Courses

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.

Professor: Bryan Fuermann
Location: RDH 706
Also listed as: ARCH 314

This course is designed as an introductory survey of the history of landscape architecture and the wider, cultivated landscape in Western Europe and the United States from the Ancient Roman period to mid-twentieth century America. Included in the lectures, presented chronologically, are the gardens of Ancient Rome, medieval Europe, the early and late Italian Renaissance, 17th century France, 18th century Britain, 19th century Britain and America with its public and national parks, and mid-twentieth century America. The course focuses each week on one of these periods, analyzes in detail iconic gardens of the period, and placse them within their historical and theoretical context.

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. 

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Professor: Ana Duran
Location: RDH 211

The urban frontier in Amazonia is among the fastest growing in the world: 80 percent of it is “informal.” Under export-oriented, neo-extractivist policies, this trend is unlikely to revert. Nevertheless, scarce research has focused on the urban phenomenon in Amazonia. How can burgeoning forest cities be retrofitted/designed? Could urbanization be allied with forest resurgence in the region? Can environmental history and archaeology influence the way in which we approach Amazonian settlements? What can we learn from local communities? Could their ancestral knowledge be adapted to current needs and illuminate design? In this seminar, we critically probe current approaches to sustainability, aware that “green solutions” being advanced by the global north often demand further extraction of natural resources in the global south. We analyze the complex intertwining between global capitalism and Amazonia, as well as the critical role both are called to play in lieu of climate change.

Prerequisites:  Limited enrollment. Permission of the instructor is required. 

Professor: Alan Plattus
Location: RDH 706

Historically, port cities around the world have played a crucial role as the nodes of connection and exchange for both local and vast global networks of production, trade, culture and power.  Since the industrial revolution, rapid development of new technologies of transport and communication have challenged the planners and developers of these cities to both adapt and innovate, creating new and hybrid spatial typologies and transforming vast areas of urbanized waterfront and rural hinterland.  These technologies, particularly containerization and the scale of modern oil tankers, have made old port areas obsolete, provoking the need and opportunity for redevelopment of significant areas of waterfront in the heart of historic cities, and raising challenging questions about economic restructuring in relation to de-industrialization, gentrification, heritage and tourism.  Through all this, port cities continue to be magnets for new immigrants and bastions of cosmopolitan exchange, even as older populations struggle to adapt to new conditions of labor and production.   And now, climate change and its impact on coastal and riparian geographies adds an additional layer of complexity and challenge.  This seminar will consider the changing and persistent patterns, functions and images of port cities, particularly in the context of their regional and global networks, researching, analyzing and mapping the architectural and spatial manifestations of those systems, and how they have transformed and are transforming urban landscapes.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor is required. 

Professor: Elihu Rubin
Location: RDH 322

This seminar operates on two fronts:  one is to generate and debate a “ghost town” history of twentieth- and twenty first-century urban (re)development; a history of the present that encompasses the politics of memory and practices in heritage and preservation.  (See descriptions in Weekly Breakdown.)  The second is to engage in public history “campaigns” for a series of post-industrial sites in New Haven, Connecticut.    

The term ghost town came into broad use in the 1920s with the rise of automobile tourism to describe the abandoned or near-deserted remnants of 19th century mining landscapes in the American West.  As a guiding metaphor and cultural landscape, ghost town represents a range of aesthetic, interpretive, and economic responses to capital flight and urban abandonment.  To what extent might these ideas apply to the quasi-derelict post-industrial space in the midst of our contemporary cities?

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor is required. 

Professor: Michael Samuelian
Location: RDH 212

Hudson Yards is the largest private real estate development project in the United States, the district will ultimately have 120,000 office workers, 30,000 residents, tens of millions of visitors and an GDP larger than many countries. As its towers begin to redefine the world-famous Manhattan skyline critics descend, the public gawks and questions inevitably rise. Why did this happen? How did this happen? Is it a good thing? And what are the impacts to cities across the country and around the world as the project continues to grow, develop and garner attention?

This course will explore and research the genesis of the project, which today is largely viewed as a billionaire’s fantasy, but in fact started with local politician’s fear of New York losing its edge as the world’s commercial capital. 

Permission of the instructor is required.

Professor: Joyce Hsiang
Location: RDH 212

Climate change disproportionately affects the people and places with the least power and resources. As our sea levels have risen, so too has the extreme socioeconomic disparity of specific communities and countries, creating a drowning class of climate refugees. Entire countries on the front lines of sea level rise face the specter of nationhood without territory, despite the undeniable fact that their contribution to this global problem is negligible. And if climate change is in fact “the result of human activity since the mid-20th century,” it is in actuality a largely male-made phenomenon, if we unpack the gender dynamics and underlying power structures of the proto-G8 nations, the self-proclaimed leaders of industrialization. These power dynamics become even further exacerbated as we consider the implications of the particularly American interest in doubling-down on investing in the heaviest piece of infrastructure ever – climate engineering. The architectural community appears to be in agreement. Climate change is a fundamental design problem. And yet calls to action have been ineffectual, responses underwhelming in the face of this overwhelming challenge. As the architectural community is eagerly poised to jump on the design bandwagon, this course seeks to reveal, foreground, empower and give physical form to the spatial dimensions and power dynamics of the people and places most impacted by climate change. More broadly, the course aspires to help students develop their own critical stance on climate change and the role architects play.

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor is required. 

Professor: Peter Crumlish
Location: GH (Grace Hopper) LEWIS

Professor: Manasvi Menon and Matthew Triebner
Location: WLH 209

Professor: Benjamin Cashore
Location: KRN 319
Also listed as: PLSC 146, F&ES 245, & F&ES 829

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.

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.

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.

Professor: John Wargo
Location: LORIA 250
Also listed as: F&ES 255 & EVST 255

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

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.