Sample of Courses

 

Graduate Level:

 

GHIS 5116: Time, Life, and Matter:

This course is a methodology and research seminar introducing students to contemporary methods in the history, sociology, and anthropology of science, technology, and media. Focusing on the historical study of new political and social formations such as networks, new social movements, and  the environment; readings we will concentrate on three approaches: Foucauldian, Deleuzian, and Deconstructionist. Readings will include: Peter Galison, Lorraine Daston, Bruno Latour, James Siegel, Keller Easterling, Michael Callon, and others.  

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GHIS 5116: Becoming Other:

This course explores how genealogies of time based media might serve as critical tools to think about difference. The focus of the course is two fold: First, to explore methodological approaches to the history of technology, media, and subjectivity. Second, to inquire into the ethical possibility such historical inquiry might offer for rethinking subjectivity, difference, and politics.

Readings and screenings include Artaud, Walter Benjamin, Michael Taussig, Susan Buck-Morss, Elizabeth Grosz, Jonathan Crary, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio, Bruno Latour, Friedrich Kittler, and Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Trinh T. Minh-Ha.

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Undergraduate Level:

 

LHIS 2006: Origins of Contemporary Visual Culture

This course explores a history of vision, visuality, and the screen since the 19th century.  It investigates how machines, life, and knowledge are historically reformulated and organized. The investigation traverses avant-garde art practices, scientific experiments, and factory floors, including new ways to approach the history of representation, media, and the body.

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LHIS 3006: Cold War/Hot Mediums

This course examined the relationship between technology, subjectivity, and culture between the end of World War II and the present; focusing on tracing the emergence of digital technologies and mapping transformations in the relationship between bodies, machines, and minds.

Topics included : psychopharmacology, the emergence of “information” as the dominant paradigm for both economy and biology, and the legacy of Cold War obsessions with control, communication, and security.

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LHST 2000: Feminist Screen Theory

The course was organized around the question: What is the relationship between feminism and the screen? This course is an investigation of this question;  inquiring into what feminism can offer our imagination of media technologies and practices. And how  feminist art and media practice informs, contests, and re-creates the interface.

 

The course was taught combining histories of science, cinema, and colonialism with contemporary feminist theories of vision and visuality.  This course was the departments introductory general survey to feminist approaches to visual culture.

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