Liberal Studies at New York University is seeking Arts and Cultures instructors to join our adjunct faculty pool. Successful candidates will be contacted on an as-needed basis to fill section openings in the Liberal Studies Core, if and when such openings arise. Candidates must be prepared to deliver course content remotely if conditions do not allow in-person instruction.

Liberal Studies provides a unique interdisciplinary educational experience to undergraduate students. The Liberal Studies Core consists of a two-year interdisciplinary global curriculum drawing on great works across civilizations. The Global Liberal Studies Bachelor of Arts, one of NYU's premier liberal arts degrees, builds on the global core with an upper division interdisciplinary set of concentrations that direct students toward different areas of global study.

The three courses in the Arts and Cultures sequence (described in further detail below) investigate literary, musical, visual, and performing arts from prehistory to modernity in a global framework. In each course, instructors train students in the methods of close reading of various types of artistic texts and the practice of interdisciplinary modes of analysis. Students are encouraged to consider modes by which cultural transmission occurs and to make cross-cultural connections between various parts of the world. Classes meet twice weekly, for 75 minutes per class session. 

Arts and Cultures Across Antiquity

This course introduces the arts from their origins to the end of antiquity, as defined for these purposes by the roughly coincident dissolutions of the Gupta, Han, and Western Roman empires, focusing on how individuals and social relations are shaped in literature, the visual, plastic, and performing arts, and through music. Conceptions of the divine, the heroic, power and disenfranchisement, beauty, love, gender, and sexuality may be examined within the context of the art and literature of East and South Asia, the Mediterranean world, and contiguous regions (such as Germania, Nubia, and Mesopotamia).

Students must complete a total of 3000-3750 words of graded writing or the equivalent, a midterm, and a final exam.

Arts and Cultures towards the Crossroads 

Arts and Cultures towards the Crossroads examines literature, the visual arts, and music produced within diverse cultural traditions across the globe, from the rise of Islam at the beginning of the 7th century to the global empire building of the late 17th/early 18th centuries. The course explores the distinctive conventions and traditions of different media and the development of cultural traditions from their ancient foundations to the early modern period through successive influences and assimilations, both local and external. Diverse cultural traditions are also considered in relation to one another: by direct comparisons of works even in the absence of historical cultural contact; by consideration of mutual interactions, exchanges, and contestations; by the assertion of cultural dominance; and by resistance to such assertions.

Students must complete a total of 3000-3750 words of graded writing or the equivalent, a midterm, and a final exam.

Arts and Cultures of Modernity

This course explores the arts from the late 17th/early 18th-century to the post-World War II era, examining how they define and reflect both local cultural views and rapidly shifting global understandings of the world. The course considers how the diverse conceptions and conditions of modernity both shaped and were shaped by the arts around the world. Many of the issues pertinent to the course -- industrialization/urbanization; the dislocations, disasters, and opportunities that followed cross-cultural contact; colonialism, decolonization, conflicts of political ideology, and liberation struggles; fundamental redefinitions of mind, language, gender, and sexual identity -- have had very different effects in various parts of the world.  Instructors encourage students to explore what it means to study the arts from global perspectives and what "globalization" itself has meant and means in the context of the arts.

Students must complete a total of 3750-5000 words of graded writing or the equivalent, a midterm, and a final exam.