An Interdepartmental Program in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation

(1-99) Primarily for Undergraduate Students

CAST 92a Internship and Analysis in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation
Staff

CAST 98a Independent Study in Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation
Staff

(100-199) For Both Undergraduate and Graduate Students

CAST 110b Dance and Migration
[ ca deis-us djw nw ]
Highlights the aesthetic, political, social, and spiritual potency of dance forms and practices as they travel, transform, and are accorded meaning both domestically and transnationally, especially in situations (or in the aftermath) of extreme violence and cultural dislocation. Usually offered every third year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

CAST 125a Confronting Gender-Based Violence
[ ca deis-us djw ]
Engaging with multiple forms of creative expression and several different social change frameworks as they address and counter various aspects of gender-based violence in discrete cultural and historical contexts, this course explores gender-based violence as a grave violation of human rights, and the creative, innovative and meaningful methods through which particular communities and individuals counter such violation, including as it intersects with race and socioeconomic status. These methods might range from art installations in galleries or public spaces to formal theatrical productions, from the choreography of street protests to graffiti, films, pop-up concerts and podcasts, many involving survivors of gender-based violence in the creative process. We’ll focus in particular on the experiences of those who identify as women, have been assigned to or perceived of as members of that category, or who identity and present as femme. Usually offered every third year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

CAST 150b Introduction to Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation
[ ss ]
How can music, theater, dance and visual and other arts contribute to community building, coexistence, and nonviolent social change? In the aftermath of violence, how can artists help communities reconcile? Students explore these questions through interviews, case studies, and projects. Usually offered every year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

CAST 170a Documenting Immigrant Experiences
[ ss ]
Investigates documentary film as a genre, and explores the potential of the medium for engaging students with immigrant communities in Waltham through hands-on production experiences. Through the process of exchanging narratives with community members, students generate raw material for a film documentary. Usually offered every third year.
Jenny Alexander and James Rutenbeck

CAST 180a Creative Approaches to Conflict Transformation and Sustainable Development
[ ca djw ]
Explores creative approaches to contemporary complex challenges, focusing on conflict transformation and sustainable development. The course introduces theories of complexity, and considers how modes of understanding and engaging through arts and culture cultivate the capacities required to constructively address complex challenges. Through the course, students will consider key concepts, review and assess case studies, collaboratively design and advocate for initiatives. Students will engage with members of a global community of inquiry making the case for arts- and culture-based approaches to complex contemporary challenges. Usually offered every year.
Cynthia E. Cohen

CAST 181b Ethics of Community Engagement Capstone Practicum
Prerequisite: CAST 150b and permission from the instructor. Yields half-course credit.
Combining theory and practice, this course supports students in the Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST) minor as they imagine and undertake their required capstone project or CAST course projects that require engagement beyond the campus. Capstone projects and individual courses may involve local, regional and even international collaborations, all helpful in fostering an empathetic and compassionate sense of people’s and communities’ situations, values, and choices. When this work is conducted within a non-profit organization, it is also a way to nurture future leaders and supporters of community-based and other associations aiming to constructively transform society. Ethical concerns must be at the forefront of the planning and implementation of all such endeavors. Usually offered every year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

CAST 189a Capstone Project Design Practicum
Prerequisite: CAST 150b and permission from the instructor. Yields half-course credit.
Students apply theories, skills, information and critical questions to an individual capstone project that engages with social transformation concerns in creative, practical and ethically-sound ways. Usually offered every year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation: Core Course

CAST 150b Introduction to Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation
[ ss ]
How can music, theater, dance and visual and other arts contribute to community building, coexistence, and nonviolent social change? In the aftermath of violence, how can artists help communities reconcile? Students explore these questions through interviews, case studies, and projects. Usually offered every year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

Core Electives

AAAS 124a After the Dance: Performing Sovereignty in the Caribbean
[ hum oc ss ]
Utilizing short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and the visual arts, this class theorizes movement and/as freedom in the spectacular or mundane movements of the region, including annual Carnival and Hosay celebrations. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

ANTH 130b Visuality and Culture
[ dl ss ]
Introduces students to the study of visual, aural, and artistic media through an ethnographic lens. Course combines written and creative assignments to understand how culture shapes how we make meaning out of images and develop media literacy. Topics include ethnographic/documentary film, advertising, popular culture, viral videos and special effects, photography, art worlds, and the technological development of scientific images. Usually offered every second year.
Patricia Alvarez Astacio or Ellen Schattschneider

ANTH 159a Museums and Public Memory
[ oc ss ]
Explores the social and political organization of public memory, including museums, cultural villages, and memorial sites. Who has the right to determine the content and form of such institutions? Working with local community members, students will develop a collaborative exhibition project. Usually offered every second year.
Ellen Schattschneider

CAST 110b Dance and Migration
[ ca deis-us djw nw ]
Highlights the aesthetic, political, social, and spiritual potency of dance forms and practices as they travel, transform, and are accorded meaning both domestically and transnationally, especially in situations (or in the aftermath) of extreme violence and cultural dislocation. Usually offered every third year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

CAST 125a Confronting Gender-Based Violence
[ ca deis-us djw ]
Engaging with multiple forms of creative expression and several different social change frameworks as they address and counter various aspects of gender-based violence in discrete cultural and historical contexts, this course explores gender-based violence as a grave violation of human rights, and the creative, innovative and meaningful methods through which particular communities and individuals counter such violation, including as it intersects with race and socioeconomic status. These methods might range from art installations in galleries or public spaces to formal theatrical productions, from the choreography of street protests to graffiti, films, pop-up concerts and podcasts, many involving survivors of gender-based violence in the creative process. We’ll focus in particular on the experiences of those who identify as women, have been assigned to or perceived of as members of that category, or who identity and present as femme. Usually offered every third year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

CAST 170a Documenting Immigrant Experiences
[ ss ]
Investigates documentary film as a genre, and explores the potential of the medium for engaging students with immigrant communities in Waltham through hands-on production experiences. Through the process of exchanging narratives with community members, students generate raw material for a film documentary. Usually offered every third year.
Jenny Alexander and James Rutenbeck

CAST 180a Creative Approaches to Conflict Transformation and Sustainable Development
[ ca djw ]
Explores creative approaches to contemporary complex challenges, focusing on conflict transformation and sustainable development. The course introduces theories of complexity, and considers how modes of understanding and engaging through arts and culture cultivate the capacities required to constructively address complex challenges. Through the course, students will consider key concepts, review and assess case studies, collaboratively design and advocate for initiatives. Students will engage with members of a global community of inquiry making the case for arts- and culture-based approaches to complex contemporary challenges. Usually offered every year.
Cynthia E. Cohen

COML/ENG 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]
Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of an introductory letter including student's major, writing/editing experience, why publishing is of interest to them, any experimental literary publications/performances they've experienced. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within the Registration periods.
Editing and publishing a literary journal -- either digital, print, or in more experimental forms -- can be an important component of a writer's creative life and sense of literary citizenship. This experiential learning course will engage students with theoretical and historical reading as well as provide practical hands-on tools for literary publishing. Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org) will be used as a case study. A group publishing project will be part of the coursework, and this can be tied into journals already being published on campus. By the end of the semester, students will have a fuller sense of the work, mindset, difficulties, strategies, and values of a literary publisher. Usually offered every second year.
Elizabeth Bradfield

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]
To decolonize book history and "maker culture," the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, the girdle book, the wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every year.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 151b Performance Studies
[ dl hum ]
Explores paradigms for making performance inside and outside of institutionalized theater spaces, with an emphasis on the performance of everyday life. Students read theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance. Combining theory with practice, students explore and make site-specific and online performances. Usually offered every third year.
Thomas King

ENG 161a Literature and Counterculture
[ hum ]
Explores alternative, subversive publics created through literature and art. Readings into avant-garde movements and their legacies, with a focus on creative political engagements with public spheres. We'll consider writing, experimental theater, visual art, and musical performance at the cultural edges and outsides. This is creative expression that plays with textual circulation and political subversion. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

ENG 169a Eco-Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information.
A creative writing workshop focused on writing essays and poems that engage with environmental and eco-justice concerns. Readings, writing assignments, and class discussions will be augmented by field trips. Usually offered every second year.
Elizabeth Bradfield

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum oc ]
Students will explore two pressing questions: How do contemporary theatre artists work to rehumanize those denied humanity? During a global climate emergency, how can the theatre, which is traditionally defined by the co-presence of humans, relocate the human as only one of many lifeforms—not the center of everything but rather entwined with other organic, inorganic, and spiritual agencies? Usually offered every second year.
Thomas King

ENG 181a Making Sex, Performing Gender
[ hum ]
Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.
Gender and sexuality studied as sets of performed traits and cues for interactions among social actors. Readings explore the possibility that differently organized gender and sexual practices are possible for men and women. Usually offered every third year.
Thomas King

FA 181a Housing and Social Justice
[ ca deis-us dl ss ]
Employs housing as a lens to interrogate space and society, state and market, power and change, in relation with urban inequality and social justice. It trains students to become participants in the global debates about housing. In doing so, it teaches students about dominant paradigms of urban development and welfare and situates such paradigms in the 20th century history of capitalism. It will explicitly adopt a comparative and transnational urban approach to housing and social justice, showing how a globalized perspective provides important insights into local shelter struggles and debates. Usually offered every second year.
Muna Guvenc

FA/NEJS 183a Breaking Boundaries in Contemporary Israeli Culture
[ ca hum ]
Explores how the Creative Arts reflect, challenge, and reconfigure various cleavages and barriers that characterize contemporary Israeli society. This course will focus on literary, visual and cinematic artworks, organized around thematic clusters and major theoretical issues. Usually offered every second year.
Gannit Ankori and Ilana Szobel

HISP 142b Literature, Film, and Human Rights in Latin America
[ hum nw ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took HECS 42b in prior years. May be taught in English or Spanish.
Examines literature, film (fiction and non-fiction) and other artistic expressions from Latin America, in conversation with the idea of human rights—from the colonial arguments about slavery and the 'natural rights' of the indigenous, to the advent of human rights in the context of post-conflict truth and reconciliation processes, to the emergence of gender and ethnicity as into the human rights framework, to the current debates about rights of nature in the midst of a global ecological crisis. Usually offered every third year.
Fernando Rosenberg

HISP 160a Culture/Media and Social Change in Latin America
[ djw fl hum nw wi ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
The central topic of this class is the role of the creative arts (creative writing, visual arts, music, film, performance) in their role as fostering political change in Latin America. We will examine key eras of 20th and 21st century cultural production in relation with shifting mass-media landscapes, from the revolutionary impetus of the early 20th century avant-gardes in literature and visual arts, popular music in the 1940s, documentary film during and the 1960s guerrillas, artistic resistance to the dictatorship, to the street art accompanying human rights and grass roots identity movements of the 2000s. Usually offered every second year.
Fernando Rosenberg

HISP 165b The Storyteller: Short Fiction in Latin America
[ djw fl hum nw ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
Through a study of Latin American short stories, some of them by consecrated writers, some of them by less well-known, we will reflect on the power of storytelling and narrative to shape subjectivity and community. We will examine topics that traverse Latin American cultures and are expressed in these stories, such tensions between literacy and oral traditions, hegemonic and minority voices, cultural diversity, ethnicity, class, migration, as well as contemporary concerns around issues of gender and sexuality, and in relation to the natural world. This class has an optional creative writing component, as students will have the chance, if so inclined, to write fiction applying concepts and themes studied in class (instead of critical/analytical assignments). Usually offered every third year.
Fernando Rosenberg

HISP 196a Topics in Latinx Literature and Culture
[ hum wi ]
May be repeated for credit. May be taught in English or Spanish.
Offers students the opportunity for in-depth study of a particular aspect of the diverse literary and cultural production of U.S. latinx. Topics will vary from year to year but may include autobiography, detective fiction, or historical fiction. Usually offered every third year.
James Mandrell, María Durán, or Staff

LGLS 129a Global Justice and Societies in Transition
[ djw ss ]
Introduces transitional justice, a set of practices that arise following a period of conflict that aim directly at confronting past violations of human rights. This course will focus on criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, and the contributions of art and culture. Usually offered every second year.
Melissa Stimell

MUS 3b Global Soundscapes: Performing Musical Tradition Across Time and Place
[ ca nw ]
Open to all students. Required of all Cultural Studies track majors.
What are we listening to? Applies engaged listening skills and critical analysis for a deeper appreciation of (non-Western) music as a cultural expression. Focuses on particular traditions as well as social context, impact of globalization, cultural production, cultural rights, etc. Usually offered every year.
Staff

NEJS 173a Trauma and Violence in Israeli Literature and Film
[ deis-us djw fl hum ]
Taught in Hebrew.
Explores trauma and violence in Israeli Literature, film, and art. Focuses on man-made disasters, war and terrorism, sexual and family violence, and murder and suicide, and examines their relation to nationalism, Zionism, gender, and sexual identity. Usually offered every second year.
Ilana Szobel

NEJS 184b Disability Cultures: Art, Film and Literature of People with Disabilities
[ deis-us djw hum ]
Explores cultural representations of disability in Israel, Europe, and the US. By focusing on literature, film, dance, and visual art, it explores physical, mental, and emotional disability experiences, and their relations to gender, sexuality, nationalism, and identity politics. Usually offered every second year.
Ilana Szobel

NEJS/WGS 110a Sexual Violence in Film and Culture
[ deis-us djw hum ]
Explores the effects of sexualized violence in society. While exploring representations of gender-based sexual violence in documentaries and features, stand-up comedy, memoirs, poetry, and visual art, this course will offer a critical discussion on Rape Culture in the 21st century, with particular attention to the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability in the construction of sexual violence. Usually offered every second year.
Ilana Szobel

SOC 154a Community Structure and Youth Subcultures
[ ss ]
Examines how the patterning of relations within communities generates predictable outcomes at the individual and small-group level. Deals with cities, suburbs, and small rural communities. Special focus is given to youth subcultures typically found in each community type. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

SOC 155b Protest, Politics, and Change: Social Movements
[ deis-us ss ]
Introduces major sociological theories about leadership, political context, culture, and identities in social movements in transnational perspective. Examines historical and contemporary cases of social movements through the lenses of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Usually offered every second year.
Gowri Vijayakumar

THA 40a The Art of Visual Narrative and Production Design
[ ca ]
Explores the process of creating visual narrative - how do we travel from idea to image to visual storytelling? We will learn to create evocative environments and visual metaphor that transport the viewer, transcend reality, and make stories. We will construct and deconstruct the idea of performance space both theatrical and site-specific. How do we create the psychological landscape of a story? What can an architectural detail tell us about character? What can we learn from objects? We will approach design from an interdisciplinary perspective that will challenge students to combine visual art, new media, performance, and space, in surprising and meaningful ways. Of interest to designers, actors, directors, film-makers, fine artists, and anyone interested in the process of creating a visual story line. Usually offered every year.
Cameron Anderson

THA 126a Playing for Change - Community Building and Social Change on Stage
[ ca djw ]
Examines ways in which theatrical arts can create change in a variety of non-traditional situations. This course is grounded in the discussion/practice of theater activists such as Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. For both theater and non-theater students, this course focuses on how and why this collaborative, useful art form can be introduced into sociological, psychological, political, cultural, educational, medical, and historical paradigms. Students will generate work surrounding social issues of importance to them. Usually offered every second year.
Jennifer Cleary

THA 132a The Collaborative Process
[ ca ]
May be repeated once for credit.
An exploration of the process of collaborative creation from the idea to performance. Students work as performers, directors, writers, and designers to create original theater pieces based on current events, literature, theater, genres, and personal obsessions. Usually offered every year.
Adrianne Krstansky

THA 138b Creative Pedagogy
[ ca oc ]
Focuses on creativity in pedagogy from a theatrical lens and is meant for anyone who wishes to teach anyone just about anything! This course will focus on the building of community and confidence that takes place within any learning environment that utilizes creative and theatrical arts as a modality. We will discuss the foundation and theories behind teaching, learning, and creative expression, allowing students to ground their own work in what has and hasn't worked in the past, as well as to expand their own creative reach and risk-taking capabilities. Usually offered every second year.
Jennifer Cleary

Electives in Creative Arts

AAAS/FA 74b Introduction to African Art
[ ca nw ss ]
Surveys the visual artistic traditions of Africa. Investigates the different forms of visual art in relation to their historical and socio-cultural context. Symbolism and complexity of Africa's visual art traditions are explored through analysis of myth, ritual, cosmology, and history. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AMST/MUS 39b Protest Through Song: Music that Shaped America
[ ca oc ss ]
Open to music majors and non-majors. Does not fulfill the Main Currents in American Studies requirement for the major.
Examines 20th and 21st century protest music to better understand the complex relationships between music and social movements. Through class discussions, reading, writing, and listening assignments, and a final performance students will discover how social, cultural, and economic protest songs helped shape American culture. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

CA 125a Provocative Art: Outside the Comfort Zone
[ ca ]
Presents, analyzes and discusses art that provokes controversies, discomfort, and other strong responses. This class will focus on a broad range of artistic expressions, including visual art, theater, film, music, and literature with Brandeis faculty as well as visiting artists. Usually offered every year.
Will Chalmus

CAST 110b Dance and Migration
[ ca deis-us djw nw ]
Highlights the aesthetic, political, social, and spiritual potency of dance forms and practices as they travel, transform, and are accorded meaning both domestically and transnationally, especially in situations (or in the aftermath) of extreme violence and cultural dislocation. Usually offered every third year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

CAST 125a Confronting Gender-Based Violence
[ ca deis-us djw ]
Engaging with multiple forms of creative expression and several different social change frameworks as they address and counter various aspects of gender-based violence in discrete cultural and historical contexts, this course explores gender-based violence as a grave violation of human rights, and the creative, innovative and meaningful methods through which particular communities and individuals counter such violation, including as it intersects with race and socioeconomic status. These methods might range from art installations in galleries or public spaces to formal theatrical productions, from the choreography of street protests to graffiti, films, pop-up concerts and podcasts, many involving survivors of gender-based violence in the creative process. We’ll focus in particular on the experiences of those who identify as women, have been assigned to or perceived of as members of that category, or who identity and present as femme. Usually offered every third year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

CAST 180a Creative Approaches to Conflict Transformation and Sustainable Development
[ ca djw ]
Explores creative approaches to contemporary complex challenges, focusing on conflict transformation and sustainable development. The course introduces theories of complexity, and considers how modes of understanding and engaging through arts and culture cultivate the capacities required to constructively address complex challenges. Through the course, students will consider key concepts, review and assess case studies, collaboratively design and advocate for initiatives. Students will engage with members of a global community of inquiry making the case for arts- and culture-based approaches to complex contemporary challenges. Usually offered every year.
Cynthia E. Cohen

ECON/FA 87a Economics and the Arts
[ ca ss ]
Prerequisite: ECON 2a or 10a; FA 30a, 30b, 57a, 59a or 62a. The FA course may be taken concurrently with ECON/FA 87a.
Economics and art history provide dual lenses for studying the mechanics of art auctions and building collections. The course will focus on the intersection of history and patronage of specific artists and works of art with the marketplace. Usually offered every second year.
Kathryn Graddy and Nancy Scott

FA 4a Sculpture Foundation: 3-D Design I
[ ca ]
Beginning-level course. Preference to first-year students and sophomores. May be repeated once for credit if taught by different instructors.
Exploration of three-dimensional aspects of form, space, and composition utilizing a variety of materials and sculptural techniques. Emphasizes students' inventing of images through the use of modern materials and contemporary ideas about sculpture. Assignments are based on abstract thought and problem solving. The intent of this course is to give students a rich studio experience and promote a fresh and meaningful approach to visual concepts. Usually offered every fall.
Tory Fair and Christopher Frost

FA 33b Islamic Art and Architecture
[ ca nw ]
Through case studies of cities, sites, and monuments, the course presents an overview of the art and the architecture of the Islamic world beginning from the seventh century up to the present. Some of the themes include, but are not limited to, Islamic material culture, orientalist imaginations, systems of governance and the colonial present, search for the local identity, urban modernity and nationalism, and globalization. Usually offered every second year.
Muna Guvenc

FA 61a History of Photography
[ ca ]
The history of photography from its invention in 1839 to the present, with an emphasis on developments in America. Photography is studied as a documentary and an artistic medium. Topics include Alfred Stieglitz and the photo-secession, Depression-era documentary, Robert Frank and street photography, and postmodern photography. Usually offered every second year.
Peter Kalb

FA 69b Inventing Tradition: Women as Artists, Women as Art
[ ca ]
Provides an art-historical overview and a feminist critique of gender and representation followed by select case studies of the art and life of women artists. Examples include non-Western art. Usually offered every second year.
Gannit Ankori

FA 76a Palestinian and Israeli Art, Film and Visual Culture: Intersecting Visions
[ ca ]
Israelis and Palestinians have been creating vibrant and bold works of art that both reflect and transcend the region's conflict-ridden history. This course offers a critical comparative study of Israeli and Palestinian art, exploring contentious expressions of pain and trauma as well as shared visions of hope and peace. Usually offered every second year.
Gannit Ankori

FA 86b Museum Studies
[ ca dl ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 85b in prior years.
An experiential learning seminar focused on the art object in the context of the museum; the history of museums (architecture, educational mission, curatorial presentation); museum ethics and provenance studies; new theories of museums and their expanded role in the community. Usually offered every second year.
Nancy Scott

FA 164a The Re-Invention of Art
[ ca djw ]
By the 1960s, the United States was the art-world capital. Radical art, however, appeared everywhere. Examines US art of the 1960's-1970s in light of artistic production in, among other places, Germany, England, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, Senegal, and Japan. Usually offered every year.
Peter Kalb

FA 165a Contemporary Art
[ ca ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took FA 152a in prior years.
After theories of power and representation and art movements of pop, minimalism, and conceptual art were established by the 1970s, artists began to create what we see in galleries today. This course addresses art at the turn of the millennium with attention to intersections of art and identity, politics, economy, and history. Usually offered every second year.
Peter Kalb

FA 169a Ecology and Art
[ ca dl ]
Provides a theoretical foundation and art historical background for discussion of contemporary art that draws attention to the ecologies, primarily natural but also cultural, of which it and we are a part. Usually offered every third year.
Peter Kalb

FA 174a Art and Trauma: Israeli, Palestinian, Latin American and United States Art
[ ca ]
A comparative and critical examination of the various ways in which personal traumas (illness, death, loss) and collective traumas (war, the Holocaust, exile) find meaningful expression in the work of modern and contemporary artists from diverse regions. Usually offered every second year.
Gannit Ankori

FA 178a Frida Kahlo: Art, Life and Legacy
[ ca nw ]
Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) has become an international cultural icon. Her innovative paintings brilliantly re-envision identity, gender and the female body, inspiring celebrities from Madonna to Salma Hayek. This course explores the art and life of Frida Kahlo, as well as her immense influence on contemporary art, film and popular culture. Usually offered every second year.
Gannit Ankori

FA 181a Housing and Social Justice
[ ca deis-us dl ss ]
Employs housing as a lens to interrogate space and society, state and market, power and change, in relation with urban inequality and social justice. It trains students to become participants in the global debates about housing. In doing so, it teaches students about dominant paradigms of urban development and welfare and situates such paradigms in the 20th century history of capitalism. It will explicitly adopt a comparative and transnational urban approach to housing and social justice, showing how a globalized perspective provides important insights into local shelter struggles and debates. Usually offered every second year.
Muna Guvenc

FA 187a Approaches to Architecture and the City
[ ca ]
Trains students in developing the ability to conduct architectural and urban analysis of the built environment. Through a comparative case-study approach—based on selected readings, real spaces, and creative projects—students will better understand architectural and urban design in relation to social, cultural, human, and political aspects. Usually offered every year.
Muna Guvenc

FA/NEJS 183a Breaking Boundaries in Contemporary Israeli Culture
[ ca hum ]
Explores how the Creative Arts reflect, challenge, and reconfigure various cleavages and barriers that characterize contemporary Israeli society. This course will focus on literary, visual and cinematic artworks, organized around thematic clusters and major theoretical issues. Usually offered every second year.
Gannit Ankori and Ilana Szobel

MUS 3b Global Soundscapes: Performing Musical Tradition Across Time and Place
[ ca nw ]
Open to all students. Required of all Cultural Studies track majors.
What are we listening to? Applies engaged listening skills and critical analysis for a deeper appreciation of (non-Western) music as a cultural expression. Focuses on particular traditions as well as social context, impact of globalization, cultural production, cultural rights, etc. Usually offered every year.
Staff

MUS 6b Survey of West African Music: Dance-Drumming from Senegal to Nigeria
[ ca djw nw ]
Explores the dance-drumming of West Africa--a global music style with profound impact on contemporary world cultures. Through engaged listening, critical analysis of ethnomusicological readings, and experiential learning on African percussion instruments, we examine the cultural context and musical systems of West African dance-drumming music. Special one-time offering, spring 2020.
Benjamin Paulding

MUS 86a Improv Collective
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Yields half-course credit. Placement auditions will be held at the start of the semester. A maximum of four course credits will be allowed for all enrollments in Ensemble (80a,b – 88a,b) alone or Private Instruction and Ensemble together. May be undertaken as an extracurricular, noncredit activity by registering in the XC section.
Open to all Brandeis students who play an instrument or sing, regardless of skill or experience in improvising, the Improv Collective focuses on both individual creativity and group improvisation. The semester culminates with a performance in Slosberg Recital hall. Usually offered every semester.
Thomas Hall

MUS 86b Improv Collective
Continuation of MUS 86a. See MUS 86a for special notes and course description.
Usually offered every semester.
Thomas Hall

MUS 87a Music and Dance from Ghana
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Yields half-course credit. A maximum of four course credits will be allowed for all enrollments in Ensemble (80a,b – 88a,b) alone or Private Instruction and Ensemble together. Instruments will be supplied by instructor.
Students in this course will study and perform a repertory of traditional music and dance of a variety of ethnic traditions from Ghana, West Africa. The drum ensemble includes bells, rattles and drums. The vocal music features call-and-response singing in local languages. The dances have choreographic formations as well as opportunity for individual expression. Drumming and dancing are closely intertwined; work will culminate in a final performance. Usually offered every year.
Benjamin Paulding

MUS 87b Music and Dance from Ghana
Continuation of MUS 87a. See MUS 87a for special notes and course description.
Usually offered every year.
Benjamin Paulding

THA 40a The Art of Visual Narrative and Production Design
[ ca ]
Explores the process of creating visual narrative - how do we travel from idea to image to visual storytelling? We will learn to create evocative environments and visual metaphor that transport the viewer, transcend reality, and make stories. We will construct and deconstruct the idea of performance space both theatrical and site-specific. How do we create the psychological landscape of a story? What can an architectural detail tell us about character? What can we learn from objects? We will approach design from an interdisciplinary perspective that will challenge students to combine visual art, new media, performance, and space, in surprising and meaningful ways. Of interest to designers, actors, directors, film-makers, fine artists, and anyone interested in the process of creating a visual story line. Usually offered every year.
Cameron Anderson

THA 109a Improvisation for Theatre: Acting Unscripted
[ ca ]
An approach to acting through the stimulation of the actor's imagination and creativity, freeing the actor's impulses and faith. Improvisation breaks down the elements of scene work and, through a series of exercises, makes these elements more personal and accessible to the actor. Usually offered every year.
Adrianne Krstansky and Dmitry Troyanovsky

THA 126a Playing for Change - Community Building and Social Change on Stage
[ ca djw ]
Examines ways in which theatrical arts can create change in a variety of non-traditional situations. This course is grounded in the discussion/practice of theater activists such as Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. For both theater and non-theater students, this course focuses on how and why this collaborative, useful art form can be introduced into sociological, psychological, political, cultural, educational, medical, and historical paradigms. Students will generate work surrounding social issues of importance to them. Usually offered every second year.
Jennifer Cleary

THA 132a The Collaborative Process
[ ca ]
May be repeated once for credit.
An exploration of the process of collaborative creation from the idea to performance. Students work as performers, directors, writers, and designers to create original theater pieces based on current events, literature, theater, genres, and personal obsessions. Usually offered every year.
Adrianne Krstansky

THA 138b Creative Pedagogy
[ ca oc ]
Focuses on creativity in pedagogy from a theatrical lens and is meant for anyone who wishes to teach anyone just about anything! This course will focus on the building of community and confidence that takes place within any learning environment that utilizes creative and theatrical arts as a modality. We will discuss the foundation and theories behind teaching, learning, and creative expression, allowing students to ground their own work in what has and hasn't worked in the past, as well as to expand their own creative reach and risk-taking capabilities. Usually offered every second year.
Jennifer Cleary

THA 142b Women Playwrights: Writing for the Stage by and about Women
[ ca deis-us wi ]
Introduces the world of female playwrights. This course will engage the texts through common themes explored by female playwrights: motherhood (and daughterhood), reproduction, sexuality, family relationships, etc. Students will participate in writing or performance exercises based on these themes. Usually offered every second year.
Adrianne Krstansky

THA 144b Black Theater and Performance
[ ca deis-us ]
Explores aesthetic innovations and transformations in African American theater and performance and examines the crucial role the stage has played in shaping perceptions and understandings of blackness. Usually offered every second year.
Isaiah Wooden

THA 145a Queer Theater
[ ca deis-us ]
Explores significant plays that have shaped and defined gay identity during the past 100 years. Playwrights span Wilde to Taylor Mac. Examining texts as literature, history, and performance, we will explore cultural change, politics, gender, the AIDS epidemic, camp, and coming out. Usually offered every third year.
Dmitry Troyanovsky

THA 150a Global Theater: Voices from Asia, Africa, and the Americas
[ ca djw nw wi ]
Explores dramatic literature and performance traditions from across the globe. Examines the ways various artists have engaged theater to express, represent, and interrogate diversity and complexity of the human condition. Usually offered every second year.
Isaiah Wooden

THA 156a Making Mirth: Building Resilience and Creating Balance
[ ca ]
Aims to build resilience through dance, movement, storytelling, comedy, improvisation and the power of play. Students will learn various methods for obtaining calm and balance while learning about the body and students will learn various methods for obtaining calm and balance while learning about the body's natural abilities in creating resilience. Usually offered every third year.
Susan Dibble

THA 180a In Your Face: Staging the Self through Theatrical Installation
[ ca ]
Students will create a living theatrical self-portrait. Through an exploration of site-specific theater and performance art and design, students will explore themselves and their values in order to create an original live work of theater. We will ask ourselves how our experiences, past and present, can become fodder for a performance that creates social transformation and empowerment. What are the differences between how we see ourselves and how others see us? How can our narratives be transformed into mythology and metaphor? Assignments and exercises throughout the semester will focus on the nuance and interplay of written and visual elements, so that students’ self-portraits emerge as truly interdisciplinary installation pieces. The visual components of projects will not follow text but will emerge linked organically to performance. Some projects will begin with a writing exercise that explores the self (letters, emails, blogs, journals, poetry, memoirs, and autobiographies). These texts will then be translated into visual expressions (video, photo, and painting). Other projects will begin with the visual idea (family heirloom, object) and a text will be written in response. What story can emerge from a family heirloom? How can an heirloom be transformed into art? Finally, how can visual expression and text be combined to tell a powerful story of transformation? The course will culminate with the creation of a living self-portrait that will combine performance and design. No experience in performance, theater, or design expected. Of interest to students of all disciplines, of particular interest to theater-makers, filmmakers, and fine artists. Usually offered every second year.
Cameron Anderson

Electives in Humanities

AAAS 79b African American Literature of the Twentieth Century
[ hum ss ]
An introduction to the essential themes, aesthetic concerns, and textual strategies that characterize African American writing of this century. Examines those influences that have shaped the poetry, fiction, and prose nonfiction of representative writers. Usually offered every second year.
Brandon Callender or Faith Smith

AAAS 124a After the Dance: Performing Sovereignty in the Caribbean
[ hum oc ss ]
Utilizing short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and the visual arts, this class theorizes movement and/as freedom in the spectacular or mundane movements of the region, including annual Carnival and Hosay celebrations. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

AAAS 125b Caribbean Women and Globalization: Sexuality, Citizenship, Work
[ djw ss wi ]
Utilizing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, fiction, and music to examine the relationship between women's sexuality and conceptions of labor, citizenship, and sovereignty. The course considers these alongside conceptions of masculinity, contending feminisms, and the global perspective. Usually offered every second year.
Faith Smith

AAAS 155b Hip Hop History and Culture
[ ss ]
Examines the history of hip hop culture, in the broader context of U.S., African American and African diaspora history, from the 1960s to the present. Explores key developments, debates and themes shaping hip hop's evolution and contemporary global significance. Usually offered every second year.
Chad Williams

AAAS/ENG 80a Black Looks: The Promise and Perils of Photography
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]
Formerly offered as ENG 80a.
Explores photography and Africans, African-Americans and Caribbean people, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. This course will examine fiction that refers to the photograph; various photographic archives; and theorists on photography and looking. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

AMST/ENG 167b Writing the Nation: James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison
[ deis-us hum ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 57b in prior years.
An in-depth study of three major American authors of the twentieth century. Highlights the contributions of each author to the American literary canon and to its diversity. Explores how these novelists narrate cross-racial, cross-gendered, cross-regional, and cross-cultural contact and conflict in the United States. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

COML 122b Writing Home and Abroad: Literature by Women of Color
[ hum nw ]
Examines literature (prose, poetry, and memoirs) written by women of color across a wide spectrum of geographical and cultural sites. Literature written within the confines of the "home country" in the vernacular, as well as in English in immigrant locales, is read. The intersections of race, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and class as contained by the larger institutions of government, religion, nationalism, and sectarian politics are examined. Usually offered every third year.
Harleen Singh

COML/ENG 70b Environmental Film, Environmental Justice
[ djw hum ]
Examines films that address nature, environmental crisis, and green activism. Asks how world cinema can best advance the goals of social and environmental justice. Includes films by major directors and festival award winners. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

COML/ENG 191a Environmental Aesthetics
[ djw hum oc ]
Explores major schools of thought about nature, ecology, and art. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

ENG 20a Bollywood: Popular Film, Genre, and Society
[ djw hum nw ]
An introduction to popular Hindi cinema through a survey of the most important Bollywood films from the 1950s until today. Topics include melodrama, song and dance, love and sex, stardom, nationalism, religion, diasporic migration, and globalization. Usually offered every third year.
Ulka Anjaria

ENG 20b Literary Games
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]
Addresses a long durée history of the games through the lens of transmedia. This then is the start pointing to examine how transmedia theory may help unpack issues in what I call “literary games” from the medieval chess board, dice game, to digital multi-player video games now. Within a discussion of transmedia we will address the various theories about narrative and play that have animated discussions about games from the Middle Ages to contemporary media. This class will also center race, gender, sexuality, disability, class in thinking through the issues of transmedia and the gaming cultures that have most recently been in the political mainstream news in relation to far-right politics. Usually offered every third year.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 28a Environmental Literature in an Age of Extinction
[ deis-us dl hum ]
Explores literature’s role in shaping modern understandings of environmental change and damage, as well as the possibility of ecological restoration. Works include environmental classics by Thoreau, Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson as well as contemporary genres including dystopia, the thriller, and climate fiction. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr or Jerome Tharaud

ENG 42a Blackness and Horror
[ deis-us djw hum ]
Examines the tense and transformative place that blackness has within the horror tradition, beginning with the late nineteenth century and moving into the present. In addition to documentaries and critical texts, we will analyze literature, films, and various aspects of material culture that explore the relationship between blackness and horror. Usually offered every third year.
Brandon Callender

ENG 43b Medieval Play: Drama, LARP, and Video Games
[ hum oc ]
Works with a selection of medieval mystery plays, medieval-themed video games and participatory live-action role play to explore: play structures and design; alternative-world creation by way of immersion; the significance of gender, race, disability, and sexuality in performance. Usually offered every third year.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ hum nw ]
Examines the functions of storytelling in the refugee crisis. Its main objective is to further students' understanding of the political dimensions of storytelling. The course explores how reworking of reality enable people to question State and social structures. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 58a Literature and Medicine
[ dl hum wi ]
How has literature grappled with illness, healing, and the patient-doctor encounter? How can poetry and storytelling communicate with experience of bodily pain--and how does the body seek to communicate its suffering without language? We examine literary responses to the body's biological vulnerabilities, and seek to contextualize the vulnerable body within the cultural and political fields that shape medical knowledge and practice. Readings in fiction, poetry, essay, and drama will suggest the art, or craftsmanship, involved in the healing sciences, as well as the diagnostic nature of literary criticism. Reading for new approaches, generated by the literary imagination, to controversial issues in medical ethics. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

ENG 60a Storytelling Performance
[ hum oc ]
This experiential course is a workshop for students to craft and perform stories for live audiences at Brandeis and elsewhere in the Boston area. Through a series of collaborative exercises and rehearsals, students will develop a repertoire of several kinds of stories, including autobiographies, fictions, folk tales, and local history. We will tell our individual and group stories, as a team, at youth programs, open mics, and other public spaces. Usually offered every second year.
David Sherman

ENG 62b Contemporary African Literature, Global Perspectives
[ djw dl hum nw oc ]
What is "African" in African literature when the majority of writers are somehow removed from the African societies they portray? How do expatriate writers represent African subjectivities and cultures at the intersection of Diaspora and globalization? Who reads the works produced by these writers? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 66b Contemporary Global Dystopias
[ hum wi ]
Explores the sources, moods, and effects of dystopian fiction from around the world. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

ENG 72a The Caribbean's Asias: Asian Migration & Heritage in the Caribbean
[ dl hum nw ]
Studies fiction and theory by and about Caribbean people of South Asian origin, and Caribbean people of Chinese origin from the late nineteenth century to the present. Examines how they have been implicated in discussions of nationalism, hybridity, diaspora, and neoliberalism. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

ENG 87b Queer Readings: Beyond Stonewall
[ hum ]
How have LGBTQ writers explored the consolidation, diaspora, and contestation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and queer personhoods since the 1960s? Texts include fiction, poetry, drama, memoirs, and film. Usually offered every second year.
Thomas King

ENG 107a Women Writing Desire: Caribbean Fiction and Film
[ hum ]
About eight novels of the last two decades (by Cliff, Cruz, Danticat, Garcia, Kempadoo, Kincaid, Mittoo, Nunez, Pineau, Powell, or Rosario), drawn from across the region, and read in dialogue with popular culture, theory, and earlier generations of male and female writers of the region. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

ENG 107b Literary Witnessing and the Poetics of Memory
[ hum wi ]
Investigation of the memorial function of modern literature as a response to historical trauma. How is the present haunted by the past; how is literature haunted by the dead? Historical contexts are primarily slavery in the Americas and European genocides. Readings will include theoretical and philosophical considerations of the role of the witness, collective memory, and historical evidence. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

ENG 111b Postcolonial Theory
[ djw hum wi ]
Introduces students to key concepts in postcolonial theory. Traces the consequences of European colonialism for politics, culture and literature around the world, situates these within ongoing contemporary debates, and considers the usefulness of postcolonial theory for understanding the world today. Usually offered every third year.
Joshua Williams

ENG 128a Race and US Cinema
[ deis-us hum ]
Explores the central role film plays in the construction and policing of racialized identities in the US. We will focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the Black/white binarism. The course is structured as a survey. US cinema originates in the white depiction of Blacks or in the white deployment of blackface, and racialized bodies continue to serve as a ubiquitous (if frequently unacknowledged) source of fascination and anxiety in contemporary cinema. We will begin with early “whitewashing” films and D.W. Griffith’s foundational epic, The Birth of a Nation, and conclude with new queer Black cinema and contemporary Black filmmakers. Usually offered third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 137b Women and War
[ djw dl hum nw ]
Examines how African women writers and filmmakers use testimony to bear witness to mass violence. How do these writers resist political and sociocultural silencing systems that reduce traumatic experience to silence, denial, and terror? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 139a Publishing Workshop: Literary Editing and Publishing
[ dl hum oc ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Students will be selected after the submission of an introductory letter including student's major, writing/editing experience, why publishing is of interest to them, any experimental literary publications/performances they've experienced. This course fulfills a workshop requirement for the Creative Writing major and minor. Please refer to the Schedule of Classes for submission formats and deadlines within the Registration periods.
Editing and publishing a literary journal -- either digital, print, or in more experimental forms -- can be an important component of a writer's creative life and sense of literary citizenship. This experiential learning course will engage students with theoretical and historical reading as well as provide practical hands-on tools for literary publishing. Broadsided Press (www.broadsidedpress.org) will be used as a case study. A group publishing project will be part of the coursework, and this can be tied into journals already being published on campus. By the end of the semester, students will have a fuller sense of the work, mindset, difficulties, strategies, and values of a literary publisher. Usually offered every second year.
Elizabeth Bradfield

ENG 142b Black Queer Literatures
[ deis-us djw hum ]
Examines various works by black queer critics and cultural producers, beginning in the early twentieth century and continuing into the present. While we largely focus upon the attempt to create the shared sense of a world and a tradition in common, we also attend to important divisions brought about by various forms and feelings of difference (including race, gender, class, nation, age and ability). Usually offered every third year.
Brandon Callender

ENG 143a The History of Mediascapes and Critical Maker Culture
[ deis-us dl hum oc ]
To decolonize book history and "maker culture," the class examines colonial erasure, colonial knowledge production, race, gender, disability, neurodiversity, sexuality in making an alternative book history that includes khipu, the girdle book, the wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every year.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 151a Queer Studies
[ hum ]
Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.
Historical, literary, and theoretical perspectives on the construction and performance of queer subjectivities. How do queer bodies and queer representations challenge heteronormativity? How might we imagine public spaces and queer citizenship? Usually offered every second year.
Thomas King

ENG 151b Performance Studies
[ dl hum ]
Explores paradigms for making performance inside and outside of institutionalized theater spaces, with an emphasis on the performance of everyday life. Students read theories of theater and performance against paradigmatic dramatic texts and documents of social performance. Combining theory with practice, students explore and make site-specific and online performances. Usually offered every third year.
Thomas King

ENG 161a Literature and Counterculture
[ hum ]
Explores alternative, subversive publics created through literature and art. Readings into avant-garde movements and their legacies, with a focus on creative political engagements with public spheres. We'll consider writing, experimental theater, visual art, and musical performance at the cultural edges and outsides. This is creative expression that plays with textual circulation and political subversion. Usually offered every third year.
David Sherman

ENG 168b Plotting Inheritance
[ djw dl hum ]
Examines novels published in the last two decades set during slavery and indenture in the British Caribbean, alongside (and as) theorizations of accumulation, inheritance, and freedom. How does fiction account for and plot material, moral and emotional worth? Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

ENG 169a Eco-Writing Workshop
[ hum wi ]
Offered exclusively on a credit/no credit basis. Enrollment is by instructor permission after the submission of a manuscript sample. Please refer to the schedule of classes for submission information.
A creative writing workshop focused on writing essays and poems that engage with environmental and eco-justice concerns. Readings, writing assignments, and class discussions will be augmented by field trips. Usually offered every second year.
Elizabeth Bradfield

ENG 170a The Globalization of Nollywood
[ hum nw ]
Introduces students to Nigeria's film industry, one of the world's largest. It focuses on both the form and the content of Nollywood films. Examines how Nollywood films project local, national, and regional issues onto global screens. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 170b Contemporary Theatre and Performance: Between Rights and the Post-Human
[ hum oc ]
Students will explore two pressing questions: How do contemporary theatre artists work to rehumanize those denied humanity? During a global climate emergency, how can the theatre, which is traditionally defined by the co-presence of humans, relocate the human as only one of many lifeforms—not the center of everything but rather entwined with other organic, inorganic, and spiritual agencies? Usually offered every second year.
Thomas King

ENG 171b African Feminism(s)
[ hum nw ]
Examines African Feminism(s) as a literary and activist movement that underlines the need for centering African women's experiences in the study of African cultures, societies, and histories. Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 172b African Literature and Human Rights
[ hum nw ]
Human rights have been central to thinking about Africa. What do we mean when we speak of human rights? Are we asserting a natural and universal equality among all people, regardless of race, class, gender, or geography? Usually offered every third year.
Emilie Diouf

ENG 181a Making Sex, Performing Gender
[ hum ]
Recommended preparation: An introductory course in gender/sexuality and/or a course in critical theory.
Gender and sexuality studied as sets of performed traits and cues for interactions among social actors. Readings explore the possibility that differently organized gender and sexual practices are possible for men and women. Usually offered every third year.
Thomas King

FA/NEJS 183a Breaking Boundaries in Contemporary Israeli Culture
[ ca hum ]
Explores how the Creative Arts reflect, challenge, and reconfigure various cleavages and barriers that characterize contemporary Israeli society. This course will focus on literary, visual and cinematic artworks, organized around thematic clusters and major theoretical issues. Usually offered every second year.
Gannit Ankori and Ilana Szobel

FREN 139a Bad Girls and Boys: Du mauvais genre
[ fl hum ]
Prerequisite: FREN 106b or the equivalent, or permission of the instructor.
Through a selection of literary texts, articles, images and films, students will explore how works from the Middle Ages to present day depict male and female figures in the French and Francophone world who have failed to conform to expectations of their gender. Usually offered every second year.
Hollie Harder

GECS 188b Human/Nature: European Perspectives on Climate Change
[ djw hum oc wi ]
Open to all students.
Introduces European attitudes towards climate change as reflected in policy, literature, film, and art, with a focus on workable future-oriented alternatives to fossil-fueled capitalism. Usually offered every second year.
Sabine von Mering

HISP 142b Literature, Film, and Human Rights in Latin America
[ hum nw ]
May not be taken for credit by students who took HECS 42b in prior years. May be taught in English or Spanish.
Examines literature, film (fiction and non-fiction) and other artistic expressions from Latin America, in conversation with the idea of human rights—from the colonial arguments about slavery and the 'natural rights' of the indigenous, to the advent of human rights in the context of post-conflict truth and reconciliation processes, to the emergence of gender and ethnicity as into the human rights framework, to the current debates about rights of nature in the midst of a global ecological crisis. Usually offered every third year.
Fernando Rosenberg

HISP 158a Latina Feminisms
[ deis-us djw hum ]
Taught in English.
Explores the theoretical frameworks and literary productions of feminisms developed by Latina/xs. It introduces students to a diversity of backgrounds and experiences (Chicana, Dominican American, Cuban American, Salvadoran American, and Puerto Rican authors) as well as a variety of genres (i.e. novel, poetry, short stories, drama). Using intersectionality as a theoretical tool for analyzing oppressions, students will explore the complex politics of gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and race in the lives of Latina/xs. They will also explore Latina/x feminists’ theoretical and/or practical attempts to transcend socially-constructed categories of identity, while acknowledging existing material inequalities. Usually offered every third year.
María J. Durán

HISP 160a Culture/Media and Social Change in Latin America
[ djw fl hum nw wi ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
The central topic of this class is the role of the creative arts (creative writing, visual arts, music, film, performance) in their role as fostering political change in Latin America. We will examine key eras of 20th and 21st century cultural production in relation with shifting mass-media landscapes, from the revolutionary impetus of the early 20th century avant-gardes in literature and visual arts, popular music in the 1940s, documentary film during and the 1960s guerrillas, artistic resistance to the dictatorship, to the street art accompanying human rights and grass roots identity movements of the 2000s. Usually offered every second year.
Fernando Rosenberg

HISP 165b The Storyteller: Short Fiction in Latin America
[ djw fl hum nw ]
Prerequisite: HISP 109b or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor.
Through a study of Latin American short stories, some of them by consecrated writers, some of them by less well-known, we will reflect on the power of storytelling and narrative to shape subjectivity and community. We will examine topics that traverse Latin American cultures and are expressed in these stories, such tensions between literacy and oral traditions, hegemonic and minority voices, cultural diversity, ethnicity, class, migration, as well as contemporary concerns around issues of gender and sexuality, and in relation to the natural world. This class has an optional creative writing component, as students will have the chance, if so inclined, to write fiction applying concepts and themes studied in class (instead of critical/analytical assignments). Usually offered every third year.
Fernando Rosenberg

HISP 196a Topics in Latinx Literature and Culture
[ hum wi ]
May be repeated for credit. May be taught in English or Spanish.
Offers students the opportunity for in-depth study of a particular aspect of the diverse literary and cultural production of U.S. latinx. Topics will vary from year to year but may include autobiography, detective fiction, or historical fiction. Usually offered every third year.
James Mandrell, María Durán, or Staff

JAPN 130a The Literature of Multicultural Japan
[ djw hum nw ]
"Multicultural" may not be an adjective that many associate with Japan, but as we will find in this class, Japan's modern literary and cinematic tradition is rich with works by and about resident Koreans, Ainu, Okinawans, outcasts, and sexual and other marginalized minorities. Why then does the image of a monocultural Japan remain so resilient? Usually offered every third year.
Matthew Fraleigh

NEJS 136a Israeli Popular Culture: Language, Gender, and Politics
[ hum ]
Ever wondered why Israeli television is all over Netflix, or why Sabra hummus came to dominate your supermarket shelves? In this course, we will examine multiple forms of popular culture, including television, music, cookbooks, social media, fashion, and more, to understand contemporary Israeli society, with a focus on debates over language, gender, and politics in a global context. Special attention will be paid to cultural production from Israel’s minorities, including Israeli Palestinians, Orthodox Jews, and Mizrahim (Jews from Arab and Islamic lands.) Course readings will combine theory, primary sources, and popular criticism. No previous knowledge of Israel, Judaism, or the Middle East is required, and all materials will be provided in English translation. Usually offered every second year.
Shayna Weiss

NEJS 173a Trauma and Violence in Israeli Literature and Film
[ deis-us djw fl hum ]
Taught in Hebrew.
Explores trauma and violence in Israeli Literature, film, and art. Focuses on man-made disasters, war and terrorism, sexual and family violence, and murder and suicide, and examines their relation to nationalism, Zionism, gender, and sexual identity. Usually offered every second year.
Ilana Szobel

NEJS 174a Minorities and Others in Israeli Literature and Culture
[ fl hum ]
Taught in Hebrew.
An exploration of poetics and identity in modern Hebrew literature. By offering a feminist and psychoanalytic reading of various Hebrew texts, this seminar explores questions of personal and national identity, otherness, visibility, and marginality in the Israeli context. Usually offered every second year.
Ilana Szobel

NEJS 184b Disability Cultures: Art, Film and Literature of People with Disabilities
[ deis-us djw hum ]
Explores cultural representations of disability in Israel, Europe, and the US. By focusing on literature, film, dance, and visual art, it explores physical, mental, and emotional disability experiences, and their relations to gender, sexuality, nationalism, and identity politics. Usually offered every second year.
Ilana Szobel

NEJS 194b Sufism: Mystical Traditions in Classical and Modern Islam
[ hum nw ]
An examination of the teaching and practices of the Sufi tradition. Explores the foundations of Sufism, its relation to other aspects of Islam, the development of Sufi teachings in both poetry and prose, and the manner in which Sufism is practiced in lands as diverse as Egypt, Turkey, Iran, India, Malaysia, and Europe. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

NEJS/WGS 110a Sexual Violence in Film and Culture
[ deis-us djw hum ]
Explores the effects of sexualized violence in society. While exploring representations of gender-based sexual violence in documentaries and features, stand-up comedy, memoirs, poetry, and visual art, this course will offer a critical discussion on Rape Culture in the 21st century, with particular attention to the intersections of gender, race, sexuality, class, and disability in the construction of sexual violence. Usually offered every second year.
Ilana Szobel

SAS 130a Film and Fiction of Crisis
[ hum nw ]
Examines novels and films as a response to some pivotal crisis in South Asia: Independence and Partition, Communal Riots, Insurgency and Terrorism. We will read and analyze texts from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka in an effort to examine how these moments of crisis have affected literary and cinematic form while also paying close attention to how they contest or support the narrative of the unified nation. Usually offered every third year.
Ms. Singh

SAS 140a We Who Are at Home Everywhere: Narratives from the South Asian Diaspora
[ hum ]
Looks at narratives from various locations of the South Asian Diaspora, while paying close attention to the emergence of an immigrant South Asian public culture. Examines novels, poetry, short stories, film, and music in order to further an understanding of South Asian immigrant culture. Usually offered every third year.
Harleen Singh

Electives in Social Sciences

AAAS 124a After the Dance: Performing Sovereignty in the Caribbean
[ hum oc ss ]
Utilizing short fiction, essays, plays, poetry, and the visual arts, this class theorizes movement and/as freedom in the spectacular or mundane movements of the region, including annual Carnival and Hosay celebrations. Usually offered every third year.
Faith Smith

AAAS 125b Caribbean Women and Globalization: Sexuality, Citizenship, Work
[ djw ss wi ]
Utilizing perspectives from sociology, anthropology, fiction, and music to examine the relationship between women's sexuality and conceptions of labor, citizenship, and sovereignty. The course considers these alongside conceptions of masculinity, contending feminisms, and the global perspective. Usually offered every second year.
Faith Smith

AAAS 155b Hip Hop History and Culture
[ ss ]
Examines the history of hip hop culture, in the broader context of U.S., African American and African diaspora history, from the 1960s to the present. Explores key developments, debates and themes shaping hip hop's evolution and contemporary global significance. Usually offered every second year.
Chad Williams

AAAS 164b Afrofuturism
[ ss ]
Analyzes the various ways in which African Diaspora cultural producers - writers, visual artists, musicians, and filmmakers - use Afrofuturism to critique racial asymmetries in the present and to imagine as-yet-unrealized, free black futures. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AAAS/FA 74b Introduction to African Art
[ ca nw ss ]
Surveys the visual artistic traditions of Africa. Investigates the different forms of visual art in relation to their historical and socio-cultural context. Symbolism and complexity of Africa's visual art traditions are explored through analysis of myth, ritual, cosmology, and history. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

AAAS/WGS 136a Black Feminist Thought
[ deis-us oc ss ]
Formerly offered as AAAS 136a.
Critical examination of the historical, political, economic, and ideological factors that have shaped the lives of African-American women in the United States. Analyzing foundation theoretical texts, fiction, and film over two centuries, this class seeks to understand black women's writing and political activism in the U.S. Usually offered every second year.
Shoniqua Roach

AAPI/WGS 137b Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
[ deis-us ss ]
Examines performances of Asian/American women and how they have changed over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We analyze American film, television, and stage performances to trace the shifting, yet continuous participation of Asian/American women on screen and scene in the United States. Important issues include Orientalism and representation, race and racism, immigration and diasporas, militarisms and empire, gender and hypersexuality, yellow face practices then and now, as well as assimilation and resistance. We ask: what have dominant representations of Asian/American been like from the silent film era to the current digital age? How have the figures of the lotus blossom, the dragon lady, the trafficked woman, the geisha, the war bride, the military prostitute, the orphan, among other problematic tropes emerged to represent Asian/American women? How has the changing political, social, and cultural position of Asian/Americans shaped their participation in media production, as well as their media representations in the United States broadly speaking? Usually offered every second year.
Yuri Doolan

AMST/MUS 39b Protest Through Song: Music that Shaped America
[ ca oc ss ]
Open to music majors and non-majors. Does not fulfill the Main Currents in American Studies requirement for the major.
Examines 20th and 21st century protest music to better understand the complex relationships between music and social movements. Through class discussions, reading, writing, and listening assignments, and a final performance students will discover how social, cultural, and economic protest songs helped shape American culture. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

ANTH 26a Communication and Media
[ dl ss ]
An exploration of human communication and mass media from a cross-cultural perspective. Examines communication codes based on language and visual signs. The global impact of revolutions in media technology, including theories of cultural imperialism and indigenous uses of media is discussed. Usually offered every second year.
Janet McIntosh

ANTH 130a Filming Culture: Ethnographic and Documentary Filmmaking
[ djw dl nw ss ]
Introduces the history, theory and production of ethnographic and documentary filmmaking. This course traces how ethnographic and culturally-inflected filmmakers have sought to depict cultural difference, social organization, and lived experiences. Students will learn the basics of non-fiction film production. Usually offered every second year.
Patricia Alvarez Astacio

ANTH 130b Visuality and Culture
[ dl ss ]
Introduces students to the study of visual, aural, and artistic media through an ethnographic lens. Course combines written and creative assignments to understand how culture shapes how we make meaning out of images and develop media literacy. Topics include ethnographic/documentary film, advertising, popular culture, viral videos and special effects, photography, art worlds, and the technological development of scientific images. Usually offered every second year.
Patricia Alvarez Astacio or Ellen Schattschneider

ANTH 140a Human Rights in Global Perspective
[ djw ss ]
Explores a range of debates about human rights as a concept as well as the practice of human rights work. The human rights movement seeks the recognition of universal norms that transcend political and cultural difference while anthropology seeks to explore and analyze the great diversity of human life. To what extent can these two goals--advocating for universal norms and respecting cultural difference--be reconciled? The course examines cases from various parts of the world concerning: indigenous peoples, environment, health, gender, genocide/violence/nation-states and globalization. Usually offered every third year.
Elizabeth Ferry

ANTH 159a Museums and Public Memory
[ oc ss ]
Explores the social and political organization of public memory, including museums, cultural villages, and memorial sites. Who has the right to determine the content and form of such institutions? Working with local community members, students will develop a collaborative exhibition project. Usually offered every second year.
Ellen Schattschneider

ANTH 184b Cross-Cultural Art and Aesthetics
[ nw ss ]
A cross-cultural and diachronic exploration of art, focusing on the communicative aspects of visual aesthetics. The survey takes a broad view of how human societies deploy images and objects to foster identities, lure into consumption, generate political propaganda, engage in ritual, render sacred propositions tangible, and chart the character of the cosmos. Usually offered every second year.
Javier Urcid

CAST 170a Documenting Immigrant Experiences
[ ss ]
Investigates documentary film as a genre, and explores the potential of the medium for engaging students with immigrant communities in Waltham through hands-on production experiences. Through the process of exchanging narratives with community members, students generate raw material for a film documentary. Usually offered every third year.
Jenny Alexander and James Rutenbeck

ECON/FA 87a Economics and the Arts
[ ca ss ]
Prerequisite: ECON 2a or 10a; FA 30a, 30b, 57a, 59a or 62a. The FA course may be taken concurrently with ECON/FA 87a.
Economics and art history provide dual lenses for studying the mechanics of art auctions and building collections. The course will focus on the intersection of history and patronage of specific artists and works of art with the marketplace. Usually offered every second year.
Kathryn Graddy and Nancy Scott

ED 158b Looking with the Learner: Practice and Inquiry
Does not satisfy a school distribution requirement--for education studies core course credit only. Lab fee: $40.
Links theory to practice in learning through the visual arts through three types of experiences: 1) looking at art; 2) museum-based interactions with students from Stanley Elementary School in Waltham; and 3) documenting our experiences as lookers, learners, and teachers. What can we learn about art, artists, ourselves, and young learners through the processes of looking at art? How can we best support students in their own encounters with art and learning? How can museums serve as a model for education in various settings? Usually offered every year.
Staff

HIST 112a Nationalism in the Middle East
[ djw nw ss ]
Seminar examining the history of nationalism in the modern Middle East. Covers divergent theories and practices of nationalism in the region, and explores the roles of gender, memory, historiography, and art in the formation and articulation of Middle East nationalisms. Usually offered every second year.
Naghmeh Sohrabi

LGLS 129a Global Justice and Societies in Transition
[ djw ss ]
Introduces transitional justice, a set of practices that arise following a period of conflict that aim directly at confronting past violations of human rights. This course will focus on criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, and the contributions of art and culture. Usually offered every second year.
Melissa Stimell

LGLS 130a Conflict Analysis and Intervention
[ oc ss ]
Examines alternatives to litigation, including negotiation and mediation. Through simulations and court observations, students assess their own attitudes about and skills in conflict resolution. Analyzes underlying theories in criminal justice system, divorce, adoption, and international arena. Usually offered every second year.
Melissa Stimell

LGLS 130aj Conflict Analysis and Intervention
[ oc ss ]
This hands-on course invites students to address social problems in immigration policy and practice through public policy reform, community organizing and legal representation. It provides background in the theories, advocacy skills, networks, movements and measures of institutional change that comprise social change practice. Students explore conflict resolution in the context of social justice advocacy, including litigation, community organizing, political advocacy, international institutions, negotiation, peace-making and mediation. Through simulations, court and community group observations, guided representation of immigrants and work with immigration advocacy groups, students assess their own attitudes and skills in conflict resolution, as well as the processes by which conflict resolution institutions and roles help construct the communities of which they are a part. We will analyze underlying theories of conflict and advocacy in domestic immigration and international arenas, as well as the relative efficacy of various modes for social change, such as big case litigation, coordinated ground-level litigation, cultural change approaches, peacemaking, grassroots organizing, direct action, political advocacy (lobbying) and business and other institution-building strategies. Offered as part of the JBS program.
Douglas Smith

SOC 119a Deconstructing War, Building Peace
[ ss ]
Ponders the possibility of a major "paradigm shift" under way from adversarialism and war to mutuality and peace. Examines war culture and peace culture and points in between, with emphases on the role of imagination in social change, growing global interdependence, and political, economic, gender, social class, and social psychological aspects of war and peace. Usually offered every year.
Gordon Fellman

SOC 154a Community Structure and Youth Subcultures
[ ss ]
Examines how the patterning of relations within communities generates predictable outcomes at the individual and small-group level. Deals with cities, suburbs, and small rural communities. Special focus is given to youth subcultures typically found in each community type. Usually offered every second year.
Staff

SOC 155b Protest, Politics, and Change: Social Movements
[ deis-us ss ]
Introduces major sociological theories about leadership, political context, culture, and identities in social movements in transnational perspective. Examines historical and contemporary cases of social movements through the lenses of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Usually offered every second year.
Gowri Vijayakumar

Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation: Capstone Practicum

CAST 181b Ethics of Community Engagement Capstone Practicum
Prerequisite: CAST 150b and permission from the instructor. Yields half-course credit.
Combining theory and practice, this course supports students in the Creativity, the Arts, and Social Transformation (CAST) minor as they imagine and undertake their required capstone project or CAST course projects that require engagement beyond the campus. Capstone projects and individual courses may involve local, regional and even international collaborations, all helpful in fostering an empathetic and compassionate sense of people’s and communities’ situations, values, and choices. When this work is conducted within a non-profit organization, it is also a way to nurture future leaders and supporters of community-based and other associations aiming to constructively transform society. Ethical concerns must be at the forefront of the planning and implementation of all such endeavors. Usually offered every year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

CAST 189a Capstone Project Design Practicum
Prerequisite: CAST 150b and permission from the instructor. Yields half-course credit.
Students apply theories, skills, information and critical questions to an individual capstone project that engages with social transformation concerns in creative, practical and ethically-sound ways. Usually offered every year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

University Bulletin (2021-2022)