ANTH 560 / LAW 678: Anthropology and Law

Professor Christopher Fennell

Wed, 2:00 - 5:50 PM

Introduction to the field of legal anthropology. Addresses anthropological theories of the nature of law and disputes, examines related studies of legal structures in non-Western cultures, and considers the uses of anthropology in studying facets of our own legal system. 

AIS 503: Seminar in Indigenous Studies

Professor Deena Rymhs

Mon, 1:00-2:50 PM

In “How Do We Behave as Good Relatives?” Daniel Heath Justice writes about “making kin as oddkin […] where the range of relatives to whom we are responsible extends far beyond our biological relatives and, indeed, the category of the human itself.” This practice of “making oddkin” serves as centerpiece of this seminar, which turns to literary and visual texts by Indigenous artists whose work sees the human as thoroughly imbricated in more-than-human worlds—and indeed, challenges the coherence of such categories altogether. The various kinscapes invoked by these works show humans in intimate relation not only with “nature” but with the strange, abject, and seemingly non-living. Their embrace of the unwanted and, at times, the “monstrous” is a radical recuperation of the negative that models ways of making others into familiars while ultimately shifting who or what is seen as worthy of relation.

CWL 501: Introduction to Theory

Professor Brett Kaplan

Tue, 3:00-5:00 PM

This seminar introduces graduate students to theory, broadly construed. We will move through diverse texts to offer a range of contemporary theories about race, gender, literature, environment, indigeneity, and other matters. Throughout the semester we will ask ourselves “what is theory?” and, no doubt, come up with multiple answers.

CWL 581: Reading World Literature

Professor Brett Kaplan

Wed, 3:00-5:00 PM

Reading World Literatures is open to graduate students in all fields who want to expand their close reading practices. It's primarily a chance to read together, engage in close reading, and explore literature from some (alas not all) parts of the world. Throughout the semester we'll read a variety of texts and use diverse critical and theoretical skills to approach literary analysis. Polyglots can read in the original languages, but all books will be available in English and students will propose some of the readings. Everyone writes short essays throughout the semester that examine the "universe in a grain of sand." Each student chooses three books and writes three seven-page papers each based on one passage from the chosen book. In addition, everyone will present one of the books of your choosing. This will be excellent prepartion for the explication de texte section of Comparative and World Literature MA and Prelim exams. 

ENGL 500: Introduction to Criticism and Research

Professor Hina Nazar

Mon, 12:30 - 02:50 PM

This course provides an overview of some of the most important schools of criticism and theory that have shaped the academic study of literature since the 1940s.  These include foundational schools such the New Criticism, Marxism, feminism, postcolonial studies, queer theory, and critical race studies, as well as recent formations such as the digital humanities, medical humanities, legal humanities, environmental humanities, etc.  Some questions we will encounter over the course of the semester include: What gives literature its specificity?  What kind of biographical and historical context is needed to understand a literary work?  Is literature an agent of social and political change?  How is agency figured in literary texts?  In literary theory?  How should we interpret interdisciplinarity in the humanities?  Do literature departments have a future in the corporate university?  While one aim of the course is to introduce you to the theoretical perspectives and debates that have shaped scholarly discourse, another, equally important one, is to encourage you to reflect on your own status as a critical reader of, and writer about, literature.  As such, we will keep literature firmly in our sights as we proceed through the semester’s readings.

ENGL 559: The Question of Tomorrow

Professor Irvine Hunt

Thurs, 9:00-11:50 AM

Black Women Poets on Radical Black Futures - In the collection Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING (2018), Erica Hunt explains why she and Dawn Lundy Martin brought this fleet of living writers together: “One dimension that drew our curiosity was to know how this particular group… would respond to the question of tomorrow.” Hunt and Martin were curious about how Black women writers are imagining “alternate ways of living out and through strictures of time.” Extending the temporal turn in Black literary scholarship, this seminar explores the nature and conditions of these contemporary “strictures”--the afterlives of modernity–and the alternative temporalities Black women poets have crafted. We will explore what makes the socialities, locations, and poetics of their timescapes revolutionary: what forms of community and care comprise them? What is the language that makes them possible? How have feminist approaches to Blackness, being, and embodiment produced shapes of time that build and protect interior, intimate, and private worlds? Our exploration, however, will not be entirely optimistic. Following Hunt and Martin, we will work to bear in mind that “living out and through” a “stricture” always entails the possibility of extending it, that “the question of tomorrow” is also a statement that tomorrow is in question. The Black poets gathered here will help us understand this ambiguity. We will examine how they have mixed a variety of media (visual art, sound, film, etc.) to imagine both apocalyptic and promising futures, and to push the limits of language. Probing a remarkable range of original concepts and aesthetic innovations that stretch and sometimes redefine the category of the future, we ultimately will theorize the capacity of gendered Blackness to create a new world. The seminar will take shape around risky conversations between critics and poets. Classical theories of gender, Blackness, and modernity by the Combahee River Collective, Hortense Spillers, and Sylvia Wynter will provide our grounding as we engage recent and new work in literary and cultural studies by Denise da Silva, Saidiya Hartman, Soyica Colbert, Kevin Quashie, Candice Jenkins, Margo Crawford, M. Jacqui Alexander, Sefanie Dunning, Katherine McKittrick, Kara Keeling, and Tina Campt. Alongside these scholarly studies, we will read collections of poetry by Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, M. NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, Bettina Judd, Claudia Rankine, Nikky Finney, Evie Shockley, Aracelis Girmay, Tracy K. Smith, and Erica Hunt. Requirements will be two class presentations, three book reviews, and a conference-length paper (8-10 pages) that culminates in either a scholarly or a creative work.

ENGL 563: Biopolitics and Governmentality 

Professor Anustup Basu

Tues, 12:30PM - 02:50 PM

Keeping the Covid 19 pandemic in mind, in this class we will look at a set of texts to understand the biopolitical and governmental restructuring of European societies after the French revolution. Europe suffered half a dozen cholera pandemics in the course of the long 19th century and lost millions of people, but not to the extent in which the Black Death of the 14th century wiped out a significant portion of its population. The pandemics were checked to the extent that western European powers were able to meet the key historical condition for the flourishing of capital and empire: able and healthy bodies to man the factories and the colonies. This was largely achieved without germ theory (until the final quarter of the 19th century) and the basic knowledge that cholera was a waterborne disease. It was done with novel technologies to order space and circulating bodies, air, and water, new ways of record keeping and archiving information, distributing risk, and a general mathematization of all details of lived life, from minimum daily nutritional requirements to the age of consent. It was the medical bureaucracy that stipulated that corpses should be buried six feet under the ground, and not the clergy. We will read Foucault, Esposito, Chatterjee, de Landa and others to understand the history and politics of this template of biopolitical modernity that has acquired new electronic and informational powers in our times. Students will be expected to actively participate in discussions and write a 20-25 page term paper at the end of the semester.

ENGL 564: Genre and Infrastructure in the Global South

Professor Rebecca Oh

Thurs, 12:30 - 02:50 PM

Genre and infrastructure are both structuring forms that shape how things will go. Generic properties shape emplotment, likely or unlikely events, types of characters, and readerly expectations; genre organizes both narrative elements and the relations between them. Likewise, infrastructures are sociotechnical systems that organize and distribute both things and the relations between them, whether by enabling or blocking the movement of people, ideas, and objects. This seminar will consider the affordances of genre for infrastructure and of infrastructure for genre, asking how these structuring forms are taken up in global South literature. We become familiar with theories of genre and theories of infrastructure from both the humanities and the social sciences, considering how genres are deployed to probe the experiences, ideas, promises and pitfalls of infrastructure. How do literary genres critique, reveal, and theorize the spatial, temporal, and embodied distributions of infrastructure? How does genre work like the “infrastructure of infrastructure”? In turn we will consider the aesthetic properties of infrastructure, the way built forms like roads, houses, cars, and sewers shape bodily movement and comportment, impact sensory perceptions, accrue affects and symbolism, produce subjectivities, and facilitate generic expectations about the world. We will also consider how both these structuring forms index the environmental, racial, gendered, political, and economic forces that have shaped the global South.

HIST 591: History and Social Theory

Professor Tamara Chaplin

Tues, 3:00PM - 4:50 PM

“Theory”—love it or hate it, social theory provides the epistemological framework through which historians, sociologists and other scholars in the humanistic and social science disciplines conceptualize our world. But what is social theory? How does it relate to historical practices? Are history and social theory fundamentally incompatible? How might social theory bolster historical work? Our goal will be to develop a “theoretical toolbox” that is both available and useful to us as historians, scholars, and educators. We will examine canonical 19th and 20th century social theory, as well as postmodern, feminist, postcolonial and queer critical approaches. Our readings will draw on the scholarship of scholars like Marx, Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Gramsci, Adorno, Habermas, Geertz, Goffman, Bourdieu, Althusser, Kuhn, Foucault, Lyotard, Scott, Butler, Fanon, Bhaba, Halberstam and Ahmed. Work includes producing short critical responses, leading discussion, and writing one longer paper.

LA 505: Methods in Arch & LA History

LAW 656: International Law

Professor: Francis A. Boyle 

Mon & Tues, 3:00-4:30 PM Online

The International Law course examines the variety of roles played by law and lawyer in ordering the relations between states and the nationals of states. The course utilizes a number of specialized contexts as a basis for exploring these roles. The contexts include, among others, the status of international law in domestic courts; the efficacy of judicial review by the International Court of Justice; the effort to subsume international economic relations under the fabric of bilateral and multilateral treaties; and the application -- or misapplication -- of law to political controversies that entail the threat of actual use of force. The course proceeds through an examination of problems selected to illuminate the operation of law within each of these contexts.

MACS/ENGL/CWL 503: Historiography of Cinema

Professor Julie Turnock

Mon, 1:00PM - 4:50 PM

While the title of this course is “Historiography of Cinema,” it is designed to help you research and incorporate issues of moving image culture more broadly into your research agendas. Cinema studies provides the longest and most thorough discourse on moving image culture, and therefore this course introduces methodology and theory beneficial to students working on topics in television, video art, advertising, social media, digital media-making, and more. The aim of this class is to introduce and train students in research methods and approaches in moving image studies and discuss how the long tradition of cinematic scholarly discourse can impact research in other areas of media and various periods of technological emergence. The course is one of the two required courses for the Graduate Film Minor. 

The course is divided into three major sections; an introductory section and two case studies around sound and melodrama. The first three weeks, we will be discussing general historiographic topics and texts, with short assignments to orient you to the field. The next several weeks will concentrate on key historical texts in the history of sound and especially the emergence of sound technology in the late 1920s and early 1930s. In the final section, we will discuss the historiographic emergence of melodrama as a field of academic inquiry. These texts will model various approaches to historical research, and just as importantly, the priority given to different kinds of evidence and the interpretation of that evidence.  There will be a screening (usually about 90min-2h) of a film appropriate to the following week’s reading. There will also be some screenings outside of class, but not every week.  

SOC 596/GWS 590: Power, Coloniality, Empire

Dr. Ghassan Moussawi

Mon, 3:30-6:20 PM

This seminar will introduce you to the wide-ranging scholarship on power, empire, and coloniality. We will unpack transnational and colonial structures of domination, while centering the intersections of race, racisms, and racializations, ethnicity, gender and (un)gendering processes, sexuality, and nation and nationalisms. To do so, we will ask the following questions: What is empire? What is coloniality? How does the study of empire help us better understand our contemporary moment? What is at the center of colonial projects and technologies of power? How does empire feel, for those who are colonized and colonizers? And how does empire shape research agendas and knowledge production? We will address a range of topics and theoretical perspectives including: settler colonialisms, comparative empire, south-south solidarities, indigeneity and indigenous studies, racial capitalism, queer theory, decolonial sociology, postcolonial feminist sociology, emotions and affect, territory and land, and migration. Throughout the course we will think about the potentials of having an anti-colonial sociology, what that might look like, and how it impacts our scholarly and public facing work.  

SPAN 528: All About Almodóvar: Melodrama, Mothers, Memory and Movidas in the Films of the (Most) Fabulous Spanish Auteur

Prof. Eduardo Ledesma

Thurs, 2:00-4:50 PM 

Who is Pedro Almodóvar and why are his films synonymous with “Spanish” culture? How do his films narrate contemporary Spanish history, disrupt gender norms, challenge traditional Catholic values, irk politicians in both the Left and Right, uphold and deconstruct Hollywood film style, and generally reframe the way Spanish cinema is perceived globally? Controversial genius, global auteur, national icon and standard bearer for queer culture, and arguably the most influential Spanish filmmaker since Luis Buñuel (possibly more than Buñuel), Almodóvar is without a doubt also the most recognizable cinematic auteur from that nation. In this class we will study his most transgressive films through a historical, political and cultural lens to parse how these complex works reflected and facilitated the convulsive changes occurring in Spain as the country emerged from its long dictatorship and moved toward a (it was then believed) shining democratic future. From his punk and post-punk films during La Movida (Madrid’s post-Franco cultural revolution) in the 80s, through his classic melodramas of the 90s and 2000s, and his more “realist” and self-reflexive later phase, we shall come to grips with a cinematic oeuvre that resists containment and categorization. The course will be centered on the analysis of the films through a variety of theoretical perspectives, including film theory, queer theory, disability studies, memory studies, psychoanalysis, Spanish cultural studies, etc. Each week we will study one film as we undertake a journey through Spanish contemporary history as understood by the filmmaker. Some of the films we will view may include Pepi, Luci, Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980), ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? (1984), Matador (1986), Tacones lejanos (1991), Todo sobre mi madre (1999), Hable con ella (2002), Volver (2006), Los abrazos rotos (2009), La piel que habito (2011) and Dolor y gloria (2019), among others. Taught in English. All texts will be made available in English, and films subtitled.