Saturday, January 24, 2009

Reading New York City

Have I mentioned that my course, Religious Geography of New York, is one of nine courses sharing a rubric called "Reading NYC"? All first-year students have to take one of these classes, whose aim it is to establish a dialectic between the city and the classroom/ discipline we hope students will carry on throughout their years here. As chair of the first year, it's my duty and pleasure to schedule these courses, and I'm having a wonderful time looking through the final syllabi of my colleagues' courses: "Nueva York," "Natural History of New York," "Poet in New York," "Sex Education and the City," "Photographic NYC," "Scenes of Recognition: Philosophy in the City," "Psychology in a City of Immigrants," and "The Visual Landscape: Duality, Difference and the Modern," on whose course page I found the remarkable picture above, "Nkisi Nkonde in a Museum" by Chris Miller (2000).