Department website: http://krieger.jhu.edu/africana/
The Center for Africana Studies (CAS) offers a rigorous focus on African-descended peoples and their cultures across the globe. Over the past millennium, the contribution, traditions, and values of African, African-American, and African Diaspora cultures helped create the modern and pre-modern world. Africana Studies, as a field of study, grew from the activist and scholarly traditions of Black Studies and the blending of peoples and ideas between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It therefore offers a broad, multidisciplinary approach to history and culture centered on the interests, conditions, philosophies, conceptual schemes, and value systems of African-descended people everywhere. Our courses focus on the human experience in the context of social, political, demographic, cultural, religious, and economic systems. They also offer a unique perspective on racism, colonialism, capitalism, and geography that properly situates the importance of people of color to the making of the modern world.
Africana Studies offers a multidisciplinary curriculum that expands the scope and range of traditional academic disciplines to the presence, roles, cultural contributions, experiences, and particular interests of African peoples and their descendants.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
This course will offer students an introduction to the central novels, plays, short stories, essays and poetry that have constituted African American Literature from 1930-1980. By focusing on representative works that span each of the major periods from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement, we will continue to consider the question of race and representation. How does one represent the race? And, for whom should black authors write – a white audience in order to change their minds about black people, or to black people for their pleasure and edification? Over the course of the semester, we will trace the various ways early- to late- 20th century black writers sometimes borrowed from earlier literary traditions and, at other times, developed new ones. In addition, we will hone in on the major debates and central texts that have come to define African American Literature and explore how it has long served as a creative, political, and intellectual enterprise.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course disrupts conventional ways of seeing, reading, and examining artistic texts. When we read a novel or study a work of art, especially that produced by white people, we tend to treat it as representative of the nation, talk about its aesthetic genius, or discuss it as reflecting its social/historical moment. Black artistic production, on the other hand, is most often treated as “protest,” as that which simply responds to a national narrative. But what would happen if we treated the experience of black people and other people of color as universal? What would happen if we treated colonialism as the dominant social and intellectual problem of our age?
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course introduces students to the interdisciplinary field of African American Studies, with attention to the literature, film, culture, history, and politics of black life in the United States. Our reading list will likely include texts by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Frances E.W. Harper, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, and others.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Humanities
This course will survey African American Literature from the 19th century to the late 20th century. We will turn to prose, poetry, and drama to explore the various ways black writes have engaged U.S. culture, history, and politics.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
‘Africa rising’ has become an influential, albeit contested, narrative used by institutions like the International Monetary Fund and World Economic Forum to describe the rapid economic growth in 21st century Africa. This rapid ‘economic growth has been accompanied by another type of ‘Africa Rising’ – a mushrooming of social protest and popular uprisings across the continent. The course will introduce important theoretical perspectives, debates, and examples to equip students to critically examine contemporary social dynamics through the interconnected themes of land, labor and environmental rights and struggles that have gripped the African continent. What has given rise to these awakenings? Who are the actors involved in these actions? What are their demands and strategies? What lessons does it hold for social movement theory and development more broadly? The first section focuses on land reclamation movements, the new wave of ‘land grabs’ and responses from below. The second section presents the role of labour movements and its intersection with popular uprisings. The third section considers responses from communities and movements to the ecological destruction and climate change.
Area: Humanities
This course will examine changing norms of racial representation in American cinema and consider those images in relation to the operations of the film industry and to specific moments in U.S. history that informed cinematic representations of race. In particular, we will be analyzing film as a social practice that creates meanings that inform both everyday practices and deliberations over many of the most important issues and debates in American society. Ultimately, the goal is to gain a better appreciation for how the stories films tell us shape our personal and collective identities and inform our understanding of political life.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
This course considers how black writers of the diaspora engaged the history and realities of colonialism and imperialism. While some novelists wrote specifically about the colonial encounter and its consequences, others chose to critique the enterprise by rewriting – from the perspective of the colonized – the literary tradition of the colonizing nation. Focusing on works by African, Caribbean, and American writers alongside the British tradition to which they respond, we will look at how diasporic writers thought about and constructed ideas about the world, the self, and the racial Other.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will examine film and literary narratives of “passing” in 20th century America. We will study texts that feature people who cross social boundaries of race, class, sexuality, and gender, and consider what “passing” reveals about American social mobility.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course will explore the relationship between racial inequality, racial politics, and policy-making in the western world, particularly as it concerns the fight for equality by people of African descent in the US, Canada, Britain, and France. It will cover historical and contemporary struggles over policy, beginning with the African-American civil rights movement, the ensuing War on Poverty and War on Drugs, and followed by contemporary debates over immigration, racial segregation, poverty and racial economic inequality across the four countries. We will take insights from theory and empirical research to study the role that racial constructs and politics play in policy designs, contests over power and resources, electoral representation, public opinion, social movements, and political change. Through case studies of policies aimed at racial inequality (e.g., affirmative action, police reform, urban revitalization), we will examine why and under what circumstances they arise, what form they take, and in what ways they alleviate or reproduce racial inequality. These questions will be considered in light of the broader impact of neo-liberalism on normative ideas about policy, race, and inequality.
Area: Humanities
Over the past few years films such as Black Panther, Get Out, and Black KKKlansman have been both critical and economic successes, significantly changing how we think of “black films” as a genre. What do these films tell us about what it means to be black at this specific moment in time? How is what these films tell us shaped by how they are produced? How do the circulation of concepts like “Wakanda Forever!” shape political imaginations? When we watch these films how are our own ideas change? As a particularly powerful form of popular culture, film not only entertains, but it educates, and in some instances propagandizes. This is no less true of black films than it is of non-black ones. In this class we will examine a range of recent popular black films with an eye to examining the politics of their production, circulation, and consumption.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will explore the various ways black people have narrated stories. From the slave narrative to fiction, biography to oral history, we will consider the relationship between historical events and the stories that people tell about those events. Where does history and imagination meet in the telling? How does one weave together story material to give it shape? While we will spend the first half of the semester engaging published and more popular narratives about black life, the second half of the course will focus on interviewing and archiving the stories of black workers and staff at JHU. What kinds of stories do they tell? How do they tell them? What do their stories help us understand about the past? Ultimately, this course will concern itself with what it means to be black and the various ways everyday people and artists alike have attempted to narrate their experiences in both writing and oral forms.
Area: Humanities
The advents of smartphone technology, social media platforms, and the 24-hour cable news cycle has made violent images of Black death and dying ubiquitous. The public consumes these images unremittingly and social movements have used these images to highlight the vulnerable character of Black life globally. However, questions remain as to whether these images work as tools of populist politicization or as sources of entertainment for viewers unsympathetic to the various politics expressed by the Black Lives Matter movement. This course seeks to explore this uncomfortable reality through the artistic renderings of Kara Walker, an acclaimed mixed media artist whose provocative explorations of race, sexuality, and violence offer one lens by which explore this political phenomenon. Additionally, students will spend the semester creating multimedia archival projects that explore these images and their political impact on Baltimore. In doing so, students will explore the politics bound within, pressed upon, and interpreted from the Black body.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Hip hop has become one of the most influential youth cultural movements of the past 40 years. It has moved from being a geographically-isolated African American and Puerto Rican musical scene to influencing every aspect of American and international youth culture, including music, visual culture, language, and politics. How did hip hop develop? Where did it come from, who made it, and why? What do the images and messages of hip hop culture mean, how has it changed our world, and who cares? We will approach these questions by delving into the historical, aesthetic, socioeconomic, and political dimensions of hip hop culture. Classes will historically explore specific themes, either examining issues that hip hop has dealt with (e.g., police brutality) or employing theoretical frameworks that we can use to help us think more critically about hip hop (e.g., subcultural theory).
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will introduce students to a variety of works written by black women of the Diaspora with a focus on the U.S. We will consider how women have theorized power, engaged history, and creatively imagined both the past and the present.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course explores the ways in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century black periodical culture fostered (and, at times, hampered) the literary and cultural production of the African diaspora. Authors will likely include Frederick Douglass, “Ethiop (William J. Wilson),” Frances E.W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Richard Bruce Nugent, and others.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course examines the historical and current public heath crises in Africa. Topics covered include infectious diseases and viral outbreaks, water and food access, sanitation, education, behavioral health, gender equality, health care and health care access, as well as the link between culture, economics and health. Introduction to Epidemiology is recommended but not required.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course examines how modern black political thought emerged through a series of critical engagements with Enlightenment ideas about universalism, progress, the authority of reason, and the foundations of citizenship. Course readings include texts by W. E. B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, James Boggs, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, and others.
Writing Intensive
The course will investigate American cinematic representations of African Americans, slavery (and more specifically its absence), the Civil War, and racial formation along the United States’ southwestern frontier in films produced from the 1950s through the contemporary period. The course closely examines American cinematic fantasies of the western frontier, frontier violence and the desire to escape or erase the tensions of race and slavery that have deeply permeated the American cultural consciousness, strongly shaping the production of American masculine ideals. The course will also take decided note of the national shift from liberal “Great Society Programs” of the 1960s to the conservative “neoliberal” social and cultural ideals in the 1980s and 1990s. Our purpose is to consider the organization and reformation of hegemonic power by way of the complex morality play the western film evokes, typically considering the interstitial geographies between blackness and whiteness, civilization and savagery, belonging and alienation, and metropolis and colonial outpost. We will privilege in our discussions the contested frontiers of racial dominion. Films include “Buck and the Preacher,” “The Battle of Algiers,” “Sgt. Rutledge,” and “Django Unchained.”
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
The first semester of Senior Honors in Africana Studies, conducted as an Independent Study. Interested students should submit an application to the CAS Director of Undergraduate Studies.
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Writing Intensive
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Writing Intensive
Prerequisite(s): You must request Independent Academic Work using the Independent Academic Work form found in Student Self-Service: Registration > Online Forms.
Cross Listed Courses
Anthropology
Africa, as anthropologists have noted, has long been a “laboratory of the future.” By tracing the intersections of technology and politics, this class considers the various experiments in oppression and liberation that have unfolded within it. Following a broad historical arc, we begin with colonial medicine, racial science, and urban planning; move to national infrastructures and postcolonial resource extractions; and finally consider contemporary African engagements with consumer technology.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Over the past two decades, African cities have absorbed rapid population increase without accompanying economic growth. Students will review the major challenges of this mode of urbanization and explore the vibrant ways residents have sought to meet them. Following anthropology’s commitment to lived experience, we will track these issues through the twists and turns of everyday life, and consider what they may say about urbanity more broadly in the 21st century. Topics include livelihood, the built environment, conflict and membership, and popular culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
"Africa Rising" or "The Hopeless Continent?" Within the span of a decade, The Economist magazine famously declared each to be true. In this class we turn to the genre of ethnography, with its focus on lived experience and critical nuance, to make sense of this seeming contradiction. We explore the themes of crisis and futurity through new works by Mbembe, De Boeck, Obarrio, and others.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This seminar explores the formation of the South Atlantic through a reading of historical and ethnographic texts. We examine the making of history and culture as contentious fields of struggle
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Comparative Thought and Literature
This course will investigate the philosophical as well as theological, juridical and political, and rhetorical and literary backgrounds that have informed and shaped Barack Obama's writings, speeches, and policy strategies leading up to and during his presidency. While paying minute attention to a few selected controversial debates in domestic and international governance and relations, and while discussing the question of Obama's legacy in and after the upcoming elections, our primary focus will be on understanding the curious blend of Christian realism, influenced by the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, the tradition of American civic republicanism and pragmatism, and Obama's specific brand of post-Civil Rights, if not necessarily post-racial, politics. All these tenets coalesce in a vision and politics that may well be described as one of "deep" pragmatism. Attention will be paid to Obama's early appeal to "simple ideas" and "small miracles," each of them yielding the Biblical and sobered injunction of a "hope against hope." But extensive consideration of his thought and impact in the assessment of biographers and intellectual historians, legal scholars and political theorists, cultural critics and pundits will add to our attempt to understand and take stock of the Obama phenomenon as well.
Area: Humanities
Economics
This course examines labor market discrimination by gender, race and ethnicity in the United States. What does the empirical evidence show, and how can we explain it? How much of the difference in observed outcomes is driven by differences in productivity characteristics and how much is due to discrimination? How have economists theorized about discrimination and what methodologies can be employed to test those theories? What has been the impact of public policy in this area; how do large corporations and educational institutions respond; and what can we learn from landmark lawsuits? The course will reinforce skills relevant to all fields of applied economics, including critical evaluation of the theoretical and empirical literature, the reasoned application of statistical techniques, and analysis of current policy issues.
Prerequisite(s): AS.180.102
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course focuses on the economics of poverty and inequality. It covers the measurement of poverty and inequality, facts and trends over time, the causes of poverty and inequality with a focus on those related to earnings and the labor market, and public policy toward poverty and inequality, covering both taxation and government expenditure and programs. By the nature of the material, the course is fairly statistical and quantitative. Students should have an intermediate understanding of microeconomic concepts. Basic knowledge of regression analysis is also helpful.
Prerequisite(s): AS.180.301
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
English
Students will write a mini-autobiography in the form of seven 3000 word essays, work shopped in class. Readings include A Small Place by Jamaica Kincaid and Brothers and Keepers by John Edgar Wideman.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course surveys post-2000 literary and cultural production from sub-Saharan Africa. Topics will include debates over genre and fiction’s relevance to African experience, legacies of canonical writing about independence, urban Africa as violent or “tragic” landscape, and problems of scale and geographical context. Readings by authors such as Adichie, Wainaina, Duiker, and Vladislavic, and students will be introduced to the main print and online arteries of African intellectual discussion. This class is for non-majors and does not count towards the English major or minor.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
This course will explore black literature written as protest. We will examine how, in the face of threats to black life, Frances E.W. Harper, Richard Wright, Amiri Baraka, and others have realized versions of W.E.B. Du Bois’s objective: “all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.”
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Using their recorded speeches, written lectures and published writings and drawing from their biographies, this course will explore the important life work of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. We intend to upend traditional conversations about political radicalism and ethnic politics by analyzing these spokesmen associated most indelibly with black nationalism and racial integration, respectively.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
In this course, we will explore the use of satire in black literary and artistic traditions. Reading will likely include poems and novels by Paul Laurence Dunbar, George S. Schuyler, Claude McKay, William Melvin Kelly, Ishmael Reed, Fran Ross, Percival Everett, and others. In addition, we will venture into the genres of film (“Get Out”) and visual art (work by Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker, the latter currently on exhibit at the BMA). The politics of satire emerge in these texts particularly through the treatment of racial uplift and respectability ideologies, race relations, the legacies and histories of slavery, visions of utopia and dystopia, and the concept of the “post-racial.” With attention to the historical and cultural conditions under which these works were produced, we will address the ways in which satire can (or cannot) effect change in the world.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Drawing from the body of work reflecting the Hollywood gunfighter and outlaw folk-hero Clint Eastwood, the course will investigate American cinematic representations of slavery (and more specifically its absence), the Civil War and racial formation along the United States’ southwestern frontier in films produced from the 1950s through the contemporary period. A focus on the cultural icon Clint Eastwood enables a close examination of American cinematic fantasies of the frontier, frontier violence and the desire to escape or erase the tensions of race and slavery that have deeply permeated the American cultural consciousness, particularly the creation of American masculine ideals. The course will also take decided note of the national shift from liberal “Great Society Programs” of the 1960s to the conservative “neoliberal” social and cultural ideals in the 1980s and 1990s. Our purpose is to consider the organization and reformation of hegemonic power by way of the complex morality play the western film evokes, typically considering the interstitial geographies between civilization and savagery, belonging and alienation, and metropolitan and colonial outpost. We will privilege in our discussions the contested frontiers of racial dominion. The curriculum is complicated by several significant points of departure from the traditional category of the Hollywood-based American western: a film to frame the question of colonialism and resistance, as well as examples of black cinematic efforts re-drawing boundaries of the racial frontier. (Are they formed at the Caribbean, the easternmost littoral? The postindustrial city? Do they correspond to the romance of organized crime and its fantasy of empire?)
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
How and why do Shakespeare's works channel racism and supremacist ideologies? How and why is it that they have also been used for inspiration and aspiration by people of color and thinkers on the political left? This course uses performance history from the Elizabethan moment to the present to explore how early modern topics such as anti-Semitism, bodily monstrosity, blood lineage, colonialism, and religious concession have allowed Shakespeare's plays to function as vehicles for thinking about race across time. Case studies include anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice at a time when it was illegal for Jews to be in England; the eighteenthand nineteenth-century blackface traditions of Othello and the careers of Edmund Kean and Ira Aldridge; Duke Ellington's exploration into Shakespeare in his 1957 jazz album Such Sweet Thunder; and Julie Taymor's 1994 Titus Andronicus, which was optioned and championed by Steve Bannon, former executive chairman of Breitbart News. Each unit of the course features an early modem play, readings about the performance tradition of that play, and an article or book chapter on that play.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course reaches beyond the much-taught postcolonial African realist canon to explore less-studied, more formally challenging works from across the continent, focusing on long-form prose and poetry. While texts will be clearly placed in an historical context, the emphasis in our readings will be on the inception, evolution, and intermingling of literary genres. How do seminal moments in African literary history complicate our received understandings of periodicity, mimesis, and the relation among selfhood, collectivity, and narration? What possibilities exist for theorizing African literature as a corpus, and what, conversely, are the descriptive and institutional limitations of “African Literature"? Primary texts will include “Ethiopia Unbound” (J.E. Casely Hayford); “Chaka” (Thomas Mofolo); “The Wrath of the Ancestors” (A.C. Jordan); “Song of Lawino” (Okot p’Bitek); and "“The Promised Land” (Grace Ogot), as well as poetry by Shaaban bin Robert and H.I.E. Dhlomo, among others. We’ll pay some attention, too, to critical trends and contextualization.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
This course examines the transnational visions of Black Empire as articulated and framed by black thinkers, writers, and visual artists around the world, roughly between 1850 and 1950. We will consider how both individuals and groups (such as the United Negro Improvement Association) responded to imperialist maneuvers through discourses of Ethiopianism, Pan-Africanism, and anti-colonialism, and how these discourses interacted with one another in surprising ways, ways that reveal the black world’s simultaneous attraction to and rejection of the imperial model in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Our reading will include novels, poems, essays, and critical texts—at least two of which share a title with this course—by W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline E. Hopkins, Sutton E. Griggs, J. A. Rogers, Langston Hughes, George S. Schuyler, Claude McKay, Brent Hayes Edwards, Paul Gilroy, Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Michelle Ann Stephens, and others.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Students interested in black print culture will engage in intensive archival research, both collaborative and individual, using the Sheridan Library’s Rare Book and Manuscript collections. Texts include poems, printed lectures, pamphlets, novels, periodicals, ephemera, correspondence, etc., alongside relevant critical and theoretical reading.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Film and Media Studies
The bad guy as hero from Little Caesar to Goodfellas. Film screenings Th 7:30-10:00 PM, Sun 7:00-9:30 PM. Lab fee: $40.
Area: Humanities
German Romance Languages Literatures
NO PREVIOUS KNOWLEDGE OF PORTUGUESE IS REQUIRED. This accelerated one-semester course covers all content for Elementary Portuguese. Upon the successful completion of this course with a grade of C or higher, students may enroll in 210.277 Intermediate Portuguese. Encourages rapid acquisition by intensive exposure to the language through immersion activities, videos and culture. The course will cover relevant aspects of the Portuguese language grammar. Students will be encouraged to use the language through communicative activities, listening and writing activities. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM. May not be taken on a Satisfactory/ Unsatisfactory basis.
Area: Humanities
This third-year course focuses on reading, writing, and oral expression. Students will read two complete works by major Brazilian, Portuguese, and/or Afro-Portuguese writers each semester, followed by intense writing and oral discussion on the topics covered. Grammar will be reviewed as necessary. All classes are conducted in Portuguese. Prereq: 210.278, placement test or instructor approval.
Prerequisite(s): AS.210.278 or equivalent score on placement test or instructor approval.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Even as a strong, divine-right monarchy emerged in France, following the Renaissance wars of religion, rebellious French thinkers never stopped questioning the foundations of power. They focused critically not only on the claims of authority issuing from the top, but also on the submissiveness of the governed and the reach of propaganda. This course examines how power shapes minds and bodies, from absolutism to the Revolution, to democratic laïcité. Readings include works by La Boétie, Montaigne, Loyseau, Bayle, Rousseau, Saint-Just, Maistre, Tocqueville, Foucault, Lefort, Rancière and the Assemblée Nationale. Readings and discussion in English.
Area: Humanities
The course is taught in English, but ONE extra credit will be given to students who wish to do the course work in Portuguese. Those wishing to do the course work in English for 3 credits should register for section 01. Those wishing to earn 4 credits by doing the course work in Portuguese should register for section 02.Section 01: 3 credits in ENGLISHSection 02: 4 credits in Portuguese (instructor’s permission required)
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
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 African Americans could both perpetuate the tradition and innovate by turns. At the same time, French taste-makers, 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 an international symposium (to be held Nov. 15 and 16; attendance mandatory) uniting noted scholars and legendary jazz musicians. Although some background in French language and basic musical notation is desirable (students are encouraged to engage in original-source research), all core course readings will be provided in English.
Area: Humanities
History
From slave revolts on the West African coast to national conventions and civil war, people of African descent have defined freedom and struggle in terms of kinship, diasporic connection, and fighting antiblack violence. This course explores the arc of that history and its role in the making of America.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An introduction to the African past. First term: to 1880. Second term: to since 1880. Cross-listed with Africana Studies.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
An introduction to African history with emphasis on diversity, mobility, and innovation. Considers both early and modern times.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course explores the dynamic and fluid world of the early modern Mediterranean (1453-1650), where Christians, Jews, and Muslims met, fought, traded with, and enslaved each other.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Overview of modern South African history, with a focus on the origins of the racial state and the development of black liberation movements.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
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.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
American Foreign Policy in the Age of Human Rights examines competing narratives about the origins of modern international human rights, and explores how those narratives historically informed American foreign policy from the American Revolution up to the present, with an emphasis on the twentieth century.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Attends to the composition and interpretive problems raised by studying the history of American imperialism, 1880s-1930s.
Writing Intensive
The years between 1959, when the course begins, and 1971, when it ends, were tumultuous and divisive. This course explores the political, racial, and cultural struggles of a half century ago.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
A course examining introducing students to the life, times and music of Billie Holiday. We will read biographies, autobiographies, novels, and listen to music.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will turn to known and not-so-known black writers during the early to mid-twentieth century who defied literary expectation and wrote stories that featured or focused on whiteness. We will consider what whiteness offered black writers and the political work that their literary experimentations did for a white American publishing industry.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This seminar will introduce students to the ideas and legacy of the renowned American scholar, journalist, and activist, W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963), asking students to locate Du Bois in his historical context and in our own. Through readings and discussions of his key works in various forms, we will assess Du Bois’s impact on major debates in American politics, African-American affairs, and academic disciplines like sociology and history. We will track changes in Du Bois's thinking over time, including in his views of racism, class, gender, liberalism, radicalism, imperialism, and war. Finally, we will consider the ways in which Du Bois's work continues to shape our understanding of these issues and debates in contemporary American society.
Area: Humanities
This course explores doing histories of people of African descent in an age of digital and social media. The focus will be on African-descended communities in the United States, but content will range across time space. Examples include: West African digital art communities; the use of slave trade databases to write Caribbean history; and the use of social media in social justice organizing from Paris to Baltimore. Students will explore questions of blackness, race, ethnicity, sex and sexuality, violence and justice while creating digital content using platforms like Wordpress, Omeka, Twitter, and Tumblr. Students will be evaluated on their acquisition of African American and Afro-Diasporic history; their knowledge of digital and social media platforms; and their ability to creatively and accurately relate the histories of blackness and black people to their representation and discussion online.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An advanced undergraduate seminar tracing the history of the Haitian Revolution from its origins in the early modern Atlantic world to its global impact and continuing legacies in the present.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course examines the history of West and Central Africa and its diasporic people and cultures during the early modern period (c. 1400-1750) in disparate parts of the Atlantic world, including Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and Anglo-America. Themes include: West and Central African political and religious cultures; trans-Atlantic slavery; African Christianity; and the question of cultural survivals.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Place of contrasts, Brazil has a multi-ethnic cultural heritage challenged by social and racial inequalities. Its political life remains chaotic. We will examine these problems through Brazilian history and culture.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Critically explores issues of decolonization and citizenship in Africa from WWII to the present. Emphasis on political inclusion and exclusion, and violence, fostered by nationalist movements and postcolonial African governments.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Examines how colonial rule transformed African legal systems, while Africans used European law for political resistance and personal gain. Research project based on colonial South African court records.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
An upper-level history reading seminar with a focus on histories of gender and sexuality in colonial and postcolonial Africa.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
A history of forced and voluntary migration and displacement in Africa, its causes and consequences, with a focus on refugees and labor migrants since 1960.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.”
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
What does a usable history of black womanhood (black queer and trans womanhood inclusive) look like? Black women’s history across time and space.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
How can we think about the interconnections between racism, theories of race and the practice of medicine? Living at a moment when racial disparities in health outcomes in the United States are still very stark, this course will provide a historically grounded approach to thinking about the roles that race and racism have played in healthcare, the production of health disparities as well as the role of medicine in the development of racist thought. While much of this course will focus geographically within the United States, this class will also explore global histories of medicine, encountering questions of race and medicine in Africa, the South Pacific and Asia. In addition to the analysis of primary source documents and historical texts, students will also be introduced to theoretical approaches to the study of race and racism from W.E.B. Dubois, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon and others.
Writing Intensive
What does science and technology look like in slave regimes? This seminar explores this question from a trans-national perspective by comparing cases in the Antebellum US, Cuba, Brazil and other countries.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Islamic Studies
This course explores how American Muslims navigate and contest complex notions of belonging in the context of national conversations on race, gender, citizenship, and national security. With a focus on specific case studies that range from Black Muslim movements of the early twentieth century to the ongoing War on Terror, the course adds complexity to the public conversation on what it means to be Muslim - and what it means to be American. We will draw on history, ethnography, first-person narratives, films, blogs, documentaries and fiction. As a Community Engaged course, the class will include site visits and learning with and from Muslim communities in Baltimore.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Near Eastern Studies
A basic introduction to Egyptian Religion, with a special focus on the nature of the gods and how humans interact with them. We will devote particular time to the Book of the Dead and to the "magical" aspects of religion designed for protective purposes.
Area: Humanities
This course examines Africa’s ancient past from the emergence of biologically modern humans, ancient hunter-gatherers, the earliest animal herding and farming populations, to cities and civilizations. While Egypt plays an undeniably central role in world history, this course concentrates in particular on ancient geographies other than Egypt.
Area: Humanities
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.
Area: Humanities
This course examines Africa’s ancient past from the emergence of biologically modern humans, ancient hunter-gatherers, the earliest animal herding and farming populations, to cities and civilizations. While Egypt plays an undeniably central role in world history, this course concentrates in particular on ancient geographies other than Egypt.
Area: Humanities
Philosophy
The Idea of Power surveys seminal texts in the history of political thought on the nature, promise, and dangers of political and social power; it also critically engages contemporary texts on race and gender power relations
Area: Humanities
This course explores the history of black thought that informs the ethics of the contemporary movement for black lives.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Political Science
This course investigates core questions of what constitutes political freedom, what limits on freedom (if any) should be imposed by authority, and the relationship between freedom, responsibility and political judgment. Spanning texts ancient, modern and contemporary, we shall investigate how power inhabits and invigorates practices of freedom and consent. Among the questions we will consider: Can we always tell the difference between consent and coercion? Are morality and freedom incompatible? Is freedom from the past possible? By wrestling with slavery (freedom’s opposite) we will confront the terrifying possibility that slavery can be both embodied and psychic. If our minds can be held captive by power, can we ever be certain that we are truly free? The political stakes of these problems will be brought to light through a consideration of issues of religion, gender, sexuality, civil liberties, class and race.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will explore theories and practices of race and immigration in order to illuminate the proliferation of populations regarded as disposable in contemporary politics. We will pay special attention to the contestable criteria used to determine eligibility for membership in the human race. We shall also examine how political power influences the relays between citizenship status and those whose lives are worthy of protection, and those who should be allowed to die.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Recommended Course Background: AS.190.214
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course analyzes the distinctive US welfare state in historical and comparative perspective. We begin with a survey of the policy context, an historical overview from the poorhouses through the Great Society, and a tour of welfare states across the rich democracies. We then survey developments – and explain the actual workings of policy – across jobs, education, welfare, pensions, and health care. We explore the institutional and political factors behind their divergent trajectories through conservative revival and the age of Trump. Students will write a seminar paper exploring policy development over time in a program or area of their choosing. Enrollment restricted to Social Policy minors only.
Prerequisite(s): Students may take AS.190.380 or AS.360.380, but not both.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross-listed with Africana Studies
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This is an advanced undergraduate seminar that explores how racial stigma functions as a marker of being always already in debt. In view of the legacies of settler-colonialism, imperialism and chattel slavery, how is it that those from whom so much has been taken are nevertheless regarded as perpetually in debt? We shall examine the moral, economic and racialized logics of power through which a range of political subjects come to be regarded as ungrateful “takers” as opposed to “makers,” and owing a debt to society. In so doing, we will investigate how temporality functions as a tool of power by considering how the indebted are made vulnerable to precarity, discipline, and disposability—in effect, forced to live life on borrowed time.
Writing Intensive
This course uses a community based learning approach to inquire into the presence of the Rastafari community in the Baltimore area. Most people will have heard of Rastafari through the music of Bob Marley. People might not know, however, that Rastafari emerges out of and has been part of a global history of liberation struggles. This course is co-taught with a local Rastafari organization. You will be intellectually and practically equipped to take part in a project of original research on the Rastafari presence in the Baltimore region, starting with the demonization of the movement in the 1980s “war on drugs” and including the movement’s response.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course explores how time, and not just space, is segregated along racial lines. We shall examine how racial injustices are experienced as impositions on human time, how resistance to racial inequality has often been figured in temporal terms, and what it means to think in untimely ways that challenge how the extended lifespans of racially dominant groups is contingent upon the foreshortened lifetimes of racial others. Readings will bring political theory into contact with contemporary experiences of race, such as: criminal (in)justice, environmental racism and the proliferation of human disposability. Recommended Course Background: One Political Theory course.
Writing Intensive
Race has been and continues to be centrally important to American political life and development. In this course, we will engage with the major debates around racial politics in the United States, with a substantial focus on how policies and practices of citizenship, immigration law, social provision, and criminal justice policy shaped and continue to shape racial formation, group-based identities, and group position; debates around the content and meaning of political representation and the responsiveness of the political system to American minority groups; debates about how racial prejudice has shifted and its importance in understanding American political behavior; the prospects for contestation or coalitions among groups; the “struggle with difference” within groups as they deal with the interplay of race and class, citizenship status, and issues that disproportionately affect a subset of their members; and debates about how new groups and issues are reshaping the meaning and practice of race in the United States.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Cities exert a substantial degree of control over American life. Throughout the 20th and early years of the 21st Century they have been centers of industry, of social change, of political change. And in part because of their status, scholars have begun to theorize about cities. The purpose of this class is to interrogate these theories through a filmic lens. Students will be exposed to readings and then in the second half of the semester, to films about cities that implicitly and explicitly speak to and about these theories. Some coursework in urban studies preferred, though not necessary.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
In this course, students will gain a foundational understanding of critical race theory, including its genesis in legal theory. The course will examine its relationship and importance to social movements, including through key concepts like intersectionality. The course will also use critical race theory to grapple with law, racial segregation, and the criminal justice system in the United States.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
The postcolonial society offers a unique terrain for the study of comparative racial politics, providing a setting for which racial and ethnic politics often take place between predominately non-white groups. In this course, students will examine contemporary understandings of the concepts of race and ethnicity and how they are deployed politically in the postcolonial society, enabling students to make deeper explications about the relationship between race, ethnicity and national inclusion as global phenomena that are the persistent and widespread legacies of colonialism, nationalism and white supremacy. Specifically, students will become familiar with the processes of colonization and decolonization--as well as postcolonial theories of resistance--that structure group politics today, drawing upon theoretical sources from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. These theoretical and historical tools will be used to study racial and ethnic politics across a range of postcolonial cases, including Indonesia, Mauritius, Fiji, Trinidad, Colombia and Brazil.
Writing Intensive
Program in Latin American Studies
In this course, we will examine biographical accounts of men and women of African descent in Latin America and in the broader Black Atlantic. These individuals include conquistadors and slaves, saints and sinners, revolutionaries and ordinary people. In their life stories, we will not only examine questions of race, gender, and religiosity that were central to the construction of identity in the early modern Atlantic world, but also the nature of the sources that allow us to tell their stories.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Program in Museums and Society
Students consider the representation of slavery in historic house museums of the late 20th century through the present, and use the university's Homewood Museum as a laboratory for the development, production and mounting of an exhibit about the men, women and children who labored at Homewood in the nineteenth century. Museums and Society Practicum course.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Students are invited to examine critically the history of Black artists exhibiting within American museums. With the help of BMA staff, class will develop interpretation for an installation to accompany a major retrospective of artist Jack Whitten that considers the “canon” of art history as a site of ongoing negotiation between taste-makers, artists, dealers, and critics, as well as art institutions that include the market and the museum. Students will take advantage of archives at the BMA, the Library of Congress and Howard University. Students will help select the artworks and themes for the show; research individual participants in the social networks that facilitated the success of some artists over others; and research the biographies of individual artworks - some that have entered the canon and some that should. M&S Practicum. CBL Course. Cross-listed with Africana Studies.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course invites students to mine the archival, literary and cultural collections of the university for materials that reflect African-American experiences and stage campus interventions based on their findings. Participates in the Housing Our Story: Archival Justice for Black Baltimore project. M&S Practicum..
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
In collaboration with a local museum, conceptualize and develop an exhibition, potentially including but not limited to: checklists, exhibition texts, interpretive strategies, and programming. Exhibition theme varies year to year. Concepts, ethics and practicalities of curation are key concerns. Research visits to regional museums and private collections as relevant.
Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
Public Health Studies
An introduction to Urban Health with Baltimore as a case study: wellbeing, nutrition, education, violence and city-wide geographic variation. Lectures by JH Faculty, local government/service providers and advocates.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Sociology
This course will introduce students to the application of statistical techniques commonly used in sociological analysis. Topics include measures of central tendency and dispersion, probability theory, confidence intervals, chi-square, anova, and regression analysis. Hands-on computer experience with statistical software and analysis of data from various fields of social research. Special Note: Required for IS GSCD track students.
Prerequisite(s): Statistics Sequence restriction: students who have completed any of these courses may not register: EN.550.211 OR EN.550.230 OR EN.550.310 OR EN.550.311 OR EN.550.413 OR EN.550.420 OR EN.550.420 OR EN.550.420 OR EN.560.435 OR AS.280.345 OR AS.200.314 OR AS.200.315 OR EN.560.348;Statistics Sequence Restriction: Students who have completed EN.550.111 OR EN.550.113 may not enroll.
Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course examines the new wave of social protest and popular uprisings in contemporary Africa through the interconnected themes of land, labor, and environmental movements.Attention will be placed on the early 21st century.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
The course examines the new wave of social protest and popular uprisings in contemporary Africa through the interconnected themes of land, labor and environmental struggles.Attention will be placed on the early 21st century.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
This course will introduce students to a range of software programs that are critical for conducting social scientific research in the 21st century. Students will develop competency in the use of computer programs for statistical analysis, database management, the creation of maps and timelines, and the presentation of research reports. The course uses examples from ongoing social science faculty research projects at Johns Hopkins on global inequality and international development. Required for GSCD track students.Course previously titled "Research Tools and Technologies for the Social Sciences"
Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
How do we think about the power relations at work in the scholarship we read and in the important texts we consider essential to our educational experience? This course will critically investigate the role that concepts of race and racism have played in formulating dominant perceptions of who can be the producers of knowledge and what constitutes authoritative knowledge itself. We will consider how and why thinkers and scholarship produced outside of Europe and North America are too often ignored for their scholarly contributions and the dynamics that lead to this situation. We will also explore how and why new and important perspectives emerge from engaging and centering voices from beyond traditional canonical works. With a particular focus on the forms of knowledge arising from European Enlightenment approaches to concepts of thought reason and objective knowledge, this course will critically engage students with a wide range of thinkers such asGWF Hegel, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Ralph Trouillot, Sadiya Hartman, Walter Rodney, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon. This course will focus largely on thinkers engaging within the Black Atlantic and black diaspora traditions to question how we might consider voices and thought from beyond Eurocentric positions in our own scholarly practice.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Is a neighborhood just a grouping of individuals living in the same place, or do neighborhoods have collective meanings and impacts on children and families? We will capitalize on research methodologies used to define and describe neighborhoods and their effects on economic and educational outcomes. These include case studies, census data, surveys, quasi/experimental data. Focus is on how research measures neighborhood effects and incorporates community level processes into models of social causation (e.g., social capital/control, community efficacy, civic engagement). Also examined: patterns in residential mobility, segregation, and preferences within black and white populations; development of housing policy in the U.S.; programs to determine how neighborhoods affect issues of social importance. Statistics and public policy background is helpful but not required.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course is an examination of sociological theories and studies of African-American families and an overview of the major issues confronting African-American family life. The contemporary conditions of black families are explored, as well as the historical events that have influenced the family patterns we currently observe. Special attention will be given to social policies that have evolved as a result of the prominence of any one perspective at a given point in time.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course provides "hands on" research experience applying sociological research tools and a sociological perspective to problems of substance. Qualitative observational and/or interviewing methods will be emphasized. Students will design and carry out a research project and write a research report. This course fulfills the "research practicum" requirement for the Sociology major.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will examine the concepts of race, racism, racial privilege in contemporary America, and the West in general. Examples from other countries will be integrated as well. Historical contexts such as the colonialism, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement, and the post Civil Rights era will help to provide an understanding of the social, political, economic, and cultural forces processes that have constructed and shaped the concepts of race and the racialized subject over time.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course uses the city of Baltimore as a lens through which to explore issues of urban inequality. We will focus on Baltimore's history of racial segregation and concentrated poverty, and its effect on the social and economic well-being of the city and its residents, with attention to education, employment, health and crime. Students will learn how to employ Census data, GIS approaches, and sociological research to inform questions about population change, inequality and the distribution of resources across the city and metropolitan region. Students will also work on one or more policy relevant studies based in Baltimore, including: a project on abandoned and vacant housing, a desegregation intervention, and a longitudinal study of inner city youth. Finally, students will become familiar with Baltimore City's programs and policy approaches to addressing the city's most pressing problems, and will design innovative and effective and innovative solutions as part of their course assignments. Enrollment restricted to Social Policy minors only.
Prerequisite(s): Students that took AS.360.357 may not take AS.230.357
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This course will examine the reciprocal relationship between Black social thought and social movements. How have social movements informed thinkers who grapple with questions of freedom and liberation in racially and economically stratified societies, and how have their ideas affected movement tactics? This course will look at 20th century movements and investigate connections between theory and practice through concepts like civil disobedience, internal colonialism, Black feminism, Black internationalism, and others.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Writing Intensive
This seminar examines the theories and historiography of colonialism and anti-colonial movements. It focuses on the establishment of the colonial division of labor, comparative colonialism, identity formation, and nationalism as well as anti-colonial movement.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
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.
Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
Study of Women, Gender, Sexuality
In this course, we will get to know intersectional feminist philosophy through the lens of a Black feminist epistemology. What does this mean? That means that we will focus on how the contributions of Black feminist authors can bring out the specific political and philosophical nature of an intersectional theoretical framework.
Area: Humanities
In 1977, feminist theorist Marilyn Frye asked, “What is it about separation, in any or all of its many forms and degrees, that makes it so basic and so sinister, so exciting and so repellent?” Her essay, “Some Reflections on Separatism and Power” was a response to the emergence and persistence in the 1960s of a feminist separatist politics, as well as its many detractors, both from outside the feminist movement and within (many black feminists, for example, critiqued the movement’s essentialism and its positioning of gender and sexuality above considerations of race). Today, Frye’s question still remains a live one; think, for example, of the now commonplace exclamation that one will “move to Canada” (or “leave Earth” as Tina Fey has it) in the face of an ominous political possibility. In a less facetious form, one might consider the separatism latent in the emergence of queer futurity politics, safe space discourse, and a more general pessimism about reform and assimilation as satisfying answers to a continually oppressive status quo. In this course, we will consider the ongoing salience of the idea ofseparatism, particularly as it is engaged within politics of gender and sexuality.
Area: Humanities
Introducing feminist approaches to ecology and nonhumans, this course considers the interconnections between heteropatriarchal domination and the domination of nonhuman animals and ecologies. What different sensibilities and ways of seeing sex and gender open up when attention shifts to nonhumans? What tensions within and between feminism, animal liberation, and ecological concern come to the fore when each approach is alongside the others? How does the study of nonhumans extend the promise of feminism, and vice versa? In responding to these questions, we will see the real breadth of issues that the theory and practice of feminism can address.
Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
Writing Seminars
This course will explore the context and craft of racial passing texts in the U.S, asking students to think critically about literal passing narratives and their persistence over time, and more broadly about how we write about cultural passing, codeswitching, and identity as conscious performance. We’ll start with texts that ground us in the genre—Chopin, Larsen, Fauset, Ellison, and Morrison—and read our way into contemporary texts, potentially including work by Danzy Senna, Mat Johnson, Brit Bennett, Min Jin Lee, and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo. Students will write a critical paper, a craft paper, and a short story or novella.
Prerequisite(s): AS.220.200
Area: Humanities
In this Community-Based Learning course, students will explore poetry of social and political engagement in partnership with high-school age writers from Writers in Baltimore Schools. Participants will put learning into practice by organizing community conversation, reflection, and collaboration. Participation in some events outside of class time will be required.
Area: Humanities