Current Courses

Call Number: 00024

Day, Time & Location: MW 12:40pm-1:55pm at To be announced

Instructor: Cecelia B Lie-Spahn

Combines critical feminist and anti-racist analyses of medicine with current research in epidemiology and biomedicine to understand health and health disparities as co-produced by social systems and biology.

Call Number: 00021

Day, Time & Location: F 10:10am-12pm at To be announced

Instructor: Alexander Pittman

This course examines the conceptual foundations that support feminist and queer analyses of racial capitalism, security and incarceration, the politics of life and health, and colonial and postcolonial studies, among others. Open to all students; required for the major in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) and the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE).

Call Number: 00427

Day, Time & Location: Th 4:10pm-6:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Rebecca Jordan-Young

Enrollment for this class is by instructor approval and an application is required. Please fill out the form here:

https://forms.gle/bPsV7rcf5RWB35PM9

This introductory course for the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE) is open to all students. We focus on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, the professor will frequently be joined by other faculty from the Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies (CCIS), who bring distinct disciplinary and subject matter expertise. Some keywords for this course include hybridity, diaspora, borderlands, migration, and intersectionality.

Call Number: 00022

Day, Time & Location: T 10:10am-12:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Manijeh Moradian 

From love to anger to disappointment to hope, political activism mobilizes emotions towards certain ends but also generates new affective states and feelings along the way. This advanced seminar will familiarize students with feminist, anti-racist and queer scholarship on affect, feelings and emotion as intrinsic to politics and as crucial for understanding how political thought and action unfold in contingent and often unexpected ways. Mixing theoretical and cultural texts with case studies, we will look at how affect permeates structures of power and domination, embodiment and identity, and collective activist projects concerned with gender and sexual liberation. Students will have an opportunity to read theories of affect as well as to “read” activist movements for affect by working with archival documents (such as zines, manifestos, and movement ephemera) and other primary sources (such as memoir, photography and documentary film).

Call Number: 14149

Day, Time & Location: W 12:10PM-2:00PM at To be announced

Instructor: Zavier Nunn

Are trans people new? Is sex binary? Can sex change? These questions and their precedents have monopolized gendered politics and have taken on global significance in recent years.

Following Foucault’s formulation of a history of the present—a genealogy of how we got here—this course is a history of the trans present in that it charts the ways in which sex and gender have been ontologized across borders and contexts, often in ways which regulate and police bodies within borders. It historicises the divisive discourses that animate present day politics, showing that sexual dimorphism’s legitimacy has been continually contested in different ways and from different standpoints for centuries, and that arguing for or against the universality of sex/gender is a move that people across left/right and liberal/illiberal political lines have historically made.

The path towards trans’ contemporary inception is not only uneven, including many discontinuities as well as continuities. It is also global and disturbing, requiring the violence of empire, eugenics, and slavery to cleave sexual dimorphism into two, whose “binary logic” trans then seeks to muddy and muddle—in ways which sometimes yield to ideas of what sex and gender “really are”. Trans people do have a history. And it is longer than transphobes would like us to believe. But it is not a pleasant or necessarily radical history. It is also not solely the history of people who are trans. Rather, this history is plural and fractious, and is a history of everyone who has ever existed in a world where gender and sex are operating concepts.

Call Number: 00805

Day, Time & Location: W 6:10-8:00 pm at To be announced

Instructor: Jacqueline Orr

Art, Research, Story draws on a range of materials from the social sciences, the visual arts, social

theory, history, and digital media to ask three interrelated questions:

• What can we learn from exploring—and disrupting—the borders between creativity

and social research? Between making ‘art’ and understanding social structure,

politics, or history?

• How does the way we tell a story also shape what that story tells? How is what we

learn from a story partly about the form that the story takes?

• What methods can feminist researchers and artists use to both analyze society, and

move us to want to change society and ourSelves?

The class will create a space of study, experiment, and (serious!) play that allows us to engage these questions, while also discovering new questions that emerge from our collective conversations. The syllabus offers many resources to inspire us: scholarly writings, digital art, live performance, poetry, graphic novels, hip hop, and photography. But our most valuable resource is our own collective curiosity and engagement, which we will use to understand the burgeoning transdisciplinary field of arts-based research practices.

Call Number: 11526

Day, Time & Location: R 12:10pm-2:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Sarah Haley

This course will provide students with a comparative perspective on gender, race, and
sexuality by illuminating historically specific and culturally distinct conditions in which
these systems of power have operated. Beginning in the early modern period, the
course seeks to destabilize contemporary notions of gender and sexuality and instead
probe how race, sexuality, and gender have functioned as mechanisms of differentiation
embedded in historically contingent processes. Moving from “Caliban to Comstock,”
students will probe historical methods for investigating and critically evaluating claims
about the past. In making these inquiries, the course will pay attention to the
intersectional nature of race, gender, and sexuality and to strategic performances of
identity by marginalized groups. This semester, we will engage research by historians
of sexuality, gender, and capitalism to critically reflect on the relationship between
critical studies of the past and debates about reproductive justice, bodily autonomy, and
gay and lesbian rights in our contemporary moment.

Call Number: 14143

Day, Time & Location: T 2:10pm-4:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Elizabeth Povinelli

Individual research in Womens Studies conducted in consultation with the instructor. The result of each research project is submitted in the form of the senior essay and presented to the seminar.

Call Number: 00033

Day, Time & Location: M 4:00pm-6:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Sandra Moyano-Ariza

Knowledge, Practice, Power is a practical and multi-disciplinary exploration of research methods and interpretive strategies used in feminist scholarship, focusing on larger questions about how we know what we know, and who and what knowledge is for. Open to non-majors, but sophomore and junior majors in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) are encouraged to enroll in this course as preparation for Senior Seminar I. This course is required for students pursuing the concentration or minor in Feminist/Intersectional Science and Technology Studies. Prerequisite: Either one introductory WGSS course or Critical Approaches to Social and Cultural Theory or Permission of the Instructor.

Call Number: 00849

Day, Time & Location: R 12:10pm-2:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Rebecca Jordan-Young

Prerequisites: Feminist Theory or permission of instructor. Investigates socially and historically informed critiques of theoretical methods and practices of the sciences. It asks if/how feminist theoretical and political concerns make a critical contribution to science studies.

Call Number: 00035

Day, Time & Location: F 1:10pm-3:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: TBD

At once material and symbolic, our bodies exist at the intersection of multiple competing discourses, including the juridical, the techno-scientific, and the biopolitical. In this course, we will draw upon a variety of critical interdisciplinary literatures—including feminist and queer studies, science and technology studies, and disability studies—to consider some of the ways in which the body is constituted by such discourses, and itself serves as the substratum for social relations. Among the key questions we will consider are the following: What is natural about the body? How are distinctions made between presumptively normal and pathological bodies, and between psychic and somatic experiences?  How do historical and political-economic forces shape the perception and meaning of bodily difference? And most crucially: how do bodies that are multiply constituted by competing logics of gender, race, nation, and ability offer up resistance to these and other categorizations?

Call Number: 00023

Day, Time & Location: R 10:10am-12:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Manijeh Moradian

In this class we will study South-West Asian and North African (SWANA) diasporic populations, social movements and cultural production that have responded to the multi-faceted ramifications of the 21st century war on terror. We will focus on diverse Arab, Iranian, and Afghan diasporas in the United States, where 19th and 20th century legacies of racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and Orientalism combined in new ways to target these groups after the September 11th, 2001 attacks. Drawing on an interdisciplinary array of texts, including ethnography, fiction, feminist and queer theory, social movement theory, and visual and performance art, we will look at how the “war on terror” has shaped the subjectivities and self-representation of SWANA communities. Crucially, we will examine the gender and sexual politics of Islamophobia and racism and study how scholars, activists and artists have sought to intervene in dominant narratives of deviance, threat, and backwardness attributed to Muslim and other SWANA populations. This course takes up the politics of naming, situating the formation of “SWANA” as part of an anti-colonial genealogy that rejects imperial geographies such as “Middle East.” We will ask how new geographies and affiliations come into being in the context of open-ended war, and what new political identities and forms of cultural production then become possible.

Call Number: 11153

Day, Time & Location: M 4:10 pm-6:00 pm at To be announced

Instructor: Lila Abu-Lughod

Subtopic: Reframing Gender Violence Globally

Theoretical Paradigms in Feminist Scholarship: Course focuses on the current theoretical debates of a particular topic or issue in feminist, queer, and/or WGSS scholarship. Open to graduate students, with preference given to students completing the ISSG graduate certificate. Topics differ by semester offered, and are reflected in the course subtitle. 

Description: Over the past couple of decades, violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) have come to prominence as loci for activism throughout the world. Both VAW and GBV regularly garner international media attention and occupy a growing place in international law and global governance. Since 2000 alone there have been more than 25 UN protocols, instruments and conventions directed at its eradication or mitigation.  By embedding gendered violence in a complex matrix international norms, legal sanctions, and humanitarian aid, the anti-VAW movement has been able to achieve a powerful international “common sense” for defining, measuring, and attending to violence against women in developing countries, particularly during conflict and in post-conflict situations.

When invoked in the halls of the United Nations and used to shape international policy, the terms violence against women (VAW) and gender-based violence (GBV) are often assumed to have stable meanings; yet they do not.  What do different parties mean when they talk of violence against women or of gender-based violence?  What is left out when the problem is framed in particular ways, and whose interests are served by such framings?  Religion, culture, and ethnicity are often linked to gendered violence with entire groups pathologized. Women in conflict situations are abstracted from their local contexts while the conflicts themselves are insistently localized. The definition of VAW or GBV is narrowed to attacks on bodily integrity, with economic, political and structural forms of violence increasingly excluded from the frames. 

This course will explore transnational feminist debates about gender-based violence and examine the critical concepts being developed within the scholarly literature to question this “common sense.” What are the elisions and exclusions in many common-sense understandings of these terms? Can we deepen the ways in which we engage with the manifestations and representations of such violence?  We will proceed through close readings of the texts of the key feminist thinkers, researchers, anthropologists and activists who are contributing to the critical analysis of the dynamics and history of this international agenda. We pay special attention to place-based research on the applicability and deployment of particular approaches to gender-based violence as found in human rights work, humanitarianism, and the proliferating organizations, governmental and nongovernmental, that promote girls’ and women’s rights and freedom from violence yet ignore other forms of violence that itself is gendered. Case studies will be drawn from the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

This course fulfills one of the requirements for the graduate certificate at ISSG but is open to other graduate students in Arts & Sciences by permission of instructor.

Call Number: 11184

Day, Time & Location: T 10:10am-12:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Julia Bryan-Wilson

This is a course is oriented to graduate students who are thinking about issues in teaching in the near and distant future and want to explore forms of pedagogy. The course will ask what it means to teach “as a feminist” and will explore how to create a classroom receptive to feminist and queer methodologies and theories regardless of course theme/content. Topics include: participatory pedagogy, the role of political engagement, the gender dynamics of the classroom, modes of critical thought and disagreement. Discussions will be oriented around student interest. The course will meet 4-5 times per SEMESTER (dates TBD) and the final assignment is to develop and workshop a syllabus for a new gender/sexuality course in your field. Because this course is required for graduate students choosing to fulfill Option 2 for the Graduate Certificate in Feminist Studies at IRWGS, priority will be given to graduate students completing the certificate.

Call Number: 14146

Day, Time & Location: Tu 2:!0pm-4:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: C. Riley Snorton 

Notes: Second half of year-long course. Meets 1/28, 2/18, 3/11, 4/8 

This colloquium will focus on new and developing research in gender and sexuality studies. It is meant for graduate students who are thinking about researching and teaching in this field in the near and distant future. Through a roster of guest speakers and in colloquium discussions, this course poses current questions, issues, methods, modes of study, and practices in the interrelated fields of gender and sexuality studies and critical race studies. The course is best suited to graduate students who have completed at least one year of coursework. Colloquium requirements include attendance at 3-6 guest speaker events over the course of the year, relevant reading in the field as necessary, and participation in discussion.

Call Number: 11457

Day, Time & Location: R 2:10M-4:00PM at To be announced

Instructor: Tara Gonsalves

The Gender/Sexuality Workshop is a forum for Ph.D. students interested in social science topics broadly related to gender and sexuality. In particular, it will provide an opportunity for students share and refine their own works in progress by getting feedback from other students in the workshop. The workshop is geared towards students conducting empirical work, from ethnographies and interview-based projects to archival research to other kinds of critical quantitative work that attempts to theorize gender/sexuality. We will take an expansive view of gender and sexuality as a mode of classifying people and a structure that organizes social life, including work that uses gender/sexuality as a lens to interrogate other social structures such as empire, capitalism, science and knowledge, states and governance, and more. The G/S Workshop will meet biweekly (every other week) over the course of Spring 2025.

Call Number: 00022

Day, Time & Location: T Th 10:10am-11:25am at TBA

Instructor: Manijeh Moradian

This introductory course for the Interdisciplinary Concentration or Minor in Race and Ethnicity (ICORE/MORE) is open to all students. We focus on the critical study of social difference as an interdisciplinary practice, using texts with diverse modes of argumentation and evidence to analyze social differences as fundamentally entangled and co-produced. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of this course, the professor will frequently be joined by other faculty from the Consortium for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies (CCIS), who bring distinct disciplinary and subject matter expertise. Some keywords for this course include hybridity, diaspora, borderlands, migration, and intersectionality.

Call Number: 15077

Day, Time & Location: M 12:10PM-2:00PM at EXT Schermerhorn Hall

Instructor: Zavier Nunn

Call Number: 00575

Day, Time & Location: T 12:10pm-2:00pm at TBA

Instructor: Rebecca Jordan-Young

This course provides a theoretical itinerary to the emergence of contemporary queer theory and engagement with some contemporary legacies of the movement. The goal is not to be exhaustive nor to establish a correct history of queer theory but to engage students in the task of understanding and creating intellectual genealogies.

Call Number: 00595

Day, Time & Location: M 4:10pm-6:00pm at TBA

Instructor: Sandra Moyano-Ariza

Call Number: 11745

Day, Time & Location: W 12:10pm-2:00pm, 754 EXT Schermerhorn Hall

Instructor: Jack Halberstam

The Senior Seminar in Women's Studies offers you the opportunity to develop a capstone research paper by the end of the first semester of your senior year. Senior seminar essays take the form of a 25-page paper based on original research and characterized by an interdisciplinary approach to the study of women, sexuality, and/or gender. You must work with an individual advisor who has expertise in the area of your thesis and who can advise you on the specifics of method and content. Your grade for the semester will be determined by the instructor and the advisor. Students receiving a grade of B+ or higher in Senior Seminar I will be invited to register for Senior Seminar II by the Instructor and the Director of Undergraduate Studies. Senior Seminar II students will complete a senior thesis of 40-60 pages. Please note, the seminar is restricted to Columbia College and GS senior majors.

Call Number: 13512

Day, Time & Location: W 2:10pm-4:00pm at 754 EXT Schermerhorn Hall

Instructor: Tara Gonsalves

This course considers formations of gender, sexuality, and power as they circulate transnationally, as well as transnational feminist and queer movements that have emerged to address contemporary gendered and sexual inequalities. Topics include political economy, global care chains, sexuality, sex work and trafficking, feminist and queer politics, and human rights. If it is a small world after all, how do forces of globalization shape and redefine the relationship between gender, sexuality, and powerful institutions like the state? And, if power swirls everywhere, how are transnational power dynamics reinscribed in gendered bodies? How is the body represented in discussions of nationalism and in the political economy of globalization? These questions will frame this course by highlighting how gender, sexuality, and power coalesce to impact the lives of individuals in various spaces including workplaces, the academy, the home, religious institutions, the government, and civil society, and human rights organizations. This course will enable us to think transnationally, historically, and dynamically, using gender and sexuality as lenses through which to critique relations of power and the ways that power informs our everyday lives and subjectivities.

Call Number: 11746

Day, Time & Location: Tu 10:10AM-12:00PM at 754 EXT Schermerhorn Hall

Instructor: Julia Bryan-Wilson

This course focuses on the development of a particular topic or issue in feminist, queer, and/or WGSS scholarship. Open to graduate students and advanced undergraduates, though priority will be given to students completing the ISSG graduate certificate. Topics differ by semester offered, and are reflected in the course subtitle.

Fall 2024 Course Description: Reading within and around feminist critiques of the gendering of labor, this seminar looks at how artists, workers, and witches are celebrated—and reviled—for their ability to shape matter, generate value, and potentially re-direct power. We will examine historical and recent texts around the entanglements between gendered creative production, non-normative sexualities, and racialized persecution. We will consider influences and points of intersection/disjunction amongst Black feminist theorizations, Italian Marxisms, Latin American activisms, and Indigenous perspectives as we untangle knotted genealogies around issues such as transformation, animism, handicraft, enchantment, reproduction, alternative forms of knowing, queer and trans self-making, peasant/folk wisdom, outlawed healing traditions, criminalized spiritualities, women’s autonomy, and revolutionary cultural labor. Three “spirits of the forest” in particular will guide our inquiries: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia Federici, and Sylvia Wynter. We will take seriously strikes, hexes, and poetry as strategies for collective liberation in the face of racism, capitalism, and patriarchy. 

Call Number: 00594

Day, Time & Location: W 10:10am-12:00pm

Instructor: Rebecca Jordan-Young

Call Number: 00556

Day, Time & Location: T 4:10pm-6:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Agniezka Legutko

Early publications in Yiddish, a.k.a. the mame loshn, ‘mother tongue,’ were addressed to “women and men who are like women,” while famous Yiddish writer, Sholem Aleichem, created a myth of “three founding fathers” of modern Yiddish literature, which eliminated the existence of Yiddish women writers. As these examples indicate, gender has played a significant role in Yiddish literary power dynamics. This course will explore representation of gender and sexuality in modern Yiddish literature and film in works created by Sholem Aleichem, Sholem Asch, Fradl Shtok, Sh. An-sky, Malka Lee, Anna Margolin, Celia Dropkin, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Kadya Molodowsky, Troim Katz Handler, and Irena Klepfisz. You will also acquire skills in academic research and digital presentation of the findings as part of the Mapping Yiddish New York project that is being created at Columbia. No knowledge of Yiddish required. 

Call Number: 19373

Day, Time & Location: T 2:10pm-4:00pm
754 EXT Schermerhorn Hall [SCH]

Instructor: C. Riley Snorton

This colloquium will focus on new and developing research in gender and sexuality studies. It is meant for graduate students who are thinking about researching and teaching in this field in the near and distant future. Through a roster of guest speakers and in colloquium discussions, this course poses current questions, issues, methods, modes of study, and practices in the interrelated fields of gender and sexuality studies and critical race studies. The course is best suited to graduate students who have completed at least one year of coursework. Colloquium requirements include attendance at 3-6 guest speaker events over the course of the year, relevant reading in the field as necessary, and participation in discussion.

Call Number: 14176

Day, Time & Location: MW 2:40PM-3:55PM 

Instructor: Jack Halberstam

This course examines twentieth-century literature, film, and music in order to explore the many and complex ways that beauty, power, and bodily identity co-articulate experiences that lie beyond the ordinary. Reading novels, essays, and poetry alongside musical interludes, we will think about bodies, power, and beauty together. This class explores the wide beyond, the other side of the everyday, the hum of being that can be discerned only in certain musical performances, the terror and pleasure that course through certain works of fiction, and the fragmented self that fails to cohere in extraordinary acts of memoir. From these pieces and unfinished conversations, we intend to collaboratively develop fresh insights on the nature of beauty and identity under increasingly draconian and profit-driven forms of knowledge and power.

Call Number: 10486

Day, Time & Location: MW 10:10am-11:25am at To be announced

Instructor: Samuel K Jr Roberts

Through assigned readings and a group research project, students will gain familiarity with a range of historical and social science problems at the intersection of ethnic/racial/sexual formations, technological networks, and health politics since the turn of the twentieth century. Topics to be examined will include, but will not be limited to, black women's health organization and care; HIV/AIDS politics, policy, and community response; benign neglect; urban renewal and gentrification; medical abuses and the legacy of Tuskegee; tuberculosis control; and environmental justice. There are no required qualifications for enrollment, although students will find the material more accessible if they have had previous coursework experience in United States history, pre-health professional (pre-med, pre-nursing, or pre-public health), African-American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Ethnic Studies, or American Studies.

Call Number: 10337

Day, Time & Location: TR 10:10am-11:25am at To be announced

Instructor: Rhiannon Stephens

This course examines the history of gender, sexuality and ways of identifying along these lines in Africa from early times through the twentieth century. It asks how gender and sexuality have shaped key historical developments, from African kingdoms and empires to postcolonial states, from colonial conquest to movements for independence, from indigenous healing practices to biomedicine, from slavery to the modern forms of work. It will also explore the history of different sexualities and gender identities on the continent. A key objective is to extend the historical study of gender and sexual identity in Africa beyond ‘women’s history’ to understand gender as encompassing all people in society and their relationships, whether domestic or public.

Call Number: 00131

Day, Time & Location: T 9:00am-10:50am at To be announced

Instructor: Maja Horn

This seminar analyzes the different critical approaches to studying same-sex desire in the Caribbean region. The region’s long history of indigenous genocide, colonialism, imperialism, and neo-liberalism, have made questions about “indigenous” and properly “local” forms of sexuality more complicated than in many other regions. In response, critics have worked to recover and account for local forms of same-sex sexuality and articulated their differences in critical and theoretical terms outside the language of “coming out” and LGBT identity politics. On the other hand, critics have emphasized how outside forces of colonialism, imperialism, and the globalization of LGBT politics have impacted and reshaped Caribbean same-sex desires and subjectivities. This course studies these various critical tendencies in the different contexts of the Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanophone, and Dutch Caribbean.

Call Number: 18972

Day, Time & Location: W 10:10am-12:00pm
477 ALFRED LERNE

Instructor: C. Riley Snorton

This course takes Octavia E. Butler’s enigmatic expression, “There’s nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns” as a guide for exploring the politics of Black speculative fiction, science fiction, and fantasy. With literary, sonic, visual, and cinematic examples, including works from Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. DuBois, Samuel Delany, Wangechi Mutu, Janelle Monae, Sun Ra, Saul Williams, and others, this class considers the contexts of possibility for re/imagining Black pasts, presents and futures. Paying particular attention to how Black speculative fiction creates new worlds, social orders, and entanglements, students will develop readings informed by ecocriticism, science and technology studies, feminist, and queer studies. We will consider the multiple meanings and various uses of speculation and worlding as we encounter and interpret forms of utopian, dystopian, and (post)apocalyptic thinking and practice. No prerequisites.

Call Number: 10195

Day, Time & Location: MW 11:40am-12:55pm at TBA

Instructor: Yannik Thiem

For the most part queer studies and religious studies have met each other with great suspicion and little interest in the conceptual resources of the respectively other field. Our guiding questions will be: What does religion have to do with queerness? What does queerness have to do with religion?

Queer theory and activists, unless they already identify as religious, often have little or little good to say about religion. Conversely, many religious traditions intensively regulate gender, sex, sexuality, and especially queerness. this course will explore how religious studies can enrich queer theory and how queer theory can reshape our thinking about religious studies. But beyond the mutual disinterest, anxieties, and animosities, queer studies and religious studies share actually a whole range of core interests and questions, such as embodiment, sexuality, gender-variability, coloniality, race appearing as religious identity and religious identity as gendered, as well as the role of catastrophe, utopia, and redemption in our experience of the world.

We will examine questions about religion come to the fore when we paying especially attention to queerness, gender, sexuality, pleasure, pain, and desire. Equally, we will examine how queer discourses mobilize religious and theological images and ideas, especially where these images and ideas are no longer clearly recognizable as having religious origins.

Rather than trying to settle on definitive answers, this course will cultivate a process of open-ended collective inquiry in which students will be encouraged to think autonomously and challenge facile solutions. Students should come away from the course with an expanded sense of how we grapple with issues related to gender, sexuality, desire, and embodiment in our everyday lives and how religion and religious formations are entangled with these issues well beyond religious communities. Ideally, students should experience this course as enlarging the set of critical tools at their hands for creative and rigorous thinking.

Call Number: 00256

Day, Time & Location: W 2:10pm-4:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Premilla Nadasen

This course examines the struggle against South African apartheid with a particular focus on the global solidarity movement in the 20th century. The class will examine key turning points in the movement, its connection with broader anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, gendered constructs of apartheid and feminist leadership in the movement, and the circulation of theories of racial capitalism. Students will understand how and why apartheid became a global concern. Students will work on a project using the primary source material available on the African Activist Archive Digital Project at Michigan State University.

Call Number: 10648

Day, Time & Location: T 2:10pm-4:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Nikolas Kakkoufa

This seminar explores the relationship between literature, culture, and mental health. It pays particular emphasis to the poetics of emotions structuring them around the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance and the concept of hope. During the course of the semester, we will discuss a variety of content that explores issues of race, socioeconomic status, political beliefs, abilities/disabilities, gender expressions, sexualities, and stages of life as they are connected to mental illness and healing. Emotions are anchored in the physical body through the way in which our bodily sensors help us understand the reality that we live in. By feeling backwards and thinking forwards, we will ask a number of important questions relating to literature and mental health, and will trace how human experiences are first made into language, then into science, and finally into action.

The course surveys texts from Homer, Ovid, Aeschylus and Sophocles to Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, C.P. Cavafy, Dinos Christianopoulos, Margarita Karapanou, Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Katerina Gogou etc., and the work of artists such as Toshio Matsumoto, Yorgos Lanthimos, and Anohni.

Call Number: 10693

Day, Time & Location: W 10:10AM-12:00PM at TBA

Instructor: Vanessa Agard-Jones

It is no secret by now that we live in a toxic sea. Every day, in every place in this world, we are exposed to an unknown number of contaminants, including those in the places that we live, the air that we breathe, the foods that we eat, the water that we drink, the consumer products that we use, and in the social worlds that we navigate. While we are all exposed, the effects of these exposures are distributed in radically unequal patterns, and histories of racialization, coloniality, and gendered inequality are critical determinants of the risks to wellness that these toxic entanglements entail. Scientists use the term body burden to describe the accumulated, enduring amounts of harmful substances present in human bodies. In this course, we explore the global conditions that give rise to local body burdens, plumbing the history of toxicity as a category, the politics of toxic exposures, and the experience of toxic embodiment. Foregrounding uneven exposures and disproportionate effects, we ask how scientists and humanists, poets and political activists, have understood toxicity as a material and social phenomenon. We will turn our collective attention to the analysis of ethnographies, memoirs, maps, film, and photography, and students will also be charged with creating visual and narrative projects for representing body burden of their own.

Call Number: 14168

Day, Time & Location: W 4:10pm-6:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Frances Negron-Muntaner

New York City has been closely linked to the Caribbean from at least the seventeenth century. Presently, nearly 25% of its inhabitants are of Caribbean descent. In addition, according to a 2021 New York City Office of Immigrants report, five of the top countries of origin of the city's new immigrants were born in a Caribbean country: Dominican Republic (421,920, number 1), Jamaica (165,260, number 3), Guyana (136,180, number 4); Trinidad and Tobago (85,680, number 8), and Haiti (78,250, number 9). In addition, Puerto Ricans, who are colonial migrants, number 1.2 million or 9% of the city’s population.

During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, New York City was a pivotal space for Caribbean radical praxis understood here as political action and thought shaped by the Caribbean experiences of enslavement, coloniality, and diaspora. These interventions deeply transformed not only New York but multiple other contexts in Latin America, Africa, and Europe, and a broad range of movements including anti-colonial, anti-racist, feminist, and queer. To better understand the impact of Caribbean radical figures and thought in New York and beyond, we will examine texts from a broad range of writers and thinkers, including Jesús Colón, Julia de Burgos, Hubert Harrison, Alexis June Jordan, Audre Lorde, José Martí, Malcolm X, Manuel Ramos Otero, Clemente Soto Vélez, and Arthur Schomburg.

Call Number: 00138

Day, Time & Location: T 2:10pm-4:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Kim F Hall 

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 12 students. Permission of the instructor required. Interested students should complete the application at: http://bit.ly/ShangeWorlds. Students should have taken a course beyond the intro level from ONE of the following areas: American Literature (through the English Department), Africana Studies, American Studies, Theatre or Womens Studies. Please note that this is a yearlong course; students who are accepted into this course will need to take its second half, AFEN BC3816, in the spring semester. A poet, performance artist, playwright and novelist, Ntozake Shanges stylistic innovations in drama, poetry and fiction and attention to the untold lives of black women have made her an influential figure throughout American arts and in Feminist history. In a unique collaboration between Barnard, the Schomburg Center for Black Culture and the International Center for Photography, and with support by the Mellon funded Barnard Teaches grant, this year long seminar provides an in-depth exploration of Shanges work and milieu as well as an introduction to digital tools, public research and archival practice. You can find more information and apply for the course at http://bit.ly/ShangeWorlds. On Twitter @ShangeWorlds.

Call Number: 00140

Day, Time & Location: W 4:10pm-6:00pm
318 Milbank Hall (Barnard)

Instructor: Elizabeth Bernstein

This research and writing-intensive seminar is designed for senior majors with a background and interest in the sociology of gender and sexuality. The goal of the seminar is to facilitate completion of the senior requirement (a 25-30 page paper) based on ;hands on; research with original qualitative data. Since the seminar will be restricted to students with prior academic training in the subfield, students will be able to receive intensive research training and guidance through every step of the research process, from choosing a research question to conducting original ethnographic and interview-based research, to analyzing and interpreting ones findings. The final goal of the course will be the production of an original paper of standard journal-article length. Students who choose to pursue their projects over the course of a second semester will have the option of revisiting their articles further for submission and publications.

Call Number: 12732

Day, Time & Location: T 4:10pm-6:00pm  at To be announced

Instructor: Hilary-Anne Hallett

Please refer to the Center for American Studies for section description

Call Number: 10744

Day, Time & Location: W 10:10am-12:00 pm

Instructor: Elizza Zingesser

How did people conceive of and talk about love on either side of the Pyrenees? This course will explore the many faces of desire in medieval French, Occitan, Arabic, Hebrew and Romance (proto-Spanish) literature to ask a broader question: what would be our understanding of lyric poetry, often taken to originate with the troubadours, if we incorporated the poems and songs of Al-Andalus? After anchoring ourselves in history, we will survey the major events and trends that attended the emergence of new poetic and musical forms both in Andalusia and in France between the 8th and the 14th centuries. We will study how these works were composed, read, performed, and transmitted. Weekly readings will combine scholarship with primary texts exploring the many facets of erotic experience: from sexual contact to love from afar, love as madness, love mediated by birds, rejection of marriage, gender fluidity and queerness. We will also think about the literary forms in which these themes are expressed, including dawn songs, bilingual love poems, treatises on achieving female orgasm, conduct manuals, and hybrid texts combining prose and verse.

Translations will be provided for most material, but reading knowledge of modern French is required.

Call Number: 12858

Day, Time & Location: T 2:10pm-4:00pm at TBA

Instructor: Claudia Breger

This introduction to German film since 1945 (in its European contexts) deploys a focus on feelings as a lens for multifaceted, intersectional investigations of cinematic history. We will explore how feelings have been gendered and racialized; how they overlap with matters of sex (as closely associated with political revolt in Western Europe, while considered too private for public articulation in the socialist East, especially when queer); and how they foreground matters of nation and trauma (for example via the notions of German ‘coldness’ and inability to mourn the Holocaust). Simultaneously, the focus on feelings highlights questions of mediality (cinema as a prototypically affective medium?), genre and avant-garde aesthetics: in many films, ‘high-affect’ Hollywood cinema intriguingly meets ‘cold’ cinematic modernism. In pursuing these investigative vectors through theoretical readings and close film analysis, the course connects affect, gender, queer, and cultural studies approaches with cinema studies methodologies. The films to be discussed span postwar and New German Cinema, East German DEFA productions, the ‘Berlin School’ of the 2000s, and contemporary transnational cinema.

Call Number: 14192

Day, Time & Location: T 12:10pm-2:00pm at TBA

Instructor: Julie Crawford

This class will focus on early modern literature’s fascination with the relationship between women, gender, and political resistance in the early modern period. The works we will read together engage many of the key political analogies of the period, including those between the household and the state, the marital and the social contract, and rape and tyranny. These texts also present multiple forms of resistance to gendered repression and subordination, and reimagine sexual, social, and political relationships in new and creative ways. Readings will include key classical and biblical intertexts, witchcraft and murder pamphlets, domestic conduct books, defenses of women, poetry (by William Shakespeare, Aemilia Lanyer and Lucy Hutchinson), drama (Othello, The Winter’s Tale, and Gallathea), and fiction (by Margaret Cavendish). The class will also include visits to The Morgan Library, Columbia’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Call Number: 11024

Day, Time & Location: M W 4:10PM-5:25PM at TBA

Instructor: Lena Edlund

Prerequisites: ECON UN3211 and ECON UN3213 This course studies gender gaps, their extent, determinants and consequences. The focus will be on the allocation of rights in different cultures and over time, why women's rights have typically been more limited and why most societies have traditionally favored males in the allocation of resources.

Call Number: 10297

Day, Time & Location: Tu 2:10PM-4:00PM at TBA

Instructor: Aziza Shanazarova

This course is a comprehensive engagement with Islamic perspectives on women with a specific focus on the debates about woman’s role and status in Muslim societies. Students will learn how historical, religious, socio-economic and political factors influence the lives and experiences of Muslim women. A variety of source materials (the foundational texts of Islam, historical and ethnographic accounts, women’s and gender studies scholarship) will serve as the framework for lectures. Students will be introduced to women’s religious lives and a variety of women’s issues as they are reported and represented in the works written by women themselves and scholars chronicling women’s religious experiences.

We will begin with an overview of the history and context of the emergence of Islam from a gendered perspective. We will explore differing interpretations of the core Islamic texts concerning women, and the relationship between men and women: who speaks about and for women in Islam? In the second part of the course we will discuss women’s religious experiences in different parts of the Muslim world. Students will examine the interrelationship between women and religion with special emphasis on the ways in which the practices of religion in women’s daily lives impact contemporary societies.  

All readings will be in English. Prior course work in Islam or women’s studies is recommended, but not required.   
 

Call Number: 13789

Day, Time & Location: W 9:10AM-12:55PM at 308 Diana Center

Instructor: Ronald Gregg

This course examines themes and changes in the (self-)representation of lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgender people in cinema from the early sound period to the present. It pays attention to both the formal qualities of film and filmmakers’ use of cinematic strategies (mise-en-scene, editing, etc.) designed to elicit certain responses in viewers and to the distinctive possibilities and constraints of the classical Hollywood studio system, independent film, avant-garde cinema, and world cinema; the impact of various regimes of formal and informal censorship; the role of queer men and women as screenwriters, directors, actors, and designers; and the competing visions of gay, progay, and antigay filmmakers. Along with considering the formal properties of film and the historical forces that shaped it, the course explores what cultural analysts can learn from film. How can we treat film as evidence in historical analysis? We will consider the films we see as evidence that may shed new light on historical problems and periodization, and will also use the films to engage with recent queer theoretical work on queer subjectivity, affect, and culture.

Call Number: 10537

Day, Time & Location: T 4:10pm-6:00pm at To be announced

Instructor: Audra Simpson

This course examines the relationship between colonialism, settlement and anthropology and the specific ways in which these processes have been engaged in the broader literature and locally in North America. We aim to understand colonialism as a theory of political legitimacy, as a set of governmental practices and as a subject of inquiry. Thus, we will re-imagine North America in light of the colonial project and its technologies of rule such as education, law and policy that worked to transform Indigenous notions of gender, property and territory. Our case studies will dwell in several specific areas of inquiry, among them: the Indian Act in Canada and its transformations of gender relations, governance and property; the residential and boarding school systems in the US and Canada, the murdered and missing women in Juarez and Canada and the politics of allotment in the US. Although this course will be comparative in scope, it will be grounded heavily within the literature from Native North America.   

Call Number: 10696

Day, Time & Location: F 12:10pm-2:00pm at TBD

Instructor: Vanessa Agard-Jones

How are bodies in the world? How is the world in bodies? Building from these deceptively simple questions, ours will be an interdisciplinary reading seminar on how bodies (mostly human, but sometimes nonhuman) are made and remade in and through their environments and via their relationships to the material world. Privileging porosity as a rubric, we consider the ever-permeable boundaries between bodies and the other beings (be they viral, chemical, microbial or otherwise) with which they become entangled. Alongside the monographs under study, we will tackle article-length engagements with theories of new feminist/queer materialisms, decolonial and critical science studies. Further, a key aim of this course is to provide students the opportunity to hone some of the most important skills we have in our toolbox as academics, relative to our teaching, our public voice/s as critics, and to our own research.

Call Number: 00128

Day, Time & Location: W 4:10pm-6:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Celia E. Naylor

The Africana Studies Department offers special topics courses every year as colloquia. These colloquia provide opportunities for students to explore areas of particular interest within African Diasporic Studies in a seminar environment. Students earn 4 credits for these courses. There are multiple colloquia offered by the department every year. Some of the topics for these colloquia have included Critical Race Theory, Indian Ocean Diaspora, The New Black, Caribbean Women, and Black Shakespeare. As the topics change, students should check with the Chair of the Africana Studies Department if they have any questions about the topics for a particular academic year.

Call Number: 00319

Day, Time & Location: W 12:10pm-2:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Shayoni Mitra

Prerequisites: Enrollment limited to 16 students. This course examines the category of "woman" as it is mobilized in performance, considering both a variety of contemporary performances chosen from a wide range of genres and a diversity of critical/theoretical perspectives. Course fulfills lecture/seminar "studies" requirement for Theatre/Drama and Theatre Arts major.

Call Number: 00133

Day, Time & Location: T 2:10pm-4:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Lisa Jahn

This course offers an overview of classic and contemporary examples of feminist ethnography. Over the course of the semester, we will trace the development of, and debates around, feminist ethnography from the 1970s to the contemporary period, highlighting the key questions and dominant paradigms of the field. We will examine how feminist approaches shape the questions we ask, how we present our research and the ethics of research. We will explore how to incorporate collaborative and activist methods and analysis in our scholarly projects, asking: How can feminist ethnography intensify efforts towards social justice in the current political and economic climate? How do feminist ethnographers link their findings to broader publics through activism, advocacy, and public policy?

Call Number: 00733

Day, Time & Location: TR 8:40am-9:55am / To be announced

Instructor: Debra Minkoff

Prerequisites: One introductory course in Sociology suggested. Social movements and the theories social scientists use to explain them, with emphasis on contemporary American activism. Cases include the Southern civil rights movement, Black Lives Matter, contemporary feminist mobilizations, LGBTQ activism, immigrant rights and more recent forms of grassroots politics. Must also register for disc section in June.

Call Number: 00531

Day, Time & Location: T 4:10pm-6:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Wendy C. Schor-Haim

Why are stepmothers and stepdaughters inevitable enemies in folk and fairy tales? Why are fathers blameless and biological mothers absent (and usually dead)? And how do these narratives, so deeply woven into our own media and language, affect our sense of our own lived reality? In this course, we’ll untangle the complicated web of relationships between mothers, daughters, and stepmothers in folk and fairy tales, from ancient Rome to current cinema. We’ll read analytic psychology, feminist literary theory, cultural history, and other critical perspectives to help us analyze the absent mother, virginal daughter, hapless father, and evil stepmother tropes across time and space, so we can defamiliarize these familiar figures and develop a deeper understanding of how and why they dominate the popular imagination. This is an upper-level course, with priority for juniors and seniors.

Call Number: 00529

Day, Time & Location: TR 2:40pm-3:55pm / To be announced

Instructor: Jhumpa Lahiri

Language is the writer’s instrument; what happens when there is more than one language to choose from, or when a dominant or initial language is replaced by another? What inspires, or necessitates, a writer to practice exophony: to migrate into “foreign” linguistic territory? And in the case of bilingual or plurilingual writers, what factors determine the language(s) chosen for creative expression, and what might cause that choice to shift over time? To what degree do exophonic writers create a third, hybrid language? And how might their works underscore the mutability and instability of language itself? This seminar will focus on a series of women who, either for political or personal reasons, have reshaped and revised their linguistic points of reference, radically questioning—and perhaps willfully subverting—notions of nationality, identity, linguistic normativity, and a “mother tongue”. Special attention will be paid to the reception of exophonic writers, to feminist narratives of separation and self-fashioning, to mother-daughter dyads, to cases of self-translation, to colonialist and post-colonialist frameworks, and to how the phenomenon of exophony further complicates, but also enriches, the translator’s task. Readings will combine literary texts with essays, interviews, and theoretical writings by and about exophonic writers. In addition to analytical papers, students will have the opportunity to experiment writing in another language and translating themselves into English. All readings will be in English; advanced reading knowledge of a foreign language is recommended but not required. 

Call Number: 14689

Day, Time & Location: TR 1:10pm-2:25pm / To be announced

Instructor: Francisco Rosales-Varo

Prerequisites: SPAN UN2102 or AP score of 4 or 5; or SAT score. An intensive exposure to advanced points of Spanish grammar and structure through written and oral practice, along with an introduction to the basic principles of academic composition in Spanish. Each section is based on the exploration of an ample theme that serves as the organizing principle for the work done in class (Please consult the Directory of Classes for the topic of each section.) This course is required for the major and the concentration in Hispanic Studies. Formerly SPAN W3200 and SPAN BC3004. If you have taken either of these courses before you cannot take SPAN UN3300. All Columbia students must take Spanish language courses (UN 1101-3300) for a letter grade.

Call Number: 00168

Day, Time & Location: T 12:10pm-2:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Widney Brown

One of the most hotly debated issues of today is the extent to which the state can legitimately dictate or impinge on one’s bodily autonomy. This is a long-running debate in the area of sexual and reproductive rights, but also is relevant to such current debates as the right to die / right to death with dignity; the right to use drugs for recreational or ritual purposes; engaging in hunger strikes as a protected form of freedom of expression; and the debate about whether the state can mandate vaccines. It is a debate that is highly gendered but also raises questions about how political power and socio-economic status influences how governments act on individuals and communities.

Call Number: 14180

Day, Time & Location: T 10:10am-12:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Zoe L. Henry

During the twentieth century in the U.S., millions of Black Americans migrated from the rural South to the urban North, ushering in new forms of sensory and social experience. This course focuses on Black women’s relationship to the modern city, from the fin de siècle, through the Civil Rights Era, to the present-day. Across a variety of genres and contexts—including novels, poetry, plays, memoir, journalism, diaries, manifestos, spoken word and travelogues—Black writers have imagined and theorized femininity through the ever-shifting contours of the metropolis. While traditional accounts of urban modernity tend to take a masculine frame, our course will remain grounded in contemporary queer and feminist critique, asking: how do the physical, material, and architectural dimensions of the city impact women’s conceptions of selfhood? How do semi-public, semi-private spaces, such as cafes, offices, nightclubs, and cabarets, enable (or fail to enable) community and group belonging? How might such spaces nurture queer of color communities specifically? What forms of economic racism and segregation did women of color encounter, and what strategies did they deploy to counteract them? Is it possible for a Black woman to remain “private in public”? What kinds of industrial and technological developments enhanced women’s independence and financial freedoms, and which, like state surveillance, ultimately impeded—and continue to impede—their ability to survive and flourish? 

Primary authors will include Jessie Redmon Fauset, Dorothy West, Marita Bonner, Ann Petry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Shay Youngblood, Sarah Broom and Raven Leilani, supplemented by short critical readings by such writers as Audre Lorde and Saidiya Hartman. Combining theoretical and literary analysis with regular fieldwork in New York City—including visits to the Schomburg Center and the Studio Museum in Harlem—the seminar ultimately encourages students to think creatively and rigorously about their own relationship to race, gender, and urban experience. 

Call Number: 00126

Day, Time & Location: T 4:10pm-6:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Maleda Beliligne

This course explores representations of queer Harlem in African American literature, sonic culture, and performance. We will consider the history and making of Harlem, key figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and the aesthetic innovations of writers and artists who defied the racial, sexual, and gendered conventions of their time. We will be guided by an intersectional approach to the study of race, gender, and sexuality and the methods of Black queer studies, African American and African diaspora literary studies, as well as sound and performance scholarship. We will ask when, where, and what was/is gay Harlem; how we might excavate its histories; map its borders; and speculate on its material and imagined futures.

Call Number: 00253

Day, Time & Location: M 2:10pm-4:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Abosede A. George

This course deals with the scholarship on gender and sexuality in African history. The central themes of the course will be changes and continuities in gender performance and the politics of gender and sexual difference within African societies, the social, political, and economic processes that have influenced gender and sexual identities, and the connections between gender, sexuality, inequality, and activism at local, national, continental, and global scales.

Call Number: 00090

Day, Time & Location: W 11:00am-12:50pm / To be announced

Instructor: Dorota Biczel

This seminar examines the changing conceptualizations and theorizations of gender and sex in the contemporary artistic practices of the Americas. Crucial to the constitution of both individual and collective identity, for contemporary artists gender and sexuality have become primary sites to rethink and reinvent the paradigms of self-expression, creativity, and artmaking, and to challenge and contest the (social) body politics at large. We will explore these practices through the prism of the evolution of the notions of gender and sex in a broad range of disciplines during the key historical moments such as the emergence of second-wave feminism and gay rights’ movement, critique of “mainstream” feminism by the feminists of color, AIDS crisis, and rise of postmodernist and queer theories, among others. We will pay special attention to the intersections of gender and sexuality with race and class, particularly germane in context of the ideologies of progress and development, and the shifts in capitalism during the last fifty years. Finally, we will probe how the notions of gender and sex have been deployed to reconsider and problematize the established art historical canons.     

            Weekly reading responses and leading class discussion on the readings will guide you in crafting a research paper proposal and its development (in consultation with the instructor). Artists participating in the seminar are invited to contextualize their own practice through a similar project and an accompanying research-based statement.

Call Number: 00255

Day, Time & Location: T 10:10am-12:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Jose Moya

Prerequisites: Permission of the instructor. Enrollment limited to 15. Preregistration required. Sophomore Standing. Explores migration as a gendered process and what factors account for migratory differences by gender across place and time; including labor markets, education demographic and family structure, gender ideologies, religion, government regulations and legal status, and intrinsic aspects of the migratory flow itself.

Call Number: To be announced

Day, Time & Location: To be announced

Instructor: To be announced

Call Number: 10951

Day, Time & Location: R 4:10pm-6:00pm / 412 Pupin Laboratories

Instructor: Eric Gamalinda

This seminar focuses on the critical analysis of Asian representation and participation in Hollywood by taking a look at how mainstream American cinema continues to essentialize the Asian and how Asian American filmmakers have responded to Hollywood Orientalist stereotypes. We will analyze various issues confronting the Asian American, including yellowface, white patriarchy, male and female stereotypes, the “model minority” myth, depictions of “Chinatowns,” panethnicity, the changing political interpretations of the term Asian American throughout American history, gender and sexuality, and cultural hegemonies and privileging within the Asian community.

Call Number: 14519

Day, Time & Location: W 2:10pm-4:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: To be announced

This is a seminar for advanced undergraduates and master’s degree students, which explores the socioeconomic consequences of China’s development of a boom, urban residential real-estate market since the privatization of housing at the end of the 1990s. We will use the intersecting lenses of gender/sexuality, class and race/ethnicity to analyze the dramatic new inequalities created in arguably the largest and fastest accumulation of residential-real estate wealth in history. We will examine topics such as how skyrocketing home prices and state-led urbanization have created winners and losers based on gender, sexuality, class, race/ethnicity and location (hukou), as China strives to transform from a predominantly rural population to one that is 60 percent urban by 2020. We explore the vastly divergent effects of urban real-estate development on Chinese citizens, from the most marginaliz4d communities in remote regions of Tibet and Xinjiang to hyper-wealthy investors in Manhattan. Although this course has no formal prerequisites, it assumes some basic knowledge of Chinese history. If you have never taken a course on China before, please ask me for guidance on whether or not this class is suitable for you. The syllabus is preliminary and subject to change based on breaking news events and the needs of the class.

Call Number: 14760

Day, Time & Location: M 10:10am-12:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Gila Ashtor

Can the words “trauma” and “pleasure” be put in the same sentence? If trauma epitomizes suffering and pleasure represents enjoyment, is there any relation between these experiences? And yet, how else to explain that people seem endlessly addicted to negative experiences, or that traumatized people often try to recreate the damage they endured?

We are living in an age of endless trauma, and everywhere we go, we hear that trauma is destructive, anathema to pleasure, that it destroys our sense of self, our security, our stability, and identity. We are taught to avoid trauma at all costs because it is harmful and inimical to flourishing. New statistics routinely confirm that we are living through a trauma epidemic in which ordinary people experience symptoms of extreme distress, flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, nightmares, and difficulty sleeping. Every year, new memoirs are published in which protagonists detail their endless battles with traumatic adversity and most television shows, across a variety of genres, include trauma as a subplot to character development (Ted Lasso, Euphoria, True Detective, to name a few). Referring to its growing pervasiveness, the New Yorker critic Parul Sehgal wrote a controversial essay, “The Case Against the Trauma Plot” (2021) in which she criticizes our culture’s overreliance on trauma as a primary trope of character development, forcing us to ask: is trauma really as widespread as we think? how did trauma become such a popular ‘identity’? what work is trauma doing for us, as individuals and as a culture? Is it possible to recognize the ubiquity of trauma while also acknowledging that we often seek situations which are harmful, even traumatizing, that we might be attracted to suffering for reasons we don’t yet understand?

This course examines the complex relationship between trauma and pleasure by familiarizing students with the clinical and theoretical concepts at the core of contemporary trauma and critical theory. We will focus specifically on the topics of: sexuality, perversion, trauma, identity, relationality, narcissism, gender and attachment in order to explore how these concepts work today. Delving into theoretical writing by Foucault, Bersani, Edelman, Berlant, Butler, Dean and Preciado, as well as clinical writing by major psychoanalysts, Freud, Laplanche, Loewald, Lacan, Laplanche and Winnicott, we will redefine contemporary debates by exploring their clinical meaning. In addition to offering a comprehensive outline of how psychoanalysis and critical theory relate, this course will expose students to a wide range of contemporary clinical thinking in order to facilitate a deeper engagement with the practical, lived dimension of psychoanalysis.

Call Number: 13937

Day, Time & Location: W 10:10am-12:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Deborah Paredez

What makes a diva a diva? How have divas shaped and challenged our ideas about American culture, performance, race, space, and capital during the last century? This seminar explores the central role of the diva—the celebrated, iconic, and supremely skilled female performer—in the fashioning and re-imagining of racial, gendered, sexual, national, temporal, and aesthetic categories in American culture. Students in this course will theorize the cultural function and constitutive aspects of the diva and will analyze particular performances of a range of American divas from the 20th and 21st centuries and their respective roles in (re)defining American popular culture.

Call Number: 10543

Day, Time & Location: F 2:10pm-4:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Jo Becker and Michael Bochenek

This course is designed to introduce contemporary children’s rights issues and help students develop practical advocacy skills to protect and promote the rights of children. Students will explore case studies of advocacy campaigns addressing issues including juvenile justice, child labor, child marriage, the use of child soldiers, corporal punishment, migration and child refugees, female genital mutilation, and LBGT issues affecting children. Over the course of the semester, students will become familiar with international children’s rights standards, as well as a variety of advocacy strategies and avenues, including use of the media, litigation, and advocacy with UN, legislative bodies, and the private sector. Written assignments will focus on practical advocacy tools, including advocacy letters, op-eds, submissions to UN mechanisms or treaty bodies, and the development of an overarching advocacy strategy, including the identification of goals and objectives, and appropriate advocacy targets and tactics.

Call Number: 10644

Day, Time & Location: R 2:10pm-4:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Julie Rajan

The term 'gendercide' highlights a range of distinct and specific forms of violence executed against human beings based on their own gender self-identification as well as patriarchal assumptions about their gender. In this course, we will examine research discerning, movements challenging, and the adjudication, and/or lack thereof, of Gender Based Violence (GBV) in several major categories traversing spatial, temporal, and ideological contexts, including: reproductive rights and health; trafficking and migration; and disaster and pandemics. It is critical to: interrogate the ideologies that drive and sustain GBV; examine in detail the harm it presents to human beings; explore what can be done to protect the security of those experiencing GBV; and to think about measures of prevention to guard additional human beings from experiencing it. The heart of the course will involve an intersectional analysis of specific case studies; highlighting the GBV associated with each case; examining the impact of GBV on human rights; and how GBV has been addressed in society. The close study of each case will assist students in illuminating intricacies, complexities, and challenges to human security in specific contexts.

Call Number: 10985

Day, Time & Location: W 4:10pm-6:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Valentina Izmirlieva

A graduate seminar which invites students to re-read contemporary history of Eastern Europe through the lens of women’s resistance. Women are no less effective history agents than men, but they usually act outside of dominant power structures, opposing and subverting them through imaginative strategies of resistance in the everyday. Focused on the Soviet Union and the contemporary states of Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, this course explores female resistance channeled through visual and performance art, fiction and documentary, poetry and film. Structured in reverse chronological order, it begins with current manifestations of women’s resistance, from artistic interventions in the War in Ukraine to Pussy Riot’s punk performances and the political activism of the Belarus Free Theater. It then investigates the genealogy of these contemporary forms of resistance in underground feminist and dissident activism during the late Soviet period, a whole range of resistance articulations through the female experiences of WW2, the GULAG and Stalinist purges, and female agency in subverting gender norms since the Bolshevik sexual Revolution of the 1920s. All reading will be available in English.

Open to graduate students. Advanced undergraduates can register with instructor’s permission. No Russian, Ukrainian or Belarusian required.

Call Number: 10564

Day, Time & Location: R 11:00am-1:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Mary McLeod

Call Number: 10092

Day, Time & Location: R 2:10pm-4:00pm / To be announced

Instructor: Alessandra M. Ciucci