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: TRANS/ FORMS:This First Year Seminar explores the ways that trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary artists and writers express form and embodiment in their work, and considers the ways in which this expression invites us to transform and radicalize our own artistic practices. While we are now familiar with the word “trans” as synonymous with transgender identity, the prefix itself offers incredible richness of formal meanings connected to transformation, change, liminality, and ongoing states of being that move beyond historically traditional boundaries. As we engage with the expression of artists who communicate in this state of “beyond,” we will work on both collaborative and individual projects in a joint discussion and workshop format, incorporating and expanding upon our source texts in new, transformative production. Poets, musicians, performance and visual artists we explore may include but are not limited to: Andrea Abi-Karam, Samuel Ace, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Tona Brown, Micha Cárdenas, Ching-In Chen, Vaginal Davis, Meg Day, Jai Dulani, Anaïs Duplan, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Rickey Laurentiis, Billy Tipton, and Wu Tsang.

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: THE COLONIAL PRESENT. The present—our messy, out of joint pandemic present—is open to interpretation. The meanings of keywords that shape our world such as capitalism, development, environment, nation, property, race, or revolution is up for grabs. To make sense of these words in the 21st century, we must look at the context in which they assumed their meaning: colonialism. This course examines colonialism not simply as a historical period as much as the key, the methodology, to rethink the present. This course proposes an interdisciplinary approach to understand colonialism through the lens of political economy, history, anthropology and international relations, as well as films and novels on the Global South. Through our readings and class discussions we will focus on two overarching questions. First, when you think about the history of colonialism, are you on the shores (the “native”) or are you on the ship? And if on the ship are you above deck (the white conquistador/settler) or below (the slave/the migrant)? Second, what is “silenced” and made “unthinkable” in the weaving of these keywords of the present? Through authors such as Chinua Achebe, Mariano Azuela, John M Coetzee, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Antje Kroeg, and Manuel Scorza, we will examine how colonial legacies reflect in today’s political forms. Our present political vocabulary is unthinkable without colonialism.

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. Writers most often associated with this movement are poets such as Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Bernadette Mayer, Amiri Baraka, Alice Notley and Eileen Myles, to name a few. 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 a creative writing option.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: RECONSTRUCTING HOME. What happens to our understanding of home when we migrate from places that shape us? When we leave—willingly or out of necessity—what do we carry into the unknown? In building a new life elsewhere, how do we preserve and repurpose essential elements of our discarded past? In this course, students will engage with works of literature and art that document the immigrant experience and explore the idea of home. Relying on texts from such writers as Jhumpa Lahiri, Ocean Vuong, Edwidge Danticat, Aleksandar Hemon, Maaza Mengiste, and Dina Nayeri, students will use a variety of mediums to record a series of observations and collaborate on a final creative project.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: WOMEN OF COLOR FEMINISMS. 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: BORN FREE?: AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE IN THE NEW MILLENIUM. Is it possible to isolate the central concerns of African American literature two decades into the 21st century? How are contemporary practitioners distinct from their forebears in focus and orientation? Is this literary century destined to remain consumed by the “problem” of the color line as W.E.B. Dubois predicted of the 20th, or will the specter of climate catastrophe, pandemics, global xenophobia, and economic disaster demand equal attention? In an attempt to answer these questions and more, this First-Year seminar will engage the works of Jesmyn Ward, Marlon James, Kiese Laymon, Rickey Laurentis, Ayana Mathis, Morgan Parker, among others. At all times our analyses will remain attuned to the complex inflections of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE BODY IN PERFORMANCE ART. This 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: LIFE AND LICHENS. We see lichens frequently in our day-to-day lives – unassuming fungi encrusting the bark on trees or the grout on city walls. Unseen to us however, are many remarkable biological stories; staggering species diversity, a multitude of ecological roles and services, and a deep, complicated symbiosis that has transformed our planet throughout history. In this class, we will reflect on the lichen and use it as a lens to view other topics and fields of study – What is a partnership really, in biology? How do our actions impact our environment? What value do lichens hold for our lives, as sources of medication, ecological actors and intrinsic sources of beauty? We will read and discuss a variety of literature including scientific research, observe lichens around the city, and complete relevant projects over the course of the class.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE TRUST OF LOCAL NEWS AND NARRATIVES. Research shows that we can embed ourselves in a story, as narratives give us opportunities to live in other people’s lives and to experience aspects of what they are experiencing. In journalism, such stories offer a powerful opportunity to learn about the world we all live in, as well as to inspire and enact reform. However, within a renewed reckoning in U.S. news media, distrust in news has never been higher. Research, however, shows that local news media continue to outperform their national counterparts, namely that local news media are better than national news at covering issues Americans can use in every aspect of their daily life -- and in reporting without bias. The health of local news affects the health of our civic life. In our class, we will discuss the power of news narratives - past and present; counternarratives; and how stories about people and their communities are best told.

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: CRITICAL PHENOMENOLOGY: OF GENDER, RACE, AND ABILITY. In this course, students will be introduced to a philosophical tradition and method called “phenomenology” as a powerful resource for analyzing and writing about social and political phenomena. Since its inception in the early 20th century, the phenomenological tradition has been defined by an insistence on the indispensability of concrete, lived experience to our knowledge of the world. In more recent years, this tradition has been mobilized to specifically account for experiences of oppression instituted in a world shaped by the legacies of racism, colonialism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism. Those authors who have drawn upon phenomenological methods to develop their critiques of these systemic injustices have come to be described as engaged in a practice known as “critical phenomenology.” Through a close-reading of these authors, the course aims to provide students with a model for developing their own practice of critical writing. Likely cases to be analyzed include: the phenomenology of solitary confinement and its relationship to prison abolition; the phenomenology of sex and gender and its relationship to violence against sex and gender minorities; the phenomenology of whiteness and diversity work in institutions of higher education; the phenomenology of disability and the built world. Likely authors to be read, include: Sara Ahmed, Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Christina Crosby, Frantz Fanon, Lisa Gunther, Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Johanna Oksala, Gayle Salamon, Claudia Rankine, Elaine Scarry, and Joan Scott.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: VISUAL POLITICS. This seminar extends classic concepts in the social sciences by considering them visually. The course is premised on the idea that politics is best considered in an expansive way that engages non-verbal aspects of communication. For example, we might ask what does authority look like? Are political identifications and disagreements voiced aesthetically? And what of resistance and change – do they also have a visual aspect? Weekly materials will include readings, lookings, and listenings from across the social sciences, humanities, and art and design. Graded assignments will include close readings of texts and images as well as the creation of visual essays.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: RELIGION AND ANTHROPOCENE. The dawning awareness that humanity is a planetary force, effecting changes in earth systems disruptive to other life forms and even leaving geological traces, has religious resonances. Are we now the “god species,” or confronted with the non-metaphorical reality of karma, of hubris, of original sin? This course explores emerging discussions of religion amid the ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. Are the insights of the world religions, fruits of the Holocene we’ve set on terminal wobble, obsolete? Must new religious narratives and rituals be crafted to articulate our new reality? We will also look at the way ostensibly secular discussions of the Anthropocene (including the many challenges to the term and its scope) engage in religion- and mythmaking, from Gaia to Chthulu. Finally we’ll ask if discussion of the “age of humans” takes us more deeply into pressing spiritual and ecojustice challenges or distracts from them.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: IMITATION AND VOICE. Find your voice. Be yourself. Be real. These are the injunctions we hear growing up, the aphorisms that will supposedly help us become the writers and thinkers we are “meant” to be. But what does it mean to write in your own voice? Using the myth of Echo and Narcissus as a starting point, this first year seminar will investigate the relationship between imitation and voice. We will read a range of voice-driven essays and short stories, and think about how language, style, tone, and cadence affects the meaning of what their authors have to say. In creative writing exercises, we will put on literary costumes, investigating how imitation might—or might not—help us move closer to our authentic writing and thinking selves. Writers will include Als, Baldwin, Carver, Kincaid, Le, Saunders, Torres, and Woolf, among others.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE: THE PATH TO NET ZERO. Few issues are more urgent than global warming. Our health, welfare, and existence on this planet depend on addressing this urgent matter. The course will examine the past, present, and potential future of the human impact on Earth's climate. We will follow the long story of carbon as it shapes the world, especially since the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the expansion of habitat destruction, resource extraction, and burning of fossil fuels. We will then consider the emergence of a climate consciousness over the past century, and more recent efforts by governments, NGOs, multilateral institutions, and activist networks to address the crisis. Finally, the course will study several possible paths to net zero--that is, a global society with no net contribution of carbon to the atmosphere. Issues of race, social justice, and the role of activists and indigenous organizations will be central to our examination.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE 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: TRANS/FORMS. This seminar explores the ways that trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary artists and writers express form and embodiment in their work, and considers the ways in which this expression invites us to transform and radicalize our own artistic practices. While we are now familiar with the word “trans” as synonymous with transgender identity, the prefix itself offers incredible richness of formal meanings connected to transformation, change, liminality, and ongoing states of being that move beyond historically traditional boundaries. As we engage with the expression of artists who communicate in this state of “beyond,” we will work on both collaborative and individual projects in a joint discussion and workshop format, incorporating and expanding upon our source texts in new, transformative production. Poets, musicians, performance and visual artists we explore may include but are not limited to: Andrea Abi-Karam, Samuel Ace, Cameron Awkward-Rich, Tona Brown, Micha Cárdenas, Ching-In Chen, Vaginal Davis, Meg Day, Jai Dulani, Anaïs Duplan, Joshua Jennifer Espinoza, Rickey Laurentiis, Billy Tipton, and Wu Tsang.

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, Julia Kristeva, James Baldwin, Jewelle Gomez, Claire Cronin, Leila Taylor, Kristen J. Sollée, Robin R. Means Coleman, Barbara Creed, bell hooks, George A. Romero, Gloria E. Anzaldúa, and more.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: VISUAL MUSIC. What do you see when you hear music, and what do you hear when you look at an artwork? This course explores the synaesthetic overlaps between music and the visual arts. These creative “correspondences” (to borrow Baudelaire’s term) have fascinated artists, musicians, scientists, and philosophers since Antiquity, but especially since the 19th century, when new technologies such as photography and sound recording challenged the traditional distinctions between artistic disciplines and encouraged many experimental approaches to the interplay of sight and sound. We will analyze a variety of musical works and visual artworks to gain a deeper understanding of the history of this field and the concepts that inform it. Through readings, exhibits, installations, performances, and creative projects, students will explore the evolving possibilities for this synergy between the visual and musical domains.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: WHAT ARE POETS FOR? "There is an old quarrel between poetry and philosophy,” writes Plato in The Republic. And while Plato banned poets from his ideal republic, the relationship between poets and philosophers is ongoing: sometimes as quarrel, but more often as conversation, inspiration, affinity. This course traces this cross-genre conversation in the work of a number of contemporary poets and the philosophers who inspire them. 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: Paul Celan, Claudia Rankine, Maggie Nelson, Fred Moten; philosophers: Nietzsche, Weil, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard, Baldwin, Heraclitus.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: ETHICS AND EXISTENCE. This course is an introduction to ethics. After familiarizing ourselves with classical approaches to ethics through the works of Aristotle, Epicurus, Epictetus, Kant, Hume and Mill, we will turn to late 19th century and 20th century existentialist approaches to ethics, primarily through the works of Nietzsche, de Beauvoir, Fanon and Foucault.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: ART & ARCHIVE: WRITING POEMS, WRITING THE PAST. In this seminar, students will collaborate with the Poetry Project, one of the longest-running arts presenters in the East Village, to explore the possibilities of writing in community, and to investigate what writing against colonization, racism, and other forms of oppression entails. Class readings and conversation will provide an introduction to literary production in the U.S. at the same time that students develop a sense of local literary lineage via the Poetry Project’s archives, immersing themselves in events and people from the project’s past and present (like Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Eileen Myles, and Diane Di Prima). These explorations, in turn, will offer students a case study of how creative communities are formed and sustained, and of the Poetry Project’s particular role as an agent of community-building, counter-hierarchical education, and artistic experimentation. Students’ archival research will be the foundation of a conversation about how histories are written, how voices and memories are silenced, and how voices and memories can be uplifted (supplemented with readings by authors like Ariella Azoulay, Shawn Wilson, Eve Tuck, and K. Wayne Yang). We’ll ask: As poetry unsettles habits of language, how can the archive unsettle habits of history? To address this question, students will be invited to uncover moments that have otherwise been erased, challenge stories that center white, cis, dominant-culture bodies, and collectively rebuild history. As they choose artifacts to highlight through creative responses of their own, students will also participate in the writing and rewriting of the history of experimental art-making in The New School’s neighboring East Village. Their work will culminate in publication through one of the Poetry Project’s digital platforms.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES. Portrait and landscape: two paradigms, two orientations, two ways of seeing the world’s inhabitants and the worlds they inhabit. We will borrow these genres from the field of visual art to explore how we “frame” human and non-human lives in writing. We will read a range of texts by authors including essayists like Roland Barthes, Michel Serres, and Leslie Jamison, poets like Layli Long Soldier, Claudia Rankine, Mahmoud Darwish, and Yehuda Amichai, and fiction writers like Shobha Rao, Anuk Arudpragasam, and Cesar Aira, using their work to address questions of land and belonging—to whom does land belong, who belongs in a given landscape?—as well as questions of identity and profiling—whose faces matter, with whose faces do we identify and why?

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: AT THE MOVIES: HUMAN RIGHTS, SCIENCE FICTION, HORROR AND RISE OF THE NEW BLAXPLOITATION. The past few years contemporary film and video be it Netflix or HBO Max has seen an explosion of race films dealing with matters of social justice and human rights employing science fiction, fantasy, horror and history. Some say it’s the golden age of television/some say we are inundated with trauma pornography dealing with historical matters. This course through texts and selected viewings of series such as Love Craft Country and The Handmaid's Tale will examine this historical moment with some underlying questions about race, gender, representation and identity, class and whether these films can and do succeed as educational tools or vehicles for social change.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: CHARISMA AND AUTHENTICITY IN GLOBAL POLITICS. This course will focus on how the charisma, charm and authenticity of politicians is communicated in online environments. First, we will review the interdisciplinary literature on authenticity, charisma and new media. Then, we will turn our attention to examples from many parts of the world, doing close readings of politicians' profiles on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. We will also consider how the mediated authenticity of politicians defers from the image of other "influencers".

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE ORIGINS AND THEOLOGY 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: 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.

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: STORYTELLING. In this course, we study and practice the art of storytelling. We start by reading and analyzing iconic short stories, personal essays, plays, and screenplays, in order to identify basic concepts of narrative structure common to all of these forms. We then use these ideas to develop stories of our own. Artists include: Dashiell Hammett, Otessa Moshfegh, James Baldwin, Anton Chekov, Jane Campion.