Advanced Undergraduate Seminar Course

Gender Studies

 In the lead-up to the 2024 US presidential election, a speaker at the Conservative Political Action Conference called for transness to be “eradicated from public life entirely,” characterizing 21 ^st century transness as a public-facing ideology that has exceeded its supposedly proper domain of private experience. However, the public life of transness has been central to American identity and politics since the country was established.

Where does public knowledge about transness come from, and who is responsible for creating it? How does knowledge about transness contribute to shared understandings about what gender is in historical moments where are collective definitions are being renegotiated?

Advanced Undergraduate Seminar Course

English 

Why does so much contemporary literature cite critical theory? What can we learn from the incorporation of theory, as an aesthetic and thematic choice, in key popular literary texts from the 21 ^st century? From Maggie Nelson’s “autotheoretical” The Argonauts to Claudia Rankine’s deeply citational Citizen: An American Lyric, the names and words of critical theorists have found their way onto the pages of contemporary literature. In popular novels – such as Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox or Shola von Reinhold’s Lote – “theory” itself becomes a driving force of plot, a central point of tension that characters navigate around. Theorists whose work is well-known in academia – such as Judith Butler, Franz Fanon, Saidiya Harman, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and José Esteban Muñoz – are now also literary interlocuters, characters, and cultural touchpoints. 

This course bridges the study of contemporary literature and critical theory, with a specific focus on the aesthetic impacts of using theory as a core part of literary expression. In this course, we will view the theorists who inform the literature as co-authors and/or characters in their own right, questioning the politics and aesthetics of how and when they appear within the texts themselves. We will also critically approach the politics of citation, asking: who/what is cited? Who is left in the margins? Whose thought is seen as a condition of a literary work’s existence, and whose is not? What conversations take place through quotation and citation? As the lines between genres blur, who counts as a “theorist” of the world and of their own conditions?

Graduate Seminar Course

Gender Studies

The rapid emergence of nonbinary gender is one of the most significant social phenomena in North American life over the past decade – yet it remains just as significantly undertheorized. This course takes the post-2010 efflorescence of the category “nonbinary” in the Anglophone west as a starting point to investigate how contemporary, or emergent, articulations of gender can illuminate gender’s form in the 21 ^st century. This includes gender’s status as an identity, its relation to capital and the state, and its relationship to cultural common sense. Through this course, students will think critically and collaboratively about the conditions of emergence for nonbinary gender in the 21 ^st century, especially in relation to colonization and race. Together, we will explore how nonbinary can help us reframe the issue of gender identity.

Introductory Undergraduate Workshop

Writing Studies

University Writing teaches undergraduates to read and write essays in order to participate in intellectual communities at Columbia and beyond. Rather than approaching writing as an innate talent, this course teaches writing as a learned skill that can be developed. Students will use writing as a way of thinking. The course invites students to mobilize the linguistic diversity that each person brings to the class. You will learn to make strategic decisions in order to convey your ideas in language that engages readers.

The content that you will think about in this course is the critical study of gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality are both forms of subjectivity that appear natural to most of us: regardless of what identities we hold, cultural common-sense dictates that we were, to quote Lady Gaga, “born this way.” Drawing on key texts in queer and transgender theory, this course will ask you to think critically about how subjectivity – our understanding of ourselves as individuals with gender identities and set sexual orientations – is formed as a site of social meaning. Gender and sexuality, of course, do not exist in a vacuum: this course will also take up how sexuality and gender are impacted by political landscapes, colonization, race, desire, and how we recount (hi)stories about ourselves.

Introductory Undergraduate Seminar

Cultural Studies

This course introduces the key texts and concepts in cultural studies through the lens of some of New York’s most storied neighborhoods and their own cultural histories and outputs. Working our way through seminal theorists whose writing has redefined how we understand “culture” – such as Stuart Hall, Michel Foucault, bell hooks, and Raymond Williams – we will apply new lenses and questions to the city around us.

Beginning in Harlem and Morningside Heights, where our campus is situated, our first unit begins by exploring the questions: what is culture, and who participates in or creates it? Tracing key moments from the Harlem Renaissance to the 1968 protests to cinematic representations of the neighborhood, this unit explores how “difference” structures our thought about culture.

The next unit takes us downtown to Lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and Chelsea Piers. Through lectures on the historical changes to these neighborhoods that occurred through the 20 ^th centuries, we will begin to explore questions about how subcultural movements ebb and flow within urban space, from the hey-days of “Bohemia” to the rise of commercialized art and tourism. We will also continue to ask questions about who is imaged as the ideal urban subject critically analyzing the semiotic constructions of the images of New York that make it out to the rest of the world, via popular television and museum curation.

Our final unit drops us into the bustle of Times Square, allowing us to intensify our thinking around images in public. Beginning with the sensory impressions of Times Square – the influx of light, sound, and advertisement – we will be introduced to new ways of thinking about the construction of “public” space and who such spaces aim to attract. Using cultural studies lenses, we will trace the gentrification and “Disneyfication” of Times Square through the 20 ^th centuries, with an eye to how the physical renovations impact the people passing through, and how certain practices of sociality and sexuality were scrubbed from Times Square in the name of “public safety”.

Throughout the course, you will amass a toolkit of core cultural studies concepts from the field’s canonical writers, preparing you to analyze the workings of power in cultural artifacts, representations, and public spaces at a university level. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to ask incisive questions about the workings of culture and its history. The skills and contextual grounding highlighted in this course will be indispensable in humanities, literature, race, gender, and film studies classrooms along your academic journey.