This is an advanced Seminar meant to deepen understanding of central themes in American Studies, Asian American Studies, and Latino/a Studies.The Seminar concentrates on historical trajectories, social and economic evolution, and cultural contributions to nation making on the part of Asian Americans and Latino/as. We will investigate colonial antecedents and processes of exclusion/stigmatization but also acts of resistance and claims on citizenship that have consistently identified the trajectory of immigrants and their descendants throughout American history.

This course introduces students to the ways that policy, design, and citizen activism shaped affordable housing in the United States from the early 20th century to the present. We explore privately-developed tenements and row houses, government-built housing, publicly-subsidized suburban homes and cooperatives, as well as housing developed through incentives and subsidies. Students will analyze the balance between public and private, free market and subsidy, and preservation and renewal. Close attention will be paid to the role of race in structuring the relationship between policymakers, property owners, renters, and homeowners.

Rise of popular entertainment, values, ideas, cultural expression, and the culture industries in modern American history. Two lectures, one precept.

This course examines changes in Americans' understanding of and response to death from the Puritans through the post-modern era, with special attention to how ethnicity impacts traditions and stories surrounding death. We will examine both elegies and gothic literature about the "undead," particularly the grim reaper, skeletons, ghosts, vampires, and zombies. We will study the material culture related to death, including cemeteries and places where the dead are prepared for burial or cremation. The timid should beware, as we will take a field trip to the Princeton cemetery to do iconographic and seriation studies.

This seminar explores the understandings of the US through an analysis of race, class, gender, and national identity in films and TV series. It questions the role of authenticity in film and TV representation, focusing on works that examine how Americans define themselves and each other. Students screen, discuss, and write about recent films and TV series made by Americans who intervene in simplistic narratives of their own diverse cultures. Through the creation of their own essay films, students compare these contemporary works with earlier media to investigate the ways American culture(s) has evolved onscreen, and how far it still must go.

This course introduces students to the multiple and varied experiences of people of Asian heritage in the United States from the 19th century to the present day. It focuses on three major questions: (1) What brought Asians to the United States? (2) How did Asian Americans come to be viewed as a race? (3) How does Asian American experience transform our understanding of U.S. history? Using newspapers, novels, government reports, and films, this course will cover major topics in Asian American history, including Chinese Exclusion, Japanese incarceration, transnational adoption, and the model minority stereotype.

The seminar examines a variety of settler colonial contexts in North America and Oceania. After exploring a range of theoretical approaches to the study of colonialism, gender, and sexuality, the course will feature three main case studies: Maori, Oneida, Cherokee, Diné, and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). We will then assess how nationalist self-determination struggles negotiate gender and sexual decolonization, focusing on the growing body of work on gender liminality, contested masculinities, Native and Indigenous feminisms, debates regarding same-sex sexuality and marriage, as well as Two-Spirit, Mahu, LGBT, and `Indigiqueer' identities.

This introduction to disability studies draws together the work of feminists and queer theorists with that of historians and clinicians in order to contextualize the field's major theoretical claims. We will take up and critique the oft-made distinction between natural, physical impairment and socially constructed disability, situating it with regards to Michel Foucault's account of biopower, and his controversial claims in Society Must Be Defended regarding "racism against the abnormal."

Foundational ENV course. Introduces students to key concepts and approaches in environmental studies from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences. Focus is on the evolving history of environmental movements, including wilderness-centered conservation and deep ecology, urban-centered environmentalism, Indigenous sovereignty and land back, and climate justice. Emphasizes US environmental movements since the 1960s, with points of comparisons to other time periods and national contexts.

Through plays produced in the United States from the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter Movement of the 2010s, we will identify and analyze various themes, approaches, and concerns within feminist plays. Employing script and dramaturgical analyses and performance techniques, students will learn how to contextualize plays from the race, gender, class, sexuality, and politics of the playwright and contextualize plays within their larger historical, social, and cultural milieus. In doing so, students will learn about the different lineages, politics, and aesthetics of feminist theatre.

Just as the Internet does today, the picture press of the last century defined global visual knowledge of the world. The pictures gracing the pages of magazines and newspapers were often heavily edited, presented in carefully devised sequences, and printed alongside text. The picture press was as expansive as it was appealing, as informative as it was propagandistic, regularly delivered to newsstands and doorsteps for the everyday consumer of news, goods, celebrity, and politics. Through firsthand visual analysis of the picture presses of both the U.S. and Russia, this course will consider the ongoing meaning and power of images.

An exploration of the graphic memoir focusing on the ways specific works combine visual imagery and language to expand the possibilities of autobiographical narrative. Through our analysis of highly acclaimed graphic memoirs and autobiographical fictions, we analyze the visual and verbal constructions of identity with an emphasis on the representation of gender dynamics and cultural conflict.

The Affordable Care Act, enacted in 2010, was the defining (and polarizing) initiative of the Obama era, with provisions to expand health insurance coverage, control health care costs, and improve the health care delivery system. This course will focus on the history of health reform, as well as implementation challenges since the law's enactment. We will examine the federal regulatory process, the many legal challenges to the law, the role that states have played in implementation, and Congressional repeal efforts. We will also investigate the role of federalism in health care policy and the future of health care reform.

This course will look to understand the current and historical role of Indigenous people as a trope in both Western culture and in American culture more specifically, the material effects of such representations and the longstanding resistance to them among Indigenous people, and work toward developing ways of supporting Indigenous sovereignty and futurity. It will include a cross-disciplinary program of learning that will work closely with the Indigenous holdings in Firestone Library.

This course surveys critical themes in the interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, including perspectives from history, literature, sociology, and gender and sexuality studies. It develops an account of Asian racial and spatial formations as a product of multiple racial settler colonial projects forged through the US wars and empire in Asia and the Pacific Islands, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, migration, incarceration, and popular culture.

This introductory course examines what it means to be Latinx in the United States. We explore Latinx identity through an analysis of history, social processes, and gender. We analyze how processes of racialization are connected to class, gender, and sexuality, as well as other identity markers. This course studies experiences and events through cultural texts comprising verbal and non-verbal communication and representation and analyzes how Latinx communities negotiate empire, identity, language, and notions of home.

This class looks at the histories, religion, and material culture of Caribbean Jews from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, and traces their impact on the US Jewish life. Prior to 1825, the largest, wealthiest, and best educated Jewish American communities were in the Caribbean. In the early nineteenth century many Caribbean Jews traveled North and settled in the United States, but the region would once again play a key role between WWI and WWII as a sanctuary for Holocaust refugees. Communities we will cover include Recife, Curaçao, Jamaica, Suriname, Barbados, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

Course examines the history of Latin America and the Caribbean since independence, paying particular attention to relations with the United States.

This course explores how ideas and discourses about race shape how public policy is debated, adopted, and implemented. Black social movements and geopolitical considerations prompted multiple public policy responses to racial discrimination throughout the twentieth century. Despite these policy responses, discrimination persists, raising theoretical concerns about the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion, political representation, the role of the state (meaning government or law) in promoting social justice, and the role of social movements and civil society in democratizing policymaking and addressing group oppression.

Why do people love Broadway musicals? How do audiences engage with musicals and their stars? How have fan practices changed since the 1950s alongside economic and artistic changes in New York and on Broadway? In what ways does "fan of" constitute a social identity? How do fans perform their devotion to a show, to particular performers, and to each other? This class examines the social forms co-created by performers and audiences, both during a performance and in the wider culture. Students will practice research methods including archival research, ethnographic observation, in-depth interviewing, and textual and performance analysis.

This class will concentrate on some of the earliest and most extensive religious and historical texts authored by Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, specifically by the Maya, Mexica (Aztec), Hopi, and Diné (Navajo). This set will allow for a critical and comparative study of Native rhetoric, mythic motifs, notions of space and time, morals, and engagements with non-Native peoples and Christianity.

How do indigenous cosmologies intersect with American literary histories and archives? This course disrupts familiar accounts of American origins on the eastern seaboard through creation stories and oral literature from the Pacific Coast of North America. Through course readings, we travel from Hawaii to Alaska. We also travel to Juneau, Alaska over spring break. We think about the Indigenous cosmologies present in American archives through a conceptual vocabulary that includes ecologies, beach crossings, oral histories, and diasporas.

This course centers on the environment as a mediator for social action to understand how ecological change impacts and is impacted by structures of race and indigeneity. Using historical and present-day examples, this course will investigate the intersections of race and indigeneity in ecological change in the United States as experienced by Native people. Assignments for this course include written reflections based on weekly readings, an end-of the-term research paper, a creative collage, and a class presentation.

Science is commonly held to be the objective, empirical pursuit of natural facts about the world. In this course, we will consider an array of theoretical, methodological, and substantive challenges that feminism has posed for this account of science, and for the practice of scientific knowledge production. In the course of this survey, we shall engage a number of key questions such as: is science gendered, racialized, ableist or classist? Does the presence or absence of women (and another marginalized individuals) lead to the production of different kinds of scientific knowledge?

This seminar explores constitutional and legal issues posed by the attempted secession of eleven states of the Federal Union in 1860-1865 and the civil war this attempt triggered. Issues to be examined include the nature of secession movements (both in terms of the constitutional controversy posed in 1860-1861 and modern secession movements), the development of the "war powers" doctrine of the presidency, the suspension by the writ of habeas corpus, the use of military tribunals, and abuses of civil rights on both sides of the Civil War.

How did concert dancers and choreographers respond to the aesthetic, social, and political economic shifts we call 'modernism'? How does dance enter the archive? We pursue these questions by examining the ways gender, nationalisms, race, and sexuality shaped ideas of the modern. Key figures include Isadora Duncan, Vaslav Nijinsky, Katherine Dunham, Sada Yakko, Martha Graham, Zora Neale Hurston, and others. We begin with dance modernisms in China, Japan, Mexico, and Europe before turning to US cases, with an emphasis on how dance artists negotiated their authority as state actors and public intellectuals.

This seminar focuses on the structural and institutional foundations of racial discrimination in the United States. It emphasizes the contributions of sociologists, some of whom will participate as invited guests. The course gives a historical overview followed by an investigation of key legislative actions and economic factors inhibiting racial equality. Subsequent topics include migration and immigration; urban development; and residential segregation. The end of the course reviews resistance movements and policies aimed at addressing systemic racism, including restorative justice and reparations.

The Oral History Lab is a hands-on course that will teach students how to conduct, catalogue, and archive oral histories. The course will be analyzing oral histories completed in SPA 364: Doing Oral History in Spanish and using them as a jumping off point to conduct more oral histories in the Princeton Latino/a/e community. The goal is to collect oral histories and write articles intended for a website on the Latine community in Princeton. Spanish-language skills are not required for this course.

This course immerses students in diverse forms of storytelling about climate change in a US context - from photojournalism and data visualization to podcasting, documentary film, and the longform essay. Informed by these models, students work in teams on a semester-long collaborative project to develop an original climate story focused on a specific place, person, or community. Teams are formed based on student interests and experience.

This course examines the history of the United States through its intellectuals and major ideas. Starting with the American Revolution and progressing through to the contemporary intellectual scene, it hopes to introduce students to major debates, themes, and intellectual movements in the history of American ideas. We will read a number of famous thinkers and actors in their own words and study the development of important schools of thought, such as Transcendentalism, Pragmatism, the Harlem Renaissance, and the New Left.

This course introduces students to methods of American Studies, Asian American Studies and Latino Studies through discussion of some of the signature ideas, events, and debates in and about America's past and present. It presents students various scholarly approaches to historical and mythic manifestations of America from local, national, and global perspectives and considers the historical and cognitive processes associated with the delineation of America. The course examines a wide range of material and media from the point of view of multiple fields of study.

This seminar will interweave the history of New York City with the history of dance across the twentieth century. It will use the work of dancers, choreographers, and critics to illuminate social, political, and cultural trends in New York's urban life. Topics include dance in working-class leisure, dance as cultural activism during the Popular Front and Black Arts eras, immigration and assimilation in NYC, and the impact of urban renewal on communities and the performing arts.

This course challenges the racial parameters of disability studies and disability history by asking how persistent conditions of antiblack violence, including mass incarceration, state divestment, medical neglect, and environmental racism, destabilize assumptions about what constitutes an "able body." Surveying scholarship in Black studies, disability studies, African American history, and the history of science and medicine, we will study the construction of disability as a racialized category. Students will also recover disability theories that are already intrinsic to the Black radical tradition, postcolonial studies, and Black feminisms.

As articulated by Thelma Golden, postblack refers to the work of African American artists who emerged in the 1990s with ambitious, irreverent, and sassy work. Postblack suggests the emergence of a generation of artists removed from the long tradition of Black affirmation of the Harlem Renaissance, Black empowerment of the Black Arts movement, and identity politics of the 1980s and early 90s. This seminar involves critical and theoretical readings on multiculturalism, race, identity, and contemporary art, and will provide an opportunity for a deep engagement with the work of African American artists of the past decade.

This course examines the diversity of the American Jewish experiences in South America, North America, and the Caribbean. Moving from the early colonial era to the present, we will examine Jewish life using historical, literary, religious, and cultural evidence. This course offers an introduction to the methods of digital humanities and will culminate in each student creating an online digital exhibit using ArtSteps. Special attention will be paid to the experiences of women as well as multiracial Jews and Jews of color.

In this course, we'll examine the musicals of Stephen Sondheim from WEST SIDE STORY (1957) to ROAD SHOW (2009) as a lens onto America. How have Sondheim's musicals conversed with American history and American society since the mid-20th century? How do Sondheim's musicals represent America and Americans, and how have various productions shaped and re-shaped those representations? We'll explore how Sondheim and his collaborators used the mainstream, popular, and commercial form of musical theatre to challenge, critique, deconstruct, and possibly reinforce some of America's most enduring myths.

This class will grapple with literary, visual and media texts that represent and theorize violence on a transnational field. We will consider the representation of pain as an industry and as a cultural phenomenon. Drawing from critical race theories, queer and psychoanalytic theories, and transnational feminist work, this course analyzes pain/violence narratives from a wide range of genres--film, essay, memoir, and policy--to explore how pain and violence is narrated and depicted and how such narrations become part of a collective consciousness that keeps systematic forms of oppression intact.

A survey of Native American Literature. In place of US origins stories, we consider the dispossession of land and waters and the impact on the environment. We reflect on the United States' attempts to eliminate Indigenous people and correspondent modes of survival and resistance. Our goal is to attend to individual and tribal experiences of life under settler colonialism, and consider the political, social, and psychological conditions that this structure produces. In this class, we aim for a more holistic understanding of the past and present in America, such that we can imagine alternative futures.

The 1970s are one of the most fascinating periods in recent American history, marking a turn from the countercultural turmoil of the 1960s to the rising conservatism of the 1980s. Often overlooked, these years nonetheless encompass tremendous social, political, and cultural change. In this seminar, we'll examine the 1970s through 10 intriguing objects--some famous, some obscure---that shaped and reflected the decade's art, politics, economics, technology, and culture. We'll use each object as an occasion for looking deeper at the issues it encapsulates or represents, how those issues reverberate across the decade, and their legacy for today.

This class aims to explore transnational issues in policing. Drawing heavily upon anthropological methods and theory, we aim neither to vindicate nor contest the police's right to use force (whether a particular instance was a violation of law), but instead, to contribute to the understanding of force (its forms, justifications, interpretations). The innovative transnational approach to policing developed during the semester will allow for a cross-cultural comparative analysis that explores larger rubrics of policing in a comprehensive social scientific framework. We hope that you are ready to explore these exciting and urgent issues with us.

Princeton University is on the unceded ancestral lands of the Lenape people, who endure to this day. Historical and contemporary awareness of Indigenous exclusion and erasure is critically important to overcoming their effects. Moreover, Princeton was home to the first gathering in 1970 that coalesced the field known as Native American Studies. As such, this seminar engages the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies. We will address questions of settler colonialism, Indigenous knowledge, resistance, education, research, stereotypes and cultural appropriation, identity, nation (re)building, and critiques of NAIS.

This course uses historical and anthropological methods to examine the health of Native communities. By investigating the history, social structures, and colonial forces that have shaped and continue to shape contemporary Indigenous nations, we investigate both the causes of contemporary challenges and the ways that Native peoples have ensured the vibrancy, wellness, and survival of their peoples. We will treat health as a holistic category and critically examine the myriad factors that can hinder or enable the wellbeing of Native nations.

In traditional workshops content and context come second to craft. Here we will explore writing political fiction, the politics of fiction and writing as political engagement. We'll read widely, from the most realistic depictions of the American political process and the varieties of immigrant experience to the work of afrofuturists and feminists. The personal is the political and our frame will range from the global to the domestic. We will write stories that inhabit experiences other than our own. This course will allow students to make interdisciplinary connections between courses on history, politics and identity and creative writing.

Bharatanatyam, butoh, hip hop, and salsa are some of the dances that will have us travel from temples and courtyards to clubs, streets, and stages around the world. Through studio sessions, readings and viewings, field research, and discussions, this seminar will introduce students to dance across cultures with special attention to issues of migration, cultural appropriation, gender and sexuality, and spiritual and religious expression. Students will also learn basic elements of participant observation research. Guest artists will teach different dance forms. No prior dance experience is necessary.

This course convenes experiences of watching and thinking about contemporary Asian American film. The syllabus is built around narrative films made by and about ethnicized Asians that have crossed the threshold of commercial viability or popular visibility in America. The central critical theme: how can the structure, flow, and mood of film, diminished in cultural capital but still vital as a form of imaginative storytelling, inspire incisive modes of seeing, feeling, and thinking what it means to be Asian in the world today? Core methods of film analysis and surveys of Asian American history inform the meditations on that central theme.

Authors and theorists of contemporary fiction have turned to various modes of fictionality, speculation, and the counterfactual to address and encounter gaps in the historical record, even if not to fully recover experiences lost to time. "Historical Fiction / Fictional History" will introduce students to literary and critical methods by toggling between "historical" and "fictional" texts, and ask them to experiment creatively with their own narrative voices.

This class explores the underside of civility: the indifference of good manners, the controlling attention of caregivers, the loving coercion of family, the quiet horrors of neighbors, friends, and allies. We will explore characters in fiction and film whose militant niceness exercises killing privilege or allows for the expansion of their narcissism...people with "good intentions" who nonetheless wreak havoc on the people and the environment around them. We will consider "niceness" as social performance, as cultural capital, as middle-class value, as sexual mores, as self-belief, and as affective management.

An introduction to the forms and meanings of American television, with an emphasis on watching, thinking, and writing critically about the medium. We will examine a range of structures, styles, and strategies specific to television, including episodic storytelling, the advent of streaming and "peak TV," and the role of television in establishing and sometimes disrupting norms of identity, politics, and aesthetics. The main approach throughout will be close analysis of specific genres, series, and episodes informed by the histories, contexts, and practices that make American television such a significant part of American culture.

Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison: each lay claim to being America's premier twentieth-century novelist. And each did so through a distinctive focus on place and identity. Even more than that shared preoccupation, however, their radical narrative innovations explain why they continue to be read. This course explores the common subjects and varied literary strategies that have transformed possibilities for American fiction.

In received tradition there are no women authors writing in English before the very late 17th century, with a very few notable exceptions in the Middle Ages. This course charts the recovery and revaluation of early modern poetry, drama and prose by women. We'll learn how significant it is and enjoyable, as we encounter works that range in subject from the harrowing death of grown-up daughters, highly original philosophy, bold political verse and critiques of slavery. We'll consider all within frameworks provided by contemporary gender and race theory and history.

This course explores the fascination with animals in film, photography and popular culture, engaging critical issues in animal and environmental studies. In the context of global crises of climate change and mass displacement, course themes include the invention of wilderness, national parks, zoos and the prison system; the cult of the pet; vampires, werewolves and liminal creatures; animal communication, emotions and rights; queering nature; race and strategies for environmental justice. How can rethinking animals help us rethink what it means to be human? How can we transform our relations with other species and the planet itself?

The term "just transition" has proliferated among climate policy makers, activists, and others from local to international scales to unite actors with labor, social justice, and renewable energy priorities. This course traces the historical origins and contested uses of just transition frameworks, exploring debates and common ground among labor, policy, environmental justice, ecosocialist, and decolonial perspectives. Emphasis is on the U.S. context with points of connection to global systems and movements.

This seminar offers an intensive introduction to working with cultural documents emerging within and from LGBTQ+ communities in the United States during the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Students will work individually and collaboratively as they engage a broad array of cultural texts and primary documents from the later 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s. Students will rehearse how to interpret, analyze, and contextualize such documents of the recent queer past as they also explore how to apply these skills within historical, literary/cultural, and dramaturgical analysis.

Feminist Futures explores the way in which recent writers have transformed science fiction into speculative fiction - an innovative literary form capable of introducing and exploring new kinds of feminist, queer, and multi-cultural perspectives. These books confront the limitations imposed on women and imagine transformative possibilities for thinking about gender roles and relationships, the body, forms of power, and political and social structures.

This course is designed to introduce students to the historical processes and issues that have shaped the lives if Indigenous Americans over the past five centuries. We will explore the ways that the diverse peoples who lived in the Americas constructed different kinds of societies and how their goals and political decisions shaped the lives of all those who would come to inhabit the North American continent. The course requires students to read and analyze historical documents and contemporary literature, and includes a visit to the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City.

This course examines the history of the United States through its intellectuals and major ideas. Starting with the American Revolution and progressing through to the contemporary intellectual scene, it hopes to introduce students to major debates, themes, and intellectual movements in the history of American ideas. We will read a number of famous thinkers and actors in their own words: Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Jane Addams, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others. Students will leave this class with a deeper understanding and appreciation for the ideas and the thinkers who have shaped the nation's politics and culture.

This course will examine the U.S. West's place, process, idea, cultural memory, conquest, and legacies throughout American history. The American West has been a shifting region, where diverse individuals, languages, cultures, environments, and competing nations came together. We will examine the West's contested rule, economic production, and mythmaking under Native American Empires, Spain, France, England, individual filibusters, Mexico, Canada, and United States.

This course explores the history of incarceration over the course of more than two centuries. It tracks the emergence of the penitentiary in the early national period and investigates mass incarceration of the late 20th century. Topics include the relationship between the penitentiary and slavery; the prisoners' rights movement; Japanese internment; immigration detention; and the privatization and globalization of prisons.

This course examines Hurricane Maria's impact on Puerto Rico and the push for a resilient, equitable future. We will explore the disaster's effects on infrastructure, economy, and communities, and the role of colonialism and environmental injustice in setting the stage. Through research projects, students will have the opportunity to investigate specific aspects of Puerto Rico's post-Maria recovery and to propose innovative solutions that prioritize equity, sustainability, and community empowerment.

This course explores the history, culture, and language of the Deaf in the United States. The first part of the course focuses on the history of Deaf people in the United States. The second part discusses various aspects of Deaf culture: language, literature, art, politics, etc. The third part critically examines different issues facing Deaf people here in the United States and around the world. These issues include audism, linguicism, ableism, intersectionality, disability justice, bioethics, and education. No American Sign Language knowledge required.

African Americans in the United States have encountered myriad barriers to their quest for inclusion. Drawing on a mix of history and social science, we will come to understand why certain segments of America oppose the full inclusion of African Americans. We will also discuss the political strategies undertaken by the Black community to combat social, political, and economic injustices. The first half of the course will focus on historical antecedents such as the civil rights movement and the Black Power movement. The second half of the course will focus on the nature of contemporary racial attitudes in the 21st century.

In this course we examine a variety of new religious movements that tested the boundaries of acceptable religion at various moments in American history. We pay particular attention to government and media constructions of the religious mainstream and margin, to the politics of labels such as "cult" and "sect," to race, gender, and sexuality within new religions, and to the role of American law in constructing categories and shaping religious expressions. We also consider what draws people to new religions and examine the distinctive beliefs, practices, and social organizations of groups labeled by outsiders as "cults."

This course is an introduction to the theory and practice of oral history. Students will learn the principles and applications of oral history. The class will collaborate with the Historical Society of Princeton and the Princeton Public Library to continue developing the "Voces de la Diáspora" Oral History project, a project partner of "Voices of Princeton". Discussion on readings will be combined with hands-on activities to prepare students for conducting oral history interviews in Spanish.

In this course, we will study the works of feminist-identified scholars and performers to examine how they use different mediums to excavate, stage, and theorize lives that place, front and center, the relationship between (P)olitics, embodied knowledge, and creative expression. Examining works in theater, students will learn about different forms of feminist practice and how those forms may support and conflict with each other. Students will also learn how to incorporate and articulate theories and mediums into their own creative practices.

From Cross Colours to boom boxes, the 1990s was loud and colorful. But alongside the fun, black people in the U.S. dealt with heightened criminalization and poverty codified through the War on Drugs, welfare reform, HIV/AIDS, and police brutality. We will study the various cultural productions of black performers and consumers as they navigated the social and political landscapes of the 1990s. We will examine works growing out of music, televisual media, fashion, and public policy, using theories from performance and cultural studies to understand the specificities of blackness, gender, class, and sexuality.

This seminar introduces urban studies research methods through a study of New York in conversation with other cities. Focused on communities and landmarks represented in historical accounts, literary works, art and film, we will travel through cityscapes as cultural and mythological spaces - from the past to the present day. We will examine how standards of evidence shape what is knowable about cities and urban life, what "counts" as knowledge in urban studies, and how these different disciplinary perspectives construct and limit knowledge about cities as a result.