Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies (LACLxS)

The question of what it means to be human requires continual investigation. Anthropology offers conceptual tools and an ethical groundwork for understanding humanity in all its diversity. This course familiarizes students with anthropological concepts and methods. We will engage in critical analysis of a broad range of subjects including language, exchange, class, race, gender, kinship, sexuality, religion, and capitalism.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

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

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

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

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

Writing Intensive

The Environmental Justice Workshop is a space for engaged learning and collaborative environmental work, giving students a chance to join in the collective struggle to build equitable and sustainable urban futures in Baltimore. In the fall of 2025, the workshop will be taught by anthropologist Anand Pandian (Johns Hopkins) as a cross-institutional partnership with anthropologist Chloe Ahmann (Cornell University) and the South Baltimore Community Land Trust. Working together as a team of faculty and students at both universities, we will collaborate with environmental justice activists and Baltimore residents to research, write, and produce a four-part digital humanities curriculum about the discriminatory history of waste management in Baltimore and its impact on working-class and minority residents. Students enrolled in this course will gain experience with archival and ethnographic research methods, learn how to conduct time-sensitive research responsive to community needs, and produce media resources for a broader civic audience engaged in the fight for environmental justice. Many class sessions will take place in various community locations in south Baltimore, and meeting times include transportation to/from the Homewood campus.

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

In this course, we will follow the development of black poetry primarily as it has evolved in the United States. Beginning with the first published African American writers of the eighteenth century and ending with several important poets writing and performing today, we will consider the shape of the African American poetic tradition as commonly anthologized and as defined by our own theoretically-informed readings of the assigned literature. Attention will be given to both canonical and neglected literary movements and groups. Readings will include poetry and essays by Frances E.W. Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, Harryette Mullen, Tracie Morris, and others.

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

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

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Introduction to Critical Diaspora Studies will explore the transnational, relational, and comparative approach to racism, migration, and colonialism at the heart of this major. It will introduce students to cutting-edge literature in the major’s four tracks: Migration and Borders; Global Indigeneities; Empires, Wars, and Carceralities; and Solidarities, Social Movements, and Citizenship. Topics covered will include diasporic and indigenous cultures and politics from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as the United States. Students should expect to learn the value of interdisciplinary and transnational approaches to questions of social belonging, activism, justice, and politics. This course will also be useful to students in all humanities and social science majors who are interested in questions of racism, migration, and colonialism. This course may entail travel over fall break.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Worldwide, there has been rapidly growing interest in research, education, and discourse around the Food-Energy-Water-Nexus (FEW-Nexus). This course will provide students with a framework to describe, analyze, and assist in addressing these complex interrelationships associated with coupled human-natural systems at local, regional, and global scales. The course integrates physical and biological sciences, social and behavioral sciences, humanities, and engineering while covering broad frameworks such as ecosystem-based approaches, critical historical and ethnographic analysis, decision science, and relevant research methods. The course culminates in a funded field work experience at several sites in Brazil. Admission by permission of instructors.

Distribution Area: Natural Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course explores the transnational convergence of Asians/Asian Americans and Latinxs/ Latinx Americans from a history of multiple imperialisms to the neoliberal, globalized present. We will situate the racialization of Asian and Latinx peoples within a larger, global framework and think critically about areas of solidarity and tension between these two multi-ethnic groups through readings in literature, history, and sociology.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.060.148 are not able to take AS.060.351.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Writing Intensive

This course looks at the traditions of anticolonial thought from the early twentieth century to the present day. Comparing movements for national liberation, realignment, and literary self-determination from across the Americas and around the world, we consider the shifting claims of empires and the colonial subjects, anticolonial frameworks, and decolonial movements that sought to contest these formations. We’ll focus largely on the Americas and the Caribbean, where the British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and American empires all competed, but we’ll also consider these movements in their worldwide adventure, a “global” perspective that accounts for how processes of decolonization were understood in Ireland, India, China, and elsewhere. Our focus will often be on manifestoes and essays in which anticolonial writers outlined their literary and political programs, but we’ll also look at a few poems, stories, and films. From Lenin and DuBois’s calls to think about the relationship between racial capitalism and imperialism to Getino and Solanas’s revolutionary cinema protesting American neocolonialism, how have the claims of anticolonial political thought found their expression?

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Writing Intensive

This course asks how early 20th-century writers and artists in the US, Latin America, and the Caribbean have pictured and imagined the histories of revolution in the Atlantic world. How did the Haitian and Mexican revolutions spur the art of the Harlem Renaissance? How did the writers and artists of the Black diaspora arrive at new histories of self-emancipation? Writers and artists to be considered include Elizabeth Catlett, Alejo Carpentier, Mariano Azuela,The course will be taught in the study room at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and students will participate in the research for and production of an upcoming museum exhibition at the museum.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

Writing Intensive

How do we measure inequalities in income and wealth? What do the historical and comparative trends look like and how do economists explain them? Is economic inequality a significant problem in the United States today? If not, why not? If so, why? And what tools do we have in the policy arsenal to deal with it? In sharing our different perspectives we will have to wrestle with concepts you may be curious about, such as “supply-side economics” “technological change” “free trade” “the top 1%” and “the k-shaped economy,” concepts that will hopefully prove useful in your understanding of other current economic issues. As an added twist, we will pair short vignettes from literature with economics readings to provide a historical and philosophical perspective, and to motivate our weekly discussions. You will have the opportunity to exchange ideas with fellow classmates in presenting group research and leading class discussions. Your final, individual presentation will explore some aspect of economic inequality, broadly defined, inspired by your own selection from literature, poetry, art, music, or film.

What does it mean to live and to write in more than one language? This is a particularly charged question in today’s globalized world. In this course, we will explore texts and films produced by multilingual writers and directors, who reflect on the experiences of the multilingual subject; their concerns range from the turmoil of living between identities and cultures, to the playful experience of daily life and existence opened up through thinking and working in multiple languages. Main questions will include: In what ways do languages influence how writers write? How does the presence of multiple languages in a text structure a reading experience and for whom? How do texts by multilingual writers destabilize conceptions of national literature? While some texts we will read were originally composed in English, the majority were written by multilingual writers in other languages. Finally, therefore, we will address what it means to read translated into English texts that were, in some sense, already produced “in translation.”

Long overshadowed by the American and French Revolutions, the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) is now widely recognized as one of the most important events in modern history. The most radical of the Atlantic Revolutions, it began with a massive uprising of the enslaved against the institution of slavery and culminated in the independence of the nation of Haiti. This First-Year Seminar will examine the origins, course, and legacy of the Revolution, addressing such issues as colonialism, racism, slavery, emancipation, human rights, and national sovereignty – issues that continue to shape the contemporary world.

Exile -- metaphysical, political, inner -- persists throughout human history as a concept, an experience, and its artistic representation. In Abrahamic traditions, Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden, barred from returning by angels with fiery swords. Socrates choses death over exile. Odysseus returns to Ithaca but neither he nor Ithaca are the same. The concept of exile relies on the existence of differentiated space and of borders. It also presupposes affective attachment: to be exiled is to be removed from – or, sometimes, to leave -- the space of belonging. How does exile differ from other forms of displacement? What are literary and artistic reactions to exile? Can one be an exile in one's own country/city? We will look for answers from thinkers, writers, and artists, such as Ovid, Dante, Baudelaire, Hannah Arendt, Nahid Rachlin, and André Aciman. Paradoxically, for many of them the only true homecoming is through writing about exile. Outings may include: The Frederick Douglass-Isaac Myers Maritime Museum in Fells Point, Bakst Theater at the Evergreen Museum, Library of Congress, National Gallery, and, possibly, the Tenement Museum in NYC.

The modern intensive care unit represents an incredible intersection of altruism and commerce, tradition and technologic innovation, humanism and challenges to agency and autonomy. Simple models of individual action scale poorly to explain aggregate behavior of complex institutions. Cynical models of profit-maximization cannot explain the daily willingness to go above and beyond. Deaths, an inevitable part of human existence, are increasingly contained within organizations designed to prolong life at all costs. We propose to introduce first year students simultaneously to: (1) the health, physiology, and technology of massively invasive contemporary “heroic” and life-sustaining therapies; (2) organizational social science to study the multi-billion dollar yet non-profit health sector and how it shapes bedside delivery of care to critically unstable patients (and how that shaping is resisted); (3) scholarship that provides tools for thinking deeply about professional action in the midst of competing values. Using a blend of intensive discussion, small group in-class projects, and introductory teaching, culminating in a brief design of a novel research project, it will prepare students to develop ways to improve our most intensive care of our most vulnerable patients and their families.

The history of Africans and people of African descent in what becomes the continental United States. We will learn about the everyday experiences of Africans and people of African descent and the way this struggle for (and meaning of) freedom made make and shake the Americas. You will learn historical facts and how to distinguish change over time and place. You will learn to construct historical narratives using primary and secondary sources, about systems of oppression (like slavery) and how those systems operate--and how ordinary people and communities resisted and took that system down. Opportunities for independent research will be available for advanced students looking for professional development and research experience.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

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

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

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

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Documenting & Digitizing Black Louisiana: Sources, Tools and Contexts is an experiential, team-based, community-engaged undergraduate seminar that combines secondary literature on the history of colonial Louisiana as well as the digital humanities, with intensive deep readings of a selection of translated documents. Seminar sessions will include gatherings with research teams of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, with a special emphasis workshops, with and hosted by scholars at JHU and beyond (including team members at Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. Students with interests in Black history, in multimedia content creation, in digital infrastructure, in manuscript documents, in translation and languages, in public history, social justice and community engagement will find much to learn in this course.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1), Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The legacies of colonialism in Latin America have been bitterly contested in recent film and other digital media. From highlighting the afterlives of enslavement to asserting Indigenous rights, creators and audiences have turned to screens to address the open wounds of the region’s colonial past. By analyzing hits like También la lluvia and the Mexican cult favorite, 499, this course uses film analysis, cultural memory, and primary sources to understand how these media make arguments about Latin America's colonial past and its significance in the present. The course similarly engages with the field of historical game studies through the analysis of videogames and boardgames that create simulations of early modern societies in the Americas. In this course, students will develop the ability to identify how digital media production and reception shape the memory of colonialism in the American hemisphere. In so doing, they will also acquire a deeper knowledge of Latin American colonial histories and their influence on contemporary culture. Necessarily, the course heavily emphasizes Indigenous perspectives and so simultaneously serves as an introduction to Indigenous Studies in Latin America.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

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

This course explores development as an ideology and a practice. From colonialism to the Cold War to contemporary NGOs, we will interrogate the history of our attempts to improve the world. This iteration of the course will have a particular focus on the intersections between development and the environment. Graduate students welcome.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

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

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

AS Foundational Abilities: Projects and Methods (FA6)

Writing Intensive

This iteration of the Black World Seminar attends to the making and meaning of blackness through the concept of property and its application between the 16th and 21st centuries. We’ll consider the push and pull factors that snatched people out of Africa and drew people of African descent to travel, build lives and determine the meaning and making of land, territory and real estate. We’ll explore, too, the historical forces which created blackness as a marker on the body, as a political and cultural identity, and as a determinant of property’s value.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Black World Seminar considers the making and meaning of blackness between the 14th and 20th centuries and Africans and people of African descent’s impact on the making of the modern world, from the slave trade to the present. We explore, too, the historical forces which created blackness as a marker on the body and as a political and cultural identity.

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course surveys the art and architecture of Mesoamerica, from the ancestral Puebloans in what is today the Southwestern United States, through the homelands of the Mexica, Maya, and Zapotec in Central America, to the Taíno and Chiriquí in the Circum-Caribbean. After first discussing the concept of “Mesoamerica,” we will then explore the material and spatial productions of these Indigenous groups. Each week we will focus on a different urban setting, examining the works communities made and used there, which included sculpture, ceramics, murals, manuscripts, textiles, metalwork, and earthen architecture. Course themes will include—but are not limited to—the portrayal of humans, animals, and sacred figures; urban design, construction, and monumentality; as well as how materials and spaces were used for religious and political purposes.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

This course considers how people envision, construct, and negotiate place in cultures throughout the Ancient Americas. From the dark galleries of the Old Temple at Chavín de Huantar to the towering twin Templo Mayor in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, we will consider how Indigenous makers created powerful places, and how those places would have been experienced and understood by ancient communities. Considering art and architecture in a variety of media, we will study places where gods live; places where important things happened; places that ordered the world; and places where humans access and negotiate power.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

An introduction to the Indigenous architectural sites and engineered spaces of the Western Hemisphere prior to European contact. At the core of our inquiry will be critiquing the naming of those spaces, and how these naming conventions have created modern understandings of those sites. In the modern United States, are Indigenous architectures considered American “antiquity?” In Latin America, are those spaces considered “Indigenous?” As many of these architectural sites were constructed by Indigenous communities who did not practice writing—and thus did not “write down” their titles—where (and from whom) did these sites get their names? Taking a hemispheric approach, class lectures will move from South to North America, covering Machu Picchu (Perú), Ciudad Perdida (Colombia), Teotihuacan (Mexico), the Hopewell Mound Group (United States), and Chaco Canyon (United States) among other Indigenous architectures, sites, and environments.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

This course examines curative medicine in the Americas through its visual culture and oral histories. Philosophies about the body, health, and causes of illness are considered, as are representations of practitioners and their pharmacology. Case studies are drawn from cross the Americas (Aztec, Moche, Aymara, Paracas, American SW). Collections study in museums, Special Collections.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

The visual arts of Andean South America and their respective cultural contexts form the basis of our study. Collections study in local and regional museums.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

Visual arts are examined and discussed in their respective social and historical contexts.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

This course will grapple with modern art as it emerges in critically important locations around the world over the course of the twentieth century, with an emphasis on Asia, Africa, and South America. Anti-colonial movements, national formations, geopolitical alliances, institution-building, exhibition, fair, and biennial histories, art group manifestos, and the intertwined relations of race, ethnicity, Indigeneity, gender, class, and sexuality. Museum visits to view works of art in person will be incorporated into the course.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

Drawing on case studies from North America, Mesoamerica, and the Andes this course considers various approaches to entombment and funerary ritual. Our analyses bear upon beliefs about death and the afterlife, ancestor veneration, fear of the dead, and the body as a site of embodied values. Tombs provide a specific context for interpreting object offerings and their attendant meanings. Collections study in regional museums.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

This course addresses the technology, iconography and social significance of metals and draws on case studies from the Americas. Collections study in museums.

Distribution Area: Humanities

AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2), Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)

In the ancient Americas, power was told through objects and objects told of power. Portraits rendered a king’s visage in stone while mural programs depicted formidable deities. Towering pyramids were climbed by rulers and the open plazas below were structured spaces for spectacles. Hieroglyphic texts could picture authoritative narratives. Literacy was controlled by those who wielded power, yet pictographic literacy could place power in the hands of the viewer. But how did powerful images or places of power come into being? And how were these works of art received, and challenged, by those not in power? Extending geographically from North to South America, this course explores how power was imaged during the ancient period (beginning in the 2nd millennium BCE). The last third of the course will be devoted to exploring not only how powerful images were received by Spanish invaders but also how the Indigenous elite continued to garner power through art under the rulings of New Spain.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

What is a body, and how do bodies make meaning in art? This course investigates the concept of the body and its expression in Indigenous art from the Ancient Americas. As a site of human experience, a node of relational exchanges, and an expressive and constructive force, the body offers us a window into ways of being and understanding in the Americas. What can the way the body is created, represented, and manipulated tell us about attitudes toward power, religion, and the structure of the world? We will consider case studies from three cultural groups: the Moche, the Maya, and the Aztec. Our investigation is focused on the human body, and explores bodies that are living, dead, gendered, fragmented, multiple, and divine.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have already taken, or are already enrolled in AS.010.647, are not eligible to take AS.010.447.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Writing Intensive

In photographs and museum displays, the visual culture of the ancient Americas is made static. Pyramids stand vacant, sculptures appear frozen, and once portable objects remain stationary. But ancient American small-scale objects were designed to be set in motion for ritual and pilgrimage, free-standing stelae and altars were meant to be circumambulated and engaged with directly, and architecture (and spaces bound by architecture) influenced the shape of bodily movement. Notably absent from a twenty-first century vantage point are the ways that these spaces, and the spaces around art, were interacted with and how objects such as polychromed ceramics and carved pieces of precious stone were moved from place to place by the region’s ancient Indigenous residents. Exploring a rich visual and material record and considering the movement of both people and objects, this course asks how works of art influenced the ways ancient peoples physically interacted with and moved throughout the three-dimensional world. By considering a series of case studies from the ancient Americas, this course seeks to better understand the full aesthetic dimensions of this visual culture in the context of its rich social use. Additionally, we will also engage with issues related to contemporary travel, tourism, and migration that crosses through these places and materials. No prior knowledge of the field is required.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

Stelae, altars, colossal heads, thrones, figures, lintels. This course considers how artists created these stone monuments in Mesoamerica, the historical region that encompasses Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras, and El Salvador. Sculptors meticulously carved stone blocks to shape and then scribes expertly incised their surfaces with hieroglyphic text or iconography. These stone monuments were then transported and moved into position, their physical placements structuring social hierarchy and mediating interactions with the divine. In reviewing recent literature within the fields of art history and material studies, we will explore the full cycle of production for monumental works of art.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

The American continent and its islands are home to a diverse and delicate ecosystem, and for millennia, Indigenous communities have tended to and shaped these rich landscapes. This seminar journeys across the Americas to understand how Indigenous makers cultivated materials from these ecologies and transformed them into impressive arrays of art and architecture. Each week, students will explore a different medium—bark, shell, rubber, feathers, reed, stone, clay, etc.—that makers shaped into visual and spatial forms. Although this course focuses on the ancestral and early modern periods, it will also explore continued and shifting practices with these materials among contemporary artists. Readings will include material analyses, art historical and archaeological interpretations, as well as early colonial writings by Indigenous authors. There will also be opportunities for students to engage with materials in class. Course material will cover issues of technical skill and ecological knowledge; ephemerality and (im)permanence; animacy and relationality as it pertains to the relationships formed between makers and their works; and the role of Indigenous materialities in reconfiguring canons and categories that continue to scaffold the field of art history. For their final assignment, students will select a multimedia work from the Indigenous Americas and unpack its materiality in both presentation and essay format.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

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

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course surveys the literary and cultural productions of Black and Latinx science fictioneers and their generative confrontations with the sci-fi genre’s fraught colonial, gendered, and racialized technoscientific origins. By engaging works of the Afrofuturist and Latinxfuturist imagination (ex. film, short stories, novels, and visual art) alongside science fiction criticism, and readings spanning the subfields of feminist, queer, and postcolonial science and technology studies, we’ll consider how Black and Latinx science fictioneers, past and present, appropriate the idioms of science and technology to upend essentialist accounts of gender, race, and sexuality, and fashion radical remappings of “gendered,” “raced,” and “sexed” bodies. Throughout the course of the semester, we'll also be interrogating how (and to what end) Black and Latinx sci-fi writers and creators such as Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Janelle Monáe, Firelei Báez, E.G. Condé , and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, among others, complicate, reconceptualize, and expand the contours of the “science” in science fiction. In so doing, we will assess the implications (be these social, political, epistemological, etc.) of positioning Black and Latinx peoples, who have more often than not been made the objects of science (and scientific racism), as key interlocutors, producers, and critical surveyors of technoscientific knowledge.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

In this course, we will explore the intersections of American literature, broadly conceived, and eugenics. Defined as the “[pseudo]science of racial improvement,” eugenics gained global traction amongst scientists, physicians, politicians (both liberal and conservative), intellectuals, writers, and the general public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Engaging genres such as horror, sci-fi, utopian and dystopian fiction, and textual mediums such as novels, poetry, television, and film from the US, Mexico, and Canada, we will thus consider how social and cultural ideas shape scientific practice and how scientific ideas inform literary and cultural imaginaries. At the same time, we will be paying special attention to how these literary and cultural texts affirm, critique, revise, or conjure futures beyond the horrors of eugenics and its destructive politics of exclusion.Considering, then, the many genealogies of eugenics, we will supplement our primary readings with excerpts of texts that shaped the makings of eugenics, legitimated it as an interdisciplinary scientific field, and that later served as springboards for the implementation of eugenic policy. Further, we will engage relevant scholarship in the fields of anthropology, history of science and medicine, sociology, science and technology studies, and the medical humanities. Through these and other readings, we will critically survey the lingering legacies of eugenic thought and how they inform contemporary questions of classification, “fit” and “unfit” bodies, death and dying, illness and health, and social identity (ex. class, disability, gender, race, and sexuality).

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Writing Intensive

No previous knowledge of Portuguese is required. This one-year sequence is a Portuguese introductory course for non-romance language speakers. The course introduces students to the basic skills in reading, writing, and speaking the language. Emphasis is placed on oral communication with extensive training in written and listening skills. Class participation is encouraged from the very beginning. Upon the successful completion of this course with a grade of C or higher, students may enroll in 210.172 Portuguese Elements II. May not be taken on a Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory basis. No Prereq. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.

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

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

NO PREVIOUS KNOWLEDGE OF PORTUGUESE IS REQUIRED. This fast-paced one-semester course covers all content for Portuguese Elementary. This course is designed as an accelerated introductory course for speakers with a sound knowledge of Spanish OR other romance languages (e.g. French and Italian). The course will cover introductory aspects of Portuguese grammar and present relevant points of the cultures of the Portuguese speaking countries. Upon the successful completion of this course with a grade of C or higher, students may enroll in 210.271 Portuguese Intermediate. May not be taken on a Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory basis. No Prereq. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Intermediate Portuguese I is designed for students who have attained an advanced elementary level in the language. The course offers training in the skills of the language with emphasis on expanding grammatical knowledge and vocabulary, while developing ease and fluency in the language through the use of a multifaceted approach. Course materials immerse students in the contemporary cultures of Portuguese-speaking world. Upon the successful completion of Intermediate Portuguese I, students may enroll in the next level, Intermediate Portuguese II – AS.210.272. May not be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.172 OR AS.210.173, or placement exam.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Intermediate Portuguese II is designed for students who have attained a mid-intermediate level in the language or completed Intermediate Portuguese I AS.210.271. The course offers training in the skills of the language with emphasis on advancing grammatical knowledge, expanding vocabulary, and developing fluency in the language through the use of a multifaceted approach. Course materials immerse students in the cultures of Brazil, Portugal, and Portuguese-speaking Africa, and reflect the mix of cultures at work in the contemporary Lusophone world. Successful completion of Intermediate Portuguese II will prepare students for the next level Advanced Portuguese I – AS.210.371. May not be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.277 or equivalent score on placement test or instructor approval.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Improve your Portuguese conversational and speaking skills through colorful Brazilian media. This course is designed for highly motivated undergraduate and graduate students who want to SPEAK Portuguese. Conversation sessions provide intensive work on communication skills through discussion on issues raised in films, news media & music. Grammar will be reviewed as needed outside of class with tutors or TA, freeing class time for more communicative activities. May not be taken on a Satisfactory / Unsatisfactory basis. Prereq: one semester of Portuguese, two semesters of Spanish or Placement test.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.275 OR AS.210.277 OR AS.210.278 OR AS.210.391 OR AS.210.392

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Medical Spanish is a comprehensive examination of vocabulary and grammar for students who either work or intend to work in medicine and health-related fields in Spanish-speaking environments. The student will be able to participate in conversations on topics such as contrasting health systems, body structures, disorders and conditions, consulting your doctor, physical and mental health, first-aid, hospitalization and surgery on completion of this course. In completing the course’s final project students will apply, synthesize, and reflect on what has been learned in the class by creating a professional dossier individualized to their professional interests. There is no final exam. Not open to native speakers of Spanish. No new enrollments permitted after the third class session.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.311 OR AS.210.312 or appropriate Spanish placement exam score.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Spanish for international business is an overview of business topics in an international Spanish-speaking context with an emphasis on deep review of grammar and vocabulary acquisition. On completion of this course the student will have developed the ability to read and critically discuss business and government relations in Latin America and will have examine entrepreneurship, finance, marketing, business ethics, human resources and commerce in the Spanish speaking world. In completing the course’s final project students will apply, synthesize, and reflect on what has been covered in the class by creating a professional dossier individualized to their own professional interests. Concepts learned in this course will be directly applicable to careers linked to international relations and will apply to various careers in business. There is no final exam. May not be taken satisfactory/unsatisfactory. Not open to native speakers of Spanish. No new enrollments permitted after the third class session. Language Program Director: Loreto Sanchez-Serrano

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.311 or or appropriate Spanish placement exam score.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Conversational Spanish surveys high-interest themes, discusses short films by contemporary Hispanic filmmakers and offers a thorough review of grammar. The student will be able to participate in conversations on topics such as personality traits, social media, political power, art and lifestyles on completion of this course. Conversational skills mastered during the course apply to all careers interconnected by Spanish. There is no final exam. Not open to native speakers of Spanish. No new enrollments permitted after the third class session.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.311 or appropriate Spanish placement exam score.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

This third-year course is a hands-on and process-oriented introduction to discussion and compositional analysis. On completion of this course, students will have improved their Spanish writing skills in various types of compositions they might be expected to write in academic settings and in real-life formats such as film reviews, letters to the editor, cover letters, etc. The course also focuses on refinement of grammar and vocabulary use. Not open to native speakers of Spanish. .

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.312 or appropriate Spanish placement exam score.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Writing Intensive

Spanish for engineering is a comprehensive examination of vocabulary and grammar for students who either work or intend to work in the engineering field to develop their communicative strategies in the field of engineering. On completion of this course, students will be able to participate in conversations on topics such as applications of biomedical engineering in the diagnosis and treatment of different medical conditions, efficient use of energy and materials, design and construction of public works, development of electrical systems and development of solutions to environmental problems. In completing the course’s final project students will apply, synthesize, and reflect on what has been learned in the class by creating a professional dossier individualized to their professional interests.There is no final exam. May not be taken satisfactory/unsatisfactory. Not open to native speakers of Spanish. No new enrollments permitted after the third-class session.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

Designed to sharpen students’ abilities in contemporary spoken and written Portuguese. This third-year course fosters the development of complex language skills that enhance fluency, accuracy and general proficiency in Portuguese and its appropriate use in professional and informal contexts. Students will briefly review previous grammar structures and concentrate on new complex grammar concepts. Using a variety of cultural items such as current news, short stories, plays, films, videos, newspaper articles, and popular music, students discuss diverse topics followed by intense writing and oral discussion with the aim of developing critical thinking and solid communication skills.Successful completion of Advanced Portuguese I will prepare students for the next level, Advanced Portuguese II, AS.210.372. May not be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.278 OR AS.210.272 or equivalent score on placement test or instructor approval.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Writing Intensive

Advanced Portuguese II offers a systematic review of the Portuguese language focused on the development of students’ communicative skills and their knowledge of the Lusophone culture. This course fosters the development of complex language skills that enhance fluency, accuracy and general proficiency in Portuguese and its appropriate use in professional and informal contexts. Students will concentrate on complex grammar concepts and the use of appropriate written and oral registers. Using a variety of cultural items such as current news, short stories, plays, films, videos, newspaper articles, and popular music, students discuss diverse topics followed by intense writing and oral discussion with the aim of developing critical thinking and solid communication skills. May not be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prereq: AS.210.371 or placement test.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.391 OR AS.210.371 or equivalent score on placement test or instructor approval.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Writing Intensive

Contacts and Contrasts in Spanish for the Professions harnesses a comparative approach to reviewing grammar and learning Spanish by offering translation practice from English to Spanish and thrusting synthesis of prior courses into coherent professional tools. Techniques may include comparing texts of medicine, public health, literature, technology, politics, and journalism between Spanish and English. Students will identify and differentiate terminology specific to these various fields and will focus on practicing correct uses of the grammatical structures relevant to English and Spanish in translation and cultural contact. In the course’s term projects, students will apply, synthesize, and reflect on their knowledge of Spanish by completing a translation exercise individualized to their professional interests. Strategies of communication mastered in this course will help students of Spanish throughout their careers.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.313 OR AS.210.314 OR AS.210.315 OR AS.210.318 OR AS.210.319

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

This course is a survey of U.S. Latinx literature that introduces students to the major trends in the tradition. While Latinx literature draws on literary traditions that span more than 400 years, our course will focus on more contemporary forms of the tradition, its “canon,” and how authors are currently “queering” this canon. Emphasizing the historical and aesthetic networks established in the Latinx literary canon that continue into the present while exploring the relationship between genre and socio-historical issues, we will read from a diverse tradition and range of genres that reflect the contested definition of “Latinx” and its shifting demographics in the U.S. We will also investigate how U.S. Latinx literature speaks to and expands “American” literary traditions, and how unique ethnic identities such as Mexican American, Nuyorican, Cuban American, and Dominican American offer different yet interconnecting representations of what it means to be Latinx in the U.S. This class ultimately underscores the heterogeneity of Latinx literature and asks how particular generic conventions stage the constructions of race, gender, sexuality, and class to establish a historically grounded understanding of the diverse literary voices and aesthetics that comprise U.S. Latinx literature.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

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

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Course is taught in ENGLISH. Did you know that one of the first Latin American actresses to conquer Hollywood was Brazilian? Did you know that cinema has existed in Brazil since 1895, just six months after the first screening in Paris? This course is an introduction to both the academic study of cinema as a communicative art and to Brazilian film. The films selected focus on the late 1950s to the present and highlight import episodes and challenges in the advancement of Brazilian society as well as its cinematic production. Film aesthetics are analyzed through a number of critical perspectives, including class, race, gender as well as ethnicity, nationalism or national identity, colonialism, social changes, and the politics of representation. In this sense, the films, and documentaries that we will be watching and studying encompass the period from the rise of New Cinema (Cinema Novo) up to films exploring the most recent trends, including movies launched up to 2022. Students wishing to do the course work in English for 3 credits should register for section 01. Those wishing to earn 4 credits by doing the course work in Portuguese should register for section 02. No Prereq.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

This class will explore the intersections of environmental and social justice issues through an analysis of literary fiction, documentaries and films, art, media, and archival materials. We will study how environmental issues are deeply connected with issues of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and the legacies of colonialism. We will pay close attention to the tensions encountered by notions such as environmentalism of the poor and the disparities that arise from a comparative and historical perspective Global South vis-à-vis Global North, and within the North, among the most vulnerable communities. We will consider the generative potential of storytelling and the arts for imagining an alternative socioeconomic and culture paradigm predicated on environmental sustainability and economic and social equity. This class is profoundly interdisciplinary, bringing together knowledge from all parts of students’ life. By the end of this course, students will see many connections between literary and cultural studies, environmental ethics, social justice, and civic engagement.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

A course that examines how women's bodies are depicted in horror literature and film, asking: how are issues of race, class, national identity, and belonging illuminated through the genre and its ongoing fascination with gender and sexuality? Why do we return to women's bodies to illuminate our fears? Why do we represent women's bodies through the horror genre? Focusing on speculative fiction and film, we will investigate how women's bodies speak to issues of power and spectatorship through affects such as disgust, terror, titillation, and pleasure.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

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

Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

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

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

In this seminar we will explore psychoanalytic theory as a method for interpreting art, literature, media, and political discourse. Our approach will be structured around an interlinking set of elements: historical stages in the development of Lacan’s theory; dimensions of experience as defined by the theory, specifically the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real; and moments of analytic interpretation, namely, the identification of the symptom, the staging of a fundamental fantasy in transference, and traversing the fantasy through subjective destitution. Readings will include texts from Lacan's seminars and writings as well as commentaries by the Slovenian philosophers Slavoj Žižek and Alenka Zupancic, the Haitian analyst Willy Apollon, the Argentine analyst Juan-David Nasio, and others. The seminar is being offered across several programs and will be taught in English, although students who can are encouraged to do readings in the original language. Attendance and participation are mandatory, but a term paper is not required.

Distribution 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 OR AS.215.390.;AS.210.311

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

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

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

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

The main objective of this course is to examine and discuss specific authors and topics in literature in Spanish from the Middle Ages to the 20th century. The course is designed to cover a selection of Hispanic texts from Spain and Latin America. Literary genres to be studied will include narratives, poetry, and drama. The bulk of each class session will be dedicated to the discussion of the assigned readings. This course is taught in Spanish. This course is required for the major in Spanish. Students who have completed AS.215.231 cannot take AS.215.211.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Taught in English. This course aims to spotlight an often-overlooked corpus of texts to study the tradition of the Gothic mode in Latin America. A literary mode created in Europe and usually thought of as exclusive to the anglophone, francophone, and German traditions, the Gothic is, however, consistently present in Latin American stories, novels, and films. During the late XIX century, the texts of Edgar Allan Poe found fertile ground in the minds of modernista writers who began transforming the superficial elements of the Gothic mode to fit a new reality. Since then, the Gothic has resisted contention and continues to rear its head in texts penned by the likes of Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Fuentes. This course seeks to briefly describe the path of the Gothic mode from its arrival in Latin America to some of its newest iterations and transformations.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

This course explores Latin America’s sonic and auditory cultures, investigating how sound plays a central role in cultural expression and identity formation. Students will examine how diverse communities across the Global South engage with and interpret sound through various sonic objects—from artistic creations to industrial sounds and natural phenomena—and research the listening practices unique to Latin American communities. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from sound studies, media studies, postcolonial studies, and critical race theory, the course will explore how sound mediates power, social relations, and the boundaries between the human and the non-human. Emphasizing a Global South perspective, this course invites students to critically examine sound’s role in shaping Latin American communities’ lived experiences, offering a deeper understanding of how sonic practices define the region’s culture.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.311 or Spanish Placement Exam

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Although the modern discipline of psychology was not formalized until the late 1800s, the mind and human behavior had been subjects of intense curiosity for centuries. In early modern Europe, painters, physicians, philosophers, and writers of fiction explored the psychological dimensions of experience from manifold perspectives. The Renaissance brought a renewed interest in physiognomy and humoral theory, as well as the growth of anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, and practices of dissection and observation. Meanwhile, the literary and visual arts were also experimenting with new forms of understanding and representing interiority, the emotions, and mental faculties and illnesses. This undergraduate seminar will study these scientific and cultural movements before the consolidation of modern psychology, seeking to understand them within their sixteenth- and seventeenth-century milieus while establishing links with interdisciplinary concerns of today. Class will be conducted in Spanish. Taught in Spanish. (If AS.210.311 was not taken, student may submit an SPE score: https://krieger.jhu.edu/modern-languages-literatures/spanish-and-portuguese/undergraduate/get-started/)

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Migrant and diasporic communities transformed medieval and early modern Spanish society. Focusing on Jews and conversos, Muslims and moriscos, and enslaved and free Afro-Europeans, this course trains a critical eye on early racialized systems that policed various boundaries of difference. Through legal documents, literature, and visual culture, students will grapple with the complex intersections of religious persecution, economic opportunity, and imperial expansion. By analyzing how premodern diasporic communities navigated social hierarchies, we will attempt to understand how migration and displacement shaped enduring racial and national identities, as well as how an array of cultural products both reinforced and challenged official ideologies. Class will be conducted in Spanish.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.311 OR SPE Score

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha is widely considered to be the first modern novel of the Western tradition. It has influenced the likes of Nabokov, Sterne, Melville, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Borges, Dickens, and Faulkner (who reread it every year), among others. In a recent literary poll of the “100 Best Books of All Time,” in which the aforementioned authors remained unranked and “all on an equal footing,” some of the greatest living writers (Salman Rushdie, Assia Djebar, Herta Müller, Orhan Pamuk, Doris Lessing, Milan Kundera, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Christa Wolf…) made an exception for Don Quijote, calling it the “best literary work ever written.” To what is such ubiquitous and unparalleled praise due? The purpose of this course will be to read Don Quijote in its entirety and to gain a critical understanding of the major cultural, historical, and political issues at play in the novel. We will seek, on the one hand, to draw out the general or ‘universal’ features that have established its place in the international literary canon while, on the other, to understand these features within the unique context of early modern Spain. By exploring such themes as parody, humor, madness, metafiction, psychoanalysis, chivalric literature, translation, and Moorish culture, the class will establish connections with other disciplines and literary traditions as well. Taught in Spanish.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.311 AND AS.210.312

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

Johns Hopkins holds one of the largest collections of ephemeral Spanish drama outside of Spain. Despite their modest appearance, JHU's comedias sueltas are unique witnesses to a prolific and rich dramatic culture in early modern Europe. In addition to works by the masters of Spain's Golden Age such as Lope de Vega, Pedro Calderón de la Barca, and Tirso de Molina, this collection comprises works by lesser-known figures from the long eighteenth century, including numerous anonymous works and even several that are unattested in the literary record. In this class, we will read and discuss representative works of these types, paying close attention to the context of the production and use of the copies in Special Collections at JHU. The final project will culminate in either a written translation or a performance of one of the comedias sueltas in the JHU collection. Taught in Spanish.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.311 or Spanish Placement Exam

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

What does a novelist’s op-ed about economics have to do with her literary writing? In what ways does a fiction writer’s essays on the environment inform how we read her novels? What happens when we find the political opinions of a writer objectionable? This undergraduate seminar will consider what the Spanish writer Francisco Ayala termed “novelist intellectuals,” that is, literary writers who actively participate in a society’s public sphere. Considering writers from Madrid to New York, from London to Buenos Aires, we will ask how one should hold a novelist’s fictional and non-fictional writings in the balance and explore ways of reading that allow us to consider the public intellectual side and the aesthetic side of a novelist together.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

A survey and exploration of important works and themes in Latin American Literature of the modern period.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

Manifestos have been instrumental in shaping cultural, political, and social landscapes. Moving through and beyond the literary canon, this course examines manifestos as distinctive literary artifacts that intertwine art, politics, and calls to action, deeply reflecting the times and ideals from which they emerged. Focusing on Latin America, this interdisciplinary course examines the evolution of the manifesto as a discursive genre in the region. It traces its trajectory from the early 20th-century literary and artistic avant-gardes to the new contemporary forms of social, ecological, and political activism. The course includes a broad survey of cultural artifacts contextualized within historical and contemporary perspectives on identity, politics, ethics, aesthetics, nature, human and non-human rights, and social justice. Our classes will encompass texts from various countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and others. The course integrates insights from diverse fields such as poetics, philosophy, literary studies, sound and media studies, design, and typography. This course will be conducted in Spanish, with reading and writing assignments accepted in Spanish and Portuguese, which will be encouraged and warmly welcomed.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

What is an illness? How do we define a sick body? How can literature, films and art convey suffering and healing? How do traditional histories of medicine structure sickness? Is there a perception––and representation––of illness that can be specific to Latin American culture? How does the Spanish language address issues of sickness, disability, and pain? This course will explore experiences of illness, suffering, pain, and healing through the readings of narratives, works of theory and criticism, and the writings of artists themselves, as well as film, artistic practices, and documentaries. Discussions will place the narratives of illness in the intersections with the history of public health, biomedical history, and the sociocultural history of disease in Latin America. Within the framework of the Medicine, Science, and the Humanities major, students will learn to recognize the value and relevance of literature and art to their personal, educational, and professional growth.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

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

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This seminar presents a transnational history of Latin American cinema from the 1960s to the present, with a special regard to its global influence. Starting with the Cuban Revolution and the subsequent founding of its film institute ICAIC, we'll examine how politics and aesthetics shape each other. We'll discuss the manifestos and films of the so-called New Latin American Cinema, including Tercer Cine, Cine Imperfecto, and Cinema Novo; the filmography made during the continent's various dictatorships; and post-dictatorship debates on memory. We'll also engage with a recent theoretical and cinematic production on gender, sexuality, the non-human, and new cinematic postcolonial approaches. (If AS.210.311 has not been taken, student may submit an SPE score:https://krieger.jhu.edu/modern-languages-literatures/spanish-and-portuguese/undergraduate/get-started/)

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

What did it mean to “know” something in an age of profound epistemological shift? This course explores the revolutionary transformations in scientific thought during the late Renaissance and early modern period (approximately 1550–1650), with particular focus on the cultural and intellectual world that produced Miguel de Cervantes. Students will examine how the Scientific Revolution unfolded alongside Spain’s so-called Golden Age of literature and art, investigating the tensions between emerging empirical methods and traditional scholastic authority, the impact of New World discoveries on European natural philosophy, and the relationship between literary imagination and scientific inquiry. Topics include the Copernican revolution, advances in anatomy and medicine, alchemy and chemistry, navigation and cartography, engineering and technology, and the role of observation and experiment in challenging Aristotelian cosmology. Through readings from various early modern scientific thinkers, and alongside Cervantes’s own works, students will consider how Don Quixote’s world was one where old certainties were crumbling and new ways of understanding nature were taking shape. Class will be conducted in Spanish.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.311 OR SPE Score

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

In this course we will examine the works of the Argentine poet and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges, one of the most influential writers of the 20th-century, as a way of thinking though key problems in the philosophy of language, epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and cosmology. In addition to many of Borges’s most important stories, we will read work from thinkers like Immanuel Kant, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Simon de Beauvoir. Taught in English with the opportunity to do work and some discussion in Spanish for those in the major.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)

A graduate seminar that focuses on texts by contemporary U.S. Latinx writers published after 2015, as well as works of scholarship and criticism in Latinx literary and cultural studies. Students will familiarize themselves with a body of work from the largest (and still growing) cultural "minority" in the U.S. to interrogate the major themes of this course––"Latinx," "minority," and "now"––as well as reflect on how national, comparative, and "minority" texts mutually interact and inter-implicate one another.

Distribution Area: Humanities

This graduate seminar on emerging cinema in Latin America focuses on thematic clusters such as gender identity, violence against women, the struggle for indigenous rights and recognition of their history, the politics of ecological crises, and the plight of youth who don’t see a viable future. We will focus on films from Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, and Colombia, among other cultures. In the month of April, the seminar will connect live to a workshop and screening series in Cuba, with a special focus on Cuba’s role in Latin American Film history and its contributions to the current trends in eco-cinema, which explores the relationship between the natural world, nonhuman animals, and humanity.

Distribution Area: Humanities

This graduate seminar explores the work of the major modernist writer João Guimarães Rosa (1908–1967), with particular attention to Grande sertão: veredas, his only and groundbreaking novel, which is scheduled to receive a new English translation in 2026. First published in Brazil in 1956 and translated into English in 1963 as The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, the novel is frequently compared to the work of James Joyce for its radical experimentation with language. Rosa experimented with narrative form and challenged literary conventions, as well as categories of gender, race, and regional identity. His fiction is almost invariably set in Brazil’s vast inland plateaus, the sertão, a landscape that acquires metaphysical dimensions in his work. In addition to reading Grande sertão: veredas, the seminar will also examine selected short stories alongside established and emerging critical approaches to Rosa’s work, including ecocriticism, regionalist poetics, trans studies, narrative theory, and translation studies. The course is taught in English, with readings in Portuguese, Spanish, and English.

Distribution Area: Humanities

As the humanities grapple with climate change, theories emerging from or centered on Amazonia contribute to a broader rethinking of the relationship between nature and culture, challenging the very definitions of these terms and the core tenets of modernity. This course explores how Amazonia has sparked new ways of thinking and aesthetic languages. We will focus on recent scholarship in archeology, anthropology, environmental humanities, and literary and cultural studies in relation to earlier ideas about Amazonia. Alongside this, we will examine literature, photography, film, and multimedia, discussing the ways in which the encounter with Amazonia has shaped aesthetic practices and, in turn, how these practices contribute to or even anticipate theoretical perspectives. Topics include thinking and its manifestations beyond the human, cosmotechnics and/as cosmopolitics, representation, and the ontological turn. Readings will include work by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Aparecida Vilaça, Eduardo Kohn, Philippe Descola, Emanuele Coccia, Davi Kopenawa, Bruce Albert, Eduardo Neves, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Lucia Sá, among others. All readings and discussions will be in English.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

Distribution Area: Humanities

Humanists possess a reservoir of scholarly abilities that prime them for contributing to debates well beyond the academy. This semester-long workshop will introduce graduate students to the basics of writing for such broad audience. Each session will be organized around particular topics in public humanities writing, including the pitching, writing, editing, and publishing processes of newspapers, magazines, and online outlets. We will also consider the forms of writing that most allow scholars to draw from their academic training and research: reviews, personal essays, op-eds, interviews, and profiles. Throughout the course we will see how the interdisciplinarity, comparativism, and multilingualism of fields from across the humanities can be helpful for reaching wide audiences. Beyond the nuts and bolts of getting started in so-called “public” writing, this course aspires to teach graduate students how to combine quality writing with academic knowledge, scholarly analysis with a general intellectual readership—and, ultimately, make academic knowledge a public good. Taught in English.

Prerequisite(s): Students who took AS.215.748 are not eligible to take AS.215.718.

Distribution Area: Humanities

This discussion-based course focuses on a wide range of texts from the colonial period to the present. We’ll read seminal texts from Portugal, Brazil, and Lusophone Africa, paying close attention to language and context. How do forms, ideas, and genres travel across the Atlantic? What shape do they take according to different geographies, cultures, and histories? Topics include the legacies of European colonialism and imperialism, slavery and its aftermath, theoretical debates about the formation of Brazilian Literature, national identity, (post)colonialism and decolonization, representations of nature, and Indigeneity. Students will read innovative prose works by Machado de Assis and Clarice Lispector; the poetry of Fernando Pessoa; Brazilian concrete poetry, and modernist manifestos; among other things. This course will be taught in English. Students may complete coursework in Portuguese or Spanish to apply the course toward relevant Spanish, Portuguese, or RLL degree requirements.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.272 AND AS.210.311 or PPE Score

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

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

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

This course will explore the many genres of traditional and popular music that have emerged among the peoples and cultures of the Caribbean region and its Diaspora. We will examine the social, political, and economic issues that have shaped the region’s music and how that music may have intersected with migration, colonization, ethnicity, race and tourism. Using a “participantobservation” approach, students will read about, listen to and research a variety of musical experiences within the relevant sociopolitical context. Students should expect to fully participate in discussions about the assigned readings and music, and should be prepared to conduct their own research and share their own or newly acquired knowledge of contemporary and “historical/traditional” musical themes, and local and regional artists. Our collective goal will be to enjoy as well as to think critically about music, culture and performance and within a moreinformed understanding of the complex, multi-varied and multi-vocal context—know as “The Caribbean”.

Distribution Area: Humanities

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

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

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

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

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

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

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

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

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

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

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

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

This course explores the complex interplay between race, class, and the politics of decolonization and national independence in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean and Latin America. Through diverse theories, primary sources, and comparative case studies, students will analyze how racialized and exploited groups have challenged systems of imperial and colonial domination while seeking to assert different meanings of freedom. The course moves beyond traditional decolonization narratives that restrict frameworks spatially to the boundaries of the nation-state and temporally to the post-World War II period. By historicizing decolonization struggles and emphasizing the transnational and comparative dimensions of the ideologies and practices of decolonization, we will explore how race and class dynamics within countries intersect with global power relations to shape the politics and processes of decolonization.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Writing Intensive

The seminar involves discussions (including with visiting authors) of readings related to the Arrighi Center’s four thematic priorities: (1) Continuity and Change in the Dynamics of Global Capitalism; (2) Changing Structures and Norms of Global Governance; (3) Global Inequality and Development; and (4) Land, Labor and Environmental Rights and Struggles. Participants include faculty and students (graduate and undergraduate) from a wide range of social science and humanities departments as well as visiting scholars from around the world. Undergraduates signing up under 230.375 will participate in both the main seminar with faculty and graduate students, followed by a special discussion session for undergraduates.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken or are enrolled in AS.230.675 are not eligible to take AS.230.375.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

Caribbean immigrants have long been an integral part of Baltimore’s rich and diverse Black community, shaping the city’s neighborhoods, politics, culture, and movements for justice. In this community-based learning course, students will explore the historical and contemporary experiences of Caribbean immigrants in Baltimore, with particular attention to migrants from the Anglophone Caribbean. Moving beyond the classroom, students will engage directly with Caribbean activists, educators, artists, and cultural workers whose lives and labor animate the city. Through oral history interviews, ethical and reflexive community engagement, and justice-driven archival practices, students will gain hands-on experience researching and co-creating an archival record of Caribbean immigrant life in Baltimore. This course is taught in partnership with Nati Kamau-Nataki of Everyone’s Place Bookstore and African Cultural Center.

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)

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

Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences