Recent monographs and thematic studies have shaped our understanding of Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's life and work, but some aspects that speak to larger formations in the history of modern architecture have been persistently ignored. Namely, this was her engagement in international resistance networks, her work in the peace and denuclearization movements, as well as the international women's movement. The course revisits these themes in the context of debates in modern architecture to excavate multiple figures from Austria, Turkey, Poland, Hungry, Germany, and France, but also Mexico, Chile, Cuba, and the Soviet Union.

"Socialist construction," in the early USSR, was an idea that brought architecture, infrastructure, and media to bear on cultivating belonging within an ethnically, ecologically, and historically complex territory ("one-sixth of the world"). This seminar takes the term as an opening onto the architecture of global socialism more broadly, with particular focus on the links between architecture, landscape, multinationalism, and internal colonization. We revisit familiar architectural movements like Constructivism, but we focus on gathering a broad geographic and temporal range of encounters between design and socialist politics.

Part of a series of seminars studying the parallel development of biological and architectural practices from the 18th c. to the present, this course focuses on recent ecological and environmental discourses through the writings of anthropologists, sociologists, material and environmental scientists, as well as architectural and literary critics. The seminar focuses on the effects of the diminishing distinction between the animate and the inanimate, the organic and the inorganic as well as the human and the non-human in the creation of living habitats and recreation of inequities within an environmentally challenged planet.

Divination might be defined as the attempt to detect sense in passing circumstance, from the flight of birds and planetary motions to handwriting and coffee grounds. This seminar focuses on speech as an object of such divination. We study oracles and prophecies, riddles, Freudian slips and other uncanny transmissions. At the same time, we discuss the techniques of reading to which such alleged omens have given rise in literature, criticism, religion, and psychoanalysis.

This course covers key issues in Japanese cinema and media studies, reading seminal and recent English-language scholarship on modern technological media's role in Japan's evolving political, social, and cultural contexts. Topics include Japanese cinema's influence on U.S. film studies, the "historical turn," integration of recent critical methods, and shifts in media production, circulation, and consumption. We also examine the formation of the global anime fan community and Japan's role in the development of the platform economy.

This interdisciplinary course explores the wide range of ways photography has been used for aesthetic, scientific, documentary, political, and surveillance purposes. Particular attention is given to the rich history of photography in France, beginning with the work of early inventors (Niépce's héliographie, Daguerre's daguerréotype, the Lumière brothers' vues photographiques animées) and practitioners (Atget, Nadar). We explore aerial & biometric photography, landscape, still life, portraiture, photo novels & photo essays, photojournalism, and photography's use as a tool of social control in the colonial context.

The seminar introduces graduate students to central problems, themes, concepts and methodologies in the history of science and neighboring fields. We explore past and recent developments including the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge, Actor-Network Theory, the study of practice and experimentation, the role of quantification, the concept of paradigms, gender, sexuality and the body, environmental history of science, the global history of science, and the role of labor and industry, amongst others.