Fall 2025 Undergraduate Courses

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 612

Recitation Sections:

PERF-UT 101.002 (16010) - Wednesdays, 9:30am - 10:45am, Room 611

PERF-UT 101.003 (16011) - Wednesdays, 11:00am - 12:15am, Room 611

To enter the field of Performance Studies is to proceed with a willingness to forgo strict definitions of art “objects” and “events.” The field encourages engagement with everyday life, performers from a variety of media, things inside and outside cultural institutions, and an expansive sense of the stage to reflect on how performance impacts our sense of the world.  Music, theater, visual art, dance, and film are not divided into separate areas of study, but are necessarily engaged all together.  While the question, “what is performance?” has mystified the minds of many, this course moves beyond this question to investigate: what does performance do? And how does performance help us to ask questions about aesthetics, politics, and the social world? The question “what does performance do?,” opens the line between theory and practice; a line that falsely separates the performer from the critic.  Students will work together across these divides. In addition to deepening an understanding of the field of Performance Studies, students read texts that vitalize critical thinking in the humanities. The course engages theories of the field as they emerge from performances themselves, especially from the robust creative repertoires of New York City. 

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 612

This course considers how raced and gendered collectives come to be marked as abject—or disregarded as worthy of care through re/articulations of the legal word. Specifically our work will center the lives of gender non-conforming groups who while struggling for rights in the U.S. spanning 1970s-2020s, centered aesthetic practice and cultural production as the driving force towards dismantling and/or re-writing formal law and--at times--‘re-scripting’ those felt, unspoken rules that go unwritten within familial and intra-community dynamics.

For example, students can expect to contemplate legal changes, theoretical articulations, juridical aesthetics, and cultural critique from across the following archive or case studies: ACT UP and The NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt; the 'Combahee River Collective Statement' and black feminist movements against gender violence; disability right protests and the 504 ‘Sit-ins;’ the Bill Cosby sexual misconduct trail and post-antebellum contractual legacies of the #MeToo era; contemporary Afro-Asian solidarities through mutual aid practices; and the fictional town of Ruby in Toni Morrison’s Paradise.

Our key thinkers—Karen Shimikawa, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Anna Storti, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha, and Jasbir Puar—will serve to anchor us in jurisprudence critique through autobiographical narrative, social engaged art practices, embodied knowing, and aesthetic theory. Accordingly, we will glean insights from performance theory, gender studies, black feminist thought, queer of color critique, and critical race theory to attend to how social movements are motivated and sustained through the inherent ruptures, comminglings, promises and limitations between performance and the law.

Assignments consist of weekly readings + discussions; one in-class performance/presentation; and a final formal or hybrid paper. Additionally, class sessions will be complimented by off-site visits to art exhibits and everyday performance sites—from the MoMA to the steps of City Hall. 

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 613

This course focuses specifically on the political aspects of performance -- how it reflects, enacts, and shifts political discourse and practices.  Beginning with a broad construction of “politics” -- that “the personal is political, and vice versa” -- the course encourages students to study events and practices that produce political effects.  How can performance and performance theory be applied usefully to understand how, why, and where political dialogue takes place, and where it fails to do so?

4 pts – In-Person, 31 Washington Pl (Silver Ctr) Room 504 

Cross-listed with the Department of French

At first glance, love is not a political affect. It nullifies tensions, cancels antagonisms, oppositions, and conflicts. Yet, in the 20th and 21st centuries Black France, many thinkers, poets, and artists, from Senghor to Fanon, etc., defended a radical understanding of love. Love can unite those separated by borders, the color line that-is- to say race and racism. It allows for a critique of the power that is exercised as much in public life as within our private lives. It opposes the multiple forms of domination that create hierarchies of rejection. The purpose of this course is to analyze how love was conceived as a transformative force to combat discourses based on race and racism in the contemporary Black France. Love is, in this course, understood in its multiple senses: interpersonal, political, and religious.

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 613

This course examines the diverse issues and methodological questions raised by different kinds of performance. Where “Introduction to Performance Studies” asks, “What is performance? What counts as performance, and what is its cultural significance?” this course asks, “How can we interpret and analyze performance? What is ‘theory’ in this context, and how do theory and practice inform each other?” Readings introduce students to key concepts in the field such as “ritual,” “performativity,” “liveness,” and “affect.” Material for the course (readings, videos, and other media) exemplify the interdisciplinary nature of performance studies by drawing from work in aesthetics, anthropology, architecture studies, ethnic/area studies, queer studies, religious studies, legal studies, literary studies, etc.

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 612

Countering the “presentist” critique of performance studies as a field (i.e., that its emphasis on “liveness” limits it to analysis of contemporary practices), this course will examine both the long history of performance (and the specific research methodologies that are required for that examination), and the history of performance studies as a mode of social inquiry.  How have performance, and the writing about performance, been deployed historically, and to what ends?  How can contemporary researches access the archives that house answers to these questions, and how do archives in themselves constitute an historiographic “performance”?  Students will consider the impact of performance in the contexts of (post-)colonial history, aesthetic genealogies, and other historiographic projects.

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 613

This course takes sexuality as its lens through which to consider performance, and vice versa.  Much of the current vitality of the concept of “performance” has come through the study of gender and sexuality -- the political impact and social legibility of performances of gender and sexuality in daily life, art practices, and elsewhere -- and this course examines and applies these theories of gender/sexuality performance to a wide range of examples.  Students will read both new and canonical work in the field of gender studies with an eye toward the specific impact of performance in this work, as well as examine performance examples in order to analyze the ways gender and sexuality are produced within them.

1- 4 pts – In-Person

Note: OPEN TO PS MAJORS ONLY. The department does not place students in internships, students are responsible for procuring their own internships. Majors should speak with Alejandra Rodríguez (ar4784@nyu.edu) before enrolling in this course.*

Performance Studies is a discipline which has sometimes addressed the performance of workers in the labor market, offering a theoretical perspective on some very practical questions: What are some of the professional skills that training in our field offers to students? What are some of the professional contexts within which this training is most useful? How might one employ some of our field's insights in the work environment? This course provides an opportunity for students to establish working relationships with organizations or institutions relevant to the field of Performance Studies, and to process and discuss their on-site work experiences with their peers and a supervising instructor. The class will touch on some of the theoretical dimensions of the experience of interning but will also offer students a space to work through real-world challenges and opportunities.

4 pts – In-Person | 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl.

Note: OPEN TO PS MAJORS ONLY. Majors should check with Alejandra Rodríguez (ar4784@nyu.edu) before enrolling in this course.*