Spring 2025 Courses

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 613

If queer theory has never been of one mind about psychoanalysis, this may be because psychoanalysis has never been of one mind about homosexuality, let alone queerness. Rather than resolve this tension, this seminar seeks to stay with this ambivalence, asking what resources each of them might offer the other. “Sex” and “sexuality” are key concepts for both psychoanalysis and queer theory. Both also share an interest in the limits of identity, the ways lived experience so often exceeds our capacity to name – let alone classify – desires, pleasures, relations, embodiments. Nevertheless, queer theory alerts us to how the categories we are called to think with, in the classroom and consulting room, may carry with them unexamined assumptions and biases. This class will examine key texts in psychoanalysis and queer theory – and stretch into recent pressures that trans theory brings to bear on both – as we together explore this cross-pollination, the history of power it is embedded in, and implications for both theory and practice, including clinical practice.

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 612

This course is of two minds. In one way our weekly discussions will offer a comparative analysis on notions of queer/durational/performance as staged across contemporary feminist phenomenology, black feminist thought, and queer of color critique. During one unit for example, we will look to novels by Toni Morrison alongside theories offered by Alia Al-Saji and Moya Bailey, asking along the way: In what ways is time distributed—rendered material—across raced, sexed, and gendered bodies? What does durational performance do or reveal across felt, aesthetic and socio-political encounters? How is performance taken up (or implied) across each discipline’s given perspective, theoretical approach and methodological application?  

In another way, this class evokes, calls forth a contemplative weekly practice where we may tend to the ‘being in time’ of the shared durational encounter that is study and to study together. This could mean rather than the oft practiced one book per week model, we may indulge in reading the same book/set of readings several times in different ways within various settings over the term. For example, one week may offer a three hour class in a nearby park where we read in silence alongside each other. While another week may feature a ten minute in-studio exercise where all class participants read a poem (or song) aloud together several times over. The quest here being to engage performance theory together by performing theory together. What may ‘doing duration’ tell us about theories of queer/time? And how are we ever to sustain ourselves—endure—as we tarry along together inside and outside of time, because of-- while undeterred by time, already in pursuit of and ever in defiance of time?

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 613

This course on transgender history and historiographic methodologies focuses on art, aesthetic and performance practices, with an emphasis on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Beginning with convergences between trans and trans of color studies with art and art history, we will debate the emergence of trans art history, and the role of aesthetic objects and concerns within trans studies over the past few decades. While the course addresses histories of work by people of expansive and non-conforming gender, we will be especially concerned with trans* practices, capacities, methods and techniques of conceptualizing and constructing the past. Through an emphasis on performance, not only will we explore past and present forms of embodied practice, we will also turn to actions and material effects of varying scales, forms of movement and migration, and the liveliness of other-than-human species and matter across time. Through a study of history, we will consider the techniques by which these are made sensible, recorded, narrated, preserved, remembered, and forgotten. Readings will be drawn from trans and trans of color studies in the arts and humanities, histories of art and performance, critical science & technology and information studies, non-Western and indigenous epistemologies.

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 612

Course Description TBA

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 613

Antonin Artaud’s The Theater and Its Double is among the foundational texts of Performance Studies. Its influence has been inestimable, and it continues to inform contemporary theory and practice across the arts. This work takes on all the more urgency as it resonates with our current situation of contagion, confinement, violence, revolt. Its most celebrated chapter, “The Theater and the Plague,” proposes an aesthetic of suffering, with the epidemic as its central metaphor: a “theater of cruelty” that prefigures the privation, isolation and incarceration of his last years, from which arose his most extraordinary works. However, The Theater and Its Double is usually read without a broader context, or more recently – given the current wave of interest in the sound arts – along with his radio piece, To Have Done with the Judgment of God. The other thirty volumes of his complete works are generally ignored by all but specialists, yet the earliest writings composed at the moment of his association with the Surrealists offer a prefiguration of his mature work, while the last pieces (diaries, poems, drawings, radio) are tantamount to a radical transformation of modernist French poetry and poetics. 

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Cinema Studies

Brillat-Savarin, in The Physiology of Taste (1825), discusses the aesthetic value of cuisine from two seemingly contradictory viewpoints, since he claims both that cuisine is the most ancient art and that “Gasterea is the tenth muse: she presides over the joys of taste,” suggesting that cuisine finally takes its place as the newest art form at the height of the Romantic period. But what does it mean to speak of cuisine as a fine art? What are the relations between cuisine and the other arts? How have the histories of gastronomy and aesthetics intersected? Can cuisine evoke the sublime? How do considerations of cuisine transform the relations between arts and crafts? Can we speak of a specifically culinary filmic genre? How is “nouvelle” cuisine related to modernism and regionalism, and “hybrid” cuisine to postmodernism and globalization? This seminar will investigate the conceptual preconditions, the discursive limits, and the poetic and rhetorical forms of the culinary imagination, under the assumption that the pleasures of the text increase the joys of eating. Our goals are to effectively conceptualize cuisine, to establish cuisine’s rightful place among the fine arts, and to examine the varied modes of gastronomic representation.

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 612

For decades, artists have explored the body as an instrument of political action. From figuration to performance and social practice, contemporary art abounds with strategies for mobilizing the body as a cipher and provocation. This performance composition course will combine readings and discussion, independent research, and hands-on practicums. We will explore a range of practices from artists such as Adrian Piper, Mary Kelly, Senga Nengudi, Jack Smith, James Luna, Pope.L, Ron Athey, Viva Ruiz, Xandra Ibarra, and texts by Jose Esteban Munoz, Jennifer Doyle, Amelia Jones, Rizvana Bradley and others. The final project will take the form of performance, broadly construed.

4 pts – In-Person, 7 East 12th, Rm 131

In runaway pursuit of a social science of poetry, let’s explore the open field or marching road or hard tone row of the not in between as if we’ve been t/here, in the subsistent circumsistence of the surround, all along. If field theory is still undergirded by the liberal, logico-atomistic metaphysics of individuation-in-relation, then perhaps open field poethics (HD, Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Louise Bennett, Francis Ponge, Nathaniel Mackey, Martin Carter, Albert Einstein, Kurt Lewin, Joan Retallack, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Karen Barad) is foregiven in the physics of entanglement and nonlocality, which pervades the (oc)cultivation of cotton and cane and which is expressed in recidivist medievalism, monkish itinerancy, troubadour’d beguining, processual work song, and recessive field holler.