Jul 6th
6:30–9:30pm EDT
Meets 4 Times
9 classes have spots left
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Ovid begins his Metamorphoses, “My soul would speak of bodies changed into new forms,” and it is the great theme of physical transformation that unites the poem’s many myths: humans becomes animals and plants, and vice versa; humans becomes stones and constellations; and humans change their sex. No poem from antiquity has so influenced Western European literature and art. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dante creatively raided Ovid’s tales...
Thursday Jul 6th, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time
(4 sessions)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Early anthropology had a sex problem. By day it studied kinship—how legitimately procreative sex produces a society—collected intimate items, and photographed naked subjects; by night, it hung around corners, pestered and menaced its way into intimate spaces. These early anthropologists were not alone. Their settler peers developed obsessions in schoolgirls and purchased wives, in erotic genres of parlor photography, in romantic rape literature,...
Sunday Jun 11th, 2–5pm Eastern Time
(4 sessions)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Friend to Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Leo Strauss, Gershom Scholem may be the best known scholar of Jewish Studies in the 20th 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, and far more engaged and systematic thinking, about questions of contemporary politics and the Jewish historical condition. An...
Thursday Jun 8th, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time
(4 sessions)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Though Gayl Jones is one of the most important writers of the 20th Century, with work that spans prose and poetic examinations of Black women’s lives all across the world, the publication of her 1999 novel Mosquito was met with significant ambivalence. Henry Louis Gates refers to Mosquito as Gayl Jones’ “dissertation”—an imitation of actual oral storytelling, rather than “a linear narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.”...
Monday Jun 5th, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time
(4 sessions)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is, perhaps above all else, a book about books. The title character’s voracious consumption of books of chivalry drives him mad, leading him to interpret windmills as giants, common inns as majestic castles, and prostitutes as highborn damsels. In addition to the medieval romances that Don Quixote reads, a variety of texts in different forms populate the narrative: Arabic manuscripts, short stories...
Wednesday Jun 14th, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time
(4 sessions)
Thousands of classes. No expiration. You choose the $ amount. Select a category or let the recipient pick.
Reclaiming our Sacred Texts: Reading the Bible in Pride Month In this queer-affirming class, we will explore the love stories of David and Jonathan and Ruth and Naomi. No text study (or even belief in God!) required — just bring your pride and an open mind.
Monday Jun 5th, 6:30–7:45pm Eastern Time
(4 sessions)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Feminist science studies scholar Donna Haraway writes: “By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are all cyborgs.” Haraway goes on to argue in her canonical essay, “A Manifesto For Cyborgs,” that to be a cyborg means to live in a world without tidy origin stories or innocent wholeness. Instead, it is about partial connections, complex...
Sunday Jun 11th, 2–5pm Eastern Time
(4 sessions)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
From Capitalist Realism to Acid Communism: an Introduction to Mark Fisher Most of the writings of the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher began their life not as academic papers or monographs or fully wrought essays but as blog posts, online responses, and even internet comments. These writings—including those that would be later collected into his some of his most famous texts—reflect one of the most unique theoretical voices of the early 21st...
Tuesday Jun 13th, 6:30–9:30pm Eastern Time
(4 sessions)
The Writing Studio @ Live Online via Zoom
In this class, you will learn first and foremost that you can write—and write well! In fact you will surprise yourself by the work you’ll be producing. The class is designed to enhance your creativity, imagination and personal voice while also teaching the skills of creative writing—memoir and fiction. This is an ongoing class geared toward those who are committed to writing and will continue this practice overtime....
Jun 5th
6:30–9:30pm PDT
Meets 4 Times
Jun 7th
10am–1pm PDT
Meets 4 Times
Jun 7th
2–5pm PDT
Meets 4 Times
Jun 8th
6:30–9:30pm PDT
Meets 4 Times
Jun 12th
6:30–9:30pm PDT
Meets 4 Times
This class has 46 more dates.
Tap here to see more
Monday Jun 5th, 6:30–9:30pm Pacific Time
(4 sessions)
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Love, Literature, and Destruction: an Introduction to Marguerite Duras Novelist, playwright, and experimental filmmaker, Marguerite Duras resists easy categorization. Despite endless attempts by critics and scholars to claim her for emerging genres and movements, it may be easier to say what she was not: she was not part of the nouveau roman (new novel) movement in France, she was not a forerunner of autofiction, she did not write autobiography,...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Literature: an Introduction to Hélène Cixous How can psychoanalysis be used to understand literature—not as an object of study, but as a mode of experiencing life through reading and writing? For Hélène Cixous, the “French Feminist” perhaps best known for the controversial practice of “feminine writing” (écriture feminine), literature offers a means of engaging and subverting systems of sexual hierarchy...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
How are we to understand loneliness today? It appears that we are facing a mass epidemic of loneliness—one perhaps exacerbated by virological pandemic of COVID-19. Britain has appointed a Minister of Loneliness to counter rising rates of isolation. Approximately 20-43 percent of American adults over the age of 60 experience “frequent or intense loneliness.” And, it is clear from medical research that loneliness has significant health impacts:...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Flannery O’Connor: Literature, Violence, and the American Gothic Over the course of her brief but prolific career, Flannery O’Connor carved out a sui generis place in American letters. An heir to the flowering of Southern literature after Faulkner in its most gothic form, O’Connor also took conscious aim at liberal intellectuals in the North to satirize facile notions of social and racial progress. Writing in prose of great clarity...
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
Shakespeare’s The Tempest: Race, Ecology, and Literature Since its initial performance, The Tempest has become one of Shakespeare’s most widely read, widely performed, and widely critiqued plays. Named for the storm conjured by Prospero in its opening scene, The Tempest depicts wizardry, shipwreck, conspiracy, and slavery—all the while opening up provocative vistas onto utopia, sex, power, commerce, and racial difference....
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research @ Online Classroom
African American Literature in the 21st Century: Race, Aesthetics, and Theory Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved forever changed the course of literary study. But if, as the scholar Kenneth Warren has suggested, 20th-century African American literature was a response to Jim Crow, how do we read the vibrant and diverse output of American American literature—and theory—in the 21st century? Everywhere we turn, we see African American...
Try removing some filters.
Give the perfect gift
Buy a gift card
Want some assistance finding a class?
Get in touch
Explore Our Team Building Experiences
Learn more
More in Life Skills
Get special date and rate options for your group. Submit the form below and we'll get back to you within 2 business hours with pricing and availability.