From secret laboratories to monumental infrastructures and the many landscapes of war, energy, and waste in between, nuclear power is at the core of a vast and radically understudied array of 20th c. architectures. Central to the most iconic architectural images of the post-war era while also rendered invisible in apparently unseen wastelands, atomic weapons, nuclear reactors, and atmospheric fallout eventually attracted intense architectural attention. Drawing on multiple literatures, the seminar explores how the nuclear penetrated beyond warscapes to enter even the private spaces of the domestic realm and the human body.

This seminar explores the parallelism of two things that were arguably at their peak in the US between 1950-75, namely architecture (with architecture understood as a discipline that is in the business of producing buildings) and criticism, with so many writers all straddling the popular world of newspapers, magazines, and radio, and the more rarefied world of scholarly discourse. Students engage with both of these things, not (or at least not wholly) through the nostalgia of enjoying a particular moment and milieu, but as a spur to generating their own written content, which will be contained in a specially conceived one-off magazine.

Buildings routinely simulate stability and immobility yet operate as porous membranes suspended within vast pulsating material, economic, social, energetic, bacteriological, and informational circuits. Architecture is an effect that is inseparable from what it represses, the vast networks trafficking between ever-increasing holes and mounds across the planet devoted to extraction and waste. This seminar pays attention to the strange entangled complexities of both architecture and extraction, and rethinks the ethics, psychopathologies, and beauties of architecture embedded in its relationships to extraction.

This seminar investigates how feminism and gender theory (from eco-feminism and intersectional feminism to queer and trans theory) can spearhead new methods of research, objects of study, and ways of seeing and analyzing spaces, buildings, and cities, as well as the human alliances within them. We study forms of organizing around women's and LGBTQ+ rights in cities, from the efforts of informal activist groups to those of institution building, and highlight these efforts as main sites for creative, architectural, and urban intervention in challenging heteronormative forms of living and instead providing spaces of care and kinship making.

This seminar explores various connections between modernist art and socialist politics from the 1848 revolutions to the present. How were these links forged, and why were they broken? What (if anything) can we deduce about the relationship between vanguard aesthetics and politics then and now?

What modes of thought does photography produce, reproduce, and make possible? In turn, what has been thought, speculated about, and contributed to photographic discourse since (before) its inception in 1839? This graduate seminar moves thematically and roughly chronologically through photography theory, with an emphasis on those texts most influential to an art historical canon/interpretation of the medium. Graduate students from all departments are welcome.

Divination might be defined as the inference of sense from passing circumstance, be it the flight of birds or the movement of the planets, handwriting or coffee grounds. This seminar explores speech as the object of divination. We study ancient oracles and prophecies, medieval riddles, modern haunting phrases, and Freudian "slips." At the same time, we discuss the techniques of reading to which they have given rise in literature, religion, and psychoanalysis.

This seminar considers the issues of language, writing, and inscription in a broad comparative perspective that brings together critical theory and recent scholarship on Korea and East Asia. It traces the issues of language and inscription against the frameworks of semiology (Derrida, Irigaray), discursive order (Foucault, Kittler), folds of matter and power (Deleuze), and ideological control (Althusser). The class also uses this theoretical framework to build our understanding of Korean (and, when applicable, East Asian) writing systems, from calligraphy, to the development of print and digital culture. All readings available in English.

What is intellectual piracy? Should it be prohibited or encouraged? How does it relate to copyright, authorship, and other legal regimes and creative activities? We survey unlawful and lawful piracy from the 19th century to the present, focusing on British, Irish, and American authors, creators, publishers, and laws. Critical concepts and institutions of modernity include: copyright, commons, informal norms, privacy, obscenity, authorship, collaboration, publishers' trade courtesy. Our goals include developing research and rhetorical skills for writing effectively in the rapidly growing interdiscipline of law and literature.

Walter Benjamin--a humanist, social-scientist, and media theorist in one--is among the most original thinkers of the 20th century. This seminar is a deep introduction to his work and its wide influence from the Frankfurt School to deconstruction and anthropocene thought. We study Benjamin's philosophies of language and of art; his theories of media experience, of urban and architectural space, and of childhood; his critiques of violence and of history; his studies of surrealism, Kafka, Brecht, and the baroque; as well as his style of writing, form of thought, and coining of concepts such as storyteller, dialectical image, and aura.

Animation is a central concept to understand the interaction between culture, technology and cultural techniques. Film is a major case for a technologically based cultural practice. We will follow the anthropological concepts of animation from animism in Freud and Lévi-Strauss through the technical use from dolls to robots and animation/animated films. Aim is to better understand the relation between animation of the inanimate and the technical enhanced animation of the spectator and user of technology.

This course provides a survey of the major works in the philosophy of technology from the nineteenth century to today. Rather than start with the Aristotelian distinction between techne and episteme, our inquiry instead begins with the division between manual and cognitive labor in the industrial workplace. What questions does modern production pose of metaphysics, epistemology, and phenomenology? The answer demands a philosophy of technology that also conceives of technology itself as philosophy and that confronts the prospect of machine intelligence.

This course unfolds from a variant on the anthropologist Stefan Helmreich's question "what was life?" to trace vitalism across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while interrogating its contemporary theoretical implications in relationship to biopolitical theory and the ontological plasticity of life at the horizon of technological expansion. We consider scalar complexity, from the cell to the cosmos and the new planetary connectedness. We also consider differently scaled histories of life through receptions of classicized Greek texts in modern vitalisms and the unstable temporality between the modern and the contemporary.

Modern architects flocked to Cuba during the 1950s: Mies, Sert, Neutra, Becket, Harrison & Abramovitz worked in Havana and built a gleaming city of modern towers, which appear as the setting of fictional works by Cabrera Infante, Reinaldo Arenas, Alejo Carpentier, and films by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Mikhail Kalatozov and others. After the 1959 Revolution, these modern spaces are re-purposed, re-fashioned and re-worked for use by a socialist government, recalling the Situationist strategy of detournement. How are these spaces read by writers and filmmakers? And how did the Revolution alter their function?