This course interrogates representations of blackness in American popular culture. Using an interdisciplinary lens that considers the social, political, cultural, and historical realities that inform popular culture, students investigate how blackness is constructed and its implications.
How do film and literature inform our understanding of the evolving concepts of art, ideology and material conditions in modern China? How have literary and cinematic representations changed over the last century to accommodate and facilitate social transformations? What are the characteristics of the cultural productions from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan? This course helps students develop a critical sense and appreciation for Chinese cinema and literature. Taught in English.
This course examines Chinese literary and cultural practices related to gender and sexuality from the turn of the twentieth century to the present. Using primary texts in translation, theoretical works, films, and visual materials, students explore the personal and collective politics involved in constructions of gender, sexuality, desire, and identity. Taught in English.
A study of the Canterbury Tales and other poems by Chaucer. A term paper is usually expected.
A study of several plays written before 1600.
A study of the major sixteenth-century genres, with emphasis on sources, developments, and defining concerns. Readings include the sonnets of Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare; the mythological verse narratives of Marlowe and Shakespeare; the pastoral poems of Spenser; and Books I and III of Spenser's Faerie Queene.
This course explores some of the radical shifts that occurred in English literature during the late eighteenth century. These developments involved not only changes in style, subject matter, and poetic theory, but also changes in the role of the author and the social purpose of writing. Both “major” and “minor” authors, male and female, are read as part of a complex revolution in cultural taste and literary practice.
A study of twentieth-century literature written in English from Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean, concentrating on colonial and post-colonial themes, as well as issues of gender, politics, and nationalism. Possible authors include Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Nadine Gordimer, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, V. S. Naipaul, and Derek Walcott.
This course examines women's participation in social and political movements throughout the world since the late eighteenth century in order to understand how gender (the set of beliefs each culture has regarding male and female difference) has affected women's involvement. The course explores a variety of gender-based arguments that women have used to bring social change, assessing whether these approaches are effective or ultimately limit women to a narrow range of issues. Some attention is paid to how gender affects men's involvement in social movements.
This course examines some of the most significant conflicts and turning points in the history of conception, pregnancy, and childbirth in Europe and its Caribbean slave colonies from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. We approach women’s reproductive bodies as contested sites of political struggle over issues as diverse as slavery, colonialism, population growth and birth control, religious reform, midwifery, the medicalization of childbirth, and nation-building. Centering women’s voices and experiences of the birth process where the sources allow us, we study the cultures and communities that women of diverse racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds constructed around biological reproduction.
A survey of the major changes in American women's lives since the end of the last century, including increased access to education, movement into the labor market, and changes in reproductive behavior and in their role within the family. Special consideration will be given to the movements for women's rights.
A general survey of political life in Latin America, as well as specific study of the most important countries-Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela. Determinants and outcomes of political process are studied, as well as the political process itself. Consideration is given to both domestic and foreign influences and policies.