Graduate Program

Studies the history of “aesthetic” thought—namely the philosophical reflection on the concepts of beauty, taste, and sublimity, on our affective response to art and nature, and on the role of art and the artist in society—from Plato to Nietzsche, with particular emphasis on how aesthetics relates to questions of epistemology, anthropology, ethics, ontology, and politics. The concepts of mimesis and the sublime will be given special attention. Authors studied include Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus, Boileau, Batteux, Burke, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, Nietzsche. Conducted in English.

This course will explore developments in world cinema industrial, social, and political from 1959 to 1989. It will explore film aesthetics, technologies, and circulation questions, considering questions like the following: What’s new about the French New Wave? What do we mean by Third Cinema? How do different national cinemas influence each other? In what ways have various national cinemas responded critically to Hollywood’s commercial dominance and to its conventions? How do popular and art? cinemas speak to each other. How does cinema respond to the pressures and provocations of other media at the inception of the digital age? Weekly screenings and film journals required.

What are the new perspectives, directions, and strategies of writing about photography and photographs, when "Theory” seems to be a passing fad and the domain of the history of photography has been merged either into histories of modern art or of regional arts? What are the new interpretations of the recurring key concepts in photography theories, and what are the new ones that have emerged? This course studies photography-related theories from the 1990s to the present to invite you, as the new generation of scholars, to reflect on how you can contribute to, develop, and innovate within the field.

This course follows contemporary art—painting, sculpture, architecture, performance, video, and installation after 1990— in South Asia and across its diaspora that represents or addresses the human body. We will take a long view, moving with the works to their various historical references, which include temple and tomb architecture, the sculptural depictions of gods and queens, and the sensorium (light, scent, and sound) of ritual practices from prehistory to the present. We will ask what alternative paradigms such long histories offer artists, and us, of the body in love, kinship, and community.

Feminism has had a powerful impact on the developing field of film theory from the 1970s to the present. This course will examine the major feminist work on film, moving from the earlier text-based psychoanalytic theories of representation to theories of feminine spectatorship to studies of reception contexts and audience. We will also give attention to the very important role of feminist theory in television studies. Weekly screenings, keyed to the readings, will allow us to test the value of these positions for close critical analysis of the film or television text. Readings to include: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Constance Penley, Judith Mayne, Linda Williams, Jacqueline Bobo, Valerie Smith, Lynn Spigel, Lynne Joyrich, Julie D'Acci.

This course examines the arguments and the rhetoric of radical thinkers who have tried to change the world rather than just interpret it since the revolutions of 1848.

Does it matter where our power comes from? Why or how and to whom? This course uses anthropological case studies of different kinds of energy sources (fossil fuels, nuclear, water, solar, wind) and different kinds of electrification (centralized grids versus micro-grids) around the world to think about the relationship between energy, environments, power, and culture with a specific focus on intersectional gender and sexuality. How do energy practices and cultural norms of racialized gender shape each other in various places around the world, and to what effects? What might empirical attention to how people talk about and use energy help us to understand about the energy transitions and climate crises of the 21st century?

This course provides an introduction to the key concepts and theories in the field of Black Geographies. We will draw on a range of interdisciplinary texts to explore how Black communities continue to shape and interact with space, place, and the environment. In doing so, we will pay particular attention to Black place making, memory work, and spatial politics. In addition, we will explore how the field of Black Geographies provides us with tools to further understand political struggles against legacies of anti-Blackness, enslavement, colonialism, carcerality, and policing.   

This course has three main areas of focus: First, we will read foundational texts in order to establish a shared basis for what constitutes Black Geographies, as well as the origins of the field of study. Next, we will work through key branches of Black Geographies, with focus areas that include racial capitalism; plantation logics; diaspora; gender and sexuality; food; ecology, carcerality and policing; and urban space. Lastly, drawing on Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s premise that “freedom is a place”, we will explore the transformative visions of Abolition Geography.

 What is the sound of Black womanhood? How do we hear and listen to Black women? Where do we hear sonic Black womanhood? When, where, and how does sound become (un)gendered and/or queered? Are we really listening? In this course, we will explore the diverse and multivocal sonic cultures of Black women, femmes, and gender-oppressed people. We learn from the vocality of early twentieth century blues women singers, locate the often erased yet long history of Black women in country music, wrestle with the complex politics of Black women’s sexuality in popular music (in genres such as disco, hip hop, and pop), and listen to the screams, the noise, the break, and the grunt as emitted by Black women, femmes, and gender-oppressed voices. We expand the definition of “sound” and contemplate its emergence across critical and cultural texts including albums, films, television, theatre, performance, literature, and more. Working with methods in sound studies, performance studies, and music/musicology, this course will “listen in detail,” as performance scholar Alexandra T. Vasquez offers, to the multiple ways that Black women create sound.

This course explores photography in Africa and the African Diaspora. We will focus mainly on black photographers and the ways in which they have used their camera to capture the contours of black life during key historical moments. Through a case study approach, we will learn how to read photographs and will pay attention to artists’ image making and curatorial practices. We will explore both social documentary photography traditions as well as portraiture and art photography. Some thematic areas will include, civil rights photography, resistance photography during the South African anti-apartheid struggle, African portraiture, vernacular photography, prison photography, feminist and queer photography, and the role of photography in the construction of post-colonial subjecthood. We will examine artists like Ronald Ngilima, Lebohang Kganye, Santu Mofokeng, Zanele Muholi, Ernest Cole, Sabelo Mlangeni (South Africa), Carrie Mae Weems, Renee Cox, Gordon Parks, James Van Der Zee (U.S.), Ajamu X, Rotimi Fani-Kyode, Roshini Kempadoo (U.K.), Seydou Keita, Malick Sidibe (Mali), and Omar Victor Diop (Senegal).

This course introduces students to the rich body of disaster literature and cinema in Japan. We will explore how Japanese artists creatively reflected on themes of loss, grief, trauma, survival, and healing; we will critically analyze how disaster writings and films probe the issues of socio-political infrastructure as well as human pain and strength. Described as events that cause “the breach of collective expectations in institutions and practices that make everyday life work” (Curato and Corpus Ong 2015), the “disasters” we encounter in this class include both natural and human-generated calamities such as fire, earthquake, war, atomic bombing, and epidemic. Also covered in this class are writings on “imagined disasters” as found in science fiction and dystopian fantasy (for example, the 1973 novel Japan Sinks by Komatsu Sakyō and its parody “The World Sinks Except Japan” by Tsutsui Yasutaka).

Varying topics relating to literature and culture representing specific styles, modes, genres, or media. Please see public notes for specific section titles and course descriptions. This topics course can be repeated (3 times) for additional credit as long as the special topic (section title) is different.

This is a course, fundamentally, about relationality as it 1) materializes in culture, politics, aesthetics, and historical experience and 2) constitutes the fields of black studies and indigenous studies. In these fields, relationality not only involves acknowledging difference and incommensurability, but it also calls for belonging, solidarity, and, crucially for us, speculation. Our seminar will examine how 20th and 21st century artists and scholars imagine and theorize relationality from a speculative vantage point, envisioning “otherwise worlds” in the face of empire, (settler) colonialism, and white supremacy. We’ll aim to speculate collectively as well, producing knowledge together and always working on the assumption that no one enters the room with the complete tools to make sense of the full scope of what speculation means and enables in black and indigenous studies. In the process, we’ll move capaciously across North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Oceania, spanning multimedia installation, fiction, poetry, music, film, and writing by artists like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Octavia Butler, Mati Diop, Grace Dillon, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Lisa Reihana, Sofia Samatar, Miryam Charles, and Canisia Lubrin, and theorists and critics such as Saidiya Hartman, Kathryn Walkiewicz, Jayna Brown, Mark Rifkin, Ian Baucom, Keguro Macharia, Edouard Glissant, Tiffany King, Joseph Pierce, and Hugo Ka Canham.

Recent critical work has called into question the saliency of national traditions and the efficacy of conventional periodization in literary studies. This shift in critical focus from the nation to the globe has implications for the field of American literature and the rationale for literary studies more generally. In this seminar we will consider reevaluations of the always evolving canon of nineteenth-century American literature in light of our increased awareness of globalization’s long history. Does rereading writers once considered “pure products of America,” like Cooper, Child, Emerson, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Hawthorne, Douglass, Delaney, Thoreau, Stowe, Dickinson, Twain, James and others, in contexts that traverse the once heavily policed borders of the U.S.A., change the meaning and implications of their work? What is the purpose of studying any national literature when the concept of the nation itself seems increasingly questionable? We will read representative works by selected canonical “American” authors as well as recent critical reevaluations of the field by Robert Levine, Wai Chee Dimock, Lisa Lowe, Edward Said, Paul Gilroy, Paul Giles, John Guillory and others.

This course traces the career of contemporary Marxism through its most well-known proponent of the last fifty years: Fredric Jameson. In light of Jameson’s recent passing, we have a chance to evaluate his legacy vis-a-vis what Marxists have been doing for the past half century, especially in the study of aesthetics, economics, and politics. While Jameson’s expansive body of work will provide the backbone of the course, we will always pair him with historical and contemporary figures who analyze the work of culture from a materialist standpoint. In so doing, students will engage not only with Jameson’s many lines of thought but also with thinkers who are both parallel and perpendicular to him. Echoing his own efforts in Marxism and Form, Late Marxism, and The Years of Theory, the course hopes to model the intellectual complexity of any theoretical tradition, its most famous representatives, and the paradigmatic texts to which they are sometimes reduced. We will resist such reductions ourselves to see what is gained and lost by positing any thinker as “representative” of a field of thought. Our goal will thus not be to lionize Jameson but, rather, to tussle with his influence on contemporary Marxism such that we unpack its antinomies, assumptions, and antagonisms as they pertain to the interpretation of culture.