Spring 2017

Tues/Thurs, 12:30 – 1:45, Wilson Hall 301

This introductory course builds upon the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean surveyed in AAS 101. Drawing on disciplines such as Anthropology, History, Religious Studies, Political Science and Sociology, the course focuses on the period from the late 19th century to the present and is comparative in perspective. It examines the links and disjunctions between communities of African descent in the United States and in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa. The course begins with an overview of AAS, its history, assumptions, boundaries, and topics of inquiry, and then proceeds to focus on a number of inter-related themes: patterns of cultural experience; community formation; comparative racial classification; language and society; family and kinship; religion; social and political movements; arts and aesthetics; and archaeology of the African Diaspora.

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wednesdays: 2:00 – 4:30, Maury 115 (section 1); 6:00 – 8:30, New Cabell 036 (section 2)

This course, taught as a lower-level seminar, will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of “Blackness” in the United States, particularly where it converges with popular ideologies about gender. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, television, and print news media create categories of race and gender in different ways for (different) Americans – each medium encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise – each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information; in particular, we will be analyzing cultural texts, the cultural environment in which they have been produced, and the audience reception of those texts. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information have –and whether or not the consuming/viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility. This class will enable students to cultivate theoretical tools and critical perspectives to analyze and question the influence of the popular media that saturate our lives.

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Mon/Wed 3:30 – 4:45, New Cabell 364

In this course, we will read a sampling of some of the exciting new novels by Africa’s young and established writers, from countries as varied as Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Ghana, and Zimbabwe. In particular, we will examine the literary innovations that women writers such as Adichie, Bulawayo, Selasie, and Mengiste use to narrate issues affecting the continent. These topics include: dictatorship; the lingering effects of colonization; the postcolonial nation state; the traumas of war and geo-politics; gender and sexuality; and migration; among others. These central questions will guide our readings: What themes, concerns, and literary strategies animate, unite, or differentiate the literature by women writers from different African countries?  How applicable are Western feminist and womanist theories to African fiction? How do sociopolitical realities inform literary expression? How can these novels help us understand the contemporary African novel within the contexts of larger historical and cultural forces, events, and movements? Assignments include a weekly African News Forum, a historical group presentation, intermittent novel reviews, and a final essay.

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon/Wed 2:00 – 3:15, Nau 341

This course examines the history of the southern Civil Rights Movement.  Studies the civil rights movement's philosophies, tactics, events, personalities, and consequences, beginning in 1900, but concentrating heavily on the activist years between 1955 and 1968.

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

Mondays 3:30-6:00, New Cabell 485

Slavery in the United States did not end after the Civil War. This course offers a historical and intersectional approach to understanding how slavery has evolved in the U.S. since 1865. Using gender, race, ethnicity, and class as critical categories of analysis, this course is designed to help students better understand modern slavery’s impact on diverse populations in the United States, including members of the African Diaspora. Some of the subjects discussed in this course include: The 13th Amendment and the restoration of slavery through convict leasing, chain gangs, and mass incarceration; the proliferation of sex trafficking in the U.S. and the legal inequalities met by its victims; human trafficking and its global connections; U.S. involvement in the international slave trade and its often overlooked effects on black populations, and U.S. based activism and approaches to the abolishing the modern slave trade.  

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Mon/Wed 2:00 – 3:15, New Cabell Hall 364

An introduction to the concepts in Afrofuturism, exploring race and alienness, race and technology, and race and modernity through futuristic representations of blackness in TV ("Almost Human”); film (Last Angel of History); music (Janelle Monáe), and literature (Butler/Okorafor). Assignments include literary essays, short films, mashups, and web-content that reimagine and interrogate representations of race and technology in contemporary media.

Instructor: Julius Fleming

Tues/Thurs 9:30 – 10:45, New Cabell 364

 this course begins with the career of Richard Wright and brings the Afro-American literary and performing tradition up to the present day. 

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs 11:00 – 12:15, Wilson Hall 301

Does the idea of a "post-racial society" hold true when we examine the complex nature of social and cultural life at the University of Virginia?  How and to what degree have the individual and collective experiences of African American undergraduates transformed since the late 1960's?  Is there still a need for the Black Student Alliance, the Office of African American Affairs, and the Office of Diversity and Equity?  Is Black Studies still an intellectual necessity in the 21st century academy?  Have these entities been successful in bringing about meaningful change in the experiences of underrepresented minorities?  And if not, how can future efforts to make the University a more inclusive institution benefit from a critical engagement with past struggles for social justice and racial equality?  Moreover, how might we find a way to more effectively bring the many segments of UVa's black community(Athletes, black Greeks, second generation immigrants, Christians, Muslims, etc) together?

To facilitate critical thinking and exchange on these and other important questions, this hybrid course grounds contemporary debates on the state of race relations at UVA within the larger, historical context of the "black Wahoo" experience.  In addition to exploring contemporary issues affecting academic, cultural, and social life on grounds, our classroom and online activities draw attention to an important yet insufficiently explored chapter in the history of "Jefferson's University" by examining the varied ways in which various student-led movements have transformed the intellectual culture and social fabric of everyday life at the University.  How those transformations continue to shape our experiences on grounds will be a topic of frequent discussion.  Though the focus of this course is local, we will explore topics that have and continue to engage college students across the nation:  the Integration of African Americans into the post-civil rights, historically white university, the political potential of Greek organizations, the status of the black athlete, the viability of the African American Studies program and departments, and the impact of Affirmative Action on higher education.

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

This course will examine how culture matters for understanding race and social inequality. The course will survey social science research about cultural forms such as everyday discourse, styles of dress, music, literature, visual arts, and media as they relate to race and inequality. As we examine these studies, we will learn about key thinkers in social science approaches to culture, and we will analyze core concepts such as cultural capital, frames, symbolic boundaries, scripts, racial grammar, and more

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon/Wed/Fri 11:00 – 11:50, New Cabell 315

This course examines the black experience in America from emancipation to the present.  We will study African Americans’ long struggle for freedom and equality, and learn about their contributions to and influence on America’s social, political, and economic development.  We will also study the history of race and racism, explore how its meaning and practice has changed over time, and how it shaped—and continues to shape—the lives of all persons in America.  Central to this course is the idea that African American history is American history, and that the American experience cannot be understood apart from the struggles and triumphs of African Americans.  Course topics include: emancipation and Reconstruction; the age of Jim Crow; the Great Migration and the New Negro; the civil rights and Black Power movements; mass incarceration; and struggles for justice and equality in the present.  In addition to readings from assigned books, students will analyze and interpret a variety of primary sources, including film, music, and visual art.  Class meetings will alternate between lectures and discussions.  Assignments will include a midterm, a final exam, two topical essays, and short responses to weekly readings.

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Thursdays 2:00 – 4:30

This course investigates the traditions and symbolics of food and eating in Africa and throughout the African Diaspora -- wherever people of African descent have migrated, settled, or have been forced to move. We will examine historical processes which have led to the development of certain foodways and explore the ways that these traditions play out on the ground today. We will begin by examining some examples of culinary tradition in different African spaces both in the past and present. We’ll be moving on to see how cooking traditions changed and morphed as people moved across oceans and land. We’ll investigate Caribbean, American (United States), and other Diasporic traditions, examining the ways people of African descent influenced cooking, eating and meaning in the new cultural worlds they entered and how the local traditions in these new spaces had an influence on these cooks’ culinary experiences. Concentrating on African spaces and cultural traditions as well as on traditions in other places in the world where people of African descent live, we will be exploring food and eating in this course in relationship to such topics as taboo, sexuality, bodies, ritual, kinship, beauty, and temperance and excess. This course will help students to investigate the way the foods people eat—or don’t eat—hold meaning for people within a variety of cultural contexts.

Instructor: Aniko Bodroghkozy

Tues/Thurs 3:30 – 4:45, New Cabell 027

Course examines the crucial relationship between the Civil Rights Movement and mass media from 1950s through early 1970s, looking at a variety of media forms: Hollywood cinema, network television, mainstream newspapers, photojournalism, the black press, and news as primary documents that can tell us something about American race relations during this period and how the nation responded to challenges posed by a powerful social change movement. Prerequisite: Students should have completed either MDST 2000 Introduction to Media Studies or AMST 2001 Formations of American Cultural Studies.

Instructor: E. Kwame Otu

Mondays, 6:00 – 8:30, New Cabell 036

Retracing the execution of the royal pages in nineteenth century Uganda, now famously known as the Martyrs of Uganda, to the murder of the LGBT human rights activist, David Kato, for example, we will explore the extent and circulation of afroqueer subjectivities in the the circum-Atlantic world. By providing an introduction to various artists, activists, and intellectuals, both in Africa and its myriad diasporas, this interdisciplinary seminar examines what it means to be both black and queer historically, spatially, and contemporarily. Together, we will explore how “afro-queer” as a concept is not only embraced or contested, but is also an aesthetic that drives imaginations and projects that constantly disrupt racialized gendered normativities dictated by white supremacist regimes. How do queer political projects perpetuate antiblackness in both liberal and neoliberal scenes of empire? And how are black queer subjects’ refusal of mainstream queer political projects constitutive of a longer history of black refusal and complicity? We will interrogate the transnational and transcultural mobility of specific aesthetics as well as racial and sexual identity categories more broadly. Our aim here is to employ the prism of artistry and of the day to day experiences of afroqueer subjects to highlight the dynamic relationship between Black Diaspora Studies and Queer Studies.

Instructor: Petal Samuel

Tuesdays, 2:00 – 4:30, New Cabell 056

In her 2016 Superbowl performance, Beyoncé donned the iconic garb of the Black Panthers, eliciting a wide range of both supportive and critical responses. This performance, however, is only one recent example of a far longer tradition of black artists controversially using their work to indict and challenge structures of oppression, demand radical social and political change, and imagine a future devoid of the pervasive and persistent anti-blackness of modern life. Black Radicalism and the Artistic Imagination explores the role of art--fiction, poetry, film, music, and visual art--in shaping and sustaining the diverse body of revolutionary, activist philosophies known as the black radical tradition. We will examine a variety of artists and texts, including the writings of Octavia Butler and James Baldwin; musicians Nina Simone, Solange, and D'Angelo; filmmaker Ava Duvernay; Haitian-American visual artist Jean-Michel Basquiat; and the artistic strategies of organizations like The Movement for Black Lives and BYP100. The course asks: What is black radicalism, and how might we define its core concerns and strategies? How are these core principles articulated through art? What continuities and deviations, points of consensus and conflict, can we observe through time when juxtaposing the creative strategies of artists through time? What is the relationship between art and activist organizations? In what way does black radical art enact, advance, or define the work of revolution?

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues./ Thurs. 2:00PM-3:15PM

This class examines the role religion plays in defining a racial category known as whiteness. By reading cultural histories and ethnographies of the religious practices of various communities, we will examine how groups now classified as white (Irish, Italians, Poles, Jews, etc.) and religious images (depictions of Jesus and the Virgin Mary) "became white" and the role that religious practice played in this shift in racial classification.

Instructor: Louis Nelson
                                                                                 
Tues./Thurs.9:30AM-10:45AM, Nau Hall 101

This interdisciplinary course covers the American South to the Civil War. While the course centers on the visual arts- architecture, material culture, decorative arts, painting, and sculpture- it is not designed as a regional history of art, but an exploration of the interrelations between history, material and visual cultures, foodways, music and literature in the formation of Southern identities

Instructor: John Hamilton

Mon./Wed. 2:00PM-3:15PM, Wilson Hall

This course explores hip-hop music as both history and lived practice with a particular focus on the music's role as technology, in two senses of that word. The first is the technological underpinnings of the music itself, and its transformation of tools of musical reproduction into tools of musical production. The second is the music's potential as a technology of education, community-building, and civic engagement. This class will be rooted in a lab-based learning experience that combines traditional academic study with introductory musical practice, offering a critical and historical examination of hip-hop music and the social contexts that birthed, shaped, and continue to sustain it. Students will be directly involved with the building, maintenance, and creative output of an in-class "audio lab," which will provide a hands-on introduction to historical inquiry and musical practice while particularly focusing on issues such as access and mobility. After the lab is up and running the outreach portion of this course will commence, which looks to extend new forms of musical education opportunities to local Charlottesville young people.

Instructor: Jack Hamilton

Mon./Wed. 3:30-4:45, Dell 1 105

This course explores the trajectories and impacts of American hip-hop as a cultural form over the last forty years, and maps the ways that a locally-born urban underclass subculture has become the dominant mode of 21st-century global popular culture. We will explore hip-hop’s historical roots in the post-Sixties urban crisis and postcolonial Caribbean diaspora; trace its emergence from subculture into mainstream culture during the 1980s and the music’s growing uses as a tool of politics and protest; probe its ascendance to the dominant form of American popular music in the 1990s and the widening regional, socioeconomic, and racial/ethnic diversity of its adherents; and finally explore hip-hop’s continuing dominance in contemporary global culture. While our syllabus is structured thematically as opposed to chronologically, the goal of this class is to provide students a clear sense of the history of hip-hop and the cultures that produced and have been produced by it, as well as broader issues that have driven both the music and conversations about it.

TR 200-315 (Dell 2 103)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 2:00PM-3:15PM

This course explores the 1920s Jazz Age from a multimedia perspective of the Harlem Renaissance in literature, journalism, painting, sculpture, dance, music, photography, film, and politics. We’ll consider the geopolitics not only of Harlem as a “Mecca of the New Negro” but also of Chicago, D.C., Richmond, and Lynchburg as instances of places contributing to the idea of the New Negro Renaissance.  We’ll examine some of the hot debates and combustible movements of the time, including:  the Great Black Migration, art as uplift and propaganda, elite versus vernacular approaches, the Negro newspaper, Negro Wall Streets and pioneer towns, race rioting, urban sociology, the Garveyite movement, Negro bohemianism, the gendering of the Renaissance idea, queer subcultures, radical activism, and interraciality. We’ll sample a wide range of works: essays by W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Jessie Fauset, and Marcus Garvey; poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Anne Spencer, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay; fiction by Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, Nella Larsen and Wallace Thurman; drama by Willis Richardson and Zora Neale Hurston; art by Aaron Douglas and Augusta Savage; dancers and choreographers Katherine Dunham, the Nicholas brothers, and Josephine Baker; musicians Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Harry Burleigh, and Roland Hayes; photographers Addison Scurlock and James Van Der Zee; and the filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. We’ll conclude with some contemporary revisualizations of the Harlem Renaissance in fiction and film.  Assignments include several short papers, a midterm, and final exam.

Instructor: John Hamilton

Mon./Wed. 3:30PM-4:45PM, Nau Hall 241

This seminar is intended to focus study, research, and discussion on a single period, topic, or issue, such as the Great Awakening, the Civil War, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, or the 1960s. Topics vary.

Instructor: Kendrick Grandison

Tues. 5:30PM-8:00 PM, Bryan Hall 235

This interdisciplinary seminar analyzes and unearths how everyday places and spaces are involved in the negotiation of power in American society. We analyze not only written texts, but also non-written materials and field trip experiences.

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison/Marlon Ross

Tues. 6:30 - 9:00, Bryan Hall 312

This interdisciplinary seminar examines the spatial implications at work in the theories, practices, and experiences of race, as well as the cultural implications at stake in our apprehensions and conceptions of space. Themes include: 1) the human/nature threshold; 2) public domains/private lives; 3) urban renewal, historic preservation, and the new urbanism; 4) defensible design and the spatial politics of fear; and 5) the cultural ideologies of sustainability. The seminar foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. This means melding concepts and practices used in the design professions with theories affiliated with race, postcolonial, literary, and cultural studies. We’ll investigate a variety of spaces, actual and discursive, through selected theoretical readings from diverse disciplines (e.g., William Cronon, Patricia Williams, Philip Deloria, Leslie Kanes Weisman, Gloria Anzaldua, Oscar Newman); through case studies (e.g., Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through local site visits. Requirements include a midterm and final exam, one site visit response paper, and a major team research project and presentation.

Instructor: James Igoe

Tues. 3:30PM-6:00PM, The Rotunda Room 150  

Africa is commonly imagined in the West as an unproblematically bounded and undifferentiated entity. This course engages and moves beyond western traditions of story telling about Africa to explore  diverse systems of imagining Africa's multi-diasporic realities. Imagining Africa is never a matter of pure abstraction, but entangled in material struggles and collective memory, and taking place at diverse and interconnected scales and locales.

Prerequisite: ANTH 1010

Instructor: Ellen Contini-Morava

Tues./Thurs. 11:00AM-12:15 PM, The Rotunda Room 150

An introduction to the linguistic diversity of the African continent, with focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Topics include  linguistic structures (sound systems, word-formation, and syntax); the classification of African languages; the use of linguistic data to reconstruct prehistory; language and social identity; verbal art; language policy debates; the rise of "mixed" languages among urban youth.

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri.10:00AM-10:50AM, New Cabell Hall 368

Mon./Wed./ Fri. 11:00AM-11:50AM, New Cabell Hall 368

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 12:00PM-12:50PM, New Cabell Hall 368

Further develops skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing, and awareness of the cultural diversity of the Swahili-speaking areas of East Africa. Readings drawn from a range of literary and journalistic materials.

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Tues./ Thurs. 2:00PM-3:15PM

Presents a comprehensive study of 'Black Theatre' as the African-American contribution to the theatre. Explores the historical, cultural, and socio-political underpinnings of this theatre as an artistic form in American and world culture. Students gain a broader understanding of the relationship and contributions of this theatre to theatre arts, business, education, lore, and humanity. A practical theatrical experience is a part of the course offering.  Prerequisite: Instructor permission

Instructor: Julius Fleming

Tues./ Thurs. 9:30AM-10:45AM, New Cabell Hall 364

Continuation of ENAM 3130, this course begins with the career of Richard Wright and brings the Afro-American literary and performing tradition up to the present day. 

ENAM 3500-002

Instructor: Marvin Campbell

MON./WED 3:30PM-4:45PM (New Cabell 132)

Soon after its appearance in eighteenth-century Germany, the Bildungsroman—or “novel of education”—developed into a major literary form, migrating to England a century later, when Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Charlotte Bronte, among others, focused on the individual’s psychological and moral development from youth to adulthood. In this course, we will explore how black authors in the United States and the English-speaking Caribbean have taken this European literary tradition and adapted it to define their own growth into selfhood and maturity, examining how colonialism, race, class, and gender, has shaped black protagonists from the early twentieth century to our contemporary moment.

From frauds to murderers; from renegades to artists; from prisoners, literal and figurative, to superheroes; from figures ostracized by their own communities, to those seeking the ties that bind in the wider world; growth for black individuals means contending with, summoning, and negotiating the rigors of power, for a voice that can surmount—if not totally free itself from—oppression. To paraphrase what Rowan Pope says to his daughter Olivia in the hit television program Scandal: no one is ever in charge, power is in charge.

Texts will include: Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson; Black Boy, Richard Wright; Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid; Sula, Toni Morrison; Luke Cage, Marvel

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

Mon./Wed. 5:00PM-6:15PM, New Cabell Hall 044

This course addresses various aspects of Francophone African Culture including , oral traditions, literature, theatre, cinema, and contemporary music and visual arts. 
Prerequisites: FREN 3031 & 3032

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

Mon./Wed. 2:00PM-3:15PM, New Cabell Hall 594

Study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. Ideological Constructions of the African as 'other'. Exoticism in cinema. History of African cinema. Economic issues in African cinema: production, distribution, and the role of African film festivals. The socio-political context. Women in African cinema. Aesthetic problems: themes and narrative styles.  Prerequisite: FREN 3032 and FREN 3584 or another 3000-level literature course in French.

Instructor: John Mason

Tues./ Thurs. 9:30AM-10:45AM, Nau Hall 211

Studies the history of Africa and its interaction with the western world from the mid-19th century to the present. Emphasizes continuities in African civilization from imperialism to independence that transcend the colonial interlude of the 20th century.

Instructor: Christina Mobley

Mon. 1:00PM-3:30PM, New Cabell Hall 042

The major colloquium is a small class (not more than 15 students) intended primarily but not exclusively for history majors who have completed two or more courses relevant to the topic of the colloquium. Colloquia are most frequently offered in areas of history where access to source materials or linguistic demands make seminars especially difficult. Students in colloquia prepare about 25 pages of written work distributed among various assignments. Some restrictions and prerequisites apply to enrollment.

Instructor: Elizabeth Varon

Mon./Wed. 10:00AM-10:50AM, McLeod Hall 2007

A history of the American South from the arrival of the first English settlers through the end of Reconstruction in 1877. Cross-listed with AAS 3231.

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00AM-11:50AM, New Cabell Hall 315

Studies the history of black Americans from the Civil War to the present.

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon./Wed 2:00PM-3:15PM, Nau Hall 341

Examines the history of the southern Civil Rights movement. Studies the civil rights movement's philosophies, tactics, events, personalities, and consequences, beginning in 1900, but concentrating heavily on the activist years between 1955 and 1968.

Instructor: Justene Hill

Wed. 3:30PM-6:00PM, Nau Hall 242

The major seminar is a small class (not more than 15 students) intended primarily but not exclusively for history majors who have completed two or more courses relevant to the topic of the seminar. The work of the seminar results primarily in the preparation of a substantial (ca. 25 pp. in standard format) research paper. Some restrictions and prerequisites apply to enrollment. See a history advisor or the director of undergraduate studies.

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Mon. 4:00PM-6:30PM, Gibson Hall 241

Intensive analysis of selected issues and concepts in comparative government.  Prerequisite: One course in PLCP or instructor permission.

Instructor: John Echeverrri-Gent

Tues. 3:30PM- 6:00PM

Examination of how politics affects the historical development of markets and the impact of inequality on the development of markets and economic development more generally.

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Thurs. 3:30PM-6:00PM, New Cabell Hall 187

Studies the government and politics of sub-Saharan Africa. Includes the colonial experience and the rise of African nationalism; the transition to independence; the rise and fall of African one-party states; the role of the military in African politics; the politics of ethnicity, nation- and state-building; patromonialism and patron-client relations; development problems faced by African regimes, including relations with external actors; and the political future of Southern Africa.  Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics and/or history of Africa.

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tues./ Thurs. 12:30PM-1:45PM, Gibson Hall 142

Introduces the mythology, ritual, philosophy, and religious art of the traditional religions of sub-Saharan Africa, also African versions of Christianity and African-American religions in the New World.

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues./Thurs. 9:30AM-10:45AM, Gibson Hall 241

This seminar examines changes in ethnographic accounts of African diaspora religions, with particular attention to the conceptions of religion, race, nation, and modernity found in different research paradigms. Prerequisite: previous course in one of the following: religious studies, anthropology, AAS, or Latin American studies

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mon 3:30PM-6:00PM, Lower West Oval Room 102

An exploration of religious concepts, practices and issues as addressed in African literature and film.  We will examine how various African authors and filmmakers weave aspects of Muslim, Christian and/or traditional religious cultures into the stories they tell. Course materials will be drawn from novels, memoirs, short stories, creation myths, poetry, feature-length movies, documentaries and short films.

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs 9:30AM-10:20AM, Maury Hall 104

This course will examine various types of inequality (race, class, gender) in the US and abroad. We will discuss sociological theories covering various dimensions of inequality, considering key research findings and their implications. We will examine to what extent ascriptive characteristics impact a person's life chances, how social structures are produced and reproduced, and how individuals are able or unable to negotiate these structures.

Instructor: Rose Buckelew

Mon./Wed. 10:00AM-10:50AM

Introduces the study of race and ethnic relations, including the social and economic conditions promoting prejudice, racism, discrimination, and segregation.  Examines contemporary American conditions, and historical and international materials.

Instructor: Ekaterina Makarova

Tues./ Thurs. 11:00AM-12:15PM, Wilson Hall 214

Examines both classic and contemporary debates within urban sociology and relates them to the wider concerns of social theory.  Topics include public space and urban culture, social segregation and inequality, the phenomenon of the global city, and the effects of economic change or urban social life.  Six credits of Sociology or instructor permission.