January 2013 Course Roster

Unless otherwise noted, all courses meet MTWR, at the Manhattan Eye and Ear Institute, 210 E. 64th St. (between 2nd and 3rd avenues).

DRAM 110 A, sec. 1:  Theatre in NYC
3-4:30pm, Edward Elefterion
The students will form a theatre-going community and will attend six productions in NYC over the three weeks of the January term.  We will not confine ourselves to Broadway.  Rather, the course will enable students to experience a taste of the wide variety of what the performing arts in NYC has to offer. This is intended to deepen their understanding of what “theatre” is and how it can be produced on many different levels.  The class with attend a Broadway show, an Off-Broadway show, two Off-Off Broadway shows, a Modern Dance performance and an Experimental Theatre piece. They will use class time preparing for and then responding to each piece through the lens of various artistic disciplines.  Students will grapple with what the artists achieved, and how they did it.

DRAM 110 B, sec. 2:  Improv in NYC
7:30-9:00pm, Christopher Dippel
Trust.  Teamwork.  Honesty.  Communication.  Risk.  These are the foundations of Improvisation and are as useful to the lawyer or layperson as they are to the actor.  This course will employ theater games and performance exercises to help students learn to think on their feet, work collaboratively, communicate effectively, and trust their own creativity and ideas.  Class work will be supplemented and informed by frequent trips into NYC to view performances of various types of improvisation.

FDED 175A and FDED 285C: Art in New York City for Educators and Administrators
10 a.m.-4 p.m., 1/2,  1/4,  1/8,  1/9, 1/10, 1/15, Susan Goetz Zwirn
This course will take us to museums and galleries in NYC to study some of the art, artists and movements that contribute to the perception of New York City as a cultural capital.  We will examine ways of integrating the art we view into the curriculum of all academic and art subjects.  This course considers how art museums and galleries reveal the social and cultural beliefs reflected in their exhibitions and presents ways to enliven and deepen the study of history, English, math, science and the arts.  This course is taught through field trips, discussion, writing and creative projects.  The course will meet in NYC from Jan 2 to Jan 15^th.   Students majoring in a variety of disciplines at Hofstra University, including but not limited to students planning to teach, will develop skills of observation, interpretation, and judgment of artifact displays and exhibitions.  Museums and galleries as institutions that communicate cultural values to varied audiences in unique ways will be emphasized. 

FIN 141, sec. 1: Money and Capital Markets
9 a.m.-12:45 p.m., Gioia Bales
This course offers an in-depth analysis of the structure of domestic and international money and capital markets and the role the government plays in these markets, as well as the role of investment bankers, brokers, and dealers in the financial markets. Issues pertaining to ethics, innovation, competition, and globalization of financial markets are also discussed. Course content is enhanced by three full-day trips to New York City, including visits to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, New York Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ, and commercial and investment banks and hedge funds. Note: This course meets at Hofstra, January 2-15, 2013.

ENGL 184E, sec. 1:  Latino Culture in NYC
9-10:30am, Lauren Kozol

From its early days, New York has been formed and informed by people from all over Latin America who have settled here or come to share their artistic work.  In this class, we will study Hispanic literature, music, dance, visual arts, cinema and cuisine based in and around New York City. We will discuss how these cultural forms represent the experience of being Latino/a in American society, and how New York becomes a site where immigrant and mainstream cultures meet, mix, merge, and transform one another. Students will discuss and write about the major debates in these works, including concerns about race, immigration, class, gender, bi-cultural challenges, nationalism, assimilation and diaspora. This class contains both an analytical and a creative component. In groups, students will be responsible for their own original Latin-influenced artistic collaboration as well as a Latin meal. In addition, we will go on five trips to the city to see and taste different aesthetic creations of Hispanic New York.

ENGL 184U, sec. 1:  Baseball, Vaudeville and the Making of NYC
11:00am – 12:30pm, Richard Pioreck
Broadcast and cable television, and professional league sports are major American economic and cultural forces.  Baseball and vaudeville are the forerunners of these two industries.  Baseball and vaudeville were born during the boom decade following the Civil War.  Initially these leisure time entertainments competed for the time and money of men.  The National League was founded in 1876.  Wine rooms, the forerunners of vaudeville houses, existed in New York and Philadelphia by 1875.  Together, baseball and vaudeville established twentieth century popular culture among the melting pot full of immigrants who were creating the urban America of the industrial age.  The course involves both classroom work and frequent trips into NYC to view such descendants of vaudeville as songs, dances, comic skits, and acrobatic performances. 

AH 192, sec. 1:  Museums of  NYC
10:30am-noon, Aleksandr Naymark
The course is an intensive version of the general systematic survey of Western art, but instead of a classroom it draws on the incomparable riches of New York art collections.  Students will explore the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and visits fourteen more major museums of New York:  Cloisters Museum of Mediaeval Art, Hispanic Society, Frick Collection, Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Arts and Design, American Folk Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Museum, Cooper-Hewitt National Museum of Design, Jewish Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Pierpont-Morgan Library, New Museum (of contemporary art) and the exposition of the American Numismatic Society in the Federal Reserve building.  Class also pays a visit to the neighboring Nassau County Museum and will be allowed “behind the scenes” to the vaults of the Hofstra Museum.

FA 198, sec. 1:  The Art Scene in NYC
3:30-5pm, Steve Keister
This course is an examination of the rapidly expanding art scene in its varied manifestations in Manhattan’s Chelsea district and Lower East Side neighborhood, and the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Greenpoint and Bushwick.  It will provide students with a direct impression of the New York art-world at a moment that embraces the energy of younger artists and newer galleries.  Students will witness the cross-fertilization of ideas and influence in curated group exhibitions in galleries and museums, and they will have the opportunity to discuss issues with contemporary artists in their studios.

HIST 177A, sec. 1:  Teddy Roosevelt's NYC
2:30-4pm, Michael Galgano
The focus of this class will be on the personal and the professional connections of Theodore Roosevelt to the City of New York during the period between 1858, the year of his birth and 1897, the year he left the New York City Police Department to take up his new job in Washington as Assistant Secretary of the Navy.  The class will visit such venues as the Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace, the American Museum of Natural History, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York City Police Museum, and the New York Historical Society.
Please note: course meets on the main Hofstra campus, Hempstead, NY.

LING 181, sec. 2:  Decoding NYC:  Language and Neighborhoods       
9:30-11am, Greg Kershner
To an outsider—and sometimes even to an insider—NYC can be hard to understand.  In this course students will attempt to decode NYC’s organization of space, the layout of buildings, street grids, fashion, and neighborhoods.   This course will explore this case of particular ‘deep’ culture codes in the culture and urban life styles of New York City.  Students will learn to “read” the city as a system of signs, as a language all its own.  The course will serve as an introduction to the theory and applied application of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in language study.  The class will make regular visits to museums and take neighborhood tours in New York, using as a point of departure the thesis that human space in general is a product of symbolic practices.

MUS 180C, sec. 1:  Music Performance in NYC
1:30-3pm, Cathy Callis
NYC has one of the most diverse and energetic music scenes in the world today.  This seminar provides the opportunity to explore some of NYC’s many facets of music performance.  Students will explore the dynamics of live performance from the perspective of the performer, the composer, the audience and the critic.  Elements of music and musical style, the interpretive aspects of performance, the medium, the venue, the repertoire, programming, publicity and marketing, the cultural contributions and accessibility of events are also examined as they relate to music performance.  Students will sample a variety of concerts, from classical to jazz to world music. 

MUS 180B, sec. A:  Jazz in NYC
7:00-8:30pm, David Lalama
Music connects our present to our personal, cultural and historical past.  The history of jazz is also the history of America’s continuing struggle toward racial equality and cultural development.  American painters and writers looked to jazz as a model of spontaneity, improvisation and experimentation.  Jack Kerouac, for example, coined the term “bop prosody” to describe his rhythmic, stream of consciousness paragraphs that merged poetry with prose by attending to the felt rhythm of words and breath.  Students learn to identify periods where musical, literary and visual arts have overlapped, and get a first-hand look at New York City’s jazz scene through to a variety of well-known and not-so-well-known clubs.

PSC 192, sec. 1:  Field Study at the United Nations
12:30-2pm, Paul Fritz
This course takes advantage of the unique opportunity afforded by our proximity to the UN and its various national missions and related organizations in order to hear first-hand from many of the key participants in the UN process.  Specifically, we will be briefed by all three of the three types of inside participants who drive international diplomacy:  those who staff United Nations agencies, those diplomats who represent their respective states at the UN, and those individuals who advocate via international non-governmental organizations.  From these various sources, as well as our own participation, we hope to obtain a solid overview of international diplomacy in this unique global institution.

JWST 101A, sec. 1:  Judaism in NYC 
Noon-1:30pm, David Kaufman
Students will discover how one of the oldest world religions, Judaism, has taken root and blossomed in the great metropolis of the modern age, NYC.  Beginning with the earliest Jewish settlement in 17th century New Amsterdam, trace the history of New York Judaism through three centuries of communal growth and religious development.  By visiting Jewish sites and communities in Manhattan and Brooklyn and by taking in lectures and media presentations students will encounter the kaleidoscope of Jewish religious Life in NYC, including colonial-era Sephardic Jews, uptown Reform Jews, downtown Orthodox Jews, middle class Conservative Jews, Hasidic and Soviet Jews, Syrian and Israeli Jews, New Age Renewal Jews, etc.  Together, they mirror the very diversity of NYC itself.

WSC 180D, sec. 1:  Bohemian New York
5:30-7pm, Patricia Navarra
Students will use a combination of literary, historical, theatrical, musical, and artistic sources to explore the political and cultural significance of the Bohemian movement in NYC.  Each student will conduct research on a related artist or topic such as Beat poetry, the Stonewall Riots, the Ashcan Artists, radical unionism, the Living Theatre, women’s suffrage.  Particular emphasis will be placed on the social and economic environments from which bohemian New York emerged, as well as the plays, stories, essays, reportage, poems, music and art that offered the first real alternative to the established cultural elite.  Classroom discussion, research, Socratic Seminar, in-class writing exercises, and field trips to a variety of NYC neighborhoods will provide students with an understanding of how the Bohemian movement shaped the twentieth century.