Department website: http://krieger.jhu.edu/africana/
The Center for Africana Studies (CAS) offers a rigorous focus on African-descended peoples and their cultures across the globe. Over the past millennium, the contribution, traditions, and values of African, African-American, and African Diaspora cultures helped create the modern and pre-modern world. Africana Studies, as a field of study, grew from the activist and scholarly traditions of Black Studies and the blending of peoples and ideas between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It therefore offers a broad, multidisciplinary approach to history and culture centered on the interests, conditions, philosophies, conceptual schemes, and value systems of African-descended people everywhere. Our courses focus on the human experience in the context of social, political, demographic, cultural, religious, and economic systems. They also offer a unique perspective on racism, colonialism, capitalism, and geography that properly situates the importance of people of color to the making of the modern world.
Africana Studies offers a multidisciplinary curriculum that expands the scope and range of traditional academic disciplines to the presence, roles, cultural contributions, experiences, and particular interests of African peoples and their descendants.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
- Cross Listed Courses
- Anthropology
- Economics
- English
- Film and Media Studies
- First Year Seminars
- History
- History of Art
- History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
- Islamic Studies
- Medicine, Science and the Humanities
- Modern Languages and Literatures
- Near Eastern Studies
- Political Science
- Program in Museums and Society
- Public Health Studies
- Sociology
- Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
- Theatre Arts & Studies
- Writing Seminars
What is Anti-Racism? How do we identify racism’s presence and effects, and how do we direct social and civic resources to end it? In this Freshman Seminar, students will learn from a series of faculty experts and invited guests about the history, workings, and legacies of racism. They’ll also study present-day and past approaches – attempted and theorized – to abolish racism in the modern world.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
This course will offer students an introduction to the central novels, plays, short stories, essays and poetry that have constituted African American Literature from 1930-1980. By focusing on representative works that span each of the major periods from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement, we will continue to consider the question of race and representation. How does one represent the race? And, for whom should black authors write – a white audience in order to change their minds about black people, or to black people for their pleasure and edification? Over the course of the semester, we will trace the various ways early- to late- 20th century black writers sometimes borrowed from earlier literary traditions and, at other times, developed new ones. In addition, we will hone in on the major debates and central texts that have come to define African American Literature and explore how it has long served as a creative, political, and intellectual enterprise.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of African American Studies, with attention to the literature, film, culture, history, and politics of black life in the United States. Our reading list will likely include texts by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Frances E.W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and others.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course introduces students to the field of Africana Studies. It focuses on the historical experience, intellectual ideas, theories, and cultural production of African-descended people. We will consider how people of the black diaspora remember and encounter Africa.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This introductory course will examine policing and prisons in the United States and beyond, with a focus on racial inequality. It will consist of three parts. First, we will define key concepts in police and prison studies. Then, we will explore the contemporary state of prisons and policing in the United States and look at debates around the rise of “mass incarceration” and aggressive forms of policing in the final third of the 20th century. Third, we will explore policing and prison in other parts of the globe in the contemporary moment, highlighting similarities and differences from the U.S. case. What can studying the instruments of social control in other societies reveal about our own? Students will develop an understanding of major trends, keywords, and debates in the literature on policing and prisons, with particular reference to race and racism.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course will introduce students to the fundamentals of community-engaged documentary filmmaking with a focus on both theory and practice. It will examine documentary filmmaking as an educational tool for raising social- and racial- justice issues from an African diasporic and global perspective. The course is taught by award-winning professional documentary filmmakers. Students will produce their own 3-5 minute film or audio podcast. Students will select their documentary film topic, conduct their own research, and move from pre-production into production. No prior experience in filmmaking is required for this course.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course explores “critical university studies” through the lens of abolitionist thought, from W.E.B. DuBois to Ruth Wilson Gilmore. It historicizes universities’ growth within U.S. cities during the twentieth century.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
This course introduces students to a history of social change in Baltimore centered on Black women artists. Students will learn and apply archival and oral history methods as they learn about local movements.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
What about performance offers a unique opportunity to learn from and with communities? How might dramatic performance be used to share information while learning from an audience? This course examines the work and research of young artists from Liberia, West Africa who used street theatre to teach best practices for prevention during the Ebola crisis and considers how their use of dialogical performance contributed to critical knowledge which iteratively informed interventions throughout their awareness campaign. This community engaged course connects public health education efforts in Africa to community health education in Baltimore through the Blackstorytelling tradition with local expert Janice the Griot. Course co-educator and artist Janice the Griot Green will share her firsthand experiences and guide the class through the principles of Blackstorytelling for community change. Students will design public performance projects around local-global community-basedconcerns using the tools they have learned. In partnership with the Great National Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore, students will develop performance-based public health messaging drawing on their collection to support community outreach curricular materials development. This performance work will be created collaboratively in workshops during class and in team meetings. Public health researchers who are looking for innovative ways to share their data will gain insights into this experimental ethnographic method and practitioners who want to offer their communities ways to connect best practices to lived experience will develop new pedagogical tools. This is a Community Engagement course in partnership with the Center for Social Concern.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
In this course, we will follow the development of black poetry primarily as it has evolved in the United States. Beginning with the first published African American writers of the eighteenth century and ending with several important poets writing and performing today, we will consider the shape of the African American poetic tradition as commonly anthologized and as defined by our own theoretically-informed readings of the assigned literature. Attention will be given to both canonical and neglected literary movements and groups. Readings will include poetry and essays by Frances E.W. Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Harryette Mullen, Tracie Morris, and others.
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
In Anti-Black Racism and Black Freedom Struggles: History, Theory, and Culture, students will learn about key historical, intellectual, and political aspects of white supremacy as a system or racial domination, and anti-black racism as a central feature of that global system. This class will explore the historical forms that white supremacy has taken—from colonialism and plantation slavery to Jim Crow, gentrification, and mass incarceration—racial ideologies, and how modern political systems have hinged on racial oppression. Most important, we will explore how black people have responded to the structures and ideologies of white supremacy, their thinking about freedom, being, and rights, and their efforts to fit into the worlds in which they found themselves, to improve those societies, and those projects that sought radical alternatives to the an anti-black world.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
This summer institute is a week long opportunity that takes place abroad with a theme focused on the healing arts. Grounding this theme is the pursuit of reparatory justice in the Rastafari faith. The summer school will integrate learning activities with existing community projects, for instance, the School of Vision and Rastafari Indigenous Village. Students will study Rastafari as an African-centered ethos, inclusive of culture and economic sustainability.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Rather than being a niched form of popular culture, black music, films, and art has in some ways become synonymous with American culture. These productions and the workers associated with them have been used to sell everything from life insurance to computer chips. But accompanying these cultural productions are a whole host of questions regarding racial authenticity, the reproduction of urban space, and various gender/class dynamics, that have gone relatively understudied. In this class we will seek to trace the politics of the production, circulation, and consumption of black cultural production.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This seminar will explore some of the pivotal historical and contemporary connections between the US and Liberia since the first Black American settlers arrived in West Africa with the American Colonization Society in 1822. This course asks: What are implications of these stories of migration and reception for how we make sense of global anti-Blackness in the contemporary moment? How does performance provoke new questions about shared histories of those impacted by colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade? Why is a more in-depth understanding of 19th century Black political thought and the precolonial West African indigenous category necessary for developing theory on the political economy of race today? Through the lens of performance studies, students will analyze the documents in the American Colonization Society archive, to reimagine these early encounters as informed by historical documentation including folklore and pan-Africanist theory. Through exploring a range of historical and contemporary materials that center the problematic “indigenous/settler” binary, students will engage in a dramaturgical process which presents powerful possibilities for unlearning historical misrepresentations. In particular, students will develop theater-based projects that interrogate the spatio-temporal connections between the stories of both, free Blacks and those who were enslaved in Maryland and manumitted to go to Liberia, and the contemporary politics of Liberia-US migration.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will examine the confrontation of Black social movements with imperialism in the twentieth century. How, we will ask, have key Black internationalist thinkers conceptualized and defined diaspora, capitalism, imperialism, war, and the global? What have been the effects of war and repression, as well as economic growth and globalization, on Black internationalism? Readings may include texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Y. Davis, Frantz Fanon, Ashley Farmer, Claudia Jones, Robin D.G. Kelley, Claude McKay, Huey P. Newton, Walter Rodney, Malcolm X, etc. Students will complete a research paper on a topic of their own choosing related to Black internationalism in the twentieth century.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the historical, theoretical, and political question of liberation in the African diaspora from the period of enslavement up to the current era. We will consider three major themes: enslavement, marronage, and freedom; Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism; Black Power and national liberation. We will examine how African peoples conceptualized freedom and liberation in each period, the major organizations and intellectuals who framed them, and how popular activity developed and informed all three (ideas, organizations, and intellectuals). Some of the questions taken up include: How did enslaved Africans conceptualize freedom? Did their ideas and activities merely extend western notions of liberty and freedom, or did they develop distinct conceptions of freedom, rights, and humanity? Why, in the early Twentieth Century, did African peoples around the world pursue pan-Africanism as a political philosophy? How do class, nationality, gender, and sexuality inform such movements? Did national liberation struggles from the 1950s through the 1970s in Africa and the Caribbean bring about fundamental changes to those societies or merely replicate colonial regimes? What connections existed between national liberation movements in Africa and the Caribbean, and Civil Rights and Black Power in the United States and England?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Washington, DC, is the capital of the United States but also the capital of its post–World War II national security state and military-industrial complex. This course will investigate the local effects of this status on the Washington-Baltimore corridor, in terms of immigration and urban development. The course will be divided into three major sections. First, we will analyze the growth and development of the military-industrial complex. Second, we will look at its place in the city and region’s development, including the construction of the Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and other institutions. Third, we will analyze how these institutions have driven changes in the region’s population, as immigrants from war-torn parts of the globe have found new homes in and near Washington, DC. This course requires at least four Friday group trips to 555 Penn in Washington, which will take most of the day (transportation provided).
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
This course offers a hands-on opportunity for students to develop new skills as community organizers by learning from the best teachers possible: residents who have been serving their neighborhoods and building grassroots power in Southwest Baltimore since the 1990s. As a community-based learning course with the Center for Social Concern, and co-taught by professors, archivists, cultural curators, and longtime residents, including the founder of Fayette Street Outreach, Ms. Edna Manns Lake, this course will leverage the narrative power of storytelling to help rewrite a multigenerational history of community organizing in a part of the city long neglected by local government and threatened historically by open-air drug markets, rampant criminalization, and predatory housing speculators. Through community immersion, including story circles, oral histories, community archiving, local meetings, and guest presentations, students will learn how to navigate, identify, and build upon existing neighborhood assets. Students will then collaborate with a community partner to co-design and complete a neighborhood project by the end of the semester. Dispelling myths, learning truths, documenting history, and honoring decades of struggle in the face of massive odds, students will help re-write the narrative of Southwest Baltimore, centering humanity and resilience among resident-activists who stayed and fought for their community.
What can we learn about mass incarceration, and social life in the USA more broadly, when we listen to incarcerated people themselves? This course centers the voices, experiences, and expertise of the incarcerated and will combine scholarly readings on life inside prisons with a range of writings by incarcerated people. Topics of discussion may include censorship, rehabilitation, Covid-19, solitary confinement, sexuality, racism, etc. Students will learn to probe primary-source collections to amplify silenced and overlooked voices, while completing a multi-stage research project. Prior course experience on mass incarceration preferred.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
This course introduces students to concepts of social justice and practices of community-engaged artmaking. It also provides students an opportunity to explore the history and legacies of the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary intersections of art and social justice in Baltimore City. Local artists and scholars will share their expertise using art to challenge social injustice. In turn, students will examine their personal creative practices and how they can be used to create and advocate for change. Throughout the semester, students will develop individual art projects that respond to course topics and are rooted in the principles and process of social practice art.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
This course is available to students who wish to pursue selected, special work that may not be included in the Center's other courses.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
The first semester of Senior Honors in Africana Studies, conducted as an Independent Study. Interested students should submit an application to the CAS Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
The second semester of Senior Honors in Africana Studies, conducted as an Independent Study. Only students who have successfully completed AS.362.510 Senior Honors In Africana Studies I will be allowed to register.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration, Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
Cross Listed Courses
Anthropology
An emerging body of literature argues that cities in the Global South work differently than Eurocentric theories of the city and urbanization suggest. This course will focus on such issues as the important role of cities in the nation’s economy, politics, and culture and interrogates the relationship between the city and its “outside.” This seminar interrogates the numerous ways that African cities, as an urban form, concept, and geography have been generative in anthropology, as well as in history, sociology, and urban studies. Africa has long existed as a crucial “other” in European culture. But how do we think of an African city outside of this limiting history? In this course, we explore the different histories, futures, and potentialities of African cities as an urban form, and lived experience, re-sorting its geographies and theorizations. We will explore issues of urban planning, (de)industrialization, urban race/ethnic relations, movement, and other issues important to the urban experience.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course explores the role of science and technology in the making of African histories and politics. We will examine precolonial iron-working, healing, and weaving; the ways guns and railroads functioned as tools of empire; the role of hydroelectric dams in postcolonial nation building; and the rise of digital communication and payment systems in the present. Throughout, we will challenge commonsense distinctions between the material and the spiritual, designers and users, wealth and people.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will create a space for students to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. The course is co-taught by community organizer Shashawnda Campbell (South Baltimore Community Land Trust) and anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins University). Students will gain first-hand exposure to environmental conditions, community needs, and organizing efforts in south Baltimore, working closely together with community members in developing collaborative and interdisciplinary projects for environmental justice. The course builds on the work of the Sustainable Design Practicum in the fall of 2022. Class sessions will take place each week in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus. Restrictions: Admission by permission of instructor. Apply at this link: https://tinyurl.com/ykjauf84
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Economics
This course examines labor market discrimination by gender, race and ethnicity in the United States. What does the empirical evidence show, and how can we explain it? How much of the difference in observed outcomes is driven by differences in productivity characteristics and how much is due to discrimination? How have economists theorized about discrimination and what methodologies can be employed to test those theories? What has been the impact of public policy in this area; how do large corporations and educational institutions respond; and what can we learn from landmark lawsuits? The course will reinforce skills relevant to all fields of applied economics, including critical evaluation of the theoretical and empirical literature, the reasoned application of statistical techniques, and analysis of current policy issues.
Prerequisite(s): AS.180.102
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course focuses on the economics of poverty and inequality. It covers the measurement of poverty and inequality, facts and trends over time, the causes of poverty and inequality with a focus on those related to earnings and the labor market, and public policy toward poverty and inequality, covering both taxation and government expenditure and programs. By the nature of the material, the course is fairly statistical and quantitative. Students should have an intermediate understanding of microeconomic concepts. Basic knowledge of regression analysis is also helpful.
Prerequisite(s): AS.180.301 AND AS.180.334
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
English
Drawing from the body of work engaging and recording the Hollywood gunfighter and outlaw folk-hero Clint Eastwood, the course will investigate American cinematic representations of slavery and its absence, the Civil War, and racial formation along the United States’ southwestern frontier in films produced from the 1950s through the contemporary period. A focus on the cultural icon Clint Eastwood enables a close examination of American cinematic fantasies of the frontier, frontier violence and the desire to escape or erase the tensions of race and slavery that have deeply permeated the American cultural consciousness, particularly the creation of American masculine ideals. The course will also take decided note of the national shift from liberal “Great Society Programs” of the 1960s to the conservative “neoliberal” social and cultural ideals in the 1980s and 1990s. Our purpose is to consider the organization and reformation of hegemonic power by way of the complex morality play the western film evokes, typically considering the interstitial geographies between civilization and savagery, belonging and alienation, and metropolitan and colonial outpost. We will privilege in our discussions the contested frontiers of racial dominion.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
A survey of the major and minor texts written by African Americans during the twentieth century, beginning with Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition and concluding with Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Using their speeches, written lectures and published writings and drawing from their biographies, this course will explore the important life work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. We intend to upend traditional conversations about political radicalism and ethnic politics by analyzing these spokesmen associated most indelibly with black nationalism and racial integration, respectively.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
This course will focus on the history of black resistance to oppression and injustice from the early republic to the present through different forms of radical speech acts. The main question(s) that we will explore are as follows: how do radical speech acts shape and inform our understanding of social and political issues, including our very conception of the United States as a nation (and ourselves as a people)? In this course, we will investigate such questions through reading radical speeches and essays from a range of black activists and examining the principles of persuasion that help shape the relationship between polemical language and activism. This course will engage with writers and speakers such as Lemuel Haynes, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Ida B. Wells, Anna Julia Cooper, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, and Alicia Garza.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
This course examines fiction writing, memoir, and film that engages the creation and meaning of jazz music. Beginning with writers who explore the late 19th experience of urban black musical cultures roughly designated “ragtime,” the course will offer a deep engagement with the representations of the “blues” and “swing” music of the long New Negro Movement between 1915 and 1940. The final section of the course considers the post-war novelists and memoirists who charted the emergence of the “Be bop” jazz musician as tragic hero, countermanding New Negro representations of entertainer par excellence. Each text will be paired with musical selections from a prominent artist. Questions of the political significance of music, black urban habitus, and musical codings of gender, race and sexuality as an oppositional or counter-hegemonic formation will be important to the course. The seminar will also have sessions to investigate key archival repositories in Baltimore, like the Eubie Blake Center and the Maryland Center for History and Culture. Texts and artists considered include: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Scot Joplin, Eubie Blake, Stomping the Blues, Bessie Smith, Satchmo, Louis Armstrong Hot Fives, Jazz, Duke Ellington, The Blacker the Berry, Fletcher Henderson, Home to Harlem, Ella Fitzgerald, Good Morning Blues, Count Basie, A Drop of Patience, Thelonius Monk, Lady Sings the Blues, Billie Holiday, Chico and Rita, Dizzy Gilespie&Chano Pozo, Night Song, Charlie Parker.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
Students interested in black print culture will engage in intensive archival research, both collaborative and individual, using the Sheridan Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript collections. Texts include poems, printed lectures, pamphlets, novels, periodicals, ephemera, correspondence, etc., alongside relevant critical and theoretical reading.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Film and Media Studies
The bad guy as hero from Little Caesar to Goodfellas. Film screenings Th 7:30-10:00 PM, Sun 7:00-9:30 PM. In addition to the prerequisites, students should complete an 200-level Film and Media Studies Critical Studies course or obtain permission from the instructor (lbucknell@jhu.edu) to enroll.
Prerequisite(s): AS.061.140 OR AS.061.141 AND students should complete an 200-level Film and Media Studies Critical Studies course or obtain permission from the instructor
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
First Year Seminars
This First-Year Seminar carefully considers the lives and works of two globally famous Black Baltimoreans: the abolitionist and statesman Frederick Douglass (1818-1895), and the premier jazz vocalist Billie Holiday (1915-1959). While we will explore key writings and performances of their work, the course also wants to use their historical lives in Baltimore to enrich our knowledge of the city and archival resources that reveal its past. During the semester we will consult a variety of primary resources like newspapers, novels, photographs, rare documents, correspondence, and recorded sound to investigate the complex and intraracial world of Baltimore in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the questions we will be considering: How did the city’s black abolitionist and religious networks contribute to Frederick Douglass’s evolution as a journalist and politician? What was the role of Chesapeake Bay black musical culture—ragtime, marching bands, banjo and fiddle ditties, and riverboat music—in the creation of Billie Holiday’s unique stylistic expression and singing? In what manner did Baltimore’s racial segregation and racism define her life and art? Students are required to visit three archival repositories during scheduled in-class trips, including a visit to the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The final project is an archive-laden digital story map.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Over the past decade, cities have become more important than ever before. Protests against policing, against increasing inequality, as well as attempts to rollback societal shifts all have the city as its core. While some suggest these struggles represent larger struggles over the relationship between labor and capital, Black Radical thinkers connect these struggles to anti-black racism. In the wake of one world challenging movement – Black Lives Matter – and one world altering crisis – the Covid-19 pandemic - this First-Year Seminar will reflect critically on these two traditions of thinking about the city by using Baltimore as a case study. This class will be taught alongside similar courses at other universities, offering students a deep dive into Baltimore.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
History
An introduction to modern African history, with emphasis on colonialism and decolonization.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Introduction to three major themes in African history, from the precolonial era to the present.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This course introduces students to the defining social, political, and cultural moments that reflect the experience of African Americans in the United States, 1896 – present. Topics include the Great Migration, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Freedom Struggle, African American politics, urban rebellion, mass incarceration, Hip Hop culture, the current movement for Black Lives, and more.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Worlds of Hip-Hop explores hip-hop as an arts movement whose forms, conventions, and standards responded to the specific political and social conditions to address questions of freedom and community.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This course explores passing narratives – stories that feature people who cross race, class, ethnic, or gender boundaries. We will consider what passing narratives can teach us about power and identity, especially as power is presumed to reside in the self and race is presumed to no longer matter.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Overview of modern South African history, with a focus on the origins of the racial state and the development of black liberation movements.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course explores the history of late twentieth-century America by examining the social, economic, and political legacies of 1960s civil rights protest for the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This is a larger seminar-style course devoted to the writings attributed to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X (El-Hajj El-Malik Shabazz). While the two the key African American male icons of the Civil Rights Movement era gained prominence in the 1950s and 1960s, they are typically discussed as representing two ideological camps: racial integration deeply committed to the idea of American exceptionalism and democratic perfection, and black nationalism, a non-state ideological move that adjudged the U.S. nation state on the same terms as any other imperial power. We will explore these binaries in their thought and the social movements connected to them, and also engage with multiple cinematic representations of the two figures that have carried them forward into contemporary times.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
This course will turn to known and not-so-known black writers during the early to mid-twentieth century who defied literary expectation and wrote stories that featured or focused on whiteness. We will consider what whiteness offered black writers and the political work that their literary experimentations did for a white American publishing industry.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
This class explores the geographic, economic and cultural issues resulting from Africa’s urban growth from precolonial times to the present.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
This upper-division course is designed to help students examine and probe the significant role Africa has played in shaping the Atlantic world and its place within its economic, social, religious, cultural, and political configurations.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
A research-intensive seminar, this course uses the rich history of Maryland to approach broader themes in early modern American and global history including colonialism, slavery, revolution, race, gender, and sex.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Through archival, literary, and other cultural texts, this course considers the history of “diversity” as both a practice and concept, beginning with the arrival of “colorblindness” in the 1890s and moving through recent approaches to institutionalized multiculturalism.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Presidential elections – even rare, unexpected, or paradigm-busting elections – do not occur in a vacuum. Instead, they are created, shaped, and constructed by a variety of significant forces, over time. This seminar thus suggests that you cannot understand modern presidential politics and contests, including the 2020 election and the upcoming 2024 election, without examining the historical antecedents that make the present-day moment possible. Consequently, while enrolled in this seminar, students will grapple with the following central question: what are the foundational moments in modern American social, political, and economic history that provided the “building blocks” for the 2024 United States Presidential Election? How can we use history to analyze and explain the developments of the 2024 election, as those moments are happening in real time?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
This course explores canonical and cutting-edge research and scholarship in the broad fields of African American Studies and History, 1865 – present. Students will move beyond a basic knowledge of the modern African American experience, while enhancing their critical research and analytical skills. Broad themes covered include questions of freedom, citizenship, agency, identity, and empowerment.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores the practice of writing and reading the history of African Americans and the wider African Diaspora. Participants will share written work and do close readings of primary and secondary texts exploring the black experience in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
What does a usable history of black womanhood (black queer and trans womanhood inclusive) look like? How do we imagine, create, and narrate black women’s stories? Black women’s history across time and space.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
History of Art
This course will grapple with modern art as it emerges in critically important locations around the world over the course of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on Asia, Africa, and South America. Anti-colonial movements, national formations, geopolitical alliances, institution-building, exhibition, fair, and biennial histories, art group manifestos, and the intertwined relations of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, class, and sexuality. Museum visits to view works of art in person will be incorporated into the course.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
How can we think about the interconnections between racism, theories of race and the practice of medicine? Living at a moment when racial disparities in health outcomes in the United States are still very stark, this course will provide a historically grounded approach to thinking about the roles that race and racism have played in healthcare, the production of health disparities as well as the role of medicine in the development of racist thought. While much of this course will focus geographically within the United States, this class will also explore global histories of medicine, encountering questions of race and medicine in Africa, the South Pacific and Asia. In addition to the analysis of primary source documents and historical texts, students will also be introduced to theoretical approaches to the study of race and racism from W.E.B. Dubois, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon and others.
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
Islamic Studies
Muslims have been a part of the American fabric since its inception. A key thread in that fabric has been the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants, some of whom were Muslims, and who not only added to the dynamism of the American environment, but eventually helped shape American culture, religion, and politics. The history of Islam in America is intertwined with the creation and evolution of African American identity. Contemporary Islam in America cannot be understood without this framing. This course will provide a historical lens for understanding Islam, not as an external faith to the country, but as an internal development of American religion. This course will explicate the history of early Islamic movements in the United States and the subsequent experiences of African-Americans who converted to Islam during the first half of the twentieth century. We will cover the spiritual growth of African American Muslims, their institutional presence, and their enduring impact on American culture writ large and African-American religion and culture more specifically.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Medicine, Science and the Humanities
The word for “medicine” in Malagasy, fanafody, can also mean “charm” or “magic.” This seminar uses that linguistic flexibility as a point of departure to explore practices for bodily healing and protection amid broader processes of social transformation, primarily in 20th- and 21st-century East Africa and the western Indian Ocean. How is the medical magical? How is the magical medical? How have separations between magic and medicine been erected, maintained, or questioned? From the role of faith healers to the region's experience of new "miracle drugs," class materials will integrate anthropology, history, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine various permutations of the magic/medicine duality over time. Topics will include facets of traditional medicine; encounters between indigenous and imported healing systems; medical pluralism; colonial and postcolonial conflicts; the rise of humanitarian global health; epidemic and pandemic politics; ritual and religious processes; and the roles of identity, inequality, and empire in healing and protection practices. Grounded in Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa, this course will also use magic/medicine to consider the region’s transcontinental and transoceanic connections.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Modern Languages and Literatures
Designed to sharpen students’ abilities in contemporary spoken and written Portuguese. This third-year course fosters the development of complex language skills that enhance fluency, accuracy and general proficiency in Portuguese and its appropriate use in professional and informal contexts. Students will briefly review previous grammar structures and concentrate on new complex grammar concepts. Using a variety of cultural items such as current news, short stories, plays, films, videos, newspaper articles, and popular music, students discuss diverse topics followed by intense writing and oral discussion with the aim of developing critical thinking and solid communication skills.Successful completion of Advanced Portuguese I will prepare students for the next level, Advanced Portuguese II, AS.210.372. May not be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prereq: AS.210.272 or (old AS.210.278) or placement test. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.
Prerequisite(s): AS.210.278 OR AS.210.272 or equivalent score on placement test or instructor approval.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Did you know that Brazil is very similar to the United States? This course is intended as an introduction to the culture and civilization of Brazil. It is designed to provide students with basic information about Brazilian history, politics, economy, art, literature, popular culture, theater, cinema, and music. The course will focus on how Indigenous, Asian, African, and European cultural influences have interacted to create the new and unique civilization that is Brazil today. The course is taught in English.No Prereq. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Over the last three decades Italy, historically a country of emigrants—many of whom suffered from discrimination in the societies they joined—became a destination for hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees from various countries, and particularly from Africa. Significant numbers of these immigrants came to Italy as a result of the country’s limited, though violent colonial history; others arrive because Italy is the closest entry-point to Europe. How have these migratory flows challenged Italian society’s sense of itself? How have they transformed the notion of Italian national identity? In recent years, growing numbers of Afro- and Afro-descendant writers, filmmakers, artists and Black activists are responding through their work to pervasive xenophobia and racism while challenging Italy’s self-representation as a ‘White’ country. How are they forcing it to broaden the idea of ‘Italianess’? How do their counternarratives compel Italy to confront its ignored colonial past? And, in what way have Black youth in Italy embraced the #Blacklivesmatter movement? This multimedia course examines representation of blackness and racialized otherness, whiteness, and national identity through literary, film, and visual archival material in an intersectional framework. Examining Italy’s internal, ‘Southern question,’ retracing Italy’s colonial history, and recognizing the experiences of Italians of immigrant origins and those of immigrants themselves, we’ll explore compelling works by writers and filmmakers such as Igiaba Scego, Gagriella Ghermandi, Maza Megniste, Dagmawi Yimer, and others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Across the 20th century, mainstream and avant-garde French culture was deeply impacted by the presence of African American musicians and performing artists hailing from the jazz tradition. From the Josephine Baker craze of the 1920s to the second post-war which welcomed the innovations of bebop and sixties-era free improvisation, metropolitan France proved a space where expatriate and exiled Black Americans could both perpetuate the tradition and innovate by turns. At the same time, French tastemakers, critics, and musicians eager to adopt new forms and styles debated the extent to which American jazz music in its various strains could be “made French.” This course in transcultural French studies will feature readings in music criticism, history, and literature, as well as frequent close listening. It will culminate in a local concert reflecting France’s continued connection to and support of jazz and related improvised musics. Though some background in French language and in musical notation is desirable (students are encouraged to engage in original-source research), all core course readings will be provided in English. Discussion in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
The Caribbean is often described as enigmatic, uncommon and supernatural. While foreigners assume that the Caribbean is exotic, this course will explore this assumption from a Caribbean perspective. We will examine the links between Caribbean and Old-World imagination, the relationship between exoticism and Caribbean notions of superstition, and the way in which the Caribbean fictional universe derives from a variety of cultural myths. The course will be taught in English and all required texts are in English, French, and English translations from French. Students in the French program can choose to read all the original French versions and write in French.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
We will study literary claims of epic colonial possession and aesthetic dispossession through close readings of five works in reverse chronological order: V.S. Naipaul’s late historical novel, A Way in the World (1994); Derek Walcott’s transoceanic poem, Omeros (1990); Alejo Carpentier’s short anti-Enlightenment moral tale, El reino de este mundo (1949) and his short tale in celebration of Afro Cuban wizardry, Viaje a la semilla (1944); Aimé Césaire’s prose poetry, mixed chronicle, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, or Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939-1947). We will address questions of temporality and historicity (Heidegger) and a base-materialist political blocking of wild dreams as attainable through translation (Bataille). Such formal and epistemic problems will draw us into issues of race across the colonial spectrum of Caribbean histories.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Near Eastern Studies
A basic introduction to Egyptian Religion, with a special focus on the nature of the gods and how humans interact with them. We will devote particular time to the Book of the Dead and to the "magical" aspects of religion designed for protective purposes.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Introduction to the grammar and writing system of the classical language of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (ca. 2055-1650 B.C.). In the second semester, literary texts and royal inscriptions will be read. Course meets with AS.133.600.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Political Science
This course introduces students to the foundational importance of race and racism to the construction of our contemporary global order. Topics include the Crusades, European imperialism, eugenics, Apartheid, freedom struggles, decolonization, and global development.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Recommended Course Background: AS.190.214
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course is a survey of the bases and substance of politics among black Americans and the relation of black politics to the American political system up to the end of Jim Crow. The intention is both to provide a general sense of pertinent issues and relations over this period as a way of helping to make sense of the present and to develop criteria for evaluating political scientists' and others' claims regarding the status and characteristics of black American political activity.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Recommended Course Background: AS.190.340.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course introduces students to the colonial logics that underpin key categories and concepts in Political Science. Working through four sub-fields – political theory, political behavior, comparative politics and international relations, the course also introduces students to alternative knowledge traditions, emanating from minority communities and colonized peoples, which seek to explain the stuff of Political Science via anti-colonial logics.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course analyzes the distinctive US welfare state in historical and comparative perspective. We begin with a survey of the policy context, an historical overview from the poorhouses through the Great Society, and a tour of welfare states across the rich democracies. We then survey developments – and explain the actual workings of policy – across jobs, education, welfare, pensions, and health care. We explore the institutional and political factors behind their divergent trajectories through conservative revival and the age of Trump. Students will write a seminar paper exploring policy development over time in a program or area of their choosing. Enrollment restricted to Social Policy minors only.
Prerequisite(s): Students may take AS.190.380 or AS.360.380, but not both.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross-listed with Africana Studies
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross listed with Africana Studies.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This is an advanced undergraduate seminar that explores how racial stigma functions as a marker of being always already in debt. In view of the legacies of settler-colonialism, imperialism and chattel slavery, how is it that those from whom so much has been taken are nevertheless regarded as perpetually in debt? We shall examine the moral, economic and racialized logics of power through which a range of political subjects come to be regarded as ungrateful “takers” as opposed to “makers,” and owing a debt to society. In so doing, we will investigate how temporality functions as a tool of power by considering how the indebted are made vulnerable to precarity, discipline, and disposability—in effect, forced to live life on borrowed time.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
Afropessimism represents a critical body of thought that takes as its fundamental premises two ideas, the Black is the Slave, and in order to end that ontological condition the world must end. In this course, we will interrogate the key readings associated with this body of thought as well as responses.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
Race has been and continues to be centrally important to American political life and development. In this course, we will engage with the major debates around racial politics in the United States, with a substantial focus on how policies and practices of citizenship, immigration law, social provision, and criminal justice policy shaped and continue to shape racial formation, group-based identities, and group position; debates around the content and meaning of political representation and the responsiveness of the political system to American minority groups; debates about how racial prejudice has shifted and its importance in understanding American political behavior; the prospects for contestation or coalitions among groups; the “struggle with difference” within groups as they deal with the interplay of race and class, citizenship status, and issues that disproportionately affect a subset of their members; and debates about how new groups and issues are reshaping the meaning and practice of race in the United States.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
Program in Museums and Society
Archives are where history is documented, and archives have tremendous power over whose stories get told. This course will critically examine the relationship between archival practice and public history by using John Hopkins University as a case study. We will work closely with archivists in the Special Collections Department and archives across Baltimore to get a firsthand look at how local archives shape public history, collective memory, and institutional silences. Students will learn how public historians, archivists, community activists, and students themselves can work together to do reparative research that advances social justice in their own communities.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
How are museums responding to the pressures to be more equitable, inclusive, and accessible towards public audiences and their staff? Students go behind the scenes of the Smithsonian, Baltimore Museum of Industry and Baltimore Museum of Art to meet with working groups and staff charged with transforming their institutions. Includes site visits, hands-on experiences and research on best practices.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
This community-engaged course will address the historic role of the African American cemetery and its present dilemmas. Operating in partnership with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, owned and operated by the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church, and the Laurel Cemetery Memorial Project, in tandem with classes at Morgan State University and Coppin State University, our collective aim is to further the interests of these local sites by researching and telling stories with community and biographical relevance.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Students learn to conduct, analyze, and interpret their own oral histories as they contribute to a wide-ranging project documenting queer worldmaking in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. region. We engage with scholarship from performance studies, queer of color critique, LGBTQ history, and public humanities to consider the politics of storytelling and the promises of public-facing oral history projects. Students have the option of developing podcasts, multimedia projects, and public humanities proposals as their final assignment.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Examines the history of African art in the Euro-American world, focusing on the ways that Western institutions have used African artworks to construct narratives about Africa and its billion residents.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Working in collaboration with staff from the Baltimore Museum of Art, students assess the opportunities and challenges of the European collections; research select objects; contribute to the department's collections development plan; and conceptualize new, more global and more inclusive approaches to the displays.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Public Health Studies
An introduction to Urban Health with Baltimore as a case study: wellbeing, nutrition, education, violence and city-wide geographic variation. Lectures by JH Faculty, local government/service providers and advocates.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.280.320 are not eligible to take AS.280.120.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
Sociology
This course will introduce students to the application of statistical techniques commonly used in sociological analysis. Topics include measures of central tendency and dispersion, probability theory, confidence intervals, chi-square, anova, and regression analysis. Hands-on computer experience with statistical software and analysis of data from various fields of social research. Special Note: Required for IS GSCD track students.
Prerequisite(s): Students who are currently registered for or have completed any of the following courses may not register for AS.230.205: EN.553.111 OR EN.553.211 OR EN.553.230 OR EN.553.310 OR EN.553.311 OR EN.553.413 OR EN.553.420 OR EN.553.430 OR EN.560.435 OR EN.560.348 OR AS.280.345 OR AS.200.314 OR AS.230.394.
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Race has been important in social classifications and producing inequalities. This course is designed to provide you with a global understanding of how racial categories are created and maintained, how they change over time, and how they vary from place to place. It is organized in four parts. The first part introduces the concepts and analytical tools used by social scientists to study race. Of particular concern is power and the social construction rather than “natural” categories of race, as well as the general social processes involved in the maintenance and reproduction of these boundaries. In the second part, we will study the theories and dynamics racial category formation in the United States with attention to forms and processes of racial exclusion and oppression, and evidence of socio-economic inequalities based on race. In the third part of the course, we will compare these processes in the U.S. to those occurring in other countries. The fourth and final part of the course examines how race and racism shape political struggles and resistance movements.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Race and ethnicity have played a prominent role in American society and continue to do so, as demonstrated by interracial and interethnic gaps in economic and educational achievement, residence, political power, family structure, crime, and health. Using a sociological framework, we will explore the historical significance of race and its development as a social construction, assess the causes and consequences of intergroup inequalities and explore potential solutions.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
This course will introduce students to a range of software programs that are critical for conducting social scientific research in the 21st century. Students will develop competency in the use of computer programs for statistical analysis, database management, the creation of maps and timelines, and the presentation of research reports. The course uses examples from ongoing social science faculty research projects at Johns Hopkins on global inequality and international development. Required for GSCD track students.Course previously titled "Research Tools and Technologies for the Social Sciences"
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
How do we think about the power relations at work in the scholarship we read and in the important texts we consider essential to our educational experience? This course will critically investigate the role that concepts of race and racism have played in formulating dominant perceptions of who can be the producers of knowledge and what constitutes authoritative knowledge itself. We will consider how and why thinkers and scholarship produced outside of Europe and North America are too often ignored for their scholarly contributions and the dynamics that lead to this situation. We will also explore how and why new and important perspectives emerge from engaging and centering voices from beyond traditional canonical works. With a particular focus on the forms of knowledge arising from European Enlightenment approaches to concepts of thought reason and objective knowledge, this course will critically engage students with a wide range of thinkers such asGWF Hegel, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Ralph Trouillot, Sadiya Hartman, Walter Rodney, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon. This course will focus largely on thinkers engaging within the Black Atlantic and black diaspora traditions to question how we might consider voices and thought from beyond Eurocentric positions in our own scholarly practice.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Recent national conversations about racial segregation, inequality and the affordable housing crisis raise many important questions—this course focuses on several of these questions, through the lens of urban sociology and housing policy. There are three main areas we will focus on in the course: 1) Understanding the role of racial segregation, neighborhood and housing effects on children and family life; 2) Research methods for studying urban poverty and neighborhoods; and 3) Programs, policies and initiatives designed to house the poor, alleviate concentrated spatial poverty, and increase residential choice. We will primarily focus on issues related to urban poverty in large cities, comparing the patterns of residential mobility and neighborhood characteristics for white and Black Americans. We will utilize archival data, qualitative interviews, census data, and quasi/experimental data to gather evidence about neighborhoods, housing, and policies, as well as their impacts. We will also explore interactive online applications that facilitate the study of neighborhoods (e.g. American Community Survey, GIS with Social Explorer). A statistics/public policy background is helpful, but not required.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
What is the function and purpose of schooling in modern society? Is education the "great equalizer" in America, or does family background mostly predict where people end up in life? What can we do to improve educational attainment? This course is designed to tackle such questions and develop the ability of students to think critically, theoretically, historically and empirically about debates in the sociology of education. The course will also cover additional topics, including: racial and economic differences in educational attainment; school segregation; the rise of for-profit education; how college matters. In addition to reading empirical studies and theoretical work, the relevance of education research for policy-making will be emphasized throughout the course.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
This course provides "hands on" research experience applying sociological research tools and a sociological perspective to problems of substance. Qualitative observational and/or interviewing methods will be emphasized. Students will design and carry out a research project and write a research report. This course fulfills the "research practicum" requirement for the Sociology major.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
This course uses the city of Baltimore as a lens through which to explore issues of urban inequality. We will focus on Baltimore's history of racial segregation and concentrated poverty, and its effect on the social and economic well-being of the city and its residents, with attention to education, employment, health and crime. Students will learn how to employ Census data, GIS approaches, and sociological research to inform questions about population change, inequality and the distribution of resources across the city and metropolitan region. Students will also work on one or more policy relevant studies based in Baltimore, including: a project on abandoned and vacant housing, a desegregation intervention, and a longitudinal study of inner city youth. Finally, students will become familiar with Baltimore City's programs and policy approaches to addressing the city's most pressing problems, and will design innovative and effective and innovative solutions as part of their course assignments. Enrollment restricted to Social Policy minors only.
Prerequisite(s): Students that took AS.360.357 may not take AS.230.357
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
In the United States, we spend more than $100 billion annually on illegal drugs—and the government spends more than $50 billion a year to combat their sale and use. These statistics raise important and complicated social questions. This course will examine the production, sale, use, and control of illegal drugs from a historical and sociological perspective. We will have three objectives: to understand the social construction of drug use and illegality in the United States and other rich countries; to uncover the political and economic consequences of drug trafficking in those countries that produce drugs, particularly in Latin America; and to examine the political economy of drug control through the so-called War on Drugs, both domestically and internationally.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Policing has become a primary way that many Americans see and experience government, particularly those from race-class subjugated communities, and has been a site of resistance and freedom struggles since the first Reconstruction. In this undergraduate seminar, we will survey key debates around policing and social movements, with a particular focus on research that takes institutional development, history, and racial orders seriously. A core preoccupation of this course will be to understand the ways in which policing “makes race” and how debates about crime, surveillance, and safety were often debates about black inclusion and equality. We will explore changes in the racial logics of policing over time, debates over how policing helped construct the racial order, and the consequences of several shifts in policing for communities. From broken windows policing in New York to the emergence of the new vagrancy-style banishment laws in urban Seattle to the men who live under constant surveillance in Philadelphia and to the large share of blacks in Ferguson with outstanding warrants for ‘failure to appear”, these policies and policing regimes have helped remake the government in the eyes of the urban poor. How does exposure to criminal justice interventions shape political learning, racial lifeworlds, and community social capital? The course will include a range of methods (ethnography, historical analysis, quantitative and qualitative).
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality
This course will encourage encounters with a number of concepts from a critical gendered perspective, including: sameness/difference, identity politics, race/gender, loyalty, security, queer ethics, and queerness in media.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
In this course, we will get to know intersectional feminist philosophy through the lens of a Black feminist epistemology. What does this mean? That means that we will focus on how the contributions of Black feminist authors can bring out the specific political and philosophical nature of an intersectional theoretical framework.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Theatre Arts & Studies
A survey of the history of the Black Performer and Performance. In exploring the art of storytelling from ancient African civilizations, students will critically engage and discuss the origins, aesthetics, characteristics, and practices of Black performers, and their often-unacknowledged contributions and influence upon mainstream performance throughout the history of the world.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Seminars
This course will explore the context and craft of racial passing texts in the U.S, asking students to think critically about literal passing narratives and their persistence over time, and more broadly about how we write about cultural passing, codeswitching, and identity as conscious performance. We’ll start with texts that ground us in the genre—Chopin, Larsen, Fauset, Ellison, and Morrison—and read our way into contemporary texts, potentially including work by Danzy Senna, Mat Johnson, Brit Bennett, Min Jin Lee, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Students will write a critical paper, a craft paper, and a short story or novella.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive