Cultural Foundations I (CFI-UA)

This course introduces the arts from their origins to the end of antiquity, as defined for these purposes by the roughly coincident dissolutions of the Gupta, Han, and Western Roman empires, focusing on how individuals and social relations are shaped in literature, the visual, plastic, and performing arts, and through music. Conceptions of the divine, the heroic, power and disenfranchisement, beauty, and love are examined within the context of the art and literature of East and South Asia, the Mediterranean world, and contiguous regions (such as Germania, Nubia, and Mesopotamia). Instructors prepare the way for Cultural Foundations II by giving some attention to the modes by which cultural transmission occurred across these regions prior to the rise of Islam.

This course is an introductory survey of Caribbean colonial and postcolonial histories and cultures. It emphasizes the West Indies (English-speaking Caribbean), focusing on the relationship between the processes of development and the strategies of exploitation that have tied far-flung continents together, and which make the region what it is today. This course also explores ideas about race, class, and gender in the Caribbean, which are often connected to development and exploitation, justifying or challenging them. The books and articles we will be reading will include anthropology, history, and fiction.

This course examines the distinction between appearance and reality across the history of the Western philosophical tradition, from Ancient Greece to contemporary thought. Through close readings of primary philosophical texts, students will explore enduring questions about truth, knowledge, perception, and the nature of human existence. The course considers how thinkers have understood the relationship between the world as it appears to us and the possibility of a deeper or hidden reality, while also examining how science, logic, art, film, poetry, and experience shape our understanding of reality. Students will engage these questions through reflective writing and discussion, considering how different philosophical perspectives illuminate, challenge, and transform our understanding of ourselves, society, and the world around us.

This course introduces students to Black Studies as an interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry, a mode of analysis, and a political project born of insurgent struggle. Through canonical and more recent works in history, political theory, and cultural analysis, students will study the Black Radical Tradition and how its architects have developed tools and insights for analyzing systems of power, domination, and culture, tools from which all students—regardless of race, gender, or sexuality—can learn and benefit from. Beginning with the institutionalization of Black Studies as an academic field, the course will examine key concepts, such as racial capitalism, Reconstruction and emancipation, race-based chattel slavery in the Americas and its afterlives, Black political organizing, and feminist thought. Students will engage foundational thinkers who have shaped the field, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Audre Lorde, among others.

This course explores the histories of slavery and race and their influence on the development of the United States. The class begins with the seventeenth-century origins of North American slavery and end with the twentieth century struggle over Civil Rights and Black Power. Along the way – largely through the use of primary sources – students see how people of African descent resisted their oppression as slaves, how African-American slavery was defended by enslavers and fortified by the national government, how African Americans as slaves and free people helped destroy slavery and struggled over the meaning of freedom, how the Jim Crow system of segregation and disfranchisement came into being, and how twentieth century movements and leaders pressed for new forms of equality and justice.