Open Courses

Corinne Doria is a historian specializing in the social history of medicine and disability. She received a doctoral degree in Modern History at Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the University of Milan in 2012. In 2013-2014, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Paris-4. She taught Modern History Paris 1 University and Disability Studies at Sciences-Po Paris from 2014 to 2018. In 2019 she was Associate Research Fellow at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies at Columbia University. She authored four books and more than twenty peer-reviewed articles.

In recent years, medical schools have been more and more integrating humanity courses in their curricula. The reason: equip future physicians with skills and competencies useful to improve the doctor-patient relationship; provide a better understanding of delicate ethical questions; enable them to maintain their professional identity in the face of the increasing role of technology.

What can humanities teach us about health, illness and care? How can history, philosophy, literature, and the arts have an impact on medicine and vice-versa?

Through the analysis of a broad range topics related to human condition and a variety of different sources (literature, art-works, movies, archives), this course will examine how arts and humanities offer different ways of thinking about health, illness, healing, and care, which are complementary rather than opposed to the scientific ones.

This team-taught open course is a series of lectures about temporal imagination in popular historical and science fiction films. Exploring narratives of our past and present in contemporary cinema, we will discuss a series of recently produced historical feature films about Russia and Western Europe, and science fiction films. The course will go beyond true/false or realistic/nonrealistic dichotomies often applied to analyses of historical narratives and future scenarios. We will examine how these narratives tell about and reveal contemporary convictions, imaginations, and anxieties. We will consider how these imaginary temporalities enable both escapism and, potentially, cognitive estrangement to reassess contemporary situations. This open course also offers an elective seminar for SAS Students.

Evgeny Grishin is a historian of Europe and Russia in the period of early modernity with particular interests in language, religion, and materiality.

duskin drum is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, performer, and the author of “Ecology. Technology. Anime” online course.

Peter Jones is a cultural historian, specializing in the religious, political, and intellectual life of medieval Europe (c.500–1500).

Erika Wolf is a visual historian with particular interest in modernism and modernity, Soviet visual culture, photography, propaganda, and cross-cultural representation. A native New Yorker, from 2013 to 2018 she taught in the department of History and Art History at the University of Otago (New Zealand. She completed a bachelor degree in Sociology and Science in Human Affairs at Princeton University, was a fellow of curatorial studies at the Whitney Museum, and completed her graduate education in both Art History and Russian & Eastern European Studies at the University of Michigan. She has received numerous international fellowships and has contributed to exhibition projects at international art museums, including the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Art Institute of Chicago. She is presently completing an introduction to the history of photography in Russia for Reaktion Press.

This lecture series provides an overview of photography from pre-photographic times to the present. We will explore various approaches to the historical study of photography: its emergence as a technology for documenting the world, its evolution in relation to other art forms, its connection to various fields of knowledge (such as medicine, anthropology, history, post-colonial studies), its role in the development of mass culture, and its use as a means of social control. Lectures will consider the photographic image in a range of contexts, including art, advertising, journalism, and propaganda, and will explore the social, political and ethical consequences of photographic media in contemporary culture.

Giacomo Andreoletti received his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Milan in 2017. During the Academic Year 2015-16, he was visiting scholar at Columbia University (New York). So far his research has focused around issues on the metaphysics of time, time travel and the problem of free will. A list of publications can be found here.

Time has always made philosophers wonder and will continue to do so until the end of time. For although our everyday conception of time might seem unproblematic, once we ask questions about the nature of time we soon realize it is an endless source of puzzlement. Time travelers can help us. They travel through time and they can tell us what time is like, or maybe they will just generate further puzzles about time.

This open course is an introduction to some issues related to the philosophical debates around time and time travel. On the one hand, philosophy of time can shed some light on whether time travel is possible and how it would look like. On the other hand, thinking about time travel can enhance our understanding of time. While dealing with time and time travel, we will also address issues such as: causation, identity over time, changing the past, time loops, fate, and free will.

Margret Grebowicz is an environmental philosopher researching exhaustion and desire, as bodies, places, relationships, and meanings interact at different levels of life. She is the author of four books: ‘Whale Song’ (Bloomsbury Academic P), ‘The National Park to Come’ (Stanford University P), ‘Why Internet Porn Matters’ (Stanford University P), and ‘Beyond the Cyborg: Adventures with Donna Haraway’ /with Helen Merrick/ (Columbia University P). Originally from Poland, she received her Ph.D. from Emory University, and taught philosophy for two decades in the US before coming to SAS. During one of those decades, she also worked as a professional jazz vocalist.

The news announce constantly that we are living on a dying planet. For many people, this overwhelms not just our ability to “do something” about it, but even our ability to think it. Sometimes, the disaster seems too immense, too intertwined with every aspect of life for a mere individual to grasp. Other times, we are told to take it one small step at a time, and that every one of our actions makes a difference. Neither position helps us understand the present or imagine the future.

This course introduces multiple critical paradigms for thinking about the environment and one’s relationship to it. Rather than trying to describe the environmental crisis, as if the problem were singular, this course illustrates how different environmental problems engender different cognitive and imaginative frameworks. The goal of the course is not to arrive at a comprehensive, total understanding of environment, but instead to explore the dynamics among these competing frameworks. Should we strive to reconcile the tensions between them? Can their differences be productive for thought, action, or both?

Oksana Bulgakowa is a professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. She graduated from the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow and obtained a doctor's degree at the Humboldt University of Berlin (1982); taught at the University of Music and Theatre Leipzig, the Free University of Berlin, Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley.

Oksana Bulgakowa is the curator of the new joint master’s program by the School of Advanced Studies and the UTMN Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences and "Digital Cultures and Media Production".

The course “Film history” introduces you to alternative models of cinema history based on the most interesting films representing different countries and different ages.

Zachary Reyna is a political theorist working in the environmental humanities and cultural study of law. He received his PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University (USA), where his dissertation offered an ecological reading of the natural law tradition that rethought the concept of political obligation for contemporary environmentalist politics. He he taught political theory and environmental thought at Johns Hopkins and Towson University, and is the assistant editor of the journal “Political Theory”. He is now professor in political theory at SAS.

Louis Vervoort studied physics in Ghent (MSc in engineering physics), Marseille (PhD) and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (post-doc). Already in this period his main interests shifted from classic physics to the foundations of the field – a research area in which the fundamental axioms are questioned and investigated. This brought him naturally to philosophy, which he studied at the University of Montreal (PhD). Some of the advantages of working in philosophy are that it allows to address a broad range of interests, and that it somehow incites to look for the unifying ideas, the fashionable ‘big picture’ (He will leave this little idea here very vague). Philosophy also encourages to ask ethical questions on research, technology, science and society. If he would have to summarize his most eye-opening experience of these last years, then it would be the observation that, at the very fundamental level, science and philosophy are solidly intertwined, and can greatly inspire each other. An idea popular among interdisciplinary practitioners, but not yet popular enough in other communities!

Maxim Alyukov is a researcher with the Public Sociology Laboratory and a PhD Candidate in Faculty of Arts at the University of Helsinki. He started his career as an engineer and then turned to psychoanalysis: Maxim was a curator at Freud’s Dream Museum, and an editor, author or translator working for several Russian journals focused on Lacanian psychoanalysis. Currently he takes part in a number of PS Lab projects on civil society, protest movements, and war in the post-communist world, as well as working on a dissertation about Russian TV viewers during the political crisis in Ukraine. Maxim holds Specialist degrees in engineering from the State Marine Technical University, and in psychology from the East European Institute of Psychoanalysis, as well as an MA degree in sociology from the European University at St.Petersburg.

Peter Jones is a cultural historian, specializing in the religious, political, and intellectual life of medieval Europe (c.500–1500). Originally from the United Kingdom, where he gained both a BA and an MA from the University of Bristol, Peter received his PhD in History from New York University in 2014. From 2014–16 he was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute, University of Toronto, and from 2016–17 he worked as a visiting scholar at the Pembroke Center, Brown University. He has published a range of articles on medieval cultural history in academic journals and edited volumes, and has recently completed a book manuscript exploring the role of humor in the political and religious revolutions of the twelfth century.

At the School of Advanced Studies, duskin drum is a founding professor and researcher in the Material Relations research group. He is an interdisciplinary scholar, artist, performer, and woodsman. In 2017, he completed a doctorate in Performance Studies with designated emphases in Native American Studies, and Science and Technology Studies at University of California, Davis. In 2005, he earned a Bachelors of Arts studying interdisciplinary theatre and performance at Evergreen State College . For 15 years, duskin has been making art and performance in Asia, Europe and the Americas.