Courses

This transdisciplinary and community-engaged course focuses on challenges of responding to extreme heat in Philadelphia. Site visits, guest speakers, readings, and community-driven research will deepen students’ understanding of the intertwined social, economic, health, and environmental challenges facing Philadelphia in a warming world.

This course will explore the vibrant contemporary art world of the city of Philadelphia—a city uniquely positioned to attract artists with its many top-tier fine art schools, world-class museums, relatively affordable living and studio spaces, and thriving network of artist-run galleries and exhibition spaces.

This course investigates the history and evolution of Philadelphia as a globalized and multi-ethnic city, using as a case study for this analysis the impact and legacy of transnational Italian culture across the centuries.

This class investigates the unique history of housing in Philadelphia. We will cover the problems the city has faced and still faces in providing affordable housing, fair access to housing and creating diverse and vibrant neighborhoods and its great legacy of innovation in this area.

This course aims to look at the importance of access to finance to small businesses and low and moderate income households, identifies how and why this access is lacking and examines efforts to address this issues.

Drawing on the “music” side of the previously taught “Popular Music & Media” course, this course will investigate the history and contemporary conditions of music making in Philadelphia and its region.

This course will explore the deep history of dining in Philadelphia, from Lenape foodways to the skills of Hercules Posey – George Washington’s enslaved chef – to the recent participation of Philadelphia cooks and restaurateurs in social justice movements.

The aim of the course would be to examine the political and economic constraints generated by poverty and racial and class segregation in contemporary urban environments and how grassroots economic initiatives rooted in mutual aid often fill the gaps and provide alternative ways to meet needs and generate supportive community.

This course will cover, as the title suggests, the role of people and political organizations in Philadelphia in the 2024 Election as it is happening. We will work together to understand how people understand politics, and how political campaigns, PACs, and non-profit organizations work to persuade and mobilize potential voters.

This class aims to trace the history of higher education and its ongoing impact on the geography, economy, and culture of greater Philadelphia and U.S. urban space broadly.

In this course, and in the city itself, we will examine literature written in and about Philadelphia before the Civil War, exploring how and why Philadelphians engaged questions of love, freedom and non-freedom.

This inter-disciplinary upper-level seminar will explore the complex school policies, teacher instructional decisions, as well as historical, political, social, economic, cultural, and structural forces that have given rise to documented reality of the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

What is public art? What is public space? What is the role of public art in a democracy? Does the fact that something is historically significant give us a reason to preserve it? Which historically significant things should we preserve and why? What is the moral value of commemorative art?  How should we assess controversies surrounding the removal of art honoring persons or groups we now judge to be morally objectionable? How best should we memorialize victims of injustice?

This course will examine the history of epidemic disease in American cities, with a focus on Philadelphia.

An introduction to the history and theory of environmental justice, an interdisciplinary field that examines how inequalities based on race, class, ethnicity, and gender shape how different groups of people are impacted by environmental problems and how they advocate for social and environmental change.