ENROLL

Eddie E O'Byrn

This course examines motifs of Black Heroism throughout the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and Early America. We take an interdisciplinary and Black Studies approach to topics like slave life and maroonage, freedom suits, military enlistment, and more. The course material will include fiction like Frederick Douglass' The Heroic Slave as well as theoretical texts like Neil Roberts Freedom as Maroonage. The aim of the course is to provide a look at the multifacted lives of Black people in the diaspora and early America with an emphasis on complex and quotidian resistance to domination.

Peter Balaam

"O City / Behold me! Incarnate me as I have incarnated you!" An investigation of the burgeoning metropolitan city where the young Walter Whitman became a poet in the 1850s. Combining historical inquiry into the lives of nineteenth-century citizens of Brooklyn and Manhattan with analysis of Whitman’s varied journalistic writings and utterly original poetry, we will reconstruct how Whitman found his muse and his distinctively modern subject in the geography, demographics, markets, politics, and erotics of New York.

Held for new first year students

Adriana Estill

This overview of the "interdisciplinary discipline" of American Studies will focus on the ways American Studies engages with and departs from other scholarly fields of inquiry. We will study the stories of those who have been marginalized in the social, political, cultural, and economic life of the United States due to their class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, citizenship, and level of ability. We will explore contemporary American Studies concerns like racial and class formation, the production of space and place, the consumption and circulation of culture, and transnational histories.

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: AMST 115.WL0 (Synonym 61925)

Adriana Estill

Christine E Castro

What function do prisons and immigrant detention centers serve? How do they figure in American history and society, especially since their current forms are relatively new? In this class, we will examine state-sponsored confinement and detention practices from seventeenth to twenty-first century America. Across three units, we will analyze abduction and captivity, forced labor and relocation, and internment and border security as carceral practices. We will pay particular attention to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability to understand how confinement and detention have shaped American state-building. 

Ross Elfline

Beyond surveying the rich history of arts by LGBTQA+ individuals, this course takes as its object of study the ways in which the arts have been used to question, undermine, and subvert the gendered and sexual norms of dominant cultures—in short, to queer them. In so doing, such visual and performative practices offer new, alternative models of living and acting in the world based on liberatory politics and aesthetics. This course will consider topics such as: censorship of queer artists; art of the AIDS crisis; activist performance; the sexual politics of public space; and queer intersections of race, class and gender in visual art among others.

Prerequisite: Any one art history course

Extra Time Required

Kelly Connole

Students will learn techniques used by Japanese potters, and those from around the world, to make vessels associated with the production and consumption of tea. Both handbuilding and wheel throwing processes will be explored throughout the term. We will investigate how Japanese pottery traditions, especially the Mingei “arts of the people” movement of the 1920s, have influenced contemporary ceramics practice in the United States and how cultural appropriation impacts arts practice. Special attention will be paid to the use of local materials from Carleton’s Arboretum as well as wood firing and traditional raku processes. 

Prerequisite: Requires concurrent registration in Art History 266

Extra Time Required, requires concurrent registration in Art History 266

Judith Howard

Dance is a field in which bodies articulate a history of sexuality, nation, gender, and race. In this course, the investigation of the body as a “text” will be anchored by intersectional and feminist perspectives. We will re-center American concert dance history, emphasizing the Africanist base of American Dance performance, contemporary black choreographers, and Native American concert dance. Through reading, writing, discussing, moving, viewing videos and performances the class will “read” the gender, race, and politics of the dancing body in the cultural/historical context of Modern, Post Modern and Contemporary Dance.

Jeff Snyder

How and why have standardized tests become so central to our educational system? This seminar will explore the following topics, among others--the invention of standardized tests and the growth of the testing industry; psychometrics (the science of mental measurement); and the controversies surrounding the use of standardized tests, including charges that they are culturally biased and do not positively contribute to student learning. Our analyses will be informed by a close examination of authentic testing materials, ranging from intelligence tests to the SAT.

Held for new first year students

Anita Chikkatur

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: EDUC 110.WL0 (Synonym 62404)

Jeff Snyder

How can we fix American public schools? What is "broken" about our schools? How should they be repaired? And who should lead the fix? This course will examine the two leading contemporary educational reform movements: accountability and school choice. With an emphasis on the nature of the teaching profession and the work of foundations, this course will analyze the policy agendas of different reform groups, exploring the dynamic interactions among the many different stakeholders responsible for shaping American education.

Kofi Owusu

We will explore developments in African American literature since the 1950s with a focus on literary expression in the Civil Rights Era; on the Black Arts Movement; on the new wave of feminist/womanist writing; and on the experimental and futuristic fictions of the twenty-first century. Authors to be read include Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, August Wilson, Charles Johnson, Ntozake Shange, Gloria Naylor, Suzan-Lori Parks, Kevin Young, and Tracy Smith.

Elizabeth McKinsey

An important preoccupation of nineteenth century America was the nature of democracy and the proper balance of individualism and the social good. An experiment in government, democracy also raised new questions about gender, class, and race. Citizenship was contested; roles in the new, expanding nation were fluid; abolition and emancipation, the movement for women's rights, industrialization all caused ferment and anxiety. The course will explore the way these issues were imagined in fiction by such writers as Cooper, Hawthorne, Maria Sedgwick, Stowe, Tourgee, Henry Adams, Twain, Gilman, and Chesnutt.

Kofi Owusu

Prerequisite: One English foundations course and one other 6 credit English course or instructor permission

Jayne A Swift

Why is the sale of sex criminalized? Who participates in sexual labor and for what reasons? What are the goals and tactics of sex worker social movements? Sexual commerce is an integral facet of U.S. society and the global economy, and yet it elicits strong and paradoxical reactions. This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of commercial sexual cultures. Taking a transnational approach, we will examine historical, political, and economic changes in sexual economies and the regulation of commercial sex. Course readings explore how sex workers have collectively organized to resist criminalization and fight for a better future.

George Vrtis

Held for new first year students

Meredith McCoy

Many Americans grow up with a fictionalized view of Indigenous people (sometimes also called Native Americans/American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians within the U.S. context). Understanding Indigenous peoples’ histories, presents, and possible futures requires moving beyond these stereotypes and listening to Indigenous perspectives. In this class, we will begin to learn about Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and the Pacific through tribal histories, legislation, Supreme Court cases, and personal narratives. The course will focus on the period from 1887 to 2018 with major themes including (among others) agency, resistance, resilience, settler colonialism, discrimination, and structural racism.

Noël Voltz

This course is a survey of early African American history. It will introduce students to major themes and events while also covering historical interpretations and debates in the field. Core themes of the course include migration, conflict, and culture. Beginning with autonomous African politics, the course traces the development of the United States through the experiences of enslaved and free African American women and men to the Civil War. The main aim of the course is for students to become familiar with key issues and developments in African American history and their centrality to understanding U.S. history.

Antony Adler

A two-credit course in which students work with faculty oversight to complete a variety of public history projects with community partners. Students will work on a research project requiring them to identify and analyze primary sources, draw conclusions from the primary source research, and share their research with the appropriate audience in an appropriate form. We meet once a week at Carleton to ensure students maintain professional standards and strong relationships in their work. Potential projects include educational programming, historical society archival work, and a variety of local history opportunities. 

Extra Time Required

Meredith McCoy

This course introduces students to the history of settler education for Indigenous students. In the course, we will engage themes of resistance, assimilation, and educational violence through an investigation of nation-to-nation treaties, federal education legislation, court cases, student memoirs, film, fiction, and artwork. Case studies will illustrate student experiences in mission schools, boarding schools, and public schools between the 1600s and the present, asking how Native people have navigated the educational systems created for their assimilation and how schooling might function as a tool for Indigenous resurgence in the future.

George Vrtis

Noël Voltz

This course focuses on the history of black women in the United States. The class will offer an overview of the lived experiences of women of African descent in this country from enslavement to the present.  We will focus on themes of labor, reproduction, health, community, family, resistance, activism, etc., highlighting the diversity of black women’s experiences and the ways in which their lives have been shaped by the intersections of their race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Serena Zabin

This course is part of an off-campus winter break program that includes two linked courses in the fall and winter. The creation and establishment of the United States was a contested and uncertain event stretched over more than half a century. For whom, for what, and how was the United States created? In what ways do the conflicts and contradictions of the nation’s eighteenth-century founding shape today’s America? We will examine how the nation originated in violent civil war and in political documents that simultaneously offered glorious promises and a “covenant with death.” Our nuanced understanding of the American Revolution and Early Republic will underpin our ability to tell these stories to the wider public.

Prerequisite: One previous history course

Participation in OCS History Winter Break Program

Mark S. Applebaum

This course will develop critical listening skills and an understanding of musical parameters through an introduction to select genres within the history of rock music. Our focus is on competing aesthetic tendencies and sub-cultural forces that shaped the music. The course includes discussions of rock’s significance in American culture and the minority communities that have enriched rock’s legacy as an expressively diverse form. Examined genres include blues, jazz, early rock ’n’ roll, folk rock, protest music, psychedelia, music of the British Invasion, punk, art rock, Motown, funk, hip hop, heavy metal, grunge, glitter, and disco. Lectures, readings, careful listening, and video screenings. Students will also argue for the best rock song of all time. 

Sarah N Lahasky

Throughout history, people have relocated for a variety of reasons, both voluntarily and forcibly. What sorts of consequences do mass movements of people have on cultural practices? This course will examine the legacy of the slave trade with relation to African-influenced music developments throughout the Americas and the Caribbean. We will first consider the nuances of West African music practices and beliefs before and during the slave trade. Then, we will explore a variety of sacred and secular traditions that developed in the New World as a result of the African Diaspora, including spirituals, the blues, jazz, rock and roll, and hip hop in North America; tango, blocos afro, cumbia, and candombe in South America; and Santería, reggae, timba, rara, and steel pan in the Caribbean. As part of this exploration, we will consider difficult questions, such as what is “black music”?; What ethical considerations must we think about in relation to who can/should play black music?; and What sorts of similarities and differences exist between African-influenced music styles in the Americas, and why? Lastly, we will consider how music in Africa has changed in more recent times due to a return of African-Americans back to their ancestral roots as well as other points of contact between the Americas and Africa, especially in relation to genres like Afrobeat, highlife, and gumbe. No previous musical experience required.

Daniel Groll

Everyone has a family of one kind or another. Whether you love them, hate them, or both at the same time, your family has played a huge role in making you the person you are. That fact raises all kinds of interesting philosophical questions such as: what limits should there be on how parents shape their kids' lives and values? Are there demands of justice that are in tension with the way families are "normally" constituted? What duties do parents have to their children and vice versa? And what makes a person someone else's parent or child in the first place--genetics, commitment, convention? This course will explore all these questions and more.

Held for new first year students

Eddie E O'Byrn

This course serves as an introduction to the philosophical subfield of Critical Philosophy of Race. In this course students examine issues raised by the concept of race, practices and methods of racialization, and the persistence of racism across the world despite efforts to end it. This method of doing philosophy opposes racism in all forms; it rejects racial pseudoscience and religious determinism, biological racialism, all forms of racial supremacy, and all forms of racial eliminativism. Instead, critical philosophy of race aims to help students understand how race is constructed and the multi-faced ways it operates in the world today.

Richard Keiser

Not Writing Rich

Barbara Allen

What justifies self-defense and retaliation in defending civil rights and liberty? What moral reasoning and strategies offer alternatives to using physical violence in a social movement to gain civil rights? Our seminar examines the American Civil Rights Movement 1954 and 1968, and compares the writings of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X to learn about nonviolent direct action, self-defense, and the use of "any means necessary" to right the wrongs of racial injustice.

Richard Keiser

Prerequisite: Sophomore Standing

Not open to first year students.

Barbara Allen

How do we know if a news organization is ideologically biased? How do we show that gender influences how world leaders approach defense policy? How do we track the growth in misinformation in political advertising worldwide? One foundational methodology for studying questions like these is content analysis. This course will enable you to analyze the texts of speeches, debates, news stories, tweets, press conferences, letters, ad texts--and the visual representations that accompany many of these forms of communication. Students will learn the basics of defining content, operationalizing variables, and conducting the analysis to get valid, reliable data.

2nd 5 weeks

Christina Farhart

This course addresses race and ethnicity in U.S. politics. Following an introduction to historical, sociological, and psychological approaches to the study of race and ethnicity, we apply these approaches to understanding the ways in which racial attitudes have been structured along a number of political and policy dimensions, e.g., welfare, education, criminal justice. Students will gain an increased understanding of the multiple contexts that shape contemporary racial and ethnic politics and policies in the U.S., and will consider the role of institutional design, policy development, representation, and racial attitudes among the general U.S. public and political environment.

Barbara Allen

“Every civil rights bill was passed for white people, not black people. I am a human being. I know … I have right(s). White people didn’t know that. … so [they] had to … to tell that white man, 'he’s a human being, don’t stop him.' That bill was for the white man…. I knew [my rights] all the time.” Stokely Carmichael spoke for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee viewpoint in 1966. The Black Panther Party enacted basic civic responsibilities in their programs. Ella Baker spoke of autonomy in community. This seminar brings voices across generations speaking to current affairs.

Chumie Juni

How can we best understand the role of religion in the world today, and how should we interpret the meaning of religious traditions -- their texts and practices -- in history and culture? This class takes an exciting tour through selected themes and puzzles related to the fascinating and diverse expressions of religion throughout the world. From politics and pop culture, to religious philosophies and spiritual practices, to rituals, scriptures, gender, religious authority, and more, students will explore how these issues emerge in a variety of religions, places, and historical moments in the U.S. and across the globe.

Lori Pearson

Is God on the side of the poor? This course explores how liberation theologians have called for justice, social change, and resistance by drawing on fundamental sources in Christian tradition and by using economic and political theories to address poverty, racism, oppression, gender injustice, and more. We explore the principles of liberationist thought, including black theology, Latin American liberation theology, and feminist theology through writings of various contemporary thinkers. We also examine the social settings out of which these thinkers have emerged, their critiques of “traditional” theologies, and the new vision of community they have developed in various contexts.

Annette Nierobisz

When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, a series of cultural messages quickly materialized in U.S. society. Statements such as, “we’re all in this together” and “the silver linings of coronavirus,” emphasized unity and gratitude while existing socio-political and generational divides were reinforced with “it’s a hoax” and “young people are spreading the virus.” What do these messages reveal about ourselves and society? This A&I seminar introduces students to the formal discipline of sociology through deconstructing rhetorical responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. We seek to understand why these cultural messages are problematic using an intellectual perspective that emphasizes “the social construction of reality.”

Held for new First Year Students

Meera Sehgal

How is it that in specific historical moments ordinary people come together and undertake collective struggles for justice in social movements such as Black Lives Matter, Me Too, Standing Rock, immigrant, and LGBTQ rights? How have these movements theorized oppression, and what has been their vision for liberation? What collective change strategies have they proposed and what obstacles have they faced? We will explore specific case studies and use major sociological perspectives theorizing the emergence of movements, repertoires of protest, collective identity formation, frame alignment, and resource mobilization. We will foreground the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, race, and class in these movements.

Annette Nierobisz

Both the U.S. and global populations are trending toward a world with far fewer young people than ever before. So, what does it mean to grow up in a rapidly aging society? This course explores age, aging, and its various intersections with demographic characteristics including gender, sexuality, race, and social class. We situate age and aging within the context of macro-structural, institutional, and micro-everyday realms. Some topics we will examine include: media depictions and stereotypes; interpersonal relationships and caregiving; the workplace and retirement; and both the perceptions and inevitable realities of an aging population.

David Wiles

The stories we encounter from sources as diverse as theater, television, film, literature, the internet and the news, may lead us to believe things about the lives we lead and the world we live in that may or may not be "true." This course will examine some of the stories we encounter, look at ways that popular culture oversimplifies or falsifies them and look at ways that theater and literature question and complicate them. The course will focus in particular on plays, films, TV shows, news and short fiction that deal with race, gender, gender identity, class, sexuality and criminal justice. 

Held for new first year students

Andrew Carlson

A study of significant American plays from the early twentieth century to the present, including playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, August Wilson, Alice Childress, Suzan Lori-Parks, and Lauren Yee. We will read plays from a theatrical lens, discussing them as blueprints for performance by examining their structure, characters, language, and theatricality. We will also discuss how these plays are in conversation with contextual historical events and notions of American identity.