This course investigates how people of African descent in the Americas have forged social, political, and cultural ties across geopolitical and linguistic boundaries. We will interrogate the transnational dialogue between African Americans and Afro-Latin Americans using case studies from Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Dominican Republic. We will explore how Black activists have partnered to challenge racism and economic inequality, while also considering why efforts to mobilize Afro-descendants across the Americas have often been undermined by mutual misunderstandings.

This course challenges the racial parameters of disability studies and disability history by asking how persistent conditions of antiblack violence, including mass incarceration, state divestment, medical neglect, and environmental racism, destabilize assumptions about what constitutes an "able body." Surveying scholarship in Black studies, disability studies, African American history, and the history of science and medicine, we will study the construction of disability as a racialized category. Students will also recover disability theories that are already intrinsic to the Black radical tradition, postcolonial studies, and Black feminisms.

This course introduces students to methods of American Studies through discussion of some of the signature ideas, events, and debates in and about America's past and present. It presents students various scholarly approaches to historical and mythic manifestations of America from local, national, and global perspectives and considers the historical and cognitive processes associated with the delineation of America. The course examines a wide range of material and media from the point of view of multiple fields of study.

This seminar connects contemporary American literature, media and visual culture with environmental movements--focusing on the work of animators, filmmakers, photographers, novelists, poets, and other artists. Several organizing questions will guide our work together: How do creators respond to--and sometimes catalyze social movements around such issues as climate change, biodiversity loss, food and water justice and pollution? How do individual writers and artists apprehend today's environmental crises and imagine livable, just futures?

This course looks at the religious traditions as a source of what Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) calls survivance, the active presence, continuance of stories, and renunciation of dominance by indigenous peoples. Our comparative approach will examine the pre and post contact traditions of the Mexicas in the Valley of Mexico followed by the Algonquian communities of early New England (e.g. Wampanoag, Mohegan, Narragansett, Pequot, et al). Sources will include the wide range of ways religion was preserved and augmented including rituals, texts, oral tradition, and material culture.

This interdisciplinary seminar will examine the history and evolution of the Walt Disney Company not only as a multinational media and entertainment conglomerate but also as a powerful cultural force, from the early films and theme parks to the highly successful streaming service. We'll consider the ever-expanding Disney multiverse (which includes Pixar, Marvel, and Lucasfilm, among others) as well as the company's global reach, while paying special attention to its impacts on, and representations of, American history, society, and culture, particularly as they touch on matters of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, and place.

This class explores the underside of civility: the indifference of good manners, the controlling attention of caregivers, the loving coercion of family, the quiet horrors of neighbors, friends, and allies. We will explore characters in fiction and film whose militant niceness exercises killing privilege or allows for the expansion of their narcissism...people with "good intentions" who nonetheless wreak havoc on the people and the environment around them. We will consider "niceness" as social performance, as cultural capital, as middle-class value, as sexual mores, as self-belief, and as affective management.

New York has long been a hub for Black creatives. From the community of Black writers living in Brooklyn in the 1850s to the artists who gravitated to Harlem in the 1920s to the collectives of Black women authors who gathered in the 1980s, New York is a key territory in Black literary culture. This course examines how New York emerges in the Black literary and cultural imaginary. As we think about New York as a place that is as imagined as it is real, we will consider the interplay between race, space, aesthetics, & politics, and literary movements, focusing on what the city makes possible & what it forecloses.

The idea of a "just transition" has proliferated among climate policy makers, activists, and others from local to international scales to unite actors with labor, social justice, and renewable energy priorities. This course traces the historical origins and contested uses of just transition frameworks, exploring debates and common ground among labor, policy, environmental justice, ecosocialist, and decolonial perspectives. Emphasis is on the U.S. context with points of connection to global systems and movements.

An exploration of the ways in which gender and crime are intertwined in some of the most significant and popular works of American fiction. Our analysis of the aesthetic, cultural, and psychological dimensions of narratives based on crime and detection will focus on texts by both women and men with an emphasis on the capacity of gender studies to illuminate American crime fiction's recurring concern with questions of race and class, justice and power, violence and victimhood.

This course examines the history of the United States through its intellectuals and major ideas. Starting with the American Revolution and progressing through to the contemporary intellectual scene, it hopes to introduce students to major debates, themes, and intellectual movements in the history of American ideas. We will read a number of famous thinkers and actors in their own words and study the development of important schools of thought, such as Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the New Left.

This course surveys the rise of mass popular culture in America (1800-2000), exploring how race, labor, gender, sexuality, technology, and urbanization shaped its evolution. It examines how cultural expressions in music, art and entertainment reflect and influence societal values and the ongoing battle over "American" identity. Two lectures and one precept a week.

This course will examine the U.S. West's place, process, idea, cultural memory, conquest, and legacies throughout American history. The American West has been a shifting region, where diverse individuals, languages, cultures, environments, and competing nations came together. We will examine the West's contested rule, economic production, and mythmaking under Native American Empires, Spain, France, England, individual filibusters, Mexico, Canada, and United States.

This course explores the history, culture, and language of the Deaf in the United States. The first part of the course focuses on the history of Deaf people in the United States. The second part discusses various aspects of Deaf culture: language, literature, art, politics, etc. The third part critically examines different issues facing Deaf people here in the United States and around the world. These issues include audism, linguicism, ableism, intersectionality, disability justice, bioethics, and education. No American Sign Language knowledge required.

This course examines the performance and reception of operas in the Americas between 1750 and 1950. Following the migration of singers, musicians, dancers, and other practitioners after the American, French, and Haitian Revolutions, as well as the California Gold Rush, the performance of opera outside the European metropole is a fascinating way to engage in the history of migration, assimilation politics, and historical performance practice in displacement. In this course, we will trace the genre's development and its effect on national identity in America, the Caribbean, Canada, and South America.

Students will engage with broad questions of democratic health in the U.S. They will also gain direct training on original data collection. The data elements of the course focus on factors that can serve as objective indicators of access to the rights and privileges of democratic citizenship in the U.S., across time and geography. In short, students will develop their research skills while helping to build a public good - the first democracy index of the United States that accounts for subnational differences in the quality of democracy due to racial climate and institutional context.

This course explores how the religious is depicted and engaged, even implicitly, in feature films. Movies selected are considered significant with respect to director, script, music, cinematography, impact in film history, influence in wider culture, etc., aside from any religious dimensions but then also because of how, why, and in what ways something is conveyed about religion - critically or affirmatively (or both). The first portion of the course will examine the presentation of specific religions. The second portion will explore religious concepts such as love, evil, fate, justice, heroes, [extraordinary] power, freedom, etc.

This course focuses on the structural and institutional foundations of racial discrimination in the United States. It emphasizes the contributions of sociologists. The course gives a historical overview followed by an investigation of key legislative actions and economic factors inhibiting racial equality. Subsequent topics include migration and immigration; urban development; and residential segregation. The end of the course reviews resistance movements and policies aimed at addressing systemic racism, including restorative justice and reparations.

As the United States has increasingly looked to its federal government to provide policies and protect rights that benefit its population, how have the branches of government risen to the occasion? Where have they struggled? What obstacles have they faced? What complexities have arisen over time? This course is an investigation of the institutional, political, and legal development of the unique "American state" in the contemporary era.

This survey course will introduce you to the central issues in K-12 education policy. We will first consider the normative dimensions of education policymaking: What are the substantive and distributional goals of K-12 public education? What does, and should, equality of educational opportunity mean in theory and practice? After introducing a framework for combining values and evidence, we will consider the empirical evidence on a range of policy levers, including policies that address school accountability, teacher quality, school choice, and curricula.

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to how performance-making intersects with local, state, federal, and international policy concerns (and vice versa). Through lecture, workshops, and guest visitors, we will examine connections between policy and performance within four central topical arenas: public speech; public assembly; intellectual property; and supply chain logistics. As we study the impact of policy on a broad array of live, embodied, and mediatized performances, we will also rehearse an understanding of statecraft, public advocacy/protest, and policy-making as consequential modes of public enactment and performance

Through plays produced in the United States from the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter Movement of the 2010s, we will identify and analyze various themes, approaches, and concerns within feminist plays. Employing script and dramaturgical analyses and performance techniques, students will learn how to contextualize plays from the race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics of the playwright and contextualize plays within their larger historical, social, and cultural milieus. In doing so, students will learn about the different lineages, politics, and aesthetics of feminist theatre.

This seminar introduces urban studies research methods through a study of New York in conversation with other cities. Focused on communities and landmarks represented in historical accounts, literary works, art and film, we will travel through cityscapes as cultural and mythological spaces - from the past to the present day. We will examine how standards of evidence shape what is knowable about cities and urban life, what "counts" as knowledge in urban studies, and how these different disciplinary perspectives construct and limit knowledge about cities as a result.