ENROLL

Baird E Jarman

Ross K Elfline

Prerequisite: Any one term of art history

Candace I Moore

This course focuses on the history, production, and consumption of cult television. The beginning of the seminar will be focused on critically examining a number of theoretical approaches to the study of genre and fandom. Building on these approaches, the remainder of the course will focus on cult television case studies from the last eight decades. We will draw on recent scholarship to explore how cult television functions textually, industrially, and culturally. Additionally, we will study fan communities on the Internet and consider how fansites, webisodes, and sites like YouTube and Netflix transform television genres.

Extra Time Required, evening screenings

Judith A 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.

Michael J Kowalewski

A survey of some of the central movements and texts in American literature, from World War I to the present. Topics covered will include modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, the Beat generation and postmodernism.

Nancy J Cho

Nancy J Cho

This course examines work by U.S. playwrights of color from the 1950s to the present, focusing on questions of race, performance, and self-representation. We will consider opportunities and limitations of the commercial theater, Off-Off Broadway, ethnic theaters, and non-traditional performance spaces. Playwrights may include Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Luis Valdez, Cherrie Moraga, August Wilson, David Henry Hwang, Philip Gotanda, Maria Irene Fornes, Anna Deavere Smith, and Chay Yew. We will watch selected film adaptations and attend a live performance when possible. 

Serena R Zabin

Far from being a single entity, America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a world of vibrant, polyglot, globally linked, and violent societies. In this course we will learn how the enslavement of Africans and Native Americans created a state of war that bridged Europe, America, and Africa. We will examine how indigenous resistance to European settlement reshaped landscapes and cultures. We will focus throughout on the daily lives of the women and men who created and shaped the vast world of early America.

Annette R Igra

George H Vrtis

Since the nation's founding, the percentage of Americans living in cities has risen nearly sixteenfold, from about five percent to the current eighty-one percent. This massive change has spawned legions of others, and all of them have bearing on the complex ways that American cities and city-dwellers have shaped and reshaped the natural world. This course will consider the nature of cities in American history, giving particular attention to the dynamic linkages binding these cultural epicenters to ecological communities, environmental forces and resource flows, to eco-politics and social values, and to those seemingly far-away places we call farms and wilderness. 

Prerequisite: History 205 or permission of the instructor

Andy A Flory

A survey of American music with particular attention to the interaction of the folk, popular, and classical realms. No musical experience required.

Deborah Appleman, Ronald Rodman, Melinda Russell

Music has a long, ugly history as a tool for the transmission of racism, and a vital one as a weapon against it. We will survey important instantiations at the intersections of music and racism in blackface minstrelsy, western classical music, Dalit music, Albinism, the U.S. national anthem, white nationalism, and the anti-apartheid movement, among others. Centering racism and antiracism, we will investigate the careers and musical output of five musicians: Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Hazel Scott, Charity Bailey, and Janelle Monae. Students will complete an original guided research project on a topic of their choice. No musical experience required.

Eddie E O'Byrn

The struggle of freedom against forms of alienation is both a historical and contemporary characteristic of Black/African-American philosophy. In this course we will explore how a variety of Black/African-American philosophers theorize these concepts. The aim of the course is to both offer resources for familiarizing students with African-American philosophers and develop an appreciation for critical philosophical voices in the Black intellectual tradition. The course will range from slave narratives, reconstruction, and civil rights to contemporary prison abolitionism, intersectionality, and afro-pessimism. The texts of the course will include: Angela Davis’ Lectures on Liberation, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells Southern Horrors, George Yancy’s African-American Philosophers 17 Conversations, and Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction. As well as select articles from historical and contemporary Black/African-American philosophers.

Barbara Allen

This course will look at the contemporary debate in multiculturalism in the context of a variety of liberal philosophical traditions, including contractarians, libertarians, and Utilitarians. These views of the relationship of individual to community will be compared to those of the communitarian and egalitarian traditions. Research papers may use a number of feminist theory frameworks and methods.

Sharon A Akimoto

Prerequisite: Psychology 110 or instructor permission. Psychology 256 or 258 recommended