University Bulletin (2023-2024)

As part of the global engagement requirement, students will study the important role that a commitment to social justice has played in the advancement of the United States, and address the role that inequality has played in the country's formation and continues to play in its development.

For students entering Brandeis beginning fall 2019, students will complete one semester course that satisfies the diversity, equity and inclusion studies in the United States requirement. Courses that satisfy the requirement in a particular semester are designated "deis-us" in the Schedule of Classes for that semester.

There is no diversity, equity and inclusion studies in the United States requirement for students entering Brandeis prior to fall 2019.

AAAS 5a Introduction to African and African American Studies
[ deis-us dl ss ]

An interdisciplinary introduction to major topics in African and African American studies. Provides fundamental insights into Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas through approaches and techniques of social science and the humanities. Usually offered every year.

Brandon Callender or Faith Smith

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

AAAS/FA 75b History of African American Art
[ ca deis-us ]

"Black art has always existed," stated artist Romare Bearden. "It just hasn't been looked for in the right places." This course examines how Black artists in the U.S. explore beauty, individuality, justice and other themes through personal, racial, and societal lenses. Usually offered every third year.
Staff

AAPI/ENG 22b Asian American Literature
[ deis-us hum ]

With its focus on a major and enduring racial formation in the U.S., this course covers a wide range of literary expressions of Asian American subjectivities forged in various flashpoints of American history, from the early days of Chinese “coolie” labor in the late nineteenth century to the contemporary moment of refugee migration. Along the way, we will learn about structures of violence that have manifested into exclusion laws, internment camps, devastating wars, and refugee displacements. Major authors include Julie Otzuka, Maxine Hong Kingston, Chang-Rae Lee, and Jhumpa Lahiri. Usually offered every fourth year.
Howie Tam

ANTH 61b Language in American Life
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Examines both language-in-use and ideas about language varieties in the United States from an anthropological perspective. Explores how language-in-use emerges from and builds relationships, social hierarchies, professional authority, religious experience, dimensions of identity such as gender and race, and more. Usually offered every second year.
Janet McIntosh

BISC 10b Reproductive Health
[ deis-us sn ]

Does not meet the requirements for the major in Biology.

We will explore the molecular, genetic, medical, and clinical basis of several diseases impacting women's health. We will investigate viral structure and assembly, model clinical procedures for diagnosis, and begin to develop an understanding of how governmental policy is designed surrounding these concerns. Usually offered every year.
Melissa Kosinski-Collins and Sumana Setty

ECON 69a The Economics of Race and Gender
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisite: ECON 2a or ECON 10a.

The role of race and gender in economic decision making. Mainstream and alternative economic explanations for discrimination, and analysis of the economic status of women and minorities. Discussion of specific public policies related to race, class, and gender. Usually offered every second year.
Elizabeth Brainerd

ED 75b Waltham Speaks: Multilingualism, Advocacy and Community
[ deis-us ss ]

Grounds community-engaged and service learning in Waltham within theoretical frameworks and practical skills from education and the social sciences. Educators (broadly speaking, in and beyond schools) integrate perspectives from history, policy, psychology, and sociology with teaching pedagogy. Through reflective, responsive, and empathetic learning, students will learn how English learner populations have shaped a community's organizations, schools, and identity. Waltham's school system and service organization leaders will teach students about their work in shaping a responsive and inclusive community. Through interviews, reflective essays, weekly discussions, and a semester-long service project, students will grow habits of mind and practical skills for work in education and beyond. Usually offered every year.
Rachel Kramer Theodorou

ENG 12a Decolonizing Tongues: Language in African Literature
[ deis-us djw hum wi ]

A comparative exploration of the politics of language in postcolonial African Literature and its impact on literary production. It locates the language question in anglophone and francophone African Literature within the context political independence. Usually offered every third year.

Emilie Diouf

ENG 15b Black Joy
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the exuberant and sometimes strained relationship between black people
and joy. In addition to literature, we will encounter various performances and perspectives that approach joy from multitude of perspectives, including minstrelsy, meditation, nature writing, ancestral remembrance, and the erotics of eating well and feeling good. Usually offered every year.
Brandon Callender

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 21b The Sex of Horror, The Horror of Sex: Gender and Sexuality in Horror
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the spectrum of feminist and gender theory approaching horror to understand how horror both reflects societal anxiety about gender and sexuality and also projects restorative narratives and radical re-imaginings of culture. We will examine recurring themes and motifs and how they transform, shift, or mutate with the fluctuating fears of the culture. This course makes the case for the horror genre as serious art, covering techniques and styles of horror literature and film, and underscoring how the genre has served as a platform to address more serious issues, such as race, class, and religion, but with a specific focus on gender and sexuality. Along the way, we will learn to think and write about the ideas, forms, conventions, and styles that connect these texts and why we enjoy reading them – or why we don’t. We will read a wide range of texts from a variety of time periods, as well as engaging with different gender theories which take varied stances on the horror genre. Special one-time offering, spring 2023.

Miranda Peery

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 30b American Film Auteurs of the 1970s
[ deis-us hum ]

Interrogates idea of cinematic style. Examines works by directors such as Robert Altman, Peter Bogdanovich, Bob Fosse, Roman Polanski, and Martin Scorsese. Usually offered every third year.
Caren Irr

ENG 41a Critical Digital Humanities Methods and Applications
[ deis-us dl hum ]

Introduces critical digital humanities methods and applications. Considers both theory and praxis, the issues of open and accessible scholarship and work, and the centrality of collaboration. We will investigate power relations, inclusivity, and the ethics of social justice. Usually offered every second year.
Dorothy Kim

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 52a Refugee Stories, Refugee Lives
[ deis-us djw dl hum nw oc ]

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 52b Vampires: Dark Fictions of Blood
[ deis-us hum ]

Highlights the innovations that black artists and scholars have made within the vampire tradition. Our sources range from literature and comics to television and film. Usually offered every third year.

Brandon Callender

FA 56a American Art
[ ca deis-us ]

A survey of American painting from the colonial period to the early twentieth-century. Usually offered every third year.
Peter Kalb

HISP 85a Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literatures and Cultures
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Introduces students to U.S. Latinx cultural productions and to the interdisciplinary questions that concern U.S. Latinx communities. Latinxs have played a vital role in the history, politics, and cultures of the United States. U.S. Latinx literary works, in particular, have established important socio-historical and aesthetic networks that highlight Latinx expression and lived experiences, engaging with issues including biculturalism, language, citizenship, systems of value, and intersectional identity. Though the Latinx literary tradition spans more than 400 years, this course will focus on 20th and 21st century texts that decolonize nationalist approaches to Latinidad(es) and therefore challenge existing Latinx literary 'canons.' Taught in English. Usually offered every year.
María J. Durán

HUM 7a Challenges of Power and the Self: Visual Arts and Literature
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Enrollment limited to Humanities Fellows.
 

Uses visual art and literature to consider how ideas of the "self" and the "other" are reformulated during decolonization, the cold war, and the world order that followed.  Using the breakdown of the British Empire and the consolidation of American reach from World War II onward, the course will examine gender, race, identity, colonization, postcoloniality, and sexuality in/as representation and narrative.  This course will examine the text and image as separate, parallel, and yet conjoined and overlapping threads of cultural production.  How does literature and art create and reflect the image, the moment, the individual or history?  How is art narrative and how does the novel or the poem evoke an image, a scene, or a sequence of events? Usually offered every second year.

Peter Kalb and Harleen Singh

SOC 1a Order and Change in Society
[ deis-us ss ]

An introduction to the sociological perspective, with an emphasis on an analysis of problems of social order and change. Topics include gender, work and family, poverty and inequality, race and ethnicity, democracy, social movements, community, and education. Usually offered every year.
Staff

SOC 46b Geographies of Inequality: Exploring Power and Space in the United States
[ deis-us dl ss ]

Through discussions focusing on the spatial nature of social life, and labs teaching students to create maps using GIS software, this course will give students the tools to ask and answer questions about society using a spatial lens. Special one-time offering, spring 2021.
Jennifer LaFleur

SOC 83a Sociology of Body and Health
[ deis-us ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took SOC 189a in prior years.

Explores theoretical considerations of the body as a cultural phenomenon intersecting with health, healing, illness, disease, and medicine. Focuses on how gender, race, class, religion, and other dimensions of social organization shape individual and population health. Usually offered every year.
Sara Shostak

WGS 5a Women, Genders, and Sexualities
[ deis-us dl oc ss ]

This interdisciplinary course introduces central concepts and topics in the field of women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Explores the position of women and other genders in diverse settings and the impact of gender as a social, cultural, and intellectual category in the United States and around the globe. Asks how gendered institutions, behaviors, and representations have been configured in the past and function in the present, and also examines the ways in which gender and sexuality intersect with many other vectors of identity and circumstance in forming human affairs. Usually offered every fall.
ChaeRan Freeze, Sarah Lamb, or Harleen Singh

AAAS 136b Black Politics in the United States: Visions, Values, and Voice
[ deis-us ss ]

AAAS 145b The Transformative Life and Politics of Malcolm X
[ deis-us djw ss ]

How did the world shape Malcolm X and his radical political philosophy? In asking this question, we will study how Malcolm X's transformation from a hustler to a prisoner to a Black Muslim significantly shaped his revolutionary vision for liberation. His life experience gave him an understanding that Black liberation in the United States is entangled with Third World. For Malcolm, Islam became the link between Africa and Asia, and between those subjected to racial violence domestically and globally. As a class, we will situate Malcolm X within this complex history of anticolonialism and Civil Rights to learn how Malcolm X transformed himself to transform the world. Usually offered every year.
Soham Patel

AAAS 156a #BlackLivesMatter
[ deis-us ss ]

Explores the evolution of the modern African American civil rights movement through historical readings, primary documents, films and social media. Assesses the legacy and consequences of the movement for contemporary struggles for black equality. Usually offered every second year.
Chad Williams

AAAS 157a African American Political Thought
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Examines the ideological and intellectual traditions that have influenced African American politics. Addresses the question of what are the best strategies for black Americans to pursue freedom and opportunity in the United States. Usually offered every second year.
Amber Spry

AAAS 159a Identity Politics in the United States
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Examines the politics of identity in the United States. It brings together several disciplines: history, political science, sociology, psychology, and others. It spans several groups and social movements in order to equip students with the skills to understand identity group politics through historical contexts, theoretical underpinnings, and current manifestations. The course is organized around a central question: what is the relationship between democracy and identity politics in the United States? In addressing this question, the course will explore the complexities of intergroup relations across race, ethnicity, class, and gender, and examine when, why, and how policy and politics respond to group interests. Usually offered every year.
Amber Spry

AAAS 170a Black Childhoods
[ deis-us ss ]

Explores historical experiences of growing up black in America. We will examine the role of race in shaping experiences and meanings of childhood from slavery to the present day, including studies of black girlhood and boyhood. Usually offered every second year.
Wangui Muigai

AAAS/HIS 154b Race, Science, and Society
[ deis-us ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took AAAS 154b in prior years.

Traces scientific concepts of race from the 18th century to today, interrogating their uses and transformations over time. It explores how science has defined race, how people have challenged such conceptions, and alternate ways for understanding human difference. Usually offered every second year.
Wangui Muigai

AAAS/WGS 121a Black Visibility
[ deis-us ss ]

Drawing on theories of the Black gaze rooted in both Black feminist visual culture (Tina Campt, bell hooks, Nicole Fleetwood) and surveillance studies (Simone Browne, Kelly Ross), this interdisciplinary course pairs a discussion of histories of anti-Black social control with an emphasis on Black reclamations of the visual field in modalities including popular film, social media, performance art, and literature. Students will emerge with a deepened understanding of how linked formations of Blackness, gender, and sexuality shape ways of seeing in American culture, and how different Black women, gender-expansive, and queer folx negotiate these formations with their art. Usually offered every year.
Carmel Ohman

AAAS/WGS 122a Carceral Studies
[ deis-us djw ss ]

With more than 10 million people imprisoned around the world in jails, detention centers, refuge camps, for-profit prisons, the effects of a carceral state are evident in many ways. Modern democratic societies often rely upon practices of incarceration, detention, and surveillance to demonstrate the power of a rule of law. This course will be an introductory study covering the social costs of the practice of incarceration across geographies and global communities. Special one-time offering, fall 2021.
Anya Wallace

AAAS/WGS 123b Black Girlhood Sexual Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

This seminar uses a feminist perspective to provide students with an overview of the achievements, experiences, productions, and sexual politics of Black girlhood in art, visual culture, 20th century American Literature, and popular media. We will explore the ways Black girlhood has been understood in popular imaginings as well as the ways Black girls represent themselves—their experiences, bodies, sexuality, race, class, knowledge histories, and labors, cultural productions. This seminar introduces students to the field of gender and sexuality as cultural study through visual culture and the aesthetics of narrative. Special one-time offering, spring 2021.

Anya Wallace

AAAS/WGS 124a Gender and Surrealism in Popular Black TV and Film
[ deis-us ]

Interprets contemporary Black experimental TV and Film (including Terence Nance’s Random Acts of Flyness, Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country) through two distinct yet overlapping intellectual and political traditions: Black feminism (as a politic that interrogates assumptions behind gender, sexuality, and race in the interests of Black women’s freedom) and Afrosurrealism (as an anti-imperialist poetic, musical, and artistic movement that denaturalizes linked power structures from African diasporic perspectives). Students will identify and articulate key features, principles, and goals of Black feminism and Afrosurrealism, tracing how different Black artists and thinkers have employed and revised these traditions since the 1960s. Special one-time offering, fall 2022.

Carmel Ohman

AAAS/WGS 125a Intellectual History of Black Women
[ deis-us ss ]

Takes a historical approach to the development of black feminist thought in the United States. We will explore major themes and events in U.S. history from the perspectives of black women (e.g., forced black migration to the Western world, transatlantic slavery, black emancipation from slavery, Jim Crow, the great migration(s), the civil rights era, and the 'post' civil rights era, etc.). We will contextualize the emergence of black feminist thought within and in relation to these events, as well as highlight black feminisms' intersections with other black intellectual traditions and freedom struggles. By the end of the course, students will be able to demonstrate a robust familiarity with the above mentioned historical events as well as define black feminist conceptual/theoretical frameworks such as standpoint theory; oppositional consciousness; intersectionality; the culture of dissemblance; the politics of respectability; controlling images; pleasure, and the erotic, among others. Usually offered every year.
Shoniqua Roach

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

AAAS/WGS 149a Black Privacy
[ deis-us ]

Informed by recent work in Black feminist, queer, and trans studies, this course explores "Black privacy" and its various meanings and contours. What is Black privacy? Can "Black privacy" exist given the public construction of blackness? How do we make legal claims to Black reproductive, informational, biomedical and domestic privacy when it is already a nebulous concept and an illusory constitutional right? How might Black privacy safeguard against or potentially reinforce the proliferation of public blackness, or its hypervisibility, iconicity, and/or surveillance? What is the erotic potentiality of Black privacy? How do concepts and practices of privacy respond to carceral regimes that animate Black surveillance and counter-surveillance? How do we balance the use of digital media as a strategy of self-making and community building even as Black critical information studies scholars demonstrate that the Internet is a space in which private information is sold and exchanged for "public" resources? Usually offered every second year.

Shoniqua Roach

AAAS/WGS 152b Beyoncé and Beyond: The Politics of Black Popular Music
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisite: AAAS 5a, AAAS/WGS 125a or AAAS/WGS 136a.

Introduces the history of contemporary black popular music and uses Beyoncé's wide-ranging and African diasporic musical repertoire as an entry-point into Black sound cultures from the US, Africa, the Caribbean, and Western Europe. Each week will spotlight part of Beyoncé's repertoire, i.e., Lemonade, Black is King, B-day, and Dangerously in Love, taking these as a jumping off point from which to survey and delve into such genres as R&B, Hip-hop, Disco, Dancehall, UK Garage, Trap Soul, New Orleans Bounce, as well as Jungle & Afrobeats. In addition to understanding these histories and genres, students will also explore public-facing popular music writing and criticism, and produce a piece of music criticism such as a blog post or Op-ed. Overall, this course investigates the aesthetic, political, cultural, and economic dimensions of Black popular music, paying particular attention to questions of gender, sexuality, class, nation, language, and technology. Usually offered every second year.
Shoniqua Roach

AAAS/WGS 180b Black Sexual Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisites: AAAS 5a and/or WGS 5a recommended for participating undergraduates.

Grounded in Black feminist theories of eroticism, pleasure, and embodiment, this seminar invites students into complex conversations about how racially and sexually minoritized people build robust sexual worlds even in the face of anti-Blackness, misogyny, and heterosexism. Inspired by Patricia Hill Collins’ 2004 monograph Black Sexual Politics, this seminar asks: how have Black women, Black queer people, and Black gender-expansive people in America used culture and social movements to create in-group knowledge and to challenge linked racial-sexual structures of oppression? How have different practitioners created and revised theories of sexuality depending on time and place? Students will emerge from this seminar with a deepened understanding of Black feminist theoretical vocabularies including but not limited to: the politics of respectability, the culture of dissemblance, ungendering, fungibility, theories of the flesh, pleasure, and misogynoir. Special one-time offering, spring 2023.

Carmel Ohman

AAPI/HIS 163a Asian American History
[ deis-us dl ss ]

Explores the history of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States with a focus on their lived experiences and contributions to U.S. society. Course culminates in a final AAPI digital oral history project. Usually offered every second year.
Yuri Doolan

AAPI/HIS 171a The United States in the Pacific World
[ deis-us djw ss ]

How have U.S. imperial ventures'cultural, military, political, and economic'reconfigured local societies and geographies? What are the afterlives of those ventures and how have they reverberated between American society and the Pacific World? To answer these questions, this course explores the history of American incursion into places such as China, Hawai'i, the Philippines, Guam, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, and Samoa from the nineteenth century to present. We explore issues such as orientalism, empires and militarism, labor and commerce, race and inequality, intimacy and sex, as well as migration, culture, family formation, and identity both in and across the Pacific Ocean. In focusing on the lasting legacies and human consequences of this contact, this course deepens our understanding of the multiracial history and character of the United States and also provides an opportunity to place the American experience within a larger global context. Usually offered every second year.
Yuri Doolan

AAPI/HIS 186b Legacies of the Korean War
[ deis-us djw ss ]

Explores the lasting legacies and human consequences of the Korean War in a transnational context. Course culminates in a final digital oral history project. Usually offered every second year.
Yuri Doolan

AAPI/WGS 126a Asian American and Pacific Islander Women
[ deis-us ss ]

Explores race, gender, and U.S. history from the perspective of Asian American and Pacific Islander women. Course culminates in a final AAPI women's digital oral history project. Usually offered every second year.
Yuri Doolan

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

AAS/AAPI 129b The Spirit of Bandung: Afro-Asian Insurgency and Solidarity
[ deis-us djw ss ]

Examines the racial conflicts between Black and Asian American communities and develops an understanding of how the Afro-Asia political project is an insurgent coalitional project. To do this, we will explore the historical and contemporary struggles, insurgencies, and solidarities of Black and Asian peoples. We will learn together how Afro-Asia serves as an insurgent site of critique, resistance, and revolutionary aesthetics that connects distant geographies, diasporas, and Black and Asian peoples to a global anti-racist, anti-imperialist, and anti-colonial political imaginary. Usually offered every year.
Soham Patel

AMST/ED 120a History of Higher Education in the U.S.
[ deis-us ss ]

Explores the history of higher education in the United States from the nation's formation to the present. Readings outline the competing purposes Americans envisioned for colleges and universities, as well as student life, institutional access, and visions of the relationship between excellence and equity. The course explores patterns of inclusion and exclusion based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, and gender and how universities served as sites where class was produced and contested. Students explore the post-World War II democratization of American higher education, the politics of college admissions, and recent movements to make college more affordable. The course also raises questions about the power universities came to hold as centers of knowledge-making networks and universities as sites of political activism. Usually offered every third year.
Leah Gordon

AMST/ED 121a Education and Equity in Modern American History
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisite: Instructor permission required.

Focusing on educational inequities related to race, ethnicity, and socio-economic status, this course examines twentieth century American efforts to make schools more equal, and in the process to make the social, economic, and racial order more just and fair. The course focuses on the ways Americans have addressed three core questions: What is educational equity? What is the relationship between school desegregation and equalization? Can equal schools create an equal society? By exploring how Americans thought about and sought to institutionalize their answers to these questions, the course investigates the promise and pitfalls of treating schooling as an egalitarian tool. Usually offered every third year.

Leah Gordon

AMST/ENG 138a Race, Region, and Religion in the Twentieth-Century South
[ deis-us hum wi ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took ENG 38b in prior years.

Twentieth century fiction of the American South. Racial conflict, regional identity, religion, and modernization in fiction from both sides of the racial divide and from both sides of the gender line. Texts by Chestnutt, Faulkner, Warren, O'Connor, Gaines, McCarthy, and Ellison. Usually offered every third year.
John Burt

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

AMST/LGLS 141b Juvenile Justice: From Cradle to Custody
[ deis-us djw ss ]

After an overview of the basics of juvenile justice in the United States, this course examines the realities and remedies for the cradle-to-prison pipeline, analyzing this pattern from the perspectives of law, society, and economics, tracing the child's experience along that path, and exploring creative public solutions. Usually offered every second year.
Rosalind Kabrhel

ANTH 122b We Are All Ears: The Power, Politics, and Ethics of Storytelling
[ deis-us oc ss ]

ANTH 126a U.S. Policing in Context: Past, Present, Future
[ deis-us ss ]

An interdisciplinary analysis of policing in the United States, which considers policing narratives, training, culture, representation, and technology. Case studies include Black Lives Matter protests and the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. Theoretical frameworks utilized include anthropology of power, critical race theory, and criminal justice. Usually offered every third year.

Ariel Ludwig

ANTH 140b Critical Perspectives in Global Health
[ deis-us djw nw ss ]

What value systems and other sociocultural factors underlie global public health policy? How can anthropology shed light on debates about the best ways to improve health outcomes? This course examines issues from malaria to HIV/AIDS, from tobacco cessation to immunization. Usually offered every third year.
Elanah Uretsky

ANTH 156a Power and Violence: The Anthropology of Political Systems
[ deis-us dl nw ss ]

Political orders are established and maintained by varying combinations of overt violence and the more subtle workings of ideas. The course examines the relationship of coercion and consensus, and forms of resistance, in historical and contemporary settings. Usually offered every second year.
Elizabeth Ferry

ANTH 171b Cities and Bodies: Mapping the Boston Metropolitan Trail
[ deis-us dl ss ]

Introduces urban design anthropology that takes the Boston suburbs as its prime object of investigation. Students will participate in the design of the Boston Metropolitan Trail (BMT), a projected grid of eight trails connecting sixteen bus, subway, and commuter rail stations around Boston. The BMT is an art installation that critiques and displaces the image of Boston, still dominated today by settler colonial fantasies centered on the Boston peninsula. The BMT is therefore an anti-Freedom Trail. It is also a slow transportation infrastructure that connects some of the main public transit nodes of the greater Boston area. Usually offered every third year.
Pascal Menoret

ANTH/WGS 176a Queer/Trans Theories from Elsewhere
[ deis-us djw ss ]

Centers the notion of 'elsewhere' in relationship to studies of gender, sexuality, power, and desire. 'Elsewhere' refers not only to place, but also to body and method. While terms like 'queer' and 'transgender' have become useful analytics for exploring gender, sexuality, feeling, space, place, relationality, and time, the academic theories that focus on these categories have remained mostly within white, US- and European academic spaces. We invite students to trouble these analytics - that is, the categories themselves, the bodies that these analytics center, and the methods deployed in relation to these analytics - by reading diverse approaches to gender and sexuality. The semester's engagement with 'elsewhere' is divided into three units: body, place, and method. Our objective is to teach students to cultivate new ways of seeing and ultimately new theories of gender and sexuality through engaging with non-canonical perspectives. Usually offered every third year.
Brian Horton and V Varun Chaudhry

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 identify and present as femme. Usually offered every third year.
Toni Shapiro-Phim

CAST 126b Dignity in Motion
[ ca deis-us djw ]

Explores ways in which humanity affirms its dignity through creative expression rooted in the body, in particular, dance, pageantry/puppetry, and ritual, as it addresses and counters various aspects of global and local experiences of oppression and violence – authoritarianism, legacies of settler-colonialism and enslavement, stifling social norms, and war and migration. The Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that … recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. This course explores how the body, in collective and individual movement, can affirm human dignity, thereby contributing to the subversion or dismantling of oppressions and rights violations, including the rise of authoritarianism, racism, gender violence, and civil and international conflict. Usually offered every third year.

ED 150b Purpose and Politics of Education
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Focuses on the United States and introduces students to foundational questions in the interdisciplinary field of Education Studies. We explore competing goals Americans have held for K-12 and post-secondary education and ask how these visions have (or have not) influenced school, society, and educational policy. We pay particular attention to educational stratification; localism; segregation; privatization; and the relationship between schooling and equality. Usually offered every year.
Leah Gordon

ED 170a Race, Power, and Urban Education
[ deis-us oc ss wi ]

Examines the nature of urban schools, their links to the social and political context, and the perspectives of the people who inhabit them. Explores the historical development of urban schools; the social, economic, and personal hardships facing urban students; and challenges of urban school reform. Usually offered every year.
Derron Wallace

ENG 102a Ghosts of Race
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines ghost stories and films from across the African Diasporic. Our discussions will consider a range of phenomena, from ancestral visitations and paranormal ethnography to haunted plantation tours. We will do so in order to highlight a variety of pressing themes within Black film and literatures, including trauma, memory, and xenophobia. Usually offered every third year.
Brandon Callender

ENG 106a Representing Slavery
[ deis-us hum wi ]

Examines the culture and politics of slavery in the US. We will read some of the classic slave narratives, some diaries of enslavers, political speeches by abolitionists and defenders of slavery, letters and public papers of President Lincoln, and novels written by authors with a close engagement with slavery. Usually offered every third year.

ENG 113b Performing Climate Justice
[ deis-us hum oc ]

Considers justice in relation to our ordinary and collective actions as these recreate or transform our social and material realities as human drivers of the Anthropocene. How can the embodied creation and transmission of knowledge and skills, by creative workers and change agents, help us imagine and create new, translocal ways of being and acting together no longer driven by fossil fuels? What happens to notions of the human, human civilization, and human history if we adopt a non-anthropocentric and biocentric approach to climate justice and climate ethics? Usually offered every fourth year.

ENG 117a The Harlem Renaissance
[ deis-us hum ]

Examines the explosive artistic, political, and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance. A major movement in African American literature, the Harlem Renaissance sought to redefine American blackness and establish artistic freedom. Usually offered every third year.
Gabrielle Everett

ENG 121b Literature in the Age of Mass Incarceration
[ deis-us hum ]

Investigates prison writing and the broader impact of mass incarceration on literature in the U.S. We will consider carceral institutions as distinctive, complex sites of cultural production and explore how creative practices in prisons emerge and circulate as texts. We will approach this literature as a practice of survival in extremity and resistance to an intensively racialized, dehumanizing set of institutions. And we will examine how this writing imagines very different forms of justice. Throughout, this course will investigate the volatile intersections of sexuality, gender, and race in carceral subjectivity and resistance. This course is based on the instructor’s experiences teaching incarcerated students in the Boston area and will have options for service-learning and community engagement. Usually offered every third year.

David Sherman

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 every third year.
Paul Morrison

ENG 131b Decolonial Pedagogy
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Familiarizes students in the humanities, social sciences and public policy with an important strain of pedagogical theory, what Brazilian pedagogue Paulo Freire called 'education as the practice of freedom.' Topics will include diversity, equity and inclusion; embodied teaching and learning; authority, or the lack thereof; grading and assessment; and teaching reading and writing. Special one-time offering, fall 2020.
Joshua Williams

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 ]

Class has a required lab component and yields six semester-hour credits towards rate of work and graduation.

To consider how 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, girdle books, wampum, pamphlets, zines, and wearable media technology. Usually offered every third year.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 143b Chaucer's "Global and Refugee Canterbury Tales"
[ deis-us djw dl hum ]

Focuses on situating Chaucer, and particularly the Canterbury Tales, as a global
work. We will examine black feminist writers, playwrights, and poets of the African diaspora who have revised, adapted, extrapolated, and voiced the Canterbury Tales in Jamaican patois, Nigerian pidgin, and the S. London dialects of Brixton. Usually offered every second year.
Dorothy Kim

ENG 175b Getting Behind in Black Gay Men's Literatures
[ deis-us hum ]

Examines black queer men’s sexualities in the field of twentieth and twenty-first century American literatures. Our focus on “getting behind” draws together topics that we will explore throughout term. These include varying attitudes that black queer writers have toward cruising and intimacy; falling behind the times; and falling behind at work, or in life, because of certain sexual pursuits. Usually offered every third year.

Brandon Callender

ENVS 111a Environmental and Climate Justice
[ deis-us djw ss ]

The consequences of climate change are distributed unequally across different world regions, countries, and different social groups within countries. This course will introduce you to the major concepts and debates related to the unequal effects of climate change, including those of the ongoing efforts to combat climate change. We also explore several proposed programs and reforms meant to contribute to the goals of environmental and climate justice, including the social activists and movements working toward addressing social, economic, and political inequalities within ongoing efforts to address climate change. Usually offered every year.

Prakash Kaswhan

ENVS 112b Governing the Environmental Commons
[ deis-us djw ss ]

Introduction to the diverse meanings, forms, and claims about commons; theories and debates about sustainable governance of the commons. Learn about the histories of dispossessions, and ongoing collective actions and mobilizations to reclaim the commons for environmental & climate justice and ecological stewardship. Usually offered every year.

Prakash Kashwan

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

HIS/HSSP 142a Health Activism
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Formerly offered as HSSP 142a.

Examines the history of health activism in the U.S. over the past 125 years, from late 19th century debates over compulsory vaccination to contemporary public health campaigns around gang violence and incarceration. Usually offered every third year.
Wangui Muigai

HISP 122b Made in las Americas: Stories about Growing up Latinx
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines what it means to grow up Latinx in a multicultural United States through a focus on Latinx young adult literature and Latinx youth culture. Surveying a range of literary works that address the development of Latinx children and adolescents, we will pay special attention to coming-of-age stories that explore how Latinx negotiate ethno-racial identity, find and assert their own voice, and gain a greater understanding about their cultural differences. We will explore what intimate knowledge Latinx youth share and how they make meaning of critical, even ostensibly trivial, life moments to construct their ever-evolving sense of self and their relationship to both Latinx and non-Latinx communities. Usually offered every second year.

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 163b Narratives of the Borderlands and Border Crossers
[ deis-us djw fl hum ]

Prerequisite: HISP 109b or HISP 111b, or permission of the instructor. Taught in Spanish.

Explores the U.S.-Mexico border and the many ways in which it has intimately shaped the experiences of people living in the borderlands and/or moving across the border. It will examine literary works that survey the U.S.-Mexico borderlands in terms of their figurative and material realities, with specific attention to how the borderlands are represented in today's society and how the U.S.-Mexico border might be reimagined. This course will also probe the experiences of migrants and border-crosses through the lens of testimonios. Usually offered every second year.
María J. Durán

HISP 178b Latinx Futurisms
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Examines critical theory about and cultural productions of Latinx futurisms. Engaging with Latinx speculative and science fiction aesthetics, it will explore questions of race, ethnicity, citizenship, immigration, gender, and sexuality, among other sociopolitical issues. Special one-time offering, spring 2020.
Maria Duran

HIST 109b A Global History of Sport: Politics, Economy, Race and Culture
[ deis-us djw nw oc ss ]

Examines soccer, boxing, baseball, cricket and other sports to reflect on culture, politics, race, and globalization. With a focus on empire, gender, ethnicity, this course considers sport as the battleground for ideological and group contests. Usually offered every second year.
Avinash Singh

HIST 114b Histories of American Capitalism
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Explores the history of American capitalism as it developed from the colonial period to the near present. We will follow three main analytical themes through the centuries: racial capitalism; the role of the state in shaping economic development; and the function of social reproduction and other unwaged work in commercial societies. As we engage central historiographic debates about the timing and location of the transition to capitalism in the United States, we will use the concept of capitalism as a tool to better understand and differentiate the wide range of economic systems that have existed in the nation’s history. Topics include: the rise of wage labor and the expansion of markets; slavery and emancipation; territorial conquest; technological and infrastructural development; the rise of big business and organized labor; alternative labor regimes and the experience of work; the economic dimensions of gender, race, and other categories of social difference; social welfare policy; and recent developments in deindustrialization, globalization, and income inequality. Usually offered every year.

A. J. Murphy

HIST 116b The History and Politics of Infrastructure in the United States
[ deis-us ss ]

Infrastructure is meant to recede into the background of civic life. But seemingly innocuous projects like roads, railways, electric grids, or even schools arose across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they became crucial nodes of colonial power, sites of enslavement and racial segregation, and of the policing of gender. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, states started to cede infrastructure to capitalist firms, privatizing key utilities and, increasingly, demurring from the responsibility to regulate these firms. By digging up the hidden history of infrastructural development, this class will reframe how we conceptualize the role of government in laying out the foundations for social activity, and give us the tools to intervene in contemporary debates over who should build, control, and maintain our infrastructure. Usually offered every third year.

Emilie Connolly

HIST 124b Universities and Colonialism
[ deis-us ss ]

Brandeis, like every university or college in North America, sits on Native land. This course provides a primer to the history of that land and its people, while inviting your original research on a specific question: How have universities played a role in colonialism? To answer this question, you will undertake an independent or small-group research project on a topic of your choosing related to universities and colonialism, preferably (but not mandatorily) one located in New England. The audience for your research will be your campus community: peers, staff, and faculty who might seek context when crafting a land acknowledgment for Brandeis’ Indigenous hosts. Usually offered every third year.

Emilie Connolly

HIST 125b Europe in the Global Cold War
[ deis-us ss ]

Offers a thematic overview of the history of the post-1945 period in Europe’s East and West, and situates these histories in their global contexts, such as decolonization, environmental change (Chornobyl catastrophe) the struggle of the USSR and the US, the Vietnam War, and debates on the “end of history” around 1989. We will study how events that started in Eastern and East-Central Europe, such as the Russian Revolution, World War II, as well as the collapse of the Soviet Union triggered political and social changes in China, Southeast Asia, and other parts of the world. Through reading diplomatic correspondence, pamphlets, memoirs and literature written by dissidents, party members, and politicians, as well as by watching and reflecting on media footage, we will examine how the Cold War and 1989 ushered in a new world order that is here with us up to the present. The course also focuses on how European states East and West rebuilt ties with the “Global South” through socialist solidarity, development aid and investments, and how the Cold War shapes the institutions and politics of the European Union up to the present. Usually offered every year.

Mate Rigo

HIST 130b Crime and Punishment in U.S. History
[ deis-us ss ]

The United States incarcerates more of its people per capita than any other nation on the planet. How did this come to be? This course examines how Americans have defined, represented, and punished crime, from the birth of the penitentiary to the present day. We will discuss an eclectic mix of historical texts and genres ' criminal codes, trial records, true-crime journalism, historical studies, social theory, urban sociology, and films. Usually offered every second year.
Michael Willrich

HIST 144b Native North America
[ deis-us ss ]

Explores the history of peoples Indigenous to Turtle Island, or the lands known today as the United States. Over five hundred years, settlers carried out an invasion of the Native Old World, a place in which diverse Indigenous people developed robust civilizations and dealt with complex geopolitical rivalries. Contrary to settler assumptions, however, Indigenous peoples did not disappear in the face of European encroachment, nor did they consolidate into a singular stereotyped Indian figure. For this reason, our course will trace the diverse evolutions of distinct Indigenous societies as a result of their ordeals with colonization. In short, we will encounter the many Native New Worlds that emerged and endure today. Usually offered every year.
Emilie Connolly

HIST 153b Slavery and the American Civil War: #1619 Project
[ deis-us dl ss ]

A hard look at American slavery from the Middle Passage to Mass Incarceration, plus an investigation into the Civil War through the lens of Black self-emancipation. Uses the tools and insights from #1619 Project. Usually offered every second year.
Abigail Cooper

HIST 157b Marginalized Voices and the Writing of History
[ deis-us dl ss wi ]

Seeks to understand not only the system but the inner lives and cultures of slaves within that system. This course is a reading-intensive seminar examining both primary and secondary sources on American slaves. Focuses on the American South but includes sources on the larger African diaspora. Usually offered every second year.
Abigail Cooper

HIST 158b Social History of the Confederate States of America
[ deis-us dl ss ]

An examination of the brief life of the southern Confederacy, emphasizing regional, racial, class, and gender conflicts within the would-be new nation. Usually offered every third year.
Abigail Cooper

HIST 159b Modern African American History
[ deis-us ss ]

Introduces students to some of the key social, political, economic, and cultural moments that defined the African American experience in the United States, 1865 through the present. Through the use of primary and secondary source materials, critical surveys, lectures, and guided discussion, this class highlights the richness and significance of the African American history. This course covers a diverse array of key themes and topics including: Reconstruction and segregation; the Great Migration; the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Feminist movements; black political power; mass incarceration and the surveillance state; and Hip Hop culture. Usually offered every second year.

Chad Williams

HIST 160a American Legal History I
[ deis-us ss ]

Surveys American legal development from colonial settlement to the Civil War. Major issues include law as an instrument of revolution, capitalism and contract, invention of the police, family law, slavery law, and the Civil War as a constitutional crisis. Usually offered every third year.
Michael Willrich

HIST 160b American Legal History II
[ deis-us ss ]

Survey of American legal development from 1865 to the present. Major topics include constitutionalism and racial inequality, the legal response to industrialization, progressivism and the transformation of liberalism, the rise of the administrative state, and rights-based movements for social justice. Usually offered every year.
Michael Willrich

HIST 161b American Political History
[ deis-us ss ]
Development of American party politics, the legal system, and government. Special attention paid to the social and cultural determinants of party politics, and economic and social policymaking. Usually offered every second year.
Michael Willrich

HIST 168b America in the Progressive Era: 1890-1920
[ deis-us ss ]

Surveys social and political history during the pivotal decades when America became a "modern" society and nation-state. Topics include populism, racial segregation, social science and public policy, the Roosevelt and Wilson administrations, environmental conservation, and the domestic impact of World War I. Usually offered every fourth year.
Michael Willrich

HIST 179a Labor, Gender, and Exchange in the Atlantic World, 1600-1850
[ deis-us ss ]

An examination of the interaction of cultures in the Atlantic World against a backdrop of violence, conquest, and empire-building. Particular attention is paid to the structure and function of power relations, gender orders, labor systems, and exchange networks. Usually offered every second year.
Govind Sreenivasan

HIST/WGS 120b Queer History in the United States
[ deis-us dl oc ss ]

Traces shifting concepts and practices of gender and sexual deviance in the United States from the colonial period to the present. We will treat queer identity and experience as a topic of historical inquiry as well as a theoretical problem, following the way that currently distinct concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality historically defined each other in shifting configurations. Topics include: queer life and concepts of gender and sexuality before Stonewall; the emergence of the categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, and later transgender identity; the dependence of gender and sexual categories on class and racial categories; the mechanisms of state and informal policing of gender and sexual norms; the creation of social movements around queer an0d gender-nonconforming identities; attitudes towards gender nonconformity in the gay rights and feminist movements of the seventies; the AIDS Crisis and activist responses to it; and the politics of contemporary representations of the history of queer and transgender struggle. Usually offered every year.
AJ Murphy

HSSP 135a Special Topics in Public Health: U.S. History and Policy
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisite: Sophomore standing.

With an interdisciplinary focus on social justice, this seminar examines the complex history of efforts in the U.S. to improve our population's health. Together we will explore the success and failures by comparing and contrasting the responses of individuals, government, and the medical profession to epidemics of smallpox, cholera, HIV/AIDs, and COVID-19, as well as “behavior-based” epidemics like tobacco, obesity, and opioids. Key topics include promoting sanitation/environmental health, managing chronic/infectious diseases, and enhancing emergency preparedness, as well as examining the role of law/government and individualism. Usually offered every year.
Sarah Curi

HSSP 182a Food, Justice and Health
[ deis-us ss ]

Recommended prerequisite: SOC 83a or SOC 84a

Introduces food as a public health issue, including "food is medicine" perspectives. Explores movements for food justice and food sovereignty, especially as a way of understanding how histories of inequity have shaped today's food system. Considers policies, programs, and practices to improve health equity. Usually offered every second year.
Sara Shostak

JOUR 110b Ethics in Journalism
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Should reporters ever misrepresent themselves? Is it ever acceptable to break the law in pursuit of a story? What kind of news footage is too graphic to share? By wrestling with difficult decisions in journalism, this course is designed to strengthen students’ critical thinking and news judgment. Usually offered every year.
Neil Swidey

JOUR 139b Reporting on Diverse Communities in Journalism
[ deis-us ss ]

Examines who has been left out of the news discourse; how that has shaped public understanding of race, immigration, gender, and sexual orientation in the United States; and how to produce coverage that is more representative and better reflects reality. Usually offered every second year.

Adriana Lacy

LACLS 152a Race and Nation in the Caribbean
[ deis-us djw hum ]

The Caribbean is an emblematic site for understanding the origins of modern forms of capitalism, globalization, and trans-nationalism. In this course, we will explore how academics and people in the Caribbean deploy ideas about 'race' and 'nation' to make sense of these transformations and impacts in the region. In particular, we will discuss the founding moments of Caribbean history, including colonialism, the genocide of Native populations, the enslavement of African people, the rise of plantation economies, and the development of global networks of goods and peoples. We will also examine tourism and debt as the continuation of long- extractive colonial practices that continue to generate stark inequalities and racial hierarchies in the region. Special one-time offering, spring 2021.
Isar Godreau

LGLS 110a The War on Drugs or the War on Us?
[ deis-us ss ]

A rigorous course that enables students to foster a deep understanding of the challenges of administering justice in a democratic society. Far from the typical lecture-based experience, this course will be conducted more like a series of hands-on workshops designed to have students learn by actively doing as opposed to passively listening. Students will do this by studying contemporary jurisprudence, formulating their own philosophy of how justice should be administered, and applying their own philosophy to real criminal cases. Usually offered every other year.

Staff

LGLS 123b Immigration and Human Rights
[ deis-us ss ]

Examines U.S. immigration practices policy in the context of international human rights treaties, social movements, historical dynamics, political struggles, and global practices, with some attention to other states' immigration policies. This course focuses on the how the daily interactions of societal institutions and roles is continuously constructing immigration and human rights systems and ideas. As such, much of the class work in this course involves practical exercises in which students experience the decision making and roles of human rights lawyers, organizers and policy leaders in the context of current social and cultural controversies, ideologies, and events. So, students will be introduced to the generally applicable skills, concepts, values, and attitudes involved in human rights litigation, movement organizing, and policy making. This course explores tensions between social movements, domestic politics, and international law in guiding immigration reform, and challenges students to assess the sources of rights and the winners and losers (in terms of efficacy and accountability) of rights talk. Usually offered every spring.

Douglas Smith

LGLS 126a Forced Migration Clinic
[ deis-us djw oc ss wi ]

Prerequisite: LGLS 123b and instructor permission.

In the Forced Migration Clinic, students represent migrants who have fled persecution or torture in their home countries and seek refuge in the United States, as well as support immigrant communities in addressing human rights violations in the United States (and abroad), out of our storefront offices in Waltham. Students handle every aspect of representation in cases and causes that determine, for example, whether a client will be granted asylum or face deportation, under the close supervision of faculty. The principal learning model for this course is reflection on planning, experience, and witnessing, so students will have multiple opportunities to try out different forms of the skills, concepts, values, and attitudes required for competent legal representation and effective and accountable social change, but they will also experience how legal systems operate from the inside and so to understand the roles of law in constructing societal conditions and expectations. Students will have the opportunity, but not the obligation, to seek Department of Justice immigration representation accreditation before, during, or after this course. Usually offered every year.

Douglas Smith

LGLS 131b Patient Autonomy: Law, Medicine, and Ethics
[ deis-us ss ]

Focuses on patient rights, examines how health and health care decisions are made, and by whom. Explores a range of current issues in the field of biomedical ethics, including the legal and ethical aspects of the physician-patient relationship, the doctrine of informed consent, the right to refuse treatment, the right-to-die, human subjects research. We also explore emerging issues of autonomy in public health with regard to opioid use, e-cigarettes, and Covid-19 vaccine and mask mandates. Analyzes the role of law in hard and often tragic choices involving life, quality of life, and death. Assesses the ability of the legal system to set standards, promote equity, and resolve conflict.  Usually offered every second year.
Staff

LGLS 149b Genetics, Law and Society
[ deis-us ss ]

Explores the social policy implications of new genetic technologies, including legal, ethical, and political challenges. Topics include privacy and discrimination, changing definitions in family law, information technology and intellectual property, forensic implications of DNA testing, regulation of reproductive technology. Usually offered every second year.
Alice Noble

NEJS 160a Jewish Feminisms
[ deis-us hum ]

Examines the role of Jewish women in the broader feminist movement and the impact of feminist theory and activism on Jewish thought, law, ritual practice and communal norms in the 20th and 21st century. We will explore classic feminist critiques and transformations of traditional Judaism and examine contemporary controversies involving issues such as equality under Jewish ritual and family law, sex segregation in public life, inclusion of Jewish People of Color and of LGBTQ Jews and antisemitism in the women's movement. Usually offered every year.
Lisa Fishbayn Joffe

NEJS 173a Trauma and Violence in Israeli Literature and Film
[ deis-us djw fl hum oc ]

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 174b Israeli Women Writers on War and Peace
[ deis-us djw fl hum oc ]

Taught in Hebrew.

An exploration of nationalism and gender in Modern Hebrew literature. By discussing various Hebrew texts and Israeli works of art and film, this course explores women's relationship to Zionism, war, peace, the state, politics, and processes of cultural production. Usually offered every second year.
Ilana Szobel

NEJS 180b Israeli Film, Literature, and Culture
[ deis-us djw hum ]

Taught in English.

Surveys the development of Israeli literature and culture over the past 100 years and includes selections of poetry and prose from a wide range of writers. The course aims to illuminate what makes Hebrew literature distinct as well as investigate the themes, symbols, and subject matter that have come to constitute its central concerns since the early 20th century. Usually offered every second year.
Ilana Szobel

NEJS 184b Disability Cultures: Art, Film and Literature of People with Disabilities
[ deis-us djw hum oc ]

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 oc ]

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

PHIL 128b Philosophy of Race and Gender
[ deis-us hum ]

Explores the nature of racism and gender oppression, as well as various remedies to them, including reparations, affirmative action, and policies of group representation at the state level. Usually offered every second year.
Marion Smiley

POL 108a Seminar: The Police and Social Movements in American Politics
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Analyses American mass political movements, their interaction with police, and their influences on American politics. Topics include the relationship between social movements and various political institutions. Explore various theories with case studies of specific political movements. Usually offered every third year.
Daniel Kryder

POL 109b Seminar: The Political Organization of White Supremacy in the U.S.: Causes, Forms, and Responses
[ deis-us ss ]

Prerequisite: Junior and Senior standing and a minimum of four Politics courses, or the permission of the instructor.

Political organizations representing white supremacy – conceptualized here as groups, movements, and institutions pursuing anti-Black racist political outcomes - have powerfully structured, and continue to influence, American political development. This course will survey the social science and historical literatures for crucial cases and useful theories which explain the causes and consequences of these organizations and broader institutions, e.g. the KKK, and the Jim Crow South more generally, but also very current examples like the Alt-Right and the Patriot Front. Usually offered every second year.

Daniel Kryder

POL 116b Civil Liberties in America
[ deis-us ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who successfully completed LGLS 116b or LGLS/POL 116b previously.

The history and politics of civil liberties and civil rights in the United States, with emphasis on the period from World War I to the present. Emphasis on freedom of speech, religion, abortion, privacy, racial discrimination, and affirmative action. Readings from Supreme Court cases and influential works by historians and political philosophers. Usually offered every year.
Jeffrey Lenowitz

POL 139a Seminar: The Radical Right: From Ballots to Bullets
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Radical right and far-right are umbrella terms used to refer to political parties and militant subcultures that differentiate themselves from mainstream conservatism. Students will be introduced to case studies of far-right groups and parties in Western Europe and the United States. We will discuss their ideologies and tactics, the different subcultures and the legal restraints that countries have used to control extremist groups linked to violence. Students will also learn about political science theories about the causes of far-right extremism. Usually offered every second year.

Jytte Klausen

POL/WGS 125a Seminar: Gender in American Politics
[ deis-us ss ]

May not be taken for credit by students who took POL 125a in prior years.

Addresses three major dimensions of women's political participation: social reform and women-identified issues; women's organizations and institutions; and women politicians, electoral politics, and party identification. Covers historical context and contemporary developments in women's political activity. Usually offered every second year.
Jill Greenlee

SOC 104a Sociology of Education
[ deis-us ss ]

Examines the role of education in society, including pedagogy, school systems, teacher organizations, parental involvement, community contexts, as well as issues of class, race, and gender. Usually offered every year.
Derron Wallace

SOC 110a Latinx Sociology
[ deis-us dl ss ]

Focuses on the sociology of Latinx communities within the United States. The course will cover a variety of topics that are of interest to sociologists, including race, gender, sexuality, class, family, immigration, and activism. Usually offered every third year.
Sarah Mayorga

SOC 113a Sociology of Love
[ deis-us ss wi ]

Examines the concept of love in sociological theory and research, through the lenses of race, economy, gender, sexuality. Usually offered every second year.
Gowri Vijayakumar

SOC 113b Sociology of Race and Racism
[ deis-us ss ]

Provides an introduction to the study of race and racism and focuses on specific socio-historical issues surrounding racial inequality in the United States. A variety of media to examine topics such as the institutionalization of white privilege, the social construction of "otherness", racial formation processes, and racial segregation are used" Usually offered every third year.
Sarah Mayorga or Derron Wallace

SOC 116b Social Inequalities in the Media
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Using sociological theories of media, students will examine how difference is constructed across race, gender, and sexuality and how those representations are connected to larger processes of inequality. Students are expected to complete a research project on media representations. Usually offered every second year.
Sarah Mayorga

SOC 129a Sociology of Religion
[ deis-us ss ]

An introduction to the sociological study of religion. Investigates what religion is, how it is influential in contemporary American life, and how the boundaries of public and private religion are constructed and contested. Usually offered every year.
Wendy Cadge or Kristen Lucken

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 year.
Gowri Vijayakumar

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.
Staff

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.
Staff

WGS 105b Feminisms: History, Theory, and Practice
[ deis-us oc ss ]

Prerequisite: Students are encouraged, though not required, to take WGS 5a prior to enrolling in this course.

Examines diverse theories of sex and gender within a multicultural framework, considering historical changes in feminist thought, the theoretical underpinnings of various feminist practices, and the implications of diverse and often conflicting theories for both academic inquiry and social change. Usually offered every year.
ChaeRan Freeze, Keridwen Luis, or Faith Smith

WGS 106a The American Social Body
[ deis-us ]

Explores the ways in which the body is shaped in American culture. What social and cultural meanings do we attach to certain bodies? How do social systems of inequality, such as racism, sexism, ableism and classism influence how we see bodies? Topics to include dieting and bodybuilding, body image and "the beauty myth," body modification, ability and disability, and the moralization of health. Usually offered every second year.
Keridwen Luis

WGS 107a Introduction to Indigenous and Native Women, Gender, and Sexualities
[ deis-us ss ]

This introductory course will critically examine colonial constructions of Native American and Indigenous women, gender diversity, and sexualities, and will explore topics relevant to contemporary experiences of Native American and Indigenous peoples in settler states known as the United States and Canada. Topics surveyed include: decolonization, gender violence, gender expansiveness, body sovereignty, and sexual sovereignty. This course will illuminate Native American and Indigenous Studies, Indigenous Feminisms, Queer Indigenous Studies, and perspectives from Indigenous authors. Students will read, view, discuss, and write about current issues in terms of topics relevant to studies of Native American and Indigenous Women, Genders, and Sexualities. Usually offered every second year.
Evangelina Macias

WGS 107b In and Beyond the Powwow Arena: Introduction to Native American Indigenous Dance
[ deis-us ss ]

Introduces history, contemporary practices, and cultural contexts of Native American Powwow dancing within the United States and Canada. The first half of the semester will focus on Native American Powwows and Powwow dances in their emergence. The second half of the semester will focus on examining contemporary practices and iterations of Powwow dancing outside of the Powwow arena. This course will touch on topics of gender and gender expansiveness, decolonization, body sovereignty, sexual sovereignty, and the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous women, Girls, Two Spirit and Trans people (MMIWG2ST). Special one-time offering, fall 2022.

Evangelina Macias

WGS 128b Transgender Health and Wellness
[ deis-us ss ]

Explores transgender health and wellness, through a depathologizing, decolonizing, intersectional, and gender-affirming approach. Topics include gender health across the lifespan, social determinants of gender health, transgender representation in the media, strategies to address health inequities within transgender communities. Usually offered every year.
Beth Clark

WGS 151a The Social Politics of Sexual Education
[ deis-us ss ]

Covers the history and sociocultural politics of sexual education in the Global North with a strong focus on the U.S. Using queer, feminist, disability, and race theory, it examines what shapes "sex" and "education." Usually offered every third year.
Keridwen Luis

WGS 156b Sexuality and Healthcare
[ deis-us ss ]

Considers how ideas about gender and sexuality affect healthcare, with a particular focus on queer and trans communities. Examines the creation of "the homosexual" and "the transsexual" as medicalized categories; the recent expansion of access to healthcare; and medicine's role in constructing certain kinds of bodies. Usually offered every second year.
Keridwen Luis

WGS 166a Gender, Sexuality, and Social Media
[ deis-us ss ]

Asks how gender, sexuality, race, dis/ability, class, and other intersections of identity impact how we use and appear on social media. Early internet theorists imagined the World Wide Web as a "free" society, where "bodily" issues such as race, gender, and disability would somehow disappear. However, these identities have not vanished; in fact, we might argue that they remain even more potent in today's age of constant media connection. We will explore feminist theories of media, gender, sexuality, and race, as well as applying these theories to current events online. Students will explore the boundaries of digital activism, question the ways we continue to be embodied online, and consider power relations, discipline, and surveillance. Usually offered every third year.
Keridwen Luis

WGS 171a Transgender Studies
[ deis-us ss ]

Introduces students to key terms and debate in the field of transgender studies, while critically interrogating how ideologies of race, class, gender, and sexuality have informed the category's rapid institutionalization. Usually offered every year.
V Varun Chaudhry

WGS 182b Feminist Bioethics: Social Justice and Equity in Health Care
[ deis-us ss ]

Examines emergence of feminist bioethics, current issues of ethical debate related to human health, and the historical context of the field. Real-world applications of feminist ethical analysis are explored through problem-based learning, discussion, reading, research, and written, oral, and visual communication. Usually offered every year.
Beth Clark