Courses

AFST B300 Black Women's Studies

Fall 2024

Black Feminist Studies, which emerged in the 1970s as a corrective to both Black Studies and Women's Studies, probes the silences, erasures, distortions, and complexities surrounding the experiences of peoples of African descent wherever they live. The early scholarship was comparable to the painstaking excavation projects of an archaeologist digging for hidden treasures. A small group of mainly black feminist scholars have been responsible for reconstructing the androcentric African American literary tradition by establishing the importance of black women's literature going back to the nineteenth century. In this interdisciplinary seminar, students closely examine the historical, critical and theoretical perspectives that led to the development of Black Feminist theory/praxis. The course will draw from the 19th century to the present, but will focus on the contemporary Black feminist intellectual tradition that achieved notoriety in the 1970s and initiated a global debate on "western" and global feminisms. Central to our exploration will be the analysis of the intersectional relationship between theory and practice, and of race, to gender, class, and sexuality. We will conclude the course with the exploration of various expressions of contemporary Black feminist thought around the globe as a way of broadening our knowledge of feminist theory.

Writing Intensive

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Africana Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Latin American,Iberian,Latinx

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ANTH B102 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

This course will explore the basic principles and methods of sociocultural anthropology. Through field research, direct observation, and participation in a group's daily life, sociocultural anthropologists examine the many ways that people organize their social institutions and cultural systems, ranging from the dynamics of life in small-scale societies to the transnational circulation of people, commodities, technologies and ideas. Sociocultural anthropology examines how many of the categories we assume to be "natural," such as kinship, gender, or race, are culturally and socially constructed. It examines how people's perceptions, beliefs, values, and actions are shaped by broader historical, economic, and political contexts. It is also a vital tool for understanding and critiquing imbalances of power in our contemporary world. Through a range of topically and geographically diverse course readings and films, and opportunities to practice ethnographic methodology, students will gain new analytical and methodological tools for understanding cultural difference, social organization, and social change.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Child and Family Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ANTH B213 Anthropology of Food

Spring 2025

Food is part of the universal human experience. But everyday experiences of food also reveal much about human difference. What we eat is intimately connected with who we are, where we belong, and how we see the world. In this course, we will use a socio-cultural perspective to explore how food helps us form families, national and religious communities, and other groups. We will also consider how food may become a source of inequality, a political symbol, and a subject of social discord. Examining both practical and ideological meanings of food and taste, this course will address issues of identity, social difference, and cultural experience.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Child and Family Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward International Studies

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ANTH B246 The Everyday Life of Language: Field Research in Linguistic Anthropology

Not offered 2024-25

The goal of this course is to develop an awareness of how language operates in various interactional and other (eg. ritual, performance, political) contexts that we commonly experience. The focus will be on gaining hands-on experience in doing linguistic anthropological data collection and analysis, and putting the results of individual student projects together as part of initiating an ongoing, multi-year project. Topics that students explore ethnographically may include: language and gender; language, race and social indexicality; sociolinguistic variation; codeswitching; register and social stance; language and social media. Student research will involve ethnographic observation, audio-recording of spoken discourse, conducting interviews, and learning how to create a transcript to use as the basis for ethnographic analysis. Students will work in parallel on individual projects cohering around a particular topic, and class time will be used to discuss the results and synthesize insights that develop from bringing different ethnographic contexts together. For the praxis component of the course, students will use the experience they have gained to generate ideas for components of a middle school/high school language arts curriculum that incorporates linguistic anthropology concepts and student-driven research on language.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Praxis Program

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ANTH B287 Sex, Gender, Biology and Culture

Fall 2024

This 200-level anthropology course is an introductory survey of topics in sex, gender, biology, and culture, approached through an intersectional feminist interdisciplinary biocultural anthropological lens. In this course, we delve into the variations of gender in the US and globally, explore the interplay between gender and sex, and examine concepts of biological sex, intersexuality, and sexuality. Students will also explore contemporary issues and research areas where anthropologists and human biologists investigate the intersection of sex and gender. This includes discussions on hormones, sports, and the brain, as well as examinations of sex and gender among non-human animals. This course offers students a unique amalgamation of biocultural anthropology, cultural anthropology, biology research, gender studies, feminist science studies, and health science. Through this course, students will develop skills to discern and assess scientific information and claims and construct a critical feminist toolkit for analyzing scientific knowledge. They will apply these skills to evaluate a diverse array of sources, ranging from peer-reviewed articles to popular media, websites, podcasts, and documentaries. Moreover, students will utilize queer feminist theories to cultivate this intersectional perspective, honing their abilities in analytical and critical thinking. Upon completion of the course, students will leave with enhanced confidence in articulating nuanced thoughts on the complex intersections of sex, gender, sexuality, science, and society.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ANTH B294 Culture, Power, and Politics

Not offered 2024-25

What do a country's national politics have to do with culture? Likewise, how are politics hidden below the surface of our everyday social lives? This course explores questions like these through anthropological approaches. Drawing on both classic and contemporary ethnographic studies from the U.S. and around the world, we will examine how social and cultural frameworks help us understand politics in new ways. We will investigate how people perceive the meanings and effects of the state; how nationalism and citizenship shape belonging on the one hand, and exclusion on the other; how understandings of gender, race, and difference converge with political action, ideology, and power; and how politics infuse everyday spaces including schools, businesses, homes, and even the dinner table. Prerequisite: ANTH B102, H103 or permission of the instructor.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward International Studies

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ANTH B312 Anthropology of Reproduction

Fall 2024

This course will examine how power in everyday life shapes reproductive behavior and how reproduction is culturally constructed. Through an examination of materials from different cultures, this course will look at how often competing interests within households, communities, states and institutions (at both the local and global levels) influence reproduction in society. We will explore the political economy of reproduction cross-culturally, how power and politics shape gendered reproductive behavior and how it is interpreted and used differently by persons, communities and institutions. Topics covered include but are not limited to the politics of family planning, mothering/parenting, abortion, pregnancy, pregnancy loss, fetal testing and biology and social policy in cross-cultural comparison. Prerequisite: ANTH 8102 (or ANTH H103) or permission of instructor. Haverford: Social Science (SO), Enrollment Cap: 15; Post Bacc Spaces: 2; If the course exceeds the enrollment cap the following criteria will be used for the lottery: Major/Minor/Concentration; Senior; Junior; Permission of Instructor.

Counts Toward Child and Family Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Health Studies

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ANTH B329 The politics of belonging and exclusion in India

Not offered 2024-25

Since India's economic liberalization in the early 1990s, the globalizing dynamics of cultural and economic liberalization have been accompanied by renewed articulations of who belongs in the "New India" and who doesn't. In this context, caste, class, religious community, language, and gender have become crucial sites for claiming citizenship, articulating distinctions among people, and constructing senses of what and who can inhabit the public sphere. Using materials from different regions of India, our focus will be on how fine-grained ethnographic study can be a tool to examine the broader dynamics of belonging and exclusion and its political and social effects. This course fulfills the BMC Anthropology major/minor ethnographic area requirement.

Writing Attentive

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward International Studies

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ANTH B331 Medical Anthro Seminar: Critical Thinking for Critical Times

Not offered 2024-25

Advanced Medical Anthropology: Critical Thinking for Critical Times explores theoretical and applied frameworks used in medical anthropology to tackle pressing problems in our world today. Coupled with topical subjects and ethnographic examples, this seminar will enable students to delve deeply into sub-specialization areas in the field of medical anthropology, including: global health inequalities, cross-border disease transmission, genomics, science and technology studies, ethnomedicine, cross-cultural psychiatry/psychology, cross-cultural bioethics, and ecological approaches to studying health and behavior, among others. No prior experience in medical anthropology is required. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing and higher.

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ANTH B354 Political Economy, Gender, Ethnicity and Transformation in Vietnam

Spring 2025

Today, Vietnam is in the midst of dramatic social, economic and political changes brought about through a shift from a central economy to a market/capitalist economy since the late 1980s. These changes have resulted in urbanization, a rise in consumption, changes in land use, movement of people, environmental consequences of economic development, and shifts in social and economic relationships and cultural practices as the country has moved from low income to middle income status. This course examines culture and society in Vietnam focusing largely on contemporary Vietnam, but with a view to continuities and historical precedent in past centuries. In this course, we will draw on anthropological studies of Vietnam, as well as literature and historical studies. Relationships between the individual, family, gender, ethnicity, community, land, and state will pervade the topics addressed in the course, as will the importance of political economy, nation, and globalization. In addition to class seminar discussions, students will view documentary and fictional films about Vietnamese culture. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or higher or first years with ANTH 102.

Writing Attentive

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward International Studies

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ARCH B253 Gender Archaeology in Pre-Islamic Western Asia

Fall 2024

This course explores the intersections of gender and archaeology in Western Asia during the pre-Islamic periods. It examines how diverse social groups use multiple means to construct, perform, and negotiate gender, sex, identities. The course discusses gender's intricate relationship with class, sexuality, and religion through analysis of texts, visual representations, spatial organization, and other material traces of the past. Grounded in the tradition of gender archaeology, this course draws on various discourses and interpretive frameworks to offer new archaeological approaches for understanding and discussing gender dynamics in both past and present societies.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward MECANA Studies

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ARCH B254 Cleopatra

Not offered 2024-25

This course examines the life and rule of Cleopatra VII, the last queen of Ptolemaic Egypt, and the reception of her legacy in the Early Roman Empire and the western world from the Renaissance to modern times. The first part of the course explores extant literary evidence regarding the upbringing, education, and rule of Cleopatra within the contexts of Egyptian and Ptolemaic cultures, her relationships with Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, her conflict with Octavian, and her death by suicide in 30 BCE. The second part examines constructions of Cleopatra in Roman literature, her iconography in surviving art, and her contributions to and influence on both Ptolemaic and Roman art. A detailed account is also provided of the afterlife of Cleopatra in the literature, visual arts, scholarship, and film of both Europe and the United States, extending from the papal courts of Renaissance Italy and Shakespearean drama, to Thomas Jefferson's art collection at Monticello and Joseph Mankiewicz's 1963 epic film, Cleopatra.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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CSTS B175 Feminism in Classics

Spring 2025

This course will illustrate the ways in which feminism has had an impact on classics, as well as the ways in which feminists think with classical texts. It will have four thematic divisions: feminism and the classical canon; feminism, women, and rethinking classical history; feminist readings of classical texts; and feminists and the classics - e.g. Cixous' Medusa and Butler's Antigone.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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CSTS B219 Poetic Desires, Queer Longings

Not offered 2024-25

This course places poetry that considers love and desire from Greco-Roman antiquity in conversation with modern poetry and critical theory (queer, feminist, and literary). How are the roles of lover and beloved constructed through gender? How does queer desire and sexuality manifest in different cultural contexts? How have poets sought to express desire through language, and in what ways does language fail to capture that desire? Students in this course will face the difficulties of articulating desire head-on through both traditional literary analysis papers and a creative writing project. Texts will include love poetry by Sappho and Ovid, Trista Mateer's Aphrodite Made Me Do It, Anne Carson's Eros the Bittersweet, and Audre Lorde's "The Uses of the Erotic."

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CSTS B230 Food and Drink in the Ancient World

Not offered 2024-25

This course explores practices of eating and drinking in the ancient Mediterranean world both from a socio-cultural and environmental perspective. Since we are not only what we eat, but also where, when, why, with whom, and how we eat, we will examine the wider implications of patterns of food production, preparation, consumption, availability, and taboos, considering issues like gender, health, financial situation, geographical variability, and political status. Anthropological, archaeological, literary, and art historical approaches will be used to analyze the evidence and shed light on the role of food and drink in ancient culture and society. In addition, we will discuss how this affects our contemporary customs and practices and how our identity is still shaped by what we eat.

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CSTS B240 (Re)Productions from Antiquity to Modernity

Not offered 2024-25

How might Ancient Greek and Roman values regarding leisure time, labor, poetic production, and reproduction intersect with those of modern capitalism? Why are texts considered the children of ancient (male) authors, and where do women fit into this textual reproductive activity? What does a queer (i.e. non-essentialist, non-binary) reproduction look like? What makes art art, and does the reproduction of art, such as Roman copies of Greek statues, entail the loss of some special uncapturable quality? This course considers the above questions, investigating ancient and modern cultural attitudes towards (re)production through intersectional feminist and queer theory. Students will explore modern textual and filmic representations of pregnancy, abortion, creation, domestic labor, and artistic labor to enrich their readings of ancient texts. Texts will include Ancient Greek tragedies such as Euripides' Medea and Sophocles' Antigone, Latin poetry such as Horace's Ars Poetica and Ovid's Metamorphoses, novels such as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, films such as My Fair Lady, and modern poetry by Johanna Hedva and Dionne Brand.

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EALC B240 Topics in Chinese Film

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies.

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EALC B264 Human Rights in China

Not offered 2024-25

This course will examine China's human rights issues from a historical perspective. The topics include diverse perspectives on human rights, historical background, civil rights, religious practice, justice system, education, as well as the problems concerning some social groups such as migrant laborers, women, ethnic minorities and peasants.

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ECON B324 The Economics of Discrimination and Inequality

Fall 2024

Explores the causes and consequences of discrimination and inequality in economic markets. Topics include economic theories of discrimination and inequality, evidence of contemporary race- and gender-based inequality, detecting discrimination, identifying sources of racial and gender inequality, and identifying sources of overall economic inequality. Additionally, the instructor and students will jointly select supplementary topics of specific interest to the class. Possible topics include: discrimination in historical markets, disparity in legal treatments, issues of family structure, and education gaps. Writing Intensive. Prerequisites: At least one 200-level applied microeconomics elective; ECON 253 or 304; ECON 200.

Writing Intensive

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ENGL B175 Queer American Poetry

Spring 2025

What does poetry have to say about the history of sexuality? How do queer voices, expansively defined, disrupt poetic norms and forms? How has poetry been congenial to the project of imagining and making queer communities, queer spaces, and even queer worlds? In this course, we survey the work of queer American poets from the late nineteenth century to the present, as we touch on major topics in the history of sexuality, queer studies, and American cultural history. This course provides an overview of American poetry as well as an introduction to queer studies concepts and frameworks; no prior experience with these fields is necessary.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ENGL B212 Renaissance Erotic Poetry

Not offered 2024-25

Even when it was concerned with elevated topics like religion, politics, or community, Renaissance poetry was deeply embodied, working through abstract topics in frank and fleshy figures. This class will serve as an introduction to Renaissance lyric, focusing on the erotic dimensions of early modern poetics. Along the way, we'll discuss topics of interest within gender and sexuality studies and queer theory. Authors will include Wyatt, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, Marvell, Herbert, Rochester, and Milton.

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ENGL B217 Narratives of Latinidad

Not offered 2024-25

This course explores how Latina/o writers fashion bicultural and transnational identities and narrate the intertwined histories of the U.S. and Latin America. We will focus on topics of shared concern among Latino groups such as struggles for social justice, the damaging effects of machismo and racial hierarchies, the politics of Spanglish, and the affective experience of migration. By analyzing a range of cultural production, including novels, poetry, testimonial narratives, films, activist art, and essays, we will unpack the complexity of Latinidad in the Americas.

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ENGL B225 Contemporary Life Writing: Form and Theory

Not offered 2024-25

In this course, we will explore contemporary forms of life writing. The term "writing" will be used flexibly to encompass self-representation in visual forms (including comics, photography, and video). We will begin by considering myth and archives in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictée; our next unit will address how life writing represents the lives of others. The last half of the course focuses on the genre of autotheory, or life writing that has become a form of theorizing (about gender, sexuality, race, and biopolitics, among other topics) in its own right.

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ENGL B227 Trans Shakespeare

Fall 2024

Everyone knows that Shakespeare's plays are chock-full of moments of gender trouble. Whether it is the fact of cross-dressing on stages that prohibited women actors or the episodes where already cross-dressed boy actors played men, the early modern stage reveled in the instability of gender and its performance. Less known, however, are the rich debates and theories about sex, gender, and sexuality that were going on at the time and that informed the performance of gender on Shakespeare's stage. Indeed, three years before the publication of Shakespeare's first folio, or collected works, a pamphlet debate between Hic Mulier (the man-woman) and Haec Vir (the womanish man) raged, bringing social anxieties about cross-dressing, sexuality, women, and masculinity to the fore of bookstall debate. This course will delve into Shakespeare's works and put them in context in the landscape of early modern theories of gender and sexuality. Moreover, this course will engage contemporary scholarship, to re-situate our approach to gender and sexuality in Shakespeare within a trans-critical framework, moving away from gender binarism in our approach to questions of gender in early modern literature. Readings include Ben Jonson's Epicene, Shakespeare's As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Merchant of Venice, and Henry VI Part I, and a selection of criticism and theory.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ENGL B237 Cultural Memory and State-Sanctioned Violence in Latinx Literature

Not offered 2024-25

This course examines how Latinx literature grapples with state-sanctioned violence, cultural memory, and struggles for justice in the Americas. Attending to the histories of dictatorship and civil war in Central and South America, we will focus on a range of genres-including novels, memoir, poetry, film, and murals-to explore how memory and the imagination can contest state-sanctioned violence, how torture and disappearances haunt the present, how hetereopatriarchal and white supremacist discourses are embedded in authoritarian regimes, and how U.S. imperialism has impacted undocumented migration. Throughout the course we will analyze the various creative techniques Latinx cultural producers use to resist violence and imagine justice.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Latin American,Iberian,Latinx

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ENGL B239 African American Poetry

Not offered 2024-25

This course explores the work of black poets in the Americas. Focusing on a range of poetic forms from the 18th century through the present, we will consider key questions that have animated the works of black poets in North America and the Caribbean, and how they have used poetic strategy to engage these questions. How do black poets explore black political and social life in various historical and geographical contexts? How do they use particular formal strategies (for example, form poetry, free verse, narrative poetry, and experimental modes) to interrogate notions of blackness? How do political movements around gender, class, and sexuality factor in? As we approach these questions, we will consider important critical conversations on African American poetry and poetics, examining how both well-known and underexplored poets use form to complicate blackness and imagine various forms of freedom. Our work will take us through several poetic genres and forms, including print works, performance poetry, hip hop music, and digital media. Throughout our analysis, we will consider how discourses on gender, sexuality, class, national and transnational identity, and other engagements with difference shape black poetic expression, both historically and in our current moment.

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ENGL B270 American Girl: Childhood in U.S. Literatures, 1690-1935

Not offered 2024-25

This course will focus on the "American Girl" as a particularly contested model for the nascent American. Through examination of religious tracts, slave and captivity narratives, literatures for children and adult literatures about childhood, we will analyze U. S. investments in girlhood as a site for national self-fashioning.

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ENGL B305 Early Modern Trans Studies

Not offered 2024-25

This course will consider the deep histories of transgender embodiment by exploring literary, historical, medical, and religious texts from the Renaissance. Expect to read about alchemical hermaphrodites, gender-swapping angels, Ethiopian eunuchs, female husbands, trans saints, criminal transvestites, and genderqueer monks. We will consider together how these early modern texts speak to the historical, theoretical, and political concerns that animate contemporary trans studies. We will read texts by Crashaw, Donne, Shakespeare, Lyly, and Dekker as well as Susan Stryker, Dean Spade, Mel Chen, Paul Preciado, and Kadji Amin. Prerequisite: Students must have completed at least one 200-level class.

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ENGL B333 Lesbian Immortal

Spring 2025

Lesbian literature has repeatedly figured itself in alliance with tropes of immortality and eternity. Using recent queer theory on temporality, and 19th and 20th century primary texts, we will explore topics such as: fame and noteriety; feminism and mythology; epistemes, erotics and sexual seasonality; the death drive and the uncanny; fin de siecle manias for mummies and seances.

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ENGL B336 Topics in Film

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course and description varies according to the topic.

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ENGL B337 Modernism and the Ordinary

Not offered 2024-25

Modernism is consistently aligned with innovation: making things new and making things strange. Yet modernist writing is preoccupied with habit, repetition, sameness, boredom, and the banal-with "things happening, normally, all the time," as Virginia Woolf once put it. This course explores the modernist fascination with the ordinary, from the objects in a kitchen to the rhythms of a day. Our primary task will be to understand the stakes of paying attention to the ordinary world for queer and women modernist writers, whose work reveals the ordinary as a site of deep ambivalence as well as possibility. Likely authors include: Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, and Jean Rhys.

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ENGL B339 Latina/o Culture and the Art of Migration

Not offered 2024-25

Gloria Anzaldúa has famously described the U.S.-Mexico border as an open wound and the border culture that arises from this fraught site as a third country. This course will explore how Chicana/os and Latina/os creatively represent different kinds of migrations across geo-political borders and between cultural traditions to forge transnational identities and communities. We will use cultural production as a lens for understanding how citizenship status, class, gender, race, and language shape the experiences of Latin American migrants and their Latina/o children. We will also analyze alternative metaphors and discourses of resistance that challenge anti-immigrant rhetoric and reimagine the place of undocumented migrants and Latina/os in contemporary U.S. society. Over the course of the semester, we will probe the role that literature, art, film, and music can play in the struggle for migrants' rights and minority civil rights, querying how the imagination and aesthetics can contribute to social justice. We will examine a number of different genres, as well as read and apply key theoretical texts on the borderlands and undocumented migration.

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Latin American,Iberian,Latinx

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ENGL B342 The Queer Middle Ages

Not offered 2024-25

This course examines medieval queer history, focusing on literary depictions of non-normative sexual identities and expressions. From monastic vows of celibacy to same-sex erotic love, from constructions of female virginity to trans identity, the Middle Ages conceptualized sexuality in a range of ways and with a range of attached assumptions and anxieties. Readings will include chivalric romance, rules for monks, cross-dressing saints' lives, and legal tracts worried about unmarried women.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ENGL B343 Sex, Sin, and the Sacred in Medieval Literature

Spring 2025

Rather than being at odds with the church, sex and sexuality was an integral part of medieval concepts of sanctity. Even as the church attempted to regulate sexual behavior, it was also deeply invested in the relationship between the divine and the corporeal, including meditation upon the frankly erotic Song of Songs; the question of Mary's virginity and motherhood; hagiographic accounts of cross-dressing saints; and the feminization of Christ's body. This course will explore three concepts-- sex, sin, and the sacred-- and their interrelationship during the medieval period. We will investigate the complex and often contradictory ways that sex was understood, exploring how medieval people conceptualized the sacred and profane -- and then troubled the very binaries such a system established. Broadly interpreting the term "sex," we will explore issues of sexual and romantic desire; sexual acts and behaviors; medieval versions of gender identity; pre-modern understandings of "biological" sex; love and courtship; and more. Readings will be mostly literary (both canonical and non-canonical) but will also include some excerpts from religious texts and both medieval and early modern medical treatises, including work from Geoffrey Chaucer, Alain de Lille, Christine de Pizan, St. Augustine, Margery Kempe, Thomas Mallory, John Gower, and Marie de France. We will pair these primary source texts with commentary and essays from critics such as Judith Butler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Robert Mills, and Carolyn Dinshaw. While texts will be presented in their original form where possible, knowledge of Middle English is not a prerequisite for the course. Prerequisite: One 200-level English course or permission of instructor

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ENGL B358 Gertrude Stein: Difficult Genius

Fall 2024

As a radical modernist writer, theorist of language, and self-styled "genius," Stein looms large in literary history. In this course, it is our task to read (and enjoy!) Stein's difficult, genre-breaking writing. We will study Stein's eclectic body of work, which spans the first half of the twentieth century (and two world wars, Stein's move to Paris, a lesbian marriage, shifting ideas about gender and sexuality), against its cultural backdrop. Among the questions we will ask are: How does Stein's work redefine reading? What are the politics of "radical" and "experimental" language use? What is a queer text? What is a genius?

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ENGL B363 Toni Morrison and the Art of Narrative Conjure

Not offered 2024-25

A comprehensive study of Morrison's narrative experiments in fiction, this course traces her entire oeuvre from "Recitatif" to God Help the Child. We read the works in publication order with three main foci: Morrison-as-epistemologist questioning what it is that constitutes knowing and being known, Morrison-as-revisionary-teacher-of-reading-strategies, and Morrison in intertextual dialogue with several oral and literary traditions. In addition to critical essays, students complete a "Pilate Project" - a creative response to the works under study.

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ENGL B372 Black Ecofeminism(s): Critical Approaches

Spring 2025

How have Black feminist authors and traditions theorized or represented the ecological world and their relationship to it? How does thinking intersectionally about gender(ing) and racialization expand or challenge conventional notions of "nature," conservation, or environmental justice? In what ways does centering racial blackness critically reframe a host of practical and philosophical questions historically brought together under the sign "ecofeminism?" Combining history and theory, the humanities and the social sciences, this interdisciplinary course will use the work of Black feminist writers (broadly defined) across a range of genres to approach and to trouble the major paradigms and problems of contemporary Euro-American ecofeminist thought. The course uses fiction and poetry by Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen as a gateway to a range of critical work by Jennifer Morgan, Sylvia Wynter, Maria Mies, and Val Plumwood as it attempts to define and deconstruct what Chelsea Frazier calls "Black Feminist Ecological Thought." Prerequisite: At least one 200-level English course and one course in Africana Studies

Counts Toward Africana Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ENGL B379 The African Griot(te)

Not offered 2024-25

English 379 is a capstone topics course in the study of two or more distinguished African writers who have made significant contributions to African literary production. The focus changes from one semester to the next so that students may re-enroll in the course for credit. The specific focus of each semester's offering of the course is outlined separately.

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FREN B105 Directions de la France contemporaine

Spring 2025

Ce cours a pour objet les dynamiques et les tensions qui structurent ou déstructurent la France contemporaine. Dans quelle mesure la France a-t-elle profité de la colonisation et de l'esclavage pour devenir la France ? Le modèle républicain est-il mis à mal par ce qu'on appelle les "communautarismes", ou n'est-il lui même qu'un déguisement du communautarisme de la majorité ? Quel est ce "séparatisme" qui menacerait la cohésion nationale et les valeurs universalistes de la France ? Pourquoi la laïcité est-elle en crise aujourd'hui ? L'État de droit peut-il demeurer un État de droit face au djihadisme ? L'arbitrage impossible entre priorité sanitaire et priorité économique montre-t-il que le pouvoir politique est devenu impuissant ? Les travaux à rendre vous permettront de vous exprimer dans des formats innovants (podcast, présentation vidéo, réalisation de pages Internet) et de perfectionner vos compétences à l'oral aussi bien qu'à l'écrit. Prerequisite: FREN 005 or 101.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Museum Studies

Counts Toward Visual Studies

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FREN B201 Le Chevalier, la Dame, et le Prêtre: études de femmes, de classes sociales et d'ethnies

Not offered 2024-25

Using literary texts, historical documents and letters as a mirror of the social classes that they address, this interdisciplinary course studies the principal preoccupations of secular and religious female and male authors in France and Norman England from the eleventh century through the fifteenth. Selected works from epic, lais, roman courtois, fabliaux, theater, letters, and contemporary biography are read in modern French translation. Prerequisite: FREN 102 or 105.

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FREN B221 Femme sujet/Femme objet

Fall 2024

An in-depth examination of how women authors from selected periods conceive of their art, construct authority for themselves, and, where appropriate, distinguish themselves from male colleagues, of whom several who have assumed female voices/perspective will be examined as points of comparison. It introduces students to the techniques and topics of selected women writers (as well as theoretical approaches to them) from the most recent (Djebar and M. Duras) to late Medieval authors. This course is taught in French. Prerequisite: FREN 102 or 105

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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FREN B302 Le printemps de la parole féminine: femmes écrivains des débuts

Not offered 2024-25

This study of selected women authors from Latin CE-Carolingian period through the Middle Ages, Renaissance and 17th century-among them, Perpetua, Hrotswitha, Marie de France, the trobairitz, Christine de Pisan, Louise Labé, Marguerite de Navarre, and Madame de Lafayette-examines the way in which they appropriate and transform the male writing tradition and define themselves as self-conscious artists within or outside it. Particular attention will be paid to identifying recurring concerns and structures in their works, and to assessing their importance to women's writing in general: among them, the poetics of silence, reproduction as a metaphor for artistic creation, and sociopolitical engagement. Prerequisite: two 200-level courses or permission of instructor.

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GERM B217 Representing Diversity in German Cinema

Not offered 2024-25

German society has undergone drastic changes as a result of immigration. Traditional notions of Germanness have been and are still being challenged and subverted. This course uses films and visual media to examine the experiences of various minority groups living in Germany. Students will learn about the history of immigration of different ethnic groups, including Turkish Germans, Afro-Germans, Asian Germans, Arab Germans, German Jews, and ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. We will explore discourses on migration, racism, xenophobia, integration, and citizenship. We will seek to understand not only the historical and contemporary contexts for these films but also their relevance for reshaping German society. Students will be introduced to modern German cinema from the silent era to the present. They will acquire terminology and methods for reading films as fictional and aesthetic representations of history and politics, and analyze identity construction in the worlds of the real and the reel. This course is taught in English

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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GERM B245 Interdisciplinary Approaches to German Literature and Culture

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Scenes of Observation:

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Taught in German. Course content varies. Previous topics include, Women's Narratives on Modern Migrancy, Exile, and Diasporas; Nation and Identity in Post-War Austria.

Writing Attentive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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GERM B321 Advanced Topics in German Cultural Studies

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Asia and Germany through Film
Section 001 (Spring 2024): The Letter, the Spirit, and Beyond
Section 001 (Spring 2025): The Letter, the Spirit, and Beyond

Spring 2025

This is a topics course. Course content varies. Recent topic titles include: Asia and Germany through Film; The Letter, the Spirit, and Beyond: German-Jewish Writers and Jewish Culture in the 18th and 19th Century.

Current topic description: The Letter, the Spirit, and Beyond: German-Jewish Writers and Jewish Culture in the 18th and 19th Century: While Jewish history extends well over a thousand years in German-speaking lands, the political, cultural, and social changes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lay the foundation for German-Jewish relations today, and begin articulating new dimensions of the experiences the "Other," treated metaphorically through the tension between the "Letter" and the "Spirit." Starting in the Age of Reason, this course focuses on depictions of Jewishness in the literary works and intellectual contributions by German and German-Jewish authors, and explores ways in which German-Jewish identity goes beyond "the Letter" and "the Spirit." The fragile utopia of religious tolerance staged in Lessing's Nathan the Wise is followed by grotesque antisemitic tropes in the folk tales and fairy tales in Romanticism, and in other nationalist, artistic endeavors such as those by Richard Wagner. Stories of disguise, concealment, and intrigue double as metaphors of assimilation and conversion of Jewish life, highlighting the complicated and conflicted place of many German-Jewish writers. The salons cultivated and attended by German-Jewish women such as Rahel Varnhagen and Fanny Lewald yield generative, philosophical thought and intellectual contributions. We will conclude by looking at twentieth century German-Jewish writers after the Holocaust, and the status of antisemitism and philosemitism in Germany today.

Course does not meet an Approach

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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GNST B108 Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies

Fall 2024

This course will introduce students to major approaches, theories, and topics in gender and sexuality studies, as a framework for understanding the past and present-not only how societies conceive differences in bodily sex, gender expression, and sexual behavior, but how those conceptions shape broader social, cultural, political, and economic patterns.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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GNST B290 Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Gender and Sexuality

Not offered 2024-25

This course offers a rigorous grounding for students interested in questions of gender and sexuality. Bringing together intellectual resources from multiple disciplines, it also explores what it means to think across and between disciplinary boundaries.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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GREK B201 Plato and Thucydides

Fall 2024

This course is designed to introduce the student to two of the greatest prose authors of ancient Greece, the philosopher, Plato, and the historian, Thucydides. These two writers set the terms in the disciplines of philosophy and history for millennia, and philosophers and historians today continue to grapple with their ideas and influence. The brilliant and controversial statesman Alcibiades provides a link between the two texts in this course (Plato's Symposium and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War), and we examine the ways in which both authors handle the figure of Alcibiades as a point of entry into the comparison of the varying styles and modes of thought of these two great writers. Suggested Prerequisites: At least 2 years of college Greek or the equivalent.

Writing Attentive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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HIST B102 Introduction to African Civilizations

Not offered 2024-25

The course is designed to introduce students to the history of African and African Diaspora societies, cultures, and political economies. We will discuss the origins, state formation, external contacts, and the structural transformations and continuities of African societies and cultures in the context of the slave trade, colonial rule, capitalist exploitation, urbanization, and westernization, as well as contemporary struggles over authority, autonomy, identity and access to resources. Case studies will be drawn from across the continent.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Africana Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward International Studies

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HIST B156 The Long 1960's

Not offered 2024-25

The 1960s has had a powerful effect on recent US History. But what was it exactly? How long did it last? And what do we really mean when we say "The Sixties?" This term has become so potent and loaded for so many people from all sides of the political spectrum that it's almost impossible to separate fact from fiction; myth from memory. We are all the inheritors of this intense period in American history but our inheritance is neither simple nor entirely clear. Our task this semester is to try to pull apart the meaning as well as the legend and attempt to figure out what "The Sixties" is (and what it isn't) and try to assess its long term impact on American society.

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HIST B226 Topics in 20th Century European History

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Gender- Modern European State
Section 001 (Spring 2024): History of Fascism: Then & Now

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies.

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward International Studies

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HIST B237 Themes in Modern African History

Section 001 (Spring 2024): Public History in Africa

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Course content varies

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Africana Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward International Studies

Counts Toward Museum Studies

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HIST B238 From Bordellos to Cybersex History of Sexuality in Modern Europe

Not offered 2024-25

This course is a detailed examination of the changing nature and definition of sexuality in Europe from the late nineteenth century to the present. Throughout the semester we critically examine how understandings of sexuality changed-from how it was discussed and how authorities tried to control it to how the practice of sexuality evolved. Focusing on both discourses and lived experiences, the class will explore sexuality in the context of the following themes; prostitution and sex trafficking, the rise of medicine with a particular attention to sexology, psychiatry and psychoanalysis; the birth of the homo/hetero/bisexual divide; the rise of the "New Woman"; abortion and contraception; the "sexual revolution" of the 60s; pornography and consumerism; LGBTQ activism; concluding with considering sexuality in the age of cyber as well as genetic technology. In examining these issues we will question the role and influence of different political systems and war on sexuality. By paying special attention to the rise of modern nation-states, forces of nationalism, and the impacts of imperialism we will interrogate the nature of regulation and experiences of sexuality in different locations in Europe from the late nineteenth century to the present.

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HIST B243 Topics: Atlantic Cultures

Section 001 (Fall 2024): Maroon Communities - New World

Fall 2024

This is a topics course. Course content varies.

Current topic description: The course explores the process of self-emancipation by slaves in the early modern Atlantic World. What was the nature of the communities that free blacks forged? What were their relationships to the empires from which they freed themselves? How was race constructed in the early modern period? Did conceptions of race change over time?

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Africana Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Latin American,Iberian,Latinx

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HIST B274 topics in Modern US History

Section 001 (Fall 2023): History of Reproductive Health
Section 001 (Fall 2024): History of Reproductive Health

Fall 2024

This is a topics course in 20th century America social history. Topics vary by half semester

Current topic description: History of Reproductive Health. An exploration of reproductive health in American history from the colonial era through the present day, with an emphasis on the long 20th century. Topics covered include gender, medicalization, and medical authority; battles over abortion rights and reproductive justice; evolving practices regarding pregnancy and childbirth; the role of technology in reproduction; and entanglements of reproductive health with social and political categories of race, gender, disability, and national identity.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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HIST B280 History of Witchcraft and Magic

Not offered 2024-25

This course examines the social, cultural, and legal history of witchcraft and magic throughout European history. We will examine the values and attitudes that have influenced beliefs about witchcraft and the supernatural, both historically and in the present day. This course will pay specific attention to the role of gender and sexuality in the history of witchcraft, as the vast majority of individuals charged in the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were indeed women. We will also study accusations of witchcraft, breaking down the power dynamics and assumptions at play behind the witch trials, and the effects of these trials on gender relations in European society. This class will track the intersections of magic and science throughout the early modern period, and the reconciliation of belief systems during the Enlightenment. We will carry our analysis into the modern period, touching on Victorian spiritualism and mysticism, the emergence of Neo-Paganism, and the return to the figure of the goddess. Our final foray will be and examination of the political "witch-hunts" of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and the enduring trope of the "witch" in modern political culture.

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HIST B284 Movies and America: The Past Lives Forever

Not offered 2024-25

Movies are one of the most important means by which Americans come to know - or think they know-their own history. We look to old movies to tell us about a world we never knew but think we can access through film. And Hollywood often reaches into the past to tell a good story. How can we understand the impact of our love affair with movies on our understanding of what happened in this country? In this course we will examine the complex cultural relationship between film and American historical self-fashioning.

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HIST B292 Women in Britain since 1750

Not offered 2024-25

Focusing on contemporary and historical narratives, this course explores the ongoing production, circulation and refraction of discourses on gender and nation as well as race, empire and modernity since the mid-18th century. Texts will incorporate visual material as well as literary evidence and culture and consider the crystallization of the discipline of history itself.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward International Studies

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HIST B325 Topics in Social History

Section 001 (Fall 2023): American Health Politics

Fall 2024

This a topics course that explores various themes in American social history. Course content varies. Course may be repeated. Current topic description Health care in America has always been political. From historical debates to modern controversies, this course explores the social and cultural dimensions of American medicine and public health, with particular attention to their politics. Incorporating analysis of primary historical sources, we will examine issues such as health activism, health insurance reform, medical civil rights battles, reproductive justice, the doctor-patient relationship, and the rise of modern bioethics.

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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HIST B337 Topics in African History

Section 001 (Fall 2023): Cities, Epidemics, Pandemics
Section 001 (Spring 2024): Hist of Global Health Africa

Not offered 2024-25

This is a topics course. Topics vary.

Counts Toward Africana Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Health Studies

Counts Toward International Studies

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ITAL B202 Racconti transnazionali a confronto: patriarcato, migrazione e transculturalità

Spring 2025

This course focusses on the development of the short story, and particularly on its changing form through the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Students will analyze Italian novellas through in-class discussions and take-home assignment. They will start by reading some short stories by Boccaccio's Decameron and will then focus closely on 19th century Rosso malpelo and L'amante di Gramigna by Giovanni Verga and on Terno secco by Matilde Serao. Moving towards 20th and 21st centuries, we will examine racism, immigration, and patriarchy in context with the reading of women writers such as Sibilla Aleramo, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, Elena Ferranate, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anna Maria Ortese, Dacia Maraini, Donatella Di Pietrantonio. Our 21st-century examples will also include Roberto Saviano's Il contrario della morte and Valeria Parrella's Il premio. To stimulate classroom discussion and provide useful insight into the wide variety of Italy's socio-cultural specificities, the texts will be supplemented with selected background information including scholarly criticism, visual media, and media reception. The course is highly interactive and, at times, adopts the mode of a creative writing workshop. Students will thus be asked to comment their and other colleagues' work by discussing points of strength and weakness. This process will facilitate the preparation for and successful drafting of the papers. It will also encourage students to learn how to analyze and self-assess their own essays. The stories will be read in Italian. Prerequisite: ITAL 102 or permission of instructor.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ITAL B209 Love, Magic, and Women Warriors: Renaissance Italian Epic

Not offered 2024-25

This course offers an overview of one of the great literary traditions of Renaissance Italy: that of chivalric poems narrating tales of war, love, and magic. Our readings will center on the two established masterpieces of the tradition, Ludovico Ariosto's romance Orlando furioso (The Madness of Orlando; 1532) and Torquato Tasso's epic Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered; 1581), but we will also look at a series of much lesser-known works by a queer and "irregular" author (Luigi Pulci), who inaugurated this genre in Florence, and by female poets of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries (Moderata Fonte and Margherita Sarrocchi), who draw on Ariosto's and Tasso's texts for inspiration. Thematically, the course will focus on questions of diversity in political and religious ideologies, differing treatments of love and conceptions of the heroic, and the representation of sexuality and gender, which is exceptionally fluid and interesting in these works. The course is taught in English and is accessible also to students without a background in Renaissance literature and with no knowledge of Italian. Students who are interested to take this course towards a major in Italian will complete their assignments in Italian and will participate in an extra hour in Italian

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ITAL B213 Theory in Practice: Critical Discourses in the Humanities

Not offered 2024-25

What is a postcolonial subject, a queer gaze, a feminist manifesto? And how can we use (as readers of texts, art, and films) contemporary studies on animals and cyborgs, object oriented ontology, zombies, storyworlds, neuroaesthetics? In this course we will read some pivotal theoretical texts from different fields, with a focus on race&ethnicity and gender&sexuality. Each theory will be paired with a masterpiece from Italian culture (from Renaissance treatises and paintings to stories written under fascism and postwar movies). We will discuss how to apply theory to the practice of interpretation and of academic writing, and how theoretical ideas shaped what we are reading. Class conducted in English, with an additional hour in Italian for students seeking Italian credit.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward Africana Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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ITAL B324 Diversity, Gender, and Queerness in Modern Italian Poetry

Not offered 2024-25

This course offers an overview of one of the great literary traditions of post-unification Italy: that of modern and contemporary poetry. Our readings will center mostly on some major protagonists of this genre, like the Nobel prize-winning Eugenio Montale, Umberto Saba, and Pier Paolo Pasolini, but we will also look at a series of much lesser-known works by female, queer and transgender poets, like Sandro Penna, Amelia Rosselli, and Giovanna Cristina Vivinetto, who negotiated their own voices within this tradition. While thinking, discussing and writing in Italian, we will examine poetic texts in the original and with a specific focus on the representation of religious and racial "otherness", the language of expression, and gender perspectives. Our authors and texts will be contextualized in their historical and social background, in order to have an in-depth interdisciplinary exploration of Italy's 20th-21st century cultural life and gain insight on Italian Modernity as a whole. Elements of metrics and rhetoric will be used and explained in order to analyze poetry in its own essence.

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ITAL B335 The Italian Margins: Places and Identities

Not offered 2024-25

Thompson Fullilove's scholarship will be the theoretical foundation of this survey of 20th century topics-from literary representations of mental health to the displacement of marginalized communities, from historical persecution in Europe to contemporary domestic violence in Italy. The main goal of the seminar will be to challenge the rhetoric of 'otherness', 'encounters', 'marginalization', 'anti-canon', and 'exoticism' that is typical of broader readings of Italy's modern traditions, adopting Thompson Fullilove's inter-sectional and trans-historical paradigms to re-imagine Italian Studies, to center the gender gap, and overcome the stigma of mental illness and madness. Rooted in the perspectives of trans-codification, trans-historical tradition, and cultural translation, this course attempts to address such questions both in theory and practice using Freudian literary criticism (The interpretation of Dreams, 1899; The Uncanny, 1919; Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920; The Ego and the Id, 1923; Civilization and its Discontents, 1930). We will start with a seminar, devoted to the analysis and discussion of primary sources and then follow with a scholarly (and creative) workshop. Tailored activities related to social activism (Praxis) will also fulfill the course requirements. Prerequisite: 200 level course or permission of instructor.

Writing Intensive

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Praxis Program

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PHIL B221 Ethics

Fall 2024

An introduction to ethics by way of an examination of moral theories and a discussion of important ancient, modern, and contemporary texts which established theories such as virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, relativism, emotivism, care ethics. This course considers questions concerning freedom, responsibility, and obligation. How should we live our lives and interact with others? How should we think about ethics in a global context? Is ethics independent of culture? A variety of practical issues such as reproductive rights, euthanasia, animal rights and the environment will be considered.

Writing Attentive

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward International Studies

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PHIL B225 Global Ethical Issues

Not offered 2024-25

The need for a critical analysis of what justice is and requires has become urgent in a context of increasing globalization, the emergence of new forms of conflict and war, high rates of poverty within and across borders and the prospect of environmental devastation. This course examines prevailing theories and issues of justice as well as approaches and challenges by non-western, post-colonial, feminist, race, class, and disability theorists.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward International Studies

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PHIL B252 Feminist Theory

Spring 2025

Beliefs that gender discrimination has been eliminated and women have achieved equality have become commonplace. We challenge these assumptions examining the concepts of patriarchy, sexism, and oppression. Exploring concepts central to feminist theory, we attend to the history of feminist theory and contemporary accounts of women's place and status in different societies, varied experiences, and the impact of the phenomenon of globalization. We then explore the relevance of gender to philosophical questions about identity and agency with respect to moral, social and political theory. Prerequisite: one course in philosophy or permission of instructor.

Critical Interpretation (CI)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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POLS B221 Gender and Comparative Politics

Spring 2025

This is an upper-level course for students interested in learning about feminist political science. We will cover the major topics of comparative politics from a gender perspective through a mix of lecture and seminar-style discussion. The topics include social movements, institutions, political parties and elections, welfare systems, democracy, and authoritarianism. The goal of the course is to teach students how to apply gendered and intersectional frameworks to contemporary political events and actors around the world. Suggested pre-requisite: a 100 or 200 level comparative politics course, political theory course, or gender & sexualities course.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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POLS B242 Gender and International Organizations

Fall 2024

Employing a multi-disciplinary feminist lens, this class examines women's and LGBTQIA+ rights within the United Nations system, with a primary focus on human rights and peace & security. This course seeks to expose students to the complex issues - social, political, economic, and legal - that characterize women's and LGBTQIA+ rights around the globe. The theoretical foundations are in the area of gender mainstreaming, which is the practice of integrating a gender equality perspective across all governing systems including but not limited to policy development, political representation, institutional regulations, program building, and budgeting. Students will be asked to conduct research on women's and/or LGBTQIA+ rights within a country of their choice. Students will present their findings to the class as well as write a final report. Prerequisite: Introductory Political Science Course or Instructor's permission.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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SOCL B102 Society, Culture, and the Individual

Fall 2024, Spring 2025

Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction. It involves what C. Wright Mills called the "sociological imagination," a way of seeing the relationship between individuals and the larger forces of society and history. In this course, we will practice using our sociological imaginations to think about the world around us. We will examine how social norms and structures are created and maintained, and we will analyze how these structures shape people's behavior and choices, often without their realizing it. After learning to think sociologically, we will examine the centrality of inequality in society, focusing specifically on the intersecting dimensions of race and ethnicity, gender, and class, and the role of social structures and institutions (such as the family and education) in society. Overall, this course draws our attention toward our own presuppositions-the things we take for granted in our everyday lives-and provides us with a systematic framework within which we can analyze those presuppositions and identify their effects..

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward International Studies

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SOCL B205 Social Inequality

Spring 2025

In this course, we will explore the extent, causes, and consequences of social and economic inequality in the U.S. We will begin by discussing key theories and the intersecting dimensions of inequality along lines of income and wealth, race and ethnicity, and gender. We will then follow a life-course perspective to trace the institutions through which inequality is structured, experienced, and reproduced through the family, neighborhoods, the educational system, labor markets and workplaces, and the criminal justice system.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Child and Family Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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SOCL B217 The Family in Social Context

Not offered 2024-25

The family represents a fundamental and ubiquitous institution in the social world, providing norms and conveying values. This course focuses on current sociological research, seeking to understand how modern American families have transformed due to complex structural and cultural forces. We will examine family change from historical, social, and demographic perspectives. After examining the images, ideals, and myths concerning families, we will address the central theme of diversity and change. In what ways can sociology explain and document these shifts? What influences do law, technology, and medicine have on the family? What are the results of evolving views of work, gender, and parenting on family structure and stability? Prerequisite of one Social Science Course

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SOCL B225 Women in Society

Fall 2024

In 2015, the world's female population was 49.6 percent of the total global population of 7.3 billion. According to the United Nations, in absolute terms, there were 61,591,853 more men than women. Yet, at the global scale, 124 countries have more women than men. A great majority of these countries are located in what scholars have recently been referring to as the Global South - those countries known previously as developing countries. Although women outnumber their male counterparts in many Global South countries, however, these women endure difficulties that have worsened rather than improving. What social structures determine this gender inequality in general and that of women of color in particular? What are the main challenges women in the Global South face? How do these challenges differ based on nationality, class, ethnicity, skin color, gender identity, and other axes of oppression? What strategies have these women developed to cope with the wide variety of challenges they contend with on a daily basis? These are some of the major questions that we will explore together in this class. In this course, the Global South does not refer exclusively to a geographical location, but rather to a set of institutional structures that generate disadvantages for all individuals and particularly for women and other minorities, regardless their geographical location in the world. In other words, a significant segment of the Global North's population lives under the same precarious conditions that are commonly believed as exclusive to the Global South. Simultaneously, there is a Global North embedded in the Global South as well. In this context, we will see that the geographical division between the North and the South becomes futile when we seek to understand the dynamics of the "Western-centric/Christian-centric capitalist/patriarchal modern/colonial world-system" (Grosfoguel, 2012). In the first part of the course, we will establish the theoretical foundations that will guide us throughout the rest of the semester. We will then turn to a wide variety of case studies where we will examine, for instance, the contemporary global division of labor, gendered violence in the form of feminicides, international migration, and global tourism. The course's final thematic section will be devoted to learning from the different feminisms (e.g. community feminism) emerging out of the Global South as well as the research done in that region and its contribution to the development of a broader gender studies scholarship. In particular, we will pay close attention to resistance, solidarity, and social movements led by women. Examples will be drawn from Latin America, the Caribbean, the US, Asia, and Africa.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Africana Studies

Counts Toward Child and Family Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Latin American,Iberian,Latinx

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SOCL B235 Mexican-American Communities

Spring 2025

For its unique history, the number of migrants, and the two countries' proximity, Mexican migration to the United States represents an exceptional case in world migration. There is no other example of migration with more than 100 years of history. The copious presence of migrants concentrated in a host country, such as we have in the case of the 11.7 million Mexican migrants residing in the United States, along with another 15 million Mexican descendants, is unparalleled. The 1,933-mile-long border shared by the two countries makes it one of the longest boundary lines in the world and, unfortunately, also one of the most dangerous frontiers in the world today. We will examine the different economic, political, social and cultural forces that have shaped this centenarian migration influx and undertake a macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of analysis. At the macro-level of political economy, we will investigate the economic interdependency that has developed between Mexico and the U.S. over different economic development periods of these countries, particularly, the role the Mexican labor force has played to boosting and sustaining both the Mexican and the American economies. At the meso-level, we will examine different institutions both in Mexico and the U.S. that have determined the ways in which millions of Mexican migrate to this country. Last, but certainly not least, we will explore the impacts that both the macro-and meso-processes have had on the micro-level by considering the imperatives, aspirations, and dreams that have prompted millions of people to leave their homes and communities behind in search of better opportunities. This major life decision of migration brings with it a series of social transformations in family and community networks, this will look into the cultural impacts in both the sending and receiving migrant communities. In sum, we will come to understand how these three levels of analysis work together.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Latin American,Iberian,Latinx

Counts Toward Praxis Program

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SOCL B251 Queering Utopia

Not offered 2024-25

What if? This question is at the heart of both social theory and speculative fiction. Theory and fiction both serve as ways through which to make sense of social life and to imagine alternatives. Within the traditions of feminist and queer thought, utopian and dystopian fiction have been utilized as a means by which to imagine the outcomes of various social processes and alternative gender/sexuality systems. This medium is also useful for exploring the ways in which gender and sexuality are not only integral to individual identity but also to the structure of social life itself. In this course we will analyze the challenges to the status quo asserted by feminist theorists and queer theorists alongside a comparison with indigenous systems of gender. We will also consider the various implications for everyday life of these theories as presented through the lens of speculative fiction. We will compare works of fiction with works of social theory to think through the ways in which gender and sexuality structure social life as well as the ways in which we do, undo, and resist gender in everyday life. Over the course of the semester, we will contemplate work by Samuel R. Delany; Michael Warner; Margaret Atwood; Ursula Le Guin; Nikki Sullivan; Sara Ahmed, José Esteban Muñoz, Laura Mamo, and more.

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SOCL B262 Public Opinion

Not offered 2024-25

This course will assess public opinion in American politics: what it is, how it is measured, how it is shaped, how it relates to public policy, and how it changes over time. It includes both questions central to political scientists (what is the public, how do they exercise their voice, does the government listen and how do they respond?) and to sociologists (where do ideas come from, how do they gain societal influence, and how do they change over time?). It will pay close attention to the role of electoral politics throughout, both historically and in the current election. It is focused primarily on the United States, but seeks to place the US in global context. If this course is taken to fulfill an elective in the Data Science minor, students will conduct hands-on analyses with real data as a key component to both their Midterm and Final Essays.

Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)

Inquiry into the Past (IP)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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SOCL B276 Making Sense of Race

Spring 2025

What is the meaning of race in contemporary US and global society? How are these meanings (re)produced, resisted, and refused? What meanings might we desire or imagine as alternatives? In this course, we will approach these questions through an array of sources while tracking our own thinking about and experiences of raced-ness. Course material will survey sociological notions of the social construction of race, empirical studies of lived experiences of race, and creative fiction and non-fiction material intended to catalyze thinking about alternative possibilities.

Course does not meet an Approach

Counts Toward Africana Studies

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

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SOCL B326 Feminist Perspectives on Hlth

Not offered 2024-25

Increasingly, an individual's sense of self and worth as a citizen turns on their health identity. In this course we will draw on theories of gender, race, sexuality, medicalization, and biocitizenship to unravel the ways in which gender structures and medical institutions are mutually constitutive and to explore how this relationship, in turn, impacts individual identity. The course will take a global approach to feminist engagement with health issues with an emphasis on human rights and bodily autonomy.

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SOCL B350 Movements for Social Justice

Not offered 2024-25

Throughout human history, powerless groups of people have organized social movements to improve their lives and their societies. Powerful groups and institutions have resisted these efforts in order to maintain their own privilege. Some periods of history have been more likely than others to spawn protest movements. What factors seem most likely to lead to social movements? What determines their success/failure? We will examine 20th and 21st-century social movements to answer these questions. Prerequisite: At least one prior social science course or permission of the instructor.

Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Peace, Justice and Human Right

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SPAN B309 La mujer en la literatura española del Siglo de Oro

Not offered 2024-25

A study of the depiction of women in the fiction, drama, and poetry of 16th- and 17th-century Spain. Topics include the construction of gender; the idealization and codification of women's bodies; the politics of feminine enclosure (convent, home, brothel, palace); and the performance of honor. The first half of the course will deal with representations of women by male authors (Calderón, Cervantes, Lope, Quevedo) and the second will be dedicated to women writers such as Teresa de Ávila, Ana Caro, Juana Inés de la Cruz, and María de Zayas. Prerequisite: at least one SPAN 200-level course. Course fulfills pre-1700 requirement and HC's pre-1898 requirement. Counts toward Gender and Sexuality Studies. Counts toward Latin American, Iberian and Latina/o Studies.

Counts Toward Gender/Sex Studies (Min/Conc)

Counts Toward Latin American,Iberian,Latinx

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