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 contributions, 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. CAS 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
AS.362.102. Anti-Racism 101. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.362.111. Introduction Africana Public Health. 3 Credits.
Introduction to Africana Public Health explores the intersections between the disciplines of Africana Studies and Public Health Studies. The course uses the research questions and evidence bases of Africana Studies to address issues of race, power, and inequality in public health. Each week, students will participate in a themed conversations between Africana Studies and Public Health scholars, then discuss and analyze the ideas raised in weekly seminars alongside course readings. The course is designed to introduce students to both fields and inspire further study and research.Introduction to Africana Public Health encourages students to think critically about the influence of social and historical forces on public health research and policy, from the local context of Baltimore to global health initiatives. By the end of the course, students will have tools to better understand how race, inequality, and social conditions shape the ways public health challenges are defined and addressed for Black communities. Students will participate in the organization and execution of the joint Africana-Public Health lunchtime speaker events.Community-based learning is a significant component of Introduction to Africana Public Health and the course requires occasional travel within Baltimore City to community partners.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.362.112. Introduction to Africana Studies. 3 Credits.
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. We will explore, too, how such people have lived, spoken, written, and produced art about colonialism and enslavement, gender and mobility, violence and pleasure. This course will be thematically organized and invite you to center your own stories about black people within your understanding of the modern world and its making.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.362.115. Introduction to Police and Prisons. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.362.119. Abolition and the University. 3 Credits.
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.128. Black Women Artists, Social Change and Baltimore. 3 Credits.
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.362.140. Blackstorytelling: Public Health in the Black World. 3 Credits.
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),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.362.200. Translating the Haitian Revolution: Resurrecting Literature. 3 Credits.
This course will examine the lasting aesthetic impact of the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) on Black fiction writers and playwrights, with an emphasis on issues related to culture wars, imaginary marronage, colonial language, slave memory, literary violence & trauma, sexual politics, beliefs, and the African diaspora.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.201. African American Poetry and Poetics. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.203. Fight the Powers that Be: Black Music and Film in the 20th Century. 3 Credits.
Focusing specifically on the representation of Black music in U.S feature films from 1900-2000, this course explores the ways in which race and power are negotiated in two interconnected spaces – behind the camera and within the narrative of the film. This seminar introduces participants to film analysis as well as an overview of several Black music genres. Assignments will include weekly responses as well as a final creative project.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.204. Anti-Black Racism and Black Freedom Struggles: History, Theory, and Culture. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.211. Rastafari: From Marcus to Marley. 1 Credit.
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
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.362.216. The Politics of Black Cultural Production. 3 Credits.
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: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.219. Black Movements in America. 3 Credits.
This course explores Black social movements in the United States to better understand social inequality, social structures, oppression, agency, and power across time and space.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.362.305. Nope. Black Resistance in Theory and Practice. 3 Credits.
What role does resistance play in black political thought and action? How do black concepts of resistance shape broader political processes? How are these concepts essential in understanding political development past and present?
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.311. Black Utopias. 3 Credits.
In this course, we will read literary and historical texts that present visions of black utopia. Authors include “Ethiop” (William J. Wilson), Marcus Garvey, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.315. Black Against Empire. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.318. Liberation in the African Diaspora. 3 Credits.
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: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.325. Humanities Research Lab: The Military-Industrial Complex in Maryland, D.C., and Virginia. 3 Credits.
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: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.362.326. Nothing About Us, Without Us: Storytelling as a Method for Community Organizing. 3 Credits.
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.
AS.362.335. Unlocking Knowledge: Theorizing Prison from the Inside. 3 Credits.
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
AS.362.345. Black Politics I. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.362.402. Arts and Social Justice Practicum. 3 Credits.
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),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.362.501. Independent Study. 1 - 3 Credits.
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 Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
AS.362.510. Senior Honors in Africana Studies I. 3 Credits.
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 Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
AS.362.511. Senior Honors in Africana Studies II. 3 Credits.
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 Customized Academic Learning using the Customized Academic Learning form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Cross Listed Courses
Agora Institute
AS.196.411. The Modern American Midterm Election in Historical Perspective. 3 Credits.
American 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 American politics and contests, including the 2024 election and the upcoming 2026 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 2026 United States Midterm Elections? How can we use history to analyze and explain the developments of the 2026 election, and put them in context 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Anthropology
AS.070.318. Black Atlantic Worlds. 3 Credits.
This seminar explores the formation of Black Atlantic worlds through a selection of historical and ethnographic texts, material artifacts, and films. We will encounter familiar themes of slavery, revolution, commodity production, and imperial power recast in the minor key of the Black experience. Exploring major works by anthropologists, particularly key figures from Johns Hopkins, the course also examines how studies of transatlantic movements have reshaped our very understanding of history and culture, not simply as static or official forms but as fields of contention.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.070.419. Logic of Anthropological Inquiry. 3 Credits.
Anthropology is an endeavor to think with the empirical richness of the world at hand, a field science with both literary and philosophical pretensions. This course grapples with the nature of anthropological inquiry, reading classic works in the discipline as well as contemporary efforts to reimagine its foundations. Required for anthropology majors.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.070.497. Black Feminist Anthropology. 3 Credits.
Anthropologist Irma McLaurin explains that Black feminist anthropologists are “Black women (first) who do anthropology (second).” Broadly, Black feminism is based on the notion that Black women and their knowledge matter. Being Black and female within a patriarchal white supremacist society subjects Black women to unique experiences that give insight into the many forms that oppression can take. But Black feminisms and Black feminists are not homogenous. There are various political views and disciplinary approaches. Of course, not all Black feminists are academics—there are artists, organizers, and mothers. There are different gender identities and sexualities. What is shared among Black feminists is an emphasis on retrieving and (re)producing Black women’s knowledge, doing activist work, and a commitment to humanism. In this course, we focus on engagements with Black feminism in all subfields of anthropology.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.070.602. Environmental Justice Workshop. 4 Credits.
The Environmental Justice Workshop is a space for engaged learning and collaborative environmental work, giving students a chance to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. In the fall of 2025, the workshop will be taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins) as a cross-institutional partnership with anthropologist Chloe Ahmann (Cornell University) and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. Working together as a team of faculty and students at both universities, we will collaborate with environmental justice activists and Baltimore residents to research, write, and produce a four-part digital humanities curriculum about the discriminatory history of waste management in Baltimore and its impact on working-class and minority residents. Students enrolled in this course will gain experience with archival and ethnographic research methods, learn how to conduct time-sensitive research responsive to community needs, and produce media resources for a broader civic audience engaged in the fight for environmental justice. Many class sessions will take place in various community locations in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus.
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Classics
AS.040.419. Epics and Empire: Postcolonial Perspectives on Vergil’s Aeneid. 3 Credits.
This seminar examines epic literature’s entanglements with empire, colonialism, ethnicity, indigeneity, and slavery via critical readings of Vergil’s Aeneid. Students will gain methodological and pragmatic familiarity with movements to ‘decolonize’ and globalize the study of antiquity. As a counterbalance to Classics’ historical service to imperialism, we will read Vergil alongside other literary epics on race, identity, and belonging, representing diverse global languages, belief systems, geographies, and positionalities. We will also survey classics of postcolonial thought, from Fanon to Hartman, and apply their theories and methods to primary sources. Our hope is to incubate reparative approaches to the Aeneid and epic literature while also evaluating novel methodologies of comparison, reception, resistant interpretation, and critical fabulation. Classics graduate students will read the Aeneid in Latin. Undergraduate and non-Classics graduate students may read in translation but should plan on substantial engagement with an additional epic of their choice. All will hone professional skills as they produce a final research paper suitable for conference presentation or open-access web publication on race-time.net.
Prerequisite(s): AS.040.307
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, & Colonialism
AS.305.101. Introduction to Critical Diaspora Studies. 3 Credits.
Introduction to Critical Diaspora Studies will explore the transnational, relational, and comparative approach to racism, migration, and colonialism at the heart of this major. It will introduce students to cutting-edge literature in the major’s four tracks: Migration and Borders; Global Indigeneities; Empires, Wars, and Carceralities; and Solidarities, Social Movements, and Citizenship. Topics covered will include diasporic and indigenous cultures and politics from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as the United States. Students should expect to learn the value of interdisciplinary and transnational approaches to questions of social belonging, activism, justice, and politics. This course will also be useful to students in all humanities and social science majors who are interested in questions of racism, migration, and colonialism. This course may entail travel over fall break.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.305.111. Methods in Critical Diaspora Studies. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students to a selection of optimal methods for researching the dynamics of racism, colonialism, and mass migration. It focuses on power and resistance, and it explores academic treatments of both from interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational perspectives. It provides practical foundations for students interested in pursuing research in Critical Diaspora Studies and other fields.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.305.125. Insurgent Interdisciplines: Critical Diaspora Studies in Historical Context. 3 Credits.
Examines the history of Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Feminist Studies, among other interdisciplines. How did these movements transform the university? What were their political-economic aspirations beyond the academy?
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.305.319. Freedom Education: Embodied Speculative History of Maryland Schools for African Americans in the 1800s. 3 Credits.
Maryland had the largest pre-Civil War population of free African Americans who were intent on creating the educational means necessary to maintain their own freedom and uplift. Education and land ownership was tantamount to securing standing in society and to forging an early, even if fraught, sense of social citizenship and its benefits. In this course, students will support the research efforts of a local Maryland school house museum to develop immersive, experiential learning and engagement tools. Drawing on material and documents specific to the museum such as objects, curricular texts, original letters, newspaper accounts, experiences of the first teachers, and contemporaneous accounts of teaching in Freedmen’s schools, students will engage in a speculative history that will serve as the foundation for creative reenactment of freedom education in early 1800s Maryland.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.305.325. Humanities Research Lab: The Black Panther Party and the Politics of Decolonization. 3 Credits.
This Humanities Research Lab will examine the Black Panther Party, placing this much-discussed radical organization in context. It will focus on how the Party developed an analysis and critique of colonialism, and how anti-colonial movements around the globe adopted perspectives of the Panthers. The course will entail original research projects by students using JHU’s collection of original Black Panther Party newspapers and other materials.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Economics
AS.180.223. Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa. 3 Credits.
Many sub-Saharan African countries are among the least developed countries in the world. In this course, we explore the economic development experiences of African countries, with more focus on sub-Saharan Africa. The course starts with a historical perspective, delves into development strategies, and examines evidence on successes and failures of some case study countries. We conclude by analyzing the many challenges that these countries continue to face in their development process. Elements of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics are required prerequisites. There would be group presentations on assigned readings.
Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.180.355. Economics of Poverty/Inequality. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
English
AS.060.223. African American Literature from 1900 to Present. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.328. The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White. 3 Credits.
This course surveys American literature and social history during what was then known as the New Negro movement (roughly 1912-1934), today popularly called the Harlem Renaissance. Since the1980s, scholars have revised claims that the “Renaissance” was a literary failure characterized mainly by exotic and primitive caricatures. Today the era is noted for renewing ideas of American pluralist nationality, a project, in the words of one critic, “of reconceiving the United States as something other than a white nation.” To think through some of these claims, the course juxtaposes the classic modernist work of white American writers alongside the classics of African American Harlem Renaissance literature. We will pay close attention to the evolution and instantiation of racial stereotypes during the 1920s and the operation of modernist literary techniques.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.379. The Rhetoric of Black Radicalism. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.417. Black Print Culture. 3 Credits.
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, and will create an online exhibition. Texts include poems, printed lectures, pamphlets, novels, periodicals, ephemera, correspondence, etc., alongside relevant critical and theoretical reading. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.
Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.060.617, are not eligible to take AS.060.417.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.430. All That Jazz: African American Literature and Music, Origins through the 1950s. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.060.617. Black Print Culture. 3 Credits.
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
AS.061.328. Gangster Films. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
History
AS.100.108. Making America: Black Freedom Struggles to 1896. 3 Credits.
The history of Africans and people of African descent in what becomes the continental United States. We will learn about the everyday experiences of Africans and people of African descent and the way this struggle for (and meaning of) freedom made make and shake the Americas. You will learn historical facts and how to distinguish change over time and place. You will learn to construct historical narratives using primary and secondary sources, about systems of oppression (like slavery) and how those systems operate--and how ordinary people and communities resisted and took that system down. Opportunities for independent research will be available for advanced students looking for professional development and research experience.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.111. Making America: Blacks in the Twentieth Century. 3 Credits.
This survey course explores the role of African-descended people and social-political responses directed at those people in the development of modern American society.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.122. Introduction to History of Africa (since 1880). 3 Credits.
Explore the social and political changes that have transformed the African continent in the modern era, with a focus on the rise and fall of colonialism, the relation between Africa and the world in the post-colonial era, and effect of colonialism and its aftermath on African household structures and gender roles.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.190. Modern African American History, 1896 – present. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.209. Slavery in the Caribbean. 3 Credits.
An introductory examination of slavery in the Caribbean, this course explores the structure of slavery and its development and its transformative effects on people and the region, and the formation of the modern world. Students can expect to explore themes broadly related to gender and sexuality; politics and economy; science and technology; health and the environment; law, culture and society.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.225. Mansa Musa’s Gold: the History of African Muslims. 3 Credits.
Today about one third of the world’s Muslims live in Africa, a continent where Islam has a long history. This course follows African Muslims as they traveled and migrated, built communities and states, produced literature and scholarship, and contended with slavery and empire. Our historical investigations will take us all over the African continent as well as across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, following the paths of African Muslim pilgrims, scholars, slaves, soldiers, merchants, rulers, and revolutionaries. No prerequisites needed.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.229. African Women in the Postcolonial City. 3 Credits.
This course examines the many facets of women’s lives in postcolonial African cities. Using diverse sources, including films, novels, and newspapers, the course interrogates how women understood and fashioned themselves amid social, political, and economic change.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.239. Chronicling the Caribbean. 3 Credits.
This course is a critical inquiry into the writing of the region’s history as mere appendage to imperial history justifying European domination and exploitation of the region. It explores how innovations in Caribbean Archaeology, Caribbean History, and the Digital Humanities challenge Eurocentric knowledge claims extending the decolonization struggle beyond politics and economy to include the academy.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
AS.100.271. Documenting & Digitizing Black Louisiana: Sources, Tools and Contexts. 3 Credits.
Documenting & Digitizing Black Louisiana: Sources, Tools and Contexts is an experiential, team-based, community-engaged undergraduate seminar that combines secondary literature on the history of colonial Louisiana as well as the digital humanities, with intensive deep readings of a selection of translated documents. Seminar sessions will include gatherings with research teams of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, with a special emphasis workshops, with and hosted by scholars at JHU and beyond (including team members at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. Students with interests in Black history, in multimedia content creation, in digital infrastructure, in manuscript documents, in translation and languages, in public history, social justice and community engagement will find much to learn in this course.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Science and Data (FA2),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.275. Passing in American Culture. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.282. Race & Power in Modern South Africa. 3 Credits.
History of colonialism, the apartheid state, and the anti-apartheid liberation struggle in South Africa, with special attention to the role of gender, race, religion, and ethnicity.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.301. America after the Civil Rights Movement. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.323. Malcolm and Martin: Evolutionary Revolutionaries. 3 Credits.
This is a 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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.354. Playing in the White: Black Writers, the Literary Colorline and Writing Whiteness. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.372. African Cities: Environment, Gender, and Economic Life. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.378. Africa and the Atlantic World. 3 Credits.
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: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.444. Historiography of the Maghreb, 1939 to the Present. 3 Credits.
We will explore key texts in the historiography of post-1939 North Africa as well as key recent publications, in French as well as in English.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.450. History Research Lab. 3 Credits.
In this course, students participate in a research “laboratory,” engaging in direct research on an area of faculty’s research, leading to the development of a collective, digital humanities project.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Projects and Methods (FA6)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.486. Jim Crow in America. 3 Credits.
This course explores the history, politics, and culture of legalized racial segregation in the United State between the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries – a regime commonly known as “Jim Crow.”
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.628. Advanced Reading in Modern African American Studies & History. 3 Credits.
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
AS.100.707. The Black World. 3 Credits.
This iteration of the Black World Seminar attends to the making and meaning of blackness through the concept of property and its application between the 16th and 21st centuries. We’ll consider the push and pull factors that snatched people out of Africa and drew people of African descent to travel, build lives and determine the meaning and making of land, territory and real estate. We’ll explore, too, the historical forces which created blackness as a marker on the body, as a political and cultural identity, and as a determinant of property’s value.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.708. The Black World II. 3 Credits.
The Black World Seminar considers the making and meaning of blackness between the 14th and 20th centuries and Africans and people of African descent’s impact on the making of the modern world, from the slave trade to the present. We explore, too, the historical forces which created blackness as a marker on the body and as a political and cultural identity.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.713. Black Womanhood. 3 Credits.
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
AS.010.386. Modern Art in a Global Frame. 3 Credits.
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: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.388. Afro Asia. 3 Credits.
This course follows twentieth and twenty-first century artistic projects that imagine, propose, or navigate Afro Asian pasts and futures. We will follow artists of African and Asian descent, several of them diasporic, in considering imaginaries of the world that precede our present. We will also engage, collaboratively, in a speculative exercise: what happens when we are given the material grounds to think the world differently? Covering significant epistemic passages in world history—the Afro Asian conference in Bandung, the origins of modernism, Négritude, comparative studies in caste, and the art history of race—and a variety of parallel primary sources (maps, music, cinema, and archival journals), we will think Afro Asia to speculate art history and think art history to speculate Afro Asia. Our work together draws heavily on local collections and specifically the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
AS.140.308. Race, Racism and Medicine. 3 Credits.
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.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Science and Data (FA2),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
Writing Intensive
Interdepartmental
AS.360.406. Experiential Research Lab Seminar. 3 Credits.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Islamic Studies
AS.194.230. African-Americans and the Development of Islam in America. 3 Credits.
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: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies
AS.361.623. LACLxS Reading Seminar: Caribbean Worlds. 3 Credits.
This interdisciplinary graduate seminar examines the Caribbean as a dynamic and multifaceted region shaped by its diverse populations, colonial entanglements, and enduring struggles for sovereignty and self-determination. Emphasizing the Caribbean’s role as a site of political, economic, and cultural innovation, the course engages major themes including indigeneity, slavery and colonial domination, race and racism, gender and sexuality, diaspora, and contested models of “development.” These issues will be analyzed through the writings and perspectives of Caribbean thinkers—both historical and contemporary—who have critically shaped regional and global discourses. Rather than positioning the Caribbean as simply “peripheral,” this course foregrounds the region as a generative space of intellectual, cultural, and political resilience with profound relevance to broader conversations in Latin America and the Global South.
Medicine, Science and the Humanities
AS.145.313. Afrofuturism, Latinxfuturism, and Technoscientific Imaginaries. 3 Credits.
This course surveys the literary and cultural productions of Black and Latinx science fictioneers and their generative confrontations with the sci-fi genre’s fraught colonial, gendered, and racialized technoscientific origins. By engaging works of the Afrofuturist and Latinxfuturist imagination (ex. film, short stories, novels, and visual art) alongside science fiction criticism, and readings spanning the subfields of feminist, queer, and postcolonial science and technology studies, we’ll consider how Black and Latinx science fictioneers, past and present, appropriate the idioms of science and technology to upend essentialist accounts of gender, race, and sexuality, and fashion radical remappings of “gendered,” “raced,” and “sexed” bodies. Throughout the course of the semester, we'll also be interrogating how (and to what end) Black and Latinx sci-fi writers and creators such as Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Janelle Monáe, Firelei Báez, E.G. Condé , and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, among others, complicate, reconceptualize, and expand the contours of the “science” in science fiction. In so doing, we will assess the implications (be these social, political, epistemological, etc.) of positioning Black and Latinx peoples, who have more often than not been made the objects of science (and scientific racism), as key interlocutors, producers, and critical surveyors of technoscientific knowledge.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.145.325. Magic/Medicine: Healing, Protection, and Transformation in African and Indian Ocean Worlds. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.145.400. Black Land & Food Sovereignty Praxis: An Environmental Justice Workshop. 3 Credits.
This course is designed to introduce and advance perspectives on radical approaches and analyses on the state of food and food systems, while learning about historic and contemporary examples of movement toward freedom and self-determination through land and food. The course is co-taught by author, organizer, educator, and filmmaker Eric Jackson (Black Yield Institute) and anthropologist Nicole Labruto (Johns Hopkins University). Black Yield Institute (BYI) is a Pan-African power institution based in Baltimore, serving as a think tank and collective action network that addresses food apartheid. The Black Land & Food Sovereignty Praxis course is BYI’s flagship popular political education course. The course immerses budding movement contributors in a theory- and practice-based classroom experience. Participants will develop new questions, challenge their beliefs, develop a critical analysis, learn skills, and build relationships that will prepare them for growth in movement toward Black land and food sovereignty. We will also offer a 3-credit spring semester project-based course that will continue work done in the fall course. Open to undergraduate and graduate students. The course builds on the model of the Sustainable Design Practicum (2021 and 2022) and the Environmental Justice Workshop (2023). Class sessions will take place each week in Cherry Hill in south Baltimore. Meeting times include transportation to and from the Homewood campus. Admission by permission of instructors. Email nlabruto@jhu.edu to receive application.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.145.410. Black Land & Food Sovereignty Practicum: An Environmental Justice Studio. 3 Credits.
This project-based course will provide training and skills in movement building through radical analyses of and approaches toward the state of food and food systems. The course immerses budding movement contributors in a theory- and practice-based experience. Students will engage in guided projects that support the movement toward freedom and self-determination through land and food. The course is co-taught by author, organizer, educator, and filmmaker Eric Jackson (Black Yield Institute) and anthropologist Nicole Labruto (Johns Hopkins University). Black Yield Institute (BYI) is a Pan-African power institution based in Baltimore, serving as a think tank and collective action network that addresses food apartheid. Participants will learn new research and design skills, contribute to projects relevant to BYI’s work, develop a critical analysis, and build relationships that will prepare them for growth in movement toward Black land and food sovereignty. The course builds on AS.145.400 Black Land & Food Sovereignty Praxis: An Environmental Justice Workshop, though the course is not a prerequisite. Open to undergraduate and graduate students. Class sessions will take place each week in Cherry Hill in south Baltimore. Meeting times include transportation to and from the Homewood campus. Admission by permission of instructors.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Modern Languages and Literatures
AS.210.371. Advanced Portuguese I. 3 Credits.
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.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.211.171. Brazilian Culture & Civilization: Colonial Times to the Present. 3 Credits.
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
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.211.423. Black Italy. 3 Credits.
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: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.212.413. For the Record: Jazz Cultures of Modern France. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.212.477. Caribbean Fiction in/and History: Self-understanding and Exoticism. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Near Eastern Studies
AS.130.126. Gods and Monsters in Ancient Egypt. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.130.314. Introduction To Middle Egyptian. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Political Science
AS.190.255. Race and Racism in International Relations. 3 Credits.
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),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.190.339. American Racial Politics. 3 Credits.
Recommended Course Background: AS.190.214
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.190.384. Urban Politics. 3 Credits.
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),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.190.385. Urban Policy. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.190.432. Afropessimism. 3 Credits.
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: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.190.437. Race and Ethnic Politics in the United States. 3 Credits.
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: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.191.397. The Politics of the Blues in U.S. Cities. 3 Credits.
How might we come to understand the blues as critical for ideational formations, identity, and institutional change for Black Americans in the twentieth century? Blues and jazz are not often understood as mediums for political thought and action. Popular culture has always been an avenue for Black Americans to express and influence American politics broadly. The blues has long been a Black working-class epistemology for Black survival and thriving, even further the blues is a foundation for building social democracy for all people. This course will examine how the blues and its extension into jazz critique and explain conditions of racial domination in the plantation South and new relations of domination in the urban North. With a particular focus on Baltimore, Chicago, and New York City, students will understand and analyze the socio-political life of the blues using historical institutionalist methods in political science.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Program in Museums and Society
AS.389.265. Hopkins History Through the Archives. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.389.314. Researching the Africana Archive: Black Cemetery Stories. 3 Credits.
This course addresses the historic role of the African American cemetery as sacred and political space, with important links to other Black institutions. Operating in partnership with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, owned and operated by the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church, we will visit the cemetery and related locations in Baltimore throughout the semester. Our collective goal is to research and share stories that further the interests of these important and vulnerable sites.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.389.405. Visualizing Africa. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.420. Curatorial Seminar: European Art. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Public Health Studies
AS.280.120. Lectures on Public Health and Wellbeing in Baltimore. 1 Credit.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Sociology
AS.230.205. Introduction to Social Statistics. 4 Credits.
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.
Prerequisite(s): Students who are currently registered for or have completed AS.230.394 may not register this course
Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.230.242. Race and Racism. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.230.244. Race and Ethnicity in American Society. 3 Credits.
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: Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.230.313. Space, Place, Poverty & Race: Sociological Perspectives on Neighborhoods & Public Housing. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.230.320. Education & Inequality: Individual, Contextual, and Policy Perspectives. 3 Credits.
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 educational policy-making will be emphasized throughout the course.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.230.323. Qualitative Research Practicum. 3 Credits.
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. Introduction to Social Statistics (230.205) and Research Methods for the Social Sciences (230.202) are prerequisites. This course is restricted to Juniors and Seniors only. Instructor permission required for prerequisite exemptions for all students (majors and non-majors). Sophomores require instructor permission.
Prerequisite(s): AS.230.202 AND AS.230.205
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.230.372. Race, Class, and Decolonization Struggles. 3 Credits.
This course explores the complex interplay between race, class, and the politics of decolonization and national independence in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean and Latin America. Through diverse theories, primary sources, and comparative case studies, students will analyze how racialized and exploited groups have challenged systems of imperial and colonial domination while seeking to assert different meanings of freedom. The course moves beyond traditional decolonization narratives that restrict frameworks spatially to the boundaries of the nation-state and temporally to the post-World War II period. By historicizing decolonization struggles and emphasizing the transnational and comparative dimensions of the ideologies and practices of decolonization, we will explore how race and class dynamics within countries intersect with global power relations to shape the politics and processes of decolonization.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.230.388. Caribbean Baltimore. 3 Credits.
Caribbean immigrants have long been an integral part of Baltimore’s rich and diverse Black community, shaping the city’s neighborhoods, politics, culture, and movements for justice. In this community-based learning course, students will explore the historical and contemporary experiences of Caribbean immigrants in Baltimore, with particular attention to migrants from the Anglophone Caribbean. Moving beyond the classroom, students will engage directly with Caribbean activists, educators, artists, and cultural workers whose lives and labor animate the city. Through oral history interviews, ethical and reflexive community engagement, and justice-driven archival practices, students will gain hands-on experience researching and co-creating an archival record of Caribbean immigrant life in Baltimore. This course is taught in partnership with Nati Kamau-Nataki of Everyone’s Place Bookstore and African Cultural Center.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.230.397. The Political Economy of Drugs and Drug Wars. 3 Credits.
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
AS.230.430. Sociology of Policing and Resistance in Race-Class Subjugated Communities. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Theatre Arts & Studies
AS.225.305. A History of Black Performance and Drama. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Program
AS.004.441. Special Topics in Writing. 3 Credits.
In these courses, students study and practice the rhetorics within a specific field. Topics vary; please see the specific semester for current offerings. Please see "Special Notes" under each section and refer to the section-level information for applicable Foundational Abilities.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Science and Data (FA2),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Writing Seminars
AS.220.314. Readings in Fiction: Antiheroines in African-American Literature. 3 Credits.
In this course we will read work by Toni Morrison, Dorothy West, Nella Larsen, Jesse Redmon Fauset, Suzan-Lori Parks, Deesha Philyaw, Shannon Sanders, Dawnie Walton and others. We will consider how to read Black women behaving “badly”, or resisting respectability politics, in a historical and contemporary context. How have writers balanced a desire for complexity, agency, and artistic freedom with practical and ethical questions about representation and stereotypes? Students will write one midterm paper on the assigned reading and complete one creative writing project. Students may choose the subject of their creative assignment, but it should engage the broad questions of the course: what makes protagonists behaving badly interesting, and what ethical or structural questions are relevant to how we portray them?
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.105 OR AS.362.112
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.220.422. Readings in Fiction: Race, Passing, and Performance. 3 Credits.
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)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive