Special Topics courses are any course offered for credit in which the subject matter or content may vary within specific sections across academic terms.
The goal of these courses is to gain a more nuanced understanding of the contemporary racial justice movement, and to carry this knowledge from the classroom to your professional and personal lives.
The University Catalog is the authoritative source for information on courses. The Schedule of Classes is the authoritative source for information on classes scheduled for this semester. See the Schedule for the most up-to-date information and see Patriot web to register for classes.
Instructor: Michael G Malouf
What are the stories that we tell about oil? This course investigates the many ways in which we narrate the complex relationship between this essential, yet mostly invisible, commodity and our daily experiences and expectations. We will approach oil and culture by looking at it from two perspectives: the first, of oil in America – its role in our utopian images of the “road,” the entrepeneur, as well as our most dystopian conspiracy theories – through novels such as Upton Sinclair’s Oil! and films like Giant, Syriana, and There Will Be Blood; the second will be of oil in the world as it appears in classics of world literature such as Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt and accounts of oil in the world such as the documentary Crude. We will also consider the cultural representations of life beyond oil and the kinds of stories we might be telling in the future. In addition to the class readings and discussion we will be working on a collaborative research project on the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Using the class wiki, we will be compiling relevant material on the spill and its cultural effects. This material will be used as part of the students’ individual research projects that they will present at the end of the semester thus bringing the historical, critical, and aesthetic perspectives from the class readings to bear on our contemporary moment.
Instructor: Catherine E. Saunders
Since Europeans first landed in what is now Virginia, both residents and visitors have told stories about the state and its inhabitants that reflect their sense of what Virginia is and should be. In this class, we’ll read and discuss texts by and about three key groups who helped shape the history of Virginia between the beginning of European colonization and the early 1830s: the people who interacted at Jamestown (Native Americans, including Pocahontas and her family, European settlers, and kidnapped Africans); Thomas Jefferson and members of his family, free and enslaved; and Nat Turner and other enslaved people who sought to free themselves by insurrection. We’ll begin by reading primary texts written at the time these figures lived, then examine how their stories have been told and retold through the present day.
12:00 PM to 01:15 PM T
OnlineInstructor: Parker S O'Connor
Beyond the Binary seeks to examine contemporary texts in multiple genres through the lens of gender. These texts may reinforce the common gender binary, actively defy roles the binary prescribes, or display some amalgamation of the former. This course will ask students to think critically about how gender intersects with or is informed by, class, race, sexual orientation, religion, or other social identities.
12:00 PM to 01:15 PM TR
OnlineInstructor: Jessica Hurley
Ecological disaster is all around us, from the immediate crises of tsunamis and wildfires to the slow disasters of toxicity and climate change. Meanwhile, the environmental humanities are one of the fastest-growing fields in contemporary critical theory. In this class, students will be introduced to the major topics and texts in the field of environmental humanities, with a particular focus on critical theories of environmental catastrophe. We will ask questions such as: how can critical theory help us to understand the environmental realities of our present? what is the relationship between the environment and literary form? How has literature adapted to portray ecological change? How can literary tools such as genre, narrative, and affect help us to understand environmental crisis? Readings will include theoretical texts from the fields of literary studies, postcolonial studies, environmental studies, philosophy, anthropology, critical race studies, feminist and queer theory, and Indigenous studies as well as novels, films, poetry, and creative non-fiction.
01:30 PM to 02:45 PM MW
Thompson Hall L004Instructor: Keith Clark
We will read and examine several plays written from the beginning of the twentieth century through the present, as well as secondary readings devoted to specific plays and to cardinal moments in the evolution of African American drama. The course will focus on plays written and performed since the 1980s, though we will begin with early “agit-prop” and folk plays of the 1910s and 1920s and also read the most renowned play in the African American dramatic canon. Moreover, we will explore how contemporary playwrights have expanded the contours of the African American dramatic landscape, addressing complex issues related black feminism, constructions of masculinity, black “authenticity” and essentialized notions of race/gender, and gay/lesbian subject formation in a culture often concomitantly “Negrophobic” and homophobic. Dramatists whose works we will examine include: Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Charles Fuller, August Wilson, Pearl Cleage, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Lynn Nottage.
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM R
OnlineInstructor: Stefan Wheelock
Instructor: Eric Gary Anderson
What do ghosts want? Why should we listen to ghosts and reckon with them? And why are there SO MANY ghosts, and hauntings, and monsters, in Native American and Indigenous literature? This course will be a field guide to the undead presences in very recent Native literature. We'll focus on several brilliant contemporary works of Native fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, almost all published in the 21st-century. As Avery Gordon argues in her book Ghostly Matters, "When a ghost appears, it is making contact with you; all its forceful if perplexing enunciations are for you." And so it seems important to try to understand what Indigenous ghosts want, and what they have to say, right now—
—about traumas and horrors
—about environments (because ghosts choose their locations carefully and because, as historian Coll Thrush observes, "examining ghost stories can be a sort of place-based methodology, in which hauntings gesture toward salient conflicts and patterns in the history of conquest. A ghost, in effect, is a place's past speaking to its—and our—present.")
—about futures (because ghosts are all about the future, too, as we'll see)
—and about much more.
We'll also talk about how and why Indigenous writers create Indigenous ghosts and monsters. As it turns out, not all of these ghosts are scary—but what's the point of a Native ghost that's actually pretty sociable and helpful? We'll find out!
We'll read fiction (mostly) as well as some poetry and non-fiction, from both the U.S. and Canada, and all written by Native and Indigenous women and men, some straight and some queer, from a range of tribal nations. Almost everything we'll read is contemporary, published in the 21st century. And, especially because we're in a fabulous active learning classroom in Peterson, we'll do lots of hands-on in-class work; be ready to move around, to whiteboard, etc. We'll also do three writing projects; for at least one of these, you'll have both creative and critical-writing options.
As Gordon writes, "we will have to learn to talk to and listen to ghosts, rather than banish them" if we want to understand ourselves and our worlds. Hope you'll consider joining us!
Instructor: Hatim El-Hibri
This is an undergraduate course which introduces key concepts in the field of television studies, and analytical approaches to television as an art form. The class will examine how has social, cultural, and political tensions of the experience of globalization find expression in contemporary U.S. programming. We will also examine how television in the U.S. has been shaped by television from beyond its borders.
12:00 PM to 01:15 PM TR
Innovation Hall 317Instructor: Tamara Harvey
In this class, we approach literature written in and about the early Americas with a particular focus on how this has always been a literature that attempts to account for something new or unfamiliar (e.g. “the new world”) while at the same time using these accounts as an occasion to talk about the here and now of the text. Some of the treatments of the early Americas we examine allow authors to claim qualities like modernity, virtue, or autonomy, either by using the early Americas as a foil or an occasion for proving these qualities. Others represent the early Americas in order to develop social, cultural, and political critiques of the present. This class meets the pre-1800 requirement. A creative option would be a possibility for the final term paper.
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM T
OnlineInstructor: Lisa Marie Gilman
This course explores relationships between folklore, gender, and sexuality. We will use theories from folklore, feminism, and gender studies to analyze the role of folklore in the construction and negotiation of gender and sexual identities, how folklore can contribute to gender conflict, and how people use folklore forms to resist and contest gender and sexual inequities. We will take an intersectional approach, understanding that multiple axes of identity intersect in each individual to shape their distinct experiences with gender and sexuality. The focus will be primarily on diverse peoples within the U.S., though course discussions and assignments will expand to global perspectives. If the Covid19 pandemic is still dominating our lives in the fall, I will shift the focus of the course to ways that gender and sexuality intersect with people’s experiences and responses to the pandemic (through an analysis of folklore, of course).
03:00 PM to 04:15 PM TR
OnlineInstructor: Jessica Hurley
This class will neither ask nor answer the question “what is science fiction.” Instead, we will pose a more interesting and challenging question: “what does science fiction do?” How has SF allowed writers and thinkers to address changing technological and social realities? How does it help us to analyze and imagine the world in new ways? What is a science-fictional intellectual approach to contemporary problems? Exploring a wide range of texts from stories of the 1930s to films, music, and novels of the present, we will examine the power of science fiction as itself a valuable technology for analyzing the present and imagining the future. Students will learn about the history and theory of science fiction, as well as recent revolutions in the genre that have made it one of the most popular literary forms for understanding contemporary global conditions.
Assignments will include weekly online discussion posts, an in-class presentation, a critical essay, and a research-based final project to be determined by each student in conversation with Professor Hurley (may be critical or creative).
Instructor: Hatim El-Hibri
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM T
OnlineInstructor: Jessica Scarlata
Looking at film and TV produced and set in a variety of cities including Mumbai, London, Hong Kong, Seoul, New York, and Rio de Janeiro, this course will address the construction of the city on screen in relation to questions of wealth and poverty, crime and criminality, surveillance and the state of emergency, and gender and sexuality. While the “global city” is linked to a particular city’s central relationship to the generation and circulation of wealth, this course is also interested in the marginal spaces of cities and the cultural production that happens in them and in relation to them. Key topics include the city’s relationship to personal and public memory; the city as futuristic nightmare; neighborhoods, segregation, and sectarianism; the city as a site of subversion and revolution.
Film/TV to be studied includes: Parasite, Gomorrah, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, Informer, Sacred Games, Madame Satã, La haine/Hate, Leila, Pose, and more. If you have any questions, please email me: jscarlat@gmu.edu
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM R
OnlineInstructor: Michelle LaFrance
What does it mean to be “in community?” At once a question of place, identity, and relation, this is also a question of the rhetorical theories and stances we take up as writers—how do we write about, for, and with communities—workplace, classroom, local, national, and/or global? This advanced class in the rhetoric of communities, community literacy, and community-based writing integrates (meaningful) community engagement with instruction and writing assignments to enrich student learning experience and emphasize reciprocal learning and reflection.
Students will be asked to volunteer with a community literacy organization (likely 826DC, see: http://826dc.org/) and to base their final project on their work with this organization.
07:20 PM to 10:00 PM T
OnlineInstructor: Isidore K Dorpenyo
The premise of this course is that the field of technical and professional communication is interdisciplinary and rhetorical. In it, history, theory, practice, and pedagogy intersect and infuse each other, encouraging an examination of technology and science as forms of knowledge and social constructs rather than products, genres, or static entities. ENGH 501 will help you to develop a foundational understanding of Technical Communication and Rhetoric as a field. Readings for this course are organized in clusters, which foreground relationships among history, theory, scholarship, and practice. Neither linear nor chronological, this class focuses on basic questions the field raises, as well as how those questions have been constructed, perceived, interpreted, critiqued, taught, and applied, with implications for the academic and non-academic workplace, as well as the civic public. We will examine:
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM M
OnlineInstructor: Amal Amireh
07:20 PM to 10:00 PM R
OnlineInstructor: Isidore K Dorpenyo
This course examines current research in the field of professional and technical communication. Students will be introduced to many of the major contemporary theories of written discourse that influence research in professional communication. We will explore how communication has been differently defined and circumscribed and why these differences matter to people who study and produce writing in the workplace. You will develop a deep, complex understanding of the field of professional communication by reading seminal works on the history of the field, value of technical and professional communication, ethical and social responsibilities of professional communicators, research questions driving the field, and professional communication skills. We will explore questions such as, “How do practitioners understand their roles in ways both similar to and different from scholars? How do our perceptions of what texts are and how they function in organizational life affect the ways we enact our roles as practitioners and scholars? How are professional communicators implicated within wider systems inside and outside organizations? What kinds of questions do researchers in professional communication ask, and how do those questions affect the outcome of research?”
Students interested in academic careers will benefit by developing scholarly skills applicable across majors:
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM M
Aquia Building 346Instructor: Christy L Pichichero
Instructor: Ricardo F Vivancos-Pérez
This course will focus on the study of human rights issues in 21st century fictional narratives by migrants and refugees, as well as in films that focus on their experiences of isolation, discrimination, adaptation and community-building. We will examine major works of fiction and films about human displacement in connection with basic notions and concepts in immigration studies, intersectionality and human rights discourse. Readings will focus on human migration to the US, Europe and Australia from Latin America, Africa, East Asia and the Middle East. They include Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019), Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), E. J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others (2020), Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Leaving Tangier (2006), Dina Nayeri’s Refuge (2017), and Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2019), and selected short fiction by Viet Thanh Nguyen and Aleksandar Hemon. Films may include ¡Alambrista! (1977), El Norte (1984), Woven (2016), Yellow(1996), Tie a Yellow Ribbon (2007), Frontières (2002), America So Beautiful (2001), Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (2017), and relevant scenes from classical 20th-century movies about migration. Main objectives of this course include fostering comparative critical thinking, interdisciplinary research, and ethical commitment in the study of cultural production.
Instructor: Ricardo F Vivancos-Pérez
This course will focus on the study of human rights issues in 21st century fictional narratives by migrants and refugees, as well as in films that focus on their experiences of isolation, discrimination, adaptation and community-building. We will examine major works of fiction and films about human displacement in connection with basic notions and concepts in immigration studies, intersectionality and human rights discourse. Readings will focus on human migration to the US, Europe and Australia from Latin America, Africa, East Asia and the Middle East. They include Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2019), Dinaw Mengestu’s The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (2007), E. J. Koh’s The Magical Language of Others (2020), Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Leaving Tangier (2006), Dina Nayeri’s Refuge (2017), and Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains (2019), and selected short fiction by Viet Thanh Nguyen and Aleksandar Hemon. Films may include ¡Alambrista! (1977), El Norte (1984), Woven (2016), Yellow(1996), Tie a Yellow Ribbon (2007), Frontières (2002), America So Beautiful (2001), Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time (2017), and relevant scenes from classical 20th-century movies about migration. Main objectives of this course include fostering comparative critical thinking, interdisciplinary research, and ethical commitment in the study of cultural production.
Instructor: Sara Regina Mitcho
This class will explore social movements around the globe. We will explore theories about how social movements work, survey a variety of tactics, look at specific movements, and discuss what constitutes success.
This course fulfills the capstone requirement or can be counted toward a Global Affairs concentration in Global Inequalities & Responses or Global Governance.
10:30 AM to 11:45 AM MW
OnlineInstructor: Benedict Carton
This course explores how modern European colonialism profoundly shaped the continent of Africa and “New World” societies of the Atlantic Ocean. Lectures and discussions will examine interconnected historical developments, including the impact of abolition; spread of “legitimate commerce”; pan-Africanist thought; imperial policymaking; evangelical missionaries; legal revolutions broadening "citizenship"; African-based Christian revivals; “racial science” and Social Darwinism; and the advent of modern-day human rights campaigns. A principal goal of this course is to train students to locate and analyze relevant primary and secondary sources. Subject to approval, you may write a paper on any topic related to the themes above.
01:30 PM to 02:45 PM MW
OnlineInstructor: Jennifer Ritterhouse
As the deadly clash over a Confederate monument in Charlottesville in 2017 showed, Americans are still divided over the legacies of the Civil War. Understanding the history of the American South after 1865 can help us make sense of these divisions. This course examines such topics as Reconstruction and its aftermath, racial politics and segregation, efforts to industrialize and modernize the South, the impact of the New Deal and World War II, and the successes and setbacks of the Long Civil Rights Movement. Throughout the course, students will learn as much about African Americans as whites, as much about poor people as elites, and as much about women as men. By the end of the semester, new immigrants, suburbanization, and conservative politics will present new issues to explore.
03:00 PM to 04:00 PM R
Instructor: Jane Hooper
This course will examine the history of intervention in Africa, with a focus on the impact of Western humanitarian campaigns on African societies during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Throughout the semester, we will consider these campaigns in the context of the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, European colonization and decolonization, the Cold War, and more recent conflicts on the continent. During the final portion of the semester, we will focus primarily on the Rwanda Genocide and its aftermath. We will use this history to reflect on current debates over political, military, and economic aid to the continent.
Instructor: Peter N. Stearns
Culture change constitutes an important and complex phenomenon, both in human societies and in organizations. Changes in culture, and resistance to change, deeply affect a variety of contemporary issues. This course assesses several types of culture change, both American and international, in an interdisciplinary context, drawing from psychology, sociology, business, conflict analysis, and history. Case studies will range from religious conversions to corporate settings to conflict management, toward finding common patterns and best practices in implementing and analyzing culture change. Students, drawn from several relevant majors, will develop research topics and group discussions to explore additional themes in the field.
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM R
OnlineInstructor: Wendi N. Manuel-Scott
In her visual album Lemonade, Beyoncé constructs a defiant black feminism that is historically, politically, and culturally positioned within the complex genealogy of black feminist thought. By situating Lemonade in the context of black feminist praxis, students are encouraged to explore the life, labor, unseen geographies, and theorizing of black women from the antebellum era to the twenty-first century. The course will engage the multiplicity of liberation strategies and aesthetic practices black women relied upon to live and survive in the United States. Through critical evaluation of historical documents, songs, poetry, documentaries, movies, literary texts, and visual culture the course will provide students with the analytical tools to examine how black women made lemonade out of lemons.
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM W
OnlineInstructor: Wendi N. Manuel-Scott
The policing of black bodies has shaped America. Since the nation’s inception to the twenty-first century, black bodies have been racialized, criminalized, and policed. Drawing on interdisciplinary approaches, students will explore historical forms of ontological racial terror and how Americans remember racial trauma and violence. How does race shape memory? Who is mourned and who is forgotten? How have Americans negotiated issues of racial memory and national identity? These questions and others continue to affect our lives today.
Our goal is to examine historical and contemporary issues of racial violence that shape memory and mourning in America. In this course, we will do this by listening to the voices and perspectives of people who lived through and experienced racial violence firsthand. This course will foreground the African American experience, center themes of freedom and citizenship, and challenge students to think about how the memory of slavery, lynching, and race riots shaped generations of African Americans. Students will examine how the histories we remember, the lives we mourn, and the stories we tell, shape our understanding of the past, our perception of the present, and the future we hope to create.
12:00 PM to 01:15 PM TR
OnlineInstructor: Yevette Richards Jordan
The course examines the underlying causes of the increased violence and oppression African Americans faced post-Reconstruction and the organizational responses of blacks to the drastic curtailment of their basic rights. During this period of Jim Crow ascendancy, African American life was circumscribed by race riots and lynching, police brutality, segregation, job exclusion, housing discrimination, unequal educational opportunities and disfranchisement. Race and gender ideology figured prominently in white justification for violence and the restrictions meted out against blacks. In addition to examining the changing political and economic conditions that gave rise to various protest and civil rights organizations and movements, the course analyzes the different personalities and ideologies of leaders in these organizations, explores the class, color, race, and intergenerational divisions that sometimes impeded a movement’s effectiveness, and investigates the gender politics of the organizations and the gendered meanings of what it meant to be black and white in America. The organizations that form part of this course’s study include the Tuskegee Machine, the Afro-American Council, the Niagara Movement, the National Association of Colored Women, the NAACP, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, the Father Divine Peace Mission, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the People’s Committee, and the March on Washington Movement.
03:00 PM to 04:15 PM MW
OnlineInstructor: Meredith H. Lair
American presidential elections are obviously historic, because they mark the transfer or continuity of political power at the highest level in American life, if not the world. But US presidential elections are also an opportunity to think historically, about the context of innumerable societal concerns, such as the role of the executive branch in government, the use of force to resolve international disputes, the United States' place in the world, the role of the state in the individual's life, the distribution of public resources, social justice and human rights, civil-military relations, media coverage and influence, and the design, function, and history of the electoral process itself. This course will be responsive to developments within the US presidential election of 2020 by considering the histories of issues that will inform the election and by providing historical antecedents to current events as they unfold. It will also emphasize the skills required to research, consider, question, discuss, and write about current events from an historical perspective.
The course will combine lecture, guest lectures, readings, documentary films, and discussion. Students' active participation in class is encouraged. Skills developed in the course include formal and informal writing, discussion participation, public speaking, basic historical research methods, textual analysis, and critical thinking.
04:30 PM to 06:00 PM T
OnlineInstructor: Gabrielle A Tayac
This course is a capstone of the History major that incorporates a public history approach. Students are required to conduct primary and secondary research illuminating the diverse perspectives, experiences, and contributions of indigenous peoples in American history. Indigenous peoples shaped cultural, political, and social landscapes over time from pre-European contact to modern eras, yet their presence beyond stereotypes often remain less visible. Sources and methods for accessing, analyzing, and interpreting indigenous voices will be introduced for students to select from a wide range of eras and tribes across the Americas. Students will learn to develop substantial public history products that may include interpretive materials, exhibit scripts, media pieces, or educational resources.
07:20 PM to 10:00 PM R
OnlineInstructor: George Oberle
This course is the capstone of the History major. Students are required to produce a substantial research paper based on their reading of primary and secondary sources focused on the ongoing legacy of our University’s namesake, George Mason, to the region and our nation. As such, the course is broadly defined to allow students to select topics from the colonial era through the modern era. Students may focus on local history, political or military topics of their choice or on subjects relating to women, slavery, education, religion, or culture more generally. After completing some readings about George Mason and the generation of the “Founders,” students, with the assistance of the instructor, will focus their attention on the various stages of researching and writing the research paper.
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM T
OnlineInstructor: Yevette Richards Jordan
The course examines the history of African American women in antebellum America by exploring the general experiences of enslaved and nominally free women, as well as the lives of noted women who were involved in the public arena as orators, writers, preachers, abolitionists and women's rights activists. Black women lived and labored under oppressive political, economic and social systems that cast doubt on their humanity and stripped them of any of the virtues associated with white women under the cult of domesticity. Free black women in the North labored as domestics, were denied decent education, and were met with daily insults in public. Elite Northern black women, while not suffering from economic deprivation, nonetheless found the burden of slavery at their door. The captive women of the South faced a brutal slave system that expropriated their labor, separated families, and blamed them for their sexual victimization. Black women were often gendered male in relation to productive labor but gendered female in the realm of sexual exploitation and in their economic role of reproduction. Within the context of the national political debates and compromises that took place on the issue of slavery and the status of free blacks, the course examines how these women confronted the contradictions and boundaries that arose from living in a limited democracy that supported slavery, white male dominance, and class hierarchies. Among the topics covered are women's work and family life, color hierarchies among the enslaved, concubinage, experience of separation, vulnerability to sexual abuse, mother-daughter bonds, and resistance and abolition, and institution building.
07:20 PM to 10:00 PM T
OnlineInstructor: Suzanne E. Smith
In this course, we will examine the history of civil rights and citizenship in modern America. Civil rights history is often most closely associated with the African American struggle for racial equality. Nevertheless, the fight for civil rights in the United States has never been simply a struggle about the needs of one racial group. Throughout this semester, we explore how many different minority groups in American have fought for their rights in a democratic society that tends to favor the majority. Some of the movements we cover include: women's rights, Native American rights, the rights of the disabled, gay rights, and the prison rights movement. By examining and comparing different social and political movements, we will develop a deeper understanding of the nature of citizenship--both its rights and obligations--in American society. What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States? Who decides who is considered a citizen and who is not? The overall goals of the course will be: 1) to develop a historic understanding of how minority groups build social and political movements to advance their needs in American society and 2) to understand how America's sense of nationhood is inextricably connected to contested ideas of citizenship.
12:00 PM to 01:15 PM MW
Merten Hall (formerly University Hall) 1200Instructor: Keith Clark
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM W
OnlineInstructor: Stefan Wheelock
10:30 AM to 11:45 AM TR
OnlineInstructor: Sophia Balakian
12:00 PM to 01:15 PM MW
OnlineInstructor: Shayna Lillian Maskell
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM M
OnlineInstructor: Wendi N. Manuel-Scott
09:00 AM to 10:15 AM MW
Instructor: Shayna Lillian Maskell
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM R
OnlineInstructor: Wendi N. Manuel-Scott
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM W
OnlineInstructor: Wendi N. Manuel-Scott
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM W
OnlineInstructor: Wayne J Froman
Hannah Arendt is widely regarded as one of the foremost philosophical political thinkers active in the second half of the twentieth century, in the wake of the devastation of World War II. This course will be a close reading of the text considered her major philosophical work, The Human Condition.
Among the topics to be addressed are: Arendt’s analysis of the vita activa, (the active life), which includes the activities of labor, work and action; the distinction between the vita activa (the active life) and the vita contemplativa (the contemplative life); the primacy of the vita activa during the archaic period of the West in Greece and its displacement by the vita contemplativa during the classical Greek period; Arendt’s strong distinction between the private and the public; the formation of “the social” when matters previously belonging to the private are taken up into the public; the historic displacement of action as the highest activity of the vita activa (and the prerogative of being human) by work (homo faber) and eventually, labor (animal laborans), turning most activities into matters of intake and output; Arendt’s critique of modern economics, in particular, Marxist economics; the historic transition to the identification of life as the highest value; the status and role of art in reference to human action; the significance of “natality” in reference to human action.
The aim, Arendt specifies, is “to think what it is that we are doing,” and we will make this our aim as well. Reference will be made to Arendt’s other works.
For students in the Traditional and Contemporary Philosophy focus, this course can be used to fulfill the contemporary philosophy requirement; or it can be used as an elective.
For students in the Ethics and Public Affairs concentration, this course can be used as an elective.
Instructor: Ricardo F Vivancos-Pérez
This course offers a representative overview of Latinx history, literatures, and cultures in the United States by engaging students in discussions of literary works and cultural practices in connection with interdisciplinary approaches to equality, inclusivity, accountability, and social justice. The course gives an introduction to the field of Latinx/a/o Studies, presenting main questions raised in this emerging field (What do “Latinx," "Latinidades," define? What are the differences and interconnections between Latinx Studies and Latin American Studies?...), and providing useful sources for further inquiry.
Beyond strict generic categorizations, literary analyses include novels, short stories, drama, and poetry; and they will be supplemented by close studies of movies, documentaries and other artistic representations. Although the materials will reflect bilingualism as one of the main identity markers of Latinas/os/xs, special attention will be given to a tradition of texts and cultural practices in the Spanish language.
The class is structured in units according to recent debates and issues in U.S. Latinx Studies. Topics and works are meant to serve as points of entry into the analysis of more general issues about Latino identity and its representations, historical roots, immigration, and the formation of Latino communities across the U.S. Overall, the objective is to provide students with a solid introduction to the history of Latinas/os/xs in the U.S. in connection with Latin American history, and a basic foundation in the analysis of U.S. Latinx literatures and cultures not only for academic purposes but also for possible implementations in their everyday lives.
04:30 PM to 07:10 PM T
OnlineInstructor: Yevette Richards Jordan