Politics

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, Seminar—Spring

In 1966, Mao Zedong launched what could well be the most radical, most adventurous mass political campaign in world history, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), which set out to attack the very communist Party-State that Mao himself had established. Going through several phases, this utopian experiment lasted for a decade (1966-1976). Students in urban universities and middle schools were the first to respond to Mao's call—and in spectacular fashion: with attacks on authorities of all kinds, rallies of millions of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, and vast numbers of young people making treks across the country. In Shanghai, radical workers took over the city from the government, establishing the (short-lived) Shanghai Commune. The Party-State fought back, however, and in many parts of the country, cycles of violence and revenge exploded. With the military brought in to restore order, the Cultural Revolution slowly slid into more managed forms of mass mobilization: tens of millions of urban youth were "sent down" to the countryside to learn from the peasants. The experiment ended only with Mao's death in 1976. This course will examine MAO's reasons for launching the GPCR, the famous Red Guards, the Shanghai Commune (its rise and demise), the causes behind the paroxysms of mass violence, the reassertion of control that began after 1969, the nature of the GPCR in rural areas, the Sent-Down Youth experience, the legacies of the GPCR for China, and its influence abroad (particularly among leftist intellectuals in Europe and the United States). Our sources will include a rich mixture of scholarship on mainland China's politics (both before and during the Cultural Revolution); contemporary primary sources (e.g., party documents, propaganda materials, a Model Opera, one of the few films made during these years); memoirs of Red Guards and intellectuals; and later art and literature written assessing the period and its legacies for China. In many ways, today's China is not understandable without an appreciation of this decade-long radical experiment, as the Party-State (still the dominant force in China) continues to bear scars of the Cultural Revolution, despite its attempt to enforce a peculiar form of amnesia on the whole country. No prior knowledge of China is required.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

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

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

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

Faculty

• Kim Christensen

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

Modern capitalist institutions are dynamic, complex, and unstable economic, political, and cultural systems that are constantly evolving. In this course, students will learn a new behavioral approach to microeconomics and how it can be applied to understanding today’s economic, financial, political, and environmental challenges and crises. We will depart from traditional microeconomics, which revolves around finding and analyzing a theoretically perfectly efficient steady state, but treats all unexpected economic disturbances and turbulence as anomalies caused by external shocks. Instead, we will target real-world, complex, open-ended situations in which interactions among heterogeneous people and social groups create internal shocks that can destabilize economic, business, and financial systems and drive them towards different pathways, including post-capitalist possibilities.

Faculty

• An Li

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

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

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

Faculty

• Kim Christensen

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

When Keynes published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, he proposed a new, non-laissez-faire, realistic macroeconomic framework to stabilize the economy, control inflation, and promote full employment. However, since the 1970s, macroeconomics has experienced “decades of intellectual regress” and the current “post-real macroeconomics” says things that are “inconsistent with the facts.” In this course, we will depart from this “post-real macroeconomics.” We will learn a post-Keynesian approach that takes structural inequality, risk, uncertainty, and human irrationality seriously. We will learn how the post-Keynesian approach is better suited for understanding real economic tendencies and financial troubles under the current stage of monopoly capitalism, such as uncontrollable inflation, wage stagnation, financialization, economic polarization, growing indebtedness, and so on.

Faculty

• An Li

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Spring

What is environmental writing, and what politics, ethics, and visions of human-nature relations does it embody? This seminar will examine canonical and contemporary environmental writing through close reading, tracing the genre’s evolution from 19th century Romanticism through contemporary multispecies and Indigenous perspectives. We will read broadly chronologically, beginning with foundational texts like Thoreau and Muir, moving through Leopold's land ethic and Carson's environmental advocacy, and continuing into contemporary voices that challenge and expand the tradition. As we read, we will ask: How do different writers imagine the human place in nature? What narrative forms and voices has the genre privileged, and what has been excluded? Whose relationship to “nature” gets to count as a part of the genre? How has environmental writing responded to ecological crisis, and what futures does it make imaginable? Through close reading and discussion, we will develop skills in literary analysis while examining environmental writing as a political and ethical practice. The course will investigate both the beauty of the genre and its limitations, attending to questions of access, social position, and the changing meanings of “nature” itself. Topics may include: Romantic and transcendentalist traditions; conservation and the land ethic; environmental advocacy and Silent Spring; solitude and contemplation; Indigenous perspectives and reciprocity; multispecies writing; place and belonging; the politics of wilderness; and environmental justice.

Faculty

• Ben Mylius

Open, Large seminar—Fall

In this course, we will explore the power dynamics behind images and how they shape the way we see and experience the world. Drawing on John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, we will examine how visuals—whether in art, film, or everyday life—are never neutral but, rather, always tied to politics. We will dive into works like Harun Farocki’s An Image, Tony Cooke’s Disco Inferno, Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, Jean-Luc Godard’s radical cinema, and Brechtian approaches to audiovisual composition. Through these films and ideas, we will see how artists and filmmakers use images to challenge the status quo, resist dominant ideologies, and spark political change. With screenings and discussions, we will sharpen the ability to critically analyze the images that surround us and understand how they influence both political consciousness and personal identity. This course is a thought-provoking investigation into how images can manipulate, provoke, invent, and sometimes resist the political forces at play in our world. 

Faculty

• Jazmín López

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

Advanced, Seminar—Fall

In 1830, the opening of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani caused a tremendous uproar leading to physical altercations among spectators—an event that came to be known as the “battle of Hernani.” Why? Because Hugo had dared to flout the conventions of classical French theater. He even altered the alexandrine—the traditional twelve-syllable line that had come to embody the order and hierarchy of the ancien régime. This famous episode in French literary history illustrates the strong connection that was felt to exist between poetry and politics throughout the 19th century and into the 20th. This course will examine how, in the wake of the French Revolution, poetry came to be understood not merely as a reflection of social and political change, but as a practice capable of producing it. Students will read major poets who reimagined the possibilities of poetic language and form, including Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud. We will then turn to the 20th century, examining the experimental practices of the Surrealists, whose approach was influenced by the trauma of World War I and the theories of Sigmund Freud, as well as the revolutionary tactics of the Négritude poets Senghor, Césaire, and Damas, whose poetry was an integral part of their anti-racist and anti-colonial movement.

Faculty

• Nicole Asquith

Intermediate, Small seminar—Year

When and why did the ancient Greeks and Romans begin to distinguish history from myth? Are we losing that distinction today? Examining selected ancient Greek and Roman texts, this course will assess the power of narratives to influence attitudes, values, and conduct. What models and counter models does ancient Greek and Roman literature offer us today to counter the rapidly increasing reach and power of digital misinformation, disinformation, and bald-faced lies? Fall readings will include excerpts of Homer and Herodotus, plus, in their entirety, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and books one through five of Livy’s History of Rome. Spring readings will include selected Greek tragedies, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and excerpts of Cicero, Horace, and Tacitus. In individual or group conferences, students will read selected texts in the original Greek.

Faculty

• Emily Anhalt

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

Open, Seminar—Fall

Between the 16th and 20th centuries, the Atlantic Ocean served as an important conduit linking the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora to North and South America, the Caribbean, and Europe—not only as forced migrants in the Atlantic Slave Trade, but as sailors, maritime workers, political radicals, abolitionists, intellectuals, and pan-Africanists, among others. This course will introduce students to the history of the Black Atlantic—an approach to conceptualizing the history of the African diaspora by focusing on the movement and migration of African and African-descended peoples between Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Although histories of enslavement are central to understanding the African diaspora in the Early Modern period, this course will give equal weight to abolitionism and related forms of resistance to enslavement and oppression. Just as importantly, we will explore the ways that African-descended peoples helped to shape many of the key ideological, political, and cultural developments in the United States, Latin America, and the Caribbean between the 16th and early 20th centuries. By focusing on certain key figures within the Black Atlantic tradition—including Phyllis Wheatley, Olaudah Equiano, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Robert Wedderburn, Sarah and Charles Remond, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and W.E.B. DuBois—we will attempt to recover a vibrant but marginalized history of radical Black thought, politics, activism, and culture.

Faculty

• Sean Griffin

Open, Seminar—Fall

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

Faculty

• Brandon Schechter

Intermediate, Seminar—Fall

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

Faculty

• Lyde Cullen Sizer

Open, 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, Seminar—Spring

Despite a growing awareness of the ways that slavery and its legacies continue to shape contemporary forms of inequality, slavery seems like an aberration from our twenty-first century perspective. Yet for much of the last 500 years, enslaved labor was broadly accepted and widely deployed throughout the Atlantic World. While it is clear that New World slavery grew and expanded simultaneously with the rise of democratic politics, independent nation-states, and capitalist economic systems in the West, slavery’s role in shaping these developments continues to be a matter of controversy and debate. This course will offer a comparative analysis of slavery and antislavery in the development of political institutions and ideologies in the Early Modern Atlantic World, while examining slavery’s links to empire, commerce, and capitalism in the Atlantic basin and beyond. While our primary focus will be on the United States and the colonies of British North America, this course will compare the rise and spread of slavery and antislavery in these regions with related developments in Brazil, the Caribbean, and Latin America. Throughout the semester, we will examine how slavery and the various forms of resistance to it impacted revolutions, independence movements, civil wars, and the formation of the modern nation states and political ideologies that we are familiar with today.

Faculty

• Sean Griffin

Open, Seminar—Spring

In 1966, Mao Zedong launched what could well be the most radical, most adventurous mass political campaign in world history, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR), which set out to attack the very communist Party-State that Mao himself had established. Going through several phases, this utopian experiment lasted for a decade (1966-1976). Students in urban universities and middle schools were the first to respond to Mao's call—and in spectacular fashion: with attacks on authorities of all kinds, rallies of millions of Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, and vast numbers of young people making treks across the country. In Shanghai, radical workers took over the city from the government, establishing the (short-lived) Shanghai Commune. The Party-State fought back, however, and in many parts of the country, cycles of violence and revenge exploded. With the military brought in to restore order, the Cultural Revolution slowly slid into more managed forms of mass mobilization: tens of millions of urban youth were "sent down" to the countryside to learn from the peasants. The experiment ended only with Mao's death in 1976. This course will examine MAO's reasons for launching the GPCR, the famous Red Guards, the Shanghai Commune (its rise and demise), the causes behind the paroxysms of mass violence, the reassertion of control that began after 1969, the nature of the GPCR in rural areas, the Sent-Down Youth experience, the legacies of the GPCR for China, and its influence abroad (particularly among leftist intellectuals in Europe and the United States). Our sources will include a rich mixture of scholarship on mainland China's politics (both before and during the Cultural Revolution); contemporary primary sources (e.g., party documents, propaganda materials, a Model Opera, one of the few films made during these years); memoirs of Red Guards and intellectuals; and later art and literature written assessing the period and its legacies for China. In many ways, today's China is not understandable without an appreciation of this decade-long radical experiment, as the Party-State (still the dominant force in China) continues to bear scars of the Cultural Revolution, despite its attempt to enforce a peculiar form of amnesia on the whole country. No prior knowledge of China is required.

Faculty

• Kevin Landdeck

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

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, Large seminar—Spring

This seminar will provide an interdisciplinary analysis of the phenomenon of propaganda and mass communications within modern society. How does propaganda “work”? How should we characterize the individuals and institutions that shape and disseminate it? What are the specific languages and visual symbols that propagandists have typically used to persuade and communicate with mass audiences? How have both “democratic” and “authoritarian” societies sought to generate consent? And how, in turn, have individuals and social groups drawn the line between what is truth and what is propaganda? Although the manipulation of information for political ends has been intrinsic to human societies across history, this course will focus on the so-called “axial age of propaganda”—beginning with World War I, which saw the emergence of tightly organized, large-scale, government-sponsored propaganda efforts across Europe and the United States. This course will utilize a variety of case studies to explore the symbolic content of specific kinds of propaganda and the institutional milieux that produce it, paying attention to propaganda that seeks both to overthrow social structures and to maintain them. We will place special emphasis on the interwar period, when—amid the onset of totalitarian regimes in Europe—the very nature of “public opinion” and mass society were hotly debated by intellectuals and interpretive experts. The course will also closely investigate the emergence of mass communications “experts” during World War II and trace their role in shaping social-science research throughout the Cold War. Finally, the course will consider the ubiquity of propaganda in contemporary society, focusing on the role of image-making professionals working in the spheres of political campaigning, advertising, and public relations.

Faculty

• Matthew Ellis

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

Intermediate, Seminar—Spring

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

Faculty

• Lyde Cullen Sizer

Open, Seminar—Year

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

Faculty

• Tristana Rorandelli

Intermediate, Seminar—Year

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

Faculty

• Tristana Rorandelli

Open, Seminar—Year

This course will provide an intensive introduction to Latin grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, with a view toward reading the language as soon as possible. Close reading of Vergil’s Aeneid in English translation will accompany intensive language study in the fall. By mid-semester, students will be translating authentic excerpts of Latin poetry and prose. During the spring, while continuing to develop and refine their knowledge of Latin grammar and vocabulary, students will read selections of Vergil’s Aeneid in Latin. The course will be rigorous and time-consuming. Students are expected to spend a minimum of two hours per day, six days a week preparing for classes and conferences. If you enjoy the challenges and satisfactions of hard work (and have good tolerance for frustration), you will find Latin fun and extremely rewarding.

Faculty

• Emily Anhalt

Advanced, Small seminar—Year

When and why did the ancient Greeks and Romans begin to distinguish history from myth? Are we losing that distinction today? Examining selected ancient Greek and Roman texts, this course will assess the power of narratives to influence attitudes, values, and conduct. What models and counter models does ancient Greek and Roman literature offer us today to counter the rapidly increasing reach and power of digital misinformation, disinformation, and bald-faced lies? Fall readings will include excerpts of Homer and Herodotus, plus, in their entirety, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and books one through five of Livy’s History of Rome. Spring readings will include selected Greek tragedies, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and excerpts of Cicero, Horace, and Tacitus. In individual or group conferences, students will read selected texts in the original Latin.

Faculty

• Emily Anhalt

Open, Seminar—Fall

Tom Stoppard, born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, died in late November of 2025. For much of his life, Stoppard was widely considered among the greatest of contemporary English-language playwrights, and at his death, compared to both Shakespeare and Shaw. Over this semester, we will read and think about a number of Stoppard's greatest plays, and in seminar discussions, we will go wherever the plays take us. Stoppard dramatized the mind and defended the body: he was always funny, never only funny, and invariably worth our attention, which we will now give him.

Faculty

• Frederic Smoler

Open, Seminar—Year

When and why did the ancient Greeks and Romans begin to distinguish history from myth? Are we losing that distinction today? Examining selected ancient Greek and Roman texts, this course will assess the power of narratives to influence attitudes, values, and conduct. What models and counter models does ancient Greek and Roman literature offer us today to counter the rapidly increasing reach and power of digital misinformation, disinformation, and bald-faced lies? Fall readings will include excerpts of Homer and Herodotus, plus, in their entirety, Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War and books one through five of Livy’s History of Rome. Spring readings will include selected Greek tragedies, Vergil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and excerpts of Cicero, Horace, and Tacitus.

Faculty

• Emily Anhalt

Open, Seminar—Year

In this seminar, we will examine the First and Second World Wars, two vast and savage armed conflicts which shaped the 20th century and its aftermath. In the first semester, we will study the course, outcome, and aftermath of the First World War, and our syllabus will focus on theories of the war’s origins, some of its literature and its representation in other media, the logic of its development, the experience of combat, the experience of the home fronts, and the effect of the war on cultural history, including the much-debated question of the war’s relationship to modernism and modernity. The second semester will focus on the Second World War, and we will be looking at many of the same questions. Our own era remains shaped by the memories of these wars and by their outcomes and afterlives. Both wars shaped and reshaped our cultures, including our understanding of the nature of war itself, which in their wake we have successively mythologized, demythologized, re-mythologized, and serially reimagined. Memories and interpretations of these wars have produced the rise and fall of modern ideas of the heroic, the false heroic, the anti-heroic, and the post-heroic. We shall explore all of these ideas.

Faculty

• Frederic Smoler

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

In popular culture, Dante’s name is virtually synonymous with his Inferno and associations of fire and brimstone. Yet, in the Divine Comedy the point is to leave hell: to emerge from darkness into the light and steadily climb the mountain of Purgatorio in order to ascend to Paradiso, to experience the love that moves the sun and other stars, the divinity that underlies all things and is our true nature. Much more than of the diabolical, Dante is a poet of divine love: “I am one who when / Love breathes in me, I take note, and as / it dictates within, so I go signifying” (Purgatorio 24.52-4). For Dante, poetry becomes a vehicle of truth when it is itself moved by the love that is not merely a passing feeling, but the very ground of being. This course will be an exploration into the ways Dante is a poet and philosopher of love, truth, and being. In the fall, we will embark on a close reading of all three realms of the Comedy, paying particular attention to these themes, and the way Dante’s poetry is both profoundly philosophical and even more profoundly experiential. In writing the Comedy, Dante seeks to transform not only his life but also our own: he writes “to remove those living in this life from a state of misery and bring them into a state of happiness” (Letter to Can Grande XIII.39). So, to read the Comedy is to read our own lives into the poem and to read the poem into our own lives. In the spring, we will read Dante’s philosophical treatise, the Convivio (the Banquet), as well as selections from his treatise on language, On Eloquence in the Vernacular, and on politics, Monarchy. Alongside these texts, we will read Dante’s major philosophical sources, especially Aristotle, his Arabic commentators, and Thomas Aquinas. All the while, we will revisit selected cantos from the Comedy, grouped by philosophical themes such as the essence of human happiness, vice and virtue, and the prime mover—being, truth, and love.

Faculty

• Joseph Romano

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, Large seminar—Fall

The impact of The Beatles has been immeasurable. In their seven years as an international touring and recording band, they explored and enlarged every aspect of song-writing technique, producing musical milestones with almost every album. This course will trace the development of The Beatles chronologically and will focus on the ways the Beatles used harmony, phrase structure, rhythm, structural ambiguity, sonority and production techniques in continuously innovative and beautiful ways. The background to this course will be the political events and social transformations of the 1960s, as well as the musical styles and cultural phenomena that The Beatles assimilated and transformed. No previous musical training or experience is required.

Faculty

• Martin Goldray

Open, Lecture—Spring

This course will study David Bowie’s music styles and cultural influences over a career that spanned almost fifty years. The focus will be on how he conveyed through music and lyrics ideas about alienation, isolation, madness, dystopia, gender ambiguity and identity, glamour, role-playing and self-realization, among other things. We will trace how he conveyed those ideas by using elements of German Expressionism, Weimar cabaret, Asian culture, dadaism, surrealism, European art films (by Buñuel, Dalí, Fellini, Dreyer, Bergman, and others), the cut-up technique made popular by William S. Burroughs, commedia dell'arte, English music hall, the Broadway musical, mime, French chanson, blues, soul, Krautrock, minimalism, science fiction, and other things. We will attempt to understand what was more interesting to him than conventional pop stardom, and why he sought an exit from that whenever he achieved it. Singer and songwriter Siouxsie Sioux said that Bowie was an unusual pop star in that he comes with a reading list; we will try to find out what might be on that list and how it might illuminate his career.

Faculty

• Martin Goldray

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Fall

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

Faculty

• Roy Ben-Shai

Open, Small Lecture—Year

Many of us are struck by the growing irrationality of contemporary democratic politics to the point where we despair of our capacity to address problems like global climate change or pandemics that could pose existential threats to our species, to fashion constructive foreign policy as wars rage, or to face a whole range of urgent but more mundane policy issues. In this course, we will seek to understand disturbing trends like populism, polarization, disinformation, and self-injuring or -defeating politics, as well as the resurfacing of nativism, xenophobia, and racism in contemporary politics—in part on their own terms but also by asking whether they are deeply rooted in human nature, at least on our current best understandings of ourselves. More specifically, democracy seems to rely on at least a minimum degree of rationality, learning, openness to argument and difference, and self-control on the part of the citizens whose votes and opinions guide government policy. But is this reliance foolhardy in light of what recent history, psychology, evolutionary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science teach? Do aspects of our current social and technological circumstances make us less able to manifest these qualities of character today than our Enlightenment progenitors hoped in the era of democratic revolutions—the era from which many of the ideas and institutions that continue to inform our politics today emerged? In this course, we will survey aspects of the political history of recent centuries, as well as our own historical moment, to ask if they should temper confidence in the power of reason in politics. We will also examine recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy that conclude that it is hard to sustain a model of human behavior that places reason and rationality in the driver’s seat. What alternative accounts of human nature are emerging from recent research? And what are their political implications, especially for democratic societies? By bringing together political science, history, and theory with cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, we should be able to occupy the intersection of distinct but equally relevant disciplines to ask whether the Enlightenment’s faith in democracy was misplaced. Or, instead, are there reasons to believe that democracy can maintain its claim to legitimacy, even after reason has been demoted in our understandings of human nature? To address this final question, we will also examine proposals for 21st-century democratic reforms that either seek to adjust downward the expectations on the capacity of citizens to engage in deliberative politics or to refashion political institutions to better summon the better angels of our nature. 

Faculty

• David Peritz

Open, Seminar—Year

In the midst of a seemingly polarized and anxious American polity, the 2026 election cycle will be a referendum on both President Trump and the 119th Congress. This course will attempt to contextualize the current state of social and political affairs in the United States and examine why so many Americans feel disillusioned about the economic and political scene. Many believe that the country is headed in the wrong direction. They see an economy that is not improving, a social and political world that is deeply divided and full of anger, and endless fighting about numerous topics, including gun control, immigration, the environment, and global engagement. These concerns will all have a potent impact on the outcome of the 2026 elections. This course will examine these current sentiments as the backdrop for understanding the 2026 electoral cycle. We will focus on what political science can tell us about electoral politics, with the electoral process itself being one of the most fundamental aspects of American democracy: allowing citizens to choose their representatives, from local county boards to the occupant of the White House. Accordingly, we will examine present and past research on numerous questions relating to elections, such as: Who votes and participates, how, and why? How does income, religion, race, and geographic region play into electoral behavior? What about institutions—such as electoral rules, various debates and the Electoral College? What about the role of mass media and social media platforms? What about the art of persuasion; that is, do campaigns matter or is it simply the economy? These are a sampling of the puzzles that we will tackle. And while the course will certainly spend a considerable amount of time looking at the presidency, we will also focus on Congressional races and local races, as well. This seminar will be an open, nonpartisan forum for discussion and debate. As such, the course will be driven by data, not dogma. We will use a variety of approaches based in logic and evidence to find answers to various puzzles about American policy and will treat this material as social scientist, not ideologues. Comfort with numbers and statistics is expected. This course will have an intensive reading and writing schedule—so please be prepared to devote the time.

Faculty

• Samuel Abrams

Sophomore and Above, Seminar—Year

Despite frequent pleas for unity from United States presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, alongside the rise of groups such as BridgeUSA, Third Way, and No Labels to promote political centrism and compromise, the seemingly never-ending sociopolitical polarization appears to be the new norm in American political life—and it may not have reached its violent peak back in January 2021. To many politicians, pundits, and others alike, the social and political scene in the United States in the 21st century appears to be one of turmoil, disagreement, division, and instability. We regularly hear about a polarized and deadlocked political class; we read about increasing class and religious differences—from the alleged divides between Wall Street and Main Street to those who are secular and those who are religious; and we often see disturbing, dangerous, and violent images and actions from various politically-oriented groups. This seminar will look at the history of division in America and explore the puzzle of how to move on from this divided state. While the course will briefly examine the veracity of these recent impressions of the American sociopolitical scene, we will center our course on the question: Is policymaking forever deadlocked, or can real political progress be made? Moreover, what are the social and policy implications of polarization? How does the nation govern and function in the Trumpian political epoch, and are the political parties representing the will of the people? What about the impact of the 2024 elections? What are we to make of the frequent calls for change and for healing America’s divisions? In this seminar, we will examine these questions and deeper aspects of American political culture today. Covering a lot of ground from America’s founding to today, after reviewing some basics of the political economy, students will study American political cultures from a variety of vantage points with a number of different stories emerging. We will look at numerous aspects of American social and political life—from examining the masses, political elites, Congress, and policymaking communities to social movements, the media, and America’s position in a global community—all with a focus on policy and moving the country forward. This course will be driven by data, not dogma. We will use modern political-economy approaches based in logic and evidence to find answers to contemporary public-policy problems and questions of polarization. The material will be treated as social scientists, not as ideologues. Students should anticipate extensive reading. Comfort with data and statistics will be expected.

Faculty

• Samuel Abrams

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, 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

Open, Seminar—Year

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

Faculty

• Carlo Sariego

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, Small Lecture—Spring

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

Faculty

• Carlo Sariego

Open, Seminar—Year

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

Faculty

• Javiera Irribarren Ortiz

First-Year Studies—Year

In the first half of this yearlong course, we will read, and use as models for our own essay writing, a range of classic essays and well-known near-contemporary and contemporary essays and memoir fragments that address the panorama of our experience on this planet. We will engage with work that considers nature, class, gender, race, deep memory, political praxis, aesthetic appreciation, existential joy or dread, and personal and family life. We will look at how the traditional essay appropriates narrative and lyric energy both to accommodate and create a living mind on the page. We will sharpen our own writing by developing principles of practical criticism that expose the tangled interactions of form and content. The second half of the course will focus on one or two canonical literary figures, whose work we will read closely and to which we will respond by employing all the new and radical literary forms of our moment-mashups, fan fiction and nonfiction, adaptations, interviews, podcasts, and any and all other ways contemporary mediums confront and assimilate the past. We will write clearly, dramatically, and well about many crucial things. In fall, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences; in spring, individual conferences will be biweekly.

Faculty

• Vijay Seshadri

Open, Seminar—Spring

This course will be an opportunity to write from life, in any genre, from overheard conversations, beloved landscapes, old photographs, memories, and events happening around us, public and private, in dormitories, families, commuter trains and cars, on our phones, laptops, in nature, shops, laundromats, campus walks, classrooms and dinner tables. We will carry notebooks at times and use our notes as the start of weekly pieces, and we will transform short practice pieces into a longer work for conference work. Students will be asked to bring in and present writing that is meaningful to them and connect it to our focus.

Faculty

• Myra Goldberg