Spring 2018

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African American and African Studies Program

 

AAS 1020 – Introduction to African-American and African Studies

Professor Claudrena Harold

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: 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.

 

AAS 2224-001 – Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Professor Lisa Shutt

Wed. 2-4:30pm

Description: 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.

 

AAS 2224-002 – Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Professor Lisa Shutt

Tu 2-4:30pm

Description: 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.

 

AAS 3200 – Martin, Malcolm, and America

Professor Mark Hadley

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: An intensive examination of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. We will come to grips with the American legacy of racial hatred and oppression systematized in the institutions of antebellum chattel slavery and post-bellum racial segregation and analyze the array of critical responses to, and social struggles against, this legacy.

 

AAS 3500-001 – Readings in Black Feminism

Professor Telisha Bailey

Tu 6-8:30pm

Description: Reading, class discussion, and written assignments on a special topic in African-American and African Studies Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor. Primarily for fourth-year students but open to others.

 

AAS 3500-002 – Art of Black Social Movements

Professor Julius Fleming

Tu 6-8:30pm

Description: Reading, class discussion, and written assignments on a special topic in African-American and African Studies Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor. Primarily for fourth-year students but open to others.

 

AAS 3500-003 – Slavery since Emancipation

Professor Talitha LeFlouria

Mon 3:30-6pm

Description: Slavery did not end after the Civil War. Using race, gender, 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 abolishing slavery.

 

AAS 3500-004 – Early Caribbean Writing

Professor Marlene Daut

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: This course will exam nineteenth-century writing (in translation, where applicable) by people of color from the Anglophone, Francophone, and Hispanophone islands, which make up the Caribbean. Haitian independence in 1804 ushered in a vibrant and diverse print culture that included poetry, plays, newspapers, and historical writing. From the pages of La Gazette Royale d’Hayti (1811-1820), to the poems of Jean-Baptiste Romane (1807-1858), to the historical writings of Louis-Félix Boisrond-Tonnerre (1776-1806), to the operas of Juste Chanlatte (1766-1828), there arose a distinct nineteenth-century literary culture in Haiti. Beginning with national literary developments in Haiti, this course expands to consider nineteenth writing from Barbados, Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica, Antigua, and Bermuda.  These writings, both fictional and non-fictional, will help us to think about whether and/or how a coherent Caribbean literary tradition was developed in the nineteenth century across geographical, linguistic, national, and indeed, imperial lines.

 

AAS 3500-005 – Black Fire

Professor Claudrena Harold

TuTh 11am-12:15pm

Description: 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.

 

AAS 3500-006 – Soul and Spice: African American Foodways

Professor Lisa Shutt

Th 3:30-6pm

Description: How did African American food traditions grow to be so rich and varied and what are the roots of these foodways, going back to the slave coasts of West Africa and beyond? How did food traditions grow, morph and change throughout the Civil War, Emancipation, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Era, and the Reagan presidency through the Obama years? We will be examining regional differences, clashing ideologies, the relationships between food and health, connections between religious practices/beliefs and culinary traditions, the secrecy and power of the proprietary recipe, family and personal identities, taboos, gender, sexuality, bodies, ritual and kinship. We will read, hear, gather and tell stories. We will inquire after the stories of rural farmers who are the descendants of sharecroppers, urban “food desert” dwellers, urban activist farmers educating a new generation of city kids, matriarchs with secret, sacred peach pie recipes and old men and young uncles whose technique for smoking ribs or flair for frying fish can evoke powerful nostalgia and delight.

We will seek out stories with the intention of building a public internet resource that will preserve and pay tribute to African American food culture in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia. Students will work with our community partners to determine the categories of content to include in the online resource, most likely we will be conducting interviews, writing food narratives, collecting recipes and documenting cooking techniques.

 

AAS 3500-007 – Race, Culture, and Inequality

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: In this course, we 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, framing processes, symbolic boundaries, scripts, and racial grammar. 

 

AAS 3500-008 – Black Women and Mass Incarceration

Professor Talitha LeFlouria

Th 3:30-6pm

Description: One out of every 100 black women are under the supervision of the U.S. criminal justice system. This course explores the history of mass incarceration and its impact on African American women. It traces its origins to the post-emancipation South, where the roots of racial bias, criminalization, and mass incarceration were first laid. It ends in the modern-day cell block where structural racism, systemic discrimination, and infinite exclusion coalesce into keeping black women contained. Some of the subjects discussed in this course include: black women and convict leasing after the Civil War; abuses of the prison health care system; how the "War on Drugs" became a war on black women; black girls and the juvenile justice system;  the punishment of pregnancy; and carceral violence against black women. 

 

AAS 3559 -- _Mpathic Design

Professor Elgin Cleckley

Wed 9-11:30am

This seminar, part of the _mpathic design initiative, will create a design proposal for the Birth site of Carter G. Woodson in Buckingham County, Virginia. Students will be a part of an interdisciplinary UVa team led by Architecture and the Carter G. Woodson Institute, developing and presenting concepts to the Buckingham African American Life and History Society. This seminar, part of the _mpathic design initiative, will create a design proposal for the Birth site of Carter G. Woodson in Buckingham County, Virginia. Students will be a part of an interdisciplinary UVa team led by Architecture and the Carter G. Woodson Institute, developing and presenting concepts to the Buckingham African American Life and History Society. 

AAS 3652 – African American History since 1865

Professor Andrew Kahrl

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: This course studies the history of African Americans in the United States from emancipation to the present. 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 urbanization; movements for equality and justice under law, at the ballot box, in schools, in the workplace, and in public life; and the changing face of race and inequality from the civil rights era to the present.

 

AAS 4109 – Civil Rights Movement and the Media

Professor Aniko Bokroghkozy

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: Before the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, there was the Civil Rights Movement. And just as the current movement has benefited from and, to a significant extent, required attention from national media in order to achieve its political and social objectives, so too did the movement of fifty years ago. In both cases, activists in these movements harnessed the power of their era’s new media. This course, while focused on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has clear resonance and relevance for the current situation of heightened activism around racial justice. In this course we examine how the media responded to, engaged with, and represented this most powerful of social change movements. We will study a variety of media forms: Hollywood cinema, network television, mainstream newspapers, photojournalism, the black press, popular music, and news magazines in order to explore the relationship between the movement and the media. We will examine media artifacts as primary documents for what they can tell us about American race relations during this period. Through intensive classroom discussion, students will hone their abilities to interpret and analyze media artifacts as historical documents, as aesthetic forms, and as ideological texts.

 

AAS 4570 – Queer Africas

Professor Kwame Otu

Mon 3:30-6pm

Description: How does “Africa” shape the contours of queerness? Might “Africa” as geography and the “African” as body be inherently queer? Illuminating how contemporary accounts on the murder of David Kato, the Ugandan LGBT human rights activist in 2011, for instance, obscure the circumstances that preceded the execution of the royal pages in nineteenth century Uganda, now famously known as the Martyrs of Uganda, we will explore the complex iterations of afro-queer subjectivities in the the circum-Atlantic world. Importantly, we will examine the extent to which the afterlife of slavery in the Americas intersect with the state of postcoloniality in Africa, and how blackness and queerness get conditioned at these intersections. By providing an introduction to various artists, activists, and intellectuals in both Africa and its myriad diasporas, this interdisciplinary seminar will thus examine what it means to be both black and queer historically, spatially, and contemporarily. The “afro-queer” is a useful optic that will help to complicate how black queer embodiments are radical aesthetics that simultaneously drive imaginations and projects that disrupt racialized gendered normativities dictated by white supremacist regimes. Therefore, we will take seriously such questions as: 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 in the era of a Black Lives Matter part of a genealogy of black rejection and complicity? We will interrogate the transnational and transcultural articulations of race, sex, and gender, to highlight the dynamic relationship and tensions between the study of Africa and its myriad diasporas and Queer Studies.   

 

AAS 4570 – Race, Class, and Gender in a Time of Crisis

Professor Ashon Crawley

Tu 3:30-6pm

Description: The guiding question for this course is this: what can we make during crisis, against crisis? The history of western civilization – at least since 1492, but before that date as well – can be considered to be an ongoing crisis of theological, philosophical, material proportion. The genocide of indigenous peoples, the displacement – through theft and selling, through indentured servitude and enslavement – of African peoples are two nodal points in this crisis. The creation of race, the making gender cohere through property ownership. We exist in an ongoing crisis, a set of crises that have been unending. And it is felt, likewise, today. These crises effect how we think about race, class and gender, how they each are their own modality of existence and how they intersect. So we will read from various thinkers, view various films, listen to various musics, that will inform us about the ongoing crisis in our moment in time. But more than reading, viewing, listening, we will propose a way forward, a path clear, to responding to the crisis of our time. What will we do, who can we be, in order to produce justice?

American Studies

AMST 4321 -- Caribbean Latinx: Cuba, Puerto Rico and the DR

Professor Carmen Lamas

Tu 3:30-6pm

Description: In this course we will read texts by Latinx writers from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. We will explore how their works speak to issues of race, colonialism and imperialism based on their individual and shared histories. We will discuss their different political histories and migration experiences and how these in turn impact their literary and artistic productions in the US.

Anthropology

ANTH 2270 -- Race, Gender, and Medical Science

Professor Gertrude Fraser

TuTh 12-12:50pm

Description: Explores the social and cultural dimensions of biomedical practice and experience in the United States. Focuses on practitioner and patient, asking about the ways in which race, gender, and socio-economic status contour professional identity and socialization, how such factors influence the experience, and course of, illness, and how they have shaped the structures and institutions of biomedicine over time.

 

ANTH 2626 -- Imagining Africa

Professor James Igoe

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: 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

Drama

 

DRAM 3070 -- African-American Theatre

Professor Theresa Davis

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: 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

Economic

 

ECON 3640 -- The Economics of Africa

Professor Mark Plant

Tu 3:30-6pm

Description: Examine the economic problems confronting sub-Saharan Africa countries, focusing on what is needed to accelerate sustainable growth and reduce poverty. Use standard economic tools to gain an understanding of the economic management challenges faced by African policy makers and the similarities and differences between African countries. Explore Africa's relationship with the rest of the world, focusing on trade, aid and economic cooperation.

English

 

ENAM 3140 -- African-American Literature II

Professor Timothy Griffiths

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: African American literature was, according to Kenneth Warren, a literary genre born during the early Jim Crow era in order to address the specific problems of racial segregation, lynching, and disenfranchisement against black people. It ended not because racial discrimination ended, but because the territory, frameworks, and promises upon which this literature was founded have radically shifted. No longer only about black people’s lack of rights as American citizens, nor a response only to forms of social oppression, writing by black U.S. authors — or, more precisely, literature about the experiences of black people living in the U.S. — has become something that goes beyond what was originally intended for the genre. This raises a number of questions. Given that African American literature is still a widely-used scholarly term as well as a way to organize artistic activism — despite its “end” — what is the future of this body of work? Is the term merely historically useful, or is it being fruitfully revised or recuperated to account for and address antiblack racism in the twenty-first century? If African American literature has ended, then is there a new and necessary organizing term for work by black authors, from Toni Morrison to Colson Whitehead? What anxieties, progressions, or changes in the analysis of social identity — particularly through intersectionality — have emerged that have changed the way literature by black authors is studied and written? And finally, what could older artistic ethics of African American writing teach us about the problems and challenges facing the artistic response to antiblack racism in the present? Our questions, while beginning with a brief prelude on the invention of African American literature as a literary movement between 1890–1930, will primarily track the development of African American literature from the early rumblings of the Civil Rights movement in the 1940s to the recent wave of literature and art oriented toward ending police violence. Along the way, we will pay service to and properly historicize movements in African American cultural production, while figuring the way black feminism, queer activism, postmodernism, transnational thought, postcolonialism, class-based analysis, and neoliberalism have altered the prerogatives and practices of African American literature over time. Our class likely will address a variety of short works by a wide range of writers, which may include Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Nikki Giovanni, Amiri Baraka, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, Ntozake Shange, Samuel R. Delany, Colson Whitehead, Jacqueline Woodson, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Class will hybridize lecture and student-facilitated discussion. Assignments will include one or two discussion papers, a hybrid take-home/in-class midterm, and a final paper. 

 

ENAM 9500 -- African American Literary and Cultural Theory

Professor Maurice Wallace

Tu 2-4:30pm

Description: Topics range from the colonial period to the cultural influence of pragmatism. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses

 

ENCR 4500-001 -- Race in American Places

Professor Ian Grandison

Tu 5:30-8pm

Description: This interdisciplinary seminar uses the method of Critical Landscape Analysis to explore how everyday places and spaces, “landscapes,” are involved in the negotiation of power in American society.  Landscapes, as we engage the idea, may encompass seemingly private spaces (within the walls of a suburban bungalow or of a government subsidized apartment) to seemingly public spaces (the vest pocket park in lower Manhattan where the Occupy Movement was launched in September 2011; the Downtown Mall, with its many privately operated outdoor cafés, that occupy the path along which East Main Street once flowed freely in Charlottesville; or even the space of invisible AM and FM radio waves that the FCC supposedly regulates in the public’s interest). We launch our exploration by considering landscapes as arenas of the Culture Wars. With this context, we unearth ways in which places are planned, designed, constructed, and mythologized in the struggle to assert and enforce social (especially racial) distinctions, difference, and hierarchy. You will be moved to understand how publicly financed freeways were planned not only to facilitate some citizens’ modern progress, but also to block others from accessing rights, protections, and opportunities to which casually we believe all "Americans" are entitled. We study landscapes not only as represented in written and non-written forms, but also through direct sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience during two mandatory field trips to places in our region. In addition to informal group exercises and individual mid-term exam, critical field trip reflection paper, and final exam, you are required to complete in small groups a final research project on a topic you choose that relates to the seminar. Past topics have ranged from the racial politics of farmers’ markets in gentrifying inner cities to the gender--and the transgender exclusion—politics of universal standards for public restroom pictograms. Students showcase such results in an informal symposium that culminates the semester. Not only will you expand the complexity and scope of your critical thinking abilities, but also you will never again experience as ordinary the spaces and places you encounter from day to day.


 

ENCR 4500-002 -- Critical Race Theory

Professor Marlon Ross

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: What does race mean in the late 20th and early 21st century? Given the various ways in which race as a biological “fact” has been discredited, why and how does race continue to have vital significance in politics, economics, education, culture, arts, mass media, and everyday social realities? How has the notion of race shaped, and been shaped by, changing relations to other experiences of identity stemming from sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism? This course surveys major trends in race theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing on a series of critical flashpoints: 1) the crisis over black authenticity during the Black Power/Black Arts movement; 2) the schisms related to women of color feminism), focused on Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple and the Steven Spielberg film adaptation; 3) the debate over the social construction of race (poststructuralist theory); 4) the debate over queer racial identities, focused on two films, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman and Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight; 5) racial violence and the law, focused on the Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement; and 6) the aesthetic movement called Afrofuturism. While concentrating on theories of race deriving from African American studies, we’ll also touch on key texts from Native American, Asian-American, and Chicanx studies.

ENLT 2547-001 -- Black Writers in America

Professor Jeffery Allen

Tu 3:30-6pm

Description: Topics in African-American writing in the US from its beginning in vernacular culture to the present day; topics vary from year to year. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

 

ENLT 2547-002 -- Black Writers in America: Race, Crime, and Justice

Professor Sarah Ingle

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description:  Topics in African-American writing in the US from its beginning in vernacular culture to the present day; topics vary from year to year. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

 

ENMC 3559 -- Race and Ethnicity in Latinx Literature

Professor Carmen Lamas

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Modern and Contemporary Literature. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

 

ENMC 4500-002 -- Multiethnic American Fiction

Professor Caroline Rody

TuTh 11am-12:15pm

Description: American authors from a wide range of backgrounds have infused contemporary American fiction with new stories. This course will observe transformations of literary form, discourse, plot, and character in an era of cultural and linguistic multiplicity; global migration; contested notions of racial, gendered, religious, sexual, and national identity; and rising interest in both ethnic histories and possibilities for cross-ethnic encounter. Secondary material will include critical and theoretical essays. Primary texts will be drawn from the novels and stories of some of the following writers: Carlos Bulosan, James Baldwin, John Okada, Grace Paley, Alfred Kazin, Lore Segal, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Bapsi Sidhwa, Louise Erdrich, Sandra Cisneros, Bharati Mukherjee, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, Gish Jen, Nathan Englander, Mat Johnson, Edwidge Danticat, Galina Vromen, Karen Tei Yamashita, Nam Le, Rabih Alameddine, Nicole Krauss, Junot Diaz, Mohsin Hamid. 
Requirements: active reading and participation, short response papers, 2 major essays (total pages=20), class leading (in groups). 

 

French

 

FREN 3585-001 -- Reading Haiti

Professor Kaiama Glover

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: Interdisciplinary seminar in French and Francophone culture and society. Topics vary annually and may include literature and history, cinema and society, and cultural anthropology. Prerequisite: FREN 3032.

FREN 4743 -- Africa in Cinema

Professor Kandioura Dramé

MonWed 2-3:15pm

Description: 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.

FRTR 2580-001 -- Blackness in French

Professor Kaiama Glover

TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

Description: Introduces the interdisciplinary study of culture in France or other French-speaking countries. Topics vary from year to year, and may include cuisine and national identity; literature and history; and contemporary society and cultural change. Taught by one or several professors in the French department. https://www.dropbox.com/s/x3ekmmjhifuso66/BIF-UVA.pdf?dl=0

History

HIAF 2002 -- Modern African History

Professor John Mason

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: 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.

HIAF 3112 -- African Environmental History

Professor James La Fleur

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: This course explores how Africans changed their interactions with the physical environments they inhabited and how the landscapes they helped create in turn shaped human history. Topics covered include the ancient agricultural revolution, health and disease in the era of slave trading, colonial-era mining and commodity farming, 20th-century wildlife conservation, and the emergent challenges of land ownership, disease, and climate change.

HIAF 4511-001 -- Atlantic Migration

Professor Christina Mobley

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: 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. See a history advisor or the director of undergraduate studies.

HIUS 1501-001 -- American Slavery and the Law

Professor Justene Hill

Mon 1-3:30pm

Description: Introduces the study of history intended for first- or second-year students. Seminars involve reading, discussing, and writing about different historical topics and periods, and emphasize the enhancement of critical and communication skills. Several seminars are offered each term. Not more than two Introductory Seminars may be counted toward the major in history.

HIUS 2053 -- American Slavery

Professor Justene Hill

MoWe 11-11:50am

Description: This course will introduce students to the history of slavery in the United Sates.

 

Media Studies

MDST 3559-004 -- Screening White Supremacy

Professor William Little

MoWe 4-5:15pm

Description: This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Media Studies.

 

MDST 3760 -- #BlackTwitter and Black Digital Culture

Professor Meredith Clark

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: Using a mix of scholarly and popular-press readings and an examination of digital artifacts, we will analyze the creations and contributions of Black digital culture from the mid-90s to the present. Covering topics including the early Black blogosphere; the creation of niche content sites like BlackPlanet.com; the emergence of Black Twitter; the circulation of memes, and the use second-screening.

 

MDST 4109 -- Civil Rights Movement and the Media

Professor Aniko Bodroghkozy

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Description: Before the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement, there was the Civil Rights And just as the current movement has benefited from and, to a significant extent, required attention from national media in order to achieve its political and social objectives, so too did the movement of fifty years ago. In both cases, activists in these movements harnessed the power of their era’s new media. This course, while focused on the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, has clear resonance and relevance for the current situation of heightened activism around racial justice. In this course we examine how the media responded to, engaged with, and represented this most powerful of social change movements. We will study a variety of media forms: Hollywood cinema, network television, mainstream newspapers, photojournalism, the black press, popular music, and news magazines in order to explore the relationship between the movement and the media. We will examine media artifacts as primary documents for what they can tell us about American race relations during this period. Through intensive classroom discussion, students will hone their abilities to interpret and analyze media artifacts as historical documents, as aesthetic forms, and as ideological texts.

 

MDST 4320 -- Celebrities of Color

Professor Keara Goin

TuTh 5:30-6:45pm

Description: Paying particular attention to how race and ethnicity intersect with the phenomenon of celebrity in the media, this highly student-driven class will investigate celebrities of color through both historical and analytical lenses. In examining the increasingly self-aware culture associated with celebrity, we will discuss the ways in which celebrity is conceived, constructed, performed, and discussed, as well as how it shapes notions of identity.

 

MDST 4559-006 -- Black Girl Magic in Media

Professor Meredith Clark

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description:  This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Media Studies.

Music

MUEN 2690 -- African Music and Dance Ensemble Level 1

Professor Michelle Kisliuk

TuTh 5:45-7:30pm

Description: A practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka), with the intention of performing during and at the end of the semester. Traditions include drumming, dancing, and singing. Prerequisites: By audition. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required. May be repeated for credit.

 

MUSI 2120 -- History of Jazz Music

Professor Scott Deveaux

MoWe 1-1:50pm

Description: Survey of jazz music from before 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century; important instrumental performers, composers, arrangers, and vocalists. No previous knowledge of music required.

MUSI 3120 -- Jazz Studies

Professor Scott Deveaux

MoWeFr 11-11:50am

Description: Introduction to jazz as an advanced field of study, with equal attention given to historical and theoretical approaches. Prerequisite: MUSI 3310 or comparable fluency in music notation, and instructor permission.

Politics

 

PLAP 3500-001 -- Race and the Obama Presidency

Professor Larycia Hawkins

MoWe 2-3:15pm

Description:

 

PLAP 4841 -- Seminar in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

Professor David O'Brien

Th 1-3:30pm

Description: Explores the vexatious lines between the rights of individuals and those of the state in democratic society, focusing on such major issues as freedom of expression and worship; separation of church and state; criminal justice; the suffrage; privacy; and racial and gender discrimination. Focuses on the judicial process. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

Religion

 

RELG 3559-002 -- Race, Religion, Belonging US

Professor Katherine Mohrman

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Description: This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of Religious Studies.

RELG 3559-001 -- Blackness and Mysticism

Professor Ashon Crawley

Mo 2-4:30pm

Description: This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject of general religion.

Sociology

SOC 3410 -- Race and Ethnic Relations

Professor Milton Vickerman

MoWe 3:30-4:45pm

Description: 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.

SOC 4100 -- Sociology of the African-American Community

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 11am-12:15pm

Description: Study of a comprehensive contemporary understanding of the history, struggle and diversity of the African-American community.

SOC 4559-002 -- Race, Crime, and Punishment

Professor Rose Buckelew

MoWe 2-3:15pm

Description: This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of sociology.

Women and Gender Studies

 

WGS 4559 -- Gender, Race and Sport: A History of African-American Sportswomen

Professor Bonnie Hagerman

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

Description: This course seeks to explore the intersection of gender and race in sport, specifically examining the African-American female experience in sport. This course will ask students to consider whether sport was (and continues to be) the great equalizer for both African-American sportsmen and sportswomen, and to evaluate their portrayals (or lack thereof) in both the white and black media. We’ll consider athletic greats Jackie Robinson and Althea Gibson, as well as lesser known athletes Jack Johnson and Ora Mae Washington—why are some athletes destined to be celebrated while others are forgotten? We will also explore the activism of Muhammad Ali and Venus Williams, and the gendered differences of their campaigns, as well as the importance of sport as a platform for voicing inequality as we look not only at breaking color barriers during Jim Crow America, but “The Black Power Salute” of the 1960s, and taking a knee—and a stand—in 2016. Through primary source readings, documentaries and discussion we’ll seek to put the African-American sporting experience in context to see just how far athletes of color have actually come in the American sporting arena.

WGS 4750 -- Global History of Black Girlhood

Professor Corinne Field

We 6-8:30pm

Description: Until recently, many historians believed that black girls were inaccessible in archives, silenced by gender, race, and age. New research proves that the voices of black girls can be recovered through creative archival strategies.  In this class, you will contribute to the emergent field of black girls’ history by collaborating with students at the University of Michigan to design an online exhibition from primary source materials.  You will also participate in the Global History of Black Girlhood Conference to be held at the University of Virginia March 17-18, 2017.  Finally, you will write a research paper exploring your exhibit topic in more depth. Assignments for this class will introduce you to a range of sources from histories to novels, poetry, films, photographs, and paintings. Themes we will consider include: creativity, pleasure, and play; political activism and social change; slavery, servitude and freedom; kinship and family; identities and borders of belonging.  Throughout, we will ask how our understandings of history, contemporary issues, and our own identities change when we move black girls' experiences from the margins to the center.

Semester: 
Year Offered: 
2018
Graduate/Undergraduate: 
Undergraduate Courses