Night School is a set of online, donation-based classes in the arts and humanities, designed for curious adults, open to everyone. Current and future courses strive to offer a diverse, interdisciplinary curriculum that investigates timely topics through the study of art, music, literature, philosophy, history, anthropology, and politics.
A crucial aspect of our mission is enabling students to take any class they would like regardless of ability to pay. Please sign up for any class that interests you, and pay as much of the suggested donation as you would like to and are able.
If you are a person who believes in our mission but cannot take a class, please considering donating to our scholarship funds so that we can continue to offer classes to everyone on a donation-basis.
“The readings were wildly reassuring, in that they utterly validated, expanded upon, and deepened thoughts I have been having, while articulating facets of the sinister systems in which we live in ways that I had never even considered. They were eye-opening & yell-inducing & got me riled up in all the best (read: rowdiest) ways.”
“The materials and Dr. Andrews' teaching inspired me to write a story that beforehand I didn't even have a concept of needing or wanting to tell. This was truly an intersection of illumination and information that was so relevant to my lived experience that it was transformative.”
"Professor Dahiya's presentation of the material is fantastic; it is engaging, cogent, and most importantly, welcoming and inclusive. Her level of attentiveness is highly welcoming and contributed to my desire to participate. She is warm, humorous, and un-intimidating, and the seminar felt like a safe space to share any and all ideas."
CLASS
Instructor: Dahiya
Online, 6 weeks/2 hrs, Wednesdays, Mar. 3-Apr.7, 7-9 PM EST. Pay what you can; $180 suggested. Open to everyone.
In 1837, German philosopher Wilhem Hegel famously declared that Africa “is no historical part of the world; it has no movement or development to exhibit.” It is instead simply a dark, voluminous landmass in the Southern hemisphere. More recently, in a 2016 TEDtalk, Black feminist theorist Brittney Cooper argues “that if time had a race, it would be white,” and according to author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates, “the defining feature of being drafted into the black race is the inescapable robbery of time.” What does it mean to be outside of history and for time itself to be racialized? What is the relation between power, politics, oppression, and philosophical concepts of space and time? How are time and space experienced under colonialism? What is the spacetime of slavery? In this six-week course, we will explore how “abstract” concepts of space and time are deeply intertwined with histories of racism, colonialism, and the history of enslavement. Together, we will examine how certain philosophical conceptions of space and time actually bolster sexed, raced, and colonial oppression.
We will read and think with those who have been forcibly pushed to the physical and metaphorical margins of society to study what bell hooks calls “the cosmology of the margin” to consider how voices in and from the margins can challenge and subvert the ideas, people, and places we tend to center in our ways of knowing and what we know. Finally, we will also consider how we must radically rethink and challenge an oppressive and restrictive conceptualization of time itself--specifically a linear time where the past has no relation to the present and a universe that is always pre-determined and pre-given in advance—in order create the possibility of a more just and liberatory futures that do not extend or reproduce oppression of the past.
Using landmark readings in the history and philosophy of science, Caribbean anti-colonial philosophy, Black feminist thought, and certain strands of 20th century French philosophy, we will study how the concepts time and space can and must be rethought in order to create new times and spaces where oppressed peoples can not only live but flourish.
Readings will include bell hooks, Brittney Cooper, Rene Descartes, Nicole Fleetwood, Elizabeth Grosz, George Wilhelm Hegel, Ashon T. Crawley, Kara Keeling, Frantz Fanon, Issac Newton, Henri Bergson, and Édouard Glissant.
CLASS
Instructor: Clough
Online, 6 weeks/2 hours, Thursdays Mar. 4-Apr. 8, 6-8 PM EST. Pay what you can, $180 suggested donation. Open to everyone.
Comics is an art form, not a genre. The combination of words and images can tell any kind of story, from intimately personal autobiography to incisive journalism to high fantasy. Many people tend to think of the history of comics as being one and the same as the history of super-hero comic books. However, the history of comics goes much wider and deeper than just one genre. In The Hidden History Of Comics, each week we will look at the development of comics through a different lens and ask how and why one genre became so dominant. We will look at the history of comics distribution and how it affected who could have access to comics. We will examine the parallel history of queer and straight underground comics. We will look at comics' place in the zine revolution of the '80s and '90s and the continuing importance of self-publishing. Some of the topics we will explore include: the rise of comics aimed at children, the gendering of comics, the near exclusion of girls' comics, the role of political and journalistic comics, the importance of memoir comics, and the role of formal innovation in changing our understanding of what comics can be. The instructor will provide ample images and samples for the class, as well as providing a suggested reading list for each week of class. The aim is to allow the class to discover not only the rich tapestry of diverse possibilities present in today's comics scene but also how this was true, yet hidden, for much of the art form's history.
CLASS/WRITING WORKSHOP
***This class and waitlist are FULL. If you are already on the waitlist, you will be notified if a space becomes available.***
Instructor: Andrews
Online, 8 weeks/2 hours, Sundays Mar. 7-Apr. 25, 7-9 PM EST, Pay what you can, $220 suggested donation. Open to everyone.
How do you write your “self”? What are the words that might make you “you” enough to cohere in language? Do we even want to be coherent selves? In this course we’ll explore different versions of “self” (auto) writing that attempt to engage with lived experience and give it voice. What is an autobiography (literally: self-life-writing), and how does it differ from, say, a memoir? What is the point of difference between a “true” story of your life and “autofiction”? And how have writers engaged with theory, philosophy, and other writers to not only write about, but also attempt to theorize their own lives—to give their lives meaning? In this eight-week course, we’ll read into the longer history of autobiography and memoir, while also taking up more contemporary categories such as autofiction, autotheory, and other allied genres. We’ll think about how economic formations determine what “genre” the self’s writing falls into, and how that’s been raced and gendered, too. All of this will be with the ultimate aim of doing our own self-writing. . . whether we come to know our selves better, or in the end, those selves fall apart.
This class will be half seminar and half writing workshop. You should either already have some writing you’re working on or be prepared to develop and share some by the halfway point of the class. By the end of the class, you will have received initial feedback from a group of peers and a second round of feedback from the instructor, with the goal of creating a publishable piece of writing. Readings might include excerpts from: Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince; Helen Keller, The Story of My Life, William Burroughs, Junky, Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain; Samuel R. Delany, The Motion of Light on Water; Karl Knausgaard, My Struggle; Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts and Bluets; Claudia Rankine, Citizen; Percival Everett, Percival Everrett by Virgil Russell; Ben Lerner, 10:04.
CLASS
Instructor: Stillman
Online, 6 weeks/1.5 hrs, Mondays Mar. 8-Apr. 12, 6-7:30 PM EST. Pay what you can; $150 suggested. Open to everyone.
Have you ever wondered where the idea of a “pervert” came from? Would it surprise you to know that it’s actually a pretty recent invention? Given that so many of us believe in things like “normal” people and “normal” sexuality, it’s easy to take those beliefs for granted. The truth, however, is that “normal” had to be invented, and now it might need to be un-invented. In this class we’re going to take a closer look at things like “perversion,” “gender,” and “straight people,” and we’re going to talk about how all of those things are recent, political, and subject to change. Exploring deviance and perversion will bring us into contact with artists like Oscar Wilde and Alison Bechdel, and theorists like Judith Butler and Andrea Long Chu. We’ll look critically at the institutions that sold us on stories about what it means to be “normal” or “healthy,” or what it takes to be a “man” or a “family.” We’ve all been subject to these and other unwritten rules about who and what we’re supposed to be, and the first step toward being free of them, or at least having some say about them, is to understand them. This class is designed to give you a clear, evidence-based account of how categories like “gay” and “straight” or “normal” and “abnormal” were invented, how things were different in the past, and how they can—and will—be different in the future.
CLASS
Instructor: Andrews
Online, 4 weeks/2 hours, Tuesdays Mar. 9-30, 6:30-8:30 PM EST, Pay what you can, $120 suggested donation. Open to everyone.
The recent explosion of Black science fiction imagery—from Janelle Monae’s Dirty Computer to Black Panther—may make it seem like Afrofuturism is new, but imagining Black futures in the US has a long past, and the spaceship has a precedent. As Mark Bould writes, “the ships landed long ago.” In this course, we will take up science critic Alondra Nelson's understanding of Afrofuturism as a series of concerns and imaginaries around Black futures that intervene in the often necropolitical realities of anti-black science, technology, and medicine. Nelson draws her definition from Ishmael Reed’s 1972 novel, Mumbo Jumbo. But as early as 1859, Martin Delany was developing a vision of insurrectionist slaves harnessing the powers of science and medicine. And in 1902, Pauline Hopkins published one of the first works of African American science fiction—long before the genre would take popular hold. From 19th century slave narratives to Sun Ra’s Arkestra to Netflix’s current series Marvel’s Luke Cage, in this four-week course we’ll track the Afrofuturist imaginary in the US in order to understand the deep stakes of envisioning Black futurity in a world so often disposed to Black death. We’ll learn about the history of race- and racist science and how these alternative imaginaries have been crucial in disrupting the prescriptions and supposed “truth” of pseudo (and often just plain bad) science to begin producing alternative futures. We will primarily look at videos, art, and writing, an also deepen our understandings of the cultural imaginaries and histories to which the artists we engage with respond and subvert. There will be some reading (especially the first week) but the majority of our exploration will be in class. In addition to authors, artists, and texts mentione above, we will look at work by: Rammellzee, Basquiat, Lil’ Kim, MF Doom, Samuel Delaney, Nick Cave, and Kodwu Ashun, among others.
CLASS/WRITING WORKSHOP
Instructor: Dove
Online, 8 weeks/2 hours, Tuesdays Mar. 9-Apr.27, 6-8 PM EST, Pay what you can, $220 suggested donation. Open to everyone.
Stories are not explanations. The whole story is the meaning. This writing workshop and discussion-based course will examine what a short story is and the choices we make as writers at the sentence and structural levels. With short stories as our texts, we will read and write with the goal of illuminating what makes a story satisfying or complete. Together we will ask the questions: What makes a short story different from a novel? How do you know what to put into a story and what to leave out? And what, pray tell, is relevant detail?
In this course, you will read and write short stories and will workshop one original story as a class, learning as you write to investigate the dynamic among the story, the world outside the story, the reader and the author. Our analysis will focus on the recursion of language and structure to bring about the “swerve”—i.e. the inevitable conclusion—for every work we encounter. Along the way we will discuss how modern fiction writers engage the writing process and read essays and interviews to expand our understanding of “realistic” fiction and how it interacts with “truth.”
This course will give you the vocabulary and knowledge to evaluate and revise your own writing and to discuss peers’ work and published stories in a critical and thoughtful manner. And you will come away with increased understanding of your individual voice, style, content, and ability for sustained narrative. Susan Steinberg, Sandra Cisneros, Joyce Carol Oates, Edward P. Jones, Flannery O’Connor, Amy Hempel, Lynne Tillman, Javier Marias, Mary Robison, Roxane Gay, Jennifer Egan and Sheila Heti are some of the authors we will likely read.
CLASS
Instructor: Stillman
Online, 4 weeks/2 hours, Sundays Apr. 4-25, 5-7 PM EST, Pay what you can, $120 suggested donation. Open to everyone.
Is there any goal more widely shared or easily recognized than romantic love? To be with someone who is your best friend, but also your favorite lover? A supportive listener, but not an emotional drain? A partner in crime, but one you could open a bank account with? Maybe even have a baby with? All in just one person…? Unlikely as it sounds, most of us seem to rank romantic love among the basic features of a livable life. It’s everywhere, in virtually every commercially successful song, TV show, movie, novel; some might say that romantic love is in every successful life—especially the ones on Instagram. But has it always been this way? So much of what we might get from a whole community of different people—have we always looked for all of it in just one person? The answer, as it turns out, is no. Romantic love is actually a pretty recent invention, and its inventors, for the most part, were artists. In this course we’ll read selections from Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Emily Bronte to study what came before romantic love and how and why it was invented, and we’ll also use more recent works like Schitt’s Creek and the Savage Lovecast to understand what romantic love looks like today. Ultimately, our goal will be to figure out what romantic love is, how it shapes us, and, if we're curious, how we might imagine ways to live our lives that go beyond this singular idea of romantic love.
CLASS/WRITING WORKSHOP
Instructor: Dove
Online, 4 weeks/2 hours, Thursdays April 8-29, 8-10 PM EST, Pay what you can, $150 suggested donation. Open to everyone.
The lyric is a message in a bottle that, as Edward Hirsch, says, “speaks out of a solitude to a solitude.” You write and, across space and time, someone else reads what you have written. In this way, a lyric poem or essay is also a two-way mirror that invites participation from the reader to create meaning from the language on the page.
In this writing course, you will read lyric poetry and essays to internalize the inherent musicality and playfulness of language and find the language that shocks us awake. You will learn some poetic inclinations that can help us ask the questions, “Is it a poem?” and “What makes it a good poem?” Doing so will empower you to form your own poetic truths that are, what Kenneth Koch calls, “sense of a new kind.” With musicality and poetic inclinations as our base, you’ll then write lyric poems and/or essays in ways that what you’re saying is inseparable from how it’s said. You’ll learn how to embrace poetic lying and how to harness fear as a catalyst. Poetry is not explanation, nor is it information. We’ll also explore how the negative capability of poetry can empower us to hone our poetic truths outside of philosophical certainty and investigate what poet Solmaz Sharif calls the “political and aesthetic objectives” of erasure.
In addition to the writers above, we will draw knowledge and empowerment from the likes of
Anne Boyer, Eileen Myles, Audre Lorde, Morgan Parker, Rachel B. Glaser, Heather Christle, Frank O’Hara, Cathy Park Hong, Claudia Rankine, Danez Smith, Patricia Lockwood, Sarah Manguso, Lyn Hejinian, Wendy Xu, Mary Ruefle, Bob Hicok, Sawako Nakayasu, Kate Durbin, Dorothea Lasky, Michelle Chan Brown, and Tommy Pico.
THEORY SEMINAR
(Familiarity with the author, topic, or related material recommended.)
Instructor: Andrews
Online, 4 weeks/1.5 hours, Thursdays Mar. 11-Apr. 1, 8:30-10 PM EST, Pay what you can, $120 suggested donation. Open to everyone.
For over two decades, poet-theorist Fred Moten has been exploring “blackness” as a concept and analytic praxis. His ideas about Black radical aesthetics disrupt static ideas of art and instead think art in terms of improvisation, performance, excess, escape, and inexactitude. His work is wide-ranging, enacting promiscuous engagement with philosophy, visual and performance art, literature, music, and myriad other genres. In this course, we will read through several essays and chapters from Moten’s works on art to try to understand his method and the concepts he develops, as well as the stakes of his Black radical interventions into aesthetic theory. We’ll track his re-valuation of traditionally devalued concepts, such as “objecthood,” “blur,” “the hold,” “debt,” and “the break.” Moten’s writing is challenging and allusive (and often, perhaps purposely, elusive, too!). We’ll work together to attend to his claims and his own performative aesthetic, hoping to catch on—if only temporarily—to his vision of always-emerging life and the possibilities of history and our present moment through Black thought. Readings will be drawn from Moten’s published books and essays, and we’ll watch videos, listen to interviews and readings, too, so we can get a feel for his feel.
THEORY SEMINAR
(Familiarity with the author, topic, or related material recommended.)
Instructor: Dahiya
Online, 6 weeks/2 hrs, Tuesdays, Apr. 6-27, 8-9:30 PM EST. Pay what you can; $120 suggested. Open to everyone.
In a 1994 essay entitled “No Humans Involved,” Black feminist philosopher Sylvia Wynter recounts, how the Los Angeles Police Department in the early 1990s routinely used the acronym “N.H.I.”—or, “no humans involved” when documenting cases of incarcerating young Black men." The problem of racism is often framed as not treating some people as 'fully human.' But the idea of humanity (and just how much of it you have) has a long history of being used for racist scientific, legal, and economic purposes. Black feminist theory, therefore, has given us crucial tools to critique not only the meaning of "the human," but its desirability. What does it mean to be human? How are the origins of the concept of the Human rooted in racialized, sexualized, and colonized violence? How has the philosophical and political idea of the Human functioned as the core logic of Colonialism, slavery, and White Supremacy? How has the category of Human been weaponized to create and justify political, cultural, and social systems of hierarchy and oppression? In this 4-week theory seminar, we will critically examine how the idea of the human has been overrepresented by the figure of “Man,” as well as how it has been critiqued and reimagined through the lineage of Black Feminist Thought. We will carefully examine the violence of humanism, investigating the ways in which the “Human” is based on marking and excluding what is non-human. Can the “Human” be reclaimed in order to affirm the humanity of the oppressed, or should we think of a political-philosophical system that thinks beyond the category of the human? Ultimately, how might we disrupt and imagine alternative frameworks that challenge the colonial and racist logics of humanism and generate new possibilities of political and social life?
Readings will include: Sylvia Wynter, Angela Y. Davis, Ashon T. Crawley, Max Hantel, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Alexander G. Weheliye, Saidiya Hartman, and Katherine McKittrick.
READING GROUP
Instructor: Dahiya
4-weeks/1.5 hours, Tuesdays, Feb. 9-Mar. 2, 8-9:30 PM EST, Pay what you can; $75 suggested donation.
First published in 1997, Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America is a landmark work in Black feminist theory. In it, Hartman challenges the conceptual separation of “slavery” and “freedom.” She argues that we have inherited a narrow concept of freedom that is, paradoxically, not freeing, and the ideas that shape what we understand “freedom” to be—such as individuality, rights, and the subject—put emancipation in a double bind. This means the legacy of slavery and its “afterlife” continue to haunt us today. In this 4-week reading group, we will carefully work through Hartman’s text together. We will ask: how does Hartman’s critique of emancipation help us understand Black life after the purported legal abolition of slavery and reconstruction? What is the relation between Blackness and sexuality? How does Scenes of Subjection allow us to rethink the relation between the racial terror and subjugation of the past and our present?
Image: The nonarrival of black freedom (c. 12.6.84)Oliver L. Jackson, Untitled 12.6.84
READING GROUP.
Instructor: Dahiya
Online, 4 weeks/1.5 hours, Tuesdays Mar. 9-30, 8-9:30 PM EST, Pay what you can, $80 suggested donation. Open to everyone.
Reading Denise Ferreira da Silva , Toward a Global Idea of Race.
First published in 2007, Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race is a groundbreaking investigation of the underlying racial logics of our modern world. Da Silva challenges the commonplace idea that thinking about race is an add-on, an afterthought to our analysis that adds a “dose of oppression.” In lieu of this “add-on” understanding, race—or what she calls the racial—“is the single most important ethico-juridical concept in the global present.” It is anything but an afterthought. In other words, the racial produced and continues to produce modern global space. Over the course of four weeks, we will read alongside da Silva in order to try to understand how “the racial” became such a powerful weapon, and through that, understand the logics and realities of racial violence. Through da Silva, we will gain an understanding of race as a concept that is actually central to not only our history, but also our science, and larger knowledge practices. We will learn how “the analytics of the racial” inform and underlie contemporary conversations about diversity and inclusion, and why racism continues to persist despite the decrying racist acts and calls to end racism. Ultimately, we will use Toward a Global Idea of Race to contemplate da Silva’s aim to put “an end to this world,” or the world as we know it, in pursuit of social justice.
READING GROUP
Instructor: Stillman
Online, 4 weeks/1.5 hours, Sundays Mar. 7-28, 5:30-7 PM EST, Pay what you can, $80 suggested donation. Open to everyone.
Reading Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future.
Since its publication in October 2020, climate activists have hailed Kim Stanley Robinson's novel The Ministry for the Future as required reading for anyone concerned with the global ecological crisis. “If I could get policymakers and citizens everywhere to read just one book this year,” writes Ezra Klein, “it would be Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future.” Featuring a plot that begins in the year 2025 and proceeds for several decades, Bill McKibben nevertheless insists: “It's not science fiction.” That's because The Ministry for the Future is one of the most ambitious, creative, well-researched and well-reasoned attempts ever made to address our current ecological catastrophe. Combining narrative, first-person reporting, critical theory, riddles, think pieces, history and policy, The Ministry for the Future plots a realistic course out of capitalism, neo-imperialism, and petro-patriarchy. Robinson's novel not only diagnoses the causes of climate change, it offers meaningful insight for organization and action, and it provides realistic, evidence-based grounds for hope. Join us, read and discuss one of the most recent and most important pieces of climate fiction out there, and become part of a growing movement that's working to think differently about the global ecosystem and how to save it.
READING GROUP
Instructor: Andrews
Online, 4 weeks/1.5 hours, Tuesdays Apr. 6-27, 6:30-8 PM EST, Pay what you can, $80 suggested donation. Open to everyone.
Reading Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man.
Since its initial publication in 1952, Ralph Ellison’s first and only completed novel, Invisible Man, has been hailed as one of the greatest works of American literature and a crucial commentary on Black life in the Jim Crow US. Over the course of four weeks, we’ll travel with the nameless narrator through four major phases of his life: his time at an all-Black college in the South; his migration north to work in a factory; his experience with a political party known as The Brotherhood; and his entanglement with underground economies and figures, eventually leading him to build his own lair underground. Each week we’ll work carefully through the language of this dense and allusive novel, while simultaneously discussing important but lesser-known aspects of Ellison’s life that impacted his writing. For example, did you know that before becoming a champion of liberal individualism, he was involved with the Communist Party USA? That he loved reading Herman Melville? That he was one of the earliest adopters of the computer and died with over 10,000 unpublished files on his computer? Or that he worked with Richard Wright and Frederic Wertham to establish The LaFargue Clinic, the first psychiatric clinic for Black people in the US…which was literally underground in a basement!? This reading group will give you a chance to read one of the most important novels written in the last century, while giving you the tools and information to understand it at a deeper literary and historical level.
DIRECTOR
Lindsey Andrews is one of the founding owners of Arcana, a tarot-inspired bar and art space in Durham, NC. She has a Ph.D. in English and Certificate in Feminist Studies from Duke University, and a B.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction & Poetry) from the University of Southern California. She has taught classes at Duke University, Vanderbilt University, and North Carolina State University, as well as through Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth summer programs. Her writing and publications focus on the relationships among art, science, and medicine. Select publications include Black Feminism’s Minor Empiricism: Hurston, Combahee, and the Experience of Evidence (Catalyst 2015), and From Inside a Black Box: Entangling Albert Einstein, Ralph Ellison, and George Jackson (Lute & Drum 2016). She grew up in rural Georgia, and after spending a decade in Los Angeles, has made her home in Durham, NC. She has two dogs, Clark Gable and Veronica Lake, who surprisingly look a lot like their namesakes.
ASSISTANT DIRECTOR
Annu Dahiya is a feminist theorist whose research and teaching foreground feminist and anti-racist philosophies; gender, sexuality, and feminist studies; and feminist philosophy of science. She completed her PhD in Literature at Duke University with certificates in Feminist Studies and College Teaching. Her undergraduate training took place at Rutgers University, where she double majored in Women’s and Gender studies and Cultural Anthropology, and double minored in Race and Ethnic studies and Biology. Annu has several years of teaching experience at Duke University, as well as through the Telluride Association in conjunction with the University of Michigan. She has presented her work and organized panels in national and international venues, and her most recent publications include The Phenomenology of Contagion and Before the Cell, There Was Virus: Rethinking the Concept of Parasite and Contagion through Contemporary Research in Evolutionary Virology. When not reading, teaching, or writing, Annu enjoys going on long walks with her canine companion Milo.
Rob Clough is a comics critic who has written for The Comics Journal, Publisher's Weekly, Studygroup Magazine, and many other publications. He has maintained his own comics blog, High-Low, (http://highlowcomics.blogspot.com/) for well over a decade and he cofounded the comics and criticism site SOLRAD.co in 2020. He serves as the Programming Director of the Small Press Expo and has moderated more comics panels than he can remember.
Michelle Dove is the author of Radio Cacophony and writing that appears in Chicago Review, Entropy, Hobart, DIAGRAM, and Guernica. She works in the English Department at Duke University, where she has also taught undergraduate and graduate-level creative writing courses for the past five years. She lives in Durham, NC, and is a member of the local electro-poetry project Streak of Tigers. Links to recent fiction and poetry are at michelle-dove.com.
Dr. Phillip Stillman has a BSc in Evolutionary and Ecological Biology from the University of St Andrews, an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago, and a PhD in English Language and Literature from Duke University. He's taught courses on neuroscience, ecology, literature, and the intersections of those areas of study. He lives and works in Durham, NC.
We're fundraising for our scholarship fund! Help us keep classes donation-based and open to all, regardless of ability to pay! Give the gift of Night School this holiday season!
Help us keep classes donation-based, affordable, and accessible for all. You can donate to the general fund, or the POC or LGBTQ scholarship funds. Just make a note in the comment box!
To gift a class to someone specific, include a message in your donation comment, and we'll be in touch to send you a gift certificate!
....I haven't taken a class in years? Don't worry! You'll get all the tools you need in class, even if you haven't been in a formal class situation in a very long time. (And--surprise!--you won't be the only one in that boat.)
....I work online all day and may not be able to be as present as I'd like to be? Again: Don't worry! Come as you are--you're taking this class FOR YOU. If you need to sit with your camera off for the first hour to decompress after work, take care of your kids in the background, eat dinner while we chat: no problem. Learning is for everyone in whatever moment in life they're in. We're happy you're able to join us!
....I can't afford the suggested price? Again, no, seriously, DON'T WORRY! We operate on a sliding scale because we really believe that learning is for everyone. We hope and believe that people who can pay will. You will be given information about how you can pay, but no one will ever ask you about it beyond that.
....I have other concerns? Just message us using the contact form below. We'll get back to you as soon as we can.
***Night School is not affiliated with any degree- or certificate-granting programs or accredited educational institutions. These classes should be considered recreational: for your own edification, enjoyment, and exploration. Let's all think together!***
Fill out this form if you have a class idea that you'd like to teach, and if it's a class we're interested in hosting, we'll get back to you!
We are open to all relevant topics, but currently especially interested in course proposals that relate arts/culture to: the environment (esp. climate change), queer studies, postcolonial/anti-colonial studies, activism, creative writing (fiction, non-fiction, poetry). Please aim your proposal description at busy but smart/curious adults who have limited familiarity with the topic.
Reading Groups:
Thick & Heavy
Scenes of Subjection
Theory Seminars:
Foucault & Art
Angela Davis
Science/Fiction & the Feminist Imagination (Andrews)
The Politics of Reproduction (Dahiya)
Being Ecological (Stillman)
The Language of Loneliness (Andrews)
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study
FEMMESTRIKE! for the Holidays
Intoxication, Addiction, Art (Andrews)
Race, Pain, Media (Dahiya)Class
Art & Illness (Andrews)
"As an artist who hasn't been able to go back to higher education but misses group discussion and dissection, it was truly a transformative opportunity to be able to relate and learn in this way with other students and Dr. Andrews."
“Professionally I'm really interested in social epidemiology, and the way we understand and experience illness and how that informs the choices we make around our care. I think a class like this widens the empathetic imagination and would be really useful to public health practitioners in designing interventions that respond to the human experience of illness.”
"Professor Dahiya did an incredible job of lecturing in a way that made a lot of sense and posed discussion questions that were really interesting to talk about with peers."
"Lindsey is quite incredible at drawing out and synthesizing class contributions, and our discussions were always very meaningful."
"I loved how knowledgeable and and insightful Dr. Dahiya was. She not only explained the readings, materials, and concepts well, but also introduced nuances and alternate ways of thinking about or even challenging the readings. Her positive, calming attitude was great and I really appreciated how she taught."
"I signed up for the class because I wanted to do more reading and thinking about illness and health, disability, and related theories. I'm particularly interested in the subject matter because I live with chronic illness, and I've found comfort and shared understanding among the community of others who experience and write about it. The class exceeded my expectations on this."
"I wrote creatively for the first time in about 10 years which was awesome! The workshop was challenging for me, but I really appreciated the input from my classmates."
"Lindsey's choice of readings was epic. The depth, breadth, variety, amount, diversity, quality, artistry, all of it - it was spot the fuck on. I could have discussed each of those pieces till the cows came home, no joke."
"Lindsey is simultaneously spectacularly supportive & honest in her writing feedback, which is a small miracle of balance, openness, and clarity of vision."
"I appreciated the way Dr. Andrews led the class: how it was clear beforehand what and for how long we were going to cover the materials, the studying of the art pieces, and the ways of establishing vocabulary for discussion so we were all on the same page. There was a wonderful mix of Dr. Andrews' expertise while allowing a lot of space for self discovery by students."
The current iteration of Night School is a modification of plans that began in early 2019. Originally, we planned to open a downtown Durham bar that would cater to curious adults, interested in continuing to learn and think about the arts and humanities. What better place to discuss ideas, interpret art, and learn new things than in the classical atmosphere of a salon over a martini or mocktail? We wanted everything about the space to be warm, welcoming to people of different levels of experience and expertise, and most of all, affordable for everyone. By March 2020, we had nailed down final negotiations for a space, planned out vintage classroom vibe, and set initial plans for a curriculum in conversation with educators and artists in Durham. And then, on the day we were set to sign a lease. . . everything came to a halt due to COVID-19. We still hope to open in 2021, but for now, we’ve moved online. But don’t let that stop you from having your own at-home cocktail while you join us!
Night School Bar| DAHNS
Copyright © 2020 Night School Bar - All Rights Reserved.
Powered by GoDaddy Website Builder