This course explores cities in East Asia from the late nineteenth century to the present. Why did the demolition of imperial city walls in Beijing, Tokyo, and Seoul symbolize modernity while Western-style architecture in treaty ports such as Shanghai and Yokohama represented a new civilization? How did monumental buildings such as Tiananmen Square, the Yasukuni Shrine, and the Kyungbok Palace play vital roles in formulating new national identities? Why did these cities become centers for mass movements?

Contemporary art belongs to a global exchange of ideas, requiring models for understanding its value beyond countries of origin. Museums and galleries regularly showcase artworks from different continents to signal historical interconnections. The course explores the challenges or curating contemporary art. We will study existing curatorial practices, and examine the role of small exhibitions as well as large international art fairs in creating an interlinked, international art community.

A detailed survey of the principal surviving monuments and the overall architectural development of the city of Athens from its origins in the Bronze Age to the end of the 4th century C.E. The archaeological evidence will be discussed against a broader cultural and historical background, with an emphasis on the specific people and events that helped to shape the city and the general social and political circumstances that gave the monuments meaning.

This course examines social protests from the perspective of the visual. Examining cultural productions from 1948-2015 we will focus on the geographical specificity of planned and spontaneous protests that have mobilized people into action. We will use a black studies framework to engage the possibilities present in resisting disparate power structures of race, gender, sexuality, class, and region. Artists, musicians, activists, writers, and grassroots organizers of social movements have been ever cognizant of the role of the visual in subverting power structures.

The seminar will draw upon Foucauldian analytics of governmentality to engage the concept of race/racism as founded on, and maintained by, colonial material conditions mobilized for political outcomes. In exposing race as constituted by a colonial and governmental lineage rather than a biological or ethnic ancestry of origins, the course shifts the conceptual meaning of race/racism from its contemporary anchorage in ideology and biology, to the constitutive logics of colonial practices of governmentality in contemporary western liberal democracies.

This course will examine African American literature and culture in the postwar period as American identities are coalescing around the concept of the US as a world power. Specifically, our task during the semester will be to discuss the myriad ways black authors and artists attempt to interrogate the structure of racial hegemony by creating poetry and prose meant to expand notions of culture and form. We will also examine music, visual art, and advertisements from this era to have a greater sense of the black experience through various cultural representations.

This course will focus on the writings of Black political thinkers in the Americas, Africa and Europe. Through critical examination of the conditions against, and contexts within, which the discourses of these thinkers are situated, this course hopes to arrive at some understanding of the principles, goals and strategies developed to contest and redefine the notions of citizenship (vis-à-vis the imperatives of race/racism and the global colonial formation), humanity, development, democracy, and freedom.

An introduction to the art and work of the set designer in the performing arts. Students will learn how a designer approaches a script, how this work impacts a production, and what means are used in the execution of the process. They will learn how to develop their own visual imaginations and how to create visual concepts through discussions, renderings, models and some hand drafting. No previous experience in theatre, performance, or the visual arts is required.

A study of some of Shakespeare's plays emphasizing the poetic and dramatic aspects of his art, with attention to the historical context and close, careful reading of the language. Eight or nine plays.

A historical survey of dramatic texts and world performance traditions from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, with attention given to: the influence of print culture on early modern theatrical movements; the rise of nationalism and the creation of dramatic genres; and the effects of industry and technology on experimental modernist forms. Understanding performance as both artistic practice and social institution, this course emphasizes the role performance has played in changing audiences and as a cultural and political force.