Global Arc

Filmmaking is a mural art. Due to the contemporary ubiquity of screens, our physical environment is increasingly eclipsed in the human experience. Yet vernacular filmmaking does not simply replace our physical nature, rather lets it emerge just as terroir wines reveal the natural environmental factors of winemaking without industrial tempering. Less industrial, more poetic film production can teach us a more respectful relation to our environment. Together with guest professors and filmmakers, we will study the interface of environmental and film studies through examples from masterpieces of cinema and our own short research film exercises.

This course focuses on major issues raised by but also extending beyond Holocaust survivor testimony, including the communication of trauma, genres of witnessing, the ethical implications of artistic representation, conflicts between history and memory, the fate of individuality in collective upheaval, the condition of survival itself, and the crucial role played by reception in enabling and transmitting survivors' speech.

Focusing on select primary texts from antiquity to the present, this seminar considers various attempts to delineate God's relation to politics from within the history of Western political thought, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the American Founding. Prominent politicians, public intellectuals, and religious leaders will also visit and offer lectures outside of the course.

This course examines the crisis of European subjectivity in the wake of WWII and the Holocaust. Such a crisis implicates not merely the concepts of Europe and the subject, but the very concept of the concept and thus entails a transformation of thought itself. Topics include crises of the subject and the human; the question of technology; the Franco-German relation; the Cold War; decolonization; exile and emigration; essay, aphorism, and lecture as anti-systematic modes. We will do intensive readings of texts from seven authors: Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, Franz Fanon, Martin Heidegger, and Jacques Lacan.

Entwined with power and capital, architecture is inseparable from coloniality. In colonized lands, architecture concretized the European claim and facilitated systems of domination. But coloniality also influenced architecture of the metropole and catalyzed the international expansion of modernization. Tracing various phases of coloniality--from bureaucratic colonialism to postcolonial recovery--and scales of architectural design--climate, city, monument, and ornament--the course interrogates sites where European architecture colluded with colonial power, and reflects on the resistances that condition its legacy in colonialist expansion.

Explores the "individual" as produced through European rituals that crosscut national boundaries, yet grow out of particular local, regional, and national cultures. How is the individual formed in the rituals of modern expressive culture? What are the functions of dance, music, visual culture, political culture, local festivals, and sport? What are the rites of passage, consumption activities, free time (vacations, tourism), and work cultures? The course will analyze empirical cases and select social theoretical frames that try to explain the emergence and development of "the individual" in modern European life. One three-hour seminar.

Before the naked city and joyless streets was the garden. This is its plot. Originally it was a "pleasant place," beyond which, in space and time, sprouted thorn and thistle. Later, much later, perhaps when it was already too late, came landscape (is it a noun or a verb, or both?). This course traces a serpentine path through the history of landscape, with occasional and revealing vistas to and from literature, the arts, and the sciences. "Down the Garden Path" suggests being taken in, willingly falling prey to the ruses that await us in the garden, and which are masked by its pleasures.

Seminar examines the origins of animation in art and architecture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The class will focus on issues of agency, affect, empathy, projection and other psychological reactions occasioned by inanimate objects as they are probed by major figures in art and architectural historiography, aesthetics, cultural anthropology, ethnography, sociology, psychoanalysis and film theory. Seminar will also analyze specific case studies from modernist avant-garde and architectural movements in Germany and France during the first half of the last century.