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 how the world really is.

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: LITERATURE OF PLACES. Places are spaces imbued with meaning, and thus sites of cultural contest over who defines that meaning, who tells the story of this or that place. We will read poets, novelists, and essayists who put place at the center of their work, whether that place is rural or urban, a small patch of land or a neighborhood, a city square like Times Square or a stretch of water like the Mississippi River. Some works we will read consider natural landscapes, or at least places we think are untouched by humans. Others focus on human-constructed worlds. Some writers urge us to develop a harmonious relationship with place; others understand place as fate; and still others are curious about place as a palimpsest bearing traces of past meanings and stories. Readings may be drawn from such writers as William Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Kate Chopin, Zora Neale Hurston, Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, Annie Dillard, bell hooks, and Colson Whitehead.

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: BIOLOGY, 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 dyeing. 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: 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: GETTING PERSONAL: IDENTITY AND THE PERSONAL ESSAY. How does a personal essay evoke the personal while also engaging deeply with the world? In this class, we’ll explore this most flexible of forms to understand the ways language can both conjure and complicate identity. We’ll think about the ways this identity is shaped by the spaces it inhabits--geographic, cultural, and even psychic spaces. For example, we’ll read authors who are shaped by New York, by memories of a homeland, by queer community, and by various social forces at play through it all. Our primary readings will be personal essays, but we’ll also read some critical social theory to provide a framework for our thinking. We’ll read established authors like James Baldwin, Joan Didion, Richard Rodriguez and Jamaica Kincaid, and mix them up with newer authors like Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, Beth Nguyun and Chantha Nguon. We’ll also read Michel Foucault to explore notions of surveillance in all public spaces. Students will be expected to write two short reflective essays, one essay that brings two or more readings into dialogue, and one final personal essay of their own.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: JOURNALISM ABOUT HIGHER EDUCATION. In this course, we will read (listen to, watch…) reported stories about college. The class will consider these stories both as exemplars of journalistic craft and as real-world accounts that support or challenge preconceptions about higher education. Stories will explore issues such as access, labor, money, and innovation. Sources will include general-interest newspapers, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Open Campus, narrative podcasts, and student press.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: WATCHING & MAKING PERFORMANCE: SPECTATORSHIP & MEANING-MAKING: 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: IDEAS OF THE UNIVERSITY: PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS INTO THE POLITICS OF HIGHER EDUCATION. In this class, students will be introduced to a series of texts, debates, and figures that have shaped the idea of the modern university as a social and political institution. Our investigations into "the" university, however, will all take as their starting point an analysis of some essay, artifact, object, or event that is related to the history of the particular university that students in this class have just entered: The New School. In so doing, the overriding aim of the course is to equip students with the tools to reflect critically on their positionality as first-year learners at this institution and to develop and complexify their own ideas about the social and political function of higher education. The course will culminate with a final project in which each student will develop their own individual investigation into a specific topic in consultation with the instructor. Likely ideas, discourses, and debates that students will be introduced to by the instructor include, but are not limited to: democracy and education; liberalism and its discontents; censorship and free speech; feminism, queer theory, and critical race theory; capitalism and the question of class in higher education. Theoretical readings will likely include samplings from the following authors: Sara Ahmed, James Baldwin, Pierre Bourdieu, Matt Brin, John Dewey, J.S. Mill, Immanuel Kant, Herbert Marcuse, Fred Moten, Plato, Claudia Rankine, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Ann Snitow. The class will also include short readings and documents related to the history of The New School, as well as excursions to some of the various site-specific art installations on campus.

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: CHARACTER STUDIES. In this course, we study and question the concept of the “character” and the process of “characterization” within film, theater, literature, and the contemporary arts. The course is equally divided between analyzing short stories, plays, films, screenplays and gallery shows, and creating our own investigative character-driven projects, inspired by the works of David Levine, Sofia Bohdanowicz, Wallace Shawn, Willam Greaves, Shirley Clarke, George Kuchar, Annie Baker, Joana Hogg, Kathleen Collins, and many others.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: SEX AND POLITICS. From national debates concerning the legality of reproductive freedom to college campus controversies over the definition of affirmative consent, the conjunction between “sex” and “politics” seems everywhere in the present to saturate social structures, cultural institutions, and the fabric of our everyday lives. But what exactly is political about sex? In this seminar, we will query how sex has been theorized and practiced by a range of scholars, activists, and artists invested in visions of social transformation. What, if anything, does one’s sex have to do with one’s politics? How do big political ideas about democracy, freedom, equality, and revolution articulate to seemingly personal and intimate matters like pleasure, desire, love, and romance? How do racism, capitalism, colonialism, patriarchy, and cisheteronormativity shape and structure sex and sexuality? Throughout, we will pay special attention to the way that various cultural workers have sought to imagine what justice might look (and feel) like when and where sex is concerned.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: ON REBELS AND REBELLIONS. To rebel is to disobey one in a position of authority or control. This course looks at different expressions and case studies of rebellion and submission in literature, philosophy, history, and art. While social and political forms of defiance and unrest such as strikes, rioting, revolt, mutiny, uprising, and fully erupted revolutions or wars for independence are the events that usually occur on a massive scale, we focus on examples of disobedience and defiance in the behavioral acts of smaller groups and individuals—civic, moral, and spiritual—among prominent leaders and rank and file participants; in heroes, antiheroes, provocateurs, gadflies, and conformists; in victories, and defeats. Authors in the course include Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Tolkien, Kropotkin, Arendt, Eisenstein, Camus, Bertolucci, among others, accompanied by cluster series such as the Spartacus myth and its consequences in art and politics, and the courageous battle for liberty by the people of Ukraine.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: TRANS/FORMS: CONSIDERATIONS OF FORM WITH TRANS* ARTISTS AND WRITERS. 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: 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: 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: 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: THE ARTIST AS ACTIVIST. This course will trace the emergence and growing importance of the “activist artist” – artists who take on pressing global human rights issues through their work. Students will engage in the work of several New School activist/artists and then delve into the work of artists connected to important social and political movements --including the documentarians of the Great Depression; civil rights and anti-war art/activists; artists responding to the AIDS pandemic, and historic advocates for environmental justice. We will then turn our attention to artists who right now are working to expand awareness of the burning issues of racial injustice, climate change, political participation and global human rights. Our focus throughout the semester will be on the ever-changing role of the artist, from those who struggle to raise consciousness -- to artists who seek to create possibilities for real social transformation.

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, Saidiya Hartman, 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: 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: ICONIC EVENTS IN INTERNATIONAL MEDIA. This course examines the media coverage of news events that have attracted large international audiences. These exceptional news events interrupt the flow of time, and provide us with uplifting or traumatic experiences and memories. The course's case studies include the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting, Princess Diana's funeral and Prince Harry's recent departure from the Royal family, the Black Lives Matter protests, nuclear and climate disasters, and others. We will examine the events’ journalistic coverage and their global social remembrance.

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: A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS AND BORDER WALLS: THE POLITICS OF IMMIGRATION IN THE US. Why is migration such a contentious and divisive issue? And why is immigration policy reform considered key for the future of the country? This course will examine U.S. migration policies and responses to past and current waves of migration from a demographic, political, economic and cultural perspective; the current issues that define the debate; and the different actors involved in shaping discourse, policies and social action in response to migration flows. Topics include a historical background of U.S. immigration policies and legislation; migration and security post - 9/11; the politics of the U.S.-Mexico border; public perceptions of migrants; the debates over the costs and benefits of immigration; activism and advocacy; and alternative narratives of migration. In addition to the academic bibliography, class materials will include documentaries, films, press articles, literary works, guest speakers and site visits.

FIRST YEAR SEMINAR: CHINA THROUGH SATIRE. This course seeks to understand China from the perspective of satire. Students will examine how Chinese artists, activists, humorists, and novelists use different media and messaging to lampoon the wealthy and powerful in China, and to creatively comment on social and global crises. The course also considers trans-border networks of satirical practice.

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 a few of these authors, the course aims to provide students with a model for developing their own practice of critical writing. 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, Frantz Fanon, Lisa Guenther, Mariana Ortega, Gayle Salamon, Joan Scott, Jonathan Sterne.