Winter 2025 Class Descriptions
WINTER 2025 course descriptions
101-8-20 – First Year Writing Seminar: From Black Power to Black Lives Matter
Given the gains of the Black Freedom Struggle, what accounts for the rise of #BlackLivesMatter? In this seminar we will pay close attention to the role of policing in Black communities since the 1960s. We will explore how and why police became so central to US social policy and the factors that produced an extraordinary degree of incarceration in the United States. We will consider the degree to which electoral politics have been responsive to the struggles and challenges in poor Black communities. This seminar examines urban racial conditions since the 1960s and explores the analyses, remedies and solutions that young activists have been formulating to address the challenges of the 21st century. Readings include historical and contemporary studies. A major goal of this class is to sharpen your writing skills. We will balance reading assignments with short writing assignments.
101-8-21 – First Year Writing Seminar: Black queer theory/studies
On October 11th, 2005, E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson’s seminal anthology Black Queer Studies was published by Duke University Press. The anthology brought together essays by scholars to assess the strengths and weaknesses of prior work on race and sexuality, highlighting the theoretical and political issues at stake in the nascent field of black queer studies. Following up with his groundbreaking edited collection, Johnson published No Tea, No Shade in 2016. Building on the foundations laid out in Black Queer Studies, No Tea, No Shade spoke new truths about the black queer people, and the black queer experience, whose radical imagination insist on always recalibrating blackness, its embodiment, and performance in an ever-changing political economy.
The goal of this course is to problematize the terms “queer,” “gender” and “sexuality,” with efforts to question assumptions that attend the usage and deployment of these terms in discourse. This course primarily centers three groundbreaking black queer films – Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight (2016), Dee Ree’s Pariah (2009), and Kristen Lovell’s The Stroll (2023) – as critical, popular, and accessible expressions of black queer theory. We will closely analyze each film alongside other popular culture forms – television shows, performance art, and other visual media – to think about how these texts are in conversation with one another and uncover topics related to black queer genders, sexual practices, vulnerability, queer cultural invisibility, sex work and survival, and LGBTQ kinship. This class will offer students an introduction into black queer theories, analytics, knowledge, and activism that emerge from LGBTQ people of color who examine the intersections of, primarily, race, class, gender, and sexuality, and other vectors of powers and categories of social life. Likewise, this course will expose students to black queer film and media and challenge us, within the academy, to close the gap between popular and academic meditations on black queer life.
211-0-20 – Literatures of the Black World: Black Gothic
When first hearing the word “gothic,” most would not think of Black authors and visual artists. However, and as acknowledged by several scholars, including the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison, race and particularly Blackness has always been inextricable from American Gothic literature. This course will consider Morrison’s claim to explore some early canonical gothic texts by Edgar Allan Poe and Kate Chopin as a foil for how Black authors and artists take up issues of haunting, monstrosity, and corporeal threat since the nineteenth century.
While we will spend a little time with white American authors, the center of this class is the production by Black artists. We will begin with the American “slave narrative,” stories by fugitive and formerly enslaved Black people. Also, we will look at nineteenth-century gothic fiction and poetry by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Pauline E. Hopkins, Adah Isaacs Menken, W.E.B. DuBois, and Charles Chesnutt. We will also read some twentieth-century gothic texts by Toni Morrison, Tananarive Due, and others. Finally, we will reach outside of the US and look at work by Caribbean and South African writers. The class will also include film, music, and visual art. The core questions of this course will include: how the gothic genre succeeds and fails for Black artists; the connections between race, slavery/apartheid, and the gothic; and the relationships between memory, history, and horror in the US and Caribbean.
Come to class ready to enthusiastically discuss myriad issues concerning race, gender, class, and sexuality.
220-0-20 – Civil Rights and Black Liberation
On January 20, 2009, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. The election of the first African American to the American Presidency marked an unprecedented moment in U.S. History. Obama’s presidency also signaled a new saliency about race in American political culture and spurred fantasies about a “post-racial” America. How did this come to be? Against the backdrop of Obama’s rise to national prominence, this course explores the seeming paradox.
236-0-20 – Introduction to Black Studies
This course surveys major concepts, methodologies and issues of academic debate that have shaped the field of Black Studies in the U.S academy. The course is comprised of three modules. In the first module students will be introduced to the history of the development of the field of Black Studies and its connections to longstanding struggles for self-possessed Black educational spaces, diasporic and transnational movements shaped by Black intellectuals interrogating structures of power and disempowerment, as well as pedagogic practices regarding education as a political resource for social change. With a grounding in some of the broad historical currents shaping the history of the field and people of African descent in the Americas and across the African Diaspora, in Module II, students will be introduced to foundational concepts and intellectual frameworks that have shaped the field and continue to animate critical debates in Black Studies. In the final module, students will actively engage a host of contemporary issues shaping cutting-edge research in the field including work on environmental and climate justice, abolitionist world-making, social-movement building in the digital age, queer Black life on screen, and race and medicine. In doing so, students will encounter the complexities of Black life and its discontents and the dynamic nature of the histories and cultures of populations of the Black Diaspora.
262-0-20 – Introduction to Black Religions
Introduces students to the variety of Black religions that developed during and after the Atlantic slave trade up to the present. Explores these traditions as continuities/changes of West African religious cosmologies. Examines the interplay between religion, politics, and the constructions of racial identities within various forms of Christianity, Islam, and other expressive cultures.
275-0-20 - Africans and African Americans.
The push for African independence in the mid-twentieth century overlapped with the Civil Rights Movement to underscore the galvanizing power of Pan-African solidarity; the social and economic transformations in the U.S. and the African continent since the 1960s have produced a less coherent political project. In this course, students will explore how the afterlives of colonialism and slavery has shaped the contemporary relationships between Africans and African Americans. A host of cultural forms and expressions offer a lens for reading the political zeitgeist, alliances, contact zones, exchanges, tensions, dissonances, and modes of solidarity between Africans and African Americans. Students will explore how writers, musicians, performers, and scholars excavate the ongoing intimacies between the continent and the African diaspora, in a post-Civil Rights U.S. and postcolonial Africa. How do migration patterns, racialized economics, global geopolitics, community activism, and technologies of culture redefine these diasporic encounters? What role does the arts play in achieving social change for our communities?
360-0-20 – Major Authors
This discussion-based course will take up the nonfiction writings of acclaimed novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist James Baldwin, emphasizing works from the 1950s to the 1970s. We will explore the social and political thought of Baldwin focusing on issues of race and racism, gender and sexuality, nationalism and national identity, justice, religion, the vocation of the artist, and the meaning of history. We will conclude the seminar with Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, a long essay inspired by Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. You will be asked to write your own nonfiction Baldwin-inspired essay.
380-0-21 – Topics in African American Studies: Reparations
Whatever happened to the 40 acres and a mule? Why are former slave masters the only ones to ever receive reparations for slavery in the U.S.? Which Black people are entitled to reparations? Run me my money interrogates reparations initiatives from the antebellum period to the present – from national campaigns to the city of Evanston. We’ll explore how scholars, activists, and community members, make arguments about who is owed what and why.
380-0-22 – Topics in African American Studies: Black Gospel Music in America
This course explores the evolution of Gospel music from its African roots to today's abundant sub-genres of contemporary Gospel. Through readings, videos, and live performances, students will engage in critical discussions regarding the language, expression, and social-historical implications of this original American art form. The class also looks at the lives of some of Gospel's luminaries, including Chicago's own Professor Thomas A. Dorsey, the "Father of Black Gospel Music."
381-0-20 – Topics in Transnational Black Studies: Black Feminisms in a Francophone Context
What is the meaning of “Black Feminism” out of its US experience and initial theorization in the United States? How did women of African descent in Europe (France, Belgium, Switzerland), the Caribbean (Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique), the Indian Ocean (La Réunion, Mayotte, and the Comoros) and Africa (Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo), whose cultures and political experiences were – at least partly – impacted by French and Belgium colonial legacy, forge their critiques of patriarchy, colonialism, and imperialism, racism? How did they also develop their own imagination of social justice, autonomy, and emancipation?
Based on a wide range of materials and references driven by the social sciences, literature, and cinema, this course aims to introduce undergraduate students to a non-US-centered and transnational perspective on Black feminisms. The historical period will span from the early 20th century to the contemporary era. According to specific topics addressed in the class, comparative insights with the English-speaking Caribbean and Africa and women’s experiences in the Global South will also be included in the
440-0-20 – Black Historiography
What are some of the major interpretative debates which have shaped the development of Black history and how might we begin to think about the histories of Black historical production? This graduate course will examine how scholars have shaped approaches to Black history and historical knowledge production across a number of themes. Topics will include gender and enslavement, emancipation in the Americas, decolonization and Black anti-colonial thought, Black agency and resistance, racial capitalism and Black internationalism. In exploring major historiographical debates on these topics, students will be encouraged to think critically about contested visions of ‘Black history’ as an academic field of inquiry and as a political and social resource across the diaspora. Likewise students will be encouraged to consider how lines of interpretation and methodological approaches to Black history have changed over time.
480-0-20 – Graduate Topics in African American Studies: Black Education
Seventy years post Brown v. Board of Education, and over 150 years post formal Emancipation, Black students are still suffering in schools. Numerous scholars have explored the ways Black students are subjected to both explicit and implicit racialized educational policies and practices. This course aims to move beyond the terrain of traditional pathways toward educational “reform” (or even restructuring) to consider the utility of exploring antiblackness in education, the historical and contemporary projects of Black educational fugitivity, considerations of school abolition, and what it may mean to engage in “wake work” in education.
480-0-21 – Graduate Topics in African American Studies: TBA
This graduate seminar in Black Studies is a transdisciplinary exploration of new and emerging technologies and their pivotal intersection with racial systems of power, disparity, and ethics in the context of democracy, colonialism, and public interest. Through rigorous analysis of race, futurity, and technology, students will examine the social, ethical, and geopolitical dimensions of Artificial Intelligence, genomics, precision medicine, AI weaponization, climate and environmental justice, and the geopolitics of technology, particularly as they relate to pan-Africanism and global Black communities. By engaging with theoretical frameworks and critical case studies from fields such as science and technology studies, critical race theory, and ethics, students will not only critique technological practices but will also explore the solution space for addressing complex societal challenges. This course invites students to imagine democratic futures that prioritize equity and social justice in an increasingly technology-driven world.