Fall 2026 Class Descriptions
Fall 2026 course descriptions
101-7-21 - First-Year College Seminar: A Dark Rock Surged Upon: Navigating Race, Class, and Gender in College
Writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) wrote the following about her time at Barnard College in the 1920s: “Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overcome by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself.” A College Seminar gives students the tools to manage the “surge” of college, both socioemotionally and academically. You have left the familiarity of your families, neighborhoods, friends, and high schools to enter a new context, one with new forms of diversity, hierarchy, division, and opportunity for connection. Even though she was writing 100 years ago, Hurston is still an awesome guide as you navigate issues of race, gender, class, and academic belonging at Northwestern. The goal of the class is to give you the tools to manage the surges of college while maintaining yourself, even as you also change. Some topics we will explore include: privilege, politics, love, friendship, curiosity, perseverance, work, and community. Hurston’s vast body of work will be the basis for our reflections, analysis, and writing.
211-0-20 – Literatures of the Black World: The Black Gothic
When first hearing the word “Gothic,” most would not think of Black authors and visual artists. However, as acknowledged by several scholars, including the Nobel Prize-winning Toni Morrison, race—and particularly Blackness—has always been inextricable from American Gothic literature. There is a great misconception that Black writers and visual artists merely appropriated British and American Gothic conventions; however, this course is designed to acknowledge the African and Black syncretic roots of American Gothic specifically. Additionally, we will explore issues of race that are deeply embedded in the American Gothic tradition, regardless of authorship.
Taking Morrison’s claim into account, this course will consider some early canonical Gothic texts by Edgar Allan Poe and Kate Chopin as a foil for how Black authors and artists have taken up issues of haunting, monstrosity, and corporeal threat since the nineteenth century. We will also consider the connections between Black Gothic art and African-based cosmology, storytelling, and ritual.
While we will spend a little time with white American authors, the center of this class is production by Black artists. We will begin with the American “slave narrative,” personal accounts by fugitive and formerly enslaved Black people. We will look at nineteenth-century Gothic poetry and fiction by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Charles Chesnutt, read twentieth-century Gothic texts by Toni Morrison and others, and watch Gothic films made since the mid-1990s. Furthermore, we will reach outside of the U.S. to look at work within the larger African diaspora. Finally, we will read several works by literary and cultural critics that present arguments and deep readings of our primary assigned literature and film.
The class will also include television, music, and visual art. The core issues of this discussion-based 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 U.S. and Caribbean.
Come to class ready to enthusiastically discuss myriad issues concerning race, gender, class, and sexuality.
213-0-20 – History of the Black World
This course brings a global lens to the study of Black history. It aims to explore the various worlds and historical contexts that have shaped Black life, and it examines Black world-making over time and space. The course begins on the African continent in the period that would set the stage for the forced migrations of Africans to Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas and moves into an exploration of how enslaved and unfree African labor became fundamental to the project of building European empires in the modern period with a focus on Britain and France. It will look comparatively at enslaving societies and processes of emancipation in the Caribbean and Latin America and devote significant attention to the historical legacies of slavery and colonialism in Europe, Africa and the Americas. The final weeks of the course will give students an opportunity to think about how Black populations outside of the U.S. have engaged in struggles for racial justice, citizenship and forms of Black liberation throughout the twentieth century and into the present.
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.
245-0-20 - The Black Diaspora and Transnationality
What can exploring Black life and the formation of Black constituencies in Europe tell us about the making of the African Diaspora? How can a consideration of Europe’s Black histories challenge how we think about what makes a nation or who counts as a citizen? With a primary focus on Britain, France and Germany, this course will explore how people of African descent and ideas about Blackness have fundamentally shaped European histories cultures and society. This course will provide students with an opportunity to engage a variety of historical issues with contemporary implications that have shaped the making of the modern African Diaspora including slavery, colonialism, anti-colonialism, the pursuit of citizenship, migration as well as the production of racial identifications and the articulation of racisms.
250-0-20 - Race, Class, Gender
This course examines race, class, and gender as living frameworks that organize social life—structuring labor, belonging, violence, desire, and recognition. Working through intersectional theory, we will ask how these categories intersect and why they so often appear natural, inevitable, or self-evident. We will read foundational thinkers (including Kimberlé Crenshaw) alongside work that traces the colonial and modern roots of these categories as technologies of governance and social order. At the same time, we will take seriously the analytic usefulness of these terms for understanding how power distributes vulnerability, advantage, and “common sense.” Finally, we will engage abolitionist and left traditions that ask a further question: not only how these categories operate, but what it might mean to undo some of the very categories we use to name injustice.
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.
334-0-20 - Gender and Black Masculinity
This course will take as its focus not only discussing (cisgender) black men but, more rigorously, interrogating gender as a racialized regime and masculinity itself as a subtle form of violence. Students will be invited to think about race and gender as co-constitutive (rather than simply and innocently intersectional), and about what might be possible after the interrogation—and possibly dismantling—of masculinity even when affixed to blackness. Overall, our aim in this course is to establish a robust understanding of gender, of racialized gender, of blackness, and of masculinity as a gendered and racialized mode of imposed existence. To examine these topics, we will explore the writing of Richard Wright and Percival Everett, documentaries on manhood, black feminist critiques of masculinity, and transgender perspectives on gender and trans masculinity.
379-0-20 – Black Women Writers
This course introduces students to a variety of works by Black women writers since Phillis Wheatley. At this moment, the notion of the “Black woman writer” may not seem anomalous or unusual. However, it was only a short time ago in history that to be a Black woman writer meant to be considered an aberration. Thomas Jefferson wrote that Phillis Wheatley’s poems were “beneath the dignity of criticism.” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., suggested that Jefferson and a panel of white men held an official trial to interrogate the authenticity of Wheatley’s work. These men would have never imagined that conference sessions, entire books, and countless critical articles would be dedicated to this foundational black woman writer: the very first black author to see their work published in the United States. We mark the beginning of Black published letters in the US with Wheatley; and it is within this tradition that we will consider the similarities and differences in content and forms by the women writers that we will read during this course.
In this class, we will survey a wide range of Anglophone Black Diaspora women authors and primarily concentrate on the United States. Our authors will include Toni Morrison and Phillis Wheatley, as well as Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, and others. We will read poetry, short stories, essays, and at least one novel by these and other authors.
380-0-20 – Topics in Black Studies: Race, Crime, and Punishment: Prisons, the US-Mexico Border, and Post-9/11 Detentions
Is American Justice (color)blind? This interdisciplinary upper-division course examines
the histories, institutions, and policies that shape broad scale systems of racialization,
incarceration, and citizenship. Drawing from legal studies, first-person narratives,
theories of race and other approaches, this class analyzes the ideas and practices that
shape the relationships between individuals, groups, and systems of power. How do
we understand different groups’ experiences with crime and punishment? How does
race, citizenship status, and religion affect these relations? We analyze how people
negotiate institutions like the prison and the US-Mexico border, and the relationships
between individual choice and broader structures. By understanding the ways that
three particular groups—African Americans, Mexicans, and Middle Easterners—are
differentially racialized and criminalized, we will address the concept of “blind justice.”
Focusing on the institutions or systems of prisons, policing, and detention centers (and
a smaller focus on criminal and immigration law), we see how various “races” actually
share overlapping and linked experiences with surveillance and disciplinary action by
state and non-state forces.
How have certain racial groups been linked with race-specific crimes? How are
particular bodies—not just actions—deemed a crime or “illegal”? What work do these
linkages do, and are they rooted in reality and/or ideology?
460-0-20 – Race, Politics, Society, and Culture
How have the notions of “race” and “Blackness” functioned across time and space? How do these categories reflect, inflect and inscribe inequality as well as group consciousness, struggle, and everyday life? What are the mechanisms that maintain racial inequalities? How have Black populations questioned, practiced, analyzed, embraced, and struggled with and against these categories and their effects. These questions guide our reading of texts from the fields of political science, history, law, anthropology, psychology, and sociology, among others. The readings address the topics of race and Blackness, politics, culture, class, place, social movements, gender, sexuality, and inequality. Emphasis will be on empirical explorations of Blackness and Black people and the societies in which it/they/we are embedded, both inside and outside of the U.S. Each class session will involve brief introductory comments by the professor, and then in-depth discussion lead by assigned facilitators.
480-0-20 – Graduate Topics: Citations of Black Political Thought
This course undertakes a critical theoretical re-reading of W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935) as a foundational text of contemporary Black Political Thought. Rather than approaching the work as a revisionist historiography of the Reconstruction era, the course reads Black Reconstruction as a paradigmatic instance of what we will call Citations of Black Political Thought: a method by which Black social life, struggle, and reflection are rendered not as objects of knowledge but as sources of conceptual production.
The course is organized around two central challenges. First, it elaborates the concepts of Black Reconstruction and the Black Constitutive Outside as the theoretical basis for this re-reading. Here, Black Reconstruction is not confined to a historical period but is treated as a conceptual methodology through which Black political thought can be understood as interrupting and reconfiguring the terms of the Western idea of the political. The Black Constitutive Outside, in turn, is a conceptual methodological site from which Black political thought emerges—not as an external supplement to the western idea of the political but as that which both founds and destabilizes it through alternative concepts.
Second, the course derives and re-reads a set of fundamental political concepts—politics, whiteness, Blackness, freedom, slavery, and race—through Du Bois’s conceptual method. These are not treated as stable categories but as historically and theoretically transformed through the analytic operations of Black Reconstruction. For instance, politics is re-specified beyond institutional governance as a field structured by antagonism between Black life politics and white sovereign order; whiteness is interrogated as a political formation of sovereignty rather than identity; Blackness is approached as a site of political articulation rather than structural abjection; freedom is reconstructed through the unfinished project of abolition democracy; slavery is re-read as a constitutive relation within modern, colonial-racial political order rather than a past condition; and race is analyzed as a structuring, relational logic of the political itself.
480-0-21 – Graduate Topics: Pan Africanism and Black Internationalism
This graduate seminar examines scholarship on events, movements, and/or initiatives that mobilized people of African descent across borders. While Pan-Africanism and Black Internationalism are overlapping terms, Pan-Africanism frequently emphasizes the unity and solidarity among African nations and the diaspora, and Black internationalism connects these struggles to broader global anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist movements. Initially an idea and movement that took root among the African Diaspora, Pan-Africanism has also been embraced on the continent, as a strategy to surmount colonialism and its afterlives. We explore how ideological commitments, gender, class and national origin have shaped various initiatives across time. While this global organizing and consciousness has deep historical roots, with the Haitian revolution as a notable flashpoint, this course will mostly focus on the 20th century.