Ethnic and Diasporic Studies

Ethnic and diasporic studies as an academic discipline lie at the intersection of several increasingly powerful developments in American thought and culture. First, interdisciplinary and comparative scholarship has become so prevalent as to represent a dominant intellectual norm. Second, the use of this new scholarly methodology to meet new academic needs and illuminate new subject matter has given rise to a plethora of discourses: women’s studies; Native American studies; African American studies; gay, lesbian, and transgender studies; and global studies. Third, and perhaps most important, there has been a growing recognition, both inside and outside academia, that American reality is incorrigibly and irremediably plural and that responsible research and pedagogy must account for and accommodate this fact.

We define ethnic and diasporic studies (loosely) as the study of the dynamics of racial and ethnic groups (also loosely conceived) who have been denied, at one time or another, the full participation and the full benefits of citizenship in American society. We see these dynamics as fascinating in and among themselves but also feel that studying them illuminates the entire spectrum of humanistic inquiry and that a fruitful cross-fertilization will obtain between ethnic and diasporic studies and the College’s well-established curricula in the humanities, the arts, the sciences, and the social sciences.

Ethnic and Diasporic Studies 2023-2024 Courses

Making the World Go Round: Children in the Machinery of Empire

Open, Lecture—Fall

In the 1920s, a Miss Wilson presented a paper at a London conference, addressing “The Education of European Children in Contact With Primitive Races.” In her talk, she described the life of rural white settler children in Kenya growing up with African playmates and expressed her concerns about the “morally deleterious” effects of such play on these future imperial leaders. This particular case illustrates discourse about the role of privileged white children in imperial regimes; but children of diverse social classes, races, and nationalities across the globe were all implicated in processes of imperial expansion and European settler colonization over (at least) the past three centuries. What was believed about children, done to children, and required of children was central to the political and economic success of empire. In this lecture, we will examine a series of cases in order to understand the diverse roles, both intentional and unintentional, of children in colonial processes. In addition to the white sons and daughters of European settler colonists in Africa and Southeast Asia, we will look at the contrary things that were said and done about mixed-race children (and their mothers) at different historical and political moments of empire. We will learn, too, about the deployment of “orphans” in the service of empire. In the metropole, particularly British cities, orphan boys were funneled into the military and merchant navy, while children of both sexes were shipped across the globe to boost white settler populations, provide free labor, and relieve English poorhouses of the responsibility of taking care of them. The ancestors of many contemporary citizens of Canada, Australia, and South Africa were exported as children from metropolitan orphanages. We will deploy approaches from sex-gender studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory. Questions that we will explore include: Why did settler authorities in Australia kidnap mixed-race Indigenous children and put them in boarding schools, when such children in other colonies were expected to stay with their local mothers out of sight of the settlers? How did European ideas about climate and race frame the ways in which settler children were nursed in the Dutch East Indies? How did concepts of childhood and parental rights over children vary historically, socioeconomically, and geographically? How did metropolitan discourses about race, class, and evolution frame the treatment of indigent children at home and abroad? The sources for this class include literature, scholarly articles, ethnographic accounts, historical documents, and film. Students will attend the lecture once a week and group conference once a week.

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Faking Families: How We Make Kinship

Open, Seminar—Year

In her study of transnational adoptees, Eleana Kim noted the profound differences between discourses about the immigration of Chinese brides to the United States and those describing the arrival of adopted Chinese baby girls: the former with suspicion and the latter with joy. Two ways that families form are by bringing in spouses and by having children. We tend to assume that family building involves deeply personal, intimate, and even “natural” acts; but, in actual practice, the pragmatics of forming (and disbanding) families are much more complex. There are many instances where biological pregnancy is not possible or not chosen, and there are biological parents who are unable to rear their offspring. Social rules govern the acceptance or rejection of children in particular social groups, depending on factors such as the marital status of their parents or the enactment of appropriate rituals. Western notions of marriage prioritize compatibility between two individuals who choose each other based on love; but, in many parts of the world, selecting a suitable spouse and contracting a marriage is the business of entire kin networks. There is great variability, too, in what constitutes “suitable.” To marry a close relative or someone of the same gender may be deemed unnaturally close in some societies; but marriage across a great difference—such as age, race, nation, culture or class—can also be problematic. And beyond the intimacies of couples and the interests of extended kin are the interests of the nation-state. This seminar, then, examines the makings and meanings of kinship connections of parent and spouse at multiple levels, from small communities to global movements. Our topics will include the adoption and fostering of children, both locally and transnationally, in Peru, Chile, Spain, Italy, Ghana, the United States, China, and Korea. We will look at technologies of biological reproduction, including the global movement of genetic material in the business of transnational gestational surrogacy in India. We will look at the ways marriages are contracted in a variety of social and cultural settings, including China and Korea, and the ways they are configured by race, gender, and citizenship. Our questions will include: Who are “real” kin? Who can a person marry? Which children are “legitimate”? Why do we hear so little about birth mothers? What is the experience of families with transgender parents or children? What is the compulsion to find genetically connected “kin”? How many mothers can a person have? How is marriage connected to labor migration? Why are the people who care for children in foster care called “parents”? The materials for this class include literature, scholarly articles, ethnographic accounts, historical documents, and film.

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Culture and Mental Health

Open, Seminar—Fall

This interdisciplinary psychology and anthropology seminar will address mental health in diverse cultural contexts, drawing upon a range of case studies to illuminate the causes, symptoms, diagnosis, course, and treatment of mental illness across the globe. We open the course by exploring questions of the classification of mental illness in order to address whether Western psychiatric categories apply across different local contexts. We explore the globalization of American understandings of the psyche, the exportation of Western mental disorders, and the impact of psychiatric imperialism in places like Sri Lanka, Zanzibar, Oaxaca, and Japan. Through our readings of peer-reviewed articles and current research in cultural psychology, clinical psychology, and psychological, psychiatric, and medical anthropology, we explore conditions such as depression and anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, susto, and mal de ojo to understand the entanglements of psychological experience, culture, morality, sociality, and care. We explore how diagnostic processes and psychiatric care are, at times, differentially applied in the United States according to the client’s race/ethnicity, class, and gender. Finally, we explore the complexities of recovery or healing, addressing puzzles such as why certain mental disorders considered to be lifelong, chronic, and severe in some parts of the world are interpreted as temporary, fleeting, and manageable elsewhere—and how such expectations influence people’s ability to experience wellness or (re-)integration into family, work, and society. Several of our key authors will join us as invited guest speakers to talk about their current work. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course.

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Anthropology and Images

Open, Seminar—Fall

Images wavered in the sunlit trim of appliances, something always moving, a brightness flying, so much to know in the world.—Don Delillo, Libra

A few cartoons lead to cataclysmic events in Europe. A photograph printed in a newspaper moves a solitary reader. A snapshot posted on the internet leads to dreams of fanciful places. Memories of a past year haunt us like ghosts. What each of these occurrences has in common is that they all entail the force of images in our lives, whether these images are visual or acoustic in nature, made by hand or machine, circulated by word of mouth, or simply imagined. In this seminar, we will consider the role that images play in the lives of people in various settings throughout the world. In delving into terrains at once actual and virtual, we will develop an understanding of how people throughout the world create, use, circulate, and perceive images and how such efforts tie into ideas and practices of sensory perception, time, memory, affect, imagination, sociality, history, politics, and personal and collective imaginings. Through these engagements, we will reflect on the fundamental human need for images, the complicated politics and ethics of images, aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, dynamics of time and memory, the intricate play between the actual and the imagined, and the circulation of digital images in an age of globalization. Readings will include a number of writings in anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and critical theory. Images will be drawn from photographs, paintings, sculptures, drawings, films, videos, graffiti, religion, rituals, tattoos, inscriptions, novels, poems, road signs, advertisements, dreams, fantasies, phantasms, and any number of fabulations in the worlds in which we live and imagine.

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Ethnographic Writing

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Transnational migration, human-animal relations, and American community life are but a few of the cultural realities that anthropologists have effectively studied and written about. This is no easy task, given the substantial difficulties involved in understanding and portraying the concerns, activities, and lifeworlds other than one’s own. Despite these challenges, ethnographic writing is generally considered one of the best ways to convey a nuanced and contextually rich understanding of people’s experiences in life. To gain an informed sense of the methods, challenges, and benefits of ethnographic writing, students in this course will try their hands at a concerted work of ethnographic writing. Along with undertaking a series of ethnographic writing exercises, students will be encouraged to craft a fully-realized piece of ethnographic writing that conveys something of the features and dynamics of a particular world in lively, accurate, and comprehensive terms. Along the way, and with the help of anthropological writings that are either exceptional or experimental in nature, we will collectively think through some of the most important features of the craft of ethnographic writing from the use of field notes and interviews, the interlacing of theory and data, the author’s voice in ethnographic prose, and the ethical and political responsibilities that come with any attempt to understand and portray the lives of others. This seminar will work best for students who already have a rich body of ethnographic research materials to work with, such that they can quickly delve into the intricacies of writing about their chosen subject.

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Migration and Climate Crisis

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

This interdisciplinary seminar in environmental studies and anthropology focuses on the interconnected social problems of migration and environmental crisis. Experts project that, in the coming decades, climate crisis will increasingly propel people to migrate, as they flee extreme weather events and areas with depleted natural resources. As migrants in the Global South and in regions disproportionately affected by industrial extraction and environmental disaster face exceedingly untenable living conditions, both internal and international migration will continue to rise. While this prediction is often posed as a problem of the near future, displacement and forced migration are not new phenomena. Indeed, the close connections between industrial extractive economic projects, land dispossession, forced migration, and environmental crisis are evident in both past and present times. Through our course readings across environmental studies, anthropology, migration studies, and other relevant disciplines, we will focus on contemporary problems and their historical legacies to ask questions like: What is at stake for people impacted by climate change? How should we understand the relationship between environmental concerns and human mobility, both historically and now? What are the links between environmental racism, land rights, and migration? How might we analyze sociolegal processes, economic projects, and both local and international politics in relation to the natural world and the movement of people, problems, and ideas across borders? How does climate crisis affect particular groups, such as immigrants, Indigenous peoples, and other historically marginalized or disenfranchised communities? How might resistance movements focused on immigrant rights inform efforts toward climate justice, and vice versa? Our readings will address a wide variety of ethnographic contexts and geographic landscapes, taking us from the fishing villages of Ghana to the urban construction sites of Italy, from the highlands of Peru to the plains of Wyoming, from rural Yucatán to downtown San Francisco, and from Puerto Rico to New York, among other places. Students may opt to conduct original fieldwork or work with local organizations as part of their conference work for this course.

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Indigenous Ecologies and Environmental Justice

Open, Seminar—Spring

Native American and Indigenous peoples today protect 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity; and Indigenous ways of living in relation to the natural environment, in keeping with Indigenous ecological knowledge and practices, have sustained ecosystems for centuries. Yet, throughout history, settler colonial and industrial extractive projects have displaced native peoples and instigated the environmental crises that plague our current world and threaten our future survival. In response to these destructive incursions on their ancestral lands, Indigenous peoples in the Americas and beyond have long been at the forefront of resistance movements against environmentally exploitative projects, engaged in an ongoing struggle that links Indigenous sovereignty with care for the natural world. In this interdisciplinary environmental studies and anthropology seminar, we will explore the humanistic concerns and ethics at stake regarding people’s role in ecosystems, our collective responsibility to protect the natural world, and our work toward environmental and climate justice as intimately linked to Indigenous ecological knowledge, governance, and rights. This course will include readings on Native American and Indigenous oral history and literature; land dispossession, displacement, and migration; ecological knowledge and practices; decolonizing food systems, agriculture, and sustainability; health, medicine, and healing; resistance movements and social alliances; and the intersections of Indigenous sovereignty, climate change, and environmental justice. We will explore Indigenous knowledge and decolonizing approaches as we re-envision an ethical path to a sustainable future that integrates environmental protection with social justice. This course will fully participate in the spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

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Black England: From Tudors to Two-Tone

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

In 1596, Elizabeth Tudor wrote to lord mayors of major English cities that there were “of late divers blackamoores brought into this realm, of which kind of people there are already here to manie…those kinde of people should be sente forth of the land.” A common myth about England is that it was a homogeneously white nation until Jamaicans and South Asians emigrated to Britain after World War II. Another myth is that there were no slaves held in England. As the above quotation indicates, free Black people were already settled there in the 16th century; and they were already the object of scapegoating for increasing poverty in the land at that time. The 17th century brought African slaves to England and, by the 19th century, the great ports of London, Bristol, and Liverpool were populated by West Africans (free and unfree); Lascars (Muslim sailors from east of the Cape of Good Hope); and seamen from Shanghai and Guangzhou, who created the first European China Town in the London Docks. In this class, we will investigate the multiracial nature of England from the Tudor era to the late 20th century. We will consider temporal moves between free and unfree lives and the role of free Africans in the abolition movement. Articulations of race, gender, and sexuality will be central, particularly as they play out in family formations and economic activities. We will wrestle with the absence of people of color in discourses about the English past and with contemporary constructions of racist stereotypes, such as the 19th-century trope of the Chinese opium den. Finally, we will engage with cultural explosions in music (reggae, ska, two-tone), film (Young Soul Rebels, Bend it Like Beckham, The Stuart Hall Project), and literature (Fathima Zahra, Aizaz Hussain, Paul Gilroy) created by second- and third-generation children of Commonwealth immigrants, particularly as they articulate with antiracism movements. Our hands-on class materials will be multidisciplinary (anthropology, history, literature) and multimedia, with a particular focus on visual images, audio, maps, and archival documents.

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Immigration and Identity

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

This seminar asks how contemporary immigration shapes individual and collective identity across the life course. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that bridges cross-cultural psychology, human development, and psychological anthropology, we will ask how people’s movement across borders and boundaries transforms their sense of self, as well as their interpersonal relations and connections to community. We will analyze how the experience of immigration is affected by the particular intersections of racial, ethnic, class, gender, generational, and other boundaries that immigrants cross. For example, how do undocumented youth navigate the constraints imposed by “illegalized” identities, and how do they come to construct new self-perceptions? How might immigrants acculturate or adapt to new environments, and how does the process of moving from home or living “in between” two or more places impact mental health? Through our close readings and seminar discussions on this topic, we seek to understand how different forms of power—implemented across realms, including state-sponsored surveillance and immigration enforcement, language and educational policy, health and social services—shape and constrain immigrants’ understanding of their place in the world and their experience of exclusion and belonging. In our exploration of identity, we will attend to the ways in which immigrants are left out of national narratives, as well as the ways in which people who move across borders draw on cultural resources to create spaces and practices of connection, protection, and continuity despite the disruptive effects of immigration. In tandem with our readings, we will welcome scholar-activist guest speakers, who will present their current work in the field.

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Public Humanities in Practice: The Hudson River Museum

Advanced, Small seminar—Spring

This small seminar will provide students with the opportunity to engage in community-based work at the Hudson River Museum. Much of our course work will be held on-site at the Hudson River Museum, where we’ll work together on a series of curatorial and public programming projects related to the Community and Partnerships Gallery. Students should have previous experience working in an arts or nonprofit setting, as much of our course work will be directly aimed at engaging the local community with the Hudson River Museum’s exhibitions, collections, and events. Ultimately, students will gain firsthand experience working in the fields of curation and community engagement, as well as in events planning.

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West African Dance

Component—Spring

This course will use physical embodiment as a mode of learning about and understanding various West African cultures. In addition to physical practice, supplementary study materials will be used to explore the breadth, diversity, history, and technique of dances found in West Africa. Traditional and social/contemporary dances from countries such as Guinea, Senegal, Mali, Ghana, and the Ivory Coast will be explored. Participation in end-of-semester or year-end showings will provide students with the opportunity to apply studies in a performative context.

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Hip-Hop

Component—Fall

In this open-level course, teaching and facilitating the practice of hip-hop/urban dance technique and performance, the class will examine the theory, technique, and vocabulary of hip-hop dance. The course will facilitate the student’s development and ability to execute and perform hip-hop/urban dance steps.

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Guest Artist Lab

Component—Year

This course is an experimental laboratory that aims to expose students to a diverse set of current voices and approaches to contemporary dance making. Each guest artist will lead a module of three-to-seven class sessions. These mini-workshops will introduce students to that artist and his/her creative process. Guests will present both emergent and established voices and a wide range of approaches to contemporary artistic practice.

Political Economy of Women

Open, Seminar—Year

What factors determine the status of women in different societies and communities? What role is played by women’s labor both inside and outside the home? By cultural norms regarding sexuality and reproduction? By religious traditions? After a brief theoretical grounding, this course will address these questions by examining the economic, political, social, and cultural histories of women in the various racial/ethnic and class groupings that make up the United States. Topics to be explored include: the role of women in Iroquois Confederation before white colonization and the factors that gave Iroquois women significant political and social power in their communities; the status of white colonist women in Puritan Massachusetts and the economic, religious, and other factors that led to the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692; the position of African American women under slavery, including the gendered and racialized divisions of labor and reproduction; the growth of competitive capitalism in the North and the development of the “cult of true womanhood” in the rising middle class; the economic and political changes that accompanied the Civil War and Reconstruction and the complex relationships between African American and white women in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements; the creation of a landless agricultural labor force and the attempts to assimilate Chicana women into the dominant culture via “Americanization” programs; the conditions that encouraged Asian women’s immigration and their economic and social positions once here; the American labor movement and the complicated role that organized labor has played in the lives of women of various racial/ethnic groups and classes; the impact of US colonial policies on Puerto Rican migration and Puerto Rican women’s economic and political status on both the island and the mainland; the economic/political convulsions of the 20th century—from the trusts of the early 1900s to World War II—and their impact on women’s paid and unpaid labor; the impact of changes in gendered economic roles on LGBT communities; the economic and political upheavals of the 1960s that led to the so-called “second wave” of the women’s movement; and the current position of women in the US economy and polity and the possibilities for more inclusive public policies concerning gender and family issues. In addition to class participation and the conference project, requirements include regular essays that synthesize class materials with the written texts.

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Migration and Climate Crisis

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

This interdisciplinary seminar in environmental studies and anthropology focuses on the interconnected social problems of migration and environmental crisis. Experts project that, in the coming decades, climate crisis will increasingly propel people to migrate as they flee extreme weather events and areas with depleted natural resources. As migrants in the Global South and in regions disproportionately affected by industrial extraction and environmental disaster face exceedingly untenable living conditions, both internal and international migration will continue to rise. While this prediction is often posed as a problem of the near future, displacement and forced migration are not new phenomena. Indeed, the close connections between industrial extractive economic projects, land dispossession, forced migration, and environmental crisis are evident in both past and present times. Through our course readings across environmental studies, anthropology, migration studies, and other relevant disciplines, we will focus on contemporary problems and their historical legacies to ask questions like: What is at stake for people impacted by climate change? How should we understand the relationship between environmental concerns and human mobility, both historically and now? What are the links between environmental racism, land rights, and migration? How might we analyze sociolegal processes, economic projects, and both local and international politics in relation to the natural world and the movement of people, problems, and ideas across borders? How does climate crisis affect particular groups, such as immigrants, Indigenous peoples, and other historically marginalized or disenfranchised communities? How might resistance movements focused on immigrant rights inform efforts toward climate justice, and vice versa? Our readings will address a wide variety of ethnographic contexts and geographic landscapes, taking us from the fishing villages of Ghana to the urban construction sites of Italy, from the highlands of Peru to the plains of Wyoming, from rural Yucatán to downtown San Francisco, and from Puerto Rico to New York, among other places. Students may opt to conduct original fieldwork or work with local organizations as part of their conference work for this course.

Faculty

Indigenous Ecologies and Environmental Justice

Open, Seminar—Spring

Native American and Indigenous peoples today protect 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity; and Indigenous ways of living in relation to the natural environment, in keeping with Indigenous ecological knowledge and practices, have sustained ecosystems for centuries. Yet, throughout history, settler colonial and industrial extractive projects have displaced native peoples and instigated the environmental crises that plague our current world and threaten our future survival. In response to these destructive incursions on their ancestral lands, Indigenous peoples in the Americas and beyond have long been at the forefront of resistance movements against environmentally exploitative projects and have engaged in an ongoing struggle that links Indigenous sovereignty with care for the natural world. In this interdisciplinary environmental studies and anthropology seminar, we will explore the humanistic concerns and ethics at stake regarding people’s role in ecosystems; our collective responsibility to protect the natural world; and our work toward environmental and climate justice as intimately linked to Indigenous ecological knowledge, governance, and rights. This course will include readings on Native American and Indigenous oral history and literature; land dispossession, displacement, and migration; ecological knowledge and practices; decolonizing food systems, agriculture, and sustainability; health, medicine, and healing; resistance movements and social alliances; and the intersections of Indigenous sovereignty, climate change, and environmental justice. We will explore Indigenous knowledge and decolonizing approaches, as we re-envision an ethical path to a sustainable future that integrates environmental protection with social justice. This course will fully participate in the spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

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First-Year Studies: Hollywood From the Margins

FYS—Year

In the last 10 years, a wave of online movements, sexual harassment cases, and studio worker strikes have exposed the systemic forces of exclusion and exploitation that shaped and still shape the US film industry. But how do we grapple critically with the ongoing material impact of Hollywood’s aura? What do we do with leftover myths and “beloved,” but horrifying, classics? Do we suppress them? Contextualize and critique them? Or disrupt their coherence and dismantle their authors by reappropriating them for art and other uses? This FYS seminar pairs 1930s-60s Hollywood films with novels, memoirs, essays, and experimental films about Hollywood to interrogate dominant narratives of film history and explore alternative modes to critique and reactivate classical Hollywood cinema. Course sessions will include a highly interdisciplinary introduction to the tools of film analysis, academic writing, and research, drawing on scholarship from across the humanities and a range of media—from films and texts to studio maps and fan magazines. During the first semester, we will reframe the history of the dream factory by deflating the romance of the male auteur and highlighting the role of marginalized labor on the studio lot. Starting with singular individuals with exceptional careers— like Dorothy Arzner, the studio system’s lone female director, and Anna May Wong, the first Asian American movie star—we will move on to culturally invisible studio workers: cutter girls, leader ladies, secretaries, extras, stunt doubles, custodians, and voice actors. During the second semester, our focus will shift from workers to spectator perspectives and experiences marginalized by the film industry, highlighting film criticism and experimental films by female, POC, and queer scholars and artists that propose subversive tools to change how we view and interpret classical Hollywood films. Topics to be discussed during the second semester include fan studies, gossip as film history, segregated storytelling, queer Hollywood “dream texts,” and “oppositional” Black looks. During the fall semester, students will meet biweekly with the instructor for individual conferences, alternating with small group conferences dedicated to writing, hands-on research, and fieldwork: We will learn how to use the library, analyze media ephemera, explore SLC’s 16mm film collection, and take field trips to local film archives and museums. In the spring, conferences will continue to take place biweekly without the alternating group conferences.

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The Movie Musical

Open, Lecture—Spring

Long dismissed as shallow mass entertainment, the movie musical remains an understudied genre despite its century-long popularity, global scope, and recurring role in film history. This lecture course offers a layered cultural history of the movie musical from the 1920s to the present, approaching it as a uniquely intermedial, transnational perspective from which to study film. Students will learn to read movie musicals through a mixture of formal analysis and material history. We will read canonical scholars, as well as more recent multidisciplinary work on the movie musical as a site for ideological contestation; performance politics; and aesthetic, narrative, and technological experimentation. In particular, we will highlight the genre’s power for hiding labor behind spectacles of seemingly spontaneous mass performance and rehearsing modern social conflicts through heterosexual couple-driven, dual-focus plots (Jets vs. Sharks, town vs. city, etc.). Other topics include: the roots of the movie musical in vaudeville, minstrelsy, opera, and ballet; the musical’s relationship to new cinematic technologies, labor forms, and industrial practices; the musical’s relationship to questions of gender, sexuality, and race; and the musical as a globally circulating and mutating “mass” cultural form. While much of our focus will be on classical Hollywood (1920s-1960s), we will also watch films from France, the Soviet Union, England, East Germany, Mexico, India, and Australia.

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Feminist Film History

Open, Seminar—Fall

What happened to women in the silent-film industry? Why are there so few female voiceovers and so many plucky secretaries in classical Hollywood films? Should dead starlets be revived as feminist icons? Can dominant aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” or feminist filmmaking techniques? How do you uncover invisible or suppressed histories? This seminar offers an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film studies by retracing film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. While our focus will be on US and European films and scholarship from the Silent Era to the end of the 20th century, students are encouraged to pursue conference projects on feminist movements, films, and film theory from any era or any part of the world. Screenings will highlight a mixture of obscure and canonical films, and readings will cover a multidisciplinary range of feminist film scholarship—from psychoanalytic film theory to media archaeology and cyberfeminism. Topics to be discussed include women at the origins of film, women’s work onscreen and on the studio lot, the male gaze and spectacular female stars of classical cinema, fan culture and gendered genres, second-wave feminism and the French New Wave, race and Technicolor, lesbian representability, and feminist authorship as political practice.

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Intermediate French I (Section 2): Scène(s) de littérature

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

This course will offer a systematic review of French grammar and is designed to strengthen and deepen students’ mastery of grammatical structures and vocabulary. Students will also learn to begin to use linguistic concepts as tools for developing their analytic writing. Over the course of the year, we will study a series of scenes from French and francophone literature from its origins to today. From the 11th-century Chanson de Roland and 12th-century “lais” and fables of Marie de France to 20th-century works by Aimé Césaire, Aminata Sow-Fall and Annie Ernaux, we will look at scenes specific to literature. What is it about literary scenes that differs from those created in other media? And what happens when we encounter them as part of a class rather than on our own? Where possible, our discussion will include points of comparison with scenes in visual media such as theatre and photography. Readings will include excerpts from Marie de Rabutin-Chantal (Madame de Sévigné), Madame de La Fayette, Gustave Flaubert, or Léon-Gontran Damas. At regular intervals, we will also study the headlines of Libération, a major Parisian daily. In this part of the course, we will consider the way climate change, food, or secularism are discussed, as well as aesthetic and ethical choices in presenting the news. In addition to conferences, a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant(e) is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. The Intermediate I and II courses in French are specially designed to help prepare students for studying in Paris with Sarah Lawrence College during their junior year.

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First-Year Studies: “We Carry It Within Us”: Culture and Politics in US History, 1776–1980

FYS—Year

“History is not merely something to read,” James Baldwin wrote in August 1965. “And it does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all we do.” This course is focused not only on history— what we consciously and unconsciously carry within us—but also on the acquisition of skills that will help you both as a college student and in life. Using the voices of the actors themselves, we will study the political and cultural work of Americans in order to read better, think better, write better, and articulate our ideas better. Rather than a representative survey of cultural history (which is, in this wonderfully diverse country, impossible), this course takes up the popular and the obscure, looking into the corners of American life for ideas, thoughts, and experiences of all kinds. Our focus will be on the themes of gender, race, and class but also will ponder sexuality, region, religion, immigration, and migration, among other themes. The course will be based on a spine of political history. The expectation is that you will come with some knowledge and will be attentive to what you do not know and then find out about it! Class will revolve around close readings of stories, cultural criticism, speeches, novels, memoir—mostly, but not exclusively, published sources—where authors work to change the minds of their readers. Those primary sources will be buttressed by articles and chapters from history textbooks. It will be challenging! This course will ask you to read more substantial work more carefully than perhaps you have before. We will discuss this work in seminar in both small groups and large; and at the end of each semester, there will be an oral exhibition pulling together the themes of the course in a meaningful way. This intellectual practice will ready you for your college career to come. In the fall, we will cover the period from the late-18th century to the late-19th; in the spring, we will move from the turn into the 20th century to near its end. Texts will include short stories, poetry, memoir, letters, and (in the spring) film. Examples in the first semester include Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the seduction novel Charlotte Temple by Suzanna Rowson, poetry by Phillis Wheatley, an unpublished novel on gender fluidity titled The Hermaphrodite by Julia Ward Howe, short stories by Herman Melville, Hospital Sketches by Louisa May Alcott, and Ragged Dick, by Horatio Alger. The spring book list will reflect the interests of the students. Writing will be ample and consistent—thought pieces, along with short essays—with regular feedback so that you grow as a reader and writer. The subject of conference work can range widely within US cultural and political history: in the fall, to 1890; in the spring, all the way to the present. Along the way, we will try to make sense of the way we carry history, the way that it is present in all that we do. Conferences will be weekly until October Study Days, with the option of being biweekly thereafter.

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Documenting Asian America

Open, Seminar—Fall

This course will introduce students to the major themes and methods of Asian American cultural studies. Each week, we will revisit a key “site” of Asian American history—the sugarcane plantation, the shoreline, the railroad, the internment camp, and the protest—and explore how Asians in America have differently documented themselves in relation to these spaces through art and literature. We will ask questions, including: How might a poem, photograph, or film differently represent the experience of migration? What common images emerge in the literature and art surrounding a particular historical event? What power or authority does the “documentary” hold in relaying the lived experiences of Asians in America? In answering these questions, course discussions will center on themes of memory, testimony, identity, and the power of representation. The course will also include field trips to area collections in documentary photography and filmmaking. Other assignments will include visual and literary analysis essays and creative-writing responses, as well as a curatorial project where students will have the opportunity to research Asian American documentarians and pitch artworks for exhibition at the Hudson River Museum.

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The Middle East and the Politics of Collective Memory: Between Trauma and Nostalgia

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

In recent decades, historians have become increasingly interested in the unique role and power of memory in public life and have sought to understand the innumerable ways that collective memory has been constructed, experienced, used, abused, debated, and reshaped. This course will focus on the rich literature on historical memory within the field of modern Middle Eastern history in order to explore a number of key questions: What is the relationship between history and memory? How are historical events interpreted and rendered socially meaningful? How is public knowledge about the past shaped and propagated? How and why—and in what contexts—do particular ways of seeing and remembering the past become attached to various political projects? Particular attention will be paid to the following topics: the role of memory in the Palestine-Israel “conflict”; postcolonial state-building and “official memory”; debates over national remembering, forgetting, and reconstruction following the Lebanese Civil War; Middle Eastern diaspora formation and exilic identity; the myth of a “golden age” of Arab nationalism; Turkish nostalgia for the Ottoman imperial past; and the role of museums, holidays, and other commemorative practices in the construction of the national past across the region. Throughout the course, we will attend to the complex interplay between individual and collective memory (and “counter-memory”), particularly as this has played out in several formulations of Middle Eastern nationalism.

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Imperialism and Servitude: Slave Rebellions in Greek and Roman History

Open, Seminar—Spring

The ancient historians of Greece and Rome have related many examples of slave rebellions to posterity. These stories tend to appear in the context of struggles to control newly acquired wealth and power from successful conquest and imperialist policies. In this course, we will focus on slave rebellions in two historical epochs. First, we will examine historical evidence on slavery in Athens and Sparta, famous Greek city-states in the period inclusive of the Persian and the Peloponnesian Wars. The second era is the Roman Republic in the final two centuries BCE when, as powerful factions struggled for power over Rome’s newly conquered wealth and territory, major slave rebellions spread from Sicily to other Roman spheres of influence—and, finally, to Italy itself in the famous Spartacus rebellion. In this course, we will read selections of the surviving historiography, in English translation, by authors such as Thucydides, Plutarch, Sallust, and Diodorus Siculus, among others. We will also read secondary scholarship discussing some of the many controversies on these topics, such as the theoretical constructs of slavery, ideologies of rebel slaves, the perspectives of historians ancient and modern, conditions favorable to revolt, and the reception of stories of rebellion in later centuries, to name a few. Assignments will include regular low-stakes writing practice, as well as a class presentation and a major conference project. Conference work may take the form of traditional papers or a digital humanities project.

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Nationalism

Sophomore and Above, Large seminar—Spring

This course provides a broad historical and theoretical inquiry into the phenomenon of nationalism—one of the most enduring ideological constructs of modern society. Indeed, the organization of the globe into a world of bordered territorial nation-states—each encapsulating a unique social identity—is such a taken-for-granted feature of contemporary geopolitics that it is easy to forget that nations did not exist for most of human history and that nationalism dates back only to the mid-to-late 1700s. And yet, despite many predictions of its imminent demise at different moments in history—Albert Einstein quipped, famously, that nationalism was an “infantile disease” that humanity would eventually outgrow—nationalism remains, perhaps, as powerful an ideological force as ever in the United States as elsewhere. This course will examine a range of foundational questions about the emergence of nations and nationalism in world history: What is a nation, and how has national identity been cultivated, defined, and debated in different contexts? Why did nationalism emerge when it did? Who does nationalism benefit, and how do different social groups compete for control over national identity and ideology? How and why did nationalism become such a vital feature of anticolonial political movements beginning in the late-19th century? Is nationalism fundamentally a negative force—violent and exclusionary—or is it necessary for forging cohesive social bonds among diverse and far-flung populations? The course will begin with the emergence of nations and nationalism in Western Europe but will then move on to explore its evolution and spread to all parts of the globe, exploring a number of case studies along the way. The course will conclude with a brief survey of the state of nationalist politics today, with a particular emphasis on Brexit and white nationalism in the United States.

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Feminist and Queer Waves: Reading Canon in Context

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

In Waves, we’ll move backward through feminist and queer time, as we revisit “classic” pieces within their original historical contexts. We will locate theory in place and time, naming how they respond to specific political, intellectual, and social exigencies. Our goal is to read these texts with close attention and care, asking how they reflect the urgent desires and needs of multiple overlapping communities. The texts represent a large breadth of topics, disciplines, and values of feminist and queer thought and are far from exhaustive history of any of these conversations. Likewise, our authors—folks such as Joshua Chambers-Letson, Saidiya Hartman, Martin Manalansan, Jennifer Nash, Claudia Rankine, Gayle Rubin, Eve Sedgwick, and Barbara Smith—each write from the specifics of their own experience, offering frequently contradictory arguments about the way the world does—and should—work. Together, we’ll build narratives about queer and feminist theoretical history that honor these complexities. We’ll build a co-authored public website that will house a timeline, theory cloud, and a digital exhibit of images from your archival research. You’ll be responsible for curating discussion for one class period. For your final conference work, you’ll conduct an independent project at either the Yonkers Public Library or the Sarah Lawrence College Archives, with an optional opportunity to help curate a final community event in spring 2024. As an interdisciplinary theory course, expect to draw on theory from gender and sexuality studies; LGBT studies; and Africana studies.

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Cold War Black Feminism

Open, Lecture—Fall

When Black feminist writing boomed in the 1970s, the United States was squarely in the middle of the Cold War. Accordingly, Audre Lorde decried the United States invasion of Grenada, June Jordan railed against the Vietnam War, and Assata Shakur penned her autobiography in asylum in Cuba. Yet, Black feminism has primarily been considered a domestic affair. How might we better understand Black feminist literature by reading it in the context of the Cold War? This course aims to answer this question first by reading proto-Black feminist authors writing in the early Cold War and then returning to the famous authors of Black feminism to consider their portrait of international affairs. Authors may include Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Pat Parker, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and others. Along the way, we will read recent scholarship to understand the historical context in which those texts were written. In so doing, we aim to better understand the Cold War’s effect on Black feminism and what those canonical texts of Black feminism can tell us about American foreign policy. Short assignments may include brief historical essays, short close readings, and response papers.

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Double Thoughts and Double Consciousness: Russian and African American Literature

Open, Large seminar—Fall

The Russian and African American literary traditions are marked by intersections as well as by affinities. As the African American press was already well aware in the 19th century, the great Russian poet and founder of the Russian literary tradition, Alexander Pushkin, was of partly African descent—a fact that he celebrated in his own writing. As, again, both Russians and African Americans recognized, the parallel institutions of serfdom and slavery ended at almost the same time: Serfs in Russia were emancipated in 1861; slaves in the United States, in 1863. In the 20th century, the Soviet experiment proved enormously appealing for African Americans seeking to escape the limitations of American racism; and, while Soviet writers explored issues of blackness, Black Americans traveled to the USSR. As significant as these points of intersection are, the two traditions are most strikingly marked by a similarly complicated approach to literary identity—what Fyodor Dostoevsky called “double thoughts” and W. E. B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.” Just as African American writers in the 20th century wrote from a position on the margins of American culture, so Russians in the 19th century wrote from the edge of a European tradition that didn’t—and, in many respects, still doesn’t—include them. Besides Pushkin, Dostoevsky, and Du Bois, writers/cultural figures considered in this class will include Nikolai Gogol, Edward P. Jones, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Paul Robeson. Note: As part of this “large seminar,” students will meet for biweekly conference in groups of three-to-five to pursue a course of reading intended to extend and deepen our class work. While students will be invited to offer their own suggestions, topics for small-group conferences might include: Serfdom and Slavery (Peter Kochin, Orlando Patterson, serf and slave narratives); Folk Authenticity (Gogol, I. S. Turgenev, Charles Chesnutt, Hurston); Black Americans and Red Russia (Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, the 1936 Soviet film Circus, M. I. Tsvetaeva, M. A. Bulgakov); Russian Revolution and Utopian Dreams (N. G. Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, A. Platonov); More Dostoevsky and/or Dostoevsky in other comparative contexts, including Richard Wright and French Existentialism; War and Peace and Russian identity; Ukraine/Eastern Europe Writes Back (A. Kurkov, S. Zhadan, E. Belorusets, O. Tokarczuk, S. Alexeivich, V. Martinowich)....

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Documenting Asian America

Open, Seminar—Fall

This course will introduce students to the major themes and methods of Asian American cultural studies. Each week, we will revisit a key “site” of Asian American history—the sugarcane plantation, the shoreline, the railroad, the internment camp, and the protest—and explore how Asians in America have differently documented themselves in relation to those spaces through art and literature. We will ask questions, including: How might a poem, photograph, or film differently represent the experience of migration? What common images emerge in the literature and art surrounding a particular historical event? What power or authority does the “documentary” hold in relaying the lived experiences of Asians in America? In answering these questions, course discussions will center on themes of memory, testimony, identity, and the power of representation. The course will also include field trips to area collections in documentary photography and filmmaking. Other assignments will include visual and literary analysis essays and creative-writing responses, as well as a curatorial project where students will have the opportunity to research Asian American documentarians and pitch artworks for exhibition at the Hudson River Museum.

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Bedford Hills: African American Prison Literature

Open, Seminar—Spring

This class combines Sarah Lawrence students and students from the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility; all class sessions and conference meetings will take place at Bedford. Consequently, all students must be at least 21 years of age.

From Frederick Douglass’ description of his time incarcerated, through Angela Davis’ representations of prisons in the 1970s, to Tayari Jones’ award-winning An American Marriage, the prison as an institution has long loomed large in the African American literary tradition. How, then, has incarceration shaped African American literature? And how has African American literature sought to represent the prison? This course seeks to answer these questions by proceeding chronologically, beginning with narratives of incarceration pre-Emancipation like those of Abraham Johnstone. We continue through accounts of convict leasing in the late 19th-century and mid-20th-century representations of incarceration by social realist authors like Richard Wright. We turn to Black feminist and Black arts representations of the prison by authors such as James Baldwin, Etheridge Knight, and more. And we end with the contemporary, considering how recent accounts of incarceration descend from a longer lineage of African American prison writing. Along the way, we will think closely about the relationship between legal citizenship, gender, race, sexuality, class and the prison. Additionally, throughout the course, short writing assignments aim to hone our skills as analysts.

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The Atlantic Is a Sea of Bones: Black Literature of the Ocean

Open, Seminar—Spring

From Olaudah Equiano’s 18th-century recounting of the Middle Passage through John Akomfrah’s 21st-century cinematic representations juxtaposing whaling with slavery, the Atlantic Ocean has loomed large in cultural production by Black artists, directors, and writers across the world. It is at once the site of the past trauma of the transatlantic slave trade and the ongoing trauma of rising tides, of the freedom offered Black mariners like Frederick Douglass and transatlantic intellectuals like Richard Wright and Stuart Hall, and more. This course will seek to unpack this tangled knot, to understand what role the ocean has played in Black thought and to consider what Black thought might offer to the ongoing climate crisis by engaging with representations of the Atlantic in visual art, literature, and film by Black cultural producers across the world. Beyond those named above, authors and artists may include Zora Neale Hurston, C. L. R. James, Mati Diop, M. Nourbese Philip, Abdulruzak Gurnah, and others. Additionally, this course will fully participate in the spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

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Music, Structure, and Power: Theories of Musical Meaning

Open, Lecture—Fall

How do we listen to unfamiliar music? What ideas, principles, and ideologies influence how we hear? What do the sounds of music tell us about society? This course explores the practice of music theory and the search for musical meaning, with examples from around the world. We will describe unfamiliar music and then understand it by using various approaches to translate its meaning. Course themes include musical and cultural differences, the relativism of musical perception, structuralist approaches to music theory, the politics of representation, decolonizing music history, and others. Course units will draw from varied ethnographic case studies from ethnomusicology and anthropology and may include examples from India, Indonesia, China, East Africa, West Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. Participation in the Balinese Gamelan music ensemble is strongly encouraged. No prior experience in music is necessary.

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Sounding Voices and Voicing Sound: Musical and Sonic Interventions of Climate Justice

Open, Seminar—Spring

How do human voices express our basic, most fundamental needs and desires? How do our voices also provoke immediate feelings and responses? And how do voices become ideologies—such as having or silencing a voice—that then shape the meanings of our voices? In this seminar, we will use these questions to forge a productive path toward better understanding the role of the human voice in climate justice. We will begin the course with canonical sources that link music with social justice. Then, we will engage recent research from sound studies, voice studies, media studies, vocal anthropology, ecomusicology, and ethnomusicology that reorients the voice and its sonic elements as a dynamically agentive and transformative force intertwined with history and culture. And then, we will apply our new understanding of the voice to better describe, analyze, and interpret vocal art that enables us to hear a new relationship with our environment. Throughout the semester, we will index a range of approaches, themes, and persuasive strategies of these activist, vocal interventions addressing climate change in order to articulate and clarify the role of music and sound in climate justice. Class topics and themes may include the speech-song continuum, phonetic variation and prosody, Bollywood playback singing, indigeneity and vocality, vocal mimesis, Tuvan throat singing, multivocality, vocal constructions of place and the environment, and others. No prior experience in music is necessary. This course will fully participate in the spring 2024 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster, with a focus on environmental and climate justice and a strong involvement with local organizations. The semester will include two interludes during which students will engage in collaborative projects across disciplines and in partnership with students from Bronx Community College. Students will have the opportunity to develop field-based conference projects.

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All Politics Is Local!

Open, Seminar—Spring

The cry that “All politics is local!,” popularized in the 1990s, pointed out that voters were often motivated by matters of daily life rather than abstract national issues. Candidates could get more votes by creating jobs at the local factory, it claimed, than by ending a long-running war. In the present political environment, the phrase’s meaning has changed. Major national issues of the day—as wide-ranging as book bans, policing, and environmental protection—are themselves matters of local life and community survival. The questions they raise about morality and democracy no longer seem abstract but urgent. In this context, local political organizing has gained special importance as the site where moral struggles are playing out, often in quiet, long-running projects away from the news cameras. The seminar will take students inside the Westchester People’s Action Coalition (WESPAC) to study local politics and learn directly from organizers. How do local communities draw on larger national debates to build power and achieve change? How do organizers narrate local issues in terms of “abstract” values—like shared responsibility to each other, the planet, and the future—to campaign for policies that seek to change the way we live? Students will tailor much of this course to their interests, pursuing a conference project on one local issue area either working with WESPAC or independently. (Likely possibilities include racial justice, decarceration, police accountability, Indian Point, worker cooperatives, public banking, Middle East policy, and social-forum organizing.) If students choose, they may do some classwork on-site with WESPAC organizers.

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Sex Is Not a Natural Act: Social Science Explorations of Human Sexuality

Open, Lecture—Fall

When is sex NOT a natural act? Every time a human engages in sexual activity. In sex, what is done by whom, with whom, where, when, why, and with what has very little to do with biology. Human sexuality poses a significant challenge in theory. The study of its disparate elements (biological, social, and individual/psychological) is inherently an interdisciplinary undertaking; from anthropologists to zoologists, all add something to our understanding of sexual behaviors and meanings. In this class, we will study sexualities in social contexts across the lifespan, from infancy to old age. Within each period, we will examine biological, social, and psychological factors that inform the experience of sexuality for individuals. We will also examine broader aspects of sexuality, including sexual health and sexual abuse. Conference projects may range from empirical research to a bibliographic research project. Service learning may also be supported in this class.

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Intersectionality Research Seminar

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Year

This class is a hands-on introduction to conducting qualitative and quantitative psychological research on the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Although research is an indispensable part of scientific endeavors, the conduct of research itself is part scientific ritual and part art form. In this class, we will learn both the science and the art of conducting ethical research with diverse participants. What is the connection of race, sexuality, and gender within an American multicultural and multiethnic society? Is there a coherent, distinct, and continuous self existing within our postmodern, paradigmatic, etc. contexts? How is the sexual/racial/gendered implicated in the creation of this self-identity? Is there principled dynamic or developmental change in our concepts of self as human beings, sexual beings, and/or racial/ethnic beings? This course explores the analysis of race, ethnicity, and sexualities within psychology and the broader social sciences; how those constructs implicitly and explicitly inform psychological inquiry; and the effects of those constructs on the “psychology” of the individual in context. The course regularly moves beyond psychology to take a broader, social-science perspective on the issue of intersectionality.

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Culture and Mental Health

Open, Seminar—Fall

This interdisciplinary psychology and anthropology seminar will address mental health in diverse cultural contexts, drawing upon a range of case studies to illuminate the causes, symptoms, diagnosis, course, and treatment of mental illness across the globe. We open the course by exploring questions of the classification of mental illness to address whether Western psychiatric categories apply across different local contexts. We explore the globalization of American understandings of the psyche, the exportation of Western mental disorders, and the impact of psychiatric imperialism in places like Sri Lanka, Zanzibar, Oaxaca, and Japan. Through our readings of peer-reviewed articles and current research in cultural psychology, clinical psychology, and psychological, psychiatric, and medical anthropology, we explore conditions such as depression and anxiety, schizophrenia, autism, susto, and mal de ojo in order to understand the entanglements of psychological experience, culture, morality, sociality, and care. We explore how diagnostic processes and psychiatric care are, at times, differentially applied in the United States according to clients’ race/ethnicity, class, and gender. Finally, we explore the complexities of recovery or healing, addressing puzzles such as why certain mental disorders considered to be lifelong, chronic, and severe in some parts of the world are interpreted as temporary, fleeting, and manageable elsewhere—and how such expectations influence people’s ability to experience wellness or (re-)integration into family, work, and society. Several of our key authors will join us as invited guest speakers to talk about their current work. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course.

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Immigration and Identity

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

This seminar asks how contemporary immigration shapes individual and collective identity across the life course. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach that bridges cross-cultural psychology, human development, and psychological anthropology, we will ask how people’s movement across borders and boundaries transforms their sense of self, as well as their interpersonal relations and connections to community. We will analyze how the experience of immigration is affected by the particular intersections of racial, ethnic, class, gender, generational, and other boundaries that immigrants cross. For example, how do undocumented youth navigate the constraints imposed by “illegalized” identities, and how do they come to construct new self-perceptions? How might immigrants acculturate or adapt to new environments, and how does the process of moving from home or living “in-between” two or more places impact mental health? Through our close readings and seminar discussions on this topic, we will seek to understand how different forms of power—implemented across realms, including state-sponsored surveillance and immigration enforcement, language and educational policy, health and social services—shape and constrain immigrants’ understanding of their place in the world and their experience of exclusion and belonging. In our exploration of identity, we will attend to the ways in which immigrants are left out of national narratives, as well as the ways in which people who move across borders draw on cultural resources to create spaces and practices of connection, protection, and continuity despite the disruptive effects of immigration. In tandem with our readings, we will welcome scholar-activist guest speakers, who will present their current work in the field.

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Environmental Policy, Racism, and Social Justice

Open, Lecture—Year

In April 2014, the residents of Flint, Michigan, noticed something was wrong with their water. Residents of the predominantly Black city reported discolored, putrid water that produced skin rashes and even hair loss. While city officials insisted that residents had nothing to be concerned about, further testing revealed high levels of lead and bacteria, the effects of which we will see for generations to come. Flint, Michigan, reignited a national conversation about the relationship of our physical environment, race, and social (dis)ability in the United States. These themes will be central to this yearlong lecture, which investigates several questions: What is the relationship between the physical environment and our bodies? How does environmental policy affect and produce social disabilities? How do built environments shape experiences of disabilities? We will discuss these questions using both historical and contemporary lenses. Our analysis begins with an exploration of the United States’ history of imperialism, segregation, and redlining to investigate how these endeavors have shaped its natural and built environment. We will then examine how the ghosts of these histories shape contemporary environmental policies and to what degree this legacy has produced different forms of social disability. Throughout these discussions, we will attend to several themes, including: how racial hierarchies shape environmental injustice, how our built environments both produce and shape experiences of marginalization, and how those experiences are addressed by communities of color and environmental justice movements. Throughout the year, group conferences will help students build and strengthen methodological skills. In the fall, students are expected to submit a research proposal, including: a topic related to an environmental issue of interest, corresponding research questions, and a review of relevant literature. In the spring, students will use their proposals to build a research portfolio that empirically and theoretically explores their topic. Portfolios should include an analysis of descriptive statistics, qualitative data of the student’s choosing, and an essay connecting findings to the lecture’s theoretical discussions.

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Social Movements and Powerful Art: Aesthetics of Authority and Resistance

Open, Seminar—Spring

Using US-based artist Sarah Sze’s remark, “Great protests are great art works,” as its inspiration, this seminar explores the relationship between art, collective ideas, and social change within the context of social movements. We begin by discussing the relationship between aesthetics and the social sciences, focusing on a sociological notion of art as a collective and inherently social process. Our study includes the work of social theorists Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Theodor Adorno, whose works not only illuminate how public culture communicates collective ideas but also how the latter is imbricated with existing power structures and social hierarchies. These critical frameworks will help us investigate the modern art world, exploring how artistic institutions and movements are sites that both perpetuate and resist authoritative ideologies. In the second half of the semester, students will use these frameworks to explore the role of culture and art within collective social movements. We will investigate several questions, including: What defines a social movement and what social conditions produce social movements? How are art and aesthetics used within social movements to communicate ideas and strengthen communities? In what ways do movements deploy art as a form of social resistance or authority? Our discussions will particularly attend to grassroots movements within historically marginalized communities. Throughout the semester, students will also learn about the benefits of visual methodologies and how social scholars use them to understand collective culture and social change. For conference, students will select a specific social movement, exploring how art is deployed within the movement for collective resistance or control. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) critical analysis of an artistic institution, comparative analysis of how different contexts of resistance deploy shared artistic mediums, or the use of art within a given movement over time. While class discussions will primarily focus on the United States, students are also invited to explore the relationship between art and social movements in other social locations.

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First-Year Studies: Islam, Muslims, and America

FYS—Year

When presidential candidate Donald Trump said, “I think Islam hates us,” and called for a ban on Muslims entering the United States, his words echoed and amplified the confusions and prejudices of many Americans. Paradoxically, once Trump became president, his first international visit was to Saudi Arabia—and photos show him holding hands with King Salman as they walked together. The disconnect between Trump’s words and actions was consistent with the long and complicated history that the United States has had with Islam and Muslims. Thomas Jefferson was intrigued by the Qur’an and Islamic law and argued that Muslims should be eligible for American citizenship, yet he remained silent about the enslaved Muslims working on his own plantation. The hypothetical Muslim worked well for Jefferson’s argument for freedom of religion in the new country but did little for actual Muslims living in America. Enslaved Africans were brought involuntarily to this country and were forcibly kept from practicing their religion. Many of their descendants began to rediscover Islam in the early 20th century and were joined by an increasing number of Muslim immigrants after the Immigration and Nationality Act ended racial quotas on immigration in 1965. Along the way, converts with European ancestry added their numbers, as Muslims became the most diverse religious community in the United States. Although Muslims currently comprise only 1% of the American population today, their significance goes well beyond their numbers. From Thomas Jefferson, to Malcolm X, to the post 9/11 era, perceptions about Muslims have functioned as barometers of deep social and political anxieties. To carefully examine these anxieties is to expose major fault lines in the domestic and foreign policies of the United States. In this class, we’ll explore these tensions but will also look at the variety of ways in which Muslim Americans have flourished in America and contributed substantially to its intellectual and creative heritage. Material studied throughout the year will include examples from the rich body of American Muslim memoirs, social and political critique, theology, literature, poetry, and art. During the fall semester, students will meet with the instructor weekly for individual conferences. In the spring, conferences will take place on a biweekly basis.

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People of the Book: Jews and Literature

Open, Seminar—Fall

Across the ages, Jews have maintained an intimate relationship with the written word. From the destruction of the Second Temple through the chaos of modernity, reading and writing have grounded and animated Jewish life and practice. Together, we will embark on an examination of critical Jewish and human issues mediated through short stories, novels, and plays. By exploring the deep textual history embedded within Jewish culture, we will wrestle with topics as varied as romantic love and marriage, the encroachment of the secular world, cross-cultural conflict and exchange, and evolving concepts of gender and sexuality. Alongside our literary journey, we will engage with an array of artistic adaptations like music, film, and visual art. Accompanied by authors—including Yiddish luminaries Sholem Aleichem and Sholem Asch, American pioneers Philip Roth and Anzia Yezierska, and more recent visionaries Etgar Keret, Tony Kushner, and Dara Horn—we will interrogate the many ways that Jews both accommodated and broke convention.

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Documenting Jewish Lives: Past as Prologue

Open, Seminar—Fall

Time: a concept that has stymied many readers, authors, and thinkers alike. Measuring change over time, however, is central to Jewish thought and practice, as well as to the historian’s craft. From weeks to months, season to season, and across the stages of the lifecycle, Jews have historically engaged with time religiously, spiritually, philosophically, and practically. Human life, when mediated through the written word, leads to a rich portrayal of life's internal complexities and inconsistencies. In this class, we will attend to the poetics of time as it shapes human lives and to human lives as they shape the poetics of time. Specifically, we will explore Jewish lives, defined broadly, to examine the intricacies of everyday experience, innermost thoughts and feelings, and interactions with the Jewish and non-Jewish world. Beginning with Baruch Spinoza, the infamous Jewish maverick, and time-traveling forward through a selection of biographies, memoirs, and fiction to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the notorious Jewish jurist, we will pursue our quest to discern—and tell anew—what makes a Jewish life.

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Jews of New York

Open, Seminar—Spring

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.” So wrote Sephardic New York Jew Emma Lazarus in 1883, putting her stamp on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and forever intertwining Jewish history with the professed American ideals of freedom, equality, and inclusivity. Whether as insult, compliment, or casual observation, the conflation of Jews and New York has become permanently entrenched in the American imagination. But how did we get from 23 Jewish refugees landing in New Amsterdam in 1654 to the New York City of Streisand, Sondheim, and Seinfeld? This course will explore 370 years of Jewish history steeped in the urban environs of the Empire State that millions elected to call home. From Lyman Bloomingdale’s retail empire to Mount Sinai Hospital’s pioneering medical research and from the groundbreaking literature of Chaim Potok to the feminist and queer activism of “Battling Bella” Abzug, the Jewish footprints on the streets and avenues of the city remain readily apparent. We will examine socialist Jews who demanded a brighter future for all, working-class Jewish women who rioted over the exorbitant price of kosher meat, and Jewish radicals who broadened the parameters of religious observance. Recognizing New York as the crucible of United States citizenship and a major center of the Jewish world, we will interrogate how—from generation to generation—the Jews shaped New York and New York shaped the Jews.

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Jewish Mystics, Rabble-Rousers, and Heretics

Open, Seminar—Spring

Does God exist? How should one read the Bible? Who should read the Bible? How can humans connect with the Divine? How does Judaism relate to social justice? How do we reconcile the dichotomy of reason and revelation? What makes one Jewish? What does it mean to live Jewishly? These questions—and still others—represent but a smattering of those with which the Jews whom we will study have grappled, both philosophically and practically, throughout history. From the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria to the musical spirituality of Debbie Friedman and with a host of radical thinkers, rule-breakers, and religious innovators in between, this class will explore the myriad ways in which Jewish luminaries have broken with convention and disrupted the status quo. These individuals provide a lens into the humanity that undergirds the Jewish thought and ritual that, on the one hand, we take for granted and that, on the other, shocks or even appalls us. Drawing from an array of historical sources—including philosophical treatises, religious texts, and literary classics—we will explore how those Jewish pathbreakers have engaged with these questions across the ages and, in turn, offer our own responses.

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Environmental Policy, Racism, and Social Justice

Open, Lecture—Year

In April 2014, the residents of Flint, Michigan, noticed that something was wrong with their water. Residents of the predominantly Black city reported discolored, putrid water that produced skin rashes and even hair loss. While city officials insisted that residents had nothing to be concerned about, further testing revealed high levels of lead and bacteria, the effects of which we will see for generations to come. Flint, Michigan, reignited a national conversation about the relationship between our physical environment, race, and social (dis)ability in the United States. These themes will be central to this yearlong lecture, which investigate several questions: What is the relationship between the physical environment and our bodies? How does environmental policy affect and produce social disabilities? How do built environments shape experiences of disabilities? We will discuss these questions using both historical and contemporary lenses. Our analysis begins with an exploration of the United States’ history of imperialism, segregation, and redlining to investigate how these endeavors have shaped its natural and built environment. We will then examine how the ghosts of these histories shape contemporary environmental policies and to what degree this legacy has produced different forms of social disability. Throughout these discussions, we will attend to several themes, including how racial hierarchies shape environmental injustice, how our built environments both produce and shape experiences of marginalization, and how those experiences are addressed by communities of color and environmental justice movements. Throughout the year, group conferences will help students build and strengthen methodological skills. In the fall, students are expected to submit a research proposal, including a topic related to an environmental issue of interest, corresponding research questions, and a review of relevant literature. In the spring, students will use their proposals to build a research portfolio that empirically and theoretically explores their topic. Portfolios should include an analysis of descriptive statistics, qualitative data of the student’s choosing, and an essay connecting findings to the lecture’s theoretical discussions.

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Sociological Theory

Open, Lecture—Fall

By covering both “classical” and “contemporary” sociological theories, this course is designed to provide students with a well-rounded understanding of sociological thought and its evolution. The main objective of the course is to introduce theoretical perspectives within sociology and how those theories have shaped the boundaries of the discipline. We will begin by exploring the concept of “sociological imagination.” Building upon that preliminary understanding, we will examine certain core sociological concepts such as class, race, gender, culture, power, institutions, and identity. While recognizing the lasting impact of sociology’s pioneering theorists—Durkheim, Weber, and Marx—we will also explore approaches that critically engage and problematize aspects of the “canon.” Our examination extends to encompass contemporary perspectives, including feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and race critical theories. Incorporating these contemporary sociological approaches, we will gain multifaceted insights into the complex interplay between sociological constructs and broader societal contexts. As the course draws to a close, students are expected to leave with a deeper appreciation of the complexity of society and the expanded array of theories through which it can be examined. Group conferences will be centered on research on related topics of students’ interest, as well as engaging in creative group projects.

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Sociology of Global Inequalities

Open, Lecture—Spring

The focus of this lecture will be to introduce students to the processes and methods of conducting sociological research projects using a transnational and/or comparative lens. We will be taking as our starting point a set of global themes—loosely categorized as human rights, culture, migration, health, climate, and development— through which we will try to build our understanding of inequality in various forms in different contexts. The approach we take here in designing research would be one that aims to move beyond the national or the nation-state as a bounded “container” of society and social issues; rather, we will aim at a better understanding of how different trends, processes, transformations, structures, and actors emerge and operate in globally and transnationally interconnected ways. For example, we can look at migration not simply through the lens of emigration/immigration to and from countries but also through the lens of flows and pathways that are structured via transnational relationships and circuits of remittances, exchanges, and dependencies. As part of group conferences, students will be asked to identify one of the key global themes through which they will examine issues of inequality, using a range of methods for data collection and analysis—datasets from international organizations, surveys, questionnaires, historical records, reports, and ethnographic accounts—that they will then compile into research portfolios produced as a group.

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Race and Slavery in the Middle East and North Africa

Open, Seminar—Fall

How do we imagine slavery in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)? How do we make sense of the histories of slavery in understanding race in the larger region today and its interconnections beyond geographical boundaries? While contemporary critical scholarship on transatlantic slavery provides a necessary corrective to colonial narratives, this course proposes to go further by bringing in voices, histories, and experiences from predominantly the Middle East and North Africa region. Drawing on a long sociohistorical arc inclusive of a wide range of localities such as Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, and Iran, this course offers an enriched understanding of constructions and legacies of slavery, as well as our conceptions of race as they play out in the current moment. The course is divided into three parts: Part I begins by establishing the theoretical and epistemological foundations of racial formation theory, as well as historiography. It will set the stage for an in-depth discussion on how theory informs our analyses of race and slavery in MENA. In Part II, we will develop an overview of race and the history of slavery in the region by examining racialized and gendered experiences, practices, and textual formation. Finally, in Part III, we will focus on case studies dealing with historical legacies and present-day practices of race in modern nation-states. Through an elaboration of myriad contemporary connections, the course will open up possibilities of generating more complex and nuanced historiographies that go beyond current understanding of such a phenomenon. For conference, students can look at cases both within and outside the region. Other possibilities for conference work include certain thematic areas such as language, gender, media constructions, use of religion, and contemporary politics.

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Sociology of the Body

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

How are bodies produced in the contemporary world? To what degree are our bodies truly our own? Using Michel Foucault’s term “biopower” and his related work as its point of departure, this course will address the above questions as well as others related to the body in order to analyze and better understand how modern social institutions and relations regulate and attempt to control our bodies. Our examination and analysis will include the various modalities through which power is enacted at the macro level—including, for example, state surveillance, violence, and policy formation. We will also explore the relation between such forces and micro-level, everyday experiences throughout, deploying the concept of “embodiment” to understand how social power not only acts upon us but also becomes internalized within our very beings. This framework will help us better understand how social power is carried through the body and shapes our physicality, as well as the ways in which we move through the social world and interact with each other. Our analysis will enable us to examine biopower more critically with respect to constructions and interpretations of sex/gender, race, class, and sexuality at multiple social scales. For conference, students are expected to select a social context of their preference through which to examine the relationship between biopolitical forces and the embodied experiences of the individual(s). Students might also explore strategies of resistance—both individual and collective—to establish bodily autonomy and resist domination. In addition to social scientific studies, students may deploy ethnographic research, media analysis, and/or turn to personal (auto)biographies as bases of their research and analysis.

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Race and Slavery in the Middle East and North Africa

Open, Seminar—Spring

How do we imagine slavery in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA)? How do we make sense of the histories of slavery in understanding race in the larger region today and its interconnections beyond geographical boundaries? While contemporary critical scholarship on transatlantic slavery provides a necessary corrective to colonial narratives, this course proposes to go further by bringing in voices, histories, and experiences from predominantly the Middle East and North Africa region. Drawing on a long sociohistorical arc inclusive of a wide range of localities such as Turkey, Tunisia, Egypt, Morocco, and Iran, this course offers an enriched understanding of constructions and legacies of slavery, as well as our conceptions of race as they play out in the current moment. The course is divided into three parts: Part I begins by establishing the theoretical and epistemological foundations of racial formation theory, as well as historiography. It will set the stage for an in-depth discussion on how theory informs our analyses of race and slavery in MENA. In Part II, we will develop an overview of race and the history of slavery in the region by examining racialized and gendered experiences, practices, and textual formation. Finally, in Part III, we will focus on case studies dealing with historical legacies and present-day practices of race in modern nation-states. Through an elaboration of myriad contemporary connections, the course will open up possibilities of generating more complex and nuanced historiographies that go beyond current understanding of such a phenomenon. For conference, students can look at cases both within and outside the region. Other possibilities for conference work include certain thematic areas such as language, gender, media constructions, use of religion, and contemporary politics.

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Bad Neighbors: Sociology of Difference and Diversity in the City

Open, Seminar—Spring

The focus of the seminar will be on questions of diversity, difference, and cosmopolitanism as it pertains to urban life in a contemporary American city such as Yonkers or New York City, as well as in urban societies around the world. We will take a sociological look at how urban communities experience, navigate, and transform social structures, relationships, and institutions in their everyday lives, as they deal with problems such as inequality, hate, and exclusion while coexisting with different and diverse populations. We will read books and essays by Arlie Hochschild, Asef Bayat, Yuval Noah Harari, Dina Neyeri, Robert Putnam, and others, as we explore ways in which cities embody histories as central while marginalizing others—and how communities and people in their everyday lives resist, alter, and decenter those histories and hierarchies. Through engaged field research, we will try to learn and understand how diverse communities of people work and live together; build and provide for the wider community; and rely on informal and formal opportunities, resources, and networks to make life in the city possible. This course aims to train students on the basics of fieldwork research and ethnography in urban settings, using a wide variety of transnationally oriented theoretical and methodological approaches. Our key thematic questions will revolve around issues of difference, diversity, and cosmopolitanism as understood through sociological lenses. By using in-depth, grounded, and deeply engaged approaches to fieldwork in the city of Yonkers and other urban areas where students live, work, or visit, we will seek to understand how communities of hyperdiversity and intense differences manage to cohabit and live together in cities and how communities deal with hate, prejudice, and structural marginalization in their everyday lives. Through grounded fieldwork, we will be able to gain a better picture of how local communities improvise and use informal means to make their everyday lives work in these spaces.

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Social Movements and Powerful Art: Aesthetics of Authority and Resistance

Open, Seminar—Spring

Using US-based artist Sarah Sze’s remark, “Great protests are great art works,” as its inspiration, this seminar explores the relationship between art, collective ideas, and social change within the context of social movements. We begin by discussing the relationship between aesthetics and the social sciences, focusing on a sociological notion of art as a collective and inherently social process. Our study includes the work of social theorists Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Theodor Adorno, whose works not only illuminate how public culture communicates collective ideas but also how the latter is imbricated with existing power structures and social hierarchies. These critical frameworks will help us investigate the modern art world, exploring how artistic institutions and movements are sites that both perpetuate and resist authoritative ideologies. In the second half of the semester, students will use these frameworks to explore the role of culture and art within collective social movements. We will investigate several questions, including: What defines a social movement and what social conditions produce social movements? How are art and aesthetics used within social movements to communicate ideas and strengthen communities? In what ways do movements deploy art as a form of social resistance or authority? Our discussions will particularly attend to grassroots movements within historically marginalized communities. Throughout the semester, students will also learn about the benefits of visual methodologies and how social scholars use them to understand collective culture and social change. For conference, students will select a specific social movement, exploring how art is deployed within the movement for collective resistance or control. Possible topics include (but are not limited to) critical analysis of an artistic institution, comparative analysis of how different contexts of resistance deploy shared artistic mediums, or the use of art within a given movement over time. While class discussions will primarily focus on the United States, students are also invited to explore the relationship between art and social movements in other social locations.

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Advanced Spanish: Latin American Female Artistic Productions

Advanced, Seminar—Fall

In this seminar, we will analyze how Latin American women reflected on traditional gender roles, heteronormative standards, intricate racial systems, class dynamics, technology, and environment concerns in their literary and cinematographic works. Through advanced grammar review and writing workshops, students will hone their communication, analytic, and essay-writing skills in Spanish. Readings include texts by Aida Cartagena Portalatín, Cristina Cabral, Gabriela Mistral, and María Fernanda Ampuero; films include La ciénaga, El último verano de la Boyita, and Fever Dream, among many others. Students will complete an individual project.

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Advanced Spanish- Black Presence and Representations in Contemporary Latin American and Latinx Cinema

Advanced, Seminar—Spring

What lessons can we draw from contemporary Latin American and Latinx films about Black subjects’ perceived and actual presence in these societies? How can the seventh art shape our perceptions and understanding of hegemonic ideologies about Blackness circulating in Latin American societies? In this seminar, we will critically reflect on these questions by analyzing films produced in the last two decades centering on the theme of Afro-Latin American and Afro-Latinx’s nuanced experiences. Alongside learning the vocabulary and developing tools for basic film analysis, we will discuss polemics around authorship in cinema. Through advanced grammar review and writing workshops, students will hone their communication, analytic, and essay-writing skills in Spanish. Films include Afroargentinos, Chocó, Pelo malo, Entre fuego y agua, and La soledad, among many others. Students will complete an individual project.

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Drawing the Body in the 21st Century

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

This drawing class creates works on paper in watercolor, ink, and collage using the human form while considering the ways in which the body has been depicted in art of the 21st century. Feminist artists and BIPOC artists have transformed the way we see and construct the world and how the figure is used in art. Borrowing a conceptual frame, in part from an exhibition curated by Apsara Di Quinzio at Berkeley Art Museum (2022), student assignments will include the following: returning the gaze, the body in pieces, absence and presence, gender alchemy, activism, domesticity and labor. In the first half of the class, students can draw directly with a model present in the classroom; the second half will introduce alternative substrates, including medical textbooks, fashion magazines, and collage. Artists will be introduced to the work of Louise Bourgeois, Jenny Holzer, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Luchita Hurtado, Sarah Lucas, Mary Minter, Kiki Smith, Lorna Simpson, Karen Finley, Kara Walker, Rona Pondick, Simone Leigh, Zanele Muholi, Wangechi Mutu, Mary Kelly, Janine Antoni, Carolee Schneeman, Kerry James Marshall, Lyle Ashton Harris, Bob Flanagan, and Féliz Gonzalez Torres.

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Performance Art

Open, Seminar—Spring

Since the early 20th century, artists have explored performance art as a radical means of expression. In both form and function, performance pushes the boundaries of contemporary art. Artists use the medium for institutional critique, social activism, and to address the personal politics of gender, sexuality, and race. This course approaches performance art as a porous, transdisciplinary medium open to students from all disciplines, including painting, drawing, printmaking, photography, sculpture, video, filmmaking, theatre, dance, music, creative writing, and digital art. Students learn about the legacy of performance art from the 1970s to the present and explore some of the concepts and aesthetic strategies used to create works of performance. Through texts, artists’ writings, video screenings, and slide lectures, students are introduced to a range of performance-based artists and art movements.

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What Remains: Presenting Absence

Open, Concept—Spring

How do we notice the traces of what’s no longer here? How do surfaces and forms bear the lingering presence of human use? This course will consider the artistic and philosophical concept of absence in its many forms: vanishing, dematerialization, disappearance, nothingness, forgetting, loss, and grief. Through lectures, readings, and studio exercises, we will experiment with multiple artistic and conceptual frameworks for bearing witness to acts of removal, erasure, and temporality. The class will explore how these strategies can, in fact, bring more visibility to suppressed bodies, histories, and ecologies. Some of the artists whose works we will consider include Gordon Matta-Clark, Félix González-Torres, Ana Mendieta, David Hammonds, Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread, Walid Raad, Do Hoh Suh, Danh Võ, Janine Antoni, and Stephanie Syujuco, among others.

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First-Year Studies: Where Was It One First Heard of the Truth?

FYS—Year

In this omnibus nonfiction writing class, we will encounter and examine over the course of a year a range of literary, artistic, social, and historical phenomena—from plays by Shakespeare and poems by Whitman, to selections from autobiographies of Gandhi and Malcolm X and Virginia Woolf, to films and memoirs of identity and gender liberation, to a classic documentary about the terminal ward of a great Northeastern-seaboard hospital, to an oral history of a poor neighborhood in Mexico City, to artwork in New York museums and current art exhibits in Chelsea, to sports events and contemporaneous political conflicts, to masterworks of modernist nonfiction experimentation. In response to this range and overflowing variety of material, students will be asked to write accurately and cogently, in the tradition of various nonfiction genres, designed to capture one aspect or another of these encounters with reality. We will write impersonal work—reportage, reviews, journalistic profiles, editorials; and we will write highly personal pieces involving the life experiences of each of us in relation to what we encounter—personal essays, memoir fragments, hybrid pieces that experiment with form, that create their own genre, that allow us to fully explore our subjectivity and our unique points of view. We will work out the rhetorical and investigative techniques, whereby the truth of experience is represented on the page. We will also look at the many ways in which language can be used to distort, obscure, and evade the truth. We will think practically and will think philosophically about representing reality. We will develop our voices and our control of words, sentences, paragraphs, and larger units. Our biases will tend toward clarity of thought and beauty of expression. In this course, there will be weekly conferences for the first six weeks and biweekly conferences thereafter.

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Fiction Workshop: Asian American Writing

Open, Seminar—Fall

This fiction workshop seeks to draw inspiration in both our reading and writing from the work of Asian American writers. In addition to coming together to support one another in a writing workshop environment—discussing matters of “craft,” “technique,” and the like—we’ll also spend our time discussing questions about race, immigration, nationality, and storytelling (in addition to any other questions) as they arise through the fiction of Asian American writers. We’ll begin with Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) and work our way “forward” to a reading list that may include Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Shawn Wong, Hisaye Yamamoto, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Jessica Hagedorn, R Zamora Linmark, Amy Tan, Don Lee, Anthony Veasna So, Ocean Vuong, Julie Otsuka, David Wong Louie, K-Ming Chang, Nam Le, Chang-rae Lee, Gish Jen, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Akhil Sharma, Paul Yoon, Jenny Zhang, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Lan Samantha Chang, and Ayad Akhtar, among others. To be clear, this is a writing class and not a critical survey of Asian American literature and literary history—at least not in the manner that my colleagues in the literature program might be able to provide. Nevertheless, Asian American fiction will constitute the common source material from which, I hope, students might derive their pleasures (and lessons) as aspiring fiction writers regardless of their chosen subjects. In addition to actively participating in class discussions and providing their peers with constructive feedback for their work, students will be expected by the end of the semester to develop and produce—through the conference system—a portfolio of short fiction.

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Speculative Fiction Workshop

Open, Seminar—Fall

Speculative fiction is a blanket term for writing that speculates on a world unlike our own. Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror are a few of the best-known categories; but speculative fiction also encompasses the uncategorizable—work that challenges our understanding of causality, time, the self, the mind, and the cosmos…or that just barely cracks the surface of the familiar, allowing the weird to seep through. At its best, speculative fiction uses imagination and metaphor to explore ideas and facets of the human experience that would otherwise remain unexpressed. In this course, we will read short stories and novels by mostly contemporary speculative-fiction authors, with a writerly eye for technique. We will also workshop fiction by students; discuss process and goals; and form a supportive, constructive community where even the wildest visions can flourish.

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Creative Nonfiction

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Fall

This is a course for creative writers who are interested in exploring nonfiction as an art form. We will focus on reading and interpreting outside work—essays, articles, and journalism by some of our best writers—in order to understand what good nonfiction is and how it is created. During the first part of the semester, writing will be comprised mostly of exercises and short pieces aimed at putting into practice what is being illuminated in the readings; in the second half of the semester, students will create longer, formal essays to be presented in workshop.

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