Courses
URBN 200: Scales of Design
Professor: Bimal Mendis
Location: RDH HASTINGS
Exploration of architecture and urbanism at multiple scales from the human to the world. Consideration of how design influences and shapes the material and conceptual spheres through four distinct subjects: the human, the building, the city, and the world. Examination of the role of architects, as designers, in constructing and shaping the inhabited and urban world. Lectures, readings, reviews and four assignments that address the spatial and visual ramifications of design.
Not open to first-year students.
URBN 230: Introduction to the Study of the City
Professor: Alexander Garvin
Location: RDH 322
An examination of forces shaping American cities and strategies for dealing with them. Topics include housing, commercial development, parks, zoning, urban renewal, landmark preservation, new towns, and suburbs. The course includes games, simulated problems, fieldwork, lectures, and discussion.
URBN 280: American Architecture and Urbanism
Insturctor: Elihu Rubin
Location: YUAG AUD
Introduction to the study of buildings, architects, architectural styles, and urban landscapes, viewed in their economic, political, social, and cultural contexts, from precolonial times to the present. Topics include: public and private investment in the built environment; the history of housing in America; the organization of architectural practice; race, gender, ethnicity and the right to the city; the social and political nature of city building; and the transnational nature of American architecture.
URBN 304: The Politics of "The Wire": HBO's Portrayal of the American City
Professor: Allison Harris
Location: LC 101
Also listed as: AFAM 164, PLSC 263
This class uses HBO’s groundbreaking series “The Wire” to investigate cities, their problems, and their politics. We watch all five seasons of the show as social scientists and use it to learn about important social scientific concepts and theories, and apply those theories to such phenomena as the politics of crime, policing, and local elections. Each week, the assigned readings—articles and book excerpts from political science as well as other social sciences—highlight the social scientific concepts displayed in the assigned episodes and provide context for lectures. All of the assignments work together to expose students to social science, how social science is conducted, and how political science can help us better understand the world around us.
URBN 324: The City Before and After The Tubewell
Professor: Anthony Acciavatti
Location: RDH 211
Also listed as: ARCH 324, SAST 384
What do such disparate cities as New Delhi, Jakarta, Mexico City, and Phoenix all have in common? In short, each city relies on a fantastic technology that few people know anything about but has transformed the shape and life of cities and their hinterlands: the tubewell. Technologies for drawing up groundwater, tubewells are used in places where municipal water supply is non-existent, unreliable, or often polluted. A minor technology with a global reach, the tubewell is to the city what the elevator was to the skyscraper in the booming American metropolis of the early twentieth century. In this course we look at how tubewells and other decentralized technologies have radically transformed urban and agricultural spaces across the globe since the nineteenth century to the present. We watch how people exult before these technologies; we witness how governments and philanthropies as well as farmers and townspeople appropriate them for radically different ends. And we consider why.
URBN 341: Globalization Space
Professor: Keller Easterling
Location: LC 102
Also listed as: ARCH 341, GLBL 253, LAST 318
Infrastructure space as a primary medium of change in global polity. Networks of trade, energy, communication, transportation, spatial products, finance, management, and labor, as well as new strains of political opportunity that reside within their spatial disposition. Case studies include free zones and automated ports around the world, satellite urbanism in South Asia, high-speed rail in Japan and the Middle East, agripoles in southern Spain, fiber optic submarine cable in East Africa, spatial products of tourism in North Korea, and management platforms of the International Organization for Standardization.
URBN491: Senior Project
Professor: Marta Caldeira
An essay or project in the student’s area of concentration. Students in the history, theory, and criticism track or in the urban studies track pursue independent research with an adviser; this project must terminate in a senior essay.
AMST 196: Race, Class & Gender in American Cities
Professor: Laura Barraclough
Location: SSS 114
Also listed as: AFAM 196, ER&M 226, SOCY 190
What do such disparate cities as New Delhi, Jakarta, Mexico City, and Phoenix all have in common? In short, each city relies on a fantastic technology that few people know anything about but has transformed the shape and life of cities and their hinterlands: the tubewell. Technologies for drawing up groundwater, tubewells are used in places where municipal water supply is non-existent, unreliable, or often polluted. A minor technology with a global reach, the tubewell is to the city what the elevator was to the skyscraper in the booming American metropolis of the early twentieth century. In this course we look at how tubewells and other decentralized technologies have radically transformed urban and agricultural spaces across the globe since the nineteenth century to the present. We watch how people exult before these technologies; we witness how governments and philanthropies as well as farmers and townspeople appropriate them for radically different ends. And we consider why.
AMST 331: Photographing the City: Urban Pictures, Urban Spaces
Professor: Kristin Hankins
Location: WALL81 101
How do we see places? How do we see boundaries? How do our practices of looking reproduce, complicate, and transform places? This junior seminar explores these questions through an engagement with American urban places and analysis of their representations throughout the 20th century, beginning with photography at the turn of the century and ending with contemporary social practice art projects. We analyze the relationship between visual culture and public space; the ways in which urban visual culture conceals and reveals power dynamics; and different ways of approaching, engaging, and representing urban places. The primary objective is to foster critical engagement with urban space and its representations—to develop an analytical framework which grounds exploration of the impact of representational strategies on experiences of space and vice versa.
AMST 350: Political Landscapes of Tourism
Professor: Jacinda Tran
Location: RKZ 04
This interdisciplinary course mobilizes tourism as a site for exploring dimensions and scales of power along racial, gendered, sexual, economic, historical, and geopolitical axes. By taking spatial analysis as the main mode of inquiry, students will learn how to critically read the visual cultures, laboring bodies, and uneven topographies that comprise the cultural terrain of tourist landscapes. How does the tourist industrial complex develop alongside and sustain modes of colonial, military, and financial world-making? In what ways do semiotic, affective, and technologic regimes map onto geographies of tourism? Students will develop critical approaches towards the making of place and memory through tourism in order to reveal colonial and capitalist underpinnings of space.
Cross-listed as: ER&M 356, WGSS 235
AMST 368: Marxism and Social Movements in the Nineteenth Century
Professor: Michael Denning
Location: LC 208
Also listed as: ER&M 224
The history and theory of the socialist and Marxist traditions from their beginnings in the early nineteenth century to the world upheavals of 1917–19. Relations to labor, feminist, abolitionist, and anticolonial movements.
AMST 425: American Culture and the Rise of the Environment
Professor: Michael Warner
Location: WLH 202
Also listed as: ENGL 430 & EVST 430
U.S. literature from the late eighteenth century to the Civil War explored in the context of climate change. Development of the modern concept of the environment; the formation and legacy of key ideas in environmentalism; effects of industrialization and national expansion; utopian and dystopian visions of the future.
ANTH 303: Field Methods in Cultural Anthropology
Professor: Sarah LeBaron von Baeyer
Location: WTS B51
The fundamentals of cultural anthropology methods. The foundations of fieldwork approaches, including methods, theories, and the problem of objectivity.
ANTH 339: Urban Ethnography of Asia
ANTH 414: Hubs, Mobilities, and World Cities
Professor: Helen Siu
Location: SA10 105
Also listed as: EAST 417 & 575, ANTH 575
Analysis of urban life in historical and contemporary societies. Topics include capitalist and postmodern transformations; class, gender, ethnicity, and migration; and global landscapes of power and citizenship.
ARCH 312: Modern Architecture in a Global Context, 1750-present
Professor: Craig Buckley
Location: LORIA 351
Architects, movements, and buildings central to the development of modern architecture from the mid eighteenth century through to the present. Common threads and differing conceptions of modern architecture around the globe. The relationship of architecture to urban transformation; the formulation of new typologies; architects’ responses to new technologies and materials; changes in regimes of representation and media. Architects include Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, John Soane, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lina Bo Bardi, Louis Kahn, and Kenzo Tange.
Cross-listed as: HSAR 312
CSGH 400: Power and Organizing in the City [Grace Hopper]
Professor: Peter Crumlish
Location: GH (Grace Hopper) LEWIS
How power is concentrated and distributed in an urban context and ways in which people organize and mobilize communities to bring about social change. Focus on New Haven as a case study, with community site visits and meetings with community leaders.
CSSM 400: Future Cities [Silliman]
Professor: Manasvi Menon and Matthew Triebner
Location: WLH 209
This course addresses the forces that shape contemporary urban life to help us understand and contextualize the future of cities. We explore different elements of city life, from resiliency to retail, using case studies from Brooklyn to Barcelona. Analyzing cities through these multiple “probes” provides insights into how a city functions as well as the values, needs, and priorities of the people who inhabit them.
EVST 245: Global Environmental Governance
Professor: Benjamin Cashore
Location: KRN 319
Also listed as: PLSC 146, F&ES 245, & F&ES 829
The development of international environmental policy and the functioning of global environmental governance. Critical evaluation of theoretical claims in the literature and the reasoning of policy makers. Introduction of analytical and theoretical tools used to assess environmental problems. Case studies emphasize climate, forestry, and fisheries.
EVST 403: The City in Modern East Asia
Professor: Michael Thornton
Location: SML 218
Also listed as: HIST 369J & EAST 404
Cities in East Asia developed into cosmopolitan urban centers in the modern era. They hosted encounters with Western empires and witnessed the rise of new forms of participatory politics; they not only reflected the broader efforts of their respective nation-states to modernize and industrialize, but also produced violent reactions against state regimes. They served as nodes in networks of migrants, commerce, and culture that grew more extensive in the modern era. In these ways, the history of East Asian urbanism is the history of the fluidity and dynamism of urban society and politics in the context of an increasingly interconnected modern world. We study cosmopolitan cities across East Asia from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the present day. A comparative approach allows us to explore both general trends and themes, and distinct historical experiences across the countries of the region. Specific seminar topics include: urban politics, including state-society relations; cities as sites of geopolitical and imperial encounters; changes in urban society, including the impact of migration and social conflict; the urban environment, including natural and man-made disasters; urban planning, at the local, national and transnational scale; and ways of visualizing the city.
EVST 290: Geographic Information Systems
Professor: Charles Tomlin
Location: WLH 202
A practical introduction to the nature and use of geographic information systems (GIS) in environmental science and management. Applied techniques for the acquisition, creation, storage, management, visualization, animation, transformation, analysis, and synthesis of cartographic data in digital form.
Cross-listed as: F&ES 290
F&ES 755: Modeling Geographic Space
Professor: Charles Tomlin
Location: BOWERS
An introduction to the conventions and capabilities of image-based (raster) geographic information systems (GIS) for the analysis and synthesis of spatial patterns and processes. In contrast to F&ES 756, the course is oriented more toward the qualities of geographic space itself (e.g., proximity, density, or interspersion) than the discrete objects that may occupy such space (e.g., water bodies, land parcels, or structures). Three hours lecture, problem sets. No previous experience is required.
F&ES 959: Clinic in Environmental/Climate Justice, Sustainability, and Public Health
Professor: Robert Dubrow, Laura Bozzi, Marianne Lado
Location: LEPH 101
In this course, interdisciplinary student teams carry out applied public health research or practice projects in the areas of environmental/climate justice, climate change, sustainability, and public health. Each team works with a sponsoring organization (e.g., unit within Yale, local health department, state agency, community organization, other nongovernmental organization). The course affords the opportunity to apply concepts and competencies learned in the classroom to these important areas. It should be of interest to students across the University, from the Schools of Public Health and Forestry & Environmental Studies to Yale College juniors and seniors. In addition, it is one of the options available to Public Health students to fulfill the practice requirement for the M.P.H. degree.
Cross-listed as: EPH 555
HIST 055: A History of Modern London
Professor: Becky Conekin
Location: WHC B-03
Chronological and thematic exploration of modern London as a metropolitan and imperial center from the late-nineteenth-century to the present day. Topics include race, gay rights, women’s rights, consumer culture, the experience of war, and the development of a multi-racial society. The fashion, food, and popular music of London emerge as important components of the city’s global identity in the twentieth century.
Enrollment limited to first-year students. Preregistration required; see under First-Year Seminar Program.
HIST 158J: American Indian Law and Policy
Professor: Ned Blackhawk
Location: LC 203
Also listed as: ER&M 308 & AMST 398
Survey of the origins, history, and legacies of federal Indian law and policy during two hundred years of United States history. The evolution of U.S. constitutional law and political achievements of American Indian communities over the past four decades.
HIST 168J: Quebec & Canada, 1791-Present
Professor: Jay Gitlin
Location: DC 215
The history of Quebec and its place within Canada from the Constitutional Act of 1791 to the present. Topics include the Rebellion of 1837, confederation, the Riel Affair, industrialization and emigration to New England, French-Canadian nationalism and culture from Abbé Groulx to the Parti Québécois and Céline Dion, and the politics of language. Readings include plays by Michel Tremblay and Antonine Maillet in translation.
HSHM 211: Global Catastrophe since 1750
Professor: Bill Rankin
Location: WLH 119
A history of the geological, atmospheric, and environmental sciences, with a focus on predictions of global catastrophe. Topics range from headline catastrophes such as global warming, ozone depletion, and nuclear winter to historical debates about the age of the Earth, the nature of fossils, and the management of natural resources. Tensions between science and religion; the role of science in government; environmental economics; the politics of prediction, modeling, and incomplete evidence.
Cross-listed as: EVST 211, G&G 211, HSHM 211.
HUMS 444: The City of Rome
Professor: Virginia Jewiss
Location: WALL81 101
An interdisciplinary study of Rome from its legendary origins through its evolving presence at the crossroads of Europe and the world. Exploration of the city’s rich interweaving of history, theology, literature, philosophy, and the arts in significant moments of Roman and world history.
PLSC 151: Global Economic Governance in the 21st Century
Professor: Tyler Pratt
Location: RKZ 102
Also listed as: GLBL 285
The modern global economy is characterized by enormous flows of money, goods, and people across national borders. These flows are a frequent source of political contestation between countries. International disputes over trade, finance, and immigration have intensified in recent years, following the 2008 financial crisis, the “Brexit” referendum in the United Kingdom, and the election of US President Donald Trump. This course examines the political processes, rules, and actors that govern international economic exchange.
PLSC 215: Global Food Challenges: Environmental Politics and Law
Professor: John Wargo
Location: LORIA 250
Also listed as: F&ES 255 & EVST 255
SOCY 160: Methods of Inquiry
Professor: Julia Adams
Location: WLH 011
The theory and practice of social inquiry. How social scientists—and aspiring social scientists—actually do their work, including designing research, sampling and measuring, and interpreting results. Examination of thesis proposal writing; ethical quandaries involved in social research.
No background in social research assumed.
SOCY 352: Material Culture and Iconic Consciousness
Professor: Jeffrey Alexander
Location: WLH 011
How and why contemporary societies continue to symbolize sacred and profane meanings, investing these meanings with materiality and shaping them aesthetically. Exploration of “iconic consciousness” in theoretical terms (philosophy, sociology, semiotics) and further exploration of compelling empirical studies about food and bodies, nature, fashion, celebrities, popular culture, art, architecture, branding, and politics.
Cross-listed as: HUMS 247, SOCY 620
SOCY 396: Cities, Suburbs, and School Choice
Professor: Mira Debs
Location: WTS B51
Also listed as: EDST 240
The changing dynamic between cities and suburbs and the role of individuals and institutions in promoting desegregation or perpetuating segregation since the mid-twentieth century. The government’s role in the expansion of suburbs; desegregating schools; the rise of school choice through magnets and charters; the effects of inner-ring suburban desegregation and of urban gentrification on the landscape of education reform.
Recommended preparation: EDST 110. Preference to Education Studies Scholars.