Lecture Classes in Online

It's true! As women we’re full of compassion, we’re intuitive and we want to help! We want to make things better!! But in the business world, women are sometimes accused of being TOO SENSITIVE, or even worse, “too emotional”. What a career killer! So where do we draw the line? How do we overcome career setbacks and professional disappointments...

I don't know who needs to hear this, but YOU ARE YOUR OWN RESCUE. Focus on your own growth and thrive in ANY environment! In my “Accountability & Goal-Setting Hacks For The WIN!” In this 60-minute class, you learn: Misconceptions & Truths about accountability and Goal-Setting (get my accountability checklist, too).⠀ The key components...

Gershom Scholem (1897–1982) may be the best known scholar of Jewish Studies in the twentieth century. Above all he is associated with launching the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism. However, Scholem’s study of mysticism was only part of his much broader, far more engaged and systematic thinking about questions of contemporary politics...

Shocks and Phantasmagoria: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project Walter Benjamin once wrote that The Arcades Project was “the theater of all my struggles and all my ideas.” Never completed and well over a decade in the making, The Arcades Project takes on the presentation and history of an entire era and place: the Parisian...

Described by Albert Camus as “the only great spirit of our times,” envied by Simone de Beauvoir for “having a heart that could beat right across the world,” and denounced by Susan Sontag as an anti-Semite, Simone Weil has been a subject of widespread fascination since her death in 1942 from (reputedly) self-starvation, undergone in solidarity...

Is there a distinction between art and life? Can art express the passions that we repress in life? Can our imaginations bypass the control of reason? Does art contain revolutionary potential? These are some of the questions we’ll be exploring in Introduction to Surrealism. Born as a literary movement in the wake of the horrors of World War I, surrealism...

“Calculus,” wrote the mathematician John Von Nuemann, “was the first achievement of modern mathematics … it is difficult to overestimate its importance.” What does it mean to say calculus initiated modern mathematics? Beyond mathematics, what influence has calculus had on the wider world? Most importantly, what is calculus—and why does...

“Technology, from slave ships to voting machines, has always played a role in the subjugation and control of black people.” So writes sociologist Rayvon Fouché, reflecting on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the “technological failure” of the New Orleans levees. Across contexts like media, medicine, infrastructure, and labor, technologies,...

Is Sexual Liberation Possible? Freedom, Repression, and Capitalism Is sexual “liberation” possible in a capitalist society? Or, is repression, beyond any political impediments to sexual freedom, an inescapable function of the structure of capitalism—of laboring, domestic reproduction, and commercialization? Can anything be done to improve the...

Sociology and Social Control: an Introduction to Émile Durkheim For the pioneering sociologist Émile Durkheim, modern Western society was wracked by a seeming paradox: the more autonomous individuals become, freed from old forms of social control, the more they come to depend on society and the bonds that unite its members. But, what makes a society...

“If workers produce commodities,” the feminist theorist Tithi Bhattacharya asked, “who produces the workers?” It’s a question that lies at the heart of Social Reproduction Theory, a body of Marxist-feminist critique that seeks to identify and describe the labor that’s required to reproduce workers and, as such, capitalist society as a whole....

From the underground League of the Just of the 1840s through the First and Second International to the rise of mass workers parties at the turn of the 20th century, Friedrich Engels labored tirelessly to turn Marxism into a revolutionary force. Sacrificing his own intellectual ambitions to support Marx, Engels took on the role of sounding board, commentator,...

The Making of the Soviet Union: Revolution, State, and Society With its call for materialist human emancipation, the founding of the Soviet Union sent shockwaves throughout the world. Internationalist at the outset, it provided the ground for thinking about and legislating socialist, feminist, and anti-colonial values simultaneously. The Soviet state...

Hammer and Hoe: Communism and Anti-Racism in the American South “Communist” may be something of a curse word in the United States, but for many Black people the U.S. Communist Party was an entry point into politics. Often excluded from the two major political parties, both of which were expressly or tacitly committed to maintaining white supremacy,...

Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: Money, Trust, and Deception Confidence is necessary. Without it, economic transactions, legal contracts, intimacy, morality, and any form of social order would be impossible. Yet, in a world of self-interested strangers and distant institutions, how do we trust, befriend, and believe? Herman Melville’s ...