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

Course description to come.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 670

This interdisciplinary course will investigate the relations between experimental film, radio, music, and sound art in modernism and postmodernism. The inventions of photography, cinema and sound recording radically altered the 19^th century consciousness of perception, temporality, selfhood, and death. The newfound role of the voice — depersonalized, disembodied, eternalized — appeared in poetic and literary phantasms of that epoch, and offered models of future (and futuristic) art forms. This course will study the aesthetic and ideological effects of this epochal shift, especially as it concerns the subsequent practice of avant-garde art and aesthetics. It will specifically focus on the recontextualization of the history of avant garde film in the broader context of the sound arts and their discursive practices, from Dada and Surrealism through Lettrism, Situationism, Fluxus and the American Indepenent Cinema. Special attention will be paid to the transformations of the 1950s and 1960s, the moment when the arts moved toward a more performative mode, entailing the dematerialization and decommodification of the aesthetic domain. The goal of this course is to examine what happens when the general visual dominance in film theorization is overturned and the role of sound is taken as essential.

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, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 612

Course description to come.