Sociology

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

In her study of transnational adoptees, Eleana Kim noted the profound differences between discourses about the immigration of Chinese brides to the United States and those describing the arrival of adopted Chinese baby girls: the former with suspicion and the latter with joy. Two ways that families form are by bringing in spouses and by having children. We tend to assume that family building involves deeply personal, intimate, and even “natural” acts; but, in actual practice, the pragmatics of forming (and disbanding) families are much more complex. There are many instances where biological pregnancy is not possible or not chosen, and there are biological parents who are unable to rear their offspring. Social rules govern the acceptance or rejection of children in particular social groups, depending on factors such as the marital status of their parents or the enactment of appropriate rituals. Western notions of marriage prioritize compatibility between two individuals who choose each other based on love; but, in many parts of the world, selecting a suitable spouse and contracting a marriage is the business of entire kin networks. There is great variability, too, in what constitutes “suitable.” To marry a close relative or someone of the same gender may be deemed unnaturally close in some societies; marriage across great difference—such as age, race, nation, culture, or class—can also be problematic. And beyond the intimacies of couples and the interests of extended kin are the interests of the nation state. This lecture will examine the makings and meanings of kinship connections at multiple levels, from small communities to global movements. Topics will include the adoption and fostering of children, both locally and transnationally, in Peru, Chile, Spain, Italy, Ghana, the USA, China, and Korea. We will look at technologies of biological reproduction, including the global movement of genetic material in the business of transnational gestational surrogacy. We will look at the ways in which marriages are contracted in a variety of social and cultural settings, including China and Korea, and the ways they are configured by race, gender, and citizenship. Our questions will include: Who are “real” kin? Who can a person marry? Which children are “legitimate”? Why do we hear so little about birth mothers? What is the experience of families with transgender parents or children? What is the compulsion to find genetically connected “kin”? How many mothers can a person have? How is marriage connected to labor migration? Why are the people who care for children in foster care called “parents”? The materials for this class include literature, scholarly articles, ethnographic accounts, historical documents, and film.

Faculty

• Mary A. Porter

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood Around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Faculty

• Robert R. Desjarlais

Open, Seminar—Spring

We are told, in one of the earliest accounts of the life and work of the Netherlandish artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525-1569), that his prints and paintings elicited laughter. From pictures of carnival celebrations and children’s games to peasant weddings and riotous hellscapes, the comic artist makes his viewers, both in the late 16th century and today, question whether any of it should be taken seriously. This course will explore the humor element in the work of Bruegel and many others in early modern Europe, examining the possible beginnings of a recognition of the artistic value of comedy and the contributions of these artists to the culture of laughter. Following art historians, as well as cultural historians who have theorized about the emergence of new comic techniques and the impulse to produce pictures in a “comic mode,” we will explore innovative creative practices and the social contexts of humor throughout Europe—from Bruegel in the Netherlands to Annibale Carracci in Italy to Albrecht Dürer in Germany to Jacques Callot in France and beyond. Topics of discussion will include early modern medical perspectives on laughter, shifting notions about humor in relation to civility and decorum, the functions of tragicomedy, the secularization of the image, and the dual roles of entertainment and didacticism in art. This course will involve visits to area museums to study paintings and prints in person.

Faculty

• Katherine Gobel Hardy

First-Year Studies—Year

What do TikTok, Bitcoin, ChatGPT, self-driving vehicles, and Zoom have in common? The answer lies in this course, which focuses on how digital technologies have rapidly altered (and continue to alter) daily life. In this course, we will develop a series of core principles that attempt to explain the rapid change and forge a reasoned path to the future. We will begin with a brief history of privacy, private property, and privacy law. Two examples of early 20th-century technologies that required legal thinking to evolve are whether a pilot (and passengers) of a plane are trespassing when the plane flies over someone's backyard and whether the police can listen to a phone call from a phone booth (remember those?) without a warrant. Quickly, we will arrive in the age of information and can update those conundrums: A drone flies by with an infrared camera. A copyrighted video is viewed on YouTube via public WiFi. A hateful comment is posted on reddit. A playful TikTok is taken out of context and goes viral for all to see. An illicit transaction involving Bitcoin is made between seemingly anonymous parties via Venmo. A famous musician infuriates their fanbase by releasing a song supporting an authoritarian politician—but it turns out to be a deepfake. A core tension in the course is whether and how the internet should be regulated and how to strike a balance among privacy, security, and free speech. We will consider major US Supreme Court cases that chart slow-motion government reaction to the high-speed change of today's wired world. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

Faculty

• Michael Siff

First-Year Studies—Year

When we encounter dancing, what are we seeing, experiencing, and understanding? How do current representations of dance reflect, perpetuate, and/or disrupt familiar assumptions about personal and social realities? Embedded historical ideas and enforcements based on race, economic class, gender, social/sexual orientation, nationality/regional affiliation, and more are threaded through our daily lives. Performing arts inside and outside of popular culture often reinforce dominant cultural ideas and feelings. Can they also propose or inspire alternatives? In fall, we will view samples of dancing in film, video, digital media, television programs, and commercials, as well as live performance. These viewings—along with reading selected texts from the fields of dance and performance, literary criticism, feminist theory, queer theory, and cultural studies—will form the basis of class discussions and exercises. In spring, we will shift focus to viewing still images and live action with readings from additional fields, including art criticism and neuroscience, as well as fine-tuning approaches to writing about our subject matter. Students will complete several class assignments each semester, as well as develop one or more substantial lines of inquiry for conference work. Conference projects may draw upon multiple disciplines, including those within humanities and creative arts. The central aim of this course will be to cultivate informed discussion and to produce new knowledge, increasing both individual and collective capabilities. We will use academic research, along with personal experience, to advance our recognition of dance as an elemental art form and as a potentially important orientation in adjacent studies. In both fall and spring, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences.

Faculty

• Peggy Gould

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Fall

Data are everywhere, and data contain plenty of valuable hidden information that is waiting to be uncovered. How can we use data properly to help inform policy decisions? In this research workshop, we will learn the essential skills and contemporary methods for conducting applied studies of economic, political, social, and policy issues using data. We will discuss how to properly formulate a research hypothesis, how to select and organize quantitative data, how to construct relevant variables, how to select empirical research methods, and how to present and communicate your research findings. The course will cover a range of contemporary applied research methods that emphasize causal inference, including panel data, fixed effects, difference-in-difference, matching, Regression Discontinuity Design, instrumental variables, and so on. We will start with finding correlations among variables of interest (e.g., How do X and Y relate to each other?) but will focus more on making causal inferences (e.g., Does X cause Y?). We will learn Stata, a relatively advanced statistical package used widely by the social science and science research communities. The ultimate goal of the course will be to help students write a successful applied conference project. But first, do no harm!

Faculty

• An Li

Open, Small Lecture—Year

This seminar, broadly speaking, will cover introductory microeconomics and macroeconomics from a wide range of theoretical perspectives, including neoclassical, post-Keynesian, Marxian, feminist, and institutional political economy perspectives. The course will enable students to understand the more “technical aspects” of economics (e.g., usage of supply/demand analysis within and outside neoclassical economics), as well as significant economic history and the history of economic thought. Theoretical issues will be applied to contemporary policy debates such as industrial policy, foreign trade, global warming, and inequality.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

What factors determine the status of women in different societies and communities? What role is played by women’s labor, both inside and outside of the home? By cultural norms regarding sexuality and reproduction? By religious traditions? After a brief theoretical grounding, this course will address these questions by examining the economic, political, social, and cultural histories of women in the various racial/ethnic and class groupings that make up the United States. Topics to be explored include: the role of women in the Iroquois Confederation before white colonization and the factors that gave Iroquois women significant political and social power in their communities; the status of white colonist women in Puritan Massachusetts and the economic, religious, and other factors that led to the Salem witch trials of 1692; the position of African American women under slavery, including the gendered and racialized divisions of labor and reproduction; the growth of competitive capitalism in the North and the development of the “cult of true womanhood” in the rising middle class; the economic and political changes that accompanied the Civil War and Reconstruction and the complex relationships between African American and white women in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements; the creation of a landless agricultural labor force and the attempts to assimilate Chicana women into the dominant culture via “Americanization” programs; the conditions that encouraged Asian women’s immigration and their economic and social positions upon immigrating; the American labor movement and the complicated role organized labor has played in the lives of women of various racial/ethnic groups and classes; the impact of US colonial policies on Puerto Rican migration and Puerto Rican women’s economic and political status on both the Island and the mainland; the economic/political convulsions of the 20th century—from the trusts of the early 1900s to World War II—and their impact on diverse women’s paid and unpaid labor; the impact of changes in gendered economic roles on LGBT communities; the economic and political upheavals of the 1960s that led to the so-called “second wave” of the women’s movement; and the current position of women in the US economy and polity and the possibilities for more inclusive public policies concerning gender and family issues. In addition to class participation and the conference project, requirements for the course will include regular essays that synthesize class materials with written texts. Possibilities for conference work include traditional conference papers, group conference papers, “dialogue” papers, and on- or off-campus service projects.

Faculty

• Kim Christensen

Open, Large seminar—Fall

In this course, we will explore the power dynamics behind images and how they shape the way we see and experience the world. Drawing on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, we will examine how visuals—whether in art, film, or everyday life—are never neutral but, rather, always tied to politics. We will dive into works like Harun Farocki’s An Image, Tony Cooke’s Disco Inferno, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, Jean-Luc Godard’s radical cinema, and Brechtian approaches to audiovisual composition. Through these films and ideas, we will see how artists and filmmakers use images to challenge the status quo, resist dominant ideologies, and spark political change. With screenings and discussions, we will sharpen the ability to critically analyze the images that surround us and understand how they influence both political consciousness and personal identity. This course is a thought-provoking investigation into how images can manipulate, provoke, invent, and sometimes resist the political forces at play in our world.

Faculty

• Jazmín López

Open, Large seminar—Fall

This seminar will provide an interdisciplinary analysis of the phenomenon of propaganda and mass communications within modern society. How does propaganda “work”? How should we characterize the individuals and institutions that shape and disseminate it? What are the specific languages and visual symbols that propagandists have typically used to persuade and communicate with mass audiences? How have both “democratic” and “authoritarian” societies sought to generate consent? And how, in turn, have individuals and social groups drawn the line between what is truth and what is propaganda? Although the manipulation of information for political ends has been intrinsic to human societies across history, this course will focus on the so-called “axial age of propaganda”—beginning with World War I, which saw the emergence of tightly organized, large-scale, government-sponsored propaganda efforts across Europe and the United States. This course will utilize a variety of case studies to explore the symbolic content of specific kinds of propaganda and the institutional milieux that produce it, paying attention to propaganda that seeks both to overthrow social structures and to maintain them. We will place special emphasis on the interwar period, when—amid the onset of totalitarian regimes in Europe—the very nature of “public opinion” and mass society were hotly debated by intellectuals and interpretive experts. The course will also closely investigate the emergence of mass communications “experts” during World War II and trace their role in shaping social-science research throughout the Cold War. Finally, the course will consider the ubiquity of propaganda in contemporary society, focusing on the role of image-making professionals working in the spheres of political campaigning, advertising, and public relations. 

Faculty

• Matthew Ellis

Open, Seminar—Fall

This course is designed to help us understand and critique the meaning of violence in the modern era. Drawing on theoreticians of violence and case studies of events, we will explore a variety of types of violence and their impact on politics and society, with a particular focus on Europe and its colonies. At the center of this course will be a number of questions: Is violence modern or archaic? What are the causes and uses of violence? What are the costs of violence on both its perpetrators and its victims? What is the legacy of different kinds of violence? What can comparing different times and places tell us about the use of violence in different contexts? Topics covered will include the establishment of state control over violence, terror, terrorism, total war, The Holocaust, and attempts to come to terms with mass violence, among others.

Faculty

• Brandon Schechter

Open, Lecture—Year

By the 20th century, African Americans produced a distinctive ethos and aesthetic of pleasure not only in music and dance but also in sports and other creative arts. Artists like Paul Robeson, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Lester Young, Duke Ellington, and John Coltrane were paradigmatic in that cultural production. In turn, the blues ethos and jazz aesthetics influenced the African American imagination in social, political, economic, and cultural life, as well as in architecture and science.

Faculty

• Komozi Woodard

Open, Lecture—Spring

World War II led to destruction of such magnitude that the international order shifted fundamentally and new terms had to be coined to describe its violence. This course will examine the events that led to the war, the war itself, and its aftermath. It will begin with a chronological outline of the Great War, the interwar years, and the war itself and then shift to explore key themes such as The Holocaust, military life, women at war, the changing meaning of race and ethnicity, occupation, etc. This course will discuss battles and leaders, but its main focus will be on the impact of the war on culture, politics, and society. Students will be asked to think seriously about how these global events were experienced by what Stalin called “the little screws of history”—i.e., “ordinary people.” This course is really about them. Issues such as total war, genocide, occupation, the terrifying new technologies of the war, and soldier’s life in the different armies will be examined. We will also look at how, after the devastation of the war, people tried to make sense of what had happened. Politicians reacted by creating new laws and institutions, while artists painted, sculpted, and made films and authors turned to the page to understand what they had seen and done.

Faculty

• Brandon Schechter

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the unique role and power of memory in public life. Historians have sought to understand the innumerable ways that collective memory has been constructed, experienced, used, abused, debated, and reshaped. This course will focus on the rich literature on historical memory within the field of modern Middle Eastern history in order to explore a number of key questions: What is the relationship between history and memory? How are historical events interpreted and rendered socially meaningful? How is public knowledge about the past shaped and propagated? How and why—and in what contexts—do particular ways of seeing and remembering the past become attached to various political projects? Particular attention will be paid to the following topics: the role of memory in the Palestine-Israel “conflict”; postcolonial state-building and “official memory”; debates over national remembering, forgetting, and reconstruction following the Lebanese Civil War; Middle Eastern diaspora formation and exilic identity; the myth of a “golden age” of Arab nationalism; Turkish nostalgia for the Ottoman imperial past; and the role of museums, holidays, and other commemorative practices in the construction of the national past across the region. Throughout the course, we will attend to the complex interplay between individual and collective memory (and “countermemory”), particularly as this has played out in several formulations of Middle Eastern nationalism. 

Faculty

• Matthew Ellis

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

This course will aim to improve and perfect the students’ speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, as well as their knowledge of Italy’s contemporary culture and literature. In order to acquire the necessary knowledge of Italian grammar, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary, a review of all grammar will be carried out throughout the year. As an introduction to modern Italian culture and literature, students will be introduced to a selection of short stories, poems, and passages from novels, as well as specific newspaper articles, music, and films in the original language. Some of the literary works studied will include selections from Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Gianni Rodari, Marcello D’Orta, Clara Sereni, Dino Buzzati, Stefano Benni, Antonio Tabucchi, Alberto Moravia, Achille Campanile, and Elena Ferrante. In order to address the students’ writing skills, written compositions will be required as an integral part of the course. Biweekly conference topics might include the study of a particular author, literary text, film, or any other aspect of Italian society and culture that might be of interest to the student. In small groups, conversation classes will be held twice a week with the language assistant; students will have the opportunity to reinforce what they have learned in class and hone their ability to communicate in Italian. When appropriate, students will be directed to specific internship opportunities in the New York City area, centered on Italian language and culture. 

Faculty

• Tristana Rorandelli

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Contradictory assumptions about the relation of homosexuals to groups have dominated accounts of modern LGBT life. In Western Europe and the United States, from the late 19th century onward, queers have been presented as profoundly isolated persons—burdened by the conviction that they are the only ones ever to have had such feelings when they first realize their deviant desires and immediately separated by those desires from the families and cultures into which they were born. Yet, at the same time, these isolated individuals have been seen as inseparable from one another, part of a worldwide network always able to recognize their peers by means of mysterious signs decipherable only by other group members. Homosexuals were denounced as persons who did not contribute to society. Homosexuality was presented as the hedonistic choice of reckless, self-indulgent individualism over sober social good. Nevertheless, all homosexuals were implicated in a nefarious conspiracy, stealthily working through their web of connections to one another in order to take over the world or the political establishment of the United States; for example, its art world, theatre, or film industries. Such contradictions could still be seen in the battles that have raged since the 1970s, when queers began seeking public recognition of their lives within existing social institutions from the military to marriage. LGBT persons were routinely attacked as threats (whether to unit cohesion or the family) intent on destroying the groups they were working to openly join. In this class, we will use these contradictions as a framework for studying the complex social roles that queers have occupied alongside some of the complex social worlds that they have created—at different times and places and shaped by different understandings of gender, race, class, ethnicity, and nationality—within the United States over the past century and a half. Sources will include histories, sociological and anthropological studies, the writings of political activists, fiction, and film. 

Faculty

• Julie Abraham

Open, Seminar—Fall

Julian of Norwich is the earliest known woman to author a text in English. In 1373, at the age of “thirty and a half,” Julian fell severely ill. On the brink of death, she experienced a series of visions, which she recorded as her “short text” or Shewings. Sometime after her recovery, she chose a life of solitude as an anchorite; and for the next 40 years, Julian contemplated and elaborated on her visionary experiences. The result is her “long text,” A Revelation of Divine Love, which has been called “the most important work of Christian reflection in the English language.’ The journey of this course will begin with Julian’s Shewings and end with her Revelation—her writings serving as a lens to various traditions of medieval mysticism. Along the way, we will encounter the “intellectual” and “erotic” threads of mysticism woven throughout Jewish, Christian, and Islamic spirituality—from the philosophy of Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Solomon ibn Gabirol (Avicebron), and Augustine of Hippo to the poetry of Ibn Arabi, Dante, and Jewish mystics. Next, we will examine how monks and mendicants such as Richard of St. Victor, William of St. Thierry, and Bonaventure understood the intersection of human and divine love, how the knowledge of self leads to the knowledge of God. We will then pause at the fraught waystation of mysticism and heresy to examine how Meister Eckhart’s and Marguerite Porete’s teachings of the soul’s total union with God were met with institutional hostility and violence. Finally, we will land once again in medieval England. After surveying Julian’s English contemporaries, we will embark on a sustained close reading of her Revelation of Divine Love—now with preparation to see how she understood the purpose of her visionary experiences: “Who showed it thee? Love. What showed he thee? Love. Wherfore showed he it thee? For love.”

Faculty

• Joseph Romano

Open, Lecture—Year

What if the roots of English literature were not wholly English? How were the origins of Italian literature pollinated with Arabic philosophy? This course will explore these questions and more through two foundational texts—Dante’s Divine Comedy and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Often read in isolation, we will instead study these works together—in historical, intellectual, and comparative context—charting how the high tide of Italian literary culture reached the shores of medieval England, how Dante’s vernacular epic of the afterlife helped shape Chaucer’s vernacular epic of earthly life. In fall, we will focus on Dante, treating his formation as a poet and thinker as a window into the formation of Italian literature itself. We will explore his engagement with the Occitan, Sicilian, and Tuscan lyric traditions; his reading of Aristotle through Arabic and Latin commentators; and his response to the burgeoning—and fraught—political and intellectual climate of medieval Florence. Having immersed ourselves in the life, times, and mind of Dante, we will then turn to the Comedy itself, reading all three canticles—the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—with special attention to Dante’s evolving understanding of love and desire. In spring, we will turn to Chaucer and his role in inaugurating vernacular English literature through a rich, self-conscious dialogue with Dante and the other “corone,” or crowns, of Italian literature—Boccaccio and Petrarch. Chaucer’s travels to Genoa and Florence in 1373 and Milan in 1378 were formative for him as a person and poet. At a time when hardly anyone in England had heard of Dante, Boccaccio, or Petrarch, Chaucer read them in the original and responded to them by creating new literary forms. In doing so, Chaucer fashioned a future English literary audience; in a real sense, he wrote for us. We will read Chaucer’s House of Fame (a direct response to the Comedy) and Canterbury Tales, pairing each tale with its Italian analogues and influences. Throughout the year, we will practice comparative reading and source study, mapping how ideas and literary forms travel across, cultures, languages, and borders. In the process, we will encounter the profoundly interconnected intellectual world of Dante’s and Chaucer’s Middle Ages.

Faculty

• Joseph Romano

Open, Seminar—Spring

What is in a feeling, and what does it do? This course will explore how medieval writers understood the emotions—what they called the passions—as forces that move the soul, affect the mind, transform the body, and raise pressing questions about free will and moral responsibility. Because the passions operate at the threshold of the soul and body, virtually every domain of medieval thought had something to say about them—from poetry and medicine to philosophy and contemplative devotion. For instance, physicians like Peter of Spain diagnosed lovesickness and melancholia as genuine medical conditions. Philosophers like Aquinas compiled catalogues of the passions—from joy and sorrow to fear and courage to despair and hope—and offered phenomenological descriptions of how the passions arise through both embodied sensation and ensouled experience. Occitan troubadours like Arnaut Daniel and Italian lyric poets like Cavalcanti and Dante could write of love as the bondage of mind and will or the source of ethical nobility and spiritual freedom. (Dante did both.) Mystics like Walter Hilton and Julian of Norwich explored how emotional awareness could be refined into subtler modes of spiritual attention and how, at the same time, the inmost experience of divine love could be expressed as ecstatic, passionate feeling. In addition to the themes and writers above, this course will examine how the passions open onto questions of habitus and disposition—how repeated action shapes how we feel and how the way we repeatedly feel shapes our action. We will also consider how emotion is at the center of vice and virtue—how the quality of our feeling determines the quality of our inner life and our life with others. With the help of contemporary scholarship, we will approach the medieval passions with historical and phenomenological methods of analysis. Through these lenses, we will see how the passions in the Middle Ages serve as a unique site for comparative intellectual history, spanning disciplines and bridging ancient, medieval, and modern traditions. At the same time, studying the medieval passions offers something more personal: the chance to recover forms of feeling and attention from the past that might expand the borders of our own in the present.

Faculty

• Joseph Romano

Open, Lecture—Fall

Variance, correlation coefficient, regression analysis, statistical significance, and margin of error—these terms and other statistical phrases have been bantered about before and seen interspersed in news reports and research articles. But what do they mean? How are they used? And why are they so important? Serving as an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and reasoning central to the understanding of data, this course will focus on the fundamental methods of statistical analysis used to gain insight into diverse areas of human interest. The use, misuse, and abuse of statistics will be the central focus of the course; and specific topics of exploration will be drawn from experimental design theory, sampling theory, data analysis, and statistical inference. Applications will be considered in current events, business, psychology, politics, medicine, and many other areas of the natural and social sciences. Statistical software will be introduced and used extensively in this course, but no prior experience with spreadsheet technology is assumed. Group conferences, conducted in workshop mode, will serve to reinforce student understanding of the course material. This course is recommended for any student wishing to be a better-informed consumer of data, and strongly recommended for those planning to pursue advanced undergraduate or graduate research in the natural sciences or social sciences. 

Faculty

• Daniel King

Open, Lecture—Fall

This course will examine how music and its global circulation make the relationships between people audible. In the social contexts of listening and musical performance, we will understand how music and its movement across community-based, regional, and national boundaries shape people’s lives. As recordings, musicians, and ideas about music move, we will learn how they sound interpersonal relationships by using selected ethnographic examples of art and popular music from across Asia. Class topics may include Javanese gamelan, South Indian classical music, Japanese taiko, Southeast Asian heavy metal, Iranian pop, brass bands, Japanese hip hop, Bollywood, music from the Silk Road Project, world jazz, Japanese noise, K-pop, the music of M.I.A., World Music 2.0, and others. Course themes related to the circulation of music will include the ideology of tradition, cultural imperialism, sound technologies, and the more recent proliferation of cultural nationalisms that seek to impede circulation. By encountering musical diversity through listening and reading materials, students will develop the critical thinking skills to make connections between sonic and textual resources and to better understand the many ways in which music and sound are meaningful around the world. Participation in Solkattu, our Indian vocal percussion ensemble, or African Classics, our African popular music ensemble, is strongly encouraged. No prior musical experience is necessary.

Faculty

• Niko Higgins

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will look at the intersections of music, culture, and nature. We will study how artists and musicians use music and sound to address climate change by surveying important trends in the young field of ecomusicology, such as soundscape studies, environmental musical criticism, acoustic ecology, and animal musicalities. Themes will range from music versus sound and the cultural construction of nature to aurality and the efficacy of sonic activism. Class sessions may include Appalachian coal-mining songs, Indigenous music from the Arctic, art music composition, soundscapes, field recordings, birdsong, soundwalks, and musical responses to environmental crises such as Hurricane Katrina and the nuclear accident in Fukushima, Japan. Participation in the Solkattu Ensemble (Indian vocal percussion) is strongly encouraged. No prior experience in music is necessary.

Faculty

• Niko Higgins

Open, Seminar—Spring

What is education for? And what kind of human being does it aim to shape? This seminar will invite students to explore education not merely as a set of practices but, rather, as a reflection of our deepest convictions about human nature, freedom, and society. Through philosophical inquiry, students will develop critical, reflective, and ethically grounded perspectives on their role as educators. The seminar will be structured around four compelling visions of the human being, each giving rise to a distinct educational ideal and each delivering a pointed critique of dominant educational paradigms. Through readings in Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates, we will examine classical humanism and its belief in a universal human essence that education must actualize through the pursuit of virtue, fulfillment, and happiness. We will then turn to the Romantic-Naturalist tradition—Montaigne, Rousseau, and Fröbel—who emphasized the child’s innate goodness and warned against educational systems that suppress natural growth. The existentialist approach, represented by Nietzsche, Sartre, and Greene, shifts from self-realization to self-creation, challenging us to resist conformity. Finally, we will explore critical pedagogy through the works of Freire, Giroux, hooks, Arendt, and Adorno, who argue that education must address broader social injustices and guard against the political dangers of uncritical obedience. This seminar will offer students not only a rich encounter with the history of educational thought but also an invitation to take a stand—to reflect on who we are, who we aspire to become, and what kind of education might lead us there.

Faculty

• Yuval Eytan

First-Year Studies—Year

Winston Churchill purportedly remarked that “we shape our buildings; thereafter, they shape us,” suggesting that the built environment and geography, more generally, have a profound impact on society, culture, and politics. This course explicitly will take the study of politics and the social world out of the narrow and traditional views of political science—views that regularly see individuals as “atoms” that are, in the words of Kenneth Shepsle, “unconnected to the social structure in which he or she is embedded”—and, instead, look at how “politics and people” are embedded in particular spaces and places and networks are highly conditioned, based on specific locational qualities, histories, and features. This course rejects the idea that individuals are atoms and explicitly brings geography into the picture in our study of American politics at the start of the 21st century—in a moment of intense rancor and polarization. After examining theory and methodology, students will tackle a number of big issues that are hotly debated in academic, political, and policy circles vis-à-vis the built environment. One example is the ever-growing literature on geographic differences and regionalism in the United States as an underlying cause of American division and fractionalization. These geographic fissures do not fall along easy‐to‐map state lines but, rather, along a variety of regions in the United States that have been described and mapped by scholars in a number of social-science disciplines. We will examine and review a number of literatures and large amounts of localized data that will enable us to look more precisely into the numerous claims that there are nontrivial regional differences in terms of political beliefs, behaviors, and distinct regional political cultures. While American regions display varied histories and cultures, the question that we will attempt to answer is whether these histories and cultures have an impact on contemporary political attitudes, behaviors, and social values. We will take on similar empirical topics throughout the year, using many tools available from the social sciences—from GIS to historical election and economic data—to examine issues of welfare, mobility, and “hollowing out the middle”; employment; innovation; gerrymandering and issues of representation; competition over natural resources; mass transit and the impact of transportation and highways on sociopolitical development; and urban and rural differences. Many of these topics will be familiar, but the tools through which we examine them will be via a geospatial lens; and the way in which we understand the surrounding politics will, hopefully, be more complete when compared to the traditional lenses of political science. This seminar will be an open, nonpartisan forum for discussion and debate and, as such, driven by data, not dogma. We will use a variety of approaches based in logic and evidence to find answers to various puzzles about American policy and will treat this material as social scientists, not ideologues. Comfort with numbers and statistics is expected, and group work along with fieldwork will be a regular feature of this seminar. Biweekly in fall and spring, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities that will include research and fieldwork.

Faculty

• Samuel Abrams

Open, Seminar—Fall

How should societies commemorate and respond to past injustices that continue to impact community members? This course will investigate various approaches, including apology, repatriation, reparation, and remembrance. What is the best course of action in the aftermath of gross violations of human rights? Which responses are feasible in a particular context, and how might the possibilities shift over time? Where have repatriation efforts been successful? Why have reparations been won in some cases but not others? Our discussions will consider the needs of victims, as well as the interests of states and the possible contradictions between the two. We will focus on the role of power in the international system and international law, as well as the ways in which seemingly less powerful groups have engaged and challenged prominent domestic and international actors. Case studies will include, but are not limited to, Native American demands for the repatriation of remains, postcolonial states’ demands for the return of cultural artifacts, Jewish struggles for restitution in the aftermath of the Holocaust, Japanese American and African American campaigns for reparations, as well as debates over environmental reparations. We will also consider the role of art, narratives, and memorials in expanding discussion in each of these case studies.

Faculty

• Elke Zuern

Intermediate/Advanced, Online Seminar—Fall

At the end of the Cold War, many Western writers wrote triumphantly about the global victory of democracy and capitalism. In the last decade, we have been bombarded with news of autocrats, both at home and abroad, undermining democracy. Income and wealth inequality have been on the rise. At the same time, surveys in a number of high- and middle-income democracies show increasing dissatisfaction with democracy. This course will address both the promise and challenges of democracy. We will consider the connections between liberal democracy and market capitalism as they have reinforced and contradicted one another. We will explore the role of social movements, including on university campuses, in bringing about change and the alternative ideals that they have offered. In this moment of great significance for the future of American democracy, particular attention will be paid to the United States; but we will also consider a set of powerful states outside the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which have defined themselves as the BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. We will explore the increase in populist leaders and popular uprisings across these states, as well as the role of ethnic nationalism and inequality. As we learn from the past to evaluate the present, we will consider a range of popular responses to these challenges, as well as alternative frameworks for the future.

Faculty

• Elke Zuern

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

Despite frequent pleas for unity from United States presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, alongside the rise of groups such as BridgeUSA, Third Way, and No Labels to promote political centrism and compromise, the seemingly never-ending sociopolitical polarization appears to be the new norm in American political life—and it may not have reached its violent peak back in January 2021. To many politicians, pundits, and others alike, the social and political scene in the United States in the 21st century appears to be one of turmoil, disagreement, division, and instability. We regularly hear about a polarized and deadlocked political class; we read about increasing class and religious differences—from the alleged divides between Wall Street and Main Street to those who are secular and those who are religious; and we often see disturbing, dangerous, and violent images and actions from various politically-oriented groups. This seminar will look at the history of division in America and explore the puzzle of how to move on from this divided state. While the course will briefly examine the veracity of these recent impressions of the American sociopolitical scene, we will center our course on the question: Is policymaking forever deadlocked, or can real political progress be made? Moreover, what are the social and policy implications of polarization? How does the nation govern and function in the Trumpian political epoch, and are the political parties representing the will of the people? What about the impact of the 2024 elections? What are we to make of the frequent calls for change and for healing America’s divisions? In this seminar, we will examine these questions and deeper aspects of American political culture today. Covering a lot of ground from America’s founding to today, after reviewing some basics of the political economy, students will study American political cultures from a variety of vantage points with a number of different stories emerging. We will look at numerous aspects of American social and political life—from examining the masses, political elites, Congress, and policymaking communities to social movements, the media, and America’s position in a global community—all with a focus on policy and moving the country forward. This course will be driven by data, not dogma. We will use modern political-economy approaches based in logic and evidence to find answers to contemporary public-policy problems and questions of polarization. The material will be treated as social scientists, not as ideologues. Students should anticipate extensive reading. Comfort with data and statistics will be expected.

Faculty

• Samuel Abrams

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

This course will provide a unique opportunity to investigate key questions of democracy in a diverse group at a crucial moment in American history. We will begin by exploring theoretical arguments regarding the merits of various forms of democracy over other regime types. If democracy is presumed to be a better system than its alternatives, why might this be the case and how might we evaluate this? We will consider key historical moments in the rise and decline of democracy—from the ideals of early American democracy and its shortcomings, to the Nazi seizure of power and the end of democracy in 1930s Germany, to the triumph of nonracial democracy with the end of apartheid in South Africa. We will investigate whether and how democracies might outperform other regimes. The class will engage empirical research, comparing democratic, transitioning, and authoritarian regimes as far as economic growth and development, human development indicators, interstate and intrastate wars, human rights, and business innovation, including artificial intelligence. Students will consider the role of free speech and censorship by exploring the ways in which a free press and open social networks support basic principles of democracy, as well as how misinformation and disinformation can starkly undermine it. The course will employ theory, history, and empirical data to evaluate the state of democracy in the United States and the possible impact of recent changes to American institutions.

Faculty

• Elke Zuern

Open, Seminar—Spring

This community-partnership course is designed to introduce students to the field of community engagement and, in particular, to our local communities: the City of Yonkers and Westchester County. Community engagement is defined as “the process of working collaboratively with and through groups of people affiliated by geographic proximity, special interest, or similar situations in order to address issues affecting the well-being of those people. This process is a powerful vehicle for bringing about environmental and behavioral changes that will improve the health of the community and its members. It often involves partnerships and coalitions that help mobilize resources and influence systems; change relationships among partners; and serve as catalysts for changing policies, programs, and practices" (CDC, 1997). Upon successfully completing this course, students will be equipped to: become familiar with the history and culture of Sarah Lawrence College, the City of Yonkers, and Westchester County; be able to identify community-based initiatives that they are passionate about; know how to conduct a community-needs assessment; and know how to create a project proposal that includes community partnership. By acquiring new knowledge and skill sets, students will experience increased civic empowerment impacting not only the College campus but also the local communities. Students will actively participate in community engagement, enhancing community partnerships by designing a transformative community project. Through self-reflection, guest speakers, special projects, and collaborations with local community partners, this course will offer a range of opportunities for students to explore and strengthen their voices, interests, and skills as engaged citizens.

Faculty

• Nelson Rodriguez

Open, Seminar—Fall

Our subject will be the worlds of childhood. In this course, we will implement different psychological theories to highlight different aspects of those worlds. Freud, Erikson, Bowlby, and Stern will provide perspectives on emotional development. Skinner, Bandura, Piaget, and Vygotsky will present various approaches to the problems of learning and cognition. Chess and Kagan will take up the issue of temperament and its interaction with experience. Chomsky and others will deal with the development of language. Bronfenbrenner and his colleagues will emphasize the importance of considering the contexts of children’s development in family, school, community, and culture. We will also look at some systematic studies that developmental psychologists have carried out to confirm, test, and critique various theories: studies of parent-infant relationships, the development of cognition and language, and the emergence of intersubjectivity. In several of these domains, studies done in cultures other than our own will cast light on the question of universality versus cultural specificity in development. Another major way of learning the worlds of childhood is via direct experience with children. In this course, all students will do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center (ECC). At times, the course will draw on students’ written ECC observations to support or critique theoretical concepts. The fieldwork will also provide the basis for developing conference work. Typically, conference projects will combine student interests, library readings, and fieldwork observations. Children’s friendships, what makes children laugh, the functions of language, and a case study of a single child are included among the many diverse topics of past student projects. With the permission of the head teacher, creating an activity for the children at ECC in music, dance, or science may be possible as a conference work option.

Faculty

• Charlotte L. Doyle

Open, Seminar—Fall

When is sex not a natural act? Every time a human engages in sexual activity. In sex, what is done by whom, with whom, where, when, why, and with what has very little to do with biology. Human sexuality poses a significant challenge in theory. The study of its disparate elements (biological, social, and individual/psychological) is inherently an interdisciplinary undertaking; from anthropologists to zoologists, all angles of study add something to our understanding of sexual behaviors and meanings. From an intersectional perspective, in this course, we will study sexualities in social contexts across the lifespan, from infancy to old age. Race, ethnicity, gender, and social class, among other identities, impact sexuality both individually and structurally. Within each period, we will examine biological, social, and psychological factors that inform the experience of sexuality for individuals. We will also examine broader aspects of sexuality, including sexual health and sexual abuse. Conference projects may range from empirical research to a bibliographic research project.

Faculty

• Linwood J. Lewis

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

How does the human mind represent the world? How do these representations vary across people? Could using a different language change how we experience time—or even how we see color? Seemingly straightforward concepts such as “in” versus “on” mean different things in different cultures; and words such as “two” and “three” may not be linguistically universal. Indeed, this very course description makes culturally-specific assumptions about psychology and implicitly assumes objectivity. At the same time, humans seem to share many central experiences, such as perceiving events, creating categories, and recalling the past. In this course, we will draw on research from psycholinguistics, cognitive development, and cultural psychology to learn cognitive science in a larger context. Critically, we will consider how these fields have been affected by a focus on Western, white, industrialized experiences. The course will investigate the broader social and ethical consequences of these assumed perspectives and explore insights and challenges that emerge when we step out of them. We will draw on primary and secondary sources, including scientific research articles, literature, and recordings. Students will develop projects in conference work that combine their interests with the course content, such as designing an experiment to test cross-linguistic effects on visual attention, analyzing vocabulary from languages other than English, or developing proposals to redesign existing experiments using culturally-informed practices.

Faculty

• Sammy Floyd

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

In this seminar, we will be considering beliefs and practices related to infant and child development across a variety of cultures and contexts, as well as programs intended to support optimal development in these cultures. Preconceived ideas about what is "appropriate" or normally expected of children (and parents) will be challenged as a result of the readings, video documentaries, reflections, and discussions throughout the semester. We will cover topics such as, but not limited to, international rights of the child, raising babies across cultures, international adoptions, refugees and displaced families, children with disabilities, effects of conflict and trauma, and access to health care and education. For the primary written assignment, students will become the "resident experts" on a given type of project or program designed to enhance the well-being of infants, children, or youth in a specific country or region of interest. Papers should be based on an actual program that the student discovers, such as through international nonprofits or efforts being carried out at the grassroots level in each country of choice (e.g., UNICEF, Save the Children, orphanages or adoption agencies, programs for children with special needs, maternal and child health programs, HIV/AIDS clinics). In addition to describing the program itself and its guiding principles, students will be asked to critique its cultural appropriateness and potential effectiveness, offering constructive suggestions as to how it might be improved upon or expanded. Students should address questions such as: Is the program sustainable? Has it been affected by recent cuts to US international aid programs? How applicable is its model to other cultural environments? What is its track record of effectiveness? Are the local community members invested in and committed to ensuring its success? The goal is to view these efforts through the lens of your knowledge about children, youth, and human development as gained from readings and explorations of these topics in class. Additional assignments, both written and orally presented, will include critiques of supplementary readings, written responses in class about required readings, and phone/online interviews with elders from a culture other than each student's own regarding traditional child-rearing practices and beliefs.

Faculty

• Lynne Koester

Open, Seminar—Spring

The question of how Judaism does and does not map onto contemporary racial categories has been, for centuries, a defining question of how Jews, as a small minority group, relate to their surrounding cultures. In many ways, the story of the historical construction of racial categories is itself a story indissolubly bound up with Jewish history—ranging from the development of the concept of blood purity during the Spanish Inquisition, which was then exported to the New World through Spanish colonialism, to late 19th-century racial theorists preoccupied with the question of how Jews do or do not relate to European peoples. As such, this course will consider the overarching question—Are Jews white?—from a historical and sociological perspective. In so doing, we will think about the historical development of the concept of whiteness itself and the relationship between the emergent concept of race and concepts of religion, ethnicity, nationhood, and nationality. We will look at how Jews were and are racially defined and categorized in different historical and cultural contexts in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the United States—and how this question is bound up with broader questions about power relations, political structures, and minority and majority identities. We will look at how Zionism and other forms of Jewish nationalism have altered Jewish racialization; how Jews relate to broader discourses of postcolonialism and Orientalism; and the different racializations of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jews in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. The course will look at the ways in which Jews responded to the rise of Black nationalism in the United States and how racialized divisions between different ethnic Jewish communities shape politics in the modern state of Israel, with a particular focus on the rise of the Mizrahi Black Panthers. We will read sources from Jews of color and Jews who identify as white, from many diverse national backgrounds, as well as from many non-Jewish thinkers who find Jewish identity a fruitful way to think about the question of racial identity and its attendant political conflicts. We will explore how racial categories for Jews function both internally, within the Jewish community, and externally. In so doing, we will come to see how Jews and their relationship to whiteness is a defining question not just for Jewish identity but also how Jewishness can help shed light on the very concept of race itself.

Faculty

• Joel Swanson

Open, Seminar—Fall

This course is for students who want to break free from the conventions of the traditional essay and memoir and discover a broader range of narrative and stylistic possibilities available to nonfiction writers. During the first half of the semester, students will read and discuss examples of formally innovative nonfiction that will serve as the inspiration for brief assignments. Completed assignments will also be read aloud and discussed each week. During the second half of the semester, students will workshop longer pieces, which they will have written in consultation with the instructor as a part of their conference work. Required texts will include: The Next American Essay, edited by John D’Agata, and Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra; all other readings will be accessible in a photocopied handout. 

Faculty

• Stephen O’Connor

Open, Seminar—Year

Long-form investigative journalism has opened many doors, perhaps most literally in America’s penal system, where journalists have regularly revealed—and freed—the wrongfully convicted. This course will set out to expose the innocence (or confirm the guilt) of a man or woman convicted of a controversial murder or other serious felony. Working collectively and using all of the tools and traditions of investigative journalism, the class will attempt to pull out all known and unknown threads of the story to reveal the truth. Was our subject wrongfully accused? Or are his or her claims of innocence an attempt to game the system? The class will interview police, prosecutors, and witnesses, as well as friends and family of the victim and of the accused. The case file will be examined in depth. A long-form investigative piece will be produced, complete with multimedia accompaniment. 

Faculty

• Marek Fuchs

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

As central to the historical development of the modern essay as its concern with personal experience is the essay’s usefulness in politics and the representation of political experience. The essay can be polemical, informative, argumentative, lyrical, intimate, condemnatory. It can narrate and describe, or it can persuade or cajole, or it can satirize. As an open, improvisational form, the essay is particularly suited to giving depth to individual experience by placing that experience in social and political contexts and among allegiances and identities—and also suited to imparting drama to collective experience by locating the individual within his, her, or their social conditions and conflicts. We will follow this give and take in our readings, which will be across the reasonable political spectrum. Some examples: Samuel Taylor Coleridge on William Pitt the Younger, George Orwell on his education, H. L. Mencken on The Presidency, James Baldwin in Switzerland, Joan Didion on the counterculture, Adrienne Rich and Anne Carson on patriarchy, Mike Davis on class and the politics of firefighting in contemporary Los Angeles, and a series of recent editorials and op-eds about our ever-present political crises. These various pieces will be used as models for our own writing, which will range from the small to the medium to the large and will be presented to the class for critique of both their rhetorical realizations and their plausibility or implausibility.

Faculty

• Vijay Seshadri