International Studies

What does it take for people to engage productively as informed, skilled, and effective members of democratic communities and the world? Whether we are scientists, doctors, engineers, advocates, public servants, or anything else, we are all members of pluralistic communities. This introductory course seeks to introduce students to the theory and principles of civic life and the rights and responsibilities of active citizenship. We’ll examine the history of and struggles for freedom, inclusion, and civic participation, the role of information, deliberation, and free expression in the public sphere, and the threats and opportunities for global democracy. Students will read and discuss materials by civic studies and democracy scholars, building a foundational understanding of civic life across disciplines and perspectives. Many of these scholars and practitioners will appear in class to discuss their work directly with students. The course will pay particular attention to the ways that students from all backgrounds can apply these ideas in their everyday lives, regardless of the professions they pursue. This course is also the first course for students interested in minoring in the SNF Agora Institute Minor on Civic Life, but is designed to inspire a commitment to participation in civic life for all students, including those who do not major or minor in related fields.

Distribution Area: 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)

Once, many believed the information revolution would undermine autocracies and energize democracies. Instead, we live in an era of unprecedented disinformation, propaganda and media manipulation. Can we reverse these developments? How do we fight back? This course will look at examples of propaganda and disinformation in the past, especially in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, as well as the present: Russia, Latin America, Europe, and the US. We will analyze how our information environment has been transformed, and think about how to create alternatives that will help deliberative democracy flourish.

Prerequisite(s): Students may earn credit for AS.196.310 or AS.196.610 or AS.196.364, but not all three.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

American elections – even rare, unexpected, or paradigm-busting elections – do not occur in a vacuum. Instead, they are created, shaped, and constructed by a variety of significant forces, over time.This seminar thus suggests that you cannot understand modern American politics and contests, including the 2024 election and the upcoming 2026 election, without examining the historical antecedents that make the present-day moment possible. Consequently, while enrolled in this seminar, students will grapple with the following central question: what are the foundational moments in modern American social, political, and economic history that provided the “building blocks” for the 2026 United States Midterm Elections? How can we use history to analyze and explain the developments of the 2026 election, and put them in context as those moments are happening in real time?

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This is an introductory course for those interested in gaining basic knowledge about contemporary Iran. It assumes no previous expertise and is open to undergraduates at all levels including Freshmen. The aim is to deepen our understanding of Iran and of the ways in which culture, religion, and politics might get entangled.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

Given that we inhabit a world after European colonialism, some would argue that empires are an artifact of the past. Yet, imperialism continues to shape our contemporary multipolar world. In this interdisciplinary seminar, students will explore topics ranging from transnational anti-colonial worldmaking projects to (post)colonial infrastructures, to the politics of citizenship and race, contested border regimes, and the rise of far-right movements to focus on the modalities of (im)mobility, subject formation, and how difference and belonging within these often-fraught imperial settings have been both defined and defied. We will also attend to non-European imperial varieties and decenter a Eurocentric perspective on migration and empire.SPECIAL NOTE: There will be a $30 lab fee for the course.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course invites students to critically examine China’s growing engagement and influence on a global scale. Over the past two decades, China’s outbound investments, loans, infrastructure projects, migration, medical, and cultural initiatives have surged dramatically. These sweeping yet variegated footprints have profoundly shaped the international political and economic landscapes. What are the peculiarities of China’s overseas practices, processes, patterns, and policies in a globalized world? This course will guide any undergraduate at Hopkins with an interest in contemporary China to analyze the multifaceted dimensions of “Global China” using ethnographic methods and other social science approaches. The course is designed to attract students from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, political science, economics, international studies, East Asian studies and Africana studies. The course is structured into three units. In the first unit, students will be introduced to the general phenomena, multi-level dynamics, and reflective methodological frameworks of Global China, laying the groundwork for the remainder of the course. In the second unit, students will explore how Global China manifests across various domains, including industry, agriculture, infrastructure, resources, and medicine. In the third unit, students will reflect on the interactions between overseas Chinese entrepreneurs and local populations, Chinese political-economic power and soft power, as well as the relationships among different overseas Chinese communities.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This seminar explores the formation of Black Atlantic worlds through a selection of historical and ethnographic texts, material artifacts, and films. We will encounter familiar themes of slavery, revolution, commodity production, and imperial power recast in the minor key of the Black experience. Exploring major works by anthropologists, particularly key figures from Johns Hopkins, the course also examines how studies of transatlantic movements have reshaped our very understanding of history and culture, not simply as static or official forms but as fields of contention.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

Bangladesh, the small, populous Muslim majority country in South Asia, steadily moving into middle income status, offers an off-centered but important vantage point upon the political culture of the region. We will read several new historical and ethnographic works, combined with film, fiction and art, to get a feel for this perspective, even as we interrogate what Bangladesh presumes about itself.

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

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

Writing Intensive

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

What is violence? Ubiquitous as a concept, it remains difficult to define both its essences and boundaries. How do we distinguish between criminality, organized, and unorganized violence? Is violence the antithesis of society, or a central component of it? In this course, we will disscuss the concept of violence, the challenges of writing about it and explore the potentials that emerge from bodies subjugated to racialized/gendered forms of violence. We will examine a number of different ethnographic spaces, including genocide in Rwanda, conflict resolution among the Nuer, the concept of criminality in Indonesia, largescale massacres in Thailand, and police violence in the United States

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.070.645 are not eligible to take AS.070.345.

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

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

One quarter of the planet's urban population lives today in slums, shantytowns, favelas, chawls, colonias and other forms of rudimentary settlements (according to UN Habitat). Despite their prevalence throughout the world, these places are still depicted as spaces of informality and abjection, rather than as sites of emergence ofinnovative -even if disadvantaged-, makeshift ways of producing the city. This course will combine ethnographic and geographical literature, as well as works of fiction and film to explore the lives of squatters and slum-dwellers in many regions of the world and examine in what way their practices, forms of dwelling, sociality, conflict and cooperation are constitutive of the urban experience.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

What role does resistance play in black political thought and action? How do black concepts of resistance shape broader political processes? How are these concepts essential in understanding political development past and present?

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

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

Writing Intensive

This course will examine the confrontation of Black social movements with imperialism in the twentieth century. How, we will ask, have key Black internationalist thinkers conceptualized and defined diaspora, capitalism, imperialism, war, and the global? What have been the effects of war and repression, as well as economic growth and globalization, on Black internationalism? Readings may include texts by W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Y. Davis, Frantz Fanon, Ashley Farmer, Claudia Jones, Robin D.G. Kelley, Claude McKay, Huey P. Newton, Walter Rodney, Malcolm X, etc. Students will complete a research paper on a topic of their own choosing related to Black internationalism in the twentieth century.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course explores the historical, theoretical, and political question of liberation in the African diaspora from the period of enslavement up to the current era. We will consider three major themes: enslavement, marronage, and freedom; Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism; Black Power and national liberation. We will examine how African peoples conceptualized freedom and liberation in each period, the major organizations and intellectuals who framed them, and how popular activity developed and informed all three (ideas, organizations, and intellectuals). Some of the questions taken up include: How did enslaved Africans conceptualize freedom? Did their ideas and activities merely extend western notions of liberty and freedom, or did they develop distinct conceptions of freedom, rights, and humanity? Why, in the early Twentieth Century, did African peoples around the world pursue pan-Africanism as a political philosophy? How do class, nationality, gender, and sexuality inform such movements? Did national liberation struggles from the 1950s through the 1970s in Africa and the Caribbean bring about fundamental changes to those societies or merely replicate colonial regimes? What connections existed between national liberation movements in Africa and the Caribbean, and Civil Rights and Black Power in the United States and England?

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Washington, DC, is the capital of the United States but also the capital of its post–World War II national security state and military-industrial complex. This course will investigate the local effects of this status on the Washington-Baltimore corridor, in terms of immigration and urban development. The course will be divided into three major sections. First, we will analyze the growth and development of the military-industrial complex. Second, we will look at its place in the city and region’s development, including the construction of the Pentagon, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, and other institutions. Third, we will analyze how these institutions have driven changes in the region’s population, as immigrants from war-torn parts of the globe have found new homes in and near Washington, DC. This course requires at least four Friday group trips to 555 Penn in Washington, which will take most of the day (transportation provided).

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

What can we learn about mass incarceration, and social life in the USA more broadly, when we listen to incarcerated people themselves? This course centers the voices, experiences, and expertise of the incarcerated and will combine scholarly readings on life inside prisons with a range of writings by incarcerated people. Topics of discussion may include censorship, rehabilitation, Covid-19, solitary confinement, sexuality, racism, etc. Students will learn to probe primary-source collections to amplify silenced and overlooked voices, while completing a multi-stage research project. Prior course experience on mass incarceration preferred.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Writing Intensive

This course is a survey of the bases and substance of politics among black Americans and the relation of black politics to the American political system up to the end of Jim Crow. The intention is both to provide a general sense of pertinent issues and relations over this period as a way of helping to make sense of the present and to develop criteria for evaluating political scientists' and others' claims regarding the status and characteristics of black American political activity.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course begins with an investigation of the history of social democracy in Europe, from origins to crisis to reconstruction, and then “globalizes” this in three ways: first, by asking how colonial relations affected social democracy in Europe; second, by examining social democratic movements in other countries; and third, by considering what would have to happen to enable a genuinely global social democracy.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Competition, Conflict, and Coordination is a reading seminar. It builds on and extends topics from elements of microeconomics and looks at modern, strategic models of how people, firms, and governments interact, seeing the importance and pervasiveness of external effects in people’s decision-making and how they can result in coordination failures. We model exchange and examine how different rules affect the potential gains from cooperation and how unequally they are distributed. We draw on insights and evidence from behavioral economics to understand risk, cooperation, altruism, and trust. These insights help us to understand people’s attitudes towards government policies like redistribution, taxation, and the funding of education. The course concludes with a basic introduction to mechanism design looking at applications like taxing behaviors governments want to curb (such as smoking and drinking), the provision of public goods, and designing policies when people have incentives to lie. It is strongly recommended that students have at least one semester of calculus.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course offers an introductory survey of foundational authors of modern philosophy and moral and political thought whose ideas continue to influence contemporary problems and debates. The course is taught in lectures and seminar discussions. Authors studied include Plato, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch, James Baldwin, Cora Diamond, Judith Butler, Kwame A. Appiah and others.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

What is the proper role of the arts and artists in society? Is censorship of the arts or artists ever permissible, for political or other reasons? How may artists and their publics challenge conventional frames of reference or control, state-sponsored or otherwise? Are any of the arts better suited than others to resistance or opposition? Are any of the arts better suited than the others to fostering control and compliance? This class will employ a comparative framework to examine these and other central questions raised by theories and histories of authoritarianism and the arts. It will investigate various theoretical and philosophical frameworks for understanding its key concepts, ranging from Plato, Kant, and Tolstoy to Dewey, Adorno, Arendt, and beyond. The class will concentrate on specific case studies drawn from across world history, beginning with examples from the early modern era, moving into the twentieth-century (including Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, the USSR, China, and the US 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s), and ending with the present day worldwide. It will draw on various art forms, including music, visual arts, literature, film, and various combinations of these and other art forms.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

his class explores the art, culture, and history of the Soviet and post-Soviet peripheries, meaning the non-Russian republics of the USSR, including, among others, the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), and the diverse countries of Central Asia including Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan). We will focus on notable examples from different art forms, including literature (fiction and poetry), music (popular, traditional, and classical), film, and the visual arts, as we investigate questions about identity, power, cultural politics, and coloniality and decoloniality from the early twentieth century up to the present. Representative creators include Oksana Zabuzhko (The Museum of Abandoned Secrets), Dato Turashvili (Flight from the USSR), Chinghiz Aitmatov (The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years), Rashid Nugmanov (The Needle), Sergei Parajanov (The Color of Pomegranates), Kira Muratova (The Piano Tuner), Valentyn Sylvestrov, Viktor Tsoi, the Ganelin Trio, and Sainkho Namchylak. We will consider how different Soviet and post-Soviet thinkers from representative traditions wrestled with local definitions of “Sovietness” as well as with varied interpretations of the “post-Soviet.” The discourse of socialist realism and its bureaucratic and aesthetic negotiations will be a central topic, but so too will divergences from Moscow-centered artistic and philosophical demands

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

The “founding father of modern Chinese literature,” Lu Xun (1881-1936) saw himself as a contemporary of writers like Gogol, Ibsen, and Nietzsche in creating his seminal short stories and essays, and likewise, he has been seen by numerous Chinese and Sinophone writers as their contemporary since his lifetime until today. In this course, we will survey Lu Xun's canonical works and their legacies through a comparative approach. What echoes do Lu Xun's works have with the European and Russian texts he engaged with? Why did his works manage to mark a “new origin” of Chinese literature? How were his works repeated, adapted, and appropriated by Chinese and Sinophone writers from the Republican period through the Maoist era to the post-socialist present, even during the Covid-19 pandemic? Are his times obsolete now that China is on the rise? Or, have his times come yet? We will raise these questions to guide our comparative investigation into Lu Xun’s works and their legacies in China’s long twentieth century and beyond.

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

Modern literature in East Asia is as much defined by creation of national boundaries as by their transgressions, negotiations, and reimaginations. This course examines literature originally written in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in light of contemporary understandings of political, social, and cultural boundary demarcation and crossings. How do experiences of border-crossing create and/or alter literary forms? How, in turn, does literature inscribe, displace, and/or dismantle boundaries? Our readings will include, but not limited to, writings by intra- and trans-regional travelers, exiles, migrants, and settlers; stories from and on contested borderlands and islands (e.g. Manchuria, Okinawa, Jeju); and works and translations by bilingual authors. All readings are provided in English translation.

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

This course will investigate the policy and scientific debate over global warming. It will review the current state of scientific knowledge about climate change, examine the potential impacts and implications of climate change, explore our options for responding to climate change, and discuss the present political debate over global warming.

Prerequisite(s): AS.270.103 or permission of instructor

Distribution Area: Natural Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

From North Korea’s nuclear threat to South Korea’s K-pop, Korea is constantly in the US media. But how much do you know about Korea? This introductory course is designed to introduce students to the long and complex cultural history of Korea. While focusing on key aspects in shaping premodern and modern Korean identity, the course also places Korea in a larger cross-national context, particularly its close interactions with China and Japan. Reading primary and secondary sources combined with visual materials, the course chronologically and thematically examines major historical moments, from Korea’s participation in and exit from a Sino-centric premodern world order, Japanese colonialism and its ramifications in Korean society, economic development and democratization, to the global popularity of Korean popular culture.

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)

Writing Intensive

This seminar introduces students to the phenomenon of migration in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan from theoretical, empirical, and comparative perspectives. The objectives of the course are to understand the 1) historical context behind present-day migrations in East Asia; 2) different patterns of migration flows and their consequences on receiving countries; 3) various theoretical frameworks for migration. The course is divided into three parts. In the first part, the course will examine theoretical approaches to migration, structured around the question of whether East Asia as a region represents a distinct model of migration. In the second, students will explore the empirical cases in greater detail by comparing and contrasting the different types of migrations. The third part addresses the responses to migration by host governments and societies and the implications of migration on citizenship and identity. Recommended Course Background: any class related to the history or politics of Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and/or China.

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 course explores the intersection of U.S. national security strategy, emerging technologies, and alliance partnerships in East Asia. Through readings, discussions, guest speakers, and a group project (oral policy briefing and policy memo), students will examine the roles of executive and legislative actors, the private sector, and foreign governments in shaping the future of technology partnerships with key U.S. allies and partners. The final assignment simulates an interagency memo-writing and briefing exercise to the National Security Advisor.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course is a broad survey of what leadership looks like in China. The main through-line of the course is the how China’s leaders navigate the often challenging terrain between constraints and incentives, on the one hand, and opportunities to apply their own individual agency. We will explore the state as the arena in which all this takes place over time (to explore continuity and change) and across space (to explore adaptation and innovation). The course does not presume prior knowledge of China or Chinese language, but students new to the study of China are encouraged to pay special attention to the cumulative nature of the course and invest in the readings, particularly in the first four weeks. Although some of the themes of this course may minimally overlap with/reinforce other Chinese politics courses offered at JHU, the approach to this class will be significantly different.

Distribution Area: 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)

The global political and security landscape of the 21st century will be shaped by the rivalry between two superpowers -- China and the U.S. For the foreseeable future, the geographic focus of that contest will be Southeast Asia and the surrounding maritime space, particularly the South China Sea. Southeast Asia is a complex, highly differentiated region of ten-plus nations, each with its own unique history and relationship with China. This course will introduce Southeast Asia as a key region -- geographically, economically, and strategically -- often overlooked by policymakers and scholars. It will also focus on the craft of national security strategy as the best tool for understanding the multi-sided competition, already well underway involving China, the U.S., and the Southeast Asian states.

Distribution Area: 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 explores the transformation of labor relations in China over the past century. It will cover the origins of the labor movement, the changes brought about by the 1949 Revolution, the industrial battles of the Cultural Revolution, the traumatic restructuring of state-owned enterprises over the past two decades, the rise of private enterprise and export-oriented industry, the conditions faced by migrant workers today, and recent developments in industrial relations and labor conflict. The course is designed for upper division undergraduates and graduate students.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

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

Writing Intensive

We will try to get a quick overview of the recent history of patriarchy in China, South Korea, and Japan from the mid-twentieth century to our present and then compare the initiatives of feminists to transform the lives of women throughout these three societies. We will also debate whether or how it makes sense to adapt the Western notions of patriarchy and sexism as well as the Western political program of feminism to the non-Western context of East Asia by reading books by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

You will learn about the efforts of ordinary, non-elite Muslims to shape the relation between their communities and the state as well as to (where applicable) the non-Muslim majority through collective organizing over the last forty years. We will read and discuss books by anthropologists, historians, and sociologists studying Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, China, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Ever since the Chinese Empire fell in 1911, Chinese have tried to think of themselves as modern and to build a modern Chinese state. Among the Western concepts that Chinese appropriated to define and comprehend themselves were the notions of ethnicity, culture, nationality, and race. We will try to answer the following questions: What was the allure of arcane and elusive Western categories on culture, ethnicity, and race for Chinese scientists in the 20th century, and how did these categories come to underpin the rule of the Chinese state over its enormous population since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949? How have the Chinese state’s policies on nationality and ethnicity shaped the minds of American China scholars as they study ethnicity and nationality in China?

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)

Diplomacy can occur in several forms, or “tracks,” that engage a range of actors critical to managing or changing state to state relations. In an increasingly complex geopolitical environment, formal government to government diplomacy, or Track 1, can be constrained by various political realities in an increasingly complex geostrategic environment. In East Asia in particular, maintaining peace and security despite the state of formal diplomatic relations is crucial, given the high prospects of nuclear use in case of war. Finding ways to overcome these challenges, creating an environment more conducive for Track 1 to restart or expand, and establishing channels of communication in the absence of Track 1 relations is often done through nongovernmental actors in a number of ways. This course will examine the role of multitrack diplomacy, both past and present, in engaging both allies and adversaries in East Asia, to help build understanding and trust, explore potential pathways forward, and help prevent conflict in this vital and dynamic region. It will examine case studies of US efforts to engage China and North Korea, strategic dialogues with US allies in the region, and broader multilateral efforts in the region, focused on how these approaches have fed into or helped support formal diplomatic processes.

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

On 13 October 2022, a middle-aged upper-middle class Chinese man staged a public political protest on an elevated road in Beijing. Peng Lifa, or “Bridge Man,” as he has become known in allusion to Tank Man from the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989, demanded elections and reforms. How have urban Chinese been able to be so content or even happy despite their lack of political freedom? The class readings will introduce you to different kinds of activists who have confronted the authoritarian state since the late 1990s, among them human rights lawyers, reporters, environmental activists, feminists, religious activists, and labor activists. We will ask whether freedom, an obviously Western notion, is useful as an analytical category to think about China. Does freedom translate across the West/non-West divide?

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course will survey the major issues of development and social change in rural China since 1950s. These issues will be addressed in chronological order. They include land ownership and land grabbing, organization of rural economic, political, and social life, rural elections and village governance, development strategies, urban-rural relationship in resource allocation, rural modernization strategies in regard to irrigation, clean drinking water, electricity supply, hard paved road, education and rural medical service, women’s rights and family life, rural consumption, and etc. This course will prepare students, both empirically and analytically, to understand what happened in rural China from 1949 to the present, and how we can engage in policy and theoretical discussions based on what we learn.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

An introduction to the economic system and economic analysis, with emphasis on total national income and output, employment, the price level and inflation, money, the government budget, the national debt, and interest rates. The role of public policy. Applications of economic analysis to government and personal decisions. Prerequisite: basic facility with graphs and algebra.

Distribution Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

An introduction to the economic system and economic analysis, with an emphasis on demand and supply, relative prices, the allocation of resources, and the distribution of goods and services. It covers the theory of consumer behavior, the theory of the firm, and competition and monopoly, including the application of microeconomic analysis to contemporary problems. The course includes lectures twice a week, each 75 minutes, and a TA session once a week for 50 minutes. The TA session is highly recommended, and attendance in both the lecture class and TA section is crucial for a better performance in the course. Students must check the dates and times of the TA sections before registering for a particular section.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

Increased mobility of people across national borders, whether by choice or by force, has become an integral part of the modern world. Using a comparative perspective and an applied economics approach, the course explores the economic and political determinants, and (likely) consequences of migration flows for East Asia, the US and the EU. Lectures, assignments and in class discussions, will be built around the following topics: i) migrants’ self-selection; ii) human capital investment decision-making; iii) remittance decisions and effects; iv) impacts on labor markets of both receiving and sending countries; and v) the economic benefits from immigration. Overall, the course will give students perspective on the why people choose or feel compelled to leave their countries, how receiving countries respond to migrants’ presence, and the key economic policy concerns that are influencing the shaping of immigration policy in East Asia, the US, and the EU.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

In 2001, Jim O’Neill, the Chief Economist at Goldman Sachs, coined the acronym BRIC to identify the four large emerging economies, Brazil, Russia, India and China. These economies had an amazing run for the next decade, and emerged as the biggest and fastest growing emerging markets. However, since 2014 there has been some divergence in the BRICs’ economic performance. In this course, we look at the economic experiences of the BRIC countries for the past several decades. We discuss the reasons that contributed to their exceptional growth rates, with particular emphasis on their transformation into market economies, and the reasons for their eventual divergence. We also analyze some of the challenges that these countries continue to face in their development process.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

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

Writing Intensive

Game Theory is the study of multiple person decision problems in which the well-being of a decision maker depends not only on his own actions but also on those of others. Such problems arise frequently in economics, political science, business, military science and many other areas. In this course, we will learn how to model different social situations as games and how to use solution concepts to understand players' behavior. We will consider various examples from different fields and will play several games in class. The emphasis of the class is on the conceptual analysis and applications and we will keep the level of mathematical technicalities at the minimum -- high school algebra and one term of calculus will be sufficient. Students who took AS.180.117 are not eligible to take AS.180.217.

Prerequisite(s): Students may not have previously taken AS.180.117.;AS.180.102 or instructor permission

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

Many sub-Saharan African countries are among the least developed countries in the world. In this course, we explore the economic development experiences of African countries, with more focus on sub-Saharan Africa. The course starts with a historical perspective, delves into development strategies, and examines evidence on successes and failures of some case study countries. We conclude by analyzing the many challenges that these countries continue to face in their development process. Elements of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics are required prerequisites. There would be group presentations on assigned readings.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Human capital is an important factor of economic growth in South Asian economies, along with physical capital and technology. Addressing health and education challenges has implications for improving a country’s human capital formation and income growth. In this course, we look at past and present health and educational outcomes in South Asian Countries. We discuss the gaps in access to education and health care services, the quality of education and health care services as well as the impacts on the productivity of the labor force. We also empirically analyze the link between economic growth and human capital development. Furthermore, we focus on some challenges and future policy options for economies in South Asia.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course will introduce students to the comparative analysis of institutions of existing capitalist systems and to the historical evolution of those institutions. By comparing the economic systems of different nations, we will try to reveal the institutional setups that either contribute or hinder economic performance. We will also examine the process of countries transforming their economies and investigate the factors that determine the differences in reforms’ outcomes between countries.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The financial crisis that began in the United States in 2007 threw virtually the entire world into recession. This class will look at the causes of the crisis and at how it unfolded. It will look into the conventional wisdom of economists, circa 2006, and why that wisdom proved to be so wrong. It will examine the financial innovations that contributed to the crisis, at the reasons financial regulators were blindsided, and at the reforms enacted after the crisis.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)

Writing Intensive

Theory of comparative advantage and the international division of labor: the determinants and pattern of trade, factor price equalization, factor mobility, gains from trade and distribution of income, and theory and practice or tariffs and other trade restrictions. Recommended Course Background: AS.180.101.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course presents International Monetary Economics theory and applies it towards gaining an understanding of recent events and current policy issues. The theory presented in this course covers a broad range of topics including exchange rate determination, monetary and fiscal policy in an open economy, balance of payments crisis, the choice of exchange rate, and international debt. The insights provided by these theoretical frameworks will enable us to discuss topics such as the global financial crisis, global financial imbalances, the Chinese exchange rate regime, and proposed changes in the international financial architecture.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

A key contribution of economics to the policymaking process is understanding and predicting reactions of agents affected by policy changes. Many policies have unintended or indirect effects that are at least as important as their direct impacts, but less obvious. Fortunately, economic theory provides us a framework to understand them. In this course, we will survey a wide variety of subjects, from taxation, to drug policy and harm reduction, to health insurance plan design and regulation, to bankruptcy codes. Working in groups, students will prepare presentations on specific policy proposals not directly covered in class, in which they will describe (with evidence) all the channels by which that policy will act.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2)

Writing Intensive

In this course we will study the role of the government in the regulation of the environment. In the first half of the course we will take a broad overview of environmental economics. We will focus on evaluating the effectiveness and trade-offs associated with various tools used to regulate the environment, covering topics related to market failures, pollution regulation, and regulation under uncertainty. In the second half of the course, we take a more applied approach and consider topics related to particular environmental issues including climate change, study the functioning of particular industries such as energy and electricity, and consider challenges to regulation such as enforcement, international borders, and unknown control costs.

Prerequisite(s): (AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102) AND (AS.110.106 OR AS.110.108 OR AS.110.113).

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course analyzes the financial and monetary system of the U.S. economy and the design and implementation of U.S. monetary policy. Among other topics, we will examine the role of banks in the economy, the term structure of interest rates, the stock market, the supply of money, the role of the Federal Reserve in the economy, the objectives of monetary policy in the United States and current monetary policy practice.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Understanding design and functioning of financial markets and institutions, connecting theoretical foundations and real-world applications and cases. Basic principles of asymmetric information problems, management of risk. Money, bond, and equity markets; investment banking, security brokers, and venture capital firms; structure, competition, and regulation of commercial banks. Importance of electronic technology on financial systems.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Application of economic concepts and analysis to the health services system. Review of empirical studies of demand for health services, behavior of providers, and relationship of health services to population health levels. Discussion of current policy issues relating to financing and resource allocation.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

The course will review selected topics in international macroeconomics and finance. The topics include: financial globalization; international portfolio diversification; capital account liberalization and the choice of the exchange rate regime in emerging markets. The analysis will be motivated by current policy issues but will also be based on mathematical models of the international economy.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102 AND AS.180.302

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Projects and Methods (FA6)

This course will provide students with the theoretical tools and historical context to understand financial crises and debt crises. We will review famous examples, such as the banking panics of the Great Depression and the Eurozone Sovereign Debt Crises, and use economic theory to understand how and why crises happen, as well as how policies can be designed to prevent them or mitigate their effects. Topics to be covered include banking crises, currency crises, sovereign debt crises, private debt crises, panics, and the relationships between them. Students will work in groups on projects connecting the more theoretical content of the course to real world events and present these projects to the rest of the class.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.102 AND AS.180.302

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2)

Writing Intensive

Good governance is associated with desirable outcomes across countries and societies: higher life satisfaction, greater income per capita, lower child mortality, longer life expectancy, less disease, etc. But these statistical associations in the data are not sufficient to establish either that good governance truly causes such societal outcomes, or what types of policies produce them. This course asks: What are the determinants of good governance? Is good governance "good" beyond its intrinsic desirability? If so, how? We use a data-driven approach, focusing on quantitative empirical methods and their applications to policy. The goal is to develop skills to be savvy consumers, as well as producers, of policy-relevant evidence related to issues of governance, in rich and poor countries alike. Topics will include: democracy, corruption, conflict, culture, mass media, quotas, and foreign aid.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.301 AND AS.180.334

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course will overview popular causal inference methods and their applications in the economics of race, gender, and culture. For each causal inference method, the class will cover the econometric theory and how to implement the method in the STATA program. Students will solve many STATA exercises in class, so they must bring a laptop to those classes. Next, we will discuss papers that used the method to answer a research question about race, gender, and culture. The topics to cover include how to show there is racial/gender discrimination and how preference is formed.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.101 AND AS.180.102 AND AS.180.301;AS.180.334 can be taken prior to enrolling in, or at the same time as AS.180.349.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The course discusses various issues in labor markets from the perspective of economic theory. We first study the major forces at work that shape labor market behavior; firms’ labor demand and workers’ labor supply. Then we discuss the equilibrium behavior of employment and wages. Using these tools, we also cover various applied topics in labor economics, such as minimum wage regulations, male-female wage differentials, human capital investment, worker mobility, and unemployment.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course focuses on the economics of poverty and inequality. It covers the measurement of poverty and inequality, facts and trends over time, the causes of poverty and inequality with a focus on those related to earnings and the labor market, and public policy toward poverty and inequality, covering both taxation and government expenditure and programs. By the nature of the material, the course is fairly statistical and quantitative. Students should have an intermediate understanding of microeconomic concepts. Basic knowledge of regression analysis is also helpful.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.301 AND AS.180.334

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Why are some countries rich while some other countries poor? Why does a country’s income per person generally grow over time? We try to analyze these questions using the theoretical and empirical growth literature. We will study seminal growth models, and also try to explain cross-country income differences in terms of factors like geography, institutions and global integration. Knowledge of regression analysis (including instrumental variables estimation) is required.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.302 AND AS.180.334

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Economists increasingly incorporate insights from psychology into models of rational decision-making. Known as "behavioral economics", this line of research considers how, for example, emotions, rules-of-thumb, biased beliefs and time-inconsistent preferences influence how we make choices. Behavioral economics increasingly pervades policy discussions on topics as diverse as: obesity, the role of media, subprime mortgages and voting patterns. Behavioral models are certainly novel, but do they help us to design superior social policies? With the goal of preparing students to address this question, this course (1) provides a thorough overview of the main contributions of behavioral economics, highlighting departures from more traditional economic models and (2) emphasizes how behavioral economic models might (or might not) improve how we think about social policy.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.301;AS.180.334 can be taken concurrently.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

Writing Intensive

This course explores selected topics in the political, economic, social, and intellectual history of Western Europe in the wider world in the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the fourteenth century. Special emphasis will be given to understanding the ways in which medieval society functioned as it reorganized itself after the almost total collapse of the ancient world. Topics include: religious plurality, sovereignty and subjecthood, flourishing of learning, chivalric culture, crusading, and the plague and its effects. We will follow the interplay between material and cultural forces in the processes of social organization.

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 survey course examines the history of Europe from the early sixteenth to the late eighteenth centuries. Topics to be examined include the Reformations and religious wars, curiosity, contact and conquest of non-European lands, the rise of modern bureaucratic states, the emergence of popular sovereignty as a political criterion, the new science, as well as expanding literacy and consumption.

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)

Modern Europe familiarizes students with key moments, ideas, communities, individuals, and movements which have defined European experiences in global encounters since the Revolutionary era. We will particularly focus on European imperial expansion, the formation of the modern nation-state, the history of political ideas and their global ramifications, and popular culture and social change.

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 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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

The United States and its allies launched the Global War on Terror in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attack. But it quickly exceeded the scope of neutralizing al-Qaeda, the organization behind that attack, leading to military campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and across numerous countries in Africa and elsewhere. This course will examine the historical background of the Global War on Terror, including its relationship to prior stages of colonialism and the Cold War. It will delve into the post-9/11 wars and examine the relationship between US foreign policy and regional politics in Asia and Africa. This course is sequential to AS.100.106, The History of the Global Cold War, though that course is not a prerequisite. This course will introduce students to concepts and methods in the study of recent history, 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)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

A class combining Latin American history since independence and digital humanities. Students will build guided research projects while thinking about questions of republicanism, freedom and unfreedom, migration, and development.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course provides an overview of Native American History in North America. We will investigate the diverse Indigenous cultures and political systems that have called the continent home from large and historically well-documented polities such as Cherokee nation and the Haudenosaunee to the crucial yet often-overlooked role of smaller polities such as those of the Abenakis and the Petites Nations of the Gulf Coast. Along the way we will ask: how have geography (and displacement) shaped culture and politics? how have Indigenous histories shaped the history of the United States (as well as Mexico and Canada)? what are the unique challenges of studying and writing Native American History today?

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)

Where is the Middle East? What is it exactly in the Middle of? What, if anything, defines it, and who gets to do the defining? This introductory course poses such questions. Whilst promising no easy answers, it will nevertheless introduce students who have no prior knowledge of the Middle East to the region. Emphasis will be placed on the history, geography, languages, religions, and culture of the pre-modern and modern Middle East. Students will also be exposed to different methods and approaches to the academic study of the region. The course, while at the introductory level, is reading and writing intensive.

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

Many Americans celebrate the United States as a “nation of immigrants,” but defining which immigrants to include and exclude in the nation has always been a contentious process. This course will put some of today’s immigration debates in historical perspective, examining how past Americans debated questions about the “fitness” of immigrants for freedom and citizenship, and how those debates in turn shaped immigrant experiences, the law, and American identity. Topics that we will cover include colonialism and slavery; immigrant labor; families; gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality; immigration law; borders and deportation; refugees and asylum seekers; and citizenship and belonging.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Explore the social and political changes that have transformed the African continent in the modern era, with a focus on the rise and fall of colonialism, the relation between Africa and the world in the post-colonial era, and effect of colonialism and its aftermath on African household structures and gender roles.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

The course will provide an introduction to the study of Jewish History.

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)

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)

This class offers a broad overview of changes in China from Neolithic times through the Song dynasty (roughly from 5000 BCE through the 13th century CE). It features discussion of art, material culture, philosophical texts, religious ideas, and literary works as well as providing a broad overview of politics and society. Close readings of primary sources in discussion sections and extensive use of visual material in lectures will allow students to consider the relationship between what (sources) we have—and what we can know about the past.

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)

We live in a world of global consumption. This course introduces students to the birth of global consumer culture in the period from the 1600s through to the American, French and Haitian revolutions. These revolutions were themselves sold to consumers through “revolutionary things”, and this period witnessed the first major consumer boycotts against slave-produced goods. Students will examine the histories of many key commodities involved in the “consumer revolution”, including fashion items such as shoes, wigs, clothing and accessories. A significant portion of the course will examine addictive stimulants like sugar, coffee, tea and tobacco, globalized and imperial goods which became common for the first time in this period. We shall see how production of these goods involved new forms of racialized exploitation; simultaneously, we shall explore the diversity of people involved in the consumer revolution, studying the consumption of important new goods by people living in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. By the end of the class, students will understand how the emergence of mass consumption affected the global politics of race, gender and class, with especially important consequences for women and non-elite men. Students will examine objects lauded for their politeness, decorative appeal, and cultural importance such as porcelain tea sets, snuffboxes, and fans. Students will choose their own objects for a student presentation and research project.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

The Cultural Revolution was Mao Zedong’s last attempt to transform Chinese society spiritually and structurally. The events of this period were marked by social upheaval, personal vendettas, violence, massive youth movements, and extreme ideological pressure. What were the causes of the Cultural Revolution? How was it experienced and how is it remembered? To what extent are its reverberations felt in contemporary Chinese society, politics, and literature? How have subsequent events affected our understanding of the Cultural Revolution decade? This course will explore the Cultural Revolution from a variety of perspectives, focusing on the relationship between events in China from 1966-1976, and their subsequent interpretation as history and in historical memory in China and beyond.

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 class focuses on Europe from the end of World War II until today. We will discuss topics such as the Cold War, the European welfare state, Europe’s volatile relations with the US and the Soviet Union/ Russia, decolonization, 1989 and neoliberalism, racism, European integration and the role of the European Union in international politics. Expect to spend 25% of class time in group work, where we discuss the assigned literature, movies, documentaries, textual and visual primary sources.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution questions about the legacy and meaning of the revolutionary era circulate among both professional historians and the American public: How revolutionary was the American Revolution, and for whom? What did the diverse population of North America in the 1770s—including free and enslaved people of African descent, Native Americans, as well white women and men in the thirteen colonies—make of the political rupture between Britain and America? What type of nation did the founders envision and how does that continue to shape the United States today? How has the American Revolution been remembered and memorialized at different times in American history? In this course we will read current scholarship on the American Revolution and also visit museum and cultural sites to explore both the events of the American Revolution and their ongoing memorialization while exploring answers to these questions.

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)

An introductory examination of slavery in the Caribbean, this course explores the structure of slavery and its development and its transformative effects on people and the region, and the formation of the modern world. Students can expect to explore themes broadly related to gender and sexuality; politics and economy; science and technology; health and the environment; law, culture and society.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course introduces students to major debates and controversies within the feminist movement in the United Kingdom and the United States from 1850 to the present. From colonial and eugenic women’s movements to anti-trans and carceral feminism, the contents and assessments of this course ask you to consider a pressing question in contemporary feminism: how do we reckon with the reality that many feminists have excluded and continue to exclude people from the liberatory futures they imagine? Together we will analyze the value and limits of historical context and evaluate the relationship between past and present controversies within the feminist movement. Employing critical feminist concepts such as intersectionality and positionality, we will consider what it means for people (including ourselves) to be “products of their time.” By doing historical research in newspaper databases, we will evaluate how feminist claims about “sisterhood” have changed over time.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Today about one third of the world’s Muslims live in Africa, a continent where Islam has a long history. This course follows African Muslims as they traveled and migrated, built communities and states, produced literature and scholarship, and contended with slavery and empire. Our historical investigations will take us all over the African continent as well as across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, following the paths of African Muslim pilgrims, scholars, slaves, soldiers, merchants, rulers, and revolutionaries. No prerequisites needed.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course explores the origins and evolution of antisemitism, with focus on questions of historical continuity and rupture, comparison with other hatreds, and the politics of history.

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 examines the many facets of women’s lives in postcolonial African cities. Using diverse sources, including films, novels, and newspapers, the course interrogates how women understood and fashioned themselves amid social, political, and economic change.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

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

Writing Intensive

There is more to Germany than beer, BMWs, and Bayern Munich. We explore politics, culture, economics and society to understand Germany and its role within Europe and the world from the 18th century, through imperialism, WWI and WWII, the Cold War to German unification, the ‘Refugee Crisis’, the rise of the AfD, and EU politics today.

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)

This course is a critical inquiry into the writing of the region’s history as mere appendage to imperial history justifying European domination and exploitation of the region. It explores how innovations in Caribbean Archaeology, Caribbean History, and the Digital Humanities challenge Eurocentric knowledge claims extending the decolonization struggle beyond politics and economy to include the academy.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Challenging the conception that Islam is synonymous with the Middle East, this course considers Muslim populations across Asia and interrogates how Islam and these regions have shaped one another.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Columbus’s arrival in the Caribbean set off a chain of violence that swept through the early modern Americas. In this course we will investigate how warfare shaped North America and the Caribbean in the period between Columbus’s fateful 1492 voyage and the establishment of an independent Haitian state. The interlinked patterns of colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery forced together people from three continents and made Native Americans, Africans, and Europeans in the Americas rethink what it meant to fight a war, and how to do it. We will consider how different cultures understood, deployed, and attempted to control violence, and then focus on specific wars, engaging with both contemporary scholarship and primary sources. Along the way, we will consider how the Americas, despite a long history before Columbus, became a “new world” through the warfare that followed after him. Throughout this semester we will read and discuss a variety of different forms of historical writing and consider the wide applicability of the history we are studying in the world around us today. Students will have the opportunity to explore different forms of historically informed writing in their own work.

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 considers the American Revolution from the perspective of locations beyond the thirteen rebelling colonies. Covering a range of global hotspots, the focus is on events from 1763 to 1788.

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)

The language of human rights can be found all around us, as a legal framework, political discourse, and method of interpreting justice and liberation. Much of this language invests human rights with a unique scale of political and intellectual power, opening up a range of questions. Can human rights accomplish justice? How are they enforced? What does it mean to support human rights? In order to answer these contemporary questions it helps to start from some historical ones. Where did human rights come from? What is a human right? Who decides and does it matter? Recently, scholars, including historians and lawyers, have revived attempts to chart the historical development of human rights as a discrete project. Those histories have diverged in the power and intellectual weight they attribute to human rights as well as the basic chronology of human rights as a discourse. This class will provide a survey of these histories and in the process attempt to introduce students to historiography as a method as well as provide insight into the structure and function of the modern human rights project.

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

This course surveys the history of Jewish magic, mysticism, and secret traditions from the Middle Ages to the 19th century. We will explore the concept of sod (mystery) and its historical variations, examining how it evolved over time. Readings will include excerpts from foundational texts of Jewish esotericism, such as Sefer Yetzirah, the Bahir, and the Zohar. Additionally, we will discuss practical Kabbalah—including the preparation and use of amulets and charms—as well as beliefs surrounding demonic (and angelic) possession.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

By 1900, France had conquered large parts of the African continent - mainly through violence - and gained a reputation as the least racist Western state. In 2023, the French government works to hold onto the power it still holds in multiple sub-Saharan countries while, at home and abroad, the perniciousness and persistence of French anti-African racisms spark debate and activism. This course examines the interactions between African and Afro-descendent people and France/the French, in Africa (with particular attention to North and West Africa), France, and beyond. We will focus on colonialism, decolonization, and neocolonialism - notably “Françafrique” - as well as how Africans and Afro-descendent people in France navigated the challenges and possibilities they encountered.

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)

Conspiratorial thinking is nothing new in American politics. Since the founding of the nation, Americans have been riveted—and riven—by conspiracy theories. This course introduces students to key methods and questions in U.S. history by exploring conspiratorial episodes from the American Revolution through the present. We’ll pick apart allegations and denials of conspiracies to discover what they tell us about American politics and culture. We’ll also consider historians’ analyses of conspiratorial claims, and think about the relationship between conspiracy and historical causality.

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)

History of colonialism, the apartheid state, and the anti-apartheid liberation struggle in South Africa, with special attention to the role of gender, race, religion, and ethnicity.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

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

This course investigates sexual cultures through the lens of modern Queer History in the United States and Western Europe, with forays into global and transnational histories.

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

A survey of major developments in American philosophy, literature, law, economics, and political theory since 1865. Among other subjects, readings will explore modernism and anti-modernism, belief and uncertainty, science and tradition, uniformity and diversity, scarcity and surfeit, and individualism and concern for the social good.

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 Algerian Revolution (1954-1962) successfully challenged French claims that Algeria was part of France and led to an independent Algerian Republic. This struggle is often seen as the touchstone anti-colonial struggle as well as the matrix for modern forms of terrorism and state-sponsored torture. We will explore its history.

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

Examines the history of France from the reign of Louis XIV to the French Revolution, focusing on early modern society, popular culture, absolutism, the Enlightenment, overseas empire, and the French and Haitian Revolutions.

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

This class explores the history of the USSR through its varied cultural domains. It will consider music, literature, film, painting, and sculpture in both “high” and “low” registers, as well as aesthetics, power, and control over the entire Soviet period, at both the center and, especially, the periphery.

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)

The United States has had 59 elections in its history, and in 2024 it will be having the next. Every election reflects a particular moment. Political parties, of course, have a logic of their own, driven by individuals and circumstances, but in some way, the elections also reflect larger, changing questions about the future of the country. This course will set the 2024 election in the long history of the American election. Each student will choose a different election to study deeply for a substantial research project, drawing on the archives of DC. At the end of the semester, we will synthesize our findings into a more readily accessible format that lays out how the American election has changed over time. This shared piece, as well as the individual histories, will be combined into a volume and perhaps an exhibit.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course immerses students in the rich historiography of the French Revolution. We will focus on recent scholarship to examine such themes as: the nature of revolution and popular activism; violence & trauma; constitutionalism; citizenship, democracy, and social rights; the revolution after Thermidor and why the republic collapsed.

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)

Examines the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that swept Europe in the eighteenth century to shape the modern world. Students will not only read canonical works of the period (Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, etc.) but also consider the broader social and cultural contexts in which ideas evolved. Thus, the class will explore the rise of the book trade and popular reading practices; new understandings of gender and sexuality; and the development of anti-Black racism and slavery in the Atlantic world.

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

This course will explore the prominent role that Asian Americans have played in U.S. legal history. Paying close attention to the relationship between immigration, citizenship, law, and society, we will dive more deeply into the legal histories of numerous groups of Asian descent in the American past and present. We will also place these experiences within the more heterogeneous and complicated landscape of race relations in the United States, as well as considering international relations and transnational connections.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

In this course, we will survey the political, social, intellectual, and cultural history of the three Islamic early modern gunpowder empires that ranged from “the Balkans to Bengal”: The Ottomans (1300-1922), the Safavids (1501-1736), and the Mughals (1526-1858).

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

Everyday, we all have encounters with animals: the mosquito that bites our arm, the rat that runs in front of us on the sidewalk, the dog that greets us upon our return home. These interactions are quotidian, but rarely reflected in the histories that we read. In this class, we will bring the animal back into the narratives that we tell by considering history from a multispecies perspective. Taking the examples of China and Japan, we will see how animals, both real and metaphoric, played a critical role in the political, economic, religious, and social lives of our historical, human, actors. We will see how the inclusion of animals in history bolsters and challenges history as it has been written and gain a deeper understanding of how our current mores regarding animals came to be. Our class will begin with a discussion of Japan and China in the 17th century and end with contemporary controversies surrounding Japanese whaling and shark fin soup. Throughout the course we will consider the ethical and philosophical ramifications of our inquiries like the agency of non-human animals. Designed for upper-level undergraduate students interested in the history of East Asia, prior knowledge of the region will be useful but is not required.

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

Using primary sources, including literature and film, we will explore the changing ways in which ideologues, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens defined national identity in 20th century China and Japan.

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)

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: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The focus will be on Soviet-American interactions, Cold-War Cultures, and the impact on both societies.

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)

The history of China from the 16th to the late 19th centuries.

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

Survey of the history of China from ca. 1895 to ca. 1976.

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

Exploration of the role of law in creating modern empires, and the role of empire in internatinal law. Focus on Africa, with comparative examples from other modern empires.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

The Modern British World introduces some of the major events, themes, and controversies that led to Britain’s global dominance and ultimate decline as an imperial power.

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

A survey of European socialist theories, including Marxism, anarchism, Social Democracy, feminism, and anti-imperialism. Authors include Proudhon, Marx, Engels, Bakunin, Bernstein, Lenin, Luxemburg, Kollontai, Césaire, and Fanon.

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)

This class explores the geographic, economic and cultural issues resulting from Africa’s urban growth from precolonial times to the present.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

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

Writing Intensive

This course explores the development of English law and the English legal tradition from the Norman Conquest through the English Revolution (ca. 1066-1688). We will begin by tracing the impact of the Norman Conquest of England and examine the origins and development of English legal and political institutions such as kingship, the common law, the evolution of legal procedure, and the court and jury system, ideas of franchise, treason and the emergence of Parliament. We will also consider how English law constructs legal categories including aliens, women, heirs, traitors as well as the legal framework for the emergence of the English Church under the Tudors. When applicable the implications of these institutions for developments in the contemporary American and British legal systems will be addressed.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This upper-division course is designed to help students examine and probe the significant role Africa has played in shaping the Atlantic world and its place within its economic, social, religious, cultural, and political configurations.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

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

Writing Intensive

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 and perception of athletes at home and abroad. The class focuses on how sports intersected with domestic and foreign policy, and how sports constructed, reinforced, and challenged notions of race, gender, and class. We will also speak with 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 development as an ideology and a practice. From colonialism to the Cold War to contemporary NGOs, we will interrogate the history of our attempts to improve the world. This iteration of the course will have a particular focus on the intersections between development and the environment. Graduate students welcome.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This seminar explores how the sex and gender binary was produced through US colonialism since the nineteenth century. Topics include domestic settler colonialism, as well as Hawaii, the Caribbean, and Asia.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

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

Writing Intensive

John Locke’s works had enormous influence in eighteenth century America and on justifications of the American Revolution. In this 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, this seminar- style course will read and discuss Locke’s major works intensively together with works influenced by Locke’s arguments and together with select scholarly interpretations. Locke’s works will be placed into the seventeenth century British, European and American contexts in which they were written, and the eighteenth-century American contexts in which they became extremely influential.

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

Seminar-style class analyzing the social, cultural, gender, religious, economic, and political history of London from Shakespeare's time through revolutions, plague, fire, and commercial, colonial, and industrial expansion.

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

What did Chinese local society look like under the Qing Empire, and how did it change over the early modern era?

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

Witchcraft, magic, carnivals, riots, folk tales, gender roles; fertility cults and violence especially in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy.

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

Can law end genocide? Modern Europe has formed the site for some of the worst global atrocities in modern history. It has also served as the birthplace and proving grounds for many of humanity’s boldest experiments in genocide prevention and global justice. In this course, we will examine the historical links between mass violence and legal change. We will focus on pivotal trials and legal campaigns in Central and Eastern Europe from World War I to the present, including the Nuremberg Trials, the UN Yugoslavian Tribunals, and the ongoing Russia/Ukraine war. We will pay special attention to the question of what the historical entanglements between international law, human rights, and empire mean for the future of universal justice in Europe and beyond.

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

Since 1900 global markets have undergone a dramatic transformation. This course will grapple with the writings of economists and social theorists who sought to understand the implications of these changes, and in some cases helped to inspire them. Questions they addressed include: does freedom result from the absence of coercion, or does it require the provision of capacities? Do markets reward desirable behaviors, or do they produce social and environmental pathologies? Does competition occur spontaneously, or does it require careful regulation and reinforcement? And what is the relationship between innovation and inequality? Readings include selections from Max Weber, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, W.E.B. DuBois, John Maynard Keynes, Friedrich Hayek, Karl Polanyi, Joseph Schumpeter, Theodor Adorno, Milton Friedman, Donna Haraway, Wendy Brown, and Thomas Piketty. Class meetings will focus on the close reading of these texts, and discussion of how and why perceptions of the market economy have changed over time.

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

We will explore key texts in the historiography of post-1939 North Africa as well as key recent publications, in French as well as in English.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This seminar-style course will focus on discussing British and American political thought from the "Age of Revolutions", a period also of many critiques of Empire and of many works of Antislavery. Readings include Paine's Common Sense and Rights of Man, the Declaration of Rights, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers; works by Smith, Burke, and Wollstonecraft; and antislavery works by Cugoano, Equiano, Rush, Wesley, and Wilberforce.

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

This course examines the emergence and practice of medieval history as a field of history in the US beginning in the nineteenth-century. We will address what the medieval past meant for the formation of the discipline of history in the US and how an imagined medieval past came to inform scholarly discourse, research approaches, methodologies, ideas about race and gender, legal and constitutional history, and the contours of nation states. The narrative of the medieval origins of states will also be addressed and questioned as it developed over the course of the 20th century. Students will do archival research in the JHU archives and in other published and unpublished source sets.

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

Cinema enjoys extraordinary prominence in India, where in a given year the output of films in Bombay—to say nothing of other Indian film centers—far surpasses the number produced by all American studios combined. While many of India’s most successful films have been derided by critics in Europe and North America, this course takes them seriously both as an artistic form and as a historical tool, treating the films, together with their consumption and circulation, as a critical window into the social history of India. We will begin our investigation in the silent era to demonstrate how, even though the majority of early films are lost, reception histories can reveal much about the communities that viewed them. Moving into the Golden Age of Hindi cinema in the 1950s and 1960s, we will consider how the popularity of these films in Pakistan, Iran, West Africa, and the Soviet Union was tied to India’s global aspirations and self-representation. This course closes with an examination of the current era of Indian cinema and the extent to which its production values, moral and political claims, and viewership (especially in the diaspora) have responded to, and perhaps emboldened, domestic shifts toward economic liberalization and rightwing politics. Focusing more on the social spaces around Indian cinema than on specific films, this course touches on such topics as the segregation of cinemas, the politics of tiered seating, and the rise of multiplexes and (il)legal streaming. Our interrogation of these spaces will reveal how these films can expose social attitudes, even on matters like caste, class, religion, language, and race that they may address only obliquely. More than this, however, this course proposes that Indian cinema, as a primary means of social interaction, entertainment, and information for millions, is not only a historical record but a historical force in its own right.

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)

In this course, students participate in a research “laboratory,” engaging in direct research on an area of faculty’s research, leading to the development of a collective, digital humanities project.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

What did it mean to be free in the premodern world? What did it mean to be a serf or enslaved? How was freedom and unfreedom experienced differently based on gender, geography, religion and space? This course explores the long history of slavery, freedom, and ‘unfreedom,’ in its many and various degrees. We will consider an array of source materials spanning law codes, personal narratives, manumission cases, chronicles, histories, and hagiographies, as well as non-written sources. How did practices of slavery and degrees of unfreedom during the Greek and Roman periods come to shape an understanding of those categories in early medieval Europe, in the Islamic world, and across the pre-modern Mediterranean? How were slavery and empire connected in the past? We will also focus on how scholars have written about slavery, manumission, and freedom and how power, difference, and ideals of freedom have been theorized over time. What methods have scholars employed to get at the experiences of those who were enslaved and silenced? And how have they attempted to narrate these histories differently?

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

Introduction to the practice of global legal history, with focus on the growth of modern international law from the seventeenth century to the present, its relationship to nationalism and empire, war, atrocity-crimes and human rights, international institutions, and the relationship between law and history.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

How has the history of modern China been told by Chinese, Western, and Japanese historians and social thinkers, and how did this affect popular attitudes and government policies toward China?

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

The sixties were a polarizing decade of unrest, revolutions, and fundamental change across Europe and the US. We will discuss 1968 through the lens of Baltimore and national case studies, and contextualize it within the Cold War and decolonization. We’ll speak with eyewitnesses, work with archivists, high school students, and community partners in the city!

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

An introduction to Chinese Art, with a focus on the (often absence of) women, through the lens of gender and sexuality.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Despite its modern-day association with a fringe extremist movement, the term “caliphate” was traditionally used to describe the Muslim world at large, the political and spiritual ruler of which bore the title of caliph. The original Islamic caliphate was established in the seventh century as a vast empire centered on the Middle East and extending deep into Africa, Asia, and Europe. It soon broke apart into a series of competing powers, until in the tenth century, three rival dynasties—the Baghdad-based Abbasids, the Spanish Umayyads, and the Fatimids of North Africa—each claimed to be the rightful caliphate. This course will examine how these fascinating political developments and conflicts played out in the realm of art and architecture between the seventh and thirteenth centuries. As well as palaces, mosques, and commemorative buildings, the course will look at media ranging from ceramics and metalwork to textiles and illustrated manuscripts, with many of the artifacts being viewed firsthand in local museum collections. These works will be considered in relation to such themes as patronage, audience, ceremony, and meaning. Particular attention will be paid to how the various caliphates—both in emulation of and competition with one another—used visual culture as a powerful tool to assert their legitimacy.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Since the publication of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550), in which the history of art was first conceived as the successive accomplishment of a select group of great men, the discipline of Art History has had a gender problem. Today, feminist scholars continue to grapple with this troubled legacy, working to redress the masculinist biases inherent in disciplinary methods and assumptions while at the same time fighting to recover the value of traditionally overlooked subjects and genres. In the early 1990s, the history of masculinity emerged as an adjunct to traditional feminist history. Aimed at addressing misconceptions about the nature and naturalness of male identity, this subfield has helped open masculinity to critical reevaluation. Drawing on the contributions of contemporary feminist scholarship as well as those of the history of masculinity, this course explores the ways in which a reconsideration of the nature of male identity in the historical past might help us rethink key art historical issues, for example, paradigmatic notions of the Renaissance artist, the nature of copying and competition, and the concepts of creativity, invention, and genius. The course will focus on developments in the German speaking world in the late fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries; as numerous historians have noted, the German speaking lands underwent a crisis of masculinity during this period, in part precipitated by the events of the Protestant Reformation. At the same time, the region witnessed profound changes in the status of the arts and of the artist. In this course, we will explore the ways in which these phenomena were related, and how they contributed to culturally specific notions of the relationship between masculinity and artistry. We will also consider the ways in which a close examination of masculinity in the German Renaissance opens up new avenues of art historical and cultural historical investigation with relevance beyond the period itself.

Distribution Area: Humanities

Faced with the apparent intractability of British rule during much of the colonial period, Indians were often forced to look outside institutional politics in order to imagine the Indian nation and their place within it. Many turned to bazaar art, films, photographs, maps, and other media that allowed them to gesture toward ideas not permitted in state-sanctioned discourse and to circumvent hurdles of multilingualism and illiteracy. We will consider, among other topics, how and why images of precolonial Indian monarchs became standardized during this time, the ability of mass-produced religious and devotional art to link households and communities, the rise and marketability of Indian maps, the role cinema hall in building and projecting national and communal bonds, and the power of iconography featuring Indians executed by the colonial state. In prioritizing the visual realm as a space wherein the Indian nation was imagined and disseminated, this course subverts classic theories of the modern nation-state that attribute its rise to literacy and language. It also seeks, as a corollary, to move the study of Indian nationalism away from the writings of the Indian elite and toward the contributions of everyday Indians whose projects were often unwritten but were no less influential.

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)

Art has always been intertwined with politics; one can even say art is always political. In modern China, this statement is especially poignant. The relationship between art and politics has been at the core of art production in China in the past century, and a perennial preoccupation of those in power, including now. This course will therefore examine three major threads: the documents, dictums, and decrees by the artists and by the regimes concerning the nature, function, and practice of art and artists in the 20th century, for example, Mao’s famous Yan’an talk in 1942; artists’ response to and art’s participation in the important political events and historical moments, for example, the 1989 democracy movement; we will also examine the space of resistance, intervention, and alterity that art created in modern China, concerning topics of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, ecocriticism, privacy, and questions of historiography. The period we examine will begin at the end of the 19th century when artists struggled with a crumbling empire facing the onslaught of modernity, to the present.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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 established historiography of Ottoman architecture is dominated by the patronage of the sultans and their elites, particularly as it shaped the empire’s third and final capital, Istanbul. While this focus on the “center” and its leadership reflects the Ottoman state’s own hierarchical structure, it also obscures the larger network of places and people that enabled the imperial system to develop and acquire meaning in the first place. This course will explore Ottoman architecture and its patronage from the perspective of these neglected regions and actors, covering such examples as Christian vassal states along the empire’s European borders, Arab lands with existing traditions of Islamic art, the curious persistence of Gothic models in the former Crusader kingdom of Cyprus, and the distinctive architectural practices of non-Muslim minorities within Istanbul itself. Drawn primarily from the early modern and modern periods, our case studies will be treated not as imitations of or deviations from the metropolitan mainstream, but as vital expressions of Ottoman culture that assertively engaged with, and themselves contributed to, the better-known strategies of the sultan’s court. We will also go beyond issues of architecture and patronage and consider these buildings as lived spaces whose associated objects, furnishings, and social and ceremonial activities were no less constitutive of the empire’s diverse architectural landscape.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Designed from the outset to be inhabited and used, works of architecture are inherently susceptible to changes in purpose, appearance, and meaning over time. This was particularly so in the Ottoman Empire (c. 1299–1922), a multiethnic and multireligious transcontinental polity whose territories were already marked by long and eventful architectural histories. Through such case studies as the Parthenon in Athens, the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul, the Citadel of Cairo, and the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, this course investigates the ways in which buildings and sites have been appropriated, repurposed, transformed, and/or reconceptualized in response to changing sociopolitical and artistic conditions. Topics to be addressed include the conversion of places of worship, (re)decoration as a vehicle of ideology, and the phenomenon of spoliation—the recycling, whether for practical or symbolic reasons, of existing building materials. In addition to the monuments themselves, we will address the objects that filled them and the human activities they hosted. While our focus will be on the Ottoman context and its relationship to the past, the course will also consider comparable examples in other geographies as well as developments in the post-Ottoman era, including the current debate over the Parthenon marbles and the recent reconversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

How can we think about the interconnections between racism, theories of race and the practice of medicine? Living at a moment when racial disparities in health outcomes in the United States are still very stark, this course will provide a historically grounded approach to thinking about the roles that race and racism have played in healthcare, the production of health disparities as well as the role of medicine in the development of racist thought. While much of this course will focus geographically within the United States, this class will also explore global histories of medicine, encountering questions of race and medicine in Africa, the South Pacific and Asia. In addition to the analysis of primary source documents and historical texts, students will also be introduced to theoretical approaches to the study of race and racism from W.E.B. Dubois, Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon and others.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

Writing Intensive

This course examines the relations of the scientific and technical enterprise and government in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. Topics will include the funding of research and development, public health, national defense, etc. Case studies will include the 1918 Spanish influenza epidemic, the Depression-era Science Advisory Board, the founding of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, the institution of the President’s Science Advisor, the failure of the Superconducting Supercollider, the Hubble Space Telescope, the covid pandemic, etc.

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)

This course takes a historical approach to the relationship between modern science and fascism. During the 20th century, fascist movements often exploited scientific traditions for economic, military, and rhetorical power. At the same time, scientists relied on fascist regimes to confer legitimacy on their research programs. In this seminar-style course, students will examine these difficult linkages through several case studies on science under fascism, which are drawn from Italy, Germany, Japan, Spain, Portugal, and their empires. The course will address several overarching questions. Is it possible to define fascist science? How have research programs supported fascist regimes, and vice versa? How have scientists reckoned with, remembered, and forgotten these difficult histories?

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Water supplies are becoming scarcer globally due to climate change. We use clean water—fresh and salt—in a variety of ways that provide comfort, stability, and health, making it one of the most valuable commodities on Earth. While countries in the Global North are beginning to see more frequent and lengthier droughts, those in the Latin America, Africa, and South Asia have long struggled over how to distribute and use their clean water supplies. This class will examine how colonialism and its far-reaching effects have created an environment of scarce water supplies in many areas of the world. Water access is difficult to achieve, but for much of the Global South, the colonial period helped craft the problems we see today. This class will ask what colonial and postcolonial technologies’ construction and use teach us about equitable clean water distribution, how social and cultural identities influence water supplies and use, and why water has been such an important element—and commodity—in our world, especially where Europeans settled and oppressed local populations.

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

America’s scientific connections with China, its East Asian allies, and the rest of the world are heavily shaped by geopolitics nowadays. This course traces the historical root of these connections and invites you to explore the movement of knowledge and people, the omnipresence of the state and concerns about national security, and the career of Asian American students and scientists. It aims to equip you with a set of analytical tools to understand the complicated dynamics of the transnational scientific community between America and East Asian countries. As nationalism regains momentum globally, it is time to look back on history and think about how we should approach the increasingly tumultuous world!

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 health and society in England, 1500 to 1800 including healing practices at all levels of society, concepts of health and illness, patient experiences, and patterns of disease. Recommended Course Background: At least one course in History or History of Science, Medicine, and Technology.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course will analyze how “Islam” and “medicine” interacted and intersected from the medieval and into the modern and contemporary world. We will look at the rise of Islamic medicine in the medieval and early modern period, the modernization of medicine in the Islamic world, and we will also investigate questions and challenges facing Muslim physicians and patients in the US, Europe and inside and outside the Muslim-majority world.We will address questions related to modernization of medical education in the Islamic world, colonization and decolonization, questions related to gender and sexuality, issues related to Islamic bioethics from organ transplantation and clinical death to abortion, artificial fertilization among other similar questions.

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 surveys the history of chemical weapons from the battlefields of World War I to the metropolitan streets of the 21st century. Emphasis is given to questions of research, development, and regulation. How have scientists participated in the invention and production of novel chemical weapons agents at different times in the past? What challenges have confronted organizations tasked with preventing the development, stockpiling, and use of these weapons? The course will explore these questions through case studies from both world wars, the Italo-Ethiopian War, the Vietnam War, and recent histories of domestic policing. Please note that this is a reading and writing-intensive seminar course. Students should be prepared to read 80-100 pages per week and write an original research paper by the end of the term.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The Dutch East India Company, or VOC, is historically and art historically well documented and firmly understood. But the Dutch also had significant holdings to the west via the Dutch West India Company, or WIC. They operated and held outposts in the present-day United States (New York/New Amsterdam), Caribbean (Surinam, Curaçao, Bonaire), Latin America (Brazil), and West Africa. Despite the abundance of materials associated with the WIC from this wide geography, these have been scarcely assessed by art historians, and a defined and comprehensive corpus has never been assembled. This class will act as a research lab in which to do so. In research teams, students will map artworks and objects created from that broad, transnational cultural ambit—categories that might include maps, landscape paintings, still life paintings featuring American flora and fauna, botanical illustrations, plantation architecture, luxury objects made from precious raw materials gathered in the Americas, the urban environment of slavery—and develop individual research questions around them.The class will run with a partner lab in the form of a course led by Professor Stephanie Porras at Tulane University. The course will feature speakers; and there is potential for funded travel to conduct research. We will start at the ground level; no previous knowledge about the field is required. Students from all disciplines are welcome.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

Learn the basics of ArcGIS, data management, and the history of maps and censuses as you help Prof. Lurtz build a digital historical atlas of Mexico. No experience necessary, graduate students welcome.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

For 1400 years, the Qur’an has played a central role in Muslim intellectual, spiritual, artistic and ritual life. This course will explore the sacred scripture of Islam through its foundational ideas, history of the text and thematic development, literary style, history and methods of interpretation, and role in Muslim spiritual and ritual life. We will also explore how the Qur’an weaves through literature, music and the visual arts.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Muslims have been a part of the American fabric since its inception. A key thread in that fabric has been the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants, some of whom were Muslims, and who not only added to the dynamism of the American environment, but eventually helped shape American culture, religion, and politics. The history of Islam in America is intertwined with the creation and evolution of African American identity. Contemporary Islam in America cannot be understood without this framing. This course will provide a historical lens for understanding Islam, not as an external faith to the country, but as an internal development of American religion. This course will explicate the history of early Islamic movements in the United States and the subsequent experiences of African-Americans who converted to Islam during the first half of the twentieth century. We will cover the spiritual growth of African American Muslims, their institutional presence, and their enduring impact on American culture writ large and African-American religion and culture more specifically.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This community-engaged course is co-created by a scholar and curator with expertise in religion, art, and material culture, and taught in partnership with the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), and centers how museums engage with the sacred. Recognizing that museums have traditionally been under-equipped to respond to the social concerns that animate their local communities, the BMA is rethinking how a twenty-first century civic museum engages the city in which it is located. Understanding the museum as a public space in which contemporary civic and social issues can be engaged, we will explore such questions as: how can a museum represent devotional objects while honoring a diversity of religious and spiritual perspectives and avoiding homogenous narratives about belief? How can a museum create relationships with religious communities to understand and interpret the objects in its collection, and navigate differences in faith-based communities with ethical care? How can a museum engage local communities in the process of writing labels for objects and in other acts of interpretation in a way that is not extractive and is genuinely value-aligned? In short, how can a museum truly become public? As a community-engaged course, students will build practically on their learning about museums, religion and public pedagogy to create and facilitate community listening circles at the BMA. The course will include visits to the BMA and other sites, guest visits on focused topics from museum professionals in other institutions, and training in listening and facilitation.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

An interdisciplinary introduction to the ways of life of Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx peoples, their origins, historical legacies, and current cultural expressions. This course assumes no prior knowledge and incorporates the insights of several disciplines including anthropology, history, political science, economics, cultural studies, literary criticism, and ethnomusicology. The course seeks to comprehend the region from multiple perspectives and to provide a broad conceptual overview.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.361.130 are not eligible to take AS.361.100.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

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

Food can be many things: sustenance, nutrition, cultural practice, and even artform. But regardless of how food is framed, it is also always political. It has the potential to be weaponized in the context of conflict. It has the potential to assert self-determination and dignity among those displaced by conflict and forced removal. And it has the potential to undergird liberation struggles as communities create food autonomy outside of oppressive structures. This course examines food as a tool and technology of both war and liberation by utilizing historic and contemporary case studies of manufactured food scarcity, food apartheid resulting from structural inequality, food-based community building, and food autonomy. We will consider agriculture, food availability, food distribution, nutrition, food-related health outcomes, food procurement, food preparation practices, and food-based justice and independence movement. As a practitioner seminar, the course will engage with food practitioners and food activists whose work addresses food and nutrition-related disparities faced by communities in sites of conflict, inequality, and diaspora.

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 course explores how medicine, science, and technology intersect with war and conflict, shaping both the battlefield and society at large. It examines the medicine-science-war nexus by investigating the ways in which war and conflict have spurred scientific innovation and medical breakthroughs and, inversely, how scientific and medical innovations have enabled new forms of warcraft. From the development of antibiotics and prosthetics to the ethical dilemmas of weapons research and the use of artificial intelligence in combat, students will examine these entanglements and the profound moral and ethical questions they raise. Relying on case studies from historical and contemporary conflicts, historical documents, films, and literature, the course will investigate topics such as the technological frontiers of war, military funding of scientific research, post-conflict legacies of wartime technologies, and the long-term health outcomes of political and military conflict. Through a critical examination of these themes, students will gain a better understanding of the complex relationship between war and advancements in medicine, science, and technology and will be prompted to analyze the ethical, social, and political implications of the entanglements between war, science, and medicine.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Did you know that Brazil is very similar to the United States? This course is intended as an introduction to the culture and civilization of Brazil. It is designed to provide students with basic information about Brazilian history, politics, economy, art, literature, popular culture, theater, cinema, and music. The course will focus on how Indigenous, Asian, African, and European cultural influences have interacted to create the new and unique civilization that is Brazil today. The course is taught in English.No Prereq. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

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

Writing Intensive

This course traces the history of Italian cinema from the silent era to the new millennium, highlighting its main trends and genres, and reflecting on the major transformations modern and contemporary Italian society experienced over the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries. We shall examine iconic films such as Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, that received international recognition and influenced other national, cinematic productions. We shall also look at the work of less famous, or independent filmmakers who received less critical attention. While this class takes an historical approach, it also includes a theoretical component and introduces students to the specificity of the cinematic language, examining films in relation to the mise-en-scène, frame composition, camera movements, editing, and sound. This class is taught in English.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Italy and the “Italian style” have become synonym of exquisite taste, class, and elegance thanks to the quality of Italian craftsmanship. This course will explore some of the major factors that contributed to the rise of Italian fashion and Italian industrial design as iconic all around the world. The classes will focus on the main protagonists and art movements that influenced the development of Italian style. We will analyze trends, clothing, and style not only in a historical context, but also through a critical apparatus that will include themes related to gender, culture, power, and politics.The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Italian is required, but those who can read in Italian will have an opportunity to do so. Everyone will learn some Italian words and expressions.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Without Amazonia, global warming could reach levels that threaten life on the planet. Yet, in an era of deforestation and climate change, Amazonia itself might be on the verge of disappearance, with disastrous consequences for the world. This course proposes interdisciplinary perspectives on Amazonia through a range of works drawn from history, anthropology, archeology, environmental studies, literature, and the arts. We’ll look at texts by European travelers and missionaries who contributed to the paradoxical image of Amazonia as a “virgin paradise” or a “green hell”; scientific studies and artists’ depictions of the region’s flora and fauna; the often-overlooked history of human occupation of the region; and projects to colonize, develop, or conserve the world’s largest tropical forest. What importance does Amazonia hold for Latin American and global geopolitics? How do art and literature, including indigenous writings, create, reinforce, or deconstruct clichés about the region? What alternative futures for our planet can Amazonia help us to imagine?

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

iddish was the language of European Jews for 1000 years. From the 19th century to the present day it has been a language that millions of Americans — Jewish immigrants and their descendants–have spoken, written in, conducted their daily lives in, and created culture in. This course will examine literature, film, newspapers, and more to explore how Jewish immigrants to America shaped their identities—as Jews, as Americans, and as former Europeans. What role did maintaining, adapting, or abandoning a minority language play in the creation of Jewish American identity—cultural, ethnic, or religious? How was this language perceived by the majority culture? How was it used to represent the experiences of other minoritized groups? What processes of linguistic and cultural translation were involved in finding a space for Yiddish in America, in its original or translated into English? The overarching subjects of this course include migration, race, ethnicity, multilingualism, and assimilation. We will analyze literature (novels, poetry, drama); film; comedy; and other media. All texts in English.

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

As is clear from current events and debates surrounding monuments to the Confederacy, monuments play an outsize role in the public negotiation of history and identity and the creation of communal forms of memory. We will study the traditions of monuments and monumentality around the world – including statues and buildings along with alternative forms of monumentality – from antiquity to the present day. We will examine the ways that monuments have been favored methods for the powerful to signal identity and authorize history. This course will also explore the phenomenon of “counter-monumentality”, whereby monuments are transformed and infused with new meaning. These kinds of monuments can be mediums of expression and commemoration for minority and diaspora communities and other groups outside the economic and political systems that endow and erect traditional public monuments. The first half of the course will examine the theoretical framework of monumentality, with a focus on ancient monuments from the ancient Near East (e.g., Solomon’s temple). More contemporary examples will be explored in the second half of the course through lectures and also field trips. We will view contemporary debates around monuments in America in light of the long history of monuments and in comparison with global examples of monuments and counter-monuments. All readings in English.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Course is taught in ENGLISH. Did you know that one of the first Latin American actresses to conquer Hollywood was Brazilian? Did you know that cinema has existed in Brazil since 1895, just six months after the first screening in Paris? This course is an introduction to both the academic study of cinema as a communicative art and to Brazilian film. The films selected focus on the late 1950s to the present and highlight import episodes and challenges in the advancement of Brazilian society as well as its cinematic production. Film aesthetics are analyzed through a number of critical perspectives, including class, race, gender as well as ethnicity, nationalism or national identity, colonialism, social changes, and the politics of representation. In this sense, the films, and documentaries that we will be watching and studying encompass the period from the rise of New Cinema (Cinema Novo) up to films exploring the most recent trends, including movies launched up to 2022. Students 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. No Prereq.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

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

Writing Intensive

The museum boom of the last half-century has centered largely around museums dedicated to the culture and history of identity groups, including national, ethnic, religious, and minority groups. In this course we will examine such museums and consider their long history through a comparison of the theory and practice of Jewish museums with other identity museums. We will study the various museological traditions that engage identity, including the collection of art and antiquities, ethnographic exhibitions, history museums, heritage museums, art museums, and other museums of culture. Some of the questions we will ask include: what are museums for and who are they for? how do museums shape identity? and how do the various types of museums relate to one another? Our primary work will be to examine a variety of contemporary examples around the world with visits to local museums including the Jewish Museum of Maryland, the National Museum of African American History and Culture and the National Museum of the American Indian.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

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

How has the Holocaust been represented in literature and film? Are there special challenges posed by genocide to the traditions of visual and literary representation? Where does the Holocaust fit in to the array of concerns that the visual arts and literature express? And where do art and literature fit in to the commemoration of communal tragedy and the working through of individual trauma entailed by thinking about and representing the Holocaust? These questions will guide our consideration of a range of texts — nonfiction, novels, poetry — in Yiddish, German, English, French and other languages (including works by Primo Levi and Isaac Bashevis Singer), as well as films from French documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters (including films by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Steven Spielberg). All readings in English.

Prerequisite(s): Cannot be taken by anyone who previously took AS.213.361

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 course will cover a timeline of the representation of the Amazon rainforest in different media, ranging from the 1930s until today, from filmmakers and literary authors from various countries, including both Amazonian and non-Amazonian perspectives. In this historiography of mainly filmic and some literary productions, we will touch on notions such as, but not limited to, national identity and its diffuse borders, agency, and the ethics of representing the ‘other’. The main objective for this course is for students to learn to identify different audiovisual and literary tropes and stereotypes that stem from a colonial mindset, which may have been carved into the mind by repetition and cultural reproduction. At the end of the course, students will have a better understanding of the (mis)representations of this cultural region and will be able to question the effects and ethics of filming it.

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 course explores the interplay between protest and cultural productions using the Israeli society as a case study. We will examine the formation and nature of political and social protest movements in Israel, such as the Israeli Black Panthers, Israeli feminism, the struggle for LGBTQ rights and the 2011 social justice protest. Dissent in the military and protest against war as well as civil activism in the context of the Palestinians-Israeli conflict will serve us to explore the notion of dissent in the face of collective ethos, memory and trauma. The literary, cinematic, theatrical and artistic productions of dissent will stand at the center of our discussion as well as the role of specific genres and media, including satire and comedy, television, popular music, dance and social media. We will ask ourselves questions such as how do cultural productions express dissent? What is the role of cultural productions in civil activism? And what is the connection between specific genre or media and expression of dissent? All material will be taught in English translation.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

This course is an approach to Twentieth century German history and culture via film and related readings in English translation. We will emphasize the national division thematically, and explore the audio and visual aspects of cinema by focusing on representative films embedded in larger narratives. Some prior familiarity with German culture is recommended but not required.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

From the epic movies of the silent era to neorealist and auteur films of the post-war period, all the way to contemporary Academy winner The Great Beauty, Italian cinema, has had and continues to have a global impact, and shape the imaginary of filmmakers all over the world. This course traces Italian film history from its origins to recent times, highlighting its main genres and trends beyond the icons of neorealist and auteur cinema, including the so-called ‘comedy Italian style,’ spaghetti westerns, horror, mafia-mockery films, feminist filmmaking, and ecocinema. While learning to probe the cinematic frame, and examine composition, camera movements, cinematography, editing, and sound, and interrogating issues of gender, class, and race, we will screen classics such as Bicycle Thieves, La Dolce Vita, and L’Avventura, but also forgotten archival films by pioneer women filmmakers, and works by emergent, independent filmmakers.

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

That the nations of the world could ever work together seems utopian, but also unavoidable: migration, war, and not least climate change make some form of global coordination increasingly necessary. This course will give historical and philosophical depth to the idea of a cosmopolitan order and world peace by tracing it from its ancient sources through early modernity to today. At the center of the course will be the text that has been credited with founding the tradition of a world federation of nations, Immanuel Kant’s "Toward Perpetual Peace" (1795). Confronting recent and current political discourse, literature, and philosophy with Kant’s famous treatise, we will work to gain a new perspective on the idea of a world order. In addition to Kant, readings include Homer, Erasmus, Pico della Mirandola, Rousseau, Jeremy Bentham, Emily Dickinson, Tolstoy, Whitman, Rosa Luxemburg, Gandhi, Hannah Arendt, John Lennon, and Martin Luther King as well as lesser-known authors such as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Ellen Key, Odette Thibault, Simone Weil, and Claude Lefort. Taught in English.

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)

Over the last three decades Italy, historically a country of emigrants—many of whom suffered from discrimination in the societies they joined—became a destination for hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees from various countries, and particularly from Africa. Significant numbers of these immigrants came to Italy as a result of the country’s limited, though violent colonial history; others arrive because Italy is the closest entry-point to Europe. How have these migratory flows challenged Italian society’s sense of itself? How have they transformed the notion of Italian national identity? In recent years, growing numbers of Afro- and Afro-descendant writers, filmmakers, artists and Black activists are responding through their work to pervasive xenophobia and racism while challenging Italy’s self-representation as a ‘White’ country. How are they forcing it to broaden the idea of ‘Italianess’? How do their counternarratives compel Italy to confront its ignored colonial past? And, in what way have Black youth in Italy embraced the #Blacklivesmatter movement? This multimedia course examines representation of blackness and racialized otherness, whiteness, and national identity through literary, film, and visual archival material in an intersectional framework. Examining Italy’s internal, ‘Southern question,’ retracing Italy’s colonial history, and recognizing the experiences of Italians of immigrant origins and those of immigrants themselves, we’ll explore compelling works by writers and filmmakers such as Igiaba Scego, Gagriella Ghermandi, Maza Megniste, Dagmawi Yimer, and others.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

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), Engagement with Society (FA4)

Despotism, authoritarianism, autocracy, dictatorship: the terms for tyranny are legion. But what exactly do we mean by tyranny, and how are we to understand it? This seminar will explore what literature, philosophy, and political theory, ancient and modern, have to say about both this (protean) concept and its many historically charged avatars. A deeper look into the history of “tyranny” reveals unexpected complexities, from affirmative uses of the term to radical critiques. To better understand this complex history and what it is we mean when we oppose political repression today, we will read classic works from political theory, philosophy, and literature (e.g. Plato’s “Apology of Socrates,” “Republic” VIII-IX; Xenophon’s “Hiero”; Livy’s “Ab Urbe Condita” 1-2; Seneca the Younger’s “De Clementia”), early modern (e.g. Machiavelli’s “Prince”; La Boétie’s “On Voluntary Servitude”; Shakespeare’s “Macbeth”; Schiller’s “Fiesco”) and modern works (e.g. Strauss on Xenophon, followed by Kojève’s Commentary; Arendt’s “Origins of Totalitarianism”).

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

Students will explore contemporary French society and culture through a wide variety of media: fiction and non-fiction readings (graphic novels, news periodicals, popular magazines), films, music, art, websites, and podcasts. A diverse range of hands-on activities in addition to guided readings will help students develop cultural awareness as we discuss topics such as education, politics, humor, sports, cuisine, immigration, slang, and national identity, as well as the historical factors that have influenced these facets of French and francophone culture. Recommended course background: AS.210.301 and AS.210.302 or permission of instructor. Contact April Wuensch (april@jhu.edu).

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.211.401 may not take AS.212.353.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Across the 20th century, mainstream and avant-garde French culture was deeply impacted by the presence of African American musicians and performing artists hailing from the jazz tradition. From the Josephine Baker craze of the 1920s to the second post-war which welcomed the innovations of bebop and sixties-era free improvisation, metropolitan France proved a space where expatriate and exiled Black Americans could both perpetuate the tradition and innovate by turns. At the same time, French tastemakers, critics, and musicians eager to adopt new forms and styles debated the extent to which American jazz music in its various strains could be “made French.” This course in transcultural French studies will feature readings in music criticism, history, and literature, as well as frequent close listening. It will culminate in a local concert reflecting France’s continued connection to and support of jazz and related improvised musics. Though some background in French language and in musical notation is desirable (students are encouraged to engage in original-source research), all core course readings will be provided in English. Discussion in English.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Political thinkers from Ernst Bloch and Carl Schmitt to Reinhard Koselleck and Theodor W. Adorno have long been drawn to Heinrich von Kleist’s novella “Michael Kohlhaas” because of the questions it raises about what a just political order would be when, in the context of this story, only the threat of violence enables the powerless to be heard. The novella takes place in the latter half of the sixteenth century as the feudal era is coming to an end, and Kohlhaas’s struggle to rectify the damage done to his property reveals the vulnerability of the then emerging merchant class to the still unchecked power of the nobility. Yet Kohlhaas’s response to the situation proves to be as arbitrary as the injustice he faces, and the only solution the novella can find for this impasse is a fairy tale that embodies—in all senses of the phrase—poetic justice. This course will examine the novella in its historical context (Reformation, doctrine of natural law, Prussian land reform) and with an eye toward modern thought on state violence, terror, liberalism, and the power of art. All texts and discussion in English.

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)

Fake facts, conspiracy theories, outright lies: have we entered a new era of “post-truth”? Some claim that deception has always been a part of political processes, that objectivity is an illusion, that every “fact” is made, formed, fashioned, constructed (“fact” comes from the same Latin root as “fiction”). Others insist that without a distinction between truth and lie, all politics is a farce, and look to fact-checking and evidence for guidance. Who is right? And what assumptions are at the basis of this perhaps overly-simple binarism? In order to get a grasp on these questions, we will explore the theme and the concept of lying in literature, philosophy, and current media, with an emphasis on political language. We will read literary texts by Heinrich von Kleist, Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, the much-discussed GDR novel “Jacob the Liar,” political philosophy by Plato, Machiavelli, Kant, Nietzsche (“On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense”), Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Nina Schick’s 2020 exposé “Deep Fakes: The Coming Infocalypse.” We will apply what we learn from these readings to fake news and social media in order to develop new skills of dealing with manipulative language. Taught in English (with the option of a section in German).

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 course introduces students to major figures and trends in German literature and thought from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. We will pay particular attention to the evolution of German political thought from the Protestant Reformation to the foundation of the German Federal Republic after WWII. How did the Protestant Reformation affect the understanding of the state, rights, civic institutions, and temporal authority in Germany? How did German Enlightenment thinkers conceive of ethics and politics? How do German writers define the nation, community, and the people? What is the link between romanticism and nationalism? To what degree is political economy, as developed by Marx, a critical response to romanticism? What are the ties that bind as well as divide a community in this tradition? We will consider these questions through a careful reading of selected works by Luther, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Weber, and Arendt.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Who has a monopoly on violence? What is the relation of the individual to the state? Is there a right to resistance? Who determines what is just or unjust, arbitrary or rational? Is there a power peculiar to art? We will consider these perennial questions of political theory through a careful examination of Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810) and theoretical works by Martin Luther, Hobbes, Rousseau, & Marx.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This seminar will be concerned with resonances between collectors, artists, poets, and other hallowed figures of modernity, and their less celebrated doubles: hoarders, bibliomaniacs, ragpickers, and gleaners. We will examine the material practices and psychic mechanisms that define these identities and authorize distinctions between them, as well as the historical contexts from which they emerge. More broadly, we will grapple with the relationships between objects and narrative. We will ask how the human-object practices of collecting, hoarding, gleaning, scavenge, misuse, and fetishism change when performed in the immaterial realm of language, and what these practices look like as rhetorical and narrative strategies.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

The supernatural is often described as the disruption of universal coherence. It becomes an aggression that challenges the stability of a world in which the natural laws were, until then, intact. The Impossible suddenly happens in a world in which it was banished.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

From the epic movies of the silent era to neorealist and auteur films of the post-war period, all the way to contemporary Academy winner The Great Beauty, Italian cinema, has had and continues to have a global impact, and shape the imagination of filmmakers all over the world. This course traces Italian film history from its origins to recent times, highlighting its main genres and trends beyond the icons of neorealist and auteur cinema, including the so-called ‘comedy Italian style,’ spaghetti westerns, horror, mafia-mockery films, feminist filmmaking, and ecocinema. While learning to probe the cinematic frame, and examine composition, camera movements, cinematography, editing, and sound, and interrogating issues of gender, class, and race, we will screen classics such as Bicycle Thieves, La Dolce Vita, and L’Avventura, but also forgotten archival films by pioneer women filmmakers, and works by emergent, independent filmmakers. This course is taught in English. Additional sessions in Italian will be arranged upon students’ request.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

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

This course will explore the fundamental aspects of Spanish culture from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. The course will offer a general survey of the history of Spain and will discuss texts, movies, songs, pictures, and paintings in relation to their social, political, and cultural contexts. This course will be of particular interest for students planning on spending a semester abroad in Spain—specially for those students going to the JHU Fall Semester in Madrid, at Carlos III University. Taught in Spanish. Recommended Course Background: AS.210.311 or appropriate Webcape score.AS.215.390 was formerly numbered AS.211.390

Prerequisite(s): Students may not have previously completed AS.211.390 OR AS.215.390.;AS.210.311

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

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

Taught in Spanish. This course will explore the fundamental aspects of Latin- America culture from the formation of independent states through the present—in light of the social, political, and economic histories of the region. The course will offer a general survey of history of Latin- America, and will discuss texts, movies, songs, pictures, and paintings, in relation to their social, political, and cultural contexts. May not be taken satisfactory/unsatisfactory.

Prerequisite(s): Students may earn credit for AS.211.380 or AS.215.380, but not both.;AS.210.311

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

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

What social, political, and economic forces make groups of people appear out of place in a given society? How have literary works contributed to counteracting the marginalization of certain groups? This course will look at how modern Spanish artists, writers, and intellectuals wrestled with questions of identity and marginalization. We will critically examine how the modern Spanish state was forged from restrictions on cultural difference and consider the various marginalized groups that were left in its wake. These groups include various peoples (e.g. the Romani), ideologies (e.g. anarchism, socialism, communism), social and economic classes (e.g. peasants, the working class), and regional identities (e.g. Catalonia, the Basque Country). Key texts in modern Spanish literature will prompt our investigation into how writers and artists reflected on, contested, and expressed the marginality of the country’s various internal others. Taught in Spanish.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

The nation of Colombia amounts to a large country partly made immense and hard to govern and corruptible by its territorial nexus and porous frontier with Venezuela. Starting from such polemic claim, leaning on misgovernance vs. excessive governmentality, we will study two novels, Laura Restrepo’s Delirio/Delirium (2004) and Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s The Noise of Things Falling (2011); both winners of the prestigious Planeta Prize. To what extent can literary fictions of such scope and ambitions, invested in deeply rooted family politics, help or harm the reader’s political trust in nations as novels and fictions as nations?

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

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

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain was home to a sizeable Black African, Afro-diasporic, and Afro-descendant population that scholarship has only recently begun to acknowledge substantively.  The historical legacy of these communities reveals that Afro-Iberians, enslaved as well as free, experienced often violent forms of racial discrimination and oppression, but that they also contributed meaningfully to a shared cultural landscape of art, literature, drama, dance, and music.  Early modern writers of fiction likewise depicted Afro-diasporic characters not only as servants but also as sovereigns, soldiers, scholars, and saints.  This advanced undergraduate seminar will grapple with these ambivalences by surveying a wide, multidisciplinary range of cultural products.  In surveying the historical and literary complexities of the African diaspora in early modern Iberia, we will ask how these communities were subjected to the violence of empire, colonialism, racism, human trafficking, and enslavement, while at the same time generating creative vectors of pride, freedom, agency, and resistance. Class will be conducted in Spanish. (If AS.210.311 has not been taken, the student may submit an SPE score: https://krieger.jhu.edu/modern-languages-literatures/spanish-and-portuguese/undergraduate/get-started/)

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often construed as impenetrable to outsiders, yet, cultural production emerging from this crucible is often presented as a “window” into the history, politics, and psychology of the conflict. Rather than operating from the assumption that culture is a mirror that simply “reflects” an objective reality, this course investigates how authors, filmmakers, and artists situated in the midst of the conflict produce art that reaches far beyond the representation of historical events, extending into the domains of religion, memory, fantasies, nostalgia, perceptions of space and time, body image and gender and sexual identities. The material covered will include feature and documentary film, literature, memoir, dance, visual art, photography and theater. All material will be taught in English translation.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Increased awareness of climate change has led to a shift in the way we address and intervene in environmental issues in the new millennium. Yet the interest in making sense of the environment has a long history in literature and the arts. How have Latin American writers and artists understood and depicted their environments and environmental questions? How do the form and content of texts and cultural artifacts influence our understanding of the non-human world? Can works of fiction shape ecological transformations? In this course we will discuss texts from the early colonial period to the present, including the literary works of Graciliano Ramos, Horacio Quiroga, and Clarice Lispector; political ecology; film; Ana Mendieta’s earth-body art; contemporary experiments in bio-art; postcolonial theory; and the intersection of environmental justice with such topics as nationalism and human rights. Going beyond ecocriticism’s original focus on the Anglo-American world, we will engage recent scholarship on Latin America that sheds light on the region’s cultural and geopolitical importance to the global climate, with particular attention to Brazil. This course aims to introduce students to current debates in Latin American Ecocriticism and the Anthropocene and thus contribute to an incipient but expanding field.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

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

Although it appears to be a relic of pre-modern Judaism, Hasidism is a phenomenon of the modern era of Jewish history. This course surveys the political and social history of the Hasidic movement over the course of the last three centuries. Students will also explore basic features of Hasidic culture and thought in their historical development. Cross-listed with Jewish Studies.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

In the Islamic Golden Age (800-1400 CE), philosophers such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, al-Ghazali, and Averroes made enormous contributions to every aspect of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, and philosophical theology. But philosophy in the Islamic world did not end with Averroes. It continued to flourish in Muslim Eastern countries, in particular Persia and India, with the works of such philosophers as Suhrawardi and Mula Sadra. In the contemporary era, drawing on their rich tradition, Muslim philosophers such as Muhammad lqbal, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and Amina Wadud continue to tackle social, philosophical, and theological issues in the Islamic world. In this course, we will discuss the works of Muslim philosophers from the Golden Age to the present day.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

An overview of philosophical thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We shall focus on fundamental questions in epistemology (knowledge, how we acquire it, its scope and limits), metaphysics (the ultimate nature of reality, the relation of mind and body, free will), and theology (the existence and nature of God, God’s relation to the world, whether knowledge of such things is possible): all questions that arose in dramatic ways as a result of the rise of modern science. The principal philosophers to be discussed are Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant, though we shall also make the acquaintance of Spinoza, Leibniz and Berkeley.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

Writing Intensive

This course begins by reviewing canonical texts in modern political philosophy beginning with Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and ends by exploring classic questions in contemporary debates in race, gender, and identity.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

John Rawls was the most important moral and political thinker of the 20th century. In this course we will look at his two main works, A Theory of Justice and Political Liberalism, along with some of the more influential criticisms of his ideas. Main topics will include the derivation of principles of justice, the role of the good in liberal political theory, and the nature of reasonable pluralism.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

Immanuel Kant's political philosophy is primarily presented in two works very late in his corpus: Perpetual Peace and the Metaphysics of Morals. In these Kant presents an account of justice as based on the innate right of individuals to freedom, which situates his account in the history of the liberal tradition of political philosophy. But what really follows from the starting point of individual freedom? In this course we will both pay careful attention to Kant's texts, and also think about the implications of the position for contemporary concerns, as well as for how liberalism should be understood.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course examines the works, influence, and legacy of often underappreciated and overlooked women philosophers of the German tradition in the 19th and 20th centuries. Although they were largely deprived of formal education and academic positions and excluded from academic discourse, women thinkers developed their own ways of philosophizing, of engaging in dialogue with their contemporaries, and of shaping the philosophical movements of their time. The course will focus on Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861-1937) and her engagement with the philosophy of life movement and psychoanalysis, Edith Stein (1891-1942) and her impact on the phenomenological tradition, and Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and her lasting contribution to existential questions of human intellectual, social, and political life. The underlying theme of the course that connects these three thinkers is the life of the mind: what can we learn from each thinker about the conditions of human life, the dynamics of personal development, and the potential for emancipation?

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

This course examines the ideals and operation of the American political system. It seeks to understand how our institutions and politics work, why they work as they do, and what the consequences are for representative government in the United States. Emphasis is placed on the federal government and its electoral, legislative, and executive structures and processes. As useful and appropriate, attention is also given to the federal courts and to the role of the states. The purpose of the course is to understand and confront the character and problems of modern government in the United States in a highly polarized and plebiscitary era.

Distribution Area: 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)

To understand politics, the 24-hour news cycle of the modern media takes us only so far. In this course, we will take a step back and implement an intellectually rigorous method. Scholars of comparative politics use the method of comparison to illuminate important political phenomena of our times. Following this method, we will embark on a scholarly tour of the world and compare the politics of various countries. We will also trace these politics back to their historical sources. We will adopt the assumption that there is something to be gained from such comparisons across space and time.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

An introduction to international politics. Emphasis will be on continuity and change in international politics and the causes of war and peace. The first half of the course will focus on events prior to the end of the Cold War, including the Peloponnesian War, the European balance of power, imperialism, the origins and consequences of WWI and WWII, and the Cold War. The second half will focus on international politics since 1990, including globalization, whether democracies produce peace, the impact of weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and the prospects for peace in the 21st century. Theories of realism and liberalism will also be considered. This course was previously AS.190.209.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course surveys scholarly approaches to processes, relations, institutions, and social structures that cross, subvert, or transcend national borders. The course will also introduce students to research tools for global studies.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

An Introduction to materialist and systemic realist and liberal theories, in four parts: theory, pre-global, global and planetary.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

An introductory overview of Western Political Theory, starting with Plato and the Greeks, moving through Machiavelli and the moderns, and ending up with a brief look at current political theory. We will analyze a range of theoretical styles and political approaches from a handful of thinkers, and develop our skills as close readers, efficient writers, and persuasive speakers.

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

In the Republic, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato posed three questions: what is justice? How would a just person live? How would a just society be governed? These three questions form the basic subject matter of of political theory. In this course we will survey the history of political theory, reading a series of political theorists who took up Plato’s questions in a wide range of contexts, from Renaissance Italy and early modern England to late colonial India and the Jim Crow US South. Throughout, we’ll consider whether there are better and worse answers to these questions, or simply different answers that appear better or worse depending on the perspective from which one considers them. We’ll look closely at how the circumstances in which political theorists lived influenced their thinking, and how those circumstances should influence our own evaluation of their thinking. And we’ll ask whether Plato’s questions were the right questions to ask in his time, whether they are still relevant in ours, and whether there are other questions that political theorists would do better to spend their time considering.

Distribution Area: 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)

The premise of this course is that a political perspective is tied up with a (meta)physical one, that is to say, with ideas about the nature of Nature and of the status of the human and nonhuman elements within it. How is the universe ordered? Who or what is responsible for it? What place do or should humans occupy within it? How ought we to relate to nonhuman beings and forces? We will read three different responses to such questions and show how they are linked to a particular vision of political life. In the first, the world into which human are born is ordered by gods whose actions often appear inexplicable: Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, Oedipus the King by Sophocles, and Hippolytus by Euripedes will represent this tragic vision of the cosmos. In the second, Plato , in Republic and in Phaedrus, the forces of reason and eros play central and powerful roles. In the third, Augustine of Hippo presents a world designed by a benevolent, omnipotent God who nevertheless has allowed humans a share in their own fate. We end the course with Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy , which offers a perspective on these three visions of the world -- the tragic, the rational, and the faithful -- which will help us evaluate them in the light of contemporary political and ecological concerns.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

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

Writing Intensive

Contemporary and emerging technologies of nuclear (weapons, terrorism, energy) outer space (missiles, missile defense, asteroids), biosecurity (bioweapons, pandemics, terrorism) and cyber (war, spying, surveillance) and implications for security, international politics, arms control, and political freedom.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This introductory course seeks to examine the politics of China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan as part of a distinct region. We will seek to understand how individual polities responded to regional developments and trends, such as the tide of colonialism, socialism, regional economic developments, and democracy. The course will introduce students to the most pressing questions concerning the rise of China, the future of the innovation economy, and intra-regional tensions.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

What principles animate American democracy? How have those principles been debated? To what extent have the institutions and practices of American government aimed to embody those principles? And how well have they succeeded in that aim? In this course, we consider these questions from two distinct angles. First, by reading historical texts, we will learn how the people that participated in or observed the colonization of North America, the American Revolution, the framing of the US Constitution, the Civil War, the Progressive Era, the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement, and the modern conservative movement understood themselves and their actions. Second, by reading contemporary scholarship on the origins and evolution of the American political order, we will try to discern patterns of stability and change that emerge in concert with, or even despite, the ideas and intentions of influential individuals and powerful groups. Throughout the course, we examine the relationship between political institutions, individual incentives and group solidarities, and political ideas. By the end of the course, students will improve their grasp on the history of our political present and, perhaps, gain a better sense of how their actions can influence our political future.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course provides an analysis of US foreign policy with a focus on the interests, institutions, and ideas underpinning its development. It offers a broad historical survey that starts with US involvement in the First World War, covers major developments of the twentieth century, and concludes with contemporary issues. Important themes include the developments underpinning the emergence of the liberal world order, strategies of containment during the Cold War, nuclear deterrence and antiproliferation efforts, the politics of international trade, alliance politics, technological and security policy, and the re-emergence of great power competition.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Over the past several decades, the power and importance of America’s presidency have greatly expanded . Of course, presidential history includes both ups and downs, some coinciding with the rise and fall of national party systems and others linked to specific problems, issues, and personalities. We should train our analytic eyes, however, to see beneath the surface of day-to-day and even decade-to-decade political turbulence. We should focus, instead, on the pronounced secular trend of more than two and a quarter centuries of American history. Two hundred years ago, presidents were weak and often bullied by Congress. Today, presidents are powerful and often thumb their noses at Congress and the courts. For better or worse, we have entered a presidentialist era.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course is about the interplay of democracy and capitalism. A core principle of democracy is equality. A core principle of capitalism is inequality. In democracies, the resource-poor are vote-rich. In contrast, the resource-rich are vote-poor. This helps combining capitalist economic systems with democratic political systems (“democratic capitalism”). But the sharp increase in income inequality in recent decades raises questions about the viability of democratic capitalism. What are the patterns, causes, and consequences of (income) inequality? How does inequality influence how democracy and capitalism interact? Why are there large differences in terms of redistribution between countries? For concreteness, the course compares the U.S. case to other rich democracies.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Global politics involves power: hard and soft power; power over, power with, and power to; resources as power; and relations and processes of power. This course will explore aspects of power as they play out in case studies of diplomacy and war, global markets, and communications networks (cyber and other information technologies). The course will also examine the nature of actors and the powers they have to act across state borders. Readings will include classic texts on power, as well as more recent works of International Relations scholarship, and class assignments will focus on using insights from these works to draw one’s own positions on foreign policy issues.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course provides an introduction to climate solutions by reviewing the politics and technologies in all major sectors: electricity, transportation, biofuels, hydrogen, buildings, heavy industry, and agriculture. In each area, we will first understand the existing technologies and potential solutions. But to understand decarbonization, we also have to study the political economy of these technologies. What role do the technologies play in the broader economy? Who will win or lose from the transition? What firms and countries dominate and control current and emerging supply chains? What makes a climate solutions project bankable? How can states design policies, regulations, and programs to successfully manage the politics of technology change?

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

The plots and settings of fictitious works provide “cases” for the exploration of international relations theories. Incorporates literature, film, and works of IR scholarship.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course will explore working people’s political strategies from the Civil War through the present. We'll examine the shifting alliances among trade unions and political parties, and investigate mobilizations by freed people, women, immigrants, and LGBTQ workers. And we’ll pay special attention to the ways that workers’ action shaped the development of the modern American state.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Course Description: This course introduces students to the conduct of social science research in the field of International Relations. Students will develop skills for evaluating scholarship and will be introduced to concepts and methods that they will be able to use for research assignments in their subsequent courses. Topics include: research design and how to review the scholarly literature; finding, evaluating, gathering, and organizing evidence/data; and introduction to evaluation of hypotheses using statistical analysis, comparative case study analysis, and other techniques. Recommended for students who have already taken a "gateway" course in IR such as Contemporary International Politics or Introduction to Global Studies.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course introduces students to the foundational importance of race and racism to the construction of our contemporary global order. Topics include the Crusades, European imperialism, eugenics, Apartheid, freedom struggles, decolonization, and global development.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

An introduction to the fundamental questions and concepts of political economy: money, commodities, profit, and capital. The course will study the nature of economic forces and relations as elements larger social and political orders.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

For 250 years, American politics and society have reflected tensions between two foundational ideals. On the one hand, the notion of republican citizenship in the Declaration of Independence has inspired notions of the common good and institutions from majoritarian democracy to jury duty and state militias. Meanwhile, the tradition of liberal protections eventually enshrined in the Bill of Rights has grown to guarantee equal treatment and more rights for more people. At times, these two principles have gone hand in hand – at others, they have pointed in two very different directions. In this class, we will explore the philosophical origins of liberalism and republicanism and trace them through historical events and cultural landmarks, from the Revolutionary War until today. In the process, we will study, interpret, and discuss the contentious history of democracy in America.

Distribution Area: 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)

This course investigates the norms, rules, and institutions associated with efforts to achieve international and global justice. We begin with arguably the most familiar vehicle for moral advocacy and global justice in the latter part of the twentieth century: international human rights. Readings consider both the achievements and limitations of human rights ideas and institutions. The second part of the course then reflects on the more ambitious question of what global justice could and should look like in the future. The course will address liberal theories as well as critical perspectives, including those concerned with the experiences and struggles of marginalized groups and societies. Readings and discussions will address various pressing topics in global affairs, which may include: food insecurity, humanitarian crises, climate change, racism, global health, migration, and artificial intelligence. Students will complete the course with a deeper understanding of the challenges associated with using rights-based instruments and institutions to remedy global injustices with complex social, cultural, economic, and political underpinnings.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course examines Latinos and the American political landscape – taking seriously the political lives of Latinos to sharpen accounts of American political development. In Part I: Latinos and American Empire, we will examine how American state building, American racial capitalism, and American empire created a varied set of racialized citizenship regimes that shaped the legality and membership of Latinos – depending on the interplay between domestic racial hierarchies and international projects. In Part II: Latinos and the Administrative State, we will examine how the regulation of Latino immigrants and asylum seekers from Latin America and the Caribbean have been an engine for American political development – including the making of border bureaucracies, networked policing that harnesses the institution of federalism, and the development of ocean-spanning detention infrastructure. In Part III: Latinos as Targets, we will examine how Latinos became racialized as ‘illegals’ and became the prime targets of state action – and how state efforts have led to the suppressing of political agency, mobilization of collective action, and even integration of Latinos into the enforcement apparatus. In Part IV: Latinos, Hierarchies, and Power, we will examine the political power of those most marginalized among the Latino population – including Black, Trans, Queer, Immigrant, and Undocumented Latinos – to learn about how these groups contend with intragroup and intergroup hierarchies, their role in intersectional movements, and their organizing under repressive conditions. In Part V: Latinos and Placemaking, we conclude with Latino placemaking across the United States to examine how Latinos – in relation with and to, and in coalition with Black, Indigenous, and Asian organizing – are cultivating and asserting political and policy influence in the face of climate change, policing, detention, and gentrification.

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

This course studies the complexity of international human rights as a vehicle for political change. The course approaches human rights as a set of legal instruments and practices, but also as a flexible political and symbolic toolbox used to address sometimes very divergent claims to justice. It pays attention to the roles of states, as well as the growing authority of human rights organizations, institutions, and online networks. We begin with a survey of major international human rights instruments before using a series of case studies to better understand how those instruments are used in practice. Rather than assume that human rights are always effective and benevolent, we set out to consider which kinds of policies they enable and which they foreclose. Cases also raise questions about the universality of human rights across cultural settings and demand critical reflection on how human rights function in North-South relations. The course draws from research aimed at improving the practice of human rights, as well as perspectives approaching human rights as instruments of power.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

The seminar will introduce students to the political and economic trajectories of Latin America as a whole and of individual countries, including Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile. Special attention will be paid to the long-term trajectory of the political regime (democracy versus dictatorship) and of economic development (variations in GDP per capita). Competing theories, from economic dependence to historical institutionalism, will be examined for their contribution to our understanding of Latin America’s relative economic backwardness and low quality democracies.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The course will cover three topics: 1) The conceptualization of political regime, democracy and authoritarianism. We will also consider neighboring concepts of other macro-political structures—government, state, and administration—in order to be able to demarcate what is distinctive about the study of political regimes.2) The characterization of political regimes in most Western and some non-Western countries, in history and today. We will centrally focus on the so called “Waves of Democratization,” but we will also consider stories with less happy outcomes, that is, processes that led to the breakdown of democracies and the installation of repressive dictatorships.3) The explanation(s) of the stability and change of political regimes around the world. Theoretical accounts of regime change come in many flavors—emphasis on economic versus political causes, focus on agents and choices versus structures and constraints, international versus domestic factors, among others. We will consider most of them.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

At the end of the 19th century racial segregation was imagined as a more than a part of Jim Crow in the U.S. South: it was imagined as a model for global order. Theorists of imperial rule crisscrossed the Atlantic to study “race relations” in the United States to bolster projects of colonial rule in Africa and the Pacific. This course will unpack the theories of spatial, racial, and urban control that underwrote these visions of global order as well as the long-lasting material impact of these ideas on cities across the globe. Together, we will also uncover the role of Baltimore, as the first city in the United States to try and implement a law upholding residential segregation, in these international relations. Other case studies include Charleston, Chicago, and Johannesburg and topics include the politics of rioting, racial capitalism, race war, gender and sexuality, and public health.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This undergraduate seminar will explore the mysteries of money. We will focus on a central and straightforward, but vexing question: what is money? Pursuing this question will take us from deep philosophical explorations of the nature of money, through the diverse history of money and theories of money, to today’s complex and dynamic financial instruments – from securities, to derivatives, to crypto.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

This course takes a “war and society” approach to the Korean War. It explores the ways in which the war entangled the United States and Korea, shaping society and politics in the US and on the Korean peninsula. The course looks at the Korean War “in the round,” as involving culture, gender, and economy as well as military operations, diplomacy and strategy. We will consider the causes, course and consequences of the war locally and globally and we will look at literature and film as well as history and social science. Properly understanding a war requires an interdisciplinary approach. Students will come away from the course not only knowing about the Korean War but also how to approach understanding any war in all its dimensions.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

What is "Marxism"? After years of obscurity, Marxism has returned to recent political and academic debates, often without any clear indication of what the term might actually mean, or how it might differ from other "radical" political traditions. In this class, we will study and discuss the most important works of Karl Marx and Marxian thinkers, from their philosophical foundations to their analysis of global capitalism, class struggle, and the roles of states and culture. In the second part of the semester, we will trace this tradition through some of the great upheavals in the 20th century: from the Russian Revolution to particular variants of the struggles against colonialism in the developing world and against racism in the United States. In the process, we will focus on the central ideas distinguishing Marxism from other philosophies as well as from adjacent, allied, and rival political movements.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

The future of Israel has never been more uncertain. Although external threats from Arab countries have abated, the danger posed by a nuclear attack from Iran grows with each passing day. Equally alarming is the growing domestic threat to Israel’s existence as a Jewish democracy. Efforts by Israel’s ruling coalition to weaken the High Court call into question whether the liberal democratic character of Israel can persist. The possibility of civil war, once thought impossible, cannot be discounted. In assessing how Israel can cope with these existential threats, lessons from the destruction of the ancient Israelite kingdoms will be examined.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

For the most part, observers of American politics have not considered the possibility that the American democratic regime might be at risk. But the unexpected election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the subsequent course of his presidency have occasioned a great deal of uncertainty and anxiety about whether democracy in the United States is at risk and whether American political institutions can withstand the stresses of contemporary politics. This course will use the Trump era to explore the conditions that seem to threaten the stability of the American regime. We will begin by exploring the political circumstances that led to Trump’s rise. We will then examine what we can learn from the experience of other countries about the conditions that make democracy either robust or fragile. Finally, we will consider how a set of contemporary political conditions in the United States — extreme partisan polarization, intense racial antagonism, growing economic inequality, and expanded executive power — contribute to the challenges facing American democracy today and in the future.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

An examination of most aspects of democratic elections with the exception of th e behavior of voters. Topics include the impact of various electoral systems and administrative reforms on the outcome of elections, standards for evaluations of electoral systems, and the impact of the Arrow problem on normative theories of democratic elections.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Considers global and comparative politics of information, information technologies, and the Internet. Examines governance of information (ownership of information, rights to information, privacy) and governance of information technologies (domain names, social media websites, etc.).

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Reflection on political ideas and institutions in the United States is often oriented by the notion that the US is in some sense exceptional. For some commentators, the US is exceptionally democratic, exceptionally stable, exceptionally productive, and exceptionally innovative. For others, the US is exceptionally racist, exceptionally unequal, exceptionally violent, and exceptionally unhealthy. What both sides share is a common point of comparative reference in Europe. For all these commentators, Europe is the norm against which all of the exceptional qualities of the US stand out. In this course, we will ask how well notions of US exceptionalism stand up against the different comparative references found in the Americas, focusing in particular on the history of political thought in the Americas. We’ll begin by studying texts from the pre-colonial and colonial periods, noting similarities and differences between the political institutions, economies, and social and racial hierarchies of in the regions that comprised British, Spanish, Portuguese, and French America. Next, we’ll consider the US, Latin American, and Caribbean independence movements, early constitutionalism, and debates on women’s role in society, slavery, and the rights of Indigenous Americans, asking what, if anything, distinguished the US from its neighbors in its early years. Finally, we’ll examine theories of imperialism, racism, patriarchy, exploitation, and environmental destruction that have emerged from the Americas in the course of the 20th century, to see how both shared and divergent historical experiences have shaped perspectives relevant to contemporary political issues.

Distribution Area: 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)

This course examines the impact of weapons of mass destruction on international politics with an emphasis on security issues. The first half of the course focuses on the history of nuclear weapons development during the Cold War and theories of deterrence. The second half of the class considers contemporary issues including terrorism, chemical and biological weapons, ballistic missile defense and proliferation. Requirements include a midterm, final and a ten page paper.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course introduces students to the major debates and issues of postwar Japanese politics. Topics include nationalism, electoral politics, civil society, and immigration.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course examines the unique position of the United States in world politics. We will briefly survey the broader international relations literature on the dynamics of power and influence in world politics and work through empirics related to American foreign policy. The course will encompass security politics as well as the economic, monetary, and ideational dimensions of American influence. Interested students must have completed at least one 100 or 200 level introductory course in international relations.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course covers enduring debates about the way the Constitution has structured the U.S. government and about which powers the Constitution assigns to the federal government and to the states. We will examine these debates in the context of American political history and thought by studying the writings of prominent participants, and landmark Supreme Court cases.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Topics include executive and emergency power, racial and gender equality, and selected free speech and religious freedom issues.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

What is a border and why do borders matter in global politics. What do borders mean under conditions of globalization? An examination of the politics of borders, transborder flows, and networks within and across borders. The readings, which come from political science and other social science disciplines, will include theoretical and case-specific works. Goals for this writing intensive course also include learning to identify researchable questions, to engage with the scholarly literature, and to understand appropriate standards of evidence for making claims.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This seminar explores some of the core questions in the study of citizenship, migration, and racial and ethnic politics through the lens of Korean diasporic populations in the United States, Japan, China, and the former Soviet Union. We will examine how immigration, citizenship, and minority policies have structured and constrained the relationship of Korean communities to both the receiving and sending states. As a diasporic group, is there a collective self-identification among members of Korean communities that transcends territorial, hemispheric, linguistic, and cultural differences? Or is the Korean ethnic identity more a reflection of racial and ethnic politics in the receiving society? What factors determine the assimilability of a particular group at a given historical moment?

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Recommended Course Background: AS.190.214

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course provides an overview of public opinion in the United States. We will explore what affects people’s political opinions, how opinions change, and how opinions affect (and are affected by) politics. Some of the questions we will discuss are: What is public opinion? How much do Americans know about politics? How do the issue positions of leading politicians affect public opinion? How do race relations affect public opinion? What role does partisanship play in all this? When and how do people change their minds about politics? How can my voice be heard in politics? The class will read papers that include quantitative/statistical work; a prior knowledge of statistical methods would be helpful but it is not required for success in the course. The final paper will be based on an original research project, the successful completion of which does not require any statistical training.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course is a broad conceptual introduction to international relations theory in a format that stresses close reading and critical discussion. We will explore mainstream theoretical perspectives and critiques of those perspectives, as well as more recent developments in the field. By the end of the course, students will have a firm grasp of the core issues and debates in the field. The course is conceptually demanding; interested students should have at least completed an introductory course in political science.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

“Can the United States and China avoid a new Cold War? One might think not given disputes over the South China Sea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, human rights, trade, ideology and so much more. Moreover, competition for influence in the developing world and American concerns as to whether China will replace it as the preeminent world power suggest a new Cold War is in the offing. Nevertheless, their extensive economic ties and need to work together to solve common problems such as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and pandemics argues against a continuing confrontation. This course will examine whether cooperation or conflict will define Sino-American relations, and whether a new Cold War—or even a shooting war—lies in the future.”

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Business, Finance, and Government in East Asia explores the dynamics of East Asia's economic growth (and crises) over the last fifty years. We will examine Japan's post-war development strategy, the Asian tiger economies, and China's dramatic rise. Centered on case studies of major corporations, this course examines the interplay between politics and economics in East Asia, and considers the following questions: How have businesses navigated East Asia’s complex market environment? In what ways can the state foster economic development? How has the financial system been organized to facilitate investment? What are the long-term prospects for growth in the region?

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This class considers the range of political violence in the 21st century. Topics to be considered are the persistence of interstate and civil wars, targeted killings, terrorism, ethnic conflict, nuclear war, genocide, lessons from Ukraine, the rise of China, humanitarian intervention, and the impact of new technologies such as AI and autonomous weaponry on armed warfare. A 15-20 page research paper and in-class examination are required. A background in international relations is desirable but not required.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This introductory course explores China's expanding global presence and influence in the context of rising US-China tensions. We will begin with an overview of China's rise since market opening in the 1980s, leading up to its ascendence as a global power in recent times. In addition to learning about the historical and political-economic dimensions of China's engagement with the world, the course aims to impart you with some basic skills in evaluating the quality of evidence and expertise, so that you can form your own informed assessment of contentious issues.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Whether thought of as a biological reality or a social construction, “race” is viewed simultaneously as global and as intensely domestic. In this course I seek to examine race from a comparative perspective. What if we thought of race as a political construction, one produced both domestically and transnationally? In this class we will examine how race and racism are produced across as well as within borders, comparing the United States with similar and dissimilar cases. Further we will examine how comparative racial politics shape and are shaped by political movements, ideologies, and orders.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

What is liberal education, and what should it be? If such an education liberates, what does it liberate from? How does that liberation happen? What virtues does liberal education cultivate? What are its characteristic pitfalls? How does liberal education relate to the contemporary debates of political life, and how might it serve the public good? This course, co-taught by a professor of postcolonial politics at Johns Hopkins University and a conservative scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, will bring together divergent perspectives around a set of landmark texts about liberal education for a common conversation, engaging with enduring questions and contemporary political controversies.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This class explores the ideas and legal doctrines that define the freedom of speech. We will examine the free speech jurisprudence of the U.S. in comparison to that of other systems, particularly the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the Supreme Court of Canada.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course is designed to help students better understand the politics of China. Lectures will focus on the tools of governance that China has employed to navigate its transition from plan to market, provide public goods and services to its citizens, and to maintain social control over a rapidly changing society. The course will draw heavily from texts covering a range of subjects including China's political economy, social and cultural developments, regime dynamics, and historical legacies. Students interested in authoritarian resilience, governance, post-communist transition, and domestic will find this course particularly instructive.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

In this course, we will explore a constellation of theories loosely tied together under the rubric ‘violence’. Where and to whom does violence occur? What qualifies as violent, and why? The focus of our attention be both above and below state-to-state wars and international relations. Although war will never be far from our focus, our emphasis will be on those forms of violence that are not reducible to the traditional notion of international conflict. Political theory will help us better understand violence; violence will help us better understand political theory.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This is an exploratory research lab course that examines Rastafari – a transnational movement with roots in the Caribbean and presence in Baltimore and DC. Students learn about the history, philosophy, and practices of the movement as well as its confrontations with racist systems of political and economic governance. Students are prepared to undertake research with the movement, which culminates in a week long immersion with the movement in Jamaica.

Distribution Area: 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)

This class explores the relationship between the U.S. Supreme Court and the social movements that have shaped or resisted its rulings. It examines both contemporary and historical cases of social movement influence on the development of constitutional law in areas including: civil rights, reproductive rights, rights to gun ownership, and debt relief. We will read Supreme Court opinions as well as scholarship in legal theory and movement politics. Throughout the class, we will ask whether and how grass-roots politics can drive constitutional change.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Nationalism ties powerful organizations to political mobilization, territory, and individual loyalty. Yet nationalism is typically studied in isolation from other social formations that depend upon organizational – individual linkages. Alternative types of identity category sometimes depend similarly upon organizations that collect and deploy resources, mobilize individuals, erect boundaries, and promote strong emotional connections among individuals as well as between individuals and institutions. In this class, we study classic and contemporary works on nationalism, drawn from multiple disciplinary and analytic traditions, in the comparative context of alternative forms of identity. The focus of the class will be primarily theoretical, with no regional or temporal limitations.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross-listed with Africana Studies

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

An analysis of public policy and policy-making for American Cities. Special attention will be given to the subject of urban crime and law enforcement, poverty and welfare, and intergovernmental relations. Cross listed with Africana Studies.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This is a writing intensive, advanced undergraduate political theory seminar. The course will examine the politics of memory: how power shapes what is available to be remembered, the timing and occasions of memory, who is allowed to remember, and the spaces inside of which remembrance takes place. Specifically, the seminar will explore how segregated memory enables racial segregation and racial inequality. Toward that end, we shall investigate political and theoretical interventions potentially equipped to contest contemporary forms of racial amnesia haunting what some have labeled a “post-truth” world.

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

While the United States has long been a democracy for white men, it has mostly been anything but democratic when seen through the eyes of Black Americans. But progress toward the expansion of democracy has occurred at a few times in American history. What made American democratization possible, and how might the United States again move toward more complete and inclusive democracy?

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Most wealthy countries are democracies, but not all democracies are wealthy—India, Costa Rica, and Mongolia are prominent examples. This course explores three fundamental questions: 1) What political institutions promote economic prosperity? 2) Under what conditions does democracy promote prosperity? 3) What are the mechanisms connecting political institutions and economic performance?

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course examines the domestic, regional, and transnational politics of the Middle East and North Africa. The class is organized into three units. The first examines major armed conflicts—anti-colonial, intra-state, and inter-state—from 1948 through the 1990s. It uses these historical moments as windows onto key issues in Middle Eastern and North African political issues such as external intervention/occupation, human rights, sectarianism, social movements, and memory politics. Unit Two focuses on policy relevant issues such as democratization, minority populations, religion and politics, and gender. In Unit Three, students will explore the politics of the Arab Uprisings through critical reading and discussion of new (post-2011) scholarship on MENA states, organizations, and populations. Enrollment limited to Political Science and International Studies majors.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course introduces students of politics to international law. We will explore historical roots and current problems, recognizing along the way persistent contestation over the participants, sources, purposes, and interests associated with international law. The course situates formal aspects of law—centered on international treaties, international organizations, the World Court (ICJ), and the International Criminal Court (ICC)—within a broader field of global governance consisting of treaty-based and customary law, states and transnational actors, centralized and decentralized forms of legal authority. We will place special emphasis on the significance of international law to colonialism, decolonization, and contemporary forms of imperialism, keeping in mind that the law has been experienced differently in the Global South and by actors not recognized as sovereign by states in positions of power. Students will be exposed to a range of approaches, including rational choice, various species of legalism, process-oriented theories, critical legal studies, and postcolonial critiques.

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

The Politics of Good and Evil examines comparatively a series of classical myths and modern philosophies concerning the sources of evil, the nature of goodness and nobility, the relations of culture to politics, nature and the gods, the degree to which any metaphysic or theological faith is certain, and so on. It is a course in “elemental theory” in the sense that each text pursued challenges and disrupts others we read. Often the reader is disrupted existentially too, in ways that may spur new thought. A previous course in political theory or a theoretical course in the humanities is advised. A high tolerance for theory is essential. Texts on or by Sophocles, Job, Genesis ("J" version), Augustine, Voltaire, Nietzsche, James Baldwin, W. Connolly and Elizabeth Kolbert form the core of the class. Assignments: 1) One 12 page paper and a second 5-7 page paper, both anchored in the readings; 2) a class presentation on one text; 3) regular attendance and quality participation in class discussions.

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

This course is an advanced undergraduate political theory seminar that examines the disproportionate impact of environmental destruction on racially stigmatized populations. Environmental racism has largely been understood in terms of environmental policy-making that discriminates against people of color, particularly with respect to the state-sanctioned siting of toxic waste facilities, the distribution of pollutants, food-deserts, and the exclusion of non-white peoples from leading positions in the environmental movement. In this seminar, we will explore environmental racism more broadly, pushing beyond its conventional, place-based understandings and approaching the corresponding logics that produce human disposability and environmental waste from the standpoint of both space and time. Examining colonial legacies of coding racial others in terms natural disasters, epidemics, infestations, non-human animals, and dirt, we shall investigate how the natural world is subjected to exploitation and domination in tandem with the subordination of racial subjects historically identified with nature and rendered expendable. In other words, we shall illuminate the logics of power through which race-making coincides with waste-making. Accordingly, we will explore political and theoretical challenges to environmental racism in multiple registers, such as those posed by Indigenous communities, decolonial thinkers and Afro-diasporic theories contesting the intersection of racial biopolitics and ecological crises.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

In this course, we will revisit canonical understandings of the American bureaucracy as a provider of public goods and as accountable to elected officials within a system of democratic governance. The course will examine the role and operation of the executive branch bureaucracy across key phases of American political development. In Part I: Expansion, we will examine the role of the bureaucracy in territorial consolidation and the overseas expansion of the American state. In Part II: Removals, we will examine the role of the bureaucracy in managing populations. In Part III: Surveillance, we will examine the role of the bureaucracy in monitoring and surveilling citizens and noncitizens alike.

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

This seminar provides an in-depth exploration of the concept of sovereignty as the central organizing concept of international relations. Rather than taking it for granted as a framework that simply individuates state actors in international politics, we will explore the history of its emergence in colonial and imperial relations and trace its interactions with phenomena such as nationalism, globalization, territoriality, and intervention. The course is open to undergraduates with previous coursework in political science.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Mass political surveillance is a hallmark of modern life. All contemporary regimes practice some form of surveillance. Yet the politics of surveillance vary. This seminar investigates the technologies, purposes, and significance of political surveillance in the 20th century in different polities. We will explore perspectives on surveillance from various approaches—historical, sociological, anthropological, and in political science.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Despite growing awareness in other subfields of political science of the importance of Asian Americans as a political constituency, Asian American political theory and thought has yet to be recognized. This course provides an opportunity to investigate and interrogate the possibility of a textual “tradition” of Asian American political thought, including writings by thinkers before the invention of “Asian American” as an analytic, political, and identity category. How do Asian American writers, thinkers, and activists conceive of core political concepts such as freedom, citizenship, inclusion, and justice in the face of longstanding historical injustices–ranging from legal and social exclusion to internment? How do Asian Americans understand, portray, and attempt to alter their social position and relation to state power? What tools of resistance were available to them, and how did they use those tools to negotiate and reconfigure central conceptual categories of political thought and politics? We will engage a wide-ranging group of Asian and Asian American writers as well as contemporary theorists, as well as a variety of genres.

Distribution Area: 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)

In the years between World Wars I and II, a fascinating group of artists, manifesto-writers, performers, intellectuals, and poets, in Europe and the Caribbean, who were put off by conventional politics of the time, decided to pursue other means of societal transformation. This seminar explores the aims and tactics, and strengths and liabilities, of Dada and Surrealism, as it operated in Europe and the Americas in the years between the World Wars. We will also read texts and images from writers and artists influenced by Dada and Surrealism but applied to different historical and political contexts.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.001.193 OR AS.190.613 are not eligible to take AS.190.415.

Distribution Area: 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)

Around the world, people speak of living through a “polycrisis”—a time when overlapping disruptions create fear and paralysis. In this course, Prof. Yuen Yuen Ang invites you to flip the script: from polycrisis to polytunity, seeing disruption as a portal to new possibilities. Polytunity opens into Ang’s broader paradigm, AIM (Adaptive, Inclusive, Moral) Political Economy, which builds on her earlier works (How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, China’s Gilded Age). Together we’ll explore AIM’s three pillars: Adaptive (systems not machine thinking), Inclusive (diverse pathways, not one template), and Moral (ideas are shaped by power and positionality)—and trace how they can inspire both new research agendas and real-world applications across a range of fields. We’ll see how Ang’s “ideational forest” grows from roots to canopy, offering a generative compass for navigating our age of disruption.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

This course will examine violence that occurs mainly within the territory of nominally sovereign states. We will focus on violence as an object of study in its own right. For the most part, we will look at violence as a dependent variable, though in some instances it will function as an independent variable, a mechanism, or an equilibrium. We will ask why violence starts, how it “works” or fails to work, why it takes place in some locations and not others, why violence take specific forms (e.g., insurgency, terrorism, civilian victimization, etc.), what explains its magnitude (the number of victims), and what explains targeting (the type or identity of victims).

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

With the tools of geopolitics, course explores political debates over globalization of machine civilization and changes in scope and pace, space and place, and role of nature in human affairs.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This seminar is intended for two types of student: a) graduate students planning to take the comprehensive exam in comparative politics, either as a major or as a minor; and b) advanced undergraduates who want to get a good sense of what graduate training in political science is about. In addition to exploring central methodological debates and analytic approaches, the seminar reviews the literature on state-society relations, political and economic development, social movements, nationalism, revolutions, formal and informal political institutions, and regime durability vs. transition.

Prerequisite(s): Students who are enrolled in, or have already taken AS.190.625, are not eligible to take AS.190.424.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This seminar explores how the New Deal, the fundamental moment in the post-Civil War United States, has structured politics and government across a variety of domains ever since. Topics include presidential leadership, executive power, political parties, labor, race, and the welfare state.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This undergraduate seminar explores the philosophical concept of time as it relates to contemporary theories of politics. We will read mainly a selection of works form the philosophical canon (Plato, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger, Derrida, Ricoeur) along with works from contemporary theorists (Brown, Connolly, Grosz, Honig, Rancière).

Distribution Area: 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)

This upper-level seminar examines some of the major debates and issues of postwar Japanese and South Korean political economy. Topics include nationalism, gender politics, civil society, immigration, and US-Japan-South Korea trilateral relations.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

A close reading of Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and Ethics by Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), with consideration of important commentaries on these works. What conceptions of the human being, nature, reason, God, and freedom are defended and affirmed by Hobbes and Spinoza? What rhetorical strategies accompany their theories of self, ethics, social life?

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.190.628 are not eligible to take AS.190.428.

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Although “the market” is conventionally understood as separate from “politics”, the modern market economy did not arise in a political vacuum. In fact, the very separation between the economy and politics is itself the product of a politically potent set of ideas. This course is an upper-division reading seminar on the origins and evolution of the modern market economy. Readings will include Smith, Marx, Weber, Polanyi, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman, Becker, and Foucault. Recommended course background: Introduction to comparative politics OR any college-level course in social or political theory.

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

Afropessimism represents a critical body of thought that takes as its fundamental premises two ideas, the Black is the Slave, and in order to end that ontological condition the world must end. In this course, we will interrogate the key readings associated with this body of thought as well as responses.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Race has been and continues to be centrally important to American political life and development. In this course, we will engage with the major debates around racial politics in the United States, with a substantial focus on how policies and practices of citizenship, immigration law, social provision, and criminal justice policy shaped and continue to shape racial formation, group-based identities, and group position; debates around the content and meaning of political representation and the responsiveness of the political system to American minority groups; debates about how racial prejudice has shifted and its importance in understanding American political behavior; the prospects for contestation or coalitions among groups; the “struggle with difference” within groups as they deal with the interplay of race and class, citizenship status, and issues that disproportionately affect a subset of their members; and debates about how new groups and issues are reshaping the meaning and practice of race in the United States.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This seminar will address the role of violence–both domestic and international–in political life. Though most claim to abhor violence, since the advent of recorded history, violence and politics have been intimately related. States practice violence against internal and external foes. Political dissidents engage in violence against states. Competing political forces inflict violence upon one another. Writing in 1924, Winston Churchill declared–and not without reason–that, "The story of the human race is war." Indeed, violence and the threat of violence are the most potent forces in political life. It is, to be sure, often averred that problems can never truly be solved by the use of force. Violence, the saying goes, is not the answer. This adage certainly appeals to our moral sensibilities. But whether or not violence is the answer presumably depends upon the question being asked. For better or worse, it is violence that usually provides the most definitive answers to three of the major questions of political life--statehood, territoriality and power. Violent struggle, in the form of war, revolution, civil war, terrorism and the like, more than any other immediate factor, determines what states will exist and their relative power, what territories they will occupy, and which groups will and will not exercise power within them. Course is open to juniors and seniors.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Despite its well-known idiosyncrasies, the American state has consistently wielded substantial power, and many Americans have long experienced the state’s power as potent, omnipresent, and structuring their lives in important ways. This research-based course will examine theories of the state and political authority both from “above” - considering the political sources of both the American state’s power and its limitations - and from “below,” using people’s own narratives and political formations to explore how Americans develop knowledge about the state, confront and resist the state’s power, and expand or shift its distribution of ‘public’ goods. How do people understand the state, theorize its operations and possibilities, deploy it, and sometimes build parallel structures of provision and governance? We explore several cases of when people marginalized by race, class, gender, or precarious legal standing organized deep challenges to state power and transformed state authority. Considering the state as both formal structure and frame for everyday experience can offer a fresh perspective on contemporary democratic challenges and political struggles. Students will conduct original research using archives and sources like the American Prison Writing Archive, oral history archives like the Ralph Bunche collection and HistoryMakers collection, and archival sources in the History Vault such as the Kerner Commission interviews. The course is appropriate for advanced undergraduates (juniors and seniors), preferably having taken courses in political science or related coursework, and graduate students in political science, history, and sociology.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Despite the periodic resurgence of war on its periphery, Europe can easily appear as a pacified and relatively boring continent. This course will question this stereotype through an examination of European politics in historical and cross-national perspective. We will discuss central concepts that comparative politics scholars mobilize in the study of European politics across time and space. Topics will include: political, legal, and economic governance; the evolution of democracy, the welfare state, partisan politics, citizenship, and identities; European integration and globalization.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Humans have long dreamed of leaving Earth and venturing into the vastness of cosmic outer space. During the 20th century space travel became a real possibility, stimulating an extraordinary outpouring of visionary space projects. Space Expansionists claim these projects are increasingly feasible and desirable. Advocates assert that human expansion into space will fundamentally improve the human situation by enabling perennial human goals (improved security from violence, expanded and protected habitat, and ultimately survival of the human species). In the first steps beyond the atmosphere, a variety of military, scientific, and utilitarian activities have been conducted. The history of space activities has been marked by sudden and unexpected spurts of activity, followed by periods of relative stagnation. Recent developments point to another period of rapid expansion: renewed military tensions, new space private sector initiatives, renewed interest in Luna, and growing efforts to divert and mine asteroids. A core part of the arguments for the desirability of space expansion are geopolitical in that they claim broadly political effects will result from humans interacting with extraterrestrial material environments composed of particular combinations geographies and human-built artifacts. Space expansionist arguments are advanced through analogies to Earth geographies (e.g. space is an ocean), as well as large-scale historical trends and patterns. Space expansion is advanced as the opening of a new frontier, reversing the contemporary global closure brought about by rising levels of interdependence. The goal of space expansionists is to make humanity a multi-world species, and it is anticipated that biological species radiation will occur. This course explores the causes and consequences of space activity; how space activities reflect and effect world political order; and whether human expansion into space is desirable, as its fervent advocates believe.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course offers a graduate-level introduction to the field of comparative politics, focusing on the substantive questions that drive contemporary research. Issues will include: state formation and state capacity; regime typology, democratization, and democratic backsliding; party systems and political behavior; political economy and economic development; racial, ethnic, and religious politics; and revolutions and political violence. Readings include both classic and recent works, selected to help students both prepare for major or minor comprehensive exams and frame their own research projects.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course is an advanced introduction to war in the modern world, encompassing its political, social, cultural and ecological dimensions. It adopts a “war and society” approach in that it covers the ways in which society shapes war and, in turn, how war shapes society. It situates “war and society” in an historically evolving global context, attending to the nature of war in both the core and the periphery of world politics. Topics include the totalization and industrialization of war; civil-military relations; modernity, reason and war; “small war”; and race, culture and war.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Intensive exploration of theories of how geography, ecology, and technology shape political orders. Case studies of ancient, early modern, global, and contemporary topics, including European ascent, industrial revolution, tropics and North South divide, climate change, geo-engineering and global commons (oceans, atmosphere and orbital space

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Over the seven decades since their invention, nuclear weapons have been a central focus in international politics. This course explores the fundamental question: what political arrangements ensure security from nuclear weapons? The debate has evolved through three stages. Initially (1945-1960), radical political changes were anticipated due to the perceived imminent threat of nuclear war. In the second stage (1960-1990), deterrence became a key concept, but opinions differed on the necessary conditions for it. The end of the Cold War marked an unexpected shift. In the third stage (1990-present), concerns about proliferation and terrorism emerged, leading to disagreements on preventive/pre-emptive actions versus arms control and disarmament. Realist international theories have been conflicted throughout these stages, with ongoing debates on arms control, public involvement, and the impact of nuclear security measures on liberal democratic governments.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.190.416 are not eligible to take AS.190.454.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This seminar explores social movements across American history, placing them in the broad context of American political development. Cases include abolition, temperance, women’s suffrage, the Second Ku Klux Klan, labor, civil rights, feminism, gun rights, Black Lives Matter, and MAGA. As we situate these movements, we seek to explore similarities and dissimilarities in their strategies and impacts. Requirements include a term paper.

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

Humanitarianism has become a pervasive form of moral and political action in world politics. Over the course of the twentieth century and beyond, humanitarian logics infused the conduct of war and informed global governance in many areas—from refugee relief and post-conflict reconstruction, to peacekeeping and development, to migration, ecological security, and recovery from natural disasters. And yet, while often celebrated as an achievement, humanitarianism involves ambiguities, contradictions, and pathologies demanding critical scrutiny. This seminar aims, first, to interrogate critically the history of humanitarian practices and, second, to refine and revise concepts used to study and evaluate those practices. We pursue these aims in part with an eye to understanding mutations of humanitarian politics accompanying contemporary challenges to the post-WWII liberal international order. Topics include: (1) the invention of “humanity” as an idea/ideal; (2)humanitarianism, war and empire; (3) varities of humanitarianism; (4) humanitarian violence; (5) humanitarian expertise and institutions; (6) humanitarianism, media, and technology;

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.190.656 are not eligible to take AS.190.456.

Distribution Area: 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)

We are used to thinking of sovereignty, the state, and war as fairly self-evident concepts and as the bedrock of so much work, not only in academic international relations, but also in policy discourse. It seems straightforward that sovereign states wage war, and war in turn may make or break states. Under conditions of rapidly advancing globalization, however, the relationship of these concepts is anything but straightforward. This class builds on historical investigations into state formation, the relationship of the military instrument to the state, the progressive globalization of the defense industrial base, the rapidly changing practices of security under technical innovation, and related phenomena to question notions of state and security and to better understand the past and present fault lines of conflict. This is a graduate course that welcomes advanced undergraduates with previous international relations coursework at instructor’s discretion.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course will survey the history of geopolitics and green industrial from China’s wind and solar push in the 1990s to the Inflation Reduction Act and beyond. We will seek to understand the determinants of industrial policy, best practices for industrial policy, and the effects of industrial policy on climate politics. The lens of geopolitics and industrial policy provides a unique avenue to understand world order. Through this lens, we will see how energy systems and technology competition animate and structure global politics.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.190.658 are not eligible to take AS.190.458.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The power to coin money was historically central to the formation of sovereign states. Yet the relationship between money and sovereignty has considerably evolved over time. First, the emergence of nation-states and of popular sovereignty meant that money was no longer primarily a state and elite concern, but also increasingly a matter of everyday life and mass politics. Second, the increasing integration and financialization of the world economy produced new challenges for sovereignty. We will discuss historical and social science scholarship that address these historical trends and the politics of money and sovereignty today. Topics will include: capitalism, public budgets and debts, central banks, populism, democracy, financialization, international integration.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course will explore the classic question, “What is justice?” While we will entertain several different answers to the question, the course will focus on how these answers speak to and past one another, illuminating contemporary quandaries related to intergenerational justice, global justice, and the justice of resistance. Guided by Nietzsche, we will read texts by authors including, among others, Plato, Kant, Bentham, Marx, Rawls, Nozick, and West. Over the course of the semester, students will write three papers. There will also be a final exam.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Federalism has become an increasingly widespread constitutional form in the world — in America, but also in Europe, the "cradle of the nation-state," and on other continents. While it typically resolves political problems, it also raises many questions about the nature of states and of sovereignty. This course will discuss scholarship that addresses federalism, sovereignty, and the state, both in contemporary politics and in historical perspective.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This is a writing intensive, advanced undergraduate political theory seminar on racial formation. Specifically, the course examines white supremacy in politics and theory. We shall take a critical-historical approach to theorize the continuities and changes in whiteness over time. For instance, what power hierarchies and political goals has white identity been fashioned to advance historically? By studying whiteness as race---and not the absence thereof--we will take up questions of how to best understand and contest contemporary manifestations of white supremacy in environmental racism, imperialism, discourses of race war and replacement theory, and ongoing neo-colonial, biopolitical and death-dealing necropolitical projects. Building on this work, we will investigate the white disavowal of existential crises of climate change and pandemic threats within apocalyptic modes of whiteness---ways of thinking and acting where the end of white supremacy is imagined and lived as the real end of the world.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The focus of the seminar is on the formation and transformation sates and regimes. The perspective is both historical and comparative, covering Western Europe, Latin America, Africa and the US as a “non exceptional” case. This is fundamentally a Comparative Politics course, but APD students will almost certainly benefit from it.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

In the 20th century, American universities became the envy of the world, leading in most categories of scholarly productivity and attracting students from every nation. In recent years, though, American higher education has come to face a number of challenges including rapidly rising costs, administrative bloat, corporatization and moocification. We will examine the problems and promises of American higher education, the political struggles within the university and the place of the university in the larger society. Upper classes and Grad Students only.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

The American constitutional order, which was designed to operate without political parties, now has parties as divided as any in the democratic world. This course will examine explanations of how this happened, the consequences of party polarization for public policy and governance, and what if anything should be done about it.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The philosophy of law or jurisprudence investigates the nature of law and what makes law, as it were, law. This course will examine some of the ways in which law has been defined and understood. It will also consider how law is distinguished from other systems of norms and values, such as morality, and how law is distinguished from other aspects of government, such as politics. In addition, the course will introduce students to discussions of legal reasoning and interpretation. To complete the course, students will be required to participate in class discussion, take two exams, and write a paper.

Distribution Area: 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)

Over the last quarter millennium, the United States of America has been the most successful state in world politics. It has had the world’s largest economy since 1870, and was on the winning side of the three great world struggles of the 20th century. During these struggles, the fate of liberal capitalist democracy in the world has been closely connected with the rise and success of the USA. This course examines the rise and impacts of the USA in comparative and international perspective. What factors account for the success of the USA during the late modern era? How has the rise and influence of the USA shaped world politics? The course focuses on the causes, consequences and possible alternatives of three founding moments (1776-88, 1861-67 and 1933-36), the role of wars against illiberal adversaries in strengthening American liberal national identity, the ways in which the internal logics of the Philadelphian states-union (1787-1861) and the liberal international order among advanced industrial democracies (1945-) as alternatives to Westphalian state-systems, the role and consequences of the US as an anti-imperial power, and the internal dual between liberal America dedicated to the Founding principles and an ‘alt-America’ of slavery and white supremacy.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

“The abnormal is he who demands, appeals, and begs” – Frantz Fanon. This course explores the writings and politics of Frantz Fanon, the radical anti-colonial author, psychiatrist, diplomat, and revolutionary who inspired decolonial and anti-racist struggles across the globe. We will situate Fanon’s writings in the global historical context of decolonization, and ask how they can illuminate contemporary questions of madness, racism, fascism, and empire. In addition to reading Fanon’s work, we will trace his influence on radical social movements, political thought, and global politics, and explore the limits and promises of culture, art, and film for social transformation.

Distribution Area: 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)

This course focuses on the politics of emerging natural and technogenic catastrophic and existential risks (CAER). The emergence and acceleration of machine-based civilization devoted to the progressive development of science-based technology has produced a fundamentally novel human situation, and the emergence of a horizon of potential disasters, catastrophes and threats to human existence. Some threats, such as super-volcanoes and asteroidal collisions, have purely natural origins. Others, such as nuclear war, bioweapons, nanotechnology, artificial superintelligence, totalitarian government and climate change are anthropogenic. Some, such as geo-engineering, space colonization and asteroidal diversion, appear to be solutions, but may also pose severe, but under-appreciated, threats. International theory is largely unprepared to conceptualize such threats, or suitable solutions to them. Many of the novel technologies have both civil and military applications. Some are increasingly accessible to small non-state actors. Foresight capacities to anticipate negative consequences of new technologies are severely limited, and powerful interests are deeply committed to their largely unhindered development. Several of these technologies may enable the establishment of highly hierarchical world government, and regulatory regimes capable of restraining them may require world government to be effective. The globally hegemonic ideology of Baconian Promethean modernism is strongly committed to unlimited scientific and technological development, making efforts to restrain, regulate or relinquish such technologies very difficult. This course focuses on the contours of these threats, the ways in which they are activated by different political factors, the features of regimes necessary to restrain them, and the implications for world order of these threats and responses to them.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Institutions are a ubiquitous part of political life. Much of the work of political life, both inside and outside government, is only possible through institutions - arrangements of power that provide continuity over time, have a relatively stable mission, jurisdiction and organizational structure. Democracy itself is dependent upon - but perhaps also constrained by - institutions. Institutions are subjects of profound anxiety, across the political spectrum, albeit for different reasons. Those anxieties come from fears about hierarchy, elite capture, illegitimacy, inflexibility, gerontocracy and ineffectiveness. This class will investigate the reasons for the creation and maintenance of institutions, the sources of institutional anxiety, and the challenges that this anxiety creates for the effective, responsible and democratic exercise of power

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This seminar explores the intellectual origins and ongoing intellectual productivity of the historical materialist account of political economy inaugurated with Karl Marx. It considers, in particular, how fatal couplings between power and difference are leveraged by capitalism as a tool of accumulation. Women’s labor and social reproduction, nature’s availability for mastery and the destructive exploitation of land and natural resources, racial inferiority and exploitative conditions of labor, and Global South peoples conscription into hyper-exploitative labor. The seminar will explore and interrogate the political dimensions of these transformations: how are relationships of political rule entangled with capitalist priorities of accumulation and which peoples/political subjects get to do the ruling and why? How did patriarchal and racial arrangements came to be, how do they relate to the production of value, and how are they sustained politically today? How do historical political transformations (including formal decolonization, democratic transitions, and the onset of free trade and structural adjustment, among others) inaugurate new forms of accumulation and how do these forms and their politics take different shape in the North and the Global South? A sample of the readings include Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, W. E. B. Du Bois, Silvia Federici, Andreas Malm, Ruy Mauro Marini, and others.

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

There is a widespread recognition that the prospects for contemporary civilization and humanity are shadowed by a range of catastrophic and existential threats, a major subset of which are anthropogenic and technogenic in character. (In the simplest terms these threats arise from the collision between scientific-technological modernity and the geography of the planet Earth.) At the same time, the two most powerful institutional complexes on the planet (market capitalism and the war state system) are committed to further rapidly advancing technology for power and plenty, and anticipate further great elevations of the human estate. Over the last long century, a great debate has emerged, across many disciplines, on the ‘terrapolitan question’(TQ): given the new and prospective material contexts for human agency, what world orders are needed to assure human survival, prosperity and freedom? Practical agency responsive to the new horizon of threat and benefit depends upon getting an adequate answer to this question.Any theory capable of illuminating these realities and choices, and answering the TQ, must be significantly materialist in character. Explicitly materialist theories are very old, and very diverse, and material factors appear in virtually every body of thought, yet are still significantly underdeveloped in contemporary international and world order theory.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course is a survey of modern political thought for advanced undergraduate students and graduate students. Its purpose is to (1) introduce some of the most significant texts in early modern European political theory, (2) survey a selection of the most important recent scholarly studies of these sources, and (3) develop theoretical and methodological skills at analyzing and interpreting the texts and the scholarship they have inspired.

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

This class introduces students to the core theories, concepts and empirical analyses of two levels of collective action analysis: social movements and advocacy organizations. We will explore current and past social movements to ask questions both fundamental (e.g. “Why do social movements start?” “Under what conditions do they succeed?”) and to look critically at the real-world constraints and opportunities contemporary advocacy organizations face.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Just how well equipped is academia to answer the most challenging questions of US national security policy? From Henry Kissinger, to Zbigniew Brzezinski and Condoleezza Rice, it seems to be an American tradition to appoint well-trained academics to the highest ranks of U.S. national security decision-making. Academics have much to say about the questions that keep policymakers awake at night: How dangerous is the spread of nuclear weapons? Should the United States come to the defense of Taiwan in the event of an attack on that island? In this course we will take up a major topic related to U.S. national security policy each week, examining the existing arguments put forth by leading academics and policymakers alike.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

The objective of this course is to examine the American right in comparative context with an emphasis on discussing how scholarship defines key terms, engaging various empirical cases from around the world ranging from Hungary to Turkey to India, and placing particular emphasis on linking theory with practice by inviting experts and scholars from within and beyond academia to discuss contemporary developments in global politics. We will closely consider major themes and concepts from other introductory political science courses such as democratic backsliding, global populism, the administrative state, and varieties of conservatism and partisanship. There are no prerequisites for this course and students from fields outside political science and international studies are strongly encouraged to participate. Dean's Teaching Fellowship.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Writing Intensive

How have Black communities practiced resistance, reimagined the future, and reshaped the politics of time? This course explores Black political behavior and resistance through the lens of Afrofuturism and alternative temporalities. Students will examine how conventional notions of time and progress have been used to reinforce power and inequity, and how Black political action, cultural production, and speculative imagination challenge these structures. Drawing on political theory, cultural texts, and Afrofuturist thought, we will investigate the strategies, visions, and practices that open new possibilities for political agency, collective memory, and visions of liberation and Black futurity.

Distribution Area: 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)

udging by institutional capabilities, modern conservative state-building is the most ambitious project ever undertaken by the American government, or perhaps any government in history. This seminar-style course will trace the emergence and unique features of this American Leviathan, encompassing the institutions dedicated to enforcement and national security as well as conservative visions of social policy. Across these different domains, we will look at how and why these programs and agencies manage to claim resources and attract unrivaled political support. From metaphorical wars waged against drugs or crime to a military-industrial complex unprecedented in its scale, we will look for patterns of conservative state-building in the presentation of mission, leadership style, and operation. Drawing on literatures and relying on insights from the disciplines of history and political science, this seminar will encourage and employ a broad analytical skill set in order to critique, and to better understand, the remarkable record amassed by the Leviathan of 20th century conservative state-building.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

Writing Intensive

The course will focus on the origin and development of the Arab-Israeli conflict from its beginnings when Palestine was controlled by the Ottoman Empire, through World War I, The British Mandate over Palestine, and the first Arab-Israeli war (1947-1949). It will then examine the period of the Arab-Israeli wars of 1956, 1967, 1973, and 1982, the Palestinian Intifadas (1987-1993 and 2000-2005); and the development of the Arab-Israeli peace process from its beginnings with the Egyptian-Israeli treaty of 1979, the Oslo I and Oslo II agreements of 1993 and 1995, Israel's peace treaty with Jordan of 1994, the Road Map of 2003; and the periodic peace talks between Israel and Syria. The conflict will be analyzed against the background of great power intervention in the Middle East, the rise of political Islam and the dynamics of Intra-Arab politics, and will consider the impact of the Arab Spring.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course will explore the evolution of Russian Foreign Policy from Czarist times to the present. The main theme will be the question of continuity and change, as the course will seek to determine to what degree current Russian Foreign Policy is rooted in the Czarist(1613-1917) and Soviet(1917-1991) periods, and to what degree it has operated since 1991 on a new basis. The main emphasis of the course will be on Russia's relations with the United States and Europe, China, the Middle East and the countries of the former Soviet Union--especially Ukraine, the Baltic States, Transcaucasia and Central Asia. The course will conclude with an analysis of the Russian reaction to the Arab Spring and its impact both on Russian domestic politics and on Russian foreign policy.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

From pirates to settlers, enslaved people to nomads, tourists to migrants, global politics are made by the overlapping routes of people on the move, and by attempts to put some people on the move, while containing others in place. In an international world order of nation-states constituted through histories of mobility, questions of movement are amongst the most pressing political issues facing students of international relations. The course will explore some of these questions through engagement with academic texts as well as fiction, film, and archival materials, to ask: What does the study of world politics look like if movement is treated as a primary rather than an exceptional condition? How do contemporary regimes of (im)mobility function to put some people on the move, and attempt to contain others in place? How do processes of colonization and decolonization unfold through questions of mobility? How are questions of belonging framed in relation to movement and stasis, for example, in relation to those rendered ‘migrants’ and ‘natives’?

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

What does it mean to live in a world often characterized as “post-truth” or “post-moral”? The postmodern turn is often characterized by a rejection of moralism. Such criticisms often argue that that which has often been called ‘morality’ is only one way in which to valuate the better and the worse—and one which impoverishes life since its works by ‘judging life’ utilizing criteria which claim to stand outside and above the life thus judged. However if this is only one way in which to evaluate, the question which is raised is: what other frameworks for valuation could there be? This course will investigate what may be meant by the critique and explore other frameworks for valuation primarily through the immanent processual ethics proposed in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics. Through reading Spinoza’s ethical framework in conversation with various considerations from fields such as the scientific, mathematical, literary, cinematic, and painterly, we will explore a possible alternative framework of normative evaluation, populated by considerations such as: power of action, capacity for affecting and being affected, what a body can do.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

This course explores the evolving concept of pluralism in political theory, from its liberal foundations to contemporary calls for “deep pluralism” that engage radically different 'worldviews,’ ‘ontologies,’ ‘worlds,’ ‘cosmologies.’

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

Is it possible to solve global poverty? For several decades the international development community has been trying to do so, with mixed results. In recent years many donor countries have dramatically reduced development aid, and there is need for new thinking on how to move forward. In this course we study what has been tried and what is being proposed now. Students leave the course with an understanding of economic development in Latin America, Africa, and Asia over the last century, as well as approaches to the study of development in different social science disciplines and an introduction to making a career in international development.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This survey course situates China's political and cultural revolutions within broader transnational contexts from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It examines foreign influences and global entanglements through topics such as Christian missionaries and anti-dynastic revolutions, the contest between the New Culture Movement and the Confucian Revering Movement, Chinese overseas and federalist movements, and the international dimensions of Chinese nationalist projects between 1898 and 1949.

Distribution Area: 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 will focus on four classical social theorists whose ideas have greatly influenced how we study and understand society: Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, and W.E.B. DuBois. Much of the course is devoted to applying their theories to analyze current social issues, especially those involving social inequality, conflict, cohesion, and change.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course examines the impact of colonialism on East and Southeast Asia from the long nineteenth century to the postwar era. Focusing on British Singapore and Hong Kong, and Japanese Korea and Taiwan, it explores colonial social and economic change, as well as postcolonial transformations. Topics include free-trade imperialism, capitalist exploitation, colonial modernity, Pan-Asianism, anticolonial movements, and nation-building in the Cold War.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Digital platforms are becoming an indispensable part of our lives. We order food and groceries through DoorDash and Instacart, request rides from Uber and Lyft, and browse content created by Instagram and TikTok influencers. How do these platforms emerge and become so deeply intertwined with our daily lives? Who is investing in and working for these platforms, and why? How do platforms operate, and what are the consequences? How do gig platform worker feel about their work and life? What are the changes and continuity of gig work compared to other low-wage work in different times and spaces? Are there any alternatives to how platforms can be organized and operated in today’s world? This undergraduate seminar will introduce and discuss the main concepts and practices of the global platform economy with a particular focus on gig labor. We will critically examine: 1) how external political, economic, and social conditions shape platforms; 2) how platforms shape workers’ labor conditions and activism, and how workers’ actions in turn impact these platforms; and 3) how today’s gig work relates to other precarious work across different time and space, and what can be done to improve gig labor’s working conditions.Following an overview in the first week, the course will tackle different topics analytically, including the emergence and evolution of the gig economy, the social formation and working conditions of gig labor, gig labor’s collective actions, state interventions in gig labor, platform work in a comparative and historical perspective, and platform cooperativism as an alternative to today’s gig economy. The course is reading and writing intensive and will be conducted as a discussion seminar.

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The course examines the modern transformation of social life from the prism of coffee and tea. It traces the mass consumption of these two caffeinated beverages from the expansion of Eurocentric capitalism from the long sixteenth century onwards. It shows the changes in the coffee and tea culture from their respective Asian contexts to the age of mass consumption at the turn of the twentieth century. The topics include cash-crop production, plantation and peasant economy, the public sphere, and food heritage and nationalism.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Race has been important in social classifications and producing inequalities. This course is designed to provide you with a global understanding of how racial categories are created and maintained, how they change over time, and how they vary from place to place. It is organized in four parts. The first part introduces the concepts and analytical tools used by social scientists to study race. Of particular concern is power and the social construction rather than “natural” categories of race, as well as the general social processes involved in the maintenance and reproduction of these boundaries. In the second part, we will study the theories and dynamics racial category formation in the United States with attention to forms and processes of racial exclusion and oppression, and evidence of socio-economic inequalities based on race. In the third part of the course, we will compare these processes in the U.S. to those occurring in other countries. The fourth and final part of the course examines how race and racism shape political struggles and resistance movements.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Race and ethnicity have played a prominent role in American society and continue to do so, as demonstrated by interracial and interethnic gaps in economic and educational achievement, residence, political power, family structure, crime, and health. Using a sociological framework, we will explore the historical significance of race and its development as a social construction, assess the causes and consequences of intergroup inequalities and explore potential solutions.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Fake news. Alternative facts. Follow the science. Misinformation. Disinformation. How can we understand the role of information, evidence, and scientific inquiry in politics? Where does information come from? How is it used? How can evidence, argument, and listening improve public conversations? This seminar will examine the connections between information, knowledge, evidence, and democracy, focusing mostly on the United States but with global examples as well.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course will examine various aspects of social inequality in China during the Mao and post-Mao eras, including inequality within villages, the rural/urban divide, labor relations, education and health policies, gender and ethnic relations, and the social foundations of elite groups. Each of these topics will be tackled analytically, but the goal is also to understand what it was and is like to live in China as the country has undergone radical social transformations over the past seven decades. The course is writing-intensive and will be conducted as a discussion seminar.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course will review the history of US foreign wars and antiwar movements and consider the relationship between the two. It is designed for both undergraduate and graduate students.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course combines theoretical frameworks with empirical case studies to examine the concept of the "Global South" and China's evolving role within it. Students will analyze the implications of China's development finance, foreign direct investment patterns, trade relationships, and cooperation initiatives with Global South countries. Through regional case studies, students will examine Chinese "Going Out" policies and strategies across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, exploring how these relationships are reshaping global economic and political dynamics. Students will develop strong analytical and research skills.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

In 2020 immigrant adults and their foreign-born and U.S.-born children counted approximately 85.7 million people, or 26 percent of the overall U.S. population. This course covers post-1965 immigration to the U.S. The inflows, stocks, and incorporation of immigrant generations make immigration one of the most important topics in sociology. Through in-depth readings, student-selected presentations, and student-led discussions, the course engages students in understanding and critiquing contentious perspectives in the potential impacts of immigration on the economic and social dynamics of American society.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

What is the function and purpose of schooling in modern society? Is education the "great equalizer" in America, or does family background mostly predict where people end up in life? What can we do to improve educational attainment? This course is designed to tackle such questions and develop the ability of students to think critically, theoretically, historically and empirically about debates in the sociology of education. The course will also cover additional topics, including: racial and economic differences in educational attainment; school segregation; the rise of for-profit education; how college matters. In addition to reading empirical studies and theoretical work, the relevance of education research for educational policy-making will be emphasized throughout the course.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

What is the relationship between space and society? In this course, we will challenge the idea that space is a mere container of human interactions and activities. We will learn how top-down decisions about space (e.g., the dismantling of public housing, land dispossession, the formation of refugee camps) contribute to social hierarchies along class, gender, race, and caste lines. We will then consider how bottom-up movements use space to resist oppression and promote social change. We will draw on theoretical and empirical work from the social sciences and urban studies, and explore cases from several regions of the world, spanning the last few decades. Students in the course will also practice broader essential skills in the social sciences, including summarizing academic arguments, connecting empirical observations to theoretical debates, and making clear and concise arguments.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Humanitarian organizations play life-preserving roles in global conflicts, and have front-row views of disasters ranging from the 2010 Haiti earthquake to the 2011 Fukushima tsunami in Japan. Yet even while they provide vital assistance to millions of people in crisis, such organizations are beset by important paradoxes that hinder their capacity to create sustainable interventions. They work to fill long-lasting needs, but are prone to moving quickly from one site to the next in search of the latest emergency. They strive to be apolitical, yet are invariably influenced by the geopolitical agendas of global powers. How do such contradictions arise, and what is their impact upon millions of aid recipients around the world? Drawing on case studies from South Sudan to Haiti, this course addresses these contradictions by exploring how and why medical aid organizations attempt, and sometimes fail, to reconcile short-term goals, such as immediate life-saving, with long-term missions, such as public health programs and conflict resolution initiatives.

Distribution Area: 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)

This course will compare the current global crisis with previous major crises of historical capitalism through a combination of theoretical and historical readings. Throughout, we will ask: What can a study of past crises tell us about the nature and future trajectory of the current global crisis? We will be particularly concerned to understand the ways in which social, economic and geopolitical crises intertwined, as well as the differential social and geopolitical impact of the crises. Which social classes bore the brunt of the disruptions in economic activity in each crisis? Which geographical areas or geopolitical groupings lost out (or benefited) from the crisis? What kinds of movements of protest emerged and how did they affect the trajectory of the crises? How have environmental and ecological challenges resurfaced in each crisis including today?

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The right to freedom from slavery. The right to movement. The right to healthcare. These rights, as described in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, are typically pitched as a universal good. But are they truly universal? Or do human rights discourses reflect a particular set of priorities and values, articulated in particular times and places? This course will address this question by exploring both current debates surrounding human rights, and the real-life challenges that activists face in putting them into practice. However powerful they may sound on paper, how binding are human rights treaties in the public sphere? How can human rights advocacy prompt governments to protect women, refugees, and sexual and gender minorities? Secondly, do understandings of justice in the Global South ever differ from those articulated in the 1948 Declaration? Finally, do human rights discourses embrace all kinds of rights equally? For example, why have human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch historically prioritized civil and political rights, like freedom of religion, over economic rights, like the right to healthcare? And more broadly, what can human rights advocacy do in the global fight against capitalist exploitation? The emancipatory rhetoric of human rights, critics worry, cannot itself undo the grim realities of global inequality. In an unequal world, could human rights organizations compel corporations to pay livable wages to their employees? Or obligate governments to provide healthcare to their citizens? Drawing on global case studies ranging from pro-refugee activists along the Greece-Turkey border to anti-FGC (female genital cutting) activism in the Gambia, this course aims to provide students with the tools to think critically about rights as a vehicle for social change.

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

This course will focus on social scientific insights into the causes, consequences and potential solutions to the climate crisis. Drawing on global and interdisciplinary scholarship, we will address such issues as: the relationship between fossil fuels and capitalism; the relationship between social inequality and "vulnerability" to climate change; the politics of "adaptation"; the organization of climate obstruction; protest and climate justice movements; the challenge of energy transition in fossil fuel producing regions; and the political-economy and sociology of renewable energy and carbon capture. The course is reading-intensive and discussion-oriented.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course surveys the relationship between China and its migrants and their descendants from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. It highlights the transnational foundation of modern Chinese nationalism. It also compares the divergent formations of the “Chinese question” in North America and postcolonial Southeast Asia. Key concepts include transnationalism, diaspora, ethnic politics, racism, Orientalism, and “united front” work.

Prerequisite(s): Students may not have completed AS.230.217 previously.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3), Citizens and Society (FA4)

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

Writing Intensive

Race, class and gender are among key factors in systematic patterns of inequality in the United States (and globally). In this course, we examine the manner in which social inequality comes about and is maintained through a range of social institutions and daily social interactions. This class will examine how social institutions and daily social interactions structure the decisions individuals make and, in turn, how the decisions that individuals make serve to perpetuate or challenge existing social institutions and interactions. We will explore how the intersection of different forms of inequality, for example race and class or class and gender challenge traditional conceptions of inequality and provide insight into the processes that perpetuate inequality. We will use these sociological tools to develop what sociologist C. Wright Mills calls the "sociological imagination" and apply this imagination to contemporary debates in American society. We will discuss how the sociological imagination differs from the approach other disciplines in social science might take to study inequality.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

How does public opinion shape electoral behavior and the contours of democracy in the United States, and how have these relationships changed as techniques for measuring public opinion have evolved since the early twentieth century?  To consider this question, the course introduces alternative perspectives on the features of a healthy democracy, including both historical perspectives and current arguments.  Interweaved with this material, the course examines how public opinion is measured and interpreted by private pollsters, survey researchers, and data journalists.  Emphasis is placed on the alternative claims that opposing analysts adopt, as well as how the technologies of data collection and analysis shape the permissibility of conclusions.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.230.224 OR AS.001.127 are not eligible to take AS.230.365.

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

This course introduces two approaches in the research of economic sociology: the emphasis on macro world-historical social change and the concern over the meso-level institutionalization of markets. Key concepts include division of labor, market, commodification, social and cultural capital, informal economy, migrants and business networks, globalization, and post-globalization.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

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: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1), Ethics and Foundations (FA5)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Focusing on the race-makings of the Asians across the Pacific in the long twentieth century, the course employs the reading materials that elucidate the constructions about the demographic categories of the Asian "races." We use prewar Japanese materials and Chinese nationalist thoughts to elaborate on the following themes: the internal distinction among the peoples grouped under the racial category of the Asians; the overall presentation about the generic category of the "Asian" peoplehood, as well as their alleged shared civilization and interests. The theoretical framework include concepts of capitalist reconfiguration of social boundaries through racism and the question of power behind the reproduction of racial hierarchy.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course will introduce students to the cutting-edge debates on global migration and refugees and give them a first-hand look at the complicated interactions between research, politics, and policy-making. Each week, students will read the work of a featured scholar who will visit the class as a guest lecture, giving students the unique opportunity to directly engage with the scholar. In addition, policy makers, community groups, and activists dealing with migration will visit the class for guest lectures, and students will have the opportunity to learn exactly how, when, and why research is (and is not) applied on the ground. To highlight the global nature of the theme, the course will highlight issues of immigration and emigration, receiving and sending countries, in the global North and South. This course is offered in Washington DC and is available to students accepted to the Spring 2025 Hopkins Semester DC only.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Is access to healthcare a fundamental human right? If so, then which global actors are obligated to provide healthcare to whom, and for how long? How do meanings of health and illness vary across time and place? And finally, how are human rights principles translated into frontline practice in order to promote well-being? This course takes a critical interdisciplinary approach to these questions through a series of global case studies ranging from humanitarian aid in post-tsunami Sri Lanka to anti-FGM (female genital mutilation) campaigns in Ghana. How do international NGOs, UN bodies, and governments collaborate (or compete) to distribute healthcare in places beset by dire resource shortages? Do human rights principles carry legal weight across borders, and if so, could access to healthcare services and essential medicines be litigated in order to compel governments to provide it? And finally, what cultural assumptions do human rights discourses carry with them, and what happens if rights-based approaches are poorly received by recipient populations? Moving beyond the basic principle of healthcare as a human right, this course aims to bring this idea’s history and politics into focus by offering an in-depth exploration of its ethics and implementation.

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

How does power operate in contemporary societies? How is power reproduced, how is it resisted and under what conditions does resistance produce social change? This course will examine how social theorists have advanced novel answers to these questions as they grappled with the historical events and social concerns of the 20th and 21st centuries, including the failure of communist movements in the West, the rise and fall of fascism and Nazism, the consolidation of capitalist democracies, the emergence of anti-colonial movements in the "Third World," and the mutations and intersections of race, gender and sexuality as forms of domination. In addition to understanding and comparing theories, we will assess their usefulness for understanding our present conjuncture.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This seminar surveys key problems of political sociology including the rise of the modern state, the origins and nature of liberal democracy, sources of authority, the relationship between political and economic power, the nation-state and nationalism, states and war, ideology and political contention, collective identity, social movements, and social revolutions. Fulfills Comparative Politics for International Studies.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

In the United States, we spend more than $100 billion annually on illegal drugs—and the government spends more than $50 billion a year to combat their sale and use. These statistics raise important and complicated social questions. This course will examine the production, sale, use, and control of illegal drugs from a historical and sociological perspective. We will have three objectives: to understand the social construction of drug use and illegality in the United States and other rich countries; to uncover the political and economic consequences of drug trafficking in those countries that produce drugs, particularly in Latin America; and to examine the political economy of drug control through the so-called War on Drugs, both domestically and internationally.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Framed by the escalating climate crisis, this seminar will focus on the social embeddedness of fossil fuels and the conditions of possibility for a renewable energy transition. Topics to be explored include the relationship between fossil fuels and capitalism; the character of previous historical energy transformations; climate denialism and the political power of the fossil fuel industry; the political and social challenges posed by fossil-fuel producing regions; contemporary proposals for a Green New Deal and "just transitions"; the challenges of siting energy infrastructure; and the social implications of various energy transition pathways associated with technologies such wind, solar, and carbon capture. Cases will be drawn from across the world. This will be a read-intensive seminar intended for advanced undergraduates and graduate students. Prior experience in social science recommended. Students will produce a final research paper on a topic and case of their choosing.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Projects and Methods (FA6)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

In this course we will examine contemporary Chinese society, looking at economic development, rural transformation, urbanization and migration, labor relations, class structure, governance, and popular protest. The course is designed for both undergraduate and graduate students. Undergraduates should have already completed a course about China.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Citizens and Society (FA4), Democracy (FA4.1)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course provides theoretical and historical approaches to examining the centrality of racism, imperialism, and colonialism to the origins and ongoing functioning of capitalism and the global political economy. We begin with the dominant theoretical frameworks used to study capitalism and carefully juxtapose these with theory and empirical analyses foregrounding capitalism’s connections to racial slavery/racialized labor exploitation, imperialism, colonialism, and gendered exploitation. Following this, we examine the unfolding of capitalism in the post-emancipation, post-independence, and neoliberal periods, paying close attention to inequalities produced within and between nations. We end by examining resistance to racial capitalism, as well as imagining alternative futures.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Can social democracy offer an alternative to neoliberal capitalism? This course begins with an investigation of the history of social democracy in Europe, from origins to crisis to reconstruction, and then globalizes this in three ways: first, by asking how colonial relations affected social democracy in Europe; second, by examining welfare states in Asia, Latin America, and Africa; and third, by considering the possibilities of global redistribution.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.230.619 are not eligible to take AS.230.419.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course introduces migration as a social process rather than a singular event. Students will be introduced to historical and contemporary literature on global migration. In this course, we will evaluate the drivers of migration, the migration selection process, the short- and long-term effects of migration on destination and origin countries, and the politics of migration policies. This course aims to provide students with a foundation in theories and methodologies that shape contemporary debates in international migration.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Citizens and Society (FA4)

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This seminar examines inter-regional connections and diplomacy in maritime Asia (focusing on the region around the Straits of Malacca, the South and East China Seas, and the Taiwan Straits). In addition to a survey of the application of world-system theories on Asia, the reading materials include the roles of trading diasporas in world history, the maritime silk Road, the Chinese tribute trade system, the British free-trade imperialism, American open-door policy, Japanese pan-Asianism, Cold-war diplomacy, and the Beijing-centric belt-and-road initiatives. The goal is to explore the prospects and limitations of examining inter-Asian connections beyond political states.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This seminar tackles major issues in the classical and contemporary sociology of religion. We begin with Ibn Khaldun, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, and Mary Douglas, asking basic questions: What are religion and the sacred? Why do they exist? What is the relationship between religion and social structure? And what role does religion play in morality, solidarity, boundaries, exploitation, patriarchy, and macrohistorical transformations such as the rise of capitalism? Keeping this theoretical grounding (and its flaws and biases) in mind, we continue to probe the problem of religion in modernity through more-recent writings. Topics include the secularization debate (Are modernity and religion antithetical?); “religious markets” and rational-choice theories of religion; religious revivalism, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and proselytizing movements; feminist and queer sociologies of religion; civil religion (Is standing for the national anthem a religious act?); embodiment and prayer; Orientalism and postcolonial interrogations of the secular; religious violence and nationalism; the intersectionality of religion with race, class, and caste; and religion and neoliberalism. Although dominant sociologies of religion have focused on Christianity in Western Europe and North America, this course applies a global lens, training significant focus on non-Western and non-Christian contexts.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Gender as we know it is not timeless. Today, gender roles and the assumption that there are only two genders are contested and debated. With the binary gender system thus perhaps nearing its end, we might wonder if it had a beginning. In fact, the idea that there are two sexes and that they not only assume different roles in society but also exhibit different character traits, has emerged historically around 1800. Early German Romanticism played a seminal role in the making of modern gender and modern sexuality. For the first time, woman was considered not a lesser version of man, but a different being with a value of her own. The idea of gender complementation emerged, and this idea, in turn, imposed heterosexuality more forcefully than ever. In this course, we will trace the history of anatomy and explore the role of literature and the other arts in the making and unmaking of gender.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)