Discover Classes. Earn Rewards.
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Upcoming Classes in NYC
The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, established in 2011, offers liberal arts education and research opportunities to local communities while supporting young scholars. With a mission to engage various intellectual traditions, the institute aims to provide accessible education and foster active, engaged citizens.
4 classes have spots left
Ovid’s Metamorphoses
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Ovid begins his Metamorphoses, “My soul would speak of bodies changed into new forms,” and it is the great theme of physical transformation that unites the poem’s many myths: humans becomes animals and plants, and vice versa; humans becomes stones and constellations; and humans change their sex. No poem from antiquity has so influenced Western European literature and art. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante creatively raided Ovid’s...
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
It is difficult to imagine a more ambitious or even hubristic philosophy than that of G.W.F. Hegel. Even Hegel’s most contemptuous critics agreed with his faithful disciples on one count: he simply could not be ignored. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that much of 19th Century European intellectual history is a story about those who were with and against Hegel’s “Absolute Idealism,” grounded in a logic he called “dialectics.” Marxism,...
Silent Film: Cinema, Society, and the Avant-Garde
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Silent film is one of modernism’s quintessential mediums. In an essay on Kafka, Walter Benjamin notes that “the invention of the film and the phonograph came in an age of maximum alienation of men from one another.” Many early film critics and connoisseurs, enthusiastic about film’s technological possibilities and developments, viewed the passing of silent film and the ascendency of “talkies” as a potential regression for the medium,...
CourseHorse Gift Card
Thousands of classes & experiences. No expiration. Gift an experience this holiday season and make it a memorable one. Lock in a price with the Inflation Buster Gift Card Price Adjuster™
Philosophy of History
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Does history have a direction, a purpose, or an end goal? Can we deduce general historical patterns from studying the past? Is it naïve to hope and work for a better future? From the Enlightenment to the twenty-first century, liberal, Marxist, positivist, and post-structuralist thinkers have offered radically different responses to these fundamental questions related to the philosophy of history. This course will survey these attempts to grapple...
Revolutionary Rumpus: an Introduction to Jazz
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Jazz is supposedly the “quintessential” American art form. But what does that mean—about jazz (as a form and artifact), on the one hand, and America, on the other? Rooted in the blues and the ragtime rhythms of Jim Crow-era New Orleans, jazz was born in the synthesis of Black folk music with European classical and even burgeoning American popular musics, creating an entirely new idiom. It flourished and transformed as it traveled north with...
Fredric Jameson: What is Postmodernism?
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
“The postmodern,” writes Marxist literary and cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, “is the force field in which very different kinds of cultural impulses . . . must make their way.” Adapted from a New Left Review essay of the same name, Jameson’s Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism is an ambitious account of how the postmodern has replaced modernism as the “cultural dominant” of late capitalism. In conversation with...
Imagining Utopia: Politics, Planning
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Imagining Utopia: Politics, Planning, and the (Im)Possible Dystopias abound in the contemporary landscape—in literature, on screen, in our diagnoses of the present. From the zombie apocalypse to planetary catastrophe to nightmarish visions of gender disciplining, dystopia is today a particularly salient category, a popular outlet for imaginations of (im)possible political futures. But the utopian genre, older by over a century, appears to have...
The Subway: Urbanism, Infrastructure, and Social Life
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 314 7th St, Brooklyn, NY
When the New York City subway opened in 1904, police had to call in reserves to tame the million-strong crowds clamoring to enter the tunnels. Within weeks, hurtling beneath the earth at speeds never before realized in a dense urban environment had become an utterly ordinary experience. For 120 years, the NYC subway, running 24 hours a day and ranking among the world’s largest, has maintained this blend of the quotidian and the extraordinary. When...
Strangers to Ourselves: an Introduction to Freud
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
In the process of investigating and treating the enigmatic disorder known as “hysteria,” Sigmund Freud established the discipline of psychoanalysis—and by so doing, profoundly altered Western subjectivity. By insisting that the bodily symptoms of hysterics represented unconscious conflict, Freud established a new way of thinking about human experience, motivations, desire, and suffering. The Freudian revolution destabilized long standing social...
Late-Capitalist Architecture
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Today, it seems scarcely possible to speak of late capitalism without citing baneful examples of its spatial manifestations—the soullessness of Hudson Yards; the Grenfell Tower disaster; the (lethal to build) Qatari World Cup stadiums; aestheticized server farms and data centers. But how, precisely, does architecture register, reproduce, and respond to the logic of global, financialized capital—materially, formally, ideologically, and in its...
Intro to Kierkegaard: Existentialism, Faith & Death
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Full Course Name: Introduction to Kierkegaard: Existentialism, Faith, and Death Søren Kierkegaard—Hamlet’s equally melancholic Danish counterpart—is frequently regarded as the father of existentialism for his exploration of concepts such as subjectivity, anxiety, and absurdity. This course will be an introduction to the main ideas of the nineteenth-century philosopher and theologian. How did Kierkegaard—through puzzles, pseudonyms, and...
Puppets and Automata: Art, Anxiety, and the Uncanny
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
From 18th century waxwork models to 21st century animatronic AI, puppets and automata of every sort have wrought an ambivalent impression—their very life-likeness inspiring fascination, speculation, and delight while, at the same time, unleashing anxieties regarding death, the other, and the supernatural. Romantic master of the macabre E.T.A Hoffman granted these uncanny objects, suspended between “living death” and “inanimate life,” a...
Mike Davis: City of Quartz
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 411 S 5th St, Brooklyn, NY
In 1990, Mike Davis published a book about his hometown, Los Angeles—“the city that American intellectuals love to hate.” City of Quartz depicted Los Angeles as a site of never-ending social war, where each new subdivision represented a desperate, self-undermining race to claim what he called the “Southern California Dream”—a dream rooted in whiteness, exclusion, anti-urbanism, and, ultimately, subordination to business and to the prerogatives...
Crisis and the City: New York in the 1970s
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Crisis and the City: New York in the 1970s (In-Person) In the years just before and following World War II, New York City built and maintained a municipal social democracy the likes of which had never been seen in the United States. Mid-century New York made the projects that underpin human life—housing, health care, transport, education, recreation—more available than ever to a working class whose political strength was reflected in the city’s...
Ruins: Beauty, Feeling, and Catastrophe (In-Person)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Discover the allure and complexity of ruins as aesthetic objects, conceptual phenomena, and spatial practices in this thought-provoking course. Delve into the cultural, political, and historical significance of ruins, exploring their representation in literature, art, and architecture. Uncover the transformative power of ruins and their relation to preservation, environmental destruction, and adaptive reuse.
Thomas Bernhard: Infamy, Brutality, and Literature
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Explore the provocative and unrelenting works of Thomas Bernhard, the notorious Austrian literary figure, in this course. Delve into his scathing critiques of postwar Austrian society. From the emptiness of the culture industry to the dark shadows of Catholicism, Bernhard's monologuing narrators dissect and confront their cultural malaise. Analyze his techniques and obsessions, and contemplate the role of literature in exposing societal follies and crimes.
The Task of the Critic: an Introduction to Rosalind Krauss
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Uncover the transformative power of poststructuralist, feminist, and psychoanalytic methods in art criticism through an exploration of the writings and ideas of Rosalind Krauss, the influential founder of October journal. Analyze representative artworks alongside her essays, as you delve into the ways in which art objects and movements challenge categorization and reshape aesthetic experience. Discover how Krauss's unique theoretical vocabulary redefines the role of the critic in art historical narratives.
Walter Rodney: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 314 7th St, Brooklyn, NY
Explore the radical propositions of Walter Rodney, the guerrilla intellectual, and his groundbreaking work. You'll learn how colonial expropriation shaped Africa's historical course and political structure. Join this course to delve into the themes of development and underdevelopment, African history and diaspora, revolutionary pedagogy, and strategies for Africa's emancipation. Uncover the contemporary relevance of Rodney's ideas on colonialism, imperialism, economic development, and racism.
Annie Ernaux: Shame and the Politics of Memory
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
What does it mean to describe one’s drive to write as a lifelong struggle against loneliness and forgetfulness? Annie Ernaux, whose “courage and clinical acuity” in writing earned her the Nobel prize in 2022, takes the matter of her own working-class milieu as the stuff of literature: her factory worker parents, their lives on either side of WWII, her personal experience of illegal abortion, the ungovernable vicissitudes of sexual desire,...
Architectural Experiments: Revolutions in Design
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
“Architecture,” wrote the late critic Michael Sorkin, “is produced at the intersection of art and property, and this is one of the many reasons it so legibly records the history of communal life.” This drawing together of the aesthetic imagination and material relations is also, perhaps, why the radical tradition has looked to architecture to anticipate and dramatize a world that could be otherwise. If the bourgeois revolutions of the nineteenth...
Get it first. Sign up for up-to-the-minute offers, sales and news.
Discover
Made in NYC
© CourseHorse, Inc. 2024 Loading...
