* Important *

This page will be updated each quarter around the time that the Schedule of Classes comes out.  Please check back regularly for updates/ corrections.  Please NOTE that a course which has been accepted in the past may not be in the future. For any questions relating to this minor, please either contact us or visit the Humanities Undergraduate Counseling Office in HIB 143.

Courses Prior to Fall 07 (and Summer courses prior to Summer 08) are shown in a different format and can be accessed by clicking HERE.

Approved Courses

Course Term (Y=Summer Session 1, Z=Session 2):  

Fall Quarter (F21)

Dept/Description Course No., Title  Instructor
LIT JRN (F21)103  LIT OF TRUE CRIMECORWIN, M.

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

PHILOS (F21)130  TPC IN MORAL PHILOSGILBERT, M.

Rights and obligations in a social world

In everyday life many of our encounters and relationships result in rights and obligations. For instance, if I promise to phone you tomorrow, you now have a right to my calling you then, and I have an obligation to do so. But what are rights and obligations, and how exactly do we come by them? Do we have some rights irrespective of our specific encounters and relationships with others? This course will focus on such questions, drawing on the work of moral, legal, and social theorists.

Days: MO WE  03:30-04:50 PM

ENGLISH (F21)100  INTRODUCTION TO LITERARY THEORYHARRIES, M.

Theory begins with distance from what we contemplate. Contemplating a work of art, we may begin with the assumption that it represents something else: a tyrant, a historical period, a wheelbarrow. Some artworks seem to aspire to imitate the world as exactly as possible. Other artworks challenge our assumptions about representation entirely: they don’t seem to refer to something outside themselves or something already in the world. Theory is, among other things, a systematic way of contemplating the difference, or the distance, between the artwork and what we understand it to represent. Criticism puts theory to work in practices of close attention to artworks. Depending upon what theory we begin with, or simply take for granted, we may understand works of art very differently and we may therefore adopt very different critical practices.

This course will survey aspects of the long history of theorizing literature and writing about it critically. While we will begin with ancient Greek examples from Plato and Aristotle, emphasis will fall on strands of theoretical thought and criticism that shape theory and criticism today. Topics will include racialized representation, feminist literary theory, and affect theory. A few literary works will provide touchstones.

The aim of the course is to make participants aware of a range of theoretical modes, alert to the ways these are put into practice in critical writing, and self-conscious about their own theoretical and critical assumptions, aspirations, and critical practices.
Days: MO WE  11:00-11:50 AM

GEN&SEX (F21)182  CAPITALISM AND BLACK FEMINIST THOUGHTHARVEY, S.

This course introduces students to the study and critiques of capitalism within Black feminist thought. We will study capitalism as a political economy that emerges through colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and the persistent chattel slavery within the Americas. We will explore the ways capitalism gives rise to the ideas of freedom, property, the racialized and gendered subject, and the human. In the second part of the class we will discuss the responses to capitalism from prominent black feminist thinkers. At the end of the course, we ask whether and under what conditions might we live otherwise.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

AFAM (F21)154  CAPITALISM&BLK/FEMTHARVEY, S.

This course introduces students to the study and critiques of capitalism within Black feminist thought. We will study capitalism as a political economy that emerges through colonialism, the transatlantic slave trade and the persistent chattel slavery within the Americas. We will explore the ways capitalism gives rise to the ideas of freedom, property, the racialized and gendered subject, and the human. In the second part of the class we will discuss the responses to capitalism from prominent black feminist thinkers. At the end of the course, we ask whether and under what conditions might we live otherwise.
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

GEN&SEX (F21)110B  MONEY SEX & POWERKANG, L.

This class examines gendered economic inequalities of money and work through studying the linked histories of debt, enclosure, imperialism, capitalism, racism and patriarchy. We will explore processes and practices of accumulation, production, value, exploitation, alienation, management, degradation, commodification, resistance, solidarity and liberation. In addition, the class will introduce students to critical feminist concept-terms: sexual division of labor, housewifization, the myth of the family wage, the double shift, wages for/against housework, social reproduction, emotional labor, care work, anti-work politics and mutual aid.
Days: TU TH  05:00-06:20 PM

ENGLISH (F21)102B  LITERATURE OF (THE) ENLIGHTENMENTLEWIS, J.

“What is enlightenment?” asked the philosopher Immanuel Kant in 1784. Writers in the decades leading up to his famously unanswerable question—a period that knew itself as “the” Enlightenment—often believed they were shining the new "light" of reason, experiment-based scientific knowledge, and toleration on the old darkness of superstition and political oppression. The result? A radically new understanding of–and interest in–what it means to be human. But was "the Enlightenment" all it claimed to be? What were its limitations, contradictions, and unique possibilities? Why did “the” Enlightenment—whose scientific advances included a new understanding of light itself—also give rise to the first gothic novels, set in a shadowy past? Most important for our purposes, how did English-speaking poets (Rochester, Pope, Finch, Wheatley), playwrights (Wycherley), satirists (Swift) and writers of romance (Behn, Haywood, Walpole) engage core Enlightenment values, such as equality, independence of mind and body, and the rightful pursuit of happiness? How can their often comic writing help us to understand our present-day quest for freedom, justice, and joy? You’ll be writing one long essay, producing one shorter piece of writing, and producing a comprehensive reading journal that charts your own quest for enlightenment through the insights of some fascinating works of literature. Kant, by the way, decided that “’have the courage to use your own understanding’ is the motto of the enlightenment.” Here’s a chance to see if do!
Days: TU TH  09:30-10:50 AM

ENGLISH (F21)106  CRIME AND FICTIONMARTIN, T.

In American society, “crime” is a codeword. Crime has long been a thinly veiled way of talking about race, class, gender, and sexuality. So what do writers really mean when they write stories—as they so often do—about crime and criminals? In this course, we will study how twentieth-century American writers have attempted to unpack the unspoken social and political meanings of crime. How, we will ask, has literature confronted the racism and sexism of police power? How did crime novels respond to the “tough-on-crime” polices and ideologies of the postwar era? And how have fiction writers sought to explain and to contest one of the most destructive developments of the past century—the rise of mass incarceration? Putting literary texts in conversation with the histories of criminalization and incarceration, this class will challenge what you thought you knew about the genre of crime fiction.
Days: MO WE  11:00-11:50 AM

PHILOS (F21)121  TOPICS THRY KNWLDGEPRITCHARD, D.

This course will offer a comprehensive overview of the core area of philosophy known as epistemology. The topics covered include: theories of knowledge; modal epistemology; virtue epistemology; epistemic externalism/internalism; radical scepticism; epistemic value; understanding. There will also be some discussion of applied epistemology, which is the application of theoretical work in epistemology to particular domains, such as law or education.

Days: WE FR  01:00-02:20 PM

ASIANAM (F21)162  ASIAN AMER WOMENQUINTANA, I.

This course examines a variety of works by and about Asian American women in order to understand how diverse, complicated, and conflicted that subject position can be. Although it appears to be a self-evident term describing a definable group of authors, “Asian American women” actually operates as a highly contested category, in which different discourses surrounding race, gender, nationality, and sexuality collide. The material we will discuss in class ranges widely, from literary texts, to documentaries, to stand-up comedy, to articles from the disciplines of English, sociology, gender studies, legal studies and history. You should feel free to draw connections and distinctions between the texts as we read them. Some of the questions we might consider in our discussions: How is the identity marker “Asian American woman” understood? What purpose does the constructed term “Asian American women” serve? What expectations about race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship do these works shatter and which do they reinforce?
Days: TU TH  11:00-12:20 PM

GEN&SEX (F21)100A  FEMINISM AND SOCIAL CHANGESCHEPER, J.

The last two years have brought an increase in global visibility to movements organized around raced and gendered violence and social inequalities. Over the past year, the pandemic has brought into heightened public view raced and gendered divisions of labor and systemic health inequalities. At the same time, people have taken to the streets against police violence and organized through the Movement for Black Lives, “an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.” Students in this course will have an opportunity to place and understand these recent events within a longer historical context of feminism and social change through memoirs, films, archives of activist posters, pamphlets, and art. Key texts include: How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on one of the most important organizations to develop out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 70s, excerpts from the memoir of South African anti-apartheid activist Winnie Madikizela-Mandela (1936-2018), 491 DAYS: Prisoner Number 1323/69, Emily Thuma’s work on late twentieth-century radical feminist antiviolence organizing, All Our Trials: Prisons, Policing, and the Feminist Fight to End Violence, and Sarah Ahmed’s blueprint for Living a Feminist Life.

From 19th century anti-lynching campaigns and 20th century anti-apartheid campaigns to contemporary antiracist feminist prison abolitionism and #Black Lives Matter, to the movements to end gender and sexual violence such as #totalshutdown (South Africa), and #MeToo, this course gives students an opportunity to ask: When feminists take on social, political, and cultural critique, how is knowledge produced, disseminated, and directed towards social change? What are the expert knowledges and everyday ways of knowing that shape feminist thinking and action? Over the course of the quarter, students will produce their own toolkits, blueprints, and archives for transmitting feminist knowledges, taking up the challenge of these authors to think critically and intersectionally about race, gender, sexuality, nation, class, and disability in social, economic, and legal justice issues, and finally consider, what it means in Ahmed’s words “to live a feminist life.”
Days: TU TH  12:30-01:50 PM

GEN&SEX (F21)100D  QUEER KNOWLEDGESSCHEPER, J.

The recent popular television drama series Pose brings Black and Latinx LGBTQ ballroom culture to new audiences at the same time schooling viewers in the histories of HIV/AIDS activism and the structural conditions of poverty, homelessness, and police violence that transgender and gender non-conforming people face. A show like Pose is more than entertainment, it participates in a type of queer archival practice and knowledge production. In this course, students consider how the queer past shapes the queer present and future, beginning with the production of 19th century normative ideas of the body and gender. Readings ask us to consider what are the historical links between slavery, Jim Crow segregation, colonialism, and the regulation of gender, sexuality, and desire. By the 20th century, mass media, popular culture, the militarization of culture, and—by the turn to the new millennium— migration, HIV/AIDS, and incarceration play increasingly significant roles in shaping public discourses about transsexuality, homosexuality, and lesbianism. Using film, popular culture, and historical archives together, students will explore how different ways of knowing, seeing, regulating, naming, and inhabiting bodies and identities come to inform contemporary ideas about queer, trans, and non-binary identities, communities, politics, art, culture, and activism. Students will learn to put popular culture representations in conversation with primary historical source materials using a variety of sources to think about what counts as queer knowledge. By the end of the quarter students use their research to produce and share new knowledges in the form of a zine (self-made small publication) that introduces audiences to archival material and key course concepts.
Days: TU TH  09:30-10:50 AM

ASIANAM (F21)151F  SOUTH ASAM STUDIESSHROFF, B.

The class brings together diverse perspectives on the experiences of South Asians in America. South Asian countries include India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh among others. From the historical presence of South Asians in America in the 1920s, to the experience of pop culture like garba with attitude, and the lives of working class taxi drivers in New York City, after 9/11 we examine the experience of South Asians in America as one of multiple belongings, and hybrid identities that are complicated connections between the culture of the U.S. and the homeland.

Selected materials include stories by Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri, sociological readings on domestic violence, citizenship dilemmas after 9/11 and selected films like Turbans, and Knowing Her Place.
Days: TU TH  02:00-03:20 PM

LIT JRN (F21)103  WRITING RACE IN USTOBAR, H.

This course aims to be a survey of nonfiction writing about race in the United States of America, from the 19th century to the present. We will examine how writers have tackled issues of racial inequality and discrimination, and constructed narratives centered on the lives of people of color in various nonfiction genres: journalism, investigative reporting, essays, criticism and memoirs. Readings will include works by W.E.B Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Octavio Paz, Carey McWilliams, Luis Alberto Urrea, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others. As a final requirement, students will produce their own work of cultural criticism or reportage.
Days: Tu Th  03:30-04:50 PM

ENGLISH (F21)105  WRITING RACE IN USTOBAR, H.

This course is a survey of nonfiction writing about race and ethnicity in the United States of America; it will culminate in a practicum in which students will work on a literary project focused on race matters. We will examine how writers have tackled issues of racial inequality and discrimination, and constructed narratives centered on the lives of people of color in various nonfiction genres, including: journalism, investigative reporting, essays, criticism, documentary film, and memoirs. The class will begin with the work of scholars and essayists whose work discusses how race and “whiteness” have been constructed socially. Readings will include works by Nell Irvin Painter, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B Du Bois, James Baldwin, Luis Alberto Urrea, Ta-Nehisi Coates and others. How do writers construct works that cut through the falsehoods of prejudice and the distortions of history? How do they work to defend the humanity of those who have been marginalized or oppressed by dominant cultures? How do they express the joy and fortitude unseen or unknown by outsiders? As a final requirement, students will produce a work of cultural reportage or criticism, producing a 2,000-word piece by finals’ week. In addition, students will produce four, 300-word “responses” to the readings.
Days: TU TH  03:30-04:50 PM

AFAM (F21)162W  BLACK PROTEST TRADNWILDERSON, F.

History and discourses of the black protest tradition. Traces emergence of black protest against racial slavery and white supremacy from the early colonial period to present and the complex elaboration of identity politics within black communities in the twentieth century.

Prerequisite: Satisfactory completion of the Lower-Division Writing requirement.
Restriction: Upper-division students only.
Days: TU  10:00-12:50 PM