Fall 2025 Class Descriptions
Fall 2025 course descriptions
101-7-20 - First-Year College Seminar:
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.
236-0-20 – Introduction to Black Studies
This course will introduce students to the field of Black Studies. We will investigate how Black studies came to be a discipline in the academy and the shape(s) it took in its initial formulations. We will explore the ways various community members, activists, students, teachers, scholars, artists, musicians, poets, and filmmakers have contributed to thinking about the Black experience both historically and contemporarily. Finally, we will consider current Black struggles for freedom, for justice, and for humanity.
325-0-20 – Education for Black Liberation
This class considers what it means to conceptualize, articulate, and actualize a liberatory Black educational project within U.S. public schools structured by anti-Black solidarity. In the first section of the course, we explore the fight to desegregate public schools and the ways the historic Brown v. Board of Education case transformed schooling for Black children and their communities. In considering the impact of the Brown decision on the experiences of Black students in U.S. public schools, we interrogate the rebukes of Brown including the various educational projects (community control, Panther freedom schools, the Black independent school movement etc.) advanced in Brown’s aftermath. In the second section of the course, we explore the myriad ways Black students experience antiblackness and anti-Black racism in U.S. public schools contemporarily, as well as the ways Black students, educators, administrators, community and family members, and scholars have articulated what the notion of liberation may mean in the face of antiblackness. In the final section of the course, we consider the tensions and possibilities in the desire to “get free” within the confines of U.S. public schools.
379-0-20 – Black Women Writers
From Lucy Terry’s poem “Bars Fight” (1746) –the first known African American literary product--to the present, black women have directly and indirectly influenced African American literary production. Virtually every major literary prize has gone to an African American woman writer at least once. Others have published bestsellers that did not obtain prizes but did make them rich and (at least briefly) famous. Regardless, each of the writers we will read this quarter are fiercely individual, unique, complex and from a broad range of backgrounds and cultures. Yet, as black women writers, they possess the distinct ability to, according to Claudia Tate, “make us profoundly conscious of what harms, degrades, denies development, destroys; of how much is unrealized, unlived; instead of ‘oppressed victims,’ the ways of resistance [and] resilience.”
This seminar will be an intensive, multi-genred examination of the ways in which writers such as Toni Morrison and Tara Stringfellow; Lynn Nottage and Suzan-Lori Parks; Toni Cade Bambara and Z.Z Packer; and poets from Phyllis Wheatley to Lucille Clifton and Natasha Trethewey have directed the trajectories of African American women's literature. Additionally, we will consider the factors and figures influential in the reception of their works.
380-0-20 – Topics in Black Studies: Queer of Color Fantasy
What is fantasy and how do queer people of color mobilize fantasy to imagine freedom. In this advanced seminar, students will read across a range of Queer of Color scholarship to analyze key texts from artists including James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Samuel Delany, Octavia E. Butler, Joel Kim Booster, and others. Students will also read standards from the Queer of Color critical canon, including works by José E. Muñoz, Roderick Ferguson, Robert Reid Pharr, and E. Patrick Johnson. Some guiding questions will include 1). What is fantasy and how does make and unmake a queer world? 2) How do scholars imagine in the presence of racist and cisheteropatriarchal structures?
380-0-21 – Topics in Black Studies: Studies in African American Philosophy: Charles Mills
African American Philosophy can be understood as philosophical engagement with African American experiences. And since African Americans (and thus their experiences) are a Western people, African American Philosophy is often theorized as, even if contentiously, engaged with Western philosophical traditions and methodologies. African American Philosophy thereby tends to apply Western traditions and methodologies to issues such as slavery, integration/self-segregation, assimilation/separatism, reparations, collective identity and efficacy, intersectionality, etc., and concepts such as respect, alienation, oppression, citizenship, forgiveness, art, progress, etc. as they are either conceptualized or reimagined through African American experiences. This course introduces students to African American Philosophy, but centers the work of one of the great pioneers of African American Philosophy—namely, Charles W. Mills. And so students will engage many issues and concepts pertinent to African American Philosophy by looking deeply into Mills’ philosophical corpus.
381-0-20 – Topics in 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 conversation and materials.
401-0-20 – Research Seminar in Black Studies
Introduction to central debates in Black Studies on a graduate level. Emphasizes critical thinking, research design and method, forms of argumentation, and theory building. Readings highlight a range of methods -- historiographic, literary, ethnographic, social scientific etc. Assignments focused on developing student independent research projects.
480-0-20 – Graduate Topics: Black Conceptual Methodologies
The aim of this course is to introduce graduate students to the importance of analysing, appropriating and formulating concepts in historically and theoretically oriented Black Studies research. This intellectual approach is described as Black Conceptual Methodologies. Through this course we will explore techniques and ideas through various critiques of western critical theory and elaborations of Black conceptualizations in relation to modern questions of history, power, hegemony, ideology, resistance and theory. In order to build towards this methodological exposition students will be introduced to techniques for evaluating and formulating concepts, as well as identifying the methods of Black conceptualizations. With reference to theoretical or ethnographic aspects of research, students will be required to undertake applied conceptual work in their assessed papers. In addition, each student will be required to innovate and develop their own formulation of Black methodological concept. Overall, the course will challenge students to think more analytically, critically and methodologically about the explanatory impact, role, applications and developments of concepts in Black studies research and theorizing.
480-0-21 – Graduate Topics: Toni Morrison
This course will be an intensive examination of the significant contributions made to American and global arts and letters by Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison. We will consider her contributions through her roles as editor, author, and public scholar. As an editor, Morrison single-handedly ensured the publication of trailblazing Black American writers. Morrison the author created a canon that centers on and celebrates the complexities of Black American life—particularly the lives of Black women. As a public scholar Morrison scrutinized the ways in which the American/Western literary canon often fails to acknowledge and include the important cultural contributions of African-descended literary artists.
480-0-22 – Graduate Topics: Black Thought: Mbembe, Moten, da Silva, Wynter
Beginning with texts by Glissant and DuBois, this course demands close reading of work from four foundational thinkers of 21st-century Black life based on the African Continent, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the US. Alignments and distensions of concepts revealed by these researchers predict capacities to extend arguments of how Black Life coheres through methods of Black Thought.