Spring 2026 Class Descriptions
SPRING 2026 course descriptions
101-8-20 – First Year Writing Seminar:
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. We will closely analyze films 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.
101-8-21 – First Year Writing Seminar:
This course will introduce students to the parameters and textures of black life, trans life, and black trans life. Popular discourse has either depicted black trans people as glamorous superstars or always and already predisposed to death. This course, then, seeks to usefully complicate these narratives and focus on black and trans life. To that end, the course will task students with gaining an understanding of the nuances of black life via its entanglement with the afterlife of slavery and contemporary radicalism; with trans life via its troubling of the gender binary; and black trans life via the ways that blackness and transness interact and converge. This is, in short, a course on black life, full stop; trans life, full stop; and black trans life, full stop.
210-0-20 – Introduction to African American Literature
In this survey of African American literature, students will read across three centuries of literary and cultural production to examine and assess the relationship between Black culture and freedom struggle. Students will engage topics in Black study—including questions of freedom, fugitivity, nationalism, and racial justice—as well as literary and cultural history to analyze and explain the development of Black literature and culture in the U.S. Our course will survey the following periods in Black literature and cultural production to analyze the evolution of Black cultural expression and its relationship to the historical transformations enveloping black people in each specific period: enslavement, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, Jim Crow and segregation, Civil Rights and the Black Arts Movement, and multiculturalism and the “post-blackness.” Throughout, will read a range of sources including poetry and prose, and long- and short-form works to characterize the ideas and imaginaries that inhere in Black literature. We will also listen to Black music, including, the Blues, jazz, and Hip Hop and view television and films that have been important entries in the cultural history of Black life.
212-2-20 – Introduction to African American History 2: Emancipation to Civil Rights Movement
This course examines African American history from the end of the Civil War through contemporary movements such as Black Lives Matter, tracing political, social, and cultural struggles for Black freedom across Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, the Great Migration, black nationalists and radical intellectual and organizing traditions, the long civil rights movement, Black Power, mass incarceration, and twenty-first-century freedom movements. Through engagement with primary sources, students will develop core historical skills including research, close reading, contextualization, and evidence-based argumentation. Every class session features a History Lab, a hands-on activity where students analyze historical sources, compare scholarly interpretations, and practice the critical thinking central to historical inquiry. Generative AI tools are integrated throughout the course as a tool and object of critical analysis: students will learn to use AI ethically and transparently while systematically critiquing AI outputs for accuracy, bias, and historical validity by verifying them against primary sources and scholarship. This dual focus on rigorous historical method and critical AI literacy prepares students both to understand the complex history of Black freedom struggles and to navigate emerging technologies thoughtfully in academic and public contexts.
236-0-20 – Introduction to Black Studies
This course introduces students the interdisciplinary field of Black Studies by examining its radical intellectual origins, foundational concepts, and contemporary significance through critical engagement with Black life, culture, thought, and resistance across the African diaspora. We will explore essential themes including the legacies of enslavement, black political and organizing traditions, and cultural production—tracing the development of Black Studies from 1960s student movements to present-day debates about blackness through the work of Black thinkers, artists, and activists. A distinctive feature of this course is its integration of critical AI literacy: students will learn to use and critically assess generative AI tools as part of their intellectual practice, examining the ethical, political, and epistemological implications of these technologies for Black Studies and black life. Through readings, discussions, hands-on AI exercises, and creative projects, students will develop both substantive knowledge of debates within the field of Black Studies and the critical skills to navigate emerging technologies thoughtfully.
250-0-20 – Introduction to Black Studies
This course examines how race, class, gender, and sexuality function as interlocking structures of power that shape social identities, life opportunities, and political struggles. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from classic Black feminist texts to recent intersectional scholarship, but also historical and sociological analysis, the course asks what it means to analyze people not as “merely raceless, sexless workers, but for whom racial and sexual oppression are significant determinants in their working/economic lives,” as the Combahee River Collective famously insists in their famous 1977 statement. Students will use this insight to explore inequality across multiple arenas—work and the economy, organizations, families and reproduction, politics and public policy, social movements, neighborhoods and cities, and the regulation of identity and sexuality —and to think critically about how intersectional analysis can inform both research and contemporary struggles for social justice.
331-0-20 – The African American Novel
In this survey course about the Black Novel, students will spend time in the 1980s, also known in academia as the Era of the Black Woman Novel. Through the formal naming and development of Black Feminism during the 1970s, the writings of Black women came into high fashion. Beginning in the late 1970s and peaking during the 1980s, this era saw the emergence of several Black women writers whose names now circulate in popular as well as academic spheres. Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer in 1988 for the novel many consider her masterpiece, Beloved. Along with Morrison, Octavia Butler, Alice Walker, and Sherley Anne Williams wrote neo-slave narratives, a genre that explored the unique positions of women and girls during Atlantic enslavement and from their more “modern” positions. Additionally, Butler emerged as the mother of Black science fiction. Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, and Tsitsi Dangarembga introduced women of the Black diaspora to their counterparts in Caribbean and continental African contexts and demanded to be seen as separate from—and not absorbed by—American exceptionalisms. Authors like J. California Cooper, Toni Cade Bambara, Bebe Moore Campbell, and Terry McMillan wrote popular fiction that Black women greedily read, starved for stories that featured women like them, and then talked about at the proverbial water cooler, in nail and hair salons, and that were sometimes developed into film.
This class will explore the Black woman novel of the 1980s. We will ask of these books: what exactly do these authors have in common, and what separates them? Are there any consistent themes, allusions, imagery, frameworks, and craft methods that we can identify as essential to understanding “the Black Woman Novel” of this time? How are these authors inserting themselves into existing traditions of literary production while, simultaneously, creating new genres and categories of their own? Finally, what can we learn from these authors that can help us in the current moment?
Come to class ready to tackle themes of love, pain, betrayal, self-expression, self-determination, identify formation and more. This course is primarily discussion-based and requires that each and every student contribute to interpretation and meaning-making. Together, we will ask the above questions—and far more—by reading several Black women’s novels of the 1980s over our ten weeks. The course will include evaluations of class participation, in-class exercises and assignments, small writing assignments, and a final multimedia project. Come ready to read and spend a wonderful intellectual time digging into narratives, genres, and the gorgeous imagery of these works.
380-0-20 – Topics in Black Studies: African American Theatre History
This class serves as the second part in a 2-quarter history cycle in African American theatre history. Students can take this course without taking part 1. The course begins with the premiere of Lorraine Hansberry’s landmark 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun and concludes with contemporary black theatre and performance. The class examines the latter half of the 20th century and early 21st century in Black theatre and performance and analyzes trends and differences in dramatic expression over time. Playwrights included on the syllabus include Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, Brandon Jacobs Jenkins, Suzan Lori Parks, Anna Deavere Smith, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and others. The course provides an overview of African American theatrical traditions in the 20th and 21st century in order to give students a comprehensive view of the development of Black theatrical expression. We will combine readings of the plays with film screenings and readings of historical and theoretical texts for context.
380-0-21 – Topics in Black Studies: Rebellious Women of Gospel Music
This course looks at the lives of notable and historic women of Black gospel music in the United States. Icons like Chicago residents Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe developed and employed their talent and unique character for stellar performances. They simultaneously navigated personal and professional challenges met at the intersection of race and patriarchal constructs. Through video footage, audio recordings, readings, and live performance demonstrations, students will explore each artist intimately and give critical thought to the complexities of her message.
380-0-22 – Topics in Black Studies: Black Political Thought
Between 2015 and 2021 the political movement Black Lives Matter emerged in the US and different parts of the world, concerned with the mobilizations against police violence towards Black populations and oppositions to structural racism and white supremacy. In 2020 the scale and longevity of Black Lives Matter was such that the New York Times referred to it as the largest social movement in US history. While the UK Guardian newspaper described the BLM protests as the largest surge of demonstrations in the UK since the slavery abolitionist movement in the early 19th century. Indeed, BLM protests were global in 2020. Certainly, there had been nothing like it since the anti-colonial movements and civil rights movements of the late 1950s and mid-1960s or the Black power movement of the 1970s, all of which had reverberations and replications among different Black populations across the world (e.g., Europe, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean). Clearly then Black protest, Black radical politics and Black-led demonstrations are nothing new. The intellectual and political question confronting us is how we should understand the motivations and ideas involved in Black radical politics. This course seeks to introduce students to the historical and political underpinnings of issues and questions raised by the BLM movement, examining their meaning in relation to what Cedric Robinson famously referred to as the Black Radical Tradition. Students will be encouraged to think about the importance of the relation between history and theory in engaging with histories of Anti-Slavery, Anti-Colonialism and Anti-Racism and in developing analyses of Black political thought in relation to different Black political movements in the making of the modern world (e.g. civil rights, Black Power, Black Feminism, Black Lives Matter).
380-0-23 – Topics in Black Studies: Feeling in Black Music
This is a course about Black Feeling as much as it is about Black Popular Music during the early to late 20th century. While not a course in musicology or even ethnomusicology, it is more broadly a course in Black cultural studies and Black cultural politics. Against that background ‘feeling’ refers to the realm of emotional and bodily intensities that emerge as recognizable and unrecognizable, prolonged sensations and orientations in personal, social, political and cultural intimacies and relationships. The course places particular emphasis on Black loving feeling and Black political feeling in different genres of Black music. The importance of studying feelings lies in drawing attention to modes in which Black individuals and collectives, are motivated and mobilized in registers of their social being that do not rely solely or particularly on cognitive processing and rational argument, in conveying meaning, ideas, dispositions and attitudes. Black feelings are activated in passions, emotions, and affects constantly enacted and foregrounded through bodies racialized and gendered as Black. Black feelings arise and are experienced in the body affecting and being affected by different genres of Black music.
In this course we will explore the idea of the Blues as a dominant, orchestrating structure of Black feeling. In referring to Black Music we will be concerned with music produced by populations of African descent, played by, consumed by and circulated within the locales and communities in which populations of African descent have become identified and identify as Black. Black music populations have undergone the racialized formations of slavery, colonialism, segregation and white supremacy. Black music emerges as a distinctive phenomenon in the 20th century and can be generally located in different repertories across the Americas, Africa, the Caribbean and Europe, or what is known as the Black diaspora. Although this course will focus largely on Black music from the US, it will also discuss Black Music from Jamaica, Nigeria and the UK. The course will also discuss the meaning of Blackness as political feeling in abjection and emancipation; and as loving feeling in intimacy and community; in the formation of identity, culture, and affect in Black music. In short, the course develops an introduction to the culture and politics of Black Feeling, explores the orientations of feeling and emotional sociality in Black Music, with examples taken from a variety of Black musical forms from the early 20th century to the late 20th century.
380-0-24 – Topics in Black Studies:
What might the world like if it were made in the image of black feminist visionaries? How and why should we invite those imagined futures into our political and social realities? In this course, students will survey a range of writing in Black feminist and queer-of-color theory, paying special attention to the world-making potential of radical thinking. Students will read foundational texts including those by Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and Kimberlé Crenshaw, alongside more recent contributions from scholars including Jennifer C. Nash, Kevin Quashie, and Nicole Fleetwood to understand the shape and contour of contemporary black feminist world-making. Additionally, students will examine the veil between literature and theory and consider the ways in which these two genres of writing bleed into and reinforce one another. This course is reading intensive with weekly writing assignments and a large summative writing assignment.
402-0-20 – Theorizing Black Genders and Sexualities
In this course, rather than simply discussing black people who fall under a marginalized gender or sexual category—black gay men and lesbians; black transgender people—we will be taking a different, more radical direction. This course will be one that concerns how blackness as a historical, philosophical, poetic force troubles the limits of gender and sexuality such that those terms are rendered inoperable and radically otherwise. Theorizing Black Genders and Sexualities, thus, reckons with what genders and sexualities are and mean, in the context of blackness and outside of or adjacent to that context, and how we might undermine, critique, interrogate, depart from, move within, or imagine outside of entirely these categorizations that are ultimately, as this course will show, regimes of whiteness, normativity, and hegemony.
480-0-20 – Graduate Topics: Afrofeminists: Black Women challenging colorblindness in Europe
"Afrofeminism" is the label coined by a new generation of Afrodescendant women, born in Europe (usually non-English-speaking) from African and Caribbean immigrant parents, to define black feminism from their specific positionality. The term aims not only to promote their multiple African heritages in Europe, but also to distinguish themselves from US Black Feminism. This triple gesture – linguistic, psycho-political, and cultural – calls for taking seriously the original formation and expressions of Black feminisms in diasporic and global contexts. It also implies analyzing the enduring consequences of colonialism of former European empires on the very soil of their metropoles through an intersectional perspective.
This course will therefore pay particular attention to the historical and social conditions of the emergence of black feminist struggles against patriarchy, racial marginalization, and social inequality in a social and political context of white hegemony, where the very notion of “systemic racism” is generally considered as "imported from the United States”. The materials and readings will give significant attention to France, approached here as a paradigmatic case of institutionalized race denial. Formerly a slave-owning colonial empire, transformed by the mass 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 republican ideology on the name of universalism. Students will also explore the impact of everyday racism and colorblindness on Black women in Europe more broadly through readings about Germany and the Netherlands, notably.
480-0-21 – Graduate Topics: Black Mindfulness Literature
In his book of essays, Turning the Wheel, novelist and professor Charles Johnson says that the poet 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.
Considering the buzz word “mindfulness,” this undergraduate course explores the extended tradition of spiritual, contemplative, and ancient practices influencing Black letters since the 19th century. Alluding clear and consistent definition, “mindfulness” is an umbrella term that includes contemplative practices, embodiment, transcendentalism, and many other lines of spiritual and secular strategies for survival and more. This course will consider how stillness, concentration, and focus on interiority provide alternative and complementary strategies for Black survival and thriving.
We will read works by Johnson and Toomer, Paschal Beverly Randolph, Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. Additionally, we will consider the theory and criticism of Howard Thurman, Kevin Quashie, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others along with Buddhist, Vedic, and West African religious texts and studies to consider the many sides of a Black mindfulness literary tradition. We will contemplate the theory and praxis of meditation, transcendence, tantra, Dharma, ritual, and possession. Additionally, we will create and execute our own mindfulness exercises and consider how they may or may not support various politics of Blackness in our current moment.
This course will require active and enthusiastic participation by everyone in the class. There will be four response papers/discussion board writing assignments, group presentations, and ongoing experimentation with mindfulness, and a final project that will engage writing as well as other media. Journaling is highly recommended for this course, as well.
480-0-22 – Graduate Topics: Performance Ethnography
This graduate-level course introduces performance ethnography as a critical and creative research method situated at the intersection of performance studies, anthropology, and the humanities. The course examines how embodied practices—performance, storytelling, ritual, and everyday action— shape (and might be shaped by) ethnographic inquiry. Through readings, presentations, dialogue, and performance workshops, students will engage key concepts including reflexivity, positionality, affect, ethics of representation, and critical approaches to ethnographic work. Foundational texts in performance ethnography will be paired with contemporary case studies of artist-researchers who use collaborative performance making to translate ethnographic encounters into public-facing work, while resisting extractive research models.
Community-engaged research and collaborative work are central components of the course. Students collaborate with campus and local community organizations to develop reciprocal research relationships grounded in accountability and care. Fieldwork may include participant observation, oral history, and shared creative practices designed in dialogue with community partners. Students will also work in small groups to create short performance works—live, site-responsive, or hybrid—rooted in their ethnographic engagements. By the end of the course, students gain practical tools for ethically grounded, community-centered performance ethnography and collaborative knowledge-making.