Electives (ELEC-GG)

This course aims to improve the critical reading and writing skills of MA students while deepening their familiarity with current debates on global theory and critical methods. Through close readings of essays by major thinkers of globalism who are also persuasive writers of critical prose, we will sharpen our understanding of how the concept of “the world” has traveled and been transformed in a variety of discursive and cultural contexts. Through frequent critical writing, students will be asked to engage carefully with these essays, not only with the ideas each essay advances but with its ways of advancing them—its writing practice. We will focus on identifying how scholars from a range of disciplines (comparative literature, history, anthropology, political philosophy, art history) and interdisciplinary fields (diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, LGBTQ studies, Africana studies, translation studies, environmental humanities and ecocriticism) structure their arguments (including at the level of the sentence and the paragraph), develop their central and supporting claims, select and integrate their sources, and craft their diction (including jargon, figurative language, and colloquialisms) so as to be heard and trusted in their chosen fields—to belong but also to distinguish themselves in robust debates.

"Clichés invite you not to think," wrote the literary critic Christopher Ricks, "but you may always decline the invitation." Clichés can be bad for language, thought, and action, in that they serve efficiency and an abstract idea of power, and lead the user away from the truth. But to avoid them entirely may be impossible. Which makes the work of the cultural critic, part of whose job is to locate and question them wherever they occur, that much trickier and deeper. In this advanced writing seminar, we will move toward an expanded and sophisticated relationship with the cliché. What is the difference between cliché and idiom, meme, tradition, trope, archetype, stereotype? Where do they live and breed? What do they accomplish? If, as Adam Phillips says, "clichés are there to stop us being suspicious," can they be much more than a writer"s bad habit--can they even be used for societal oppression? Or, conversely, can they bring people together? We will read criticism which notices the use of clichés in many forms of culture, by Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Margo Jefferson, Teju Cole, and Nuar Alsadir; we will consider extensions of the cliché in fiction (Danzy Senna), drama (Samuel Beckett), visual art (Kara Walker), poetry, music; and in algorithms and artificial intelligence. Students will write critical essays in response to the readings, as well as to current cultural or social events, paying special attention to how clichés function in the subject itself and the discourse around it.

This course is for graduate students who wish to strengthen their creative writing skills or acquire more experience in narrative prose—stories and novels, of course, but also memoirs, essays, biographies, travel narratives, first-person journalism and any form where story is a structural element. It’s a foundational course, covering basic concepts such as structure, point of view, dialogue, character development, modes of realism, figurative language, and narrative drive, but it will also serve as a refresher for students returning to the writing process. (Students should revisit basic grammar and punctuation before the first class and be prepared to turn in technically competent work.) One primary goal is to provide a firm head start on creative projects, though for some students, this will also be a chance to assess commitment before getting in too deep. Assignments will include short weekly writing exercises, responses to NYU Classes discussions, and at least one longer piece to be discussed workshop-style and significantly revised as a final. Readings in various genres will alternate with essays on craft; assignments will include works by Alice Munro, Stephen Millhauser, Edward P. Jones, Louise Erdrich, Haruki Murakami, Annie Dillard, John Gardner, Francine Prose, David Foster Wallace, Italo Calvino, Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm and Zadie Smith, among others.

Individual scenes are important building blocks of any prose narrative, yet the craft of designing a scene is often neglected by aspiring writers. In this class we will study all the aspects of designing a successful scene: setting, inner plot, inner structure, spotlight on the characters, POV, choreography of physical movement, dialogue. We will study how to write sex scenes, death scenes, party scenes, battle scenes, and nature scenes. Readings will include Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Leo Tolstoy, Elena Ferrante, James Baldwin, Roberto Bolano, Annie Proulx, Alice Munro, Sarah Waters.

In this fiction workshop, we will identify and practice the essential technical elements of fiction writing. We will look under the hood, take the back off the clock, peer into the innards, in order to study the formal decisions necessary for effective story-telling. Our inquiry will include: point of entry; character and plot; creating meaningful scenes; interiority vs. external action; exposition; the management of time; the position of the narrator; linear v/s modular design; dialogue and its uses; conflict and resolution; image systems and so on. Fun exercises that encourage play, class readings, technique essays and student work will be points of departure for our enquiries into the internal workings of fiction. Readings include among others Sharma, Marcus, Gurganus, Bulawayo, Anam, and essays on the craft of writing by Butler, Hrijbal and Keesey among others.

How does the telling transform a story? And how can a story govern its own telling? In this course for writers in all genres, we consider diverse storytelling strategies, looking at fiction, creative nonfiction and narrative poetry, as well as theater and a few short films. Through exercises in both prose and poetry, we explore how a writer imagines a project via formal decisions about voice, genre, point of view, diction, even meter and rhyme. The intent is to move us away from comfort zones, to help us draw invention from the unfamiliar and to broaden our literary and verbal palettes, so students should be prepared to be daring, open-minded and seriously playful. (Please note that while this is not a workshop in the conventional sense, the instructor will be available during office hours to discuss personal creative projects.) Readings will include works by Amy Hempel, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Vikram Seth, Vladimir Nabokov, John Lewis, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, W G Sebald, Nicholson Baker, Robert Frost, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Marjane Satrapi, David Shields and others; also films by Su Friedrich, Maya Deren and Kenneth Anger and performance work by Anna Deavere Smith and Ruth Draper.

The main goal of this course is to provide students with ways how to enhance traditional storytelling by new technologies without diminishing the role of the written word. We will examine every aspect of the craft of traditional fiction writing: plot, structure, point of view, narrative voice, dialogue, building of individual scenes, etc as well as the new techniques of the digital age: hypertext, visual and audio images, social media. We will learn how to balance the traditional with the new without overwhelming the written text with gadgets. The class will become a creative lab studying ideas by others, coming up with their own, presenting their fiction, responding to the writing of others, and discussing questions about literature, editing, and publishing in the digital age. Each student will create and present to class a work of fiction based on some of the ideas we will be discussing. The works don’t have to be in the electronic form, but the students will need to explain how they would work. Each student will create a basic website with a writer’s profile and portfolio of her works. Readings will include fiction by: Borges, Nabokov, Michael Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Jennifer Egan.

The art of dramatic writing lies at the intersections of vision and voice, content and craft. This graduate level course is geared at preparing new MA students for the early stages of their journey towards writing an original work for the stage or screen. Students read, discuss, and create their own artistic statements/manifestos before moving into an examination of traditional western narrative structure (think Aristotle and The Hero’s Journey); from there, class discussions and exercises move on to complicate and repudiate that form. Readings include contemporary dramatic works (which may include Is God Is, Friday Night Lights, Barry, and many more). Supplemental texts include films, television shows, and theoretical pieces, may of which will be individually assigned according to the particular interests of each student. Each student will write an original short piece (for either stage or screen), and will come away with the seeds of what may become their thesis project.

This course is intended for students who are interested in studying and making documentary films about social change. A documentary will be screened in every class and discussion will focus on the fundamentals of filmmaking (story, structure, editing, cinematography, music, interviewing) and the importance of access and luck. While not a production course, its primary purpose is to make students more conscious of motives and methods in documentaries intended to bring about social change through the consideration of questions such as: How do documentary filmmakers construct their films in hopes of effecting social change? What kinds of stories are best told through the visual medium of film? How do documentary filmmakers deal with real people and real situations and grapple with the ethics of using the lives of others to tell their stories? A number of professional filmmakers will visit class to share their work and to talk about process, decision-making, as well as how the film industry works. In addition, students will discuss a selection of important, effective documentary films along with related readings by authors such as Freire, Coates, Kidder, Sontag and Baldwin.

How does matter—generally thought of as the inert stuff of nature, acted upon or animated by humans—come to matter in the social, political, and ecological senses of the word? This seminar explores recent approaches to materiality across art, anthropology, feminist theory, and political ecology, an interdisciplinary constellation of scholarship often called the “new materialism.” Proceeding from political theorist Jane Bennett’s rendering of vibrancy as a thingly agency bound up with social justice, this course is an invitation to work critically with this formation in a transcultural way. We will interrogate the “newness” of the new materialism, situating its histories and genealogies in earlier phenomenological approaches to matter, while exploring its alternative lineages and contestations. Students will apply the new materialism’s diverse methodological tools for theorizing things and networks to their own practices and projects. Emphasizing graduate-level reading skills, our discussions will be based primarily on recent book-length texts, which we will work to situate within the new materialism and within their authors’ own disciplinary lineages. In addition to Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, books may include Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals, Noémi Tousignant's Edges of Exposure, and Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End.

How have museums shaped the theoretical, practical, and political concerns of anthropology as a discipline? Why does anthropology in museums matter now? In this course, we will explore these questions through an engagement with material practices of museum anthropology, broadly defined as acts of assembling, interpreting, caring for, circulating, and displaying the material world. Beginning with a history of museums in relation to anthropology in the “museum age” of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in Europe and North America, we will consider the complex colonial and modernist legacies of these institutions, and how they have shaped pervasive ideas about objects and subjects of display. Centering critical Indigenous perspectives, we will expand on the contemporary roles and relations of museum anthropology amidst globalization, environmental crisis, digital futures, and decolonization. Maintaining a materialist approach to museums as sites of cultural production, we will ask how and why innovations in museology are shifting the terms of access to and control of significant objects and stories. Through museum visits, students will explore a variety of methods for conducting anthropological research in and on museums and material culture. Alongside shorter texts by anthropologists, historians, curators, and artists, we will read several recent books on material practices in museums, which may include James Clifford’s Returns, Cara Krmpotich’s The Force of Family, and Amy Lonetree’s Decolonizing Museums.

Diagnoses and discussions of individual trauma have become all but ubiquitous. And yet collective trauma has not received the same level of public attention or disciplinary development. This course seeks to track the emergent field of Collective Trauma over the last several decades. We will explore the ways in which forms of social suffering and trauma have been theorized, examined, and "treated," while critically engaging the psychological, cultural, and political implications thereof. Collective or cultural trauma is thought to emanate from cultural upheaval and formidable challenges to the social and moral order. In class and in our readings, we will attempt to map key contours of this multivalent disciplinary field and its related practices. We will explore a variety of theoretical and empirical sources, as well as case studies on topics such as: Truth commissions and reparations; intergenerational and epigenetic trauma; the Covid pandemic and mental health crises among teens; atrocity and indigenous modes of healing; memorials and the politics of memory; activism and communal healing linked to gun violence; displacement and foced migration; PTSD and sexual violence; art-based therapeutic methods; racialized modes of structural violence; climate change and community trauma, to name a few. Some of the authors/artists/activists we will explore include Didier Fassin, Gloria Anzaldua, Yael Danieli, Paul Farmer, Ta Nehisi Coates, Stef Craps, Susan Sontag, Jefferey Alexander, Franz Fanon, Gloria Anzaldua, and Judith Butler.

History, as most of us are taught it in the American school system, has long been written by, and for, the powerful, and historical archives are often considered fixed bases for "fact." Oral history turns these notions on their heads. While, as a cultural practice, oral history has long been utilized informally, oral history was brought into the Western academic world as an ethics and method by scholars and activists in the mid-20th century in order to infuse and nuance history with the voices and histories of disempowered groups and peoples—people of color, women, indigenous communities, differently abled people, political radicals, laborers and the working poor, and the LGBTQIA+ community. In this course, we'll engage in a critical assessment of the practice of oral history, with the goal of understanding the context of its origins and uses and examining the ethics and principles that shape it as a mode of research. We'll read and listen to exemplary oral history interviews by noted practitioners in the field, and develop relational interview skills that prize power-sharing, trust-building, careful questioning, and consider the notion of co-creativity. A core part of this course is learning The Listening Guide method, pioneered by psychologist Carol Gilligan, which we use to analyze oral history interviews; this method calls upon and hones deep listening skills, considers the relational elements of dialogue, and engages researcher/interviewers in deep self-observation and reflection about their own role and impact on both process and "result." As the capstone experience of the course, students will design, carry out, and analyze oral history interviews of their own, with a final project that can be presented as a written analysis, audio documentary/podcast, or multi-media/video. This course is particularly well-suited for students interested in history, cultural studies, psychology/social work, journalism, (auto)biographical writing, human rights, documentary production, and social movements/activism.

This graduate seminar will focus upon the broad question of how societies, predominantly influenced by Islamic traditions, might find a home in the modern world on their own terms. We will discuss the possibility of a critical re-thinking of certain modern conventional modes of thinking about modernity, secularism, and democracy. The class will examine notions of citizenship, religion, and globalization in societies that have been historically influenced by Islamic tradition and institutions. This will be done by way of interrogating the works of contemporary scholars of Islamic modernity, including Mohammed Arkoun, Abdullahi An-Na'im, Fatima Mernissi, Talal Asad, Saba Mahmood, and Aziz Al-Azmeh. We will explore questions that cut across the disciplines of history, anthropology, sociology, and law.

This course explores scholarly debates about communities and justice. Course material covers longstanding themes such as state-society relations, democracy and political participation, emergence of political identities, grassroots and netroots, community organizing and urban governance, and social movements. Students will acquire critical literacy in social studies, including the bodies of literature mentioned above that draw on anthropology, political theory, geography and sociology. These insights should be able to inform students’ further critical engagement in the world. Particular attention will be paid to 1) how political problems both reflect and help constitute social practices, identities and inequalities, and 2) how this complex relationship between the ‘social’ and the ‘political’ is manifested on a variety of levels, from global networks and nation-states to cities, regions and local neighborhoods.

This graduate seminar explores some of the central themes in modern Iranian intellectual history. The primary focus of the course will be the transnational circulation of intellectual discourses in contemporary Iran. Intellectual and religious ideas travel in time and space. This is the case with modern ideas, but also with ideas we consider as “traditional” or “local.” Iranian intellectual thought came to interact and overlap with Western liberalism, European and Russian social democracy, French and German Counter-Enlightenment, among others. European thought has traveled to Iran, but, Persian and Islamic traditions have also journeyed to Europe, only to then return to contemporary Iran. The cases of Ahmad Fardid, Ali Shari’ati, and Henry Corbin are conspicuous examples of the reciprocal traveling lifecycle of intellectual ideas and traditions. The course is designed to study three intellectual currents in contemporary Iran. However, we will pay special attention to how these intellectual trends overlap, mutually borrow, and share similar origins in past Iranian or European traditions.

How does identity impact historical narrative? How do communities tell their own histories, especially those that have been omitted from the historical record? What happens when communities disagree about place and placemaking? In this course, we will examine the roles of history, identity, and place as we explore the literature, the historiography, and the practices of community history with a focus on New York City. By reading some of the formative histories of different communities and putting them into dialogue with readings, including graphic novels, about identity and place, we will examine the changing nature of community given the evolving interpretations of race, class, gender, ethnicity, disability, and sexuality. We will be collaborating with the Place Matters program of local, non-profit, Citylore, on the final project. Guest speakers may include archivists, memory workers, and public historians. Readings may include works by Benedict Anderson, George Chauncey, Kimberle Crenshaw, Timothy J. Gilfoyle, Leslie M. Harris, Judith Heumann, Alison Kafer, Nell Painter, Kirk Savage, Christina Sharpe, and John Kuo Wei Tchen.

This graduate seminar will focus on the literary and political legacy of the Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). We will read selections from his major works (poetry, prose, and essays) and consider major critical approaches and debates about his writings and his status in Palestinian history and collective memory.

Over the past four decades, analysis of the Iranian revolution has been constricted to the national framework. Scholars have mapped opposition actors or the Pahlavi state, while considering institutional strength or weakness (“the rentier state”, “mosque networks”, or Left parties). Even approaches seeking to foreground Islamism as a discursive tradition have slipped into Iranian exceptionalism: Shia Islamic peculiarities, clerical leadership, and Ruhollah Khomeini as a charismatic figure. This graduate seminar explores the global processes which helped and shaped the making of 1978-79 Iranian revolution. We will highlight the multiplicity of spaces of the revolution such as streets, schools, prisons, personal lives, and histories such as the Cold War and Global 1960s and 70s. We will study the Revolution within the historic context of two crucial decades leading to the demise of the old regime. This juncture reveals diverse global inspirations driving the revolution. The Iranian revolution’s global character cannot be understood except in terms of a circulatory system of flows of people and ideas between Iran, the West, Middle East, Asia, and the Soviet Union and those in Latin America.

“If you put on anarchist glasses," writes political scientist James C. Scott in his book Two Cheers for Anarchism, “and look at the history of popular movements, revolutions, ordinary politics and the state from that angle, certain insights will appear that are obscured from almost any other angle.” Using an “anarchist squint,” Scott argues, allows us to better understand more clearly informal order, submerged politics, informal regulation of markets and commons, resistance to the state, subversion of legal regimes, and other topics. It can show us, in other words, the ways that people have built order, regulated their lives, and resisted domination in ways outside and against the state. The idea of this seminar is to adopt such an “anarchist squint” and take anarchism as method for students’ varied work and so to test the utility of an “anarchist squint” for it. We will spend the term reading scholarship by people who do and do not identify as anarchists or as abolitionists, but who ask the sort of questions anarchists and abolitionists ask. These may include Scott, Colin Ward, Ursula Le Guin, Saidiya Hartman, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, David Graeber, and others. Familiarity or affinity with political anarchism are unnecessary but welcome.

As part of ongoing struggle against police brutality, environmental injustice, mass incarceration and white supremacist violence, activists, artists, academics and everyday folk are wondering aloud about how antiblackness shapes the world we live in. Both plea and protest, the insistence that black lives matter activates and animates an older, yet enduring concern that centers the vexed relationship between blackness and the (properly) human. In this course we will consider what it means to treat the question of the relation between the black and the human as a radically open one. We will read widely in black studies, with an emphasis on recent literature that forwards urgent and profound critiques of humanism. Our readings--which include essays by Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Fred Moten, Joao Vargas and Zakiyyah Jackson--provide us with an occasion to consider what modes of being, politics, aesthetics and sociality are enabled or dis-abled by thinking blackness outside of the category of the human. Some of the inquiries to be foregrounded here are: What are the stakes in decoupling our study of blackness from humanism? Do the models of thinking "beyond" the human offered by post-humanism, new materialism, and animal studies inadequately incorporate a racial history that posits blacks as sub- or inhuman? What do we make of new works that rethink this history of black life alongside the live(lines)s of objects, machines and animals? Over the course of the semester we will devote much time to exploring the intricacies of this new and exciting literature, thereby deepening our awareness of why it has sparked such intense and lively discussion and debate.

Contemporary Western societies are often characterized as places where the process of accumulating and consuming material goods plays an outsized role in shaping individuals, economies and cultures. Consumerism— the linking of happiness, freedom, and economic prosperity with the purchase and consumption of goods—has long been taken for granted as constitutive of the “good life” in these societies. This course takes an interdisciplinary (sociology, anthropology, history, economics and popular media) approach to consumption and how it is understood in different societies. In particular, we engage variable histories of consumption, theoretical explanations of its rise and effects, and everyday practices of consumption. We explore consumption’s role in shaping racial, class and international boundaries and examine how consumption informs how people think of their identities, of success, failure and happiness. Theorists and texts include Marx, Marcuse, Bourdieu, Bauman, Frank Trentmann, Elizabeth Chin and Jeremy Prestholdt's Domesticating the World.

This course examines the US criminal justice system, with a particular focus on the nation's imprisonment rates and the numerous ways that the having been incarcerated affects the individual and his or her family post-release. The course explores its subject matter by drawing from a range of social science disciplines, including economics, political science, sociology, and law. It also incorporates some discussion of insights from historians and philosophers. The course is designed to teach students about (a) what is known about our nation's punishment system and (b) the methodology that social scientists use in their research. The course places a strong emphasis on empirical evidence. It also places an emphasis on the policy implications of social science research. Readings may include A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Punishment for the Poor by Alexes Harris, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Insecurity by Loic Waquant, Marked: Race, Crime and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration by Devah Pager, The Eternal Criminal Record by James Jacobs, and US Justice Statistics by the National Research Council.

Postfeminism is an ambiguous and often contradictory term whose very indeterminacy speaks to the difficulties in understanding contemporary relationships between feminism, femininity, citizenship and identity. Positioned simultaneously as a backlash against feminism, a testament to achieved gender equality, as a reclamation of traditional feminine values and a sign of female success, postfeminism’s significance is widely felt even as its specific meanings and cultural effects appear unclear. This class will examine postfeminism’s relationship to feminism and femininity, situating all three as historically and culturally significant manifestations of the female self. Closely linked to the development of neoliberalism with its emphasis on self-reliance, choice and privatization, postfeminism is largely a product of consumer culture and mass media that have particularly consequences for feminine identities and gender relations. This course will look at popular women’s media from the makeover show, to fashion magazines and blogs, chick films and television drama to explore how they manage tradition and promote a more privatized and commercial feminine self, negotiating the relationship between family responsibilities and more laissez faire ideas of female success and self-actualization.

Racialized media narratives about migrants and the “migration crisis” have transformed politics in the US, but also across much of the world in the past several years. In this course, we will think through the current moment of crisis by examining the historical and structural causes of modern migration, forced dispossession and displacement. We will locate the current crisis in much longer histories of settler colonialism, transatlantic slavery, forced migration and indenture that have shaped modern political struggles over race, nationality and citizenship. We will then turn to the role of media across platforms and technologies in surveilling and policing on the one hand and setting the limits on the other, of 21st century public understandings of national belonging and claims to citizenship within and beyond borders. Finally, the seminar will focus on migrant-led movements for civil rights, sanctuary and open borders. The seminar draws from the growing inter-disciplinary scholarship in critical migration studies including Anthropology, History, Sociology, Geography, Media and Cultural Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies. Readings may include: Browne, Simone (2015) Dark matters: On the surveillance of blackness; Jodi Byrd (2014) The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism; Ngai, Mae M (2014) Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Reece Jones & Mathew Coleman (2019), Open Borders: In Defense of Free Movement; Gregory, D. (2004). The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Ghassan Hage, (2017) Is Racism an Environmental Threat?; Leo Chavez (2013), The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation; Robyn Magalit Rodriguez (2010) Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World

This course will examine how poetic thought and practice shapes notions of history, self, collectivity, and change in South Asia and the Middle East. The course considers “poetic knowledge” as a term that might encapsulate the value and meaning of the poetic as a mode of being, seeing and doing in the world. We will delve into the breadth and depth of non-Western literary thought, theory and practice in South Asia and the Middle East, reading key texts by poets, historians, and anthropologists including A. K. Ramanujan, Ann Gold, Lila Abu-Lughod, Steve Caton, and Sheldon Pollock. Alongside, we will read selected, poetic texts in translation from a variety of languages including Braj, Urdu, Persian, Sindhi, and Punjabi. Course themes include poetic knowledge as a reflection on history and society, gender and power in poetic traditions, poetry and political critique, and the relationship between poetic idiom and spiritual subjectivity.

How do we represent historical events graphically? How can we use drawing to practice paying attention to historical images? How do we generate new perspectives when telling histories with multiple narratives? Similar to the impact that The 1619 Project has had by reaching a broader audience, could graphic histories raise the visibility of previously marginalized stories and allow us to rethink long-held beliefs about our past? In this methods-focused course, we will read and analyze historical scholarship and graphic histories in a case- study approach in order to determine how best to work with primary sources to create our own graphic histories with diverse representation. This course relies on the philosophy and techniques of Lynda Barry and Ivan Brunetti with the underlying belief that anyone can draw. No prior drawing experience is required. Readings may include works by Kyle Baker, Meg-John Barker, Jason Eaglespeaker, Ebony Flowers, Rebecca Hall, Ken Krimstein, Nora Krug, John Lewis, Scott McCloud, Eric Orner, Frank “Big Black” Smith, Anna Veltfort, and Gene Leun Yang. Guest speakers may include authors, illustrators, historians, publishers, and visual storytellers.

According to many twentieth-century scholars, as the Western world continued to advance scientifically, industrially, and economically, religions and religious beliefs would gradually fade away. While that may have been somewhat true in a few European countries, in most of the West, in particular the Americas and the United States, religion continues to play a major role. To understand America, in the 21st century—the political, educational, philosophical, artistic, and social—requires some understanding of the roles that religions play. In this course, we will look at multiple communities, belief systems, institutions, and practices. While we will look at traditional institutions and texts, the main focus of this course will be on the everyday experiences of people and the ways their lives intersect with religion: what scholars call “lived religion.” Topics will include the decline of mainstream congregations and the rise of the evangelical, as well as the emerging visibility of queer theologies, pagan communities, and other new religious movements. We will examine the growing religious identification as “spiritual but not religious” and as “none.” We will look at the religious underpinnings of political movements from Islamophobia to Black Lives Matter to trans rights to Donald Trump. Readings will include texts taken from within these movements, within the popular media, and theoretical analysis from multiple perspectives and disciplines. Scholarly readings will include works by Talal Assad, Saba Mahmood, Ann Pellegrini, Robert Orsi, Graham Harvey, Jeffrey Stout, Cornell West, Mark C. Taylor, Tyler Roberts, Marcella Althaus-Reid, and others.

This course will explore the plays of Shakespeare and other early modern English dramatists in a broad Mediterranean context, including fictions from the Italian novellatradition, Renaissance Italian and Spanish comedy and tragicomedy, several plays by Plautus set in the northern and eastern Mediterranean, captivity narratives and materials on Ottoman and North African relations. The class will look at questions of race and racialization in relation to questions of religion and empire, and at the emergence of Shakespearean comedy and “romance” or “tragicomedy” in relation to Italian, classical and Spanish precursors and contemporaries. Readings will probably include non-Shakespearean English dramas such as The Battle of Alcazar (George Peele), A Christian Turned Turk (Daborne), The Renegado and The Bondsman (both by Massinger), The Deceived (by the Italian Sienese humanist academy The Intronati), and Cervantes’ “The Bagnios of Algiers” or “The Great Sultana.”  A selection will be made from the following plays by Shakespeare: Comedy of Errors, Much Ado about Nothing, Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest. We will draw on recent scholarship on race, religion, and transnational theatrical intersections including Black Lives in the English Archives by Imtiaz Habib and Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion, eds Jonathan Burton and Ania Loomba, and work by Daniel Vitkus, Nabil Matar, Barbara Fuchs, Ayanna Thompson, Jonathan Burton, Ania Loomba and Dennis Britton, among others.

The rhythm known as the habanera, recognized as the first written music based on an African motif, has zigzagged around the globe for centuries. In this course we will pay close attention to how and why this syncopation pattern, believed to originate in the premodern kingdom of Kongo, today manifests in a wide range of musics--from opera to afrobeats. Team taught by an Afro-Cuban musician and a black diaspora cultural historian, and offered in conjunction with a series of evening seminars featuring renowned scholars, musicians and DJs, this colloquium organizes a central question--what does it mean to hear diaspora? Master classes and listening assignments are designed to build proficiencies with respect to various genres (including, but not limited to ragtime, reggaeton, tango, son, samba, zouk, kizomba, bolero and bachata) and encourage students to experiment with thinking through music. Readings and discussions foster cultural literacies and ask us to consider how contact, circulation, and commodification relay a rhythm that carries a place name to so many different places in the world. The transatlantic traffic in slaves, travel, trade, work, war, migration and music industry marketing figure prominently here. How does this va y ven of people and objects, ideas and sounds oblige us to seriously (re)think notions of intangible heritage and sharpen our awareness of the creative and affective forces that shape and sustain afro diaspora’s musical cultures?