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.

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.

Modernism comes with a host of monsters and ghosts. This course traces the teleology of "walking shells" in literary and visual culture and explores the crisis of: 1) parenthood in an age of synthetic reproduction; 2) racial and gendered logic in the sub-/semi-/non-human. We explore similarities and differences among these categories of the less-than-human. We want to rethink oppositional relationships, including between humans and things, bodies and objects, essence and prosthetics, art and technology.

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.

"What shall we say of the Marxian philosophy and of its relation to the American Negro?," Du Bois once asked. His answer was that "it must be modified," not because Marx was wrong but because Capital is one of the four "books in the world which every searcher for truth must know." To know Capital to be true, in this seminar, is to understand how Marx, after the American Civil War, learned to include in his work the most brutal facts of capitalism: chattel slavery, servitude, and extraction in colonies across the globe. "Race," and everything signified by this four-letter word, completes Marx's own expansive account of modernity.