Graduate

The aim of this seminar is to help its members recover visions, texts, sounds, concepts, moods and utopian impulses from the 1990s that can help us to see our way out of our current situation, that help us to imagine different worlds. Through a series of readings, viewings, listenings, and conversations, we will engage in an ongoing collaborative project that will culminate with a collectively composed and designed performance and publication at the end of the quarter. Two areas of thematic focus will be 1) the nature and effects of the fall of the Berlin wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War on political situations ranging in scale from the intimate and personal to the global and geopolitical and 2) the emergence of a new queer politics in response to the AIDS crisis and the corresponding emergence of queer theory. Our course title is inspired by a 1999 essay by Douglas Crimp, in which he argued for a return to Andy Warhol’s films and art through the methods and concepts offered by cultural studies and queer theory, instead of the ones that a conservative art history had theretofore presented. Crimp’s retrospective look at the gender and sexually transgressive underground film and theater scene of the 1960s in order to demonstrate the contemporary relevance of cultural, visual and queer studies motivates our desire to get more out of the 1990s for our troubled present.

A sprawling, digressive epic like The Brothers Karamazov or War and Peace may come first to mind when you think of the classic Russian novel. But Russian authors of the nineteenth century also produced short novels distinguished by their intellectual intensity and tight formal structure. An outlet for political speech under censorship or a passionate cry for recognition of the “spiteful man,” the Russian novella lay bare the injustices of late Russian imperial society. It also performed acute psychological analysis of the lovesick and brokenhearted. We will read novellas by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Chekhov, as well as the unjustly neglected Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya, who was one of the most popular authors of the 1870s in Russia. In seminar-style discussion, we will examine critical approaches to the novella form, the historical and cultural context of the period with a comparative look at European literature, and the “accursed questions” at the heart of the works themselves. All readings are assigned in translation with an option (pending enrollment) to participate in a Russian-language section through Languages across the Curriculum (LxC). This course fulfills the GATEWAY requirement for REES majors matriculating in AY 2025-26.

This seminar will explore revolutionary erotics as both a modality and site of revolutionary thought and action. We will engage erotics and desire expansively as strategies for sensuous and affective agitation and political resistance, probing topics such spirituality and erotics, as well as erotics and its publics and politics. We will think about how erotics and desire have been central to revolutionary art and politics from anti-imperial and anti-fascist struggles to anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and queer worldbuilding, from revolutionary love to terrorist drag, and from the US to Yugoslavia and Iran. The seminar asks, how has the erotic excited revolutionary action-- challenging at once the taboo and commodity fetish—and how can erotics can help us reimagine agitation today?

The Berlin-based seminar will include studio visits with renown contemporary artists, a guided visit of the Gropiusbau’s current show: Vaginal Davis: Fabelhaftes Punk, a performance by CHEAP collective, and a series of events and performances surrounding art week. Studio visits will include meetings with Berlin-based artists such as AA Bronson– co-founder of General Idea, Sophie Jung, Piotr Nathan, and Hito Steyerl.

While in Berlin students will also have time to explore their own research-based art project in consultation with the instructors, relevant archives, and museums. They will have an opportunity to present their work during the final class review and critique.

Helen of Troy has been a source of fascination for ancient and modern writers alike, serving as a symbol of unattainable beauty and destructive femininity. This course explores the various portrayals of Helen throughout Greco-Roman poetry (epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy) and prose (historiography, oratory), as well as contemporary literature and film. Taking into account the conventions and historical context of each genre we will examine her character as it relates to questions of gender, sexual power, agency, identity, embodiment and social structures. All readings will be in English and include but are not limited to selections from Homer, Euripides, Gorgias, Ovid, Seferis, Marlowe, and Walcott. 

The Hollywood film studios were established in the same years that the Hittite language was deciphered, and so began two genre-building projects that have barely interacted.  What do the ancient annals of the king’s military exploits have in common with Westerns like Stagecoach and The Searchers?  Can we read the story of a murdered Hittite prince—who would have been the future pharaoh of Egypt—as a film noir, like The Maltese Falcon?  Is a mythological text about a missing deity a better example of Hollywood film style than the musical Singin’ in the Rain?  In the first course in the history of the world to compare Late Bronze Age Hittite texts and classic Hollywood genre films, we will endeavor to understand what makes a genre recognizable across time, culture, and medium.  Topics we will explore include storytelling through text and image, reception, literary and film style, adaptations, and what makes a “classic”.  We will dive into Hittite texts in translation, watch Hollywood films, and consult literary and film theory.

For various reasons, short stories have been among the most popular genres in literature. They have also been among the most translated. In this class we will read short stories from all over the world, and from various time periods. From early fables from collections like the Sanskrit Pañcatantra and Arabian Nights we will discuss how translation played a role in the transmission of these tales across linguistic traditions. Entering the modern period, we will discuss how short stories confront questions of Colonialism, Post-Colonialism, Gender, Sexuality, Religion, the Climate Crisis etc. We will be guided in our inquiry by classic theorists of the genre like Edgar Allen Poe, Henry James and Vladimir Popp. Authors to be read include well known figures like Lev Tolstoy, María de Zayas, Anton Chekhov and Rabindranath Tagore, as well as lesser known figures such as Manto, Stefan Grabiński, Ambai, Masti Venkatesha Iyengar, Premchand, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and Chaso. All readings in English.

This course explores the representation of animality in Jewish literature and visual art. We will explore questions of animal ethics and ecological entanglement across a range of secular and religious genres, from folklore and poetry to Hasidic tales and rabbinic narrative. Writers will include Kafka, Sholem Aleichem, Celan; artists will include Soutine, Chagall, Sarah Shor, and more. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.

This course examines the long history of queer love poetry, from the ancient world to postmodernism. Its readings are particularly interested in how modernists claimed literary lineages of queer poetics, queered social practices and communal literary spaces, and reinvented verse forms to reflect queer eros. We will study works from Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, Spanish, Greek, and several other languages. No prerequisites. Open to undergrad and grad students.  

This course explores the multifarious entanglements between shamanism—as a religious phenomenon, as an anthropological imaginary, and as a mode of existence—and global modernity. How did shamanism as a concept emerge in the age of colonial expansion and ethnological racialization, how did it affect modernity's understanding of human history, and how do shamanic (dis)articulations of historicity, personhood, sexuality, trauma, translation, and the "nature/culture divide" intervene in modernity's politics? In contemplating these questions, we will consider a variety of "shamanic" artworks ranging from shamanic liturgies to travelogues, music recordings, film, performance art, contemporary literature, and beyond. We will attend both to the spiritual worlds of the "original" shamans of Northeast Asia (through texts from the Evenki, Khakas, Manchu, Tuvan, and other Siberian languages) and to a much broader corpora of (Anglophone, Chinese, German, Greco-Roman, Indigeneous American, Japanese, Tibetan, etc.) works that can be generatively thought of as shamanic in some way. In doing so, we will reflect on the limitations and powers possessed by the figure of the shaman in various broader contexts, both in the history of ideas and in the contemporary world.

This course offers an introduction to psychoanalytic theory by surveying significant writings by Freud and by Freud's readers. We will explore Freud's various models of the psyche, his interventions into the theory of sexuality, and his writings on religion by tracking the development of key concepts like transference, the Oedipus complex, narcissism, melancholia, the unconscious, and the death drive, among others. How have these concepts evolved over the course of their deployment in 20th- and 21st-century critical and political projects like feminism and queer theory? How have major developments in psychoanalysis read Freud anew? And in what ways do these psychoanalytic projects respond to their historical conditions? Readers of Freud whom we will encounter may include Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray, Derrida, Butler, Spillers, Edelman, Dean, and Musser.