Approved Courses

This course introduces students to interdisciplinary ethical analyses of science. It explores the social role of scientific knowledge, focusing on the history of the biological sciences with special attention to gender, race, class, and empire. How does science influence everyday life? How do the priorities of a society shape its approach to science? Over the past two decades, ethical and diversity issues in the practice science have grown dramatically in importance. Scholars as well as policy makers and activists have argued that the views of practicing scientists, of social scientists, and of philosophers should inform one another. Any systematic social and historical understanding of the sciences requires us to use a wide range of disciplines. We will survey the history and politics of biology, with a focus on the sciences of sexuality, race, and the body, the readings are drawn from academic studies of history, culture, and politics.
Days: TU TH  03:30-04:50 PM

The course examines the dialectics of the colonizer and the Colonized in the making of  Europhone African literature.  The two linked social forces have impacted the ethics, aesthetics and politics of contemporary African literature including choice of themes, language and even publishing options. Though the course is based on individual texts and writers from the colonial to the post-colonial period, the connecting link is the struggle between  the two forces,  whose consequences underly the anxieties globalization today.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

This course will focus on the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and will highlight his influence on 20th century literature and film. Reading for this class will include two novels by Dostoevsky: Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov. The goal of this course is to encourage the exploration of one of Russia’s greatest novelists and public figures. An understanding of Dostoevsky is an essential component to the understanding of nineteenth century Russia, and arguably of Russian culture, and of world intellectual and cultural history. Students will write a midterm paper and a final paper.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

The “American Dream” was first conceptualized by James Truslow Adams in 1931, who said that life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, regardless of social class or circumstances of birth. Many Americans have accepted this ethos as central to our democracy and believe that education is the basis for achieving it. This class will examine the relationship between public schooling and the promotion of democratic ideals in American society over the past two centuries. Students will explore the historiographical debates about the central goals and purposes of American public education and will consider whether those goals promote or contradict those of particular groups who seek to benefit from it.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

Art is so highly valued, with such a strong emotional and political charge, that disputes—even wars—over its acquisition, ownership, and display can be traced for millenia. Acute problems surround the acquisition of antiquities that typically surface through illegal digging, theft or plunder, and this scavenging destroys contexts, resulting in the irreversible loss of history. Art of more recent periods may be offensive, or may record or reflect atrocities and be painful to view.  How do historians of art assess and advise these ethical challenges?  What are the legal frameworks that seek to control ownership and display of art?  What should be the role of modern museums?  What happens to cultural property, including art, in time of war, and is it possible to anticipate and regulate this?  Should modern countries have the right to claim past artistic production from much earlier periods as their own exclusive state property, or does the art of the past belong to everyone as a part of global heritage?  How can we try to avoid the deliberate destruction of art by ideologues?  This course addresses a broad range of ethical and legal issues pertaining to art, ownership and cultural heritage. We will explore ways to come to a consensus on controversies, and also consider how concern about these issues reflects our contemporary values.
Days: WE  03:30-06:20 PM

This course examines how different feminist scholars, writers, and activists have attempted to think about, interrogate, analyze, critique and, in short, to theorize the various social, political, economic, historical, cultural, scientific, and philosophical contours of the categories of woman, women, sex, gender, sexuality, class, race, nation, and region.


Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

Examines the historical production of non-normative sexual and gender identities, bodies, practices, and communities. Explores how past formations inform and shape the present and future.
Days: MO WE  02:00-03:20 PM

Each week we will examine a different marginalized group within Japanese society as a means of  1) examining developments in Japanese history from the late nineteenth century to the present and 2) understanding how individuals operate within the distinctive framework of Japanese institutions and social networks.
Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM

This course will examine the effects of philosophical empiricism and political revolution on the poetry and drama of mid to late seventeenth century Britain, particularly as these concepts and realities are expressed in the literature about, by and on behalf of women. Along with shorter works, we will read longer works that include Milton’s Paradise Lost, Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko. Students will write a take-home midterm of medium length and a longer final essay that will go through a careful drafting and revision process.
Days: MO WE  12:30-01:50 PM

True crime, at its best, it not just about cops and killers, but can tell us much about the world in which we live. While the crimes may animate the narratives – which make for gripping reading – the best books transcend the genre by giving readers a strong sense of place,an insight into the criminal mind, a window into the cops’ world, a feel for the agony of the victims, and the impact on the community. Every crime contains three major players that provide the cornerstone for compelling character studies: a perpetrator, a victim, and an investigator. In this class we will discuss the ethnical challenges true crime writers encounter, the difficulties they face during the reporting, and the decisions they make during the writing. We will explore the psychology of criminals; the effect their behavior has on society, the legal world and the criminal justice system; and the social implications of their crimes. Homicide detectives, former prison inmates, and true crime writers will visit the class, give presentations and answer questions. Some writers whose works we will read include David Grann, Norman Mailer, and John Berendt.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

Examination of feminist approaches to militarism, war, and political violence drawing on representations of women as both victims of and participants in military violence; effects of militarism on formations of gender; effects of military industrial complex on nationalism and identity.
Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM

The phenomenon first became noticeable during the First World War, but during the 1920s it was clear for all to see: the “New Negro” had arrived. Located mainly within the large urban centers of the North, such as Chicago, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and especially New York City’s Harlem, the “New Negro” was described by contemporaries as that segment of the black population that was more self-confident, more vocal and articulate in airing the grievances of “the race,” and more militant in the defense of his or her rights as a citizen than the “Old Negro” was. The self-styled “New Negroes” described themselves in identical terms. New journals, magazines and newspapers emerged that articulated this new outlook in urban black America. The Messenger, the Crusader, the Negro World, the Chicago Defender were the most widely read and well-known of these organs.
The course is primarily concerned with the making of the “New Negro.” It begins with an examination of the place of black people within American society at the turn of the century, analyses the profound changes brought about by the First World War, the epic movement of African Americans from the South (known as the “Great Migration”) and Afro-Caribbeans from the islands, and follows the “New Negro” movement to the end of the 1920s, the eve of the Great Depression. Throughout the course, attention will be paid to the inter-relationship between culture and politics, and in particular, how these two phenomena influenced and conditioned each other. The course aspires to place the remarkable black cultural outpouring of the 1920s, especially that of the “Harlem Renaissance,” within its proper political, economic and social contexts.
Days: TH  04:00-06:50 PM

Visit the Logic and Philosophy of Science website for more information.

Same as LPS 140. 

Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

The United States became a modern, urban-industrial society in the late 19th Century. This transformation changed the economic circumstances of many Americans and the broader social structure. It also inspired reformers, who hoped to transform the state to meet the challenges of a modern capitalist society. Crusading men and women sought better city services, protections for workers, environmental conservation, and government regulation of big business. However, their initiatives also reflected deep divisions in society with regard to income, race, ethnicity, and gender, and many seemed to reject modernization altogether. This course will examine America’s transformation between 1890 and 1920 with particular attention paid to the experiences of workers, women, children, and immigrants. History 100W fulfills the upper-division writing requirement for UCI and the historical writing requirement for the History Major with requirements that are set by the school and the department.  Our goal will be to analyze how historians approach a topic, examine evidence, and create arguments and students will demonstrate understanding through written work.
Days: WE  01:00-03:50 PM

How did enslaved women and men understand their selves within slavery? The course will explore how individuals articulated their identities within and beyond enslavement in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Cuba, Brazil, and throughout Latin America. Our task will be to explore how scholars investigate, build arguments, and write histories based on the documents available: judicial records, Inquisition cases, slave and free testimonies, and other primary sources. By asking how historians excavate their sources, we will explore questions such as: How did enslaved men and women claim communities within enslavement? How did distinctions of gender change the meanings of enslavement and freedom? What constituted resistance given the shared religious values of the enslaved and slaveholders? Who was a slave and why? How did women and men claim their bodies and their beings within and beyond slavery?

This is a seminar devoted to the discussion of assigned articles and books as we work to articulate the concerns and the politics of the current historiography. Students will lead discussion, submit weekly reading responses, and submit a historiographic essay and a research paper.


Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

This course provides a deep introduction to one of the most important American  thinkers of the 20th century, W. E. B. Du Bois. Taking a grounding  in several essential early essays by Du Bois, the course places his classic text The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (1903) as the pivotal reference of the term. Key concepts by Du Bois, such as “double-consciousness” and the “problem of the color line” are spelled out and studied. This account of Du Bois’s practice, also shows how both literary production and critical journalism were central aspects of his practice across more than a half century. The course thus provides a careful guide through some key early works of an essential thinker in African American and American literature, art, philosophy and the human sciences of the 19th and 20th centuries. Work for the course includes a bi-weekly journal, two sort essays (3-5 pages), and a final essay.
Days: TU TH  03:30-04:50 PM

Critical, skeptical, ironic, playful: The literary and historical period we call “postmodernism” (starting in the mid-20th century) was supposed to put an end to the idea of “progress” in history, philosophy, and art. All the “master narratives” we use to explain the world broken; all systems of meaning and social faiths subjected to corrosive irony and doubt. Postmodernism promised spectacle, flux, and change. How could postmodernism end? And what comes next?

In this course we will read important works of postmodern literature and theory in order to understand this important moment in art and thought. Readings may include: Acker, Ashbery, Barth, Barthelme, Beckett, Davis, Delay, DeLillo, Howe, Pynchon and others.
Days: TU TH  03:30-04:50 PM