Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Upcoming Classes in NYC
The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, established in 2011, offers liberal arts education and research opportunities to local communities while supporting young scholars. With a mission to engage various intellectual traditions, the institute aims to provide accessible education and foster active, engaged citizens.
11 results
Louis Althusser: Ideology and Repression (In-Person)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 275 Madison Ave, New York, NY
Unpack the power of ideology through the influential lens of Louis Althusser. Examine the interplay between repressive and ideological state apparatuses, and explore how social orders reproduce themselves. Engage with key commentaries to understand Althusser’s enduring impact on radical theory and political struggle.
Ruins: Beauty, Feeling, and Catastrophe (In-Person)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 315 E 91st St, New York, NY
Discover the allure and complexity of ruins as aesthetic objects, conceptual phenomena, and spatial practices in this thought-provoking course. Delve into the cultural, political, and historical significance of ruins, exploring their representation in literature, art, and architecture. Uncover the transformative power of ruins and their relation to preservation, environmental destruction, and adaptive reuse.
Journals and Diaries: Life, Privacy, and Literature
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 208 West 13th Street, New York, NY
Delve into the intimate world of writers' diaries, where life and literature intertwine. This course explores how authors from Virginia Woolf to Sheila Heti use diaries to navigate creative processes, confront personal struggles, and resist linear storytelling, offering unique insights into the craft of writing and the anxieties of memory and legacy.
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Annie Ernaux: The Years and The Use of Photography (In-Person)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 79 Chambers Street, New York, NY
Explore Annie Ernaux’s The Years and The Use of Photography, two groundbreaking works that navigate the intersection of personal memory and collective experience. Examine the drive to document, the tension between private and public sentiment, and the aesthetic representation of reality. This course offers a profound look at postwar European identity and its enduring imagery.
Puppets and Automata: Art, Anxiety, and the Uncanny
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 315 E 91st St, New York, NY
Explore the captivating world of puppets and automata, delving into their roles as artistic marvels and cultural symbols of fascination and unease. From Italian puppet theater to avant-garde film and radical productions, uncover their impact on subjectivity, representation, and the boundaries between artifice and humanity.
Philosophy of History
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 30 Irving Pl, New York, NY
Embark on a journey through the ages to unravel the mysteries of historical philosophy. From Enlightenment ideals to modern critiques, explore divergent perspectives on the purpose and trajectory of history. Delve into the implications of these philosophical inquiries for contemporary politics, science, and culture, and ponder the significance of historical narratives in shaping our understanding of the world.
Words, Words, Words: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Its Interpreters
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 30 Irving Pl, New York, NY
Dive into the world of Shakespeare's Hamlet and its myriad interpretations, exploring themes of love, desire, melancholy, guilt, and political intrigue. Engage with critics from Goethe to Freud, examining how their reflections reveal as much about the critics themselves as the play. Analyze how Hamlet continues to shape our understanding of human existence and the act of interpretation itself.
From Radical Doubt to Absolute Certainty
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 18 Bridge St, New York, NY
Descartes’ Meditations: From Radical Doubt to Absolute Certainty “To demolish everything completely and start again right from the foundations…to devote myself sincerely and without reservation to the general demolition of my opinions.” This is the project that René Descartes sets forth in the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy: to dismantle all acquired belief, then start science over from scratch. In this course, we will...
The Good, the Bad, and the Evil
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: an Introduction to Moral Philosophy Why should we be good? What makes an action moral—and how can we know? If an act is moral here and now, is it necessarily moral there and then? Is goodness in some way connected to happiness? And, what constitutes a moral judgment—is it an exercise of reason, or merely an expression of feeling? In this class, we’ll investigate the nature and scope of morality as it’s been...
Fiction and Inner Life: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Can words describe what Virginia Woolf calls “the daily drama of the body”? Can literature verbalize our interiority: physical and spiritual change, the home, the mind, and the relationships between them? In her celebrated novel Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf’s eponymous protagonist is plagued with perpetual anxiety: Clarissa Dalloway is always on the verge of sickness, waking up on a sunny morning with a feeling of “terror,” “overwhelming incapacity,”...
The Abyss I am Made Of: an Intro to Clarice Lispector
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
The Abyss I am Made Of: an Introduction to Clarice Lispector Compared over the course of her life to Marlene Dietrich, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, a sphinx, a she-wolf, a “foreigner on earth,” and a hurricane, the Jewish Brazilian Clarice Lispector, born to Ukrainian parents who fled to Brazil from interwar pogroms, made an indelible stamp on the literature of her adopted homeland—and...
God or Nature: Spinoza’s Ethics
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
Discover the revolutionary philosophy of Spinoza as we delve into his magnum opus, the Ethics. Explore Spinoza's monistic materialism and his groundbreaking notion of God or Nature. Uncover the enduring legacy of Spinoza's ideas across philosophy, politics, science, and religion.
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (In-Person)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 45 Main St , Brooklyn, NY
Delve into the world of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a masterpiece exploring love, lust, and the social upheavals of 19th-century Russia. This course examines the novel’s portrayal of family, gender, religion, and modernity, addressing how personal choices intertwine with political and societal shifts during a period of transformation.
The Subway: Urbanism, Infrastructure, and Social Life
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 411 S 5th St, Brooklyn, NY
Explore the intricate relationship between urbanism, infrastructure, and social life through the lens of the New York City subway. Investigate its historical, sociological, and economic impact, from its role in urban expansion to its influence on everyday life and politics. Delve into the subway's cultural representations and envision the kind of life it enables and could enable.
Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 68 Jay St, Brooklyn, NY
What does it mean to be human in the world today? Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition (1958) is a provocative treatise on what it means to live on earth and share the world in common. Her study, originally intended to be titled Amor Mundi (Love of the World), investigates the central activities of human life—labor, work, action—and their corresponding realms—private, social, public. For Arendt, The Human Condition is about protecting spaces...
LaborTalks: Democracy in Chains
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 247 West 37th St, New York, NY
The roots of neoliberalism are both political and intellectual. The post-World War II right-wing reaction to the New Deal and various emancipatory social movements, such as the Civil Rights movement, sought to not only elect conservative politicians and enact conservative policies, but also change the very rules of democratic governance—as historian Nancy MacLean writes in her highly lauded book Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical...
The Singularity: AI & the Post-Human Future
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 119 N 11th St, Brooklyn, NY
Full Course Name: The Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Post-Human Future Alan Turing, whose Turing Test set the initial standard for artificial intelligence, mused towards the end of his life on the prospects of a truly superintelligent machine: “it seems probable that once the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers…At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to...
Virginia Woolf: Embodiment and Novel Experiments
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 230 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY
In an essay called “Flying Over London,” Virginia Woolf imagines herself as a passenger on an airplane passing over the city. Her imagined journey becomes an occasion to think about both the lures of a fixed, constant subjectivity and the shifting currents of an unstable modernity. This fraught relationship with the self (and the flight from it) offers a crystalline lens through which to view Woolf’s experiments in writing and thinking the...
Poetry and Poetics: An Introduction
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 230 5th Ave, Brooklyn, NY
What is poetry and what is it good for? These questions have long haunted practitioners and readers of this “beautiful and pointless” art, to quote the contemporary critic David Orr. But “beautiful and pointless” were not always the terms of the debate. On the contrary, these questions about what poetry is and what it does mean something profoundly different in our contemporary moment than they meant in centuries past. Nor is this sense of...
Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research See all classes by this school @ 323 Dean St, New York, NY
This course will consider these questions by examining Nietzsche’s distinctive and radical conception of philosophy and its history, as well as his views on the nature and value of knowledge and truth. We will begin by considering how Nietzsche’s attack on popular morality and philosophical moral theory go hand in hand with bold theses in metaphysics and epistemology. We will ask: How should we understand the difference between a morality and...
Reviews of Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
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James Joyce: Ulysses
It was not easy, but I didn't expect it to be. I got some very useful insight into the book, which will help in my second reading. I will be looking for more classes taught by Professor Porte. -
Proust in Time: The Prisoner
pretentious, and unwelcoming professor -
God or Nature: Spinoza’s Ethics
This was a great class. I'm excited to continue to take BISR classes every month for the rest of my life! LOL I'm serious. -
The Singularity: AI & the Post-Human Future
Required more structure. Seemed more of a reading review club, than an instructional class. -
Jorge Luis Borges: Mysticism, Fiction, and Politics
Teacher was knowledgeable, good readings, active participants. -
Signal and Noise: An Introduction to Statistics
Excellent class. Excellent instructor. Raphaële breathed life into stats. Very fun class! -
Leo Tolstoy: Anna Karenina (In-Person)
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The Subway: Urbanism, Infrastructure, and Social Life
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Vergil’s Aeneid: Myth, Empire, and Ruin
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Mining: Industry, Ecology, and Capitalism
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Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition
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Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady
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Don DeLillo: Underworld
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Freedom, Politics, and the Individual
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The Mahabharata: From Exile to Apocalypse
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Feminist Science Fiction
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The Good, the Bad, and the Evil
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An Introduction to Schopenhauer
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Kant’s Critical Aesthetics
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Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition
