DEPARTMENT OF BLACK STUDIES

Winter 2026 Class Descriptions

• Winter 2026 Class Schedule

WINTER 2026 course descriptions

101-8-20 – First Year Writing Seminar: Fighting Apartheid, Locally and Globally

This first year seminar introduces students to apartheid, the system of white supremacy in South Africa that relegated the nation’s Black majority to isolated homelands, deprived them of political and civil rights, forcibly extracted their labor and denied them free mobility. A worldwide anti-apartheid movement from the 1940s to the 1990s helped to isolate and bring down the regime. Americans played an important role, including a Black Chicagoan named Prexy Nesbitt whose leadership and organizing anchor some of the seminar.

 211-0-20 – Literatures of the Black World: Black Love in Literature

This course offers an in-depth exploration of the diverse expressions of love in twentieth-century African American literature, film, and music. While many U.S. Black literature courses center primarily on themes of racial struggle, systemic oppression, and historical trauma, this class takes a complementary but distinct approach: we will examine love as a radical, resilient, and transformative force in Black life and cultural production. We will trace the manifold ways that Black writers, filmmakers, and musicians have articulated love—as romantic desire, self-affirmation, familial devotion, friendship, and communal care—as integral to the Black experience in the United States.

Throughout the quarter, we will consider how love operates not in spite of struggle but alongside it, as both a form of resistance and a strategy for survival, healing, and thriving. We will ask: What does it mean to love under the weight of structural racism? How is love sustained, celebrated, or challenged within Black communities? How do these representations complicate mainstream narratives about Black life?

Our inquiry begins with Zora Neale Hurston’s seminal novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, where we will investigate the contours of romantic love, agency, and voice in the rural American South during the 1930s. We will explore maternal love and generational wisdom in Langston Hughes’s poem “Mother to Son,” and filial love and identity formation in James McBride’s memoir The Color of Water.

We will also engage with a rich selection of Black films—such as Love Jones, Set It Off, and Soul Food—as visual texts that portray varied dimensions of intimacy, friendship, and familial bonds. Alongside this, we will listen closely to the music of artists like Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, The O’Jays, Sly & The Family Stone, Sam Cooke, Sister Sledge, and Bill Withers, analyzing how these musicians give voice to love of self, love of others, and love of Black community as acts of joy, resistance, and political expression.

This class is both analytical and creative in nature. Students will be expected to actively participate in discussions, complete assigned readings and viewings, and come prepared to engage deeply with the texts and themes. Coursework will include at least one group presentation, a final multimedia project, and various in-class writing assignments and collaborative activities.

Throughout the quarter, students will be invited to bring in their own selections of contemporary Black media—literary, musical, or visual—that engage with the theme of love, creating a bridge between the historical texts we study and our current cultural moment. Ultimately, the course invites us to reimagine love not as a private sentiment but as a vital, collective force that shapes how Black people have understood themselves, their communities, and their futures.

212-1-20 – History of the Black World

This course covers the origins and experiences of the group of people known as African Americans or Blacks in the United States Their development is rooted in the cultures of Africa, Europe and the Americas; the African slave trade from the African continent to the Americas; and the founding of the United States as a nation distinct from the rest of the Americas. Beginning with Africa and the African Diaspora from the 1400s to the late-eighteenth century, the course than focuses on African descendants in the United States from the late-eighteenth century to the eve of the U.S. Civil War in 1861.

213-0-20 – History of the Black World

This course delves into the history of colonialism and anticolonialism in 20^th century Africa through memoir, literary nonfiction, literature and film. Readings include Andree Blouin’s My Country, Africa: Autobiography of the Black Pasionaria, Elaine Mokhtefi’s Algiers, Third World Capital; Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s  In the House of the Interpreter and Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease.

 380-0-20 – Topics in Black Studies: Run me my money: The historic and contemporary fight for 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.

380-0-21 – Topics in Black Studies: Screening Blackness: On Race, Sexuality, and the Moving Image

This course explores how film, television, and digital media have represented and reimagined Black life through the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. From early cinema’s racist caricatures to the radical work of Black queer filmmakers, we will analyze how visual culture shapes the terms of representation. This course will look at both mainstream and independent works, with particular attention to how Black cultural producers create alternative practices of looking, feeling, and desiring on screen. Drawing on Black studies, queer studies, and film and media studies, students will engage in a range of texts – such as Hollywood features, experimental shorts, documentary, adult film – to ask: What does it mean to be seen as Black? How do moving images take up pleasure, racial fictions, and resistance? And how does screening Blackness open new possibilities for thinking about identity, community, joy, pain, and freedom?

380-0-22 – Topics in Black 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."

380-0-23 – Topics in Black Studies: Black Mindfulness Literature

In his book of essays, Turning the Wheel, novelist and professor Charles Johnson says that Jean Toomer’s long poem, “The Blue Meridian” (1932): “offers us a bridge between the black experience and the profound reflections on selfhood long a part of Vedic literature.” Johnson identifies Toomer’s work as a key text within a longer tradition of Black letters that intersect with Vedic and Buddhist philosophies and practices.

This course takes stock of Black politics in the U.S. in the decades since the Civil Rights Movement. We will explore Blacks' ongoing and still fitful quest for racial equality and democratic responsiveness. Our review will pay close attention to the internal dynamics of Black politics. As we chart Blacks' political gains and setbacks, we will focus on class, gender, and other cleavages in the population to see how different groups have fared. We also will examine Blacks' fraught relations with whites, their engagement with mainstream political institutions, and their efforts to secure their rights and advance their interests from within and outside these institutions at the national and local level. The course materials cover a mix of topics that have occupied students of race and American politics since the Civil Rights Movement. These include: ongoing intergroup conflict and prejudice; segregation; social provision and criminal justice policies; systemic anti-Black racism in law enforcement; racial dynamics in voting and access to the ballot; partisan politics; and Blacks' electoral fortunes, including the election of the country's first Black president and the ensuing political developments. The overarching goal of the course is to shed light on the state of American democracy by studying the contemporary political experiences of Blacks.

403-0-20 – Theorizing Blackness and Diaspora

This graduate seminar examines Blackness and diaspora through a global purview over the span of five centuries. The course develops a rigorous approach to analyzing and understanding concepts of diaspora and racial Blackness grounded in theoretical approaches and historical methods. Students examine a range of expert theoretical frameworks for interpreting race and diaspora as developed in multiple disciplines. Beginning with the emergence of Afro-Atlantic commercialism in the 1400s and ending with racialization practices of the twenty-first century, the seminar spans multiple historical periods to examine the socio-political, economic, and cultural dimensions of Black diasporic experiences. Through critical readings, discussions, and research projects, students will engage with key texts and debates that shape the field, fostering a comprehensive understanding of the historical and contemporary dynamics of race and diaspora.

480-0-20 – Graduate Topics: Black Lives, Black Research

Building on students’ grounding in Black Studies methodologies, this course invites deeper engagement with the theories, practices, and ethics that shape Black research. Black Lives, Black Research centers students’ own projects, using them as a site through which to consider how Black studies scholars define their objects of study, select their methods, and situate their work within ongoing Black intellectual and political traditions. Together, we will ask what it means to conduct research that is accountable to Black life—its complexities, communities, and world-making capacities—and how our scholarly approaches both draw from and contribute to the broader field of Black studies.

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.