Anth 453/LA 454: Landscape Archaeology
Christopher Fennell
Wed, 3:00 - 5:50 PM / Gregory Hall, Room 329
Landscape archeology addresses the complex issues of the ways that people have consciously and unconsciously shaped the land around them. Human populations have engaged in a variety of processes in organizing space or altering the landscape around them for a diversity of purposes, including subsistence, economic, social, political, and religious undertakings. People often perceive, protect, and shape the land in the course of symbolic processes engaging with their sense of place, memory, history, legends, and the boundaries of realms sacred and profane. Archaeology provides invaluable tools for examining such processes, and we can provide morphological and environmental data on past landscapes that are available from no other sources. This course covers a range of topics: methods of investigation; phenomenological analysis; critical heritage studies; interpretation and modeling of results; archaeological ethics and cooperative project designs working with local and descendant communities concerned with the heritage of the landscapes under study; and strategies for protecting the cultural resources manifest in those landscapes.
HIST502: Problems in Comparative History: Queer Sexualities
Tamara Chaplin
Tue, 3:00-4:50 PM / Gregory Hall, Room 325
This graduate course is an exploration of the themes, debates, and methods shaping queer history. It incorporates theory and is focused on the production of historical work in the field, ranging geographically and chronologically in order to examine the lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer past. We will give special attention to persecution, pathologizing, and modalities of resistance and desire while also investigating the forms of power that have influenced the historical gendering and racialization of sexual identity categories.
ENGL 563: Seminar in Literary Themes and Movements: Apocalypse
Rebecca Oh
Thurs, 9:00-11:20 AM / English Building, Room 307
The times are apocalyptic. Since at least midcentury, apocalypse no longer signifies a divine world-ending but a secular one. It encompasses the midcentury nuclear complex and fears of nuclear annihilation, neoliberal austerity, the effects of war and colonialism, and most recently it names the crisis of futurity inaugurated by climate change. This course will explore the cultures of apocalypse– the narratives, genres, affects, representations, and discourses – produced out of perceptions of futurelessness that have succeeded each other in the modern era. In relation to nuclearity, neoliberalism, and environmental crisis in the US and the global South, we will examine scholarly and cultural texts that confront apocalypse’s unwanted futures and “sense of an ending” from both the future and the past. What happens to its stakes and forms when apocalypse can be prevented and conversely when it cannot be changed? Are speculative and historical apocalypses always distinct or do their temporalities blur? Relatedly, how do we track the unevenness of apocalypse, the fact that futurelessness is never actually universal? Readings may include criticism by Jacques Derrida, David Pike, Eva Horn, Teresa Heffernan, Monika Kaup, Dan Sinykin, Jessica Hurley, Frederick Buell, and others. Aesthetic works may include The Road, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Almanac of the Dead, Future Home of the Living God, Animal’s People, How Beautiful We Were, The Year of the Flood, Parable of the Sower, Mad Max: Fury Road, Apocalypse Now, Arlit: Duxieme Paris, Iep Jaltok, Anote’s Ark, and The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On. Course work will likely include discussion leading, the cultivation of a research archive, an annotated bibliography, and a final seminar paper.
LA 587: Environmental Materialism
D. Fairchild Ruggles
Mon, 9:00-11:50 AM / Unit for Criticism Office (English Building, Room 100)
From new materialism, posthumanism, actor-network theory, and deep ecology, the seminar asks how the human body and the environment—the world from which we are apart and of which we are a part—are simultaneously material and social.
GGIS 595: Technology, Engineering, and Politics
Brian J. Jefferson
Tues, 2:00-4:50 PM / Davenport Hall, Room 137C
This seminar explores current perspectives and problems at the intersection of technology, engineering, and politics. Focusing on digital communications, the seminar will cover debates across history, political theory, and other cognate fields to better understanding how today's politics are being reshaped by technology. The seminar will be a workshop in which students are encourage to share and develop their projects with one another.
GWS 580: Queer Theories & Methods
Ghassan Moussawi
Tues, 11:00-1:50 PM / 1205 W Nevada, Room 102
Queer theories have opened up new and multiple ways for us to think of power and knowledge production in the social world. This interdisciplinary graduate seminar focuses on a number of key debates in the formation of what came to be known as “queer theory.” Rather than thinking of a singular queer theory, this course rethinks queer theories and methods by focusing on silences, meeting points, and tensions between queer theory, queer of color critique, women of color feminisms, and transnational queer studies. Topics include race and racialization, racisms, crip theory, borders, immigration, transnational (im)mobilites, affect and hauntings, empire and settler colonialism, and death, dying, and queer mournings. In addition, we will discuss queer methodologies by asking: what are queer methods? How does one conduct “queer” research? We will queer research by considering topics including: collaboration, (bad)feelings, auto-ethnographies, solidarities, and our own positions with regards to our research. This course is open to students from all disciplines. It is not required to have a background in gender and sexuality studies to take this course.