Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality

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.Students may receive credit for either AS.290.330 or AS.290.420, but not both.

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.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Natural Sciences

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

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities

Much of what we know about love and desire we owe to fiction’s ability to evoke these experiences. Consider for example that the publication, in Germany, of The Sorrows of Young Werther inspired young men across Europe to dress and behave just like this lover. Just as nowadays film and television represent, as well as mold our conceptions of love, love-stories from the eighteenth-century onwards have given shape to gendered subjectivities in ways that still matter now. As, intriguingly, illness is a recurrent theme in many modern love stories, we will be prompted to decipher signs and symptoms in the bodies of mind of our protagonists. Why is it that in Western cultures, passion is tightly interwoven with a landscape of pain, suffering, and disease? In studying texts that represent major aspects of a romantic sensibility, we are indeed invited to trace the steps of a history of the body increasingly defined by gender and by medical knowledge. The readings for this class (all available in English) include: Austen, Persuasion; Balzac, The Unknown Masterpiece; Barthes, Lover’s Discourse; Goethe; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Mann, Death in Venice; Winterson, Written on the Body.

Prerequisite(s): Students who have taken AS.001.196 are not eligible to take AS.300.334.

Area: Humanities

Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach, this course examines the role that gender and sexuality play within primarily the South Korean polity and in Asia. Drawing on queer studies, feminist studies, and critical Asian studies, the class will offer a foundational framework from which to analyze how social constructs around gender and sexuality play a major part in the marginalization of communities and their access to rights and representation. We will explore questions of kinship, family, love, and intimacy as they pertain to the larger thematics of the course.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Drawing on critical race theory, and gender and sexuality studies, this course provides the analytical framework necessary to grapple with how belonging and difference are produced, manifested, and challenged within Korea’s citizenry. Students will gain knowledge on modern Korea and its diasporas and examine its construction as one rooted in a history of empire, nationalism, militarism, and neoliberalism.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course examines labor market discrimination by gender, race and ethnicity in the United States. What does the empirical evidence show, and how can we explain it? How much of the difference in observed outcomes is driven by differences in productivity characteristics and how much is due to discrimination? How have economists theorized about discrimination and what methodologies can be employed to test those theories? What has been the impact of public policy in this area; how do large corporations and educational institutions respond; and what can we learn from landmark lawsuits? The course will reinforce skills relevant to all fields of applied economics, including critical evaluation of the theoretical and empirical literature, the reasoned application of statistical techniques, and analysis of current policy issues.

Prerequisite(s): AS.180.102

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course looks at four crucial figures who have haunted feminist thought and responses to feminism over the centuries. Sappho, known as the first female poet, remains an enigmatic icon of feminine desire and creativity; Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus and the heroine of Sophocles’s play Antigone, still inspires feminist analyses of women’s relationship to law, the state and civil society; and Joan of Arc, the militant maid of Orleans, troubles thinking about women and violence as well as women, religion and spirituality. The last figure is Mary Wollstonecraft, often cited as the first modern feminist. The course will examine literary works written about these iconic figures, as well as contemporary feminist writing about their influence and viability as models for the future of feminism.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

An exploration of the achievements and investments of one of the most influential coteries in the history of Britain. In addition to delving into key fictions by Virginia Woolf, we will examine novels by Leonard Woolf and E. M. Forster, art criticism by Roger Fry and Clive Bell, biographical essays by Lytton Strachey, economic writings by John Maynard Keynes, and poetry by T. S. Eliot.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This is the moment for a course on the Canadian climate activist, poet, and novelist Margaret Atwood. Best known for her dystopian The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Atwood's monitory visions in poetry, short stories, non-fiction and novels attend to themes of malevolence, metamorphosis, memory, genetic mutation, totalitarianism, corporate control, feminism, and climate disaster, while rooted in traditions of folktale, myth, and ironic detachment. Among other works, including poetry and non-fiction, we will read novels The Handmaid's Tale, The Testaments, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam, exploring Atwood's "writing with intent." Seminar discussion; midterm; class presentations; two short papers and one final project.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Dickinson’s poetry, more than most, has seemed to prompt creativity in others. In the past two decades, especially, poets, writers, critics, and filmmakers have found their own voices in response to hers. We will focus on the formal, aesthetic, historical and gendered aspects of her poetry as we try to understand, and benefit from, this power to elicit response. Exams are unlikely. Instead, expect close attention to your own writing, as we pay close attention to hers.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Concepts include expansion, crowding, data collection, the miniscule, temporality, the planetary and the cosmic in the first age of European mercantile activity and colonial expansion. With readings from world-systems theory and theories of the anthropocene, our case studies will comprise pre-modern English literary texts, including Milton, Paradise Lost, Anne Bradstreet, The Four Monarchies, early modern science (Hooke, Newton), Defoe, The Storm, and early British and colonial American holdings in the Garrett Library. The class will be hands-on, working with material from Special Collections, and will include working towards a digital project (no digital project background necessary).

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Humanities

From tap dancer to gangster, assassin to anguished teen, versions of the male in film from the silent era to the present. Cross-listed with Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. One core course in Film and Media Studies is preferred but not required.

Area: Humanities

This course will explore a range of Almodóvar’s work, from the early films emerging out of La Movida Madrileña up to and including The Human Voice and Parallel Mothers, with particular emphasis on All About My Mother, Talk to Her, Bad Education, Volver, and Pain and Glory. We will examine the director’s influences and antecedents—Bunuel, Hitchcock, Sirk, Cassavetes, among others—against the backdrop of Spain’s dramatic political and cultural transformation after the death of Franco. And we will closely analyze the characteristics that define Almodóvar’s status as an auteur: his groundbreaking approach to sexuality, queer politics and gender transformation; his innovative use of melodrama; and his dazzlingly eclectic visual style.

Area: Humanities

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. Cross-listed with WGS. No pre-requisite.

Area: Humanities

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

Prerequisite(s): AS.061.140 OR AS.061.141 OR AS.061.226

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

Examines changing ideals of masculinity in France after 1960 as they found expression on film, rooting the work of iconic stars and directors in their cultural, political and historical contexts.

Area: Humanities

The idea that the “personal” is “political” finds no greater example than in the politics of reproduction. From inheritance laws, the rights of the offspring of enslaved peoples, or policies to reduce (or increase) fertility, the modern nation state has had a great deal to say about the use and produce of human bodies. In this First-Year Seminar, we will examine how formal and informal institutions have governed reproductive practices over the past 200 years. We will look at how family structures and economic development map onto fertility, and at how technological innovations in fertility control (including birth control and IVF) have influenced women's economic and political participation. We will also consider whether reproductive policies have differential impacts for LGBTQ households. Finally, we examine the “dark side” of reproductive policies -- not only sterilization campaigns but also the treatment of sex workers and sex-selective abortion -- to understand how state policies have divided households based on race, class, and occupation.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Humanities

In this First-Year Seminar students will develop an understanding of the ways in which gender structures health and well being through adulthood and later life. The experience of sexual minorities and the ntersection of gender with class and ethnicity will also be discussed. Students will be expected to participate actively and lead discussions on specific topics.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Why are cities associated with sex and vice? Are cities a natural refuge for LGBT people? This course explores the role of American cities in the history of sexuality.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course uses the writings of medieval women to explore their social and religious worlds and orients visionary writing within the broader narrative of religious movements from the 12th-14th centuries.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course examines reproductive politics in the United States from the colonial era to the present. Topics include contraception, abortion, and sterilization, emphasizing the impact of gender, class, and race.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This course will examine how early modern views on the body, gender, and sexuality shaped beliefs about the abilities and rights of women and men.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

A research-intensive seminar, this course uses the rich history of Maryland to approach broader themes in early modern American and global history including colonialism, slavery, revolution, race, gender, and sex.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

This seminar will problematize the gradual advent of gender across the life sciences, clinic, anthropology, and state power by pairing them with competing Black, Indigenous, queer and trans vernacular theories of the same.

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This seminar will offer training in feminist, queer, transgender and postcolonial approaches to the history of sexuality by exploring what methods are adequate to writing the history of trans femininity as a specifically nineteenth and twentieth century phenomenon. Areas of emphasis will include histories of sexology, sex work, social movements, and trans feminism and its opponents. The primary geographic focus will be the US, but through a transnational lens that connects to Western Europe, South Asia, and Latin America.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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, engaging viewers, or spurring participation, performance art asks what it means to perform, and what kinds of actions count, in contemporary culture. As such, performance art allows us to rethink established art historical concerns with form, perspective, and materiality, while offering critical insight into everyday life. 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 diverse array of artists and practices will be supplemented by readings in art history and criticism, as well as in feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and political thought.

Area: Humanities

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

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

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

Area: Humanities

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

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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

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.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

While there is a vast literature on reproduction in a global context, this course will focus on the arc of what we might call decolonial histories of reproduction—those that center issues of justice, freedom, intimacy, and agency, as well as cultural negotiation, conflict, and change. Students will write critical histories of reproduction, with attention to the ways in which reproductive politics interface with institutions that exert hegemonic, racialized, gendered, and ableist forms of state power and colonial power. We will also appreciate the ways in which reproduction interacts with other—non geographically-bound, non-institutionalized, and non-state mediated—forms of biopolitical power. We will analyze how the historiography has evolved over time and discuss future directions in the field.

This course invites students to take the perspective of gender and sexuality on health and medicine. In this course, we do not see gender and sexuality as a separate domain of health. Instead, we will learn how a gender perspective is in fact crucial for critically exposing the ways in which medicine is interpenetrated by social life and by law. For example, what technologies and discourses constitute “the normal”? How is sexuality braided into disease surveillance? How do we understand the lawfare on the terrain of reproductive rights? What aspects of disease are suppressed in dominant forms of knowledge production, due to the undervaluation of gendered forms of experience? We will take cases involving HIV/AIDS; reproductive justice and rights; poverty, marginality and queer kinship; and household patterns of care.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

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

Area: Humanities

This seminar examines recent emerging narrative and documentary global feminist filmmakers, applying feminist theory, intersectional theory, cine´ma ve´rite´, theory of nonviolence, and intersubjectivity to understand their work. Each week, we will examine one filmmaker’s approach to their own personal practice of feminist filmmaking, and either interview them during our class or screen a pre-recorded zoom interview. In this seminar students will go beyond a theoretical feminist film criticism to one introduced into a lived and living feminist film practice. The filmmakers in question are Marialy Rivas (Chile), Elisabeth Scharang (Austria), Habiba Djahine (Algeria), Patricia Ortega (Venezuela and Argentina), Wanuri Kahiu (Kenya), Naomi Kawase (Japan), Sandra Kogut (Brazil), Kirsten Johnson (USA), TT the Artist (USA), Patricia Ramos (Cuba), Susana de Sousa Dias (Portugal), Claudia Llosa (Peru), Alina Marazzi (Italy), Rosine Mfetko Mbakam (Cameroun and Belgium).

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

From the time of its invention in the Hispano-Arabic world, as a kind of counterfeit religion, love has been a paradoxical, transgressive phenomenon: mystical, adulterous, con game, parlor game, alienation or self-affirmation. We’ll explore a few crucial moments in its long history, from Socrates's female teacher Diotima to the reality show Love is Blind, and we'll bring a literary, sociological and anthropological approach to the challenges posed by love's protean discourse. Works by Plato, Saint Augustine, Ibn Hazm, the abbess Héloïse, Sartre, Beauvoir, Barthes, Ernaux, Houellebecq, and others. Readings and discussion in French.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.301

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

This course traces a literary history of sexuality from the Middle Ages to contemporary women’s writing. We will analyze how sexual pleasure changed over time. In particular, we will discuss what role literature plays in the reproduction and transformation of bodily pleasures. The course explores how the pleasures of bodies are imagined in and through literature, but also whether words are bodies that give pleasure and perhaps even have their own pleasures.

Area: Humanities

This seminar will explore the narrative, dramatic, and quasi-journalistic work of Heinrich von Kleist in its philosophical and literary environment. We will examine how Kleist comments on and parodies the positions of the enlightenment, German Idealism, Weimar classicism, and the theater establishment. We will pay particular attention to the way he combines the verbal and the visual in his performative, narrative, and syntactic strategies, and analyze how this contributes to a specifically Kleistian sense of humor.Grading: P/F

In this course we will explore the problem of the relationship of women to dynastic power in the literature and culture of late medieval and Renaissance in Italy. Beginning from Giovanni Boccaccio’s famously ambivalent portraits of women in the Decameron and his treatise On Famous Women, we will locate women within an early modern system of inherited power and literary representations. We will then move to study a series of genealogically motivated chivalric poems (such as Orlando innamorato, Orlando furioso, Floridoro, Gerusalemme liberata) which propose a number of roles for women: warriors, queens, saints, monsters, saviors, poets, founders. These texts return again and again to the key role of women in establishing and maintaining dynastic continuity within noble families, but also to the dangers they pose to dynastic stability. We will try to understand how these literary texts work within the social and political context of the Italian city- states of this period. We will also study the involvement of women in the production and circulation of literary texts, focussing on notable patrons of the arts like Isabella d'Este and Lucrezia Borgia, and on important poets like Vittoria Colonna.

Area: Humanities

What does it mean to be “other,” and how can reading about experiences of otherness affect our understanding of historical moments? In this interdisciplinary survey of contemporary Italian literature, students will read through the lens of “the other” in order to highlight both the milieu of lived experiences (often lived by the authors themselves) outside of sociocultural ideals, and the role they play within modern Italian canon. Combining gender studies, animal studies, posthumanism, and other theoretical frameworks, students will examine works from authors such as Sibilla Aleramo, Carlo Levi, Elena Ferrante, Igiaba Scego, and directors Vittorio De Sica, and Alice Rohrwacher. Taught in English—students wishing to do coursework in Italian should register for AS.214.363 (02).

Area: Humanities

Elena Ferrante is Italy’s most acclaimed contemporary novelist, although her true identity remains unconfirmed. Having been translated into and published in 45 languages, with over 15 million copies sold worldwide, her ‘Neapolitan Quartet’ triggered what has been called ‘Ferrante Fever.’ Through reading and discussion of Ferrante’s works (novels, letters, and a fairytale) and their screen adaptations— the HBO TV series My Brilliant Friend and Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter (2022) —we shall discover the reasons behind this global, literary phenomenon while exploring themes such as gender, memory, trauma, women’s participation in, or exclusion from, history, and the internal violence of a rapidly changing society. In addition to Ferrante’s works, we shall also read Anna Maria Ortese, Elsa Morante, and Fabrizia Ramondino to understand the influence of women writers from previous generations on Ferrante’s work. This class is taught in English. Additional discussion sessions in Italian will be offered.

Area: Humanities

We will analyze and discuss four novels and three films impacted by gender violence and political idolatry under shattering stress. Oficio de tinieblas or The Book of Lamentations (1962) by Rosario Castellanos (Mexico). Zama (1956) by Antonio di Benedetto (Argentina). Delirio or Delirium (2004) by Laura Restrepo (Colombia). El ruido de las cosas al caer or The Noise of Things Falling (2011) by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombia). In addition, we will examine in depth films by Lucrecia Martel (Argentina): the short Rey muerto (1995), La ciénaga (2001), and her own version of Zama (2017). Course taught in Spanish.

Prerequisite(s): AS.210.312

Area: Humanities

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

Area: Humanities

Many opera scholars have noted that opera abuses its female characters. Many operatic heroines die, whether from violent acts or chronic diseases. However, women in opera also wield great power through their voices as ambitious queens, cunning servants, magical beings, and femmes fatales. In this course we will examine how these female characters operate through explorations of the operas’ historical context, their texts and scores, and modern performance practice. Spanning from the 17th to 21st centuries, the repertoire studied in this class will provide an introduction to opera history. At the same time, we will delve deeply into different ways to do close analyses of opera through the lens of gender, reading the work of such thinkers as Carolyn Abbate, Naomi Andre, Adriana Caverero, Catherine Clément, and Wayne Koestenbaum.

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

How do art historians and archaeologists recover and study genders and sexualities of ancient people? This writing-intensive seminar looks at texts and objects from ancient Egypt, Assyria, and Greece through the lens of gender and sexuality studies. Beyond exploring concepts of gender in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean, students will also consider how modern scholars have approached, recovered, and written about ancient gender identities. There are no prerequisites for this course.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

How did women move within their gendered spheres of influence in ancient Egyptian society? How do scholars discuss women in the ancient world and what are the spheres influence often allotted to women? How can we investigate the lives of women through the material record? What methodologies are applied by scholars to study women in antiquity? This course seeks to explore these questions and much more. The course will utilize textual and material evidence to examine and deconstruct the economic, social, religious, and political roles of women in ancient Egypt.

Area: Humanities

Seminar on Beauvoir’s moral philosophy, covering the major works of the 1940s. Readings will include selections from The Blood of Others, Pyrrhus and Cineas, All Men are Mortal, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Second Sex. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates. (Beginning undergraduates should contact Professor Kosch.) No prerequisites.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Humanities

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.

Area: Humanities

Introduction to queer & trans politics and culture in the period immediately preceding the gay liberation movement, from the early to late 1960s, focusing on intersections of race, sexuality, and gender. Course examines how we have come to narrate queer & trans history and investigates the ways archival practices shape conceptions of queer & trans life. Students learn research methods as they draw on and contribute to the university’s digitized archival collections.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

This course introduces students to a blend of public history, queer studies and transgender studies. Students learn oral history and archival research methods as they draw on and contribute to the university’s archival, museum, and library collections.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

How are museums responding to the pressures to be more equitable, inclusive, and accessible towards public audiences and their staff? Students go behind the scenes of the Smithsonian, Baltimore Museum of Industry and Baltimore Museum of Art to meet with working groups and staff charged with transforming their institutions. Includes site visits, hands-on experiences and research on best practices.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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 in spring 2024.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Students examine select texts and archival materials related to Emily Dickinson, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Edith Wharton, Ida B. Wells, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Sui Sin Far, Alice Duer Miller, and Zora Neale Hurston. Students interrogate how these writers navigated the constraints of gender, as informed by race and class, in the decades before and after the 19th Amendment and consider literary collecting in relation to gendered cultural politics.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

Students learn to conduct, analyze, and interpret their own oral histories as they contribute to a wide-ranging project documenting queer worldmaking in the Baltimore-Washington D.C. region. We engage with scholarship from performance studies, queer of color critique, LGBTQ history, and public humanities to consider the politics of storytelling and the promises of public-facing oral history projects. Students have the option of developing podcasts, multimedia projects, and public humanities proposals as their final assignment.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

As part of an ongoing collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art, students are invited to contribute to a special exhibition about touch and tactility in 20th century American art. Research artists such as Jasper Johns, Yoko Ono, Betye Saar, Felix Gonzalex-Torres, create thematic installations, and conceptualize museum interpretation to activate the tactile dimensions of art.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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, urbanization, population and the environment and the demographic effects of HIV/AIDS and Covid.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

The discussion surrounding women’s health has often remained limited to understanding women’s reproductive health needs. This course seeks to move beyond this topic to explore the key issues affecting women’s health, utilizing a life course perspective. This undergraduate course will focus on a select number of themes including: a) understanding the history of women’s health; b) sexual and reproductive health; c) maternal health; d) violence against women and girls; e) the needs of younger girls and aging women; and f) how mental health and stigma affect women. The course brings both U.S. and global perspectives to enhance the understanding of how the field of women’s health has evolved over time. It will also address some of the challenges public health professionals continue to face in addressing the health and wellbeing of women today. This seminar-style course combines class presentations with journal clubs and small group discussions. Gordis Teaching Fellowship course. Priority registration is given to Public Health Studies majors. Other students will be permitted to register as space allows.

Prerequisite(s): AS.280.350

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Writing Intensive

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

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

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Sociological perspectives on contemporary family life, including marriage and divorce, cohabitation, single parenthood, same sex partnerships, children’s wellbeing, balancing work and family responsibilities, domestic violence, and government policy toward families.

Area: Social and Behavioral Sciences

Tony Kushner’s epoch-making play weaves together astonishingly diverse sides of America in a broad tapestry; a modern work that emerged at the end of the 20th Century, now being revived world wide: it provides keys to understanding the American zeitgeist and the coming transformations of the culture. In one pivotal work we find the emergence of LGBT rights, the Mormon Church, the AIDS epidemic, the new “spirituality,” the Reagan-era transformation of both government and business, and the looming figure of Roy Cohn whose influence in American politics “behind the scenes” ranged from the Rosenberg trial to his work as counsel for the McCarthy Committee in the 1950s: and even his legacy in the 2016 as primary political and business mentor of the current President of the United States.

Area: Humanities, Social and Behavioral Sciences

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.

Area: Humanities

Writing Intensive