Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man | How did Ellison conceive of the cosmopolitan aspirations of modernism, with its promise of liberation, for black artists bedeviled by race? | July BISR Online Courses

Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Resting on the fault line between art and politics, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man makes the powerful claim that black modernism and the African-American experience are central to the American narrative. For Ellison, the plight of his narrator, “both black and American,” was emblematic of major...

Silvia Federici: Women, Capitalism, and the Body | What is the legacy of the witch-hunt, and what does it teach us about the nature of capitalism? | July BISR Online Courses

Silvia Federici: Women, Capitalism, and the Body - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research The infamous witch-hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries were, as Silvia Federici puts it, “one of the most monstrous attacks on the body perpetrated in the modern era.” Persecuted as witches, and murdered in the tens of thousands, were heretics, healers, slaves, disobedient wives, and women who ...

Albert Camus: From Existentialism to Postcolonialism | How do we balance, on the one hand, Camus’s initial position as one Europe’s foremost existentialist writers with, on the other, his later inclusion in the postcolonial literary canon? | July BISR Online Courses

Albert Camus: From Existentialism to Postcolonialism - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research If many of his postwar peers have disappeared from view, Albert Camus occupies a visible, and seemingly invincible, position in the Western literary canon. With their vivid renditions of the absurdity of the human condition, Camus’s novels remain potent vehicles for exploring key existentialist th...

The Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Post-Human Future | What is “the Singularity,” and what intellectual tools might we use to interrogate it? | July BISR Online Courses

The Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Post-Human Future - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Alan Turing, whose Turing Test set the initial standard for artificial intelligence, mused towards the end of his life on the prospects of a truly superintelligent machine: “it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers…...

Literature and Catastrophe: Germany, Austria, and the First World War (In-Person) | How can we understand the German cultural response to the First World War, in all its political, aesthetic, and methodological diversity? | BISR July Courses at The Urbane Arts Club

Literature and Catastrophe: Germany, Austria, and the First World War (In-Person) - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Europe’s long nineteenth century came to a bloody and ignoble end in the trenches of the so-called Great War. The apocalyptic effects of this four-year conflagration reverberated throughout the continent (and the globe), but were perhaps felt most acutely in Germany and Austria, where millions of ...

English Romantic Poetry: Art, Crisis, and the Radical Imagination | How can we understand English poetry in the wake of the French Revolution? | July BISR Online Courses

English Romantic Poetry: Art, Crisis, and the Radical Imagination - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Romanticism arrived in England with the publication of The Lyrical Ballads (1798), a radical work of poetry, written “in the real language of men,” which drew impetus from the same egalitarian ideals that spurred the architects of the French Revolution. Yet, as the Revolution turned to Terror, i...

Powers of Speech: Language and Politics | What are the political valences of different speech acts, including slogans, commands, insults, and lying? | June BISR Online Courses

Powers of Speech: Language and Politics - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Ever since the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle defined the human being both as a political animal (zoon politikon) and as an animal endowed with speech and reason (zoon logon echon), the relationship between our linguistic capacities and our forms of collective life has preoccupied philosophers....

Q***r NYC: Before Stonewall (In-Person) | How and why did New York City become a transnational center of q***r culture and performance? | June BISR Courses at St Lydia's

Q***r NYC: Before Stonewall (In-Person) - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research On June 28, 1969, legend has it that Sylvia Rivera threw the first brick at Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn, igniting gay liberation across the globe. In truth, it was probably a Molotov cocktail, and she was likely not the first to throw one. But more importantly, the story of gay liberation in New Yor...

Q***r NYC: Before Stonewall | How and why did New York City become a transnational center of q***r culture and performance? | June BISR Online Courses

Q***r NYC: Before Stonewall - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research On June 28, 1969, legend has it that Sylvia Rivera threw the first brick at Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn, igniting gay liberation across the globe. In truth, it was probably a Molotov cocktail, and she was likely not the first to throw one. But more importantly, the story of gay liberation in New Yor...

Inequality in the 21st Century | What characterizes the new global plutocracy, and how do elites reproduce themselves across borders? | June BISR Online Courses

Inequality in the 21st Century - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research The economist Branko Milanovic has remarked that “reading about global inequality is nothing less than reading about the economic history of the world.” While human societies have always exhibited material inequality, the issue reemerged after the 2008 financial crisis as a central topic of publ...