Please consult the New School Course Catalog for a full list of current courses. Spring 2024 courses that count for the Gender and Sexuality Studies Graduate
Certificate are listed below; view an archive of past courses.
Spring 2024 Courses
GSOC 5061: Contemporary Sociological Theory
Cresa Pugh,
Assistant Professor of Sociology
This course offers an introduction to influential ways of thinking sociologically that emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries and which elaborate on, and transform, original themes of the foundational period of “classical sociology.” Departing from positivism
and holism, interpretivist contemporary theories shed new light on the micro-foundations of “society” and of the self, with a growing attention to gender, race, fluid identity, and questions of social reproduction and ecology. The course covers American
and Continental sociological theory, as well as critical race and postcolonial theory. Overall, the course equips students with the ability to critically analyze contemporary sociological texts with a focus on the way these texts apply theoretical
frameworks to pressing issues of our time.
NINT 5251: Political Economics of Development
Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Professor of International Affairs
The defining challenges of our times—extreme inequality within and between countries, environmental destruction, pervasive poverty, threats to democracy—do not fall from the sky. They result from public policies and social institutions that in turn are
shaped by theories about the process of development. This course offers a critical introduction to the central ideas and theories that have shaped these policy choices. The course addresses questions such as: Is inequality necessary for economic growth?
Why is the gender wage gap so persistent? Should the understanding of the economy limited to market interactions? How can developing countries grow with environmental sustainability? Is spending on health and education a luxury or an investment? Do
international trade agreements create a level playing field for countries? Is a flexible labor market the most effective way to promote employment and wage growth? What is the role of the state in transforming economies? How should the governance
of global international economic institutions be reformed to give more voice to the Global South? The course emphasizes the importance of ethical foundations and the historical inequities of North–South relations. It introduces theories from mainstream
and heterodox approaches including structuralism, feminism, capabilities and human rights, and sustainability. The aim is to prepare students to engage critically and creatively in contemporary debates about what works and what does not work in promoting
sustainable and equitable development. Prerequisite: Economics in International Affairs (NINT 5109) or the equivalent.
NMDS 5117: Gender, Culture, and Development
Brittnay Proctor-Habil, Assistant Professor of Race and Media
For the historian Joan Scott, gender is a useful category for historical analysis. For the transactivist Leslie Feinberg, gender is poetry. For Black feminists, such as Angela Davis and Kimberlé Crenshaw, gender is inextricable from race, class, and sexuality.
This course examines the complex and fluid concept of gender as it manifests in media forms in the widest sense (including human and cyber bodies, print and online news, graphic novels, movies, television, Web series, and performing arts). We study
the ways in which gender identities are imposed, resisted, and lived, focusing on the role of media in transmitting, shaping, maintaining, and transforming representations of gender. Students analyze gendered and racialized language and embodiment
in the fields of art, activism, popular culture, and the law and consider how the intersection of gender and race influences the construction of media. The course provides an introduction to feminist approaches to media studies, drawing on Black feminism,
queer theory, disability studies, psychoanalysis, memoir, and journalism.
NMGM 5104: Intersections Between Management and Social Justice
Nidhi Srinivas, Associate Professor of Management
In this course, we examine if and how management and managers can be vehicles to advance social justice in different forms—ecological, economic, racial, sexual or gender, design etc. Grounded in critical social theories, it explores if and how someone
interested in using management ideas to promote social justice inhabits a contradiction. Is it possible to think of management in terms of larger questions of social justice, to create workplaces and organizations that are more democratic and inclusive?
The course requires students to attend or view recordings of the Management & Social Justice Conversation Series, ground them in the literature, and take an actively engaged and critically reflective stance toward the topics and organizations we study.
We look at themes such as emancipatory management practices, forms of inclusion in workplaces, intersectional management practices, Indigenous knowledge and politics, and ecological activism and organizations. Students are encouraged to submit their
final projects to be featured in the conversation series for the following year.
PGDS 5055: Discourses in Design
Caroline Dionne,
Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Design Practice and Curatorial Studies
This course introduces the main theoretical frameworks and methodologies that have shaped and continue to shape the field of design studies. It follows a seminar format in which key texts are explored and used to structure a set of thematic discussions
that tackle the complex relationship of design to several social themes. We explore the ethical and political dimensions of design, venturing into questions of gender, class, and processes of racialization. Using frameworks ranging from the 1960s
notion of the wicked problem and the emerging concept of design research to current approaches in speculative design, design activism and practices of collective making, we investigate design studies from a material culture perspective while inviting
into the discussion concepts and discourses from other fields of knowledge such as philosophy, social theory, and gender studies. Students are assessed on the basis of written assignments, class presentations, and active seminar participation.
GANT 6516: Migration and the Ethics of Care
Columba González-Duarte, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Around the world, migrants are engaging in political action and implementing practices and relations of solidarity and care. These "affective solidarities" are also infusing feminist theory with new forms of political praxis. What types of knowledge and
ways of knowing are manifested in or have emerged from migrants’ ethics and care practices? What potential do these knowledges and practices have for destabilizing restrictive global regimes of mobility—enforced through state borders and policing—that
reflect and reproduce capitalist and patriarchal oppression? In this class, we examine human and nonhuman migrations through the lenses of feminist theory, STS, eco-social studies, and migrants’ affective solidarities. We discuss contemporary migrant
experiences and scholarship at the intersections of care, solidarity, ethics, and politics. We also consider the role of ethnography in advancing social and ecological justice. I welcome student projects that are focused on or overlap with these themes
and concepts.
NEPS 5008: Sustainability Perspectives and Practice
Tamra Gilbertson, Part-Time Lecturer
This course explores critical sustainability and environmental policy paradigms and their practical applications in policy, management and civil society and social movement organizing across levels of analysis and scales, including the global, transnational,
state, regional, translocal, and local. By delving into the theoretical and conceptual complexities that underpin environmental sustainability, economic development, the political economy, and resulting policies, this course foregrounds the way different
knowledges have or can (re)shape the architecture of sustainability governance and the strategic and tactical horizons of collective action through environmental social mobilization. While providing rich historical and theoretical foundations, the
course emphasizes related socioenvironmental issues and sectors by examining multiscalar policy frameworks. The course takes a critical perspective, investigating institutional, governmental, and organizational structures. We also examine collective
action strategies and tactics as they play out in real decision-making scenarios of environmental policy for and through social transformation. These paradigms are examined in their historical genealogies and contemporary manifestations as political-ecological
and socioenvironmental bodies of knowledge and power and as frameworks that shape, legitimize, contest, disrupt, or transform institutional design, organizational structures, and movement formation. Attention is given to the way diverse paradigms
relate to key moments in the unfolding history of environmental policy and sustainability management. Analyses of these key moments combine scholar-activist insights with practitioners' and movement-based grounded knowledge that centers critical,
intersectional/depatriarchalizing, subaltern/decolonizing (e.g., Indigenous/BIPOC/Southern/frontline/grassroots/peasant/fisherfolk), and just-transition frameworks for change, beyond the dominant concepts of sustainability and the green economy.
NEPS 5020: Indigenous Ecologies
Leonardo E. Figueroa Helland,
Associate Professor of the Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management
Areas managed by Indigenous and local communities retain most of the world's biodiversity, house significant portions of the world's terrestrial carbon sinks, and show slower rates of land degradation and deforestation. Indigenous ecosystem governance,
especially when managed autonomously through application of Indigenous knowledges and communal practices, has been shown to not only nurture and protect but even enhance and restore ecosystems. Yet Indigenous peoples and lands have continuously faced
recurrent waves of colonization, dispossession, cultural destruction, ecocide, and genocide at the hands of empires, settler societies, states, and corporations driven by extractive, exploitative, and racial agendas. Still, Indigenous peoples have
continued to resist these practices and organize to reclaim lands, cultures, and the right of self-determination and to defend Mother Earth. Indigenous movements and knowledges are resurging from the grassroots to the global sphere and across fields
ranging from environmental policy and land management to climate justice and human rights. This course looks at the way Indigenous peoples around the world have nurtured knowledges, practices, and forms of organization that underpin decolonial and
transformative modes of resistance in the face of Anthropocene crises related to climate, environment, food, migration, health, and other challenges. The course also explores the way these Indigenous knowledges, practices, and communal forms of governance,
cultivated over thousands of years in intimate relation to the land, are being creatively reconfigured to form intersectional and global alliances to nurture sustainable alternatives and propel just transitions.
NEPS 5029: Toxicity, Ecology, and Health: Restoring the Body Territory
Abigail Perez Aguilera, Assistant Professor of Environmental Policy and Sustainability Management
How do we describe a healthy environment? How does the presence of toxicity in communities change the dynamics of conviviality and life expectancy as well as the landscape? How do different regions around the world experience, overcome, and sometimes
completely change as the result of toxic and other unhealthy environments? How does the toxification of territories and environments manifest in bodies and communities of humans and nonhumans? How do communities and other actors work to restore the
interconnected health of territories, environments, and bodies? In this course, we explore these questions and others relying on texts and resources that center analyses of toxicity, waste, risk assessment and risk management, health, community-based
activism, citizen science, gender and queer studies, posthumanism, critical studies of science and technology, critiques of racial capitalism, and decolonization and depatriarchalization of knowledge. The course creates a space within which to critically
examine how toxicity has been interpreted, contested, and addressed (or not addressed) in science, knowledge production, the production and politics of expertise, policy, governance, and community organizing. We center environmental health justice,
subjugated knowledges, and community and global health approaches that conceive of body and territory as one. We examine toxicity, waste, and health both in the broad context of knowledge and governance and through applied case examinations that connect
toxicity, ecology, and health to contested interpretations, power–knowledge relations and responses from different actors, including scientists and scholars, the science–policy interface, policymakers, civil society and social movement actors, artists,
and people from different communities affected by toxic environments. We address matters of toxic embodiment by applying a territorial approach in cases of carcinogens, waste management and processing, toxified industrial and extractive sites and
territories, and others. By taking an integrated territorial-community approach that ties together health of body and of ecology, we situate the critical engagement with toxicity in relation to broader projects of monumental modernity, developmentalism,
racial capitalism, and the decolonization of health.
PGHT 5550: Re-fashioning the Body: Posthumanism and New Materialism in Contemporary Fashion
Francesca Granata, Associate Professor in the School of Art and Design History and Theory
At the turn of the 21st century, experimental fashion presented grotesque bodies-out-of-bounds, inspiring a critique of norms of beauty and propriety. This shift was influenced by feminism’s desire to open up and question gender and bodily norms, particularly
the normative bodies of fashion, and by the AIDS epidemic. In the 21st century, fashion designers continue to explore this topic, further breaking down boundaries between humans and nonhumans, subjects and objects. As the centrality of the human comes
into question in the wake of the looming climate crisis, posthumanism has increasingly come to bear on experimental fashion. In posthumanism, the human is no longer the center of a world that serves as a passive resource for exploitative and self-serving
endeavors; rather, the human becomes a co-creator with the nonhuman and earth “others.” Fashion as an embodied practice connected to the material is an important site for the study of this assemblage of human–nonhuman matter. This seminar will interrogate
these shifts and explore questions such as: Why is the sealed and “perfect” body of classicism being so forcefully challenged by contemporary designers? How can we understand the emergence of the grotesque in relation to changes in gender roles, normative
sexuality, and the AIDS crisis? How do theories of the posthuman and new materialism influence contemporary fashion and performance? In class, we look at a range of media, including the video and performance work created by Leigh Bowery in collaboration
with Charles Atlas and Michael Clark, the dance performances of Merce Cunningham in which he collaborated with Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons; the experimental fashion shows of Alexander McQueen, Martin Margiela, and Hood by Air; and the work of
Iris Van Herpen. We also examine the relation of textiles to the body as a second skin, a surface on which bodily borders are negotiated. Our readings draw on fashion studies, art and design history, feminist and queer theory, trans studies, science
studies, and medical anthropology. Among the authors read are Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Paul B. Preciado, José Esteban Muñoz, Lynda Nead, Emily Martin, Mikhail Bakhtin, Caroline Evans, Monica Miller, and Anneke Smelik.
PGID 5111: Theories of the Interior
Allyson McDavid,
Assistant Professor of Ancient Material and Visual Culture
This course surveys key theoretical grounds for the study of interiors and the practice of interior design. We use the study of interiors to address a range of issues that concern designers today. We begin by questioning whether there is a theory specific
to interior design and thus interrogating the very notion of theory and its relevance for interior design practice. We explore discourses considered useful in thinking about the ways in which interior design has been practiced at different times and
investigate the way a body of theory might be constructed in this field in contrast to the field of architecture, within which interior design is usually studied. Themes we study include taste, comfort, fashion, gender, lifestyle, and the everyday.
Our approach, as evidenced through the topics considered, addresses interior design as a socially relevant practice that is closely aligned with daily life and popular culture. The course is run as a research seminar and is experimental in nature.
Students are expected to contribute significant research and ideas to the course.
UTNS 5153: Visual Histories: Research, Critique, and Storytelling for Designers and Planners
Fabrizio Furiassi, Part-Time Lecturer
The course is a broad overview of architectural and urban histories from the early 20th century to today. These histories are positioned within broader disciplinary contexts informing contemporary design and research practices. The seminar challenges
linear narratives that have privileged Western contexts as epicenters of historical and cultural production by embracing diverse and inclusive areas of discussion. Each session addresses one of these areas, and each area brings to the seminar an ongoing
discourse across the works of scholars, architects, urbanists, artists, and activists and several crucial positions that have emerged from them. We invite some of these practitioners to expand our conversations and help us understand how topics such
as domesticity, technology, materiality, climate, human rights, gender, race, and nationalism unfold in diverse design and research practices. We also dig into relevant literature by past and contemporary theorists. Some of these readings address
methodological issues and help us set up a theoretical framework for discussion and analysis. Other readings provide in-depth historical and design contexts. While the contents of many of these texts might overlap with diverse areas of discussion,
each session serves as a magnifying lens allowing specific observations about the intricate historical, theoretical, and design worlds. Through their observations, students develop individual research interests and forms of analysis, critique, and
storytelling that serve as the basis for their final “visual essays.” These essays explore history and critical thinking, presenting an argument developed through a combination of text and images. Students’ arguments hinge on the collection, production,
and sequencing of drawings, diagrams, and images providing visual information that is hard to capture in words. The essays will be presented in a public event and delivered in the form of digital booklets, short films, or websites. The course provides
foundations and methods for graduate students willing to engage with higher levels of historical and theoretical study and with research-based design and multimedia practices.
GPSY 6449: The Psychology of Sexuality
Pantea Farvid, Associate Professor of Applied Psychology
In this advanced psychology course, we examine seminal as well as cutting-edge theories, research, and controversies related to the psychology of sexuality and intimate relationships. We draw on a range of approaches (e.g., feminist biology, psychology
of epigenetics, queer theory, sexology, and transnational feminist research) to understand the intersecting categories of sex, gender, identity, sexuality, intimate relationships, and individual and collective psychologies. Using historical, popular
culture, empirical, and clinical examples, we also take into consideration the intersectionality of race/ethnicity, class, disability, geographic location, and immigration status. Topics explored include theories of gender and sexuality, LGBTQIA+
sexualities, "fringe" intimacies (e.g., BDSM, sex work, polyamory/ethical non-monogamy), the institution of heterosexuality, sexual fluidity, technology and sex/dating, sexual violence, and relationship anarchy. Applications of this knowledge to everyday
life, interdisciplinary and psychological research, and clinical practice are also addressed throughout the course.
GHIS 5140: America in the World
Oz Frankel,
Associate Professor of History
This seminar is inspired by recent public and scholarly debates about American borders and boundaries, globalization, “exceptionalism,” the “War on Terror,” and other aspects of U.S. regional and global presence. The course’s diachronic axis begins with
Thomas Jefferson’s notion of an “Empire of Liberty” and continues with “Manifest Destiny”; Western expansion; colonial interventions in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines; the U.S. ascendancy throughout the “American Century”; and struggles over
U.S. engagement with the rest of the world in the 21st century. Conversely, we consider the American perception of the outside world and the global presence in the United States, the "worlding" of America. Thematically, the course highlights the complex
roles that race, gender, modern capitalism, and popular culture have played in shaping America's place in the world, imperial ideologies, and systems of control, domination, and acculturation inside and outside the formal boundaries of the United
States.
GLIB 5146: Women in the Avant-Garde
Terri Gordon,
Associate Professor of Comparative Literature
This course examines the pivotal role of women in the European avant-garde movements of the 20th century. Women are often seen as the models and muses of their male contemporaries in the groundbreaking movements of the 20th century. Yet they were also
creators and pioneers in their own right. In this course, we study the multiple ways in which women contributed to the 20th-century vanguard, the personal and political stakes involved in forging new territory in art and culture, the pain and suffering
that often attended their revolutionary efforts, and the artistic legacies they have left. Themes explored include the nexus of art and politics, sexuality and gender violence, war and madness, and suffering and creativity. We study Italian Futurism,
German Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, and other movements at the vanguard of European culture, politics, and art. The course covers the literary genres of poetry, prose, and drama and the artistic genres of painting, photography, collage and photomontage.
We also read "founding" documents, such as manifestoes and political tracts. Writers and artists explored include Leonora Carrington, Mina Loy, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Claude Cahun, Hannah Hoch, Frida Kahlo, and Unica Zurn. We read theoretical texts by
Andre Breton, F.T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, and Walter Benjamin.
GPHIL 6157: Hegel's Master–Slave Dialectic and After
Jay Bernstein, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy
The purpose of this course is to critically interrogate the idea that Hegel’s account of the dialectic of Master and Slave in his Phenomenology of Spirit was adopted by later thinkers in order to challenge the basic structures and mechanisms
of chattel slavery, racial domination, colonial domination, class domination, gender difference and domination and, finally, to examine the ecofeminist contention that it represents the overall structure of the capitalist domination of the environment
today, in the Anthropocene. One way of simplifying this claim is to say that racism, the domination of labor by capital, colonialism, and patriarchy in the modern world are all part of the aftermath of slavery, its continuance by other means. Among
the texts we read are Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death; Karl Marx, The 1844 Manuscripts; Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth and Black Skin, White Masks; Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex;
Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature; and Stefania Barca, Forces of Reproduction.
GPHI 6159: Ideology
Cinzia Arruzza,
Associate Professor of Philosophy, and Nancy Fraser, Henry A. and Louise Loeb Professor of Political and Social Science
In this course, we explore the history of the concept of ideology and its theoretical applications to the understanding of social and political phenomena such as exploitation and gender, sexual, and racial oppression. We read texts by Marx, Lukács, Gramsci,
de Beauvoir, Althusser, Bourdieu, Hall, Mills, Eagleton, Haslanger, Fields, Fricker, and others.
GPSY 6444: Humanization and Dehumanization
Katrina Fincher, Assistant Professor of Psychology
In this course, we discuss the psychological processes surrounding humanization and dehumanization. Additional topics covered might include prejudice, stereotyping, and stigmatization; racism and sexism; and genocide and murder.
APFS 5108: Fashion Criticism
Melody Thomas
In this seminar, we investigate the history, present state, and possible futures of fashion criticism. We begin by examining English-language newspapers and magazines starting in the late 19th century, when “women’s pages” were established. We focus on
the ways changes in fashion criticism in the press mediated changes in women’s social roles, as evident from the change in newspaper nomenclature of fashion sections, including women's pages and style sections, in the 1960s and 1970s. We later examine
the way fashion criticism gained momentum in the 1980s and became legitimized as a form of cultural criticism in the 1990s. In the final section, we examine the way fashion criticism is being transformed by new technologies while influencing their
development. We ask questions such as: Why has fashion criticism lagged behind criticism of other forms of popular culture, such as film or music? What events beginning in the 1980s catalyzed an increased interest in fashion as a cultural force and
its attendant forms of criticism? Finally, what forms will fashion criticism take in the future? Working fashion critics appear as guest speakers to share their experiences in the field.
NMDS 5136: Digital Feminisms
Kate Einhorn, Dean
of the School of Undergraduate Studies; Professor of Culture and Media
In the early 2000s, some believed we had arrived at a "postfeminist" era. Rather than moving beyond feminism, however, over the past two decades, we have seen feminism become increasingly popularized. We now live in a world where feminist slogans emblazon
overpriced T-shirts and global corporations like Nike and Dove sponsor advertising campaigns promoting girls' and women's empowerment. Networked feminism has also changed both who engages in feminist activism and the forms feminist activism takes.
Feminism is now mainstream. It has gone viral. But feminism's popularization has come at a cost. This course examines post-, popular, and networked feminisms in the 21st century. Students read articles and books by feminist culture and media studies
scholars such as Angela McRobbie, Sarah Banet-Weiser, Safiya Noble, and Jessica Ringrose. They also research and interrogate the efficacy of several recent feminist events and movements (e.g., Slutwalk, MeToo, and the Women's March). They leave the
course with a deeper understanding of contemporary feminisms and their inherent contradictions.
PSCE 5130: Looking Beyond the Glass Ceiling
Kimberly Ackert, Part-Time Assistant Professor
This seminar course is open to all design students but focuses on women transitioning from graduate degree programs into the professional work force. The format of the syllabus and course material encourage direct and personalized interactions between
professionals and students in discussing a range of issues from a female perspective. The course material includes historical references and case studies of women in all areas of design, a review of books and articles, and guest speakers and office
visits. The course provides a platform for discussion and debate of current events affecting women from political and social points of view, with the aim of recognizing challenges such as pay inequality and other forms of discrimination. We focus
on confidence building and developing the communication and negotiating skills women need to thrive and succeed in professions that have historically been male dominated. Diversity in enrollment will contribute to the goal of ensuring a level playing
field.
UTNS 5702: Becoming Visible
Gina Walker,
Professor of Women's Studies
How do we represent “missing” earlier women when the systems for knowing we have in place have been built by, for, and about the lives of men? This course is an opportunity to translate empirical research into various media, beginning with multidisciplinary
data that provides evidence of individual women and their accomplishments from the past, and to experiment with the norms and forms of the making of history itself. For example, translations of recently excavated cuneiform letters from the 19th century
BCE reveal details of the experiences of named female weavers, managers, colleagues, wives, and mothers, some of these written by the women themselves. We learn that even then, women were denied equal recognition as “professionals” with their male
collaborators. Together we consider “female biography” as a vehicle to interrogate what it means to represent the female past. The course does not presuppose knowledge of women’s history but instead assumes that students from a variety of disciplines
and practices will want to roll up their sleeves and work through the complex challenges of making the legions of “unremembered women” newly visible, tangible, knowable, instructive, inspiring.
APFS 5109: Fashion, Identity, and the Body
Morna Laing, Assistant Professor of Fashion Studies
Fashion is a phenomenon that has always defined the body and its understanding in society. Sizing, pattern making, and representation of bodies in fashion media are only few of the fashion industry’s practices that have informed the formation of identity.
Although the perception of our bodies is influenced by the construction of beauty ideals and the disciplinization of bodies, "dressed bodies" are also tools shaping the ways in which the social world and power relations are organized and structured.
This course explores these cultural relationships, investigating it from different theoretical perspectives, from gender and queer studies to postcolonial and affect theory. Students explore the way bodies are constructed in fashion, studying different
representations and ideals of beauty, design practices, and forms of discrimination and empowerment of bodies in image making in the 20th and 21st centuries. We also look at different fashion media, exploring the way ideals of body (normative and
non-normative) and body practices (dieting and plastic surgery, for example) are culturally constructed, investigating the way fashion images have informed ideals of beauty, gender, race, and size in our society.
GECO 5035: Political Economy of Gender: Theory and Policy
Kirstin Munro, Assistant Professor of Economics
This course proceeds from the premise that “building a theory of women's liberation around the category of ‘women’ … is a mistake” (Vogel 1973). Instead, we expand our understanding of gender beyond the category of “women” to investigate the relationship
between gendered divisions of waged/unwaged work and accumulation. The domestic labor debates of the 1970s are the primary focus of our readings, providing the context for our evaluations of current Marxist-feminist political economy and the framework
for students’ own application of theoretical political-economic considerations to a present-day policy problem. Students are expected to have carefully read or re-read Part VII (The Accumulation of Capital) and Part VIII (Primitive Accumulation)
of Capital, Volume 1, immediately before the start of the semester in preparation for this course.
GHIS 5003: The World Money Makes
Emma Park,
Assistant Professor of History
Despite claims to the contrary, money has never merely functioned as a means of exchange, unit of account, or store of value. We begin by exploring theories of money, diving into various approaches to understanding not only what money is but why it exists
and what it does. The second half of the course sets these theories in motion. By exploring historical case studies of global significance across time, we investigate the relationship between money and power, homing in on the role of money in consolidating
and and contesting imperial formations and in generating and reproducing relations of inequality along the intersecting lines of class, gender, race, and ethnicity.
GPHI 5406: Gender and Its Discontents
Romy Opperman,
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
This is the required core course for the university-wide graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies. It is open to all the graduate students who are interested in sexuality and gender studies. Our starting point is the acknowledgment that sex-
and gender-based modes of social organization are pervasive and, further, that their prominence and persistence are reflected in sex- and gender-conscious research across the humanities, the arts, the social sciences, design, and studies dedicated
to social policies and innovative strategies for social intervention. We expand on this starting point through both an in-depth survey of influential theoretical approaches to sex, gender, and sexuality—such as Marxist feminism, Black feminism, Native
and Indigenous feminism, transgender studies, queer theory, and postcolonial and decolonial feminism—and an exploration of the significance of different approaches. Topics to be explored include but are not limited to intersectionality, coalition
and liberation, ecofeminism and queer ecology, equality and rights, exploitation and the division of labor, the construction of gender, performativity, gender images, and narrative and identity.
NINT 5171: Hollywood and the World
Nina Krushcheva, Professor of International Affairs
This course is an interdisciplinary introduction to the relationship between American cinema and world politics beginning with D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation of 1915. The principal purpose of the course is for students to gain an understanding
of some of the broad themes of contemporary world politics, such as state and nationhood, nationalism, intelligence, conflict, globalization, colonization/decolonization, development/underdevelopment, security/insecurity, and, most profoundly, the
politics of identity based on race, class, gender, and sexuality. We examine each of these themes through the lenses of film theory, American cinema, and international political economy. Through lectures, discussions, film screenings, and classroom
presentations, we analyze the ways in which American cinema has represented and constructed the world around us—sometimes realistically or even satirically and at other times fantastically. In our journeys into these themes, we visit some of the following
characters: Cleopatra, Rambo, Jason Bourne, and "Hollywood as American dream factory."