Rethinking the Renaissance: Alternatives to "Early Modernity"
AS.010.634 (01)

"The Renaissance" as a periodization under attack, and its persistance; the hermeneutics of the Pre-Modern Image since Panofsky; the critique of Eurocentrism; challenges to and recuperations of iconology, assessing the contributions of semiotics, psycholanalysis and queer theory.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/10
• PosTag(s): HART-RENBAR

Foucault and Kant
AS.190.604 (01)

This seminar will explore Kant and Foucault comparatively across the registers of ontology, morality, epistemology, time, and politics. How does each move into and across these registers? How do the two thinkers inform and challenge one another? Texts will include: Kant, The Critique of Practical Reason, Conflict of the Faculties, Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, The Anthropology (sections); Foucault, The Order of Things (chapters), Discipline and Punish, “On the Genealogy of Ethics,” “What Was Enlightenment?”, and Subjectivity and Truth.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Political Arts: Dada, Surrealism, and Societal Transformation
AS.190.613 (01)

An exploration of the political aims and tactics, and strengths and liabilities, of Dada and Surrealism, as it operated in Europe and the Americas in the years between and after the World Wars. Readings by Andre Breton, Leonora Carrington, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Meret Oppenheim, College of Sociology, and others. Seniors allowed by permission of instructor only.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

Theories-Comp Politics
AS.190.625 (01)

This seminar is intended for graduate students planning to take the comprehensive exam in comparative politics, either as a major or as a minor. In addition to exploring central methodological debates and analytic approaches, the seminar reviews the literature on state-society relations, political and economic development, social movements, nationalism, revolutions, formal and informal political institutions, and regime durability vs. transition. Graduate students only.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): POLI-CP

Comparative Citizenship and Immigration Politics
AS.190.612 (01)

Graduate students only. Examines the contemporary political dynamics of migration, citizenship, and race concentrating on North America, Europe and East Asia. We will focus on how citizenship and immigration policies shape immigrant political identities, claims, and strategies as well as how immigrants impact public debates and policies in receiving societies.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Quantitative Methods for the Study of Politics
AS.190.626 (01)

This course is intended as Ph.D.-level introduction to applied statistics, with a focus on the identification of causal effects in the tradition of the Neyman/Rubin potential outcomes framework. Prior coursework in applied statistics or quantitative methods will be useful but is not required. Upon completion of the course, students will be in a position to understand and critically assess scholarship that uses instrumental variables, difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, and other quasi- and natural-experimental research designs. Formal mathematical proof will be kept to a minimum. Students will be asked to adapt existing code and write some of their own code in R.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): POLI-CP, POLI-AP, POLI-IR

Future of American Democracy
AS.190.322 (01)

For the most part, observers of American politics have not considered the possibility that the American democratic regime might be at risk. But the unexpected election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the subsequent course of his presidency have occasioned a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety about whether democracy in the United States is at risk and whether American political institutions can withstand the stresses of contemporary politics. This course will use the Trump era to explore the conditions that seem to threaten the stability of the American regime. We will begin by exploring the political circumstances that led to Trump’s rise. We will then examine what we can learn from the experience of other countries about the conditions that make democracy either robust or fragile. Finally, we will consider how a set of contemporary political conditions in the United States — extreme partisan polarization, intense racial antagonism, growing economic inequality, and expanded executive power — contribute to the challenges facing American democracy today and in the future.

• Credits: 3.00
• Level:
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/19
• PosTag(s): POLI-AP, INST-AP

The Development of American Political Institutions
AS.190.632 (01)

This course explores institutional development in American national politics, from the Founding until the present. It traces parties, Congress, the presidency, bureaucracy, and courts, and also examines how those institutions have interacted with one another across American history. Throughout the course, we will consider how ideas, interests, procedures, and sequence together shape institutions as they collide and abrade over time. Finally, although it hardly covers the entire corpus across the subfield, the course is also designed to prepare students to sit for comprehensive examinations in American politics.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/15
• PosTag(s): POLI-AP

Decolonizing the Episteme: Knowledge, Empire and the Academy
AS.190.607 (01)

What complicity does the Western academy have with empire? How might the development of certain intellectual dispositions be implicated in the challenges of imperial rule? And how might such implications have produced influential concepts and theories? In this course we will consider the ways in which - and extent to which - the academy’s claim to epistemic privilege has a colonial provenance. Seniors permitted with instructor permission only.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/15
• PosTag(s): POLI-IR

Political Corruption
AS.190.634 (01)

Political corruption is widely seen to be an impediment to economic and political development and stability. But what is political corruption? The common definition of corruption as abuse of power for private gain is too vague to be of serious scholarly use. Is “abuse” culturally specific or merely a synonym for “illegal” - or even worse, for undesirable according to some unspecified standard? Does “private gain” refer only to under-the-table cash payments to a corrupt official, or does it extend to intangible private benefits, and does it extend to gains for identifiable favored groups (“club goods”) and may or may not include the corrupt official him or herself? This seminar will focus on several questions. How should political corruption be defined, and what is at stake in the choice if definition? Are there identifiable patterns to, or types of, political corruption? What conditions encourage or discourage corruption, and how might corruption be controlled or limited? What are the consequences of corruption - and are they necessarily all negative?

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): POLI-CP

Theories of Constitutional Governance
AS.190.635 (01)

This class is focused on the nature of constitutions and the way that they should and do work within a political system, with particular emphasis on the U.S. context. We will examine both normative and empirical arguments about the relationship between politics and constitutional law. More specifically, we will think about how societies and individual actors should make meaning out of constitutional texts, how they do seem to make meaning out of those texts, and the conditions that give rise to constitutional drafting and change. Graduate students only.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Politics of Information and Information Technologies
AS.190.636 (01)

What information is and how it flows in the world are questions that are now obviously relevant to the fraught politics of today. We live in a time in which the facticity and authenticity of information is often questioned, in which the flood of “too much” information is often blamed for problematic outcomes, and in which information technologies and social media have (perhaps) upended previous expectations about how communication happens. This course explores the politics of information and information technologies from ancient times to the present, drawing from a substantial body of scholarship in political science and other fields to apply older and more recent wisdom to contemporary problems. Among the themes to be explored are: the differences between knowledge, information, and data; embodied (corporeal) information; commodification of information; securitization of information; technological change, information, and the political; information, cyberspace, and governance; and information privacy/transparency. And, of course: “fake news,” “cyber,” and “bots.”

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 13/15
• PosTag(s): POLI-IR

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (16)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (17)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (10)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (11)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (03)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (02)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (04)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (05)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Re-Turn to Language
AS.190.657 (01)

A central claim of structuralism is that all systems of meaning are structured along the lines of language. Post-structuralism challenges this claim but does not dismiss it so much as probe the ways in which these systems fail and reveal interesting things about how communication may (not) take place. What is sometimes called "post-post-structuralism" rejects the focus on language, emphasing instead how meaning is generated in and by culture or with the (mostly) unacknowledged collaboration of matter. This course will revisit these claims, challenges, and refusals within the context of contemporary, philosophy, literary theory, and political thought. We will read, among others, texts by Saussure, Liev-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Butler, and Barad. Students will be required to submit weekly response papers and write a final 20-30 page paper on a topic related to the course.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/15
• PosTag(s): POLI-PT

Policy Dynamics
AS.190.651 (01)

Policy dynamics is the study of changes of the political system in its entirety, from the point of view of the system's outputs--what government actually does, or fails to do. It is dynamic in that it seeks to explain changes in what matters governments feel can or must be addressed, the tools that are available to deal with problems, and the interactions of government and non-government actors that generate change. Particular emphasis will be placed on studying policy dynamics over long periods of time, including such post-enactment issues as implementation, policy feedback on political identities and group formation, and policy durability.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Racial Capitalism
AS.190.638 (01)

This graduate seminar will explore the imbrication of the theory, history, and politics of the logic of race and the logic of capital.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): POLI-AP, POLI-PT

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (10)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (11)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (13)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (12)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (14)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (07)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (08)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (09)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (15)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (20)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (22)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (05)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (04)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (02)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (23)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (03)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (21)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (14)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (09)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (15)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (21)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (26)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (06)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (25)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (18)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (13)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (08)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (22)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (18)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (24)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (20)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (25)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (06)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (24)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (23)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (19)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (17)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (19)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (07)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.190.800 (26)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (12)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dissertation Research
AS.190.849 (16)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available:
• PosTag(s): n/a