Introduction to American Constitutional Law

Explore the foundations of the U.S. Constitution and the Supreme Court’s role in shaping American life. Through landmark issues—slavery, gun rights, reproductive freedom, and free speech in the digital age—you’ll learn to read cases and compare how Justices interpret the Constitution. Along the way, visits to the Museum of the City of New York and Federal Hall will connect classroom study to the places where American democracy was debated and defined. By the end, you’ll have the tools to analyze constitutional debates and their impact on society today.

Instructor: Jonathan Keller

Jonathan Keller is Term Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Barnard College, where he teaches courses in Constitutional Law, American Politics, and Political Philosophy. For the past decade, he was Associate Professor of Political Science at Manhattan College, has worked as a speech writer for former NY Governor Mario M. Cuomo, and worked on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Wall Street and the Public Culture of Finance 

Wall Street has been imagined as a site of democracy, capitalism, and the pursuit of the American Dream; it has also been imagined as a place of immorality, filled with greedy global elite male financiers taking advantage of the “99 percent”. This seminar will consider how capital, gender, race, culture, and power shape understandings of Wall Street in the popular imagination, and how people’s everyday practices reshape that understanding. Drawing on a variety of texts –anthropological, sociological, political-economic, historical, literary, and cinematic – we will examine the ways new forms of capital produce financial subjects, class difference, and crisis, within the global economy. We will also explore the ways Occupy Wall Street, Me Too, Black Lives Matter and other social movements are recapturing the radical imagination and the possibilities of new forms of resistance to capitalism that often intersect with sexism, racism, and other systems of power. Using interdisciplinary methodologies such as fieldwork, archival research, and literary analysis students will produce short papers and one research paper that allows them to take advantage of conducting research in New York City. 

Instructor: Melissa Fisher

Melissa Fisher Ph.D., a cultural anthropologist, is on the faculty of Parsons School of Design at the New School. She is also a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, an Associate Researcher (remote) at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, and a Senior Advisor focused on workplace culture and design at CFAR Consulting Services. She has extensive experience ethnographically studying, writing, and consulting on gender, class, race, work, Wall Street, space, and power. Her current book in progress explores how architects and other professionals imagine and design post-covid work environments with a focus on equity and justice. Her work has also been showcased in her books, Frontiers of Capital: Ethnographic Reflections on the New Economy (Duke University Press) and Wall Street Women (Duke University Press), articles, white papers, media appearances, keynote speeches, and consulting on several films, including the Sony Classic 2016 female financial thriller, Equity. She has held full-time faculty positions at New York University, Georgetown University, and was most recently the Laurits Andersen Professor of Business and Organizational Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen. She received her B.A. in English from Barnard College, and her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University.

Fashion & Dress in World Cultures

This course explores the complex cultural significance of fashion and dress across global societies, with particular emphasis on non-Western cultures. Students will examine how clothing, textiles, and body adornments serve as powerful expressions of cultural identity, social hierarchies, and worldviews. The course investigates how people across different societies use dress to communicate religious beliefs, social status, cultural affiliation, and gender identity.

The course is organized geographically—with focused units on Asia, Africa, the Americas, and other regions—and spans from the early modern period to contemporary times. Students will analyze how indigenous dress practices evolve through cultural exchange, colonialism, globalization, and modernization. Through theoretical frameworks drawn from material culture studies, anthropology, history, and fashion theory, students will develop a deeper understanding of why people dress as they do and how clothing practices reflect broader social, economic, and cultural dynamics.

Instructor: Zingha Forma

Zingha Foma is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in History at New York University, specializing in African history. Her research examines fashion and textile trade on the Gold Coast during the 15th-17th centuries, investigating how commercial relationships shaped local industries, wealth distribution, and fashion practices in West Africa. Her work explores the complex dynamics between European trade networks and indigenous textile traditions.
Beyond her academic work, Foma is an accomplished fashion designer and textile maker who creates contemporary pieces rooted in African cultural heritage. Her practice as both a scholar and artist provides unique insights into the historical and modern dimensions of African textile traditions. She brings both theoretical knowledge and practical expertise in traditional textile-making techniques to her teaching.

Black Panthers to the Woman King

From Black Panthers to the Woman King: Gender, Power and War in the 17th - 19th Century in West Africa. The Agoji warriors, an all-female army that emerged in the Kingdom of Dahomey during the eighteenth century, have been the subject of two popular films, Black Panther and The Woman King. Dahomey was a West African centralized and militarized kingdom in current-day Benin, and its population was made of people who identified as Fon. The Agoji warrior women were the front-line troops in the kingdom of Dahomey, an empire in West Africa that existed from 1625 to 1894. During the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Dahomey gained access to the sea through conquest and controlled Ouidah, the second busiest slave-trading port in West Central Africa. The Agoji were known for their ruthlessness, fearlessness, and military power, all elements that inspired the fictional Dora Milaje in Black Panther and the all-female warrior unit in The Woman King

Instructor: Zingha Forma

Zingha Foma is a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate in History at New York University, specializing in African history. Her research examines fashion and textile trade on the Gold Coast during the 15th-17th centuries, investigating how commercial relationships shaped local industries, wealth distribution, and fashion practices in West Africa. Her work explores the complex dynamics between European trade networks and indigenous textile traditions.
Beyond her academic work, Foma is an accomplished fashion designer and textile maker who creates contemporary pieces rooted in African cultural heritage. Her practice as both a scholar and artist provides unique insights into the historical and modern dimensions of African textile traditions. She brings both theoretical knowledge and practical expertise in traditional textile-making techniques to her teaching.

Women in Urban New York: Changes, Spaces, and Mobilities

The turn-of-the-century United States was a nation on the cusp of a number of momentous social, cultural, and political movements. One of the biggest changes was in the status and role of women. From the emergence of the New Woman in the last decade of the 19th century, to the suffragette in the 1910s and the flapper in the 1920s, the roles and positions of women were expanding and evolving in unprecedented ways. Coupled with the growth and expansion of cities, women’s mobility and the spaces they occupied changed dramatically during this time period. In this course, we will examine texts that depict the situation of women and their mobility in various social and cultural contexts in the shifting urban landscape of early twentieth-century New York City. What spaces were women allowed/expected to occupy? What spaces were considered taboo or off limits? What were the effects and consequences of the spaces that women occupied? How did women’s mobility differ from men's? How do race and class impact mobility and space? What factors influenced women’s mobility and how did these factors change/develop over time? Course materials will likely include work by Nella Larsen, Djuna Barnes, Sui Sin Far, Anzia Yezierska, Edith Wharton, and Faith Baldwin, as well as the film Skyscraper Souls.

Instructor: Kristina Chesaniuk

Kristina Chesaniuk received her Ph.D. in American Literature from Auburn University in 2021. Her research focuses on space and mobility in American women's writing, the urban novel, and feminist geography.

Sex and Gender Across Long Time

The idea of gender is a relatively recent formulation, often complicated by the ferocity distinction between the sexes found across history. This course (divided into two parts) uses art objects, literary texts, philosophy, psychology and finally film and digital media to interrogate the ideas of sex and gender, to explore the violent ways in which female sexuality has been denied or constrained, that same sex desire was erased or pathologized, and how the transgender experience, even as it works to deny sexual difference, complicates the relations between both sex and gender.

Instructor: Ross Hamilton

Ross Hamilton specializes in metahistorical patterns from the Reformation to Romanticism, as well as the shift from natural philosophy to early modern science. He is also interested in the Annales historians and their influence. He was a prize teaching fellow at Yale, and held a post-doctorate fellowship at Johns Hopkins University. His first book, Accident: A Literary and Philosophical History (University of Chicago Press, 2008), traces the transformations and mutations of Aristotle's notion of the accidental or inessential from Sophocles to late 20th century film. It won the Harry Levin Prize from the ACLA for best work of literary history in 2007-8. A second book, Falling: Literature, Science and Social Change, explores literary analogues to the paradigm shift from natural philosophy to early modern science described by Thomas Kuhn, among others. In addition to editing Tom Jones, he has written articles on Wordsworth, Erasmus Darwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the eighteenth century culture of gambling, theater and the rise of the novel, and the paintings of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.