Ethnic and Diasporic Studies

At the close of the 1920s, Miss Wilson presented a paper at a London conference, addressing “The Education of European Children in Contact With Primitive Races.” In her talk, she described the life of rural white Kenyan settler children growing up with African playmates and expressed her concerns about the morally deleterious effects of such play on these future imperial leaders. This particular case illustrates discourse about the role of privileged white children in imperial regimes, but children of diverse social classes, races, and nationalities across the globe were all implicated in processes of Imperial expansion and European settler colonization over (at least) the past three centuries. What was said about children, done to children, and required of children was central to the success of Imperial projects. In this seminar, we will explore materials from across the globe to understand the diverse roles, both intentional and unintentional, of children in Imperial processes. In addition to the white sons and daughters of European settler colonists in Africa and Southeast Asia, we will also look at the contrary things that were said and done about Indigenous children and children of mixed parentage at different historical and political moments of empire. We will learn about the deployment of “orphans” in the service of empire. In the metropole, particularly British cities, orphan boys were funneled into the military and merchant navy, while children of both sexes were shipped around the world to boost white settler populations, provide free labor, and relieve English poorhouses of the responsibility of taking care of them. The ancestors of many contemporary citizens of Canada, Australia, and South Africa were exported as children from metropolitan orphanages. Conceptually, we will use approaches from child development, sex-gender studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory. Questions we will explore include: Why did settler authorities in Australia kidnap mixed-race Indigenous children and put them in boarding schools, when such children in other colonies were expected to stay with their local mothers out of sight of the settlers? How did European ideas about climate and race frame the ways in which settler children were nursed in the Dutch East Indies? How did concepts of childhood and parental rights over children vary historically, socioeconomically, and geographically? How did metropolitan discourses about race, class, and evolution frame the treatment of indigent children at home and abroad? Materials for this course will include fiction, memoirs, scholarly texts, ethnographic accounts, historical documents, visual images, and map making. Course work will include weekly writing, seminar discussion, group research projects, and use of digital platforms. Biweekly in fall, students will have individual conferences with the instructor to review submitted assignments, discuss course materials, and receive necessary support for adjustment to college. In alternate weeks, students will meet for collaborative group conference projects. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore child and adolescent development through a cross-cultural lens. Focusing on case studies from diverse communities around the world, we will look at the influence of cultural processes on how children learn, play, and grow. Our core readings will analyze psychological processes related to attachment and parenting, cognition and perception, social and emotional development, language acquisition, and moral development. We will ask questions like the following: Why are children in Sri Lanka fed by hand by their mothers until middle childhood, and how does this shape their relations to others through the course of life? How does an Inuit toddler come to learn moral lessons through scripted play with adults, and how does such learning prepare them to navigate a challenging social and geographic environment? Is it true that Maya children do not do pretend play at all? How does a unique family role influence the formation of identity for Latinx youth in the United States? How are unequal childhoods shaped by social exclusion and discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender, and immigration status? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, our course material will draw from developmental psychology, human development, cultural psychology, and psychological anthropology and will include peer-reviewed journal articles and books, as well as films that address core issues in a range of geographic and sociocultural contexts. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course. Fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center is optional.

“The future belongs to the ghosts,” remarked the philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1996, as his interlocutor, Bernard Stiegler, phrases the main idea behind that statement: “Modern technology, contrary to appearances, increases tenfold the power of ghosts.” With the advent of the internet, various forms of social media, and the ubiquity of filmic images in our lives, Derrida's observations have proven to be quite prophetic, such that they call for a new field of study—one that requires less an ontology of being and the real and more a “hauntology” (to invoke Derrida's punish term) of the spectral, the virtual, the phantasmic, the imaginary, and the recurrent revenant. In this seminar, we consider ways in which the past and present are haunted by ghosts and vexed by spectrality. Topics to be covered include: specters and hauntings, figures and apparitions, history and memory, trauma and political crisis, fantasy and imagination, digital interfaces, haunted data and archives, and visual and acoustical images. We will consider a range of films and video, photography, literary texts, acoustic reverberations, internet and social media, and everyday discourses and imaginings. Through these inquiries, we will be able to further our understanding of the nature of specters and apparitions in the contemporary world in their many forms and dimensions. Students will be invited to undertake their own hauntologies and thus craft studies of the phenomenal force of specters, hauntings, and the apparitional in particular social or cultural contexts.

In her study of transnational adoptees, Eleana Kim noted the profound differences between discourses about the immigration of Chinese brides to the United States and those describing the arrival of adopted Chinese baby girls: the former with suspicion and the latter with joy. Two ways that families form are by bringing in spouses and by having children. We tend to assume that family building involves deeply personal, intimate, and even “natural” acts; but, in actual practice, the pragmatics of forming (and disbanding) families are much more complex. There are many instances where biological pregnancy is not possible or not chosen, and there are biological parents who are unable to rear their offspring. Social rules govern the acceptance or rejection of children in particular social groups, depending on factors such as the marital status of their parents or the enactment of appropriate rituals. Western notions of marriage prioritize compatibility between two individuals who choose each other based on love; but, in many parts of the world, selecting a suitable spouse and contracting a marriage is the business of entire kin networks. There is great variability, too, in what constitutes “suitable.” To marry a close relative or someone of the same gender may be deemed unnaturally close in some societies; marriage across great difference—such as age, race, nation, culture, or class—can also be problematic. And beyond the intimacies of couples and the interests of extended kin are the interests of the nation state. This lecture will examine the makings and meanings of kinship connections at multiple levels, from small communities to global movements. Topics will include the adoption and fostering of children, both locally and transnationally, in Peru, Chile, Spain, Italy, Ghana, the USA, China, and Korea. We will look at technologies of biological reproduction, including the global movement of genetic material in the business of transnational gestational surrogacy. We will look at the ways in which marriages are contracted in a variety of social and cultural settings, including China and Korea, and the ways they are configured by race, gender, and citizenship. Our questions will include: Who are “real” kin? Who can a person marry? Which children are “legitimate”? Why do we hear so little about birth mothers? What is the experience of families with transgender parents or children? What is the compulsion to find genetically connected “kin”? How many mothers can a person have? How is marriage connected to labor migration? Why are the people who care for children in foster care called “parents”? The materials for this class include literature, scholarly articles, ethnographic accounts, historical documents, and film.

What does it mean for a society to deem certain people “illegal” immigrants? How do the politics and policies of contemporary deportation regimes affect migrants’ lives? In what ways does discourse about borders and belonging, citizenship and criminality, shape migrants’ everyday experience in places like Ghana, Nicaragua, Italy, and the United States? In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore how social categories, language, law, and public policy shape processes of immigration and migrant lives across the globe. Drawing upon recent work in cultural anthropology, sociology, linguistics, public policy, and critical ethnic and Indigenous studies, we will examine the ramifications of immigration policies and public discourses that demarcate citizenship, membership, and belonging in diverse contexts. We will analyze how the experience of unauthorized migration is affected by the particular intersections of racial, ethnic, class, gender, generational, and legal boundaries that migrants cross. In so doing, we will pose a range of questions. For example, how do undocumented youth navigate the constraints imposed by “illegalized” identities, and how do they come to construct new self-perceptions as emerging adults? How do families navigate transnational migration, separation, and the threat of arrest, detention, and deportation in various social contexts? What forms do resistance and protest take, and how do migrants participate in social movements and social change? These questions will allow us to analyze how different forms of power—implemented across realms, including state-sponsored surveillance and immigration enforcement, language and educational policy, health and social services—shape and constrain immigrants’ understanding of their place in the world, and their experience of exclusion and belonging. These questions will also lead us to ask how the categories of legal status or citizenship help us to understand the sociocultural, economic, and political structures that shape all of our lives. In tandem with our readings, we will welcome scholar-activist guest speakers, who will present their current work in the field. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central themes of the course.

Javanese shadow theatre, Bedouin love poems, and American community life are but a few of the sociocultural worlds that anthropologists have effectively studied and written about. This is no easy task, given the substantial difficulties involved in understanding and portraying the concerns, activities, and lifeworlds other than one’s own. Despite these challenges, ethnographic research is generally considered one of the best ways to form a nuanced and contextually rich understanding of a particular social world. To gain an informed sense of the methods, challenges, and benefits of such an approach, students will try their hands at ethnographic research and writing. In fall, each student will be asked to undertake an ethnographic research project in order to investigate the features of a specific social world—such as a homeless shelter, a religious festival, or a neighborhood in Brooklyn. In spring, students will craft a fully realized piece of ethnographic writing that conveys something of the features and dynamics of that world in lively, accurate, and comprehensive terms. Along the way, and with the help of anthropological writings that are either exceptional or experimental in nature, we will collectively think through some of the most important features of ethnographic projects, such as interviewing others, the use of field notes, the interlacing of theory and data, the role of dialogue and the author’s voice in ethnographic prose, and the ethical and political responsibilities that come with any attempt to understand and portray the lives of others.

Throughout history, settler colonial and industrial extractive projects have displaced Native American and Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands and instigated the environmental crises that plague our current world and threaten future survival. Indigenous peoples in the Americas and beyond have long been at the forefront of resistance movements against environmentally exploitative projects, engaged in an ongoing struggle that links Indigenous sovereignty with care for the natural world. In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore the humanistic concerns and ethics at stake regarding people’s role in ecosystems, our collective responsibility to protect the natural world, and the necessary work toward environmental and climate justice as intimately linked to Indigenous ecological knowledge, governance, and rights. This course will include readings on Native American and Indigenous oral history; land dispossession, displacement, and migration; ecological knowledge, practices, and biodiversity; decolonizing food systems, agriculture, and sustainability; health, medicine, and healing; resistance movements and social alliances; and the intersections of Indigenous sovereignty, climate change, and environmental justice. We will look to case studies covering topics such as the links between language and land in Arctic environmental education; regenerative food systems in New Zealand, Mexico, and Peru; the effects of oil drilling in Ecuador and uranium mining in Navajo country; and resistance movements like Standing Rock/NoDAPL. Our texts will include poetry, interviews, multimedia pieces, book chapters, and journal articles primarily authored by Indigenous scholars and artists. We will explore Indigenous knowledge and decolonizing approaches as we re-envision an ethical path to a sustainable future that integrates environmental protection with social justice.

This aphorism, “We are here because you were there," attributed to British anti-racist activist A. Sivanandan, is the response of contemporary Britons of color to white people who challenge the rights of Britons of color to British residency and citizenship. These resistances come, in part, from the inaccurate belief that Britain was a homogeneously white nation until the mid-20th century and from the ideology that “Black” and “British” are mutually exclusive categories. In fact, there have been people of color resident and participating in British society for hundreds of years; over six centuries, their numbers and their roles expanded steadily in direct relation to the expansion of the British Empire and the colonization of millions of British “subjects” around the world. At its peak in 1922, maps showed the red coloring of Great Britain ruling over of one-quarter of the globe. This course, taught from an anthropological perspective, will explore the ways in which myriad racial categories, including white, have been mutually constituted in Great Britain in the context of shifting cultural, economic, and political circumstances. This will include exploring the differences and conflicts among the four nations that now constitute the nation state that is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Hands-on class materials will be multidisciplinary (anthropology, history, geography, literature) and multimedia, with a particular focus on visual images, audio, maps, popular culture, and archival documents. We will look at the nature of British Imperial expansion through trade, settlement, and enslavement; but the main focus will be the resulting racialized landscapes in Great Britain. We will look at the lives of free Black people in Tudor times and the means, both formal and informal, by which enslaved people in Britain freed themselves and blended into Black English communities in the 18th century. We will learn about the merchant sailors who came from West Africa; the Lascars (Muslim sailors) from east of the Cape of Good Hope; and the Chinese seamen from Shanghai and Guangzhou, who established the first China Town in Europe in the London docklands in the 19th century. We will also learn about the Black men and women performing on the stages of theatres in England and Wales. Articulations of race, gender, and sexuality will be central, particularly as they play out in family formations. Intersections with class are critical, too, particularly in the 19th century when the burgeoning white middle class used the same racialized discourses lumping together the English working class, Irish immigrants, and “natives” overseas. We will devote a significant amount of attention to the 20th century, with its two World Wars that depended on the labor of colonized subjects. We will look at discourses about “race relations” in Britain after 1948, which include white nationalist movements, government white papers, and some misguided writings by anthropologists, among other things. Finally, we will explore examples of explosions in popular culture created by second- and third-generation children of Commonwealth immigrants and their allies: music genres, including reggae, ska, and two-tone; films such as Young Soul Rebels, Bend it Like Beckham, and The Stuart Hall Project; and literature, including writings by Fathima Zahra, Aizaz Hussain, Paul Gilroy, and Jackie Kay. Each student will attend the weekly lecture and one weekly seminar meeting. Assignments will include biweekly written reflections, leading seminar discussions, and collaborating in group research projects.

This interdisciplinary course will address mental health in diverse cultural contexts, drawing upon a range of case studies to illuminate the causes, symptoms, diagnosis, course, and treatment of mental illness across the globe. The course will open by exploring questions of the classification of mental illness to address whether Western psychiatric categories apply across different local contexts. We will explore the globalization of American understandings of the psyche, the exportation of Western mental disorders, and the impact of psychiatric imperialism in places like Sri Lanka, Zanzibar, Oaxaca, and Japan. Through readings of peer-reviewed articles and current research in cultural psychology, clinical psychology, psychological anthropology, psychiatric anthropology, and medical anthropology, students will explore conditions such as depression and anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, susto, and mal de ojo to understand the entanglements of psychological experience, culture, morality, sociality, and care. We will explore how diagnostic processes and psychiatric care are, at times, differentially applied in the United States according to a client’s race, ethnicity, class, or gender. Finally, we will also explore the complexities of recovery or healing, addressing puzzles such as why certain mental disorders are considered to be lifelong, chronic, and severe in some parts of the world but are interpreted as temporary, fleeting, and manageable elsewhere—and how such expectations influence people’s ability to experience wellness or (re)integration into family, work, and society. Several key authors will join us as invited guest speakers to talk about their current work. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course.

There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarity. —Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is one of the most important thinkers and writers of the 20th century. His many writings and innovative concepts, which continue to be discussed and debated today, are of pressing relevance for the contemporary moment, marked as it is by themes of technological and aesthetic transformations, political violence, and histories of exile and displacement. The purpose of this intensive seminar will be to delve into the textures of Benjamin’s life—from his childhood years in Berlin to his final days in France and Spain—while considering the diverse and intricate formations of Benjamin’s thought and writing. For this inquiry, we will be drawing from a number of biographical, historiographic, political, literary, and anthropological lines of analysis to gain an incisive sense of his groundbreaking writings on film and photography, literature and translation, concepts of history, and the politics of culture. Along the way, we will connect Benjamin’s thought to other significant writers and philosophers, including Charles Baudelaire, Marcel Proust, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Hannah Arendt, and Jacques Derrida. We will focus on a number of key texts authored by Benjamin, including Berlin Childhood around 1900, The Arcades Project, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” “The Task of the Translator,” “The Storyteller,” and “On the Concept of History.” In engaging with these and other challenging texts and giving thought to Benjamin’s life and death more generally, students will develop a richly informed understanding of the life and thought of this singularly compelling person while coming to terms with the haunted histories of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This seminar in art theory and curatorial practice will explore ecological aesthetics in the era of anthropogenic climate change. The course’s guiding question will be: What forms might an aesthetic experience of nature take when it no longer privileges the human observer but, rather, cultivates an equality and reciprocity between all forms of life? Possible answers will be drawn from recent work in critical theory, Black studies, Indigenous studies, queer theory, continental philosophy, and science and technology studies. Case studies on the work of selected contemporary artists will complement the theoretical frameworks under consideration. The course’s topics will include: post-Enlightenment aesthetics of nature, biopower, vitalism, post- and antihumanisms, plant philosophies, bacteria and fungi studies, and deep time. The course will also incorporate a curatorial practicum that will allow students to participate in the production of an on-campus exhibition exploring ecological themes. In addition to exercises on exhibition writing, model making, and art installation, we will meet with artworld professionals working at museums in the New York area.

When we encounter dancing, what are we seeing, experiencing, and understanding? How do current representations of dance reflect, perpetuate, and/or disrupt familiar assumptions about personal and social realities? Embedded historical ideas and enforcements based on race, economic class, gender, social/sexual orientation, nationality/regional affiliation, and more are threaded through our daily lives. Performing arts inside and outside of popular culture often reinforce dominant cultural ideas and feelings. Can they also propose or inspire alternatives? In fall, we will view samples of dancing in film, video, digital media, television programs, and commercials, as well as live performance. These viewings—along with reading selected texts from the fields of dance and performance, literary criticism, feminist theory, queer theory, and cultural studies—will form the basis of class discussions and exercises. In spring, we will shift focus to viewing still images and live action, with readings from additional fields, including art criticism and neuroscience, as well as fine-tuning approaches to writing about our subject matter. Students will complete several class assignments each semester, as well as develop one or more substantial lines of inquiry for conference work. Conference projects may draw upon multiple disciplines, including those within humanities and creative arts. The central aim of this course will be to cultivate informed discussion and to produce new knowledge, increasing both individual and collective capabilities. We will use academic research, along with personal experience, to advance our recognition of dance as an elemental art form and as a potentially important orientation in adjacent studies. In both fall and spring, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences.

Throughout history, settler colonial and industrial extractive projects have displaced Native American and Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands and instigated the environmental crises that plague our current world and threaten future survival. Indigenous peoples in the Americas and beyond have long been at the forefront of resistance movements against environmentally exploitative projects, engaged in an ongoing struggle that links Indigenous sovereignty with care for the natural world. In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore the humanistic concerns and ethics at stake regarding people’s role in ecosystems, our collective responsibility to protect the natural world, and the necessary work toward environmental and climate justice as intimately linked to Indigenous ecological knowledge, governance, and rights. This course will include readings on Native American and Indigenous oral history; land dispossession, displacement, and migration; ecological knowledge, practices, and biodiversity; decolonizing food systems, agriculture, and sustainability; health, medicine, and healing; resistance movements and social alliances; and the intersections of Indigenous sovereignty, climate change, and environmental justice. We will look to case studies covering topics such as the links between language and land in Arctic environmental education; regenerative food systems in New Zealand, Mexico, and Peru; the effects of oil drilling in Ecuador and uranium mining in Navajo country; and resistance movements like Standing Rock/NoDAPL. Our texts will include poetry, interviews, multimedia pieces, book chapters, and journal articles primarily authored by Indigenous scholars and artists. We will explore Indigenous knowledge and decolonizing approaches as we re-envision an ethical path to a sustainable future that integrates environmental protection with social justice.

This course will seek to understand the origins and rise of the New Right in the United States and elsewhere as it has taken shape in the latter half of the 20th century to the present. We will seek to identify the origins of the New Right and what defines it, alongside exploring the varied geographies of the movement and its numerous strands and identifying the constituents of the contemporary right coalition. In addition, we will explore the actors and institutions that have played a role in the expansion of the New Right (e.g., courts, state and local governments, the Tea Party movement, conservative think tanks, lawyers, media platforms, evangelical Christians, billionaires, militias, and more) and the issues that motivate the movement (e.g., anti-communism, immigration, environment, white supremacy and nationalism, voter suppression, neoliberal economic policies, anti-globalization, free speech). This is a reading-intensive, discussion-oriented seminar in which we will survey a broad sweep of the recent literature on the New Right. While the course will focus most specifically on United States context, conference papers based on international/comparative case studies are welcome. Students will be required to attend associated talk and film viewings; write weekly essays and engage classmates in conversation online the night before seminar; and write two short research papers that link the themes of the class with their own interests, creative products, research agenda, and/or political engagement. Students will also conduct two associated creative projects/expressions. Transdisciplinary collaborative activities across the college and community are encouraged. Film, performance, written commentary, podcasts, workshops, and other forms of action can provide additional outlets for student creative projects and engagement.

“History is not merely something to read,” James Baldwin wrote in August 1965. “And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all we do.” This course will be focused not only on history—what we consciously and unconsciously carry within us—but on the acquisition of skills that will help you both as a college student and in life. Using the voices of the actors themselves, we will study the political and cultural work of Americans in order to read better, think better, write better, and articulate our ideas more effectively and persuasively. Rather than a representative survey of cultural history (which is, in this wonderfully diverse country, impossible), this course will take up the popular and the obscure, looking into the corners of American life for ideas, thoughts, and experiences of all kinds. Our focus will be on the themes of gender, race, and class but will ponder sexuality, region, religion, immigration, and migration, among other themes. It will be based on a spine of political history. The expectation is that students will come with some knowledge and will be attentive to what they do not know and will go find out about it! Class will revolve around close readings of stories, cultural criticism, speeches, novels, and memoirs—mostly, but not exclusively, published—where authors work to change the minds of their readers. Those primary sources will be buttressed by articles and chapters from history textbooks. It will be challenging! This course will ask you to read more substantial work, more carefully, than perhaps you have before. We will discuss this work in seminar in both small groups and large; and at the end of each semester, there will be an oral exhibition pulling together the themes of the course in a meaningful way. This intellectual practice will ready you for your college career to come. In fall, we will cover the late 18th century to the late 19th century; in spring, we will move from the turn into the 20th century to near its end. Texts will include short stories, poetry, memoir, letters, and (in spring) film. Fall examples include Thomas Paine’s Common Sense; the seduction novel Charlotte Temple by Suzanna Rowson; poetry by Phillis Wheatley; an unpublished novel on gender fluidity, titled The Hermaphrodite, by Julia Ward Howe; short stories by Herman Melville; Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott; and Ragged Dick by Horatio Alger. The spring book list will reflect the interests of the students. Writing will be ample and consistent—thought pieces along with short essays—with regular feedback so that you grow as both a reader and a writer. The subject of conference work can range widely within US cultural and political history: in fall, up to 1890; in spring, all the way to the present. Along the way, we will try to make sense of the way we carry history, the way that it is present in all that we do. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences may be weekly or biweekly.

The continent of Africa has variously been described as the birthplace of humanity, the "Motherland," a country, a continent, Mother Africa, and a “heart of darkness.” All of these descriptions reflect representations of Africa, but how accurately do they reflect reality? The goal of this course will be to study the intellectual history of what we know—or think we know—about modern Africa. Why is it that some of the most prominent images of Africa today are either negative (e.g., Africa as a diseased, hungry, and war-ravaged continent) or romanticized (e.g., Africa as a mother figure, birthplace of civilization, or lush nature preserve)? A central theme of our discussions will be that ideas have a history that is as powerful as radioactive isotopes. In other words, ideas maintain a shelf life, even when their origins have long become obscured. Unfortunately, this has profound implications for Africa’s place in a modern, media-driven, globalized world where image can be as important as reality. Through the use of historical documents, political manifestos, philosophical treatises, travel narratives, autobiographies, and current news sources, we will study how the image of Africa has changed over time. We will trace the “heart of darkness” narrative and analyze why it has become such an enduring trope of modern Africa. Near the end of the course, we will direct a significant proportion of our class discussions toward analyzing a contemporary event occurring on the African continent, preferably as a group project. Ultimately, our purpose will be to interrogate various descriptions of Africa over time and analyze where they originated from, why they exist, whether they are accurate, and what they mean for the future of African peoples in a globalized, interconnected, and increasingly hot world.

A friend put her arms around Edna Pontellier, feeling her shoulder blades, in Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel, The Awakening. Why? To see if her wings were strong. “The bird that would soar above the level plain of tradition and prejudice must have strong wings,” she told Edna. “It is a sad spectacle to see the weaklings bruised, exhausted, fluttering back to earth.” In this course, we will read the work of US women writers who soar “above the level plain of tradition and prejudice” and study women artists, workers, and activists of all kinds over two centuries. Historians will help us understand the worlds in which they lived and, hence, the strength they must use to offer their voices. We will focus on women both inside and outside of the worlds of privilege in which Edna lived. In fall, the focus will include the life of Martha Ballard, a Maine midwife; the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, an early African American poet; the cultural criticism of abolitionist activists like Harriet Jacobs and Lydia Maria Child; the essays of early critics of gender convention like Judith Sargent Murray, Sarah Grimke, and Margaret Fuller; and resistance among women workers and the women who wrote about their “mighty hunger and thwarted dreams.” We will also read Julia Ward Howe’s unfinished mid-century novel, The Hermaphrodite, in which she explores the constraints of the gender binary, and consider the lives and resistance of Native American women. In spring, we will look at the work and life of recent immigrants like Jewish American Anzia Yezierska, Harlem Renaissance writers like Nella Larsen, struggling white Midwestern radicals like Meridel Le Sueur, early environmentalist activists like Josephine Johnson, closeted radical women in lesbian pulps like that of Patricia Highsmith, early Civil Rights activists like Ann Petry, and powerful cultural critics like Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros, among others. We will analyze political cartoons and manifestas from the women’s liberation movement and watch a few notable films directed by women. Taught mainly through primary sources, this course will bracket those novels and stories with scholarship to provide a sense of historical context. Themes will include race, class, ethnicity, immigration and migration, sexuality, and, of course, gender. This is not a classic survey but, rather, readings in the cultural history of the nation framed with political and social history. Assessments will be oral as well as written, with an emphasis on developing analytic and historical arguments. There will be opportunities to explore individuals and groups, based on student interest, through historical research.

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the unique role and power of memory in public life. Historians have sought to understand the innumerable ways that collective memory has been constructed, experienced, used, abused, debated, and reshaped. This course will focus on the rich literature on historical memory within the field of modern Middle Eastern history in order to explore a number of key questions: What is the relationship between history and memory? How are historical events interpreted and rendered socially meaningful? How is public knowledge about the past shaped and propagated? How and why—and in what contexts—do particular ways of seeing and remembering the past become attached to various political projects? Particular attention will be paid to the following topics: the role of memory in the Palestine-Israel “conflict”; postcolonial state-building and “official memory”; debates over national remembering, forgetting, and reconstruction following the Lebanese Civil War; Middle Eastern diaspora formation and exilic identity; the myth of a “golden age” of Arab nationalism; Turkish nostalgia for the Ottoman imperial past; and the role of museums, holidays, and other commemorative practices in the construction of the national past across the region. Throughout the course, we will attend to the complex interplay between individual and collective memory (and “countermemory”), particularly as this has played out in several formulations of Middle Eastern nationalism. 

This introductory queer and feminist studies course will center the intellectual work of theorists within the traditions known as Black feminist theory and queer of color critique. The course will read scholarship by Gloria Anzaldúa, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Barbara Christian, Cathy J. Cohen, the Combahee River Collective, Roderick Ferguson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiya Hartman, E. Johnson Patrick, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, José Esteban Muñoz, Jennifer C. Nash, C. Riley Snorton, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams. The course will also explore documentary films by Marlon Riggs, fiction by Toni Morrison, creative nonfiction and poetry by Claudia Rankine, and the films Moonlight (directed by Barry Jenkins) and The Watermelon Woman (directed by Cheryl Dunye). Conference projects will emerge from archival research at the Sarah Lawrence College Archives. Students will meet every two weeks at the Sarah Lawrence College Library in one of four conference groups organized around overarching topics of concern and debate from the class, including: 1) critical fabulation, 2) institutionality and the academy, 3) violence, resistance, and care, and 4) emotion. Major writing assignments will include four brief “archival dispatches,” where students will report on their research findings to describe their intellectual, political, and emotional investments in the archives. For the course's final assignment, students will develop an individual project proposal that envisions a future intellectual, activist, or artistic response to the archives.

The television show Hoarders: Buried Alive. Artist Andy Warhol’s junk collection, consisting of receipts, junk mail, and takeout menus. Professional organizer Marie Kondo and her minimalist ideals. Big-screen televisions, fast fashion, and floating islands of plastic trash contrasted with the promises of decluttering, downsizing, and shrinking homes. From fantastic depictions of people overwhelmed with their accumulation of things to popular self-help books that promise freedom and joy in the form of a clean home, this course will be concerned with the judgments we make about people and their relationship to their stuff. This course will begin to unpack "abject object orientations" by investigating figures like the archivist, the hoarder, the minimalist, and the collector. The course will ask how race, gender, sexuality, and class shape our judgments of people and their relationship to things. By looking to depictions of whom Scott Herring calls "material deviants" across performance art, film, and memoir, we will describe the cultural logics through which speaking of a person's orientation toward objects becomes a way of making ethical claims about them. For major assignments, students will develop three total live performances, including two archival “show and tells,” and a final autoethnographic performance unpacking students' own relationship to things. Archival “show and tells” will center an object from trips to the Sarah Lawrence Archives and can be either solo or group performances. Potential field-trip sites may include the Hudson River Museum, local thrift and resale stores, and the Yonkers Public Library Local History Room. No previous performance experience is required.

This course will examine how music and its global circulation make the relationships between people audible. In the social contexts of listening and musical performance, we will understand how music and its movement across community-based, regional, and national boundaries shape people’s lives. As recordings, musicians, and ideas about music move, we will learn how they sound interpersonal relationships by using selected ethnographic examples of art and popular music from across Asia. Class topics may include Javanese gamelan, South Indian classical music, Japanese taiko, Southeast Asian heavy metal, Iranian pop, brass bands, Japanese hip hop, Bollywood, music from the Silk Road Project, world jazz, Japanese noise, K-pop, the music of M.I.A., World Music 2.0, and others. Course themes related to the circulation of music will include the ideology of tradition, cultural imperialism, sound technologies, and the more recent proliferation of cultural nationalisms that seek to impede circulation. By encountering musical diversity through listening and reading materials, students will develop the critical thinking skills to make connections between sonic and textual resources and to better understand the many ways in which music and sound are meaningful around the world. Participation in Solkattu, our Indian vocal percussion ensemble, or African Classics, our African popular music ensemble, is strongly encouraged. No prior musical experience is necessary.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau is often regarded as a foundational figure in the development of the Western ideal of authenticity—the belief that a moral life entails uncompromising loyalty to one’s true self. Rousseau dedicated his life to the pursuit of a formula in which authenticity could serve as a path to happiness. And yet, time and again, he found himself entangled in paradoxes that were not merely philosophical but vividly reflected in his own life. His educational theory is a cornerstone of modern humanistic educational thought, yet he entrusted all five of his children to a public foundling hospital shortly after birth. He denounced popular entertainment but authored the best-selling novel of the 18th century. He professed deep Christian faith, while his books were burned as heretical. He argued that romantic love is an essential part of human existence while spending his final years in near-total solitude. This seminar welcomes anyone interested in modern philosophy, theories of the self, and the fragile threshold where bold ideas encounter human vulnerability. Rousseau was not only a thinker of inner conflict, he was also a political revolutionary whose writings have been interpreted as foundational to modern communism, liberal democracy, and even totalitarianism. His influence stretches across the ideological spectrum, making him a key figure for understanding both the promises and the perils of modernity.

What is education for? And what kind of human being does it aim to shape? This seminar will invite students to explore education not merely as a set of practices but, rather, as a reflection of our deepest convictions about human nature, freedom, and society. Through philosophical inquiry, students will develop critical, reflective, and ethically grounded perspectives on their role as educators. The seminar will be structured around four compelling visions of the human being, each giving rise to a distinct educational ideal and each delivering a pointed critique of dominant educational paradigms. Through readings in Plato, Aristotle, and Isocrates, we will examine classical humanism and its belief in a universal human essence that education must actualize through the pursuit of virtue, fulfillment, and happiness. We will then turn to the Romantic-Naturalist tradition—Montaigne, Rousseau, and Fröbel—who emphasized the child’s innate goodness and warned against educational systems that suppress natural growth. The existentialist approach, represented by Nietzsche, Sartre, and Greene, shifts from self-realization to self-creation, challenging us to resist conformity. Finally, we will explore critical pedagogy through the works of Freire, Giroux, hooks, Arendt, and Adorno, who argue that education must address broader social injustices and guard against the political dangers of uncritical obedience. This seminar will offer students not only a rich encounter with the history of educational thought but also an invitation to take a stand—to reflect on who we are, who we aspire to become, and what kind of education might lead us there.

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore child and adolescent development through a cross-cultural lens. Focusing on case studies from diverse communities around the world, we will look at the influence of cultural processes on how children learn, play, and grow. Our core readings will analyze psychological processes related to attachment and parenting, cognition and perception, social and emotional development, language acquisition, and moral development. We will ask questions like the following: Why are children in Sri Lanka fed by hand by their mothers until middle childhood, and how does this shape their relations to others through the course of life? How does an Inuit toddler come to learn moral lessons through scripted play with adults, and how does such learning prepare them to navigate a challenging social and geographic environment? Is it true that Maya children do not do pretend play at all? How does a unique family role influence the formation of identity for Latinx youth in the United States? How are unequal childhoods shaped by social exclusion and discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender, and immigration status? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, our course material will draw from developmental psychology, human development, cultural psychology, and psychological anthropology and will include peer-reviewed journal articles and books, as well as films that address core issues in a range of geographic and sociocultural contexts. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course.  Fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center is optional.

This interdisciplinary course will address mental health in diverse cultural contexts, drawing upon a range of case studies to illuminate the causes, symptoms, diagnosis, course, and treatment of mental illness across the globe. The course will open by exploring questions of the classification of mental illness to address whether Western psychiatric categories apply across different local contexts. We will explore the globalization of American understandings of the psyche, the exportation of Western mental disorders, and the impact of psychiatric imperialism in places like Sri Lanka, Zanzibar, Oaxaca, and Japan. Through readings of peer-reviewed articles and current research in cultural psychology, clinical psychology, psychological anthropology, psychiatric anthropology, and medical anthropology, we will explore conditions such as depression and anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, susto, and mal de ojo to understand the entanglements of psychological experience, culture, morality, sociality, and care. We will explore how diagnostic processes and psychiatric care are, at times, differentially applied in the United States according to a client’s race, ethnicity, class, or gender. Finally, we will also explore the complexities of recovery or healing, addressing puzzles such as why certain mental disorders are considered to be lifelong, chronic, and severe in some parts of the world but are interpreted as temporary, fleeting, and manageable elsewhere—and how such expectations influence people’s ability to experience wellness or (re)integration into family, work, and society. Several key authors will join us as invited guest speakers to talk about their current work. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course.

Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality, a race, an ethnicity—or all or none of these? This question has driven Jewish thought for centuries and has preoccupied both Jewish thinkers and non-Jewish thinkers attempting to make sense of the place of the Jewish minority in surrounding cultures. In this seminar, we will explore the complex and multifaceted ways in which Judaism and Jewish peoplehood are understood historically, theologically, and sociologically and how this form of identity does or does not map onto emergent modern concepts of religion and nationality. We will use Judaism as a test case for exploring the very concept of “religion” itself, as it evolved in European culture, and the question of whether religion is a universal concept that applies to all humans around the world or a particularist construction emerging out of a uniquely Christian history. We will investigate topics such as the nature of Jewish religious practice, the relationship between Jewish law and identity, the rise of secular Jewish movements, and the implications of Jewish nationalist movements. We will engage with key texts from the Hebrew Bible, rabbinic literature, and modern Jewish thought while also considering contemporary debates on Jewish identity, secularism, and the intersection of faith, practice, and culture. We will also spend some time on comparative religious studies, examining how Judaism fits within broader categories of religion and spirituality and how these categories describe the multifaceted nature of Jewish life. The course will encourage students to grapple with the way in which concepts that we use in our everyday life, such as “religion,” in fact reflect deeply embedded histories and cultural biases and to think about what it means to do comparative religious studies as an academic project. Students will complete both short essays and in-class presentations over the course of the year in addition to one group presentation. The final conference project will serve as a culmination of a research question that the student has pursued; and while it may take a variety of forms and media, depending on the personal interests of the student, the project will display sustained research and engagement with academic sources related to the topic of choice. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

It has been almost a quarter of a century since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. How have perceptions changed about the events that occurred that day? Shortly after the attacks, then-President George W. Bush insisted that Islam was not to blame and, instead, framed the battle ahead as “the war on terror.” But what about those who insisted that what had happened was an almost inevitable result of the “clash of civilizations”? How did Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda frame the narrative and their part in it? What kinds of arguments were presented to justify the attack and the US military interventions that followed? In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, what has been called the “Islamophobia industry” developed and flourished, taking full advantage of new forms of media. What role has mainstream and alternative media played in how Muslims have been portrayed and the discrimination that they have faced in the years since 9/11? Ten years after the attacks, the 9/11 Memorial and Museum opened in New York City. How has this site and other memorials shaped the collective memory of the events, as well as the curriculum being taught to a generation born after 2001? In addition to the architects of these memorials, artists, writers, and filmmakers have explored the many religious, political, and social dimensions of the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath. How have these works of imagination expanded the ways in which people have made sense of, and found meaning in, painful events? While this seminar is being offered through the religion discipline, the approach will be an interdisciplinary one, drawing upon readings and other materials from a variety of academic, artistic, and literary fields.

The question of how Judaism does and does not map onto contemporary racial categories has been a defining question for centuries of how Jews, as a small minority group, relate to their surrounding cultures. In many ways, the story of the historical construction of racial categories is itself a story indissolubly bound up with Jewish history; ranging from the development of the concept of blood purity during the Spanish Inquisition, which was then exported to the New World through Spanish colonialism, to late 19th-century racial theorists, who were preoccupied with the question of how Jews do or do not relate to European peoples. As such, this course will consider the overarching question—“Are Jews white?”—from a historical and sociological perspective. In so doing, we will think about the historical development of the concept of whiteness itself and the relationship between the emergent concept of race and concepts of religion, ethnicity, nationhood, and nationality. We will look at how Jews were and are racially defined and categorized in different historical and cultural contexts in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the United States—and how this question is bound up with broader questions about power relations, political structures, and minority and majority identities. We will look at how Zionism and other forms of Jewish nationalism have altered Jewish racialization; how Jews relate to broader discourses of postcolonialism and Orientalism; and the different racializations of Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ethiopian Jews in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East. The course will look at the ways in which Jews responded to the rise of Black nationalism in the United States and how racialized divisions between different ethnic Jewish communities shape politics in the modern state of Israel, with a particular focus on the rise of the Mizrahi Black Panthers. We will read sources from Jews of color and Jews who identify as white, from many diverse national backgrounds, as well as from many non-Jewish thinkers who find Jewish identity a fruitful way to think about the question of racial identity and its attendant political conflicts. We will explore how racial categories for Jews function both internally, within the Jewish community, and externally. In so doing, we will come to see how Jews and their relationship to whiteness is a defining question not just for Jewish identity but also how Jewishness can help shed light on the very concept of race itself.

How does the setting up of a textile factory in Malaysia connect with life in the United States? Or of ship building in Bangladesh? What was the relationship of mothers to children in 17th-century, upper-class French households? What do we expect of the same relationships today? In the United States? In other societies? Across rural and urban areas? How do contemporary notions of leisure and luxury resemble, or do they, notions of peoples in other times and places regarding wealth and poverty? What is the relation between the local and the global, the individual and society, the self and “other”? How is the self constructed? How do we connect biography and history, fiction and fact, objectivity and subjectivity, the social and the personal? These are some of the questions that sociology and sociologists attempt to think through. In this seminar, we will ask how sociologists, and social thinkers in general, analyze and simultaneously create reality. What questions do we/they ask? How does one explore these questions and arrive at subsequent findings and conclusions? Through a perusal of comparative and historical materials, we will look afresh at things we take for granted; for example, the family, poverty, identity, travel and tourism, progress, science, and subjectivity. The objective of the seminar will be to enable students to critically read sociological texts and become practitioners in “doing” sociology (something we are always already involved in, albeit often unself-consciously). This last endeavor is both designed to train students in how to undertake research and intended as a key tool in interrogating the relationship between the researcher and the researched, the field studied, and the (sociological) text. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly. 

In an era of unprecedented global connectivity, why do economic and social inequalities continue to deepen? This lecture will provide students with a critical introduction to the sociological study of global inequalities, moving beyond national boundaries to examine the transnational structures, institutions, and processes that produce and sustain disparities in wealth, power, and opportunity. We will explore key themes such as human rights, migration, labor, health, climate justice, and development, analyzing how these intersect with racial, gendered, and class-based inequalities across different societies. Rather than treating nations as isolated "containers" of social issues, we will focus on the ways in which global forces—such as capitalism, colonial legacies, and international policy regimes—shape patterns of privilege and precarity. Students will engage with interdisciplinary sources, including sociological research, ethnographies, policy reports, and case studies from regions in the Global South and North. Topics will include the rise of transnational migration networks, the impact of neoliberal economic policies on developing economies, the persistence of racial hierarchies in global labor markets, and the consequences of climate change for displaced communities. As part of group conferences, students will identify a key global issue and develop a research portfolio using a variety of methods—statistical analysis, historical records, qualitative interviews, and ethnographic sources—to investigate how inequality is shaped and contested in different contexts. The course will encourage students to think critically about solutions, exploring social movements, policy interventions, and alternative models of economic and social justice. This course is open to all students interested in understanding the dynamics of inequality on a global scale. No prior coursework in sociology is required, but students should be prepared for rigorous reading, discussion, and research.

Cities are shaped not only by official policies and infrastructures but also by the informal and everyday interactions that blur boundaries—between legality and illegality, local and global, self and other. This seminar will explore informality as a defining feature of urban life and globalization, examining how people navigate unregulated economies, build informal networks of care and survival, and redefine cosmopolitanism through daily acts of negotiation, adaptation, and contamination. Using a transnational and ethnographic lens, we will look at how informal economies—street vending, unregistered housing, underground labor networks—shape cities from the margins. We will also examine cultural and social "contaminations"—where urban residents of different class, racial, ethnic, and migratory backgrounds encounter and transform each other’s ways of life—sometimes in conflict, sometimes in collaboration. Rather than viewing informality as a "problem" to be solved, we will investigate how it can be a form of survival, resistance, and even innovation. Key themes include the role of informal housing and precarious urbanism, as seen in slums, refugee camps, and do-it-yourself architecture, as well as the dynamics of street economies and alternative labor structures. We will explore how migrant communities shape transnational place making; the politics of food, music, and everyday cultural hybridity; and how public space is governed, contested, and informally negotiated in cities. These intersecting themes highlight the ways in which urban life is constantly being reshaped through both structural constraints and human agency. Readings will include works by Teresa Caldeira, Asef Bayat, AbdouMaliq Simone, Ananya Roy, and Saskia Sassen, alongside ethnographic case studies of cities in Southeast Asia, Latin America, Africa, and North America. Students will conduct ethnographic fieldwork— exploring the informal landscapes of urban spaces, neighborhoods, and/or digital communities around them—as part of conference work. These projects can culminate in ethnographic essays, photo essays, digital maps, or multimedia storytelling. This course is designed for students interested in urban studies, migration, globalization, and the sociology of everyday life. No previous background in sociology is required, but students should be ready to engage in active field observation, lots of fieldnote writing, discussion, and critical and creative thinking.

This course will survey visual forms of expression across Latin America that record history and represent cultural memories, struggles, and identities. By approaching material sources, students will broaden their comprehension skills and activate discourse production to engage critically in oral and written discussions about historical and social challenges. Among other sources, we will address political violence and resistance through comics such as El Síndrome Guastavino and Violencia política en el Perú, films such as Nostalgia de la luz and La noche de los 12 años, and arpilleras textile art. As students are introduced to Mexican muralism in the 20th century, they will broaden their understanding by analyzing contemporary expressions of street art and graffiti in Brazil and Cuba. Students will also learn about the cholets, Andean architecture from El Alto, and floating houses across delta rivers and lakes. Alongside photography, we will explore the use of body art, from the funerary rituals of Indigenous Selk'nam to Afro-Caribbean masquerades, Mara gang tattoos, and feminist activism. In this seminar, students will examine material culture to deepen their understanding of discursive structures such as description, exposition, narration, comparison, and argumentation. Students will also enhance their Spanish language skills by expanding their vocabulary and effectively applying linguistic and grammatical resources. Throughout the course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop written and oral communication skills in Spanish, as well as critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through multimedia projects that foster multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research trip to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Museo de El Barrio, Institute for Latin American Art, Hispanic Society of America, and Bronx Museum of the Arts. In addition to class time, students will attend a weekly conversation session with a language tutor. All primary sources, class discussions, and assignments will be in Spanish.

This course will examine films produced in Latin America and the Caribbean in the last 40 years that contributed to their nations’ collective memory, history, and cultural identity. Students will watch short and full-length feature films, ranging from melodrama to documentary and passing through thriller and romance. We will analyze how Luis Puenzo, Andrés Wood, and Mariano Barroso employed four areas of cinema to construct and visualize a collective memory after the atrocities resulting from the dictatorial regimes in Argentina, Chile, and the Dominican Republic, respectively. The course will also explore how cinema was utilized to recuperate and disseminate cultural identity and history in Peru, Honduras, and Puerto Rico. In this discussion-based seminar, students will learn a basic technical language to offer pointed criticism about films produced in Spanish in Latin America and the Caribbean. Students will also delve into the existing scholarship regarding memory, history, and nationalism to think critically about the narratives that they will encounter. Through advanced grammar review and weekly conversation sessions—in small groups with the language assistant—students will further hone their communication skills in Spanish. This seminar will contain an individual conference project.

The growing recognition of Latin American comics as a subject of academic study in the 21st century has further diversified the medium in the region. This course will explore the representation of Indigenous identities and cultural narratives in contemporary Chilean comics, focusing on works published during the 2000s boom. This moment was driven by various factors, such as collaborative projects, the strengthening of distribution circuits, efforts by independent publishers, access to global comic industries, and state funding opportunities. Students will engage with frameworks from comics studies and critical theory to analyze how these graphic sources challenge hegemonic representations and contribute to broader discussions on Indigenous representation, cultural resistance, and transnational dialogues on race and ethnicity. Students will analyze comic genres ranging from historical fiction and fantasy to superheroes and horror, the course will examine how Indigenous cultures are represented within the framework of post-indigenism, as studied through Alemani's research. Rather than merely recalling pre-Hispanic myths or questioning identity in response to colonial wounds, contemporary Chilean comics position Indigenous narratives within a globalized world through complex sequential narratives and hybrid aesthetics. Among other references, Chajnantor draws on Japanese manga to depict cultural aspects of the high plateau and the Atacama desert, while the Varua saga examines historical milestones and oral traditions to reconstruct Rapa Nui cultural memory. Adventure comics shape Mapuche superhero resistance in Guardianes del Sur, and manga-inspired robots depict a Selk’nam futurist society after settler colonialism in Mecha Selk’nam. The collaborative project Mitoverso creates a universe of superheroes inspired by folk stories, while Los fantasmas del viento articulates the intersection of Indigenous groups and European descendants in the Patagonian region. Throughout this course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop communication skills in Spanish and critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through a semester-long multimedia project that enhances multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research visit to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Society of Illustrators, Brooklyn Independent Comics Showcase, and The Drawing Center. All primary sources, class discussions, and assignments will be in Spanish.

What role does speculation play in subverting the past, rethinking the present, and building different futures within the Americas? The field of speculative fiction uses multiple forms of arts and media to craft fictional imaginaries that have become a vehicle to narrate historical horror by studying Merla-Watson and Olguín and to criticize versions of modernity imposed across the Americas by studying Colanzi. While these speculative imaginaries use the codes of fiction—such as space-time travel, horror, robots, alternative realities, zombies, and genetics—they also expand upon them to address struggles of the Americas’ history of colonialism, dispossession, and mestizaje. In this advanced seminar, we will engage in a cross-cultural trajectory of contemporary speculative fiction in multiple forms, such as literature, comics, film, and performance within the United States-Mexico border, the Caribbean, and the Southern Cone. Topics studied may include: from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands to her theory on Queer Futurities and from critical race theory to movies such as La Llorona, Juan de los muertos, and Sleep Dealer. This trajectory will also range from mainstream franchises, such as Marvel and Star Wars, to superheroes depiction in El Alto and Tierra del Fuego. We will focus on transdisciplinary works by Rita Indiana and Luis Carlos Barragán and artwork by Marion Matínez, Amalia Ortiz, and Edgar Clement. We will also reflect on Futurisms made by mestizos, Indigenous, and Afro-Caribbeans while assessing the scopes of climate change and environmental crisis within these communities. Throughout this course and biweekly conference meetings, students will develop communication skills in Spanish and critical-thinking abilities. Students will further advance their research skills through a semester-long multimedia project that enhances multiliteracy and public humanities competencies. The course also contemplates one field research trip to relevant local museum exhibits and artist conventions, such as the Center for Fiction, Feria Internacional del Libro de la Ciudad de Nueva York, and Museum of the Moving Image. Sources will be in Spanish, English, and Spanglish, while class discussions and assignments will be conducted entirely in Spanish.

The traditional Western house is subdivided into smaller spaces and rooms through social means. Such rooms embody a situated hierarchy set forth by the notion of the “paterfamilias” and “dominus,” or traditional heads of the family. The division of rooms and their functions reiterate this nuclear-family structure, furthering the separation from the outside world and of everyone within the house. This partitioning of space further defines private and public; and the shelter, protection, and safety that the home provides “is inseparable from the immense economic, technological, and political structures that produce it.” Therefore, the house is also intertwined with the “framework of political organization” in its physicality and its imbued implication of “labor, work, and political action.” This course is titled from an extended essay by Virginia Woolf and a Dogma-presented architectural exhibition, and corresponding exhibition catalogue, on domestic space. Students will research the house based on objects, aesthetics, and spatial tensions. These subjects are also connected to the financial aspect of the person or persons within the room and the house. The representation of these aspects will be key, as they bring up cultural norms and styles to counter these norms through design, making, and research. How do we represent the room today within political, economic, and social concerns? How do objects inform, shape, dictate, and influence our understanding of this room? What histories bring us to this point in time, where the room is prescribed to us through modernism? Lastly, how does this room relate to the rest of the house?

This fiction workshop will seek to draw inspiration from the way that American writers have grappled with the experience of race and racial inequality. How do race and racism act not only as social forces but also as imaginative ones? How do they become narrative resources for writers? How do writers engage with these historical and imaginative legacies? What lessons might aspiring writers draw from their efforts? In other words, how might we fruitfully think about what Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap have called—in their anthology of the same name—“the racial imaginary”? Over the course of this creative-writing workshop, students will be asked to explore the American racial imaginary by examining writing in a variety of genres and disciplines—from short stories to personal essays and poetry, as well as academic criticism and historical scholarship—in the interest of producing and workshopping their own original fiction. For final conference projects, students will be expected to produce a portfolio of fiction. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer and what we may write? In this course, we will discuss an array of choices that writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War II until the present. Students will be asked to read excerpts from six texts: Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War; Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism; and two long poems, Peter Dale Scott’s "Coming to Jakarta" and Dionne Brand's "Inventory." Group conferences will function as writing workshops to offer students feedback on their letters in progress in addition to various writing exercises. The lens of this course will be that of a writer—using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present. 

As central to the historical development of the modern essay as its concern with personal experience is the essay's usefulness in politics and the representation of political experience. The essay can be polemical, informative, argumentative, lyrical, intimate, condemnatory. It can narrate and describe, or it can persuade or cajole, or it can satirize. As an open, improvisational form, the essay is particularly suited to giving depth to individual experience by placing that experience in social and political contexts and among allegiances and identities—and also suited to imparting drama to collective experience by locating the individual within his, her, or their social conditions and conflicts. We will follow this give and take in our readings, which will be across the reasonable political spectrum. Some examples: Samuel Taylor Coleridge on William Pitt the Younger, George Orwell on his education, H. L. Mencken on The Presidency, James Baldwin in Switzerland, Joan Didion on the counter-culture, Adrienne Rich and Anne Carson on patriarchy, Mike Davis on class and the politics of firefighting in contemporary Los Angeles, and a series of recent editorials and op-eds about our ever-present political crises. These various pieces will be used as models for our own writing, which will range from the small to the medium to the large and will be presented to the class for critique of both their rhetorical realizations and their plausibility or implausibility.