Spring 2024 Graduate Courses

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 612

This course focuses on performance as a mode of research/investigation: how can engaging in a performance or practice (rather than simply reading about/observing it) illuminate in ways that may be otherwise inaccessible to the researcher? What knowledges does the doing of performance produce? Students in this class will be asked to develop research questions (in consultation with the instructor), design and engage in a performance project aimed at answering (or at least investigating) those questions, and then produce a final project (written or performed) that illustrates their research findings. 

 4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 613

How have trans studies, trans-of-color studies, contemporary art history and aesthetics converged in recent years? What research questions, methods, objects of attention, formal concerns and challenges have surfaced? We will explore how various aesthetic forms and cultures have been designated (and debated) as trans-, and the ways in which trans art history has emerged as a field of study. With a focus on aesthetic and cultural practices from the twentieth and twenty-first century, this course registers how trans and trans of color work, indigenous worldviews and non-Western concepts of gender have rethought hermeneutics, epistemologies and historiographies of art, representation and culture. The course will also take up trans* studies interventions into matter, affect, animality and value, particularly with regards to performance, process and project-based approaches involving experimental material techniques and instrumentation, site-sensitive strategies and multimedia forms. Coursework involves the close reading of texts, attention to art/events, presented and written assignments.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 674

As an elemental articulation of the symbolic, landscape has always been a primary site of performance, from popular festivals to courtly extravaganzas; it has served for centuries as the mythic ground of painting, has appeared among the first subjects of photography, and has been transmuted into the background of most films. Paying special attention to the contemporary hybridization of the arts, this course will investigate the following topics in relation to both avant-garde and popular cinema: anguish and trauma, eros and the landscape as symbolic form; landscape, film and the Gesamtkunstwerk; imaginary landscapes and alternate worlds; ecological and technological soundscapes; the aesthetics of dilapidation.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 613

Anything may be transformed into a doll, puppet, or marionette. For one childhood friend, the corner of his blanket was a cherished companion; for another, it was his “cushy,” a seemingly banal but actually marvelous pillow; in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, the young protagonist is in secret dialogue with own finger, while in Philip Roth’s Sabbath’s Theater, the protagonist’s finger becomes a lascivious and very public performer. Dolls, puppets, and marionettes may be familiar or uncanny, poetic or commonplace, artistic or commercial, playful or magical, delightful or fearful, secret or public. They may appear as private playthings, characters in object theaters, religious relics, transitional objects; as phantoms or simulacra, devils or gods, monsters or marvels, fetishes or commodities. This seminar will be truly interdisciplinary, integrating history, theory, performance, theater, cinema, art, literature, and ethnography, all in the quest to find our own inner puppets.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 613

Michel Foucault once famously wrote: “Perhaps one day this century will be known as Deleuzian.” Gilles Deleuze’s admiration for Foucault is well known, and he famously read aloud a passage from Foucault’s The Use of Pleasure – his voice cracking - to an assembled crowd of mourners outside the hospital where Foucault had died a few days earlier, in June 1984. "What is philosophy today," Deleuze read, quoting his friend, "if it does not...consist of an attempt to know how and to what extent it is possible to think differently?" Forty years later, Foucault and Deleuze continue to offer provocative and generative openings for thought, politics, and life. In this course we will take up this legacy and investigate ways in which the “practical philosophy” of Gilles Deleuze intersects with the “genealogical/archeological” critique of power, knowledge, and the politics of truth advanced by Michel Foucault. We will proceed always with an eye towards issues and topics pertaining to questions of performance and its social relations. Keywords will include: representation, body, arrangement, conduct, archive, action, performativity, biopolitics, to mention a few. The course will be structured around close readings of some central (and some ex-centric) texts by the two authors. Just as the lives of Deleuze and Foucault intersected along lines of personal friendship and intellectual complicity, they eventually went different ways along lines of political discomfort and philosophical disagreement. Perhaps a re-reading of their oeuvre today, when “fascist life” emerges without any masks, would allow for a critical, political, clinical and aesthetic re-suturing of their severance.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 613

The premise of this course involves a twofold question: how does performance enter the scene of writing? And, how can performance move our writings about it? While performance resists any prescriptive function for scholarship, it pushes writers to their imaginative limits--and tests the limits of their patience.  Models for how one might find the words and the way to talk about performance—what it does to an audience of one or many—are bountiful across literary and critical genres.  And yet we often turn to these models for their content (what they are about) rather than the effects of their composition.  The course will lean on these readings (essays, fiction, poetry, songs, criticism) as guides for involving, and not avoiding, performance in our scholarly work.  Performance, often cast as a deferred or secondary support for an argument, carries the lush potential to unsteady any decisive claim.  We will explore inventive ways to introduce performances in writing by challenging the dependable (and often limiting) coordinates of “context,” through experimenting with research methods and descriptive play, and most importantly, by discovering the joy and difficulty of revision.  As we will also study-to-resist journalistic protocols and the temporality of social media, students can take the opportunity of the seminar to stretch out their analysis in the ways that performance demands.

This course thinks through the relationship of art and Blackness to feminism, womanism, sex, gender, sexuality. How is Blackness rendered through gender, sex, and sexuality, and how are gender, sex, and sexuality informed by Blackness? How does art in its most expansive terms engage, depict, and reformulate Blackness? How are Black artists reconfiguring and exploring gender, sex, and sexuality and their fraught tensions? The course methods will include engagement with visual art, music, performance, film, tv, everyday life, and critical theory.

Some of our course interlocutors will include: art from the 2024 Whitney Museum Biennial, other gallery and museum exhibitions; texts such as The Invention of Women (1997), Race and Performance After Repetition (2020), Frottage (2019), Black Sound (2024); videos and music from Janelle Monáe, Rihanna, Durand Bernarr, Chika, Kelela, and Tems; and films such as The Stroll (2023), Little Richard: I am Everything (2023), and Twenty Feet from Stardom (2013).

Students will be encouraged to create, write, perform, collaborate, make, and think alongside, against, and around these issues, methods, and objects.

For PhD Students: a final seminar-length paper is expected. 

For MA students: the final is a small group or individual presentation/performance/project and an annotated bibliography.