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:""THINKING FREE SPEECH TODAY: PROBLEMS IN SOCIAL JUSTICE",This course provides students with an introduction to the concept of free speech, as well as an opportunity to analyze and evaluate disagreements surrounding it. On the one hand, we will read a sampling of theoretical texts and extracts—from political and legal philosophy, feminist and queer theory, and critical race theory—to understand the history of debates surrounding the right to speech. On the other hand, we will simultaneously consider a series of case studies by reading, viewing, and listening to historical and present-day journalistic accounts of political disputes surrounding speech. Likely cases to be considered will deal with issues of state censorship, anti-oppression activism, hate speech, political lying, and online disinformation. Throughout the course, we will also consider how appeals to the value of free speech have shaped public discourse surrounding student activism, demands for social justice by young people, and the university as a liberal institution.

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: "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: "WRITING AGAINST INEQUITY": In this first-year seminar, we’ll explore what it means to write against racism, colonization, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, classism, and other inequities in a variety of genres including fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and hybrid works. We’ll also consider the history of how writing is taught, published, and received in the United States, and how the publishing and academic industries have entrenched inequity and—more recently—worked to reverse it. Where does creative production overlap with politics? To what degree are aesthetics political? What structures can support writing more equitably, and create a more equitable world as a result?

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: "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:“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: "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: "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: "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: "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 critical and 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 most likely include Als, Baldwin, Carver, Kincaid, Le, Saunders, Smith and Woolf, among others.

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:"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 Handmaids 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: "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.