Approaches urban schools and communities as sites of promise and innovation as well as sites for social and political struggle. Examines the significance of community organizing as a form of education and the role of community organizing to improve urban schools. Readings include an examination of organizing tactics from historical figures such as Saul Alinsky, Ella Baker, Myles Horton, and Dolores Huerta. Topics may include "grow your own" teacher initiatives, parent trigger laws, and culturally-sustaining educational programming. (Same as: EDUC 1015)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022.

American cities have been historic cauldrons of racial and ethnic conflict. Concentrates on urban violence in American cities since 1898. Students study moments of conflict during the early republic and the nineteenth century. Topics examined include the post-Reconstruction pogroms that overturned interracial democracy; the Red Summer and its historical memory; the ways race and ethnicity shaped urban residential space; the effects of immigration on urban political economy and society, and the conflicts over space, labor, and social relations that arose; and the waves of urban violence that spread across the country in the mid-1960s. Note: This course is part of the following field(s) of study: United States. (Same as: AFRS 1320, HIST 1320)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2024, Fall 2021.

Introduces students to college-level historical thinking, writing, and analysis. Covers the history of New York City from the geological formation of what became Manhattan Island through the present; however, most of the history covered spans the 1600s through the end of the twentieth century. In part, narrates a history of the United States from the colonial era to the present through the story of New Amsterdam and New York City. Another focus is the history of modern, capitalist cities and the cultures, people, economies, and governments they produce. Students work mostly with primary sources and learn how New York City became one of the preeminent modern cities in the world. Note: This course is part of the following field(s) of study: United States (Same as: HIST 1321)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2020.

Explores the city as the paradigmatic experience and symbol of modern life in Western Europe from the early modern period to the mid-twentieth century through the lens of art. The increasing concentration of people in urban centers produced new forms of political and financial power and created new forms of sociability, bringing people from different places, races, classes, backgrounds, and beliefs together into productive and jarring encounters. Artists both helped shape these new urban geographies and responded to them in their art. Topics covered include the changing infrastructure and visual culture of the urban landscape; public art and the formation of civic identities; new forms of display and sale of art; and artists’ engagement with the physical, social and emotional experience of the city in their artwork. Serves as an introduction to the methods of art history, with an emphasis on close looking and visual analysis. (Same as: ARTH 1600)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2024.

Geographical information systems (GIS) organize and store spatial information for geographical presentation and analysis. They allow rapid development of high-quality maps and enable powerful and sophisticated investigation of spatial patterns and interrelationships. Introduces concepts of cartography, database management, remote sensing, and spatial analysis. Examines GIS and remote sensing applications for natural resource management, environmental health, and monitoring and preparing for the impacts of climate change from the Arctic to local-level systems. Emphasizes both natural and social science applications through a variety of applied exercises and problems culminating in a semester project that addresses a specific environmental application. Students have the option of completing a community-based project. (Same as: ENVS 2004, DCS 2335)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021, Spring 2021.

Explores visual cultural trends in modern China with socialist and post-socialist conditions as the contextual setting and visual cultural studies the theoretical framework. Discussion topics include but not limited to the following: architecture, from the Imperial Palace to the Bird’s Nest stadium; art, from socialist realism to post-socialist experiment; advertising, from Shanghai modern to global consumerism; and digital media, from the Internet to bloggers. Questions central to the course ask how visual cultural trends reflect and react to China’s social-economic transitions, and how the state apparatus and the people participate in cultural production and consumption. This is a research-oriented course. Students gain knowledge about contemporary Chinese culture as well as skills in the critical analysis of cultural artifacts and trends. (Same as: ASNS 2071)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021.

Asks what a digital representation of a city could and should be, particularly in a moment when travel is limited, using Florence, Italy as a case study. Examines digital image, text, and spatial data about the city, juxtaposing it against non-digital primary sources, secondary critical readings, reflections on experiences of urban and other spaces, and data that we will create in class. Emphasizes shifting definitions across time, language, and digital artifacts of what and who is Florentine in these representations. Coursework happens in three phases: going “under the hood” of the popular digital artifacts that provide an experience of Florence in order to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of representation; expanding our definition of Digital Florence to find local perspectives on what the essential features of the city could be; and proposing a digital intervention that better reflects the values we have identified throughout the semester. Assumes no programming knowledge. Taught in English. (Same as: DCS 2100, ITAL 2100)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022.

Investigates the political, economic, and sociocultural development of cities and metropolitan areas with a focus on American cities and a spotlight on neighborhoods and local communities. Traces major theories of urbanization and considers how cities also represent contested sites where diverse citizens use urban space to challenge, enact, and resist social change on the local, state, and national levels. Topics include economic and racial/ethnic stratification; the rise and fall of suburban and rural areas; the production and maintenance of real and imagined communities; the production and consumption of culture; crime; immigration; sexuality and gender; and urban citizenship in the global city. This course satisfies the "Introductory Survey" requirement for the Urban Studies minor. (Same as: SOC 2202)

Prerequisites: SOC 1101.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2021.

Today, camps and prisons are thought of as distinct and separate forms. How might we think of mass incarceration and mass migration together? What might a region like the Middle East and North Africa add to such an inquiry? Situates the region within wider global regimes of movement control by tracking the entangled history of camps and prisons. Centers the struggles and modes of expression of the detained and encamped. Topics include the emergence of camp and penal forms, humanitarianism and refugeehood, migrant workers and dispossession, environmental history and urbanization, partition and race. Engages prison writing and memoir, aesthetic practices, and film making. (Same as: MENA 2610)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Examines the use of geographical information systems (GIS) to organize, analyze, and visualize spatial data within social science and humanities research. Introduces foundational concepts of cartography, database design, spatial data representation, and data visualization. Provides hands-on experience in spatial data collection, three-dimensional modeling, spatial analysis, spatial network analysis, and spatial statistics. The application of GIS to areas of social scientific and humanistic inquiry are explored through examination of case studies, weekly laboratory exercises, and an individual semester project that culminates in a conference-style research poster. Case studies and data sets are drawn from anthropology, archaeology, and related fields, such as sociology, history, and cultural geography. (Same as: ANTH 2215)

Prerequisites: ANTH 1100 or ANTH 1101 - 1103 or SOC 1101.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2021.

Approaches urban schools and communities as sites of promise and innovation as well as social and political struggle. Examines the significance of community organizing as a form of education and the role of community organizing to improve, defend, and transform urban schools. Engages in major debates around urban education through readings and films. Features the perspectives of leading education researchers, policymakers, community organizers, and teacher scholars. Includes discussions of popular education, parent trigger laws, privatization, social movement unionism, and culturally-sustaining educational programming. (Same as: EDUC 2272)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2020.

Explores approaches by communities and regions to build resilience in the face of changing environmental and social conditions. Examines the ways communities establish policies and collaborate with state, federal, private and nonprofit sectors towards strengthening local economies, safeguarding environmental values, protecting public health, addressing issues of economic and social justice, and implementing mitigation and adaptation strategies. Provides students with firsthand understanding of how digital and computational technologies including Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are playing an increasingly important role in understanding and informing effective approaches for expanding resilience at a community level to inform policy decision. Students gain proficiency with GIS as part of the course. (Same as: ENVS 2301, DCS 2340)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2020.

Focuses on journals, plays, poems, and novels in which London itself plays a vital role, including James Boswell’s “London Journal,” Daniel Defoe’s “Moll Flanders,” John Gay’s “Trivia”; or the “Art of Walking the Streets of London,” and Frances Burney’s “Evelina.” In addition to engaging in critical analysis of these literary texts, students learn how to use digital mapping, spatial analysis, and image markup to imagine eighteenth-century London and work collaboratively to create maps charting the movements of real people (such as Boswell) and fictional characters (such as Moll Flanders) within the city. Theaters, coffeehouses, shops, prisons, hospitals, and parks are among the public spaces explored in order to contextualize, enrich, and question the literature. Note: Fulfills the pre-1800 requirement for English majors. (Same as: ENGL 2305)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022.

Upon his ascent to power after a century of war, Rome’s first princeps, Augustus, launched a program of cultural reformation and restoration that was to have a profound and enduring effect upon every aspect of life in the empire, from fashions in entertainment, decoration, and art, to religious and political habits and customs. Using the city of Rome as its primary text, this course investigates how the Augustan “renovation” of Rome is manifested first and foremost in the monuments associated with the ruler: the Mausoleum of Augustus, theater of Marcellus, temple of Apollo on the Palatine, Altar of Augustan Peace, and Forum of Augustus as well as many others. Understanding of the material remains themselves is supplemented by historical and literary texts dating to Augustus’s reign, as well as by a consideration of contemporary research and controversies in the field. (Same as: CLAS 2202, ARCH 2202)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2024.

Examines the changing nature of the urban built environment in four major European cities from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Course considers a wide range of factors that have contributed to shaping the cities’ spaces and forms, among them: politics, money, war, environmental degradation, spatial inequities, industrialization, immigration, public health, heritage, tourism, and gentrification. Explores the changing role these capital cities have played on the world stage while also exploring everyday life at street level, housing from slum life to mansion, urban infrastructure, and the impact of grand schemes of urban planning and design. This course satisfies the non-US requirement for the urban studies minor. (Same as: ENVS 2427, HIST 2005)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2022.

Examines major buildings, architects, architectural theories, and debates during the modern period, with a strong emphasis on Europe through 1900, and both the United States and Europe in the twentieth century. Central issues of concern include architecture as an important carrier of historical, social, and political meaning; changing ideas of history and progress in built form; and the varied architectural responses to industrialization. Attempts to develop students’ visual acuity and ability to interpret architectural form while exploring these and other issues. (Same as: ENVS 2431, ARTH 2430)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2021.

Explores the evolution of the American city from the beginning of industrialization to the present age of mass communications. Focuses on the underlying explanations for the American city’s physical form by examining cultural values, technological advancement, aesthetic theories, and social structure. Major figures, places, and schemes in the areas of urban design and architecture, social criticism, and reform are considered. Semester-long research paper required. Note: This course is part of the following field(s) of study: United States. (Same as: ENVS 2444, HIST 2006)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2023, Spring 2021.

This course offers an in-depth investigation of the architecture and urbanism of North America’s most celebrated architect, with emphasis on the major themes of his work—particularly the complex relationship between Wright’s buildings, urban schemes, and nature. We will examine key projects for a diverse range of environments and regions while also placing Wright and his works into larger historical and architectural contexts. Throughout the course we will engage in a critical analysis of the rich historical literature that Wright has evoked in recent years. (Same as: ENVS 2445)

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022, Fall 2020.

The city has long been central to the creation of theater. From Athens to Beijing and Abydos to London, performance is deeply connected to the places where it is created. But the opposite is also true—performance creates cities. This course explores how theater and performance shape the ways people move, connect, build, remember, and generally live in cities. Through readings, theater attendance, and performance-making, students examine how performance has influenced various global cities’ histories, architecture, environments, and economies. Cities examined may include Portland, Maine; New York; Grahamstown; Mexico City; Beijing; London; Berlin; Athens; Buenos Ares; or Tokyo. (Same as: THTR 2507)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

A megalopolis of 37 million people, Tokyo is the largest city on the planet, a title it has held on and off since the early eighteenth century. Yet Tokyo as we know it today—as a futuristic city of glass, steel, cement, and neon—obscures its deeper past. From its founding four hundred years ago, it has endured fires, earthquakes, epidemics, and bombings, reinventing itself each time. This course takes Tokyo as its subject of study, from its supposed origins as a fishing village to its explosive growth as the castle headquarters of the Tokugawa shoguns, the command center of the Japanese empire, and finally an essential node in the global economy. Considering Tokyo as a series of transformations reveals both the power and problems of capitalism, consumerism, and industrialization, especially through the analytics of gender, class, and ethnicity. Lectures, readings, and films pay close attention to Tokyo’s design, architecture, and infrastructure as shaping and being shaped by the shifting political and cultural landscape of Japan and the wider world. (Same as: HIST 2410, ASNS 2410)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2024.

This course takes up the life of twentieth-century US poetry in the city, including in public school systems, urban social movements, cafes and bars, on the radio, at poetry slams, and elsewhere. Students will attend to the public contexts in which poetry takes place and consider the role of poetry in urban society and the influence of urbanism on verse. Serious attention is paid to both the formal intricacies of language on the page and the social analysis of the context of poetry’s creation, reproduction, and reception in cities. We explore three cities—Chicago, New York, and San Francisco—through the eyes of poets, including Philip Levine, Adrienne Rich, Jack Spicer, Frank O’Hara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Amiri Baraka. (Same as: ENGL 2557)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2024.

Intermediate seminar. Covers the history of people of African descent in what becomes New York City from the Dutch colonial period through the present. Students read key books on all major historical themes and periods, such as the early history of slavery and the slave trade; black life and religion during the early republic and gradual emancipation; the Civil War and draft riots; black communal life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; the Harlem Renaissance; the Great Depression; the civil rights era; the age of urban crisis; the 1980s and the rise of hip-hop; and blacklife since 9-11. Students gain wide exposure to working with primary sources. (Same as: AFRS 2626)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Seminar. America is an urban nation today, yet Americans have had deeply ambivalent feelings toward the city over time. Explores the historical origins of that ambivalence by tracing several overarching themes in American urban history from the seventeenth century to the present. Topics include race and class relations, labor, design and planning, gender and sexual identity, immigration, politics and policy, scientific and technological systems, violence and crime, religion and sectarian disputes, and environmental protection. Discussions revolve around these broad themes, as well as regional distinctions between American cities. Students are required to write several short papers and one longer paper based upon primary and secondary sources. Note:This course is part of the following field(s) of study: United States. (Same as: HIST 2660, GSWS 2662)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023.

Seminar. Examines major contemporary cities shaped by histories of colonialism, the Cold War, and contemporary neoliberalism. Considers how these large-scale forces interacted with local, regional, and national cultures and economies to produce specific spatial politics and patterns of urbanization (such as through race, class, caste, gender, sexuality, and ability). Course materials to include primary sources from a range of genres (e.g., film, personal narrative, municipal regulations, planning documents, graffiti), as well as secondary source works of recent historical and ethnographic scholarship and selected critical readings in urban theory. Key themes include segregation and urban mixing; urban infrastructures and technological change; formally recognized and unrecognized economies; impacts of war, mass migration, and mass violence; and the everyday sensory life of the city. Medium-length independent research project developed in stages over the semester. Fulfills the non-Euro/US requirement for history majors and minors. Not open to students who have taken HIST 2346. (Same as: HIST 2805, ASNS 2583)

Advanced seminar. An exploration of the ways contemporary planetary consciousness has influenced conceptions of the human and the animal, as well as their supposed difference. Examines, in light of modern and current world literature, new models for both the exemplary world citizen and human species identity. Investigates to what extent, and by what creative means, reconsiderations of humans’ impact on the planet and place in the world are recorded in narratives of other creatures and the perceptual possibilities of their worlds. (Same as: ENGL 3012)

Prerequisites: ENGL 1000 - 1049 or ENGL 1100 - 2969 or ENGL 3000 (same as GSWS 3000) or higher.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2020.

Through the exploration of art, literature, architecture and the unique worldview of the ancestral Andean societies, this course will take a look at the different ways in which the three main countries in the Andes—Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia—have dealt with processes of social, political, and cultural modernization since the late nineteenth century until the present day. Readings will include works by Peruvian, Bolivian, and Ecuadorian writers to examine modernist, avant-garde and postmodernist aesthetics. Students will analyze how internal migration to the cities of Lima, Quito and La Paz has reconfigured them, changed their urban dynamics, and impacted the economy and the natural environment. One example students will engage with includes architecture from iconic Bolivian architect Freddy Mamani ,who invented the construction of the Cholets in the city of El Alto, Bolivia. Cholets offer a unique way of connecting urban space to Aymaran identity (an identity that is very connected to the land in Boliva). Students will also address the issue of migration and the reconfigurations of Andean identities in the United States, through the works of Bolivian author Edmundo Paz Soldán and the Ecuadorian-American writer Ernesto Quiñónez and his experience living in Harlem. Taught in Spanish. (Same as: HISP 3211, LACL 3215)

Prerequisites: HISP 2409 (same as LACL 2409) or HISP 2410 (same as LACL 2410) or HISP 3200 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Fall 2022.

The mythical fate-driven foundation of Rome and the city’s subsequent self-fashioning as caput mundi (capital of the world) have made the city an idea that transcends history, and that has for millennia drawn historians, poets, artists, and, most recently, filmmakers to attempt to capture Rome’s essence. As a result, the city defined by its ruins is continually created anew; this synergy between the ruins of Rome -- together with the mutability of empire that they represent -- and the city’s incessant rebirth through the lives of those who visit and inhabit it offers a model for understanding the changing reception of the classical past. This research seminar explores the cycle of ancient Rome’s life and afterlife in the works of writers and filmmakers such as Livy, Virgil, Tacitus, Juvenal, Petrarch, Shakespeare, Keats, Goethe, Gibbon, Hawthorne, Freud, Moravia, Rossellini, Fellini, Bertolucci, and Moretti. All readings in English. (Same as: CLAS 3310)

Previous terms offered: Spring 2021.

Seminar. Focuses on important issues in the history of the American city during the past half century with some comparative excursions to cities beyond. Issues include urban renewal and responses to it, historic preservation, gentrification, high-rise syndrome, the loss and creation of public places, and the making of a humane and successful city today. Considers both the city’s appearance and form and the social and cultural issues that help shape that form. Examines these issues in depth through primary and secondary source readings. Throughout the semester students pursue a research project of their own, culminating in a presentation to the class and a substantial (twenty-five page) paper. (Same as: ENVS 3998)

Prerequisites: ENVS 2004 (same as DCS 2335 and URBS 2004) or ENVS 2301 (same as DCS 2340 and URBS 2301) or ENVS 2403 (same as HIST 2182) or ENVS 2431 (same as ARTH 2430 and URBS 2431) or ENVS 2444 (same as HIST 2006 and URBS 2444) or ENVS 2445 (same as URBS 2445) or ENVS 2470 (same as ARTH 2470 and URBS 2470) or AFRS 2220 (same as URBS 2620) or AFRS 2626 (same as URBS 2626) or AFRS 3230 (same as HIST 3230 and URBS 3230) or GOV 2309 or HIST 1321 (same as URBS 1321) or HIST 2660 (same as GSWS 2662 and URBS 2660) or HIST 2802 (same as ASNS 2585 and URBS 2802) or SOC 2202 (same as URBS 2202) or URBS 1000 - 2969 or URBS 3000 or higher.

Previous terms offered: Spring 2023, Spring 2021.