Professor Anustup Basu Tue, 12:30-02:50PM 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...

Professor Deena Rymhs Mon, 1:00-2:50PM 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...

Professor Irvine Hunt Thur, 9:00-11:50AM 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...

Professor Brett Kaplan Wed, 3:00-5:00PM 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...

Professor Tamara Chaplin Tues, 3:00PM - 4:50PM “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...

Professor Hina Nazar Mon, 12:30 - 02:50PM 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...

Professor Julie Turnock Mon, 1:00PM - 4:50PM 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...

Professor Christopher Fennell Wed, 2:00 - 5:50pm 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. 

Professor: Francis A. Boyle  Mon & Tue, 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...