Graduate Courses

COL 525: Trans Affect and the Coloniality of Gender
Andrea Pitts
Tuesday 3:30-6:10 Clemens 1032
Class #22152
This course will work through several new books addressing trans affect and experience, including expressions of negative feelings like fatigue, numbness, rage, and depression among trans writers, artists, and activists. The course also seeks to bring this work on trans affect and experience into dialogue with investigations of forms of kinship, desire, comportment, and bodily expression that challenge the modern/colonial gender system

COL 690: Dissertation Writing Workshop
Andrea Pitts
Monday 12:30-3:10 Clemens 708
Class #14890
The Dissertation Writing Workshop (DWW) is a one-credit hour, mandatory course for all COL PhD students to be taken in the fall semester immediately following the completion of the Oral Examinations. The DWW serves two basic purposes: 1) facilitates the transition from seminars and exam preparation to the writing of the dissertation; 2) professionalization and job market preparation. Requirement for the DWW include the following: 1) production of a substantial and complete draft of a chapter of the dissertation, which will be presented to the workshop participants for comments; 2) presentation of a shorter version of the chapter (40 -50 minutes, approximately 20 pages) during the session in which the longer chapter will be discussed; 5) reading and discussion of other workshop participants' work. Dissertation directors and other faculty will be invited to attend the oral presentations of the student’s work·. The DWW meets the first week of the fall semester to organize the schedule of presentations and any other meetings. In most cases, the DWW will reconvene during the second half of the semester in order to critique the work of the workshop participants. Student grades depend on successful completion of all requirements. Failure to complete successfully the requirements results in the student's having to repeat the DWW in the following fall semester. 

COL 712: “AI Power, Race, and Gender”
Ewa Ziarek
Monday 12:30pm-3:10pm
Clemens 708
Class #23174 (REC-Extensive) #23175 (SEM-Intensive)
More and more scholars, public policy organizations, political organizers and journalists argue that we are witnessing a shift in power relations as every day human activities, from dating, driving, shopping, labor, entertainment, news watching, judiciary decisions to profiling, ranking and hiring practices are organized by big data and AI. And as everyone also admits, the far-reaching implications of this turn – political, ethical, and epistemological – are hard to foresee.   Despite its claims to objectivity and impartiality, algorithmic decisions replacing human judgments not only reproduce but in fact produce new forms of cultural, social, and political inequalities and domination.  In this context, this course asks several fundamental questions:  what are the new forms of economic, gender and race domination emerging with the computational turn and the so-called “datafication” of power and knowledge? Are we witnessing new forms of governmentality and neocolonialism that further dispossess minoritarian subjects? How can feminist and race theories help us to diagnose and contest these new forms of domination? This course does not presuppose any prior knowledge either in algorithmic culture or feminist/critical race theory. On the contrary, beginners willing to confront new intellectual, cultural, and political shifts are most welcome. I imagine this course isa collaboratory, which, building on the syllabus, will create new archives of knowledge and new modes of critical reflection. (Core seminar)

COL 714: “Poetic Thinking”
Krzysztof Ziarek
Wednesday 12:30pm-3:10pm
Clemens 708
Class #23178 (REC-Extensive) #23179 (SEM-Intensive)
In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” Heidegger remarks that all art is, in how it comes to unfold, poetry (Dichtung). Marking a crucial distinction between poetry as a literary genre, (Poesie) and “poetizing”  or “poetic composing” (Dichten), Heidegger suggests that there is a poetic dimension distinctly formative in every kind of art. This dimension extends also to the domain of thought. The course will examine several poetic and theoretical texts (including Fanon, Heidegger, Howe, Kang, Kim, Lorde, Loy, Lyotard, Stein, Williams) as well as visual arts and music,  with a view to discerning this poetic dimension in thinking. What is the relation of this poetic element to cognition and representation? Where in text, language, and words does this poetic dimension emerge? What is the role of sound, rhythm, and silence in thinking’s shape and expression? (Core seminar)

COL 715: “Practices of Truth-Telling: “Race,” Resistance, Refusal” (Foucault Seminar)
Devonya Havis
Wednesdays 3:30pm-6:10pm
Clemens 1004
Class #23180 (REC-Extensive) #23180 (SEM-Intensive)
Conditions governing what can be claimed as truth or falsity have always been sites of contestation. In recent years this already complex terrain has become even more fraught – especially for those communities whose racialized bodies are subjected to intimate, yet structural, violent constraint. This seminar will explore truth-telling as a ‘practice’ that not only disrupts an unjust status quo but also crafts possibility from impossibility.

Utilizing the Blues, Jazz, narratives, and other vernacular phenomena, we will examine how such practices critique invidious processes of racialization and offer theoretical insights into fostering a world that can be otherwise. Toward this end we will use the first part of the semester to engage in a close reading of Michel Foucault’s works on governmentality, critique, and Parrēsia. The course will then take up such thinkers as James Baldwin, Audra Simpson, Ralph Ellison, Saidiya Hartman, Zora Neal Hurston, among others, who will trouble and expand upon truth-telling as ethical practice. The following provocations will be touchstones in our interdisciplinary investigations: What problems arise when practicing truth-telling under social, political constraint? How do modes of truth-telling effect material conditions? What teachings are offered by persons who have needed to be skillful in crafting possibility from impossibility? How might we understand living under conditions of constraint as an existence that is more than oppression? How might such concepts as freedom and justice be transposed by those communities who have been historically marginalized? (Core seminar)

COL 716: “The Memory of Genocide”
David Johnson and Shaun Irlam
Tuesday 12:30pm-3:10pm
Clemens 708
Class #23182 (REC-Extensive) #23183 (SEM-Intensive)
The memory of genocide: this is what there ought not be. The point of genocide, its express purpose, is to leave no one to tell the story, to leave no trace of the event, to reduce the event to cinders, to ashes, “spread over the plains of Auschwitz,” as Robert Antelme put it in L’espèce humaine (1957). Indeed, the question of the proof of genocide, of Auschwitz and the so-called “final solution,” provoked Jean-François Lyotard to write Le différend (1983) and to ask the question of the event: “Arrive-t-il ?” (“Does it happen?” “Does it arrive?”). The ashes of Auschwitz—and not only of Auschwitz, but of Armenia, Cambodia, Rawanda, Bosnia, Gaza—remain and their remainder testifies to the event and its impossible memory. This course focuses on two major genocidal events of the twentieth century, the Nazi extermination of European Jewry (and others), which has been variously called the worst crime in human history, the crime of crimes, a crime against humanity, and which led to the invention of the term “genocide”; and the Rwandan genocide which saw the massacre of nearly one million Tutsi and sympathetic Hutu in eight months of 1994.
Many of the course materials were originally written or produced in French, but are also available in English. Provisional primary readings include: Robert Antelme, L’espèce humaine (1947), Elie Weisel, La nuit (1958/2007), Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (1986); Shlomo Venezia, Sonderkommando. Dans l’enfer des chambres à gaz (2007); Jean Hartzfeld, Dans le nu de la vie (2000), Une saison de Machettes (2003), La strategie des antilopes (2007). Secondary readings include Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz (1999); Catherine Coquio, Le mal de véritié ou l’utopie de la mémoire (2015); Tzvetan Todorov, Face à l’extrême (1991); Annette Wieviorka, Déportation et génocide (1992) and L’ère du témoin (1998).***
***Reading are subject to change. All primary readings will be available in English. Course taught in English. (Core seminar) (Core seminar)

COL 525/ FR 526: “Psychoanalysis and Ecopoetics” 
Fernanda Negrete
Tuesday 4:00-6:40 Clemens 904
Class# 23825

This seminar examines experiences of and relationships to time, space, and transition zones in psychoanalysis and in a range of ecopoetic practices.

In a short paper written around the same time as the better known "Mourning and Melancholia" (1915), Freud explored the connection between beauty, joy, and ephemerality in nature beside a poet friend of his who was stricken with a kind of pain that today might be considered a case of solastalgia, a state of homesickness for the impending losses related to environmental change. To Freud, embracing the intimate link between joy and impermanence was crucial, but if it involves letting go of stasis and aversion to change, how does this attitude face up to the very practical problem that the planet can very well become totally inhospitable to human and non-human life? This destructive trend gained its momentum, as we know, in an industrialized world where collective life takes place under the threat of nuclear escalation and neoliberal policy, so what would be a different choice after mondialisation and who would be able to make it? Where do current concepts and practices of care stand in this situation, and how do these practices differ from ecopoetics and from the ethics of psychoanalysis? The answer involves beauty: in psychoanalysis it promptly shows the horror that is its underside, so in the seminar we consider both this dialectic and the fact that it does not exhaust what is at stake in aesthetic feeling and creation, particularly with regard to crisis, drive, subjectivity, freedom, and action. We will consider artworks from impressionism to Land Art to current time-based and ephemeral art, and read texts by Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Jacques Lacan, Willy Apollon, and other analysts, as well as by philosophers and writers such as Suzanne Césaire, Hélène Cixous, Maryse Condé, Gilles Deleuze, Frankétienne, Édouard Glissant, Félix Guattari, Immanuel Kant, Julia Kristeva, Leda Maria Martins, Bénédicte Meillon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Johanna Oksala, Suely Rolnik, Cécile Sauvage, Jonathan Skinner, Robert Smithson, and Cecilia Vicuña.

COL 690: Dissertation Writing Workshop
Kalliopi Nikolopoulou
Monday 12:30-3:10 Clemens 708
Class #15167

The Dissertation Writing Workshop (DWW) is a one-credit hour, mandatory course for all COL

PhD students to be taken in the fall semester immediately following the completion of the Oral Examinations. The DWW serves two basic purposes: 1) facilitates the transition from seminars and exam preparation to the writing of the dissertation; 2) professionalization and job market preparation. Requirement for the DWW include the following: 1) production of a substantial and complete draft of a chapter of the dissertation, which will be presented to the workshop participants for comments; 2) presentation of a shorter version of the chapter (40 -50 minutes, approximately 20 pages) during the session in which the longer chapter will be discussed; 5) reading and discussion of other workshop participants' work. Dissertation directors and other faculty will be invited to attend the oral presentations of the student’s work·. The DWW meets the first week of the fall semester to organize the schedule of presentations and any other meetings. In most cases, the DWW will reconvene during the second half of the semester in order to critique the work of the workshop participants. Student grades depend on successful completion of all requirements. Failure to complete successfully the requirements results in the student's having to repeat the DWW in the following fall semester. 

COL 721 REC/ SEM:” Popularity, Nationality, Universality”
Rodolphe Gasche
Tuesday 12:30pm-3:10pm Clemens 708
Class #22868 (Extensive) 22869 (Intensive)

In this seminar we will pursue several goals. Through selected passages from mainly Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, this seminar will explore the Enlightenment demand for a popular form of philosophy, and ask the question whether such a demand however desirable is possible without eclecticism, and banalization of the singular level of thought on which philosophy operates. The other issue that will be explored concerns the relation of philosophy to nationalities. Is there something like national philosophies? What does the cliché of German, French, or British  philosophy, mean?   How does  philosophy’s claim of universality go together with its alleged, or even explicitly proclaimed nationality? Selected passages from Nietzsche’s will help us flesh out and answer these questions. In addition, we will read sections of Derrida’s The Other Heading, as well as his essays “Popularities,” and “Onto-Theology of

National Humanism.” (counts toward COL core seminar requirement)

COL 722 REC /SEM "Testimony and Survival"
David Johnson
Tuesday 3:30pm-6:10pm Clemens 708
Class #22870 (Extensive) 22871 (Intensive)

This seminar concerns with the structural possibilities and limitations of testimony. What makes my testimony possible as mine and how is my testimony always that of another? We will also be concerned with the structural relation of testimony to fiction and of the truth to mendacity. Finally, we will ask about the relation of testimony to survival, to living on or survivance. We will read Jacques Derrida’s Fiction and Testimony (Demeure: Maurice Blanchot) and “History of the Lie: Prolegomenon” (Histoire du mensonge), as well as Alexandre Koyré’s “The Political Function of the Modern Lie” (Réflexions sur le mensonge). From there, we’ll take up Robert Antelme’s The Human Race (L’espèce humaine), Primo Levi’s If This is a Man (Si c’est un homme), Charlotte Delbo’s Auschwitz et après and Le Convoi de 24 Janvier, Elie Wiesel’s Night (La nuit) and Jorge Semprun’s Literature or Life (L’écriture ou la vie).

Secondary readings will include Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz; Catherine Coquio, Parler des camps, parler de genocide; Rodolphe Gasché, Storytelling; Élise LameyRested, Parole vraie, parole vide; Annette Wieviorka, The Era of the Witness (L’ère du témoin).

The first half of the seminar will advance via lectures on Derrida. The second half will be organized around student “kick-offs” of the primary and secondary readings. Final research paper (15-20 pages). (counts toward COL core seminar requirement)

COL 723 REC / SEM “Contemporary Poetry and the Task of Language”
Krzysztof Ziarek
Wednesday 13:30pm-3:10pm Clemens 708
Class #22872 (Extensive) 22873 (Intensive)

In the context of AI and ChatGPT, it is imperative to rethink the cultural and political roles of aesthetic practices and the inventive task of language in them. What is singular about poetic practice that AI and “large language models” cannot replicate? Although we will focus on poetry, these issues are at stake today in all artistic practices. With this framework in mind, we will examine poetry written after 1945 in the larger context of modernist and avant-garde poetics. To address this question, we will read a range of poets and interdisciplinary thinkers. Reading will include poetry by Oppen, Cage, Celan, Coolidge, Howe, Kim, Williams, and Bervin, with theoretical texts by Benjamin, Heidegger, Derrida, Nancy, and selected writings from critical AI studies. (counts toward COL core seminar requirement)

COL 525 Latina/x Feminist Aesthetics
Andrea Pitts
Tues/Thurs
11:00am-12:20pm
Capen 1004
Class #22924

Through a survey of differing forms of music, dance, visual art, theater, film, food, and literature, this course examines how U.S.-based Latina/x feminists have imagined and created new worlds of sensibility, desire, and aesthetic possibility. Often by defying racial, gender, and sexual norms, Latina/x artists and theorists push at the boundaries of societal expectations for Latinx and other racialized and colonized populations. This creative work includes shaping new spaces for community connection, constructing new or retrofitting forms of self-expression, and moving across and within oppressive spaces in resistant and transformative ways. Themes woven throughout the course include queer embodiment and desire, trans/travesti life and futurity, disability and crip of color critique, analyses of state and interpersonal violence, transnational feminist solidarity and conflict, and in-depth explorations into the relationship between politics and art. ***No prerequisites required – all are welcome to enroll!***

COL 735 Left of Marxism: Feminist, Queer, Indigenous, and Black Critiques
Elisabeth Paquestte
Tuesday
3:30pm-6:10pm
Clemens 708
REC Class #10024 SEM Class #10023

The focus of this course is the various feminist, queer, Indigenous, and Black critiques of

Marxism that have circulated for decades. Derived from a variety of geopolitical locations (from

Europe, to the Caribbean, and North America) scholars and activists have been critiquing the

way in which marginalized subjects are excluded from the narrative of "universal emancipation" that the socialist revolution promised. Furthermore, drawing from feminist, queer, Indigenous, and Black theorists, we consider the various ways in which these scholars suggest that we can stretch Marx to seek emancipation that is "actually" universal. The course will begin with a cursory reading of Karl Marx, after which we will delve into these various critiques. (core seminar)

COL 738 Athen, Jerusalem, Rome
Rodolphe Gasche
Tuesday
12:30pm-3:10pm
Clemens 708
REC Class #10015 SEM Class #10014

Europe (or the West in general) is commonly retraced to the double legacy of Greek and Judaic thought and civilization. The names of the two cities: Jerusalem and Athens, are often used to refer to this origin and heritage of the West. Apart from Mecca, the importance of Rome is often neglected in this scheme even though it is via Rome that the Greek legacy became bestowed on Europe. In this seminar about the multiple origin of European thought and culture, we will inquire into some of the distinctive features of the Greek and Jewish legacies in the formation of Western thought, and in particular Western literature. We will start with a reading of Leo Strauss’ lectures from 1950 on “Jerusalem and Athens: Some Introductory Reflections,” before proceeding to Erich Auerbach’s essay on “Figura,” and the introductory chapter, “Odysseus’ Scar,” to his classical study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

Time permitting we will also include in this seminar, Remi Brague’s study on Excentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization, as a basis for a discussion of the Roman heritage as one that consists in adopting foreign cultures without destroying them, as well as his essay “Athens, Jerusalem, Mecca” as a critical counterpart to Leo Strauss’ lectures.  (core seminar)