Class Schedules

This course introduces students to the intellectual roots and contemporary applications of cultural studies, including critical media studies, focusing on the theoretical bases for analyses of power and meaning in production, texts, and reception. It includes primary readings in anti-racist, feminist, modern, postmodern, and queer cultural and social theory, and compares them to traditional approaches to the humanities. Designed as preparation for intermediate and advanced work grounded in cultural studies, the course is writing intensive, with special emphasis on developing skills in critical thinking and scholarly argumentation and documentation. Completion of or enrollment in MCST 110 is the prerequisite for majoring in media and cultural studies.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The Far Right in the United States has appropriated working class identities to produce an identity among the white working class. Donald Trump, for instance, intentionally portrays a large gap in highbrow and lowbrow to take jabs at privileged liberals (such as when he tweeted the "Hamberder" photo). This course observes what can be called the Far Right "theater of politics" in order to understand how liberals have left working class culture behind in ways that allowed the far right to fill the void by finding persuasive techniques in culture (country music, religion, church...) to articulate a political voice that some working class folks, especially whites, may find appealing. Some of the major questions of the course include: (1) How do political and economic elites produce class, gender, and racial divides and segmentations by aligning themselves with the cultural practices often associated with working class folks? (2) Can the left create a political culture that cultivates respect for organic cultural expressions that include religious expressions and pop-cultural themes like country music and sports (yes, even football!) into their fold  Reducing everything to class and asking all others to submit to its political logic is a limited vision. Instead, the course investigates whether it is possible to envision a political project that rather than privileging the concerns of upper-middle class whites produces a culture of resistance that can articulate working class subjects - straight, queer, white, black, binary, non-binary - into a populist left movement? One of the truly powerful features of the Left is that it is much more diverse than the Far Right. Is it possible to extend that diversity even further so that it can show a "little respect" for organic cultural producers to feel comfortable producing and living in multiple class, racial, gender, and sexual habitus?

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

What does it mean to theorize “the political”? How does one undertake such an inquiry? What is the relationship between the political, the economic, the social, and the cultural? This course is designed to help students answer these questions and introduce them to the field of political theory. We will explore the work of some of the most influential thinkers in the history of political thought – namely, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and Arendt. We will also engage contemporary scholarship in the discipline and try to understand where political theory is headed today. This course will move beyond the scope of a traditional introductory survey and consider the ways in which political theory has historically ignored questions of racism, sexism, and colonialism. In an attempt to decolonize the canon, we will consider the ways in which these issues have been ignored despite the fact that they have lurked in the background of some of the most important texts in the history of political thought.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

What does it mean to theorize “the political”? How does one undertake such an inquiry? What is the relationship between the political, the economic, the social, and the cultural? This course is designed to help students answer these questions and introduce them to the field of political theory. We will explore the work of some of the most influential thinkers in the history of political thought – namely, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Marx, and Arendt. We will also engage contemporary scholarship in the discipline and try to understand where political theory is headed today. This course will move beyond the scope of a traditional introductory survey and consider the ways in which political theory has historically ignored questions of racism, sexism, and colonialism. In an attempt to decolonize the canon, we will consider the ways in which these issues have been ignored despite the fact that they have lurked in the background of some of the most important texts in the history of political thought.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is a historical survey of theories and methodologies used in feminist and queer studies. Course material highlights the unique and intertwined knowledges feminist and queer scholars have produced; these include the re-makings of liberal, Marxian, antiracist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories, and their uses in humanities and social science methods. The course centrally examines how feminist and queer studies transform societies and are transformed through struggle over their gender/sexual identities, racial formations, and global/transnational locations. The course considers how feminist and queer studies have arisen in close relationships-of union, tension, and antagonism-and how feminist and queer work today may link. Prerequisite(s): Acquaintance with feminist, queer, and trans knowledges and experiences is great but not required. An enthusiasm to know more is a requisite.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

In less than ten years we have gone from Laverne Cox gracing the cover of Time Magazine, declaring that we have reached the "transgender tipping point," to a broad based anti-trans culture war. From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, CeCe MacDonald to Chelsea Manning, Transparent to Pose, trans people have experienced unprecedented media coverage over the past ten years. And yet, alongside this positive media coverage, trans exclusion has emerged as a key component of the global rise of white nationalism, and we see legislatures across the country foment fear of the transsexual child predator, pass bills to restrict trans kid's participation in sports, and limit gender affirming medical care for youth and adults. Even more concerning, The National Coalition of Antiviolence Projects reports that 2021 saw a record number of murders of transgender individuals, in particular trans women of color. In all of these instances, it's useful to consider how and why the specter of transness is raised. What social and political work does that figure do?This course investigates the ways that ideas about normative and non-normative gender are produced in the context of white supremacy and capitalism, recognizing that discourses about gender, race, class, sexuality and nation are co-constitutive and historically contingent. Foregrounding intersectionality, we begin with situating the production and policing norms around gender and sexuality as a key tactic of settler colonialism, and then we move forward in time through the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to think about how norms around racialized gender and sexuality have been policed, resisted, and transformed in various historical moments.This course will examine transness as practices of gender transgression, rather than solely an identity category, practices that are historically and geographically contingent. In doing so, we will ask: What has gender non-conformity meant in various  historical moments? How do race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability structure trans lives and communities? How have key institutions within the US constructed ideas about gender normativity and policed gender transgression? How has that policing impacted and shaped trans life? What is the relationship between feminism and trans people and trans liberation? How have trans people envisioned and fought for social justice? What space can trans embodiment and politics open up for new ways of living, relating, and imagining otherwise?

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course introduces students to debates, methods, and conceptual frameworks in race and gender, as represented in performance. It engages students in an interdisciplinary exploration of key terms--such as corporeality, embodiment, intersectionality, and performativity--that remain central to the fields of gender and sexuality, critical race theory, and performance. Through drafts and revisions of written work, critical dialogues and oral presentations in small groups, peer feedback, and analytical reading, students will engage in questions around identity formation, structural inequality, and the politics of citizenship.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course introduces students to debates, methods, and conceptual frameworks in race and gender, as represented in performance. It engages students in an interdisciplinary exploration of key terms - such as corporeality, embodiment, intersectionality, and performativity - that remain central to the fields of gender and sexuality, critical race theory, and performance. Through drafts and revisions of written work, critical dialogues and oral presentations in small groups, peer feedback, and analytical reading, students will engage in questions around identity formation, structural inequality, and the politics of citizenship.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Taught in English; there is an optional German component for those who want to have the course count toward their German-taught courses. In this case, students must do the reading and writing assignments and some of their oral presentations in German.What does the internationally (mis)used word "kafkaesque" actually mean? This course approaches Kafka's work both as a case for literary analysis and as one that offers insights into modernism. In one way or another, Kafka sheds light on massive industrialization, bureaucratization, the commodification of art, the destabilization of patriarchy, and the development of technology and media, as well as on the question: what is literature itself. In addition to a selection of Kafka's fiction, we shall read Crumb and Mairowitz's graphic version of Kafka's life and work, allowing students to produce their own graphic group project.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course is designed to engage students with the most sophisticated and useful schools of thought available in the social science disciplines. The course raises a number of questions: How can we best understand the complexities of self and society? Are these units of analysis useful in and of themselves? Are they contained in an essential body or polity that we can identify as some unitary entity called Jenny and John Doe, American, French, Arab/Jew, black/white, modern/primitive, developed/underdeveloped, Oriental/ Occidental, homo/heterosexual, male/female? Or are they socially produced units that have no essence in-of-themselves, produced and made real only through performance with the "Other"? Furthermore, is there something unique about modernity that has fundamentally transformed the notions of our selves, bodies, polities, races, and civilizations? If the answer to the last question is in the affirmative, how and why did this come to be the case, and what consequences does it hold for our understanding of the past and of the future? These are the kinds of questions that great figures in sociology have been asking since the nineteenth-century, including classic theorists like Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and Karl Marx, as well as more recent writers such as Ervin Goffman, Michel Foucault, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Edward Said.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

All readings and class taught in English; no pre-knowledge required. In this course we shall approach films as a medium that, through all of its means (from dialogue to more formal aspects, such as camera angle or editing), raises and attempts to negotiate philosophical, ideological, and political issues and conflicts. We shall be exposed to different methodologies of film analysis while examining: (a) a few representative films of three influential European film movements (German expressionism, Italian Neo-Realism, French nouvelle-vague), as a means of tracing the itinerary of European cinema from an action-oriented to a reflection-oriented practice; (b) the British and later American work of Alfred Hitchcock, as a mode of cinematography that employs the "gaze" as a principle of structural organization; and (c), American films of the 1970's - 1990's, as attempts to represent the world of late capitalism.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

All readings and class taught in English; no pre-knowledge required. In this course we shall approach films as a medium that, through all of its means (from dialogue to more formal aspects, such as camera angle or editing), raises and attempts to negotiate philosophical, ideological, and political issues and conflicts. We shall be exposed to different methodologies of film analysis while examining: (a) a few representative films of three influential European film movements (German expressionism, Italian Neo-Realism, French nouvelle-vague), as a means of tracing the itinerary of European cinema from an action-oriented to a reflection-oriented practice; (b) the British and later American work of Alfred Hitchcock, as a mode of cinematography that employs the "gaze" as a principle of structural organization; and (c), American films of the 1970's - 1990's, as attempts to represent the world of late capitalism.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Since its “discovery” by Europeans in the 15th century, America has occupied a uniquely ambivalent place in the imagination of Europeans: as a window onto its own future, and as its backward and uncouth child; as a vindicator of human dignity, and as a warning example of democracy’s worst outgrowths. In this new course, we will trace the “New World” in the geographical, sociological, politological, literary, and cinematic imagination of Europe since the advent of European colonization. The focus will be on the unique transnational entanglements that have joined Europe to its uncannily similar other since the early modern era and continue to do so today. Discussion topics include: “first contact”; mapping the new continent; cannibalism and the Eucharist; premodern anticolonialism; romanticism’s love/hate relationship to the US; democracy and the tyranny of the majority; European antiracism and its hypocrisies; “Indianthusiasm” and the politics of cultural appropriation; critical theory moves to California or “Frankfurt Goes L.A.”; European émigrés’ role in the US denazification program; re-education movies in post-war Germany; Kafka’s "America" in text and film; current perceptions of fascism rising in the US. Readings by Hans Staden, Michel de Montaigne, J.G. Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, G.F.W. Hegel, W. v. Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Alexis de Tocqueville, W.E.B. Du Bois, Max Weber, Erik Erikson, T.W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka; films by Leslie Fenton, Jacques Tourneur, J.-M. Straub and D. Huillet. Weekly reading responses, participation in a group presentation, two short papers, one 10-page final project. Counts as elective for the Critical Theory Concentration.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Since its “discovery” by Europeans in the 15th century, America has occupied a uniquely ambivalent place in the imagination of Europeans: as a window onto its own future, and as its backward and uncouth child; as a vindicator of human dignity, and as a warning example of democracy’s worst outgrowths. In this new course, we will trace the “New World” in the geographical, sociological, politological, literary, and cinematic imagination of Europe since the advent of European colonization. The focus will be on the unique transnational entanglements that have joined Europe to its uncannily similar other since the early modern era and continue to do so today. Discussion topics include: “first contact”; mapping the new continent; cannibalism and the Eucharist; premodern anticolonialism; romanticism’s love/hate relationship to the US; democracy and the tyranny of the majority; European antiracism and its hypocrisies; “Indianthusiasm” and the politics of cultural appropriation; critical theory moves to California or “Frankfurt Goes L.A.”; European émigrés’ role in the US denazification program; re-education movies in post-war Germany; Kafka’s "America" in text and film; current perceptions of fascism rising in the US. Readings by Hans Staden, Michel de Montaigne, J.G. Herder, Alexander von Humboldt, G.F.W. Hegel, W. v. Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Alexis de Tocqueville, W.E.B. Du Bois, Max Weber, Erik Erikson, T.W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Franz Kafka; films by Leslie Fenton, Jacques Tourneur, J.-M. Straub and D. Huillet. Weekly reading responses, participation in a group presentation, two short papers, one 10-page final project. Counts as elective for the Critical Theory Concentration.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

When you think of ‘nature,’ what comes to mind? Do gender and sexuality come to mind? How about racial capitalism, settler colonialism, or heteropatriarchy? In this course, we will examine how systems of power shape our concepts and relationships with nature, paying particular attention to the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and the environment. We will place feminist and queer ecologies in dialogue to destabilize assumptions about nature and science that reinforce ideas of what is “natural” and “normal.” Feminist and queer ecologies critique the ways in which heterosexuality, monogamy, and gender binaries render “nature” as orderly and pure, in need of protection from populations or relationships deemed deviant or dangerous. Instead, feminist and queer ecologies invite us to reimagine how our relationships with nature are rooted in intimacy, multiplicity, and interdependence. Special emphasis will be placed on critiquing the colonial unconscious of feminist and queer ecologies that tends to erase longstanding Indigenous practices of other-than-human relationality and kinship. Topics we will explore include environmental justice, queer theory, environmental racism, ecofeminism, science and technology studies, urban studies, rural studies, new materialism, political ecology, queer Indigenous feminisms, relationality and kinship, reproductive justice, climate justice, feminist and queer futurities, animal studies, and posthumanism.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

This course explores the complex interrelationship of sports and the media, using critical theory frameworks to consider the role mediated sports play within our lives. While there will be opportunities for creative work, this is not a sports journalism course and will not provide direct training for aspiring sports writers. Instead, we will mostly look at sports media from the perspective of the reader, viewer, and fan, examining how we engage with these cultural texts and use them to make sense of our world, construct our identities, and form political and social relationships with others. By surveying key historical case studies mostly drawn from the U.S. context, such as the career of Joe Louis in the 1930s, the iconic protests at the 1968 Olympics, the 1999 Women’s World Cup, and the Malice at the Palace in 2004, we will contend with how sports have served as unique and complex sites for working out ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and nationhood. This background will then frame our engagement with contemporary sports media. Students will be expected to keep a detailed journal of their sports media consumption and be prepared to turn a critical eye on their own practices of spectatorship, fandom, and social media participation.

General Education Requirements:
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The word "ritual" is used in many contexts to refer to types of practice that are considered centrally important, as well as formalistic and repetitive. This seminar-style course concentrates on the concept of ritual as a central component of social practice, within and without religious groupings. Focusing on developing the concept of ritual, we will focus on ritual across traditions. This requires students to 'work with' concepts - forming a conception of what they mean by ritual, and be willing to change that conception when faced with contradictory evidence.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Taught in English; there is an optional German component for those who want to have the course count toward their German-taught courses. In this case, students must do the reading and writing assignments and some of their oral presentations in German.What does the internationally (mis)used word "kafkaesque" actually mean? This course approaches Kafka's work both as a case for literary analysis and as one that offers insights into modernism. In one way or another, Kafka sheds light on massive industrialization, bureaucratization, the commodification of art, the destabilization of patriarchy, and the development of technology and media, as well as on the question: what is literature itself. In addition to a selection of Kafka's fiction, we shall read Crumb and Mairowitz's graphic version of Kafka's life and work, allowing students to produce their own graphic group project.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Through Orientalist and Colonial "Feminist" lenses Arab and Middle Eastern women have been pigeonholed into a multitude of binaries: invisible/hyper visible, silent/silenced, submissive/unruly, oppressed victim/violent terrorist, etc. By de-centering European and U.S. dominated discourse, we will examine feminist movements in both Arab countries and their diasporas. From fights for women’s education in 1920’s Egypt to the Arab Springs in 2011, indigenous feminist movements like the 2019 "No Free Homeland Without Free Women" work of Tal’at in Palestine and Iran’s Jin, Jîyan, Azadî (Women, Life, Freedom) movement in 2022, to the work of the Palestinian Feminist Collective against colonial feminism in the wake of October 7th, we will construct a living timeline of women’s movements against intra-cultural patriarchy, liberal/Western feminisms, and colonialism/imperialism from the 20th century up through todays political world. Through this course, students develop anti-colonial language and gain historical context required to challenge ongoing erasure of the roles of Arab/Middle Eastern women in liberation movements.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

This course introduces students to the intellectual roots and contemporary applications of cultural studies, including critical media studies, focusing on the theoretical bases for analyses of power and meaning in production, texts, and reception. It includes primary readings in anti-racist, feminist, modern, postmodern, and queer cultural and social theory, and compares them to traditional approaches to the humanities. Designed as preparation for intermediate and advanced work grounded in cultural studies, the course is writing intensive, with special emphasis on developing skills in critical thinking and scholarly argumentation and documentation. Completion of or enrollment in MCST 110 is the prerequisite for majoring in media and cultural studies.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The Far Right in the United States has appropriated working class identities to produce an identity among the white working class. Donald Trump, for instance, intentionally portrays a large gap in highbrow and lowbrow to take jabs at privileged liberals (such as when he tweeted the "Hamberder" photo). This course observes what can be called the Far Right "theater of politics" in order to understand how liberals have left working class culture behind in ways that allowed the far right to fill the void by finding persuasive techniques in culture (country music, religion, church...) to articulate a political voice that some working class folks, especially whites, may find appealing. Some of the major questions of the course include: (1) How do political and economic elites produce class, gender, and racial divides and segmentations by aligning themselves with the cultural practices often associated with working class folks? (2) Can the left create a political culture that cultivates respect for organic cultural expressions that include religious expressions and pop-cultural themes like country music and sports (yes, even football!) into their fold  Reducing everything to class and asking all others to submit to its political logic is a limited vision. Instead, the course investigates whether it is possible to envision a political project that rather than privileging the concerns of upper-middle class whites produces a culture of resistance that can articulate working class subjects - straight, queer, white, black, binary, non-binary - into a populist left movement? One of the truly powerful features of the Left is that it is much more diverse than the Far Right. Is it possible to extend that diversity even further so that it can show a "little respect" for organic cultural producers to feel comfortable producing and living in multiple class, racial, gender, and sexual habitus?

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

The first decades of the 20th century produced some of the most innovative works in literary history, permanently transforming the way in which we see, hear, and otherwise perceive the world around us. More than any aesthetic movement before or since, modernists including Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Franz Kafka, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Gertrude Stein, Friedrich Nietzsche, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Marcel Proust were keenly aware of both the limits of language and the inevitability of their transgression. They used words in ways that stretch sense to the point where it breaks, but with the aim of revealing a richer domain of finer-grained perception that is obscured by our everyday linguistic and intellectual habits. Over the course of the semester, we will read literary, philosophical, and theoretical accounts that both thematize and perform their own linguistic (in)capacities: to represent, to translate, to obscure, to estrange, to reveal. We will also examine some instances of modernist music, painting, and film. Our aim is to arrive at a nuanced understanding of how words work, contrasting linguistic phenomena with other forms of expressive media, and inquiring into the potential of language to articulate non-linguistic modes of experience. Meets requirements for argumentative writing, internationalism, and critical theory. All readings in English.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course will examine the developments of contemporary art beyond traditional centers of gravity in Europe and the United States. Using a series of case studies, it will examine how globalization impacts artistic production in different parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, India, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. While analyzing a diverse range of artistic practices in these regions, the course will critically explore key discourses around the topic of globalization, including hybridity and diaspora, from post-modern and post-colonial perspectives. No background in art history necessary.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This course will examine the developments of contemporary art beyond traditional centers of gravity in Europe and the United States. Using a series of case studies, it will examine how globalization impacts artistic production in different parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, India, Latin America, Russia, Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Middle East. While analyzing a diverse range of artistic practices in these regions, the course will critically explore key discourses around the topic of globalization, including hybridity and diaspora, from post-modern and post-colonial perspectives. No background in art history necessary.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

For Marx, "philosophy" is really not a thing, since the world of ideas has no independent existence. And nevertheless, all Marx ever did was to write things, to do theory. In this course, we will come to know Marx’s theory as something that cannot be separated from the texts he wrote, texts that continue to challenge us in questioning the way we make sense of the world. We will read selections from Marx’s early writings on religion and alienation through the theory of ideology and commodity fetishism in tandem with texts by 20th-century thinkers and activists who critiqued and further developed Marx’s thought (Gramsci, Luxemburg, Du Bois, Angela Davis, Adorno). Requirements: Reading responses, problem sets, one short and one long paper. Core course for the Critical Theory Concentration. Taught in English.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

The course is an introduction to some of the important theoretical and methodological work conducted by scholars in various disciplines who hope to better define and understand religious phenomena. This seminar begins with some of the early twentieth century texts that are often cited and discussed by contemporary scholars of religion (e.g., Durkheim, Weber, Freud) and then turns to a number of investigations stemming from engagement with earlier theorists or refracting new concerns. The course inquires into the problems of defining and analyzing religious cultures, and the researcher's position or positions in this analysis, as this has been approached from anthropological, sociological, and religious studies perspectives.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WP
Writing WC

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course fulfills the political theory requirement for the Political Science major. No prior experience required. According to Cedric Robinson, capitalism, from its advent, "pursued essentially racial directions." This insight led Robinson to a theory of “racial capitalism” that has been taken up by several scholars across disciplines. Through this course, we will attempt to answer the following questions: What is racial capitalism? How do we understand its key components (racism and capitalism) and how do they relate to one other? Is the question of the relationship between racism and capitalism a historical one or a purely theoretical one? How have these concepts influenced contemporary political struggles? What role do slavery, property relations, prisons, and the police play in the reproduction of racial capitalism?

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

All readings and class taught in English; no pre-knowledge required. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) has been called the "savage anomaly" of the Enlightenment because his philosophy enables an alternative or 'hidden' modernity based on the interdependence of beings rather than their hierarchy. Ever more political theorists, environmentalists, and ecologists are turning to Spinoza's vision of a nonhierarchical union of nature and society that rejects anthropocentrism as the promise for a more equitable and sustainable life. In this course we shall focus on the foundation of Spinoza's unconventional thesis: his intertwined conceptions of the human being as part of nature-as opposed to the prevailing notion of the human as an autonomous "imperium" in, yet above, nature-and of society as a continuation of nature-as opposed to the dominant theories of the "social contract" that ground society on its break with, or repression of, nature (Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant). We shall examine Spinoza's entailed radical revision in understanding both the "political" and the "environment." Beyond Spinoza's Ethics and his Theologico-Political and Political treatises, we shall read major commentators on Spinoza's ethical and political theory and on his role in environmental ethics and Deep Ecology.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

All readings and class taught in English; no pre-knowledge required. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) has been called the "savage anomaly" of the Enlightenment because his philosophy enables an alternative or 'hidden' modernity based on the interdependence of beings rather than their hierarchy. Ever more political theorists, environmentalists, and ecologists are turning to Spinoza's vision of a nonhierarchical union of nature and society that rejects anthropocentrism as the promise for a more equitable and sustainable life. In this course we shall focus on the foundation of Spinoza's unconventional thesis: his intertwined conceptions of the human being as part of nature-as opposed to the prevailing notion of the human as an autonomous "imperium" in, yet above, nature-and of society as a continuation of nature-as opposed to the dominant theories of the "social contract" that ground society on its break with, or repression of, nature (Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant). We shall examine Spinoza's entailed radical revision in understanding both the "political" and the "environment." Beyond Spinoza's Ethics and his Theologico-Political and Political treatises, we shall read major commentators on Spinoza's ethical and political theory and on his role in environmental ethics and Deep Ecology.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

All readings and class taught in English; no pre-knowledge required. Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) has been called the "savage anomaly" of the Enlightenment because his philosophy enables an alternative or 'hidden' modernity based on the interdependence of beings rather than their hierarchy. Ever more political theorists, environmentalists, and ecologists are turning to Spinoza's vision of a nonhierarchical union of nature and society that rejects anthropocentrism as the promise for a more equitable and sustainable life. In this course we shall focus on the foundation of Spinoza's unconventional thesis: his intertwined conceptions of the human being as part of nature-as opposed to the prevailing notion of the human as an autonomous "imperium" in, yet above, nature-and of society as a continuation of nature-as opposed to the dominant theories of the "social contract" that ground society on its break with, or repression of, nature (Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant). We shall examine Spinoza's entailed radical revision in understanding both the "political" and the "environment." Beyond Spinoza's Ethics and his Theologico-Political and Political treatises, we shall read major commentators on Spinoza's ethical and political theory and on his role in environmental ethics and Deep Ecology.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This interdisciplinary course reimagines the study and practice of performance art as a bridge between disciplines and a dialogue between theory and practice, mind and body, history and experimentation. Students will gain a rare opportunity to think, move, and create across traditional disciplinary boundaries within fine arts, investigating how artists transform the body into a site of creation, resistance, and social critique—from early avant-garde disruptions to contemporary, cross-cultural performances in galleries and in public spaces. Students will engage with foundational texts on embodiment, spectatorship, and the politics of visibility alongside hands-on explorations of performance strategies by globally significant artists, ensuring that they learn not only about historical figures such as Marina Abramović, Joseph Beuys, and Carolee Schneemann, but also with cutting-edge global artists and experimental collectives in performance art today.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism OR U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

This interdisciplinary course reimagines the study and practice of performance art as a bridge between disciplines and a dialogue between theory and practice, mind and body, history and experimentation. Students will gain a rare opportunity to think, move, and create across traditional disciplinary boundaries within fine arts, investigating how artists transform the body into a site of creation, resistance, and social critique—from early avant-garde disruptions to contemporary, cross-cultural performances in galleries and in public spaces. Students will engage with foundational texts on embodiment, spectatorship, and the politics of visibility alongside hands-on explorations of performance strategies by globally significant artists, ensuring that they learn not only about historical figures such as Marina Abramović, Joseph Beuys, and Carolee Schneemann, but also with cutting-edge global artists and experimental collectives in performance art today.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Fine arts

Course Materials

Contemporary international order is defined by political insecurity and economic inequality. This stands in contrast to the ideals of liberal internationalism. How did this reality come about? How can it be undone? This course examines the role of settler colonialism, global empire, and decolonization in the making and unmaking of the modern world. We will first examine a range of social and political issues (including borders and policing; sovereignty and international law; incarceration and criminality; development and abandonment) and theorize how insecurity and inequality are products of historical and ongoing settler colonialism. In the second part of the course, we will explore how colonial orderings of the world have been resisted and reconfigured by decolonial, Third World, and Indigenous thinkers and organizers. We will analyze the potential of decolonial and abolitionist movements to remake the world, with a particular emphasis on issues of economic redistribution, community safety, and collective liberation.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials

Are we living in revolutionary times?  How do we know? This course takes a journey through the last 50 years of some large upheavals across the world-in language, politics, economics, culture, and media-to find some answers of how we are similar and different.  It uncovers how and why the struggles, in theories and practices, for power and representation have created the conditions in which we exist today. We travel through all kinds of 'post' and 'neo'-liberalism, humanism, feminism, nationalism, and colonialism-and how they intertwine in our own lived experiences.  Some topics: protest against gender, sexual, race, economic, and linguistic bio-regimes, revolts of the colonized and marginalized, and resistant/ liberatory creations in art, technology, and media. Authors include Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Michel Foucault, Theresa Cha, Silvia Federici, Noam Chomsky, Ta-Nehisi Coates, bell hooks, Chela Sandoval, and Gayatri Spivak, among others.  At the end of the course, we will all know a little more about where we stand. People from all disciplines welcome. Prerequisite(s): Sophomore or junior standing or permission of instructor, and at least one course in the department (core course recommended, cross-listed accepted).

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
U.S. Identities and Differences

Distribution Requirements:

Course Materials

For Marx, "philosophy" is really not a thing, since the world of ideas has no independent existence. And nevertheless, all Marx ever did was to write things, to do theory. In this course, we will come to know Marx’s theory as something that cannot be separated from the texts he wrote, texts that continue to challenge us in questioning the way we make sense of the world. We will read selections from Marx’s early writings on religion and alienation through the theory of ideology and commodity fetishism in tandem with texts by 20th-century thinkers and activists who critiqued and further developed Marx’s thought (Gramsci, Luxemburg, Du Bois, Angela Davis, Adorno). Requirements: Reading responses, problem sets, one short and one long paper. Core course for the Critical Theory Concentration. Taught in English.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course considers surveillance as a social formation, inseparable from the theory and exercise of power. On the one hand, it takes up the pressing questions surveillance raises, from the development of cutting-edge technologies to the complex work of international regulation. On the other hand, it situates surveillance historically as central to projects of imperial conquest, state formation, and colonial rule. Engaging with theoretical works, primary sources, empirical studies and artistic renderings, students will grapple with problems of surveillance and power across geographic and historical contexts.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course considers surveillance as a social formation, inseparable from the theory and exercise of power. On the one hand, it takes up the pressing questions surveillance raises, from the development of cutting-edge technologies to the complex work of international regulation. On the other hand, it situates surveillance historically as central to projects of imperial conquest, state formation, and colonial rule. Engaging with theoretical works, primary sources, empirical studies and artistic renderings, students will grapple with problems of surveillance and power across geographic and historical contexts.

General Education Requirements:
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

In two separate interviews in the 1970s, Michel Foucault claims he hides his citations of Karl Marx. These claims undermine the dominant scholarly narrative according to which Marx and Foucault offer contradictory frameworks of analysis. Through an exploration of key texts by these authors, this class will explore the possibility of reading Marx and Foucault as theoretical allies rather than enemies. In particular, we will focus on the possibility of reading Marx’s critique of political economy and Foucault’s genealogical analysis of power and subjectivity together. We will compare the methods of the authors, consider their approaches to the study of history, and ask what it means to take up their theoretical work politically.

General Education Requirements:

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Traces the development of theoretical accounts of culture, politics and identity in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and related lands since the 1947-1991 decolonizations. Readings include Fanon, Said, Walcott, Ngugi and many others, and extend to gender, literature, the U.S., and the post-Soviet sphere. The course bridges cultural representational, and political theory. Prerequisite(s): Prior internationalist and/or theoretical coursework strongly recommended.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

Traces the development of theoretical accounts of culture, politics and identity in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and related lands since the 1947-1991 decolonizations. Readings include Fanon, Said, Walcott, Ngugi and many others, and extend to gender, literature, the U.S., the post-Soviet sphere, and Europe. The course bridges cultural, representational, and political theory. Prerequisite(s): Prior internationalist and/or theoretical coursework strongly recommended.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA
Internationalism

Distribution Requirements:
Humanities

Course Materials

This course introduces students to the broad range of explanations for social and cultural phenomena used by anthropologists since the emergence of the discipline in the 19th century. The course focuses on the development of three broad theoretical approaches: The American school of cultural anthropology, British social anthropology, and the French school that emerged from the work of Durkheim and his followers. The course also examines theoretical approaches such as cultural materialism, and symbolic and interpretive approaches to the study of culture. Prerequisite(s): Junior or senior standing.  Students should have at least two courses in anthropology including ANTH 101 or ANTH 111, or the permission of the instructor.

General Education Requirements:
Writing WA

Distribution Requirements:
Social science

Course Materials