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MALS 70000 Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies
Shifra Sharlin
Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30  [19050]

Learning how to read and write at the graduate level means learning how to identify, analyze, and participate in different disciplinary conversations.   The goal of this course is to introduce students to these conversations by studying the scholarship on the secretarial profession.   At the beginning of the twentieth century, becoming a secretary was the career of choice for ambitious women from rural and immigrant backgrounds. Becoming a secretary offered an opportunity to figure out how to become urban, professional, American, and middle-class woman.   We will explore the way scholars from different disciplines understand this transformation and, in the process, develop our own self-awareness as writers and intellectuals who have something to contribute.

MALS 70200 Metropolis: A Political, Historical, and Sociological Profile of New York
Cindy Lobel
Wednesdays, 6:30-8:30  [19051]

This interdisciplinary course will explore New York City’s rise and role as the nation’s metropolis, examining several key themes in the city’s development.  In particular, we will look at Gotham as a center of work, culture and residency as well as at the diverse populations that have called the city home through its four-decade history.  We will examine New York City from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science.

MALS 70300 Law, Politics, and Policy
(Cross listed with P SC 71904 and ASCP 82000)
Joe Rollins
Mondays, 4:15-6:15  [19052]

This course will introduce students to the dominant methodologies of legal analysis found in the social sciences.  Different sections of the course will examine foundational texts of the Law & Society movement, surveying, for example, major contributions from political science, sociology, criminology, psychology, and other empirically grounded disciplines.  It is designed to expose students to legal formalism (in the Langdellian sense of formalism), and to introduce them to legal institutions and reasoning, including statutes, legislation, and precedent. 

MALS 70500 Renaissance Culture
(Cross-listed with RSCP 72100 Introduction to Renaissance Studies: Renaissance Responses to Classical Genre Theory, CLAS 82500, ENGL 71600)
Tanya Pollard and Cristiana Sogno
Thursdays 4:15-6:15  [19053]

This course explores Renaissance responses to Classical and Late Antique literary criticism, with an emphasis on their consequences for both theory and practice of literary genres.  We will pay particular attention to discussions of tragedy, comedy, tragicomedy, satire, and fiction, with attention both to theoretical treatises and to examples of these genres in both periods.  Readings will include selections from Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, Heliodorus, Longinus, Horace, Cicero, Plautus, Cinthio, Guarini, Scaliger, Sidney, Jonson, and Shakespeare.  All the texts for the course will be available in English translation, but PhD students in Classics will read classical and neo-Latin texts in the original languages, and others with the requisite languages are welcome to do so as well.  Requirements will include presentations and either a research paper or an English translation of, and commentary on, a relevant Latin text not available in translation.

MALS 70700 The Shaping of Modernity, 1789-1914
Richard Kaye
Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15  [19054]

This course will explore a wide range of significant intellectual, historical, scientific, political and creative works of the period as well recent or contemporary texts dealing with the era.  A key theme in the class will be revolutionary change. We will begin with Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, De Toqueville’s Democracy in America, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, and John Stuart Mills’ On Liberty. Turning to fiction, we will examine Austen’s Mansfield Park, Dickens’ Bleak House, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, and Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Other texts (or excerpts from texts) include Darwin’s The Origin of Species, William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, Henry Adams’ The Education of Henry Adams, Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution, E.P Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, and  T.J. Clark’s The Painting of Modern Life: Paris and the Art of Manet and His Followers. Class presentations and a final paper.

MALS 70900 Approaches to Life Writing
Rachel Brownstein
Tuesdays, 4:15-6:15  [19055]

How do  ineffable factors such as taste, mood, and social climate affect value in the aesthetic markets of fashion?   This course will consider the business of fashion not only in terms of production, but also branding, the models who promote the styles, and the consumers who buy them. Students will be exposed to readings across a range of topics including selections from among works by Pietra Rivoli, Don Slater, Sharon Zukin, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Nancy Green, Ashley Mears, Joanne Entwistle, Nigel Thrift, Alison Hearn, Thorsten Veblen, and Pierre Bourdieu.  We will discuss a range of topics, including global labor flows within the garment industry; a select history of fashion production practices; a sociology of shopping; various treatments of consumers and consumption; an ethnography of the modeling industry; critical discussions of branding, design, and luxury markets; technology and innovation; fast fashion; eco fashion; and sustainability. Each student will research and write in at least one of these areas, culminating in a final project aimed at sharing this research. 

MALS 71400 Introduction to International Studies
Mark Ungar
Thursdays, 6:30-8:30  [19057]

This course studies international relations by applying the field’s major theoretical frameworks to contemporary global issues.  We will examine the development and roles of international organizations, international law, and international financial institutions; evolving relationships among governments and societies; and global cooperation on issues like war, poverty, health, human rights, and the environment. 

MALS 71700 Psychology of Work and Family: An Introduction
Karen Lyness and Kristen Shockley
Mondays, 6:30-8:30  [19081]

This course will emphasize the psychological aspects of work and family issues as they are experienced by the individual, such as conflicts between work and family roles, and will introduce the student to major work-family (or work-life) theories and research in the psychology literature. In addition, the course will cover organizational policies and programs that are designed to help employees manage work and family responsibilities. 

MALS 72100 Feminist Texts and Contexts
(Cross-listed with WSCP 81001)
Victoria Pitts-Taylor and Talia Schaffer
Thursdays, 11:45-1:45  [19058]

This course provides a broad overview of the issues and texts of Women’s Studies. The instructors will use an interdisciplinary approach to consider some of the themes, questions, methodologies, and findings of Women’s Studies scholarship. The course will cover a selection of feminist texts, taken from both literary and social science sources, and also classic and contemporary theoretical works. In addition, students will explore the ways in which the field of women’s studies has raised new questions and brought new perspectives to those areas where the humanities and social and behavioral sciences intersect, with material which is interdisciplinary in nature and frequently poses a challenge to conventional disciplinary boundaries.

Russ Castronovo and Susan Gillman begin the introduction to their recent collection States of Emergency: The Object of American Studies (2009), with a seemingly straightforward question: “What is the object of American studies?” For Castronovo and Gilman, this question leads directly to two others: “What does ‘American studies’ study, and what does it want?” The object of this course is to explore these questions by considering the histories, theories, and practices of the interdisciplinary field of American studies, from its inception as an academic discipline to its present “state of emergency.” Using the first publication of American Quarterly in 1949 as a starting point, we will consider how American studies has been transformed from a movement into an institution represented by one of the largest and most widely recognized annual academic conferences in the United States. The collection edited by Castronovo and Gillman is one of the most recent attempts to recalibrate and redefine the field of American studies, but the impulse it represents is as old as the field itself. For all of its centrality, American studies remains an anomaly in the academy: Generally organized as a program and not a department, it resides somewhere between (or, perhaps, outside) normative disciplinary boundaries and in sometimes productive, sometimes uneasy relations to the other “studies” which have been created in part on its model. During this semester we will consider the complexity inherent in this model, as we trace the influence of both seminal and emerging work in American studies. We will also consider the different meanings that American studies has (and has had) for different disciplines, and attempt to take stock of its current position in the academy and in our own work.

MALS 73400 Africana Studies: An Introduction
(Cross-listed with AFCP 70100 and ENGL 85500)
Jerry Watts
Tuesdays, 6:30-8:30  [19078]

This seminar offers an intensive investigation of the life and writings of W.E.B. DuBois.  Through discussions of his major and minor writings, we will be able to chart dominant as well as oppositional currents in American/Afro-American thought.  DuBois emerged as a distinct intellectual presence during the last decade of the 19th century and would continue to publish until his death in 1963. Moreover, throughout his entire adult life, DuBois was a political activist in behalf of the freedom struggle of Afro-Americans; obtaining self-determination for colonized peoples throughout the world; and in his later life, the Soviet Union led world communist struggle against capitalism.  His political activism informed his intellectual output and vice versa.  As a writer, DuBois wore many intellectual hats during his lifetime: historian The Suppression of the African Slave Trade to the United States of America (1896) and Black Reconstruction in America; sociologist, The Philadelphia Negro (1899); essayist, The Souls of Black Folks (1903) and Darkwater: Voices From Within the Veil (1920); autobiographer, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay towards an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940); political polemicist and agitator through his editorial writings in The Crisis, the journal of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People;  and finally, novelist (I count his novels among his minor works).   The DuBois corpus is far too large to discuss in any single semester, consequently, we will read selectively from his works.  Nevertheless, the course is reading intensive and will require participation in class discussions, several short papers and one longer research paper.

MALS 74500 Great Digs: Important sites of the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic Worlds
(Cross-listed with ART 72000)
Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis
Wednesdays, 4:15-6:15  [19079]

This course introduces students to major archaeological methods and important archaeological sites from the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds. It seeks to broaden students’ awareness of archaeological methods and types of evidence, while demonstrating how interconnected the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds are. The two primary methods of archaeological inquiry, excavation and survey, are first introduced, discussed and problematized in this course.  We will then survey specific sites – cities, towns and, in certain cases, residences – to understand how archaeology has contributed to our knowledge of these sites. Athens, Alexandria, Rome, Hadrian’s Villa (Tivoli), Pompeii, Dura Europos, Constantinople, Ravenna, Jerusalem, Samarra will each be the focus of a lecture.  Archaeological evidence – art, architecture and other types of material culture, such as ceramics and glass –  from each site will be discussed in detail. By the end of the course students will gain a knowledge of the principles of archaeological excavation and survey; an understanding of major classes of archaeological evidence; and knowledge of important archaeological sites from the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds.

Course Requirements

The course is composed of lectures at which attendance is mandatory. The course assumes no previous knowledge of archaeology. Two papers are required. First, a 7-10 page paper that discusses a methodology or type of evidence that archaeologists use to understand a site or region; for example a student could discuss numismatic evidence, dendrochronology, or field survey and the benefits and problems that it presents to archaeologists in this paper. Students will be graded on this paper; however, it must be revised and resubmitted, as this course also aims to help students develop their academic writing. Second, students must prepare a 15-20 page report on the historical and significance of a site of their choice from the Classical, Late Antique or Islamic worlds that has not been discussed in class; this site can be a city or a specific excavation site or area.  This report should be based on the study of all published archaeological and historical sources for the site and it aims to teach students an understanding of a site’s topography and to develop an ability to describe a site in clear and precise archaeological and architectural terms. It should also enable a student to understand and interpret archaeological sites and publications and demonstrate the significance of the selected site.

All papers are double-spaced and must be properly referenced. Images should be included when appropriate.

Office Hours: Wednesday, 2-4. GC 3300.6

Preliminary Readings
Renfrew and Bahn, Archaeology, Theories, Methods and Practice (pp.9-160)
Alcock, S. Graecia Capta

Preliminary Syllabus (subject to revision)
Lecture 1: Introduction to discipline of Archaeology and the course
Lecture 2: Introduction to Excavation Techniques
Lecture 3: Introduction to Survey
Lecture 4: Classical Athens
Lecture 5: Alexandria
Lecture 6: Pergamon and the cities of the Hellenistic World
Lecture 7: Rome
Lecture 8: Pompeii and the Bay of Naples
Lecture 9: Hadrian’s Villa (Tivoli)
Lecture 10: Dura Europos
Lecture 11: Constantinople
Lecture 12: Ravenna
Lecture 13: Late Antique and early Islamic Jerusalem
Lecture 14: Samarra and Conclusions

MALS 75400 Introduction to the Digital Humanities: Debates in the Digital Humanities
(Cross-listed with ENGL 89020 and ASCP 81500)
Matthew Gold
Mondays, 4:15-6:15  [19080]

The growth and popularization of the digital humanities (DH) in recent years has highlighted the many ways in which computational tools are being brought to bear upon humanities scholarship and teaching. Recent methodological experiments in the digital humanities – quantitative approaches to literary history, algorithmic methods of text analysis and visualization, public forms of peer-to-peer review, and interactive pedagogies for the open web – have helped scholars re-imagine the basic nature and forms of academic research and teaching across a range of disciplines.

But what is the digital humanities, and why should we care about it? What kinds of questions can DH make legible that other modes of academic inquiry conceal? Is the digital humanities a field unto itself, or is it simply a set of methodologies that can be applied in multiple fields? Will there be a point at which digital tools will be so pervasive that the field we now call “digital humanities” will simply be known as the “humanities”?

This course will explore these and other questions through a set of historical, theoretical, and methodological readings that trace the rise and popularization of the digital humanities over the past two decades.  Students will be introduced to emerging debates in the digital humanities and will become familiar with some of the fundamental skills necessary to develop and analyze digital humanities projects. We will examine and critique a range of such projects and begin to sketch out possible undertakings of our own.

A central aim of this course is to involve students in the rich and evolving constellation of spaces in which networked conversations are reshaping the norms of scholarly communication. These spaces include blogs and Twitter, which, as MLA Director of Scholarly Communication Kathleen Fitzpatrick has pointed out in “Networking the Field,” scholars are using “as a means of getting feedback on work in progress or as an alternative channel through which an author can reach an audience more quickly and directly.” We will analyze the benefits and drawbacks of this new conversational ecosystem that surrounds digital humanities work.

Readings will include texts and projects by Ian Bogost, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Dan Cohen, Cathy Davidson, Johanna Drucker, Jason Farman, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Matthew Kirschenbaum, Peter Krapp, Alan Liu, Tara McPherson, Franco Moretti, Bethany Nowviskie, Stephen Ramsay, Geoffrey Rockwell, Tom Scheinfeldt, Michael Witmore, and Jonathan Zittrain, among others.

No technical skills are required, though a willingness to experiment (and even fail) with DH tools is crucial. Class assignments will include weekly engagements with and participation on our class blog and Twitter feed; contributions to a collaborative Zotero bibliography; an oral presentation on a DH project; and a final project in one of the following forms: a seminar paper (~20 pages), a detailed DH project proposal, or a substantive contribution to a new or existing DH project.

This class will survey the “birth” of cinema from a number of inter-related perspectives. How did the heightened realism and new storytelling impulse of the cinema alter existing modes of pictorial and theatrical display?

We will begin with early experiments with moving images and think about actualities, serials and comic shorts as-the new genres of early cinema, which then gave way to an industrial mode of production driven by a powerful star-system and large studios. The course will not only study cinema’s birth and development but also its ability to invent novel film genres, change perceptions of modernity, mobilize race-gender politics (sometimes dubiously), picture new women, and radically enhance viewing pleasures. 

We will situate these topics within the larger context of international film movements, the development of national cinemas worldwide, and broader questions of film historiography.

Although our primary examples will be drawn from American silent cinema, we will also turn to British, Indian, Russian, Swedish and German examples to better understand the rapid proliferation and varied applications of the medium. Finally, we will examine the initial impact of sound on cinema though, as we will see, silent cinema had always been an aural medium.

Screenings will include selections and/or whole features, depending on the unit we are covering: The Movies Begin: A Treasury of Early Cinema, 1894-1913, Edison: The Invention of the Movies: 1891-1918, Landmarks of Early Film, Vol. 1, George Melies: First Wizard of Cinema, More Treasures from American Film Archives 1894-1931, Griffith Masterworks, extracts from American, British, and French serials, The Birth of Krishna, shorts by Chaplin and Keaton, Little American, The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, Till the Clouds Roll By, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Ingeborg Holm, Queen Christina, Man with a Movie Camera, The Goddess, Pandora’s Box, and Sunrise.

Requirements: Readings must be completed before the day for which they are slotted. Please come to class on time. Full attendance, engaged viewing, and active classroom participation are vital to your success. Discussion–20%. Reading responses and discussion questions-10 %. A research paper with original content (20-25 pages) will fulfill a major requirement for this course–70%. Your topic must be chosen in consultation with me. A one page proposal will be due four weeks before the final paper is due, after which we will meet to discuss your topic.

More than one absence will make it very hard for you to pass the course. Please let me know at least a day in advance if you are going to miss class.

A reading list is available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5110).
 

MALS 79600 Thesis Workshop
Shifra Sharlin
Mondays, 6:30-8:30  [19064]

The goal of this workshop is to help students at any point in the thesis-writing process by reading each others’ work and reflecting on the writing and research process.

THE  NATIONAL  COALITION OF INDEPENDENT SCHOLARS
The Independent Scholar, February 2012, p. 25 Volume 25, Issue 1
http://www.ncis.org/the-independent-scholar/

On Reviving the Intellectual Essay (Not!)

By William Eaton Warner

     A distinguished historian once accused me of trying to revive the intellectual essay. Perhaps “accused” is the wrong word; he was just noting what I was up to and tipping his cap to the quixotic nature of someone in the early twenty-first century United States writing pieces like the present one.

      The sense I have — riding in the “quiet car” of an Amtrak train, or on airplanes — is that people no longer spend much time reading. Or this is not quite right either. We may spend more time than ever reading. We text compulsively. Our evening phone calls have been replaced by evening e-mailing: reading and writing. What we seem to be reading less of is . . . for example, intellectual essays. And we are increasingly reading on rather small electronic devices, which facilitate and frustrate various types of reading. As an enthusiastic writer of footnotes (as opposed to endnotes) — and having found that footnotes can be a means of having dialogue within a text and of encouraging dialogic thinking more generally — I have noted that electronic devices are not friendly to footnotes.

      So then, what am I up to? Or rather: What are we up to with our interdisciplinary endeavors, trying to be generalists in a world of specialists, intellectuals in a world of social-media addicts (ourselves perhaps included), seekers of intellectual connections in a world in which people are hoping against hope that thanks to all their electronic connections our lack of warmer contact with other human beings will pass unnoticed (and by ourselves first and foremost)?

      What was Don Quixote doing, we might ask? But perhaps our writing and scholarship is not only quixotic, or self-deceptive, or freighted with nostalgia for some past way of being and of writing and reading. When I was young I had too much energy (and smoked too many cigarettes) to sit still and read, but one of the books that did make its way to me, to my heart, was Saul Bellow’s Augie March. Nicely, what I have remembered most from that book is a quotation from Balzac that appeared on the back cover. “I am a member of the opposition, which is called Life” is how I have since retranslated the line. (“Je fais partie de l’opposition qui s’appelle la Vie.”) For decades this line spoke to me very clearly, and in the same way that I presume it spoke to Augie and Saul: There was something life giving, or life-full, in not just, cork-like, going along with the flow. (Though doesn’t such going along well describe Augie’s life? John W. Aldridge wrote about the “divisibility of theme and content” in this novel.)

      In nicotine-less middle-age, how I love to read and to find new subjects to learn about, and so I researched the Balzac quotation. It turns out to have been made in a letter to his sister written in 1849 when Balzac was surviving a serious illness and was also shaken by the European revolutions of 1848 — revolutions in which the working classes had tried and failed to gain more power, more control over their lives, a larger share of the comforts of modern life. Balzac himself was far from a revolutionary, and so his remark is a mix of what we might call hardiness and pride (as regards his health) and political incorrectness (as regards the revolutions). I (Monsieur Balzac) am a member of the opposition party “life” — defying death and not getting swept up in anti-bourgeois enthusiasms. (Skipping ahead, one might imagine, unfortunately, Balzac thumbing his nose at Occupy Wall Street.)

      Humbled, but not broken, I come back to this idea of reviving the intellectual essay in the twenty-first century or of trying to be a generalist (an interdisciplinary scholar) in a world of specialists. It seems to me that this pursuit — our pursuit — is about standing up out of the current, using our thighs and our heads, not only to search for another way of life or to hope quixotically for one, but also to simply say “No.” Life must be elsewhere.

            Here in the United States we are so attached — desperately attached — to “ac-cent-tchu-ating the positive”. (A typical e-dating self-characterization: “I am a very positive person who is looking for other positive people. I am not interested in men/women who are not positive.”) This may, inter alia, reveal, yet again, our ignorance of science — or at least of electricity. You need both the positive and the negative to get any current, and the positive flows, and quite rapidly, toward the negative (and vice-versa).

            I would also tip my own cap to ancient Greek henology. For the Greeks, 1 and 2 were not numbers in the sense of enumerating, describing quantities. The Greek 1 represented unity, what in spiritual contexts is now referred to as “the one”. The Greek 2 was negation, specifically negation of the 1, of unity. It was only with the denial or destruction of the 1 by the 2 that all the stuff of life, the discordant world of possibility, the 3, 4, 5 . . . as if miraculously, appeared. And so — yes, at times feeling ridiculous; at times, yes, reveling in the ridiculousness — I write intellectual essays?

            Heading toward a close, I note that it is not uncommon for a writer of intellectual essays to feel s/he should be reading — beyond Aldridge, Balzac and Bellow — Emerson and Montaigne. From the latter one might learn how to get carried away, cork-like, on rivers of thought, and also — a lost art! — how to share with readers the manifold poetry, insights and confusions of of previous writers, instead of being limited to one’s own point of view. From Emerson we might learn about hard words and misunderstanding —

Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day. — “Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.” — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?

            It is by sanctifying our faults, as Cocteau once said, that we create. Ou bien: In a preface to a book of engravings by Véronique Filozof, “Car c’est en sanctifiant des fautes qui cessent d’en être que l’artiste domine un monde trop sage.” Glossing and then twisting: It is while celebrating our faults (to include in essay form) that we do battle with a species long too sure of itself.

The End.

This new track is conceived with the Graduate Center’s recent new initiative in mind to launch a Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, which seeks to cultivate critical dialogue across conventional disciplinary divides. This track seeks to allow students to approach science and technology from a variety of perspectives through courses in diverse disciplines represented at the Graduate Center.

The two core courses proposed here will provide students with two different perspectives on science and technology studies. The first course, Narratives of Science and Technology: Literature and the Visual Arts, will emphasize how science and technology have been portrayed in literature, film, and the arts generally, and how each reflects the social understanding of the science and technology of the times in which the works to be studied were written, filmed, or created. The second course, Social Impacts of Science and Technology: Case Studies, will provide students with a necessary foundation in Science Studies generally, focusing on examples of science and technology in different contexts from semester to semester. The first such offering will provide a general overview of the history of science and technology from the Renaissance to the present, including a case study that emphasizes the development and impact of science and technology in China. It is hoped that this course will involve students from the Graduate Center, as well as students in the Institute for History of Science and Technology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, as a course team-taught by professors from both institutions.

Core Courses:

MALS 72500: Narratives of Science and Technology: Literature and the Visual Arts

Course Description:
From Dr. Jekyll’s hidden laboratory to Dr. Strangelove’s doomsday scenario, images of the scientist, science, and technology, as they are represented in film and literature, argue as signifying spectacles. This three credit interdisciplinary course will examine representations of science and technology in multiple film, photographic, and literary narratives. Students will evaluate how these narratives reinforce or question modern and contemporary paradigms of science and technology, as each strategizes the concept of progress. The films and literature studied in this course are drawn from various genres, and not just science fiction. Students will be introduced to critical film and literary theory and related criticism, as well as engaging in close study of primary, interdisciplinary texts. In particular, the course will discuss the role of the scientific and technological as spectacle, and the way in which notions of progress are both “real” and “reel” spaces of twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. Reading assignments are given for every class, and students are requested to present an in-class report. There is a final research paper (approximately 15-20 pages) due at the end of the semester.

Rationale:
This first course in the Science and Technology Studies track will expose students to the ways in which science and technology have been treated in various media, but predominantly in literature and film. The approach will be rigorously interdisciplinary, encouraging students to approach their reading of literature and viewing of films concerned with science and technology from the diverse perspectives of the various disciplines represented in the various Ph.D. Programs at the Graduate Center. Some students may wish to pursue their studies form the perspectives of philosophy, sociology, history, ethnography, and a host of other possible ways to view, analyze, and understand the place of science and technology in human society and modern culture.

Learning Goals and Outcomes:
Upon successful completion of this course, students will demonstrate an understanding of how science and technology have served to shape the modern world. They will have a basic knowledge of the empirical methods, research skills, and theoretical approaches to studying science and technology from multiple perspectives.

MALS 72600: Social Impacts of Science and Technology: Case Studies

This course will study some of the great discoveries of science and inventions of technology that have changed the course of human history, with a view to assessing their origins, impact, and eventual consequences, both foreseen and unintended. Through individual case studies, from the invention of the wheel or the arch to atomic energy or space technology, through selected case studies across time and in particular parts of the world, or by the contributions of individuals like Pasteur or Edison, or by genres including film and fiction, this course will survey major scientific discoveries and technological inventions that have changed human history in significant ways. Reading assignments are given for every class, and students will make weekly seminar reports. There will be either a series of short essays and/or a final research paper (approximately 15-20 pages) due at the end of the semester.

Rationale:
This second course in the Science and Technology Studies track will expose students to major examples across time of different technologies and scientific discoveries that have in turn changed the course of human history, often with unintended consequences. In the spirit of the Graduate Center’s recently established Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies, this course will also introduce students to one in-depth case study of a particular culture and its response to science and technology, or of science and technology as viewed through different genres or reflected in a specific science or technology. China, the first example as described above (p.2, in the general Rationale for the track) has a long history of science and technology, but one that interacted with western science in ways that have also changed and reshaped its destiny, as well as the rest of the world with which China co-exists. This second required core course—Social Impacts of Science and Technology: Case Studies—will be a timely opportunity to bring the full resources of science studies to the analysis of how science and technology have shaped the modern world.

Learning Goals and Outcomes:
Upon successful completion of this course, students will possess a basic understanding of the methods, concepts, and theories employed by scholars concerned with science and technology studies, who approach their subjects from diverse perspectives.

Questions about the MALS track in Science and Technology Studies may be directed to liberalstudies@gc.cuny.edu.

MALS Track in Digital Humanities
The digital humanities is an emerging field of scholarly endeavor that has come into prominence in recent years. Defined broadly as the application of digital technologies to humanities scholarship and teaching, the digital humanities involves a range of approaches that include algorithmic literary criticism, new models of “distant reading,” the use of network theory to examine historical events, the digital encoding and analysis of archival manuscripts, the incorporation of geospatial data into scholarly projects, the uses of social media and networked platforms (e.g. blogs and wikis) to enhance classroom instruction, among others. The field, as a whole, explores the ways in which traditional scholarly activities are being reshaped by the new methodologies made possible through data-driven inquiry.

The two core courses in the DH track introduce students to broad trends in DH scholarship and give them practical experience in using DH methods and tools. This mix of theoretically informed analysis with hands-on practice reflects the popular sentiment that DH is, at least in part, about building. After taking the two core courses in the track and the introductory MALS course, students will be able to pursue deeper knowledge in a particular humanities discipline. In their thesis projects, students will take advantage of this mix of specialized discipline-specific knowledge and research methodologies to create projects that will be of value to the larger digital humanities community.

The MALS track in digital humanities builds upon already-existing digital humanities projects at the CUNY Graduate Center, including the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, the CUNY Academic Commons, the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program, the New Media Lab, and the American Social History Project. By allowing MALS students to explore both digital humanities methodologies and to apply those methodologies to a humanities field of their choosing, the track enables graduates to apply for a broad range of jobs upon graduation.

Core Courses

MALS 75400 Introduction to the Digital Humanities

Course Description:
The dramatic growth of the Digital Humanities (DH) over the past half dozen years has helped scholars re-imagine the very nature and forms of academic research across a range of scholarly disciplines, encompassing the arts, the interpretive social sciences as well as traditional humanities subject areas. DH has re-shaped the very boundaries and parameters of interdisciplinary scholarship, teaching and library practices in the twenty-first century academy. This initial core course will explore the history of the digital humanities, focusing especially on diverse pioneering projects and core texts that catapulted to prominence this innovative methodological and conceptual approach to scholarly inquiry. The course will also emphasize the ways in which DH has helped transform the nature of academic teaching and pedagogy in the contemporary university with its emphasis on collaborative, student-centered and digital learning environments and approaches. Students will be introduced to important technical skills and tools–including metadata tagging and visualization, database, digital markup, and social networking software (including blogs and wikis)—that will help them undertake their own digital humanities work in subsequent courses in the program. The course will also take up broad social, legal and ethical questions and concerns surrounding digital media and contemporary culture, including privacy, intellectual property, and open/public access to knowledge and scholarship.

Rationale:
This initial course exposes new MA in DH students to the emerging and rapidly changing field of Digital Humanities, allowing them to explore a range of interdisciplinary approaches to academic research and teaching. Exposure to diverse DH projects and core texts will encourage students to rethink the nature of academic inquiry at the same time as they begin to master a range of essential digital tools that they will use in their own scholarly endeavors. A focus on understanding and using DH tools and methodologies will help students define the nature of their subsequent DH work in the program and in the field.

Learning Goals and Outcomes:
Upon successful completion of the course, students will:
• possess familiarity with major readings in the field of digital humanities;
• apprehend basic computational approaches to research and teaching used in the digital humanities;
• have explored a representative range of prominent DH projects; and
• have explored the broad social, legal and ethical questions and concerns surrounding digital media and contemporary culture, including privacy, intellectual property, and open/public access to knowledge and scholarship.

MALS 75500 Digital Humanities Methods and Practices

Course Description:
This course provides a broad, applied introduction to the methods and practices involved in digital humanities scholarship and teaching. Background readings will orient students to the theoretical and methodological considerations involved in various DH-centered approaches, and each section of the course will include a hands-on introduction to tools and practices that enable such approaches to be used in digital humanities projects. Sample units include algorithmic approaches to text, network analysis, data visualization, TEI markup, geospatial inquiry and display, interactive pedagogy, open scholarship and peer-to-peer review, material analysis of digital objects, comparative approaches to archival texts, and new approaches to archival collections.

Rationale:
Following the broad introduction to the digital humanities offered in the first core course in the track, this “Methods and Practices” course will help students put their ideas into practice and begin digging into DH analysis. As a field, the digital humanities emphasizes hands-on work; a course that moves students from the study of the contours of the field into its source code is in keeping with the nature of the discipline. It will provide a broad base of approaches that students can continue to explore as they take classes in a discipline of their choice from the Graduate Center’s offerings, and it will help orient students to a range of possible approaches that they might take as part of their MALS thesis project. No coding experience is required to take the course.

Learning Goals and Outcomes:
Upon successful completion of the course, students will have been introduced to a range of analytic approaches used in digital humanities projects, have an understanding of the types of skills needed to complete digital humanities research projects and digital teaching approaches, have moved from theoretical and methodological considerations towards applied digital-humanities work, and have begun thinking about the kinds of projects they might like to explore in their MALS thesis project.

Questions about the MALS track in Digital Humanities may be directed to liberalstudies@gc.cuny.edu.

Stemming from the Black Studies programs and departments formed in the late 1960s, Africana Studies is the study of cultures, politics, and histories of peoples of African origin in both Africa and in the African diaspora. At present, Africana Studies is a systematic way of studying black people’s religion, sociology, culture, cultural expression and history throughout the world. It examines the iterative effect of the black experience on society as well as society’s impact on the black experience. Therefore, this academic endeavor relies heavily on many disciplines across the social sciences and humanities.

The question of diversity in general and Africana Studies in particular at higher levels of education is no longer a “yes-or-no” query; it is a matter of “when” and “how.” The matter of “when” is a question of will, commitment, and resources; and it is a question that university administrators across the country are addressing. The matter of “how,” though, is a question for research scholars; and it raises questions proper to disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.

This MALS Track is the only M.A. or M.S. degree offered in Africana Studies within the CUNY system.

The two required core courses in the track are:

MALS 73400 Africana Studies: Introduction
This course provides a broad overview of the issues and methods of Africana Studies. The instructor will use an interdisciplinary approach to consider some of the themes, questions, methodologies, and findings of Africana Studies scholarship. The course will introduce students to a selection of texts, taken from literary, cultural, and social science sources; additionally, both classic and contemporary theoretical works will be incorporated. Students will explore the ways in which the field of Africana Studies has raised new questions and brought new perspectives to the humanities, the social sciences, as well as their intersection(s). The purpose here is to challenge conventional disciplinary boundaries.

MALS 73500 Africana Studies: Global Perspectives
The Global Perspectives course will explore the dynamics of racial, ethnic, and economic relations of power in domestic, international, and transnational settings. The course will examine scholarship produced by and about Black people, Third World citizens, and other social and political actors whose experiences and thinking have shaped contemporary ideas about race, power, and international political economies. The course will explore how both self-identified people of color and people who do not consider themselves as such write about and understand race, gender, justice, human rights, tolerance, agency, imperialism, and other relevant topics. Though many experiences will be considered, this course is specifically designed to foreground experiences beyond the borders of the United States.

Questions about the MALS track in Science and Technology Studies may be directed to liberalstudies@gc.cuny.edu.

Introduction:
Archaeology, popularized by films such as the Indiana Jones series, is far more than just good Hollywood fodder; rather it is a fundamental way through which scholars can unravel the history, cultures and civilizations of humanity. The aim of the MALS track in the Archaeology of the Classical, Late Antique, and Islamic Worlds is to explore the material culture of these worlds through an interdisciplinary lens, drawing upon the fields of archaeology, history, art history, classics, anthropology and middle eastern studies. Though disparate in time and space, Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds were artistically, historically and intellectually linked. Using a multi-disciplinary approach, major sites, key monuments, cultural trends and fundamental ideas of the Classical, Late Antique, and Islamic Worlds are discussed in order to better understand how the human past has been written through art, architecture and material culture.

Degree Requirements
This Master’s degree program includes a required introductory course (introduction to graduate liberal studies), two required core courses to introduce the student to archaeological topics, and six courses of the student’s choice, plus the final thesis (or project). These courses will provide a total of 30 credits for the Master’s degree and are designed to conform to similar requirements of the other concentrations currently offered by the MALS Program.

The two core courses will provide the student with multiple perspectives and a sound understanding of the history, culture and artistic milieu of the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds in order to prepare her/him to take advanced courses in Classics, History, Art History or Middle Eastern Studies as well as other relevant disciplines.

• The first core class, From Alexander to Muhammad: Introduction to the Cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean, introduces students to the languages and literature, as well as to the history and culture of the ancient Mediterranean, Late Antique and early Islamic worlds in the form of a descriptive survey.  The course is organized into four units, which focus on Alexander the Great; the Hellenistic Era; the Roman Empire; and Late Antiquity and the rise of Islam respectively. Major works of literature and history are read in translation to give students the background and basic knowledge that they need to go on for their further studies.

• The Second core class, Great Digs: important sites of the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic Worlds, exposes students to major archaeological sites from the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds. It seeks to broaden students’ awareness of archaeological methods and aims to demonstrate how interconnected the Classical, Late Antique and Islamic worlds were. Two major types of archaeological techniques, excavation and survey, are introduced.The course will then focus on examples from all periods surveyed in the track, including sites such as Classical Athens, Rome, Hadrian’s Villa (Tivoli), Pompeii, Alexandria, Constantinople, Ravenna, Jerusalem, Dura Europos, and Samarra. These examples and others will serve as case studies that demonstrate how specific sites shaped our knowledge of human history.

Together these two courses are intended to expose students to the major historical events, cultural trends, intellectual debates, archaeological techniques and archaeological sites. These courses will also prepare the students to focus on their own interests and deepen their knowledge for preparation of their MA thesis or project.

Field Work
Students are encouraged to participate in fieldwork, such as an archaeological excavation or research in a museum. Students may participate in a project of their own design and, if approved by the MALS executive officer, may receive up to three credits (equal to one course) towards their degree. Students may register for an Independent Study with a member of the doctorate faculty to receive credit for this project.

Questions about the MALS track in The Archaeology of the Classical, Late Antique, and Islamic Worlds may be directed to liberalstudies@gc.cuny.edu.

William Blake (1757-1827) studied Hebrew to be able to read the Old Testament, and incorporated Hebrew words in several of his works. The paper offers a judgment of his competence in Hebrew by analyzing the characters he drew, and interprets the words they form.

The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (2001.73), reproduced with the permission of The Morgan Library & Museum.

This example is a watercolor drawing entitled Jobs’ Evil Dreams, one of a series drawings and engravings Blake created to illustrate The Book of Job. Portrayed is Job’s nightmare. Hovering above the tormented sleeping Job is Satan in the guise of the “Angel of Light,” who points to the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Three of the Hebrew words are not part of the biblical commandments. A new interpretation is offered to explain the message that Blake cleverly hid in the representation of the Ten Commandments.

*     *     *

An essay entitled “Transition from Corambis to Polonius: The Forgotten Pun on a Diplomatic Scandal in a Hamlet Q2 Stage Direction” by Abraham Samuel Shiff, has been published by the peer-reviewed on-line site Hamlet Works.  

Shakespeare introduced a pun into the Hamlet second quarto (Q2) of 1604/5 to mock the ambassador who insulted the majesty of Queen Elizabeth, a scandal famous in its day.  The passage of time and a compositor’s error in the first folio (F1) edition of 1623 obscured the reference to the 1597 diplomatic scandal.  This essay explains the incident, the pun that it generated, and the consequence of the printer’s error.

The essay is available through the Hamlet Works home page: www.hamletworks.org.  From the menu on the left side, select “Hamlet Criticism,” to access the page with the link to the essay “Transition from Corambis to Polonius.”

*   *   *

“Blake’s Priestly Blessing: God Blesses Job.” Forthcoming in the peer-reviewed journal:
Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly.

Illustration by permission of The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. PML 30214. Gift of Phillip Hofer, 1934.

William Blake’s mature creative genius is expressed in the series of engravings known as the Illustrations for the Book of Job.  In engraving number 17, Blake portrays his interpretation of the biblical sentences Job 42:5 and 42:12. This essay argues that Blake used as his model the Orthodox Jewish synagogue ritual for the priestly blessing. The ritual is explained, the iconography is analyzed, and reasons are offered as to why Blake, a visionary Protestant, relies upon this Jewish religious practice.

 
http://brooklyneagle.com/articles/brooklyn-responder-prepares-surgery-experts-debate-911-zadroga-law

http://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/markowitz-returns-alma-mater-state-borough-address

 http://www.thevillager.com/villager_442/occupiersbring.html

 www.thejewishweek.com/news/new_york/battle_save_senior_centers

http://www.downtownexpress.com/?p=1197

The CUNY Graduate Center — located on Fifth Avenue in a landmark building, the former B. Altman department store — is the only University in the US that is not a design or fashion school to offer a Master’s degree in Liberal Studies with a track in Fashion Studies. This is a groundbreaking area of specialization that offers the chance to study the phenomenon of fashion from a variety of standpoints and in a unique interdisciplinary framework. The track in fashion is the result of more than a decade of academic international conferences, exhibitions, film screenings and festivals, and PhD seminars that have taken place at the Graduate Center and that culminated with the establishment of the PhD concentration in Fashion Studies available to PhD students.

This new concentration will enable students to serve as adjunct instructors in the CUNY colleges and beyond where fashion courses are taught.

The Graduate Center boasts an internationally renowned faculty in all areas and disciplines. The GC is also the site of a number of prestigious centers of research, such as the Center for the Humanities, The Center for the Study of Women and Society, The Gotham Center, The Center for Place, Culture and Politics, The Center of Gay and Lesbian Studies as well as the New Media Lab.

With the historical Garment district and the Museum of the Fashion Institute of Technology a few blocks away, the GC is located at the interface between the academy and industry. This strategic geographical location at the heart of New York City, one of the world’s fashion capitals, make the GC the ideal place and environment to study fashion in action.

Fashion is an economic force, a culture industry and a powerful way to convey identity, politics, status, and personality. Fashion can simultaneously express freedom and constriction, be both democratic and totalitarian; and both repress and liberate the body and gender roles. A thorough study of the history of fashion in its symbolic, creative and coercive faces, shows how it has been crucial in the construction of national identities in fascist regimes or in processes of decolonization, such as in India, or in the remapping of the world economy, including China, India and Brazil, even in past epochs like the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Fashion is closely tied to industrial, technological and economic developments and is at the center of cultural activity and change. In today’s globalised world, the fashion and textile industry are key factors to understand the profound transformations occurring in cities, nations and regions the world over.

Underlining all the recent scholarly attention that has been given to fashion is the intent of stripping it of its apparent light and frivolous reputation, and replacing it with a serious scholarly investigation that seeks to uncover the many complex layers that its surface conceals. The study of fashion, costume and dress has not only involved a series of disciplines, but has also had the effect of expanding the boundaries of these disciplines

After being trained in the core courses the program requires, students choose from among a number of electives that will be offered through the Inter-Disciplinary Studies Concentration in Fashion and the wide range of courses offered in the social sciences and the humanities by departments and programs at the GC. Students will receive guidance to develop their own plan of study according to their main research interest and training.

The Track’s two core courses are: MALS 71200. The Culture of Fashion. The course will introduce students the fashion system, its implications with body, gender and class. It will also consider its role and power in the context of global history, from nations to empire and to globalization as well as recent developments in digital technology. Students will get acquainted with the foundational theories of fashion as well as the most recent research in fashion studies.; and MALS 71300. The Business of Fashion. The course will offer students in depth and critical knowledge of how the business of fashion works through study of new scientific research in technology, design, textile, the functioning of modeling industry etc. as well as addressing issues of globalization, sustainability and the environment.

The two core courses are strictly interrelated and will connect the culture and the business of fashion in a broad theoretical framework and as practiced and communicated via museums, galleries, design houses, magazines, fashion shows and weeks, and department stores.
New York, one of the global capitals of fashion, is the ideal place to study fashion. As part of the requirements of the classes, students will visit some of the NYC museums such as the MET, FIT, Cooper Hewitt, as well as meeting with professionals working in the fashion industry (designers, creative directors, department store buyers, journalists and photographers). Students will also and participate in the many lectures and international conferences organized at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Students will be encouraged to develop a theoretical and rigorous framework that will enable them to conduct research for their final thesis.

The Fashion track of the MA in Liberal Studies is coordinated by Professor Eugenia Paulicelli (epaulicelli@gc.cuny.edu).

Introduction:
Attempting to manage both work and family responsibilities has become an increasingly challenging and pressing issue for many people. Because these issues are so timely and important, they have captured the attention of many academic scholars, resulting in a large body of literature about work and family issues. The aim of the Psychology of Work & Family MALS Track is to explore a variety of topics and approaches to understanding work and family issues, and to prepare students to pursue further studies relating to their individual interests. Adopting a multi-disciplinary lens, these ideas are discussed from an individual, organizational, and broader cultural/cross-national perspective drawing from psychology, sociology, political science, economics, and other relevant disciplines.

Degree Requirements:
This Master’s degree program includes a required introductory course (introduction to graduate liberal studies), two required core courses to introduce the student to Work and Family topics, and six courses of the student’s choice, plus the final thesis (or project). These courses will provide a total of 30 credits for the Master’s degree and are designed to conform with similar requirements of the other concentrations currently offered by the MALS Program.

The two core courses will provide the student with multiple perspectives on work and family issues in order to prepare her/him to take advanced courses in psychology as well as other relevant disciplines.

• The first core course, Psychology of Work & Family: An Introduction, will emphasize the psychological aspects of work and family issues as they are experienced by the individual, such as conflicts between work and family roles, and will introduce the student to major work-family (or work-life) theories and research in the psychology literature. In addition, the course will cover organizational policies and programs that are designed to help employees manage work and family responsibilities.

• The second course, Cross-Cultural & Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives on Work & Family Issues, is designed to broaden the student’s perspectives and deepen her/his understanding of work and family issues. The course will extend beyond the individual level of analysis and take an international perspective by introducing the student to various aspects of context – including cultural, political, and socioeconomic aspects of context – that are critical for understanding individual work and family experiences, as well as broader policies and practices. In addition, the course will incorporate findings from other social science disciplines beyond psychology, including family studies, sociology, political science, and economics, each of which offers a unique perspective on work and family issues.

Together these two core courses are designed to expose students to a wide variety of contemporary work-family issues and also prepare students to pursue their individual interests related to work and family. Examples of relevant topics include gender, families, children, careers, organizations, cultures, globalization, social policies, health, and various aspects of diversity (e.g., race, socioeconomic status, and disabilities). Students may deepen their understanding of topics that interest them through the wide selection of relevant elective courses, which are currently offered at the Graduate Center, as well as their thesis research.

Questions about the MALS track in the Psychology of work and Family may be directed to liberalstudies@gc.cuny.edu.

cc-licensed photo by ebis50

We’re pleased to report that the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies recently received approval for five new tracks of study, all set to begin in the Fall 2012 semester:

Africana Studies
Archaeology of the Classical, Late Antique, and Islamic Worlds
Digital Humanities
Psychology of Work and Family
Science and Technology Studies

Stay tuned for fuller descriptions of each of these new tracks. In the meantime, please contact us with any questions you might have.

Learning how to read and write at the graduate level means learning how to identify, analyze, and participate in different disciplinary conversations.   The goal of this course is to introduce students to these conversations by studying the scholarship on the secretarial profession.   At the beginning of the twentieth century, becoming a secretary was the career of choice for ambitious women from rural and immigrant backgrounds. Becoming a secretary offered an opportunity to figure out how to become urban, professional, American, and middle-class woman.   We will explore the way scholars from different disciplines understand this transformation and, in the process, develop our own self-awareness as writers and intellectuals who have something to contribute.

MALS 70000 – Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies
GC:   T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 6494, 3 credits, Rachel Brownstein, [17825]  

This course will introduce students to critical thinking and techniques of academic research and writing, as well as to the languages and methods of a variety of disciplines and kinds of interdisciplinary study.  Guest lecturers and readings by, e.g., Alan Bennett, Sven Birkerts, Natalie Zemon Davis, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Carlo Ginzburg, Michel Foucault, Virginia Woolf, and John Ruskin will introduce students to a spectrum of arguments, approaches, and prose styles. We will consider ways of reading and writing and arguments about books, the disciplines, and education. Students will become familiar with the library and data bases and genres of academic writing, such as the short summary, the more extended analysis, the conference paper, the annotated bibliography, the prospectus, and the thesis.

MALS 70100 – Narratives of New York:
Ancient Forms in New Worlds: The History and Archaeology of the Classical World in New York City
GC:   R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 7395, 3 credits, Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis, [17831] Cross listed with CLAS 74300 

This course introduces students to the critical issues and debates in the study of classical architecture and its reception through the lens of classically-inspired architecture of New York City. Specifically, this course considers major Greco-Roman building types and considers how and why American patrons, architects, and city planners re-interpreted, modified and deployed Greco-Roman forms in the construction of major buildings and monuments in New York City. The course also serves as an introduction to reception studies, its theories and methodologies. In this course, we will attempt to understand why Grand Central Station, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library, Grant’s Tomb, and other structures, drew upon Classical Architecture. This course uses New York City as a classroom to explore and understand Classical Architecture and the important role that Classical civilization has played in shaping New York’s architectural history. Comparative examples from other American and European cities will also be included in the discussions when appropriate.

The course is composed of a series of seminars that will meet at the Graduate Center and walking seminars where the class will visit specific monuments in order to learn how to study and look at buildings.

MALS 70400 – Cultural Studies and the Law:
Nonviolence and Social Movements in 20th-Century America: A Conversation
GC:   R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Robert Wechsler/Chris Caruso/ William Kelly [17844] Cross listed with ASCP 81500

The subject of the course is the centrality of nonviolence to the success of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s in the American South.   The course will focus on the Civil Rights Movement–how nonviolence, sometimes as a core philosophical tenet and sometimes with pragmatic appreciation of what would work, was employed to resist and eventually break the Jim Crow conditions of the South. The course will include primary and secondary literature on topics including the Long Civil Rights Movement, nonviolence theory, and biographies of some of the movement’s leaders; it will also include original interviews with people who were there before Montgomery and beyond, including Staughton Lynd, James Lawson, Bob Moses and many of the volunteers who went South from 1960  through 1965. The course will also consider the relevance of nonviolence as a tool for solving today’s problems and look at 21^st century cases.

MALS 70600 – Enlightenment and Critique
GC:   W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 7395, 3 credits, Sandi Cooper, [17827] 

Is the western world fated for decline? From Oswald Spengler in the 1920′s to the provocative Niall Ferguson, 2011, predictions of collapse of western civilization periodically grab headlines.

Is the western world the inimical enemy of Islam and do we live in a permanent battle ground of a “clash of cultures”? (Samuel Huntington)

Such assertions suggest that an exploration of what the concept of “western” means, how it evolved to assume its modern guise is in order.

This class will begin with readings describing the scientific revolution and the revolution in thinking in the 17-18th century, juxtaposed with the reality of popular culture and folk superstitions. It will move on to an exploration of the legacies that shaped “modernism” – for instance, the French Revolution legacy of liberty vs. equality; the application of the ideal of equality into socialism, especially the Marxian analysis; the demand to stretch freedom and equality to include women; the struggle to abolish warfare as a relic of an unenlightened past. Readings will come from primary documents and secondary analyses.

MALS 70800 – Transformations of Modernity:
Faking It: American Women Writers and the Masks of Modernism
GC:   W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. 8203, 3 credits, Hildegard Hoeller, [17834] Cross listed with ENGL 88000, ASCP 81500 & WSCP 81000

Why did Nella Larsen–if she did–”plagiarize” a story by Sheila Kaye-Smith, and why did she also write under a pseudonym? Why did Zora Neale Hurston “plagiarize”–if she did–an article about Cudjoe Lewis from Southern writer Emma Langdon Roche and then expand the piece after? And what masks did she wear in her letters and autobiography? And why was Roche interested in representing Cudjoe’s story, the story of the last surving African slave, which Hurston and Roche has also wanted to represent? Why did, as Michael North notes in The Dialect of Modernism, editors check whether the writer of “Melanctha” was indeed Getrude Stein, a white woman, before they considered it a valuable piece of modernist writing in “black” voice? And why did now forgotten Pulitzer Prize winning author Julia Peterkin– a white Southern plantation owner who had also chased after Cudjoe’s story–write in “black” voice? Why did Edith Wharton in one of her late fictions reimagine her roots as potentially less white than always imagined? And how “real” is the immigrant voice of Anzia Yezierska’s immigrant narrative Breadwinners? In this seminar we will explore these questions in the works–essays, fiction, letters, autobiographies–of early 20th century women writers (such as Stein, Larsen, Hurston, Wharton, Faucet, Hurst, Yezierska, Peterkin, Roche), and we will pay attention to their manipulations of their texts and the reader/writer contract within the rich critical context of modernism’s use of modes and strategies such as collage, textual borrowing, translation, ethnography, folklore, masking, and primitivism.

MALS 71000 – Forms of Life Writing
GC:   M, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. 5382, 3 credits, Ruth O’Brien, [17828] Cross listed with P SC 71903

This seminar explores different manifestations of storytelling as political performance, especially narrative, law, and contemporary political theory, with a particular eye to what is happening in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) now.  Life writing is often done in “real” time, such as during this type of protest movement.
 
The main form of life writing that this seminar considers is storytelling, which uses fiction to reveal how laws and the public policies behind them — such as the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990 and the Civil Rights Act (CRA) of 1964 — have been interpreted by the judiciary, and how its interpretation of these laws affects people’s daily lives.
 
Reading about someone’s experience in narrative form gives us a different vantage point than what a social-science monograph or data and statistics can provide. It underscores not only the magnitude and significance of topics studied by feminists (like patriarchy or sex discrimination) on an individual scale, but also the context and subtleties associated with these issues on a societal scale. It’s local, regional, and global all at once.
 
Narrative methodology does not make claims about universal truths or assert that there is only one way of “knowing about the world.” It accepts the subjectivity of the writer and the reader.  Narratives fulfill what feminist legal scholar Kathryn Abrams calls an “experiential epistemology.”
 
This seminar studies the different genres of storytelling and also acts as a workshop for each student’s artistic and activist expression (political performance), in terms of commentary (law), narrative, or both.  It focuses on life writing of populations that are vulnerable because of class, gender, sexuality, disability, or ethnic identities.

MALS 71500 – Critical Issues in International Studies:
African-American Writers Confront Africa and the Diaspora
GC:   W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 3209, 3 credits, Jerry Watts, [17830]

The course offers an in-depth overview of the ways in which twentieth-century Black American writers attempted to morally and politically engage the peoples and plight of the African Diaspora.  Some black writers confronted the African Diaspora in their roles as Christian missionaries.  Such figures included Alexander Crummell, a guiding influence on the young W.E. B. DuBois.  Crummell believed that black Americans could best help black Africa by elevating them culturally, i.e.: converting them to Christianity.  Despite his fondness for Crummell, W.E.B. DuBois believed that the drive to convert Africans to Christianity was but a handmaiden of European colonial domination.  As a consequence, DuBois became a major organizer in the struggle against European colonialization via his participation in various Pan-Africanist organizations.   Other black writers who supported an end to European colonial domination of Africa joined forces with the Garvey movement of the 1920s.  It was during the Harlem Renaissance that Countee Cullen penned his famous poem, “What is Africa to Me.”  Still others attached their names and creative products to radical anti-European colonial efforts coming out of England.  Figures such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston allowed their work to appear in Nancy Cunard’s famous anthology, Negro.  Hurston is unique in many ways for her outreach to the African Diaspora was premised on cultural exploration and exchange not advocacy of freedom from European colonial domination.  In Tell My Horse, Hurston offers a sympathetic if not reactionary and patronizing depiction of black life in Haiti and Jamaica.  Conversely, novelist Richard Wright was a staunch supporter of third world anti-colonialism.  In Black Power and The Color Curtain, Wright presented an anti-colonial thesis but one that did not validate traditional African cultures.  After all, Wright was a Marxist and though Marxists viewed capitalism as the primary “enemy”, they also believed that industrialization was the only road to progress.  We will study these writers and others in hopes of accessing the major ways in which black American writers confronted their ties to the African continent.    

MALS 72300 - Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies:  
Masculinity/Modernism/Migration
GC:   W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. 8202, 3 credits, Robert Reid-Pharr, [17835]  

In this seminar we will continue the work of those scholars intent upon placing the many aesthetic/intellectual structures grouped under the label, “Modernism,” into their social and historical contexts.  Most specifically, we will examine the ways that Modernism in the United States has been both produced—and productive of—long established, if continually changing, discourses of race, class, gender, and nationality.  With particular emphasis on the writing of African American male modernists: Chester Himes, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman we will examine the many ways that questions surrounding masculinity and travel (particularly migration) are shot through the “Modernist project.”  Finally we will address the ways that the black female novelist, Nella Larsen, responded to and resisted the masculinist modes she encountered.  Students will be required to write three short (ten page) essays addressing three of the four authors whom we will examine.

Week I: Introduction

Week II: Mark Morrisson, “Nationalism and the Modern American Canon, “in Walter Kalaidjian, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 12 – 35; Mark A. Sanders, “American Modernism and the New Negro Renaissance,” in Walter Kalaidjian, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 129 – 156; Jed Rasula, “Jazz and American Modernism,” in Walter Kalaidjian, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 157 – 176; Janet Lyon, “Gender and Sexuality,” in Walter Kalaidjian, ed. The Cambridge Companion to American Modernism, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 221 – 241.

Week III:  James Smethurst, The African American Roots of Modernism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

 Chester Himes

Week IV: Chester Himes, The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, the Early Years (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1971).

Week V: Chester Himes, My Life of Absurdity: The Autobiography of Chester Himes, the Later Years (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1976).

Claude McKay

Week VI: Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987).

Week VII: Claude McKay, Banjo (New York: Mariner Books, 1970).

Week VIII: Claude McKay,  A Long Way from Home (New York: Mariner Books, 1970).

 Wallace Thurman

 Week IX: Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry, (New York: Dover, 2008).

Week: X: Wallace Thurman, Infants of the Spring (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992).

Nella Larsen

Week XI: Thadious Davis, Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: A Woman’s Life Unveiled (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1994).

Week XII: Nella Larsen, Passing in The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen, Passing, Quicksand and the Stories (New York: Anchor, 2001).

Week XIII: Nella Larsen, Quicksand in The Complete Fiction of Nella Larsen, Passing, Quicksand, and the Stories.  (New York: Anchor, 2001).

MALS 73100- American Culture and Values:
Introduction to American Studies: Histories and Methods
GC:  W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. 4422, 3 credits, Kandice Chuh, [17255] Cross listed with ASCP 81000

This course is designed to provide entry to American studies, understood as an interdisciplinary academic field with attendant histories and methods. By collectively articulating its genealogies, students will work toward locating their individual critical interests and investments in relation to American studies.

What are the questions and issues animating American studies discourses? In what new directions should the field move? In what ways is interdisciplinarity central to both its major questions and its methods of pursuit? What does interdisciplinarity come to mean in and for American studies?

Anchoring texts for the course include Margo Canaday’s The Straight State; Alicia Camacho’s Migrant Imaginaries; Bethany Moreton’s To Serve God and Walmart; Ussama Makdisi’s Artillery of Heaven; Monique Truong’s Book of Salt; and Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler’s edited Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Other readings for the course will be made available on blackboard.

Students will be expected to write about 25-30 pages in total, distributed across two shorter and one longer assignment.

MALS 73200 – American Social Institutions
GC:   T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 3306, 3 credits, Martin Burke, [17833]

The purposes of this interdisciplinary course are three. First, it will examine a wide range of original source materials which have featured prominently in classic and contemporary analyses of American society and culture. Second, it will introduce class members to recent scholarship on selected topics in American history and related social sciences (anthropology, political science, sociology) from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries. Finally, it will encourage class members to become familiar with emerging online and interactive new media resources for doing advanced research in American cultural studies. Among the authors to be read are Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Edward Bellamy, W. E. B. DuBois, Jane Addams, Helen Lynd, C. Wright Mills, Michael Harrington, and Betty Friedan.

MALS 74300 – Bioethics: Policies and Cases
Autonomy and Liberty in Medicine
Sinai: T, 5:15-7:15 p.m., January 31 – May 22, 2011
3 credits, Rosamond Rhodes and Ian Holzman, [17843]  
Mount Sinai School of Medicine
1176 Fifth Avenue, 3^rd Floor, Newborn Medicine Conference Room

The concepts of “autonomy” and “liberty” have a significant place in medical and research ethics.  In the clinical realm, autonomy is the central concept in our appreciation of informed consent for treatment and in the assessment of decisional capacity.  In the context of research, many people see informed consent as the central factor in determining the ethical acceptability or unacceptability of research.  In public policy, liberty is at issue in legislation requiring vaccination, quarantine, or reporting of infectious disease.  Infringements on liberty are also involved in legislation that imposes limitations on abortion and reproductive choices, in our regulation of therapeutic and recreational drugs, and in the prohibition of physician-assisted suicide.  

This course will begin with discussion of the recent Abigail Alliance cases that argued in terms of liberty and autonomy for the release of Phase I trial drugs for use by people with terminal illnesses.  We will then examine how the issues of liberty and autonomy arise in the context of contemporary bioethics debates over:  personal responsibility for health, public health efforts to promote good health, public health surveillance, assessment of decisional capacity in adults and children, justified paternalism, forced treatment and forced confinement, abortion, embryo selection, life extension, physician-assisted suicide, selling transplant organs, vaccination and infectious disease containment, newborn screening, and genetic testing of children for adult onset diseases. With an appreciation of these controversies, we will go on to explore the philosophic concepts of autonomy and liberty themselves.  We shall read and discuss the work of classic (e.g., Aristotle, Kant) and contemporary authors in order to develop a clear understanding of how the terms are used and a platform for critiquing various positions.

Principle Texts:

Paul EF, Miller, FD, & Paul J, editors, Autonomy, Cambridge UP, 2003.

Christman J and Anderson J, editors, Autonomy and the Challenges to Liberalism: New Essays, Cambridge UP, 2005.

Rhodes R, Francis LP, and Silvers A, editors, The Blackwell Guide to Medical Ethics, Blackwell Publishing, 2007.

MALS 74300 – Bioethics: Policies and Cases
Medical Ethics
Sinai: M, 5:45-7:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Stefan Baumrin, [17842] Course meets at Mt. Sinai Hospital.  Cross listed with PHIL 77900

MALS 77100 – Aesthetics of Film
GC:   M, 4:15-8:15 p.m., Rm. C-419, 3 credits, Edward Miller, [17837] Cross listed with ART 79400, THEA 71400 & FSCP 81000

Ever since the Lumiere Brother’s train arrived at the station, film has been concerned with its own mechanics and meanings and the ways in which film not only captures the moment but transforms it, creating an impact upon its audience with distinct aesthetics.

This course highlights the self-referentiality of film and argues that a central aspect of the cinematic enterprise is the depiction of the filmmaking environment itself through the “meta-film.” Using this emphasis as an entry into aesthetics, the course involves students in graduate-level film discourse by providing them with a thorough understanding of the concepts that are needed to perform a detailed formal analysis.

The course’s main text is the ninth edition of Bordwell and Thompson’s Film Art (2009) and the book is used to examine such key topics as narrative and nonnarrative forms, mise-en-scene, composition, cinematography, camera movement, set design/location, color, duration, editing, sound/music, and genre.

In addition, we read key sections of Robert Stam’s Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (1992), Christopher Ames’ Movies about Movies: Hollywood Revisited (1997), Noth & Bishara’s Self-Reference in the Media (2007), John Thornton Caldwell’s Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film & Television (2008), and Lisa Konrath’s Metafilms: Forms and Functions of Self-Reflexivity in Postmodern Film (2010) in order to strengthen our understanding of the connections between aesthetics and reflexivity.

As part of the course we construct a taxonomy of films that focus on the landscape of the filmmaking terrain itself. As such, we watch Thanhouser and Marston’s Evidence of the Film (1913), Charlie Chaplin’s The Masquerader (1914), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Donen and Kelly’s Singing in the Rain (1952), Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (1960), Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963), Francois Truffaut’s Day for Night (1973), Robert Altman’s The Player (1991), Tom DeCillo’s Living in Oblivion (1995), P.T. Anderson’s Boogie Nights (1998), David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind (2008), and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008).

Students are expected to write a short weekly response to the reading and screening. The 12-15 page final paper is a formal analysis of a film that foregrounds cinematic production.

MALS 77200 – History of Cinema I
GC:   T, 6:30-9:30 p.m., Rm. C-419, 3 credits, Alison Griffiths, [17838] Cross listed with ART 79500, THEA 71500 & FSCP 81000

Course Description: Film History I provides students with an overview of precinema, early cinema and silent film, considering both American filmmaking and European national cinemas.

Beginning with an examination of nineteenth century philosophical toys and the serial photography of Edweard Muybridge and Etienne Jules-Marey, the course traces the development of film from 1894 through to the advent of sound in 1927.

Following an analysis of early film (pre-1907), including the work of Edison, Porter, the Lumiere Bros., Melies, Pathe, and members of the Brighton School in the UK, the course takes up the major figures of Griffith, Micheaux, Flaherty, Eisenstein, Stroheim, and Dreyer who were critical in exploring the creative (and discursive) possibilities of film form in the silent era.

Topics covered during the course include: American “race” cinema of the 1920s, early documentary film, Soviet filmmaking, Weimar cinema, and Hollywood silent comedy. The course is structured as an advanced seminar with 100% attendance expected, active and frequent student participation, and critical engagement with the readings since lecturing will be kept to a minimum.

Course Requirements: Three reading response papers (2-3pp) [15%]. Reading discussant (leading discussion of readings from a week you sign up for [10%]. Research paper (18-20pp): original research on a topic approved by me and submit an 18-20pp final paper [65%]. Oral presentation of the final research paper [10%]

Course Readings and Screenings: Required Texts: Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer, eds., The Silent Cinema Reader (London: Routledge, 2003). [hereafter SCR]

Other required readings available on E-reserve at Mina Rees Graduate Center Library. Recommended readings are not on E-reserve unless indicated. Course code for accessing books is: Books and films owned by the Graduate Center will be placed on reserve for the duration of the course.

Film Screenings: Given the length of certain films, it is impossible to screen them in their entirely during the class meeting. I therefore recommend you try and view titles prior to the class meeting. Most of the film shown in class are either owned by the Graduate Center (where they are on reserve) or can be rented from Netflix, Kim’s Video, or even Blockbusters. You will find the excerpts from films shown in class infinitely more satisfying (and meaningful) if you are familiar with the larger work they are drawn from.

MALS 78100 – The Digital Humanities in Research and Teaching
GC:   W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 7395, 3 credits, Stephen Brier/Matthew K. Gold, [17829]

The dramatic growth of the Digital Humanities (DH) over the past half dozen years has helped scholars re-imagine the very nature and forms of academic research and teaching across a range of scholarly disciplines, encompassing the arts, the interpretive social sciences, and traditional humanities subject areas. This course will explore the history of the digital humanities, focusing especially on the diverse pioneering projects and core texts that ground this innovative methodological and conceptual approach to scholarly inquiry and teaching.  It will also emphasize ongoing debates in the digital humanities, such as the problem of defining the digital humanities, the question of whether DH has (or needs) theoretical grounding, controversies over new models of peer review for digital scholarship, issues related to collaborative labor on digital projects, and the problematic questions surrounding research involving “big data.” The course will also emphasize the ways in which DH has helped transform the nature of academic teaching and pedagogy in the contemporary university with its emphasis on collaborative, student-centered and digital learning environments and approaches. Along the way, we will discuss broad social, legal and ethical questions and concerns surrounding digital media and contemporary culture, including privacy, intellectual property, and open/public access to knowledge and scholarship. Students will be expected to participate actively in class discussions and online postings (including on blogs and wikis) and to research and write a final multimedia presentation on a key topic in the digital humanities. Students completing the course will gain broad knowledge about and understanding of the emerging role of the digital humanities across several academic disciplines and will begin to learn some of the fundamental skills used often in digital humanities projects.

MALS 78200 – The Politics of Contemporary Urban Education
GC:   T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 3306, 3 credits, Judith Kafka, [17836]

This class investigates the social, economic and political forces that shape contemporary urban education, focusing on school reform as a political, rather than technical, construct.  We will consider historical and contemporary efforts to reform urban public schooling, locating those efforts within a wider political arena.  The class will examine how both local and national political dynamics have helped shape and drive varying school reform strategies, including market-based choice models, state and federal accountability programs, changes to school funding mechanisms, and mayoral control.  Particular attention will be paid to issues of race and class as frames for understanding the politics of urban education.

MALS 79600 – Thesis Workshop
GC:   T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 6300, 1 credit, Shifra Sharlin, [16834]

The goal of this workshop is to help students at any point in the thesis-writing process by reading each others’ work and reflecting on the writing and research process.

http://www.kbnewsletter.com/t/ViewEmail/r/26AD82B6CEEED8DD/E93C0FC1CE50C1AA05AF428974F65BCD

CITY ROOM: At Mass, N.Y. Archbishop Is Silent on Gay Marriage, by Mick Meenan,

a Liberal Studies student currently working on his MA thesis.

http://nyti.ms/k8lsAh

MALS 70000 – Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies

GC:   M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 6421, 3 credits, Prof. Joseph, [15941]

This required course will introduce students to interdisciplinary study and study within the disciplines as pursued in the MALS program and other programs, as well as to debates within the discipline Special attention will be paid to the nuts and bolts of graduate study, e.g. the genres of academic writing such as conference papers, the prospectus and the thesis.

MALS 70000 – Introduction to Graduate Liberal Studies

Learning how to read and write on the graduate level means learning how to identify, analyze, and participate in different disciplinary conversations.   The goal of this course is to introduce students to these conversations by studying the scholarship on the secretarial profession.   At the beginning of the twentieth century, becoming a secretary was the career of choice for ambitious women from rural and immigrant backgrounds. Becoming secretaries offered an opportunity to figure out how to become urban, professional, American, and middle-class women.   We will explore the way scholars from different disciplines understand this transformation and, in the process,  develop our own self-awareness as writers and intellectuals who have something to contribute.

MALS  70200 – Political/Historical/Sociological Profile of NYC

GC:   W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 3306, 3 credits, Prof. Lobel, [15929]

This interdisciplinary course will explore New York City’s rise and role as the nation’s metropolis, examining several key themes in the city’s development.  In particular, we will look at Gotham as a center of work, culture and residency as well as at the diverse populations that have called the city home through its four-decade history.  We will examine New York City from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, including history, sociology, anthropology, economics, and political science.

MALS 70500 – Classical Culture

GC:   R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 8203, 3 credits, Prof. Marianetti, [15930]  

The course will be a survey of selected pieces of ancient literature and legend that have subsequently influenced Western civilization. The chosen literary works will be analyzed from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining literature, history, archaeology, religion, culture, politics and philosophy. Certain universal issues will be considered as they are conveyed through the literary genres. The class will concentrate upon a thorough examination and discussion of the following primary sources: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Hesiod’s Theogony, Homer’s Odyssey, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Oedipus Cycle (the Theban plays), Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis, Aristophanes’ The Clouds, Plato’s Apology and Symposium and Virgil’s Aeneid. Course Program: 1 September Introduction to Class Objectives and Requirements 8 September The Epic of Gilgamesh 15 September Hesiod’s Theogony 22 September Homer’s Odyssey (I-XII) 29 September NO CLASS 6 October Homer’s Odyssey (XIII-XXIV) 13 October Aischylos’ Agamemnon 20 October Aischylos’ Choephoroi and Eumenides 27 October Sophocles’ Oidipous Rex FIRST PAPER DUE 3 November Sophocles’ Antigone and Oidipous at Colonus 10 November Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis 17 November Aristophanes’ The Clouds 24 November NO CLASS 1 December Plato’s Apology and Symposium 6 December Virgil’s Aeneid (I-VI); Virgil’s Aeneid (VII-XII) SECOND PAPER DUE Grading/Class Requirements: 90-100=A 80-89=B 70-79=C 60-69=D 0-59=F first paper 25% second paper 25% attendance/participation 50% All of you are responsible for having read the weekly assignment so that we can discuss its content. Each week, in addition, one or two students will present articles from secondary sources about the particular play, work and author. Although I will provide you with an extensive bibliography for each literal piece and ancient author we examine, I urge you to spend sufficient time in the library doing research on what is being the most updated information on the authors of your preference. This exercise will benefit you as it will form a preparatory stage in doing research for your Master’s thesis or your PhD dissertation. Absences are not recommended. Verbal and physical participation is required. I do not give extra credit projects. I do not accept late papers. I look forward to having an enjoyable and cooperative semester with all of you!!!!!!

Great dialogues of Plato tr. By W.H.D. Rouse (Signet Classics)

Hesiod’s Theogony  tr. By Richard Caldwell (Focus Classical Library)

Aristophanes, The Clouds: An Annotated Translation tr. By M. Marianetti (Univ. Press of America)

The Odyssey of Homer tr. by Richmond Lattimore (Perennial Classics)

Euripides IV tr. by R. Lattimore and David Green (The Univ. of Chicago Press)

Virgil’s Aeneid tr. By David West (Penguin Classics)

Sophocles The Three Theban Plays tr. By Robert Fagles (Penguin classics)

Aeschylus The Oresteia tr. By Robert Fagles (Penguin Classics)

H. D. F. Kitto, The Greeks (Penguin Classics)

D. Jackson, The Epic of Gilgamesh (Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers)

MALS 70700 – The Shaping of Modernity, 1789-1914

GC:   T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 4433, 3 credits, Prof. Gordon, [15931]  

Political liberty is the most pressing demand in much of the world today.  It is not easy to achieve.   Hatred of being oppressed is not the same as hatred of oppression itself.  To hate a tyrant is not to love liberty; love of individual rights and personal freedom is also required.  Nineteenth-century Europe was a laboratory for the development of both modern democracy and dictatorship.  This course will examine the political, economic and social forces that lay the foundation for liberal democracy, fascist and communist dictatorship, two world wars and the Holocaust in the twentieth century.  It will in particular focus on the evolution of democratic process in France through two empires, two monarchies and three republics, the development of a social welfare state in authoritarian Germany, and the transformation of traditional Britain government into a genuine democracy, all against a background of unprecedented economic growth and violent social change.  Special attention will also be paid to the social and political pathologies of Tsarist Russia and Austria-Hungary, an empire that one author called “a laboratory for the destruction of the human race,” and whose sad history was a harbinger of so many murderous events in our own time.

MALS 70900 – Approaches to Life Writing

GC:   W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 8202, 3 credits, Prof. Hintz, [15932]

This course will explore the narrative nature of life writing, with attention to point of view, tone and narrative structure. Throughout the course, we will try to define the main genres of life writing (biography, autobiography, letters and diaries)—with the awareness that the distinction between these forms is anything but clear. Much of the course will be devoted to experiments in life writing forms (from the modernist period forward) and the link between novels and life writing. Secondary readings will include writings by Samuel Johnson, James Olney, Georges Gusdorf, Peggy Kamuf, Carolyn Heilbrun, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Carl Rollyson, and Paul John Eakin.

MALS 71200 – The Culture of Fashion: Clothing Culture of Early Modern Italy and England

GC:   R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 3309, 3 credits, Profs. Paulicelli/Fisher, [15943] Cross listed with ENGL 82100 & RSCP 83100.  

 This course will examine the clothing culture of early modern Italy and England. During this period, “fashion” was much broader than a simple notion of dress; it could refer to a wide variety of things like behavior and manners, and even to national character and identity.  Thus, fashion became an important institution of modernity. This course will investigate how and where fashion came to the fore, establishing itself as a threat to morality and religious belief, and serving as a vehicle for gender, class and ethnic definitions. We will draw on a broad interdisciplinary framework and discuss sources from both the English and Italian literary traditions (although all the reading will be in English). We will examine texts from many different genres, including costume books, plays, poetry, novellas, treatises, and satires. We will also be analyzing early modern visual and material culture. We will ultimately consider how dress (and other types of ornamentation that covered the body) became a cause for concern for the Church and State. These institutions sought to regulate individual vanity and any desire to transgress the accepted societal codes.

POSSIBLE TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION WILL INCLUDE:

• The sumptuary laws from the period that prescribed the types and styles of fabrics that could be worn by persons of various ranks.

•The importance of clothing and fashion in court culture, especially as discussed by Castiglione’s The Courtier.

•The significance of clothing and accessories in public space. In hierarchical environments, but also the street, rituals, parades, spectacles etc.

•The significance of costumes on the early modern stage, both symbolically and materially.

 •The role that accessories of dress like the codpiece and farthingale played in materializing masculinity and femininity, as well as the cultural context and significance of gendered crossdressing (both inside and outside the theatrical context).

•The use of cosmetics, and especially their relationship to the formation of racial ideals.

•The practice of forcing members of religious groups to wear specific forms of dress (Shylock, for example, mentions his “Jewish gabardine” in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice).

 •The erotics of dress in love poetry, and in everyday life.

POSSIBLE READINGS WILL INCLUDE:

English texts such as William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night; Ben Jonson’s Volpone; the poetry of Robert Herrick; polemical pamphlets about crossdressing such as Hic Mulier and Haec Vir.

Italian texts such as Baldassare Castiglione’s The Courtier; excerpts from Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni di tutto il mondo and Giacomo’s Franco’s Habiti; Pietro Aretino’s The School of Whoredom, Arcangela Tarabotti’s, Antisatira

MALS 71400 – Introduction to International Studies

GC:   R, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 3305, 3 credits, Prof. Hattori, [15933]

The two main purposes of this course are to introduce you to theoretically informed historical analyses of international relations (IR) and to help you apply one of the theories of IR to an international subject of your choice.  While the historical contexts and theories of IR will help you engage in further studies in IR, your paper will enhance your understanding of how you may gain social scientific knowledge by reviewing relevant theoretical literature, conceptualizing your subject matter, developing research questions, figuring out how to answer them, gathering information about them, organizing the research result as evidence for your answer to the research question, and developing your answer as an argument about a particular phenomenon or relationship on the chosen topic in the context of existing theoretical arguments. 

MALS 72100 – Feminist Texts and Theories

GC:   T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. 3212, 3 credits, Profs. Cole/Lee, [15934] Cross listed with WSCP 81001.

This course provides a broad overview of the issues and texts of Women’s Studies. The instructors will use an interdisciplinary approach to consider some of the themes, questions, methodologies, and findings of Women’s Studies scholarship. The course will cover a selection of feminist texts, taken from both literary and social science sources, and also classic and contemporary theoretical works. In addition, students will explore the ways in which the field of women’s studies has raised new questions and brought new perspectives to those areas where the humanities and social and behavioral sciences intersect, with material which is interdisciplinary in nature and frequently poses a challenge to conventional disciplinary boundaries.

MALS 73100 – American Culture & Values

GC:   M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. 3209, 3 credits, Prof. Singer, [15935] Cross listed with ASCP 81000.    

In this course, we will focus on a variety of literary and film titles as we explore complex eruptions and erasures of American identity as it is revealed, or rather manufactured, in varieties of narrative forms. From the early captivity narratives, to Emily Dickinson, and up to the graphic novel, this course will present perspectives on the complex issue of national identity. Particular attention will be given to evaluating the manner in which literature interrelates with other media and how each venue reflects cultural and historical ideologies. For example, what makes a text “American”? How does literature from the past comment on the present? Are literary and film narratives mirrors or x-rays into the nation’s psyche?

Course requirements include active participation in discussions, an oral presentation, and one paper (approx. 20 pages) which critically interprets the assignments/new material.

Preliminary Reading List–THIS WILL BE UPDATED IN EARLY AUGUST Riverside Editions: American Captivity Narratives Wheatley’s Complete Writings Douglass’ Narrative of the Life Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Whitman’s Leaves of Grass Poe’s Collected Stories and Poetry Dickinson’s Collected Poems Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills Plath’s Ariel Albee’s The Zoo Story/American Dream

MALS  74100 – The Conceptual Structure of Science

GC:   T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 4433, 3 credits, Prof. Dauben, [15936] Cross listed with HIST 78400.

This course will survey the rise of modern science from Copernicus to Newton, the period of intellectual ferment in the 16th and 17th centuries generally referred to as the Scientific Revolution. In addition to charting the advance of astronomy and physics through the works of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Boyle, Newton and Leibniz, the revolution in biology associated with Vesalius, Harvey and others will also be considered, along with related questions in the history of botany, medicine and iatrochemistry.

The emphasis in this course will be upon texts, a careful reading of the original scientific “classics,” along with diaries and letters where they survive, in order to evaluate as much as possible from primary sources the most important factors that motivated and inspired the creators of modern science. In assessing the social role the “new” science played, the disturbingly unfamiliar world in which philosophical, religious and even political principles were called into question will also be examined.

MALS  74300 – Research Ethics Sini: M, 5:30-7:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rhodes, [15942] Course meets at Mt. Sinai.  Cross listed with PHIL 77700.

Learning Objectives: By the end of this course participants should be able to: – Refer to the historical evolution of research ethics and the development of protections for human subjects. – Identify and employ the guiding principles of research ethics. – Evaluate clinical studies in terms of ethical considerations. – Review the research ethics literature and use it in addressing questions related to clinical research. – Justify decisions about the ethical conduct of research in terms of reasons that other reasonable scientists should accept.

MALS  77200 – Film History II

GC:   W, 2:00-6:00 p.m., Rm. C419, 3 credits, Prof. Massood, [15937] Cross listed with FSCP 81000 & THEA 71600.

This course is devoted to intensive analysis of the international development of cinema as a medium and art form from the early sound years (1930 onward) to the present. We will concentrate on major film tendencies and aesthetic and political developments through a close examination of individual film texts.

Subjects covered will include Hollywood filmmaking during the Depression years, French Poetic Realism, Italian Neorealism, melodrama and other postwar Hollywood genres, the rise of global “new waves” (including French, Latin American, and German filmmaking movements from the late-1950s through the 1970s) and modernist tendencies in international cinema.

We will also examine the rise of American independent filmmaking, recent global cinema trends, and the effects of new digital technologies on visual and narrative aesthetics.

Emphasis will be placed on the major historical currents of each period and on changes in aesthetic, political and industrial context.

Required Texts:

Required: David A. Cook. A History of Narrative Film. 3rd ed. New York: Norton, 1996. Available through the GC Virtual Bookshop. Scheduled films and supplemental readings ® are on reserve in the library.

Recommended books and additional films are listed in the syllabus, available in the Certificate Programs office (Room 5110).

Please note: Students are not required to purchase recommended texts or view all the suggested films.

Course Requirements:

Writing Assignments:
1) 8pp. essay on prearranged topic. (40%)
2) 15pp. final essay on topic of choice. (50%)

Discussion Questions:
Each week, two students will be required to prepare two questions each to initiate class discussion on the scheduled reading and screening. (10%)

Class sessions will begin promptly at 2:00pm and will last, unless otherwise noted, until 6:00pm. Please be prepared to attend the entire class.

MALS  78100 – Issues in Urban Education

GC:   W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. 7314, 3 credits, Prof. Rogers, [16435]

MALS 79000 – Thesis Research

3 credits, Faculty

MALS 79600 – Thesis Workshop

GC:   T, 4:15-6:15 p.m.,  Rm. 3305, 1 credit, Prof. Sharlin, [16834]

The goal of this workshop is to help students at any point in the thesis-writing process by reading each others’ work and reflecting on the writing and research process. 

“I was interested in Foucault’s theories about identities being created out of historical circumstances, and started to read outside of class about what those historical circumstances had been for our modern identity categories.” 

 The product of her efforts, a thesis entitled “Common Histories: Genealogies of Modern Categories of Gender, Sexuality, and Race,” explores, according to its author, how “the many ways in which our modern methods of classifying humans have been socially and culturally created.”  Written under the supervision of Professor Steven Kruger in the English Department, the thesis moves from tracing the nascence of the modern category of “homosexual” in the late 19^th century to the sexualization of racial categories and, finally, to the emergence in the last century of the category “transgender” and an investigation of the socio-cultural forces through which it was shaped. 

After wrapping up her work for the program Ms. Erickson-Schroth returned to Dartmouth, graduating with her medical degree in June of this year.  She currently serves as the Director of Student Programming for the American Medical Student Association where, among other things, her responsibilities include promoting activism and student organizing around health care issues.  In addition, she is busy preparing a proposal for an edited volume—tentatively entitled Trans Bodies, Trans Selves—that will act as “a resource guide for the transgender population, covering health, legal issues, cultural and social questions, history, theory, and more.”  As envisioned, the book will provide “a place for transgender people, their partners and families, students, professors, guidance counselors, and others to look for up-to-date information on transgender life.”  

We congratulate Ms. Erickson-Schroth on her accomplishments, and thank her for the unique, significant, and timely contributions she is in the process of making to the vitality of the communities that she serves.

The new track also provides the kind of flexibility that characterizes the other MALS concentrations and which has helped the program establish a strong presence at The Graduate Center and beyond.  Participants will take two core courses as required by the program guidelines, and can fulfill their remaining credit requirements by taking additional classes within the program or in outside departments.  According to Professor Singer, New York Studies has been planned to serve as “a bridge into other disciplines” and will to this end provide students with resources that will enable them to “take advantage of the research facilities and deep pool of scholarly talent at The Graduate Center.”    

‘Narratives of NYC: Literature and the Visual Arts’ (MALS 70100) is the first of the concentration’s core courses and will be taught by Professor Singer this spring.  Its focus will be on exploring representations of the city and of its people, places, spaces, and history in different narrative forms.  As its title suggests, the course will emphasize in particular literature’s relationship to film and other visual media.  Professor Cindy Lobel of the History Department at Lehman College will teach the second core course this fall.  ‘Metropolis: A Political, Historical, and Sociological Profile of NYC’ (MALS 70200) will pick up where ‘Narratives’ left off, by widening the set of genre- and subject-specific orientations and tools that can be used during thesis preparation and taken into further coursework.

Faculties at The Graduate Center have truly made it an excellent place to be immersed in interdisciplinary study of the city.  Courses have recently been given, for example, in the Art, English, Theater, Anthropology, Political Science, and Sociology departments directly engaging issues that are uniquely urban or bear especially on the life of the Big Apple, even as these were often situated in webs of broader concerns.  Promoting and extending precisely this kind of work, The Graduate Center houses, among many other research centers and institutes, the Gotham Center for New York City History; the Center for Urban Education Policy; and the Center for Urban Research.         

Thus supported, the New York Studies concentration is poised to have a wide appeal both within the current student body and without.  Its organizers, including Professors Singer, Lobel, the MALS departmental leadership and administrative staff, anticipate that it will attract educators from the city and surrounding areas, city employees, a diverse collection of national and international students, and more generally those with abiding interests in things NYC who would like to explore their interests in the atmosphere of inquiry cultivated at The Graduate Center.  The New York Studies concentration, if it proves to be anything like its namesake, will thrive by facilitating the growth of mutual recognition and shared commitment in the name of the distinctions such interests can achieve.