Spring 2025 Courses

REGISTRATION INFORMATION

Check for registration holds. All holds must be resolved and removed in order to enroll in classes for the spring semester. Go to the Student Center in Albert and look at the “Holds” section on the right side of the page.

Update your contact information. Go to the Student Center in Albert and click on "Personal Information." All students are required to have an "NYU Emergency Alert" cellular phone number and emergency contact information to register for Spring 2025.

NON-MAJORS: Due to the one-year format of the Master’s program most of our classes are restricted to majors only. If you are interested in registering for a class you must submit an External Student Registration form. If space becomes available you will be contacted with registration instructions: Click here for External Form

2025 Spring Course Offerings

 

Queer Theory: Queer Theory and Psychoanalysis | A. Pellegrini

PERF-GT 1035.001 (17904) - Tuesdays 3:45pm to 6:45pm

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6th 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.

Topics in PS: Queer Temporalities/Performing Duration | M. De Berry

PERF-GT 2122.002 (17905) - Thursdays, 3:30pm to 6:30pm

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6th 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?

Topics in Trans Studies: Trans* Histories: Art, Aesthetics, Performance | J. Tang

PERF-GT 2930.001 (22509) - Wednesdays, 5:00pm to 8:00pm

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6th 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.

Special Project: Race & Art: Black Diaspora | S. Smalls

PERF-GT 2216.002 (17906) - Mondays 3:15pm to 6:50pm

4 pts – In-Person, 181 Mercer, 5th Fl., Room 565

Course open to PS Graduate Majors only by instructor permission. In a sentence or two, tell Professor Shanté Paradigm Smalls <shantesmalls@nyu.edu> why you want to take this course.

This course thinks through the relationship of art and Black Diaspora. Key themes the course will explore are feminism, womanism, sex, gender, sexuality, creativity, time, geography, protest, and other “Black matters.” How is Blackness rendered through gender, sex, and sexuality, and how are gender, sex, and sexuality informed by Blackness? How is Blackness articulated, disarticulated, or unarticulated across the Black Diaspora? How does art in its most expansive terms engage, depict, and reformulate Blackness? How are Black diasporic artists reconfiguring and exploring gender, sex, sexuality, time, place, space, politics, and imagination 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 local gallery and museum exhibitions; thinkers and artists such as Felwine Sarr; bell hooks, Milton Santos; Kiyan Williams; Dionne Brand; Mark Anthony Neal; Frank Wilderson; Tavia Nyong’o; Joāo H Costa Vargas; Denise Ferreira da Silva; Nikita Gale; Kevin Quashie; Biko Mandela Gray; Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí; Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich, and more. Students will be encouraged to create, write, perform, collaborate, make, and think alongside, against, and around these issues, methods, and objects. For All: a short presentation on an art object of your choice. For PhD Students: a final seminar-length paper is expected. For MA students: the final is a small group or individual presentation/paper/performance/project and an annotated bibliography.

Special Project: Studies in 16th Century Literature: Gender and Performance in Italian Theater | I. Caiazza

PERF GT 21216.003 (22932) / ITAL-GA 2589 - Thursdays, 3:30pm to 6:15pm

4 pts – In-Person, Casa Italiana, 24 W 12th St, RM 203

This course examines the interplay between the Classical (Ancient Greek and Latin) comic tradition and the Italian Renaissance theater, focusing on key texts from figures such as Aristophanes, Terentius, Machiavelli, Ariosto, and Margherita Costa.  Through a comparative lens, we will explore in particular how these works shape and challenge contemporary notions of gender and sexuality within the comedic genre.  Topics will include the interplay between politics and comedy, the dynamics of power and desire, and the strategies employed by both male and female writers to craft female characters.  While we will focus on the Italian Renaissance and its connections to classical comedy, in their assignments students can apply the methodological lenses we develop throughout the course to contexts of their choice (e.g. theatrical texts from different eras and areas, performative interpretations of theatrical texts, their reception, or their re-readings through different art forms, such as the cinematic one).

Adavanced Seminar: Artaud & Psychopathology | A. Weiss

PERF-GT 2217.001 (17907) - Wednesdays, 12:30pm to 3:30pm

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6th 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. 

Advanced Seminar: Cuisine in Film, Performance and the Arts | A. Weiss

PERF-GT 2850.001 / CINE-GT 3011 (22203) - Tuesdays 12:30pm to 4:30pm

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6th Fl., RM 652

(Students who enroll in this course will recieve a one-time tuition credit in the amount of $112.00 to offset the cost of fees collected for the course.)

Limited seats. Admission by application.

Prospective students should send an email to allen.weiss@nyu.edu stating their department, class standing (MA or PhD -- no undergraduates admitted), their reason for wishing to take the course, and a very brief statement of their familiarity with modern and contemporary art, performance and theory.

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.

Performance Composition: Body Politics | A. Shvarts

PERF-GT 2730.001 (17909) - Fridays, 1:30pm to 4:30pm

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6th 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.

Field Theory and the Poethics of the Open Field | F. Moten

COLIT-GA 2978 / POET-GA 2002 / PERF-GT 2216.002 (22809) - Mondays, 11:00am to 1:45pm

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.