Historical and theoretical investigations of media from the advent of writing systems, paper and the construction of single-point perspective to phonography, radio, telephony, and television and up through the critical reflection on cyberspace, rhetorics of PowerPoint, surveillance and data shadows. Issues explored include the relationship between representation and technology, the historicity of perception, transformations of reigning notions of imagination, literacy, communication, reality and truth, and the interplay of aesthetics, technics and politics.
Topics in German Media Theory & History
Professor/Instructor
Thomas Yaron LevinAdvanced Topics in Modern Architecture
Professor/Instructor
Beatriz ColominaExplores the critical transformation in the relationship between interior and exterior space in modern architecture, which is most evident in domestic space. Domestic space ceases to be simply bounded space in opposition to the outside, whether physical or social. An analysis of modern houses is used as a frame to register contemporary displacements of the relationship between public and private space, instigated by the emerging reality of the technologies of communicaton, including newspaper, telephone, radio, film, and television.
Topics in Architecture
Professor/Instructor
Spyros PapapetrosThis course covers various topics related to the history and theory of architecture.
Topics in Literature and Philosophy
Professor/Instructor
Daniel Heller-RoazenChance and contingency were long thought to lie outside the realm of knowledge. Then there arose new means for measuring probabilities of the most varied kinds. This seminar will explore the conditions and occurrence of that shift, as well as its consequences, as they are reflected in a few literary and philosophical works.
Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory
Professor/Instructor
Juliane RebentischCourse treats a wide range of theoretical and historical issues concerning the interpretation of literary and cultural materials. Topics include psychoanalytic approaches to literature, the Frankfurt School and its legacy, feminist theory, German-Jewish Acculturation, relations between literature and the other arts, theories of literary reception, and fascism and culture.
Introduction to Historiography of Science
Professor/Instructor
Angela N. H. CreagerIntroduces beginning graduate students to the central problems and principal literature of the history of science from the Enlightenment to the 20th century. Course is organized around several different methodological approaches, and readings include important works by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, as well as by historians of science.
Seminar in History of Photography
Professor/Instructor
Anne McCauleyThe seminar is concerned with the work of a single European or American photographer or with a significant movement in the 20th century.
Criticism and Theory
Professor/Instructor
Paul NadalA study in the major texts in criticism and theory. Authors include Plato, Aristotle, Sidney, Shelley, Derrida, and Foucault, among others. Topics include mimesis, structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and new historicism.
Literary and Cultural Theory
Professor/Instructor
Andrew ColeA study of the role of culture in literary practice and theory. Topics include postmodernism, post-colonialism, feminism, performance theory, queer theory, and popular cultures, among others.
PhD Proseminar
Professor/Instructor
Beatriz ColominaA research seminar in selected areas of aesthetics, art criticism, and architectural theory from the 18th to the 20th centuries on the notion of representation in art and architecture. This seminar is given to students in the doctoral program at the School of Architecture and to doctoral candidates in other departments.
Gender, Cities, and Dissent
Professor/Instructor
S.E. EistererThis course asks how intersectional feminism, queer, and trans theory can spearhead new methods of research, objects of study, and ways of seeing and analyzing spaces, buildings, cities, and human alliances within them. Overall, the seminar focuses on practices and forms of organizing around LGBTQ+ rights and how historical actors have formed networks and associations to resist dominant spatial and political regimes.
Topics in Environmental Studies
Professor/Instructor
Allison CarruthThis topics course offers seminars with a focus on climate change and/or biodiversity. Seminars under this topic examine environmental and societal issues associated with two of the key defining challenges of our time: climate change and/or biodiversity loss. The course uses a multi-disciplinary combination of perspectives and approaches grounded in the Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences.
Humanistic Perspectives on the Arts
Professor/Instructor
Brooke A. Holmes, Nida Miriam GhouseThe study of the arts at the intersection of the disciplines.