Undergraduate Courses

AFAM 367/AMST431/ER&M 344/WGSS 455
Representation and the Black Female Body
Hazel Carby
Th 2.30-4.20
Examination of how some black women have responded to the racialization of societies and to the culture and politics of gendering and sexuality in the twentieth century in Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Forms and media include fiction, poetry, autobiography, paintings, sculpture, performance art and film, and music.

Undergraduate Courses

AFAM 110 01 (11185)
Freedom and Identity in Black Cultures
Naomi Pabst
TTh 1.00-2.15
2HTBA
Introduction to major themes and topics in African American experiences; basic methods of interdisciplinary analysis and interpretation in African American studies. Topics include black economic, political, and social institutions; self-identity and social status; literature, art, film, and music; and political and social issues and their relationship to changing social structures.

AFAM 161 01 (13421)/ HIST 186
African American History: from the Beginning to Emancipation
William King
TTh 11.30-12.20

AFAM 191 01 (11186) / AFST218 / FREN230 / LITR266
Francophone African and Caribbean Literature
Christopher Miller
T 1.30-3.20
A comprehensive survey of literature written in French from sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. Introduction to the context of French colonialism and its institutions; consideration of both local and global culture; independence and the postcolonial era. Authors include Senghor, Césaire, Sembène (including film), Kourouma, Bâ, Belaya, Condé, and Lopes.

AFAM 228 01 (11187) / HSAR375
African American Artists in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Century
Kelly Jones
MW 11.30-12.45
A study of the ways in which African American artists have developed a presence in the visual arts over the past century through stylistic approaches such as romanticism, modernism, and formalism, as well as by using strategies identified with postmodernism, feminism, and cultural nationalism.

AFAM 279/ AMST 273/ WGSS 342
Black Women's Literature
Naomi Pabst
Th 3.30-5.20
Examination of literary and critical writings of black women of the post-civil rights generation. Exploration of the ways these writers construct and contest the cultural, ideological, and political parameters of black womanhood. Topics include narrative strategy, modes of representation, and textual intersections of race, gender, sexuality, color, ethnicity, nationality, class, and generation. Texts placed within the context of black women's literary legacies.

AFAM 296 01 (11190) / AMST296 / ENG296
African American Literature III: 1970 to the Present
Elizabeth Alexander
MW 11.30-12.45
1HTBA
A survey of African American literature of the past thirty years, including works by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Anna Deavere Smith, and Danzy Senna. Topics include black feminist literature, black gay and lesbian literature, developments in literary criticism and theory, and contemporary black drama.

AFAM 320 01 (11191)
Black Culture and Resistance
Theresa Runstedtler
Th 2.30-4.20
Exploration of the intersection of black popular culture and resistance, with attention to both the liberating and the limiting aspects of cultural forms - from folklore to fashion to film - as modes of social critique and collective inspiration in the African American struggle against racial oppression.

AFAM 347 01 (11193)
Caribbean Lives: Psyco-Social Aspects
Ezra Griffith
W 2.30-4.20
A study of the development over time of individuals living in the English-speaking Caribbean. Attention both to the portraiture of the lives and to the psycho-social context in which the individuals lived. Discussion of the unique elements in Caribbean life that facilitated or inhibited the developmental process.

AFAM 352 01 (11194) AMST438/ER&M291/LITR295/WGSS343
Caribbean Diasporic Literature
Hazel Carby
T 1.30-3.20
An examination of contemporary literature written by Caribbean writers who have migrated to, or who journey between, different countries around the Atlantic rim. Focus on literature written in English in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, both fiction and nonfiction. Writers include Caryl Phillips, Nalo Hopkinson, and Jamaica Kincaid.

AFAM 364 01 (11195) /HSAR473
African Diaspora Photography
Kellie Jones
T 1.30-3.20
Discussion of the African diaspora and its intersection with photographic history and theory. Consideration of the impact that people of African descent have had on photography, both as practitioners and as image and representational strategy.

AFAM 408 01 (11196) /AFAM596/AMST460/AMST641/ENGL443/ENGL947
Twentieth Century African American Poetry
Robert Stepto
T 1.30-3.20
The African American practice of poetry between 1900 and 1960, especially of sonnets, ballads, sermonic, and blues poems. Poets studied include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden. Includes sessions at the Beinecke Library for inspection and discussion of original editions, manuscripts, letters, and other archival material.

AFAM 418 01 (11197) /AFAM732/FILM421/FILM716/LITR363
Film and Harlem Renaissance
Terry Francis
M 7.00-9.00p
W 3.30-5.30
Consideration of the cinematic expressions and canonical writings of the Harlem Renaissance. Focus on films from the 1890s to the late 1940s, including early images of African Americans, "race movies" of the silent and sound eras, and American and foreign films that feature black stars.

AFAM 424 01 (11198) /HIST441/HSHM433
Race and Medicine in America, 1800-2000
Susan Lederer
T 1.30-3.20
An examination of the history of race and medicine in the United States, primarily but not exclusively focused on African Americans' encounters with the health care system. Topics include slavery and health; doctors, immigrants, and epidemics; the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and the use of minorities as research subjects; and race and genetic disease.

AFAM 432 01 (11200) /AFAM748/AMST413/AMST639/ENGL385
Rethinking the African American Literary Canon
Elizabeth Alexander
T. 3.30-5.20
A reexamination of works central to the conventional African American literary canon, focusing on new historical, literary, and theoretical contexts for these writings. Authors include Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Robert Hayden, Lorraine Hansberry, and Toni Morrison.
Some prior knowledge of African American literature recommended.

AFAM 431 01 (11199)/AFAM557/AMST431/AMST703/ANTH481/ANTH681
Introduction to Jazz Studies
John Szwed
T 1.30-3.20
An overview of jazz and its cultural history, with consideration of the influence of jazz on the visual arts, dance, literature, and film; an introduction to the scholarship and methods of jazz studies.

AFAM 438 01 (11202) /HIST449
Foundations of African American Culture
Jennifer Baszile
Th 9.30-11.20
An exploration of the range of African American experiences in North America through the Civil War era. Focus on the changing nature of identities, specifically racial categories, during this period. Topics include the meaning of Africa, the rise of African American culture, changing ideas of freedom, free black communities, abolition, and gender.

AFAM 443 01 (11204) /AMST423/HIST437
Black Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century
Jonathan Holloway
Th 1.30-3.20
An examination of the traditions, contexts, and trajectories of black intellectual and social activist discourse since 1895. Topics include racial authenticity politics, intraracial class conflict, high versus low culture, protest forms, and the complicating narratives of gender and class in racialist thought.

AFAM 471 01 (11205)
Independent Study: African American Studies
DUS: Director of Undergraduate Studies
1 HTBA
Independent research under the direction of a member of the department on a special topic in African American Studies not covered in other courses. Permission of the director of undergraduate studies and of the instructor directing the research is required. A proposal signed by the instructor must be submitted to the director of undergraduate studies by the end of the second week of classes. The instructor meets with the student regularly, typically for an hour a week, and the student writes a final paper or a series of short essays.
May be elected for one or two terms.

AFST 290 01 (11210) /ANTH290
Gender and Sexuality in Africa
Eric Worby
MW 2.30-3.45
Exploration of the diverse and changing ways in which gender and sexuality are informed by culture, politics, religion, and social organization in colonial and postcolonial Africa.

AFST 486 01 (11219) /HIST486
Slavery and the Slave Trade in Africa
Robert Harms
T 1.30-3.20
The slave trade from the African perspective. Analysis of why slavery developed in Africa and how it operated. The long-term social, political, and economic effects of the Atlantic slave trade.

AMST 270 01 (11231) /HIST170/WGSS270
Women in America: from the Colonial Period to 1900
Rebecca Tannenbaum
MWF 11.30-12.20
Survey of the history of women and gender roles from the English settlement of the North American coast to 1900. Emphasis on work and family roles, social and political movements, and regional, racial, and cultural variation.

AMST 322 01 (11238) /WGSS371
Gender, Family, and Cultural Identity in Asia and the United States: a Dialogue
Geetanjali Chanda
MW 1.00-2.15
A cross-cultural dialogue focusing on family, gender, and identity. An exploration of how specific Asian countries and people approach issues of religion, dress, education, and food as identity markers; U.S. perceptions and reactions to similar issues.

AMST 349 01 (11243) /ER&M288/WGSS434
Border Feminism
Alicia Camacho
W 1.30-3.20
An examination of the experience of women of Mexican descent in the United States in relation to cultural and political movements in the Third World.

AMST 444 01 (11251)
Religion, Nationalism, and Diaspora
Brandi Hughes
Th 3.30-5.20
Exploration of religion as a mediating language and thematic counterpoint for African American expressions of communal belonging. Histories of African American Christianity, Islam, and Africanist religious beliefs studied in relationship to narratives, performances, and visual arts that record the intersections of religion, popular culture, and political struggles for African American freedom in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

AMST 482 01 (11254) /WGSS340
History of Femist Thought
Laura Wexler
W 2.30-4.20
Key works from the history of feminist thought in Britain, France, and the United States from the Enlightenment to the present, with related writings on gender. Authors include Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Mill, Freud, Woolf, de Beauvoir, Walker, Irigaray, Paglia, and Butler.

ANTH 287 01 (11275) /WGSS387
Feminist Ethnographies
Karen Nakamura
TTh 2.30-3.45
Exploration of developments in feminist anthropology through close reading of ethnographies written in the past thirty years. Focus on both feminist research methods and the question of authority and voice.

ANTH 352 01 (11282)
Gender in Southeast Asia
Savoja Dorairajoo
T 9.30-11.20
Themes in gender research in Southeast Asia; the Western category “gender” as applied in the Southeast Asian context. Topics include cultural notions of male and female; institutions such as family, religion, the state, and nongovernmental organizations as they apply gender to societies; a cross-cultural perspective on alternate gender identities; and why and how gender both constructs and is constructed by individuals and social institutions.

ENGL 359/WGSS 352
Feminist Perspectives on Literature
Margaret Homans
F 1:30-3:20
Feminist and queer methods in literary criticism. Topics include the sexual politics of literary traditions; gender and sexuality in relation to plot, narrative, authorship, language, and theories of reading and popular culture; voice, silence, and the politics of representation; and the contributions of literature to feminist and queer theory and political movements. Principle readings include works by Monique Wittig, Alice Walker, Virginia Woolf, Maxine Hong Kingston, Audre Lorde, Sandra Cisneros, Elizabeth Bishop.

ENGL 386/AMST 440
Legal Fictions: Race and Law in Twentieth-Century American Culture
Sanda Lwin
M 2:30-4:20
An examination of the aesthetics and politics of race in twentieth-century American culture through readings of literary and legal narratives. Topics include the color line, citizenship, exclusion, internment, miscegenation, passing, and segregation. Literary and legal texts, supplemented by essays from field of critical race history.

EP&E 332 01 (13628) /PLSC320
Liberalism, Gender and Multiculturalism
Seyla Benhabib
T 9.30-11.20

ER&M 200 01 (11650)
Introduction to Ethnicity, Race and Migration
Alicia Camacho
MW 11.30-12.45
Exploration of the historical roots of contemporary ethnic and racial formations and competing theories of ethnicity, race, and migration. Examination of the cultural constructions and social practices of race, ethnicity, and migration in the United States and around the world.

FILM 380 01 (11695) /LITR410/WGSS338
Women and Cinema
Moira Fradinger
M 7.00-9.00p
W 3.30-5.20
An introduction to theoretical debates on how issues of gender and sexuality are played out in cinema. Special attention to the works of women filmmakers around the world, to debates within feminist film theory and the intellectual traditions that inform them, and to the roles that women have historically played in cinema. Films by Ida Lupino, Germaine Dulac, Maya Deren, Margaret Von Trotta, Maria Luisa Bemberg, Susana Amaral, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and others.

HIST 433 01 (11833) /HIST950/JDST385/JDST787/RLST225/RLST795
Women and Judaism
Paula Hyman
M 1.30-3.20
An exploration of the roles and representation of Jewish women in the modern period. Special attention to the role of gender in Judaism; the social, cultural, and political activity of women; and the development and impact of feminism.
For History majors, counts toward either European or U.S. distributional credit, upon application to the director of undergraduate studies.

HIST 442 01 (11839) /HSHM445/WGSS453
Women and Medicine in America from the Colonial Era to the Present
Naomi Rogers
T 9.30-11.20
American women from the colonial era to the present as midwives, patients, healers, reformers, revolutionaries, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Ways that women have shaped American health care and medical research.
Prospective junior History majors should apply for seminars for the following term on forms provided by the department. Forms will be available in 237 HGS after midterm in the fall and after break in the spring. On these forms students indicate their first three choices of seminars for each term. All students who wish to preregister must declare their major and take the mandatory History library orientation by the end of the first week after midterm in the fall and by the end of the first week after break in the spring. Lists of assignments for the following term will be made available as soon as possible, posted outside 237 HGS. In September and in January, application for admission should be made directly to the instructors of the seminars, who will admit students to remaining vacancies in their seminars. Priority is given to applications from juniors, then seniors, majoring in History, but applications are also accepted from qualified sophomores and from students majoring in other disciplines or programs.

INTS 380 01 (12931)
Race and Ethnicity in the Americas
Natalia Sobrevilla Perea
W 1.30-3.20

LITR 232 01 (12029) /ITAL240/WGSS240
Women Intellectuals in Italy
Francesca Cadel
3 HTBA
The presence of women in Italian intellectual life from Renaissance to modern Italy. The representation of gender and social identity in art, literature, and science from Vittoria Colonna to Rita Levi Montalcini.

LITR 233 01 (12030) /ENGL305
Austen and Bronte and Twentieth-Century Women's Novels
Katie Trumpener
MW 2.30-3.45
Examination of ways that twentieth-century British, American, and anglophone writers rewrite, revise, and reconcile key novels by Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë as prototypes of a women's novel tradition. Particular attention to narrative voice, reader identification, and the novel's function as a record of social norms and as an agent of historical change. Novels by Edith Wharton, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Drabble, Cynthia Ozick, Jean Rhys, and others; secondary readings by Virginia Woolf, Edmund Wilson, Edward Said, Claudia Johnson, and D. A. Miller.

PLSC 214 01 (12232) /PLSC817
Race and Violence in American Cities
Douglas Rae
Paul Bass
M 3.30-5.20
An examination of racial violence in American cities in the closing years of the civil rights era, and of the implications of that violence for subsequent politics and policy. A central case study is the 1969 Black Panther murder of Alex Rackley, mistakenly identified as an FBI informer.

SOCY 143 01 (12370)
Race and Ehnicity
Averil Clarke
TTh 9.00-10.15
An introduction to the study of race and ethnicity from a sociological perspective. Focus on how racial and ethnic differences are constituted and affect individual life outcomes. Attention to both local and national communities, as well as the political and economic bases of ethnic and race relations in the history of the United States.

WGSS 110 01 (12464)
Gender and Sexuality in Society
Megan Sinnott
MW 1.00-2.15
A broad overview of the issues, theories, and approaches involved in the study of sexuality and gender and in the discipline of women's studies.

WGSS 255 01 (12467)
Biology, Gender and Sexuality
William Summers
TTh 10.30-11.20
1HTBA
A critical examination of current biological thinking about gender differences and their origins; male-female sexual dimorphisms and their variations; the continuum from essentialism to constructionism; the mental and cognitive aspects of sexuality; theories of eroticism and sex-object choice; physiology of sexual responses; and genetic factors in the biology of behavior.
For students in the Class of 2008 and previous classes, counts toward the natural science requirement.

WGSS 296 01 (13438)
Making Modern Sexual Difference
Jonathan Katz
TTh 4.00-5.15

WGSS 307 01 (12472)
White Masculinity and Sexuality in U.S. Popular Culture
David Agruss
Th 1.30-3.20
An examination of white male masculinity and sexuality in a contemporary U.S. context, tracing the circuitous connections among hyperbolic masculinity, heterosexuality, queerness, and the commodification of idealized whiteness in literature, film, and popular culture.

WGSS 356 01 (13867)
Women and Nature
Maria Trumpler
T 3.30-5.20

WGSS 362 01 (12480)
Reading Gender and Sexuality in the Archive
David Agruss
Th 9.30-11.20
Discussion of a wide range of theoretical approaches to research on gender and sexuality studies, including historicism, psychoanalysis, deconstruction, ideology critique, and postcolonial theory. Frequent library visits to examine various collections, databases, and finding tools.
Fulfills the methods requirement.

WGSS 403 01 (13440) /EAST403/HIST476/KREN210
Confucianism and Feminism in KoreaS
Taik Kyun Kim
Th 1.30-3.20

AFAM 505 01 (10716) /AMST643/HIST772
Theorizing the Racial Formation of the United States in the Early Twenty-first Century
Jonathan Holloway
W 1.30-3.20
A designated core course for students in the joint Ph.D. program; also open to students in American Studies and History. The interdisciplinary seminar includes readings from the fields of critical legal studies, cultural studies, literary history, history, politics, and sociology.

AFAM 596 01 (10723) /AFAM408/AMST460/AMST641/ENGL443/ENGL947
African American Poets of the Modern Era
Robert Stepto
T 1.30-3.20
The African American practice of poetry between 1900 and 1960, especially of sonnets, ballads, sermonic, and blues poems. Poets studied include Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden. The classes include sessions at Beinecke Library for the inspection and discussion of original editions, manuscripts, letters, and other archival materials.

AMST 645 01 (10735) /AFAM723/CPLT949
Black Intellectuals of the Caribbean Diaspora
Hazel Carby
M 1.30-3.20 CO493 313
This course examines work by writers of Caribbean descent from different regions of the transatlantic world. In response to contemporary interest in issues of globalization, the premise of the course is that in the world maps of these black intellectuals we can see the intertwined and interdependent histories and relations of the Americas, Europe, and Africa. Thinking globally is not a new experience for black peoples and we need to understand the ways in which what we have come to understand and represent as 'Caribbeanness' is a condition of movement. Literature is most frequently taught within the boundaries of a particular nation, but this course focuses on the work of writers who shape the Caribbean identities of their characters as traveling black subjects and refuse to restrain their fiction within the limits of any one national identity. We practice a new and global type of cognitive mapping as we read and explore the meanings of terms like black trans-nationalism, migrancy, globalization, and empire. Diasporic writing embraces and represents the geopolitical realities of the modern, modernizing, and postmodern worlds in which multiple racialized histories are inscribed on modern bodies.

AFAM 814 01 (10753) /PLSC823
Race and Ethnicity
Khalilah Brown-Dean
T 10.30-12.20
This course is an introduction to research on race and ethnicity in American politics. Topics include the social construction of race; intersections between race and gender; black, Latino, and Asian American public opinion and political participation; minority representation; the relationship among race, racism, and public policy; immigration and citizenship; state politics; the psychology of racial politics; and the role of race in campaigns. We discuss and debate the empirical contributions of this literature, as well as questions of theory, methodology, and research design.

AFAM 819 01 (10762) /AMST706/HIST711
Research in African American History and Culture to Emancipation
Jennifer Baszile
Th 1.30-3.20
This research seminar explores the full range of African American experience through the era of emancipation. The initial meetings examine central evidentiary and analytical challenges of research. The remainder of the course focuses on the conception, development, writing, and revision of article-length papers.

AFAM 840 01 (10766) /ENGL862
African American Theater, Drama, and Performance
David Krasner
W 10.30-12.20
Studies in African American theater, drama, and performance of the nineteenth and through the twentieth century, including plays, performances, and theories during major periods of artistic development: the new Negro Movement, Harlem Renaissance, Federal Theater Projects, post-WWII Realism, Black Arts Movement, modernism, Postmodernism, and feminist/womanist theater. Among the playwrights examined are Hansberry, Baraka, Shange, Bullins, Kennedy, and August Wilson.

AFAM 847 01 (10771) /AFST847/CPLT947/FREN947
African-Caribbean Connections in French
Cristopher Miller
Th 10.30-12.20
The intertwined literary and cultural relations between Africa and the Caribbean, as made possible by the slave trade and French colonialism. Focus on changing models of linkage and exile, beginning with nineteenth-century experiments, continuing with: early twentieth-century movements in Haiti and in France; two versions of Negritude; social realism; independence; 'creoleness.' Authors include Maran, Senghor, CÈsaire, Roumain, Sembene, Glissant, CondÈ, Warner-Vieyra, Lopes. Reading knowledge of French required.

ENGL 862
African American Theater, Drama and Performance
David Krasner
W 10:30-12:20

ENGL 947
African American Poets of the Modern Era
Robert Stepto
T 1:30-3:20