FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: "BIO, ART & SOCIAL JUSTICE": In this course we will explore how artists and scientists can work together to create new ways of knowing and understanding the world we live in using a social justice and planetary health lens. We will explore how both science and art involve inquiry, creativity, interpretation, and personal expression. Drawing on the work of Latin American muralists, Black artist Wangechi Mutu, environmental artist Alexis Rockman, and Visual AIDS artists, we will reflect on past mistakes to imagine a different future. The course is modular spanning topics such GMOs food/agriculture, urban planning/health diagnostics/biomedical treatments, recreational genomics/social and individual identity, and cell regeneration/immortality/disability justice. Assignments include journal entries, essays, visual narratives, design statements, and a creative or critical independent project that re-examines how we define ourselves, how we interact with one another, and how we can simultaneously promote science and social justice. We will conduct 3-4 experiments at home in the remote environment, including isolating your own DNA, viewing cell regeneration in the context of a case study focused on the establishment of Henrietta Lacks' cells as a biomedical tool, and the use of microbial pigments for non-toxic painting and dying. At the end of the course we will assess how this course and its approach has affected your perception of learning and your ability to interpret and create visual narratives for social change.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: "RACE IN AMERICA": This course will explore specific aspects of race in America through the prism of several controversial matters: race and sex, Jim Crow Laws, hybrid warfare, predatory capitalism, race and gentrification and racial genetics. These topics will be examined as ways of understanding race, race politics and the larger issues around racial dynamics while focusing on the criminal justice apparatus, revenue-generating policing on low-income municipalities across the United States, including ‘stop, frisk, and question’ tactics, ticketing and arrest practices as it is currently happening in the United States. Race is a particular social construction designed for the sole purpose of creating an “other” and racism according to Feuchtwang “is linked to self-identification when self-group-identification is reinforced or defended by a move toward purification or its milder version, territorial ownership of a place, whether that place is a neighborhood, a larger locality or a whole country, and assimilation to that self-identification. In such circumstances, the others identified by signs of membership are said to belong elsewhere, not here, unless they can assimilate to become ‘one of us’ – always a former ‘us’ of a golden age that is idealized out of the actual past. The projected other threatens this self-identification.” While there will be brief historical consideration of how this phenomenon (racism) came to pass and will be part of our dissection; emphasis, however, will be on current events as a way to critically examine why race and racist attitudes are so desperately held not only by Americans but people around the world.

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: UNEXPECTED MEDIA: A DIFFERENT VIEW OF TECHNOLOGY. In this first-year advising course we will both zoom closer into the idea of "technology, as a key term of modern life, while also zooming out to incorporate different examples of technology that don't, at first, appear to be so. As such, we shall question common assumptions about what, and what does not, constitute technology. We shall also pay closer attention to different techniques, technics, and "soft technologies," that help us shape and respond to the world around us. Examples will likely include: clothing, food, gesture, time, confession, voice, love, and even the self. As such, this course will be a general introduction to some influential ideas in the humanities; especially in terms of media theory and cultural studies.

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: "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: "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: "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: "REALITY OF FICTION" Beginning with a most basic question, "what is fiction?," this course will attempt to understand how fiction is defined against reality, and how this distinction, as well as the subtle shades differentiating truth from lies, verisimilitude from simulation, become difficult to maintain. Is there a brute reality outside of narrative? Is there an aesthetic reality or a narrative time and space? Can fiction both fortify and critique what we take to be reality? How do narratives marshal belief in the stories they tell and the images they present? We will begin with a series of foundational texts, including Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, and Denis Diderot's Rameau's Nephew; we will then turn to modern contexts, including Friedrich Nietzsche's "Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense," Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw." We will conclude by testing these frameworks in the contemporary, examining Janet Cardiff's audio-tour The Missing Voice, Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up, as well as numerous media events from the assassination of JFK to Desert Storm.

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:DICKENS AND CRIME" Who goes to prison, and for what sort of crimes? This is a central question in Little Dorrit (1855-1857), Charles Dickens’s masterful novel of financial crime. We read the tale of an imprisoned debtor’s daughter and a massive bank fraud in installments, as it was first published, over the course of the semester. Reading Dickens slowly allows us to savor his prose and to explore the politics of his writing, in the context of his life. We also read journalism from Dickens’s time and our own, while considering parallels in our own lives. George Bernard Shaw once claimed that Little Dorrit was more revolutionary than Marx’s Das Kapital. We find out why.   "

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:WATCHING & MAKING PERFORMANCE: SPECTATORSHIP & MEANING-MAKING" This hybrid studio-seminar course will utilize discourse – physical, verbal and textual – as a means toward critical reflection about performance and spectatorship. Time-based performance practice will be complemented with required reading and writing assignments, viewing recorded performances in class, and required out of class activities. Topics will include questions of representation, narrative, and cultural-situatedness inherent to viewing and making time-based performance; ways meanings and meaningfulness are constructed from the various data we receive as spectators; and varied possibilities for the audience-performance relationship. There will be a creative practice component to the class, but students need not have prior dance, theater or performance training.  "

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR:"THEORIES OF MONEY" What is money? Where did money come from? Did money emerge as an ad hoc solution to the complexity of barter, as a means with which to tokenize debt, as a value-form and commodity that functions as a universal equivalent, or as a “creature of law” created by sovereign states to direct economic activity? What is the difference between fiat currencies and gold standard monetary systems? How does the seeming “naturalness” of money obscure the neo-imperialism of US dollar hegemony? How have monetary policies exacerbated racial and class inequalities? What are the social consequences of monetary policies that inflate asset prices, enable wealthy people to accumulate more wealth, lock ordinary people out of the housing market, and sediment a class structure organized around the property-owning class and the renter class? This seminar will be a wide-ranging introduction to money that is focused primarily on the social aspect of money. We will read a range of monetary theory, from Marxist monetary theory to chartalism and Modern Monetary Theory.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR:"THE SCIENCE OF BEER, WINE AND CHEESE" In this course students will explore the history, science and culture of fermented microbial processes, such as cheese, wine and beer production, fermented sausages and meats, and mushroom cultivation. Through laboratory activities involving starter cultures, students will learn about the factors that control and enhance microbiological growth and activity such as temperature and pH, and how humans can and have exploited and manipulated microbes in food and beverage production and agricultural practices. Students will be introduced to the chemical and biological processes that create different fermented foods, with techniques that blend modern scientific knowledge with indigenous and traditional values and practices across our globe. The course will combine classroom lectures and group recitations along with guided excursions to local sites on campus, including our green roof where we observe plant growth, our cafeteria where we separate and begin to compost our food, and our water treatment plant where fermentation is used to breakdown our waste. In addition, field trips and virtual excursions may include visits to libraries, local farms, and farmer’s markets in Union Square. Assignments will include weekly reflective blogs, laboratory activities, and a collaborative project aimed at melding a comprehensive appreciation of the science, history, and culture of fermented foods and other agricultural products.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: "INTRODUCTION TO THE END OF THE WORLD" Invoking the end of the world has become a common, daily occurrence. A long history of apocalyptic traditions around the world precedes today's fears and imaginaries of worldly collapse and humanless futures. This course will begin by examining a range of older apocalyptic ideas from around the world before turning to contemporary endings - from pandemics to climate change to nuclear armageddon to the collapse of capitalism. Despair not. Throughout we will be considering how imaginaries of the end can also bring forth possibilities for action and change, for imagining and creating alternative worlds.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR:"ANTHROPOCENE HUMANITIES" The Anthropocene names the new reality – and awareness – that humanity has become a planetary agent, the single most important factor in current earth history. The term was coined by natural scientists but has been increasingly taken up by thinkers in the human sciences. This course surveys debates about the meaning and significance of humanity’s new status within the earth system from historical, philosophical, literary and comparative, as well as feminist, postcolonial and postsecular perspectives. We'll employ the tools of the humanities to make sense of the Anthropocene, and use the challenge of the Anthropocene to reimagine the work of a planetary humanities.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR:"THE ARTIST AS ACTIVIST" This course will trace the emergence of the “activist artist” who engages in the issues of their time by delving into distinct movements for social change. We'll study the reformers at the turn of the 20th century; the social documentarians of the Great Depression; the civil rights and anti-war activists of the ‘60s; artists responding to the AIDS pandemic and artists today who are working to expand awareness about the burning issues of racial injustice, climate change, political participation and global human rights. Our focus will be on the ever changing role of the artist, from those who document and satirize in order to raise consciousness, to artists who seek to create lasting social transformation.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR:"PARTICIPATING AMERICAN PUBLICS" In this course, we will explore the reasons that civic participation is important as well as the multiple possible pathways for engaging in civic participation ranging from public speech to voting to social movements. In addition, we will discuss the ways that people may educate themselves and organize with others to advocate for political changes. During the course, we will examine what social structures are, what participation means, what political organizing entails and why all of these concepts are central for understanding democracy in theory and practice.  "

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: "ORIGINS AND SPIRITUALITY OF THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT". This course examines the intersections of religious public witness, radical freedom movements, American exceptionalism, and social activism in the origins and futures of the Black Lives Matter Movement.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR:"UNIVERSALISM, FOR AND AGAINST" We hold these truths to be self evident…” In recent years, universalism as a philosophical and political doctrine has been challenged. The seminar examines the meaning of this concept, “universalism”; it’s philosophical underpinning; the objections to it — for example as inherently conservative, racist, an ideology for those in power, etc. We’ll be reading texts by Kant, Heidegger, Du Bois, Arendt, Rawls, Rorty, Butler, Balibar and Mills, among others. And side-by-side with philosophy will deal with inherent questions of identity politics, Zionism and liberalism."

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: "AMERICAN HORROR STORY". How do we make sense of the things that we fear? How can horror help us understand the past and the present? In this first-year seminar, students will explore the haunted intersections between American history, narrative, and horror. Through a multi-genre offering of texts, reflections, and prompts, students will examine how the genre of horror has been shaped by the historical past and its ongoing impact on the contemporary American imagination. Students will also cultivate work of their own that will investigate, reimagine, and redefine what American horror can teach us about fear, humanity, and resilience in a post-pandemic future. Students will engage with texts by Carmen Maria Machado, Wes Craven, Colin Dickey, Jewelle Gomez, Claire Cronin, Toni Morrison, Rivers Solomon, Robin R. Means Coleman, Barbara Creed, Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Alice Sola Kim, Octavia E. Butler, and more.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: "IMAGINING THE VERNACULAR FUTURE" What is the role of vernacular language in literature and how does it help shape a new language for the future? How can we use vernacular to embrace our idiosyncratic voices, protest the status quo and project the world we want to see? We will explore these questions and read texts that transcend time and place in their imaginings of radical futures. Seminar discussion will center around readings from Rotten English, edited by Dohra Ahmed; Sleeping with the Dictionary, by Harryette Mullen; this planet is doomed, by Sun Ra; Born Palestinian, Born Black, by Suheir Hammad; and more. Students will create original vernacular works as part of this seminar's visual, linguistic and intellectual explorations.

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 emphasis on images in the context of conflict 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. At least one guest speaker will enhance the learning experience.

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: 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?