The Graduate Center
The City University of New York
COURSES
–SPRING 2012
ASCP. 81000 - Introduction to American Studies: Histories & Methods
GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Chuh, [17255] Cross listed with MALS 73100
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.
ASCP. 81500 - Policed
GC: T, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Gilmore, [17256] Cross listed with EES 79903
POLICED will take an in-depth look at contemporary policing in its material and ideological dimensions. With a focus on the Americas, while attentive to the movement of practices and consultants around the planet, we will consider the origins and development of modern policing, the embedding or displacement of police-work into a broad range of educational and social services, and the relationship of mass incarceration to these features of public life.
We will devote significant attention to the roles race, gender, sexuality, colonialism, property, beliefs, war, and inequality play in the proliferation of certain kinds of policing.
Given that some of the most feared police forces of the twentieth century were those of anti-capitalist states, our goal is to specify the convergences and divergences between modes of production and whole ways of life, from slave patrols to stop-and-frisk.
ASCP 81500 - Critical Anthropologies of the US
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Maskovsky, [17909] NOTE: Fulfills area course requirement for cultural anthropology. Cross listed with ANTH. 72900
This course explores the contributions of anthropology to the critical study of the United States.
We will treat "the United States" as a problematic and will take the nation-state, its peoples, and its borders not as givens but as objects of analysis. In particular, we will draw connections between recent ethnographic work and four ways of conceptualizing the US nation-state: as a settler society, a former slave-holding society, an immigrant/industrial society, and an imperial nation-state.
Recent work will be read alongside key theoretical statements, ethnographic "classics,” and interdisciplinary debates that help us to specify what the United States "is" from various political points of view. We will also explore the epistemological, theoretical and methodological challenges of US research, and the "stakes" of US research for the discipline-at-large.
ASCP 81500 - Traveler-Artists of 19th Century
GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Manthorne, [17913] Course open to Art History students only. Department permission required for all others.Cross listed with ART. 87300
This seminar focuses on art works in the CPPC, which offers an historial overview of the genesis and development of the Latin American landscape genre from the mid-17th to the end of the 19th century.
Both native artists and those from Europe and the United States are represented in the CPPC from Frans Post to Armando Reverón, including Frederic Church, Frederick Catherwood, Fritz Melbye, Camille Pissarro, and those in Humboldt’s in Germany: Rugendas, Hildebrandt, and Bellerman. Expeditionary art is another element of the collection, including Robert Schomburgk’s exploration of Guayana.
Students will study these works first-hand, including paintings, prints, photographs, maps, drawings, and watercolors.
We then interrogate the visual documents from a variety of perspectives: the relation of art to travel and the literature of travel; the reception of art at cultural crossroads; the rise of tourism; colonial versus post-colonial encounters; imprint on foreign travel on the host country,; and art’s role in global and hemispheric dialogues. Depending on the student`s topic, this course can be considered American, Latin American, or European art.
Requirements: Seminar members are expected to deliver a conference-style oral presentation and complete a written research paper, and will have the opportunity to contribute to a publication. 5 auditors permitted only with prior permission of the instructor
Preliminary Reading: Katherine E. Manthorne, Tropical Renaissance: North American Artists Exploring Latin America, 1839-1879. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Press, 1989.
ASCP 81500 - Demography/Pop Geog/GISc
L: T, 6:00-8:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Maroko, [17914] Course open only to students in the EES Ph.D. Program. Cross listed with EES. 79903
ASCP 81500 - Early American Speculations: Aesthetics & Risk in the Circum-Atlantic World, 1790-1830 GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Faherty, [17915] Cross listed with ENGL. 75000
The revolutionary Circum-Atlantic basin was a marketplace of new writing, new ideas, new paranoias, new frauds and exploitations, new land schemes and settlements, new economies, new enterprises in self-creation and authorship, and new desires for alternative worlds. This course seeks to map some of these conjectures, innovations, risks, and predictions which distinguish the revolutionary age. In so doing, we will explore how such a reorientation might challenge exceptionalist (nationalist) literary and cultural narratives or force paradigm shifts in the field imaginary.
Some questions we will address along the way: What speculative practices do we need to talk about these revolutionary innovations? What are the speculations and investments of canonization and authorship? How do social, scientific, sexual, and economic speculations concretize in literary productions? How do literary texts offer alternative histories or counterfactual tales as a means of entering into political and social discourses? What did it mean to inhabit a risk culture and/or a culture always at risk? How do we account for literary representations of counter-revolutionary movements? How do we classify attempts to stabilize uncertainty and curtail certain kinds of speculation?
In addition to our examination of primary texts, we will be reading a broad range of recent critical work to think about the conventions and limitations of disciplinarity, and to consider the challenges of writing about canonical and non-canonical texts (to contemplate, among other questions, whether or not the canonical “status” of a novel demands a different kind of scholarly engagement).
Requirements will include one oral report and a final seminar paper.
*The Graduate Center will be hosting an international conference on this theme this upcoming April. Our readings will therefore attempt to align (to a degree) with some of the texts under discussion at this conference so that we will have direct access to emerging scholarship in the field.
Possible texts include: Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American, the anonymously published The History of Constantius & Pulchera, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, Susanna Rowson’s Trials of the Human Heart, the anonymously published The Hapless Orphan, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn and Edgar Huntly, Martha Meredith Read’s Margaretta, Lenora Sansay’s The Secret History, or The Horrors of St. Domingo, Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette, Isaac Mitchell’s The Asylum, Lucy Brewer’s The Female Marine, Sally Woods’ Dorval; or, the Speculator , Tabitha Tenney’s Female Quixotism, Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry, Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Crater, and Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee.
ASCP 81500 - Black Feminism & the Civil Rights Movement
GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wallace, [17916] Cross listed with ENGL. 85500
We will examine major African American cultural and intellectual developments of the period of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power (as defined by the imagined nexus of Fanny Lou Hamer, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X).
Selective and precise combinations of race and gender discourses of the 1960s will be considered in relation to pre-eminent occasions of the visual culture of the times, in particular as manifest in the works of African American artists Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden and Faith Ringgold.
Comparisons and new insights post-Black-Macho-and-The-Myth-of –The-Superwoman will be emphasized.
Participants will be encouraged to focus upon their own innovative interpretations in related fields of photography, film, visual art and intellectual literature of the 1960s.
ASCP 81500 - Faking It: American Women Writers & the Masks of Modernism
GC: W, 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Hoeller, [17917] Cross listed with ENGL. 88000, MALS 70800 & 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 women, 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.
ASCP 81500- Gender, Power & Money
GC: M, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. McCarthy, [17918] Cross listed with HIST 75300 & WSCP 81000
This course will examine the historical and theoretical literature on gender, power, and money, with an emphasis on the period from 1800 to the 1930s.
Historians have made invaluable contributions in rewriting history “from the bottom up” over the past half century, but in the process they have underplayed the role of elites, the exercise of power (rather than agency), and the contours and consequences of the national pursuit of wealth. Gender studies have further complicated these issues, by underscoring the differences between men’s and women’s allotted public roles.
This course builds, in part, on this work and the writings of earlier theorists who wrote on the social meaning of money and the exercise of power; Thorstein Veblen, in particular, underscored the ties between masculinity and the pursuit of wealth, raising a number of questions.
How has the nexus of money and masculinity developed and changed over time; how has it affected men at the lower end of the economic spectrum as well as those at the top; how has it colored professional and political considerations? What happened when money passed into women’s hands, especially as they moved into the public sphere through their business, political, social and philanthropic pursuits? How have the exercise of power, and the pursuit and uses of wealth historically differed between women and men?
Although the weekly readings are historical, the course will draw on an interdisciplinary theoretical literature that spans women’s, gender and masculinity studies, sociology, and 19th and early 20th century economics. The readings are also structured in such a way that the course can be taken as a women’s studies class.
Students will read one book per week for class discussion, and write a proposal for a research project to examine some aspect of gender, power, and/or money in American history.
The goals are to introduce students to new areas of inquiry, and to hone their analytical and proposal-writing skills.
ASCP 81500 - Visual Culture in US History
GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Brown, [17919] Cross listed with HIST. 75400
"Historical understanding is like a vision, or rather like an evocation of images." Inspired by Johan Huizinga's insight, this course will explore the ways the study of visual culture—as subject and as evidence—illuminates and alters the research and analysis of major themes and eras in U.S. history.
We will investigate the manner in which different visual media documented, articulated, and embodied conditions, relations, ideas, identity, and issues from the early republic to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
While loosely chronological, the course readings and discussions are organized to consider a range of historiographic approaches and methods and to critically evaluate the impact and efficacy of using visual evidence to study the past.
REQUIREMENTS In addition to participation in class, each student also will be responsible for leading one or more class discussions (including reading and reporting on one or more of the optional readings, chosen in consultation with me). In addition, students are responsible for a final research paper (approximately 20 pages), which will be due at the last class (with a one-page précis due on March 13). *Please note there is a reading assignment for the first class.
Reading list and schedule available in the Certificate Programs Office (Room 5110)
ASCP 81500 - Literature of American History II
GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Nasaw, [17920] Course open only to Ph.D. students in the History Program. History department permission required for all others Cross listed with HIST. 80000
PRELIMINARY READING LIST (changes may be made in Civil Rights, Vietnam, and Politics and Culture between the Wars sections) available at
http://web.gc.cuny.edu/History/pages/courses/12spring/12spring.htm
You will be doing a lot of reading this semester. Do it carefully. This course, if it works, will serve several purposes. It will prepare you for your written and orals examinations, but, more importantly, it will give you the basis to put together your first syllabi. Most of the books listed below have been published in the last few decades; some are more ancient; a few are methodologically innovative. All, I think, are well-written and have something to contribute to ongoing debates.
Assignments: Readings
There will be common reading each week and a short list of supplementary readings. All students are required to do the common reading and all should try to read the supplementary books as well. (Students should also read the appropriate pages in a college-level textbook on the subject/issues/time period covered by the primary reading.) One student will be assigned each week to read and prepare notes on one of the supplementary readings. I have included several novels and autobiographies as optional readings. I will ask for volunteers to read and report on these books.
All assigned readings have been put on reserve at the Graduate Center library.
Assignments: Writing:
(1) One student each week will be assigned to read the review literature on the book assigned as common reading and write an essay of no more than 1,000 words on how the book fits (or doesn’t fit) into the larger historiography. This essay will be shared with classmates. (2) Each student in the class will chose two books from the supplementary lists, read them, and prepare reviews to be shared with classmates. (3) There will be a final (take-home) examination that will mimic the qualifying written examination you will be required to take in the fall.
ASCP 81500 -- Seminar in American History II
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Rosenberg, [17921] Cross listed with HIST. 84900
ASCP 81500 – American Social Institutions
GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Martin Burke, [18336] Cross listed with MALS 73200
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.
ASCP 81500 - Terror & Terrorism
GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Wolin, [17923] Cross listd with P SC. 71902 & HIST 72100.
In February 1794, Maximilien Robespierre articulated the modern conception of terror – a fateful sacralization of political violence – when he proclaimed that, "Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue, the general principle of democracy applied to our country's most urgent needs."
Robespierre's legacy came to fruition with the Bolshevik Revolution and with a series of subsequent political regimes (China, Korea, Cambodia) that emulated the Jacobin-Bolshevik model.
"Terrorism," conversely, which derives from nineteenth-century Russian populism and European anarchism, inverts the state terrorist model by advocating redemptive political violence from below. Its most recent and vociferous representatives have been: the Baader-Meinhof Group, Italy's Red Brigades, the Irish Republican Army, and al-Qaeda.
"Terror and Terrorism" will approach these topics and themes by studying political manifestos, historical narratives, and cinematic representations of terror ("The Baader-Meinhof Complex," "The Battle of Algiers," "Carlos").
We will also examine theoretical discussions of political violence as elaborated in classic texts by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Sorel.
ASCP 81500 - Congress
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Jones, [17924] Cross listed with P SC. 72210
The United States Congress is one of the most powerful representative assemblies and the most extensively studied political institutions in the world.
This course is designed to help students develop a basic understanding of the major works and debates in the scholarly study of Congress, as well as the ability to explain, synthesize, and critique them.
The course is targeted for students seeking to complete the department’s first exam in American politics.
Required readings for the course include all those in the Congress section of the American Politics Reading List, among many others that are classics in the literature.
The course will cover Congress both from the perspective of individual members, including roll call voting and representation, and the institution as a whole, including committees, parties.
ASCP 81500– Contemporary Political Theory: Biopolitics
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Petchesky, [17925] Cross listed with P SC. 80602 & WSCP 81000.
This course will be an in-depth inquiry into the work of Michel Foucault, particularly Foucault’s concepts of biopower, biopolitics, and governmentality, with readings drawn from The Foucault Reader, The History of Sexuality Vol. I, and the Collège de France lectures of 1975-78.
Building on this base, we will explore a number of contemporary European, feminist, post-colonial and queer theorists who have built upon or critiqued Foucault’s conceptual framework—including Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Wendy Brown, Melinda Cooper, Eugene Thacker, Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, Achille Mbembe, Ratna Kapur, Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian, Eithne Luibhéid, and Jasbir Puar.
Through these quite varied lenses, we will attempt to unpack the meanings and recent applications of “biopolitics” as a theoretical approach to understanding states, governance, and geopolitics in the late 20th/early 21st century world. This inquiry in turn will take us into the nether-regions of some fairly controversial current issues, for example, biometric surveillance, torture, state and non-state bio-terrorism, policies regarding sex workers and sexual minorities (particularly immigration policies), population policies and genetic engineering. In all of this, we will be concerned with how gender, race and sexuality intersect with global capitalism, militarism and colonial occupation in both theories and political practices.
Students will be required to make two oral presentations on assigned readings during the semester, pass a mid-term take-home exam, and write a final paper.
ASCP 81500 - American Political Development
GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. O'Brien, [17926] Cross listed with P SC. 82210 & WSCP 81000.
This 800-level seminar studies American political development with a particular focus on the role of ideas.
First, the seminar examines the political-development approach or framework. It places this framework in context with other methodological inquiries as well as theories of ideas.
Second, it reviews the American versions of republicanism, liberalism, and capitalism, with an eye to explaining how these ideologies have helped and hindered the national periods of reform.
Third, it probes the sources of other ideas or isms, namely racism and sexism, and the impact that the state has had on mitigating them in the latter half of the 20th century.
How have these specific isms or ideologies shaped the American identity and social movements? Whether it is reform ideas influenced by a Lockean version of individualism and capitalism or a Humean version of the public good, this seminar explores how these ideas and isms influenced the type of reform policy regimes that American presidents and Congress have constructed in the 20th and 21st centuries.
ASCP 81500 - Social Theory of Time & Space
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Aronowitz, [17927] Cross listed with SOC. 80000
Time and space are relatively neglected topics in the social sciences. But they are central to the natural sciences which have fundamentally altered our conceptions.
This course explores the concepts of time and space in social theory. Beginning with how physics and biology address these questions, we will see how philosophers such as Henri Bergson, Gaston Bachelard, and Alfred North Whitehead dealt with them.
Finally, the work of E.P. Thompson, Henri Lefebvre, Norbert Elias and the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse will be discussed.
Among the readings:
Lee Smolin- The Trouble with Physics
Levins and Lewontin- The Dialectical Biologist
Bergson- Matter and Memory
Bachelard- Dialectic of Duration
Whitehead- Selections from Process and Reality
Thompson- “Time, Work- Discipline…”
Lefebvre- Production of Space; Critique of Everyday Life volume 3.
Norbert Elias- Time: an Essay
Adorno- Selections from Negative Dialectic
Marcuse- One Dimensional Man
Some of these readings will be in the form of class presentations.
ASCP 81500- Political Sociology of Intellectuals in 20th Century U.S.
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Watts, [17928] Cross listed with SOC. 80103
This course offers an overview of the major theoretical and conceptual debates concerning the function of intellectuals in the United States. In addition, this course will explore but not exhaust the myriad of roles played by intellectuals.
We will discuss intellectuals as ideologues, social moralists , political activists, artists, musicians, and teachers. Intellectuals play significant roles as technocratic advisors to the state on issues of social policy. For instance, the debate over Charter schools versus traditional public schooling relies on the expertise of educational policy intellectuals. Economists advise the President on economic policy, etc. Yet, economists also advise private financial institutions and corporations on investment strategies. Political scientists who claim to be able to predict the stability of foreign states now advise corporations on the safety of their overseas investments.
Though there are a myriad of ways that intellectuals function as servants of power, intellectuals also play crucial roles as critics of power. Intellectuals like Noam Chomsky view their mission as exposing government lies in regards to foreign policy. Other intellectual critics write for popular political magazines ala The Nation, The New Republic or The New York Review of Books. Intellectuals who write for general learned audiences are often referred to as “public intellectuals.” In his book, The Last Intellectuals, Russell Jacoby claimed that American civic life was has diminished as a result of the over specializing of knowledge as well as a significant reduction in mass market outlets that would allow “public intellectuals” to distribute their ideas. In many respects Jacoby was probably correct when he wrote The Last intellectuals.
However the rise and expansion of the internet (ie. blogs, etc.) appears to have dramatically expanded the space for public intellectual debate and dialogue.
Theorists of intellectuals that we will discuss include Gouldner; Coser; Mannheim; Bourdieu; Edward Said; Foucault; Sartre; and Gramsci; and Baumann.
ASCP 81500 - Asian Americans
GC: W, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Min, [17929] Cross listed with SOC. 82800
The main objective of this course is to provide an overview of Asian American
experiences by covering Asian Americans both as a whole and major Asian ethnic groups separately. Major Asian American groups to be covered separately are Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, South Asian, Korean, and Southeast Asian (Indo-Chinese).
General topics to be covered are immigration (history and contemporary trends), settlement patterns, socio-economic adjustment, prejudice and discrimination, family and gender issues, community organization, ethnicity (ethnic attachment, ethnic identity, and ethnic solidarity), and intergenerational transition.
Specific topics and theories to be covered include the following: the model minority thesis, pan-Asian ethnicity, multiracial Asian Americans, Asian Americans’ positioning in U.S. race relations, the effects of globalization on Asian immigration patterns, Asian Americans’ transnational ties, Asian Americans’ political development, Korean-Black conflicts, the effects of gender role changes on Asian immigrants’ marital conflicts, second-generation Asian Americans’ ethnic identity and socioeconomic attainment, and the effects of 9/11 on South Asian Americans.
Students will look at fresh data on Asian American experiences derived from the 2000 and 2010 Censuses and recent American Community Surveys and recent research findings.
Students will discuss major issues related to Asian American experiences and review a comprehensive literature on Asian American experiences. These components of the course will help doctoral students to decide dissertation topics related to Asian American experiences.
Second Edition of Asian Americans: Contemporary Trends and Issues, edited by Pyong Gap Min will be used as the major textbook. In addition, students will read three other books as side readers and about ten journal articles related to key issues and theses pertaining to Asian American experiences. Three other books are Pyong Gap Min, Preserving Ethnicity through Religion in America: Korean Protestants and Indian Hindus across Generations (NYU Press, 2010), Min Zhou’s and Carl Bankston’s Growing Up American: How Vietnamese Children Adapt to Life in the United States (Russell Sage Publication, 1998), and Yen Le Espiritu’s Home Bound: Filipino American Lives across Cultures, Communities, and Countries (University of California Press, 2003).
ASCP 81500 SOC. 86903 - The Sociology of Sports
GC: R, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Kornblum, [17931] Cross listed with SOC. 86903
Sociology of Sports: This will be a workshop course in which we develop approaches to three major subjects within the sociology of sports in contemporary societies.
The first unit of the semester will deal broadly with the literature on boxing considered through analytical frameworks of corporal sociology (the body), race, and social class.
The second unit of the course will develop approaches to a critical understanding of college sports, and especially to the hypertrophy of college football.
The third subject we will consider is the history of how sports have been treated in the discipline of sociology, from the Chicago school to sports sociology as it is currently taught and practiced.
Students will be encouraged to undertake projects that will reflect their own theoretical and empirical interests and are not necessarily encompassed by material in the three units of study that will be developed in the expanded curriculum.
Students and faculty currently involved in sports research or related subjects will make guest presentations and students enrolled in the seminar will be invited to present their material at the end of the semester.
ASCP 81500 - Queer Culture, Theory & Media
GC: T, 11:45 a.m.-3:45 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Gerstner, [17933] Open to Ph.D. students only.Cross listed with THEA. 81500, FSCP 81000, ART 89600 & WSCP 81000.
This course studies the ways queer cultural producers engage a range of media to explore questions of identity (sexuality, race, gender, class, nation). The relationship between queer cultural identity and media is complex—particularly as it is filtered through a global economy—and, as such, finds its expression through a dynamic and political use of multi-mediated platforms.
With readings from queer theorists as our backdrop and through analyses of film, video, literature, novels, poetry, dance, and other media-arts, we will consider the varied and diverse contours that generate queer media.
Our study may include, among others, works by David Wojnarowicz, Marlon Riggs, Charles Henri Ford, Yvonne Rainer, Cheryl Dunye, Barbara Hammer, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Riyad Wadia, R.W. Fassbinder, Jean Genet, Peter Wells, Cui Zi'en, Emile Devereaux, and others.
Students are expected to complete weekly readings and screenings (when assigned), one-page weekly writing assignments, deliver a 15-20 minute presentation, and submit a 6,000-word final paper.
Before the first class meeting please familiarize yourselves with the following: "The Culture Industry" (available as pdf on Blackboard); Judith Halberstam's chapter 5 ("Technotopias: Representing Transgender Bodies in Contemporary Art" (on reserve, In a Queer Time and Place; and Michael Warner's "Introduction" to Fear of a Queer Planet (on reserve).
Required Texts: Course Reader (CR, hereafter available through www.universityreaders.com). Instructions will be given in class how to obtain the reader from University Course Readers. Abelove, Henry, Michèle Anna Barale, and David M. Halperin. The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. New York: Rougledge, 1993.
ASCP 81500 - Historical Contexts Urban Education
GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Brier, [17934] Course open only to Ph.D. students in the Urban Ed Program. Cross listed with U ED. 70200
ASCP 82000 - Critical Issues: Postwar Landscape
GC: R, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Senie, [17937] Course open to Art History students only. Department permission for all others.Cross listed with ART. 77300
This course will consider changing conventions and critical issues in landscape art from the postwar period to the present.
Topics will include the debate over landscape vs. abstraction, the landscape as utopia/dystopia, and sculpture as landscape. There will be a special focus on themes of the American road in art, establishing links to American road literature, film, and music.
Requirements: A term paper (10-12 pages); a midterm and final, both take home.
Auditors permitted (up to 5) but will be required to participate in some gallery-based assignments.
Preliminary Reading:
Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford, 1999).
Joel Snyder, “Territorial Photography” and Charles Harrison, “The Effects of Landscape,” in W.J.T. Mitchell, ed. Landscape and Power (University of Chicago, 1994),175-239.
ASCP 82000 - Walt Whitman's America--and Harriet Beecher Stowe's and John Brown's, Too: Literature, Culture, and Society GC: W, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Reynolds, [17940 ] Cross listed with ENGL. 75100
Walt Whitman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown, three towering figures of nineteenth-century America, had an enduring impact on literature and society.
Whitman’s all-inclusive poetry absorbed many facets of the American experience and forever altered the language and themes of poetry.
Stowe’s landmark antislavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin directed popular cultural themes and images toward an assault on slavery that helped trigger the Civil War and affected politics, racial views, and gender relations right up to modern times.
John Brown, the abolitionist warrior, became a cultural icon who inspired an outpouring of literary responses from such prominent writers as Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Whittier, Longfellow, and Lydia Maria Child.
This seminar explores the literary, social, and political contexts and resonances of Whitman, Stowe, and Brown, whose careers intermingled. The overarching presence in the course is Whitman, the quintessential American bard whose democratic poetry attempted to heal the social ruptures that Stowe and Brown, in their energetic challenges to the existing political system, exacerbated.
We trace the development of Whitman’s career, from his early journalism and apprentice poetry and fiction through the great 1885 edition of Leaves of Grass to his war poems and later writings. Whitman’s works open windows on an array of historical phenomena—science and pseudoscience, the visual arts (including photography and painting), theater, music, politics, law, philosophy, religion, reform, sexual mores, slavery, issues of gender and race—that have become of central interest to critics.
Among Stowe’s works, we concentrate on her two antislavery novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred, and consider the many cultural spin-offs, including Uncle Tom-based plays and merchandise.
John Brown’s meaning for Whitman, Stowe, and other American writers of his time and later periods is considered. Websites such as the Walt Whitman Archive and Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture are tapped for documents and images.
Secondary readings include a variety of critical, cultural, and theoretical studies, including excerpts from Professor Reynolds’s writings.
Course requirements include an oral report and a term paper.
ASCP 82000 - From Rebellion to Modernism: Crosscurrents of the 1920s
GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Dickstein, [17941] Cross listed with ENGL. 86000
The 1920s are invariably seen as the first modern decade in American life, thanks to significant social changes but also to transformations in the arts and communications. The changes that contributed to modernization include the aftereffects of the world war, with its uprooting of combatants, their war experience, the wartime growth and centralized planning of major industries, as well as the postwar prosperity; the shift or population from rural areas to major cities; the cumulative impact of decades of mass immigration in creating a more multicultural society; new avenues of mass communication, among them movies and radio, popular sports, public relations, and advertising; the emergence of a distinct, rebellious youth culture, carrying with it momentous changes in moral standards and sexual mores; and, finally, major transformations in the arts that both reflected and at times influenced these social trends. Yet there were also strong countercurrents representing older nativist traditions: isolationism, Prohibition, moral revivalism, the closing off of immigration.
The course will explore how writers and artists lived the experience of modernity and gave voice and form to the upheavals of modern life, sometimes with enthusiasm, often with hostility. Their angles of vision include the famous “revolt from the village” - the attack on provincial life - by writers like Sherwood Anderson in Winesburg, Ohio; the expatriate experience as chronicled by Malcolm Cowley, embracing works by Hemingway, Pound, and Fitzgerald; the postwar disillusionment in writers that finds its tone in Hemingway and Eliot; the new avant-garde of little magazines and the cultural criticism of Mencken and Van Wyck Brooks; the extreme recoil from modernity in Eliot and Willa Cather, among others, along with the pioneering techniques of literary modernism in writers are different as Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Hart Crane; the exploration of racial identity by Nella Larsen and the Harlem Renaissance and ethnic identity in the fiction of Anzia Yezierska and the film The Jazz Singer, which also marks the coming of sound to the movie industry; and the new musical modernism, especially in jazz works by George Gershwin, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington.
In short, the course will center on some major literary and artistic achievements of the decade, approached both in and of themselves and as keys to the social and psychological experience of the times. Literary works discussed will include Cowley’s Exile’s Return, Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Hemingway’s In Out Time and The Sun Also Rises, Cather’s The Professor’s House, Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, Yezierska’s Hungry Hearts and Bread Givers, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and shorter works, and poetry by Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, Millay, Frost, and Crane, though not all of these writers will make the cut.
There will also be assignments from secondary works of social history and criticism.
Each member of the class will also be expected to deliver an oral report and a concluding research paper.
ASCP 82000 - The United States after 1973
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Stein, [17942] Cross listed with HIST. 74900
What historians call the “golden age of capitalism” and the “age of compression” in the United States and abroad began after World War II and ended in 1973. This course will analyze the sources of the era’s shared prosperity in the U.S., the global changes that challenged it, the struggle during the 1970s to preserve it, and the failure to do so in 1979 and 1980. It will then analyze the new politics and capitalism of the era from 1980 to the present, leading to the current economic crisis. We will examine both the economic ideas and practices of the eras alongside the changing politics and social composition of the Democratic and Republican parties, and political culture in the United States.
All of the books are available at Barnes and Noble (18th St.) and are on reserve. The articles can be obtained from one of many online collections. .The first book on each topic (occasionally there will be several) will be our common reading. Each student will choose one subject and prepare questions which will begin our discussion. The questions should be emailed to the other students by the Monday evening before our Wednesday class.
Written work: The first paper will be the writing up of the issues in the week’s reading. It is due on the day we discuss the topic and should be about 3 pages (short). The final paper will be a critical analysis of Sean Wilentz’s Age of Reagan in the light of our reading this semester. The question: Does our reading this semester alter in any way this common and popular narrative of the period. The paper will be due December and should be 10-15 pages.
ASCP 82000- Contemporary American Political Thought
GC: T, 2:00-4:00 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. O'Brien, [17944] Cross listed with P SC. 80300 & WSCP 81000.
This new course represents the second course in the American Political Thought track of American Politics, focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries. (The seminar entitled American Political Thought concentrates on the 18th and 19th centuries.) One very current highlight of this new course is: We will study what documents OWS presents, and is presenting in "real" time; and whether or not it is discourse tantamount to protest movement political thought.
This seminar not only enlightens those interested in American Political Thought but also helps students prepare for the electoral and behavioral aspects of the American Politics examination by concentrating on public opinion and social movements of post-war identity leaders and their followers.
Contemporary American Political Thought/Theory examines the spaces and juxtapositions created by identity movements and vulnerable populations on three analytical tracks: 1) Race; 2) Women, Gender, Sexuality, and Vulnerable Populations; and 3) American Capitalism and Hegemony. First, the track on race compares and contrasts universal civil rights, black power, radical black feminism, and multiculturalism and multiracialism. Second, the track on gender and sexuality reviews first- and third-wave feminism, queer theory, postmodernist feminism, theories of the body, and immigrant and vulnerable populations. The final track focuses on American capitalism, transnationalism, and hegemony (anti-imperialism and post-colonialism, post-war neoclassical economics or neo-liberalism, and behavioral economics).
This seminar modernizes American political thought and includes the revolutionizing American Studies scholarship at the Graduate Center, with its emphasis on genealogies of revolutionary action, discourse, and political culture(s). It does this by giving attention to the writings, pamphlets, and thoughts of social-movement leaders and members and analyzing the question of political rhetoric and resonance (is the trajectory top-down or bottom-up?). For instance, the manifesto of S.C.U.M. (the Society for Cutting Up Men) had as much resonance for its leader, who shot Andy Warhol, as did its minuscule membership. How are events on Wall Street today similar to early-20th-century events?
Finally, this seminar provides a foundation for students interested in contemporary political theory by reading contemporary political thinkers as diverse as William Faulkner, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse, W. E. B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Gloria Steinem, Patricia Collins, Judith Butler, Anne Norton, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Antonio Negri, and Michael Hardt.
ASCP 82000 - American Labor & Globalization
GC: W, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Fox Piven, [17945 ] Cross listed with P SC. 82004, SOC 84600, & WSCP 81000.
This course will examine the constraints and possibilities that confront the American labor movement.
We will examine contemporary events, including the stunning setbacks of organized labor and workers generally over the past four decades, the changing demographic composition of the workforce and of unions, and the ways that the unions have tried to cope with these developments.
We will try to understand these developments, as well as the possibilities for the future, by locating them in the context of the bigger intellectual frameworks suggested by theoretical studies of power, of globalization, and the role of labor in the distinctive political development of the United States.
Finally we will try to bring this background to bear in examining the current moment and the possibilities for transformation it suggests.
ASCP 82000 - Issues of Contemporary Immigration
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Alba/Foner, [17946] Cross listed with SOC. 85800 & WSCP 81000.
The recent – and massive – immigration in the past few decades is transforming the wealthy societies of the West. It is also transforming the study of immigration. By now, there is a substantial, and growing, scholarly literature on immigration as sociologists, along with social scientists in allied disciplines, grapple with the complexity of the subject.
This course will examine some of the key issues in the study of contemporary immigration, primarily focusing on the United States but also looking at Western Europe.
Among the questions we will explore: What are the new conceptualizations of assimilation that have been put forward and how do they advance the field? Can the study of immigration in the past illuminate the present? What are the consequences of transnational ties and do they persist among the second generation? How is immigration changing the social construction of race and ethno-racial relations in the United States? What difference does gender make? How different are new destinations in the United States from old immigrant gateways? What can we gain by comparing U.S. immigration to the recent influx in western Europe?
Students will critically discuss and prepare comments on relevant works in the immigration field and write a final research paper.
ASCP 82000- No Child Left Behind
GC: T, 6:30-8:30 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Bloomfield, [17948] Cross listed with U ED. 75200
No Child Left Behind: Law and Policy Workshop will analyze current issues related to NCLB/Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization in the context of past and present policy aims and research results.
Study of legal sources and ideas for amending or waiving the statute, underlying regulations, and policy documents will yield workshop-style class presentations and, it is hoped, publishable findings in defense of a current reauthorization proposal.
ASCP 82000 - Politics of American Education
GC: M, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Spring, [17949] Cross listed with U ED. 75200
This course will examine the complex world of U.S. educational politics which encompasses the formal structure of school governance pressured by a civil society consisting of teachers unions, religious groups, administrative organizations, business interests, think tanks and foundations, parents, and other special interest groups.
Voices heard from civil society groups are often conflicting ranging from parental satisfaction with local schools to foundations claiming schools are failing.
In addition, the course will examine the role of education ideologies in determining the goals, curriculum, and instructional methods of American schools. Also included will be a discussion of the education business which encompasses textbook publishers, test producers, tutoring and test preparation companies, charter school management companies, for-profit schools, on-line schooling, software makers, and a host of other supporting industries.
ASCP 82000- Post-Colonial Perspectives in Early Childhood Education
GC: T, 4:15-6:15 p.m., Rm. TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Gupta, [17950] Cross listed with U ED. 75200
This seminar will briefly introduce the beginnings of early childhood education; provide an overview of child development theories that contributed to the discourse of developmentally appropriate practices; and discuss critical studies on DAP using a postcolonial lens.
The objective will be to explore the tensions between the assumptions underlying a DAP-based pedagogy and the realities of classrooms, images of teachers and children in culturally diverse contexts; and discussing the need to prepare teachers in an early childhood education discourse that is more inclusive of "other" voices.
The class, as a learning community, will be taught primarily through discussion and dialogue and students are encouraged to raise questions, share stories and learn collaboratively.
(Past courses: Fall 2011; Spring 2011; Fall 2010:Spring 2010;Fall 2009; Spring 2009; Fall 2008; Spring 2008; Fall 2007; Spring 2007; Fall 2006; Spring 2006; Fall 2005; Spring 2005; Fall 2004; Spring 2004; Fall 2003; Spring 2003, Fall 2002)
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