Spring 2026 Graduate Courses

Laura Harris
Wednesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 1020 / Class # 7294
4 points

This course closely examines theoretical writing concerned with aesthetic, social and psychological aspects of the cinematic medium.  Questions addressed range from the nature of cinematic representation and its relationship to other forms of cultural expression to the nature of cinematic spectatorship and the modes of attention and perception it has helped shape.  Classic and contemporary texts from the history of film theory will be studied alongside examples from the history of film, its precursors and its extensions and reconfigurations in digital media and other audiovisual technologies.

This course is open to Cinema Studies MA students only.

Anna McCarthy
Mondays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 1026 / Class # 7295
4 points

This course will trace the history of free speech and censorship on television. We will explore case studies of political insurgency and protest in a selection of national contexts and periods. Areas of focus include, but are not limited to, the U.S. civil rights movement, the Irish republican struggle, Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa, Palestinian resistance to the Israeli state, and Sandinista-era Nicaragua.

This course is open to Cinema Studies MA students only.

Toby Lee
Fridays, 8:00am-12:00pm
Room 635
CINE-GT 3902 / Class # 7316
4 points

Seminar on the methods and procedures of writing the doctoral dissertation in Cinema Studies. The course guides students in preparing their dissertation proposal through in-class debate, written feedback from the instructor, shared readings, and visits from guests with experience in the process. Students who have defended their dissertation proposals will visit the class. (We read their proposals in preparation for their visits.) Students will make regular presentations of work-in-progress, to meet the goal of finishing their proposal by the end of the semester in readiness for their upcoming oral exam defending it (usually in late May/early June). The course stresses mutual aid in class discussion. By the end of the semester, you should have settled who is advising your dissertation, and possibly also have identified another member of your dissertation committee (5-person in total).

This course is open to Cinema Studies PhD students only.

Shawn VanCour
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 652
CINE-GT 1025 / Class # 21738
4 points

This course explores shifts in sound technologies, industries, style, and listening sensibilities that have operated within and alongside transformations in moving image media from the late 19th century to the present. From the telephone, radio, and phonograph to sound cinema, television, videogames, and mobile/online media, we will investigate the technological, economic, aesthetic, and cultural dimensions of sound history and the types of archival collections and research methods used by sound historians. Classes will include short lectures, screenings, and discussion, conversations with scholars, archivists, and sound professionals, demonstrations of selected technologies, and site visits to local archives. Final research project required.

Permission code required to register for Cinema Studies MA & PhD and MIAP students only. Request a permission code here.

Outside graduate students who are interested may email the Professor Shawn VanCour at svg1@nyu.edu

Michael Gillespie
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 635
CINE-GT 1333 / Class # 22098
4 points

With a focus on American cinema and the idea of black film, the class considers new paradigms for genre, narrative, aesthetics, culture, historiography, and intertextuality. Centering black film as art and discourse, the class renounces notions of black film as a stable category, genre, merely a reflection of lived experience, or a matter of positive/negative images, authenticity, and essence. With a concentration on “film blackness,” this seminar is an intensive study of the politics and pleasures that constitute the idea of black film. Informed by Film and Media Studies, Visual Culture Studies, American Studies, Performance Studies, and Black Studies scholarship, course topics will include experimental/avant-garde cinema, film noir, blaxploitation, speculative fiction, Black womanist/feminist film, independent cinema, the racial grotesque, hip-hop art cinema, and queer cinema.

Permission code required to register. Request a permission code here.

Allen Weiss
Wednesdays, 12:30-3:30pm
Room 613
CINE-GT 1981-001 / Class # 13139
4 points

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.

By Application Only: Please send an email to allen.weiss@nyu.edu, and include the following information: department; MA or PhD; theoretical background; background in dolls, puppets, marionettes; reason for wishing to join seminar. Deadline December 1st.

This course is open to Cinema Studies students only. Outside students should register for PERF-GT 2218.

Anna McCarthy
Thursdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 646
CINE-GT 3011 / Class # 21363
4 points

Who doesn't love a good detective story? Among the many pleasures of the procedural narrative, at the forefront lies the process of solving a mystery--the enjoyable mental labor of finding a solution to a problem. But what problem? And whose pleasure? This seminar seeks answers to such questions by looking into the cultural work that police stories perform. We will explore what it means to narrate the process of police work as a cognitive endeavor (and not as, say, an expression of power or the threat of physical force), asking how films and TV shows about cops mediate between what Louis Althusser termed the "ideological" and the "repressive" state apparatuses, and, by extension, how they negate other ways of imagining the social.

Our work takes seriously the abolitionist proposition that police stories are, more often than not, copaganda. As Mark Anthony Neal notes in "The Myth of the Good Cop," these stories "actively counter attempts to hold police malfeasance accountable by reinforcing the ideas that the police are generally fair and hard-working and that Black criminals deserve the brutal treatment they receive." At the same time, as Mariame Kaba and Andrea Richie point out, Copaganda does not always come "unambiguously packaged." Policing always implies self policing, and stories about the regulation of conduct are often stories about the liberal institution of the self, an institution threatened by collective life and community accountability. 

Screenings, readings, and discussions focus on a different aspect of the copaganda problematic each week. Student work includes primary research, in-class presentations and a final research paper (or an equivalent "deliverable" developed in consultation with the instructor.) 

Permission code required to register. To obtain a permission code, send an email to am81@nyu.edu detailing the reasons for your interest in this course, plus any other relevant information.

Zhen Zhang
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 1136
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 7322
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 7323
4 points

The course studies Sinophone or Chinese-language cinemas from the emergence of post-classical or post-socialist cinemas in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Mainland China from 1970s-1980s to the more recent formations around the turn of the new century in the region and beyond. The distinctiveness of the three new wave cinemas and their interactions and aftermaths, especially after the Hong Kong handover in 1997 and under the impact of neoliberal globalization, offer ideal laboratories for reconsidering the premises and limitations of the concepts of national and transnational cinema.  Along the same axis, we will also probe the problematic of cultural nationalism and neo-regionalism (e.g.; “greater China” and pan-Chinese cinema) within the trans-Asian context, and the tension between state's cultural policy and film industry, commercial cinema and art or independent practices.  Given the massive transformations in media technology and industrial organization in the past decades, we will also consider the ramifications of new/digital media for film and screen culture, including the new documentary movement, amateur and activist film/video practices, and queer and feminist cinema.  Screenings include festival favorites, commercial blockbusters and DV works. Students actively take part in discussions, presentations and engage in research toward a term project.

Please note: History of Sinophone World Cinema I is NOT a prerequisite for enrollment.

Dana Polan
Thursdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 1202
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 7298
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 7299
4 points

Martin Scorsese is one of the most celebrated of American feature film directors (along with documentaries, long and short). His name even adorns the title of our department (as well as scholarships in the department and Tisch's Martin Scorsese Virtual Production Center in Brooklyn). This course sets out to study the director and the development of his reputation through close study of key films across his career. We will look at such topics as: ethnicity, community, masculinity, representations of privileged individuals (such as artists, whether they merit that privilege or not), criminality and morality, distinctions of non-fiction and fiction film, musical soundtracks, genre, and so on. We will also give a key place to Scorsese’s efforts around film history: his film preservation work; his own written histories of film as well as documentaries on specific national cinemas; the ways his own films take inspiration from the trajectory of cinema — and sometimes build direct direct reference to it in their narratives — from its silent days to the affordances of special effects today (like 3D with the movie Hugo, about the earliest days of cinema).

Toby Lee
Mondays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 2001 / Class # 7305
4 points

In this course, we examine the history of documentary form as political discourse and practice. We take as a starting point documentary theorist Michael Renov’s discussion of poetics — which he defines as the rigorous investigation of aesthetic forms, their composition and function — in the context of the documentary image. While Renov argues that “poetics must also confront the problematics of power,” so too must an understanding of political documentary take seriously questions of poetics and form. Through close readings of particular films and careful study of their formal strategies and aesthetic choices, we explore how documentary images act, or how they are made to act, within larger structures of power and resistance. We will look at films from a wide range of periods, places and styles — including observational, experimental, compilation/appropriation, performative, propaganda, and essay films — considering these works in relation to a variety of topics including social and political activism, revolutionary movements, state violence, surveillance, colonialism and anti-colonialism, human rights, and the shifting politics of the image in the digital age.  

Permission code required to register. Please contact the course instructor (tobylee@nyu.edu) with your department/degree program and reasons for your interest in the course, no later than November 21.

Jacob Floyd
Fridays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 2121
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 7306
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 7307
4 points

Two of the highest grossing original films of 2025 were Sinners and Weapons, and their popularity led to conversations and questions about horror, questions central to this course: what defines the horror film and why is it popular? Is it a set of formal traits, a narrative approach, shared motifs, an affect, a worldview, or something determined by fans? In this course, we will seek to define horror cinema and, in the process, chart its generic evolution, as well as its relationship to genre theory, the film industry, historical events, popular culture, fans, and media formats and technologies. While the course will focus primarily on film, we will acknowledge horror cinema’s relationship with literature, television, and new media. After completing the course, students will be able to identify central topics and debates in horror studies, as well as engage in original research that provides their own definition of the term, as well as account for horror’s industrial and cultural resonance. During the course, we will screen both canonical classics and lesser-known works.

Dana Polan
Tuesdays, 6:00-10:00pm
Room 648
CINE-GT 2125
Section 001 (Cinema Studies students) Class # 14060
Section 002 (Outside students) Class # 14061
4 points

This course offers a broad survey of American cinema from 1960 up to the present.  While the emphasis will be on the dominant, narrative fiction film, there will be attention to other modes of American cinema such as experimental film, animation, shorts, and non-fiction film.  The course will look closely at films themselves -- how do their styles and narrative structures change over time? -- but also at contexts:  how do films reflect their times?  how does the film industry develop? what are the key institutions that had impact on American film over its history?  We will also attend to the role of key figures in film's history:  from creative personnel (for example, the director or the screenwriter) to industrialists and administrators, to censors to critics and to audiences themselves.  The goal will be to provide an overall understanding of one of the most consequential of modern popular art forms and of its particular contributions to the art and culture of our modernity.

Ella Shohat
Mondays, 2:00-5:35pm
181 Mercer Street, Room 565
CINE-GT 1025-002 / Class # 23177
4 points

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the various dimensions of the cultural politics of Middle Eastern/North African cinema within transnational perspectives. We begin from the premise that representation itself is a site of contestation, with profound historical and theoretical implications impacting the subject, genre, aesthetic, and narrative framing. Drawing on various texts from diverse disciplines, including from film/media studies, literary theory, visual culture, and cultural studies, this course examines issues of representation in their various ramifications for debates over “the colonial,” “the national,” and “the diasporic.” The course will engage in a close analysis of the films, while also taking on board the various scholarly texts written about the films and their production and reception. The course will be organized around key concepts and questions having to do with Orientalist visual culture, the imperial imaginary, contested histories, imagined geographies, gender and national allegory, diasporic identity and postcoloniality, and the graven images taboo and the theology of adaptation. The course also examines Middle Eastern/North African films in terms of image, sound, editing, and so forth, exploring the ways in which cultural representations are shaped by specifically mediatic techniques. The close study of films will be combined with the analysis of related audio-visual materials. Discussion of the readings in relation to the screening will form a substantial part of the course. 

This course is open only to Cinema Studies graduate students. Outside students should register for ASPP-GT 2041.

Tejaswini Ganti
Tuesdays, 2:00-5:00pm
25 Waverly Place, Room 612
CINE-GT 1403 / Class # 4671
4 points

Since the millennium, the ethnography of media has emerged as an exciting area of research within anthropology.  While claims about media in people’s lives are made on a daily basis by journalists, media industries, and politicians among others, anthropologists have been interested in looking at how media is part of the naturally occurring lived realities of people’s lives.  This course examines the social and political life of media and how it makes a difference in the daily lives of people as a practice – in production, reception, or circulation. It examines cross-culturally how the mass media have become the primary means for the circulation of symbolic forms across time and space and crucial to the constitution of subjectivities, collectivities, and histories in the contemporary world.  Topics include the role of media in constituting and contesting national identities, in forging alternative political visions, in transforming religious practice, and in creating subcultures.  The types of media forms we will examine range from commercial filmmaking to news production to digital media. We will read about media practices in diverse parts of the world such as Australia, India, Iran, Nigeria, Russia, Turkey, and the U.S.

Permission code required to register. Request a permission code here.

Prerequisite: Culture & Media I

Dan Streible
Wednesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 674
CINE-GT 1806-002 / Class # 20837
4 points

This course embraces a broad conception of curating as the treatment of materials from their discovery, archiving, preservation and reformatting, through their exhibition, distribution, exploitation, and interpretation. It compares and contrasts the often differing curatorial practices found in archives, museums, cinematheques, festivals, art galleries, web platforms, and other venues. The course examines the goals of public programming, audience engagement, and the myriad factors involved with presenting and distributing moving image media. We explore various methods to present archival and often marginalized moving film, video and digital media via engaging exhibitions, events, publications, and media productions. Our guest speakers are professionals involved in the world of cinema, art and cultural curating and programming.

Permission code required to register. Request a permission code here.

Open to any NYU graduate students and (with prior permission of the instructor) advanced undergraduates in Tisch. Advanced undergraduates at Tisch should email the instructor (dan.streible@nyu.edu) by 12/1/25 to request permission to register.

David Forgacs
Thursdays, 3:30-6:15pm
Casa Italiana, Room 203
CINE-GT 1981-002 / Class # 23125
4 points

The course investigates the relationship between films and urban space in Italy. What happens when the static or mobile camera meets the built environment, when editing cuts and splices the city into “views”, when the flat rectangular screen frames three-dimensional space? How does sound interact with images? Can film adequately disclose and interrogate urban “social space”, including the power differentials that operate within cities? This is not a course on “the Italian city” or in “the history of Italian cinema”. “Urban space” is not a synonym of “city” and the course jumps over whole decades and selects a finite corpus of films, located mainly in three cities – Milan, Naples and Rome – which treat space in those cities in unusual or illuminating ways.

The course is offered within the Department of Italian Studies. Knowledge of the Italian language may be an asset but it is not required, and all the sound films studied have English subtitles. 

This course is open only to Cinema Studies graduate students. Outside students should register for ITAL-GA 2895.

Cheryl T. Furjanic & Pegi Vail
Tuesdays, 11:00am-1:30pm
25 Waverly Place, Room 612
CINE-GT 1996 / Class # 4672
4 points

Yearlong seminar in ethnographic documentary video production using state-of-the-art digital video equipment for students in the Program in Culture and Media. Students devote the spring semester to intensive work on the project, continuing to shoot and edit, presenting work to the class, and completing their (approximately 20-minute) ethnographic documentaries. Student work is presented and critiqued during class sessions, and attendance and participation in group critiques and lab sessions is mandatory. Students should come into the class with project ideas already well-developed. Students who have not completed the work assigned in the first semester are not allowed to register for the second semester. There is no lab fee, but students are expected to provide their own videotapes. In addition to class time, there are regular technical lab sessions on the use of equipment.

Permission code required to register. Request a permission code here.     

For approved Culture & Media students in their second year only after completing Video Production I and Sight & Sound: Documentary.

Juana Suárez
Tuesdays, 12:30-4:30pm
Room 670
CINE-GT 2049-002 / Class # 10838
4 points

This course studies the different kinds of institutions that collect and manage cultural material: museums of art, natural history, and motion pictures; libraries and historical societies; corporate institutions. It compares and contrasts these types of institutions to reveal how they differ from one another, paying particular attention to how different institutional missions affect internal metadata and information systems. It examines theories of collecting, the history and ethics of cultural heritage institutions, the organizational structures of institutions that house collections (including trends in staffing and the roles of individual departments), and their respective missions and operational ethics. The class will visit a variety of local cultural organizations, and will have working professionals talk about their organizations and duties.

Open to Cinema Studies MA & PhD students, with prior permission of the instructor. Interested students should email the instructor (juana@nyu.edu) by 12/1/25 to request permission to register.

CINE-GT 2901 / class # 7308        1-4 points variable

A student wishing to conduct independent research for credit must obtain approval from a full-time faculty member in the Department of Cinema Studies who will supervise an independent study for up to 4 credits. This semester-long study is a project of special interest to the student who, with the supervising faculty member, agrees on a course of study and requirements.  The proposed topic for an Independent Study project should not duplicate topics taught in departmental courses.  This is an opportunity to develop or work on a thesis project.

To register, you must submit an Independent Study Form. Once the information from your form is verified by your faculty supervisor, you will receive a permission code.

CINE-GT 2950 / class # 7319        1-4 points variable

A student wishing to pursue an internship must obtain the internship and submit the Learning Contract before receiving a permission code.  Internship grades are pass/fail.