International Studies

Open, Seminar—Fall

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore child and adolescent development through a cross-cultural lens. Focusing on case studies from diverse communities around the world, we will look at the influence of cultural processes on how children learn, play, and grow. Our core readings will analyze psychological processes related to attachment and parenting; cognition and perception; social and emotional development; language acquisition; and moral development. We will ask questions such as the following: Why are children in Sri Lanka fed by hand by their mothers until middle childhood, and how does this shape their relations to others through the course of life? How does an Inuit toddler come to learn moral lessons through scripted play with adults, and how does such learning prepare them to navigate a challenging social and geographic environment? Is it true that Maya children do not do pretend play at all? How does a unique family role influence the formation of identity for Latine youth in the United States? How are unequal childhoods shaped by social exclusion and discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender, and immigration status? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, our course material will draw from developmental psychology, human development, cultural psychology, and psychological anthropology and will include peer-reviewed journal articles, books, as well as films that address core issues in a range of geographic and sociocultural contexts. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course and may opt to do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center.

Faculty

• Deanna Barenboim

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

This course will explore issues of identity and difference, locality and community, through the lens of space and place. Engaging with recent scholarly work in the fields of sociocultural anthropology, migration studies, ethnic studies, sociology, geography, architecture, and literature, we will seek to decode sociospatial arrangements to understand structures and processes of exclusion and marginalization. At the same time, we will observe how material realities and linguistic discourse shape people’s navigations through space, and how efforts at placemaking create sites of collective identity, resistance, belonging, and recognition. We will ask questions such as: how should we understand notions of displacement, transborder identifications, or longings for homeland as they play out for Sierra Leonean Muslims in Washington, DC, Ecuadorian immigrants in Italy, or Indigenous Latin American migrants in California and Wyoming? How does “talk of crime” instantiate racial segregation in a Brazilian favela? What boundaries are created by gated communities in places like San Antonio, Texas and Mumbai, India? How does public policy police green spaces to restrict access by people who are unhoused in San Diego? What should we make of “placeless” spaces or states, such as those instantiated through technologies like social media, radio, or meditative practice? Posed in a wide range of ethnographic contexts, our efforts to puzzle through these issues will require attention to the ways in which space and place are spoken, embodied, gendered, racialized, and (il)legalized. We will likewise attend to the politics and ethics of decolonizing scholarship on space and place and to the meanings of an engaged anthropology that leans towards social justice.

Faculty

• Deanna Barenboim

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will ask how words do things in the world, exploring the complex linkages between language, politics, and identity in both past and present contexts. We will pose a range of questions, such as: How does language enable powerful regimes to take force, and how do linguistic innovations constitute a creative means to challenge oppression? What role does the politics and poetics of language play in broader social movements and cultural revitalization efforts? How do particular political configurations produce language shift or constrain the possibilities for verbal expression in specific social groups? How does language take shape through specific narrative forms like testimonio, and how do such forms constitute or enable acts of political resistance? We will look at such topics in a range of ethnographic contexts, with a special focus on the Americas. Our readings will address case studies including: the emergent Indigenous Zapotec language and music revival in the highlands of Oaxaca, Mexico; the lexicon of terror that shaped the political kidnappings and murders of Argentina’s Dirty Wars; the legacies of secrecy, silence, and creative resistance among Native American nations in the United States Southwest; the challenges and joys of bilingualism among transnational migrants; and the acts of narrative witnessing employed by a range of people including political prisoners, Indigenous rights leaders, and undocumented youth. Students will be invited to draw upon original linguistic research as a central part of their conference work.

Faculty

• Deanna Barenboim

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

This course 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 senses 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.

Faculty

• Deanna Barenboim

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

First-Year Studies—Year

This seminar is a sustained look at the recent history of China and Japan, the major countries within East Asia. Placed alongside each other, the often wrenching history of Japan and China over the past three centuries raises important historical themes of Asian modernity—questioning both its sources and how we define it. Often portrayed as a direct import from the West in the 19th-century, we will ask whether modernity might instead be traced to legacies of Japan’s isolationist feudalism under the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1867) and China’s multiethnic Manchu dynasty (1644-1911) even as we acknowledge the far-reaching impact of Euro-American imperialism. For example, did the evolving samurai culture of the Tokugawa era lay socio-economic foundation for Japan’s political and economic modernity in the late 19th century? And did deep changes in Qing China society destabilize the dynastic balance of power as early as the 18th century? Both China and Japan have entrenched master narratives that portray themselves as victims of the West, but we will also investigate the contours of Asian imperialism. How and why were their empires built, and how did they end? How were the nation-states we now call China and Japan formed, and how was nationalism constructed (and re-constructed) in them? What role did socio-economic, cultural, and international crises play in fueling nationalist sentiments? How and where was radicalism (of various forms, including Maoism) incubated? The impact of war, preparing for it, waging it, and rebuilding in its wake will be a repeated theme, too. And finally, we will look at Asia’s economic dynamism, covering both Japan’s post-World War II capitalism (and its roots in the wartime imperialist project) and China’s transition to a market economy. Course readings will consist of historical scholarship regularly punctuated by primary sources, documents, fiction, and some film. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for group conferences and biweekly for individual conferences. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

Open, Seminar—Fall

What is “the long postwar”? For decades, Japanese intellectuals and cultural historians have been engaged in debate over when (or whether) the “postwar period” will ever really be over, and how to understand Japan’s current national, geopolitical, and culture identity in relation to the empire that came before. This discourse has been reignited with the political rise of Takaichi Sanae, elected Japan’s first female prime minister in 2025, who seems intent on radically revising Japan’s postwar constitution. This course will examine Japanese culture since 1945 through key works of fiction and film, tracing the arc from the devastation of war and the United States Occupation, through the reconstruction of social order and national community, to the development of a hyper-modern consumer culture. Some of the issues we will explore include the depiction of the war and its aftermath, the influence of the United States Occupation, the disintegration of the family system, questions of cultural and personal memory, historical revisionism and ideas about the remilitarization of Japan, radical New Left movements in the 1960s, the representation of marginalized groups in postwar society, and the culture of postmodernism. Students will connect the historically informed close reading skills we develop in the course with individual conference work on a topic related to media from postwar and/or contemporary Japan or East Asia.

Faculty

• Julia Clark

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

This course will explore China’s place as both an initiator and a subject of globalization between the second century (Han dynasty) and the 15th century (the Mongol, Yuan dynasty). To do so, we will follow the rise and development of the Silk Roads with the goal of uncovering the variety of cross-cultural influences among China and its closest neighbors (the Uighurs, Tibet, Central Asia, and the Russian steppe), as well as distant lands (including India, Europe, and South East Asia). More specifically, topics covered will include the following: political and state-sanctioned relations, including diplomacy and interregional wars; economic exchange and trade; the spread of religions (including Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity); and, finally, the exchange of technology, art, and material culture (including food, ceramics, and items of daily use). This will be a lecture course with weekly seminars. The lectures will be based on scholarly research and provide the broader historical and cultural context for a study of primary documents. In the seminar portion, we will undertake a closer reading and discussion of those primary documents.

Faculty

• Ellen Neskar

Open, Seminar—Year

This course will look at China’s philosophical traditions—Confucianism, Daoism, and Legalism—and seek to understand their role in developing notions of rulership and ideal governance. In fall, we will do close readings of the foundational texts in each of these traditions. Topics to be explored will include: notions of the Dao (Tao) and the ways in which it might be attained by individuals, rulers, and society; the essence of the mind, human nature, and the emotions and the ways in which they shape political action; the role of inner self-cultivation in producing appropriate social engagement. In spring, we will look at the ways in which later dynasties applied these philosophies to their political ideology and governments. We will also explore the ways in which individuals resisted the government and established their own practices of social action.

Faculty

• Ellen Neskar

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will explore a variety of forms of traditional popular culture that continue to survive in China and abroad. Among the topics we will cover are: folktales (Mulan, Butterfly Lovers), festivals (New Year’s, Dragon Boat, Herdboy, and Weaving Maid), popular deities (Mazu, Guanyin), and religious practices (All Souls, Hell, ancestor worship). Our focus will be on their historical origins and transformations through a variety of cultural forms. Particular attention will be paid to their entertainment, political, ideological, and sociological functions. This course will aim to build different—and sometimes competing—conceptions of “tradition” and understand their continuing relevance today. Since many of these practices and beliefs reside outside the lens of elite taste and political authority, our materials will include opera, drama, popular fiction, and visual arts. 

Faculty

• Ellen Neskar

First-Year Studies—Year

We live in the world of monopoly capitalism—a market economy dominated by big rent-seeking corporations with immense political and economic power domestically and internationally. What economic methods and theories are suited for understanding the historical development, current turbulence, and future tendencies of monopoly capitalism? We will engage in a series of critical conversations about various schools of economics and their logics of economic policy-making, in order to gain a well-rounded and holistic understanding of the business of global monopoly capitalism and its economic, social, and political ills. How did the financial market get so big? Why do artificial intelligence and manufacturing robots have to replace human work? How will global monopoly capitalism evolve socially, economically, and politically? And many other questions. Students will encounter not only the so-called “standard” economics and business thinking, but also a plurality of classical political economists such as Smith; Ricardo and Mill and their descendants; feminist economists; critical management scholars; the old and new institutionalists; the Marxian and Keynesian challengers; contemporary behavioral economists; and so on. Biweekly in fall, students will alternate between individual conferences with the instructor and small-group activities. Biweekly in spring, students will meet with the instructor for individual conferences. 

Faculty

• An Li

First-Year Studies—Year

The 2024 Presidential Election result will have far-reaching implications for economic, social, and environmental policies. It will also be significant in terms of the future of American democracy and social wellbeing. In this course, we will situate current economic and political challenges in a theoretical and historical context by drawing on insights from difference schools of thought in economics as well as other disciplines such as law, politics, sociology, and history. Some of the key questions to be addressed are as follows: How can the central debates in political economy help us understand some of the unprecedented challenges we face, such as new gilded age style wealth concentration and power, economic insecurity, and the climate crisis? Why is the study of history a central methodological priority for many economists and why not so for others? Why do people distinguish between “regulation” and laissez-faire and is this a false dichotomy? What is the history of industrial and social policy in the United States and other countries? How do we understand the relationship between political and corporate power and the “rule of law” with regard to market outcomes? What is Project 2025 and how can we understand its theoretical basis and implications? These and others will be some of the questions that we will be tackling throughout the course of the year, thereby ensuring that students develop a solid foundation to the fundamental debates in economic theory and policy and understand the key role of methodology in the study of political economy. Finally, the goal is to ensure that students develop the ability to critically engage scholarly work in economics. In fall until mid-semester, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; thereafter through spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Open, Small Lecture—Year

This course on business history will situate business in its social and political contexts. At the core of the course is the argument that the economy is embedded in the political society and is thus subject to historical change. The study of business cannot be separated from politics and political struggle, which determine how society is legally constructed in any given moment in history. Thus, what is of often called “private enterprise” sits on a contextually determined set of power relations which shape and are in turn shaped by current legal institutions. Challenging the idea, common to conventional discourse, that economies can be more or less regulated, this course will focus on the politics of business regulation, which in some contexts has produced socially progressive outcomes and in others regressive ones. Regulation is ubiquitous and subject to variation given changed circumstances due say to an economic crisis, new technologies, global competition, socio-political pressures etc. In this course, the nature and politics of business regulation will be studied in different national and historical contexts, involving countries in the Global South (e.g. Mauritius, Chile, Brazil, the Indian state of Kerala, South Africa etc.) and the Global North (e.g. United States, Sweden, Germany, etc.). It will address a wide range of topics that include: (a) slavery, cotton, banking, and property rights in early American industrialization; (b) legal struggles between corporations and society over constitutional rights (e.g. what brought about the landmark Supreme Court case, Citizens United v. FEC (2010)?); (c) corporations and colonialism (e.g. the British East India Company, the Virginia Company, etc.); (d) business regulation during the post-Civil War Reconstruction Period; (e) late industrialization and social well being; (f) using the United States and Sweden as case studies, the construction of welfare states and workers’ attempts to secure social and economic rights; and (g) the history of the relationship between business associations and anti-democratic politics, including the links between Silicon Valley technolibertarians and digital capitalism (i.e. artificial intelligence and crypto currencies). At a theoretical level, the study of business history will be grounded in debates in microeconomics, theories of business investment and pricing, and the relationship between law, politics, history, and economics. This course will be of interest to students who wish to understand contemporary social and political challenges in a theoretically and historically informed way.

Faculty

• Jamee Moudud

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

How do we understand humans and their relationship to nature—and how do these understandings shape the ways we design our societies, relate to each other and the natural world, and imagine our world into the future? This lecture course will introduce political theory through environmental questions, focusing on two central themes. First: how does introducing a concern for “the Earth” or “ecology” deepen, and often complicate, our understanding of key political concepts like justice, freedom, democracy, and power? Second: how do the perspectives and methods of political theory relate to those of other disciplines—ecology, climate science, history, anthropology—which approach similar questions in very different ways? We will begin by examining what political theory is and exploring how different understandings of human nature and the natural world have shaped political thinking across traditions. We will then explore how environmental concerns reshape core political questions about governance, collective action, and social change—and how we might imagine and practice political futures within planetary limits.

Faculty

• Ben Mylius

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

How do humans respond to existential threats? This seminar will examine psychological and political patterns that emerge during crises—environmental catastrophe, economic collapse, pandemics, and rapid technological change. We will explore how fear shapes desires for certainty, belonging, and control; how communities form through inclusion and exclusion; and how perceived existential threats reshape relationships between individuals, groups, authority, and the broader-than-human world. Drawing on psychology, political theory, and environmental studies, we will consider some of what is known or hypothesized about destructive and constructive individual and collective responses to crises. Some of our topics may include: mortality salience, terror management theory, in-group/out-group dynamics, scapegoating and purification fantasies, imagined histories, the appeal of hierarchy under threat (including toward the natural world), the feedback loops that intensify these patterns, and alternative forms of belonging and solidarity. The course will emphasize collaborative inquiry: we are all trying to understand what humans are capable of in dark times, including recognizing these patterns in ourselves and exploring how we might work with rather than against our shared vulnerability in the present.

Faculty

• Ben Mylius

Open, Large seminar—Year

This course is designed primarily for students who have not had any exposure to French and will allow them to develop, over the course of the year, an active command of the fundamentals of spoken and written French. We will use grammar lessons to learn how to speak, read, and write in French. In-class dialogue will center on the study of theatre, cinema, and short texts, including poems, newspaper articles, and short stories from French and francophone cultures. During the spring semester, students will be able to conduct a small-scale project in French on a topic of their choice. There are no individual conference meetings for this level, though a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant is required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged.

Faculty

• Jason Earle

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 begin to use linguistic concepts as tools for developing their analytic writing. More than other countries, France’s identity was shaped by centuries of what is now perceived by the French as a historically coherent past. In this course, we will explore the complexities of today’s French identity—or, rather, identities—following relevant contemporary controversies that have shaken French society in the past 30 years while simultaneously exploring historical influences and cultural paradigms at play in these débats franco-français. Thus, in addition to newspapers, online resources, recent films, television series, and songs, we will study masterpieces of the past in literature and in the arts. Topics discussed will include, among others, school and separation from faith; cuisine and traditions; immigration and urban ghettos; women and feminism in France; France’s relation to nature and the environment; the heritage of French Enlightenment (les Lumières), duty to remember (devoir de mémoire), and France's relationship with dark episodes of its history (slavery, Régime de Vichy and Nazi occupation, and the Algerian war). Authors studied will include Marie de France, Montaigne, Voltaire, Hugo, Flaubert, Proust, Colette, Duras, Césaire, Djebar, Chamoiseau, and Bouraoui. In addition to conferences, a weekly conversation session with a French language assistant will be required. Attendance at the weekly French lunch table and French film screenings are both highly encouraged. This course is specifically designed to help prepare students to study in the Paris global education program.

Faculty

• Eric Leveau

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

This course is designed for students who already have a strong understanding of the major aspects of French grammar and language, but who wish to develop their vocabulary and their grasp of more complex aspects of the language. Students are expected to be able to easily read more complex texts and to express themselves more abstractly. A major part of the fall semester will be devoted to the study and discussion of literary texts in French. In a challenge to his readers, “Question your soupspoons,” Georges Perec summed up, in his unique manner, a particular strain of 20th-century French letters—one that seeks to turn literature’s attention away from the extraordinary, the scandalous, and the strange toward an examination of the ordinary makeup of everyday life. This course will examine some of the aesthetic and theoretical challenges that the representation of the quotidian entails. Does the everyday hide infinite depths of discovery, or does its value lie precisely in its superficiality? How do spaces influence our experience of everyday life? How can (and should) literature give voice to experiences and objects that normally appear undeserving of attention? How does one live one’s gender on an everyday basis? Can one ever escape from everyday life? We will review fundamentals of French grammar and speaking and develop tools for analysis through close readings of literary texts. Students will be encouraged to develop tools for the examination and representation of their own everyday lives in order to take up Perec’s call to interrogate the habitual. Readings will include texts by Proust, Breton, Aragon, Leiris, Perec, Queneau, Barthes, the Situationists, Ernaux, and Calle. The Intermediate French I (FREN 3501) and Intermediate French II (FREN 3750) courses are specially designed to help prepare students to study in the Paris global education program.

Faculty

• Jason Earle
• Nicole Asquith

First-Year Studies—Year

This course will provide a broad introduction to the political, social, cultural, and intellectual history of the Middle East from the late 18th century to the present. After a brief conceptual overview, the course will draw upon a wide array of primary and secondary sources to illuminate the manifold transformations and processes that have contributed over time to shaping what has meant to be “modern” in this remarkably diverse and dynamic region. Particular attention will be paid to the following themes: the question of modernization and reform within the Ottoman and Qajar empires; the experience of different forms of European imperialism in the Middle East; the integration of the Middle East into the world economy; World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; state-building in both colonial and postcolonial contexts; transformations in religious thought; changing family norms and gender roles and the genesis of Middle Eastern women’s movements; nationalism; class politics, social movements, and revolution; Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict; post-World War II geopolitics and the Cold War in the Middle East; Nasserism and pan-Arabism; the role of US power in the Middle East; the origins and spread of political Islam; the political economy of oil; globalization and neoliberalism; and the impact of various new cultural forms and media on the formation of identities across the region. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Matthew Ellis

First-Year Studies—Year

This course will introduce students to the leading writers of the 18th-century Enlightenment: Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Montesquieu, Locke, and many others. Dozens of our own society’s most characteristic beliefs about the structure of the universe, human nature, the foundations of political community, and the principles of morality were first put into circulation by Enlightenment thinkers, and to understand the Enlightenment is to understand much that is important about ourselves. The course’s central focus will be ideas, values, and sensibilities as expressed in works of philosophy, literature, and art. But, we will also consider 18th-century political and social history and the role of the Enlightenment in inspiring the French Revolution, the event which marked the real dawn of the modern world. Students in the course can pursue conference projects examining almost any aspect of life or culture in 17th- to 19th-century Europe. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Philip Swoboda

Open, Seminar—Fall

Climate change, political debates, and changes to immigration and refugee policies mean that African people are living and working in unexpected places. Studies of the African diaspora used to focus on the dispersal of Africans as a result of Trans-Saharan or Trans-Atlantic slave trades. More recent scholarship has focused on new African diasporas, such as communities throughout the Indian Ocean, Senegambians in Harlem, Ghanaians in Germany, Nigerians in Japan. These modern-day diasporas, powered in part by the forces of globalization, demand new levels of analysis. People of African descent have made long lasting contributions to the societies where they now live. Unfortunately, when their positions are defined by prejudice, discrimination, or servile status, these contributions are often appropriated or ignored. The goals of this course will be to understand the multiple origins of the African diaspora and bring the contributions of people of African descent to the forefront of intellectual discourse. We will attempt to answer the questions: What are the contours of the modern African diaspora? How have African migration patterns changed over time? What role has class, ethnicity, gender, religion, and race played in notions of return or exile? Although this is primarily a history course, we will make use of geography, sociology, anthropology, autobiography, literature, film, and music as sources. Students will gain a clear understanding of how present-day African migration patterns fit into a larger history of voluntary, involuntary, and forced migration. Ultimately, we will develop a deeper understanding of Africa’s global present in order to appreciate the contributions that African peoples will make to our global future.

Faculty

• Mary Dillard

Open, Large seminar—Fall

The Middle East has a long and rich urban tradition, boasting some of the world’s oldest cities. At the same time, the cities of the region have undergone profound changes over time, particularly as a result of the range of global forces, patterns, and linkages that are intrinsic to the process of “modernity” (a conceptual category that will be examined at great length). This course will explore the lived experience of urban space as a lens through which to view broader transformations in the social, political, economic, and cultural history of the Middle East from late antiquity to the present. The course will also introduce students to some recent developments in urban theory and different methods that scholars have adopted to capture various aspects of city life, particularly in the modern period. To this end, the approach of the course will be interdisciplinary, drawing from such fields as art history, anthropology, sociology, geography, comparative literature, film studies, and political economy to explore the historical development of Middle Eastern cities through a variety of frames. In our effort to think beyond the “hard city” of bricks and mortar, particular attention will be paid to the cultural imagination and expression of various Middle Eastern cities in literature and film—our main “primary sources” in this course. Throughout the course, we will examine what cities have meant for Middle Eastern society and culture in a variety of contexts; study how various individuals and social groups across the region have experienced and used urban space; explore how writers, artists, and filmmakers have attempted to imagine and render their urban milieus; and consider the extent to which the Middle Eastern experience of urban modernity has paralleled others around the globe. Cities to be covered include: Cairo, Istanbul, Damascus, Mecca, Baghdad, Tehran, Isfahan, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Aleppo, Alexandria, Beirut, Algiers, Marrakesh, Aden, Izmir, and Dubai.

Faculty

• Matthew Ellis

Open, Seminar—Fall

How do states develop their power? To what extent can people influence that power? Who are “the people”? This course will use the history of modern Mexico to consider broad questions of state formation and democracy. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 was a defining moment for the 20th century, but its legacy has been difficult to classify. From a decentralized peasant movement focused on agrarian reform to a centralizing nationalist project focused on state-building, the revolution was a mix of left- and right-wing tendencies. Mexico served as a refuge for figures like Leon Trotsky, Fidel Castro, and the Sandinistas, even as it became a hub for Latin American anticommunism in the Cold War. It fostered movements for indigenous rights, regional autonomy, gender, and LGBTQ rights but also saw the violent repression of student protests in 1968. This course will examine longstanding tensions between radicalism and conservatism in Mexican History, tracing their interplay with Catholicism, Marxism, and the Latin American Cold War, with special attention to Mexico–United States relations. Looking beyond simplistic narratives of Mexico’s “Institutional” Revolution, we will cover a range of topics, including the modernizing Porfirian period, the rural campaign of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, the nationalist presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas, anticommunism and the Cold War, student protests in 1968, rock music and counterculture in the 1970s, tourism and the creation of Cancún, the Zapatista movement in the 1990s, and post-NAFTA tensions around drug traffic in the neoliberal 21st century. The course will develop skills in historical methodology, using innovative or relevant historical scholarship and many types of primary sources, including, testimonies, music, visual arts, poetry, novels, and film. We will use the tools of history to construct competing narratives of revolution and nation in Mexico.

Faculty

• Jesse Horst

Open, Seminar—Fall

What is the relationship between migration and nation? How do people in movement shape political dynamics, state formation, and national identity? How is national membership maintained amid diaspora? This course will focus on the history of Cuba, but it uses Cuba’s history to address questions of broad relevance to Latin America and all modern societies. The Cuban Revolution was the first socialist revolution in the Western Hemisphere and a watershed moment for the Cold War. Taking power in 1959, rebels in Cuba toppled a dictatorship, defied the United States, and shocked the world. The Revolution became a beacon for the left throughout Latin America and a warning for the right. More than six decades later, its contested legacy is enough to tilt the balance in United States presidential elections. At the time of the revolution, Cuba was a nation of immigrants. Beginning with the forced migration of enslaved peoples from different regions of Africa, Cuba received waves of immigrants from across the Caribbean, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. After 1959, Cuba became primarily a sending nation, with an especially large, politically active diaspora in Florida. The past five years have seen the largest wave of emigration in Cuban history. This course will engage with active historical debates around migration, nation, and diaspora in Cuba. We will cover topics like the economic and political dynamics of Haitian and West-Indian migration to Cuba, the nationalist origins of the 1959 revolution, the evolving social dynamics of Latin Miami, LGBTQ politics in the Mariel Boatlift of 1980, and the mass arrival of Cubans via Nicaragua to the United States' southern border since protests in 2021. The course will develop skills in historical methodology, using innovative or relevant historical scholarship and many types of primary sources, including, testimonies, music, visual arts, poetry, novels, and film. We will use the tools of history to construct competing narratives of revolution and nation in Cuba.

Faculty

• Jesse Horst

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

Open, Lecture—Fall

In a global landscape marked by genocide, wars of choice, piracy, and international terrorism, what use is international law? Can it mean anything without a global police force and a universal judiciary? Is "might makes right" the only law that works? Or is it true that "most states comply with most of their obligations most of the time"? These essential questions frame the contemporary practice of law across borders. This course examines international law from its historical foundations through today's most pressing challenges: When can states legally use force? How do human rights claims constrain sovereignty? When does law actually bind? How do international norms become domestic reality? Students will engage with both doctrine and practice, learning to analyze how international law functions—and fails—in a multipolar world. Beyond mastering legal frameworks, students will develop critical skills for understanding how states behave, how power and principle interact in global affairs, and how individuals and organizations can leverage international law to effect change—or when other tools prove more effective.

Faculty

• Mark R. Shulman

Open, Lecture—Fall

This course will introduce students to the main themes of Russian history from the Middle Ages through the Communist revolution of 1917. We will begin by examining how history transformed the various Slavic tribes of the East European plain into the three distinct peoples whom we now term “Russians,” “Ukrainians,” and “Belarusians.” We will consider the medieval principality of Moscow—in which Russia’s enduring traditions of autocratic government, territorial expansionism, and xenophobia originally took shape—and trace the course of Muscovy’s protracted struggle with Poland-Lithuania for dominance in Eastern Europe. We will investigate how rulers such as Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine the Great endeavored to meet “the challenge of the West”—to marshal the resources of their huge but economically backward empire in order to compete militarily with the monarchs of more advanced European countries. We will discuss resistance to the oppressive demands of the tsarist state on the part of peasants, Cossacks, religious dissidents, and non-Russian peoples. We will consider how the tsars’ response to the Western challenge called into being a new, Europeanized elite, which in the 19th century grew restive under the tutelage of its government and was increasingly attracted to liberal and socialist ideas. In the final weeks of the semester, we will consider the revolutionary upheavals that convulsed the Russian Empire in the early years of the 20th century and created the conditions for the establishment in Russia of the world’s first socialist regime.

Faculty

• Philip Swoboda

Open, Seminar—Year

This course will provide a broad introduction to the political, social, cultural, and intellectual history of the Middle East from the late 18th century to the present. After a brief conceptual overview, the course will draw upon a wide array of primary and secondary sources to illuminate the manifold transformations and processes that have contributed over time to shaping what has meant to be “modern” in this remarkably diverse and dynamic region. Particular attention will be paid to the following themes: the question of modernization and reform within the Ottoman and Qajar empires; the experience of different forms of European imperialism in the Middle East; the integration of the Middle East into the world economy; World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire; state-building in both colonial and postcolonial contexts; transformations in religious thought; changing family norms and gender roles and the genesis of Middle Eastern women’s movements; nationalism; class politics, social movements, and revolution; Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict; post-World War II geopolitics and the Cold War in the Middle East; Nasserism and pan-Arabism; the role of US power in the Middle East; the origins and spread of political Islam; the political economy of oil; globalization and neoliberalism; and the impact of various new cultural forms and media on the formation of identities across the region.

Faculty

• Matthew Ellis

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

Open, Lecture—Spring

History is replete with pogroms, religious wars, show trials, and genocide. For as long as people have congregated, they have defined themselves against an other—and have persecuted that other. Yet history has also produced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international tribunals, truth and reconciliation commissions, and movements demanding dignity. Can we hope to understand the human experience without examining both the wrongs and the rights? Do power and interest always triumph over principle, as realists claim? Or does a logic of mutual respect offer better solutions? This course will examine the history and practice of international human rights, focusing on the claims individuals and groups make against states. Students will master both rights doctrine and the practical techniques of human rights advocacy, learning how activists, lawyers, and movements have wielded human rights discourse to challenge oppression—and when those efforts have fallen short. Through this exploration, students will develop their own informed perspective on how the world works: how states respond to moral claims, how international and domestic politics intersect, and how ordinary people can drive meaningful change in the face of entrenched power.

Faculty

• Mark R. Shulman

Open, Lecture—Spring

Between 1917 and 1923, a state of an entirely new type—the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” or “USSR”—was erected by Lenin’s Communist Party on the territories that had previously been ruled by the Russian tsars. Under the dictatorship of the Party, the country then followed a unique and extraordinary path to become a literate, urban, industrial society. In this course, we will trace the fortunes of the USSR through seven decades of Communist rule, and then consider how and why, in 1991, Party rule collapsed and the USSR broke up into 15 independent states. We will discuss how the experiences the country underwent during the Communist era have shaped its post-Communist development. We will endeavor to explain why the attempt to create a prosperous, democratic Russia in the 1990s faltered, and how this set the stage for a quarter-century of increasingly autocratic rule by President Vladimir Putin. We will look at Russia’s relations with the other “newly independent states” of Eastern Europe—above all Ukraine—and explore how Putin’s reading of the Russian past has conditioned many of his actions as Russia’s ruler—including his war to destroy Ukrainian independence (2014–present).

Faculty

• Philip Swoboda

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

The year 1968—a year which saw the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the passage of a landmark civil rights act, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy—looms large in American historiography and public memory as a symbolic inflection point. But 1968 was also a highly consequential year in global history, one with world-changing and epoch-defining significance for the broader confrontations of the Cold War, the political and economic fortunes of the developing world, and the emergence of globalized cultures and countercultures. This course will examine the global history of the postwar period through the lens of 1968, drawing from one or more of the major events of each month of that year to explore such themes as anticolonial and revolutionary struggles, youth culture and political movements, the Cold War, the rise of second-wave feminism, and the conservative backlash to postwar liberalism. Along the way, we will analyze and discuss the significance of such events as May ‘68 in France, the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico, the Vietnam War, the Pan-Africanist and Non-Aligned movements, and the Cultural Revolution in China. Ultimately, we will consider the success and failures of these movements and their legacies, while critically reevaluating the global significance of the 1960s as a whole.

Faculty

• Sean Griffin

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

Markets, profits, and exploitation seem to define capitalism; but exchanges, markets, and exploitation of the powerful over the powerless have existed long before the word “capitalism” even entered the English language. So, what defines capitalism? How has that meaning changed over time? Does capitalism change across time and space? What changes has capitalism brought to economic life? What aspects of economic life transcend capitalism? Who are the advocates of capitalism? Who are its critics, and why? This seminar will seek to address these questions through a study of the transformations in economic life before, during, and after capitalism. The course will examine the historicity of concepts such as markets, prices, wages, and profits—and the debates around the origins of capitalism. It will trace the economic, social, political, and cultural transformations generated through the expansion and resistance to capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course will be organized chronologically but also thematically. Some of the topics covered include gender, race and slavery, nationalism and war, socialism, anarchism, Cold War politics, Third Worldism, and neoliberalism. Aside from mandatory attendance and active participation, the requirements for the course include an individual exam, a collaborative research conference project, weekly responses, and oral presentations. 

Faculty

• Margarita Fajardo

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

Advanced, Small seminar—Fall

The aim of this course is to allow students of Italian at an advanced level to work on translating works from Italian to English to better their knowledge of the language and of Italian vocabulary and syntax. Each student will choose a different text to work on independently, but will be responsible for sharing the draft of their translation with the group; in our weekly meetings, we will go through each student’s translation and make suggestions as well as examine the original text's style and tone. For students who are interested in participating on a joint project with a historian from Università degli Studi di Firenze, the texts to be translated will be biographical and historical texts from a digital humanities project on intellectuals displaced from fascist Italy. Select translations from the latter project will be published under the student’s own name in the host institution's portal: https://intellettualinfuga.com/.

Faculty

• Tristana Rorandelli

Open, Seminar—Fall

What is “the long postwar”? For decades, Japanese intellectuals and cultural historians have been engaged in debate over when (or whether) the “postwar period” will ever really be over, and how to understand Japan’s current national, geopolitical, and culture identity in relation to the empire that came before. This discourse has been reignited with the political rise of Takaichi Sanae, elected Japan’s first female prime minister in 2025, who seems intent on radically revising Japan’s postwar constitution. This course will examine Japanese culture since 1945 through key works of fiction and film, tracing the arc from the devastation of war and the United States Occupation, through the reconstruction of social order and national community, to the development of a hyper-modern consumer culture. Some of the issues we will explore include the depiction of the war and its aftermath, the influence of the United States Occupation, the disintegration of the family system, questions of cultural and personal memory, historical revisionism and ideas about the remilitarization of Japan, radical New Left movements in the 1960s, the representation of marginalized groups in postwar society, and the culture of postmodernism. Students will connect the historically informed close reading skills we develop in the course with individual conference work on a topic related to media from postwar and/or contemporary Japan or East Asia.

Faculty

• Julia Clark

Open, Seminar—Spring

The conflation of Russian nationalism and Russian imperialism that so often marks our understanding of cultural production in the Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet spaces has often gone unnoticed in the West. As the extraordinary resistance of Ukraine in the face of current Russian aggression makes clear, a remapping of that literary landscape is long overdue. This course will supply some historical context while centering our attention on the remarkable flowering of Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian literature currently underway. We will begin with the curious emptiness of Russian nationalism as expressed first in Russian-American journalist M. Gessen’s recent contribution to This American Life, “Eight Fights,” and then in a classic text of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1831). While still in the 19th century, we will make a brief foray into Polish and Ukrainian literature as written at a time when neither Poland nor Ukraine existed as sovereign nations: our reading here will include Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz’s long narrative poem “Pan Tadeusz” and then in a classic text of Russian literature, Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1834); a few shorter poems by the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko; and a few short stories by the Ukrainian writer Mikolay Hohol, better known by his Russian name, Nikolai Gogol. We will then jump to the 20th century with Viktor Shklovsky’s account of the Bolshevik Revolution in Sentimental Journey (1921). With the Russian empire re-established now in Soviet terms, we will trace the rise of contemporary Polish, Belarusian, and Ukrainian literature in turn. In the Polish context, we will read Bruno Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles (1934) as written in the shadow of the Nazi invasion; Witold Gombrowicz’s gender-bending tale of post-World War II exile in Trans-Atlantyk (1953); and watch Andrzej Wajda’s tribute to the Solidarity movement in his 1977 film, Man of Marble. We will then finish with the 21st century and 2018 Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights (2007). For Belarus, we will return to World War II with The Ordeal (1972), first as originally written by the Soviet-Belarusian writer Vasil Bykaŭ (in Russian, Vasilii Bykov) and then as adapted by Soviet-Ukrainian filmmaker Larisa Shepitko in her 1977 film, The Ascent. We will then read Voices From Chernobyl (1997) by the 2015 Nobel Prize-winning writer, Svetlana Alexievich. From Alexievich’s Russian-language account of a disaster that struck Belarusians and Ukrainians alike, we will turn to Markiian Kamysh’s more narrowly Ukrainian reflection on life after Chernobyl, Stalking the Atomic City (2014), before exploring just a few of the works that mark the vibrant contemporary Ukrainian scene: Oksana Zabuzhko’s Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex (1996), Evgenia Belorusets’s Lucky Breaks (2022), Serhiy Zhadan’s The Orphanage (2017), and Halyna Kruk’s recent collection of poems, A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails (2023).

Faculty

• Melissa Frazier

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, 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 will explore 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 using various approaches to translate its meaning. Course themes will 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 Angklung Chandra Buana, an Indonesian tonal percussion ensemble, is strongly encouraged. No prior experience in music is necessary.

Faculty

• Niko Higgins

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, Lecture—Fall

Antonio Gramsci reportedly wrote, “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” He was commenting on the rise of fascism in Italy under Mussolini, but he saw the possibility that, after temporary struggle, something new and beautiful might be built to replace the old system. Recently, he has been quoted by political actors across the spectrum, arguing that we are living in an era of profound change, risk, and possibility. This course will begin by defining the international liberal order created in the wake of World War II, with the founding of the United Nations and the Bretton Woods institutions, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. This period also saw the development of a new era of international law and the framing of human rights within the context of the Cold War. The international system was defined by two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. After the decolonial struggles of the post-war period, many Asian and African states entered the international system and sought to both accommodate themselves to some aspects of the system while seeking to challenge others. By 1989, as the bipolar world of the Cold War era was replaced with the unchecked dominance of the United States, Francis Fukuyama (in)famously proclaimed “the end of history,” defined by the full victory of the liberal world order, capitalism, and liberal democracy. Less than two decades later, the cracks in the system became apparent. In this course, we will follow the liberal triumphalism of the 1990s to the growing isolationism and illiberalism of the 2020s. As United States hegemony is increasingly challenged by the rise of China, and the unipolarity of the 1990s is likely to be replaced by a bipolar or even multipolar arrangement, we will attempt to understand the outlines of the new system, while recognizing its lack of permanence.

Faculty

• Yekaterina Oziashvili
• Elke Zuern

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Spring

The events of September 11, 2001 unleashed a bitter and contentious debate regarding not just how states and societies might best respond to the threat of violence but also, fundamentally, what qualifies as terrorism. Just nine days later, and without resolving any of these difficult issues, the United States announced its response: The Global War on Terrorism. Two and a half decades later, we are no closer to consensus concerning these politically and emotionally charged debates. Americans are also belatedly beginning to realize that the greatest threat of terror attacks in the United States originates from domestic rather than foreign actors, often white nationalists. This course will investigate the use of violence by state and non-state actors to assert their authority and to inspire fear. The modern state, as it was formed in Western Europe, was born of war. In Charles Tilly’s often-quoted phrase: “War makes states, and states make war.” The ability to control violence within a territory has long been a key part of the definition of a functioning state. The presence of armed groups on a state’s territory, which the state does not or cannot effectively control, is therefore a direct challenge to a state’s authority and has the potential to undermine its recognition as an international actor. This course will discuss the evolution of the terminology of terror and terrorism from the French Revolution to the present and consider frameworks to distinguish forms of violence and different types of violent actors. We will explore acts of state terror and their consequences and consider the use of the term ”terrorism” in the popular press, in political rhetoric, and in policymaking by states and international organizations. We will consider a range of nonstate actors that have employed violence—including South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), and white nationalists in the United States—and explore the impact their use of violence has had for their popular support, for local and transnational communities and their ability to achieve their goals. Finally, we will consider new means of terror from drone warfare to cyber warfare. As part of our discussion of United States foreign policy. We will conduct a Model Diplomacy simulation in which students will assume the roles of members of the United States National Security Council (NSC).

Faculty

• Elke Zuern

Open, Seminar—Fall

In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore child and adolescent development through a cross-cultural lens. Focusing on case studies from diverse communities around the world, we will look at the influence of cultural processes on how children learn, play, and grow. Our core readings will analyze psychological processes related to attachment and parenting; cognition and perception; social and emotional development; language acquisition; and moral development. We will ask questions such as the following: Why are children in Sri Lanka fed by hand by their mothers until middle childhood, and how does this shape their relations to others through the course of life? How does an Inuit toddler come to learn moral lessons through scripted play with adults, and how does such learning prepare them to navigate a challenging social and geographic environment? Is it true that Maya children do not do pretend play at all? How does a unique family role influence the formation of identity for Latine youth in the United States? How are unequal childhoods shaped by social exclusion and discrimination on the basis of race, class, gender, and immigration status? Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, our course material will draw from developmental psychology, human development, cultural psychology, and psychological anthropology and will include peer-reviewed journal articles, books, as well as films that address core issues in a range of geographic and sociocultural contexts. Students will conduct conference projects related to the central topics of our course and may opt to do fieldwork at the Early Childhood Center.

Faculty

• Deanna Barenboim

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

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

This course 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 senses 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.

Faculty

• Deanna Barenboim

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—Spring

As a far-right ultranationalist movement focused on social hierarchy, tradition, and the subordination of individual rights for the national collective, fascism has been deeply intertwined with religious themes and imagery since it arose in Europe in the early 20th century. As such, this seminar will examine the complex and often paradoxical relationship between religious ideas and fascist political movements in Central Europe during the first half of the 20th century. The course will investigate how religious traditions, symbols, and narratives were mobilized both to legitimize authoritarian, nationalist projects and also to inspire forms of resistance, dissent, and ethical critique in the decades leading up to, during, and immediately following World War II. Focusing on literary, artistic, philosophical, and political texts, the seminar will move beyond a singular focus on Nazi Germany to explore a wider Central European landscape shaped by fascist influence. We will examine responses to fascist movements and regimes in Germany, Hungary, Poland, Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, and Czechoslovakia, attending to both foreign occupation and homegrown forms of authoritarian nationalism. While Nazi domination and its catastrophic consequences will form an unavoidable part of the historical backdrop, the course will emphasize the diversity of fascist ideologies and the range of religious and cultural responses they provoked. Early in the course, we will consider how Christian, mystical, and quasi-religious concepts, such as sacrifice, redemption, mythic origins, and sacred nationhood, were appropriated by fascist thinkers and writers to naturalize violence, exclusion, and obedience. Alongside these pro-fascist or accommodationist texts, we will read religiously inflected critiques that challenged fascism from within theological, ethical, and spiritual traditions, including Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and heterodox sources. A central focus of the seminar will be the work of dissident writers and artists who, in the face of censorship, persecution, and mass violence, turned to religious symbolism, spiritual language, and philosophical reflection as resources for resistance. Essays, novels, poetry, film, and visual and performance art from across Central Europe will be studied as sites where older traditions were reworked to confront dehumanization, preserve moral agency, and imagine alternative forms of community. These creative responses often forged new spiritual and cultural openings rather than simply returning to inherited orthodoxies. In the final section of the course, we will examine post–World War II reflections on fascism, focusing on how memory, trauma, and responsibility were negotiated in the aftermath of destruction. We will ask how literature, philosophy, and art participated in the construction of collective memory, and whether it is possible to sustain national or cultural identity without reproducing the exclusionary nationalism that fueled fascist movements in the first place. Through close reading, historical contextualization, and comparative analysis, students will gain a nuanced understanding of religion’s ambivalent role in both enabling and resisting fascism, and of the enduring challenges posed by this history for politics, culture, and memory. Along the way we will explore themes that remain as relevant as ever today – technology, power, evil, faith, hope, and the political – all with a view to asking what it might mean to live freely as a human being in modernity.

Faculty

• Joel Swanson

Open, Lecture—Fall

This lecture will introduce major areas of study in the sociology of deviance, detention, and illegality through a global and transnational lens. Rather than asking simply why individuals break rules, the course will examine how societies create rules, decide who counts as a problem, and build institutions to manage that decision, from everyday policing to migration control and humanitarian governance. We will begin by learning about foundational theories by Émile Durkheim on anomie and the social function of deviance, Robert Merton’s strain theory, and later developments including conflict theory, labeling theory, stigma, and the controversial “broken windows” model. These frameworks will provide tools for understanding how behaviors become categorized as criminal, pathological, risky, or merely tolerated—and why those distinctions rarely fall evenly across populations. From there the course will move outward to contemporary forms of regulation and global population management. Readings will examine detention regimes, border enforcement, and the administration of displaced populations, alongside transnational sectors where legality is negotiated rather than fixed, with case studies including industrial fishing and maritime labor exploitation (Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean), informal and illicit global trade (Carolyn Nordstrom’s Global Outlaws), and transnational sex work and trafficking (Christine Chin and Kimberly Hoang). Through these cases, students will consider how states, markets, and humanitarian institutions classify people as “deviant,” “criminal,” or “illegal,” and how those categories function as tools of governance and political leverage. The course will also explore resistance movements such as prison hunger strikes, struggles against apartheid, undocumented activism, and other social movements that challenge official classifications and reshape public discourse and morality. We will conclude by examining how the COVID-19 pandemic produced new forms of deviance tied to public health, surveillance, and biopolitical regulation, which reveal how quickly norms of acceptable behavior can shift under conditions of crisis. Conference work will be conducted in collaborative research groups. Each group will produce a portfolio on a chosen topic related to deviance, detention, or illegality, including presentations, guided discussions, and individual critical essays that integrate theoretical and empirical material from the course. By the end of the semester, students should be able to see deviance not as a property of particular people but as an ongoing social process—one through which societies define order, distribute punishment, and negotiate belonging.

Faculty

• Parthiban Muniandy

Open, Seminar—Year

What kinds of social worlds emerge when people are expected to live temporarily for years or decades? Across the contemporary world, refugees, undocumented migrants, and other displaced populations inhabit spaces organized around waiting, in camps, detention regimes, asylum systems, informal settlements, and humanitarian infrastructures. Yet these are not only sites of crisis. They are places where families form, schools struggle to operate, economies stabilize, and political movements grow, even in environments designed to prevent permanence. This seminar will examine displacement not simply as movement across borders but as a reorganization of time, legality, belonging, and everyday coexistence. We will explore how people become categorized as “temporary”—asylum seekers, guest workers, foreign laborers, seasonal migrants—and what this status does to their lives, rights, and futures. The course will situate migration within broader global realities: more than a billion people move internally or internationally, while climate change, conflict, and economic restructuring continue to produce new forms of displacement and precariousness. We will ask how states manage mobility, why certain populations become national “problems,” and how migrants craft livable worlds within administrative uncertainty. Readings will introduce key theoretical approaches to citizenship, governance, and mobility, including Hannah Arendt on statelessness and the “right to have rights,” Giorgio Agamben on exception and camp rule, Michel Foucault on discipline and regulation, and Aihwa Ong on flexible citizenship and graduated sovereignty. Ethnographic and urban scholarship from Liisa Malkki, Didier Fassin, Miriam Ticktin, Peter Nyers, Asef Bayat, and Ananya Roy anchor these ideas in everyday practice, while literary and climate perspectives—including Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement—push us to think beyond policy frameworks toward imagination, narrative, and planetary change. We will also examine how displacement is represented across media—photography, film, fiction, and interactive worlds—and how societies are responding to an era increasingly defined by hyper-diversity and permanent precarity. The seminar will be writing-intensive and research-oriented. Students will practice observation and analytic writing throughout the semester and develop a conference project based on an original research question related to migration, bordering practices, or urban coexistence. Students will be encouraged to experiment with unconventional forms of analysis and storytelling that grapple with vulnerability, temporariness, and being out-of-place in the contemporary world.

Faculty

• Parthiban Muniandy

Intermediate/Advanced, Seminar—Year

Much of our lives are spent dealing with organizations in one fashion or another. They are a staple of our everyday lives, whether directly or indirectly: we rarely escape them. They include government and nongovernmental structures, ranging from government bureaucracies to schools, hospitals, religious spaces, and less formal entities such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Because of their ubiquitousness—and the assumption that bureaucracies exemplify “modernity” and “value-free” systems—the study of organizations has been a key subfield not only within sociology, but also within the fields of public and business administration. This course is designed to address the veracity of the claims made on behalf of bureaucracies, as well as critiques directed at organizational theory and behavior. Our overarching objective is to examine the manner in which organizations have been conceptualized, as well as the processes and practices through which they operate and change, and their implications for those who are “subjected” to them. Starting with Max Weber, a seminal figure in the field, we will examine underlying assumptions regarding “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” the rule of law, bureaucratic activism and inertia, the relation between organizations and their larger political and economic milieu, as well as ongoing organizational struggles. In addition to Weber, we will read other classics such as Sloan Wilson’s novel, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, and William Whyte’s The Organization Man. These and more contemporary critiques of organizations—both written and visual—will enable us to go beyond simplistic and normative understandings of bureaucracies and classic sociological theories and texts to rethink historical and contemporary organizations—in order to analyze the functioning of power at an everyday and structural level, and its attendant outcomes. For conference, working in small groups, participants will undertake primary research on a specific aspect of organizational practice at Sarah Lawrence College. Possible topics include an examination of space and design, changes in the student body and/or curricular design, the shift from same sex to co-education at the College, workers’ struggles at the College, outsourcing of certain college offices/tasks, attendant processes of decision making, student and/or faculty governance and organization, the College board and donors, community partnerships and/or the relationship between the school and its environs. To facilitate research in the College archives, we will rely on and work with our College Archivist who will provide us with her knowledge and expertise. Other than historical research based on the College Archives, interviews with present and past faculty, administrators, donors, alums or some combination of these sources could also be drawn upon for conference work. Finally, students will be expected to tie their analyses to larger questions such as the political economy of education, institutional structures, social movements, and struggles for change.

Faculty

• Shahnaz Rouse

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, Seminar—Spring

How do relationships travel? What happens when family, friendship, politics, money, and belonging no longer fit inside one country? This seminar will explore the dense webs of connection that link people across borders and the ways these ties reorganize everyday life. Migration today rarely means a clean break between “here” and “there.” Instead, migrants, students, workers, and activists sustain ongoing social worlds spanning multiple places at once: households stretched across continents, businesses coordinated across time zones, political debates conducted through messaging apps, and identities negotiated between overlapping communities. The course will examine how these networks challenge conventional ideas of nation, integration, and community. We will engage major theoretical approaches to global interconnectedness, including Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou on social capital and immigrant networks, Arjun Appadurai on cultural globalization and imagination, Faranak Miraftab on transnational relationality and grassroots politics, and Manuel Castells on the network society and digital communication. These frameworks will help us understand how mobility reshapes not only movement but also obligation, care, authority, and opportunity. Empirical case studies will address diaspora politics and homeland influence, remittances and economic survival strategies, digital communication and long-distance intimacy, and transnational activism and solidarity movements. Particular attention will be paid to how technologies, from informal money transfer systems to social media platforms, enable new forms of belonging while also producing new inequalities and surveillance. The seminar will be discussion-centered and research-oriented. Students will conduct small observational or interview-based projects tracing a transnational network of their choosing and develop a conference paper analyzing how connections operate across space, institutions, and everyday practice. By the end of the semester, students should be able to see globalization not as an abstract force but as something lived, maintained through messages sent at odd hours, obligations negotiated across currencies, and communities built in more than one place at the same time.

Faculty

• Parthiban Muniandy

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/Advanced, Seminar—Fall

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 oral and written communication, expand vocabulary, and refine grammar while developing descriptive precision, analytical skills, and critical thinking in Spanish. The “El Dorado” myth emerged from the colonial search for vast treasures in the Americas, imagining a land of limitless gold and wealth. As described by René Zavaleta (1986), it reflects a vision of magical surplus that justified and sustained unequal extraction–consumption relationships, later reframed as “the curse of abundance” by Alberto Acosta (2009). The course will situate “El Dorado” within broader global imaginaries, including Atlantis, Lemuria, The Land of Mu, and Aztlán, the ancestral homeland of Chicanx cultural imagination. Students will engage with diverse sources, including short stories, myths, comics, films, sculpture, and paintings. Among other cases, they will study Caesar’s City of Trapalandia, colonial-era sites reputedly filled with gold and silver at the end of the world; the “Tesoro del Inca” myth, recounting gold allegedly hidden by Atahualpa Yupanqui in Llanganates Hill, Ecuador; and the Afro-Caribbean myth of Mami Wata, represented as a mermaid-savior and symbol of fortune. Students will analyze narration, description, comparison, and argumentation while developing critical perspectives on extractivism, colonial legacies, and socioecological justice. 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, they 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

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

Open, Small Lecture—Fall

What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer and what we may write? In this course, we will discuss an array of choices writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War II until the present. Students will be asked to read excerpts from six texts: Joel Whitney's Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World's Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Eric Bennett's Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War; Vivian Gornick's The Romance of American Communism; and two long poems, Peter Dale Scott's "Coming to Jakarta" and Dionne Brand's "Inventory." This is not a history or a literature course; our lens will be that of a writer, using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present. Although this is a lecture course, students will be asked to participate, improvise, and work with a partner, as well as participate in one seminar a week, which will function as a writing workshop. At the end of the course, students will be asked to present what they have learned in the form of an 8- to 10-page letter—to your partner, to me, or to anyone else you choose, living or dead—addressing some of our class questions and your responses to them. The only expectation is the courage to think out loud with other people—a.k.a. the courage required to learn.

Faculty

• Suzanne Gardinier

Open, Seminar—Fall

The Iowa Writers' Workshop was founded by Wilbur Schramm in 1936. Schramm went on to a many-faceted career, which included cowriting a postwar manual for the army called The Nature of Psychological Warfare. He saw the writing workshop as a way to train “the kind of young persons who can become the kind of writers we need,” in a future framed by the dominance of the United States. This course will look for the traces of this project of domination in poetry and will ask what might happen for writers when the domination is seen from the point of view of the dominated and the “free” from the point of view of the prison. Why are censorship and incarceration such central facts of what it means to be a poet elsewhere? Why has that not been true in the United States? How does Archibald MacLeish’s “a poem should not mean but be” or T. S. Eliot’s “like a patient etherized upon a table” sound beside Adam Wazyk’s “how many times must one wake you up before you recognize your epoch?” or Suzanne Césaire’s use of surrealism as a tool to recover stolen power, “purified of colonial stupidities”? What is real freedom? What are its ways? How is the poetry that comes from it? Our class text will be an anthology and workbook, The Most Beautiful Sea: Poems & Pathways Toward Poems, including the work of Nas, Elizabeth Bishop, Refaat Alareer, Nâzım Hikmet, Marie Howe, Joshua Bennett, Lucille Clifton, Nipsey Hussle, Mahmoud Darwish, Dionne Brand, and the greatest of all poets: Anonymous. Students will be asked to complete in-class writing exercises, write letters with a partner, bring drafts to conference, and make a chapbook. In the words of Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet, we will look together for “the most beautiful sea” that “hasn’t been crossed yet," also known as, “the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you / I haven’t said yet.”

Faculty

• Suzanne Gardinier