Department website: https://krieger.jhu.edu/wgs/
The Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality works to catalyze intellectual discussions—at Johns Hopkins, in Baltimore, and beyond—in which gender and sexuality concerns play important roles.
We are a forum that brings together undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty from different departments who share an interest and a need to address and interrogate their research fields from a queer, feminist, or otherwise gender- and sexuality-inflected perspective.
The activities of the program integrate teaching and research on all levels. Most importantly, the program encourages and supports initiatives for research projects, events, and curriculum developments emerging from all parts of the JHU campus—undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty alike.
WGS brings new scholarship into conversation on campus in three main ways. First, the program sponsors a seminar series that brings speakers from academia and the broader community to Johns Hopkins University. Second, we organize workshops each semester around multiyear themes, such as “Affect and Emotion” and “Medical Humanities.” Finally, we bring renowned scholars and public figures to the Homewood campus through our annual Visiting Distinguished Professorship. Recent visiting professors have included Karen Barad (University of California-Santa Cruz), Joan Wallach Scott (Institute for Advanced Studies), Trinh-Minh Ha (University of California-Berkeley), and Michael Warner (Yale University).
WGS offers an undergraduate minor that enables students to devote a portion of their education to the study of women, gender, sexuality, and related issues. WGS also offers research fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students. Graduate students also have the opportunity to design and teach a course.
Through both interdisciplinary and specialized courses, students are encouraged to develop critical and comparative approaches to the study of gender and sexuality—often in interaction with related issues such as race, class, global health, and violence. Courses in the program are taught by prominent faculty members from across the disciplines and are cross-listed through a variety of departments. New courses are added frequently.
WGS also offers an undergraduate Seminar/Practicum, where students combine volunteer work in a local social service agency with a seminar that explores the connections between social justice and academic inquiry.
For current course information and registration go to https://sis.jhu.edu/classes/
Courses
AS.363.201. Introduction to the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. 3 Credits.
This course will serve as an intensive introduction to contemporary approaches to theories of gender and sexuality, and their relationship to cultural production and politics. Students will develop a historically situated knowledge of the development of feminist and queer scholarship in the 20th and 21st centuries, and consider the multiply intersecting forces which shape understandings of sexual and gender identity. We will consider both foundational questions (What is gender? Who is the subject of feminism? What defines queerness?) and questions of aesthetic and political strategy, and spend substantial time engaging with feminist and queer scholarship in comparative contexts. Students will be introduced to debates in Black feminism, intersectionality theory, third world feminism, socialist feminism, queer of colour critique, and trans* theory. We will read both canonical texts and recent works of scholarship, and the final weeks of the course will be devoted to thinking with our theoretical and historical readings against a selection of feminist and queer literature and cinema. No prior familiarity with the study of gender and sexuality is necessary.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.363.253. Disease, Illness and Medicine from the Perspective of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies. 3 Credits.
This course invites students to take the perspectives of women, gender and sexuality studies in the study of illness and disease. The course asks: What difference do such perspectives make in the study of disease? Are ways of describing and responding to illness and suffering made available for us to rethink the experience of affliction as such? The course will invite students to consider disease, illness, and suffering as embedded within social worlds and as sites where institutions, medical knowledge, and intimacy are entangled. We will explore topics including: the gender politics of asylum, displacement and refugeehood; the clustering of violence and illness in neighborhoods marked by chronic exposure to police violence; the counter-politics of care in the context of claims to reproductive justice; the politics of the population and the household decision-making in relation to scarcity; the rethinking of the clinical encounter as it is criss-crossed by law in cases of sexual violence.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.363.331. Gender and Sexuality beyond the Global West. 3 Credits.
Gender and Sexuality in the Global West. Topics change each semester. See class search for specific topic being taught each term.
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)
AS.363.333. Poetics and Politics:. 3 Credits.
Topics will vary by term. Please see the specific term and section for current topics.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.363.341. Making Modern Gender. 3 Credits.
Gender as we know it is not timeless. Today, gender roles and the assumption that there are only two genders are contested and debated. With the binary gender system thus perhaps nearing its end, we might wonder if it had a beginning. In fact, the idea that there are two sexes and that they not only assume different roles in society but also exhibit different character traits, has emerged historically around 1800. Early German Romanticism played a seminal role in the making of modern gender and modern sexuality. For the first time, woman was considered not a lesser version of man, but a different being with a value of her own. The idea of gender complementation emerged, and this idea, in turn, imposed heterosexuality more forcefully than ever. In this course, we will trace the history of anatomy and explore the role of literature and the other arts in the making and unmaking of gender.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.363.346. Queer Performativity. 3 Credits.
Introduces students to the intersections of queer theory, performance studies, and LGBTQ history with a focus on “queer worldmaking:” the ways in which performances—both theatrical and everyday rituals—have the ability to establish alternative views of the world. Case studies include the ballroom scene in Baltimore and beyond, migratory street youth subcultures, and queer nightlife. This course also offers a unique lens on the archive and historical research by approaching embodied memory, gestures, and ritual as systems for learning, storing, and transmitting cultural knowledge.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.363.405. A Century of Trans Cultural Production. 3 Credits.
This discussion oriented seminar will offer an intensive survey of cultural production by trans, non-binary, gender-nonconforming, and intersex artists, writers, poets, and musicians. We will examine how this body of work engages with and contests sexological norms around gender and sexuality, relate it to contemporary critical writing by trans theorists. In a moment of greater visibility for trans people, but one characterized by revanchist backlash, how are forms, genres, and aesthetic strategies used to understand the production of gender in relationship to racism, colonialism, and capitalism? How are trans people forming their own networks to aid in the production and distribution of their work? How do we at Johns Hopkins—site of much problematic medical work on gender and sexuality—understand our positioning relative to these currents? Class discussion will be supplemented by conversations with visiting artists, publishers, and editors, and by an associated series of public readings, lectures, and screenings. We may cover work by Claude Cahun, Leslie Feinberg, Jordy Rosenberg, Juliana Huxtable, Tourmaline, Kai Cheng Thom, Kay Gabriel, Cat Fitzpatrick, and Joshua Whitehead, among others.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Cross Listed Courses
Anthropology
AS.070.227. Sex, Gender, Culture. 3 Credits.
What is gender? We talk so much about it, but what is it really? How does one distinguish between the social and historical life of gender vis-à-vis sex as a biological category? Yet even the category sex as biology is not as straightforward as it seems and often indicates arbitrariness and blurriness when it comes to demarking definite lines of difference between a binary gender model (male, female). Anthropologists are increasingly exploring gender in multiple contexts, from kinship structures and political economies, as well as in settings of piety and religiosity, to spaces in which the category of human itself becomes difficult to define. In this course we will engage in genealogies as well as current debates. We will learn and discuss a wide array of perspectives, debates, and theories that have shaped feminist anthropology, queer theory, and black feminist theory.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Behavioral Biology
AS.290.330. Human Sexuality. 3 Credits.
Course focuses on sexual development, sexuality across the lifespan, gender identity, sexual attraction and arousal, sexually transmitted disease, and the history of commercial sex workers and pornography. Please note that the use of electronic devices is not permitted during this class, in order to promote the full interactive potential of this engaging seminar-style offering. Open to Juniors & Seniors within the following majors/minors: Behavioral Biology; Biology; Cognitive Science; Medicine, Science & the Humanities; Molecular & Cellular Bio; Neuroscience; Psychological & Brain Sciences; Public Health; Sociology; Study of Women, Gender, & Sexuality.
Distribution Area: Natural Sciences, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.290.420. Human Sexual Orientation. 3 Credits.
This course will examine the historical and current theories of sexual orientation and sexual variation development by examining the biological, psychological and social contributing factors that influence the development of sexual orientations and variations along with treatment and modification of problematic sexual behaviors. Priority given to Behavioral Biology majors.
Prerequisite(s): Students may receive credit for AS.200.204 or AS.290.330 or AS.290.420, but only ONE can count towards the upper level SOCSCI in Behavioral Biology
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Democracy (FA4.1),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Biophysics
AS.250.351. Reproductive Physiology. 2 Credits.
Focuses on reproductive physiology and biochemical and molecular regulation of the female and male reproductive tracts. Topics include the hypothalamus and pituitary, peptide and steroid hormone action, epididymis and male accessory sex organs, female reproductive tract, menstrual cycle, ovulation and gamete transport, fertilization and fertility enhancement, sexually transmitted diseases, and male and female contraceptive methods. Introductory lectures on each topic followed by research-oriented lectures and readings from current literature.
Distribution Area: Natural Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
Center for Economy and Society
AS.197.212. Reading Seminar: Political Economy of Public Health and Gender. 3 Credits.
This course examines how conceptions of gender shape and are shaped by public policy in the U.S. We use varying theoretical and empirical perspectives to ask why gendered inequalities persist in access to health care, labor market opportunities and earnings, and other domains of social and economic life--as well as how they intersect with other axes of social difference, such as race, ethnicity, and sexuality. We place the U.S. in comparative perspective and examine how the relationship between gender and inequality varies across capitalist democracies.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Science and Data (FA2),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
Classics
AS.040.321. Women in Greek Drama: Feminist Perspectives from Text to Stage. 3 Credits.
This course explores the portrayal of women in ancient Greek drama through the lenses of feminist theory, gender studies, and the intersection of performance and gender. By analyzing key passages from significant texts and contextualizing them within their social, cultural, and theoretical frameworks, students will examine how ancient narratives about women continue to resonate with contemporary gender issues. The course will culminate in the creation of a theatrical piece—a compilation of women's monologues from ancient Greek drama—allowing students to design, adapt, and perform their interpretations in a final performance.
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
East Asian Studies
AS.310.303. Women and Writing in Modern China. 3 Credits.
China’s turbulent 20th century was marked by social and political upheavals, wars, and economic hardship. Women writers played an important role in documenting these events. How did women experience and understand their historical context? How were their experiences and interpretations different from (or similar to) those of their male counterparts? This course will search modern China’s mind through women’s writings. Students will read works by women writers of the “long 20th century” (roughly 1890s-2020s) including, but not limited to, Ding Ling, Xiao Hong, Zhang Ailing, and Zhang Jie. We will engage in close readings of their literary works in context of their life experiences, considering key themes such as women’s identity and agency, nationalism, revolution, and social reform as well as new and changing gender norms. Basic knowledge of modern Chinese history helpful but not required.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.310.329. Women, Patriarchy, and Feminism in China, South Korea, and Japan. 3 Credits.
We will try to get a quick overview of the recent history of patriarchy in China, South Korea, and Japan from the mid-twentieth century to our present and then compare the initiatives of feminists to transform the lives of women throughout these three societies. We will also debate whether or how it makes sense to adapt the Western notions of patriarchy and sexism as well as the Western political program of feminism to the non-Western context of East Asia by reading books by historians, anthropologists, and sociologists.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
English
AS.060.388. Old World/New World Women. 3 Credits.
The course considers the transatlantic writing of three women in the early modern period, Anne Bradstreet, Aphra Behn, and Phillis Wheatley. We will consider issues of identity, spatiality, religion, commerce, enforced labor, sexuality, race, and gender, along with literary tradition, formal analysis and poetics. We will read a good deal of these early women writers. Foremost in our mind will be the question of how perceptions of space and time are mediated through the global experiences of early modernity.
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
Film and Media Studies
AS.061.248. Women Making Films About Women. 3 Credits.
This course will examine films (features and shorts) throughout the history of cinema beginning with Alice Guy-Blaché . We will look at how form reveals content, thematic issues and how films relate to the culture and politics of the filmmaker. Filmmakers include Germaine Dulac, Nelly Kaplan, Marguerite Duras, Chantal Ackerman, Barbara Hammer and Nina Menkes. Readings include critical essays, texts by the filmmakers and fiction. Assignments consist of weekly papers on the films.
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
AS.061.389. Women Making Movies (Europe). 3 Credits.
This course introduces students to some of the most exciting female directors of the 21st century, asking how gender shaped the production and reception of their films. Do particular directors attribute any significance to the fact of being a woman? Does a director's gender shape her choice of subject or how she represents it? Does wider knowledge of works directed by women change our sense of the canon and authorship? Covers non-U.S. films, strongly encouraged for FMS majors and minors. No pre-requisite.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.061.391. Love and Film. 3 Credits.
In this course, we explore different understandings of "love" and the way that film has dealt with the concept as a medium. We explore a variety of approaches to the question of "love" - from the agapic to the familial to the romantic - through a series of interdisciplinary readings ranging from philosophy to anthropology. We will also equally explore the question of how film has engaged with the question of love as a concept, and what depictions of human affection - from the general to the personal - it has offered us. Screenings are required for this course. Lab fee: $50
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
AS.061.393. Violent Attractions. 3 Credits.
Violence, ritualized and anarchic, celebrated and deplored, in popular film from silent era melodrama and slapstick comedy to contemporary sports, crime, and combat films. Two short critical papers and an oral presentation. Interested non-majors and pre-majors may contact the instructor about permission to enroll: lbucknell@jhu.edu.
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
First Year Seminars
AS.001.174. FYS: Women and Family in Chinese Film. 3 Credits.
From the early 20th century, Chinese society underwent a turbulent process of modern transformation. Industrialization, urbanization, and democratization challenged previous gender and family norms. Meanwhile, at exactly this time, the Chinese film industry flourished, especially in the modern metropolis of Shanghai. Women and family provided a useful microcosm through which to explore national questions related to revolution, war, and modernity. They also entertained a public eager for new leisure pursuits. Popular feature films not only recorded but also interpreted and helped shape family and gender roles. Using filmic representations as the main material this First-Year Seminar will survey the "family question" (and "the woman question") in 20th century China
AS.001.204. FYS: French Identities - Race, Gender, Religion, and Sexual Orientation in Contemporary France. 3 Credits.
How should a just society come to terms with persistent inequalities? France, the country of liberty, equality and fraternity, that offered sanctuary from US racism to such figures as James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Miles Davis and legalized same-sex marriages two years before the US did, is now deeply divided. This First-Year Seminar explores the tensions and contradictions between the universalist and color-blind ideals of the French republic and the realities of discrimination in contemporary French society. Topics studied include the status of the concept of race in political discourse; the law forbidding signs of religious belief in the public schools and responses to it; how American initiatives like Black Lives Matter, #metoo and critical gender studies have both sparked French activism and political movements and generated a powerful backlash; and what Americans can learn about how to fight injustice—and how not to—from the French. We will look at a wide variety of texts, including writings by activists, historians, and journalists, along with sociologies of the police and young adult novels, and will listen to popular French music and watch a number of contemporary French films.
History
AS.100.125. The History of Gender and Sexuality on the Internet. 3 Credits.
This course examines the historical forces since the 1960s that gave rise to the computing industry, the internet, and social media. Topics will include the history of Silicon Valley, parasociality, loneliness, and identity politics.
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)
AS.100.220. "Bad Feminism": Exclusion and Essentialism. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students to major debates and controversies within the feminist movement in the United Kingdom and the United States from 1850 to the present. From colonial and eugenic women’s movements to anti-trans and carceral feminism, the contents and assessments of this course ask you to consider a pressing question in contemporary feminism: how do we reckon with the reality that many feminists have excluded and continue to exclude people from the liberatory futures they imagine? Together we will analyze the value and limits of historical context and evaluate the relationship between past and present controversies within the feminist movement. Employing critical feminist concepts such as intersectionality and positionality, we will consider what it means for people (including ourselves) to be “products of their time.” By doing historical research in newspaper databases, we will evaluate how feminist claims about “sisterhood” have changed over time.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.252. Sex and the American City. 3 Credits.
Why are cities associated with sex and vice? How did modern forms of policing and urban development first arise? This introductory course explores the place of US cities in the history of sexuality, including Baltimore.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.100.275. Passing in American Culture. 3 Credits.
This course explores passing narratives – stories that feature people who cross race, class, ethnic, or gender boundaries. We will consider what passing narratives can teach us about power and identity, especially as power is presumed to reside in the self and race is presumed to no longer matter.
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)
AS.100.283. Making and Unmaking Queer Histories: Identity, Self-Representation, Politics, and Contexts, 1800-Pre. 3 Credits.
This course investigates sexual cultures through the lens of modern Queer History in the United States and Western Europe, with forays into global and transnational histories.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.396. The Gender Binary and American Empire. 3 Credits.
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
AS.100.426. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. 3 Credits.
Witchcraft, magic, carnivals, riots, folk tales, gender roles; fertility cults and violence especially in Britain, Germany, France, and Italy.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
AS.100.622. New Directions in the History of Sex, Gender, and Empire. 3 Credits.
This seminar engages graduate students with recent historiography on Gender and Sexuality in the context of Britain and the British Empire. Subthemes include labor history, the history of technology, trans studies, and urban history.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.643. Queer and Trans Historiography of Western Europe/Empire post-1945. 3 Credits.
This seminar engages graduate students with recent and “classic” historiography on LGBTQ+ questions in French, German, and other western European spaces, with particular attention to empire.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.650. New Directions in the Histories of Labor, Gender, and Sexuality. 3 Credits.
This course introduces graduate students to innovative methodologies and practices coming out of the historiographies of British and American labor histories. Readings will focus on recent literature concerning the intersection of sex, work, gender, and empire.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.711. A Trans History of the Welfare State. 3 Credits.
This seminar investigates US trans history through the prism of the welfare state. Readings will prioritize the analysis of class, political economy, and labor to make sense of gender’s material functions, practices of transition, and the maneuvers and aims of policy and statecraft. The course will ultimately explore why a tiny population has become a significant object of welfare state management since the New Deal.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.713. Black Womanhood. 3 Credits.
What does a usable history of black womanhood (black queer and trans womanhood inclusive) look like? How do we imagine, create, and narrate black women’s stories? Black women’s history across time and space.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS.100.769. Gender History Workshop. 3 Credits.
Workshop for presentation of works-in-progress on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality, including drafts of dissertation chapters, research papers, talks, and proposals. Students in disciplines other than history are welcome.
AS.100.770. Gender History Workshop. 3 Credits.
Workshop for presentation of works-in-progress on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality, including drafts of dissertation chapters, research papers, talks, and proposals. Students in disciplines other than history are welcome. Graduate students only.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
History of Art
AS.010.255. Introduction to Performance Art. 3 Credits.
Performance art is provocative and often controversial because it troubles, without dissolving, the distinction between art and life. Not just a matter of activating bodies or spurring participation, performance art asks what kinds of actions count as worthy of attention in contemporary culture. Studying performance art provides a unique introduction to art history because it allows us to rethink established art historical concerns with representation, form, perspective, and materiality, while at the same time offering critical insight into the forms of attention that structure everyday life. In this introduction to performance art and its history, we will explore how performance art addresses ingrained assumptions about action and passivity, success and failure, embodiment and mediation, “good” and “bad” feelings, emancipation and dependency. The study of performance art invites transdisciplinary approaches. Students from across the university are welcome. Our attention to a wide array of artists and practices will be supplemented by readings in art history and art criticism as well as diverse theoretical approaches.
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)
AS.010.290. Women, Gender, and Sexuality: An Introduction to the History of Chinese Art. 3 Credits.
An introduction to Chinese Art, with a focus on the (often absence of) women, through the lens of gender and sexuality.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.291. The Art of Ancient Greek Medicine. 3 Credits.
This course analyzes the role of artists and the visual arts in shaping ancient Greek medicine and the afterlife of these ideas. Grounded in the visual arts, we will explore class, gender, race, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality as they intersect with developments in ancient medicine and later interpretations of this history. Includes excursions to local museums.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.010.301. Michelangelo: Religion, Sexuality, and the Crisis of Renaissance Art. 3 Credits.
The course will focus on the controversies surrounding the representation of the body in the writings and figurative art of Michelangelo and his contemporaries, the historical circumstances under which the most admired artist in Europe was attacked as a blasphemer and an idolator, and the effect of widespread calls for censorship on his later production. The writings of Michelangelo, Pietro Aretino, Benvenuto Cellini and own writings will be considered with a focus on their staging of an ambivalent and transgressive eroticism.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.336. Männer und Meister: Artistry and Masculinity in Sixteenth-Century Germany. 3 Credits.
Since the publication of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550), in which the history of art was first conceived as the successive accomplishment of a select group of great men, the discipline of Art History has had a gender problem. Today, feminist scholars continue to grapple with this troubled legacy, working to redress the masculinist biases inherent in disciplinary methods and assumptions while at the same time fighting to recover the value of traditionally overlooked subjects and genres. In the early 1990s, the history of masculinity emerged as an adjunct to traditional feminist history. Aimed at addressing misconceptions about the nature and naturalness of male identity, this subfield has helped open masculinity to critical reevaluation. Drawing on the contributions of contemporary feminist scholarship as well as those of the history of masculinity, this course explores the ways in which a reconsideration of the nature of male identity in the historical past might help us rethink key art historical issues, for example, paradigmatic notions of the Renaissance artist, the nature of copying and competition, and the concepts of creativity, invention, and genius. The course will focus on developments in the German speaking world in the late fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries; as numerous historians have noted, the German speaking lands underwent a crisis of masculinity during this period, in part precipitated by the events of the Protestant Reformation. At the same time, the region witnessed profound changes in the status of the arts and of the artist. In this course, we will explore the ways in which these phenomena were related, and how they contributed to culturally specific notions of the relationship between masculinity and artistry. We will also consider the ways in which a close examination of masculinity in the German Renaissance opens up new avenues of art historical and cultural historical investigation with relevance beyond the period itself.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.339. Sex, Death, and Gender: The Body in Premodern Art, Medicine, and Culture, c. 1300-1600. 3 Credits.
To what extent was the body and its depiction a site of contestation, identification, or desire in the Middle Ages and Renaissance? If the body in the West since the 1800s is seen to have been shaped by the rise of photography and film, the institutionalization of biomedicine, and the establishment of techniques of surveyance and mechanization, then how was the body represented, disciplined, and experienced in the preceding centuries? In an age of unprecedented encounter with non-European bodies, what did it mean to describe and categorize bodies by race, region, or religion? These are some of the major questions this class seeks to answer, which is fundamentally interdisciplinary as it draws upon insights and methods from anthropology and the history of medicine and history of science to investigate how the body has been represented and imagined in the visual arts. The bodies of the suffering Christ, the female mystic, the dissected cadaver, the punished criminal, and the non-European ‘Other’ will loom large as we work to problematize notions of a normative body, whether in the premodern world or in the contemporary one. While most readings and lectures will concern the body and its representation in the Christian West during the later Middle Ages and Renaissance, students are encouraged to work on a topic of their choosing from any geographical area 1000-1800 CE for their research papers.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.377. Modern Palestinian Art & Its Contexts. 3 Credits.
Modern Palestinian art took shape in the bourgeois salons of nineteenth-century Cairo, the Ottoman-era workshops of Jerusalem’s icon painters, the militant presses of revolutionary Beirut, and the sewing circles of Amman’s refugee camps. It emerged from the state-sponsored art schools of the Communist Bloc, in conversation with the Black Panther Party, through crowds of curious exhibition-goers in Tokyo and Oslo and Tehran and, of course, in defiance of the ongoing Israeli occupation. This class introduces students to art made in and around Palestine between 1880 and today, focusing on its engagement with the myriad worlds in which it has always participated. How can visual culture mediate relationships to local heritage across space and time, or negotiate nationalism in the absence of a nation? What tensions arise around the circulation of artwork inexorably linked to a liberation struggle? How have artists navigated questions of the “postcolonial” as the subjects of a contemporary colonial regime? This class will explore modern Palestinian visual art from a transnational perspective, paying particular attention to the roles of women and gender in its creation, content, and display.
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
AS.010.413. Historical and Conceptual Bases of Art History. 3 Credits.
This course introduces students to the principal methods and theories of art history. Students will work through readings foundational for the discipline, texts that define key methodological consolidations in the twentieth century, and more recent (e.g. feminist, visual studies, global, post-colonial, and/or ecological) critiques and rethinking. Specific texts will vary by instructor, but the course seeks—in any instantiation—to include a plurality of perspectives.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.418. On Weaving: Feminism, Ecology, Care. 3 Credits.
How might a critical and material art history contribute to contemporary debates in theory? Feminist and queer theories, on the one hand, and ecological thought, on the other, have often turned to metaphors of weaving in their attempt to think antihierarchical forms of relationality. Against models of autonomous selfhood, weaving is evoked to foreground the material fact of our interdependence with human and other forms of life, and to articulate relations that are all too often discounted in western liberal cultures – along with the care work that goes into maintaining them. This seminar lends texture to metaphors of weaving by looking at material practices. We consider how the study of textile and fiber arts informs theoretical concerns, while also attending to the ways in which our reading of theory impacts our appreciation of artistic techniques and practices. The course will include two group excursions on Saturdays to the exhibition “Woven Histories: Textiles and Modern Abstraction” at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, sponsored by the Faculty-Student Engagement and Enrichment Fund.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
AS.010.474. Picturing Performance. 3 Credits.
Picturing Performance takes up the material traces of ancient Greek performance—the remains of theaters, paintings, masks, and musical instruments, as well as epigraphic, papyrological, and other textual transmissions of these works—alongside contemporary receptions of these performances, which have been such a rich site of reworking. Examples include: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Anäis Mitchell’s Hadestown, Euripides’ The Bacchae and Hope Mohr Dance’s Before Bacchae, and Sophocles’ Antigone and Theater of War’s Antigone in Ferguson. These ancient performances engage questions of gender and sexuality, constructions of race, migration, citizenship, and belonging, power, governance, and resistance, disease and collective healing, among the subjects that have also inspired contemporary interpretations. All texts will be read in translation. We will visit museum collections in the region and, where possible, see live performances of these works.
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
AS.010.481. Figuration after Formlessness. 3 Credits.
What would an art history of modernism look like that sought not to overcome or eliminate painterly figuration, but to attend to displaced and disparaged figures in it? At least since Benjamin Buchloh’s important 1981 warning about a “return to figuration” in European painting, figuration has been linked with questionable, if not highly suspect, aesthetic and political values – from nostalgia to repression. Buchloh inherits this this view from the historical avantgardes, which sought to counter conventions of figuration by developing disparate strategies of abstraction. And it is this view of figuration that guides both formalist and social art histories: For both share an anxiety about the authoritative figure of the human form.This seminar invites an alternative perspective on the artistic project of figuration. We look at modern and contemporary practices of figuration that cannot so easily be dismissed as retrogressive or authoritarian. These practices suggest ways of thinking the figure without an appeal to its coherent visibility or sovereign standing. We will read broadly in the contemporary critical theory, feminist and queer theory, Black thought, and critical disability studies that share this investment (e.g. Butler, Cavarero, Garland-Thomson, Halberstam, Hartman, Honig, Sharpe, Wynter). We will critically reconsider Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’ project Formless: A User’s Guide, along with the turn of the twenty-first century debates about abjection, feminism, and “body art” it engaged. Artists under discussion include Maria Lassnig, Ana Mendieta, Alina Szapocznikow, Kara Walker, and Hannah Wilke, amongst others. For the final research paper, graduate students are encouraged to bring their own archives to the questions addressed in the seminar.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.010.674. Picturing Performance. 3 Credits.
Picturing Performance takes up the material traces of ancient Greek performance—the remains of theaters, paintings, masks, and musical instruments, as well as epigraphic, papyrological, and other textual transmissions of these works—alongside contemporary receptions of these performances, which have been such a rich site of reworking. Examples include: the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Anäis Mitchell’s Hadestown, Euripides’ The Bacchae and Hope Mohr Dance’s Before Bacchae, and Sophocles’ Antigone and Theater of War’s Antigone in Ferguson. These ancient performances engage questions of gender and sexuality, constructions of race, migration, citizenship, and belonging, power, governance, and resistance, disease and collective healing, among the subjects that have also inspired contemporary interpretations. All texts will be read in translation. We will visit museum collections in the region and, where possible, see live performances of these works.
Writing Intensive
AS.010.681. Figuration after Formlessness. 3 Credits.
What would an art history of modernism look like that sought not to overcome or eliminate painterly figuration, but to attend to displaced and disparaged figures in it? At least since Benjamin Buchloh’s important 1981 warning about a “return to figuration” in European painting, figuration has been linked with questionable, if not highly suspect, aesthetic and political values – from nostalgia to repression. Buchloh inherits this this view from the historical avantgardes, which sought to counter conventions of figuration by developing disparate strategies of abstraction. And it is this view of figuration that guides both formalist and social art histories: For both share an anxiety about the authoritative figure of the human form.This seminar invites an alternative perspective on the artistic project of figuration. We look at modern and contemporary practices of figuration that cannot so easily be dismissed as retrogressive or authoritarian. These practices suggest ways of thinking the figure without an appeal to its coherent visibility or sovereign standing. We will read broadly in the contemporary critical theory, feminist and queer theory, Black thought, and critical disability studies that share this investment (e.g. Butler, Cavarero, Garland-Thomson, Halberstam, Hartman, Honig, Sharpe, Wynter). We will critically reconsider Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois’ project Formless: A User’s Guide, along with the turn of the twenty-first century debates about abjection, feminism, and “body art” it engaged. Artists under discussion include Maria Lassnig, Ana Mendieta, Alina Szapocznikow, Kara Walker, and Hannah Wilke, amongst others. For the final research paper, graduate students are encouraged to bring their own archives to the questions addressed in the seminar.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS.010.730. Vulnerable Images. 3 Credits.
What is a vulnerable image? The Latin vulnus points us in two directions: toward the relational vulnerability arising from the sight of wounds and the action of wounding; and toward the raw disclosure of the body's interior. This seminar, team-taught so as to bring the perspectives of the modern and the long premodern era into dialogue, attends to vulnerable images in both senses: we will consider not only works that picture vulnerable subjects, but images that, in their vibrant materiality or through their use and circulation, themselves become vulnerable. Across both domains we will examine what is arguably their shared capacity: to make viewers aware of their own vulnerability, and to provoke a range of responses, from the "tragic" emotions of pity and fear, to horror and disgust, compassion and care, pleasure and pain. Each week involves the critical juxtaposition of artworks and texts drawn from modern and contemporary culture with those from the long premodern past. Topics include pain as spectacle and perceptions of pain; care, attention, and maternal inclination; the vulnerability of gendered and racialized bodies; representations of torture, punishment, and war; laughter and grotesque humor; the subjects and objects of iconoclasm; material decompositions and forms of fragility. Readings run the gamut from Aristotle to Arendt, Freud to Butler, Warburg to Hartman, Sontag to Scarry.
Distribution Area: Humanities
Writing Intensive
History of Science, Medicine, and Technology
AS.140.329. Women, Health, and Medicine in Colonial and Antebellum America. 3 Credits.
This class will examine the history of women’s health and medicine in America from the 17th century to the mid-19th century, a period in which settler colonialism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade mixed European, Indigenous American, and African people and belief systems, resulting in diverse healing practices and understandings of the body and gender. Major themes addressed in the course include reproductive health, domestic and “alternative” medicine, as well as enslavement, racialized medicine, poverty, disability, and sexuality.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Interdepartmental
AS.360.406. Experiential Research Lab Seminar. 3 Credits.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Medicine, Science and the Humanities
AS.145.322. Bodies in Flux: Medicine, Gender, and Sexuality in the Modern Middle East. 3 Credits.
This course examines how bodies, genders, and sexualities in the modern Middle East, from the nineteenth century to the present, have been shaped and represented via changing and competing discourses. Through a variety of historical, ethnographic, sociological, media, and literary readings, the course investigates dynamic representations of bodies in flux: colonized bodies, medicalized bodies, gendered bodies, sexualized bodies, (re)productive bodies, aging bodies, and bodies in revolt. The course pays special attention to science, technology, and medicine in their interaction with cultures, laws, and religious practices. Some of the topics covered include analyzing histories of and discourses on gender, sexuality, health and disease, reproduction, genital cutting, and gender-based violence.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Modern Languages and Literatures
AS.211.224. Made in Italy: Italian style in context. 3 Credits.
Italy and the “Italian style” have become synonym of exquisite taste, class, and elegance thanks to the quality of Italian craftsmanship. This course will explore some of the major factors that contributed to the rise of Italian fashion and Italian industrial design as iconic all around the world. The classes will focus on the main protagonists and art movements that influenced the development of Italian style. We will analyze trends, clothing, and style not only in a historical context, but also through a critical apparatus that will include themes related to gender, culture, power, and politics.The course is taught in English. No knowledge of Italian is required, but those who can read in Italian will have an opportunity to do so. Everyone will learn some Italian words and expressions.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.211.379. Body Modifications: Post-body, Gender Anarchy, Virtual Cosmesis. 3 Credits.
This course looks at the phenomenon of body modification from the digital turn of the 1990s through contemporary queer and feminist post-body practices to body performances and transformations spanning the past 30 years. Our viewpoint will include questions around the contemporary aesthetics of “face and interface,” the flamboyant body in the current trans movement, as well as a more critical view of body modification raised by technological change such as AI generated influencers and more generally the status quo of the body’s “cosmesis,” or arrangement and adornment, in the era of social media and post-truth. We will be working with both primary sources from musicians and performers such as Arca to the trans ballroom phenomenon in Rio de Janeiro, as well as with secondary sources including the critical works by queer and intersectional theorists and feminist authors. Students will attend and participate in the classroom and will be writing a midterm and a final paper of their choice on the subject matter.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.211.383. Haunting Flesh: Women, Horror, and the Body. 3 Credits.
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)
AS.212.318. Women in French Literature of the 17th and 18th Centuries. 3 Credits.
This course will examine the changes in the relationship of women to literature in France before the French Revolution from several points of view: (1) What were the social and intellectual contexts of gender distinctions? (2) How did men writing about women differ from women writing about women? (3) How were these questions affected by the changing norms of literary productions? Texts by Mme. de Sévigné, Molière, Mme. de Lafayette, Prévost, Diderot, Rousseau, Laclos, and Beaumarchais.
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
AS.212.405. Women's Life Writing in French. 3 Credits.
This course explores various strategies devised by contemporary women writers across the Francophone world (France, Sénégal, Algeria) for telling their stories of plural identities, displacement, rebellion, and self-emancipation. Challenging the illusions of effortless métissages, these stories confront bluntly and directly the conflicts that lie at the heart of the most familial, intimate relationships with mothers, lovers, kins. Works by Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Yourcenar, Maryse Condé, Marie Cardinal, Leila Sebbar, Annie Ernaux, Christine Angot, Ken Bugul.
Prerequisite(s): AS.210.301 AND AS.210.302, or equivalent by permission
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.212.436. Love, from Beginning to End. 3 Credits.
From its origins – in Socrates's homoerotic mythologies, in the poetry of pre-Islamic Arabia, and in the currents that crossed from medieval Al-Andalus into Italy and Southern France – love has been a paradoxical, transgressive phenomenon: mystical longing, counter-religion, con game, parlor game, alienation, or self-affirmation. Contemporary sociologists have reported its demise, brought about by too many right- and left-swipes. In this course we explore a few crucial moments in the history of love, from Socrates's female teacher, Diotima, to today's dating shows, and we'll bring a literary, a sociological, and an anthropological approach to the challenges posed by love's protean discourse. Works by Plato, Ovid, Saint Augustine, Majnûn, Ibn Hazm, the abbess Héloïse, Pierre de Marivaux, Simone Weil, Annie Ernaux. The course is conducted in French.
Prerequisite(s): AS.210.301 and AS.210.302 or Equivalent Placement
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
AS.213.385. The Flesh of Nature: Body, Media and Environment. 3 Credits.
In this course we will explore how literature and film depict the material relationships between our human bodies and more-than-human worlds within and around us. We will consider not only how the classical elements (earth, air, fire, water) are media and how they connect our individual bodies with other bodies, but how the body itself is a medium. We will examine a range of ecologically conscious literary texts and films from the German and Nordic worlds as they engage themes including elementality, the nuclear age, the Anthropocene, and queer ecologies.
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
AS.214.330. Reinterpreting Myths, Reinterpreting Women. 3 Credits.
This course aims to reflect on the most iconic myths of classical antiquity, to be re–read through the contribution of psychoanalytic theories. In class, we will analyze the ten proposed women mythological figures, to be divided according to three major categories of wicked wives and mothers, abandoned women, and nonhuman female monsters, in their evolutions through the centuries, in order to note and investigate their new meanings and interpretations.How, for example, can the maternal figure of Medea still be considered relevant today? What meaning does she carry, and in what ways has she been reinterpreted and rewritten by literature, art, and other humanistic fields? Likewise, what is the source of the fascination still associated with the tragic figures of Ariadne and Dido, or the terror caused by monstrous beings such as the Mermaids and Medusa? How has popular culture re–appropriated them, modernizing them, and making them iconic in fantasy films like Harry Potter, in famous TV series like Game of Thrones, in horror movies, or in Disney’s animated films? Students will be able to answer these questions during the course, focusing each week on a specific myth drawn from classical Greek and Latin literature and following it through its literary and artistic developments, especially in the context of Western culture.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.214.363. Italy Beyond Italy: Languages, Affects, and Geographies in Modern Literature. 3 Credits.
What is Italian in a globalized world? How do geography, language, and migration shape the stories we tell and the ways we read them? This course offers an introduction to twentieth- and twenty-first-century Italian literature through a transnational lens. We will explore how Italian identity is constructed, challenged, and redefined through migration, multilingualism, and political contestation. Focusing on authors who write about Italy from afar or examine the broader world from within its borders, we will reconsider Italy not as a fixed geographic entity, but as a fluid concept shaped by global entanglements and affects. Readings will include novels about dictatorship, contemporary diasporic family memoirs, postcolonial narratives of identity and migration, and graphic novels that link the streets of Rome to global conflict zones. We will examine how the Italian language becomes a site of expression and transformation—adopted, reshaped, and reimagined by writers working across borders and traditions. Authors include Dino Campana, Italo Calvino, Antonio Tabucchi, Melania Mazzucco, Jhumpa Lahiri, Claudia Durastanti, Igiaba Scego, Helena Janeczek, Amara Lakhous, and Zerocalcare. Throughout the semester, students will engage with key themes including the history of fascism and anti-fascism, colonial legacies, modern migration, and the resurgence of nationalism in Europe while critically rethinking what constitutes “Italian literature” today.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
AS.214.417. Galileo in Dialogue: Science, Literature, and Gender in Early Modern Italy. 3 Credits.
This seminar investigates the contours of scientific dialogue in early modern Italy through the figure of Galileo Galilei and his intellectual milieu. We will examine how literary culture shaped the circulation of new ideas, and how women—whether as poets, patrons, or correspondents—participated in the exploration and communication of scientific knowledge. Readings include selections from Galileo’s scientific writings and extensive correspondence, alongside literary and artistic texts that illuminate the cultural contexts in which his ideas were produced, debated, and disseminated. By situating Galileo within academic, courtly, and cultural networks, the seminar considers the reciprocal relationship between scientific inquiry and literary production, with particular attention to how gender shaped access to, and participation in, intellectual life.
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)
Near Eastern Studies
AS.130.154. Giving Birth and Coming to Life in Ancient Egypt: The Tree and the Fruit. 3 Credits.
Childbirth is an event that is highly cultural, and is accompanied by gestures and beliefs that say a lot about the society in which they can be observed. This class will be based on Ancient Egyptian texts (translated), images and objects related to beliefs and practices surrounding pregnancy, birth-giving and the first moments of human life. We will discover the Egyptian views on procreation, the objects, the spells and the formulas used to protect pregnancy and childbirth – one of the most dangerous moments in a woman’s life –, the divine entities invoked, the reactions caused by non-ordinary births (for example, twins), and the purification rites that punctuate the post-partum period. Finally, we will see that the first biological birth is a model on which many beliefs about life after death are based. Several guest researchers will present birth and childbirth in other ancient societies in order to broaden the discussion and establish comparisons.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Citizens and Society (FA4)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3),
Engagement with Society (FA4)
Philosophy
AS.150.436. Philosophy of Gender. 3 Credits.
In this class we will examine philosophical questions about gender, and about the intersections between gender and other social categories including race, class and sexuality. We will focus specifically on questions about the metaphysics of gender and other social categories.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Writing Intensive
Program in Museums and Society
AS.389.220. Queer Sixties. 3 Credits.
Introduction to U.S. queer and trans politics and culture in the period building up to the gay liberation movement. The course highlights the significance of homophile organizing, drag and leather communities, trans activism, bar- and street-based publics, experimental film, and subcultural practices. It examines how we, as a culture, have come to narrate queer and trans history and investigates the ways archival practices shape those narrations. Students will learn to conduct historical research in online and analog archives, finding and integrating primary and secondary sources to write original research about the past.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Culture and Aesthetics (FA3),
Projects and Methods (FA6)
AS.389.325. Women of the Book: Female Miracle Workers, Mystics, and Material Culture, 1450-1800. 3 Credits.
From psycho-spiritual autobiographers to mystical bi-locating nuns, convent crèche-keepers to choristers of sacred music, from rock-star-status mystics to the hidden careers of women printers, engravers, and miracle-makers, this course will explore the remarkable intellectual, cultural, and imaginative contributions of women who found refuge, agency, and power within alternative lives.
Distribution Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive
AS.389.326. Curating Gertrude Stein: Queer/Modernist/Celebrity. 3 Credits.
Gertrude Stein was a writer who was disparaged, yet wildly popular; a celebrity as well as an object of scorn; openly yet invisibly queer. Reading selections of Stein’s writing and that of her friends, lovers, and enemies, we will study her networks, art collection, and cultural status, and work extensively with rare books and archival materials, to explore these dilemmas. Student research will be incorporated into a major exhibition at the George Peabody Library.
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
AS.389.410. Public Humanities & Social Justice. 3 Credits.
Investigates collaborative humanities methods that foster democratic participation among publics more broadly conceived than the academy, including participatory action research, collaborative oral history, indigenous research methods, interactive theater, participatory archival practices, and cooperative models for connecting art, artists, and audiences. Course focuses on queer, trans, and Black histories in Baltimore, includes excursions to local cultural institutions, and is co-taught by prominent public humanists, artists, and activists from Baltimore and beyond.
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)
AS.389.420. Curatorial Seminar: European Art. 3 Credits.
Working in collaboration with staff from the Baltimore Museum of Art, students assess the opportunities and challenges of the European collections; research select objects; contribute to the department's collections development plan; and conceptualize new, more global and more inclusive approaches to the displays.
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)
Psychological & Brain Sciences
AS.200.325. Social Attraction and Relationship Development. 3 Credits.
This course will cover theories and research on social attraction, both in the context of romantic and platonic relationships (friendships), at various stages of development including adolescence and later adulthood. This includes a focus on topics such as first impressions, courtship, internet applications, rejection, para-social relationships, and more. We will draw on evolutionary theories, sociocultural and situational forces, personality traits, family/peer influence, and incorporate multidisciplinary research from fields spanning psychology, communication, and sociology. Coursework includes critiques of existing literature, discussions, research proposals, and presentations.
Prerequisite(s): AS.200.133
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Science and Data (FA2),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
Public Health Studies
AS.280.225. Population, Health and Development. 3 Credits.
This course will cover the major world population changes in the past century as well as the contemporary situation and projections for this century. Topics include rapid population growth, the historical and continuing decline of death and birth rates, contraceptive methods as well as family planning and child survival programs, population aging, migration (including urbanization), population and the environment and a debate about whether the average person in the world in 2050 will be better or worse off than the average person today.
Distribution Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences
AS Foundational Abilities: Citizens and Society (FA4),
Ethics and Foundations (FA5)
EN Foundational Abilities: Engagement with Society (FA4)
Sociology
AS.230.370. Housing and Homelessness in the United States. 3 Credits.
This course will examine the role of housing, or the absence thereof, in shaping quality of life. It will explore the consequences of the places in which we live and how we are housed. Consideration will be given to overcrowding, affordability, accessibility, and past and existing housing policies and their influence on society. Special attention will be given to the problem of homelessness.
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
Theatre Arts & Studies
AS.225.318. 21st Century Female Playwrights. 3 Credits.
This is a writing intensive class exploring the current wealth of women playwrights, including Pulitzer Prize winners: Wendy Wasserstein, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, and Jackie Sibblies Drury (2019 Prize for FAIRVIEW). We will discuss Script Analysis and read (and see) plays by numerous writers including Claire Barron, Kia Corthron, Theresa Rebeck, Sarah Ruhl, Danai Gurira, Caleen Sinnette Jennings, and Hansol Jung. This class will include a mid-term and a Final Paper.
Distribution Area: Humanities
AS Foundational Abilities: Writing and Communication (FA1),
Culture and Aesthetics (FA3)
EN Foundational Abilities: Creative Expression (FA3)
Writing Intensive