Spring 2026 Graduate Courses

4 points

This seminar celebrates the intellectual, aesthetic, and political force of Black feminist performance through the work of Toni Morrison, Saidiya Hartman, and Audre Lorde. Engaging their fiction, essays, poetry, and memoirs, we will consider how each writer forges a distinctive voice and argumentative strategy to redress histories of violence while articulating practices of black femme survival, queer community care, and soma-erotic joy.

Central to this course are questions of how Black feminist writing itself becomes performative—world-making and world-breaking—toward collective psycho-somatic repair. As such, we will situate this fierce and fly trio within a vibrant lineage of black and Afro-Caribbean experimental performance from the late twentieth century to the present. Together then, we will examine both the possibilities and limits of narrative form and theoretical critique, tracing how conceptual essays and creative texts move within and against political life. 

Finally, in explicit honor of Black feminist performance, the course embraces a capacious understanding of access and learning, inviting participants to encounter complex ideas through theatre-like exercises, contemplative movement, and nontraditional modes of “doing theory” in the classroom.

Assignments include individual and small-group creative-critical responses—ranging from close readings to choreographic explorations—and a collaborative final performance that threads scholarship to collective care, theoretical critique to political joy. Participants will also engage the city as archive, visiting historical venues and sites across Manhattan and Brooklyn where legacies of Black feminist performance continue to root and bloom. 

4 points

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

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” James Baldwin

How as artists and citizens do we respond creatively in times of crisis? Where do poetics and politics intersect?  What performative forms of resistance can we enact socially?  What are the new languages of aesthetic resistance, which we need to create in order to answer to the times we are living in? This course interrogates the theory and practice of resistance in body based performance by exploring innovative modes of creating with, and thinking about ways of negotiating our existence in the current political climate. This class looks at examples of how artists have responded in the past and present to oppressive governments, dictatorships in Latin America, natural disasters and community emergencies, in order to generate new ways of understanding what the impact of resistance is in society and in our bodies. We will consider texts from performance theory, political theory, as well as poetry, fiction and oral histories, from thinkers that reflect on different approaches to resistance. The course invites you to think of performance as a practice that blurs the line between art, life and politics, emphasizing participation, dialogue, and direct action. Proposes that artists and thinkers need to be versed in social skills, political strategies, and tactics that will assist them in making new performative works. The ethos of the course is to encourage students to question the function and boundaries of the body in performance, everyday life, and as a tool for empowerment and solidarity across communities.

4 points

Enrollment is capped at 16 students; permission of instructor required. Email instructor with the following: why you would like to take this class; what you hope it will contribute to your research, studies, and/or artistic practice; and any relevant prior course background. Apply by December 1, 2025. 

This course takes a multi-angled approach to thinking trauma and history together. On the one hand, drawing on key works in psychoanalysis (Freud, Ferenczi, Laplanche), trauma studies, affect studies, performance studies, as well as select performances, this class will explore trauma as a form of relating to history. By indicating the complex interaction between external and internal realities, the models of psychic trauma made available in the texts we will study disrupt simplistic notions of causality and referentiality. They can also help move us away from an over-focus on what trauma does to us to ask instead what traumatized subjects do with, not about, their trauma (Saketopoulou).

On the other hand, this course also ventures a critical history — a genealogy, in the Foucauldian sense — of trauma. Among other things, we will wonder at the transformations undergone by the concept of psychic trauma, asking how it leapt beyond its sites of emergence in 19th-century medical debates over workplace injuries to become a term of everyday usage. Indeed, today, the term trauma is as likely to circulate in Tik Tok videos or appear in UN special reports on torture as it is to be theorized in specialized journals in the psy sciences (i.e., psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis). Paradoxically, then, psychic trauma — clinically understood to disorder time — has generated new ways of telling time. As Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman propose, trauma has “created a new language of the event” (The Empire of Trauma, p. 6).

This connects to the third strand of the class: the politics of trauma. Woven into the ways individuals, groups, and nations narrate and make sense of exceptional as well as everyday violences, the category of psychic trauma can offer a supple socio-political diagnostic of how history enters us. Invocations of psychic trauma can, however, just as easily serve to individualize and depoliticize the socio-historical dimensions of organized violence and, even, to recast perpetrators as victims, as via such categories as “combat trauma” (Abu El Haj). The point in this regard is neither to rescue nor condemn trauma discourse, but to consider the various ways it works in the world, its truth effects. This is also the work of this seminar.

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.

Enrollment is capped at 12 students. 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.

4 points

In this reading-based seminar we will study writings in transgender studies and trans of color critique between the 1970s and the present, for the ways in which trans studies has drawn upon and restaged modern questions and practices of knowledge and experience. What epistemes of power/knowledge have shaped the emergence of trans studies as a trans/anti-disciplinary field of work? What trans* ways of knowing and understanding have emerged that expand, or unsettle, existing formations and paradigms of collective understanding? With special attention to work in the arts and humanities – and with relevance to performance studies – we will read trans* studies texts engaged with archival and historiographic inquiry, historical materialism, necropower, semiotics, phenomenology, affect, aesthetics, ecology and technoscience. Coursework involves reading critical theory and the close study of performance, poetry, visual art and film.

4 points

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

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.

4 points - please refer to Albert for class meeting day/time/location

Ever since Plato’s notorious censorship of the musicopoetic arts or mousiké (i.e. the work of the muses) one might say that the western philosophical tradition has had a somewhat anxious  relation to performance. But what is exactly is performance? And how might we draw  parameters around the diverse practices, experiences, and events that we assign to the category of  performance or the “performing arts”? How do text-based endeavors like literature and  philosophy struggle to grasp the experience of dance or music, and how do such forms negotiate  questions of textuality for their own construction and regeneration? What might performance tell us about our experience of time, memory, and the ways we conceive of our identities? Or how  might performance embody the work of philosophy?  

This course takes up the polysemous dimensions of the word “performance” as well as it what it  means to “perform” through a range of disciplinary perspectives. We will begin by discussing  the relations between performance and religious ritual before assessing when performance  practices begin to become conceived as discreet “arts” and “disciplines” in their own right. We  will examine philosophy’s often anxious relation to practices associated with performance, and  we will probe deeply into the kinds of “performance anxieties” we might experience or  encounter in our everyday lives and our mediated worlds. Drawing from philosophy, literature, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer theory, and performance studies, this course is an invitation to think about performance in theory and practice. Readings will include writings by people like Fred Moten, Ann Pellegrini, Judith Butler, Thomas Hobbes, Amiri Baraka, Friedrich Nietzsche, Heinrich von Kleist, Leo Tolstoy, Martha Graham, Constantin Stanislavski, D.H Winnicot, Hélène Cixous, Allan Kaprow, Peggy Phelan, Richard Schechner, Erwin Goffman,  Diana Taylor, Susan Leigh-Foster, and José Muñoz, among others. Moreover, students will take  advantage of various performance events at NYU’s Skirball Center.