Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

English Romantic Poetry: Art, Crisis, and the Radical Imagination | How can we understand English poetry in the wake of the French Revolution? | July BISR Online Courses

English Romantic Poetry: Art, Crisis, and the Radical Imagination - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Romanticism arrived in England with the publication of The Lyrical Ballads (1798), a radical work of poetry, written “in the real language of men,” which drew impetus from the same egalitarian ideals that spurred the architects of the French Revolution. Yet, as the Revolution turned to Terror, i...

Powers of Speech: Language and Politics | What are the political valences of different speech acts, including slogans, commands, insults, and lying? | June BISR Online Courses

Powers of Speech: Language and Politics - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Ever since the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle defined the human being both as a political animal (zoon politikon) and as an animal endowed with speech and reason (zoon logon echon), the relationship between our linguistic capacities and our forms of collective life has preoccupied philosophers....

Q***r NYC: Before Stonewall (In-Person) | How and why did New York City become a transnational center of q***r culture and performance? | June BISR Courses at St Lydia's

Q***r NYC: Before Stonewall (In-Person) - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research On June 28, 1969, legend has it that Sylvia Rivera threw the first brick at Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn, igniting gay liberation across the globe. In truth, it was probably a Molotov cocktail, and she was likely not the first to throw one. But more importantly, the story of gay liberation in New Yor...

Q***r NYC: Before Stonewall | How and why did New York City become a transnational center of q***r culture and performance? | June BISR Online Courses

Q***r NYC: Before Stonewall - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research On June 28, 1969, legend has it that Sylvia Rivera threw the first brick at Manhattan’s Stonewall Inn, igniting gay liberation across the globe. In truth, it was probably a Molotov cocktail, and she was likely not the first to throw one. But more importantly, the story of gay liberation in New Yor...

Inequality in the 21st Century | What characterizes the new global plutocracy, and how do elites reproduce themselves across borders? | June BISR Online Courses

Inequality in the 21st Century - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research The economist Branko Milanovic has remarked that “reading about global inequality is nothing less than reading about the economic history of the world.” While human societies have always exhibited material inequality, the issue reemerged after the 2008 financial crisis as a central topic of publ...

Gender and the Ancient World | How can we recover voices and bodies that earlier scholarship ignored, misidentified, or rendered invisible? | June BISR Online Courses

Gender and the Ancient World - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Who decides what bodies meant in the past? When it comes to how archaeologists determine the gender, status, or identity of a person, heteronormative assumptions have long guided their hands. Such perspectives have led to graves being identified as male because they contain weapons, or burials label...

Emanation and Return: an Introduction to Neoplatonism (In-Person) | In this course, we will explore Neoplatonism as theory and practice, centering our investigation on the Enneads of Plotinus | June Courses at BISR Central

Emanation and Return: an Introduction to Neoplatonism (In-Person) - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research “Strive to bring the god in ourselves back to the God in the All.” These were the parting instructions of Plotinus, the charismatic Egyptian philosopher who, in the third century CE, brought a novel and potent form of Platonism from Alexandria to Rome, where it would achieve prominence among the...

The Cultural Front: Labor, Culture, Ideology (In-Person) | What types of new voices did this movement cultivate and support, how did they transform understandings of labor, “the people,” solidarity, and aesthetic forms? | June BISR Courses at Interference Archive

The Cultural Front: Labor, Culture, Ideology (In-Person) - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research In the oft lamented history of the American Left, the decade of the 1930s shines through as a unique moment of political potential realized in widespread mobilization and influence. Responding to the global crisis set in motion by the Great Depression, labor activists, policy intellectuals, and crea...

Free Speech: Law, Repression, and Erasure | What legal and political tools do we have—and what tools are needed—to guarantee a free and democratic society? | June BISR Online Courses

Free Speech: Law, Repression, and Erasure - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research The Supreme Court has written that the freedom protected by the First Amendment—of speech, of the press, of association, of assembly and petition—is “the matrix, the indispensable condition of nearly every other form of freedom.” And yet, from the banning of books in schools to online hate a...

Kierkegaard: Either/Or | What does it look like to orient one’s life around fundamental values, whether the aesthetic, ethical, religious, or political? | June BISR Online Courses

Kierkegaard: Either/Or - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or: a Fragment of Life is a profound, and highly experimental, philosophical investigation into two essential modes of human existence: the aesthetic and the ethical. The first volume, Either, comprises the miscellaneous papers of an anonymous Aesthete: it contains apho...