Media and Modernity

Academic Year: 
2020-21
Department for Program: 
Architecture
Affiliated Departments: 
Art and Archaeology
English
German
Spanish and Portuguese
Address: 
S-110 Architecture Building
Phone: 
609-258-3741
Website: 
Program in Media and Modernity Interdepartmental Graduate Certificate Program
Program offerings: 
Certificate
Director of Graduate Studies
Thomas Y. Levin
Beatriz Colomina
Graduate Program Administrator
Clemens Finkelstein

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.  The certificate does not appear on the official transcript.

Certificate

Certificate Requirements: 
Program Description:

Ph.D. students may obtain the certificate by fulfilling the following requirements:

1. enrollment in at least two seminars cross-listed with MOD (Media and Modernity);

2. regular attendance at M+M program events held during the semester; and

3. participation in a dissertation colloquium led by the program's directors.

Students qualifying for the certificate should send the following information (in a single document) to mandm@princeton.edu no later than May 1 for awarding of the certificate in that academic year:

a) Full name, department, program, year, expected date of graduation, contact email;

b) Name and contact email of primary advisor;

c) A list of courses fulfilling the qualifications for the Certificate, as listed above. Each of these should include all course numbers under which the class was listed, course titles, instructor names, descriptions (as listed on the Course Offerings website of the University) and the grade option for which each class was taken;

d) Any further information that might be useful and is not covered by the points above.

Faculty

Director

  • Beatriz Colomina (co-director)
  • Thomas Y. Levin (co-director)

Executive Committee

  • Ruha Benjamin, African American Studies
  • Eduardo L. Cadava, English
  • Beatriz Colomina, Architecture
  • Brigid Doherty, German
  • Devin A. Fore, German
  • Hal Foster, Art and Archaeology
  • Rubén Gallo, Spanish & Portuguese
  • Sylvia Lavin, Architecture
  • Thomas Y. Levin, German
  • V. Mitch McEwen, Architecture
  • Spyros Papapetros, Architecture
  • Rachel L. Price, Spanish & Portuguese
  • Irene V. Small, Art and Archaeology

Associated Faculty

  • M. Christine Boyer, Architecture
  • D. Graham Burnett, History
  • Zahid R. Chaudhary, English
  • Steven Chung, East Asian Studies
  • Angela N. Creager, History
  • Rachael Z. DeLue, Art and Archaeology
  • Elizabeth Diller, Architecture
  • Diana J. Fuss, English
  • Mario I. Gandelsonas, Architecture
  • Daniel Heller-Roazen, Comparative Literature
  • Brooke A. Holmes, Classics
  • Anne McCauley, Art and Archaeology
  • Michael Meredith, Architecture
  • Alexander Nehamas, Philosophy
  • Jeff Nunokawa, English
  • Mónica Ponce de León, Architecture
  • Jesse A. Reiser, Architecture
  • Paul E. Starr, Sociology
  • Gavin Steingo, Music
  • Carolyn Yerkes, Art and Archaeology
For a full list of faculty members and fellows please visit the department or program website.

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.
ARC 594 Topics in Architecture (also
MOD 504
/
HUM 593
/
ART 584
) This course covers various topics related to the history and theory of architecture.
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.
ENV 596 Topics in Environmental Studies (Half-Term) (also
AMS 596
/
ENG 584
/
MOD 596
) This topics course offers seminars with a focus on climate change and/or biodiversity. Seminars under this topic examine environmental and societal issues associated with two of the key defining challenges of our time: climate change and/or biodiversity loss. The course uses a multi-disciplinary combination of perspectives and approaches grounded in the Humanities, Sciences, and Social Sciences.
GER 517 Modernism and Modernity (also
MOD 535
/
FRE 554
) 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 523 Topics in Media Studies (also
MOD 523
) Historical and theoretical investigations of media from the advent of writing systems, paper and the construction of single-point perspective to phonography, radio, telephony, and television and up through the critical reflection on cyberspace, rhetorics of PowerPoint, surveillance and data shadows. Issues explored include the relationship between representation and technology, the historicity of perception, transformations of reigning notions of imagination, literacy, communication, reality and truth, and the interplay of aesthetics, technics and politics.
GER 525 Studies in German Film (also
MOD 510
/
COM 524
) 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 597 Humanistic Perspectives on History and Society (also
ARC 597
/
LAS 597
/
SPA 557
/
MOD 597
) 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."