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: 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?

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: 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: WATCHING & MAKING PERFORMANCE: SPECTATORSHIP & MEANING: This hybrid studio-seminar course will utilize discourse – physical, verbal and textual – as a means for critical reflection on the acts of time-based performance and spectatorship. Improvisational performance practice in the studio will be complemented with required reading and writing assignments, as well as viewing live and recorded performances. 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-performer relationship. There will be some studio component to the class, but students need not have prior dance, theater or performance training.

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: 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: 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: LATIN AMERICAN MODERN ART: 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 ILLUSION OF COLOR: Many prominent philosophers, scientists, and artists have argued that our experience of color is an illusion, that colors as we see them do not really exist. This course traces the history and philosophical significance of this idea, from its origin in a series of surprising discoveries about light and vision, through to its contemporary manifestations in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and art. Topics to be discussed will include whether we can ever really know what someone else’s experience is like, how language relates to perception and thought, what art can tell us about experience, and whether perception tells us about how the world really is.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: THE IDEA OF REVOLUTION: This course offers a critical introduction to the study of the political concept of revolution. A main purpose is to explore how this concept by unifying different modalities of resistance, revolt, uprising, rebellion, sedition, and insurrection became in modern times the paradigmatic experience of emancipatory politics to such an extent that it defined modernity as the age of revolutions. We will therefore discuss what is at stake in naming some events revolutions and whether and how this naming practice renders some events more visible and enduring than others. In this context, the course will also examine various temporalities and geographies of revolution and engage with a number of influential theoretical and strategic formulations of the revolutionary project by probing at the criteria that were established in order to think about some revolutions in tandem or in comparison with one another. Respectively, we will consider how distinct conceptions of revolution have informed and influenced different approaches to politics, power, and political subjectivity. Another course objective is to investigate the challenges and dilemmas of revolutionary thought and practice, its limitations, contradictions, and failures and therefore to address the question of whether the term has become so fraught today that it should be either discarded altogether or replaced with other signifiers of radical struggle and social change. Finally, we will look at a constellation of political concepts that were associated with the emergence and modulations of revolutionary politics and shaped profoundly the modern political lexicon (citizenship, sovereignty and constituent power, constitutionalism, violence and terror, dictatorship, disobedience, democracy, nationalism, socialism, anti-imperialism and decolonization, etc.).

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: MONEY: Can we imagine life without money? And why would we want to imagine life without money? In this seminar we will examine the ways that coins, cash, currencies, and commodities mediate interactions between human beings. We will read various ethnographies relating to many parts of the world so as to better understand the histories and meanings of money, or how money can be understood as an economic and cultural practice. What forms does money take? What distinguishes barter from exchange, gifts from commodities, official monies from alternative monies? And why do we make such distinctions? To answer these questions, we will study the history and anthropology of money. This seminar aims to give critical consideration to the ways that money has been understood by both local communities and anthropologists.

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: 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: 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: VISUAL MUSIC: What do you see when you hear music? How do we translate impressions from one artform into another sense modality? This course explores theoretical and practical perspectives on 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 nineteenth 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 and compare 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, guided viewing and listenings, and creative projects, students will explore the still-evolving possibilities for this synergy between the visual and musical domains.

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: 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: 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, 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, Morgan Parker, Kiese Laymon, Rickey Laurentis, Tyehimba Jess, Ayana Mathis, among others. At all times our analyses will remain attuned to the complex inflections of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: A WORLD OF MANY WORLDS: In this interdisciplinary first-year seminar, we will explore perspectives on multiple worlds—and the making of worlds—in literature, philosophy, science, anthropology, and media studies. Together we will read science fiction literature and philosophical texts on worlds, and listen to anthropologists discuss the political stakes of what they call “the pluriverse” for a decolonial project. Our explorations will take us on a journey through a variety of media forms, including Hollywood blockbusters like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and ethnographic collections at the American Museum of Natural of History. We will experiment with making worlds of our own, both individually and collectively, and students should expect to do a lot of reading, thinking, playing, documenting, and writing.