ENROLL

Ross Elfline

Prerequisite: Any one term of art history

Matt Rand

Sophomore Priority

Waitlist for Juniors and Seniors: BIOL 101.WL0 (Synonym 59615)

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.

Jennifer L Schaefer

This course analyzes constructions of gender and sexuality in Latin America from the pre-colonial and colonial periods through nation building in the nineteenth century and globalization in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Drawing on sources including testimonies, legal documents, memoirs, and art, it considers how social, political, and economic structures created unequal power relations as well as how individuals moved within these frameworks, at times even challenging them. In particular, it explores how the racial and ethnic inequalities created through conquest, colonialism, and slavery both shaped and were shaped by gender and sexuality, as well as how these inequalities persisted.

Serena 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.

Kristin Bloomer

The history of Christianity usually focuses on Jesus: the stories and doctrines that have revolved around him. This course will focus on Mary and the many ways she has contributed to the various lived traditions of Christianity. We will, for example, consider the mother of Jesus (Miriam, as she was first called) as she has figured in literature, art, apparition, and ritual practice around the world. We will also consider Mary Magdalene, her foil, who appears in popular discourse from the Gnostic gospels to The Da Vinci Code. Case studies, texts, images, and film will be our fare.

Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg

We all lead gendered lives, in our felt identities as well as through how we are perceived, advantaged, and disadvantaged by others. This course examines gender and gender relations from an anthropological perspective, centering and contextualizing the global human diversity of gendered experiences. Key concepts such as gender, voice/mutedness, status, public and private spheres, and the gendered division of labor—and their intellectual history—let us explore intriguing questions such as how many genders there are, and whether gender is mutable. The course focuses on two areas: 1) the role of sex, sexuality, and procreation in creating cultural notions of gender, and 2) the impacts of colonialism, globalization, and economic underdevelopment on gender relations.

Prerequisite: The department strongly recommends that 110 or 111 be taken prior to enrolling in courses numbered 200 or above.

Liz Raleigh

Prerequisite: Prior Sociology/Anthropology course or instructor permission

Lizbett J Benge

What is a body? What can bodies do? These questions guide our journey into the elements of space/time/body/mind as anchor points to explore contemporary performance art. We will engage feminist technoscience studies, geographies of space and place, trauma-informed care practices, intersectional women of color feminisms, and art as activism to deepen our evolving understandings of spacetimebodyminds. Students will develop performance solos in their chosen artistic mediums that take up and respond to bodies as theoretical, material, concrete, and abstract. The course is open to all students, regardless of experience level, with an interest in: movement, performance, art, community building, feminist theory, and collective creation. Assignments will include a mix of viewings, creative response sheets, journal prompts, embodied exercises, and a research-based photo essay.

Lizbett J Benge

Underpinned by women of color feminisms, abolitionism, and socially engaged performance practices, this course unpacks how art is a vehicle for social change in spaces of unfreedom such as: jails, prisons, ICE facilities, detention centers, and group home facilities. Work for the class will include readings and creative reading responses, researching case studies, and reflective assignments. As a culminating project, students will create individual performance-based works informed by critical understandings of punishment, crime, enslavement, surveillance, and/or state violence.