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Courses Related...
Courses Related to Diversity and Racial Justice
(Undergraduate and Graduate, Listed Alphabetically by Departments and Programs)
Responding to calls from our students and the larger campus community to strengthen and expand anti-racist and social justice curriculum and pedagogy, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts seeks to highlight the following courses. These courses are one part of our ongoing efforts and heightened commitment to teaching and scholarship that recognizes the crucial and often neglected contributions, experiences and struggles of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) and the historical and contemporary legacies of systemic racism and its intersections with other forms of inequality and injustice. Courses and programs being offered in the coming spring aim to integrate diverse content, critical thinking skills and classroom spaces that foster deep and transformative engagement with these concerns.
Spring 2021
Printable course guide »
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 118. Survey of Afro-American Literature II
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 10:10–11:00 a.m.
Course Description:
Introductory level survey of Afro-American literature from the Harlem Renaissance to the present, including DuBois, Hughes, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Baldwin, Walker, Morrison, Baraka and Lorde. (Gen. Ed. AL, DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 133. African-American History: Civil War-1954
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Major issues and actions from the beginning of the Civil War to the 1954 Supreme Court decision. Focus on political and social history: transition from slavery to emancipation and Reconstruction; the Age of Booker T. Washington; urban migrations, rise of the ghettoes; the ideologies and movements from integrationism to black nationalism. (Gen.Ed. HS, DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 151. Literature & Culture
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 11:15-12:05 p.m.
Course Description:
Relevant forms of Black cultural expressions contributing to the shape and character of contemporary Black culture; the application of these in traditional Black writers. Includes: West African cultural patterns and the Black past; the transition-slavery, the culture of survival; the cultural patterns through literature; and Black perceptions versus white perceptions. (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 156. Revolutionary Concepts in Afro-American Music
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:00 a.m.
Course Description:
This course will examine the development of Afro-American music during the twentieth century with an especial focus on links to the Harlem Renaissance and Black Arts Movement. In particular, the class will survey the variegated styles and productions of artists, including Bessie Smith, Eubie Blake, James P. Johnson, Ma Rainey, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Memphis Minnie, Robert Johnson, Leadbelly, Lightnin' Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, Mary Lou Williams, Charlie "Bird" Parker, Max Roach, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, Jimmy Smith, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Pharaoh Sanders, Randy Weston, Nina Simone, Charles Mingus, Archie Shepp, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin, Curtis Mayfield, Booker T. & the MGs, Nikki Giovanni, Sun Ra, the Chicago Art Ensemble, Sonia Sanchez, Albert Ayler, Leon Thomas, Jayne Cortez, The Watts Prophets, The Last Poets, and Gil Scott-Heron. (Gen. Ed. AT, DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 170. The Grassroots Experience in American Life and Culture I
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
This course combines instruction in research techniques in a variety of Humanistic and Social Science disciplines, and hands-on experience with those techniques, with substantive materials focusing on the long struggle of minority populations for full participation in American cultural and public life. (Gen. Ed. HS, DU)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 291L. Losing Gender
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course will take seriously the claim that gender is anti-Black, that slavery marked an epochal rupture and that slavery is a technology for producing a kind of human. Following the work of Hortense Spillers' Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book, this course is interested in thinking through how the politics gender differentiation was and still is central to black subject making in the New World. One of the objectives for this course, is to develop a way to advocate for a politics vested in the abolition of gender in the long run and in the short-run, doing the work in thinking about how race, gender, and sexuality has been vital to subject making.
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 293C. Race, Sexuality, and the Law in Early America
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
What is race? What is sexuality? And how did early American history shape the legal structures that would come to define racial and sexual identities and possibilities? In this course, students will examine how African, European, and Native American ideas about race and sexuality influenced the development of colonial, early Republican, and antebellum America, with a special focus on the evolution of American legal frameworks undergirding racial and sexual hierarchies. Topics covered include initial encounters between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans; the birth and evolution of racial slavery; interracial sex and marriage; citizenship and belonging; and legal and extra-legal violence.
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 297A. Black Springfield Revisited
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
African American urban studies is a vibrant area of intellectual inquiry. This course will acquaint you with a variety of disciplinary tools for studying African American life in the city of Springfield, Massachusetts, our urban neighbor just 25 miles away. We will start with a broad survey of the city's history that began when William Pynchon and a company of Puritan men from Roxbury, founded Springfield in 1636 at the confluence of three rivers. Pynchon established a trading and fur-collecting post and enslaved Africans became a vital part of its labor force. Springfield officially became a city in May of 1852, but by then slavery had ended and the city had developed a reputation as a Underground Railroad depot thanks to antislavery freedom fighters like Thomas Thomas, Eli Baptist, and John Brown. Springfield's location at the crossroads of New England is the most significant reason for its economic progress as an industrial city. In 2010, Springfield was a city of 156,060, that was 22.3% Black or African American, and 4.7% from Two or More Races (1.5% White and Black or African American). Latinos of any race made up 38.8% of the population (33.2% Puerto Rican). It is a multicultural community, and is the regional center for banking, finance, and courts. Field trips to important sites, interviews with Ms. LaJuana Hood, founder of Springfield's Pan African Historical Museum USA, as well as other important culture bearers, will be special facets of the course. Community engaged research will be emphasized.
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 330. Songbirds, Blueswomen, Soulwomen
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesdays 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Course Description:
The focus for this course is the cultural, political, and social issues found in the music and history of African American women performers. The primary emphasis in the course will be on African American women in Jazz, Blues, and Soul/R&B, but students also will study African American women composers as well as Spiritual-Gospel and Opera performers.
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 390C. Afro-American Literature of the 1930s
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 12:20-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
An intensive look at the literature of African Americans between the Harlem Renaissance and the emergence of Richard Wright and his naturalistic vision. The historical context, the continuing influence of the Harlem Renaissance, other art of the period, the influence of the political climate on the poetry and prose of representative African American writers of the 1930s, and the directions for African American literature of the 1940s mapped out in the 1930s. (Gen.Ed. AL, U)
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 397B. Native Americans/African Americans
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesdays 6:00-8:30 p.m.
Course Description:
Explores numerous levels and terms of the encounter between Native Americans and Blacks, including native tribal identity, Black identity, famous people of mixed ancestry, contested identities, Native Americans in jazz and pop music. Native and Black cultural traditions in intermarriage, Native Americans as slaves, slavery and freedmen, "free colored" communities, decoding historical documents, tribal legacy assertions, "triracials," and the impact of mixed ancestry on both Black and native communities.
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 397P. Black Presence at UMass Amherst-Part II,
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 591E. Black Feminist & Queer Insurgencies
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesdays 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Course Description:
This course traces black feminist and queer theories of militancy, insurgency, and revolutionary planning from Harriet Tubman to the present day. Untethering our perspective from the domain of normative masculinities, we will instead focus on forms of organization, revolt, and defensiveness (Nash) that are equally attuned to care, healing, and the transformative force of pleasure and desire (Hartman; Musser). We will study how people take care of each other in the face of state violence and the neoliberal state?s ongoing divestment from public infrastructure and services by exploring histories and experiments in mutual aid, community and armed defense, femme expertise and care webs (Piepzna-Samarasinha), revolutionary mothering (Gumbs, Martens, Williams), radical separatism and communal living, critical solidarities, sex radicalism, and abolition as a form of both radical imagination and social transformation. We will seek to map an alternative genealogy of black revolutionary theory through the history of black feminist and queer militancy. Throughout, we will be invested in the long-term work of black study (Moten and Harney) and utopian planning at the same time as we investigate practical tactics and strategies that approach white supremacy as a racial and gendered act of war that requires immediate mobilization and response.
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 597R. Reparations for African Descendants
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
The United Nations declared 2015 to 2024 the International Decade of People of African Descent. The International Decade is a follow up of the process from the 2001 UN World Conference against Racism, where the international community designated the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade as a Crime against Humanity. In that spirit, this course will explore the issue of reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans in the United States. Reparations to the descendants of captive Africans has been debated in African-American political discourse for decades. This course will look at other cases for reparations internationally, engaging the history and the basis for the demand as well as proposals for reparations for African descendants.
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 692T. Gender and Power in the Atlantic World
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesdays 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Course Description:
This course examines the history of the Atlantic World through a gendered lens, exploring the ways in which European conquest and colonization of the Americas and the enslavement of millions of Africans and indigenous Americans gave rise to modern gender categories and hierarchies. In this course, students will engage with both foundational and more recent scholarly works on the subject, encountering a broad temporal and geographical range. Over the course of the semester, they will come to understand the ways in which the formation and reformation of gendered ideologies and identities lay at the center of Atlantic colonial and imperial projects, racial slavery, and nascent Western capitalism.
Course Number and Name:
AFROAM 693C. The History of Love, Sex, and Marriage in Black America
Meeting Days/Time:
Thursdays 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Course Description:
Why aren't more African Americans married? Are African American women doomed to stay single? Is the two-parent black household a myth? These are some of the questions frequently asked about contemporary black relationships. This graduate course examines the history of African American love, sex, and marriage. Spanning slavery to present, this course investigates the political, economic, and social drivers that have shaped black love and family. It will pay special attention to the relationship between African American romantic and sexual encounters -heterosexual and queer - and mid-twentieth century social movements (e.g. Civil Rights and Black Power Movements). This course also will explore miscegenation; rape and sexual violence; free love and the sexual revolution; reproduction, childrearing, and family; pornography and sex work; marriage reform and welfare rights; and disease and medicine.
Course Number and Name:
Art 231 Photo II
Meeting Days/Time:
M/W 1:25-4:10 p.m.
Course Description:
In-depth exploration of techniques and materials including zone system, large format, and non-silver processes. Slide lectures, discussions, and readings. Prerequisite: ART 230 or consent of instructor.
Course Number and Name:
Art 311 Visual Arts and Human Development II
Meeting Days/Time:
Tu/Th 1-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Continuation of ART 310. Exploration of art as taught in public schools. Topics include: artistic and aesthetic development, approaches to teaching art history, criticism, and studio, museum education, problem solving and concept development in art, multicultural approaches to the art curriculum and special education in art classrooms. Readings, written assignments, class presentations, and extensive off-campus field experiences. Prerequisite: B.F.A. major or consent of instructor.
Course Number and Name:
Art 398P Portfolio Practicum
Meeting Days/Time:
Tu 12-1 p.m.
Course Description:
Features the contribution of guest artists and designers of color from historically marginalized backgrounds. Readings and discussion address the impact equity and justice has on creative fields today.
Course Number and Name:
Art 497P Design Projects & Production
Meeting Days/Time:
Tu/Th 1-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Features readings and discussion that consider which groups are historically left out of the design process and how designers can re-orient the field towards equity and just collaboration. Our core digital fabrication project will explicitly deal with topics of labor and environmental justice.
Course Number and Name:
Art 497JS Junior/Senior Seminar
Meeting Days/Time:
Tu/Th 4:40 -7:50 p.m.
Course Description:
The Junior/Senior Seminar explores unexpected and non-traditional approaches to collaboration, with a focus on interdisciplinary practices. Together, we will investigate and redefine the role of the collaborator and the artist. Practices, traditions and histories will be analyzed in an ongoing cycle of discussion, reading and making. An emphasis will be placed on developing concepts and imagery in relation to contemporary art practice and theory. Participants may work in any medium, format or discipline.
Course Number and Name:
Art 795 Graduate Art Seminar
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4-6:50 p.m.
Course Description:
Graduate-level seminar course which will focus, this spring, on performance artists of color. Class will be taught by Professor Daniel Sack as a direct collaboration between English and Art students.
Course Number and Name:
Art 511 Visual Arts & Human Dev II
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
None available.
Course Number and Name:
English 117 Ethnic American Literature
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Course Description:
Primarily for non-majors. This introductory study of American culture encourages students to think critically about ethnic American experiences. Reading texts authored by ethnically diverse American authors, this class asks students to engage critically with American culture and identity, particularly as it is experienced by individuals of various backgrounds. Some of the questions this course explores include: What do we make of American experiences that contradict popular ideas of what it means to exist in America? How do ethnic experiences allow us to more critically consider American culture? How do various authors engage with their ethnicity while still identifying as distinctly American? How have shifting formations of race impacted ethnic authors? Using texts that span from June Jordan and Langston Hughes to Fatimah Asghar and Maxine Hong Kingston, this class uses fiction, poetry, and prose to consider how America and the American experience has been navigated, understood, reimagined, and experienced by various ethnic communities across time with a particular emphasis on the perspectives of these communities. (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)
Course Number and Name:
English 131 Society & Literature: Literature and Human Rights
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 11:15-12:05 p.m.
Course Description:
This course explores the relationship between literature and human rights in the American context and Global South. In what ways do writers use specific genres to articulate and humanize what may seem to be otherwise abstract concepts such as human rights and social justice? How do literary modes of representation both reclaim and problematize discourses of human rights? We will discuss how aesthetics and ethics combine to produce alternative and innovative ways of imagining a 'just' society. Students will consider how novels, short stories, and films become a creative platform to educate and raise awareness on compromised or denied social, cultural, and economic rights in systems of war, colonization, slavery, race, and caste. We will also consider instances where writers and artists have successfully agitated society into action and have in turn found their own rights compromised and their voices and works censored or destroyed. This course will include the works of Toni Morrison, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nadine Gordimer, Deepa Mehta, and Bong Joon-ho among others. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)
Course Number and Name:
English 132 Gender, Sexuality, Literature & Culture: Romantic Variations: Love, Sex, and Representation in Literature
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Course Description:
Love stories abound in our present culture – through books, films, news, oral narratives, etc. We staunchly believe that we 'know' and 'recognize' what love is and entails in our individual lives, and we also deploy the word in larger cultural arenas to indicate an absolute social good. This section of English 132 examines the plethora of (often conflicting) meanings that this complicated word holds, looking specifically at what 'love' has meant, now means, might mean, (or meant not to mean) in various personal, social, and political contexts throughout literary history. We will ask questions such as: how did/do people conceive of the origins of love? Who can (or is allowed to) love? How is gender and sexuality represented in love narratives, and conversely, how do these narratives reproduce or contest heteronormative sex and gender difference? How can (or cannot) love, an inherently gendered concept, embody social justice, particularly in contexts of racial violence and economic inequality? And finally, but of crucial importance, is love 'real,' and how is it ever possible (or meaningful) for us to know?
To arrive at answers, we will begin the class by looking at 'traditional' Western literature on love (Sidney, Shakespeare, Elizabeth Inchbald), then move onto variations of romance narratives across cultures and societies (Ama Ata Aidoo, Arundhati Roy, Han Kang). By the end of this course, you should be able to think and write more critically about this particular abstract and universal term we take for granted, how the seemingly personal affect of love is in fact historically contingent and deeply entrenched in social structures of gender, sexuality, race, colonialism, and global capitalism, and the ways in which literature might help us make sense of the power and potential violence it. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)
Course Number and Name:
English 132 Gender, Sexuality, Literature & Culture
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course will comparatively examine gender and sexuality as they are portrayed in popular novels and their media adaptations to account for the significance of their discrepancies. A primary focus of this course will be the exploration of the ways in which race figures into popularized portrayals of gender and sexuality and their subsequent public receptions. We work to ask whose narratives are being circulated and popularized to then discuss the possible insufficiencies and racial biases of these representations. (Gen.Ed. AL, DG)
Course Number and Name:
English 141 Reading Poetry: Poetry, Activism, and Change
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 11:15-12:05 p.m.
Course Description:
Poetry can change the world. I'm not exaggerating. Poems bring us inside different perspectives and experiences. Poets examine, interrogate, and even subvert the traditions and "norms" of our world, and help us imagine new worlds. In this course, we will explore the power of poetry by focusing on reading and sharing poetry as a form of social justice activism. We will share work by poets from intersecting marginalized communities, and discover how these poets weave activism into their work through word choice, imagery, and structure. We will also discuss the themes and topics they employ, as well as how their contexts inform their writing choices. Students in this class will read a lot of poetry, write brief guided reflections, learn about the lives and activism of several poets, and share poetry with each other and the wider world.
Readings for this class will include works by Kaveh Akbar, Maya Angelou, Billy-Ray Belcourt, jody chan, Staceyann Chin, Natalie Diaz, jayy dodd, Terrance Hayes, Ava Hoffman, Ilya Kaminsky, Zefyr Lisowski, Layli Long Soldier, Audre Lorde, Tommy Pico, Claudia Rankine, Raquel Salas Rivera, Danez Smith, Ocean Vuong, Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib, and many other American and international poets. (This course fulfills the AL Gen Ed requirement.)
Course Number and Name:
English 150 Writing and Society
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 12:20–1:10 p.m.
Course Description:
In this course, we will be investigating the field of "Writing Studies," an increasingly important area of interdisciplinary study at the intersection of literacy, communication, digital studies, education, and linguistics. This field has expanded in recent years to examine "writing" as a mechanism through which to understand the operations of power in society. Throughout the semester, we will focus extensively on social, cultural, and political power relations as writing reflects, creates, or challenges them. Students will have the opportunity to practice writing, and reflect on that practice, through assignments that take up questions such as: What are scholarly and popular understandings about what writing is or can do in the world? How does a diversifying society redefine writing as effective, creative, illegal, failing? How can writing engage people to take social action in ways they might not have before? (Gen. Ed. SB, DU)
Course Number and Name:
English 200: Intensive Literary Studies for the Major (English 200): Culture, Capital, Climate
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
This class will introduce students to the practice of critical reading of literary texts. It will focus on themes of nature, ecology, ecological imperialism, and the role of global capital in these areas. Students will read a range of exciting texts from around the world and develop a firm understanding of literary genre. Introduction to multiple theoretical schools, including feminist, race, and postcolonial studies, and the environmental studies will be through deliberations on the conjoined aspects of culture, capital and climate. The ultimate aim of this course is to introduce methodologies of close reading and foster critical writing skills. Writing assignments will include analytical précis of theoretical texts, reviews of literary texts, and a critical essay of 8-10 pages. Authors include Amitav Ghosh, Colson Whitehead, Barbara Kingsolver, Rebecca Solnit, Eavan Boland, and Brian Friel.
Course Number and Name:
English 221 Shakespeare
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 12:20-1:10 p.m.
Course Description:
Do we still live in Shakespeare's world? In the language, poetry, and drama of Shakespeare, what continues to inform, inspire, haunt or hurt us? Throughout this introductory course, we will consider how Shakespeare's works shaped ideas about the early modern world and how, in turn, that legacy continues to shape notions of our world today. We will also use Shakespeare to look beyond ourselves: to ask how early modern ideas of gender, race, sexuality, nation, even distinctions between human and inhuman differ in surprising ways from our own. Along the way, we will read tragedies, comedies, a history play and some sonnets. You will become well practiced in close reading as we consider how individual words and phrases open onto urgent questions about the changing social, political, and theatrical worlds of Shakespeare's time.
Course Number and Name:
English 254 Writing and Reading Imaginative Literature
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 11:15-12:05 p.m.
Course Description:
EMBODYING VOICES. What is language? What is a body? What is a voice? This course will explore the answers to these questions and illustrate how they are all facets of the same jewel. Together, we'll break down the anatomy of a line, a sentence, a stanza, a paragraph, a page, and explore techniques to expand and complicate their depth. Writers you can expect to read in this course include Hanif Abdurraqib, Claudia Rankine, Ken Liu, Ocean Vuong, Safia Elhillo, Danez Smith, and Layli Long Soldier. Studying these writers, we will examine how they further the message of their writing through experimentation with form and how they use the synergy of structure and language to challenge the tangibility of the subjects addressed. We will determine what techniques empower the voices of these writers to haunt the minds of their readers and we'll cultivate our own practices to teach us to do the same. Through literary exploration, creative writing, and workshopping, we will purposefully shape a body from which the voices of our writing will speak, cry, sing, dance, and shout. (Gen. Ed. AL)
Course Number and Name:
English 268 American Literature and Culture before 1865
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
This course studies the "imagined community" of the United States and the assembly an "American" literature. Readings include fiction, poetry, autobiography, oratory, journalism, and rhetoric written in North America between 1670 and 1865. The readings reflect tensions arising from the status of religious belief, urban vs. rural experience, the rise of industrial labor, and the enslavement of human beings who had "unalienable rights" to life and liberty. The course examines the economic challenges faced by writers like Edgar Poe, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and Harriet B. Stowe, and the political challenges facing writers like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs. The course also examines the historical forces that conferred canonical status on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph W. Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau and delayed Emily Dickinson's and Herman Melville's recognition until the mid-twentieth century.
Course Number and Name:
English 269 American Literature and Culture after 1865: The Art of Protest
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course looks at relationships between protest, history, and popular culture in America through the narrative spaces of literature. In our contemporary moment, the visibility of protest and counter-protest, free speech and hate speech, and the mediums of Twitter and literature, are contentious spaces that invite us to interrogate how we as individuals create, align, and/or break with national narratives. This class will respond to the invitation this divisive political climate has constructed by turning to stories – tracing representations of resistance, protest, and resilience from the antebellum period to Trump's presidency. Our questions will consider the relationships between art and protest, diverse embodiments of protest and resistance, and the cultural and historical contexts that inform these movements. This project will lead us through a diverse and complex archive of American literature where we will reckon with the stories we have told about ourselves, each other, and the nation at stake.
As a survey course, our aim will be to read widely, think critically, and write ethically. We will develop an understanding and a language for how texts work on the level of form as we consider theme and content. We will also use writing, both informal and formal, to develop and deliver our responses to these texts as we think critically about race, gender, class and sexuality, not as fixed or stable entities, but instead as historically, socially, culturally, and individually imbued constructs.
Course Number and Name:
English 300: Junior Year Writing: Literary Resistance and Global Politics
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Ever wonder what the study of literature has to do with "real" problems or contemporary politics? Through study of the intimacies between art and geopolitics, this course will offer you some answers and some ways of thinking about the question. Focusing on the co-forming interactions of states, economies, and artmakers, we'll read literature in tandem with political studies of its historical context (regarding issues of war, colonialism, racism, sexism, and labor exploitation). COURSEWORK: In essays, you will be asked to combine conceptual, historical, and literary analysis. As in all Junior Writing courses, essay drafts and revisions will be required. In addition to historical reading, the course focuses on twentieth-century fiction, though it may also cover a couple of nineteenth-century texts. Likely texts and authors include 1001 Nights, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Chesnutt, Virginia Woolf, Ismat Chughtai, Mulk Raj Anand, Arundhati Roy, and Patricia Powell.
Course Number and Name:
English 315 Speculative Fiction: Speculative Fiction: Dystopia/Utopia
Meeting Days/Time:
W 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Course Description:
Surprising no one, this class is about the relationship of misery to possibility, of oppression to struggle, and of doom to imagination. We will be reading in the area of speculative fiction, broadly defined, and we will bite off a pretty large chunk of history in doing so. In fact, this class will be as much about the historical context of speculative fiction as it will be about the fiction "itself." At the root, what we are seeking to understand is how literature metabolizes historical crisis, and how, in doing so, it can serve as a ballast and inspiration as well.
Texts and authors will include: Octavia Butler, Colson Whitehead, Victor LaValle, Mary Shelley, Amitav Ghosh, Larissa Lai, N.K. Jemisin, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mohsin Hamid, and others
Course Number and Name:
English 341 Autobiography Studies
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
In this course, our primary work will be to trace the development of Native American autobiography, including spiritual autobiographies, collaborative or "as told to" autobiographies, memoirs, and other contemporary personal narratives. Topics of study will include: the concept of authorship, modes of production, questions of authenticity, and the role of the editor and/or translator, in addition to those specific to Native literatures—relationship to place and community, identity issues, and preservation of language and culture. Authors will include Samson Occum, William Apess, Black Hawk, Zitkala-Sa, John G. Neihardt and Black Elk, N. Scott Momaday, Louise Erdrich, and Deborah Miranda, among others.
Course Number and Name:
English 354 Creative Writing: Intro to Fiction: The Guise of Fiction: Conveying Truth in Falsehood
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 11:15-12:05 p.m.
Course Description:
We write to communicate the incommunicable. And, by doing so, we enact the ultimate form of empathy. The exchange between writer and reader is intimate, messy. How do we navigate this process without alienating the other? How do we craft stories while staying vulnerable, humble? Through workshop and lecture, we'll learn to walk the line between characterization and personal experience. We'll discover how to write from a place of vulnerability, how to open ourselves up to each other. And, we'll embark on a journey to find our unique voices, strange as they may be.
There will be readings from living writers alongside writers from the established canon. Readings from writers of color, and writers from around the world. Some of the authors we'll read include Franz Kafka, Carmen Maria Machado, Toni Morrison, Raymond Carver, Zadie Smith and Julio Cortazar. Note that, as classmates, it's our role to foster a safe environment, not only for creative expression, but for creative reception. Offensive and hateful rhetoric in older texts will always be prefaced, if not challenged. It will not be tolerated within the text of your peers. In-class writing exercises will help hone your abilities on the line-level. Expect to offer valuable critique for the work of your fellow peers.
Course Number and Name:
English 354 Creative Writing: Mixed Genre
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
'Precarious Lives': Writing with Vulnerability. In Precarious Life (2004), Judith Butler entreats us: "Let's face it. We're undone by each other. And if we're not, we're missing something" (23). This is a sentiment we will begin from and return to throughout this course. Butler is interested in precarity: a condition of material uncertainty and structural abandonment. While some lives and bodies are more precarious than others, this is a political condition that many of us encounter in some form or other during our lives. What are the ways that you experience precarity? How are you marginalized, silenced, threatened, and misunderstood? How can we connect across our shared and differential experiences of precarity, allowing for undoing as well as transformation?
In this course, we will generate hybrid creative work while looking at representations of precarity in contemporary texts across various genres and forms. We will study, honour, and challenge how other writers navigate complicated and complex places of (inter)personal vulnerability. Besides Butler, authors may include Bhanu Kapil, francine j. harris, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Ocean Vuong, Porpentine Heartscape, Richard Siken, and Sarah Kane. Drawing from assigned texts as testimony and inspiration, we will provide candid, thoughtful feedback on each other's writing. How can we give power to precarity: that which is simultaneously a source of great pain and possibility?
Course Number and Name:
English 366 Modern Poetry
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course is a survey of modern American poetry. Our guiding question will be: What is the relationship between modern poetry and capitalist modernity? Focusing on the period between 1890 and 1950 and working from a comparativist perspective, we will explore how various poets interpreted their shared historical context through different poetic forms and experiments. In addition to a broad overview of modernism's canonical authors (e.g. Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, W.C. Williams, Ezra Pound), we will spend significant time on the trajectories of African-American poetics (e.g. Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes), feminist poetics (e.g. H.D., Gertrude Stein) and Depression-era anti-capitalist poetics (e.g. Muriel Rukeyser, Kenneth Fearing). Throughout our readings and discussions, we will look at the ways in which our poets are a part of the shifting cultures, politics, and histories of the first half of the 20th century; their works address American imperialism, world wars, rapid industrialization, racism and anti-racism, working class resistance, and the transformation of gender regimes.
Course Number and Name:
English 372H Caribbean Literature
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
In this course we will read contemporary works from the English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking literatures of the Caribbean (all texts will be read in English), comprising a mixture of "canonical" and emerging authors. Lectures (rare) and discussions (regular) will address central themes in Caribbean writing, as well as issues of form and style (including the interplay between creole and European languages).
Some of the themes that will preoccupy us are history and its marks upon the Caribbean present; racial identity and ambiguity; colonial and neo-colonial relationships among countries; gender and sexuality. Assignments will include an informal reading journal and three major papers of varying lengths; there may also be student presentations, small-group work, and in-class writing activities. Authors may include Maryse Conde, Tiphanie Yanique, Kei Miller, Rene Depestre, Dionne Brand and Mayra Santos-Febres.
Course Number and Name:
English 469 Victorian Monstrosity
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Course Description:
Although the term "monstrosity" connotes fear and repulsion, many nineteenth-century writers were compelled by the idea of attraction between humans and not-quite human creatures such as demons, vampires, goblins, and ghosts. In exploring the aesthetic, political, economic, historical, and racial(ized) dimensions of these enchanted literary liaisons, we will consider their relationship to literary/cultural movements including medievalism, realism, and the gothic revival as well as to contemporary political debates over science, empire, immigration, masculinity, and the status of women. Primary texts may include poetry by Gottfried Bürger, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Mary Robinson, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, and William Wordsworth, and prose by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Sheridan Le Fanu, Margaret Oliphant, and Richard Marsh.
Course Number and Name:
English 491LM Literature, Music, and the Rules of Engagement: Multi-Ethnic Musical Experiences in the US
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
In this course, we will analyze 20th century novels, poems, and a play by African American, Native American, Mexican American, and Arab American writers, who draw on music, especially jazz and blues, to perform race, gender, class, and migration. In particular, we will consider the relationship between musical styles and historical events, and their impact on the characters' identities and lived experiences. Some class time will be spent on listening to and critiquing musical pieces in terms of their influence on the forms, aesthetics, and politics of our texts: the rules of engagement. We will read works by Diana Abu-Jaber, James Baldwin, David Henderson, Américo Paredes, Sherman Alexie, August Wilson, and a selection of jazz and blues poems.
Course Number and Name:
English 491SA Amandla! S. African Literature & Politics, Apartheid and Post-apartheid
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Course Description:
"Amandla!" means "Power", and it was a prominent political slogan in the anti-apartheid struggle. Over the last hundred years, South Africa has seen transitions of a momentous nature: from a colonial past to a postcolonial present; from the oppressions of apartheid to Nelson Mandela's first democratically elected government in 1994 and the postapartheid period beyond. In this setting South African literature has kept the pulse of its society, registering its lived experience and telling its inner history. In this context we'll read works by key writers both black and white, male and female. We'll draw on fiction, drama and poetry, and dip into music, documentaries and video to widen our sense of cultural and political engagement in and through a tumultuous history. We'll work to understand the relationship between politics and art, and we'll also gain a sense of the extraordinary cultural and social range of South African literature—of its voices, views and perspectives, the possibilities, complexities and problems of a new society in the making. Authors will range from the most noted and famous, such as Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee (both Nobel Prizewinners), to lesser-known but nonetheless extraordinary writers, among them Njabulo Ndebele, Zoë Wicomb, K. Sello Duiker, and Phaswane Mpe. By the end of the course you'll have some insight into a remarkable country and some remarkably powerful literature, relevant and resonant not only for its own world but also our own.
Course Number and Name:
English 491Z Poetry of the Political Imagination
Meeting Days/Time:
Tues 1:00-3:30 p.m.
Course Description:
Juniors and Seniors, International Exchange or National Exchange plans, or Graduate students with TECS subplans only. Poetry of the political imagination is a matter of both vision and language. Any progressive social change must be imagined first; any oppressive social condition, before it can change, must be named in words that persuade. Poets of the political imagination go beyond protest to define an artistry of resistance. This course explores how best to combine poetry and politics, craft and commitment. Students read classic works ranging from the epigrams of Ernesto Cardenal, written against the dictator of Nicaragua, to Allen Ginsberg's Howl, the book that sparked an obscenity trial. They also read the farmworker poems of Diana García, born in a migrant labor camp; the emergency room sonnets of Dr. Rafael Campo; the prison poetry of political dissident Nazim Hikmet; and the feminist satire of Marge Piercy, among others. Students respond with papers, presentations or some combination. Class visits by authors complement the reading and discussion.
Course Number and Name:
English 492N Nature, Climate Change and Literature
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
The Guardian describes climate change as "The Greatest Story Ever Told." It is not surprising that the newspaper should cast the unfolding threat of climate change through the lens of a "story." Climate change has been cast as an environmental problem with economic, political and scientific solutions. However, as the geographer Mike Hulme pointed out: "Science may be solving the mysteries of climate, but it is not helping us discover the meaning of climate change." In this seminar we will read groundbreaking novels, short stories, critical essays, and creative non-fiction that engage with the big questions of environment, weather and climate. The aim of the seminar is to show the importance of literary study in this period of interminable catastrophes, and also to demonstrate the crucial ways in which culture, capital and climate are imbricated within each other. Students will also have the opportunity to watch short documentaries and analyze climate change-related artworks. Climate Change is a multi-issue problem with multi-generational effects; stories are as crucial as ice core data to prepare for a habitable future.
Course Number and Name:
English 494JI Going to Jail: Incarceration in US literature
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Why do we put people in cages? In what ways does the caging of humans impact those outside as well as inside? Writers have long used the prison as a space from which to ask questions about the nature and meaning of criminality and the rule of law, about human minds, bodies, and behavior, about economics, politics, race, and social class, and about how language makes and unmakes us as human beings. In this class, we will study US fiction, poetry, film, and nonfiction prose (print and digital) by prisoners, journalists, scholars, lawyers, and activists in order to consider these issues for ourselves. We will draw on the knowledge and critical skills you have gained through your gen ed coursework throughout. Assignments will include five short papers and two drafts of a longer final paper. Authors may include: Michelle Alexander, Malcolm Braly, Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Martin Luther King, CeCe McDonald, Khalil Gibran Muhammad, David Oshinsky, Bryan Stevenson, Jerome Washington, and Malcolm X. Open only to senior English majors.
Course Number and Name:
English 497T Teaching Writing in the 21st Century
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:30 p.m.
Course Description:
Why do we privilege some kinds of writing over others? What uses and functions does writing serve in society? How is writing changing as a result of social media and other technologies? An introduction to writing studies designed for people who may want to teach K-16, this course will inquire into the changing nature of writing in the 21st century. Specifically, we will investigate why and how writing matters within social hierarchies; what conceptual frames we have for understanding writing production; how cultural contexts affect a writer's choices; how textual features reflect different writers and ways of knowing; and most importantly, how people learn to write. To do so, we will look into research and scholarship on diverse literacies, writing processes, the nature of academic writing, and how writers from diverse populations may approach writing tasks differently. We will focus not only on how we might teach writing but also on how writing is changing in response to multiple Englishes, digital platforms, and the information economy. By the end of the course, students will be able to articulate their own position on what the goals of writing education ought to be and start to define a teaching practice that might emerge from it.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 111 World History since 1500
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 9:05-9:55 a.m. (plus discussion)
Course Description:
The development of the modern world, with particular attention to colonialism, imperialism, and the revolutionary movements for national liberation. (Gen.Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 112 Introduction to World Religions
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 12:20-1:10 p.m. (plus discussion)
Course Description:
What is religion, and why do people care so much about it? This course will examine the origins and development of some of the world's major religions including Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We will read sacred texts and travel to sites of worship. We will also consider how religion continues to shape current affairs. Students will prepare analytic essays, participate in group discussions, and attend off-campus field trips. The course will demonstrate that understanding religion is critical to participating in a global community and will neither advocate or denigrate religious participation. (Gen. Ed. I, DG)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 112H Introduction to World Religions Honors
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 115 China: 1600 to the Present
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 11:15-12:05 p.m. (plus discussion)
Course Description:
The history and culture behind China's emergence as a modern power. Topics include: heritage of the Ming and Qing dynasties; Western maritime trade and naval power; Christian missionaries and Western educators; peasant rebellion and overthrow of imperial rule; Chinese nationalism, the Marxist-Maoist order; China as contender for superpower status. (Gen.Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 120 Latin America: The Colonial Period
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:25-2:15 p.m. (plus discussion)
Course Description:
General view of the cultural, economic, and political development of Latin America, 1492 to 1824. Topics include the Iberian and Indian backgrounds; Spanish and Portuguese imperial organization; role of Indians, Blacks, and Europeans in the New World; the coming of independence. (Gen.Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 131 Middle East History II
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 12:20-1:10 p.m. (plus discussion)
Course Description:
Survey of social, political and cultural change in the Middle East from the rise of the Ottoman Empire around 1300 to the present. Topics include the impact on the Middle East of the shift in world trade from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic; social, political, and cultural change; Ottoman and European relations; imperialism and revolution; World War I and the peace settlement; state formation; and the rise of nationalism and religious fundamentalism. (Gen.Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 155 From Empires to Nations: The Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 1:25-2:15 p.m. (plus discussion)
Course Description:
The transformation of the Atlantic World from a world of empires into one of nation-states through examining the interactions between Africans, American Natives, and Europeans from the fifteenth through the end of the eighteenth century. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 161 Africa Since 1500
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-10:50 a.m. (plus discussion)
Course Description:
African and European imperialism, nationalism, and independence; how these developments have changed the life and culture of African people. (Gen.Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 170 Indigenous Peoples of North America
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00-4:50 p.m. (plus discussion)
Course Description:
The diverse histories of indigenous peoples in North America from their origins to the present. Focus on indigenous perspectives, examining social, economic, and political issues experienced by indigenous peoples. Emphasis on diversity, continuity, change, and self-determination. (Gen.Ed. HS, DU)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 281 The Global History of Soccer
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Soccer is without question the world's most popular sport. Its impact reaches beyond entertainment to influence and reflect cultural values and identities, economic interests and power relationships between peoples and nation states. The course takes a historical approach by surveying important developments within the game and how they impacted people at the local, national and international level. Select case studies examine in detail the particular ways the sport has promoted and/or challenged significant global phenomena such as the expansion and resistance to imperialism and authoritarianism, the development of racial and national identities and gender relationships. (Gen.Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 347 Traditional Japan
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 8:30-9:45 a.m.
Course Description:
This course traces the history of Japan from the distant past through the centralization and prosperity of the Tokugawa period (1600-1868). It will focus on social, political, cultural, and religious history and will place familiar figures like the Japanese samurai, sumo wrestler, geisha, haiku poet, and Buddhist monk in their proper historical context. Through a variety of primary sources, from the performance piece to the autobiography to the legal edict, as well as a textbook, students will learn about the diversity, constant reinvention, conflict, and harmony that characterized traditional Japan.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 354 History of Mexico
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course traces the history of Mexican society, politics, and culture from the late 18th century to the present. The first half analyzes the turbulent formation of Mexico, the legacies of Spanish colonialism, peasant uprisings of the 19th century, and the origins and course of the famous Revolution of 1910. The second half focuses on the century since the revolution, including the consolidation of a conservative one-party state, the so-called "Mexican miracle" of the mid-20th century, the adoption of neoliberal economic policies starting in the 1980s, and the ongoing political struggles of workers, peasants, women, students, and indigenous people. Equipped with this historical grounding, we will then try to make sense of the crises of neoliberalism, drug-related violence, and declining state legitimacy in the early part of this century. Previous Latin American history survey desirable.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 394AI Age of the Crusades
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 1:25-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
Students will study the history of the Age of the Crusades (1090s-1290s). They will cover the eight major crusades to the Middle East and North Africa, including personalities, ideologies, and military and logistical challenges. They will investigate the European Crusaders, those Muslim, Christian and Jewish who were "Crusaded Against", and the cultural interactions among them all. Student will also examine Crusades in Europe, and Crusades of later centuries. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-Hist majors.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 394TI Mongol and Turkish Empires
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Course Description:
In this course students investigate the history of Genghis Khan and the Great Mongol Empire, the Mongol Successor Empires, and the copycat Temurid Empire, covering the time period 1150-1500. They look at the rise, expansion and fall of these empires, and at the complexities that make this history so gripping. They also learn unexpected secrets about the contributions made by Chinggis Khan?s womenfolk to this history, based on new research. Course fulfills the History Department?s pre-1500 requirement and one of its two non-Western requirements. In it students will reflect on themselves as students and history majors, on their college careers so far, and on what they have learned in their college careers. They will then make connections between these reflections and the diverse topics we cover in Mongol and Turkish history. This will be through a special paper, on two of four response papers, on both exams, and in guided discussion during most lectures. At the end of the course, they will not only have gained insight into the class material, but also insight into themselves and into their own personal knowledge of the world. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-Hist majors.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 397GGH Gandhi: Myth, Perspective, and Politics
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00-4:15 p.m.
Course Description:
The most prominent figure in India's anti-colonial nationalist movement, Mahatma Gandhi has also been one of the most remarkable global leaders and thinkers of the twentieth century. Charting Gandhi's trajectory against the background of events in South Africa and colonial India, this course examines the ideas, strategies, achievements and limitations of Gandhian politics. Using a variety of written sources and films, we will critically assess Gandhi's influence on and conflicts with various streams of anti-colonial nationalism(s) in India. A critical evaluation of these themes will not only afford insights into the life, ideology and activism of Gandhi, but also allow us to better understand the nature of British imperialism, the different strands of Indian nationalism, and the features of political transition that occurred in 1947.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 392AH A Poisoned Well: Ancient Heritage and Modern Racism
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Ancient Greeks and Romans thought about the world and its inhabitants in racialized categories. Climate, diet, bloodlines, and other factors supposedly made some peoples inherently superior and others immutably inferior. The writings and assumptions behind this racialized thinking were taken up and used by European intellectuals from the Renaissance forward, becoming a poisoned well that informed the formation of racist ideologies, regimes, and policies in twentieth century. This seminar explores the entanglement between ancient racialized thinking and modern expressions of racism?and even resistance against racism. We will explore this topic by reading recent books, articles, and media reports on the following topics: ancient strategies of othering, the encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples in the New World, the valorization of Greek and Roman texts and artifacts in colonial Algeria and Nazi Germany, and the use of Greek and Roman imagery in contemporary ethno-nationalist movements in Europe and the United States.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 253H Asian-Pacific American History: 1850-Present
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
History of Asian-Pacific Americans as it is inextricably linked to the empire-building projects of the United States and other imperial powers in the Asia-Pacific region, 1850-present. (Gen.Ed. HS, DU)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 265 US LGBT and Queer History
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course explores how queer individuals and members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities have influenced the social, cultural, economic, and political landscape in United States history. With a focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the course covers topics such as the criminalization of same-sex acts, cross-dressing, industrialization and urbanization, feminism, the construction of the homo/heterosexual binary, transsexuality and the "lavender scare" during the Cold War, the homophile, gay liberation, and gay rights movements, HIV/AIDS, and (im)migration. We will often look to examples from the present to better explore change over time and the modes and influences that shape both current and past understandings of gender and sexual difference. (Gen. Ed. HS, DU)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 290A African American History from Africa to the Civil War
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This 4-credit General Education course introduces students to the study of African American History. It begins with a discussion of the early twentieth-century Black intellectuals who pioneered the field of African American History and how the field has grown and changed over the past century. The course then charts the history of the African and African American experience, mainly in North America/United States from the late 17th Century through the end of the US Civil War. The course material includes lectures and readings that highlight other geographic locations and major events in the African Diaspora, such as the Haitian Revolution, and considers the connections to people and events in the United States. Topics covered in this course include: the Middle Passage; African American culture, religion, and art; slavery and the US Constitution and US law; free Black communities in antebellum US; southern slavery and the domestic slave trade; slave resistance and rebellion; Black intellectual and literary traditions; Black women's and men's political activism; colonization and emigration movements; Black soldiers and civilians in the Civil War; emancipation and the end of slavery in the United States. (Gen.Ed. HS, DU)
Course Number and Name:
Hist 293R U.S. Woman Against Imperialism: Resistance and Resilience
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Course Description:
This course explores the relationship of women (cis, trans, identifying as non-binary) to the social, cultural, economic, and political developments shaping the United States as an empire from 1890 to the present. It examines the regulation of womxn's bodies and sexualities, the gendered narrative of imperialism, and womxn's resistance to imperial power at home and abroad. This course will specifically focus on how class, race, ethnicity, and sexual identity have affected womxn's historical experience through a transnational lens. It questions the mainstream historical narrative to reclaim the voices of underrepresented and/or silenced groups.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 297ME From Muhammad to Islamic Empire: Rise of Islam in Late Antique Context
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Course Description:
What was the world like at the time of the Rise of Islam and how did the new religion change the Global World Order? The Historical circumstance of the rise of Islam is often misunderstood and shrouded in mystery, or obfuscated by partisan bickering. In this course we take a historical analytical approach to the History of Islam and Empire, We will put under scrutiny the religious structure of the Late Antique Near East, the Rise of Islam and the early Arab conquests, to the establishment of the first Arab Empire and its transformation into a new "Islamic Empire" under the hegemony of the Abbasids. No prior background assumed. All readings in English.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 346 China in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
The personalities, events, and forces that shaped China during the last century: collapse of the imperial order; warlordism, foreign invasion; political and cultural revolutions; Mao and the Chinese Communist Party; the struggle to "modernize" China's economy, society, and culture; role of China in today's world.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 392E The U.S. in Latin America
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Course Description:
This class explores the long and contentious relationships between the United States and the Latin American nations. It focuses on the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, analyzing the Spanish-American war, upheaval in Central America in the 1920s, the place of Cuba within the growing informal U.S. empire, trade relations with the South American nations, the impact of the Cold War on the hemisphere, the role of the CIA in destabilizing and overthrowing popularly elected government, and the U.S. as both a supporter and opponent of Human Rights and democracy under various late twentieth-century presidents. We analyze these events through the lenses of political, economic, social, and cultural history.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 397JL Social Justice Lawyering
Meeting Days/Time:
Th 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Course Description:
From fighting Jim Crow segregation to challenging the recent Muslim travel ban, judicial review has historically been used as a strategy to reign-in executive and legislative over-reach and protect Constitutional rights. This course will examine how lawyers, social movements, and everyday people have used litigation to advocate for social justice in the United States. Through reading in-depth studies of important civil and criminal cases, we will explore such questions as: What is the history of social justice lawyering in the United States and how, why and when have social movements turned to litigation to advance their causes? What are the pros and cons of using litigation to achieve social justice, versus other tools like direct action, lobbying for political change, and community organizing? How effective is litigation in achieving the goals originally envisioned by lawyers, activists, and litigants? How have lawyers constrained or expanded the vision of social justice movements? What dilemmas do lawyers?who are ethically bound to zealously advocate for the interests of individual clients?face when they are additionally interested in advancing "a cause"? Cases explored may include issues such as civil rights, women's rights, free speech, LGBT/Queer rights, disability rights, environmental justice, criminal justice, poverty and people's lawyering, immigration rights, and the rise of conservative social movement lawyering. Prior law-related coursework helpful, but not required.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 397RR History of Reproductive Rights Law
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
This course will explore the history of reproductive rights law in the United States, centering the reading of statutes, court decisions, amicus briefs, and law review articles. We will look at the progression of cases and legal reasoning involving a wide variety of reproductive rights issues, including forced sterilization, contraception, abortion, forced pregnancy/c-sections, policing pregnancy (through welfare law, employment policies and criminal law), and reproductive technologies. We will pay particular attention to how differently situated women were/are treated differently by the law, particularly on the basis of age, class, race, sexual orientation, and ability. We will also examine the role lawyers have historically played in advancing (or constraining) the goals of the reproductive rights movement(s) and explore the effectiveness of litigation as a strategy to secure these rights. Finally, we will consider the question of reproductive rights versus reproductive justice and whether reproductive justice can be obtained through advocating for reproductive rights.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 397SC Sex and the Supreme Court
Meeting Days/Time:
Tu 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Course Description:
This course focuses on the U.S. Supreme Court and its rulings regarding sex and sexuality. What has the Court said about what type of sexual activity or sexual relationships are constitutionally protected and how and why has this changed over time? What is or should be the Court?s role in weighing in on these most intimate issues? We will examine several hot button issues such as reproduction (sterilization/contraception/abortion); marriage (polygamous/interracial/same sex); pornography/obscenity; sodomy; sexual assault on college campuses; and sex education in public schools. We will consider how the Court and advocates framed these issues, used or misused historical evidence, and how the argument and/or evidence changed depending on the audience (i.e. the Court or the general public). Students will write several short argumentative essays, learn how to read and brief Supreme Court cases, and present an oral argument based on one of their argumentative essays. Prior law-related coursework is helpful, but not required.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 397SL American Slavery
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This advanced course explores the role of the institution of racial slavery in the United States. We will examine the economic, political, and social importance of slavery in the development of the United States, paying special attention to recent literature reexamining the relationship between nineteenth-century slavery and capitalism. Although our focus will be on the enslavement of Africans and African Americans, we will also learn about Native American slaves and enslavers. Along the way, we will explore varied experiences of slavery, with a focus on the dynamic construction of slave cultures, religions, and families. We will learn about the spectrum of slave resistance and study the impacts of various forms of resistance. We will then examine the forces driving the abolition of slavery during the Civil War. Finally, in order to evaluate the outcome of emancipation, the last weeks of class will examine the legacies of racial slavery and the movement for slavery reparations. The course closes with an examination of modern slavery in the United States.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 450:01 Travel Writing: Explorations into the History of the Middle East
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
In this Junior Writing Seminar, we will explore major milestones in the history and historiography of the modern Middle East through travel writing, construed broadly as texts composed by authors on the move. We will use the vantage points of men and women from the region and beyond to examine Middle Eastern political and social history from circa 1800 to the present day. General topics include: the origins of the modern era, the rise of Western imperialism, new conceptions of political belonging, the formation of nation states, and the road to revolution. A priority of this course is to improve the quality of your writing through papers based on our study of these topics, and through regular and fun grammar drills. Towards this end, you will write several short papers and one term paper, and will workshop your drafts in class with me and with your classmates. Strengthen your ability to communicate effectively to readers, while learning about key moments in modern Middle East history and how they have been experienced by those who lived through them.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 450:03 Anatomy of the Barbarian: Ethnography and Empire in the Greco-Roman World
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Our 21st century world has been, and continues to be shaped by traditional, often stereotypical ideas about `foreign? peoples and their customs, and the same was true for the ancient Greeks and Romans. In this seminar, we will look beyond the generic `barbarian? label so common in Greek and Latin writing about foreigners in order to explore how ancient ethnographic thought fundamentally shaped the way Greeks and Romans perceived the world around them, and interacted with peoples from beyond their cultural cores. Beginning with Herodotus and other Greek writers and continuing through the period of the Roman empire, we will discuss topics including ancient ideas about ethnicity and race, theories of environmental determinism, and ancient imperial ideologies. Throughout the course, we will also explore how ancient ethnographic writings have been employed in early modern and contemporary settings to shape and justify more recent imperial projects and social agendas.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 450:04 Monsters, Foreigners - Outsiders in Antiquity - The Middle Ages
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Course Description:
Idealized and despised, outsiders, both real and imagined, define a society through negative and positive examples. We will examine numerous primary sources including Babylonian epic, Greek tragedies, paintings, sculpture, histories, geographies, saints' lives, theology, Viking poems, manuscript illumination, Arthurian legends, and witch-hunting manuals. By placing our sources in their historical contexts, we will examine the ways that a society represents and uses its outsiders. The structure of the class will be roughly chronological beginning in the Ancient Near East and continuing through the Classical world, and medieval Europe, but will also proceed thematically to examine different kinds of outsiders. The subjects of our inquiry will be the fantastic--monsters, zombies, revenants, wild men--but we will also consider the related representations of real peripheral groups and individuals including Jews, Muslims, saints, heretics, and those accused of witchcraft.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 492CW China at War: The Opium War, Taiping Rebellion, and WWII
Meeting Days/Time:
M 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Course Description:
This is an advanced readings seminar focusing on recent English-language scholarship on modern Chinese military history. Roughly a third of the semester will be devoted to each of three major conflicts that helped shape China's modern history: the Opium War (1840-1842): the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864); and the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 that intersected with World War II. A basic background in modern Chinese history, such as one would get from an undergraduate survey, is strongly recommended.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 492P The War for Palestine, 1948: New Interpretations and Approaches
Meeting Days/Time:
Tu 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Course Description:
The war for Palestine in 1948 has been the subject of exciting new research in the last several years. At the center of this war stands the interdependence of Jewish independence and the Palestinian Nakba (the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians during the war). New studies have contributed to our knowledge of the war, as well as to its causes, going back to the British Mandate in 1917-1948, and to its consequences for Jews, Palestinians, and other Arabs after 1948. In this seminar we shall explore the local, regional, and global factors that gave meaning to this war, looking at the cultural and political history of Jewish and Palestinian societies, while placing it within a larger international context of the post-1945 period. Some of the topics to be discussed are the British Mandate, social studies on Jewish and Palestinian society, decolonization, partitions, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism. An important goal of our endeavor is to capture the experience of Jews and Palestinians during the war; we shall therefore read primary sources, particularly diaries of contemporaries.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 492W U.S. Women and Gender History
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
This course will focus on selected topics in U.S. women's and gender history from 1877 to the present. In addition to analyzing women's experiences, we will also consider how gender has been mediated by class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Other topics will include women's political participation and social activism; reproduction, race, and eugenics; immigration and migration; shifting conceptions of gender and sexuality; and women's changing labor force participation.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 646 Indigenous Peoples in Early America
Course Description:
This graduate seminar surveys the major themes, methods and historiographic trends in Native American / American Indian / First Nations history from the early contact period to about 1850. Common readings will be a mix of classic works and recent scholarship.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 692J The US in Japan
Course Description:
In this seminar graduate students will examine the relationship between the United States and Japan since 1853. After introducing students to the general diplomatic history of US Japan relations, the course will focus on other types of transnational history between the two countries. From gender to religion to race, students will explore the important role that individual actors, organizations, and ideas have played in connecting Japan and the United States, particularly at the sub-state level. This approach aims to complicate students' understanding of what constitutes transnational history as well as familiarize them with different categories of historical analysis. The second half of the course will be devoted to the composition of an original research paper that incorporates significant primary and secondary sources.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 692P The war for Palestine, 1948: New Interpretations and Approaches
Course Description:
None available.
Course Number and Name:
Hist 692CW China at War: The Opium War,Taiping Rebellion, and WWII
Course Description:
This is an advanced readings seminar for upper-level history majors and graduate students, focusing on recent English-language scholarship on modern Chinese military history. Roughly a third of the semester will be devoted to each of three major conflicts that helped shape China's modern history: the Opium War (1840-1842): the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1864); and the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 that intersected with World War II. A basic background in modern Chinese history, such as one would get from an undergraduate survey, is strongly recommended.
Course Number and Name:
Art-Hist 327 Contemporary Art
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
This course will address the increasingly broad and complex range of materials, meaning, and social functions of contemporary art from a western perspective, but in the context of multiple global art worlds. How do we make sense of this seemingly chaotic landscape where sometimes directly conflicting interpretations of art making coexist? This course introduces students to a series of major issues in contemporary art and criticism. It will provide a historical and critical perspective on major social/aesthetic problems such as conceptualism, new media, earth art, postmodernism, neo-expressionism, institutional critique, identity politics, political interventions, installation art, ecology, globalization, relational aesthetics, and the role of consumerism and the art market. It brings a new emphasis on community engagement and social practice art for Spring 2021: students will work with the UMCA education curator to coordinate group visits of high school students from Springfield to the museum, in person or virtually, for critical discussions on the culture of museums and the way they relate to diverse and racialized communities.
Course Number and Name:
Art-Hist 329 Latin American/US Latinx Art 1800-Present
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course is an introduction to the art produced in Latin America and by people of Latin American descent, from 1800 to the present. Organized chronologically, the course emphasizes the essential role that art and visual culture have played in the political, social, and religious spheres of Latin America since the wars of independence, as well as the way art is mobilized by Latinx people in the United States. Classes will focus on key topics, including the art of national propaganda, the activation of indigenous visual traditions, the representation and erasure of Afro-Latin Americans, the visualizations of diasporic identities, and art as a contemporary political tool.
Course Number and Name:
Art-Hist 627 Contemporary Art
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
This course will address the increasingly broad and complex range of materials, meaning, and social functions of contemporary art from a western perspective, but in the context of multiple global art worlds. How do we make sense of this seemingly chaotic landscape where sometimes directly conflicting interpretations of art making coexist? This course introduces students to a series of major issues in contemporary art and criticism. It will provide a historical and critical perspective on major social/aesthetic problems such as conceptualism, new media, earth art, postmodernism, neo-expressionism, institutional critique, identity politics, political interventions, installation art, ecology, globalization, relational aesthetics, and the role of consumerism and the art market. It brings a new emphasis on community engagement and social practice art for Spring 2021: students will work with the UMCA education curator to coordinate group visits of high school students from Springfield to the museum, in person or virtually, for critical discussions on the culture of museums and the way they relate to diverse and racialized communities.
Course Number and Name:
Art-Hist 629 Latin American/US Latinx Art 1800-Present
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course is an introduction to the art produced in Latin America and by people of Latin American descent, from 1800 to the present. Organized chronologically, the course emphasizes the essential role that art and visual culture have played in the political, social, and religious spheres of Latin America since the wars of independence, as well as the way art is mobilized by Latinx people in the United States. Classes will focus on key topics, including the art of national propaganda, the activation of indigenous visual traditions, the representation and erasure of Afro-Latin Americans, the visualizations of diasporic identities, and art as a contemporary political tool
Course Number and Name:
Art-Hist 791A Seminar - Afro-Latin American Art
Meeting Days/Time:
Tu 4:00-6:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This seminar investigates Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx art from the colonial period to the present. Despite the growing fame in mainstream popular culture of Afro-Latinx artists like Cardi B, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Amara La Negra, the misconception that Latin Americans and US Latinxs are all brown mestizos (people of mixed Spanish and Indigenous ancestry) persists. In this course we will analyze the critical role that art and visual culture has played in (mis)shaping of Afro-Latinidad. Each week, we will take images produced by, for, and about Afro-Latin Americans, as the starting point for the discussion of major themes, including the visual codification of race, Anti-Blackness, colonialism, slavery and abolition, Afro-Latin religiosity, and art activism. In addition, we will unpack the historiographic traditions of the discipline of art history that have led to the erasure and marginalization of Black artists and subjects.
Course Number and Name:
MES 190A The Middle East in Global Policy -- university's only interdisciplinary intro to Middle East region
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
This course is a basic, interdisciplinary introduction to the contemporary Middle East, and uses three substances central to contemporary society as organizing metaphors for issues that help define the region that stretches from Morocco to Iran. We consider a wide range of topics including the modern legacy of Western colonialism in the region, the impact of oil, the roles of religion, gender politics, Arab-Israeli conflicts, and US policies towards the region. Satisfies the modern 100-level requirement for the Middle Eastern Studies major. (Gen. Ed. SB, DG).
Course Number and Name:
MES 220 The Middle East and the World: 1400-1800
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
In many textbooks, the history of the Middle East is the mirror opposite of European history. We are told that the Middle East was a rich and cosmopolitan region of the world in the Middle Ages, but that its failure to properly modernize led first to weakness and colonization and more recently to extremism and violence. While Europe soared ahead in the years between 1400 and 1800, the Middle East appeared to languish. Explaining why the Middle East failed to "keep up" with Europe has preoccupied a number of scholars. In contrast to the above, this course will question whether a narrative of European success and Middle Eastern failure is the most fruitful way to understand the transformations of the early modern period (1400-1800). While our focal point in the course will be the Middle East, we will use a comparative historical approach to investigate how the challenges of this era were navigated across the globe. We will examine topics such as the rise of the capitalism, the spread of new technologies and organizational models, and the evolution of the modern state. How did the peoples of the Middle East shape - as well as cope with - such massive changes? How did their adaptations compare with those of contemporaries in Asia, Africa and America as well as Europe? Using a framework of shared transformation, we will try to form a more nuanced view of what was gained and lost in the early modern Middle East. What aspects of the Middle Eastern experience were familiar in other parts of the world? What can our understanding of the past tell us about the possibilities for the Middle East's future? (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
MES/Judaic 327 Jewish Food in Historical Perspective
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course examines the production, consumption, and meaning of food within the context of Jewish civilization in a global, diachronic framework, beginning in Biblical times and ending with the modern Jewish deli. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
MES/Judaic 344 Film and Society in Israel
Meeting Days/Time:
W 4:00-6:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course uses film to discuss Israeli society. Topics include: foundation of Israel, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Holocaust survivors, religion, gender, and interethnic relations. All film showings are with English subtitles. (Gen. Ed. AT, DG)
Course Number and Name:
MES/Judaic 351 Crossing Borders in Israel/Palestine
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 12:20-1:10 p.m.
Course Description:
This course will provide a literary lens through which to approach the Palestine-Israel Conflict and the narratives, concerns and dreams of those living in its crosshairs. Building upon notion of crossing borders, this course will consider some of the most prominent Arabic and Hebrew-language literary and cultural works of the conflict via thematic units including Empathy, Rage and (In)Justice; History and Memory, The Body and the Senses, and Shaping The Future. Throughout, we will consider Israeli and Palestinian literatures and cultures comparatively, both within and beyond the geopolitical borders, epistemological confines and linguistic proscriptions of the political status quo. To this end, we will read and analyze in light of debates concerning competitive and multidirectional memory, politics and aesthetics, citizenship and refugees, social and restorative justice, self-determination, and the politics of translation. (Gen. Ed. AL, DG)
Course Number and Name:
Judaic 101 Jewish Experience 1: Ancient to Medieval
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
A survey of the literature and culture of the Jewish people in the formative years of its history. Emphasis on the development of Judaism in the biblical, Graeco-Roman, and rabbinic periods. Final unit treats the Jewish life-cycle and the system of religious practices. (Gen. Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
Judaic 102 Jewish Experience 2: Medieval to Modern
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:0-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
The life and history of the Jews in the medieval and modern worlds. Topics include Jewish-Christian relations; development of Jewish philosophy and mysticism; Jewish life in Eastern Europe; the Holocaust; State of Israel; Jews and Judaism in North America. (Gen.Ed. HS, DG)
Course Number and Name:
Judaic 365 Anti-Semitism in Historical Perspective
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Survey of antisemitism through its various stages of historical development, from ancient times to the present. Primary focus on the intellectual, religious, political, and social roots of Jew-hatred. Special attention to its impact on Jewish life and thought, and to the range of Jewish re-sponses to anti-semitism. Topics include: the Jews in Graeco-Roman society; medieval Christendom and Islam; the emergence of modern political and racial anti-semitism. (Gen.Ed. HS, DG).
Course Number and Name:
Judaic 492P The War for Palestine: 1948
Meeting Days/Time:
Tu 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Course Description:
The war for Palestine in 1948 has been the subject of exciting new research in the last several years. At the center of this war stands the interdependence of Jewish independence and the Palestinian Nakba (the expulsion and dispossession of the Palestinians during the war). New studies have contributed to our knowledge of the war, as well as to its causes, going back to the British Mandate in 1917-1948, and to its consequences for Jews, Palestinians, and other Arabs after 1948. In this seminar we shall explore the local, regional, and global factors that gave meaning to this war, looking at the cultural and political history of Jewish and Palestinian societies, while placing it within a larger international context of the post-1945 period. Some of the topics to be discussed are the British Mandate, social studies on Jewish and Palestinian society, decolonization, partitions, ethnic cleansing, and settler colonialism. An important goal of our endeavor is to capture the experience of Jews and Palestinians during the war; we shall therefore read primary sources, particularly diaries of contemporaries.
Course Number and Name:
CHINESE 150 Peoples and Languages of China
Course Description:
Focus on social and cultural diversity in China through the lens of language. This course will emphasize three aspects: classification of the minorities and their languages, language contact and the formation of Chinese dialects, and the role of language in identifying ethnic groups and in maintaining distinct cultures. No prerequisites.
Course Number and Name:
COMP-LIT 122 Spiritual Autobiography
Course Description:
None available. (AL, DG)
Course Number and Name:
COMP-LIT 144 War Stories
Course Description:
None available. (AL, DG)
Course Number and Name:
COMP-LIT 231 Comedy
Course Description:
Our course begins with the premise that contemporary American comedy is informed by the histories of ethnic American groups -- African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and U.S. Latinos/Latinas -- along with issues of race, class, sexuality and citizenship. American comedians, independent filmmakers, feminists and transgendered comics deploy the language of comedy to invoke serious social matters in contemporary American life: racism, heterosexism, homophobia, class biases against the poor and the undocumented, misogyny, war and other burning issues of the day. We will thus consider that the ends of comedy are more than laughter. Comedy confronts political issues that are constitutive of and threatening to the U.S. body politic. (Gen Ed AL)
Course Number and Name:
COMP-LIT 330 Translation, Cross-Cultural Communication and the Media
Course Description:
None available. (AL, DG)
Course Number and Name:
COMP-LIT 391PT Translating and Publishing Stories
Course Description:
Since its founding in 1959, the Massachusetts Review has been one of the nation’s leading literary magazines. The publication is particularly noted for its commitment to progressive politics: for its leadership in publishing black arts writers, leading figures from the women’s movement, early work in postcolonial theory, and LGBTQ writing. In recent years, the magazine has renewed its commitment to internationalism, bringing great writers from around the world into its pages. This seminar will be taught by the Executive Editor of the Mass Review, and it will feature stories in translation published by the magazine. In addition to interpreting stories and discussing their historical contexts, our conversations will focus on the work of editing and of translation, illustrating how stories move from idea to page—and, in some cases, to print.
Course Number and Name:
FRENCH 280 - Love and Sex in French Culture
Course Description:
None available. (AL)
Course Number and Name:
FRENCH 284/Film-Studies 284 Undead Souths: The Southern Gothic and Francophone Mythologies in Film and Television
Course Description:
None available.
Course Number and Name:
FRENCH 353/Film-Studies 353 African Film
Course Description:
None available. (AT DG)
Course Number and Name:
GERMAN/FILM-ST 304 - From Berlin to Hollywood
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course focuses on refugees escaping Europe as Nazi Germany invades one country after the other. Filmmakers and actors, producers and editors, script writers and film score composers, men and women, waited for visas, wrote letters, and boarded ships to find themselves in Hollywood of the 1930s and the 1940s. The film studios in California soon resembled Rick's Café in Michael Curtiz's unforgettable 1942 classic Casablanca. Separated from a home that had gone crazy, exile filmmakers and artists mingled with other migrants, communists, racialized or minoritized groups. Via such exchanges, the Weimar expressionism was revitalized in Hollywood in a direct expression of the despair, racism, and struggles that refugees have been through – all of which culminated in the emergence of film noir and the horror genre; but also in the redefinitions of the melodrama and the comedy. This seminar interrogates travel and travails, cultural transfer and the popular, exile and displacement, as well as the diverse experiences within the exile community in terms of gender, sexual orientation, linguistic abilities, age, class, and racialization. We will look at popular directors such as Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder, actors Marlene Dietrich and Peter Lorre, as well as less- known emigrees, such as Salka Viertel who opened her home for refugees of all walks of life and coined the phrase "the kindness of strangers." All films will be streamed with in English or with English subtitles. Readings and discussions in English. (Gen.Ed. AT)
Course Number and Name:
PORTUG 309 - Brazilian Women
Course Description:
Mixing biography, literary criticism and cultural history this course will explore women’s experience through Brazilian history as well as introduce the achievements and contributions of women to the cultural and intellectual history of Brazil. We will use literary works, films and essays from a variety of disciplines to analyze what has been said by and about Brazilian women; the situation of Brazilian women past and present. Moreover we will discuss not only what Brazilian women have achieved but also how fundamental issues in Brazilian history have hinged on specific notions of gender. From Anita Garibaldi to Chiquinha Gonzaga and Nise da Silveira among others, the present course will examine the role of women in Brazilian history and culture, discuss the ways in which women have shaped Brazil’s past and present, and analyze some of the ideas and experiences of women in Brazil. Taught in English.
Course Number and Name:
SPANISH 313 - Spanish for Heritage Speakers & Community Engagement
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course continues the work of Spanish 314, Spanish for Heritage Speakers. For the first 7 weeks, students will continue to gain proficiency in Spanish grammar, spelling, and vocabulary while exploring issues relevant to the Latin@/x community with the textbook used in Spanish 314. During the following 6 weeks, students will pair with a local Spanish Heritage speaker in 6th or 8th grade. They will hold virtual conversations where Spanish 313 students will together with their mentee write a short graphic novel in Spanish or a similar project. We will conclude the course sharing the novels in a virtual forum with Spanish 313 students who will effectively serve as undergraduate mentors and their Amherst-Pelham School district mentees. By engaging in the community, Spanish 313 students will achieve greater mastery of what they have learned by teaching their mentees language points studied in class. They will serve as role models and informal liaisons encouraging mentees to attend college while UMass students become part of a greater local Latin@/x community in Amherst.
Course Number and Name:
SPANISH 324 - Introduction to Latino/a Literature
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
In this course students will think critically about the various "wild tongues" that have defined U.S. Latinx literature and culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. Our analysis will center on issues of power as they are experienced by diverse U.S. Latinx populations. Specifically, we will focus on Latinx writers, performers, and scholars that push the boundaries of acceptable gender, sexuality, and racialization within U.S. Latinx cultures, focusing specifically on Caribbean and Chicanx populations in the United States. Students will be required to engage critically with primary texts, as well as reflect on the ways in which these issues exist in the world around us. Because Latinx thinkers often blur the boundaries of traditional literary and scholarly genres, we will consider pinnacle works of Latinx studies - such as those of Pedro Pietri, Gloria Anzaldua, and Junot Diaz - alongside other forms of cultural production, such as performance art and film. We will also try our hands at these art forms in an effort to find new, embodied ways to interact with expressions of Latinx culture. Course texts are written in both English and Spanish. Class discussion will take place in Spanish. All assignments must be completed in Spanish. (Gen. Ed. AL, DU)
Course Number and Name:
SPANISH 397CL - Special Topics- Chican@/x Literature and Indigeneity
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00- 5:15 p.m.
Course Description:
None available.
Course Number and Name:
SPANISH 456 - Spanish Translation for Community Health Services
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00 - 11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
Students will work in translating from English into Spanish Holyoke Health's web site while also studying the challenges and responsibilities of working as civically-engaged volunteers in an urban community health services setting.
Course Number and Name:
LINGUIST 101: People and Their Language
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 1:25-2:15 p.m.
F Section
Course Description:
This course considers language from the viewpoint of nature and of society. A central concern is the question of what distinguishes a dialect from a language. We look at how accents and dialects are important markers of regional and social identity and closely examine the pernicious effects of dialect prejudice.
Course Number and Name:
LINGUIST 389: Introduction to African American English
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
African American English (AAE) is a linguistic variety with set rules governing sentence structure, sound structure, word structure and meaning. We will investigate five areas related to the structure of AAE in social contexts: speech events, components of the grammar, history, educational issues, and representation in the media and literature.
Course Number and Name:
LINGUIST 411: Introduction to Language Acquisition
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
How does a child choose one grammar from a million possible grammars? How are grammar and thought alike and not alike. Stresses the child's use of an inborn linguistic mechanism to produce creative sentences. Acquisition of syntax and semantics from the one-word stage through complex utterances. Linguistic principles as a window to unconscious principles of mind. Recent discoveries in the area of complex syntax. Students learn to search naturalistic data and do a small experiment. The course explores the acquisition of African American English, bilingualism, 2nd language acquisition, and heritage languages.
Course Number and Name:
Phil 164H Medical Ethics
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
Race and medicine will be a prominent sub-theme.
Course Number and Name:
Phil 170 Problems in Social Thought
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Course Description:
Includes: How should we respond to injustice and oppression?
Course Number and Name:
Phil 170 Problems in Social Thought
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Includes: How should we respond to disagreement in the wake of societal injustice.
Course Number and Name:
Phil 370 Intro to Social-Political Philosophy
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
Examine critiques of class, race, and gender perspectives.
Course Number and Name:
Phil 163 Business Ethics
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 1:25-2:15 p.m.
Course Description:
Will cover issues where social justice and business interests conflict.
Course Number and Name:
Theater 130: Contemporary Playwrights of Color, (Lec 1)
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 a.m. (remote)
Course Description:
Theater movements of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, and the body of literature by contemporary playwrights of color within a historical context. (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)
Course Number and Name:
Theater 130: Contemporary Playwrights of Color, (Lec 2)
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 8:30-9:45 a.m. (remote)
Course Description:
Theater movements of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, and the body of literature by contemporary playwrights of color within a historical context. (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)
Course Number and Name:
Theater 130: Contemporary Playwrights of Color, (Lec 3)
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 4:00-5:15 p.m. (remote)
Course Description:
Theater movements of Blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, and the body of literature by contemporary playwrights of color within a historical context. (Gen.Ed. AL, DU)
Course Number and Name:
Theater 293B: Brown Paper Studio, An Applied Theater Process
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 1:25-3:25 p.m. (F2F)
Course Description:
In spring 2021 Brown Paper Studio's curriculum focus will be on practices inspired by Black Feminist Theater and Theatrical Jazz. We will explore the concept of`Radical Presence as a path of self-care and its importance in building healthy, sustainable community.
Course Number and Name:
Theater 333: Contemporary Repertory: Queer Theater
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 1:00-2:15 p.m. (remote)
Course Description:
This course will explore the politics, aesthetics, and themes of contemporary queer theater. Students will examine several plays through queer and performance theory lenses. Meets Junior Year Writing and Theater Major dramaturgy elective requirements.
Course Number and Name:
Theater 334: Contemporary Repertory: Women
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m. (remote)
Course Description:
Explores how women voice themselves and their concerns through theatre/performance. Students will read texts and see performances by and about women and will examine them within their sociopolitical/historical contexts.Meets Junior Year Writing and Theater Major dramaturgy elective requirements.
Course Number and Name:
Theater 393N & Theater 393NH: Devised Theater
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00-6:00 p.m. (F2F)
Course Description:
Course participants will be co-creators in a campus community celebration entitled `The Rites/Rights of Spring: A Festival of Unity? produced by the Theater Dept. in cooperation with Afro-Am Studies in April 2021. Our festival is conceived as both a virtual and if conditions permit, a live event. Festivals are a society's way of restoring and renewing its core values; The Rites/Rights of Spring affirms beauty, freedom, humanity and art in these transformative times. Students will serve in a variety of roles including festival planning, management, facilitation, promotion, performance, etc. Prerequisites are TH140 or an equivalent theater course.
Course Number and Name:
Theater 597D: Multicultural Theater Practice (open to undergrads)
Meeting Days/Time:
W 12:20-2:15 p.m. (remote)
Course Description:
In this course, students will examine African and African American theater produced in the 20th and 21st century and written or translated into English. We will observe the differences and similarities between work across geographic and temporal locations and conduct dramaturgical research to support concept statements that could facilitate professional productions of these works. Because the literary work we will consider spans about a century and comes from the U.S., the Caribbean and the African continent, we will pay special attention to questions about race, culture and representation including problematic practices such as the consistent exclusion of dramatic work that challenges dominant social and political agendas across the US. More importantly, we will examine how artists use their creative work to articulate a sense of self, community and nation and just how contentious this process continues to be for artists of the African diaspora. Using post-colonial theory, we will hone our skills in understanding culturally specific dramatic literature that explores concepts of power, oppression, and representation.
Course Number and Name:
Theater 797D: Special Topics: Multicultural Theater Practice
Meeting Days/Time:
W 12:20-2:15 p.m. (remote)
Course Description:
In this course, students will examine African and African American theater produced in the 20th and 21st century and written or translated into English. We will observe the differences and similarities between work across geographic and temporal locations and conduct dramaturgical research to support concept statements that could facilitate professional productions of these works. Because the literary work we will consider spans about a century and comes from the U.S., the Caribbean and the African continent, we will pay special attention to questions about race, culture and representation including problematic practices such as the consistent exclusion of dramatic work that challenges dominant social and political agendas across the US. More importantly, we will examine how artists use their creative work to articulate a sense of self, community and nation and just how contentious this process continues to be for artists of the African diaspora. Using post-colonial theory, we will hone our skills in understanding culturally specific dramatic literature that explores concepts of power, oppression, and representation.
Full course listing
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 187 – Gender, Sexuality and Culture
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 4:00-5:15 p.m. - Derek Siegel
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m. - Sandra Russell
UWW Section – Adina Giannelli
Course Description:
This course offers an introduction to some of the basic concepts and theoretical perspectives in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Drawing on disciplinary, interdisciplinary and cross-cultural studies, students will engage critically with issues such as gender inequities, sexuality, families, work, media images, queer issues, masculinity, reproductive rights, and history. Throughout the course, students will explore how experiences of gender and sexuality intersect with other social constructs of difference, including race/ethnicity, class, and age. Special attention will be paid to the ways in which interlocking systems of oppression have shaped and influenced the historical, cultural, social, political, and economical contexts of our lives, and the social movements at the local, national and transnational levels which have led to key transformations. (Gen. Ed. I, DU)
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 201 – Gender and Difference: Critical Analyses
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15 a.m.
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
An introduction to the vibrant field of women, gender, and sexuality studies, this course familiarizes students with the basic concepts in the field and draws connections to the world in which we live. An interdisciplinary field grounded in commitment to both intellectual rigor and individual and social transformation, WGSS asks fundamental questions about the conceptual and material conditions of our lives. What are "gender," "sexuality," "race," and "class?" How are gender categories, in particular, constructed differently across social groups, nations, and historical periods? What are the connections between gender and socio-political categories such as race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, (dis)ability and others? How do power structures such as sexism, racism, heterosexism, and classism and others intersect? How can an understanding of gender and power enable us to act as agents of individual and social change? Emphasizing inquiry in transnational feminisms, critical race feminisms, and sexuality studies, this course examines gender within a broad nexus of identity categories, social positions, and power structures. Areas of focus may include queer and trans studies; feminist literatures and cultures; feminist science studies; reproductive politics; gender, labor and feminist economics, environmental and climate justice; the politics of desire, and others. Readings include a range of queer, feminist and women thinkers from around the world, reflecting diverse and interdisciplinary perspectives in the field.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 205 – Feminist Health Politics
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
What is health? What makes health a matter of feminism? And what might a feminist health politics look like? These questions lay at the heart of this course. In Feminist Health Politics, we will examine how health becomes defined, and will question whether health and disease are objectively measured conditions or subjective states. We will also consider why and how definitions and standards of health have changed over time; why and how standards and adjudications of health vary according to gender, race, sexuality, class, and nationality; and how definitions of health affect the way we value certain bodies and ways of living. Additionally, we will explore how knowledge about health is created; how environmental conditions, social location, politics, and economic conditions affect health; how various groups have fought for changes to health care practices and delivery; and how experiences of health and illness have been reported and represented.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 286 – History of Sexuality and Race in the U.S.
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Course Description:
This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary feminist study of sexuality. Its primary goal is to provide a forum for students to consider the history of sexuality and race in the U.S. both in terms of theoretical frameworks within women's and gender studies, and in terms of a range of sites where those theoretical approaches become material, are negotiated, or are shifted. The course is a fully interdisciplinary innovation. It will emphasize the links rather than differences between theory and practice and between cultural, material, and historical approaches to the body, gender, and sexuality. Throughout the course we will consider contemporary sexual politics "from the science of sex and sexuality to marriage debates" in light of histories of racial and sexual formations. (Gen. Ed. HS, DU)
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 291P – From Shrek to Killing Eve: Gender and Pop Culture
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
This course examines popular culture—including television, film, music, music videos, sports, and social media—from a feminist perspective. We will watch and read a range of popular media and look at popular culture as a site of political and social ideology, interrogating how popular culture works to normalize and perpetuate oppression. Course content will address the question of how film and television produce meaning around race, gender, and other identities and what popular culture says about society. Course content will include the changing of LGBT depictions throughout recent history, the impact of the Hayes code, and the continues representational violence that occurs through the trope of "bury your gays" which continues to be an issue in film and television. We will watch films, such as Shrek, to explore satire and its limit and will watch television shows, such as Killing Eve and Black Mirror, to look at how they utilize generic conventions to disrupt normative meanings around gender, violence, and technology. We will also take a deep dive into social media and its effects on current politics and our own experiences with social media usage. This will be examined within the broader context of propaganda, the rise of authoritarianism, and distorted representations of fascism in popular media. We will also examine the relationship of media and pop culture to social justice and the potential for different types of media to disrupt norms, such as hip-hop culture, short stories that resist normative structures, and various films/TV shows.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 292L/AFROAM 292L – Losing Gender
Meeting Days/Time:
MW 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Have you ever felt that gender is a bit odd? Ever feel a little perplexed about "gender reveal parties" and the obsession around an unborn child's genitals? Binaries are strange, knowing the range of thought, expression and creativity humanity* is capable of. Why are we told there are two main genders? What happens when you take all of this into account alongside histories of slavery and conquest? This course will take seriously the claim that gender is anti-Black, that slavery marked an epochal rupture and that slavery is a technology for producing a kind of human. Following the work of Hortense Spillers' Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book, this course is interested in thinking through how the politics gender differentiation was and still is central to black subject making in the New World. One of the objectives for this course, is to develop a way to advocate for a politics vested in the abolition of gender in the long run and in the short-run, doing the work in thinking about how race, gender, and sexuality has been vital to subject making.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 293W - Beauty as Work: Nail Salons, Fashion and Medical Tourism
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
How have bodies become both the site and the vehicle for new forms of labor, consumption, production and reproduction? What does the commercialization of the body and embodied exchanges reveal about interconnections between personal, local, national and global contexts? This course will examine enactments of body labor in locations and processes ranging from nail salons, beauty pageants, cosmetic surgery, surrogacy, medical tourism to frontline healthcare work within the pandemic. Drawing on interdisciplinary feminist, transnational and ethnic studies scholarship, it centers bodies and body labor as lenses through which to examine race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, labor, migration and globalization.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 293R/HISTORY 293R – Womxn Against Imperialism
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 4:00-5:15 p.m.
Course Description:
This course explores the relationship of women (cis, trans, identifying as non-binary) to the social, cultural, economic, and political developments shaping the United States as an empire from 1890 to the present. It examines the regulation of womxn's bodies and sexualities, the gendered narrative of imperialism, and womxn's resistance to imperial power at home and abroad. This course will specifically focus on how class, race, ethnicity, and sexual identity have affected womxn's historical experience through a transnational lens. It questions the mainstream historical narrative to reclaim the voices of underrepresented and/or silenced groups.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 295D - Democracy Works: People, Power and Government
Meeting Days/Time:
MWF 10:10-11:00 a.m.
Course Description:
Civil Rights leader, Dolores Herta, is famous for saying, "The only way Democracy can work is if people participate." With this in mind, class participants will take a deep dive into Massachusetts state government to explore the legislative and budget processes focusing on where people - as individuals and as part of social movements - are powerful. This course will start with the basics and move on to the intersection of inside and outside strategy and organizing.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 340 – Critical Prison Studies
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
There are currently over 2 million people living in prisons and jails across the United States - more incarcerated people per capita than any other country in the world. What is the carceral state and how do particular gendered and racialized bodies get caught up in its logics? How do gender, race, sexuality, and class shape systems of discipline, punishment, surveillance, and control? What is "anti-carceral feminism" and what are some of the abolitionist critiques of the prison industrial complex? This course approaches the issue of mass incarceration through the lens of feminist social justice theory, gender and sexuality studies, and critical race theory. An intersectional and deeply interdisciplinary exploration of the carceral, the course draws on literature, memoir, film, history, social science, psychology, art and popular media to interrogate and explore the many dimensions of mass incarceration in the US.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 393G – Global Mommy Wars
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 2:30-3:45 p.m.
Course Description:
How has motherhood become a highly contested site for racial politics? How are mothers pitted against each other in ways that undermine struggles for reproductive justice? The "mommy wars" were once shorthand for a mostly media-fueled catfight between middle class stay-at-home versus working mothers. These old mommy wars have not gone away, but they have been sutured to newly virulent debates focused on racialized discourses regarding tiger mothers, "anchor babies," birthright citizenship and family separations at the border. This course will focus on constructions of Asian American motherhood while situating these in comparison to scholarship and debates regarding Black, Latinx, Native and Indigenous and White mothers and motherhood. It will draw on a wide range of materials, including feminist and ethnic studies scholarship, public debates, policy initiatives, media representation, and creative writing to explore how race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, nation and migration have shaped current and historical constructions of motherhood. This course will count towards the theory requirement for WGSS majors.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 395N/ANTHRO 395N – Gender, Nation and Body Politics
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
In this course, we will examine feminist theorizations, critiques, and accounts of gender and sexuality in the context of nation-state formations, colonization, globalization, and migration. We will interrogate how the gendered body becomes a target of violence, regulation, and objectification, but also functions as a site of resistance. We will also examine how the body serves as a marker nation and identity, and a locus generating knowledge, both scientific and experiential. Some issues we will cover include racialization, labor, citizenship, heteronormativity, reproduction, schooling, and incarceration, as well as the role of anthropology and ethnography in both understanding and enacting political engagements with these issues.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 491E/ANTHRO 491E – Queer Ethnographies
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 11:30-12:45 p.m.
Course Description:
Ethnography, the signal methodology of anthropology, is now a widespread research method, taken up by scholars across disciplines seeking to understand social processes in everyday life. Queer scholars in the United States pioneered the use of ethnographic methods within the US, arguing that queer communities constituted 'subcultures' that should be studied in their own right. This course begins with these earlier works, from the 1970s and 1980s, and will quickly move to a survey of contemporary queer ethnographic work. The course will end with a consideration of ethnographic film that addresses the everyday lives of LGBTQI people and movements from around the world. Students will come away from the course with a better understanding of the theoretical critiques that ethnography makes available for scholars of sexuality and gender, and of the history of ethnography within anthropology. This course will count towards the theory requirement for WGSS majors.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 494TI – Unthinking the Transnational
Meeting Days/Time:
TuTh 10:00-11:15 a.m.
Course Description:
This course is about the framework of transnational women's and gendered activisms and scholarship. We will survey the field of transnational feminist research and praxis, locating structures of power, practices of resistance, and the geographies of development at work in a range of theories and social movements. The course will not only examine the implementation of feminist politics and projects that have sought to ensure some measurable social, cultural, and economic changes, but also explore the ways conceptions of the `global' and `transnational' have informed these efforts. Students will have the opportunity to assess which of these practices can be applicable, transferable, and/or travel on a global scale. We will focus not only on the agency of individuals, but also on the impact on people's lives and their communities as they adopt strategies to improve material, social, cultural, and political conditions of their lives. Satisfies the Integrative Experience for BA-WoSt majors.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 695E - Theorizing Eros
Meeting Days/Time:
Thursday 4:00-6:30 p.m.
Course Description:
This graduate seminar centers around the project of theorizing eros. The erotic has been a rich site of queer feminist thinking about the epistemic and material costs of the imposition of sexuality as an interpretive grid for making sense of human nature. The course will begin with the study of sexuality as a knowledge system, with a focus on racial and colonial histories of sexuality, while most of the rest of the semester will be devoted to queer feminist considerations of the erotic as a site of ethics and politics. Michele Foucault famously distinguished between "scientia sexualis" and "ars erotica" and Audre Lorde, coterminously, between the "pornographic" and the "erotic." In The History of Sexuality and "Uses of the Erotic," eros operates as a set of possibilities, or capacities, - for pleasure, joy, fulfilment, satisfaction – that exceed and provincialize sexuality and which might inspire ways of rethinking nature, need, and relationality. In addition to Lorde and Foucault, we will read Lynne Huffer, L.H. Stallings, Ladelle McWhorter, Adrienne Marie Brown, Sharon Holland, Ela Przybylo, Jennifer Nash, and Amber Jamilla Musser, among others, to help us think capaciously about what queer feminist erotics can do.
Course Number and Name:
WGSS 705 – Feminist Epistemologies and Interdisciplinary Methodologies (formerly titled WGSS 691B - Issues in Feminist Research)
Meeting Days/Time:
Tuesday 2:30-5:00 p.m.
Course Description:
This is a required course for students enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies. Those students will be given priority enrollment. Certificate students can contact lindah@umass.edu if the class is full they need to be added.
This course will begin from the question, "what is feminist research?" Through classic and current readings on feminist knowledge production, we will explore questions such as: What makes feminist research feminist? What makes it research? What are the proper objects of feminist research? Who can do feminist research? What can feminist research do? Why do we do feminist research? How do feminists research? Are there feminist ways of doing research? Why and how do the stories we tell in our research matter, and to whom? Some of the key issues/themes we will address include: accountability, location, citational practices and politics, identifying stakes and stakeholders, intersectionality, inter/disciplinarity, choosing and describing our topics and methods, research as storytelling, and the relationship between power and knowledge.