WSCP 81000  

ASCP. 81500 - Gladiatrices in American Art:  Women in the Artistic Sphere1848-1920  GC:  M, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Manthorne, [22191] Cross listed wth ART 87300 & WSCP 81000. Course open to Art History Ph.D. students only, permission required for all others.  

Gladiatrix was the female equivalent to a male gladiator, a trained combatant. The women we explore in this seminar were just that: painters, sculptors, critics, photographers, printmakers, gallery owners, historians and collectors who battled to shape the cultural realm. We discover that the American art world as currently outlined in survey books and courses has omitted an entire network of accomplished women that we aim to reinsert into the narrative. Taking our cues from Women’s History Studies, we address important questions in the social history of art and women’s rights from the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 to the passing of the 19th Amendment in 1920, guaranteeing all American women the right to vote. Together we investigate a wide array of historical figures and enterprises, aided by a growing bibliography in the field and accessible art collections. 5 auditors permitted, only by permission of the instructor. Requirements:  Weekly reading assignments & discussion; visits to art collections; final, 20-page research paper including related abstract, annotated bibliography, and short oral presentation.
Preliminary Readings:  April F. Masten, Art Work. Women Artists and Democracy in Mid-Nineteenth Century New York. (Philadelphia: U. of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).
Kirsten Swinth, Painting Professionals. Women Artists & the Development of Modern American Art, 1870-1930. (Chapel Hill & London: U. North Carolina Press, 2001).
 

ASCP 81500- American Aesthetics: Out of the Ordinary  GC:  R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Richardson, [22337] Cross listed with ENGL. 80200

The syllogism suggested in my grouping as I have the figures who will anchor discussions over the term plays around the signal importance in which William James held Emerson, Wittgenstein held James, and Stanley Cavell holds both Emerson and Wittgenstein. Emerson repeatedly and variously described as one of the aims of his lecturing and writing to show the ordinary to be extraordinary, wake us to the constant and magnificent mystery in which we are suspended: “Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree…. All things swim and glitter.” James investigated and naturalized this aspect, admitting religious experience in its myriad forms as intrinsic to human nature, describing even the philosophical method identified with his name as participating in this activity: “Pragmatism…she widens the field of search for God.” Wittgenstein kept The Varieties of Religious Experience on the bookshelf above his desk throughout his life after his first reading in 1912 when he was a student of philosophy at Cambridge and wrote to his teacher Bertrand Russell, “Whenever I have time now I read James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. This book does me a lot [Wittgenstein’s emphasis] of good.” Cavell’s particular aspiration is to square the circle, so to speak, demonstrate that Wittgenstein’s ambition “to bring words back home from their metaphysical to ordinary use,” is grounded in the intellectual revolution sparked in 1836 by Emerson’s anonymously published, azure-covered volume Nature and epitomized, for Cavell, in his 1844 essay “Experience.” Tracing the path uncovered in this recuperation—through Emerson’s and Thoreau’s “Eastern longings,” through Nietzsche’s strong reading of Emerson, through John Dewey’s first naming of Emerson not only as a philosopher but as “The Philosopher of Democracy” and his own internalization of the centrality of “experience”—to continuing forms of secular revelation will provide the direction of this seminar. There will be readings from each of the major figures mentioned here, of course, plus related material as appropriate to the shapes taken by the ongoing conversation. Topics will include the nature of language games and of “passionate utterance,” what Russell queried as “mysticism and logic,” pragmatism versus “pragmaticism” in relation to language, skepticism, ordinary language philosophy and performance, moods, moral perfectionism, genius, and, always, the very slippery ordinary: “We live amid surfaces, and the true art of life is to skate well on them.”
 
ASCP 81500 - People of New York City  GC:  W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Helmreich, [22340] Cross listed with SOC. 82301

ASCP. 82000 -  Culture & Society in 19th-Century New York: Washington Irving-Coney Island  GC:  R, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Lott, [21568]

Framed by notable recent debates in and constellations of American Studies scholarship, this course will examine key cultural and social formations in the tumultuous development of nineteenth-century New York City, so serving as an advanced introduction to both.  We will trace out the lines of fracture and dissent that shaped the transformation of New York, from the writing of Irving and Cooper early in the century to the administered leisure of Coney Island at the turn of the twentieth.  Topics to be taken up may include romanticism and real estate (Cooper, the Hudson River School painters, the construction of Central Park); what Georg Simmel called the metropolis and mental life (Melville, Poe, Buntline, Howells, Crane); evangelical abolitionism and the minstrel show’s racism; “manifest domesticity” at the intersection of popular women’s fiction, the slave narrative, and haute magazine writing (possibly through a focus on magazinist N.P. Willis, his housekeeper Harriet Jacobs, and his sister, the writer Fanny Fern); the self-inventions and cultural interventions of P.T. Barnum and Walt Whitman; underground or alternative sexualities (the flash press, sexual subcultures); crowds and power—the class divisions (and political formations) behind the Astor Place Riot, the Draft Riots, and the great labor uprisings of the 70s and 80s; post-Civil War embourgeoisement and the patrician enclaves of James and Wharton; the new-immigrant and -migrant New York of vaudeville and coon show, documentary photography and Abraham Cahan; Jose Marti in New York exile and the imperial adventurisms of 1898.  Current scholarly interest in questions of temporality, fantasy, affect, print capitalism, transnationalism, and periodization itself will punctuate our inquiries; the recent formation of the nineteenth-century Americanist group C19 (and its new journal J19) will offer us additional texts and perspectives for thought.  Ultimately it will be our business to think about where key debates in the field may be tending in the years ahead and to develop an engagement with American Studies professional practices—conferences, lectures, panels, journals—in which you will be encouraged to participate.

ASCP. 82000 - Write Like a Man: Baldwin, Mailer and the Flowering of  American  Masculinity  GC:  T, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dolan, [22260] Cross listed with ENGL 88100

Using one of the most unlikely (and briefest) literary friendships as its nexus,this seminar will examine the varieties of manhood and masculinity that permeated late-twentieth-century literary culture, particularly as they were inflected by sexual orientation, race,and nationhood/transnationality. The preliminary syllabus for the course will pair roughly analogous readings by James Baldwin and Norman Mailer (e.g.,Go ndtw16 Tel/It on the Mountain with The Naked and the Dead; Giovanni's Room with selections from Advertisements for Myself; Another Country with An American Dream; The Evidence of Things Not Seen withain  The Executioner's Song), but further readings will be adjusted based on student interest. Given our two core writers, explorations of the inscribed masculinities of American Beat culture and French existentialism, for example, seem far from unlikely. Students of all disciplines and methodological stripes (e.g., African American Studies ,Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Ethnic Studies, American Studies, Cultural Studies, Comparative Literature, unreconstructed Structuralism, abiding admiration for Franco Moretti) are heartily and vigorously encouraged to enroll. Seminars can be awfully boring if everyone in them agrees a priori on what is important. Course requirements include participation; one brief presentation and bibliography on the scholarship relating to a text we are reading in common; and a bibliography, longer presentation, and term paper on a work/author that we are not reading in common.

ASCP. 82000 - Citizenship & Human Rights GC:  T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Turner, [22295] Cross listed with SOC 84600

ASCP. 82000 - The Politics of Experience: Countercultures in the Age of Decolonization   GC:  R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Alcalay, [22258] Cross listed with ENGL 86000   

Through a range of diverse sources, we will trace the emergence of North American countercultures in the context of the Cold War and decolonization, with a special emphasis on the domestic effects of the American war in Vietnam and foreign policy in general, particularly regarding the Middle East. Along the way, we will consider Amiri Baraka’s 1960 visit to Cuba, and the enormous political, historical, and ideological significance of the war to liberate Algeria from French colonial rule. By looking at various materials, evidence, and testimony (including film), we will explore how different archives, memories, and histories are created, transmitted, suppressed or obliterated. Films may include: Bunker Hill 1956 (Kent Mackenzie, 1956), The Exiles (Kent Mackenzie, 1961), The Connection (Shirley Clarke, 1962), The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), Winter Soldier (Winterfilm, 1972), Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977), The War At Home (Glenn Silber, 1979), Passin’ It On (Jon Valadez, 1993), Code Name Artichoke (Egmont Koch, 2002), What We Want, What We Believe: The Black Panther Party Library (Roz Payne Archives & Newsreel Films, 1967-2006), Sir, No Sir (David Zeiger, 2005) Primary texts may include: The Poetry and Life of Allen Ginsberg: A Narrative Poem (Ed Sanders),  Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction (Henry Dumas),  A Simple Revolution (Judy Grahn),  Recollections of My Life As A Woman (Diane di Prima) Also works by Toni Cade Bambara, Amiri Baraka, Lucia Berlin, Jayne Cortez, Diane di Prima, Edward Dorn, Robert Duncan, Juan Felipe Herrera, Hettie Jones, Bob Kaufman, Audre Lorde, Eugene Redmond, Muriel Rukeyser, Michael Rumaker, Hubert Selby, Lorenzo Thomas, Janine Pomy Vega, Diane Wakoski, John Wieners, Douglas Woolf, and others. Background texts may include: Hearts and Minds: Bodies, Poetry, and Resistance in the Vietnam Era (Michael Bibby), Black Against Empire: The History & Politics of the Black Panther Party (Joshua Bloom, Waldo E. Martin Jr.), Discourse on Colonialism (Aimé Cesaire), “After Mecca” Women Poets & the Black Arts Movement (Cheryl Clarke); The Wretched of the Earth (Franz Fanon), Vietnam & Other American Fantasies (H. Bruce Franklin), Franz Fanon: A Critical Approach (Irene Gendzier), Another Mother Tongue (Judy Grahn), Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria (James D. Le Sueur), Epic Encounters (Melani McAlister), The Portable Malcolm X Reader (Manning Marable, Garrett Felber), On the Walls and in the Streets: American Poetry Broadsides from the 1960s (James D. Sullivan).

Research topics for possible Lost & Found projects will be carried out individually or collectively and can focus on a number of areas:connections between cultural figures of the 1930s and those of the 1950s

a. connections between cultural figures of the 1930s and those of the 1950s

b. investigation into lesser known work emerging from various movements: Umbra, the Black Arts movement, Nuyorican & Chicano/a writers, the anti-war movement, gay liberation, the women’s movement etc.

c. the pedagogy of writers, whether in or out of institutionalized settings (for example, an exploration of teaching materials by Adrienne Rich, Toni Cade, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Larry Neal, and others, who all taught at CUNY during open admissions, as well as lectures by Diane di Prima, Gregory Corso, Philip Whalen, and others).

d. connections across the arts (between writers & musicians, visual artists, dancers etc.)

ASCP. 82000 - Democratic Theory  GC:  M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wallach, [22278] Cross listed with P Sc 80402
   
ASCP. 82000 - Educating Educators GC:  M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Michelli, [22297] Cross listed with U ED 75100  

In this seminar we will engage in a deep analysis of policy, practice, and research related to how educators are prepared in the United States with special focus on urban education. You will engage in reading, discussion and research around critical questions central to the field including the influence of federal policy, the connection between research and policy, the application of high stakes testing to teacher education, the privatization of teacher education, the rise of alternate pathways to teaching and major changes in accreditation. Class sessions will include, where possible, discussions with leaders in teacher education such as policy makers, researchers, administrators and faculty in teacher education as well as candidates in teacher education programs from a several settings. Many graduates of the Ph.D. program in Urban Education have entered careers as teacher educators. This seminar is designed to give you an "insider view" of the issues surrounding the profession.

ASCP. 82000 - Education's Digital Future  GC:  W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Brier/Picciano, [22298] Cross listed with U ED 75100

This seminar will critically examine technology influences on teaching and learning in higher education in the present and in the near future. Online learning, blended learning, social media, MOOCs, open source content, and other elements of modern technology will be examined in terms of their philosophical, pedagogical, social and career implications for faculty in American higher education institutions. This seminar will also adopt a critical lens in examining technology initiatives supported by private interest groups that have come to permeate American education. The seminar facilitators will draw upon a wide range of scholarly readings and electronic media as well as explore practical ramifications of the growing influence of digital technology on teaching and learning.

ASCP. 82000 - Immigrant Groups/City Politics  GC:  M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mollenkopf, [22285] Cross listed with P Sc 83800, SOC 82800 and WSCP 81000

ASCP. 82000 - International Security  GC:  W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Liberman, [22276] Cross listed with P Sc 86801 

ASCP. 82000 - Language, Culture, Disability: Psychological Perspectives  GC:  M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Bursztyn, [22299] Cross listed with U ED 75100  

This seminar addresses childhood disability in the context of linguistic and cultural diversity in urban schools and communities. The seminar will offer a thematic approach to a range of topics including the roles of language and culture in child and adolescent development; the impact of disability on learning, social integration, and identity formation; and the specific challenges faced by immigrant children with special needs in schools and communities. The aim of this seminar is to study the implications for intervention, teaching and educational policy development with diverse students.  The course presents perspectives on language, culture, and disabilities through selected case studies, documentary films and literature.

ASCP. 82000 - Latin American Modernisms: 1915-1945  GC:  W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Indych-Lopez, [22252] Open to Ph.D. Art History students, permission required for all others. Cross listed with ART 77400

This course is an overview of the various currents of modernism that developed in Latin America in the first half of the twentieth century. Emphasis will be placed on the artistic production of artistic centers, such as São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Havana, and Montevideo.  Discussions will focus on the conditions of modernity in the region, representations of race, class, and gender, artistic responses to colonialism, nationalism, modernization, exile, revolution, and the heterogeneous forms of vanguard movements that emerged often as a result of trans-Atlantic and international exchange.  We will examine the strategic theoretical writings of artists and cultural thinkers as they forged urban, nationalist, regional, or universalist movements and cultural practices, examining Latin America’s contributions to global modernism.  No auditors permitted.

Requirements: Regular attendance, weekly readings, participation in discussion, oral presentation on readings, midterm, and final exam.

Preliminary Readings:  Achugar, Hugo. “Latin American Modernities.” In Alfredo Boulton and His Contemporaries: Critical Dialogues in Venezuelan Art, 1912–1974. Ed. Ariel Jiménez. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008.  García Canclini, Néstor.  “Modernity after Postmodernity.” In Beyond the Fantastic:Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America. Ed. Gerardo Mosquera.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996. 
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Modernity and Periphery.” In Beyond Dichotomies: Histories, Identities, Cultures, and the Challenge of Globalization. Ed. Elisabeth Mudimbe-boyi. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002.

ASCP. 82000 - Modern Presidency: FDR-Obama  GC:  R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Renshon, [22280] Cross listed with P Sc 82001   

ASCP. 82000 - Music & Culture: US in the 1970's  GC:  M/F, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Taylor, [22270] Cross listed with MUS 86600  

ASCP. 82000 - Movements/Elections/Interest Groups  GC:  R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Fox Piven, [22282] Cross listed with P Sc 82001, SOC 84600 and WSCP 81000

ASCP. 82000 - Paths, Detours, and Barriers to Citizenship: Immigrants, Refugees, Aliens and Outsiders in US history, Law and Culture  GC:  M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Nasaw, [22265] Cross listed with HIST 75700

We will interrogate the sometimes conflicting, sometimes consonant, but always changing relationships between notions of citizenship—and its cultural significance, political resonance, and legal entitlements—and American immigration policy. While attentive to European migrations from the seventeenth to the twenty-first centuries, we will focus on twentieth and twenty-first century border crossings from Mexico, immigrations from Asia, the discordant and unintended consequences of post-World War II legislation.

The readings will explore the separate but entwined historical literatures on “citizenship” and “immigration.” I have designed them to be global in reach and interdisciplinary in perspective.

Students may be asked to write short papers in the course of the semester and a major final paper in the form of a “lecture” to undergraduates on the themes and issues discussed in the readings.

ASCP. 82000 - Ralph Ellison: An American Literary Enigma GC:  T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Watts, [22253] Cross listed with ENGL 75600

The acclaim which accompanied the 1952 publication of Ellison’s first novel, Invisible Man heralded the appearance of a major literary talent who would undoubtedly influence American letters for decades to come.  Awarded the National Book Award for fiction, Ellison would spend the next fifty years trying unsuccessfully to complete a second novel.  In fact, when Ellison died, it was discovered that the manuscripts he left behind were not close to constituting a completed second novel.  Years after his death, scholars still cannot definitively explain why Ellison was unable to finish this work.  Some believe that he suffocated under the burden of living to see his first novel declared a “classic.”  They hypothesized that Ellison despaired about the second novel believing that it was not reaching the heights of Invisible Man. Perhaps Ellison also recognized that many Afro-American intellectuals were devastated by his inability to complete this second novel because they had created Ellison as the standard bearer of black artistic excellence. Ironically, Ellison was no small contributor to that image of himself for he constantly celebrated himself as a unique American writer.  Ellison did manage to publish two well received collections of non-fiction essays.  One collection, Shadow and Act, became a highly influential discussion of Afro-American/American culture. 
In this seminar, I hope to situate Ellison the man and Ellison the literary symbol in their various intellectual contexts. We will read Invisible Man, his two non-fiction essay collections (Going to the Territory and Shadow and Act) and the unfinished second novel, Juneteenth, which was put together by Ellison’s literary executor and published after Ellison’s death.  We will also read criticism of Ellison’s fiction and discussions of his theories of Afro-American culture.

ASCP. 82000 - Re-visiting the Black Atlantic  GC:  T, 11:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Bennett, [22268] Course open to doctoral students only, Cross listed with IDS 81660

Twenty years after the publication of Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1993) American scholarship no longer simply posits the relationship between blackness and modernity as an irreconcilable problem. Though Gilroy posited The Black Atlantic as a ‘heuristic’ work, the ideas associated with the book engendered scholarly inquiry into disparate sites of knowledge production, most notably history, anthropology, and literary studies but also in fields (philosophy and political thought) once perceived as the exclusive domain of an organic and hermetically sealed Western tradition. By insisting that blackness figures as a constitutive element of modernity, Gilroy effected a lasting transformation in knowledge production. He, of course, built on the black radical tradition that included the enslaved and free blacks, Abolitionists and Nationalists along with W.E.B. Dubois, Claudia Jones, and C.L.R. James. But Gilroy’s insistence on framing black writings as thought and seeing the experiences of blacks as a social phenomenon with powerful consequences for the history of modernity re-configured the scholarly agenda on various disciplinary fonts. As part of a Graduate Center initiative, The Black Atlantic @ Twenty, and in collaboration with New York University, “Re-visiting the Black Atlantic: Knowledge, Disciplinarity & Diasporic Formations” Professors Bennett (GC, History) and Morgan (NYU, Social & Cultural Analysis and History) will offer a seminar that examines how Gilroy work has influenced scholars to re-configure their theorization of the past and the writing of history. For this reason, the course is not strictly configured as an exercise in historiography—the effort to historicize scholarly writings on a particular theme or event in the past. Even as this course analyzes selective historiographies related to slavery, race making, and freedom, our attention will always be directed at the ways that scholars since Gilroy’s intervention have approached these aforementioned themes in relation to the narrative of modernity. Stated differently, how have writers related experiences of violence, difference, and an emergent liberty to modernity prior to and in the aftermath of The Black Atlantic’s appearance? In preparation for the seminar, the participants are asked to read Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000 [1983]). Finally, participants should know that the seminar meetings will alternate between the Graduate Center and New York University. The first meeting will be held on the NYU campus (20 Cooper Square, Room 471, the Department of Social Cultural Analysis) on September 3, 2013.

ASCP. 82000 - Specters of the Black Atlantic: Reconsidering Race and Freedom in the Circum-Atlantic World 1789-1859    GC:  T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Faherty, [22256] Cross Listed with ENGL 85000 

In the twenty years since its landmark publication, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) has dramatically reshaped the ways in which we understand the political and social geographies of race and diaspora. Gilroy’s pathbreaking volume demonstrated the limitations of “nationalist paradigms” to account for the “transcultural and transnational” dimensions of modernity, and in this course we will attempt to trace the routes of such cultural practices across the first half of what Ian Baucom calls “the long twentieth century.” As Jeannie Marie Delombard has very recently argued Gilroy’s geographical reorientation of the African diaspora “had the unexpected effect of promoting a corresponding (if less celebrated) chronological recalibration” of the field. In particular, this  critical turn has reinvigorated the study of eighteenth and early nineteenth century circum-Atlantic cultural production by expanding our operant sense of its canonical dimensions. As such, John Marrant, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Ignatius Sancho, and Venture Smith are often embraced as important early pivots in Black Atlantic cultural production even if, unlike Phillis Wheatley or Jupiter Hammon, they do not have roots within an “American” literary tradition or provide testimony about their enslavement in North America. By placing Gilroy’s framework in conversation with the work of C.L.R. James, Ian Baucom, Avery Gordon, Stephanie Smallwood, Fred Moten, Ivy Wilson, Joseph Roach, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Kenneth Warren, and others, this course aims to explore the ways in which an “Africanist” presence shaped the formation of the circum-Atlantic world. In so doing, we will consider the ways in which issues of race, freedom, unfreedom, and personal sovereignty were the fundamental concerns of the age of revolutions (even when texts are seemingly silent about racial categories). In essence, we will sound out the contours of how the themes of freedom and individualism which have been proffered as the emblematic themes of “American literature” are in fact dependent on a manifestly unfree black population. In so doing, we will also explore the ways in which a wide range of writers responded to these concepts of unfreedom, diaspora, revolution, and hybrity. Following the work of Laurent Dubois, Ashley White, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, we will also place a particular emphasis on the impact of the Haitian Revolution on the formation of the nascent U.S Republic, even as we consider the root causes for the longstanding silencing of the complexities of the past. In addition to our critical readings, we will also examine a variety of texts from the long eighteenth century including works by: Venture Smith, Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Phillis Wheatley, Jupiter Hammon, Charles Brockden Brown, Leonora Sansay, David Walker, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Wilson, Harriet Jacobs, and Martin Delany. Requirements for the course include class participation, an oral report, and a seminar-length paper. NB: Students should read Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008) in preparation for the first class session.
 
ASCP. 82000 - Sociology of Education   GC:  R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Attewell, [22294] Cross listed with SOC 84503   

ASCP. 82000 - The Civil War  GC:  T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Oakes, [22263] Cross listed with HIST 75200

This course will introduce students to the major issues—social, political, economic, and military--related to the origins and prosecution of the Civil War. Readings will consist of classic debates as well as some of the latest monographs. Grades will be based on three short papers as well as participation in weekly discussions.
NOTE: In preparation for the class, as essential background, students should already have read James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom.
 
ASCP. 82000 - Twentieth Century Political Thought  GC:  W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jacobs, [22274] Cross listed with P Sc 70300

ASCP. 82000 - Youth Cultures in the Americas GC:  R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Ramos-Zayas, [22366] Cross listed with ANTH 72000.

 
See Also:

EES. 79903 - Glbl Hazards/Environ Resources   C:   T/R, 9:00-10:15 a.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Padilla, [22036] Section open to Ph.D. EES students only.                                    

EES. 79903 - Global Feminisms    GC:  M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Oza, [22030] Section open to Ph.D. EES students only. Cross listed with WSCP 81000.             

EES. 79903 - Immigration/Migration/Justice    JJ:  R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Varsanyi, [22031] Section open to Ph.D. EES students only. Cross listed with CRJ 87300.         

EES. 79903 - Introduction to Housing   H:   W, 5:35-7:25 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Angotti, [22032] Section open to Ph.D. EES students only.                                       

EES. 79903 - Space & Cultural Theory  GC:  R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Low, [22028] Section open to Ph.D. EES students only. Cross listed with ANTH 71800 & SYC 80103.
 
 
 

___________________________________________________________

SPRING 2013

ASCP. 81000 - Introduction to American Studies: Histories & Methods
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reid-Pharr, [20102] Cross listed with MALS 73100.

What is the object of American studies?” “What does ‘American studies’ study, and what does it want?” The object of this course is to explore these questions by considering the histories, theories, and practices of the interdisciplinary field of American studies, from its inception as an academic discipline to its present “state of emergency.”

We will consider how American studies has been transformed from a movement into an institution represented by one of the largest and most widely recognized annual academic conferences in the United States.

Generally organized as a program and not a department, it resides somewhere between (or, perhaps, outside) normative disciplinary boundaries and in sometimes productive, sometimes uneasy relations to the other “studies” which have been created in part on its model.

During this semester we will consider the complexity inherent in this model, as we trace the influence of both seminal and emerging work in American studies. We will also consider the different meanings that American studies has (and has had) for different disciplines, and attempt to take stock of its current position in the academy and in our own work.

This course is designed to accomplish three goals: 1) to offer practical research training to student scholars for whom a primary field of engagement is American studies; 2) to deepen understanding of the key questions in contemporary Americanist discourses; and 3) to provide a structured forum for participants to develop and workshop essays for publication consideration in a peer reviewed journal or equivalent venue in the field.
 
To accomplish these goals, participants will engage in such questions as, what is a research question? What are exigency and methodology? How does one embed her- or himself into a field? What do disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity mean theoretically as well as practically?

In addition to participants’ essays, the texts for the course will include examples of recently published articles and chapters; calls for papers for journals and editions; and the readings for the public seminars offered by the Revolutionizing American Studies initiative, which participants are expected to attend as part of the work of this course.
 
Much of the workshopping will be accomplished by using the Academic Commons resources. Participants should establish an Academic Commons account if they have not yet done so. 

For the first class meeting (1 Feb), students should prepare a 1-page description of their respective projects for the semester, which should include primary field(s) of engagement and target publication venue(s).

Students interested in registering in this course should contact Kandice Chuh at kchuh@gc.cuny.edu with a brief description of the specific project she or he has in hand and plans to develop during the semester.

ASCP. 81500 - History & Politics of Time
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wilder, [20910] Cross listed with ANTH 81500.

ASCP. 81500 - Indigenity & its Discontents--CANCELLED
GC: F, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dombrowski, [20911] Cross listed with ANTH 81900.

ASCP. 81500 - Anthropology and History
GC: W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Skurski, [20912] Cross listed with ANTH 82000.

This seminar explores the mutual engagement of anthropology and history, and challenges the assumptions that have defined disciplinary boundaries over time. We will examine the genealogies and topics that have shaped the development of historical anthropology and anthropologically informed history, with a focus on categories of analysis, conceptual frameworks, and modes of presentation.

In this seminar we will discuss innovative monographs and articles that map critical engagements and exemplify transdisciplinary work.

Students will write commentaries on the readings, a review essay, and a final paper.

ASCP. 81500 - American Jewish History
GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kessner, [20877] Cross listed with HIST 74900 & MALS 76200.

For those who would understand the history of the United States and its diverse people the history of the Jews in the US is significant; for those who would understand Jewish history, the role of the Jewish community in the United States is crucial.

Less than one hundred years ago many would have questioned this latter statement. After all, the important centers of world Jewry were located across the Atlantic and much that was important in Jewish life transpired there. But troubles and tragedies triggered a series of migrations that brought millions of Jews to the U.S. and today the U.S. has the largest Jewish population in the world.

We will be investigating some of the uprooting forces that accounted for the waves of Jewish immigration. They came (especially in the period 1880-1920) in the millions, and confronted many of the conventional immigrant challenges; and others that were quite unique.

In time this previously marginal population formed an influential minority populating America’s large cities and lending their institutions a piquant cultural tone.

It is of course too simple to speak of a single American Jewish community or culture for they came from many places with a variety of backgrounds. Is there a center that held these disparate historical elements together? Can America’s Jews legitimately be described as a community? Do they share values and outlooks? Are they defined by religion or culture or social relationships, or is there something else, perhaps external, that is even more important?

What was the process of their Americanization? What were the forces – economic, political, social, cultural and religious- that shaped their experience here?

Moreover, it was far from a passive experience. Jews had a large, perhaps disproportionate, impact on the American nation and we will seek to study that impact on society, thought, culture and politics.

Over the past thirty years a generation of freshly conceived studies about American Jewish life have given this field a vigor and standing that it had not attained before. Historians of the American Jewish experience have fashioned a rigorous body of systematic work that is informed by theory and broad questions. They have crafted a textured complex past from the lives of immigrants, artists, political ideologues and religious thinkers; from philanthropists, workers, women, and idealists.

Course learning objectives:

Collateral Assignments:

Reading, leading class discussions and participating in them are integral to successfully completing the work for this class. Each session will have a discussion leader who will prepare a short synopsis of the reading to be e-mailed in advance of class and lead a discussion on the reading. A second reader will offer a critique of the reading based on the review literature and the student’s own evaluation. There are several additional assignments.

In addition other assignments will include:

Research paper or historiographic essay on an approved topic.

ASCP. 81500 - Authentication & Novelization in 19th-Century American Writing
GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hoeller, [20874] Cross listed with ENGL 75500 & WSCP 81000.

William Andrews notes in his essay “The Novelization of Voice in Early African American Narrative" that the most "radical vocal experiment in nineteenth-century black American writing [was] that which introduced the fictive voice into the tradition of African-American narrative."

This course will look at the complicated tensions between truth claims, credibility, and the use of a “fictive voice” in the works of African-American writers such as Williams Wells Brown, Hannah Crafts, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Wilson, as well as white writers such as Martha Griffith Browne (who authored the fake Autobiography of a Female Slave), Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Theodore Dwight Weld (who compiled Slavery As It Is) in order to explore authenticating and novelizing strategies in their narratives.

How did African-American writers negotiate the boundaries between truth and fiction and what were the payoffs and stakes of moving from the slave narrative into fiction or using fictional devices within the genre of the slave narrative? And how did white writers such as Martha Griffith Browne, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Herman Melville negotiate their fictions’ relation to truth and rely on authenticating moves?

Our discussion will include critical readings surrounding these questions and their literary, cultural, and political contexts—which made them both urgent and complicated--, as well as, whenever possible, multiple texts by one writer such as, for example, the three autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and his fictional piece “The Heroic Slave,” Williams Wells Brown’s 1847 slave narrative and his novel Clotel, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

ASCP. 81500 - Black Visual Culture
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wallace, [20875] Cross listed with ENGL 85500 & WSCP 81000.

The field of visual culture, which encompasses but is not limited to traditions of art history, has become increasingly central in a digital age in which the inventory of available images from the past continues to expand via the many museums and archives online, as well as the many artist’s websites.
 

Black visual culture, as I am defining it, takes up related topics in the context of racial images, which are drawn from visual art history, and the history of human display, as well as stereotypes from the mythological to the forensic (i.e. The Venus Hottentot).

It would be impossible in the space of a single semester to do justice to the potential of such a field. Alternatively, I have constructed herein for our perusal a sampler composed of the following segments:
 

1. European and American Art:
17th through 19th century,
taken from The Image of the Black in Western Art (Harvard UP and Belknap)
The magi in the Renaissance;
Abolitionist images in the 18th and 19th century.

2. African American Art: 20th Century
Jacob Lawrence’s The Photographer (1942),
Romare Bearden’s The Block (1971)
Faith Ringgold, Street Story Quilt {1985),
“Modern Storytellers: Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Faith Ringgold”
Metropolitan Museum of Art Website
The Jacob Lawrence and Gwen Knight Virtual Resource Center
 

3. Photography: 20th Century
Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton Album,
Johnston (Frances Benjamin) Collection, Library of Congress
WEB DuBois, Negro Exhibit at the 1900 Paris Exposition
“African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition”
Library of Congress and the NAACP’s The Crisis,
“The Modernist Journals Project: The Crisis 1910-1922” Brown University & The University of Tulsa Collection
James VanDerZee and black portraiture,
Gordon Parks and FSA Photography, Library of Congress
Contemporary Afro-American Women Photographers:
Carrie Mae Weems
Lorna Simpson
Renee Cox

ASCP. 81500 - Core Seminar in Politcal Science
GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. O'Brien, [20881] Cross listed with P SC 71000 & WSCP 81000.

All incoming students pursuing a Ph.D. or an M.A. in political science are strongly encouraged to take this seminar for the purpose of knitting us all into a lifelong community or collectivity of intellectuals who are passionate about politics.

Every student in political science studies some aspect of power. They examine power in abstraction (political theory), or power from the perspective of our nation-state (American politics), among foreign nation-states (comparative politics), or between nation-states (international relations).

As a global hegemon, the United States also exerts formal and informal influence, manifested formally as American foreign policy or informally as American cultural or economic hegemony (American Studies, Women’s & Gender Studies).

This seminar explores theoretical questions associated with culture and resistance, particularly involving political identity, and inciting American or global social movements that protect vulnerable populations.

Finally, it refers to the American exportation of the rule of law in terms of the Americanization of Europe (neo-classical capitalism, neo-liberalism, new empires, fundamentalism) or the European Union (EU), as well as the exportation of the Anglo-Saxon and Enlightenment culture(s) of civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights, manifested in the Yoo brief, the Gitmo Supreme Court cases, and the Veil controversy, and the use of Shari’a tribunals at home and abroad.

(1-credit tutorials also available with my permission & EO permission.)

ASCP. 81500 - Introduction to Disability Studies in the Humanities
GC: R, 2:00-5:00 p.m., Rm. 3491, 3 credits, Prof. Straus, [20880] Permission of instructor required. Cross listed with MUS 84000 & IDS 81670.

An introduction to the emerging, interdisciplinary field of Disability Studies in the Humanities. Topics will include “Nineteenth-Century Networks of Care,” “Narratives of Disability,” “Intellectual Disability,” Performing Disability,” “Disability and Sexuality,” “Autism as Disability Culture,” “‘Mental Illness’ and Post-Psychiatry,” and “The Work of Disability Memoir.” Guest lecturers include CUNY faculty (Sarah Chinn and Talia Schafer) and three of the leading figures in Disability Studies (Lennard Davis, Rachel Adams, and Thomas Couser). The topics, instructors, and students in this course will represent a variety of fields within the humanities. Enrollment by permission of the instructor: jstraus@gc.cuny.edu.

ASCP. 81500 - Fabric of Cultures: NY Fashion
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Paulicelli, [20872] Cross listed with ART 80010, IDS 82300, MALS 72100 & WSCP 81000.

The seminar will focus on New York and the birth of American fashion, covering a time span from the sweatshops of the second half of the nineteenth century where Jewish and Italian immigrants worked, to the gilded age, department stores, the emergence of the ―American Look‖ in the 1930s and 1940s, on to the subsequent shifts that occurred in the 1960s, up until the present of the New York Fashion week and New York as a global fashion capital.

We will focus on the major role played by women who have worked in the industry as designers, stylists, and journalists (such as the New York-based Claire McCardell, Elizabeth Hawes, Diana Vreeland, Jo Copeland and others).

We will go on to examine the New York socio-cultural context out of which these women emerged, the relationship the city has with fashion and modernity, with fashion‘s role as a creator of national and local identity, and image.

Fashion in New York will be studied as an industry, an economic force, a phenomenon that creates and performs identities and fosters interplay between gender, the body and sexuality. Particular attention will be given to those periods of great transformation in the history of the city when fashion played an important role in shaping the city‘s culture and identity, and had an impact on lifestyles and gender perception in the workplace and in other social and private spaces.

Visits to museums and archives will be scheduled during the semester to complement the topics covered in class. Readings will be drawn from theoretical and historical texts as well as novels, magazine articles, memoirs and films.

Authors will include W. Benjamin, R. Barthes, D. Harvey, S. Buck-Morss, N. Rantisi, C. Millbank, V. Steele, N. Green, P. Stallybrass, D. Soyer, D. Gilbert, C. Breward, Rebecca Arnold, Edith Wharton, Lois Gould (a memoir about her mother, the fashion designer Jo Copeland,) short films by D.W. Griffith on fashion, consumption, modernity, documentaries on the garment district, Bill Cunningham and others.

Students will be encouraged to conduct original research and use the museum and clothing archives in the city as well as the libraries for their final project.

ASCP. 81500 - Gender and Globalization
GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Eisenstein, [20886] Cross listed with SOC 86800 & WSCP 81000.

ASCP. 81500 - Gender & Sexuality in the 20th-Century U.S.
GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hurewitz, [20878] Cross listed with HIST 75700 & WSCP 81000.

This class is an opportunity to discuss recent work in the history of gender and sexuality in the U.S. As a field, this is a wide and still expanding area of historical research, including studies in women's history, gay history, histories of sexual behavior, abortion, masculinity, femininity, dating, marriage, transgender identity, and more.

Additionally, historians have been approaching this already wide array of topics from a mix of cultural, social, and political perspectives. As a result, there is a lot of interesting work for us to investigate.

We'll focus in on a different book each week to get a sense of how this field has emerged and is continuing to grow. The sequence of books is roughly chronological, starting from the late 19th century and going to the late 20th century.

My hope is that, in addition to learning about the field, we'll also be developing some narratives about how ideas about gender and sexuality changed over the last century or so.

ASCP. 81500 - Genealogies of Magical Realism in the Americas
GC: W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Di Iorio, [20876] Cross listed with ENGL 86500.

This class will study the literary mode of magical realist fiction in which "irreducible elements" of magic are included in otherwise realistic narratives. Mainstream readers, and even literary critics, tend to identify magical realism solely with Latin American literature, but other readers and critics have acknowledged that magical realism is one of the main trends in contemporary world literature.

We will examine early precursors, and definitions, of magical realism, as well as some of its most famous examples. The famous Latin American models created space for, or gave a voice to, those who found themselves on the margins of power. We will test whether this is also the case in the more recent magical realist examples in fiction by global writers who are not Latin American, U.S. minority writers, and women writers.

As well, we will examine magical realism in relation to literary theory, particularly noting how magical realism is a mode that often interrogates, and enables an accounting of, personal and historical trauma.

Some texts we will read: The Kingdom of This World by Alejo Carpentier, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, Red Sorghum by Mo Yan, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Magical Realist Fiction: An Anthology, edited by Young and Hollaman, and other texts.

Last but not least, while I continue to compile the reading list over the next month, I am open to any suggestions you might have about additional texts.

ASCP. 81500 - NYCDOE After Mayor Bloomberg
GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Bloomfield, [20890] Cross listed with U ED 75200.

Based on course readings and presentations by policy actors, students will research strengths and weaknesses in the vision, structures, and programs of the DOE under Mayor Bloomberg in order to formulate legal and policy recommendations for the next Mayor and the Legislature.

Particular issues to be addressed include governance/operational structures such as the roles of the PEP, support networks, and partnership organizations; accountability based on school and teacher evaluation systems; strategies to improve student performance and close achievement gaps; and school choice.

Course outcomes include a Workshop Monograph by students aimed at educators, politicians, policy makers, and the broader community and, perhaps, participation in course-related academic conference.

ASCP. 81500 - Party Polarization in American Politics
GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jones, [20882] Cross listed with P SC 72001.

Has the American public become more polarized? What about political elites running in elections and serving in government? Is there any connection between mass and elite polarization? Why does polarization seem to be taking place, and what are its consequences?

This class will delve deeply into all of these questions. We will begin by taking a historical perspective and asking whether current levels of polarization within the U.S. government are unusually high, or whether the seemingly low levels from a half century ago were the real aberration. We will explore several different explanations for why the parties in government have become more divided from each other over the past 50 years or so, including both constituency-based explanations as well as institutional ones.

After that, we will shift our attention to the mass public. We’ll examine evidence both for and against the notion that the American public is currently polarized, and try to document and explain the specific ways in which the American public has—and has not—become more polarized over time (e.g., culturally, economically, geographically).

Finally, we will analyze the consequences of elite and mass polarization—for public policy, for representation, and for public’s attitudes towards politics and government.

Many of the readings in the class will be drawn from the American politics reading list – integrating both American institutions and processes.

ASCP. 81500 - Popular Music in Cross-Cultural Perspectives
GC: M, 2:00-5:00 p.m., Rm. 3389, 3 credits, Prof. Manuel, [20879] Cross listed with MUS 83000.

This course combines conceptual and analytic approaches to the study of popular music with explorations of diverse selected genres, emphasizing music cultures outside the Euro-American mainstream and distinct from those (such as Hispanic Caribbean music) that are covered in other seminars. While not attempting to provide a comprehensive survey of world popular musics, the course also aims to generate some familiarity with a representative spectrum of non-Euro-American genres diverse in style, historical era, and locale. We are interested both in socio-musical aspects as well as formal analytical approaches to the music genres studied.

Thematic focuses include: Frankfurt School critiques in global perspectives, gender issues, urbanization, music and socio-political movements, media studies perspectives, globalization and diasporic dynamics, and the power dynamics of musical interactions between the West and “the rest.” Music cultures covered will include Africa, the Middle East, Greece, India, East and Southeast Asia, Mexico, and South America.

A term paper and one or two short written assignments will be required.

ASCP. 81500 - Race and Ethnicity
GC: W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kasinitz, [20888] Cross listed with SOC 85800.

Race and ethnicity are constantly changing and evolving, yet they remain among the most persistent forms of structured social inequality. Focusing on the United States, but with reference to other multi-ethnic societies, we will examine the evolution of the concept of “race” and its relationship to racism; the heritage of slavery and segregation and their impacts contemporary life; the origins of modern racism and anti-Semitism, “scientific racism, ” why and how the salience of ethnic identity increases and decreases at particular historical moments, the relationship of race and ethnicity to migration, nationalism, colonialism and class, the growth of the Latino and Asian American populations and what that means for American notions of race, etc.

In addition we will take an in depth look at how racial boundaries change, competition and cooperation between ethnic groups in contemporary America and how “racialized” minorities are (or are not) incorporated into different societies.

Readings will include works by W.E.B. Dubois; Jean Paul Sartre, George Fredrickson; William Julius Wilson, David Roediger, John Iceland, Richard Alba, Tariq Madood, Alejandro Portes, Stephen Steinberg and Mary Waters.

ASCP. 81500 - Socially Engaged Art/Political Economy
GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Sholette, [20873] Permission of instructor required. Cross listed with ART 86040.

Art is big business: a few artists command huge sums of money, the vast majority are ignored; yet these marginalized artists remain essential to the mainstream cultural economy serving as its missing creative mass. At the same time, a rising sense of oppositional agency is developing within these invisible folds of cultural productivity.

Selectively surveying structures of visibility and invisibility, resentment and resistance, this seminar will focus on the present and past state of the archive made up of alternative hybrid cooperative networks, systems of artistic gift exchange, tactical media , and community based public art.

Participants will research such artists‘ groups as Pussy Riot, Viona, W.A.G.E., W.H.W., The Yes Men, Temporary Services, Group Material, PAD/D, while reading historical and theoretical texts by Adorno, Brecht, Bishop, Bourdieu, Debord, Lippard, Mouff, Enwezor, Steyerl, Kester, and others. Auditors by permission.

Theodor W. Adorno: "Black as an Ideal" (1970) and "Commitment" (1962)

ASCP. 81500 - Social Movements in the US  
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Fox Piven, [20883] Cross listed with P SC 72410, SOC 86400 & WSCP 81000.

This course has three main parts. We will begin with an examination of the major theories that purport to explain social movements, including the conditions that give rise to the movement, the forms movement action takes, and the consequences. In particular we will be searching in this literature for the understandings of power implicit or explicit in the theory. I will suggest that the literature neglects the question of power from below, and suggest some directions for inquiry into the admittedly infrequent occasions when power is exercised from below.

The second and third parts of the course are historical and empirical. We will look at the history of social protest movements in the United States, from the mobs of the revolutionary war era, and including the abolitionists, the populists, the labor movement, civil rights, and the LBGT movements. Finally, we will (as best we can given that the literature on recent events is somewhat sparse) look at contemporary movements, including the global justice, environmental, and Occupy movements, as well as anti-austerity protests, and try to glean insights into the conditions that give rise to these movements, and the factors that account for responses to them.

ASCP. 81500 - Sociology of Medicine
GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Pitts-Taylor, [20885] Cross listed with SOC 77800 & WSCP 81000.

This course will address the sociology of medicine from a range of critical perspectives and theoretical vantage points, including social constructionism, actor network theory, the governmentality literature, feminism, queer theory, critical race studies, neomaterialism, and critical disability studies.

We will examine current manifestations of medicalization, health and illness, and biosociality as social products of the neoliberal context, and pursue both illness and disability as sites of social struggle. We will consider the promise and limits of social constructionism in understanding the sick body and the disabled subject; we will address the medicalization of physical and cognitive impairments as well as trends in psychiatry; we will look at the emerging transnational trade in organs, cell lines, and bioinformatics and consider how sociological frameworks can contributing to understanding these

ASCP. 81500 - The Body in Performance
GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Powers, [20889] Cross listed with THEA 85400.

Exploring the tension between the study of drama as literature versus its study as performance, this course examines the role of performing bodies as critical signifiers and makers of meaning.

We will discuss the difference between the linguistic and corporeal trajectories of performance theory and focus on concepts such as "corporeality", the embodied social codes as exhibited in relation to theatrical space, performance style, costume, properties, gesture, etc.

How do such corporeal components work symbiotically to create an embodied discourse? What are the techniques by which theater historians can interpret this discourse? How might this discourse challenge or reinforce social norms? In the study of historical dramas, how can we reconstruct such absent corporeal aspects from the available historical sources? What problems arise in doing so?

Mindful of such questions surrounding the study of performance, we will read critical works such as those of Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau, Marcel Mauss, Susan Leigh Foster, Cynthia Novack, Joseph Roach, and Diana Taylor, while we examine performance style and artists such as contact improvisation, Takarazuka, Grotowski, Terzopoulos, and Carmelita Tropicana.

In the process, we will consider the ways in which both a production’s historical context and the performance context of the theater (e.g. theatrical space, costume and properties, audience) both influence and are influenced by performing bodies.

Course requirements include weekly discussion questions, an in-class presentation, and 15 – 20 page research paper.

ASCP. 81500 - Youth/Marginalzation/Subculture/Resistance
GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Brotherton, [20887] Cross listed with SOC 85000.

ASCP 81500 - Digital Humanities: Methods & Practices GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dwyer, [20988] Cross listed with MALS. 75500

This is a hands-on course in doing Digital Humanities. Its practice generally entails four main stages: data capture, annotation, exploration and analysis, and dissemination. Workshops surveying the tools, methods, and standards entailed in these stages are a regular part of the weekly class. In addition to training in these skills, the course will explore the profound cultural changes that the practice of digital humanities instantiates and reflects. First, the tools and data we choose shape the research questions we ask. Second, the digital humanities generally aim to create community resources, going beyond the work of the individual. Students will be assessed on their applying this new approach to scholarship and information to a project of their choice. The course has no prerequisites, and welcomes students from all humanities and social-science disciplines.

ASCP. 82000 - '60's NYC Community Cultural Education
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Brier, [20908] Cross listed with U ED 71200.

This research seminar focuses on the historic struggles over community control of education that wracked New York City neighborhoods and schools during the “long decade” of the 1960s. The seminar will start with the failed efforts by parents and activists to integrate the NYC public school system beginning in the late 1950s and extending through the mid-1960s, then focus closely on the epochal 1968 UFT strike against community control of the public schools that shutdown the entire school system in the fall of that year, and finally look at the battles in the City University beginning in the late 1960s to open admissions to a broader, more representative cross section of the city’s public school graduates.

Seminar participants, who will hopefully be drawn from a range of social science disciplines and from the MALS program, will begin by doing close reading of extant secondary analyses of these historical events.

We will then immerse ourselves in primary source materials, including contemporary reportage, oral interviews (some of which we will conduct ourselves), governmental and agency reports and data, as well as cultural and visual sources, to develop a broad understanding of what happened during the critical long decade of the 1960s and the implications for understanding the current status of NYC’s educational institutions.

Students will be expected to develop single-authored or collaborative research projects on a historical subject of particular interest to them, resulting in research papers and/or multimedia presentations that can and should be publishable.

Emphasis will be placed on learning how to “read,” evaluate and contextualize historical documents and sources.

ASCP. 82000 - Musical Relations between African-Americans & European-American in US, 1865-1965
GC: M, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. 3491, 3 credits, Prof. Blum, [20899] Open to doctoral students only; not open to auditors. Cross listed with MUS 83400.

The seminar interrogates prominent (and less prominent) interpretations of the musical relations between African Americans and European Americans in the first century after the Civil War. The “interrogation” is “enhanced” through analysis of both the theoretical presuppositions and the practical consequences of the various approaches. The seminar in not intended as a chronological survey, and some familiarity with the music history of the U.S. in this period is highly desirable. The workload includes weekly reading and listening assignments (to be discussed in class by each participant), small exercises, and a final paper on an approved topic.

Open only to doctoral students (in any program). Not open to auditors.

ASCP. 82000 - African-American Fiction Since the 1970's
GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Webb, [20895] Cross listed with ENGL 75600, AFCP 73100, MALS 73500, & WSCP 81000.
A study of the poetics and politics of postmodernism in the fiction of African American writers since the 1970s. Although the last three decades of the twentieth century were undoubtedly the most productive and innovative period in the development of African American literature and literary criticism, it was also a period of extreme social and cultural fragmentation in African American communities.

In this course we will examine how African American writers have addressed the problems of literary representation when faced with increased commodification of culture and knowledge, the proliferation of new forms of literacy and orality, and the breakdown of traditional forms of community. Our readings will also include some selections not usually considered postmodernist but that address similar concerns about identity, culture, writing and possibilities for social change.

We will read selected essays by theorists of postmodernism such as Hutcheon, Jameson, Harvey and Bhabha as well as essays by literary critics and cultural theorists who have been involved in ongoing discussions about the relevance of postmodernism for African Americans at the turn of the 21st century such as bell hooks, Cornel West, W. Lawrence Hogue, Wahneema Lubiano, and Madhu Dubey.

Requirements: Oral presentations and a term paper (15-20 pages). The course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussions of assigned readings and oral presentations each week.

Texts: Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo; Clarence Major, My Amputations; Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters; John Edgar Wideman, Sent for You Yesterday; Charles Johnson, Middle Passage; Toni Morrison, Jazz; Gayle Jones, The Healing; Colson Whitehead, The Intuitionist; Madhu Dubey, Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism.

ASCP. 82000 - American Art: the '50's & 60's
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Powers, [20891] Cross listed with ART 77300. Instructor permission required

This course will survey the trio of movements that revolutionized US art in the 1950s and 1960s: Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism.

Special attention will be paid to the critical elaboration both of Modernism and of alternatives to it in a domestic context; the roles of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art in an international and, especially, Cold War context; the ways in which Pop art effectively sublated, rather than outright rejected, Abstract Expressionism; internal relationships between Pop Art and Minimalism, as well as contemporary responses to / reactions against Minimalism; issues of gender, race and sexual orientation that are so vital in the transition from the so-called "age of consensus" to one of activism and protest; and, dovetailing with this transition, the development of Conceptual Art toward the end of the 1960s.

Auditors by permission.

Preliminary Readings: Harold Rosenberg, ―The American Action Painters‖ (1952); Allan Kaprow, ―The Legacy of Jackson Pollock‖ (1958); Clement Greenberg, ―Modernist Painting‖ (1960), which are available at: http://www.mediafire.com/arth [For a general introduction to the works and contexts we will be discussing: Lisa Phillips, The American Century: Art & Culture 1950-2000 (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art 1999), pp. 11-222.]

ASCP. 82000 - American Renaissance
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reynolds, [20894] Cross listed with ENGl 75100 & WSCP 81000.

The literary flowering that occurred in the United States between 1835 and 1865 constituted one of the richest periods in literary history. Known as the American Renaissance, this period saw dazzling innovations in literary style, philosophy, and social criticism brought about by Emerson and Thoreau; the metaphysical depth and cultural breadth represented by the novels of Melville and Hawthorne; the breathtaking poetic experimentation of Whitman and Dickinson; and the psychological and artistic achievement of Edgar Allan Poe.

The issues of race and chattel slavery were powerfully depicted by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Political struggles and class conflict were dramatized in popular novels by George Lippard and George Thompson, and women’s issues in the fiction of Sara Parton and others.

In addition to reading central works of the American Renaissance—among them Moby-Dick, “Bartleby,” The Scarlet Letter, Leaves of Grass, Walden, Poe’s tales, Emerson’s essays, Dickinson’s poems, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Douglass’s Narrative, and several noncanonical works--we shall discuss key theoretical and critical approaches to their writings.

An oral report and a term paper are required.

ASCP. 82000 - CUNY As Lab
GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Battle/Kornblum, [20904] Cross listed with SOC 81200.

All students will work on a semester-long group project conducting quantitative (survey) and qualitative (one-on-one interviews & ethnography) research on a CUNY-wide study of undergraduates. Students will receive experience in all phases of empirical research, from conceptualization to analysis and all points in between. This course is appropriate for students in the traditional social sciences (e.g. sociology, anthropology, psychology, urban education, and history) as well as more contemporary ones (e.g., gender studies, race studies, American studies, cultural studies, lesbian and gay studies).

Prerequisite:  NONE

ASCP. 82000 - Brazil and the US: Comparative Paths to the Modern, 1820-1920
GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Manthorne, [20892] Cross listed with ART 77300. Instructor permission required

Utilizing a global art history framework, this lecture course examines the art of Brazil and that of the United States during the long 19th c. Brazil’s transformation from a colonial, agrarian, slave society to a predominantly urban, middle-class, industrialized nation and aspiring world power demonstrates important parallels to the US, and provides a basis for comparative analysis of their pictorial productions.

Moving from the establishment of European-inflected academic instruction (1810, Philadelphia; 1816 in Rio) to the embrace of the modern (1913, Armory Show, US; 1922, Week of Modern Art, São Paulo), we identify artistic trends and cross-currents. Ultimately we pose the question: what did it mean to be modern in Brazil and in the U.S.?

After long downplaying its 19th c. art, Brazil is now coming to terms with this era. Simultaneously major exhibitions and publications are looking beyond the nation to the western hemisphere and Atlantic world as units of study. The time is ripe to incubate new understanding and research. This course also prepares students for oral examinations in art of the US and/or Latin America.

Requirements:
   Five auditors accepted, only with approval of the instructor.

Preliminary Readings:
READ Katherine Manthorne, “Remapping American Art,” American Art 22 (Fall 2008): 112-117; VIEW: American Identities, Installation of the Collection, Brooklyn Museum of Art.

ASCP. 82000 - Ethnic Politics/Comparative Perspectives
GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. George, [20903] Cross listed with P SC 87800 & WSCP 81000.

This course focuses on the politics of ethnicity and nationalism, with a comparative focus. We will investigate theoretical arguments regarding the roots and power of ethnic identity and the ways that such identification enters into the political sphere. We will analyze arguments about whether and how ethnic diversity might affect political competition and conflict.

The course will examine general theories and then also hone in on identity politics in particular geographic regions including, but not limited to postcommunist Europe and Eurasia, Latin America, and South Asia. Students will also have an opportunity to read further on geographical areas of their own scholarly interest.

In addition to being a course on the subject matter of identity, students will hone their analytical skills through close readings of texts and examination of how authors construct and implement their research agenda.

Students will read the equivalent of a book per week as well as prepare written reading analyses and questions. Students will lead the discussions. There will be two exams in the course.

ASCP. 82000 - Government & Politics in NYC
GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mollenkopf, [20902] Cross listed with P SC 82510.

Political scientists have described New York City both as an exemplary case of machine politics (from Boss Tweed of Tammany Hall to Vito Lopez – just forced to step down as chairman of the Kings County Democratic Organization) and of urban reform (from Mayor LaGuardia arguably through Mayor Bloomberg).

It is a strongly liberal city, with a large municipal welfare state and a unionized public labor force, yet mayors supported by the Republican Party have governed it for the last fifteen years.

Despite having experienced tremendous racial and ethnic change, only one minority person, David Dinkins, has served even one term as mayor and no Latino has been elected to city-wide office.

This course will use the 2013 city elections as a lens for understanding the construction of electoral majorities and exercising political power in this large, complex, multicultural setting.

Students will read and discuss classic readings, conduct primary research, and consider New York in comparative perspective.

ASCP. 82000 - Immigration & Globalization
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Alba/Foner, [20906] Cross listed with SOC 85800.

This course will provide an overview of the literature on contemporary immigration. The focus will be on the U.S., but the larger context of South-North immigration will be brought into view. Attention will be divided between theories and empirical research, as the course considers accounts of who immigrates and why and how immigrants insert themselves into the receiving society and its economy. The final part of the course will consider the impact of immigration on future ethno-racial divisions.

ASCP. 82000 - Neos & Isms
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. O'Brien, [20901] Cross listed with P SC 82001 & WSCP 81000.

“Neos & Isms” (read intercurring conflicts between, among, and across formal and informal political institutions). This 8000-level political-science seminar prepares students for the major or minor in both the required National Institutions track and the Electoral Process track in American politics of the approved American Politics Comprehensive Reading List.*

This course, while theoretical and historical, is an American-politics seminar that crosses intradisciplinary divides by relying on PD (political development, or historical institutionalism, as it is known in comparative) as a methodology with two analytical axes of the role of ideas (stemming from a radical feminist interpretation of monism). The seminar, in other words, is informed by American Studies and Women’s Studies literature, given its emphasis on difference as the United States built a relatively strong nation-state and became a global hegemon.** It pays particular attention to nation-building in juxtaposition with the recurring, crosscutting conflicts of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality.

It includes discussions about formal and informal political institutions and identities applied to Obama and other presidents from the very late 19th through the 20th and 21st centuries, during intercurrence or in, across, and/or over time (clash of political development and political thought) or engaged with the other so-called federal branches.

In other words, it concentrates on enduring institutional and ideational juxtapositions and enduring or classic conflicts in the United States in the executive, legislative, and judicial branches as well as in the media (including social media) that effect political identities.

The intercurring conflicts raised in Part II are classic and representational ones in, across, and/or over time (contingency and history) and political time (macro historical events). They are reviewed in broad strokes to cover these enduring juxtapositions in the five federal institutions led by the American president (including the executive branch, or the bureaucracy he governs), as well as the legislative and judicial branches in play, and involving public opinion, given the role of communications in a representational democracy in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The conflicts are classic and/or representative -- involving the administrations of Andrew Johnson, Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, JFK, LBJ, and Nixon though Reagan, and giving special attention to the differences between George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

The “Neos & Isms” themselves involve thinkers, theories, and schools of thought, going so far as to explore emerging social theories (including “systematic theory” and radical feminist theory) as well as full-fledged ideologies, or values and belief structures, and political cultures that alter or affect political and economic action and behavior in every form of consciousness.

Some of the “Neos & Isms” reviewed in APD are: 1) neoconservatism and neoclassical capitalism, 2) neoliberalism (containing critiques of capitalism, liberalism, republicanism, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism), 3) neo-feudalism and neo-tribalism (juxtapositions found in fundamentalism, theories of supremacy, and spatial hegemony, and involving or impacting all vulnerable populations), and finally 4) multilateralism, reflecting earned egalitarianism within conceptions for horizontal domestic and transnational deliberative democracy or work on “commons.”

Relating APD methodology to “Neos & Isms” is three-dimensional from the perspective of 1) the individual (un-sub-non-full- consciousness, identity, worldview, and traditions, including those of and constructed by vulnerable and autonomous populations), 2) the five federal institutions (national, transnational, even local entities), and 3) time or contingency.

Unlike the Contemporary American Political Thought seminar, this course relies on secondary rather than primary sources that are housed in political science, American Studies, and gender studies, and found more often in qualitative research or humanistic social-science journals that address contemporary issues in science.

Students in social science and humanities are welcome and will find the reading appealing if they are intradisciplinary (American, political theory, IR, or comparative politics within political science), as will those cross-listed in humanities and other social sciences, since I also use some interdisciplinary readings from literary theory, cultural studies, particularly American Studies and Women’s Studies, and history, and make reference to science and the history of science.

Course Requirements:
The main requirement is classroom discussion and a 20- to 25-page research paper, with a possible eye to revising for publication (1- to 2-credit tutorials can supplement this, with the permission of the instructor and the EO).

Complete assigned readings, distributed via some form of Internet platform, before a set time when each class meets. Summaries and classroom participation account for 40 percent.

* Classic -- reading from reading list that is at least 10-15 years old. (See http://americanfieldexamprep.ws.gc.cuny.edu/ )

** Current -- what you should know in National Institutions from historical institutionalism, APT, APD, and cultural-studies reading IN political science or as crossover from other interdisciplinary fields, primarily my other fields of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies. (See http://ruthobrien.ws.gc.cuny.edu/ )

ASCP. 82000 - So Bad It's Good: Postwar Visual Culture from NY  to LA
GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hadler, [20893] Cross listed with ART 87300. Instructor permission required

This course will examine the visual culture of the postwar era from the Kitchen Debate to the populuxe automobile with enough chrome embellishments for designer Raymond Loewy to deem them “jukeboxes on wheels.”

Postwar science fiction, the atomic kitchen, the camp aesthetic, advertising strategies, and mass culture debates will be among the topics addressed. The sets and content of the award winning television series, Mad Men, show us that the discussion of objects from this era is a far cry from being exhausted.
 

Requirements: Course requirements include a seminar report and a final paper. Auditors permitted.

Preliminary readings:
Books: Jeffrey L. Meikle, Design in the USA, Oxford University Press, 2005
Susan Sontag, “Notes on Camp” 1964

ASCP. 82000 - Readings in African-American History
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Stein, [20897] Cross listed with HIST 79500 & WSCP 81000.

This course explores major historical subjects in post-emancipation African-American history. We will examine recent literature, and assumptions underlying such work, on the following topics: Reconstruction, Jim Crow, migration, class structure and ideology, nationalism, culture, New Deal, civil rights movement, "black power," and what is often called the "post-civil rights" world.

ASCP. 82000 - Studies in the Current Season
GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Carlson, [20907] Cross listed with THEA 81400.

This course will be built around class visits to five current New York productions during the term.

Around each production will be gathered a set of historical and theoretical readings to contextualize and discuss that production. The selection of productions will attempt to cover as wide a range as possible of theatrical approaches, including plays representative of different traditions, historical periods, and dramatic types.

Before the beginning of classes in the Spring the first two or three productions will have been chosen, but others will probably not be selected until later in the season, to take advantage of later announcements.

Every effort will be made to procure reduced or student seating prices, but students should be prepared to spend up to $200 for theatre admissions. No textbooks, however, will be required.

Assignments: Students will be asked to submit two reports on additional productions.

ASCP. 82000 - The Music of Charles Ives
GC: W, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. 3491, 3 credits, Prof. Blum, [20900] Cross listed with MUS 86000.

The seminar interrogates prominent (and less prominent) interpretations of the musical relations between African Americans and European Americans in the first century after the Civil War. The “interrogation” is “enhanced” through analysis of both the theoretical presuppositions and the practical consequences of the various approaches. The seminar in not intended as a chronological survey, and some familiarity with the music history of the U.S. in this period is highly desirable. The workload includes weekly reading and listening assignments (to be discussed in class by each participant), small exercises, and a final paper on an approved topic.

Open only to doctoral students (in any program). Not open to auditors.

ASCP. 82000 - US & Middle East Relations: 1944-present
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, [20898] Cross listed with HIST 75600 & MES 73900.

This course examines the historical roots and rise of U.S. involvement in the Middle East and Muslim world. Students will develop a strong grasp of the major issues, themes, and debates relating to the U.S. involvement in the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially support for the state of Israel; the rise of revolutionary nationalist movements, evident in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, and Libya; America’s dependence on petroleum, demonstrated through U.S. support for right-wing dictatorships in Iran and Saudi Arabia, the oil boycotts of the 1970s, and the first Persian Gulf war. The course will also explore the social and cultural trends of the post-World War II era evidenced in film, media, and literature that have contributed to the gap between the west and the Muslim world. All of these topics will help explore the roots of 9/11 and explain how and why the United States currently finds itself embroiled in many of its current conflicts abroad.

ASCP. 82000 - Work, Labor & Labor Movements
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Aronowitz, [20905] Cross listed with SOC 83105.

This course is an examination of the transformation in the structure of labor during the post-world war two era. Among the topics under consideration is the effects of technology and the emergence of the global economy on the nature of work, the fate of the labor movement, and their influences on working class and salaried labor. We will explore the distinction between work and labor We will also interrogate the responses of secondary and post -secondary education to changed work, the geographic dispersal of large sections of the labor force and the ideologies that have accompanied deindustrialization.

Among the works that will be discussed are: Joshua Freeman Working Class New York; Jefferson Cowie Stayin’ Alive; C Wright Mills White Collar; Frank Bardacke Trampling Out the Vintage (on farm workers); Michael Honey Going Down Jericho Road (on Martin Luther King and the Memphis Garbage Workers); Stanley Aronowitz False Promises (Selections); Hannah Arendt The Human Condition; Andre Gorz Critique of Economic Reason; Bruno Gulli Labor of Fire; Michael Goldfield The Decline of Organized Labor in the United States; Arlie Hochschild The Second Shift. Also work on immigrant workers by Immanuel Ness, and poor workers’ unions. Articles on the rebellious Chinese Workers, Occupy Wall Street as a labor movement. Some of these books and articles will be student presentations; others will be presented by the instructor.

ASCP 82000- Reassessing Inequality & Reimagining the 21st Century                                                                                                 GC:   T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Cahill/Luttrell, [20982] Cross listed with IDS. 81640, PSYC 80103, MALS, P SC

Engaging broad questions of economic inequality and its impact on the “commons,” or public sphere, this seminar will combine a political economic analysis with an examination of lived experiences, counter-narratives and everyday forms of resistance; and consider the role that new technologies can play in offering alternative ways to document, study, and resist inequalities.  

The seminar will engage these issues from the ground-up, as they play out in a particular place, East Harlem (El Barrio/Spanish Harlem).
East Harlem (El Barrio/Spanish Harlem) is a neighborhood saturated with complex personal and collective narratives of demographic change, economic hardship, vibrant cultural creativity, social movements, community organizations, and decades of public representations as a site of urban poverty.

Keeping in mind how growing inequality in wealth, income, and debt is affecting public services and institutions, the seminar will take a particular look at housing and public education.

The course will take a hybrid form – including face-to-face weekly sessions situated in a digitally mediated environment. The course will also include community engagement events and participatory research in East Harlem.  Sessions will  be facilitated by CUNY faculty members drawn from a range of social science and humanities disciplines, and will include a prominent list of intellectuals, activists, and experts drawn locally and from around the world, with unique expertise on various aspects of inequality.

Simultaneously, this course will engage critical questions with regards to how new technologies can be used for community-engaged teaching and scholarship. The course will offer a different take on the “MOOC” (massively open, online course), here re-conceived as a “POOC” a participatory, open, online course that hopes to engage community members, and people from around the world, in dialogue with the ideas in the course.
 

The seminar is designed to problematize issues related to representations of inequality; notions of community; and useable and meaningful research while simultaneously providing access to, and motivation for using, new digital tools and methods for addressing inequality.

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FALL 2012

ASCP. 81000 - Introduction to American Studies: Histories & Methods GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Humphries, [19288] Cross listed with MALS 73200.

Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman begin the introduction to their recent collection States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (2009), with a seemingly straightforward question: “What is the object of American studies?” For Castronovo and Gilman, this question leads directly to two others: “What does ‘American studies’ study, and what does it want?” The object of this course is to explore these questions by considering the histories, theories, and practices of the interdisciplinary field of American studies, from its inception as an academic discipline to its present “state of emergency.” Using the first publication of American Quarterly in 1949 as a starting point, we will consider how American studies has been transformed from a movement into an institution represented by one of the largest and most widely recognized annual academic conferences in the United States. The collection edited by Castronovo and Gillman is one of the most recent attempts to recalibrate and redefine the field of American studies, but the impulse it represents is as old as the field itself. For all of its centrality, American studies remains an anomaly in the academy: Generally organized as a program and not a department, it resides somewhere between (or, perhaps, outside) normative disciplinary boundaries and in sometimes productive, sometimes uneasy relations to the other “studies” which have been created in part on its model. During this semester we will consider the complexity inherent in this model, as we trace the influence of both seminal and emerging work in American studies. We will also consider the different meanings that American studies has (and has had) for different disciplines, and attempt to take stock of its current position in the academy and in our own work.
 

ASCP. 81500 - Core Seminar in Political Science GC:R, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. O'Brien, [19300] Cross listed with P SC 71000.

All incoming students pursuing a Ph.D. and an MA* in political science are strongly encouraged to take this seminar for the purpose of knitting us all into a life-long community or collectivity of intellectuals who are passionate about politics. Every student in political science studies some aspect of power. They examine power in abstraction (political theory), or power from the perspective of our nation-state (American politics), among foreign nation-states (comparative politics), or between nation-states (international relations). As a global hegemon, the United States also exerts formal and informal influence, manifested formally as American foreign policy or informally as American cultural or economic hegemony (American Studies). This seminar explores theoretical questions associated with culture and resistance, particularly involving identity, and inciting American or global social movements. Finally, it refers to the American exportation of the rule of law in terms of the Americanization of Europe (neo-classical capitalism, neo-liberalism, new empires, fundamentalism), or the European Union (EU), as well as the exportation of the Anglo-Saxon and Enlightenment culture(s) of civil rights, civil liberties, and human rights, manifested in the Yoo brief, the Gitmo Supreme Court cases, and the Veil controversy, and the use of Shari'a tribunals at home and abroad. (1 credit tutorials also available with my permission & EO permission).

ASCP. 81500 - Geographic Theory & Thought GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Smith, [19290] Cross listed with ANTH 81700 & EES 79903.　Permission of instructor required.

ASCP. 81500 - History of CUNY GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Brier/Picciano, [19303] Cross listed with U ED 75100.

The City University of New York (CUNY) is the largest urban public university in the United States, enrolling more than 500,000 matriculating students and adult and continuing education students in its 24 colleges and schools. CUNY traces its roots to the opening of the Free Academy (later The City College) in 1847, with the stated mission of “educating the children of the whole people.” New York’s municipal college system grew steadily with the addition of Hunter College in 1870 and Queens and Brooklyn colleges in the 1930s. It wasn’t until 1961 that the City University of New York was formally established.

This research seminar examines this great university’s unique history and contribution to New York City and the world. In addition to CUNY’s early years, the seminar will review the system’s colleges, people and policies over the past half century, including the fight over open admissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the impact of the city’s fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s, the battle over remediation in the 1990s, and contemporary issues related to state and city fiscal support, faculty governance, tuition increases and the rise of a strong central administration.

Any student interested in the evolution of urban higher education will find this seminar an invaluable source of information and discussion. The seminar leaders--one a U.S. social historian; the other an educational policy expert--between them have more than 70 years of experience working in this “people’s university.”

ASCP. 81500 - Materializing the Good Life GC: M, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Chuh, [19295] Cross listed with ENGL 80600 & WSCP 81000.

What does it mean to live ‘the good life’? What does it mean now, when normative definitions – of the good life as equivalent to economy stability, educational access, freedom from state intrusion – seem ever less available to ever greater numbers of people? What has it meant historically, and how have these meanings been conditioned and even compelled by the political, cultural, economic, and affective structures that have characterized different times?

Who is successful in achieving the good life, who fails, and in both cases, with what effects? This course will undertake to address such questions by working with and through a set of key concepts including liberalism, neoliberalism, humanism, secularism, and cosmopolitanism.

We will work by assessing the theoretical and philosophical grounds and aesthetic modalities through which ‘the good life’ has been stabilized conceptually and materially, by and for whom, and to theorize ways of living and knowing alternative to dominant definitions through our engagements with the literary-cultural and theoretical texts anchoring the course.

Students enrolled in this course are asked to read J. Jack Halberstam’s, The Queer Art of Failure, prior to the first day of class. We will also read work as wide-ranging as that by Lauren Berlant, Wendy Brown, Immanuel Kant, Janet Jakobsen, Chandan Reddy, Sianne Ngai, Cedric Robinson, Jean Luc Nancy, Lisa Duggan, Jodi Melamed, Achille Mbembe, Friedrich Schiller, and Eve Segwick, as well as literary/cultural works that we collectively identify in the first days of the course.

Students taking the class for 4 credits should expect to produce two short papers and a longer seminar project. Students taking the class for 2 credits will be asked to write and present a conference-length paper (10 pages) to complete the requirements of the course.

ASCP. 81500 - Photography/American West/Myth/Hist GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Manthorne, [19291] Cross listed with ART 79000.　Art History department permission required.
Photography’s beginnings and early development parallel Euro-American exploration and settlement of the American West. This lecture course interrogates that intertwined relationship beginning with the daguerreotypes of the Mexican-American War and terminating with early western movies. It presents a social history that interrogates how photography shaped the popular conception of the West, and how the visual exploration of the region expanded the medium. Our topics include railroad promotional commissions; photographic work of the great post-Civil War surveys (1867-1879) headed by F.V. Hayden, Clarence King, George M. Wheeler, and John Wesley Powell; shifting patterns of representing the American Indian; and the role of women photographers in the western territories. Photography’s distinct strategies for documenting history and embodying myth are identified via comparisons with western painters Catlin, Bierstadt, and Moran. The display and distribution of photographs via exhibitions, stereographic viewers, albums, and illustrated books are examined. The course includes several visits to major photographic collections and one class devoted to demonstrations of historic cameras, lens, field work, and wet plate collodion techniques.
Requirements: midterm and final examinations including image identification and essays; participation in weekly discussions on readings; a 10 page written research paper, with related abstract, annotated bibliography, and short oral presentation.
Preliminary reading: Martha A. Sandweiss. Print the Legend. Photography and the American West. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2002.

ASCP. 81500 - Readings in US Women's History GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. McCarthy, [19297] Cross listed with HIST 74300 & WWCP 81000.

ASCP. 81500 - Mic Check: Rhetorics of Power and Resistance in the Aftermath of Occupy  GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Shor, [19293] Cross listed with ENGL 79010.

In the late 20th century, Vaclav Havel exhorted idealists to "speak truth to power." Playwright and politician, Havel proposed that democratic discourse could undermine undemocratic oligarchies. Such dreams and discourses moved millions to bury the crony regimes of Eastern Europe. Thus continued a remarkable history of non-violent transformation which can trace its roots to the Ghandian campaigns before 1948 in India and to the great American Civil Rights Movement in the U.S in the 1950s-1970s.

Confronting entrenched and armed oligarchies is formidable anywhere, yet the weapons of rhetoric have been strangely enabling in democratic struggles.

Opposition movements have undermined the "regimes of truth" and the "legitimate language" which Foucault and Bourdieu separately named as discursive tools for domination. A bevy of police states from the Baltic to the Adriatic fell by 1991. More recently, an Arab Spring spread across borders with some spectacular successes and some major setbacks, with the Egyptian story heavily-marked by communications strategies.

Then, in September, 2011, a handful of creative activists physically occupied Zuccotti Park near Wall Street, encamping in a tent village, launching an "Occupy Movement" in the Capitol of Capital. For two months, the village morphed into new expressive shapes, attracting tens of thousands to witness if indeed "another world is possible," one that challenges the vast economic inequality damaging American life. By the time the Occupy camp was destroyed by a violent police assault in November, it had become an intolerable built challenge to the legitimate authority of Wall Street and the oligarchy represented by billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The camp embodied, uttered and projected alternative ways of being and seeing, and was an incubator of alternative rhetoric.

Among the alternatives practiced in this transformative space were "horizontal" social relations. A horizontal rather than a vertical rhetoric structured its meetings. Open general assemblies operated horizontally with rotating chairpeople and with "stacks" to determine speaking order based on social power of speakers, that is, who speaks most and least in such public spheres, which individuals and groups were socially ascribed lesser or greater authority to speak in public(challenging what Paulo Freire called "the culture of silence").

Occupy also generated autonomous working-groups which copied the horizontal structure of the general assemblies. Most notable, perhaps, Occupy also installed "the human microphone" as a public-address system. Denied legal use of sound-amplification at Zuccotti by the police, general assemblies and other large meetings practiced group repetition of a speaker’s remarks in a now-famous choral method. The human microphone also emerged as a tool for assertion of utterances at public protests where an individual’s call of "mic check!" assembled the human micropohone for amplification as well as for relaying instructions.

With Occupy camps now driven out public spaces, this seminar will study horizontal discourse and rhetorical resistance emerging from the protests.

For background on the conflict of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic discourses, we will study the relevant work of Foucault, Bourdieu, Chomsky, James Scott, David Graeber, Paulo Freire, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, and Goran Therborn, among others. Lots of discussion during seminar meetings, weekly journals on the readings, final project.

ASCP. 81500 - Seminar in American History I GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kessner, [19299] Cross listed with HIST 84900.

This seminar is designed to train incoming graduate students in the craft of historical research and writing. Over the course of the term, each student will formulate a research topic, prepare a bibliography of relevant primary and secondary sources, write an historiographic essay, and present and defend a formal project proposal for the substantial research paper that is to be completed in the second semester seminar. Weekly meetings will discuss common readings, share and critique written work, and develop and refine the research proposals. We will also be devoting some time to methods and issues involved in undergraduate teaching.

Students should focus primarily on framing a topic and honing a well defined, focused and reasonable research question for their papers. The purpose of the collateral assignments is to help push this process forward. Thus, from the very beginning students should be thinking about their research project, sampling secondary readings and investigating the availability of accessible sources.

Course learning objectives: Familiarize students with the full range of issues we confront as historians trying to do original work: how to pose researchable questions, how to find and cull through sources, how to weigh and interpret evidence, construct arguments, and situate one’s own arguments in a wider field of debate in the field.

Syllabus and reading list available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5110).

ASCP. 81500 - Serial Narrative GC: T, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dolan, [19292] Cross listed with ENGL 76300.

This course will consider the popularity and peculiar aesthetics of longform, open narratives over the last two hundred years, from the romans-feuilleton of Eugene Sue’s day down to the web serials of our own.

The specific balance of classes will be determined by student interest but the course will be purposely multimedia, probably including classes on the following topics: Victorian magazine serials; the silent film-and-newspaper serials of the Progressive/Edwardian era; Irna Philips’ creation of the soap opera in Chicago radio (and its continuation into the television era); the shift from yellowback and pulp novels into comic books during the 1940s; and the continued popularity and reinvention of Coronation Street and Doctor Who.

Some attention will also be paid to the effect serialization has on conceptually closed narratives (e.g., Dickens and James’ encounters with serialization; telenovelas).

Secondary readings will be drawn from structuralist narratology and media studies. Students from all area groups are welcome, and they will be encouraged to choose topics for their final projects that tie the course’s more general themes and technologies into their specific area of focus.

ASCP. 81500 - Social Movements GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jasper, [19301] Cross listed with SOC 84600

This course has two purposes. First, to introduce students to the main currents in research and theory on social movements and protest, second, to focus on micro-level processes within them, such as meaning making, emotions, and decision making. We will especially highlight decisions as one way that these micro-foundations come together to shape actions and outcomes, in an emerging strategic and cultural approach.

Students will lead class discussions.

Written assignments include three memos and a Wikipedia essay.

After completing this course, students should be able to teach courses on social movements at the undergraduate level and should be able to identify researchable questions at the cutting edge of the field.

ASCP. 81500 - Theory Colloquium GC: T, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reid-Pharr, [19294] Cross listed with ENGL 80100.

In this seminar we will place the concept of the "Black Atlantic" into both its historical and theoretical contexts. Beginning with C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins and ending with Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic we will trace the development of Atlantic Studies, paying particular attention to slavery, travel, cultural contact and transformation.

Other texts that we will examine include: Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of a Black Radical Tradition, Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery; Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History; Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History; Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation; Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route; Lewis Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences; Peter Linebaugh, The Many Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic; Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640 – 1940.

ASCP. 81500 - Towards a Networked Academy GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Gold, [19296] Cross listed with MALS 75400 & ENGL 89020.

The growth and popularization of the digital humanities (DH) in recent years has highlighted the many ways in which computational tools are being brought to bear upon humanities scholarship and teaching. Recent methodological experiments in the digital humanities – quantitative approaches to literary history, algorithmic methods of text analysis and visualization, public forms of peer-to-peer review, and interactive pedagogies for the open web – have helped scholars re-imagine the basic nature and forms of academic research and teaching across a range of disciplines.

But what is the digital humanities, and why should we care about it? What kinds of questions can DH make legible that other modes of academic inquiry conceal? Is the digital humanities a field unto itself, or is it simply a set of methodologies that can be applied in multiple fields? Will there be a point at which digital tools will be so pervasive that the field we now call "digital humanities" will simply be known as the "humanities"?

This course will explore these and other questions through a set of historical, theoretical, and methodological readings that trace the rise and popularization of the digital humanities over the past two decades. Students will be introduced to emerging debates in the digital humanities and will become familiar with some of the fundamental skills necessary to develop and analyze digital humanities projects. We will examine and critique a range of such projects and begin to sketch out possible undertakings of our own.

A central aim of this course is to involve students in the rich and evolving constellation of spaces in which networked conversations are reshaping the norms of scholarly communication. These spaces include blogs and Twitter, which, as MLA Director of Scholarly Communication Kathleen Fitzpatrick has pointed out in "Networking the Field," scholars are using "as a means of getting feedback on work in progress or as an alternative channel through which an author can reach an audience more quickly and directly." We will analyze the benefits and drawbacks of this new conversational ecosystem that surrounds digital humanities work.

Readings will include texts and projects by Ian Bogost, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Dan Cohen, Cathy Davidson, Johanna Drucker, Jason Farman, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Peter Krapp, Alan Liu, Tara McPherson, Franco Moretti, Bethany Nowviskie, Stephen Ramsay, Geoffrey Rockwell, Tom Scheinfeldt, Michael Witmore, and Jonathan Zittrain, among others.

No technical skills are required, though a willingness to experiment (and even fail) with DH tools is crucial. Class assignments will include weekly engagements with and participation on our class blog and Twitter feed; contributions to a collaborative Zotero bibliography; an oral presentation on a DH project; and a final project in one of the following forms: a seminar paper (~20 pages), a detailed DH project proposal, or a substantive contribution to a new or existing DH project.

ASCP. 81500 - Urban Com Stud: City as Social Laboratory GC:　　R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kornblum, [19302] Cross listed with SOC 85600.

This course will explore a number of themes in urban sociology, as represented by readings that include the essays in Sennett (ed.) Classic Essays in the Culture of Cities, and work by Wilson, Benjamin, Duneier, Zukin, Kornblum, Goffman, Lefebvre, Harvey, and others. Class discussion based on the readings, and my involvements in research on the area , will help us develop a set of empirical questions to explore in Manhattan’s Midtown during the semester. Emphasis will be on using themes in social theory to generate actual research in the field.
 

ASCP. 82000 - Abolitionism & the Origins of the Civil War GC:　　T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Oakes, [19309] Cross listed with HIST 75700.

ASCP. 82000 - Readings in African American Literary and Cultural Theory GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reid-Pharr, [19306] Cross listed with ENGL 85500 & WSCP 81000.

Focusing primarily on travel and space, this seminar will introduce students to some of the more significant recent critical and theoretical trends within the study of Black American literature and culture.

Participants will be asked both if it is possible to produce a specifically black literary criticism and whether Black American identity is effected, manipulated, challenged or perhaps even erased within "peculiar" performative or spatial contexts.

At the same time, the course will examine how African American Studies intersects with and challenges Feminist Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, Ethnic Studies, and American Studies.

Students will be asked to write several short papers during the course of the semester. They will also do at least one in class presentation

ASCP. 82000 - American Politics GC: M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Polsky, [19313] Cross listed with P SC 72000.

ASCP. 82000 - American Pragmatism GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Godfrey-Smith, [19311] Cross listed with PHIL 77400.
A survey of work by the 'classical' pragmatists (Peirce, James, Dewey) followed by a look at some more recent thinkers including Rorty, Price, and Brandom. Dewey's 1925 book Experience and Nature will get the most attention. The focus will be on epistemological, metaphysical, and meta-philosophical issues, not on value theory or politics.

ASCP. 82000 - Colonial & Early Federal American Literature GC:　　W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reynolds, [19305] Cross listed with ENGL 75000.

American literature cannot be fully understood without a familiarity with its rich, varied early phase, which extends from the narratives of European explorers of the New World through seventeenth-century Puritan poetry and prose to the eighteenth-century literature of enlightenment, revolution, national founding, and early romanticism.

This course examines this formative period of American literature. Besides covering the full range of colonial and early federal writings, we probe various critical and theoretical approaches to American literature. In particular, transnational, circumatlantic, and cultural-studies approaches, which have been prominent in recent Americanist criticism, are drawn upon for insights into this literature, much of which is preoccupied with questions of transatlantic exchange, colonialism, and diaspora.

Among the topics considered are encounters between European settlers and ethnic others; ongoing efforts to define America and Americanness in transatlantic contexts; the culture and aesthetics of New England Puritanism (crucial for understanding later writers such as Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville); the innovative poetry of Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor; the seminal contributions to philosophy and homiletics by Jonathan Edwards; African Americans and slavery, including the earliest known examples of slave narratives; Native American writing, such as the Winnebago trickster cycle; the Indian captivity narrative; women’s writings, such as Judith Sargent Murrary’s feminist prose and Susanna Rowson’s popular novel Charlotte Temple; public and autobiographical writings by Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, Paine, and Hamilton; and the American Gothic fiction of Philadelphia’s Charles Brockden Brown.

Course requirements include a term paper and an oral report on a work of criticism.
 

ASCP. 82000 - Democracy: Inequality & Reprssion GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Markovitz, [19314] Cross listed with P SC 87800.

ASCP. 82000 - W.E.B. DuBois: Scholar, Essayist, Activist GC:　　T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Watts, [19307] Cross listed with ENGL 85500.

This seminar offers an intensive investigation of the life and writings of W.E.B. DuBois. Through discussions of his major and minor writings, we will be able to chart dominant as well as oppositional currents in American/Afro-American thought.

DuBois emerged as a distinct intellectual presence during the last decade of the 19th century and would continue to publish until his death in 1963. Moreover, throughout his entire adult life, DuBois was a political activist in behalf of the freedom struggle of Afro-Americans; obtaining self-determination for colonized peoples throughout the world; and in his later life, the Soviet Union led world communist struggle against capitalism.

His political activism informed his intellectual output and vice versa. As a writer, DuBois wore many intellectual hats during his lifetime: historian The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America (1896) and Black Reconstruction in America; sociologist, The Philadelphia Negro (1899); essayist, The Souls of Black Folks (1903) and Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (1920); autobiographer, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay towards an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940); political polemicist and agitator through his editorial writings in The Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and finally, novelist (I count his novels among his minor works).

The DuBois corpus is far too large to discuss in any single semester, consequently, we will read selectively from his works.

Nevertheless, the course is reading intensive and will require participation in class discussions, several short papers and one longer research paper.

ASCP. 82000 - Immigrant Families GC: R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Korn-Burstyn, [19318] Cross listed with U ED 71100.
In this seminar we will explore the perspectives of immigrant families residing in New York City on education and schooling, and examine how families negotiate relations with schools. The interaction between immigrant families and schools provides fertile ground for a meeting of social imaginations - the familial and the pedagogic - providing ground for shared purpose and for clarifying barriers to genuine engagement. In this seminar, we will identify and study causes of potential tension and conflict as well as opportunities for engagement between families and schools. We will explore the often vast gaps between immigrant families’ cultures of origin and the cultures of urban schools, while pointing to the ways in which schools can develop relationships of trust with families.
In this seminar we will explore the perspectives of immigrant families residing in New York City on education and schooling, and examine how families negotiate relations with schools. The interaction between immigrant families and schools provides fertile ground for a meeting of social imaginations - the familial and the pedagogic - providing ground for shared purpose and for clarifying barriers to genuine engagement.　In this seminar, we will identify and study causes of potential tension and conflict as well as opportunities for engagement between families and schools.　

We will explore the often vast gaps between immigrant families’ cultures of origin and the cultures of urban schools, while pointing to the ways in which schools can develop relationships of trust with families.

ASCP. 82000 - Law, Politics and Policy GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rollins, [19312] Cross listed with MALS 70300 & P SC 71904.

This course will introduce students to the dominant methodologies of legal analysis found in the social sciences. Different sections of the course will examine foundational texts of the Law & Society movement, surveying, for example, major contributions from political science, sociology, criminology, psychology, and other empirically grounded disciplines. It is designed to expose students to legal formalism (in the Langdellian sense of formalism), and to introduce them to legal institutions and reasoning, including statutes, legislation, and precedent.

ASCP. 82000 - Magazine Photography, 1890's-1950's GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Pelizzari, [19304] Cross listed with ART 89000. Department permission required.
Recent scholarship in photography has focused on the context of magazine publications, investigating the works of individual photographers in relationship to a complex web of editorial strategies dealing with politics, glamour, and commerce. Introduced in newspapers and illustrated weeklies in the 1880s, photography became a potent vehicle for communication in the 1920s, with the technical improvements of photogravure and rotogravure and the creation of spectacular layouts of images and text. These photographs contributed to a media craze that responded to the tempo of modern life and that fostered transnational histories across Germany, Russia, France, Italy, Spain, and the United States. The course explores how photographers negotiated with editors and media tycoons who directed the destiny of production and reception of their images on a global scale.
Requirements: A research project that includes an abstract, a bibliography, and a final paper discussing a picture-essay or a particular theme from an original magazine cover found in New York City libraries [a list of collections will be distributed in class].
Preliminary readings:
Thomas Michael Gunther, “The Spread of Photography. Commissions, advertising, publishing,” in Michel Frizot., The New History of Photography (Köln: Könemann, 1998): 555-581.Mary Panzer, Introduction to Things as They Are. Photojournalism in Context since 1955, (London: Chris Boot, 2006): 9-33.
Siegfried Kracauer, ‘Photography’ (1927), in Thomas Levin, ed., The Mass Ornament: Weimar essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995): 47-63.

ASCP. 82000 - People of New York City GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Helmreich, [19316] Cross listed with SOC 82301. Course open to Sociology students only.

This course looks at the different neighborhoods/communities that make up this great and fascinating city. Its focus is on the different ethnic, religious, and racial groups in the city and their social and cultural life-----Hispanics, Jews, Arabs, Asians, African Americans, Greeks, Italians, and people of differing socioeconomic and gender groups. In addition, we will be looking at the neighborhoods themselves, their  architectural and spatial characteristics, how  and why they grew, and how they function as communities.
An integral part of the course will be field work---visiting and studying the areas-----Bensonhurst, Carroll Gardens, Gerritsen Beach, the South Bronx, Chelsea, Glendale, Maspeth, Harlem, etc., etc. Readings will reflect the above topics

ASCP. 82000 - Sociology of Gender GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Eisenstein, [19315] Cross listed with SOC 73200 & WSCP 81000.

This course is an introduction to the sociology of gender, and can be used by students to prepare for an orals field in gender. Topics to be covered will include some of the following: gender and imperialism; globalization and women’s labor; race, class and the critique of intersectionality; feminist/womanist theory; the body, sexuality and heteronormativity; families and housework; incarceration and gender; capitalism, consumerism, and the uses of gender identity; reproductive rights and population control; violence and rape culture; migration; public life, neoliberalism and welfare; Islam, Christianity and the state; and colonialism and indigenous identities. Guest lecturers from Sociology and other GC programs will be invited to join us during the semester.

ASCP. 82000 - Spanish in the U.S. GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Otheguy, [19317] Cross listed with LING 75600 & SPAN 80100. Permission required.

The main purpose of the seminar is for students to carry out research on the Spanishes spoken and written in the United States, using either the paradigm of variationist sociolinguistics or that of the sociology of language. Under variationist sociolinguistics, the student will organize and carry out a small research project on a variable feature of the lexicon, phonology or grammar of Spanishes as spoken or written in New York or other parts of the US. Under the sociology of language, the student’s paper will be on attitudes toward these forms of speech, or their social and demographic distribution, on code selection, on maintenance and shift, on Spanish-language media, on language in the schools, or on some other relevant topic. A second purpose of the course is for the student to become familiar with the salient works of the research literature on the topic, with an emphasis on variationist works. The instructor will conduct classes in Spanish. Questions in class, and class dialogue in general, can be in either English or Spanish according to student preferences. Written work can be in English or Spanish. Some readings will be in English and some in Spanish.

ASCP. 82000 - Studying Urban Schools GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Semel, [19319] Cross listed with U ED 75100.
This course examines the history of different types of urban schools, including public, independent, Catholic and their different types of pedagogic practices, traditional and progressive. Through a number of school histories, students will analyze the ways in which urban schools have changed over time and how, despite significant social, political and educational change, there has been significant constancy. The course will examine a number of themes, including issues of race. social class, ethnicity and gender, differences in place (urban schools as different?), differences in types of schools (i.e. public vs. private), differences in curriculum and pedagogy (i.e. traditional and progressive), the role of particular schools in educational reform, constancy and change in urban schooling, and methods for writing school histories.

ASCP. 82000 - US Culture/Society/Politics, 1928-1988 GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Nasaw, [19308] Cross listed with HIST 75400. 

ASCP. 82000 - US in 1920's: Music & Culture GC: F, 10:00 a.m.-1:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Taylor, [19310] Cross listed with MUS 86200.

During the 1920s music and musicians served as both causes and effects in social history.  Seen in the larger context of the aftermath of World War 1, the technology boom (especially in recording, radio, and film), Prohibition, the emergence of organized crime, the Harlem Renaissance, the early history of jazz, and many literary and artistic movements, music becomes a lens through which to examine radical shifts in America’s views on gender, race, class, and a host of other issues.  And in this setting, discussions of what the term “Modernism” meant during the decade can be particularly fruitful. Though readings will be taken from a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, a central focus will be on listening—both in and out of class. The course will explore work by musicians and composers as diverse as George Gershwin, Aaron Copland, Henry Cowell, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Dane Rudhyar, Ruth Crawford, and several others. Assignments will consist of weekly written responses to reading and listening, discussion-leading, a midterm writing assignment, and a final project that will incorporate a class presentation and final paper.