This course examines the lives, labors, cultures, and experiences of Black women in the United States from slavery to Emancipation and throughout the twentieth century. The class will pay particular development to the historical, social, economic and political factors that contributed to the rise of Black feminist consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s.

In this interdisciplinary class, students of race as well as gender, sexuality, disability, etc. read deeply and broadly in academic journals as a way of learning the debates in their fields and placing their scholarship in relationship to them. Students report each week on the trends in the last five years of any journal of their choice, writing up the articles' arguments and debates, while also revising a paper in relationship to those debates and preparing it for publication. This course enables students to leap forward in their scholarly writing through a better understanding of their fields and the significance of their work to them.

Love is a deeply personal experience. Yet, powerful social, political, and economic forces determine who we love, when we love, and how we love. Looking at practices of romantic love, dating, sex, marriage, queer love, friendship, and familial love across different social and global contexts, this course explores how social and cultural factors shape our most intimate relationships. Drawing on ethnography, history, and journalism, we examine the intersections between love and technology, gender, race, the law, capitalism, colonialism, and religion. For the final project, students will use creative writing or multi-media to tell a love story.

The goal of this course is to understand what queer lifeworlds are like in diverse cultural and sociopolitical contexts. What is the relationship between queerness and larger forces such as culture, coloniality, global capitalism, religion, and the state? What counts as queer and whose recognition matters? What is the nature of the work of becoming that is involved, and what resources do they draw upon in doing so? What factors enable or curtail these possibilities? Is queer always radical and against the norm? We will answer such questions by reading ethnographies, theories, and biographies that focus on queer lifeworlds across the world.

In almost every human society, women are expected to perform different tasks than men. Was there a biological or cultural reason for this? True - women are the only sex to give birth to date, but does that mean there is no escape from traditional sex roles? In this class we will explore female behavioral biology from an evolutionary and biocultural perspective. We will pair physiology and life-history theory with cultural outcomes to engage with feminism and social and political debates. Topics include menstrual taboos, sexual differentiation and gender identity, reproduction, contraception, women's health, workplace equality, etc.

This course examines feminist critiques of art history and contemporary art. What challenges did they pose to the fields of art history and contemporary art? Drawing on artworks by Rosa Bonheur, Georgia O'Keeffe, Adrian Piper, Cindy Sherman, Shahzia Sikander, Andy Warhol and others from the Princeton University Art Museum, as well as readings in art history, art criticism, cultural criticism, literature and philosophy, we will see how the feminist critique transformed art history and contemporary art, and was itself transformed in the process.

What is the relationship between race and genre? Through a survey of major works and debates in Asian American literature, this course examines how writers employ a variety of generic forms--novels, comics, memoirs, film, science fiction--to address issues of racial and ethnic identity, gender, queerness, memory, immigration, and war. By placing racial formation in relation to social, economic, and intellectual developments, we will explore the potential of literary texts to deepen our historical understanding of Asians in the U.S. and beyond, and probe into what labeling a work of literature as "Asian American" allows us to know and do.

An examination of the moral principles governing love and sex. Questions to be addressed include: Do we ever owe it to someone to love him or her? Do we owe different things to those we love? Do we owe it to a loved one to believe better of him than our evidence warrants? What is consent, and why is it morally significant? Is sex between consenting adults always permissible, and if not, why not? Are there good reasons for prohibiting prostitution and pornography? Everyone has opinions about these matters. The aim of the course is to subject those opinions to scrutiny.

An introduction to ancient Greco-Roman mythology in its cultural context and in relationship to broader human concerns (e.g., creation, mortality and immortality, sex and gender, time, change, love, and death). The course offers a who's who of the ancient Greco-Roman imaginative world; considers its relations with other ancient Mediterranean cultures and its transformations over time; and delves into the main ancient sources for well-known myths. We will also consider modern adaptations of ancient myths.

This course explores the ideas of sex, sexuality and gender in ancient Greek and Roman literature to better understand how these worked in the social, cultural and political spheres of antiquity. We will analyze the primary literary and material evidence we have for sexuality and gender in Greece and Rome, and survey the modern scholarly approaches to those same texts. Topics will include: interactions between the sexes (courtship, extramarital desire, sex and marriage); same-sex desire and homosociality; the status of women and men in terms of social function, age and religious activity; and transgressive actions.

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.

Despite the stereotypes of the over-bearing Tiger Mom and the Immigrant Mom, the figure of the mother has been surprisingly absent (either missing, dead, or otherwise gone) in 20th and 21st century Asian American literature and cinema. This class explores how the missing maternal figure structures the lifeline of Asian American imagination. Why is such a primal figure of origin ghostly? What happens to the mother-child relationship in the shifting contexts of diaspora, migration, nationhood, interracial relation, technology, and/or adoption? What happened to the "Asian Mother" in the late stage of American neoliberalism and racial reckoning?

This class considers Jane Austen not only as the inventor of the classic novel but also as an inspiring, ceaslessly discussable author who is--thanks to a steady stream of adaptations and spinoffs--our contemporary. Pairing each novel with recent adaptations and current issues, we will discuss how Austen treats love, violence, sisterhood, sex, and power. Exploring Austen's difference as well as her modernity, we will learn as much about ourselves as about her novels.

This immersive, multimedia course invites us to come to our senses in creative ways, exploring climate crises like melting ice, rising oceans, deforestation and displacements. We will come alive to hidden worlds, kayaking the Millstone and trips to Manhattan, engaging animal and environmental studies. Through film, images and writing, we explore the vital ways environmental issues intersect with gender, race and sexualities. Themes include: wilderness; national parks; violent settler colonialism; masculinities; militarization; Indigenous knowledges; animal intelligence and emotions; slow violence; the commons; and strategies for change.

This course will be run as a seminar, focusing on the writings and lives of four major "spies of Empire." Three of them - TE Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and Dame Freya Stark (roughly contemporaneous with each other) - represented/worked for British imperial interests in what is today termed the Middle East or more accurately, the SWANA region. The fourth, Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss-Russian woman masquerading often as a man, supplied intel about Algeria to French colonial administrators through her writings.

What does RuPaul's Drag Race teach us about our everyday gendered performances? How does The Bachelor shed light on contemporary courtship rituals? Reality television shows may seem like frivolous fun (and they are!), but they are also illuminating cultural artifacts that reflect contemporary American norms and values. In this course, we will analyze these forms of entertainment through a social scientific lens, investigating what they reveal about our collective understandings of sex, gender, and sexuality.

This course focuses on "bad girls" (and boys!): people who perform their gender and/or sexuality in ways that fall outside of the norm. We will examine how cultural meanings shape our shared understandings of what is "normal" or "abnormal," "good" or "bad," and we will regularly link our course readings to current events and elements of popular culture.

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 workshop rehearses the critical and compositional skills necessary for developing an accurate, contextualized, and compelling account of a woman's life. Course participants will engage a variety of critical and creative modes to research and compose original works of creative biographical non-fiction about a biographical subject of their choice. Throughout, the course will engage foundational methods and techniques of biographical storytelling as they also evince (and confront) the personal, moral, ethical and other questions emerging from the stories we choose to tell about women's lives.

Since the publication in the 1980s of the seminal essay by Chandra Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes," feminist scholarship has sought to decolonize knowledge by decentering the Global North and rejecting the universalization of Western experiences. Differences in experiences across cultures and nations became a focal point of feminist inquiry. Universal claims engendered suspicion, leading many to reject analysis of larger systems such as "patriarchy." The avoidance of ethnocentrism also became a priority. How do we achieve these goals? In other words, how do we decolonize feminist knowledge?

Although the queer and trans activist Marsha P. Johnson is well-known in popular media for her middle name, "pay it no mind," among her contemporaries she is better remembered for lingering on street corners and asking passersby "spare change for a starving queen?" Using a racial capitalist framework, this course examines the history of gender and sexual diversity in the United States from the pre-colonial period to the present. We will read work by historians of sexuality and gender alongside scholars of Black and Brown labor as we ask how U.S. history looks different when we center sexual and gender nonconforming working-class populations.

How do women in Asia become "gendered" in times of war-as caregivers, as refugees, as sex workers, as war brides? This course offers an introductory survey of American wars in Asia from 1899 to the present, taking the perspectives not of Americans but of the historically marginalized. Students will be challenged to rethink and reimagine war histories through voices on the ground across Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, Okinawa, Hawaii, and Guam. foregrounding written testimonies and oral histories of women against the backdrop of war, militarism, and empire, the course will also make broader connections across the Asia pacific.

This seminar surveys the history of sexuality, situating recent works in the field alongside canonical texts and longstanding debates in the field. Please see instructor for a draft of the syllabus.

As carceral systems expand across the Americas, this course articulates two feminist traditions for the abolition of the prison-industrial complex in the U.S. and against punitive systems in Latin America to explore how communities theorize and organize under carceral systems, envisioning and rehearsing diverse forms of justice. Building on abolitionist, feminist, and anthropological literature in dialogue with grassroots organizers, this course introduces students to theories on the carceral state, interrelated forms of violence, and organizing for justice under carceral states, including the U.S., but with a special focus on Latin America.

What did it mean to be a woman in the late Republic and Imperial Rome? What social conditions, cultural attitudes, and lived experiences defined their identities? Can we hear their voices after two millennia? To answer these questions, we will analyze a wide range of primary material in Latin, from literary texts to inscriptions and graffiti. We will encounter representations of women from different socio-economic backgrounds and better understand the discourses (literary, religious, mythical, and medical) shaping their identities. Readings aim to improve students' flexibility with Latin across genres and media.

The decline of marriage in recent decades is often tied to the decline of religion. But why should marriage, a contractual relationship centered on sex and property, be seen as a religious practice? This seminar considers the varied and surprising ways in which the great monotheistic traditions of the Near East came to connect certain forms of human marriage - or their rejection- to divine devotion, and considers how marriage worked in societies shaped by these traditions. Spanning biblical Israel to the medieval Islamic world, this course will introduce you to the historical study of Near Eastern religions and to the field of family history.

This course explores the lives and representations of Muslim women from Medieval times to the present. We use scripture, documents, novels, poetry, films, and scholarly studies from different fields. The topics include women's piety, sexuality, marriage, family, slavery, learning, feminisms, war, and the gendering of the "war on terror." A trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art included.

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.