Media and Modernity

Academic Year: 
2016-17
Website: 
Program in Media and Modernity
Program offerings: 
Certificate
Director of Graduate Studies
Hal Foster
Beatriz Colomina

Academic department detail

Overview

The Program in Media and Modernity promotes the interdisciplinary study of the unique cultural formations that came to prominence during the last two centuries, with special attention paid to the interplay between culture and technology. The program centers on architecture, art, film, photography, literature, philosophy, music, history, and all forms of electronic media from radio to video and information technologies. The program draws on the rich hu­man and material resources that exist at Princeton and provides a focus and forum for research and teaching in the spaces, texts, and media of modernity. The program offers a graduate certificate and collabora­tive teaching, learning, and research opportunities centered on team-taught seminars and cross-disciplinary colloquia.

Students may not gain admission to the University through the Program in Media and Modernity.  They may affiliate with the program and earn a certificate from it after having been admitted through a degree-granting department.

Courses

Permanent Courses

Courses listed below are graduate-level courses that have been approved by the program’s faculty as well as the Curriculum Subcommittee of the Faculty Committee on the Graduate School as permanent course offerings. Permanent courses may be offered by the department or program on an ongoing basis, depending on curricular needs, scheduling requirements, and student interest. Not listed below are undergraduate courses and one-time-only graduate courses, which may be found for a specific term through the Registrar’s website. Also not listed are graduate-level independent reading and research courses, which may be approved by the Graduate School for individual students.

ARC 571 Research in Architecture (also
ART 581
/
MOD 573
) A research seminar in selected areas of aesthetics, art criticism, and architectural theory from the 18th to the 20th centuries on the notion of representation in art and architecture. This seminar is given to students in the doctoral program at the School of Architecture and to doctoral candidates in other departments.
ARC 576 Advanced Topics in Modern Architecture (also
MOD 502
/
ART 598
) Explores the critical transformation in the relationship between interior and exterior space in modern architecture, which is most evident in domestic space. Domestic space ceases to be simply bounded space in opposition to the outside, whether physical or social. An analysis of modern houses is used as a frame to register contemporary displacements of the relationship between public and private space, instigated by the emerging reality of the technologies of communicaton, including newspaper, telephone, radio, film, and television.
ARC 577 Topics in Contemporary Architectural Theory (also
MOD 577
) Explores recent changes in architectural history, theory, criticism, and practice by examining the effects of contemporary critical theory on architectural discourse. Particular attention is given to the ways in which architectural theory has influenced the critical theory of other disciplines and vice versa.
ART 565 Seminar in Modernist Art and Theory (also
MOD 565
) The seminar focuses on the study of a particular problem in modernism. Possible topics include the advent of modernist abstraction, the different uses of advant-garde devices of collage and photomontage, the readymade and the construction, art and technology, art and the unconscious, art and political revolution, and antimodernism.
ART 567 Seminar in History of Photography (also
MOD 567
) The seminar is concerned with the work of a single European or American photographer or with a significant movement in the 20th century.
COM 513 Topics in Literature and Philosophy (also
MOD 578
) Chance and contingency were long thought to lie outside the realm of knowledge. Then there arose new means for measuring probabilities of the most varied kinds. This seminar will explore the conditions and occurrence of that shift, as well as its consequences, as they are reflected in a few literary and philosophical works.
ENG 572 Introduction to Critical Theory (also
HUM 572
/
MOD 528
) The ethical, historical, and political dimensions of Jacques Derrida's thought and writings.
GER 517 Modernism and Modernity (also
SLA 522
/
COM 519
/
MOD 516
) Explores the rise of modernism in the arts in the German-language world. Emphasis on the intellectual sources of the modernist movement in such thinkers as Nietzsche and Freud and such theorists of modernity as Weber, Simmel, Andreas-Salomé, and Benjamin.
GER 520 Topics in Literary and Cultural Theory (also
ARC 524
/
MOD 522
) Course treats a wide range of theoretical and historical issues concerning the interpretation of literary and cultural materials. Topics include psychoanalytic approaches to literature, the Frankfurt School and its legacy, feminist theory, German-Jewish Acculturation, relations between literature and the other arts, theories of literary reception, and fascism and culture.
GER 521 Topics in German Intellectual History (also
MOD 521
) The course examines in their entirety mostly short texts that advance solutions to the intellectual problems preoccupying major German religious thinkers, writers, and philosophers, viz. justification, selfhood, theodicy, play, contingency, asceticism, estrangement, malaise, authenticity.
GER 525 Studies in German Film (also
MOD 525
) Course explores movements in German cinema, with attention given to the cultural and ideological contexts as well as recent debates in contemporary film theory. Attention may focus on such pivotal topics as Weimar or the New German cinema, issues in German film theory, questions of film and Nazi culture, or avant-garde cinema, and on genres such as the "Heimatfilm," the "Street Film," and works by women and minority filmmakers.
HOS 595 Introduction to Historiography of Science (also
MOD 564
/
HIS 595
) Introduces beginning graduate students to the central problems and principal literature of the history of science from the Enlightenment to the 20th century. Course is organized around several different methodological approaches, and readings include important works by anthropologists, sociologists and philosophers, as well as by historians of science.
HUM 595 Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities (also
ARC 593
/
MOD 551
) In the IHUM tradition, this course is team-taught, often by faculty from two different departments. Courses that fall under this topic are widely cross-listed and intended to attract students from many departments and programs. These topics are the most interdisciplinary of the IHUM offerings, aiming to bring together combinations of art, philosophy, literature, history in theory and practice, criticism, and methods from the qualitative social sciences.
HUM 597 Humanistic Perspectives on History and Society (also
MOD 575
/
ARC 597
/
LAS 597
/
SPA 505
) In this seminar we locate Spinoza and the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) in the exciting currents of seventeenth-century philosophy, theology, biblical scholarship and exegesis. Resituating Spinoza in Golden Age Holland we examine the resources and relevant controversies that shaped the Tractatus, with an eye to common concerns and traditions: the legacies of humanism and Reformation in the Netherlands, for instance, the larger worlds of his friends, as well as the vibrant Jewish community in Golden Age Amsterdam and the varieties of Christian lay piety that fall broadly under the banner of "the Radical Reformation."