Queer Studies

Instructor: Thomas March

U.S. high schools are only just beginning to incorporate the history of LGBTQ people in their History curricula, and many lag far behind. Without understanding the obstacles and discrimination that a group has faced, one cannot fully appreciate that their demand for equal treatment is in fact a struggle for civil rights. Covering queer U.S. History and Culture from the early 20th Century through the present, this course introduces students to how enforcement of and reaction against institutionalized discrimination have shaped the LGBTQ experience in this country. Students will learn not just about events but about often-overlooked people who shaped the course of this history—often heroically. Our study of historical sources will be supplemented by visits from influential and dynamic guest speakers in the arts and humanities. Students will have an opportunity to study our guests’ work in advance and discuss it with them when they visit. This course is not restricted to students who identify as LGBTQ—this history is important for everyone, so allies are welcome and encouraged!

Fashion & Dress in World Cultures

Instructor: Zingha Forma

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.

Leading by Example: Theories of Leadership from Antiquity to the Present 

Instructor: Alejandro Cuadrado

How should those in positions of power use it? What is the role of society, mentorship, education, and individuals in preparing people for leadership roles? This course will take a historical view at the ways in which people in various cultures and societies across different time periods (Antiquity, the Italian Middle Ages, and the 20th-21st centuries) have sought to answer these questions. In approaching this topic, we will consider the role of exemplarity—the idea that someone else’s actions, behaviors, and political ideas might inform our own practice. To this end, we will read texts that use exemplarity to model political and non-political leadership. This class will consist of several readings, brief writing assignments, and a final in-class symposium in which students will present the results of a research project.

Sex and Gender Across Long Time

Instructor: Ross Hamilton

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.

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

Instructor: Kristina Chesaniuk

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.

Lean in or Dig Deep

Instructor: Michelle Smith

We examine the theory and practice of two “models” of feminist leadership: liberal-individualist and radical-collective. Advocates of both models seek women’s empowerment. However, they disagree over the means and ends of women’s activism. Broadly, liberal feminists seek equal power in political institutions and corporations as well as equal access to the means for social and economic advance. Liberal feminists may pursue “reproductive rights” and consider gender-equality the mark of feminist success. Social justice feminists seek nothing less than the end of sexism and all forms of subjugation (racial, class, sexual orientation ETC.) which sustain existing anti -egalitarian, sexist, racist and hetero-normative structures. Social justice feminists may pursue “reproductive justice” and consider the transformation of existing gender, social and economic relations success. Culture, language, and representation are important venues for all sorts of feminist action and theorizing. But again, disagreement is more common than not.  In this course, we ask more questions than we answer. What sorts of feminist commitments do the #METOO movements manifest?   What might a truly intersectional feminism achieve?  Should feminism necessarily be sex-positive?   Can women seek BOTH freedom from subjugation AND inclusion in the existing socio-political order? (How) can feminists who disagree nevertheless ally with each other in pursuit of common ideals and objectives? Do feminists seek gender justice or freedom? And post-Dobbs, how much can any of these questions matter when women’s bodily autonomy, the cornerstone of feminist demands, is once more under threat?  Assignments consist of multiple drafts of a <7-page final paper, a group “zine” project, daily journaling in response to readings, and participation in facilitated classroom discussion.

Introduction to American Constitutional Law

Instructor: Jonathan Keller

This 3-week course will introduce you to basic concepts in American Constitutional Law - including the founding and development of the US Constitution and the historical context of major controversies of the US Supreme Court -- such as slavery, gun rights, reproductive freedom, and free speech in the age of social media. You will also learn how to read Supreme Court cases, and be given the tools to evaluate the different approaches Justices use to interpret the Constitution. You will emerge with a deeper understanding of the role the Constitution and the Supreme Court play in American society in 2024.

Wall Street and the Public Culture of Finance 

Instructor: Melissa Fisher

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. 

Imagining Global Warming: Climate Change and the Arts

Instructor: Jonathan Gill

While Global Warming has historically been seen as a matter best understood through a scientific lens, more recently it has been recognized as a quintessentially "wicked"problem," one that cannot be understood from a single perspective. Keeping in mind the value of bringing different disciplinary attitudes to such a problem, this course supplements a purely scientific approach to Global Warming by calling on the many different ways that the human mind--and eye, hand, and ear--have sought to understand and react to our ever-changing environment. Students will begin by reviewing in the first week of the course the basic science of Climate Change and then studying the roots of our understanding of nature, including a variety of ancient religious texts and a wide range of Creation Narratives from around the globe. The second week of the course will be an introduction to a critical examination of artistic responses to Climate Change in recent decades. This will include Land Art that questions and tests our control over the landscape, a century of films that feature natural disaster scenarios, dystopian poems and short stories, music that seeks to represent the challenges of climate change in the auditory dimension, paintings and sculptures that visualize global warming, and performance art that uses the human body to dramatize the ways in we have been transforming nature. In the third week of the course, students will be exposed to the history of environmentalism itself before spending the final sessions in groups producing their own artistic responses to Climate Change.