FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: DOWNTOWN NEW YORK: New York City is a hub of cultural capital. The music, fashion, and art that becomes popular in New York City carries a weight that is matched by no other city in the world. How did NYC come to be a cultural authority? We will answer this question by focusing on the period of the 1970s, a famously grim period in the city’s history. The subways were dysfunctional, unsafe, and covered in graffiti, unemployment and crime were at an all-time high, police corruption was rampant, and some of the city’s most vulnerable populations had taken up residence in filthy abandoned buildings. Amid these ashes of urban decay, two remarkable genres of music arose, all of which would soon spread across the globe: punk rock (largely from middle-class white kids in the Lower East Side), and hip-hop (from African-Americans at block parties in the South Bronx). We will examine the interactions between these two genres, asking questions about how musical practices interact and consolidate into genres that are associated with cultural identities.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: HOW THE TOILET CHANGED THE WORLD: In this project-based seminar, we focus on the development of the toilet and its impact on sanitation and public health from the earliest biblical accounts to the present day and beyond. Class discussions will draw on news articles, blogs, and selections from scientific papers, and labs will contribute to the instructor's microbiological research investigating the impact of human activity on New York water bodies and ecosystems. We will approach access to toilets as a social justice issue both as a public health threat as well as a threat to public safety, particularly that of women. Students will learn about how toilet design and use differs across our globe according to cultural, economic, and political differences. Lastly, students will learn about current developments in improving sanitation and toilet access and how intrepid and creative individuals are developing ways to make money from poop. Assignments will include weekly reflective blogs, laboratory activities, and a collaborative project to design and market concept toilets that are aesthetically pleasing, affordable for low-income communities, and minimize their impact on planetary health. At the end of the course we will assess how this course has affected your perception of how toilets have impacted humans from the perspectives of public health, social justice, aesthetics and design.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: INTRO TO LITERATURE AND ECOLOGY: Literature offers us the chance to imagine beyond ourselves, and to develop empathy. This introduces students to literature which explores human interaction with the environment, meaning the natural world which supports human life. The course centers on close reading of fiction and poetry, framed by examples of other kinds of writing (such as essays). All these texts encourage us to think about both the environment and social justice in this country and the world and we benefit from carefully reading them.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: POETRY AND FILM: THE POETRY OF HART CRANE AND THE CINEMA OF KEN BURNS: This class will involve a careful reading of Hart Crane’s The Bridge and a shot-by-shot analysis of Ken Burns’ The Brooklyn Bridge. We will explore the relationship between poetry and cinema and attempt to understand the ways in which both mediums refract each other. We will also explore the poetry of everyday life.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: WOMEN OF COLOR FEMINISM: We will begin this course with Audre Lorde's two foundational essays "The Uses of Anger" and "The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," to shape how we understand activist and intellectual "technologies." Framing technology as the practical application of knowledge, we will consider how Women of Color Feminist thought and activism has invented and mobilized a wide range of technologies to produce a huge body of work toward social change. From This Bridge Called My Back to #This Tweet Called My Back, we will trace these technologies primarily in the United States, but looking beyond the United States as well, to consider this vast repertoire of technological innovation and power. Working across media, we will study the work of folks including Lorde, June Jordan, Chela Sandoval, Marci Blackman, Sara Ahmed, Lisa Nakamura, Janet Mock, Sylvia Wynter, Katherine McKittrick, Monica Roberts, BlackGirlDangerous (Mia McKenzie), The Feminist Wire, the Crunk Collective, INCITE!, bell hooks, Gloria Anzuldúa, Cherrí Moraga, Suey Park, #IdleNoMore, Dina Georgis, Shola Lynch and others. The intellectual project of the course will convene around analyses driven by race, class, gender, sex, citizenship and de/colonization. Students will have the opportunity to read closely, to think together, and to produce creative-critical projects based on course materials.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE ECONOMICS OF DESIRE, CONSUMPTION, AND HAPPINESS: This seminar will explore the paradox that people buy things that don’t make them happy. We examine the benefits to employers and the market system from household dissatisfaction. The students will critically examine literature on economic psychology, Marxist interpretations of commodity fetishism, new frontiers on brain science, and learn some basics of everyday personal finance about budget managing, planning for the future​ including the real cost and rate of return ​of student debt​. ​We will take field trips to the ​slave museum (African American Burial Grounds -- National Park in Manhattan), the Tenement Museum, and the MOMA, and a consumer store of the class's choice.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: WHAT IS POLITCAL THEORY? This course would be an introductory exploration to the history of political and social thought: the ideas that have helped shape our political world. We will, through several significant texts that have influenced the way we think of our collective political existence, engage with some of the most enduring questions in politics. What is freedom? What are the nature and sources of political authority and obligations? What makes democracy a desirable, or perhaps dangerous, way of organizing our collective life? What is the state and why do (or if) we need it? These are some of the questions we would collectively explore in this course. The goal of the course would be to both a get an understanding of the history of thinking politically, as well as to gain a richer, more critically reflective relationship to our own political present. We would be reading Plato, Hobbes, Rousseau, Marx, and Nietzsche, along with some more contemporary authors.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: ANTI-SOCIAL MEDIA: ATTENTION, DISTRACTION, ADDICTION: This course will explore the special, dynamic, and intimate relationship between attention and distraction, with a special focus on the use and abuse of social media. Topics will include, but not be limited to, the cultural history of isolating and engineering attention, the political advantages of creating distraction, and the technological innovations and arrangements which currently capture and/or deflect the precious resource of the (endangered?) human attention span. We will also be creating and cultivating our own exercises in sustained attention.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: SOLITUDE AND COMMUNITY: In this course, we will work from the premise that solitude and community are not in conflict, but are rather mutually reinforcing—and both essential. What is college if not movement between community and solitude and back again? Can’t the solitude of scholarship be seen as being in communion with oneself? We will examine stories, poems, and essays that address being alone and being together, investigating how they speak to our need for connection, and the strange and beautiful truth that our minds are only ever our own.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: POETS AND ARTISTS OF THE NEW YORK SCHOOL: The generation of writers and artists to emerge in the mid-twentieth century in New York City is usually referred to as the New York School. The New York school is most often associated with well known and celebrated figures such as poets Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, Alice Notley and Anne Waldman, among others. But what do these writers have in common beyond sharing the geography of New York City in their formative years? This course will examine the intersections between poetry and art from this period and consider their ongoing influence on contemporary writing in New York. In addition to reading the writings of several New York School poets and listening and viewing visual and acoustic works by some of the artists and musicians with whom they collaborated, students will explore first-hand how some of New York's downtown neighborhoods shaped the work in question. Assignments for this course include creative writing options.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE ESSAYS OF ZADIE SMITH: Perhaps better known for her novels, Zadie Smith has in recent years come to be known as a master essayist and cultural critic, whose works offer a unique look into the worlds of literature and the arts, technology and the environment, race and identity, and so much more, over the past generation. This advising seminar considers Smith as a voice for our moment, and asks students to take seriously the world they share with Zadie Smith: from Facebook to Get Out, climate change to the experience of joy, Q-Tip to Karl Ove Knausgaard.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: VISUAL CULTURE: ETHICS & DEBATES: This course examines vital aspects of today’s visual culture. We explore what it means to “read” an image; think about how are images used politically; and ask whether what is “un-seen” is as important as what is seen. Students tackle philosophical, ethical, and political questions, and are encouraged to pursue topics of individual interest for assigned papers and projects. Our explorations involve a variety of visual genres, including a graphic novel, film, magazine ads or commercials, and photography. In examining key debates of the politics and ethics of visual images, this course places special, extended emphasis on images in the context of war as well as humanitarian and social crises. Throughout, we consider our own roles—as consumers and creators of images—in contemporary visual culture, contemplating our relation to imagery through, for instance, aesthetic and humanitarian lenses. Students write reaction papers, a longer essay, and have the option of a visual project. City-based excursions and at least one guest speaker enhance the learning experience.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: WHAT ARE POETS FOR?: What are poets for in a destitute time? The philosopher Martin Heidegger asked, meditating on the place of poetry in the modern world. Poets and philosophers have often wondered about each other and sought inspiration in each other’s work. Both philosophy and poetry are ways of thinking deeply about the world. What happens when they overlap; when the border between genres is blurred or willfully ignored? This course traces this genre-crossing in the work of a number of contemporary poets, and some deeply poetic philosophers. We read philosophers who write with the grace and depth of poets, and poets who enlarge the scope of their investigations with the rigor and analytical clarity of philosophers. Poets are likely to include: Gertrude Stein, Paul Celan, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Fred Moten; philosophers: Nietzsche, Weil, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Deleuze, DuBois, Saint Augustine, Heraclitus.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE BODY IN PERFORMANCE ART: The seminar focuses on the human body in performance art. What is performance art? Is everyone a performance artist? What makes it different from experimental theatre, or visual art? We will look at artists whose work concentrates on the body: Cassils, Yana Evans, niv acosta, Yoko Ono, among others. Students will go to see performances, read theory and make short performances of their own. The final project is a creative response to a performance artist of their choice.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: VISUAL CULTURE: ART AND DESIGN: This seminar introduces students to an academic understanding of the close connection between art and design from antiquity to the present, paying special attention to the politics of design across the dynamics of art (classically defined by “autonomy” and “disinterestedness”) and design (defined by function, form and technology). The course is aimed at training students to develop analytical and critical skills when interpreting the different media and materials that both art and design depend on, as in the practice of sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and film, as well as their applications in architecture, furniture and fashion. Besides art history and the history of design, the course will draw on the disciplinary resources of visual anthropology and ethnographic studies in order to broaden the horizon of the subject to also include non-Western visual cultures of art and design.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: GLOBAL HISTORY OF HEALTH AND MIGRATION: Migration and health are key elements of our past and our present. This seminar explores the key contextual connections between health and migration. There are one billion migrants in the world today but this situation is the latest development of a global history where migration is a factor intrinsically related and affected by health. From the perspective of the history of science, we will examine Global South cases of health vis-à-vis national and transnational migration as well as other cases of global circulation and displacement of people. Special consideration will be given to gender and ethnic issues. Contexts to be explored include religious pilgrimages in Africa and Asia, military crisis and refugee displacements in Europe and Latin America and internal and external migration in the Americas.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: LATIN AMERICAN MODERNISM: FROM THE 1920S TO THE 1960S: This course examines the emergence and development of Latin American modernisms in their so-called first and second waves. The first one, which unfolded from the 1920s to the 1940s in Brazil, Mexico and Cuba, witnessed the artists’ combination of imported European avant-garde tendencies—such as post-impressionism and Cubism—with local motifs to produce an art that could reflect a national identity. The second wave pertains to the post World War II raise of abstract tendencies in South America, specifically, concrete abstraction in Argentina and Brazil, and op and kinetic art in Venezuela. Artistic modernisms in the region will be studied in connection with the political and cultural context in Latin American countries. This class will enable students to develop their skills in close reading, discussion, research, and writing by engaging with a range of critical and artistic works. As part of this course, we will visit museum's exhibitions and private art galleries that specialize in Latin American art.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE LEGACY OF THE WITCH: The witch is having a moment. Film and television are filled with tales of witches and otherworldly women, visual art and literature are plumbing the depths of pagan lore, and runways are replete with occult symbolism. In this cultural climate, the witch is increasingly viewed as a symbol of female power, but she is equally a symbol of female persecution. Many may now embrace the witch identity for political or spiritual reasons, but thousands of women have suffered ostracism, abuse, torture, and death because of their perceived association with witchcraft. This course will analyze the archetype of the witch through a feminist lens and explore the ways femininity has been demonized since the early modern era. Using a variety of historical and contemporary texts, films, and artworks, students will delve into the legacy of the witch as an enduring cultural icon.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE SPIRIT OF THINGS: AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION: This is an introduction to the anthropology of religion. But instead of enumerating major or minor religions and examining their beliefs, we will approach the topic at a slight angle: through the cross cultural study of practices, ideas and events that put into play the relation between spirits and things. We will mainly examine sites where the crucial western secular boundary separating thing and spirit gets troubled – where a person might become a thing, or a thing might appear animate, where we find ghosts in machines as much as in dreams or in tsunamis, where we see spirits seeping into politics, science and medicine, where we encounter shamans encountering a jaguar spirit, activists invoking a higher power to fight injustice, healers healing through spirit possession, inventors reproducing the sounds of the afterlife, technoscientific projects claiming that an avatar is a spiritual person, cryonicists freezing human bodies in order to revive the person in the future...

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: EXPERIENCING TIME: This course is about how time is defined, experienced, and creatively explored. We will examine how time is organized in movement and rhythm, expressions of desire and hope, and systems of efficiency and productivity. We will also learn about the ways in which technologies and aesthetics of time are used for political and economic ends. The following are among the questions that will guide our work: How does space and environment influence our sense of time? How do we creatively represent and manipulate time? As our understanding of time deepens, does our understand of ourselves and others shift? How do manufacturing and media systems organize time?

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE SIMULATION GAMES: DEATH, DISEASE, DENIAL, AND DRUGS: In this project-based seminar, we will analyze current scientific and popular literature and generate data using physical and computer simulations to address a variety of contemporary challenges spanning health, environmental conservation, and population dynamics. Topics include restoration of declining animal populations, genetic engineering of mosquitoes to combat infectious agents such as those that cause Malaria and Zika, the manipulation of news feeds to create “alternative facts” that spread via social media, the determination of a therapeutic dose of medicine, and the possibility of a happy ending for the human race following a zombie apocalypse. A major focus of this course will be coding mathematical simulations using free specialized software. We will design algorithms to visualize changes in populations in space and time. Current issues will be approached within a mathematical and biological framework with an aim to identify ways to make a positive impact on our society and the environment.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: ANCIENT AND MODERN GLOBAL SLAVERIES: This course examines global slaveries in their varying forms: debt labor, forced labor, domestic servitude, and sexual slavery. Diverse systems of bondage have existed for thousands of years, appearing in Ancient Greece, medieval Eastern Europe, and after the transatlantic slave trade began during the modern era, the Americas. Slavery even persists in present-day nations like the African country of Mauritania, where the institution was outlawed in 1981, and India, where there are an estimated 14.3 million slaves. Even in the United States, human traffickers buy and sell men and women to perform manual labor and sexual services. This course will trace the evolution of slavery across space and time, with an emphasis on regions of the world where slavery is still prevalent today. Students will grapple with important ethical questions through philosophical and economic texts to create definitions for terms like slavery, bondage, liberty, and freedom. Readings include philosophical treaties, historical books, autobiographical narratives, contemporary articles written by investigative journalists, and the oral testimonies of former slaves. The course will also evaluate audio and visual materials including songs, photographs and documentary films.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: CREATE/DESTROY A BOOK: This is a course about writers who use another text as a point of departure – a photo album, a recipe, a mall catalogue, the Bible. Students will be invited to analyze the creative devices the authors use. They will be expected to think about their own creative work in relationship to other texts and other objects.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: PLATO'S REPUBLIC: This course will introduce the student to philosophical questions, and questioning, through a close reading and discussion of Plato’s Republic. A wide range of issues will be on the table, such as the nature of knowledge and art, the relation between society and the person, and the meaning of war; but everything will turn on one basic question: “What is justice?"

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: IMPROVISING THE POSSIBLE: Improvisation is all around us. It occurs in a wide range of human activity, from creative practice in the arts to everyday conversations to spontaneous negotiations with one’s environment. Nevertheless, perhaps because of its liveness and unpredictability, improvisation is often difficult to define and analyze. In this course, students draw from recent scholarship on improvisation within the fields of philosophy, anthropology, musicology, as well as dance and performance studies, in order to grapple with the nature of improvisation, and to consider its potential as a meaningful political practice. At various points, the course also turns to jazz and jazz studies, where one finds a vast and rigorous analysis of improvisation, and often an exacting look at race, gender, and the politics of performance. Where does improvisation come from, and where might its power exist? In addition to critical texts, students consider a range of live and recorded performances throughout the semester.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: SPIRITUAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY: One of the ways we make sense of the trajectory of our lives and of our ultimate questions is by uncovering a narrative of meaning. In this course, we will encounter contrasting contemporary spiritual autobiographies and spiritual memoirs: books and essays (and also documentary film) by writers/artists from diverse backgrounds (African-American, Euro-American, Latina/o, S.E. Asian; Buddhist, Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Mestiza/indigena, Muslim; lesbian, gay, heterosexual, and transgender) who offer rich and moving examples of the attempt to understand the spiritual impulses that have significantly informed their lives. The constellation of themes we will explore though these texts include: ancestors, lineage, tradition, cell memory; secrets/disclosure and passing; the body, sexuality, desire; concepts of God and the sacred; exile, homecoming, turning and returning; suffering, loss, and mortality; forgiveness and freedom; and the role of autobiographical writing as craft and as a process of liberation, broadly construed.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: EXAMINING URBAN PLACE: “Place”—particularly public space—is where people socialize, exercise, play, relax, encounter other cultures, build social capital, buy and sell goods, interact with friends and meet new people, connect with community, express political views, appreciate architecture, and simply enjoy the weather. Place helps unite us. In this seminar, students will dissect how urban planning and design shapes the qualities of place, affects social dynamics in the city, influences our happiness and health, and help define us. As a crucial component of the course, we will study important historical moments in New York’s urban planning and development, from Robert Moses’s megaprojects to the development of the High Line, to the seemingly ever-present phenomenon of gentrification. Throughout the course, students will use New York City as a living laboratory to produce independent and collaborative research and multimedia projects.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: IN THEIR FOOTSTEPS: NEW YORK'S LITERARY LANDSCAPE: This course aims to tap into the storied literary landscape of New York City in order to delve into our own creative writing and close reading practices. As a hybrid exploration/creation lab, we will conduct a multi-tiered engagement with different New York-based authors (both dead and alive) to soak in their habitat. We will partake in short communal readings of texts; visit historical points of reference and relevance; craft individual and group exercises based upon the text and excursions; and workshop them with the goal of leaving with a portfolio of your own New York-centric work. In class and out of class readings will include E.B. White, Ric Burns, Walt Whitman, Anne Waldman, Allen Ginsburg, Patti Smith, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Andy Warhol, James Baldwin, Edith Wharton, Joseph Mitchell, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and many more.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: LUNACY, CRIME & ADDICTION: This course explores the curious and often confounding ways in which human civilizations have wrestled with the concepts of mental illness, criminal behavior and addiction across time. We examine how superstitious beliefs, religious convictions, and the desire to maintain existing political and economic power imbalances have often conspired to blur the boundaries between these concepts.