Spring 2025 Class Descriptions
SPRING 2025 course descriptions
101-8-20 – First Year Writing Seminar: AI, Race, and the Future of Humanity
This undergraduate first-year writing course is designed to teach essential writing skills that will empower students to communicate successfully and support their achievements as college students and beyond, as career professionals. This course devotes central attention to the intersection of race and technology, particularly as examined in Black Studies scholarship. Students will learn about systemic racial forms and impacts of AI technology, explore the rapidly changing world of generative AI technology, and comprehend AI’s risks, relevance, and benefits for scholarly communication. Students will discover methods to apply generative AI to advance research, analyze data, and effectively communicate insights. This course will also engage human creativity, combining it with AI-assisted ideation to elevate student’s capacity for creative writing. Designed to nurture circumspect and curious learners, this course invites students to engage with the uncharted future of AI, race, and humanity, cultivating socio-technical analysis, scholarly communication, and ethical frameworks for implementation. Join us on this exciting journey to enhance writing skills, harness the potential of AI for written expression, and study the pivotal role of race and AI for the future of humanity.
211-0-20 – Literatures of the Black World: Black Classicism
“Black Classicism” is the study of black scholars, writers, and artists who deliberately engage with and extend the classical tradition (read: neoclassical works) as well as the creative and intellectual production by those scholars and writers. Michelle Valerie Ronnick coined the term Classica Africana in 1996 to describe, in short, “the influence of classical studies on people of African descent.” Classica Africana includes those in the nineteenth century who studied and read classical literatures and languages, Greek and Latin, the students of standard formal American education as influenced by the British liberal arts system, neoclassical or black classicist writing, and, to a lesser degree, the traces of classical literatures common to popular memory.
This course introduces the long history of Black Classicist literatures in the United States. Since Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), the very first publication by an African American in the United States, black writers have engaged with classical works by Greek and Roman authors. During this class, we will read selections from Black Classicist writers and the referent texts (in translation). We will explore the variety of fiction and poetry that may include Phillis Wheatley, Ovid, Pauline E. Hopkins, Charles Chesnutt, Euripides, as well as more recent work by Toni Morrison, Donika Kelly, and Kwame Dawes & Matthew Shenoda. As a class, we will create our own set of unique inquiries and explore the answers to, at least, the following questions: How do “the classics” inform the stories by African American authors? What kinds of capital do classical themes, plotlines, and symbolism create for Black Classicist writers? What assumptions can we make about Black authors who rewrite classical works? In what ways are those assumptions affirmed and exploded through our semester-long literary inquiry? In what ways does Black classicism alter the way we understand the classical texts to which it refers?
212-1-20 – Introduction to African American History 1: Key Concepts From 1700-1861
This course explores the history of African American people, beginning with their West African origins and examining their pursuit of freedom, dignity, and self-determination from the Atlantic slave trade through the Civil War. Organized chronologically, the course highlights the social, political, cultural, and intellectual forces, key figures, and organizations that shaped the early African American experience. Special attention is given to the role of gender in shaping experiences of slavery, white supremacy, patriarchy, and resistance to this oppression. Additionally, the course investigates how the legacies of slavery, sexual violence, systemic discrimination, and labor exploitation have contributed to many challenges faced by African Americans and black people in America today. Finally, it reveals how foundational ideas of freedom, resistance, rebellion, and self-determination emerged from the early experiences of Africans in America.
339-0-20 – Unsettling Whiteness
What is the single most obvious and significant thing that can be said about the US, even with a rudimentary knowledge of US history, which is the least remarked upon, least analysed, and least studied, and yet without it, the US as we understand today would not exist as we know it? The answer is ‘whiteness’. Whiteness as a word and concept can be difficult and troubling to understand for some. In this course whiteness refers to three phenomena: First, the dominant representation of people in the US who historically came to describe and understand themselves as ‘white’ on the basis of exploiting, violating, segregating, oppressing, administrating, marginalizing and caricaturing those designated as ‘non-white’ (e.g. Black, Native American, Asian, Latinx). Second, the hegemonic cultural norms identified as white in ruling the institutions, governments, laws, ideas, policies of the US that assume and support the sovereign dominance, rights and authority of white populations over non-white populations. Third, the inheritance and acceptance of white ruling culture (e.g. white supremacy, white privilege) as normative; and (in the post-civil rights era), the denial that whiteness exists, together with opposition to any attempts to highlight, expose or discuss it. This course will discuss whiteness in historical, political, cultural and visual terms and also present conceptual tools for the analysis of whiteness as a dominant formation.
375-0-20 – Political Blackness Across the Americas
The aim of this course is to understand the political meaning of Blackness in the Black Radical Tradition, by examining its emergence and circulation across the Americas between the colonial-settler-slavery societies of the 16th century and the white western democracies of the 20th centuries. This requires us to think historically about Black populations, including their identities, cultures and movements in terms that include Latin America and the Caribbean as well as the United States. In short, it means understanding Blackness in the Americas as a multiplicity of Black experiences, identities, cultures, politics and histories. It is important to recall that up until the mid-point of the 20th century the overwhelming numbers of African descended (Black) populations across Africa, the Americas and Europe lived under formalized colonial and racial regimes based on different institutionalized versions of western white supremacy. During the 20th century despite Black populations in Latin America and the United States being citizens of independent countries while those in Africa and the Caribbean largely remained colonized subjects, Black populations throughout this Black Diaspora, were routinely the subjects of racial subordination, racial segregation and racial violation. It is in relation to these conditions that the course discusses political Blackness, in particular why and how it emerged and the ways in which it persists into the 21st century, enabling critiques of white supremacy and mobilizing movements of politics, culture and identification. Throughout the 20th century the colonial question of race, its rule over Black populations lives, and diverse Black resistances to race, have deeply influenced the cultural and political orientations and solidarities of Black people across the Americas. The course is a reminder that Black populations across the Americas have historically navigated and attempted to overcome through politics and culture, the same and different continuities and discontinuities of racial subordination, segregation and violation affecting Black populations. The course will focus primarily on Latin America and the Caribbean.
380-0-20 – Topics in Black Studies: The Politics of Abolition
This course explores the history of abolitionist movements as articulated by black radicals, imprisoned intellectuals, activists, and organizers, with a focus on the mid-20th century, the Black Power Movement, and the contemporary era. While the 2020 police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor ignited calls to “Defund the Police” and interest in prison abolition, these demands are deeply rooted in a longer historical trajectory. The first half of this course traces the early seeds of abolition, examining foundational abolitionist ideas and the ways policing and mass incarceration became tools of the state to suppress black freedom movements and oppress those most vulnerable to white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. The second half centers on contemporary abolitionist thought, writing, and organizing, exploring ongoing efforts to dismantle the carceral state and reimagine society. Throughout, the course highlights that carceral state abolition has always been grounded in intersectional analyses of power, identifying carceral institutions as reflections of broader systems of oppression. It also emphasizes abolition’s vision of freedom and liberation from these systems, alongside the creation of a new society rooted in transforming oppressive systems and the ways that we relate to one another.
380-0-21 – Topics in Black Studies: Studies in African American Literature: Black Joy
In this class, students will analyze Black literature and popular culture to understand the cultural work of joy, especially in the face of antiblackness. Reading across a range of texts, including poetry, short and long fiction, film, music, and food, students will analyze how joy emerges alongside a other social feelings—despair, rage, and hope to name a few. In addition, we will take up questions that have formed the core of Black study in the 20th century including 1) How do Black people “theorize” in their everyday life and cultural production (Christian 1987); 2) What cultural forms emerge to respond to and undermine antiblackness (Carpio 2008; Scott 2022); 3) What role does literature play in the relation of Black feeling and the creation of Black life worlds (Hurston 1928; Lorde 1978; Quashie 2022; Nash 2024). Throughout, we will be especially attentive to how gender and sexuality work in tandem with race to contribute to the emotional lifeworlds of Black people.
380-0-22 – Topics in Black Studies: Who's Afraid of Black Sexuality?
This course invites students into an interdisciplinary, intersectional exploration of how Black sex and sexualities are imagined, governed, and experienced in the U.S. and beyond. Through an array of critical lenses, we will investigate the ways colonial, slavocratic, antiblack, capitalist, patriarchal, and heterosexist systems have shaped dominant discourses and practices surrounding Black sexuality. In undertaking this work, we will center Black voices, bodies, and desires, exploring how Black people have navigated, resisted, and redefined these constraints to articulate their own erotic lives.
Drawing from a rich array of sources—including music, film, visual art, and performance art, as well as texts in Black feminist theory, queer of color critique, histories of sexualities, critical ethnography, and porn studies—students will engage with Black sexuality as a charged site where power, pleasure, vulnerability, and freedom intersect. By the end of the course, students will have developed tools to critically analyze representations of Black sexuality, while also considering the radical potential of Black eroticism as a space of self-expression, joy, and resistance.
380-0-23 – Topics in Black Studies: Problematic Faves(?): Race/Gender in Pop Media
How does pop music illuminate the structural violences of race, gender, and sexuality that we navigate on a daily basis? In mining the “problematic” in pop culture, as well as the resistive work of marginalized artists, this course will explore the lyrical, sonic, and visual worldmaking enacted by contemporary pop musicians in order to make sense of the myriad roles that pop culture and media play in the production, reproduction, and maintenance of power and social operations. Students can expect to engage the work of artists such as Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Frank Ocean, SZA, and Charli XCX (amongst others) alongside texts from a diverse range of fields including Black studies, performance studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Evaluation methods include discussion posts, a short written midterm assignment, and a final creative playlisting project.
380-0-24 – Topics in Black Studies: Black Women's History: Slavery and Freedom in the 19th Century
This course will examine the lives of African American women between the American Revolution and the Civil War. Topics to be addressed include labor; family and community relationships; sexuality and intimacy; and political activism: free black women in the anti-slavery movement and enslaved women's resistance to enslavement. By the end of the course, students will have learned about the life experiences of women of African descent in the nineteenth-century U.S.; and will have gained an understanding of how historians write history using primary and secondary sources.
380-0-25 – Topics in Black Studies: The Poetics and Erotics of Audre Lorde
In her complementary, progressive set of essays, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” Audre Lorde asserts that poetry – rather than being luxury or idle fantasy – is the “disciplined attention to the true meaning of ‘it feels right to me’” (37). Lorde defines poetry not as “sterile word play" but as “a revelatory distillation of experience” (37). Consequently, she situates the poetic in an inherent interrelation with the erotic, asserting that the erotic “is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing” (54). Moving through a framework that insists on acutely and fully feeling what we do, as well as on doing and distilling what we feel in a manner that is revelatory, this course seeks to engage in Black feminist praxis – thinking alongside Lorde’s conceptualizations of poetry and the erotic – to carefully examine myriad articulations of queer Black existence and embodied experience.
Throughout the quarter, we will use these two essays from Sister Outsider as a springboard from which to explore the affective, intellectual, and creative significance of acute and full queer Black feelings and revelatory distillations of experience. These interventions are meant to highlight the ways that queer Black storytellers and tellers of queer Black stories – including poets, novelists, critical theorists, filmmakers, actors, painters, and performance artists – mobilize the poetic and erotic to access and articulate new modes of queer Black being, feeling, and doing.
420-0-20 – Expressive Arts and Cultural Studies
It is impossible to capture the breadth and depth of Black people’s artistic contributions, motivations, and expressions in a single quarter. However, during this course, we will sample a variety of literary, critical, multi-media, and theoretical articulations of Black expression. At the core of our inquiry through these texts lie questions that go beyond representation and identity to think about the forms and strategies that Black folk have used to reflect and hold in question the worlds in which they navigate. The class will read primary works from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries and bring them into conversation with current and historical popular media, the extension of the tradition/s earlier artists wrote, sung, painted, struggled with and against.
480-0-20 – Graduate Topics in African American Studies: Afrofeminists: Black Women in Europe
"Afrofeminism" is the label forged by a new generation of Afrodescendant women (mostly in their twenties and early thirties), born in Europe (often non-English-speaking), to define their black feminism to not only affirm their multiple African heritages while they live in Europe, but also to distinguish themselves from US Black Feminism. This triple gesture – linguistic, political and cultural – calls for taking seriously the original formation and expressions of Black feminisms in diasporic and global contexts. It also implies to analyze the enduring consequences of colonialism of former European empires on the very soil of their metropoles through an intersectional perspective.
In this sense, this course will pay attention to the historical and social conditions of the emergence of black feminist struggles against patriarchy, racist minoritization and social inequality in a social and political context of white hegemony, where systemic racism is generally considered as "a notion imported from the United States”. The reflections and readings will mainly focus on France, a European country which is paradigmatic of institutionalized race denial. Formerly a slave-owning colonial empire still marked by massive immigration of workers from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Indian Ocean in the 1960s, France still maintains ambiguous political and economic ties with these territories, while it actively excludes any reference to race from its official legislation as it has made colorblindness the bedrock of its national republicanism. However, some material will address the topic of Afrofeminism in a broader European context.
480-0-21 – Graduate Topics in African American Studies: Neo-Liberalism and its Discontents
Mass incarceration, gentrification, right-wing nationalism, border militarization, police brutality, massive debt, the prison industrial complex, mass deportation campaigns, domestic warfare against anti-racist movements, war in the Middle East, growing class division, attacks on public education and healthcare, climate change, civil wars in African and Latin America, and attacks on affirmative action. These are all conditions that can be analyzed within the advent and context of late global capitalism which is also often referred to as neoliberalism, or post-Fordism. The first part of this course will analyze the impetus and structural characteristics of neoliberalism or late global capitalism to better understand how it has been manifested in many of the crises already mentioned. In this section, we will scrutinize the function and logics of capitalism to identify how and why the shift from a Fordist to a Post-Fordist political economy transpired. Special attention will be paid to how capitalism interacts with and is informed by racial, colonial, and gender logics to exacerbate the vulnerability of Black, Indigenous, Brown, and other racialized groups to exploitation, removal, and premature death. We will also focus on how the situations that racialized groups in the global north face are relationally tied to the precarity that racialized populations in the global south endure. The second section of the seminar will scrutinize the ideological and psychosocial components of neoliberalism. It will focus on how neoliberalism is a corresponding ethic or mode of governance intended to atomize a polity, emphasize individualism, and thus disrupt nodes of solidarity and mutual aid. In this sense, neoliberalism influences how concepts such as liberation, freedom, or justice are theorized, imagined, taught, and organized around. This section of the seminar also foregrounds the university as an integral location for the study of neoliberalism. It focuses on how insurgent critiques of power once associated with the Third World Left of the Cold War era have been de-emphasized in favor of a growing emphasis on therapeutic adjustment, bourgeoise performances of excellence, recognition, safe space, and care.
480-0-22 – Graduate Topics: Studies in African American Literature: The Black Novel
In this course students will assess how the novel has figured in the development of Black literature and life over the long 20th Century. Through our engagement with this form, student’s will examine how long-form narrative fiction has captured the historical and social realities of Black life since the turn of the 21st century and how it has called for different worlds through innovative technique and style. We will read topically from the end of the 19th century through to the 21st century and will consider how the novel has evolved as a form that takes in multiple genres. In addition to fiction, students will also read theories of narrative written by black and non-black authors to better understand how narrative works.