• Art Worlds
• Gender Politics
• Global Histories
• Literary Cultures
• Science Studies
• The City

Each area provides a detailed, cross-disciplinary study of issues central to the topics they encompass. Emphasis is balanced between foundational conversations essential to serious inquiry in each area, and an understanding of the most current work going on in each field. Because the areas are broadly defined, courses touch on an array of historical, theoretical, and practical concerns, reflecting current academic research while allowing substantial latitude for exploration and innovation.

Art Worlds explores the elusive concept of culture. While culture encompasses expressions of creativity and aesthetics, culture is also anthropological and institutional. It is about how we live our lives and the sense of place and person that makes us human. Simultaneously transcendental and quotidian, culture is both the mark of the individual and the bond that makes for community. Art Worlds investigates these complex spheres through the riches of an internationally acclaimed faculty and
the urban context of New York City - one of the world's greatest cultural resources. From ancient artifacts to contemporary performance art, New York City's museums, galleries, theatres, institutes, and very streets enhance and enliven the innovative scope of Art Worlds.

Perhaps society's most fascinating manifestation, cities are places at the leading edge of social change and cultural development. Cities across time and around the world have profoundly influenced our very understanding of what it means to be human. The City investigates the urban phenomenon concretely and conceptually, as framework and crossroads, focusing on New York City as well as other metropolises. With their wealth of imagery, models, innovations, tensions, challenges, and dynamics, cities provoke both homogeneity and diversity, harmony and bloody conflict. With inexhaustible resources and questions, The City functions as laboratory, workshop, theatre, and teacher to the social sciences and humanities.

Contemporary scholarship is extraordinarily alive to questions of gender. Problems of gender are primary concerns in the humanities and social sciences, as they are in everyday life. Gender is a social fiction that often behaves as a fact. It changes across histories, cultural arrangements, and expressive behaviors.
In addition to concern with how gender reveals the constituent force of knowledge that makes up specific academic disciplines, gender creates its own political knowledge. Gender Politics offers important insights by reaching into numerous disciplines and examining many different sorts of texts: literary, filmic, theatrical, critical, and "social."

The end of the cold war challenges conventional views of history. New ideas, methodologies, and historical understandings are coming to the fore as we grapple with the dynamics of an ever-shrinking but ever more complex world. Global Histories provides a framework to investigate transnational viewpoints and local history, cultural study, and world politics.

Blending established themes with contemporary questions, Global Histories incorporates broad topics such as postcolonialism, nationalism, and state formation with specialized and creative approaches to historical analysis. Drawing on the cultural diversity of the Graduate School and New York City, Global Histories offers innovative perspectives on the contemporary world, both past and present.

Literary Cultures - Encompassing a wide spectrum of literary traditions and their intersections with other practices, Literary Cultures looks through multiple critical lenses to understand more clearly questions of literary production, implication, and promise. This area of inquiry organizes multidisciplinary theoretical approaches to a wide array of literary and cultural expressions in which considerations of style, technique, and genre are complemented with questions of cultural and material context. Literary texts, in their myriad forms, are a major dynamic in the construction of identity, including aspects of gender, race, and class. Students in Literary Cultures explore aspects of this dynamic, while also examining what is distinct about literary expression.

Science's theoretical, experimental, conceptual and technological advances are radically reshaping modern life and thought. Ranging from projects as awesome as the human genome study to the quotidian changes wrought by the personal computer, the scope and impact of science is unparalleled. We have come to expect constant innovation and paradigmatic revolution, but are still regularly challenged by scientific discovery. Science in Society explores the historical and contemporary ramifications of science and the scientific mode of inquiry. Drawing on the major research arms of the Graduate School, Science in Society develops technological familiarity and scientific literacy while investigating ways of discussing and better interpreting science and technology.