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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Our democratic system depends on an informed public, but media today are polarized along ideological lines, undercut by economic and technological change and sometimes polluted with bogus stories written for profit or spin. In this course, taught by a veteran journalist, we will discuss the evolution of news, examine the current challenges and assess what citizens can do to get a fair understanding of what's going on. We’ll use many concrete examples and students will have multiple writing assignments.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Modern democracies like the U.S. are undergoing severe challenges from within and elsewhere. Internally, many of their citizens are newly skeptical of democracy, believing for example that elections are rigged. Outside, they face new competition from authoritarian systems such as China’s government, which show no signs of converging towards democracy, and offer a possible alternative system of rule. Finally, democracies also have to engage with new policy challenges, such as racial justice and climate change. In this course, we will draw upon the collective wisdom of faculty at Johns Hopkins’ new SNF Agora Institute, to understand better the political challenges that democracy faces, and the policy challenges that it has to respond to. We will put modern democratic challenges in their appropriate historical context. Has America really been a democracy in the past? We will ask about the social and political conditions under which democracy does well, and under which it fails. Finally, we will look at the new agenda of questions that democracy faces, and the means that it can draw on to confront them.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

How is democracy doing around the world? This course will help students to answer this question and ask their own questions about political systems by examining a variety of quantitative measures of facets of democracy in the U.S. and internationally. We consider general indices as well as those that focus on specific normatively-appealing aspects—the absence of fraud in and broader integrity of the electoral process itself, the guarantees of fundamental human rights to all, governments’ effectiveness and accountability to the public, the equity of both representation and policy outcomes for minority groups and those historically disadvantaged or excluded, and the possibility and extent of civic engagement in non-government institutions. Wherever possible, the course will present evidence about the kinds of institutions and policies that seem to bolster democracy. Students can expect to gain hands-on experience with publicly-available subnational and national indicators of electoral and democratic quality.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Democracies around the world are under threat. This course introduces students to the philosophical foundations of democracy as well as the history of democratic revolutions, institutions, and principles. How can we defeat the most important contemporary challenges to democracy, including populism, authoritarianism and disinformation? And how can we revive the “democratic spirit” - in America and around the world?

Area: Humanities

We live in an era of disinformation’ mass persuasion and media manipulation run amok. More information was meant to improve democracy and undermine authoritarian regimes- instead the opposite seems to be happening. This course will take you from Russia to South Asia, Europe to the US, to analyze how our information environment has been transformed, why our old formulae for resisting manipulation are failing, and what needs to be done to create a model where deliberative democracy can flourish.

Prerequisite(s): Students who took AS.191.364, AS.196.310, OR AS.196.610 are not eligible to take AS.196.364.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course will introduce first-year students to the anthropology of modern South Asia from the lens of its varied minorities. We will interrogate ideas of nation, community, tradition, and belonging across the region to understand contemporary dilemmas of diversity, heterogeneity, and cultural citizenship.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Over the past two decades, African cities have absorbed rapid population increase without accompanying economic growth. Students will review the major challenges of this mode of urbanization and explore the vibrant ways residents have sought to meet them. Following anthropology’s commitment to lived experience, we will track these issues through the twists and turns of everyday life, and consider what they may say about urbanity more broadly in the 21st century. Topics include livelihood, the built environment, conflict and membership, and popular culture.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This is an introductory course for those interseted in gaining basic knowledge about contemporary Iran. The focus will be on culture and religion and the ways they in which they become interwoven into different kinds of political stakes.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Students will be introduced to problems of global governance in the context of transnational conflicts, changing nature of war, new epidemics and pandemics, and the threats of planetary extinction. What are the ways security is imagined and what kinds of political passions are mobilized for security of people versus security of states.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course examines the multiple and overlapping crises afflicting Latin America today through an ethnographic lens. Featuring conversations with authors of recent work on the region’s most pressing issues, we will explore the contours of knowledge production itself under conditions of precarity and violence. Discussions will include the retrenchment of borders, migration crises, the state management of life and death, the resurgence of authoritarianism, food insecurity, and resource conflicts.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course will takes the reverberations of the Korean War to examine the ways in which catastrophic violence is absorbed into and corrodes social life. Particular attention is paid to the transnational nature of conflict, how boundaries around peace and war are established, and how recent scholarly and artistic work on the Korean War has critically engaged dominant frameworks of memory and trauma. Readings will draw from fiction, ethnography, historiography and will also include film. This course also draws from the public syllabus on Ending the Korean War.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This seminar offers an examination of Brazilian culture and politics through close readings of classic and contemporary ethnography. The course will track how anthropologists have approached the complexities and contradictions of Brazilian society. And, conversely, we investigate how studies in Brazil have prompted challenges to and generated innovations in anthropological thought.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course explores the idea and practice of the commons through various sites and objects (money, work, natural resources, urban land, knowledge and culture, etc.). We will examine the promise and limitations of local, grassroots social and economic forms of organization that propose alternatives to the market economy. Focusing on workers, consumers and housing cooperatives; community currencies; urban gardens; self-help associations; fair trade organizations and knowledge networks; we will enquire how these social economies propose autonomous forms of living together, and sharing resources, property and labor.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course takes the Korean War as a site to both explore: 1) contemporary historical and political transformations in East Asia and globally and 2) the ways in which violence, catastrophic loss, and separation are woven into everyday life. It will explore the Korean War through film, fiction, historiography, and draw on comparative materials in anthropology

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course explores the role of science and technology in the making of African histories and politics. We will examine precolonial iron-working, healing, and weaving; the ways guns and railroads functioned as tools of empire; the role of hydroelectric dams in postcolonial nation building; and the rise of digital communication and payment systems in the present. Throughout, we will challenge commonsense distinctions between the material and the spiritual, designers and users, wealth and people.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This seminar explores how precarity in South Korea gains expression in the medium of TV and film. In particular, this seminar will focus on how the moving image brings the viewer into the texture of everyday life. We will focus on the TV show Misaeng and include films such as Parasite and Burning. TV and film will be paired with readings on the transformations of intimate life in contemporary South Korea and comparative work on precarity.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This seminar offers a close reading of selected works of Karl Marx, along with supplemental secondary literature. We will explore how the central pillars of Marx’s thought--including dialectical materialism, critical political economy, and utopian socialist thought—shape his critical method in interrogating the logic of capital.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

In this course we will examine how forms of governance, politics, expert knowledge, and citizen actions are implicated in the emergence and management of epidemics.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

What is the nature of anthropological concepts and what relations do they bear to concepts internal to a society? We invite students to think with key ideas from Hindu and Islamic traditions, asking if anthropological concepts are best seen as abstractions from the particular or as intertwined with ongoing lines of inquiry, say into the nature of the real and continual efforts to test it? Topics in ritual theory, grammar, aesthetics, translation, revelation, luminosity, figuration and the mythological among those to be considered.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This introductory course will examine policing and prisons in the United States and beyond, with a focus on racial inequality. It will consist of three parts. First, we will define key concepts in police and prison studies. Then, we will explore the contemporary state of prisons and policing in the United States and look at debates around the rise of “mass incarceration” and aggressive forms of policing in the final third of the 20th century. Third, we will explore policing and prison in other parts of the globe in the contemporary moment, highlighting similarities and differences from the U.S. case. What can studying the instruments of social control in other societies reveal about our own? Students will develop an understanding of major trends, keywords, and debates in the literature on policing and prisons, with particular reference to race and racism.

Area: Humanities

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course 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?

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Introductory survey of foundational texts of modern philosophy, social and political thought, and literature. This semester will include works by Plato, René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Virginia Woolf, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Judith Butler, Kwame A. Appiah, Jacques Derrida, and others. The course is taught in lectures and in seminar discussions.

Area: Humanities

This course offers an introduction to the political forces, cultural values, and social factors which have shaped the history of women’s labor in the US. This course will ask question such as: Why do we place a higher value on work which takes place in the public sphere than work in the home? How do representations of work in literature and popular movies reinforce or subvert gender roles? How have women negotiated gendered and racial boundaries through political action or writing? Focusing on racialized labor, domestic labor, sex work, and factory work, the course will provide an interdisciplinary cultural study of women’s work relevant to our current historical moment. Authors discussed include Saidiya Hartman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emma Goldman, and Kathi Weeks.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This course offers a conceptual and historical introduction to Intellectual History. What makes the “history of ideas” different from the history of other objects? What, if anything, distinguishes the history of ideas from the history of philosophy? What is it exactly that we call “ideas”? In what sense do they have a history? These are examples of the kind of questions addressed in the course.

Area: Humanities

This course introduces students to the nineteenth century Russian novel and considers its lasting impact on world culture. We will read classic masterpieces of the psychological and philosophical novel, and their experimental forerunners. Short lectures on historical and cultural context and on methods of literary analysis will be combined with intensive group discussion. Novels include Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, Eugene Onegin, Dead Souls, and Hero of our Time.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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, Sinophone, and East Asian 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 writers from the Republican period through the Maoist era to the post-socialist present, even during the Covid-19 pandemic? How do we assess his cross-cultural reception? Are his times obsolete now that China is on the rise? Or, have his times come yet? Through our comparative survey, Lu Xun's works and their afterlives will offer us a window onto China's long twentieth century and beyond in a transnational context. All materials are provided in English translation.

Area: Humanities

Comedy and musical comedy film flourished in the USA during the Great Depression as well as in the USSR during the Stalinist Great Terror. This course will compare films of the era in a variety of genres (musical, epic, Western, drama), examining the intersections between politics and aesthetics as well as the lasting implications of the films themselves in light of theoretical works on film as a medium, ethics and gender.

Area: Humanities

A survey of contemporary literature and film from the peripheries of the Chinese-speaking world, with a special focus on Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Europe. We will not only examine literary and filmic works in the contexts of the layered histories and contested politics of these locations, but will also reexamine, in light of those works, critical concepts in literary and cultural studies including, but not limited to, form, ideology, hegemony, identity, history, agency, translation, and (post)colonialism. All readings are in English; all films subtitled in English.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

Environmental degradation and disaster offer a steady backdrop to the 20th century in Russia and the Soviet Union. While the Soviet regime promised mastery over the environment and Russian culture valorized the harmonization of humans with the natural world, environmental catastrophe proved the folly of those dreams. We will read works by authors who havegrappled with this ongoing catastrophe and its implications for relations between human beings and the world. Texts range from short stories and novellas to modernist experimental fiction and documentary prose. We will also engage with materials in special collections and screen selected films. Authors include: Chekhov, Bulgakov, Platonov, Solzhenitsyn, Rasputin,Petrushevskaya, and the Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

A survey of Japanese and Japanese- language literatures produced in Japan and its (former)colonies during the “transwar” period, or the several years before and after the end of WWII. This periodization enables us to take into account the shifting boundaries, sovereignties, and identities amid the intensification of Japanese imperialism and in the aftermath of its eventual demise. We aim to pay particular attention to voices marginalized in this political watershed, such as those of Japanese-language writers from colonial Korea and Taiwan, intra-imperial migrants, and radical critics of Japan’s “postwar” regime. Underlying our investigation is the question of whether literature can be an agent of justice when politics fails to deliver it. We will introduce secondary readings by Adorno, Arendt, Levinas, Derrida, and Scarry, among others, to help us interrogate this question. All readings are in English.

Area: Humanities

This course examines global political revolutions through cinema and the ways in which cinema helped to make political revolutions. Early cinema was intimately intertwined with the Russian revolution, and Russian revolutionary cinema had a profound impact on the ways in which media was used for revolutionary purposes through the 20th century and around the world. Students will be introduced to films from a number of different countries, and the history and context of their production and reception. They will also learn methods of film analysis and produce their own video essay.

Area: Humanities

Climate change poses an existential threat to human civilization. Yet the attention and concern it receives in ordinary life and culture is nowhere near what science tells us is required. What are the causes of this mismatch between crisis and response? What accounts for our collective inability to imagine and grasp this new reality, and how can it be overcome? In pursuit of these questions, we will pair literary works and films with texts from politics, philosophy, literary theory, and religion, that frame climate change as a fundamental challenge to our ways of making sense of the human condition.

Area: Humanities

Russian cinema was born out of the intense artistic experimentation of the fin-de-siècle avant-garde and developed in a climate of dramatic political and cultural change in the twenties and thirties. While subject to draconian censorship in the Soviet period, it nonetheless engaged in active dialogue with the film industries of Western Europe and America and had a lasting impact on world cinema. This course examines the extraordinary flourishing of avant-garde cinema in the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 30s including films by Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin, and Dovzhenko, their theoretical writings, and their far-reaching influence on film and film theory. All readings in English, films subtitled in English.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

What is China? This question has gained new relevance amid the nation’s recent rise as a global power. We survey how China was imagined, represented, and conceptualized in literature, film, and philosophical writings from mainland China, overseas Chinese communities, East Asia, and the West from the late nineteenth century to the present. Through exploring this complex history, we aim to understand China and the contemporary world in a diversified, historically self-reflective way. Topics of discussion include, but not limited to, representation, identity, form, allegory, exile, diaspora, modernism, translation, world history, and universality. All readings are in English; all films subtitled in English.

Area: Humanities

This course charts the evolution of the field of climate science over the last 250 years. We will explore the history of scientific development that led to advances in climate research in the 19th and 20th century. We will also explore the political and social context in which climate science evolved in the West and the backlash of climate change denial that developed due to the influence of the fossil fuel industry. While this course is focused on history, students will be exposed to introductory scientific and technical concepts needed to understand basic climate science.Our understanding of the earth's climate has come a long way in the last two centuries. We understand the implications of climate change on humanity and have already begun to feel the effects of the changing climate on our society. Yet, it has taken us too long to prioritize climate action and policy. Why does knowledge not always translate into governance and policy? While we understand how the climate impacts our society, do we understand how our society impacts climate research? We will look for answers to these and more questions in this course from a historical framework.

Prerequisite(s): AS.270.103 OR AS.271.360 OR AS.140.302 OR AS.140.388

Area: Natural Sciences

Prereq: 270.103 or permission of instructor.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.

Area: Natural Sciences

Environmental Ethics is a philosophical discipline that examines the moral relationship between humans and the natural environment. For individuals and societies, it can help structure our experience of nature, environmental problems, human-environmental relations, and ecological awareness. Beginning with a comprehensive analysis of their own values, students will explore complex ethical questions, philosophical paradigms and real-life case studies through readings, films and seminar discussions. Traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics will be examined and applied. Environmental moral worldviews, ranging from anthropocentric to ecocentric perspectives, will be critically evaluated. Organized debates will help students strengthen their ability to deconstruct and assess ethical arguments and to communicate viewpoints rooted in ethical principles. Students will apply ethical reasoning skills to an examination of contemporary environmental issues including, among others, biodiversity conservation, environmental justice, climate change, and overpopulation. Students will also develop, defend and apply their own personal environmental ethical framework. A basic understanding of modern environmental history and contemporary environmental issues is required. Prior experience with philosophy and ethics is not required.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

The water, energy and food (WEF) nexus is a topic of growing interest in the research and policy communities. This course will survey WEF concepts and principles, introduce tools of analysis, and engage students in case studies of critical WEF issues in the United States and internationally.

This course provides students with a broad introduction to US environmental policymaking and policy analysis. Included are a historical perspective as well as an analysis of future policymaking strategies. Students examine the political and legal framework, become familiar with precedent-setting statutes such as NEPA, RCRA, and the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and study models for environmental policy analysis. Cost benefit studies, the limits of science in policymaking, and the impact of environmental policies on society are important aspects of this course. A comparison of national and international policymaking is designed to provide students with the proper perspective. This course is taught in conjunction with an identical graduate course. All students will be expected to perform at a graduate level.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course offers a comprehensive overview of Korean history and culture from ancient times to the modern era. Through primary, secondary, and audio-visual sources, students will become familiar not only with the overall contours of the entirety of Korean history, but also with its cultural and religious legacy. The course combines lectures and class discussions.

Area: Humanities

This course offers a comprehensive overview of Korean history, politics, and culture encompassing premodern, modern, and contemporary times. Through primary and secondary materials, students will learn about the formation of Korea as a complex interplay of dynastic changes, wars, colonialism, rapid modernization, migrations, and minority and diasporic politics. We will approach the study of Korea through a cultural studies perspective, paying close attention to systems of power, ideology, gender, race, and class.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This survey course introduces students to major events and themes addressed in Korean literature and film such as: Japanese colonialism, modernity, capitalism, the Korean War, rapid industrialization, postmodernity, immigration, transnational adoption, and more. Students will examine the role of literature and film in the development of the nation and the depiction of the Korean and Korean-diasporic subject as a complex set of intersecting social identities that contend with race, class, and gender.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This course aims to inspire students to explore the impacts, meanings, and explanations of social transformation in contemporary China, via the lens of documentary photography. The photographic images of selective topics will include the products of photojournalism and documentary photography, and several documentary films, by both Chinese and non-Chinese photographers. While one picture is worth thousand words, one picture may also provoke countless interpretations. Students are strongly encouraged to read broadly about different aspects of social transformations in contemporary China, and to select and curate their own subjects of photo images. The spirit of comparative study of documentary photography of China and other parts of world will be strongly encouraged. Active class participation is imperative. A small exhibition on the campus will be organized by the Spring semester. The course is designed for upper division undergraduates. Cross-listed with Sociology and International Studies (CP).

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This introductory course will familiarize students with the major dynamics of political and social change in contemporary China since 1949. The course will be divided chronologically into four main topics: 1. The contested processes of nation-state making in modern China before 1949; 2. The making of the socialist system during the Mao Years and its dismantling since 1978; 3. The Reform Era transformation to a market economy with Chinese characteristics; 4. The dynamic relationships among the state, market and society since the new millennium. Students will explore how scholars have explained major political and social changes with reference to individual and collective rationalities, specific organizational and institutional arrangements, and specific strategic and cultural mechanisms of Chinese political and social habits.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This seminar explores select human rights issues in China (e.g., human rights impacts of the management of COVID-19, the Hong Kong protests, mass detentions/forced labor in Xinjiang province) and the extraterritorial reach of China’s human rights challenges. As a practice and policy-oriented course, we will also investigate different responses and actions taken by the U.S. government and Congress, including hearings, legislation, reports, statements, etc. Class assignments include advocacy for Chinese prisoners of conscience (each student will “adopt” one currently detained PoC), and written work that mirrors real-world writing. We’ll also have several human rights advocates and experts visit the class to share their experiences and insights. This seminar explores select human rights issues in China (e.g., human rights impacts of the management of COVID-19, the Hong Kong protests, mass detentions/forced labor in Xinjiang province) and the extraterritorial reach of China’s human rights challenges. As a practice and policy-oriented course, we will also investigate different responses and actions taken by the U.S. government and Congress, including hearings, legislation, reports, statements, etc. Class assignments include advocacy for Chinese prisoners of conscience (each student will “adopt” one currently detained PoC), and written work that mirrors real-world writing. We’ll also have several human rights advocates and experts visit the class to share their experiences and insights.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Eurasia, stretching from the Western Europe across Russia, Central Asia, and China to the Pacific, is by far the largest continent on earth, with a massive share of global population, economic output, and key natural resources. It has been traditionally Balkanized. Yet since the late 1970s, due to China’s modernizations, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a series of global geo-economic shocks, the nations of this Super Continent have become increasingly interactive, creating fluid new trans-regional political-economic patterns that remain remarkably unexplored. This course explores the critical junctures that made Eurasia the dynamic, growing colossus that it is becoming today, as well as the global implications, from a unique problem-oriented perspective. It looks first at the developmental and political challenges confronting China, Russia, and key European states as the Cold War waned, how the key nations coped, and how they might have evolved differently. It then considers the new challenges of the post-Cold War world, and how national and local leaders are responding today. Particular attention is given, in this problem—centric approach, to the challenges that growing Eurasian continental connectivity, epitomized in China’s Belt and Road Initiative, are creating for US foreign policy and for the grand strategy of American allies in NATO, Japan, and Korea. Note: Some familiarity with Eurasian history and/or politics is recommended

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Urban China has gone through two major social transformations since 1949: the embrace of a central planning socialist system between early 1950s and late 70s, and the embrace of neo-liberal market economy in the so-call “socialism with Chinese characteristics” since 1980. While the political regime remains the same over time, many profound changes have occurred in economic life, social life, cultural life, spiritual life and civil life. What really happened in the social transformation of urban China? What would explain those changes? How did people in different walk of life deal with those huge and deep social transformation? To address these concerns, we will exam a list of issues. Topics includes changes in population and demographic characteristics, employment structure and job market, workplace and residential communities, income and wealth distributions, segregation impacts of urban household registration systems, urban consumption patterns, courting cultures and dressing codes, spiritual practices, and social mobility and social stratifications. In the realm of public policies, we will pay special attentions to the issues of transportation, housing, medical service, public education, social insurance, and environmental protection. We will also study the characteristics of contentious politics and how social conflicts of power, interest, justice, cultural and belief were processed in urban China.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

In this course, students will engage with select topics in Korean history from premodern and modern times and examine how the past has been represented through various forms of film and literature. This will be combined with readings of academic articles to allow students to gauge the distance between scholarship and cultural expressions of history. Through this, students will be introduced to the highly contested and often polarizing nature of Korean history and the competition surrounding historical memory. Prior coursework in East Asian Studies strongly recommended.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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. Cross-listed with Sociology and International Studies (CP).

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This interdisciplinary survey course considers questions related to women and gender in Chinese society. Taking a long historical view, the course examines ideologies, social institutions, and literary representations of women and gender in traditional society and their modern transformation. Specific topics to be explored include the concept of Yin and Yang, Confucian gender ideology and the family, sex and sexuality, marriage and concubinage, footbinding, and calls for women's liberation in the context of twentieth-century Chinese revolutions. The course will end with an examination of the relationship between social media and gender politics as seen through the Chinese MeToo movement. Students will have the opportunity to work with a variety of primary sources including historical, literary, and visual materials.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This seminar explores the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and government responses on a range of human rights in Asia, with a focus on the cases of China, Japan, Taiwan, India, South Korea, and Myanmar. In the first part of the course, we will investigate the fundamentals of the international human rights system, the foundational Universal Declaration of Human Rights and core human rights treaties, and the role of civil society in protecting, defending , and advancing human rights. We will then explore the United Nations’ human rights-based guidance for Covid-19 response and prevention, the right to health, and approaches to the balancing of rights and duties, including freedom of movement, freedoms of association and assembly, individuals’ right to health and duties to others, the right to education, rights to privacy, freedom of expression, right to information (and the problem of disinformation) and governments’ emergency powers (and their limits) to protect public health. Inequities and discrimination exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic will also be discussed, as will the necessity for international cooperation to effectively battle Covid-19 and vaccine inequity.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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?

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This class will explore the construction of race and its applications in Asia and its diasporas. Using the notion of “mixed-race” as an analytic, we will examine how the colonial origins of race and the ensuing Cold War have influenced concepts of national identity and belonging. Employing an inter-sectional approach towards race, gender, and sexuality, the course will draw on a variety of media including memoirs, archives, and videos, to contemplate the locus of race and mixed-race and their importance within the larger nexus of identity formation in Asia and its diasporas.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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?

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

An introduction to the economic system and economic analysis with emphasis on demand and supply, relative prices, the allocation of resources, and the distribution of goods and services, theory of consumer behavior, theory of the firm, and competition and monopoly, including the application of microeconomic analysis to contemporary problems.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

The informal economy is one of the most complex economic and political phenomena of our time. It exists in rich and poor countries alike, currently employs almost half of the world’s workers, about 1.8 billion people, and totals to economic activity of around $10 trillion. If the informal economy were an independent nation, it would be the second-largest economy in the world, after the United States and before China. In today’s globalizing environment, are informal economies a poverty trap or an engine of growth? Do they stimulate entrepreneurship and popular empowerment, or promote exploitation? How does an improved understanding of the size and organization of informal economies affect service provision, social policy or taxation? What are the implications of the informal economy for social cohesion and popular politics? The proposed course will address these (as well as other) questions related to the informal economy to offer students an understanding of such complex phenomenon from a variety of perspectives. The course will comprise three parts. Part 1 will explore the complexities of the informal economy, and the effects of informality on policies of inclusive growth. Part 2 will draw on empirical evidence and comparative case studies to examine informal economies in various regions, including Africa, East Asia, North and South America, and Europe, highlighting variations in activities, relations with the state, global integration and economic outcomes. Finally, Part 3 will discuss the ongoing economic policy shift from punitive measures to accepting informality as a virtual space through which citizens flow from job-seeker to compliant entrepreneurs.

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

A comprehensive survey of economic behavior by households, farms and firms in poor countries and the role of and for governments. Discussions include measurement of income levels, economy-wide equilibrium, sources of growth, agriculture and industry, international trade and investment, savings, population, fertility, education, health, income distribution and public finances. Applies economic theory rigorously to interpret and evaluate the economic experience of poor countries. Diagnostic test on Elements of Economics is required in the second week. Grading based on 3 exams and one paper.

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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)

Area: Humanities

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.102

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.301

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.301

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Benefits of good health and its costs. Health demand and supply in poor countries. Welfare economics of Public Health. This is a writing seminar. There are some lectures on how to write a paper and on the substance of the economics of international health but the focus and only assignment is a 40-page paper by each student under the supervision of the instructor.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.180.391 cannot take AS.180.390.;AS.180.301

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Discussion of the economic experience of Post-War China, primarily emphasizing topics rather than historical narrative: agriculture, industry including corporate governance and public enterprises, international trade, population, migration, education, health, public finances among other topics. This course is writing intensive and the only assignment for the course is a 40 page paper on some aspect of the Chinese economy to be done under the close supervision of the instructor. The course is not primarily a lecture course, although there will be some lectures on how to do a paper and on the substance of the Chinese economic experience.

Prerequisite(s): Students may not take AS.180.390 if they took AS.180.391.;AS.180.301

Writing Intensive

The British nineteenth century was marked by rapid industrialization and increasing social inequality. It gave birth to some of the most well-known novelists and thinkers in the English language, while introducing technologies of communication and surveillance that continue to trouble us today. It was also a period of the British Empire’s overseas expansion and racial-economic empowerment, especially in Africa, East Asia, and the Mediterranean. This course surveys a wide range of literary, artistic, intellectual developments that took place across a wide geographical terrain in the British imperial nineteenth-century, as well as later imperial and post-imperial renditions of it.

Area: Humanities

In this First-Year Seminar, we will explore what it means to think and write across multiple cultures in the contemporary world. What do we gain and/or lose when we think and write crossing cultural boundaries? How do knowledge and experience of two or more cultures help us think and act critically, creatively, and ethically? What does plurality of cultures mean to universal discourses such as science and technology? How can cultural differences help or hamper our efforts to tackle global problems like climate change? These are some of the guiding questions that we will investigate together in this course by examining novels, essays, autobiographies, travelogues, philosophical writings, and films that engage with multiplicity of cultures between East Asia -- especially China, Japan, and Korea – and the West as well as within East Asia.

Area: Humanities

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. Students will learn to interpret public opinion patterns, which requires a brief presentation of basic concepts from survey sampling, including what to make of the polling industry’s most boring concept: margin of error.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course examines race and social movements in America from the Revolution to 1921.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

A class combining Latin American history since independence and digital humanities (revised with 2021 student feedback). Students will build guided research projects while thinking about questions of republicanism, freedom and unfreedom, migration, and development.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This introductory course aims to 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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

An introduction to modern African history, with emphasis on colonialism and decolonization.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Introduction to three major themes in African history, from the precolonial era to the present.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course is an introduction to Japan’s history from 1800 to the present with emphasis on the influences of an increasing global circulation of ideas and people. Topics include the emperor system, family and gender, imperialism, World War II, the postwar economy, and global J-pop.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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. 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 interpretation in China and the West during the Cultural Revolution decade and since. (Previously offered as AS.100.219 and AS.100.236. )

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course explores the series of religious and political conflicts that make up what are known now as the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This class explores the construction and articulation of Black womanhood between the anglophone and francophone worlds in the 19th and 20th century. Through a study of secondary and primary sources, we will follow African American women across the Atlantic and analyze their experiences with France and the French language.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course offers an overview of the history of the Uyghur people from their conversion to Islam in the tenth century to the present-day human rights crisis in Xinjiang, China.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

There is more to Germany than beer, BMWs, and Bayern Munich. We explore politics, culture, economics and society to understand Germany and its role in Europe and the world from the 18th century to the 2015 ‘Refugee Crisis’, climate change, EU and NATO politics today.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course provides an intensive introduction to the causes, character, and consequences of the American Revolution, the colonial rebellion that produced the first republic in the Americas, and set in motion an age of democratic revolutions in the Atlantic world. A remarkable epoch in world history, the revolutionary era was of momentous significance.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course explores the rich history of West Africa and its place in the broader world. Topics include the environmental history of the Sahara desert, West African empires, and the rise of Nollywood and contemporary culture.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course is a survey of the history of Jewish magic, mysticism, and secret tradition from the Middle Ages till the 19th century. We shall explore the concept of the sod (mystery) and its historical variants. We shall read excerpts from the most important texts of Jewish esotericism, such as Sefer Yetzirah, the Bahir, and the Zohar. We shall also discuss “practical Kabbalah”, i.e. the preparation and use of amulets and charms, as well as demonic (and angelic) possession.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

The course examines religious difference in the medieval Middle East, including everyday encounters and relations between members of different communities; the policies of some Islamic states towards non-Muslims; conversion to Islam and the Islamization of society and space.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course explores how historical events and processes, such as colonialism and globalization, have shaped ideas of health, healing, medicine, and power in specific African societies since the 19th century. 100-level course in African History recommended.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This class focuses on Europe from the end of World War II until today. We will discuss such topics as the Cold War, social democracy, the welfare state, the relationship to the US and the Soviet Union, decolonization, migration, 1989, European integration, neoliberalism, and the EU. We will discuss and analyze academic literature, movies, documentary films, textual and visual primary sources.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course will trace the historical development of Jewish and Christian mysticism between the 11th and the 19th centuries.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Overview of modern South African history, with a focus on the origins of the racial state and the development of black liberation movements.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Making and Unmaking Queer Histories introduces students to the major themes and historical developments which shape contemporary understandings of LGBTQ+-identified subjects and communities in the US and Western Europe.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Seminar on modern Russia. No midterm and no final. 6 short weekly journals, two short papers, and two small quizzes.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Political, social and cultural history of a turning-point in European history that witnessed the birth and death of democracy.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Examines the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that swept Europe in the eighteenth century to shape the modern world. Topics include science and religion; print culture; gender and sociability; political economy; and race, slavery, and colonialism.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course will examine both the Haitian Revolution and the early period of Mexican independence by engaging with the ideas of actors within these events in international contexts.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

“In the sixteenth century of our era”, wrote the eminent historian of Muslim societies Marshall Hodgson, “a visitor from Mars might well have supposed that the human world was on the verge of becoming Muslim”. They would have based this assertion, continues Hodgson, on the political, cultural, and economic vitality of the empires of the Ottomans, the Mughals, and the Safavids. This survey course will introduce students to the history, culture, institutions, and socio-religious makeup of these three early modern polities that ranged from the Balkans to Bengal, paying particular attention on issues of dynastic and religious law, cultural, religious, and military-diplomatic exchanges with the world and with each another, and their impact on the social, religious, and ethnic makeup of modern Europe and Asia.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This interdisciplinary course surveys critical themes related to Asian American art and activism including perspectives from history, art and visual culture, literature and gender and sexuality studies.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This is not a typical history course but one on historical theory and modern historiographical thought. How did historians in the past generations attempt to analyze the past? To what extent is history connected to other disciplines? What was the French contribution to contemporary historiography? What is "new history"? In this seminar, we are going to examine the scholarship of the French Annales, arguably the most influential and revolutionary “school” of historiography in the twentieth century. Students will read selected works of the Annales historians and discuss concepts such as economic history, serial history, longue durée, conjuncture, total history, mentalité, historical psychology, and historical anthropology.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

History of China since ca. 1900.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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. This course focuses on varying forms of imperial governance, the interrelationships between metropole and colony, and the formation of British and colonial national identities.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Tolstoy and his era, 1820s to 1910s. Topics include state and politics, empire, the Russian identity, and forms of cultural expression. Students consider "War and Peace" and other masterworks.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course will cover the period commonly known as the High Middle Ages, that is, the civilization of Western Europe in the period roughly from 1050 to 1350. . It is a period of exceptional creativity in the history of Western Europe and in medieval history specifically, a time when many of the most characteristic institutions of Europe came into being.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

The course will introduce the student to the main themes and debates in Jewish historiography from the 19th century to the present.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Jewish history, politics, and culture across a century of enormous transformations and transformative enormities in Europe, the US, and the Middle East. Topics include: impacts on Jewish life of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the post-imperial reordering of the Eastern Europe and the Middle East; Zionism and other modes of Jewish contestatory politics; the consolidation of American Jewry; Nazism and the Holocaust in Europe; formation and development of the State of Israel; the global reordering of Jewish life amid cross-currents of the Cold War, conflict in the Middle East, and success in the US. Substantial attention to recent and contemporary history including the dramatic changes in Israeli society and polity over the past forty years and the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Using legal texts as a window into English society, we will address the changing nature of royal power, trial by jury, treason, felony, and the freedoms enshrined in the Magna Carta.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Examines case-studies of imperial conquests (Islamic, Mongol, reconquista, early colonialism) and attendant changes in religion (Christianization; Islamization) and in language (Arabization; transition from Latin to European vernaculars) across medieval Eurasia.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Using textual and visual documents (including books from Peabody Library), we will examine the contrasts of Brazilian history and culture, and its connections with 19th and 20th century Baltimore.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This class reassesses the history of the Cold War through sports. We will investigate how the Cold War has shaped sports, the Olympic movement, the role of athletes at home and abroad. We will discuss how sports were used in domestic and foreign policy, and how Cold War sports reinforced or challenged notions of race, gender, and class.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Explores the daily lives of non-elites in the medieval Middle East—including food; housing; clothes; marriage and divorce; poverty and charity; urban festivals. Half of our meetings devoted to close readings of primary documents (e.g. private letters, court records).

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Place of contrasts, Brazil has a multi-ethnic cultural heritage challenged by social and racial inequalities. Its political life remains chaotic. We will examine these problems through Brazilian history and culture (literature, cinema).

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Seminar style course in which John Locke’s major works will be read intensively, together with some of his contemporaries’ works, and select scholarly interpretations.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

We will read and analyze key works of social and critical theory produced in relation to 20th and 21st century problems of state and society, nationalism, empire, totalitarianism, genocide, capitalism, political order, gender, race, sexuality, secularism, religion, environmental catastrophe. Possible readings include Weber, Du Bois, Adorno, Arendt, Foucault, Balibar, Beckamong others.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Through intensive and extensive reading, we will explore contemporary Israeli society, politics, and culture, contemporary Palestinian society, politics, and culture under occupation, and the historical processes that have shaped both societies and their ongoing entanglement.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Key works on the history of Nazi Germany’s murder of European Jewry during the Second World War; Jewish responses; the recasting of Jewish and global thought in relation to this signal event; genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ since the Holocaust.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course examines the experience of Chinese women, and also how writers, scholars, and politicians (often male, sometimes foreign) have represented women’s experiences for their own political and social agendas.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

What was medieval Cairo like? Students explore urban life in this imperial capital (969-1517), including food and market habits; relations between Jews, Christians, and Muslims; patronage; plague, drought, and famine.Pre-requisite for enrollment: Students must have taken two history courses.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course examines shifting understandings of the philosophical foundations, political implications, and social effects of the market economy since the early twentieth century.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

A history of forced and voluntary migration and displacement in Africa, its causes and consequences, with a focus on refugees and labor migrants since 1960.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This 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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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?

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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 national case studies, the Cold War, and the history of Baltimore. This is a community-engaged class!

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Explores the different ways Early Modern painters and printmakers incorporated mirrors and optical reflections into their works for the sake of illusion and metaphor, deception and desire, reflexivity and truth-telling. Connecting sense perception and ethical knowledge, embedded mirror images often made claims about the nature of the self, the powers of art, and the superiority of painting in particular.

Area: Humanities

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

Area: Humanities

Viewed within the dynamic historical context of colonial society, we consider the pictorial, sculptural, and architectural programs that ensued in viceregal Peru (1532-1825). We examine the role of religious orders, art schools, artisan guilds and cofradía, and consider the social and political implications of art patronage.

Area: Humanities

Centered on modern-day Turkey and encompassing vast territories in Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Ottoman Empire (1299 – 1923) was the longest lived and among the most powerful Islamic states in history, with an artistic tradition to match. This course explores the functional and symbolic role that architecture played during the empire’s formative centuries, when three successive capital — Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul — served to visualize the sultans’ growing claims to universal authority. With reference to mosques, palaces, tombs, and other categories of architecture, the course will examine the buildings in their artistic, social, and political contexts. Themes to be addressed include patronage and audience, architectural practice and the building trade, ceremonial and ritual, topography and urban planning, and the relationship of Ottoman architecture to other traditions.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

Long characterized in the Western imagination as exotic realms of fantasy, harems in Islamic tradition served as private domestic quarters for the women of elite households. This course explores the harem—as an institution, a physical space, and a community of women—from various art-historical perspectives, considering such topics as the harem’s architecture, the agency of its inhabitants as patrons and collectors, the mediating role of eunuchs in the harem’s visual and material culture, and the ability of harem women to make their mark through public artistic commissions. Our case studies will address a range of Islamic geographical and chronological contexts, though we will focus on the empires of the early modern period and, above all, the famous harem of the Ottoman sultans at the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul. In challenging popular misconceptions, the course will also look at the wealth of exoticizing imagery that the harem inspired in Western art, which we will consider through Orientalist paintings at the Walters Art Museum and illustrated rare books at Hopkins itself.

Area: Humanities

This course will explore modern and contemporary art in colonial and postcolonial contexts from Bangladesh to northern Africa. How do artists negotiate demands to support their national and local identities while participating in modernism across borders? What role do secularism and spirituality have in modern art? How do anticolonial, Marxist, and feminist politics shape art in these regions? How do global economic forces and the rise of powerful collectors, private museums, and international art fairs shape art and artists working across this geographic area? We will foreground the role of women as artists, collectors, patrons, and scholars throughout.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Humanities

This seminar will ask how photography produces ways of knowing: how does photography’s reality-effect shape its dissemination and absorption? Is photography’s emergence during the colonial era coincidental or catalytic? How is memory (re)constituted in a photography-saturated world? What kinds of histories does photography encourage and discourage? Is a photograph an object? We will read across disciplines (literature, anthropology, history, history of art, political science, theory) to investigate the epistemology of photography and the photograph.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This class explores histories of diseases, epidemics, and therapeutics in Asia. We will examine the rise of public health and the nation-state and the social and political factors that guided the outcomes of public health campaigns. Who was helped? Who was harmed? Why? How? To answer these questions, we will compare both top-down and bottom-up movements to understand questions of access and ethics in different communities—ethnic, racial, and religious—and the handling of different diseases that were acute, infectious, and chronic.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Writing Intensive

In this course, we will look at a number of key epidemic diseases in the pre-modern and modern world, from Black Death to COVID-19, and investigate how it affected medical thought and practice, as well as political, social and economic lives. We will pay special attention to how these diseases spread and how they affected and were influenced by questions of race, gender, sexuality and colonialism.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Medical practice is complex in Latin America and the Caribbean. Most countries in the region have universal healthcare; yet, the quality of clinical services varies widely, and is influenced by degrees of incorporation into—or marginalization from—social power structures. Many people take their health into their own hands by supplementing biomedicine with plant based remedies as well as religious and spiritual services. This course will interrogate the history and contemporary relevance of healthcare in Latin America and the Caribbean, with particular interest in how medicine intersects with colonialism, slavery, capitalism, neo-colonialism, grassroots revolutionary movements, the Cold War, and neoliberalism. Drawing on films, visual and performance art, and music, students will consider the ways in which race, gender, indigeneity, ability, class, and nation have affected people’s experiences with medical practice. Informed by postcolonial and decolonial scholarship, we will also examine why Latin America and the Caribbean have become “laboratories” for the production of medical knowledge, and importantly, how that knowledge was created by indigenous, enslaved, and migrant people as well as professionals. Finally, we seek to understand individual health problems in relation to the social and political determinants of health. As such, the course prompts students to reflect on why healthcare professionals—in the United States and abroad—would benefit from historically-informed communication with patients and their communities. This is a discussion-based seminar that requires active participation. There are no exams. The course does not assume any previous knowledge of the history of medicine or Latin American history.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

What major knowledge traditions about life’s generation and function have taken shape in Asia that continue to shape our contemporary world? How have they fared in encounters with Western knowledge traditions? How have modern biology, biotechnology and biomedicine developed in Asia in recent years within distinct geopolitical contexts? This course addresses these questions with selected historical cases from China, India, Japan, Koreas and selected Southeast Asian countries. It first introduces concepts and frameworks of major non-Western knowledge systems about life such as yin-yang and five phases and examine how religions, politics, and cross-cultural encounters impacted these systems, their evolutions or replacements. Then the class will examine the political, material, cultural and institutional contexts of more recent development in the life sciences in Asia. Class activities include lectures, discussions, research seminars, a final research project, and possible conversations with visiting professors and field trips.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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!

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

How have wars shaped the natural world, and vice versa? How have affected communities responded to environmental harm? This course explores the environmental history of warfare from the 18th century through the 20th century. It interrogates the relationship between imperialism, nation-building, and environmental destruction, while asking how the natural world might or might not have influenced the outcome of these military conflicts. The course demonstrates how warfare drew attention to environmental vulnerabilities, both on a local and a global scale. Topics include resource extraction in Euro-American empires, WWII recycling campaigns, ecological violence in the Vietnam War, and nuclear weapons testing.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

The nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic change in the dynamic of urbanization, as the share of the world’s urban population doubled from 6.6 per cent in 1800 to 12 per cent in 1900. Cities around the world were being built and rebuilt during this period with the aim of creating productive urban spaces by bringing about transformations in urban infrastructure like water supply, sanitation engineering, architecture, zoning and street planning, transportation engineering, and so forth. This seminar will survey the transnational history of the development and transformation of cities around the world, including in the United States of America, and their environments during the nineteenth century. The histories of these cities are intimately linked with both the natural environment surrounding them and the communities living and building on them, and we will explore a different city every week with the help of different kind of media, like literary fiction, film, maps, newspaper articles, etc.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Technical cooperation has been one of the most favored formats of international development because it aims to provide internal capacity for future development. Nevertheless, technical cooperation has been a site of political conflicts where different countries, social groups, capital funds, forms of knowledge, expertise, and opportunities collide. This course critically analyzes the political, diplomatic, social, and cultural surroundings of technical cooperation projects between the United States and East Asia during the second half of the 20th century. The course has three parts, each focusing on 1) theoretical and conceptual approaches to technical cooperation projects in East Asia, 2) different stakeholders, and 3) specific examples that display how the projects unfolded in real-life situations. Throughout the course, students will analyze various formats of historical sources such as photography, diary, correspondence, pamphlet, interview transcripts, and more!

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This seminar will explore scientific-technological innovations and how they affected politics and communication in the United States from the introduction of steam railways and boats, the newspaper, the telegraph, telephone, photography, radio, the movies, television, and the digital computer. In lieu of a final examination, each student will be asked to write a research paper in consultation with the faculty. Lectures, discussions, films.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Japan is often described as “nature-loving,” and is considered to be one of world leaders in environmental protection policies. Yet current environmental successes come on the heels of numerous environmental disasters that plagued Japan in the past centuries. Juxtaposing Japanese environmental history and its reflection in popular media, the course will explore the intersection between technology, environment, and culture.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

What can we learn from science fiction about the history of science and technology? What ideas about science do Sci-Fi novels manifest? Is the relationship between science and science fiction always the same, across different time periods and geographical areas? This course will explore these questions by taking a comparative perspective. Each meeting we will read a Sci-Fi novel from Europe, America, South and East Asia, and discuss it in conjunction with historical writing about relevant scientific developments. Reading Sci-Fi novels from 17th-century Germany, 19th-century England and India, and 20th-century Japan, China, Korea and the US, the students will explore how actual scientific developments were reflected in fiction, and what fictional depictions say about the aspirations and anxieties provoked by new technologies.

Writing Intensive

This course will introduce students to basic concepts in economics, political science and sociology relevant to the study of social problems and the programs designed to remedy them. It will address the many inequalities in access to education and health care, unequal treatment in the criminal justice system, disparities in income and wealth, and differential access to political power. The focus will be on designing effective policies at the national and local level to address these pressing issues. This course is open to all students, but will be required for the new Social Policy Minor. The course is also recommended for students who are interested in law school, medical school, programs in public health, and graduate school in related social science fields. This course does not count as one of the required courses for the Economics major or minor, but it is required for the Social Policy Minor. Cross list with Sociology, Economics and Political Science. Freshman, Sophomore and Juniors only.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Learn the basics of ArcGIS and data management as you help Prof. Lurtz publish an agricultural dataset and maps from 10 years before Mexico erupted in revolution. No experience necessary.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course will focus on the intellectual and cultural legacies of “Islamic pasts.” It has been argued by scholars that Islam is not only a religion but a “civilization” with identifiable sensibilities, overlapping histories, and temporalities. This civilization once spread from the Atlantic coast of Africa to the Indian subcontinent and beyond, but regimes and dynasties have changed hands in many of these places, while remaining in place in others. What remains of Islamic pasts in places where Islam once reigned supreme but has either vanished, been reduced to minority status, or repressed in ongoing political projects? This course examines lost Islamic pasts in the contemporary world, using readings from anthropology, history, literature, and poetry. As the basis of this course, we will read four texts in their entirety focusing on four different geographic points of interest—Spain, India, the Balkans, and Palestine.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

While media often present Islam as a fairly univocal and compact cultural and religious system, news reports about tensions, hostility and at times open conflict within the Islamic world itself are frequent. Unity and internal diversity characterize Islam nowadays and have historical roots that have deeply shaped Islam since its very inception.This course will explore the historical origins of the dynamics of unity and diversity in Islam from the predication of Muhammad and the expansion of the first caliphate, to the formation of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal empires. By focusing on the historical events and the cultural production of the first millennium of Islam, this course will offer a thorough historical introduction to its cultural and religious complexity.

Area: Humanities

The three most widespread monotheisms have much more in common than is generally portrayed: a common founding figure, a partly shared succession of prophets, closely comparable ethical concerns and religious practices, a history of coexistence and of cultural, religious, social and economic interaction. This course will focus on a number of key texts and historical events that have shaped the relationships between Jews, Muslims, and Christians during the Middle Ages and contributed to their reciprocal construction of the image of the “other.” The geographical center of the course will be the Mediterranean and the Near and Middle East, a true cradle of civilizations, religions, and exchange.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

In partnership with the social justice organization Justice for Muslims Collective, this community-engaged course and oral history project will explore how diverse Muslim communities navigated and contested belonging and political and cultural agency amidst state-sponsored violence and national debates on race, gender, citizenship and national security after 9/11 and during the ongoing War on Terror. Through history, ethnography, first-person narratives, film, fiction, and online resources, students will learn about the impact of 9/11 on American Muslim communities. This includes cultural and political resistance to imperialism, racism, and Islamophobia as well as to intersectional inequities within Muslim communities that were intensified in the context of Islamophobia. Students will learn about community activism and organizing from JMC, and complete a participatory action research project with the organization. This project is an oral history archive that will address gaps in the documentation of movement histories when it comes to early organizing against War on Terror policies by Muslim communities and communities racialized or perceived as Muslim. Students will be trained to record stories of resistance among leaders who organized and responded at the local and national-level in the Greater Washington region, to support the building of an archive that will shape a wide variety of future organizing and advocacy efforts.

For over a thousand years, the Sufi tradition has been a dynamic force in Islamic social, political and spiritual life. The tradition offers a treasure trove of devotional literature and music, philosophical treatises, contemplative practices, and institutions of social and political organization. After unpacking the politics of the term “Sufi,” we will trace the historical development of the tradition from the early ascetics in Iraq and Syria to the age of trans-national Sufi orders, with case studies from South Asia, Turkey, and the United States. We will then move into some of the key constructs of the tradition of spiritual growth and character formation: the divine-human relationship, the stages of the spiritual path, contemplative and practical disciplines, ideas of sainthood, discipleship and ethical perfection, and the psychology of love. Throughout the class, we will explore the nature of experiential language and interrogate the tradition through the lens of gender. We will also experience Sufism through ritual and music.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course explores how American Muslims navigate and contest complex notions of belonging in the context of national conversations on race, gender, citizenship, and national security. With a focus on specific case studies that range from Black Muslim movements of the early twentieth century to the ongoing War on Terror, the course adds complexity to the public conversation on what it means to be Muslim - and what it means to be American. We will draw on history, ethnography, first-person narratives, films, blogs, documentaries and fiction. As a Community Engaged course, the class will include site visits and learning with and from Muslim communities in Baltimore.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

The hajj pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the pillars of Islam. But Muslims around the world also take part in many other pilgrimages, from the massive annual Shi’a pilgrimage to Karbala to the smaller ziyarat “visits” to Sufi saint shrines, to travel to centers of Islamic learning, to pilgrimage to isolated natural features like mountains, trees, valleys. What are the theologies that propel the act of travel in Islam? How are cities, architectures, economies shaped by these cultures? And how are these traditions affected by the wars and colonial projects that plague many Muslim-majority countries in the contemporary world? Readings in this course will draw from anthropology, philosophy, Islamic interpretive texts (tafsir), and travelogues.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

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?

Area: Humanities

This course will survey German ideas—in philosophy, social and political theory, and drama—since the Enlightenment. Authors include Kant, Schiller, Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Weber, Horkheimer, and Adorno.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Who was Niccolò Machiavelli? We often hear the term “Machiavellian” in reference to actors in business or politics, but what does it really mean? What does Machiavelli teach us about the nature and the dynamics of political power? Can Machiavelli’s thought offer insights into today’s politics and fast-changing world? The course aims to answer these questions by addressing three topics. First, we will study Machiavelli’s life and times, particularly the events connected to his production and the context in which he wrote his main writings. We will see how the fifteenth-century Florentine humanism and the massive political changes affecting early modern Europe shaped Machiavelli’s mindset. Second, we will familiarize ourselves with Machiavelli’s thought by reading The Prince and excerpts from Discourses on Livy. Third, we will get acquainted with some of the main trends in the reception of Machiavelli in the 20th and 21st centuries. Special attention will be paid to interpretations of Machiavelli by Antonio Gramsci, Leo Strauss, Isaiah Berlin, John Greville Agard Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and John P. McCormick. We will also pay attention to modern television programs and films that show the width and depth of Machiavelli's legacy.

Area: Humanities

This seminar examines some of the ways we define, represent, and think about the concept of labor in capitalism. We will analyze and compare a wide variety of texts (literary, visual, and theoretical) that embody different, often contradictory, notions of the work we do, why we do it, and how it affects us. As we investigate different types of work—productive and unproductive, physical & intellectual, factory & office—a few of the questions we will ask are: What methods have writers and artists used to depict labor in the 20th and 21st centuries? How is labor stratified along racial and gender lines? Is it possible to imagine a post-work society? The course curates a range of cultural artifacts (short stories, manifestos, novel excerpts, visual art, and film) that employ aesthetic strategies like irony, humor, absurdity, and duration to represent the dynamics of labor in capitalism. Theoretical texts then provide varied conceptual viewpoints from which to compare, contrast, and synthesize our impressions and interpretations of art and literary works. By the end of the semester, we will have traced a trajectory of labor in capitalism from the early 20th century to our own strange and precarious present.

Writing Intensive

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 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.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Over the past decade, growing numbers of filmmakers in Italy have addressed ecological crises in their work. This class takes an eco-critical approach to contemporary Italian cinema, examining a body of compelling place-centered stories that deal with local and global issues. Defining the scope of eco-cinema and the ways we can interrogate films as ecological texts, we shall screen earth-centered films that raise consciousness about the consequences of human manipulation of the natural world; the complicity of industry, government, and organized crime in creating environmental crises; and the effects of economic and social malaise. Screenings include iconic films such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert (1963), more recent, critically acclaimed films such as Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (2008), Alice Rohrwacher’s Happy as Lazzaro (2018), and many others.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

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

Area: Humanities

Italian Culture course offered on the JHU Summer Program in Bologna. Permission required. Must be taken for a letter grade. Open to students admitted to the JHU Summer Program in Bologna only.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

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 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.

Area: Humanities

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, but ONE extra credit will be given to students who wish to do the course work in Portuguese. Those wishing to do the course work in English for 3 credits should register for section 01. Those wishing to earn 4 credits by doing the course work in Portuguese should register for section 02. The sections will be taught simultaneously. Section 01: 3 credits Section 02: 4 credits (instructor’s permission required). No Prereq. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

Today France is a multicultural, multi-ethnic society fractured by the memories of colonialism. Throughout the country's history, French thinkers – classical and contemporary – have questioned the foundations of power and focused critically not only on the claims of authority issuing from the top, but also on the compliance of the governed. What it is, they ask, that makes people stick together and recognize each other as citizens of one country? Is there such a thing as a shared history, and is Fraternité something more than a slogan? Works by La Boétie, Montaigne, Diderot, Robespierre, Tocqueville, Gobineau, Camus, Sartre, Memmi, Foucault and others.

Prerequisite(s): Students may not have previously completed AS.212.341.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

German Media Theory is an advanced course for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students, giving an introduction and overview of the specifically German version of Media Studies that first gained traction in the 1980s. The term media refers not just to mass media but more broadly to devices that process, transfer and store information, reaching from the alphabet that changed the culture of writing, or the printing press made famous as the foundation of the ‘Gutenberg galaxy’ to computers and smart phones dominating our current lives. In this course we will cut across disciplinary boundaries to explore the multifaceted roots and formations of German media theory which combine literary poststructuralism, histories of science and technology, psychoanalysis, cybernetics, art history, and philosophy among other fields. Readings include works by Friedrich Kittler, Bernhard Siegert, Cornelia Vismann, Wolfgang Ernst, Walter Benjamin, Niklas Luhmann, Michel Foucault, Marshall McLuhan and many others. The course will be taught in English and all readings will be available in English.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

What does it mean to traverse a name? What’s in a name? What if that name is Orpheus, one of antiquity’s most renowned poets? In this class we will try to answer these three questions. We will follow the myth of Orpheus from its origins in antiquity to the Italian Renaissance. Our aim will be to look at the ways a name and, in this case, a story is able to take on different forms as it travels through time and as it is being narrated. Through the texts of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and Poliziano, we will compare their delivery of the myth against those of the Roman poets Virgil and Ovid. Via a close reading of each text, we will use elements inherent to the story such as love, loss, pain, dismemberment, identity, gender and sexuality to explore the concept of multiplicity within a single unity. Historical contextualization, literary theory, textual criticism and reception will serve as further tools to help us in our questioning. Ultimately, we will follow the journey of transformation of the myth to ask ourselves two final questions: is it the same story? Are we the same readers? No prior knowledge of any of the texts is necessary. The course will be taught in English with section 02 available in Italian for Italian Majors and Minors to fulfill their requirements.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

We will trace the dream of designing an ideal society and the danger of creating its opposite in the sixteenth and seventeenth century Italian and European thought.

Area: Humanities

The course is an interdisciplinary introduction to the study of Latin America. It brings together archeology, ethno-history, art history, literature and environmental studies.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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): AS.210.312;Students may earn credit for AS.211.380 or AS.215.380, but not both.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

What do Hugo Chávez, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump have in common? According to many from across the political spectrum, they are all populists. But what is populism, exactly, and how can it describe such disparate phenomena as left-wing social movements, xenophobic anti-immigrant policies, and economic redistribution? This advanced seminar will examine the history, culture, and political theory of populism. We will pay special attention to the resurgence of populism after the Great Recession and examine a number of cases from Latin America, Europe, and the United States.

This course with seminar option is devoted to Mexico, its past and present paths into a remote inside-out pre-imperial epoch inalienable from North-against-South histories across the American Narcoland from Honduras to Alaska. Our nonfictional materials combine detailed summaries and readings of Stuart Elden's The Birth of Territory and James Maffie's Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion. The fictional matter concerns Roberto Bolaño's 1998 novel, Los detectives salvajes (The Savage Detectives), Corman McCarthy's apocalypse Western, 1985 Blood Meridian, and Carlos Reygadas' films, Post Tenebras lux (2012) and Nuestro tiempo (2018).

Area: Humanities

The Great Recession—sometimes called the financial crisis or the economic crisis of 2008—brought financial markets to a halt and created significant political turmoil across the North Atlantic. But its impact on culture, and literature especially, has often been ignored. This seminar will travel across Europe, from Dublin to Madrid, from London to Reykjavík in order to examine how literature has registered this most recent economic crisis. We will focus on how crisis is narrated and the ways in which literary works have managed to provide a voice for marginalized social, economic, and political demands.

Area: Humanities

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?

We will study literary claims of epic colonial possession and aesthetic dispossession through close readings of five works in reverse chronological order: V.S. Naipaul’s late historical novel, A Way in the World (1994); Derek Walcott’s transoceanic poem, Omeros (1990); Alejo Carpentier’s short anti-Enlightenment moral tale, El reino de este mundo (1949) and his short tale in celebration of Afro Cuban wizardry, Viaje a la semilla (1944); Aimé Césaire’s prose poetry, mixed chronicle, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, or Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (1939-1947). We will address questions of temporality and historicity (Heidegger) and a base-materialist political blocking of wild dreams as attainable through translation (Bataille). Such formal and epistemic problems will draw us into issues of race across the colonial spectrum of Caribbean histories.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

This course will use the concept of the Other to study the ways in which various marginal groups in Israel are represented in contemporary Israeli films, TV drama, prose-fiction, poetry and visual art. As a nation-state which was founded on the premise of a utopian vision of a just and fair society and as a promise for a safe haven for Jews escaping their status as Others, contemporary Israeli culture offers a unique case study. The course will run as a research seminar in which students will be encouraged to actively engage in analyzing the ways in which cultural productions depict the Other/s and Otherness as well as the social, political and psychological motivations and implications of these depictions. We will ask questions such as: who is considered as Other and by whom? What roles do the cultural representations play in shaping national collective identity, stereotypes and the perception of the self as Other? And how collective memory shapes Otherness?

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Humanities

This course examines the role of the Holocaust in Israeli society and culture. We will study the emergence of the discourse on the Holocaust in Israel and its development throughout the years. Through focusing on scholarly, literary, artistic, and cinematic responses to the Holocaust, we will analyze the impact of its memory on the nation, its society, politics, and collective self. The course is divided to three general categories: Historical and Sociological Perspective, Literary Perspective, and Cinematic Perspective. However, we will study the crossroad between these three categories, and will explore them in relation to one another.

Area: Humanities

In the 20th century, the Lusophone world saw the rise and fall of such authoritarian governments as the Estado Novo in Portugal (1933–74) and the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964–85). During this period, a series of revolutionary political movements sprung up, as well as innovative cultural production. How does culture respond to censorship? How do art and politics comment on and ultimately transform each other? In this course we will discuss novels, poetry, film, songs, and artworks from Brazil, Portugal, and Lusophone Africa that engage critically with dictatorships and their aftermaths. Topics include violence, trauma and memory, colonialism, post-colonialism, and decoloniality, race and the legacies of slavery, counterculture, and popular cultures. Readings and discussion in Portuguese. Interested students who have not completed course prerequisites should contact the instructor for permission to enroll.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

The vast body of work produced women artists and writers in Brazil has been marginalized by canonical cultural narratives, which are now being contested by a spate of scholarly and artistic projects. This course spotlights the production of women from the early twentieth century to the present, including renowned and lesser-known works. We’ll discuss art, literature, and film alongside feminist theory, exploring radicality as it relates to aesthetics and politics. How do women’s art, literature, and thought engage with and transform Brazilian cultural production? What are their contributions to global discussions about gender and sexuality? How do these works respond to historical events? Among the topics addressed are the body, feminism, race, indigeneity, and politics. We’ll study Clarice Lispector’s acclaimed stories, the first Brazilian proletarian novel written by modernist icon Patricia Galvão, known as Pagu, the diaries of Carolina Maria de Jesus, the emblematic paintings of Tarsila do Amaral, and Lygia Clark’s artwork, as well as the booming scene of contemporary cinema and poetry. The course is taught in English, but those interested in doing the coursework in Portuguese (4 credits) should register for section 02.

Area: Humanities

The Middle East is home to the invention of agriculture, cities, and writing. It is also in the Middle East that we find evidence of humanity’s earliest diplomatic activity in, for instance, the actual letters sent by ancient kings to one another, the treaties drawn up after their conflicts, and the inscriptions that commemorate their conquests. In this course, we examine texts such as these to explore questions such as: How do we characterize the international system of the ancient Middle East? Does this system change over the approximately two millennia for which we have documentation? Is it better to approach ancient diplomacy through present-day eyes or in the context of ancient world-views? Is an understanding of diplomacy in the ancient Middle East relevant to our understanding of modern international relations? All texts read in translation.

Area: Humanities

A broad survey of the significant political and cultural dynamics of Jewish history in the Medieval, Early-Modern, and Modern Eras.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

In this course we will examine major issues in the philosophy of law, including the nature of law, the role of the Constitution in legal decisions, and the justification of punishment. No previous knowledge of law or philosophy is required.

Area: Humanities

The Idea of Power surveys seminal texts in the history of political thought on the nature, promise, and dangers of political and social power; it also critically engages contemporary texts on race and gender power relations

Area: Humanities

An examination of some of the central texts of the Enlightenment, including works by Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Kant.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

The course is an in-depth study of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise. Among the topics to be discussed are: Spinoza’s Bible criticism, the nature of religion, philosophy and faith, the nature of the ancient Hebrew State, Spinoza’s theory of the State, the role of religion in Spinoza’s political theory, the freedom to philosophize, the metaphysics of Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise, and finally, the reception of the TTP.

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.

Area: Humanities

This course will be a close reading of Plato's Republic, with special attention to the parallel of city and soul, the relevance of metaphysics to politics, and the relation of aristocracy, democracy and tyranny.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

To understand politics, the sound bites of the modern media take 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 in order 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 work from the assumption that there is something to be gained from such comparisons across space and time.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course examines some of the central ideas and institutions that have transformed politics in the contemporary world through the lens of East Asia, focusing on Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China. We analyze two enduring themes of classic and contemporary scholarship in comparative politics: development and democracy. The purpose is to introduce students to the various schools of thought within comparative politics as well as to the central debates concerning East Asian politics.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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. Students who have taken Contemporary International Politics 190.209 or International Politics 190.104 may not register.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course investigates core questions of what constitutes political freedom, what limits on freedom (if any) should be imposed by authority, adn the relationship between freedom, responsibility, and political judgement. Spanning texts ancient, modern, and contemporary, we shall investigate how power inhabits and invigorates practices of freedom and consent. Among the questions we will consider: Can we always tell the difference between consent and coercion? Are morality and freedom incompatible? Is freedom from the past impossible? By wrestling with slavery (freedom's opposite) we will confront the terrifying possibility that slavery can be both embodied and psychic. If our minds can be held captive by power, can we ever be certain that we are truly free? The political stakes of these problems will be brought to light through a consideration of issues of religion, gender, sexuality, civil liberties, class and race.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course examines the impact of weapons of mass destruction on global politics and American interests. The first half of the course focuses on nuclear weapons, examining their development and targeting throughout the Cold War. The second half of the course examines contemporary issues involving nuclear weapons (including arms control, nuclear zero, terrorism, proliferation and defense). It also considers other weapons of mass destruction (or disruption) including chemical, biological, radiological and cyber weapons. The growing concerns about Artificial Intelligence will also be addressed. Requirements include a midterm and a final exam.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Development is often assumed to be an economic issue. In this course we examine the politics of development on a global scale. We begin by looking at the colonial and Cold War histories of development. We then use these histories to contextualise contemporary development issues that directly affect international relations such as aid and debt, humanitarianism, food security, land “grabs”, migration and indigenous rights. The course also seeks to understand the ways in which the issues underlying global development have always connected and continue to connect the peoples and polities of the Global North and Global South.

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?

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course will plumb the theoretical depths of democracy and its manifold forms, ideas, and arguments. After sampling a handful of the many democratic traditions in the field, we will attempt to ‘apply’ these theories to two issues that have proven particularly sticky for democratic thinkers: the global nuclear arrangement, and global climate change. The course will require significant reading and writing and will be driven by in-class discussion.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

What you need to know about Chinese politics covers the major scandals, political events, and policy debates that every China watcher needs to know. This first module of a two-semester experience brings together two professors, Prof. Andrew Mertha (SAIS) and Prof. John Yasuda (KSAS), with very different perspectives on China's past achievements, its political and economic futures, and the global implications of China's rise. The course seeks to give ample coverage to every major political question about China that is often missed in a semester long class. In addition to lively debates between the instructors, students can also expect guest speakers from the policy world, business, and the academy for a fresh take on what's going on in China today.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This serves as a two-semester survey of Chinese politics from 1911-Present. This second module explores the politics of the reform and post-reform eras.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

While traditional studies on security have focused largely on border protection, sovereign authority of the state, and interstate alliances, the threats posed to everyday people were not a central focus of security analyses until the end of the Cold War. The human security approach has evolved as a challenge to conventional thinking on security. This course will introduce the notion of human security, trace its emergence and evolution in the global political discourse, explore the theoretical scholarship from which it developed, and evaluate its effectiveness as a framework for addressing the most egregious threats human beings face today. From refugee flows, gender inequality, ethnic conflict, mass atrocities, poverty, to climate change, human security scholarship and policy has sought to examine the various threats to the lives of people that transcend national borders and allow us to break out of narrow thinking to develop innovative and globally-minded solutions.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

While policies were passed to ensure equal opportunity for racially subjugated Americans, the United States witnessed increasing stratification of wealth and income and deepening concentration of poverty, stagnation in closing racial gaps, and new forms of inequality posed by the striking upsurge in contact with the criminal justice system at the bottom of the skills ladder and concentration of wealth at the top. At the same time, the welfare state came under attack and faced challenges posed by an aging population, women entering the labor force, deindustrialization, and international pressures of globalization. Social spending withered in some areas while spending on citizens was increasingly likely to happen through tax expenditures and private means. This course investigates the politics around these developments and competing perspectives in debates over redistributive policies in the United States and their impact on inequality, particularly race and gender inequality. We will examine the contours of inequality and explanations for why it has expanded over the past several decades. We explore why the US is exceptional in both the level of inequality it tolerates and the generosity and types of remedies to alleviate poverty in comparison to its European counterparts and debate the role of race, unions, electoral politics and institutions. We investigate several specific cases of persistent racial inequality – concentrated poverty, segregation, and incarceration. We investigate both how policies have reinforced racial and gender divisions from a top-down perspective as well as examining under what conditions the disadvantaged contest inequality, exploring how political struggle shapes policy from the bottom-up. The last part of the course examines the consequences of inequality and social policy for representation and citizenship and how economic inequality affects political representation and responsiveness of elites to masses.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course will explore theories and practices of race and immigration in order to illuminate the proliferation of populations regarded as disposable in contemporary politics. We will pay special attention to the contestable criteria used to determine eligibility for membership in the human race. We shall also examine how political power influences the relays between citizenship status and those whose lives are worthy of protection, and those who should be allowed to die.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course examines issues of political identity, political incorporation, and political participation of Asian Americans. Themes include Asian American panethnicity, the struggle for immigration and citizenship, Asian American electoral politics, political activism and resistance since the 1960s, and the impact of Asian Americans on the politics of race and ethnicity in the United States.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Law of Democracy refers to the statutes, court decisions, and other practices that govern the electoral processes. Although the United States and Canada have a great deal in common, they have approached many of the problems involved in institutionalizing democracy quite differently. Recognizing these differences should contribute to understanding both the strengths, and the problems, of the two approaches. Specific topic will include the right to vote, political finance, delineation of district boundaries, electoral dispute resolution, and the role of electoral management bodies and elections administrators.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

In this class, we will ask questions about the relationship between equality, law, and society. We will investigate how people have used law in their movements for greater equality, and ask whether law has served these movements well and how it has worked. We will pay particular attention to movements based on race, gender, and economic class.

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.).

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course is a survey of the unique position of the United States in world politics. We will cover the broader international relations literature on the dynamics of hegemony and empire, from work in the realist tradition to more critical approaches. The course will encompass security politics as well as the economic and monetary dimensions of American influence. Interested students must have at least completed one 100 or 200 level introductory course in international relations.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

From the founding of the United States to the COVID-19 pandemic, modern universities have evolved into expansive, complex institutions that play a variety of indispensable roles in the support of democratic societies. They educate citizens as well as specialists; produce new knowledge that shapes discourse and public policy; foster reasoned debate; and act as engines of social mobility. They also incite a great deal of controversy, criticism, and distrust, including for how they have performed these roles. In this course, we will study the centuries-long relationship between universities and democracy, and assess how successfully these institutions (including Johns Hopkins) are fulfilling their most profound functions today.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

An introduction to the study of political behavior, emphasizing electoral behavior in democratic countries.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Recommended Course Background: AS.190.214

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course introduces students to the historical and institutional foundations of modern South Korean politics. Topics include nationalism, political economic development, civil society, globalization, and ROK-DPRK relations.Recommended students should take Intro to Comparative Politics or a course related to East Asia first.(CP)

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Recommended Course Background: AS.190.340.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Jews exercise a good deal of power in contemporary America.. They are prominent in a number of key industries, play important roles in the political process, and hold many major national offices. For example, though Jews constitute barely two percent of America’s citizens, about one-third of the nation’s wealthiest 400 individuals are Jewish and more than ten percent of the seats in the U.S. Congress are held by Jews. One recent book declared that, “From the Vatican to the Kremlin, from the White House to Capitol Hill, the world’s movers and shakers view American Jewry as a force to be reckoned with.” Of course, Jews have risen to power in many times and places ranging from the medieval Muslim world and early modern Spain through Germany and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. In nearly every prior instance, though, Jewish power proved to be evanescent. No sooner had the Jews become “a force to be reckoned with” than they found themselves banished to the political ma rgins, forced into exile or worse. Though it may rise to a great height, the power of the Jews seems ultimately to rest on a rather insecure foundation. Cross-listed with Jewish Studies. Course is open to juniors and seniors.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

“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.”

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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?

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

An examination of the ways in which violence has been used to secure political ends. Topics include civil wars, targeted killings, terrorism, ethnic conflict and war itself. Students examine what makes types of political violence unique and what unites them.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course surveys the major trends and approaches to the comparative study of race in political science and critically examines the link between race and politics. Topics include race and state formation, citizenship and national membership, immigration, racial regimes, and the political economy of race. Recommended Course Background: Courses in comparative politics, immigration, and racial politics.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course focuses on one of the most powerful stories told in the tradition of western political theory: the story of the social contract. This story is about the constitution of legitimate political authority. It is told in many ways and each version makes different assumptions, in particular about human nature, the power of reason, the value of order, and the character of justice. We examine this often-conflicting assumptions and explore how they continue to inform the way we think about the possibilities and problems of politics. Readings include texts by Arendt, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Freud, Pateman, the Federalists, Derrida, and Douglass. Final grades are based on class participation, two exams and two papers.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Though it is possible to imagine ways of addressing the multiple crises the world will face as the atmosphere warms, seas rise, and pollutants seep into the surface of the planet, any serious proposal will require a degree of coordination amongst nation-states that has proven impossible to achieve in the past. In this course, we will consider this difficult situation by treating it as an instance of an old problem in political theory: how to escape the infamous “state of nature,” where individuals struggle to obtain the resources they need to survive at others’ expense, rather than cooperating to satisfy their needs and address the threats they face in common. First, we will study some influential reflections on the state of nature by Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Freud, and Pateman, as well as efforts to apply the logic of the state of nature to problems in international politics by Kant, Wendt, Waltz, Enloe, and others. Then we will read contemporary work on the international politics of climate change and ask what it would take to start building the better world that is possible today.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course introduces students to the colonial logics that underpin key categories and concepts in Political Science. Working through four sub-fields – political theory, political behavior, comparative politics and international relations, the course also introduces students to alternative knowledge traditions, emanating from minority communities and colonized peoples, which seek to explain the stuff of Political Science via anti-colonial logics.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This undergraduate seminar is designed to introduce students to the comparative study of political violence and intra-state conflict. We will examine social science theories and empirical studies on a wide range of forms of political violence, including civil war, coups, state repression, communal violence, riots, terrorism, genocide, and criminal-political violence. We will study these phenomena at the micro, meso and macro levels, and focus on understanding their causes, dynamics, outcomes, and aftermath. The class will also equip students with an ability to analyze political violence by using social scientific tools.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

This course analyzes the distinctive US welfare state in historical and comparative perspective. We begin with a survey of the policy context, an historical overview from the poorhouses through the Great Society, and a tour of welfare states across the rich democracies. We then survey developments – and explain the actual workings of policy – across jobs, education, welfare, pensions, and health care. We explore the institutional and political factors behind their divergent trajectories through conservative revival and the age of Trump. Students will write a seminar paper exploring policy development over time in a program or area of their choosing. Enrollment restricted to Social Policy minors only.

Prerequisite(s): Students may take AS.190.380 or AS.360.380, but not both.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Most wealthy countries are democracies. But not all democracies are wealthy—India, Costa Rica, and Mongolia are prominent examples of poor countries with democratic regimes. The course will examine the relation between economic development and political democratization under three big questions. (a) Under what conditions, and through which mechanisms, does economic development promote democracy? (b) If economic development is not possible in the foreseeable future, how do countries achieve stable democratization? (c) Under what conditions, and through which mechanisms, does democracy foster economic development?

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Considers how parties and elections structure political conflict, and facilitate (or not) democratic control of government. Topics include campaigns, voting behavior, election administration, money in politics, presidential nomination, and party coalitions.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course examines the most important debates about China’s political economic development. After exploring Mao Zedong’s disastrous economic policies, we will consider the politics of reform and opening under Deng Xiaoping, and finally conclude with China’s state capitalist policies across a variety of issue areas. The course will cover literatures on financial reform, public goods provision, foreign trade and investment, agriculture, corruption, business groups, and regulatory development. Where possible we will draw comparisons with the economic experiences of other East Asian nations as well as other post-communist states.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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?

Since antiquity, global politics have been defined by the struggle between imperialism and anti-imperialism. This course examines the arguments that have accompanied this struggle, considering influential texts written to defend or to denounce empires, as well as contemporary scholarship on imperial and anti-imperial ideologies. We will focus in particular on how imperial conflicts shaped natural law, international law, liberalism, and cosmopolitanism, as well as the connections between imperialism and contemporary capitalism, development assistance, and humanitarian intervention. The fundamental questions for the course are: What is an empire? and What would it mean to decolonize our world, our international institutions, and our minds?

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

In this seminar we examine the origins, dynamics, and consequences of nonviolent struggles around the world. How do ordinary people organize for social change? What are the differences in people power campaigns in authoritarian and democratic contexts? When does nonviolent resistance succeed or fail, and what are the political consequences of these outcomes? In answering these questions, we will study the central ideas behind nonviolent action, learn about the most important scholarly discoveries in this field and analyze paradigmatic cases. Students will choose a historical or contemporary nonviolent movement to interrogate throughout the semester, as we learn new concepts, theories, and empirical patterns to make sense of them.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Capitalism and Ecology focuses on the relations between capitalism and climate during the era of the Anthropocene. How do capitalist processes of fossil extraction, consumption, production and governance contribute to the pace of climate warming, glacier flows, the ocean conveyor system, species loss and other phenomena? What are the effects and the possible modes of political response? How do the nonhuman, self-organizing processes such as glaciers, oceans and climate change on their own as they also amplify the effects of capitalist emissions? The course combines texts on capitalism and activism with those by geoscientists on how the nonhuman systems work. Books by authors in the fields of political theory, geology, anthropology, economics, philosophy and ethology will be drawn upon. Authors such as Michael Benton, Brian Fagan, Hayek, Naomi Klein, Fred Hirsch, Fred Pearce, van Dooren and Connolly are apt to be read to engage these issues. A previous course in political theory is recommended. The class is organized around student presentations on assigned readings. Two papers, 10-12 pages in length. Extensive class discussion.

Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Writing Intensive

This upper-level undergraduate writing intensive course brings together the work of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault to focus on their critiques of modernity and their discussions of political change/revolution. Although Arendt and Foucault are often understood as coming from and supporting different political theoretical traditions, the course will also explore ways in which their shared debt to the work of Friedrich Nietzsche illuminates sometimes surprising commonalities and complementary positions. There is no final exam in this course but in addition to reading assignments, students will be required to write three papers.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This is an advanced undergraduate seminar that explores how racial stigma functions as a marker of being always already in debt. In view of the legacies of settler-colonialism, imperialism and chattel slavery, how is it that those from whom so much has been taken are nevertheless regarded as perpetually in debt? We shall examine the moral, economic and racialized logics of power through which a range of political subjects come to be regarded as ungrateful “takers” as opposed to “makers,” and owing a debt to society. In so doing, we will investigate how temporality functions as a tool of power by considering how the indebted are made vulnerable to precarity, discipline, and disposability—in effect, forced to live life on borrowed time.

Writing Intensive

In the 19th Century America was noted for its courts, political parties and representative institutions. Today, America’s political parties and representative institutions have declined in importance while the institutions of the executive branch have increased in importance. This seminar will examine the nation’s key executive institutions and aspects of executive governance in the U.S. Students will alternate primary responsibility for week’s readings. Every student will prepare a 10-15 page review and critique of the books for which they are responsible in class.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course uses a community based learning approach to inquire into the presence of the Rastafari community in the Baltimore area. Most people will have heard of Rastafari through the music of Bob Marley. People might not know, however, that Rastafari emerges out of and has been part of a global history of liberation struggles. This course is co-taught with a local Rastafari organization. You will be intellectually and practically equipped to take part in a project of original research on the Rastafari presence in the Baltimore region, starting with the demonization of the movement in the 1980s “war on drugs” and including the movement’s response.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

An examination of the ways in which violence has been used to secure political ends. Topics include terrorism, assassination, genocide, coups, rebellions and war itself. Students examine what makes types of political violence unique and what unites them. (Formerly AS.190.372)

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This is a writing intensive, advanced undergraduate political theory seminar on racial formation. Specifically, the course explores the end of whiteness in multiple senses of the phrase. First, to what extent do the ends served by whiteness change, or remain continuous, over time? What power hierarchies and political goals has white identity been engineered to advance historically? We shall then examine the contemporary phenomenon whereby the end of white supremacy is conceived by some as the end of the world. This, in turn, will lead us to investigate how we should best understand white disavowal of threats of climate change and pandemics/health-care crises currently coursing through white identity politics. The last part of the course will be dedicated to exploring the end of whiteness in terms of the theories and practices potentially required to dismantle whiteness as white supremacy. Readings include Du Bois, Fanon, Painter, Baldwin, Moreton-Robinson, Hartmann, Olson

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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).

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Investigates the causes of large-scale policy disasters, examining the role of ideology, psychology, organization design and political incentives. Examples may be drawn from the Iraq War, Bay of Pigs, Hurricane Katrina, the U.S. Financial crisis, Shuttle Challenger disaster. economic development policy, privatization, and the Great Society. Limited to seniors or with permission of instructor. (CP / AP)

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This class is designed to introduce students to qualitative methodology. Practically, students will gain first-hand experience with qualitative research methods via research design, ethics review, in-depth interviewing, participant observation, and archival/primary source research. They will learn to deploy analytical techniques such as discourse analysis and process tracing. Students will also be asked to consider the merits of qualitative approaches more generally, and discuss the relative advantages of qualitative, experimental, and quantitative approaches. Questions that we will discuss include: What place should qualitative research have in a research design? Can qualitative research test hypotheses, or only generate them? Can qualitative research explain social phenomena, or only interpret them? What are the disadvantages and advantages of qualitative approaches compared to quantitative approaches? For what kinds of research questions are ethnographic techniques best suited? Is replicability possible for ethnographic field research? What criteria of evidence and analytical rigor apply on this terrain?

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Contact with criminal justice has become a primary way that many Americans see and experience government, particularly those from race-class subjugated communities. Yet, our field has been slow to appreciate the development of the carceral state or to consider its manifold for citizenship. In this advanced undergraduate seminar, we will survey key debates around punishment, state violence, and surveillance, with a particular focus on research that takes institutional development, history and racial orders seriously. Why did the carceral state expand in "fits and starts" and with what consequence for state-building? We explore its (racialized and gendered) relationship to other key systems: foster care, social provision, labor relations and the labor market, and immigration enforcement. A core preoccupation of this course will be to understand the ways in which the criminal justice system "makes race" and how debates about crime and punishment were often debates about black inclusion and equality. How does exposure to criminal justice interventions shape political learning, democratic habits, and racial lifeworlds? In addition to policy, political discourse, and racial politics, we will employ works from a range of fields - history, sociology, law and criminology - and a range of methods (ethnography, historical analysis, quantitative and qualitative). Required books include: Khalil Muhammad's Condemnation of Blackness: race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Elizabeth Hinton's From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, David Oshinsky's Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, Bruce Western's Punishment and Inequality in America, and Michael Fortner's Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment.

Writing Intensive

Israel is one of the only countries whose existence is openly challenged. This class will examine the future of Israel focusing on international and domestic threats to its continued existence as a Jewish democracy. Outside threats to be considered include nuclear attack and the growing international movement to delegitimize Israel. domestic challenges include demographic changes, the role of religion in governance, and doubts as to whether one can be a Jewish state and still be a democracy. Lessons from the destruction of the ancient Israelite kingdoms and from contemporary state deaths will be included. The course will conclude by considering efforts that Israel can undertake to meet the threats it faces.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Europe has been in a sense the first testing ground for theories of comparative politics, but many outsiders now see Europe as a pacified and somewhat boring place. This course will question conventional wisdom through an examination of European politics in historical and cross-national perspective. We will apply the comparative method to the study of European politics today, and conversely we will ask what Europe tells us more generally about politics. We will see that Europe is still a locus of intense conflict as well as remarkably diverse experimentation. Topics will include: political, legal, and economic governance; the evolution of democracy and fundamental rights, the welfare state, class stratification, immigration and race, the role of religion; European integration and globalization. Recommended background: Introduction to Comparative Politics.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Intensive examination of the political aspects of human activities in outer space, past, present and future, with focus on militarization, earth-remote sensing, surveillance, navigation, resource exploitation, the Outer Space Treaty, and colonization.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Power is a -- if not the -- key concept of international relations, yet there is no single definition of power that is accepted by all scholars in the field. In this course we will critically examine definitions of power from classic and contemporary works of international relations, political science, and related areas of study.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Writing Intensive

Though the torchlight parade has long since passed, American parties still stand in the shadow of the nineteenth-century Party Period. This course seeks to untangle the ideologies and practices of party politics from the Founding to the Progressive Era. Topics include the rise of mass parties, political violence, the coming of the Republican Party, the party politics of Reconstruction and westward expansion, corruption and the political machine, Populism, and movements for reform. We pay particular attention to comparisons between past and present, and to opportunities taken and foregone.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

An intensive examination of competing theories of the role of nuclear weapons in world politics and alternative global security orders. Focus on nuclear weapons and the interstate system, deterrence, war fighting, arms control, proliferation and terrorism, with select historical and contemporary case studies.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course will survey the history of industrial policies for clean technologies from China’s wind and solar push in the 1990s to the Inflation Reduction Act. 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 industrial policy provides a unique avenue to understand world order. Through this lens, we will see how nature, knowledge, and geopolitics come together in various formations throughout world history.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

The philosophy of law or jurisprudence investigates the nature of law and what makes law, as it were, law. Thus, this course will examine various 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. Students will be required to participate in class discussion, take three exams, and write one paper.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

“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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

In this course, students will gain a foundational understanding of critical race theory, including its genesis in legal theory. The course will examine its relationship and importance to social movements, including through key concepts like intersectionality. The course will also use critical race theory to grapple with law, racial segregation, and the criminal justice system in the United States.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

What is the relationship between capitalism and empire in modern times? The history of capitalism and the history of imperialism are often treated as separate subjects. By contrast, this course begins with the hypothesis that modern empires were the progenitors of capitalist globalization, and that capitalism has been an international or geopolitical system from its earliest inceptions. The purpose of the course, then, is to engage students in a dual exploration of the political economy of modern empires and the geopolitical dimensions of modern capitalism, with a focus on Britain and the United States. We will draw our course readings from a diverse array of theoretical and historical sources on capitalism, empire and global political economy. The overarching aim of the course is to excavate how imperial histories can illuminate the nature of contemporary globalization.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

The ecological crisis currently underway calls into question political theories that emphasize concern with the ‘human’ above all else. Yet this is the hallmark of humanist political thought, encompassing notions of freedom, equality, property, knowledge, agency, time, and so on. This course rethinks ‘politics’ (theory and modes of action) from the more-than-human perspective of political ecology in conjunction with Black, Indigenous, feminist, and postcolonial thought. We will challenge political concepts that justify the domination of nature for human flourishing, and consequently question prevalent notions of what counts as ‘human’ and what as ‘nature’. We will situate anthropocentric politics within histories of capitalism and colonialism and explore the interconnections between human and non-human domination through such processes as ecological imperialism, racial capitalism, and environmental racism. Toward the end of the course, we will explore recent scholarship on modes of political action suitable for building alternate, just futures for all forms of life in a more-than-human world.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Through an intensive and in-depth reading of theorists, thinkers, historians, and political scientists, this course will take students through the deeply interconnected story of American race relations and labor politics. We will examine primary source material, such as the essays of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, the speeches of A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the memoirs of Charles Denby and Angelo Herndon, and the pamphlets of Claudia Jones; we will read historical accounts which situate these figures in their context; and we will engage critically with the fundamental topic: in the United States, what is the relationship between race and class; racism and exploitation; civil rights and labor activism? Toward the end of the course, we will examine recent scholarship that has returned to these themes to show how deeply imbricated America—its people, its institutions, its political economy—remains to this history.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course is an introduction to the Congressional role in foreign policy. The Constitution grants the President the authority to conduct foreign policy. Yet it also gives Congress a substantial role in the shaping of foreign policy. The roles are not always clear, creating an inherent tension between these two branches of government and efforts on each side to increase their power. This class will address the “rules of the road” in conducting American foreign policy and how they change. The class will go beyond theory to include case studies that show the tension between Congress and the Administration – including the Iran Agreement, Climate Change, the use of sanctions and American policy towards Cuba. The course will include guest lecturers who work in Congress on the various aspects of foreign policy – including appropriations, intelligence, oversight and investigations. We will address the Congressional role in ratification of treaties and in declaring war. The class will consider the different ways that each branch of government approaches human rights and sanctions. The class will also address the domestic political aspects of foreign policy – including the role of advocacy groups and special interests and the political use of Congressional investigations. One class might be held in Washington D.C. at the U.S. Senate, so would require additional time for travel.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course examines the growth and development of the American state’s coercive institutions, namely, the military and police. We will explore the ways in which the American state makes war, fights crime, and polices the boundaries of citizenship. While we tend to approach these topics from the perspective of international relations, law, or political philosophy, this course focuses on American politics and institutions. How did the United States secure control over a transcontinental territory in the absence of a large standing army? Why did the federal government try to criminalize vices, and how were these statutes enforced? How did violence influence the development of the American state, and to what extent do these historical processes explain warfare and law enforcement today?

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

What is revolution and how is it done? Who is up to the task of revolution: the nation, working class, the colonized? How do radicals learn from the mistakes of past revolutions and evaluate the possibility of revolution in their own time? In this course, we will follow a series of debates in political theory in France from forerunners to the French Revolution (Rousseau, Sieyes) through to the aftermath of May 1968 revolts (Kristeva, Badiou, Foucault). The goal of the course is to map these theoretical debates alongside historical events in French history to which these theories are in some way responses and interventions. Besides the two major historical events bookending the course, we will also chart a course through 19th Century and 20th Century developments in the theories of popular sovereignty, violence, decolonization, and revolution (looking to theorists like Blanqui, Sorel, Fanon, Beauvoir, Sartre, and Althusser among others). Beyond the particular French examples discussed in the course, we will also focus on broader questions about the relationship between political theory and history, and we will discuss a variety of approaches to making sense of theory and history alongside one another. No previous familiarity with political theory or French history is expected for this course. Readings in French history will be assigned alongside works of political theory to help contextualize the material.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course investigates the roots of the American police, and its impact on people and place. Political theorist Markus Dubber calls police the “most expansive, most amorphous of governmental powers.” Policing is a key component of state power, but the current web of police institutions was never inevitable. In studying the deliberate creation of the police, we will pay particular attention to race-class hierarchies in the historical and contemporary carceral state. We will struggle through questions on safety, freedom, repression, and political power, such as: How did a country founded on principles of radical republicanism develop vast institutions of patrol and surveillance? Under what conditions do police powers expand or contract? And what contributes to safety in America? This course will first, look at the historic roots of American police. The next section of the course attempts to analyze how or when these institutions intervene in the lives of Americans. Next, we will study police from the perspective of policed populations and think about what impact these interactions have on American democracy and belonging. Through studying police and prisons, students will learn about an important face of the American state and how certain state functions are differentially distributed along lines of race and class.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

The United States is a capitalist economy and we live in a capitalist world. This a fact we take for granted and therefore spend little time examining. Capitalism’ proponents attribute our society’s unprecedented wealth and technological advances to this economic system. Some go so far as to claim that modern democracy and social progress are impossible without a capitalist economy. Critics point to growing social inequality and a slew of environmental ills as proof of capitalism’s unsustainability. Some suggest that capitalism is antithetical to true democracy and human flourishing. But what exactly is capitalism? How did it evolve in the USA and how does the form capitalism takes in the United States differ from the forms it takes elsewhere? And, crucially, how is capitalism shaped by – and how does it shape – contemporary politics? And how exactly is this all related to liberalism, conservatism, neoliberalism, libertarianism, socialism, and democratic socialism? This seminar is designed to help students critically approach these questions.Rather than taking simplistic pro-contra approach, this seminar will examine capitalism along four axes: as a political-economic system, a corollary set of structures and institutions, the force behind a specific form of state organization, and the determinant of how society and individuals act and see themselves. To explore these issues, we will focus on a number of contemporary political issues, with a primary geographic focus on the United States, including the following: the debates over the welfare state and socialized healthcare; unions, lobbies, and special interests; the connection between capitalism, culture, and ideology; the effects of a capitalist organization of labor of questions of race, gender, and citizenship; the commodification of the environment and other species; and the process of critique, resistance, and social change in a capitalist system. Throughout, we will discuss the theoretical and empirical arguments put forward by a historically and disciplinarily broad range of thinkers including Karl Marx, Simone Weil, John Locke, Adam Smith, Robert Nozick, Thomas Sewell, Nancy Fraser, David Graeber, Melinda Cooper, Andreas Malm, and Guy Debord, through to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elon Musk.

Writing Intensive

This course surveys museums, from their origins to their most contemporary forms, in the context of broader historical, intellectual, and cultural trends including the social movements of the 20th century. Anthropology, art, history, and science museums are considered. Crosslisted with Archaeology, History, History of Art, International Studies and Medicine, Science & Humanities.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

We explore the possible futures of cultural heritage and museums in times of accelerating climate change, pandemics, armed conflict and political and social turmoil by examining past and contemporary events.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Examines the history of African art in the Euro-American world, focusing on the ways that Western institutions have used African artworks to construct narratives about Africa and its billion residents.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Why do billions of people continue to live in poverty? What obstacles stand in the way of secure and dignified lives for all? Who is most likely to bring about change, what strategies should they follow, and what kinds of institutions should they put in place? This course will introduce the main theoretical perspectives, debates, and themes in the field of international development since the mid-20th century. It has three sections. The first section focuses on debates over the optimal conditions and strategies for generating economic growth and on the relationship between growth, human welfare, and inequality. The second section presents critical assessments of development interventions from various perspectives. The third section considers the role of social movements in shaping development and social change in the 21st century.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This survey course examines the foreign influence on China’s political changes between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The topics include Chinese Christians and anti-dynastic revolutions, Japanese imperialism and Chinese nationalism, Chinese overseas and federalist movements, as well as global connections of Chinese communist movements between 1921 and 1949.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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. Students will gain an in-depth understanding of how each theorist answered three major questions: 1) what is the origin, structure and historical dynamic of modern society?; 2) how do we gain an accurate knowledge of society?; 3) what are the conditions of possibility for freedom in modern society? In comparing, applying and critiquing their respective theories, students will advance their own theory of society.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

The course examines the new wave of social protest and popular uprisings in contemporary Africa through the interconnected themes of land, labor, and environmental movements.Attention will be placed on the early 21st century.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course introduces students to issues of global social change, with a particular focus on the challenges of international development and the contemporary globalization process. Specific themes include world income inequality and global poverty, the rise of supranational organizations (e.g. WTO and EU) and their relations with sovereign states, anti-globalization activism, the rise of China and India in the global economy, and the origins as well as consequences of the current global economic crisis and global pandemics, among others. Lectures will be aided by documentary films and other multi-media materials. Special Note: Fulfills Economics requirement for IS GSCD track students only. Formerly offered as AS 230.353. Students who took AS.230.353 cannot take AS.230.221.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course surveys the impacts of colonialism in East and Southeast Asia. Special attention will be paid to the social and economic development in British Singapore and Hong Kong as well as Japanese Korea and Taiwan. Topics include free-trade imperialism, colonial modernity, anticolonial movements, pan-Asianism, and post-war U.S. hegemony.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course examines the trajectory of economic development in China since the beginning of market reforms in the late 1970s, with a special focus on social inequality and forms of resistance that have emerged in response to the expansion of the market economy. The first part of the course focuses on understanding the academic debates around China’s economic miracle and introduces students to theories about the relationship between market expansion and social resistance. The second part focuses on key thematic topics including the rural/urban divide, rural protest, urban inequality and labor unrest, gender and sexuality in social movements, environmental protests, and the politics of ethnic relations.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Examining the exchange of culture, people, and commodities between the United States and Mexico since the 19th century, this course asks not just how US practices and policies have shaped Mexican society, but how, in turn, Mexico has shaped the United States. We will examine the social, political, and economic forces that have long pulled these two societies together – and pushed them apart.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

The course examines the modern transformation of social life from the prism of coffee and tea. The topics include colonial expansion and cash-crop production, pan-Asianism and Orientalism, the question of the public sphere, and food nationalism.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course will introduce students to a range of software programs that are critical for conducting social scientific research in the 21st century. Students will develop competency in the use of computer programs for statistical analysis, database management, the creation of maps and timelines, and the presentation of research reports. The course uses examples from ongoing social science faculty research projects at Johns Hopkins on global inequality and international development. Required for GSCD track students.Course previously titled "Research Tools and Technologies for the Social Sciences"

Area: Quantitative and Mathematical Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

How do we think about the power relations at work in the scholarship we read and in the important texts we consider essential to our educational experience? This course will critically investigate the role that concepts of race and racism have played in formulating dominant perceptions of who can be the producers of knowledge and what constitutes authoritative knowledge itself. We will consider how and why thinkers and scholarship produced outside of Europe and North America are too often ignored for their scholarly contributions and the dynamics that lead to this situation. We will also explore how and why new and important perspectives emerge from engaging and centering voices from beyond traditional canonical works. With a particular focus on the forms of knowledge arising from European Enlightenment approaches to concepts of thought reason and objective knowledge, this course will critically engage students with a wide range of thinkers such asGWF Hegel, W.E.B. Du Bois, Angela Davis, Ralph Trouillot, Sadiya Hartman, Walter Rodney, Derek Walcott, Sylvia Wynter and Frantz Fanon. This course will focus largely on thinkers engaging within the Black Atlantic and black diaspora traditions to question how we might consider voices and thought from beyond Eurocentric positions in our own scholarly practice.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

While developments in biomedicine and health care have led to the eradication, cure and management of many human health problems, disease, illness and health have also been the focus for aggressive social controls and population management. The technologies and practices of disease control and health management have been foundational to some of the most aggressive structures of oppression in recent history such as the Jewish Ghetto, the Concentration Camp, the South African Township and techniques of segregation. This course seeks to explore how epidemics and disease control are linked to larger questions of power, state craft and international dynamics. This course asks how have outbreaks of infectious disease shaped social and political action? How do societies respond to outbreaks and why? What do epidemic moments tell us about global structures of power and the dynamics of control? Drawing on historical cases including plague during the European Renaissance and before, the HIV/AIDS Pandemic and the West African Ebola Outbreak of 2013-2016, this course will introduce students to the history and practices of disease control as well as important theoretical perspectives by which to understand the sociological and historical effects of disease and the responses to them. Students will engage sociological concepts such as biopolitics, social construction of disease and illness and biosecurity and produce a final research paper examining the outcomes and responses to an epidemic event to show mastery of the topics covered in the course.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This class offers an advanced engagement of various topics in international development. The course begins with an historical examination of the actors and global events, as well as the intellectual debates, that birthed the field of international development as a discrete area of study and practice. We will then analyze the evolving theories that dominated the first five decades of the international development effort. The final part of the course will examine more recent perspectives that have attempted to fill the intellectual void left by the demise of the traditional development paradigm. Here we will cover topics that span the global North and South, including issues of race/caste/ethnicity, migration, gender, and right-wing nationalism. Some prior knowledge of international development is recommended

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course surveys sociological theories and research on immigration to the U.S. Theoretical approaches include theories of international migration, economic sociology, immigration, and assimilation. Research topics include the impact of U.S. immigration laws and policies on immigrant inflows and stocks, self-selection of immigrants, the impact of immigration on the native-born population and the U.S. labor market and economy, and the adaptation of the first and second generations.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course examines the complex, at times conflicting, relationship that has emerged between Indian seats of power from above and Indian expressions of society from below. Attention will be placed on the period between 1947 to the present.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course employs a comparative perspective to examine the gendered impact of international development experiences and policies. Students will discuss the historical evolution of how the concept of gender has been constructed, conceptualized, and integrated into international development theory and practice. The course will also examine how greater international development. In particular, we will examine structural theories of poverty reduction, individual theories of power and processes of stratification at the household and family level. Specific issue areas will include the globalization, class and work political participation and social movements. Cross-listed with International Studies (CP, IR). Fulfills Economics requirement for IS GSCD track students only.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course provides "hands on" research experience in the field of global social change and development. The course fulfills the "research practicum" requirement for Sociology majors and is required for the GSCD track.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

In this course, students will learn about analyzing revolutionary and counterrevolutionary movements, with a focus on their strategic dimensions. Contributions from the military, counterinsurgency, sociology of revolution, historical materialist, world-system, and critical realist literature will provide different visions of strategy and tactics. The cases of Guatemala and Chile in the early 1980s and 1970s, respectively, will provide historical and empirical roots to class discussions about these different approaches and the possibilities of synthesizing them.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Rural China is experiencing profound socioeconomic and political transformations during four decades of reform. When millions of rural migrants leave their hometown to work in factories, the countryside is simultaneously being remade by the expansion of cities and state policies that seek to revolutionize Chinese agriculture. These ongoing and uncertain dynamics reshape social relations, conflicts, and tensions among state, peasants, and capital in the rural social space. This course examines the historical origins, uncertain processes, and profound social consequences of these major changes that are taking place in post-reform rural China. The course is organized around 4 modules. In each of them, students will first read about key concepts and theoretical frameworks, such as socialist primitive accumulation, collective action, social reproduction, and peasant moral economy. They will then use these analytical tools to critically engage with the more empirically grounded research on China’s agrarian transformation. While the course primarily focuses on China, students will have opportunities to conduct research on other parts of the world, which will provide useful, comparative viewpoints.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

How do men and women make decisions about marriage and childbearing, negotiate work-family demands, and divide housework and childcare? Why are East Asian societies experiencing lowest-low fertility? What are the legacies of the one-child policy? How does homosexuality transcend patriarchal family? To answer these questions, this course will explore in depth the dynamics of family, gender, and sexuality in contemporary East Asia (mainly China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan).

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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? Special emphasis will be placed on (1) “the late-nineteenth century great depression”, (2) the Great Depression of the 1930s, and (3) the period of crisis and stagflation in the 1970s. We will be particularly concerned to understand 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? How have environmental and ecological challenges resurfaced in each crisis including today?

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course will examine the dynamics of transformative social change in Latin America and the Caribbean through analyses of resistance, rebellion, and revolution. Because revolutionary change is at once the most transformative and the most rare, this course will cover the exemplary cases of the Haitian, Mexican, and Cuban revolutions, but then also ask how theorists have understood the dynamics of both open rebellion and of everyday resistance in societies deeply structured by racial, gender, and class power, situated within an unequal world system. Attending to both local and global dynamics, this course will ask how Latin American dynamics have both conformed to and challenged universalist theories of social change.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Global migration is a hot topic in the news and in political campaigns today. It has reached an unprecedented size, and it has also fueled countless social protests around racial, ethnic, and class-based tensions. Indeed, the speed, size, and controversies around global migration are re-shaping our conventional understandings of the nation-state, citizenship, and welfare rights. But global migration is not new. Therefore contemporary migration raises important questions about what is and is not unique about the present moment. This course will begin my introducing students to the long history of global migration and capitalism. It will then examine the various aspects of contemporary migration--covering issues of gender, South-South migration, class and skill, sending and receiving countries' roles in controlling migration, migrants' protests, diaspora organizations, and the connections between immigration and emigration. Through in-depth reading and discussion, the course engages students in understanding and critiquing contentious perspectives on these issues. The course aims to provide students with a solid understanding of the theories, methodologies, research, and debates that shape contemporary discussions of international migration and development.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course will focus on the social dimensions of climate change. Drawing on global and multi-disciplinary scholarship, we will address such issues as: the history of fossil capitalism; the relationship between social inequality and “vulnerability” to climate change (including heat waves, drought, rising seas, and extreme weather); climate migration and the political economy of “adaptation”; the merits of various mitigation strategies, including the Green New Deal, conservation offsets, and geo-engineering; the roots of climate denialism; and climate justice movements. Students will write a final research paper on a sociological aspect of climate change.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Does capitalism promote democracy and stability, or repression, racial conflict, and social unrest? Following the 2008 financial crisis, countries around the world have experienced severe economic and political crises, giving rise to explosive movements that have challenged the viability of capitalism and democracy as durable systems. By considering these developments, this course examines the core political dimensions of capitalist societies. We will define and discuss key terms, like capitalism, racial capitalism, the capitalist state, democracy, social movements, and more. We will pay special attention to the ways in which the economic, political, and ideological structures of capitalist societies shape and are shaped by social movements and political parties. The course is global in perspective, drawing on developments in many countries, with a special focus on the United States.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course surveys the relationship between China and Chinese overseas 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.

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course investigates two familiar concepts in sociology: race and caste. For the majority of theoretical contributions on race and caste focus on North America or the developed world, this course aims at advancing an understanding of race and caste from non-western experiences. In modern history, many scholars have debated the similarities and differences between the two concepts and the course aims at introducing the students to these writings. The course focuses on a specific historical phase: capitalism. To build more explicit connections of both race and caste with class, the course will focus on developments since colonization in most of the world, which introduced capitalist relations as a hegemonic force. The students will engage with broader questions such as: how are caste and race different from and similar to each other? Is it possible to use one category to describe the other? If so, how? What are the essential elements of these two categories in their given social contexts? How does incorporating ‘class’ into analysis shape the defining elements of race and caste?

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Cryptocurrencies? NFTs? Meme stocks? What is happening in contemporary capitalism? To answer this question, our seminar will facilitate an in-depth engagement with the theories and histories of finance capitalism. We will focus on how the financial transformations of capitalism over the past century have been theorized and historicized towards answering the following questions: is finance capitalism an aberration, a phase, or the norm of capitalism? What are the underlying forces driving financialization? What is the relationship between finance capitalism, economic crises, rising indebtedness, and racial capitalism? And what can we say about where contemporary capitalism is headed? This seminar will take an interdisciplinary approach, reading prominent thinkers across political economy, history, sociology, geography, and political science. Our readings and discussions will explore the past, structure, and movement of contemporary capitalist society and help to orient us in this bewildering era of financial exuberance, taking stock of the present and its possible trajectories.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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. Students will learn to interpret public opinion patterns, which requires a brief presentation of basic concepts from survey sampling, including what to make of the polling industry’s most boring concept: margin of error.

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

Today, Islamic finance is a global industry comprising nearly $3 trillion in assets, with hubs from Kuala Lumpur to Dubai to London. But half a century ago, nothing called “Islamic finance” existed. So where did Islamic finance come from? Why is it growing so fast? And what does it mean for finance to be Islamic? We discuss the ban on usury in Islam and other religious and philosophical traditions, finance in early and medieval Islamic societies, petrodollars and the birth of Islamic banking in the 1970s, the rise of Islamic capital markets since 2000, contemporary shariah-compliant financial structures, and the constitution of piety through financial practice.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course discusses how geopolitics, technology as well as social differentiation (such as race, class and gender) shape the structure of economic actions. Special attention will be paid to patterns of state-business relationship, labor processes, migrant economy, globalization and international division of labor.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course will examine the role of housing, or the absence thereof, in shaping quality of life. It will explore the consequences of the places in which we live and how we are housed. Consideration will be given to overcrowding, affordability, accessibility, and past and existing housing policies and their influence on society. Special attention will be given to the problem of homelessness.

Prerequisite(s): Students may not have previously taken AS.230.223.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

After examining alternative explanations for why individuals obtain different amounts and types of educational training, the course focuses on how an individual’s family background and race affect his or her trajectory through the educational system. The course covers the specific challenges that have confronted urban schooling in America since the 1960s, including the classic literature on the effects of school and community resources on student achievement as well as the development and later evaluation of school desegregation policies. The course also considers case studies of current policy debates in the US, such as housing segregation and school resegregation, voucher programs for school choice, and the motivation for and consequences of the establishment of state-mandated testing requirements. Throughout the course, emphasis is placed upon the alternative modes of inquiry and writing which opposing scholars, policymakers, and journalists use to address these contentious topics.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

We are generally told that you can't put a price on life or a price on our health but lives are quantified, valued and priced every day. In this class we will explore the ways in which life is valued in the modern world, its effects and the outcomes from it. We will also examine how forms of quantification and valuation have been employed to dehumanize and subjugate peoples, especially those racialized as different. Beginning with an exploration of human pricing during the trans-Atlantic Slave trade and continuing through to contemporary health care and health insurance practices, this course will examine how we value (monetarily) human existence in modernity. This course will introduce students to ideas emerging out of the Black Marxist Tradition, postcolonial thought, and critical feminist approaches to historical research. From the examination of insurance under slavery to the use of race corrections in medical algorithms, this class will confront students with the question- "how can we put a price on life?" and most importantly "Should we?".

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

What is the structure of society, how does it change, and how is it reproduced? What is the relation between social structures and our ideas about them? What are the conditions of possibility for human freedom? 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. This semester there will be a particular focus on the social theories of Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, Michel Foucault, Nancy Fraser and Stuart Hall. In addition to understanding and comparing theories, we will assess their usefulness for understanding our present conjuncture with a particular emphasis on right-wing extremism and the relationship between racism and capitalism.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Neoliberalism, a political project that seeks to subject all aspects of social life to free market force, has ascended to orthodoxy in developed and developing countries alike over the last four decades. This course is a reading seminar focused on some of the key classic and cutting-edge original texts that critically examine and debate the origins, socio-political impacts, and crisis of the neoliberal project. It will cover such topics as the genealogy of the neoliberal idea, neoliberal state, informalization of works, neoliberal cities, rise of the one percent, and global governance. Class will be a mix of lecture and seminar-style discussions. Requirements include reading memo, class presentation, and a term paper.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

In this course we will examine contemporary Chinese society, looking at economic development, rural transformation, urbanization and migration, labor relations, changes in class structure and family organization, health care, environmental problems, governance, and popular protest. The course is designed for both graduate and undergraduate students. Undergraduates must have already completed a course about China at Hopkins. Cross-listed with East Asian Studies.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This seminar examines inter-regional connections and diplomacy in maritime Asia (focusing on the region around the Straits of Malacca, South and East China Seas, and the Taiwan Straits). In addition to a survey of world-system theories on Asia, the reading materials cover the maritime silk road, Chinese tribute trade system, British free-trade imperialism, American open-door policy, Japanese pan-Asianism, Cold-war diplomacy, and the Beijing-led Belt-and-Road Initiatives. The goal is to explore the prospects and limitations of examining East and Southeast Asia beyond the inter-state framework.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This is an intensive reading seminar on working class formation from a comparative, historical and global perspective, including theoretical and empirical (case study) readings on changes over time in labor process, labor markets, and labor movements. We will build on a range of local case studies to establish spatial and temporal patterns, and discuss the connections between these global patterns and the dynamics of historical capitalism.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course will encourage encounters with a number of concepts from a critical gendered perspective, including: sameness/difference, identity politics, race/gender, loyalty, security, queer ethics, and queerness in media.

Writing Intensive

Women in Western Thought is an introduction to (the history of) Western thought from the margins of the canon. The class introduces you to some key philosophical question, focusing on some highlights of women’s thought in Western thought, most of which are commonly and unjustly neglected. The seminar will be organized around a number of paradigmatic cases, such as the mind/body question in Early Modern Europe, the declaration of the rights of (wo)men during the French revolution, the impact of slavery on philosophical thought, the MeToo debate and others. By doing so, the course will cover a range of issues, such as the nature of God, contract theory, slavery, standpoint epistemology, and queer feminist politics. Students will engage with questions about what a canon is, and who has a say in that. In this sense, Women in Western Thought introduces you to some crucial philosophical and political problems and makes you acquainted with some women in the field. The long term objective of a class on women in Western thought must be to empower, to inspire independence, and to resist the sanctioned ignorance often times masked as universal knowledge and universal history. People of all genders tend to suffer from misinformation regarding the role of women and the gender of thought more generally. By introducing you to women who took it upon themselves to resist the obstacles of their time, I am hoping to provide role models for your individual intellectual and political development. By introducing you to the historical conditions of the exclusion and oppression of women (including trans and queer women as well as black women and women of color), I hope to enable you to generate the sensitivities that are required to navigate the particular social relations of the diverse world you currently inhabit. By introducing philosophical topics in this way, I hope to enable you to have a positive, diversifying influence on you future endeavours.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This course develops an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to introduce students to ecofeminism through a special focus on its inflections in non-western contexts. Through class discussions and sustained writing engagement, we will develop an understanding of the history of ecofeminism, including theoretical debates linking gender perspectives with political mobilization, as well as ecofeminism's enduring influence on new intellectual and political movements.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities