Master's Courses
University of Califonia, Berkeley
History and Theory of New Media (Spring 2023)
This course provides a broad historical and theoretical background for new media production and practice. The class will map out theoretical approaches from different disciplines and allow graduate students to discuss and apply them to their own research projects.
This course offers a survey of some of the key texts in Hindi literary studies, with excursions into other South Asian language literatures. The class is designed to provide a comprehensive study of the scholarship on modern Indian literature and particularly movements in Hindi. As part of the course, we will discuss various methodological and ideological approaches to the study of literature. The texts have been selected to illuminate the important moments in the history of a modern literary idiom and the debates around the formation of the canon and the various exclusions. All the texts will be in English, though a small selection of the optional texts will be in Hindi.
Locative Media (Fall 2022)
Professor Clancy Wilmott
From postcards and maps to mobile phones, this course considers the history and future of locative media, as technological, situated, and navigational ways of expressing and understanding space, location, and bodies. This is a theory and making course. It is designed to help students traverse the nuances between a) critically engaging with theoretical ideas and implementing the questions that they raise into their practice and b) critically engaging with the technological production of space and place, and implementing the questions that it raises into theory.
The Victorian Novel (Fall 2022)
Professor Sukanya Banerjee
Focusing on the Victorian novel, this course will examine why it emerged as the dominant literary form in nineteenth-century Britain. What made the novel so popular, and in what ways did the novel shape—and was shaped in turn—by the prevailing social, political, and aesthetic preoccupations of the time? What accounts for the Victorian novel’s abiding hold on us today? In addressing these questions, we will read different genres of the Victorian novel, the bildungsroman, the “industrial” novel, the sensation novel, and the fin de siècle gothic. In doing so, we will also focus on enhancing our analytical skills: close reading, developing a thesis, and structuring an argument. It will appear as an indepent study in my transcript
Design Radicals: The Bay Area Counterculture Legacy (Fall 2022)
Professor Greg Castillo
This seminar examines the historical legacy of symbiotic countercultures that emerged in the Bay Area during the ‘long-‘60s.’ Intersectional maker cultures linked the parallel projects of revolutionary social transformation mounted by ecofreaks, cyberfreaks, and ‘outlaw builders’; Black, Chicano, and Native American activists; lesbians and gay men; and children and ‘free school’ educators. Course readings from Design Radicals: Spaces of Bay Area Counterculture (Univ. of Minnesota Press, forthcoming) explore topics including the spatial politics ‘liberated territories’ at occupied spaces like People’s Park and Alcatraz, hand crafted architecture and the ‘Outlaw Builder,’ the ‘ecofreak’ and the birth of ecological consciousness, underground publishing as consciousness raising media, political posters as a protest medium, LSD as a catalyst of cultural breakthroughs, and the spatial tactics of intentional communities. Our discussions will assess these practices for their potential as a ‘usable past’ capable of informing and inspiring design radicals in the present.
Novel in India (Spring 2022)
Professor Rahul Parson
An undergraduate seminar which looked at a variety of novels from early modern and modern India with a special emphasis on Bengal. Lecture and discussion on the novel as it arose on the Indian subcontinent during the 19th and 20th centuries, using English translations and original works in English. Critical discussion of the novel as a modern genre adapted to local conditions and coexisting with older traditions of writing. Examines the novel as a window on Indian modernities. Interpretation of Indian society, culture, and history through literature.
STS Research Seminar (Spring 2022)
Professor Hannah Zeavin
A seminar where we worked through the methodologies of producing research with each student producing a journal length article for review.
This course will cover methods and approaches for students considering professionalizing in the field of STS, including a chance for students to workshop written work.
Topics in Science and Technology Studies (Fall 2021)
Professor Hannah Zeavin
This is an introductory graduate level course in Science and Technology Studies where we worked through the basics of STS, both through new and old scholarship. We worked on the evolving nature of STS and how this new multi-disciplinary 'discipline' is established.
Professor Rahul Parson
This is a graduate seminar in Hindi where we worked through the various forms of Hindi literature and its urban imaginaries and how we can see it in context of liberalization and beyond. One of the central texts was Kalikatha by Alka Saraogi.
Literature plays a crucial role in representing and imagining the city, providing acute observations on urban life and social processes (David Harvey). Novels, in particular, explore urban desires and motivations in relation to social forms, institutions, and conventions. The class will read excerpts from recent novels in Hindi, published after the 1991 initiation of neoliberal reforms.
Asian Studies Pro-seminar (Fall 2021 and Sping 2022)
Professor Andrew Jones
In the first semester of the pro-seminar, we discussed various research methods that helped us proceed in our career as researchers and academics in area studies. In the second semester, we worked on different research methodologies, and how we can apply that in Asia centric scholarship.