Investigates the politics of identity and recognition as the basis for claims about institutional legitimacy and social struggle. Examines such diverse figures as Sartre, Fanon, Bataille, Foucault, Lacan, Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Zizek, and Badiou.
Instructor
Robert Meister
Focuses on moral, metaphysical, and epistemological issues using classical texts along with some contemporary readings on related philosophical problems. Plato, Kant, and Sartre provide the central readings on ethics, while Descartes, Hume, Kant (again), and Wittgenstein provide the central metaphysical and epistemological discussions. Issues of philosophy of language and method are highlighted throughout.
Instructor
Emmett Peixoto
General Education Code
TA
Studies the modern concept of revolution. Course proposes to inquire into the concept of revolution, insurgency, revolt and resistance in theory and practice. The course aims to analyze thinkers such Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G.W. F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, V.I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, and the revolutionary declarations from the French Revolution to the Zapatista insurgency.
General Education Code
TA
Explores the politics of resistance and how different thinkers have conceptualized what it means to resist, why it is necessary, and with what methods it should be done. Side by side with the theorists of resistance, the course analyzes examples of resistance from around the world, traversing different time periods, geographies, and cultures. Examples range from peasant revolts to labor movements, feminist struggles to anti-war mobilizations, prisoner uprisings to anti-colonial wars and contemporary forms of corporeal, self-sacrificial resistance. Relying upon the concrete political problems posed by each historical instance as springboards into larger theoretical concerns, the course focuses on questions such as the nature of power relations, different forms of political organization and representation, the relationship between means and ends, the role of violence, and the function of different media, especially as they become manifest in the complexity of real politics.
General Education Code
TA
Places the anti-imperial radical and thinker Mohandas Gandhi in the context of twentieth-century global politics, philosophy, and history. Studies political and philosophical history through the global prism of empire and modernity.
General Education Code
PE-H
In the core of a London slum, with wars raging all around him, the printer William Blake sounded the trumpet of prophecy. This course channels Blake's war-time revelations, laying bare the antimonies of imperial violence and the prophetic tradition.
General Education Code
IM
Students develop the skills necessary to analyze popular music. First, challenging common-sense understandings of how music functions. And second, understanding how history works its way into musical forms.
General Education Code
IM
Examines the history and theory of the Black Panther Party (BPP). Texts situate the historical conditions leading to the BPP's rise; theoretical inspirations and contributions; national and international reach; and decline following state repression, electoral campaigns, and guerrilla warfare.
General Education Code
ER
Investigates the social, spatial, and economic inequalities that mark urban life in the United States. Focuses on broad debates and narratives about progress, development, race, creativity, and justice, tying these large themes to how the contemporary American city is produced, governed, and imagined.
General Education Code
ER
Examines how histories of war are inextricably tied to the histories of media, particularly in the the context of 20th-century United States. Emphasis given to the development of an interdisciplinary field of cybernetics (a study of control, purposiveness, information, and communication) as a response to the World War I. Interrogates how this field provided the theoretical material for media studies—at the same time contributing immense technological means to wartime development. Materials draw from political history, media studies, communication studies, philosophy of science, and critical theory, as well as various audio-visual materials such as music and film, to examine the intricate relationship between mass-produced communication and conflict.
General Education Code
TA
What is the witch? A historical person? A vestige of pre-colonial European ancestry? A cultural object whose image and identity are shaped by film, paintings and literature. Class considers the witch's development in Europe. Also reviews the witch as a tool of racial, economic and social stratification in society. By looking at how the witch is represented through visual and literary culture, students develop an understanding of the witch as a historic symbol of shifting relations of gender, class and power.
Instructor
Gabriel Mindel
General Education Code
IM
Examines how the integration of global trade, finance, and production networks has affected the lives of workers, with a particular emphasis on workers in (or from) the Global South. Each unit focuses on a particular aspect of working-class experience—migration, precarity, and coercion, successively.
General Education Code
CC
The goal of this course is to introduce students to the thought of Karl Marx and some of the major thinkers working in the Marxist tradition. The majority of the course centers on Marx's writing, though students also read texts that extend and develop Marx's ideas into areas that Marx himself did not explore. Course addresses questions central to the Marxist tradition: What is capital? What is capitalism? What is a capitalist state? How did Marx understand colonialism and national liberation struggles? What is the specific nature of gendered oppression and exploitation under capitalism? What is the relationship between capitalist production and cultural production?
General Education Code
CC
Course takes, as its starting point, the formation of the Marxian concept of imperialism in the early 20th century, in the context of centuries of colonialism and the late 19th-century scramble for Africa. Course surveys debates about imperialism in the post-World War period, particularly as they relate to the history of capitalism in the Global South and developments in world trade, finance, and production, leading to consideration of the present moment and grappling with what is novel in global capitalism today.
General Education Code
TA
Considers both the religious sources of political ideas and the political sources of religious ideas, addressing topics, such as sovereignty, justice, love, reason, revelation, sacrifice, victimhood, evil, racism, rebellion, reconciliation, and human rights.
Instructor
Robert Meister
General Education Code
TA
Starting from Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto," course explores theoretical and myth-making texts that articulate visions of a future beyond humanity. Examines manifestations of the posthuman in film, fiction, and scholarly work. Readings include Haraway, Plato, Descartes, and others. Explores the concept of artificial intelligence as a fascination of science fiction, an engineering objective, a field of study, a philosophical problem, etc. Discussions on: (a) the figure of the thinking machine, its promises and attendant anxieties; (b) the history of ideas leading up to the birth of the field of artificial intelligence in the early 20th century; and (c) the philosophical roots of underlying concepts, such as intelligence, artificiality, agency, mechanism, identity, rationality, logic and free will.
Instructor
Michael McCarrin
General Education Code
TA
Introduction to the relationship between philosophy and poetics in some major 19th- and 20th-century poets and thinkers.
From Muir Woods to Hollywood and Silicon Valley to the Central Valley, California has been a path breaker that has shaped politics and cultural production. The state's rich diversity makes it an especially exciting site for studying the relations between divergent social, economic, cultural, political, and ecological forces. Course investigates the histories, cultures, and geographies of California by exploring relations between power and place through ethnographic, archival, critical, and aesthetic lenses. Also examines the role of identity within constructions of inequality and struggles for political change. Course fulfills one upper-division course requirement for the minor in the history of consciousness.
General Education Code
ER
Explores the politics of writing by moving beyond rehearsals of established form into an analysis of the politics of writing, asking: What are the philosophical and political implications of the writing forms we choose?
General Education Code
IM
Provides an introduction to critical scholarship on media infrastructures with a focus on cybernetic systems, internet protocol, surveillance, logistics, and finance. It explores how these configurations of power are reorganizing our societies and restructuring our subjectivities.
General Education Code
PE-T
Analyzes films and images to consider how the genre of horror has screened the problems, expectations, and fantasized afterlives of racism, labor exploitation, ruin, and war.
General Education Code
ER
Examines the "real" in a variety of registers—from realism in art to reality TV, from virtual reality to the real number system—and asks what, if anything, these usages have in common, what distinguishes the real from the unreal, from the ideal, and from the lie. Through writing, films, and television ranging from the serious to the whimsical, course looks at the ways in which the idea of "reality" is invoked, how it is represented, and to what ends.
General Education Code
TA
Takes up the literary form of the parable to illuminate a pressing and complex problem: the threat of global climate change. How can the simplest of stories help us to explore our options for a planetary future?
General Education Code
TA
Explores the meanings of modernity, religion, and violence and examines the conceptual status that war and sovereignty, long associated with religious belief, have since been accorded within the modern humanist and secular tradition. Also explores aspects of this tradition and their relationship to questions of morality and violence and how violence-and its relationship to secularism-can be better understood today as a mode of negotiating human existence in a world dominated by technology and its myths.
This interdisciplinary course considers the atom in four respects: as philosophical idea, as weapon, as catastrophe, and as clock. Students will learn about ancient atomisms, radiometric dating, the Manhattan Project, the bombing of Hiroshima, and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
General Education Code
PE-T
Survey of seminal work on ancient origins of the state, diverse geo-political systems of war and diplomacy, and consequences of the formation of the world market on the evolution of geo-political systems up to and beyond the wars of today.
Concentrates on the Marxist tradition of critical theory, centering on classical texts by Marx and by writers in the Marxist tradition up to the present.
General Education Code
TA
Surveys major developments in the capitalist world economy from the 13th century to today. Topics include: the transition to capitalism in Europe; the emergence of banking; colonization, slavery, and uneven development; industrialization; and globalization.
General Education Code
CC
Examines the history of the idea of "miseducation" through a transnational lens. Focuses in particular on histories of the (mis)education of people of African descent, drawing on historical cases and theorizations from both the Continent and the diaspora. This class will trace the emergence of the concept and proximate theorizations of "education" itself through an array of different social movements, institutional formations, and texts.
General Education Code
CC
Provides the historical context and the theoretical tools necessary for understanding today's radical right. Specific focus on considering the far right in the context of radical constructions under conditions of late capitalism.
General Education Code
ER
Studies the multiplicity of meanings of the word "species" explored in Donna Haraway's "When Species Meet," including its use in biology, racial and gendered uses, religious and economic meanings. Examines discourses surrounding species from the ancient Greeks through the present.
General Education Code
PE-E
Examines the material, discursive, and racialized conditions that have produced refugees in the last century. Also examines the social claims made by refugees, institutional responses to them, and political alternatives to state belonging
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 117
General Education Code
CC
Explores what happens if money is examined as a material and politically contingent phenomenon in its own right, rather than assuming the classic "three functions of money" (unit of account, means of exchange, and store of value). Students examine these functions separately with an eye to the tensions that arise between them, and trace a deep history of monetary systems as the outcome of a process of negotiation and contestation. Topics considered include palace economies, cowrie shells, metallic coinages, the modern monetary revolution, and contemporary struggles over student debt.
General Education Code
PE-H
Course touches on the philosophical roots of Hegel's text, starting from the pre-World War II rereading of Hegel's master/slave dialectic that became the kernel of postwar thought arising from struggles over capitalism, communism, fascism, racism, colonialism, and feminism.
Instructor
Robert Meister
Examines the modern concept of state, its anthropological assumptions, categories, its critique, and its crisis. Inquires into the concept of representation, borders, security and control in thinkers, such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, and Lenin.
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
General Education Code
TA
Examines the concept of politics, its anthropological assumptions, categories, and its crisis. It proposes to inquire into the concept of politics, justice, conflict and law in thinkers, such as Aristotle, Plato, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Fanon, and Gandhi.
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
Explores the clinical, political, and philosophical relevance of the (post) Freudian psyche. Examines how the psyche takes shape around various social forms (e.g., child, woman, queer, colonial, Black, proletarian, religious, digital), as well as how the social is shaped by psychical processes (e.g., projection, introjection, transference, splitting, repression, dissociation, identification, sublimation). Approaches the psyche from various disciplinary perspectives. Clinical and experimental research is used to illustrate a range of theoretical constructs.
General Education Code
PE-H
Gives students a grasp of different definitions and uses of the concept queerness in its relationship to race and how it's tied to the politics of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identity.
Inquires into the relationship between politics and violence as articulated by early modern, modern, and contemporary political theorists. Investigates the role of violence in the constitution and maintenance of sovereign power and the construction of the modern subject of politics.
General Education Code
TA
How postcolonial thought occasions the reconsideration of the Western tradition of political philosophy and the discovery of alternative pathways of modernization within it.
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
General Education Code
CC
Seminar in modern political thought. The focus and outcome of the course is developing the skill of analytical thinking and clear formulation of concepts in writing. Raises and discusses a set of fundamental questions around the method and methodology of moral and political thought, to which every member in the seminar contributes.
Does Latin American thought have to appeal to quintessential Western philosophical questions regarding knowledge, ethics, reality? Course explores how concepts such as identity and abstraction, as well as realities of indigeneity and diversity, both cause and effect the development of analytical and political frameworks across Latin America. Examines what difference social, political, and ethnic inequality might make to the development of core conceptual and philosophical questions and frameworks.
Instructor
Rasmus Winther
General Education Code
CC
Introduces the histories of exploration, museum collection, and photography that shape historical and contemporary ideas about race, culture, and place in Africa.
Cross Listed Courses
CRES 140A
General Education Code
CC
Provides an introduction to classical and contemporary texts of radical political theory, a body of work that critically examines fundamental premises of politics. Addresses the question What is the 'political?'
Provides students an opportunity for in-depth analysis of advanced topics within the history of consciousness arena. Course topic changes; see the Class Search for current topic.
The development of Freud's concept of mind. Extensive reading tracing the origins and development of Freud's theories and concepts (e.g., abreaction, psychic energy, defense, wish-fulfillment, unconscious fantasy, dreams, symptoms, transference, cure, sexuality) and emphasizing the underlying model of the mind and mental functioning.
Is race a social construct or (partially at least) a biologically grounded reality? Which medical, biological, social, and political agendas are at play with respect to the genomics of race? Genomic results of the past few decades have added significant complexity to the view that race is primarily a social construct. The debates rage, and the stakes are high. Course engages the history, philosophy, and anthropology of the genetics and genomics of race from the 19th century to today, also introducing the basic science on a "need-to-know" basis.
Instructor
Rasmus Winther
General Education Code
ER
As steerers of planetary climate systems, loci of biodiversity, sources of food, and cradles of inspiration to poets, philosophers, artists, and society in general, the oceans are essential to our future. Course combines history, philosophy, literature, and cinema, using them as lenses through which to analyze, understand, and effect positive change on troubled oceans. Course fits well with UCSC's oceanside location and marine campus.
Instructor
Rasmus Winther
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Introduces the comparative study of world religions and provides critical entry points toward the understanding of its history as a discipline. Special emphasis on the troubled history of imperialism, orientalism, and facile generalizations that have always accompanied the attempt to understand foreign or dead cultures.
General Education Code
CC
Critically engages with feminist-Marxist perspectives on social-reproduction. Introduces the foundation of Marxism and feminist-Marxist critique while examining the international feminist struggle historically from the origins of capitalism to the present moment.
Examines the socio-political and cultural origins of early 20th-century avant-garde movements focusing on the vanguard movement of futurism, the roles played by the disenchantment of the world, and technological rationalization as it relates to warfare and aesthetic production.
General Education Code
TA
Examines baseline philosophical and scientific views of human nature in the context of the debate about existence and the role of human nature., Considers whether human nature is singular or plural, genetic or environmental, and what role it plays in political and social thought. Examines race and sex/gender as biological and/or cultural categories and realities. Concludes with explicit attention to theoretical and conceptual frameworks highlighting nurture, the environment, and social construction, vis-a-vis human "nature." As a critical and exploratory course, no ultimate position on human nature is endorsed. Prerequisite(s):
HISC 166 and by permission of instructor.
Instructor
Rasmus Winther
A program of individual study arranged between an undergraduate student and a faculty member. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
An introduction to history of consciousness required of all incoming students. The seminar concentrates on theory, methods, and research techniques. Major interpretive approaches drawn from cultural and political analysis are discussed in their application to specific problems in the history of consciousness. Prerequisite(s): first-year standing in the program. See the department office for more information.
Writing-intensive course based on readings in
HISC 203A.
Seminar anchored in a question fundamental to the history of ideas in the modern history of empire: How to think globally about political thought. Through sustained examinations of classic texts in the history of moral and political philosophy, the seminar explores how the "global" itself becomes a universal framework essential to understanding politics worldwide.
Examines modern humanism and its critics in a trajectory composed of three moments: foundational texts of 19th century humanism and some of their 20th century interpreters, the critiques of humanism launched by structuralist/post-structuralist continental theory in the 1960s that dealt with the essentialization of the human (theoretical anti-humanism), and contemporary critiques that take issue with anthropocentrism (posthumanism/transhumanism). Students consider thematics that have shaped humanism and the controversies surrounding it including questions of secularism, morality, and materialism, essentialism and class/gender/racial identity, anthropocentrism, and universalism. Readings include Feuerbach, Marx, Sartre, Heidegger, Foucault, Althusser, Haraway, Braidotti, and Ferrando.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Students read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit from cover to cover. This book has been critical for many disciplines such as philosophy, politics, psychology, anthropology, sociology
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Examines major streams of theorization about the subject in postwar and contemporary continental and critical theory. Thinkers include Althusser, Badiou, Balibar, Butler, Fanon, Foucault, Honneth, Laclau and Mouffe, Mbembe, Ranciere, and Sartre.
There is a history of political consciousness that culminated in the project of enlightenment. There is a history of individual, collective, and political unconscious, which culminated in fascism. These two histories are intertwined, but their outcome is not preconceived. On the contrary, their relationship and integration constitute a field of possibilities for social, political, and human experimentation. This course inquires into the concept of political unconscious by exploring thinkers, such as Kant, Foucault, Adorno, Horkheimer, Freud, Jung, Reich, Fromm, Marcuse, and Klein.
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
Explores foundational and emergent theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of race. Issues examined include the production of race within and across various spheres of human activity and how race has shaped notions of difference and commonality in the past and present.
Addresses about 10 of the significant critiques of human rights discourse published in the past decade by authors, such as Moyn, Douzinas, Fassin, Ticktin, J. Slaughter, D. Chandler, Mamdani, Weitzman, Badiou, and Meister.
Instructor
Robert Meister
Students expected to locate with fluency and precision their own research projects within the conceptual and methodological frameworks defining the late-20th century constellation of thought to be laid out systematically over the course of the term.
Instructor
Robert Meister
Attempts to break through the pervasive dystopia and catastrophism of the present and open up speculative proposals regarding the not-yet and what's to come. Students critically consider methodologies of futurity among varieties of radical imaginaries grounded in the traditions of the oppressed—including Afrofuturisms, Indigenous, Chicanx/Latinx, multispecies, postcapitalist, and communist proposals—and place them in relation to threatening reactionary, neo-fascist tendencies.
Examines how artists and activists are responding by using surveillance technologies to look over "big brother's" shoulder and to create greater awareness of privacy issues. Course pays particular attention to metadata, big data, bio-power, and the relationship between various forms of surveillance with respect to privacy, publicity, and free speech.
Writing-intensive course based on readings in HISC 222A.
Through close readings of Althusser's major texts, this course systematically examines the political and philosophical thought of Louis Althusser and analyzes why he is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.
Investigates the many layers of Marx's Capital.
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
Examines modern conceptions of liberty from a non-liberal perspective. Proposes to inquire into the concept of liberty as an individual and collective right by exploring its philosophical justifications and criticism in thinkers, such as Kant, Hegel, and Marx.
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
Provides a careful contextualization and a critically informed interrogation of the major works of Carl Schmitt, a figure at the center of many contemporary debates in political and legal thought.
Introduces the relation between philosophy and poetics in some major 20th-century poets and thinkers.
Instructor
Carla Freccero
Writing-intensive course based on readings in HISC 230A.
Explores the rise and fall of the philosophical system. It proposes to inquire into the origin of the systematic philosophy, its development, its crisis, and its disintegration. This theoretical trajectory will be investigated together with alternative trajectories in thinkers, such as I. Kant, G. Fichte, Novalis, K.W.F. Schlegel, G.W.F. Hegel, M. Stirner, S. Kierkegaard, K. Marx, F. Nietzsche, L. Wittgenstein, T.W. Adorno, W. Benjamin, Empedocles.
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
Examines the various modes through which intellectuals, artists, and other commentators have written about music as a socially situated art as well as the ways they have theorized the social through examinations of musical phenomena. Focus changes with course offering.
Focuses on the critical-theoretical approaches that are associated with an interdisciplinary group of scholars affiliated with the Institute for Social Research, known as the "Frankfurt School". Surveys some of their most important contributions to the critique of capitalism, the authoritarian state, instrumental reason, culture, historical progress, law, and social organization. Discusses whether or not these different works fit together into a single tradition called "critical theory" and what theoretical and political implications the gesture of such naming entails. Investigates the normative foundations of critique and the philosophical influences that shape them. Course also explores the different "generations" of the Frankfurt School and map out the relationship of these thinkers to the traditions of Western Marxism, psychoanalysis, and social theory. Concludes by analyzing the limitations of critical theory and the intellectual challenges it faces in the contemporary world.
Students read landmark works of classical and contemporary Marxism. Writings from Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, Benjamin, Sartre, Althusser, Anderson, Jameson, and Zizek are addressed.
Writing-intensive seminar based on HISC 237A. Students read landmark works of classical and contemporary Marxism. Writings from Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Lukacs, Gramsci, Adorno, Benjamin, Sartre, Althusser, Anderson, Jameson, and Zizek are discussed.
Provides training for graduate students in university-level pedagogy in general. Under the supervision of the department chair, coordinated by a graduate student with substantial experience as a teaching assistant.
Study of the work and influence of Frantz Fanon from a range of viewpoints: existential, phenomenological, psychoanalytic, and political; a variety of genres: film, literature, case history, and critique; and a set of institutional histories: clinical, cultural, and intellectual.
Writing intensive course based on readings in HISC 242A.
Examines the history of black radical intellectual, cultural, political, and/or social movements. May take the form of a survey of different aspects of black radicalism or may focus on a particular individual, groups, period, etc.
Offers a critical introduction and overview of black critical theory across multiple fields and genres. Beginning with the question of race and ontology, students go on to consider questions of sovereignty and domination, freedom and liberation, identity and difference, and conclude with a study of race and the post-human. Major thinkers studied include: Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe, Frantz Fanon, and W.E.B. DuBois, as well as contemporary figures, such as Frank Wilderson, Fred Moten, and Hortense Spillers.
French poststructuralism, with particular attention to the main philosophical texts of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Other representative theorists as well as critics of poststructuralism are studied as time permits.
Cross Listed Courses
PHIL 252
Survey of 19th- and 20th-century intellectual history that focuses on a cross-section of major works from Hegel to Levi-Strauss.
Examines key works of Frankfurt School theorist Jurgen Habermas, his followers, and critics, on topics such as the public sphere, the theory of communicative action, power and domination, and religion and secularism.
Survey of European philosophies of difference, tracing the evolution of philosophical concepts and frameworks from Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Bergson, and Heidegger through later 20th-century French post-structuralist, feminist, and Frankfurt School theory.
Examines the position of Africa in cultural studies and the simultaneous processes of over- and under-representation of the continent that mark enunciations of the global and the local. Themes include defining diaspora, the West as philosophy, and Africa in the global economy.
Cross Listed Courses
FMST 264
Focuses on the theorization of life and death in relation to power as proposed by 20th-century thinkers. Investigates how a biopolitical problematic has emerged and what insights into politics it offers. Explores the different ways in which thinkers have conceptualized biopolitics and its broader implications.
Focuses on the exploration of biopolitics and necropolitics on the body. Examines how the body has become deeply integrated into power relations in modern society. Also explores different forms of corporeality that are conduits of political struggle and sites of transgression, resistance, and refusal.
Readings include works by speakers at UCSC's Rethinking Capitalism Initiative. Topics are: (1) financialization versus commodification (how options-theory has changed capitalism); (2) material markets (how this theory performs); and (3) valuation and contingency (how economies make worlds).
Cross Listed Courses
ANTH 268A
Instructor
Robert Meister
HISC 268A addressed changes in the theory and practice of capitalism as derivatives markets have become increasingly central to it. This course, which can be regarded as either background or sequel, concerns questions that surround recent debates about derivatives from the standpoint of broader developments in law, culture, politics, ethics, ontology, and theology. What would it mean to see questions of contingency and value as a challenge to late-modern understandings of these modes of thought?
Cross Listed Courses
ANTH 268B
Instructor
Robert Meister
Covers modern conceptions of property and their critique. Inquires into the concept of property as an individual right by exploring its philosophical justifications and criticism in thinkers, such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, G.W. F. Hegel, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and Karl Marx.
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
Explores the critique of the unilinear historical time through the prism of Reinhart Koselleck, Walter Benjamin, and Ernst Bloch's attempts to reconfigure the concepts of time and history. During the course, students investigate how time affects both representation of reality and political praxis.
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
Course aims to rethink Marx against the grain, from the debate with Russian populists to Capital and the Grundrisse. Investigates formal subsumption not as a historical stage, but as a form that denotes how capitalism encounters, incorporates, and combines existing modes of production without creating a homogeneous world.
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
The guiding thought of this seminar is the question of what is, and is not, sovereign. Exploring a wide range of authors (such as Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Kant, Schmitt, Bataille, and Fanon), this seminar addresses the most salient problems in recent discussions of sovereignty.
Instructor
Massimiliano Tomba
Readings focus on the early 20th-century rediscovery of political theology; its use in theorizations of the Holocaust; and its return in 21st-centurty debates on empires, war, terror, enmity, reconciliation, fanaticism, human rights, political economy, and global catastrophe. Students cannot receive credit for this course and HISC 85.
Instructor
Robert Meister
Independent study formalizing the advisee-adviser relationship. Regular meetings to plan, assess and monitor academic progress, and to evaluate coursework as necessary. May be used to develop general bibliography of background reading and trajectory of study in preparation for the qualifying examination.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
A practicum in the genres of scholarly writing, for graduate students working on the composition of their qualifying essay or doctoral dissertation.
Research carried out in field settings, based on a project approved by the responsible faculty. The student must file a prospectus with the department office before undertaking the research and a final report of activities upon return.
Research carried out in field settings, based on a project approved by the responsible faculty. The student must file a prospectus with the department office before undertaking the research and a final report of activities upon return.
Research carried out in field settings, based on a project approved by the responsible faculty. The student must file a prospectus with the department office before undertaking the research and a final report of activities upon return.
Directed graduate research and writing coordinated with the teaching of undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Directed graduate research and writing coordinated with the teaching of undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Directed graduate research and writing coordinated with the teaching of undergraduates. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Systematic working through a prearranged bibliography which is filed as a final report at the end of the quarter with the signature of the instructor. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
A seminar study group for graduate students focusing each quarter on various problems in the history of consciousness. A statement and evaluation of the work done in the course will be provided each quarter by the students who have participated in the course for that quarter, and reviewed by the responsible faculty.
Quarter offered
Fall, Winter, Spring
Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Independent study and research under faculty supervision. Students submit petition to sponsoring agency.
Under the supervision of a History of Consciousness faculty member, students finishing their dissertation meet weekly or bi-weekly to read and discuss selected draft chapters, design difficulties and composition problems.
Prerequisite(s): advancement to candidacy.
Prerequisite(s): advancement to candidacy.
Prerequisite(s): advancement to candidacy.
Cross-listed Courses
Workshop investigating moving and still images to create visual and sonic languages for production, exhibition and installation. Core faculty Mark Nash and Isaac Julien invite students to participate in ongoing projects as well as present and discuss their own work. Established artists, film makers and curators are also invited to present their work to the group. (Formerly offered as Research Group: Isaac Julien Studio Lab.)
Cross Listed Courses
FILM 250F, HISC 250F
Interrogation of the relationship between law and its instantiating gendered categories, supported by feminist, queer, Marxist, critical race, and postcolonial theories. Topics include hypostasization of legal categories, the contest between domestic and international human rights frameworks, overlapping civil and communal codes, cultural explanations in the law, the law as text and archive, testimony and legal subjectivity.
Cross Listed Courses
HISC 212
Explores how human subjects come to be visually defined and marked by race discourse. Covers diverse theoretical literatures on the topic, primarily in visual studies, but also in cultural studies, post-colonial studies, and psychoanalysis.
Cross Listed Courses
HISC 245, FMST 245
Instructor
Jennifer Gonzalez
Examines modes of thinking and imagining the future throughout human history, and considers the fate of the future today. Topics include apocalyptic religion, utopia and dystopia, progress, revolution, finance, and everyday life. Critical approach designations: Histories, Power and Subjectivities. Distribution requirement: Global.
Cross Listed Courses
HISC 149H
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
PR-E
The social, affective, and psychic structures of our neoliberal era make it difficult to live a good life. Drawing on the broad tradition of critical theory and utopian imaginings, the course aims to give practical and theoretical guidance toward achieving a good life.
Cross Listed Courses
HISC 149
Instructor
Christopher Connery
General Education Code
TA