Chloe Center for the Critical Study of Racism, Immigration, and Colonialism

Tom Jobim, best known as the composer of the bossa nova classic “Girl from Ipanema,” once quipped, “Brazil is not for beginners.” Beyond enduring stereotypes, the complexities and contradictions of Brazilian society have long been fertile ground for anthropological inquiry. This seminar offers close readings of classic and contemporary ethnography that interrogate Brazilian society as a set of questions and paradoxes.  We will also explore, conversely, how studies in Brazil have deeply shaped core anthropological thought.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.070.636, are not eligible to take AS.070.336.

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

The Korean War from the dominant U.S. perspective is seen as a “forgotten war”, one that today registers in caricatures of the predicament of the two Koreas. This course will explore the entangled histories of empire in the Korean War. It will seek to shift our understanding of Korean War from a U.S. dominated Cold War perspective to the Inter Asian contexts in which war unfolded. Further, it will examine closely how scholars in Korea and diasporic scholars have engaged an ongoing war and partition and moved beyond ethnonationalist frameworks. As a study of war, we will consider how techniques of punishment and torture came to be justified and refined in specific sites, the role of the Korean War within multiple other wars, such as Vietnam, and in mass atrocity (such as Gwangju Uprising and Massacre) and the figure of the political prisoner and the subject of humanitarianism.

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

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

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5), Projects and Methods (FA6)

Take a moment to reflect on the present and future, and it is difficult to escape a sense of things breaking down in a fundamental way. But cycles of breakdown and repair are an ecological reality. And human communities, especially those marginalized and exploited by prevailing social and political structures, have long pursued repair and reparation as matters of both survival and justice. This course thinks through ideas of repair as means of engaging with contemporary social and ecological impasses in a spirit of restitution. Drawing from environmental anthropology, materialist philosophy, and abolitionist thought, we will work to chart the ethical and strategic promise of repair as a mode of engagement with toxic and unlivable circumstances. We will also work in the manner of a collective studio, each of us pursuing and charting a specific practice of repair.

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)

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

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

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)

This graduate seminar (welcoming advanced undergrads with instructor permission) 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.

Although fundamentally grounded in human existence, Illness, pain, and suffering are also cultural experiences that have been depicted in literature and film. The way different cultures relate to and convey pain is embedded in the cosmogonic ideas each society holds about suffering and its outcomes. Reading through different literary texts from different parts of the world and drawing on movies that portray varied experiences of illness, this course aims to help students think about illness and its ramifications in a more transcultural way in order to understand how illness functions across different geographic, climatic, political, and social conditions. The students will also gain a better understanding of the causes of pain, its symptoms, and the different manners in which the authors and filmmakers whose works we will study mediate it to their readers and viewers. From basic traditional potions to hyper-modern medical technologies, illness also mobilizes different types of science across cultures and social classes. By the end of the course, students will develop an ethics of reading for illness not a as monolithic condition but rather as an experience that has unique cultural codes and mechanisms that need to be known to better understand it and probably treat it.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

There are almost 500 million Indigenous people in the world. They speak a variety of languages, produce knowledge in their mother tongues, and have deep connections to their lands and cultures. Indigenous people have been at the helm of a Global Indigeneity Movement that has mobilized both scholarship and activism in search of a better world. Despite their best efforts, the rich indigenous cultural production and their worldviews remain confined to very limited circles. Building on the notion of "indigenous ecologies," which spans a wide range of approaches and fields, this course will interrogate some of the salient questions related to literature, translation, extraction, environmentalism, and social justice from the perspective of Indigenous creators. The students will engage with materials produced by Indigenous thinkers, filmmakers, activists, and academic scholars to gain a deeper understanding of indigeneity across cultures and continents as well as the myriad critical ways in which its proponents approach knowledge production, climate change, and many other pressing questions.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This discussion-based seminar will survey science fiction written by indigenous authors in what are now the United States, Canada, and Australia. We will investigate by what means and to what ends this particular genre has been taken up by indigenous peoples both to reflect on their settler-colonial pasts and presents and to imagine decolonial futures. Texts may include: Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead; William Sanders, "The Undiscovered"; Daniel Heath Justice, The Way of Thorn and Thunder; Blake Hausman, Riding the Trail of Tears; Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow; Claire Coleman, Terra Nullius; Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.

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

This seminar offers an introduction to a key concept in contemporary critical theory and literary and cultural studies: settler colonialism, understood as a specific form of colonialism undergirded by the expropriation of land and resources rather than the exploitation of labor and thereby involving the attempted elimination and replacement of Indigenous polities and societies by an invading force. The course will have a dual focus: 1) tracing the theoretical distinction of settler colonialism from other forms of colonialism and tracking the critique implicit in this distinction of dominant forms of leftism that arguably presuppose a settler-colonial frame of reference; 2) tracking the history of what James Belich has called the “Anglo settler revolution” of the nineteenth century and engaging in a comparative analysis of the literatures produced in the course of that revolution in what are now Ireland, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken, or are currently enrolled in AS.060.636, are not eligible to take AS.060.436.

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

The Cold War was a defining event of the 20th century. But what was it? Where did it take place? Who were the major contenders? And what were the consequences? This introductory course will examine the Cold War in a global context, looking beyond the United States and Europe. Students will learn about how the Cold War unfolded in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, in relation to the fall of European empires, the process of decolonization, and the rise of U.S. global power. This course will introduce students to key themes and primary sources in the study of the Global Cold War, as a foundation for further courses in History, Critical Diaspora Studies, International Studies, Political Science, etc.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)

Jewish history 1750-present in Europe, the Near East, the US, Israel; the challenges of modernity and new forms of Jewish life and conflict from Enlightenment and emancipation, Hasidism, Reform and Orthodox Judaism to capitalism and socialism; empire, nationalism and Zionism; the Holocaust. Extensive attention to US Jewry and State of Israel.

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)

From 1565 to 1815, the Manila galleons sailed between Spanish colonies in the Philippines and Mexico. Thousands of free and enslaved Asians from all over coastal Asia disembarked these ships at Acapulco and, within decades, could be found throughout Mexico, Central America, and Peru. A second and larger migratory wave of Chinese and South Asian contract laborers arrived in the Caribbean and South America during the nineteenth century. This course examines these two waves and their entanglements to chart the trajectories of the earliest Asian diasporas in the Americas. In the evaluation of these topics, we will pay close attention to racialization, cross-cultural exchange, lived experience, and unfree labor.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This class reassesses the history of the Cold War through sports. We will investigate how the Cold War has shaped sports, the Olympic movement, the role of athletes at home and abroad. We will discuss how sports intersected with domestic and foreign policy, and how sports constructed, reinforced, and challenged notions of race, gender, and class. We will also interview JHU alumni and former athletes who made a career out of sports.

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

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

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.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

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.

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

In The Great Derangement Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh writes that “the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of imagination.” Worldwide, climate and environmental change is stirring the imaginary of novelists, filmmakers, and artists who are finding ways to frame, emplot, or even perform, an unmanageable phenomenon like climate change. How is climate change shaping new modes of storytelling and aesthetics? How do film, literature, and environmentally conscious art transform our perception of the world we inhabit and its unpredictable changes? Can climate change narratives help us to imagine futures of possibilities, maybe dystopian, uncertain, or even happy, but futures nonetheless? This multimedia course explores, through a transnational perspective, a variety of contemporary novels, films, and other media that attempt answer these questions.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

This course examines the intersection of speculative fiction, horror, science fiction, and hauntings with latinidad. Reading a variety of short stories, novels, and films, we investigate how genre fiction addresses the unique experience of Latinxs in the Americas, compelling us to reimagine what the speculative can be as it intersects with race and ethnicity.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3), Engagement with Society (FA4)

This seminar takes as its jumping off point the question of how the representation of race and ethnicity intersects with theories surrounding aesthetics, literary form, and speculation writ large, proposing that the investigation of these elements and their various imbrications offer an important aperture to consider the contemporary, and ways to reflect on the haunting remainders of history as they become manifest in cultural production.

Distribution Area: Humanities

This course surveys museums, from their origins to their most contemporary forms, in the context of broader historical, intellectual, and cultural trends including the social movements of the 20th century. Anthropology, art, history, and science museums are considered.

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

This course critically examines the role of exhibitions in shaping cultural narratives and public understanding of people and places across the globe. Students will explore the history, theory, and practice of exhibiting cultures in museums, galleries, and digital platforms. Topics include curatorial ethics, representation and identity, postcolonial critiques, audience engagement, and the impact of emerging technologies on exhibition design. Through case studies and hands-on projects, students will analyze how cultural heritage is displayed and interpreted, considering issues of appropriation, authenticity, and inclusivity. The course culminates in a final project where students conceptualize and design their own cultural exhibition proposal.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

Oral Histories are a means by which history is both generated and preserved. Talking to and recording people in their own voices is immensely valuable, but also brings challenges. This course equips students with the ideas, theoretical framework and methods of making and interpreting oral histories and provides hands-on experience researching, designing and creating an archival record of our time to professional standards. Our project focuses on Baltimore's Confederate monuments. We will interview key stakeholders in debates that led to their removal and in ongoing conversations about what to do with them now.

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)

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: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

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

What is a refugee? Since World War II, states that have pledged to offer protection to refugees have frequently been drawn instead to the dictates of nationalism and communitarianism, which prioritize concern for their own citizens, rather than to the needs of forced migrants. As a result, even those migrants that have been formally recognized as refugees according to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention have not been assured of protection, and other migrants have been even less assured. In this course, we will locate the reasons for this reality in the legal, political, and historical underpinnings of political asylum. What is the difference between an asylum seeker and a refugee? How has the refugee category been redefined and contested by international bodies since 1951? How are the ambiguities of real-life violence and persecution simplified in asylum adjudication interviews that require clear, factual narratives? What kinds of protections are offered to asylum seekers, whether by UN bodies, NGOs, or host governments, and how have such protections varied geographically and historically? Finally, what protections, if any, are afforded to those migrants who are fleeing not persecution but rather “merely” endemic poverty or climate-induced displacement? The course draws on literature from sociology, history, anthropology, and international refugee law in order to understand the capacity (or lack thereof) of human rights discourses and declarations to contravene state sovereignty in the name of protecting the rightless.

Distribution Area: 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

The United States incarcerates more people than any other democratic country in the world; Baltimore City has the highest incarceration rate in Maryland, with 1 in every 100 residents locked up in a state prison. In this publicly-engaged course, students will learn about mass incarceration in the United States—its history, its dysfunction, and its current impact on the Baltimore community. In addition to reading and reflecting on personal narratives from the American Prison Writing Archive (housed at the JHU Sheridan Libraries), we will interact with organizers, activists, educators, and writers working with and on behalf of currently and formerly incarcerated people. In partnership with a Baltimore reentry program serving formerly incarcerated women, students will perform interviews and assist individual memoir projects.

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

An introduction for students unfamiliar with the Korean language but interested in Korean culture / literature. Students will read a variety of translated texts, especially of works written in the 20th and early 21st centuries by authors including Kim Tong-in, Hwang Sun-won, Pak Wanso, Hwang Sok-yong and Han Kang; there will also be classes on traditional sijo poetry. Students will become familiar with Korean literary genres and formal features, and develop a broad understanding of the historical and sociocultural context of Korean literature.

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