For the fourth year, NYU Prague will host students from Abu Dhabi for “J-term”- a three week course in January taught by professors from New York. This year we will have 2 classes: Is Liberalism Dead? The rise and decline of the master idea of our time taught by James Traub and Socialism on Screen, taught by Bruce Grant.
James Traub, who taught the same course last year, is a well-known American journalist. He has written extensively about international affairs and education, as well as many analyses of the post-Trump era. He was a staff writer for The New Yorker and he has written for The NewYork Review of Books, The Atlantic Monthly, the National Review and Foreign Affairs. He just came out with the book What Was Liberalism?: The Past, Present, and Promise of a Noble Idea, and you can borrow it from the NYU Prague library.
Bruce Grant is the chair of the Anthropology Department at the College of Arts and Science at NYU. He’s a specialist on cultural politics in the former Soviet Union, studying the Sovietization of indigenous people and the way the Caucasus has been presented in Russian popular imagination. His class will focus on how the Soviets used cinema to promote political ideas to the population at large, becoming, in the words of Trotsky, the government’s new church.
Both courses will take place from January 6-24.