Sunday, June 24 – Friday, June 29, 2012
One Week Program, Residential and Commuter Options
Classes are held Monday–Friday 9:30 a.m. - 12:30 p.m.
Please browse our courses for Summer 2012. If you would like to receive further information about our program, please join our mailing list.
Architecture
NEW YORK CITY DESIGN INTENSIVE
In this introduction to the many scales of design in New York City, we will learn from practicing designers about their work through a series of talks, tours of design studios, and visits to museums and sites in the city. This course will introduce a range of design – including graphic design, architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Students will keep a design journal and will be required to make daily entries on the course blog.
History new!
MODERNIST NEW YORK
What makes a city, a poem, or a painting ‘modern’? This course will explore New York’s vibrant literature, art, film and music during the early twentieth century, an era of fast-paced and profound cultural change. We will read fiction and poetry by writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, and the writers and artists of the Harlem Renaissance; we will visit the sites that inspired them and study the art and architecture of the period through visits to MoMA and to the Studio Museum in Harlem. Our readings will present a spectrum of modern urban experience, from the thrills of new technology, architecture, and economic opportunity to the fears of alienation, poverty, and violence. Together we will explore how the culture of New York City responded to the challenges of a rapidly modernizing world—and how the city, in turn, became the quintessential modern environment.
Literature
DISCOVERING OLD NEW YORK
In this course we will dig into New York City’s rich history, reading and analyzing novels, autobiographical narratives, and short sketches by some of the most renowned writers of the past: Henry David Thoreau, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and others. We will watch films, go on walking tours, and visit New York museums as we discover the panorama of New York City’s history and consider the variety of human experiences that the city’s literature captures.
Music
THE NY MUSIC SCENE
Students will be exposed to the diverse and unique music scene in the cultural capital of the world, New York City. In class, we will learn how to listen to and talk about music in new ways, covering styles from jazz to classical, Latin to hip-hop. These auditory experiments--no previous musical training is required--will be contextualized by studies of the roots of each genre and the important contributions made by artists on the New York scene. We will have also the opportunity to visit some of New York’s legendary nightclubs, concert halls, and performance spaces.
Philosophy new!
WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?
This five-day course offers a very brief introduction to philosophy from both a historical and a thematic perspective. Each day will be devoted to a different philosophical question, taking as its point of departure a short passage from a classic text of Western philosophy. We will begin with the first book of Plato’s Republic, which asks, How should we live? We will then explore the sharp distinction Plato draws between appearance and reality in the famous allegory of the cave in Book VII. We then ask, with Descartes, What can I know? how Hume will try to persuade us of the compatibility of free will and determinism, and we will conclude with a discussion of the meaning (if any) of life and Nietzsche’s dictum, “God is dead.”
Political Science new!
INSIDE THE 2012 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Every four years, the United States holds an event that is part gladiatorial sport, part national tutorial, part serous policy debate, and part media spectacle – the presidential election. This year, the nation’s first African-American president, governing in a time of economic difficulties, will face off against a Republican challenger determined to make him a one-term president and recapture the White House for the GOP. In this timely and highly participatory one-week class, we will review the presidential election thus far and lay out the road ahead; gain an understanding of the complex Electoral College and of the electoral map in 2012; explore the lessons of presidential history since 1932; examine the role of money, media, organized interests, and campaigns; and provide a preview of Election Day.
Psychology
THE MENTAL LIFE OF BABIES
In this class, we will try to see the world through the eyes of an infant. What do they see and hear? How do they view and learn about the world around them? We will spend some time discussing the methods psychologists use to study infants, and visit a developmental psychology laboratory that uses some of these methods, as well as a children’s museum that incorporates developmental psychology research. We will read papers that describe different theories of what the mental life of a baby is like, and discuss whether the psychological prowess of infants is due in large part to nature, to nurture, or to the subtle interaction between the two.
Theatre
THEATRE IN THE CITY
This course explores the richly diverse theatrical worlds of New York City, focusing on two significant theatrical elements: text and environment. We will look at the city as both the subject of drama and as an influence in producing and staging practices, exploring the idea of the city itself as character and performance space. We will read several plays, attend a performance, and visit with working theatre artists. The class will study the context and genesis of the shows we see and also critique them. Thus, by the week's end, we will have experienced theatre from the perspective of practitioner, audience member, scholar and critic.
Mixed Media
MASH-UP: REMIX, REUSE, RECOMBINE, REFLECT
This course is ideal for students interested in the arts and who are able to process its complexities in a critical, theoretical way. He or she should also be into art/aesthetics, fashion, and ephemera. Popularized in the 1960s, the first type of “Mash-Up” is considered collage, where Surrealist artists expressed a non-linear narrative based on reusing, recycling, and recombining various media. In today’s digital era, “Mash-Ups” take various forms such as sampling, editing, remixing, “Photoshopping,” and just about anything people can come up with using the Internet. The question becomes: are these thoughtful reinventions that send their own unique messages, or are they uninspired, even plagiarized works? Students will create their own “Mash-Ups” and reflect upon what is lost and gained through “recombinant” or appropriation art. At the end of the course, students will create one “Mash-Up” (either digital or using the old fashioned paper collage method) and a reflection piece that explains how their “Mash-Up” allows viewers to see the original works in new and interesting ways. Class trips will include gallery crawls, seeing contemporary Chelsea gallery shows, and collecting ephemera from the shows along the way to document the experience.
Urban Studies
EXPLORING NEW YORK LANDSCAPES
In this one-week course we will explore New York City neighborhoods to gain a better understanding of how cities operate. We will use the urban landscape as our classroom, discussing the works of urban planners, theorists and fiction writers alongside historical newspaper articles and maps to examine how New York functions today and in the past. In explorations ranging from Barnard’s Campus to Greenwich Village and the Lower East Side, we will ask what factors contribute to a neighborhood’s vitality. What makes certain parks and street corners more vibrant or more dangerous than others? We will think historically about urban planning decisions, asking why some buildings gain historic protection while others are torn down, and why certain renewal efforts succeed while others fail miserably.
Writing
DOCUMENTING THE PRESENT: THE ART OF ATTENTION CLOSED
What does it mean to write about ourselves—or not to write about ourselves? “I imagine,” Joan Didion writes, “that the notebook is about other people. But of course it is not. . . . My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress. Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point.” During our week together, we will document the world around us and, in so doing, create records of our personal experiences. We will read poems, essays, and fiction; we will listen to music, to noise, and to silence; we will visit museums and the Barnard zine archive; we will write every day. At the end of the week, students will make their own
books, telling stories of their New York summer lives.
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“My favorite thing about this week was the bonds I made with the girls here. I feel like I’ve known them forever even though it’s only been one week.”
–Molly, PCP '11
