Spring 2023 | ITAL 0701, CLPS 0540, HMAN 0700A | Simulating Reality: The (Curious) History and Science of Immersive Experiences
Fulvio Domini, Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences & Massimo Riva, Professor of Italian Studies
Can an experimental approach enhance our critical-historical understanding of immersive experiences? We will look at the history of 3D vision from an interdisciplinary perspective combining the science of perception and the cultural history of technology. Through a series of collaborative activities and team experiments, we will learn how popular, pre-digital optical devices (such as camerae obscurae, magic lanterns, panoramas, or stereoscopes) foreshadow contemporary VR, AR, or XR experiences designed for education and entertainment. Among the themes explored: virtual travel, social voyeurism and surveillance, utopian and dystopian imagination. (COEX)

Spring 2023 | ANTH 1313, PHP 1313A, HMAN 1400B,  | Are We Really All in This Together? Culture, Structure, and Health Disparities
Abigail Harrison, Associate Professor of Behavioral and Social Sciences & Daniel Jordan Smith, Charles C. Tillinghast, Jr. Professor of International Studies
COVID-19 revealed the shared vulnerability of humankind to a microscopic pathogen. It also reminded us that the global burden of disease and health-related social problems are unevenly distributed, often tracking inequalities tied to race, class, and nation. This course brings together perspectives from public health and cultural anthropology to investigate and explain the underlying causes and consequences of the disparities associated with health crises around the world. Students will interrogate and learn to utilize polysemic theoretical concepts such as culture and structure, developing humanities-influenced perspectives regarding human wellbeing that can enhance public health research, practice, and outcomes.

Spring 2023 | ANTH 1840, CLPS 1391, HMAN 1400C | Indigenous Languages of the Americas: An Introduction
Scott AnderBois, Associate Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences & Paja Faudree, Associate Professor of Anthropology
This course introduces students to the past and present of Indigenous languages of the Americas. A collaboration between faculty from linguistics and linguistic anthropology, the course synthesizes both fields with Indigenous studies and other disciplines. We examine how the distinct grammatical properties of these languages intersect with various aspects of their social contexts — from the politics surrounding their use to their presence in popular culture — as we grapple with the complex current realities of these languages in the lives of the Indigenous people who speak them and others whose investments span diverse interests. (COEX/RPP)

Fall 2022 | ENGL 2761W, HMAN 2401O | The Sublime
Marc Redfield, Florence Pirce Grant University Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Professor of German Studies & Zachary Sng, Professor of German Studies and Comparative Literature
The notion of the sublime has inspired powerful writing from the classical era to our own. In this collaborative humanities seminar we’ll work through some famous writing on the sublime (Longinus, Burke, Kant, and various 20th-century philosophers and critics) and engage the sublime tradition in literature and painting (the Bible to Milton to Jorie Graham; Caspar David Friedrich to the Hudson River School to Barnett Newman) and possibly music, cinema, or other media. We will think about the sublime in relation to race and gender; capitalism, globalization, and modern technics; the animal, the anthropocene, and the post-human.

Fall 2022 | HMAN 2400T, EMOW 2400T | Imagining Cities: Early Modern Urban Perspectives
Laura Bass, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies and History of Art and Architecture & Evelyn Lincoln, Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Italian Studies
Every city is a palimpsest in space and time. Architectural treatises, legal charters, novels, poems, paintings, maps, and the archeological record all provide points of entry to real and imagined urban centers. This collaborative humanities seminar considers early modern cities as varied as Rome, Seville, Peking, Mexico City, and the City of God, but seminar participants will propose their own cities of interest. This multidisciplinary archive forms a basis for collaborations in recovering and reconstructing built environments from different perspectives in text, image, and digital media, working with original materials in special collections wherever possible.

Spring 2023 | ENGL 2761V, HMAN 2401P | In the Wake of War: Ecologies of Displacement in Contemporary Fiction and Poetry
Daniel Y. Kim, Professor of English and American Studies & Ada Smailbegovic, Assistant Professor of English
If COVID has forced many humans into an awareness of the vast contours of nonhuman time, how might an analogous awareness be brought to bear upon war and its aftermath? How might we mediate between historical perspectives that register what Rob Nixon has termed “slow violence” and ones attuned to such punctual events of mass destruction as military conflict? This collaborative humanities seminar addresses such questions by engaging the work of writers like Etel Adnan, Ruth Ozeki, and Leslie Marmon Silko and filmmakers like Aida Begić as well as ecocritical scholarship that is attentive to racial and colonial histories of extraction and violence. “In the Wake of War” Conference

Spring 2023 | HMAN 2401I | On Belief
Leela Gandhi, John Hawkes Professor of the Humanities and English & Vazira Zamindar, Associate Professor of History
This course enquires into belief as a form of knowledge, politics, way of life, and resource for living-together in a multi-religious world. It examines the demotion of belief in disciplines of colonial and postcolonial modernity (democracy, the shift from comparative religion to comparative linguistics, formations of “art”). Contexts for accommodating belief are equally pertinent (tradition, self-care, family values, revolutionary energy). Readings are from philosophy, theology, postcolonial and critical race studies, self-help manuals, multi-media texts, and performances. Topics include the history of religions, fundamentalism, tolerance, devotion, surrender, refusal, spirituality, contemplation, submission, secularism, post-secularism, religious minorities, faith-healing, magic, skepticism, martyrdom, and apostasy.

Spring 2023 | HMAN 2401Q | Racial Ecologies
Jayna Brown, Professor of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies & Macarena Gómez-Barris, Timothy C. Forbes and Anne S. Harrison University Professor of Modern Culture and Media
In this course we explore the capitalist and consumer climate emergency by attending to local and planetary disasters, and ask if this emergency is the inevitable outcome of the Western onto-epistemic regime. We center Black, Indigenous, and Global South creative modes of living, being, and doing. We define racial ecologies as constituted out of a global structure of colonial power that includes slavery, extraction, debt, settler colonialism, carcerality, and hierarchies of race/gender/sex. Yet, racial ecologies also de-link from this condition through collaborative and autonomous practices and through new/old imaginaries of survivance. Our approach to the collaborative humanities exceeds the logics of anthropocentric containment by focusing on radical, Black feminist, and queer decolonial projects that destabilize dominant understandings of the human and non-human. Case studies, literary texts, visual arts, experience, installation, sound, media, and performance are important nodes of our discussion.

Spring 2023 | HMAN 2500 | Project Development Workshop
Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities & Shahzad Bashir, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History
In this capstone course, students completing the Doctoral Certificate in Collaborative Humanities pursue individual or collaborative projects, such as a dissertation chapter, an article on method/theory, or a stand-alone essay related to the larger field. The workshop provides a collaborative and supportive space in which students from different disciplines can share their work and receive and give feedback that will broaden and sharpen the framing of their projects. At the end of the semester, participants present in a Collaborative Public Workshop. Admission to the seminar requires a formal application process and the completion of two HMAN 2400 seminars.

Spring 2023 | HMAN 2300 | Introduction to Digital Humanities
Ashley Champagne, Lecturer in Humanities and Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship & Steven Lubar, Professor of American Studies and History
Digital humanities uses digital methodologies and formats to answer humanities research questions, produce and share knowledge, and teach. It encompasses critical studies of digital environments, innovative modes of researching and advancing arguments (including methodologies for constituting archives, analyzing texts and images, and visualizing data), new forms of scholarly and general publications, and digital pedagogy. The digital changes the way we research, understand, and share information in the humanities. This course will introduce students to a range of methodologies and critical lenses. Students will learn to collect resources formatted for machine-actionable research, analyze qualitative and quantitative datasets, and visualize and present their findings. They will consider the ethics of digital work and publication. Each student will plan a digital humanities project. This course is open to all graduate students and fulfills a requirement for the doctoral certificate in digital humanities.

Spring 2023 | ANTH 1730, HMAN 1976 | Violence of the Past
Andrew Scherer, Associate Professor of Anthropology
This course is both a study of the evidence used by anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians for reconstructing patterns of war and violence in the past and also the implications for that research on contemporary peoples. Scholars continue to be preoccupied with the question of whether war and violence has escalated or declined in modern times, often embedding their interpretations in notions of progress and the supposed success of Western nation-states in curtailing violence. Less well-acknowledged is both the shakiness of the data on which such claims are made and the stereotyped perceptions they reinforce regarding the peoples subjugated by the colonial powers from which modern nation-states descend. We will consider both foundational tests and recent scholarship regarding the anthropological, archaeological, and historical evidence for violence in the human past while critically examining how that research is consumed in popular discourse.

Spring 2023 | HMAN 1975U | The Jewelers of the Oumma: Inhabiting the Jewish Muslim World
Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media
The independence of Algeria in 1962 marked the end of a centuries-old intertwined Jewish and Muslim world in North Africa and the Middle East. This end, however, is made into a non-event in the annals of history. We will study the colonial projects that produced this termination as a non-event and will ask questions about the role of different imperial technologies such as art, museum, and archive in normalizing it. The Maghreb will be our point of departure, but students are invited to explore other imperial geographies and ask how practices of art-making such as jewelry, pottery, embroidery and others — not works of art destined to be displayed in museums — can resuscitate imaginaries of shared worlds? (RPP)

Spring 2023 | HMAN 1975V | Latin Radicals: Polemics by Spaniards and Native Authors in Early Colonial Mexico
Andrew Laird, John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and Humanities and Professor of Hispanic Studies
The seminar, rooted in an ongoing research project on Cristóbal Cabrera, the first poet in the Americas, has a broader compass, incorporating texts by Cabrera’s influential contemporaries and associates which contain inflammatory criticism of the conduct of the Spaniards in the Indies. The seminar will also introduce writings by indigenous Mexican rulers who took advantage of their humanist education to write Latin, challenging aspects of the colonial status quo and advancing the interests of their local communities. (RPP)

Spring 2023 | HMAN 1975W, CLAS 1750W | Outside Philosophy
Stephen Kidd, Associate Professor of Classics
Outside of each philosophical system stands a non-philosopher who laughs at it. From Aristophanes’ mockery of Socrates, to Lucian’s mockery of the Stoic lifestyle, to Erasmus’ mockery of the Scholastics, to Voltaire’s mockery of Leibniz’ “best of all possible worlds,” it often seems that philosophy, no matter how seriously it may be taken, barely has a leg to stand on. And yet, the outsiders arguably fare no better: what are their beliefs? Why do they refuse to tell us? Are they just quasi-philosophers who simply are too cowardly to commit to what they believe?

Spring 2023 | HMAN 1975Z | The Nature of Cities
Scott Frickel, Professor of Environment and Society and Sociology
This course investigates the environmental conditions and consequences of cities and urbanization in the context of climate change, aging urban infrastructure, and deepening social and environmental inequality. We will examine different efforts to conceptualize the socio-ecological and historical processes that create and change cities, and explore ways in which these processes are consequential, including cities’ appetites for natural resources, energy, and land; pollution and hazardous waste; newer and older forms of environmental injustice and privilege; and urban sustainability movements. Throughout, we will treat cities as laboratories for engaged humanities and social science inquiry. (RPP/WRIT)

Fall 2022 | HMAN 0800B | The Art of International Relations
Damien Mahiet, Lecturer in Humanities
From the ritual handshakes of country leaders to iconic photographs of migrants and refugees, from the use of music in combat and torture to the mobilization of art to make a better world, aesthetics informs the way international actors present themselves, portray the world, perceive others, and conceive of peace, conflict, and war. At the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, this course explores cultural practices constitutive of the diplomatic stage, international society, transnational networks, globalization, and postcoloniality in the 20th and 21st centuries. These include theatre, literature, music, dance, images, film, television, and social media. This course may be counted as a track elective in the security track of the international and public affairs concentration. (FYS/WRIT)

Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 | HMAN 1000A and B | Cogut Institute Research Seminar
Amanda Anderson, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of English and Humanities
This yearlong seminar involves reading and discussing in-progress research by the annual fellows of the Cogut Institute for the Humanities, an interdisciplinary group of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates engaged in extended research on a major project or honors thesis. Students read a wide range of works-in-progress, prepare questions and participate in seminar discussions, intervene as first questioners for specific sessions assigned to them in advance, and present their own work twice during the year. Admission to the course requires that students have received the Cogut Institute Undergraduate Fellowship for the year in which they enroll.

Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 | HMAN 1971S | Introduction to iPhone/iPad Moviemaking Using 3-D and 360 VR Comparisons
Theodore Bogosian, Visiting Assistant Professor of the Practice of Humanities
Mobile Devices are democratizing movie-making by lowering barriers to entry, enabling students to become full-fledged members of the film industry virtually overnight. This pioneering course provides the basic tools for students to create and distribute no- and low-budget live-action motion pictures with professional production values utilizing only their personal smartphones. Students will acquire the skills to plan, capture, and edit short motion pictures through hands-on instruction and experimentation with low-cost accessories, including selfie-sticks, lens adapters, directional microphones, and iPhone apps like Filmic Pro, Vizzywig, and iMovie. Limited to junior, senior, and graduate students.

Fall 2022 | HMAN 1975R | Religion from Below
Michael Satlow, Dorot Professor of Judaic Studies and Religious Studies
There has always been a tension between “religion,” as it is practiced by ordinary people and communities, and the prescriptions of those who see themselves, or who have more official roles, as religious “elite.” What, though, does it mean to speak of this “lived” or “popular” religion? Primarily through the close readings of case studies, this course will explore how scholars approach and theorize actual lived religious practice, and whether through such a cross-disciplinary and transhistorical approach we might be able to think more broadly about the ways in which people approach religion, and the reasons they do so. (WRIT)

Fall 2022 | HMAN 1975S | Figures of the Sovereign
Adi Ophir, Visiting Professor of Humanities and Middle East Studies
The sovereign is a person, institution, or a people where sovereignty — often understood as “the supreme authority in a given territory” — resides. How does the sovereign display its marks and perform or exercise its supreme authority? How is it questioned or undermined? These are matters of political imagination and public contestations no less than of legal definitions and conceptual distinctions. This is also where the problematization of the very idea of sovereignty may begin. We will study these questions by following the sovereign’s language, time, impunity, and unruly subjects. Our stories, images, and concepts will be drawn from a variety of sources: early modern (Machiavelli, Hobbes), modern (Schmitt) and contemporary political theory (Honig, Butler, Sawyer); modern literary fictions (Melville, Kafka); journalistic essays on autocrats, abroad and at home (Snyder, Gessen); and anthropological accounts of “stateless societies” (Clastres, Graeber).

Spring 2023 | HMAN 1974L | The Coming Apocalypse: Between the Earth and the World
Adi Ophir, Visiting Professor of Humanities and Middle East Studies
A cascading catastrophe threatens to turn the earth uninhabitable and bring our world to its end. How to think, in this context, the relation between our world, the world, and the earth? Are they known, experienced, shared with others, or being destroyed in the same way? How have their differences and convergence been affected by globalization, and affected our understanding of the “Anthropocene”? Following the news on ongoing and future climate catastrophes, the seminar addresses these and related questions through critical readings of theoretical and philosophical texts, including works by Arendt, Latour, Haraway, Povinelli, Yussof, Moore, and Mbembe.

Fall 2022 | EAST 0411, HMAN 0900J | Diplomats, Drunkards, and Anarchists: Competing Visions of the Future in Japan’s Global Past
Manimporok Dotulong, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities (East Asian Studies)
This course offers a broad introduction to the global and transnational dimensions of a cornerstone event in modern East Asian history: the “Opening” of Japan. This historical moment connected the country with the wider world in a myriad of contradictory ways. It produced the first non-Western nation state to join the ranks of colonial “Great Powers.” It also inspired anti-imperialists and critics of Western modernity throughout the world: from Black internationalists and Muslim intellectuals to environmental activists and anarchist revolutionaries. We will study various sources, methods, and theories to make sense of these and many more cross-border connections. We will also reflect on competing notions of historical progress that inform our interpretations of the past. By the end of the course, students will have acquired foundational knowledge and skills to scour the past for lost imaginations of the future.

Fall 2022 | ENGL 0300M, HMAN 0900I | Medieval Gender
Mariah Min, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities (English and Medieval Studies)
In this course, we will examine the multiplicity of ways that gender and sexuality are portrayed in the literature of medieval Britain and interlinked cultural regions. How do medieval texts depict gender categories, relations of desire and violence, intersectional subject positions, and anxieties about sex that remain alive today? What are some currents of fluidity, peculiarity, and rebellion in early ideas about gender and sexuality? Texts may include the “Roman de Silence,” the lais of Marie de France, and The Book of Margery Kempe. (RPP)

Fall 2022 | CLAS 1070, HMAN 1975Y | Narratives of Disability in Greek and Latin Literature
Hannah Silverblank, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (Classics and Comparative Literature)
What is disability? What makes someone disabled, or enabled, now and in the past? How was disability conceptualized in ancient Greek and Latin sources? How do ancient Mediterranean narratives of disability provide insights into disability histories, presents, and futures? What is the relationship between disability, society, politics, power, and oppression? In this course, we take an interdisciplinary approach to the question of how Greek and Latin writing represented complex ideas about embodiment, society, and community. Our course material traverses the intersections between critical disability studies, disability justice movements, ancient literature, and classical studies. We will work together to adapt the course experience to meet the access needs, interests, and unique wisdom of the particular community of students enrolled in the class.

Fall 2022 | HISP 1331R, HMAN 1975X | Blackness and Puerto Rican Literature
Adrián Emmanuel Hernández-Acosta, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities (Hispanic Studies)
This course approaches Puerto Rican literature as a set of texts with which to critically think about discourses of racial blackness in the Puerto Rican archipelago and its diasporas. We examine key literary moments, from 19th-century “foundational fiction” and early 20th-century “Afro-Antillean” poetry to contemporary Black Puerto Rican voices. Guided by a set of Puerto Rican and Black U.S. scholars, our discussions are informed by the historical changes in the political status of Puerto Rico and how these changes have shaped discourses of racial Blackness in Puerto Rican literature and culture. By focusing on the specificities of various Puerto Rican literary scenes, this course aims to gain insight into broader discussions regarding racial Blackness in the Caribbean and Afro-Latin America. A playlist of music by Puerto Ricans complements the course. Class discussions are in Spanish. (RPP)

Fall 2022 | STS 1700R, HMAN 1975T | Bodies at Work: Disability and Capitalism
Emily Rogers, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (American Studies and Science, Technology, and Society)
​​If disability has been defined as the inability to work, then an exploration of disability necessitates an exploration of capitalism. Workplaces literally injure and disable bodies, while changing arrangements of labor define and redefine what makes something a disability, requiring new tasks of bodies at work. This course traces the dynamic relationship between bodies and economies over the course of American history from the birth of industrial management science in the nineteenth century, to the “essential worker” of the COVID-19 pandemic. Nimbly moving back and forth between disability studies and labor history, we will develop the conceptual tools to understand capitalism through the lens of disability, while also generating new ways to think about disability via critical histories of capitalism. We will also look at how disabled people have pushed back, envisioning new ways of valuing bodies beyond productivity. (RPP/WRIT)

Fall 2022 | ANTH 2325, HMAN 2900Y | The State and the Circulation of Meaning
Michael Berman, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities (Anthropology)
This course is designed as a disorientation of the state. Rather than seeing the state as a fixed, absolute entity that exists on a separate plane of existence, this course analyzes the state as an effect-producing abstraction that arises in contested circulations of meaningful signs. Viewing the state as a material abstraction (a complex sign) rather than as an absolute entity, we turn to theories of differentiation in circulation and movement. We attempt to answer the questions: What is movement? What moves? And what does movement create, break down, and change? Thinking about the implications of such questions, we will consider the extent to which differentiations in movement carve out units of governance, how the differences produced in those units might generate change, and how forms of difference might partially escape and alter such movement (or not).

Spring 2023 | ANTH 0350, HMAN 0900K | Suffering and Compassion
Michael Berman, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities (Anthropology)
One might say that to be human is to suffer, but what is suffering? Is it to be avoided or embraced? To what ends? The answers to these questions are not just personal or psychological. Rather, they are deeply sociocultural and historical. Orientations toward suffering shape major aspects of life, such as religion, politics, humanitarianism, and medicine. This course explores different ways that society and culture create suffering, and ways that suffering shapes society and culture. This happens not just in suffering itself but also in ways that people try to overcome suffering. Therefore, we also consider the relationship of compassion, empathy and sympathy, and other forms of care to suffering, always paying close attention to questions of the unequal distributions of both suffering and compassion to different groups of people. (RPP)

Spring 2023 | HISP 0750W, HMAN 0900L | Caribe Queer
Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities (Hispanic Studies)
The Hispanophone Caribbean and its diasporas have created a vibrant literary and more broadly artistic catalog through which to think formations of gender and sexuality in racial, political, and economic context. In this course, we focus on 20th- and 21st-century Dominican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban queer and trans authors, characters, artists, and themes. We discuss literary, poetic, and artistic material within a set of historical and theoretical frames. We ask how Hispanophone Caribbean literature and art portray and theorize racial, gendered, and sexual life in relation to historical and contemporary structures of power. A playlist featuring queer and trans Caribbean artists complements the course. Most readings are in Spanish. Class discussions and assignments are in Spanish. (RPP)

Spring 2023 | COLT 1815U, HMAN 1976B | Encountering Monsters in Comparative Literature
Hannah Silverblank, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (Classics and Comparative Literature)
What is a monster? What happens when one encounters a monster? This literature-based seminar considers monsters in different literary traditions, including ancient epic, folktale, poetry, theory, science fiction, and cinema. Monstrous figures from different cultural traditions, places, eras, genres, and forms will guide us through various representations of monstrosity — a concept which both invites and defies definition. We will ask: what cultural and imaginative needs do monsters fill? How do monsters help us think about identity politics and the cultural production of ideas of self and other? To what extent are monsters tools of ideological oppression, and to what extent are monsters liberatory figures that offer conceptual alternatives to systems of oppression and violence? (RPP)

Spring 2023 | EAST 1702, HMAN 1976J | Pacific Indigeneities: From Māori Mythology to James Cameron’s “Avatar”
Maro Dotulong, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities (East Asian Studies)
What is indigeneity? The answer is all but straightforward, especially in the context of the Western Pacific. We will examine a deeply eclectic mix of sources of Pacific indigeneity — from Māori Mythology, the Kuroshio Current, and Okinawan cuisine to Southeast Asian revolutionary thought, Oceanian cosmology, and James Cameron’s “Avatar.” In doing so, we will lay bare the intricacies of the concept of indigeneity as they relate to one of the world’s hotbeds of bio- and linguistic diversity. Paying close attention to forms of knowledge production both within and beyond the academy, this course explores Pacific manifestations of the global indigenous movement.

Spring 2023 | ENGL 1361Q, HMAN 1975P | Medieval Race
Mariah Min, Postdoctoral Fellow in International Humanities (English and Medieval Studies)
In this course, we will explore the historically specific contours of race in England and interrelated cultural regions during the High and Late Middle Ages, as well as learn and practice how to read Middle English. Not open to first-year students. Enrollment limited to 20. (RPP)

Spring 2023 | HIAA 1625, HMAN 1976C | Native American Architecture
Eric Johnson, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (History of Art and Architecture and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative)
Academic disciplines that discuss Native American pasts (such as archaeology, anthropology, and history) have historically characterized Indigenous peoples of North America by what they supposedly “lack.” Architectural history is no exception. Despite a deep continental history of Native American constructions — whether monumental earthen mounds or effigies, village complexes, roads, or megaliths — Native architecture is often ignored in histories of architecture. Combining archaeological, ethnographic, archival, and oral-historical sources, this course exposes the erasure of Native Americans from architectural history and celebrates the diversity and complexity of Indigenous built environments. We first examine how different academic disciplines have historically studied (and sometimes erased) Native American architecture. Then we will survey Indigenous architecture before settler colonialism. We end the course studying the violence of and resistance to colonialism in North America and how contemporary Indigenous architectural traditions have been shaped in response. (WRIT)

Spring 2023 | MCM 1506X, HMAN 1975J | Love Hurts: Romance, Media, Masochism
Veronica Fitzpatrick, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (Modern Culture and Media)
The widespread popularity, profitability, and critical derision of mainstream romance media, from ABC’s prolific “The Bachelor” franchise to “Fifty Shades of Grey,” affirms masochism — the enjoyment of what is painful — as a key subject for film and media studies. This course will pair a range of film and television romance texts — from global art cinema to Hollywood rom-coms to reality TV — with conceptual frameworks at the intersections of pain, personhood, and performance. We’ll survey the critical lenses media studies offers for the contemplation of historically derided objects, including genre studies (melodrama, pornography), platform analyses (reality, soap), to critical theory (including queer and affect-based approaches), working collectively to historicize and defamiliarize contemporary mediations of amity, intimacy, and identity.

Spring 2023 | STS 1700A, HMAN 1976A | Disability and Sexuality: Politics of Desire and Desirability
Emily Rogers, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow (American Studies and Science, Technology, and Society)
Disabled people have been variously understood as undesirable, as subjects who do not desire, or as people whose desire is dangerous and perverse. In this course, we will excavate the origins of these understandings and develop new ones through a “cripping” of sexuality. The “normalization” of disabled sexuality through disciplinary regimes, and the ways disabled people have challenged them, will be a central theme. The course will utilize texts from both queer theory and disability studies, understanding the ways disabled sexuality pushes against normative expectations of proper sexuality. From the eugenic logic controlling the reproduction of the “feeble-minded”; to discourses of consent and agency surrounding intellectual disabilities; to interdependency, care, and disabled intimacies; to queer crip theories of kink, we will take disability as a crucial lens into the constitution of modern understandings of “sexuality” itself. (RPP/WRIT)