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.
ARTH 546: Theories of Photography
Terri Weissman
Thur, 2:00-4:40 PM / Art and Design Building, Room 312
Theories of Photography. At certain historical moments, photography becomes a particularly charged and closely examined object of debate. In the 1930s, writers such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Elizabeth McCausland grappled with the political and social stakes of the photographic image. In the 1970s and 1980s, critics including Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, and Rosalind Krauss renewed these debates, questioning photography’s claims to truth, authorship, and aesthetic autonomy. The late 20th and early 21st centuries mark another such moment, as digital technologies and networked circulation have transformed how images are produced, disseminated, and understood. This course introduces students to key theoretical and historical arguments about the status and meaning of the photographic image today. We will examine photography’s relationship to topics such as documentary and witnessing; political rights; racial profiling; imperialism; and the impact of artificial intelligence and algorithmic image-making on photography’s evidentiary authority, authorship, and ethics.
FR 578: Marcel Proust
Francois Proulx
Tue, 3:00 - 4:50 PM
Seminar on Marcel Proust's multivolume novel A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-1927). Readings include excerpts from each volume of the novel and related critical texts from approaches including genetic criticism, Jewish and queer studies, philosophy, art history, musicology, and cognitive theory. Taught in French; seminar discussions will be conducted in French or English; students from graduate programs other than French Studies are welcome to read the novel in English.
GER 574/471: Romanticism and its Afterlives
Laurie Johnson
Tue, 3:00-4:50 PM
Romanticism is one of the most significant movements in Western intellectual history. And, it supposedly ended around 1850. In this course, however, we will test the notion that Romanticism is still with us, in various guises. Texts from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) to Christoph Ransmayr's The Terrors of Ice and Darkness (1996), as well as several films, will help students develop a clear understanding of the movement, of its impacts, and of important trends in literary, philosophical, and cultural history from the late eighteenth century through today. This course is for graduate and undergraduate students. Readings and discussions are in English, with no prerequisites. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students in German should read the course texts in German (and may choose to write essays in German).