Spring 2019 Course Offerings

(also AMST 4630/6630, GOVT 4835/6835, PHIL 4435/6435)
Spring. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
A. Eisenberg.
R: 2:30 – 4:25 p.m.

Political authority is often cast in terms of the legitimate power of the state and assessed on the basis of whether state authority extends too far (authoritarianism and fascism) or not far enough (libertarianism and anarchism). This seminar considers some new directions in thinking about political authority that focus on non-state groups such as Indigenous communities, corporations, and religious associations which claim authority to follow their own rules, values, and norms even if these depart from ones endorsed by the state. We begin by considering some classical treatments of authority by Hobbes, Weber, Arendt, Foucault, and others. We then turn to pluralist arguments about state authority, starting with Sophocles play Antigone, moving to early 20th-century political pluralists such as Follett, Laski, Dewey, and critics such as Schmitt. The final part of the course considers plural authorities today by examining scholarship about authority and identity, the political authority that Indigenous peoples are claiming over lands and resources, that businesses claim over workers, and that religious groups sometimes claim over their members and outsiders. In these different contexts, we will consider ways in which political authority today is plural, contested, relational, and enacted through practice.

Avigail Eisenberg is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at University of Victoria in British Columbia. She specializes in political theories of diversity and political pluralism in the history of political thought and has published monographs on each of these subjects: Reasons of Identity (2009) and Reconstructing Political Pluralism (1995). She also has written extensively about the relation between the state and religious minorities, Indigenous peoples, and national minorities with a particular focus on Canada. She has held fellowships at Hebrew University, Université de Montréal, and the Rockefeller Centre in Bellagio. Her recent scholarship and teaching interests include dissent and resistance, democratic communication, and reconciliation. She is currently researching and writing a book on pluralist understandings of political authority drawing on examples of authority claims made by Indigenous communities, religious groups, and business corporations.

(also CLASS 4602, HIST 4632/6632, MEDVL 4632/6632)
Spring. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
D. Fernández.
T: 10:10 a.m. – 12:05 p.m.

This seminar will focus on the transition between the Roman Empire and the Middle Ages from the perspective of political legitimacy. As the symbolic and institutional frameworks of the Western Roman empire crumbled during the fifth century, new alternatives emerged in the so-called barbarian kingdoms. Traditional narratives emphasize the transition from ancient models of authority directly to Germanic and/or Christian rulership. This seminar will challenge narratives of straightforward transformation and discuss the creativity of rulers, intellectuals, and common people in their ideas on legitimate political authority during this neglected period. Ethnicity, religion, gender, and other categories informed the construction of legitimate rulership as well as dissidence and resistance. This seminar will therefore focus on the notions of rebel, usurper, and rebellion during this period.

Discussion of late antique notions of legitimate authority have much to contribute to debunking inaccurate references to this period, most recently by far-right political groups. Contemporary ethno-nationalist discourse has embraced the medieval period as a golden age society led by a white, warrior elite with simple values. This course will provide students with a critical toolbox of historical analysis that emphasizes the period’s cultural and intellectual diversity. It will also show how discourses on legitimate and illegitimate authority were used as tools of oppression and resistance, challenging rose-tinted portrayals of the period.

The seminar will build upon a discussion of primary sources in translation. The professor will provide historical contextualization; thus, no prior knowledge of ancient or medieval history or languages is required. Texts will be organized chronologically but also thematically, to reflect the wealth of themes related to discourses on political authority. We will cover traditional topics associated with late-antique male rulership, namely ethnicity, military identity, religious sanction, and wealth redistribution. But we will also devote particular attention to themes beyond traditional kingship, such as queenship, informal political authority, infant rulers, and portrayals of rulers’ sexuality.

Damián Fernández is an Associate Professor of History at Northern Illinois University. He received his BA in History from the University of Buenos Aires and pursued his graduate studies at the University of British Columbia (MA in Religious Studies) and Princeton University (PhD in History). Damián Fernández’s previous research focused on the social history of the Iberian Peninsula during Late Antiquity. His book, Aristocrats and Statehood in Western Iberia, 300-600 C.E. (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), examines the relationship between socio-economic elites and state authority during the transition between the Roman Empire and the so-called barbarian kingdoms. His next book will trace the history of ideas on rebellion in the Visigothic kingdom of Toledo, the polity that succeeded the Roman Empire in the Iberian Peninsula before the Muslim conquest of 711. By analyzing the literature on rebellion, the book will argue that ideas on rebel-hood contributed to defining post-Roman government around the notion of “order” (political, military, and cosmic). Damián Fernández is also working on a translation and commentary of the Liber Iudiciodum or Visigothic Code, a seventh-century compilation of laws issued by Visigothic kings.

(also PHIL 4433/6433)
Spirng. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
K. Manne.
T: 12:20 – 2:15 p.m.

Since Stanley Milgram‘s famous experiments on obedience to authority conducted in the early 1960s, and arguably long before that, it‘s been clear that the majority of people are unreliable judges of who to obey, who to follow, and who to treat as moral authority figures. (The corresponding epistemic problem of who to believe, who to listen to, and who to regard as an expert or an authority on some intellectual subject, is the primary focus of my research proposal.)

This advanced seminar would begin by considering the nature and bases of a mistaken sense of moral obligation to follow someone‘s lead, either because one falsely takes oneself to owe them obedience as such, or because one erroneously treats them as a source of superior moral insight. We will also consider the ways in which agents might muster resistance (both individually and collectively) to such illicit moral demands, and/or reorient to the commands and commanders which genuinely deserve our allegiance.

We will then explore questions about the epistemology and metaphysics of genuine or licit moral authority, which is at least partly a matter of issuing, and not contradicting, independently valid moral requirements. Among other classic metaethical possibilities, we will consider a source of basic moral constraints which I moot in some of my work in metaethics: viz., that a vulnerable, embodied subject‘s will makes authoritative demands on the agents suitably positioned to respond by doing as bidden (if only inchoately or implicitly), and to refrain from acting in ways which they protest against (if only inwardly and silently), all else being equal. I also propose to discuss the subsequent possibility of what I call a democracy of the body, as opposed to one based purely on voting and conscious deliberation. The imperatival nature of complex visceral distress states, such as hunger and humiliation, may be further topics.

Kate Manne has been an assistant professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University since 2013. Before that, she was a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2011–2013), did her graduate work at MIT (2006–2011), and was an undergraduate at the University of Melbourne (2001–2005), where she studied philosophy, logic, and computer science.

Nowadays, her research is primarily in moral, feminist, and social philosophy. Her first book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press) came out late in 2017 (copyright 2018). It constitutes a systemic exploration of the nature, function, and social dynamics of misogyny, even in allegedly post-patriarchal contexts such as the US, the UK, and Australia. Review essays and commentary about the book have appeared in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, the Times Literary Supplement, Guernica, Jezebel, Bitch Magazine, Vox, Slate, and the LA Review of Books, among other venues. Down Girl was selected as a Book of the Year by Carrie Tirado Bramen for Times Higher Education, Cordelia Fine for The Big Issue, Skye Cleary for The Reading Lists, Chuck Mertz for This is Hell, and was included among the Dozen Most Memorable Books of 2017 by Carlos Lozada for The Washington Post, the "Five Best Books on Cruelty and Evil" by Paul Bloom for Five Books, and "Big Summer Reads for 2018" by Kerri Miller (MPR News). 

Manne has also published a number of scholarly papers about the foundations of morality, which posit a novel source of some of the most fundamental moral claims on us as agents: the bodily imperatives of other people and creatures—e.g., a subject’s “make it stop!” state of pain, fear, hunger, or social humiliation—together with social norms that help to enable their fulfillment, and prevent their violation. She has defended Bernard Williams-style reasons internalism, arguing that a moral claim does not count as a reason for an agent unless she can be rationally persuaded to recognize it as a reason for her. And many agents appear quite recalcitrant.  

For a Sisyphean twist, Manne regularly writes opinion pieces, essays, and reviews on moral and political topics—in venues including The New York Times, The Boston Review, the Huffington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Times Literary Supplement.

(also ARTH 4720/6720, BSOC 4634, HIST 4634/6634, STS 4634/6634)
Spring. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
J. Ratcliff.
T: 2:30 – 4:25 p.m.

During Europe’s colonial era, the modern museum emerged as a site of cultural and scientific authority. This course investigates the history of imperial collections and collectors, with a focus on Britain and the East India Company in the nineteenth century. Examples of topics include: the “supply chain” for artifacts and knowledge resources; changing conceptions of intellectual property, ownership and access; household versus public versus for-profit collections; museums and the narration of social values and cultural identities; debates over the function or aims of museums and related institutions; the collections and the administration of the empire; the collections and the growth of the sciences; the postcolonial legacies of colonial collections.

Recommended for students with some prior coursework in modern history (post-1600).

Jessica Ratcliff is Assistant Professor in the Department of Science and Technology Studies.  She works on the history of science and technology, specializing in Britain and its former empire. Her work so far has explored the historical relationship between forms of science and forms of state, in contexts ranging from technological invention and courtier culture in seventeenth-century England to patronage of physical sciences in nineteenth-century Travancore. She is particularly interested in studying the connections between science and the state by way of economics and material culture. Currently, she is working on a book about the East India Company’s library and museum in London. Recent publications include: "The East India Company, the Company's Museum, and the Political Economy of Natural History in the Early Nineteenth Century" in Isis (September 2016); "Travancore's Magnetic Crusade: geomagnetism and the geography of scientific production in a princely state" in British Journal for the History of Science (June 2016); and "The Great Data Divergence: Global History of Science within Global Economic History" in Global Scientific Practice during the Age of Revolutions (2016).

(also COML 4622, GERST 4635, ROMS 4635/6635)
Spring. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
A. Schuster.
M: 12:20 – 2:15 p.m.

“How sad! There’s nothing to be done with this Kafka. The more I try, the closer I get to him and the further away I go. Am I missing an organ? His anxiety, his anguish, I understand them well but I do not feel them. If he seems to be haunted by the existence of an elusive transcendence, a court of which one is ignorant but on which one depends, a guilt without object, I, on the contrary, feel that I am responsible for everything which happens to me, and even what happens elsewhere and to others.” In a letter to his English translator, Jean Genet expresses both his admiration for and perplexity with Kafka: if Kafka’s fictions stage a dramatic relation to the Law whose strictures and judgements remain inscrutable, Genet takes the subjectivation of guilt as his absolute starting point: he is a criminal, and he writes from the perspective of the one exiled from society, and who is therefore supremely responsible (for himself and others). It is almost as if Genet begins where Kafka ends, with the assumption of the eternal “shame” of K.’s assassination at the conclusion of The Trial. In our examination of authority, we will investigate how the neurotic Kafka and the perverse Genet provide contrasting (and intersecting) perspectives on the drama of Law and the outcast. We will focus in particular on a lesser known story by Kafka, “Investigations of a Dog,” which deals with the authority of knowledge (what Lacan called the “university discourse”), and the possible founding of a new science. Genet’s theater constitutes an extended meditation on the problem of how to separate oneself from power, or how to exorcise the attachment to the master within oneself, and we will read his plays (together with his writings on art) with an eye to the difficulties of the emancipation from authority.

Aaron Schuster (BA Amherst College; MA, PhD Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) is a philosopher and writer, based in Amsterdam. He is the author of The Trouble with Pleasure: Deleuze and Psychoanalysis (Short Circuits Series, MIT Press, 2016). His book Spasm: A Philosophy of Tickling is forthcoming from Cabinet Books, and he is a co-author, together with Eric Santner and William Mazzarella, of Sovereignty Inc.: Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment, to be published in the Trios Series of the University of Chicago Press. Other recent publications include “Being and Enjoyment in Plato’s Philebus: A Lacanian Perspective” (in College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, Spring 2018), “The Sexual Life of Communists: Reflections on Alexandra Kollontai” (forthcoming in The Alexandra Kollontai Reader, Sternberg Press and Kontsfack, Stockholm), and “Fasting and Method: Kafka as Philosopher” (in Poiesis, eds. Petar Milat and Nathan Brown, Zagreb: Mama Multimedia Center, 2017). He has written on such topics as the history of levitation, the politics of sleep, the psychopathology of AI, the debt drive, the comedy of Lubitsch, Genet’s theater, Kafka’s philosopher dog, Platonov’s Anti-Sexus, and complaining. He has been a fellow at the Theory Department of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry ICI Berlin, and the Institute for Advanced Studies Southeast Europe, Rijeka, Croatia. In 2016, he was a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, at the Center for Disciplinary Innovation, the Franke Institute for the Humanities.

(also ASRC 4637/6637, PMA 4966/6966)
Spring. 4 credits.
Limited to 15 students.
D. Rogers.
M: 10:10 a.m. - 12:20 p.m.

This seminar explores the narratives of Black girlhood in contemporary media and popular culture. This exploration will also deal with the dearth of existing narratives around Black girlhood and the complexities of their lived experiences in education, sexuality, and interaction with authority.

Students will analyze Black girlhood through a diverse collection of films, both narrative and documentary, in feature length, as well as short form. Historical narratives and fiction literature will also be of focus as blueprints for a number of film adaptations.

We will consider the following questions: How does the intersection of race, class, gender, authority, education, and policing impact the ways we understand girlhood? How have Black girls defined girlhood and the transition from Black girl to Black woman when confronted with authority, be it within systems or asserted by individuals? How has authority rendered Black girlhood invisible and criminal?

We will consider these questions and more through a number of texts, including Monique Morris’ Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools, Marcia Chatelain’s South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration, and Aimee Meredith Cox’s Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship. We will also consider a number of films, including Spike Lee’s Crooklin, Dee Ree’s Pariah, Céline Sciamma's Girlhood, Anna Rose Holmer’s The Fits, Amanda Lipitz’s Step and Landon Van Soest and Jeremy Levine's For Ahkeem, and Nijla Mumin’s Jinn.

With these texts will we examine the racialization of girlhood, the criminalization of Black girls, sexual literacy, youth activism, education, and Black girls in social media and hip-hop culture.

Dehanza Rogers is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor in Performing and Media Arts. Her films focus on the intersections of race, gender, and identity. 

Her most recent work, From Land to Land, a video installation, explores the precarious nature of being undocumented in America. Rogers is currently working on a short form narrative #BlackGirlhood which focuses on the criminalization of Black girlhood in America.  

Rogers’ research has been supported by The President Council’s of Cornell Women, Cornell Humanities Council, and the Cornell Council for the Arts. She is currently a Society for the Humanities Fellow and a member of the CIVIC Media Studies Collaborative.  

She received her BA in Anthropology at California State University, Northridge in Anthropology with a focus on folklore and refugee youth culture. She pursued her graduate studies at the University of California, Los Angeles’ School of Theatre, Film and Television, receiving an MFA in Film Directing and an MFA in Cinematography. 

(also ARCH 6408, ROMS 6380)
Spring. 4 credits.
Limited to fellowship recipients.
P. Erber.
T: 12:20 – 2:15 p.m.

Course Description

In a 1962 performance entitled Incubation Process / Joint Core System, Japanese architect and artist Arata Isozaki invited the public to participate in the allegorical construction of a chaotic, randomly developing city of nails and colorful electric wires on top of a large satellite image of the Tokyo Bay. The piece presented an unequivocal commentary on the massive reconstruction efforts that preceded Tokyo’s 1964 Olympics; to the top-down style of urban planning brought forward by the Japanese government, it opposed an organic, unpredictable, and, to some extent, democratic model of urban growth.

At the intersection of literary and urban studies, architecture, art, politics, and economic theory, this seminar approaches the city as an object of competing desires, clashing utopias, and dissenting projects for the future of mankind in its interaction with the natural environment. From the winding alleys of Tokyo to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and beyond, we will examine representations of the city as backdrop and protagonist, subject and object of a wide range of literary pieces, visual artworks, and theoretical investigations. Particular attention will be given to the city as a privileged site for peripheral fantasies of modernity, as well as to the unexpected, unfinished, disruptive elements that emerge within the planned urban environment. Envisaging the city itself as a text, the seminar will explore multiple possibilities of a hermeneutics of urban space.

In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the course, students will be expected to engage with a variety of media, genres, and authors and simultaneously encouraged to bring their diverse disciplinary perspectives and insights to the conversation. We will profit from the vast resources available at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, at Cornell University Library, as well as from the collection of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art. Authors, architects, and artists examined range from Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, and Maeda Ai to the Situationists, Akasegawa Genpei, and Kon Wajiro, from Oscar Niemeyer, Lina Bo Bardi, and Max Bill to João do Rio, Hélio Oiticica, Mike Davis, and Teresa Caldeira, among others.

Course Instructor: Pedro Erber, Associate Professor of Luso-Brazilian Studies, Department of Romance Studies, Cornell University

Call for Applications

The Spring 2019 Urban Representation Lab, “Urban Unplanning: The City as Text,” is an innovative seminar for graduate students in the humanities and design disciplines. Urban Representations Labs are offered under the auspices of Cornell University’s Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities grant and are organized by the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and the Society for the Humanities.

Selected students receive a $1,500 stipend to support a final project. Since final projects will be collaborative, students with diverse backgrounds and skill sets (i.e. ethnography, film and video, critical theory, digital mapping, architecture, fine art, landscape architecture, city planning, etc.) are encouraged to apply.  Applicants should be in their first three years of graduate training or enrolled in a graduate professional program.  Advanced undergraduate students may apply, but preference will be given to graduate students.

Materials to be submitted: (1) C.V.  (2) A two-page statement describing your interest in and qualifications for the seminar including: a. your state of graduate study; b. your background or interests in urban representation; c. your interest in collaborative research and your knowledge of various methods and tools we may bring to it; and d. your background with relevant experiences such as curating, architecture, etc. and your experience with digital skills such as GIS, web design, internet art, photography, video, sound recording or any other relevant information.  No letters of recommendation are required.

Questions should be directed to Emily Parsons, elp25@cornell.edu.

Applications must be submitted via http://urbanismseminars.cornell.edu/apply/ by December 21, 2018.