Spring 2026 Graduate Courses

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

Course description to come. 

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

Course description to come.

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

This course explores contemporary performance practices that engage issues of ecology and climate. We will study the ecosystems of performance and the performance of ecosystems through a broad range of performance genres: site-based performance, one-on-one performance, performances with non-human audiences, theater plays, gallery installations, and community-based festivals. Through these performance works, we will analyze posthuman and nonhuman relational entanglements across scales, from the microbial to the metereological. Our inquiry will be accompanied by theorists like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Jason Moore, Anna Tsing, Alton Krenak, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Nick Estes, Harriet Washington, Donna Haraway, Una Chaudhuri, Val Plumwood, Watsuji Tetsurō, and more, who offers visions of degrowth, counterapocalypse, and intergenerational justice.

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

Course description to come. 

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

Course description to come. 

4 points, Tisch Hall, Room LC13

This course will take the recent appearance of new English additions of Das Kapital and Lire le Capital as an opportunity to consider the differences between and the convergences of reading and critique.

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

This class will investigate the anthropological, philosophical, and mathematical foundations of Performance Studies by way of a close encounter with the work of three foundational figures in performance, which is to say black performance, and performance studies/theory, which is to say black performance studies/theory: James Baldwin, Adrian Piper, and Samuel R. Delany. We will consider, by way of Delany, two important strains of discourse that focus on the nature and origins of writing and on the performance’s relation to the task of writing. These foci allow the following questions: Where does writing come from (historically, as a particular linguistic and semiotic phenomenon, and individually, as the result of impulse and desire)? How might we begin to speak of the sexuality and/or procreativity of writing? What is the relationship between social/economic/political formations and the origins and ends of writing? What happens when we think of money as a kind of writing, writing as a kind of value? How do writing and money produce space and time, particularly the space and time of the city? These questions concerning writing provide a quite specific backdrop against which can be examined the fundamental questions concerning race, sexuality, kinship, exchange, myth, ritual and theater that animate the anthropology of performance. We’ll ask how Performance Studies can serve both to cut and augment such a backdrop to the extent that it is or can be structured by re-theorizing and/or de-emphasizing writing. Writing is also crucial to Piper’s work as a performance artist. Her writing traces the boundary between critical philosophy and racialized performances, thereby allowing us to think the place of the latter in the former, to dwell on what happens when such performances are deployed in order to critique racial categories, and to investigate what happens when the visual singularity of a performed, curated or conceptualized image is deployed in order to move beyond what she calls the “visual pathology” of racist categorization. Piper opens such questions by way of her intense engagement with Kant, by way of her belief in the ongoing redefinition of necessarily incomplete categories and the therapeutic power her performances are intended to exert to that end. This belief raises further questions regarding the place or echo of racialized performance in the construction of Kant’s formulations, not only at the level of the object or example, but also at the level of the theorizing subject, Kant himself. Thinking Kant through Piper and vice versa will allow us to ask: Is critical philosophy always already infected and structured by this visual pathology? Can we so easily separate visual singularity from visual pathology? Can singularity ever be singularly visual? Might it not be necessary to hear and sound the singularity of the visage? How do sound and its reproduction allow and disturb the frame or boundary of the visual? What’s the relation between sonic materiality and originary maternity? If we ask these questions, we might become attuned to certain liberating operations sound performs at that intersection of racial performance and critical philosophy which had heretofore been the site of either the occlusion of phonic substance or the pre-critical oscillation between the rejection or embrace of certain tones. These are Baldwin’s questions as well (as Piper’s and Delany’s). His attunement to intra-actions of sound and visuality – to light’s tonalities and choreographies – presage sensual and sexual emergences and emergencies in late-twentieth century art and providing a conceptual field and a non-conceptual feel that will prove crucial to the emergence of what and how we study. In general, we’ll always be thinking about how it is that studying the nature and origins of the downtown scene demands that we consider that Harlem, which is nowhere, is everywhere.