Gender and Sexuality Studies

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

How does a chronic illness affect a person’s orientation to the everyday? What are the social and political forces that underpin life in a homeless shelter? What is the experiential world of a blind person, a musician, a refugee, or a child at play? In an effort to answer these and likeminded questions, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in developing phenomenological accounts of particular lived realities in order to understand—and convey to others—the nuances and underpinnings of such realities in terms that more general social or symbolic analyses cannot achieve. In this context, phenomenology offers an analytic method that works to understand and describe in words phenomena as they appear to the consciousnesses of certain peoples. The phenomena most often in question for anthropologists include the workings of time, perception, selfhood, language, bodies, suffering, and morality as they take form in particular lives within the context of any number of social, linguistic, and political forces. In this course, we will explore phenomenological approaches in anthropology by reading and discussing some of the most significant efforts along these lines. Each student will also try their hand at developing a phenomenological account of a specific social or subjective reality through a combination of ethnographic research, participant observation, and ethnographic writing.

Faculty

• Robert R. Desjarlais

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

What was modern art? How did artists respond to a changing world—one altered by fascism, colonization and anti-colonial protest, war and mass migration, the legacies of enslavement, and rationalized forms of labor? What representational strategies did artists use to respond to modernity, to remake the world anew? This course will move in and out of canonical accounts of modernism (Cubism, Futurism, Surrealism, Dada, Mexican Muralism, Abstract Expressionism, etc.) to tell the story of modernism through the work of underrepresented artists—artists of the Black Atlantic and Latin America, queer and trans artists, artists of color, women artists, and artists seen as “outside” the canon. We will look to discourses of leftist politics and collectivity, feminist struggle, abolitionism and antiracist discourse. The emphasis of this course will be on the global plurality of modernism, shifting our understanding of where modernism was produced, when, and by whom. This course will serve as an introduction to art history in the sense that it will equip students with the basic tools of close, slow looking and of descriptive writing about art, art historical research, and practices of curatorial display while also introducing students to broad and diverse histories of modern art. The course will also include field trips to New York City museums. This course is a lecture with weekly seminars. One lecture a week will introduce you to the broader movements, while weekly seminars will look at specific case studies and scholarly approaches to writing about contemporary art.

Faculty

• Sarah Hamill

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

Taking a global approach, this course will look at how artists redefined the mediums, materials, and hierarchies of modernism in the postwar period. We will look closely at how artists embraced radicality, by protesting for civil rights, Latinx, Black, and Indigenous rights, LGBTQ rights, women’s rights, and claiming an antiwar politics in the 1960s and 1970s. This radicality shifted in the 1990s with the rise of neoliberalism and the global art market, and we will investigate changes in contemporary art and its display after 1990. Movements this course will explore include: Gutai, Neoconcretism, Happenings, Pop Art, Fluxus, minimalism, global conceptualism, site-specificity, Earthworks, the Chicano Arts Movement, the Black Arts Movement, feminism, video art, institutional critique, installation, activist art, participatory art, Relational Aesthetics, Craft, new media, biennials, and the global art museum. Throughout, we will focus on specific artworks and gain a vocabulary for close looking, while also attending to primary sources (manifestos, letters, statements, poems) and secondary, art historical, and theoretical accounts. Assignments will include papers (based on works in New York City museums and galleries), peer reviews, presentations, reading responses, a contextual research essay, and a group curatorial assignment. This course will be taught in a lecture-seminar hybrid style. One lecture a week will be presented to introduce students to the broader movements. Weekly group conferences will look at case studies of artists and representational issues.

Faculty

• Sarah Hamill

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will explore how conceptions of Japan as a modern nation state have always been entangled with ideas about sex, gender, and reproductive bodies, from the eugenicist policies of reproductive control that were foundational to the Japanese Empire (1868-1945), to the current Japanese government’s attempts to combat the depopulation crisis. In many cases, such as the “fertile womb battalions” (kodakara butai), which commended and rewarded women who gave birth to multiple children during the empire’s mobilization for total war (1937-1945), there is also an eerie resemblance to the recent surge in pronatalist sentiments within the United States government. Together, we will learn about how eugenics and reproductive rights were intertwined in early Meiji-era debates on womanhood and motherhood, reading key early feminist texts from Hiratsuka Raichō and the Japanese Bluestockings, and then trace how those ideas echo and transform through the radical uman ribu (women’s liberation) movement in the 1970s through to the present day. Other topics covered will include resistance and collaboration with the Empire among female proletarian writers in Japan and colonial Korea; Hayashi Fumiko's literary representation of licensed prostitution under the United States Occupation; postwar depictions of the discriminatory fixation on the reproductive lives of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Pan-Asian feminism and the “comfort women” redress movements in the 1990s; and the contemporary rise of a new generation of popular writers in Japan (and East Asia more broadly) who seek to complicate prior understandings of gender, parenthood, and the human body. We will end the term by looking at techno-natalist dystopias (or utopias?) in recent Japanese science fiction. Students will complete an individual conference project related to modern Japanese media and/or the themes of the course.

Faculty

• Julia Clark

First-Year Studies—Year

Students will enroll in a combination of component classes in dance specially designed for the first-year student, including a selection of movement practice classes at the appropriate level; Improvisation (DNCE 5531) in the fall semester; Composition (DNCE 5517) in the spring semester; and Dancing Into the Future (DNCE 5521). Together, these studies will make up the First-Year Studies in Dance. Students will be dancing in the studio nearly every day. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• John Jasperse

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Feminist economics arose as a critique of the androcentric and Eurocentric assumptions underlying mainstream, neoclassical economics. But over the past 30 years, feminist economics has developed into a coherent economic perspective that acknowledges and investigates power differentials in both the home and the market on the basis of race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, nation, and disability status. Feminist economics takes seriously the crucial economic impact of caring labor, both paid and unpaid, in the home and the broader community. And it proposes alternate measures of economic success that emphasize bodily integrity, human agency, sustainability, and human rights. We will begin this course with a brief exploration of the historical context for the development of feminist economics; i.e., the rise of feminist movements in both the developed world and the Global South. We will then examine the differences between feminist and mainstream neoclassical economics by examining questions such as: What do we mean by “the economy”? Do transactions and activities have to be monetized to be “economic”? How is caring labor, both paid and unpaid, conceptualized in economics and how does the performance of this labor impact one's status in both the labor market and the household? The answers to these and similar questions will help us to reconceptualize economics to take account of all of the labor necessary to reproduce both individuals and social/economic structures. Finally, we will apply this reconceptualized, feminist vision of economics to questions of economic policy. We will examine a number of case studies including: a) the persistence of occupational segregation and wage differentials by gender and race and policies to mitigate these inequalities; b) the impact of domestic violence and other forms of non-market coercion on economic outcomes; c) the impact of reproductive control (or the lack thereof) on the economic trajectories of both individuals and societies; d) the (re)conceptualization and measurement of economic development and growth. In addition to class participation, requirements for the seminar will include frequent short papers on the readings, leading class discussions (in pairs), and participation in group presentations. In lieu of a traditional conference project, students may choose a service-learning project and an accompanying placement journal. Possible service-learning placement sites include a domestic violence shelter, a local LGBT support and advocacy organization, a reproductive rights group, and an organization advocating for the rights of domestic workers.

Faculty

• Kim Christensen

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

In this course, we will explore the economic, political, and cultural factors that have contributed to the rise of authoritarianism in the United States and abroad. We will begin with a detailed examination of the current economic context; i.e., the crisis of neoliberal, globalized capitalism and its impact on various strata of the United States population. Next, we will examine several political economic perspectives on the rise of authoritarianism, including works by such theorists as Hobsbawm, Poulantzas, Gramsci, Paxton, and Gessen. We will examine Ehrenreich and Foer’s theories of the “professional managerial class” and recent reporting on techno-radicals to explore the class interests and adversaries of the current U.S. regime. We will discuss the contributions of patriarchal ideologies and institutions to the reproduction of hierarchical, gendered practices within homes and public institutions. We will examine the contributions of discriminatory immigration law and the histories of institutionalized racism to current immigration policies. Finally, using the works of, among others, McAlevey and Nakagawa, we will discuss ways to defend democratic communities and resist authoritarianism. Requirements will include frequent, short papers on the readings and co-leading class discussions. In lieu of individual conference papers, students will be asked to form small groups to investigate, write, and present on the rise of authoritarianism in another country or the history of an authoritarian movement (such as the KKK) within the United States. Possibilities may also exist for service-learning placements.

Faculty

• Kim Christensen

First-Year Studies—Year

What happened to women in the silent-film industry? Can patriarchal aesthetic regimes be dismantled through “feminine” filmmaking? Should dead movie stars be revived as feminist icons? How do we excavate invisible histories? This first-year seminar will offer an overview of the main questions and methods of feminist film studies by tracing film history through the lens of female- and feminist-identifying filmmakers, workers, critics, and historians. Course sessions will include an interdisciplinary introduction to the tools of film analysis, academic writing, and research. Weekly screenings will highlight a mix of obscure and canonical narrative, experimental, and documentary films from the silent era to the end of the 20th century. Our focus will be on European and United States films, but conference projects may exceed these bounds. Readings will cover a wide range of feminist film and media scholarship, from psychoanalytic feminist film theory to cyberfeminism and feminist media archaeology. Topics to be discussed will include women at the origins of film, women’s work onscreen and on the studio lot, the male gaze and spectacular female star of classical cinema, fan culture and gendered genres, lesbian representability, and feminist authorship as political practice. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities, such as labs dedicated to writing, hands-on research, and field trips. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

Faculty

• Leana Hirschfeld-Kroen

Open, Seminar—Fall

How has so much of popular culture come to center around the image of the glamorous, talented, and terribly difficult woman we call “the diva”? And why is she constantly followed by throngs of queer fans who worship her every move, who have an encyclopedic knowledge of her work, and who practice becoming her? This course will track the construction of the diva as a site for the invention, regulation, and performance of gender and sexuality. Beginning with the Hollywood star system that brought us divas such as Joan Crawford and Bette Davis and the musical cultures that brought us Maria Callas and Aretha Franklin, we will then look to the cultures of fandom, worship, and imitation that surround them. Here, we will pay special attention to the role of queer cultures and drag performance in propelling and deconstructing divadom. Films such as The Beaver Trilogy, Paris Is Burning, and Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, alongside media and cross-gender performance like Lypsinka’s “Passion of the Crawford” and selections from the RuPaul’s Drag Race universe, will act as prisms through which we will explore the mix of individualism, allure, genius, and artifice that make up the diva’s image.

Faculty

• Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

Open, Lecture—Spring

This course will focus on what transness, cinema, and the digital do to each other. How have the history of film and digital media changed through the innovations of trans directors, artists, and subjects? How has trans identity been shaped by film form and the expansion of the digital? How have trans communities and activists used film and digital media to shape the political and social realities that surround them? In this course, we will view major works by trans directors, explore complex representations of trans life in cinematic and digital works, and study a vast array of film and media studies scholarship on transness. Our syllabus will think comparatively about trans cinema and digital media across time periods, genres, genders, and nations, including taking other forms of difference like sexuality, race, and ability as active analytical questions which modify and are modified by gender. Students will gain familiarity and skill with questions on the politics of representation and the connections between transness, technology, and aesthetics.

Faculty

• Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué

Open, Seminar—Spring

Building on the screenings, lectures, and critical frameworks established in Subversive Film: Theory, Critique, and Intergenerational Collaboration (FILM 3235) in the fall, this course will center collaborative film production between Sarah Lawrence students and residents of the Wartburg senior living community. Working in pairs or small groups, participants will develop and produce short narrative, documentary, hybrid, or audio-based projects that draw inspiration from the histories and strategies of subversive cinema explored in the previous semester. Through writing, cinematography, sound, editing, and readings and discussions on collaborative authorship, students will explore filmmaking as a collective and intergenerational practice with the power to subvert expectations and reshape dominant narratives. Emphasis will be placed on experimentation and processes that challenge conventional hierarchies of authorship. By the end of the semester, each collaborative team will complete a short film or audio work to be screened publicly.

Faculty

• Tura Oliveira

Open, Seminar—Fall

This course will explore subversive film and intergenerational learning and making, bringing together Sarah Lawrence students and residents from Wartburg senior living facility for screenings, lectures, and collaboration. Guest artists, writers, and filmmakers will present lectures on selected works, situating them within broader traditions of avant-garde cinema. We will focus the radical interventions of feminist, queer, and Black filmmakers, tracing how these works expose structures of power and reshape dominant narratives using the tools of genre, horror, social critique, and meta-cinema. Writing workshops will support the development of critical and creative responses, laying the groundwork for Intergenerational Film: Collaboration and Subversion (FILM 3265) in the spring in which students and residents will pair off and collaborate on narrative films.

Faculty

• Tura Oliveira

Open, Seminar—Fall

Wars of the 19th and 20th centuries shaped Europe’s borders and societies. Ideas of the privileges of citizenship grew in tandem with the responsibilities of military service. Colonial expansion allowed militaries to test out new technologies and forms of rule, while expanding their empires. Armies were used to keep diverse empires together, not only through force, but also by creating a common sense of purpose and co-opting elites. Battles were a legitimate, legal way to decide territorial disputes, until they were not. In the course of the 20th century, wars of unimaginable destruction reshaped societies and expanded the boundaries of what was imaginable, including the destruction of all life on Earth. This course will examine the interplay of military and society from the early 19th century to the present. We will examine the relationship between citizenship and military service, war as politics, Europe’s colonial wars, mobilization and demobilization, the World Wars, Cold War, and the current crises in Europe. We will look at radical attempts to reimagine the place of the military by communists and fascists, the most destructive wars in recorded history, the long period of relative peace in Europe, the end of the Cold War and its aftermath.

Faculty

• Brandon Schechter

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

Using literature from the 1850s to the 1950s as potentially both reflection and prescription (though never as fact), we will study the political and cultural life of the United States. Drawing mainly on primary sources, this course will zero in on questions of gender, race, capitalism, and national identity. We will focus, in particular, on writers who challenge the status quo, and who seek, through their fiction or memoir, to create an alternate America. Writers may include Rebecca Harding Davis, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Horatio Alger, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Abraham Cahan, W.E.B. DuBois, Upton Sinclair, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Nella Larsen, Ann Petry, and J.D. Salinger, among other less well-known figures.

Faculty

• Lyde Cullen Sizer

Open, Lecture—Spring

The 20th century revealed the potential for humans to destroy each other in new and shocking ways and also a variety of projects to create better people and governments. Europe was ground zero for both these disasters and attempts to mitigate them. It was the primary battlefield of both world wars, the laboratory of both fascism and communism, rebuilt by both capitalists and communists. In the latter half of the century, it formed a Union, moving beyond the nationalism that had defined much of its past. Europe was also a central stage of the Cold War, the point of contact between the capitalist and communist worlds, until—seemingly miraculously—the communist world imploded. Throughout the "short 20th century"—the period between the Great War and the fall of communism in Europe, a term coined by historian Eric Hobsbawm—and to this day, this space is haunted, another subject of this course. This lecture will cover major events and trends in Europe from the eve of the Great War to the fall of the Berlin Wall (with an epilogue). It will examine the major cultural and political events of the bloodiest century in recorded history. Among topics covered will be the World Wars, rise of dictatorships, Cold War, emergence of the European Union, the “end of history” and historical memory. Our readings will be divided between scholarship interpreting these events, primary sources, and films. We will continually ask what defines “Europe,” what its borders are, and think about the future of its past.

Faculty

• Brandon Schechter

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

Using primary sources—essays, books of cultural criticism, novels, memoirs—coupled with framing history texts, this course will explore the ways women have protested their condition from the mid-19th century to the late 20th. In three sections, roughly corresponding to what historians have called the “waves” of the women’s movement, we will explore the multiple ways women have constructed and reconstructed womanhood through both feminism and womanism. Writers may include Sarah Grimké, Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Nella Larsen, Kate Millett, Audre Lorde, Maxine Hong Kingston, Shulamith Firestone, Toni Morrison, and less well known “Third Wave” feminists and critics of feminism in the 1980s and 1990s.

Faculty

• Lyde Cullen Sizer

Open, Seminar—Year

This course, for students with no previous knowledge of Italian, will aim to provide a complete foundation in the Italian language with particular attention to oral and written communication and all aspects of Italian culture. The course will be conducted in Italian after the first month and will involve the study of all basic structures of the language—phonological, grammatical, and syntactical—with practice in conversation, reading, composition, and translation. In addition to material covering basic Italian grammar, students will be exposed to fiction, poetry, songs, articles, recipe books, and films. Held once a week, group conferences will aim to enrich the students’ knowledge of Italian culture and develop their ability to communicate; this goal will be achieved by readings that deal with current events and topics relative to today’s Italian culture. Activities in pairs or groups, along with short written assignments, will be part of the group conference. In addition to class and the group conferences, the course has a conversation component in regular workshops with the language assistant. In small groups, conversation classes will center on the concept of Viaggio in Italia: a journey through the regions of Italy through cuisine, cinema, art, opera, and dialects. The Italian program will organize trips to the Metropolitan Opera and relevant exhibits in New York City, as well as the possibility of experiencing Italian cuisine firsthand as a group. By the end of this course, students will attain a basic competence in all aspects of the language. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, regular individual meetings with an Italian language assistant, in addition to class sessions, will be required.

Faculty

• Tristana Rorandelli

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

This course will aim to improve and perfect the students’ speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, as well as their knowledge of Italy’s contemporary culture and literature. In order to acquire the necessary knowledge of Italian grammar, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary, a review of all grammar will be carried out throughout the year. As an introduction to modern Italian culture and literature, students will be introduced to a selection of short stories, poems, and passages from novels, as well as specific newspaper articles, music, and films in the original language. Some of the literary works studied will include selections from Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Gianni Rodari, Marcello D’Orta, Clara Sereni, Dino Buzzati, Stefano Benni, Antonio Tabucchi, Alberto Moravia, Achille Campanile, and Elena Ferrante. In order to address the students’ writing skills, written compositions will be required as an integral part of the course. Biweekly conference topics might include the study of a particular author, literary text, film, or any other aspect of Italian society and culture that might be of interest to the student. In small groups, conversation classes will be held with the language assistant; students will have the opportunity to reinforce what they have learned in class and hone their ability to communicate in Italian. When appropriate, students will be directed to specific internship opportunities in the New York City area, centered on Italian language and culture.

Faculty

• Tristana Rorandelli

First-Year Studies—Year

Different historians trace the invention of homosexuality to different historical moments, from the 16th to the mid-19th centuries. The invention of heterosexuality, it would seem, followed after. Certainly the term “heterosexual” appeared only after the term “homosexual” was coined in the later 19th century. Neither meant, at first, what they mean today. In this course, we will study the development of modern understandings of same-sex desire in relation to understandings of sex, gender, race, class, nation, nature, culture, and opposite-sex desire. We will be drawing centrally on literary works, especially novels, which have been crucial sites for the construction and dissemination of modern conceptions of sexuality. But we will also be reading histories, science, laws, letters, and polemics, and watching films. Although we will be considering some earlier materials, we will focus on two periods: first, from the 1880s to the 1960s; then, the 1960s to the present. By the 1880s, almost everyone agrees, a recognizably modern understanding of homosexuality was becoming available. The sexual/cultural landscapes that subsequently developed were not radically rearranged until the 1960s, when the gay and women’s liberation movements insisted on a political analysis of sexuality. Over the past 50 years, that political analysis and the activism it has fostered have had profound consequences for LGBT lives and cultural presences, even as earlier understandings still persist. This course will serve as an introduction to a broad range of modern literature; to fundamental works in the history of sexuality and contemporary queer studies; and to critical thinking about how we talk, read, and write about sex. Although class materials will be generally focused on Europe and North America from the 1880s to the present, and conference work may deal with histories, politics, or cultural works from this context, conference projects may also be focused on other times and places. The class will be based on students’ discussion of our materials, which will be read on paper. Electronic devices will generally not be permitted in class, and use of artificial intelligence (AI) will not be allowed. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Julie Abraham

Open, Seminar—Fall

The 1990s was a period of aesthetic and critical foment for queer and trans life and politics in the United States. In New York, Los Angeles, and other cities, planned gentrification and rezoning—and resistance to them—had a lasting impact on the city's racial, sexual, and economic landscapes, and on a generation of media makers, activists, artists, and writers. This course asks after the ongoing cultural inheritance of the 1990s. We will study questions of social life, sexual and racial politics, space, and governance, as well as key concepts in performance studies, critical race studies, black studies, queer and gender theory, and the economic left that emerged under the pressures of this period. Through cultural objects, critical writing, and archival material, we will trace how the notion of “public sex” came into focus among queer and trans organizers, cultural workers, and academics during heightened responses to HIV/AIDS, intensified policing, and state attacks on areas of sexual commerce and recreation. How did shifting frameworks of “public space” emerge alongside new techniques of protest, media-making, and broadcast? How did entwined aesthetic and social practices yield legacies of interdisciplinary performance, poetry, printmaking, and photography? We will explore the material and infrastructural histories that shaped queer and trans cultural production, such as mass demonstrations against policing, the nascent internet, and the dismantling of welfare and state arts funding.

Faculty

• Amalle Dublon

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

This course takes up questions of gender, sexuality, and sound, drawing connections between popular audiovisual culture—such as disco, vocal fry, and ASMR videos—and experimental media since 1945. Sexual politics have been understood almost exclusively in terms of visual and textual markers, yet their entanglement with the sensory and philosophical register of sound is extensive. Gender and sexuality cut through discourses on sound and sonic aesthetics, asking us to rethink both the history of experimental sonic media and the status of sound in the arts more broadly. Likewise, attention to sonic aesthetics and performance might compel us to reframe sexual difference, and sexual dissidence. We will study how media makers have deployed sound—as part of videos, films, performances, and audio work—in ways that offer material for thinking through sexuality, gender, and queer and trans experience. The role of musical, vocal, and auditory practices within political movements will also be considered. Course material will span experimental and popular media, music, poetry, and film, as well as disability studies, Marxist feminism, trans and queer studies, and psychoanalytic approaches to voice and listening. We will explore how close attention to sound and sound studies might reshape central knots in queer studies.

Faculty

• Amalle Dublon

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will explore how conceptions of Japan as a modern nation state have always been entangled with ideas about sex, gender, and reproductive bodies, from the eugenicist policies of reproductive control that were foundational to the Japanese Empire (1868-1945), to the current Japanese government’s attempts to combat the depopulation crisis. In many cases, such as the “fertile womb battalions” (kodakara butai), which commended and rewarded women who gave birth to multiple children during the empire’s mobilization for total war (1937-1945), there is also an eerie resemblance to the recent surge in pronatalist sentiments within the United States government. Together, we will learn about how eugenics and reproductive rights were intertwined in early Meiji-era debates on womanhood and motherhood, reading key early feminist texts from Hiratsuka Raichō and the Japanese Bluestockings, and then trace how those ideas echo and transform through the radical uman ribu (women’s liberation) movement in the 1970s through to the present day. Other topics covered will include resistance and collaboration with the Empire among female proletarian writers in Japan and colonial Korea; Hayashi Fumiko's literary representation of licensed prostitution under the United States Occupation; postwar depictions of the discriminatory fixation on the reproductive lives of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Pan-Asian feminism and the “comfort women” redress movements in the 1990s; and the contemporary rise of a new generation of popular writers in Japan (and East Asia more broadly) who seek to complicate prior understandings of gender, parenthood, and the human body. We will end the term by looking at techno-natalist dystopias (or utopias?) in recent Japanese science fiction. Students will complete an individual conference project related to modern Japanese media and/or the themes of the course.

Faculty

• Julia Clark

Open, Seminar—Spring

Sappho has been famous for a very long time: born in the sixth century BCE (a couple hundred years after Homer), Sappho has been considered one of the greatest poets of the western canon for millennia, a writer whose poetry has influenced authors from Plato to Anne Carson. Sappho’s fame was such that it outlived even her poems: today, Sappho’s poetry survives only in 600 fragments, with only one complete poem remaining. This course will consider the reception of Sappho—as both a literary character and a corpus of poetry—over 2,600 years. Beginning with the composition of her poems, we will discuss the possible contexts of their creation, their critical reception, and their thematic material. We will also explore the formation of Sappho as a character, in plays, poems, and testimonia and her simultaneous characterization as the Tenth Muse, the gender-bending personification of queer erotic desire, and the self-destroying victim of cultural forces. As we chart the intertwined reception of both poems and character over two millennia—through Plato, Menander, Catullus, Horace, Boccaccio, Sidney, Donne, Katherine Philips, Swinburne, H.D., Woolf, Mary Barnard, Anne Carson, and many others—students will become familiar with the larger currents of Sappho’s long afterlife. We will gain experience applying a variety of theories and methodologies, including lyric theory, historicism, queer theory and historiography, book history, feminist theory, and reception theory. Through our reading, we will come to understand that the only question more interesting than who Sappho was is the question of what she has meant to people over time and what about her poetry, persona, and potential has kept us going back to her for more than 20 centuries.

Faculty

• Katherine Horgan

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Spring

Marcel Proust’s multivolume novel In Search of Lost Time is a towering monument of 20th-century literature, one that continues to fascinate and intimidate readers to this day. At its heart, Proust’s novel traces the intellectual and sentimental development of its narrator as he moves from childhood to adulthood, eventually discovering his vocation as a writer. Through its historical arc, the novel also portrays the nuances of a French society transitioning from the late 19th to the early 20th century. One of the main goals of this course will be to understand Proust’s contributions to the novel in the age of modernism and modernity. We will see how he pushed the limits of the genre by blurring the boundaries between fiction, autobiography, and essay, and we will analyze in detail his singular style characterized by a digressive prose rich in associations. We will also explore how the expansiveness of Proust’s narrative allows for the inclusion of extensive reflections on a vast variety of different topics: time, memory, art, social class, sexuality, jealousy, religion, history, speech, and the writing of life itself. Our primary focus will be on a close reading of the novel in order to better understand Proust’s narrative, voice, and worldview. We will read in English translation the first volume, Swann’s Way, and the final volume, Time Regained, in their entirety, alongside key scenes from other volumes. We will also read a selection of secondary texts that adopt different approaches to reading Proust, including biography, psychology, sociology, gender studies, and philosophy. In conference, students will be able to explore diverse aspects of Proust’s novel in more depth, or pursue projects that help us situate Proust in his literary, historical, and cultural contexts.

Faculty

• Jason Earle

Open, Lecture—Fall

Variance, correlation coefficient, regression analysis, statistical significance, and margin of error. You’ve heard these terms and other statistical phrases bantered about before, and you’ve seen them interspersed in news reports and research articles. But what do they mean? How are they used? And why are they so important? Serving as an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and reasoning central to the understanding of data, this lecture course will focus on the fundamental methods of statistical analysis used to gain insight into diverse areas of human interest. The use, misuse, and abuse of statistics will be the central focus of the course, and specific topics of exploration will be drawn from experimental design theory, sampling theory, data analysis, and statistical inference. Applications will be considered in current events, business, psychology, politics, medicine, and many other areas of the natural and social sciences. Calculator and spreadsheet software will be used extensively in this course, but no prior experience with these technologies is assumed. Group conferences, conducted in workshop mode, will serve to reinforce student understanding of the course material. This lecture is recommended for anybody wishing to be a better-informed consumer of data and strongly recommended for those planning to pursue advanced undergraduate or graduate research in the natural sciences or social sciences.

Faculty

• Daniel King

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 path towards 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. We will then 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.

Faculty

• Niko Higgins

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

Does life have a purpose, a meaning? What does it mean “to be”? What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a woman (or to be a man)? What does it mean to be black (or to be white)? What makes us into who we are? What distinguishes each of us, and what, if anything, is in common to all of us? These and other questions are raised by existentialist philosophy and literature, mostly through interrogation of real-life experiences, situations, and “fundamental emotions,” such as anxiety, boredom, loneliness, and shame. In the first half of this course, we will get acquainted with the core tenets of existentialist thought by reading two of its most influential figures: Jean-Paul Sartre (France, 1905-1980) and Martin Heidegger (Germany, 1889-1976). In the second half, we will analyze texts by authors who expand or challenge these core tenets on the grounds of their experiences of oppression. These authors are Simone de Beauvoir (France, 1908-1986), Frantz Fanon (Martinique, 1925-1961), Viktor Frankl (Austria, 1905-1997), and Jean Améry (Austria, 1912-1978). Group conference will meet weekly and play a central role in this course. In it, we will mostly read literary texts or watch films that are relevant to the work of the above-listed authors. Conference material will include stories by Franz Kafka, Albert Camus, and Ralph Ellison, and films such as The Battle of Algiers (1967) and Monsieur Klein (1977).

Faculty

• Roy Ben-Shai

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is one of the most influential philosophers and historians of the second half of the 20th century, famous for developing Nietzsche’s thesis that knowledge is not a progressive quest for objective truth, but a historical construct produced in the service of socio-political power structures. Our readings will trace a gradual evolution in Foucault’s thinking on power, from perceiving it as a mechanism of control (confinement, exclusion, incarceration, and punishment, but also curing, disciplining, educating, and surveilling) to perceiving it as a mechanism of producing pleasure (through practices, regulations, and inhibitions of sexuality as well as their transgressions). Foucault’s special talent is his capacity to produce, through historical study and insight, new narratives and perspectives, which can alter our understanding of our history, our culture, our institutions, our upbringing, and ourselves in the deepest and most unexpected ways. When it works (and much of it depends on our own commitment to the reading process), his writing can liberate us from bonds and preconceptions we never even knew we had. This will be a guided reading and discussion-centered seminar, with weekly reading responses. For the conference component of the course—unless you have a well-defined and executable alternative in mind, which we would agree upon in advance—each student will conduct an independent study of one philosophical text of their choice out of a list of options. Options will include philosophers who influenced Foucault, such as Plato and Nietzsche, and ones whose thought was influenced by him, such as Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler.

Faculty

• Roy Ben-Shai

Open, Seminar—Fall

This seminar is intended as a broad survey of the different branches of psychology, with an examination of their underlying principles and organizing major theories from a “critical” perspective. A critical perspective suggests an integration of “normative” perspectives on behavior and mental processes with an empirically informed analysis of societal, cultural, and structural effects such as social categorization of race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and social class on these matters. We will begin with a brief history of psychology as a science, unpacking the benefits and the costs of a positivistic scientific approach to the study of behavior, moving through neural, sensing, and perceiving approaches to self, then development, cognition, personality, and ending with the definition and treatment of psychological disorders. Conference work can focus on deeper analyses within a particular area of psychology of interest to students.

Faculty

• Linwood J. Lewis

Open, Seminar—Fall

Care and caregiving are aspects of daily life that each of us depend upon at various times throughout our lives. Yet, care remains hidden and devalued in our current sociopolitical climate in which women continue to provide a majority of care. In this course, we will look at care, both as an orientation and an activity provided by family and friends to people with disabilities and older adults. Utilizing Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory as a framework, we will explore the multilevel experiences of family caregivers. Specifically, we will focus on caregiving triads in all their diversity, including paid care workers and care receivers living with a variety of chronic illnesses. This course will take an interdisciplinary approach and introduce students to the various literature on family caregiving. From psychology to public health, we will consider care as a reciprocal process that ebbs and flows throughout the life course. We will read from feminist theory, critical disabilities studies, psychology, and public health, as well as look at how care is portrayed in popular culture, film, and books. We will learn about multilevel interventions, such as individual and policy responses geared toward supporting family caregivers, as well as organizations and social movements dedicated to creating better conditions of care for all.

Faculty

• Magdalena Ornstein-Sloan

Open, Seminar—Fall

This course will engage a feminist psychology that recognizes how the psychological and physical well-being of women, queer, and/or trans people—but also all people—requires understanding and challenging oppressive structures and building more life-affirming ones. As such, this seminar will explore the category of gender within and beyond the psychological discipline and will aim to familiarize students with major theoretical perspectives on gender including social constructionism, various feminist traditions, queer theories, post-colonial theories, and various psychological traditions. Engaging these traditions, we will think expansively about how gendered practices—from sexuality to labor and family—have been studied in relation to patriarchy and racial capitalism, but also how they form meanings in the physical and psychological lives of individuals. We will examine psychological empirical research as well as interdisciplinary theoretical and multimedia works on gender across history and culture, emphasizing the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, disability, and immigration in the experiences of women, girls, two-spirit, trans, and/or nonbinary individuals. We will, for example, read Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, and Sandra Harding and watch film/documentary clips about Indigenous frameworks of gender. We will engage with how gender is embedded in contested relations of power in diverse communities and how feminists and psychologists have pushed for change in and beyond academia to envision healing, solidarity, and justice.

Faculty

• Sonia Sánchez

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

We have time, energy, questions, and few responsibilities. We want to push the envelope, resist compromise, lead revolutions, and turn the world upside down. Because we do not yet know quite how to be, we have not settled and will not let the dust settle around us. —Karlin and Borofsky, 2003

Many traditional psychological theories of development posit a brief transition from adolescence to adulthood; however, many people moving into their 20s experience anything but a brief transition to “feeling like an adult,” pondering questions such as: How many SLC alums can live in a Brooklyn sublet? What will I do when I finish the Peace Corps next year? In this course, we will explore the psychological literature concerning emerging adulthood, the period from the late teens through the 20s. We will examine this period of life from a unified biopsychosocial and intersectional perspective. This course will be a hands-on introduction to conducting qualitative and quantitative psychological research on the intersection of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality with people in emerging adulthood.

Faculty

• Linwood J. Lewis

Advanced, Seminar—Fall

In this research internship course, students will gain research experience through active engagement in a psychology research lab with a member of the psychology faculty. This will involve an internship within a research lab on campus, including a weekly lab meeting, a weekly collaborative meeting across labs, ongoing contributions towards research and practice within their lab and/or community settings, additional individual and group meetings as needed, and additional synchronous and asynchronous research work. Weekly lab meetings will involve reading and discussing research articles and research-methods papers specific to the topics of research being undertaken by each student and faculty member. Students will be expected to learn the current research approaches being employed by their supervising faculty member and to contribute toward ongoing research in the form of a research practicum. They may also have the opportunity to develop and implement their own independent research projects within the labs in which they are working, depending on lab priorities. Students will be expected to make progress on research projects between meetings, as determined in collaboration with their primary supervising faculty.

The weekly collaborative cross-labs meeting will include readings on, and discussions of, research methods and ethics—both broad and specific to the research in which students are involved—as well as the discussion of contemporary research articles that are relevant to student and faculty research projects. All faculty and students involved in the research experience will take turns leading the discussion of current research, with faculty taking the lead at the beginning of the semester and students taking the lead as their expertise develops. 

Students participating in the course will be expected to attend and actively participate in weekly collaborative cross-labs meetings and weekly lab meetings; keep an ongoing journal and/or scientific lab notebook; select and facilitate group and lab discussions of relevant contemporary research articles (at least once for each meeting type); work within a lab and/or community setting, as appropriate for their projects; contribute toward ongoing research and practice within their lab or community settings; report on their ongoing lab research in the form of a short paper prepared for possible publication and a poster at the Science and Math Poster Symposium; and provide their colleagues with ongoing verbal and written feedback on their projects. Students will be responsible for working collaboratively with their colleagues to further develop their understanding of each of the topics covered in class.

Faculty

• Kim Ferguson
• Linwood J. Lewis
• Maia Pujara
• Sammy Floyd

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

In this course, we will explore research methodologies and traditions that scholars and non-academic communities have used toward transformative change. We will focus specifically on research approaches that support efforts to address injustice at the root and build collective community power. While drawing from across disciplines for decolonial, feminist research methodologies, we will be rooted in a critical social psychological lens that illuminates the importance of structural and historical analysis as well as analysis built through individuals’ subjectivity and lived experience of oppression and resistance. Students will learn about various liberatory uses of research methodologies and analytic frameworks from across time and space —including community-engaged and participatory action research, oral history and testimonio, black feminist ethnography, and other activist scholarship. Many of these research approaches and frameworks have been forged through and shaped by liberatory traditions/social movements, hence we will explore them firmly rooted within these histories—in particular, Black, Indigenous, and queer liberation, and disability justice and abolitionist movements. We will learn how these movements’ ideals and theoretical and strategic interventions are critical for justice-oriented research because of (a) their invaluable, sharp analysis of the conditions and root causes of oppression, and (b) their expansive, transformative visions and approaches toward justice. Theoretical and empirical readings from psychology and other disciplines will be enriched by visits to learn about activism and engagement with multimedia sources offering important theorizing (e.g., documentary and other film clips, podcasts, art, music, etc.). This course may be of special interest to students considering a future in interdisciplinary research, who plan to engage in projects that address injustice, or more generally, who wish to engage with transformative theories of change.

Faculty

• Sonia Sánchez

Advanced, Seminar—Spring

In this research internship course, students will gain research experience through active engagement in a psychology research lab with a member of the psychology faculty. This will involve an internship within a research lab on campus, including a weekly lab meeting, a weekly collaborative meeting across labs, ongoing contributions towards research and practice within their lab and/or community settings, additional individual and group meetings as needed, and additional synchronous and asynchronous research work. Weekly lab meetings will involve reading and discussing research articles and research-methods papers specific to the topics of research being undertaken by each student and faculty member. Students will be expected to learn the current research approaches being employed by their supervising faculty member and to contribute toward ongoing research in the form of a research practicum. They may also have the opportunity to develop and implement their own independent research projects within the labs in which they are working, depending on lab priorities. 

The weekly collaborative cross-labs meeting will include readings on, and discussions of, various concepts in research related to open science practices, finding funding/grant writing, collecting and analyzing data, as well as the discussion of contemporary research articles that are relevant to student and faculty research projects. All faculty and students involved in the research experience will take turns leading the discussion of current research, with faculty taking the lead at the beginning of the semester and students taking the lead as their expertise develops. 

Students participating in the course will be expected to attend and actively participate in weekly collaborative cross-labs meetings and weekly lab meetings; keep an ongoing journal and/or scientific lab notebook; select and facilitate group and lab discussions of relevant contemporary research articles (at least once for each meeting type); work within a lab and/or community setting, as appropriate for their projects; contribute toward ongoing research and practice within their lab or community settings; report on their ongoing lab research in the form of a short paper prepared for possible publication and a poster at the SciMath Poster Symposium; and provide their colleagues with ongoing verbal and written feedback on their projects. Students will be responsible for working collaboratively with their colleagues to further develop their understanding of each of the topics covered in class.

Faculty

• Kim Ferguson
• Sammy Floyd

Open, Seminar—Fall

As a method of analyzing human beings through the lens of unconscious mental processes, the field of psychoanalysis has long had much to say about the topic of religion and the divine, as foundational influences on human experience and the human condition. This seminar will explore how psychoanalytic theory has grappled with religion, myth, ritual, and the idea of the divine from the late 19th century to the present. Rather than treating religion solely as belief or doctrine, the course will approach it as a set of symbolic practices, narratives, and affects that shape subjectivity, desire, and social life. Psychoanalysis will provide a distinctive lens through which to ask why religious ideas persist, how they are experienced, and what psychic work they perform. The course will begin with Sigmund Freud, whose writings on religion, most notably Totem and Taboo, The Future of an Illusion, and Moses and Monotheism, frame religion as a response to unconscious wishes, anxiety, and authority. Freud’s controversial reduction of religion to illusion and neurosis will set the stage for later debates about whether psychoanalysis undermines, explains, or transforms religious meaning. From there, we will turn to Carl Jung, whose depth psychology offers a contrasting account of myth, symbol, and the sacred, emphasizing archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the religious dimensions of psychic integration. Mid-century figures such as D. W. Winnicott and Erich Fromm will allow us to think about religion beyond repression and illusion. Winnicott’s concept of transitional phenomena will open new ways of understanding ritual, prayer, and religious objects as creative spaces between inner and outer reality, while Fromm’s humanistic psychoanalysis will help us to reconsider religion in relation to ethics, freedom, and social critique. We will then examine Jacques Lacan, whose reworking of Freud through language, structure, and desire raises difficult questions about God, law, absence, and the symbolic order. The seminar will also foreground feminist psychoanalysis, particularly the work of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, who challenge masculinist assumptions in both psychoanalysis and religious traditions. Their writings will invite us to rethink embodiment, maternity, sexuality, and alterity, and to ask whether new imaginaries of the divine are possible beyond patriarchal symbolic systems. In the final portion of the course, we will engage postcolonial psychoanalytic perspectives, considering how religion, colonial power, race, and trauma intersect. These approaches will allow us to question the universality of classical psychoanalytic models and explore how religious myth and practice function within histories of domination, resistance, and cultural translation. Through close readings of theoretical texts and sustained discussion, students will critically assess psychoanalysis as both a critique of religion and a resource for reimagining it. The course will encourage reflection on enduring questions about belief, meaning, desire, and the unconscious in modern and global contexts.

Faculty

• Joel Swanson

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

Why have trans bodies become central to brain imaging studies? Can facial recognition technologies identify queerness? Why do animals such as “gay penguins” attract outsized scientific and cultural attention? More broadly, how did science come to position itself as an authority on sex, gender, and sexuality, and how does that history shape our lives today? This interdisciplinary course will examine how science has defined queerness—and how queer critiques have reshaped it in return. It will trace sex and sexuality science from racialized theories of evolution and sexual dimorphism to contemporary biomedical and computational technologies that claim access to bodily truths. The course will ask how critique can be put into practice when struggles for queer survival and rights have often depended on recognition by scientific and state institutions, and whether science itself can be reworked through queer commitments. The course will combine social theory with hands-on engagement across disciplines through field trips, artistic and activist encounters, and interdisciplinary readings. Students will examine how knowledge is produced not only in laboratories and clinics, but also through art and digital media, using these sites to reflect on the stakes of scientific classification in everyday life. Throughout, we will emphasize the political construction of scientific knowledge and consider how queer inquiry might transform both science and the worlds it helps make. Conference projects may include archival research on the history of sex; ethnographic or interview-based studies; critical analyses of biomedical or computational technologies (such as medical devices or artificial intelligence); or fieldwork in museums, labs, clinics, or community organizations. Students may also design interdisciplinary projects that rethink scientific methods, classification, or public science through queer and trans critique.

Faculty

• Carlo Sariego

Open, Seminar—Year

What does it mean to say the family is a political institution? This course will take up that question by examining the family as a key site where value is produced, distributed, and contested. At stake are questions of what and whom we value, including which families circulate wealth and security, which are rendered disposable or precarious, and how the reproductive practices of some populations are protected and encouraged while others are regulated, stigmatized, or denied. This seminar will introduce students to core sociological theories of race, family, and reproduction, beginning with Marx and Engels and moving through Black feminism, feminist political economy, queer and trans theory, disability studies, and contemporary debates over reproductive politics. We will examine how United States family ideals have been shaped through long histories of settler colonialism, racial capitalism, slavery, immigration control, and imperial power, and how family separation has functioned as a recurring political technology from enslavement and Native American boarding schools to contemporary practices at the United States border. We will supplement this history with sources ranging from science fiction films (Alien) and documentaries (No Más Bebés) to literature, poetry, and speculative fiction (Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”) to explore how the political family is imagined across genres. By the end of the year, students will have a substantive grounding in key sociological debates, using the family as a lens through which to understand how power operates in intimate life and how intimate life, in turn, shapes power. Coursework will involve creating kinship maps or family trees, tracing the histories of particular families across generations or institutions, and incorporating structured personal reflection into final projects.

Faculty

• Carlo Sariego

Advanced, Seminar—Year

In recent years, gender and nationalism have been at the center of local, national, and global politics and concerns in the United States, but also globally. Starting with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, attempts to overturn availability of contraception in numerous states in the United States, as well as at the national level, struggles over gender and/or heteronormativity continue to be ongoing. Overall, nationalism can be understood as a project simultaneously involving construction(s) of bodies, memory, history, and identity. In this seminar, we will identify the multiple and shifting dimensions of nationalism as a world historical phenomenon. Central to our focus will be the centrality and particular constructions of gender in different national projects. Attention will be paid to nationalism in its colonial and contemporary trajectories. Questions to be addressed will include the following: What is the relationship between nationalism and identity? Which symbols/languages are called upon to produce/evoke collective identity? What are the various inclusions, exclusions, and silences that particular historically-constituted nationalisms involve? Is nationalism necessarily a positive force? If not, under what circumstances, in what ways, and for whom does it pose problems? What is the relationship of nationalism(s) to socially and politically marginalized groups? How is pluralism and difference constructed and treated? How do the same issues, such as those regarding cultural authenticity and identity, take on a different meaning at diverse historical moments? How is the insider/outsider relationship conceptualized, and what shifts occur in different periods? Women have been interpellated and have participated within nationalist movements in a variety of ways. The dynamics and contradictions of such involvement will be analyzed closely. We will strive to explore the implications of these processes for women's and non-binary individuals' sense of self, citizenship, and belonging at specific periods and over time. In the spring semester, we will turn our attention more specifically to performances of nationalism through institutional and popular cultural arrangements. Under the former category, we will look at issues of migration, immigration, and exile; public policy and international relations; war and conflict. In the arena of popular culture, we will examine the production of nationalism(s) through the mass media, sports, film, museums and exhibitions, and tourism. Conference work can include an examination of a specific nationalist movement, theoretical issues pertaining to nationalism(s), memory, identity, performances of nationalism(s) in popular culture and the mass media, and the interplay between institutional and everyday constructions of nationalism in specific settings.

Faculty

• Shahnaz Rouse

Open, Small Lecture—Spring

What does the future of health and medicine look like, and who gets to imagine it? This course will introduce students to the social study of science, medicine, and technology by exploring how medical knowledge is produced across hospitals, laboratories, activist movements, community clinics, art spaces, and imagined futures. We will examine both medical utopias and dystopias, moments when science promises care and progress, as well as moments when it produces harm or exclusion. A key focus of the course will be how knowledge is produced not only by experts, but also by communities. We will examine alternative and grassroots health movements (from the Black Panthers and ACT UP to disability activism and feminist texts like Our Bodies, Ourselves) alongside mainstream medical institutions and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, longevity drugs, and GLP-1s. We will take seriously how medical knowledge is built and used in real-world settings, and how scientific authority influences everyday decisions about bodies, care, and risk. Students will develop practical skills in analysis, research, and writing while learning how to think across disciplines in ways that are useful for pre-med, clinical work, public-facing careers, and future study. Students will learn introductory field methods and research skills through conference work that investigates how scientific and medical knowledge circulates across different spaces, from social media and emerging reproductive technologies to protest art, public health campaigns, and community-based expertise. The course will culminate in a collaborative research project modeled on a mini academic conference, where students will present original work on how science and medicine operate in everyday life. By the end of the course, students will understand science and medicine not as neutral fields, but as social forces that can both heal and harm.

Faculty

• Carlo Sariego

Open, Seminar—Year

This course is designed for students with prior exposure to Spanish who seek a faster-paced alternative to Beginning Spanish (SPAN 3001). Using a communicative, discussion-based, and hands-on classroom methodology, students will strengthen foundational grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation while developing oral and written communication skills, descriptive precision, and analytical abilities in Spanish. As students become familiar with key concepts such as “artivism” and “climate advocacy,” the course will introduce Spanish language and culture through authentic sources, including songs, graphic journalism, fashion practices, visual art, performance, and collective projects. Students will examine Andean sustainable weaving traditions and circular fashion through artisan networks such as the Centro de Textiles Tradicionales del Cusco; collective visual projects focused on biodiversity preservation in the Amazon; and graphic journalism addressing environmental contaminants in the Caribbean. The course will also explore artistic responses to extractivism that foreground water rights, gender, and Indigenous sovereignty, such as installations by Carolina Caycedo, performances by Mapuche artist Seba Calfuqueo, and hip-hop lyrics by Aztec artist Xiuhtezcatl Martinez. Students will engage with primary and secondary sources before class and use class time for guided discussion, collaborative activities, and applied language practice. The course will also require attendance to two relevant public-facing activities (e.g.: museum, conference, convention, etc.), documented through a structured logbook and brief in-class presentation. While there are no individual conferences with the instructor, students are required to attend weekly individual meetings with a Spanish language assistant, in addition to the two weekly class sessions and the biweekly group conference meeting.

Faculty

• Javiera Irribarren Ortiz

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

What lessons can we draw from Latin American and Caribbean societies? How have their writers and artists employed their intellects and talents to educate both local and international audiences about the issues facing their societies? This yearlong, discussion-based seminar will delve into these questions. Designed for students who have previously taken Beginning Spanish (SPAN 3001) or Advanced Beginning Spanish (SPAN 3110), it also invites those who are interested in exploring these questions to take the Spanish placement test and interview with the instructor to ensure that this is the correct level for them. This course will follow a “flipped classroom” methodology where students are first introduced to the materials at home and then come to class to delve deeper into these concepts. Through extensive grammar review and engagement with authentic materials, students will broaden their vocabulary, hone their verbal and written communication skills, increase their cultural competency levels, as well as improve their close reading and critical analytical skills. We will discuss topics relevant to Latin American and Caribbean societies—such as health, education, migration, environmental concerns, gender and sexuality, race, historical memory, and technology—through poetry, short stories, podcast episodes, films, music, and legislation. We will carefully discuss the cultural productions of Samanta Schweblin, Daniel Alarcón, and Valeria Luiselli, among many others. In addition to class time, students will complete an individual conference project each semester and attend a conversation session every week with our language assistant.

Faculty

• Danielle Dorvil

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Spring

This course is designed for students who have reached a solid foundation in their Spanish language skills but have not yet fully applied context-based communicative practices. Using a discussion-based and hands-on methodology, students will strengthen their oral and written communication, expand vocabulary, and refine grammar while developing descriptive precision, analytical skills, and critical thinking in Spanish. Throughout the semester, we will examine the rise of manga aesthetics in Latin American comics, tracing early influences from 1990s animation and the spread facilitated by digital platforms such as Webtoon. Students will explore works across genres, including “shōjo” (for adolescent women), “shōnen” (for adolescent men), “BL” (focused on male-male relationships), and “mecha” (robot-centered action stories). Latin American productions blend Japanese manga, United States adventure and superhero traditions, and French-Belgian influences, while incorporating mestizo, Indigenous, and Afro-descendant cosmologies shaped by colonial and migration histories. Case studies from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Peru will illustrate regional trends, with students analyzing narrative, visual style, and cultural context to understand how these works negotiate identity, genre, and cultural memory across Latin America. Students will analyze narration, description, comparison, and argumentation while developing critical perspectives on semiotics methods, sequential art, and global entanglements. They will also engage with primary and secondary sources before each session and use class time for guided discussion, collaborative activities, and applied language practice. Throughout the semester and in biweekly conference meetings, students will also complete creative and research-based multimedia projects that foster multiliteracy and public humanities skills. The course will require attendance to one relevant public-facing activity (e.g.: museum, conference, convention, etc.), documented through a structured logbook and brief in-class presentation. In addition to class meetings, students will participate in weekly conversation sessions with a language assistant.

Faculty

• Javiera Irribarren Ortiz

Advanced, Seminar—Fall

Since their conceptions, Latin American and Caribbean societies have been accompanied by the looming presence of disasters. Throughout the centuries, literature from this region has abounded with earthquakes, hurricanes, and other environmental devastations, indicating an enduring preoccupation regarding these catastrophes among its intellectuals and artists. Far from being natural and singular events, these tragedies rather reveal the legacies of key colonial systematic structures and some corresponding failures of nation-building projects. At the same time, these literary works render visible intellectual and artistic efforts made to learn from and remember past catastrophes, as well as to imagine sustainable, ecological futures. This discussion-based seminar will delve into this dialogue. Throughout the semester, we will read and analyze enriching narratives originally written by Latin American and Caribbean thinkers. Although our conversations will be held exclusively in Spanish, the texts will represent the linguistic varieties in this region of the world in translation. Our discussion of these texts will be enriched by fundamental theoretical contributions from critical disasters studies, ecocriticism, decolonial thought, and memory studies. Designed for students who have previously completed Intermediate/Advanced Spanish (SPAN 3873), the course also invites those who are interested in the topic to take the Spanish placement test and interview with the instructor to ensure that it is the correct level for them. Students will improve their close reading and critical thinking skills through reading and written assignments. This seminar will contain an individual conference project.

Faculty

• Danielle Dorvil

Open, Concept—Spring

Over the last 50 years, ecofeminist artists have used means such as photography, performance, and community engagement as a way to approach ecological crises, using the body as a site of resistance, kinship, and violence. Methods such as deep listening, endurance performance, slow cinema, foraging and gathering, cartography, and communal urban gardens are just a few of the approaches of ecofeminist artists. These artworks address ecological issues of sustainability, extraction, and marginalization that impress both upon vulnerable bodies and the nonhuman world. Many of these works fall within an economy of care, which we will examine as gendered and racialized work. This course is an art class, with an emphasis on reading and discussion. This course will research and discuss artists whose work combines feminist and ecological themes. We will look, listen, and read seminal works of artists, with a focus on primary sources such as artist and theorist writings, artwork, and interviews—and with a goal in mind to synthesize and respond to this subject in our own works. Each week will introduce a new topic or category of ecofeminist methodology. Each week will include a discussion board and a thematic exercise. The course will culminate in a final project.

Faculty

• Jessica Segall

Open, Seminar—Spring

In this generative workshop, we will explore the poetics of the archive. While poetry can spring from us in an outpouring of spontaneous emotion, engagement with exterior texts can unlock new possibilities for the page. We are, of course, archives ourselves, of our own lived experiences—all we have known and felt, all we have learned from the interior and exterior texts of our lives. We will investigate the relationships between our inner and outer archives, and the fruitful tensions that this interplay opens up in our poems. Students will also be asked to work extensively with an archive of their choosing. This could take the form of a personally held archive—letters from an ancestor, for example, or engagement with materials at one of the many amazing archives nearby, such as the Lesbian Herstory Archive in Brooklyn. Our reading companions will be books featuring archival work, such as Cameron Awkward-Rich’s "An Optimism," Anne Carson’s "Nox," Alice Oswald’s "Memorial," Marwa Helal’s Invasive species, Jos Charles’ feeld, and Wendy Xu’s The Past.

Faculty

• Miller Oberman

Open, Seminar—Spring

Where does inspiration come from? Why do we always write about the same thing? Do the muses really exist? What do we do with the best line we have ever written that just does not fit that poem? This course will allow us to delve into our obsessions: what we write and why. Quiller-Couch and Faulkner begged us to let go of our “darlings,” yet in this course we are going to lean in. When we lean into our beloved lines, we can discover even more about ourselves and our work. What about the muses? We will be calling on them for our own inspiration and becoming our own muses to create poems that bring us closer to our unique poetic voice. Poets such as Jack Gilbert, Natalie Diaz, Patrick Rosal, Aracelis Girmay, and more will be read; and each week’s reading assignments will be used to dispel writers block and build creativity. Students will write poem drafts in the style of, or inspired by, poets, muses, and, of course, our own obsessions. A packet of poems and an essay on poetry will be assigned weekly, along with a writing prompt to be used for the creation of new work. The course will culminate in individual portfolios of 6–8 works of revised poetry. Revision will stem from in-class workshop and one-on-one conferences. This course will be all about leaning into what we cannot shake: our fixations and our passions. Come with your most open and tender selves, and let’s create our most cherished work. 

Faculty

• Yesenia Montilla