Fall 2020 Course Offerings

1. Include a statement on your syllabus about multilingualism and inclusivity. Describe the classroom ethos you wish to cultivate, to which you expect students to contribute. Emphasize your commitment as an instructor to fostering a congenial, collaborative, and respectful environment for all students, and reiterate that commitment verbally at the start of term. Use this space to also highlight the additional resources available to multilingual writers and international students. (Sample statements at the Knight Institute's Indispensable Reference for Teacher of First-Year Writing Seminars website.)
2. Find out early in the semester what language skills are present in your classroom. Include a question about languages spoken/read/written on a start-of-term questionnaire which students share privately with you. Have students write a discussion board post to the entire class introducing themselves and talking about their language and writing skills and goals for the course. Questions about language skills may also come up naturally in seminar discussions (see item 3).
3. Actively draw on the range of language skills your students have. Especially for courses in the humanities and the social sciences, your students’ knowledge of different languages can be a resource that benefits the entire class during discussions and presentations. Give students an opportunity to volunteer their knowledge of different languages in a range of venues—discussions (e.g., exploring etymologies), presentations, papers and written assignments.
4. Wait for it…Multilingual writers for whom English is a second (or third or fourth) language may need a little more time to process questions and formulate responses in a seminar setting. If students are slow to respond when you pose a discussion question, give them time to think before hurrying to fill the silence.
5. Build opportunities for thinking about and responding to discussion questions in advance into your syllabus/lesson plan. Have students write discussion board posts or reading responses in advance of class discussion. Carve out free-writing time during class before a discussion, allowing students to formulate their thoughts on paper before participating. Have students discuss their ideas in small groups before opening up a class- wide discussion in order to build confidence before speaking in front of the entire class.
6. Avoid making assumptions. (This holds true for all of your students, but especially multilingual and international ones!) Do not assume your students’ knowledge of certain writing and language skills. Different educational backgrounds and experience mean that students will be familiar with a range of writing styles, genres, and rules. Conversely, don’t assume a lack of knowledge of certain writing or language skills. Better to get a sense early in the semester of all of your students’ past writing experience (again, a start-of-term questionnaire is a fantastic place to start), and continue to check-in and gauge students’ levels of writing and language expertise throughout the term.
7. Incorporate sessions on diction, grammar, and mechanics into your lesson plan (for FWS instructors especially). Chances are, many students—not just international or multilingual ones—will benefit from going back to basics and learning the standards specific to your field or course.
8. Remind students of the writing resources available to them. Encourage students to make use of office hours and multilingual writing support from the Knight Institute. Direct them to the resources page on the Knight website where handouts and advice for multilingual writers can be found, and/or share specific handouts or online resources with them.
9. For more ideas. check out Global Cornell's website: Teaching International Students: Tips for Online Instruction and this video recording of a panel discussion hosted by the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity: Mentoring and Supporting International Scholars.

Grace Catherine Greiner, Multilingual Writing Tutor

Establishing a strong writing community in a First-Year Writing Seminar is an essential and complex challenge -- especially in online or socially-distanced classrooms. Peer review activities are one way to initiate and deepen students’ commitment to each other as writers.

At their best, peer review activities enable students to:

• refine and develop specific drafts; 
• refine and develop more sustainable/agile ways to navigate the writing process;
• learn how to give and receive constructive feedback;
• engage in collaborative learning that reinforces course learning outcomes;
• practice interpersonal communication; and
• build community with structured, writing-focused activities.

Follow this link to a real time GoogleDoc | Peer Review Activities Idea Swap where we are collecting ideas for designing digitally-mediated peer review activities. Join other FWS instructors to post additional ideas for classroom activities and instructional tools that you have tried or are considering.

Tracy Hamler Carrick

(also ARKEO 4651/6651, VISST 4651/6651)
Fall. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
Denise Green
Tuesdays, 3:00-4:55pm
Online Only

Curated fashion exhibitions are fabricated sites where research practice, creative design, storytelling, and aesthetics converge in order to convey visual and material narratives for public consumption. In this course, students will learn about curatorial practice more broadly, and the display of fashion artifacts more specifically through theory and practice. Throughout the semester, students will collaborate on the curation of a fashion exhibition. This shared project and tangible end goal will ground theoretical discussions and enable students to convey what they have learned conceptually through the process of exhibition curation and fabrication. The course will begin with theorizing curation as research practice, while considering both conceptual and aesthetic aspects of display. We will discuss the challenges inherent in fashion exhibition design, such as mannequins and the dearth of an animate body. Next, we will focus on research methods, process, and information gathering. The research process will lead into the process of critical curatorial selection, exhibit fabrication, and iterative revision in fabricating the display space. Students will consider how their exhibition contributes new knowledge to the field.

Evaluation of student learning will be based upon: (1) contributions to a collaboratively curated fashion exhibition that will be mounted on campus using the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection and other archives and collections housed at Cornell University; (2) contributions to a digital version of the exhibition, hosted on exhibits.library.cornell.edu; (3) an approximately 1000-word review of a current fashion exhibition; and (4) annotations and written reflections on weekly class readings.

Denise Nicole Green is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design, Director of the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, and founder of the Cornell Natural Dye Studio. Her research uses ethnography, video production, archival methods, curation, and design practice to explore important social, cultural, and political issues through fashion. As a designer, curator, ethnographer, and filmmaker, she uses fabrication in various forms to convey her research findings. She is an award-winning curator and documentary filmmaker and has shown design work in juried international exhibitions and at New York Fashion Week. Professor Green is also a faculty member in American Indian and Indigenous Studies and the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material studies, as well as a graduate field member in the Department of Anthropology at Cornell.  

(also ASIAN 4482/6682, RELST 4652/6652, VISST 4652/6652)
Fall. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
Anthony Lovenheim Irwin
Thursdays, 9:10-11:05am
In-Person with Transition to Online

How did the construction of Buddhist temples in China define what Buddhism in that country came to be? What do contemporary Muslim painters in Indonesia contribute to global understandings of Islam? What does study of nineteenth-century Shaker women’s paintings of divine visions reveal about religious change in America? Does learning skills in fabrication change how we read religious texts and histories?

This course looks at how craftspeople, artisans, architects, and artists have formed the contours of some of the dominant religions in the world today. It exercises the concept of “making and knowing” by challenging seminar members to learn and think with techniques of fabrication to inform our scholarly insights and outcomes.

Most work on “making and knowing” has been about empirical knowledge, the way that manipulation of the material world in the realms of fun and fabrication have refined methodologies germane to scientific knowledge. This course underscores the transcendent aspects of empiricism, where making is understood to point to another way of knowing—knowing what is holy, right, ethical, and fruitful. We explore: How acts of collective making define ideas of beneficence for entire communities. How through making religious objects and spaces people mark the contours of their cosmological trajectories. How making in some traditions is theorized as a mode of meditative practice as well as mechanism for social improvement. In others, making can be a mode of absolving sin, creating the heavens on earth, and communing with the divine.

While exploring “making and knowing” as central to the construction of religious systems, we will also engage in making to see how it can enhance scholarly work. While learning the fundamentals of drawing, we will employ sketching to improve fieldwork and object-studies. We will test how storyboarding can help organize academic papers and make them clearer and more accessible. Ultimately, the course is experimental, seeing if learning the fundamentals of fabrication can inform our scholarly investigation of the practice.

Anthony Lovenheim Irwin is a scholar of Asian religions who thinks, talks, teaches, and writes about the social and ethical resonance of crafting, building, and construction. Dealing primarily with Buddhism in Thailand, his work focuses on the importance of craftspeople as central figures in the transmission and definition of religious traditions and communities. Following the craftspeople, artists, monks, nuns, and villagers he has been lucky enough to work with in northern Thailand, he pays special attention to the nonhuman and miraculous powers that participate in acts of religious building and crafting. His research has received funding from the American Council of Learned Societies, The US Fulbright Program, and the Australian National Research Council. He has taught at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, The University of Michigan, and Siena College. 

(also GERST 6653, PMA 4553/6553, STS 4653/6653, VISST 4653/6653)
Fall. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
Jeffrey West Kirkwood
Thursdays, 11:30am-1:25pm
Online Only

In what was arguably the first philosophy of technology, Ernst Kapp defined projection as to “throw out or forth, to place before or displace outward, to relocate something interior into the outside world.” He continued by claiming “projection and representation are not actually all that different, insofar as the inward act of representing is not independent of the object placed before the eyes of a representing subject.” The modern history of “representation,” and with it theories of subjectivity, realism, and potentiality, have been bound to projection technologies that establish a relationship between optical apparatuses and seemingly disembodied images. Linear perspective was tied to geometric projection; Kant’s transcendental subject has been connected to the magic lantern, Freud and Ferenczi’s psychoanalytic theory of projection and introjection to optics, Mercator projection to an abstract vision of space that propelled colonialism, and cinematic projection to the legal definition of race and commerce in early twentieth-century America. More recently these relationships have moved into museums and galleries through installations that interrogate or employ “projected images,” and an entire industry of future-oriented, computer-based prediction has emerged to offer a grim sense of coming changes in climate, sea-level, and economic inequality. It is these histories and futures that the course will examine. How we understand facts, counterfactuals, impossibility, futurity, and fiction is largely a function of the technological protocols through which they are constructed. The seminar returns to the histories, theories, and practices of projection to explore how projection mechanisms have come to define the relationship between concrete realities and imagined states.

Jeffrey West Kirkwood is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Binghamton University, State University of New York, where his research concentrates on media theory, cultural techniques, and theories and histories of “the digital.” He received his PhD from Princeton University and an MA from the University of Chicago, and he has been the recipient of a number of fellowships, including a Fulbright Fellowship, a Harold W. Dodds Fellowship, and fellowships at the International Research Institute for Cultural Technologies and Media Philosophy (IKKM). In 2018 he co-edited and co-wrote the introduction to the first English translation of Ernst Kapp’s Elements of a Philosophy of Technology, and his writing has appeared in October, Grey Room, Texte zur Kunst, Zeitschrift für Medien- und Kulturforschung (ZMK), OSMOS, and a number of edited collections, among other places. His first book, Endless Intervals: Cinema and Psychology around 1900, is currently under review, and he is completing a second book entitled The Negative Image: A History of Impossible States.

(also FGSS 4654, LGBT 4654, MUSIC 4354/6354, PMA 4554/6554)
Fall. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
Stephan Pennington
Mondays, 12:40-2:35pm
Online Only

Having a voice is often seen as a central metaphor for a person's agency. Having a voice allows a person to be heard as well as to speak. Yet, how we speak or sing, and how our voices are heard is socially constructed and varies based on many different identity factors including race, gender, and sexuality. From black opera divas and transgender jazz musicians to lesbian rock singers and cross identity voice over actors, this seminar will explore how to analyze and make meaning out of the use of voices within music and media: materially, culturally, and historically.

This seminar will look at the intersectional cultural politics of vocal production in music and media focusing on race, gender, and sexuality as the primary analytical lenses. The seminar will be an interdisciplinary exploration of Voice Studies, Transgender Studies, Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, and Queer Theory. A series of case studies that cross time and genre, this seminar will denaturalize and historicize a thing we tend to think of as most natural: the voice. Through close listenings of a series of vocal performances, contextualized by a variety of primary and secondary sources, this seminar will challenge seminar participants to rethink politics and production of race, gender, and sexuality. The course will culminate in a substantial research paper that will challenge the students to put into practice what they’ve learned throughout the semester.

Stephan Pennington is an Associate Professor of Music at Tufts University. His research interests are concerned with the musical performances of identity and he has presented on a wide range of topics from on the rumba craze in 1930s Germany to appropriation as an historical process. He has published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Ethnomusicology Forum, and Women & Music. He is currently working on two book projects, one on transgender vocality and the second on the persistence of enlightenment white supremacy in current musicological culture.

(also CLASS 4801/6801, COML 4801/6801)
Fall. 4 credits.
Mathura Umachandran
Tuesdays, 10:10-12:05

(also LING 3303)
Fall. 4 credits.
Jon Ander Mendia
Tuesdays/Thursdays 11:40am - 12:55pm

This course explores both syntax (how words and phrases are combined into sentences) and semantics (how the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences are interpreted). The course aims to give students to the ability to address questions regarding syntactic and semantic properties of languages in a rigorous and informed fashion. Topics covered include phrase structure, grammatical relations, transformations, semantic composition, modification, quantification, and the syntax/semantics interface. Emphasis throughout the course is placed on forming and testing hypotheses.

(also AMST 2280, STS 2280)
Fall. 3 credits.
Hannah LeBlanc
Mondays/Wednesdays 8:40am - 9:55am

How have different dimensions of our lives become matters of public health? Focusing on modern America, this course explores how public health has been bound up with histories of the state, the economy, and inequality. Most broadly, we will ask what is defined as a public health problem and why. The class examines early attempts to control infectious disease, the expansion of public health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and new dimensions of public health in the post-war period. In the final portion, the class will explore recently recognized threats to the public’s health. Throughout, we will pay attention to the practices of public health that have fostered or challenged hierarchies of race, gender, class, and ability.

Hannah Leblanc is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society for the Humanities and the Department of Science & Technology Studies. She received her PhD in History from Stanford University, with a concentration in History of Science and a PhD minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her current book project, Nutrition for National Defense, examines US government-sponsored nutrition science projects in World War II and the Cold War. Drawing on extensive archival research, it tells the story of how home economists, doctors, food technologists, military strategists, and corporate researchers linked the emerging science of nutrition to the needs of a country at war. The research and technologies produced by these experts seeped into an immense array of government and industrial projects, touching everything from Cheetos, to the federal poverty line, to international development programs. Her second project examines the invention of disposable food packaging and the waste infrastructure needed to make it viable.

(also PMA 4821/6821)
Fall. 4 credits.
Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz
Mondays/Wednesdays 7:30-8:45 pm

This class interrogates new theoretical understandings about space and how bodies marked by various types of difference (race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, fatness, ability, and socioeconomic class) interact and move in it. We will uncover the visual, linguistic, and performative representations and social structures used in deciding which bodies are allowed to create and use spaces, and to what ends. We will ask questions that examine how people make claims to space. What kind of space does a performance engender? How do racialized and gendered spaces alter where performances can happen? This course is part-seminar and part-practicum. We will investigate theories that shape and contest our understanding of space, the body, and motion, and engage these themes by creating mini-performances. Previous performance experience is not necessary.

Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Society for the Humanities and the Department of Performing and Media Arts. His current book project Choreotopias: Performance, State Violence, and The Near Past uncovers experimental dance and video art in twentieth-century Mexico, and how these aesthetic forms are mediated by gender, class, and race in the face of abusive power. As a Fellow, he will be expanding the theoretical framework in his book by exploring the relationship between truth, lies, and performance. Assessing how “truth” is produced, deployed, and mediated, he will deliberate not only if and how performance activates and represents truth-telling differently from print, televisual, and digital media, but also how the logics of racialization and gender are tied to who can use performance to make truth claims. Juan Manuel will be teaching seminars about the politics of movement and the fabrication of truth.