Graduate Program

This course explores how popular media over the past 500 years has influenced views of Native American history and culture. Topics include early printed images, traveling shows, film, advertising, video games, fashion, social media, and artificial intelligence. Participants will learn to spot bias, assess credibility, and engage in informed conversations about American history and cultural heritage.

Introduction to abstract art, 1900 to the present: its stakes, procedures, and critical demands; as well as its significance to histories of capitalism, decolonization, and radical philosophy.

Traditional Chinese arts had their own rich media and modes of expression, while new media introduced during the late
Qing and early Republican reforms brought distinct traditions and possibilities. This course examines both the
continuities linking imperial and modern China and the ruptures marking this era of transformation. Through close
readings of major media theory and China studies scholarship, we explore how media shaped China’s transformations
and the debates they inspired. Students will gain insight into methods for studying these questions and develop a deeper
understanding of China’s visual cultural history from the 18th to early 20th centuries. No Chinese language is required.

This course will approach photography through modernism’s history and theory, its autonomy in formalist criticism, the question of medium, and competing models including Marxism, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and postmodern critiques of essence and ontology. We will examine foundational texts of photography theory, framing photography as a “theoretical object” (Michael Fried, 2008) for art, visual culture, and art history. Meeting twice weekly, each session focuses on the close reading of one essay, fostering precise textual understanding. Students will develop skills in close reading, build a foundation for later critical studies, and deepen awareness of historiography.

This course will explore the many ways in which cinema operates as a time machine. Through close analysis of works by Agns Varda, Chantal Akerman, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Jean-Luc Godard we will consider varieties of cinematic temporality in relation to questions of history and memory (collective and subjective). Readings will include: Gilles Deleuze, Kaja Silverman, David Rodowick, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin.

At present, parts of the world seem to be transitioning from liberal democracy to another (or other) regime(s). The duration and nature of that transition are unknown; however, historical transitions and the art describing them are available to study. We will examine possible valences offered by theories of transition that range from gender transitions to psychoanalytic of “transitional object theory,” as well as art from the last few decades attesting to the transition out of state socialism and dictatorships. Work on and discussion of aspects of visual culture outside art are more than welcome, as are topics from the present.

This course works its way through texts from a variety of disciplines (art history, history, literary studies, political philosophy) that help us analyze capitalism and colonialism as interrelated historical developments. Readings include Marx, CLR James, Max Raphael, Fanon, T J Clark, Geeta Kapur, Spivak, and B. R. Ambedkar.

How do people across the world experience, construct, and perform gender? How have notions of gender been shaped by cultural, economic, political, and social forces? This course will examine gender as a key component of social life. Beginning with a basic overview of anthropological and sociological approaches to gender and sexuality, we will move on to examine some of the key theories and concepts that inform this work. What distinguishes sex from gender? How does gender intersect with race, class, religion, and nationhood? Special attention will be given to how colonialism, globalization, and neoliberal capitalism have shaped gendered experiences and practices across the world. By interrogating these concepts, we challenge binary understandings of gender and open space for a more inclusive, global exploration of the topic. Students will be introduced to feminist, queer, and decolonial theories, providing multiple perspectives for analyzing gender as a social structure and lived experience. The course will then examine ethnographic case studies from diverse regions, highlighting how gender is constructed and performed in different sociocultural contexts. Topics include rituals of gender transition in Indigenous cultures, gender nonconforming roles in South Asia (such as hijras), the fluidity of gender categories in Polynesia, and state regulation of bodies and identities. Students will be encouraged to think critically about how anthropological approaches to gender are relevant in everyday life. We will explore the gendered dynamics of work, politics, education, healthcare, and media, examining how cultural assumptions about masculinity and femininity are embedded in these spheres. Students will build essential skills in critical thinking, argumentation, and academic writing. Readings will span ethnographic studies, theoretical essays, and multimedia sources such as films and advertisements, offering diverse examples of how anthropologists study gender.

Garbage, trash, waste, discards, refuse, dirt, filth. All societies produce it, but what counts as trash, why, and how it is handled, varies widely. This class will consider a variety of anthropological examples from around the world to ask, What is wasting as a practice, according to whom, and what are its effects? How are cultural ideas about garbage and wasting produced in historically contingent ways, in relation to particular economic, political, and cultural systems? How can analyzing discard systems help us to understand and perhaps transform systems of power? We will look at examples both locally and globally, ranging from toxic post-industrial sites, to landfills or sewers, to wasting bodies.

This course is an interdisciplinary survey of the creation of an American Empire following the closing of the continental frontier in the 1890s. It was driven by the competition for scarce natural resources such as fertile land, minerals, and fossil fuels, and for cheap labor and access to markets. Part 1 covers American military intervention in Latin America, Asia and Europe between 1890 and 1945. Part 2 covers the competition between the USA and the USSR for hegemony in the post-colonial world between 1945 and 1992. Part 3 covers imperialist rivalry for the control of oil in the Middle East as the backdrop for the “Global War on Terror” that dates from 1992. Key readings include Williams The Tragedy of American Diplomacy; LeFeber Inevitable Revolutions; Klein The Shock Doctrine; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin; Rashid Taliban; and Mitchell Carbon Democracy.

 In 1903 when Du Bois wrote that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” early cinema and photography were already well-established technologies shaping discourses of race and the boundaries between black and white. In this course we will examine the relationship between visual culture and race, particularly blackness. We will ask the following questions: What is the relationship between visuality and modern understandings of race? How does visual culture shape perceptions of race and racialized bodies? After establishing the historical context, we will consider how contemporary artists from the African diaspora imagine blackness otherwise by playing with, challenging, and subverting overdetermined stereotypes of blackness. We will explore this subject matter by examining the visual and performance art practices of black filmmakers, photographers, curators, fine artists, etc. Potential artists include Spike Lee, Kara Walker, Kehinde Whiley, Mary Sibande, Athi-Patra Ruga, Wangechi Mutu, Grace Jones, Josephine Baker, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Beyoncé, and Rihanna. This course will introduce students to a range of historical and contemporary debates that inform the theory and practice of Black Visual Culture.

“Mutilated Bodies, Mutilated Discourse”invites students to challenge assumptions as they relate to critical issues of agency, race, class, and representation of the body. The course is a critical investigation of the representation of female genital cutting in both African and Western discourses. The controversy over this practice already begins with the act of its naming. Genital cutting, female circumcision, female genital surgery are the names used to designate what some considered as legitimate ritualized practices while others see them as outdated misogynistic rituals. The course provides an understanding of the contexts in which a fragmented transnational sisterhood allows for a proliferation of mutilation discourses on poor and defenseless bodies.

How do Black women make sense of their lives? How do Black women organize, survive, and thrive? How do Black women resist? How do Black women nourish their knowledge and create community? Black feminist criticism and theory-making has been how some have addressed these questions. This course is an introduction to the study, practice, and politics of Black feminist theory. In this class, we will explore historical, popular, and artistic expressions of this school of thought from the nineteenth century to the present. To achieve this, we will engage a wide variety of critical, cultural, and creative texts including but not limited to journal articles and essays, speeches, literature, performance, music, film, and so on. Some of the thinkers, activists, and artists we will discuss include but are not limited to bell hooks, Angela Y. Davis, Janet Mock, Tourmaline, Carrie Mae Weems, and more. We will additionally incorporate a variety of intersectional perspectives on Black feminist theory with regards to race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, class, nation, etc. In so doing, the class aims to examine the relationship between theory and praxis in the development and ongoing evolution of the history, politics, activism, and art of Black feminisms.

The Russian revolution and the establishment of the USSR as a communist state coincided with the advent of cinema, which Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin deemed “the most important of the arts.” Bolstered by a centralized, ideologically driven film industry, Soviet film embodied both avant-garde experimentation and Socialist Realist conformity while defining the boundaries of cinematic language and giving rise to some of the world’s most influential filmmakers like Eisenstein, Vertov, and Tarkovsky. This course is a chronological overview of Soviet cinema from its beginnings to the collapse of the USSR that will explore the ways that filmmaking shaped national and political identity of the Soviet Union. Students will approach films as both works of cinematic art and as cultural/historical artifacts, considering how these two ways of “thinking about film” relate to one another and what they reveal about the conflicting ideologies and anxieties of the Soviet experiment. 

This class explores the representation of sexuality, and gender in nature writing through the lens of queer theory. Drawing on a variety of disciplines, including environmental justice, feminist studies, and LGBTQIA+ movements, this class will consider how queer ecologies reveal and disrupt traditional gendered and heterosexual ideologies around nature, that are often iterated in how we understand the environment and bodies.

This course is designed for students who have completed introductory and intermediate level courses in film and media, and are prepared to engage with more advanced readings in film theory and analysis. Subject areas will include semiotics, psychoanalysis, Marxist theory, feminist theory, queer theory, genre studies, phenomenology, cinematic realism, and theories of the avant-garde. The course will closely examine significant works of global cinema in the narrative, documentary, and experimental traditions.