This course serves as an introduction to the major concepts and historical circumstances informing architecture and urban design in the 20th century. Central themes include the impact of advances in modern technology on building forms; changing attitudes toward ornament and eclecticism; the rise of the metropolis and the suburb; and the socio-political concerns underlying most of these issues.

This is an introduction to one of history’s most creative periods and to one of the world’s most important and influential cities. We look at the historical background—civil wars between the Guelph and the Ghibbeline parties, conflicts between Florence and the papacy, the horrific plague of 1348, the transformation of Florence into a capitalistic society and its emergence as a major international city, and the rise of the ruling Medici family.

Like Louise Brooks’ Lulu, the prototypical femme fatale, the seductive cities of Paris and Berlin have exerted a continual power over artists and writers in the 20th century. Caught in an obsessive love-hate relationship, France and Germany have engaged in a dialectic marked by fiery aggression and mistrust on the one hand, and a mutual fascination and attraction on the other. We explore the explosive and ongoing culture exchange between these two nations as they struggle not only with their individual identities, but also with their collective European ones.

Jazz-age Paris was, in the words of Maurice Sachs, "the decade of illusion." It was the era of dancings, Mistinguett, the Charleston, Josephine Baker, and jazz; it was the era of Cocteau, Picasso, Man Ray, Kiki, and the Russian ballet; it was the era of Paul Poiret, Coco Chanel, and the flapper. This course provides a cultural overview of Paris in the Roaring Twenties, with a focus on the representation of women on stage and in literary texts. Our study includes surrealist art and literature, avant-garde film, performance art, jazz music, and

This course is an in-depth exploration of the pivotal period in African American social and cultural history known as the Harlem Renaissance. Enabled by the Great Migration the influx of Southern Blacks into Northern cities such as New York the Harlem Renaissance of the early 20th century produced a body of work remarkable for its breadth and complexity of themes. Through the varied creative productions of artists and intellectuals of the era, we contextualize this self-conscious movement in relation to other social, cultural, and historical phenomena that helped define modern times.

This course will examine new media and communication technologies – the Internet, mobile and wireless technologies – to investigate the ways in which they are being shaped as tools of openness and freedom while, at the same time, allowing for closure and captivity. How have some of the more controlling aspects been readily adopted into our home, offices, cities and spaces in a post 9/11 environment?

This course will study the relationship between the rise of the modern city and the development of photography and cinema. We will explore how the experience of life in the modern metropolis led to the need for new forms of media, ones based on shock and reproducibility. Central to this thesis will be a reading of Walter Benjamin’s study of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century, as his notion of the flaneur.