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Cities of the World explores the histories of a selected group of global cities during notable moments in their social, economic, and political lives. It spans roughly 40 centuries from ancient Mesopotamia to post-world war South America to investigate how cities have been made by, and have made, humans. This course will focus on one or two cities based on a theme each week and discuss the urban built environment and monumental architecture in their historical context. In this course, students will learn about the history of major cities such as Rome, Cairo, Tenochtitlan, Angkor, Paris, Beijing, Isfahan, New York, and Brasília. More importantly, they will comprehend critical social, economic, and political themes from the “Agricultural Revolution” to Capitalism. Finally, they practice how to “read” urban spaces by developing their spatial analytical skills in historical contexts.

Location

Morey Room 525

Controversies about the sites, meanings, and relevance of memorial structures in the public sphere have once again summoned theage‐old issue of the monument. This course is interested in monumentality as both a cultural polemic and a methodological problem.Aside from looking at architectonicpresences, what does monumentality – understood as a historicalcondition,as a value system,as an aspiration, as a feltpresence, a modeofartmaking – mean for the currentpractice of art and architecturalhistory? We will extend beyond the traditional scope of the monument understoodas a buildingorthing,toexaminediverseformsandmodalities,including: urbaninfrastructure, grassrootsmemorials, the filmic image, naturaltopography,the portableobject, the remains of war, dispossession, and persecution, asexpressionsof, and reactions to, monumentality.

Location

Hylan Building Room 203

The short-lived Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) produced some of the best works ofChinese painting. Exquisite details were left in the images, many of which have been overlooked in the agendas and methods ofcurrent scholarship. We will study scholarly writings about Yuan paintings (topics include the lives and work of the “f�dzܰ� masters,” the political tensions between Mongol rulers and the literati painters, and the aesthetics of brushwork, to name a few) and the Complete Collection of Yuan Paintings our library recently acquired, which will allow for a patient examinationof these works, so that we might better reflect on their conceptions and renditions. For the final assignment, students will be required to select and write about a recurring detail or technique in the works of a specific painter, embedding it within existing scholarly frameworks, or questioning them with new perspectives.

Location

Morey Room 524

Thiscourseexamines the foundational texts of photography theories, those that give photography the potential significance to be a “t���ǰ���پ��������Dz���𳦳�” (Michael Fried, 2008) for  art and art history. We will read photography from the perspective of the history and theory   of modernism (Baudelaire, Benjamin), photography’s autonomy and ontology in formalist criticism (���Ի��é Bazin, John Szarkowski, BeaumontNewhall, Peter Galassi), photography and the question of medium (Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, RosalindKrauss), with reference to competing theoretical models that include but are not restricted to Marxism, semiotics and psychoanalysis, as well as postmodernist critiquesof photography’s identity and essence (John Tagg,Allan Sekula, VictorBurgin).

Location

Morey Room 524

This course provides a detailed examination of the French filmmakers of the New Wave, from

1959 to 1967. We will examine the work of Jean-Pierre Melville, Claude Chabrol, Francois

Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Agnes Varda, and Jacques Rivette. We will also explore

the films' historical context and influence through some attention to their predecessors and

successors. Knowledge of French helpful, but not necessary.

Location

Morey Room 504

Trans studies is an interdisciplinary field that addresses questions of gender, sexuality, and embodiment through the lens of transgender experiences. How does this field change both the ways we look at objects and their forms, and how we consider subjectivity —the ways in which we are overdetermined by not only our individual and interpersonal experiences, but the many frameworks (race, class, etc.) that tell us who we are? In other words, how do we understand a field that is about “who” we are but also about change and transition to fundamentally alter the concept of subjectivity? Further: how can we understand the process of transition as a question inside not only subjectivity, but also form? What terms—from “becoming” to “the body,” from “capacity” to “visibility”—lend trans aesthetics a specific usefulness to thinking about form, and make it an urgent set of methods and methodological challenges for the present? Objects from film and television to contemporary art and media will be the main focus, along with texts by Susan Stryker, Eliza Steinbock, Marquis Bey, Kay Gabriel, Paul Preciado and others; a background or some prior readings in queer theory or queer studies is recommended.

Location

Morey Room 524

While the land art movement in the 1960s/1970s changed many understandings of conceptualism (and landscape) in Europe and America, little attention has been paid to its cultural precedents. This seminar surveys the famous enterprises and writings of artists like Robert Smithson, but interprets them through current (and past) "environmental" discourses. Weekly meetings, discussion, and a final paper.

Location

Morey Room 524

No description

Location

Lattimore Room 441

This course explores the legal, political, and philosophical dimensions of the concept of indigenous people; how it differs from overlapping concepts such as peasantry, race, ethnicity, language, culture, and religion; how its definition varies according to the history of colonialism in different parts of the world; and why this movement gained momentum after the end of the Cold War.

Location

Bausch & Lomb Room 269

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?

Location

Morey Room 205

This course examines developments and innovations in Russian cinema from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the present day as the Russian film industry struggled to move from a command to a market economy and adapt to new challenges. We will consider these films as works of cinematic art, as cultural/historical artifacts, tools of propaganda and nation building, aesthetic manifestations of political dissent, and (most importantly) how these ways of "thinking about film" relate to one another and reflect the cultural and ideological complexities of post-Soviet modernity. Spring 2024 subtheme: Depicting War. In English.

Location

Hylan Building Room 305

Location

Lattimore Room 401

Moving images recorded on analog film defined the 20th century in an unprecedented way. This course considers the tangible object that is the source of the image onscreen, and the social, cultural, and historical value of a reel of film as an organic element with a finite life cycle. We focus on the analog photographic element and its origins (both theatrical and small gauge), the basics of photochemical film technology, and the state of film conservation and preservation worldwide. Guest lectures by staff of the Moving Image Department of George Eastman Museum provide a first-hand look at film preservation in action, allowing us to consider analog film as an ephemeral form of material culture: a multipurpose, visual record that is art, entertainment, evidentiary document, and historical artifact. Weekly film assignments. Class meets on River Campus and at George Eastman Museum (900 East Ave, no admission fee but students provide their own transportation). No audits, no pre-requisites. Enrollment limited by hands-on nature of course.

Location

Wegmans Room 1009

How does Black Paris, as the lived experience of today marginalized immigrants, as a site of the production of a certain understanding of blackness, contribute to our understanding of the global black condition? This course is a study of Black Paris, as imagined by generations of Black cultural producers. Paris is a space of freedom and artistic glory that African American writers, soldiers and artists were denied back home. For students from French colonies, Paris was the birthplace of Negritude, the cultural renaissance informed by the Harlem Renaissance. Black Paris, for those caught in poor suburbs, calls to mind images of riots, dilapidated schools, but also rap music and hip-hop, elements of transnational black imagination that sometimes speaks the language of the Black Lives Matter movement. In English

Location

Lechase Room 161

“Miracles are a retelling in small letters,” said C.S. Lewis, “of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.” In recent years, Korean film and television has taken the world by storm in what is no small miracle of marketing, technology, and story-telling, but what does contemporary Korean film and television render visible that would otherwise be difficult to see? Onscreen interactions with the supernatural, divine, or horrific provide a unique medium for myth-making, identity formation, and world-building. In this course students will explore the ways in which religion in Korean film and television confront mortality and collective anxieties, and how the interaction between the religious and nonreligious serve as sites for the construction and interrogation of nation, race, gender, identity, modernity, cosmology, and moral discourse.

Location

Frederick Douglass Room 420

In this class, we will explore the role of scale in moving image media, especially in film and television, by turning to the history of the close-up to grapple with its aesthetic and critical genealogy across directors, theorists, genres, periods, and regions. The scale of the close-up is a singular site for exploring much larger questions about what kinds of attention, sensation, and orientation the relative size of an image creates for a spectator; how film and television organize experiences of distance and proximity through scalar perception; how expressivity, subjectivity, and interiority are mediated by scale; what horizons of historical reception—e.g., large screens in the public space of movie theaters, television sets in the living rooms of private homes, mobile phones that we carry between public and private horizons—do to the scale of moving image media; where detail fits into film and television as a form over and against other mediums; and how histories of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation are intertwined with close-ups and the scale of moving image media.

Location

Morey Room 403

An intensive study of the films of Akira Kurosawa, Japans most durable and visible auteur. Thanks to Kurosawas prolific output during his fifty-year career, from his debut in the 1940s to his recent work in the 1990s, an analysis of his films also offers the opportunity to examine some of the major cultural, political, and social issues and events that have left an imprint on the theory and production of film in Japan. We will also consider the work of many individuals (for example, the screenwriter Shinobu Hashimoto) who made important contributions to creating the Kurosawa opus, and whose careers are closely associated with Kurosawa.

Location

Morey Room 205

How do we listen? Through the music of saxophonist John Coltrane, this class will explore different ways of focusing our ears and how we might develop strategies for making sense of our observations. Coltrane is an ideal figure for this activity. His improvisations could be soulful, contemplative, aggressive, experimental, and free. As a composer, he successfully explored the tension between innovation and tradition. He was also a cultural icon. By the mid-1960s, an uncertain time in postwar America, he also became a symbol for civil rights as many listeners interpreted his music as a form of political resistance, a call for social change, and an expression of radical spirituality. What musical features allow such associations to emerge? How do such interpretations of sound intersect with larger cultural, historical, and social issues? As we explore these questions (and others) we will approach listening as a social practice and skill to be cultivated. Previous knowledge of Coltrane (or jazz) is not necessary, but attentive ears are always required.

Location

New Sibley Library Room 404

The course explores the chansonnier as cultural artifact from the time of the troubadours to the sixteenth century, examining both “classic” chansonniers (those containing French songs exclusively) and “mixed” chansonniers that emphasize songs in French but also include short works on sacred texts as well as secular compositions in other languages. Both manuscript and printed chansonniers will be considered. The object will be to place individual chansonniers within the social and musical contexts of their time, with special emphasis on gender in relation to text and ownership.

Location

New Sibley Library Room 404

This course introduces students to a wide range of philosophical thought about music, with materials drawn from the history of philosophy as well as related discourses such as the sciences and contemporary cultural critique. Starting with ancient Greek commentaries on aesthetics, the class will move through relevant readings dating from the Renaissance and the Enlightenment before delving more deeply into German Idealism and various strands of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought. Course objectives will include: increasing students’ awareness of how music’s philosophical and existential import has changed over time; expanding the range of critical tools students can bring to the study of music; finding creative ways to pair “extramusical” thought about music with interpretation of actual musical examples; and querying the current and future role of music as a spur to humanistic (and post-humanistic) inquiry. A final research paper will be required. DMAs and students from all PhD programs are welcome with instructor permission.

Location

New Sibley Library Room 404