Jeffrey Moser (History of Art and Architecture) and Felipe Rojas Silva (Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology)

Long before there were archaeologists, there were people who knew how to interpret traces of the past. Those traces have always been in flux, subject to changing cultural, environmental, and technological factors. While stone carvings, bones, ruins, and other durable objects have long encouraged reflections about the beings who created them, there are also those who have considered smells, flowers, dreams, and other seemingly ephemeral phenomena to be traces of distant pasts. What can be a trace of the past? How have people followed these traces? And how might the insights and oversights of these past ways of knowing the past inform our own efforts to identify or create traces for an uncertain future? This course explores some of the many ways in which individuals and communities have found and followed traces of earlier times.

Jeffrey Niedermaier (Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies) and Maru Pabón (Comparative Literature)

An injunction to compare has taken hold in humanities work, and it should be welcomed. Yet the “grounds” of comparison are largely Euro-colonial turf, even when all the comparanda involved arrive from far outside the bounds of Western modernity. Led by readers of literature outside the circle of the modern West, this seminar asks: Can we compare from elsewhere? How can we attain comparative vantage points on culturally and temporally unalike texts without occupying the spaces of epistemic and political domination? Together we will interrogate grounds of comparison through explorations of transregional and transhistorical readings, including Third-Worldist manifestos, medieval Arabic philosophy, and multiscriptal poetics from early Japan. We consider the stakes and ethics of comparison and comparatism; strategies for decentering staid paradigms without turning our backs on theory or history; and potential affinities among mutually remote texts and their readers.

Peter Szendy (Cogut Institute and Comparative Literature) and Adi Ophir (Cogut Institute and Middle East Studies)

The seminar brings together two distinct approaches — phenomenological and narratological — to explore the constellations formed by the three concepts of debt, repair, and reparations, as well as the harm, loss, or suffering they presuppose. Drawing inspiration from various intellectual traditions, we will look at different scales of damage and repair. We will ask how these concepts have been used and abused in efforts to undo the harms which humans do to other humans, and to the world they inhabit and share. Advocating for reparations for slavery in the United States has often taken German reparations for Nazi crimes as a historical reference and precedent: our seminar will consider analogies and differences, as well as the limits of this model. We will also reflect upon the claims for reparations for ecological catastrophes enabled or accelerated by abandonment, negligence, or greed.

Macarena Gómez Barris (Modern Culture and Media) with Rebecca Schneider (Modern Culture and Media)

This collaborative, interdisciplinary seminar engages modes of inquiry in environmental humanities research and accounts for a range of theories and methods that encompass qualitative, historical, decolonial, and community-engaged scholarships, among others. The seminar focuses in particular on human and nonhuman relations and their impacts on environmental change, drawing on concepts and practices such as survivance, duration, weathering, extraction, and geological time. In addition to scholarly and theoretical texts, we will explore films, novels, creative nonfiction, and performances. Assignments help students engage and refine approaches to environmental scholarly inquiry and practice in a time of intensifying planetary and local crisis.

Holly Shaffer (History of Art and Architecture) with Tim Barringer (Yale University)

This collaborative seminar examines artists’ innovations amidst the commercial ambitions of the East India Company at major ports and centers of trade across Asia. Within the period of the Company’s relentless pursuit of profits, artists trained in India, China, and Britain forged relationships across cultures and experimented with materials and techniques to produce striking artworks. This course interrogates the relationship between these artists and a corporation. It asks whether “style” links such disparate arts through subjects of colonial interest — including portraits and ethnographic types, landscapes and architectural drawings, plants and animals — or if the description holds only through the terminology of “Company” art that developed as the British empire waned. Students will engage with these arts in Brown’s collections, and in the exhibition, Painters, Ports & Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1760-1830, at the Yale Center for British Art.

Daniel Kim (English and American Studies) and Mariah Min (English)

In this seminar, we will seek to develop an understanding of how “racism is itself,” in the words of Etienne Balibar, “a singular history” — of how it consists not so much of “a single invariant racism but a number of racisms, each of which “has no fixed frontiers” and can thus cross-contaminate each other, even across wide expanses of time and space. In theoretical and historiographical terms, we will attend to this multivalent and multicombinant quality of race/racism in two ways: 1) we will explore how to conceptualize relationally the various racial formations that emerged in modernity out of the slave trade, colonialism in its multiple manifestations, and Nazism; and 2) we will study pre-modern forms of collective hatred and fear that emerged prior to the putative stabilization of race as a defining category of identity. We also focus on a number of literary works from the medieval period to the present that bring the liveliest currents of “race” into vibrant intimacy, both synchronically and diachronically.

Holly Case (History and Cogut Institute) with guest scholars

We live in an era of big problems and small details. It is a time of globalization and atomization, of big data and nanotechnology—nothing is too minute to escape surveillance, regulation, or sale, and scalability is often used as a measure of success. Scale is the stuff of awe and the sublime and the feeling of utter insignificance. Can one person’s behavior change the way an entire system works (“personalized medicine,” or climate change)? When does a change in scale mean a change in kind? Is morality/ethics a question of scale? Should we think big, or is the devil in the details? We will discuss the theme of “Scale” from a variety of historical and other perspectives with texts from philosophy, literature, history of science, theology, psychology, sociology, and political theory, as well as film and poetry.

Amanda Anderson (Cogut Institute and English) and Peter Szendy (Cogut Institute and Comparative Literature)

In this capstone course, students completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation chapter, an article on method/theory, or a stand-alone essay related to the larger field. The workshop provides a collaborative and supportive space in which students from different disciplines can share their work and receive and give feedback that will broaden and sharpen the framing of their projects. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two HMAN 24*** seminars.

Kiana Murphy (American Studies) and Alejandra Rosenberg Navarro (Hispanic Studies)

What does it mean to work through archival silences? What archival methods are necessary to mine the gaps? Facilitated by two cultural studies scholars, one located in American Studies and the other in Hispanic studies, this collaborative humanities seminar tackles the archive as an institution, a practice, and a methodology through the tools of queer studies, critical race theory, gender theory, media studies, and postcolonial studies. We will study archive theory through methodological discussions and hands-on practice with Brown’s special collections at John Hay Library. We will engage the work of key scholars in the field of archival studies, such as Saidiya Hartman, Anjali Arondekar, Marisa J. Fuentes, and Zeb Tortorici. Assignments will consist of short and long essays, responses to archival materials, group presentations, and the organization of a one-day public symposium.

Peter Szendy (Cogut Institute and Comparative Literature) and Laura Odello (French and Francophone Studies and Italian Studies)

What is a face? Faces are generally considered unique to the being they belong to — usually a human being, since animals tend to be denied access to faciality. Indeed, face, understood as singularity, is for Emmanuel Levinas what grounds the ethical relation to the other. But faces, as deepfakes have shown, are also utterly replicable: they can be grafted, mimicked, appropriated, forged. Our collaborative humanities seminar will delve into the representations of faces (portraits, self-portraits, selfies, close-ups), the classification of faces (Johann Kaspar Lavater’s physiognomy, the iconography of hysteria, Cesare Lombroso’s Criminal Man), the staging of faces (pornography), the racial politics of faces (Blackface, facial recognition, Frantz Fanon’s notion of mask), and the philosophy of “faceity” (Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Giorgio Agamben).

Macarena Gómez-Barris (Modern Culture and Media) and Leila Lehnen (Portuguese and Brazilian Studies)

Anthropocenic exhaustion begs for new/old artistic modes of gathering and collectivity. How can we think, do, create, perform, listen, sense, perceive, and generate future-oriented imaginaries based on the texture of ancient ways? This collaborative humanities course centers perspectives, translations, and mediations from and about the Américas. We seek to decenter the liberal humanism of environmental thinking to present modes of being that emerge from the otherwise of the Américas. This imaginary is pluralistic in its linguistic, racial, ethnic, and gendered imagination. It foregrounds submerged perspectives and unearths subterranean stories that confront legacies of (neo)colonialism, racial capitalism, and extractivist exploitation. Guest participants — with the support of the Brown Arts and Cogut Institutes, Modern Culture and Media, and Portuguese and Brazilian Studies — enliven our study across the U.S., Turtle Island, and Abya Yala (the Indigenous nomenclature for the Américas).

Stuart Burrows (English) and Ravit Reichman (English)

From archives to monuments, photographs to films, sound recordings to selfies to Twitter feeds, modern life has reached a saturation point of object-driven memory. This collaborative humanities seminar examines modes of capturing memory in the 20th and 21st centuries, and asks what replaces the medieval memory palace as an imaginary habitat for recollection. What happens when memory becomes an external object, a thing that exists independently of our own apprehension, a form with its own ontology, ethics, and aesthetics? This course looks back on how writers, filmmakers, and critics conceptualized, explored, and reimagined the relationship between technology and memory, particularly at a time when, paradoxically, the extraordinary proliferation of images in the digital age threatens to render obsolete the camera’s function of recording and transmission.

Leela Gandhi (Cogut Institute and English) with guest scholars

In this introduction to postcolonial theory we will consider key Western sources (Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Levi Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas), anticolonial manifestos (Gandhi, Fanon, Césaire, Memmi), and political and ethical practices (civil disobedience, armed struggle, friendship). In addition to canonical critics (Said, Bhabha, Spivak), the course will review new interests in the field (transnationalism, non-western imperialisms, the environmental turn). Offered as a collaborative humanities seminar in Spring 2024, Postcolonial Theory will host and think with a series of guest scholars.

Candace Rice (Archaeology and the Ancient World and Classics) and Parker VanValkenburgh (Anthropology)

Empires — ancient, early modern, and contemporary — have profoundly shaped the distribution of wealth and power in the modern world. However, imperial formations are strikingly diverse, and many of the entities that scholars now call “empires” were not understood as such during their own times. This collaborative humanities graduate seminar explores that diversity and examines how empires rise, fall, and perdure. While taking a global, comparative perspective, we also attend to local processes, analyzing how landscapes, objects, and people were bound up with imperial trajectories in such contexts as the ancient Mediterranean, Persia, China, the Andes, the Early Modern Atlantic, and the contemporary world. We afford particular attention to local peoples’ relationships with empires, environmental history, political economy, historiography, and imperial art and material culture.

John Cayley (Literary Arts) and Ellie Pavlick (Computer Science)

Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have produced systems that can appear human-level in their ability to generate text and images. This technology opens questions concerning the relationships between the art and philosophy of language and computation as cultural infrastructure. This seminar will explore how technology and humans interact via language, and what it means for humans and for AI to read and to write. The format of this collaborative humanities seminar will emphasize in-class discussion. Readings will comprise a mix of literature, including digital literature, theory, and philosophy of language. Participants will not be required to have a background in computer science or technology, but will experience tutorials on key technical concepts in order to enable them to think critically about cutting-edge developments in AI beyond a superficial level.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media) and Macarena Gómez-Barris (Modern Culture and Media and Brown Arts Institute)

In this seminar we describe and analyze how the colonial order mined the world, focusing mainly on North Africa and South America. Metals are conveyors of powers, and are seated in pre-colonial mythologies, cosmologies, and ways of being in the world. In this collaborative theory/praxis course we ask with others (Walter Rodney, Eduardo Galeano, or Guamán Poma) how these can be reclaimed through the exercise of the gestures and techniques of below-the-ground materials. What would it mean practically to overturn the histories of plunder, theft, and evacuation and imagine beyond them? A central aspect of the course is to make and visit jewelry as immanent to social and spiritual fabrics. We acknowledge the presences and excesses of the materials we work with and engage these objects beyond the colonial and monocultural imagination.

Amanda Anderson (Cogut Institute and English) and Tamara Chin (Comparative Literature)

In this capstone course, students completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation chapter, an article on method/theory, or a stand-alone essay related to the larger field. The workshop provides a collaborative and supportive space in which students from different disciplines can share their work and receive and give feedback that will broaden and sharpen the framing of their projects. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two HMAN 2400 seminars.

Timothy Bewes (English) and Peter Szendy (Cogut Institute and Comparative Literature)

Not only has capitalism been defined in many different ways (as this or that); it also redefines itself endlessly. Is capitalism as metamorphosis the best definition of it? And if so, could we encapsulate capitalism in the conjunction or preposition “as,” which registers both the expression of equivalence (“as much as”) and the fiction of it (“as if,” “as though,” “as it were”). This collaborative humanities seminar will explore the metamorphic masks of capitalism through readings ranging from Marx (capitalism as vampirism) and Benjamin (capitalism as religion) to Sylvia Wynter (capitalism as plantation). We will approach literary genres such as “it-narratives” (where money narrates its own circulation) and reflect upon the fictionality of personhood (corporations acting as persons), as well as metaphors of mining (data) and extraction (energy) as shared logics of the "capitalocene."

Rebecca Louise Carter (Anthropology)

This course is a forward-thinking exploration of experimental ethnography, focusing on creative and multi-modal approaches and their relevance and application to humanistic social inquiry. Participants will consider both the lingering hierarchies and decolonial horizons of knowledge production and sharing, centering theory and practice from a range of disciplines within as well as outside of the academy. Geared to advanced undergraduate and early graduate students, learning takes place through modules and case study, supplemented by guest lectures, residencies, and other activities. The course also includes a series of lab sessions providing training in specific methods such as creative writing, drawing, photography, film, and performance, and culminates in a public sharing of participants’ collaborative and independent work.

Adi Ophir (Cogut Institute and Middle East Studies), in parallel with Stathis Gourgouris (Comparative Literature) at Columbia University

The seminar examines Political Theology through critical readings of ancient canonical texts considered as foundational in the traditions of Western philosophy, Judaism, and Christianity. Texts from Anaximander, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristotle, the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Renaissance musings of Etienne de La Boetie will be read alongside 20th-century thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Pierre Clastres, Cornelius Castoriadis, Hans Blumenberg, Michel Foucault, Regina Schwartz, Jan Assmann, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig. Can readings of ancient canons be both non-anachronistic and critical? Must critique be secular? Or Gnostic? Can the political be separated from the theological? What can formations of ancient theo-political imagination teach us about the limits of ours? The seminar is taught in parallel with Professor Stathis Gourgouris and his class at Columbia university. Collaborative work will take place among students at Brown and across the two campuses.

Mark Cladis (Religious Studies) and Sharon Krause (Political Science)

How are we to respond to ecological crises that interweave politics, economy, religion, and culture, and that affect and position people differently based on their race, class, gender, sexuality, and other aspects of their identities? What resources do we have—or can we create—for reimagining “the human” and the more-than-human in ways that might be emancipatory for both? What kinds of cultural efforts, artistic work, social practices, and political institutions might figure in this reimagining? This collaborative humanities seminar explores a diverse range of contemporary and historical works, including poetry, fiction, film, theology, social and political theory, nature writing, and environmental studies, including work by Wordsworth, Shelley, Thoreau, Bennett, Vogel, Du Bois, Kateb, Silko, Keller, Kymlicka, Gómez-Barris, Jarman, and Nixon, among others. The course emphasizes collaborative thinking and writing, both inside and outside the classroom.

Stephen Houston (Anthropology and History of Art and Architecture) and Felipe Rojas (Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology)

To be human is to make many marks: tags and emblems of identity, memory aids that direct and guide human action, and writing that records the sounds and meanings of language, or that might exult in the purposively meaningless asemic script. This process reveals the powers of human invention and facilitates and deepens the “graphospheres” that envelop human life. Visible, concrete signs form an environment from which people construct and construe meaning. This collaborative humanities seminar addresses the nature of graphs from past to present. Topics include: the technology of graphs; their many precursors and parallel notations; their emergence, use, and “death”; their development over time, especially in moments of cultural contact and colonialism; their setting and presence as physical things; the perils and possibilities of their interpretation; acts of grapholatry and graphoclasm; and the nature of non-writing.

Thomas Schestag (German Studies) and David Wills (French and Francophone Studies)

This collaborative humanities seminar will address the question of what we understand by “emptiness.” Conversely, we will ask what we mean by “fullness,” and how that is conceived of as the opposite of emptiness. Beginning with Lucretius’ notion of the void, and ending with the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, the seminar will examine a series of philosophical and artistic versions of emptiness (and fullness) as they have played out from ancient/classical to modern/contemporary times. Further examples will include the poetry of Paul Celan, novels by Marguerite Duras, a miniature by Gentile Bellini, and the paintings of Mark Rothko. The constant backdrop to our discussions will be how the passivity or potentiality of blankness is, or is not, transformed into activity or actuality (as well as the ethical and political consequences of that transformation).

Amanda Anderson (Cogut Institute and English) and Shahzad Bashir (History and Religious Studies)

In this capstone course, students completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation chapter, an article on method/theory, or a stand-alone essay related to the larger field. The workshop provides a collaborative and supportive space in which students from different disciplines can share their work and receive and give feedback that will broaden and sharpen the framing of their projects. Attention is also paid to key forms of professionalization, including public speaking, crafting and responding to questions, and audio/visual interviewing as a form of professional inquiry and self-presentation. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two seminars in the HMAN 24*** series.

Laura Bass (Hispanic Studies and History of Art and Architecture) and Evelyn Lincoln (History of Art and Architecture and Italian Studies)

The cities we inhabit and remember are constituted not only by bricks and mortar, but also in textual and visual representations. How were early modern cities imagined and represented, from the ideal to the disastrous, and how were these representations contested both locally and from afar? We will respond to these questions and consider how performances and experiences of city life were mediated textually and visually, using a diverse archive of narratives, festival accounts, architectural treatises, legal documents, historical records, maps, images, and archaeological remains, among other sources. Taught by two early modernists, an Italianist and a Hispanist, this collaborative humanities seminar invites students to draw on each other’s interests and participate in the construction of the syllabus, expanding its geographical and chronological purview.

Timothy Bewes (English) and Adi Ophir (Cogut Institute and Middle East Studies)

Is thinking — free, autonomous, independent — really possible? If so, under what conditions or constraints? This collaborative humanities seminar will explore the problem of thinking and thought in our world: If thinking is an act, what or who undertakes it? If an event, are there preferred sites or media in which it takes place? How does it affect us, and why do we often fail to give a proper account of our thought? Can thinking be raced, gendered, and queered? Should we dispense with the notion of thinking altogether? Readings will span philosophical works, theoretical texts, novels, poems, and videos/films.

Marc Redfield (Comparative Literature, English, and German Studies) and Zachary Sng (German Studies and Comparative Literature)

The notion of the sublime has inspired powerful writing from the classical era to our own. In this collaborative humanities seminar we’ll work through some famous writing on the sublime (Longinus, Burke, Kant, and various 20th-century philosophers and critics) and engage the sublime tradition in literature and painting (the Bible to Milton to Jorie Graham; Caspar David Friedrich to the Hudson River School to Barnett Newman), and possibly music, cinema, or other media. We will think about the sublime in relation to race and gender; capitalism, globalization, and modern technics; the animal, the anthropocene, and the post-human.

Leela Gandhi (English and Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women) and Vazira Zamindar (History)

This course enquires into belief as a form of knowledge, politics, way of life, and resource for living-together in a multi-religious world. It examines the demotion of belief in disciplines of colonial and postcolonial modernity (democracy, the shift from comparative religion to comparative linguistics, formations of “art”). Contexts for accommodating belief are equally pertinent (tradition, self-care, family values, revolutionary energy). Readings are from philosophy, theology, postcolonial and critical race studies, self-help manuals, multi-media texts and performances. Topics include the history of religions, fundamentalism, tolerance, devotion, surrender, refusal, spirituality, contemplation, submission, secularism, post-secularism, religious minorities, faith-healing, magic, skepticism, martyrdom, and apostasy.

Daniel Kim (English and American Studies) and Ada Smailbegovic (English)

If COVID has forced many humans into an awareness of the vast contours of nonhuman time, how might an analogous awareness be brought to bear upon war and its aftermath? How might we mediate between historical perspectives that register what Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence” and ones attuned to such punctual events of mass destruction as military conflict? This collaborative humanities seminar addresses such questions by engaging the work of writers like Etel Adnan, Ruth Ozeki, and Leslie Marmon Silko and filmmakers like Aida Begić as well as ecocritical scholarship that is attentive to racial and colonial histories of extraction and violence.

Jayna Brown (Brown Arts Institute and Theatre Arts and Performance Studies) and Macarena Gómez-Barris (Brown Arts Institute and Modern Culture and Media)

In this course we explore the capitalist and consumer climate emergency by attending to local and planetary disasters, and ask if this emergency is the inevitable outcome of the Western onto-epistemic regime. We center Black, Indigenous, and Global South creative modes of living, being, and doing. We define racial ecologies as constituted out of a global structure of colonial power that includes slavery, extraction, debt, settler colonialism, carcerality, and hierarchies of race/gender/sex. Yet, racial ecologies also de-link from this condition through collaborative and autonomous practices, and through new/old imaginaries of survivance. Our approach to the collaborative humanities exceeds the logics of anthropocentric containment by focusing on radical, black feminist, and queer decolonial projects that destabilize dominant understandings of the human and non-human. Case studies, literary texts, visual arts, experience, installation, sound, media, and performance are important nodes of our discussion.

Amanda Anderson (Cogut Institute and English) and Shahzad Bashir (History and Religious Studies)

In this capstone course, students completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation chapter, an article on method/theory, or a stand-alone essay related to the larger field. The workshop provides a collaborative and supportive space in which students from different disciplines can share their work and receive and give feedback that will broaden and sharpen the framing of their projects. Attention is also paid to key forms of professionalization, including public speaking, crafting and responding to questions, and audio/visual interviewing as a form of professional inquiry and self-presentation. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two HMAN 2400 seminars.

Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman (American Studies and English) and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media)

Retouch is a term often associated with repair — of a print, a photograph, a piece of cloth — while it also bespeaks the capacity to induce or to bring about what could have been unjustly left unattended, silenced, forgotten, or, on the contrary, what may have required covering, concealment, or removal (from sight). This collaborative seminar explores different gestures, modalities, and initiatives of repair and reparation, redress and restoration, return and redistribution, remedy and recuperation. Attending to the lasting structures of imperialism, racial capitalism, and gender violence, we seek ultimately to imagine and to theorize the retouch of shared worlds.

Susan Bernstein (Comparative Literature and German Studies) and Peter Szendy (Cogut Institute and Comparative Literature)

“Our time is running out of time:” this is a feeling that lingers on since the advent of a modernity that allows for less and less lingering. It reaches its apex with the Anthropocene understood as maximal contrast between the deep time of geology and the short temporality of human history. Our collaborative seminar will trace the genealogy of accelerationism to futurism and nihilism, while also approaching boredom as a philosophical question. It will offer readings (slow and fast) of classics of literature that stage the (fast or slow) passing of time (Goethe’s Second Faust, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse).

Tamara Chin (Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies) and Adi Ophir (Cogut Institute and Middle East Studies)

At least since decolonization, the study of antiquity has been a battleground for conflicting projects (imperial, colonial, national, indigenous, religious, feminist and queer, etc.). This collaborative seminar explores disciplinary formations that have supplied rival groups with cognitive maps, narratives of identity formation and transformation, and assets for real and symbolic capital. We will explore key disciplinary sites of debate — in archaeology, philology, philosophy, Scriptural and Classical studies, and history — concerning the distribution of groups (of people, languages, races), the establishment of spatial and temporal boundaries, and the limits of what can be argued, shown, possessed, and claimed to be true.

Leon Hilton (Theatre Arts and Performance Studies) and Jennifer Lambe (History)

This collaborative seminar examines the global course of psychiatry and anti-psychiatry following WWII and the emergence of new critical perspectives within and beyond the discipline. Readings center the coalescing mobilization against traditional asylum psychiatry and psychiatric technologies (shock therapies, lobotomy, psychopharmaceuticals); alternative and experimental practices that challenged psychiatric expertise (including consciousness raising groups, schizoanalysis, and the c/s/x movement); and aesthetic and cultural representations of these histories (in literature, film, visual art, and theatre). We will be especially attuned to the cross-fertilization between anti-psychiatry and other movements, including civil rights, feminism, gay liberation, disability rights, prison abolition, and anti-colonial struggles.

Stuart Burrows (English) and Ravit Reichman (English)

From archives to monuments, photographs to films, sound recordings to selfies to Twitter feeds, modern life has reached a saturation point of object-driven memory. This course examines modes of capturing memory in the 20th and 21st centuries, and asks what replaces the medieval memory palace as an imaginary habitat for recollection. What happens when memory becomes an external object, a thing that exists independently of our own apprehension, a form with its own ontology, ethics, and aesthetics? This seminar looks back on how writers, filmmakers, and critics conceptualized, explored, and reimagined the relationship between technology and memory, particularly at a time when, paradoxically, the extraordinary proliferation of images in the digital age threatens to render obsolete the camera’s function of recording and transmission.

Leela Gandhi (Cogut Institute and English)

In this introduction to postcolonial theory we will consider key Western sources (Hegel, Marx, Lacan, Levi Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas); anticolonial manifestos (Gandhi, Fanon, Césaire, Memmi); political and ethical practices (civil disobedience, armed struggle, friendship). In addition to canonical critics (Said, Bhabha, Spivak), the course will review new interests in the field (transnationalism, non-western imperialisms, the environmental turn). Offered as a collaborative humanities seminar in Spring 2022, Postcolonial Theory will host and think with a series of guest scholars.

Yannis Hamilakis (Archaeology and the Ancient World, Classics) and Vazira Zamindar (History)

This collaborative humanities seminar considers colonization as a material condition and focuses on decolonial practices from the ‘south’ that engage the matter and materiality of things, objects, artefacts, and landscapes, from archaeological remains to museum objects, works of art, and contemporary material traces of migration and border crossing. We will interrogate the material and racial basis of the ‘south’ and explore modes of thinking and practice (from indigenous perspectives to contemporary art) that can suture the relationship between objects and people. The seminar will also function as a workshop for student collaborations on decolonial experiments with material objects/sites.

Amanda Anderson (Cogut Institute and English) and Shahzad Bashir (History and Religious Studies)

In this capstone course, students completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation chapter, an article on method/theory, or a stand-alone essay related to the larger field. The workshop provides a collaborative and supportive space in which students from different disciplines can share their work and receive and give feedback that will broaden and sharpen the framing of their projects. Attention is also paid to key forms of professionalization, including public speaking, crafting and responding to questions, and audio/visual interviewing as a form of professional inquiry and self-presentation. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two HMAN 2400 seminars.

Bathsheba Demuth (History and Environment and Society) and Lukas B. Rieppel (History)

We live in a time of immense global change and ecological rupture that poses a foundational challenge for modern society. How are we to respond to environmental crises on a geological scale without papering over complex issues of social inequality, racial difference, and gender norms? How do we promote the flourishing of sustainable communities that include both human and non-human, present and future beings? This collaborative seminar explores the emergence of the field of environmental humanities as a context for these questions. Readings include works from history, anthropology, philosophy, Indigenous studies, and science studies.

Amanda Anderson (Cogut Institute and English) and Thomas Lewis (Religious Studies)

From the hermeneutics of suspicion to the post-critique, a range of thinkers and theories have positioned suspicion as a central critical disposition of the modern age. In this collaborative seminar we will explore the concept and practice of suspicion both in relation to the classic objects over against which it emerged — morality, religion, and tradition — and through the lens of other modes of engagement more recently proposed, including charity, reconstruction, attunement, quiet, resonance, and reparative practices of reading. Readings will be drawn from philosophy, critical theory, race and ethnicity studies, gender and sexuality studies, and literary theory and criticism.

Emily Dolan (Music), in parallel with Jonathan Sterne (McGill University)

What is an instrument? Today, in a variety of fields, the definitions of instrument and instrumentality are transforming. While retaining its older connotations of delegation, means to ends, and tool-use, the "instrument" now also implies bigger, messier complexes of technologies, bodies, and rationalities. In this seminar, we will think transversally across categories and contexts to consider the form and meaning of musical instruments, technical instruments, and ideas of instrumentality. Readings will draw from music, media studies, science and technology studies, sound studies, cultural studies, and related fields. This is a distributed seminar, collaboratively taught between Brown and McGill Universities.

Thangam Ravindranathan (French Studies) and Ada Smailbegovic (English)

In this collaborative seminar we will consider the flickering edge between metaphor and materiality in the shadow of the Anthropocene. Weekly discussions will be built around a series of “threshold sites” — including Sea, Sun, Silk, Plastic, Forest, Photograph, Shell, Horse, Whale — in which “matter” and “figure” may be seen to be simultaneously in relation and at odds. We will endeavor to think metaphoricity as the imbrication of materiality and semiosis, and in its relationship to ecological time, through readings from Lucretius, Melville, Coleridge, Ponge, Moore, Bervin, Barad, Haraway, Derrida, and Ricoeur, among others.

Timothy Bewes (English) and Paja Faudree (Anthropology)

This collaborative humanities graduate seminar explores the revolutionary ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin, considering their influence in two disciplines, literary studies and linguistic anthropology. The primary historical context of the course is our own political present, characterized by linguistic homogenity, the unification of power, and the rise of authoritarian governments. How effective are Bakhtin's theories of dialogue, polyphony, and carnival as principals of resistance to the challenges of the current moment?

Leela Gandhi (Cogut Institute and English) and Peter Szendy (Comparative Literature and Humanities)

This collaborative seminar proposes an interdisciplinary and inter-cultural inquiry into breath as the shared figment of philosophical, spiritual, therapeutic, athletic, musical, and environmental practices, among others. How does breath travel across disparate traditions, bodies, and technologies? Is it vital or metaphysical? Is it restricted to particular genres? Does it have a history? Topics include punctuation and phrasing; climate change and the crisis of oxygen; circular breathing and "breathy" vocalization in musical traditions; the notion of ruh in Sufism, pneuma in ancient Greek thought, qi in ancient Chinese thought, and "breath" as a synonym for "self" in ancient Indian philosophy.

Marc Redfield (Comparative Literature and English) and Gerhard Richter (German Studies and Comparative Literature)

What is a date? How does it relate to our understanding of historical time? How can the idea of a date be represented in words and images? Is our interpretation of a date fixed once and for all, or does it change over the course of time? What does it mean to commemorate the anniversary of a date? When it comes to a date, what is the relation between its repeatability and its singularity? This graduate seminar will devote itself to the vexing question of the date in literature, the arts, critical thought, and cultural theory. Among other things, we will analyze Marx’s revolutionary perspective on 1848; the notion of an individual date in light of Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence of the same; Benjamin’s notion that “to write history means to give dates their physiognomy”; Faulkner’s literary engagement with the date of the Haitian Revolution; Adorno’s reflections on art and thought “after Auschwitz”; Derrida’s meditations on Celan’s poetry of the date; and the politics of memory in the American discourse on 9/11 in relation to “the other 9/11” of Pinochet’s coup in Chile.

Tina Campt (Modern Culture and Media) and Dixa Ramírez D'Oleo (American Studies and English)

Slowness, stillness, stasis—these terms signal diminished velocity, extended duration, delayed development or reduced exertion. But what if we understand them as an intensification, rather than a reduction, of forces? How do slowness, stillness, and stasis animate fugitivity in various bodies of thought? What if slowness, stillness, and stasis instantiate modes of anticolonial practice and thought, or imagine/realize a world nonsensical to much of dominant western thought? This collaborative humanities seminar will explore practices of slowness, stillness, and stasis in literature, theory, performance and art, and the ways in which they unsettle our understanding of fugitive social practices of refusal.

Amanda Anderson (Cogut Institute and English) and Tamara Chin (Comparative Literature and East Asian Studies)

In this capstone course, students completing the Graduate Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation prospectus, a dissertation chapter, or a methodological/theoretical exercise relating to their field of interest. Weekly sessions are devoted to work-in-progress and discussion of key texts addressing method and theory in and beyond the humanities. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two HMAN 2400 seminars.

Gerhard Richter (German Studies and Comparative Literature) and Peter Szendy (Cogut Institute and Comparative Literature)

What is the future of the university? Its very idea has undergone drastic changes, from the formulation of “academic freedom” in 1155 to what, under neoliberal capitalism, has been called the “uberfication of the university.” Our seminar is dedicated to key texts—from Kant to Derrida and Butler—in this history, focusing on topics such as the corporatization of universities, political protest, and the unconditional. Students will pursue collaborative inquiries into the idea of a university, conduct archival work, or jointly translate and comment upon significant historical and theoretical documents.

Shahzad Bashir (Middle East Studies and Religious Studies) and Holly Shaffer (History of Art and Architecture)

This is a seminar about what happens when arts and ideas move. It defines processes of artistic and literary translation, from the repetition and reuse of narratives to the uncanny meeting of pictorial conventions to the tweaks, adjustments, and inventions that propelled arts across the early modern world. We will address theories of translation and imitation, and focus on problems of style, language, impostors, dictionaries, media, and ethnography, especially in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Class will include training in artistic practices of replication and a collaborative project with special collections. 

Michael Steinberg (History and Music) and Prerna Singh (Political Science and International and Public Affairs)

This collaborative seminar investigates the imbrications of race, nation, and immigration from the comparative perspectives of the social sciences and the humanities. Taught by a political scientist with an emphasis on state/society relations in Asia and a historian with a focus on modern European intellectual history, politics, and arts, the course examines questions of belonging, inclusion, and exclusion in areas of the world that provide fruitful sites of analysis, such as the United States, Europe, South Asia (India), Latin America (Brazil), and Africa (South Africa). Materials will include films, fiction, theoretical writings, and data sets. 

Laura Bass (Hispanic Studies) and Evelyn Lincoln (History of Art and Architecture and Italian Studies)

Every city is a palimpsest in space and time. Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” of reputation and imagination and Miéville’s double-awareness in “The City and the City” provide points of entry to visualizations and narrations of real and imagined urban centers. This course considers cities as varied as Rome, Seville, Mexico City, and the City of God in literature, political and architectural treatises, maps, images, and archaeological and historical records. This multidisciplinary archive forms a basis for collaborations in recovering and reconstructing built environments from different perspectives in text, image, and digital media, working with original materials in special collections.

Laura Odello (French Studies) and Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg (Comparative Literature and Italian Studies)

This collaborative seminar provides an introduction into what is called “Italian Thought” (Agamben, Cacciari, Cavarero, Esposito, Federici, Fortunati, Gramsci, Muraro, Negri, Rovatti, Tronti, Vattimo). It offers close readings of texts considered as classics of “Italian Thought” (the “Inside” of our title) and also seeks to include and make functional other languages excluded from this discourse (the “Out” of our title: feminism, queer theory, psychoanalysis). Students will engage with the Pembroke Center Archive and collaborate on translation and glossary projects.

Tina Campt (Cogut Institute and Modern Culture and Media), in parallel with Saidiya Hartman (Columbia University)

How does one represent black life? What forms of accounting or reckoning are enacted by black photo books? Defined by Gerry Badger as “a book — with or without text — where the work’s primary message is carried by photographs,” these texts offer densely layered accounts of blackness and black sociality that are not restricted to the visual—they are haptic and sonic engagements and improvisations that render black life through visual frequencies that register well beyond what we see in their images. Placing a series of historical and contemporary black photo books in conversation with sonic scripts, embodied performances, and moving images inspired by and in dialogue with them, we will unpack the multiple visual frequencies of black life articulated in and through these works with an eye toward understanding the practices of black refusal and futurity that structure their varied creative practices.

Harold Cook (History) and Tara Nummedal (History and Italian Studies),in parallel with J.B. Shank and Michael Gaudio (University of Minnesota)

This collaborative seminar examines premodern ways of knowing through entangled histories of art, craft, science, and medicine in Europe before 1800. Whether through the visual representations of naturalists or the manipulation of matter by artists/artisans to render nature meaningful, useful, or both, premoderns made knowledge in ways that defy modern disciplinary divisions. In studying premodern knowledge work through its own disciplinary understandings, we explore the research methodology of reconstruction, i.e., the argument that we must reconnect material objects with texts, and both with laboratory research practices, to fully understand premodern knowledge work.

Timothy Bewes (English) and Brian Meeks (Africana Studies)

In this capstone course, students completing the Graduate Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation prospectus, a dissertation chapter, or a methodological/theoretical exercise relating to their field of interest. Weekly sessions are devoted to work-in-progress and discussion of key texts addressing method and theory in and beyond the humanities. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two HMAN 2400 seminars.

Adi Ophir (Cogut Institute and Middle East Studies) and Peter Szendy (Cogut Institute and Comparative Literature)

This is a seminar on four forms of temporality: suspension, rupture, heterochronia, and coming to an end. These forms will be explored as pertaining to politics, theology, and experience. Agamben’s reading of Paul (The Time That Remains) provides us with a conceptual grid, and “waiting for the Messiah” will be one of the modes of temporalization examined. Kafka’s staging of delay in The Castle, Fritz Lang’s invention of the filmic countdown, and the “checkpoint” in occupied Palestine will constitute major counterpoints. Students will work on collaborative assignments defined collectively and focusing on a specific event, text, or film.

Tapati Guha-Thakurta (Visiting Professor) and Vazira Zamindar (History)

Addressing history and art history, this collaborative seminar will look at the colonial and postcolonial circuits of movement, transaction and replication that have shaped not just the destinies of art, archaeological and architectural objects but equally the structures of institutions and disciplines that govern these object-worlds. This will involve thinking through critiques of a Eurocentric aesthetics and art history and engaging with practices such as theft, fugitivity, replication, mimicry, and free adaptations. While drawing on South Asia for its primary lines of enquiry, the "south" of South Asia in this seminar will serve more broadly as an epistemic pull. 

Ariella Azoulay (Comparative Literature and Modern Media and Culture) and Laura Wexler (Yale University)

The seminar explores some theoretical, historical, material, practical, methodological and curatorial aspects of archives. Special attention will be given to archives’ modes of operation in dis/placing people and objects, and the roles “documents” play in the co-constitution of “well-documented-objects” and "un-documented people." Students will be asked to work collaboratively in and with archives as sources and tools, and to experiment with creating archives of their own. The seminar involves one trip to Yale and some irregular hours, which are noted in the syllabus.

Nathaniel Berman (International Affairs, Law, and Modern Culture) and Thomas Lewis (Religious Studies)

Scholarly debates across many disciplines and political upheavals around the globe demonstrate the continued urgency of the struggle between the "secular" and the "religious." This collaborative seminar traces the intertwined genealogies of the three key terms in this conundrum: religion, secularity, and the international. These terms have been continually subject to theoretical and practical contestation and reconfiguration, from early modern Europe, through the histories of colonialism and anti-colonialism, to post-Cold War turmoil. Readings include judicial decisions from the United States, Europe, and India, as well as authors such as Saba Mahmood, Ashis Nandi, J. Z. Smith, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Winnifred Sullivan.

Mark Cladis (Religious Studies) and Sharon Krause (Political Science)

We live in an age of immense, intersecting environmental problems that pose deep challenges to democratic life. How are we to respond to ecological crises that interweave race, class, ethnicity, and gender/sexuality; humans and the non-human; and politics, economy, religion, and culture? This collaborative seminar explores a range of contemporary and historical work in environmental humanities, with a focus on radical imaginaries of ecological democracy. The readings reflect a diversity of normative commitments and methodological approaches and include such authors as Wollstonecraft, Emerson, Thoreau, Du Bois, Silko, Wendell Berry, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, Rob Nixon, and Glenn Coulthard.

Daniel Kim (English and American Studies) and Ada Smailbegovic (English)

Drawing on the tools of affect theory and critical race studies this collaborative seminar examines how poetic works can simultaneously be engaged in audacious formal and conceptual experimentation while remaining committed to imagining how subjectivity might be experienced both through and beyond structures of gender, race and sexuality. Readings include Theresa Cha, Myung Mi Kim, Fred Moten, Claudia Rankine, Sara Ahmed, Gilles Deleuze, Baruch Spinoza.

Paul Guyer (Cogut Institute and Philosophy) and Dietrich Neumann (History of Art and Architecture, Urban Studies, and Italian Studies)

One of the most ancient human practices, answering to the need for shelter, architecture also counts as a fine art in modern times. Is there tension between the functionality of architecture and the disinterested contemplation seen as the hallmark of aesthetic experience? Taught by a philosopher and an architectural historian, the course is interdisciplinary and collaborative. Students work in multi-disciplinary teams to prepare seminar presentations and papers. Case studies will draw on texts and buildings from a diversity of sources, historical periods, and geographical regions.

Bonnie Honig (Political Science, Modern Culture and Media) and Adi Ophir (Cogut Institute and Middle East Studies)

Arendt’s “care for the world,” inspired by Augustine, resonates with Foucault’s "care for the self." Both are secularized versions of theological ideas. This seminar explores “care for the world,” at the intersection of politics and theology, in Arendt and Foucault, with texts from the Bible, Mishna, Marx, Fanon, Augustine, Winnicott, and Bouteldja. Attending to genre—Arendt’s and Foucault's essays (on refugees) and journalism (the Eichmann trial and the Iranian revolution)—we will work collaboratively through a series of exemplary figures—the revolutionary, journalist, activist, environmentalist, therapist—to ask what care for the world means in theory and practice. 

Amanda Anderson (Cogut Institute and English) and Tamara Chin (Comparative Literature)

In this capstone course, students completing the Graduate Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation prospectus, a dissertation chapter, or a methodological/theoretical exercise relating to their field of interest. Weekly sessions are devoted to work-in-progress and discussion of key texts addressing method and theory in and beyond the humanities. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two HMAN 2400 seminars.

Jacques Khalip (English) and Matthew Guterl (Africana Studies and American Studies)

This course examines the social, political, and cultural deployments of what we call "trans/passing" in a variety of literary and visual texts, mostly drawn from the national popular imaginary. While passing has been considered an extension and disruption of "settled" racial identities, and trans has generally been invoked as an intersectional or gender/queer subject position, our neologism points to the confluence of these terms in contemporary popular culture, a confluence that braids and scrambles the multiple registers of gender, race, sexuality, and class.

Ariella Azoulay (Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media) and guest lecturers

Photography is usually practiced in the presence and assistance of several or many individuals but its history and theory have been written as the story of single heroes—the photographers—and of the technology of the instruments they used. This course will question such types of history and theory by presenting the event of photography as a collaborative enterprise and examining different uses of photography in various historical, geographical, economic, cultural, and political contexts. Apart from making historical and theoretical interventions, students will also be encouraged to experiment with cameras and explore strategies for archiving images.

Kevin McLaughlin (English and Comparative Literature) and Peter Szendy (Cogut Institute and Comparative Literature)

Europe begins with a myth: Europa (meaning something like a broad face), the mother of King Minos, who is abducted by Zeus appearing as a white bull and taken to Crete. In the Politics, Aristotle employs the word Europe in order to distinguish between the Greeks and their barbarian neighbors. Europeans for Aristotle are those nations that lack "political organization and the capacity to govern their neighbors." The Ancient Greeks use the word Europe to refer to the Balkans. Some historians have argued that the term Europe was understood in the early middle ages as signifying the overcoming of the older distinction between the Orient and the Occident. During the early decades of the twentieth-century wars and other political disasters led to a discourse of "crisis" around the question of the "European spirit" that was revived near the end of the century as the European Union was established. In this course we will look at the origins of Europe and its aftermath in the literary study, philosophy, and political theory. Read more on the blog of the Cogut Institute.

Amanda Anderson (Cogut Institute and English) and Bonnie Honig (Modern Culture and Media and Political Science)

This course will identify a set of key themes in the field of politics and literature and examine them using methods and theoretical frameworks from political theory and literary studies. It is a cross-disciplinary course meant to promote collaboration and self-reflection about disciplinary method and interdisciplinarity, using key examples from the field. Likely themes and concepts include: the ideology of form, affect, ethos, and the relation between political practice and literary mode, political mode and literary practice. Texts will include classical tragic or comic drama, the modern novel, melodramatic film, and the literary essay.

Tamara Chin (Comparative Literature) and Rebecca Nedostup (History)

This seminar explores the construction of new geographies and timescales of historical narration during the late nineteenth- and twentieth-century periods of social upheaval (displacement, colonialism, war). We will explore shifts within a set of genres and disciplines (e.g., genealogy, Classics, religion, geohistory). Questions include: How did cosmological and geological timescales change? How were classicists in different parts of the world compelled to re-scale their vision of antiquity? What kinds of comparativism and universalism shaped debates about the time-space of history? We will focus on debates in China, Taiwan and Europe, but also look at how they related to other parts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Amanda Anderson (Cogut Institute and English) and Leela Gandhi (Cogut Institute and English)

This team-taught seminar examines the intersection of ethics and politics from the perspective of critical theory, comparative political and moral philosophy, and transnational intellectual history of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. We will examine antagonisms and hierarchies of ethics and politics, ethics as a political discipline, the tension between politics as an institution and as a way of life or ethos. Authors to include Arnold, Wilde, Nietzsche, Gandhi, Berlin, Arendt, Weil, Foucault, Rawls, Habermas, Shklar, Cavell, Butler.

Ariella Azoulay (Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature) and Leela Gandhi (Cogut Institute and English)

This seminar will look at the year 1948 across international locations and from an interdisciplinary perspective. An array of new nation-states, institutions, political and cultural formations and styles emerged at this moment, with the movements of decolonization, the spread of global socialism, and aftermath of the Second World War. We will analyze these events through documents, images, philosophical texts, archives, literary texts from the era.