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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
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(4.6-star rating across 29 reviews)

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.

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Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

9 classes have spots left

American Populism

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

American Populism: History, Democracy, and Agrarian Revolt In recent decades, populism in the U.S. has most visibly been a right-wing phenomenon—from Pat Buchanan to the Tea Party to Trump—often overlapping politically with plutocracy and white nationalism. However, the largest populist movement in American history, the People’s Party of the 1890s, arose on the left, and is arguably one of the most radically democratic political formations...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Culture, Feeling, and Capital

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Culture, Feeling, and Capital: An Introduction to Raymond Williams Activist, critic, and key figure in the development of cultural studies, Raymond Williams was among the most influential radical intellectuals of the 20th century. The concepts and approaches he developed or helped to popularize—“structures of feeling,” “cultural materialism,” “keywords,” “dominant, residual, and emergent”—continue to shape new work in cultural...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

The Protestant Reformation

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

The Protestant Reformation: Theology, History, and Modernity In 1517, the Augustinian monk Martin Luther nailed a set of 95 Theses protesting the corruption of the Catholic Church to the door of his local church in Wittenberg, Germany, starting the Protestant Reformation that would radically transform the religious and political landscape of Europe. That, at least, is the usual story. This course complicates that story, looking at the historical...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
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Madness: Society and the Psyche

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

From the start, Western philosophy, literature, and medicine have been preoccupied—and haunted—with the figure of the mad and the idea of madness. What lies at the root of seemingly strange irruptions of emotion, speech, and erratic behavior? Do they arise by happenstance, or are they symptoms of disturbances in the body, the mind, the psyche, the soul, humours, and the like? Does the behavior of the mad reveal secret messages, canny prophecies,...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules

Literature and Colonialism: Joseph Conrad & Tayeb Salih

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Famously excoriated by Chinua Achebe as an “offensive and deplorable” dehumanization of the lives of Africans, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may be one of the most intensively scrutinized and adapted works of modern European literature. Achebe’s critique has since been contested, not least as a deliberate misreading of Conrad’s own perhaps ambivalent understanding of the industrialized barbarism of Belgian colonialism in the Congo....

(29) All levels 21 and older
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Wonderful, Wonderful Times: Reading Elfriede Jelinek

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Explore the provocative works of Elfriede Jelinek, Nobel Prize-winning author, in this course from the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Analyze Jelinek's anti-realist technique, the influence of capitalism and fascism on sex and romance, and the role of myth in her worldview. Discover how her writings challenge societal norms and provide a lens into life after liberal humanism.

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Uncover the transformative power of language and explore the metaphilosophical implications of Ludwig Wittgenstein's groundbreaking work in this thought-provoking course. Discover a new perspective on the nature of language and the mind, and embark on a journey to unravel the mysteries of philosophy.

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$335

4 sessions

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Fictions and Meta-Fictions

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

Fictions and Meta-Fictions: Mysticism and Politics in the Works of Jorge Luis Borges This class centers upon one of Latin America’s most prolific and influential literary figures, Jorge Luis Borges. It will introduce students to Borges’ most canonical works, including the two short story collections Fictions and The Aleph, as well as the essay collection Other Inquisitions. Students with previous knowledge of Borges’...

(29) Intermediate 21 and older
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Introduction to Music Theory

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 30 Irving Pl, New York, NY

What are the basic structures of western music? What rules and norms—of harmony, melody, and rhythm—unite works as remote from each other in time and style as Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper? What are the acoustic, perceptual, and historical roots of this musical grammar, and does understanding them shape the way we hear and respond to music? These are some of the questions we will address in Introduction...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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$315

4 sessions

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Friedrich Nietzsche: Truth and Morality

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

Friedrich Nietzsche is among the most notorious and controversial thinkers in the western intellectual tradition. He aimed to philosophize “with a hammer,” to demolish the philosophical tradition founded by Socrates and Plato and slaughter its most sacred cows. Central to that tradition is the value placed on truth, reason, objectivity, and a moral system based on altruism and self-sacrifice. In contrast to forming the bedrock of a stable political...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Sex, Gender, and the Avant-Garde

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY

The early 20th century avant-gardes—from Futurism to Dada, Constructivism to Surrealism—hailed and aimed to generate, via new aesthetic experience, new forms of social and political consciousness. Gender norms and sexual hierarchies, as relics of a past imaginary no longer apropos of the present, came under fire by an eclectic, international generation of artists. Hannah Höch dissected and montaged the aspirational image of the era’s vaunted...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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$335

4 sessions

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The Mahabharata: From Exile to Apocalypse

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY

The Mahabharata is one of the great literary works of South Asian history. It narrates an epic story: the introduction to our supposed age, the Kali Yuga—one of downfall and decline, but also eventual rebirth. Preeminently a dialogic work, the Mahabharata remembers a past that requires constant re-narration, simultaneously defining and critiquing dharma—or “proper conduct.” These dialogues culminate famously...

(29) All levels 21 and older
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$315

4 sessions

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Freedom, Politics, and the Individual

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY

Introduction to Liberalism: Freedom, Politics, and the Individual This is an online course. What are we talking about when we talk about liberalism? Ubiquitous in political discourse, liberalism is nevertheless difficult to straightforwardly define—not least because it seems to mean different things to different people in different places. Is liberalism a doctrine of private property? Of social contract? Of market economies? Of individualism, self-determination,...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Don DeLillo: Underworld

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY

Don DeLillo’s Underworld is a novel of ends: of the Cold War; of the 20th century; of the millennium; of history; of metanarratives; of humanism; of the American Century. It is, at the same time, a novel of the new—of the underworlds that might give rise to other worlds. The story of Nick Shay, a waste management executive living in Arizona, spans the period from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War, and maps the United...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY

Can a woman “suffice to herself and be happy”? This is one of the questions at the heart of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), which tells the story of Isabel Archer, an American navigating the constraints of European society in the late 19th century. First serialized in The Atlantic Monthly and MacMillan’s Magazine, this novel of James’s middle period displays an exhilarating combination of high style and psychological...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Proust in Time: The Prisoner

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY

The Prisoner, the fifth volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and the opening passage of le roman Albertine, “the Albertine cycle,” is a portrait of obsessive love. Albertine, the prisoner of the title, prowls the golden cage of the narrator’s house, swathed in luxury, the object of his jealous, possessive fixation. How does romantic love work? And what does Proust’s picture of the tragicomedy of romantic love in belle époque France...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Richard Wagner: Tristan und Isolde

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY

This is an online course. “I fear that the opera will be forbidden,” Richard Wagner wrote to a correspondent as he was completing the last act of Tristan und Isolde. “Only mediocre performances can save me! Absolutely perfect ones will make people insane.” Wagner, not known for his modesty, could be suspected of exaggerating. Yet Tristan, in its reception, has borne him out, inspiring in its listeners an erotic devotion (and at...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Aesthetics and the Senses

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY

The event of art, Jacques Rancière writes, plays out in “form, a burst of colour, an acceleration of rhythm, a pause between words, a movement, or a glimmering surface.” Art, in other words, transforms the “sensible fabric” of life “at the cost of constantly merging its own reasons with those belonging to other spheres of experience.” This course will put Rancière’s assertion to the test, examining the ways in which theories of the...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Reading the Bible: the Life of Moses

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY

Why do we write the lives of individual people? Why do we write them the way we do? In this course, we’ll consider an individual whose life has been written perhaps more than anyone else’s: Moses. Why was Moses’s life written, and why, in the Bible, was it written in the way that it was? We’ll begin with the perhaps the earliest biography of Moses as such, Philo of Alexandria’s On the Life of Moses. We’ll then...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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Trans/Queer/Woman: Theory and Politics

Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online, New York, NY

Transfeminine lives are often seen as having, in and of themselves, political consequences, theoretical limits, and some kind of relation to a ‘beyond’ of gender. While former sports celebrity Caitlyn Jenner has come to stand for the notion that ‘transgender’ is now a “respectable” identity, Olympic gold-star medalist Caster Semenya, despite not being transgender, is now caught up in a fraught and ugly fracas over the question of “what...

(29) All levels 21 and older
No upcoming schedules
$315

4 sessions

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