Ancient & Medieval Era

56:606:501:01 Arts of the Middle Ages
Cross Listed with: 50:082:320:01
M 1:20 pm – 4:10 pm
Room: FA-227
Instructor: Beth Pilliod

Art of the Middle Ages in Europe from fourth to fourteenth centuries. Includes examination of the art of the Byzantine, Carolingian, Ottonian, Romanesque, and Gothic periods.

Early Modern Era

56:606:511:01 Roman Art
Cross Listed with: 50:350:539:01
TH 6:00 pm – 8:40 pm
Room: BSB-107
Instructor: Christopher Fitter

Condemned in permanence to overwork, malnutrition, illiteracy, and the contempt of social ‘superiors’, the poor of England lost even such relief as monasteries had offered when Henry VIII suppressed these in the 1530s. Yet if the establishment regarded the poor as little more than animals, its religion officially exalted poverty as the condition of Christ and his apostles, and Christianity proclaimed all humanity to be created in the image of God. Such contradictions exploded into rebellions and war in sixteenth century Europe, often driving increasingly frightened literary men into demonization of the underclasses. How do such great figures as Thomas More, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare fit into these circumstances? Are there analogies in today’s USA to this pattern of ‘blaming the victim’? We will read, among others, More’s Utopia, Shakespeare’s Lear and Measure for Measure, and excerpts from Crowley, Rastell, Latimer, Spenser, and Winstanley. Grading will be by one in-class presentation, and a 15-20 page term paper.

Studies of the 20th Century

56:606:531:01 Readings 1945-Present
Cross Listed with: 56:512:508:01
M 6:00 pm – 8:40 pm
Room: BSB-107
Instructor: Nick Kapur

This course will investigate recent scholarship on the major developments in American history from the United States’ emergence as a global nuclear superpower in the wake of World War II through the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, down to the present day as the U.S. faces the asymmetrical threat of terrorism and possibly a new rival for global supremacy in the form of a resurgent China. In addition to exploring major domestic events, such as the civil rights movement, the rise of feminism and environmentalism, and the Reagan counterrevolution, we will also consider the effects of globalization, the rise of multinational corporations and NGOs, the ascendance of neoliberalism, and the ongoing influence of American culture and ideas on the rest of the world.

Cultural Diversity

56:606:541:01 Special Topics: African American Novel Since WWII
Cross Listed with: 56:352:540:01, 50:014:400:01
T 6:00 pm – 8:40 pm
Room: BSB-108
Instructor: Keith Green

This course explores African-American novels published since World War II. It begins with Ralph Ellison?s indispensable meditation on blackness in the first half of the twentieth century, Invisible Man, and moves towards more recent texts such as Toni Morrison?s haunting rumination on family and slavery, Beloved. Course participants will become familiar with the considerable body of criticism related to this literature as well as understand the social and historical conditions that inform its production. Course requirements include regular class participation, an annotated bibliography, an oral presentation, and a substantial research paper.

COURSE HAS BEEN CANCELLED

Studies of Ideas

56:606:601:01 Child Geographies
Cross Listed with: 56:163:692:01
W 6:00 pm – 8:40 pm
Room: SOC-309
Instructor: Kate Cairns

What is the space of childhood? Where (and how) are children ‘out of place’? What do children’s everyday movements and place-based identities reveal about contemporary dynamics of culture, capitalism, and globalization? This course engages with the burgeoning field of children’s geographies to examine childhood as a social and spatial construct. We will engage with key theoretical and methodological debates surrounding the study of space, place, and movement in children’s lives. Spanning multiple spatial scales (e.g., the body, city, nation) and processes (e.g., representation, mobility, exclusion), we will examine how geographical insights can shed new light on key debates in childhood studies. Particular attention will be paid to ways in which children’s geographies are shaped by relations of power (e.g., as gendered, racialized, and classed).

Arts and Literature

56:606:608:01 Contemporary Art
Cross Listed with: 50:082:354:01
T 3:00 pm – 5:50 pm
Room: FA-227
Instructor: Cyril Reade

Prerequisites: 50:082:101 or 102, or 103 or permission of instructor. Art in America and Europe 1940 to 1980. Includes discussion of Surrealist, Abstract Expressionist, Minimalist, Pop, Op, and Conceptual Art, Happenings, and site-specific and direct metal sculpture.

56:606:609:01 Survey Japanese Art, Samuari to Manga
Cross Listed with: 50:082:360:01
TH 3:00 pm – 5:50 pm
Room: FA-227
Instructor: Chinghsin Wu

This course introduces major Japanese artworks from prehistory to present, including the art and culture of the samurai, ink painting, woodblock prints, Zen art, tea culture, decorative arts, technology and multimedia, manga, and animation as well as their artistic, historical, religious, social, and intercultural contexts. The class will investigate and critique various digital approaches to Japanese visual culture and help students to use digital tools (such as virtual exhibitions or comic formats) to present their final projects on selected topics in Japanese art. No prerequisites.

56:606:610:01 Digital Story Telling
Cross Listed with: 50:082:233:01, 50:989:403:01, 56:200:573:01
T, TH 1:30 pm – 4:20 pm
Room: FA-119
Instructor: Allan Espiritu

This Digital Storytelling brings together teams of writers and graphic designers to complete three multimedia project. These projects may include, but are not limited to, e-books, chapbooks, posters, digital shorts, and art objects which incorporate text. Students with be challenged to question the traditional role and processes related to writing and designing. Each team will present its work to the instructors and the class for review and critique over three periods during the course. Each team will leave the course with at least three products to promote, publish, or add to their portfolios. The course is for advanced students, special permission required.

56:606:611:01 Special Topics: Writing Machines
Cross Listed with: 56:842:554:01
W 6:00 pm – 8:40 pm
Room: ATG-218
Instructor: Jim Brown

What does it mean to write with machines? We have long used machines to write, and those machines have always actively shaped how writing happens. Today, this question is extended even further, since we are writing with machines in a different sense of the term “with.” We are writing alongside computational machines. From algorithms that generate news stories to bots that edit Wikipedia to the various “autocomplete” functions on our devices, computational machines are doing a great deal of writing. This course will ask how such machines force us to reconsider what we mean when we say we write “with” machines. More than mere tools, machines are collaborating with us and, in some cases, writing with very little human intervention. Students will both read about and experiment with various computational technologies. No technological expertise is required.

Possible texts in this course include:Speaking Code, by Geoff Cox, Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities, edited by Jim Ridolfo and Bill Hart-Davidson Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, by Friedrich Kittler Comparative Textual Media, edited by Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, Reading Writing Interfaces, Lori Emerson. Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, by Matthew Kirschenbaum, Remixing Composition, by Jason Palmeri

56:606:612:01 Queer Looks: Art and Film
Cross Listed with: 50:082:201:01, 50:988:298:03
W 6:00 pm – 8:50 pm
Room: FA-227
Instructor: Cyril Reade

In this course, representations of queer sexuality in art, film and popular culture are presented, discussed and analyzed, beginning with a brief overview of the classical and neo-classical periods, as a prelude to a chronological survey of lgbt visual and literary material from the late 19th century to the present. In 19th century America the poet Walt Whitman and the painter Thomas Eakins captured the spirit of American masculinities. The American vision became more urban in the early twentieth century, captured in the works of Charles Demuth, George Bellows and Marsden Hartley; and in the 1930s, in the photographs of George Platt Lynes, and the paintings of Jared French and Paul Cadmus. The Harlem Renaissance presented its own vision of masculinity through the works of, amongst others, the photographer Carl van Vechten, novelist James Baldwin and poet Langston Hughes. The sensibility of Andy Warhol looms over the post-war period, redefining the American cultural landscape before the epochal 1969 Stonewall riots. We situate the birth of gay liberation in the U.S. in the context of the civil rights struggles, feminism and the anti-war movement, challenged subsequently by the onset of AIDS and characterized by the work of General Idea and Act-Up, on the one hand, and the more graphically provocative work of Robert Mapplethorpe, on the other. We examine the diversification of the queer community as transgendered identity asserts itself and the opening of popular culture to issues of diverse sexual identities. We explore expressions of queer sensibility outside of North America and Europe. We turn finally to the issue of gay marriage, both in the U.S. and abroad. This visual, filmic and textual examination is informed by the theoretical writings of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Richard Meyer, and the fiction of such writers as John Rechy, Gore Vidal and Jean Genet.

Politics and Society

56:606:623:01 Classical Political Theory
Cross Listed with: 50:790:371:01
M, W, F 10:10 am – 11:05 am
Room: ATG-224
Instructor: New Professor (to be updated in August)

The leading figures of Western political theory from Plato to Machiavelli.

56:606:624:01 American Political Thought
Cross Listed with: 50:790:375:40
M, W 6:00 pm – 7:20 pm
Room: CS-109
Instructor: Timothy Knievel

The heritage of ordered liberty in America. Analysis of the writings of such major figures in American thought as Jefferson and Madison, as well as broad theories of the operation of American political institutions.

56:606:625:01 American Presidency
Cross Listed with: 50:790:407:01
M, W, F 11:15 am – 12:10 pm
Room: FA-242
Instructor: Shauna Shames

The constitutional basis and development of the American presidency. The potentialities of presidential government, patterns of presidential politics, and the power, strengths, weaknesses, and limitations of presidential authority.

Culture and Criticism

56:606:631:01 Art History Methodology
Cross Listed with: 50:082:490:01
T, TH 11:00 am – 12:20 pm
Room: FA-227
Instructor: Martin Rosenberg

Permission of instructor. Intended primarily for Art History majors.
Explores diverse methodologies that have been important to the History of Art from its foundations to the present. Examines historiography, formalism, iconography, connoisseurship, Marxism, Semiotics, revisionism, post-modernism, and contemporary art criticism and theory. Prepares art history majors for successful graduate study.

56:606:632:01 Children and Cinema
Cross Listed with: 56:163:642:01
M 6:00 pm – 8:40 pm
Room: Soc-309
Instructor: Meredith Bak

This seminar will explore the figure of the child in contemporary international cinema. Through screenings, readings, and discussion, seminar participants will develop the analytical skills to discuss cinematic form, style, and language, as well as gain a basic understanding of the networks of cultural production and distribution associated with international film festivals. Principal emphasis will be placed on the cultural, political, and historical significance of children as cinematic subjects with a secondary interest in children as audiences and producers. Examples will be drawn from across genres and styles (such as live-action, animation, documentary, short, and feature-length) and will be international in scope. Students will write in several critical and analytical styles.

Gender and Sexuality

56:606:661:01 Women and Art: 18th & 19th Centuries
Cross Listed with: 50:082:305:01
T,TH 1:30 pm – 2:50 pm
Room: FA-227
Instructor: Martin Rosenberg

Prerequisites: 50:082:101 or 102, or 103 or permission of instructor.
A thematic and chronological survey of women as artists, as images in works of art, and an examination of gender issues in art. Historical periods vary each term.

56:606:662:01 Women in Literature
Cross Listed with: 56:350:530:01
T 6:00 pm – 8:40 pm
Room: ATG-226
Instructor: Carol Singley

Notable literature by and about women, with attention to historical developments, feminist theory, and formal and thematic qualities that shape a female literary tradition. Topics include gender relationships (power and intimacy); race and cultural difference; marriage and motherhood; friendship and rivalry between women; and the figure of the female artist. Texts are drawn from the MA in English Candidacy Exam reading list. Oral presentations, short writings, and a final paper or project.

Historical Analysis

56:606:671:01 Readings: 1820-1898
Cross Listed with: 56:512:510:01
W 6:00 pm – 8:40 pm
Room: 429 Cooper Street, 1st floor conference room
Instructor: Andrew Shankman

This course provides an advanced introduction to the primary economic, political, social, and cultural developments of the U.S. nineteenth century.

56:606:672:01 Issues in Public History
Cross Listed with: 56:512:531:01
TH 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Room: 429 Cooper Street, 1st floor conference room
Instructor: Charlene Mires

This course is designed to introduce graduate students to the theory, methods, and practice of history outside the classroom. In this seminar, we will investigate the challenges of historical work in historic sites, museums, archives, and other public history settings.

56:606:673:01 History of the English Language
Cross Listed with: 56:615:530:01
W 6:00 pm – 8:40 pm
Room: CS-202
Instructor: Richard Epstein

To be updated as the information becomes available…

Capstone Research

56:606:689:01, 90, J1
Stuart Charme

Independent study of special interest to the student, under supervision of an advisor chosen by the student in consultation with the program director.

Research in Liberal Studies

56:606:690:90
Stuart Charme

Matriculation Continued

56:606:800:01
Stuart Charme

Continuous registration may be accomplished by enrolling for at least three credits in standard course offerings, including research courses, or by enrolling in this course for 0 credits. Students actively engaged in study toward their degree who are using university facilities and faculty time are expected to enroll for the appropriate credits.