Winter 2027 Class Descriptions
WINTER 2027 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.
212-1-1 - Introduction to African American History 1: Key Concepts From 1700-1861
This undergraduate course traces the making of the African Diaspora from West and Central African empires to the U.S. Civil War in 1865. We study the early period of African American history through a global, transnational lens. Rather than treating enslaved and free Black people merely as subjects of empire and slavery, the course takes seriously how African-descended peoples actively shaped the modern Atlantic world through acts of political revolution, religious formation, cultural creation, technology development, and economic innovation. Starting with cultural and economic systems in West-Central Africa, then moving to Caribbean and Southern underground markets, we explore maritime networks, patent battles, and early mutual-aid financial institutions. The course examines how Black technological mastery and entrepreneurial agency intersected with human trafficking, regimes of slavery, and formations of gender, kinship, and freedom struggles across the Americas.
The course is designed as an interactive "historical lab" requiring no prerequisites. It employs a “flipped” approach for active learning, features brief lectures, and structures generous attention to collaboratively workshopping primary sources so that students learn to explore and explain complex dimensions of history and culture.
This course also equips students with skills in the responsible use of generative AI to support discovery of expert sources, rigorous analysis of evidence, critical thinking, and intellectual argument based on primary sources and analysis.
213-0-20 - History of the Black World
This course delves into the history of colonialism and anticolonialism in 20th 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.
225-0-20 - 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."
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. 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, students will also 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 weeks of the course, students will actively engage a host of contemporary issues shaping cutting-edge research in the field including work on environmental and climate justice, discriminatory design in AI technologies, 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.
247-0-20 - Black Life. Trans Life
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.
262-0-20 - Introduction to Black Religion: The North American Experience
In this course students will be introduced to the variety of Black religions in the United States from the early 19th century to the present. We will examine the historical and political dynamics that shaped these traditions from their origins in Africa to the formation of new religions that emerged in urban cities on the East Coast and in the Midwest. We will use written and multimedia sources to explore topics such as gender, migration, the movement for civil rights, and Black religious technologies in the 21st century.
320-0-20 - Social Meaning of Race
Racism is probably the most enduring paradox in modern democracies. This is especially true in the U.S.A. Scholars have proven how race determines where we live, the quality of education we receive, our economic opportunities, our access to the law, our access to health care, the quality of air we breathe, and often even our access to life itself. For example, in the U.S., roughly 20% of the Black, Latinx, and Native American populations live in poverty as compared to only 9% of whites. Blacks, Latinxs, and Native Americans experience premature death at rates that are roughly 60% higher than whites. Black and Latinx graduation rates from colleges are roughly twice as low as whites. Blacks and Latinxs are incarcerated at rate that is over twice as high as white people. This course is designed to help students understand this paradox. Questions we will consider are: What is race and how did it become such a central organizing principle in our world? How does race relate to other vectors of power such as class, gender, and sexuality? How are our identities or subjectivities shaped by race? How does race differ from ethnicity or nationality? How does racial ideology shape policy? How do the histories of racialized groups relate to one another? How have racialized groups informed our understanding of race through their expressive cultures or activism? We will explore these issues through readings, discussions, lectures, films, short stories, and music.
380-0-20 - Topics: Black Feminist Theory
This course begins not from the premise, necessarily, of an intellectual and political genealogy of black women. Though also not to the exclusion of this. But rather, this course is one that thinks black feminist—not black “women’s”—theory and theorizing; this course chronicles the ways that the political, intellectual, ethical, and social resound radically and progressively and names that resonance—and all its vibrations and textures—black feminist theory. Thus, we will, of course, be reading a variety of black women along the jagged gendered spectrum between and beyond “cis” and “trans,” but more specifically we will, in this course, be tracing the ways radical politics and ethics arise in such a way as to interrogate the established parameters of race and gender normativity, of our social world. To do this, we will be reading the work of people like bell hooks and Patricia Hill Collins, Toni Morrison and Saidiya Hartman, Jennifer Nash and Hortense Spillers, and more.
380-0-21 - Topics: Race and the American Musical (Post 1830/Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment/Race & Ethnicity)
In this seminar, students will analyze how race has worked in relation to the Broadway musical from the early days of the form through to the contemporary. Students will consider how transformations in American race relations, immigration policy, geopolitics, and social policy have influenced when and how race manifests in the genre.
380-0-22 - Topics: Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was a Nobel Laureate who experimented with a number of literary genres, including her famous novels and—less famous, still renowned—essays and criticism. This course offers an introduction to the work of Toni Morrison, as author, critic, and literary citizen. Alongside various texts within her oeuvre, we will read past and recent criticism on Morrison, attending formal as well as cultural and historical considerations. This course affords an occasion to practice and develop ways of reading and expressing thought.
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 - Topics: De-Colonial and Third World Marxism
The seminar aims to de-provincialize Marxist Theory. It focuses on how thinkers and revolutionaries across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and the Middle East interpreted and transformed historical materialism to address imperialism, slavery, underdevelopment, coloniality, patriarchy, and racial capitalism. Students will likely engage the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels on primitive accumulation and colonialism; Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxembourg on imperialism; W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Clovis Moura, Beatriz Nascimiento, and Cedric Robinson on the Black radical tradition; Silvia Federici, Gayatri Spivak, Selma James, and Raya Dunayevskaya on Marxist feminism; Claudia Jones, Sylvia Wynter, Louise Thompson Patterson, and Lélia Gonzales on Black feminist Marxism; Mao Tse Tung, Amilcar Cabral, Huey Newton, and Glen Coulthard on revolutionary praxis and contradiction; Walter Rodney, Ruy Mauro Marini, and Samir Amin on underdevelopment; and Frantz Fanon, Anibal Quijano, and Denise Ferreira da Silva on psycho-affect and de-colonization.
480-0-21 - Topics: Afrofuturism
Explores AfroFuturism, a literary and cultural aesthetic demonstrating/imagining how people of color project ourselves into narratives of the future. Investigation of speculative fiction, fantasy literature, sound cultures, artworks, music videos, and dance to trace the concept of an AfroFuturist point of view. Creation of AfroFuturist media and performance. Artists considered include writers Samuel R. Delany and Legacy Russell; musicians Parliament-Funkadelic and Sun Ra.