Course # Class # Course Title Instructor Time Room

Monday
PERF-GT 2311 15979 Cultural Studies: Demi-Mondes & Dance Worlds Kapchan/Malnig 9:30-12:15pm 613
PERF-GT 2000 5287 Projects in Performance Studies (REQ) Lepecki 12:30-3:15pm 612

PERF-GT 2100 15985 Topics in Critical Theory: Comparative Literary &
Performance Theory in Contemporary Black Studies Nyongo/Garcia 3:30-6:15pm 613
PERF-GT 2002 5603 Performance Theory: Aesthetics Muoz/Chuh 4:15-7:00pm 612
PERF-GT 2216 5599 Performing Fiction Browning 6:30-9:15pm 613
Tuesday
PERF-GT 2530 5600 Seminar in Dance Theory: Dance and its Images Lepecki 9:30-12:15pm 612
PERF-GT 2505 16100 Sound & Image in the Avant Garde Weiss 1:00-5:00pm 677
Wednesday
PERF-GT 2850 15988 Food & Performance: Cuisine Film and the Arts Weiss 2:30-6:30pm 611
Thursday
PERF-GT 2241 16434 Topics in Criticism: Affect Theory Flatley 10:00-12:45pm 611
PERF-GT 2603 15318 Performance Theory: Religion, Performance & Pellegrini 12:30-3:15pm 613

APPLY FOR MAY GRADUATION: In order to graduate
in May 2014, you must apply for graduation by
Pre-Registration Checklist:
There are three steps that you can take now to
prepare for registration:
1.Make an appointment with your academic advisor to
help select your classes.
2.Check for registration holds. All holds must be
resolved and removed in order to enroll in classes for
spring semester. Go to the Student Center in Albert and
look at the "Holds" section on the right hand side of the
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3.Update your contact information. Go to the Student
Center in Albert and click on "Personal Information." All
students are required to have an "NYU Emergency Alert"
cellular phone number and emergency contact information
to register for Spring 2014.
Important Dates
November 2013
18 Registration for spring begins-9:00am

January 2014
27 Internal PhD applications due
27 First day of spring classes
February 2014
3 Graduate Tuition Due
7 Last Day to Apply for Graduation
10 Last Day to register/drop/add
March 2014
17-21 Spring Break
May 2014
12 Last day of spring classes
15 MA Final Projects Conference Day 1
16 MA Final Projects Conference Day 2
21 NYU Commencement
Spring 2014 Course Bulletin
Demi-Mondes & Dance Worlds
Deborah Kapchan (deborah.kapchan@nyu.edu) & Julie Malnig (julie.malnig@nyu.edu)
PERF-GT 2311 (15979)
Monday 9:30am 12:15pm
4 points
Room 613

demi !m"nd/ a group of people in society who are not considered to behave according to the
moral or social standards accepted by most people

Worlds of social dance often nd their genesis among artists, rebels, non-conformists, and others
who are deliberately or accidentally marginal to mainstream capitalist culture. From the bordellos of
Buenos Aires, where tango was born, to the honky-tonks of Nashville, to the jazz clubs of New
Orleans and New York, to say nothing of contemporary raves, social dances roots may be found in
transgressive behavior. Dancers in these scenes are often referred to as obsessed, addicted, and
out of control. But whose control? In this course we examine the relation of the moving body to
music and transgression, analyzing the way aesthetic styles create demimondes and subcultures
that transform gender relations and public affect writ large. Beginning with theories of the aesthetic
that explain the power of the body in cultural expression, we move on to examine dance worlds in
their historical and ethnographic context, paying close attention to the politics of the body and its
inuence on changing parameters of social permissibility. We will also explore dancers efforts to
test behaviors and assert identities outside the connes of the ordered, everyday world and
consider what qualities are lost or gained when these dances become adopted for mainstream
consumption.

We will read works by Pierre Bordieu, Marcel Mauss, Jacques Ranciere, Jose Munoz, Jane
Desmond, Sarah Thornton, Fiona Buckland, Robert Farris Thompson, Julie Taylor, Juliet McMains,
Frances Aparicio, Marta Savigliano, Barbara Browning, and Tricia Rose, among others.
Projects in Performance Studies
*required for all MA students
Andr Lepecki (andre.lepecki@nyu.edu)
PERF-GT 2000 (5287)
Monday 12:30 3:15pm
4 points
Studio 612

*PS administration will register MA students for lecture and discussion sections.
This course will run primarily as a workshop in which current MA students will begin with a paper or
performance piece begun in a previous PS course and develop that project into a fuller research
project. Part of the time will be spent in small (TA-led) workshops; the rest of the time will be spent
en masse, where we will discuss strategies for revision, publication, and/or production. The course
Course Summaries
For bios of resident faculty, please visit http://performance.tisch.nyu.edu/page/faculty.html
Monday

culminates in a symposium in which graduating MA students present an excerpt or prcis of that
research to the department.
Projects in Performance Studies: Discussion Sections (required)
Mondays Location Meeting Time
PERF-GT 2000.002 (5288) 611 12:30 to 1:45pm
PERF-GT 2000.003 (5289) 613 12:30 to 1:45pm
PERF-GT 2000.004 (5290) 611 2:00 to 3:15pm
PERF-GT 2000.005 (5291) 613 2:00 to 3:15pm
Comparative Literary & Performance Theory in Contemporary Black Studies (limited
enrollment)
Tavia Nyongo (tavia.nyongo@nyu.edu)
PERF-GT 2100 (15985)
Monday 3:30 6:15pm
4 points
Room 613
Permission of instructor required to enroll. Interested PS students should contact
Professor Nyongo at tavia.nyongo@nyu.edu no later than December 1st.
This reading-intensive seminar in contemporary black studies ranges across several disciplinary
formations and is designed for students seeking to deepen existing knowledge of scholarship and
theory related to black writing and expressive cultures, and as an immersion in these literatures for
those seeking to hybridize black studies and/or black Atlantic theory with other areas of research.
Throughout, we devote attention to key texts from the archive of black Atlantic thought and
consider theoretical problems in the eld of black studies.
Aesthetics (limited enrollment)
Jos Muoz & Kandice Chuh (CUNY) (jose.munoz@nyu.edu / kchuh@gc.cuny.edu)
PERF-GT 2002 (5603)
Monday 4:15 7:00pm
4 points
Room 612
Permission of instructor required to enroll. Interested PS students should contact
Professor Muoz at jose.munoz@nyu.edu no later than December 1st.

There has been a surge of interest in the aesthetic. This course inquires into that trend: why
aesthetics, why now? We will commence with a review of key moments in classical philosophical
denitions of the aesthetic. Proceeding from that work we will consider ash points in the history of
aesthetics, including major debates and the constitution of movements principally in the western
European tradition. Taught between literary and performance studies, this course will think about
the aesthetic as a hermeneutic and performative mode of inquiry. Readings will include work by
Plato, Plotinus, Aristotle, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Spinoza, Schelling, Schiller, Spivak, Kant, Hegel,
Adorno, Bloch, Derrida, Ranciere, Whitehead, Shaviro, Ngai, and Moten, among others.
Presentations of research to the class and a nal project constitute the formal requirements of the
course.

Performing Fiction
Barbara Browning (barbara.browning@nyu.edu)
PERF-GT 2216 (5599)
Monday 6:30 9:15pm
4 points
Room 613

Narrative ction and performance would seem to stand in stark contrast to one
another. The novel and the short story as genres offer certain possibilities (point of
view, intermediary voice, the invocation of the readers capacity for imagination) that
performance might seem to foreclose. By the same token, live performance offers the
specic possibilities of sensory, non-linguistic engagement, and ephemerality. This
course will explore the potentially productive tension between ction and performance
by examining:
Performances based on works of narrative ction and specically on works
that would appear to be adamantly textual, works that would seem to resist or to
defy staging
Works of narrative ction based on performances, or created in collusion or
collaboration with performers or performances
Performance art which relies on the reading of narrative text
Textual experiments in producing performative ction narrative prose which
doesnt merely denote action, but makes things happen
We will discuss the work of (among others) Spalding Gray, Elevator Repair Service
(Gatz), Sophie Calle and Paul Auster (Double Game / Leviathan), Subcomandante
Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II (The Uncomfortable Dead), and writers Lydia Davis,
David Markson, Harry Mathews, and Ronald Sukenick. We will also experiment with the
collusive creation of our own ctional performances and performative ction.
Dance Theory: Dance and its Images (limited enrollment)
Andr Lepecki (andre.lepecki@nyu.edu)
PERF-GT 2530 (5600)
Tuesday 9:30am 12:15pm
4 points
Studio 612

Please send a one- page statement stating your reasons for wanting to enroll in this course and
also include a short bio. Send statement to andre.lepecki@nyu.edu no later than December 1st.
In this course we will investigate how dance increasingly captures the imagination of the arts
throughout the twentieth century and becomes, since the 1950s, a crucial mode of
experimentation in the visual arts. Understood both as producer of images and as pre-conditioned
by images that determine its circulation, dance will be analyzed in its broadest manifestations: not
only choreography, but also video-art, photography, sculpture, lm, installation, poetry, drawing and
sound. One main question we will pursue is: how does dance re-imagines the very status of the
image? How does it proposes, even, non-visual images for the visual arts? The course will have a
strong theoretical component, and particular attention will be given to philosophies of the image,
Tuesday

including texts by Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancire and Georges Didi-Huberman.
We will also read recent dance philosophy that addresses the imagetic nature of dance (Susan
Kozel, Erin Manning, Stamatia Portanova).
Sound & Image in the Avant Garde
Allen Weiss (allen.weiss@nyu.edu)
PERF-GT 2805 (16100)
Tuesday 1:00 5:00pm
4 points
Room 677

This interdisciplinary course will investigate the relations between experimental lm, radio, music,
and sound art in modernism and postmodernism. The inventions of photography, cinema and
sound recording radically altered the 19th century consciousness of perception, temporality,
selfhood, and death. The newfound role of the voice depersonalized, disembodied, eternalized
appeared in poetic and literary phantasms of that epoch, and offered models of future (and
futuristic) art forms. This course will study the aesthetic and ideological effects of this epochal shift,
especially as it concerns the subsequent practice of avant-garde art and aesthetics. It will
specically focus on the re-contextualization of the history of avant-garde lm in the broader
context of the sound arts and their discursive practices, from Dada and Surrealism through
Lettrism, Situationism, Fluxus and the American Independent Cinema. Special attention will be paid
to the transformations of the 1950s and 1960s, the moment when the arts moved toward a more
performative mode, entailing the dematerialization and decommodication of the aesthetic domain.
Cuisine Film and the Arts (limited enrollment)
Allen Weiss (allen.weiss@nyu.edu)
PERF-GT 2550 (16100)
Wednesday 2:30 6:30pm
4 points
Room 611
Limited Enrollment (12). This course requires an application to the instructor. Please prepare a
one page double-spaced statement, which includes the following information: 1. Student status:
MA/PhD 2. Department/program where you are enrolled, 3. Background in theory and
background (both practical and intellectual) in cuisine, 4. How you see this course tting into your
own intellectual project(s). Please email this statement to allen.weiss@nyu.edu no later than
December 1, 2013.
Brillat-Savarin, in The Physiology of Taste (1825), discusses the aesthetic value of cuisine from two
seemingly contradictory viewpoints, since he claims both that cuisine is the most ancient art and
that Gasterea is the tenth muse: she presides over the joys of taste, suggesting that cuisine nally
takes its place as the newest art form at the height of the Romantic period. But what does it mean
to speak of cuisine as a ne art? What are the relations between cuisine and the other arts? Can
Wednesday

we speak of a specically culinary lmic genre? How have the histories of gastronomy and
aesthetics intersected? Can cuisine evoke the sublime? How do considerations of cuisine
transform the relations between arts and crafts? How is "nouvelle" cuisine related to modernism
and regionalism, and "hybrid" cuisine to postmodernism and globalization? This seminar will
investigate the conceptual preconditions, the discursive limits, and the poetic and rhetorical forms
of the culinary imagination, under the assumption that the pleasures of the text increase the joys of
eating.
Affect Theory
Jonathan Flatley (jonathanatley@wayne.edu)
PERF-GT 2241 (16434)
Thursday 10:00am 12:45pm
4 points
Room 611

In recent years, scholars in multiple disciplines, including literature, social theory, philosophy,
psychology and neurobiology have turned to the question of affect with great energy in a series of
attempts to account for the delicacy and power, the evanescence and durability, the bodily
rootedness and the cultural variability of human emotion. This seminar will examine this recent
affective turn in the context of a long history of attempts to understand affect, emotion, feeling
and mood. The semester will be divided into three sections. In the rst, we will consider the
relationship between affect and mimesis (or imitation), a central concern in attempts to understand
affect beginning with Platos Republic and Aristotles Poetics. In examining how we are affected by
imitation, we will also read Wiliam James, Freud, Melanie Klein, Walter Benjamin, Daniel Stern and
some recent work on mirror neurons. We will then turn to consider the role of affect and mood in
the creation of collectives, especially political collectives: how are people moved to politcal action?
Here our reading will center on a consideration of Martin Heideggers Being and Time and his
understanding of Stimmung, or mood, but we may also read selections from Lenin, Theresa
Brennan, Jean Luc Nancy and Paolo Virno. Finally, we will consider the mood of the affective turn
itself, and examine some key debates, theories and positions from recent years, starting with the
work of Silvan Tomkins, Eve Sedgwick, Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi, moving then to authors
such as Lauren Berlant, Ann Cvetkovich, Heather Love, Peter Sloterdijk and Sianne Ngai. In this
last section, the particular logic and importance of specic affects, feelings and moods such as
love, fear, shame, melancholia, and rage will also come into focus. Along the way, as a class, we
will develop and draw on aesthetic and political examples to help us work through these theories.
Jonathan Flatleys areas of interest include literatures and cultures of modernity, affect studies,
modern and contemporary art, American studies, African-American literature and culture, Russian
and Soviet literature and culture, globalization and culture, gender Studies and queer theory, critical
theory. He has written Like: Andy Warhol and Affectivity. Forthcoming as well as Affective
Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008.
Thursday

Religion, Performance & the Law (limited enrollment)
Ann Pellegrini (ap39@nyu.edu)
PERF-GT 2603 (15318)
Thursday 12:30 3:15pm
4 points
Room 613
Permission of instructor required to enroll. Interested PS students should contact
Professor Pellegrini at ap39@nyu.edu no later than December 1st.

An examination of the interplay between religion and the law in the United States using
performance studies as key analytic lens and performance as crucial object of study. We will ask
how religion and religious subjects have been constituted through court decisions and
Congressional legislation, with a particular eye to the performative dimensions of the religious/
secular, or Church/State, boundaries in American public life. The bodily dimension of the way
religion lives in, and also exceeds, the law will be an ongoing question for this course, especially
insofar as religion coats and codes other vectors of social belonging: such as gender, race,
sexuality, immigration status, geography, generational.