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...

Prof. Eduardo Ledesma Meeting Time: Thursday 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...

Dr. Ghassan Moussawi Mondays, 3:30-6:20pm  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...