80 courses with the subject AFRS, each shown exactly as we captured it from the college's catalog, with every element we hold. Where the wording looks broken, that is our reading of the catalog, not the college's text.
AFRS 100Introduction to Africana Studies1
The course proposes an overview of the field of Africana Studies, emphasizing the historical and cultural connections between Africa and its diaspora. Articulated on distinct geographical spaces and historical time periods, it focuses on the consciousness that emerges from the resistance of African peoples and their descendants. The course develops a multidisciplinary approach to understanding slavery, colonialism, nationalism, and transnationalism from a pan-African perspective. Readings focus on W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Howard Thurman, Marcus Garvey, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Huey Newton, Edward Said, and Angela Davis, among others. The particular subjects and themes explored vary with each faculty teaching the course. Mootacem Mhiri.
The course is required for all majors and correlates. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Spring
AFRS 105The Self and the Western Other in Modern Arabic Literature
1 1 unit(s) (Same as INTL 105 ) The cultural “encounter with the West” is a major theme in modern Arabic literature and culture. In this course, we read and discuss an array of novels, novellas, and short stories that depict personal and collective histories of encounters between Arab and African postcolonial subjects and the West, both at home and in the diaspora. We analyze a selection of documentary and feature films by North African and Middle East directors that dramatize this encounter and explore its consequences. The course familiarizes students with persistent orientalist and colonialist representations of Arab and Islamic otherness in Western literary and cultural discourses. Students develop a better understanding of the region’s cultural complexity and its unresolved relationship to a Western global modernity that it contests and admires simultaneously. The readings include critical excerpts from Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and literary works by such authors as Assia Djebar and Tayeb Salih, among others. Mootacem Mhiri. This course is one of three prerequisite pathway courses for AFRS 200 . Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
This course is an elementary level course offered during fall semester only. The course builds basic skills in Modern Standard Arabic, the language spoken, read, and understood by educated Arabs throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and other parts of the world. No prior experience in Arabic is necessary. The course focuses on building students’ abilities to (1) communicate successfully basic biographical information: name, place of residence, family members, and daily life activities, using memorized material; (2) understand speech dealing with areas of practical need such as highly standardized messages, phrases, or instructions, such as memorized greetings, pleasantries, leave taking, very basic questions and answers related to immediate need or personal information; (3) derive meaning from short, non-complex texts that convey basic information for which there is contextual or extra-linguistic support; (4) manage successfully a number of uncomplicated communicative tasks in straightforward social situations, such as giving basic personal information, and describing basic objects, a limited number of activities, preferences, and immediate needs. Tagreed Al-Haddad, Mootacem Mhiri. Tagreed Al Haddad, Mootacem Mhiri. Students who did not complete AFRS 106 may enroll in AFRS 107 , if they demonstrate equivalent knowledge by a placement test. Yearlong course 106- AFRS 107 . Three 50-minute periods, plus one drill period per week. Course Format: CLS
This is an elementary level course offered during spring semester only. The course focuses on building students’ abilities to (1) create statements and formulate questions based on familiar material in short and simple conversational-style sentences with basic word order; (2) understand basic information conveyed orally in simple, minimally connected discourse that contains high-frequency vocabulary; (3) understand fully and with ease short, non-complex texts that convey basic information and deal with personal and social topics of immediate interest, featuring description and narration; (4) ask simple questions and handle a straightforward survival situation by producing sentence-level language, ranging from discrete sentences to strings of sentences, typically in present time. Tagreed Al-Haddad, Mootacem Mhiri. Tagreed Al Haddad, Mootacem Mhiri. Students who did not complete AFRS 106 may enroll in AFRS 107, if they demonstrate equivalent knowledge by a placement test. Yearlong course AFRS 106 -107. Three 50-minute periods, plus one drill period per week. Course Format: CLS
This course examines regimes of imprisonment and state violence that spawn carceral structures and the strategies of resistance racialized captives have used to disrupt and dismantle them. By calling into question perpetual states of siege practiced by the United States: violence against women, red scares, the War on Drugs, Poverty, and Terror, this course makes connections between domestic policing practices and military campaigns across the Global South.
AFRS 131Narratives of Black History: Lives and Archives1
(Same as HIST 131 ) This course is an introduction to African American history, explored through the lives of African Americans and their historical records. Focusing on autobiographies, biographies, letters, diaries, oral histories, archival sources, and narrative-driven film and song, this course examines how African Americans have navigated, narrated, and shaped U.S. history, politics, and culture from the eighteenth century to the present. This course uses narrative as a window into major themes in African American history, including slavery, resistance, emancipation, citizenship, migration, urbanization, activism, political organizing, and community building. We engage with the writings and perspectives of a range of historical actors, from the narratives of enslaved and free people in early America to the experiences of activists, artists, musicians, workers, and everyday people in the contemporary U.S. We also consider how historians situate individual accounts within historical context and develop skills in historical analysis and writing. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANST 150 and EDUC 150 ) This course explores how children’s school experiences contribute to their involvement in youth justice systems. Students read about the theories that undergird different approaches to youth justice and how these impact individuals, families and communities. This class weaves together personal narratives and storytelling, policy studies, and curriculum studies to examine the approaches that are currently utilized and to imagine ways to create socially just experiences for youth. Erin McCloskey. This course is held at the Dutchess County Jail. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as HIST 168 ) This course introduces students to major themes and debates in African American history, starting with their African origins and leading into the twenty-first century. It explores African American experiences through a variety of primary source materials, including letters, speeches, newspaper articles, posters and autobiographies. Through lecture and class discussion, students interrogate how race, class, gender, sexuality and ability have shaped African American experiences over time. The primary objective is to help students develop a solid understanding of the political, social, economic and personal lives of African Americans from their arrival in the colonies through today. Specific topics covered include African antecedents, colonial and antebellum slavery, the abolitionist movement, African American free people, the Civil War, Emancipation, Jim Crow segregation, the modern freedom struggle, popular culture, and the contemporary experience. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 175Mandela: Race, Resistance and Renaissance in South Africa1
(Same as HIST 175 ) This course critically explores the history and politics of South Africa in the twentieth century through the prism of the life, politics, and experiences of one of its most iconic figures, Nelson Mandela. After almost three decades of incarceration for resisting Apartheid, Mandela became the first democratically elected president of a free South Africa in 1994. It was an inspirational moment in the global movement and the internal struggle to dismantle Apartheid and to transform South Africa into a democratic, non-racial, and just society. Using Mandela’s autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, as our point of departure, the course discusses some of the complex ideas, people, and developments that shaped South Africa and Mandela’s life in the twentieth century, including: indigenous culture, religion, and institutions; colonialism, race, and ethnicity; nationalism, mass resistance, and freedom; and human rights, social justice, and post-conflict reconstruction. Ismail Rashid. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
An in-depth examination of the methodologies in Africana Studies, this course develops comparative frameworks for unsettling essentialist and nationalist discourses across space and time. Covering theories of Négritude, racial capitalism, and African philosophies (such as abolitionism and Black Power), it analyzes their manifestations in visual and performing arts, religious practices, literatures, and languages. Students leave this course with a sophisticated understanding of how pan-African liberatory consciousness and radical aesthetics speak to power. The skills gained from this course prepare them to confront and interpret the complexities of the 21st-century persistence of racism. Jasmine Syedullah.
One of the following courses: AFRS 100 , AFRS 105 , AFRS 110 . This course is a requirement for the Africana Studies Major, the Africana Studies Correlate, and the Prison Studies Correlate. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Spring
AFRS 202Black Music1
(Same as MUSI 202 ) An analytical exploration of the music of certain African and European cultures and their adaptive influences in North America. The course examines the traditional African and European views of music performance practices while exploring their influences in shaping the music of African Americans from the spiritual to modern times. Tamyka Jordon- Conlin. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as MEDS 203 and PHIL 203 ) Theorizations of the carceral state are commonly traced back to 1975, when, in Discipline and Punish , Michel Foucault famously defined the “carceral archipelago” as a series of institutions that, well beyond the frontiers of criminal law, exported penitentiary logics and penal practices to the entire social body. In this course, we pursue a reconstruction of, both, Foucault’s evolution in his assessment of the carceral archipelago – from the ideology of disciplinary institutions to more capillary self-representations and self-fashionings of individuals in late capitalism -, and the constellations of scholars that, before and after Foucault, have provided theorizations of the carceral state. Among those who preceded Foucault, we focus on Jeremy Bentham’s late 18th century layout of the panopticon as the architectural archetype of the modern correctional facility, and Antonio Gramsci, whose 1930s Prison Notebooks inspires us to reflect on how carcerality has become a culturally hegemonic framework within which to imagine life, death, and survival in today’s world. Among the thinkers who came after Foucault, we concentrate on three different sets of voices: social movements, including the Chicano Movement and the Black Panthers, who launched the prison as a stage and a platform of political resistance in the 1960s and 1970s; social scientists and civil rights advocates, who have theorized the continuity between the plantation economy and the prison industrial complex, including William J. Wilson and Michelle Alexander; and public intellectuals, such as Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis, who have upheld prison abolitionism as the linchpin of criminal justice reform. Giovanna Borradori. First six-week course. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 204Intersections of Our Homes, Schools, and Communities1
(Same as ANST 204 and EDUC 204 ) This course draws on varied and rich experiences of all participants to read about, share and discuss the ways our homes, schools and communities intersect to create experiences for youth. We discuss the benefits and drawbacks of different school structures and different behavioral and instructional approaches. We explore how school structures such as standardized testing, tracking, and curriculum design influence students’ experiences in and out of school. Throughout the course we grapple with the continued significance of socially differentiating factors such as race, gender, class, sexuality, dis/ability, and citizenship in shaping public policy and youth’s experiences.
(Same as WFQS 205 ) This course examines a selection of literary works by modern and contemporary Arab women writers in English translation. We will read fiction, poetry, autobiographies, short stories, and critical scholarship by and about Arab women, from North Africa and the Middle East, in order to develop a critical understanding of the social, political, and cultural context(s) of these writings, and to form an enlightened opinion about the issues and concerns raised by Arab women writers throughout the Twentieth Century, at different historical junctures, and in different locations. Our class discussions will focus—among other themes—on: (1) Arab women writers and feminism. (2) Arab Women and Islamism. (3) Arab women and the West. (4) Arab Nationalism(s), Arab Modernity(s), and Arab women. (5) Arab Women writing in the Diaspora: hyphenated identities and different routes of homecoming. The authors to be read include Assia Djebar (Algeria); Fatima Mernissi (Morocco); Nawal Sadaawi (Egypt); Hanan Al-Shaykh (Lebanon); and Sahar Khalifeh (Palestine); and many others. Mootacem Mhiri. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANST 206 , MEDS 206 , and PHIL 206 ) First coined by Cedric Robinson in 1983, racial capitalism asserts that the potential for the accumulation and optimization of profit, which drives capitalism, would not be possible without the project of racial ordering and racialized exploitation. This course reconstructs the history of this concept, from Robinson, who was writing at the rise of neoliberalism, privatization, and deregulation in the Reagan era, through and after the War on Terror, the pandemic, until today. By close-reading main sources in this theoretical lineage, students are given critical skills to reflect on two implications universally shared by racial capitalist theorists: on the one hand, rather than homogenizing social relations as Karl Marx had wrongly assumed, capitalism differentiates populations by racializing them, first of all epidermically, and then geographically, culturally, and religiously; on the other hand, in contrast with prominent historical reconstructions of the rise of capitalism and modernity, including Max Weber’s, capitalism absorbs and reformulates racialized orderings that structured the feudal order that preceded it in medieval Europe. To exemplify the workings of racial capitalism on a material level, we devote considerable time to examining the case of London’s West India Dock, from its modern colonial reconstruction in 1802 until its transformation into an educational museum and a tourist attraction located in Canary Wharf. We show how the development of the West India Dock, from a key colonial hub of transport and exchange, including human bodies, to a Wunderkammer of postcolonial equivocations, encapsulates the feedback loop between the conditions of production organizing the plantation economy in the Caribbean and the workings of the imperial metropole, yesterday and today. Giovanna Borradori. First six-week course. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
This is an intermediate-level course offered during fall semester only. The course focuses on enhancing students’ abilities to (1) create with the language and communicate personal meaning effectively; (2) satisfy personal needs and social demands to survive in an Arabic speaking environment; (3) understand information conveyed in simple, sentence-length speech on familiar or everyday topics. (4) understand short, non-complex texts that convey basic information and deal with personal and social topics. (5) build intercultural competence through exposure to authentic Arabic expressions, proverbs, and similar linguistic and cultural idioms. Mootacem Mhiri. This course is designed for students who have completed AFRS 107 or its equivalent successfully as demonstrated by a placement test. Three 50-minute periods, plus one drill period per week. Course Format: CLS
This is an intermediate level course offered during spring semester only. The course focuses on enhancing students’ abilities to (1) write short, simple communications, compositions, and requests for information in loosely connected texts about personal preferences, daily routines, common events, and other personal topics; (2) understand simple, sentence-length speech in a variety of basic personal and social contexts and accurately comprehend highly familiar and predictable topics; (3) understand short, non-complex texts, featuring description and narration, that convey basic information and deal with basic and familiar topics; (4) handle successfully a variety of uncomplicated communicative tasks in straightforward social situations such as exchanges related to self, family, home, daily activities, interests and personal preferences, as well as physical and social needs, such as food, shopping, travel, and lodging; (5) develop their intercultural competence through increased exposure to authentic Arabic literary and journalistic audiovisual material. Tagreed Al-Haddad. Students who did not complete AFRS 213 may enroll if they demonstrate equivalent knowledge by a placement test. Three 50-minute periods, plus one drill period per week. Course Format: CLS
(Same as GRST 209 ) In this class we undertake a close reading of Omeros , a modern epic poem by West Indian Nobel Laureate, Derek Walcott (1930-2017). In the poem Walcott celebrates his home island of St. Lucia and the whole of the Caribbean archipelago as he simultaneously confronts the histories of colonialism and slavery that shaped it. While utterly Caribbean in setting, scope and theme, the poem is positioned in close conversation with the Homeric poems and represents, by many accounts, the most important work of Homeric reception in English since Joyce’s Ulysses . Walcott’s alter-ego in the poem is a wandering poet-Odysseus; his St. Lucian characters bear the names of figures from Greek myth— Achille, Hector, Philoctete, Helen— and Homer himself appears in the poem as a figure called “Omeros” who washes up on the St. Lucian shore. As we navigate the poem’s complicated narrative trajectories and follow them back and forth across temporal and spatial boundaries, we explore the ways that Walcott’s positioning of himself in relationship to Homer enacts his vision of a New World aesthetic. We read Omeros alongside select Homeric intertexts and come to inhabit Walcott’s Caribbean, a creolized space of infinite possibility in which he can position himself as another bard, a contemporary of Homer singing in the same song tradition while giving voice to the experience of his people and his native archipelago. Rachel Friedman. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as MUSI 210 ) It’s after the end of the world. Don’t you know that yet? This course surveys Black cultural production through the lens of Afrofuturism. Through creative and scholarly work, students will discover the ways Afrofuturists utilize image, text, and sound to design freedom technologies. Readings include Octavia Butler, Marlo David, Kodwo Eshun, Paul Gilroy, Alondra Nelson, Sun Ra, Louise Seamster, Victor Ray, and Alexander Weheliye. Tamyka Jordon-Conlin.
One course in Africana Studies, Music, or permission of the instructor. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
AFRS 211Islam in Europe and the Americas1
(Same as RELI 211 ) Various processes of migration and conversion have contributed to the development of Muslim minority communities in Europe and the Americas, dating back to the 17th century. From enslaved Muslims in the Americas, to the Nation of Islam, to colonial and post-colonial migrations, to the debates over whether and how to define “European,” “American,” and “Latin@” Islams, this course covers the history of these religious communities and movements, their relationships with European and American states, and how contemporary European and American Muslims have described and theorized the experience of being a religious minority or diaspora. Key themes include race & ethnicity, gender & sexuality, transnational media, political resistance, ethics, and spirituality. Kirsten Wesselhoeft. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 213Art, Spirituality and Power in Precolonial African History1
(Same as HIST 213 ) Spirituality, power and art were inextricably linked in many African societies or civilizations before the nineteenth century. This intensive course explores political and social dynamics in selected precolonial African societies through some of their prominent artistic objects and monuments on public display, especially in museums at Vassar, Brooklyn and New York City. Amongst the African societies whose artifacts are usually on display are: Egypt, Kush, Nubia, Axum, Edo, Kongo, Yoruba, Great Zimbabwe, Swahili States and Kongo. Each student selects, researches and completes a project on artifact(s) emblematic of one their selected society or civilization’s representation of power and spirituality. The final product of the project can be in a variety of written and creative formats. Ismail Rashid. One 3-hour period. Course Format: INT
(Same as HIST 215 ) This course traces the early history of African Americans in the United States, from their African origins to the end of the U.S. Civil War. We foreground the lives, labor, cultures and resistance of African-descended people, and examine how they forged community, navigated racial inequalities, and shaped the political and social foundations of the United States and the modern world. Course readings and materials emphasize analysis of gender, age, class, and regional identities within African American communities. Key historical topics and themes include the transatlantic slave trade, the Middle Passage, colonial slavery and race in early America, diasporic identities and cultures, traditions of resistance, antebellum slavery, narratives of enslavement, abolition and Black activism, the Civil War, and the legacies of early Black history. Using primary and secondary sources, students analyze how African Americans contested slavery and fought for freedom from the colonial period through the nineteenth century. Whitney Fields. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 217Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy: Cultural Studies Between Media Theory and Philosophy0.5
(Same as ANST 217 , MEDS 217 , and PHIL 217 ) This course is dedicated to exploring the theoretical approach developed by the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. Its core is a close-reading of selected works by its two most impactful voices: Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy. A foundational methodology for many interrelated fields – from postcolonial studies to media theory, from sociology to critical race studies – cultural studies seek to understand how meaning is produced by culturally hegemonic social and media formations, which have the power to shape both agencies and counter-agencies. We trace the history of the Birmingham school from the late 1970s, when it was born as a response to the neoliberal agenda of the Thatcher government, through the War on Terror, the pandemic, until today. While focusing on the development of Hall and Gilroy as scholars of Black Atlantic diasporic constellations, we also look back at their critical sources, especially their transformation of the Marxist legacies of Antonio Gramsci and Louis Lefevre, and forward at their ongoing worldwide impact, especially in South Africa and Latin America. Giovanna Borradori. First six-week course. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANST 219 and ENGL 219 ) “Queer of Color Critique” is a form of cultural criticism modeled on lessons learned from woman of color feminism, poststructuralism, and materialist and other forms of analysis. As Roderick Ferguson defines it, “Queer of color analysis…interrogates social formations as the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and class with particular interest in how those formations correspond with and diverge from nationalist ideals and practices.” This course considers what interventions the construction “queer of color” makes possible for queertheory, LGBT scholarship and activism, and different models of ethnic studies.We assess the value and limitations of queer theory’s “subjectless critique” (in other words, its rejection of identity as a “fixed referent”) in doing cultural and political work. What kind of complications (or contradictions) does the notion “queer of color” present for subjectless critique? How might queer of color critique inform political organizing? Particular attention will be devoted to how “queer” travels. Toward this end, students determine what conflicts are presently shaping debates around sexuality in their own communities and consider how these debates may be linked to different regional, national or transnational politics. Throughout the semester, we evaluate what “queer” means and what kind of work it enables. Is it an identity or an anti-identity? A verb, a noun, or an adjective? A heuristic device, a counterpublic, a form of political mobilization or perhaps even a kind of literacy? Hiram Perez. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
Can we imagine safety without the police? This course reflects upon the political and social implications of our reliance on policing, surveillance, and criminalization to keep the peace and promote public safety in U.S. culture. By placing policing philosophies such as broken windows theory, the war on poverty, and the war on drugs, in conversation with intersectional accounts of the casualties of state-sanctioned violence, vigilante culture, and homeland security, this course challenges students to put domestic policing practices in global perspective. In addition to drawing on science fiction, social science, film, and national histories of policing whose geographic landscapes shift in accordance with pressing political concerns of the day, students also study the emergent critical prison studies literature to better contextualize how common sense notions of care, privacy, and the common good become exclusionary constructs that shape imaginations of what keeps us safe, especially in the places we call home. Jasmine Syedullah. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as WFQS 221 ) From Celia the Slave (1855) to CeCe McDonald (2011) cis, queer, and trans women (particularly of color) have been deemed unruly, deviant, and criminalized for defending themselves against gendered violence. With no selves to defend in the face of the law, how do these subjects seek justice when their survival is routinely “rewarded” with both legal and extralegal forms of punishment? While critiques of the criminal justice system often center the mechanisms of the system itself, this course is concerned with the testaments of survivors, their protocols of survival, namely the feminist, trans, and queer-of-color ethics, activisms, and intellectual histories that resist gender violence, criminalization, and punishment. This course centers histories, testimony, poetry, art, music, and social theory including activists accounts from Harriet Jacobs, Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, Sylvia Rivera, Dean Spade, Miss Major, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and others. Jasmine Syedullah. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ENGL 223 ) Decades of historiographic erasure have resulted in canonical accounts of the Surrealist movement that overlook the involvement of Black artists. This course introduces students to surrealism through the work of African diasporic artists from the early to late 20th century to assess the impact they had on print culture, ethnography, as well as visual and performance art. Students learn how surrealist creative techniques that call into question the authoritative dominion of consciousness and rationalism were utilized by Black surrealists to dissent openly against Eurocentrism, colonialism, and unquestioned respect for the law. By comparison, the course also considers how Black artists’ practices that predated the arrival of surrealism converged with the movement upon its transnational growth. Assigned readings include works by Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Jayne Cortez, Katherine Dunham, Skunder Boghossian, Wifredo Lam, Sun Ra, Aimé Césaire, Suzanne Césaire, Abdellatif Laâbi, Léon-Gontran Damas, and Amílcar Cabral. Michael Reyes Salas. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 225Prison Literature and Political Dissidence in the MENA Region1
(Same as INTL 225 ) Prison literature is a well-developed subgenre of modern Arabic letters. The earliest works depicting the suffering of political prisoners in the MENA region date back to the 1940s. In this course, we read novels, memoirs, short stories, and poetry that portray the horrors of the imprisonment experience and the denial of personal and political freedoms to political dissidents and freethinking intellectuals. Throughout this expansive literary corpus, we discover how the prison experience itself becomes an overarching metaphor for the usurpation of individual and human rights under brutal dictatorial regimes and police states emerging from the failure of postcolonial nationalist projects in the second half of the twentieth Century until the present. The course readings help students to understand some of the root causes of instability and the seemingly interminable cycles of violence that plague the region. Authors include Tahar Ben Jellloun (Morocco) Sonallah Ibrahim, Nawal Sadaawi and Zaynab Al-Ghazali (Egypt), Faraj Bayrakdar and Moustafa Khalifa (Syria), Hashem Gharaibeh (Jordan) Mahmoud Saeed and Sinan Antoon (Iraq). All readings are in English translation. Mootacem Mhiri. The course fulfills the requirements of the Prison Studies Correlate. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 227The Harlem Renaissance and its Precursors1
(Same as ENGL 227 ) This course places the Harlem Renaissance in literary historical perspective as it seeks to answer the following questions: In what ways was “The New Negro” new? How did African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance rework earlier literary forms from the sorrow songs to the sermon and the slave narrative? How do the debates that raged during this period over the contours of a black aesthetic trace their origins to the concerns that attended the entry of African Americans into the literary public sphere in the eighteenth century? Eve Dunbar. Course Format: CLS
(Same as SOCI 229 ) This course provides an overview of black intellectual thought and an introduction to critical race theory. It offers approaches to the ways in which black thinkers from a variety of nations and periods from the nineteenth century up to black modernity engage their intellectual traditions. How have their perceptions been shaped by a variety of places? How have their traditions, histories and cultures theorized race? Critics may include Aimé Césaire, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. DuBois, Frantz Fanon, Paul Gilroy, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Ida B. Wells, and Patricia Williams. Diane Harriford. Diane Harriford Course Format: CLS
(Same as HIST 231 ) Since the early modern era, slavery, colonialism, commerce, piracy, and migration have woven the Mediterranean together in both peace and in horrifying violence. This broad, multipolar web of conflict and communication has served as the context in which multiple French and Algerian identities have careened into modernity. Constant references to local and cross-Mediterranean “others” have shaped the very meanings of such key terms as “emancipation,” “republic,” “Islam,” “progress,” and “civilization.” Even today, debates on issues ranging from women’s clothing to secularism to immigration to anti-Semitism echo with this long and contested history. Joshua Schreier. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as FILM 232 ) This course provides a survey of the history and theory of African American representation in cinema. It begins with the silent films of Oscar Micheaux and examines early Black cast westerns ( Harlem Rides the Range, The Bronze Buckaroo, Harlem on the Prairie ) and musicals ( St. Louis Blues, Black and Tan, Hi De Ho, Sweethearts of Rhythm ). Political debate circulating around cross over stars (Paul Robeson, Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Eartha Kitt, and Harry Belafonte) are central to the course. Special consideration is given to Blaxploitation cinema of the seventies ( Shaft, Coffy, Foxy Brown, Cleopatra Jones ) in an attempt to understand its impact on filmmakers and the historical contexts for contemporary filmmaking. The course covers “Los Angeles Rebellion” filmmakers such as Julie Dash, Charles Burnett, and Haile Gerima. Realist cinema of the 80’s and 90’s ( Do the Right Thing, Boyz N the Hood, Menace II Society, and Set it off), is examined before the transition to Black romantic comedies, family films, and genre pictures ( Coming to America, Love and Basketball, Akeelah and the Bee, The Great Debaters ). Mia Mask.
FILM 209 and permission of the instructor. Two 75-minute periods plus outside screenings. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
AFRS 233Carceral Literature of the Caribbean1
(Same as ENGL 233 ) This course examines how the narratives of non-imprisoned Caribbean writers who live in (neo)colonial conditions contest carceral entrapment. To perceive these dynamics, this class focuses less on ‘prison literature,’ which focuses exclusively on the prison experience, and more on ‘carceral literature,’ which is a broader exploration of the meanings of incarceration. In this vein, this course examines a range of literary works from drama to fiction and non-fiction prose narratives with the aim of better understanding how the meanings of incarceration shift and circulate within the wider Caribbean region. Such a re-orientation offers students a comprehensive framework to examine the punitive environments non-incarcerated people inhabit. Michael Reyes Salas. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ENST 234 and GEOG 234 ) Ideas about “race” and “nature” are intimately bound up with the production of space. Historically, essentialist theories about racial difference served to legitimize and naturalize oppression, dispossession, and enslavement. Racism and white privilege have also long been present in how non-human natures are understood and managed in rural and urban environments, and have contributed to the uneven socio-spatial distribution of environmental harms. This course draws on political ecology, environmental justice, and theories of racial capitalism to apprehend and deconstruct the historical and contemporary relationships between race, space, and nature. Potential topics may include: connections between race, property, and land; the plantation as a socio-ecological phenomenon; environmental racism; Eurocentric ideologies of nature; and racialized exclusion and eviction in the creation of National Parks in North America and Africa. Ashley Fent. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
Detailed study of the cultures of people living in a particular area of the world, including their politics, economy, worldview, religion, expressive practices, and historical transformations. Included is a critical assessment of different approaches to the study of culture. Areas covered vary from year to year and may include Europe, Africa, North America, India and the Pacific. May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.
Subject
AFRS
Credits (min)
1
Credits (max)
1
Credit unit
unit(s)
Type
course
Repeatable
May be repeated for credit if the topic has changed.
(Same as GEOG 242 , INTL 242 and LALS 242 ) The vast Amazon Basin lies mainly in Brazil, the giant of Latin America. Along with the bordering Andean countries, Brazil’s regional development programs have aggressively expanded transportation, in-migration, agribusiness, and resource extraction into Amazonia. Related deforestation has increasingly transformed the Amazon into soy plantations and savanna grasslands. Besides putting local environments and populations at risk, including native and migrant residents, the regional transformation has changed climates near and far. This course investigates the interrelated political ecologies of Amazonia, Brazil, South America, and world systems. Specific topics for study include the legacies of colonial Brazil; race relations, Afro-Brazilian cultures, and Indigenous peoples; urban-industrial growth and national integration; environmental devastation and sustainability; and long-run prospects for more equitable development in Brazil. Brian Godfrey.
A previous course in social sciences. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 243Twentieth Century Black Writers Against the Surveillance State1
(Same as ENGL 243 ) As Black writers in the U.S. formed part of various artistic, political, and literary movements throughout the 20th century, law enforcement agencies employed various surveillance tactics to stave off perceived threats posed by dissent literature. For example, ever since the early 20th century F.B.I. ‘ghost readers’ began to monitor the literary work of Black authors for signs of sedition or treason. This course investigates how such intrusions into privacy influenced the creation and public reception of Black literature. Because the right to privacy is based on notions of self-possession, which we often take for granted today, the course examines how access to privacy is often delimited based on race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, and national origin. Michael Reyes Salas. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANTH 244 ) This course re/introduces alternative modalities of belonging through a focus on multiple cultures and peoples interacting across the Indian Ocean. Using historical works, ethnographies, travel accounts, manuscript fragments, and film, we explore the complex networks and historical processes that have shaped the contemporary economies, cultures, and social problems of the region. We also critically examine how knowledge about the peoples and pasts of this region has been produced. Although the course concentrates on northern Africa, eastern Africa, southwest India, the Arabian Peninsula, and islands are included in our consideration of the region as a cultural, economic, and political sphere whose coastal societies were especially interconnected. Topics include: imperialism, globalization, temporality, cosmopolitanism, labor and trade migrations, religious identification, and gender. Candice Lowe Swift. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as HIST 246 ) This course provides an overview of major developments in African American history from Emancipation to the present. We trace key events and themes, including Reconstruction, segregation and Jim Crow, Black modernity and activism, World War I, the Great Migrations, Black Power, race and electoral politics in postwar America, Black feminisms, Black trans, queer, and feminist activism, and the Black Lives Matter Movement. Drawing on a range of texts, including narratives, biographies, social histories, images, artwork, music and archival sources, this course highlights the historical and ongoing movements for Black freedom in the U.S. and modern world. In this survey of modern Black history, students engage with primary and secondary sources, with particular attention to themes of gender, sexuality, class, and region. Whitney Fields. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
(Same as POLI 247 ) This course relates to the meanings of various group experiences in American politics. It explicitly explores, for example, issues of race, class, gender, disability, and sexual orientation. Among other things, this course addresses the contributions of the Critical Legal Studies Movement, the Feminist Jurisprudence Movement, the Critical Race Movement, and Queer Studies to the legal academy. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 248Racial and Ethnic Group Politics in Popular Culture1
(Same as POLI 248 ) Popular culture often affects and depicts public opinion on prominent social and political issues, and attitudes towards racial and ethnic groups. In this course, students think critically about the ways popular culture influences and reflects U.S. racial and ethnic group politics. Students consider how popular culture portrays and provides insights into government actions and policies toward various racial and ethnic groups, race relations and prospects for political coalitions, group responses to discrimination, and Americans’ perceptions and attitudes on a number of cultural, political, social and policy dimensions. Among the topics studied are the following: aspects of the political histories of various groups in the U.S., anti-miscegenation and anti-interracial relationship attitudes, 20 th and 21 st century race relations, immigration and citizenship, political resistance, mobilization, empowerment and participation, and racial group membership, identity and consciousness. These topics are examined throughout the semester by reading scholarly texts, and analyzing music videos, television shows, motion pictures, and documentaries. Taneisha Means. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27.
(Same as ENGL 251 ) This course considers Black literatures in all their richness and diversity. The focus changes from year to year, and may include study of a historical period, literary movement, or genre. The course may take a comparative, diasporic approach or may examine a single national or regional literature.
(Same as SOCI 252 and STS 252 ) When comparing the 36 countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the United States spends twice the average on healthcare. However, the US ranks 28 in life expectancy, 33 in infant mortality, and last in obesity. In other words, Americans spend more on healthcare but live shorter and unhealthier lives. When examining US healthcare up close, there are significant disparities between sub-populations. For example, socioeconomic status (SES) is inversely associated with risk of disease, which means that having higher SES correlates with lower risk of disease. In the first half of this course, students investigate how race, gender, socio-economic status, and their intersections impact health disparities and inequalities. In the second half of this course, students examine collective responses to health inequalities and representation. Catherine Tan. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
The specific focus of the course varies each year, and may center on a literary movement (e.g., Transcendentalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain School), a single work and its milieu (e.g., Moby-Dick and the American novel, Call It Sleep and the rise of ethnic modernism); a historical period (e.g., the Great Awakening, the Civil War), a region (e.g., Southern literature, the literature of the West), or a genre (e.g., the sentimental-domestic novel, American satire, the literature of travel/migration, American autobiography, traditions of reportage, American environmentalist writing).
AFRS 255Race, Representation, and Resistance in U.S. Schools1
(Same as EDUC 255 and URBS 255 ) This course interrogates the intersections of race, racism and schooling in the US context. In this course, we examine this intersection at the site of educational policy, media and public attitudes towards schools and schooling- critically examining how representations in each shape the experiences of youth in school. Expectations, beliefs, attitudes and opportunities reflect societal investments in these representations, thus becoming both reflections and driving forces of these identities. Central to these representations is how theorists, educators and youth take them on, own them and resist them in ways that constrain possibility or create spaces for hope. Kimberly Williams Brown. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as POLI 257 and URBS 257 ) This course explores the physical and imaginative dimensions of selected postcolonial cities. The theoretical texts, genres of expression and cultural contexts that the course engages address the dynamics of urban governance as well as aesthetic strategies and everyday practices that continue to reframe existing senses of reality in the postcolonial city. Through an engagement with literary, cinematic, architectural among other forms of urban mediation and production, the course examines the politics of migrancy, colonialism, gender, class and race as they come to bear on political identities, urban rhythms and the built environment. Case studies include: Johannesburg , Nairobi, Algiers and migrant enclaves in London and Paris. Samson Opondo. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 259Settler Colonialism in a Comparative Perspective1
(Same as POLI 259 ) This course examines the phenomenon of settler colonialism through a comparative study of the interactions between settler and ‘native’ / indigenous populations in different societies. It explores the patterns of settler migration and settlement and the dynamics of violence and local displacement in the colony through the tropes of racialization of space, colonial law, production/labor, racialized knowledge, aesthetics, health, gender, domesticity and sexuality. Attentive to historical injustices and the transformation of violence in ‘postcolonial’ and settler societies, the course interrogates the forms of belonging, memory, desire and nostalgia that arise from the unresolved status of settler and indigenous communities and the competing claims to, or unequal access to resources like land. Case studies are drawn primarily from Africa but also include examples from other regions. Samson Opondo. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27.
Prisons are sites of containment and exclusion which are situated in networks of connections and relations. Through a project-based learning activity this course examines socio-spatial entanglements of the prison industrial complex in the context of Dutchess County. We overview recent cases of local prison closures alongside the inauguration of a new carceral facility in Poughkeepsie. By conceiving of carcerality as an analytical modality, this intensive seeks to better understand the spatial formation of New York State penalscapes and their economic processes. To this end, we investigate the commercial involvement of corporations in industrialized punishment and overview some activist efforts at prison divestment. This intensive encourages students to rethink how new relationships and renovated institutions could be created to undermine the expansion of carceral geographies. Michael Reyes Salas. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: INT
AFRS 266Art, Urgency, and Everyday Life in the United States1
(Same as ANST 266 and ART 266 ) What is this thing called socially-engaged, social practice, activist, and/or community-centered art? Where does it come from, who makes it, who is it for, how does it work, and what can it do? What are some of the ways this interdisciplinary practice–often woven within struggles for justice and healing–is defined and deployed? And how might its success be assessed? Dwelling together on these questions by way of dynamic case studies, we consider how a range of U.S. based creators are grappling with urgent issues of our time. Lisa Collins.
ART 105 or ART 106 or coursework in Africana Studies, American and Native American Studies, Women, Feminist, and Queer Studies, or permission of the instructor. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
AFRS 272Modern African History1
(Same as HIST 272 ) Africa has experienced profound transformations over the past two centuries. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Africans lost and regained their independence from different European colonial powers. This course explores the changing African experiences before, during, and after European colonization of their continent. Drawing on primary sources, film, memoirs, and popular novels, we look at the creative responses of African groups and individuals to the contradictory processes and legacies of colonialism. Particular attention is paid to understanding how these responses shape the trajectories of African as well as global developments. Amongst the major themes covered by the course are: colonial ideologies, African resistance, colonial economies, gender and cultural change, African participation in the two world wars, urbanization, decolonization and African nationalism. We also reflect on some of the contemporary developmental dilemmas as well as opportunities confronting post-colonial Africa. Ismail Rashid. Two 75-minute periods. Not offered in 2026/27.
(Same as ANST 276 and ENGL 276 ) Though our culture has become increasingly comfortable with self exposure, it does not completely explain why people so frequently resort to the genre of memoir to publicize the self. What might be required of the writer—in terms of aesthetics, historical memory, the publishing industry, and the market—might also be mysterious to many. This intensive seeks to peak behind the curtain of memoir making, with an eye toward having students produce a substantial, but hardly oversized (20 pages), draft of a memoir of their own. We meet with real live memoirists, and having read their works, question them mercilessly about how they brought their stories into being. Among the inquiries that will drive our enterprise is what makes a memoir black. Another is what difference does this (racial) difference make for memoir-writing. Tyrone Simpson.
Permission of the instructor and 200-level courses in English/ Africana Studies/American Studies. One 3-hour period. Course Format: INT
Offered
Spring
AFRS 280Africana Philosophy1
(Same as PHIL 280 ) The following intermediate-level intensive class provides a historical survey and conceptual introduction to Africana Philosophy. Taking a global approach, the class shows the inter-continental and trans-historical conversations that Africana Philosophy has had with other Philosophical disciplines and schools. This trans-historical and cosmopolitan approach thus reveals the multiplicitous referents of Africana Philosophy and its various practices, methods, and areas of inquiry. Topics addressed include Blackness and the invention(s) of Africa, Blackness and an Anti-Black World, the lived experience of the black, (para-)ontological and racial difference, intersectionality, a poetics of relations, the gifts of black folk, and cosmopolitics. Philosophical approaches studied include black marxism, black existentialism, black feminism, anti-colonial resistance, critical race theory, afro-pessimism, and black ops. Authors studied include David Walker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neal Hurston, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, Hortense Spillers, Achille Mbembe, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Lewis Gordon, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, Fred Moten, and Frank Wilderson. The Intensive class focuses on six questions throughout the semester; these questions are both present in the literature as well as be formulated in conversation with students. The Intensive class focuses on one of those specific questions every two weeks and assembles a list of work surrounding that question, offering different answers. Work for this Intensive class includes constellation (packet-style) reading where students divide up the reading among one another, experimental writing, co-produced work, and video essays. Osman Nemli. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: INT
(Same as ANST 281 and GRST 281 ) “The Classics” have long been associated with elite educational institutions and constructions of “Western civilization” that, at their worst, provide a thin veil for white supremacy. South Carolina Senator and eventual Vice President John C. Calhoun once claimed that if somebody could find a Black man who understood Greek, then he might at last believe that that man “was a human being and should be treated as a man.” In his account of escaping enslavement, Samuel Ringgold Ward counters Calhoun by pointing to a Roman African author, asking, “Was Terence, the black poet, a gentleman?” At stake in the gatekeeping of the Greek and Roman past is the definition of what it means to be truly human and, as a result, who the humanities are for. In this course, we explore the rich history of Black writers from the eighteenth century to the present day who have reclaimed and reimagined Greco-Roman antiquity. Pairing selections from ancient Greek and Roman texts with readings from authors including Phillis Wheatley Peters, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison, and Rita Dove, we trace the lives and afterlives of mythological figures like Niobe and Medea. Drawing on the work of poets, novelists, critics, and a range of other thinkers, we ask: How have Black writers complicated and refined ideas of the human and the humanities in light of the classics? Who has gotten to define “The Classics” in the United States? What kinds of capital are at play when someone alludes to Homer, Ovid, or Terence? How have Black classicist authors reimagined ancient Greek and Roman texts? Rachel Morrison.
One course in GRST or one course in ANST or one course in AFRS or permission of the instructor. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Spring
AFRS 282Afro-Caribbean Voices in Francophone Phenomenology0.5
(Same as FFS 282 and PHIL 282 ) French phenomenology is a rich and complex lineage of inquiry, whose methodological influence can be traced in a variety of disciplines, from Continental philosophy, where it originates, to sociology, psychology, and virtually every other social science and humanity. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty are the figures predominantly considered key to this lineage. This course is aimed at decolonizing this representation of “French” phenomenology by introducing students to the specific questions and methods developed by Afro-Caribbean “francophone” phenomenologists, from the 1930s through the 2010s. The contributions of Léopold Sédar Senghor, Aimé Césaire, Franz Fanon, and Éduard Glissant, as well as their influence on contemporary anglophone decolonial theorists, including Sylvia Wynter, Saidyia Hartman, and Christina Sharpe, will thus emerge as a distinct constellation within the phenomenological tradition. Students learn how these Afro-Caribbean thinkers both shared the agenda of phenomenology and challenged some of its Eurocentric premises. In its historical progression, the exploration of this Afro-Caribbean contellation illuminates an approach to the philosophy of race on phenomenological premises. Giovanna Borradori. First six-week course. Two 75-minute periods. Course Format: CLS
0.5 to 1 unit(s) Individual or group field projects or internships. The department. Unscheduled. May be selected during the academic year or during the summer. Course Format: INT
0.5 to 1 unit(s) Individual or group project of reading or research. The department. Unscheduled. May be selected during the academic year or during the summer. Course Format: OTH
An introduction to the research methods used in the disciplines represented by Africana Studies. Through a variety of individual projects, students learn the approaches necessary to design projects, collect data, analyze results, and write research reports. The course includes some field trips to sites relevant to student projects. The emphasis is on technology and archival research, using the Library’s new facilities in these areas. The course explores different ideas, theories and interdisciplinary approaches within Africana Studies that shape research and interpretation of the African and African diasporic experience. Students learn to engage and critically utilize these ideas, theories and approaches in a coherent fashion in their own research projects. They also learn how to design research projects, collect and analyze different types of data, and write major research papers. Emphasis is placed on collection of data through interviews and surveys as well as archival and new information technologies, using the facilities of Vassar libraries. The course includes some field trips to sites relevant to student projects. Required of majors and correlates, but open to students in all disciplines.
Upper-intermediate language and culture intensive in Modern Standard Arabic. Designed to consolidate students’ reading and listening comprehension, and their oral skills at the intermediate-mid level of proficiency, and to help them reach intermediate-high level proficiency by the end of the course. Tagreed Al-Haddad. Tagreed Al-Haddad. Three 50-minute periods. Course Format: INT
Upper-intermediate language and culture course in Modern Standard Arabic. Designed to consolidate students’ reading and listening comprehension, and their oral skills at the intermediate-mid level of proficiency; and to help them reach intermediated- high level proficiency by the end of the course. Tagreed Al-Haddad. Tagreed Al-Haddad.
AFRS 313Culture and Society in the Middle East and North Africa1
This is an advanced Language and Culture course taught in Arabic. Students continue to develop their communicative skills while gaining practical knowledge about some valued ancestral and ever-present Arab social values centered around notions of respect, hospitality, cooperation, and social solidarity. We read, speak, and write about a range of texts from different genres. We watch documentary and feature films as well as music videos illustrating the social currency and continued relevance of those social values in contemporary Arabic societies as manifested in daily life practices, traditions, Arab leisure time activities, the arts, music, and food across the Middle East and North Africa. Tagreed Al-Haddad. Three 50-minute periods Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 317Youth Culture and Politics in Africa, 1930s to Present1
(Same as HIST 317 ) Starting in the 1930s, youth in many colonized African countries produced new organizations and cultural expressions to affirm their identity, challenge colonial domination, and participate in a transnational exchange of ideas, culture and politics. The seminar explores how these cultural expressions, organizations and exchanges reflected the shifting aspirations of different generations of African youth. It is attentive to the impact of their agency and actions as well as their transnational and Afro-diasporic connections. While looking at these organizatiois as part of a broader historical process, the seminar focuses more closely on groups and movements such as the West African Youth league in the 1930s, the Black Consciousness Movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the Pan-African Youth Union in the 1980s, and End SARs, Y’en A Marre, Black Lives Matter, and Gen Z activists in the early 21st century. Ismail Rashid. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ENGL 319 ) Re-examinations of canonical literature in order to discover how race is either explicitly addressed by or implicitly enabling to the texts. Does racial difference, whether or not overtly expressed, prove a useful literary tool? The focus of the course varies from year to year. Eve Dunbar.
Some of the most radical demands for freedom emerge from the most confining spaces of containment. This seminar immerses students in the thought, witness, and writings of outlaws, captives, and exiles – to ask how prophetic figures learn to tell the time of freedom against conventional narratives of modern progress. Readings include selections from David Walker and Nat Turner’s antebellum abolitionism, Assata Shakur and Grace Lee Boggs’s contributions to Cold War era liberation movements, and reflections from the leaderful movements for Black Lives. Students learn to analyze the transformative power of testimony and identify protocols of fugitive acts through the living archive of the abolitionist tradition to closely consider the implications of its speculative ideas of freedom not yet realized. Jasmine Syedullah. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 322Caribbean Spaces: Discourses of West Indian resistance, love and hope1
(Same as EDUC 322 and WFQS 322 ) Caribbean Spaces centers the English speaking West Indies and its diverse people, food and customs. I borrow the title from Carole Boyce Davies who says, “the claiming of Caribbean Space captures ontological ways of being in the world. It assumes movement as it makes and remakes the critical elements of Caribbean geography; landscape and escape, sky and sun, but also music, food and style.” Caribbean people are diverse, multifaceted and complex as a result of colonial histories, and modern struggles for self determination and governance. In this course, we explore a people who introduced the world to maroonage, and anti-colonial insurrection. A people who resist subjugation, love themselves into freedom and governance and a people who use “every mickle to mek a muckle.” This course explores themes of resistance, love and hope across the diaspora called the Caribbean through anti-slave narratives, independence and economic struggles, language and customs, education, tourism, sexuality, etc. Kimberly Williams Brown. One 3-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ART 323 ) What allows for some former plantations, prisons, and jails to achieve the distinguished status of heritage site while other similar places are simply razed and forgotten? This interdisciplinary cultural analysis course comparatively explores issues of power, race, difference, and knowledge through case studies of prison museums and other carceral heritage sites. Students analyze how writers, curators, and social theorists, respond to competing historical narratives concerning the topic of incarceration. Course readings feature essays by prominent critics of the prison-industrial complex in tandem with photo-essays that commemorate various prisons across the globe, exhibition and curatorial work premised on anti-colonial and anti-carceral museum interventions, and transnational debates on the topic of memory and history. By the end of the course, students better understand the various motivations for preserving carceral sites as well as the differing relationships spectators and visitors have with these vexed places. Michael Reyes Salas. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANST 336 , ENST 336 , HIST 336 , and WFQS 336 ) This seminar operates on the notion that structural racism and environmental degradation are historically related–and that Black Americans have confronted the two together. Over the course of the semester, we interrogate how different Black activists have done so, from the Antebellum period to the present day. We consider how enslaved people drew from nature in their resistance to slavery, as well as the role of pollution, environmental disasters, and gentrification in twentieth-century organizing. Toward the end of the course, we explore the concepts of environmental justice and ecofeminism. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 344Living for the City: Race, Space, and Place in Urban America1
(Same as HIST 344 and URBS 344 ) This seminar explores the development and transformation of Black urban life in America from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Organized chronologically and regionally, it examines how Black Americans shaped cities across the North, South, and West–from colonial cities to modern. metropolises. Topics include urban slavery and labor, nineteenth-century migration and urbanization, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age and industrialization, and Jim Crow-era segregation. In addition to tracing key themes in Black urban history, the assigned course materials analyze the economic, social, and political transformations of Black urban communities. We consider the methods and strategies that Black urban communities used to challenge racial, gender, and class inequalities in the long nineteenth-century United States. Whitney Fields. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 346Seminar on the U.S. Courts and Legal System1
(Same as POLI 346 ) This course is designed to promote and facilitate healthy discussion, debate, and dialogue about the U.S. legal system and the centrality of race, ethnicity, and politics in the system. Students start the course by examining the roots of the modern legal system. In part II of the course, students explore the legal processes and actors significant to the system, such as police officers, lawyers, jurors, and jurists. Special attention is given to investigating and discussing diversity within the legal system and the myriad factors influencing legal actors’ decisions. The course concludes with students exploring and researching some of the issues facing the courts and our criminal legal system, such as the criminalization of marginalized populations, mass imprisonment and e-carceration, crimmigration, the treatment of individuals detained and confined in local, state, and federal penal institutions, the politics of re-entry and life post-incarceration, and demands for justice, reform, and abolition. Taneisha Means.
Permission of the instructor. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Fall
AFRS 351Africana Studies Seminar1
This seminar explores both historical and contemporary debates within the field of Africana Studies. Students examine a variety of subjects and themes encompassing different disciplinary and interdisciplinary works drawn from the humanities and social sciences. The critical perspectives that the seminar engages draw attention to the political, representational and explanatory value of a variety of genres of expression and knowledge practices. By delving into philosophical, historical, aesthetic and political analyses of Africa and African Diaspora societies, subjects and practices, students acquire a deep understanding of Africana research methods culminating in a substantive research project. The particular subject and themes explored vary with the faculty teaching the course. Jasmine Syedullah.
AFRS 100 or permission of the instructor. One 2-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 352Redemption and Diplomatic Imagination in Postcolonial Africa1
(Same as POLI 352 ) This seminar explores the shifts and transformations in the discourse and practice of redemptive diplomacy in Africa. It introduces students to the cultural, philosophical and political dimensions of estrangement and the mediation practices that accompany the quest for recognition, meaning and material well-being in selected colonial and postcolonial societies. Through a critical treatment of the redemptive vision and diplomatic imaginaries summoned by missionaries, anti-colonial resistance movements and colonial era Pan-Africanists, the seminar interrogates the ‘idea of Africa’ produced by these discourses of redemption and their implications for diplomatic thought in Africa. The insights derived from the interrogation of foundational discourses on African redemption will be used to map the transformation of identities, institutional forms, and the minute texture of everyday life in postcolonial Africa. The seminar also engages modern humanitarianism, diasporic religious movements, Non-Governmental Organizations and neoliberal or millennial capitalist networks that seek to save Africans from foreign forces of oppression or ‘themselves.’ Samson Opondo.
(Same as ANTH 353 ) This course focuses on creole languages and the communities who speak them as a window to understand how historical processes—imperial expansion, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, racist domination, the plantation system, anti-colonial resistance, and post-colonial nation-building—impact language genesis, change, and shift. This course also traces how colonial legacies continue to inform dominant attitudes about language in the current global political economy. Themes include multilingualism, language revitalization, the relationship between language and ethnonationalism, the role of language in anti-imperialist social movements, the aesthetics and politics of creolization, the role of language in the upholding and challenging racism, as well as the role of language in creating cosmopolitan and diasporic communities and identities. Louis Romer. One 3-hour period. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
(Same as ANTH 354 and MEDS 354 ) Much recent critical work on digital media and society has scrutinized how organizational, cultural, and ideological blindspots of tech companies in and around Silicon Valley have led to technologies that entrench existing racial biases, strengthen the dominance of English over other languages, and magnify both state and corporate power at the expense of democracy and civil liberties. This course explores the communities of engineers, content creators, entrepreneurs, hackers, digital nomads, and activists who inhabit seemingly peripheral locales that challenge our prevailing views of the digital media technology industry. These far-flung locales include Pacific or Caribbean island tax havens that, despite their smallness, play an outsize role in the global technology industry, and also cities such as Hyderabad, India, and Medellín, Colombia, which host thriving communities of tech developers and hackers. This course introduces concepts such as raciolinguistics, decoloniality, and racial capitalism to examine the role of digital technology industries in perpetuating or contesting racism and linguistic imperialism. Meanwhile, reading and discussing ethnographic research on technology in the so-called global peripheries unsettle prevailing US-and-Eurocentric notions of technology and digital media. This course concludes with a research capstone that surveys a community of tech workers or content creators interested in addressing the inequities produced through digital media technologies. One 3-hour period. Course Format: CLS
Covers a variety of current issues in modern anthropology in terms of ongoing discussion among scholars of diverse opinions rather than a rigid body of fact and theory. May be repeated for credit if topic has changed.
Permission of the instructor. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
Offered
Spring
AFRS 374The African Diaspora1
(Same as HIST 374 ) This seminar investigates the social origins, philosophical and cultural ideas, and the political forms of Pan-Africanism from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. It explores how disaffection and resistance against slavery, racism and colonial domination in the Americas, Caribbean, Europe, and Africa led to the development of a global movement for the emancipation of peoples of African descent from 1900 onwards. The seminar examines the different ideological, cultural, and organizational manifestations of Pan-Africanism as well as the scholarly debates on development of the movement. Readings include the ideas and works of Edward Blyden, Alexander Crummell, W. E. B. Dubois, Marcus Garvey, Amy Garvey, C.L.R. James, and Kwame Nkmmah. Ismail Rashid.
Permission of the instructor. Not offered in 2026/27. Course Format: CLS
AFRS 385Africans in Asia: Agency, Entanglements, Accommodations1
(Same as ANTH 385 ) This course contributes to studies of black diasporas by centering the historical and contemporary involvement of Africans in Asia. We also consider Afro-Asian lifeways in and between Eastern Africa and Asia. Among topics/issues we address are: how Africans have experienced and influenced different parts of Asia, including the Middle East, Persia, South Asia, and China; how encounters with Asians have influenced African cultures and ways of life; how systems of servitude, including slavery and indenture in the Indian Ocean might be distinguished from Transatlantic enslavement; how Africans interacted historically with Asians as traders, servants, political figures, artisans, military personnel, ordinary peoples, and in some cases, governors. Expanding the diversity and complexity of our questions about African diasporas, students draw on historical texts, ethnography, fiction, film, and other media to inform their studies of African diasporans east and north of the continent. As we explore topics that are situated within particular places, the course simultaneously challenges easy understandings of region, place, people, and culture. Candice Lowe Swift. One 2-hour period. Course Format: CLS
