"Is Public School 'Choice" Good for the Black Community?" Professor Mary Pattillo

"Choice" has become the buzz word across the policy spectrum, especially in housing, schools, and health care. This talk questions the assumptions, ideology and philosophy undergirding public school choice, using data from two projects. The first focuses on how black community leaders work with whites to bring "choice" schools to a gentrifying black neighborhood in Chicago. The second interviews black parents navigating the landscape of public school "choice." Findings highlight the complicated role black community leaders play in both facilitating and hampering access to high quality public education for low-income African-Americans. Further findings suggest that socioeconomic differences influence, not only who "chooses," but also what black parents hope to gain when they do choose. While there is no definitive answer as to whether public school choice is good or bad for the black community, this research presents important empirical data which contribute to a better understanding of what is at stake in the educational policy of "choice."

$30 Million Investment Benefits STEM Research

Ebony Jones

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: Enslaved Convicts in Imperial Spaces:  Race and Penal Transportation during the Abolition Era

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of History North Carolina State University (tenure-track)

History
New York University

Oludamini Ogunnaike

Associate Professor of African Religious Thought and Democracy

Gibson 438

Alexandria Smith

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Alexandria Smith completed her Ph.D. in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University New Brunswick. Her research explores questions of sensation, embodiment, eroticism, and geography in literatures written by diasporic Black queer subjects. Her dissertation, Afrekete’s Room: Mapping the Shape of Space and Narrative in Black Queer Women’s Writing proposes sensual worldmaking as a literary strategy which employs lived and embodied experiences as a source of literary and theoretical knowledge about gender, Blackness, and queerness.

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
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"Black Women and the Carceral State, Then and Now: Conversation between Mary Ellen Curtin and Talitha L. LeFlouria"

This event is free and open to the public.

"Conversations in Caribbean Studies" Book Chat with Faith Smith

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"Enduring Questions, New Methods: Haitian Studies in the 21st Century"

In the spirit of Papa Legba (a Haitian lwa, or spirit, who acts as a crossroads between the human and non-human worlds), this conference is dedicated to what Gina Ulysse has called “New Narratives of Haiti.” We envision this conference as a series of roundtables. Dispensing with formal papers, we hope to facilitate conversation as a crossroads at which scholars might generatively explore Haitian history, art, politics, and culture in ways that contest narratives of fear, repression, failure, and dependency.  Our participants represent and intersect with a range of perspectives, including art history, history, literature, anthropology, religion, politics, development, and performance studies. Ultimately, the goal of this conference is to bring together leading thinkers and cultural actors (from Haiti, the United States, and the circum-Caribbean) to share information and thereby deepen our collective understanding of the prominent role Haiti and Haitians have had in making and critiquing the modern world-system.

 

Conference Schedule

THURSDAY, 12 APRIL

4:00-5:30PM – Haiti and the Digital Humanities
Minor Hall 110

Nathan H. Dize, Julia Gaffield,  Marlene L. Daut
– moderated by Kaiama L. Glover

5:45PM – Welcome Remarks 
Deborah McDowell
 

Clark 107

6:00-7:30PM – Building Programs for Haitian Studies in the United States

Cécile Accilien, Laurent Dubois, Claudine Michel, Jean Eddy Saint-Paul
– moderated by Robert Fatton, Jr.

7:30PM – Reception

FRIDAY, 13 APRIL

Minor Hall 110

9:30-11:00AM – Politics and Intellectual History

Jean Casimir, Sara Johnson, Délide Joseph, Matthew Smith
– moderated by Marlene L. Daut

COFFEE

11:15AM-12:30PM – Translating Haitian Literature

Kaiama L. Glover, Deborah Jenson, Nadève Ménard
– moderated by Njelle Hamilton

LUNCH

2:00-3:30PM  – Thinking Vodou: Faith, the Archive, the Law

Kyrah Malika Daniels, Colin Dayan, Christina Mobley, Kate Ramsey
–moderated by Gina Athena Ulysse

COFFEE

3:45-5:00PM – Haitian Kreyòl

Michel DeGraff, Mariana Past, Jacques Pierre
– moderated by Christina Mobley

5:00-5:30PM Closing Remarks

"Keep the Movement Coming On:" A Symposium in Memory of Julian Bond

"Keep the Movement Coming On:" A Symposium in Memory of Julian Bond

October 20 - 21, 2016

"Keep the Movement Coming On" is a multi-interdisciplinary symposium organized in remembrance of Julian Bond, honoring the life and legacy of this lodestar in the modern movement for civil rights and social justice. It is altogether fitting that we host this symposium here at the University of Virginia, where Julian Bond taught for twenty years—from 1992-2012—in the Corcoran Department of History. By conservative estimates, over 5,000 students enrolled in his blockbuster course on the History of the Civil Rights Movement, "making his past our present," as one student noted. Indeed, the phrase "making his past our present" captures perhaps one of the major objectives of this symposium, which looks backward and forward simultaneously: backward at the broad arc of Bond’s 50-year career as a legislator, educator, and life-long champion for civil rights and social justice, and forward to what his illustrious career demands of those of us who strive to honor him over the next two days.

Watch video from the symposium on the Carter G. Woodson Institute's YouTube page

"New Negroes from Africa”

award-winning

History

"Silence is Not an Option"

"The Changing Same": Black Women's Literature, Criticism, and Theory

"The Haunted and the Hunted:" A Flash Seminar on Stop-and-Frisk

The Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies in the University of Virginia’s College of Arts & Sciences will present a screening of the documentary video, “The Hunted and the Haunted: An Inside Look at the New York Police Department’s Stop-and-Frisk Policy,” followed by a panel discussion, on Nov. 5 at 6:30 p.m. in Minor Hall Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

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#TRANSCRIBEBOND Crowdsourcing Event

#TRANSCRIBEBOND Crowdsourcing Event Information

Date: Wednesday, August 15, 2018 10 AM to 4:00 PM

On Wednesday, August 15, your help is needed to record the writings of civil rights leader Julian Bond in an online archive. By participating, you will ensure that future generations can engage with the writings of one of the foremost leaders of the civil rights movement.

How to Participate:

Transcribing is easy and can be done from any computer. You can commit any amount of time you can spare for the project, from 30 minutes to one hour or more!  Follow these easy steps:

  1. RSVP your intentions to participate here.
  2. On August 15th, go to www.fromthepage.com
    • How to transcribe:
      • You can create or edit transcriptions by modifying the text entry field and saving. Each modification is stored as a separate version of the page, so that it should be easy to revert to older versions if necessary.
      • Registered users can also add notes to pages to comment on difficult words, suggest readings, or discuss the texts.

  3. Begin transcribing!
  4. Be sure to promote this fun and easy crowdsourcing effort on your social media accounts using the hashtag #TranscribeBond.

About the Julian Bond Papers Project

The University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute, in partnership with the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, Center for Digital Editing, Scholars’ Lab, and Virginia Humanities, launch The Papers of Julian Bond project in August 2018. The crowdsourced transcription event is the first stage in the ultimate production of The Papers of Julian Bond – a digital scholarly edition, which will be called The Essential Julian Bond.

About Julian Bond

Civil rights icon Julian Bond fought for social justice and equality from the time he co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 until his death in 2015. In between those years he served in the Georgia legislature, co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, served as chairman of the NAACP, engaged in political activism on various fronts – and taught more than 5,000 students as a University of Virginia professor. 

Questions

Any questions about the transcription event and the project can be directed to kblizzard@virginia.edu

Locations:

Those based in Charlottesville are invited to transcribe with us at one of the following locations: 

110 Minor Hall, the Carter G. Woodson Institute, Minor Hall, McCormick Rd, Charlottesville, VA 22904

The Scholars’ Lab in Alderman Library: 160 McCormick Rd, Charlottesville, VA 22904

Shenandoah Joe on Ivy Road: 2214 Ivy Rd #109, Charlottesville, VA 22903

Virginia Center for the Book at the Jefferson School: 233 4th St NW, Charlottesville, VA 22903

 

 

#TranscribeBond Event

 

#TranscribeBond Event Information

The Carter G. Woodson Institute, in partnership with the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections LibraryCenter for Digital EditingScholars’ Lab, and Virginia Humanities, announces the launch of The Papers of Julian Bond with a special two-day event.

On August 14, starting at 4:00 PM, the scope and goals of the edition will be announced at an event held in 110 Minor Hall, with a reception to follow at 5:30 PM. The next day, on August 15, from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM, all will have the opportunity to advance this historic project by transcribing a wide and varied sample of his papers at various hubs around Charlottesville, including 110 Minor Hall, the Scholars’ Lab in Alderman Library, Shenandoah Joe on Preston Avenue, and the Virginia Center for the Book at the Jefferson School. Additionally, from 12:00 to 1:00 PM on August 15, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library will host an exhibition of original Julian Bond materials in their Byrd-Morris Room.

Join us in celebrating the life and legacy of Julian Bond by preserving and engaging with his words. RSVP for the event here. Those wishing to participate but unable to join in person can still contribute remotely, by accessing our project workspace on FromThePage when it goes live in August and engaging online with the hashtag #TranscribeBond.

'Fearless' Poet Claudia Rankine to read, discuss events in Ferguson

Claudia Rankine, one of the most innovative poets writing today, will visit the University of Virginia on Wednesday. She will read from her just-published book, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” and lead an open discussion focusing on recent events in Ferguson, Missouri.

'Juneteenth' to be commemorated with film screening

A screening of the recent film “Sugarcoated Arsenic” will take place on June 20 in honor of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and of “Juneteenth,” the oldest known celebration commemorating the end of slavery. Sponsored by the University of Virginia Library’s “Common Ground Community,” the film, which explores African-American life during the 1970s at the University, will be shown at 3 p.m. in the Clemons Library’s Viz Lounge.

30th Anniversary Symposium will explore 'African American and African Studies: At Work in the World"

March 30, 2011 — The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a symposium April 7-9 which will explore a range of topics, including education, labor and economics, migration, bio-genetics, sexuality, the African diaspora and ideas of kinship.

30th Anniversary Symposium: African American and African Studies at Work in the World 

We at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies are excited to celebrate our Thirtieth Anniversary. Founded in 1981 as the Institute for African American Research, it was renamed a year later in honor of Virginia native, Carter G. Woodson. Armstead L. Robinson, the Institute's founding director, began his tenure with a two-fold mandate: to promote and enhance the research and teaching of African American Studies in the schools and departments of the University of Virginia and to establish a center for research in African American Studies at this major southern university, the first of Virginia's institutions of higher learning to establish an African American Studies program. Also Professor of History, Armstead Robinson held this position until his untimely death in 1994. Since then, each subsequent head—Acting Director William Jackson, Director Reginald Butler, Interim Director Scot French, Interim Director Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton, and now Director Deborah E. McDowell (2008-)—has worked to advance the Institute's founding mandate. A small, but vital institution, "the Woodson," as it is affectionately known, has always depended on the energy of a committed handful of core faculty, including Professors Roquinaldo Ferreira, Claudrena Harold, and Marlon Ross, as well as supportive faculty affiliates who have staffed its committees, mentored its fellows, advised its undergraduate majors, and taught the wide array of courses that comprise our interdisciplinary program.

Click here for a reproduction of the symposium program 

View UVa Today's coverage of the symposium and the dedication to the Catherine "Kitty" Foster Memorial Site

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A Conversation on Black Women and Mass Incarceration

Listen to powerful leaders at the forefront of reentry and criminal justice reform discuss their experiences with mass incarceration. Discover how they transformed their lives into visions for systemic change, and how they are empowering others to do the same.

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A Conversation with Junot Diaz and Njelle Hamilton on "Writing Race, Futurity, and Apocalypse in Afro-Caribbean Diaspora"

Event is free and open to the public.

A Different Day

History

A House Divided: Slavery and Emancipation in Delaware, 1638–1865

A Little Child Shall Lead Them

History

A Little God

History

A Little Taste of Freedom

award-winning

History

A New Plantation South

African-American Studies

A New Plantation South: Land, Labor, and Federal Favor in Twentieth-Century Arkansas

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A Reading By Poet Joshua Bennett

joshua.bennett.oct.10.poster.jpg

AAIHS 9th Annual Conference

#AAIHS 2024 - Reparations: Past, Present, and Future


Quick links:

Location(s):


Thursday, March 7

Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, 233 4th St NW, Charlottesville

Friday - Saturday, March 8-9


University of Virginia

Minor Hall, 102 Amphitheater Way, Charlottesville, VA 22903*

Warner Hall, 128 Amphitheater Way, Charlottesville, VA 22903*

*Parking available in Lot C-1 (see AAIHS Map below)

Maps (Building, Parking, Campus)

AAIHS Map (with detail for parking, hotels, and nearby restaurants)

Minor/Warner Street View (street level view of buildings)

UVA Visitor Map (main campus map)

WiFi Connection for UVA Guests


We recommend that conference participants who have access to "eduroam" use the "eduroam" network to connect.

If you do not have access to "eduroam" please follow the instructions below to join "UVA Guest":

  • Open a web browser and you should be automatically directed to the "Welcome to UVA Wireless" website
    • If you are not redirected automatically, enter "connect.virginia.edu"
  • Click "continue" under the guest section
  • Enter the passcode and click "log-in"
  • Short-Term Guest passcode: zwad2pd

For more information about connecting to UVA networks, visit UVA's IT website

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AAIHS Awards Ceremony and Ta-Nehisi Coates Keynote Discussion

AAIHS Awards Ceremony and Ta-Nehisi Coates Keynote Discussion: 5:30 - 7:00 pm, Warner 209

To conclude the first day’s events, conference attendees will experience an enlightening keynote featuring Ta-Nehisi Coates , and an awards ceremony to celebrate the innovative scholarship being produced by members of AAIHS. We will honor the winners of AAIHS’s annual awards: the Pauli Murray Book Prize, the C.L.R. James Research Fellowship, the Maria Stewart Journal Article Prize, and the Du Bois-Wells Graduate Student Paper Prize.

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AAIHS: Day 1

Below are the times and locations for Sessions 1 - 3 and the luncheon film screening with Robin Rue Simmons

Session 1: 8:30am-10:15am

1. Abolition, Control, and Preservation: Bearing Witness to the Archive’s Demand for Educational Reparations

Minor 110

All sessions run from 8:30 am - 10:15 am

Chair: Derrick P. Alridge, University of Virginia

Darrion Wallace, Stanford University
Lesson on Manifesting Freedom and Emancipation: International Perspectives on Educational Reparations from Black Anti-Slavery Abolitionists of the 19th Century

Christian Walkes, Harvard University
Preserving Pride: The Black Schoolhouse and Educational Reparations

Zenzile Reddick, Harvard University
Maximum Feasible Participation: The History of Community Control and the Future of Educational Reparations 

2. Education and Reparations

Warner 110

Chair: Lily Santoro, Southeast Missouri State University

Peter H. Wood, Duke University
Two Centuries of Forced African American Illiteracy

Tatiana McInnis, North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics

Reparations: A Pedagogy of Possibility

Emily Masghati, Penn State Behrend
The Julius Rosenwald Fund and the Subversion of Restorative Justice in Higher Education

3. International Dimensions of Reparations

Warner 104

Chair: Robert Greene II, Claflin University

Sanyu Mulira, Spelman College
Gaudeloupe, Mé 1967, and the Dangerous Quagmire of Autonomy in the French Caribbean

Nicholas Andersen, Tufts University
The Redemption of Africa and Reparations

Nigel Westmaas, Hamilton College
Reparations and Reconciliation: Exploring the Significance of Apology and Restitution for Slavery in Guyana

Session 2: 10:30 am - 12:15 pm

4. The Long History of Reparations

Minor 110

All sessions run from 10:30 am - 12:15 pm

Chair: Chloe Celeste Porche, University of Virginia

Cameron Sauers, Penn State University
The Original Case Against Reparations: James Beecher and the Betrayal of Order No. 15

Timothy Kumfer, Georgetown University
“If We Want to Keep It, We’ll Have to Fight For It”: The Adams Morgan Organization and the Origins of Community Reinvestment

Meredith F. Coleman-Tobias, Mount Holyoke College
Thirst: Spiritual Reparation and Sobonfu Somé’s Po(r)table Ritual

5. Roundtable: Descendant Communities and the Land in Viriginia

Warner 110

Chair: Justin Reid, Founder of Griffin Blvd Archives
Hannah Scruggs, Harvard University and Descendant Organizer

Auriana Woods, The Getting Word Oral History Project
Niya Bates, Princeton University and Founder of the Scuffletown Project

6. Black Childhoods, Intellectual History & Repair: A Discussion

Warner 104

Chair: Paula C. Austin, Boston University

Ashleigh Greene Wade, University of Virginia

Justene Hill Edwards, University of Virginia

Corinne T. Field, University of Virginia

Luncheon and Film Session: 12:30 pm - 2:30 pm 

Minor 125

Screening of The Big Payback, featuring film Q&A with Robin Rue Simmons

Session 3: 2:30 pm - 4:15 pm

8. Towards a Vocabulary of Repair: Black Life in Colombia

Minor 110

All sessions run from 2:30 pm - 4:15 pm.  

Chair: Jameelah Morris, Stanford University

Jameelah Morris, Stanford University
The Temporal Experience of Repair: Generational Struggles for Livability in Urban Colombia

Amber H. Henry, University of Virginia
A Refrigerator on the Side of the Road: Palenquera Women and the Politics of (Dis)Repair

Fatima Siwaju, University of Virginia
The 2017 Paro Cívico in Buenaventura: Embodied Politics of Repair in the Colombian Pacific

9. Panel Discussion: “Black Women’s Biographies” featuring Amrita Myers

Minor 125

Chair: Paula C. Austin, Boston University

Amrita Myers, Indiana University, Bloomington 

10. Black Debts, Black Fortunes: Discussing Reparations for Black Womxn and Their Communities

Warner 110

Chair: Lydia Lindsey, North Carolina Central University

Erica Duncan, New York University
Enslaved and Freed Black Women’s Claims for Housing and Sustenance in the Bahamas

Carmin Wong, Penn State University
On Various Subjects: Phyllis Wheatley, the Foremother of Early American Poetry

Sonya Williams, New York University
Re-covering the Discourse of Reparative Justice & Negritud in the Works of Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe & Delia Zapata Olivella

AAIHS Awards Ceremony and Ta-Nehisi Coates Keynote Discussion: 5:30 - 7:00 pm, Warner 209

AAIHS Awards Ceremony

Ta-Nehisi Coates Keynote Discussion

Warner 209

Reception: 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm Minor Hall Lobby

Join us for refreshments in the lobby of Minor Hall following the keynote discussion with Ta-Nehisi Coates

  

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AAIHS: Day 2

Below are the times and locations for Sessions 1 - 3 and the closing reception featuring the music of JoVia Armstrong

Session 1: 8:30am-10:15am

11. Do You See God in Us? Slavery, Reparations, and Repair in Midwestern Jesuit University​

Minor 110

All sessions run from 8:30 am - 10:15 am

Chair: Luther Adams, University of Washington Tacoma

Robin Proudie, Executive Director of the Descendants of the Saint Louis University Enslaved

Kamm Howard, Executive Director of Reparations United

Christopher Tinson, Saint Louis University

12. Modern Ideas About Reparations

Warner 104

Chair: Kersuze Simeon-Jones, University of South Florida

Willie Mack, University of Missouri
“It Was an Attack On All of Us”: Haitians and Black Americans in New York City and the Korean Grocer Boycott

Karen Sotiropoulos, Cleveland State University
“A Citizen of a Country That Does Not Yet Exist”: Airlift Africa and Higher Education During the Bandung Era

Ashleigh Cartwright, University of Pennsylvania
White Power and Profit in U.S. Public School Integration

Jacob Ivey, Florida Memorial University
“We Have Got the Power Brokers’ Attention”: Black Economic Power and the Anti- Apartheid Movement in South Florida

13. The Ideologies of Reparations

Warner 110

Chair: Gregory Mixon, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Nicole Viglini, Penn State University
“It Would Only Be An Act of Justice to Pay Us”: Propertied Black Women’s Ideologies of Repair in the Era of Freedom

Keston K. Perry, University of California, Los Angeles
Entangled Histories, Ecological Imperialism and Pan-African Futures

Rozanne Gooding Silverwood, Columbia University
Reconciling a Sovereign Debt: A Close Reading of the FWP Narratives That Preserve the Erased History of Indian Slaveholding

Nicole M. Gipson, University of Bristol Reparations: A Transatlantic Project

Session 2: 10:30 am - 12:15 pm

14. Building a Cast for Reparations

Minor 110

All sessions run from 10:30 am - 12:15 pm

Chair: Justin Hansford, Howard University

Linda J. Mann, George Mason University

Corey C. Shaw, D.C. Legacy Project Director of Empower DC

Charkera Ervin, Human Rights Counsel for UN Permanent Forum on People of African Descent

15. Reparations and American Empire

Warner 104

Chair: Robert Greene II, Claflin University

DJ Polite, Augusta University
U.S. Jim Crow Empire to Revolutionary Cuba

Tejasvi Nagaraja, Cornell University

War, Anti-War and Reparations

Kimberly F. Monroe, Trinity Washington University
“Down South in the Summertime”: Assata Shakur, Reparations, and the Black Freedom Struggle

Swords into Ploughshares Presentation 12:30 - 1:30 pm

Minor 110

Andrea Douglas, Executive Director of the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

Jalane Schmidt, Director of the UVA Democracy Initiative’s Memory Project

Swords into Ploughshares: The Future of the Robert E. Lee Statue”  is an innovative project to melt down the statue of Robert E. Lee that formerly stood in one of Charlottesville’s public parks and use the bronze to make a new work of public art.

Session 3: 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm

16. Author Meets Engaged Readers: Roundtable on Andrew W. Kahrl’s The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America

Minor 125

All sessions run from 1:45 pm - 3:30 pm.  

Devin Fergus, University of Missouri
Camille Walsh, University of Washington Bothell
Esther Cyna, Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin, Paris-Saclay Mike Amezcua, Georgetown University
Response by Andrew Kahrl, University of Virginia

17. Reparations and the Long Civil Rights Era

Minor 110

Chair: Jacob Ivey, Florida Memorial University

Andrew J. Douglas, Morehouse College
Reparative Money: The Monetary Theory of Robert S. Browne

Sam Klug, Loyola University Maryland
More Than a Manifesto: Reparations and the Political Economy of Black Power

Adriana Green, University of California

Berkeley 40 Acres and the Moon

Reception, 3:30 pm-5:15 pm, Minor Hall Lobby

Enjoy refreshments and fellowship in the lobby of Minor Hall ahead of JoVia Armstrong's musical performance

Special Musical Performance by JoVia Armstrong, 5:30 - 6:15 pm, Warner 209

Join us for a special musical performance by JoVia Armstrong (UVA Music) and her band!

  

AAS Alumna Niya Bates featured in UVA Today article

Niya Bates' work at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello was featured in UVA Today: Many Stories to Tell Alumna Niya Bates Shares African American History and Culture. Bates is an alumna of the AAS undergraduate program. 

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AAS Alumni Panel

Please join us this Friday for an AAS Alumni Panel from 1:00 - 2:30 p.m. in Minor 125. There will be good food to share following the event.

Friday, April 22, 2016

Our alumni have a lot to say about how they have used the knowledge and skills they acquired as AAS students in their careers and beyond. We have a wonderful group of panelists joining us. Short biographies of the participants can be seen below.

 

Please do plan to join us! We look forward to seeing you there.

Joshua Adams (AAS 2012):

Mr. Joshua Adams is an arts & culture journalist with B.A. in African American Studies and a M.A. in Journalism from USC. Before grad school, he worked as a journalism instructor in the Division Street 2013 program for Young Chicago Authors, a non-profit focusing on youth empowerment through performance art. Joshua currently works as a freshman English teacher at Urban Prep Englewood. His writings often explain current and historical cultural phenomenon through personal narratives. Writing and Music are his biggest passions, connecting the dots is his life goal. He has had work published on Ebony.com, has been a guestblogger for HuffPost, has pieces aggregated by The Root, and more. He has also interned at HipHopDX, the world's largest website for Hip Hop news.

Jennifer Bowles (AAS 2014):

Ms. Jennifer Bowles was elected to the Martinsville, Virginia City Council on November 4, 2014, the youngest individual ever to have been chosen by that city's voters and only the second African American woman to be elected to that office. She began her four year term on January 1, 2015.  After taking her oath of office she was elected Vice-Mayor for a two year term. Jennifer is a member of the West Piedmont District Planning Commission and founder  of the Martinsville chapter of the Millennials and is one of the key players in the region's politics. 

 

Tomika Ferguson (AAS 2007):

Dr. Tomika Ferguson is the Director of Community Partnerships at James Madison University. In this role, she oversees a number of programs at JMU,  and develops and strengthens partnerships with businesses, professional associations, K-12 schools and community organizations. She is passionate about expanding access to higher education for students of color, those from low-income households, student-athletes and students who will be the first in their family to attend college. She speaks to students in grades K-12 and their families, higher education professionals and community organizations about how to prepare for, be successful in, and graduate from college. She utilizes her personal experiences as a first-generation college student from a rural community, relevant research, my academic and professional experiences to demystify the ways students can be confident in themselves, identify and articulate their strengths, and be successful to accomplish their goals. Dr. Ferguson holds advanced degrees in Education, Higher Education Administration and Student Affairs from the University of Indiana, Bloomington.  She is a board member of Big Brothers/Big Sisters of Harrisonburg-Rockingham County and in her first year following her graduation from U.Va., she was a College Adviser with the Virginia College Adviser Corps.  

 

LaTasha Levy (AAS 2000):

 

We are grateful that Dr. LaTasha Levy has been in residence here at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for the past three academic years. While many of our students have had the benefit of her instruction during that time, many do not realize that she is a graduate of U.Va.'s AAS program or that she directed the Luther P. Jackson Black Cultural Center between 2001-2004. After teaching humanities at the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, Dr. Levy went on to earn a M.P.S. in Africana Studies at Cornell University and a Ph.D. in African American Studies from Northwestern University. We will miss her very much when she leaves to begin her new tenure-track position in American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington.

 

Kristen Lucas (AAS 2009):

 

Ms. Kristen Lucas works as a Family Services Associate with Habitat for Humanity of Greater Charlottesville, where she has connected potential partner families, family advocates, donors and community stakeholders since January 2013. She is a certified Housing Counselor through the Virginia Association of Housing Conselors. Before working with Habitat for Humanity, Ms. Lucas served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica.

AAS Alumnus J.T. Roane co-authored an article the Black Agenda Report

J.T. Roane, an alumnus of the AAS undergraduate program, co-authored an article the Black Agenda Report: A Totally Different Form of Living: On the Legacies of Displacement and Marronage as Black Ecologies 

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AAS Annual Soul Food Dinner

​​---Catered by Mel's Cafe

AAS & AS Students,  We are looking forward to hosting you at this special, informal event to celebrate the end of classes and to fortify ourselves for papers and exams​.

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AAS Annual Soul Food Dinner

​​---Catered by Mel's Cafe

AAS & AS Students,  We are looking forward to hosting you at this special, informal event to celebrate the end of classes and to fortify ourselves for papers and exams​.

AAS Diploma Ceremony

General Information:

Final Exercises for the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences will be on Saturday, May 21, 2022. The Lawn ceremony will start promptly at 10 a.m. For information on the Lawn ceremony, including parking, transportation and other logistics, see: https://majorevents.virginia.edu/finals/saturday-ceremonies. For additional information about Finals Weekend, please visit:  www.virginia.edu/finals.


 

AAS Diploma Ceremony information:

Date: Saturday May 21, 2022

Time: 12:30 – 2:00pm,

Location: Minor Hall Auditorium (all weather location) 

Reception to follow at 2:00 pm

  

Disability and Accommodations

Minor Hall’s accessible entrance is on the left side of the building. Once you’ve entered the building, wheelchair ramps are located on the right side of the auditorium, which will take you to dedicated accessible seating inside the hall.

 

Tickets

-     Each graduating student will receive up to 5 tickets for the department ceremony

-     Kindly pick up your tickets from Ms. Debbie Best (dab8s@virginia.edu) in 108 Minor Hall by Thurs May 5 by 3pm.

 

Graduating students logistics:

-     Kindly arrive in Minor Hall no later than 12:30pm on Saturday, May 21st

-     Line up in alphabetical order in hallway on left when you enter Minor Hall

-     We’ll take a group photo once all students have arrived

-     Graduating students will proceed in order into the auditorium through left entrance, walk down the middle aisle, stand in front of assigned seat until all students are in position, then sit together for the start of the program

-     During the diploma ceremony: when your name is called, stand, proceed to the podium to receive your diploma, pause for a photo, proceed up the center aisle then toward the middle of the auditorium, then back to your seat as your bio is read.

 

Reception:

-     After the department ceremony, we will have a reception outside the auditorium from 2:00 - 3:00pm, catered by Pearl Island

-     If you haven’t yet done so, please inform Ms. Debbie Best and/or Prof. Hamilton of any dietary restrictions by May 13 by filling out the survey at https://forms.gle/4h6jo9Fadv3yg6Jv6

 

Contact:

For any questions or concerns, please email Prof. Njelle Hamilton (nwh9f) or Ms. Debbie Best (dab8s).

 

We look forward to celebrating your accomplishments with you!

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AAS Diploma Ceremony 2022

For information about the 2022 AAS Diploma ceremony, please see the following page:

 

https://woodson.as.virginia.edu/aas-diploma-ceremony

 

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AAS Faculty Brown Bag Lecture: Ashon Crawley

“Blackpentecostal Sound and Augmented Reality”

This talk explores the relationship between the practices of prayer and praise that emerge from within Blackpentecostal spaces and the emergence of an art  imagination and practice that includes analogue painting, performance and digital augmented reality applications. I am arguing that a Blackpentecostal imagination, a Blackpentecostal method, can inform a black feminist, blackqueer anethical move towards liberation, justice and joy.

 

Prof. Crawley is Associate Professor of  Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. His research and teaching experiences are in the areas of Black Studies, Performance Theory and Sound Studies, Philosophy and Theology, Black Feminist and Queer theories. His first book project, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), is an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imaginings otherwise. He is currently working on three projects; The Lonely Letters (Duke 2020), an autobiofiction that explores the relationship between blackness, quantum mechanics, mysticism and love; a third book, tentatively titled “Made Instrument,” about the role of the Hammond Organ in the Black Church, in Black sacred practice and in Black social life more broadly; and a third project about blackness and a critique of western constructions of mysticism. 

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AAS Ice Cream Social

Come and Join Us!

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AAS Majors Meet & Greet

AAS Program:

Professor Anne Rotich and the AAS Swahili Program featured in UVA Today

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AAS Soul Food Dinner

---Catered by Mel's Cafe

AAS & AS Students,  We are looking forward to hosting you at this special, informal event to celebrate the end of classes and to fortify ourselves for papers and exams​. Please try and RSVP through the invitation you received earlier this week. 

This has been a very difficult few weeks for all of us and hopefully, this will be a time to gather informally, decompress a bit, to share some time together talking about how to bring about CHANGE and healing.

AAS Spring 2023 courses

View current course listings page

Spring 2023

These course listings are subject to change. Courses with low enrollment may be canceled. The official system of record at the University of Virginia is the Student Information System (SIS). www.virginia.edu/sis. Make sure to discuss your curricular plan and academic progress report with your AAS major advisor during Advising Period, October 24 to November 4.


 

Core Courses

All majors and minors must complete the 1010 and 1020 core course sequence.

 

AAS 1020 – Introduction to African-American and African Studies II.

Prof. Ashon Crawley. Tu, Th 12:30-1:45pm , Nau 101 

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century. Fulfills: 1010/1020 requirement

 

 

HIAF 1501 Introductory Seminar in African History: Runaways, Rebels, and Revolutionaries.

Prof. James La Fleur; 

Th 4:00-6:30pm, Bryan Hall 235

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. Fulfills: African Studies Minor requirement

 

AAS 7000 – Introduction to Africana Studies.

Prof. Nasrin Olla

 Mon 3:30-6:00pm. New Cabell 068.

This is an introductory course that will survey key texts in the interdisciplinary fields of African American, African, and Caribbean Studies. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to identify and understand the major themes that have shaped the development of the discipline of Africana Studies. Assignments in the course will help students to develop an understanding of both the methodological and theoretical challenges that prevail in studies of the African Diaspora, such as learning to evaluate sources and to acquire an awareness of, as well as to question, the silences, repressions, omissions, and biases involved in interpreting writing both from and about the African diaspora. Some of the key terms that students will become familiar with are: ethnocentrism, white privilege, race, racism, hegemony, colonialism, imperialism, agency, diaspora, power, identity, modernity, nation, citizenship, sovereignty, and globalization, as well as how these concepts intersect with ideas of both gender and class. NB: For Graduate Students Only

 

 


 

Social Science or History

All majors must take at least one SSH course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Race and Politics, or 4000 research.

 

AAS 3300 Social Science Perspectives on African American and African Studies

Prof. Sabrina Pendergrass. Tu Th 2:00-3:15. New Cabell 183

This course will focus on major debates, theories, and methodological approaches in the social sciences that contribute to African American Studies. The course helps students to consider how a multidisciplinary approach enriches efforts to analyze such issues as housing, education, and incarceration as they relate to the African Diaspora. Fulfills: SSH

 

AAS 3500.001 Race and Medicine in America from 1960-Present

Prof. Liana Richardson. Tu Th 11:00-12:15. New Cabell 064

In this course, we will examine the medical practices involved in the social construction of racial difference and the persistence of racial health inequities in the U.S. during the last 50 years. Drawing from relevant scholarship in sociology, anthropology, and history, we will discuss the origins and consequences of medical racism, as well as the continued role of medicine in racial meaning-making. Case studies and historical accounts about the (mis)use of race in the clinical encounter and in diagnostic and treatment algorithms, as well as the racialization of various health issues (e.g., obesity, heart disease, and mental illness), will provide illustrative examples. We will also consider why the medicalization of social issues—from collective violence to drug addiction—is often a racialized process, focusing especially on how contrasting schemas of medicalization and criminalization result in the differential labeling and treatment of racial groups as either victims or villains. Lastly, we will discuss the consequences of these phenomena for health equity, social justice, and human/civil rights, as well as the potential strategies for addressing them. Fulfills: SSH

 

AAS 3500.002 Environmental Justice Across the Globe

Prof. Kimberly Fields. 

Wed 6:30-9pm. New Cabell 332

This course examines from multiple perspectives issues of environmental quality and social justice across the globe. We will start from the premise that all people have a right to live in a clean environment free from hazardous pollution or contamination, and to the natural resources necessary to sustain health and livelihood. We will investigate how and why the resources people need to flourish varies across the globe. In some cases, these resources are air, soil or water. In other instances they may include healthy fisheries, forests, or land to farm or graze animals on. With this as our starting point, we will question why, and through what social, political and economic processes, some people are denied this basic right. How is it that certain groups of people do not have access to basic resources, or are systematically burdened with pollution or environmental hazards to a greater extent than other groups? To what extent  is environmental inequality a global phenomenon? What explains the patterns in environmental inequality observed throughout the world? What are the social relations of production and power that contribute to these outcomes? What can be done? We begin by examining the relationship between environmental justice and globalization, and the global distribution of environmental benefits and burdens and explanations for that distribution. We then examine struggles for environmental justice in diverse regions of the world, as well as government responses to those struggles. We will explore these issues through a series of case studies of environmental (in)justice in South America, Africa, Asia and the Carribbean. Through these case studies we will examine environmental justice issues in urban and rural settings; the strategies and politics of poor peoples’ environmental justice movements. Fulfills: SSH

 

AAS 3810. Race, Culture and Inequality

Prof. Sabrina Pendergrass. 

Tu Th 11:00-12:15. New Cabell 036

This course will examine how culture matters for understanding race and social inequality. It 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. Fulfills: SSH

 

AMST 2559 Afro-Latinx Histories in the Americas

Prof. Christina Proenza-Coles; 

Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm, Brice Hall 235

ADD course desc. Fulfills: SSH

 

HIAF 2002  Modern African History

Prof. John Mason; 

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, Gibson 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. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3031  History of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

Prof. Amir Syed; 

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, Clark Hall G004

This course concerns the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with an emphasis on African history. Through interactive lectures, in-class discussions, written assignments and examinations of first-hand accounts by slaves and slavers, works of fiction and film, and analyses by historians, we will seek to understand one of the most tragic and horrifying phenomena in the history of the western world. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3051  West African History

Prof. James La Fleur; 

Tu Th 11:00-12:15am, Clark Hall 101

History of West Africans in the wider context of the global past, from West Africans' first attempts to make a living in ancient environments through the slave trades (domestic, trans-Saharan, and Atlantic), colonial overrule by outsiders, political independence, and ever-increasing globalization. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3112  African Environment History

Prof. James La Fleur; 

Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm, Nau Hall 141

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. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 4501  Photography and Freedom in Africa 

Prof. John Mason; 

Mo 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell Hall 032

Photography and Freedom in Africa, blends African history, American history, and the history of photography to explore the ways in which both African and western photographers shaped and misshaped the world's understanding of Africa during the era of anti-colonial struggles and the Cold War.  Fulfills

 

HIST 3501 Introductory History Workshop: Race, Religion, & Resistance in Atlantic History

Prof. Amir Syed; 

Th 2:00-4:30pm, The Rotunda Room 150

This course introduces students to how historians conceptualize the Atlantic World and approach the entangled histories of Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Students will learn how to ask historical questions, examine issues on the production of historical narratives, and interpret documents. Fulfills: SSH

 

HIUS 3232 The South in the Twentieth Century

Prof. Grace Hale; 

Mo We, 1:00pm-1:50pm John Warner Hall 104

Studies the history of the South from 1900 to the present focusing on class structure, race relations, cultural traditions, and the question of southern identity Fulfills: SSH

 

HIUS 3501 Race, Place, and the Schoolhouse 

Prof. Erica Sterling; 

We 2:00-4:30pm, Memorial Gym 213

Few things evoke more emotion from the U.S. electorate than assertions of state control over how and where children are educated. Using 20th century black educational history as our guide, students will learn how urban, gender, or cultural historians, for example, use different methodologies to answer similar questions about access, equity, and power. Fulfills: SSH

 

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Prof. Milton Vickerman; 

Mo We 2:00-3:15pm, New Cabell Hall 032

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.  Fulfills: SSH

 

SOC 4260 Race, Crime and Punishment 

Prof. Rose Buckelew; 

Mo We 2:00-3:15pm, New Cabell Hall 032

This course is an exercise in critical thinking and writing. We will investigate connections between race and crime in contemporary America. To do so, we will explore constructions of crime and race and patterns of victimization, criminality and punishment. We will uncover shifting definitions of crime and the ways that institutions, policies and practices shape patterns of punishment. Fulfills: SSH

 

 


Humanities

All majors must take at least one Humanities course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Social Science/History, Race and Politics, or 4000 research.

 

AAS 2224. Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Prof. Lisa Shutt. 

Wed 2:00-4:30pm, New Cabell 395

This course 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. Concentrating on media texts that have influenced and ‘set the stage’ for today’s media, we will primarily examine media texts from the 1970s through the first decade of the 21st century. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, 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. Fulfills: Humanities.

 

AAS 2500. Swahili Cultures & Stories

Prof. Anne Rotich

This is an introductory course to the Swahili cultures. The course offers an in-depth understanding of the Swahili people, their cultures and history. The course will bring to the fore the diversity of issues concerning the Swahili people and the Swahili coast including music, food, clothing, trade, and the social and political issues. We will also pursue a range of basic questions such as:  How have issues of identity, class, ethnicity and race informed Swahili people experiences?  How, and in what contexts, did Swahili people confront—and overcome— historical challenges brought by the Arabic and European settlement in East Africa? How have Swahili cultures crossed international borders through the Indian Ocean trade and through globalization? Students will actively engage in an analytical examination of stories from east Africa and other required readings and then express their responses through class discussions, group presentations and write an analytical final paper.  Fulfills: Humanities; Africa Requirement

 

AAS 2559 Black Girlhood and the Media 

Prof. Ashleigh Wade. 

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, New Cabell 338

How do movies, viral videos, and memes impact the material lives of Black girls? This course offers an introduction to the emergent and growing field of Black Girlhood Studies, especially in relation to media representation and engagement. The course will cover foundational texts about Black girlhood alongside a range of media – newspapers, magazines, film, and Internet/social media content – to explore the ways in which Black girlhood has been constructed and portrayed through these platforms. We will use these explorations as a way of 1) understanding the tenets of Black girlhood studies and 2) identifying what is at stake in documenting and representing Black girls’ experiences. As part of the course, students will have an opportunity to create their own media/text (YouTube video, website/blog, essay collection, chapbook, etc.) about Black girlhood. Fulfills: Humanities

 

AMST 2753/ARTH 2753 Arts and Cultures of the Slave South 

Prof. Louis Nelson; 

Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Gilmer Hall 301

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. Fulfills: Humanities

 

AMST 3321 Race and Ethnicity in Latinx Literature

Prof. Carmen Lamas 

Mo 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell Hall 323

Surveys transformations in Africa from four million years ago to the present, known chiefly through archaeology, and focusing on Stone and Iron Age societies in the last 150,000 years. Prerequisite: ANTH 2800 or instructor permission. Fulfills: Humanities

 

AMST 3407 Racial Borders and American Cinema 

Prof. Shilpa Dave; 

Mo We  2:00-3:15pm, Brice Hall 235

This class explores how re-occurring images of racial and ethnic minorities such as African Americans, Jews, Asians, Native Americans and Latino/as are represented in film and shows visual images of racial interactions and boundaries of human relations that tackle topics such as immigration, inter-racial relationships and racial passing. Fulfills: Humanities

 

AMST 3427 Gender, Things, and Difference

Prof. Jessica Sewell; 

Mo We 2:00-3:15pm, Gibson Hall 242

This class explores how material culture, the physical stuff that is part of human life, is used to help to construct and express gendered and other forms of difference. We will look at how bodies and clothes shape our understanding of our own and others’ identities, how we imbue objects with gender, how the food we cook and eat carries cultural meanings, and how the design of buildings and spaces structures gender. Fulfills: Humanities

 

AMST 3559.001 Mapping Black Landscapes

Prof. Lisa Goff; 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell Hall 323

Course description pending: Fufills

 

ANTH 3880 African Archaeology

Prof. Zach McKeeby; 

Mo We Fr 10:00-10:50am, New Cabell Hall 383

Surveys transformations in Africa from four million years ago to the present, known chiefly through archaeology, and focusing on Stone and Iron Age societies in the last 150,000 years. Prerequisite: ANTH 2800 or instructor permission. Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

DRAM 4590.002 The Black Monologues

Prof. Theresa Davis; 

TBA, TBA Hall TBA

A directed project-based study offered to upper-level students. Fulfills: Humanities

 

ENGL 3025 African American English

Prof. Connie Smith; 

Tu Th 11:00-12:15pm, New Cabell Hall 287

This course examines the communicative practices of African American Vernacular English (AAEV) to explore how a marginalized language dynamic has made major transitions into American mainstream discourse. AAEV is no longer solely the informal speech of many African Americans; it is the way Americans speak. Fulfills: Humanities

 

FRT 3559 Black France Musicscape: Race, Space, Gender and Language Across The French-Speaking World

Prof. Rashana Lydner

Tu Thur 3:30 - 4:45pm

This interdisciplinary course examines the impact of music and language use in the Black Francophone world. It provides students an opportunity to explore, think critically, and discuss issues on cultural expression from multilingual communities in West and Central Africa, the French Caribbean, and mainland France. We will engage with key terms such as the Black Atlantic, la francophone, authenticity, creolization, globalization, and multilingualism. To do this, we will read various texts, listen to and analyze music and music videos from genres such as coupé décalé, ndombolo/soukous, afro beats, pop, hip hop/ rap, zouk, dancehall and reggae. Throughout the semester, we will think about the importance of race, space, gender and language in the formation of a Black France Musicscape. Fulfills: Humanities

 

MDST 3407 Racial Borders & American Cinema 

Prof. Shilpa Dave; 

Mo We 9:00-9:50am, Gilmer Hall 390

The history of American cinema is inextricably and controversially tied to the racial politics of the U.S. This course will explore how images of racial and ethnic minorities such as African Americans, Jews, Asians, Native Americans and Latino/as are reflected on screen and the ways that minorities in the entertainment industry have responded to often limiting representations. Prerequisite: MDST Major. Fulfills: Humanities

 

MDST 3510.003 Topics in Media Research: Race and Digital Media Studies

Prof. Pallavi Rao; 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm, Bryan Hall 325

This hands-on course prepares students to read, evaluate, and design research in media studies. Drawing on critical, historical, administrative, and industrial traditions in the field, students will learn to assess the validity and anticipate the ethical requirements of various methods & data collection procedures. Following a theme selected by the instructor, the course culminates with each student proposing a new, original research study. Fulfills: Humanities

 

RELA 2750 African Religions 

Prof. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton; 

Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Gibson Hall 141

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. Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

RELA 3730 Religious Themes in African Literature and Film

Prof. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton; 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm, Gibson Hall 142

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. Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

RELG 3405 Introduction to Black and Womanist Religious Thought 

Prof. Ashon Crawley; 

Mo 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell Hall 168

Is thought always already racialized, gendered, sexed? This Introduction to Black and Womanist Thought course argues that thought does not have to submit itself to modern regimes of knowledge production, that there are alternative ways to think and practice and be in the world with one another. An introduction to major thinkers in both religious thought and traditions with attention to theology, philosophy, and history. Fulfills: Humanities

 

RELG 3713 Black Religion and Criminal Justice System

Prof. Kai Parker; 

Tu Th 3:30-4:45pm, Nau Hall 141

ADD course desc. Fulfills: Humanities

 

 


 

Race and Politics

All majors must take at least one Race & Politics course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Social Science/History, or 4000 research.

 

AAS 2500.002 Introduction to Race, Class, Politics & the Environment 

Kimberly Fields. Wed 3:30-6:00pm. New Cabell 489

This course introduces students to the adoption and implementation of environmental policy in the United States and examines issues of environmental quality and social justice. We will concentrate on federal, state and local governance and relations across these levels. In turn, we will compare the abilities of state and federal governments to develop and implement environmental efforts and policy, as well as their consequences.  The course takes as axiomatic the premise that all people have a right to live in a clean environment free from hazardous pollution or contamination, and to the natural resources necessary to sustain health and livelihood. With this as our starting point, we will question why, and through what social, political and economic processes, some people are denied this basic right. How is it that certain populations of people do not have access to basic resources, or are systematically burdened with pollution or environmental hazards to a greater extent than other populations? What are the social relations of production and power that contribute to these outcomes? What can be done? We begin by examining the philosophical foundations and history of the environmental justice movement and foundational concepts such as justice, race and class. We then explore these concepts through a series of case studies of urban environmental (in)justice in the U.S. Through these case studies we will examine environmental justice issues in urban and rural settings; the strategies and politics of poor peoples’ environmental justice movements; and climate justice. Fulfills: Race and Politics

 

AAS 2500.003 Race, Class and Gender

Prof. Liana Richardson

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am,  New Cabell 323

While many people in the United States embrace the rhetoric of equality, “the American Dream,” and “the land of opportunity,” social inequality by race, class, and gender is a persistent feature of our society.  The overall goal of this course is to examine the social, political, and economic forces that cause and are produced by this inequality, paying particular attention to how race, class, and gender intersect to shape lived experiences and life chances. First, we will discuss how power and privilege are patterned by race, class, and gender. Then, we will examine how the resultant inequalities are perpetuated and reinforced by social institutions such as the labor market, housing, health care, media, and criminal justice system. Finally, we will consider potential strategies for disrupting these linkages, and the social justice politics associated with them. Fulfills: Race and Politics/SSH.

 

AAS 3853. From Redlined to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the US

 

Prof. Andrew Karhl

Mon Wed 9:00-9:50. Ridley G008

This course examines the history of housing and real estate and explores its role in shaping the meaning and lived experience of race in the United States.  We will learn how and why real estate ownership, investment, and development came to play a critical role in the formation and endurance of racial segregation, modern capitalism, and the built environment.  We will look at how homeownership and residential location shapes the educational options, job prospects, living expenses, health, quality of life, and wealth accumulation of Americans.  We will study the structure and mechanics of the American real estate industry, the formation of federal housing policy, and the political economy of housing and development from the New Deal through the civil rights movement to the present.  We will explore the dynamic relationship of race and space in twentieth-century cities and suburbs.  As we do, we will acquire a deeper knowledge and understanding of how real estate shapes our lives and lies at the heart of many of the most vexing problems and pressing challenges facing America today. 

 

ANTH 2270 Race, Gender, and Medical Science

Prof. Gertrude Fraser; 

Mo We 3:00-3:50pm, Minor Hall 125

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.. 

 

 


Africa

All majors must take at least one Africa course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement can double count with any other distribution.

 

AAS 2500. Swahili Cultures & Stories

Prof. Anne Rotich

This is an introductory course to the Swahili cultures. The course offers an in-depth understanding of the Swahili people, their cultures and history. The course will bring to the fore the diversity of issues concerning the Swahili people and the Swahili coast including music, food, clothing, trade, and the social and political issues. We will also pursue a range of basic questions such as:  How have issues of identity, class, ethnicity and race informed Swahili people experiences?  How, and in what contexts, did Swahili people confront—and overcome— historical challenges brought by the Arabic and European settlement in East Africa? How have Swahili cultures crossed international borders through the Indian Ocean trade and through globalization? Students will actively engage in an analytical examination of stories from east Africa and other required readings and then express their responses through class discussions, group presentations and write an analytical final paper.  

 

AAS 3500.003. Traveling While Black: Tourism in Africa and Diaspora 

Prof. Amber Henry. 

Tu 2:00-4:30. New Cabell 383

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 3559. Africulture: From the African Roots of US Agriculture to Black Farmers in the 21st Century

Mr. Michael Carter, Jr. (with Prof. Lisa Shutt)

Tu 2:00-4:30. New Cabell 303

Led by a practicing farmer-activist, (Michael Carter, Jr. of Carter Farms in nearby Orange County, VA) we will examine how principles, practices, plants, and people of African descent have shaped US agriculture and thus, the lives of all Americans. By examining a wide range of history, laws, attitudes, cultures and traditions, we will see how many US staple commodities and practices have their roots in Africa and observe cultural similarities between indigenous cultures around the world. While evaluating realities of today’s Black farmers and the innovations they devise to survive in a system stacked against them, we will look for solutions to an array of challenges in environmental and agricultural sciences faced by today’s Black farmers. 

 

HIAF 2002  Modern African History 

Prof. John Mason; 

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, Gibson 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. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3031  History of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

Prof. Amir Syed; 

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, Clark Hall G004

This course concerns the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with an emphasis on African history. Through interactive lectures, in-class discussions, written assignments and examinations of first-hand accounts by slaves and slavers, works of fiction and film, and analyses by historians, we will seek to understand one of the most tragic and horrifying phenomena in the history of the western world. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3051  West African History

Prof. James La Fleur; 

Tu Th 11:00-12:15am, Clark Hall 101

History of West Africans in the wider context of the global past, from West Africans' first attempts to make a living in ancient environments through the slave trades (domestic, trans-Saharan, and Atlantic), colonial overrule by outsiders, political independence, and ever-increasing globalization. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3112  African Environment History

Prof. James La Fleur; 

Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm, Nau Hall 141

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. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 4501  Photography and Freedom in Africa

Prof. John Mason; 

Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm, Nau Hall 141

Photography and Freedom in Africa, blends African history, American history, and the history of photography to explore the ways in which both African and western photographers shaped and misshaped the world's understanding of Africa during the era of anti-colonial struggles and the Cold War.  Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

RELA 2750 African Religions 

Prof. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton; 

Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Gibson Hall 141

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. Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

RELA 3730 Religious Themes in African Literature and Film

Prof. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton; 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm, Gibson Hall 142

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. Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

 


4000 Level Research

All majors must take at least one course at the 4000-level that requires a 20-page research paper or its equivalent. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Race and Politics, or Social Science/History. For courses outside of AAS, kindly confirm with the instructor before/at the start of classes that the course meets the research requirements.

 

 

AAS 4501. Engaging Local Histories: River View Farm

Prof. Lisa Shutt. 

Tu 2:00-6:00. New Cabell 068 (and off-grounds location at Ivy Creek Natural Area – we will arrange transportation)

 This course aims to encourage students to situate and shed light on various aspects of Black history and culture in Albemarle County and the surrounding regions through the lens and example of River View Farm and those who created it, lived there, farmed there, and led local and regional communities in a number of ways. We will often hold class meetings on site at the farm (not far from grounds in Albemarle County) and engage various sources to become knowledgeable about Hugh Carr, whose earnings as the farm manager of the nearby Woodlands plantation enabled him to establish the farm with a 58-acre tract in the late 1860s. By examining the lives of Carr’s daughter, Mary Carr Greer, who was the first female principal of the Albemarle Training School and her husband, Conly Greer, Albemarle County’s first Black agricultural extension agent, we will follow students’ interests to examine topics ranging from the early post-emancipation lives of formerly enslaved men and women, the Black Extension Service and Land Grant University system, Black 4-H youth programs, women’s “Demonstration Clubs,” the history of African American education in the region between 1840 and the mid-20th century, Black agricultural history, local Albemarle County histories of the Civil Rights Movement, African American communities such as Hydraulic Mills and Union Ridge (and the flooding of Albemarle Black communities to build a reservoir), the impact of global forces on local experiences, African American foodways, the importance and format of kitchen gardens, museum studies, the history of historicizing River View Farm and other local sites related to Black history, and many more possible topics. Part of the work of this class involves actively working with the Ivy Creek Foundation to support their mission of providing education about local Black histories to the public. Students will produce a 20-page paper on their original research using archival materials (including a wealth of recorded interviews), material culture, and of the landscape/built environment. 4.0 credits
Fulfills: 4000-level research

 

AAS 4570.001 IIlegal & Second Slavery in Age of Revolutions

Instructor TBA

Mon Wed 3:30-4:45. New Cabell 209

ADD course desc. 

 

AAS 4570.002 Black Reconstruction

Prof. Anna Duensing. 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm New Cabell 064

This seminar offers an in-depth study of W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1935 magnum opus Black Reconstruction. In addition to a close reading of major selections from the book, our work will focus on the national and international sociopolitical contexts in which Du Bois researched and wrote, the historiographical terrain he challenged and ultimately overturned through his analysis, and the long-term impact of Black Reconstruction within historical scholarship, political thought, radical activism, and U.S. political culture. We will read Du Bois in conversation with his major influences and interlocutors alongside scholars who built on his foundational insights, ideas that were revolutionary at the time but are far more commonplace today. This includes his challenge to dominant historiography and still-persistent myths about slavery and Reconstruction; his analysis of the lost opportunities of Reconstruction; his framing of entanglements of race and class oppression; the centrality of Black labor to the entire social and economic structure of the modern world; the inequalities and racial violence essential to the maintenance of capitalism; the role of whiteness in relation to U.S. citizenship; and the revolutionary possibilities of abolition democracy. Our other readings will include work from C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, Cedric Robinson, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, David Roediger, Robin Kelley, and Thulani Davis. Fulfills: 4000-level research

 

AMST 4559 Race, Criminality, and Abolition 

Prof. Lisa Cacho; 

Tu Th 11:00-12:15pm/ 2:00-3:15, Wilson Hall 214

ADD course desc. Fulfills: 4000

 

AMST 5559 Mapping Black Landscapes

Prof. Lisa Goff; 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell Hall 323

ADD course desc. Fulfills: 4000

 

ENGL 4500 Sally Hemings University

Prof. Lisa Woolfork; 

Tu 5:30-8:00pm, John W. Warner Hall 110

This course is “Sally Hemings University.” Its objective is to prepare students to examine and reconfigure the status quo. This course seeks to help students appreciate the shift from euphemisms (“racially-charged” or “racially-tinged”) to vocabularies of consequence (“racist” or “white supremacist”), to foster a facility for talking capably and comfortably about “uncomfortable” topics such as systems of domination and their influence upon university and daily life. “Sally Hemings University” is a site where the adverse effects of overt and subtle forms of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism and other systems of dominance are scrutinized. As a course, “Sally Hemings University” explores questions generated by re-framing “Mr. Jefferson’s University” (and universities generally) as a site that destabilizes the dominant narrative of the university as Jefferson’s primary property and by extension that of similarly entitled white men. Fulfills: 4000 with instructor permission

 

ENGL 4580.001 Critical Race Theory

Prof. Marlon Ross; 

Th 5:00-7:30pm, New Cabell Hall 064

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 black literary and cultural theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing on a series of critical flashpoints that have occurred over the last several decades. These flashpoints include: 1) the crisis over black authenticity during the Black Power/ Black Arts movement; 2) the schisms related to womanism (or 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’ 2016 film Moonlight; 5) racial violence and the law, focused on the Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement; and 6) the aesthetic movement called Afrofuturism. Other reading will include a variety of theoretical essays and chapters drawn from different disciplines, including legal theory, film and media studies, sociology, history, political theory, and hip hop studies. 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. The goal of the course is to give you a solid grounding in the vocabulary, key figures, concepts, debates, and discursive styles comprising the broad sweep of theoretical race studies from the late- twentieth century to the present, and to nurture your own theorizing about race and its deep cultural impact. Fulfills: 4000

 

ENGL 4580.002 Race in American Places

Prof. K. Ian Grandison; 

Tu 5:00-7:30pm, Bryan Hall 323

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. Fulfills: 4000

 

HIAF 4501 Seminar in African History: Photography and Freedom in Africa.                  

Prof. John Mason; 

Mo 3:30-6:00pm, Clark Hall 101

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. Seminar work 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. Fulfills: 4000

 

HIUS 4501 Seminar in the United States History: Slavery and Founders

Prof. Christa Dierksheide; 

Th  2:00-4:30pm, New Cabell Hall 038

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. Seminar work 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. Fulfills: 4000

 

MUSI 4090 Concepts of Performance in Africa 

Prof. Michelle Kisliuk; 

Th 3:30-5:00pm, Old Cabell Hall S008

ADD course desc. Fulfills: 4000; Africa

 

MUSI 4523 Issues in Ethnomusicology: Electronic Music in Africa

Prof. Noel Lobley; 

Mo We 9:30-10:45am, Wilson Hall 142

An intensive experience with ethnomusicology and performance studies, this seminar explores musical ethnography (descriptive writing), experiential research, sociomusical processes, and other interdisciplinary approaches to musical performance. Addresses issues involving race, class, gender, and identity politics in light of particular topics and areas studies. Prerequisite: MUSI 3070 or instructor permission. Fulfills: 4000; Africa

 

 


Languages and Other Electives

 

SWAH 1020.001. Introductory Swahili II 

Prof. Leonora Anyango.

Mon Wed Fri 10:00am - 10:50am; Online

This course is a continuation of SWAH 1010. The course is designed to advance your knowledge of Swahili from the SWAH 1010. It is expected that you will build your Swahili lexicon and Swahili grammar to enable you to adequately contribute to basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk more deeply about your work, studies, country and your preferences, needs, and interests following the correct grammar rules. You will learn how to handle basic social conversations at the market, in the hospital, and also talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will also learn about more cultural aspects of everyday culture in East Africa from class and from engaging virtually the Swahili community in Charlottesville.

 

SWAH 1020.002 Introductory Swahili II

Prof. Anne Rotich; Section 002, 

Mon Wed Fri 11:00-11:50, Brooks 103

This course is a continuation of SWAH 1010. The course is designed to advance your knowledge of Swahili from the SWAH 1010. It is expected that you will build your Swahili lexicon and Swahili grammar to enable you to adequately contribute to basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk more deeply about your work, studies, country and your preferences, needs, and interests following the correct grammar rules. You will learn how to handle basic social conversations at the market, in the hospital, and also talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will also learn about more cultural aspects of everyday culture in East Africa from class and from engaging virtually the Swahili community in Charlottesville.

 

SWAH 2020 Intermediate Swahili II

Prof. Anne Rotich; 

Mon Wed Fri 12:00-12:50am, Brooks 103

This is an intermediate Swahili course that is intended to equip you with more language skills in speaking, reading, writing, listening and cultures. It is an opportunity for you to enhance your language skills gained from SWAH 2010. At the end of this course you will have increased your Swahili vocabulary, speak Swahili with more ease and less errors, understand and interact with Swahili speakers. You will be able to write and analyze texts and essays in Swahili on different topics and appreciate more the cultures of the Swahili people. You will also be able to express yourself, your everyday activities, discuss politics or current events in Swahili. To achieve this we will utilize Swahili short story texts, multimedia resources, the internet, magazines, and news broadcast stations to enhance your learning.

 

 

About

At a Glance


Founded in 1981, the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies is named in honor of native Virginian Carter Godwin Woodson, known to many as 'the father of black history''. The Woodson's founding director, historian Armstead L. Robinson, launched the Institute with a two-fold mandate: (1) to enhance the research and teaching of African-American Studies in the schools and departments of the University of Virginia and (2) to establish an African-American Studies Research Center which would make important contributions to scholarship and learning at this major southern university.

 

 

The Department of African American and African Studies and Undergraduate Degree Program


Since its inception under the banner of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, the Department of African American and African Studies has promoted interdisciplinary and collaborative research and interpretation of the African American and African experience in a global context. The Woodson Institute administers the undergraduate major and minor degrees in African American and African Studies (AAS). In addition to the African-American and African Studies major and minor, the department also has a minor in African Studies, which was initiated in 2007. For students who wish to conduct intensive research, the deparment offers a Distinguished Majors Program (DMP) which culminates in a thesis project supervised by an academic advisor. 

The Research Institute and the Woodson Fellowship Program


Beyond the department proper, the Woodson functions as a research Institute. Among other activities, the Institute facilitates an internationally renowned two-year residential fellowship program. During this program, pre- and post-doctoral scholars from universities and colleges around the nation take up residence in the Fellows Annex in order to complete their scholarly projects in a rigorous, supportive, and interdisciplinary intellectual community. Selected through an intense international competition, Woodson fellows represent young scholars in the humanities and social sciences at the cutting edge of the Africana Studies field. Over the course of its history, the Institute has sponsored more than 200 emerging scholars whose work has appeared in numerous books and articles published by the foremost university presses and academic journals. In addition to advancing the research goals of the Institute, the presence of these fellows has enriched the number and range of course offerings available within the undergraduate curriculum and has been instrumental in faculty recruitment at U.Va.

Strategic Vision


The primary goal at the Carter G. Woodson Institute is to continue the pioneering work of our namesake through an active program of undergraduate teaching and curriculum development; original interdisciplinary research; institutional and financial support of scholars; conferences and colloquia; publications and public outreach projects.

About the Institute

At a Glance


The Woodson Institute has earned international acclaim as a magnet for some the world’s best graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, creating a collaborative, supportive, and interdisciplinary environment for innovative scholarship. The fellowship program provides scholars time to complete their research before they jump into the responsibilities of teaching full time; at the same time, Woodson Fellows are immersed in a community of scholars who bring the perspectives of their various disciplines to bear on advancing each other’s scholarship during monthly workshops. In these regular workshops, pre and post-doctoral fellows receive feedback on dissertation or manuscript chapters from a guest interlocutors , the director of Fellowships, and their colleagues in the fellowship program. 

Since its inception, the fellowship program has supported over 180 emerging scholars (and counting!). Its high rate of success has placed its fellows in tenure-track positions and post-doctoral fellowships at colleges and universities across the nation, including: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As the crown jewel of the research Institute, the Woodson takes pride in the spirit of being at the cutting edge of scholarship in Africana Studies as articulated by Deborah McDowell, Woodson Director from 2009 - 2021.

"If you want to find out where scholarship is going in African American and African Diaspora scholarship, across the disciplines, find out who is at the Woodson Institute.”

 

Apply 

Visit the fellowship program page for more information about how to apply to the Woodson Fellowship program. Applications are due on the 1st of December by 11:59 pm.


Meet the Woodson Fellows

Current Fellows

Review the bios and project descriptions for the current cohort of Woodson Fellows 

Fellowship Alumni

Browse the alumni of the Woodson Fellowship program from 1981 to present


 

 

 

 

 

The Institute's Public Outreach Mission

As a major research institute, the Woodson prioritizes public outreach through events, grant-funded projects, and workshops with K-12 teachers. Our mission emphasizes the importance of sharing knowledge and advancing black studies scholarship in the spirit of our namesake Carter G. Woodson. As such, public engagement has been at the heart of the Institute since its inception. Read more about the public engagement projects at the core of the Institute's mission. 

Abraham Seda, Woodson pre-doctoral fellow, published an article in Black Perspectives

Abraham Seda, Woodson pre-doctoral fellow, published an article in Black Perspectives: Jack Johnson and Africa: Boxing and Race in Colonial Africa

Activist Angela Davis to headline conference on Prison populations, Spend a week in residence

April 13, 2009 — An estimated 32 percent of black males will enter state or federal prison during their lifetimes, compared to 17 percent of Hispanic males and 5.9 percent of white males, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Activist to Talk about Prison Reform

September 8, 2010 — Ruthie Gilmore, professor of earth and environmental sciences at City University of New York, will give a talk, "What Is to Be Done? Prison Expansion and Opposition to It, in Globalizing Perspective," on Sept. 17 at 3 p.m. in the University of Virginia's Minor Hall auditorium.

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800

History
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Africa Day Event for High School Students

High School students from around Charlottesville area are invited to participate in different interactive and engaging sessions on languages, cultures, history, music, potiltics and contemporary issues in Africa.

AFRICA DAY

On Friday, March 24th 2017, The Carter G. Woodson Institute held Africa Day on UVA grounds, coordinated by Professor Anne Rotich. Its objective was to increase awareness and knowledge of Africa and its cultures. High school students were treated to different presentations that focused on African cultures, languages, historical, social and political knowledge of Africa. An estimated 200 students and their teachers attended A Day in Africa including students from Albemarle High School, Charlottesville High School, Monticello High School and Western Albemarle High School. 

There were a total of sixteen 30-min sessions by faculty, Swahili students, and graduate students. The program  began with a welcome address by Professor Deborah McDowell and culminated in a final African Dance performance by Professor Michelle Kisliuk and her students and an African themed lunch. About 30 volunteers provided invaluable assistance in different ways from the planning preparations and assisting during the day of the event. 

Africa is Country: A new Zion

Robert Trent Vinson published an article in Africa is Country in its Religion and Democracy in Africa series, to be published as a forthcoming edited volume through UVA Press

AAS Alumni Panel

African American and African Studies Alumni Panel --

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African American and African Studies at the Activities Fair

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African American and African Studies Diploma Ceremony

American and African Studies Diploma Ceremony will take place on Saturday, May 20 at 12:45 p.m. following Final Exercises on the Lawn.

You must come straight from the lawn ceremony in order to have time to line up in the foyer of Minor Hall and prepare to enter the auditorium. Regardless of weather, our diploma ceremony will take place in the Minor Hall auditorium (Minor 125)

There will be a reception following the ceremony.

African American and African Studies Major

Requirements for an AAS Major


To fulfill the requirements of the African American and African Studies (AAS) interdisciplinary major, students must complete nine courses (totaling 29 credit hours) or contact the Director of Undergraduate Programs (DUP), Lisa Shutt.

The African American and African Studies interdisciplinary major comprises 9 courses (a minimum of 29 credit hours) that are selected from the list of AAS courses, approved by an AAS faculty advisor, and satisfy the following requirements:

  1. All majors must complete AAS 1010 and AAS 1020 (4 credits each) and receive with a grade of C or above in both courses. 
  2. All students must complete seven additional courses (totaling 21 credit hours).  These seven courses must either be in the department (with the course prefix AAS) or be on the list of AAS-approved courses offered in other departments.  The seven courses must be distributed as follows:
  • One course (3 credits) must focus on race and politics (either an AAS course or a course on the list of AAS-approved courses)
  • One course (3 credits) must be in the humanities (either an AAS course in the humanities or a course selected from the list of AAS-approved courses in the following departments: Art History, Drama, English, French, Media Studies, Music, Philosophy, Religious Studies)
  • One course (3 credits) must be in social sciences or history (either an AAS course in social science or history or a course selected from the list of AAS-approved courses in the following departments: American Studies, Anthropology, Economics, Linguistics, Politics, Psychology, Sociology, Women, Gender & Sexuality)
  • Three courses (9 credits) of electives (any AAS courses or AAS-approved courses in other departments
  • One 4000-level seminar (3 credits) that requires a 20-page research paper. If a 4000-level course on our course page is not listed as “Fulfills: 4000-level seminar,” check with the instructor ahead of time. (All AAS 4XXX courses automatically count, though new courses might take some time to show up as such in SIS).
  • NB: One of these above seven courses must focus on Africa

Other Requirements

  • No more than 6 transfer credits from relevant study abroad may be counted toward the AAS major. Students wishing to apply courses taken abroad to the major must receive advance written permission from the AAS Director of Undergraduate Programs.
  • No more than two courses (six-eight credits) can be double counted for the major unless the student’s second major is interdisciplinary (in which case up to three courses may be double counted with the permission of both programs).
  • AAS 4993 (Independent Study) does not meet the 4000-level seminar requirement. Students must have a minimum cumulative GPA of 3.0 to qualify to enroll in AAS 4993; students may petition the AAS Curriculum Committee to make exceptions by submitting a petition form found on the AAS website, but exceptions are granted only in exceptional circumstances. Only one independent study can count toward the AAS major and it must count as an elective.
  • Language courses taught within the department cannot be used to satisfy the distribution requirements.
  • For any course you take that is not listed on our course page as an approved course, you may request an exception for it to count by emailing the DUP of AAS with the course syllabus any time before your final semester. 
  • All majors must maintain a major GPA of 2.0 or higher (which includes all courses taken toward the major)

Declaring the Major

Deadline

Students must declare a first major before the last day of classes in their fourth semester. Students who transfer as third-years must defer or declare no later than September 30. New third-year spring-term transfers must defer or declare by February 1. See the academic calendar for the exact deadline for fourth-semester students to declare a major.

 Procedures

To declare the major in AAS, a student must be enrolled in or have completed (with a grade of C or above) either AAS 1010 or AAS 1020. When you’re ready to declare:

  • Complete the major worksheet (pdf) using your Academic Requirements report in SIS to capture courses you’ve already taken that can count for the major. Also consult our course archives to speculate on courses you might take in upcoming semesters.
  • Make an appointment with the DUP, Lisa Shutt to discuss the courses you have taken, or plan to take, to fulfill the AAS requirements.
    • NB: The courses you list on your worksheet and declaration are understood to be speculative. You can swap out any of the courses for another (AAS or non-AAS) course listed on our website each semester as course offerings or your schedule changes; just always keep in mind the core requirements you need to fulfill to graduate with the major. 
  • Once the DUP has approved your curricular plan and assigned you an advisor, you’ll submit your declaration electronically on the College’s DocuSign page. Please do not proceed to this step until the DUP has signed off on your worksheet.
  • Your new major will show up in SIS within a business day of all the signatures being submitted. 
  • From that point forward, your AAS major advisor will be your main point of contact for advising on course enrollment and progress towards the major each semester, usually during Advising Period. For any questions regarding courses not showing up in SIS as counting towards your major, you should contact the DUP directly.

Major Requirement Worksheet (pdf)

“The information contained on this website is for informational purposes only. The Undergraduate Record and Graduate Record represent the official repository for academic program requirements. These publications may be found at http://records.ureg.virginia.edu/index.php.” 

African American and African Studies Minor

Requirements for an AAS Minor


A minor in African American and African Studies consists of completion of AAS 1010 and AAS 1020 with a grade of C or better in each course; twelve credits beyond AAS 1010 and AAS 1020, chosen from the list of approved courses posted on the Woodson Institute’s website; and a minimum GPA of 2.0 in all courses counted toward the minor. Up to six credits of relevant study abroad may apply to the minor with the prior approval of Director of Undergraduate Programs.

 


 

Students considering a minor in African American and African Studies may consult any AAS faculty advisor, or contact the Director of Undergraduate Programs (DUP), Lisa Shutt.

The procedure for declaring a minor in African American and African Studies is now entirely electronic. The steps are as follows:

1. To be ready to declare, you have to have already passed either or both AAS 1010 and 1020 with a C or better. 

2. If this is the case, then fill out the AAS Minor Worksheet provided below. Make sure to complete all the sections: your name, intended graduation date, and all the course information section (using your SIS record of courses you’ve already taken for the minor, and the AAS course page on our website to find courses you can take in future semesters to fulfill the listed requirements). Make sure to put the course number, the full course title, and the semester you’ve taken it or plan to take it.

3. Once you’ve completed the form, email it to the DUP who will review your curricular plans and determine if a meeting is necessary. If you’re having any issues or need advice about particular courses, contact the DUP by email.

4. After the DUP has reviewed and approved your curricular plans, you’ll transfer the information to the registrar’s electronic submissions formPlease do not proceed to this step until your worksheet has been approved!

African American and African Studies Minor Declaration Form (pdf)

 

 

African American Midwifery in the South

Anthropology
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African Colloquium Series

African Colloquium Series Lecture: Case Watkins -- Cultures and Landscapes of African Oil Palm in Colonial Bahia

Long essential in many West African societies, palm oil became an integral component of Afro-Brazilian culture and cuisine in the early colonial period, and the palm groves that yield the oil represent an Afro-Brazilian landscape. Watkins, a PhD candidate in geography and anthropology at LSU, marshals evidence from colonial archives, travellers' accounts, ethnographies, fieldwork, and digital geographic data to analyse the development of Bahia’s Palm Oil Coast. While Africans and Afro-Brazilians emerge as principal actors, the analysis places humans within a broader socio-ecological framework to demonstrate how cultural-historical processes, biogeographies, agroecologies, and Atlantic commerce all coalesced to establish and sustain Bahia’s Afro-Brazilian landscape, and help integrate an Atlantic World.

229A New Cabell Hall

Free and Open to the Public

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African Colloquium Series

African Studies Colloquium Series Lecture: Dr. Judith Byfield -- Women, War and Rice: World War II and Abeokuta (Nigeria)

My research interests have evolved over time.  I began with a very strong interest in African art and literature and gradually added  the colonial state, nationalism, women's history, and the African Diaspora, specifically the Anglophone Caribbean.  Most of my research and writing thus far has focused on women's social and economic history in colonial Nigeria.  My first book, The Bluest Hands: A Social and Economic History of Women Indigo Dyers in Western Nigeria, brought many of my interests together for it examined the transformation of indigo dyeing and textile production in Abeokuta, a town famous for its indigo dyed cloth, adire.  It illuminated the ways in which the colonial state transformed women's economic life as well as the ways women navigated the new economic landscape and pressed the colonial state to protect their livelihoods.  My current manuscript, The Great Upheaval: Women, Taxes and Nationalist Politics in Nigeria, 1945-1951,  explores a women's tax revolt in Abeokuta after WW II, and follows the projection of this political episode unto the national stage as the organization that led the tax revolt grew into a national women's organization that tried to shape the nationalist movement. 

My courses reflect the full range of my interests.  They include lecture courses on Caribbean history,  Africa After 1800,  Popular Culture in Africa as well as seminars on a range of topics - Nationalism and Decolonization; Marriage and Divorce; Cloth, Dress and Identity.

229A New Cabell Hall

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African Colloquium Series: Aalyia Sadruddin

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African Colloquium Series: Adom Getachew

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African Colloquium Series: Adom Getachew

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African Colloquium Series: Adriaan Van Klinken

Adriaan Van Klinken

Centre for Religion and Public Life
& Leeds University Centre for African Studies, University of Leeds

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African Colloquium Series: Besi Brillian Muhonja

Besi Brillian Muhonja

Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
& African, African American, and Diaspora Studies James Madison University

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African Colloquium Series: Elyan Hill (Southern Methodist University)

November 10: Elyan Hill (Department of Art History, Southern Methodist University) will deliver a talk titled “Altars in Motion: Embodied Visualities in Togolese Sacred Arts,” which explores how contemporary Ewe altars and dance in Togo honor enslaved ancestors, and reenact histories of trade and forced migration.

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African Colloquium Series: Emmanuel K. Dogbevi

Emmanuel K. Dogbevi

Managing Editor of Ghana Business News
& Executive Director of NewsBridge Africa

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African Colloquium Series: Jatin Dua

Jatin Dua

Department of Anthropology & Center for South Asian Studies University of Michigan

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African Colloquium Series: Jordanna Matlon

Jordanna Matlon

School of International Service, American University

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African Colloquium Series: Oludamini Ogunnaike

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African Colloquium Series: Peter Hudson

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African Colloquium Series: Robert Trent Vinson (UVA)

November 17: Robert Trent Vinson (Director, Carter G. Woodson Institute, The University of Virginia) will present "Rapping Zulus: Afrika Bambaataa, the Universal Zulu Nation, and the Global Spread of Progressive Hip-Hop Cultures." His talk will also give the ASC community the chance to meet the new Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies.

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African Colloquium Series: Solange Ashby (UCLA)

October 20: Solange Ashby (Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA) will discuss her work on deep African history, centering Ancient Nubia to better understand ancient and classical Egyptian, Greek, and Roman religious histories.

African Diaspora conference opens in Accra

Robert Trent Vinson leads ASWAD's 11th Biennial Conference at the University of Ghana in Accra, Ghana on the theme "Repatriating African Studies"

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African Photography: The Ethics of Looking and Collecting in the Age of Restitution

African Photography:
The Ethics of Looking and Collecting in the Age of Restitution 

Friday, November 11th
9am - 4pm

Since the 1990s, exhibitions of African photographers such as Seydou Keïta have raised questions about the relationship of ownership to authorship, visibility to privacy. Concerns about the ethics of looking and collecting have grown more urgent with recent debates about the restitution of African cultural heritage.

This online symposium draws together scholars, artists, and curators who explore the ethics of working with photographs and methods to decolonize the medium, and its histories.

What rights do photographers have? In today's age of hypervisibility, can sitters claim their "right to opacity," to use Édouard Glissant's term? What is the future of collecting and curating photographs that originate in family and colonial archives on the continent? Can viewers embody “the active struggle of looking with,” in Tina Campt’s words—rather than observe passively—and can this engender new ways of seeing? 

Speakers:

  • Sandrine Colard (Rutgers University–Newark)
  • Osaisonor Godfrey Ekhator-Obogie (Institute for Benin Studies)
  • Patricia Hayes (University of the Western Cape)
  • Candace Keller (Michigan State University)
  • Lebohang Kganye (Visual artist and photographer)
  • Ingrid Masondo (Iziko South African National Gallery)
  • Steven Nelson (National Gallery of Art)
  • Giulia Paoletti (University of Virginia)
  • John Peffer (Ramapo College of New Jersey)
  • Z.S. Strother (Columbia University)

Keynote: Temi Odumosu (University of Washington)

Welcome: David Freedberg (Columbia University) and Douglas Fordham (University of Virginia)

Concluding Remarks: Steven Nelson (National Gallery of Art)

For more information, including the full program, abstracts, speaker bios, and bibliography, visit: https://art.as.virginia.edu/african-photography-conference

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African Studies Colloquium Fall Lecture Series:

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African Studies Colloquium Series

African Studies Colloquium Lecture: Mary Hicks PhD Candidate-- University of Virginia Department of History

Notions of African Sovereignty in Post-Slave Trade West Africa

Violence, Political Sovereignty and the British Suppression of the Slave Trade on the West African Coast, 1811-1825

Recently, a growing number of historians have interrogated the numerous commercial, political, and ethical ramifications wrought by Great Britain’s 1807 unilateral decision to spearhead a military and legal effort to end to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. As both Robin Law and Christopher Brown have argued, the zealousness of British abolitionist efforts on the West African coast were intimately linked to colonization schemes which aimed to both aggrandize British power abroad, and civilize African polities increasingly perceived as economically antiquated and morally corrupt. Few scholars, however, have placed Africans and their activities at the center of this narrative. As my presentation will show, British privateers and naval vessels increasingly utilized a “judicious mixture of bullying and bribery” to suppress the trans-Atlantic slave trade. This conversion in policy led to a diminished recognition and observance of the territorial and commercial sovereignty for West African polities located along the Gold and Slave Coasts. In the trading ports frequented by Portuguese and Brazilian slavers, including Porto Novo, Whydah and Onim, British anti-slaving vessels violently seized suspected slaving ships and their crews (many of whom were African-born, enslaved seamen) and fired on African port communities as they abetted foreign slavers. These maritime battles were un-sanctioned by the customary rights recognized for both European and African polities derived from the “Law of Nations,” which protected rulers and sovereign people’s ability to conduct their own commerce unimpeded by outside nations, except during times of war. My paper explores the legal contradictions and ironies of Britain’s early anti-slaving activities for West African commercial port communities, especially the role that violence played in coercing compliance of the suppression of the trade. Furthermore, British perceptions of African sovereignty during this period underwent an acute transformation from the eighteenth century—during which intense British slave trading conducted at these same coastal communities operated under the implicit recognition of African rulers’ lawful right to sell their own subjects as slaves. In the years following prohibition, British administrators, politicians and naval officers repeatedly ignored the autonomy and agency of slave trading African rulers. Furthermore, as my paper argues, British military and diplomatic power after 1811, increasingly undermined African attempts to employ European legal theory to protect their participation in a trans-Atlantic slave trade which continued to be highly profitable to a small number of West African merchants.

 

299A New Cabell Hall

Free and open to the public.

African Studies Colloquium Series: "Impossible Frontiers" by Kwame E. Otu

African Studies Colloquium Series presentation by Kwame E. Otu. 

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African Studies Colloquium Series: A.D. Carson

A.D. Carson

McIntire Department of Music, University of Virginia

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African Studies Colloquium Series: Allen F. Isaacman & Barbara S. Isaacman

October 13: Allen F. Isaacman & Barbara S. Isaacman (Department of History, University of Minnesota; and a retired criminal defense attorney, respectively) will speak about the activism and research that led to their recent book, Mozambique’s Samora Machel: A Life Cut Short.

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African Studies Colloquium Series: Anita Plummer (Howard University)

September 22: Anita Plummer (Department of African Studies, Howard University) will deliver a talk titled “Kenya, China, and the Online Public Sphere,” about how virtual spaces enable non-elite Kenyans to respond to large-scale Chinese fishing operations off the Kenyan coast.

 

We are happy to kick off the 2021–22 African Studies Colloquium Series next Wednesday, 22 September, when we welcome guest speaker Anita Plummer, Assistant Professor of African Studies at Howard University. Dr. Plummer’s work focuses on African political economy, transnationalism, and Sino-African relations. She has conducted research in China, Kenya, South Africa, Mozambique, and Senegal. Her current book project is titled Street-Level Discourses: Change, Power and Agency in Kenya’s Engagements with China. The book focuses on grassroots perspectives and responses to China’s increased political and economic interventions in Africa. (We’re also proud to note that Dr. Plummer is a former Predoctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.)

 

Dr. Plummer’s talk is titled “Discordant Discourses: Kenya, China and the Online Public Sphere.” The talk will take place on Zoom on Wednesday, 22 September, from 3:30–5:00 PM.

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African Studies Colloquium Series: Ebony Coletu

Ebony Coletu is a scholar and writer based in Philadelphia and Accra. She received her Ph.D. from Stanford University. As a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana she researched back-to-Africa initiatives led by Gold Coasters between 1898-1928. She also stages public memorials and conversations about little-known girls and women born in Ghana who died abroad in the name of a cause. Her current book project, Relentless Returns, chronicles a linked series of African invitations for diasporic return and investment in the early days of pan-Africanism.

 

Abstract: In 1926, Laura Adorkor Koffey traveled to the U.S. inspired by a prophetic calling to invite African Americans to live and invest in the Gold Coast. She launched her speaking tour as a charismatic organizer with Marcus Garvey’s U.N.I.A. movement but less than two years later she was assassinated in Florida. Critics called her a fraud, an imposter from Georgia rather than a Gã princess. For decades, confusion about her identity made it difficult to say anything about her motives and family history. This talk shares several methods used to gather fragmented information in Accra that led to a surprising new story about Laura Adorkor Koffey and her family’s century-long investment in diasporic return.

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African Studies Colloquium Series: Halimat Somotan

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African Studies Colloquium Series: Jermaine Scott

“We are not Asking this as Beggars’: The Confederation of African Football and the Fight to Decolonize FIFA”

 

 

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African Studies Colloquium Series: Jessica Krug

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African Studies Colloquium Series: Kwame E. Otu

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African Studies Colloquium Series: Kwame Otu

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African Studies Colloquium Series: Meet and Greet

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African Studies Colloquium Series: Oludamini Ogunnaike, Religious Studies (UVA)

Oludamini Ogunnaike is an assistant professor of Religious Studies at William & Mary. He teaches courses on Islam, Islamic Philosophy, Spirituality, and Art, as well as African and African Diasporic Religions.

 

He holds a PhD in African Studies and the Study of Religion from Harvard University, and spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

 

Professor Ogunnaike's research examines the philosophical dimensions of postcolonial, colonial, and pre-colonial Islamic and indigenous religious traditions of West and North Africa, especially Sufism and Ifa. He is currently working on a book entitled, Sufism and Ifa: Ways of Knowing in Two West African Intellectual Traditions and maintains a digital archive of West African Sufi poetry.

African Studies Minor

Requirements for an African Studies Minor (AS)


 

A minor in African Studies consists of six courses (totaling a minimum of 20 credits) taken from at least two departments. There are no prerequisites. To complete the minor, students must take HIAF 2001 and HIAF 2002 and earn a grade of C or better in both courses; take twelve additional credits approved by the Director of Undergraduate Programs and earn a minimum GPA of 2.0 in all courses counted toward the minor. Up to six credits of relevant study abroad may apply to the minor.

 

 


Declaring an African Studies Minor

The procedure for declaring a minor in African Studies is as follows

 

 

 

Afro-American Sources in Virginia: A Guide to Manuscripts

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After College, What's Next? A Post-Graduation Workshop

Students often ask us, "What can I do with this major/minor?" or "What am I qualified to do once I graduate from college?" -- have you ever wondered? How can you market your degree in African American and African Studies? What kinds of jobs are available? What about graduate or professional school? This will be a useful experience, regardless of your academic year at U.Va. Refreshments will be served before and after the event.

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After College, What's Next? A Post-Graduation Workshop

Students often ask us, "What can I do with this major/minor?" or "What am I qualified to do once I graduate from college?" -- have you ever wondered? How can you market your AAS or AS degree? What kinds of jobs are available? What about graduate or professional school? This will be a useful experience, regardless of your academic year at U.Va. Refreshments will be served before and after the event.

 

Minor 125

Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga headshot

Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: "We Dance With Existence: Black-Indigenous Placemaking in the Land Known as México and Beyond"

Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga’s research includes social movements, racialization, blackness, indigeneity, nation-state formation and geography. Her dissertation, titled We Dance With Existence: Black-Indigenous Placemaking in the Land Known as México and Beyond, illuminates how Black, Indigenous, and Black-Indigenous women engage in placemaking practices that reveal and unsettle notions of race, place, and (nation-) statehood in México. Merging ethnographic and archival research conducted from 2016-2020 in Guerrero, Oaxaca, Veracruz and Mexico City with theories and methodologies from Anthropology, History, Black Studies, and Native/Indigenous Studies, Agbasoga argues that Black-Indigenous placemaking practices create two critical ruptures: first, in the (re)produced bifurcation of blackness and indigeneity, and second, in the Mexican state’s racialization of its territory as mestizo. These ruptures generate space to think about alternative possibilities for Black, Indigenous, and Black-Indigenous communities throughout what is known as “The Americas”/Abya Yala.

 

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor New York University, Gallatin School of Individualized Study

Anthropology
Northwestern University

Age of Concrete

History

Albert Luthuli

History

Alexandria Smith, current Woodson post-doctoral fellow published an article in the Journal of Feminist Scholarship

Alexandria Smith, current Woodson post-doctoral fellow published "Being in the Black Queer Diaspora: Embodied Archives in A Map to the Door of No Return" in the Journal of Feminist Scholarship

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All CGWI Events Postponed for week of November 14

Angelica Allen

Dissertation Title:
Blackness in the Philippine Imaginary

This project is a critical ethnography focused on the experiences of a community in the Philippines known as the Black Amerasians (the progeny of African American servicemen and Filipina women). Employing a range of methodologies—including autoethnography, visual ethnography, and oral histories—the project is based on nine months of fieldwork centered on communities of Black Amerasians living near Angeles City and Olongapo City, home to two of the largest former American military bases and to the Philippines’ highest concentrations of Black Amerasians. It examines how members of these communities form and negotiate their identities and shape the ways in which the larger Filipino community perceives them. The first academic study to document the lives of Black Amerasians in the Philippines, the project contributes to growing body of scholarship on Blackness in the Pacific.

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Chapman University 

Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin
Alridge

Derrick Alridge

Professor

Specialties:
Social Foundations of Education

319 Bavaro Hall

American Africans in Ghana

History

American Muslim Women

Religious Studies

Amphibious Subjects

Anthropology

Amphibious Subjects: Book Talk

Book talk for Kwame E. Otu's first monograph: Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana

An Ethnography of Hunger

Anthropology

Ancestral House

English

Andrew Kahrl won Connecticut Book Award for best non-fiction book from the Connecticut Center for the Book

Anna Duensing, post-doctoral fellow, publishes op-ed in WashPo's "Made By History" blog

Leonora Anyango

Swahili Instructor

Leonora Anyango, PhD, is a language, culture, and education expert of international repute. She is an applied linguist and specializes in the teaching and writing of languages, including but not limited to Kiswahili, English as an International Language, and Japanese. She has also taught College Composition, Creative Writing and Multicultural Education. She is an avid curriculum developer and has worked in this capacity as a consultant for reputable institutions such as Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. She is a Certified Legal and Health Interpreter, and she has worked as a translator for Institutions such as the World Bank. Her research concentration includes second language teaching and learning, multilingual writing pedagogies, African rhetoric, and translation and interpretation. Anyango is also an avid writer of creative nonfiction and poetry. She has published numerous works. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking, reading, and learning a new language. 

Application Guidelines

Application Guidelines: 


  • Please do not wait until the last day to submit your application. If are technical difficulties in the submission process, we are unable to accept applications after the deadline.      

  • C.V. must include the following: personal contact information, date(s) and location(s) of degree(s) earned, honors and awards, lectures and conference presentations, publications and, the names of three referees.

  • Project description should include the following:

  1. The nature of the research to be completed during the period of the fellowship award, as well as the significance of this work 
  2. A detailed plan of research and revision 
  3. An outline of the concrete objectives to be achieved during the award period. These objectives must include a statement of publication plans for the proposed research and writing.
  • Bibliography can be a "working bibliography," but should list those scholarly works that the applicant considers most important to the intellectual development of the project. 

Application Instructions

Please review the following pages for information about each specific fellowship opportunity as well as important deadlines, application guidelines, review procedures, and frequently asked questions:

Please note: due to the large number of applications we receive each year, we are unable to provide feedback for unsuccessful applicants.

The posting number for this application season will be available on the pre and post-doctoral fellowship pages in the months prior to the application deadline.  

The application deadline for the fellowship program is always the same: December 1st at 11:59 PM (Eastern Standard Time). We are unable to review applications submitted after this date.

Application Guidelines

In addition to the application instructions listed on the pre and post-doctoral fellowship pages of our website, please find supplementary material pertaining to preparing your application on the "Application Guidelines" page. 

Review Procedures

All applications and supporting documents will be reviewed by a committee constituted of Woodson Institute Faculty and Affiliates according to the following research and teaching missions of the Institute. A list of relevant information can be found on the "review procedures" page of our website. 

Frequently Asked Questions

For any and all additional information, please consult the "frequently asked questions" page on our website. Any remaining questions not covered in this section of the website can be directed to the Woodson's administrative staff. 

Maurice Apprey

Maurice Apprey

Dean, Office of African American Affairs, Professor of Psychiatry, School of Medicine

#4 Dawson's Row
(Luther P. Jackson House)

Shaun Armstead headshot

Shaun Armstead

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Imagined Solidarities: Black Liberal Internationalism and the National Council of Negro Women’s Journey from Afro-Asian to Pan-African Unity, 1935 to 1975

Shaun Armstead is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Her dissertation, “Imagined Solidarities: Black Liberal Internationalism and the National Council of Negro Women’s Journey from Afro-Asian to Pan-African Unity, 1935 to 1975,” charts the understudied international activities of one of the largest African American women’s organizations in U.S. history.

History
Rutgers University

JoVia Armstrong

Assistant Professor

Art Isn't Just the Pursuit of Beauty, According to Bill T. Jones

November 13, 2008 — In the artistic projects he takes on, award-winning choreographer Bill T. Jones said he wants his dance company to become an engine of change, both in the creative process and in the resulting performance.

As its only remaining elected officials depart, Haiti reaches a breaking point

Robert Fatton, Jr., Woodson faculty affiliate, was quoted in an NPR piece about Haiti's political crisis

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ASC Erik McDuffie, University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

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ASC Marius Kothor, Yale University

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ASC with Mxolisi Mchunu (POSTPONED)

African Studies Colloquium Series event with Mxolisi Mchunu

 

Mchunu published the book Violence and Solace: The Natal Civil War in Late-Apartheid South Africa through UVA Press. At the event, copies of the book will be available for purchase and signing by the author.

For more on the publication and Mchunu:

The Natal Midlands in South Africa was ravaged by conflict in the 1980s and 1990s between supporters of the United Democratic Front and Inkatha. The violence left thousands of people dead, injured, homeless, and emotionally wounded. In Violence and Solace, Mxolisi Mchunu provides a historical study of the origins, causes, and nature of political violence in the rural community of KwaShange in the Vulindlela district, one of the areas most affected by the political violence in the Natal Midlands.

Mchunu survived the internecine violence in Natal and reflects on his childhood experiences and the complex political situation in the homelands between 1985 and 1996. Threading individual and local factors with regional and national forces, he entwines autobiographical reflections with historical scholarship to explain the political violence that rocked parts of Natal. While provincial and national leaders emerge as complex actors negotiating a chaotic world with no predictable outcomes, Mchunu shines the brightest spotlight on the women and children who suffered most during the conflict. The result is a seminal work on transition violence during the twilight of apartheid.

 

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ASC: Adia Benton, Northwestern University

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ASC: Amir Syed (UVA)

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ASC: Celina De Sa, University of Texas, Austin

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ASC: Guilia Paoletti (UVA)

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ASC: Idriss Fofana, Harvard University

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ASC: Kwasi Konadu, Colgate University

Prof.  Kwasi Konadu, Colgate University. "“Many Black Women of this Fortress”: Global Empire, Slavery, Race, and Religion on Africa's Gold Coast"

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ASC: Mauro Nobili (University of Illinois)

ASC: Rudo Mudiwa, University of California, Irvine

Thursday, October 26th
10:30 pm - 12:00 pm
Minor 110

Rudo Mudiwa, Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine

Abstract: 
A Revolutionary Opening: 1975, New Women, and African Decolonization
African anti-colonial movements often invoked a New Woman—free, educated, and politically conscious—who would emerge from the rubble of colonialism. This talk examines how this figure emerges in the midst of several historical currents: the rise of Third World feminism, the Marxist-Leninist turn of African anti-colonial struggles, and consumer culture which marketed a transnational aesthetic befitting the New African Woman. Using Zimbabwe as a case study, I explore the New African Woman’s circulation in Pan-African media, party propaganda, and fiction. I argue that while it offered liberatory possibilities for women, New African Womanhood crafted a normative femininity—transnational yet paradoxically bound to nationalisms, subversive of gender norms yet bound to masculine figures—which compromised the revolutionary transformation promised by decolonization movements.

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ASC: Tracy Mensah, PhD Candidate, Georgetown University

ASC: Tracy Mensah, PhD Candidate, Georgetown University. "Sindhis in the Gold Coast: From Retailing to Manufacturing, 1948-1960"

 

Register here: https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0qc-2hrD0uHNzyE1skcW5F6TH85l...

 

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ASC: Victoria Massie (Rice University)

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ASC: Xaiver Livermon, UC Santa Cruz

Ashon Crawley awarded a Crossroads Art Fellowship at Princeton University

Ashon Crawley awarded Fellowship from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music

Ashon Crawley is awarded prestigious award from the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. For more information about the fellowship visit: https://ism.yale.edu/ism-fellows

Ashon Crawley awarded the Judy Tsou Critical Race Studies Award by the American Musicological Society

Ashon Crawley is 2022 Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks

Ashon Crawley named Visiting Artist at UPenn

This spring, the Center for Public Art and Space (CPAS) at Weitzman will host renowned writer, artist, and educator Ashon Crawley, C’03, as its 2022 visiting scholar artist. Dr. Crawley’s work explores the intersection of performance, blackness, queerness, and spirituality.

Ashon Crawley's art exhibition "Enunciated Life" reviewed by KCRW

At the California African American Museum (CAAM) right now, there’s an exhibition called “Enunciated Life.” It looks at Black spiritualism — in particular, Black Pentecostalism — as a source of vitality, creativity, movement, social life, and joy. That’s even in the face of racism and discrimination against Black people. 

Ashon Crawley's book The Lonely Letters won the Lambda Literary Award

Ashon Crawley won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award in the category of LGBTQ Nonfiction for his book The Lonely Letters

Ashon Crawley was one of eight recipients of an UNDO Fellowship by the UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art

Ashon Crawley was one of eight recipients of an UNDO Fellowship by the UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art. The fellowship pairs artists and writers as part of an effort to expand radical fillmaking practices and research new languages of documentary cinema. Crawley was paired with artist Crystal Z. Campbell: UnionDocs Announces the Recipients of the UNDO Fellowship

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ASWAD Book Talk: Aisha Khan's The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press)

Description

In this ASWAD sponsored event, Dr. Aisha Khan will discuss her new book: The Deepest Dye: Obeah, Hosay, and Race in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press)

 

Register here:

https://virginia.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_IEvxcVLVSiWRZJRoV2zg2w

August in Perspective

February 1 - March 2, 2018

In the shocking aftermath of August 11th and 12th, the immediate impulse of the UVA community was to understand and position these events in a long historical context.  The first approach was to learn from our faculty, visiting speakers, and experts about why these ideologies persist and manifest themselves in this particular community and at this institution. Yet, however essential is the desire to know and understand, to see August 11th and 12th as the proverbial “teachable moment,” our actions have neglected to consider something equally necessary: to process, to heal, to breathe, and to engage these events through art-making processes and practices. 

Audre Lorde reminds us that “all knowledge is mediated through the body and that feeling is a profound source of information about our lives.” In this light, then, we have thought to focus attention on the neglected approaches to the events of summer 2017, those dedicated to feeling, embodying, to sensing August, to putting August in perspective and entrusting our bodies and our emotions to reveal the profundity of what we already know: that we are intimately and inextricably connected across ideologies, demographics, generations, and geography.

On each Saturday throughout the month of February 2018, the August in Perspective series convened arts workshops to foster community, introspection, and reconciliation through creative expression.

 

Workshops included: 

February 1-2nd, Paloma McGregor and Rashida Bumbray Dancing While Black Residency

Helms Theater, UVA Drama Building

RUN MARY RUN considers the harmonic ideas and tonal vocabulary of the McIntosh County Shouters—master ring shout artists—as a point of departure. Creating an active ritual for the ceremony of the ring shout, the performers go on a ride through the cosmologies of the Low Country, Geechie Sea Islands, Tennessee Blues, P Funk, and Hip Hop—relating the shout to the history of Black music.

Dance Diaspora Collective is comprised of the alumni and friends of Dance Diaspora, Oberlin College's premier West African and Afro-form dance company.  Made up of artists, musicians and cultural workers, the collective draws from the work and repertoire originally established by its founder, Professor Adenike Sharpley, master dancer and choreographer.

 

February 10th, “12-Hour Play Project” hosted by the Paul Robeson Players, Minor Hall 125

The Paul Robeson Players is an independent student-run Revolutionary Theatre Organization, but grounded in the roots of African and African-American theater traditions.  Its goal is to cultivate artistic diversity in the realm of theater performance.

With students from the Monticello High School drama program, workshop participants wrote, directed, and performed a play in 12-hours called “8—12—17.”

February 17th “Musical Compositions on Life in Charlottesville” hosted by A.D. Carson, Rap Lab, New Cabell Hall 398

A.D. Carson is Assistant Professor of Hip Hop and the Global South. Carson is a performance artist and educator from Decatur, Illinois. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University doing work that focuses on race, literature, history, and rhetorical performances.

Through the composition exercises, students from Friendship Court, participating in a grant project with Bama Works funded project with MIMA (Modern Improvisational Music Appreciation), wrote an original song called “The Daily Routine.”

February 24th “Crafting Spaces of Solidarity and Resistance” hosted by Destinee Wright, Ashon Crawely, and Sara Brickman, Citizen Justice Initiative Lab, New Cabell Hall 452

The Solidarity Cards Project began in Charlottesville, Virginia as a response to the 2016 election results. It has since evolved into an anonymous platform for participants to openly voice their concerns about contemporary political issues and social justice causes. Facilitator: Destinee Wright is an alumna of UVA with a B.A. in women, gender and sexuality. Wright is an artist, digital marketing consultant, and the owner and operator of Luxie Hair Services, a mobile hair extension and braiding studio.

Kintsugi Pottery is a traditional Japanese art that uses a precious metal – liquid gold, liquid silver or lacquer dusted with powdered gold – to repair broken pottery. As a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise. Facilitator: Ashon Crawley is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Professor Crawley works in the areas of black studies, queer theory, sound studies, theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies.

Erasure is a form of found poetry or found art created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. Facilitator: Sara Brickman is an author, performer, and activist from Ann Arbor, MI. She is a graduate student in the M.F.A. creative writing program at UVA.

Dancing While Black

August in Perspective Kick Off: Dancing While Black Performs "Run Mary Run"

Join us for a FREE performance of Run Mary Run by Rashida Bumbray & Dance Diaspora Collective. This performance serves as the kick off event for “August in Perspective,” a series of arts events scheduled throughout the month of February fostering creative responses to the events of August 11th and 12th through theater, music, and dance workshops with guest artists, UVA students and faculty, community organizations, and local area high schools. 

Rashida Bumbray has been performing the ring shout – a spiritual dance developed during slavery – for about a decade. For the newest installment of this work, Run Mary Run, she considers the harmonic ideas and tonal vocabulary of the McIntosh County Shouters – master ring shout artists – as a point of departure. Creating an active ritual for the ceremony of the ring shout, the performers go on a ride through the cosmologies of the Low Country, Geechie Sea Islands, Tennessee Blues, P Funk, and Hip Hop – relating the shout to the history of Black music. Run Mary Run is developed in collaboration with a large ensemble, the Dance Diaspora Collective and special guest master dancer, Adenike Sharpley, Professor, Oberlin College. Costumes by Gingie McLeod, Dindi Designs. 

“Motion and music and memory entwined” - The New York Times Best Concerts of 2012

“It was an enduring blood memory…we were in the waters of William Henry Johnson’s I Baptize Thee.” - 2014: The Year According To LaTasha N. NeVada Diggs, Walker Arts Center 

Nominated for a 2014 BESSIE: Outstanding Emerging Choreographer 

2014 Recipient: Harlem Stage Fund For New Work

The performance will be followed by an informal talkback session and panel with Paloma McGregor, Director of Angela’s Pulse and Founder of Dancing While Black, Rashida Bumbray, Adenike Sharpley, and local artists, students, and faculty. 

About the Artists
Rashida Bumbray’s choreography draws from traditional African American vernacular and folk forms including ring shouts, hoofing, and blues improvisation in order to interrogate society and initiate healing. Bumbray was nominated for the prestigious Bessie Award in 2014 for “Outstanding Emerging Choreographer.” Her performance Run Mary Run in collaboration with Jason Moran and Dance Diaspora Collective was named among Best Concerts of 2012 by the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff. Bumbray recieved the 2014 Harlem Stage Fund for New Work. Her work has been presented by Columbia University, Caribbean Cultural Center, Dancing While Black, Harlem Stage, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New Museum, Project Row Houses, SummerStage, Tate Modern and Weeksville Heritage Center. Bumbray received her MA in Africana Studies from New York University and her BA in African American Studies and Theater & Dance from Oberlin College where she studied Jazz, Blues and Afro dance forms with Adenike Sharpley and collaborated with the late Wendell Logan’s Oberlin Jazz Ensemble. 

Since 2012, Dancing While Black has worked to bring the voices of Black movement artists from the periphery to the center. A New York-based initiative with national reach, DWB supports dialogue, documentation, process and performance, particularly among Black artists whose practices do not fit neatly into the boxes created for us. Over the past five years, DWB has produced the work of more than a dozen Black dance makers, supported 22 Fellowship artists in the developing of their practice and networks and gathered scholars, writers and artists to participate in diverse platforms that center their voices and build community. Our work is done in partnership with individuals, institutions and communities committed to creating a more equitable landscape. Now celebrating its Fifth Anniversary Season, DWB will host a three-day festival at Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance in May 2018 and is developing a new digital journal that will launch in Fall 2018. 

Angela’s Pulse creates and produces collaborative performance work dedicated to building community and illuminating bold, new stories. We provide a home for interdisciplinary collaborations that thrive on both politics and play, and we are committed to developing timely performance works that provoke, inform and inspire. Co-founded by Paloma and Patricia McGregor, Angela’s Pulse was named for their mother Angela, an artist, teacher and activist who continues to inspire their work. 

Dancing While Black/Angela's Pulse is supported by the Surdna Foundation and Dance/NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund, made possible by the Ford Foundation. 

This event was made possible by the support of the Arts & Sciences Collective Response: Moving Forward Fund, UVA’s Department of Drama and its Dance Program, The Carter G. Woodson Institute, Citizen Justice Initiative, and the University of Virginia Arts Council. 

Admission is free, but tickets are required. The maximum number of tickets that may be reserved is two (2).All tickets will be held in will-call for pickup at the door. The UVA Arts Box Office will open at 7 pm for will-call pickup and any unreserved tickets will be available at that time. Any reserved tickets not picked up by 7:45 pm, 15-minutes prior to curtain, will be released.

Dancing While Black

August in Perspective Workshop: Dancing While Black's Master Class for the Masses "Praise Traditions"

Dancing While Black's Master Classes for the Masses series presents: Dance Diaspora Collective/ PRAISE TRADITIONS 

About: With the Afro form and the pulse at the center, this class will explore 3 well known spiritual dances: The Baptist Shuffle (from the Deep South, Mississippi & Alabama); The Ring Shout (from the Sea Islands and Low Country of Georgia and the Carolinas) and the Cordon (from Cuba)

  • February 2nd, 2018 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, UVA Helms Theater
  • RSVP to khw6c@virginia.edu by January 31st, 2018

No prior dance training required. Please wear comfortable clothing and shoes. 

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August in Perspective Workshops

August in Perspective: Creative Responses to #Charlottesville

 

On each Saturday in February 2018, the "August in Perspective: Creative Responses to #Charlottesville" series will foster creative responses to the events of August 11th and 12th through theater, dance, music, and art workshops with UVA students and faculty, community organizations, and local area high schools. Registration for events is not required, but recommended, especially for those with dietary and/or accessibility needs. 

To kick off the series, Rashida Bumbray & Dance Diaspora Collective’s Dancing While Black perform “Run Mary Run.” The free performance and discussion take place at UVA's Helms Theater on Thursday, February 1st at 8:00 pm. Free tickets can be reserved via UVA Arts Box Office. The visiting artists will host a workshop on Friday, February 2nd from 11:00 am – 1:00 pm in the Helms Theater. Please RSVP to khw6c@virginia.edu by January 31st, 2018.   

On the Saturdays of February 10th, 17th, and 24th, the August in Perspective series hosts the following workshops.

  • Paloma McGregor and Rashida Bumbray Dancing While Black Residency

 

  • PRAISE TRADITIONS Workshop with Dance Diaspora Collective
  • February 2nd, 2018 11:00 am - 1:00 pm, UVA Helms Theater
  • RSVP to khw6c@virginia.edu by January 31st, 2018
  • Dancing While Black's Master Classes for the Masses series Presents: Dance Diaspora Collective/ PRAISE TRADITIONS 
  • About: With the Afro form and the pulse at the center, this class will explore 3 well known spiritual dances: The Baptist Shuffle (from the Deep South, Mississippi & Alabama); The Ring Shout (from the Sea Islands and Low Country of Georgia and the Carolinas) and the Cordon (from Cuba).
  • No prior dance training required. Please wear comfortable clothing and shoes. 

Participants in the Diaspora Dance Collective workshop

  • "How to Live in Charlottesville," 12-hour Theater Project with UVA’s Paul Robeson Players
    • February 10th, 2018 9:00 am - 10:00 pm, Minor Hall, Room 125
    • Participants will write, cast, direct, and perform a series of original plays organized around the theme of “How to Live in Charlottesville”
    • Register via this link by January 31st, 2018
    • Meals provided
    • No prior theater training or experience required. Please wear comfortable clothing and shoes

 

  • “Musical Reflections on Life in Charlottesville,” Workshop with A.D. Carson & PRESENCE Center for Applied Theater Arts
    • February 17th, 11:00 am - 2:00 pm, Minor Hall, Room 125
    • Hip-hop workshop with A.D., Assistant Professor of Hip-Hop and the Global South, UVA
    • MIMA method workshop on musical improvisation with Mecca Burns, PRESENCE Center for Applied Theater Arts, Charlottesville
    • Students from Friendship Court workshop on original musical composition 
    • Registration recommended via this link. Refreshments provided

 

  • “Crafting Spaces of Solidarity and Resistance,” Erasure/Found Poetry with Sara Brickman, Solidarity Cards with Destinee Wright, and Kintsugi pottery with Ashon Crawley  
    • February 24th, 11:00 am – 2:00 pm, Citizen Justice Lab Space, New Cabell Hall Room 452 (4th Floor), University of Virginia
    • Found poetry and collage workshop with Sara Brickman, UVa MFA English Program
    • Solidarity Cards demo and composition, Destinee Wright
    • Kintsugi pottery with Ashon Crawley, UVa African American Studies/Religious Studies
    • Registration recommended via this link. Refreshments provided

 

  • Culminating Showcase  
    • March 2nd 7:00 pm, The Haven
    • Performance of "A King's Story" by Joshua St. Hill, Amaya Wallace, and the Monticello Drama Department
    • Film screening of play and 12-hour play project, "8-12-17"
    • Showcase of original musical works
    • Poetry readings
    • Display and discussion of Kintsugi pottery and Solidarity Cards
    • Registration recommended via this link. Refeshments provided

 

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August in Perspective: "How to Live In Charlottesville" 12-hour theater project

  • "How to Live in Charlottesville," 12-hour Theater Project with UVA’s Paul Robeson Players
    • February 10th, 2018 9:00 am - 10:00 pm, Minor Hall, University of Virginia
    • Participants will write, cast, direct, and perform a series of original plays organized around the theme of “How to Live in Charlottesville”
    • Register via this link by January 31st, 2018
    • Meals provided
    • No prior theater training or experience required. Please wear comfortable clothing and shoes
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August in Perspective: Culminating Showcase

Culminating Showcase  

  • March 2nd 7:00 pm, The Haven
  • Performance of "A King's Story" by Joshua St. Hill, Amaya Wallace, and the Monticello Drama Department
  • Performance of plays created during the 12-hour play project, "How to Live in Charlottesville"
  • Performance of musical composition on redevelopment by children of Friendship Court
  • Poetry readings
  • Display and discussion of Kintsugi pottery and Solidarity Cards

 

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August in Perspective: “Crafting Spaces of Solidarity and Resistance”

“Crafting Spaces of Solidarity and Resistance,” Erasure/Found Poetry with Sara Brickman, Solidarity Cards with Destinee Wright, and Kintsugi pottery with Ashon Crawley  

  • February 24th, 11:00 am – 2:00 pm, Citizen Justice Lab, New Cabell Hall, Room 452
  • Found poetry and collage workshop with Sara Brickman, UVa MFA English Program
  • Solidarity Cards demo and composition, Destinee Wright
  • Kintsugi pottery with Ashon Crawley, UVa African American Studies/Religious Studies
  • Lunch provided

 

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August in Perspective: “Musical Reflections on Life in Charlottesville,” Workshop with A.D. Carson & PRESENCE Center for Applied Theater Arts

“Musical Reflections on Life in Charlottesville,” Workshop with A.D. Carson & PRESENCE Center for Applied Theater Arts

  • February 17th, 11:00 am - 2:00 pm, Minor Hall, Room 125
  • Hip-hop workshop with A.D., Assistant Professor of Hip-Hop and the Global South, UVA
  • MIMA method workshop on musical improvisation with Mecca Burns, PRESENCE Center for Applied Theater Arts, Charlottesville
  • Students from Friendship Court workshop on original musical composition 
  • Registration recommended via this link. Refreshments provided

Dionne Bailey

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Please Don't Forget About Me:’ African American Women, Mississippi, and the History of Crime and Punishment in Parchman Prison, 1890–1980

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of History at Colgate Universty

History
University of Mississippi

Sarah Balakrishnan

Post-Doctoral

Dissertation Title:
Public Land and the People’s Power: Colonialism, Community, and Mass Politics in the British Gold Coast (Southern Ghana), c. 1807-1957

My research reveals how human geographies of the Atlantic slave trade shaped colonial rule in the Gold Coast, leading to the British state’s early—and path-breaking—downfall. In March 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to achieve independence from colonial rule. My project suggests that it is no coincidence that it is also the territory where the colonial state owned the lowest proportion of land—a fact owed to transformations in human-land relationships during the slave trade. By tracing a history of territorial occupation and spatial formations before colonization, I reveal how endemic migration during the slave trade created population pressure in the south, leading to a division in land that resembled private property. Whitehall’s subsequent declaration that all land in the Gold Coast was “the private property of its people” not only prevented mass annexation by colonists, but forced colonization by unusual means. Contrary to studies of colonial states that privatized and enclosed the commons, I examine the reverse process: the “public”-ization of the private. In order to govern the Gold Coast, Britain supplanted the private estates of the slave trade with a public forged through state infrastructure, agricultural commons, and public spaces designed for rituals and mass surveillance. They reorganized all land and sovereignty in the colony according to a public/private divide. What they did not count on, however, was how this project would introduce a new vision of political community: an “anticolonial public” united by these transformations to land and space. Even more than the Pan-African activism of figures like Kwame Nkrumah, popular protests surrounding the functions of public land made the colony ungovernable by the 1940s. Against studies that analyze decolonization through identitarian categories like race and nationhood, my project traces the evolution of a body politic—“the anticolonial public”— through changes to human geographies that occurred over nearly three hundred years.

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of History at University of Minnesota

History
Harvard University
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Sarah Balakrishnan

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Public Land and the People’s Power: Colonialism, Community, and Mass Politics in the British Gold Coast (Southern Ghana), c. 1807-1957
History
Harvard University
Laurie Balfour

Laurie Balfour

Professor

S395 Gibson Hall

Tiffany Barber

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: "Undesirability and the Value of Blackness in Contemporary Art"

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at University of Delaware (tenure-track)

Art History
University of Rochester

Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism

History

João Batista Nascimento Gregorie

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
For a True Democracy: Black Political Activism in Military Brazil

João Batista Nascimento Gregoire earned a Ph.D. in History from the University of Kansas. João is currently writing a book provisionally entitled For a True Democracy: Black Political Activism in Military Brazil. His work examines the intersection between the Brazilian Black movement and the process of re-democratization, as well as the engagement of Black organized militancy with the larger conceptualization of human rights.

Joao’s scholarship has been published in the peer-reviewed journals The Black ScholarBrasiliana: Journal for Brazilian Studies, and The Latin Americanist. He is also the recipient of the Jon Tolman Award (2022) from the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA), and the James R. Scobie Prize (2020) from the Conference on Latin American History (CLAH). 

 

History
University of Kansas

Becoming Human

award-winning

English
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Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in Visual Culture in Santo Domingo

In this ASWAD sponsored event, Dr. Rachel Afi Quinn (University of Houston) will discuss her new book: Being La Dominicana: Race and Identity in Visual Culture in Santo Domingo.

 

Register via this link: https://virginia.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_POdaFAW3RD64zmqnwZtbPQ

 

Frances Bell

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
In a State of Flight’: The Struggle for Freedom in the Haitian Diaspora, 1791-1830

Frances Bell is a PhD candidate in History at William & Mary, focusing on the legalities of slavery in the age of abolition. Her dissertation, titled "'In a State of Flight': The Struggle for Freedom in the Haitian Diaspora, 1791-1830," examines the legal and social interactions of several thousand people who were taken as slaves from revolutionary Haiti to the United States by enslavers fleeing the revolution. Following their journeys from revolutionary Haiti to the eastern seaboard of the United States, this project examines how enslaved Haitians acquired legal knowledge and formed social networks as they sought out different forms of legal and extra-legal freedom. Her work highlights the precarity of legal freedom in the revolutionary Atlantic, arguing that individual struggles over mobility were intrinsic to the legalities of slavery. Frances’s work has been supported by the Omohundro Institute and the Folger Institute, and has been published in the Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, 1750-1850. 

History
The College of William & Mary
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Ben and Jerry's Sundaes for AAS/AS Students

We think that with all the hard work you're doing, you deserve something sweet. Join us in Minor Hall 108 on October 2 from 5:00 - 6:15 p.m. for FREE Ben & Jerry's ice cream sundaes! Know someone interested in a major or minor in AAS or a minor in African Studies? Invite your friend to join us. We'll have some info there on our academic program and Prof. Shutt will be there to answer questions. This will also be an opportunity for you to purchase $5 AAS T-shirts and/or to contribute items (or make a financial contribution) to the care packages for our alumnae serving abroad in the Marines and the Peace Corps. But regardless, plan to join us for some delicious sundaes!

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Bertin M. Louis, Jr.: Anti-Haitianism, Statelessness, and Religious Practice in the Bahamas

Anti-Haitianism, Statelessness, and Religious Practice in the Bahamas

Bertin M. Louis, Jr. is an Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American & Africana Studies (AAAS) at the University of Kentucky and served as the inaugural Director of Undergraduate Studies for AAAS (2019-2021). He is President of the Association of Black Anthropologists, past Editor of Conditionally Accepted, and a current regular contributor to Higher Ed Jobs.  Dr. Louis studies the growth of Protestant forms of Christianity among Haitians transnationally, which is featured in his New York University Press book, “My Soul is in Haiti: Protestantism in the Haitian Diaspora of the Bahamas (2015)”  which was a Finalist for the 2015 Haitian Studies Association Book Prize in the Social Sciences.  He also studies human rights and statelessness among Haitians in the Bahamas and antiracist social movements in the US South.  Dr. Louis teaches courses in Black Studies and Cultural Anthropology and he received his PhD in 2008 from the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in Saint Louis.

Minor Hall

Debbie Best

Administrative and Undergraduate Assistant

104 Minor Hall

Lindsey Beutin

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: If Slavery’s Not Black: The stakes of the U.S. State Department’s campaign against human trafficking

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Media Arts at McMaster University (tenure-track)

English
University of Pennsylvania

Beyond Granite: Pulling Together - Ashon Crawley's creates exhibition entitled HOMEGOING on the U.S. National Mall

Ashon Crawley is one of six commissioned artists creating public art exhibitions on the U.S. National Mall. The pilot exhibition, Pulling Together is part of the new Beyond Granite initiative, presented by the Trust for the National Mall in partnership with the National Capital Planning Commission and the National Park Service. 
 

Beyond Granite: Pulling Together stages six installations on the National Mall that recall underrepresented American histories

Ashon Crawley's art exhibition featured in The Architect's Newspaper

Bittersweet Legacy

award-winning

History

Black for a Day

African-American Studies

Black Patience

African-American Studies

Black Prisoners and their World, Alabama, 1865-1900

History
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Black Studies across Grounds Reception

Black Studies and Digital Humanities will be focus of panel discussion

So-called “digital humanities” have become a major focus of scholarly research these days. The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies and the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia will host two visiting speakers who will discuss what race and black studies bring to digital humanities during a session to be held Oct. 7 at 4 p.m. in Bryan Hall, room 229.

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Black Studies REMIX: "KNOWLEDGE" The Fifth Element of Hip Hop--A Conversation with Dr. James Braxton Peterson

Black Studies REMIX: "KNOWLEDGE" The Fifth Element of Hip Hop--A Conversation with Dr. James Braxton Peterson

Dr. James Braxton Peterson is a scholar-activist and media contributor whose work on Hip Hop illuminates the educational and political dimensions of one of the world's most influential art forms. He argues that knowledge is the "Fifth Element of Hip Hop" culture (alongside djing, mc-ing, breakdancing, and graffiti). His weekly WHYY podcast, called "The Remix," explores the Fifth Element of Hip Hop through the politics of race relations and the cultural debates surrounding celebrities and entertainers. You can access "The Remix" at the following link:

http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/blogs/the-remix

 

Join us for a discussion about the intersections of knowledge, Black Studies, and the transformative power of Hip Hop. 

(Dr. James Braxton Peterson serves as the Director of Africana Studies and Associate Professor of English at Lehigh University. He is also the founder of the Hip Hop Scholars, Inc. and is a frequent contributor to news media.)

 

Sponsored by the AAS Majors Union and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American And African Studies

Black Woman Reformer

award-winning

History
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BLACKBALLED: THE BLACK AND WHITE OF RACE ON AMERICA’S CAMPUSES

The Blackballed KNOW BETTER/DO BETTER Campus Racism Lecture: This is not your ordinary lecture on racism. Frank, blunt, but somehow entertaining, Lawrence Ross' lecture on campus racism is based on his new book, Blackballed: The Black & White Politics of Race on America's Campuses. Ross breaks down not just the overt racism that occurs on college campuses almost daily, but their true roots. Are college campuses utopian spaces devoted to critical thought, or are they afflicted with the same issues as American society? That's the question Ross will answer in his lecture. And he guarantees that once you know better about campus racism, you'll do better when it comes to helping eliminate it.

 

Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility

award-winning

Religious Studies

Blowin’ Hot and Cool

award-winning

English

Nemata Blyden

Armstead L. Robinson Professor (AAS)

Minor 227C

A scholar specializing in African American, African Diaspora, and African history, Nemata Blyden is the author of African Americans and Africa: A New History (Yale University Press, 2019), and West Indians in West Africa, 1808-1880: The Diaspora in Reverse (University of Rochester Press, 2000), among other publications.  Her teaching and scholarship center the experiences of African descended people, thinking about this history in insightful ways by looking at their history through an often-neglected lens of “Global Black” history.  Her principal thematic interests have included nineteenth century African American history, African American engagement with Africa, as well as African and American and Caribbean migrations to Africa.

Her current project reflects her continuing interest in African American history and the connection between the African continent and its diaspora. A family biography of a black Atlantic family, the project attempts to tell the history of various spaces in the Atlantic world through the eyes of an extended family. Blyden holds an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in History from Yale University and a bachelor’s degree in History and International Relations from Mount Holyoke College. As a Professor in the Department of African American and African Studies, Blyden will teach a variety of courses on the Black experience. 

 

Author, African Americans and Africa: A New History,

https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300198669/african-americans-and-africa

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0300198663?pf_rd_p=f3acc539-5d5f-49a3-89ea-768a917d5900&pf_rd_r=6C0XKEYKXE1EGM96Y142

 

Bond of Iron

award-winning

History

Bond Papers Project - Website Launch Event

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Book Launch event for Professor Kwame E. Otu

Book launch event:
Amphibious Subjects: Sasso and the Contested Politics of
Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana

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Booker T. Washington: The Man and His Legacy (virtual)

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Brenda Marie Osbey: Visiting Faculty Poetry Reading

Building the Black Arts Movement

Art History

Bulletin Board:

Visit the newly launched Julian Bond Papers Project website

Call for Applications: Julian Bond Papers Project

The Papers of Julian Bond Project

Student Internship

Overview:

The Papers of Julian Bond is an innovative digital project that seeks to make the life’s work of Civil Rights icon Julian Bond freely available to the public and to render accessible the editorial process to community historians, crowdsourced transcriptionists, and student apprentices.

Julian Bond was a trusted voice in American democracy throughout his life, which spanned seven decades and significant historical moments like the U.S. Civil Rights era, school desegregation, the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, the movement for Gay Rights, and the environmental movement. The Papers of Julian Bond project plans to catalog, transcribe, annotate, and publish Bond’s collection over approximately two decades, while implementing a crowdsourced transcription process that has created over 8000 pages to-date.

The student apprentices will get hands-on experience in public history, documentary editing, and African-American studies with the opportunity to build skills for college, learn digital tools, and engage with the history of the environment around them. 

 

Responsibilities:

  • Scan speeches in Special Collections Library using DSLR cameras.
  • Work in teams to proofread and correct speeches pertaining to Civil Rights, voting rights, labor/education rights, and LGBTQ rights, among other topics.
  • Work independently to transcribe and archive documents in an online database.
  • Track work regularly using workflow spreadsheet.

Preferred Skills and Experience:

  • Interest in one or more of the following areas: African-American studies, history, community engagement, social justice, social studies, public history, and/or digital storytelling.
  • Excellent attention-to-detail and penchant for detail-oriented work (file management, spreadsheets, correcting/editing written documents).
  • Communication and organizational skills, including the ability to work independently, stay focused on assigned tasks, and work with team members professionally.

 

The position is 20-hours/week during the summer and 10-hours/week during the academic semester with a $15/hr rate of pay. We will prioritize students who provide a firm commitment to work during the 2022-2023 academic year as well as students who are African American and African Studies majors/minors.

 

Application Instructions:

Submit a resume and cover letter to the following email addresses:

jrp2gf@virginia.edu

lkb2k@virginia.edu

In your cover letter, explain your interest in the position and provide specific examples of why you would thrive in this role.

 

Deadline: April 29th, 2022 at 5:00 pm (EST)

Malcolm Cammeron

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
The Bulldozer and the Movement: The Gadsden Freedom Struggle in the Age of Urban Renewal

Malcolm Cammeron is a doctoral candidate in the department of History at the University of Virginia.  Malcolm's dissertation explores the intersections of urban planning, urban and environmental equalities, and social movements in the U.S. South. Following World War II, many southern cities undertook ambitious planning and development initiatives to fuel the region’s growth, drive modernization, and fortify Jim Crow. His dissertation is a case study that examines how contestation over changing urban environments informed the local Black freedom struggle.

History
University of Virginia

Caribbean Borderlands:

Please join us as the Conversations in Caribbean Studies presents

"Caribbean Borderlands: Postnationalism Prefigured @20”

Friday October 7, 2022; 10am-12 noon

Bryan Hall 229

Featuring panels and roundtables in honor of the 20th anniversary of Prof. Carnegie’s book:

  • Charles Carnegie, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, Bates College
  • Timothy Chin, Professor of English, California State University
  • Ronald Cummings, Associate Professor of English, McMaster University
  • Rachel Goffe, Assistant Professor of Human Geography, University of Toronto
  • David Scott, Ruth and William Lubic Professor and Chair, Anthropology, Columbia University
  • Deborah Thomas, R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, Director for Center for Experimental Ethnography, University of Pennsylvania
  • Matthew Chin, Assistant Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, UVa
  • Njelle Hamilton, Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies, UVa

Sponsored by the Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation; and the departments of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies; Anthropology; English; and Africana Studies.

Register for the Zoom webinar here: https://virginia.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_LtY-3Oy9Qz2GekolBnnjxQ

 

Caribbean Borderlands: Postnationalism Prefigured @20

The Conversations in Caribbean Studies series presents a series of panels and roundtables in honor of the 20th anniversary of Prof. Carnegie’s book: Postnationalism Prefigured: Caribbean Borderlands

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Caribbean Dinner

The AAS/AS Undergraduate Program requests the honor of your presence at our Annual Spring Diaspora Dinner!

This year, we will be dining on delicious Caribbean food, catered by Chef Tony Polanco

We are looking forward to hosting you at this special, informal event to celebrate the end of classes. Let's join in together and fortify ourselves for papers and exams (and grading!), and let us congratulate our soon-to-be AAS graduates.

Caribbean Writer Maryse Conde to visit UVA

March 2, 2011 — Caribbean writer Maryse Condé will give a public talk, "Journey of a Caribbean Woman Writer," during a two-day visit to the University of Virginia. She will speak about her life and literary experiences in the Caribbean, France, Africa and the U.S. as they resonate in historical, cultural and intellectual contexts and visit with students in the College of Arts & Sciences' Department of French Language and Literature.

Carter G. Woodson Bio

 

Born in 1875 in Buckingham County to parents who were formerly enslaved, Woodson went on to earn a Ph.D. in History at Harvard University in 1912, only the second African-American to receive a Harvard doctorate, his predecessor being the eminent scholar, W.E.B. DuBois. Woodson was instrumental in bringing professional recognition to the study of African-American history during a period when most historians held the opinion that African Americans were a people without history. He founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History in 1915 (later to be re-named the Association for the Study of African American Life and History) and its scholarly journal, The Journal of Negro History (now the Journal of African-American History), in 1916. Under his leadership, Negro History Week (now Black History Month) was inaugurated in the United States as an annual celebration of African-American achievement.

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Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies

Congratulations Class of 2018  from all of us at the Carter G. Woodson Institute upon successful completion of a demanding course of study!  We are as pleased and as proud as your family must be.  We are looking forward to seeing you at our diploma ceremony.

 

LOCATION/TIME

Our departmental diploma ceremony will be conducted Saturday, May 19, 2018, in Minor Hall Room 125

IMMEDIATELY following the Lawn ceremony. The ceremony will begin at 12:45 p.m(students should line up no later than 12:30pm.) A reception will follow the ceremony in the lobby of Minor Hall. If any of your guests have special needs, please let us know in advance.

 The diploma ceremony will be in Minor Hall Room 125, regardless of weather.     

 

TICKETS

Please pick up your tickets for your AAS Diploma ceremony tickets  in Minor Hall Room 108 on weekdays between April 30 thru May 4, from 9:00 a.m. – noon and 2:00 – 4:00 p.m. Tickets can be picked up only after the completion of an exit questionnaire, which will take approximately 15 minutes to complete.  Student IDs are required for pick-up and each student will ONLY be allowed to receive his/her own tickets.

Carter G. Woodson Institute Series

This series is published in association with the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American Studies at the University of Virginia.

Carter Godwin Woodson (1875 - 1950)

The Woodson Institute is named in honor of Carter Godwin Woodson, who was born in New Canton, Virginia in 1875. Among his numerous accomplishments, Woodson pioneered the field of Black Studies by institutionalizing the study of black history through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (now called ASALH), which sought to educate the general public about the lives, experiences, and culture of black Americans. The Woodson Institute at UVA draws its mandate from Woodson's deep commitment to education, public engagement, and institutional support for the field of black studies.

This page provides an overview of key dates in Carter Godwin Woodson's life. We strongly encourage those interested in Woodson to read through "Willing to Sacrifice: Carter G. Woodson, the Father of Black History, and the Carter G. Woodson Home," authored by historian Pero Dagbovie and comissioned by the National Park Service. The Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH) also has resources about Carter G. Woodson, the association's history, and black history month. 


Timeline of Sigificant Events:

  • 1875: Born to Anne Eliza (Riddle) and James Henry Woodson New Canton, Virginia
  • 1887: Decided that "I'm going to be Charles Bullard" New Canton, Virginia
  • 1892: Moved to West VA to work on the railroad and in the coalmines West Virginia
  • 1895: Began school at Frederick Douglass High School Huntington, West Virginia
  • 1897: Graduated from Frederick Douglass High School Huntington, West Virginia
  • 1897-1898: Attended Berea College, Berea, Kenticky
  • 1897-1900: Began teaching in Winona, Fayette County West Virginia
  • 1900: Returned to Douglass High School to teach history and work as the principal Huntington, West VA
  • 1903: Received Bachelor of Literature from Berea College Berea, Kentucky
  • 1903-1907: Worked as a teacher supervisor in the Philippines
  • 1907-1908: Attended University of Chicago, where he received a M.A. in European History, Romance Languages, and Literature Chicago, Illinois
  • 1908 - 1912: Attended Harvard University as a PhD student, where he became the 2nd African American after W.E.B. Du Bois to receive a PhD from Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts
  • 1915: Published his first book: The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861
  • 1915: "While attending the Exposition of Negro Progress, Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) (now called the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, ASALH) Chicago, Illinois
  • 1915-1947: Published 4 monographs, 5 textbooks, 5 edited collections of documents, 5 sociological studies, 13 articles
  • 1916: Established the scholarly publication Journal of Negro History Chicago, Illinois
  • 1919-1920: Dean of Howard University's School of Liberal Arts Washington, D.C.
  • 1920-1922: Dean at West VA Collegiate Institute - Institute, West Virginia
  • 1921: Formed Associated Publishers, Inc. 
  • 1922: Purchased three-story, late 19th century Italian home. It also became the office for ASNLH and Associated Publishers, Inc. WashingtonD.C.
  • 1926: Proposed and launched the first observance of "Negro History Week," which would become an annual event during every second week of February and later become codified as Black History Month
  • 1926: Received the NAACP Spingarn Medal
  • 1929-1933: Established the Woodson Collection at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
  • 1933: Published his most well-known book The Mis-Education of the Negro through Associated Publishers, Inc. Washington, D.C.
  • 1937: Published the first issue of Negro History Bulletin
  • 1930s-1940s Woodson wrote hundreds of essays, including over fifty essays The Negro History Bulletin, 
  • 1950: Died in his office home from a heart attack Washington, D.C.
  • 1975: Marker installed at the Third Liberty Baptist Church demarcating Woodson birthplace New Canton, Virginia
  • 1976: ASALH expands Negro History Week into Black History Month
  • 1979: The District of Columbia lists Woodson's Home on its Inventory of Historic Sites
  • 1981: The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies is founded at the University of Virginia by historian Armistead Robinson. Charlottesville, Virginia
  • 1984: The U.S. Postal Service issued a 20-cent stamp in honor of Woodson 
  • 1998: Lauryn Hill releases her debut, Grammy Award-winning album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, paying homage to Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro
  • 2001: The National Trust for Historic Preservation lists the Carter G. Woodson Home as one of the "11 Most Endangered Places in the U.S."
  • 2005: The U.S. National Park Service purchases the Carter G. Woodson Home from ASALH in order to establish a National Historic Site.

Celeste Day Moore, 2014 fellowship cohort, published Soundscapes of Liberation from Duke University Press

Celeste Day Moore, 2012-2014 fellowship cohort, published Soundscapes of LiberationAfrican American Music in Postwar France (Duke University Press)

CGWI Celebrates Centennial of Richard Wright's Birth

April 3, 2008 — "Juvenile Delinquent Becomes Famous Writer" — that's how one critic described author Richard Wright. 

The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia will celebrate and explore the life and work of this influential author during a two-day celebration to mark the 100th anniversary of Richard Wright's birth on Thursday, April 10 and Friday, April 11. All events, free and open to the public, will be held in the Harrison Institute-Small Special Collections Library Auditorium.

CGWI Project "Illusion of Progress" Features at Workshop with SPLC

FROM UVA TODAY

 

"When he sent the word out in the fall about the daylong Saturday workshop, “Resources for Teaching the History of Race in the United States,” the response was bigger than for any other program, he said. Usually 30 to 40 teachers from Virginia will show up for a particular topic, but this time nearly 200 expressed interest. Ultimately, 100 teachers from more than 40 school divisions attended the March 17 program in UVA’s Zehmer Hall, where the center is located. Several teachers even made the trip from Washington, D.C., Maryland and North Carolina.

The center’s program coordinator, Becky Yancey; associate director Natsuko Rohde; and the Zehmer Hall staff flawlessly managed the sudden surge, Luftig said, adding, “This might be the most productive event the Center for the Liberal Arts has run in my 18 years of directing the center,” he said.

Luftig reached out to two partners the center has worked with before: UVA’s Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Teaching Tolerance project, to see what resources they might present to the teachers.

The free program introduced teachers to the Teaching Tolerance project’s “Framework for Teaching American Slavery,” an education guide that includes primary-source texts and images, teaching models, podcasts, a list of key concepts and summary of objectives; as well as the Woodson Institute’s website, “The Illusion of Progress: Charlottesville’s Roots in White Supremacy,” which explores this history and broadens the focus beyond Charlottesville’s Confederate statues. The Web-based project aims to show how entrenched stereotypes of racial difference enabled socioeconomic injustices to take root, thwarting black people’s claims to personhood, citizenship and basic freedoms."

Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South

award-winning

History

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Chicago's New Negroes

African-American Studies

Class of 2012: Woodson Fellow Z'etoile Imma Offers a Vision of African Men Beyond Violence

May 8, 2012 — When Z'etoile Imma taught University of Virginia undergraduates about Africa, she would ask, "When I say 'Africa,' what does that mean to you?" The responses were mostly negative, she said, but her scholarship, like her teaching, aims to help change that.

Conflict Bodies

English

Jasper Conner

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Twice a Problem: Black Disability in the Segregated South

Jasper works on the history of disabled African Americans in the modern U.S. South. Combining archival research with oral history, his work explores the lived experiences of Black disabled people at residential schools, at work, and in the community. His work is informed by the birth of his second child, who is Deaf. Disability Studies Quarterly is publishing his article “Blind and Deaf Together: Cross-Disability Community at Virginia’s Residential School for Black Disabled Youth” in an upcoming issue of the peer-reviewed journal. Jasper is on the Board of Directors of the Disability History Association. His research has been supported by the Archie K. Davis Fellowship, Kentucky Historical Society Research Fellowship, VCU Publishing Research Award, and the William P. Heidrich Research Fellowship.

History
The College of William & Mary

Contemporarity in Africa: Feminist Perspectives on an Alternative Future

The African Studies Colloquium Series Presents “Contemporarity in Africa: Feminist Perspectives on an Alternative Future” Professor Patricia McFadden

Contempt and Pity

award-winning

History
Contini Morava

Ellen Contini-Morava

Professor

Specialties:
Meanings and discourse functions of grammatical forms, pragmatics, linguistic theory and method, African linguistics (especially Bantu)

Department of Anthropology
Brooks Hall 204

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Conversations in Caribbean Studies (Virtual) Book Chat with Carmen Lamas

Description

Conversations in Caribbean Studies Book Chat with Carmen Lamas, author of The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas: Literature, Translation, and Historiography (Oxford UP, 2021)

Respondent: Marissa Lopez (UCLA), author of Racial Immanence: Chicanx Bodies beyond Representation (NYU Press, 2019).

Hosted by Marlene L. Daut, Professor of American and African Diaspora Studies, University of Virginia

Register here: https://virginia.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAsdeihrzooEtU_UtSo5mNRozO365...

 

 

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Conversations in Caribbean Studies Book Chat with Carmen Lamas

Conversations in Caribbean Studies Book Chat with Carmen Lamas, author of The Latino Continuum and the Nineteenth-Century Americas: Literature, Translation, and Historiography (Oxford UP, 2021). Respondent: Marissa Lopez (UCLA), author of Racial Immanence: Chicanx Bodies beyond Representation (NYU Press, 2019).

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Conversations in Caribbean Studies Book Chat with Robert Fatton Jr.

Conversations in Caribbean Studies Book Chat with Robert Fatton, Jr., author of The Guise of the Exceptionalism: Unmasking the National Narratives of Haiti and the United States (Rutgers UP, 2021). Respondent: Chelsea Stieber (Catholic University of America), author of Haiti’s Paper War: Post-Independence Writing, Civil War, and the Making of the Republic, 1804–1954 (NYU Press, 2020).

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Conversations in Caribbean Studies Colloquium

April J. Mayes, Associate Professor and Chair of History at Pomona College 

Edward Paulino, Assistant Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Anne Eller, Associate Professor of History at Yale University

 

Register here

Conversations in Caribbean Studies Colloquium: Legacies of "the New World Avenger" 

2019 marks the 15th-anniversary of the publication of Laurent Dubois’s Avengers of the New World (2004), the first narrative history of the Haitian Revolution to be published in the English language since the landmark appearance of C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins in 1938. Dubois' book heralded a new era of interest in the Haitian Revolution among Anglophone scholars. Several newer books that were published in the wake of these earlier works include Julia Gaffield’s Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition After Revolution (2015) and Grégory Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (2019). In this, the inaugural event of the Conversations in Caribbean Studies Colloquium, these authors will discuss the broad impact of studies of the New World Avenger on the fields of Haitian, Caribbean, Atlantic, and American historical, literary, and cultural studies.

Introductory remarks by Marlene Daut, Associate Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute and Associate Professor of African American and American Studies

Panelists included:

Laurent DuBois, Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History and founder of the Forum for Scholars & Publics at Duke University

Julia Gaffield, Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University

Grégory Perriot, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford

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Conversations in Caribbean Studies: Mini Book Chat with Kaiama L. Glover. Event Moderated by Njelle Hamilton

Cornel West encourages students to 'major in a courageous life.'

Professor Vinson also moderated a conversation with Cornel West which was featured in UVA Today

Courses 2000 - 2009

Fall 2009

 

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 1010 - Introduction to African-American and African Studies (4)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

12:30-1:45PM Tu/Th, Minor Hall 125

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

Required Discussion Section

 

AAS 2700 - Festivals of the Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

9:30-10:45AM Tu/Th, McLeod Hall 1004

By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion (Jonathan Z. Smith, Ronald Grimes, Lawrence Sullivan), and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity

Required Discussion Section

Cross-listed as RELG 2700

 

AAS 3157 - Caribbean Perspectives (3)

Instructor: Yarimar Bonilla

3:30-6:00PM W, Monroe Hall 116

Breaking with popular constructions of the region as a timeless tropical paradise, this course will re-define the Caribbean as the birthplace of modern forms of capitalism, globalization, and trans-nationalism. We will survey the founding moments of Caribbean history, including the imposition of slavery, the rise of plantation economies, and the development of global networks of goods and peoples. We will then examine the various forms of colonial and imperial power that have operated in the region during the latter part of the twentieth century and the lasting legacies of inequality and hierarchy that persist in contemporary Caribbean societies. Lastly, we will revisit the idea of the Caribbean as a tourist heaven and question popular images of the region as a site of tropical fantasy.

Cross-listed as ANTH 3157

 

AAS 3200 - Martin, Malcolm, and America (3)

Instructor: Mark Hadley

12:00-12:50PM M/W/F, New Cabell Hall 215

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

Cross-listed as RELG 3200

 

AAS 3500 - Kinfolks, Families, and Relating in the African Diaspora

Instructor: Todne Thomas

2:00-3:15PM Tu/Th, New Cabell Hall 234

This class is designed to trace the changing contours of New World African family affiliations across time and space. In doing so, we will undertake some of the difficult questions surrounding Black family lives and histories. How are the self-definition and social production of Black family ties impacted by economic and political forces as well as academic depictions of Black family realities? What oral, scientific, and religious technologies are used by the members of the Black Atlantic to (re)produce family genealogies? What are the impacts of unearthing “roots” and diasporic connections on African American, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro-Latino identity formation? Course materials include ethnographies and personal narratives representing various dimensions of Black family experiences. Documentaries and other visual media will also be assigned and used for course instruction.

 

AAS 3500 - Race, Law, and War

Instructor: Herbert "Tim" Lovelace

3:30-4:45PM Tu/Th, New Cabell Hall 324

 

AAS 4070 - Directed Reading and Research (3)

Similar in format to AAS 401, but meant to be equivalent to twice as much work (6 credits), and taken over a full year. Students in the DMP enroll under these numbers for thesis writing.

 

AAS 4500 - Advanced Studies in Literary Criticism: Race, Space and Culture (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross, Ian Grandison

7:00-9:30PM Tu, Bryan Hall 332

Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, 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., National Geographic documentary, Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through local site visits (Monticello, Vinegar Hill). Requirements include a midterm and final exam, one site visit response paper, and a major team research project and presentation.

Cross-listed as ENCR 4500

 

AAS 4500 - Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

11:00-12:15PM Tu/Th, Bryan Hall 332

This advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include critical essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams. This class is restricted to online waitlist and/or instructor permission. It is designed for students majoring in English, African American Studies, and/or American Studies.

Cross-listed as ENAM 4500

 

 

AAS 4570 - Advanced Research Seminar in African-American and African Studies: Ethnicity and Gender in Africa

Instructor: John Willis

3:30-6:00 Tu, New Cabell Hall 118

Reading, class discussion, and research on a special topic in African-American and African Studies culminatiing in the composition of a research paper. Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor. Primarily for fourth-year students but open to others.

 

AAS 4993 - Independent Study (1-3)

Allows students to work on an individual research project. Students must propose a topic to an appropriate faculty member, submit a written proposal for approval, prepare an extensive annotated bibliography on relevant readings comparable to the reading list of a regular upper-level course, and complete a research paper of at least 20 pages.

 

AAS 5528 - Topics in Race Theory: Race in the 2008 Election(3)

Instructor: Wende Marshall

6:30-9:00PM M, Brooks Hall 103A

This course examines theories and practices of race and otherness, in order to analyze and interpret constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of race from the late 18th to the 21st centuries. The focus varies from year to year, and may include race, progress and the Westgender, race and power,and whitesupremacy.'The consistent theme is that race is neither a biological nor a cultural category, but a method and theory of social organization, an alibi for inequality, and a strategy for resistance. Cross listed as AAS 528. Prerequisite: ANTH 101, 301, or other introductory or middle-level social science or humanities course

Cross-listed as ANTH 5528

 

AAS 5891 - South Atlantic History (3)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

3:30-6:00PM Th, New Cabell Hall 122

Surveys the history of African and Africa-descendent peoples throughout the Atlantic by combining lectures, discussion sections and movies. It moves away from the prevailing North America-centric paradigm in studies of the African Diaspora to explore the forced migration of Africans in regions such as Angola, Brazil, Gold Coast, Kongo, Caribbean, and Cuba. The first section lays out the groundwork to understand the development of the African Diaspora by focusing on Africa before and after its interactions with Europeans. The second section centers on Latin America and the Caribbean, where almost eighty percent of Africans forced to leave Africa wound up as slaves. The last section deals with North America, tracing the process of establishment of enslaved labor force in the seventeenth century and exploring nineteenth and twentieth centuries Diasporic connections between the United States, Haiti, and Liberia. The class devotes significant attention to issues such as community formation in Africa, religion in Africa and the Diaspora, slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, back-to-Africa movement by Afro-Brazilians and African-Americans, origins of pan-Africanist movement, and resistance to slave labor in Africa and in the Americas.

Cross-listed as HIST 5891

American Studies Program

 

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 2156 - Peoples and Cultures of Africa

Instructor: Jason Hickel

10:00-10:50AM, M/W/F, Rouss Hall 410

ANTH 3157 - Caribbean Perspectives (3)

Instructor: Yarimar Bonilla

3:30-6:00PM W, Monroe Hall 116

Breaking with popular constructions of the region as a timeless tropical paradise, this course will re-define the Caribbean as the birthplace of modern forms of capitalism, globalization, and trans-nationalism. We will survey the founding moments of Caribbean history, including the imposition of slavery, the rise of plantation economies, and the development of global networks of goods and peoples. We will then examine the various forms of colonial and imperial power that have operated in the region during the latter part of the twentieth century and the lasting legacies of inequality and hierarchy that persist in contemporary Caribbean societies. Lastly, we will revisit the idea of the Caribbean as a tourist heaven and question popular images of the region as a site of tropical fantasy.

Cross-listed as AAS 3157

 

ANTH 3880 - African Archeology (3)

Instructor: Adria LaViolette

11:00-11:50AM M/W/F, New Cabell Hall 138

This course surveys the archaeological knowledge currently available about the African continent, with particular emphasis on the Late Stone Age, when fully modern humans dominate the cultural landscape, and periods thereafter through the archaeology of the colonial period. The material includes the great social, economic, and cultural transformations in African history known primarily through archaeology, and the most important archaeological sites and discoveries on the continent. Throughout the course a theme will be the politics of the past, and the changing role of the practice of archaeology in Africa.

 

ANTH 5528 - Topics in Race Theory: Race in the 2008 Election (3)

Instructor: Wende Marshall

6:30-9:00PM M, Brooks Hall 103A

This course examines theories and practices of race and otherness, in order to analyze and interpret constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of race from the late 18th to the 21st centuries. The focus varies from year to year, and may include race, progress and the Westgender, race and power,and whitesupremacy.'The consistent theme is that race is neither a biological nor a cultural category, but a method and theory of social organization, an alibi for inequality, and a strategy for resistance. Cross listed as AAS 528. Prerequisite: ANTH 101, 301, or other introductory or middle-level social science or humanities course.

Cross-listed as AAS 5528

Department of Art History

 

Department of Drama

DRAM 3070 - African American Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

2:00-3:15PM Tu/Th, Drama Ed. Bldg. 217

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 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.

Department of English

ENAM 3130 - African-American Survey I (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

2:00-3:15PM Tu/Th, Maury Hall 110

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American letters, from Briton Hammon's Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings (1860) to W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903)Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Working our way through a variety of genres (elegy, drama, the captivity narrative, the slave narrative, the essay, public oratory, speeches, and novels), we will explore a number of matters pertinent to literary studies in general, as well as those with specific implications for African-American writing and writers. We will consider the circumstances of textual production and reception, ideas and ideologies of literary history and culture, aesthetics, authorship and audience. We will focus our attention immediately on the emergence of African-American writing under the regime of slavery and the questions it poses about "race," "authorship," "subjectivity," "self-mastery," and "freedom." We will consider the material and social conditions under which our selected texts were edited, published, marketed, and "authenticated," lingering especially on the role white abolitionists and editors played in the production and mediation of these texts for various reading publics. Our ultimate aim is to situate our selections within the broadest possible contexts of their time and ours. Other required texts include Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, William Wells Brown's Clotelle, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition.

 

ENAM 3510 - Reading the Black College Campus

Instructor: Ian Grandison

12:30-1:45PM Tu/Th, Cabell 132

 

ENAM 3559 - Cross-Cultures of Modern Harlem

Instructor: Sandhya Shukla

9:30-10:45 Tu/Th, New Cabell Hall 338

This course explores the cultural production, intellectual history and political movements that construct the globality of Harlem. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, we cover the development of various ethnic and racial neighborhoods arrayed across regions of the area—Black Harlem, Jewish Harlem, Italian Harlem and Spanish Harlem—and the conflicts and intimacies inherent in their transformations over time. We inquire into the representation and life of Harlem through the lens of the navigation and contestation of difference. Considering migrancy, diaspora, nationalism, race and ethnicity, and class formation in comparative perspective brings the global into the local and effectively reimagines how “minoritized space” is made both materially and symbolically. Materials to be discussed include works by Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Piri Thomas, Yuri Kochiyama, Leroi Jones, Irving Horowitz, Gordon Parks Jr., Joe Cuba, Jacob Lawrence, and others.

 

ENAM 4500 - Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

11:00-12:15PM Tu/Th, Bryan Hall 332

This advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include critical essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams. This class is restricted to online waitlist and/or instructor permission. It is designed for students majoring in English, African American Studies, and/or American Studies.

Cross-listed as AAS 4500

 

ENAM 4814 - African-American Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Angela Davis

9:30-10:45AM Tu/Th, Pavilion VIII 103

We will read several novels and short stories by African American women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, two written responses to readings (each 2 to 3 double spaced typed pages long) and a formal essay (12 to 15 pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place.

Prerequisite: The course is first offered to fourth year majors in English, Women's Studies and Afro-American and African Studies.

 

ENCR 4500 - Advanced Studies in Literary Criticism: Race, Space and Culture (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross, Ian Grandison

7:00-9:30PM Tu, Bryan Hall 332

Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, 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., National Geographic documentary, Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through local site visits (Monticello, Vinegar Hill). Requirements include a midterm and final exam, one site visit response paper, and a major team research project and presentation.

Cross-listed as AAS 4500

 

ENLT 2547 - Black Writers in America, section 0002: Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

9:30-10:45AM Tu/Th, Cabell Hall B029

This seminar uses Black women’s writings from mid-century to the present to introduce new English majors to important concepts in literary analysis. To better understand genre, themes, and assorted literary conventions, we will focus closely on a range of literary styles. We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day. Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women’s writing of the last fifty years? How has the literature adapted in response to specific cultural or historical moments.

Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

 

ENLT 2547 - Black Writers in America, section 0003: Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Camilla Amirati

2:00-3:15PM M/W, Cabell Hall 424

Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

 

ENMC 4500 - African-American Drama

Instructor: Lotta Lofgren

9:30-10:45AM T/Th, Bryan 330

A survey of African-American drama from the 1950's to the present. Along the way, we will place the drama in relation to established norms, investigating the motives and methods of the playwrights for carving out new ground. We will examine the shared and divergent concerns of male and female playwrights, their sense of audience, the dilema of writing as an idividual and as a member of a group silenced too long, their relationship to the past, the present, and the future. We will also examine the changing definitions of the black aesthetic. We will read works by James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, Augsut Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others.

Department of French Language & Literature

FREN 4743 - Africa in Cinema (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

11:00-12:15PM Tu/Th, New Cabell Hall 242

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: French 332 and French 344 or another 300-level course in French

Department of History

HIAF 2001 - Early African History (4)

Instructor: Joseph Miller

9:30-10:45AM Tu/Th, Claude Moore Nursing Edu. G120

Studies the history of African civilizations from the iron age through the era of the slave trade, ca. 1800. Emphasizes the search for the themes of social, political, economic, and intellectual history which present African civilizations on their own terms.

Required Discussion Section

 

HIAF 3021 - History of Southern Africa (4)

Instructor: John Mason

12:30-1:45PM Tu/Th, Claude Moore Nursing Edu. G120

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times.

 

HIAF 4511 - Colloquium in African History: Race & Culture in S. Africa & the US (4)

Instructor: John Mason

3:30-4:45PM Tu/Th, New Cabell Hall 319

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.

 

HIAF 4993 - Independent Study in African History (1-3)

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member, any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Open to majors or non-majors

 

HILA 3111 - Public Life in Modern Latin America (3)

Instructor: Herbert Braun

8:00-9:15AM Tu/Th, New Cabell Hall 430

How do Latin Americans navigate their ways, collectively and also individually, through their hierarchical social orders? Why is there so often so much stability and order to their societies? Surveys inform us that Latin Americans are among the happiest people in the world? Why might this be? Why do so many Latin Americans across time appear to be so proud of their nations? Why do they look at one another so often? Why is there so little hatred in Latin America? Why do poor people in Latin America seem to know more about rich people than rich people know about them? Why do traditions matter so? Why are there so many good novelists there? These and other questions, answerable and not, about life and the human condition in Latin America are what will be about in this course.

 

HIST 5891 - South Atlantic History (3)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

3:30-6:00PM Th, New Cabell Hall 122

Surveys the history of African and Africa-descendent peoples throughout the Atlantic by combining lectures, discussion sections and movies. It moves away from the prevailing North America-centric paradigm in studies of the African Diaspora to explore the forced migration of Africans in regions such as Angola, Brazil, Gold Coast, Kongo, Caribbean, and Cuba. The first section lays out the groundwork to understand the development of the African Diaspora by focusing on Africa before and after its interactions with Europeans. The second section centers on Latin America and the Caribbean, where almost eighty percent of Africans forced to leave Africa wound up as slaves. The last section deals with North America, tracing the process of establishment of enslaved labor force in the seventeenth century and exploring nineteenth and twentieth centuries Diasporic connections between the United States, Haiti, and Liberia. The class devotes significant attention to issues such as community formation in Africa, religion in Africa and the Diaspora, slavery, the transatlantic slave trade, back-to-Africa movement by Afro-Brazilians and African-Americans, origins of pan-Africanist movement, and resistance to slave labor in Africa and in the Americas.

Cross-listed as AAS 5891

 

HIUS 3651 - Afro-American History to 1865 (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

2:00-2:50PM M/W, Claude Moore Nursing Edu. G120

This course surveys the major political, cultural, social, and intellectual developments taking place in African American history from the beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade to the end of the American Civil War. Specific attention will be given to the formation and evolution of slave communities in the American South, the complex ways whites and blacks grappled with the “slavery question”, and the northern roots of Jim Crow America. Through an analysis of slave narratives and political tracts, students will also become familiar with various thinkers in the African American intellectual tradition.

Required Discussion Section

 

HIUS 3671 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Julian Bond

3:30-5:30PM Tu, Wilson Hall 301

This lecture course examines the history, philosophies, tactics, events and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward.

The Southern movement - variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement - was a black-led, interracial mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation by the mid-60s.

Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping and occasionally complimentary phases - lobbying, litigation and protest.

In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights.

In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation and the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools.

The last phase, lasting a decade from '54 through '65, was a decade of protests - boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations - as well as grass-roots organizing campaigns that laid the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s.

Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength and followers from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation. The movement's well-known and lesser-known proponents and their strategies will be examined.

Required Discussion Section

 

HIUS 4591: Virtual Vinegar Hill II: Visualizing an African American Memoryscape (3)

Instructor: Scot French and Bill Ferster

3:30-6:00PM W, New Cabell Hall 242

In the 1960s, Charlottesville's Vinegar Hill neighborhood -- a center of African American business activity and community life for nearly a century

-- was declared "blighted" by local authorities and demolished under the federally funded Urban Renewal program. Project boosters hailed the redevelopment project, coupled with the opening of a modern public housing complex several blocks away, as a much-needed upgrade to the downtown area.

Yet, for Charlottesville's African American citizens, the project produced a profound sense of rupture and loss that lingers to this day. Vinegar Hill, as a "site of memory," has come to symbolize the demise of African American-owned businesses; the disintegration of African American community life; and the erasure of African American history from Charlottesville's commemorative landscape.

Building on the collaborative efforts of University students, faculty, and participating community groups, this class will explore the possibilities for visualizing the Vinegar Hill "memoryscape" through a state-of-the-art interactive website. Students will work with photographs, fire insurance maps, newspapers, city directories, census returns, oral histories, and a variety of public records related to the urban renewal/public housing project. What might the thoughtful application of digital technologies to these historical texts and statistical data reveal? What questions might we ask that would shed new light on this neighborhood and the social forces that led to its demise? Prior experience with humanities computing is not required.

Prospective readings include selected chapters from: James Saunders and Renae Shackelford, Urban Renewal and the End of Black Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia: An Oral History of Vinegar Hill; W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory; David J. Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past, and Benjamin J. Fry, Computational Information Design.

Grading will be based on weekly reading responses/class participation (30 percent); a 7-10-page research report and/or documentary video script based on primary and secondary sources (35 percent); and the development and presentation of a web-based "visualization" in consultation with fellow students and the instructors (35 percent).

Media Studies

MDST 3559 - Race & the Media (1- 4)

Instructor: Staff

1:00-1:50PM M/W/F, Clark Hall 102

Department of Music

MUEN 3690 - African Drumming and Dance Ensemble (2)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

5:15-7:15PM Tu/Th, Old Cabell Hall 107

A practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies), with the intention of performing during and at the end of the semester. Though no previous experience with music or dance is required, we give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and a polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required of each class member. The course is repeatable for credit, providing experienced students the opportunity to develop within an ongoing U.Va. African Music and Dance Ensemble. Admission is by informal audition during the first class meeting.

 

Department of Politics

PLAP 3500 - Special Topics in American Politics: Race and Gender in US Politics (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

1:00-1:50PM M/W, Gilmer Hall 190

 

PLAP 4810 - Class, Race, and the Environment (3)

Instructor: Vivian Thompson

1:00-3:30PM Tu, Brown Reading Room

 

PLCP 2120 - Politics of Developing Areas(3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton/ David Waldner

9:00-9:50AM M/W, Wilson Hall 402

Surveys patterns of government and politics in non-Western political systems. Topics include political elites, sources of political power, national integration, economic development, and foreign penetration.

 

PLCP 5840 - Gender Politics in Africa (3)

Instructor: Denise Walsh

2:00-3:15PM Tu/Th, Minor Hall 130

This course begins with the highly contested concepts of gender and feminism in Africa. We then turn to war and militarism, the basis of modern, gendered African nations and states. With the rise of African women’s movements, democratization and the spread of a human rights culture, African women won a greater role in politics, the third theme of the course. Their success increased hopes that the state would attack sexism. Those hopes have yet to be fulfilled as our investigation of some of the region’s most pressing problems, such as HIV/AIDS and limited economic development indicate.

Cross-listed as SWAG 5840

 

PLPT 3200 - African American Political Thought (3)

Instructor: Katherine (Lawrie) Balfour

11:00-12:15 Tu/Th, New Cabell Hall 424

This course examines both the critical and the constructive dimensions of African American political thought. Through our readings and discussions, we will assess the claims that black Americans have made upon the polity, how they have defined themselves, and how they have sought to redefine the basic terms of American public life. Among the themes that we will explore are the relationship between slavery and democracy, the role of historical memory in political life, the political significance of culture, the connections between “race” and “nation,” and the tensions between claims for black autonomy and claims for integration, as well as the meaning of such core political concepts as citizenship, freedom, equality, progress, and justice. As we focus our attention on these issues, we will be mindful of the complex ways in which the concept of race has been constructed and deployed and its interrelationship with other elements of identity such as gender, sexuality, class, and religion.

Department of Psychology

PSYC 4870 - The Minority Family: A Psychological Inquiry

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

9:00-11:30AM Tu, Gilmer Hall B001

Examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing "deficit" and "strength" research pardigms.

Prerequisite: PSYC 306 and at least on course from each of the following groups: PSYC 210, 215, or 230, and PSYC 240, 250 or 260, and students in the African-American and African studies or studies in women and gender programs.

Enrollment Restrictions: 4th-year Psychology majors/minor

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 2750 - Introduction to African Religions(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

1:00-1:50PM M/W, Gilmer Hall 141

An introductory survey of African religions. The course concentrates on African indigenous religions, but Islam and Christianity are also discussed. Topics include African mythologies and cosmologies, as well as rituals, artistic traditions and spiritualities. We consider the colonial impact on African religious cultures and the dynamics of ongoing religious change in the sub-Sahara.

Required Discussion Section

 

RELA 3351 - African Diaspora Religions (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

2:00-3:15PM Tu/Th, New Cabell Hall B020

The seminar will examine the changes in ethnographic accounts of African diaspora religions, with particular attention given to how different research paradigms illuminate these Caribbean and Latin American religions and the questions of religion, race, nation, and modernity. Practitioners of these religions are conventionally regarded as atavistically maintaining a “traditional” world-view. But this class will evaluate how devotees of African diaspora religions are continually innovating their religious practices as they navigate modernity. While learning about the specificities of African diaspora religions, students will also study theoretical changes in the field of cultural anthropology vis-à-vis the investigation of African-descended communities, material religion, ritual performance, and the effects of national politics and transnational migration patterns upon religious practice.

Written requirements include a 20-page seminar paper which meets the Second Writing Requirement.

 

RELG 2700 - Festivals of the Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

9:30-10:45AM Tu/Th, McLeod Hall 1004

By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion (Jonathan Z. Smith, Ronald Grimes, Lawrence Sullivan), and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity

Required Discussion Section

Cross-listed as AAS 2700

 

RELG 3200 - Martin, Malcolm, and America (3)

Instructor: Mark Hadley

12:00-12:50PM M/W/F, New Cabell Hall 215

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism

Cross-listed as AAS 3200

 

RELG 3351 - African Diaspora Religions

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

The seminar will examine the changes in ethnographic accounts of African diaspora religions, with particular attention given to how different research paradigms illuminate these Caribbean and Latin American religions and the questions of religion, race, nation, and modernity. Practitioners of these religions are conventionally regarded as atavistically maintaining a “traditional” world-view. But this class will evaluate how devotees of African diaspora religions are continually innovating their religious practices as they navigate modernity. While learning about the specificities of African diaspora religions, students will also study theoretical changes in the field of cultural anthropology vis-à-vis the investigation of African-descended communities, material religion, ritual performance, and the effects of national politics and transnational migration patterns upon religious practice.

Written requirements include a 20-page seminar paper which meets the 2^nd Writing Requirement.

Department of Sociology

SOC 3410 - Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

2:00-3:15 M/W, New Cabell Hall 316

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 4420 - Sociology of Inequality (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

4:00-5:15 M/W, New Cabell Hall 123

A survey of basic theories and methods used to analyze structures of social inequality. Includes comparative analysis of the inequalities of power and privilege, both their causes and their consequences for social conflict and social change.

Prerequisite: Six credits of sociology or permission of instructor

Studies in Women and Gender

SWAG 5840 - Gender Politics in Africa (3)

Instructor: Denise Walsh

2:00-3:15PM Tu/Th, Minor Hall 130

This course begins with the highly contested concepts of gender and feminism in Africa. We then turn to war and militarism, the basis of modern, gendered African nations and states. With the rise of African women’s movements, democratization and the spread of a human rights culture, African women won a greater role in politics, the third theme of the course. Their success increased hopes that the state would attack sexism. Those hopes have yet to be fulfilled as our investigation of some of the region’s most pressing problems, such as HIV/AIDS and limited economic development indicate.

Cross-listed as PLCP 5840

 

Spring 2009

 

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 102 - Crosscurrents in the African Diaspora (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

1230-1345 TR, WIL 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.

AAS 215 - Culture and World Politics (3)

Instructor: Maurice Apprey

1530-1800 T, CAB B026

AAS 220 - African Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Z'etoile Imma

1100-1215 TR, CAB 224

AAS 308 - Fugitive Slaves in a Global Perspective (3)

Instructor: Lydia Wilson

1400-1515 TR, CAB B026

This course surveys anthropological, historical, and archaeological approaches to the study of fugitive slaves, also known as maroons. The course considers the importance of maroon studies in highlighting Africans' resistance to enslavement in the Americas and explores themes taken up in more recent research, such as community formation. Students will examine the public interpretation of maroon history, review research on fugitive slaves in a variety of world regions, and consider the continued challenges some descendant communities have faced.

AAS 351 - The Politics of Development in Africa (3)

Instructor: Kristin Phillips

1400-1515 MW, WIL 215

Since the mid-twentieth century "development" has served as the dominant paradigm (as well as the justification) for international intervention into the political, economic, and social affairs of African communities and states. In this course we will draw on anthropological theories, ethnographies of development, and critiques of development to explore the history and politics of these interventions. We will begin by examining the kinds of interventions that foreshadowed development - trade, colonialism, missionization. We will then trace the life history of the development project in post-colonial Africa through its diverse agents and various incarnations: from its inception, through structural adjustment programs, democratization and the post-development critique, to the emergence of neoliberalism as development's governing philosophy. Throughout, we will draw on ethnographies of development in Africa to gain a deeper understanding of how people living in Africa experience their economic, political, and social positions in today's world and how international interventions have shaped these experiences, for better and for worse.

AAS 366 - African American History Since 1865 (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

1530-1620 TR, WIL 301

This course surveys the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Specifically focusing on the complex character of black life in the United States, students will examine African Americans’ protracted struggle to build strong families and communities, create vibrant and socially meaningful artistic productions, and confront what philosopher Cornel West refers to as the “pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery in our world.” Exploring the political and philosophical concerns pursued by activists and intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Ralph Ellison, Angela Davis, Amiri Barka, Toni Cade Bambara, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, this class critically engages black Americans’ complex views on what it means to be American, modern, and human. Organizations and movements that will be discussed include but are not limited to the Garvey Movement, SNCC, the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Cultural expressions and movements that will be explored include but are not limited to the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, 1960s jazz and soul, funk, and hip-hop.

Cross-listed as HIUS 366

AAS 382 - Black Protest Narrative (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

1400-1515 TR, BRN 330

This course explores the relation between modern racial protest and African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film, narrative poetry) from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s, focusing on the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and the emergence of Black Power. As well as examining the social, political, and economic contexts of protest narratives, we’ll probe their aesthetic, formal, and ideological structures, and assess how protest writers represent controversial topics of the time, such as lynching, segregation, sharecropping, disenfranchisement, anti-Semitism, unemployment, migration, urbanization, religion, sexuality, war and military service, strikebreaking, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. We start with the most famous protest narrative, Richard Wright’s Native Son, then study other narratives, many of which challenge Wright’s forms and ideas. Other writers include Angelo Herndon, William Attaway, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, and Bobby Seale, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and social science. Requirements include heavy reading schedule. midterm, final exam, and reading journal.

Cross-listed as ENAM 382

AAS 401 - Independent Study (1-3)

Allows students to work on an individual research project. Students must propose a topic to an appropriate faculty member, submit a written proposal for approval, prepare an extensive annotated bibliography on relevant readings comparable to the reading list of a regular upper-level course, and complete a research paper of at least 20 pages.

AAS 406A - From Gold Coast to Reparations: A Social History of American Slavery(3)

Instructor: Deirdre Cooper Owens

1500-1830 T, CAB 130

This course will survey African slavery in the Americas broadly (16th century – 19th century) and the U.S. South during both the colonial and antebellum eras. In addition to centralizing the market costs of slavery and exploring the “world the slaves made,” we will also examine the little-known world of slavery among native peoples. Lastly, we will analyze both the impact and legacy of slavery on contemporary American society.

AAS 406B - Ethnicity and Religion in Nigeria and South Africa (3)

Instructor: John Willis

1530-1800 R, CAB 334

This course explores the diversity of gendered and ethnic identities in sub-Saharan African societies. Drawing from various moments in South Africa’s and Nigeria’s history, it examines how these identities have been historically articulated in words and action. It considers the cultural symbols and practices from which individuals and groups have drawn to define gender and ethnic norms. In many respects, these countries have very different histories reflecting alternative visions of Africa. South Africa has long been known as a multi-racial society, a magnet of European settlement, an apartheid state, and the most westernized and mineral-rich African nation. Conversely, Nigeria has developed a reputation as a mono-racial, multi-ethnic and multi-religious society, a repellant to European settlement, a military state fraught with ethnic conflicts, and as Africa’s most corrupt and human-resource rich nation. Students will examine some of the historical factors that have contributed to the development of these nations and the images of them that circulate both on the continent and in Europe and the United States. The course asks several questions: Does the use of gender and ethnicity as categories of analysis allow students to see more points of similarity than difference between the two nations? How have notions of gender become associated with ethnic and national identities? What have been some of the social, political, and economic implications of an individual’s location as a gendered or ethnic being?

AAS 451 - Directed Reading and Research for DMP (3)

Independent Study

Similar in format to AAS 401, but meant to be equivalent to twice as much work (6 credits), and taken over a full year. Students in the DMP enroll under these numbers for thesis writing.

AAS 452 - Thesis for DMP (3)

Meeting time to be determined by instructor and student

American Studies Program

AMST 201 - Arts and Cultures of the Slave South (3)

Instructor: Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson

1530-1645 MW, CLK 107

"Arts and Cultures of the Slave South” is an undergraduate, interdisciplinary course that 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. The course will cover subjects ranging from African American spirituals to creolization and ethnicities in Louisiana, from the plantation architectures of both big house and outbuildings to the narratives of former slaves. In the process, students will be introduced to the interpretive methods central to a wide range of disciplines, from archaeology and anthropology, to art and architectural history, to material culture, literature, and musicology. In addition to two weekly lectures by co-faculty Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson, students will also attend weekly discussion sections and special events including guest lectures, field trips, movie nights, and demonstrations and samplings of traditional southern foods.

Cross-listed as ARTH 263 and CCFA 202

AMST 201 - Rural Poverty in Our Time (3)

Instructor: Grace Hale

1530-1710 T, MIN 125

This course will explore the history of non-urban poverty in the American South from the 1930s to the present. Weaving together the social histories of poor people, the political history of poverty policies, and the cultural history of representations of poverty, the course follows historical cycles of attention and neglect: rural poverty during the Great Depression, rural poverty from the war on poverty to the Reagan Revolution, and rural poverty in the age of Katrina, the present. In each section, we will examine the relationship between representations (imagining poverty), policies (alleviating poverty), and results (the effects of those representations and policies in the economic, political, and psychological status of poor people).

Cross-listed as HIUS 360

AMST 401A-1 - American Film: Los Angeles in Hollywood (3)

Instructor: Eric Lott

1700-1930 R, BRN 310

Not exactly a conventional film course, this one will use Hollywood cinema as the centerpiece of an inquiry into the cultural history and imaginary geography of Los Angeles. In addition to cultural historians and geographers such as Mike Davis, Sue Ruddick, and Eric Avila, we’ll read theorists of the so-called culture industry (e.g., Theodor Adorno), social commentators and gossips on L.A. and Hollywood (e.g., Carey McWilliams, Chester Himes, John Gregory Dunne, Kenneth Anger), and such novels as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust (1939), Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), and Michael Tolkin’s The Player (1988). Plus, of course, the films, all of them about Los Angeles or Hollywood itself: e.g., King Vidor’s Show People (1928), Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stanley Donnen/Gene Kelly’s Singin in the Rain (1952), Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls (1968), Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadass Song (1971), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (1975), Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Luis Valdez’s La Bamba (1987), John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991), Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off (1997), Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski (1998), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon (2002), Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004).

Cross-listed as ENLT 255-2

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 291A - People, Culture and Environments of Africa (3)

Instructor: Matthew Powlowicz

1000-1050 MWF, CAB 123

Humans and the natural environment engage in a complex interaction. Humans transform their surroundings even as those surroundings shape the societies and cultural institutions they create. This course pursues both the question of how this interaction has proceeded in different places and among different peoples in Africa, and the cultural significances given to the environment so that we might better understand why it proceeded in that way. Drawing on evidence from ethnography, archaeology, ethnohistory and folklore we will examine how nature becomes entangled with political power and social ranking, with memory and group identity, and the consequences for the environment, and for the people who live there, which result.

ANTH 291B - Religion and Relationships: Caribbean Perspectives (3)

Instructor: Todne Thomas

0900-0950 MWF, CAB 324

This course analyzes the constitution and reproduction of Caribbean religious communities within the social contexts of enslavement, emancipation, postcolonialism, and transnationalism. Assigned readings survey ethnographies of Christianity, Hinduism, and Afro-Caribbean traditions like Rastafarianism, Vodun, and Candomble'. Course discussions and themes consider the contours of Caribbean religious groups as well as means by which ritual, religious ideologies, and kinship discourses enmesh practitioners in religious networks.

ANTH 554A - Africa and Social Theory (3)

Instructor: Sasha Newell

1530-1800 W, CAB B028

The encounter between Europe and Africa has produced some of the most important social theory and some of the most problematic misrepresentations. This course tracks the social imaginary of Africa in relationship to the development of theoretical frameworks through which Africa is represented. If the concept of the fetish was born out of cross-cultural misunderstandings between Europe and Africa, to what extent is Africa itself a fetish through which the European self is produced? Exploring the anthropology of exchange, bodies and persons, kinship, witchcraft, and colonialism in Africa, we investigate the implications for collective representations of Africa. At the same time we consider Africa's symbolic role within theories of modernity, race, economy, and religion through which Europe sets itself apart in the global hierarchy. This class thus explores the ambiguous zone between the 'real', the imaginary, and the theory of Africa, and the way each has fed into the construction of the other.

This class will fulfill the second writing requirement.

SWAH 102 - Introduction to Swahili II (3)

Instructor: Michael Wairungu

0900-0950 MWF, CAB 224

1100-1150 MWF, MIN 130

This is the second part of a two-semester beginning Swahili course. It will focus on developing the already acquired Swahili listening, speaking, reading and writing skills so as to understand basic Swahili, and actively participate in day-to-day Swahili cultural activities. Enrollment in this course is subject to Instructor's Permission as the student is required to have completed SWAH 101 at UVa. Upon completion of this course, students will be expected to demonstrate evidence of the acquisition of: a) basic skills in performing day-to-day interactions such as greetings, interpersonal conversations, and comprehension in Swahili; b) use of simple but fairly communicative grammatical constructions; c) appreciation of basic cultural practices of the Swahili-speaking people. Class meetings shall be supplemented by technology sessions where deemed appropriate.

Department of Art History

ARTH 263 - Arts and Cultures of the Slave South (4)

Instructor: Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson

1530-1645 MW, CLK 107

"Arts and Cultures of the Slave South” is an undergraduate, interdisciplinary course that 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. The course will cover subjects ranging from African American spirituals to creolization and ethnicities in Louisiana, from the plantation architectures of both big house and outbuildings to the narratives of former slaves. In the process, students will be introduced to the interpretive methods central to a wide range of disciplines, from archaeology and anthropology, to art and architectural history, to material culture, literature, and musicology. In addition to two weekly lectures by co-faculty Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson, students will also attend weekly discussion sections and special events including guest lectures, field trips, movie nights, and demonstrations and samplings of traditional southern foods.

Cross-Listed as AMST 201 and CCFA 202

Department of Drama

DRAM 307 - African American Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

1400-1515 TR, DRM 217

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 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.

Department of English

CPLT 342 - Contemporary Drama (3)

Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

1530-1645 TR, BRN 334

This is the second half of a two-semester course on modern and contemporary American and European drama (with a few forays into other regions), covering post-Absurdism to the present. The first half is not a prerequisite. We will examine postwar quests for dramatic and theatrical structures relevant to a socially and morally chaotic world. From a study of reactions to the Theatre of the Absurd, we move to an investigation of contemporary drama, celebrating the success of women and minority playwrights in our own period. These playwrights, earlier deprived of a voice, have transformed theater of the past fifty years. We will read plays by Ntozake Shange, Tom Stoppard, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Tony Kushner, Sam Shepard, Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others.

Course requirements: two short papers, a long paper or a project (one option is to write your own play), a final exam.

Cross-listed as ENGN 342

ENAM 314 - African American Literature (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

0930-1045 TR, CAB 118

A continuation of ENAM 313, African American Literature I, this course concentrates on twentieth and twenty-first century African American novels, short stories, prose essays, and poetry. This lecture and discussion based class will address literature from pivotal cultural and political moments in African American life, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Writers include, but are not limited to, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and several contemporary authors. Mandatory assignments include response paragraphs, papers, quizzes, midterm and final exams.

ENAM 382 - Black Protest Narrative (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

1400-1515 TR, BRN 330

This course explores the relation between modern racial protest and African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film, narrative poetry) from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s, focusing on the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and the emergence of Black Power. As well as examining the social, political, and economic contexts of protest narratives, we’ll probe their aesthetic, formal, and ideological structures, and assess how protest writers represent controversial topics of the time, such as lynching, segregation, sharecropping, disenfranchisement, anti-Semitism, unemployment, migration, urbanization, religion, sexuality, war and military service, strikebreaking, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. We start with the most famous protest narrative, Richard Wright’s Native Son, then study other narratives, many of which challenge Wright’s forms and ideas. Other writers include Angelo Herndon, William Attaway, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, and Bobby Seale, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and social science. Requirements include heavy reading schedule. midterm, final exam, and reading journal.

ENAM 482C -African-American Speculative Fiction (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

1100-1215 TR, CAB 335

This class focuses on a genre of African American literature that is best described as "speculative." While all literature can be said to "speculate" about different topics, themes or events, the literary offerings in this class will venture into imagined worlds of horror, science fiction, fantasy as crafted by African American authors. Writers include Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due and others. We will use these primary texts and other sources from film and television to question the racial markings and motives of "mainstream" speculative literatures and to consider the implications of the genre for African American literature and culture.

ENGN 342 - Contemporary Drama (3)

Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

1530-1645 TR, MRY 113

This is the second half of a two-semester course on modern and contemporary American and European drama (with a few forays into other regions), covering post-Absurdism to the present. The first half is not a prerequisite. We will examine postwar quests for dramatic and theatrical structures relevant to a socially and morally chaotic world. From a study of reactions to the Theatre of the Absurd, we move to an investigation of contemporary drama, celebrating the success of women and minority playwrights in our own period. These playwrights, earlier deprived of a voice, have transformed theater of the past fifty years. We will read plays by Ntozake Shange, Tom Stoppard, Wole Soyinka, Derek Walcott, Tony Kushner, Sam Shepard, Caryl Churchill, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others.

Course requirements: two short papers, a long paper or a project (one option is to write your own play), a final exam.

cross-listed as CLPT 342

ENGN 482B - Ethnic American Drama (3)

Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

1230-1345 TR, BRN 330

This seminar celebrates the richness, diversity, passion, and sophistication of contemporary ethnic American drama. We will read plays by African American, Asian American, Hispanic American, and Native American dramatists. We will examine their shared concerns and their cultural particularities, and explore how all groups negotiate traditional dramatic forms and even fundamental definitions of theater to express their own visions. Our work with these plays will challenge old methods of interpretation and our own cultural assumptions. We will try to understand how these plays are and are not uniquely American by examining the plays themselves and reading a selection of theoretical works. We will explore some of the political challenges to and ramifications of ethnic American drama. We will read plays by David Henry Hwang, Ntozake Shange, Thomson Highway, Maria Irene Fornes, Suzan-Lori Parks, Wakako Yamauchi, Cherrie Moraga, William Yellow Robe, and others.

Cross-listed as ENMC 482B

ENLT 247 - Black Writers and Black Music(3)

Instructor: Eric Nunn

1530-1645 MW, BRN 312

This course traces the interrelations of twentieth-century African American literary and musical histories from W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk through the Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s to the present day.

ENLT 247- Black Writers and the Media (3)

Instructor: Benjamin Fagan

1700-1850 TR, BRN 312

Restricted to 1st and 2nd year students.

In this course students will examine a key trope that permeates African American literature: media. We will approach this term in two senses. On the one hand, we will look at how texts appear in diverse mediums, be they newspapers, anthologies, audio recordings, or television coverage. On the other hand, students will read key works that place the problem of media representation at the center of their projects. Students will spend a significant amount of time with each selected text, allowing them to develop critical close reading skills. Moreover, by examining one work in multiple mediums they will be able to investigate how form and presentation inflect a text's meaning. We will read texts ranging from 18th century poetry to 21st century oratory. We will read canonical authors such as Phyllis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, and Ralph Ellison, and also consider the works of lesser-known writers such as Martin Delany and Francis Ellen Watkins.

ENLT 255-2 - American Film: Los Angeles in Hollywood (3)

Instructor: Eric Lott

1700-1930 R, BRN 310

Not exactly a conventional film course, this one will use Hollywood cinema as the centerpiece of an inquiry into the cultural history and imaginary geography of Los Angeles. In addition to cultural historians and geographers such as Mike Davis, Sue Ruddick, and Eric Avila, we’ll read theorists of the so-called culture industry (e.g., Theodor Adorno), social commentators and gossips on L.A. and Hollywood (e.g., Carey McWilliams, Chester Himes, John Gregory Dunne, Kenneth Anger), and such novels as Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust (1939), Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run? (1941), and Michael Tolkin’s The Player (1988). Plus, of course, the films, all of them about Los Angeles or Hollywood itself: e.g., King Vidor’s Show People (1928), Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946), Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Stanley Donnen/Gene Kelly’s Singin in the Rain (1952), Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Roger Corman’s Little Shop of Horrors (1960), Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls (1968), Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadass Song (1971), Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Hal Ashby’s Shampoo (1975), Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (1977), Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), Amy Heckerling’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985), Luis Valdez’s La Bamba (1987), John Singleton’s Boyz n the Hood (1991), Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down (1993), Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994), Tim Burton’s Ed Wood (1994), Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), F. Gary Gray’s Set It Off (1997), Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski (1998), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999), David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr. (2001), Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel Canyon (2002), Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator (2004).

Cross-listed as AMST 401-A1

Department of French Language & Literature

FREN 346 - African Literatures and Cultures (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

1000-1050 MWF, CAB 236

This course will explore aspects of African literatures and cultures. It will focus on selected issues of special resonance in contemporary African life. Oral literature and its continuing impact on all other art forms. Key issues in French colonial policy and its legacy in Africa: language, politics, education. The course will examine the image of the postcolonial state and society as found in contemporary arts, paintings, sculpture, music, and cinema. Selections from painters like Cheri Samba (Democratic Republic of Congo), Werewere Liking (Cameroun) and sculptors like Ousmane Sow, including such popular icons as Mamy Wata and forms such as Souwere glass painting; from musicians like Youssou Ndour (Senegal), Cheb Khaled (Algeria), Seigneur Rochereau, Tshala Muana (DRC), Salif Keita (Mali), and Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); from Mande, Peul, and Kabyle oral literatures in French translation; from filmmakers D.D. Mambety, Moussa Sene Absa, and Ngangura Mweze. Visit to National Museum of African Arts depending on availability of funding. The final grade will be based on contributions to discussions, a mid-term exam, 2 papers, and a final exam.

Prerequisite: French 332

FREN 411 - Francophone Literature of Africa (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

1200-1250 MWF, CAB 424

Introduction to the Francophone literature of Africa; survey, with special emphasis on post- World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights of Africa. The role of cultural and literary reviews (Légitime Défense, L'Etudiant noir, and Présence Africaine) in the historical and ideological development of this literature will be examined. Special reference will be made to Caribbean writers of the Negritude movement. Documentary videos on African history and cultures will be shown and important audio-tapes will also be played regularly. Supplementary texts will be assigned occasionally. Students will be expected to present response papers on a regular basis.

In addition to the required reading material, 2 essays (60%), regular class attendance, and contribution to discussions (10%), and a final exam (30%) constitute the course requirements. Papers are due on the dates indicated on the syllabus.

Department of History

HIAF 202 - Modern African History (4)

Instructor: John E. Mason

0930-1045 TR, CMN G010

This course explores the history of Africa from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade, in the early nineteenth century, to the present. Our goal is to examine the historical roots of the continent's contemporary condition, both good and bad. We look at the slave trade and its consequences, the European conquest of most of the African continent, African resistance to colonial rule, and the reestablishment of African independence.

We concentrate on three regions: West Africa, especially Nigeria; Central Africa, especially the Congo and Rwanda; and southern Africa, especially South Africa. We pay particular attention to the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and with the various strategies that Africans employed to resist, subvert, and accommodate European domination.

HIAF 202 is an introductory course and assumes no prior knowledge of African history. There will be two blue book exams, a mid-term and a final and periodic quizzes on the readings

HIAF 401A - History Seminar - Modern African Conflict, Decolonization to the Present (4)

Instructor: John P. Cann

1530-1800 M, RAN 212

This seminar investigates the conduct of selected wars following the British, French, and Belgian decolonizations in Africa. Students will begin by developing an appreciation of the small war theorists and African culture to provide a framework for the understanding and analysis of this genre of conflict in both its military dimension and its broader socio-cultural context. The seminar will then consider the case studies of Biafra (1967-1970), the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-1974) and its aftermath, including the South African Border War (1966-1989), the Rhodesian Front War (1962-1980), and RENAMO in Mozambique (1976-1992) before proceeding to a selection of subsequent and often continuing conflicts, such as, Senegal (1982-2004), Algeria (1954-1962 and 1992-present), Chad (1978-1987), Sudan (1955-1972 and 1983-2005), Uganda (1987-2005), Sierra Leone (1991-2002), and the US involvement in Somalia (1992-1994). It will examine both internal factors, such as, tribal animosities, water and property rights, child soldiers, and religious tension, and external ones, such as, the role of NGOs, military companies, peacekeepers, former colonial powers, and neighboring states, in each of the contests. Readings are drawn from published materials with no more than 250 pages per week. Grading is based on class participation (50%) and on a research paper (50%) of approximately 20 pages on a relatively modern African conflict of the student’s choice that analyzes its causes, its participants and their motivations, its conduct, and the outcome based on the themes developed in seminar.

HIAF 404 - Independent Study in African History (3)

(Topic to be determined by instructor and student)

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes.

Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HILA 202 - Modern Latin America (3)

Instructor: Brian P. Owensby

0930-1045 TR, RFB G004B

This course will explore the historiesof Latin America from the wars of independence between 1808-1830 to the present day. Emphasis will be on understanding the relationship between large economic structures and the lives of historical actorsin political, social, and cultural terms and in global context. Wewill read primary and secondary sources. I will lecture once a weekand we will have a semi-socratic discussion of the readings once aweek. I will ask you to write two interpretive essays, one roughly atmid-term and the other at the end of the semester.

Enrollment will belimited to 60.

HILA 402A - History Colloquium - Mestijaze and Race Mixing in Latin American History (4)

Instructor: Brian P. Owensby

1300-1530 T, RFN 227A

This colloquium will delve into the history of how Indigneous People, Europeans, and Africans met in the crucible of conquest and created anovel social order from the biological and cultural mixing thatcharged by the crossed circuits of desire, misunderstanding, violence,and accident. We will discuss “mestizaje”—cultural and biological mixing—the role of intermediaries, race, and race relations, from the16th- to the 21st centuries. We will read a broad range of books. Students will write interpretive essays aimed at problematizing conventional “racial” thinking.

Enrollment will be limited to 12 motivated students.

HIUS 360 - Rural Poverty in Our Times (3)

Instructor: Grace Hale

1530-1710 T, MIN 125

This course will explore the history of non-urban poverty in the American South from the 1930s to the present. Weaving together the social histories of poor people, the political history of poverty policies, and the cultural history of representations of poverty, the course follows historical cycles of attention and neglect: rural poverty during the Great Depression, rural poverty from the war on poverty to the Reagan Revolution, and rural poverty in the age of Katrina, the present. In each section, we will examine the relationship between representations (imagining poverty), policies (alleviating poverty), and results (the effects of those representations and policies in the economic, political, and psychological status of poor people).

Cross-listed as AMST 201

HIUS 366 - African American History from the Civil War to the Present (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

1530-1620 TR, WIL 301

This course surveys the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Specifically focusing on the complex character of black life in the United States, students will examine African Americans’ protracted struggle to build strong families and communities, create vibrant and socially meaningful artistic productions, and confront what philosopher Cornel West refers to as the “pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery in our world.” Exploring the political and philosophical concerns pursued by activists and intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Ralph Ellison, Angela Davis, Amiri Barka, Toni Cade Bambara, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, this class critically engages black Americans’ complex views on what it means to be American, modern, and human. Organizations and movements that will be discussed include but are not limited to the Garvey Movement, SNCC, the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Cultural expressions and movements that will be explored include but are not limited to the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, 1960s jazz and soul, funk, and hip-hop.

Cross-listed as AAS 366

HIUS 367 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Julian Bond

1530-1730 T, CLK 107

This lecture course examines the history, philosophies, tactics, events and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward.

The Southern movement - variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement - was a black-led, interracial mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation by the mid-60s.

Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping and occasionally complimentary phases - lobbying, litigation and protest.

In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights.

In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation and the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools.

The last phase, lasting a decade from '54 through '65, was a decade of protests - boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations - as well as grass-roots organizing campaigns that laid the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s.

Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength and followers from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation. The movement's well-known and lesser-known proponents and their strategies will be examined.

Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five- to seven-page papers.

Texts:
Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo Press
Forman James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press
Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, Thompson Learning

Videos:
"Eyes on the Prize - America's Civil Rights Years, 1954 - 1965", # 1 to 6 "America the at the Racial Cross words, 1965 - 1985", # 1 and 2; PBS Video, Blackside Inc., Boston
"The Road to Brown", William Elwood, Producer, California Newsreel

HIUS 403 - Virtual Vinegar Hill: Visualizing an African American Memoryscape (4)

Instructor: Scot French and Bill Ferster

1530-1800 W, CAB 118

In the 1960s, Charlottesville's Vinegar Hill neighborhood -- an African American residential-business district born of late-19th and early-20th century black enterprise -- was declared "blighted" by local authorities and demolished under the federally funded Urban Renewal program. Civic leaders and project boosters hailed the demolition/redevelopment project, coupled with the opening of modern public housing complexes for those forcibly displaced, as a much-needed facelift for the downtown area. Yet, for Charlottesville's African American citizens, the project produced a profound sense of loss that lingers to this day. Vinegar Hill, as a site of memory, has come to symbolize the displacement of the African American working and business classes; the destructive impact of urban renewal/gentrification on African American community life; and the erasure of African American history from Charlottesville's commemorative landscape.

Building on the collaborative efforts of University researchers and local community groups, this class will explore the possibilities for visualizing the Vinegar Hill "memoryscape" through a state-of-the-art interactive website. Hundreds of historical photographs, maps, and household surveys have been scanned and entered into a database, thanks to the previous efforts of U.Va. faculty and student researchers. Likewise, newspaper articles on the topic have been indexed, and some audio- and video-taped oral histories are available for inclusion. At this stage of the project, with so much of the scanning and transcription completed, the digital component of the class will focus on the application of new visualization technologies and the prospects for advancing scholarship through the careful framing of historical problems or questions. What might the thoughtful application of visualization technologies to this data reveal? Prior experience with humanities computing is helpful, but not required.

Prospective readings include selections from: J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics, and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia; James Saunders and Renae Shackelford, Urban Renewal and the End of Black Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia: An Oral History of Vinegar Hill; Ann Kelly Knowles, Past Time, Past Place: GIS for History; and David J. Staley, Computers, Visualization, and History: How New Technology Will Transform Our Understanding of the Past.

Each student will complete a 12-15-page research paper in preparation for a "visualization" to be developed in consultation with the instructors.

Grading will be based on reading responses/class participation (30 percent); a 12-15-page research paper (35 percent), and the development and public presentation of the visualization (35 percent).

 

Media Studies

 

Department of Music

MUSI 212 – History of Jazz Music (4)

Instructor: Scott DeVeaux

1100-1150 MWF, MRY 209

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.

MUEN 369 – African Music and Dance Ensemble (2)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

1715-1915 TR, MRY 110

Hands-on course featuring drumming, dancing and singing from Ghana (Ewe) and from the Central African Republic. Public performance is expected. A guest artist will join us in residence for the final week of class and performance.

Prerequisite: Instructor permission by audition.

Note: Because the subject matter changes each semester, courses numbered MUEN 360-369 may be repeated for credit, but no more than eight performance credits may be applied toward the baccalaureate degree in the College.

MUSI 212 - History of Jazz (4)

Instructor: Scott Deveaux

1200-1250 MWF, WIL 301

Survey of jazz music from before 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century; important instrumental performers, composers, arrangers, and vocalists.

MUSI 309 - Performance in Africa (4)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

1600-1650 TR, MRY 110

An undergraduate seminar focusing on the cultural contexts and issues surrounding African music and dance.

There is also a practical component, which requires participation in the African Music and Dance Ensemble as part of the credit for Musi 369.

Admission by informal audition during first class meeting.

Department of Politics

PLAP 524B - Policy and Politics Inequality (3)

Instructor: Vesla Weaver

1900-2130 R, CAB B020

PLCP 581 - Government and Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa (3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

1400-1630 M, CAB 320

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; not open to students who have taken PLCP 381.

Department of Psychology

(No courses offered for Spring 2009)

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 285 - Afro-Creole Religions of the Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

1230-1345 TR, CAB 311

A lecture course with weekly discussion section meetings which surveys African-derived religions in Latin American and the Caribbean, such as Cuban Santeria, Brazilian Candomble, and Jamaican Rastafarianism. A reading of contemporary ethnographic sources is supplemented by the screening of documentary films.

RELA 390 - Islam in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

1300-1350 MW, CAB 311

This course offers an historical and topical introduction to Islam in Africa. After a brief overview of the central features of the Muslim faith, our chronological survey begins with the introduction of Islam to North Africa in the 7th century. We will trace the transmission of Islam via traders, clerics, and jihads to West Africa. We shall consider the medieval Muslim kingdoms; the development of Islamic scholarship and the reform tradition; the growth of Sufi brotherhoods; and the impact of colonization and de-colonization upon Islam. Our overview of the history of Islam in East Africa will cover: the early Arab and Asian mercantile settlements; the flowering of classical Swahili courtly culture; the Omani sultanates and present-day Swahili society as well as recent "Islamist" movements in the Sudan and other parts of the East African interior.

Readings and classroom discussions provide a more in-depth exploration of topics encountered in our historical survey. Through the use of ethnographical and literary materials, we will explore questions such as the translation and transmission of the Qur'an, indigenization and religious pluralism; the role of women in African Islam; and African Islamic spirituality. Midterm, final, short paper, participation in discussion.

RELA 410 - Yoruba Religions (3)

Instructor: Benjamin Ray

0930-1045 TR, CAB 210

An in depth study of Yoruba religion through its oral traditions, ritual performances, traditional art, independent churches, and its representation in literature. The course will cover the following subjects: Ifa divination; sacred kingship; the orisha; the concept of supreme being; plays by Ijimere, Soyinka, and Osofisan; Yoruba art and aesthetics; concepts of personal destiny, final judgment, and rebirth.

RELC 523 - Pentecostalism (3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

1530-1800 T, CAB 330

This course will study the history, practices, and theology, of Pentecostalism, the fastest growing Christian movement in the world, from its origins among poor whites and recently freed African Americans to its phenomenal expansion in places like South America, Asia and Africa. The course will explore Pentecostalism’s theological and historical relationship to the Methodist, Holiness, Apostolic, and Charismatic movements, as well as Pentecostal belief in phenomena like speaking in tongues, healing, miracles, and prophecy. Finally, the course will use race, class, and gender analysis to evaluate the cultural influences of Pentecostalism in the US and elsewhere in the world.

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 - Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

1400-1515 MW, WIL 216

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.

Studies in Women and Gender

SWAG 224 - Black Femininities and Masculinities in the U.S. Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

1700-1930 TR, CLK G004

Restricted to first and second year students.

In weekly readings, writing and discussions we will explore the nature of the institution in which we all reside: the university. In order to focus on the role of gender and women as a central issue, we will learn how the American university was formed, how it developed over time and how it functions today. Some of the books we will read, in whole or in part: In the Company of Educated Women: A History of Higher Education in America (Barbara Solomon); The Making of the Modern University (Julie Reuben); Transforming Knowledge (Elizabeth Minnich); The Lecherous Professor (Deitz and Weiner); Exiles and Communities: Teaching in the Patriarchal Wilderness (Joanne Pagano); and The Blue Angel (Francine Prose).

SWAG 237 - Feminism in America, 1910 – Present (3)

Instructor: Cori Field

1100-1215 TR, MIN 130

This course will explore the history of feminism in America from the 1910s to the present day. We will examine the various philosophies and strategies of people who have allied themselves with the feminist movement as well as those who have opposed it. We will ask how activists imagined sexual equality and what reforms—political, legal, economic, cultural, or psychological—they proposed. We will explore the connections between feminism and other movements including avant-garde modernism, labor organizing, black civil rights, pacifism, gay rights, and immigration reform. By focusing on differences among women, we will debate whether there ever was—or could be—a woman’s rights movement that spoke to all women.

Most of the assigned readings are primary documents. While I will provide short lectures introducing those documents, the majority of our class-time will be spent discussing and interpreting primary sources as a group.

This course meets the Second Writing Requirement.

Fall 2008

 

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 101 – African American & African Studies I (4)

Instructor: Karen Fields
1230-1345 TR, MIN 125

AAS 101 is a team-taught lecture that explores the history and culture of Africans in Africa and people of African descent in the Americas. The class begins by analyzing issues such as the formation of agricultural/sedentary communities, food transformation, and technological innovations in Africa prior to the contacts with European. We will then examine the social and economical dimensions of African contacts with
Europeans during the slave trade era. The class will also cover the African Diaspora in the Americas, emphasizing the African Diaspora to regions outside North America.

AAS 307 -- Africa and Africans in the US Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt
1530-1800 M, COC 115

AAS 357 -- Caribbean Perspectives (3)

Instructor: Yarimar Bonilla
1530-1800 W, CAU 116

AAS 401 – Independent Study (1-3)

Topic to be determined by the instructor and the student

AAS 405A – Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork
1100-1215 TR, CAB 335

This combined graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, McBride’s The Color of Water, Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include weekly response papers, comparative essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams. This class is restricted to instructor permission. It is designed for advanced undergraduates in English, African American Studies, and American Studies.
Cross-listed as ENAM 481F

AAS 405B – Critical Race Theory (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross
1530-1800 T, WIL 141A

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, 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? Using Winston Napier’s text African American Literary Theory: A Reader, this course surveys major trends in black literary theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing especially on these movements: the Black Aesthetic, womanism and feminist critique, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, gender and queer theory, hip hop, incarceration, and postcolonial and diaspora studies. Although theoretical writings comprise the heart of the course, discussions will revolve around several artistic works as applicable case studies: Percival Everett’s 2005 novel Wounded, Spike Lee’s 2000 film Bamboozled, and Suzan-Lori Parks’ 1994 The America Play. Requirements include several short critical response essays, one class discussion presentation, and a term research paper.
Cross-listed as ENCR 481

AAS 405C- African American Survey (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell
1400-1515 TR, BRN 328

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American letters, from Briton Hammon’s Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings (1860) to W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Working our way through a variety of genres (elegy, drama, the captivity narrative, the slave narrative, the essay, public oratory, speeches, and novels), we will explore a number of matters pertinent to literary studies in general, as well as those with specific implications for African-American writing and writers. We will consider the circumstances of textual production and reception, ideas and ideologies of literary history and culture, aesthetics, authorship and audience. We will focus our attention immediately on the emergence of African-American writing under the regime of slavery and the questions it poses about “race,” “authorship”, “subjectivity”, “self-mastery”, and “freedom.” We will consider the material and social conditions under which our selected texts were edited, published, marketed, and “authenticated,” lingering especially on the role white abolitionists and editors played in the production and mediation of these texts for various reading publics. Our ultimate aim is to situate our selections within the broadest possible contexts of their time and ours. Other required texts include Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, William Wells Brown’s Clotelle, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. Restricted to 2nd and 3rd years.
Cross-listed as ENAM 313

AAS 405D Black Power

Instructor: Claudrena Harold
15:30-18:00 R, CAB 242

Tracing black women and men’s quest for political, economic, and cultural power from the Depression Years to the present, this seminar examines African Americans’ collective efforts to eradicate what philosopher Cornel West refers to as the “pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery in our world.” Significant attention will be given to black intellectuals and activists’ debates over the best way to deal with the economic consequences of white supremacy and global capitalism, the usefulness of armed self-defense as a weapon in the fight against racial injustice, and the problem of sexism within the black liberation movement. To better understand the diversity and breadth of black oppositional activity in the twentieth-century, students will examine the protest activities of a number of black leaders, cultural artists, and movement organizations. Organizations and activists to be examined include but are not limited to W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and the Council of African Affairs, Ella Baker and SNCC, Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Angela Davis and the American Communist Party, Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement, Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Toni Cade Bambara, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the more recent Black Radical Congress. Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to the research methods and techniques used by historians. We will not only explore historians’ use of oral and written texts, but will also reflect on the ways in which scholars’ theoretical and political viewpoints inform their interpretation of primary sources. Students will have the opportunity to further develop their historical skills through a series of assignments designed to assist them in identifying research topics and questions; interpreting primary texts; and substantiating arguments with historical evidence.

AAS 451 – Directed Research for DMP (3)

Meeting time to be determined by instructor and student

AAS 452 – Thesis for DMP (3)

Meeting time to be determined by instructor and student

American Studies Program

AMST 201 - The Global South (3)

Instructor: Eric Lott
1400-1515 TR, CAB 324

Following the lead of the “new southern studies,” this course will introduce you to the practice of American Studies by remapping the South from cotton belt to sun belt and beyond. We’ll consider the region in three conceptual frames: as a sub-national section with a distinctive, historically changing political economy (antebellum chattel slavery, postbellum debt peonage, post-Fordist neoliberalism) and cultural history; as the northern part of a hemispheric South that includes the Caribbean and Latin America; and as a key component in what has come to be called the global South—that low-wage losing player in today’s international division of labor, perhaps best keynoted by that Bastard Out of Arkansas, Wal-Mart. This is all obviously a tall order, and we’ll only be able to chart certain genealogies of cultural-political thought and struggle. But among other things, I’d like to take up the idea of southern exceptionalism or what used to be called the “mind” of the South and certain of its cultural expressions (e.g., the plantation romance, the slave narrative, the rape-lynching nexus, Faulkner, Hurston, the blues, Deliverance, Dorothy Allison, Outkast); the U.S. South’s various and extensive cultural-political relations with its southern neighbors (e.g., the Mexican War, Jose Marti and the “Spanish-American War,” U.S. military involvement in Haiti, post-Cuban Revolution Havana and Miami, Russell Banks’s Continental Drift, Faulkner’s influence on Gabriel Garcia Marquez, V.S. Naipaul’s A Turn in the South, the invention of the Caribbean steel drum out of U.S. oil drums, reggae’s transformation of American R&B, Derek Walcott’s Arkansas Testament); and the place and role of the U.S. South in a global North-South divide (e.g., African agricultural practices in slave-owning South Carolina, Richard Wright’s reporting in The Color Curtain on the 1955 Bandung conference of non-aligned nations, post-1965 Asian immigration to states like Virginia, Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, “Toyotization” in North Carolina auto plants, the sweated labor behind and cultural influence of Wal-Mart).

AMST 401– The Landscapes of Slavery (3)

Instructor: Maurie McInnis
1300-1530 R, FHL 215

From January to April 2007, a major exhibition, "The Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art," will be at the University of Virginia Art Museum featuring more than 80 works by more than 50 artists spanning 1800 to the present. Artists include: Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Thomas Hart Benton, William Johnson, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Joyce Scott, Romare Bearden, Juan Logan, and Kara Walker, among others. Working closely with the works in the exhibition, this class will examine the visual depictions of the plantation South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tackle questions of politics, protest, memory, nostalgia, and identity. In addition to examining the work of painters who tackled the subject, this class will also look at how the region was portrayed in the popular press, in novels, and in film. Students will do their research projects on works in the exhibition.This class fulfills the second writing assignment.

Cross-listed as ARTH 491

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 319 – Urban Africa and Popular Culture (3)

Instructor: Sasha Newell
1400-1515 MW, MIN 130

In this course, we explore the cultural transformations and continuities produced by the emergence of African cities during and after colonialism. Tracing anthropological debates around African urban centers from the 1940s until the present, we will consider the efflorescence of new cultural forms of music, art, dress, and film in conjunction with new sources of identity such as slang, nationality, religion, ethnicity, consumption, and migration. Attention will be given to local efforts at attaining 'modernity' as well as perceived "loss of culture" and movements to preserve 'tradition'. Theoretical issues to be discussed: mimesis, modernity and 'hybrid' identities; urban social integration and the production of ethnicity; colonialism, class, and resistance; capitalism and economy; transformations in kinship, gender and sexuality.

ANTH 388 African Archaeology (3)

Instructor: Adria Laviolette
1100-1150 MWF, CAB 338

This course surveys the archaeological knowledge currently available about the African continent. The emphasis will be on the Late Stone Age, when fully modern humans dominate the cultural landscape, and the subsequent Iron Age, but will also briefly cover pre-modern humans and the archaeology of the colonial period. The material includes the great social, economic, and cultural transformations in African history known primarily through archaeology, and the most important archaeological sites and discoveries on the continent. Throughout the course a theme will be the politics of the past, and the changing role of the practice of archaeology in Africa.

Department of Art History

ART 264 - African American Art (4)

Instructor: Carmenita Higginbotham
1100-1215 TR, CAM 160

(No course description available)

Department of Drama

(No courses offered for Fall 2008)

Department of English

ENAM 313- African American Survey (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell
1400-1515 TR, BRN 328

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American letters, from Briton Hammon’s Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings (1860) to W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Working our way through a variety of genres (elegy, drama, the captivity narrative, the slave narrative, the essay, public oratory, speeches, and novels), we will explore a number of matters pertinent to literary studies in general, as well as those with specific implications for African-American writing and writers. We will consider the circumstances of textual production and reception, ideas and ideologies of literary history and culture, aesthetics, authorship and audience. We will focus our attention immediately on the emergence of African-American writing under the regime of slavery and the questions it poses about “race,” “authorship”, “subjectivity”, “self-mastery”, and “freedom.” We will consider the material and social conditions under which our selected texts were edited, published, marketed, and “authenticated,” lingering especially on the role white abolitionists and editors played in the production and mediation of these texts for various reading publics. Our ultimate aim is to situate our selections within the broadest possible contexts of their time and ours. Other required texts include Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy, William Wells Brown’s Clotelle, Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. Restricted to 2nd and 3rd years.
Cross-listed as AAS 405C

ENAM 481E – African-American Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Angela Davis
1530-1645 MW, BRN 328

We will read several novels and short stories by African American women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, two written responses to readings (each 2 to 3 double spaced typed pages long) and a formal essay (12 to 15 pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place.

Prerequisite: The course is first offered to fourth year majors in English, Women's Studies and African-American and African Studies.

ENAM 481F – Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork
1100-1215 TR, CAB 335

This combined graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, McBride’s The Color of Water, Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include weekly response papers, comparative essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams. This class is restricted to instructor permission. It is designed for advanced undergraduates in English, African American Studies, and American Studies.
Cross-listed as AAS 405A

ENLT 247 (0001) - Black Writers In America (3)

Instructor: Scott Selisker
1700-1815 TR, BRN 312

Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

This course will survey some representative highlights of the rich tradition of African American literature, with an emphasis on the major works, debates, and historical contexts of the twentieth century. We will learn how to read in and around the literary dimensions of these important American works, considering artistic movements, generic conventions, issues of interpretation, and the different formal concerns that confront fiction, poetry, autobiography, oratory, drama, and the essay. Our readings will prompt us to think in sophisticated ways about race, identity, representation, and community. Our work in the course will equip you with tools for reading further, in the African American and other literary traditions. The syllabus will likely include works by: Douglass, Du Bois, Washington, Chesnutt, Hughes, Hurston, Ellison, Baldwin, Hansberry, King, Malcolm X, Brooks, and Morrison. Course requirements: active engagement with the materials and your peers, occasional response papers, three critical essays (5-7 pp.), an informal presentation, and a final exam.

ENLT 247 (0002) – Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork
930-1045 TR, Location: TBA

Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

(No course description available.)

ENLT 247 (0003) – Black Migration (3)

Instructor: Sonya Donaldson
1400-1515, BRN 332

Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

(No course description available.)

Department of French Language & Literature

FREN 348 – Literature and Culture of North Africa (3)

Instructor: Majida Bargach
1200-1250 MWF, CAB 330

Prerequisite: French 332

La situation géographique des pays d’Afrique du Nord fait de cet ensemble un carrefour d’influences diverses depuis l’antiquité. Bordé au sud par le Sahara, à l’ouest par l’océan atlantique, au nord par la mer méditerranée, il est rattaché à l’Asie à son extrémité nord-est par l’isthme de Suez.
Les cultures et populations nord-africaines reflètent cette diversité d’influences qui n’ont jamais cessé de les irriguer depuis les premières invasions à la colonisation et jusqu’aux effets récents de la mondialisation.
Nous aborderons les cultures de l’Afrique du Nord à travers des œuvres littéraires francophones qui nous mèneront de l’Egypte au Maroc, de l’histoire coloniale aux données actuelles, des religions à l’art.
Books TBA

FREN 411 - Francophone Literature of Africa (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame
1530-1645 TR, CAB 225

Introduction to the Francophone literature of Africa; survey, with special emphasis on post-World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights of Africa. The role of cultural and literary reviews (Légitime Défense, L'Etudiant noir, and Présence Africaine) in the historical and ideological development of this literature will be examined. Special reference will be made to Caribbean writers of the Negritude movement. Documentary videos on African history and cultures will be shown and important audio-tapes will also be played regularly. Supplementary texts will be assigned occasionally.

In addition to the required reading material, 2 essays (60%), regular class attendance, and contribution to discussions (10%), and a final exam (30%) constitute the course requirements. Papers are due on the dates indicated on the syllabus.

Required reading:

  • Diop, Birago. Les Contes d’Amadou Koumba
  • Chevrier, J. Anthologie Africaine: Poésie
  • Fatou Diome. La Préférence nationale
  • Assia Djebar. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (See Toolkit).
  • Boudjédra, Rachid. L'Escargot entêté

FREN 443– Africa in Cinema (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame
1230-1345 TR, CAB 242

This course is a study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. It deals with the representations of African cultures by filmmakers from different cultural backgrounds and studies the ways in which their perspectives on Africa are often informed by their own social and ideological positions as well as the demands of exoticism. It also examines the constructions of the African as the other and the kinds of responses such constructions have elicited from Africa’s filmmakers. These filmic inventions are analyzed through a selection of French, British, American, and African films by such directors as John Huston, S. Pollack, J-J Annaud, M. Radford, Ngangura Mweze, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cisse, Gaston Kabore, Amadou Seck, Dani Kouyate, Brian Tilley, Jean-Marie Teno on a variety of subjects relative to the image of Africa in cinema.

The final grade will be based on one mid-semester paper (select a film by an African filmmaker and provide a sequential reconstruction of the story based on the methods of P. S. Vieyra and of F. Boughedir ), a final paper (7-10 pages), an oral presentation and contributions to discussions. Each oral presentation should contribute to the mid-semester paper and to the final research paper. The final paper should be analytical, well documented and written in clear, grammatical French using correct film terminology supplied with the syllabus.

Required reading list (on reserve, see Toolkit for FREN 443):

  • Ferid Boughedir, Le cinéma africain de A a Z
    (Specific selections of the following works will be announced weekly.)
  • Kenneth W. Harrow, Matatu- With Open Eyes: Women and African Cinema
  • Gardies, André, Cinéma d’Afrique Noire Francophone : l’espace-miroir
  • Vieyra, P. S, Le cinéma africain
  • Sembène Ousmane, Cinéaste
  • Ukadike, F. N., Black African Cinema
  • Research in African Literatures - Special Issue: African Cinema./ Vol. 26, No.3, Fall 1995.
  • Diawara, Manthia, African Cinema

Department of History

HIAF 201 - Early African History through the Era of the Slave Trade (4)

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller
930-1045 TR, MRY 104

From the mists of the once-dark continent’s unwritten past Early African History draws out Africans’ distinctive strategies and achievements in culture, politics, and economics. Starting broadly at the dawn of history and continuing in detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 201 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the ironic interplay of tragedy and ambition in a continent increasingly trapped in exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of modern African history, HIAF 202, taught in spring semester, follows subsequent events down through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.)

HIAF 201 is a introductory lower-division survey. The instructor presents the major themes of the early history of the continent in lectures twice each week. Students meet additionally in discussion sections for reviews of readings, map quizzes, and preparation for written assignments. Requirements include weekly short map quizzes, short written responses to each class, a short paper reacting to assigned readings, and a take-home final exercise. The course belongs to the Afro-American and African Studies curriculum, qualifies for the new minor in African Studies, meets the “non-western/non-modern” requirement for the major in History, counts as an adjunct course for Studies in Women and Gender, and qualifies for the College “non-western perspectives” area requirement.

After an opening consideration of Mistaking Africa (Keim) in modern American culture, readings revolve around weekly assignments in texts of varying perspectives (Reader, Africa: A Biography of the Continent, and Newman, Peopling of Africa – subject to revision upon availability of a superior alternative). Other chapters and professional articles introduce the distinctive methodologies of doing history without written sources (including the famous Mande oral epic Sundiata), highlight interpretive (“historiographical”) issues, and consider concepts relevant to understanding early Africa.

No formula determines final marks for HIAF 201. Students are graded according to their “highest consistent performance” in all aspects of the course, including attendance at lectures and participation in discussions, with ample allowance made for the unfamiliarity of the subject matter early in the term; options allow students to devise personal combinations of graded work that allow each one to take advantage of specialized abilities and accommodate other academic commitments.

HIAF 201 presumes no prior knowledge of Africa or experience with the study of history. However, consistent application and preparation are expected, particularly early in the term, since the subject is new to nearly everyone in the course. Students in all four years of their undergraduate careers and in all colleges of the University complete HIAF 201 with success. Most find it a challenging and rewarding opportunity to discover a once-neglected story of Africa and its place in world history and to examine assumptions that modern Americans – themselves included – make that they did not know they held.
jcm (2/08)

HIAF 302 - History of Southern Africa (3)

Instructor: John Mason
1230-1345 TR, RSH 410

HIAF 302 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The emphasis is on South Africa. HIAF 302 begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.

By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest had not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs.

Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.

Course materials include biographies, memoirs, fiction, music, and films, as well as academic studies. Students will write two five to seven page essays and write two blue book exams, a mid-term and a final.

HIAF 402A - History Colloquium - “Color and Culture in South Africa and the United States” (4)

Instructor: John Mason
1700-1815 TR, BRN 310

HIAF 402 is a small, research-oriented course that explores the histories of South Africa and the United States in comparative perspective.

South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries owe much of their early economic development to slavery. In both complex systems of racial domination shaped society for generations before and after the emancipation of the slaves. And in both the interracial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.

At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true. Both white supremacy and the struggle against it were more violent in South Africa than in the United States. And, since 1994, a democratic political system has ensured that black South Africans have enjoyed a degree of political power that black Americans have never experienced.

The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, music, film, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.

HIAF 402 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course should have taken at least one course in African history, preferably South Africa, and two courses in American history.

HIAF 404 - Independent Study in African History (3)

(Topic to be determined by instructor and student)

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HILA 201 - Colonial Latin America (3)

Instructor: Brian P. Owensby
930-1045 TR, MRY 115

This course will explore major developments and issues in the study of Latin American history, including Indigenous societies on the eve of Spanish conquest, the struggles over the shape of a conquest society, the emergence of a distinctive world culture up to the 18th century, and the pressures and disputes that led to wars of national independence in the early 19th century. We will seek to understand the dynamics of the colonial relationship in a global historical context.

HILA 311 - Public Life in Latin America (3)

Instructor: Herbert Braun
800-915 TR, CAB 430

How do Latin Americans navigate their ways, collectively and also individually, through their hierarchical social orders? Why is there so often so much stability and order to their societies? Surveys inform us that Latin Americans are among the happiest people in the world? Why might this be? Why do so many Latin Americans across time appear to be so proud of their nations? Why do they look at one another so often? Why is there so little hatred in Latin America? Why do poor people in Latin America seem to know more about rich people than rich people know about them? Why do traditions matter so? Why are there so many good novelists there? These and other questions, answerable and not, about life and the human condition in Latin America are what will be about in this course.

Probable Texts:

  • Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries
  • Carlos Fuentes, The Campaign, UVa Printing Services Packet
  • Domingo F. Sarmiento, Facundo or, Civilization and Barbarism
  • Daniel Levine, Vale of Tears: Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893-1897
  • Carlos Fuentes, The Good Conscience
  • Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
  • Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat
  • Julia Alvarez, In the Time of the Butterflies
  • Herbert Braun, Our Guerrillas, Our Sidewalks: A Journey into the Violence of Colombia, 2nd ediition
  • David Goldstein, The Spectacular City: Violence and Performance in Urban Bolivia

Grading:

One journal, submitted as a work in progress during any day between November 1 and November 7, worth 30% of the grade, written continuously on Word, and sent as an email attachment. In the subject of the email message write “HILA311 Journal.”

Twenty page final essay on historical patterns in Latin America, worth 40% of the grade. This final essay will emerge organically from the journal. Hard copy.
Class participation, according to a structured format, worth 30% of the grade.

HIST 215 - US-Latin American Relations in the 20th Century (3)

Instructor: Gerald Haines
1600-1650 MW, WIL 301

At the end of the 19th century most of Latin America was controlled by oligarchy elites, was economically poor, illiterate, and suffered from a vast inferiority complex. The United States was a far off secondary power. By the end of the 20th century much had ch9anged, democracy flourished, economic optimism was everywhere, and the United States was a close giant and major economic power. This course will examine US policies toward and relations with Latin America during the 20th century. Although it will incorporate Latin American attitudes and views, it will focus primarily on the role the United States played. The emphasis is on US policy and attitudes and Washington’s response to Latin American developments. It will illustrate how US policymakers perceived Latin America, American security concerns, the expansion of corporate capitalism, economic development programs, and efforts to contain communist expansion and promote democracy in the hemisphere. In addition to detailing the impact of World War I and World war II and the Cold war on inter-American relations, the course will examine the use of US military interventions and CIA covert action programs to further US objectives in the hemisphere, especially in Mexico, Haiti, Guatemala, Panama, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and Nicaragua. It will also examine cultural efforts and images and changing political ideologies and migration patterns and how these changed over time as Washington policymakers attempted to create and maintain a US dominated hemisphere.

Requirements:

Mid Term Examination 30%; Research Paper 20%; Final Examination 40%; Course Participation 10%

Required Reading:

  • Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of US Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
  • Robert H. Holden and Eric Zolov, eds., Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
  • Nick Cullather, Secret History: The CIA’s Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954 (Palto Alto, CA: Stanford University press, 1999).

HIUS 323 - Rise and Fall of the Slave South (3)

Instructor: TBA
1300-1350 MW, RFN G004A

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the sixteenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slaveowners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians.

Requirements include substantial research in primary documents in Alderman Library. Research topics are broad and require students willing to tackle open-ended assignments. Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course.

HIUS 329 - Virginia 1865-Present (3)

Instructor: George Gilliam
1230-1345 TR, GIL 141

History is the study of change over time. This course will examine change in Virginia from about 1861 to the present. The course will especially follow six main topics: (a) the role of Reconstruction in configuring Virginia’s racial and political divisions; (b) changing notions of who should vote, and how much each vote should count; (c) the role of debt and the resolution of the conflict between Funders and Readjusters in constructing Virginia’s “pay-as-you-go” philosophy; (d)Virginia’s struggles with race (e) economic, social and cultural change in post-World War II Virginia; and (f) the shift in control of Virginia from the rural machine politics of Harry F. Byrd to the suburban politics of modern Virginia.

Readings will average approximately 100 pages per week, and will be drawn from both primary documents and secondary material. Among the readings will be selections from: Ronald L. Heinemann et al., Old Dominion/New Commonwealth: A History of Virginia, 1607-2007; Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Post-emancipation Virginia; and J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy: Race, Politics and Citizenship in Jim Crow Virginia. The class meets twice per week. Approximately half of each class will be spent in lecture and half in a class discussion. There will be a short answer mid-term exam, one 5-7 page paper involving the use of primary source materials, one group project, and a final examination requiring one short and one long essay.

HIUS 347 - American Labor (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold
1230-1345 TR, CAB 316

This course examines the cultural lives, labor struggles, and political activities of the American working class from the end of Reconstruction to the present. Students will analyze how working women and men both shaped and were shaped by the nation’s transformation into the world’s largest industrial power, the social upheavals of the World War I era, the economic hardships brought about by the Great Depression, the social policies of the New Deal, the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, and continuing debates over the meanings of work, citizenship, and democracy. Significant attention will be given to the organizations and political movements workers created to advance their economic interests. How those movements have dealt with the complex racial, ethnic, and gender divisions within the American working class will receive significant attention. Since working-class history is about more than the struggle of laboring people to improve their material condition, this course will also focus on other topics, such as workers’ leisure activities, customs and thoughts, and religious beliefs.

Film, music, books, and articles will be the texts for this course. Students’ grades will be based on class participation, two exams, three quizzes, and two book reviews.

HIUS 365 - African American History through Reconstruction (3)

Instructor: Reginald Butler
1300-1350 MWF , CAB 325

This lecture course is part of a year-long survey of the African American experience in British Colonial North America and the United States. This segment (HIUS 365) covers the period from the beginnings of the trans-Atlantic slave trade through Reconstruction. It will relate the African American experience to the broader experience of Africans in the Diaspora, as well as larger themes and concepts (the rise of capitalism and the nation-state, European expansion, slavery and the slave trade in Africa, the development of racial ideologies, etc.) in world history. We will examine some of the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities, paying particular attention to how African Americans themselves shaped their experiences. Discussion sections will devote considerable attention to primary sources, with a focus on the intersection of the "local" and the "global." In addition, we will explore the relevance of the African American past to contemporary social and political debates, such as immigration, affirmative action, and reparations.

HIUS 367 – The History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Julian Bond
1530-1730 T, WIL 402

This course examines the origins, philosophies, tactics, events, personalities and consequences of the southern civil rights movement from 1900 to the mid-‘1960s. Readings, lectures and videos will be the basis for the final examination. Students will be required to write two short papers. The final grade will be determined on the basis of the two papers (25% each), the final examination (30%), and discussion section participation (20%).

Texts required:

  • Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, Thompson Learning Custom Publishing;
  • Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press;
  • Wilkins, Roy with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo.

Viewing Required:

  • “Eyes on the Prize”, America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, # 1-6;
    America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985, # 1 & 2; PBS Video, Blackside Inc., Boston.
  • “The Road to Brown”, William Elwood, California Newsreel.

HIUS 401B / AAS 401 - History Seminar, Black Power (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold
1530-1800 R, CAB 242

Tracing black women and men’s quest for political, economic, and cultural power from the 1960s to the present, this seminar examines African Americans’ collective efforts to eradicate what philosopher Cornel West refers to as the “pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery in our world.” Significant attention will be given to black intellectuals and activists’ debates over the best way to deal with the economic consequences of white supremacy and global capitalism, the usefulness of armed self-defense as a weapon in the fight against racial injustice, and the problem of sexism within the black liberation movement. To better understand the diversity and breadth of black oppositional activity in the twentieth-century, students will examine the protest activities of a number of black leaders, cultural artists, and movement organizations. Organizations and activists to be examined include but are not limited to W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Angela Davis and the American Communist Party, Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement, Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party, Toni Cade Bambara, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the more recent Black Radical Congress. Toward the end of the course, we will examine the question of whether economic, political, and cultural empowerment is a reality or possibility for blacks in 21st century America.

Film, music, books, and articles will be the texts for this course. Students’ grades will be based on class participation, three quizzes, two book reviews, and a final paper.
Cross-listed as AAS 405D

HIUS 401H - History Seminar, Black Leadership and Oral History (4)

Instructor: Phyllis Leffler
1300-1530 W, WIL 141A

This research seminar will use the website for the Explorations in Black Leadership project (https://blackleadership.virginia.edu/) as a springboard for analysis of the utility of oral history as a meaningful source of historical information. Each student will select one or more people from the website, and will evaluate individual responses to questions asked against other sources of information. This will require substantial research into biographical and autobiographical writings, interviews, speeches, newspaper articles, policy initiatives in the public or private sector, and relevant contextual secondary source literature. The final research paper will place the individuals studied in regional and historical context, in an effort to explore the major factors that gave rise to leadership.

Group readings include selected materials from:

  • Adetayo Alabi, Telling Our Stories: Continuities and Divergences in Black Autobiographies
  • Vincent Harding, Hope and History: Why We Must Share the Story of the Movement
  • Lea Williams, Servants of the People: The 1960s Legacy of African American Leadership
  • Ronald Walters and Robert Smith, African American Leadership
  • Jacob Gordon, Black Leadership for Social Change
  • Adam Faircough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000
  • Richard Kluger, Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality

This seminar will require regular submissions of materials during the course of the term, including a project design, bibliography, secondary source paper, and first and second drafts. Grades will be based on individual components of the paper, submitted sequentially, as well as on the final draft

HIUS 403A - African American Culture to 1865 (4)

Instructor: Reginald Butler
1530-1800 T, CAB 130

This reading seminar examines how African American cultures and societies developed in the north and south. How did forcibly transported Africans respond to the different agricultural economies, the conditions of enslavement, and European and native American cultures that they encountered during the colonial period? The course will begin in the early period during which large numbers of Africans arrived in British North America. It will then shift its focus to mature African American communities in which the vast majority of persons were American born. We will examine issues of African ethnicity and geography; family and kinship; religious practice; and diverse forms of aesthetic expression. Readings may include selections from: Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery; Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail; Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market; and Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South.

HIUS 824 - Topics in Modern Southern History (3)

Instructor: Grace Hale
1300-1530 T, RFN 227A

This research seminar focuses on the history of the US South from 1890 to the present through readings, discussions, and completing article-length research papers. Topics of emphasis include the transnational US South, the cultural history of the US South, the intersection of African American history and Southern history, and the new Southern labor history.

Media Studies

MDST 412 – Cyberspace, Race, Ethnicity (3)

Instructor: David Golumbia
930-1045 TR, CLM 322A

(No course description available.)

Department of Music

MUSI 212 – History of Jazz Music (4)

Instructor: Scott DeVeaux
1100-1150 MWF, MRY 209

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.

MUEN 369 – African Music and Dance Ensemble (2)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk
1715-1915 TR, OCH 107

Practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies). No previous experience with music or dance is necessary. Special attention is given to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and a polymetric sensibility. (S)

Prerequisite: Instructor permission by audition.

Note: Because the subject matter changes each semester, courses numbered MUEN 360-369 may be repeated for credit, but no more than eight performance credits may be applied toward the baccalaureate degree in the College.

Department of Politics

PLAP 324 - Race, Gender American Politics (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders
1100-1215 TR, Location: TBA

Examines the process of communicating politics from multiple angles, including the rhetoric of political leaders, campaign communications, political discussion with friends and acquaintances, political representation in the mass media, and growing forms of alternative personal media.

PLAP 424A – Race, Ethnic and Immigration (3)

Instructor: Vesla Weaver
930-1045 TR, CAB 241

(No course description available.)

PLAP 524A – Race Gender Amer Pol (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders
1400-1630 W, WIL 215

(No course description available.)

PLCP 212 – Politics Of Developing Areas (3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton
900-950 MW, WIL 402

Surveys patterns of government and politics in non-Western political systems. Topics include political elites, sources of political power, national integration, economic development, and foreign penetration.

Department of Psychology

PSYC 487 – The Minority Family (3)

Instructor: Melvin Wilson
9-11:30 T, GIL 225

Examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing “deficit” and “strength” research paradigms.
Enrollment Restrictions: 4th-year Psychology majors/minors
If course is full through ISIS: Please use the online waiting. Do not email the professor.
Format: Seminar.
No. and type of exams: TBA
Papers or projects: TBA

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 389 - Christianity in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton
1200-1250 MW, CAB 311

This course examines the history of Christianity in Africa from its roots in Egypt and the Maghrib in the 2nd c. CE, to contemporary times when nearly half the continent's population claims adherence to the faith. Our historical overview will cover the flowering of medieval Ethiopian Christianity, 16th- and 17th- century Kongolese Christianity, European missions during the colonial period, the subsequent growth of independent churches, the emergence of African Christian theology, and the recent examples of charismatic and Pentecostal “mega-churches.” We will consider the relationship between colonialism and evangelism; assess efforts in translation and inculturation of the gospel; reflect on the role of healing, prophesy and spirit-possession in conversion, and explore a variety of ways of understanding religious change across the continent. We will attempt both to position the Christian movement within the wider context of African religious history, and to understand Africa's place in the larger course of Christian history.
Cross-listed as RELC 389

RELC 318 - American Evangelicalism (3)

Instructor: Pam Cochran
1100-1215 TR, HAL 123

Evangelical Protestantism has played a vital role in shaping American history, culture and religion. It is estimated that some 25-35% of the American population (c. 70-100 million) today identifies with this movement. Far from being a monolithic entity, however, the religious, ideological, and social allegiances of evangelicalism are quite diverse. In addition, evangelicals maintain a somewhat paradoxical relationship with American society, functioning simultaneously as a politically powerful interest group (insiders) and as cultural antagonists (outsiders). This course is designed to introduce students to the history of evangelicalism, its characteristic religious patterns, and its ongoing negotiations with contemporary American culture.

RELG 270 - Festivals of the Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt
1230-1345 TR, PV8 103

By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious synthesis and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion, and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity.

RELG 320 - Martin, Malcolm, and America (3)

Instructor: Mark Hadley
1400-1450 MWF, HAL 123

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various forms of social criticism. The course requirements include engaged participation, three short essays, a mid-term and a final examination.

Department of Sociology

SOC 306 – Critical Perspect On Whiteness (3)

Instructor: Matthew Hughey
930-1045 TR, CAB 338

(No course description available.)

SOC 487 – Immigration (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman
1400-1515 MW, CAB B029

Examines contemporary immigration into the United States from the point of view of key theoretical debates and historical circumstances that have shaped current American attitudes toward immigration.

Studies in Women and Gender

SWAG 236—Women’s Rights in America (3)

Instructor: Cori Field
11-11:50 MWF, MIN 130

We will examine the philosophy and strategy of women’s rights activists in the United States from the Declaration of Independence in 1776 to the winning of woman suffrage in 1920. We will explore how the American ideals of freedom and equality were complicated by sexual/gender differences. We will ask how activists imagined sexual equality and what reforms—political, legal, economic, cultural, or psychological—they proposed. Finally, by focusing on differences among women, we will debate whether there ever was—or could be—a woman’s rights movement that spoke to all women.

Most of the assigned readings are primary documents. While I will provide short lectures introducing these documents, the majority of our class-time will be spent discussing and interpreting primary sources as a group.

 

 

Spring 2008

 

African American and African Studies

AAS 102 – Crosscurents in the African Diaspora (4)

Instructors: Marlon Ross and Ian Grandison

1230-1345 TR

MIN 125

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, sociology, geography, mapping, and spatial analysis, 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 307 – History of Brazil (3)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

12:30-1:45 TR

CAB 337

This class surveys the History of Brazil from early Portuguese colonization in the sixteenth century to Brazilian Independence in 1822. It places the onset of the colonization of Brazil against the backdrop of the broader Portuguese empire between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It devotes significant attention to the establishment and growth of indigenous slavery and the transition to African slavery, dwelling on the intellectual and religious debates that the establishment of slavery brought about in the colony and the metropolis. It analyzes the social, political, cultural, and religious underpinnings of colonial Brazil by seeking to integrate Brazilian history into the broader Atlantic World, primarily Africa and the Spanish colonies in the Americas. In addition to lectures and discussions, several movies on colonial Brazil will be shown.
(This course is cross-listed with HILA 307)

AAS 351 - African Diaspora Religions (3)

Jalane Schmidt

930-1045 TR

HAL 123

The seminar will feature close readings of ethnographic literature about African diaspora religions, and require students to write a seminar-length final paper. Often deemed emblematic of these groups' ethnic identities, the religious practices of African-descended populations in Latin America and the Caribbean are a frequent site of inquiry for cultural anthropologists. We will examine the often-polemical "African retention" vs. "creolization" debate as this relates to changing theoretical paradigms in anthropology and to African-descended populations' shifting political fortunes, activism, and cultural cachet. We will attend to changing conceptions of "race," "religion," and "nation" in the treatment of these religions by legal institutions, as well as how officials from the tourism industry and government ministries have influenced processes of "folkloricization."
(This course is cross-listed as RELA 351)

AAS 401 – Independent Study (1-3)

Topic to be determined by the instructor and the student

AAS 402 – Africa and the Black Atlantic (3)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

1530-1800 R

CAB 236

This seminar investigates the relationship between Africa and the Atlantic World between the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. The class begins by undertaking a critical reading of the historiography of the Black Atlantic/African Diaspora (Gilroy, Matory, Mann, among several others), then moving on to analyze contemporaneous accounts by Africans, including Equiano. Key issues that will be treated are the circulation of ideas in the Atlantic through the rise of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé, the conceptualization of slavery and the Atlantic world by Africans, as well as both failed and successful reverse migration movements. Students will write a research paper based on the accounts analyzed in class.
(Cross-listed as HIAF 401A)

AAS 406A – Gendered Experiences in Africa and its Diaspora (3)

Instructor: Edwina Ashie-Nikoi

1530 -1800 M

BRN 310

This seminar explores the interconnections between gender and history in Africa and its Diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean. The course will pay particular attention to the experiences of women of the African Diaspora, but will also explore the experience of men and their articulations of masculinity, and will examine how gendered readings could challenge our understandings and assumptions about historical events in the Diaspora. Readings for the course will be multidisciplinary, and include novels and auto/biographies such as The History of Mary Prince, the only biography of an enslaved woman in the Caribbean. The seminar proceeds from the theoretical perspective that gender is a critical and indispensable category of historical analysis that interlocks with race, class, and other factors. The course will culminate in a 17-25 page research paper.

AAS 406 B – Racial Geographies of Virginia (3)

Instructor: Ian Grandison

1830-2100 T

BRN 332

Traditionally, geography is a scientific discipline devoted to studying and recording, through the supposedly neutral lens of empirical observation, the distribution of features or "resources" (minerals, soils, terrain, drainage, vegetation, wildlife, climate, tribes, clans, kingdoms, nations, "races") that exist at, below, or above the earth's surface. In the popular imagination, geography is often seen as the hobby of people who like to know what and where things are in the world, whether for the love of trivia or for the leisure of touristic adventure. An experimental seminar, this course resonates with "critical geography," which challenges both academic and popular assumptions about geography. Informed and inspired by cultural critique in the humanities, critical geography is a new area of inquiry that interrogates the presumed empirical neutrality of the discipline by focusing on how geographic knowledge has been shaped by the messy negotiation of power among social groups. Critical geography rejects theories of environmental determinism whereby the temperament and social progress of the world's peoples are seen as wholly determined by regional climates and ranked on a scale from primitive to civilized. Thus, racial geography acknowledges the ways in which human groups, arbitrarily distinguished through race, have been among the resources catalogued by geography for the purpose of exploitation. This seminar will serve as a forum for participants to collaborate on delineating the scope of the notion of "racial geography" using the state of Virginia-in any or all of its past or present configurations-as a frame of reference. How has the formation of race helped to give rise to the idea of Virginia, first as a crown colony, then as a commonwealth? How has the emergence of Virginia with its shifting territorial boundaries (from colonization to birthplace of North American slavery, from capital of the confederacy to headquarters of massive resistance against desegregation) been geographically constructed through the notion of race (enterprising settlers, indentured servants, savage vs. friendly natives, chattel slaves, immigrant aliens)? The seminar is conducted through a variety of short, intensive readings; map interpretation workshops; informal individual and group exercises; and field trips. Graded requirements include a midterm exam and a final critical essay (3750 to 5000 words).

AAS 406C – Black Power and the Civil Rights Movement

Instructor: Julian Hayter

1530-1800T

CAB 432

This seminar explores the relationship between the American civil rights movement and the black power movement. Recently, a number of scholars have started to expand the traditional chronology of the two movements by searching for their ideological and social origins. In their search, these historians insist that the noncompliant ideology found in the black power movement (e.g., armed resistance, black nationalism, communism, & socialism) and the black populism commonly associated with the civil rights movement, both pre-date WWII. Scholars have also found that these supposedly distinct forms of activism were combined in various times and places, suggesting that the black power movement may not have been a complete refutation of civil rights activism. We will interrogate this supposed binary through class discussion and readings. We will consider how civil rights activists used measures commonly associated with black power ideology, and we will explore how the marriage of these allegedly dissimilar movements informed the construction of black power politics during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Readings, class discussion, and research will culminate into a 17-20-page paper.

AAS 406D – Blood Diamonds, Black Gold and Joe: The History of African Commodities

Instructor: Todd Cleveland

1530-1800R

CAB 234

Africa is playing an increasingly important role in furnishing three of the world’s most coveted commodities: diamonds, oil and coffee. Each of these items also has a long history on the continent, dating back to the colonial era and, in the case of coffee, even earlier. In this course, we will explore and compare the histories of these commodities, focusing on the labor forces involved in production, the political economies in which production took place and the ways these commodities shaped (and continue to shape) contemporary developments on the continent. We will pay close attention to the relationships between commodities and the major political, social and economic changes on the continent, such as the onset and conclusion of
European colonialism, and the ways that the production of these commodities has both hastened and delayed these developments. The course’s geographic scope will take us across the continent, from “Cape Town to Cairo,” while temporally we will pay special attention to changes over time related to commodity importance and production and will also historicize contemporary commodity phenomena such as “blood diamonds,” “Dutch Disease” and “neo-colonialism,” thereby connecting contemporary African society with the African past. There will be a variety of assignments, culminating in a 17-20-page paper.

AAS 451 – Directed Research for DMP (3)

Meeting time to be determined by instructor and student

AAS 452 – Thesis for DMP (3)

Meeting time to be determined by instructor and student

AAS 528 – Topics in Race Theory: White Supremacy

Instructor: Wende Marshall

1900-2130W

CAU 116

Who is "white"? What is white supremacy? What is the relationship between white supremacy and globalization, whiteness and class power? If "race" is a "social construct," is it also an alibi for white supremacy? How and where is white supremacy deployed in the U.S. and the world? Is the white supremacy manifest by low wealth "whites" a product of hegemony, or false consciousness? If the discourse on non-whites centers on pathological behaviors, what might we construe as (im)proper white behavior? These questions will guide our explorations into the practices and ideologies, structures and discourses of whiteness in post-Reconstruction U.S. and elsewhere. Course Meets: Second Writing Requirement.
(Cross-listed as ANTH 528)

 

American Studies

AMST 401 – The Landscapes of Slavery (3)

Instructor: Maurie McInnis

1300-1530 R

FHL 215

From January to April 2007, a major exhibition, "The Landscape of Slavery: The Plantation in American Art," will be at the University of Virginia Art Museum featuring more than 80 works by more than 50 artists spanning 1800 to the present. Artists include: Winslow Homer, Eastman Johnson, Thomas Hart Benton, William Johnson, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, Carrie Mae Weems, Joyce Scott, Romare Bearden, Juan Logan, and Kara Walker, among others. Working closely with the works in the exhibition, this class will examine the visual depictions of the plantation South in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and tackle questions of politics, protest, memory, nostalgia, and identity. In addition to examining the work of painters who tackled the subject, this class will also look at how the region was portrayed in the popular press, in novels, and in film. Students will do their research projects on works in the exhibition.This class fulfills the second writing assignment.
(Cross-listed as ARTH 491)

 

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 256 - Peoples and Cultures of Africa (3)

Instructor: Njoki Osotsi

1400-1515 MW

CAB 119

The course surveys topics in modern Africa, through a variety of readings, films, and music. Historical developments over the last 500 years will be given, including how these historic processes have determined and continue to shape contemporary life in Africa. The effects of Western narratives of Africa and African peoples will be studied, as well as how international aspects of African conflicts, including the DRC and Sierra Leone have affected African cultures. The course will also analyze current cultural issues including religion and cosmology, politics, marriage, family life, and female circumcision, to show the complexity, diversity, and richness of lives and societies in Africa. This is a lecture and discussion course.

ANTH 304 – France in North Africa and North Africa in France (3)

Instructor: Anna Lim

1530-1800 T

CAB 319

This course traces the complex and often controversial relationship between France and North Africa, exploring both French "presence" in North Africa under colonialism, and the later North African "presence" in France through what is generally referred to as "post-colonial migrations." We will interrogate the meaning of "decolonization" and the subsequent construction of mutually exclusive categories "French" and "North African," and ask how the colonial past and the relationship between North Africa and France are conceived by both North Africans and the French. We will pay particular attention to the case of Algeria, which, under colonialism, was considered part of French national territory and where French nationality had been extended to all native-born inhabitants. We will also look at how the ideological construction of a secular France and a Muslim North Africa factored into issues of citizenship under colonialism, and continue to play out in framing the current debates over immigration. This course will combine lecture and seminar formats.
(Cross-listed as MESA 304)

ANTH 401C – Contemporary African Societies

Instructor: Adria LaViolette

1700-1930T

CAB 325

This seminar engages the human landscape of modern Africa, through the close reading of a selection of monographs and African feature films from diverse cultural and geographical areas. The texts are drawn from fiction, ethnography, life history, and social history, and are taught against a backdrop of economic strategies, forms of social organization, and challenges facing modern African women and men. We will discuss urban and rural transformations, the elite and poor, and the forces that draw them together; transnational migration; and belief systems. How relationships between men and women are contextualized and negotiated is a theme found throughout the readings and films, as well as the struggle of people in different circumstances to build new relationships with older beliefs and practices, and with new forms of government. Meets second writing requirement if you submit a draft of your paper for comments prior to your final submission.

ANTH 528 – Topics in Race Theory: White Supremacy

Instructor: Wende Marshall

1900-2130W

CAU 116

Who is "white"? What is white supremacy? What is the relationship between white supremacy and globalization, whiteness and class power? If "race" is a "social construct," is it also an alibi for white supremacy? How and where is white supremacy deployed in the U.S. and the world? Is the white supremacy manifest by low wealth "whites" a product of hegemony, or false consciousness? If the discourse on non-whites centers on pathological behaviors, what might we construe as (im)proper white behavior? These questions will guide our explorations into the practices and ideologies, structures and discourses of whiteness in post-Reconstruction U.S. and elsewhere. Course Meets: Second Writing Requirement.
(Cross-listed as AAS 528)

 

Department of Art History

ARTH 263 – Arts and Cultures of the Slave South

Instructors: Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson

1530-1645 W

CLRK 108

“Arts and Cultures of the Slave South” is an undergraduate, interdisciplinary course that 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. The course will cover subjects ranging from African American spirituals to creolization and ethnicities in Louisiana, from the plantation architectures of both big house and outbuildings to the narratives of former slaves. In the process, students will be introduced to the interpretive methods central to a wide range of disciplines, from archaeology and anthropology, to art and architectural history, to material culture, literature, and musicology. In addition to two weekly lectures by co-faculty Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson, students will also attend weekly discussion sections and special events including guest lectures, field trips, movie nights, and demonstrations and samplings of traditional southern foods.
(Cross-listed as CCFA 202)

 

Department of Drama

DRAM 307- African American Theatre

Instructor: Theresa Davis

1400-1515 TR

DRM 217

Course description unavailable

 

Department of English

ENAM 314 African-American Literature II (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

9:30-10:45

CAB 323

Course description unavailable

ENAM 481A – African American Women Writers (3)

1530-1645 MW

BRN 332

Instructor: Angela Davis

We will read several novels and short stories by African American women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, two written responses to readings (each 2 to 3 double spaced typed pages long) and a formal essay (12 to 15 pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place. Restricted to English, African-American Studies, and Women's Studies Majors

ENAM 482B – African-American Speculative Fiction (3)

1100-1215 TR

CAB 335

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Course description unavailable

ENAM 482 C – Dubois’ Souls of Black Folks (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

1400-1515 TR

BRN 328

This course is devoted entirely to W.E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903)--its reception history, its encyclopedic roots and sources, its surrounding contexts, as well as the depth of its influence on African-American literature and intellectual history. We will consider the book’s structuring metaphors and concepts ¬ “souls,” “folk,” “veil,” and “double-consciousness” ¬ and pursue the various manifestations of DuBois’s most famous aphorism: “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” We will also address matters concerning the construction of black masculinity in the post-Emancipation South, the psychological complexities of identity, theories of race, and the poetics and politics of mourning. Texts will include the following essays by DuBois: “What is the Negro Problem?” “The Conservation of Races,” “The Concept of Race,” “The Negro as He Really Is” (with accompanying photographic illustrations), and “Phillis Wheatley and Africam American Culture.” Other selections include Goethe’s Faust, Negro spirituals (what DuBois termed “the sorrow songs”), Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (selections), Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” Emerson’s “Fate” and “The Transcendentalist,” Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” William James’s The Principles of Psychology (excerpts), Thomas Dixon’s The Leopard’s Spots, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery, Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood, Tennyson’s “In Memoriam,” Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South, and Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition, as well as DuBois’s correspondence with William James, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Jessie Fauset, and others. Near the end of the course, we will briefly address the international dimension of DuBois’s work and influence, particularly the Pan-African connection.

ENLT 247 – Black Writers in America (3)

Instructor: Rosemary Millar

930-1045 TR

TBA

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of Black prose. We will examine both canonical and non-canonical texts and a variety of genres-spiritual autobiographies, speeches, short stories, and novels. We will explore a number of themes including the uses of folk/oral tradition, heroism, alienation, class, gender and colour consciousness. Possible texts include Maria S Stewart’s “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality”; Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children; Paule Marshall Praise Song for the Widow. We will also examine the relation between the black vernacular tradition and the black formal text as well as political, cultural and critical issues of the writers’ time and our own. To continue to hone our reading and writing skills, active class participation, presentations and three essays (5-7 pages) are required. A final exam is also required. Restricted to first and second-year students.

ENMC 482C - Contemporary African-American Drama (3)

Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

1230-1345 TR

CAB 331

We will survey African-American drama from the 1950's to the present. Along the way, we will place the drama in relation to established norms, investigating the motives and methods of the playwrights for carving out new ground. We will examine the shared and divergent concerns of male and female playwrights, their sense of audience, the dilemma of writing as an individual and as a member of a group silenced too long, their relationship to the past, the present, and the future. We will also examine the changing definitions of the black aesthetic. We will read works by James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others.

 

Department of French Language and Literature

FREN 345 - Topics in Cultural Studies: Haitian Voices

Instructor: Stephanie Hopwood

1400-1515 TR

CHM 260

On January 1, 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines renamed Saint Domingue as the newly independent nation of Ayiti, the name taken from the Taino word for “land of mountains.” Thus Haiti, at the time the world’s richest colony, became the world’s first Black Republic. Less than three years after independence, however, Haiti’s first emperor for life was ambushed and assassinated, setting into motion a domino-effect of national catastrophes that would endure for over two centuries and render the once wealthy island the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.
Taking into account Haiti’s rich, complicated, and largely tragic history, we will examine the Haitian novel from 1944 to 1992, focusing on such themes as national identity, the intersection of memory and dictatorship, (de)zombification, and exile. Readings will include novels by Jacques Roumain (Gouverneurs de la rosée), Jacques Stephen Alexis (Compère Général Soleil), Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Amour, Colère, et Folie), René Depestre (Le Mât de Cocagne), and Dany LaFerrière (Le Goût des jeunes filles). Course requirements will consist of several short papers, a mid-term, a final exam, and active participation.

FREN 346 – African Literatures and Culures (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

10-1050 MWF

CLM 322A

Prerequisite: French 332

This course will explore aspects of African literatures and cultures. It will focus on selected issues of special resonance in contemporary African life. Oral literature and its continuing impact on all other art forms. Key issues in French colonial policy and its legacy in Africa: language, politics, education. The course will examine the image of the postcolonial state and society as found in contemporary arts, paintings, sculpture, music, and cinema. Selections from painters like Cheri Samba (Democratic Republic of Congo), Werewere Liking (Cameroun) and sculptors like Ousmane Sow, including such popular icons as Mamy Wata and forms such as Souwere glass painting; from musicians like Youssou Ndour (Senegal), Cheb Khaled (Algeria), Seigneur Rochereau, Tshala Muana (DRC), Salif Keita (Mali), and Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); from Mande, Peul, and Kabyle oral literatures in French translation; from filmmakers D.D. Mambety, Moussa Sene Absa, and Ngangura Mweze. Visit to National Museum of African Arts depending on availability of funding. The final grade will be based on contributions to discussions, a mid-term exam, 2 papers, and a final exam.

Selections from the following texts will feature among the required reading list:
Wéréwéré Liking - Statues colons
A. Sow - La Femme, la Vache, la Foi
D.T. Niane - Soundjata ou l'épopée mandingue
Amadou Hampaté Ba - Koumen
Mouloud Mammeri - Poèmes Kabyles anciens

FREN 570 – Francophone Literature of Africa (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

1530-1800M

WIL 414B

Survey of 20th century Francophone literature of Africa. Colonial literature and Assimilation; Negritude, Nationalism and Identity; Postcolonial literature; Feminism; Literature and Censorship; Language and Literature; Theatre and ritual performance; and Oral literature as a major intertext will all be examined through novels, poems, and plays by contemporary African writers in French. Authors will include Senghor, B. Diop, C. Beyala, M. Beti, A. Laabi, Djebar, Mimouni, Utamsi, Werewere Liking, Rabemanjara, and Ken Bugul. Weekly response papers, brief mid-semester oral presentations and bibliographies of the selected research subjects and a research paper (F570: 12-15 pages; F870: 20-25 pages) are required.

Required Reading:
Mongo Beti – Le Pauvre Christ de Bomba
Bernard Dadié- Béatrice du Congo
Sony Labou Tansi- La Parenthèse de sang suivi de Je soussigné cardiaque
Assia Djebar- Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement
Driss Chraibi- L’Homme du livre
Alain Mabanckou- Memoire de porc-epic
Calixte Beyala- Comment cuisiner son mari à l’Africaine
Fatou Diome – Le Ventre de l’Atlantique
Ousmane Sembène- Guelwaar 
Michel Hauser- Littératures francophones: III. Afrique noire, Océan indien.
Jacques Noiray- Littératures francophones: I. Le Maghreb.

 

Department of History

HIAF 202 – Modern African History

Instructor: John Mason

1700-1815 TR

CAB 311

This course explores the history of Africa from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade, in the early nineteenth century, to the present. Our goal is to examine the historical roots of the continent's contemporary condition, both good and bad. We look at the slave trade and its consequences, the European conquest of most of the African continent, African resistance to colonial rule, and the reestablishment of African independence.
We concentrate on three regions: West Africa, especially Nigeria; Central Africa, especially the Congo and Rwanda; and southern Africa, especially South Africa. We pay particular attention to the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and with the various strategies that Africans employed to resist, subvert, and accommodate European domination.
HIAF 202 is an introductory course and assumes no prior knowledge of African history. There will be two blue book exams, a mid-term and a final, and periodic quizzes on the readings.

HIAF 389 – Africa and World History

Instructor: Joseph Miller

930-1045 TR

WIL 216

HIAF 389 explores “world history” from the perspective of Africa, for advanced undergraduates.
The Department of History at the University of Virginia has offered courses placing Africa in broader “Atlantic” frameworks, mostly in the modern era but ha not routinely considered Africa’s place in the long-term history of the human race – even though genetic and other evidence establishes that all modern humans descended from ancestors living in Africa. Conversely, “world history”, a very recent addition to the UVa history curriculum, characteristically finds only the most marginal of roles for Africa – mostly as a continent victimized and colonized by others, Muslims and modern Europeans. Hegel, philosopher of the modern discipline of history, specifically excluded Africa from his schema of universal history as the continent lacking.
HIAF 389 tackles all these challenges: (1) to historicize an African past (all 50,000 years of it) still commonly seen in static, quasi-ethnographic terms; (2) to place this narrative of challenges and changes in the broader story of human history throughout the world; and (3) to look afresh at the familiar narrative of world “civilizations” in terms derived from African perspectives, strategies, and experiences. If you want to think again about what you thought you knew, about any part of the world (including the modern US), this should be the course for you. I hope to leave no one in the room unchallenged.
HIAF 389 will provide the usual narrative framework of Africa’s past through reading a current text (John Reader, Africa: A Biography) but will develop significantly different interpretive emphases; the critical contrast will reveal the assumptions underlying the way that historians think – or should think, since so few of them actually do. We will also read a world-history text (Armesto, The World: A History) and attempt to bring the two approaches together with the argument to be developed in the course. We will also read more technical articles on concepts and processes integral to understanding Africa and history. You need not have taken either HIAF 201 or 202 (Introductions to early and modern Africa), but if you have not you will need to take responsibility for grasping the basic narrative from which the course will build.
Students will write short analytical “take-home points” at the end of every class. Frequent, short map quizzes will encourage useful awareness of the geographical contexts of all human history. Written requirements will include periodic short “position papers” reflecting on the course content as it develops. There will be no in-class examinations. The final exercise will be a take-home essay responding to a single question: “How do you now, having spent a semester looking at global history in the context of Africa’s past, and vice versa, see the similarities and the differences between Africans’ experiences and those of other people elsewhere around the globe?”
Student writing will be considered intensely and analytically.

HIAF 401A – Africa and the Black Atlantic (3)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

1530-1800 R

CAB 236

This seminar investigates the relationship between Africa and the Atlantic World between the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. The class begins by undertaking a critical reading of the historiography of the Black Atlantic/African Diaspora (Gilroy, Matory, Mann, among several others), then moving on to analyze contemporaneous accounts by Africans, including Equiano. Key issues that will be treated are the circulation of ideas in the Atlantic through the rise of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé, the conceptualization of slavery and the Atlantic world by Africans, as well as both failed and successful reverse migration movements. Students will write a research paper based on the accounts analyzed in class.
(Cross-listed as AAS 402)

HIAF 404 – Independent Study in African History (1-3)

Topic to be determined by instructor and student

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HILA 307 – History of Brazil (3)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

12:30-1:45 TR

CAB 337

This class surveys the History of Brazil from early Portuguese colonization in the sixteenth century to Brazilian Independence in 1822. It places the onset of the colonization of Brazil against the backdrop of the broader Portuguese empire between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. It devotes significant attention to the establishment and growth of indigenous slavery and the transition to African slavery, dwelling on the intellectual and religious debates that the establishment of slavery brought about in the colony and the metropolis. It analyzes the social, political, cultural, and religious underpinnings of colonial Brazil by seeking to integrate Brazilian history into the broader Atlantic World, primarily Africa and the Spanish colonies in the Americas. In addition to lectures and discussions, several movies on colonial Brazil will be shown.
(This course is cross-listed with AAS 307)

HILA 402A: Globalization in Latin American (4)

Instructor: Brian Owensby

R 13:00-15:30

PV8 108

In this advanced undergraduate colloquium we will explore the idea of “globalization” from the perspective of Latin America’s 500-year history of engagement with global phenomena. While globalization has become a buzzword in recent years, it has a long history in Latin America, from Spain’s 16th-century “conquest” of indigenous America, to the slave trade to places such as Brazil and Cuba, to the trans-Atlantic intellectual exchanges of the late 18th century, to the effects on Indian villages as Latin American countries began to participate in the international economy as providers of raw materials and commodities in the 19th century, to the rebellion of the Zapatistas in southern Mexico in the 1990s against NAFTA. Through a wide variety of texts and films we will seek a critical perspective on globalization as a broad historical process that must be understood in relation to local histories and happenings. The course will satisfy the second writing requirement. Enrollment will be limited to 12.

HILA 402B: Latin American In Quest of Identity (4)

Instructor: Herbert Braun

T 13:000-15:30

PV8 103

In Latin America the search for identity has been a plural endeavor. Latin Americans have asked, “Who are we? Rarely have they asked, “Who am I? “Who are we? What kind of a people are we? What kind of a civilization? What is our destiny? What are the causes of our backwardness? What lies in our future? These thoughts run through the writings of almost all of Latin America’s great thinkers.
The course will be divided into two parts: In the first eight weeks we will read together from the writings of some of those great thinkers, including Bolívar, Sarmiento, Andrés Bello, José María Luis Mora, Lucas Alamán, Alcides Arguedas, Francisco Bulnes, José Ingenieros, José Enrique Rodó, José Martí, José Carlos Mariátegui, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, Edmundo O’Gorman, Leopoldo Zea, Octavio Paz.
Students in this course will write a final interpretive essay on this quest for identity based on our readings of historical and contemporary writers. This essay will be between twenty and thirty pages in length.

HILA 404: Independent Study in Latin American History (1-3)

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member, any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings.

HIST 213 – World History of Slavery

Instructor: Joseph Miller

1900-2130 M

PAV 8, 108

HIST 213 takes a seemingly well-known subject – slavery – and considers the many academic disciplines through which scholars, and others, have approached this ubiquitous human condition. There are many ways to write about the past beyond history itself. Considering these varying perspectives on a seemingly single topic will allow students to enrich their understandings of a subject of continuing and often emotional interest, while also giving Second-Years substantial and considered insight into the epistemologies underlying their options in the University’s departments of anthropology, arts, economics, history, literature(s), political economy, psychology, and sociology – among others – as they face the College requirement to select (and declare) their major subjects.
Although most Americans, when they hear the word “slavery”, think only of cotton fields in antebellum Mississippi, slaving has been a recurrently prominent feature of human history for thousands of years, in every part of the world, and in many different forms, few of them remotely like the Mississippi Delta in the 1840s. The course secondarily sketches the outline of this long, varied, and not always tragic history.
Slavery is also a subject of ongoing, very contemporary, often emotional political concern. The “hot-button” quality of the subject, and its frequent confusion with race and even with gender, make it difficult to discuss intelligently (as distinct from passionately). All the greater the need, then, to develop a clear-headed sense of how one thinks about it in alternative ways.
The instructor is a historian with broad familiarity with other academic disciplines and substantial experience studying slavery, world-wide. The course will feature readings representative of the various approaches to several instances of slavery. Class sessions will center on discussion of the issues they raise. We will begin with a seemingly innocuous sketch of the history of the “institution” and consider the implications both of what the author has written and also – and more importantly – how the author has written it. In succeeding weeks, we will read and critically analyse works written from other disciplinary perspectives, not so much to fill out the narrative of slavery in world history as to understand the implications of writing as – for example – an economist, as distinct from as a literary critic, as distinct from as a historian.
Course requirements will center on short, weekly position papers focused on assessing the works read and considering the epistemological implications of each. In lieu of a final examination, students will submit a slightly longer essay assessing the strengths (and limitations) of one of the disciplines considered during the term. All student writing will be considered intensely and analytically, based on a set of “writing tips” focused on clarity and coherence of argumentation. Final grades will reflect students’ “highest consistent performance”; no mechanical formula will apply.

HIUS 100A – Family and Community in African-American History

Instructors: Reginald Butler and Scot French

1300-1530 T

WIL 141A

This seminar will explore the theme of family and community in African American history, from the Colonial period through the early Civil Rights era. We will devote a portion of each class to a close examination of primary sources and a critical reading of secondary sources, including film. Grades will be based on 6-7 short research/writing assignments and a final presentation. Readings may include selections from Michael P. Johnson and James L. Rourk, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South; Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925; Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861; Anthony E. Kaye, Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South; Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth Century South; Tera Hunter, 'To Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women's Lives and Labors after the Civil War; Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration; and Michele Mitchell, Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction. This course meets the second writing requirement.

HIUS 221 – Gender and Race in US History

Instructor: Cori Field

1100-1215

CAU 112

This course will introduce students to the history of gender and race in the United States. We will seek to answer the following questions: What does it mean to treat gender and race as historically constructed categories? What is the difference between gender history and women's history, between the history of race and the history of racial groups? How does the study of gender and race change the narrative of U.S. history? How does it change our understanding of contemporary issues and problems?
We will focus on three key moments when gender and race proved particularly salient: the establishment of slavery in the colonial South and Puritanism in colonial New England; industrialization and the expansion of white manhood suffrage in the antebellum era; the creation of an American empire and Jim Crow segregation at the turn of the twentieth century.
The readings will be drawn from critical theory, historical monographs, and primary documents. Assignments will include selections from: Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History; Denise Riley, Am I That Name?; Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs; Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work; Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract; Barbara Welke, Recasting Liberty; Allison Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; and Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow.
Lectures will provide historical context, but the majority of class-time will be spent discussing the readings. Course requirements will include active participation in class discussion, weekly written responses to the reading, two five page papers, and a take-home final exam. Readings will average 75 pages per week. There are no prerequisites for taking this class.
(Cross-listed with SWAG 220)

HIUS 316: Viewing America 1945 to the Present (3)

Instructor: Brian Balogh

MW 10:00 – 10:50

WIL 402

This course will examine how Americans experienced some of the major events that shaped their lives. We will view what millions of Americans did by watching feature films, news reels, and footage from popular television shows and news broadcasts. We will also read primary and secondary texts that explore among other topics, the domestic impact of World War II, America's reaction to the atomic bomb, the rise of the military-industrial-university complex, the emergence of the Cold War, the culture of anxiety that accompanied it, suburbanization, the "New Class" of experts, the Civil Rights movement, changing gender roles in the work place and at home, the origins and implications of community action and affirmative action, the War in Vietnam, the Great Society, the counterculture, Watergate, the environmental movement, challenges to the authority of expertise, the decline of political parties, structural changes in the economy, the mobilization of interest groups from labor to religious organizations, the emergence of the New Right, the challenge to big government, the end of the Cold war, and the role of the electronic media in politics.

HIUS 324 – The South in the Twentieth Century

Instructor: Grace Hale

1400-1450 MW

WIL 301

This course examines the broad history of the American South in the twentieth century, with special emphasis on racial violence, the creation of segregation, class and gender relations within the region, the cultural and economic interdependence of black and white southerners, and the Civil Right Movement and its aftermath. Sources examined will include film, fiction, and music as well as more traditional historical sources like newspapers and court opinions. Students interested in American Studies, African American Studies, and Gender Studies are also welcome.
Grading: midterm 25%; paper (5-7 pp) 25%; final exam 30%; participation in discussion sections and attendance at film and documentary screenings 20%

HIUS 366 – African-American History from the Civil War to the Present

Instructor: Reginald Butler

1300-1350 MWF

WIL 216

This lecture course explores the history and culture of African Americans in the United States. We will examine some of the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities, paying particular attention to how African Americans themselves shaped their experiences. We will devote some portion of each class to the close examination of primary sources, with a particular focus on the historical implications for contemporary African American lived experiences. Course requirements include written weekly reading responses, a short paper, midterm, and final.

HIUS 367 – History of the Civil Rights Movement

Instructor: Julian Bond

1530-1730 T

WIL 403

This lecture course examines the history, philosophies, tactics, events and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward.
The Southern movement - variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement - was a black-lead, interracial mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation by the mid-60s.
Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping and occasionally complimentary phases - lobbying, litigation and protest.
In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights.
In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation and the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools.
The last phase, lasting a decade from '54 through '65, was a decade of protests - boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations - as well as grass-roots organizing campaigns that laid the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s.
Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength and followers from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation. The movement's well-known and lesser-known proponents and their strategies will be examined.
Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five- to seven-page papers.

Texts:
• Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo Press
• Forman James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press
• Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, Thompson Learning
Videos:
• "Eyes on the Prize - America's Civil Rights Years, 1954 - 1965", # 1 to 6
• "America the at the Racial Crossroads, 1965 - 1985," # 1 and 2; PBS Video, Blackside Inc., Boston
• "The Road to Brown," William Elwood, Producer, California Newsreel

HIUS 401H – History Seminar:

Reconstructing the South, 1862-1877 (4)

1530-1800 W

RFN 227B

Instructor: Keith Harris

This course is a seminar in which students will analyze political and social issues in the southern United States beginning with the period of wartime reconstruction through the so-called Compromise of 1877. We will primarily examine how Reconstruction politics overlapped with individuals’ public and private lives and investigate how people negotiated and shaped political and personal relationships in an era of uncertainty. Students will analyze several works of scholarship as well as produce an original research paper of substantial length.

HIUS 403B– African American Culture to 1865

1300-1530 T

CAB 241

Instructor: Reginald D. Butler

This course will examine how African American cultures and societies developed in the north and south. How did forcibly transported Africans respond to the different agricultural economies, the conditions of enslavement, and European and native American cultures that they encountered during the colonial period? The course will begin in the early period during which large numbers of Africans arrived in British North America. It will then shift its focus to mature African American communities in which the vast majority of persons were American born. We will examine issues of African ethnicity and geography; family and kinship; religious practice; and diverse forms of aesthetic expression. Readings may include selections from: Johannes M. Postma, The Atlantic Slave Trade; Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail; Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market; and Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South.

 

Department of Music

MUEN 369 African Drumming and Dance Ensemble (2)

1715-1915 TR

OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

This is a practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies, Bagandou farmers), with the intention of performing during and at the end of the semester. These traditions include drumming, dancing, and singing, all students are expected to try all aspects, even if they then specialize only in a given medium for performance. We will give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and a polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required of each class member. No experience is required, but there is an informal audition (first class meeting) prior to final enrollment.

MUSI 207 - Roots Music in America (3)

Instructor: Richard Will

MW 11:00 – 11:50

WIL 301

According to mainstream media, "roots music" like gospel, blues, country, folk, and bluegrass nourishes more popular genres such as rock and hip-hop, while also expressing the emotional and social concerns of (mainly) rural African-American and White American communities. We will examine both claims by studying the origins and development of roots genres and the way they are depicted in films, criticism, politics, and elsewhere.

MUSI 208 - African American Gospel Music (3)

Instructor: Melvin Butler

13-13:50 MW

MIN 125

No description available.

MUSI 309 Performance in Africa (4)

Instructor: Michelle Kisuluk

1545-1700 TR

OCH 107

This course explores performance in Africa through reading, discussion, audio and video examples, and hands-on practice. The course meets with Music 369 (African Drumming and Dance Ensemble) as a "lab", but is a full academic course.* Students in Music 309 are automatically part of the current semester's UVA African Drumming and Dance Ensemble (by audition). Your role in the Ensemble as learner and performer is crucial to your overall work in the course (also see description for Music 369). We will explore African music/dance styles, their sociomusical circumstances and processes, as well as performed resistances and responses to the colonial and post/neo-colonial encounter. In addition, we will address the politics and processes involved in translating performance practices from one cultural context to another. Readings, discussions, and written work will focus heavily on topics and issues related to the main music/dance traditions that we are learning to perform this semester. The course will explore both "traditional" and "popular" styles, leading us to question those categories.

MUSI 426 – Music and Religious Experience in the U.S.

Instructor: Melvin Butler

1530-1645

OCH 107

MUSI426 is primarily a reading seminar in which we will explore the role of musical practice in religious communities in the United States. We will highlight the complex relation between musical style and transcendent experience, while paying special attention to the ways in which the "religious" and the "secular" are musically and socially constructed in American society. Jon Michael Spencer’s work on theomusicology will be a significant resource, along with books and articles by Judith Becker, Philip Bohlman, Horace Boyer, Guthrie Ramsey, Teresa Reed, Jeffery Summit, and other ethnomusicologists. Audio and video recordings, in addition to selected assigned readings, will fuel our class discussions. Throughout the semester, students will develop final projects built around ethnographic field research.
*Course satisifes Second Writing Requirement.

 

Department of Politics

PLAP 382: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights (3)

Instructor: David Klein

MW 13:00 – 13:50

WIL 301

Studies judicial construction and interpretation of civil rights and liberties reflected by Supreme Court decisions. Includes line-drawing between rights and obligations.

PLAP 481: Class, Race and the Environment (3)

Instructor: Paul Martin

1530-1800 W

CAB 123

Course description unavailable

PLCP 581: Government and Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa (3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

M 13:00 – 15:30

CAB 236

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.

PLIR 325 – International Relations of Africa (3)

1530-1800 W

CAB 340

Instructor: TBA

Course description unavailable

 

Department of Psychology

PSYC 487 – Minority Family

9-11:30 M

GIL B001

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

Examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing “deficit” and “strength” research paradigms.

 

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 285 Afro-Creole Religions (3)

1530-1645 TR

GIL 141

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Course description unavailable

RELA 300 Women and Religion in Africa (3)

1530-1800 W

MRY 110

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

This course examines women’s religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women’s agency in indigenous religious movements, Christian congregations and Muslim communities in Africa. Requirements: 1) active class participation; 2) several short written assignments; 3) two exams.

RELG 285 African Diaspora Religions (3)

930-1045 TR

HAL 123

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

The seminar will feature close readings of ethnographic literature about African diaspora religions, and require students to write a seminar-length final paper. Often deemed emblematic of these groups' ethnic identities, the religious practices of African-descended populations in Latin America and the Caribbean are a frequent site of inquiry for cultural anthropologists. We will examine the often-polemical "African retention" vs. "creolization" debate as this relates to changing theoretical paradigms in anthropology and to African-descended populations' shifting political fortunes, activism, and cultural cachet. We will attend to changing conceptions of "race," "religion," and "nation" in the treatment of these religions by legal institutions, as well as how officials from the tourism industry and government ministries have influenced processes of "folkloricization."

RELC 523 Pentecostalism (3)

1530-1800 R

PV8 108

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

This course will study the history, practices, theology, and praxis of Pentecostalism, the fastest growing Christian movement in the world, from its origins among poor whites and recently freed African Americans to its phenomenal expansion in places like South America, Asia and Africa. The course will explore Pentecostalism’s theological and historical relationship to the Holiness, Apostolic, and Charismatic movements, as well as Pentecostal belief in phenomena like speaking in tongues, healing, miracles, and prophecy. Finally, the course will use race, class, and gender analysis to evaluate the cultural influences of Pentecostalism in the US and elsewhere in the world.

 

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 – Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

MW 1400-1515

CAB 341

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

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 442 – Sociology of Inequality (3)

MW 1600-1715

COC 115

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Surveys basic theories and methods used to analyze structures of social inequality. Includes comparative analysis of the inequalities of power and privilege, and their causes and consequences for social conflict and social change.

 

Studies in Women and Gender

SWAG 220 – Gender and Race in US History

Instructor: Cori Field

1100-1215

CAU 112

This course will introduce students to the history of gender and race in the United States. We will seek to answer the following questions: What does it mean to treat gender and race as historically constructed categories? What is the difference between gender history and women's history, between the history of race and the history of racial groups? How does the study of gender and race change the narrative of U.S. history? How does it change our understanding of contemporary issues and problems?
We will focus on three key moments when gender and race proved particularly salient: the establishment of slavery in the colonial South and Puritanism in colonial New England; industrialization and the expansion of white manhood suffrage in the antebellum era; the creation of an American empire and Jim Crow segregation at the turn of the twentieth century.
The readings will be drawn from critical theory, historical monographs, and primary documents. Assignments will include selections from: Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History; Denise Riley, Am I That Name?; Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs; Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness; Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work; Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract; Barbara Welke, Recasting Liberty; Allison Sneider, Suffragists in an Imperial Age; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues; Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization; and Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow.
Lectures will provide historical context, but the majority of class-time will be spent discussing the readings. Course requirements will include active participation in class discussion, weekly written responses to the reading, two five page papers, and a take-home final exam. Readings will average 75 pages per week. There are no prerequisites for taking this class.
(Cross-listed with HIUS 221)

SWAG 222 – Political History of Housework

Instructor: Vanessa May

10:00-11:15 T R

WIL 140

Does housework have a history? What is that history and how has it shaped women’s role in American politics and society? Does housework count as “work” equal to the paid labor performed by men? What about the housework performed by paid domestics, often women of color? Is housework a political issue? Women have been the designated caretakers, paid and unpaid, of American homes and families for generations. The role of homemaker has also been central to women’s political identities from Hillary Clinton’s infamous statement that she would not stay “home and bake cookies” to Phyllis Schlafly’s carefully crafted image as just another homemaker. This course will trace the history of housework in the home, economy, culture, and politics of America. We will look at how housework has changed over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, how women have used the role of homemaker to gain entry to American politics, and the lives and choices of the immigrants and women of color who performed paid housework for middle-class and wealthy families. Finally, students will look at the political challenge that housework still presents today, from the poor working conditions of the often undocumented immigrants who perform our paid domestic labor to the “second shift” worked daily by women who work outside the home to the current cultural debate about whether middle-class mothers should stay home with their children or go to work.

 

Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese

POTR 427 - Afro-Brazilian Civilization (3)

Instructor: David Haberly

MWF 11:00 – 11:50

CAB 134

A general introduction, in English, to the literature and culture of Brazil from 1500 to the present, with special emphasis upon the role of Afro-Brazilians in the creation of that literature and culture. No knowledge of Portuguese is required, and lectures and readings will be in English. The course includes discussions of the nation's social and historical development, but these topics will be presented through readings in the major works of Brazilian literature, including the works of important Afro-Brazilian authors.

 

Fall 2007

 

African-American and African Studies

AAS 100 – Leadership in Black Ethnic Communities (3)

1530-1800 R

CAB 330

Instructor: Leonard Perry

This course will provide an intellectual and social context (with field work) for the examination of leadership theory and its application for Black community development and leadership in African-American communities.
The Course will pursue a culturally specific perspective in the exploration of the various topics ofleadership and use an instructional framework that emphasizes experiential learning.
An analysis of African-centered leadership from historical and contemporary, domestic and international perspectives will provide an additional backdrop for gaining knowledge and understanding of leadership and its relationship to the African Diaspora and its communities.

AAS 101 – African American and African Studies I (3)

12:30-1:45 TR

WIL 301

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

AAS 101 is a team-taught lecture that explores the history and culture of Africans in Africa and people of African descent in the Americas. The class begins by analyzing issues such as the formation of agricultural/sedentary communities, food transformation, and technological innovations in Africa prior to the contacts with European. We will then examine the social and economical dimensions of African contacts with Europeans during the slave trade era. The class will also cover the African Diaspora in the Americas, emphasizing the African Diaspora to regions outside North America. Students will read the following: Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge, 2001; Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy (eds.), The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: his Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America. Princeton, Markus Wiener Publishers, 2003; Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004; Michael L. Conniff and Thomas J. Davis, Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora. Blackburn Press, 2002; George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000. Oxford, 2004. Grading for the class will consist of the following: Participation/Discussion; Short Response Papers; Midterm Exam; Short Writing Assignment; Final Exam.

AAS 215 Culture and World Politics (4 with discussion)

1530-1800 (1800-1850 Disc) R

CLK 101

Instructor: Maurice Apprey

This course explores the role of culture in international politics. While cultural factors have long influenced the pattern of international relations, many people believe that religious, ethnic and other cultural factors have become increasingly important in the post Cold War era. These "identity" issues raise new questions about the role of national sovereignty, the prospects for democracy throughout the world, and the future of international interactions. Correlatively what experiences can today’s students bring to these discussions, given their own ethnic, national or religious identities
The course, then, will focus on several broad themes that are structured around the pivot of identity and Otherness but we will use multiple cultural, national, international and historical contexts to engage those central issues in the first instance. These in turn will feed our imagination in the EDLF laboratory course for investigating issues of identity and difference at the personal and relational levels with peers at this university. At length, we begin with broader themes and invariably end with discussions on how we situate ourselves in these complex and changing times.

• What kinds of arguments have dominated international discussions of the post Cold War international system? How have these changed in the wake of September 11?
• What kinds of assumptions structure national self-images? Images of others?
• How do "identity politics" – religion, ethnicity and nationalism – affect international relations?
• What are the roots of the tensions between “Islam” and the “West”?
• Are “democracy" and “human rights” universal concepts? How do Western and non-Western belief systems affect the social bases of political order in various countries?
• What assumptions structure U.S. foreign policy? How different are the perspectives of less powerful groups in the international system?
• What role do non-governmental organizations (NGOs) play in facilitating social problem-solving, conflict resolution and nation-building?
• Manifestations of Identity and Otherness in multiculturalism in the US. What is the residual legacy of Black Nationalism in the US?
• Manifestations of Identity and Otherness: The case of South Africa. What lessons can be learned from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Project?

AAS 250 – The Health of Black Folks (3)

1100-12:15 R

MCL 2014

Instructor: Wende Marshall

"The Health of Black Folks" is a course in medical anthropology which will analyze the relationship between race, class, gender and health, both historically and in the present (with particular attention to the
experience of Native Americans and African Americans). The course is interdisciplinary and in addition to anthropology may offer readings and analysis from sociology, public health and epidemiology, literary
studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies and history. Issues addressed in the course may include: the myth of the biological basis of race; race, health and the environment; black, brown and poor bodies as research subjects for biomedical science; gender, race and reproductive health; and specific epidemics such as cancer or HIV.
(Cross listed under ANTH 250)

AAS 401 – Independent Study (1-3)

Topic to be determined by the instructor and the student

AAS 405A – Black Mater: Migrancy, Maternity and New Social Orders (3)

1300 -1530 W

CAB 331

Instructor: Alwin Jones

This course will introduce students to both historical and emergent debates and discourses regarding the place of the mother figure in the literature and culture of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, especially as related to and through questions of migrancy and power. This study examines writing and cultural expressions in English of the “interstitial Caribbean” from the periods of 1789 to 1863, and 1950 to 2006, with interstitiality implying an overt association by the writers with Caribbeanness. Students will examine the works via a very interdisciplinary approach in this project, engaging not only the literary, but also the historical, sociological, religious, and performative. Our goal is to examine how these writers maneuver in and against the dominant social orders of chattel slavery, the pre/emancipation moment, or post/coloniality, in relation to how they “language” a politicized and political migrant maternity, and identify this mobilized maternity with the imagining of “new” social orders. Some of the writers and texts include but are not limited to: Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince (1831), Martin Delaney’s Blake (1861-63), the poetry and performances of Louise Bennett, Audre Lorde, Linton Johnson’s and Saul Williams, Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstone, Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, Audre Lorde’s Zami, and the film Sankofa, as well as other short stories and essays.

AAS 405B – African Women Write the (Post) Colonial (3)

1530-1800 T

CAB B026

Instructor: Z’etoile Imma

Course Description: In this seminar we will explore the diverse expressions of the (post)colonial experience from the myriad of voices that constitutes African women’s writing. Traversing various landscapes through African women’s writings will allow to us insight into their significant yet often overlooked re-formulation of history, experience, identity, and agency. We will focus primarily on the novel and short fiction as the genres of focus. Undoubtedly, questions regarding the (post)colonial, gender, race, class, modernity, space, exile, violence, resistance, war and language will arise. Informed by various theories, we will attempt to define and grapple with these terms. Specifically we will deconstruct the postcolonial as a gendered experience, gather various postulations on “third world feminisms,” learn to recognize significant themes that appear inter-textually, offer our own analysis of the profound work we have collectively examined, and enjoy the company/challenge of our own diverse standpoints.

AAS 451 – Directed Research for DMP (3)

Meeting time to be determined by instructor and student

AAS 452 – Thesis for DMP (3)

Meeting time to be determined by instructor and student

 

American Studies

AMST 201 (0003) – Race, Identity and American Visual Culture (3)

1230-1345 TR

CAB 323

Instructor: Carmenita Higginbotham

Course description unavailable

 

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 401D -Contemporary African Societies (3)

1530-1645 MW

CLK 101

Instructor: Adria LaViolette

This course engages the human landscape of modern Africa, through the close reading of a selection of monographs and African feature films from diverse cultural and geographical areas. The main texts are drawn from fiction, ethnography, and social history, and are taught against a backdrop of economic strategies, forms of social organization, and challenges facing modern African women and men. We will discuss urban dwellers and rural farmers, both the elite and poor, and the forces that draw them together; transnational migration; and belief systems. How relationships between men and women are contextualized and negotiated is a theme found throughout the readings and films, as well as the struggle of people in different circumstances to build new relationships with older beliefs and practices, and with new forms of government. Course Satisfies the Second Writing Requirement.

ANTH 589 – Precolonial African Cities and States (3)

1530-1800 T

CAB 336

Instructor: Adria LaViolette

This seminar explores the archaeological and other forms of evidence concerning larger-scale African societies prior to the 16th century A.D. It will focus on the origins and trajectories of these societies, their changing political economies, ideologies, and the nature of their connections to each other, their regional neighbors, and to other parts of the world. Permission of Instructor.

 

Department of English

ENAM 313 African American Survey (3)

1400-1515 TR

BRN 328

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American letters, from Briton Hammon's Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings (1860) to W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903)Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Working our way through a variety of genres (elegy, drama, the captivity narrative, the slave narrative, the essay, public oratory, speeches, and novels), we will explore a number of matters pertinent to literary studies in general, as well as those with specific implications for African-American writing and writers. We will consider the circumstances of textual production and reception, ideas and ideologies of literary history and culture, aesthetics, authorship and audience. We will focus our attention immediately on the emergence of African-American writing under the regime of slavery and the questions it poses about "race," "authorship," "subjectivity," "self-mastery," and "freedom." We will consider the material and social conditions under which our selected texts were edited, published, marketed, and "authenticated," lingering especially on the role white abolitionists and editors played in the production and mediation of these texts for various reading publics. Our ultimate aim is to situate our selections within the broadest possible contexts of their time and ours. Other required texts include Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, William Wells Brown's Clotelle, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition. Restricted to 2nd and 3rd years.

ENAM 315 American Renaissance (3)

10-10:50 MWF

AST 265

Stephen Railton

This course will look closely at the achievements of the period 1835-1855 in American literature. We'll study canonical masterpieces like Emerson's essays, Thoreau's Walden, Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Melville's Moby-Dick and Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass. We'll also study some of the most popular works of this period: Longfellow's poetry and Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, for instance. We'll also study the beginnings of African American literature in the work of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Wilson. In the twice-weekly lectures and once-weekly discussions, we'll consider each work on its own terms, and in terms of its relationships to the other works and to the preoccupations of the period. During these decades there was, as Emerson said later, "a new consciousness." We'll try to figure out what that means.

ENAM 381 (0001) – Black Protest Narrative (3)

1530-1645 TR

MRY 113

Instructor: Marlon Ross

This course explores the relation between modern racial protest and African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film, narrative poetry) from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s, focusing on the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and the emergence of Black Power. As well as examining the social, political, and economic contexts of protest narratives, we’ll probe their aesthetic, formal, and ideological structures, and assess how protest writers represent controversial topics of the time, such as lynching, segregation, sharecropping, disenfranchisement, anti-Semitism, unemployment, migration, urbanization, religion, sexuality, war and military service, strikebreaking, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. We start with the most famous protest narrative, Richard Wright’s Native Son , then study other narratives, many of which challenge Wright’s forms and ideas. Other writers include Angelo Herndon, William Attaway, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, and Bobby Seale, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and social science. Films include: Native Son (starring Richard Wright), No Way Out (starring Sidney Poitier), and The Education of Sonny Carson . Heavy reading schedule. Midterm, final, and reading journal required.

ENAM 381 (0002) – Reading the Black College Campus (3)

1530-1645 TR

CAB 340

Instructor: Ian Grandison

Have you ever thought about how the monumentality of the signature buildings on the campuses of land-grant colleges and universities in America, resist the aim of the slight “ Cow School ” to belittle the official mission of these institutions? What about how the ubiquitous ivy, cloaking all manner of structures on the campuses of “Ivy League” colleges and universities, signify the high status of these institutions? In this student-centered, sensing, interpreting, and communication course, we consider the ways in which identity politics are implicated spatially in built environments. We focus on college campuses, especially those of HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities). We consider how such built environments were shaped by (and shaped) the struggle to democratize education in the United States especially during the Jim Crow Period. Rather than the still predominant approach in architectural and landscape architectural criticism of understanding built-environments art-historically; as collections of artifacts—usually buildings—assessed in relation to rigorously policed canons of accepted types and styles, we foreground the importance of understanding built environments as arenas of cultural conflict and negotiation. Thus, beyond its significance as an outdoor museum of neo-classical buildings, the Lawn is a multi- layered record of the sometimes delicate and sometimes robust negotiation among the individuals and groups connected with it for position and privilege in the social hierarchy. Consider how the Pavilions distinguish those who live in them from those who live in the rooms that stretch like motels between the Pavilions? Better, beyond the discourse associated with it, how does the Lawn distinguish its residents from those who have no other business there except as respectful and admiring passers-by? Understood in this way, built environments become crucial sources in cultural critique. With the help discussions, required field trips, occasional workshops and lectures, and student presentations, we will explore concepts and methods to read built environments by synthesizing knowledge gained from sensing them, studying them through maps and diagrams and through primary and secondary written and oral accounts. Readings will include Anderson ’s Black Education in the South as will as a number excerpts drawn from within and beyond the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, historic preservation, and environmentalism. In addition to studying required readings and preparing for class discussion, you shall complete a mid-term quiz, three group exercises, and a semester journal. All this culminates in a month-long group research project that will be presented in a Final Open House at the end of the semester. You will continue to develop your abilities of critical reading and discussion of textual, graphic, and physical materials. You will be able to practice important interdisciplinary group process skills. When all is said and done, however, you will acquire ideas that will never allow you to experience the spaces around you in quite the same way!

ENAM 481A – African American Women Writers (3)

1530-1645 MW

BRN 332

Instructor: Angela Davis

We will read several novels and short stories by African American women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, two written responses to readings (each 2 to 3 double spaced typed pages long) and a formal essay (12 to 15 pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place. Restricted to English, African-American Studies, and Women's Studies Majors

ENAM 481B – Fictions of Black Identity (3)

1100-1215 TR

CAB BO29

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

This combined graduate and advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title "Fictions of Black Identity." The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, McBride's The Color of Water, Walker's Black, White, and Jewish, Beatty's White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include weekly response papers, comparative essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams. This class is restricted to instructor permission. It is designed for advanced undergraduates in English, African American Studies, and American Studies.

ENAM 358 - U.S. Literature and Citizenship

1100-1216 TR

CAB 134

Instructor: Victoria Olwell

How has literary writing shaped conceptions of citizenship? What resources does literature provide for thinking about the kinds of inclusion-and exclusion-that citizenship defines? In this course, we’ll explore how U.S. literature has “imagined” national community, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s famous term. We’ll define citizenship in multiple ways: as formal incorporation in the state, as civic participation, as a form of subjectivity, and as cultural inclusion, to name just a few of the most important. Our major project will be to see how literature not only has been essential to the formation of discourses of citizenship, but also has created modes of citizenship. In part, our course will consider the thematics of citizenship in selected literary texts from the late eighteenth century through the present day. We’ll see how literature has provided a space of conversation where conceptions of national community could be formed and disputed. But, we’ll also see literature as itself a technology of citizenship, one that produces relations among readers and styles of subjectivity that are themselves instances, rather than reflections, of citizenship. Our literary readings will be clustered around several areas of struggle over the terms of citizenship; these include national formation, race, gender, immigration, sexuality, labor, and the security state. Literary readings will likely include Charles Brockden Brown, Weiland; Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and other poems; several pieces by Frederick Douglas; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; short stories by Hawthorne and Melville; women’s suffrage plays, poems, and fiction; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Zami, A New Spelling of My Name, Tony Kushner, Angels in America, and Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land. We’ll also read a few pieces of recent theory and criticism.
Course requirements include energetic participation, two short papers, a longer essay, and a final examination.

ENCR 481 A – Race, Space and Culture

1830-2100 T

CAB 130

Instructors: Marlon Ross and Ian Grandison

Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, 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., National Geographic documentary, Indian reservations, burial grounds, suburban homes, gay bars, national monuments); and through local site visits (Monticello, Vinegar Hill, Woolen Mills). Requirements include a midterm and final exam, two brief critical essays, one site visit response paper, and a major team research project.

ENLT 247 – Black Women Writers

930-1045 TR

BRN 330

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

This seminar uses Black women's writings from mid-century to the present to introduce new English majors to important concepts in literary analysis. To better understand genre, themes, and assorted literary conventions, we will focus closely on a range of literary styles. We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day. Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women's writing of the last fifty years? How has the literature adapted in response to specific cultural or historical moments?

ENLT 247 – Black Writers in America

12-1250 MWF

BRN 332

Instructor: Nathan Ragain

Course description unavailable

ENMC 481C – Cross Cultural Poetries

1400-1515 MW

BRN 330

Intructor: Jahan Ramazani

In this seminar, we will explore the dynamics of cross-cultural influence and exchange in modern and contemporary poetry in English. One of the most prominent features of modern and contemporary poetry is an intensified cross-pollination across boundaries of nation and ethnicity. To frame our work, we will read essays on modern transnationalism, diaspora, mobility, and intercultural affiliation by James Clifford, Homi Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and Neil Lazarus. We will also pause over Picasso’s appropriation of African art in inventing Cubism. Reading poetry and critical essays, we will then turn to the appropriations by such Euro-modernist poets as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound of East Asian and South Asian cultural forms and genres, asking if these are acts of inventive assimilation or imperial theft. Conversely, we will ask what happens to Euro-modernist texts and forms when African American poets and postcolonial poets from Africa , India , and the Caribbean hybridize them with their indigenous cultural resources. We will consider similar questions with regard to other cross-cultural poetries, including Irish, Native American, Latino, Asian American, and Black British. While tracing cross-cultural mediation within individual poems, we will also ask broad questions about the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of the cross-cultural. Teaching strategies will require active class collaboration, cooperative engagement, and co-leading of discussion. An abstract and a seminar paper will also be required. Our primary texts will be volumes 1 and 2 of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, third edition.

 

Department of French Language and Literature

FREN 411 – Francophone Literature of Africa (3)

TR 1530-1645

CAB 216

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

Introduction to the Francophone literature of Africa; survey, with special emphasis on post- World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights of Africa. The role of cultural and literary reviews (Légitime Défense, L'Etudiant noir, and Présence Africaine) in the historical and ideological development of this literature will be examined. Special reference will be made to Caribbean writers of the Negritude movement. Documentary videos on African history and cultures will be shown and important audio-tapes will also be played regularly. Supplementary texts will be assigned occasionally. Students will be expected to present response papers on a regular basis.
In addition to the required reading material, 2 essays (60%), regular class attendance, and contribution to discussions (10%), and a final exam (30%) constitute the course requirements. Papers are due on the dates indicated on the syllabus.

Required reading
Diop, Birago. Les contes d’Amadou Koumba .
Chevrier, J. Anthologie Africaine: Poésie
Bâ, Mariama. Une si longue lettre.
Assia Djebar. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Toolkit).
Boudjedra, Rachid. L'escargot entêté.

FREN 443 – Africa in Cinema (3)

TR 1230-1345

CAB 321

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

This course is a study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. It deals with the representations of African cultures by filmmakers from different cultural backgrounds and studies the ways in which their perspectives on Africa are often informed by their own social and ideological positions as well as the demands of exoticism. It also examines the constructions of the African as the other and the kinds of responses such constructions have elicited from Africa’s filmmakers. These filmic inventions are analyzed through a selection of French, British, American, and African films by such directors as John Huston, S. Pollack, J-J Annaud, M. Radford, Ngangura Mweze, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cisse, Gaston Kabore, Amadou Seck, Dani Kouyate, Brian Tilley, Jean-Marie Teno on a variety of subjects relative to the image of Africa in cinema. The final grade will be based on one mid-semester paper (select a film by an African filmmaker and provide a sequential reconstruction of the story based on the methods of P. S. Vieyra and of F. Boughedir ), a final paper (7-10 pages), an oral presentation and contributions to discussions. Each oral presentation should contribute to the mid-semester paper and to the final research paper. The final paper should be analytical, well documented and written in clear, grammatical French using correct film terminology supplied with this description.

Reading list (on reserve, see Toolkit for FREN 443)
Required:
Ferid Boughedir: Le cinéma africain de A a Z
(Specific selections of the following works will be announced weekly.)
Kenneth W. Harrow: Matatu- With Open Eyes: Women and African Cinema
Gardies, André: Cinéma d’Afrique Noire Francophone : l’espace-miroir
Vieyra, P. S.: Le cinéma africain
Sembène Ousmane, cinéaste
Ukadike, F. N. Black African Cinema
Research in African Literatures - Special Issue: African Cinema./ Vol. 26, No.3, Fall 1995.
Diawara, Manthia: African Cinema

HIAF 201 – The History of Africa through the Era of the Slave Trade

930-1045 TR

CAB 138

Instructor: Joseph Miller

From the mists of the once-dark continent’s unwritten past Early African History draws out Africans’ distinctive achievements in culture, politics, and economic strategies. Starting broadly at the dawn of history and continuing in detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 201 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the ironic interplay of tragedy and ambition in a continent increasingly trapped in exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of modern African history, HIAF 202, taught in spring semester, follows subsequent events down through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.)
HIAF 201 is an introductory lower-division survey. The instructor presents the major themes of the early history of the continent in lectures twice each week. Students meet additionally in discussion sections for reviews of readings, map quizzes, and preparation for written assignments. Requirements include weekly short map quizzes, short written responses to each class, a short paper reacting to assigned readings, and a take-home final exercise. The course belongs to the Afro-American and African Studies curriculum, qualifies for the new minor in African Studies, meets the “non-western/non-modern” requirement for the major in History, and qualifies for the College “non-western perspectives” area requirement.
Readings revolve around weekly assignments in texts of varying perspectives (Shillington, History of Africa, and Newman, Peopling of Africa – subject to revision upon availability of a superior alternative). Other chapters and professional articles introduce the distinctive methodologies of doing history without written sources (including the famous Mande oral epic Sundiata), highlight interpretive (“historiographical”) issues, and consider concepts relevant to understanding early Africa.
No formula determines final marks for HIAF 201. Students are graded according to their “highest consistent performance” in all aspects of the course, including attendance at lectures and participation in discussions, with ample allowance made early in the term for the unfamiliarity of the subject matter; options allow students to devise personal combinations of graded work that allow each one to take advantage of specialized abilities and accommodate other academic commitments.
HIAF 201 presumes no prior knowledge of Africa or experience with the study of history. However, consistent application and preparation are expected, particularly early in the term, since the subject is new to nearly everyone in the course. Students in all four years of their undergraduate careers and in all colleges of the University complete HIAF 201 with success. Most find it a challenging and rewarding opportunity to discover a once-neglected story of Africa and its place in world history and to examine assumptions that modern Americans – themselves included – make that they did not know they held

HIAF 302 – History of Southern Africa

TR 0930-1045

CAB 215

Instructor: John E. Mason

HIAF 302 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The emphasis is on South Africa. HIAF 302 begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.
By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest had not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs.
Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.
Course materials include biographies, memoirs, fiction, music, and films, as well as academic studies. Students will write two five to seven page essays and write two blue book exams, a mid-term and a final.

HIAF 402 – History Colloquium: Race and Culture in South Africa and the United States (4)

TR 1400-1515

CAB 330

Instructor: John E. Mason

HIAF 402 is a small, research-oriented course that explores the histories of South Africa and the United States in comparative perspective.
South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries owe much of their early economic development to slavery. In both complex systems of racial domination shaped society for generations before and after the emancipation of the slaves. And in both the interracial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.
At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true. Both white supremacy and the struggle against it were more violent in South Africa than in the United States. And, since 1994, a democratic political system has ensured that black South Africans have enjoyed a degree of political power that black Americans have never experienced.
The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, music, film, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.
HIAF 402 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course should have taken at least one course in African history, preferably South Africa, and two courses in American history.

HIAF 404 – Independent Study in African History (1-3)

Topic to be determined by instructor and student

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HILA 401A – History Seminar: Conquest and Convivencia (3)

1300-1530

RAN 212

Instructor: Brian Owensby

This seminar (limited to 12 students) will explore a variety of themes in relation to the world-shaping encounter between European-, indigenous-, and African peoples between the 16th- and 18th- centuries. We will explore the meaning of conquest, violence, and what it meant for such different peoples to relate to each other through religion, law, sex, work, and knowledge. The course will culminate in a research paper exploring broad historiographical or historical themes.

HIST 589 – South Atlantic History

1530-1800 R

CAB 247

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

HIST 589 is a reading and discussion course on Atlantic History. We will focus on the commercial and cultural interconnections between Africa (West and Central Africa) and Latin America (Brazil). The class takes a historiographical approach to such concepts as Atlantic History, African Diaspora and Black Atlantic. We will examine and discuss different historiographies that deal with overlapping issues but not always speak to each other. Reading will include the following titles: Linda Heywood (ed.), Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002; José Curto and Paul Lovejoy (eds.), Enslaving Connections: Changing Cultures of Africa and Brazil during the Era of Slavery. New York, Humanity Books, 2004; Mieko Nishida, Slavery and Identity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Race in Salvador, Brazil, 1808-1888. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2003; James Sweet. Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770. London, University of North Carolina Press, 2003; Wim Klooster and Alfred Padula (eds.), The Atlantic World: Essays on Slavery, Migration, and Imagination. New Jersey, Prentice Hall, 2005; The Yoruba Diaspora in the Atlantic World. Bloomington and Indiana Press, Indiana University Press, 2005; Peter Coclanis (ed.), The Atlantic Economy during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Organization, Operation, Practice, and Personnel. Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 2005; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993; Paul Lovejoy and David Trotman (eds.), Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of Ethnicity in the African Diaspora. London, Continuum, 2003; Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004; Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy (eds.), The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: his Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America. Princeton, Markus Wiener Publishers, 2003. Grades will be based on class participation, presentation of the readings, and a final paper.

HIUS 323 – Rise and Fall of the Slave South

0900-0950 MWF

FRN G004B

Instructor: Jaime Martinez

Course description unavailable

HIUS 329 – Virginia History, 1861 - the Present

1230-1345

MRY 115

Instructor: George Gilliam

History is the study of continuities and change over time. This course will examine Virginia history from about 1861 to the present. We will especially consider the following issues:
1. Between the end of the Civil War and the post-civil rights era, which groups have tried to empower which Virginians, at what times, and utilizing which strategies? Which groups have tried to disempower which Virginians, at what times and utilizing which strategies?
2. How have Virginians used racism to weave the political, social, and economic fabric of modern Virginia?
3. How have Virginians dealt with concerns about debt (public and private) and the financing of public infrastructure since the Civil War? What roles have state and federal governments played in dealing with those concerns? What have been the results of the ways Virginians have managed those concerns?
4. In which respects were the political, economic, social and racial landscapes of Virginia during the post-World War II decades similar to, and in which respects dissimilar to, those of the post-Civil War decades?
Readings will average approximately 90 pages per week, and will be drawn from both primary documents and secondary texts (books and journal articles). Classes will involve discussion of the required reading material, as well as presentations of additional material by the instructor and invited guest participants. There will be a map exercise, a multiple choice and short answer mid-term exam, one 5-7 page paper on a topic of the student’s choice, based upon original research in primary source materials, one group project, and a final examination requiring two essays.

HIUS 365 – African American History Through Reconstruction

1300-1350 MWF

CAB 319

Instructor: Reginald D. Butler

This lecture course is part of a year-long survey of the African American experience in British Colonial North America and the United States. This segment (HIUS 365) covers the period from the beginnings of trans-Atlantic slave trade through Reconstruction. We hope to relate the African American experience to the broader experience of Africans in the Diaspora, as well as larger themes and concepts (the rise of capitalism and the nation-state, European expansion, slavery and the slave trade in Africa, the development of racial ideologies, etc.) in world history. We will examine some of the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities, paying particular attention to how African Americans themselves shaped their experiences. We will devote considerable attention to primary sources, with a focus on the intersection of the "local" and the "global." In addition, we will explore the relevance of the African American past to contemporary social and political debates, such as immigration, affirmative action, and reparations.

HIUS 367 – History of the Civil Rights Movement

1530-1730 T

WIL 402

Instructor: Julian Bond

This lecture course examines the history, philosophies, tactics, events and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward.
The Southern movement - variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement - was a black-lead, interracial mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation by the mid-60s.
Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping and occasionally complimentary phases - lobbying, litigation and protest.
In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights.
In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation and the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools.
The last phase, lasting a decade from '54 through '65, was a decade of protests - boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations - as well as grass-roots organizing campaigns that laid the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s.
Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength and followers from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation. The movement's well-known and lesser-known proponents and their strategies will be examined.
Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five- to seven-page papers.

Texts:
• Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo Press
• Forman James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press
• Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, Thompson Learning
Videos:
• "Eyes on the Prize - America's Civil Rights Years, 1954 - 1965", # 1 to 6
• "America the at the Racial Crossroads, 1965 - 1985," # 1 and 2; PBS Video, Blackside Inc., Boston
• "The Road to Brown," William Elwood, Producer, California Newsreel

HIUS 401B – History Seminar: Reconstruction in the North (4)

1530-1800

CAB B028

Instructor: Erik Alexander

This seminar, entitled “Reconstruction in the North”, will ask students to examine closely the change over time in white Northerners’ attitudes towards federal Reconstruction policies, with the rationale that the waning commitment of northern voters to federal Reconstruction programs had a direct relationship with political decisions in Washington. Northern attitudes towards the South were vastly different in 1865 and 1877, and this seminar will ask students to consider what those changes were, and what events helped to cause the changes.
Under this broad umbrella of northern attitudes towards Reconstruction, students will be able to approach this period through a wide range of more specific topics. Potential topics of study include political developments, economic changes, labor movements and social change, white Northerners’ conceptions of race, and the legacy and memory of the Civil War.
The product of the seminar will be a 25-page term paper of original historical research on a topic of the student’s choosing. The seminar will begin with 5 weeks of reading and discussion to help give students a historical context for their paper topics. Students will also be required to submit a 6-8 page research proposal for their term paper topic in week 6, and participate in a peer review of term paper drafts. The seminar paper will be due at the end of the semester. The semester grade will come from class participation and peer review (25%), the research proposal (25%), and the seminar paper (50%).
Likely assigned texts include Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1865-1877 (1988), Mark Wahlgren Summers, The Era of Good Stealings (1993), David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872 (1967), Heather Cox Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901 (2001), and David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (2001).

HIUS 401D – History Seminar: Free African Americans in the United States, 1787-1865 (4)

1300-1530 M

CAB 242

Instructor: Sarah Maxwell

This course will focus on the lives of free blacks in both the slave states of the south, and the emerging free states of the North in the early republic and antebellum decades. The lives of free blacks differed between the two regions. As slavery became more central to life in the southern states, free people of color found their lives influenced by the relative status of slaves. In the North the decline of slavery bolstered free black numbers, however economic fluctuations and mass immigration had a substantial effect on race relations, circumscribing their opportunities in some arenas while opening up other options. During the first several weeks of the course, students will read and analyze major secondary works, to gain an understanding of the scholarship of free blacks, and to guide students to a paper topic of the proper breadth. The remainder of the semester students will spend researching and writing an original 25-30 page paper on a topic of their own choice, while consulting with their fellow students and the course instructor. Readings may include Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters; David Cohen and Jack Greene, eds. Neither Slave Nor Free; Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox; and James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, In Hope of Liberty

HIUS 403B– African American Culture to 1865

1300-1530 T

CAB 241Instructor: Reginald D. Butler

This course will examine how African American cultures and societies developed in the north and south. How did forcibly transported Africans respond to the different agricultural economies, the conditions of enslavement, and European and native American cultures that they encountered during the colonial period? The course will begin in the early period during which large numbers of Africans arrived in British North America. It will then shift its focus to mature African American communities in which the vast majority of persons were American born. We will examine issues of African ethnicity and geography; family and kinship; religious practice; and diverse forms of aesthetic expression. Readings may include selections from: Johannes M. Postma, The Atlantic Slave Trade; Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective; Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail; Leon F. Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market; and Dylan Penningroth, The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth-Century South.

 

Department of Music

MUEN 369 African Drumming and Dance Ensemble (2)

1715-1915 TR

OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

This is a practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies, Bagandou farmers), with the intention of performing during and at the end of the semester. These traditions include drumming, dancing, and singing, all students are expected to try all aspects, even if they then specialize only in a given medium for performance. We will give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and a polymetric sensibility. Concentration,
practice, and faithful attendance are required of each class member.

MUSI 212 - History of Jazz (3)

1100- 1150 MWF

MRY 209

Instructor: Scott Deveaux

No previous knowledge of music is required. This course meets the Non-western perspectives requirement. This course is a survey of the history of jazz from its beginnings around 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the 20th century. Important instrumental performers, vocalists, composers, and arrangers are listened to and discussed..

MUSI 308 Issues in American Music (3)

3:30-4:45 TR

MRY 104

Instructor: Melvin Butler

Issues in American Music will examine ethnomusicological perspectives on various popular musical genres in the United States, including minstrelsy, blues, jazz, gospel, rhythm-and-blues, and rock-and-roll. Reading, writing, and listening assignments will deal primarily, but not exclusively, with African American contributions to these musical traditions. Class discussions will center on the historical interplay of black and white musical aesthetics, the politics of race and ethnicity, and the role of music in constructing "Americanness."

 

Department of Politics

PLAP 570 – Racial Politics (3)

9:30-10:45 TR

BRN 324

Instructor: Vesla Weaver

Course description unavailable.

PLCP 212 – Politics of Developing Areas (3)

MW 0900-0950

WIL 301

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Surveys patterns of government and politics in non-Western political systems. Topics include political elites, sources of political power, national integration, economic development, and foreign penetration.

PLCP 524 – Gender Politics in Africa (3)

1530-1800 T

CAB 330

Instructor: Denise Walsh

Comprehensive introduction to gender politics in Africa, including gender transformations under imperial rule, gender and national struggles, gender and culture claims, women’s movements and the gendering of the post-colonial state.
Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics or at least one social science course in SWAG. Including: gender and the state; feminist perspectives on war and peace, security, international political economy and the politics of development; and women and human rights. No prior knowledge of feminist theory or international relations is assumed or required. Cross-listed as SWAG 432.
The course meets the second writing requirement

PLPT 320: African American Political Thought (3)

1230-1345 TR

CAB 132

Instructor: Lawrie Balfour

Course description unavailable

 

Department of Psychology

PSYC 405 – Oppression, Empowerment and Social Change

9-11:30 T

GIL B001

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

This course will focus on an analysis of oppression, empowerment and liberation. Also, the course will discuss methods and strategies aimed at its amelioration of oppression in modern American society. Topics to be covered are the definition of oppression, social impact of oppression, including racial, economic, sexual discrimination, alienation, and loss of self-esteem. Moreover, we will talk about the role of privilege in the maintenance of an oppressive society.

 

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 275 Introdcution to African Religions (3)

1300-1350 MW

PHS 204

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

An introductory survey of African religions. The course concentrates on African traditional religions but Islam and Christianity are also discussed. Topics include indigenous mythologies and cosmologies, sacrifice, initiation, witchcraft, artistic traditions and African religions in the New World.

RELC 409 African Americans and the Bible (3)

1530-1800 W

CAB 230

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

Course description currently unavailable.

RELG 270 Festivals of the Americas (3)

930-1045 TR

CAB BO21

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Communities (and even entire nations) throughout the Caribbean, and South, Central and North America celebrate festivals which are rooted in religious devotion, and which serve to mark sacred time and and to assert claims about religious, ethnic, and national identities. The class will read ethnographic accounts and listen to musical recordings of signature religious festivals--such as Saint Patrick's Day in Boston, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, Carnival in Brazil, the Day of the Dead in Mexico--in order to study significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas. Students will develop skills as critical readers of anthropological, historical, and religious studies accounts of religious and cultural change, and increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, and sacred time and space in relation to ethnicity.

RELG 280 African American Religious History (3)

1230-1345 TR

CAB 130

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

This course will explore African American religious traditions in their modern and historical contexts, combining an examination of current scholarship, worship and praxis. This course will explore the religious life and religious institutions of African Americans from their African antecedents to contemporary figures and movements in the US. While the course will emphasize the growth and spread of Evangelical Christianity among African Americans, it will also consider a few non-Christian influences upon black churches and black communities. In considering the wide variety, popularity, economic strength, and ubiquity of religious institutions in the African American community, we will ask what role religion plays for black people, and what role African American religious life plays in the broader scheme of American life.

RELG 336 - Religions in the New World: 1400s-1830s (3)

1400-1515 TR

CAB 225

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

A history course which examines Latin American and Caribbean religions from the 1400s through the 1830s. We will proceed topically (in rough chronological order), studying religious encounters during the pre-Columbian era, the Spanish conquest and colonial eras, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Latin American independence (1820s), and slave emancipation in the anglophone Caribbean (1830s). The class will focus primarily upon the signature religious episodes, devotions, personalities and institutions of indigenous, African, Afro-creole, and mestizo communities, since these "gente de color" constituted the majority population in the New World during this historical epoch. We will consider issues of historiography?specifically, the problem of interpreting (sometimes hostile) extant archival sources and the use of such primary material in the writing of secondary literature. Students will develop their abilities to evaluate primary sources (in translation), and to identify the interpretive choices which scholars make in the crafting of historical narratives.

 

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 – Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

MW 1400-1515

CAB 341

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

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

 

Studies in Women and Gender

SWAG 224 – Black Feminities and Masculinities in the US Media (3)

1900-2145 R

CAB 325

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

This course will explore U.S. media representations of gendered African-American and African worlds, individuals, and experiences and will address the role the U.S. media has played in creating the popular images and understandings that prevail in this country surrounding categories of blackness and gender.
Focusing largely on the intersection of race, gender and otherness, this class will analyze the ways different media (including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, academic writing, and radio, television, and print news media) produce and reproduce cultural categories in different ways for (different) Americans - each media encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise - each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience.
How does the media create and perpetuate categories of blackness, whiteness, femininity, masculinity, foreignness, safety, danger? Working toward their own particular projects, students will collect examples each week from various sources (print, television, film, etc.) for discussion. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information have and whether or not the viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility. Students will assemble a detailed portfolio/research paper.

SWAG 416 – Single Mother to Welfare Queen: Women, Poverty and Public Policy (3)

1600-1830 W

CAU 134

Instructor: V. May

There is a long cultural history connecting women and poverty, from depictions of single immigrant mothers in the 1890s to media images of “welfare queens” in the 1980s. Today, women are more likely to be impoverished than men. This course will examine women and poverty in twentieth-century America. Over the course of the semester we will answer the following questions: How have middle-class people and reformers thought about women in poverty and how have racial and gender expectations colored their analyses? Have reformers’ policies had the effect on poor women that reformers intended? Is there a pragmatic public policy to meet the needs of poor families? This course will look not only at the various policies crafted to reach women in poverty but will also examine the daily experiences of poor women as they and their families struggled to survive. Course readings will include some scholarly treatments of policy initiatives but will emphasize the voices of poor women themselves telling their own stories through memoir.

SWAG 432 – Gender Politics in Africa (3)

1530-1800 T

CAB 330

Instructor: Denise Walsh

Comprehensive introduction to gender politics in Africa, including gender transformations under imperial rule, gender and national struggles, gender and culture claims, women’s movements and the gendering of the post-colonial state.
Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics or at least one social science course in SWAG. Including: gender and the state; feminist perspectives on war and peace, security, international political economy and the politics of development; and women and human rights. No prior knowledge of feminist theory or international relations is assumed or required. Cross-listed as PLCP 524.
The course meets the second writing requirement.

 

Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

SPAN 490 – Race in the Americas (3)

1400-1515 MW

CAB 119

Instructor: Ruth Hill

This course explores representations of caste, race, and class by Latin Americans, Spaniards, West Indians, and Latinos, alongside critical race theory and case studies produced in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The bulk of our readings will consist of poems, essays, dramas, histories, and novels, spanning the early modern period to the twentieth century.

Readings will include:
José Gumilla. Orinoco ilustrado (1, cap. 5);
Benito Feijoo, “Color etiópico” (Teatro crítico, 7, disc. 3)
José Martí, “Madre América” y “Nuestra América
Jorge Amado, Jubiabá.
José Vasconcelos, Raza cósmica
Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera.
Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America.
Peter Wade, Race and Ethnicity in Latin America.
Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation.
Rafael Pérez Torres, Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture

Spring 2007

 

African-American and African Studies

AAS 102 - Crosscurrents of the African Diaspora (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

TR 12:30 – 13:45

WIL 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.

AAS 305 – African Politics, Literature, and Film (3)

Instructor: Andrew Lawrence

T 15:30-1800

WIL 141A

This course analyzes the intersection of the cultural and the political in contemporary sub-Saharan Africa through the media of literature and film. Together with background works discussing African historical and political developments, students will analyze and discuss some of the finest exemplars of world literature and film, including the work of such directors as David Achkar, Souleymane Cisse, Djibril Diop-Mambety, Flora Gomes, Gaston Kabore, Thomas Magotlane, Sembene Ousmane, Cheick Oumar Sissoko, and Jean-Marie Teno; and the work of authors including Chinua Achebe, J.M. Coetzee, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Bessie Head, Dambudzo Marechera, Zakes Mda, Njabulo Ndlebele, Sembene Ousmane, and Ngugi wa Thiongo. Themes include representations of Africa's precolonial and colonial past, negotiations of its present post-colonial realities, state and social power, changing gender relations, and traditions and modernities. Students will also evaluate the ways in which aesthetic approaches describe political themes; that is, the politics of culture as well as the culture of politics.

AAS 307: Afro-Brazilian History (3)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

TR 12:30-13:45

GIL 141

This class will survey the history of Brazil from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries by highlighting issues related to the Afro-Brazilian population. The largest country in Latin America, Brazil was by far the single largest destination of the slave trade from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. No other country outside Africa has a larger population of African-descendants. The class deals with issues such as the rise of African slavery in sixteenth century Brazil, Brazilian links with West Africa and Central Africa until the mid-nineteenth century, Afro-Brazilian religions, resistance to slavery, and abolitionism. The class takes an approach to Brazilian history that emphasizes Brazil’s deep social, commercial and cultural links with Africa. In addition to lectures, movies/documentaries will be shown. Readings might include the following books: Hendrik Kraay, Afro-Brazilian Culture and Politics: Bahia, 1790s-1990s (NY, 1998); Matthew Restall (ed.), Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, 2005); Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550-1835 (Cambridge, 1988); Alida Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil: 1500-1600 (Austin, 2006); Laura de Mello e Souza, The Devil and the Land of the Holy Cross: Witchcraft, Slavery, and Popular Religion in Colonial Brazil (Austin, 2004); James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill, 2003); David Eltis, Economic Growth and the Ending of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (New York, 1987).
(This course is cross-listed with HIST 307)

AAS 401: Independent Study (1-3)

Topic and requirements to be determined by the instructor and the student

AAS 402: Black Atlantic 1550-1850 (4)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

R 15:30-18:00

CAB 335

This reading and discussion seminar problematizes the notion of the “Black Atlantic” as a conceptual framework to analyze the forced migration of Africans throughout the Atlantic. The class will place the development of the concept of the Black Atlantic against the backdrop of work by African-American and Caribbean intellectuals that argued for a pan-Africanist standpoint while analyzing the history of the African diaspora. The class combines readings in theory and methodology with readings dealing with the actual experiences of cultural and social interaction between Africans and Europeans around the Atlantic. It deals with issues such as mestiçagem, the formation of creole societies in Africa, and identity. Most of classes focus on the Northern Atlantic, but the class will also draw on examples from the Latin America – mainly Brazil – and Lusophone Africa. Readings include Herman Bennett, “The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the ‘History’ of the Black Atlantic”, African Studies Review, 43 (2000); Charles Piot, “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic”. The South Atlantic Quarterly 100:1, Winter; Kristin Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture”, Slavery and Abolition, 2001.
(This course is cross-listed as HIST 402A)

AAS 406A: Black Atlantic Representations of Violence (3)

Instructor: Régine Jean-Charles

M 15:30-18:00

MIN108

This course examines the phenomenon of violence in African-American, Caribbean, and African literatures and the development of discourses and the representations of violence throughout these literary histories. As we investigate these representations, we will also study discourses of violence along with some of the major debates surrounding violence in postcolonial contexts. In order to do so we will begin with Paul Gilroy’s concept on the shaping violence of The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. We will then travel through major historical moments in African Caribbean, and African-American literature in order to observe how representations of violence function in these contexts. To complement our conception of violence we will also refer to Hanna Arendt’s On Violence and Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World in order to situate the question of violence in a broader context. By framing our inquiry with Gilroy’s text, we initiate a movement that places emphasis on a network of ideas rather than geographic space. Thus the class is divided into two sections: the first “Moments in Black Atlantic Literatures,” does not chart a literal historic timeline, but rather a thematic one by looking at novels written in or based on particular moments in the histories of the Black Atlantic, in particular ancient times, slavery, colonization and deconolization. The second section, “Currents in Black Atlantic Literatures” is grouped around five categories that explore reappearing currents of significant cultural, social, historical, and political impact: immigration/migrations, sexual violence, state-sponsored violence, war and genocide. Through theoretical reading drawn from the fields of philosophy, trauma studies, feminist theory and postcolonial studies we will explore different ways of representing, reading, framing, and understanding violence in Black Atlantic literatures.

AAS 406B: Racial Geographies of Virginia (3)

Instructor: Ian Grandison

W 15:30-18:00

CAB 432

Even though its boundaries have become more uncertain, several notions still conjure the discipline of geography. Geography, we can reasonably assert, involves the objective investigation of places with the central purpose-albeit unspoken-of cataloging the earth's surface relative to opportunities and constraints for exploitation by humans. How does "race" fit into this project of geography? Does "human geography" or the headings, "demography," "population," "people," or "occupation" (intermingled as they are with such headings as "physical characteristics," "climate," "transport," or "towns") allow for engaging "race" critically as it is engaged in, say, cultural studies? To foreground this issue, in this experimental seminar, I am introducing the idea, "racial geography." Drawing on case-studies from the State of Virginia-including its historical configurations-we will try to develop themes and concepts to elucidate this idea. Consider, for example, the implications of a race-inflected exploration in the popular sub-discipline, urban geography. Quantitative and geometric models of urban distribution or pragmatic theories of urban siteing are of little use in understanding the location of Washington DC. No consideration of the "rank" and "size" of adjacent urban centers or of proximity to deep water for harbors or to gaps in a mountain barrier can explain this city was placed where it was placed at the turn of the nineteenth century. Why did the city, named after the foundingest of the founding fathers, remain a backwater for so long after the federal government relocated there? Chattel slavery was the reason for which urban location theory cannot account. It predetermined the fate of rival cities such as Quaker Philadelphia. It influenced the geography of the Civil War, and it explains why the Chesapeake from time to time still inundates facilities such as the National Archives as it seeks to reclaim its brackish swamps. Requirements of the seminar will include a mid-term exam and a research paper of 15 pages. Students should already have or be ready to develop the facility of interpreting and producing maps and other graphic materials. At the beginning of the semester, students will be asked to explain their motivations for wanting to participate in the seminar.

AAS 406C: Black Power and Revolutionary Politics

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

T 15:30-18:00

CAB 236

Tracing black women and men’s quest for political, economic, and cultural power from the Depression Years to the present, this seminar examines African Americans’ collective efforts to eradicate what philosopher Cornel West refers to as the “pervasive evil of unjustified suffering and unnecessary social misery in our world.” Significant attention will be given to black intellectuals and activists’ debates over the best way to deal with the economic consequences of white supremacy and global capitalism, the usefulness of armed self-defense as a weapon in the fight against racial injustice, and the problem of sexism within the black liberation movement. To better understand the diversity and breadth of black oppositional activity in the twentieth-century, students will examine the protest activities of a number of black leaders, cultural artists, and movement organizations. Organizations and activists to be examined include but are not limited to W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and the Council of African Affairs, Ella Baker and SNCC, Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Angela Davis and the American Communist Party, Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts Movement, Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Toni Cade Bambara, the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, and the more recent Black Radical Congress. Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to the research methods and techniques used by historians. We will not only explore historians’ use of oral and written texts, but will also reflect on the ways in which scholars’ theoretical and political viewpoints inform their interpretation of primary sources. Students will have the opportunity to further develop their historical skills through a series of assignments designed to assist them in identifying research topics and questions; interpreting primary texts; and substantiating arguments with historical evidence.
(This course is cross-listed as HIUS 401K)

AAS 406 E - Afro-Brazilian Civilization (3)

Instructor: David Haberly

MWF 11:00-11:50

CAB 320

A general introduction, in English, to the literature and culture of Brazil from 1500 to the present, with special emphasis upon the role of Afro-Brazilians in the creation of that literature and culture. No knowledge of Portuguese is required, and lectures and readings will be in English. The course includes discussions of the nation's social and historical development, but these topics will be presented through readings in the major works of Brazilian literature, including the works of important Afro-Brazilian authors. (Enrollment restricted to participants in Brazil Study Abroad program.
(Cross-listed with POTR 427.)

AAS 451: Directed Research/DMP (3)

AAS 452: Thesis/DMP (3)

 

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 225: Nationalism, Racism, Culture, Multiculturalism (3)

Instructor: Richard Handler

MW 14:00-15:15

MRY 209

Introductory course in which the concepts of culture, multiculturalism, race, racism, and nationalism are critically examined in terms of how they are used and structure social relations in American society and, by comparison, how they are defined in other cultures throughout the world.

ANTH 388: Archaeology of Africa (3)

Instructor: Adria LaViolette

TR 9:30-10:45

CAB 316

This course surveys the archaeological knowledge currently available about the African continent. The emphasis will be on the Late Stone Age, when fully modern humans dominate the cultural landscape, and the subsequent Iron Age, but will also briefly cover pre-modern humans and the archaeology of the colonial period. We will discuss the great social, economic, and cultural transformations in African history known primarily through archaeology, and the most important archaeological sites and discoveries on the continent.

ANTH 401C: Contemporary African Societies (3)

Instructor: LaViolette

TR 1230-1345

CAB 331

This course engages the human landscape of modern Africa, through the close reading of a selection of monographs and African feature films from diverse cultural and geographical areas. The main texts are drawn from fiction, ethnography, and social history, and are taught against a backdrop of economic strategies, forms of social organization, and challenges facing modern African women and men. We will discuss urban dwellers and rural farmers, both the elite and poor, and the forces that draw them together; transnational migration; and belief systems. How relationships between men and women are contextualized and negotiated is a theme found throughout the readings and films, as well as the struggle of people in different circumstances to build new relationships with older beliefs and practices, and with new forms of government. Meets second writing requirement.

ANTH 528: Topics in Race Theory: White Supremacy (3)

Instructor: Wende Marshall

R 1900-2130

CAB 426

What is "White Supremacy"? Who is 'white"? How does an emphasis on race (i.e. "racism" and "race relations") obscure the relationship between white power and class oppression? What is to be gained by discourses that pathologize "blacks" and render "white" behavior normative? With attention to both discourse and practice the course will explore the meaning and power of whiteness. Satisfies second writing requirement.

 

Common Courses

CCFA 202: Arts and Cultures of the Slave South (4)

Instructors: Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson

MW 15:30-16:45

PHS 203

An exploration of the interrelations between history, material and visual cultures, music, and literature in the formation of Southern identities. The course covers subjects ranging from the archaeology of seventeenth-century Virginia and the formation of African American spirituals, to creolization and ethnicities in Louisiana, to the plantation architectures of the big house and outbuildings and the literary traditions of antebellum women. Students are introduced to the interpretive methods central to a wide range of disciplines, from archaeology and anthropology, to art and architectural history, to material culture, literature, and musicology. (Y)

CCSS 200: Rural Poverty in Our Time (3)

Instructor: Grace Hale

R 15:30-17:20

WIL 402

This course will use an interdisciplinary format to explore the history of non-urban poverty in the American South from the 1930s to the present. Weaving together the social histories of poor people, the political history of poverty policies, and the history of representations of poverty, the course follows historical cycles of attention and neglect: rural poverty during the Great Depression, rural poverty from the war on poverty to the Reagan Revolution, and rural poverty in the present. In each section, we will examine the relationship between representations (imagining poverty), policies (alleviating poverty), and results (the effects of those representations and policies in the economic, political, and psychological status of poor people).

 

Department of English

ENAM 314: African American Survey II (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

TR 11:00-12:15

CAB 323

Continuation of ENAM 313, this course begins with the career of Richard Wright and brings the Afro-American literary and performing tradition up to the present day.

ENAM 482D: African-American Speculative Fiction (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

TR 9:30-10:45

BRN 330

No description available.

ENAM 482E: The Harlem Renaissance (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

TR 11:00-12:15

BRN 328

No description available.

ENCR 482 - Race in American Places (3)

Instructor: Ian Grandison

M 15:30-18:00

BRN 334

Do assumptions about race operate when we consider the idea of an “American Place?” This interdisciplinary seminar interrogates this question by exploring place in America within the context of contemporary culture wars, especially as these are circumscribed by the concept of race. We consider, for instance, how place is embroiled in the ideological work of distinguishing people according to identity and, then, of fixing identity groups within unyielding hierarchies. How, for example, does the seemingly innocuous story of The Three Little Pigs lead us to assume particular racial attributes of each pig based on the materials—straw, say, versus brick—and architectural styles—hut, say, versus cottage— of the house each builds? Do we identify people as “primitive” or “destitute” because they live in, say, wooden shacks. Do we assume that such people cannot govern themselves and, so, are unworthy of autonomy? We consider how such conflation of race and place are reinforced not only by social custom but also by planning and design policy and practice that define and rigorously maintain separate often unequal racial territories. Have you considered the ways in which such places as Charlottesville’s celebrated Downtown Mall, for example, might be configured or programmed to encourage symbolic ownership by one or other racial group? How the advent of Homeowners’ Associations maintains racial territories against the force of legal desegregation? Does the concurrency of homelessness and home-owners-associations in American society suggest anything about prevailing assumptions about a relationship between our right to privacy and our racial and class identity? We explore such issues through targeted discussion of readings; mandatory visits to places around Charlottesville; informal workshops (mainly to develop the ability to interpret maps, plans, and other graphic representations of places); and in-class presentations. Requirements include three informal small group exercises, an individual site-visit comment paper, a mid-term and final exam, and a group research project. The last requirement is presented in an informal symposium that represents the culmination of the semester.

ENCR 482A: Critical Race Theory (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

MW 15:30-16:45

MCL 2008

No description available.

ENGN 482/ENMC482A: African American Drama (3)

Instructor: Lotta Lofgren

TR 12:30 – 13:45

WIL 141B

We will survey African-American drama from the 1950's to the present. We will place the drama in relation to established norms, investigating the motives and methods of the playwrights for carving out new ground. We will examine the shared and divergent concerns of male and female playwrights, their sense of audience, the dilemma of writing as an individual and as a member of a group silenced too long, their relationship to the past, the present, and the future. We will also examine the changing definitions of the black aesthetic. Playwrights include, among others, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

ENLT 214M: Southern Literature (3)

Instructor: Morgan Myers

TR 9:30-10:45

PHS 205

No description available.

ENLT 255M: Race in American Culture (3)

Instructor: Sylvia Chong

MW 15:30-16:45

CAM 423

No description available.

ENWR 106: Rap as an Art Form (3)

Instructor: Jason Nabi

TR 9:30-10:45

BRN 310

No description available.

ENWR 106: Race in the U.S. (3)

Instructor: Brian Roberts

TR 12:30-13:45

BRN 330

No description available.

ENWR 110: Africa Speaks (3)

Instructor: Z’etoile Imma

MWF 11-11:50

MCL 2007

No description available.

 

Department of History

HIAF 100: African Encounters with the Others (3)

Instructor: Laura Stokes

T 13:00-15:30

CAB B021

No description available.

HIAF 201: Early African History (4)

TR 9:30-10:45

Instructor: Joseph Miller

RFN G004B

Starting broadly at the dawn of history and continuing in detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 201 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the ironic interplay of tragedy and ambition in a continent increasingly trapped in exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. HIAF 201 is a lower-division introductory survey and presumes no prior knowledge of Africa or experience with the study of history. Students in all four years of their undergraduate careers and in all colleges of the University complete HIAF 201 with success. Beyond the Afro-American and African Studies curriculum, the course meets the "non-western/non-modern" requirement for the major in History and qualifies for the College "non-western perspectives" area requirement.

HIAF 404: Independent Study in African History (1-3)

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member, any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings.

HILA 402A: Globalization in Latin American (4)

Instructor: Brian Owensby

R 13:00-15:30

BRN 332

In this advanced undergraduate colloquium we will explore the idea of “globalization” from the perspective of Latin America’s 500-year history of engagement with global phenomena. While globalization has become a buzzword in recent years, it has a long history in Latin America, from Spain’s 16th-century “conquest” of indigenous America, to the slave trade to places such as Brazil and Cuba, to the trans-Atlantic intellectual exchanges of the late 18th century, to the effects on Indian villages as Latin American countries began to participate in the international economy as providers of raw materials and commodities in the 19th century, to the rebellion of the Zapatistas in southern Mexico in the 1990s against NAFTA. Through a wide variety of texts and films we will seek a critical perspective on globalization as a broad historical process that must be understood in relation to local histories and happenings. The course will satisfy the second writing requirement. Enrollment will be limited to 12.

HILA 402B: Latin American In Quest of Identity (4)

Instructor: Herbert Braun

T 15:30-18:00

MCL 2007

In Latin America the search for identity has been a plural endeavor. Latin Americans have asked, “Who are we? Rarely have they asked, “Who am I? “Who are we? What kind of a people are we? What kind of a civilization? What is our destiny? What are the causes of our backwardness? What lies in our future? These thoughts run through the writings of almost all of Latin America’s great thinkers.
The course will be divided into two parts: In the first eight weeks we will read together from the writings of some of those great thinkers, including Bolívar, Sarmiento, Andrés Bello, José María Luis Mora, Lucas Alamán, Alcides Arguedas, Francisco Bulnes, José Ingenieros, José Enrique Rodó, José Martí, José Carlos Mariátegui, Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, Edmundo O’Gorman, Leopoldo Zea, Octavio Paz.
Students in this course will write a final interpretive essay on this quest for identity based on our readings of historical and contemporary writers. This essay will be between twenty and thirty pages in length.

HILA 404: Independent Study in Latin American History (1-3)

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member, any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings.

HIST 307: Afro-Brazilian History (3)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

TR 12:30-13:45

GIL 141

This course is cross-listed as AAS 307. See description in the AAS section, above.

HIST 402A: Black Atlantic 1550-1850 (4)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

R 15:30-18:00

CAB 335

This course is cross-listed as AAS 402. See description in the AAS section, above.

HIUS 309 - Civil War and Reconstruction (3)

Prof. Gary Gallagher

TR 8:00 – 9:15

WIL 301

This course explores the era of the American Civil War with emphasis on the period 1861-1865. It combines lectures, readings, films, and class discussion to address such questions as why the war came, why the North won (or the Confederacy lost), how the war affected various elements of society, what was left unresolved at the end of the fighting, and how subsequent generations of Americans understood the conflict's meanings. Although this is not a course on Civil War battles and generals, about 50 per cent of the time in class will be devoted to military affairs, and we will make a special effort to tie events on the battlefield to life behind the lines. The course will be organized in two lecture meetings a week. Grades will be based on two geography quizzes (each 5% of the course grade), two take-home examinations (each 35% of the course grade), and a 7-page paper that integrates material from the lectures, readings, and films (20% of the course grade). Note: This course does not satisfy the second writing requirement. Required Books (some substitutions may be made): Edward Porter Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy; John Q. Anderson, ed., Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868; Ira Berlin and others, eds., Free at Last; Jean Berlin, ed., Letters of a Civil War Nurse; Andrew Delbanco, ed., The Portable Abraham Lincoln; A. J. L. Fremantle, Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 186; Glenn Linden and Thomas Pressly, eds., Voices from the House Divided; Frank Wilkeson, Turned Inside Out: Recollections of a Private Soldier.

HIUS 316: Viewing America 1945 to the Present (3)

Instructor: Brian Balogh

MW 10:00 – 10:50

GIL 150

This course will examine how Americans experienced some of the major events that shaped their lives. We will view what millions of Americans did by watching feature films, news reels, and footage from popular television shows and news broadcasts. We will also read primary and secondary texts that explore among other topics, the domestic impact of World War II, America's reaction to the atomic bomb, the rise of the military-industrial-university complex, the emergence of the Cold War, the culture of anxiety that accompanied it, suburbanization, the "New Class" of experts, the Civil Rights movement, changing gender roles in the work place and at home, the origins and implications of community action and affirmative action, the War in Vietnam, the Great Society, the counterculture, Watergate, the environmental movement, challenges to the authority of expertise, the decline of political parties, structural changes in the economy, the mobilization of interest groups from labor to religious organizations, the emergence of the New Right, the challenge to big government, the end of the Cold war, and the role of the electronic media in politics.

HIUS 324 - 20th Century South (3)

Instructor: Lori Schuyler

MW 9:00 – 9:50

RFN G004A

This course will explore the social, cultural, political, and economic history of the South in the twentieth century. Major themes of the course will include the rise and fall of legalized segregation, the development of a viable Republican party in the region, the role of southern reformers and activists, and the importance of historical memory. We will examine major events in the region from the perspectives of black southerners and white southerners, men and women, sharecroppers and landowners, Republicans and Democrats, moderates and activists. Readings for the course may include: W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; Grace Lumpkin, To Make My Bread, Christopher MacGregor Scribner, Renewing Birmingham: Federal Funding and the Promise of Change, 1929-1979; Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi.

HIUS 350: Work, Poverty and Welfare: 20th Century U.S. Social Policy (3)

Instructor: Guian McKee

TR 15:30-16:45

CAB 345

This course will examine the historical relationship between work, poverty, and the development of social policy in the United States during the twentieth century. Particular emphasis will be placed on the changing structure of the American workplace, shifts in societal conceptions about the place of the state in American life, and alterations in both the nature of poverty and perceptions of the poor in the United States. We will focus, however, on the interaction of these issues with social policy, broadly defined, as well as the role of race, gender, and political economy in defining these important dimensions of twentieth century American life. As a result, the course will approach the history of American social policy from the “ground up” and from the “top down”: we will study both the development of broad public policy structures and the experiences of Americans (both elites and non-elites) who determined the course of such policies and lived with their results. Students will engage in detailed historical explorations of maternalist welfare policies, progressivism, labor organizing, workplace reform, Social Security, AFDC (welfare), economic planning, public housing, urban renewal, employment policy, job training, the War on Poverty, Medicare and Medicaid, the welfare rights movement, and the reaction against the welfare state. The course will conclude with an examination of critical social policy developments in the last fifteen years, including the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, the failure of the Clinton health care plan, and recent proposals for social security and Medicare reform.
While primarily a lecture course, this class will provide extensive opportunities for student discussion of assigned readings and other materials. Course requirements will include a research paper of approximately 10 pages, a mid-term and final, regular attendance, and active participation in class discussions. The weekly reading will average 150 pages. Texts may include Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America; Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective; Jennifer Klein, For All These Rights: Business, Labor, and the Shaping of America's Public-Private Welfare State; Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White; David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America, as well as scholarly articles, primary sources, films, and other historical material.

HIUS 362: Women in America, 1869 to the Present

Instructor: Ann Lane

MW 11:00-11:50

MIN 125

This course will examine women's activities and consciousness from the last half of the nineteenth century to the present. We will pay special attention to how social and economic changes that accompanied industrialization and urbanization influenced women's lives and to the importance of race and class as categories for understanding women's experiences. The topics we will examine will include domestic and family roles, economic contributions, reproductive experience, and public activities. Reading will average about 200 pages per week.

Some of the required books for this course will be:
Dorothy Richardson, The Long Day
Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to Back Seat
Ann Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
Mary Odem, Delinquent Daughters
Susan Douglas, Where the Girls Are

There will also be a packet of articles that will be part of the required reading for the course. There will be one midterm, one five to eight page paper, and a final examination. Each week we will have two lectures and one required discussion section.

HIUS 366 – African American History Since 1860 (3)

Instructor: Reginald Butler

MWF 13:00-13:50

CAB 316

This lecture course explores the history and culture of African Americans in the United States. We will examine some of the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities, paying particular attention to how African Americans themselves shaped their experiences. We will devote some portion of each class to the close examination of primary sources, with a particular focus on the historical implications for contemporary African American lived experiences.
Course requirements include written weekly reading responses, a short paper, midterm, and final.

Texts may include:
Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction;
Leon Litwack, Trouble in MindBlack Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow;
Steven Hahn, Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration,
Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw;
Tera Hunter, To 'Joy My Freedom;
Richard Wright, Black Boy.

HIUS 367 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Julian Bond

T 15:30-17:30

WIL 402

This lecture course examines the history, philosophies, tactics, events and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward. The Southern movement - variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement - was a black-lead, interracial mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation by the mid-60s. Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping and occasionally complimentary phases - lobbying, litigation and protest. In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights. In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation and the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools. The last phase, lasting a decade from '54 through '65, was a decade of protests - boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations - as well as grass-roots organizing campaigns that laid the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s. Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength and followers from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation. The movement's well-known and lesser-known proponents and their strategies will be examined. Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five- to seven-page papers.

Texts and videos:
Roy Wilkins (with Tom Matthews), Standing Fast; James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries; Julian Bond and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, "Eyes on the Prize - America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965", # 1 to 6; "America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965 - 1985,” # 1 and 2; "The Road to Brown.”

HIUS 401C: Free Blacks in Urban and Rural America, 1776-1865 (4)

Instructor: Reginald Butler

T 13:00 – 15:30

CAB 242

American independence from Great Britain produced a revolutionary change in African American life. Condemned to perpetual, hereditary slavery by more than a century of British-American law and custom, African Americans seized the moment to challenge their subordinate place in American society and recast themselves as free and equal citizens. Sympathetic whites, moved by trans-Atlantic currents both secular and spiritual, took their first, cautious steps toward ending the African slave trade and gradually abolishing slavery. In the North and West, the slow death of slavery by court decree, legislative act, and constitutional provision gave rise to "coloured" enclaves in urban areas such as Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. In the South, liberalized manumission laws produced substantial populations of "free blacks" or "free persons of color" in Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans. The rapid growth of these quasi-free communities (with their rural counterparts), coupled with growing restiveness among the slaves (as evidenced by the Haitian Revolution and, closer to home, the widely publicized slave conspiracies led by Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner), produced a repressive, frequently violent white backlash with the openly stated aim of free black colonization or removal. How did "free black" urban and rural enclaves - like the much-celebrated "maroons" of Jamaica and "quilombos" of Brazil - defend themselves against the hostile forces arrayed against them? What strategies did they employ to preserve their fragile hold on freedom and forestall their deportation and dispersal?
Students in this course will conduct original archival research and write a major paper on the theme of "Free Black Life in Urban and Rural America." Possible research topics include:
• Education/literacy
• Apprenticeship
• Property ownership
• Geographic mobility/migration
• Free Blacks as slave holders
• The Canadian experience
• Institution-building (churches, schools, voluntary associations, etc.)
• Social/economic relations with "white" patrons
• Political activity
• Family life
• Mob violence and strategies for communal self-defense
• Ideologies of "race" and "color"
• Collective memory
• Social movements (emigration, colonization, abolition, civil rights, suffrage, etc.)
• Occupational status/class stratification within the "free black" caste
Students may be assigned chapters or excerpts from the following: Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Master: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South; Gary Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840; David Gellman, Jim Crow New York: A Documentary History of Race and Citizenship, 1777-1877; Thelma Foote, Black and White Manhattan: The History of Racial Formation in Colonial New York City; W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail; Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North; Christopher Phillips, Freedom's Port: The African American Community of Baltimore,1790-1860; Gregg D. Kimball, American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond; Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862; and Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War.

HIUS 401D: Remembering the Civil War, 1815 to Today (4)

Instructor: Matthew Speiser

R 15:30-1800

WIL 141A

This course is a seminar in which students will investigate the role of memory in history, by exploring how American memories of the Civil War have changed (and, in some cases, stayed the same) from the immediate wake of Appomattox to the present day. The course will examine the legacies of Union victory, Confederate defeat, slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction in American culture. Students will explore key aspects of Civil War memory, including its prominent role in society and how competing memories have emerged, evolved, clashed, and weakened among different individuals, groups, regions, and eras.
Class discussions will focus on memory’s role in society, specifically regarding how Americans have remembered Civil War-era historical figures, their ideas, and their actions, as well as the societies, events, and circumstances surrounding them. We will examine how different people can remember the same event in different ways: how history can shift according to the eye of the beholder.
The readings in this class will examine the study of memory, memory’s place in academic as well as popular culture, and conscious attempts to shape American memory, as well as broader manifestations of Civil War memory throughout society, in fiction, film, scholarship, journalism, speechmaking, and other components of American culture. Each week, the reading selections will total between 200 and 300 pages. We will read some work from historians about Civil War memory, such as segments from David Blight’s Race and Reunion. Many of the readings will be primary sources, such as The Frederick Douglass Papers and a handbook celebrating the Civil War centennial in the 1960s. We will also read fictional and personal books like Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels and segments from Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic. Students will expand upon the class’s themes by writing a 25-page research paper grounded in primary documents.
For generations, Americans have debated the social, cultural, and political implications of mass migration from Europe, Africa, and Asia, and Latin America and the resulting ethnic-racial demographies for "our" national identity. In this seminar, students will combine traditional archival research with new technologies to explore the impact of African and African-American migration and settlement patterns on American culture and society. We will examine major themes and key episodes from each era of American history -- Colonial, Revolutionary, Early National, Antebellum, Civil War/Reconstruction, Jim Crow/Civil Rights - in preparation for our own, broadly collaborative digital history research projects. Students will be introduced to seminal texts, archival collections at U.Va., as well as relevant digital resources, including the Transatlantic Slaving Database; Virtual Jamestown; Virginia Runaways; Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the Civil War; American Memory; Historical Census Data Browser; Civil War Newspapers; and Race and Place. Students will be graded on the following basis: 50 % on the web-based exhibit that their team constructs; 25 % on an online journal chronicling the student's experience with creating digital history; 25 % on individual participation and work in the course. Each team will present a demonstration of its project in the last week of the course.

HIUS 401E: Digital History Seminar: Mapping the Impact of African and African-American Demographies on American Culture and Society (4)

Instructor: Scot French

W 15:30-18:00

Ruffner 227B

For generations, Americans have debated the social, cultural, and political implications of mass migration from Europe, Africa, and Asia, and Latin America and the resulting ethnic-racial demographies for "our" national identity. In this seminar, students will combine traditional archival research with new technologies to explore the impact of African and African-American migration and settlement patterns on American culture and society. We will examine major themes and key episodes from each era of American history -- Colonial, Revolutionary, Early National, Antebellum, Civil War/Reconstruction, Jim Crow/Civil Rights -- in preparation for our own, broadly collaborative digital history research projects. Students will be introduced to seminal texts, archival collections at U.Va., as well as relevant digital resources, including the Transatlantic Slaving Database; Virtual Jamestown; Virginia Runaways; Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the Civil War; American Memory; Historical Census Data Browser; Civil War Newspapers; and Race and Place. Students will be graded on the following basis: 50 % on the web-based exhibit that their team constructs; 25 % on an online journal chronicling the student's experience with creating digital history; 25 % on individual participation and work in the course. Each team will present a demonstration of its project in the last week of the course.

HIUS 401F: The Law and Politics of Slavery in the Early Republic (4)

Instructor: George Van Cleve

R 15:30-18:00

CAB 331

This seminar will explore how American slavery changed during the period 1770-1821, emphasizing how political and legal changes during that period affected the institution. The seminar will begin with four weeks of readings and discussions on various aspects of slavery and related developments during the early Republic. Readings will consider social and economic changes during this period that affected slavery, as well as the major reasons for its growth, differentiation, and geographic expansion. Readings will also address key political developments, such as the treatment of slavery in the Constitution and disputes over the expansion of slavery into territories and new States (e.g., the Louisiana Purchase, the Missouri Compromise). Finally, readings will consider legal developments such as the abolition of slavery in the northern states, and laws concerning the abuse of slaves. Students will be expected to read approximately 150 pages per week during the first four weeks. Students will also be expected to participate in primary source research training sessions in Alderman Library and the Small Special Collections Library. Students will choose topics for research papers that will be completed during the remaining weeks of the course, and presented in final course meetings at the end of the semester. A paper of approximately twenty-five pages based on primary source research will be required (85% of grade). Class and training participation will account for 15% of the grade. This course fulfills the second writing requirement.
Preliminary readings may include portions of the following: Robert William Fogel, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877; Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic (ed. and completed by Ward McAfee); Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Constitutional Convention: Making a Covenant with Death,” in Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II, eds., Beyond Confederation); Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood; Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation; Thomas D. Morris, Southern Slavery and the Law, 1619-1860; Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power; Philip D. Morgan, “Black Society in the Lowcountry, 1760-1810,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds. Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution; Allan Kulikoff, “Uprooted Peoples: Black Migrants in the Age of the American Revolution, 1790-1820” in ibid.; Douglas R. Egerton, “Gabriel’s Conspiracy and the Election of 1800”; U.S. House of Representatives, Annals of Congress, 1st Cong. (February-March 1790); Philip D. Morgan, “The Poor: Slaves in Early America,” in David Eltis, Frank D. Lewis, and Kenneth L. Sokoloff eds., Slavery in the Development of the Americas.

HIUS 401J: Towns and Commerce in the Slave South, 1800-1860 (4)

Instructor: Amanda Mushal

M13:00-15:30

RFN 227B

As centers of commerce, shipping, and social and political engagement, towns and cities helped shape the history of the slave South. Yet southern history has generally been written as the history of an agricultural region. How did southern towns relate to plantation society? This course challenges students to explore the physical structure of southern towns, town as centers of social, economic, and political networks, ways in which race and slavery shaped and were shaped by urban environments, and the role of towns in discussions of southern distinctiveness, slavery and industrialization, and the development of southern nationalism.
This seminar is designed to introduce students to major issues in antebellum southern urban history, as well as to the resources available to scholars in this field. During the first part of the course, we will meet weekly to discuss assigned readings. Texts will include selections from Gregg Kimball, American City, Southern Place: A Cultural History of Antebellum Richmond, Edward D.C. Campbell, Jr., and Kym S. Rice, eds., African-American Life in the Antebellum South, Lisa Tolbert, Constructing Townscapes: Space and Society in Antebellum Tennessee, and William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, The Web of Progress: Private Values and Public Styles in Boston and Charleston, 1828-1843, as well as other essays and journal articles. We will consider key issues raised by the authors as well as their use of historical evidence. We will also examine antebellum newspaper articles, public records, and other primary documents which students may wish to engage in their research projects.

HIUS 40IK: Black Power and Revolutionary Politics

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

T 15:30-18:00

CAB 236

This course is cross-listed as AAS 406C. See the description in the AAS section, above.

 

Department of Music

MUSI 207 - Roots Music in America (3)

Instructor: Richard Will

MW 11:00 – 11:50

WIL 301

According to mainstream media, "roots music" like gospel, blues, country, folk, and bluegrass nourishes more popular genres such as rock and hip-hop, while also expressing the emotional and social concerns of (mainly) rural African-American and White American communities. We will examine both claims by studying the origins and development of roots genres and the way they are depicted in films, criticism, politics, and elsewhere.

MUSI 208 - African American Gospel Music (3)

Instructor: Melvin Butler

MW 12-12:50

MIN 125

No description available.

 

Department of Politics

PLAP 370 - Racial Politics (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

TR 11:00 – 11:50

PHS 204

Examines how attributions of racial difference have shaped American Politics. Topics include how race affects American political partisanship, campaigns and elections, public policy, public opinion, and American political science. Prerequisite: One course in PLAP or instructor permission.

PLAP 382: Civil Liberties and Civil Rights (3)

Instructor: David Obrien

MW 13:00 – 13:50

WIL 301

Studies judicial construction and interpretation of civil rights and liberties reflected by Supreme Court decisions. Includes line-drawing between rights and obligations.

PLCP 581: Government and Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa (3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

M 13:00 – 15:30

CAB 318

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.

PLIR 424A: International Relations in Southern Africa (3)

Instructor: Andrew Lawrence

R 15:30-18:00

CAB 316

No description available.

 

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 279: African Ritual and Religion (3)

Instructor: Njoki Osotsi

TR 14:00- 15:15

HAL 123

The class is a survey of African traditional religions with special emphasis on ritual. The central goal of the course is to introduce the students to a wide variety of religious practices in Africa, both indigenous and foreign. The class will study the African traditional approach to the sacred in the traditional and mainstream religions. A range of religious and ritual performances, including initiations and healing rituals will be studied, with the aim of engaging the students' minds and curiosity in the great diversity. The course requires the students to question their basic perspectives, assumptions and biases particularly regarding non-western religions and cultures. The class will achieve these objectives through relevant readings, lectures, movies and discussions. By the end of the class, it is hoped that the student will have broadened their views on religion, especially as it is practiced in Africa. Final exam; 2 quizzes; two short essays.

RELA 410 - Yoruba Religions (3)

Prof. Benjamin Ray

TR 9:30 – 10:45

CAB 210

Studies Yoruba traditional religion, ritual art, independent churches, and religious themes in contemporary literature in Africa and the Americas.

 

Department of Sociology

SOC 487: Immigration (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

MW 15:30 – 16:45

CAB 316

Examines contemporary immigration into the United States from the point of view of key theoretical debates and historical circumstances that have shaped current American attitudes toward immigration.
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Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

POTR 427 - Afro-Brazilian Civilization (3)

Instructor: David Haberly

MWF 11:00 – 11:50

CAB 320

A general introduction, in English, to the literature and culture of Brazil from 1500 to the present, with special emphasis upon the role of Afro-Brazilians in the creation of that literature and culture. No knowledge of Portuguese is required, and lectures and readings will be in English. The course includes discussions of the nation's social and historical development, but these topics will be presented through readings in the major works of Brazilian literature, including the works of important Afro-Brazilian authors.

Fall 2006

 

African-American and African Studies

AAS 100A – Black Nationalism

1300-1500 R

PV8 108

Instructor: Claudrena N. Harold

This course examines black nationalists’ protracted struggle for political autonomy, economic independence, and cultural self-definition in twentieth-century America. Major events to be discussed include the rise and fall of the Marcus Garvey Movement during the 1920s, the emergence of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam after the close of World War II, and the political and cultural upheavals in Afro-America during the Black Power era. Students will have the opportunity to explore the politics of a wide range of black radicals, including Amy Jacques and Marcus Garvey, Robert Williams, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Audley Moore, and Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones). Scholarly investigations of black nationalism normally conclude with an analysis of the disintegration of the Black Power Movement in the early 1970s, but this course will also investigate the contemporary manifestations of black nationalism. Exploring diverse topics such as the Million Man March in 1995, the rise of Afrocentricity as a major theoretical framework in Black Studies, and the race consciousness articulated in the music of various hip-hop artists, students will investigate the continuing significance and visibility of black nationalism in American politics and culture. Possible texts for the course include Michele Mitchell’s Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction, Dean Robinson’s Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought, Tony Martin’s Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey, Tommie Shelby’s We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, William L. Van Deburg’s New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, James W. Smethhurst’s The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, and Timothy Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie: Robert Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Students will read an average of 200 pages per week. Grades will be based on class attendance and participation, two exams, and three book reviews.

AAS 101 - Africa in the Atlantic World (4)

1230-1345 T R

WIL 301

Instructors: Roquinaldo Ferreira and Scot French

This team-taught lecture course is part of a year-long survey of the history and culture of Africans in Africa and people of African descent in the Americas. During this semester, we will cover a variety of topics, including African societies before 1800, the Atlantic slave trade, literatures of the Atlantic World, the origins and development of New World plantation societies, Africana religions, life and labor in the United States, and the protracted process of emancipation. Students should come away with an understanding of the major problems, events, and people that shaped the African-American experience. At the same time, we will gain a sense of how that experience fit into the history of people of African descent in the larger Atlantic world. Students are encouraged, but not required, to take both semesters of this course. Reading will include the following books: Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge, 2001; Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy (eds.), Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004; Michael L. Conniff and Thomas J. Davis, Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora. Blackburn Press, 2002; George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000. Oxford, 2004. Grading for the class will consist of the following: Participation/Discussion; Short Response Papers; Midterm Exam; Short Writing Assignment; Final Exam.
(Cross-listed as HIAF 203: The African Diaspora)

AAS 323 – Rise and Fall of the Slave South(3)

0900-0950 MW

MIN 125

Instructor: Edward L. Ayers

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the sixteenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slaveowners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians.
Requirements include substantial research in primary documents in Alderman Library. Research topics are broad and require students willing to tackle open-ended assignments. Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course.
(This course is cross-listed as HIUS 323.)

AAS 405B – From Black Arts to Hip-Hop

1300-1530 M

Minor 108

Instructor: Alwin A. D. Jones

In this seminar we will study the last 50 years of Black “writing” in America, especially focusing on the Black Arts and Hip Hop Movements, the impetus being: Black Writing is Still Alive and Emergent. We will investigate the politics, poetics, and aesthetics of writings as bracketed by these two movements. From its inception, scholars within Black Studies have always maintained an interdisciplinary approach in their intellectual pursuits, we will therefore follow suit in ours by examining film, "life writing," visual art, poetry, music and music lyrics, drama, performance arts, theory, history, activist writing, etc. Our in-depth study will highlight themes and issues within the period such as international collaboration, cross-generational discourse, generational identity, gender, race, space, religion and theodicy, revolution, the relationship between the written and spoken/performed word, “remix” and signification, the role of the cipher, and other interests that students might have. “When you roll up in the dance yo… Anything can happen” as we investigate these themes critically. For example, we will work together to “define” current hip hop sensibilities that include strains and urgings such as “neo-soul,” “spoken word,” “Hollywood rap/film star-ism,” “gangsta rap-ism,” etc. We would want to investigate what we happens when we look at urgings such as commercial and popular hip hop and/or rap in light of the political and aesthetic inclinations of the Black Arts Movement and other strains of hip hop.
The material that we will intellectually remix include the work of well known and important authors and figures, as well as other lesser known but still important writers. A tentative list of primary texts and authors include, but are not limited to: Sapphire’s Push, Sister Souljah’s The Coldest Winter Ever, El Hajj Malik Shabazz from myriad speeches and from The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls, from The Amiri Baraka Reader, Listen Up: Spoken Word Poetry, Sonia Sanchez’s Shake Loose My Skin, Tupac Shakur’s The Rose that Grew from Concrete, Saul Williams’s said the shotgun to the head, Toni Morrison’s Sula, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, and Gwedolyn Brooks’ Blacks (and her autobiographical writings and commentaries). The film text and discussions will highlight productions such as SlamBamboozled, from Eyes on the PrizeBrown SugarJuice, Boyz in the HoodSankofa, The Brotherhood, Drop Squad, Chapelle Show, Ali, and a few blacksploitation films. Other writers and artists whose work we will cover include Audre Lorde, Carolyn Rodgers, Martin Luther King, Haki R. Madhubuti, Nikki Giovanni, John Coltrane, Jessica Care Moore, Sarah Jones, The Nuyorican Poets, The Last Poets, Nina Simone, Outkast, NWA, Dead Prez, Christopher Wallace, Kanye West, Talib Kweli.

AAS 405C – Religion, Politics and the State in Africa (3)

1400-1630 T

Minor 108

Instructor: Vicki L. Brennan

This course addresses the politics of religion in sub-Saharan African societies including topics such as religious freedom, religious conflict, religious nationalism, and religious pluralism. We begin by looking at the interactions between pre-colonial African religions and politics in order to explore the ways in which religions can legitimate and/or undermine authority. We consider religious and political change in relation to both Islamic Jihad and Christian “civilizing missions” in West and South Africa respectively. In the nationalist and postcolonial period, we explore the political dimensions of religious movements and the religious dimensions of political movements; with a particular focus on the impact that transnational religions--such as Pentecostalism and global Islam--have on the soverignty of nation-states in Africa. Course requirements include active participation in seminar discussions, weekly one-page reports on the course readings, and a series of writing assignments that will culminate in a 20-page research paper.

AAS 405D – Race, Class, and Gender in Brazil

1100-1215 T R

Minor 108

Instructor: Angela Figueiredo

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the relationship between race, class, and gender in Brazil since 1930. Classes will include contemporary public issues about affirmative action. Historically, the study of race in Brazil has centered on comparing Brazil and the U.S., with the conclusion that in Brazil racism is less than here because the mixed race population and Afro-Brazilians can negotiate their social position if they are middle-class; frequently, class prevailed over race and gender was not important. Actually, this context has changed in recent decades and we need to consider the economic and political changes that have taken place in Brazil as well as in the level of education, racial self-identification and identity formation among Afro-Brazilians. The study of gender and race in Brazil took off in the 1990s, the majority of it focusing on the difference in income between black and white women. This course will consist of four parts: first, we will study the classic texts on this subject; second, we will talk about the beginning discussions on racism in the 1980s; third, we will study the relationship between gender and race; and, finally, we will study the political context today.
This course meets twice a week, each class with 1:15 hours. Classes will combine lectures and audio-visual resource. In each class two students are expected to read a text and answer questions. Grading will be based on participation in the class and a small final paper.

 

American Studies

AMST 401 (0001) - White Supremacists Write the Americas: From Aryan Atlantis to White Aztlan

1400 – 1515 MW

BRN 334

Instructor: Ruth Hill

This seminar examines various racial projects that contributed to the national formation of white supremacy, ca. 1915-2005, especially those hemispheric projects that have constructed the ancient Aztec, Maya and Inca civilizations as Caucasian/ Aryan/ White. We will also be examining the related racial projects of ancient White Egypt and ancient White India, some transamerican racial formations of black supremacy and brown supremacy, and the confluence of white supremacy and Christian extremism in postmodern, electronic racial projects. Evaluation: Active and intelligent participation in classroom dialogues and weekly study group meetings, plus 1-2 pp. response papers after study group meetings: 20%; mid-semester précis of research paper including annotated bibliography (10 pp.): 20%; brief oral presentation of research project: 10%; research paper (25-30 pp.): 50%.
Readings and other materials will be on reserve at Clemons and available through toolkit. They include materials from white supremacist websites and selections from the following: Madison Grant, Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History; Conquest of A Continent; Lothrop Stoddard, Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy; New World of Islam; Re-Forging America; Achmed Abdullah, “Through Mohammedan Spectacles”; W.E.B. Dubois, “African Roots of War”; José Vasconcelos, Cosmic Race (La raza cósmica); James Denson Sayers, Can the White Race Survive?; Earnest S. Cox, White America: The American Racial Perspective as Seen in A Worldwide Perspective; Let My People Go; Unending Hate; Teutonic Unity; Matthew Pratt Guterl, The Color of Race in America, 1900-1940; Lee Baker, From Savage to Negro: Anthropology and the Construction of Race, 1896-1954; Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of A Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race; and Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s.

AMST 401 (0002) - Hollywood, Film, and American Culture: The 1930s

1300-1530 M W

RAN 212 (M) / MCL 2008 (W)

Instructor: Carmenita Higginbotham

This course examines American cinema produced in Hollywood during the 1930s. While the Great Depression serves as an important backdrop to our investigation, we will interrogate how issues such as ethnic/racial representation, shifting gender roles, sexuality, and urbanity are mediated in popular cinema in this decade. In addition to film, we also will consider extra-textual sources and other aspects influential to the film industry such as the studio system, the Hayes Code, stardom, and changes within narrative and film techniques. Requirements for this course include two short response essays and a 15-20-page research paper.

AMST 201 (0003) - Language in the US

1300-1350 MWF

Cauthen House 134

Instructor: Ashley M. Williams

Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. is not (and never has been) linguistically homogenous: from dying and revitalized Native American languages to newly arrived immigrant languages, from regional and social dialect variation to innovation among adolescents and Hip Hop, the American language situation is diverse and changing. This course invites students to investigate this not-quite-melting-pot variety both through readings in current research and through small-scale field research. Topics covered in the course will include the origins and distinctions of American English, language controversies such as Ebonics and the English-Only movement, research in language attitudes and discrimination, topics in bilingualism and education, plus the latest studies in language issues involving different ethnicities, genders, sexualities, ages, and social classes.
In this course we will pull material from a variety of sources (including films, literature, the media, and recent studies), and will employ a variety of approaches (linguistic, anthropological, sociological, historical, and more) as we investigate and debate what is uniquely “American” about the language situation in the United States:

Grading (100 points total):
Participation: 20
Individual Project & Presentation: 40
Weekly Critical Response Papers (10 @ 4 points each): 40

1) Attendance and participation are essential to completing this course successfully. You are expected to complete the readings, listen attentively and actively, and thoughtfully engage in discussion. Our class meetings depend on your having studied the assigned material inquisitively, critically, and energetically.
2) Individual Project and Presentation (10-15 pages) (papers due the last day of class, presentations during the last few weeks of class): You will write a paper on some topic on language in the US based on original research gathered from a variety of sources (recordings, interviews, articles, other print material, films, music, field observations, etc.) and present your work to the class. Please note that your topic proposal (a brief 1 page description of what you plan to do in your paper, including a short bibliography, plus a brief in-class presentation) is due by WEEK 8.
3) (Nearly) Weekly Critical Response Papers (due dates marked in Schedule; topics on Toolkit): You will hand in a 1-2 page response paper on a question given out the preceding week. These questions will ask you to critically respond to and engage with some aspect of the preceding week’s readings, films, discussions, etc. They probably also will help you in formulating and finalizing your individual paper topic.

Required Texts:
Course Reader: a collection of articles available through course web page on Toolkit.
Finegan, Edward & John R. Rickford (eds.). 2004. Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-first Century. Cambridge University Press.
Lippi-Green, Rosina. 1997. English with an Accent. Routledge.

 

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 228 Introduction to Medical Anthropology (3)

TR 1100-1230MCL 1020

Instructor: Wende Marshall

The suffering body is inevitable in human experience, but the meaning of suffering is interpreted differently across cultures and time. Conceptions of the body, notions of health and methods of healing vary considerably. The point of this course, which introduces medical anthropology to undergraduates, is to contextualize bodies, suffering, health and power. The aim of the course is to provide a broad understanding of the relationship between culture (particularly in the U.S.), healing (especially the Western form of healing known as biomedicine), health and political power.

ANTH 387 Archaeology of Virginia (3)

TR 1400-1515

MIN 130

Instructor: Jeffrey Hantman

This course provides an overview of the insights gained into Virginia's history and prehistory through the joining of archaeological and ethnohistoric research. The course explores culture change and adaptation in Virginia (and the Chesapeake region more broadly) from the time of earliest human settlement of the region to the nineteenth century. In this vast time frame, we will focus on a number of selected topics for which people, events and sites in Virginia provide a unique perspective. These include: the origins of archaeology in America, current debate surrounding the timing and process of the initial settlement of America, the development of distinct regional polities such as the Powhatan and Monacan chiefdoms, early interaction between American Indians and Europeans and the long-term impacts of colonialism, and archaeological research on Euroamerican and African-American culture in the region.

ANTH 401A Social Inequalities: Religious, Modern, and Postcolonial(3)

W 1400-1630

CAB 215

Instructor: Ravindra Khare

A seminar on comparative discussion of social inequalities in societies both postcolonial and modern (e.g., contemporary India and the U.S.), with a focus on how different social, religious and political forces now play their roles in continuing and complicating social differences and issues along the lines of gender, class, caste, race, religion, and latest, globalization. The seminar will include appropriate in-class exercises conducted by students on the inequalities experienced and coped with in life. Course satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

ANTH 543 African Languages (3)

Instructor: David Sapir

MW 1530-1645

The course will cover the classification of African languages, selected grammatical typologies, African lexicography, and examples of oral literature. Students will give presentations on these topics with respect to a specific language or languages. The intention of the course is to investigate the considerable variety of linguistic types present in sub-Saharan Africa. Permission of Instructor required.

ANTH 585 - Methods in Historical Archaeology (3)

W 1630-1900

CAM 108

Instructor: Fraser Neiman

This course offers an introduction to analytical methods in historical archaeology, their theoretical motivation, and their practical application in the interpretation of material culture. The class combines lectures and discussion with computer workshops, in which students have a chance to explore historical issues raised in the reading and lectures using real architectural and archaeological data. The course is designed to teach students in architectural history, history, and archaeology theoretical models, simple statistical methods, software applications, and how they can be integrated to address important historical questions. Our principle historical focus is change in the conflicting economic and social strategies pursued by Europeans, Africans, and Native-Americans, and their descendents in the colonial Chesapeake. In 2006, much of the course will be devoted to seventeenth-century Jamestown.

 

Common Courses

CCFA 202 – Arts and Culture of the Slave South

MW 1530-1645

WIL 301

Instructors: Maurie McInnis and Louis P. Nelson

We will embark on an exploration of the interrelations between history, material and visual cultures, music, and literature in the formation of Southern identities. The course covers subjects ranging from the archaeology of seventeenth-century Virginia and the formation of African American spirituals, to creolization and ethnicities in Louisiana, to the plantation architectures of the big house and outbuildings and the literary traditions of antebellum women. Students are introduced to the interpretive methods central to a wide range of disciplines, from archaeology and anthropology, to art and architectural history, to material culture, literature, and musicology.

 

Department of English

ENAM 313 – African American Survey(3)

TR 1400-1515

CAB 132

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Analyzes the earliest examples of African-American literature, emphasizing African cultural themes and techniques that were transformed by the experience of slavery as that experience met European cultural and religious practices. Studies essays, speeches, pamphlets, poetry, and songs.

ENAM 322 – Faulkner

MWR 1100-1150

CAB 216

Instructor: Stephen Railton

We'll spend the semester inside the fictions Faulkner wrote about Yoknapatawpha County, that intersection of his imagination with the Old South and the Modernist Novel.

ENAM 341 – Black Women Writers (3)

TR 930-1045

CAB 318

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Course description unavailable.

ENAM 381 – Black Protest Narrative (3)

TR 1100-1215

Instructor: Marlon Ross

This course explores the relation between modern racial protest and African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film, narrative poetry) from the mid-1930s to the early 1970s, focusing on the Great Depression, World War II, the Civil Rights movement, and the emergence of Black Power. As well as examining the social, political, and economic contexts of protest narratives, we’ll probe their aesthetic, formal, and ideological structures, and assess how protest writers represent controversial topics of the time, such as lynching, segregation, sharecropping, disenfranchisement, anti-Semitism, unemployment, migration, urbanization, religion, sexuality, war and military service, strikebreaking, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. We start with the most famous protest narrative, Richard Wright’s Native Son , then study other narratives, many of which challenge Wright’s forms and ideas. Other writers include Angelo Herndon, William Attaway, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Alice Walker, and Bobby Seale, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and social science. Films include: Native Son (starring Richard Wright), No Way Out (starring Sidney Poitier), and The Education of Sonny Carson . Heavy reading schedule. Midterm, final, and reading journal required.

ENAM 481 – African American Women's Autobiography (3)

TR 930-1045

BRN 332

Instructor: Angela Davis

Course description unavailable

ENAM 481 – The Slave Narrative

TR 1100-1215

PV8 108

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Course description unavailable

ENAM 481/ENLT 255 – Disenfranchised Voices

TR 930-1045

CAB 335

Instructor: Marion Rust

For more than a century before Benjamin Franklin, in 1771, purportedly began the letter to his son that became the Autobiography of and for a young nation, inhabitants of colonial America – British, African and Native American, enslaved and indentured, male and female, ministers, heads of state and condemned criminals on their way to the scaffold – found occasion to engage in some form of life-writing. In this class we examine their words, both to broaden our understanding of why and how people choose to narrate a self into being, and to narrow our focus on a particular historical period newly accessible to us through a host of recently discovered personal writings. How does early American life-writing challenge our assumptions regarding what counts as autobiography and what purposes it serves?How did early Americans surmount the obstacles to rendering fluid life experience in the clumsy medium of language, and what can we learn from their attempts as we engage in our own practices of self.

ENAM 481C Crane, Chopin, and Chesnutt

1400-1515 MW

BRN 312

Instructor: Stephen Railton

From very different backgrounds, these American artists all arrived at the end of the 19th and the turn into the 20th century at about the same time. We'll look closely at each writer's own achievement, especially in Maggie, The Red Badge of Courage, The Conjure Woman, The Marrow of Tradition and The Awakening, but we'll also study them in the context they create together as they push American literature into new thematic territories, and define new roles for American readers. Because the class is a seminar, I'll expect you to come to class prepared to talk and listen to each other, and ask you to do a variety of tasks, from leading a class discussion to writing several short writing assignments and a long (10-12 page) final essay.

ENAM 358 - U.S. Literature and Citizenship

TR 1100-1215

CAB 134

Instructor: Victoria Olwell

How has literary writing shaped conceptions of citizenship? What resources does literature provide for thinking about the kinds of inclusion-and exclusion-that citizenship defines? In this course, we’ll explore how U.S. literature has “imagined” national community, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s famous term. We’ll define citizenship in multiple ways: as formal incorporation in the state, as civic participation, as a form of subjectivity, and as cultural inclusion, to name just a few of the most important. Our major project will be to see how literature not only has been essential to the formation of discourses of citizenship, but also has created modes of citizenship. In part, our course will consider the thematics of citizenship in selected literary texts from the late eighteenth century through the present day. We’ll see how literature has provided a space of conversation where conceptions of national community could be formed and disputed. But, we’ll also see literature as itself a technology of citizenship, one that produces relations among readers and styles of subjectivity that are themselves instances, rather than reflections, of citizenship. Our literary readings will be clustered around several areas of struggle over the terms of citizenship; these include national formation, race, gender, immigration, sexuality, labor, and the security state. Literary readings will likely include Charles Brockden Brown, Weiland; Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette; Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass and other poems; several pieces by Frederick Douglas; Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; short stories by Hawthorne and Melville; women’s suffrage plays, poems, and fiction; The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, Zami, A New Spelling of My Name, Tony Kushner, Angels in America, and Gish Jen, Mona in the Promised Land. We’ll also read a few pieces of recent theory and criticism.
Course requirements include energetic participation, two short papers, a longer essay, and a final examination.

ENLT 224 Studies in Drama– 20th Century American Drama in Black and White

TR 1400-1515

BRN 310

Instructor: Brian Roberts

This course surveys plays by important 20th century American writers--both black and white--with an eye toward examining the movement away from the minstrel tradition as well as with the goal of interrogating the strategies, ethics, and implications of representing racial Others in drama. While reading works in which black and white playwrights script the interactions of black and white characters, we will closely analyze selected scenes and acts in order to become familiar with the techniques of the dramatic art, including issues of dramatic genre, reading versus performance, conventions of speech and dialogue, and issues of plot and subplot. We will also pay attention to African and European influences on 20th century American drama's important movements and modes of stage expression. Course requirements include weekly quizzes, three papers, and a comprehensive final exam.

ENLT 247 –Black Writers in America

TR 1700-1815

CAB 334

Instructor: Erich Nunn

This course traces the interrelations of twentieth-century African American literary and musical histories from W. E. B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk through the Negro Renaissance of the 1920s and the Black Arts movement of the 1960s to the present day. Texts include those by writers on music and writing by musicians. Including autobiography, poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, as well as instrumental and vocal music, the course provides a broad overview of these traditions. Students will learn to pay close attention to language and form, while gaining an understanding of the cultural and historical contexts that inform these literary and musical productions. Course requirements include extensive class participation, three formal essays, weekly response papers, reading quizzes, a mid-term, and a final exam.

ENLT 248 - Fictions of the yard

1700-1815 TR

CAB 247

Instructor: Alwin Jones

This course will introduce students to the various permutations of the genre called “Yard Fiction,” generally associated with the writings of Caribbean nationals and expatriates of color. We will examine mostly novels and novellas, starting with C.L.R. James’s Minty Alley (1939), which is considered the first “Yard Fiction” text. The “yard” can be defined as a space that is home to mostly people of color who are predominantly all working class citizens, employed and unemployed. The yard is usually a building, or a group of buildings on the same street, basically a “tenement.” Subsequently, everything thing in the selected texts generally occurs in each of the different characters’ “own back yard.” The yard, as a physical space, generally binds the characters/people and the text.
Some of the primary texts include Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street, Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place, V.S. Naipaul’s Miguel Street, Samuel Selvon’s Moses Ascending, and Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance. We will also listen and examine the music and poetry of artists such as Linton Kwesi Johnson and Saul Williams. We will examine how these different authors image and utilize the space of yard in order to tell their story. As we progress along in the course, students will be able to develop a working history of “yard fiction” as a specific genre through discussion and written scholarship. Some general themes that are consistent with the genre are gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, urban space, imperialism, globalization, coloniality, independence, property/territory, and culture, along with music/calypso and gossip as primary carrier of news and information.

 

Department of French Language and Literature

FREN 443 – Africa in Cinema (3)

TR 1230-1345

CAB 321

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

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. Prerequistes: FREN 332 and FREN 344

FREN 570 – Francophone Literature of Africa(3)

TR 1530-1645

WIL 141B

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

Studies the principal movements and representative authors writing in French in Northern, Central, and Western Africa, with special reference to the islands of Madagascar and Mauritius. Explores the literary and social histories of these regions.

 

Department of Germanic Languages and Literature

GETR 348 (3); ENGN 362: Autobiography, Memoir, and Memory-Making in the Twentieth-Century and Beyond

MWF 1100-1150

Instructor: Ms. Schenberg

Isabel Allende writes, "My life is created as I narrate, my memory grows stronger with writing."
This course asks, what is the relation between memory and creation of an autobiography or memoir? What does Allende mean by her claim that her writing creates (rather than records) her life? How do various twentieth-century authors put memory to work in creating autobiography and memoir?
In reading our selected texts, we will consider the above questions, as well as the following: How is autobiography used to explore childhood, trauma, race, gender and the self as writer? We will also explore the current surge in popularity of these forms of writing.
Authors read will include Walter Benjamin, Annie Dillard, Ruth Klüger, Christa Wolf, Malcolm X, and Maxine Hong Kingston and Barbara Kingsolver.
Students will be expected to keep a reading journal, write response papers, prepare two five-page papers and write a final exam.

 

Department of History

HIAF 203 – The African Diaspora (4)

TR 1230-1345

WIL 301

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

HIAF 203/AAS 101 is a team-taught course that is part of a year-long survey of the history and culture of Africans in Africa and people of African descent in the Americas. During this semester, we will cover a variety of topics, including African societies before 1800, the Atlantic slave trade, literatures of the Atlantic World, the origins and development of New World plantation societies, Africana religions, life and labor in the United States, and the protracted process of emancipation. Students should come away with an understanding of the major problems, events, and people that shaped the African-American experience. At the same time, we will gain a sense of how that experience fit into the history of people of African descent in the larger Atlantic world. Students are encouraged, but not required, to take both semesters of this course. Reading will include the following books: Herbert Klein, The Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge, 2001; Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy (eds.), Randy J. Sparks, The Two Princes of Calabar: An Eighteenth Century Atlantic Odyssey. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2004; Michael L. Conniff and Thomas J. Davis, Africans in the Americas: A History of the Black Diaspora. Blackburn Press, 2002; George Reid Andrews, Afro-Latin America, 1800-2000. Oxford, 2004. Grading for the class will consist of the following: Participation/Discussion; Short Response Papers; Midterm Exam; Short Writing Assignment; Final Exam.
(Cross-listed as AAS 101).

HIAF 302 – History of Southern Africa

TR 0930-1045

CAB 323

Instructor: John E. Mason

HIAF 302 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The emphasis is on South Africa. HIAF 302 begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.
By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest had not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs.
Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.
Course materials include biographies, memoirs, fiction, music, and films, as well as academic studies. Students will write two five to seven page essays and write two blue book exams, a mid-term and a final.

HIAF 389 – Africa In World History

TR 0930-1045

CAB 337

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

HIAF 389 is an experimental exploration in “world history” for advanced undergraduates. The Department of History at the University of Virginia has offered courses placing Africa in broader “Atlantic” frameworks, mostly in the modern era, but never considering Africa’s place in the long-term history of the human race – even though genetic and other evidence establishes that all modern humans descended from ancestors living in Africa. “World history”, a very recent addition to the UVa history curriculum, characteristically finds only the most marginal of roles for Africa – mostly as a continent victimized and colonized by others, Muslims and modern Europeans. Hegel, philosopher of the modern discipline of history, specifically excluded Africa as the “continent without history”.
HIAF 389 tackles all these challenges: (1) to historicize an African past (all 50,000 years of it) still commonly seen in static, quasi-ethnographic terms; (2) to place this narrative of challenges and changes in the broader story of human history throughout the world; and (3) to look afresh at the familiar narrative of world “civilizations” in terms derived from African perspectives, strategies, and experiences. If you want to think again about what you thought you knew, about any part of the world (including the modern US), this could be the course for you. I hope to leave no one in the room unchallenged.
HIAF 389 will provide the usual narrative framework of Africa’s past through reading a current text (Gilbert & Reynolds, Africa in World History) but will develop significantly different interpretive emphases; the critical contrast will reveal the assumptions underlying the way that historians think, or should think, since so few of them actually do. We will also read a world-history text and attempt to bring the two texts together with the approach to be developed in the course. We will also read more technical articles on concepts and processes integral to understanding Africa and history. You need not have taken either HIAF 201 or 202 (Introductions to early and modern Africa), but if you have not you will need to take responsibility for grasping the basic narrative from which the course will build.
The instructor will lecture one session/week on Africa and then, during the second session, invite students to compare the materials presented for Africa to historical patterns and processes elsewhere around the world. Students will write short “take-home points” at the end of every class. Frequent, short map quizzes will encourage useful awareness of the geographical contexts of all human history. Written requirements will include periodic short “position papers” reflecting on the course content as it develops. There will be no in-class examinations. The final exercise will be a take-home examination asking a single question: “How do you now, having spent a semester looking at the past in Africa in the context of global history, and vice versa, see the similarities and the differences between Africans’ experiences and those of others elsewhere around the globe?” Student writing will be considered intensely and analytically.

HIAF 402A – History Colloquium - Color And Culture in South Africa and the United States (4)

TR 1400-1515

CAB 334

Instructor: John E. Mason

HIAF 402 is a small, research-oriented course that explores the histories of South Africa and the United States in comparative perspective.
South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries owe much of their early economic development to slavery. In both complex systems of racial domination shaped society for generations before and after the emancipation of the slaves. And in both the interracial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.
At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true. Both white supremacy and the struggle against it were more violent in South Africa than in the United States. And, since 1994, a democratic political system has ensured that black South Africans have enjoyed a degree of political power that black Americans have never experienced.
The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, music, film, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.
HIAF 402 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course should have taken at least one course in African history, preferably South Africa, and two courses in American history.

HIAF 404 – Independent Study in African History

TBA

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HILA 306 – Modern Brazil

TR 0930-1045

CLK 101

Instructor: Brian Owensby

Land of the Future. World’s ninth largest economy. More people of African descent than all but a handful of African countries. Nation of immigrants. Last country in the Western hemisphere to abolish slavery. Society of Racial Democracy. Home of samba and bossa nova. Five-time world soccer champion. A place where a metal worker without a college education was elected president. Home of the Cordial Man. Leader of a movement that has begun to question globalization.
All of these are Brazil. This course will trace the history of Brazil from the late 18th century to the present day. We will focus on trying to understand the trajectory of a nation that in many ways defies the idea of what a nation is supposed to be. We will look at how Brazil became modern, and how this history forces us to question the very idea of modernity itself. In doing so, we will compare Brazil and the US, for only by confronting what Americans take for granted is it possible to learn anything about Brazil—or any other place for that matter.

HILA 402A – Race & Hybridity in Latin America

R 1300-1530

CAU 112

Instructor: Brian Owensby

Half a millenium of biological and cultural mixing has made Latin America a place where race means something quite different from what it does in the US and other places. This colloquium will explore Latin America’s unique history of race mixing, from the earliest moments of contact between Europeans and indigenous peoples, to the later arrival of Africans, to the emergence of multi-hued societies of castas, to the creation of national ideologies of mestizaje. The idea is to explore Latin America on its own terms and to allow that exploration to unsettle taken-for-granted notions of race as US Americans generally think of it.

HIME 100A – Migration, Modernity, Democracy: Cultural Exchange and Conflict (3)

M 1530-1800

CAB 337

Instructor: Monica Black

What might such diverse subjects as depictions of the Prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper cartoon, Muslim women veiling, unrest in the suburbs of Paris, and Turkey entering the European Union have in common? Particularly as Middle Eastern and North African migration to Europe has increased over the past decades, questions of cultural exchange and difference have come more and more to dominate relations between the Middle East and Europe. This course will explore how different ways of conceiving of modernity, democracy, the place of religion in peoples’ lives, and certain political struggles—such as the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or Iran’s nuclear program—have brought Middle Easterners and Europeans increasingly into dispute. The history of European imperialism and decolonization in the Middle East, the rise of forms of Middle East nationalism, the nature and variety of contemporary Muslim religious identity and activism, and the Middle Eastern and North African immigrant experience in Europe will be major themes in the course. Course meetings will be comprised of short lectures introducing the main themes for the week, followed by a discussion of assigned texts. On average, students can expect to read around 150 pages per week. Requirements include a short, midterm paper (5-6 pages), a longer (15 page) paper due at the end of the semester, and active participation in discussions. The course fulfills the college’s second writing requirement.

HIST 100 – Great Migrations of the 20th Century

W 1530-1800

CAB 337

Instructor: Pablo Davis

Three great Northward and Westward migrations that reshaped the politics, economy, society, and culture of the United States in the 20th were those by Southerners, Black and White, and by Puerto Ricans. Drawing on a range of historiographic, literary, and film sources, the course will consider the origins, unfolding, and consequences of these massive movements of people. The course will also draw on soul, country, salsa, and related musical genres as an important auxiliary source of insight into the world of migration.

HIUS 100A –Black Nationalism

R 1300-1500

PV8 108

Instructor: Claudrena N. Harold

This course examines black nationalists’ protracted struggle for political autonomy, economic independence, and cultural self-definition in twentieth-century America. Major events to be discussed include the rise and fall of the Marcus Garvey Movement during the 1920s, the emergence of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam after the close of World War II, and the political and cultural upheavals in Afro-America during the Black Power era. Students will have the opportunity to explore the politics of a wide range of black radicals, including Amy Jacques and Marcus Garvey, Robert Williams, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Audley Moore, and Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones). Scholarly investigations of black nationalism normally conclude with an analysis of the disintegration of the Black Power Movement in the early 1970s, but this course will also investigate the contemporary manifestations of black nationalism. Exploring diverse topics such as the Million Man March in 1995, the rise of Afrocentricity as a major theoretical framework in Black Studies, and the race consciousness articulated in the music of various hip-hop artists, students will investigate the continuing significance and visibility of black nationalism in American politics and culture. Possible texts for the course include Michele Mitchell’s Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction, Dean Robinson’s Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought, Tony Martin’s Race First: The Ideological and Organizational Struggles of Marcus Garvey, Tommie Shelby’s We Who are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, William L. Van Deburg’s New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, James W. Smethhurst’s The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s, and Timothy Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie: Robert Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Students will read an average of 200 pages per week. Grades will be based on class attendance and participation, two exams, and three book reviews.
(Cross-listed with AAS 100A).

HIUS 323 – Rise and Fall of The Slave South

0900-0950 MW

MIN 125

Instructor: Edward L. Ayers

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the sixteenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slaveowners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians.
Requirements include substantial research in primary documents in Alderman Library. Research topics are broad and require students willing to tackle open-ended assignments. Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course.

HIUS 329 – Virginia History, 1861-2005

1230-1345

GIL 141

Instructor: George Gilliam

History is the study of change over time. This course will examine change in Virginia from about 1861 to the present. The course will especially follow six main topics: (a) the evolving nature of democracy in Virginia; (b) continuities and change between “Ol’ Virginny” and modern Virginia; (c) the role of Reconstruction in configuring Virginia’s racial and political divisions; (d) the role of debt and the resolution of the conflict between Funders and Readjusters into Virginia’s “pay-as-you-go” philosophy; (e) social and cultural change in Virginia; and (f) the rural machine politics of Harry F. Byrd.
Readings will average approximately 100 pages per week, and will be drawn from both primary documents and secondary material. Among the readings will be selections from: Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction; Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia; Edward L. Ayers, Southern Crossing, Bruce Schulman, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980, and Jay Winik, April 1865: The Month that Saved America.
The class will meet twice per week. Approximately half of each class will be spent in lecture and half in a class discussion. There will be a multiple choice/short answer mid-term exam, one 5-7 page paper involving the use of primary source materials, one group project, and a final examination requiring one short and one long essay.

HIUS 365 – African American History Through Reconstruction

MWF 1300-1350

CAB 341

Instructor: Reginald D. Butler

This lecture course is part of a year-long survey of the African American experience in British Colonial North America and the United States. This segment (AAS-HIUS 365) covers the period from the beginnings of trans-Atlantic slave trade through Reconstruction. We seek to relate the African American experience to the broader experience of Africans in the Diaspora, as well as larger themes and concepts (the rise of capitalism and the nation-state, European expansion, slavery and the slave trade in Africa, the development of racial ideologies, etc.) in world history. We will examine some of the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities, paying particular attention to how African Americans themselves shaped their experiences. We will devote some portion of each class to the close examination of primary sources, with a particular focus on the intersection of the "local" and the "global." Students will be evaluated on three test grades and a research project to be explained fully in the syllabus.

HIUS 367 – History of the Civil Rights Movement

T 1530-1730

WIL 301

Instructor: Julian Bond

This lecture course examines the history, philosophies, tactics, events and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward.
The Southern movement - variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement - was a black-lead, interracial mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation by the mid-60s.
Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping and occasionally complimentary phases - lobbying, litigation and protest.
In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights.
In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation and the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools.
The last phase, lasting a decade from '54 through '65, was a decade of protests - boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations - as well as grass-roots organizing campaigns that laid the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s.
Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength and followers from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation. The movement's well-known and lesser-known proponents and their strategies will be examined.
Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five- to seven-page papers.

Texts:
• Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo Press
• Forman James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press
• Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, Thompson Learning
Videos:
• "Eyes on the Prize - America's Civil Rights Years, 1954 - 1965", # 1 to 6
• "America the at the Racial Crossroads, 1965 - 1985," # 1 and 2; PBS Video, Blackside Inc., Boston
• "The Road to Brown," William Elwood, Producer, California Newsreel

HIUS 401C – History Semnar –The North and Reconstruction (4)

W 1300-1530

CAB 335

Instructor: Michael F. Holt

The purpose of this majors seminar is to examine how bid a role the post-Civil War experiment of Reconstruction in the South played in northern elections between 1865 and 1876. That is, to what extent did those northern elections revolve around federal policy for the South as opposed to intrinsic developments and issues in the North. After a few weeks of common reading and discussion, each student will pick a year and research its state, congressional, and, if relevant, presidential elections in newspapers, Appleton’s Annual Cyclopaedia, which contains both Republican and Democratic platforms for most states, Harpweek, and any other possible primary sources.
Students’ grades will be based on participation in class discussion, a short paper on the preliminary reading, the research paper which will be presented to the seminar, and the criticism they offer of fellow students’ papers. This course fulfills the second writing requirement.

Preliminary readings may include:
• David H. Donald, Jean H. Baker, and Michael F. Holt, The Civil War and Reconstruction
• David Montgomery, Beyond Equality: Labor and the Radical Republicans, 1862-1872
• Heather Cox Richardson, The Failure of Reconstruction
• Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848-1876

HIUS 401E – History Seminar – Slavery and the Southern Frontier (4)

T 1530-1800

BRN 310

Instructor: Andrew Torget

This seminar will examine the expansion of the nineteenth-century American South in the decades before the Civil War. The region we know today as the South expanded drastically between 1810 and 1860 as men and women, black and white, poured into regions of North America that would eventually become Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri and Texas. Growing wealthy by growing cotton, white migrants who brought their enslaved workforce to this Southern frontier created the most powerful slave regime in world history--all in a span of only fifty years. Students in the course will examine the rapid and turbulent growth of the Southern frontier during this important period, assessing what the development of this region meant for United States history. The first several weeks of the course will be devoted to reading secondary works on the South and its frontier, to gain a collective sense of what other historians have said about it. For the rest of the class, students will research and write an original paper (approximately 25-30 pages) in consultation with their fellow students and instructor on a topic of their own choosing that relates to the course. Possible readings include: James Oakes, The Ruling RaceA History of American Slaveholders; Joan Cashin, A Family VentureMen and Women on the Southern Frontier; James Miller, South by Southwest: Planter Emigration and Identity in the Slave South; Michael Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War.

HIUS 403 – Slavery & Freedom in the North

T 1400-1630

MIN 108

Instructor: Reginald D. Butler

This course will examine slave and free black life in the towns, seaport cities, and on rural farms and plantations in the Northern and New England colonies/states from the early seventeenth century through the Civil War. Thematically the course will explore the parallel and interactive processes of European expansion/colonization and the construction of uniquely American racial, class, and gender formations. The course will challenge traditional colonial, revolutionary, and early national historiography that situated slavery on the region's political, social, and cultural margins. Rather, we will argue that slavery played a central role, not only as a major source of cheap agricultural, industrial, domestic, and maritime labor, but as a vehicle for minimizing class conflict and cohering ethnic, religious, social and political discord, particularly in Northern port cities. While the thematic and geographical focus of the course will center on the development of "societies with slaves" in this region, it will naturally suggest comparable experiences in other societies in the West Indies, Central and South America and the American South. Other topics for consideration will include, relations with native peoples, changing patterns of the region's slave trade and the impact on African American culture, slavery's implications for the development of working class identity and culture, shifting racial demographies, the role of gender in constructing race and identity, forms of resistance, the role of blacks in the Revolution, slavery and the making of the constitution, the reinvention of racial ideologies to support the exclusion of blacks from participation in the new republic, emancipation and colonization as solution to the "problems" of race and slavery, the abolitionist movement in black and white, African American cultural institution building, the role of blacks in the growth of Ante bellum politics, and African Americans in the Civil war.
We will read extensively in the recent secondary literature, including the works of Ira Berlin, David Roediger, Thelma Foote, Graham Hodges, Gary Nash, Jeffrey Bolster, and William Pierson. The class will also examine related published primary documents (newspapers and other periodicals) and manuscripts. Students will be evaluated on class discussion, required weekly critical writing assignments, and a major paper of twenty or more pages.

 

Department of Music

MUSI 426 Caribbean Music, Identity, and Power

TR 1100-1215

OCH S008

Instructor: Melvin Butler

Course description unavailable.

 

Department of Politics

PLAP 570 – Racial Politics

R 1530-1800

CAB 325

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

Course description unavailable.

PLCP 212 – Politics of Developing Areas

MW 0900-0950

WIL 301

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Surveys patterns of government and politics in non-Western political systems. Topics include political elites, sources of political power, national integration, economic development, and foreign penetration.

PLCP 524 – Gender Politics in Africa

TR 0930-1045

RAN 212

Instructor: Denise Walsh

Course description unavailable.

PLIR 424A: International Political Economy of Africa

T 1300-1530

CAB B021

Instructor: Andrew Lawrence

Course description unavailable.

PLIR 424D – U.S. Foreign Policy in Africa

W 1300-1530

CAB 130

Instructor: Leonard H. Robinson

Course description unavailable.

 

Department of Psychology

PSYC 487 – The Minority Family

M 0900-1130

GIL 081

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

Examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing “deficit” and “strength” research paradigms. Prerequisite: PSYC 306 and at least one course from each of the following groups: PSYC 210, 215 or 230, and PSYC 240, 250 or 260, and students in the Afro-American and African studies or studies in women and gender programs.

 

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 389 Christianity in Africa

TR 1230-1345

TBA

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Historical and topical survey of Christianity in Africa from the second century C.E. to the present. Cross listed with RELC 389. Prerequisite: A course in African religions or history, Christianity, or instructor permission.

RELG 280 African-American Religious History

TR 1100-1215

TBA

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

Course description unavailable.

 

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 – Race And Ethnic Relations

MW 1400-1515

CAB 316

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

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 410 – Afro-American Communities

TR 1530-1645

TBA

Instructor: M. Rick Turner

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

 

Studies in Women and Gender

SWAG 432 - Gender Politics in Africa

TR 0930-1045

RAN 212

Instructor: Denise Walsh

Course description unavailable.

Spring 2006

 

African-American and African Studies

AAS 102 - Crosscurrents of the African Diaspora (4)

Prof. Corey Walker

TR 12:30 – 1:45

MCL 2014

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 366: African American History Since 1865 (3)

Prof. Claudrena Harold

TR 9:30 – 10:45

MRY 115

This course examines the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Topics to be explored include blacks’ varied response to the rise of Jim Crow; the social and political upheavals brought about by the massive migration of Southern blacks to the industrial North during the First and Second World Wars; the achievements and failures of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; and the continuing significance of race in American society. This course will explore the political careers of such noted black activists as Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton. Significant attention will also be given to lesser known freedom fighters who struggled to create a more democratic America. Possible textbooks for the course include Tera Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, Beth Tompkins Bates’ Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945, Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Struggle, Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, William L. Van Deburg’s New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, Robert F. Williams’ Negroes With Guns, Komozi Woodard’s Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman Anthology, and Ronald W. Walters’ Freedom is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates and American Presidential Politics. Students will read an average of 200 pages per week. Grades will be based on class attendance and participation, three quizzes, and three exams.

AAS 406A - Mapping Race, Place, and Diaspora (3)

Prof. Scot French

W 1:00 – 3:30

CAB 247

This upper-level research seminar invites students to immerse themselves in the latest scholarship on race, space, and diaspora while participating in community-based research projects sponsored by the Carter G. Woodson Institute's Center for the Study of Local
Knowledge (CSLK). Funded by a grant from the Ford Foundation, the CSLK seeks to bridge the traditional divide between universities and local communities by creating new models for intellectual and social exchange between academic and lay scholars.
During the first six weeks of the class, students will work closely with the instructor to develop individual research projects using original source materials related to African American life in Central Virginia. Students will meet with lay scholars and activists to
explore possibilities for collaboration. Special training sessions will be held in U.Va.'s new media/humanities computing centers to ensure that students are well-acquainted with new technologies to aid their research. During the second six weeks of the class, each
student will produce a significant work of scholarship (subject to prior approval by the instructor) for incorporation into a community project. The final exam will consist of a formal, 10-minute presentation to the research seminar and invited guests.

AAS 406 E - Afro-Brazilian Civilization (3)

Prof. David Haberly

MWF 11:00 to 11:50

CAB 331

A general introduction, in English, to the literature and culture of Brazil from 1500 to the present, with special emphasis upon the role of Afro-Brazilians in the creation of that literature and culture. No knowledge of Portuguese is required, and lectures and readings will be in English. The course includes discussions of the nation's social and historical development, but these topics will be presented through readings in the major works of Brazilian literature, including the works of important Afro-Brazilian authors. (Enrollment restricted to participants in Brazil Study Abroad program. Meets same time and place as POTR 427.)

 

American Studies

AMST 201A - Arts of the Harlem Renaissance (3)

Prof. Carmenita Higginbotham

TR 11:00 – 12:15

WIL 216

This course will survey the visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography prints) as well as literature, music and film of the Harlem Renaissance. Students are introduced to the cultural, historical, political and social issues framing the development of the movement and its defining critical anthology, The New Negro Movement. Presented both chronologically and thematically, this course will interrogate issues of artistic identity, gender, patronage and the aesthetic influences of the African Diaspora on African American artists during the 1920s and early 1930s. Students will be exposed to the work of such legendary figures such as Alain Locke, W.E.B. DuBois, Meta Warrick Fuller, Aaron Douglas, Archibald Motley Jr., Langston Hughes and Paul Robeson.

 

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 225 - Racism, Nationalism, Multiculturalism (3)

Prof. Richard Handler

MW 2:00 – 3:15

MRY 209 3 credits

Introductory course in which the concepts of culture, multiculturalism, race, racism, and nationalism are critically examined in terms of how they are used and structure social relations in American society and, by comparison, how they are defined in other cultures throughout the world.

ANTH 565 - Creole Narratives (3)

Prof. George Mentore

MW 2:00 – 3:15

CAB 338

We begin with 18th- and 19th-century Caribbean intellectual life. We do so from the perspective of European imperialism and its influences upon colonized values, slavery, race, class and color. We examine the persistence of these major themes through the 20th century, formalized in the battle of ideas between the elite of the mother country and the Creole upper classes. We will attempt to read the images of the Creole self and explore their claims for a crisis of identity. We will also focus on the so-called spiritual character of the Creole personality. We shall conclude by looking at the way in which the specifics of island culture have directed nation building and how they appear to have helped in the perpetuation of ideological and political dependencies.

 

Common Course

CCSS 200 - Rural Poverty in Our Time (3)

Prof. Grace Hale

W 2:00 – 4:50

PHS 203

This course will use an interdisciplinary format to explore the history of non-urban poverty in the American South from the 1930s to the present. Weaving together the social histories of poor people, the political history of poverty policies, and the history of representations of poverty, the course follows historical cycles of attention and neglect: rural poverty during the Great Depression, rural poverty from the war on poverty to the Reagan Revolution, and rural poverty in the new Gilded Age, the present. In each section, we will examine the relationship between representations (imagining poverty),
policies (alleviating poverty), and results (the effects of those representations and policies in the economic, political, and psychological status of poor people).

 

Department of English

ENAM 314 - African American Survey II (3)

Prof. Lisa Woolfork

TR 9:30 – 10:45

CAB 215

Continuation of ENAM 313, this course begins with the career of Richard Wright and brings the Afro-American literary and performing tradition up to the present day.

ENAM 482E - Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Prof. Lisa Woolfork

TR 11:00 – 12:15

BRN 332

No description available.

ENCR 482 - Race in American Places (3)

Prof. Ian Grandison

T 6:30 – 9:00

BRN 330

Race in American Places is an inter-disciplinary seminar that explores ways in which multi-cultural negotiations in American society (especially around notions of racial difference) are embedded in places. We consider, for instance, how the innocent children's story, The Three Little Pigs, teaches us to draw particular conclusions about the moral standing of people (or pigs) based on the materials and architectural styles of the places where they live, recreate, work, or study. We contemplate the ways such places as Charlottesville's Downtown Mall, although thought of as belonging to the "public," are planned and designed to welcome some members of the public while discouraging use by others. Ever wondered about what the coincidence of homelessness and home-owners' associations implies about assumptions of a relationship between the right to privacy and personal wealth in American society? Or are the places within the typical American home gendered? We explore issues such as these via targeted discussion of readings, mandatory visits to places around Charlottesville, informal workshops, and in-class presentations. Course requirements include three informal small group exercises, an individual site-visit comment paper, a mid-term and a final exam, and a small group research project. The last requirement is presented in an informal symposium that culminates our semester's work.

ENGN 422/ENMC 482 - African American Drama (3)

Prof. Lotta Lofgren

TR 12:30 – 1:45

CLK 101

We will survey African-American drama from the 1950's to the present. We will place the drama in relation to established norms, investigating the motives and methods of the playwrights for carving out new ground. We will examine the shared and divergent concerns of male and female playwrights, their sense of audience, the dilemma of writing as an individual and as a member of a group silenced too long, their relationship to the past, the present, and the future. We will also examine the changing definitions of the black aesthetic. Playwrights include, among others, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

ENLT 214M - Modern American Race and Ethnicity (3)

Prof. Jolie Sheffer

MW 3:30 – 4:45

CAB 324

This class looks at major American authors of the twentieth century through the lens of place. In American literature, race and ethnicity are not merely descriptive terms, they are lived conditions. To be a raced or ethnic subject is to live in a different America, sometimes a physically segregated one, sometimes a metaphoric one. The authors we study in this course portray the geography of race and ethnicity in different ways. America can be a promised land, a prison, a museum, or an elevator shaft, among other things.

ENLT 247 - Black Writers and Black Music (3)

Prof. Erich Nunn

TR 5:00 – 6:15

WIL 216

No description available

ENLT 255M - New World Colonialism (3)

Prof. Anna Brickhouse

T 6:30 – 9:00

BRN 332

This course will examine American exploration and colonization in a comparative context, reading English, French, and Spanish colonial accounts of New World encounter and considering a variety of genres and forms, including travel accounts, letters, poems, plays, and novels. We will pay special attention to the different functions that the theme of captivity performed within colonial American cultures. (All French and Spanish readings will be available in English translation.)

ENMC 484 - Inter-ethnic Fiction (3)

Prof. Caroline Rody

TF 12:30 – 1:45

Students in the Modern Studies Program will have first priority for admission to this seminar, which will consider American literature’s increasingly interethnic imagination, its engagement with the heterogeneity of contemporary American culture and with its hybrid literary heritage. Reading contemporary fiction and theory, we will consider cross-ethnic meeting not as a marginal concern, but as a constitutive element of ethnic identities, histories, and narratives. How does the encounter with ethnic/racial otherness shape the ethnic text's social and political vision, its reworking of literary and cultural forms and traditions, its handling of language(s), its representations of gendered identities and sexualities, and its engagement with traumatic histories? We will read stories and novels by contemporary American writers from widely diverse backgrounds, such as Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Michelle Cliff, Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Sherley Anne Williams, Grace Paley, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Lore Segal, Philip Roth, Jonathan Safran Foer, Sandra Cisneros, Bharati Mukherjee, Bapsi Sidwha, Gish Jen, Chang-Rae Lee, and Karen Tei Yamashita. We will also read theorists of race, ethnicity, and hybridity in literature and culture. Students are expected to be very active class participants; to write brief biweekly compositions, a short paper, and a long seminar paper; and with a partner to lead a class discussion.

ENWR 106 - Class Matters (3)

Peter Capuano

MWF 9:00 – 9:50

BRN 310

No description available.

ENWR 106 - Race in the U.S. (3)

Brian Roberts

TR 9:30 – 10:45

RAN 212

No description available.

ENWR 110 - Caribbean as U.S. Immigrant (3)

Alwin Jones

TR 3:30 – 4:45

No description available.

 

Health Evaluation Sciences

HES 536 - Health Disparities

Prof. Oliver Norman and Prof. Ruth Gaare

R 9:00 – 11:30

No description available.

 

Department of History

HIAF 202 - Africa Since 1800 (4)

Prof. John Mason

TR 9:30 – 10:45

MCL 1003

This course explores the history of Africa from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade, in the early nineteenth century, to the present. Our goal is to examine the historical roots of the continent's current circumstances, both good and bad. We will look at the slave trade and its consequences, the European conquest of most of the African continent, African resistance to colonial rule, and the reestablishment of African independence. We will concentrate on three regions: West Africa, especially Nigeria; Central Africa, especially the Congo and Rwanda; and southern Africa, especially South Africa. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and with the various strategies that Africans employed to resist, subvert, and accommodate European domination. HIAF 202 is an introductory course and assumes no prior knowledge of African history.

HIAF 305 - History of West Africa (3)

Prof. James Lafleur

TR 11:00 – 12:15

MCL 1004

HIAF 305 is a lecture and discussion course that explores the history of West Africans in the wider context of the global past. Our course begins in very distant times, and traces currents of change from West Africans’ first attempts to make a living in ancient environments through their subsequent challenges and actions in the eras of the slave trades (trans-Saharan and Atlantic), colonial overrule by outsiders, political independence, and ever-increasing globalization. Though the course focuses primarily on those people living in the region, we will follow a select few to their new places of residence in rural America in the early Atlantic era and in urban centers in our times. The majority of course readings will be journal articles and book excerpts (to be made available on Toolkit). In addition, we are likely to use the following books in their near-entirety: Basil Davidson, West Africa before the Colonial Era: A History to 1850; Stephen Ellis, Mask of Anarchy: the Destruction of Liberia and the Religious Dimension of an African Civil War; Sandra Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana; Paul Stoller, Money Has No Smell: The Africanization of New York City. Course requirements include active participation class discussions, four map quizzes, and three exams.

HIAF 403 - Landscape and Memory in Africa (3)

Prof. James Lafleur

R 1:00 – 3:30

WIL 141A

Far from being a “wilderness” untouched by human hands, Africa was the first landscape people domesticated physically and cognitively. HIAF 403 investigates the cultural geographies of Africa in historical terms, that is to say, how and why people have changed the meanings they attached to particular places over time and how those notions informed people’s actions. Following an initial introduction to the subject of collective memory, the course proceeds through several recent monographs that highlight African landscapes rich in history. A prospective reading list includes: Emmanuel Akyeampong, Between the Sea and the Lagoon: An Eco-Social History of the Anlo of Southeastern Ghana David William Cohen and E. S. Atieno Odhiambo, Siaya: The Historical Anthropology of an African Landscape James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Misreading the African Landscape Robert Harms, Games Against Nature: An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa Mark Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: The Social Landscape of a Mercantile Society Nancy Jacobs, Environment, Power, and Injustice: a South African History Terence Ranger, Voices from the Rocks: Nature, Culture, and the History in the Matopos Hills of Zimbabwe Rosalind Shaw, Memories of the Slave Trade: Ritual and Historical Imagination in Sierra Leone Tamara Giles-Vernick, Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rainforest Course requirements will include active participation in weekly seminar-format meetings, weekly exchange of reading notes, and progressively sophisticated and lengthy writing assignments culminating a final draft of research paper of at least 20 pages.

HIAF 404 - Independent Study in African History

HIAF 501 - Politics and Poverty Africa (3)

Prof. John Mason

T 1:00 – 3:30

CAB 139

I used to call this course "What's Wrong with Africa." The title was intentionally provocative. It reflected a view of Africa that continues to be reproduced daily on television, in magazines and newspapers, and even in movies. Teenagers with machine guns, babies with swollen bellies, the devastation of Aids, and bleak, unending poverty... This is the Africa that we too often see and read about. The image is, of course, misleading; Africa is by no means a continent-wide disaster area. But there is enough truth in these images of human suffering to cause Africans and non-Africans alike to ask, What's wrong? There are no simple answers to this question. HIAF 501 is an introduction to the difficult work of understanding Africa's multiple crises. We will look at the problem from a variety of different perspectives. We will examine both internal factors and Africa's relations with the rest of the world. We will read novels, journalism, polemics, and historical, political and environmental analyses by both African and non-African writers. At the end of the semester, students will write a paper in which they themselves investigate an aspect of the question. Students will write a two-page discussion paper on each week's reading. The paper is due in class every Tuesday. A 12 to 15 page essay on some aspect of Africa's crises will be due at the end of the semester. The long essay will account for approximately 50% of the final grade, the discussion papers about 30%, and class participation about 20%.

HILA 100- Gender and Ethnicity 20th Century Latin America (3)

Prof. Frederick Vallve

W 3:30 – 6

CAB B030

Most Latin Americans hailed the twentieth century as “Latin America’s century,” the triumph of liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century in most of the region, the “liberation” of most of the continent from colonial rule and the unstoppable march towards “order and progress” under the firm guidance of export-oriented economic policies would put Latin America on equal footing with its Northern neighbors and Europe. Yet this was hardly the case, by the end of the century Latin America had experienced three major revolutions as well as many minor ones, its relationship with the USA and Europe was definitely not on an equal footing, most of the region was beset with long periods of political dictatorship and persistent economic underdevelopment and poverty. Yet, in many ways it was indeed Latin America’s century. The impact of Latin American culture was felt throughout the world through literature, music and popular culture and “Latin-ness” became one of the century’s icons. This colloquium will look at the interaction between culture, politics and society in twentieth-century Latin America through readings and discussions focusing on gender and ethnicity. Readings: Klubock, Thomas, Contested Communities: Class, Gender and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904-1951; Donna Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires, Prostitution, Family and Nation in Argentina; Alejandro De la Fuente, A Nation for All: Race, Inequality and Politics in 20th Century Cuba; George Reid Andrews, Blacks and Whites in São Paulo, Brazil; Alma Guillermoprieto, Samba.

HIUS 100 - Southern Women’s History (3)

Prof. C. Janney

R 1:00 – 3:30

MCL 2007

This weekly seminar will explore nineteenth and twentieth century southern social and cultural history by examining the lives of white and black southern women. We will look at a range of women's lives and activities, from work to sexuality, paying careful attention to the ways in which race and class shaped women's experiences. Assignments will include diaries, autobiographies, novels, films, and monographs. Through discussion and the three papers, we will focus both on how women in the past understood their own lives, and how historians have used their writings in crafting contemporary understandings of southern history. This course also asks students to explore the different ways in which historians approach their craft. We will discuss how a variety of sources—both secondary (textbooks and monographs) and primary (diaries, letters, memoirs, etc.)—influence our construction of a historical narrative. In doing so, students will learn essential skills for participating in upper-level history courses at the University of Virginia and fulfill the second writing requirement. Required readings include: Victoria Bynum, Unruly Women; Drew Faust, Mothers of Invention; Lalita Tademy, Cane River; Harriet Keyserling, Against the Tide: One Woman's Political Struggle. There is also Course Packet of required readings for sale at The Copy Shop on Elliewood Avenue.

HIUS 309 - Civil War and History (3)

Prof. Gary Gallagher

TR 8:00 – 9:15

WIL 301

This course explores the era of the American Civil War with emphasis on the period 1861-1865. It combines lectures, readings, films, and class discussion to address such questions as why the war came, why the North won (or the Confederacy lost), how the war affected various elements of society, what was left unresolved at the end of the fighting, and how subsequent generations of Americans understood the conflict's meanings. Although this is not a course on Civil War battles and generals, about 50 per cent of the time in class will be devoted to military affairs, and we will make a special effort to tie events on the battlefield to life behind the lines. The course will be organized in two lecture meetings a week. Grades will be based on two geography quizzes (each 5% of the course grade), two take-home examinations (each 35% of the course grade), and a 7-page paper that integrates material from the lectures, readings, and films (20% of the course grade). Note: This course does not satisfy the second writing requirement. Required Books (some substitutions may be made): Edward Porter Alexander, Fighting for the Confederacy; John Q. Anderson, ed., Brokenburn: The Journal of Kate Stone, 1861-1868; Ira Berlin and others, eds., Free at Last; Jean Berlin, ed., Letters of a Civil War Nurse; Andrew Delbanco, ed., The Portable Abraham Lincoln; A. J. L. Fremantle, Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 186; Glenn Linden and Thomas Pressly, eds., Voices from the House Divided; Frank Wilkeson, Turned Inside Out: Recollections of a Private Soldier.

HIUS 310 – Reconstruction (3)

Prof. C. Janney

MWF 10:00 – 10:50

WIL 216

This course explores a variety of post-Civil War transitions in the United States. We will discuss both southern and northern reactions to and participation in the rebuilding of a nation that had been pulled apart by four years of war. We will take into account the political response to reuniting the nation and northern perceptions of the defeated Confederacy. A great deal of the course, however, will focus on the southern experience. We will examine how southern whites grudgingly relinquished slaveholding, how the South experimented with less restrictive labor systems, and how African Americans attained limited civil and social equality. We will consider changing modes of economic and social life in both the North and the South, which concluded with the establishment of the Solid South (and debatably the nation) by the end of the 19th century. There will be two lectures each week (Mondays and Wednesdays). Each Friday will be dedicated to discussion. There will be two take-home examinations in the course and a 5-7 page research paper. Possible required readings to include: • Jean Edward Smith, Grant • Hans L. Trefousse, Andrew Johnson: A Biography • John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta After the Civil War • Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood • Stephen Kantrowitz, Benjamin Tillman and the Reconstruction of White Supremacy • Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia • Altina L. Waller, Feud: Hatfields, McCoys, and Social Change in Appalachia, 1860-1900. There is also Course Packet of required readings for sale at The Copy Shop on Elliewood Avenue.

HIUS 324 - 20th Century South (3)

Prof. Lori Schuyler

MW 2:00 – 2:50

RFN G004A

This course will explore the social, cultural, political, and economic history of the South in the twentieth century. Major themes of the course will include the rise and fall of legalized segregation, the development of a viable Republican party in the region, the role of southern reformers and activists, and the importance of historical memory. We will examine major events in the region from the perspectives of black southerners and white southerners, men and women, sharecroppers and landowners, Republicans and Democrats, moderates and activists. Readings for the course may include: W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk; Grace Lumpkin, To Make My Bread, Christopher MacGregor Scribner, Renewing Birmingham: Federal Funding and the Promise of Change, 1929-1979; Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi.

HIUS 329 - Virginia from 1865 – Present (3)

Prof. George Gilliam

TR 12:30 – 1:45

RFN G004B

History is the study of change over time. This course will examine change in Virginia from about 1861 to the present. The course will especially follow six main topics: (a) the evolving nature of democracy in Virginia; (b) continuities and change between “Ol’ Virginny” and modern Virginia; (c) the role of Reconstruction in configuring Virginia’s racial and political divisions; (d) the resolution of the conflict between Funders and Readjusters into Virginia’s “pay-as-you-go” philosophy; (e) social and cultural change in Virginia; and (f) the rural machine politics of Harry F. Byrd. Written history is compiled by historians working from various sources of uneven quality and in various times, subject to a wide variety of influences. This course will--in connection with the study of Virginia history--consider the sources available to historians of Virginia, and will examine several of the ways historians have made use of source materials at different times and under various influences. The course will help students develop their skills of critical understanding and analysis of various types of materials. Readings will average approximately 100 pages per week, and will be drawn from both primary documents and secondary material. Among the readings will be selections from: Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction; Jane Daily, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia; Edward L. Ayers, The Promise of the New South; Charles Pearson, The Readjuster Movement in Virginia; Nancy and Charles Perdue, Talk About Trouble; and Ronald Heinemann, Harry Byrd of Virginia. The class will meet twice per week. Approximately half of each class will be spent in lecture and half in a class discussion. There will be a multiple choice/short answer mid-term exam, one 5-7 page paper involving the use of primary source materials, one group project, and a final examination requiring one short and one long essay.

HIUS 330 - History of UVA in the 20th Century (3)

Prof. Phyllis Leffler

TR 11:00 – 12:15

CAB 332

We hear much about "Mr. Jefferson's University" in its nineteenth century beginnings, but little about how it evolved toward the nationally and internationally prominent institution it is today. How did this evolution occur? What 19th century values are still recognizable? How did tradition and change intersect throughout the 20th century? Who were the individuals who helped to lead this university, and what were their pressing concerns? How does this university compare to others in the region and in the nation at specific moments in time? These are some of the questions we will explore. To fully understand this university, however, it will be necessary to know something about the context of the growth of higher education in the United States. Issues of administration, student culture, academic culture, and state and federal initiatives in higher education will be integrated into the course. Course readings/assignments include the following: Christopher Lucas, American Higher Education: A History; Susan Tyler Hitchcock, The University of Virginia: A Pictorial Histor. Course packet at Brillig Books (ca. 300 pages) Web-based readings of primary documents, student papers, exhibits Use of alumni surveys by Lawn residents and women before 1970 (both in Special Collections and on database) Oral history project based on database created from oral history collection or analysis of new material from the UVA Oral History Archives. Written assignments will include an evaluation of alumni questionnaires (ca. 5 pages), a mid-term take home paper (5-7 pp.), an oral history project and paper (ca. 5-7 pages), and a final paper (ca. 10-12 pages). There will be no in-class exams. This course meets the second writing requirement, and will be of interest to students in American History, American Studies, Women's Studies, African-American History, Education. The course will use discussion of assigned readings extensively.

HIUS 350 - 20th Century U.S. Social Policy (3)

Prof. Guian McKee

MW 3:30 – 4:45

CAB 345

This course will examine the historical relationship between work, poverty, and the development of social policy in the United States during the twentieth century. Topics of particular focus will include the changing structure of the American workplace, shifts in societal conceptions about the place of the state in American life, and alterations in both the nature of poverty and perceptions of the poor in the United States. We will examine the interaction of these issues in shaping social policy, as well as the role of race, gender, and political economy in defining these important dimensions of twentieth century American life. As a result, the course will approach the history of American social policy from the “ground up” and from the “top down”: we will study both the origin and development of broad public policy structures and the experiences of Americans (both elites and non-elites) who determined the course of such policies and lived with their results. Students will engage in detailed historical explorations of progressivism, labor organizing, maternalist welfare policies, workplace reform, Social Security, AFDC (welfare), public housing, urban renewal, employment policy, job training, the War on Poverty, Medicare and Medicaid, the welfare rights movement, and the reaction against the welfare state. The course will conclude with an examination of critical social policy developments in the last fifteen years, including the failure of the Clinton health care plan, the Welfare Reform Act of 1996, and recent proposals for social security and Medicare reform. While primarily a lecture course, this class will provide extensive opportunities for student discussion of assigned readings and other materials. Course requirements will include a research paper of approximately 10 pages, a mid-term and final, regular attendance, and active participation in class discussions. The weekly reading will average 150 pages. Texts may include Michael B. Katz, In the Shadow of the Poorhouse: A Social History of Welfare in America; Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930; Theda Skocpol, Social Policy in the United States: Future Possibilities in Historical Perspective; Jill Quadagno, The Color of Welfare: How Racism Undermined The War on Poverty; Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White; David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America, as well as scholarly articles, primary sources, films, and other historical material.

HIUS 366 - Afro-American History Since 1865 (3)

Prof. Claudrena Harold

TR 9:30 – 10:45

MRY 115

This course examines the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Topics to be explored include blacks’ varied response to the rise of Jim Crow; the social and political upheavals brought about by the massive migration of Southern blacks to the industrial North during the First and Second World Wars; the achievements and failures of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; and the continuing significance of race in American society. This course will explore the political careers of such noted black activists as Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Huey Newton. Significant attention will also be given to lesser known freedom fighters who struggled to create a more democratic America. Possible textbooks for the course include Tera Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After the Civil War, Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression, Beth Tompkins Bates’ Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945, Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Struggle, Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, William L. Van Deburg’s New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, Robert F. Williams’ Negroes With Guns, Komozi Woodard’s Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940-1980, Toni Cade Bambara’s The Black Woman Anthology, and Ronald W. Walters’ Freedom is Not Enough: Black Voters, Black Candidates and American Presidential Politics. Students will read an average of 200 pages per week. Grades will be based on class attendance and participation, three quizzes, and three exams.

HIUS 367 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Prof. Julian Bond

TR 2:00 – 2:50

WIL 402

This lecture course examines the history, philosophies, tactics, events and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward. The Southern movement - variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement - was a black-lead, interracial mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation by the mid-60s. Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping and occasionally complimentary phases - lobbying, litigation and protest. In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights. In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation and the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools. The last phase, lasting a decade from '54 through '65, was a decade of protests - boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations - as well as grass-roots organizing campaigns that laid the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s. Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength and followers from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation. The movement's well-known and lesser-known proponents and their strategies will be examined. Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five- to seven-page papers.

Texts and videos: Roy Wilkins (with Tom Matthews), Standing Fast; James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries; Julian Bond and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, "Eyes on the Prize - America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965", # 1 to 6; "America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965 - 1985,” # 1 and 2; "The Road to Brown.”

HIUS 401 - African American Protest in the 20th Century (4)

Prof. Claudrena Harold

T 1:00 – 3:30

MCL 2007

This seminar examines African Americans' protracted struggle against racist practices and institutional structures, economic exploitation, and cultural imperialism. To better understand the diversity and breadth of black oppositional activity in the twentieth-century, students will examine the protest activities of a number of black leaders and movement organizations, including Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cyril Briggs and the African Blood Brotherhood, Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam, Angela Davis, Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Deacons of Self-Defense, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Significant attention will be given to their debates over the best way to deal with the economic consequences of white supremacy and global capitalism, the usefulness of armed self-defense as a weapon in the fight against racial injustice, and the problem of sexism within the black liberation movement. Over the course of the semester, students will be introduced to the research methods and techniques used by historians. We will not only explore historians’ use of oral and written texts, but will also reflect on the ways in which scholars’ theoretical and political viewpoints inform their interpretation of primary sources. Students will have the opportunity to further develop their historical skills through a series of assignments designed to assist them in identifying research topics and questions; interpreting primary texts; and substantiating arguments with historical evidence. Possible texts for the course include W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Manning Marable’s W.E.B. Du Bois: Black Radical Democrat, Angela Davis’ Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, Lance Hill’s The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, Earl Lewis’ In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia, William Sales’ From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Struggle, and Manning Marable’s The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life.

 

Department of Media Studies

MDST 356 - Jim Crow and American Cinema (3)

Prof. Robert Jackson

T 3:30 – 6:30

CAB 311

No description available.

 

Department of Music

MUSI 207 - Roots Music in America (3)

Prof. Richard Will

MW 10:00 – 10:50

MRY 209

According to mainstream media, "roots music" like gospel, blues, country, folk, and bluegrass nourishes more popular genres such as rock and hip-hop, while also expressing the emotional and social concerns of (mainly) rural African-American and White American communities. We will examine both claims by studying the origins and development of roots genres and the way they are depicted in films, criticism, politics, and elsewhere.

MUSI 208 - African American Gospel Music (3)

Prof. Melvin Butler

TR 2:00 – 3:15

OCH 107

No description available.

MUSI 309 - Performance in Africa (4)

Michelle Kisliuk

TR 3:30 – 4:20

OCH 107

No description available.

MUSI 312 - Jazz Studies (3)

Prof. Scott Deveaux

MW 2:00 – 3:15

OCH 107

No description available.

MUSI 369B - African Drumming and Dance (2)

Michelle Kisliuk

TR 5:15-7:15

OCH 107

This course may be repeated for credit. This is a practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies and Bagandou farmers), with the intention of performing informally throughout the semester and formally, with guest artists, at the end of the semester. We will give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and a polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, high attention, interaction, and faithful,/prompt attendance are required of each class member. Each member is also respectfully expected to help prepare the classroom (move chairs, sweep, set up drums/sticks) and to restore the space to classroom style at the end of each meeting.

 

Department of Politics

PLAP 370 - Racial Politics (3)

Prof. Lynn Sanders

TR 11:00 – 11:50

MCL 2014

Examines how attributions of racial difference have shaped American Politics. Topics include how race affects American political partisanship, campaigns and elections, public policy, public opinion, and American political science. Prerequisite: One course in PLAP or instructor permission.

PLAP 382 - Civil Liberties and Civil Rights (3)

Prof. David Obrien

MW 1:00 – 1:50

MRY 209

Studies judicial construction and interpretation of civil rights and liberties reflected by Supreme Court decisions. Includes line-drawing between rights and obligations.

PLIR 331 - Ethics and Human Rights in West Africa (3)

Prof. Michael J. Smith

MW 11:00 – 11:50

WIL 402

How do issues of human rights and ethical choice operate in the world of states? Do cosmopolitan ideals now hold greater sway among states than traditional ideas of national interests during the Cold War? Considers ideas of philosophers like Thucydides and Kant in addition to concrete cases and dilemmas taken from contemporary international relations. Specific issues include defining human rights, “humanitarian intervention,” just war theory, and the moral responsibilities of leaders and citizens.

PLIR 424E - Africa: Security and Insecurity (3)

Prof. Flora Jones

M 3:00 – 5:30

CAB 138

No description available.

PLPT 302 - African American Political Thought (3)

Prof. Lawrie Balfour

MW 12:30 – 1:45

CAB 319

This course examines key figures and central concepts in African American political thought from the 19th through the 21st centuries. Issues addressed include the relationship between slavery and American democracy, separation vs. integration, and the promise and limitations of formal equality. Prerequisite: one course in PLPT or instructor permission.

PLCP 581 - Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa (3)

Prof. Robert Fatton

M 1:00 – 2:30

CAN 130

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.

 

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 341 - Witchcraft, Healing, and Popular Religion in Africa (3)

Prof. Amy Nichols-Belo

M 3:30 – 6:15

CAU 112

This course seeks to examine contemporary religious beliefs and practices in a variety of cultural settings throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Through ethnographic texts, documentaries, and feature films, we will investigate healing practices, current ideas about witchcraft and magic, as well as popular religious expression in Islamic and Christian practice. We will focus on the connections of post-colonial politics, HIV/AIDS, and economic marginalization to religious belief and practice. Since this course is a 300-level seminar, students will be expected to actively prepare for and participate in class discussions, present texts in-class, and write a 12-15 page research paper. Additional course requirements include two quizzes and a final examination.

RELA 410 - Yoruba Religions (3)

Prof. Benjamin Ray

TR 9:30 – 10:45

CAB 312

Studies Yoruba traditional religion, ritual art, independent churches, and religious themes in contemporary literature in Africa and the Americas.

RELC 323 – Pentacostalism (3)

Prof. Valerie Cooper

T 3:30 – 6:00

CAB 332

This course will study the history, practices, theology, and praxis of Pentecostalism, the fastest growing Christian movement in the world, from its origins among poor whites and recently freed African Americans to its phenomenal expansion in places like South America, Asia and Africa. The course will explore Pentecostalism’s theological and historical relationship to the Holiness, Apostolic, and Charismatic movements, as well as Pentecostal belief in phenomena like speaking in tongues, healing, miracles, and prophecy. Finally, the course will use race, class, and gender analysis to evaluate the cultural influences of Pentecostalism in the US and elsewhere in the world.

 

Department of Sociology

SOC 222 - Contemporary Social Problems (3)

Prof. Matthew Hughey

TR 11:00 – 12:15

WIL 301

An analysis of the causes and consequences of current social problems in the United States: Race and ethnic relations, poverty, crime and delinquency, the environment, drugs, and problems of educational institutions.

SOC 410 - African-American Communities (3)

Prof. M. Rick Turner

TR 3:30 – 4:45

CAB 320

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear more comprehensive understanding of the history, struggle and diversity of the African-American community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the African-American community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of their cultural history. the course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for African-American people's sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussions, lectures, videos, readings and class presentation as well as written assignments, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamic of the African-American community.

Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

POTR 427 - Afro-Brazilian Civilization (3)

Prof. David Haberly

MWF 11:00 – 11:50

CAB 424

A general introduction, in English, to the literature and culture of Brazil from 1500 to the present, with special emphasis upon the role of Afro-Brazilians in the creation of that literature and culture. No knowledge of Portuguese is required, and lectures and readings will be in English. The course includes discussions of the nation's social and historical development, but these topics will be presented through readings in the major works of Brazilian literature, including the works of important Afro-Brazilian authors.

SPAN 419 - Critical Race Theory (3)

Prof. Ruth Hill

TR 9:30 – 10:45

CAB 319

This course is designed to introduce advanced undergraduate students and graduate students to critical race theory (crt) as an offshoot of critical legal studies (cls), which coined the term “critical race theory,” and as a broader, interdisciplinary body of scholarship and commentary on race and its intersections with gender, class, religion and sexuality. All readings and discussion will be in English. *Enrollment instructor permission only managed through electronic waiting lists. Prerequisites for Spanish majors and minors: 311 and 330; for all others: at least two courses completed in a social science or an interdisciplinary program such as American Studies or African-American Studies. Only distinguished majors and graduate students may enroll in 591.*

Fall 2005

 

African-American and African Studies

AAS 101: Africa in the Atlantic World (4)

Prof. Scot French

Tuesdays–Thursdays 12:30-1:45 plus discussion

Wilson 301

This team-taught course is part of a year-long survey of the history and culture of Africans in Africa and people of African descent in the Americas. During this semester, we will cover a variety of topics, including African societies before 1800, the Atlantic slave trade, literatures of the Atlantic World, the origins and development of New World plantation societies, Africana religions, life and labor in the United States, and the protracted process of emancipation. Students should come away with an understanding of the major problems, events, and people that shaped the African-American experience. At the same time, we will gain a sense of how that experience fit into the history of people of African descent in the larger Atlantic world. Students are encouraged, but not required, to take both semesters of this course.

AAS 305: Plantations in Africa and the Caribbean (3)

(cross-listed as ANTH 324)

Prof. Hanan Sabea

Tuesdays-Thursdays 12:30-1:45

Cabell 345

This course seeks a comparative analysis of plantations in Africa and the Americas by examining them as places of work and spaces of sociality. It examines the historical linkages between Africa and the Americas in the establishment and reproduction of plantations as they relate to the colonial empires, the differentiated entrenchment of capitalism around the globe, and correspondent movement of ideas, people and things. We will examine the lives people made on plantations as documented in the practices and experiences of slaves, workers, planters, and traders, and explore the socio-economic and political implications of plantations of the localities in which they have been operating.

AAS 306: The Ethics of Black Power (3)

(cross-listed as RELC 306)

Prof. Corey D.B. Walker

Tuesdays-Thursdays 11-12:15

Cabell 330

In his now classic text Blood in My Eye, George Jackson writes, “All revolution should be love inspired.” This lecture course will plumb the depths of Jackson’s remark by critically interrogating the ethical dimensions of the Black Power concept and the cultural, ideological, and political interventions influenced by this conceptual revolution. We will explore the ethics of Black Power in relation to the revolutionary exploits of artists, activists, and intellectuals in their tremendous efforts to challenge and transform the capitalist, racist, and sexist hegemony of the United States and the Western world in the second half of the twentieth century. To this end, we will revisit the work of a number of thinkers, movements, and cultural and political formations, including Albert Cleage, Angela Davis, Vicki Garvin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Larry Neal, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, February 1st Movement, SOBU/YOBU, African Liberation Support Committee, Black Arts Movement, Malcolm X Liberation University, Institute of the Black World, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. We will also assess the ethical parameters of the various ideological tendencies that influenced the conceptual formulation and political articulation of Black Power including Black Nationalism, Feminism, Liberalism, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and Pan-Africanism.

AAS 323: The Rise and Fall of the Slave South (3)

(cross-listed as HIUS 323)

Prof. Edward L. Ayers

Mondays–Wednesdays 11-11:50 plus discussion

Minor 125

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the sixteenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slaveowners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians.
Requirements include substantial research in primary documents in Alderman Library. Research topics are broad and require students willing to tackle open-ended assignments. Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course.

AAS 405A: Race and American Islam (3)

Prof. Jamillah A. Karim

Wednesdays 1–3:30

Minor 108

This course will explore how race has helped to shape a distinctively American Islam. Focusing on the experiences of African American, South Asian, and Arab Muslims, the course will examine both black and immigrant responses to American racism. How do American Muslims’ distinct ethnic histories produce different forms of protest to white supremacy? How do they produce different levels of assimilation into the dominant society? How do Islamic ideals inform their resistance and accommodation into the larger American society? And how do they use Islam to overcome racial barriers? The course will also examine the intersections of race, class, and gender. How does the interplay of race-class-gender identities create competing and overlapping notions of American Islam?

AAS 405B: Geographies of the Black Atlantic (3)

Ms. Mieka Brand

Tuesdays 1-3:30

Minor 108

How do people shape the spaces they live in? In what ways are people's lives and experiences themselves shaped by the spaces within which they occur? This course takes 'space' as the central theme for exploring literature on the African diaspora. Ideas about space (and related concepts such as place, landscape, geography, etc.) will grounds us as we study scholarly works by and about people of African descent. Readings will be drawn from a broad span of disciplines, including history, anthropology, geography, literature, cultural studies, and material culture. In our discussions will tie these readings together as we study their varying perspectives on geographies of the Black Atlantic. We will consider questions such as: What are the spaces that people of African descent have carved out for themselves?and how do they reflect particular cultural identities? How have spaces of segregation and division (Plantations, Jim Crow cars, Urban ghettos, for example) informed ideas about race and racial identities? How have African descendants re-imagined and reclaimed marginalized spaces? How have movements (geographical, political or social) contributed to people's understandings of the Black Atlantic?
Readings for the course will include works by Paul Gilroy ("Routes and Roots"); John Jackson (Harlemworld); Liisa Malkki (Purity and Exile); St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton (Black Metropolis); Griffin and Fish (Stranger in the Village); Saunders and Shackleford (Urban Renewal and the end of Black Culture in Charlottesville, Virginia); Upton and Vlach (Common Places); and others. Assignments for the course will include two short papers (~5 pages each), two response papers to fieldsite visits (~1-2 pages each) and a final research project (~10 pages). This course fulfills the second writing requirement.

Anthropology

ANTH 250: Health of Black Folks (3)

Prof. Wende Marshall

Tuesdays-Thursdays 3:30-4:20

Minor 125

This is a course in medical anthropology which will analyze the relationship between black bodies and biomedicine both historically and in the present. Co-taught by Norm Oliver, M.D-(Department of Family Medicine, UVA Health Systems), an anthropologist/physician, and Wende Marshall-a medical anthropologist, the course will offer both political economic, and post-structuralist lenses with which to interpret the individual and social health and disease of African-Americans. Selected topics include the black female body in the middle passage and slavery; the use of race in the human genome project; black bodies as research subjects for biomedical science, and the epidemic of cancer and HIV among African -Americans.

ANTH 324: Plantations in Africa and the Caribbean (3)

(cross-listed as AAS 305)

Prof. Hanan Sabea

Tuesdays-Thursdays 12:30-1:45

Cabell 345

This course seeks a comparative analysis of plantations in Africa and the Americas by examining them as places of work and spaces of sociality. It examines the historical linkages between Africa and the Americas in the establishment and reproduction of plantations as they relate to the colonial empires, the differentiated entrenchment of capitalism around the globe, and correspondent movement of ideas, people and things. We will examine the lives people made on plantations as documented in the practices and experiences of slaves, workers, planters, and traders, and explore the socio-economic and political implications of plantations of the localities in which they have been operating.

ANTH 357: Peoples & Cultures of the Caribbean (3)

Ms. Yadira Perez

Tuesdays-Thursdays 1100-1215

Ruffner G004C

This course examines the cultures, societies, and histories of the Caribbean, focusing primarily on the English-, Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean. Thematically, the course focuses on processes of racialization, effects of globalization, patterns of family and kinship, experiences of labor and migration; religion and resistance; and tourism.

ANTH 526: History Production and Collective Memory (3)

Prof. Hanan Sabea

Thursdays 5:00-7:30

Cabell 130

This course is an examination of the meaning and relationship between the past and present, memory and history in anthropological debates. Specifically, it seeks an analysis of the conceptual and methodological boundaries between history production and collective memory paradigms. Themes addressed will include the making of public and official history, alternative histories, the politics of memory, ownership of the past, writing and archives, and the role of narratives of the past in the drawing of boundaries between groups, along the lines of race, gender, ethnicity, nation, and religion. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

ANTH 528: Race, Progress, and the West (3)

Prof. Wende Marshall

Wednesdays 3:30-6

Cabell 338

This course examines theories and practices of race and otherness, in order to analyze and interpret constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of race from the late 18th to the 21st centuries. The focus varies from year to year, and may include "race, ?progress? and the West," "gender, race and power," and "white supremacy." The consistent theme is that race is neither a biological nor a cultural category, but a method and theory of social organization, an alibi for inequality, and a strategy for resistance. Cross listed as AAS 528. Prerequisite: ANTH 101, 301, or other introductory or middle-level class.

ANTH 529B: The Outsiders: African-American Pioneers in Anthropology (3)

Prof. Gertrude Fraser

Tuesdays-Thursdays 9:30-10:45

Cabell B029

There is a mistaken notion that African American scholars were absent both from Anthropology's intellectual development and the debates which drew on anthropological concepts and research. This course seeks to correct that perception. With an emphasis on the period between 1900 and 1960, the course will document the work and presence of African American pioneers in Anthropology and explore the politics and practices that render their work invisible to us today. The course will also try to understand how these individuals carved an intellectual space for themselves inside and outside the discipline under racist and exclusionary conditions. We will end by assessing the contributions made and lessons offered to contemporary Anthropology and Anthropologists by these hidden ancestors. Course Satisfies Second Writing Requirement.

Art

ARTH 255: African American Art (4)

Instructor: TBA

Tuesdays-Thursdays 2-3:15 plus discussion

Campbell 160

No description available.

English

ENAM 313: African American Survey (3)

Prof. Deborah McDowell

Tuesdays-Thursdays 11-12:15

Cabell 320

Analyzes the earliest examples of African-American literature, emphasizing African cultural themes and techniques that were transformed by the experience of slavery as that experience met European cultural and religious practices. Studies essays, speeches, pamphlets, poetry, and songs. Restricted to third- and fourth-years.

ENAM 381: Black Protest Narrative (3)

Prof. Marlon Ross

Tuesdays-Thursdays 11-12:15

Minor 130

No description available.

ENAM 381: Reading the Black College campus (3)

Prof. K. Ian Grandison

Tuesdays-Thursdays 3:30-4:45

Cabell 340

No description available.

ENAM 481C: Representations of Slavery(3)

Prof. Stephen Railton

Mondays-Wednesdays

BRN 312

No description available.

ENAM 581: Trauma and African-American Literature(3)

Prof. Lisa Woolfork

Tuesdays-Thursdays 11-12:15

BRN 332

No description available.

ENLT 247M Black Women Writers(3)

Prof. Lisa Woolfork

Tuesdays-Thursdays 9:30-10:45

Cabell 334

No description available.

French language and Literature

FREN 411: Francophone Literatures of Africa (3)

Prof. Kandioura Dramé

Tuesdays-Thursdays 11-12:15

Wilson 141B

Survey of 20th century Francophone literature of Africa. Colonial literature and Assimilation; Negritude, Nationalism and Identity; Postcolonial literature; Feminism; Literature and Censorship; Language and Literature; Theatre and ritual performance; and Oral literature as a major intertext will all be examined through novels, poems, and plays by contemporary African writers in French. Authors will include Senghor, B. Diop, C. Beyala, M. Beti, A. Laabi, Djebar, Mimouni, Utamsi, Werewere Liking, Rabemanjara, and Ken Bugul. Weekly response papers, brief mid-semester oral presentations and bibliographies of the selected research subjects and a research paper (12-15 pages/ 570; 20-25 pages/870) are required.

FREN 443: Africa in Cinema (3)

Prof. Kandioura Dramé

Tuesdays-Thursdays 2-3:15

Randall 212

This course is a study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. It deals with the representations of African cultures by filmmakers from different cultural backgrounds and studies the ways in which their perspectives on Africa are often informed by their own social and ideological positions as well as the demands of exoticism. It also examines the constructions of the African as the other and the kinds of responses such constructions have elicited from Africa?s filmmakers. These filmic inventions are analyzed through a selection of French, British, American, and African films by such directors as John Huston, S. Pollack, J-J Annaud, M. Radford, Ngangura Mweze, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cisse, Gaston Kabore, Amadou Seck, Dani Kouyate, Brian Tilley, Jean-Marie Teno on a variety of subjects relative to the image of Africa in cinema. The final grade will be based on one mid-semester paper (select a film by an African filmmaker and provide a sequential reconstruction of the story based on the methods of P. S. Vieyra and of F. Boughedir ), a final paper (7-10 pages), an oral presentation and contributions to discussions. Each oral presentation should contribute to the mid-semester paper and to the final research paper. The final paper should be analytical, well documented and written in clear, grammatical French using correct film terminology supplied with this description.

FRTR 329: Contemporary Caribbean Culture (3)

Prof. A. James Arnold

Mondays-Wednesdays 3:30-4:45

An upper-division course in Caribbean culture studied through literary texts published in English, French, and Spanish. All texts will be read in English. No knowledge of French or Spanish is required, although it will be advantageous to have a foreign language. Students who have done well in this course in the past have had a solid introduction to the Caribbean either in Anthropology, Afro-American studies, or History. The introduction to Comparative Literature (CPLT 201, 202) can also be helpful.
Interpretation of cultural materials will stress the process of creolization in the region. Differences between Caribbean and US definitions of ethnicity will be stressed, as will attitudes toward gender roles. Authors who have been read in recent offerings of this course include Alexis, Carpentier, Césaire, Danticat, Depestre, Naipaul, Rhys, Santiago, and Walcott.
This course satisfies the Non-Western Studies requirement in the College. Course requirements: Midterm exam and substantial term paper.

History

HIAF 201: Early African History Through the Era of the Slave Trade (4)

Prof. Joseph C. Miller

Tuesdays-Thursdays 9:30-10:45 plus discussions

MCL 1004

From the mists of the once-dark continent's unwritten past Early African History draws out Africans' distinctive achievements in culture, politics, and economic strategies from the dawn of history through the eighteenth century. The course necessarily starts very broadly and then moves into greater detail from the millennium before the Present Era (c. 1000 bce) through the peak of Atlantic slaving in the last 1700s. HIAF 201 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the ironic interplay of tragedy and ambition in a continent increasingly trapped in exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans and Americans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800.
HIAF 201 is a lower-division introductory survey. The instructor presents the major themes of the early history of the continent in lectures twice each week. Students meet additionally in discussion sections for reviews of readings, map quizzes, and preparation for written assignments. Requirements include weekly short map quizzes, a mid-term examination (only the better of two tries counts), and a final examination (format to be negotiated with the class). The course belongs to the Afro-American and African Studies curriculum, meets the "non-western/non-modern" distribution requirement for the major in History, and qualifies for the College "non-western perspectives" area requirement. As it also meets the College "historical perspectives" requirement, we will consistently focus on what makes the vision of Africa's past presented in the course truly historical--not an uncomplicated question for Africa.
Readings revolve around weekly assignments in a new text (Gilbert and Reynolds, Africa in World History) with supplementary references to maps in Shillington, History of Africa, and Newman, Peopling of Africa. Selected chapters in other books and professional articles introduce the distinctive methodologies of doing history without written sources (including the famous Mande oral epic Sundiata), highlight interpretive ("historiographical") issues, and consider concepts relevant to understanding early Africa . The total number of pages assigned runs at approximately 1200.
HIAF 201 presumes no prior knowledge of Africa or experience with the study of history. Since the subject is so new to nearly everyone in the course, consistent application and preparation are expected, particularly early in the term. Students in all four of their undergraduate years and in all colleges of the University complete the course with success. It is a challenging and rewarding opportunity to discover a once-neglected story of Africa and its place in world history and to examine erroneous assumptions about Africa that modern Americans -- students in HIAF 201 included -- do not know they make.

HIAF 302: History of Southern Africa (3)

Prof. John Mason

Tuesdays-Thursdays 9:30-10:45

Cabell 323

HIAF 302 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The emphasis is on South Africa . HIAF 302 begins with a look at the pre-colonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of the conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.
By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest did not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs.
Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by non-racialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.

HIAF 402: Race and Popular Culture in South Africa and the United States (4)

Prof. John Mason

Tuesdays–Thursdays 2–3:15 (4 credits)

Cabell 332

HIAF 402 is a colloquium (or seminar) in comparative South African and American history. We will look at the ways in which popular culture--especially music, film, and sports--reflects South African and American racial categories and identities and, at the same time, helps to create them. Course materials include scholarship, biography, autobiography, music, and film.
South Africa and the American South are like distant cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries owe much of their early economic development to slavery. In both complex systems of racial domination shaped society for generations during and after the emancipation of the slaves. And in both the interracial struggle against racism gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.
A close look at popular culture will open a window on what is perhaps the central irony of both South African and American cultural history--that the harsh realities of racial oppression and racial segregation have produced a culture that is not segregated at all. It is neither black nor white, neither African nor European, but utterly and thoroughly mixed. It is no accident, for instance, that the most distinctively American forms of popular music--blues and spirituals, bluegrass and country, jazz and rock--were born of mixed African and European cultural parentage.
Students will participate actively in class discussions and prepare a research paper on a subject of their own choosing.

HIAF 404: Independent Study in African History (3)

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HIUS 323: The Rise and Fall of the Slave South (3)
(cross-listed as AAS 323)

Prof. Edward L. Ayers

Mondays–Wednesdays 11-1150 plus discussion

Minor 125

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the sixteenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slaveowners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians.
Requirements include substantial research in primary documents in Alderman Library. Research topics are broad and require students willing to tackle open-ended assignments. Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course.

HIUS 328: History of Virginia 1865

Prof. Crandall Shifflett

Tuesdays-Thursdays 12:30-1:45

Maury 115

This course covers the social, political, and economic development of Virginia up to 1865. The course examines in detail seven key subjects in Virginia 's colonial and antebellum history:

• Encounters and Exchanges Between Virginia's Indians and European settlers
• Regional Differences in Settlement, Politics, and Society
• Slavery's emergence and development
• Origins and Legacies of the American Revolution
• Thomas Jefferson and American Society and Politics
• 19th-century Slavery and Nat Turner's Rebellion
• Secession and Civil War in Virginia

This course is intended to provide students with detailed and complex analysis of the major events, themes, and people in Virginia 's history to 1865. We will explore the largest issues of the period not only through political leaders but also through the lives of ordinary Virginians. Primary and secondary readings and 3-4 films cover the key subjects we will focus on. The course requirements include two 5-7 page papers, a midterm and a final exam. Participation in class discussions is expected. Likely readings include, Kupperman, Indians and English, Berlin , Many Thousands Gone, Issac, The Transformation of Virginia, Ellis, American Sphinx, Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies, and selected online texts and documents.

HIUS 347: American Labor (3)

Prof. Claudrena Harold

Mondays-Wednesdays-Fridays 12-12:50

Cabell B030

This course examines the cultural lives, labor struggles, and political activities of the American working class from the end of the Civil War to the present. Over the course of the semester, students will analyze how working women and men both shaped and were shaped by the rise of big business during the Gilded Age, the social upheavals of the World War I era, the economic hardships brought about by the Great Depression, the social policies of the New Deal, the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, and continuing debates over the meanings of work, citizenship, and democracy. Significant attention will be given to the organizations workers created to advance their economic interests. The course will explore the success and failures of the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the Communist Party, among other groups. A major issue to be explored in our discussions of working-class movements will be the ways in which laboring people have been divided along racial, gender, ethnic, and regional lines. Since working-class history is about more than the struggle of laboring people to improve their material condition, this course will also focus on other topics, such as workers? leisure activities, customs and thoughts, and religious beliefs.
Possible texts for the course include Nelson Lichtenstein, Susan Strasser, and Roy Rosenzweig's Who Built America ? Working People and the Nation's Economy, Politics, Culture, and Society, 1877 to the Present , Linda Cohen's Making A New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939, Michael Honey's Southern Labor and Black Civil Rights: Organizing Memphis Workers, Thomas Sugrue's The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit, Chana Kai Lee's For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed,Or Not Getting By in America. Students' grades will be based on class attendance and three exams.

HIUS 367: History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Prof. Julian Bond

Tuesdays-Thursdays 1-1:50 plus discussion

Maury 209

This lecture course will examine the history, philosophies, tactics, events, and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 to the middle 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-40s forward.
The Southern movement - variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement - was a black-led, interracial mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation by the mid-60s. Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping and occasionally complimentary phases - lobbying, litigation and protest. In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights. In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation and the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools. The last phase, lasting a decade from '54 through '65, was a decade of protests - boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations - as well as grass-roots organizing campaigns that laid the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s.
Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength and followers from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation. The movement's well-known and lesser-known proponents and their strategies will be examined.
Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five- to seven-page papers.

HIUS 401: Southern Progressivism: Government, Economy, Gender, and Race, 1890-1920 (4)

Prof. George Gilliam

Tuesdays 6-8:30

Wilson 141A

Progressivism has been called the "formative birthtime of basic institutions, social relations, and political divisions of United States society as it evolved towards and beyond the mid-twentieth century." Though the period is best-remembered as the time when the public regulation of big business started, the seeds of today's civil rights, environmental protection, and public health and occupational safety movements also were planted during the progressive era.
Southern Progressivism has been complicated by its intersection with virulent racism. State constitutional conventions held in the South between 1890 and 1910 to create the framework for progressive regulation of business at the same time took steps effectively to disfranchise African-Americans and poor whites. C. Vann Woodward concluded that "Southern progressivism generally was progressivism for white men only, and after the poll tax took its toll not all the white men were included."
Scholars have not fully explored the aftermaths of those state constitutional conventions in the South, however, and have left to others to explore whether progressive administrative institutions regulated or promoted business, and to consider the role such regulators played in the implementation of Jim Crow laws. The enforcement of Jim Crow laws and the use of black convict labor in the South provided an impetus for Americans to form the NAACP during this period. Rapid industrialization and urbanization pushed women to organize for protective legislation and for reforms in public health and education. This seminar will provide students the opportunity to explore the intersections of progressive reformers, regulators, the business communities, and the forces of racial segregation. Students interested in turn-of-the-century race regulation, the early women's movements, as well as those who are interested in the relationship between the variegated business communities and progressive regulators should be rewarded. The common readings and seminar discussions also will expose students to stark divisions within the business communities as well as to the nascent women's movement and to issues of race and class that seem particularly pertinent to the changing social landscape of the period.
The course will include five weeks of required readings designed to provide a common understanding of the period and a range of different historical experiences and questions relating to Progressivism. The average weekly reading load will be 120 pages and will include selections from traditional works such as Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform, from revisionist works such as Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism, as well as more recent scholarship including Edward L. Ayers' The Promise of the New South and Noralee Frankel, Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era. By the sixth week of the course students will submit their paper topics in the form of a two-page proposal that outlines their preliminary research plan. During the next several weeks students will meet individually with the instructor. The entire class will also meet several times during the middle of the course so that students can discuss their research progress, learn about each other's work, and help their peers with any research obstacles they may encounter. The primary goal of the seminar is to assist students in learning how to conduct their own research and will culminate in a paper 25-30 pages in length, based on original research in primary sources. That paper is intended to fulfill the second writing requirement.

HIUS 401: African-American Protest in Twentieth-Century America (4)

Prof. Claudrena Harold

Tuesdays 3:30-6

Randall 212

This seminar examines African Americans' protracted struggle against political disfranchisement, social injustice, lynching and white terrorism, racially discriminatory employment structures, and unfair housing policies sanctioned by the federal government. Students will explore not only the diversity and breadth of black oppositional activity, but also the importance of dissent in the making of American democratic traditions. Some of the organizations and activists to be examined in this course include W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, Malcolm X and the Organization of African American Unity, Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective, Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party, and Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam. A central issue to be explored in our examination of these and lesser known activists will be their efforts to deal with the economic consequences of white supremacy and racial capitalism. How black nationalists, socialists, and communists have differed in their ideas about the best way for working-class blacks to improve their material condition will be a question examined closely. Significant attention will also be given to other important issues and debates, including the international dimensions of the black freedom struggle, the usefulness of armed self-defense as a weapon in the fight against racial justice, and the problem of sexism within the black liberation movement.
Possible texts for the course include Charles Payne and Adam Green's Time Longer Than Rope: A Century of African American Activism1850-1950, Tony Martin's Race First: The Organization and Ideological Struggles of Marcus Garvey, Penny M. Von Eschen's Race Against Empire, Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957, Chana Kai Lee's For Freedom's Sake: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, William Sales, From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, Lance Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, Robert Williams, Negroes With Guns, and Charles Jones' The Black Panther Party Reconsidered. Students' grades will be based on class attendance and participation, response papers, and a research paper.

HIUS 401: Slavery in the Making of the Antebellum South (4)

Prof. Calvin Schermerhorn

Thursdays 1-3:30

Cabell 426

This seminar will examine the institution of slavery as a way to chart social developments in the fifty years before the American Civil War. Beginning with the argument that slavery underpinned and permeated all areas of antebellum society, we will investigate how men and women of European and African descent interacted with one another in the context of social networks and communities, real or imagined. The developments we will cover include westward expansion and what it meant for family networks, free and enslaved, the rise of evangelicals, anti-abolitionist and anti-black violence, slave markets and slave labor, racial identities in a slave society, and the idea or ideology of emerging southern sectional identity. The seminar will conclude with a re-evaluation of the opening argument, which will incorporate the results of students? research.
The course will include several weeks of readings, which will introduce major themes in nineteenth century southern history. Selections include: Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slavery; Joan Cashin, A Family Venture: Men and Women on the Southern Frontier; David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828-1861: Toward Civil War; Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market; Donald Matthews, Religion in the Old South; and Joshua Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex and Families Across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787-1861. Discussions of the readings focus on historical issues and also the authors' use of evidence. They are designed to encourage members of the seminar to think about the possibilities for using primary sources as the bases for historical arguments.
During the balance of the seminar, students will conceptualize, research, and write a 25 page term paper, which will be the primary requirement of the course. Other requirements include two 3 page papers, an oral presentation of research, and a peer review session for drafts late in the semester.

Politics

PLAP 450: Voting Rights and Representation

Prof. David Klein

Mondays-Wednesdays 3:30-4:45

Cabell 130

No description available.

PLCP 581: The Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

Prof. Andrew Lawrence

Thursdays 1-3:30

Cabell 431

No description available.

Religious Studies

RELA 276: African Religion in the Americas (3)

Prof. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mondays-Wednesdays 12-12:50 plus discussion

GIL 141

This course explores the African religious heritage of the Americas. We will concentrate on African-derived religions in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as Cuban Santeria, Haitian Vodou, and the Jamaican Rastafari movement. North American slave religion, the black church, and African-American Islam will also be considered. We will seek to identify their shared religio-cultural "core" while developing an appreciation for the distinctive characteristics and historical contexts of each "New World" tradition. We will address topics such as ideas of God and Spirit; the significance of ritual sacrifice, divination, and initiation; the centrality of trance, ecstatic experience and mediumship; and the role of religion in the struggle for liberation and social justice. Final, Midterm, periodic quizzes on the readings, participation in discussion.

RELA 582: Ritual in African Religion

Prof. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tuesdays 3:30-6

Cabell 234

RELC 306: The Ethics of Black Power(3)

(cross-listed as AAS 306)

Prof. Corey D.B. Walker

Tuesdays-Thursdays 11-12:15

Cabell 330

In his now classic text Blood in My Eye, George Jackson writes, “All revolution should be love inspired.” This lecture course will plumb the depths of Jackson’s remark by critically interrogating the ethical dimensions of the Black Power concept and the cultural, ideological, and political interventions influenced by this conceptual revolution. We will explore the ethics of Black Power in relation to the revolutionary exploits of artists, activists, and intellectuals in their tremendous efforts to challenge and transform the capitalist, racist, and sexist hegemony of the United States and the Western world in the second half of the twentieth century. To this end, we will revisit the work of a number of thinkers, movements, and cultural and political formations, including Albert Cleage, Angela Davis, Vicki Garvin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., Larry Neal, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, February 1st Movement, SOBU/YOBU, African Liberation Support Committee, Black Arts Movement, Malcolm X Liberation University, Institute of the Black World, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. We will also assess the ethical parameters of the various ideological tendencies that influenced the conceptual formulation and political articulation of Black Power including Black Nationalism, Feminism, Liberalism, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and Pan-Africanism.

RELC 345: Kingdom of God in America (3)

Prof. Charles Marsh

Tuesdays-Thursdays 3:30-4:45The course examines the influence of theological ideas on social movements in twentieth century America and asks such questions as: How do religious commitments shape the patterns of everyday living, including economic, political, and sexual organization, as well as racial perception? What role do nineteenth century European and American Protestant theologies play in shaping the American search for "beloved community"? How does social existence influence conceptions of God and religious community? Our main historical focus will be the Civil Rights Movement in the South, but we will also look at counter-cultural movements of the late 1960's, as well as the intentional community movement, the faith-based community-development movement and recent organizing community initiatives.

Psychology

PSYC 404: Stereotyping (3)

Prof. Stacey Sinclair

T 2-4:30

Gilmer 225

Description of course contents: African Americans are lazy. Older adults are senile. Women are dependent. Stereotypes such as these influence each of our lives every day. We may see images in the media that correspond to these stereotypes, some one may use stereotypes to judge us, or we may use stereotypes to judge others. Where do these stereotypes come from? How do they affect those who are subject to them? Why do people engage in stereotyping? The goal of this course is to familiarize you with theories and evidence pertinent to understanding the processes that underlie stereotyping and how stereotypes affect the way we view each other, and ourselves.
Format: Discussions, presentations, and minimal lectures
No. and type of exams: no exams
Papers or projects: 3-4 (5 page) papers and one oral presentation
Prerequisites: PSYC 306 Enrollment Restrictions: PSYC majors; exceptions with instructors' permission.
If course is full through ISIS: A waiting list will be maintained through the psychology website. Do not contact the professor.

PSYC 405: Oppression and Empowerment (3)

Prof. Melvin Wilson

M 7-9:30 p.m.

Gilmer 225

Course description unavailable.

PSYC 487: The Minority Family (3)

Prof. Melvin Wilson

M 9-11:30

Gilmer 240

Course description unavailable. Prerequisites: PSYC 306.

Sociology

SOC 341: Race and Ethnicity (3)

Prof. Milton Vickerman

Mondays-Wednesdays 2-3:15

Cabell 325

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 410: African American Communities (3)

Prof. M. Rick Turner

Tuesdays-Thursdays 3:30-4:45

Cabell 320

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear more comprehensive understanding of the history, struggle and diversity of the African-American community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the African-American community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of their cultural history. the course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for African-American people's sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussions, lectures, videos, readings and class presentation as well as written assignments, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamic of the African-American community.

SOC 464: Urban Sociology (3)

Prof. Ekaterina Makarova

Tuesdays-Thursdays 2-3:15

Cabell 323

The course explores changing urban life in different cultural, social and historical settings. It examines both classic and contemporary debates within urban sociology and relates them to the wider concerns of social theory. Among the topics to be discussed are theories of urban development and decline, social segregation and urban inequality, cultural meanings of the city, problems of urban policy and planning.

SOC 487: Immigration (3)

Prof. Milton Vickerman

Mondays-Wednesdays 4-5:15

Cabell 325

A merge glance at any newspaper today will show that immigration is a "hot button" issue. Increasingly, one sees people of influence calling for restrictions on the entrance of illegal immigrants, restrictions on benefits to legal immigrants, and even the curtailment of legal immigration. While these sentiments reflect the social and political climate of the times, they are not new. Over a century ago, Americans expressed very similar sentiments-only, then, they were directed against Eastern Europeans, instead of Blacks, Hispanics and Orientals. Thus, this course seeks to understand immigration in America by examining the racial and historical underpinnings on which it has been built. We will show that some basic sentiments have expressed themselves in several ways in different historical periods. Along the way we will also examine relevant data showing the impact which immigration has had on American society.

 

Spring 2005

 

African-American and African Studies

AAS 100 – Black Nationalism (3)

T 1300-1350 MCL 2008

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

This course examines black nationalists’ protracted struggle for political autonomy, economic independence, and cultural self-definition in twentieth-century America. Major events to be discussed include the rise and fall of the Marcus Garvey Movement during the 1920s, the emergence of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam after the close of World War II, and the political and cultural upheavals in Afro-America during the Black Power era. Students will have the opportunity to explore the politics of a wide range of black radicals, including Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), and Assata Shakur. Scholarly investigations of black nationalism normally conclude with an analysis of the disintegration of the Black Power Movement in the early 1970s, but this course will also investigate the contemporary manifestations of black nationalism. Exploring diverse topics such as the Million Man March in 1995, the grassroots movement for the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the race consciousness articulated in the music of various hip-hop artists, students will investigate the continuing significance and visibility of black nationalism in American politics and culture. Required texts may include Tony Martin’s Race First, Ula Taylor’s The Veiled Garvey, William L. Van Deburg’s New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, William W. Sales’ From Civil Rights to Black Liberation: Malcolm X and the Organization of Afro-American Unity, and Timothy Tyson’s Radio Free Dixie: Robert Williams and the Roots of Black Power. Students will read an average of 150 pages per week. Grades will be based on class attendance and participation, two short essays, a midterm, and one fifteen-page paper.

AAS 102 - Crosscurrents in the African Diaspora (4)

TR 1230-1345 WIL 302

Instructor: Hanan Sabea

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/ HIUS 336 – African-American History Since 1865 (3)

MWF 1300-1350 CAB 311

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

This course examines the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Topics to be explored include blacks’ varied response to the rise of Jim Crow; the social and political upheavals brought about by the massive migration of Southern blacks to the industrial north during the First and Second World Wars; black radical politics during the Great Depression and New Deal era; the successes and failures of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements; and the continuing significance of race in American society. This course will explore the political careers of such noted black activists as Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X, and Louis Farrakhan; however, significant attention will also be given to ordinary black women and men whose fights against racial and economic injustice led to the creation of a more democratic America. Required texts may include Steven Hahn’s A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration, Tera Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom, Kimberly Jones’ Alabama North, William L. Van Deburg’s New Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 1965-1975, Penny M. Von Eschen’s Race Against Empire, Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, and Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic. Weekly reading assignments will average about 150-175 pages. Students’ grades will be based on class attendance, one short paper, and three exams

AAS 406A/ HUIS 402 – Colloquium in African American History (3)

T 1300-1530

Instructor: Reginald D. Butler

Through the reading of contemporary and classic secondary literature and selective primary materials, this course will examine the significant developments in the history of African Americans to the Civil War. We will begin with an analysis of the role of Africa and Africans in the development of the Atlantic World. Our focus will then shift to consider the establishment of slavery in the British Colonies with particular emphasis on acculturation processes and African ethnicity, the temporal and spatial range of slave regimes, and the evolution of racial ideologies. The course then looks at slavery and freedom in the revolutionary, constitutional, and early republic eras with a focus on the role of slavery in the formation of a national identity, the economic, intellectual, and religious forces that under girded the Abolitionist movement, and the division of the nation into two societies, a free North and a slave South. The course will end with an examination of the mature plantation regimes of the Southern United States, the massive migration of slaves from the upper South to the cotton-producing states of Mississippi Alabama, and Georgia, the abolitionist movement, and the role of slavery in the Civil War. Course requirements include weekly reading assignments of 250 pages, short written responses to each week's readings, and a major research paper based on both primary and secondary materials

AAS 406C – African Americans in Urban America (3)

W 1300-1530 MIN 108

Instructor: Cheryl D. Hicks

How have scholars, and particularly historians, defined and addressed black urban identity in America? This research seminar examines the history of the black urban experience, focusing primarily on the period from the turn-of-the century to the present. As we discuss the interpretive frameworks that have guided scholarship in black urban studies, we will focus on selected themes such as migration, labor, politics, and culture. We will explore the various dimensions of the black urban experience by using primary sources, scholarly analyses, music, and film. Evaluation will be based on class participation, two class presentations, one short essay, and a final research paper.

AAS 406D/RELG 440 – Marx, Politics and Theology (3)

M 1530-1800 CAB 132

Instructor: Corey D.B. Walker

Why Marx? Why Now? In light of the massive geopolitical upheavals of 1989 and the economic hegemony of global capitalism in the 1990s, these two questions are particularly resonant for a seminar that seeks to radically rethink Marx and the Marxian legacy for the intellectual project of Critical Religious and Theological Studies. To this end, Marx, Politics, and Theology will interrogate some of the germinal texts by Marx - The German Ideology, Grundrisse, and Capital - in recasting the contemporary problematic of the relation between politics and theology. We will also consider selected texts by a number of theorists who work within the wake of Marx, most notably Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Enrique Dussel, and C.L.R. James.

AAS 406E – Afro-Brazilian Civilization (3)

MWF 1100-1150 CAB 224

Instructor: David Haberly

This course, cosponsored by the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies and the Department of Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, is designed to prepare students for a four-week field learning experience in Bahia, Brazil, scheduled for May-June 2005. It offers students a general introduction, in English, to the literature and culture of Brazil from 1500 to the present, with special emphasis upon Afro-Brazilian history and cultural contributions. The course includes discussions of the nation's social and historical development and of a wide range of cultural phenomena in the nation's past and present.
Students who successfully complete AAS 406E will be invited to participate in the summer field learning component, which includes 9 credits of coursework and intensive Portuguese language training through daily classroom instruction and home-stays. Thanks to a grant from the Ford Foundation, the costs of tuition, fees, and travel will be subsidized in part by the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African and African-American Studies. We hope to limit students' share of these costs to between $1,500 and $2,000.
Course prerequisites: Proficiency in Spanish and/or Portuguese and an overall GPA of 3.0 or better. Students proficient in Spanish but not in Portuguese must enroll in PORT 101, MWF 1200-1250.

Enrollment is by instructor permission only. Students who meet the prerequisites for the course should submit the following:

  • a letter of application (no more than two pages double-spaced) describing personal interest in subject, relevant coursework (such as AAS 101/102), and academic goals to be achieved through the course;
  • at least one letter of recommendation from a faculty member; and
  • an up-to-date grade report (VISTAA printout acceptable).

Application materials should be submitted to Prof. Reginald D. Butler at the Carter G. Woodson Institute, Minor 108, by Friday, Nov. 19.

Anthropology

ANTH 257 - Traditional Healing and Western Medicine in Africa (3)

MWF 1000-1050 CAB 325

Instructor: Clare Terni

Shamans. Witch-doctors. Mediums. Con artists. Soul-stealers. Visionaries. Cannibals. Are these words for the village sangomas and inyangas of South Africa? Or for the University-trained doctors in their long white coats? Through a variety of sources and media, this course explores the full spectrum of healing practice in Africa. We will pay particular attention to cultural constructions of "illness" and how people make decisions to seek care. We will also study the ways in which indigenous healing practices both resist and augment European treatments, and the political dimensions of 'health.'

ANTHR 394 - Archeological Approaches to Chesapeake Slavery (3)

W 1700-1930 CAB 330

Instructor: Fraser Nieman

This course explores how archaeological evidence can be used to enhance our understanding of slavery and the slave-based society that evolved in the Chesapeake from the 17th through early-19th centuries. The course covers both archaeological methods and recent contributions to the historical and archaeological literatures on slavery. A central emphasis is a series of research projects that offer students the opportunity to use their newly acquired methodological and historical knowledge in the analysis of data from the Digital Archaeological Archive of Chesapeake Slavery (http://www.daacs.org). The class format combines lecture, discussion, and computer workshops. Pre-requisite: prior coursework in archaeology.

ANTH 565 - Creole Narratives (3)

TR 1530-1645 CLK 102

Instructor: George Mentore

We begin with 18th- and 19th-century Caribbean intellectual life. We do so from the perspective of European imperialism and its influences upon colonized values, slavery, race, class and color. We examine the persistence of these major themes through the 20th century, formalized in the battle of ideas between the elite of the mother country and the Creole upper classes. We will attempt to read the images of the Creole self and explore their claims for a crisis of identity. We will also focus on the so-called spiritual character of the Creole personality. We shall conclude by looking at the way in which the specifics of island culture have directed nation building and how they appear to have helped in the perpetuation of ideological and political dependencies.

Art History

ARTH/RELA 345 - African Art (3)

TR 930-1045 CAB 210

Instructor: Benjamin Ray

Each student will design an exhibition catalogue of African art (using MS Word) that will incorporate the results of the student's study of African art. The exhibitions will contain an introductory explanation of the exhibit's theme, selected images of African art objects, relevant field-context images, descriptive labels, and other explanatory textual materials. The images of African art will be taken from excellent collections at the Bayly Museum of the University of Virginia, the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, the Hampton University Museum, National Museum of African Art, and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The course includes the following curricular components: a brief history of African art studies; African ritual and cosmology; analysis of African art exhibition catalogues; library research on selected art objects; the exhibition of African art in museum contexts; and the commercial treatment of African art. The aim of the course is to create exhibitions of African art that are true to the objects in their own setting while communicating effectively to a Western audience unfamiliar with African art.

American Studies

AMST 201A - Whiteness: Color and Consciousness (3)

1400-1515 MW BRN 328

Instructor: Pensri Ho

AMST 202 - Rural Poverty in Our Time (3)

W 1530-1720 CHM 402

Instructor: Grace Hale

This course will use an interdisciplinary format to explore the history of non-urban poverty in the American South from the 1930s to the present. Weaving together the social histories of poor people, the political history of poverty policies, and the history of representations of poverty, the course follows historical cycles of attention and neglect: rural poverty during the Great Depression, rural poverty from the war on poverty to the Reagan revolution, and rural poverty in the new Gilded Age, the present. In each section, we will examine the relationship between representations (imagining poverty), policies (alleviating poverty), and results (the effects of those representations and policies on the economic, political, and psychological status of poor people). Sources will include oral history collections, films, photographs, music, non-fiction narratives, government reports, and histories. Requirements include a midterm, a final, two short papers, and twenty hours of volunteer work with an area non-profit working with poor people.

English

ENAM 314 African American Literary Survey II (3)

MW 930-1045 CAB 215

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

A continuation of ENAM 313, African American Literature I, this course concentrates on twentieth and twenty-first century African American novels, short stories, prose essays, and poetry. This lecture and discussion based class will address literature from pivotal cultural and political moments in African American life, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Writers include, but are not limited to, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Carolyn Ferrell, and Terry McMillian. Mandatory assignments include weekly response paragraphs, four response papers, quizzes, midterm and final exams.

ENAM 382 - Reading the Black College Campus (3)

MW 1400-1515 BRN 330

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

[Description taken from Spring 2004 COD] A student-centered, reading, seeing, discussion, and communication course, we consider the ways in which identity politics are implicated spatially in built environments. Focusing on how the campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities were shaped by—and shaped—the struggle over African-American education particularly during the Jim Crow Period, we explore built environments as arenas of cultural conflict and negotiation. How do built environments such as college campuses assign and assert the “proper” place of individuals and groups in social hierarchies? How do subordinated groups resist these processes? From the uncomfortable union of “agriculture” and “industry” and “education”—such as connoted by the label “Cow School” for land-grant institutions—to the cultural uses of gothic architecture in avowing the high status of “Ivy League” institutions, we open up discourse on built environments to engage the politics that circumscribe built environments. We will tease out working concepts and methods that help de-center the paradigm of interpreting built environments art-historically—in relation to rigorously policed canons of accepted types and styles. This will be accomplished through discussion of short readings drawn from within and beyond the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and environmentalism and through occasional field trips, workshops, and lectures. In addition to studying readings in time for class discussion, students will be also required to complete two quizzes, four group exercises, and a semester long group-project. The course will help students engage built environments by integrating knowledge gained from experiencing them with our senses, from studying them by mapping and diagramming spatial relationships, and from interrogating primary and secondary written and oral accounts.

ENAM 482 - Disenfranchised Voices (3)

TR 930-1045 PV8 108

Instructor: Marion Rust

"Disenfranchised": African American, Native American, female, spiritual nonconformist, indentured servant, youth. "Narrative": poetry, captivity narrative, criminal narrative, spiritual autobiography, feminist theory,musical drama, slave narrative. In this class, we will read work by escaped captives, religious subversives, con men, anonymous congregations, abused wives, midwives, black seamen and Native American preachers. Possible authors include Anne Hutchinson, Anne Bradstreet, Mary Rowlandson, Olaudah Equiano, Martha Ballard, Abigail Abbot Bailey, Samson Occom, Sarah Pierpont Edwards, Phyllis Wheatley, Judith Sargent Murray and Stephen Burroughs. Requirements consist of active preparation and participation, a final research paper of about 15 pages, and at least two short presentations on assigned readings.

ENAM 582 - Fictions of Black Identity (3)

TR 1100-1215 MIN 130

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

[Description taken from Spring 2004 COD.] This senior seminar will explore the dual meaning of the title "Fictions of Black Identity." The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, McBride's The Color of Water, Walker's Black, White, and Jewish, Beatty's White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include weekly response papers, comparative essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams.

ENGN/ ENMC 482 - African-American Drama (3)

TR 1230-1345 BRN 332

Instructor: Lotta Lofgren

French

FREN 326 - African Literature and Culture (3)

TR 1400-1515 CAB 247

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

This course will explore aspects of African literatures and cultures. It will focus on selected issues of special resonance in contemporary African life. Oral literature and its continuing impact on all other art forms. Key issues in French colonial policy and its legacy in Africa: language, politics, education. The course will examine the image of the postcolonial state and society as found in contemporary arts, painting, sculpture, music, and cinema. Selections from painters and sculptors like Chéri Samba (Zaire), Ousmane Sow, Younousse Sèye (Senegal), Wéréwéré Liking (Cameroun), including such popular icons as Mamy Wata and forms such as Souwere glass painting; from musicians like Youssou Ndour (Senegal), Cheb Khaled (Algeria), Seigneur Rochereau, Tchala Muana (Zaire), Salif Keita (Mali), and Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); from Mande, Peul, and Kabyle oral literature in French translation; from filmmakers D. D. Mambety, O. Sembène, G. Kaboré, Dani Kouyaté, Moussa Sène Absa. Students should keep in mind that in addition to the reading assignments, a class visit to the National Museum of African Art in Washington will be required. The final grade will be based on contribution to discussions, a mid-term exam, a paper, and a final exam.

History

HIAF 202 – Africa Since 1800 (3)

TR 1230-1345 CAB 345

Instructor: John Mason

HIAF 202, Africa since 1800, explores the history of Africa from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade to the present. Our goal is to examine the historical roots of the continent's current circumstances, both good and bad. We will look at the slave trade and its consequences, the European conquest of most of the African continent, African resistance to colonial rule, and the reestablishment of African independence. The course concentrates on three regions: West Africa, especially Nigeria; Central Africa, especially the Congo and Rwanda; and southern Africa, especially South Africa. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and with the various strategies that Africans employed to resist, subvert, and accommodate European domination. Course materials include novels, autobiographies, scholarly works, music, and films. HIAF 202 is an introductory course and assumes no prior knowledge of African history.

HIAF 305 History of West Africa (3)

TR 1530-1645 CAB 345

Instructor: James Lafleur

HIAF 305 explores the political, social, cultural, and environmental history of people living in West Africa from earliest times to the present.Though the course perspective emphasizes West Africans’ substantial contributions to historical developments elsewhere – in other regions of Africa as well as in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas – we will keep our focus on people and historical change within the region. Doing so is not only proper to the course content, but also prudent. This “part” of Africa is already by itself physically huge (only somewhat smaller than the continental United States) and therefore boasts great ecological diversity; and was (and continues to be) home to people speaking a dizzying number of languages and thinking of themselves not as belonging to the region but instead to communities with distinctive, and distinctly historical, traditions.The majority of course readings will be journal articles and book excerpts (to be made available on Toolkit). In addition, we are likely to use the following books in their near-entirety:
Adu Boahen, Topics in West African History
Sandra Greene, Sacred Sites and the Colonial Encounter: A History of Meaning and Memory in Ghana
Lisa Lindsay, Working with Gender: Wage Labor and Social Change in Southwestern Nigeria
D. T. Niane, ed., Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali
Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa
James Webb, Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600-1850
Course requirements include: active participation in biweekly in-class discussions; four map quizzes; two mid-term exams; and a three-hour final exam.

HIAF 404 - Independent Study

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HIAF 501 - Politics of Poverty in Africa (3)

TR 1400-1515 CAB 345

Instructor: John Mason

What's wrong with Africa? The question is intentionally provocative. It reflects a view of Africa that is reproduced daily on television, in magazines and newspapers, and even in movies: teenagers waving machine guns in the air, babies with swollen bellies and pencil-thin limbs, the devastation of Aids, the bleak, unending poverty... This is the Africa that many people think that they know. The image is not so much false as it is grossly incomplete. Africa is by no means a continent-wide disaster area. But there is enough truth in these images of human suffering to cause Africans and non-Africans alike to ask, What's wrong with Africa? There are no simple answers to this question. HIAF 501 is an introduction to the complex task of exploring the roots of Africa's multiple crises. The course looks at the problem from a variety of perspectives. We will examine both internal factors and Africa's relations with the rest of the world. We will read novels, journalism, polemics, and scholarly analyses by both African and non-African writers. At the end of the semester, students will write a paper in which they themselves investigate some aspect of the problem.

HIEU 401 - The Atlantic World, 1700-1833 (4)

W 1300-1530 CAB 426

Instructor: Maya Jasanoff

The eighteenth-century Atlantic world was a place of opportunity, violence, discovery, danger, and tragedy. Cultures mixed, often by force; fortunes were made and lost; and buccaneers, slaves, entrepreneurs, pilgrims, and settlers brought new societies, including our own, into being. This seminar will explore the links between Britain, North America, the Caribbean, and West Africa, during an age of transformation. Focusing on the topics of slavery, migration, and national identities, we will look at specific regions around the Atlantic and consider them in wider global context. How does an Atlantic perspective affect the way we think about American or British history? We will consider this and other questions using a range of materials: memoirs, maps, images, travel accounts, and scholarly histories. At a time when America's relations with Britain and Europe are under intense pressure, understanding our shared Atlantic history seems more relevant than ever.
Class will be discussion-based. Students will be asked to write one short essay (4-5 pp.) and one longer essay (10-12 pp.) on a subject of their choice. Readings (approximately 150-200 pp. per week) will include: Bernard Bailyn, The Peopling of British North America; Linda Colley, Britons; Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; John Demos, The Unredeemed Captive; and Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative….

HIST 330 South Atlantic Migrations (3)

MW 1530-1645 CAB 119

Instructor: Pablo Davis

Throughout its history, the South Atlantic region (Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia on the mainland; Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands in the Caribbean) has experienced enormous, sometimes wrenching, often creative, and always significant movements of people. Native American life, European settlement, African immigration (most of it involuntary), and the forced exodus of Cherokee and other peoples are all among the most important movements prior to the twentieth century. In the past hundred-plus years, Black and White northward migration; the Cuban expatriate community; Puerto Rican migration to the mainland, and other Caribbean and Latin American immigration have transformed the cultural, social, economic, and political life of the South Atlantic (not to mention the US as a whole). Increasingly, movement has assumed more complex shapes, at times circular. The course amounts to a collective exploration of why people have moved within, into, and out of the South Atlantic region, and how it has mattered, with particular focus on the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.

HIST 519 African Ethnicity in the Atlantic World (3)

W 1530-1800

Instructor: James Lafleur

HIST 519 is a reading and discussion course that explores the special intellectual problems and potential of applying historical rigor to the topic of African ethnicity in the Atlantic era. “Ethnicity” is a conceptual term that comes from the social sciences, and marks an individual’s sense of belonging to a group of people. Normally in the social sciences, and in popular thinking, ethnic identity is considered to be immutable and invulnerable to alteration. This stress on continuity rather than change has been particularly tenacious in popular thinking and academic discourse about the ethnicity of Africans, who are commonly thought of as “traditional” (and, polemically, as “backward” or “stuck in the past”). In contrast, descriptions of the ethnicity of African communities on this side of the Atlantic (and particularly in this country) have tended to underestimate the remarkable degree to which persons of African descent continued to consider themselves to belong to specific ethnic communities of their ancestral homelands and the significance such ethnic notions might have played in the shaping of New World history.
A list of prospective “core” materials includes: David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein, eds., The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Database on CD-ROM Set and Guidebook; Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South; and Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of African American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective. HIST 519 is a reading and discussion course that requires that students have the ability, and are motivated, to work independently. Students will find that the majority of their efforts are spent outside of the classroom as they prepare for weekly meetings (read, reflect, and formulate ideas to contribute). All students are expected to come to class meetings completely prepared to discuss course readings in an intelligent and collegial manner. Additionally, every student will write a research paper (expected to be in the range of some 15 pages, but in no case longer than 25 pages) on the topic of their choice, within the broad thematic/geographical parameters of this course.

HIUS 100 - Brown v. Board of Education (3)

M 1300-1530 CAU 112

Instructor: Gordon Hylton

This seminar explores the legal and cultural significance of the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education which declared unconstitutional mandatory racial segregation in schools. The course also focuses on the more general role of the Supreme Court in the history of race relations in the United States. The first portion of the seminar will explore the Supreme Court’s treatment of race and racial discrimination in the century leading up to 1954. After examining the Brown case in some detail, it will then focus on the legacy of Brown in the fifty years since the decision. Readings will be a combination of judicial decisions, legal briefs and arguments, and secondary scholarly works. The primary texts will be Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights and Richard Kluger, Simple Justice, 2nd ed.

HIUS 309 Civil War and Reconstruction (3)

TR 930-1045 WIL 301

Instructor: Michael Holt

Through lectures and readings this course will address the following questions. Why did the North win and the South lose the Civil War? What was the purpose of Reconstruction after the war and what impact did it have on the post-war South? Why did Reconstruction ultimately fail? My larger purpose in examining these years, however, is to assess the impact of the Civil War on American society and politics and to challenge the traditional idea that the Civil War was a fundamental turning point or watershed in American history. The course will be organized in three lecture meetings a week without formal discussion sections. Student grades will be based on a midterm, an 8-10 page paper on assigned course reading, and a comprehensive final examination. Readings should average about 230 pages a week.

HIUS 324 - 20th Century South (3)

MW 1300-1350 PHS 204

Instructor: Grace Hale

This course examines the broad history of the American South in the twentieth century, with special emphasis on racial violence, the creation of segregation, class and gender relations within the region, the cultural and economic interdependence of black and white southerners, and the Civil Right Movement and its aftermath. Sources examined will include film, fiction, and music as well as more traditional historical sources like newspapers and court opinions. Students interested in American Studies, African American Studies, and Gender Studies are also welcome. Grading: midterm 25%; paper (5-7 pp) 25%; final exam 30%; participation in discussion sections and attendance at film and documentary screenings 20%

HIUS 367 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

TR 1400-1450 WIL 402

Instructor: Julian Bond

This course will examine the origins, philosophies, tactics, events, personalities and consequences of the southern civil rights movement from 1900 to the mid-‘1960s. The movement, largely composed of grass-roots unknowns, was based on a culture of resistance instilled by racially restrictive laws and customs institutionalized by the resistant white South following the demise of Reconstruction. By employing a variety of tactics, at the end of the ‘60s decade, it had won impressive victories against state-sanctioned discrimination. Readings, lectures and videos will be the basis for the final examination. Students will be required to write two short papers. The final grade will be determined on the basis of the two papers (25% each), the final examination (30%), and discussion section participation (20%).

HIUS 401 - The 60s in Stereo: The Johnson Years (4)

W 1530-1800 PV8 103

Instructor: Kent B Germany

In the 1960s America faced unprecedented challenges and opportunities. At home, the struggle for civil rights, a minimum wage, full employment -- in short, a greater society -- politicized a new generation, bringing many into the streets. Abroad, the Cold War with the Soviet Union reached the brink of a nuclear exchange while the strategy of containing communism led to the deaths of over 50,000 servicemen in Vietnam. Although each would wield power in his own way, presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson both understood the unusual nature of their time and chose to create an extensive historical record of what they did in the White House. Between them these presidents secretly recorded over 1,000 hours of meetings, monologues and telephone conversations, a collection of material that provides an unparalleled view into the workings of the American government at the highest levels. This semester students will be introduced to the Johnson tapes. Students will engage a wide variety of source material ranging from secondary sources, traditional primary sources, to multimedia sources and the tapes themselves to discuss historical methods, the evolution of historical interpretation, and the fragility of primary sources. What are the strengths and weaknesses of these once secret tapes as historical sources? The goal of the course is to give students the tools they need to employ these remarkable sources in a research paper on the Johnson era.

HIUS 401 - Welfare in 20th Century America (4)

M 1530-1800 CAB 426

Instructor: Ethan Sribnick

This seminar examines the history of social welfare policy and the development of the American welfare state. Students are expected to investigate the social, legal, political or intellectual history of one aspect of welfare policy using primary sources and produce a paper of 25 to 30 pages in length. In addition, students will be required to complete a short essay (5 –7 pages) on secondary sources and several other short assignments. Readings will expose students to the history of the U.S. welfare state and various explanations for its unique development. Assigned works will include James T. Patterson, America’s Struggle Against Poverty in the Twentieth Century; Ellen Ryerson, The Best Laid Plans: America’s Juvenile Court Experiment; Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America; along with several other articles and book chapters. Approximately 150 to 200 pages of reading will be required for the first five weeks. For the remainder of the course, students will focus on their research and writing. Students are expected to participate actively in class discussions and consultations with the instructor. Grading will be determined as follows: participation-25%, essay on secondary sources-10%, prospectus and bibliography-15%, final paper-50%. This class will fulfill the CLAS second writing requirement, and the History department 400-level seminar requirement.

HIUS 401 - African Americans in the Civil War (4)

R 1530-1800 CAB 426

Instructor: Andre Fleche

Although the Civil War represents a central event in African American history, much of the scholarship of the period remains devoted to the experiences of white participants. This Major’s Seminar seeks to close that gap by asking advanced undergraduate students in history to develop an original research paper on African Americans in the Civil War. We will use the lens of military history to examine issues of race during the war years by considering issues as diverse as African American soldiers, discrimination and activism within the army, military policy toward slaves, civilians, and freedmen, women’s roles in camp, and post-war commemorations of black service. After 4-5 weeks of shared readings in relevant scholarship, students will embark on an independent research project culminating in a 25 page paper.

HIUS 401 - Southern Home Front (4)

T 1530-1800 CAB B020

Instructor: K. Ray

The latest generations of Civil War scholarship have employed interpretative structures more social in orientation. Historians have addressed older questions about military objectives, to be sure, but they also have posed questions of increasing complexity regarding national identity and political development, the role of the economy, and changes in gender, class and race relations among the people who created and sustained the conflict. In order to acquire these insights, historians have had to account for the experiences of all people who participated in the war.
This seminar will allow students to explore some of the more recent scholarly trends before posing new questions of their own. Specifically, we will spend the first seven weeks reading and discussing secondary literature, and using it to organize research projects that will culminate in a 25-30 page paper. Possible topics include: community division in the secession crisis; the political leaders who shaped the new Confederate nation; the impact of the war on local economies; the women who served at the front lines (as nurses, cooks, and spies) and at home (as mothers, farmers, and laborers); and the enslaved and free black communities who exploited opportunities throughout the crisis to improve their position.
The second half of the semester will consist of independent meetings with the instructor and self-guided research and writing, with periodic classes to discuss research ideas and finished papers. Students will be evaluated primarily on the papers they write, but performance in class discussions will also factor into final grades.

HIUS 403 Documenting the Civil Rights Era (4)

R 1300-1530 RFN 211

Instructor: William Thomas

Permission of the Instructor Required. Students in this course will examine the archival film footage from two Virginia television stations and develop a documentary film for public television around these valuable resources. Students will be expected to contribute to a highly creative enterprise and work together toward a common goal. The course will include readings on the civil rights era and important documentary films, including Eyes on the Prize, Standing in the Shadow of Motown, A Change Was in the Air, Scottsboro: An American Tragedy, The Murder of Emmett Till, and George Wallace: Settin' the Woods on Fire. Students will examine documentary films as a genre of historical interpretation as well as produce one of their own. This course is specially designed with support from the Mead Endowment Fund and the Seven Society, and will be an opportunity for students to work together on an exciting collaborative production. Technical skills are not necessary for this course--the course is aimed for students with creative energy, deep interest in the subject, excellent writing and communication abilities, creative talents, and diverse experiences.

Music

MUSI 208 – American Roots Music (3)

TR 1100-1215 WIL 301

Instructor: Richard Will

Scholarly and critical study of music of the Americas, with attention to interaction of music, politics, and society. Specific topics announced in advance. Prerequisite: No previous knowledge of music required.

MUSI 209 – African Music (3)

MW 1400-1515 MRY 209

Instructor: Heather Maxwell

No description available.

MUSI 212 - History of Jazz (3)

MW 1300-1530 WIL 402

Instructor: Scott DeVeaux

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

MUSI 309 - Performance in Africa (4)

TR 1530-1620 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Explores music/dance performance in Africa through reading, hands-on workshops, discussion, and audio and video examples. The course covers both "traditional" and "popular" styles, through discussion and a performance lab. Prerequisite: Instructor permission. *Must also enroll in MUSI 369

MUSI 369 - African Drumming and Dance (2)

TR 1715-1915 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

*Must also enroll in MUSI 309

MUSI 369C - Afro-Pop Ensemble (2)

MW 1600-1800 OCH B018

Instructor: Heather Maxwell

No description available.

MUSI 426 - Song and Society in West Africa (3)

TR 1230-1345 OCH S008

Instructor: Heather Maxwell

No description available.

Politics

PLAP 370 - Racial Politics

TR 1230-1345 CAB 216

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

Examines how attributions of racial difference have shaped American politics. Topics include how race affects American political partisanship, campaigns and elections, public money, public opinion, and American political science. Prerequisite: One course in PLAP or instructor permission.

PLAP 382 - Civil Liberties and Civil Rights (3)

MN 1300-1350 MRY 209

Instructor: David Klein

PLCP 212 - Politics of Developing Areas (3)

MW 900-950 WIL 301

Instructor: Robert Fatton

PLCP 581 - Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa (3)

M 1300-1530 CAB 130

Instructor: Robert Fatton

This course is not open to students who have taken PLCP 381. 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.

PLIR - Ethics and Human Rights in West Africa (3)

MW 1100-1150 MIN 125

Instructor: Michael Smith

Linguistics

LNGS 222 - Black English

MW 1100-1150 CAB 138

Instructor: Mark Elson

This course is an introduction to the history and structure of Black English. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the history and structure of what has been termed Black English vernacular or Black Street English. We will also be concerned with the sociolinguistic factors which led to the emergence of this variety of English, as well as its present role in the African-American community and its relevance in education, employment, and racial stereotypes. No prerequisites, but some background in linguistics (example ANTH 240, LING 325) will be helpful.

Religious Studies

RELG 400A - Major Seminar: Theological and Religious Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement (3)

T 1530-1800 CAB 234

Instructor: Charles Marsh

In this course, we explore the methodologies with which scholars have analyzed and interpreted the American civil rights movement. We are especially interested in the recent emergence of religious and theological interpretations. Readings are based on primary and critical sources, and class sessions include lectures, discussions and student presentations on research. Seminar requirements include a one- page written response to the weekly readings completed before class; consistent participation in seminar discussions; a mid-term exam; and a 30-minute presentation based on the final research paper. Prerequisite: permission of instructor. Restricted to Religious Studies Majors.

Sociology

SOC 410 - Afro-American Communities (3)

TR 1530-1645

Instructor: M. Rick Turner

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear more comprehensive understanding of the history, struggle and diversity of the African-American community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the African-American community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of their cultural history. the course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for African-American people's sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussions, lectures, videos, readings and class presentation as well as written assignments, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamic of the African-American community.

SOC 442 - Sociology of Inequality (3)

MW 1100-1150 CAB 320

Instructor: Bethany Bryson

A survey of basic theories and methods used to analyze structures of social inequality. Includes comparative analysis of the inequalities of power and privilege, both their causes and their consequences for social conflict and social change

SOC 487 - Immigration (3)

MW 1600-1715 WIL 215

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

A merge glance at any newspaper today will show that immigration is a "hot button" issue. Increasingly, one sees people of influence calling for restrictions on the entrance of illegal immigrants, restrictions on benefits to legal immigrants, and even the curtailment of legal immigration. While these sentiments reflect the social and political climate of the times, they are not new. Over a century ago, Americans expressed very similar sentiments-only, then, they were directed against Eastern Europeans, instead of Blacks, Hispanics and Orientals. Thus, this course seeks to understand immigration in America by examining the racial and historical underpinnings on which it has been built. We will show that some basic sentiments have expressed themselves in several ways in different historical periods. Along the way we will also examine relevant data showing the impact which immigration has had on American society.

University Seminars

USEM 171 - Brown Reflections: The Decision’s Legacy (2)

W 1400-1550 CAB B029

Instructor: Selena Cozart

In the midst of the 50th anniversary of both the Brown Decision of 1954 and the Brown II Decision of 1955, the impact of these decisions on equitable education for all remains a complicated and heavily debated area of study, with many of the outcomes yet to materialize. In this course, students will study the America that produced a need for the Brown decision and investigate what that America has done with that decision in the intervening years. Using memoir, biography, and historical documents and commentary, students will gain a multilayered view of the implications of Brown on their own educational experiences.

USEM 171 - Education in Black and White (2)

W 1400-1550 CAB B029

Instructor: Selena Cozart

What are the issues in education unique to communities of color? Does the ethnicity of your teacher make any difference? What are the implications of classrooms becoming more diverse ethnically, socio-economically, and according to ability while the teacher corps reflects decreasing diversity? Are all of the students of color sitting together? This course is designed to explore issues regarding the education of persons from underrepresented groups in the United States. The focus of this exploration will be K-12 education, higher education, and the preparation of the next generation of educators from these underrepresented groups. This course will investigate a variety of topics that affect both students and prospective teachers of any color. Students will examine best practices for education and think critically about how to contribute to the improvement of education for all.

USEM 171 - Politics of Southern Africa (2)

M 1400-1550 RFN 173

Instructor: Leonard Robinson

This course covers the history of Southern Africa prior to the colonial era through the end of Apartheid in South Africa, and the regions’ evolution toward more open, democratic societies. Politically a highly charged and complex region, the impact of Portuguese, British, and German systems of colonialism – combined with the rigidity, brutality and influence of Apartheid – resulted in an unusual array of dynamics as Africa marched toward independence, the post-independence era and finally the onset of democratization in the late 1980’s. Featured countries are South Africa, Namibia Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Botswana.

USEM 171 - The 60’s In Black and White (2)

T 1530-1720 CAB 318

Instructor: Julian Bond

The sixties saw a generation of young people begin to build movements which would stop a violent war abroad and start a nonviolent war at home. An ideological attack has been leveled against the decade, obscuring a progressive history and attempting to erase and discredit models successive generations might follow. As a result, '60s history is ambiguous. What made the movements for peace and equal rights possible? What events triggered them? Who were their participants? What is their legacy for the present? This seminar will attempt to answer these and other questions as we examine the history, events, personalities and culture of the 1960s. Students are required to write two brief but comprehensive papers on a '60s individual, organization or movement, and/or a '60s philosophy.

Education

EDLF 555 - Multi-Cultural Education (3)

W 1600-1845 T 1600-1845 R 1000-1245 RFN 241

Instructor: Robert Covert

Prepares students to deal with the increasingly multicultural educational milieu. Emphasizes the process of understanding one’s own bias and prejudices and how they effect the school and classroom learning environment. Included are readings, class discussions, field projects, journal writing, and other methods of directed self explorations.

 

Fall 2004

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 100 – Black Nationalism (3)

T 1530-1800 CAB B029

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

This course examines black nationalist’s protracted struggle for political autonomy, economic independence, and cultural self-definition in twentieth-century America. Major events to be discussed include the rise and fall of the Marcus Garvey Movement during the 1920s; the emergence of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam after the close of World War II; the rise of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense during the turbulent sixties; and the movement for the creation of Black Studies programs and departments in the post-Civil Rights era. Students will have the opportunity to explore the politics of a wide range of black radicals, including Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), and Assata Shakur. Scholarly investigations of black nationalism normally conclude with an analysis of the disintegration of the Black Power Movement in the early 1970s, but this course will also investigate the contemporary manifestations of black nationalism. Exploring diverse topics such as the Million Man March in 1995, the grassroots movement for the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the race consciousness articulated in the music of such hip-hop artists as Public Enemy, Lauryn Hill, and Krs-One, students will investigate the continuing significance and visibility of black nationalism in American politics and culture. Students will read an average of 120 pages per week. Grades will be based on class attendance and participation, two short essays (5-7 pages) and one fifteen-page paper. This course satisfies the CLAS second writing requirement.

AAS 101 – Africa In The Atlantic World (4)

T R 1230-1345 WIL 301

Instructor: Scot French

This team-taught course is part of a year-long survey of the history and culture of Africans in Africa and people of African descent in the Americas. During this semester, we will cover a variety of topics, including African societies before 1800, the Atlantic slave trade, literatures of the Atlantic World, the origins and development of New World plantation societies, Africana religions, life and labor in the United States, and the protracted process of emancipation. Students should come away with an understanding of the major problems, events, and people that shaped the African-American experience. At the same time, we will gain a sense of how that experience fit into the history of people of African descent in the larger Atlantic world.

AAS 315/RELC 305 – Theologies Of Liberation (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 337

Instructor: Corey D. B. Walker

Who is God to the oppressed? What does it mean to do Christian theology from the underside? This course will critically examine the ideas, methodologies, and orientations of different theological trajectories within the field of Liberation Theology, including African-American, Gay/Lesbian, Latin American, Minjung, Mujerista, and Womanist theologies of liberation. The course will focus on theological method, modes of social and economic analysis particularly those perspectives inspired by varieties of critical theory and philosophies of liberation, and challenges to traditional Christian theologies.

AAS 305 – Travel Accounts Of Africa (3)

T R 1700-1815 CAB 340

Instructor: Hanan Sabea

The course explores how 18th- and 19th-century travel accounts about Africa have influenced ethnographic writing and popular views about the continent and its people. It traces the genealogy of methods of knowledge production, major concepts that are generated and inherited, underlying assumptions, and recurring images that have shaped the representation of places and peoples in Africa. We will analyze the accounts produced about Africa in terms of the symbolic, technical and ideological conventions used by the writers. We will pay special attention to the gender, nationality, and profession of the authors, the purpose for their travels, and the times and places they visited.

AAS 323/ HIUS 323 – Rise And Fall Of The Slave South (3)

M W 1100 -1150 MIN 125

Instructor: Edward L. Ayers

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the sixteenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slaveowners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians. Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Requirements include a midterm and final as well as a substantial research paper. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course.

AAS 365/HIUS 365 – African-American History To 1865 (3)

M W 1400-1450 CAB 345

Instructor: Reginald Butler

This lecture course explores the history and culture of African Americans in British colonial North America and the United States through 1865. We will examine changing constructions of race, gender, and class, as well as the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities associated with this period. We will devote some portion of each class to the close examination of primary sources, with a particular focus on the intersection of the "local" and the "global." Weekly reading assignments will average about 150-175 pages. Grade will be based on participation, weekly reading responses, one short paper, a midterm, and a final.

AAS 401 – Independent Study (3)

TBA

AAS 405B – Imprisoned America

M 1300-1530 MIN 108

Instructor: Ethan Blue

The vast overrepresentation of people of color behind bars in the United States demands that we place American criminal justice in the long history of racial dominance and economic conflict, from chattel slavery and American Indian extermination to the contemporary prison-industrial complex. While the course focuses on the particularities of incarceration in the United States, tools gained and lessons learned will be applicable to analyzing radically disenfranchised populations - immigrants, lepers, juvenile delinquents, and sexual deviants - in other times and locations. In addition to weekly readings, students will write a twenty page paper on a subject of their choosing. Selected readings: Asha Bandele, The Prisoners' Wife; David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory; George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson; Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formations in the United States; and Christian Parenti, Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis.

AAS 451 – Distinguished Majors Program/ Directed Research (3)

TBA

AAS 452 – Distinguished Majors Program/Thesis (3)

TBA

Department of Anthropology

SWAH 101 - Introduction To Swahili (3)

MWF 0900-0950

Instructor: Yared Fubusa

Introduces the most widely spoken indigenous language of East-Central Africa. Focuses on speaking, comprehension, reading and writing skills, and the language in its cultural context.

SWAH 102 - Introduction To Swahili (3)

MWF 1000-1050

Instructor: Yared Fubusa

Continues from SWAH 101.

NOTE: SWAH 101 and 102 are offered under the auspices of the Anthropology Department. A course in Swahili may count toward the Anthropology major, as an elective within the major.

ANTH 225 – Nationalism, Racism, And Multiculturalism (3)

T R 1230-1345 MCL 1020

Instructor: Richard Handler

Introductory course in which the concepts of culture, multiculturalism, race, racism, and nationalism are critically examined in terms of how they are used and structure social relations in American society and, by comparison, how they are defined in other cultures throughout the world.

ANTH 305 -- Travel Accounts Of Africa

TR 1700-1815 CAB 340

Instructor: Hanan Sabea

The course explores how 18th- and 19th-century travel accounts about Africa have influenced ethnographic writing and popular views about the continent and its people. It traces the genealogy of methods of knowledge production, major concepts that are generated and inherited, underlying assumptions, and recurring images that have shaped the representation of places and peoples in Africa. We will analyze the accounts produced about Africa in terms of the symbolic, technical and ideological conventions used by the writers. We will pay special attention to the gender, nationality, and profession of the authors, the purpose for their travels, and the times and places they visited.

ANTH 385 Folklore In America (3)

TR 1100-1215

Instructors: Charles Perdue

This course will focus primarily on Anglo- and Afro-American traditional culture and, within that domain, deal with problems of definition, origin, collection, and analysis of the main genres of folklore--narrative and song.

ANTH 401A Senior Seminar:Anthropology Of Colonialism In Virginia (3)

R 1400-1630

Instructor: Jeffrey Hantman

This course considers the history and cultural contexts of European colonialism in Virginia in the 16th and 17th centuries, and its long-term effects on Native Americans, African Americans, and Europeans. Through archaeological and documentary sources, we will examine the different responses of Indian people to the arrival of Europeans. Archaeology and ethnohistory will also be used to assess the long-term impact of tobacco cultivation and European expansion on Native Americans and the enslaved African Americans who arrived in the 17th century. Finally, we will examine the lingering effects of colonial policies into the 20th and 21st centuries.

ANTH 401B Senior Seminar: Postcolonial Inequalities & Anthropology Today (3)

T 1530-1800

Instructor: Ravindra Khare

A discussion of social inequalities, mainly class, caste, race, religion, age and gender under postcolonial and post-industrial conditions in a comparative cultural and regional perspective. A distinct (but not exclusive) focus will be on contemporary India and America. Very different yet in some ways very similar, these two distant cultures, societies and countries afford distinct opportunities to study entrenched inequalities of caste, class, race and religion, alongside a pursuit of democracy, equality, and civil and human rights. The last third of the course will be devoted to reviewing related and relevant concerns, interests and directions now evident in the organization and activities of American anthropology today.

ANTH 543 – African Language Structures (3)

M W 1400-1515 BRK LIB

Instructor: J. Sapir

The course will cover the classification of African languages, selected grammatical typologies, African lexicography, and examples of oral literature. Students will give presentations on these topics with respect to specific languages. The intention of the course is to investigate the considerable variety of linguistic types present in sub-Saharan Africa.
Permission of the instructor is required.

Department of English Language and Literature

ENAM 313 – African American Survey (3)

T R 1100-1215 MRY 113

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American prose, from l760, the date of Briton Hammon's Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings to l901, the year of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery. We will work our way through canonical and non-canonical texts and through multiple genres-- captivity narratives, spiritual autobiographies, slave narratives, sermons, execution sermons, criminal narratives, speeches, novels--and will explore a number of issues related to literary history, culture, aesthetics, authorship, audience, genre, and narratology. Among the questions to be explored? How have literary historians given shape to or "storied" this tradition? How do black women's writings complicate these "fictions" of literary history? What is the relation between the black vernacular tradition and the black "literary" text? How do the white abolitionists and editors involved in the production of slave narratives trouble traditional conceptions of authorship? Who "authors" a speech by Sojourner Truth that is stenographically transcribed and appears in multiple versions? What confluence of factors and ideologies explain the "canonical" version of "Ain't I a Woman?" Other texts include Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Harriet Wilson's Our Nig; Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom; David Walker's Appeal; Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, and Thomas Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner. We will work to situate these and other selections in the political, cultural, and critical controversies of their time and ours.

ENAM 481A – African-American Women Writers (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB B026

Instructor: Angela Davis

We will read several novels and short stories by African-American Women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, four written responses to readings (each one typed page long) and a formal essay (ten to twelve pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls...; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place.
Prerequisite: The course is restricted to fourth year majors in English, Women's Studies and African-American and African Studies.

ENCR 481B – Race, Space, And Culture (3)

W 1830-2100 CAM 135

Instructors: K. Ian Grandison

This multi-disciplinary course explores racial and other cultural identities in relation to the built environment and other conceptions of space. How has the concept of race helped to shape our interactions with space in both conscious and unconscious ways? How have our historical constructs of space helped to determine, in both articulated and inarticulate ways, what it means to identify with, or against, one cultural identity or another? Co-taught by Marlon Ross of English and African-American Studies and K. Ian Grandison of Landscape Architecture and American Studies, the course draws from and beyond the disciplines represented by its instructors to synthesize ways of interrogating the written, graphic, filmic, and field resources necessary for broadening our understanding of space. The course provides a forum for weekly discussion hinged on targeted readings (such as James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan, Oscar Newman's Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design, Philip Deloria's Playing Indian, Leslie Kanes Weisman's Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment, and Marc Leepson's Saving Monticello: The Levy Familys Epic Quest to Rescue the House that Jefferson Built), films (such as National Geographic's Gorilla and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing), and local field trips (such as to Woolen Mills, Monticello, and Vinegar Hill). Relating to the inter-disciplinary thrust of the course, students will have the opportunity to work in small teams to lead selected class sessions, to complete a research project, and to participate in a final Open-House that serves as the capstone for the course.

Department of French Language and Literature

FREN 346 – Topics in African Culture (3)

M W 1300-1350 CAB 224

Instructor:

La littérature francophone marocaine prend ses racines dans l'Afrique, la France coloniale mais aussi dans le monde arabo-musulman et dans les cultures berbères et judéo-arabe. C'est cette extraordinaire mixité culturelle et ethnique que des auteurs marocains d'expression française vont illustrer dans leurs ouvrages, depuis l'époque coloniale jusqu'à nos jours. Après avoir étudié des œuvres écrites durant le protectorat français au Maroc ou relatant cette période, nous aborderons la littérature contemporaine expression des rêves, des mythes et des aspirations politiques et sociales.

FREN 570 – African Literature

T 1530-1800 BRN 334

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

Studies the principal movements and representative authors writing in French in Northern, Central, and Western Africa, with special reference to the islands of Madagascar and Mauritius. Explores the literary and social histories of these regions.

FRTR 329 -- Comparative Caribbean Literature & Culture

M 1530-1800 CAB 316

Instructor: A. James Arnold

This is an upper-division cross-disciplinary course; it supposes an introduction to literary, historical or anthropological study. The question to be examined throughout the semester is: Who/What is Creole? Literary texts (poems, novels) as well as popular genres will be examined for what they tell us about the construction of national identity. Students will be encouraged to work in small groups to develop a project for class presentation. Multi-media presentations will be welcome. There will be a midterm and a final examination or a research paper. Authors will include several of the following: Alexis (Haiti), Brathwaite (Barbados), Carpentier (Cuba), Condé (Guadeloupe), Naipaul and Lovelace (Trinidad), Walcott (St. Lucia).

Department of History

HIAF 201 – Early African History Through the Era of the Slave Trade (4)

T R 1230-1345 MCL 1004

Instructor: James Lafleur

Early African History draws Africans' distinctive achievements in culture, politics, and economic strategies out from the mists of the once-dark continent's unwritten past. Starting with the dawn of history and taking the story up in detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 201 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the ironic interplay of tragedy and achievement in a continent increasingly trapped in exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of African history, HIAF 202, taught in the spring, narrates subsequent events down through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.)
HIAF 201 is a lower-division introductory survey. The instructor presents the major themes of early African history in lectures twice each week. Students meet additionally in discussion sections for review of readings, quizzes, and preparation for written assignments. Requirements include weekly map quizzes, a mid-term examination (only the better of two tries counts), three short papers (4-5 pages) rehearsing historical questions for the mid-terms and considering the written sources on Africa's past, and a final examination (format to be negotiated with the class). The course belongs to the African-American and African Studies curriculum, meets the "non-western" requirement for the major in History, and qualifies for the College "non-western perspectives" area requirement. Students may rewrite one of the papers to fulfill the College Second Writing Requirement.
Readings revolve around weekly assignments in a text (Shillington, History of Africa), for a total of about 225 pages. Other assigned chapters and professional articles introduce the distinctive methodologies of doing history without written sources (including the famous Mande oral epic Sundiata), highlight interpretive ("historiographical") issues, and consider concepts relevant to understanding early Africa. The total number of assigned pages runs at approximately 1200.
No formula determines final marks. Students are graded according to their "highest consistent performance" in all aspects of the course, including attendance at lectures and participation in discussions, with allowance made for the unfamiliarity of the subject matter early in the term; a number of options allow students to devise a combination of graded work that will accommodate other academic commitments and reflect specialized abilities most accurately.
HIAF 201 presumes no prior knowledge of Africa or experience with the study of history. Since the subject is new to nearly everyone in the course, consistent application and preparation is expected, particularly early in the term. Students in all four years of their undergraduate careers and in all colleges of the University complete the course with success.
Most find it a challenging opportunity to discover and examine assumptions about modern Americans -- themselves included -- they did not know they held.

HIAF 302 – History Of Southern Africa (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 324

Instructor: John Mason

HIAF 302 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing South Africa. The course begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of the conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.
By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest did not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, and even religious beliefs.
Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, multi-ethnic nationalism evolved into nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.
HIAF 302 is an introductory course and assumes no prior knowledge of African history.

HIAF 319 – African Environmental History (3)

T R 1530-1645 MCL 1004

Instructor: James Lafleur

HIAF 402 – Race And Popular Culture In South Africa And The United States (4)

T R 1400-1515 RAN 212

Instructor: John Mason

HIAF 402 is a seminar in comparative South African and American history. We will look at the ways in which popular culture--especially music, film, and sports--reflects South African and American racial categories and identities and, at the same time, helps to create them. Course materials include scholarship, biography, autobiography, music, and film.
South Africa and the American South are like distant cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries owe much of their early economic development to slavery. In both complex systems of racial domination shaped society for generations during and after the emancipation of the slaves. And in both the interracial struggle against racism gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.
A close look at popular culture will open a window on what is perhaps the central irony of both South African and American cultural history--that the harsh realities of racial oppression and racial segregation have produced a culture that is not segregated at all. It is neither black nor white, neither African nor European, but utterly and thoroughly mixed. It is no accident, for instance, that the most distinctively American forms of popular music--blues and spirituals, bluegrass and country, jazz and rock--were born of mixed African and European cultural parentage.
Students will participate actively in class discussions and prepare a research paper on a subject of their own choosing.

HIAF 404 – Independent Study In African History (3)

TBA

Instructor: Staff

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HIST 504 – Monticello Intership (3)

M 1500-1830 PV5 109

Instructor: Phyllis Leffler

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor. Directed research, largely in primary source materials, on topics relating to Jefferson's estate, life, and times. Directed by senior members of the Monticello staff. The internships are restricted to graduate students in history and to fourth year undergraduate history majors. A maximum of two students each semester can be admitted to the course.

HIUS 100 – Black Nationalism (3)

T 1530-1800 CAB B029

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

This course examines black nationalist’s protracted struggle for political autonomy, economic independence, and cultural self-definition in twentieth-century America. Major events to be discussed include the rise and fall of the Marcus Garvey Movement during the 1920s; the emergence of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam after the close of World War II; the rise of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense during the turbulent sixties; and the movement for the creation of Black Studies programs and departments in the post-Civil Rights era. Students will have the opportunity to explore the politics of a wide range of black radicals, including Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Angela Davis, Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), and Assata Shakur. Scholarly investigations of black nationalism normally conclude with an analysis of the disintegration of the Black Power Movement in the early 1970s, but this course will also investigate the contemporary manifestations of black nationalism. Exploring diverse topics such as the Million Man March in 1995, the grassroots movement for the release of Mumia Abu-Jamal, and the race consciousness articulated in the music of such hip-hop artists as Public Enemy, Lauryn Hill, and Krs-One, students will investigate the continuing significance and visibility of black nationalism in American politics and culture. Students will read an average of 120 pages per week. Grades will be based on class attendance and participation, two short essays (5-7 pages) and one fifteen-page paper. This course satisfies the CLAS second writing requirement.

HIUS 323/AAS 323 – Rise And Fall Of The Slave South (3)

T R 0930-1045 MIN 125

Instructor: Edward L. Ayers

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the sixteenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slave owners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians.
Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Requirements include a midterm and final as well as a substantial research paper; the course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course.

HIUS 328 – History Of Virginia To 1865 (3)

M W F 1300-1350 GIL 190

Instructor: William Thomas

This course covers the social, political, and economic development of Virginia up to 1865. The course examines key subjects in Virginia's colonial and antebellum history: the life and culture of Virginia's Native Americans, the colonial experience at Jamestown and white colonial settlement, the development of slavery in the Chesapeake region, the establishment of colonial society, the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, Nat Turner's Rebellion, and the secession of Virginia in 1861.
Requirements for the course include three 5-7 page papers and a final exam. One of the papers will include research in Alderman Library's Special Collections. The course will feature both lecture and discussion during the weekly meetings. The course will use a reader of primary source readings from the period, such as Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and other documents, autobiographies, and texts. In addition, the course will include some of the following readings:
T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, Myne Own Ground
Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion
Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
Rhyss Issac, The Transformation of Virginia 
Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
Helen Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia

HIUS 347 – The American Working Class Since The Civil War

M W F 1200-1250 CAB 431

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

This course examines the cultural lives, labor struggles, and political activities of the American working class from the end of the Civil War to the Clinton era. Over the course of the semester, students will analyze how working women and men both shaped and were shaped by the rise of big business during the Gilded Age, the social upheavals of the World War I era, the economic hardships brought about by the Great Depression, the social policies of the New Deal, the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, and continuing debates over the meanings of work, citizenship, and democracy. Significant attention will be given to the organizations workers created to advance their economic interests. The course will explore the success and failures of the Knights of Labor, the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, and the Communist Party. A major issue to be explored in our discussions of these organizations will be the ways in which laboring people have been divided along racial, gender, ethnic, and regional lines. Since working-class history is about more than the struggle of laboring people to improve their material condition, this course will also focus on other topics, such as workers’ family life, leisure activities (music and sports), customs and thoughts, and religious beliefs.
Required texts for the course may include Jacqueline Jones’ A Social History of the Laboring Classes, Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors After The Civil War, Nelson Lichtenstein’s State of the Union: A Century of American Labor, Neil Foley, White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture, Linda Gordon’s Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890-1935, and Bruce Nelson’s Divided We Stand: American Workers and the Struggle for Black Equality. Readings will average no more than 150 pages a week. Grades will be based on attendance and class participation, a mid-term examination, two short essays (5 pages), and one ten page paper. This course satisfies the CLAS second writing requirement.

AAS 365/HIUS 365 – African-American History To 1865 (3)

M W 1400-1450 CAB 345

Instructor: Reginald Butler

This lecture course explores the history and culture of African Americans in British colonial North America and the United States through 1865. We will examine changing constructions of race, gender, and class, as well as the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities associated with this period. We will devote some portion of each class to the close examination of primary sources, with a particular focus on the intersection of the "local" and the "global." Weekly reading assignments will average about 150-175 pages. Grade will be based on participation, weekly reading responses, one short paper, a midterm, and a final.

HIUS 367 – History Of The Civil Rights Movement (3)

T R 1400-1450 WIL 402

Instructor: Julian Bond

This lecture course will examine the history, philosophies, tactics, events, and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward.
The Southern movement--variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement--was a black-lead mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation in the South by the middle 1960s.
Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping phases--lobbying, litigation and protest. In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights. In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation, the denial of the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools. The last phase, lasting a decade from '55 to '65, was a period of protest--boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations--as well as organizing campaigns that lay the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s.
Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation in the United States. The movement's well-and lesser-known proponents and opponents and their stratagems will be examined. Discussion section required. Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five-to-seven page papers.
Texts:
Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo Press
Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Open Hand Press
Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit At The Welcome Table, American Heritage
Videos:
"Eyes On The Prize -- America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965," # 1 -6; America At the
Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985, #1 & 2; PBS Video, Blackside, Inc. Boston.
"The Road to Brown," William Elwood, Producer, California Newsreel.

HIUS 401 C – Civil Rights Era In Virginia (3)

R 1300-1530 PV8 108

Instructor: William Thomas

This course examines the important events in Virginia during the long period of civil rights battles from the 1930s through the 1970s. This course will examine the politics, media, culture, and economy of Virginia in this period. Virginia was the scene of some of the earliest court battles over desegregation, and one of the cases in Brown v. Board of Education emerged from Prince Edward County. Virginia's segregationist massive resistance program was one of the strongest in the South in the 1950s, resulting in a statewide crisis of public school closings. Prince Edward County officials closed their schools for nearly five years rather than integrate them, and in Danville violence erupted in the summer of 1963 over civil disobedience and protests. The Supreme Court decided key Virginia cases with national repercussions that ended bars on miscegenation, threw out token integration in schools, and removed the poll tax in elections. This course seeks to explore the origins and explanations for these dramatic events, and will focus particularly on new areas of research in this period such as white Protestantism, African American women's history, the role of the Cold War, and media and cultural influences.
Readings will focus on both Virginia and comparative accounts of the period in Southern history, including for example: J. Douglas Smith, Managing White Supremacy, Robert Pratt, The Color of Their Skin, David Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow, Jeff Woods, Black Struggle Red Scare: Segregation and Anti-communism in the South, Sarah Patton Boyle, The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in a Time of Transition, and Len Holt, An Act of Conscience.
Students will also have access to and work with a rare archive of television news footage from two Virginia television stations (see www.vcdh.virginia.edu/civilrightstv). Research papers for this course may be on any subject broadly conceived under the course title, and students interested in a wide range of subjects are especially welcome.

HIUS 401 D – The Sixties In Stereo: The Kennedy Years

W 1530-1800 CAB 134

Instructor: David Coleman

In the 1960s America faced unprecedented challenges and opportunities. At home, the struggle for civil rights, a minimum wage, full employment -- in short, a greater society -- politicized a new generation, bringing many into the streets. Abroad, the Cold War with the Soviet Union reached the brink of a nuclear exchange while the strategy of containing communism led to the deaths of over 50,000 servicemen in Vietnam.
Although each would wield power in his own way, presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson both understood the unusual nature of their time and chose to create an extensive historical record of what they did in the White House. Between them these presidents secretly recorded over 1,000 hours of meetings, monologues and telephone conversations, a collection of material that provides an unparalleled view into the workings of the American government at the highest levels.
This semester students will be introduced to the Kennedy tapes. Students will engage a wide variety of source material ranging from secondary sources, traditional primary sources, to multimedia sources and the tapes themselves to discuss historical methods, the evolution of historical interpretation, and the fragility of primary sources. What are the strengths and weaknesses of these once secret tapes as historical sources? The goal of the course is to give students the tools they need to employ these remarkable sources in a research paper on the Kennedy era.

HIUS 401 G – An Exploration In Southern Women’s History: From Segregation To Civil Rights

R 1300-1530 CAB 412

Instructor: Lori Schuyler

This writing intensive course is intended to introduce students to the research and writing of history. Through readings and discussion, students will examine how segregation, industrialization, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement affected the lives of southern women, and how women responded to and shaped these changes in southern society. During the first five weeks, students will read and discuss several major studies of southern women's history. Students will also begin formulating their research topics and exploring primary sources. In the remaining weeks of the semester, students will research and write an article-length (20-30pp) paper that examines some aspect of southern women's history since 1865.
Required Readings May Include:
Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom
Anne Firor Scott, The Southern Lady
Glenda Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow
Elna Green, Southern Strategies
Lisa Lindquist Dorr, White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960
Georgina Hickey, Hope and Danger in the New South city : Working-class Women and Urban Development in Atlanta, 1890-1940
Jane Turner Censer, The Reconstruction of White Womanhood
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi

Department of Music

MUSI 212 – History Of Jazz Music (3)

M W 1300-1350 WIL 402

Instructor: Scott Deveaux

This course is a survey of the history of jazz from its beginnings around 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century. Important instrumental performers, vocalists, composers, and arrangers are listened to and discussed. Lab section is required.

MUSI 307 – Worlds Of Music (3 )

T R 930-1045 OCH 107

Instructor: TBA

To understand the complexities of global musics, we must begin at home appreciating the diversity of musics within the U.S.-"the global is in the local" (Fabian 1998, 5). This course is an introduction to ethnomusicology primarily for music majors featuring case studies of contemporary musical traditions from the twentieth century.
The study of ethnomusicology is a study of understanding otherness and understanding not only how other people make music, but also the way we tend to perceive other musics as less complex than ours, and we tend to appreciate the music but not the people.
Prerequisite: Major in music or anthropology, or permission of instructor.

MUSI 369 – African Drumming And Dance (1-2)

T R 1700-1900 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

A practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies), with the intention of performing at the end of the semester. Though no previous experience with music or dance is required, we will give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required of each class member, the goal being to develop an ongoing UVA African Drumming and Dance Ensemble.
Prerequisites: Permission of instructor by audition on first day of class.

Department of Politics

PLIR 424A – Globalizing Africa :The International Political Economy Of Africa

TR PV8 103 1400-1515

Instructor: Andrew Lawrence

Given Africa's immense size and geographical, cultural and political diversity, and given political economy's broad conceptual reach, any course on the International Political Economy (IPE) of Africa is bound to be selective in its focus and themes. Additionally, some themes will apply to some countries and regions more than others. However, for every theme covered, this course gives a central place to the voices and experiences of Africans, past and present. The course will analyze perspectives on colonial legacies and postcolonial dynamics; the nature of the African state; regime change and democratization; regional wars and complex humanitarian crises; the politics of debt, structural adjustment, and the AIDS crisis; relations with the U.S. and other major powers; and regional and international organizations.
Restricted to Third-Year, Fourth Year, Politics

PLCP 583 – Modern South African Politics In Comparative Perspective

W CAB 318 1300-1530

Instructor: Andrew Lawrence

This course will examine twentieth (and early 21st.) century South African politics with a focus on the rise and fall of apartheid, in the context of the historical circumstances that produced it, the personal experiences of South Africans under apartheid, and the local and international networks and movements of opposition it generated. Course materials include historical and political analyses, autobiographies, fiction, and film. Through comparative reference to the U.S. and other contexts, the course also examines critical theories of race, racial formation, and segregation. It further investigates the dynamics of colonialism, and its role in creating apartheid doctrine in South Africa, and the shifting relationship between apartheid and (both national and international) capitalism.
Restricted to Third-Year, Fourth Year, Politics

Department of Psychology

PSYC 487 –The Minority Family: A Psychological Inquiry (3)

M 0900-1130 GIL 225

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

This course examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing "deficit" and "strength" research paradigms.
Prerequisites: PSYC 306 and at least one course from each of the following groups: PSYC 210, 215 or 230, and PSYC 240, 250, or 260, and students in the African-American and African studies or studies in women and gender programs. Telephone Enrollment Restrictions: PSYC majors. If this course is full through ISIS: keep trying through ISIS.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 275 – African Religions (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 345

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

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.

RELA 390 – Islam In Africa (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 319

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Historical and topical introduction to Islam in Africa. Cross-listed as RELI 390.
Prerequisite: RELA 275, RELI 207, RELI 208, or instructor permission.

RELC 305 – Theologies Of Liberation (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 337

Instructor: Corey D. B. Walker

Who is God to the oppressed? What does it mean to do Christian theology from the underside? This course will critically examine the ideas, methodologies, and orientations of different theological trajectories within the field of Liberation Theology, including African-American, Gay/Lesbian, Latin American, Minjung, Mujerista, and Womanist theologies of liberation. The course will focus on theological method, modes of social and economic analysis particularly those perspectives inspired by varieties of critical theory and philosophies of liberation, and challenges to traditional Christian theologies.

RELG 321 – African American Religious History

T R 1100-1215 MIN 130

Instructor: TBA

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 – Race And Ethnic Relations (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 319

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

The terms “race” and “ethnicity,” and issues associated with them are, to say the least, problematic. The meanings of these – and related – terms are unclear and policies that address “racial” issues are usually very contentious. Why is this the case? Why is race, seemingly, a source of unending conflict? This course will address these questions by examining the general issue of race from a historical and comparative perspective.

SOC 410 – African American Communities (3)

T R 1530-1645 CAB 216

Instructor: Rick Turner

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear, comprehensive understanding of the history, struggles and diversity of the African-American community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the African-American community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of the cultural history of African-Americans. The course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for African-American people's sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussion, lectures, videos, reading, writing, and class presentation, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamics of the African-American community.

SOC 442 – Sociology Of Inequality (3)

M W 1530-1645 CAB 338

Instructor: Bethany P. Bryson

A survey of basic theories and methods used to analyze structures of social inequality. Includes comparative analysis of the inequalities of power and privilege, both their causes and their consequences for social conflict and social change.

 

Spring 2004

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 102 – Introduction io African-American and African Studies II: Cross-Currents in the African Diaspora (3)

T R 12:30-1:45 PHS 204

Instructor: Corey D.B. Walker

This team-taught course builds upon and expands on the subjects and themes developed in AAS 101: Introduction to African-American Studies and African Studies. With a temporal focus on the 20th century, we will critically explore and analyze the links and disjunctions in the cultural, economic, political, and intellectual practices and experiences of people of African descent throughout the African diaspora. This course features an interdisciplinary approach in developing conceptual, theoretical, and analytical frameworks for understanding the depth and range of experiences of people of African descent in the Americas, Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. Beginning with an overview of the history, theoretical questions, and methods of the Black Studies Project, the course is divided into three units that examine African diasporic social and political thought and expression; identity formation and comparative racial classification; and literary, cultural, and aesthetic currents in the African diaspora.

AAS 366 – African-American History Since 1865 (3)

M W 2-2:50 RFN G004A

Instructor: Reginald D. Butler and Scot A. French

This lecture course explores the history and culture of African Americans in the United States. We will examine some of the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities, paying particular attention to how African Americans themselves shaped their experiences. We will devote some portion of each class to the close examination of primary sources, with a particular focus on the intersection of the “local” and the “global.” Course requirements include weekly reading responses, a short paper, midterm, and final. Texts may include: Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow; Richard Wright, Black Boy; Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw; and Deborah McDowell, Leaving Pipe Shop. (Cross-listed with HIUS 366)

AAS 401 - Independent Study (3)

TBA

AAS 406A – Black Modernity (3)

M 1:00-3:30 MIN 108

Instructor: Davarian Baldwin

This class interrogates the text and contexts of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to create a working definition of a “Black modernity.” Specifically, bringing historical and cultural analysis to bear on a single work of fiction, this course will survey key themes in the Black modern experience from 1899 to 1950 including migration, urbanization, the black modern aesthetic, black radicalism and black nationalism. While modernity has been generally understood to consist of secularization, mass production, and consumption, scientific rationalization and democratization, black people in the West have had an uneven relationship to these processes. With W.E.B. DuBois’ concept of “double-consciousness” in mind, this course explores the uneven relationship the black subject has had as both outside of, yet central to the modern experience. It should be noted that neither literary, film, nor social scientific texts take on a primary position in this critical reading, thinking and writing intensive course. All texts are used in a fully interdisciplinary framework where the conceptualization of a Black modernity becomes the primary focus of analysis. Those looking to get basic African American history or to simply read the novel should not take this course. As an upper-level seminar that only meets once a week, this is a reading, writing, thinking and participation intensive course. Requirements include two 3-5 page film critiques, five 4-6 page papers (every other week), two 2-3 page conceptual reflection papers, and a take-home final exam.

AAS 406B – Beyond Black And White: Race In 20th Century America (3)

W 1:00-3:30 MIN 108

Instructor: Peter Flora

How is race lived and understood in America? How has each new generation of Americans remade race for its own time from the experiences and ideas of earlier generations? This seminar will tackle these questions by examining the history of racial thought in America since the late nineteenth century. Students' grades will be based on participation in weekly discussions of assigned readings (200-250 pgs/wk), a 4-5-page review essay, and a 20-page research paper on a course-related topic supervised by the instructor. Course readings will include both primary and secondary sources, and will draw from authors such as W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Richard Rodriguez, Barbara Fields, and Cornel West, among others.

AAS 406C – Religion And Diaspora (3)

M 930-1200 MIN 108

Instructor: Isabel Mukonyora

The aim of this seminar course is to compare and contrast three functions of the term Diaspora that can be discerned from history. The course begins with an in depth study of the meaning of the term Diaspora given by the rise of the Jewish nation in biblical history. This will be followed by case studies of other uses of the term, for example a) in Rastafarianism in a cultural matrix of the transatlantic world of former African slaves and b) in the rise of Apartheid in South African history. Each student will write a 20 page essay based on material presented in class as part of preliminary research to be carried out while the seminar series runs. Basic reading material will be made available on toolkit to be supported by literature to be identified in the library through working on the 20-page essay.

AAS 406D – The Color Of Work: Labor, Race, And History In South Africa And The United States (3)

R 1-330 RFN 173

Instructor: Clare Terni

How do social constructions of race shape and legitimate peoples? Working lives? This course will explore comparative histories of South Africa and the United States in order to critically consider what it means to be black, white, and working in each of these countries. Special attention will be paid to the mining industries of South Africa and West Virginia, comparisons between Jim Crow and the apartheid system, and the impact of working conditions on the lives of people associated with male workers: their families, age-mates, prostitutes, and others. Students' grades will be based on participation in weekly discussions of readings (ca. 200 pages/wk), a 4-5 page review essay, one class presentation of a reading, and a 20-page research paper on a topic related to the course and supervised by the instructor. Course readings will include material from both history and anthropology, from authors such as Leonard Thompson, John Cell, David Roediger, and Talal Asad, accompanied by primary source materials from both South Africa and the US.

AAS 406E - Afra-Amer-Indians:Constructions Of Race, Identity, And Memory (3)

R 930-1045 PV8 (Pavilion 8) 103

Instructor: Anjana Mebane-Cruz

For many, this class will the their introduction to the concept of "Black-Indians" and the history of mixed race Indians in the US. The course will explore some of the constructs of race categories, perceptions and history building from the colonial period to the present. The course will attend to the ways in which people resist and subvert categorization and legitimacy while even while constructing and preserving memory and identity. There will be guest lecturers from/associated with Afra-Amer-Indian groups. Requirements: Two ten-page papers as well as two or three one page response papers to critical articles/papers. There will be a fifteen page midterm. Final to be decided.

AAS 451 - Distinguished Majors Program/ Directed Research (3)

TBA

AAS 452 - Distinguished Majors Program/Thesis (3)

TBA

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 401D - The Color of Work: Labor, Race, And History In South Africa And The United States (3)

R 1-330 RFN 173

Instructor: Clare Terni

(Cross-listed as AAS 406D; see course description above.)

ANTH 401E - Afra-Amer-Indians (3)

R 930-1045 PV8 (Pavilion 8) 103

Instructor: Anjana Mebane-Cruz

(Cross-listed as ANTH 401E; see course description above.)

ANTH 256 – African Cultures (3)

M W F 9-9:50 RFN G004C

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Through this course, students will gain an understanding of the richness and variety of African life. While no course of this kind can hope to give more than a broad overview of the continent, students will learn which intellectual tools and fundamental principles are necessary for approaching the study of the hundreds of cultures that exist today on the African continent. Drawing from ethnographic texts, literary works and documentary and feature films, specific examples of African peoples and their lifeways will be selected in order to sample the cultural richness and diversity of the African continent. Fills the Non-Western Perspectives Requirement

ANTH 267 – How Others See Us (3)

M W 10-10:50 RFN G004C

Instructor: Ira Bashkow

This course examines how America, the West, and the white racial mainstream are viewed by "others" in different parts of the world and introduces anthropological perspectives on culture, colonialism, identity, race, and discourses of otherness. Readings and films deal with topics such as the views of Islamist extremists, African perspectives on European colonialism, American Indian responses to Anglo-Americans, Chinese writings about America, Papua New Guinean constructions of white expatriates, the portrayal of whites in Japanese advertising, and critiques of the "invisibility" of whiteness in the U.S. We will ask what others' views can (and can't) teach us about the anthropology of our own lives, as well as about the possibilities and problems of cross-cultural understanding in general. Course requirements center on extensive reading assignments and an interview-based field research project to be conducted in local communities.

ANTH 388 – African Archaelogy (3)

M W F 9-9:50 GIL 141

Instructor: Adria LaViolette

This course surveys the archaeological knowledge currently available about the African continent. The emphasis will be on the Late Stone Age, when fully modern humans dominate the cultural landscape, and the subsequent Iron Age, but will also briefly cover pre-modern humans and the archaeology of the colonial period. We will discuss the great social, economic, and cultural transformations in African history known primarily through archaeology, and the most important archaeological sites and discoveries on the continent. Throughout the course a theme will be the politics of the past, and the changing role of the practice of archaeology in Africa.

ANTH 565 – Creole Narratives (3)

T R 12:30-1:45 PHS 205

Instructor: George Mentore

We begin with 18th- and 19th-century Caribbean intellectual life. We do so from the perspective of European imperialism and its influences upon colonized values, slavery, race, class and color. We examine the persistence of these major themes through the 20th century, formalized in the battle of ideas between the elite of the mother country and the Creole upper classes. We will attempt to read the images of the Creole self and explore their claims for a crisis of identity. We will also focus on the so-called spiritual character of the Creole personality. We shall conclude by looking at the way in which the specifics of island culture have directed nation building and how they appear to have helped in the perpetuation of ideological and political dependencies.

Department of Economics

ECON 415 – Economics Of Labor (3)

T R 11-12:15 RSH 104

Instructor: William Johnson

Prerequisite: ECON 301 (or 311) and 371 (or its equivalent), or permission of instructor
Economic analysis of employment and wages, including the economics of education, unemployment, labor unions, discrimination and income inequality.

Department of English Language and Literature

ENAM 314: African American Survey II (3)

M W 2-3:15 PHS 205

Instructor: Marlon Ross

A continuation of ENAM 313, African American Literature I, this course concentrates on twentieth- and twenty-first century African American literature and culture. Focusing on the changing notions of racial identification, this lecture and discussion based class will address a wide array of genres - including fiction, poetry, drama, polemical prose, autobiography, music, photography, and film - shaping and shaped by pivotal cultural and political movements, such as the "New Negro," the Harlem Renaissance, Civil Rights, Black Arts/Black Power, womanism, as well as current debates over matters like hip hop, same-sexuality, affirmative action, incarceration, and "premature death." Writers include, but are not limited to, Charles Chesnutt, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Nella Larsen, Anne Spencer, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Margaret Walker, Amiri Baraka, Huey Newton, Carolyn Rodgers, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. Mandatory assignments include two response papers, quizzes, midterm and final exams.

ENAM 382: The Black College Campus (3)

M W 2-3:15 CAU 134

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

A student-centered, reading, seeing, discussion, and communication course, we consider the ways in which identity politics are implicated spatially in built environments. Focusing on how the campuses of Historically Black Colleges and Universities were shaped by—and shaped—the struggle over African-American education particularly during the Jim Crow Period, we explore built environments as arenas of cultural conflict and negotiation. How do built environments such as college campuses assign and assert the “proper” place of individuals and groups in social hierarchies? How do subordinated groups resist these processes? From the uncomfortable union of “agriculture” and “industry” and “education”—such as connoted by the label “Cow School” for land-grant institutions—to the cultural uses of gothic architecture in avowing the high status of “Ivy League” institutions, we open up discourse on built environments to engage the politics that circumscribe built environments. We will tease out working concepts and methods that help de-center the paradigm of interpreting built environments art-historically—in relation to rigorously policed canons of accepted types and styles. This will be accomplished through discussion of short readings drawn from within and beyond the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and environmentalism and through occasional field trips, workshops, and lectures. In addition to studying readings in time for class discussion, students will be also required to complete two quizzes, four group exercises, and a semester long group-project. The course will help students engage built environments by integrating knowledge gained from experiencing them with our senses, from studying them by mapping and diagramming spatial relationships, and from interrogating primary and secondary written and oral accounts.

Department of History

HIAF 202- Africa Since 1800 (4)

T R 9:30-10:45 CAB 138

Instructor: John Mason

HIAF 202 examines the last 200 years of African history, beginning with the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, in the early nineteenth century. The course is divided into four parts. The first is an overview, touching on the slave trade and its consequences, the European conquest of most of the African continent, African resistance to colonial rule, and the reestablishment of Africa independence. We will then retrace these themes, in depth, as they emerge in the history of three specific regions: West Africa, especially Nigeria, Central Africa, especially the Congo and Rwanda, and southern Africa, especially South Africa and Zimbabwe. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and with the various strategies Africans employed to resist European domination. HIAF 202 is an introductory course and requires no prior knowledge of African history. Course materials include textbooks, novels, autobiographies, and films.

HIAF 404-Independent Study In African History (3)

TBA

Instructor: Staff

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HILA 330 – South Atlantic Migrations (3)

M 3:30-6 CAB 319

Instructor: Pablo Davis

Throughout its history, the South Atlantic region of the United States (Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Puerto Rico, and US Virgin Islands) has experienced enormous, sometimes wrenching, often creative, and always significant movements of people. Native American life, European settlement (especially Spanish and English), African immigration (most of it involuntary), and the forced exodus of Cherokee and other peoples are all among the most important movements prior to the 20th century. In the past hundred-plus years, Black and White northward migration; the Cuban expatriate community; Puerto Rican migration to the mainland, and other Caribbean and Latin American (im)migration have transformed the cultural, social, economic, and political life not only of the South Atlantic but of the United States as a whole. Increasingly, movement has assumed more complex shapes, at times circular. The course amounts to a collective exploration of why people have moved within, into, and out of the South Atlantic region, and how it has mattered, with particular focus on the past 150 years.

HIST 504 – Monticello Internship (3)

TBA

Instructor: Phyllis Leffler

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor. Directed research, largely in primary source materials, on topics relating to Jefferson's estate, life, and times. Directed by senior members of the Monticello staff. The internships are restricted to graduate students in history and to fourth year undergraduate history majors. A maximum of two students each semester can be admitted to the course.

HIUS324 – 20TH Century South (3)

M W 10-10:50 MRY 209

Instructor: Grace Hale

This course examines the broad history of the American South in the twentieth century, with special emphasis on racial violence, the creation of segregation, class and gender relations within the region, the cultural and economic interdependence of black and white southerners, and the Civil Right Movement and its aftermath. Sources examined will include film, fiction, and music as well as more traditional historical sources like newspapers and court opinions. Students interested in American Studies, African American Studies, and Gender Studies are also welcome. Grading: midterm 25%; paper (5-7 pp) 25%; final exam 30%; participation in discussion sections and attendance at film and documentary screenings 20%.

AAS 366/HIUS 366 – African-American History Since 1865 (3)

M W 2-250 RFN G004A

Instructor: Reginald D. Butler and Scot French

This lecture course explores the history and culture of African Americans in the United States. We will examine some of the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities, paying particular attention to how African Americans themselves shaped their experiences. We will devote some portion of each class to the close examination of primary sources, with a particular focus on the intersection of the “local” and the “global.” Course requirements include weekly reading responses, a short paper, midterm, and final. Texts may include: Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow; Richard Wright, Black Boy: A record of Childhood and Youth; Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw; and Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi.

HIUS 367 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

T R 2-2:50 MIN 125

Instructor: Julian Bond

This lecture course will examine the history, philosophies, tactics, events, and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward. The Southern movement--variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement--was a black-lead mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation in the South by the middle 1960s. Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping phases--lobbying, litigation and protest. In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights. In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation, the denial of the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools. The last phase, lasting a decade from '55 to '65, was a period of protest--boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations--as well as organizing campaigns that lay the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s. Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation in the United States. The movement's well and lesser-known proponents and opponents and their stratagems will be examined. Discussion section required. Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five-to-seven page papers.

Department of Music

MUSI 212 - History Of Jazz Music (3)

M W 1-1:50 OCH 101

Instructor: Scott Deveaux

This course is a survey of the history of jazz from its beginnings around 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century. Important instrumental performers, vocalists, composers, and arrangers are listened to and discussed. Lab section is required.

MUSI 307 – Worlds Of Music (3)

T R 3:30-4:45 OCH 107

Instructor: Natalie Serrazin

Prerequisite: Major in music or anthropology, or permission of instructor.
To understand the complexities of global musics, we must begin at home appreciating the diversity of musics within the U.S.-"the global is in the local" (Fabian 1998, 5). This course is an introduction to ethnomusicology primarily for music majors featuring case studies of contemporary musical traditions from the twentieth century.
The study of ethnomusicology is a study of understanding otherness and understanding not only how other people make music, but also the way we tend to perceive other musics as less complex than ours, and we tend to appreciate the music but not the people.

MUSI 309 – Performance In Africa (3)

T R 3:30-4:45 OCH 107

Instructor: Michele Kisliuk

Prerequisite: instructor permission.
Explores music/dance performance in Africa through reading, hands-on workshops, discussion, and audio and video examples. The course covers both "traditional" and "popular" styles, leading us to question those categories. Class meetings focus not only on musical repertoire, sociomusical circumstances, and processes, but also on the problems and politics of translating performance practice from one cultural context to another. Major in music or anthropology, or permission of instructor. The study of ethnomusicology is a study of understanding otherness and understanding not only how other people make music, but also the way we tend to perceive other musics as less complex than ours, and we tend to appreciate the music but not the people.

Department of Politics

PLAP 370 – Racial Politics (3)

M W 11-11:50 CAB 345

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

Racial Politics is about how race shapes American politics. We will look at race in elections, public policy, and public opinion. We will examine how the political thinking and choices of people of different races differs, how racial politics implicates ideas about class and gender, and how scholarship on race depends on the race of the person conducting it. We will consider the implications for an increasingly racially diverse and complicated polity of defining race primarily in terms of black/white conflict. Our goal is to see how citizens, politicians and scholars draw on ideas about race, to appreciate when these ideas are reinforced or challenged by our politics, and to become sensitive to the ways in which contemporary social scientific scholarship on race itself informs the politics of race in the U.S. Though American political science is built around models of black/white difference, we will work to criticize and extend these models as we consider the enduring and evolving problem of race in the United States. Above all, our goal is to talk with each other about race both critically and democratically.

PLAP 382 – Civil Liberties And Civil Rights (3)

M W 1-1:50 WIL 301

Instructor: David O’Brien

The course focuses on freedom of speech and religion, the rights of the accused, the right of privacy, and struggles over equality and the equal protection of the law.

PLIR 424 – The International Political Economy Of Africa (3)

T R 2-3:15 PV8 103

Instructor: Andrew Lawrence

This course provides a critical overview of the political economy of Africa, at the local, national, regional and
transnational levels. These multiple perspectives provide a context for analyzing some of the major issues confronting Africa. These include the requisites for economic growth; the politics of AIDS and other diseases; and the crisis of transnational wars and militarized conflicts and their accompanying internal and international
refugee crises. An analysis of these and other issues enables students to address key debates: Is state-led economic development possible in contemporary Africa? What are the prospects for regional integration and African Union? How decisive are international organizations, NGOs, and the transnational ideological context for developments in Africa?

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 276 – African Religions in Americas (3)

M W 12-12:50 CAB 337

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

This course explores the African religious heritage of the Americas. We will concentrate on African-derived religions in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as Cuban Santeria, Haitian Vodou, and the Jamaican Rastafari movement. North American slave religion, the black church, and African-American Islam will also be considered. We will seek to identify their shared religio-cultural "core" while developing an appreciation for the distinctive characteristics and historical contexts of each "New World" tradition. We will address topics such as ideas of God and Spirit; the significance of ritual sacrifice, divination, and initiation; the centrality of trance, ecstatic experience and mediumship; and the role of religion in the struggle for liberation and social justice. Final, Midterm, periodic quizzes on the readings, participation in discussion.

RELA 276 – African Art (3)

T R 9:30-10:45 CAB 210

Instructor: Benjamin Ray

Each student will design an exhibition of African art for presentation on the Web that will incorporate the results of the student's study of African art. The exhibitions will contain an introductory explanation of the exhibit's theme, images of selected African art objects, relevant field-context images, descriptive labels, and other explanatory textual materials. The images of African art will be taken from collections at the Bayly Museum of the University of Virginia, the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, the Hampton University Museum, and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and are used with copyright permission. The course includes the following curricular components: a brief history of African art studies; African ritual and cosmology; analysis of African art exhibition catalogues; library research on selected art objects; the exhibition of African art in museum contexts; training in Web skills and image processing. The aim of the course is to create exhibitions of African art that attempt to be true to the objects themselves while placing them in an educational environment of value to the exhibitor and the viewer alike.

RELC 310 – Third World Christianity (3)

T R 9:30-10:45 RSH 110

Instructor: Isabel Mukonyora

This course focuses issues of Christian thought in third world histories sharing a colonial past. This is an opportunity to examine various kinds of arguments for Liberation Theology that have come with the translation and adaptation to Latin America, Africa and Asia. Literature that exposes students to writers such as Segundo, the Boff brothers, Desmond Tutu, Allan Boesak, Kwame Bediako and others will be on toolkit to read alongside The Cambridge Companion on Liberation Theology (Edited by Christopher Rowland) The main aim in class meetings is to discuss these articles and the issues they raise in student led discussion, while lectures are used to define Liberation Theology in the light of the impact of Christianity in cultures beyond the western world.

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 – Race And Ethnicity (3)

M W 2-3:15 CAB 316

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

This course provides a graduate level introduction to the field of Race and Ethnicity. As such, it attempts to cover a broad spectrum of topics, focusing on the theoretical and consequential aspects of conceptions of race and ethnicity. Of necessity, the course also has a historical focus, since modern-day debates over race are strongly conditioned by the past. Moreover, to really understand issues of race and ethnicity, we must take a cross-cultural perspective, since these debates have often been skewed by a focus on the wrenching problems produced by racial/ethnic conflict in the United States. By adopting these perspectives, the course seeks to provide insight into the complexities that surround issues of race and ethnicity.

SOC 410 - African American Communities (3)

T R 3:30-4:45 CAB 123

Instructor: M. Rick Turner

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear, comprehensive understanding of the history, struggles and diversity of the African-American community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the African-American community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of the cultural history of African-Americans. The course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for African-American people's sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussion, lectures, videos, reading, writing, and class presentation, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamics of the African-American community.

SOC 442 – Sociology of Inequality (3)

W 1-4:30 CAB 338

Instructor: Bethany P. Bryson

A survey of basic theories and methods used to analyze structures of social inequality. Includes comparative analysis of the inequalities of power and privilege, both their causes and their consequences for social conflict and social change.

Studies in Women and Gender

SWAG 325 – Gender and African Religions (3)

T R 11-12:15 BRN 328

Instructor: Isabel Mukonyora

The aim is to bring together reading material on different religious traditions of Africa including (Christianity and Islam) from which we can learn about some of the ways religion shapes attitudes to gender in contemporary African societies. African creation myths and examples of ritual behavior, will be used to shed light on concepts of gender that explain both the oppression and ritual 'power' in traditional societies. This will be followed by seminar work led by students on different chapters of Mukonyora's forthcoming book on the impact of colonial conquest on changing attitudes to sexuality in the modern African society of Zimbabwe. Group discussions led by students will be a regular feature of this class that ends with an overview of the challenges that face women in modern African societies where religious movements are widespread.

Swahili

SWAH 101 – Introductory Swahili (3)

M W F 10-10:50 PV8 103

Instructor:

Introduces the most widely spoken indigenous language of East-Central Africa. Focuses on speaking, comprehension, reading and writing skills, and the language in its cultural context.

SWAH 102 – Intermediate Swahili (3)

M W F 12-12:50 PV8 103

Instructor:

No description available.

University Seminar

USEM 171/0020 – The Black and White 60’s (2)

T 3:30-5:30 PV8

Instructor: Julian Bond

The 1960’s saw a generation of young people begin to build movements, which would stop a war abroad and start a war at home. What made these movements for peace and equal rights possible? What events triggered them? Who were participants? What is their legacy in the present? This seminar – through biographies activists in the movements – attempts to answer these and other questions as we examine personalities, events, and culture of the 1960s. Students will be required to write a comprehensive a paper on a 60’s subject – a participant, an organization, a movement.

 

Fall 2003

 

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 101 - Introduction to African-American and African Studies (4)

T R 1230-1345 WIL 301

Instructor: Reginald D. Butler and Scot French

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

AAS 305/RELC 305 - Black Theology (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 337

Instructor: Corey D. B. Walker

This lecture and discussion course will introduce students to a few of the significant topics and themes in the field of black theology. Among some of the major topics to be discussed include the emergence and academic codification of black theology, its challenge to other Christian theologies, its doctrinal orientations, and its relation to other theologies of liberation. Readings will primarily be drawn from the foundational texts of James H. Cone. We will also consult texts by Dwight Hopkins, William R. Jones, Deloris Williams, and others.

AAS 323/ HIUS 323 - Rise And Fall Of The Slave South (3)

M W 1100 -1150 MIN 125

Instructor: Edward L. Ayers

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the sixteenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slaveowners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians.
Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Requirements include a midterm and final as well as a substantial research paper; the course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course.

AAS 365/HIUS 365 – African-American History To 1865 (3)

T R 1230-1345 WIL 301

Instructor: Reginald Butler and Scot French

This lecture course explores the history and culture of African Americans in British colonial North America and the United States through 1865. We will examine changing constructions of race, gender, and class, as well as the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities associated with this period. We will devote some portion of each class to the close examination of primary sources, with a particular focus on the intersection of the "local" and the "global." Weekly reading assignments will average about 150-175 pages. Grade will be based on participation, weekly reading responses, one short paper, a midterm, and a final.

AAS 401 - Independent Study (3)

TBA

AAS 405A/HILA 403 – Thinking From Cuba (4)

R 1300-1530 CAB B029

Instructor: Brian Owensby

What is it to try to see the world from another perspective? Can we ever do it? Is classroom experience enough? With these questions front and center, this course will explore the history of Cuba, from the colonial period to the contemporary era. Chronologically we will cover conquest, slavery, Spanish colonialism, US neocolonialism, and Revolution. Thematically, we will be concerned to understand the structures of slavery, the culture of race in a multi-racial society, the experience of living under colonial and neocolonial powers, the efforts to define a national identity in part through Afro-Cuban culture, and the meaning of an egalitarian revolution in relation to Cuba's past. This class will be unusual in that it will begin here at UVa and finish on site in Havana, Cuba. After a full semester's worth of academic work here, the class will move to Havana in early January for a 7-day extension of the semester. During that week we will hear from Cuban scholars, activists, and government officials, read and discuss works of history and fiction, hold nightly seminars, explore Havana for clues to how everyday life is lived and probably hear some Cuban music. Instructor permission is required for this course. Enrollment limited to 10. If interested, please see Prof. Owensby in Randall 122, W 1330-1430 or Th 1100-1200. Preference for those with some knowledge of Spanish.

AAS 405B – African Modernity: Readings In African Studies (3)

M 9:30-12:00 MIN 108

Instructor: Isabel Mukonyora

This course is designed to allow students an opportunity to spend the first six weeks of the semester examining two well-known books that further understanding of the political, social, and religious dimension of living in Africa today. Augmented by lecture material based on other African writers and seminar discussions that require active student participation, the first book to be looked at is entitled The Idea of Africa by Victor Mudimbe, followed by In My Fathers's House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture by Anthony Appiah. Students will be required to read these two books in the first six weeks of the semester before time is allocated for independent research that draws on the extra literature by African writers such as John Mbiti, Kwasi Wiredu, Paulin Hountondji and others responding to the challenges of Western hegemony. Written assignment is a 20-page paper on a selection of topics agreed in class. This class satisfies the following AAS major requirements -- 1) course in humanities, 2) course on Africa, and 3) 400-level or above course with term paper.

AAS 451 - Distinguished Majors Program/ Directed Research (3)

TBA

AAS 452 - Distinguished Majors Program/Thesis (3)

TBA

AAS 529 – Topics In Race Theory (3)

M 1900-2130

Instructor: Wende Marshall

This course will examine theories and practices of race and otherness, in order to analyze and interpret constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of race (particularly whiteness) from the late 18th to the 21st centuries. Central to our discussion will be the "progress" paradigm, so essential to positivism and western social science, and the relationships between race/whiteness, culture, nation, gender, and history.

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 529A – Topics In Race Theory (3)

M 1900-2130 CAB 432

Instructor: Wende Marshall

This course will examine theories and practices of race and otherness, in order to analyze and interpret constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of race (particularly whiteness) from the late 18th to the 21st centuries. Central to our discussion will be the "progress" paradigm, so essential to positivism and western social science, and the relationships between race/whiteness, culture, nation, gender, and history.

Department of English Language and Literature

ENCR 481B – Race, Space, And Culture (3)

W 1830-2100 CAM 108

Instructors: K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross

This multi-disciplinary course explores racial and other cultural identities in relation to the built environment and other conceptions of space. How has the concept of race helped to shape our interactions with space in both conscious and unconscious ways? How have our historical constructs of space helped to determine, in both articulated and inarticulate ways, what it means to identify with, or against, one cultural identity or another? Co-taught by Marlon Ross of English and African-American Studies and K. Ian Grandison of Landscape Architecture and American Studies, the course draws from and beyond the disciplines represented by its instructors to synthesize ways of interrogating the written, graphic, filmic, and field resources necessary for broadening our understanding of space. The course provides a forum for weekly discussion hinged on targeted readings (such as James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan, Oscar Newman's Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design, Philip Deloria's Playing Indian, Leslie Kanes Weisman's Discrimination by Design: A Feminist Critique of the Man-Made Environment, and Marc Leepson's Saving Monticello: The Levy Familys Epic Quest to Rescue the House that Jefferson Built), films (such as National Geographic's Gorilla and Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing), and local field trips (such as to Woolen Mills, Monticello, and Vinegar Hill). Relating to the inter-disciplinary thrust of the course, students will have the opportunity to work in small teams to lead selected class sessions, to complete a research project, and to participate in a final Open-House that serves as the capstone for the course.

ENAM 313-Early African American Literature I (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 332

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American prose, from l760, the date of Briton Hammon's Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings to l901, the year of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery. We will work our way through canonical and non-canonical texts and through multiple genres-- captivity narratives, spiritual autobiographies, slave narratives, sermons, execution sermons, criminal narratives, speeches, novels--and will explore a number of issues related to literary history, culture, aesthetics, authorship, audience, genre, and narratology. Among the questions to be explored? How have literary historians given shape to or "storied" this tradition? How do black women's writings complicate these "fictions" of literary history? What is the relation between the black vernacular tradition and the black "literary" text? How do the white abolitionists and editors involved in the production of slave narratives trouble traditional conceptions of authorship? Who "authors" a speech by Sojourner Truth that is stenographically transcribed and appears in multiple versions? What confluence of factors and ideologies explain the "canonical" version of "Ain't I a Woman?" Other texts include Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Harriet Wilson's Our Nig; Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom; David Walker's Appeal; Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, and Thomas Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner. We will work to situate these and other selections in the political, cultural, and critical controversies of their time and ours.

ENAM 481A - African-American Women Writers (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB B020

Instructor: Angela Davis

We will read several novels and short stories by African-American Women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, four written responses to readings (each one typed page long) and a formal essay (ten to twelve pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls...; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown GirlBrownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place.
Prerequisite: The course is restricted to fourth year majors in English, Women's Studies and African-American and African Studies.

ENAM 481B – Early African-American Literature (3)

T R 1100-1215 BRN 332

Instructor: Deborah E. McDowell

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American prose, from l760, the date of Briton Hammon's Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings to l901, the year of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery. We will work our way through canonical and non-canonical texts and through multiple genres-- captivity narratives, spiritual autobiographies, slave narratives, sermons, execution sermons, criminal narratives, speeches, novels--and will explore a number of issues related to literary history, culture, aesthetics, authorship, audience, genre, and narratology. Among the questions to be explored? How have literary historians given shape to or "storied" this tradition? How do black women's writings complicate these "fictions" of literary history? What is the relation between the black vernacular tradition and the black "literary" text? How do the white abolitionists and editors involved in the production of slave narratives trouble traditional conceptions of authorship? Who "authors" a speech by Sojourner Truth that is stenographically transcribed and appears in multiple versions? What confluence of factors and ideologies explain the "canonical" version of "Ain't I a Woman?" Other texts include Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl;
Harriet Wilson's Our Nig; Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom; David Walker's Appeal; Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, and Thomas Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner. We will work to situate these and other selections in the political, cultural, and critical controversies of their time and ours.

ENAM 481C – Representations Of Slavery (3)

M W 1400-1515 CAB 247

Instructor: Stephen F. Railton

Slavery was a fact of American life for the first 250 years of the country's existence, but we'll be studying it at one remove. Our focus will be on how slavery has been imagined, conceived or re-presented by American writers, black and white, and by American culture, during the last 150 years. We'll start with Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and end with Morrison's Beloved. In between we'll read novels and stories by Twain, Cable, Chesnutt, Mitchell, Faulkner and a few others. We'll study theatrical and cinemagaphic enactments of slavery, from minstrelsy to the "Tom Shows" derived from Stowe's novel to films like Gone with the Wind. Assignments will include a couple short pieces, an oral report, and a seminar essay.

Department of French Language and Literature

FREN 346 – Topics In African Culture (3)

M W 1300-1350 CAB 236

Instructor: Majida Bargach

La littérature francophone marocaine prend ses racines dans l'Afrique, la France coloniale mais aussi dans le monde arabo-musulman et dans les cultures berbères et judéo-arabe. C'est cette extraordinaire mixité culturelle et ethnique que des auteurs marocains d'expression française vont illustrer dans leurs ouvrages, depuis l'époque coloniale jusqu'à nos jours. Après avoir étudié des œuvres écrites durant le protectorat français au Maroc ou relatant cette période, nous aborderons la littérature contemporaine expression des rêves, des mythes et des aspirations politiques et sociales.

FREN 443 – Africa In Cinema (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 235

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

Study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. Ideological Constructions of the African as "other". History of African cinema. Sociological and ideological filmmakers from different cultural backgrounds and studies the ways in which their perspectives on Africa are often informed by their own social and ideological positions as well as the demands of exoticism. It also examines the constructions of the African as "other" and the kinds of responses such constructions have elicited from Africa's filmmakers. These filmic "inventions" are analyzed through a selection of French, British, American, and African films by such directors as John Huston, S. Pollack, J-J Annaud, M. Radford, Ngangura Mweze, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cisse, Gaston Kabore, Amadou Seck, Dani Kouyate, Brian Tilley, Jean-Marie Teno on a variety of subjects relative to the image of Africa in cinema. The final grade will be based on 2 short papers (4 pages/each), a final paper (7-10 pages), an oral presentation and contributions to discussions. Each oral presentation will lead to a written paper on the subject of the presentation; the paper will address suggestions made during discussions in class. Papers should be analytical, written in clear and grammatical French using correct terminology supplied with this description.

Department of History

HIAF 201- Early African History Through The Era Of The Slave Trade (4)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 345

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

Early African History draws Africans' distinctive achievements in culture, politics, and economic strategies out from the mists of the once-dark continent's unwritten past. Starting with the dawn of history and taking the story up in detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 201 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the ironic interplay of tragedy and achievement in a continent increasingly trapped in exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of African history, HIAF 202, taught in the spring, narrates subsequent events down through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.)
HIAF 201 is a lower-division introductory survey. The instructor presents the major themes of early African history in lectures twice each week. Students meet additionally in discussion sections for review of readings, quizzes, and preparation for written assignments. Requirements include weekly map quizzes, a mid-term examination (only the better of two tries counts), three short papers (4-5 pages) rehearsing historical questions for the mid-terms and considering the written sources on Africa's past, and a final examination (format to be negotiated with the class). The course belongs to the African-American and African Studies curriculum, meets the "non-western" requirement for the major in History, and qualifies for the College "non-western perspectives" area requirement. Students may rewrite one of the papers to fulfill the College Second Writing Requirement.
Readings revolve around weekly assignments in a text (Shillington, History of Africa), for a total of about 225 pages. Other assigned chapters and professional articles introduce the distinctive methodologies of doing history without written sources (including the famous Mande oral epic Sundiata), highlight interpretive ("historiographical") issues, and consider concepts relevant to understanding early Africa. The total number of assigned pages runs at approximately 1200.
No formula determines final marks. Students are graded according to their "highest consistent performance" in all aspects of the course, including attendance at lectures and participation in discussions, with allowance made for the unfamiliarity of the subject matter early in the term; a number of options allow students to devise a combination of graded work that will accommodate other academic commitments and reflect specialized abilities most accurately.
HIAF 201 presumes no prior knowledge of Africa or experience with the study of history. Since the subject is new to nearly everyone in the course, consistent application and preparation is expected, particularly early in the term. Students in all four years of their undergraduate careers and in all colleges of the University complete the course with success.
Most find it a challenging opportunity to discover and examine assumptions about modern Americans -- themselves included -- they did not know they held.

HIAF 302 – History Of Southern Africa (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 423

Instructor: John Mason

HIAF 302 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing South Africa. The course begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of the conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.
By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest did not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, and even religious beliefs.
Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, multi-ethnic nationalism evolved into nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.
HIAF 302 is an introductory course and assumes no prior knowledge of African history.

HIAF 402- What’s Wrong With Africa (4)

T R 1400-1515 PV8 108

Instructor: John Mason

War, famine, disease, and unending poverty... This is the Africa that we too often read about in newspapers and magazines and see on TV. While this sort of coverage is misleading--Africa is not simply a continent-wide disaster area--there is enough truth in the images of human suffering to cause Africans and non-Africans alike to ask, What's wrong with Africa?
HIAF 402 explores the roots of Africa's multiple crises, focussing primarily on Africa's relations with the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. Topics include the overseas slave trade, conquest and colonialism, anti-colonial liberation struggles, and post-colonial politics and economics. Course materials include African novels and movies and current scholarship from Africa and the west.

HIAF 404-Independent Study In African History (3)

TBA

Instructor: Staff

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HIST 504 – Monticello Intership (3)

Day: TBA 0930-1045

Instructor: Phyllis Leffler

Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor. Directed research, largely in primary source materials, on topics relating to Jefferson's estate, life, and times. Directed by senior members of the Monticello staff. The internships are restricted to graduate students in history and to fourth year undergraduate history majors. A maximum of two students each semester can be admitted to the course.

HIST 511-Slavery In World History (3)

M 1300-1530 PV5 109

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

HIAF 511 is a small seminar-style class for graduate students and advanced undergraduates (with instructor's
permission) that will explore historical approaches to the study of one of the world's oldest, most ubiquitous, and most tragic, institutions. Most Americans are familiar with slavery only as it developed in the Old South in the decades before the Civil War. In fact, Greeks, Roman, Muslims, Africans, Renaissance Italians, Brazilians, West Indian planters, Buddhists, Maori, and many others also held significant numbers of people -- by no means all of them African -- in bondage. Most also treated slavery as a way to assimilate foreigners, not as the racially exclusive dead end that American laws of slavery prescribed. The objective of HIAF 511 is to move beyond static stereotypes and consider the enslavement as a process of its many distinctive times and places in world history.
Recent major works in this enormous field (some 700-800 academic studies appear each year focused primarily on slavery) will form the basis for weekly class discussions. In addition, each member of the class will select one region and prepare a substantial term-paper (i.e. based on secondary authorities) setting its experiences with slavery in the relevant historical context. The background reading for the modern portions of the course will be Robin Blackburn's The Making of New World Slavery. Other, extremely varied readings will develop the history of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean, the Islamic world, Africa, medieval Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and colonial North America, and the United States.
HIAF 511 carries no specific pre-requisites, but its broad setting presumes a general familiarity with several parts of the globe, or a willingness to assimilate a considerable quantity of new material during the semester.
All stages of writing a polished term paper (a preliminary paper proposal, an interim draft, a revised draft, and the final submission) will receive close editorial attention, with the object of developing clarity and efficiency in writing; students will be expected to prepare each one of these steps sufficiently in advance of deadlines to revise before submitting, on time. The paper will constitute the final examination for the course.
Students will also be graded on their grasp of the readings as demonstrated in contributions of relevant insight from them to class discussions.
The instructor will work with students to define paper topics that will support special interests in given times or places and will support petitions to count this course toward appropriate area and other requirements within the history major or, for graduate students, to support history fields or programs in other departments. Undergraduates may use the course to meet the Second Writing Requirement.
Please contact the instructor (<jcm7a@virginia.edu>, 924-6395) if you are considering enrolling in the course, in order to understand its learning strategy and to plan your participation in it in ways that will develop your broader educational goals.

HIUS 323/AAS 323 – Rise And Fall Of The Slave South (3)

T R 0930-1045 MIN 125

Instructor: Edward L. Ayers

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the sixteenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slave owners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians.
Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Requirements include a midterm and final as well as a substantial research paper; the course fulfills the Second Writing Requirement. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course.

HIUS 328 – History Of Virginia To 1865 (3)

M W F 1100-1150 GIL 190

Instructor: William Thomas

This course covers the social, political, and economic development of Virginia up to 1865. The course examines key subjects in Virginia's colonial and antebellum history: the life and culture of Virginia's Native Americans, the colonial experience at Jamestown and white colonial settlement, the development of slavery in the Chesapeake region, the establishment of colonial society, the Revolution, Thomas Jefferson, Nat Turner's Rebellion, and the secession of Virginia in 1861.
Requirements for the course include three 5-7 page papers and a final exam. One of the papers will include research in Alderman Library's Special Collections. The course will feature both lecture and discussion during the weekly meetings. The course will use a reader of primary source readings from the period, such as Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia and other documents, autobiographies, and texts. In addition, the course will include some of the following readings:
T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, Myne Own Ground
Charles Dew, Apostles of Disunion
Joseph Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson
Rhyss Issac, The Transformation of Virginia
Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom
Helen Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia

HIUS 365/AAS 365 -African-American History, Through Reconstruction (3)

T R 1230-1345 WIL 301

Instructor: Reginald Butler and Scot French

This lecture course explores the history and culture of African Americans in British colonial North America and the United States through 1865. We will examine changing constructions of race, gender, and class, as well as the major themes, problems, events, structures, and personalities associated with this period. We will devote some portion of each class to the close examination of primary sources, with a particular focus on the intersection of the "local" and the "global." Weekly reading assignments will average about 150-175 pages. Grade will be based on participation, weekly reading responses, one short paper, a midterm, and a final. (Cross-listed with HIUS 365.)

HIUS 367 - History Of The Civil Rights Movement (3)

T R 1400-1450 MIN 125

Instructor: Julian Bond

This lecture course will examine the history, philosophies, tactics, events, and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward.
The Southern movement--variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement--was a black-lead mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation in the South by the middle 1960s.
Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping phases--lobbying, litigation and protest. In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights. In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation, the denial of the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools. The last phase, lasting a decade from '55 to '65, was a period of protest--boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations--as well as organizing campaigns that lay the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s.
Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation in the United States. The movement's well-and lesser-known proponents and opponents and their stratagems will be examined. Discussion section required. Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five-to-seven page papers.
Texts:
Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo Press
Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Open Hand Press
Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit At The Welcome Table, American Heritage
Videos:
"Eyes On The Prize -- America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965," # 1 -6; America At the
Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985, #1 & 2; PBS Video, Blackside, Inc. Boston.
"The Road to Brown," William Elwood, Producer, California Newsreel.

Department of Music

MUSI 212 - History Of Jazz Music (3)

M W 1300-1350 OCH 101

Instructor: Scott Deveaux

This course is a survey of the history of jazz from its beginnings around 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century. Important instrumental performers, vocalists, composers, and arrangers are listened to and discussed. Lab section is required.

MUSI 307 – Worlds Of Music (3 )

T R 1530-1645 OCH 107

Instructor: TBA

Prerequisite: Major in music or anthropology, or permission of instructor.
To understand the complexities of global musics, we must begin at home appreciating the diversity of musics within the U.S.-"the global is in the local" (Fabian 1998, 5). This course is an introduction to ethnomusicology primarily for music majors featuring case studies of contemporary musical traditions from the twentieth century.
The study of ethnomusicology is a study of understanding otherness and understanding not only how other people make music, but also the way we tend to perceive other musics as less complex than ours, and we tend to appreciate the music but not the people.

MUSI 369 – African Drumming And Dance (1-2)

T 1715-1930 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor by audition on first day of class.
A practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies), with the intention of performing at the end of the semester. Though no previous experience with music or dance is required, we will give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required of each class member, the goal being to develop an ongoing UVA African Drumming and Dance Ensemble.

Department of Politics

PLPT 320 – African-American Political Thought(3)

M W 1400-1515 CAB 324

Instructor: Lawrie Balfour

This course aims to introduce you to both the critical and the constructive dimensions of African American political thought in the past two centuries. Through our readings and discussions, we will assess the claims that black Americans have made upon the polity, how they have defined themselves in the face of efforts to demean and exclude them, and how they have sought to redefine the basic terms of American public life. Among the themes that we will explore are the relationship between slavery and democracy, the role of historical memory in political life, and the meaning of such core political concepts as freedom, equality, justice, and progress. As we focus our attention on these issues, we will be mindful of the complex ways in which the concept of race has been constructed and deployed and its interrelationship with other elements of identity such as gender, sexuality, and class.

Department of Psychology

PSYC 487-The Minority Family: A Psychological Inquiry (3)

M 0900-1130 GIL 225

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

This course examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing "deficit" and "strength" research paradigms.
Format: Lecture discussion presentations. No. and type of exams: TBA. Papers or projects: TBA
Prerequisites: PSYC 306 and at least one course from each of the following groups: PSYC 210, 215 or 230, and PSYC 240, 250, or 260, and students in the African-American and African studies or studies in women and gender programs. Telephone Enrollment Restrictions: PSYC majors. If this course is full through ISIS: keep trying through ISIS.

Department of Religious Studies

RELC 305/AAS 305 – A Black Theology Of Liberation(3)

M W 1400-1515 CAB 337

Instructor: Corey D.B. Walker

This lecture and discussion course will introduce students to a few of the significant topics and themes in the field of black theology. Among some of the major topics to be discussed include the emergence and academic codification of black theology, its challenge to other Christian theologies, its doctrinal orientations, and its relation to other theologies of liberation. Readings will primarily be drawn from the foundational texts of James H. Cone. We will also consult texts by Dwight Hopkins, William R. Jones, Deloris Williams, and others.

RELA 389/RELC 389 Christianity In Africa (3)

M W 1400-1515 CAB 424

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Well known theologians such as Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian and St. Augustine from North Africa have been claimed in contemporary African Church history to be forefathers of both African and western theology. This lecture series begins with the history of Christianity in Africa from late antiquity to the present, paying particular attention to African agency in mission, but also taking into account the histories of conquest surrounding the missionary enterprise. It will be shown how Greco-Roman imperialism and European colonialism beginning with the Portuguese adventures of the14th century have shaped the African response to Christianity. The emergence of African Indigenous Churches will be looked at against this background colonial conquest, missionary paternalism and independency in Africa. Historical, theological and sociological issues will be brought together in this general introduction to Christianity in Africa.

RELC 511 – Black Theology: Theories, Methods, Sources

M W 1530-1800 MCL 2008

Instructor: Corey D. B. Walker

This seminar provides an in-depth historical and systematic study of the field of black theology. Specific and sustained attention will be given to theological implications of the category of "experience" as it relates to the work of several theologians in this area, particularly the early thought of James H. Cone. We will also closely examine some new trajectories in the field, most notably the turn to American pragmatism and to the wide and disparate field of cultural studies. Readings will include analytical as well as constructive texts and will cut across fields and disciplines.

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 – Race And Ethnic Relations (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 319

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

The terms “race” and “ethnicity,” and issues associated with them are, to say the least, problematic. The meanings of these – and related – terms are unclear and policies that address “racial” issues are usually very contentious. Why is this the case? Why is race, seemingly, a source of unending conflict? This course will address these questions by examining the general issue of race from a historical and comparative perspective.

SOC 410 - African American Communities (3)

T R 1530-1645 CAB 216

Instructor: Rick Turner

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear, comprehensive understanding of the history, struggles and diversity of the African-American community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the African-American community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of the cultural history of African-Americans. The course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for African-American people's sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussion, lectures, videos, reading, writing, and class presentation, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamics of the African-American community.

SOC 442 – Sociology Of Inequality (3)

M W 1400-1515 CAB 134

Instructor: Bethany P. Bryson

A survey of basic theories and methods used to analyze structures of social inequality. Includes comparative analysis of the inequalities of power and privilege, both their causes and their consequences for social conflict and social change.

SOC 464 – Urban Sociology( 3)

T R 1100-1215 CLK 101

Instructor: Marakova

The course explores changing urban life in different cultural, social and historical settings. It examines both classic and contemporary debates within urban sociology and relates them to the wider concerns of social theory. Among the topics to be discussed are theories of urban development and decline, social segregation and urban inequality, cultural meanings of the city, problems of urban policy and planning.

University Seminar

USEM 171/0020 – The 60s In Black & White (2)

T 1530-1730 PV8 108

Instructor: Julian Bond

The 1960’s saw a generation of young people begin to build movements, which would stop a war abroad and start a war at home. What made these movements for peace and equal rights possible? What events triggered them? Who were participants? What is their legacy in the present? This seminar – through biographies activists in the movements – attempts to answer these and other questions as we examine personalities, events, and culture of the 1960s. Students will be required to write a comprehensive a paper on a 60’s subject – a participant, an organization, a movement.

 

 

Spring 2003

 

Afro-American and African Studies Program

AAS 102 - Introduction To Afro-American Studies II (4)

T R 1230-1345 MIN 125

Instructor: Corey D. B. Walker

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 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. Discussion section required.

AAS/ANTH 250 - Health Of Black Folks (3)

TR 1700 - 1750 RSH 202

Instructors: Wende Marshall and M. Norman Oliver

"The Health of Black Folks" is a course in medical anthropology which will analyze the relationship between black bodies and biomedicine, both historically and in the present. Co-taught by M. Norman Oliver, M.D-a physician (Department of Family Medicine, UVA Health Systems) and anthropologist (Department of Anthropology) and Wende Marshall, a medical anthropologist, the course will offer both political economic, and post-structuralist lenses with which to interpret the individual and social health and disease of African-Americans. Selected topics include the black female body in the middle passage and slavery; the use of race in the human genome project; black bodies as research subjects for biomedical science and the epidemic of cancer and HIV among African Americans. This course is cross listed as ANTH 250.

AAS/ANTH 306 - African Interlocuters (3)

TR 930-1045 MIN 130

Instructor: Hanan Sabea

The course explores how a group of Africans, working primarily as assistants to Europeans interested in Africa during the late 19th and early 20th century, participated in the process of knowledge production about the Continent. We will juxtapose works (textual and otherwise) composed by African assistants to those produced by anthropologists, explorers, missionaries, and administrators to examine if there is a difference in the descriptions and interpretations about Africa and its people. Ethnographies produced by Africans will constitute our third body of texts. Our analysis will focus on an examination of who these Africans and Europeans were, how they came to participate in this process, and how their different positions are reflected in the categories deployed, the methodologies followed, and the assumptions embedded in the accounts. This course satisfies college second writing, non-western perspective and Anthropology majors' cultural diversityrequirements. This course is cross listed as ANTH 306

AAS/HIUS 366 - African American History Since 1865 (3)

MW 1100 - 1150 CAB 138

Instructors: Reginald D. Butler and Scot A. French. This lecture course explores the history and culture of African Americans in the United States from the age of emancipation to the present. The course explores some of the major problems, events, structures, and personalities that shaped their lives, paying particular attention to how black people themselves shaped their experiences. We will devote some portion of each class to the close examination of primary sources, with a particular focus on the "local" (sometimes, but not necessarily, this locality). Readings will include the following: Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow; Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw; Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; Gena Caponi, Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. Grades will be based on section participation, research project, midterm, and final exam. This course is cross-listed as HIUS 366.

AAS 401 - Independent Study (3)

TBA

AAS 406 - Violence And American Democracy (3)

M 1300-1530 PV 5 109

Instructor: Corey D. B. Walker

Contemporary engagements of violence and democracy are typically reserved for discussions of emerging democratic regimes and movements in such places as the "Third World" and former socialist countries. However, there is a general hesitancy in examining the theoretical and historical relationships of violence and American democracy. This seminar will critically examine how and in what ways violence physical, psychological, and symbolic has informed and continues to inform constructions, articulations, and practices of American democracy. Seminar readings will come from selected works of a wide and diverse collection of thinkers, including Thomas Jefferson, Maria Stewart, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Ellison, Judith Butler, and Thomas Dumm. By illuminating the complex and changing relationships of violence and democracy in the United States, it is hoped that seminar participants will come to a deeper understanding of the American experiment with democracy.

AAS 406B - Religion And Diaspora (3)

W 1000-1230 MIN 108

Instructor: Isabel Mukonyora

This course combines in a study of a book that is in the process of being prepared for publication, the way ideas of displacement in Africa have led to the rise of a "diaspora" type of Christianity and Culture in Southern and Central Africa. It is hoped that the students who take part in this seminar come prepared to dialogue with other views of the meaning of diaspora, especially in the African American uses of the word diaspora today. Students need to come prepared for a lot of discussion because this is course takes the format of a seminar with a lot of students involvement.

AAS 406C – Politics Of Culture In Modern South Africa (3)

R 1300-1530 CAB B020

Instructor: Brenna Munro

In this course we will look at the connection between aesthetics and politics in several modern South African cultural arenas, examining the debates that have raged there about race and writing, struggle and art. We will begin with a section on the vibrant urban culture of 1950s Sophiatown, then turn to the "protest writing" of the 70s and 80s, and finish with a section on the new nation and the dilemmas of writing in "transition"; atoning and accounting for the past, and imgaining new futures. Texts may include Bloke Modisane's memoir, Blame Me on History, Miriam Makeba's township jazz, Drum and Staffrider magazine, worker's performance poetry, Dennis Brutus' poems on exile and imprisonment, Athol Fugard's play Blood Knot, Njabulo Ndebele's contentious essays, J. M. Coetzee's novel Disgrace and Antjie Krog's account of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of My Skull: Guilt, Sorrow and the Limits of Forgiveness in the New South Africa. There will be short papers on each section, presentations, and a longer final paper.

AAS 451 - Distinguished Majors Program/ Directed Research (3)

TBA

AAS 452 - Distinguished Majors Program/Thesis (3)

TBA

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 235 - Introduction To Folklore (3)

TR 1400-1515 BRK B001

Instructor: Charles Perdue

Introduction to the materials and methods of folklore study. The course is also intended to be an introduction to folklore scholarship and to the history of the discipline. Materials used as examples in this course-narratives, songs, etc.-are drawn about equally from Anglo and African-American sources. Course Meets Second Writing Requirement

ANTH 281 - Human Origins (3)

MWF 1000-1050 RSH 202

Instructor: Jeffrey Hantman

The course is intended to provide an overview and assessment of the theory, methods, and data used by anthropologists to reconstruct human physical and cultural evolution. Chronologically, the course spans the time from the initial appearance of hominids (ca 4.5 million years ago) to the period prior to the rise of urbanism and early state formation (ca 10,000 B.C.). The course is divided into three topical components: 1) a review of evolutionary theory, and the controversy surrounding that theory; 2) an in-depth survey of the data used to support current models of the pattern of human evolution, and 3) a study of the origins of modern human adaptations in the relatively recent past, with respect to uniquely human behaviors such as complex language, ritual, religion and art.

ANTH 565 -- Creole Narratives (3)

TR 1530-1645

Instructor: George Mentore

This course sets as its principal task -- within the parameters of Caribbean ethnography -- an examination of social being as narrative. Caribbean stories about cultural identity become the analyzable material not only for understanding these regionally and historically distinct societies, but also for forming an anthropology of personhood. We will move through the plots of such characters as Olaudah Equiano, the slave trade, the peasant village, race, nationalism, mimesis, masculinity, femininity, motherhood, and healing. The idea will be to confront and understand (and not be threatened by) the various intertwined identities made vital in the Antilles.

Department Of Art History

ARTH 345 - African Art (3)

TR 0930 - 1045

Instructor: Benjamin Ray

Each student will design an exhibition of African art for presentation on the Web that will incorporate the results of the student's study of African art. The exhibitions will contain an introductory explanation of the exhibit's theme, images of selected African art objects, relevant field-context images, descriptive labels, and other explanatory textual materials. The images of African art will be taken from collections at the Bayly Museum of the University of Virginia, the Fowler Museum of Cultural History, the Hampton University Museum, and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and are used with copyright permission. The course includes the following curricular components: a brief history of African art studies; African ritual and cosmology; analysis of African art exhibition catalogues; library research on selected art objects; the exhibition of African art in museum contexts; training in Web skills and image processing. The aim of the course is to create exhibitions of African art that attempt to be true to the objects themselves while placing them in an educational environment of value to the exhibitor and the viewer alike.

Department Of Drama

DRAM 307 - Contemporary African American Drama (3)

MWF 1400-1450 CAB 119

Instructor: Ishmail Conway

This course on African-American Theater will provide an opportunity for students to learn about this rich, distinctive American International art form. This particular theatrical experience emanates out of the experience of Africans in America. The course will explore the theatrical experience that enriches audiences, builds Thespians, communicates history and futures. Specifically, this course will explore the personalities, the literature and plays; the great companies, management and advancement; the socio-cultural implications, the technical contributions to theater.

Department of English Language and Literature

ENAM 314- African American Survey II (3)

T R 1100-1215 CAB 323

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

A continuation of ENAM 313, African American Literature I, this course concentrates on twentieth and twenty-first century African American novels, short stories, prose essays, and poetry. This lecture and discussion based class will address literature from pivotal cultural and political moments in African American life, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Writers include, but are not limited to, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Carolyn Ferrell, and Terry McMillian. Mandatory assignments include weekly response paragraphs, four response papers, quizzes, midterm and final exams.

ENAM 332- Contemporary African American Drama (3)

TR 1530-1645 BRN 328

Instructor: Lotta Lofgren

This course will study contemporary African American drama from the 1950's to the present. We will examine how the playwrights rework old and invent new forms to express a unique world view in a theatrically viable way. We will ask such questions as: How much should any artist compromise his or her vision in order to be heard? What kind of audience does each playwright write for? How do African American male and female playwrights differ in their outlook and even in their interpretation of the genre? What is their sense of responsibility to the past and to the future? How does the double need to define oneself as an individual and as a member of a group affect the playwrights and their art? We will read works by Alice Childress, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ed Bullins, Charles Fuller, Adrienne Kennedy, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, Suzan-Lori Parks, and others.

ENAM 382 - Black Protest Fiction (3)

T R 1530-1645 CAB 337

Instructor: Marlon Ross

This course explores the relation between modern racial protest and African American fiction and autobiography from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. The modern "protest" tradition emerges in response to the Great Depression, World War II, and the early Civil Rights movement. Protest narratives are influenced by a variety of trends - including Soviet communism, industrial labor unionization, the second wave of the Great Migration, Pan-Africanism, the fight against European fascism, the promise of New Deal policies, and the emergence of mass street demonstrations as a vehicle of racial protest. As well as examining the social, political, and economic contexts of protest narratives, we'll probe their aesthetic, formal, and ideological structures, and assess how protest writers represent controversial topics of the time, such as lynching, segregation, sharecropping, disenfranchisement, anti-Semitism, unemployment, migration, urbanization, religion, sexuality, military participation, strikebreaking, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. We start with the most famous protest narrative, Richard Wright's Native Son, then study other narratives written before and after, many of which challenge Wright's forms and ideas. Other authors include Angelo Herndon, William Attaway, Ann Petry, Chester Himes, James Baldwin, and Gwendolyn Brooks, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and social science.

ENAM 482B – The Souls Of Black Folk (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 330

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

April 2003 marks the 100th anniversary of W. E. B. DuBois's THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK, which many regard as the African-American "Ur-text." This course is devoted entirely to this book--its reception history, its encyclopedic roots and sources, its surrounding contexts, as well as the range of its influence on African-American literature and intellectual history. We will obviously linger over the book's structuring metaphors and concepts-"souls," "folk," "veil," and "double-consciousness"-and pursue the various manifestations of DuBois's most famous aphorism: "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." We will also address matters concerning the construction of black masculinity in the post-Emancipation South, the psychological complexities of identity, theories of race, and the poetics and politics of mourning. Texts will include the following essays by DuBois: "What is the Negro Problem?" "The Conservation of Races," "The Concept of Race," "The Negro as He Really Is" (with accompanying photographic illustrations), and "Phillis Wheatley and Africam American Culture." Other selections include Aeschylus's The Oresteia (excerpts), Negro spirituals (what DuBois termed "the sorrow songs"), Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (selections), Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, Tennyson's "In Memoriam," Emerson's "Fate" and "The Transcendentalist," Hawthorne's "The Minister's Black Veil," William James's The Principles of Psychology (excerpts), William Dean Howells's An Imperative Duty, Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, Tennyson's "In Memoriam," Anna Julia Cooper's A Voice from the South, Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, as well as DuBois's correpondence with Williams James, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Jessie Fauset, and others. Near the end of the course, students will be invited to address the international dimension of DuBois's work and influence, particularly the Pan-African connection.
Undergraduate students are eligible for the 400 level class only.

ENAM 482D – Fictions Of Black Identity (3)

T R 930-1045 PV8 B003

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

This senior seminar will explore the dual meaning of the title "Fictions of Black Identity." The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, McBride's The Color of Water, Walker's Black, White, and Jewish, Beatty's White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include weekly response papers, comparative essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams.

Department of History

HIAF 202 - Africa Since 1800 (4)

T R 1400 - 1515 CHM 304

Instructor: John Mason

This course spans the years from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century to the present. The focus of the first part of the course is on the slave trade and its consequences. The effects of the trade in human beings lingered long after its abolition. Many African societies were weakened, setting the stage for colonial conquest, while others were strengthened, often at the expense of their neighbors. The second part of the course looks at the conquest of much of Africa by European nations and at the dynamics of colonial rule. It is especially concerned with the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and with the many ways in which Africans resisted European domination. The final section of the course is devoted to the post-colonial period, studying first violent and non-violent forms of anti-colonial struggle and then the position of independent African nations in the contemporary world. The course is structured around lectures and readings. Additional course materials include novels and films.HIAF 202 is an introductory course and requires no prior knowledge of African history. Discussion section required.

HIAF 302- History Of Southern Africa (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 423

Instructor: John Mason

HIAF 302 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, emphasizing South Africa. The course begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of the conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence. By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest did not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs. Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, multi-ethnic nationalism evolved into nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.

HIUS 366 - African American History Since 1865 (3)

MW 1100 - 1150 CAB 138

Instructors: Reginald D. Butler and Scot A. French

This lecture course explores the history and culture of African Americans in the United States from the age of emancipation to the present. The course explores some of the major problems, events, structures, and personalities that shaped their lives, paying particular attention to how black people themselves shaped their experiences. We will devote some portion of each class to the close examination of primary sources, with a particular focus on the "local" (sometimes, but not necessarily, this locality). Readings will include the following: Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow; Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw; Robin D.G. Kelley, Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; Gena Caponi, Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin', & Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. Grades will be based on section participation, research project, midterm, and final exam. This course is cross-listed as AAS 366.

HIAF 404-Independent Study In African History (3)

TBA

Instructor: TBA

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HIST 504 - Monticello Internship (3)

Instructor: Charles McCurdy

Directed research, largely in primary source materials, on topics relating to Jefferson's estate, life, and times. Directed by senior members of the Monticello staff. Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor. The internships are restricted to graduate students in history and to fourth-year undergraduate history majors. A maximum of two students each semester can be admitted to the course.

HIUS 202 - American History Since 1865 (4)

T R 1230-1345 MCL 1020

Instructor: William Thomas

This course covers the history of the United States from the Civil War to present. The course examines social, political, economic, and cultural changes in American history and focuses on several major themes-the struggle to fulfill the nation's commitment to equality and justice, the development of large-scale industrial capitalism, the rise of the United States as a world power and its responsibility in global affairs. The course examines in detail such important topics as the course of racial justice since Reconstruction, the growth of businesses and the consumer market, and the fighting and consequences of the Cold War. We will explore some of the most dramatic problems in modern American history: racial conflict, urban growth, suburban expansion, international engagement, demographic change, and political contest. Readings will include Edward Ayers, et al. American Passages text and its accompanying web site of documents, audio, video, and interactive maps, as well as Lewis Sinclair's Babbitt and Anne Moody's Coming of Age in Mississippi. The course will also use several documentary and feature films--including Vietnama Television History 1945-1970Dr. Strangelove, and Berkeley in the Sixties. The course is a four credit course, and students attend two lecture classes and one discussion section class each week. Students are required to take a mid-term and a final exam, write two 5-7 page essays, and participate actively in discussion sections.

HIUS 324 – 20th Century South (3)

M W 1000-1050 RFN G004A

Instructor: Lorraine Schuyler

This course will explore the social, cultural, political, and economic history of the South in the twentieth century. Major themes of the course will include the rise and fall of legalized segregation, the development of a viable Republican party in the region, the role of southern reformers and activists, and the importance of historical memory. We will examine major events in the twentieth century South from the perspectives of black southerners and white southerners, men and women, sharecroppers and landowners, Republicans and Democrats, moderates and activists. Grades will be based on participation in weekly discussion sections, as well as one five-page paper, a midterm and a cumulative final exam.
Assigned Readings will include a mix of fiction, autobiography, and scholarly monographs.
Required titles may include:
Paul Gaston, The New South Creed: a Study in Southern Mythmaking
Tera Hunter, To ‘Joy My Freedom
Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner 
W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk
Grace Lumpkin, To Make My Bread
Pete Daniel, Lost Revolutions: The South in the 1950s
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi
Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and the Transformation of American Politics

HIUS 367 - History Of The Civil Rights Movement (3)

T R 1400-1450 MIN 125

Instructor: Julian Bond

This lecture course will examine the history, philosophies, tactics, events, and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward. The Southern movement--variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement--was a black-lead mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation in the South by the middle 1960s. Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping phases--lobbying, litigation and protest. In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights. In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation, the denial of the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools. The last phase, lasting a decade from '55 to '65, was a period of protest--boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations--as well as organizing campaigns that lay the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s. Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation in the United States. The movement's well-and lesser-known proponents and opponents and their stratagems will be examined. Discussion section required. Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five-to-seven page papers.

Department of Music

MUSI 212 - History of Jazz Music (3)

M W 1400-1515

Instructor: Scott Deveaux

Prerequisite: No previous knowledge of music is required. This course is a survey of the history of jazz from its beginnings around 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century. Important instrumental performers, vocalists, composers, and arrangers are listened to and discussed. NOTE: This course meets the Non-western perspectives requirement

MUSI 215 - Intro to African Music (3)

M W 1100-1215 TR OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

This course is meant as a first exposure to African rhythm, movement, and concepts of performance. We will explore several African music cultures in-depth (West and Central Africa) and survey several others to get a sense of the breadth and variety of African musical life. There will be a course packet of reading assignments, in-class rhythm and movement workshops, listening and video-viewing, discussion (of reading), and brief writing assignments. There will be a midterm and final exam.

MUSI 309 – Performance In Africa (4)

TR 1715-1930 OCH 107

W 1530 - 1700 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

This course meets jointly with MUSI 369, African Drumming and Dance Ensemble. Students registered for MUSI 309 receive 4 academic credits, those only in MUSI 369 receive 2 "performance" credits. You may only register for ONE of these courses, not both.
Meeting jointly with MUSI 369 (African Drumming and Dance Ensemble, but with an extra hour of discussion) this course explores performance in Africa through in-depth reading, discussion, audio and video examples, and hands-on practice. The course will explore both "traditional" and "popular" styles, leading us to question those categories. With a few exceptions, we will focus mostly on areas of West and Central Africa, though students may choose other areas to focus on for their research projects. We will explore music/dance styles and their sociomusical circumstances and processes, as well as performed resistances and responses to the colonial and post/neo-colonial encounter. In addition, we will address the issues and politics involved in translating performance practices from one cultural context to another.
Attendance at all class meetings is required, as is careful reading, film viewing, and preparation for discussion. Students will keep a weekly response journal (handed in to the instructor via email) with brief entries for each week responding to the reading, discussions, performance labs, and listening. Every week (by Sunday, 5 p.m.) each student will choose at least one recording from the music library (via the web catalogue) to listen to and respond to in their journal. There will be a mid-term paper (8-10 pages, typed) and a final exam (open book, essay and short answer).

MUSI 369 – African Drumming and Dance (1-2)

TR 1715-1930 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Prerequisite: Permission of instructor by audition on first day of class. Note: This semester, this course meets jointly with MUSI 309, Performance in Africa. Students registered for 309 receive 4 academic credits, those in 369 receive 2 "performance" credits. You may only register for ONE of these courses, not both.
This is a practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies and Bagandou farmers), with the intention of performing informally throughout the semester and in a final concert in April. We will give special attention to continuing to develop tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and a polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, high attention, interaction, and faithful,/prompt attendance are required of each class member. Each member is also respectfully expected to help prepare the classroom (move chairs, sweep, set up drums/sticks) and to restore the space to classroom style at the end of each meeting. Participation in public performance is also expected.
Students are strongly encouraged to bring a cassette tape recorder to class and to dress comfortably. Several readings are recommended, but not required.

Department of Politics

PLAP 370 – Racial Politics (3)

MW 1100-1150 CAB 345

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

This course examines how attributions of racial difference have shaped American Politics. Topics include how race affects American political partisanship, campaigns and elections, public policy, public opinion, and American political science. Through the course, our animating question will be: is the American liberal democratic polity - a polity which instituted and abolished slavery based in race - basically sound apart from its unfortunate anti-democratic episodes, or is the racial order a fundamental element structuring this polity? Though the American racial order has deep historical roots, we will concentrate our attention on its recent manifestations. We will examine how the political thinking and choices of people of different races differs, how racial politics implicates ideas about class and gender, and how scholarship on race depends on the race of the person conducting it. We will consider the implications for an increasingly racially diverse and complicated polity of defining race primarily in terms of black/white conflict.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 275- Intro To African Religions (3)

M W 1100-1150 RFN G004C

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

An introductory survey of African religions. The course concentrates on African traditional religions but Islam and Christianity are also discussed. Topics include indigenous mythologies and cosmologies, sacrifice, initiation, witchcraft, artistic traditions and a brief introduction to African-derived religions in the New World.
Readings include: Ray, African Religions; Stoller & Olkes, In Sorcery's Shadow; Soyinka, Death and the King's Horseman; Ijimere, The Imprisonment of Obatala; Salih, The Wedding of Zein; and a packet of readings.
Requirements: regular attendance and participation in discussion, two in-class exams, and a cumulative final exam.

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

LNGS 222 - Black English (3)

MW 1100-1150 MRY 104

Instructor: Mark Elson

An introduction to the history and structure of Black English. The goal of this course is to introduce students to the history and structure of what has been termed Black English vernacular or Black Street English. We will also be concerned with the sociolinguistic factors which led to the emergence of this variety of English, as well as its present role in the African-American community and its relevance in education, employment, and racial stereotypes

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 – Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

MW 1400-1515 CAB 341

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

The terms “race” and “ethnicity,” and issues associated with them are, to say the least, problematic. The meanings of these – and related – terms are unclear and policies that address “racial” issues are usually very contentious. Why is this the case? Why is race, seemingly, a source of unending conflict? This course will address these questions by examining the general issue of race from a historical and comparative perspective.

SOC 410 - Afro-American Communities (3)

T R 1530-1645 CAB 338

Instructor: Rick Turner

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the history, struggles and diversity of the African-American community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the African American community within urban society and on the need for students to acquire knowledge of the cultural history of African Americans. This course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for the African-American people's sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. This class is organized around the premise that there is a distinctive, coherent, persistent African-American Sociological perspective frame of reference, world view, or cultural ethos that is evident in the behavior, attitude, feelings, life styles, and experience patterns of Black America. By means of discussion, lecture, video, reading, writing, and class presentations this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamics of the African-American community.

University Seminar

USEM 171/0020 – The 60s In Black & White (2)

T 1530-1730 CAB 320

Instructor: Julian Bond

The 1960’s saw a generation of young people begin to build movements which would stop a war abroad and start a war at home. What made these movements for peace and equal rights possible? What events triggered them? Who were participants? What is their legacy in the present? This seminar – through biographies activists in the movements – attempts to answer these and other questions as we examine personalities, events, and culture of the 1960s. Students will be required to write a comprehensive a paper on a 60’s subject – a participant, an organization, a movement.

 

 

 

 

Fall 2002

 

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 101 - Introduction to Afro-American and African Studies (4)

T R 1230-1345 MIN 125

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

AAS 305 - Travel Accounts of Africa (3)

11:00-12:15 TR

Instructor: Hanan Sabea

The course explores how 18th and 19th century travel accounts about Africa have influenced ethnographic writings and popular views about the continent and its people. It traces the genealogy of methods of knowledge production, major concepts that are generated and inherited, underlying assumptions and recurring images that have shaped the representation of a place and people. We will analyze the accounts produced about Africa with special focus on categories of gender, nationality, profession of the authors, the purposes underlying their encounters, and the times and places they visited. This course is cross-listed as AAS 305

AAS 401 - Independent Study (3)

TBA

AAS 405A Caliban's Reason: The Theoretical Legacies of Frantz Fanon and C.L.R. James (3)

M 1300-1530 CAB 331

Instructor: Corey D. B. Walker

There has been a virtual renaissance in the study of Fritz Fanon and C.L.R. James in the United States academy. Both Fanon and James have been appropriatedbyscholars across disciplines - Political Science, Literature, and American Studies - and by scholars who advocate various methodological and theoretical approachepsychoanalysis, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. But why the (re)turn to Fanon and James? Why now? This seminar critically interrogates the works of thesetwo pivotal intellectual figures in the black radical tradition with an eye towards providing some provisional answers to these and other equally intriguing questions. Through a close and careful reading of their texts we will examine several themes addressed by each of these authors - the challenge of violence,theoriesof revolution, ideas of nation, questions of represention, and relationiships between race, gender, class, and capitalist political economy.

AAS 405B (3)

R 1400-1630 CAB 331

TBA

AAS 405C – The Rebellious Slave in American Thought(3)

W 1300-1530 MIN 108

Instructor: Scot French

This seminar will examine how Americans, from Jefferson's day to our own time, have thought about race, slavery, citizenship, and revolutionary violence by reference to the figure of the rebellious slave. Examples will be drawn from popular culture and selected works of scholarship. Students will be introduced to theories and conceptual models employed by professional and lay historians in the eras of Slavery, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights. Course requirements include short written responses to assigned readings and films, active participation in weekly discussions, and a 20-page research paper on a pre-approved topic. Readings will range from 150 to 200 pages a week. No previous coursework in History or African American Studies required.
Assigned readings may include excerpts from the following:
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785)
David Walker’s Appeal (1829)
The Confessions of Nat Turner and related documents (1831)
The Virginia Slavery Debates of 1831-32
Frederick Douglass, The Heroic Slave (1851)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1859)
William S. Drewry, The Southampton Insurrection (1900)
Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder (1936)
Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (1941)
Stanley Elkins, Slavery (1959)
Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution (1979)
William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967)
William Styron’s ‘Confessions of Nat Turner:’ Ten Black Writers Respond (1968)
Shirley Williams, Dessa Rose (1986)

AAS 451 - Distinguished Majors Program/Directed Research (3)

TBA

AAS 452 - Distinguished Majors Program/Thesis (3)

TBA

ANTH 529A – Topics in Race Theory (3)

T 1530-1800 CAB 331

Instructor: Wende Marshall

"Gender/Race and Power" will explore the imbrications of race and gender within and without the African Diaspora, with regard to questions of State power, conquest, colonialism/postcolonialism and global capitalism. We will be particularly attentive to the shortcomings of "race theory" in regard to gender and sexuality, and will attempt to chart masculinist assumptions within "canonical" race theory. Requirements: responsibility for leading each seminar; weekly précis on the readings; a final 20-page + bibliography paper.
Course meets the Second Writing Requirement.

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 225 - Racism, Nationalism, Multiculturalism (3)

M W 1400-1515 GIL 130

Instructor: Richard Handler

Introductory course in which the concepts of culture, multiculturalism, race, racism, and nationalism are critically examined in terms of how they are used and structure social relations in American society and, by comparison, how they are defined in other cultures throughout the world.

ANTH/AAS 305 - Travel Accounts of Africa (3)

1530-1800 CAB 236

Instructor: Hanan Sabea

The course explores how 18th and 19th century travel accounts about Africa have influenced ethnographic writings and popular views about the continent and its people. It traces the genealogy of methods of knowledge production, major concepts that are generated and inherited, underlying assumptions and recurring images that have shaped the representation of a place and people. We will analyze the accounts produced about Africa with special focus on categories of gender, nationality, profession of the authors, the purposes underlying their encounters, and the times and places they visited. This course is cross-listed as AAS 305

ANTH 330 – Tournaments and Athletes (4)

T R 1100-1215 MIN 125

Instructor: George Mentore

This course will offer you a cross-cultural study of competitive games. Criticizing current theories about the "innocence" of sports while comparing and contrasting various athletic events from societies around the
world, it will provide an argument to explain the competitive bodily displays of athletes. It will select materials, which allow you to examine bodily movement, meaning, context, and process, in addition to the relations between athletes, officials, spectators, and social systems. Its general thesis will be that sport brings out the universal morals of community, challenges and tests them in controlled and unthreatening genres, yet never defeats them or makes them appear unjust.
The student must enroll in one of the obligatory discussion sections in 330D.

ANTH 356 – Vernacular Architecture (3)

T R 1100-1215 CAM 153

Instructor: Dell Upton

American Vernacular Architecture introduces a variety of North American vernacular building traditions, examining the design and building traditions of a variety of ethnic and regional cultures, the ways buildings and landscapes are used, and what they mean to their builders and users. Among the topics to be explored will be rural and urban house types, vernacular building systems, commercial architecture, the public landscape, and the vernacular landscapes of work and of religion, focusing on European, African, and Native American traditions that shaped the most familiar and widespread folk architectures, as well as on the urban landscapes of 19th- and 20th-century African Americans and European and Asian immigrants. In every case, we will look at built environments as expressions of ethnic and racial identity, organizers of social life, and conscious works of art.

ANTH 388African Archaeology (3)

M W F 09:00-9:50 CAB 215

Instructor: Adria LaViolette

This course surveys archaeological knowledge currently available about ancient North Africa, the Sahara, and sub-Saharan Africa. The emphases will be on the Late Stone Age, the Iron Age, and the archaeology of the colonial period. The goal is to provide a firm grasp of the great transformations in pre-modern African history, and to provide students with information about some of the most important archaeological sites, discoveries, and research on the continent. Throughout the course, a theme will be the politics of the past, and the changing role of the practice of archaeology in Africa.

ANTH 529A – Topics in Race Theory (3)

T 1530-1800 CAB 331

Instructor: Wende Marshall

"Gender/Race and Power" will explore the imbrications of race and gender within and without the African Diaspora, with regard to questions of State power, conquest, colonialism/postcolonialism and global capitalism. We will be particularly attentive to the shortcomings of "race theory" in regard to gender and sexuality, and will attempt to chart masculinist assumptions within "canonical" race theory. Requirements: responsibility for leading each seminar; weekly précis on the readings; a final 20-page + bibliography paper.
Course meets the Second Writing Requirement.

Department of English Language and Literature

ENLT 247/001 – African American Autobiography (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 334

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Chronological survey in African American literature in the U.S. from its beginning in vernacular culture to works by Frederick Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston, Amiri Baraka, Ishmael Reed, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker.

ENAM 313-Early African American Literature I (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 324

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American prose, from l760, the date of Briton Hammon's Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings to l901, the year of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery. We will work our way through canonical and non-canonical texts and through multiple genres-- captivity narratives, spiritual autobiographies, slave narratives, sermons, execution sermons, criminal narratives, speeches, novels--and will explore a number of issues related to literary history, culture, aesthetics, authorship, audience, genre, and narratology. Among the questions to be explored? How have literary historians given shape to or "storied" this tradition? How do black women's writings complicate these "fictions" of literary history? What is the relation between the black vernacular tradition and the black "literary" text? How do the white abolitionists and editors involved in the production of slave narratives trouble traditional conceptions of authorship? Who "authors" a speech by Sojourner Truth that is stenographically transcribed and appears in multiple versions? What confluence of factors and ideologies explain the "canonical" version of "Ain't I a Woman?" Other texts include Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Harriet Wilson's Our Nig; Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom; David Walker's Appeal; Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, and Thomas Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner. We will work to situate these and other selections in the political, cultural, and critical controversies of their time and ours.

ENAM 381- Race in American Spaces (3)

W 1000-1230 CAM 108

Instructor: Ian Grandison

Description currently unavailable.

ENAM 481C - African American Women Writers (3)

T R 0930-1045 BRN 332

Instructor: Angela M. Davis

We will read several novels and short stories by African American women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, two written responses to readings (each 2 to 3 double spaced typed pages long) and a formal essay (12 to 15 pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place.
Prerequisite: The course is first offered to fourth year majors in English, Women's Studies and Afro-American and African Studies

ENAM 483/ENTC 483 – Race and Performance in the 20th C. US (3)

T R 1230-1345 BRN 330

Instructor: Scott Saul

This course will look at how all sorts of Americans -- blacks, Jews, Latinos, Anglos, Asian-Americans and Native Americans -- have played at playing themselves, inventing new kinds of cultural forms for the purpose, or have tried not to play themselves, given the powerful ways that social categories like race can be ill-fitting, arbitrary, or unjust. We will be looking at twentieth-century stories of self-fashioning and self-exposure, masquerade and passing, slumming and nose-thumbing, and will be particularly interested in the interplay between the history of social movements and the bounds of cultural imagination. The course will bring together literature, film and music, with an emphasis on the different strands and practices of African-American music as they emerge over the course of the 20th century. Possible texts include: the novels Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (James Weldon Johnson), Passing (Nella Larson), Giovanni's Room (James Baldwin), and Dogeaters (Jessica Hagedorn); the films The Jazz SingerSalt of the EarthImitation of Life, Little Big Man, and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song; the drama of Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy, Ed Bullins, Luis Valdez, Naomi Iizuka and Suzan-Lori Parks; the poetry of Langston Hughes and Sterling Brown; the performance art of Adrian Piper and Guillermo Gomez-Peña; and the music of ragtime, early blues, R&B, hip-hop and rock en español.

Department of French Language and Literature

FREN 346 - La Litterature Francophone Macocaine (3)

M W F 1200-1250 CAB 225

Instructor: Majida Bargach

La littérature francophone marocaine prend ses racines dans l’Afrique, dans la France coloniale mais aussi dans le monde arabo-musulman et dans les culturesberbère et judéo-arabe. Depuis l’époque coloniale (1912-1956) jusqu’à nos jours, les écrivains marocains d’expression française ont tour à tour séduit ou choqué de part et d’autre de la Méditerranée. Après avoir étudié des oeuvres écrites pendant le Protectorat français au Maroc, nous aborderons la littérature contemporaine expression des rêves, des mythes et des aspirations politiques et sociales.
Lectures: Période coloniale: Ahmed Séfrioui, La boite à Merveilles; Driss Chraïbi, Le passé simple.Littérature d’aujourd’hui: Fouad Laroui, Les dents du topographe, Edmond Amrane el Maleh, 1000 ans et un jour. Expression féminine: Rajae Benchemsi, Fracture du désir.
Documents audiovisuals: Films: Souheil Benbarka, Amok; Nabil Ayouch, Ali Zaoua, prince des rues; Farida Belyazid, Ruses de femme. Sites sur l’internet: entretiens avec les auteurs francophones.
Travaux: Examen partiel, examen final, 5 essais de 2 à 3 pages et un projet de recherche par équipe.

FREN 411 – Francophone Literature of Africa (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 236

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

This course surveys the literary tradition in French, emphasizing post-World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights, and examines the role of cultural reviews in the development of this literary tradition.

Department of Politics

PLCP 212 – Politics of Developing Areas (3)

T R 0930-1045 MRY 209

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Surveys patterns of government and politics in non-Western political systems. Topics include political elites, sources of political power, national integration, economic development, and foreign penetration. Discussion Section Required.

PLPC 581- Politics of Sub Saharan Africa (3)

F 1530-1800 PV8 108

Instructor: Ben Fred-Mensah

Description currently not available

PLIR 582 - Africa and the World (3)

F 1230-1500 PV8 B003

Instructor: Ben Fred-Mensah

Description currently not available

Department of History

HIAF 201- Early African History Through the Era of the Slave Trade (4)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 345

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

Early African History draws Africans’ achievements in culture, politics, and economic strategies out from the mists of the once-dark continent’s unwritten past. Starting at the dawn of history and continuing in detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 201 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. Thelast third of the course examines the ironic interplay of tragedy and achievement in a continent increasingly trapped in exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans,until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of African history, HIAF 202, taught in the spring, narrates subsequent events down through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.)
HIAF 201 is a lower-division introductory survey. The instructor presents the major themes of early African history in lectures twice each week. Students meet additionally in discussion sections for review of readings, quizzes, and preparation for written assignments. Requirements include weekly short map quizzes, a mid-term examination (only the better of two tries counts), three short papers (4-5 pages) rehearsing historical questions for the mid-terms and considering the written sources on Africa’s past, and a final examination (format to be negotiated with the class). The course belongs to the Afro-American and African Studies curriculum, meets the “non-western” requirement for the major in History, and qualifies for the College “non-western perspectives” area requirement. Students may rewrite one of the short papers to fulfill the College Second Writing Requirement.
Readings revolve around weekly assignments in texts of varying perspectives (Shillington, History of Africa, Newman, Peopling of Africa, and the brand-new Ehret, Civilizations of Africa), for a total of about 225 pages. Other chapters and professional articles introduce the distinctive methodologies of doing history without written sources (including the famous Mande oral epic Sundiata), highlight interpretive (“historiographical”) issues, and consider concepts relevant to understanding early Africa. The total number of assigned pages runs at approximately 1200.
No strict formula determines final marks for HIAF 201. Students are graded according to their “highest consistent performance” in all aspects of the course, including attendance at lectures and participation in discussions, with ample allowance made for the unfamiliarity of the subject matter early in the term; a number of options allow students to devise personal combinations of graded work that will accommodate other academic commitments and highlight specialized abilities most accurately.
HIAF 201 presumes no prior knowledge of Africa or experience with the study of history. Since the subject is new to nearly everyone in the course, consistent application and preparation is expected, particularly early in the term. Students in all four years of their undergraduate careers and in all colleges of the University complete the course with success. Most find it a challenging opportunity to discover and examine assumptions about modern Americans – themselves included – they did not know they held.

HIAF 402- Race and Culture in South Africa and the American South (4)

T R 1400-1515 WIL 141A

Instructor: John Mason

HIAF 403 is a seminar in comparative history. Through biography, autobiography, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race became the overwhelming reality in the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white. South Africa and the American South are like distant cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries owe much of their early economic development to slavery. In both complex systems of racial domination shaped society for generations during and after the emancipation of the slaves. And in both the interracial struggle against racism gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories. At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. Most dramatically, in South Africa the descendants of European immigrants constitute a minority of the population; in the United States, of course, the reverse is true. Course materials include music, movies and videos, as well as biographies, autobiographies, and current scholarship.

HIAF 403-What's Wrong With Africa? (4)

T R 0930-1045 WIL141B

Instructor: John Mason

War, famine, disease, and unending poverty... This is the Africa that we too often read about in newspapers and magazines and see on TV. While this sort of coverage is misleading--Africa is not simply a continent-wide disaster area--there is enough truth in the images of human suffering to cause Africans and non-Africans alike to ask, What's wrong with Africa?
HIAF 402 explores the roots of Africa's multiple crises, focusing primarily on Africa's relations with the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. Topics include the overseas slave trade, conquest and colonialism, anti-colonial liberation struggles, and post-colonial politics and economics. Course materials include African novels and movies and current scholarship from Africa and the west.

HIAF 404- Independent Study in African History (3)

TBA

Instructor: TBA

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HIST 504 - Monticello Internship (3)

Instructor: Peter Onuf

Directed research, largely in primary source materials, on topics relating to Jefferson's estate, life, and times. Directed by senior members of the Monticello staff.
Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor. The internships are restricted to graduate students in history and to fourth-year undergraduate history majors. A maximum of two students each semester can be admitted to the course.

HIUS 307 - The Coming of the Civil War (3)

T R 0930-1045 MIN 125

Instructor: Michael F. Holt

This lecture course closely examines American history between 1815 and 1861. While its primary objective is to explain why a sectional conflict of long duration between the North and the South produced secession and Civil War in 1861, it also addresses in some detail the events and significance of the so-called "Age of Jackson." Economic development, westward expansion, and the escalation of sectional antagonism between Northerners and Southerners over time will all be addressed. But the primary focus of the lectures will be on political developments in these years, for only those developments, I believe, can explain why secession and war occurred when they did.
The course will have no discussion sections. Students' grades will be based on a midterm examination, an 8-10 page paper on the assigned course reading, and a comprehensive final examination. Students may take this course on a Credit/No Credit basis, but I require at least a C final average grade to earn a grade of Credit. Readings for the course are likely to include the following:
Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America
William Lee Miller, Arguing about Slavery
Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s
Minisha Sinha, The Counter-revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina
James M. McPherson, What They Fought For.

HIUS 324 – The American South in the 20th Century (3)

M W 1000-1050 MRY 209

Instructor: Grace Hale

This course examines the broad history of the American South in the twentieth century, with special emphasis on racial violence, the creation of segregation, class and gender relations within the region, the cultural and economic interdependence of black and white southerners, and the Civil Right Movement and its aftermath. Sources examined will include film, fiction, and music as well as more traditional historical sources like newspapers and court opinions. Students interested in American Studies, African American Studies, and Gender Studies are also welcome.Grading: midterm 25%; paper (5-7 pp) 25%; final exam 30%; participation in discussion sections and attendance at film and documentary screenings 20%.

HIUS 367 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

T R 1400-1450 MIN 125

Instructor: Julian Bond

This lecture course will examine the history, philosophies, tactics, events, and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward. The Southern movement--variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement--was a black-lead mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation in the South by the middle 1960s.
Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping phases--lobbying, litigation and protest. In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights. In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation, the denial of the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools. The last phase, lasting a decade from '55 to '65, was a period of protest--boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations--as well as organizing campaigns that lay the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s. Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation in the United States. The movement's well-and lesser-known proponents and opponents and their stratagems will be examined. Discussion section required. Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five-to-seven page papers.
Texts: Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo Press
Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Open Hand Press
Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit At The Welcome Table, American Heritage
Videos: "Eyes On The Prize -- America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965," # 1 -6; America At the Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985, #1 & 2; PBS Video, Blackside, Inc. Boston. "The Road to Brown," William Elwood, Producer, California Newsreel.

HIUS 401A- Living in the Segregated South (3)

M 1300-1530 RFN 227A

Instructor: Clayton Brooks

Living in the Segregated South will focus on the daily experiences of individuals living in the American South (1890s through 1960s). The seminar offers students the opportunity to reevaluate a contested period of historical study and reconsider the meanings of segregation and southern through a variety of historical monographs, novels, autobiographies, and oral histories that offer diverse perspectives across class, race, and gender lines. Building on this knowledge, students will conduct their own historical inquiries into the twentieth century South. The seminar will provide a basis of support to guide this research project.

Department of Music

MUSI 212 - History of Jazz Music (3)

M W 1400-1515 OCH 101

Instructor: Scott Deveaux

This course is a survey of the history of jazz from its beginnings around 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century. Important instrumental performers, vocalists, composers, and arrangers are listened to and discussed. Lab section is required.

MUSI 369 – African Drumming and Dance (1-2)

T 1715-1930 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

A practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies), with the intention of performing at the end of the semester. Though no previous experience with music or dance is required, we will give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required of each class member, the goal being to develop an ongoing UVA African Drumming and Dance Ensemble. Prerequisites: Permission of instructor by audition on first day of class.

Department of Politics

PLPT 320 – African American Political Thought (3)

M W 1400-1515 CAB 118

Instructor: Lawrie Balfour

This course introduces students to central concepts and questions in African American political theory and practice since the 19th century. Themes to be explored include: the connection between slavery and democracy, competing conceptions of equality and freedom, the interconnections between race and other markers of political identity such as gender and class, and the role of historical memory in political life.

Department of Psychology

PSYC 487-The Minority Family: A Psychological Inquiry (3)

M 0900-1130 GIL 225

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

This course examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing "deficit" and "strength" research paradigms.
Format: Lecture discussion presentations. No. and type of exams: TBA. Papers or projects: TBA
Prerequisites: PSYC 306 and at least one course from each of the following groups: PSYC 210, 215 or 230, and PSYC 240, 250, or 260, and students in the Afro-American and African studies or studies in women and gender programs. Telephone Enrollment Restrictions: PSYC majors. If this course is full through ISIS: keep trying through ISIS.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 276- African Religion in the Americas (3)

M W 1000-1050

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

This course explores the African religious heritage of the Americas. We will concentrate on African-derived religions in Latin America and the Caribbean, such as Cuban Santeria, Brazilian Candomblé, Haitian Vodou, and the Jamaican Rastafari movement. North American slave religion, the black church, and African-American Islam will also be considered. We will seek to identify their shared religio-cultural "core" while developing an appreciation for the distinctive characteristics and historical contexts of each "New World" tradition. We will address topics such as ideas of God and Spirit; the significance of ritual sacrifice, divination, and initiation; the centrality of trance, ecstatic experience and mediumship; and the role of religion in the struggle for liberation and social justice. Final, Midterm, periodic quizzes on the readings, participation in discussion. Discussion Section required.

RELG 280 - African American Religious History (3)

M W 1100-1215 MCL 2009

Instructor: TBA

This course will survey the origin and development of African American religion in the United States. Centered on essential questions regarding the nature of black faith and the role religious institutions have played in black life, the course will explore the critical relationship between African American religion and African American cultural forms. We will address a number of themes, including: the connection between "the black church" and black political thought; race, gender, and religion; and Black Theology. We will also trace the development of African American religion in various historical contexts, particularly slavery (emphasis on Virginia), the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights era. Although this course will focus primarily on African American Protestantism, careful attention will be given to black Catholicism and the Nation of Islam.

RELA/RELI 390- Islam in Africa (3)

M W 1400-1515

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

This course offers an historical and topical introduction to Islam in Africa. After a brief overview of the central features of the Muslim faith, our chronological survey begins with the introduction of Islam to North Africa in the 7th century. We will trace the transmission of Islam via traders, clerics, and jihads to West Africa. We shall consider the medieval Muslim kingdoms; the development of Islamic scholarship and the reform tradition; the growth of Sufi brotherhoods; and the impact of colonization and de-colonization upon Islam. Our overview of the history of Islam in East Africa will cover: the early Arab and Asian mercantile settlements; the flowering of classical Swahili courtly culture; the Omani sultanates and present-day Swahili society as well as recent "Islamist" movements in the Sudan and other parts of the East African interior. Readings and classroom discussions provide a more in-depth exploration of topics encountered in our historical survey. Through the use of ethnographical and literary materials, we will explore questions such as the translation and transmission of the Qur'an, indigenization and religious pluralism; the role of women in African Islam; and African Islamic spirituality. Midterm, final, short paper, participation in discussion.

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 – Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 316

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

The terms “race” and “ethnicity,” and issues associated with them are, to say the least, problematic. The meanings of these – and related – terms are unclear and policies that address “racial” issues are usually very contentious. Why is this the case? Why is race, seemingly, a source of unending conflict? This course will address these questions by examining the general issue of race from a historical and comparative perspective.

SOC 410 - African American Communities (3)

T R 1530-1645 CAB 320

Instructor: Rick Turner

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear, comprehensive understanding of the history, struggles and diversity of the African-American community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the African-American community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of the cultural history of African-Americans. The course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for African-American people's sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussion, lectures, videos, reading, writing, and class presentation, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamics of the African-American community.

University Seminar

USEM 171/0020 – The 60s in Black and White (2)

T 1530-1730 WIL 140

Instructor: Julian Bond

The 1960’s saw a generation of young people begin to build movements which would stop a war abroad and start a war at home. What made these movements for peace and equal rights possible? What events triggered them? Who were participants? What is their legacy in the present? This seminar – through biographies activists in the movements – attempts to answer these and other questions as we examine personalities, events, and culture of the 1960s. Students will be required to write a comprehensive a paper on a 60’s subject – a participant, an organization, a movement.

 

Spring 2002

 

African-American and African Studies

AAS 102 - Afro-American Culture (4)

T R 1100-1215 MRY 209

Instructor : Hanan Sabea

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 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. Discussion section required.

AAS 250-Health of Black Folks (3)

T R 1700-1815 CAB 345

Instructor: Wende Marshall

"The Health of Black Folks" is a course in medical anthropology which will analyze the relationship between black bodies and biomedicine, both historically and in the present. Co-taught by Norm Oliver, M.D-a physician (Department of Family Medicine, UVA Health Systems) and anthropologist (Department of Anthropology) and Wende Marshall-a medical anthropologist, the course will offer both political economic, and post-structuralist lenses with which to interpret the individual and social health and disease of African-Americans. Selected topics include the black female body in the middle passage and slavery; the use of race in the human genome project; black bodies as research subjects for biomedical science and the epidemic of cancer and HIV among African Americans.

AAS 352 - The American South in the Twentieth Century (3)

M W 1200-1250 RSH 202

Instructor: Scot French

The American South has long stirred the emotions and imaginations of those who lay claim to its storied past. Even today, this much-celebrated "melting pot" of racial, regional, and national identities threatens to combust, from time to time, over such issues as the Confederate flag, affirmative action, and reparations for slavery. This course will survey the social, cultural, and political landscape of the eleven former Confederate States of America, with a particular emphasis on the Commonwealth of Virginia. Topics will include: Heritage vs. History; Jeffersonian Origins of the South's Herrenvolk Democracy; Life and Labor After Emancipation; White Supremacy and the 'Negro Question'; Black Leadership and the Rise of Booker T. Washington; Jim Crow and the Perverse Logic of Southern Progressivism; World War I and the Great Migration; the Southern Renaissance in Arts and Letters; Labor Organizing and Union-Busting in the Depression Era; the New Deal and World War II as Agents of Change; Civil Rights, Black Power, and the Women's Movement in the South; the War on Southern Rural Poverty; the Rise of the Republican Party and the New Christian Right; Southern Cultures in the Age of the Internet; and the Enduring Legacies of Slavery, Civil War and Reconstruction. Lectures will be interspersed with sounds and images from the period. Grades will be based on participation in weekly discussion sections, three short writing assignments (5-7 pages each), in-class quizzes, a midterm exam, and a final exam. Readings may include selections from the following: W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk(1903); Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (1901); Theodore Rosengarten, All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw; William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (1936); James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939); William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son (1941); Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (1946); C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1954); Sarah Patton Boyle, The Desegregated Heart: A Virginian's Stand in Time of Transition (1962); Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968); Robert Penn Warren, Jefferson Davis Gets His Citizenship Back (1980); Melissa F. Greene, Praying for Sheetrock (1991); Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War (1998).

AAS 401 - Independent Study (3)

TBA

AAS 406A - Culture, Politcs, and Society in the African Diaspora, 1600 to 1850 (4)

M 1300-1530 CAB 331

Instructor: Frederick C. Knight

This course will provide students with an opportunity to explore a wide range of themes in the history of Africans in the Americas. Among the topics to be considered include the rise of trans-Atlantic slave trade, the evolution of slaveholding societies in the Americas, the development of African-American cultures and identities, and the formation of race, class, and gender. Students will be responsible for class discussion of articles, book chapters, and other assigned texts. Also required is a twenty-page research paper, due at the end of the semester, on a topic of the students' choice and approved by the instructor. Books will include Black Riceby Judith Carney, Exchanging Our Country Marks by Michael Gomez, Black Jacks by Jeffrey Bolster, and Blind Memory by Marcus Wood.

AAS 406B - Remembering Trouble: Race, Memory, and Recovery in Africa and the African Diaspora ( 3)

W 1300-1530 CAB 331

Instructor: Chris Colvin

There is no shortage of painful material, of experiences of violence, violation and turmoil for African peoples throughout the world to draw from when they undertake to remember their troubles. Slavery, colonialism, decolonization, civil and regional wars, migration, exile, globalization, industrialization, racism and racial violence, poverty, even democratization and liberalization have all produced painful memories in a variety of ways for African people. In this course, we will examine the diverse ways and reasons these memories have been expressed in literature, in law, in art and music, in oral histories and in museums. We will ask if there are particular modes of remembering that are specific to local African experiences and cultural contexts. We will also consider what social, political, personal and cultural purposes telling stories of past trouble serve in the present context. We will look to film, literature, oral history, ritual, poetry, music, theater, the visual arts, court transcripts, legislation, museums, memorials, journalism and interviews in considering the problems of remembering and recovering from painful pasts. Texts: Country of My Skull, Antjie Krog; Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zair, Johannes Fabian; Purity and Exile, Liisa Malkki; Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade, Phillip Curtin; Heart of Redness, Zakes Mda. A coursepack will also be prepared by the instructor for use in class. Class Requirements: Besides attendance and active participation in discussions, students will be asked to prepare a one-page written response to each week's readings for the first seven weeks. Thereafter, we will concentrate on preparing, drafting and revising a major research paper that will serve as the principle product of the course. In addition, each student will be asked once during the semester to prepare to lead the discussion on that week's reading. The majority of class time will be devoted to discussion of the weekly readings. We will also view several films and make time on the last two days for each student to present a short, five-minute presentation on the topic they explored in their term paper. This course fulfills the AAS major requirement for a 400-level seminar with research paper.

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 250 - The Health of Black Folks (3)

T R 1700-1815 CAB 345

Instructor: Wende Marshall

This course is cross-listed as AAS 250

ANTH 256 - Peoples & Cultures of Africa (3)

M W F 1000-1050 RSH 202

Instructor: Adria LaViolette

This course engages the human landscape of modern Africa, through the close reading of a selection of monographs and African feature films. The main texts, drawn from fiction, ethnography, and social history, are taught against a backdrop of economic strategies, different forms of social organization, cultural expressions, and challenges facing modern African women and men. An edited volume on Africa will provide relevant essays to combine with and contextualize the monographs and films. We will focus on rural and urban dwellers, the elite and poor, and the forces that draw all of them together; transnational migration; and belief systems. How relationships between men and women are contextualized and negotiated is a theme found throughout the readings and films, as well as the struggle of people in different circumstances to build new relationships with older beliefs and practices, and with changing forms of government. This course does not attempt to survey all issues and peoples in modern Africa, but rather to distill and feature certain themes of especially wide relevance. This is a lecture and discussion course.

ANTH 543 - African Linguistics (3)

M W 1400-1515 CAB 318

Instructor: David Sapir

The course will cover the classification of African languages, selected grammatical typologies, African lexicography, and examples of oral literature. Students will give presentations on these topics with respect to specific languages. The intention of the course is to investigate the considerable variety of linguistic types present in sub-Saharan Africa. The permission of the instructor and a background in linguistics is required.

Department of Drama

DRAM 307 - African American Theater (3)

M W F 1400-1450 GIL 141

Instructor: Ishmail Conway

This course on African-American Theater will provide an opportunity for students to learn about this rich, distinctive American International art form. This particular theatrical experience emanates out of the experience of Africans in America. The course will explore the theatrical experience that enriches audiences, builds Thespians, communicates history and futures. Specifically, this course will explore the personalities, the literature and plays; the great companies, management and advancement; the socio-cultural implications, the technical contributions to theater.

Department of English Language and Literature

ENLT 247 - Survey of African American Literature (3)

T R 1400-1515 BRN 332

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

The Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance refers to that efflorescence of African-American arts and letters occurring roughly between 1920 and 1935, although its chronological boundaries tend to shift depending on the literary historian's persuasion. This course will quarrel with that popular and largely taken-for-granted notion of an artistic movement of Black Americans identified exclusively with one district in New York City. Principal texts will include photographs by Carl Van Vechten and James Vander Zee; poems by Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Helene Johnson, Sterling Brown, and Langston Hughes; Alain Locke's The New Negro, Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen's Passing, recordings by Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey; Duke Ellington's film short Black and Tan Fantasy, and The Emperor Jones, starring Paul Robeson; and book jackets, advertisements, illustrations, and a range of critical essays. We will begin by exploring the construction of Harlem as city myth, as work of art and will examine the place it occupied in the cultural imagination of the l920s and 30s. We'll want to ask why Harlem was considered an exotic-erotic pleasure/tourist zone for some and for others, the emblem of a utopian ethos of racial renewal and political progress. We will address the generational tensions among the writers associated most popularly with the movement, as well as the economics of literary production. We will examine specifically how artists were patronized and marketed to the American public/s and the corresponding effects of the patronage system on black artistic production, and reception. Course Requirements: Three essays and a final examination.

 

ENAM 482B - The Harlem Renaissance (3)

T R 1100-1215 CAB B026

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

The Harlem (or New Negro) Renaissance refers to that efflorescence of African-American arts and letters occurring roughly between 1920 and 1935, although its chronological boundaries tend to shift depending on the literary historian's persuasion. This course will quarrel with that popular and largely taken-for-granted notion of an artistic movement of Black Americans identified exclusively with one district in New York City. Principal texts will include photographs by Carl Van Vechten and James Vander Zee; poems by Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Helene Johnson, Sterling Brown, and Langston Hughes; Alain Locke's The New Negro, Claude McKay's Home to Harlem, Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen's Passing, recordings by Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey; Duke Ellington's film short Black and Tan Fantasy, and The Emperor Jones, starring Paul Robeson; and book jackets, advertisements, illustrations, and a range of critical essays. We will begin by exploring the construction of Harlem as city myth, as work of art and will examine the place it occupied in the cultural imagination of the l920s and 30s. We'll want to ask why Harlem was considered an exotic-erotic pleasure/tourist zone for some and for others, the emblem of a utopian ethos of racial renewal and political progress. We will address the generational tensions among the writers associated most popularly with the movement, as well as the economics of literary production. We will examine specifically how artists were patronized and marketed to the American public/s and the corresponding effects of the patronage system on black artistic production, and reception. Finally, we will try to sort through the various assessments of the Harlem Renaissance in literary history, including those that question the validity of designating it a "movement," since the artists generally caught under this umbrella held such disparate aesthetic and ideological aims. We will read the likes of Nathan Huggins who claims that the Harlem Renaissance was an "historical fiction." And Harold Cruse, who argues that if this was a movement, then it was one defined by "inspired aimlessness," one that "lacked a cultural philosophy" and continued a "tradition of white cultural paternalism." For David Levering Lewis, the Harlem Renaissance was an "exercise in black bourgeois egocentrism and meliorism." There are even those inclined to assess the Harlem Renaissance as did Ralph Ellison "The Lost Generation:" "Looked at coldly . . . [it] was a literary conceit of such major proportions that today it seems like a swindle." Judge for yourself next semester.

ENAM 482D- Black Women Writers 1950s to the Present (3)

T R 1230-1345 BRN 312

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

This seminar explores the range of Black women's writings from mid-century to the present. We will focus closely on the text's adherence to its contemporary literary and social conventions. We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day. Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women's writing of the last fifty years? How has the literature adapted in response to a specific cultural or historical moment? Writers include, but are not limited to, Ann Petry, Alice Walker, Jewelle Gomez, Dorothy West, Tananarive Due, Barbara Neely, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Morrison. Class requirements include active class participation, discussion leading, response papers, long and short essays.

ENAM 482E - Mark Twain and His Times (3)

M W 1400-1515 BRN 203

Instructor: Stephen Railton

We\'ll read all Mark Twain\'s major works, and selected examples of his other literary and public performances. We\'ll be equally interested in what his works say about America and what Americans in his time had to say about him. We\'ll make extensive use of internet resources, especially the website "Mark Twain In His Times" that I\'ve been building for several years. Interested students will have the option of doing a web project instead of a final essay, though neither knowledge about nor enthusiasm for electronic technology is a prerequisite for the course. What I will expect you to bring to class is a willingness to participate, to help shape the discussions, and a curiosity about what the well-known, always controversial but also widely and deeply beloved image Sam Clemens created as Mark Twain can tell us about his times, our culture and even ourselves. If the class fills up and you\'re interested in taking it, I will be keeping a waiting list. To get on it you can e-mail me at sfr@virginia.edu

ENAM 482F -Violence in America: Slavery and Civil War (3)

T R 1100-1215 BRN 332

Instructor: Franny Nudelman

In this course, we will study representations of suffering, death, and mourning in the contexts of slavery and civil war. Most broadly, we will investigate how years of debate over slavery influenced the way that people perceived the crisis of war. Here are some questions we will ask: How do wartime renderings of the deaths of soldiers draw on prewar representations of slave suffering and rebellion? What strategies do artists use to convey pain and sorrow, or to show that suffering cannot be communicated? How did racial violence, as well as efforts to resist it, change with emancipation? Why is wartime violence so often portrayed as beneficial, the basis for a renewed sense of national identity and belonging? The syllabus will be interdisciplinary: as well as reading important literary texts like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Thomas Gray's The Confessions of Nat Turner, and Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, we will also examine a wide-range of sources such as music and photography, cemeteries and monuments--with an eye to historical context.

ENTC 353-Aesthetics and Politics in African American Literature (3)

T R 0930-1045 MIN 130

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

What tensions underlie the creation of African American literature? How do writers reconcile aesthetic possibility with the social pressures that confront them? What socio-political circumstances do these writers face and how are they presented in their literature? These are some of the questions that will guide our study of selected African American literature this semester. Writers include, but are not limited to, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Ralph Ellison, Ron Karenga, James Baldwin, and Ernest Gaines. Class requirements include active class participation, periodic response papers, quizzes, mid-term and final exams.

ENTC 482B - Post Colonial Drama (3)

T R 1530-1645 BRN 310

Instructor: Lotta Lofgren

The weakening of colonial power worldwide has called to our attention a rich and varied drama previously hidden or suppressed. In this course we will conduct a comparative study of plays from many cultures, working toward a viable definition of postcolonial drama, investigating the playwrights varied paths of divergence from the colonizing power. Casting a wide net, we will examine plays by ethnic playwrights in the United States, and by playwrights from Africa, India, the Caribbean, the former Soviet Union, Australia, Canada, Ireland, and possibly others. We will read works by Baraka, Kennedy, Hwang, Parks, Walcott, Soyinka, Havel, Devlin, Highway, Malouf, and others. Requirements: frequent written responses to the readings, class participation, a research paper.

ENTC 482D - African American Historical Fiction (3)

T 1400-1630 BRN 312

Instructor: Caroline Rody

This seminar will investigate a vibrant contemporary literary genre: African-American texts about slavery. Reading novels and poems and viewing films that reimagine this core story of New World African culture, we will consider the meanings of the contemporary project--literary, historical, political, psychological--to rewrite a people's founding trauma. Thematic concerns will include the representation of slave communities, plantation character types, literacy and literary authority, freedom, memory and imagination, power, gender, race and color, sexuality, and the possibilities and limits of cross-race relations. We will consider these texts' engagement with conventional "histories," oral and literary traditions, and 20th century developments in narrative form, as well as their experiments in genre ("neo-slave narrative," epic, picaresque, satire, gothic, science fiction, magic realism) and in uses of rhetoric and humor. The course will begin with 19th century slave narratives (Douglass, Jacobs, others) and continue with 20th century rewritings, many post-1975, including Margaret Walker, Jubilee; Alex Haley, Roots; Octavia Butler, Kindred; Charles Johnson, Oxherding Tale; Toni Morrison, Beloved; Sherley Anne Williams, Dessa Rose; and others. Films will include Birth of a NationGone With the Wind(excerpts), The Autobiography of Miss Jane PittmanRoots, and Daughters of the Dust. Requirements include vigorous class participation, one short paper, a long seminar paper, and weekly paragraph responses.

Department of French Language and Literature

FREN 346 Litterature Africaine (3)

M W F 1000-1050 CAB 325

Instructor: Suzanne Houyoux

Ce cours est une introducion à la littérature francophone d' Afrique noire, en particulier le roman. Après quelques présentations, développant les contextes historique et idéologique de cette littérature, des exercices collectifs de lecture et d'analyse conduiront à des travaux et présentations de groupe. L'évaluation étant permanente, une présence assidue et participation active sont impératives ; l'examen final est remplacé par l'analyse thématique d'un roman.

Department of Government and Foreign Affairs

GFAP 344 - Urban Politics (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 324

Instructor: Glenn Beamer

Prerequisite: any course in GFAP, GFCP, or economics. Analyzes the structure, politics, and problems of American cities. The meaning and scope of "urban crisis" receive extensive attention. Examines the growing ties between the federal government and cities, central city-suburban conflict, machine politics, and welfare and housing policies. A significant part of the course will focus on race and the politics of Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and Detroit.

GFAP 351 - Minority Politics (3)

M W 1300-1350 CAB 345

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

The most entrenched divisions, largest conflicts and most persistent problems in American politics center around race. This course is devoted to an analysis of how attributions of racial difference shape American politics. Through the course, our animating question will be: is the American liberal democratic polity -- a polity which instituted and abolished slavery based in race -- basically sound apart from its unfortunate anti-democratic episodes, or is the racial order a fundamental element structuring this polity? Though the American racial order has deep historical roots, we will concentrate our attention on its recent manifestations. We will investigate the role of race in national elections, public policy remedies for racial inequality, and public opinion about these policies and other racial issues. We will attend to how racial politics implicates ideas about class and gender, and to differences in scholarship on race produced by people of different races. We will consider the implications for an increasingly racially diverse and complicated polity of defining race primarily in terms of black/white conflict. Discussion section required.

GFIR 582 - Africa and the World (3)

W 1530-1800 HAL 123

Instructor: Layi Abegunrin

Prerequisite: some background in international relations and/or the history of Africa. Overview of the international politics of sub-Saharan Africa, including inter-African relations as well as Africa's relations with the major powers, and the international dimensions of the Southern African situation. Explores alternative policy options open to African states. Considers a number of case studies which illustrate the policy alternatives.

GFCP 583 - Politics of South Africa (3)

W 1230-1515 CAB 247

Instructor: Layi Abegunrin

Prerequisite: GFCP 212, GFCP 581 or instructor permission. Studies the socio-political structures of white supremacy and the political transition to majority rule. Emphasizes the confrontation between African and Afrikaaner nationalisms, the consequences of economic growth on the patterns of racial stratification, and the complicated process contributing to the creation of the multi-racial democratic society.

Department of History

HIAF 202 - Africa from Imperialism to Independence (4)

T R 1530-1645 GIL 141

Instructor: John Mason

This course spans the years from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century to the present. The focus of the first part of the course is on the slave trade and its consequences. The effects of the trade in human beings lingered long after its abolition. Many African societies were weakened, setting the stage for colonial conquest, while others were strengthened, often at the expense of their neighbors. The second part of the course looks at the conquest of much of Africa by European nations and at the dynamics of colonial rule. It is especially concerned with the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and with the many ways in which Africans resisted European domination. The final section of the course is devoted to the post-colonial period, studying first violent and non-violent forms of anti-colonial struggle and then the position of independent African nations in the contemporary world. The course is structured around lectures and readings. Additional course materials include novels and films.HIAF 202 is an introductory course and requires no prior knowledge of African history. Discussion section required.

HIAF 302 - History and (Auto) Biography from Modern South Africa (3)

T R 1100-1215 RFN 283

Instructor: Robert T. Vinson

This course is an introduction to both the modern history of South Africa and to individual South African lives, some famous, some "ordinary folk." The course begins with a brief survey of major pre-20th century themes such as the construction and reconstruction of African states, societies and ethnicities, Dutch and British settlement and conquest, slavery, the discovery of gold and diamonds, subsequent rapid industrialization and the South African War. The course then turns to the extraordinary autobiographies, biographies, essays, novels and personal testimonies of South Africans, black, white, "colored", Jewish and Indian, female and male, urban and rural, to further enliven the turbulent history of 20th century South Africa. From colorful, but dangerous urban townships, to the beautifully haunting countryside, these personal accounts detail how South Africans shaped, and were shaped by, rural impoverishment, rapid industrialization, segregation, apartheid, anti-apartheid organizations and the "negotiated" revolution that culminated in the country's first democratically elected government, that of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress. We will also interrogate the claim that there is a "new" post-apartheid South Africa-noting contrasts and continuities with the old segregationist and apartheid regimes. Readings include Leonard Thompson, A History of South Africa; Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom; Mpho 'M'atsepo Nthunya, Singing Away the Hunger; Stephen Biko, I Write What I Like; Winnie Mandela, Part of My Soul Went With Him; Peter Abrahams, Mine Boy; Ahmed Kathrada, Letters from Robben Island; Sol Plaatje, Native Life in South Africa; Gillian Slovo, Every Secret Thing; Don Mattera, Gone With theTwilight: Story of Sophiatown; Shula Marks, Not Either An Experimental Doll; David Goodman, Fault Lines: Journeys into the New South Africa; and Eugene De Kock, Prime Evil. Grades will be determined from two 5-to 7-page analytical essays that situate individual accounts within the larger thematic concerns (land dispossession, urbanization, segregation, apartheid, the resilience of anti-apartheid activity, the "negotiated revolution" etc.) of the course. Each of these essays will be worth 20% of your grade. One of these essays can be extended into the 15-to 20-page final paper that will be worth 40% of your grade. The remaining 20% will be determined by the quality of your class participation. Undergraduates may use the course to meet the Second Writing Requirement.

HIAF 403 History of Pan-Africanism (4)

W 1530-1800 CAB B028

Instructor: Robert T. Vinson

This course surveys the history of Pan-Africanism, from its roots in the trans-Atlantic slave trade to present times and is particularly concerned with three particular themes: 1) Pan-Africanist thought and action within the context of African political and intellectual history; 2) The interactions between Africans and African diasporic communities in the Americas, the Caribbean and Europe and how such exchanges injected a specifically Pan-Africanist consciousness into locally-based political movements and; 3) The centrality of gender-both in masculinist conceptions of African nationhood and in relations between female and male Pan-Africanists-in Pan-African movements. This seminar will be discussion-oriented and based on readings that will include 1st person testimonies from Pan-Africanists like Marcus Garvey, Adelaide Casely Hayford and W.E.B. Du Bois, historical accounts and primary documents from key persons and organizations and from the seven Pan-African Conferences held in the 20th century. A preliminary list of readings include: Lemelle and Kelley eds., Imagining Home: Class, Culture and Nationalism in the African Diaspora; Von Eschen, Race Against Empire; Wamba, Kinship; Abdul-Raheem, Pan-Africanism; Sutherland and Meyer, Guns and Gandhi in Africa; Harris, Afro-American Reactions to War in Ethiopia; Adi, West African Students in Britain; Esedebe, Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement; 1776-1991, Hill ed. Pan-African Biography; Harris ed. Global Dimensions of the African Diaspora; Langley, Ideologies of Liberation in Black Africa 1856-1970 and Adeleke, Un-African Americans. On average, students will be expected to read 150-175 pages per week and to be prepared to effectively discuss the readings in seminar discussions. Grades will be determined by the quality of the individual's contribution to weekly discussions (20%), by two 5-to 7- page position papers (20% each), and by one 15-20 page final paper (40%), which can be a more detailed analysis of a theme developed in one of the position papers. Undergraduates may use this course to fulfill their second writing requirement.

HIAF 503 Gender, Sexuality, and Family in African History (3)

R 1530-1800 MCL 2009

Instructor: Robert T. Vinson

Gender, Sexual and Familial relations, because they are central to understanding Africa's diverse societies and its historical processes, are fundamental to any examination of Africa. Throughout this graduate-level course, we will use these themes as an analytical lens to uncover fresh perspectives on such familiar topics in African history such as state formation, slavery and slave trading, "legitimate commerce", colonialism, nationalism and the post-colonial state. Within this thematic framework, we will also examine controversial and contemporary issues such as female circumcision and HIV/AIDS. The course will be interdisciplinary, utilizing the various perspectives of historians, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, archaeologists, filmmakers and novelists. A preliminary list of course readings include Bay, Wives of the Leopard; Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands; Gruenbaum, The Female Circumcision Controversy; Greene, Gender, Ethnicity and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast; Hunt ed., Gendered Colonialisms; Morrell ed., Changing Masculinities; Scully, Liberating the Family?; Van De Walle and Renne ed. Regulating Menstruation; Grinker, Houses in the Rainforest; Emecheta, The Slave Girl; Murray and Roscoe eds. Boy-Wives and Female Husbands; Cohen and Atieno-Odhiambo, Burying SM; Hodgson and McCurdy, Wicked Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa; and Wright ed. Strategies of Slaves and Women. Grades will be determined by the quality of your discussion and by a comprehensive final paper of at least twenty pages on a topic relevant to course readings and agreed upon by the instructor. Advanced undergraduates, who feel themselves capable of engaging in graduate-level work, may use this course as a second writing requirement.

HIST 403 - Culture, Politics, and Society in the African Diaspora, 1600 to 1850 (4)

M 1300-1530 CAB 331

Instructor: Frederick C. Knight

This course is cross-listed as AAS 406A

HIUS 100A - Religion and American Public Life Since World War II (3)

M 1530-1800 WIL 140

Instructor: Byron Hulsey

This reading seminar, which fulfills the second writing requirement, is primarily an examination of religious change, continuity, and conflict in this nation's public life since World War II. In particular, we will explore how different groups of Americans have used their religious faiths to justify contested beliefs and actions as they have confronted the momentous events and issues that have shaped modern American culture. We will devote particular attention to the Cold War, civil rights, Vietnam, the rise of the religious right, and the religious and political dilemmas Americans face in contemporary culture. Students will read approximately 200 pages per week for eight weeks, write five essays of five pages each for five weeks, and participate actively in class discussions during each of the fourteen sessions. The essays will comprise 75% of the final course grade, with the remaining 25% being devoted to class participation. There will be no mid-term or final examination. A complete reading list will be posted at the end of November on the bulletin board of Randall 128. Readings will include: Stephen J. Whitefield, The Culture of the Cold War; Robert S. Ellwood, 1950: Crossroads of American Religious Life; Charles Marsh, God's Long Summe; Adam Fairclough, Martin Luther King, Jr; James Carroll, An American Requiem.

HIUS 366 - Introduction to African American History, 1860-Present (4)

M W 1100-1150 CAB 345

Instructor: Dylan Penningroth

This lecture course explores the history and culture of African Americans in the United States from the age of emancipation to the present. The course explores some of the major problems, events, structures, and personalities that shaped their lives, paying particular attention to how black people themselves shaped their experiences. Readings average about 150 pages per week and may include the following: W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York, 1989); Nat Love, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love (Univ. Nebraska Press, 1995); J. T. Trowbridge, The South (1866; Arno 1969); JoAnn Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It (Knoxville, 1987); Michele Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Grades will be determined from section participation and three papers.

HIUS 367 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

T R 1400-1450 GIL 130

Instructor: Julian Bond

This lecture course will examine the history, philosophies, tactics, events, and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward. The Southern movement--variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement--was a black-lead mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation in the South by the middle 1960s. Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping phases--lobbying, litigation and protest. In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights. In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation, the denial of the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools. The last phase, lasting a decade from '55 to '65, was a period of protest--boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations--as well as organizing campaigns that lay the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s. Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation in the United States. The movement's well-and lesser-known proponents and opponents and their stratagems will be examined. Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five-to-seven page papers. Texts: Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo Press; Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Open Hand Press; Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit At The Welcome Table, American Heritage. Videos: Eyes On The Prize -- America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, # 1 -6; America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985, #1 & 2; PBS Video, Blackside, Inc. Boston; The Road to Brown, William Elwood, Producer, California Newsreel Discussion section required.

HIUS 401-The Black Family (4)

W 1300-1530 BRN 330

Instructor: Dylan Penningroth

"The black family" may be one of the most talked-about and least-understood institutions in America. From the powerful lineages of Ghana to the complexities of families under slavery, to Puff Daddy and the Family, black kinship has been a place of power, flexibility, symbolism, and criticism. This course aims to foster a conversation about family life in Africa and the United States: What was it? Who is and who isn't part of the family? Why is kinship so important to people? One way to get at these questions is to study how people who lived in or around black families represented their experiences in diaries, memoirs, letters, court cases, newspapers, and government documents. Students will write a 25-page research paper based on sources like these. During the first month or so, readings of about 200 pages per week will provide students with background on African and African American history and introduce them to the range of available sources. Students will work with the instructor to choose a topic and then do independent research. A complete draft of the paper will be due in mid-November. We will meet again as a group to hear reports about the status of each student's research. Final drafts will be due at the last meeting of the semester, during which students will also be expected to present an oral report to the class on his or her findings. This course fulfills the history thesis and the second writing requirements. Some of the texts we read during the first six weeks may include: Carol Stack, All Our Kin; Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff, Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, Introduction and chapter 9; Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present; Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White; Roger Gocking, Competing Systems of Inheritance Before the British Courts of the Gold Coast Colony (1990). Some background in history would be helpful, but not required.

HIUS 403B African-American Culture to1865 (3)

R 1300-1530 CAB 224

Instructor: Reginald Butler

From a historical perspective, this course will examine how African American cultures and societies developed in the north and south. How did forcibly transported Africans respond to the different agricultural economies, the conditions of enslavement, and European and native American cultures that they encountered during the colonial period? The course will begin in the early period during which large numbers of Africans arrived in British North America. It will then shift its focus to mature African American communities in which the vast majority of persons were American born. We will examine issues of African ethnicity and geography; family and kinship; religious practice; and diverse forms of aesthetic expression. Readings may include selections from the following: Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Low Country; David Barry Gaspar and Darlene Clark Hine, eds., More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas; Ira Berlin, Many Thousand Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America; Stephan Palmie, ed., Slave Cultures and the Culture of Slavery, Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South; Kathleen M. Brown, Goodwives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia; William D. Piersen, Black Legacy: America's Hidden Heritage; Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and Foundations of Black America; Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made. Grades will be based on class participation, group projects, and a major research paper.

Department of Media Studies

MDST 256- Africa and Africans in the US Media (3)

T R 1230-1345 CAB 247

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

This course will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of "Africa" and "Blackness" in this country. We will focus primarily on the context of the present-day United States. However, we will also briefly address pre-colonial and colonial periods and touch on the role of popular media in particular contemporary African contexts. This class will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, academic writing, and radio, television, and print news media create "Africa" in different ways for Americans - each media encapsulating its own markers of legitimacy and expertise - each negotiating its own ideas of authorship and audience. Students will collect examples each week from various sources (print, television, film, etc.) for discussion. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information about such a mis- and under- represented area of the world have - and whether or not the viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility. Students will assemble a fifteen to twenty-page portfolio/research paper.

Deparmtent of Music

MUSI 212 - History of Jazz Music (3)

T R 1230-1345 OCH 101

Instructor: Matthew Butterfield

Prerequisite: No previous knowledge of music is required. This course is a survey of the history of jazz from its beginnings around 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century. Important instrumental performers, vocalists, composers, and arrangers are listened to and discussed. NOTE: This course meets the Non-western perspectives requirement. Lab, F, 9:00 - 9:50, Rm. 107 OCH (Jeff Decker) Lab, F, 11:00 - 11:50, Rm. 107 OCH (Jeff Decker) Lab, F, 12:00 - 12:50, Rm. 107 OCH (Jeff Decker)

MUSI 369 - African Drumming and Dance (2)

T R 1715-1930 OCH 107

Instructor: Eric Gertner

Prerequisite: Permission of instructor by audition on first day of class. A practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies), with the intention of performing at the end of the semester. Though no previous experience with music or dance is required, we will give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required of each class member, the goal being to develop an ongoing UVA African Drumming and Dance Ensemble.

MUSI 412 - Jazz and Race: The Cultural Politics of Musical Criticism (3)

T R 0930-1045 OCH S008

Instructor: Matthew Butterfield

Prerequisite: Music 312 or consent of the instructor. This seminar will explore the issue of race in jazz music and criticism in a variety of historical contexts, ranging from the music's origins in New Orleans to its present institutional canonization via Wynton Marsalis's Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra. Topics will include authenticity and musical value as they relate to race, the problem of white hipness, and the relationship between jazz improvisation and vernacular linguistic practices such as Signifyin(g). Students will write several one-page responses to the listening and reading assignments and complete a research paper on a topic of their choice.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 278 - GENDER IN AFRICAN RELIGIONS (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 431

Instructor: Isabel Mukonyora

By drawing information from African Religions, this course deals with topical questions of interest to anyone wishing to analyze the ways in which ideas or beliefs can impact on human behavior. The course runs as follows (i) a study of the Bantu religious language where ideas about male and female sexuality are used in a complementary fashion to try and express belief in God as creator of the heavens, earth and humanity as gendered realities. An attempt will be made to show the extent to which a traditional African cosmology explains the roles of men as leaders and women as producers in most African traditional societies. (ii) a study of how gender imagery was used in the spectrum of Christian and Gnostic religious movements found in North Africa during late antiquity. Students will be welcome to look at various ways in which gender imagery featured in early Christian talk about God, the creation process and depictions of evil and so on. Since the ancient cosmology in which North Africans used gender imagery made an impact on orthodox Christianity, this section of the course should be of interest to anyone wishing to learn about the emergence of Christianity as a patriarchal religion. (iii) a study of how gender imagery from African traditional religions and Christianity combine is a new discourse on gender in the new religious movements of Africa, otherwise known as independent churches. Since Christianity is the dominant religion of Africa today, it is appropriate to end with a quick survey of the way the traditional religions of Africa continue to shape people's attitudes to sexuality in independent Africa. This way one revisits the religious traditions of Africa in a way that encourages greater sensitivity in matters of gender in today's world by drawing lessons from a part of the world where Christianity is the most popular religion around which Africans are creating new identities.

RELA 390 - Islam in Africa (3)

T R 1230-1345 RFN G004C

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

This course offers an historical and topical introduction to Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa. After a brief overview of the central features of the Muslim faith, our chronological survey begins with the introduction of Islam to North Africa in the 7th century. We will trace the transmission of Islam via clerics, Sufis and Berber jihads to West Africa. We shall consider the medieval Muslim kingdoms; the development of Islamic scholarship and the reform tradition; the growth of Sufi brotherhoods; Fulbe ethnic nationalism and Islamic militancy; and the impact of colonization and de-colonization upon Islam. Our overview of the history of Islam in East Africa will cover: the early Arab and Asian mercantile settlements; the flowering of classical Swahili courtly culture; the Omani sultanates and present-day Swahili society. Readings and classroom discussions provide a more in-depth exploration of topics encountered in our historical survey. Through the use of ethnographical and literary materials, we will explore questions such as the translation and transmission of the Qur'an, indigenization and religious pluralism; the status of women in African Islam; and African Islamic spirituality.

RELC 323 - Pentacostalism: Origins and Development (3)

T R 1100-1215 CAB 323

Instructor: Wallace Best

This course will analyze the Pentecostal movement of the past 20th century as a transcultural religious phenomenon. Looking to a wider international context, we will explore the development of Pentecostalism in such countries as Mexico, Brazil, Korea, and China. We will also concern ourselves with the way ethnic minorities within the United States have reshaped the practice and the meanings of Pentecostalism, as well as Evangelicalism in general, particularly with regard to race and gender. Because the course is about a religious movement, our analytical approach will be historical, anthropological, and theological. Using various Pentecostal texts and articles, we will work toward a clearer understanding of the basic tenets of Pentecostalism, namely "divine healing," "baptism in the Holy Spirit," and "speaking in tongues." We will also investigate how the most recent internationalist shift within the Pentecostal movement has renewed millennialist thought and efforts for Christian ecumenism.

RELG 528 - Black Women's Narratives (3)

W 1530-1800 CAB 320

Instructor: Wallace Best

This course will analyze the Pentecostal movement of the past 20th century as a transcultural religious phenomenon. Looking to a wider international context, we will explore the development of Pentecostalism in such countries as Mexico, Brazil, Korea, and China. We will also concern ourselves with the way ethnic minorities within the United States have reshaped the practice and the meanings of Pentecostalism, as well as Evangelicalism in general, particularly with regard to race and gender. Because the course is about a religious movement, our analytical approach will be historical, anthropological, and theological. Using various Pentecostal texts and articles, we will work toward a clearer understanding of the basic tenets of Pentecostalism, namely "divine healing," "baptism in the Holy Spirit," and "speaking in tongues." We will also investigate how the most recent internationalist shift within the Pentecostal movement has renewed millennialist thought and efforts for Christian ecumenism.

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 - Race and Ethnicity (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 325

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

The terms "race" and "ethnicity," and issues associated with them are, to say the least, problematic. The meanings of these - and related - terms are unclear and policies that address "racial" issues are usually very contentious. Why is this the case? Why is race, seemingly, a source of unending conflict? This course will address these questions by examining the general issue of race from a historical and comparative perspective.

SOC 410 - African American Communities (3)

T R 1530-1645 CAB 338

Instructor: Rick Turner

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear, comprehensive understanding of the history, struggles and diversity of the African-American community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the African-American community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of the cultural history of African-Americans. The course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for African-American people's sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussion, lectures, videos, reading, writing, and class presentation, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamics of the African-American community.

University Seminar

USEM 171/0014 - The 60s in Black and White (2)

T 1530-1720 CAB 122

Instructor: Julian Bond

The 1960's saw a generation of young people begin to build movements which would stop a war abroad and start a war at home. What made these movements for peace and equal rights possible? What events triggered them? Who were participants? What is their legacy in the present? This seminar - through biographies activists in the movements - attempts to answer these and other questions as we examine personalities, events, and culture of the 1960s. Students will be required to write a comprehensive paper on a 60's subject - a participant, an organization, a movement.

Fall 2001 

African-American and African Studies

AAS 101 Introduction To Afro-American And African Studies(4)

T R 1100-1215 PHS 209

Instructor: Dylan Penningroth

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

AAS 324 Plantations In Africa And The Caribbean (3)

T R 0930-1045 MIN 130

Instructor: Hanan Sabea

This course seeks a comparative analysis of plantations in Africa and the Caribbean by highlighting the similarities and differences between the two contexts and their effects on plantations as place of work and spaces of sociality. It also examines the historical linkages between Africa and the Caribbean in the making and reproduction of plantations as they relate to the colonial empires, the differentiated entrenchment of capitalism around the globe, and correspondent movement of ideas, people and things. Finally, the course explores the socio-economic and political implications of plantations on the localities in which they have been operating.
This course is cross-listed as ANTH 324.

AAS 351 African American Social And Political Thought (3)

T R 1100-1215 MAU 115

Instructor: Corey D.B. Walker

Negotiating Modernity
The close of the nineteenth century and the opening of the twentieth century was a period of enormous intellectual activity. African American intellectuals were at the vanguard of some of the most intriguing and intellectually stimulating social and political movements shaping the modern world. From the nationalist visions of Alexander Crummell to the feminist leanings of Anna Julia Cooper to the avowed Marxist orientation of Harry Haywood, African American thinkers were instrumental in developing and promoting new and interesting strands of social and political thought. This course will engage the various currents in African American social and political thought from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. With the theme "Negotiating Modernity," we will explore this complex intellectual world where African American intellectuals sought to develop critical social and political responses when "all that is solid melts into air." Course requirements include active class participation, brief response papers, and extended essays.
Selected readings may include: Tunde Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans; Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind;Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From The South; Alexander Crummell, Destiny & Race; Angela Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism; W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater; Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik; Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism; Stephanie Shaw, What A Woman Ought To Be and Do; Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-education of the Negro.

AAS 401 Independent Study (3)

TBA

AAS 405A Anthropology And The African Diaspora (3)

M 1300-1530 CAB 130

Instructor: Mieka Brand

In this course we will investigate the role of anthropology as it relates to the African diaspora. The term "diaspora" refers to the dispersal of peoples of African descent and their role in the transformation and creation of new cultures, institutions, and ideas outside of Africa. How do people of the African diaspora make sense of their world? In what ways do forces such as colonialism, capitalism or racism shape these understandings? What commonalities and differences can we find across different parts of the diaspora? Readings will range from the early works of W.E.B. Du Bois and Zora Neale Hurston to contemporary literature by anthropologists such as Lee D. Baker, Gertrude Fraser and Theresa Singleton, and will span the fields of socio-cultural anthropology, archaeology, and historical anthropology. Readings will focus primarily on the United States, but will include also studies from the Caribbean, Central and South America, Europe and, of course, Africa. Reading load will range from about 100 to 200 pages per week. In addition to regular attendance and active participation, requirements for the course include four 1-2 page précis, leading one or more discussion section, and a final independent research project of approximately 20-25 pages.
This course will fulfill the AAS major requirement of a 400-level course with term paper.

AAS 405B Race, 'Progress,' And The West (3)

R 1400-1630 CAB 225

Instructor: Wende Elizabeth Marshall

How does the notion of race shape our conceptions of nationhood, class, culture and gender? How was (is) whiteness understood as "raced?" This seminar will analyze the historic development of the race concept in the west from the European "enlightenment" to the 21st century and analyze and interpret constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of race, particularly in regard to the imbrications of race/culture, race/nation and race/gender in Western theory and practice. Requirements include a 20-page research paper (fulfills AAS major requirement) and short oral presentations on the readings.
Possible readings include: Bernal, Black Athena (introduction to Vol. 2); Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution; Foucault, selections from The Order of Things; Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World; Prakash, Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World; Lefkowitz and Rogers, selections from Black Athena Revisited; Montesquieu, Persian Letters; Spencer, Evolution of Society; Tylor, Primitive Society; selections from the Hebrew Bible; Goldberg, Racist Culture; Gregory and Sanjek, Race; Krenshaw et. al, Critical Race Theory; Dower, War without MercyRace and Power in the Pacific War; Said, Orientalism; Jackson-Fossett and Turner, Race Consciousness; Brown, Die Nigger Die; Cleaver, Soul on Ice; Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk; Fanon, Black Skin.

AAS 405C Race And Place: African-American Education In Post-Emancipation Virginia, 1865-1965(3)

W 1300-1530 MIN 108

Instructor: Scot French

This advanced research seminar invites students to explore the subject of African American education in post-emancipation Virginia through scholarly readings and the intensive study of archival materials, such as photographs, oral histories, and public records. In the first six weeks of class we will read and discuss works of scholarship that place African American schooling in its local, regional, and national contexts, beginning with Carter G. Woodson's classic, The Mis-Education of the Negro. The second half of the class will be devoted to researching and writing of individual papers and the building of a collaborative web-based project. This course fulfills the AAS requirement of a 400-level seminar with term paper.
Prospective readings include:
• Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro
• William A. Link, Jackson Davis and the Lost World of Jim Crow Education
• James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935
• Samuel L. Horst, The Diary of Jacob E. Yoder of the Freedmen's Bureau School, Lynchburg, Virginia, 1866-1870
• Charles S. Johnson, Growing up in the Black Belt: Negro Youth in the Rural South
• Florence C. Bryant, Memoirs of a Country Girl
and excerpts from various Civil Rights era autobiographies

AAS 451 Distinguished Majors Program/ Directed Research (3)

TBA

AAS 452 Distinguished Majors Program/Thesis (3)

TBA

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 324 Plantations In Africa And The Caribbean (3)

T R 0930-1045 MIN 130

Instructor: Hanan Sabea

This course seeks a comparative analysis of plantations in Africa and the Caribbean by highlighting the similarities and differences between the two contexts and their effects on plantations as place of work and spaces of sociality. It also examines the historical linkages between Africa and the Caribbean in the making and reproduction of plantations as they relate to the colonial empires, the differentiated entrenchment of capitalism around the globe, and correspondent movement of ideas, people and things. Finally, the course explores the socio-economic and political implications of plantations on the localities in which they have been operating.
This course is cross-listed as AAS 324.

ANTH 330 Tournaments And Athletes (4)

T R 1100-1215 MIN 125

Instructor: George Mentore

This course will offer you a cross-cultural study of competitive games. Criticizing current theories about the "innocence" of sports while comparing and contrasting various athletic events from societies around the world, it will provide an argument to explain the competitive bodily displays of athletes. It will select materials, which allow you to examine bodily movement, meaning, context, and process, in addition to the relations between athletes, officials, spectators, and social systems. Its general thesis will be that sport brings out the universal morals of community, challenges and tests them in controlled and unthreatening genres, yet never defeats them or makes them appear unjust.
The student must enroll in one of the obligatory discussion sections in 330D.

ANTH 388 African Archaeology (3)

M W F 09:00-9:50 CAB 215

Instructor: Adria LaViolette

This course surveys archaeological knowledge currently available about ancient North Africa, the Sahara, and sub-Saharan Africa. The emphases will be on the Late Stone Age, the Iron Age, and the archaeology of the colonial period. The goal is to provide a firm grasp of the great transformations in pre-modern African history, and to provide students with information about some of the most important archaeological sites, discoveries, and research on the continent. Throughout the course, a theme will be the politics of the past, and the changing role of the practice of archaeology in Africa.

Department of English Language and Literature

ENLT 247/001 Black Writers In America (3)

T R 1100-1215 CAB 139

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Black Women Writers 1950s to the Present
This seminar explores the range of Black women's writings from mid-century to the present. We will focus closely on the text's adherence to its contemporary literary and social conventions.We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day. Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women's writing of the last fifty years? How ahs the literature adapted in response to a specific cultural or historical moment? Writers include, but are not limited to, Ann
Petry, Alice Walker, Jewelle Gomez, Dorothy West, Tananarive Due, Barbara Neely, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Morrison. Class requirements include active class participation, discussion leading, response papers, long and short essays.

ENLT 247/002 African American Writers (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 245

Instructor: TBA

Description currently unavailable.

ENAM 313 Early African American Literature I (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 332

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American prose, from l760, the date of Briton Hammon's Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings to l901, the year of Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery. We will work our way through canonical and non-canonical texts and through multiple genres-- captivity narratives, spiritual autobiographies, slave narratives, sermons, execution sermons, criminal narratives, speeches, novels--and will explore a number of issues related to literary history, culture, aesthetics, authorship, audience, genre, and narratology. Among the questions to be explored? How have literary historians given shape to or "storied" this tradition? How do black women's writings complicate these "fictions" of literary history? What is the relation between the black vernacular tradition and the black "literary" text? How do the white abolitionists and editors involved in the production of slave narratives trouble traditional conceptions of authorship? Who "authors" a speech by Sojourner Truth that is stenographically transcribed and appears in multiple versions? What confluence of factors and ideologies explain the "canonical" version of "Ain't I a Woman?" Other texts include Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Harriet Wilson's Our Nig; Frederick Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom; David Walker's Appeal; Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces, and Thomas Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner. We will work to situate these and other selections in the political, cultural, and critical controversies of their time and ours.

ENAM 381 Black Protest Fiction (3)

M W 1400-1515 CAB 119

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Description currently unavailable.

ENAM 481C African-American Women Writers (3)

T R 0930-1045 BRN 312

Instructor: Angela Davis

We will read several novels and short stories by African-American Women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, four written responses to readings (each one typed page long) and a formal essay (ten to twelve pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls...; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place.
Prerequisite: The course is restricted to fourth year majors in English, Women's Studies and African-American and African Studies.

ENAM 481D - Aesthetics And Politics In African American Literature (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 335

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

What tensions underlie the creation of African American literature? How do writers reconcile aesthetic possibility with the social pressures that confront them? What sociopolitical circumstances do these writers face and how do they present in their literature? These are some of the questions that will guide our study of selected African American literature this semester. Writers include, but are not limited to, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Ralph Ellison, Ron Karenga, James Baldwin, and Ernest Gaines. Class requirements include active class participation, periodic response papers, quizzes, mid-term and final exams.

This course is cross-listed with ENTC 481H

ENAM 481E Faulkner, Gaines & The Plantation (3)

T R 1100-1215 BRN 310

Instructor: Charles Rowell

To write the South (or to write of the South) -- as William Faulkner and Ernest Gaines do -- is, ultimately, to read the plantation and its accompanying myth in varying manifestations. In such a context, the plantation is an enclosed world marked by restricting codes and mores, a hierarchical regime whose unlimited power is centered in the hands of an owner who determines the daily life and fate of its inhabitants. The plantation is, on the one hand, a large farm, an economic site; it is, on the other, a social and political entity which not only constructs and controls the lives of its inhabitants but also assigns them roles and value in terms of their race, class, and gender; in the revisionary history of some Southerners, the plantation is even a family, filled with white "parents" and black "children." The plantation is ultimately a culture which, with its penchant for control and domination in the interest of a few, shaped the way of life and determined the political imperatives of an entire region, the South.
This course will not only critique the plantation as a socio-political regime; using two of its most renowned writers, one black and the other white, this course will also examine critically how Faulkner and Gaines deploy the plantation as they write the South in fiction. What does it mean for a beneficiary of the regime (Faulkner: white, male, upper-middle class) to represent it in Absalom, Absalom and The Sound and the Fury, among others? If he critiques the plantation or its culture, what does he say, even as he invents a county in Mississippi in which to set his fictional world? And what of Ernest Gaines (black, male, from a poor family) who grew up as a victim of the plantation's legacy? Writing in the wake of legions of Southern white writers who created plantation myths affirmed by white Americans nationwide, Gaines stepped on dangerous ground when he decided to set his fiction in the changing plantation world of southern Louisiana in The Autobiography of Miss Jane PittmanOf Love and Dust, and other texts. How does this native of a Louisiana plantation critique (or defend?) that regime? In the end, does Faulkner or Gaines present the "truer" fiction of the South?

ENTC 481H Trauma Theory & African-American Literature (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 335

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Trauma theory is an emerging branch of literary scholarship pioneered by such critics as Cathy Caruth and Shoshanna Felman. Despite the value of these interpretive strategies, trauma as a literary methodology is not often used to comment on African American culture. In this class we will consider trauma theory by reading the standard-bearers as well as new voices on the scene. Focusing on traumas endemic to African American life, slavery and lynching, we will explore how the fields of history, psychology, and literary analysis converge to form literary trauma studies. We will also consider how African American subjectivity influences the definition and structure of trauma. Students will be required to participate actively, lead discussion and write two essays.
This course is cross listed as ENAM481D

Department of French Language and Literature

FREN 346 Topics In African Culture (3)

T R 1100-1215 CAB 236

Instructor: Majida Bargach

Course description currently unavailable.

FREN 411 Francophone Literature Of Africa (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 235

Instructor: TBA

This course surveys the literary tradition in French, emphasizing post-World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights. Examines the role of cultural reviews in the development of this literary tradition.

Department of Government and Foreign Affairs

GFCP 212 Politics Of Developing Areas (3)

T R 0930-1045 TBA

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Surveys patterns of government and politics in non-Western political systems. Topics include political elites, sources of political power, national integration, economic development, and foreign penetration.

Department of History

HIAF 100 Food And Famine In Africa (3)

W 1300-1530 RFN 311

Instructor: Tamara Giles-Vernick

This course will introduce students to the study of history by exploring famine in Africa. Famines have plagued Africa throughout its history and, contrary to popular belief, have not resulted from exclusively "natural" causes.
Examining famine in Africa's past sheds light on the complexity of assigning "causes" to events in the past. It also demonstrates how history can provide insights into present strategies for preventing famine. In this course, the history of African famine gives us an opportunity to learn about the methods and concerns of historical inquiry and to develop skills for reading critically, writing lucidly, and arguing cogently.
By examining historical case studies of famine in Ethiopia, Somalia, the Sahel, and South Africa, we will explore the complexity of change in human lives. Understanding this complexity helps to illuminate why events such as famines occur. Our case studies will provide us with opportunities to evaluate how historians and other commentators on famine use evidence to explain historical change. We will investigate the different kinds of evidence that historians use, including ecological, oral, and written evidence. We will examine different writings that draw upon historical interpretation, including narratives, first-person accounts, governmental reports, and novels. Finally, we will explore how history can contribute to our understandings of contemporary problems.

HIAF 201 Early African History Through The Era Of The Slave Trade (4)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 345

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

Early African History draws Africans' distinctive achievements in culture, politics, and economic strategies out from the mists of the once-dark continent's unwritten past. Starting with the dawn of history and taking the story up in detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 201 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the ironic interplay of tragedy and achievement in a continent increasingly trapped in exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of African history, HIAF 202, taught in the spring, narrates subsequent events down through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.)
HIAF 201 is a lower-division introductory survey. The instructor presents the major themes of early African history in lectures twice each week. Students meet additionally in discussion sections for review of readings, quizzes, and preparation for written assignments. Requirements include weekly map quizzes, a mid-term examination (only the better of two tries counts), three short papers (4-5 pages) rehearsing historical questions for the mid-terms and considering the written sources on Africa's past, and a final examination (format to be negotiated with the class). The course belongs to the Afro-American and African Studies curriculum, meets the "non-western" requirement for the major in History, and qualifies for the College "non-western perspectives" area requirement. Students may rewrite one of the papers to fulfill the College Second Writing Requirement.
Readings revolve around weekly assignments in a text (Shillington, History of Africa), for a total of about 225 pages. Other assigned chapters and professional articles introduce the distinctive methodologies of doing history without written sources (including the famous Mande oral epic Sundiata), highlight interpretive ("historiographical") issues, and consider concepts relevant to understanding early Africa. The total number of assigned pages runs at approximately 1200.
No formula determines final marks. Students are graded according to their "highest consistent performance" in all aspects of the course, including attendance at lectures and participation in discussions, with allowance made for the unfamiliarity of the subject matter early in the term; a number of options allow students to devise a combination of graded work that will accommodate other academic commitments and reflect specialized abilities most accurately.
HIAF 201 presumes no prior knowledge of Africa or experience with the study of history. Since the subject is new to nearly everyone in the course, consistent application and preparation is expected, particularly early in the term. Students in all four years of their undergraduate careers and in all colleges of the University complete the course with success.
Most find it a challenging opportunity to discover and examine assumptions about modern Americans -- themselves included -- they did not know they held.

HIAF 402 History Colloquia (4)

T R 1400-1515 PV8 108

Instructor: John Mason

"What's Wrong with Africa?"
War, famine, disease, and unending poverty... This is the Africa that we too often read about in newspapers and magazines and see on TV. While this sort of coverage is misleading--Africa is not simply a continent-wide disaster area--there is enough truth in the images of human suffering to cause Africans and non-Africans alike to ask, What's wrong with Africa?
HIAF 402 explores the roots of Africa's multiple crises, focussing primarily on Africa's relations with the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas. Topics include the overseas slave trade, conquest and colonialism, anti-colonial liberation struggles, and post-colonial politics and economics. Course materials include African novels and movies and current scholarship from Africa and the west.

HIAF 403 Making Race In South Africa And The United States (4)

T R 0930-1045 RAN 212

Instructor: John Mason

HIAF 403 is a seminar in comparative history. Through biography, autobiography, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race became the overwhelming reality in the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.
South Africa and the American South are like distant cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries owe much of their early economic development to slavery. In both complex systems of racial domination shaped society for generations during and after the emancipation of the slaves. And in both the interracial struggle against racism gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.
At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. Most dramatically, in South Africa the descendants of European immigrants constitute a minority of the population; in the United States, of course, the reverse is true.
Course materials include music, movies and videos, as well as biographies, autobiographies, and current scholarship.

HIAF 404 Independent Study In African History (3)

TBA

Instructor: Staff

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HIAF 503 Family And Gender In African History (3)

T 1800-2030 RAN 212

Instructor: Tamara Giles-Vernick

Family and gender relations have fundamentally shaped Africa's changing societies, economies, and cultures, just as it has been shaped by them. We will begin this course by exploring various ways of understanding familial and gender relations, as both Africans themselves and social scientists have imagined them. We will then focus on how African men, women and families have participated in, influenced, and been transformed by various processes in African history, including slavery, migration, urbanization, colonial rule, legal change and the development of the postcolonial state.
Family and gender history incorporates the analytical questions and tools of history, anthropology, political economy, and sociology. Students can expect to read at least one book a week for the course. A preliminary list of course readings includes: Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands; Cohen and Atieno-Odhiambo, Burying SM; Cooper, Marriage in Maradi; Emecheta, The Slave Girl; Grinker, Houses in the Rainforest; Hodgson and McCurdy, Wicked Women and the Reconfiguration of Gender in Africa; Hunt, Gendered Colonialisms; Ranger, Are We Not Also Men?; Scully, Liberating the Family?; Soyinka, Ake, The Years of Childhood; Werbner, Tears of the Dead.

HIAF 511 Slavery In World History (3)

M 1300-1530 PV5 109

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

HIAF 511 is a small seminar-style class for graduate students and advanced undergraduates (with instructor's permission) that will explore historical approaches to the study of one of the world's oldest, most ubiquitous, and most tragic, institutions. Most Americans are familiar with slavery only as it developed in the Old South in the decades before the Civil War. In fact, Greeks, Roman, Muslims, Africans, Renaissance Italians, Brazilians, West Indian planters, Buddhists, Maori, and many others also held significant numbers of people -- by no means all of them African -- in bondage. Most also treated slavery as a way to assimilate foreigners, not as the racially exclusive dead end that American laws of slavery prescribed. The objective of HIAF 511 is to move beyond static stereotypes and consider the enslavement as a process of its many distinctive times and places in world history.
Recent major works in this enormous field (some 700-800 academic studies appear each year focused primarily on slavery) will form the basis for weekly class discussions. In addition, each member of the class will select one region and prepare a substantial term-paper (i.e. based on secondary authorities) setting its experiences with slavery in the relevant historical context. The background reading for the modern portions of the course will be Robin Blackburn's The Making of New World Slavery. Other, extremely varied readings will develop the history of slavery in the ancient Mediterranean, the Islamic world, Africa, medieval Europe, Brazil, the Caribbean, and colonial North America, and the United States.
HIAF 511 carries no specific pre-requisites, but its broad setting presumes a general familiarity with several parts of the globe, or a willingness to assimilate a considerable quantity of new material during the semester.
All stages of writing a polished term paper (a preliminary paper proposal, an interim draft, a revised draft, and the final submission) will receive close editorial attention, with the object of developing clarity and efficiency in writing; students will be expected to prepare each one of these steps sufficiently in advance of deadlines to revise before submitting, on time. The paper will constitute the final examination for the course.
Students will also be graded on their grasp of the readings as demonstrated in contributions of relevant insight from them to class discussions.
The instructor will work with students to define paper topics that will support special interests in given times or places and will support petitions to count this course toward appropriate area and other requirements within the history major or, for graduate students, to support history fields or programs in other departments. Undergraduates may use the course to meet the Second Writing Requirement.
Please contact the instructor (<jcm7a@virginia.edu>, 924-6395) if you are considering enrolling in the course, in order to understand its learning strategy and to plan your participation in it in ways that will develop your broader educational goals.

HIST 504 Monticello Internship (3)

Instructor: Phyllis Leffler

Directed research, largely in primary source materials, on topics relating to Jefferson's estate, life, and times. Directed by senior members of the Monticello staff.
Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor.The internships are restricted to graduate students in history and to fourth-year undergraduate history majors. A maximum of two students each semester can be admitted to the course.

HIUS 307 The Coming Of The Civil War (3)

T R 0930-1045 MIN 125

Instructor: Michael F. Holt

This lecture course closely examines American history between 1815 and 1861. While its primary objective is to explain why a sectional conflict of long duration between the North and the South produced secession and Civil War in 1861, it also addresses in some detail the events and significance of the so-called "Age of Jackson." Economic development, westward expansion, and the escalation of sectional antagonism between Northerners and Southerners over time will all be addressed. But the primary focus of the lectures will be on political developments in these years, for only those developments, I believe, can explain why secession and war occurred when they did.
The course will have no discussion sections. Students' grades will be based on a midterm examination, an 8-10 page paper on the assigned course reading, and a comprehensive final examination. Students may take this course on a Credit/No Credit basis, but I require at least a C final average grade to earn a grade of Credit.
Readings for the course are likely to include the following:
• Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America
• William Lee Miller, Arguing about Slavery
• Richard E. Ellis, The Union at Risk
• Peter Kolchin, American Slavery, 1619-1877
• Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
• Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s
• Minisha Sinha, The Counter-revolution of Slavery: Politics and Ideology in Antebellum South Carolina
• James M. McPherson, What They Fought For

HIUS 323 The Rise And Fall Of The Old South (3)

M W 1100-1150 PHS 203

Instructor: Edward L. Ayers

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the seventeenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slave owners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians. Throughout, the focus will be on the way that black Southerners and white Southerners interacted.
Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Requirements include a midterm and final as well as a substantial research paper. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course.
Discussion section required.

HIUS 365 African-American History, Through Reconstruction (3)

M W 1200-1250 RFN G004B

Instructor: Dylan Penningroth

This course explores the history and cultures of people of African descent in North America from the 1500s to the mid-nineteenth Century, and from the African continent to the Americas. We will engage critically with a variety of topics, including identities, families, and communities, gender, the slave trades and slavery, resistance, and emancipation. We will pay special attention to how black people themselves shaped their experiences, and how those experiences relate to the history of the broader Atlantic world.
Readings being considered:
• Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (trans. 1998; New York, 1988)
• T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York: Oxford, 1982)
• Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985)
• David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995)
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dover, 1995)
• Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1983)
The readings will average 150-200 pages per week. There will be two papers and a final exam. Each week we will have two lectures and one required discussion section.

HIUS 367 History Of The Civil Rights Movement (3)

T R 1400-1450 MIN 125

Instructor: Julian Bond

This lecture course will examine the history, philosophies, tactics, events, and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward.
The Southern movement--variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement--was a black-lead mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation in the South by the middle 1960s.
Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping phases--lobbying, litigation and protest. In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights. In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation, the denial of the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools. The last phase, lasting a decade from '55 to '65, was a period of protest--boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations--as well as organizing campaigns that lay the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s.
Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation in the United States. The movement's well-and lesser-known proponents and opponents and their stratagems will be examined. Discussion section required. Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five-to-seven page papers.
Texts:
• Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo Press
• Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Open Hand Press
• Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit At The Welcome Table, American Heritage
• Videos:
• "Eyes On The Prize -- America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965," # 1 -6; America At the Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985, #1 & 2; PBS Video, Blackside, Inc. Boston.
• "The Road to Brown," William Elwood, Producer, California Newsreel.

HIUS 401/A History Seminar: Who's An American? Americanism And National Identity In The United States 1945-90 (3)

M W 1530-1800 B003

Instructor: Carl Bon Tempo

What did Southern segregationists, African-American civil rights leaders, feminists, and proponents of the fledgling New Right political movement have in common during the 1960s? At first glance, not much. But upon closer examination, it is clear that many of the leaders in these groups manipulated the ideas and rhetoric of national identity and Americanism in order to formulate their own answers to the question, "Who's an American?"
In this 401 seminar, students will explore how Americans living in the last half of the twentieth century created and employed a political language called Americanism and, in doing so, conceived of national identity. What was Americanism and how did it relate to national identity? The two concepts were closely related. One historian described Americanism this way: "[I]t can best be understood as a political language, a set of words, phrases, and concepts that individuals used - either by choice or necessity - to articulate their political beliefs and press their political demands." This "political language" and these "words, phrases, and concepts" often rested upon definitions of national identity and character.
The main goal of this course is for students to arrive at an understanding of how definitions of Americanism and national identity varied during this period according to which Americans did the defining - and according to their distinct political, social, economic, and cultural agendas. During the first third of the class, students will read selections (between 150 to 200 pages per week) from a variety of works that offer definitions of both Americanism and national identity. Discussions in these weeks will center on how race, place, gender, class, and contemporary historical events contributed to the many forms of Americanism. The readings will provide a methodological, historiographic, and historical foundation for the last two-thirds of the course, during which students will write a 25 page, primary source-centered, research paper.
This seminar provides an opportunity for students to read cutting edge scholarship about national identity, Americanism, patriotism, and citizenship, as well as the opportunity to contribute to this scholarship with their research paper. Possible paper topics include - but are by no means limited to - the ways in which participants in debates about immigration policy, the various branches of the Civil Rights Movement, segregationists in the South, or the neo-conservative political movement of Barry Goldwater (or Ronald Reagan) crafted definitions of national identity and an Americanist language to satisfy its political and social agendas. Papers can address a variety of topics and sources from almost as many angles. This wide scope, I believe, will produce lively discussions and papers.
Texts will probably include: (We will read portions of these works and most will be available via toolkit)
• Lynne Cheney. Selection of articles from The New Republic, The Chronicle of Higher Education,
• and The Reader's Digest on the formation and need for National History Standards.
• Gary Gerstle. Working Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
• Will Herberg. Protestant-Catholic-Jew. Second Edition. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1960.
• Linda Kerber. No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Hill and Wang, 1998.
• Gunnar Myrdal. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944.
• David Potter. People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954.
• Bryant Simon. A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

HIUS 401/B History Seminar: The North And Reconstruction (3)

W 1300-1530 RFN 227A

Instructor: Michael F. Holt

Reconstruction was the political and constitutional settlement imposed by the victorious North on the defeated Confederacy after the Civil War. Much has been written about the framing of these policies in Washington and their implementation in the South, and this literature is filled with assertions about the reaction of the northern public to this post-war experiment. Surprisingly little systematic research, however, has in fact been done about the relative importance of developments in the South compared to developments within the North itself to the northern public. The purpose of this majors seminar is to undertake that investigation by examining the role of southern Reconstruction vis-à-vis other kinds of issues and concerns in northern elections between 1865 and 1876. After a few weeks of common reading, each student will be assigned a specific election year for research. The objective will be to read as many Republican and Democratic newspapers from the North as possible for that year to determine what issues election campaigns focused on and how central Reconstruction was in the appeals rival parties made to the electorate.
Readings for this seminar will include the following:
• David Donald, Jean H. Baker, and Michael Holt, The Civil War and Reconstruction
• Eric Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction
• William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1877

HIUS 401/D History Seminar: Southern Progressivism:Government, Economy, Gender, And Race 1890-1920 (3)

W 1900-2130 CAB 247

Instructor: George Gilliam

Progressivism has been called the "formative birthtime of basic institutions, social relations, and political divisions of United States society as it evolved towards and beyond the mid-twentieth century." Though the period is best-remembered as the time when the public regulation of big business started, the seeds of today's civil rights, environmental protection, and public health and occupational safety movements also were planted during the progressive era. Southern Progressivism has been complicated by its intersection with virulent racism. State constitutional conventions held in the South between 1890 and 1910 to create the framework for progressive regulation of business at the same time took steps effectively to disfranchise African-Americans and poor whites. C. Vann Woodward concluded that "Southern progressivism generally was progressivism for white men only, and after the poll tax took its toll not all the white men were included."
Scholars have not fully explored the aftermaths of those state constitutional conventions in the South, however, and have left to others to explore whether progressive administrative institutions regulated or promoted business, and to consider the role such regulators played in the implementation of Jim Crow laws. The enforcement of Jim Crow laws and the use of black convict labor in the South provided an impetus for Americans to form the NAACP during this period. Rapid industrialization and urbanization pushed women to organize for protective legislation and for reforms in public health and education. This seminar will provide students the opportunity to explore the intersections of progressive reformers, regulators, the business communities, and the forces of racial segregation. Students interested in turn-of-the-century race regulation, the early women's movements, as well as those who are interested in the relationship between the variegated business communities and progressive regulators should be rewarded. The common readings and seminar discussions also will expose students to stark divisions within the business communities as well as to the nascent women's movement and to issues of race and class that seem particularly pertinent to the changing social landscape of the period.
The course will include five weeks of required readings designed to provide a common understanding of the period and a range of different historical experiences and questions relating to Progressivism. The average weekly reading load will be 120 pages and will include selections from traditional works such as Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform, from revisionist works such as Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism, as well as more recent scholarship including Edward L. Ayers' The Promise of the New South and Noralee Frankel, Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era. By the sixth week of the course students will submit their paper topics in the form of a two-page proposal that outlines their preliminary research plan. During the next several weeks students will meet individually with the instructor. The entire class will also meet several times during the middle of the course so that students can discuss their research progress, learn about each other's work, and help their peers with any research obstacles they may encounter. The primary goal of the seminar is to assist students in learning how to conduct their own research and will culminate in a paper 25-30 pages in length, based on original research in primary sources. That paper is intended to fulfill the second writing requirement.

HIUS 401/F History Seminar: The Politics Of Race In America After 1954 (3)

R 1530-1800 WIL 215

Instructor: Kent Germany

How has race mattered? From 1954 to the present, American race relations have undergone a dramatic transformation. This seminar will examine aspects of that transformation. For this course, the term "politics" is defined in its broad sense and includes the personal, public, private, electoral, and cultural. Readings will focus on the ways that African-Americans have built power since 1954 and the responses made by others to their efforts. The seminar's major focus will be on the American South, but it is not limited to a regional approach. In the first part of the course, students will develop topics for their papers, while discussing and critiquing some of the literature concerning the rise of Massive Resistance, the development of the integrationist coalition, the growth of black power, and the counter response to the Civil Rights Movement. After the first five weeks or so, the course will be devoted to the student's production of a 25 to 30 page paper based on original research. UVA has a wide range of resources that apply to this topic. The reading load should average approximately 200 pages during the appropriate weeks. Some of the probable readings are listed below, but may change slightly. Completion of this course satisfies the second writing requirement.
Some of the probable readings include:
• Carter, Dan T. From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: Race in the Conservative Counterrevolution, 1963-1994.
• Goldfield, David R. Black, White, and Southern: Race Relations and Southern Culture, 1940 to the Present.
• Lawson, Steven F. Running for Freedom: Civil Rights and Black Politics in America Since 1941.
• Patterson, James T. Brown v. Board of Education: A Civil Rights Milestone and Its Troubled Legacy.
• Powell, Lawrence N. Troubled Memory: Anne Levy, the Holocaust, and David Duke's Louisiana.
• Rieder, Jonathan. The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism. [selections]
• Smith, Robert Collins. They Closed Their Schools: Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1951-1964. [selections]
• Weems, Robert E. Desegregating the Dollar: African-American Consumerism in the Twentieth Century. [selections]
Possible Paper Topics (These are merely suggestions for further inquiry. Students will be given wide latitude in selection of topics as long as they pertain to the course.) Aspects of Massive Resistance. Corporate policies on employment, marketing, pricing, production, and distribution. Case studies of interracial relationships: political, economic, social, religious, romantic, or otherwise. Student-teacher relationships after Jim Crow (or similar issues in health care, social work, worship, etc.). The Economics of Inclusion. Transformation of UVA. Black Power and Black Studies. Black Capitalism. Economic Development in low-income areas. Residential Patterns. Community organizing. Party realignment. Studies of campaign rhetoric and strategy. The Republican Southern Strategy. Race and the politics of law and order. Race and the politics of welfare. Influence of race in public policies: Desegregation of public accommodations, reapportionment, affirmative action, busing, school desegregation, antipoverty programs, fair housing, policing.

HIUS 403/B African Americans And Sports In The Twentieth Century: a Social History (3)

R 1300-1530 RFN 311

Instructor: Reginald Butler

John Hoberman argues in his recent book, Darwin's Athletes, that in the 19th and early 20th centuries sports were completely racialized as evidence of white superiority and a rationale for European colonial hegemony. The demographics of sports have changed dramatically in post industrial America. This course examines the history of African Americans in competitive athletics and the historical transformations in the rhetoric and meaning of the relationship between athleticism, race, gender and nation. The course is structured around the seminar. Students will read and discuss a variety of texts in anthropology, history, american studies, and literature. Gena Dagel Caponi, Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin, and Slam Dunking, John Hoberman, Darwin's Athletes, and C.I.R. James, Beyond a Boundary, are a few of the books that we will read. Students will also read extensively in magazines and journals as well as view material from popular and documentary film, and television. Students will write weekly reading responses and a major paper of twenty to twenty five pages.

Department of Music

MUSI 212 History Of Jazz Music (3)

T R 1230-1345 OCH 101

Instructor: M. Butterfield

This course is a survey of the history of jazz from its beginnings around 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century. Important instrumental performers, vocalists, composers, and arrangers are listened to and discussed. Lab section is required.

MUSI 219 Introduction To African Music (3)

T R 1400-1450 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

This course presents a survey of traditional and popular music/dance styles across West and Central Africa. Readings, listening, and video-viewing assignments will be supplemented with with a weekly lab section (which meets during the latter part of each class session) that will offer practical exposure to the African rhythms, movements and styles of musical interaction addressed each week. Careful reading, class discussion and participation in lab learning are required of each student. There will be a mid-term and a final exam. Lab, (no credit), Gertner, M. 12:00-12:50, Rm. 107. Lab, (no credit), Gertner, F. 13:00-13:50, Rm. 107

MUSI 307 Worlds Of Music (3 )

T R 1100-1215 OCH 107

Instructor: Kyra Gaunt

Prerequisite: Major in music or anthropology, or permission of instructor.
To understand the complexities of global musics, we must begin at home appreciating the diversity of musics within the U.S.-"the global is in the local" (Fabian 1998, 5). This course is an introduction to ethnomusicology primarily for music majors featuring case studies of contemporary musical traditions from the twentieth century.
The study of ethnomusicology is a study of understanding otherness and understanding not only how other people make music, but also the way we tend to perceive other musics as less complex than ours, and we tend to appreciate the music but not the people.

MUSI 369 African Drumming And Dance (1-2)

T 1715-1930 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Prerequisites: Permission of instructor by audition on first day of class.
A practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (BaAka pygmies), with the intention of performing at the end of the semester. Though no previous experience with music or dance is required, we will give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required of each class member, the goal being to develop an ongoing UVA African Drumming and Dance Ensemble.

MUSI 425 Popular Culture & Music (3)

W 1530-1800 OCH S008

Instructor: Kyra Gaunt

Few realize that the performance of German folksong in the 18th century, minstrelsy in the 19th century, the games black girls play in the U.S., bomba in Puerto Rico, and Zairean popular music in the 20th century have a lot to tell us about popular culture. They tell a lot about the shift from popular culture being produced by everyday people to being produced for the masses. Hip-hop is no exception. We explore the contradictory role popular culture has and does play in defining power, modernity, culture, and otherness (i.e., race, class, sex/gender, nation, etc.). Readings from ethnomusicology, anthropology, culture studies, and popular music journalism. Music listening and participating in musical events. Oral presentation of term paper.
Prerequisite: Graduate student or 4th year in music or anthropology, or permission of instructor.

Department of Psychology

PSYC 406 Psychology Of Oppression And Empowerment (3)

T 1400-1630 CAU 112

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

This course analyzes oppression and its amelioration in modern American society. Format: Lecture/discussion. No. and type of exams: TBA. Papers or projects: TBA
Prerequisites: PSYC majors who have taken at least one course from each of the following groups: PSYC 210, 215, 230 and PSYC 240, 250, or 260, and students in the Afro-American and African studies or studies in women and gender programs. Telephone Enrollment Restrictions: Restricted to PSYC majors. If this course is full through ISIS: keep trying .

PSYC 487 The Minority Family: A Psychological Inquiry (3)

M 0900-1130 GIL 225

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

This course examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing "deficit" and "strength" research paradigms.
Format: Lecture discussion presentations. No. and type of exams: TBA. Papers or projects: TBA
Prerequisites: PSYC 306 and at least one course from each of the following groups: PSYC 210, 215 or 230, and PSYC 240, 250, or 260, and students in the Afro-American and African studies or studies in women and gender programs. Telephone Enrollment Restrictions: PSYC majors. If this course is full through ISIS: keep trying through ISIS.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 275 Introduction To African Religions (3)

M W 1100-1150 CAB 345

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

An introductory survey of African religions, this course will concentrate on African traditional religions but Islam and Christianity will also be discussed. Topics will include indigenous mythologies and cosmologies, sacrifice, initiation, witchcraft, artistic traditions and African religions in the New World. Readings include: Ray, African Religions; Stoller and Olkes, In Sorcery's Shadow; Soyinka, Death and the King's Horsemen; Ijimere, The Imprisonment of Obatala; Salih, The Wedding of Zein; and a packet of readings.
Discussion Section required.

RELG 280 African-American Religious History (3)

M W 1000-1050 CAB 311

Instructor: Wallace Best

This course will survey the origin and development of African American religion in the United States. Centered on essential questions regarding the nature of black faith and the role religious institutions have played in black life, the course will explore the critical relationship between African American religion and African American cultural forms. We will address a number of themes, including: the connection between "the black church" and black political thought; race, gender, and religion; and Black Theology. We will also trace the development of African American religion in various historical contexts, particularly slavery (emphasis on Virginia), the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights era. Although this course will focus primarily on African American Protestantism, careful attention will be given to black Catholicism and the Nation of Islam.

RELA 341/ RELC 341 Introduction To African Christian Theology (3)

T R 1100-1215 CAB 341

Instructor: Isabel Mukonyora

This course begins with a critique of the questions that have led to the emergence of theologies in plural in today's world. The special attention will be paid to the colonial legacy of negation of African cultures and traditional religion as a way of showing why a traditional of African theology was pioneered by John Mbiti and followed by Pobee, Dickson and others along the lines of endorsing African traditional religion as preparatio evangelica. Attention will also be paid to the use of questions derived from western theology to give shape to most African scholarship in theology so far. Case studies will be used demonstrate this 'cultural' approach to theology to which Black Theology inherited from African American culture by theologians in South African can be also added. In contrast attention will be paid to a newly developed theology based on a vernacular understanding of Christianity from Mukonyora's doctoral study of an African Independent Church called the Masowe Apostles. In short, three kinds of African Theology which are explicable against the background of the experience of being Christian in Africa today will be examined and critiqued in this introduction to African Christian Theology.

RELG 382 Islam In The African American Experience (3)

W 1530-1800 CAB 242

Instructor: Wallace Best

The Nation of Islam (NOI) was unquestionably one of the most significant religious developments among African Americans in the 20th century. In addition to examining the history of the movement, this course will explore the various meanings attributed to NOI practice and theology. Of particular concern will be the ways its ideological structure has allowed the NOI to function both as a "black nationalist" and religious body, with resultant tensions and ambiguities. Since the movement has historically been characterized by its charismatic leadership, we will spend time examining the lives of such figures as Wallace D. Fard, Elijah Muhammad, Louis Farrakhan, and of course, Malcolm X. Other themes covered in the course will include: women and the Nation, the return to Orthodoxy, the NOI and black Christianity, the NOI and political power, and the relationship between urbanization, migration and the NOI.

RELA 389/RELC 389 Christianity In Africa (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 118

Instructor: Isabel Mukonyora

Well known theologians such as Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian and St. Augustine from North Africa have been claimed in contemporary African Church history to be forefathers of both African and western theology. This lecture series begins with the history of Christianity in Africa from late antiquity to the present, paying particular attention to African agency in mission, but also taking into account the histories of conquest surrounding the missionary enterprise. It will be shown how Greco-Roman imperialism and European colonialism beginning with the Portuguese adventures of the14th century have shaped the African response to Christianity. The emergence of African Indigenous Churches will be looked at against this background colonial conquest, missionary paternalism and independency in Africa. Historical, theological and sociological issues will be brought together in this general introduction to Christianity in Africa.

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 Race And Ethnic Relations (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 316

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

The terms "race" and "ethnicity," and issues associated with them are, to say the least, problematic. The meanings of these--and related--terms are unclear and policies that address "racial" issues are usually very contentious. Why is this the case? Why is race, seemingly, a source of unending conflict? This course will address these questions by examining the general issue of race from a historical and comparative perspective.

SOC 410 African American Communities (3)

T R 1530-1645 CAB 320

Instructor: Rick Turner

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear, comprehensive understanding of the history, struggles and diversity of the African-American community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the African-American community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of the cultural history of African-Americans. The course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for African-American people's sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussion, lectures, videos, reading, writing, and class presentation, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamics of the African-American community.

University Seminars

USEM 171/0020 The 60s In Black & White (2)

T 1530-1730 WIL 140

Instructor: Julian Bond

The 1960's saw a generation of young people begin to build movements which would stop a war abroad and start a war at home. What made these movements for peace and equal rights possible? What events triggered them? Who were participants? What is their legacy in the present? This seminar --through biographies activists in the movements--attempts to answer these and other questions as we examine personalities, events, and culture of the 1960's. Students will be required to write a comprehensive a paper on a 60's subject--a participant, an organization, a movement.

 

Spring 2001

 

African-American and African Studies

AAS 102 – Introduction To African-American And African Studies II (4)

T R 1230-1345 MRY 209

Instructor: Olufemi Taiwo

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 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. Discussion section required.

AAS 401 - Independent Study (3)

(TBD)

AAS 406A - African Photography (3)

M 1300-1530 CAB 331

Instructor: Liam Buckley

This course explores the visual cultures structured around the presence of cameras and photographs in Africa. The method of the course is interdisciplinary, drawing on work conducted in visual anthropology, in colonial discourse and postcolonial theory, and material culture studies. In its colonial and postcolonial contexts, the activity of photography has provided persons with a time to establish identities for themselves and social relations with others, while exercising power and testing authority. Students will examine the range of African practices that have developed historically during the taking of, posing for, display, collection and exchange of photographs. The final section of the course focuses on the "social lives" of African photographs--things moving through history, beyond the immediate lives and contexts of those who produced and posed in them, capable of serving varying ideological ends.

AAS 406D - Interpreting Community: A Case Study Of Cape Coast, Ghana (3)

R 1800-2100 Minor Hall 108

Instructors: Scot French and Maurice Cox

[Cross-listed with ARCH 566]

Through the townscape of Cape Coast, Ghana, we will investigate methods of reading cultural landscapes and challenge assumptions about interpretations of place. The course will unfold against the larger context of the West Coast of Africa and the involvement of Cape Coast and other coastal towns in the history of trade-particularly the enslavement of Africans.
This course targets advanced undergraduate and graduate students whose research interests focus on discerning cultural patterns and deciphering expressions of change in the built, natural, and social environments. Using non-traditional sources such as oral testimony, ritual, and performance, students will develop the skills needed for collecting, distilling, and conveying the complexities of community through intensive exposure to Cape Coast. In interdisciplinary teams, students will develop, reformat, and produce interpretations of this place using a variety of digital media.
Requirements include the completion of weekly reading assignments/interpretive exercises, participation in class discussion, weekly journal entries, and a final multimedia product.
The course will be taught in a seminar/workshop format and is conceived of as the predecessor to an interdisciplinary student research project for the summer of 2001 in Cape Coast, Ghana. This summer project is contingent upon funding from the United States Department of Education, Fulbright-Hays Group Study Abroad Program and will have an application process independent of the spring seminar. Collaborators: School of Architecture, Afro-American and African Studies, and the Digital Media Lab, Robertson Media Center.
Instructor's permission is required. Preference will be given to third- and fourth-year students and students applying to study abroad in Ghana this year.

AAS 406E - Critical Race Theory: Law And Literature (3)

W 1300-1530 Minor Hall 108

Instructor: Bernie D. Jones

Critical race theory scholars comprise a group of law professors of color, primarily African American, who developed a critique of the legal profession in the 1980s to 1990s, in response to rising conservatism within the American political, social and legal orders in the post-civil rights era. Disenchanted with both the legal liberalism which made the civil rights movement possible and with the prevailing radical response of critical legal studies, they developed an approach to legal scholarship based in a heightened consciousness of the role race can play in determining African American status within society. One unorthodox approach to scholarship lay in storytelling. Through storytelling, they gave voice to the realities of African Americans whose voices had been silenced by racial hierarchy under the law, and through the use of formalistic legal rules. Critical race theorists used storytelling in essays and in short story fiction, as an approach to cultural criticism. We will be reading works of critical race theory storytelling by Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, Richard Delgado, and David Dante Troutt.
This class is a research seminar which will satisfy the second writing requirement.

AAS 451 - Distinguished Majors Program/ Directed Research (3)

TBD

AAS 452 - Distinguished Majors Program/Thesis (3)

TBD

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 256 – Peoples & Cultures Of Africa (3)

M W F 1300-1350 CAB 138

Instructor: Adria LaViolette

This course engages the human landscape of modern Africa, through the close reading of a selection of monographs and African feature films from diverse cultural and geographical areas. The main texts, drawn from fiction, ethnography, and social history, are taught against a backdrop of economic strategies, different forms of social organization, cultural expressions, and challenges facing modern African women and men. An edited volume on Africa will provide relevant essays to combine with and contextualize the monographs and films. We will focus on rural farmers, urban dwellers, both the elite and poor, and the forces that draw all of these together; transnational migration; and belief systems. How relationships between mean and women are contextualized and negotiated is a theme found throughout the readings and films, as well as the struggle of people in different circumstances to build new relationships with older beliefs and practices, and with new forms of government. This course does not attempt to familiarize students with all issues and peoples in modern Africa, but rather to distill and feature certain themes of especially wide relevance. This is a lecture and discussion course.

ANTH 318 – Social History Of Commodities: Linkages Between Africa And The Americas (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 423

Instructor: Hanan Sabea

This course examines how certain agriculture products turned into world commodities linking, in the process of their production, exchange and consumption, diverse places and people around the globe. The main focus is on the connections between Africa and the Americas through the movement of people and commodities. Informed by production exchange and consumption theories the course focuses on coffee, sugar and tobacco, primarily in terms of where they originated; when, where and how they transform into commodities of daily consumption; and the conditions under which they are produced and enter into circulation.

Department of Art History

ARTH 255 – African American Art (3)

M W F 1100 – 1150 CAM 160

Instructor: Andrea Douglas

The course is a survey of Afro-U.S art from the 18th century to the present. It hopes to contextualize the painting, sculpture, and photography of Afro-U.S artists in the history of Western art. Emphasis is also placed on the associated post-colonial theory/modern theory. Topics include the New Negro movement, the Black arts movement and post-modern installation. There are no pre-requisites for this course.

Department of Drama

DRAM 307 - African American Theater (3)

M W F 1400-1450 CAB 323

Instructor: Ishmail Conway

This course on African-American Theater will provide an opportunity for students to learn about this rich, distinctive American International art form. This particular theatrical experience emanates out of the experience of Africans in America. The course will explore the theatrical experience that enriches audiences, builds Thespians, communicates history and futures. Specifically, this course will explore the personalities, the literature and plays; the great companies, management and advancement; the socio-cultural implications, the technical contributions to theater.

Department of English Language and Literature

ENLT 247 – Black Writers In America (3)

T R 0800-0915 MCL 2009

Instructor: Kathy Nixon

(Description not available – see instructor)

ENLT 247M/001 – African American Literature (3)

"Fictions of Slave Revolt in Americas"

M W 0900-0950 BRN 330

Instructor: Virginia Thornton

The Middle Passage, the auction block, the quarters, the fields, the whip, the runaway -- these are the defining scenes of slavery in the popular imagination, brought forward on almost any plantation tour to form the picture of slave presence in the Americas. But that's not all of the story. In this class, we'll look at a different part of the narrative, a tale of slaves rising against their owners and the results of armed revolt. We will begin with texts like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (1688) and excerpts from the autobiographical The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and move forward to include Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1856), Arna Bontemps' Black Thunder (1936), and William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), as well as the recent and controversial Stephen Spielberg film Amistad. Through these and other lens, we will trace both literary and historical accounts of slave uprisings written by participants and their targets, by casual observers, and by those a generation or more later, all of whom try to understand the complex entanglements and oppressions at the heart of slave revolt. Course requirements: weekly e-mail questions, four 5-7 page papers, final exam.

ENAM 314 – African American Survey (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 323

Instructor: Tejumola Olaniyan

A cross-genre survey of African-American literature from the close of the Harlem Renaissance to the present. We will pay close attention to significant formal innovations and thematic preoccupations that define this literature and the relationships, if any, between such concerns and the (changing) conditions of possibility of the literature itself.

ENAM 358 – Relations Of Race (3)

M W 1100-1215 CLM 201

Instructor: Stephen Railton

We'll read popular 19th and 20th century fictions like Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Leopard's Spots to look closely at how America's majority white culture defined "whiteness," "blackness" and the relations between them. We'll also keep those texts in contact with fictions by African American writers like Douglass, Chesnutt, Hurston and Wright. And we'll look continuously at 20th (and maybe even 21st) century popular culture – represented mainly by film and television -- to see how historically constructed racial narratives and types persist and change, continue to operate as popular fictions in our time. Discussion section required.

ENAM 482A – American Film (3)

M W 1530-1645 BRN 330

Instructor: Eric Lott

An introduction to the history of Hollywood film and film technique, focusing particularly on the American film industry's impact on and representation of 20th Century cultural history. We won't read background historical works to help us understand what's going on in the films; we'll read the films as cultural-historical works--prismatic, condensed, displaced, distorted, oneiric works, to be sure, but ones that clue us in to the way Americans have imagined their history over the last hundred years. Syllabus of films still to be finalized, but more than likely many of the following will be included: Griffith's Birth of a Nation (1915), Michaeux's The Homesteader (1922), Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927), Fleming's The Wizard of Oz (1939), Hawks's His Girl Friday (1940), Curtiz's Mildred Pierce (1945), Ford's The Searchers (1956), Hitchcock's Vertigo (1957), Welles's Touch of Evil (1958), Clarke's The Cool World (1963), Penn's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Coppola's The Godfather (1972), Altman's Three Women (1977), Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977), Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989), Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), Spielberg's Amistad (1997). Books: Sklar, Movie-Made America; Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art; Anger, Hollywood Babylon.

ENAM 482D – Aesthetics And Politics In African American Literature (3)

T R 0800-0915 CAB 335

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

What tensions underlie the creation of African American literature? How do writers reconcile aesthetic possibility with the social pressures that confront them? What socio-political circumstances do these writers face and how do they presented in their literature? These are some of the questions that will guide our study of selected African American literature this semester. Writers include, but are not limited to, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Charles Chesnutt, Ralph Ellison, Ron Karenga, James Baldwin, and Ernest Gaines. Class requirements include active class participation, periodic response papers, quizzes, mid-term and final exams.

ENTC 316 – Black Women Writers 1950s To The Present (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 216

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

This seminar explores the range of Black women’s writings from mid-century to the present. We will focus closely on the text’s adherence to its contemporary literary and social conventions. We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day. Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women’s writing of the last fifty years? How has the literature adapted in response to a specific cultural or historical moments? Writers include, but are not limited to, Ann Petry, Alice Walker, Jewelle Gomez, Dorothy West, Tananarive Due, Barbara Neely, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Toni Morrison. Class requirements include active class participation, discussion leading, response papers, long and short essays.

ENTC 331 – Major African American Poets (3)

T R 1230-1345 BRN 328

Instructor: Charles Rowell

In a poem entitled "Black Art," Amiri Baraka, one of the original architects of the Black Aesthetic, writes "We want a black poem. And an/Black World./Let the world be a Black Poem/And Let All Black People Speak This Poem ... " This course will focus on Baraka's heirs, contemporary African-American poets who, though aware of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and its aesthetic dicta, are creating poetry that mines community and self and thus moves beyond the essentialist ideology of the Movement. Yet these contemporary poets are ever mindful of the aesthetic which derives from the culture and lives of USA communities. Yusef Komunyakaa, for example, remembers his Southern home without preachment; Rita Dove reimagines the interior details of family and its importance; Toi Derricotte explores the difficult geographies of women's bodies in childbirth; Michael Harper radically reconstructs US American history as revelation, recounting moments of horror and hope; and, in language that is both luminous and terrifying, Audre Lord inscribes "the love that dare not speak its name."

ENTC 482 – African Literature (3)

R 1400-1630 BRN 330

Instructor: Tejumola Olaniyan

This course is a detailed introduction to the major writers and diverse literary traditions of the continent. We will explore connections of structures—literary/ideological, etc.—across a variety of boundaries—race, gender, class, genre, region, etc. We will address such interesting issues as the possibility of a postcolonial African literary voice in non-African but Europhone languages, the colonial encounter and cultural imperialism, cultural nationalism and the independent nation-state, and history and genre/literary forms. Some of the writers we will read are Nawal El Saadawi, Tsitsi Dangaremba, Wole Soyinka, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Nadine Gordimer, Chinua Achebe, and Buchi Emecheta. Requires: class presentation(s), 2 short papers (10 pp. each).

ENTC 482B – Contemporary African-American Women Playwrights (3)

T R 1230-1345 WIL 140

Instructor: Lotta Lofgren

This senior seminar is an intensive study of plays by African American women from the 1950's to the present. Moving fairly quickly to cover as much as possible of this fertile ground, we will examine how these playwrights rework old and invent new forms to express a unique world view in a theatrically viable way. We will ask such questions as: How much should any artist compromise his or her vision in order to be heard? What kind of audience does each playwright write for? What is her sense of responsibility to the past and the future? How does the double need to define oneself within the group and as a group affect the playwrights and their art? The course aims to celebrate the achievement of these remarkable artists: from their position on the margins they offer us plays so new and compelling that they force us to reconsider our notions of what theater is and can be. We will read works by Alice Childress, Lorraine Hansberry, Adrienne Kennedy, Aishah Rahman, Ntozake Shange, Suzan-Lori Parks, Anna Deavere Smith, and others. Course requirements: enthusiastic class participation, frequent written responses to readings, an occasional oral book report, a longer research paper.

ENTC 533 – The 1970s (3)

M W 1400-1515 CAB122

Instructor: Eric Lott

The 70s are too often seen as America’s Embarrassing Years, the decade of the Dry Look and Watergate, Three’s Company and stagflation, Est and ESP, postindustrial decline and the Bicentennial, Mandingo and the Steve Miller Band. Our narratives of the 70s give us only an era of late-imperial decadence (Vietnam, Studio 54), a self-interested Me Decade (Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism), an age of cults and terrorism (the Black Panthers, the Symbionese Liberation Army, Jim Jones’s People’s Temple), or a shallow (at best campy) culture of celebrity (Halston, Cher, Travolta). This course, by contrast, will be guided by the hypothesis that the 70s are not only the most interesting post-WWII decade but the one in which American culture actually fulfilled the promise of the 1960s—even amid the culture’s pervasive sense of post-heroic anomie. In our interdisciplinary inquiry, we will examine the period’s widespread interest in "authenticity" or roots (the Alex Haley miniseries, Kingston’s Woman Warrior, George Clinton’s One Nation Under a Groove, early Bruce Springsteen, Loretta Lynn’s Coal-Miner’s Daughter, Jimmy Carter); a new kind of cultural radicalism (the Afro, the Wounded Knee affair, the commune, leather culture, Richard Pryor, Lily Tomlin, punk, blaxploitation films, the No Nukes events); a recasting of gender, sexuality, and desire (feminist/lesbian sectarian debates, the Sensitive Man, Renee Richards, the critique of the so-called "sexual revolution," The Mary Tyler Moore Show); a new understanding of political economy (the advent of the "multinational corporation," Barnet and Muller’s Global Reach, Dog Day Afternoon, the commodity irony of the "pet rock," OPEC, Network); an embrace of anti-humanist thought and art (Foucault, Althusser, Warhol, disco, Doctorow’s Ragtime); and a political culture of widespread left-liberalism, later supplanted by the rise of the new right (McGovern, the ‘72 Black Political Convention in Gary, Nixon’s disgrace, Harvey Milk, Annie Hall, Carter’s rightward turn, "austerity," the firing of Andrew Young, American Gigolo, Ronald Reagan). Our inquiry will raise questions about (among other things) cultural value, 70s nostalgia, 70s legacies good and bad, the very idea of periodization, the prospects for a "unified field theory" of a cultural moment, and other matters.

Department of French Language and Literature

FREN 345, SEC. 2 – African Literatures And Cultures (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 332

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

This course will explore aspects of African literatures and cultures which demonstrate the complexity of the African experience through the creative arts. It will focus on selected issues of special resonance in contemporary African life. Oral literature and its continuing impact on all other art forms. Key issues in French colonial policy and its legacy in Africa: language, politics, education. The course will examine the image of the postcolonial state and society as found in contemporary arts: painting, sculpture, music, and cinema. Selections from painters and sculptors like Cheri Samba (Zaire-Congo), Ousmane Sow, Younousse Seye (Senegal), Werewere Liking (Cameroun), including such popular icons as Mamy Wata and forms such as Souwere glass painting ; from musicians like Youssou Ndour (Senegal), Cheb Khaled (Algeria), Seigneur Rochereau, Tshala Muana (Zaire-Congo), Salif Keita (Mali), and Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); from Mande, Peul, and Kabyle oral literatures in French translation; from filmmakers D. D. Mambety, O. Sembene, G. Kabore, Dani Kouyate, Moussa Sene Absa.
Students should keep in mind that in addition to the reading assignments, a class visit to the National Museum of African Art in Washington may be required, depending on availability of funds. The grade will be based on contribution to discussions (regular class attendance is required), writing assignments consisting of 7 short papers and the final exam all written in clear and grammatically correct French.
In addition to a selection of texts placed on reserve in a box at Cabell Hall Room 307, the following books will feature among the required reading list: Manu Dibango Trois kilos de cafés; Werewere Liking - Statues colons; A. Sow - La Femme, la Vache, la Foi; A. H. Ba- Kaidara; M. Mammeri - Poèmes Kabyles anciens

FREN 444 - Africa In Cinema (3)

T R 1100-1215 CLM 322B

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

This course is an exploration of African cultures through cinema. It deals with the representations of African cultures by filmmakers from different cultural backgrounds and studies the ways in which their perspectives on Africa are often informed by their own social and ideological positions as well as the demands of exoticism. It also examines the constructions of the African as "other" and the kinds of responses such constructions have elicited from Africa’s filmmakers. These filmic "inventions" are analyzed through a selection of French, British, American, and African films by such directors as John Huston, S. Pollack, J-J Annaud, M. Radford, Ngangura Mweze, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cisse, Gaston Kabore, Amadou Seck, Dani Kouyate, Brian Tilley, Jean-Marie Teno on a variety of subjects relative to the image of Africa in cinema. The final grade will be based on 2 short papers (4 pages/each), a final paper (7-10 pages), an oral presentation and contributions to discussions. Each oral presentation will lead to a written paper on the subject of the presentation; the paper will address suggestions made during discussions in class. Papers should be analytical, and written in clear, grammatical French using correct terminology supplied with this description.
Required reading list (on reserve):
Ferid Boughedir -Le cinéma africain de A a Z
Recommended (Specific selections will be announced weekly.)
Kenneth W. Harrow - Matatu- With Open Eyes: Women and African Cinema
Gardies, André - Cinéma d’Afrique Noire Francophone : l’espace-miroir.
Vieyra, P. S. - Le cinéma africain- Sembène Ousmane, cinéaste
Ukadike, F. N. - Black African Cinema, Research in African Literatures - Special Issue: African Cinema. Vol. 26, No.3, Fall 1995.
Diawara, Manthia - African Cinema.

Department of Government and Foreign Affairs

GFAP 344 - Urban Politics (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 324

Instructor: Glenn Beamer

Prerequisite: any course in GFAP, GFCP, or economics

Analyzes the structure, politics, and problems of American cities. The meaning and scope of "urban crisis" receive extensive attention. Examines the growing ties between the federal government and cities, central city-suburban conflict, machine politics, and welfare and housing policies. A significant part of the course will focus on race and the politics of Chicago, New York, Atlanta, and Detroit.

GFAP 351 – Minority Politics (3)

T R 1100-1150 GIL 141

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

The most entrenched divisions, largest conflicts and most persistent problems in American politics center around race. This course is devoted to an analysis of how attributions of racial difference shape American politics. Through the course, our animating question will be: is the American liberal democratic polity -- a polity which instituted and abolished slavery based in race -- basically sound apart from its unfortunate anti-democratic episodes, or is the racial order a fundamental element structuring this polity?
Though the American racial order has deep historical roots, we will concentrate our attention on its recent manifestations. We will investigate the role of race in national elections, public policy remedies for racial inequality, and public opinion about these policies and other racial issues. We will attend to how racial politics implicates ideas about class and gender, and to differences in scholarship on race produced by people of different races. We will consider the implications for an increasingly racially diverse and complicated polity of defining race primarily in terms of black/white conflict. Discussion section required.

GFAP 382 – Civil Liberties And Civil Rights (3)

M W 1300-1350 CLK 147

Instructor: David O’Brien

Prerequisite: two courses in GFAP or instructor permission
In this course we will discuss freedoms of speech, demonstrations, and association, search and seizures and racial profiling, race and capital punishment, school desegregation, and affirmative action. We will study judicial construction and interpretation of civil rights and liberties reflected by Supreme Court decisions, including line-drawing between rights and obligations. (No CR/NC enrollees.) Discussion section required.

GFAP 589 – School Choice: Politics And Effect (3)

T 1300-1530 RFN 281

Instructor: Frederick Hess

School choice may be the most ardently discussed and debated issue in education today. Choice-based reforms, which seek to reform k-12 education by giving students and families more choice in choosing which school to attend, have spread rapidly across the country in recent years.
Not only are market-based reforms such as school vouchers and charter schooling important in their own right, but they provide useful lenses through which to consider deeper questions relating to the purpose, nature, history, and performance of schooling. In this seminar we will examine the theoretical case for and against school choice, the politics and history of school choice, and the evidence on the promise and problems presented by choice. We will pay particular attention to the topics of school vouchers and charter schooling.
Choice advocates suggest that consumer freedom will allow more children to attend high-performing schools free from the red tape that hampers public schools and that competition will force traditional school systems to perform better. Choice critics respond that school choice threatens to splinter the country along class, ethnic, and religious lines; could undermine support for public education; and may result in consumers demanding an education for their children that the larger community would not approve. A great deal of research into the effects of school choice has been conducted in recent years, but there is a great deal of dispute as to whether the data are accurate and how they should be interpreted. This course will explore these issues in depth.
Since 1990, more than 30 states have adopted charter school legislation. More than a thousand charter schools now exist across the U.S. Meanwhile, private and public voucher programs are now running in a number of major cities. The debate over these increasingly popular programs offers an unusually clear look at the philosophical debates and the politics that characterize American education. The conflict highlights cleavages between conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats, civil libertarians and those who believe the division between church and state is currently higher than it ought to be, and teacher union leaders and public school critics.

GFCP 583 – Politics Of South Africa (3)

M W 0900-0950 CAB 337

Instructor: Guy Martin

Prerequisite: GFCP 212, GFCP 581 or instructor permission
Studies the socio-political structures of white supremacy and the political transition to majority rule. Emphasizes the confrontation between African and Afrikaaner nationalisms, the consequences of economic growth on the patterns of racial stratification, and the complicated process contributing to the creation of the multi-racial democratic society.

GFIR 582 – Africa And The World (3)

M W 1200-1250 CAB 337

Instructor: Guy Martin

Prerequisite: some background in international relations and/or the history of Africa
Overview of the international politics of sub-Saharan Africa, including inter-African relations as well as Africa's relations with the major powers, and the international dimensions of the Southern African situation. Explores alternative policy options open to African states. Considers a number of case studies which illustrate the policy alternatives.

Department of History

HIAF 202 – Africa From Imperialism To Independence(4)

T R 1700-1815 CAB 345

Instructor: John Mason

This course spans the years from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade in the early nineteenth century to the present.
The focus of the first part of the course is on the slave trade and its consequences. The effects of the trade in human beings lingered long after its abolition. Many African societies were weakened, setting the stage for colonial conquest, while others were strengthened, often at the expense of their neighbors.
The second part of the course looks at the conquest of much of Africa by European nations and at the dynamics of colonial rule. It is especially concerned with the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and with the many ways in which Africans resisted European domination.
The final section of the course is devoted to the post-colonial period, studying first violent and non-violent forms of anti-colonial struggle and then the position of independent African nations in the contemporary world.
The course is structured around lectures and readings. Additional course materials include novels and films. HIAF 202 is an introductory course and requires no prior knowledge of African history. Discussion section required.

HIAF 302 - History Of Southern Africa (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 424

Instructor: John Mason

HIAF 302 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The course begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of the conquest, colonialism, and apartheid. It ends with the recent rebirth of African independence.
During the last three hundred years, all African societies in southern Africa were conquered by Europeans and incorporated into colonial empires and the global economy. Conquest did not come easily. Every society in the region resisted fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it powerfully reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs.
Resistance itself assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, multi-ethnic nationalism evolved into nonracialism, uniting black South Africans with many whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.
The course is structured around lectures, discussions of assigned readings (including novels and autobiographies), videos, and films. HIAF 302 requires no prior knowledge of African history.

HILA 402, Sct. A "Race-Mixing In Latin American History" (4)

T 1530-1800 PV8 B003

Instructor: Mr. Brian Owensby

Difference and intimacy. Violence and love. Freedom and constraint. Myth and memory. Through a 16th-century Indian chronicle, paintings, essays, fiction, and scholarly texts, this course will explore the experience and idea of mestizaje racial and cultural mixing in Latin American history and in Western history more broadly from the perspective of Latin America. This will not be an exhaustive historical treatment, but a delving into how people have lived and understood their relations with one another through what we now think of as race and how social orders have taken shape around this experience. We will learn not only about race in Ibero America but also ask challenging questions of the category of race itself through the Ibero-American experience. Students will write two papers drawing on materials explored in class.

HIUS 100, Sct. A "Religion And America’s Public Life Since World War II" (3)

M 1530-1800 WIL 140

Instructor: Byron Hulsey

This reading seminar, which fulfills the second writing requirement, is primarily an examination of religious change, continuity, and conflict in this nation's public life since World War II. In particular, we will explore how different groups of Americans have used their religious faiths to justify contested beliefs and actions as they have confronted the momentous events and issues that have shaped modern American culture. We will devote particular attention to the Cold War, civil rights, Vietnam, the rise of the religious right, and the religious and political dilemmas Americans face in contemporary culture.
Students will read approximately 200 pages per week for eight weeks, write five essays of five pages each for five weeks, and participate actively in class discussions during each of the fourteen sessions. The essays will comprise 75% of the final course grade, with the remaining 25% being devoted to class participation. There will be no mid-term or final examination. A complete reading list will be posted at the end of November on the bulletin board of Randall 128.
Readings will include:
Stephen J. Whitefield, The Culture of the Cold War
Robert S. Ellwood, 1950: Crossroads of American Religious Life
Charles Marsh, God's Long Summer
Adam Fairclough, Martin Luther King, Jr.
James Carroll, An American Requiem

HIUS 323 - The Rise And Fall Of The Old South (3)

M W 1100-1150 MIN 125

Instructor: Edward L. Ayers

This course will explore the emergence and destruction of the most powerful slave society of the modern world: the American South. It will begin with the seventeenth century and extend through the Civil War and Reconstruction. We will examine the lives of slaves and slave owners, small farmers and large planters, men and women, soldiers and civilians. Throughout, the focus will be on the way that black Southerners and white Southerners interacted.
Readings will be diverse, including original documents, materials on the Web, fiction, and secondary accounts. Requirements include a midterm and final as well as a substantial research paper. Energetic participation in a weekly discussion section is a central part of the course. Discussion section required.

HIUS 366 - Introduction To African-American History, 1860-Present (3)

M W 1100-1150 MRY 104

Instructor: Reginald Butler

This lecture course is part of a year-long survey of the history and culture of people of African Americans in the United States from the early colonial period to the present. The course explores some of the major problems, events, structures, and personalities that shaped the lives of people of African descent in the United States, paying particular attention to how black people themselves shaped their experiences. At the same time, we will gain a sense of how those experiences fit into the history of people of African descent in the wider Atlantic world.
Readings will average about 150-200 pages per week. Students are encouraged, but not required, to take both semesters of the Introduction to African American History. Grades will be determined from section participation, two papers, and a final exam. Discussion section required.

HIUS 367 - History Of The Civil Rights Movement (3)

T R 1400-1450 MIN 125

Instructor: Julian Bond

This lecture course will examine the history, philosophies, tactics, events, and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward.
The Southern movement--variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement--was a black-lead mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation in the South by the middle 1960s.
Lectures will outline the movement's three over-lapping phases--lobbying, litigation and protest. In the first phase, from 1910 to the middle '30s, it developed a campaign of propaganda, education and lobbying to shape public opinion and create a climate favorable to civil rights. In phase 2, from the '30s to the '50s, it sought and won important test cases in housing segregation, the denial of the right to vote, and attacking separate and unequal schools. The last phase, lasting a decade from '55 to '65, was a period of protest--boycotts, sit-ins, and mass demonstrations--as well as organizing campaigns that lay the groundwork for minority electoral victories in the late '60s and '70s.
Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive pre-existing networks of church, fraternal, social and labor organizations, drawing strength from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation in the United States. The movement's well-and lesser-known proponents and opponents and their stratagems will be examined. Discussion section required. Grades will be determined from a final examination, student participation in sections, and two five-to-seven page papers.
Texts:
Wilkins, Roy, with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo Press
Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Open Hand Press
Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit At The Welcome Table, American Heritage
Videos:
"Eyes On The Prize -- America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965," # 1 -6; America At the
Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985, #1 & 2; PBS Video, Blackside, Inc. Boston.
"The Road to Brown", William Elwood, Producer, California Newsreel

HIUS 401, Sct. A "The South In The New Deal Era: Race, Class, And Politics In The U.S. South, 1933-1948" (4)

W 1900-2130 CAB 335

Instructor: Lawrence Richards

The New Deal was a turning point in the history of the South. New Deal policies set in motion a process that would result in the demise of the Southern low-wage, agrarian economy and transform it into the dynamic, urban-based economy of the present "Sunbelt." Further, the New Deal sowed the seeds of the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s.
These consequences were not foreseen, and certainly not intended by most Southern politicians. While initially they supported the New Deal, by 1938 most Southern leaders had turned against Franklin Roosevelt and had allied themselves with conservative Republicans to stymie liberal legislation. What motivated this change? Were Southerners primarily concerned that the New Deal was undermining the South's traditional low-wage economy? Were they fearful that increased Federal activism would threaten the racial status quo? And how do we account for the fact that, while we normally think of Southern politicians in this period as staunch conservatives, many prominent liberals also managed to attain high office in the South even in the late 30s? These are some of the questions this course will attempt to answer.
Students taking this course will write a 25 page research paper exploring some facet of Southern politics, race relations, or labor policy during the New Deal era. Topics may range from a study of African-American political activity in the South, to the effect of New Deal policies on Southern workers, to some aspect of Southern politics and/or politicians. These, of course, are only some of the many issue in Southern history from 1933 to 1948 that students may wish to pursue.
Seventy-five percent of the student's final grade will be based on papers and 25 percent will be based on class participation. This course meets the second writing requirement. (Note: some of these readings will be on reserve at Clemons, others will be included in a course packet.)
Readings will include the following:
Sullivan, Patricia, Days of Hope: Race and Democracy in the New Deal Era (University of North Carolina Press, 1996)
Simon, Bryant, A Fabric of Defeat: The Politics of South Carolina Millhands, 1910-1948 (University of North Carolina Press, 1998)
Schulman, Bruce, From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development, and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (Oxford University Press, 1991
Bartley, Numan, The New South, 1945-1980 (Louisiana State University Press, 1995
Heinemann, Ronald, Depression and New Deal in Virginia: The Enduring Dominion (University Press of Virginia, 1983
Key, V. O., Southern Politics in State and Nation (Alfred Knopf, 1950
Mason, Lucy Randolph, To Win These Rights: A Personal Story of the CIO in the South (Harper, 1952)
Logan, Rayford, ed., What the Negro Wants (University of North Carolina Press, 1944)

Department of Music

MUSI 212 - History Of Jazz Music (3)

M W 123--1345 OCH 101

Instructor: Peter Spaar

This course is a survey of the history of jazz from its beginnings around 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century. Important instrumental performers, vocalists, composers, and arrangers are listened to and discussed.

MUSI 309 – Performance In Africa (4)

T 1715-1930 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

[This course is combined with MUSI 369, African Drumming And Dance Ensemble. Students registered for 309 4 academic credits, those only in 369 receive 2 "performance" credits only]

This course explores performance in Africa through reading, discussion, audio and video examples, and hands-on practice. The course will explore both "traditional" and "popular" styles, leading us to question those categories. With a few exceptions, we will focus mostly on areas of West and Central Africa, with occasional glances at the Caribbean (Cuba) and Latin America. We will explore musical/dance styles and their sociomusical circumstances and processes, as well as performed resistances and responses to the colonial and post/neo-colonial encounter. In addition, we will address the issues and politics involved in translating performance practices from one cultural context to another.
Attendance at all class meetings is required, as is careful reading, film viewing, and preparation for discussion. Students will keep a weekly response journal (handed into the instructor via e-mail or hard copy notebook) with brief entries for each week responding to the reading, discussions, performance labs, and listening. Every week (by Sunday, 5 p.m.) each student will choose at least one recording from the music library (via the web catalogue) to listen to and respond to in their journal. There will be a mid-term paper (6-8 pages, typed) and a final exam (open book, essay and short answer).

MUSI 369 – African Drumming And Dance (2)

T 1715-1930 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

This is a practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa BaAka pygmies and Bagandou farmers), with the intention of performing informally throughout the semester. We will give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and a polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, high attention, interaction, and faithful,/prompt attendance are required of each class member. Each member is also respectfully expected to

help prepare the classroom (move chairs, sweep, set up drums/sticks)and to restore the space to classroom style at the end of each meeting. Participation in public performance is also expected. Students are strongly encouraged to bring a cassette tape recorder to class and to dress comfortably. Class repertoire audiotape available in the music library. Several readings are recommended/On reserve in the music library:
Peruse:
1) Locke, David 1996 "Africa" chapter [Chapter 3] in Worlds of Music Jeff Todd Titon, editor. Schirmer books. Comes with a recording of Agbeko with hardcover book. Read intro and first part of the chapter that focuses on Atsiagbeko and the feel of African polyrhythm. Then peruse the last section of the chapter which focuses on BaAka music.
2) Chernoff, John Miller. 1978. African Rhythm and African Sensibility, Univ. of Chicago Press. This book is less than 200 pages long. I recommend reading the entire book, but at least Chapters 1 and 2 ( pp. 27-88).
3) Kisliuk, Michelle. (Available at the bookstore and on reserve in music library): "Seize the Dance!" BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance Oxford University Press.
Further reading:
Manuscript article: "What's the 'it' That we Learn to Perform? Teaching BaAka Music and Dance" Michelle Kisliuk with Kelly Gross. In Ted Solis, ed., Performing Ethnomusicology: World Music Ensembles (tentative title). Manuscript accepted by editor. Contract pending for volume. (Will put copy on electronic reserve)

MUSI 420 – Gender, Race, And Film Musical (3)

M 1530-1800 CLM 322A

Instructor: Suzanne Cusick

(Description not available – see instructor)

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 276 – African Religion In America (3)

M 1900-2130 CAB 118

Instructor: Michael Mason

The Atlantic Slave Trade carried millions of Yoruba-speaking peoples to the Caribbean and Brazil. They brought a diverse pantheon of deities, complex religious ideas, and a wide range of ritual practices. In the Americas, enslaved people and their descendants transformed the pantheon, ideas, and practices in response to their new social circumstances. Recent years have seen the publication of many excellent studies of Yoruba religion in Africa and its relatives in the Americas. These studies have focused on two main questions: How have people used these religious systems to find and express meaning in their lives? What leads people to changed these religions over time? This course explores these questions through several examples from Yoruba religion before turning to Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, and Cuban Santería. Discussion section required.

RELC 323 – Pentacostialism: Origins And Development (3)

T 1100-1215 MCL 2009

Instructor: Wallace Best

This course will analyze the Pentecostal movement of the past 20th century as a transcultural religious phenomenon. Looking to a wider international context, we will explore the development of Pentecostalism in such countries as Mexico, Brazil, Korea, and China. We will also concern ourselves with the way ethnic minorities within the United States have reshaped the practice and the meanings of Pentecostalism, as well as Evangelicalism in general, particularly with regard to race and gender. Because the course is about a religious movement, our analytical approach will be historical, anthropological, and theological. Using various Pentecostal texts and articles, we will work toward a clearer understanding of the basic tenets of Pentecostalism, namely "divine healing," "baptism in the Holy Spirit," and "speaking in tongues." We will also investigate how the most recent internationalist shift within the Pentecostal movement has renewed millennialist thought and efforts for Christian ecumenism.

RELG 556 – Issues In African-American Religion (3)

W 1530-1800 CAB 432

Instructor: Wallace Best

The literature on African American religion and religious history has grown substantially in the past half century. In this course we will examine many of the crucial texts as a way to understand how scholars have gone about the study African American religion and history, and as a way to understand the issues that have shaped the religious development of American people of color. In this way the emphasis in the course will be both methodological and historiographical. Topics will include: black religion as history and phenomenon, dialectical models of black faith, black Christian nationalism, religious pluralism, and politico-religious organization. Requirements will include weekly short papers and a final research essay.

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

LNGS 222 – Black English (3)

M W 1100-1150 CAB 138

Instructor: Mark Elson

Introduction to the history and structure of what has been termed Black English Vernacular or Black Street English. Emphasizes the sociolinguistic factors which led to the emergence of this variety of English, as well as its present role in the black community and its relevance in education, racial stereotypes, etc. Discussion section required.

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 – Race And Ethnicity (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 325

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

The terms "race" and "ethnicity," and issues associated with them are, to say the least, problematic. The meanings of these – and related – terms are unclear and policies that address "racial" issues are usually very contentious. Why is this the case? Why is race, seemingly, a source of unending conflict? This course will address these questions by examining the general issue of race from a historical and comparative perspective.

SOC 410 - African American Communities (3)

T R 1530-1645 CAB 338

Instructor: Rick Turner

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear, comprehensive understanding of the history, struggles and diversity of the African-American community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the African-American community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of the cultural history of African-Americans. The course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for African-American people's sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussion, lectures, videos, reading, writing, and class presentation, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamics of the African-American community.

School of Architecture

ARCH 507 – Gender And Race Theories (3)

F 0900-1145 CAM 302

Instructor: Lisa Henry

Given the references to the human body throughout the history of architectural discourse, it is surprising that particular bodies: the female body or the black body for example have been mostly suppressed and marginalized. Contemporary critical theory, however, provides a system through which to study the very margins of architectural production. It is the aim of this semester to mobilize some of these discourses in order to study public and domestic architecture, revealing the implications of gender and race within them. We will examine the structure of history, autobiography, and memory, as a means of exploring issues of gender, race, authorship, representation, and the production and reception of architecture. The objective is not only to provide a working methodology with which to analyze and critique architecture, but also to sustain a possible ground for its production. Requirements: The course will be taught in a seminar format. Participants will be responsible for weekly readings, class discussion, a short autobiographical text to be developed over the course of the semester, a collaborative presentation of readings and projects, a short investigative work to include visual representations and text (3-6 pages) will be developed by each student in conjunction with their presentation, and a research/design project developed from the autobiographical text.

ARCH 556 – Interpreting Community: A Case Study Of Cape Coast, Ghana

R 1800-2100 Minor Hall 108

Instructor: Maurice Cox

Through the townscape of Cape Coast, Ghana, we will investigate methods of reading cultural landscapes and challenge assumptions about interpretations of place. The course will unfold against the larger context of the West Coast of Africa and the involvement of Cape Coast and other coastal towns in the history of trade-particularly the enslavement of Africans.
This course targets advanced undergraduate and graduate students whose research interests focus on discerning cultural patterns and deciphering expressions of change in the built, natural, and social environments. Using non-traditional sources such as oral testimony, ritual, and performance, students will develop the skills needed for collecting, distilling, and conveying the complexities of community through intensive exposure to Cape Coast. In interdisciplinary teams, students will develop, reformat, and produce interpretations of this place using a variety of digital media.
Requirements include the completion of weekly reading assignments/interpretive exercises, participation in class discussion, weekly journal entries, and a final multimedia product.
The course will be taught in a seminar/workshop format and is conceived of as the predecessor to an interdisciplinary student research project for the summer of 2001 in Cape Coast, Ghana. This summer project is contingent upon funding from the United States Department of Education, Fulbright-Hays Group Study Abroad Program and will have an application process independent of the spring seminar. Collaborators: School of Architecture, Afro-American and African Studies, and the Digital Media Lab, Robertson Media Center.

University Seminars

USEM 171/0014 – The 60's In Black & White (2)

T 1530-1730 PV8 103

Instructor: Julian Bond

The 1960’s saw a generation of young people begin to build movements which would stop a war abroad and start a war at home. What made these movements for peace and equal rights possible? What events triggered them? Who were participants? What is their legacy in the present? This seminar – through biographies activists in the movements – attempts to answer these and other questions as we examine personalities, events, and culture of the 1960s. Students will be required to write a comprehensive a paper on a 60’s subject – a participant, an organization, a movement.

 

Fall 2000

 

African-American and African Studies

AAS 101 - Introduction To Afro-American And African Studies (4)

T R 1100-1215 MRY 209

Instructor: Dylan Penningroth

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

AAS 205- Travel Accounts And Ethnographies Of Africa (3)

T R 0930-1045 PAV VIII, 103

Instructor: Hanan Sabea

The course explores how 18-19th century travel accounts about Africa have influenced ethnographic writings about the continent. Starting with contemporary US representations about Africa and anthropological reflections on the disciplines engagements with the Continent, we will trace the genealogy of basic concepts by reading travelers, missionaries, and explorers descriptions about their encounters in Central, Southern and Northern Africa. We will analyze the connections between the profession/gender of writers, their nationality, and their descriptions of the places they visited. We will move then to ethnographic accounts of the same regions to examine how the analysis of different areas within the Continent are premised on certain ideas about people and places, how these ideas are reproduced, and how they reflect heritages of the encounter between the West and Africa. Theoretical and methodological questions of knowledge production, power and the development of disciplines will be examined.

AAS 322 – History Of African-American Women 1600-Present (3)

TR 1230-1345 MRY 104

Instructor: Eileen Boris

This course surveys the experience of women of African descent in the United States, looking backward from the end of the twentieth century. Through the voices of African American women, we will trace the struggle to define their own lives and improve the social, economic, political, and cultural position of black communities. Uncovering this history requires both looking at the past from the standpoint of different groups of black women, but also contrasting self-perception with material and ideological circumstances not always of their own choosing. We will discuss West African gender systems; womens enslavement; the gendered meaning of the civil war, emancipation and segregation; forms of resistance and protest; women as community builders and institution creators; and black feminist thought. Throughout we will investigate womens work at home and in the labor market; kinship and family relations; sexuality, violence and beauty culture; the female life cycle; the impact of social policy on black women; and women's relationship to each other, their children, their men, and white society. There will be a course packet of articles; recent historical monographs, like Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996); and primary sources, including Beverly Guy-Shetfall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New Press, 1995).
Course is cross-listed as HIUS 322.

AAS 401 - Independent Study (3)

AAS 405A – History In A Box: Research Methods In African American Studies (3)

M 1300-1530 MIN 109 (Woodson Institute Conference Room)

Instructor: Scot French

  • An original Harper's Weekly magazine from Oct. 8, 1864
  • An undated photograph of two smiling American soldiers -- one black, one white -- taken at the S. Kimura studio
  • Gospel Hour Publications on "Petting" and "Sins Most Often Committed by Women"
  • A 1961 senior class commencement announcement from Jackson P. Burley High School
  • Family letters spanning several decades
  • A horsehair brush, a pearl brooch, and an empty Prince Albert tobacco can

These are just some of the items salvaged from a local house and donated to the Carter G. Woodson Institute for identification, preservation, and interpretation. What can these artifacts tell us about the African American family that left them behind? Is it possible to construct, from these fragments, a social and cultural history that extends well beyond Charlottesville? Students will investigate this unprocessed collection, develop a digital archive of images and text, and produce a series of interpretive reports on the contents. No special computer skills are required. Lectures and readings will introduce students to the methodologies employed by archivists and researchers specializing in African American Studies and related fields.

AAS 405B – Photography In Africa (3)

W 1300-1630 MIN 109 (Woodson Institute Conference Room)

Instructor: Liam Buckley

This course explores the visual cultures structured around the presence of cameras and photographs in Africa. The method of the course is interdisciplinary, drawing on work conducted in visual anthropology, in colonial discourse and postcolonial theory, and material culture studies. In its colonial and postcolonial contexts, the activity of photography has provided persons with a time to establish identities for themselves and social relations with others, while exercising power and testing authority. Students will examine the range of African practices that have developed historically during the taking of, posing for, display, collection and exchange of photographs. The final section of the course focuses on the “social lives” of African photographs—things moving through history, beyond the immediate lives and contexts of those who produced and posed in them, capable of serving varying ideological ends.

AAS 405C – African Americans And Civil Rights After 1965: What Next? (3)

T 1400-1630 MIN 109 (Woodson Institute Conference Room)

Instructor: Bernie D. Jones

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund led the legal battle to end de jure discrimination during the civil rights movement. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the battle seemed to be over. Official barriers to full equality within society had been dismantled. The question remained about what the next step should be. How might all African Americans fulfill the dream? The battles moved from the courtroom to the classroom as lawyer academics wondered: what was the movement supposed to have done? Did it do a good job? Was there still work to be done? Based upon their perceptions, they aligned themselves within various camps: critical legal studies, critical race theory, feminist theory, critical race feminism, and law and economics.
This class will be a seminar, in which students will explore how legal scholars within various schools of thought approach the question of civil rights and the effectiveness of the law at addressing the struggle for equality. This class will satisfy the second writing requirement.

AAS 451 - Distinguished Majors Program/ Directed Research (3)

TBA

AAS 452 - Distinguished Majors Program/Thesis (3)

TBA

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 227 - Race, Gender, And Medical Science (3)

MW 1530-1645 CAB 332

Instructor: Gertrude Fraser

This course is designed to explore the social and cultural dimensions of biomedical practice and experience in the United States, with some cross-cultural material for comparative purposes. It 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 of and course of illness, and how the have shaped the structures and institutions of biomedicine over time.

ANTH 330 – Tournaments And Athletes (4)

T R 1100-1215 MIN 125

Instructor: George Mentore

This course will offer you a cross-cultural study of competitive games. Criticizing current theories about the “innocence” of sports while comparing and contrasting various athletic events from societies around the world, it will provide an argument to explain the competitive bodily displays of athletes. It will select materials which allow you to examine bodily movement, meaning, context, and process, in addition to the relations between athletes, officials, spectators, and social systems. Its general thesis will be that sport brings out the universal morals of community, challenges and tests them in controlled and unthreatening genres, yet never defeats them or makes them appear unjust.
Discussion Section Required.

ANTH 388 - African Archaeology (3)

M W F 1000-1050 CAB 215

Instructor: Adria LaViolette

In this lecture and discussion class we begin with a brief overview of human evolution, from the earliest anstralopithecines to the emergence of modern humans in the Middle to Late Stone Age. We then slow the pace and deal in greater depth the Late Stone Age and Iron Age societies, up through the archaeology of European colonialism. Although we cannot touch on all the topics of interest over this vast time period and continent, the goal of the course are to give you solid footing in the broad themes, most important details, and controversies in African Archeology. Areas of focus include great archaeological sites; hunter/gatherer societies; plant and animal domestication; technological and social innovations of the Iron Age; Nile Valley peoples; medium-range and large-scale societies; the archaeology of Islam; the Trans-Saharan, Atlantic and Indian Ocean trades; and the politics of archaeology in the developing nations on the African continent.

ANTH 589C - Labor, Capital And States In Contemporary Africa (3)

1000-1230 F RSH 111

Instructor: Hanan Sabea

Informed by labor and production theories this course examines one angle of the interface between Africa and the world by focusing on the relationship between international capital, systems of governance, and laboring people. Ethnographic case studies of various social organizational contexts through which this three-tiered relation can be explored will include mining corporations, plantations, conservation and parks, production of cash crops, arms and sex trade, military conscription, and working at ports/docks. Topics covered include: the multiple meanings of labor and work experienced under diverse regimes of power, the social organization of work and its implications for self identification and group formation, the dynamics of organizing space and controlling people through work, the politics of labor under colonial and post-colonial regimes, and the repercussions of the so-called globalization on labor and social relations in the Continent.

Department of English Language and Literature

ENLT 247/0001 - Black Writers In America (3)

T R 1230-1345 SECTION 1, BRN 330

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

“The Short Story”
If literature is the bread of life, then the short story is dim sum: morsels of literary excellence. As a literary form, the short story engages a range of literary genres, contexts, styles and issues in a small discursive space. This class takes an exploratory approach to twentieth-century African American literature by considering a variety of writers and their techniques. Reading the short stories of Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, Randall Kenan, James A. McPherson, Octavia E. Butler and others, students will hone their critical thinking skills as they develop interpretive strategies to better understand this literature. Class requirements include active class participation (discussion and presentation), twenty pages of writing (one 4-5 page essay, two 6-7 page essays) and a final exam.
Restricted to 1st-2nd years. Course meets Second Writing Requirement and Non-Western Perspectives Requirement.

ENLT 247/0002 - Black Writers In America (3)

T R 1400-1515 SECTION 2, BRN 328

Instructor: Kendra Hamilton

“The Big House”
The South lost the Civil War…but it won the peace. That is to say, the peacetime war of words that raged—in magazines, history books, popular songs, movies, and more—over how the war would be perceived…and remembered. Indeed, in one of the central ironies of the Civil War, the very fact that the “Big House” way of life was so thoroughly demolished paved the way for a something much better: a mythical “Big House” where all slaves were contented, all Southerners were generous and noble, and all Yankees went home with a Southern bride. The myth soothed the sensibilities of a shattered nation, welded erstwhile opponents into a cohesive national unit, and even identified a convenient scapegoat to take the blame for the “late unpleasantness”: none other than the freedmen, who were both pitied as pathetically “unready” for freedom and attacked as pathologically dangerous to the white race…Of course, not everyone was fooled—particularly not African American artists, many of whom responded by shaking the dust of the South, literally and figuratively, off their feet; migrating North; and creating a vibrant, jazz-inflected literature of the city. But even where these artists most fervently celebrated the modern and the new, they never ceased to gesture toward their Edenic paradise lost, their horrifically haunted homeplace: the South. Our task in this course will be to explore the ways in which African American novels, poetry, and films have tried to tear down the master’s house—to revise, recast, and rewrite the Southern plantation romance in a heroic effort to destabilize a pernicious—and still vital—literary master narrative.
Course requirements: Weekly email “questions” for discussion; four five-page papers; midterm; final exam. Readings/films: Birth of a Nation (film), D.W. Griffith, The Marrow of Tradition, Charles Chestnutt, Cane, Jean Toomer, The Land Where the Blues Began (film), Alan Lomax, Selections from Southern Road, in The Collected Poems of Sterling BrownTheir Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston, Selections fromUncle Tom’s Children, Richard Wright, Meridian, Alice Walker, Gathering of Old Men, Ernest Gaines, Selections from Magic City, Yusef Komunyakanaa, Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash, Beloved, Toni Morrison, Eve’s Bayou (film), Kasi Lemmons.

ENAM 313 - African-American Literature I (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 323

Instructor: Tejumola Olaniyan

A cross-genre survey of African-American literature beginning from the slave narratives to the close of the Harlem Renaissance. We will pay close attention to significant formal innovations and thematic preoccupations that define this literature and the relationships, if any, between such concerns and the (changing) conditions of possibility of the literature itself.

ENAM 481C- African-American Women Writers (3)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 318

Instructor: Angela Davis

We will read several novels and short stories by African-American women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, two written responses to readings (each 2 to 3 double-spaced typed pages long) and a formal essay (12 to 15 pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls; Toni Morrison, Sula and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place.
Prerequisite: The course is first offered to fourth-year majors in English, Women's Studies, and Afro-American and African Studies.

ENTC 481 B -Trauma, Theory And African-American Literature (3)

TR 0930-1045 BRN 312

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Trauma theory is an emerging branch of literary scholarship pioneered by such critics as Cathy Caruth and Shoshanna Felman. Despite the value of these interpretive strategies, trauma as a literary methodology is not often used to comment on African American culture. In this class we will consider trauma theory by reading the standard-bearers as well as new voices on the scene. Focusing on traumas endemic to African American life, slavery and lynching, we will explore how the fields of history, psychology, and literary analysis converge to form literary trauma studies. We will also consider how African American subjectivity influences the definition and structure of trauma. Students will be required to participate actively, lead discussion and write two essays.

Department of French Language and Literature

FREN 443 – Africa In Cinema (3)

T R 1100-1215 TBA

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

(Course taught in French)
This course is an exploration of African cultures through cinema. It deals with the representations of African cultures by film makers from different cultures and studies the ways in which their perspectives on Africa are often informed by their own social and ideological positions as well as the demands of exoticism. It also examines the constructions of the African as "other" and the kinds of responses they have so far elicited from Africa's cineasts. These filmic "inventions" are analyzed through a selection of French, British, American, and African films by S. Pollack, J-J Annaud, M. Radford, Djibril Diop Mambety, Ngangura Mweze, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cissé, Gaston Kaboré, Amadou Seck, Dani Kouyaté, Brian Tilley, and Jean-Marie Teno on a variety of subjects relative to the image of Africa in cinema. The final grade will be based on 2 short papers (4 pages/each), a term paper (7 pages), and contributions to classroom discussions. Reading: Gardies, André - Cinéma d'Afrique Noire Francophone: L'espace-miroir (Reserve) Diawara, Manthia - African Cinema(Reserve) Vieyra, Paulin Soumano - Le Cinéma Africain (Reserve) and Ousmane Sembène, Cinéaste... (Reserve); Ukadike, F. N. - Black African Cinema (Reserve); Research in African Literatures-Special issue: African Cinema, Vol. 26, No.3, Fall 1995.

FRTR 329 - Comparative Carribean Culture (3)

MWF 1100-1150 CAB 337

Instructor: Albert Arnold

The course will examine in a comparative context Caribbean cultural phenomena, primarily literary, of the past half century. We will read poetry and fiction from the English-, French-, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean and will discuss some music from the region as well. We will examine models of cultural production (Negritude, Caribbeanness) that attempt to account for the specificity of Caribbean societies. The contrasting situation of U.S. society will serve as the backdrop for our discussions, both during the Monday and Wednesday lectures and the Friday discussion sessions.
There will be a midterm and a final examination. Students will prepare a short research paper for the end of the semester as well.
Prerequisites: Some knowledge of modern literature and/or Caribbean society is necessary for success in this course. Students who have performed well in the past have already taken AAS 101, 102, an introduction to Cultural Anthropology, or a serious introduction to literature (CPLT 201, 202 or the equivalent couse in English). First-year students will not be admitted to the course.

Department of Government and Foreign Affairs

GFAP 550 - Race And American Politics (3)

T 1530-1800 CAB 122

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

GFCP 341 - Government And Politics Of The Middle East And North Africa (3)

T R 1400-1515 CAB 215

Instructor: William Quandt

This course will introduce students to the contemporary political systems of the region stretching from Morocco to Iran. A number of themes will be stressed: the struggle for independence; the problems of forming nation-states; the persistence of strong social forces; the role of leadership; the weakness of institutions; political and economic reasons for underdevelopment; oil and renter states; the importance of religion; the political role of women; and prospects for democratization.

GFCP 424 - Democratic Transitions And Consolidation In Latin America (3)

M 1530-1800 CAB 134

Instructor: David Jordan

This seminar investigates the challenges to democratic transitions and consolidations in contemporary Latin America. Such topics as barriers to democratic transition in Mexico, the problems of corruption and the impact on the civic culture from the transition from a statists to a market economy are investigated.

GFCP 531 – Government & Politics In Latin America (3)

M W F 1100-1150 CLK 143

Instructor: David Jordan

GFPT 424A– Africa Political Thought (3)

T R 930-1045 CAB 337

Instructor: Guy Martin

Department of History

HIAF 201, SCT. 100 - Early African History Through The Era Of The Slave Trade (4)

T R 0930-1045 CAB 311

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

Early African History draws Africans’ distinctive achievements in culture, politics, and economic strategies out from the mists of the once-dark continent's unwritten past. Taking up this story in the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 201 and follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the ironic interplay of achievement and tragedy in a continent increasingly committed to exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of African history, HIAF 202, taught in the spring, narrates subsequent events down through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.)
HIAF 201 is a lower-division introductory survey. The instructor presents major themes of early African history in lectures twice each week. Students meet additionally in discussion sections for review of readings, quizzes, and preparation for written assignments. Requirements include weekly map quizzes, a mid-term examination (better of two tries), three short papers (4-5 pages) rehearsing historical questions for the mid-terms and considering the written sources on Africa's past, and a final examination (format to be negotiated with the class). The course belongs to the Afro-American and African Studies curriculum, meets the "non-western" requirement for the major in History, and qualifies for the College "non-western perspectives" area requirement. Students may rewrite one of the papers to meet College standards for the Second Writing Requirement.
Readings revolve around weekly assignments in a text (Shillington, History of Africa), for a total of about 225 pages. Other assigned chapters and professional articles introduce the distinctive methodologies of doing history without written sources (including the famous Mande oral epic Sundiata), highlight interpretive ("historiographical") issues, and consider concepts relevant to understanding early Africa. The total number of assigned pages runs at approximately 1200.
No strict formula determines final marks. Students are graded according to their "highest consistent performance" in all aspects of the course, including attendance at lectures and participation in discussions, with allowance made for the unfamiliarity of the subject matter early in the term; a number of options allow students to devise a combination of graded work that will accommodate other academic commitments and reflect specialized abilities most accurately.
HIAF 201 presumes no prior knowledge of Africa or experience with the study of history. But since the subject is new to nearly everyone in the course, consistent application and preparation is expected, particularly early in the term. Students in all four years of their undergraduate careers and in all colleges of the University ordinarily complete the course with success. Most find it a challenging opportunity to discover and examine assumptions about modern Americans -- themselves included – they did not know they held. Required work includes weekly quizzes on geography, a mid-term examination (two tries), three short papers (4-5 pages) rehearsing historical questions for the mid-terms and considering written sources on Africa’s past, and a final examination (format to be negotiated with the class). The course belongs to the Afro-American and African Studies curriculum, meets the "non-western" requirement for the major in History, and qualifies for the College “non-western perspectives” area requirement. Students may elect to rewrite one of the papers to meet College standards for the Second Writing Requirement.
Discussion section required.

HIAF 401- History Seminar: The Two Souths (4)

T 1530-1800 CAB 245

Instructor: John Mason

“The Two Souths: History and Culture in South Africa and the United States South”
The Two Souths is a reading and research course in comparative history. We will explore the similarities and differences in South African and American Southern history through biography and autobiography. South Africa and the American South are like distant cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries were born in the conquest of local people by European immigrants. Both owe much of their early economic development to slavery. In both complex systems of racial domination shaped society for generations during and after the Emancipation of the slaves. And in both the interracial struggle against racism gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories. At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. Most dramatically, in South Africa the descendants of European immigrants constitute a minority of the population; in the United States, of course, the reverse is true.
During the first part of the course we will read accounts of the lives of ordinary and extraordinary South Africans and southerners, black and white, women and men. The goal here is to begin to understand the historical context within which individuals made choices about their lives.
The second part of the course will be devoted to research and writing. Students will identify a South African and an American southerner whose lives--or aspects of them--can be sensibly compared and write a paper about the two based on primary and secondary sources.
Instructor permission required. Course meets Second Writing Requirement and Non-Western Perspectives Requirement.

HIAF 404 - Independent Study In African History (3)

TBA

In exceptional circumstances and with the permission of a faculty member any student may undertake a rigorous program of independent study designed to explore a subject not currently being taught or to expand upon regular offerings. Independent Study projects may not be used to replace regularly scheduled classes. Enrollment is open to majors or non-majors.

HIAF 505 - Black Atlantic Critical Thought (3)

TR 1100-1215 WIL 141A

Instructor: John Mason

In this course we will examine the ideas and activism of major figures in African and African-American political thought. These men and women of the African diaspora created a tradition of emancipatory thought within societies shaped by slavery and colonialism, by racial oppression and economic exploitation. Circumstances forced them to address questions of both identity and political action. They understood that the black experience is at the heart of modern western history and that blacks are at the same time marginalized within modern western societies. "Who am I," they asked, "and who are we as a people?" "What should I, and we, do about the circumstances that confront us?" Most members of this tradition also considered the ways in which uneven power relationships within black communities shaped the personal and political landscape, limiting the range of political possibility.
The men and women that we will study in this course approached the problems that they and their communities faced in a variety of ways. They drew on resources as varied as pan-Africanism, classical liberalism, democratic socialism, Marxism, black nationalism, critical theory, and gender theory, yet each participated, at least implicitly, in a common intellectual project. Their vision was broad rather than narrow; they were suspicious of power and privilege, rather than covetous of it. Having arrived at answers to the questions they asked, they acted.
Together we will read and discuss the work of a number of representative figures. Students will prepare a one or two page discussion notes each week and help to lead the week's discussion two or three times during the semester. The final assignment will be a term paper of fifteen to twenty pages, examining the writing and activism of either a representative of this tradition or a critic of it.

HILA 320 – History Of The Caribbean, 1500-2000 (3)

T R 1230-1345 CAB 345

Instructor: Richard Drayton

The Caribbean is a region of the Atlantic world bounded by Central America and the north of South America, and by an arc of islands which runs from Trinidad in the south, to the Bahamas in the north, and Cuba in the west. This course begins with the examination of the physical geography of the region, and with a glance backwards to the Amerindian civilizations whose tools and gods had made its reef and jungle human for over five thousand years before the arrival of Columbus. But it is principally concerned with its history after 1500 AD, and with the processes through which people from part of the European and African continents, and ultimately from Asia, came to make the region their home. Our emphasis will be on the islands of the region, and on how sugar production, plantation slavery, and European colonialism shaped society, culture and politics. We shall examine the pattern of forced and free migration; the varieties of slavery, resistance, and rebellion; the shifting currencies of race and identity; how a dialogue between the European and African cultures shaped language, religion, literature and the arts; the varieties of emancipation, popular politics, nationalism, and of experiences of political independence.
Our reading is almost exclusively drawn from within the Caribbean intellectual tradition, in particular from its Anglophone component. We will therefore be studying the Caribbean from the inside, and paying critical attention to how the Caribbean, in our own age, has discovered itself.
Students are expected to attend all lectures, and to read perhaps 150 pages each week, in rhythm with the lectures, each of which will include a discussion. Your grade will be based 20% on participation, 20% on a midterm, and 60% on a final examination.

HIST 504 - Monticello Internship (3)

Instructor: Phyllis Leffler

Directed research, largely in primary source materials, on topics relating to Jefferson's estate, life, and times. Directed by senior members of the Monticello staff.
Prerequisite: Permission of the instructor.The internships are restricted to graduate students in history and to fourth-year undergraduate history majors. A maximum of two students each semester can be admitted to the course.

HIUS 301- Colonial America (3)

M W 1000-1050 MRY 115

Instructor: Mr. Stephen Innes

The colonial period was the seedtime of the characteristics we most associate with America: representative government, liberal capitalism, chosenness, pluralism, complicated race relations, violence, and direct action. Focusing primarily on the course probes the origins of these components of American "exceptionalism." The overriding goal throughout will be to attempt to explain how colonies with such dramatically different beginnings could have arrived at a common republican synthesis by 1776.
Lectures on Monday and Wednesday will be followed by discussion on Friday, led by the instructor. There will be one midterm examination and one two-page paper in addition to the final examination.
The reading assignments include the following books:
• Edmund Morgan, American Slavery - American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia
• James Horn, Adapting to a New World: English Society in the Seventeenth Century Chesapeake
• Harry S. Stout, The New England Soul: Preaching and Religious Culture in Colonial New England
• Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, & Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789
• Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
• Peter Wood, Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion
• Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography
Discussion section required.

HIUS 307-The Coming Of The Civil War (3)

T R 11-1215 CAB 138

Instructor: Michael F. Holt

By focusing on the interaction between an escalating sectional conflict and the operation of the American political system between approximately 1840 and 1861, this course will attempt to explain why the Civil War broke out in April 1861. There will be three 50-minute lectures each week. Grades will be allotted as follows: Midterm, 30%; Paper, 30%; and Final Exam, 40%.
The reading list may include:
o Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson
o James B. Stewart, Holy Warriors
o William W. Freehling, Road to Disunion: The Secessionists at Bay, 1800-1854
o Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
o David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861
o Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s

HIUS 322 – History Of African American Women, 1600 To The Present(3)

T R 1230-1345 MRY 104

Instructor: Eileen Boris

This course surveys the experience of women of African descent in the United States, looking backward from the end of the twentieth century. Through the voices of African American women, we will trace the struggle to define their own lives and improve the social, economic, political, and cultural position of black communities. Uncovering this history requires both looking at the past from the standpoint of different groups of black women, but also contrasting self-perception with material and ideological circumstances not always of their own choosing. We will discuss West African gender systems; womens enslavement; the gendered meaning of the civil war, emancipation and segregation; forms of resistance and protest; women as community builders and institution creators; and black feminist thought. Throughout we will investigate womens work at home and in the labor market; kinship and family relations; sexuality, violence and beauty culture; the female life cycle; the impact of social policy on black women; and women's relationship to each other, their children, their men, and white society. There will be a course packet of articles; recent historical monographs, like Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1996); and primary sources, including Beverly Guy-Shetfall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New Press, 1995).
Course is cross-listed as AAS 322.

HIUS 324-The South In The Twentieth Century (3)

M W 11-1150 MIN 125

Instructor: Grace Elizabeth Hale

This course examines the broad history of the American South in the twentieth century, with special emphasis on racial violence, the creation of segregation, class and gender relations within the region, the cultural and economic interdependence of black and white southerners, and the Civil Right Movement and its aftermath. Students interested in American Studies, African American Studies, and Gender Studies are also welcome. Bibliography: W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (1946), Grace Lumpkin, To Make My Bread (1932), William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom (1936), Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic (1998), Grace Hale, Making Whiteness (1998).
Grading: midterm 25%; paper (5-7 pp.) 25%; final exam 30%; participation in discussion sections and attendance at film and documentary screenings 20%.
Discussion section required.

HIUS 361- History Of Women In America, 1600 To 1865 (3)

M W 11-1150 CAB 316

TBA

A study of the evolution of women's roles in American society with particular attention to the experiences of women of different races, classes, and ethnic groups.
Discussion section required.

HIUS 365 – Introduction To African American History, 1500-1865 (3)

M W 1300-1350 MRY 104

Instructor: Dylan Penningroth

This course explores the history and cultures of people of African descent in North America from the 1500s to the mid-nineteenth Century, and from the African continent to the Americas. We will engage critically with a variety of topics, including identities, families, and communities, gender, the slave trades and slavery, resistance, and emancipation. We will pay special attention to how black people themselves shaped their experiences, and how those experiences relate to the history of the broader Atlantic world.
Readings being considered:
• Boubacar Barry, Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade (trans. 1998; New York, 1988)
• T. H. Breen and Stephen Innes, Myne Owne Ground: Race and Freedom on Virginia's Eastern Shore, 1640-1676 (New York: Oxford, 1982)
• Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I A Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: Norton, 1985)
• David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995)
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dover, 1995)
• Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1983)
The readings will average 150-200 pages per week. There will be two papers and a final exam. Each week we will have two lectures and one required discussion section.

HIUS 367 - History Of The Civil Rights Movement (3)

T R 1400-1450 GIL 130

Instructor: Julian Bond

This lecture course will examine the history, philosophies, tactics, events, and personalities of the Southern movement for civil rights from 1900 through the late 1960s, with special concentration on the years from the mid-'40s forward.
The Southern movement--variously called the black struggle, the freedom fight, or the civil rights movement-was a black-lead mass movement which effectively ended legal segregation in the South by the middle 1960s. Through the leadership of various national and local organizations, and through anti-segregation campaigns directed by indigenous and extra-communal leadership figures who built on extensive networks of church, fraternal, and social and labor organizations, drawing strength from a protest community rooted in black America and created in response to white supremacy, the movement succeeded in eliminating legal segregation in the United States. The movement's well- and lesser well known proponents and opponents and their stratagems will be examined.
Grades will be determined from two brief papers and a final examination and section participation.
Discussion section required.

HIUS 401, SCT. B - History Seminar (4)

W 1300-1530 RFN 227A

Instructor: Grace Elizabeth Hale

"The South Since 1945: Southern Lives in the Civil Rights Era”
In this research seminar, we will spend the first five weeks of the semester examining the general history of the period (1945-1975) and reading biographies of Martin Luther King, Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, Elvis, Flannery O'Connor, and George Wallace. How do the final mechanization of agriculture, the Civil Rights Movement, the Cold War, Vietnam, and the explosion of a commercialized popular culture effect the lives of black and white southerners? How does the region's culture change? Students will in consultation with the professor develop their own research projects on this topic. At subsequent class meetings, students will critique each other's works in progress and report on their own research.
Instructor’s permission required.

HIUS 401, SCT.C - History Seminar (4)

W 1300-1530 RFN 211

Instructor: George H. Gilliam

"Southern Progressivism: Government, Economy, Gender, and Race, 1890-1920"
Progressivism has been called the "formative birthtime of basic institutions, social relations, and political divisions of United States society as it evolved towards and beyond the mid-twentieth century." Though the period is best-remembered as the time when the public regulation of big business started, the seeds of today's civil rights, environmental protection, and public health and occupational safety movements also were planted during the progressive era. Southern Progressivism has been complicated by its intersection with virulent racism. State constitutional conventions held in the South between 1890 and 1910 to create the framework for progressive regulation of business at the same time took steps effectively to disfranchise African-Americans and poor whites. C. Vann Woodward concluded that "Southern progressivism generally was progressivism for white men only, and after the poll tax took its toll not all the white men were included."
Scholars have not fully explored the aftermaths of those state constitutional conventions in the South, however, and have left to others to explore whether progressive administrative institutions regulated or promoted business, and to explore the role such regulators played in the implementation of Jim Crow laws. The enforcement of Jim Crow laws and the use of black convict labor in the South provided an impetus for Americans to form the NAACP during this period. Rapid industrialization and urbanization pushed women to organize for protective legislation and for reforms in public health and education. This seminar will provide students the opportunity to explore the intersections of progressive reformers, regulators, the business communities, and the forces of racial segregation. Students interested in turn-of-the-century race regulation, the early women's movements, as well as those who are interested in the relationship between the variegated business communities and progressive regulators should be rewarded. The common readings and seminar discussions also will expose students to stark divisions within the business communities as well as to the nascent women's movement and to issues of race and class that seem particularly pertinent to the changing social landscape of the period.
The course will include five weeks of required readings designed to provide a common understanding of the period and a range of different historical experiences and questions relating to Progressivism. The average weekly reading load will be 120 pages and will include selections from traditional works such as Richard Hofstadter's The Age of Reform, from revisionist works such as Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism, as well as more recent scholarship including Edward L. Ayers' The Promise of the New South and Noralee Frankel, Nancy S. Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era. By the sixth week of the course students will submit their paper topics in the form of a two-page proposal that outlines their preliminary research plan. During the next several weeks students will meet individually with the instructor. The entire class will also meet several times during the middle of the course so that students can discuss their research progress,
learn about each other's work, and help their peers with any research obstacles they may encounter. The primary goal of the seminar is to assist students in learning how to conduct their own research and will culminate in a research paper 25-30 pages in length. That paper is intended to fulfill the second writing requirement.
Instructor permission required.

HIUS 401, SCT. D History Seminar (4)

W 1900-2130 RAN 212

Instructor: Jenry Morsman

"American Sport in the 20th Century"
The emergence of sports as a dominant element of American life is a significant development in twentieth-century American history. Every day millions of Americans participate in the ever-expanding world of sport. Some play, some coach, many watch, and even more dream. Some write about it, some package it, some advertise it, some sell it, and many more buy it. There are legions of those, too, who criticize it. Americans have made heroes of their best players, and cities have built reputations on the success of their teams, measured by national, even world titles. The two most recognizable Americans throughout the United States and around the world are retired African American athletes, Muhammad Ali and Michael Jordan. Sports in America have evolved from a primarily local and leisurely pastime in the nineteenth century into a big business, a national obsession, and a significant source of American cultural imperialism. This transformation, and its causes and consequences, will be the subject of this course.
Students who enroll in this class will have opportunity to read about and critically think through the professionalization, the commercialization, and the regulation of sports in America. Together we will attempt to come to terms with the concept of amateurism. We will explore the birth of big-time college athletics, the relationship between college athletic programs and the universities with which they are associated, and the crises which have shaped both. We will discover how and why immigrants to America have responded to American sports. We will pay special attention to the influence sports have had in the contested fields of race, class, and gender; and, in turn, we will try to take measure of the ways in which race, class, and gender have influenced they way Americans perceive and play sports.
In the first several weeks of the course, we will make our way through a common reading list of both primary and secondary sources. Averaging roughly 250 pages a week for the first half of the semester, we will read, and discuss in class, a range of materials, so that students may get a clearer sense of the field and develop an appropriate topic. Selected readings for American Sport in the Twentieth Century include (but are not limited to) Ronald Smith's Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Sports; Allen Guttmann's A Whole New Ballgame: An Interpretation of American Sports; S.W. Pope's Patriotic Games: Sporting Traditions in the American Imagination1876-1926; Michael Oriard's Reading Football: How the Popular Press Created an American Spectacle; Peter Levine's Ellis Island to Ebbets Field: Sport and the American Jewish Experience; and John Hoberman's Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Class members will also read selected articles and examine several varieties of primary documents housed in Alderman Library.
During the fifth week of classes students will be required to submit a two-page Research Prospectus in which they will propose their respective topics. Students will also write a two-page Primary Source Analysis in the seventh week of the semester. The remainder of the semester will be devoted to completing a rough and a final draft of a paper, 25-30 pages in length. The final draft will account for 60% of each student's overall grade; the rough draft and the two shorter papers will combine to account for 20% of that grade; and class participation (especially discussion of the assigned readings and of each other's written work) will account for the remaining 20%. Successful completion of American Sport in the Twentieth Century will satisfy the University's second writing requirement.
Instructor’s permission required.

HIUS 401, SCT. E-History Seminar (4)

R 1300-1530 RFN 311

Instructor: William Thomas

"Civil War Virginia Seminar"
Civil War Virginia is a thesis seminar that will explore the intersections between social and military experiences in Virginia during the Civil War and their legacies in modern Virginia history. The course will concentrate on explaining and exploring the connections between battle field and home front and the ongoing struggles over the memory of the war and its social and military meaning. Virginia's experience as a battle ground state makes it an ideal place to look at these connections. Students will read the current scholarly literature on Civil War Virginia, placing the military and social experience of Virginia in the larger context of the war. Students will research and write papers on topics that make connections between the military and social experience of the Civil War and its legacies in modern life. Readings include among others: Charles Royster's The Destructive War, Gary Gallagher's Lee and His Generals in War and Memory, Carol Reardon's Pickett's Charge in History and Memory, and Drew Gilpin Faust's Mothers of Invention.
Instructor’s permission required.

HIUS 403 B– African-American Culture To 1865 (4)

W 1300-1530 RFN 311

Instructor: Reginald Butler

From a historical perspective, this course will examine how African American cultures and societies developed in the north and south. How did forcibly transported Africans respond to the different agricultural economies, the conditions of enslavement, and European and native American cultures that they encountered during the colonial period? The course will begin in the early period during which large numbers of Africans arrived in British North America. It will then shift its focus to mature African American communities in which the vast majority of persons were American born. We will examine issues of African ethnicity and geography; family and kinship; religious practice, and diverse forms of aesthetic expression. Students will be required to write a major research paper based on both primary and secondary materials.

Department of Music

MUSI 212 - History Of Jazz Music (3)

M W 1400-1515 OCH 101

Instructor: Scott DeVeaux

This course is a survey of the history of jazz from its beginnings around 1900 through the stylistic changes and trends of the twentieth century. Important instrumental performers, vocalists, composers, and arrangers are listened to and discussed.
Prerequisite: No Previous knowledge of music is required. Note: This class meets the Non-western Perspectives requirement.

MUSI 307-Worlds Of Music - Multicultural Music In Us (3)

T R 0930-1045 OCH 107

Instructor: Kyra Gaunt

An introduction to the ethnomusicological study of music and performance examining diverse peoples and cultures making music within the United States. We question what is "American" music and culture and discover extant worlds of music and other musical identities found in our own backyards.
Case studies include steel band in Brooklyn, Asian-American hip-hop, Arab music in Detroit, the Riot Grrrl Movement, and Mexican mariachi. Each student is responsible for an autobiographical oral performance-presentation, weekly responses to assigned readings, a reflective essay, and a final presentation and paper.
Prerequisite: music major or permission of instructor (non-majors with interests and experience in musical performance welcome).

MUSI 309- Performance In Africa (3)

R 1530-1645 OCH107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

This course, in conjunction with MUSI 369 (African Drumming and Dance Ensemble) explores performance in Africa through reading, discussion, audio and video examples, and possible field trips. The course will cover both "traditional" and "popular" styles, leading us to question those categories. Class meetings will focus not only on musical repertoire, sociomusical circumstances, and processes, but also on the issues and politics of translating performance practices from one cultural context to another. These discussions will lead us to broader questions about socio-esthetic processes and the performance of identity. Attendance at all class meetings is required, as is careful reading and preparation for discussion, and a final term paper/presentation.
*Co-requisite: MUSI 369, 2 Credits Enrollment limit: 15 students

MUSI 369 - African Drumming & Dance Ensemble (2)

T R 1715-1930 OCH 107

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

A practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from West Africa (Ghana, Togo) and Central Africa (Baaka pygmies), with the intention of performing at the end of the semester. Though no previous experience with music or dance is required, we will give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and a polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required of each class member, the goal being to develop an ongoing UVA African Drumming and Dance Ensemble.
Prerequisite: Permission of instructor by audition on first day of class.

MUSI 522 - Music And The Black Atlantic (3)

W 1530-1800 OCH S008

Instructor: Kyra Gaunt

A graduate seminar questioning the complex and strategic musical performances of blackness and black (female)ness. Explores the enculturation of black and african ways of performing in the post-1950s diaspora and in post-colonial Africa. How does the performance of stories, music, spoken word, dance and other rituals reflect the aesthetics and philosophies of musical blackness from soul to highlife to voudoun to the other real and imagined global connections between Africans and the African diaspora? Creative writing, experimental ethnography, play, movement, and the interplay between the verbal, sonic, and kinesic will guide our observations and interpretations of written work, sound texts, and live performance. Readings groups (a.k.a. midwives) will be assigned to raise an issue, problem, or question from the readings through performative interaction. Weekly written responses, group presentations, participant-observation and final ethnography (ca. 20 pages) required.
Prerequisite: permission of instructor

Department of Psychology

PSYC 487 – The Minority Family: A Psychological Inquiry (3)

M 0900-1130 GIL 225

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

This course is designed to examine critically the current state of research on minority families. Although the emphasis will be given to the Black family, other minorities, e.g., Native Americans, Chicanos, Asian-Americans will be considered. The psychological literature as well as selected work from anthropology and sociology will be covered. Special attention will be given to comparing "deficit" and "strength" research paradigms throughout the course. Format: Lecture, discussion and 2 presentations. No. and type of exams: 1 exam. Papers or projects (describe): 1 paper.
Prerequisites: PSYC 306 and at least one course from each of the following groups: PSYC 210, PSYC 215 or PSYC 230, and PSYC 240, PSYC 250 or PSYC 260. Also open to students in the Afro-American and African studies or women's studies programs--see instructor for permission. Telephone Enrollment Restrictions: Psych majors If course is full through ISIS: The instructor will keep a waiting list for the course. If you email the instructor (mnw), you will be added to the waiting list. Do not expect a reply from the instructor. Do not email the instructor to check whether you have been added. *Course May Meet Second Writing Requirement.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 275 – Introduction To African Religions (3)

M W 1000-1050 CAB 311

Instructor: TBA

An introductory survey of African religions, this course will concentrate on African traditional religions but Islam and Christianity will also be discussed. Topics will include indigenous mythologies and cosmologies, sacrifice, initiation, witchcraft, artistic traditions and African religions in the New World. Readings include: Ray, African Religions; Stoller and Olkes, In Sorcery's Shadow; Soyinka, Death and the King's Horsemen; Ijimere, The Imprisonment of Obatala; Salih, The Wedding of Zein; and a packet of readings.
Discussion section required.

RELC 389 - Christianity In Africa (3)

T R 1400-1515 MRY 115

Instructor: Matthew Engelke

This course examines the development of Christianity in Africa from its ancient roots in Egypt and the Maghreb to contemporary times. Our historical survey will cover medieval Nubian and Ethiopian Christianity, the Kongo Christian kingdoms of the 15th and 16th centuries, European missions during the colonial period, the growth of independent churches and the emergence of African Christian theology. We will address issues such as the relationship between colonialism and evangelism; religion and rebellion; translation and inculturation of the gospel; and the role of healing, prophesy and spirit-possession in the conversion process. We will attempt both to position the Christian movement within the wider context of African religious history, and to understand Africa's place in the course of Christian history.

RELG 321 – African-American Religions In Historical Perspective (3)

1200-1250 MWF PAV 8, 108

Instructor: Wallace Best

This course will examine the relationships between African American religion, black culture and black political thought.
Centering our study on a few essential questions regarding the nature and function of black church, we will explore its affect upon black cultural forms -- music (from Gospel to Rap), fiction, poetry, and oratory. We will address a number of themes, including: the relationship between black church and black political leadership, race and religion, feminist theologies, and "Afro-centric Christianity." We will trace the development of African American religion in various historical contexts: Slavery, the Great Migration, and the Civil Rights era. Although this course will focus on African American Protestantism, we will examine black religion in other forms as well, particularly black Catholicism and the Nation of Islam

Department of Sociology

SOC 341 Race And Ethnicity (3)

M W F 1400-1515 CAB 316

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Introduction to 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.

University Seminars

USEM 170/6 – The 60s In Black And White (2)

T 1530-1730 CAB 337

Instructor: Julian Bond

The 1960’s saw a generation of young people begin to build movement which would stop a war abroad and start a war at home. What made these movements for peace and equal rights possible? What events triggered them? Who were the participants? What is their legacy in the present? This seminar—through biographies of activists in the movements—attempts to answer these and other questions as we examine personalities, events, and culture of the 1960s. Students will be required to write a comprehensive paper on a 60’s subject—a participant, an organization, a movement.

 

Crawley

Ashon Crawley

Professor (AAS/Religious Studies)

431 Gibson Hall

Ashon Crawley is Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. Professor Crawley works in the areas of black studies, queer theory, sound studies, theology, continental philosophy, and performance studies. His first book project, Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press) investigates alternative modes of sociality present in the aesthetics practices of Black Pentecostalism. His second book, The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press), explores the relationships between blackness, quantum mechanics, mysticism, and love. He is currently at work on two books about the Hammond B3 organ, the Black Church and sexuality.

Cultivation and Culture

African-American Studies

Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas

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Currents and Conversation Forum

Since the beginning of his tenure, President Trump has actively targeted immigrants through executive orders, calls to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and, most recently, incendiary comments referring to nations in the African diaspora as “s***hole countries.” Amid the bombastic rhetoric and unconstitutional executive orders, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have detained immigrants in record numbers. According to The New York Times, “the agency arrested more than 28,000 ‘non-criminal immigration violators’ between Jan. 22 and Sept. 2, a nearly threefold increase over the same period in 2016.” In recent weeks, ICE has also targeted immigrants’ rights activists detaining Ravi Ragbir and Amer Othman Adi, and deporting Jean Montrevil and Jorge Garcia.

 

 

FEATURING:

 

Robert Fatton Jr.                      Professor, Department of Politics, University of Virginia

Marlene L. Daut                      Associate Professor, African American and African Studies/American Studies, University of Virginia

Sabrina Pendergrass                 Assistant Professor, African American and African Studies/Sociology, University of Virginia

Kwame E. Otu                         Assistant Professor,  African American and African Studies, University of Virginia

 

 

The January 22nd panel will situate the recent comments and events in the research and expertise of University of Virginia faculty working in Africa, Haiti, and the U.S.

 

 

This event is free and open to the public.

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Currents in Conversation: "The Prison Strike and the Carceral State"

The "Currents in Conversation" fora explore issues and topics dominating the headlines, airwaves, and social media platforms with implications for the study of race. This Fall, we pick up on a topic that has received precious little air-time on major news organizations: the Nationwide Prison Strike, which took place across 13 states from August 21st - September 9th, 2018. 

Panelists Include:

Dennis Childs is Associate Professor of African American Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary—a work that considers the legal, political, and cultural connections between chattel slavery and modern imprisonment in the U.S. As a scholar-activist, he has worked with various organizations including All of Us or None, the Chicano-Mexicano Prison Project, Students Against Mass Incarceration, and the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. He was a member of the first ever prisoner solidarity delegation from the US to Palestine in 2016, which included former US-held political prisoners, Black Panther Party members, labor organizers, and scholar-activists. He has also served as Community Advisory Board Member for Critical Resistance, a national organization working to abolish the prison industrial complex.  

 

A.D. Carson is a performance artist and educator from Decatur, Illinois. He received his Ph.D. in Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design at Clemson University doing work that focuses on race, literature, history, and rhetorical performances. A 2016 recipient of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award for Excellence in Service at Clemson, Carson worked with students, staff, faculty, and community members to raise awareness of historic, entrenched racism at the university through his See the Stripes campaign, which takes its name from his 2014 poem. His dissertation, “Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions,” is a digital archive that features a 34 track rap album and was recognized by the Graduate Student Government as the 2017 Outstanding Dissertation. 

 

Shannon Ellis is a Powell Legal Fellow at the Legal Aid Justice Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. Ellis's Fellowship project is designed to provide civil advocacy on behalf of vulnerable court-involved or incarcerated individuals. Since Ellis began working for the Legal Aid Justice Center in January 2017 and as a fellow starting last November, she has met with more than 100 women at the Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women in Troy, Virginia, to help ensure they are healthy and safe, and that their rights are being met. Before joining LAJC, Shannon practiced family law in Charlottesville and provided pro bono representation for LAJC’s Special Immigrant Juvenile project.  Shannon earned her bachelor’s degree and law degree from the University of Virginia. 

 

Jordy Yager is a freelance journalist focused on issues of poverty and inequity in America. From the base of his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia, Jordy's work has appeared in The New Yorker, NPR, Columbia Journalism ReviewThe Los Angeles Times, and many others. He also serves as a research fellow at the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, where he is mapping the city's current and historical racial disparities.

Currents in Conversation: Judas and the Black Messiah

A Currents in Conversation event discussing the widely popular film "Judas and the Black Messiah."  

Panelists include: Lynn French, former Black Panther Party member

Mary Phillips, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies, Lehman College, CUNY

A.D. Carson, Assistant Professor of Hip-Hop and the Global South,

UVA Moderated by Kwame E. Otu, Assistant Professor of African-American and African Studies, UVA

Currents in Conversation: Race, Racism, and Immigration

Currents in Conversation: Race, Racism, and Immigration

January 22nd, 2018

Minor Hall 125

Since the beginning of his tenure, President Trump has actively targeted immigrants through executive orders, calls to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and, most recently, incendiary comments referring to nations in the African diaspora as “s***hole countries.” Amid the bombastic rhetoric and unconstitutional executive orders, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have detained immigrants in record numbers. According to The New York Times, “the agency arrested more than 28,000 ‘non-criminal immigration violators’ between Jan. 22 and Sept. 2, a nearly threefold increase over the same period in 2016.” In recent weeks, ICE has also targeted immigrants’ rights activists detaining Ravi Ragbir and Amer Othman Adi, and deporting Jean Montrevil and Jorge Garcia. In light of these events, the Woodson Institute reprises its occasional “Currents in Conversation” series on January 22nd 2018 in Minor Hall 125 at 7:00 pm with a forum entitled “Race, Racism, and Immigration.” The Currents in Conversation fora are designed to explore issues and topics dominating the headlines, airwaves, and social media platforms with implications for the study of race. The January 22nd panel will situate the recent comments and events in the research and expertise of University of Virginia faculty working in Africa, Haiti, and the U.S.

Panelists include:

Robert Fatton Jr. is the Julia A. Cooper Professor of Government and Foreign Affairs in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia. Born and raised in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, he is the author of several books and a large number of scholarly articles, the most of recent which is “Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery.”

Marlene L. Daut is Associate Professor of African American and American Studies at the University of Virginia. She specializes in early Caribbean, 19th-century African American, and early modern French colonial literary and historical studies. Daut is the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti, and she has developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900.

Sabrina Pendergrass is an assistant professor of sociology and African American and African Studies. Her research and teaching interests include race, inequality, internal migration, cultural sociology, and the U.S. South.

Kwame E. Otu is an assistant professor of African American Studies at the University of Virginia. His research transects issues of sexual citizenship, gender, human rights NGOs, and neoliberal racial formations in postcolonial Africa.

 

Currents in Conversation: The Prison Strike and the Carceral State

"The Currents in Conversation" fora are designed to explore issues and topics dominating the headlines, airwaves, and social media platforms with implications for the study of race. This Fall, we pick up on a current that has received precious little air-time on major news organizations: the Nationwide Prison Strike, which took place across 13 states from August 21 - September 9, 2018.

Dana Cypress

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
"In the Time of Disaster: Representations of Hurricane Katrina in African American Literature and Culture"

My project, "In the Time of Disaster: Representations of Hurricane Katrina in African American Literature and Culture", explores African American post-Katrina cultural production that engages the political, cultural, and social effects of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi. I read the spatio-temporal parameters of Black post-Katrina films, music, and literature to consider how these texts challenge and revise our cultural memory of the storm. I argue that together these texts, which include works by Jesmyn Ward, Patricia Smith, Mat Johnson, Kiese Laymon, among others, contextualize Hurricane Katrina as a process that unfolds on a continuum of ongoing Black freedom struggles rather than a discrete event. The temporal disruptions found in my archive expand the depth of historical knowledge about the affected region to make visible the social and political preconditions of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation and aftermath. The spatial orientations of Black post-Katrina cultural texts bring the Mississippi Gulf Coast into view alongside New Orleans. I read this geographic pivot to Mississippi as an important intervention of Black post-Katrina cultural production that provides an expansive view of multiple souths in the region and the otherwise obscured histories of coastal Black communities adversely affected by the storm. Together, these spatio-temporal revisions offered by Black writers and artists reveal the figure of the Black mother as central to African American cultural and literary interpretations of the storm.

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of English at Colgate University 

English
University of Pennsylvania
Marlene Daut headshot

Marlene Daut

Professor (AAS/French)

227A Minor Hall

Marlene L. Daut specializes in anglophone and francophone Caribbean, US African American, and French colonial literary and historical studies. Her books include Baron de Vastey and the Origins of Black Atlantic Humanism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool University Press, 2015). She is also co-editor of the volume, Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (UVA Press 2021). Her next book is an intellectual history of Haiti titled, Awakening the Ashes, which is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press. Daut is the co-creator and co-editor of H-Net Commons’ digital platform, H-Haiti and curates a website on early Haitian print culture at http://lagazetteroyale.com. She has also developed an online bibliography of fictions of the Haitian Revolution from 1787 to 1900 at the website http://haitianrevolutionaryfictions.comClick here to learn more about her work.

Davis Theresa

Theresa Davis

Associate Professor

Drama Building Room 213

Days of Hope

History

Deborah E. McDowell authored the foreward to The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison

Deborah E. McDowell authored the foreward to The Bloomsbury Handbook to Toni Morrison

Deborah E. McDowell Named Carter G. Woodson Institute Director at the University of Virginia

April 23, 2008 — Deborah E. McDowell, the Alice Griffin Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Virginia, has been named director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at U.Va. She had been interim director for the past year, overseeing an active year of programming.

Deborah E. McDowell receives Award for Leadership Excellence

Deborah E. McDowell, Director of African-American and African Studies and Alice Griffin Professor of English, receives the Distinguished Women's Scholar Award from Purdue University's Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence. The award “recognizes the doctoral alumnae of Purdue who have made significant scholarly contributions. In recognizing these women, an example is made, and a standard set for the aspiring women scholars of Purdue today.”

Deborah McDowell featured in the inaugural edition of Amplify

McDowell featured in the inaugural edition of Amplify, a publication from the Division for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Virginia

Deborah McDowell Lauds Powerful Prose of her Friend, Toni Morrison

UVA TODAY: Deborah McDowell Lauds Powerful Prose of her Friend, Toni Morrison

https://news.virginia.edu/content/deborah-mcdowell-lauds-powerful-prose-her-friend-toni-morrison

Deborah McDowell's introduction to Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing was also quoted in a New York Times article on the Netflix show "Passing"

Deborah McDowell's introduction to Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing was also quoted in a New York Times article on the Netflix show "Passing": The Real Surprise of ‘Passing’: A Focus on Black Women’s Inner Lives 

Democratic Discourses

English

Department of African American and African Studies

At a Glance


Over the course of its 40 year history, the Woodson Institute has advanced the field of Black Studies and supported undergraduate students at UVA as a program in African American and African Studies. In 2017, the Woodson acheived departmental status to formalize its position as an academic department. As a department, the Woodson is commited to training the next generation of thinkers as well as the general public about issues of race, social justice, and inequality. The core of this work is the African American and African Studies major and minor, which exposes students to critical inquiry and discussion about the lives and expereinces of people in the African diaspora. Global in context, rigorous in content, the department's teaching emphasizes intellectual intersections, cross-cultural connections, and real-world applications. 

Our majors in African American and African Studies have taken their education to pursue a wide range of careers in law, K-12 education and higher education, medicine, non-profit sector, business and consulting. As you plan your academic and professional career, review the programs and opportunities offered at the Woodson Institute. 

 

Major in African American and African Studies

Visit our undergraduate program page for more information about the department, its teaching vision, and how to major/minor in Africana Studies. 

Distinguished Majors Program

Advanced students in Africana studies may wish to apply for the Distinguished Majors Program (DMP) which culminates in a thesis project supervised by an academic advisor. 

Study Abroad

In partnership with the The department runs a flagship study abroad program to Ghana in partnership with the University of Ghana and W.E.B. Dubois Memorial Centre for Pan African Culture

Swahili

In addition to the minor in African studies, which was created in 2007, the Department offers Swahili language classes and hosts an annual Africa Day event with local schools. 

Designing a New Tradition

Art History
Scott Deveaux

Scott DeVeaux

Professor

112 Old Cabell Hall

Mamadou Dia

Assistant Professor of Practice (French and Media Studies)

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Digital Blackness Conference

Disabilities of the Color Line

African-American Studies

Distinguished Majors Program in African American and African Studies

About the Distinguished Majors Program (DMP)


The Distinguished Majors Program in African American and African Studies affords qualified students the opportunity to do advanced research, and to receive, at graduation, the honor of “Distinction”, “High Distinction” or "Highest Distinction." Third-year students with a superior academic record are encouraged to apply.

 

Entry into the DMP Program


  •        All applicants must be third-year students who have achieved a GPA of 3.40 in all coursework prior to application for the program.
  •        All applicants must have the agreement of a thesis supervisor. The supervisor can be any faculty member who offers courses that count toward the AAS major. The thesis supervisor must agree to direct the thesis research in the fall and spring semesters of the applicant’s fourth year.
  •        All applicants must have another faculty member’s agreement to serve as second reader. The second reader must be a fulltime academic or general faculty member who teaches courses at UVa.

 

Applying to the DMP


Application to the DMP should be made to the Director of the Distinguished Majors Program, Professor Sabrina Pendergrass, by completing the application form and submitting a one-page proposal and a list of five-to-ten relevant sources.

Application should be made to the DMP Director, Professor Sabrina Pendergrass, and copied to AAS DUP, Lisa Shutt, by March 15th.  Admission to the DMP is decided by the AAS Curriculum Committee.

DMP Application (pdf)

 

Completing the Distinguished Majors Program


Completing the Distinguished Majors Program and eligibility for graduation honors hinges on the successful achievement of the following CLAS and AAS terms:

  •   Satisfaction of all CLAS requirements as stated in the Undergraduate Record with an overall GPA of at least 3.40.
  •   Fulfillment of the distribution requirements for the normal AAS major.
  •   Successful completion of at least six credits of course work at or above the 4000-level, in addition to the six credits specific to preparation of the thesis, outlined in #4, below.
  •   Enrollment in and completion of AAS 4070 (Distinguished Major Thesis I) and AAS 4080 (Distinguished Major Thesis II).  AAS 4070 and AAS 4080 are three-credit courses for students who are completing a thesis for the Distinguished Majors Program. Students enroll in AAS 4070 with the DMP Director in the first semester of the fourth year.  In the second semester, students register for AAS 4080 with their advisor. The time students spend on the thesis courses each week is equivalent to the time spent on other three-credit courses at the university. But rather than the work of a traditional course, students will spend the time carrying out their thesis projects. Students will submit short excerpts from their work or writing to the DMP Director and/or their supervisor on a regular basis to further their progress, and they will meet regularly with the DMP Director and their supervisor to receive guidance on their work.
  •  Participation in all seminar meetings for AAS 4070 and AAS 4080. Students will meet together at least three times during the fall and at least two times during the spring. In seminar meetings, students will discuss their projects, share excerpts from their writing, and learn more about writing a thesis. Students must send copies of all assignments submitted for the seminar meetings to their thesis supervisors.
  •   Timely submission of a thesis of approximately 40 pages in length to the thesis supervisor and second reader no later than the last day of spring semester classes for Spring graduation.

Funding Opportunities


The department has grant and fellowship funding available to students who are accepted into the Distinguished Majors Program in African American and African Studies for the 2024-2025 academic year. This funding is provided with support from the Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit "Grants and Fellowships for Thesis Research in Africana Studies"

 

Frequently Asked Questions


Q: Are Distinguished Majors exempted from any College graduation requirements?

A: No. You must complete all the area requirements listed in the Undergraduate Record, and all the requirements for the AAS major.

Q: Are Distinguished Majors exempted from the 4000-level seminar-with-a-research paper required of “regular” AAS majors?

A: No. See question 1.

Q: If I write my thesis on an Africa-related topic, does that exempt me from the Non-Western Perspectives requirement?

A: No. See question 1.

Q: Are AAS 4070 (Distinguished Major Thesis I) and AAS 4080 (Distinguished Major Thesis II) taken in addition to the nine courses required for the “regular” major?

A: No, not necessarily. The DMP comprises a minimum of 29 credits, just like the regular AAS major. Most students may need to take more than 29 credits, however, to fulfill the distribution requirements of the major and the research and thesis components of the DMP.

Q: Who chooses my thesis supervisor and my second reader?

A: You do.

Q: Must the supervisor and the second reader be faculty members?

A: Yes. The thesis supervisor and second reader must be fulltime academic or general faculty who teach courses at UVA.

Q: How long should my thesis be?

A: Your thesis should be approximately 40 pages.  

Q: Who grades my thesis?

A: The DMP Director will assign your grade for AAS 4070 (Distinguished Major Thesis I, taken in the fall).  Your thesis supervisor will assign your grade for AAS 4080 (Distinguished Major Thesis II, taken in the spring).

Q: Who determines whether or not I will be awarded honors and if so, what level of distinction I will be awarded?

A: Your supervisor and second reader will make that determination, in consultation with the DMP Director, and in light of your entire academic record.

Q: Is there an "official" deadline when the thesis is due to my supervisor for grading?

A: Yes. The last day of class instruction for the spring semester in which AAS 4080 is taken.

Q: What if I plan to graduate in August?

A: Your thesis must be submitted to your thesis supervisor and second reader no later than May 20. Be sure to inform them early in the spring if you plan to graduate in August rather than May.

Q: How soon should my thesis supervisor submit his report to the DMP Director?

A: The supervisor should plan to submit his/her report to the DMP Director on the first Friday after the last day of class instruction. If that is not possible, alternative arrangements can be made with the DMP Director at the Woodson Institute. Note that late reports may mean that your level of distinction might not appear on the graduation program.

 

 

“The information contained on this website is for informational purposes only. The Undergraduate Record and Graduate Record represent the official repository for academic program requirements. These publications may be found at http://records.ureg.virginia.edu/index.php.”  

Disturbing the Peace

History

Divided We Stand

History

Dividing Lines

award-winning

History

Does Reparations Have a Future? Rethinking Racial Justice in a 'Color-Blind' Era 

Organized by Deborah McDowell (Alice Griffin Professor of English and Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies), Kim Forde-Mazrui (William S. Potter Professor of Law), and Lawrie Balfour (Professor of Politics), the symposium is organized around four sessions—“Reparations in Historical Frame,” “Reparations and the University,” “Reparations and the Nation,” “Reparations around the Globe.” Panelists will examine the range of meanings, questions, controversies, and aspirations the term “reparations” has elicited historically and will explore among other topics, the cultural, legal, economic, and political legacies of slavery and Jim Crow. 

A controversial term provoking a range of meanings and responses, “reparations” has been used most commonly to refer to material compensation in the present as a means of righting the wrongs of the past. In the political arena, the connection between the crimes of the past and the health of the polity has been acknowledged in the recent spate of public apologies, particularly for slavery and Jim Crow. Beginning with the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2007, several states and then the U.S. Congress expressed regret for slavery and segregation and vowed that the lesson of this past history would not be lost. In its 2009 apology, the U.S. Senate observed that "African-Americans continue to suffer from the consequences of slavery and Jim Crow laws—long after both systems were formally abolished—through enormous damage and loss, both tangible and intangible, including the loss of human dignity and liberty." For many, including the distinguished historian, John Hope Franklin, such apologies cost nothing and carry limited utility as concerns the work of righting wrongs. The next step, he asserted, was “to do something."

Click here for a reproduction of the symposium program 

To listen to audio recordings from the symposium view its YouTube playlist 

Doing Time in the Depression

History
Drame

Kandioura Drame

Associate Professor

342 New Cabell Hall

Anna Duensing

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Fascism Is Already Here: Civil Rights and the Making of a Black Antifascist Tradition

Anna Duensing is a historian of the United States and the world, specializing in African American history, Black radicalism, transnational social movements, and the evolving global politics of white supremacy across the twentieth century. She is currently working on her first book manuscript Fascism Is Already Here: Civil Rights and the Making of a Black Antifascist Tradition. The book follows Black activists, artists, intellectuals, and their multiracial coalitions from the 1930s through the 1970s to map a long arc of Black antifascism in the United States and, by doing so, seeks to better understand the specter of fascism within the U.S. political landscape. 

 
History
Yale University

Ella Baker Day Symposium at UVA

March 28, 2011 — A list of the titans of the Civil Rights Movement includes Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. But the list should include Ella Baker, an unsung heroine of the movement who worked closely, but quietly, with those titans over her long career.
 

Emancipation in the Virginia Tobacco Belt, 1850-1870

History

Enduring Questions, New Methods

April 12-13, 2018

The dominant narrative of Haiti remains an under-analyzed story in which cultural and political advocates from the United States, France, Great Britain, and what historian Brenda Gayle Plummer has otherwise called, “the great powers,” have been required to intervene in Haiti on many different occasions in order to “save the country from itself.” However, the asymmetrical and often dialogic influence of Haiti on these world powers in the realms of art, literature, music, culture, and religion, for example, are rarely presented, with many scholars and other writers (especially journalists) focusing instead on long-historical Atlantic World fears about Haiti in the wake of its war of independence (1791-1803), and contemporary fears of Haitian migration to the U.S. in the form of “boat people.”

In the spirit of Papa Legba (a Haitian lwa, or spirit, who acts as a crossroads between the human and non-human worlds), we propose a conference dedicated to what scholar and invitee, Gina Ulysse, has called “New Narratives of Haiti.” We envision this conference as a series of roundtables. Dispensing with formal papers, we hope to facilitate conversation as a crossroads, at which scholars might generatively explore Haitian history, art, politics, and culture in ways that contest narratives of fear, repression, failure, and dependency.  In an effort to counter the fragmentation that can result from the geographic and intellectual diversity of Haitian Studies as a field, this conference will convene national and international scholars, artists, activists, and cultural leaders from a variety of different disciplines. We expect that our participants will represent and intersect with a range of perspectives, including art history, history, literature, anthropology, religion, politics, development, and performance studies. Ultimately, the goal of this conference is to bring together leading thinkers and cultural actors (from Haiti, the United States, and the circum-Caribbean) to share information and thereby deepen our collective understanding of the prominent role Haiti and Haitians have had in making and critiquing the modern world-system.

The conference will engage speakers in English, French, and Haitian Kreyòl and employ translators to ensure maximum accessibility. We also plan to have a mix of established and emerging scholars, along with several politicians, writers, activists, and scholars from Haiti.

Engaging Race: Black Girls Matter

November 12, 2015

Focused on black girls, the forum is largely inspired by “Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected,” a report released by the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia University and the African American Policy Forum. Authored by Kimberle Crenshaw, Jyoti Nanda and Priscilla Ocen, the report, based on a review of national data and on personal interviews with girls in selected regions of the country, is but one in a growing number of such reports, all describing a disturbing national trend: the percentage of girls in the U. S. juvenile justice system is rapidly on the rise. The excessive disciplinary measures they face in schools lead to escalating rates of violence, arrest, suspension and/or expulsion. Girls of color, in particular, face much harsher school discipline than their white peers. For example, Black girls are suspended six times more than their white peers (while black boys are only suspended three times more than white males). 

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Engaging Race: Black Girls Matter Forum

Next Week at the Woodson Institute

Engaging Race-- A Carter G. Woodson Forum:  “BLACK GIRLS MATTER”

 

Thursday, November 12, 2015—4:30 PM—123 Robertson Hall

  

We invite you to the second forum in the year-long “Engaging Race” series sponsored by the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies.  Focused on black girls, the forum is largely inspired by “Black Girls Matter:  Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected,” a report released by the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies at Columbia University and the African American Policy Forum.  Authored by Kimberle Crenshaw, Jyoti Nanda and Priscilla Ocen, the report, based on a review of national data and on personal interviews with girls in selected regions of the country, is but one in a growing number of such reports, all describing a disturbing national trend: the percentage of girls in the U. S. juvenile justice system is rapidly on the rise.  The excessive disciplinary measures they face in schools lead to escalating rates of violence, arrest, suspension and/or expulsion.  Girls of color, in particular, face much harsher school discipline than their white peers.  For example, Black girls are suspended six times more than their white peers (while black boys are only suspended three times more than white males). 

 

According to Kimberlé Crenshaw one of the study’s authors, “As public concern mounts for the needs of men and boys of color through initiatives like the White House’s My Brother’s Keeper, we must challenge the assumption that the lives of girls and women—who are often left out of the national conversation—are not also at risk.”

 

Please join us for this roundtable/discussion on black girls with a panel of experts:

  • Lindsey Jones (PhD candidate, the Curry School of Education)
  • Priscilla Ocen (Loyola University Law School)
  • Tammy Owens (Ph.D. Candidate, University of Minnesota and Pre-doctoral Fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute)
  • LaKisha Simmons (University of Buffalo)
  • Joanna Williams (Associate Professor in Curry School of Education).

Read a copy of the “Black Girls Matter” report here.

This event is free and open to the public.

Engaging Race: Forum on Race, Citizenship and Social Justice

In response to recent tragic events, including the murders of Charleston church members in June, the torching of multiple churches and several police shootings of unarmed black men, the University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies will present a panel discussion, “Engaging Race: Forum on Race, Citizenship and Social Justice,” on Thursday at 4:30 p.m. in Minor Hall, room 125.

Engaging Race: On Violence, Citizenship, and Social Justice

Anchored by Khalil Muhammad, Executive Director of the Schomburg Center in Black Culture (of the New York Public Library), the forum, titled "Engaging Race:  On Violence, Citizenship, and Social Justice,” is inspired by recent events in Charleston, South Carolina.  But the Charleston massacre is but one catalyst for engaging a range of issues emerging in its wake.  Among these, by no means new to this hour, are:  the underreported escalation of black church burnings over the last several weeks, the controversy surrounding the Confederate flag, and the unabated instances of police brutality against black bodies, committed with impunity.  It bears remembering that Reverend, and state senator, Clementa Pinckney, one of those slain, championed legislation making south Carolina the first state to require all law enforcement agencies to use body cameras. Irony of ironies, the governor of South Carolina signed this bill into law on June 10 -- exactly a week before  Pinckney and his parishioners were murdered in cold blood.

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Engaging Race: The Carter G. Woodson Forum On Violence, Citizenship, and Social Justice

Anchored by Khalil Muhammad, Executive Director of the Schomburg Center in Black Culture (of the New York Public Library), the forum, titled "Engaging Race:  On Violence, Citizenship, and Social Justice,” is inspired by recent events in Charleston, South Carolina.  But the Charleston massacre is but one catalyst for engaging a range of issues emerging in its wake.  Among these, by no means new to this hour, are:  the underreported escalation of black church burnings over the last several weeks, the controversy surrounding the Confederate flag, and the unabated instances of police brutality against black bodies, committed with impunity.  It bears remembering that Reverend, and state senator, Clementa Pinckney, one of those slain, championed legislation making south Carolina the first state to require all law enforcement agencies to use body cameras. Irony of ironies, the governor of South Carolina signed this bill into law on June 10 -- exactly a week before  Pinckney and his parishioners were murdered in cold blood.

Joining Khalil Muhammad will be Heather Thompson (Professor of History, University of Michigan), Dennis Childs (Professor of Literature, University of California, San Diego), Anthea Butler (Professor of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania), and James Peterson (Professor of Africana Studies, Lehigh University).

 

This event is generously supported by the

Office of the Provost, Summer Session and Special Academic Programs, International Studies Office, Center for Race and Law, Curry School of Education, Office for Diversity and Equity, Project on Lived Theology, Office of Admissions, The Miller Center, and the Departments of History, English, and Sociology

Engaging Race: The Race Tax: Economic Predation in Black America

March 24, 2016

Exorbitant rent for inferior housing.  Payday lenders on every block. Police forces that see your neighborhood as a source of municipal revenue rather than a community in need of protection.  In America today, low-income minority neighborhoods suffer not only from a shortage of economic opportunity but also from an abundance of predatory industries and practices.  While forms of economic exploitation have helped cities balance their budgets and businesses and investors amass fortunes, it has compounded the struggles of African American communities and contributed, in no small measure, to the racial wealth gap in America today.   Critics call it the “race tax,” and its roots are buried deep in the soil of America’s segregated cities.  This spring’s Woodson Forum will bring together four of America’s leading scholars on economic predation in Black America’s past and present for an engaging, informative discussion of the devastating effects of often hidden practices.  By shining a light on enterprises and institutions that prey on the urban poor, this event aims to generate greater awareness of the challenges facing many Black Americans today and a deeper understanding of issues informing the BlackLivesMatter movement.

Panelists include:
Devin Fergus, Associate Professor of African American and African Studies at Ohio State University and Senior Fellow at Demos, a policy research institute based in New York. 

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of "From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation," published by Haymarket Books in January 2016. 

N.D.B. Connolly, Herbert Baxter Adams Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University and Visiting Associate Professor of History and Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University.

Mildred W. Robinson, faculty at University of Virginia Law School and co-editor of "Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education" (2009).

Enterprising Southerners

African-American Studies

Enterprising Women

Sociology
Keverson

Kevin Everson

Professor

McIntire Department of Art
Brooks Hall 102A

Experiencing Mount Vernon

History

Faculty members awarded NEH Fellowships

Marlene Daut awarded fellowship for her project "Awakening the Ashes: An Intellectual History of Haiti" which seeks to produce an intellectual history of Haiti from 1804 to the 1950s.

Andrew Kahrl's fellowship project "The Power to Destroy: A Hidden History of Race and Taxes in America" will lead to a book and digital map on property taxation and race from Reconstruction through the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis.

For full details, read press release "NEH Announces $33 Million for 213 Humanities Projects Nationwide"

Faculty members earn Guggenheim Fellowships to support music, filmmaking

Nicole Mitchell Gantt (UVA Music, Woodson faculty affiliate) earns a Guggenheim Fellowship for a project entitled "Portraits of Sonic Freedom"

Fall 2010

View current course listings page

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 1010 - Introduction to African-American and African Studies (4)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM, Wilson Hall 301

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance and three written exams.

AAS 3157 - Caribbean Perspectives (3)

Instructor: Yarimar Bonilla

Weds. 3:30-6:00PM, Monroe Hall 124

Combined with ANTH 3157

Breaking with popular constructions of the region as a timeless tropical paradise, this course will re-define the Caribbean as the birthplace of modern forms of capitalism, globalization, and trans-nationalism. We will survey the founding moments of Caribbean history, including the imposition of slavery, the rise of plantation economies, and the development of global networks of goods and peoples. We will then examine the various forms of colonial and imperial power that have operated in the region during the latter part of the twentieth century and the lasting legacies of inequality and hierarchy that persist in contemporary Caribbean societies. Lastly, we will revisit the idea of the Caribbean as a tourist heaven and question popular images of the region as a site of tropical fantasy.

AAS 3200 - Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Instructor: Mark Hadley

Mon./Weds./Fri. 2:00-2:50PM, Wilson Hall 215

Combined with RELG 3200

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

AAS 3456 - Supreme Court and Civil Rights (3)

Instructor: Joseph G. Hylton

Tues/Thurs. 2:00-3:15PM, New Cabell Hall 319

This course explores the role of the United States Supreme Court in defining the legality of racial distinctions in the United States in the post-Civil War era. Special attention is paid to the role of the court¿s landmark 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education. The class will be taught in a discussion format based upon assigned readings.

AAS 3500-1 African Peoples and Cultures (3)

Instructor: Felistas (Njoki) Osotsi

Tues/Thurs. 3:30-4:45PM, Wilson Hall 215

The course explores the cultures of various African peoples through a variety of sources – films, ethnographies, narratives and literature. We will consider how Africa has been portrayed by anthropologists, explorers, historians and the media, and focus on issues that are relevant to an understanding of contemporary African societies: village life, urbanization, migration, status of women, the struggle to gain independence from colonial powers and the postcolonial period.

* NOTE: This course counts toward the African Studies Minor. It also fulfills the “one course about Africa” requirement within the AAS Major, or can be used for AAS elective credit.

AAS 3500-2 From Motown to Hip-Hop: The Evolution of African American Music (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs. 9:30-10:45AM, Rouss Hall 410

This course takes a bold, sweeping look at the role of popular music in African Americans' push for self-definition, political power, and social recognition. It considers how musical expression has provided black women and men with an outlet for individual expression, community building, sexual pleasure, political organizing, and economic uplift. Some of the artists that we will explore in-depth include James Brown, the Supremes, Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Public Enemy, Parliament-Funkadelic, Luther Vandross, Tupac, Lauryn Hill, Kanye West, Jay-Z, Lil’ Wayne, Nikki Minaj, and Beyonce. Through an engagement with these and other artists’ sonic and visual representations (i.e. music videos) students will address larger questions surrounding the sexual exploitation of the black female body, the deep class divisions underlying black America's recurring debates over "proper" racial presentations, and white America’s historic exploitation of African American culture.

 

In addition to looking at the artistry of black music, we will also give attention to the business side of African American cultural productions. Thus, students will spend time looking at black owned/black-run companies like Motown, Philadelphia International, Master P’s No Limit, and Puff Daddy’s Badboy.

 

The primary material for this course will be written texts (books and articles), music, and videos.

AAS 4070 - Directed Reading and Research (3)

Students in the DMP enroll under this number for thesis writing.

AAS 4500 - Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues/Thurs. 11:00AM-12:15PM, Nau Hall 141

Combined with ENAM 4500

This advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include critical essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams. This class is restricted to online waitlist and/or instructor permission. It is designed for students majoring in English, African American Studies, and/or American Studies.

AAS 4570-1 - Violence and Africa (3)

Instructor: Cassie Hays

Tues, 3:30PM - 6:00PM, New Cabell Hall 319

Via the historical and sociological study of violence and Africa, this course poses and attempts to resolve a variety of questions. First, what are the patterns and policies of imperialism and colonial governance that manifest in expressions of violence? In what ways can we see modern actions as originating in the colonial era? How are race and ethnicity solidified, reinforced, or reconfigured through the lens of violence? How and why does gender, and particularly violence against women, become a meaningful way for perpetrators to articulate control or degrade their opposition? What are the roles of environment and natural resources in instigating or perpetuating violence by and against people? How can we begin to move beyond contemporary media representations and ‘read’ the politics of violence in Africa as unexceptional?

This course will focus on the colonial origins, postcolonial manifestations, and public culture depictions of violence in Africa. We will begin with a short history of genocide; several theoretical analyses of aggression; and a brief look at the roles of media and globalization in instigating and perpetuating violence (and perceptions of violence) in Africa. Building from this foundation, we will examine the concepts of colonialism and imperialism and their practice in German Namibia, Belgian Congo, and British Kenya. We begin our study of the post- and neo-colonial with a look at Algeria’s struggle for independence from the French and a late 20th century story of poaching in Zambia. Several weeks will be spent on investigating the colonial origins of violence in South Africa and Rwanda, concluding with the closely connected issues of war and rape in the DRC and gendered violence in South Africa.

A 20-page research paper is expected at the conclusion of the semester.

AAS 4570-2 -Race, Madness, and Violence in the Epistolary Genre (3)

Instructor: Dennis Tyler

Thurs, 3:30 - 6:00, Wilson 216

This course will primarily examine issues of madness and violence in the epistolary novel. The epistolary novel is a form that uses letters as the principal mode of communication, although diary entries, newspaper clippings, and other documents (recordings, blogs, and e-mails) are sometimes used in order to heighten the authenticity of a story and to mirror the realities of everyday life. We will analyze epistolary works as a portal to the complex range of human expression. In the course, we will talk about the letter form and letter writing in a variety of ways: as a personal and intimate type of communication, as an open forum for confession, as a locus of insanity, as a sort of political activism, and, in some cases, as a source of international exchange between nations (England, African countries, and the United States).

Some of the major issues we will discuss include, but are not limited to, the representation of domestic abuse and sexuality in Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of the novel; the complexities of memory and melancholy as a consequence of slavery in Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River; the trauma of verbal, physical, and sexual abuse in Sapphire's Push; and the crisis of identity in Percival Everett’s Erasure.

A twenty-page research paper is expected at the end of the semester.

AAS 4993 - Independent Study (1-3)

Allows students to work on an individual research project. Students must propose a topic to an appropriate faculty member, submit a written proposal for approval, prepare an extensive annotated bibliography on relevant readings comparable to the reading list of a regular upper-level course, and complete a research paper of at least 20 pages.

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 3157 - Caribbean Perspectives (3)

Instructor: Yarimar Bonilla

Weds. 3:30-6:00PM, New Cabell Hall 316

Combined with AAS 3157

Breaking with popular constructions of the region as a timeless tropical paradise, this course will re-define the Caribbean as the birthplace of modern forms of capitalism, globalization, and trans-nationalism. We will survey the founding moments of Caribbean history, including the imposition of slavery, the rise of plantation economies, and the development of global networks of goods and peoples. We will then examine the various forms of colonial and imperial power that have operated in the region during the latter part of the twentieth century and the lasting legacies of inequality and hierarchy that persist in contemporary Caribbean societies. Lastly, we will revisit the idea of the Caribbean as a tourist heaven and question popular images of the region as a site of tropical fantasy.

Department of Drama

DRAM 3070 - African American Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Tues./Thurs., 2:00-3:15PM, Drama Education Bld. 217

This course 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.

Department of English

ENAM 3130 - African-American Survey I (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 424

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American letters, from Briton Hammon's Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings (1860) to W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903)Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Working our way through a variety of genres (elegy, drama, the captivity narrative, the slave narrative, the essay, public oratory, speeches, and novels), we will explore a number of matters pertinent to literary studies in general, as well as those with specific implications for African-American writing and writers. We will consider the circumstances of textual production and reception, ideas and ideologies of literary history and culture, aesthetics, authorship and audience. We will focus our attention immediately on the emergence of African-American writing under the regime of slavery and the questions it poses about "race," "authorship," "subjectivity," "self-mastery," and "freedom." We will consider the material and social conditions under which our selected texts were edited, published, marketed, and "authenticated," lingering especially on the role white abolitionists and editors played in the production and mediation of these texts for various reading publics. Our ultimate aim is to situate our selections within the broadest possible contexts of their time and ours. Other required texts include Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, William Wells Brown's Clotelle, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition.

ENAM 3280 - Reading the Black College Campus (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45PM, New Cabell 122

College campuses are rich sources for interrogating how places and spaces around us manifest the negotiation of power among social groups distinguished by race in America. Landscapes connected with the black struggle to secure literacy in America, for example, are particularly fruitful for such exploration. In “Reading the Black College Campus,” we consider, for instance, the landscapes that shrouded enslaved people such as Frederick Douglass as they acted on a black cultural imperative to secure literacy against the grain of antebellum law and custom. We interrogate Historically Black College and University (HBCU) campuses, such as Virginia Union University’s, as well as (Historically White College and University (HWCU) campuses, such as the University of Virginia’s, to understand the contestation surrounding the democratization of higher education to include opportunities for African Americans from the promising beginning of the first HBCUs during the Reconstruction period; through the curricular compromises championed by Booker T. Washington responding to the inequality engineered by a doctrine of “separate but equal” under surging Jim Crow and the progress made as a result of growing challenges on behalf of racial equality especially in the wake of World War I and of World War II; to the reconstitution of inequality by dividing the landscape into enforced race and class territories in our own post-Jim Crow moment. A student-centered course, our exploration will hinge on your careful study of required reading and other materials and on your participation in a required field trip to an HBCU campus and in related workshops to develop knowledge and abilities to interrogate graphic representations of landscapes. Requirements completed individually include a closed-book midterm and final exam and a three-page paper reflecting on the field trip. Assignments completed in groups include two informal exercises, student-led discussion of assigned materials scheduled for eight sessions of the semester and, most important, a final group research project that includes a prospectus, a report, and a presentation in a final symposium.

ENAM 3559 - Cross-Cultures of Harlem (3)

Instructor: Sandhya Shukla

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, New Cabell 320

This course explores the cultural production, intellectual history and political movements that construct the globality of Harlem. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, we cover the development of various ethnic and racial neighborhoods arrayed across regions of the area—Black Harlem, Jewish Harlem, Italian Harlem and Spanish Harlem—and the conflicts and intimacies inherent in their transformations over time. We inquire into the representation and life of Harlem through the lens of the navigation and contestation of difference. Considering migrancy, diaspora, nationalism, race and ethnicity, and class formation in comparative perspective brings the global into the local and effectively reimagines how “minoritized space” is made both materially and symbolically. Materials to be discussed include works by Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, James Weldon Johnson, Piri Thomas, Yuri Kochiyama, Leroi Jones, Irving Horowitz, Gordon Parks Jr., Joe Cuba, Jacob Lawrence, and others.

ENAM 4500 - Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues/Thurs. 11:00AM-12:15PM, Nau Hall 141

Combined with AAS 4500

This advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include critical essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams. This class is restricted to online waitlist and/or instructor permission. It is designed for students majoring in English, African American Studies, and/or American Studies.

ENAM 4814 - African-American Women Authors (3)

Instructor: Angela Davis

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45AM, New Cabell Hall 337

We will read several novels and short stories by African American women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, two written responses to readings (each 2 to 3 double spaced typed pages long) and a formal essay (12 to 15 pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place. Prerequisite: The course is first offered to fourth year majors in English, Women's Studies and Afro-American and African Studies.

Department of French Language & Literature

FREN 4743 - Africa in Cinema (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Wilson Hall 141A

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 332 and FREN 344 or another 300-level literature course in French.

FREN 4813 - Introduction to Francophone Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti) (3)

Instructor: Stephanie Berard

Mon. 3:30-6:00PM, Wilson Hall 215

 

Focuses on the literature, culture and arts of the Francophone Caribbean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti). Issues of colonialism and postcolonialism, slavery and freedom, exile and immigration, race and gender will be examined through poetry, novels, storytelling, theater, music and film analysis.

Prerequisite: A 300-level French literature course

Department of History

HIAF 1501 - Reading the African Diaspora (3)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, Nau 141

 

This seminar uses movies, novels and a vast array of audio-visual of resources (including the slave trade dataset, the largest attempt ever to quantify pre-nineteenth-century African migration) to explore the African Diaspora in the Atlantic from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. We will pay particular attention to the intellectual debates that have shaped the field of Diaspora Studies in the past sixty years. The class will closely assess state-of-the-art scholarship on African culture, formation of Africa-descent communities, and resistance to slaving. We will read Vincent Brown’s The Reaper's Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery; Laurent Dubois’ Avengers of the New World; and Jane Landers’ Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions. Course requirements include regular attendance and participation, class presentation, and a research paper. This class fulfills the second writing requirement.

HIAF 2001 - Early African History through the Era of the Slave Trade (4)

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

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

From the mists of the once-dark continent’s unwritten past Early African History draws out Africans’ distinctive strategies and achievements in culture, politics, and economics. Starting broadly at the dawn of history and continuing in detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 2001 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the ironic interplay of tragedy and ambition in a continent increasingly trapped in exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of modern African history, HIAF 2002, taught in spring semester, follows subsequent events down through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.)

HIAF 2001 is an introductory lower-division survey. The instructor presents the major themes of the early history of the continent in twice-weekly lectures. Students meet additionally in discussion sections for reviews of readings, map quizzes, and preparation for written assignments. Requirements include short written responses to each class, weekly short map quizzes, a short paper reacting to assigned readings, and a take-home final exercise. The course belongs to the Afro-American and African Studies curriculum, qualifies for the minor in African Studies, meets the “non-western/non-modern” requirement for the major in History, counts as an adjunct course for Studies in Women and Gender, and qualifies for the College area requirements in “non-western perspectives” and “historical perspective”.

 

HIAF 3021 - History of Southern Africa (4)

Instructor: John Mason

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

HIAF 3021 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The emphasis is on South Africa.

The course begins with a look at the pre-colonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.

By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest had not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs.

Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.

Course materials include biographies, memoirs, fiction, music, and films, as well as academic studies. Students will take periodic quizzes on the readings and write two blue-book exams, a mid-term and a final.

 

HIAF 4511 - Colloquium in African History: Color and Culture in South Africa and the United States (3)

Instructor: John Mason

Tues./Thurs. 3;30-4:45PM, New Cabell B031

HIAF 4511 is a small, research-oriented course that explores the histories of South Africa and the United States in comparative perspective.

South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries owe much of their early economic development to slavery. In both complex systems of racial domination shaped society for generations before and after the emancipation of the slaves. And in both the interracial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.

At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true. Both white supremacy and the struggle against it were more violent in South Africa than in the United States. And, since 1994, a democratic political system has ensured that black South Africans have enjoyed a degree of political power that black Americans have never experienced.

The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, music, photography, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.

HIAF 4511 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course must have taken at least one course in African history, preferably South Africa, and two courses in American history.

 

HIUS 3471 - American Labor History (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues./Thurs. 11-12:15, Nau 211

This course examines the political engagements, labor struggles, and cultural endeavors of the U.S. working class from the end of the Civil War to the present. It chronicles how the lives of the U.S. laboring majority was shaped by the rise of big business during the Gilded Age, the social upheavals of the World War I era, the economic hardships brought about by the Great Depression, the social policies of the New Deal, the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, and continuing debates over the meanings of work, citizenship, and democracy in the United States. A major issue to be explored in our discussions of U.S. working class history will be in the ways in which laboring people have been divided along racial, gender, ethnic, and regional lines.

 

HIUS 3671 - the History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Julian Bond

Tues. 3:30-5:30PM, Clark Hall 107

This lecturecourse discusses, critiquesand analyses the American civil rights movement from 1900 through the 1960s, examining the movement's leadership, opposition, tactics, setbacks, achievements and interactions with Presidents, Congressional leadership, and the involvement of rank-and-file activists.

Texts required are: James Forman's The Making of Black Revolutionaries, Julian Bond and Andrew Lewis' I'm Gonna SitAt The Welcome Table, and Roy Wilkins' Standing Fast.

Department of Music

MUEN 2690/3690 or 4690 (registration number depends on student seniority in the ensemble) - African Music and Dance Ensemble (2)

*This course fulfills requirements for the African Studies Minor, but neither the AAS Major, nor the AAS Minor.

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Thurs 5:15-7:15PM, Old Cabell Hall107

The African Music and Dance Ensemble is a practical, hands-on course focusing on several music/dance forms from Western and Central Africa with performances during and at the end of the semester. Though no previous experience with music or dance is required, we will give special attention to developing tight ensemble dynamics, aural musicianship, and a polymetric sensibility. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required of each class member, the goal being to develop an ongoing UVa. African Music and Dance Ensemble.

Department of Politics

PLAP 3700 - Racial Politics (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

Mon./Wed. 11:00-11:50AM, Minor Hall125

 

Examines how attributions of racial difference have shaped American Politics. Topics include how race affects American political partisanship, campaigns and elections, public policy, public opinion, and American political science.

Prerequisite: One course in PLAP or instructor permission.

 

PLCP 2020 - The Politics of Developing Areas (3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Mon/.Wed. 9:00-9:50AM, South Lawn Commons

 

PLCP 4840 Gender Politics in Africa (3)

Instructor: Denise Walsh

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, New Cabell Hall B026

Combined with SWAG 4320

This course focuses on the ways social structures and institutions shape gender in sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on the state. It begins with the highly contested conceptions of gender and feminism in Africa. Next, we turn to nationalism and gendered colonial African states. With the success of national liberation movements and the rise of African women’s movements many African countries liberalized; some became democracies. Those political transformations and the spread of a human rights culture meant women in much of Africa won a greater role in politics, the third theme of the course. Their success increased hopes among feminists that the state would attack sexism. Those hopes have yet to be fulfilled, as an investigation of the region’s most contemporary pressing problems, from the sexual division of labor to HIV/AIDS.

 

PLPT 4060 - Politics and Literature (3)

InstructorLawrie Balfour

Weds. 1:00-3:30, Gibson Hall 241

 

This advanced, interdisciplinary seminar considers how works of fiction enhance our understanding of the terms of democratic life. How do the authors contribute to our understanding of ourselves as individuals and as citizens and to our conception of political identity (local, national, global)? In what ways do they make use of the presence of the past; how do they redescribe familiar histories or bring silenced histories to the fore; and how do they address the legacies of historic injustice (slavery, colonialism, and state violence)? In what ways do different texts work on their readers and what, if any, are the political consequences? The theme of the seminar in the Fall of 2010 is the centrality of race and the afterlife of slavery in American political experience. Our core texts will be Moby DickInvisible Man, and Beloved. In addition, to considering these novels as works of political theory, will read other work by Melville, Ellison, and Morrison and an array of critics. Previous upper-level course-work in AAS, Political Theory, American Studies, or English is recommended.

Department of Psychology

PSYC 4870 The Minority Family: A Psychological Inquiry (3)

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

Weds. 9:00-11:30AM, Ruffner Hall 173

 

Examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing 'deficit' and 'strength' research paradigms. Prerequisite: PSYC 306 and at least one course from each of the following groups: PSYC 210, 215 or 230, and PSYC 240, 250 or 260, and students in the Afro-American and African studies or studies in women and gender programs.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 3890 - Christianity in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM, Gibson Hall 211

Combined with RELC 3890

 

This course examines the history of Christianity in Africa from its roots in Egypt and the Maghreb in the 2nd c. CE, to contemporary times when nearly half the continent's population claims adherence to the faith. Our historical overview will cover the flowering of medieval Ethiopian Christianity, 16th- and 17th- century Kongolese Christianity, European missions during the colonial period, the subsequent growth of independent churches, the emergence of African Christian theology, and the recent examples of charismatic and Pentecostal “mega-churches.” We will consider the relationship between colonialism and evangelism; assess efforts in translation and inculturation of the gospel; reflect on the role of healing, prophesy and spirit-possession in conversion, and explore a variety of ways of understanding religious change across the continent. We will attempt both to position the Christian movement within the wider context of African religious history, and to understand Africa's place in the larger course of Christian history.

RELC 3890 - Christianity in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM, Gibson Hall 211

Combined with RELA 3890

 

This course examines the history of Christianity in Africa from its roots in Egypt and the Maghreb in the 2nd c. CE, to contemporary times when nearly half the continent's population claims adherence to the faith. Our historical overview will cover the flowering of medieval Ethiopian Christianity, 16th- and 17th- century Kongolese Christianity, European missions during the colonial period, the subsequent growth of independent churches, the emergence of African Christian theology, and the recent examples of charismatic and Pentecostal “mega-churches.” We will consider the relationship between colonialism and evangelism; assess efforts in translation and inculturation of the gospel; reflect on the role of healing, prophesy and spirit-possession in conversion, and explore a variety of ways of understanding religious change across the continent. We will attempt both to position the Christian movement within the wider context of African religious history, and to understand Africa's place in the larger course of Christian history.

 

RELC 5559-4 - African Americans and the Bible (3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

Thurs. 3:30-6:00PM, New Cabell Hall 324

 

In this course, we will look at the ways African American scholars, clergy, laity, men, women, the free, and the enslaved, have read, interpreted, preached, and taught scripture. In examining these uses, we will also seek to sketch out a broader theology, history, and sociology of black people as they used the tool at hand, the Bible, to argue for their own humanity, create their own cultures, and establish their own societies. We will also undertake the interpretive enterprise, seeking to find common ground for understanding the meaning of the biblical text in our own, and others’ communities.

RELG 3200 - Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Instructor: Mark Hadley

Mon./Weds./Fri. 2:00-2:50PM, Wilson Hall 215

Combined with AAS 3200

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism

Department of Sociology

SOC 3410 - Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon./Weds. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 345

 

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 Family (3)

Instructor: Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl

Mon./Weds. 3:30-4:45PM, McLeod Hall 2005

 

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear more comprehensive understanding of the history, struggle and diversity of the AfricanAmerican community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the AfricanAmerican Community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of their cultural history. The course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for AfricanAmerican people sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussions, lectures, videos, reading and class presentation as well as written assignments, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamic of the AfricanAmerican community.

Studies in Women and Gender

SWAG 2224: Black Femininities and Masculinities in Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon. 6:30-9:00, Cocke Hall 115

This course 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 media 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.

SWAG 4840 Gender Politics in Africa (3)

Instructor: Denise Walsh

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, New Cabell Hall B026

Combined with PLCP 4320

 

This course focuses on the ways social structures and institutions shape gender in sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on the state. It begins with the highly contested conceptions of gender and feminism in Africa. Next, we turn to nationalism and gendered colonial African states. With the success of national liberation movements and the rise of African women’s movements many African countries liberalized; some became democracies. Those political transformations and the spread of a human rights culture meant women in much of Africa won a greater role in politics, the third theme of the course. Their success increased hopes among feminists that the state would attack sexism. Those hopes have yet to be fulfilled, as an investigation of the region’s most contemporary pressing problems, from the sexual division of labor to HIV/AIDS.

Fall 2011

View current course listings page

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 1010 - Introduction to African-American and African Studies (4)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance and three written exams.

AAS 2559 - Black Femininites and Masculinities in the Media (3)

IInstructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon. 2:00-4:30

This course 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 media 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.

* Another section of this course is offered on Mon. 6:30-9:00 as SWAG 2224 (See below)

AAS 2700 - Festivals of the Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues/Thurs. 9:30-10:45AM

Combined with RELG 2700

By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion (Jonathan Z. Smith, Ronald Grimes, Lawrence Sullivan), and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity.

AAS 3280 - Reading the Black College Campus (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

Tues. 6:30-9:00PM

Combined with ENAM 3280

Historically Black Colleges and University campuses are records of the process of democratizing (extending to excluded social groups such as African-Americans) opportunities for higher education in America. Through landscapes, we trace this record, unearthing the politics of landscapes via direct experience as well as via interpretations of representations of landscapes in literature, visual arts, maps, plans, and photographs. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

AAS 3456 - Supreme Court and Civil Rights (3)

Instructor: Gordon Hylton

Mon./Weds. 4:00-5:15PM

This course explores the role of the United States Supreme Court in defining the legality of racial distinctions in the United States in the post-Civil War era. Special attention is paid to the role of the court’s landmark 1954 decision, Brown v. Board of Education. The class will be taught in a discussion format based upon assigned readings.

AAS 3500-1 Development and Culture in Africa (3)

Instructor: Niklas Hultin

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15

This course draws on insights from critical theory to examine social issues, culture and development in Africa. As part of a broader introduction to the history and politics of the continent, it explores the general contours of European colonialism, national independence, and the position of African states in today's global economic order. Against this backdrop, the course teaches students to handle various theories of underdevelopment and draws attention to specific case studies – such as Nigeria and South Africa – to discuss issues related to race, class, gender, trade, violence, and HIV/AIDS.

AAS 3500-2 - Black Fire: African America Artistic Expression, Black Studies, and the Struggle for Freedom (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Mon/Weds. 2:00-3:15PM

"My field is black studies. In that field, I’m trying to hoe the hard row of beautiful things. I try to study them and I also try to make them. Elizabeth Alexander says 'look for color everywhere.' For me, color + beauty = blackness which is not but nothing other than who, and deeper still, where I am." Fred Moten

Early in the spring of 1969, an Ad Hoc Committee of the Black Students for Freedom and the Black Academic Community at the University of Virginia submitted a fourteen page proposal to key University administrators, demanding the formation of an African-American Studies program. The Committee’s proposal placed an emphasis on five important areas: history, sociology, economics, politics, and the arts. In their discussion of the critical importance of the arts, black student leaders emphasized the necessity of offering courses on African Americans’ contributions to literature, music, theater, dance, sculpture and painting. Their demands bore the imprint of a historical moment in which African American artists, writers, and consumers raised several important questions about the politics of black art and its relationship to the black liberation struggle: If popular art informs public perception, then what type of images and messages should the politically engaged artist put for th in his or her cultural productions? To what extent should African American artists subscribe to a black aesthetic, and who has the power to define the social, political, and cultural parameters of that aesthetic?

Throughout the fall semester, the course, “Black Fire” will engage these and other important questions by looking at various artists and cultural productions that have been instrumental in shaping the texture of social and cultural life in contemporary America. Significant attention will be given to the ways in which black women and men have relied on art as a vehicle for community building, political organizing, economic uplift, and of course, individual expression. On a related note, our class will engage the ways in which African American students at UVA—under the leadership and guidance of BSA and OAAA— have historically sought to integrate these artistic developments into the curriculum of African American Studies and the broader University life. The purpose here is to provide students with a sense of the local and national dimensions of the black arts movement.

For this broad course, topics of extensive discussion include but are not limited to the cultural politics of BSA’s 1970s “Black Culture Week” series; representations of black urban realism in 1970s African American music, particularly soul, funk, and fusion jazz; the poetics and politics of the Black Arts movement; the anti-penological discourses pervading the music of Gil-Scott Heron during the 1970s and early 1980s; Michael Jordan, Nike, and the global commodification of black style; The Cosby Show, A Different World and the expansion of the black bourgeoisie; the Native Tongues movement, Afrocentricity and the Golden Age of Hip-Hop; OutKast, Jason Moran, and the search for a Southern black Aesthetic; Prince, Meshell Ndegeogello, and the politics of black sexuality; and the influence of the Neo-Soul movement in black music and film. Possible readings for the course include Angela Davis’ “Art on the Frontline: Mandate for a People’s Culture,” Herman S. Gray’s Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation and Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness; The Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader; Christine Acham: Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power; and Portia Maultsby’s African American Music: An Introduction.

AAS 3500-3 Women Writing Africa (3)

Instructor: Barbara Boswell

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45

This survey course serves as an introduction to the literature of African women writers. It aims to situate African women’s literary production within the political and historical contexts in which these works are produced, and broadly examine the issues selected African women writers have chosen to highlight in their fiction. Particular attention will be paid to constructions and critiques of gender relations within each text. Novels include Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1989), Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero (1975), Mariama Ba’s So Long a Letter (1989), Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die (1989), Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes (1991), Buchi Emecheta’s The Joy’s of Motherhood (1979), Bessie Head’s Maru (1971), Rayda Jacobs’s The Slave Book (2000), and Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins (2002).

AAS 3559 - African American Health Professionals (3)

Instructor: Preston Reynolds

Tues. 3:30-6:00

This course addresses important issues of race and health disparities, as well as offering students an introduction to the understudied history of black medical professionals. Over the past three centuries, African American physicians, dentists, nurses and public health professionals have made major contributions to eliminating health disparities, offering, in many instances, the only source of medical and dental care available. Many of our majors consider a career in medicine--either as physicians, nurses or public health workers--and this course will surely be relevant for them. Students will also have the valuable experience of examing an array of primary documents pertaining to African American health care professionals in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the South.

AAS 3652 - African-American History Since 1865 (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15

Combined with HIUS 3652

This course surveys the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Through an engagement with a wide range of primary and secondary texts, along with multimedia, students will examine African Americans’ endeavors to build strong families and communities, create vibrant and socially meaningful artistic productions, and establish a robust political infrastructure capable of bringing into existence a more just and humane world. Some of the questions that this course will explore include but are not limited to: How does an engagement with African American history broaden our understanding of such concepts as “freedom,” “democracy,” "race," and “nation.” How have African American leaders sought to shape U.S. public policy in ways that would enhance the quality of life for laboring people, particularly the working poor? What were the major philosophical and tactical points of disagreement among black freedom fighters during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras? And lastly, how have African Americans relied on artistic expression, i.e., music, television, film, and the visual arts, to strengthen their movements for social justice?

AAS 4070 - Directed Reading and Research (3)

Students in the DMP enroll under this number for thesis writing.

AAS 4500-1 - Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15

Combined with ENAM 4500

This advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include critical essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams. This class is restricted to online waitlist and/or instructor permission. It is designed for students majoring in English, African American Studies, and/or American Studies.

AAS 4500-2 - Race in American Places (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

Weds. 6:30-9:00

Combined with ENCR 4500

How do assumptions about race operate when we consider the idea of an “American Place?” This interdisciplinary seminar interrogates this question by exploring place in America within the context of the “Culture Wars,” especially as these are catalyzed by the notion of race. We consider, for instance, how place is embroiled in the ideological work of distinguishing people according to identity and, then, of fixing identity groups within unyielding hierarchies. Consider, for example, how the seemingly innocuous story of The Three Little Pigs leads us to assume racial attributes of each pig based on materials and architectural styles. Thus, it seems so natural, so correct to identify groups of people as “primitive” and “destitute” versus “civilized” and “successful” based on assumptions about their housing. What are the implications of our culture’s insistence on promoting the notion that “Africans,” say, live in huts of mud or straw. We are interested in how such assumptions linking race and place are reinforced by planning, design, and preservation concepts and practice. How does the increasing popularity of Homeowners’ Associations maintain racial territories against the spirit of legal desegregation? Does the concurrency of homelessness and home-owners-associations in American society suggest anything about prevailing assumptions about a relationship between the right to privacy and racial and class identity? We study these questions with the help of targeted discussion of readings, required field trips to places around Charlottesville, informal workshops especially to develop the ability to interpret maps, plans, and other graphic representations of places, and student delivered presentations in class. Requirements include three informal small group exercises, an individual site-visit comment paper, a mid-term and final exam, and a group research project. The last requirement is presented in a symposium that represents the culmination of the semester.

AAS 4570-1 The Phenomenon of Oprah's Book Club (3)

Instructor: Dennis Tyler

Thurs. 3:30-6:30PM

Since its inception in September 1996, Oprah’s Book Club has transformed the literary landscape in a variety of profound ways—from ushering in a new wave of enthusiastic readers and spiking the sale of books around the globe to reshaping the advertising and marketing of fiction and offering readers a popular way of engaging literature. This level of success has allowed Oprah to accomplish her ultimate goal: to make her book club “the biggest book club in the world and get people reading again.”

Oprah’s mission—while extraordinary and spectacular in its scope—could not have been accomplished without, to some extent, drawing attention away from her selected texts and their formal and aesthetic qualities. Indeed, the scale and production of Oprah’s Book Club have raised a number of critical questions regarding both the advantages and drawbacks of a televised book club that are worthy of further exploration. For instance, what methods does the book club employ to make literature accessible to a mass televisual audience, and why does an extended discussion of literary form, content, and genre often get condensed in order to reach and maintain such a large following? How does the book club serve as a litmus test for the ongoing debates between highbrow and lowbrow literary cultures? In what way does the book club figure Oprah as the arbiter of literary taste, and what kind of backlash does she receive by assuming this role? How does Oprah use her book club to popularize and deify her selected authors? And, finally, in what way should U.S. public culture interpret the book club’s logo: Should it be understood as an innocuous seal of approval, as a symbol of sheer consumerism and corporatization in the global literary marketplace, or as something more complex and elaborate? We will explore these matters and questions as we engage the literature of Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Ernest Gaines, and Jonathan Franzen (among others).

A twenty-page research paper is required for the course.

AAS 4570-2 The Black Body in Transnational Translation (3)

Instructor: Barbara Boswell

Mon. 3:30-6:00

This interdisciplinary course has a strong emphasis on visual culture, and examines the way in which the figure of the “black body’ is discursively and visually constructed as it migrates globally and through history. The course aims to impart to students the ability to deconstruct the way the black body has been configured throughout history and in contemporary visual culture. Paying attention to the ways bodies are racialized, gendered, and sexualized in global cultural production, students will learn how to read the black body as “text” on which the dominant ideologies of its time are inscribed. The course starts by examining the body of the slave, reading texts on scientific racism, and unpacking the role of scientific racism in providing a rationale for slavery. Next, students examine the sexualized black female body through a reading of the life of Saartjie Baartman, the so-called South African “Hottentot Venus” who was brought to Europe in 1810 and put on display. Participants expand this theme by looking at the construction of the black male body as hypersexualized and dangerous, through the work of Ghanaian feminist filmmaker Yaba Badoe in her path-breaking documentary, “I Want Your Sex” (1990), and by viewing excerpts from films such as “Birth of a Nation” (1915). Students conclude this session on the black gendered body by critically reviewing contemporary film and music videos produced in the USA.

 

The second part of this course examines the ways in which black artists and writers in Africa and throughout the diaspora have chosen to represent race. Drawing on my published scholarship on the work of writer Doreen Baingana and filmmaker Yaba Badoe, this section examines the art of, amongst others, Bernie Searle, a South African visual artist, Ugandan writer Doreen Baingana, and African American visual artist Kara Walker. This section of the course aims to explore art as a mode of resistance to stereotypical racial images of the black body. Texts include excerpts from Amina Mama’s Beyond the Masks: Black Women and Subjectivity (1991), Kwesi Kwa Prah’s Discourses on Difference, Discourses on Oppression (2002), Dorothy Roberts’s Killing the Black Body (1997), and Doreen Baingana’s Tropical Fish: Stories out of Entebbe (2005).

 

AAS 4993 - Independent Study (1-3)

Allows students to work on an individual research project. Students must propose a topic to an appropriate faculty member, submit a written proposal for approval, prepare an extensive annotated bibliography on relevant readings comparable to the reading list of a regular upper-level course, and complete a research paper of at least 20 pages.

Department of Drama

DRAM 3070 - African American Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

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

This course 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.

Department of English

ENAM 3130 - African-American Survey I (3)

Instructor: Deborah E. McDowell

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

This course surveys pivotal moments and texts in the history of African-American letters, from Briton Hammon's Narrative of Uncommon Sufferings (1860) to W. E. B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903)Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Working our way through a variety of genres (elegy, drama, the captivity narrative, the slave narrative, the essay, public oratory, speeches, and novels), we will explore a number of matters pertinent to literary studies in general, as well as those with specific implications for African-American writing and writers. We will consider the circumstances of textual production and reception, ideas and ideologies of literary history and culture, aesthetics, authorship and audience. We will focus our attention immediately on the emergence of African-American writing under the regime of slavery and the questions it poses about "race," "authorship," "subjectivity," "self-mastery," and "freedom." We will consider the material and social conditions under which our selected texts were edited, published, marketed, and "authenticated," lingering especially on the role white abolitionists and editors played in the production and mediation of these texts for various reading publics. Our ultimate aim is to situate our selections within the broadest possible contexts of their time and ours. Other required texts include Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Frances Harper's Iola Leroy, William Wells Brown's Clotelle, Harriet Wilson's Our Nig and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition.

ENAM 3280 - Reading the Black College Campus (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

Tues. 6:30-9:00PM

Combined with AAS 3280

Historically Black Colleges and University campuses are records of the process of democratizing (extending to excluded social groups such as African-Americans) opportunities for higher education in America. Through landscapes, we trace this record, unearthing the politics of landscapes via direct experience as well as via interpretations of representations of landscapes in literature, visual arts, maps, plans, and photographs. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

ENAM 4500 - Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15

Combined with AAS 4500

This advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that Black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure Black identity? Can one be phenotypically White and still be Black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately Black? Readings include, but are not limited to, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White, and Jewish, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include critical essays, leading class discussion, midterm and final exams. This class is restricted to online waitlist and/or instructor permission. It is designed for students majoring in English, African American Studies, and/or American Studies.

ENAM 4500 - Space and Time in Harlem (3)

Instructor: Sandhya Shukla

Tues. 3:30-6:00PM

ENCR 4500- Race in American Places (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

Weds. 6:30-9:00PM

Combined with AAS 4500

How do assumptions about race operate when we consider the idea of an “American Place?” This interdisciplinary seminar interrogates this question by exploring place in America within the context of the “Culture Wars,” especially as these are catalyzed by the notion of race. We consider, for instance, how place is embroiled in the ideological work of distinguishing people according to identity and, then, of fixing identity groups within unyielding hierarchies. Consider, for example, how the seemingly innocuous story of The Three Little Pigs leads us to assume racial attributes of each pig based on materials and architectural styles. Thus, it seems so natural, so correct to identify groups of people as “primitive” and “destitute” versus “civilized” and “successful” based on assumptions about their housing. What are the implications of our culture’s insistence on promoting the notion that “Africans,” say, live in huts of mud or straw. We are interested in how such assumptions linking race and place are reinforced by planning, design, and preservation concepts and practice. How does the increasing popularity of Homeowners’ Associations maintain racial territories against the spirit of legal desegregation? Does the concurrency of homelessness and home-owners-associations in American society suggest anything about prevailing assumptions about a relationship between the right to privacy and racial and class identity? We study these questions with the help of targeted discussion of readings, required field trips to places around Charlottesville, informal workshops especially to develop the ability to interpret maps, plans, and other graphic representations of places, and student delivered presentations in class. Requirements include three informal small group exercises, an individual site-visit comment paper, a mid-term and final exam, and a group research project. The last requirement is presented in a symposium that represents the culmination of the semester.

Department of French Language & Literature

FREN 3046 - African Literatures and Cultures (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45PM

This course will explore aspects of African literatures and cultures. It will focus on selected issues of special resonance in contemporary African life. Oral literature and its continuing impact on all other art forms. Key issues in French colonial policy and its legacy in Africa: language, politics, education. The course will examine the image of the postcolonial state and society as found in contemporary arts, paintings, sculpture, music, and cinema. Selections from painters like Cheri Samba (Democratic Republic of Congo), Werewere Liking (Cameroun) and sculptors like Ousmane Sow, including such popular icons as Mamy Wata and forms such as Souwere glass painting; from musicians like Youssou Ndour (Senegal), Cheb Khaled (Algeria), Seigneur Rochereau, Tshala Muana (DRC), Salif Keita (Mali), and Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); from Mande, Peul, and Kabyle oral literatures in French translation; from filmmakers D.D. Mambety, Moussa Sene Absa, and Ngangura Mweze. Visit to National Museum of African Arts depending on availability of funding. The final grade will be based on contributions to discussions, a mid-term exam, 2 papers, and a final exam.

Selections from the following texts will feature among the required reading list:
Wéréwéré Liking - Statues colons
A. Sow - La Femme, la Vache, la Foi
D.T. Niane - Soundjata ou l'épopée mandingue
Amadou Hampaté Ba - Koumen

FREN 3585 - Literature and Culture of North Africa (3)

Instructor: Majida Bargash

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15PM

FREN 4743 Africa in Cinema (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM

 

Department of History

HIAF 2001 - Early African History through the Era of the Slave Trade (4)

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45AM

From the mists of the once-dark continent’s unwritten past Early African History draws out Africans’ distinctive strategies and achievements in culture, politics, and economics. Starting broadly at the dawn of history and continuing in detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 2001 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives without the technologies that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the ironic interplay of tragedy and ambition in a continent increasingly trapped in exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of modern African history, HIAF 2002, taught in spring semester, follows subsequent events down through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.)

HIAF 2001 is an introductory lower-division survey. The instructor presents the major themes of the early history of the continent in twice-weekly lectures. Students meet additionally in discussion sections for reviews of readings, map quizzes, and preparation for written assignments. Requirements include short written responses to each class, weekly short map quizzes, a short paper reacting to assigned readings, and a take-home final exercise. The course belongs to the Afro-American and African Studies curriculum, qualifies for the minor in African Studies, meets the “non-western/non-modern” requirement for the major in History, counts as an adjunct course for Studies in Women and Gender, and qualifies for the College area requirements in “non-western perspectives” and “historical perspective”.

HIAF 3021 - History of Southern Africa (3)

Instructor: John Edwin Mason

Tues/Thurs, 9:30-10:45AM

HIAF 3021 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The emphasis is on South Africa.

The course begins with a look at the pre-colonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.

By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest had not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs.

Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.

Course materials include biographies, memoirs, fiction, music, and films, as well as academic studies. Students will take periodic quizzes on the readings and write two blue-book exams, a mid-term and a final.

HIAF 4511 - Colloquium in African History: Color and Culture in South Africa and the United States (4)

Instructor: John Edwin Mason

Thurs. 3:30-4:45PM

HIAF 4511 is a small, research-oriented course that explores the histories of South Africa and the United States in comparative perspective.

South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries owe much of their early economic development to slavery. In both complex systems of racial domination shaped society for generations before and after the emancipation of the slaves. And in both the interracial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.

At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true. Both white supremacy and the struggle against it were more violent in South Africa than in the United States. And, since 1994, a democratic political system has ensured that black South Africans have enjoyed a degree of political power that black Americans have never experienced.

The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, music, photography, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.

HIAF 4511 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course must have taken at least one course in African history, preferably South Africa, and two courses in American history.

HIST 4591 - The Transatlantic Slave Trade (3-4)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

Thurs. 3:30-6:00PM

HIUS 3652 - African-American History Since 1865 (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15

Combined with AAS 3652

This course surveys the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Through an engagement with a wide range of primary and secondary texts, along with multimedia, students will examine African Americans’ endeavors to build strong families and communities, create vibrant and socially meaningful artistic productions, and establish a robust political infrastructure capable of bringing into existence a more just and humane world. Some of the questions that this course will explore include but are not limited to: How does an engagement with African American history broaden our understanding of such concepts as “freedom,” “democracy,” "race," and “nation.” How have African American leaders sought to shape U.S. public policy in ways that would enhance the quality of life for laboring people, particularly the working poor? What were the major philosophical and tactical points of disagreement among black freedom fighters during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras? And lastly, how have African Americans relied on artistic expression, i.e., music, television, film, and the visual arts, to strengthen their movements for social justice?

HIUS 3671 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Julian Bond

Tues. 3:30-5:30PM

This course will examine the origins, philosophies, tactics, events, personalities and consequences of the southern civil rights movement from 1900 to the mid-‘1960s. The movement, largely composed of grass-roots unknowns, was based on a culture of resistance instilled by racially restrictive laws and customs institutionalized by the resistant white South following the demise of Reconstruction. By employing a variety of tactics, at the end of the ‘60s decade, it had won impressive victories against state-sanctioned discrimination. Readings, lectures and videos will be the basis for the final examination. Students will be required to write two short papers. The final grade will be determined on the basis of the two papers (25% each), the final examination (30%), and discussion section participation (20%).

Texts required: Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, Thompson Learning Custom Publishing; Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press; Wilkins, Roy with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo.

Department of Music

MUEN 2690,3090,4690- Performance in Africa (4)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Tues./Thurs 5:15-7:15PM

By audition first day of class, no experience expected; A practical, hands-on course focusing on the singing, drumming, and dance from West Africa (Ewe Ghana/Togo) and Central African Republic (BaAka).

Department of Politics

PLAP 3340 - Race, Ethnicity and Immigration in American Politics (3)

Instructor: Vesla Weaver

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-6:00PM

PLCP 2120 Politics of Developing Areas (3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Mon./Weds. 9:00-9:50AM

PLCP 4810 - The Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa (3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Mon. 3:30-6:00PM

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; not open to students who have taken PLCP 381.

Department of Psychology

PSYC 4870 - The Minority Family (3)

Instructor: Melvin Wilson

Mon. 9:00-11:30AM

Examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing 'deficit' and 'strength' research paradigms. Prerequisite: PSYC 306 and at least one course from each of the following groups: PSYC 210, 215 or 230, and PSYC 240, 250 or 260, and students in the Afro-American and African studies or studies in women and gender programs.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 3900/RELI 3900 - Islam in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM

This course offers an historical and topical introduction to Islam in Africa. After a brief overview of the central features of the Muslim faith, our chronological survey begins with the introduction of Islam to North Africa in the 7th century. We will trace the transmission of Islam via traders, clerics, and jihads to West Africa. We shall consider the medieval Muslim kingdoms; the development of Islamic scholarship and the reform tradition; the growth of Sufi brotherhoods; and the impact of colonization and de-colonization upon Islam. Our overview of the history of Islam in East Africa will cover: the early Arab and Asian mercantile settlements; the flowering of classical Swahili courtly culture; the Omani sultanates and present-day Swahili society as well as recent "Islamist" movements in the Sudan and other parts of the East African interior.
Readings and classroom discussions provide a more in-depth exploration of topics encountered in our historical survey. Through the use of ethnographical and literary materials, we will explore questions such as the translation and transmission of the Qur'an, indigenization and religious pluralism; the role of women in African Islam; and African Islamic spirituality. Midterm, final, short paper, participation in discussion.

RELC 2559 - Pentecostalism (3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

Mon./Weds. 2:00-3:15

This course will study the history, theology, and practices of Pentecostalism, the fastest growing Christian movement in the world, from its origins among poor whites and recently freed African Americans to its phenomenal expansion in places like South America, Asia, and Africa. We will explore Pentecostalism’s theological and historical relationship to the Methodist, Holiness, Apostolic, and Charismatic movements, as well as Pentecostal belief in phenomena like speaking in tongues, healings, miracles, and prophecy. During the course of the semester, we will ask how Pentecostalism has come to encompass one in every four Christians worldwide in the space of little over a century. Finally, the course will use race, class, and gender analysis to evaluate the cultural influences and future trajectory of Pentecostalism in the US and elsewhere in the world.

RELC 3559 - African-Americans and the Bible (3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

Tues. 3:30-6:00PM

RELG 2700 - Festivals of the Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45AM

Combined with AAS 2700

By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion (Jonathan Z. Smith, Ronald Grimes, Lawrence Sullivan), and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity.

RELG 3360 - Religions in the New World(3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

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

A history course which examines Latin American and Caribbean religions from the 1400s through the 1830s. We will proceed topically (in rough chronological order), studying religious encounters during the pre-Columbian era, the Spanish conquest and colonial eras, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Latin American independence (1820s), and slave emancipation in the anglophone Caribbean (1830s). The class will focus primarily upon the signature religious episodes, devotions, personalities and institutions of indigenous, African, Afro-creole, and mestizo communities, since these "gente de color" constituted the majority population in the New World during this historical epoch. We will consider issues of historiography?specifically, the problem of interpreting (sometimes hostile) extant archival sources and the use of such primary material in the writing of secondary literature. Students will develop their abilities to evaluate primary sources (in translation), and to identify the interpretive choices which scholars make in the crafting of historical narratives

Department of Sociology

SOC 3410 - Race & Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon./Weds. 2:00-2:50PM

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 (3)

Instructor: Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl

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

The purpose of this course is to provide students with a clear more comprehensive understanding of the history, struggle and diversity of the AfricanAmerican community. Emphasis will be placed on salient contemporary public issues as well as on the historical role of the AfricanAmerican Community within urban society and on the need for students to obtain knowledge of their cultural history. The course will approach these topics from a framework of analysis with consideration for AfricanAmerican people sociological and historical relationship to the political and economic system in America. By means of discussions, lectures, videos, reading and class presentation as well as written assignments, this course will provide new insights and perspectives into the dynamic of the AfricanAmerican community.

SOC 4870 - Immigration (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon./Weds. 4:20-5:45PM

This course examines contemporary immigration into the United States from the point of view of key theoretical debates and historical circumstances that have shaped current American attitudes toward immigration.

Studies in Women and Gender

SWAG 2224 - Black Femininities and Masculinities in the Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon. 6:30-9:00PM

This course 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 media 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.

Fall 2012

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African-American and African Studies Program

AAS1010 Introduction to African-American and African Studies I (4)

Instructor:

Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance and three written exams.

AAS 2700 Festivals of the Americas (3)

Combined with RELG 2700

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion (Jonathan Z. Smith, Ronald Grimes, Lawrence Sullivan), and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity.

AAS 3000 Women and Religion in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cindy Hoehler-Fatton

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

This course examines women's religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women.

AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Combined with RELG 3200

Instructor: Mark Hadley

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

AAS 3280 Reading the Black College Campus (3)

Instructor: Ian Kendrich Grandison

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45

Historically Black Colleges and University campuses are records of the process of democratizing (extending to excluded social groups such as African-Americans) opportunities for higher education in America. Through landscapes, we trace this record, unearthing the politics of landscapes via direct experience as well as via interpretations of representations of landscapes in literature, visual arts, maps, plans, and photographs.

AAS 3500-001 Black Protest Narrative (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? What is the relation between political protest and aesthetic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, anti-Semitism, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion (including Nation of Islam), crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Some major works include Richard Wright’s Native Son, Angelo Herndon’s Let Me Live, Ann Petry’s The Street, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride toward Freedom, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Audre Lorde’s Zami, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and sociology. We’ll study the cross-over film No Way Out, the black exploitation film Superfly, and black independent films Killer of Sheep and Tongues Untied. Requirements include heavy reading schedule, midterm, final exam, and reading journal.

AAS 3500-002 Social Science Perspectives on African-American and African Studies (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

This course surveys seminal theories, concepts, and texts across the social sciences that contribute to African-American and African Studies. We draw on disciplines such as sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, and epidemiology, and we consider their distinctive, but complementary perspectives on the racial contours of debates about education, health, incarceration, and other social issues.

AAS 3500-003 Framing the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Combined ENAM 3500

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

This multi-media course will survey selected fiction, non-fiction, photography and film from the U. S. Civil Rights Movement. The arc of the course spans the Brown v. Topeka decision (1954) to the emergence of SNCC and the Black Power Movement. Topics for discussion will include the interplay between history and memory, as well as gender, sexuality, and class, in representations of the period; ideologies of black liberation and the tactics of mass protest; the relationship between the movement and mass media industries; debates about race and rights; the politics of race and the fragility of citizenship; the economics of racial oppression and resistance.

AAS 3652 African American History since 1865 (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

This course surveys the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Through an engagement with various primary and secondary texts, and multimedia, students examine African Americans' endeavors to build strong families and communities, create socially meaningful art, and establish a political infrastructure capable of bringing into existence a more just and humane world.

AAS 4070 Directed Reading and Research (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Time: TBA

Students in the Distinguished Majors Program should enroll in this course for their first semester of thesis research.

AAS 4500 Race, Space and Culture (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross

Combined with ENCR 4500

Mon 6:30-9:00

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.
AAS 4570 What's Love Got to do with it? (3)

Instructor: Kwame Holmes

Wed 3:30-6:00

This research seminar explores the way popular assumptions about "normal" gender roles and sexualities have both shaped African American history, determined the encounter of black and white in the United States and remain central to the construction of black identity. Central questions this course will explore include: How have race and sexuality been socially constructed alongside one another in the United States? How have desire and intimacy become commodified and politicized through the prism of race? Topical concerns that will be addressed include: Is marriage for white people and if so, does that matter? What is the relationship between "black" and "gay" identity and social movements in the United States? What are the politics of inter and intra-racial relationships? This course will begin with a month of theoretical readings on the construction of race and sexuality in the United States. From there, we will analyze a range of primary sources from the period of enslavement to the modern era. Students will be expected to write a 20 page research paper on a topic of their choosing related to the interaction of race, gender and sexuality in North America.

American Studies

AMST 2220 - Race, Identity and American Studies Visual Culture

Instructor: Carmenita Higginbotham

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45, Bryan Hall 235

This course surveys the role that visual culture played in constructing racial and ethnic identities in the United States from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century. Debates about immigration, nationalism, labor and urbanism will be explored through an examination of critical texts and images (including advertisements, cartoons, films, paintings and photographs.) Importantly, the course will encourage students to engage with theoretical, ideological and aesthetic concerns regarding ethnicity, race, class and gender across media.

Art History

ARTH 2745 - African American Art

Intructor: Carmenita Higginbotham

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

This course surveys the visual arts (painting, sculpture, photography, prints, mixed media and textiles) produced by those of African descent in the United States from the Colonial period to the present. Presented both chronologically and thematically, the class interrogates issues of artistic identity, gender, patronage and the aesthetic influences of the African Diaspora and European and Euro-American aesthetics on African American artists.

Department of Drama

DRAM 307 - African-American Theatre

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

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

Department of English

ENLT 2547 Black Writers in America: Literature of Civil Rights

Instructor: Audrey Golden

Restricted to 1st and 2nd Year Students

Tues/Thurs 5:00-6:15

This course will examine the relationship between the literary and legal texts of the American Civil Rights movement. We will begin with W.E.B. DuBois’ and Booker T. Washington’s writings, appearing soon after the United States Supreme Court’s “separate but equal” ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). We will ask how these early texts inform the thinking behind such seminal novels as Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), both appearing in the Jim Crow era. We will then put these early novels in conversation with the 1950s and 1960s political writings of the Civil Rights movement. Looking at these literary materials in conjunction with excerpts from legal documents and related theoretical texts, this course will examine the ways in which literature has shaped Black personhood before the law, the literary mechanisms for imagining equal rights in the first half of the twentieth century, and the ways in which the aims of literature and law may (or may not) have coincided with the passing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The later part of this course then will consider both the literary and legal ramifications of “Civil Rights” in America and will question the role that post-1964 literature may play in imagining civil rights remedies for cases in which the law has proven limited. Likely literary and political texts will include those of W.E.B. DuBois, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Anthony Grooms. Requirements will include three papers, several short response papers, and a final exam.

ENEC 3120 - Sensibility, Slavery, and Revolution

Instructor: Brad Pasanek

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

“INDEPENDENCE and SLAVERY are synonymous terms.”
“Reason is and ought only to be a slave to the passions.”
“They say that I am a tyrant. Rather, I am a slave, a slave of Liberty.”

ENEC 3120 is a survey of the transatlantic literature of slavery and revolution published in the late eighteenth century. The three sentiments set out above — the first American, the second British, the third French — begin to illustrate paradoxical relations of mastery, servitude, tyranny, and rebellion in the period. The Enlightenment moment is characterized by reform, abolition, and revolt; and the literature of the period participates in this politics. Pleasures, profits, and violence mark vertices in the triangular exchanges between Europe, Africa, and America; discussion will consider how the literal trade in slaves and sugar figures in literary history. As we investigate a period of English literature traditionally labeled “The Age of Sensibility” or “The Age of Johnson,” we will read mainly prose (some fiction but also political pamphlets and biography) and poetry. Course requirements: weekly reading assignments, two papers, and a final.

ENMC 4500 African-American Drama

Instructor: Lotta Löfgren

Tues/Thurs 3:30-4:45

We will survey African-American drama from the 1950's to the present. We will place the drama in relation to established norms, investigating the motives and methods of the playwrights for carving out new ground. We will examine the shared and divergent concerns of male and female playwrights, their sense of audience, the dilemma of writing as an individual and as a member of a group silenced too long, their relationship to the past, the present, and the future. We will also examine the changing definitions of the black aesthetic. Playwrights include, among others, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Amiri Baraka, Ntozake Shange, August Wilson, and Suzan-Lori Parks.

ENAM 3500 Black Protest Narrative

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Mon/Wed 2:00-3:15

Cross-listed with AAS 3500

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? What is the relation between political protest and aesthetic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, anti-Semitism, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion (including Nation of Islam), crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Some major works include Richard Wright’s Native Son,Angelo Herndon’s Let Me Live,Ann Petry’s The Street, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride toward Freedom, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Audre Lorde’s Zami, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and sociology. We’ll study the cross-over film No Way Out, the black independent films Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. Requirements include heavy reading schedule, midterm, final exam, and reading journal.

ENAM 3500 Framing the Civil Rights Movement

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Tues/Thurs 12:00-1:15

This multi-media course will survey selected fiction, non-fiction, photography and film from the U. S. Civil Rights Movement. The arc of the course spans the Brown v. Topeka decision (1954) to the emergence of SNCC and the Black Power Movement. Topics for discussion will include the interplay between history and memory, as well as gender, sexuality, and class, in representations of the period; ideologies of black liberation and the tactics of mass protest; the relationship between the movement and mass media industries; debates about race and rights; the politics of race and the fragility of citizenship; the economics of racial oppression and resistance.

ENAM 4814 African-American Women Authors

Instructor: Angela Davis

Tues/Thurs 930-1045

Restricted to English, African-American Studies, Women Studies, Poetry Program majors

We will read several novels and short stories by African American women, examining in particular how the authors portray black women as individuals and in the context of American society. This course requires active class participation, two written responses to readings (each 2 to 3 double spaced typed pages long) and a formal essay (12 to 15 pages long). The reading list is: Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God; Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls; Toni Morrison, Sula, and Tar Baby; Alice Walker, In Love and Trouble; Paule Marshall, Brown Girl, Brownstones; Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place. Prerequisite: The course is first offered to fourth year majors in English, Women's Studies and Afro-American and African Studies.

ENCR 4500 Race, Space and Culture

Instructors: Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross

Mon 6:30-9:00

Cross-listed with AAS 4500

Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, 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.

ENMC 3500-South African Literature of Apartheid and the Transition

Instructor: Dr. Barbara Boswell

Tu/Thu 12:30– 1:45pm

This survey course critically examines key South African novels in English, noting the ways in which selected writers engaged racial segregation and the growing disenfranchisement of citizens during apartheid. It also highlights the transitional period from apartheid to de-mocracy during the 1990s, investigating new literary forms and traditions generated by the transition to de-mocracy. Focusing on prominent 20th and 21st century South African texts, the course notes how writers have critiqued apartheid, as well as emerging nationalisms and the nation-building projects of post-apartheid South Africa. Novels may include: Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country (1948), J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die (1989), Zakes Mda’s The Madonna of Excelsior (2002), Sindiwe Magona’s Mother to Mother (1998), and Phaswane Mpe’s Welcome to Our Hillbrow (2001).

Department of French Language & Literature

FREN 3046 – African Literatures & Cultures

Instructor: Kandoura Dramé

Tues/Thurs 3:30 – 4:45

This course will explore aspects of African literatures and cultures. It will focus on selected issues of special resonance in contemporary African life. Oral literature and its continuing impact on all other art forms will be explored. Key issues in French colonial policy and its legacy in Africa: language, politics, education, etc. The course will examine the images of the postcolonial state and society as found in contemporary arts, paintings, sculpture, music and cinema. Selections from painters like Cheri Samba (Democratic Republic of Congo), Werewere Liking (Cameroun) and sculptors like Ousmane Sow, including such popular icons as Mamy Wata and forms such as Souwere glass painting; from musicians like Youssou Ndour (Senegal), Cheb Khaled (Algeria), Seigneur Rochereau, Tshala Muana (DRC), Selif Keita (Mali), and Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); from Mande, Peul, and Kabyle oral literatures in French translation; from filmmakers D.D. Mambety, Moussa Sene Absa, and Ngangura Mweze. Visit to National Museum of African Arts depending on availability of funding. The final grade will be based on contributions to discussions, a mid-term exam, two papers and a final exam.

FREN 4743 – Africa in Cinema

Instructor: Kandouira Dramé

Tues/Thurs 11:00 – 12:15

This course is a study of the representation of Africa in American, Western European and African films. It deals with the representations of African cultures by filmmakers from different cultural backgrounds and studies the ways in which their perspectives on Africa are often informed by their own social and ideological positions as well as the demands of exoticism. It also examines the constructions of the African as the "other" and the kinds of responses such constructions have elicited from Africa's filmmakers. These filmic inventions@are analyzed through a selection of French, British, American, and African films by such directors as John Huston, S. Pollack, J-J Annaud, M. Radford, Ngangura Mweze, Jean-Pierre Bekolo, Souleymane Cisse, Gaston Kabore, Amadou Seck, Dani Kouyate, Brian Tilley, Jean-Marie Teno on a variety of subjects relative to the image of Africa in cinema. The final grade will be based on one mid-semester paper (select a film by an African filmmaker and provide a sequential reconstruction of the story based on the methods of P. S. Vieyra and of F.Boughédir), a final paper (7-10 pages), an oral presentation and contributions to discussions. Each oral presentation should contribute to the mid-semester paper and to the final research paper. The final paper should be analytical, well documented and written in clear, grammatical French using correct film terminology.

Department of History

HIAF 2001: Early African History through the Era of the Slave Trade

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

From the mists of the once-dark continent’s unwritten past Early African History draws out Africans’ distinctive strategies and achievements in culture, politics, and economics. Starting broadly at the dawn of history and continuing in greater detail from the millennium before the Present Era, HIAF 2001 follows the sometimes-surprising ways in which village elders, women, merchants, kings, cattle lords, and ordinary farmers pursued meaningful lives with strategies of community that contrast with the materiality and individualism that modern Americans take for granted. The last third of the course examines the interplay of tragedy and ambition in a continent increasingly exiling its own people in slavery to Europeans, until the Atlantic slave trade began to wind down after about 1800. (A second semester of modern African history, HIAF 2002, taught in spring semester, follows subsequent events through twentieth-century colonialism and the post-1960 era of independence and impoverishment.) http://www.virginia.edu/history/node/2410

HIAF 3021: History of Southern Africa

Instructor: John Edwin Mason

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

HIAF 3021 is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with an emphasis on the country of South Africa. The course begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.

By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires. Conquest had not come easily. Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated. Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs. Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements. Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.

Course materials include biographies, memoirs, fiction, music, and films, as well as academic studies. Students will take periodic quizzes on the readings and write two blue-book exams, a mid-term and a final.

HIAF 4511: Colloquium in African History, "Color and Culture in South Africa and the United States"

Instructor: John Mason

Tues/Thurs 3:30-4:45

South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries complex systems of racial domination shaped the politics and cultures of both societies -- for good (for instance, rock & roll) and bad (for instance, slavery). And in both an inter-racial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.

At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true.

The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, film, music, photography, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.

HIAF 4511 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course must have taken at least one course in African history (preferably South Africa) and a course in American history.

HIUS 3471: American Labor History

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs 11:00-12:15

This course examines the political engagements, labor struggles, and cultural endeavors of the U.S. working class from the end of the Civil War to the present. It chronicles how the lives of the U.S. laboring majority was shaped by the rise of big business during the Gilded Age, the social upheavals of the World War I era, the economic hardships brought about by the Great Depression, the social policies of the New Deal, the emergence of the Civil Rights Movement, and continuing debates over the meanings of work, citizenship, and democracy in the United States. A major issue to be explored in our discussions of U.S. working class history will be in the ways in which laboring people have been divided along racial, gender, ethnic, and regional lines.

HIST 4501: Major Seminar, "Sex, Stereotypes, and the Seduction of Africa"

Instructor: Cody Perkins

Tues 3:30-6:00

This course will highlight the diverse historical interpretations of sexualities in African history since 18th-century interactions between Africans and Europeans through the modern AIDS crisis in central and southern Africa. In addition to prominent themes in scholarly literatures, the course aims to enable students to recognize popular stereotypes and myths pertaining to Africans and the African continent as an imagined space. Stereotypes about Africans, the African environment, and sexualities in general will figure prominently in our discussions as we consider how stereotypes are created and what their modern implications might be. We will also consider the diverse meanings Africans placed in sex as a performance of love, companionship, political protest, and community identities. Readings in the first six weeks of the course are intended to expose students to historical interpretations and debates about African sexualities as they consider possible research paper topics.

HIAF 4511: Colloquium in African History, "Color and Culture in South Africa and the United States"

Instructor: John Mason

Tues/Thurs 3:30-4:45

South Africa and the American South are cousins: instantly recognizable as members of the same family, but with distinctively different personalities. Both countries complex systems of racial domination shaped the politics and cultures of both societies -- for good (for instance, rock & roll) and bad (for instance, slavery). And in both an inter-racial struggle against racial domination gave rise to some of the most important people and events in their histories.

At the same time, the differences between the two countries cannot be ignored. In South Africa blacks constitute the overwhelming majority of the population, and the descendants of European immigrants are a small minority. In the United States, of course, the reverse is true.

The course holds the similarities and differences between the two countries in a creative tension. Through biography, autobiography, film, music, photography, and scholarship, we will look at the ways in which race shaped the lives of South Africans and Americans, both black and white.

HIAF 4511 is designed primarily, but not exclusively, for history majors and fulfills the history department's seminar/colloquium requirement. Students enrolling in the course must have taken at least one course in African history (preferably South Africa) and a course in American history.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 2750 African Religions(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mon/Wed 12:00-12:50

An introductory survey of African religions. The course concentrates on African indigenous religions, but Islam and Christianity are also discussed. Topics include African mythologies and cosmologies, as well as rituals, artistic traditions and spiritualities. We consider the colonial impact on African religious cultures and the dynamics of ongoing religious change in the sub-Sahara.

RELA 5559 New Course in African Relgions: Evangelism in Contemporary Africa(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Thurs 3:30-6:00

This seminar examines Christian missions in Africa over the past two decades. We consider foreign, faith-based initiatives in Africa, as well as African missionaries in Europe and the U.S. How are missionary efforts being transformed in response to democratization, globalization and a growing awareness of human rights? What is the relationship between evangelism and development, proselytism and humanitarian aid, mission and education today?

RELG 2700 Festivals of the Americas(3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion (Jonathan Z. Smith, Ronald Grimes, Lawrence Sullivan), and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity.

RELG 3200 Martin, Malcolm, and America(3)

Instructor: Mark Hadley

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

RELG 3360 Religions in the New World(3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

A history course which examines Latin American and Caribbean religions from the 1400s through the 1830s. We will proceed topically (in rough chronological order), studying religious encounters during the pre-Columbian era, the Spanish conquest and colonial eras, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Latin American independence (1820s), and slave emancipation in the anglophone Caribbean (1830s). The class will focus primarily upon the signature religious episodes, devotions, personalities and institutions of indigenous, African, Afro-creole, and mestizo communities, since these "gente de color" constituted the majority population in the New World during this historical epoch. We will consider issues of historiography?specifically, the problem of interpreting (sometimes hostile) extant archival sources and the use of such primary material in the writing of secondary literature. Students will develop their abilities to evaluate primary sources (in translation), and to identify the interpretive choices which scholars make in the crafting of historical narratives.

Department of Sociology

SOC 3410 Race & Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon/Wed 3:30-4:45

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 African-American Communities (3)

[accordion]

Instructor: TBA

Tues/Thurs 11:00-12:15

Prerequisites: Six credits of sociology or permission of instructor

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

Studies in Women and Gender

WGS 2224 Black Femininities and Masculinities in Media(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon 6:30-9:00

Combined with MDST
This course 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 media 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.

WGS 3250: MotherLands: Landscapes of Hunger, Futures of Plenty (3)

Instructor: Kendra Hamilton

Tues/Thurs12:30-1:45

This course explores the legacy of the "hidden wounds" left upon the landscape by plantation slavery along with the visionary work of ecofeminist scholars and activists daring to imagine an alternative future. Readings, guest lectures, and field trips illumine the ways in which gender, race, and power are encoded in historical, cultural, and physical landscapes associated with planting/extraction regimes such as tobacco, mining, sugar, and corn. Course satisfies the Global Perspectives requirement.

WGS 3559 – African-American Women in 20th Century Visual Arts(3)

Instructor: Jacqueline Taylor

Mon/Wed/Fri10:00-10:50

Through the 20th century, African‐American women, like their white counterparts, challenged gender constraints on their political, social and economic rights. Unlike their white counterparts, however, black women battled a long history of entrenched racist ideology. From the first moments of encounter, European imperialists appropriated the black body in service of a propaganda of consumption and exploitation. Subjected to the male gaze, women of African descent were imagined as exotic and highly sexualized, or barbaric and hideous, providing evidence in support of white superiority. In the 20th century however, African Americans sought to overturn negative stereotypes of the black female body, replacing them with both real and differently imagined black female identities. This course will explore the ways in which African American women presented themselves and were represented in visual culture from the New Negro to the Black Power Movement and beyond.

Fall 2013

View current course listings page

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS1010 Introduction to African-American and African Studies I (4)

Instructor:

Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance and three written exams.

AAS 2700 Festivals of the Americas (3)

Combined with RELG 2700

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues/Thurs 9:30-10:45

By reading case studies of various religious festivals in locations throughout the Caribbean and South, Central and North America, as well as theoretical literature drawn from social anthropology and religious studies, students will become familiar with significant features of contemporary religious life in the Americas, as well as with scholarly accounts of religious and cultural change. Students will become more critical readers of ethnographic and historical sources, as well as theories from the Study of Religion (Jonathan Z. Smith, Ronald Grimes, Lawrence Sullivan), and will increase their ability to theorize about ritual, festivity, sacred time, ritual space and ethnicity.

AAS 3000 Women and Religion in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cindy Hoehler-Fatton

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

This course examines women's religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women.

AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Combined with RELG 3200

Instructor: Mark Hadley

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

AAS 3280 Reading the Black College Campus (3)

Instructor: Ian Kendrich Grandison

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45

Historically Black Colleges and University campuses are records of the process of democratizing (extending to excluded social groups such as African-Americans) opportunities for higher education in America. Through landscapes, we trace this record, unearthing the politics of landscapes via direct experience as well as via interpretations of representations of landscapes in literature, visual arts, maps, plans, and photographs.

AAS 3500-001 Black Protest Narrative (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? What is the relation between political protest and aesthetic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, anti-Semitism, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion (including Nation of Islam), crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Some major works include Richard Wright’s Native Son, Angelo Herndon’s Let Me Live, Ann Petry’s The Street, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride toward Freedom, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Audre Lorde’s Zami, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and sociology. We’ll study the cross-over film No Way Out, the black exploitation film Superfly, and black independent films Killer of Sheep and Tongues Untied. Requirements include heavy reading schedule, midterm, final exam, and reading journal.

AAS 3500-002 Social Science Perspectives on African-American and African Studies (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

This course surveys seminal theories, concepts, and texts across the social sciences that contribute to African-American and African Studies. We draw on disciplines such as sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, and epidemiology, and we consider their distinctive, but complementary perspectives on the racial contours of debates about education, health, incarceration, and other social issues.

AAS 3500-003 Framing the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Combined ENAM 3500

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15

This multi-media course will survey selected fiction, non-fiction, photography and film from the U. S. Civil Rights Movement. The arc of the course spans the Brown v. Topeka decision (1954) to the emergence of SNCC and the Black Power Movement. Topics for discussion will include the interplay between history and memory, as well as gender, sexuality, and class, in representations of the period; ideologies of black liberation and the tactics of mass protest; the relationship between the movement and mass media industries; debates about race and rights; the politics of race and the fragility of citizenship; the economics of racial oppression and resistance.

AAS 3500-004 African Worlds - Life Stories(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon. 3:30-6:00

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither!

AAS 3500-005 History of the Civil Rights (3)

Instructor: Lynn French

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45

TBA

 

AAS 3652 African American History since 1865 (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

This course surveys the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Through an engagement with various primary and secondary texts, and multimedia, students examine African Americans' endeavors to build strong families and communities, create socially meaningful art, and establish a political infrastructure capable of bringing into existence a more just and humane world.

AAS 3749 Food Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Tues. 3:30-6:00

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 or have been forced to move. 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. Topics will include symbol, taboo, sexuality, bodiesm ritual, kinships and beauty among others.

AAS 4070 Directed Reading and Research (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Time: TBA

Students in the Distinguished Majors Program should enroll in this course for their first semester of thesis research.

AAS 4500 Race, Space and Culture (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross

Combined with ENCR 4500

Mon 6:30-9:00

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.

AAS 4570 Black Womanhood and the Politics of the Body (3)

Instructor: Zakiyyah Jackson

Wed. 3:30-6:00

This course examines political and cultural constructions of black women's bodies in the United States. It aims to situate Black women’s literary representations of “the black female body" within the political and historical contexts in which these works are produced. The course will place emphasis on black feminist interventions into legal, scientific, medical, and philosophical constructions of black womanhood, particularly with respect to constructions of black women’s gender and sexuality.

PSYC 4870 The Minority Family: A Psychological Inquiry

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Time & Day: TBA

Description coming.

Anthropology

ANTH 2500 Anthropology of the Caribbean (3)

Instructor: Kristin Lahatte

Intensive studies of particular world regions, societies, cultures, and civilizations.

ANTH 3559-001 Food and Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Tues.3:30-6:00

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 or have been forced to move. 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. Topics will include symbol, taboo, sexuality, bodiesm ritual, kinships and beauty among others.

ANTH 3559-002 (Imagining Africa)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Day & Time: TBA

Description coming.

ANTH 3603, Archaeological Approaches to Atlantic Slavery (3)

Instructor: Frasier Naiman

Wed. 4:30-7:00

This course explores how archaeological and architectural evidence can be used to enhance our understanding of the slave societies that evolved in the early-modern Atlantic world. The primary focus is the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, the later exemplified by Jamaica and Nevis. The course is structured around a series of data-analysis projects that draw on the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (http://www.daacs.org).

Architectural History

ARH 3500 Black Women in the Visual Arts(3)

Jacqueline Taylor

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15

Topical offerings in architectural history

ARH 3603, Archaeological Approaches to Atlantic Slavery (3)

Frasier Naiman

Wed.4:30-7:00

This course explores how archaeological and architectural evidence can be used to enhance our understanding of the slave societies that evolved in the early-modern Atlantic world. The primary focus is the Chesapeake and the British Caribbean, the later exemplified by Jamaica and Nevis. The course is structured around a series of data-analysis projects that draw on the Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery.

Drama

DRAM 3070, African American Theatre (3)

Instructo: Theresa Davis

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

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

English

ENAM 3500-001, Black Protest Narrative(3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? What is the relation between political protest and aesthetic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, anti-Semitism, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion (including Nation of Islam), crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Some major works include Richard Wright’s Native Son, Angelo Herndon’s Let Me Live, Ann Petry’s The Street, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride toward Freedom, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Audre Lorde’s Zami, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and sociology. We’ll study the cross-over film No Way Out, the black independent films Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. Requirements include heavy reading schedule, midterm, final exam, and reading journal.

ENAM 3500-002 Framing the Civil Rights Movement(3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

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

ENAM 5559 Contemporary African American Literature(3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45

This seminar uses the concept of time as a foundation for exploring selected works of contemporary African American Literature. Time is a useful representational concept in so far as it allows for a wide-ranging assessment of literary and cultural tropes. Time is a noun and a verb; it is the basis for history. It can be on our side or we can run out of it. It can heal all wounds or it can be a wound itself. These are the types of questions that will be used as a beginning for larger and evolving conversations about the works listed below. The course is also committed to helping students develop their own research agenda through formation of a culminating seminar paper and cultivate pedagogic techniques using the discussion-leading portion.

ENCR 4500-001 Race, Space and Culture (3)

Instructors: Kenrick Ian Grandison & Marlon Ross

Tues. 6:30-9:00

This seminar uses the concept of time as a foundation for exploring selected works of contemporary African American Literature. Time is a useful representational concept in so far as it allows for a wide-ranging assessment of literary and cultural tropes. Time is a noun and a verb; it is the basis for history. It can be on our side or we can run out of it. It can heal all wounds or it can be a wound itself. These are the types of questions that will be used as a beginning for larger and evolving conversations about the works listed below. The course is also committed to helping students develop their own research agenda through formation of a culminating seminar paper and cultivate pedagogic techniques using the discussion-leading portion.

ENCR 4500-002 Race in American Places

Instructor: Kenrick Ian Grandison

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45
 

ENLT 2547-001 Prophets of the Hood (3)

Instructor: Jason Saunders

Mon./Wed. 5:00-6:15

Why do we so often associate black life with urban space? This class will explore how black writers have collaborated, contested, and wrestled with the urbanization of blackness over the 20th and 21st centuries. We’ll not just read across genres and artistic forms (i.e. drama, autobiographies, novels, and poems) but through literary movements and historical periods as well. Likely authors include Charles Chestnutt, Nella Larsen, Richard Wright, Loraine Hansberry, Gwendolyn Brooks, Malcolm X, John Edgar Wideman, Sapphire, and Jay Z. The course requirements are two five page and one ten page paper, a final exam, and lots of conversation.

ENLT 2547-002 Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 8:00-9:15

This seminar uses Black women’s writings from mid-century to the present to introduce new English majors to important concepts in literary analysis. To better understand genre, themes, and assorted literary conventions, we will focus closely on a range of literary styles. We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day. Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women’s writing of the last fifty years? How has the literature adapted in response to specific cultural or historical moments?

ENLT 2547-003 Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Shermaine Jones

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

Challenging the national boundaries that commonly define literary studies, this course offers a survey of 20th century black women writers to locate a traditionally marginal group at the center of discussions of race, gender, and nation. Students will examine works of African, Afro-Caribbean, and African American women writers through feminist and post-colonial frameworks. We will not only examine the similarities and thematic commonalities in these works but also the differences due to distinctive historical, spatial, and cultural imperatives. Central concerns of the course include: sexuality, motherhood, violence against women, resistance, identity, and family. While novels are the primary text in this course, we will also explore poetry, drama, and film.

French

FREN 3585-001 Francophone Caribbean (3)

Instructor: Stephanie Berard

Mon./Wed. 5:00-6:15

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 3585-002, North African Literature and Culture (3)

Instructor: Majida Bargach

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45

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.

History

HIAF 2001 Early African History (3)

Instructor: Joseph Miller

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45

Studies the history of African civilizations from the iron age through the era of the slave trade, ca. 1800. Emphasizes the search for the themes of social, political, economic, and intellectual history which present African civilizations on their own terms.

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa (3)

Instructor: John Mason

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:20

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times.

HIUS 3652 African American History since 1865 (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

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

Politics

PLAP 3820, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties(3)

Instructor: David Klein

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15

Studies judicial construction and interpretation of civil rights and liberties reflected by Supreme Court decisions. Includes line-drawing between rights and obligations.

PLCP 2120, Politics of Developing Areas(3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Mon./Wed. 9:00-9:50

Surveys patterns of government and politics in non-Western political systems. Topics include political elites, sources of political power, national integration, economic development, and foreign penetration.

PLCP 4500-001 Imperialism and Globalization(3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Thurs. 3:30-6:00

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

Religious Studies

RELA 3000 Women and Religion in Africa(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

This course examines women's religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women.

RELA 3890 Christianity in Africa(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mon./Wed. 1:00-1:50

Historical and topical survey of Christianity in Africa from the second century c.e. to the present. Cross listed with RELC 3890. Prerequisite: A course in African religions or history, Christianity, or instructor permission.

RELC 3890 Christianity in Africa(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mon./Wed. 1:00-1:50

Historical and topical survey of Christianity in Africa from the second century c.e. to the present. Cross listed with RELA 3890. Prerequisite: A course in African religions or history, Christianity, or instructor permission.

RELG 2700, Festivals of the Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues./Thur. 9:30-10:45

Readings will include contemporary ethnographies of religious festivals in the Caribbean ans South, Central, and North America, and increase their knowledge of the concepts of sacred time and space, ritual theory, and the relationships between religious celebration and changing accounts of ethnicity.

RELG 3200, Martin, Malcom and America(3)

Insrtructor: Mark Hadley

Tues./Thurs.9:30-10:45

An analysis of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

RELG 3800, African American Religious History(3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

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

This course will explore African American religious traditions in their modern and historical contexts, combining an examination of current scholarship, worship and praxis. It will examine the religious life and religious institutions of African Americans from their African antecedents to contemporary figures and movements in the US.

Sociology

SOC 2442 Systems of Inequality(3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs. 10:00-10:45

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.

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15

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 4420, Sociology of Inequality (3)

Instructor: Paul Kingston

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15

Surveys basic theories and methods used to analyze structures of social inequality. Includes comparative analysis of the inequalities of power and privilege, and their causes and consequences for social conflict and social change. Prerequisite: Six credits of sociology or instructor permission.

Women and Gender Studies

WGS 3450, Presenting & Representing African American Women in 20th Century Visual Arts (3)

Instructor: Jacqueline Taylor

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15

Through the twentieth century, African-American women challenged gender constraints on their political, social and economic rights. This course explores the role of the visual arts in reinforcing and countering images of African American women's identity. We will examine women in visual art, architecture, film and popular culture within the context of cultural, political and social change.

Fall 2014

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

AAS1010 Introduction to African American and African Studies I (4)

Instructor: Jim La Fleur

Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance and three written exams.

AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Combined with RELG 3200

Instructor: Mark Hadley

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

AAS 3500 Social Science Perspectives on African American and African Studies (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15

This course surveys seminal theories, concepts, and texts across the social sciences that contribute to African American and African Studies. We draw on disciplines such as sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, and epidemiology, and we consider their distinctive, but complementary perspectives on the racial contours of debates about education, health, incarceration, and other social issues.

AAS 3500 African Worlds through Life Stories (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Tues. 3:30-6:00

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither!

 

AAS 3559 Gordon Parks-Documentary Tradition (3)

Instructor: John Mason

Tues/Thurs. 3:30-4:45

Gordon Parks and the American Documentary Tradition, is a special one-time-only course that explores work of one of the most important artists of the 20th century. For nearly half a century, Parks' photography, writing, and films made him one of the most important black voices in American culture. Although his 1971 hit movie "Shaft" made him a celebrity, his photojournalism, fiction, and an autobiography had already brought him considerable fame.

The course coincides with a major exhibition of Parks' photography that opens at the University's Fralin Museum of Art in September 2014. The course will take advantage of the exhibition itself and the various programs, films, and guest speakers that will accompany it.

AAS 3559 will look at all aspects of his career, with a special emphasis on his photojournalism. It will also view Parks in the context of the history of which he was such an important part -- the American tradition of documentary film, photography, and writing. We will examine the work of people as diverse as Dorothea Lange and Carrie Mae Weems, and Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X, Ken Burns and Spike Lee. Course materials include readings, photography, films, and several guest lectures by photographers and filmmakers. Students will write short papers on readings, films, and the exhibition. As members of small groups, they will participate in creating online and in-class presentations on aspects of Parks' career.

AAS 4570 Trauma and Narration in African Diaspora Literature (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues. 6:30- 9:00

In this course, we will explore literary representations of some of the traumas that have affected African Diaspora peoples in the past century: slavery, colonization, racism, sexual abuse, war, immigration and dictatorship. In particular, we will examine some ways that major African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean writers have attempted to narrate trauma. Reading writers such as Toni Morrison, Edwidge Danticat, Austin Clarke, Zoë Wicomb, Nuruddin Farah, and Chimamanda Adichie, our central questions will include: How can trauma be narrated? By what narrative devices and strategies? What does the choice of narrative devices and strategies teach us about the nature of trauma and its effects on the mind and body? Is trauma an inherent experience in the African Diaspora? Requirements include a theory application paper, a narrative experiment, and a seminar paper.

AAS 4570 Africa in the US Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15

This course will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of “Africa” and “Blackness” in this country. We will focus primarily on the context of the present-day United States. However, we will also address pre-colonial and colonial periods and touch on the role of popular media in particular contemporary African contexts. This class will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, radio, television, and print news media create “Africa” 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. Working toward their own semester projects, students will collect examples each week from various sources (print, television, film, etc.) for discussion. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information about such a mis- and under- represented area of the world have – and whether or not the viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility.

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 2500 The Anthropolgy of the Caribbean (3)

Instructor: Kristin Lahatte

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00-11:50

It has been suggested that the Caribbean serves as a “master symbol” for understanding the processes of the modern world. This course will anthropologically examine this claim by exploring the history of the Caribbean from the time of European colonization to the present day with particular attention to subjects such as slavery and plantation economies, revolution and retribution, creolizaton, globalization, and migration and transnationalism.

Department of American Studies

AMST 2753 Arts and Cultures of the Slave South (3)

Instructors: Maurie McInnis and Louis

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

“Arts and Cultures of the Slave South” is an undergraduate, interdisciplinary course that 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. The course will cover subjects ranging from African American spirituals to creolization and ethnicities in Louisiana, from the plantation architectures of both big house and outbuildings to the narratives of former slaves. In the process, students will be introduced to the interpretive methods central to a wide range of disciplines, from archaeology and anthropology, to art and architectural history, to material culture, literature, and musicology. In addition to two weekly lectures by co-faculty Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson, students will also attend weekly discussion sections and special events including guest lectures and a field trip.

Department of Drama

DRAM 3070  African American Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

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

Department of English

ENLT 2547 Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfolk

Tues./Thurs. 8:00-9:15

This seminar uses Black women’s writings from mid-century to the present to introduce new English majors to important concepts in literary analysis. To better understand genre, themes, and assorted literary conventions, we will focus closely on a range of literary styles. We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day. Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women’s writing of the last fifty years? How has the literature adapted in response to specific cultural or historical moments?

ENLT 2552 Black Women Writers (3)

Instructor: Susan Fraiman

Mon./Wed. 3:30-4:45

An introduction to close reading and critical writing focused on recent works by women in a variety of genres and from a range of national contexts.  Possible works (final list still to be determined) include stories by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie; a graphic narrative of growing up by American cartoonist Alison Bechdel; a film set in India directed by Mira Nair; images of the U.S. by queer photographer Catherine Opie; Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s memoir of a “harem girlhood.”  Our discussion of these texts will address basic formal issues: modes of narration; the difference between “story” and “plot”; the use of framing and other structural devices; the constraints of genre; the handling of images, tone, and diction.  Likely thematic concerns include the effects of colonialism and migration on women; explorations by women of growing up, growing old, marriage, maternity, queer sexuality, work, and creativity; ties and tensions among women across boundaries of nation, generation, race, and class; the divergent meanings of feminism for women around the world.  We will work not only on becoming attentive readers but also on learning to conceive and organize effective critical essays.  This writing intensive course (three papers totaling 20 pages) satisfies the prerequisite for the English major as well as the second-writing requirement.   There is also a final exam.

ENAM 3500  Studies in American Literature: The Civil Rights Movement

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Tues./Thurs 2:00-3:15

ENAM 3500 Studies in American Literature: Harlem Renaissance, Arts & Politics

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs 1100-1215 

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 (yes, 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 Du Bois, Alain Locke, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Marcus Garvey; poetry by Georgia Douglas Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Anne Spencer, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay; novels by Nella Larsen and Wallace Thurman; drama by Angelina Weld Grimke 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 Holliday, 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 reading journal, and a final “revisioning” project where you’ll be required to offer your own re-imagining of the New Negro era.

ENAM 5840 Contemporary African American Literature:  TIme and African American Literature (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfolk

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45

This seminar uses the concept of time as a foundation for exploring selected works of contemporary African American Literature. Time is a useful representational concept in so far as it allows for a wide-ranging assessment of literary and cultural tropes. Time is a noun and a verb; it is the basis for history. It can be on our side or we can run out of it.  It can heal all wounds or it can be a wound itself. These are the types of questions that will be used as a beginning for larger and evolving conversations about the works listed below. The course is also committed to helping students develop their own research agenda through formation of a culminating seminar paper and cultivate pedagogic techniques using the discussion-leading portion.

ENCR 4500 Advanced Studies in Literary Criticism: Race in American Places(3)

Instructor: Ian Grandison

Thurs. 6:30-9:00

This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on built environments in America within the context of contemporary culture wars—especially as circumscribing issues of race.  We interrogate ideologies that distinguish people, placing them into social hierarchies, based on the places with which they are associated.  We consider, for example, how the seemingly innocent story of the Three Little Pigs shapes dominant assumptions about the moral attributes of people (masquerading as pigs) based on the materials and architectural styles of the houses in which they live.  In so doing we denaturalize popular assumptions that, say, straw huts or wood shacks represent the moral failing or lack of fitness of those we thus label as “primitive.”  Can such places as Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall (which we think of as belonging to “the public”) be planned and designed to welcome use by some members of the public and discourage use by others?  What does the concurrency of homelessness and homeowners’ associations in American society suggest about assumptions regarding a relationship between our right to privacy and our wealth?  We explore such issues through targeted discussion of readings; mandatory visits to places around Charlottesville; informal workshops (mainly to develop the ability to interpret maps, plans, and other graphic representations of places); and in-class presentations.  Requirements include three informal small group exercises, an individual site-visit comment paper, a mid-term and final exam, and a group research project.  The last requirement is presented in an informal symposium that represents the culmination of the semester.

Department of French

FREN 3585 North African Literature and Culture (3)

FREN 4743 Africa in Cinema (3)

Instructor: Kandioure Dramé

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

Department of History

HIAF 2001 Early African History (3)

Instructor:  James La Fleur

Is an introductory course that explores why? where? when? how? people living on the African continent – from Cairo to Cape Town, and Dakar to Dar es Salaam – changed what they did from the so-called Stone Age to the years of intensive slaving and the export of humans as captives (ending roughly 200 years ago).

Over the course’s sixteen weeks, we will develop interpretive themes to help us make sense of experiences so diverse that they resist reduction into a single, unifying, continent-wide narrative. The course perspective emphasizes that Africans have always been engaged with their regional and continental neighbors in the making of world history, and that African history has significance and intellectual importance of its own, rather than deriving relevance only in its relationship to dynamism in Europe or the Americas. 

The course is structured with materials and lessons that guide the students through three successive learning stages, each with its own map quiz, exam, and discussion participation grade.  This architecture supports ambition and risk-taking in early stages of the course, positive response to constructive criticism, and intellectual independence and polished performance by the end of the term.

HIAF 2001 presumes no prior knowledge or personal experience with Africa and it requires no previous college-level studies in History. Course materials include a textbook, specialized scholarly readings, and other media rich with sights and sounds.

The course belongs to the African-American & African Studies curriculum, is required for the minor in African Studies, meets the “non-western/non-modern” requirement for the major in History, counts as an adjunct course for Studies in Women and Gender, and qualifies for the College of Arts & Sciences area requirements in “non-western perspectives” and “historical studies.”

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa (3)

Instructor: John Mason

Is a lecture and discussion course on the history of southern Africa during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with an emphasis on the country of South Africa.

The course is especially concerned with the ways in which people expressed their political beliefs through popular culture.  It begins with a look at the precolonial African societies of the region, before moving on to a study of conquest, colonialism, the rise and fall of apartheid, and the recent rebirth of African independence.

By the end of the nineteenth century, all of the African peoples of southern Africa had been conquered by European powers and incorporated into Dutch, British, Portuguese, and German colonial empires.  Conquest had not come easily.  Every society in the region resisted European domination fiercely, sometimes for many decades before being finally defeated.  Colonialism and African responses to it dramatically reshaped societies in southern African, transforming political and economic systems, gender and class relations, even religious beliefs.

Resistance to colonialism assumed new forms in the twentieth century, as Africans began to bridge ethnic divisions to create multi-ethnic trade unions, churches, political parties, and liberation movements.  Particularly in South Africa, African nationalism was influenced by nonracialism, uniting blacks and progressive whites in the ultimately successful struggle against apartheid.

Course materials include biographies, memoirs, fiction, music, and film, as well as academic studies.  Students will take periodic quizzes on the readings and write two blue-book exams, a mid-term and a final.

HIME 2001 History of the MIddle East and North Africa, ca. 570- ca. 1500 (3)

Instructor: Joshua White

The success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and the resurgence of piracy off the Horn of Africa have catapulted maritime raiding back into the public consciousness. Books, movies, and news articles have proliferated in recent years that cater to this new interest, and some commentators have sought context for the Somali phenomenon in the early modern Mediterranean. This course examines Mediterranean piracy in its own right, from the proxy battles for supremacy in North Africa in the sixteenth century to the U.S. naval interventions there in the nineteenth. We will pay special attention to the political, social, religious, legal, and economic ramifications of both Christian and Muslim sea raiding. Piracy in the early modern Mediterranean was a universal threat that affected East and West, North and South, Muslims, Christians, and Jews.  It left its mark on the political geography of the coasts, impacted the development of international law and the conduct of diplomacy, and provided the pretext for both Ottoman and European imperial expansion. It mobilized the rhetoric of intractable religious conflict, popularized new genres of literary expression, created new networks of trade and destroyed others, and led thousands into lives of captivity. Its legacy is still with us today.

Beyond familiarizing you with the history of piracy in the Mediterranean, our goal in this course is to develop your ability to read critically, analyze sources, and deploy evidence to back up your arguments. Readings will be a mix of scholarly works and primary sources--including captivity narratives, diplomatic reports, court cases, fiction, and selections from the autobiography of an Ottoman corsair. There are no exams. Evaluation will be based on class participation and a series of short and medium-length papers that you will have the opportunity to revise. No previous knowledge of Mediterranean history or pirates is required.

HIST 3559 New Course in General History; Gordon Parks and the Modern Documentary Tradition (3)

Instructor: John Mason

Gordon Parks and the American Documentary Tradition, explores work of one of the most important artists of the 20th century.  For nearly half a century, Parks' photography, writing, and films made him one of the most important black voices in American culture.  Although his 1971 hit movie "Shaft" made him a celebrity, his photojournalism, fiction, and an autobiography had already brought him considerable fame.

The course looks at all aspects of his career, with a special emphasis on his photojournalism.  It coincides with an major exhibition of Parks' photography that opens at the Fralin University of Virginia Art Museum in September 2014.  The course will take advantage of the exhibition itself and the various programs and speakers that will accompany it.

HIST 3559 will also view Parks in the context of the history of which he was such an important part -- the American tradition of documentary film, photography, and writing.  We will examine the work of people as diverse as Dorothea Lange and Carrie Mae Weems, and Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X, Ken Burns and Spike Lee.

Students will write short papers on readings, films, and the exhibition.

 As members of small groups, they will participate in creating online and in-class presentations on aspects of Parks' career.

HIUS 3071 The Coming of the Civil War (3)

Instructor: Elizabeth Varon

Through a close examination of the interrelationships among economic change, cultural and political developments, and the escalating sectional conflict between 1815 and 1861 this lecture course seeks to explain what caused the outbreak of the American Civil War in April 1861. Students should note that this period also encompasses the Jacksonian era of American history, and most of the lectures in the first half of the course will be devoted to examining it, with a focus on party politics and debates over slavery. Grades will be based on class participation and on three written assignments: a midterm exam; an 8-10 page term paper; and a comprehensive, take-home final examination.

HIUS 3671 History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Lynn French

This course focuses on the long arc of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, arguably the greatest social movement of the 20th Century.  It will examine the social change accomplished from the 1870’s through the 1970’s – culminating in what might be considered a second reconstruction.  Most of the discussion will center on the work and lives of African Americans, but also will consider the impact of the Movement upon race, gender and ethnicity not only in America but around the globe as well.

In addition to assigned reading, student will be expected to submit four very brief essays on topics that highlight an issue, organization or leader.  Lively and intense class participation is encouraged. Diplomacy and respect for others’ views is required.

Department of Politics

PLAP 3820 Civil Liberties and Civil Rights (3)

PLCP 2120 The Politics of Developing Areas (3) 

PLCP 3410 Politics of the Middle East and North Africa (3)

PLCP 4500 Special Topics in Comparative Politics (Imperialism and Globalization) (3)

PLPT 4500 Special Topics in Political Theory (Freedom, Empire and Slavery) (3)

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 2750  African Religions(3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

An introductory survey of African religions. The course concentrates on African indigenous religions, but Islam and Christianity are also discussed. Topics include African mythologies and cosmologies, as well as rituals, artistic traditions and spiritualities. We consider the colonial impact on African religious cultures and the dynamics of ongoing religious change in the sub-Sahara.

RELA 3559 New Course in African Religions (Religion in African Literature and Film) (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

An exploration of the ways in which religious concepts, practices and issues are addressed in African literature and film.  Literary genres include novels, short stories and poetry; Cinematographic genres include commercial "Nollywood" movies, as well as "Christian video films"   We will examine how various directors and authors interweave aspects of Muslim, Christian and/or traditional religious cultures into the stories they tell.

RELG 3200 Martin, Malcolm, and America (3)

Instructor: Mark Hadley

An analysis 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.  We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

RELG 3360 Conquest and Religions in the Americas, 1400s-1830s (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

A history course which examines Latin American and Caribbean religions from the 1400s through the 1830s. We will proceed topically (in rough chronological order), studying religious encounters during the pre-Columbian era, the Spanish conquest and colonial eras, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Latin American independence (1820s), and slave emancipation in the anglophone Caribbean (1830s). The class will focus primarily upon the signature religious episodes, devotions, personalities and institutions of indigenous, African, Afro-creole, and mestizo communities, since these "gente de color" constituted the majority population in the New World during this historical epoch. We will consider issues of historiography?specifically, the problem of interpreting (sometimes hostile) extant archival sources and the use of such primary material in the writing of secondary literature. Students will develop their abilities to evaluate primary sources (in translation), and to identify the interpretive choices which scholars make in the crafting of historical narratives.

RELG 3559 The Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Charles Marsh Jr.

The seminar considers the American civil rights movement as theological drama.  The goal is to analyze and understand the movement, its participants and opponents, in religious and theological perspective.  While interdisciplinary in scope, the seminar will probe the details of religious convictions in their dynamic particularity and ask how images of God shape conceptions of race, community and nation and modes of practical engagements.  Readings include four seminal studies of the period, writings by movement and anti-movement activists, and documents archived at http://archives.livedtheology.org/, in the digital history titled, "The Civil Rights Movement as Theological Drama".  Course requirements include active participation in class discussions, one 20-30 presentation, weekly reading summaries (250-300 words), one research paper (10-12 pages, or 3000-3400 words), and a take-home final.

Department of Sociology

SOC 2442 Systens if Inequality(3)

 

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.

Soc 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

Fall 2015

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

AAS1010 Introduction to African American and African Studies I (4)

Instructor: TBA

Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance and three written exams.​

 

​AAS 2559-001 Routes, Writing, Reggae (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues 5:00-7:30

In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore the history of reggae music and its influence on the development of autochthonous Jamaican literature. In addition to readings on Jamaican history, Rastafarianism, and Haile Selassie I and Ethiopianism (via Maaza Mengiste's novel, Beneath the Lion's Gaze), we will listen to and analyze reggae and dancehall songs to discern the themes, poetic devices, musical structures, and social and historical contexts of the music form, with a view to mapping what themes, devices, and structures reggae lends to local literature and literary culture. Our course readings will range from dub poetry by Jean Binta Breeze and Mutabaruka, reggae poetry by Kamau Brathwaite and Kwame Dawes, reggae short fiction from Geoffrey Philp and Colin Channer, and reggae  novels from Michael Thelwell (The Harder They Come) and Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings).  Assignments include: listening and reading journals, oral presentations,  musical and literary reviews, and an analytical final paper.

AAS 2559-002 The Films of Spike Lee (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

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

One of the most significant figures in modern American cinema, Spike Lee is one of today’s most prolific American filmmakers and arguably the most recognizable African American filmmaker alive.  With 35+ films to his credit, Lee’s filmography indexes the broad and tangled history of public debate over race, class, gender, ethnicity and commercial cinema since the 1980s. This course will consider the evolution of the themes, genres, techniques, and artistic philosophy reflected in Lee’s work as director, producer and cultural critic over his considerable career. We will also be concerned to highlight the tensions that arise from Lee’s seemingly contradictory reputation as an ‘independent’ filmmaker and his prominence as a commercially successful ‘mainstream’ producer and director.  We will view several major and lesser-known films, from blockbusters like Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X to the obscure Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop. We will also consider Lee’s documentary projects 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke among other important Lee works (including television ads). The goal of the course is to critically situate ‘the Spike Lee phenomenon’ in the history of black American cinema and in the wider context of global filmmaking in the 20th and 21st century.​

 

AAS 2559-003 Afro-Creole Religions (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tue./Thurs. 9:30-10:45

This survey course investigates African-inspired religious practices in Latin America and the Caribbean such as Haitian Vodou, Cuban Regla de Ocha (aka “Santería”), and Brazilian Candomblé. We will read ethnographic accounts and consider how devotees deploy the history of slavery and re-interpret African influences in their practices, and evaluate practitioners' and anthropologists' debates about terms such as “Africa,” “tradition,” “modernity,” “creole,” and “syncretism.” A discussion section is required.​

AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Combined with RELG 3200

Instructor: Mark Hadley

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.​

AAS 3500 African Worlds in Biography (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 3:30-6:00

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither!​

AAS 3559 From Redlines to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the United States (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15

This course examines the dynamic relationship between real estate, racial segregation, wealth, and poverty in American cities and suburbs, with an emphasis on the period from the New Deal to the present.  We will look at how the quest for homeownership in a capitalist society shaped ideas of race and belonging, influenced Americans’ political ideologies and material interests, and impacted movements for civil rights and economic justice.  We will study the history of Federal housing policies and programs, the evolution of real estate industry practices in the age of civil rights and “white flight,” the relationship between residential location and quality of public education, and contemporary trends in housing and real estate markets in metropolitan America.  In addition to secondary readings in history, sociology, economics, and urban studies, students will learn to interpret a variety of primary sources, including land deeds and covenants, tax records, maps, financial statements, contracts, and industry trade publications.  Class meetings will alternate between lectures, tutorials, and discussions of weekly reading assignments.  Students will complete 3 topical essays and a final research project.

AAS 3652 African American History since 1865 - Present (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

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

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.

 

AAS 4570-001 Time and African American Lit (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tue./Thur. 9:30-10:45

This seminar uses the concept of time as a foundation for exploring selected works of contemporary African American Literature. Time is a useful representational concept in so far as it allows for a wide-ranging assessment of literary and cultural tropes. Time is a noun and a verb; it is the basis for history. It can be on our side or we can lack what seems sufficient.  It can heal all wounds or it can be a wound itself. These are the types of questions that will be used as a beginning for larger and evolving conversations about the works listed below. The course is also committed to helping students develop their own research agenda through formation of a culminating seminar paper.  Writers studied include Percival Everett, Jesmyn Ward, Edward P Jones, and Toni Morrison.

 

AAS 4570-002 Africa in the US Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon. 3:30-6:00

This course will address the role the media has played in creating images and understandings of “Africa” and “Blackness” in this country. We will focus primarily on the context of the present-day United States. However, we will also address pre-colonial and colonial periods and touch on the role of popular media in particular contemporary African contexts. This class will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, popular fiction, radio, television, and print news media create “Africa” 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. Working toward their own semester projects, students will collect examples each week from various sources (print, television, film, etc.) for discussion. We will concentrate on the particular ways various media produce, display, and disseminate information. Finally, we will ask what responsibilities those who create and circulate information about such a mis- and under- represented area of the world have – and whether or not the viewing public shares in any sort of responsibility.​

DEPARTMENT OF ​ENGLISH ​

ENLT 2547 Black Writers in America (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tue./Thurs. 8:00-9:15

This seminar uses Black women’s writings from mid-century to the present to introduce new English majors to important concepts in literary analysis. To better understand genre, themes, and assorted literary conventions, we will focus closely on a range of literary styles.  We will also consider patterns of representation established in the 1950s and watch how they develop, disintegrate, or evolve into the present day.  Do certain issues or themes remain important in Black women’s writing of the last fifty years?  How has the literature adapted in response to specific cultural or historical moments?

ENAM 3500-005 Advanced Studies in American Literature: Black Protest Narrative(3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Thurs. 11:00-12:15

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? What is the relation between political protest and aesthetic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, anti-Semitism, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion (including Nation of Islam), crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Some major works include Richard Wright’s Native Son, Angelo Herndon’s Let Me Live, Ann Petry’s The Street, James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain, Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Stride toward Freedom, Alice Walker’s Meridian, Bobby Seale’s Seize the Time, and Audre Lorde’s Zami, as well as pertinent readings in history, literary criticism, journalism, and sociology. We’ll study the cross-over film No Way Out, the black exploitation film Superfly, and black independent films Killer of Sheep and Tongues Untied. Requirements include heavy reading schedule, midterm, final exam, and reading journal.

 

ENAM 3500-006 Advanced Studies in American Literature: The Civil Rights Movement(3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45
 

This multi-media course will survey selected fiction, non-fiction, photography and film from the U. S. Civil Rights Movement. The arc of the course spans the Brown v. Topeka decision (1954) to the emergence of SNCC and the Black Power Movement. Topics for discussion will include the interplay between history and memory, as well as gender, sexuality, and class, in representations of the period; ideologies of black liberation and the tactics of mass protest; the relationship between the movement and mass media industries; debates about race and rights; the politics of race and the fragility of citizenship; the economics of racial oppression and resistance.

ENAM 3510 Studies in African American Literature and Culture (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Mon./Wed,/Fri. 12:00-12:50

The voice and vision of James Baldwin, one of the twentieth century's most impassioned and prolific voices on race, sex, democracy and art, are the subjects of this course. A brilliant essayist, a controversial novelist, playwright and sometime poet, Baldwin is not only among the missing subjects of American civil rights history, he anticipated many of the contemporary concerns of American and African American literature and cultural studies, including, especially, American identity politics. In this course we will look to Baldwin's fiction, nonfiction and dramatic worlds for an early protocol of cultural critique foregrounding themes of race, class, gender, citizenship, black expatriation, the moral lives of children and urgency of art.

ENAM 3880 Literature of the South (3)

Instructor: Jennifer Greeson

Mon./Wed 10:00-10:50

Across the 20th century and into the 21st, Americans negotiating the transformations of modernity and postmodernity have turned to literary representations of the South to get their bearings.  In imagining the South we seek a rooted, enduring culture in a sea of commercialism and mobility; we confront the persistence of racial and economic inequality at odds with the ideals of the United States; we insist upon the importance of locality in our increasingly global consciousnesses.  We also consume “the South” as a commodity, invoke it as an excuse or alibi for the nation’s ills, and enjoy its ostensible perversity as a guilty pleasure.  In this course we will read some of the most challenging, startling, and beautiful American prose fiction of the past 100 years, while attending as well to the broader cultural field of film, image, and music of which it is a part.  We will think in particular about questions of nationalism and literature (the role of “folk” culture; the location of poverty; place and race); questions of representation and representativeness (“identity” of writers; authenticity; production and presentation of Southern stuff); and questions of performance (of class, gender, race, and region).  Major authors will include Chesnutt, Faulkner, Caldwell, Porter, Wright, Welty, Hurston, Percy, and O'Connor.

ENAM 3510 Studies in African-American Literature and Culture (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Mon./Wed./Fri.12:00-12:50

The voice and vision of James Baldwin, one of the twentieth century's most impassioned and prolific voices on race, sex, democracy and art, are the subjects of this course. A brilliant essayist, a controversial novelist, playwright and sometime poet, Baldwin is not only among the missing subjects of American civil rights history, he anticipated many of the contemporary concerns of American and African American literature and cultural studies, including, especially, American identity politics. In this course we will look to Baldwin's fiction, nonfiction and dramatic worlds for an early protocol of cultural critique foregrounding themes of race, class, gender, citizenship, black expatriation, the moral lives of children and urgency of art.

ENCR 4500 Advanced Studies in Literary Criticism: Race, Space, and Culture (3)

Instructors: Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross​

Tues. 6:30-9:00

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.

ENAM 5840 Contemporary African-American Literature (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfolk

Thurs. 9:30-10:45

This seminar uses the concept of time as a foundation for exploring selected works of contemporary African American Literature. Time is a useful representational concept in so far as it allows for a wide-ranging assessment of literary and cultural tropes. Time is a noun and a verb; it is the basis for history. It can be on our side or we can lack what seems sufficient.  It can heal all wounds or it can be a wound itself. These are the types of questions that will be used as a beginning for larger and evolving conversations about the works listed below. The course is also committed to helping students develop their own research agenda through formation of a culminating seminar paper.  Writers studied include Percival Everett, Jesmyn Ward, Edward P Jones, and Toni Morrison.

Fall 2016

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

AAS 1010  Introduction to African American and African Studies I (4)

Instructor: E. Kwame Otu

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

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance in lecture and discussion section, and three written exams.

AAS 1559  Routes, Writing, Reggae (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45,  Gilmer Hall 141

In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore the history of reggae music and its influence on the development of autochthonous Jamaican literature. In addition to readings on Jamaican history, Rastafarianism, and Haile Selassie I and Ethiopianism (via Maaza Mengiste's novel, Beneath the Lion's Gaze), we will listen to and analyze reggae and dancehall songs to discern the themes, poetic devices, musical structures, and social and historical contexts of the music form, with a view to mapping what themes, devices, and structures reggae lends to local literature and literary culture. Our course readings will range from dub poetry by Jean Binta Breeze and Mutabaruka, reggae poetry by Kamau Brathwaite and Kwame Dawes, reggae short fiction from Geoffrey Philp and Colin Channer, and reggae  novels from Michael Thelwell (The Harder They Come) and Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings).  Assignments include: listening and reading journals, oral presentations, musical and literary reviews, and an analytical final paper.

AAS 2224 Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 2:00-4:30, New Cabell 191

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 2559 The Films of Spike Lee (3)

Intructor: Maurice Wallace

Tues./Thurs.  2:00 -3:15, Physics Blg 204​

One of the most significant figures in modern American cinema, Spike Lee is one of today’s most prolific American filmmakers and arguably the most recognizable African American filmmaker alive.  With 35+ films to his credit, Lee’s filmography indexes the broad and tangled history of public debate over race, class, gender, ethnicity and commercial cinema since the 1980s. This course will consider the evolution of the themes, genres, techniques, and artistic philosophy reflected in Lee’s work as director, producer and cultural critic over his considerable career. We will also be concerned to highlight the tensions that arise from Lee’s seemingly contradictory reputation as an ‘independent’ filmmaker and his prominence as a commercially successful ‘mainstream’ producer and director.  We will view several major and lesser-known films, from blockbusters like Do the Right Thing and Malcolm X to the obscure Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop. We will also consider Lee’s documentary projects 4 Little Girls and When the Levees Broke among other important Lee works (including television ads). The goal of the course is to critically situate ‘the Spike Lee phenomenon’ in the history of black American cinema and in the wider context of global filmmaking in the 20th and 21st century.​

AAS 2559 Sensing Africa (3)

Instructor: E. Kwame Otu

Tues. 6:00 - 8:00, New Cabell Hall 132

Following the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s cautionary tale about “the danger of the single story,” which sheds light on how Africa has been framed in both mainstream and radical discourses, this course explores how the senses can be mobilized to complicate the place of Africa in history, as well as the material struggles and traumatic displacements that have occurred there from colonial times to date. By bringing together a wide variety of materials ranging from ethnographies, novels, and documentaries to video clips and films, the course aims to help us question our misperceptions about Africa. First, we will engage with the question, “how to understand this extraordinary continent through our “perceptions?” More broadly perception is “the process of becoming sensitive to physical objects, phenomena.” In other words, our senses, which include sight, smell, sound, touch, and taste, play a key role in how we perceive and misperceive the world. So, to ask the question “how is Africa misperceived” requires that we ponder how our senses respond to Africa, not just visually, but say, through feeling, sound, and even taste when it is portrayed as backward, poor, undemocratic, and homophobic in mainstream representations. In the first half of the course, we will study how the way we perceive [sense] Africa is informed by particular histories, cultures, religions, political economies, and racial constructs. By underlining perception, we will engage in modes of enquiry that emphasize how Africa matters, questioning both historical and current stereotypes about the continent. The extent to which African intellectuals, artists, writers, scientists, among others, reinvent themselves in moments that both appear promising and uncertain is at the heart of this course.

AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America (3)

Combined with RELG 3200

Instructor: Mark Hadley

Tues./Thurs. 11:00 - 12:15, Gibson Hall 241

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.​

AAS 3500 - 001 Musical Fictions (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues/Thurs. 11:00 - 12:15, New Cabell Hall 485

In this interdisciplinary course we will explore the genre of the contemporary musical novel as we read seminal blues, jazz, reggae, mambo, and calypso and rock novels from writers such as James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, Michael Thelwell, Oscar Hijuelos, Esi Edugyan, and Nick Hornby.  We will explore issues such as: How and why do contemporary writers record the sounds (instruments, rhythm, melody, tone), lyrics, structure, and personal and cultural valences of music, not on wax, but in novelistic prose, and what does it mean to simultaneously read and ‘listen to’ such novels? What kinds of cultural baggage and aesthetic conventions do particular music forms bring to the novel form? Why are writers and readers both so intrigued by the figure of the musician as a literary trope? Assignments include: listening and reading journals, oral presentations, musical and literary reviews, and a final paper.

AAS 3500 - 002 Race and Real Estate (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 323

This course examines the dynamic relationship between real estate, racial segregation, wealth, and poverty in American cities and suburbs, with an emphasis on the period from the New Deal to the present.  We will look at how the quest for homeownership in a capitalist society shaped ideas of race and belonging, influenced Americans’ political ideologies and material interests, and impacted movements for civil rights and economic justice.  We will study the history of Federal housing policies and programs, the evolution of real estate industry practices in the age of civil rights and “white flight,” the relationship between residential location and quality of public education, and contemporary trends in housing and real estate markets in metropolitan America.  In addition to secondary readings in history, sociology, economics, and urban studies, students will learn to interpret a variety of primary sources, including land deeds and covenants, tax records, maps, financial statements, contracts, and industry trade publications.  Class meetings will alternate between lectures, tutorials, and discussions of weekly reading assignments.  Students will complete 3 topical essays and a final research project.

AAS 3500 - 003 James Baldwin (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Mon./Wed./Fri.  12:00-12:50, Dell 2 101

The voice and vision of James Baldwin, one of the twentieth century's most impassioned and prolific voices on race, sex, democracy and art, are the subjects of this course. A brilliant essayist, a controversial novelist, playwright and sometime poet, Baldwin is not only among the missing subjects of American civil rights history, he anticipated many of the contemporary concerns of American and African American literature and cultural studies, including, especially, American identity politics. In this course we will look to Baldwin's fiction, nonfiction and dramatic worlds for an early protocol of cultural critique foregrounding themes of race, class, gender, citizenship, black expatriation, the moral lives of children and urgency of art.

AAS 3500 - 004 Social Science Perspectives on African American and African Studies (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs. 3:30 - 4:45, New Cabell Hall 383

This course surveys seminal theories, concepts, and texts across the social sciences that contribute to African-American and African Studies. We draw on disciplines such as sociology, psychology, political science, anthropology, and epidemiology, and we consider their distinctive, but complementary perspectives on the racial contours of debates about education, health, incarceration, and other social issues.

AAS 3749 Food and Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 107

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.

AAS 4570  Black Women and Work (3)

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

Mon. 3:30 - 6:00, New Cabell Hall 107

This course is an Advanced Research Seminar. Black women have always worked. This course offers an intersectional and historical examination of the lives and labors of African American women in the United States. Using gender, race, and class as essential categories of analysis, this course is designed to help students better understand the myriad contributions working black women have made to American history—across time and space—as slaves, convict workers, domestic servants, laundresses, nurses, sex workers, beauty shop owners, educators, numbers runners, labor activists, and so on. Some of the subjects discussed in this course include: the role enslaved women played in the plantation economy as producers and reproducers, black women and convict labor in the post-Civil War South, the lives and labors of wage-earning African American women, black women’s engagement in illicit and informal economies (e.g. sex workers, bootleggers, gamblers, etc.), black women’s informal and formal labor activism and protest, and the scientific labors of sick and deceased incarcerated black women. Historical social perceptions and constructions of non-laboring black women, who have been cast as “lazy,” “deviant,” and “criminal,” will also be discussed.  

Swahili

SWAH 1010 - Introductory Swahili I (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 10:00-10:50 Monroe Hall 113

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00-11:50 Monroe Hall 113

Semester 1 - Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa.

SWAH 2010 - Intermediate Swahili I (3)

Mon./Wed./Fri. 12:00-12:50 Monroe Hall 113

Semester 3 - Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa.

American Studies

AMST 3559- 2 -  Hip-Hop As Technology (3 credit in fall, 3 credits in spring)

Instructor: Jack Hamilton

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

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-buildiing, 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.

AMST 3559 - 3 - Cultures of Hip-Hop (3)

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.

AMST 4500 - 3  Race, Space, and Culture (3)

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.

AMST 4500 - 4 W. E. B. Du Bois (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Bryan Hall 332

This course examines the work, career, and life of leading American and international intellectual  W.E.B. Du Bois by placing him historically in relation to the movements he led, the figures he allied himself with and fought against, and the transformations in thought, social activism, and literature he helped to bring about.

AMST 4500 - 5 Documentary and Civil Rights (3)

Instructor: Grace Hale

Mon. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 066

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. It foregrounds the multidimensionality of space as a physical, perceptual, social, ideological, and discursive phenomenon. 

Drama

DRAM 4590 The Black Monologues (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Mon./Tues./Wed./Thurs./Fri. - 7:00 - 9:00

A directed project-based study offered to upper-level students. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

English

ENAM 3500 The Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Deborah McDowell

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45, Monroe Hall 118

ENAM 3510 James Baldwin (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Mon./Wed./Fri. 12:00-12:50, Dell 2 101

The voice and vision of James Baldwin, one of the twentieth century's most impassioned and prolific voices on race, sex, democracy and art, are the subjects of this course. A brilliant essayist, a controversial novelist, playwright and sometime poet, Baldwin is not only among the missing subjects of American civil rights history, he anticipated many of the contemporary concerns of American and African American literature and cultural studies, including, especially, American identity politics. In this course we will look to Baldwin's fiction, nonfiction and dramatic worlds for an early protocol of cultural critique foregrounding themes of race, class, gender, citizenship, black expatriation, the moral lives of children and urgency of art.

ENAM 4500-3 W. E. B. Du Bois (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Bryan Hall 332

This course examines the work, career, and life of leading American and international intellectual  W.E.B. Du Bois by placing him historically in relation to the movements he led, the figures he allied himself with and fought against, and the transformations in thought, social activism, and literature he helped to bring about

ENAM 5840 Contemporary African American Literature (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, Cocke Hall 101

This course for advanced undergraduates and master's-level graduate students surveys African American literature today. Assignments include works by Evreett, Edward Jones, Tayari Jones, Evans, Ward, Rabateau, and Morrison

ENCR 4500 Race, Space, Culture (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

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.

ENGL 1500 Routes, Writing, Reggae (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45

Gilmer Hall 141

In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore the history of reggae music and its influence on the development of autochthonous Jamaican literature. In addition to readings on Jamaican history, Rastafarianism, and Haile Selassie I and Ethiopianism (via Maaza Mengiste's novel, Beneath the Lion's Gaze), we will listen to and analyze reggae and dancehall songs to discern the themes, poetic devices, musical structures, and social and historical contexts of the music form, with a view to mapping what themes, devices, and structures reggae lends to local literature and literary culture. Our course readings will range from dub poetry by Jean Binta Breeze and Mutabaruka, reggae poetry by Kamau Brathwaite and Kwame Dawes, reggae short fiction from Geoffrey Philp and Colin Channer, and reggae  novels from Michael Thelwell (The Harder They Come) and Marlon James (A Brief History of Seven Killings).  Assignments include: listening and reading journals, oral presentations,  musical and literary reviews, and an analytical final paper.

ENLT 2547 Black Woman Writers (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 8:00-9:15,  Nau Hall 142

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.

French

FREN 4811 Francophone Literature of Africa (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

Introduction to the Francophone literature of Africa; survey, with special emphasis on post- World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights of Africa. The role of cultural and literary reviews (Légitime Défense, L'Etudiant noir, and Présence Africaine) in the historical and ideological development of this literature will be examined. Special reference will be made to Caribbean writers of the Negritude movement. Documentary videos on African history and cultures will be shown and important audio-tapes will also be played regularly. Supplementary texts will be assigned occasionally. Students will be expected to present response papers on a regular basis.

FRTR 3584 African Cinema (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

This course is a survey of African cinema since the 1950s.  First the course will examine the representation of Africa and the Africans in colonial films as well as policies and practices of colonial nations regarding cinema and filmmaking in Africa.  Second the course will study the birth and evolution of celluloid filmmaking in postcolonial Africa.  Third the emergence of Nollywood film industry.

HISTORY

HIAF 2001 Early African History (3)

Instructor: Christina Mobley

Tues./Thurs.11:00-12:15, Claude Moore Nursing Education Bldg G120

An introductory course to the history of Africa from roughly the dawn of history until the end of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Over sixteen weeks we will proceed chronologically by region, learning about the great diversity of peoples, cultures, and climates that inhabit the African continent. In this course we will learn that Africa was never the “dark continent” that it is often supposed to be. A major focus of the course will be Africa’s engagement with the outside world, including the trans-Saharan trade, Swahili city-states and the Indian Ocean, and Trans-Atlantic trade. We will see how Africans have always been important historical actors in world history, exploring how they interacted with their neighbors in ways that made sense to them and their communities.
Course material will be presented through interactive lectures and in-class discussion as well as in depth examination of primary and secondary historical courses, art and material culture. Evaluation will be based on class participation and a series of take-home writing assignments geared towards helping students develop their critical thinking, reading, and writing faculties. No prior knowledge of African history is required.

HIUS 3559 -1 Sounds of Blackness (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues./Thurs 2:00-3:15, Nau Hall 211

HIUS 3651 Afro American History to 1865 (3)

Instructor: Justene Hill

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell 368

In this course, we will interrogate the history of people of African descent in the United States, from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the outbreak of the Civil War.  We will discuss major events in early African-American history to consider how the twin engines of slavery and the quest for freedom shaped the lives of millions of African and African-American people in the United States.  Students will consider how social, economic, political, and legal frameworks established in the period between the colonial era and the Civil War influenced the lived experiences of African Americans, enslaved and free.  Topics will include: pre-colonial West and Central Africa, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the development of North American slavery, resistance and revolution in Atlantic slave communities, gradual emancipation laws, economics of slavery, the gendered experience in slavery and freedom, and black people’s participation in anti-slavery politics.  Students will learn about the multifaceted experiences of African Americans by analyzing primary and secondary sources, films, and historical fiction.

HIUS 3654 Black Fire (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45, Minor Hall 125

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.

HIUS 3853 From Redlines to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the US (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 323

This course examines the relationship between race, real estate, wealth, and poverty in the United States, with an emphasis on the period from the New Deal to the present.  We will learn about the instrumental role homeownership and residential location has played in shaping the educational options; job prospects, living expenses, health, quality of life, and wealth accumulation of Americans in the twentieth century, and how race became--and remains --a key determinant in the distribution of the homeownership's benefits in American society.  We will study the structure and mechanics of the American real estate industry, the historical and contemporary dynamics of housing markets in urban and suburban America, and the impact of governmental policies and programs on the American economy and built environment.  We will look at how the promise of perils of homeownership has shaped ideas of race and belonging, and informed the political ideologies and material interests, of both white and black Americans.  We will learn how and why real estate ownership, investment, and development came to play a critical role in the formation and endurance of racial segregation, and in the making of modern American capitalism.  And we will explore how legal challenges and political mobilizations against racial exclusion and economic exploitation in housing markets came to shape the modern black freedom movement as a whole.  As we do, we will acquire a deeper knowledge and understanding of how real estate shapes our lives and lies at the heart of many of the most vexing problems and pressing challenges facing America today.  

HIUS 4501-1 Race and Inequality in America (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Tues. 1:00-3:30, Shannon House 108

This research seminar will examine the history of race as social category, racism as a set of interpersonal and institutional practices, and racial inequality in 20th century American life.  Students will study a range of scholarship and conduct research on a topic related to the course's theme, culminating in a final research paper.

Politics

PLAP 3700 Racial Politics (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

Tues./Thurs 11:00-12:15, Gibson 341

Examines how attributions of racial difference have shaped American Politics. Topics include how race affects American political partisanship, campaigns and elections, public policy, public opinion, and American political science. Prerequisite: One course in PLAP or instructor permission.

PLAP 4841 Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

Instructor: David O'Brien

Fri. 1:00-3:30, Gibson Hall 142

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.

PLCP 3012 The Politics of Developing Areas

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Mon./Wed. 9:00-9:50, Minor Hall 125

PLPT 4500 - 001 Freedom, Empire, and Slavery

Instructor: K. Lawrie Balfour

Wed. 2:00-4:30, Nau Hall 241

Investigates a special problem of political theory such as political corruption, religion and politics, science and politics, or the nature of justice.

Religion

RELA 2850 Afro- Creole Religions in the Americas

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

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

This survey course investigates African-inspired religious practices in the Caribbean, Latin America, and the U.S., particularly those religions--such as Haitian Vodou, Cuban Regla de Ocha (aka “Santería”), Brazilian Candomblé, and black churches in North America--which are deemed emblematic of local African-descended populations and even entire New World societies. By reading ethnographies, we will compare features common to many of these religions—such as polytheism, initiatory secrecy, divination, possession trance, animal sacrifice—as well as differences—such as contrasting evaluations of the devotional use of material objects, relations with the dead, and the commodification of ritual expertise. We will consider how devotees deploy the history of slavery and re-interpret African influences in their practices, and evaluate practitioners' and anthropologists' debates about terms such as “Africa,” “tradition,” “syncretism,” “modernity,” and “creole.”

Sociology

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Instructor: Kimberly Hoosier

Tues./Thurs. 9:00 - 9:50, Minor Hall 130

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.

 

View current course listings page

Fall 2017

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

 

AAS 1010 Introduction to African American and African Studies I (4)

Instructor: Kwame E. Otu

Tues./Tues. 12:30-1:45, Minor Hall 125

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1850s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; and the rise of anti-slavery movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The first section provides an overview of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and its impacts on Africa. The second section centers on Latin America (Brazil and Cuba) and the French Caribbean - Haiti. The last section deals with North America, tracing the history of slavery from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century. Course requirements include regular attendance in lecture and discussion section, and three written exams.

AAS 2224-001 Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Thurs. 2:00-4:30, Mcleod Hall 2005

This course 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 3500-003  Race, Medicine and Incarceration (3)

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

Wed. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 303

The social history of medicine in the black experience has a long and seedy background. This course offers a three tiered approach to understanding the history of black incarceration (broadly defined) and the ways in which the captive black body has functioned as a site of medical exploitation and profit from the period of slavery to the present. Using medicine, race, and gender as critical categories of analysis, this course is designed to help students better understand how the male and female slave, prisoner, asylum “inmate,” and unclaimed “indigent” black body contributed to the development of modern medicine, as experimental subjects and autopsy specimens. Some of the subjects discussed include: the history of slavery and medicine in the American South, the post-Civil War medical crisis in the black community, the rise of convict leasing and the New South penal medical economy, Jim Crow and medical (in)justice in late 19th century America, the rise of the early 20th century eugenics movement and its impact on incarcerated subjects, prison photography and the black body as spectacle and specimen in the modern era, and a host of other related topics. This course is tailored to students interested in the sciences and humanities, and will prove useful for those pursuing careers in the medical profession.

AAS 3500-004 Social Science Perspectives on African American Studies (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 407

Are black students who do well in school accused of “acting white”? Do middle-class blacks feel a shared fate with low-income blacks? How do the political views of black youth differ from those of older blacks? We will address these and other questions in AAS 3500. In this course, you will learn about major debates across the social sciences that contribute to African American and African Studies. We will draw on readings from sociology, political science,psychology, public health, anthropology, law, economics, and media studies. We will consider how a multidisciplinary approach enriches our efforts to analyze issues such as health disparities, education, or incarceration as they relate to the African diaspora

AAS 3500-005 White Liberalism and the Black Writer (3)

Instructor: Petal Samuel

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, New Cabell Hall 364

Reviews of Jordan Peele’s 2017 film Get Out in The Guardian, The Root, The New York Times, and Vice praise the film as a sharp and timely critique of white liberalism—what the reviews describe variously as “nice racism” or “self-congratulating” allyship—re-emerging in the wake of the Obama presidency. However, black writers and activists across the globe have long grappled with the limits of white allyship long prior to the Obama era. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail” warned of the dangers of the “white moderate” who prefers the “absence of tension” to the “presence of justice”. Ama Ata Aidoo’s 1977 Our Sister Killjoy follows a young Ghanaian girl’s reflections on racism and colonialism as she experiences subtle, yet pernicious, forms of racism while on an ostensibly benevolent state-sponsored trip to Germany.

In this class, we will examine the figure of the white liberal in literature, the arts, and media, focusing on the ways they are described and represented by black writers and artists. We will ask: What is white liberalism? How and why does it come to be understood as an ideological position that is dangerous or hostile to movements for social, political, and economic equality? We will examine a wide range of texts—novels, poetry, music, visual art, and film—be writers and artists such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Jamaica Kincaid, Solange, and Jordan Peele.

AAS 3559-001 Revolutionary Struggles in the African Atlantic (3)

Instructor: Kwame E. Otu

Mon. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 415

In this course, we will grapple with the concept of struggle, as it pertains to Africans’ desire to wrestle themselves from the interlocking white supremacist systems of colonialism, enslavement, apartheid, and racialized capitalism. How, we will consider, has the desire to be “free” from these systems of oppression defined black identities both in Africa and its myriad diasporas? Our goal is to work together to comprehend blackness as struggle, and to amplify how black bodies continue to contend with anti-black regimes spawned by enslavement, colonial oppression, and apartheid. Focusing on places like South Africa to Brazil to the USA to England, and from Haiti to Guinea, we shall emphasize how in the afterlives of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, white supremacist structures and infrastructures continue to legitimize black death. In the face of death, nevertheless, the struggle to live a dignified life, and to be free from white supremacy continue to define black experiences in neocolonial and neoliberal scenes of empire. Understanding that this struggle is revolutionary, we shall tackle how the fight for freedom from white supremacy is constitutively part of the desire to be free from heteropatriarchal nationalism and sexism, homonegativity, and racialized capitalism. Thus, we will ask: How do African and African descended peoples’ quests for freedom in the circum-Atlantic world compel us to revision freedom as something other than a state of being, but as a condition continuously in the process of becoming?  

AAS 3559-002 America in the Age of Revolution (3)

Instructor: Marlene Daut

M/W 2:00 - 3:15, New Cabell Hall 338

This course is a literary-historical examination of comparative American writing in a revolutionary era that began with the U.S. American Revolution in 1776, continued with the storming of the Bastille in France in 1789, and culminated with a series of slave revolts and military strikes that erupted in Saint Domingue in 1791 and led to Haitian independence in 1804.  Students will examine the origins, meanings, and legacies of these political struggles for freedom and equality in writings by a diverse array of authors.

AAS 3559-003 Sound and Religion of James Baldwin (3)

Instructor: Ashon Crawley

Mon. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell 056

This course uses the texts of James Baldwin – fictional, theatrical, essay forms – to have students think more broadly about how Black literature is a sound and religious literature, how it is always concerned with both sound and religion as augmentations of sense experience, sound and religion as a disruptive force against western thought. We will explore how sense experience itself is produced through non-division when we listen closely to the texts. And what is heard in Baldwin's texts often most forcefully show up in scenes of religiosity. In this course, we will give special attention to how Baldwin utilizes sound and religion in his texts to produce arguments.

AAS 3559-004 ​American Colonialism and Post-Colonial Theory (3)

Instructor: Marlene Daut

Mon./Wed. 5:00-6:15, New Cabell Hall 332

In this course, students explore the content and historical contexts of postcolonial theory beginning with colonial America. Through the examination of different foundational texts and the authors who have defined colonial and postcolonial theory, students will engage with the major issues that preoccupy postcolonial thinkers such as identity and alterity, nationalism and cultural imperialism, hybridity and origins, as well as diaspora. The relationship between postcolonial theory, capitalism, Marxism and postmodernism is something that will also be examined, as we explore the complexity and contradictions within the field of postcolonial theory itself.

AAS 3559-005 African Worlds through Life Stories (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon./Wed. 5:00-6:15. Shannon House 107

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither!

AAS 4501-001 African American Women's History (3)

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

Tues. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 027

In her 1989 essay, “Beyond the Sound of Silence: Afro-American Women in History,” historian Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham proclaimed that “The sound of silence, which resonates throughout much of the scholarship on Afro-Americans and women, reflects the failure to recognize black women’s history as not only an identifiable field of inquiry in its own right, but as an integral part of Afro-American, American, and women’s history.” Since the publication of Higginbotham’s seminal critique of the marginalization and obscuration of black women in the historical literature, these silences have been broken and the black female has moved from the periphery to the center of historical and historiographical discourse. In this course, students will be introduced to the significant themes and events that have shaped black women’s historical experiences from slavery to the present. Some of the topics covered in this course include: gender and the middle passage; women and slavery; the medical lives of enslaved women; the plight of working-class and incarcerated black women in the post-Civil War South; gendered violence, terror, and resistance in the aftermath of emancipation; black women’s informal and formal activism and protest during the Civil Rights movement, and black women’s ongoing crusade for justice through the #SayHerName and #BlackGirlsMatter movement. 

AAS 4501-002 Black Power (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues. 3:30- 6:00, Nau Hall 242

Over the course of the semester, students will examine the dynamic ways people of African descent in the United States have struggled for cultural, economic, and political empowerment within the context of a white supremacist culture. Much of the class will focus on the 1960s and the 1970s; however, previous and subsequent periods will also be analyzed. Students should leave this class with not only a broader knowledge of “Black Power” as a cultural, political, and ideological movement, but also with a more nuanced understanding of the research methods and interpretive frameworks utilized by historians, as well as other social scientists, interested in Black Power in particular and the Black freedom struggle in general. Students will also have the opportunity to further develop their research skills and techniques through a series of assignments designed to assist them in identifying research topics and questions, interpreting primary and secondary texts, and substantiating arguments with “sound” evidence.

It bears mentioning that this course will devote significant attention to the local dimension of Black Power by engaging student activism on UVA’s campus between 1968 and 1984. Significant attention will be given to students’ fight for a Black Studies department at UVA, their massive demonstrations against racial apartheid in South Africa, and their general struggle to make the University a more egalitarian place.

SWAH 1010: Introductory Swahili I (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 10:00-10:50, New Cabell Hall 038

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits. 

SWAH 1010: Introductory Swahili I (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00-11:50, New Cabell Hall 038

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits. 

SWAH 2010: Intermediate Swahili I (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 12:00-12:50, New Cabell Hall 038

This second year Swahili course is intended to equip you with more language skills in speaking, reading, writing, listening and cultures. It’s an opportunity for you to enhance your language skills. At the end of this course you will have increased your Swahili vocabulary, speak Swahili with more ease and less errors, understand and interact with Swahili speakers. You will be able to write and analyze texts and essays in Swahili on different topics and appreciate more the cultures of the Swahili people. You will also be able to express yourself, your everyday activities, discuss politics or current events in Swahili. To achieve this we will utilize multi-media resources, the internet, literary texts, magazines, and news broadcast stations to enhance your learning.

Fall 2018 Undergraduate Courses

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

 

AAS 1010--Introduction to African American and African Studies I

Kwame Otu

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

 

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

Lisa Shutt

Th 2:00-4:30pm

Mo 2:00-4:30pm

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.

 

AAS 2559--History of Abolition in the Americas

Marlene Daut

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

The course will introduce students to the long history of attempts to abolish chattel slavery in the Americas. By reading primary documents that include speeches, newspaper articles, novels, poetry, and religious tracts, we will examine the rise of abolitionist movements in Great Britain, France, the Caribbean, and the United States. In many respects, transatlantic abolitionists invented the modern concept of human rights, an ideological tool indispensable to all of our social justice movements in the present, but laden with its own ethical and social complications. By looking at abolition as a global phenomena that extended well beyond the geographical borders of the United States, we will discover a whole range of new events and actors in one of human history’s most compelling and disturbing dramas. By covering issues ranging from gradual emancipation in New England in the late eighteenth century, to the abolition of slavery in the French Caribbean in 1794, to its reinstatement in 1802, to the end of the US Civil War in 1865, to the legal abolition of slavery in Cuba and Brazil in the 1880s, we will examine the origins and ideological underpinnings of antislavery andabolitionist movements across the Atlantic World. In so doing, we will pay special attention to the different methods by which abolitionists in the Atlantic World defined the goals of anti-slavery activism, as well as the various meanings of liberty and independence produced within their discourses. 

 

AAS 2559-- Swahili Cultures

Anne Rotich

MoWeFr 1:00PM - 1:50PM

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits. 

AAS 2657--Routes, Writing, Reggae

Njelle Hamilton

TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

In this course, we will trace the history of reggae music and explore its influence on the development of Jamaican literature. With readings on Jamaican history, we will consider why so many reggae songs speak about Jah and quote from the Bible. Then, we will explore how Marcus Garvey's teachings led to the rise of Rastafarianism, which in turn seeded ideas of black pride and black humanity into what would become reggae music.

 

AAS 3300--Social Science Perspectives on African American and African Studies

Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

This course will focus on major debates, theories, and methodological approaches in the social sciences that contribute to African American Studies. The course helps students to consider how a multidisciplinary approach enriches efforts to analyze such issues as health disparities, education, and incarceration as they relate to the African Diaspora.

AAS 3500-001 Digital Caribbean Studies

Marlene Daut

Tu 2:00-4:30pm

Increasingly, we access, share, and create information in digital forms, and this has been referred to as a digital revolution. But how does — or how should — this revolution in the way we teach, learn, and conduct research also change the way we do scholarly work in the classroom? The digital humanities investigates how new media and digital tools are changing the way we produce knowledge in the humanities, by enabling us to share not only information, but sound, visualizations, and even performances using new platforms. This class will provide an introduction to some of these formats and tools, along with immediate critical reflection and discussion about their value to the academy. Since information technology has become one of the key ways in which the peoples of the Caribbean and its diasporas both communicate with one another and gain access to global conversations, alongside this exploration of digital tools, in general, this class will likewise study how the internet can help people in marginalized spaces to engage with crucial social problems and to express their political ideals and aspirations. As the creators of the Digital Caribbean website have attested, “the Internet is analogous in important ways to the Caribbean itself as dynamic and fluid cultural space: it is generated from disparate places and by disparate peoples; it challenges fundamentally the geographical and physical barriers that disrupt or disallow connection; and it places others in relentless relation.” This class will therefore both introduce students to the digital humanities and to the Caribbean as an apt space for exploring the potential of the internet to confront and disrupt many of the more traditional structures of dominance that have traditionally silenced marginalized voices

AAS 3500-002 Revolutionary Struggles in African Atlantic

Kwame Otu

Tu 3:30-6:00pm

In this course, we will grapple with the concept of struggle, as it pertains to Africans’ desire to wrestle themselves from the interlocking white supremacist systems of colonialism, enslavement, apartheid, and racialized capitalism. How, we will consider, has the desire to be “free” from these systems of oppression defined black identities both in Africa and its myriad diasporas? Our goal is to work together to comprehend blackness as struggle, and to amplify how black bodies continue to contend with anti-black regimes spawned by enslavement, colonial oppression, and apartheid. Focusing on places like South Africa to Brazil to the USA to England, and from Haiti to Guinea, we shall emphasize how in the afterlives of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, white supremacist structures and infrastructures continue to legitimize black death. In the face of death, nevertheless, the struggle to live a dignified life, and to be free from white supremacy continue to define black experiences in neocolonial and neoliberal scenes of empire. Understanding that this struggle is revolutionary, we shall tackle how the fight for freedom from white supremacy is constitutively part of the desire to be free from heteropatriarchal nationalism and sexism, homonegativity, and racialized capitalism. Thus, we will ask: How do African and African descended peoples’ quests for freedom in the circum-Atlantic world compel us to revision freedom as something other than a state of being, but as a condition continuously in the process of becoming?  

AAS 3500-003 Toni Morrison

MoWe 2:00-3:15pm

Maurice Wallace

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 3500-004 Working Barefoot in the Snow and Other Dimensions of the Environmental History of Slavery

Tony Perry

Mo: 3:30 - 6:00 pm

This course bridges studies of the historical environment and American slavery in order to examine enslaved people’s complex relationship to the places they inhabited. We will devote particular attention to enslaved women and men’s encounters with a range of environmental phenomena, including the land and landscape, waterways, plants and animals, and the weather. Thinking deeply about the impact of slavery on the environment and vice versa, we will also consider how Virginia-based locales such as the UVA Grounds, Monticello, and the Great Dismal Swamp are entwined in the larger environmental history of slavery in this country.

AAS 3500-005 What is Performance? The Practice of Black & Latin/x Performance

Ethan Madarieta
M/W, 2:00 – 3:15

From 2001 to 2009 Black artist William Pope.L crawled 22 miles up Broadway in Manhattan dressed in a Super Man costume with a skateboard strapped to his back in his performance The Great White Way. In 1972 Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta performed Untitled (Death of a Chicken) in which she, naked and standing before a white wall, held a recently decapitated live chicken by its legs in the throes of death. In his 2017 performance Manual to Be (to Kill) or to Forgive my Own Father, indigenous Mexican artist Emilio Rojas cut text from several (mis)translated copies of his father’s children’s book Little Friend and assembled his own texts from these on over a hundred self-healing cutting mats for 8 hours/day, five days/week (ongoing). Connecting all of these performances are their physical and emotional intensity, duration, endurance, and their specific reference to present and historical racial subjectivities. But why did these artists perform and document such acts? What and how do these performances mean? What can they tell us about ourselves, race, culture, social relations, and even existence? And what effects do these, and other performances have in the world? This course prepares us to answer these questions by first understanding what performance is, and second, how to study it through research, writing, and practice. Throughout the course we will explore the foundations of Performance Studies and Performance Theory and put pressure on what has largely been a white and western discipline by engaging works by Black and Latina/o/x scholars and performers, and by perceiving theory as performance and performance as the practice of theory. We will apply the knowledge gained through this practice in in-class analyses of live and documented performances, and in our own daily practice. You will also write three short essays that formally analyze a performance related to the theme of the week in which the essay is due. And finally, we will all be practicing various modes of performance in class, with an option of creating a well-conceived and thoughtful 10 – 12-minute performance in lieu of a final research paper.

AAS 3500-006 Free Your (Funky) Mind: Mod/ernist Africana Poetry

Brenda Marie Osbey
Wednesdays, 3:30 – 6:00

This course locates the origins of Modernism in the texts of Africana authors of the New World and covers poetry, poetics and poetry movements of Brazil, Latin America, the Caribbean and United States. MAPA begins with audio/video presentations of composer-musician-performance artist George Clinton and his early Parliament-Funkadelic bands as a way of introducing such major Black Arts Movement poets of the period as Amiri Baraka, Mari Evans, spoken word artist Sekou Sundiata and others. Works by the above-mentioned poets epitomize innovations associated with late 20th-early 21st literary expression: experimentation with and revision of traditional forms; irregular line/stanza; disrupted syntax; transgressive language; experimentation with sound and rhythm; blurring of boundaries between poetry and music (blues, jazz, hip-hop, chant); heightened emphasis on oral delivery and performance; increased use of multi-media, improvisation and audience participation; dramatic monologue and confessional style and tone; interiority and questions of identity and displacement; a trend toward more social and political themes; thematic treatment of previously taboo or unorthodox topics; increased emphasis on human and technological threats to the natural environment, to name a few. These and other trends, however, date to far earlier periods and works. The seminar, therefore, resets to introduce work by earlier Africana poets who radicalized poetic expression, language, diction, content, and form across the Americas. Modernism begins with the “adoption” and transformation of European languages by African captives throughout the Americas as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. MAPA treats poets of African descent writing in the four primary languages of the New World – Portuguese, Spanish, French, English. Included are samples of works by such early Modernist poets as Domingos Caldas Barbosa of 18th century Brazil, Candelario Obeso, Armand Lanusse and the Couvent School/les Cenelles poets of 19th century Colombia and New Orleans, respectively. The course then advances to works by the first self-declared Modernist poet, Rubén Darío of Nicaragua; continues with major poets of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1910’s and 20’s; Mario de Andrade’s conception and execution of the 1922 Week of Modern Art in Brazil; Caribbean writers of the Negrismo and Négritude movements of the 1930’s and 40’s; and concludes with the work of such US and Anglophone Caribbean poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden and Martin Carter. 

AAS 3645--Musical Fictions

Njelle Hamilton

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

Over the course of the semester, we will explore the genre of the contemporary musical novel in order to better understand why writers and readers are so intrigued by the figure of the musician as a literary trope. Pairing close listening and music theory with close readings of seminal blues, jazz, reggae, mambo, calypso and rock novels set in the US, UK, Jamaica, Trinidad, France and Germany.

AAS 3749--Food and Meaning in African and the Diaspora

Lisa Shutt

We 2:00-4:30pm

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 or have been forced to move. 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.Topics will include symbol, taboo, sexuality, bodies, ritual, kinship & beauty, among others.

AAS 3853--From Redlined to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the US

Andrew Kahrl

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

This course examines the history of housing and real estate and explores its role in shaping the meaning and lived experience of race in modern America. We will learn how and why real estate ownership, investment, and development came to play a critical role in the formation and endurance of racial segregation, modern capitalism, and the built environment.

AAS 4570--MLK Jr.: Power, Love, Justice

Maurice Wallace

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

Reading, class discussion, and research on a special topic in African-American and African Studies culminating in the composition of a research paper. Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor. Primarily for fourth-year students but open to others.

American Studies

AMST 4500--Race and Sound

John Hamilton

We 6:00-8:30pm

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.

Anthropology

ANTH 2250--Nationalism, Racism, Multiculturalism

Richard Handler

TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

Introductory course in which the concepts of culture, multiculturalism, race, racism, and nationalism are critically examined in terms of how they are used and structure social relations in American society and, by comparison, how they are defined in other cultures throughout the world.

ANTH 3310--Controversies of Care in Contemporary Africa

China Scherz

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

In this course we will draw on a series of classic and contemporary works in history and anthropology to come to a better understanding of current debates concerning corruption and patronage, marriage and sexuality, and medicine in Sub-Sahararn Africa.

Architectural History

ARTH 2753--Arts and Cultures of the Slave South

Louis Nelson

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

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.

ARTH 4591--Histories Photography Africa

Staff

Th 3:30-6:00pm

Subject varies with the instructor, who may decide to focus attention either on a particular period, artist, or theme, or on the broader question of the aims and methods of art history. Subject is announced prior to each registration period. Representative subjects include the life and art of Pompeii, Roman painting and mosaics, history and connoisseurship of baroque prints, art and politics in revolutionary Europe, Picasso and painting, and problems in American art and culture. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

Drama

DRAM 3070--African-American Theatre

Theresa Davis

TuTh 2:00-3:15pm

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

 

English

ENAM 3559--Jim Crow America

K. Ian Grandison and Marlon B. Ross

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

Why has Jim Crow persisted? This course examines how the Jim Crow regime was established in New England during the early republic, how it was nationalized after the Civil War, and how it has been perpetuated into the present, despite the passage of 1960s Civil Rights legislation. What have been the changing modes of maintaining Jim Crow particularly in law (including law enforcement), education, planning, public health, and mass media (newspapers, film, radio, and social media); and what strategies have African Americans used to fight Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and economic exclusion. Focus will be placed on Charlottesville, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. as case studies. The course culminates in a required field trip to Richmond.

 

ENAM 4500--W. E. B. Du Bois

Marlon Ross

Th 5:30-8:00pm

This course examines the work, career, and life of leading American and international intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois by placing him historically in relation to the movements he led, the figures he allied himself with and fought against, and the transformations in thought, social activism, and literature he helped to bring about. Because Du Bois’s intellectual and activist contributions range across the fields of history, sociology, education, fiction, philosophy, political theory, literary theory, biography, and autobiography, we’ll sample works by him in each of these fields. In addition to examining his major texts — including The Souls of Black Folk (philosophy), Philadelphia Negro (sociology), Black Reconstruction in America (history), John Brown (biography), Dark Princess (novel), Dusk of Dawn (autobiography), The World and Africa (African studies) — we’ll sample his influential essays from the journal he edited, The Crisis. Du Bois’s phenomenal impact will be further understood by examining the work of his interlocutors, those with whom he had an intense public dialogue on major issues of the day, including Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Marcus Garvey, Langston Hughes, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Oswald Garrison Villard. We’ll contextualize influential theories like the color-line, double consciousness, the Talented Tenth, art as propaganda, liberal education as uplift, Pan-Africanism, etc. in light of the movements he championed, including the Niagara Movement, the NAACP, the Pan-African Congresses, the anti- lynching campaign, the Harlem Renaissance, anti-World War II activism, the United Nations movement, anti-colonialism, and democratic socialism. How did a man whose fierce idealism over decades end in a decision to renounce his U.S. citizenship and retreat to Ghana in the final years of his life?

 

ENAM 4500--Black Queer Culture

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Timothy Griffiths

Mary Kuhn

In the now-essential critical anthology Black Queer Studies (2005), scholars like E. Patrick Johnson, Mae G. Henderson, and Dwight A. McBride announced three primary reasons for the formalization of black queer cultural studies: the need for a usable past in African American culture for black queer people, the traditionally patriarchal and heterosexist tendencies of African American cultural studies, and a perceived inhospitality in women’s and gender studies toward research on race as it intersected with gender and sexuality. When Barry Jenkins’ film Moonlight won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017, it was a sign to some that at least some minor progress had been made in the cultural representation of queer people of color. “Intersectionality,” though not always adequately defined, is now an acknowledged conceptual keyword of liberal and leftist culture. And in women’s and gender studies and African American studies, it is now becoming a given that critiques of race, gender, and sexuality are not hermetically sealed discourses, that the elevations and devaluations of certain identitarian markers are constellated in both deliberate and latent fashions. Given the progress being made in all three of the needs Black Queer Studies addressed, what are the primary critical problems faced by black queer cultural studies now and in the future? How can we continue to expand the usable past of black queer culture, opening up African American cultural production across its history to a black queer critical audience? Where have increases in black queer cultural representation succeeded and what are the discontents of cultural representation as a primary ethic of black queer liberation? How can or should we understand the relationship between the discursive histories of black feminism and black queer culture, and what conflicts have arisen in their mutual (but not always well-mapped) related growth? And finally, how do the anthologizing practices and theorizations of black queer culture elevate or exclude various iterations of black queer cultural expression, identity, or history? To answer these questions, we will engage a very broadly defined canon of black queer literature from Harriet Jacobs to Uzodinma Iweala, constellating black queer identity with other forms of black transgressive sexuality. Other cultural figures may include Alice Dunbar Nelson, Nella Larsen, James Baldwin, Barbara Smith, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, E. Patrick Johnson, Cheryl Dunye, Samuel R. Delany, Janelle Monae, and Berry Jenkins.

ENCR 4500--Race in American Places

K. Ian Grandison

Tu 5:30-8:00pm

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.

ENLT 2547--Black Writers in America

Alyssa Collins

MoWe 3:30-4:45pm

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.

French

FREN 3570--Topics in Francophone African Studies

Kandioura Dramé

TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

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

FREN 4743--Africa in Cinema

Kandioura Dramé

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

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.

History

HIAF 1501--Africa and Virginia

James LeFleur

We 3:30-6:00pm

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.

HIAF 2001--Early African History

Christina Mobley

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Studies the history of African civilizations from the iron age through the era of the slave trade, ca. 1800. Emphasizes the search for the themes of social, political, economic, and intellectual history which present African civilizations on their own terms.

HIAF 3021--History of Southern Africa

John Mason

TuTh 9:30-10:45

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times.

HIAF 4511--Soccer in the Global South

Christina Mobley

Mo 3:30-6:00pm

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.

HILA 1501--Race, Sex, Cold War Latin America

Eleana McGrath

Tu 6:00-8:30pm

Intended for first- or second-year students, this course introduces the study of history. 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 history.

HIUS 1559--Slavery and Its Legacies

Kirt Von Daacke

TuTh 2:00-3:15pm

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of United States history.

HIUS 2559--African American History to 1865

Justene Hill

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of United States history.

HIUS 3490--From Motown to Hip-Hop

Claudrena Harold

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

This survey traces the history of African American popular music from the late 1950s to the current era. It examines the major sonic innovations in the genres of soul, funk, and hip-hop over the course of the semester, students will examine how musical expression has provided black women and men with an outlet for individual expression, community building, sexual pleasure, political organizing, economic uplift, and interracial interaction

HIUS 4501--Capitalism and Slavery

Justene Hill

TuTh 13:30-1:145pm

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.

HIUS 4501--Eugenics

Sarah Milov

Mo 3:30-5:00pm

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.

Media Studies

MDST 3760--#BlackTwitter and Black Digital Culture

Meredith Clark

TuTh 2:00-3:15pm

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.

Politics

PLCP 3410--Politics of Middle East and North Africa

Jonah Schulhofer-Wohl

MoWe 3:30-4:45pm

Introduces contemporary political systems of the region stretching from Morocco to Iran. Prerequisite: Some background in comparative politics and/or history of the Middle East.

PLCP 4810--Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

Robert Fatton

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.

Religion

RELA 2850--Afro-Creole Religions in the Americas

Jalane Schmidt

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

A survey course which familiarizes students with African-derived religions of the Caribbean and Latin America

RELA 3890--Christianity in Africa

Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

MoWe 1:00-1:50pm

Historical and topical survey of Christianity in Africa from the second century c.e. to the present. Cross listed with RELC 3890. Prerequisite: A course in African religions or history, Christianity, or instructor permission.

RELC 3222--From Jefferson to King

Mark Hadley

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

A seminar focused upon some of the most significant philosophical and religious thinkers that have shaped and continued to shape American religious thought and culture from the founding of the Republic to the Civil Rights Movement, including Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jane Addams, William James, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr. We will explore how their thought influenced the social and cultural currents of their time.

RELG 3325--The Civil Rights Movement in Religious and Theoretical Perspective

Charles Marsh

Tu 3:30-6:00pm

The seminar considers the American Civil Rights Movement, its supporters and opponents, in religious and theological perspective. While interdisciplinary in scope, the seminar will explore the religious motivations and theological sources in their dynamic particularity; and ask how images of God shaped conceptions of personal identity, social existence, race and nation in the campaigns and crusades for equal rights under the law.

RELG 4559--MLK Jr.: Power, Love, Justice

Maurice Wallace

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

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

Sociology

SOC 2442--Systems of Inequality

Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 11:00-11:50am

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.

SOC 3410--Race and Ethnic Relations

Milton Vickerman

MoWe 2:00-3:15pm

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 4559--Race, Crime, and Punishment

Rose Buckelew

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

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

Women and Gender Studies

WGS 2896--Front Lines of Social Change: Through the Lens of Gender, Race, and Class

Jaronda Miller-Bryant

TuTh 13:30-1:45pm

This course is for students who have committed to an internship with the Women's Center. While analyzing the intersectionality of race, class and gender and the deep connection to advocating for social change, interns will be exposed to experiential learning on Grounds in the community and abroad. We see our interns as ambassadors for the university. This course was designed to help students develop into the most well-informed interns possible.

 

WGS 4620--Black Feminist Theory

Lanice Avery

Th 2:00-4:30pm

This course critically examines key ideas, issues, and debates in contemporary Black feminist thought. With a particular focus on Black feminist understandings of intersectionality and womanism, the course examines how Black feminist thinkers interrogate specific concepts including Black womanhood, sexual mythologies and vulnerabilities, class distinctions, colorism, leadership, crime and punishment, and popular culture.

FALL 2019 Undergraduate Courses

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

 

AAS 1010 Introduction to African American and African Studies I

Professor Kwame Otu

TuTh 12:30PM - 1:45PM

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

Fulfills: 1010 requirement

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

Professor Lisa Shutt

TuTh 9:30AM - 10:45AM

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

TuTh 11:00AM - 12:15PM

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.

Fulfills: Race and Politics in the US

AAS 2559 Music, Politics and Social Movement

Professor Kevin Gaines

TuTh 2:00PM-3:15PM

The course introduces students to the history of African American, U.S., and African diaspora social movements during much of the twentieth century through a focus on the social and cultural origins of various genres of popular music. Lectures (including listening to musical examples) will emphasize the social and political contexts for popular music forms including: the blues, folk music, jazz, gospel, calypso, rhythm and blues, soul, fusion, disco, funk, Latin music, reggae, African popular music and hip hop.  Throughout, we will highlight various forms of social protest music over time.  Key social movements include the Great migration, the U.S. labor movement, African American struggles for equality culminating in the civil rights and black power movements, labor rebellions in the Caribbean, 1960s youth counterculture, antiwar movements, second wave feminism, and African national liberation movements. We will also attend to connections between popular music and anti-racist liberation movements abroad, and assess the role of the popular music industry, radio, television and other mass media in aiding or abetting movements for social change.  We will also examine the global circulation and influence of American and African American popular music and culture.   Students will gain a basic knowledge of the main social political, and intellectual issues, concepts, social movements, and transformations of twentieth and twenty-first century African American and global history. 

Fulfills: History or Social Science

AAS 3500-001 Major Issues Civil Rights Law

Professor H. Tim Lovelace

TuTh 11:00AM-12:15PM

This course will explore key themes in US civil rights law. We will engage competing visions of racial equality through law by examining contemporary topics such as affirmative action, school resegregation, and the criminal justice system. This course will also highlight the limitations of law in racial reform and will consider the ways in which law is often complicit in perpetuating race, gender, and class hierarchies.

AAS 3500-002 Revolutionary Struggles in African Atlantic

Professor Kwame Otu

Mo 3:30PM - 6:00PM

In this course, we will grapple with the concept of struggle, as it pertains to Africans’ desire to wrestle themselves from the interlocking white supremacist systems of colonialism, enslavement, apartheid, and racialized capitalism. How has the desire to be “free” from these systems of oppression defined black identities both in Africa and its myriad diasporas? Our goal is to work together to comprehend blackness as a struggle, and to amplify how black bodies continue to contend with anti-black regimes spawned by enslavement, colonial oppression, and apartheid. Focusing on places like South Africa to Brazil to the USA to England, and from Haiti to Guinea, we shall emphasize how in the afterlives of slavery, colonialism, and apartheid, white supremacist structures and infrastructures continue to legitimize black death. In the face of death, nevertheless, the struggle to live a dignified life, and to be free from white supremacy continue to define black experiences in neocolonial and neoliberal scenes of empire. Understanding that this struggle is revolutionary, we shall tackle how the fight for freedom from white supremacy is constitutively part of the desire to be free from heteropatriarchal nationalism and sexism, homonegativity, and racialized capitalism. Thus, we will ask: How do African and African descended peoples’ quests for freedom in the circum-Atlantic world compel us to revision freedom as something other than a state of being, but as a condition continuously in the process of becoming?  

Fulfills: Africa, 3000-level

AAS 3500-003  Black Environmental Thought

Professor Tony Perry

We 6:30PM - 9:00PM

From the period of enslavement onwards, black people have had a unique relationship to the environment. Despite there existing a rich written and artistic record of black people in North America engaging the environment, these perspectives have been largely under-explored in contemporary studies of American environmental thought. Thus, drawing on a range of sources including slave narratives, oral history, music, fiction, film, poetry, and visual art, this class will explore black perspectives on the environment across American history to the present. In doing so, we will study how black people's relationship to the environment has changed over time and how this relationship might inform contemporary environmental problems concerning and beyond matters of justice.

Fulfills: 3000-level

AAS 3500-006 Race, Class, Politics & the Environment

Professor Kimberly Fields

We 3:30PM - 6:00PM

This course explores the relationships between 'race', socio-economic status, interest group politics and environmental policy. We will address and contend with debates surrounding the claims that racialized and poor communities disproportionately shoulder society's negative environmental burdens.  Particular regard will be paid to the political and decision-making processes through which environmental issues are channeled, evaluated and  addressed. Through a variety of analytical and contextual lenses, we will examine fundamental environmental problems faced by individuals and communities of color and the policies and initiatives designed to address them. Attention will also be given to the political and economic responses of community, business, and political stakeholders towards perceived environmental inequities. Additionally, stakeholder responses to existing environmental justice policies and initiatives will also be considered. Furthermore, we will discuss arguments concerning political elites' and interest groups' perceived failures to provide a politically viable vision and remedial strategy to address environmental injustice.

 Through selected case studies, we will examine a number of topics and questions. Some key topics to be considered include: theories of racism and justice, the conceptual history and definitions of environmental racism, the historical development and goals of the environmental justice movement, the social, political, economic and environmental advantages and drawbacks of current systems of production and consumption, stakeholder responses to environmental inequities, the impact of environmental justice policies on environmental inequities as well as their impact on subsequent political behavior, pollution in developing nations and, indigenous peoples.  Additionally, the possible causes for patterns of injustice will be examined. Recent proposals to address the problem of environmental racism and injustice will be discussed and analyzed.

AAS 3500-008 The Sporting Black World

Professor Jermaine Scott

TuTh 8:00AM - 9:15AM

This course seeks to explore the relationship between Blackness and modern sports in the African Diaspora. While the dominant scholarship on Black athletes is often prescribed through African American Blackness, this course illuminates the experiences of Black athletes inside and outside the United States and addresses a number of critical questions: Why is modern sport a site of Black political struggle? Why is the African Diaspora a critical site for Black athletic politics? How do Black athletes negotiate the complicated terrains of race, gender, sexuality, citizenship, and community? This course will answer these questions by paying attention to Black athletes in different historical conjunctures across a range of sports, including but not limited to, boxing, baseball, track and field, football/soccer, cricket, and tennis. Moreover, students will learn the history of Black athletic politics in an effort to better contextualize its contemporary moment.

AAS 3559 – Black and Womanist Religious Thought

Professor Ashon Crawley

Mo. 3:30PM - 6:00PM

Is thought always already racialized, gendered, sexed? This course, Introduction to Black and Womanist Thought, takes as its line and root the idea that thinking and, as such, behaving, does not have to submit itself to modern ways of producing knowledge. We will discover that there are alternative ways to think and practice and be in the world with one another. And we call this alternative otherwise possibility. In this course we will not simply consider the history of Black Theology and Womanist Theology as accommodating the concept of theology; we will also consider the limits of particular concepts like theology, and how certain concepts are insufficient for understanding and contending with Black life. Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple and essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens” will serve as the anchoring points for the course around which we can discuss Black Thought, Womanist Thought and otherwise possibility, alternatives to the normative world. We will read from James Cone, William R. Jones, Alice Walker, Sherman Jackson, Delores Williams and others.

 

AAS 3710 African Worlds through Life Stories

Professor Lisa Shutt

We 2:00PM - 4:30PM

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the 'individual' in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood.

Fulfills: Africa, Social Science or History, 3000-level

AAS 3745 (ENGL 3635) Currents in African Literature

Professor Njelle Hamilton

Tu 3:30PM - 6:00PM

In this course, we will read a sampling of some exciting new works of fiction from Africa's young and established writers. In particular, we will examine the literary innovations that African writers use to narrate issues affecting the continent such as dictatorship, the lingering effects of colonization, the postcolonial nation state, the traumas of war and geo-politics, religion, gender and sexuality, and migration, among others.

Fulfills:Humanities, 3000-level, Africa

AAS 3810 Race, Culture and Inequality

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 2:00PM - 3:15PM

This course will examine how culture matters for understanding race and social inequality. It 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.

Fulfills: Social Science or History, 3000-level

AAS 4501 Advanced Research Seminar in History and AAS: Black Power

Professor Claudrena Harold

Tu 3:30PM - 6:00PM

Reading, class discussion, and research on a special topic in African-American and African Studies culminating in the composition of a research paper. Topics change from term to term, and vary with the instructor. Primarily for fourth-year AAS and History students--double majors and others. Crosslisted with the History major seminar.

Fulfills: 4000-level seminar, Social Science or History, 3000-level, Race and Politics in the US

AAS 4570 Blackness & Mysticism

Professor Ashon Crawley

Tu 3:30PM - 6:00PM

This course considers the radicalism internal to a European Mystical Tradition but also its delimitation, particularly with how it gets cognized in western thought. We will then investigate a Black Radical Mystical Tradition that cannot be, as Robinson might say, "understood within the particular context of it genesis." It is a lived and living tradition, a tradition against religion, a tradition against western thought and modern man.

 

 

SWAHILI

SWAH 1010-001 Introductory Swahili I

MoWeFr 10:00AM - 10:50AM

Professor Anne Rotich

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits.

SWAH 1010-002 Introductory Swahili I

MoWeFr 11:00AM - 11:50AM

Professor Anne Rotich

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits. 

Prerequisite: limited or no previous knowledge of Swahili.

SWAH 2010 Intermediate Swahili I

MoWeFri 12:00PM - 12:50PM

Professor Anne Rotich

This second year Swahili course is intended to equip you with more language skills in speaking, reading, writing, listening and cultures. It’s an opportunity for you to enhance your language skills. At the end of this course you will have increased your Swahili vocabulary, speak Swahili with more ease and less errors, understand and interact with Swahili speakers. You will be able to write and analyze texts and essays in Swahili on different topics and appreciate more the cultures of the Swahili people. You will also be able to express yourself, your everyday activities, discuss politics or current events in Swahili. To achieve this we will utilize multi-media resources, the internet, literary texts, magazines, and news broadcast stations to enhance your learning.

Prerequisite: SWAH 1020

AMERICAN STUDIES

AMST 4500 Race and Sound

Professor Jack Hamilton

We 3:30PM - 6:00PM

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.

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

ANTHROPOLOGY

ANTH 3310 Controversies of Care in Contemporary Africa

Staff

TuTh 12:30PM - 1:45PM

In this course we will draw on a series of classic and contemporary works in history and anthropology to come to a better understanding of current debates concerning corruption and patronage, marriage and sexuality, and medicine in Sub-Sahararn Africa.

Fulfiils: Social Science or History, 3000-level, Africa

HISTORY OF ART

ARTH 4591 Histories of Photography in Africa

Professor Giulia Paoletti

Professor Amanda Phillips

We 1:00PM - 3:30PM

Subject varies with the instructor, who may decide to focus attention either on a particular period, artist, or theme, or on the broader question of the aims and methods of art history. Subject is announced prior to each registration period. Representative subjects include the life and art of Pompeii, Roman painting and mosaics, history and connoisseurship of baroque prints, art and politics in revolutionary Europe, Picasso and painting, and problems in American art and culture. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

Fulfills: Humanities, Africa, 3000-level

DRAMA

Dram 3070 African-American Theatre

Professor Theresa Davis

TuTh 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

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-levelD

Dram 4590 The Black Monologues

Theresa Davis

TBA

A directed project-based study offered to upper-level students. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

ENGLISH

ENGL 2572 Black Writers in America

Professor Lisa Woolfork

TuTh 8:00AM - 9:15AM

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.

Fulfills: Humanities

ENGL 2599 Landscapes of Black Education

Profesor K. Ian Grandison

TuTh 3:30PM - 4:45PM

MoWeFr 11:00AM - 11:50AM

Usually an introduction to non-traditional or specialized topics in literary studies, (e.g., native American literature, gay and lesbian studies, techno-literacy, Arthurian romance, Grub Street in eighteenth-century England, and American exceptionalism). For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

Fulfills: Humanities, Race and Politics in the US

ENGL 3572  Black Protest Narrative

Professor Marlon Ross

Th 5:30PM - 8:00PM

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion, crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Either directly or indirectly, all of these narratives ask pressing questions about the meaning of American citizenship and racial community under the conditions of racial segregation and the fight for integration or black nationalist autonomy. What does it mean to be “Negro” and American? How should African Americans conduct themselves on the world stage, and which international identifications are most productive? What roles do the press and popular media play in the sustenance and/or erosion of a sense of community both within a racial group and in relation to the country? What are the obligations of oppressed communities to the nation that oppresses them? What role should violence play in working toward liberation? We begin our study with the most famous protest novel, Richard Wright’s Native Son. Then we examine other narratives in this tradition, including works by Angelo Herndon, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Essex Hemphill, and Joseph Beam. Films include Joseph Mankiewitz’s No Way Out, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and The Watermelon Man, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. In addition to fiction, film, and autobiography, we’ll read selections from pertinent texts in history, literary criticism, journalism, cultural criticism, film theory, and sociology. Assignments include two short essays, a midterm, and a final exam.

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

ENGL 4580 Race, Space, Culture

Professor K. Ian Grandison

Tu 5:30PM - 8:00PM

Co-taught by K. Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross, 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.

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level, 4000-level Seminar

 

ENGL 5700 Contemporary African-American Literature

Professor Lisa Woolfork

TuTh 9:30AM - 10:45AM

This course for advanced undergraduates and master's-level graduate students surveys African-American literature today. Assignments include works by Evreett, Edward Jones, Tayari Jones, Evans, Ward, Rabateau, and Morrison

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

ENWR 3500 Black Women's Writing and Rhetoric

Professor Tamika Carey

TuTh 2:00PM - 3:15PM

A course for students who are already proficient academic writers and wish to develop their writing skills further in a workshop setting.

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

FRENCH

FREN 3570 Topics in Francophone African Studies

Professor Kandioura Dramé

TuTh 12:30PM - 1:45PM

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

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level, Africa

FREN 4743 Africa in Cinema

Professor Kandioura Dramé

TuTh 3:30PM - 4:45PM

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.

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level, Africa

HISTORY

HIAF 1501 Africa and Virginia

Professor James La Fleur

Th 3:30PM - 6:00PM

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.

Fulfills: Social Science or History, Africa

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa

Professor John Mason

TuTh 9:30AM - 10:45AM

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times.

Fulfills: Social Science or History, Africa, 3000-level

HIAF 3051 West African History

Professor James La Fleur

TuTh 2:00PM - 3:15PM

History of West Africans in the wider context of the global past, from West Africans' first attempts to make a living in ancient environments through the slave trades (domestic, trans-Saharan, and Atlantic), colonial overrule by outsiders, political independence, and ever-increasing globalization.

Fulfills: Social Science or History, Africa, 3000-level

HIUS 2003 Slavery and Freedom at UVA and in Virginia: History and Legacies

Professor Kirt Von Daacke

TuTh 9:30AM - 10:45AM

This course examines the history of slavery and its legacies at UVA and in the region, recovering the experiences of enslaved individuals and their roles in building/maintaining the university, & contextualizing those experiences within U.S. history. It also puts that history into political context, tracing the rise of sectional tensions, secession, the advent of emancipation, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, desegregation, and civil rights change.

Fulfills: Social Science or History, Race and Politics in the US

HIUS 3654 Black Fire

Professor Claudrena Harold

TuTh 11:00AM - 12:15PM

This course examines the history and contemporary experiences of African Americans at the University of Virginia from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the present era.

Fulfills: Social Science or History, Race and Politics in the US, 3000-level

MEDIA STUDIES

MDST 3760 #BlackTwitter and Black Digital Culture

Professor Meredith Clark

TuTh 2:00PM - 3:15PM

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.

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

MDST 4559 Memory, Media and Justice

Professor Meredith Clark

We 5:00PM - 7:30PM

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

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

MUSIC

MUSI 3372 Writing Rap

Professor A.D. Carson

TuTh 9:30AM - 10:45AM

Course focuses on the craft of writing raps. No previous experience writing raps required. Students will listen to, attempt to deconstruct, and evaluate a broad range of rap music while learning the basics of composing lyrics. Along with writing raps, students will learn songwriting techniques and some theoretical approaches to composing larger works such as a 'mixtape' or 'album' through examinations of music, criticism, and literature.

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

MUSI 4065 The "Black Voice"

Professor A.D. Carson

TuTh 2:00PM - 3:15PM

This course focuses on critical analyses of and questions concerning the "Black Voice" as it pertains to hip-hop culture, particularly rap and related popular musics. Students will read, analyze, discuss a wide range of thinkers to explore many conceptions and definitions of "Blackness" while examining popular artists and the statements they make in and about their art.

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

POLITICS

PLPT 3200 African American Political Thought

Professor Lawrie Balfour

MoWe 2:00PM - 3:15PM

This course examines key figures and central concepts in African American political thought from the 19th through the 21st centuries. Issues addressed include the relationship between slavery and American democracy, separation vs. integration, and the promise and limitations of formal equality. Prerequisite: one course in PLPT or instructor permission.

Fulfills: Social Science or History, Race and Politics in the US, 3000-level

RELIGIOUS STUDIES

RELA 2850 Afro-Creole Religions in the Americas

Staff

TuTh 9:30AM - 10:45AM

A survey course which familiarizes students with African-derived religions of the Caribbean and Latin America

Fulfills: Humanities, Africa

RELG 1500 Religion, Race, and Democracy

Professor Larycia Hawkins

Mo 3:30PM - 6:00PM

These seminars introduce first- and second-year students to the academic study of religion through a close study of a particular theme or topic. Students will engage with material from a variety of methodological perspectives, and they will learn how to critically analyze sources and communicate their findings. The seminars allow for intensive reading and discussion of material. Not more than two Intro Seminars may count towards the Major.

Fulfills: Humanities, Race and Politics in the US

RELG 3559 Black and Womanist Rel Thought

Professor Ashon Crawley

Mo 3:30PM - 6:00PM

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

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

RELG 3559 Religion and Black Freedom

Staff

MoWe 2:00PM - 3:15PM

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

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

RELG 5559 Blackness and Mysticism

Professor Ashon Crawley

Tu 3:30PM - 6:00PM

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

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

SOCIOLOGY

SOC 2442 Systems of Inequality

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 11:00AM - 11:50AM

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.

Fulfills: Social Science or History, Race and Politics in the US

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Professor Rose Buckelew

TuTh 9:30AM - 10:45AM

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.

Fulfills: Race and Politics in the US, Social Science or History, 3000-level

SOC 4750 Racism

Professor Milton Vickerman

MoWe 2:00PM - 3:15PM

Racism, the disparagement and victimization of individuals and groups because of a belief that their ancestry renders them intrinsically different and inferior, is a problem in many societies. In this course we will examine the problem of racism by investigating the workings of these sociological processes theoretically, historically, and contemporaneously.

Fulfills: Social Science or History, 3000-level

SPANISH

SPAN 4500 Afro-Latinidad

Professor Anne Garland Mahler

MoWe 2:00PM - 3:15PM

Prerequisite: SPAN 3010, 3300, and 3 credits of 3400-3430, or departmental placement.

Fulfills: Humanities, 3000-level

WOMEN, GENDER, and SEXUALITY

WGS 4620 Black Feminist Theory

Professor Lanice Avery

Th 2:00PM - 4:30PM

This course critically examines key ideas, issues, and debates in contemporary Black feminist thought. With a particular focus on Black feminist understandings of intersectionality and womanism, the course examines how Black feminist thinkers interrogate specific concepts including Black womanhood, sexual mythologies and vulnerabilities, class distinctions, colorism, leadership, crime and punishment, and popular culture.

Fulfills: Social Science or History, 3000-level

 

Fall 2020 Undergraduate Course

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

 

AAS 1010 Introduction to African American and African Studies

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm -- Minor Hall 125

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

Fulfills: 1010

 

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

Professor Lisa Shutt
Tu 3:30-6:00pm -- New Cabell Hall 032

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.

Fulfills: Race and Politics in the US; Humanities

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

Professor Lisa Shutt
We 2:00-4:30 -- New Cabell Hall 315

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.

Fulfills: Race and Politics in the US; Humanities

AAS 2559-001: The Souls of Black Folk

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass
TuTh 9:30-10:45am  -- New Cabell Hall 068

In this course, we will examine the social organization of African American communities. Some of the intellectual framing for the issues we will study come from writings by the pioneering sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. We will discuss African Americans’ social status and experiences at the intersections of class, color, gender, and sexuality. We also will study institutions within the community, and we will consider social issues that African Americans will face in the future.

AAS 2559-003 The Global Color Line

Professor Robert Vinson
TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm -- New Cabell Hall 032

The 20th century was marked by European colonialism in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, as well as Jim Crow segregationist regimes in the US.  Tracing the transnational flows of people, cultures, institutions and ideologies across the black world, this course includes discussion of the Pan-Africanism of W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, internationalist black women like Claudia Jones and Eslanda Robeson, African, Asian and Caribbean decolonization movements, the centrality of women and gender in the US Civil Rights and Black Power eras, and the global solidarities that ended South African apartheid. In doing so, this course illuminates global visions of black self-determination and transnational solidarities among people of color that continue to inform contemporary movements for political, socio-economic and social justice.  

Fulfills: Africa Course Requirement

AAS 2559-004 The Racial Life of Covid-19

Professor Tony Perry
TuTh 9:30-10:45am -- Web-Based Course

Although Black Americans account for only 13% of the U.S. population, they make up roughly 25% of those who have died from Covid-19. This statistic is only the latest in the long history of racialized disparities in American public health. This course is dedicated to examining the social, institutional, and environmental determinants of health and illness in the U. S. We will also consider the relationship between race and disease in Africa, the Caribbean, and across the Black diaspora. We will give particular attention to the factors producing the racial fault lines and inequalities the Covid-19 pandemic has exposed, placing them in long historical context. As an interdisciplinary course, this class will also feature guest lecturers from a variety of disciplines, schools, and institutions. Together they will help us understand, not only the historic relationship between race and disease, but also the specific impact of Covid-19 on black life and health worldwide.

AAS 2657 Routes, Writing, Reggae

Professor Njelle Hamilton
Tu 3:30-6:00pm -- The Rotunda Room 150
(ENGL 2599)

When most people think of reggae music, they think of lazing out on a Caribbean beach with a marijuana spliff and nodding to the music of Bob Marley. But what is the history of the music of which Marley is the most visible ambassador? How did the music of a small Caribbean island become a worldwide phenomenon, with the song “One Love” and the album Exodus named among the top songs and albums of the 20th century? This course traces the history of reggae music and its influence on Jamaican literature. Framed by readings on Jamaican history, Marcus Garvey’s teachings, and Rastafari philosophy, at the heart of the course is an intensive study of Marley’s lyrics and the literary devices, musical structures, and social contexts of reggae. Armed with these tools, we will apply the ‘reggae aesthetic’ to Jamaican poetry, fiction and film, including The Harder They Come and the Booker Prize novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings. Assignments such as album reviews, ‘diss’ tracks, and critical essays will allow you to engage topical and controversial issues such as: misogyny and homophobia in reggae and dancehall; the place of religion and spirituality (and yes, marijuana) in reggae; reggae’s critique of oppression and racial injustice; cultural appropriation and the global marketplace; and the connections between reggae, dancehall, hip-hop, EDM, and reggaetón.

Fulfills: Humanities

AAS 3000 Women and Religion in Africa

Professor Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton
TuTh 12:30-1:45pm -- New Cabell Hall 411

This course examines women's religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women.

Fulfills: Africa; Humanities

AAS 3500-001 Black Women and Mass Incarceration

Professor Talitha LeFlouria
We 3:30-6:00pm -- New Cabell Hall 111

Fulfills: Race and Politics in the US; Social Science or History

AAS 3500-002 Race, Medicine and Incarceration in America

Professor Talitha LeFlouria
Th 3:30-6:00pm -- New Cabell Hall 111

Fulfills: Race and Politics in the US; Social Science or History

AAS 3500-003 Black Environmental Thought

Professor Tony Perry
TuTh 9:30-10:45am -- New Cabell Hall 315

Fulfills: Social Science or History

AAS 3500-004 Black and Womanist Religious Thought

From the period of enslavement onwards, black people have had a unique relationship to the environment. Despite there existing a rich written and artistic record of black people in North America engaging the environment, these perspectives have been largely under-explored in contemporary studies of American environmental thought. Thus, drawing on a range of sources including slave narratives, oral history, music, fiction, film, poetry, and visual art, this class will explore black perspectives on the environment across American history to the present. In doing so, we will study how black people's relationship to the environment has changed over time and how this relationship might inform contemporary environmental problems concerning and beyond matters of justice.

Professor Ashon Crawley
Mo 3:30-6:00pm -- Gibson Hall 141

Fulfills: Humanities

AAS 3500-005 Black Philosophy and Black Religion

Professor Ashon Crawley
We 3:30-6:00pm -- New Cabell 187

Fulfills: Humanities

AAS 3500-006 Race, Class, Politics and the Environment

Professor Kimberly Fields
We 3:30-6:00pm -- New Cabell Hall 027

This course explores the relationships between 'race', socio-economic status, interest group politics and environmental policy. We will address and contend with debates surrounding the claims that racialized and poor communities disproportionately shoulder society's negative environmental burdens.  Particular regard will be paid to the political and decision-making processes through which environmental issues are channeled, evaluated and  addressed. Through selected case studies, we will examine a number of topics and questions. Some key topics to be considered include: theories of racism and justice, the conceptual history and definitions of environmental racism, the historical development and goals of the environmental justice movement, the social, political, economic and environmental advantages and drawbacks of current systems of production and consumption, stakeholder responses to environmental inequities, the impact of environmental justice policies on environmental inequities as well as their impact on subsequent political behavior, pollution in developing nations and, indigenous peoples.  Additionally, the possible causes for patterns of injustice will be examined. Recent proposals to address the problem of environmental racism and injustice will be discussed and analyzed.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

 

AAS 3500-009 Environmental Justice in the Mid-Atlantic

Professor Kimberly Fields
We 6:30-9:00pm -- New Cabell 107

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

AAS 3671 History of the Civil Rights Movement

Professor Kevin Gaines

TuTh 11:00am -12:15pm

AAS 3710 African Worlds though Life Stories

Professor Lisa Shutt
Th 2:00-4:30pm -- Dell 2 101

Fulfills: Africa; Humanities

AAS 3810 Race, Culture and Inequality

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass
Th 2:00-3:15pm -- New Cabell Hall 207

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

AAS 3853 From Redlined to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the U.S.

Professor Andrew Kahrl
MoWe 10:00-10:50am -- Minor Hall 125

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

AAS 4501 Religion and the Struggle for Black Equality

Professor Kevin Gaines
MoWe 2:00-3:15pm -- New Cabell Hall 036

Fulfills: 4000-level seminar

AAS 4570-001 Modern Caribbean

Professor Marlene Daut
Tu 2:00-4:30

The Caribbean is often located in the popular imaginary as a tropical paradise of palm trees replete with resorts designed for tourist consumption. Modern Caribbean Studies helps to refocus understandings of the West Indies beyond this stereotype by highlighting it as a place with myriad and complex histories, cultures, and forms of thinking. The Caribbean, for example, is comprised of a distinctly heterogeneous population, which is the result of contact between Europeans, indigenous Americans, Africans, and Asians. Colonialism, slavery, indentured servitude, and other forms of forced migration and unfree labor were largely responsible for producing the diverse societies we continue to see in the greater Caribbean region today. This introductory course on Caribbean Studies will comparatively situate the geographical and sociocultural aspects of the Caribbean beginning with an overview of the region’s history. The course encourages students to understand the modern Caribbean through a variety of topics, such as gender and sexuality; migration and diaspora; the legacies of slavery and colonialism; globalization and inequality; race and racism; and tourism. The course will also introduces a variety of artistic, intellectual, and religious traditions found in the Caribbean today, including the musical styles of calypso, konpa, zouk, reggae, merengue, and salsa. Literature, film, philosophy, social movements, and politics may also be primary features of the course

 

SWAHILI

SWAH 1010-001 Introductory Swahili I

Professor Anne Rotich
MoWeFr 10:00-10:50am -- Brooks Hall 103

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits.

SWAH 1010-002 Introductory Swahili I

Professor Anne Rotich
MoWeFr 11:00-11:50am -- Brooks Hall 103

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits.

SWAH 2010 Intermediate Swahili I

Professor Anne Rotich
MoWeFr 12:00-12:50pm -- Brooks Hall 103

This second year Swahili course is intended to equip you with more language skills in speaking, reading, writing, listening and cultures. It’s an opportunity for you to enhance your language skills. At the end of this course you will have increased your Swahili vocabulary, speak Swahili with more ease and less errors, understand and interact with Swahili speakers. You will be able to write and analyze texts and essays in Swahili on different topics and appreciate more the cultures of the Swahili people. You will also be able to express yourself, your everyday activities, discuss politics or current events in Swahili. To achieve this we will utilize multi-media resources, the internet, literary texts, magazines, and news broadcast stations to enhance your learning.

AMERICAN STUDIES

AMST Slavery and Its Legacies

Professor Kirt von Daacke

MoWe 2:00-3:15pm

This course examines the history of slavery and its legacy at UVA and in the central Virginia region. The course aims to recover the experiences of enslaved individuals and their roles in building and maintaining the university, and to contextualize those experiences within Southern history.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

DRAMA

DRAM 3070 African-American Theatre

Professor Theresa Davis

TuTh 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

Fulfills: Humanities

ENGLISH

ENGL 2572 Black Women Writers

Professor Lisa Woolfork

TuTh 8:00am - 9:15am

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.

Fulfills: Humanities

 

ENGL 3570 Jim Crow America

Professor K. Ian Grandison + Marlon Ross

TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

Fulfills: Humanities; Race and Politics in the US

 

ENGL 3572 African American Rhetorical Traditions

Professor Tamika Carey

TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

This course examines the distinct communication and argumentative strategies African Americans have created and modified in pursuit of full humanity since the enslavement era as a specific rhetorical tradition. Students will learn rhetorical theory from such scholars as Geneva Smitherman, Molefi Asante, Keith Gilyard, Elaine Richardson, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Adam Banks, and more and they will use these frameworks to investigate and assess the techniques within speeches, essays, book-length primary sources, and critical works by such figures as David Walker, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Carter G. Woodson, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Gil Scott Heron, Audre Lorde, the Crunk Feminist Collective, and others. Through this work, we will determine how African Americans use rhetoric as a techne, or art, to meet their needs and how rhetoric can provide an analytical tool to critique and evaluate arguments. Assignments may include: short essays, an oral presentation, a hybrid exam, and a multi-part digital project.

Fulfills: Humanities

 

ENGL 3572 Multimedia Harlem Renaissance

Professor Marlon Ross

TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

Intensive study of African-American writers and cultural figures in a diversity of genres. Includes artists from across the African diaspora in comparative American perspective. For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

Fulfills: Humanities

 

ENGL 4570 Reading the Black College Campus

Professor K. Ian Grandison

Tu 5:30pm - 8:00pm

Fulfills: 4000-level seminar; Race and Politics in the US

 

ENGL 5700 Contemporary African-American Literature

Professor Lisa Woolfork

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

This course for advanced undergraduates and master's-level graduate students surveys African-American literature today. Assignments include works by Evreett, Edward Jones, Tayari Jones, Evans, Ward, Rabateau, and Morrison

Fulfills: Humanities

FRENCH

FREN 3585 Slave Narratives from the Francophone World (Antilles, Haïti, Mauritius)

Professor Nicolas Lombart

TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm

The slave narrative is originally a type of literary genre involving the (written) autobiographical accounts of enslaved Africans in Great Britain and its colonies (the later United States, Canada, and Caribbean nations), from the end of 18th century to the early 1920s. The genre is still vivid through the “neo-slave narrative”, a modern fictional work set in the slavery era by contemporary authors (Toni Morrison, Edward P. Jones, Marie-Elena Jones, etc.). This course will examine how Francophone writers deal with this Anglophone literary tradition to “think” the postcolonial situation and “shape” the postcolonial subject from the slave perspective in the Francophone contemporary World (Antilles, Haïti,

Mauritius). We will more particularly study: Maryse Condé, Moi, Tituba, sorcière… Noire de Salem (1988) [Guadeloupe]; Patrick Chamoiseau, L’esclave vieil homme et le molosse (1999) [Martinique]; Evelyne Trouillot, Rosalie l’infâme (2003) [Haïti]; and Natacha Appanah, Les rochers de poudre d’or (2006) [Île Maurice].
Requirements include: 1) regular reading and active participation in class discussion, 2) an oral presentation on a particular aspect of the Francophone contemporary slave narrative, 3) a series of short commentaries from the four novels, 4) and a final paper. Prerequisites: FREN 3032. Course conducted in French.

Fulfills: Humanities

FREN 4811 Francophone Literature of Africa

Professor Kandioura Drame

TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

Surveys the literary tradition in French, emphasizing post-World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights. Examines the role of cultural reviews in the development of this literary tradition. Prerequisite: FREN 3032 and at least one FREN course numbered 3041 to 3043 (or instructor permission).

Fulfills: Humanities

HISTORY

HIAF 1501 Africa and Virginia

Professor James LaFleur

Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm

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.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Africa

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa

Professor John Mason

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Africa

HIAF 3051 West African History

Professor James LeFleur

TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

History of West Africans in the wider context of the global past, from West Africans' first attempts to make a living in ancient environments through the slave trades (domestic, trans-Saharan, and Atlantic), colonial overrule by outsiders, political independence, and ever-increasing globalization.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Africa

HIUS 2559 African-American Women's History

Professor Justene Hill Edwards

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

HIUS 3490 From Motown to Hip-Hop

Professor Claudrena Harold

TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

This survey traces the history of African American popular music from the late 1950s to the current era. It examines the major sonic innovations in the genres of soul, funk, and hip-hop over the course of the semester, students will examine how musical expression has provided black women and men with an outlet for individual expression, community building, sexual pleasure, political organizing, economic uplift, and interracial interaction

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

HIUS 3671 African American Freedom Movement, c 1945-Present

Professor Kevin Gaines

TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

This course examines the history and legacy of the African American struggle for civil rights in twentieth century America. It provides students with a broad overview of the civil rights movement -- the key issues, significant people and organizations, and pivotal events -- as well as a deeper understanding of its scope, influence, legacy, and lessons for today

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

HIUS 4501 American Capitalism, American Slavery

Professor Justene Hill Edwards

Th 2:00pm - 4:30pm

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.

Fulfills: 4000-level seminar; Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

MUSIC

MUSI 2120 History of Jazz Music

Professor Scott DeVeaux

MoWe 4:00pm - 4:50pm

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.

Fulfills: Humanities

PSYCHOLOGY

PSYC 4870 The Minority Family: A Psychological Inquiry

Professor Melvin Wilson

Th 2:00pm - 4:30pm

Examines the current state of research on minority families, focusing on the black family. Emphasizes comparing 'deficit' and 'strength' research paradigms. Prerequisite: PSYC 3006 and at least one course from each of the following groups: PSYC 2100, 2150 or 2300, and PSYC 2400, 2700 or 2600, and students in the Afro-American and African studies or studies in women and gender programs.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

RELIGIOUS STUDIES

RELA 3073 Religion and Society in Nigeria

Professor Oludamini Ogunnaike

Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm

Not only is Nigeria home to uniquely dynamic, diverse, and globally influential religious traditions, but these traditions have profoundly shaped the history, culture, and politics of the nation-state of Nigeria and its diaspora. This course examines the historical development of religious traditions in Nigeria and their interactions.

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

RELA 3559 Religion, Witchcraft, and Modernity in Africa and Diaspora

Professor Julie Jenkins

Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm

 

Fulfills: humanities; Africa

RELA 3730 Religious Themes in African Literature and Film

Professor Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mo 3:30pm - 6:00pm

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.

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

RELA 5073 Religion and Society in Nigeria

Professor Oludamini Ogunnaike

Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm

Not only is Nigeria home to uniquely dynamic, diverse, and globally influential religious traditions, but these traditions have profoundly shaped the history, culture, and politics of the nation-state of Nigeria and its diaspora. This course examines the historical development of religious traditions in Nigeria and their interactions

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

RELG 2559 Ballots, Bullets, Bibles: On Black Liberation

Professor Kai Parker

MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

Fulfills: Humanities; Race and Politics in the US

RELG 3405 Introduction to Black and Womanist Religious Thought

Professor Ashon Crawley

Mo 3:30pm - 6:00pm

Is thought always already racialized, gendered, sexed? This Introduction to Black and Womanist Thought course argues that thought does not have to submit itself to modern regimes of knowledge production, that there are alternative ways to think and practice and be in the world with one another. An introduction to major thinkers in both religious thought and traditions with attention to theology, philosophy, and history.

Fulfills: Humanities

RELG 3559 Introduction to Black Philosophy and Religion

Professor Ashon Crawley

We 3:30pm - 6:00pm

Fulfills: Humanities

RELG 3559 Black Music, Black Faith

Professor Kai Parker

We 3:30pm - 6:00pm

Fulfills: Humanities; Race and Politics in the US

 

RELG 5225 The Civil Rights Movement Religious Perspectives

Professor Charles Marsh

We 3:30pm - 6:00pm

The seminar considers the American Civil Rights Movement in religious and theological perspective. While interdisciplinary in scope, the seminar will explore the movement's religious influences and theological sources and ask how differing images of God and doctrinal commitments shaped particular ways of interpreting and engaging the social order.

Fulfills: Humanities; Race and Politics in the US

SOCIOLOGY

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Professor Rose Buckelew

MoWe 1:00pm - 1:50pm

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.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

SOC 4750 Racism

Professor Rose Buckelew

TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

Racism, the disparagement and victimization of individuals and groups because of a belief that their ancestry renders them intrinsically different and inferior, is a problem in many societies. In this course we will examine the problem of racism by investigating the workings of these sociological processes theoretically, historically, and contemporaneously.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

Women and Gender Studies

WGS 4620 Black Feminist Theory

Professor Lanice Avery

Th 4:00pm - 6:30pm

This course critically examines key ideas, issues, and debates in contemporary Black feminist thought. With a particular focus on Black feminist understandings of intersectionality and womanism, the course examines how Black feminist thinkers interrogate specific concepts including Black womanhood, sexual mythologies and vulnerabilities, class distinctions, colorism, leadership, crime and punishment, and popular culture.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

 

 

Fall 2021 Undergraduate Course

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

 

AAS 1010 Introduction to African American and African Studies

Robert Vinson, Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

[Fulfills: required for the major]

 

AAS 2224-001 Black Femininities & Masculinities in the US Media

Lisa Shutt, Tu 2-4:30pm

This course 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.

[Fulfills: Humanities; SSH]

AAS 2224-002  Black Femininities & Masculinities in the US Media

Lisa Shutt   We 2-4:30pm

This course 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.

[Fulfills: Humanities; SSH]

AAS 2559-001 The Souls of Black Folk

Sabrina Pendergrass, Tu Th 11-12:15pm

In this course, we will examine the social organization of African American communities. The intellectual context for the issues we will study come from the foundational work of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and others. We will discuss African Americans’ social status and experiences at the intersections of class, color, gender, and sexuality. We also will study institutions within the community, and we will consider social issues that African Americans face today and will face in the future.

[Fulfills: SSH]

AAS 3500-001 Intro to Black Performance Studies

Ashon Crawley, W 3:30-6:00pm

"Don't be performative!" A word often said to mean fake, phony, inauthentic, untrue. In this course we will discuss the history of the concept of "performative". We will also discuss the role of performance to Black popular, intellectual and spiritual culture. We will engage fiction, poetry, music, theater, activism and how these practices are various attempts to practice blackness as a living, breathing existence. 

[Fulfills: Humanities]

AAS 3500-002 Monsters in Film and Literature: Monstrous Intimacies in the American Imagination

Janée Moses, TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

How has mainstream, white audiences’ “fictitious” fear of angry black masses impacted the genres of horror film, fantasy, and science fiction? This seminar, which begins with D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, explores the making of racialized and gendered monsters in the aftermath of enslavement in the American cultural imagination through literature and film of the 19th and 20th centuries. Using the intervention of Christina Sharpe’s Monstrous Intimacies (2010) concerning the contemporary repetition of familiar and familial violence that shaped black and white life during colonial slavery, as well as critical race theory, we will explore difference and otherness on the basis of race, gender, sexuality, and power to consider the potential for the monster and the non-monster to be identified through formulations that resemble black and white subjects. The course ends with the critically acclaimed film, Get Out, and the push for further conversations about the ways in which monstrosity and otherness continue to be recognizably black. Throughout the semester, students will learn to place literature and film into their corresponding historical contexts and complicate concepts of racial and national identities with attention to America’s histories of monstrous intimacies.

[Fulfills: Humanities; Race &Pol]

AAS 3500-003 Global Perspectives on Environmental Justice

Kimberly Fields, Tu 6:30-9pm

This course uses an interdisciplinary social-science perspective to track the global trajectory of environmental justice movements and analyze them in relation to other global and regional processes. We will consider cases that do not explicitly invoke environmental justice as such, but where experiences of injustice are inseparable from environmental problems. Some key topics to be considered include: theories of racism and justice, the conceptual history and definitions of environmental racism, the historical development and goals of the environmental justice movement, the social, political, economic and environmental advantages and drawbacks of current systems of production and consumption, stakeholder responses to environmental inequities, the impact of environmental justice policies on environmental inequities as well as their impact on subsequent political behavior, pollution in developing nations and, indigenous peoples. Additionally, the possible causes for patterns of injustice will be examined. Recent proposals to address the problem of environmental racism and injustice will be discussed and analyzed.

[Fulfills: ]

AAS 3500-006 Race, Class, Politics & the Environment

Kimberly Fields, Tu 3:30-6pm

This course explores the relationships between 'race', socio-economic status, interest group politics and environmental policy. We will address and contend with debates surrounding the claims that racialized and poor communities disproportionately shoulder society's negative environmental burdens. Particular regard will be paid to the political and decision-making processes through which environmental issues are channeled, evaluated and addressed. Through a variety of analytical and contextual lenses, we will examine fundamental environmental problems faced by individuals and communities of color and the policies and initiatives designed to address them. Attention will also be given to the political and economic responses of community, business, and political stakeholders towards perceived environmental inequities. Additionally, stakeholder responses to existing environmental justice policies and initiatives will also be considered. Furthermore, we will discuss arguments concerning political elites' and interest groups' perceived failures to provide a politically viable vision and remedial strategy to address environmental injustice. Through selected case studies, we will examine a number of topics and questions. Some key topics to be considered include: theories of racism and justice, the conceptual history and definitions of environmental racism, the historical development and goals of the environmental justice movement, the social, political, economic and environmental advantages and drawbacks of current systems of production and consumption, stakeholder responses to environmental inequities, the impact of environmental justice policies on environmental inequities as well as their impact on subsequent political behavior, pollution in developing nations and, indigenous peoples. Additionally, the possible causes for patterns of injustice will be examined. Recent proposals to address the problem of environmental racism and injustice will be discussed and analyzed.

[Fulfills: : Race & Pol; SSH]

AAS 3645 Musical Fictions (cross-listed with ENGL 3569)

Njelle Hamilton, Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm

What is it about musicians? Why do we imagine that they have some kind of special gift, some magic that makes them something more than human? Why do we mourn so deeply and collectively when our favorite musician passes away? Why do we form Hives and Navies to publicly, collectively, and obsessively follow and fawn over our favorite performers? Over the course of this semester, we will explore the genre of the contemporary musical novel in order to better understand why writers and readers are so intrigued by the figure of the musician as a literary trope. Pairing close listening and music theory with close reading of seminal blues, jazz, reggae, mambo, calypso and rock novels set in the U.S., U.K, Jamaica, Trinidad, France, and Germany, we will also consider how novelists attempt to record the sounds (instruments, rhythm, melody, tone), lyrics, structure, and personal and cultural valences of music, not on wax, but in novelistic prose, and what kinds of cultural baggage and aesthetic conventions particular music forms bring to the novel form. Why for example, are ‘jazz’ novels so concerned with race and the chronicle of black lives under oppression and violence all across the globe? Why are so many ‘rock’ novels written by male writers, and why do they so often deal with issues of (white) masculinity under threat? The topical nature of many of these issues, songs, and novels will hopefully inspire you to thought-provoking class discussions, critical response papers, and final papers that push against the “fictions” and assumptions of musicians and novelists alike.

[Fulfills: Humanities]

AAS 3710 African Worlds through Life Stories

Lisa Shutt, Th 2-4:30pm

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither.

[Fulfills: Humanities, Africa]

AAS 3810 Race, Culture & Inequality

Sabrina Pendergrass, Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm

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, collective memory, and racial grammar. The course will draw on disciplines such as sociology, political science, anthropology, and more.

[Fulfills: SSH]

SWAHILI

SWAH 1010-001 Introductory Swahil

Anne Rotich, MWF 10-10:50am

This course is intended for students with no previous experience with Swahili. The course provides an introduction to basic Swahili language skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits.

SWAH 1010-002 Introductory Swahil

Anne Rotich, MWF11:00-11:50am

Swahili is the most widely-spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits.

SWAH 2010 Intermediate Swahili

Anne Rotich, MWF 12-12:50am

This is an intermediate level course designed for students who have taken SWAH 1010 or prior Swahili language experience to further enhance grammatical skills, and an emphasis on speaking and writing through a reading of Swahili texts.

AMERICAN STUDIES

AMST 3200/ / PLPT 3200 African American Political Thought

 Lawrie Balfour Tu Th 11:00-12:15

This course explores the critical and the constructive dimensions of African American political thought from slavery to the present. We will assess the claims that black Americans have made upon the polity, how they have defined themselves, and how they have sought to redefine key terms of political life such as citizenship, equality, freedom, and power.

Fulfills: Race & Politics in the US

AMST 3221 Hands-On Public History: Slavery and Reconstruction

Lisa Goff Th 3:30-6pm

This year-long class is a part of a 3-year collaboration with local community groups to conduct historical research into African American history in central Virginia. Students will conduct fieldwork near Charlottesville and will investigate past and current examples of the public history of slavery and Reconstruction at sites like Monticello and Montpelier, as well as lesser-known sites. We will work together with community organizations and Black churches to geolocate undocumented sites of African American history, including gravesites; and create digital Story Maps that seek to unearth the hidden histories of enslaved and free African Americans in the 19th and early 20th centuries—and the legacies of those histories today. Students will collaborate with local community groups, WTJU, and Scholars Lab to produce podcasts and digital maps that fill in some of the gaps in the public history of slavery and its legacies in Charlottesville and surrounding counties--contributing, in some small way, to a more just and comprehensive public history.

Fulfills: SSH

AMST 3559/ENGL 3572 Black Protest Narrative

Marlon Ross Tu Th 11:00-12:15

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art (fiction, autobiography, film) from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, and black gay/lesbian liberation movements. We explore the media, forms, and theories of modern protest movements, how they shaped and have been shaped by literature and film. What does it mean to lodge a protest in artistic form? Some themes include lynching, segregation, sharecropping, black communism, migration, urbanization, religion, crime and policing, normative and queer sexualities, war and military service, cross-racial coalitions, and the role of the individual in social change. Either directly or indirectly, all of these narratives ask pressing questions about the meaning of American citizenship and racial community under the conditions of racial segregation and the fight for integration or black nationalist autonomy. We begin our study with the most famous protest novel, Richard Wright’s Native Son.  Then we examine other narratives in this tradition, including works by Angelo Herndon, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Essex Hemphill, and Joseph Beam. Films include Joseph Mankiewitz’s No Way Out, Melvin Van Peebles’ Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and The Watermelon Man, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied. In addition to fiction, film, and autobiography, we’ll read selections from pertinent texts in history, literary criticism, journalism, cultural criticism, film theory, and sociology. Assignments include two short essays, a midterm, and a final exam.

Fulfills: Humanities

DRAMA

DRAM 3070 African-American Theatre

Theresa Davis Tu Th 2:00-3:15

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.

Fulfills: Humanities

ENGLISH

ENGL 2572 Black Writers in America (Black Women Writers)

Lisa Woolfork, Tu Th 8:00-9:15am

Topics in African-American writing in the US from its beginning in vernacular culture to the present day; topics vary from year to year.

Fulfills: Humanities

ENWR 3730 - African American Rhetorics

Tamika Carey Th 11:00AM-12:15PM

This course explores the question of how African Americans use writing, speaking, and other cultural performances and productions toward freedom. We will take up this question by learning rhetorical concepts circulating within African American writing and speaking traditions and by learning criticism, a method for analyzing and evaluating the techniques and consequences of a message or conversation. We will explore this question by studying case studies of the arguments’ writers, activists, preachers, comedians, and everyday figures have employed to shape this culture. Assignments may include: two essays, a discussion leading assignment, and a multi-part digital publishing project. This course is ideal for students who want to sharpen their lenses for understanding and employing writing and communication strategies that promote social justice efforts.

Fulfills: Humanities

ENGL 4560-003 - Harlem Stories

Sandhya Shukla Tu Th 9:30-10:45AM

Fulfills: Humanities; if you’d like to take this course to fulfill the 4000-level research requirement, confirm with the professor ahead of time.

ENGL 4570 Reading the Black College Campus

Ian Grandison Tu 5:00-7:00pm

How does the discourse that posits the UVA Lawn as a seminal architectural legacy of a United States founding father help to distinguish the Lawn’s residents from passers-by, who must admire it from a respectful distance?  “Reading the Black College Campus” is a student-centered, sensing/interpreting/communicating course that is generally concerned with the ways in which built environments are entangled with the negotiation of power in society. In particular, we explore this goal by focusing on how the campuses of HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) were shaped by (and shaped) the struggle to democratize education in the United States especially during the Jim Crow Period.  Rather than the still dominant approach in architectural and landscape architectural criticism to emphasize art-historical interpretations, we foreground interpretations that engage built environments, such as college campuses, as arenas of cultural conflict and negotiation. With this interrogation as a model, students are encouraged to engage our own campus more critically. Through discussion of readings and field trips (including one to the campus of a Virginia HBCU), lectures and workshops, and student-group presentations, we explore ideas, concepts and methods to read built environments by synthesizing knowledge gained from sensing them, studying them through maps and diagrams and primary and secondary written and oral accounts.  Readings include Anderson’s Black Education in the South. Fulfills: 4000-level seminar; Race and Politics in the US

ENGL 5700 Contemporary African-American Literature

Lisa Woolfork Tu Th 9:30-10:45

This course for advanced undergraduates and master’s-level graduate students surveys African-American literature today. Assignments include works by Everett, Edward Jones, Tayari Jones, Evans, Ward, Rabateau, and Morrison.

Fulfills: Humanities

FRENCH

FREN 3570 African Oral Traditions

Kandioura Drame Tu Th 3:30-4:45pm

A Study of major texts from Oral Traditions in Africa. Historical and literary values of the narratives, poems, and songs today. Roles of Griots as creators and performers of Oral compositions. How the music of griots inspires and sustains contemporary popular musical forms across Africa today. The challenges facing Oral Traditions today and opportunities for the future in various African societies. Prerequisite:  FREN 3031 and FREN 3032. Fulfills: Africa; Humanities. 

FREN 4811 Francophone Literature of Africa

Kandioura Drame Tu Th 12:30-1:45

Surveys the literary tradition in French, emphasizing post-World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights. Examines the role of cultural reviews in the development of this literary tradition. Prerequisite: FREN 3032 and at least one FREN course numbered 3041 to 3043 (or instructor permission).

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa; NB if you would like to take this course to fulfill the 4000-level research requirement, confirm with the professor ahead of time.

HISTORY

HIAF 2001 Early African History

Jim LaFleur Tu 11:00-12:15pm

Studies the history of African civilizations from the iron age through the era of the slave trade, ca. 1800. Emphasizes the search for the themes of social, political, economic, and intellectual history which present African civilizations on their own terms.

Fulfills: Africa; SSH; required for the African Studies minor.

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa

John Mason Tu Th 9:30-10:45am

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times.

Fulfills: SSH; Africa

HIAF 3112 African Environmental History

Jim LaFleur Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm

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.

Fulfills: Africa; SSH.

HIUS 3490 From Motown to Hip-Hop

Claudrena Harold Tu Th 11:00-12:15

This survey traces the history of African American popular music from the late 1950s to the current era. It examines the major sonic innovations in the genres of soul, funk, and hip-hop over the course of the semester, students will examine how musical expression has provided black women and men with an outlet for individual expression, community building, sexual pleasure, political organizing, economic uplift, and interracial interaction. Fulfills: Humanities; SSH

HIUS 5000 African-American History to 1877

Justene Hill Edwards Fr 2:00-4:30pm

Fulfills: SSH

MUSIC

MUSI 4065 The ‘Black Voice’

A.D.Carson Tu Th 9:30-10:45am

This course focuses on critical analyses of and questions concerning the ‘Black Voice’ as it pertains to hip-hop culture, particularly rap and related popular musics. Students will read, analyze, discuss a wide range of thinkers to explore many conceptions and definitions of ‘Blackness’ while examining popular artists and the statements they make in and about their art.

Fulfills: Humanities

POLITICS

PLAP 3500 Race and the Obama Presidency

Larycia Hawkins Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm

Fulfills: Race & Politics

RELIGIOUS STUDIES

RELA 3000 Women and Religion in Africa

Cindy Hoehler-Fatton Tu Th 11:00-12:15

This course examines women's religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women. Fulfills: Africa; Humanities

RELG 5195 Blackness and Mysticism

Ashon Crawley Tu 2:00-4:30

This course considers the radicalism internal to a European Mystical Tradition but also its delimitation, particularly with how it gets cognized in western thought. We will then investigate a Black Radical Mystical Tradition that cannot be, as Robinson might say, “understood within the particular context of its genesis.” It is a lived and living tradition, a tradition against religion, a tradition against western thought and modern Man.

Fulfills: Humanities

Fall 2022

View current course listings page

Fall 2022

These course listings are subject to change. Courses with low enrollment may be cancelled. The official system of record at the University of Virginia is the Student Information System (SIS). www.virginia.edu/sis. Make sure to discuss your curricular plan and academic progress report with your AAS major advisor during Advising Period March 28 to April 8.


 

Core Courses

All majors and minors must complete the 1010 and 1020 core course sequence.

 

AAS 1010 Introduction to African American and African Studies I

Instructor:  Kevin Gaines; Tu Thu 12:30 pm - 1:45PM

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

 


 

Social Science or History

All majors must take at least one SSH course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Race and Politics, or 4000 research.

 

AAS 2500.001 The Souls of Black Folk

Instructor:  Sabrina Pendergrass; Tu Thu 11:00 am - 12:15 pm

In this course, we will examine the social organization of African American communities. The intellectual context for the issues we will study come from the foundational work of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and others. We will discuss African Americans’ social status and experiences at the intersections of class, color, gender, and sexuality. We also will study institutions within the community, and we will consider social issues that African Americans face today and will face in the future.

ENGL 3570.003 Jim Crow America

Instructor: Ian Grandison and Marlon Ross; Tu Thu 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm

Why has Jim Crow persisted? This course examines how the Jim Crow regime was established in New England during the early republic, how it was nationalized after the Civil War, and how it has been perpetuated into the present, despite the passage of 1960s Civil Rights legislation. What have been the changing modes of maintaining Jim Crow particularly in law (including law enforcement), education, planning, public health, and mass media (newspapers, film, radio, and social media); and what strategies have African Americans used to fight Jim Crow segregation, discrimination, disenfranchisement, and economic exclusion. Focus will be placed on Charlottesville, Richmond, and Washington, D.C. as case studies. The course culminates in a required field trip to Richmond.

HIAF 2001 Early African History

Instructor:  James La Fleur; Tu Thu 11:00 am -12:15 pm

Studies the history of African civilizations from the iron age through the era of the slave trade, ca. 1800. Emphasizes the search for the themes of social, political, economic, and intellectual history which present African civilizations on their own terms. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa

Instructor:  John Mason; Tu Thu 9:30 am -10:45 am

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times. Also fulfills Africa requirement)

HIAF 3112 African Environmental History

Instructor:  James La Fleur; Tu Thu 12:30 pm -1:45 pm

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. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

HIUS 3652 Afro-American History since 1865

Instructor:  Kevin Gaines; Tu Thu 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm

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

 

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Instructor:  Rose Buckelew: Tu Thu 2:00 pm - 2:50 pm

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.

 


 

Humanities

All majors must take at least one Humanities course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Social Science/History, Race and Politics, or 4000 research.

 

AAS 2224 Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Instructor:  Lisa Shutt; Tu 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm (section 1); Wed 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm (section 2)

This course 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 2500-001 Introduction to African Languages and Literatures

Instructor:  Anne Rotich; Mon Wed Fri 1:00 pm - 1:50 pm

This course is a survey of literary texts in English by contemporary African writers. Students will develop an appreciation for literatures and languages of Africa and an understanding of issues that preoccupy African writers and the literary strategies that they employ in their work. Students will read a variety of texts including novels, short stories, poetry, film and songs and critically analyze the cultural and aesthetics of the literary landscape. Particular attention will be on how authors engage themes such as identity, patriarchy, gender, class, and politics in post-colonial structures. Students are expected to actively engage in an analysis and exploration of the required literary works and to express their responses through class discussions, reflections, group presentations and the writing of analytical digital stories. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

AAS 2657 / ENGL 2599 Routes, Writing, Reggae

Instructor:  Njelle Hamilton; Tu Thu 3:30 pm - 4:45 pm

In this interdisciplinary course, we will explore the history of reggae music and its influence on the development of autochthonous Jamaican literature. In addition to reading historical documents about colonization and independence, Rastafarianism, Haile Selassie I, the intersection of race, gender and sexuality in Jamaica, and the history of Jamaican music, we will listen to and analyze reggae and dancehall songs to discern the themes, poetic devices, musical structures, and social and historical contexts of the music form. Our course texts will range from reggae films to poetry, short fiction, and novels, as you learn tools to map the themes, devices, and structures that reggae music lends to local literature and literary culture. Assignments include: listening journals, group research and oral presentations, short literary analyses, pick your Reggae Grammy, and a long album review in lieu of a final paper.

 

AAS 3645-001 / ENGL 3560 Musical Fictions

Instructor:  Njelle Hamilton; Tu Thu 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm

Why do we mourn so deeply when our favorite musician passes away? Why do we form Hives and Navies to publicly, collectively, and obsessively follow and fawn over our favorite performers? Over the course of this semester, we will explore the genre of the contemporary musical novel to better understand why writers and readers are so intrigued by the figure of the musician as a literary trope. Pairing close listening and music theory with close reading of seminal blues, jazz, reggae, mambo, calypso and rock novels set in the U.S., U.K, Jamaica, Trinidad, France, and Germany, we will also consider how novelists attempt to record the sounds (instruments, rhythm, melody, tone), lyrics, structure, and personal and cultural valences of music, not on wax, but in novelistic prose, and what kinds of cultural baggage and aesthetic conventions particular music forms bring to the novel form. Why, for example, are ‘jazz’ novels so concerned with race and the chronicle of black lives under oppression and violence? Why are so many ‘rock’ novels written by male writers, and why do they so often deal with issues of (white) masculinity under threat? The topical nature of many of these issues, songs, and novels will hopefully inspire you to thought-provoking class discussions, critical response papers, and final papers that push against the “fictions” and assumptions of musicians and novelists alike.

 

AAS 3710.001 African Worlds through Life Stories

Instructor:  Lisa Shutt; Thu 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

AAS 3559 / MDST 3760 – Reading Black Digital Culture

Professor Ashleigh Wade

Mon Wed 3:30PM – 4:45PM

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. (Fulfills: Humanities; 3000)

 

AAS 3559/ENG 3560 - Creolization, Poetics, & Racial Embodiment

Professor Nasrin Olla

Mon Wed 5:00PM – 6:15PM

How do we imagine ethics in a multicultural world? What new visions of relation and exchange are found in postcolonial thought? How does the legacy of colonialism shape our contemporary moment? We will approach these questions through the capacious thought of the Caribbean writer Édouard Glissant alongside other poets, novelists, and philosophers. This course will be relevant to students interested in Caribbean Studies, African & African Diasporic Literature, and Postcolonial Theory. (Fulfills: Humanities; 3000)

 

DRAM 3070 African American Theatre

Instructor:  Theresa Davis; Tu Thu 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm

This course presents a comprehensive study of “Black Theatre” as the African American contribution to the theatre. During the semester, we will explore 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 drama to theatre arts, business, education, lore, and humanity. A practical theatrical experience is a part of the course offering. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

 

ENGL 2599.005 Resistance in Black Literature and Film

Instructor: Amber McBride Tu Th 5:00 pm - 6:15pm

 

ENGL 3572-001 Multimedia Harlem Renaissance

Instructor:  Marlon Ross; Tu Thu 11:00 am - 12:15 pm

Intensive study of African American writers and cultural figures in a diversity of genres. Includes artists from across the African diaspora in comparative American perspective.

 

MEST 3492 Afro-Arabs, Africans, and MENA

Instructor:  Nizar Hermes; Mon 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm

This course offers an in-depth exploration of the literary representation and cultural construction of Black Afro-Arabs and Africans in premodern Arabic sources ranging from boasting epistles

(mufākharāt) and travel literature to poetry and –-chiefly—popular sagas/folktales (siyar shaʿabiyyah) which turned into pseudo-historical literary and cultural epics/romances. We will sample the works of some of the most “Arab-washed,” literary and intellectual icons in the history of MENA (SWANA), featuring Black heroes, poets, and knights. We will situate these texts in such contexts as the Zanj rebellion (869–883) in Iraq; the reign of Abū al-Misk Kāfūr (946-968), the black slave turned into vizier then sultan of Ikshīdid Egypt and the Levant; the Saharian Afro-Amazigh dynasties of North Africa and al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) and their eleventh century invasion of the West African empire of Ghana; the sixteenth-century Moroccan imperial forays into the Songhai realms and the invasion of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, the elite African army of the Afro-Arab sultan Mulāy Ismāʿīl of Morocco (r.672 to 1727), the great Swahili city-Sultanates of East Africa (Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Mombasa), the richly symbiotic Afro-Arab Swahili language and culture, and the pioneering 1846 abolition of slavery in the regency of Tunisia. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

MUSI 2559 Motown vs Everybody: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

JoVia Armstrong
MW 11:00-11:50 + discussion section 
 
This course reviews the history of Motown Recording Company beginning with the Great Migration and examines how Motown helped shape today’s record industry. We will explore topics around artist social responsibility, law, mental health, and technology. Students will also compare how black social movements influenced and reflected the music of Motown, Stax Records, and Philadelphia International Records. 
 

MUSI 4559 Afrofuturism 

Nicole Mitchell Gantt
Tu 9:30 AM-12:00 PM
 
Afrofuturist artists design alternative mythological worlds, utilizing African folklore, fantasy and ancestral wisdom to creatively address social justice. Students will explore Afrofuturist works in music, film, science fiction and visual art as a pathway to deepen their understanding of the diversity of Black thought and creativity. 
 

RELA 2400 Introduction to Africana Religions

Instructor:  Ashon Crawley; Tu 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm

This is an introductory survey course exploring the topic of Africana religions generally, including the practices of spirituality of black people in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and on the continent of Africa. Particular attention will be paid to the relations between these various locations, and their similarities and differences. We will listen to music, watch film, read fiction, poetry, sacred texts and works of criticism.

 

RELA 2800 Introduction to Yoruba Religions

Instructor:  Oludamini Ogunnaike; Tu Thu 12:30 pm -1:45 pm

(Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

RELA 3890 / RELC 3890 Christianity in Africa

Instructor:  Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton; Tu Thu 11:00 am -12:15 pm

Historical and topical survey of Christianity in Africa from the second century c.e. to the present. Cross listed with RELC 3890. Prerequisite: A course in African religions or history, Christianity, or instructor permission. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

RELC 2770-001 The Black Church

Instructor:  Kai Parker; Tu Thu 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm

 

RELC 3222 From Jefferson to King

Instructor:  Mark Hadley; Tu Thu 9:30 am -10:45 am

A seminar focused upon some of the most significant philosophical and religious thinkers that have shaped and continued to shape American religious thought and culture from the founding of the Republic to the Civil Rights Movement, including Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jane Addams, William James, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr. We will explore how their thought influenced the social and cultural currents of their time.

 

WGS 3559.002 Feminist and Queer Art in the Caribbean

Instructor:  Matthew Chin; Mon 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm

This course examines the relationship between gender, sexuality, and cultural production in the Caribbean. In so doing, it seeks to think through feminist and queer approaches to Caribbean aesthetics, art history, and art criticism. Students learn about individual artists, art works, and art collectives and institutions and how they operate within the context of local, regional, and global art markets and economies.

 


 

Race and Politics

All majors must take at least one Race & Politics course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Social Science/History, or 4000 research.

 

AAS 2500.003 Race, Class, and Gender

Instructor:  Liana Richardson; Tu Thu 11:00 am - 12:15 pm

While many people in the United States embrace the rhetoric of equality, “the American Dream,” and “the land of opportunity,” social inequality by race, class, and gender is a persistent feature of our society.  The overall goal of this course is to examine the social, political, and economic forces that cause and are produced by this inequality, paying particular attention to how race, class, and gender intersect to shape lived experiences and life chances. First, we will discuss how power and privilege are patterned by race, class, and gender. Then, we will examine how the resultant inequalities are perpetuated and reinforced by social institutions such as the labor market, housing, health care, media, and criminal justice system. Finally, we will consider potential strategies for disrupting these linkages, and the social justice politics associated with them.

 

AAS 3500.002 Race, Ethnicity, and Health in US

Instructor:  Liana Richardson; Tu Thu 9:30 am - 10:45 am

In this course, we will examine the relationships between “race”/ethnicity, other axes of difference, and health inequalities in the United States. Drawing from research in a variety of disciplines, including epidemiology, demography, and sociology, we will examine how health is distributed by “race”/ethnicity, as well as the factors that give rise to the differential distribution of health across racial/ethnic groups.  We also will discuss whether contemporary health promotion and disease prevention policies are sufficient to address racial/ethnic inequalities in health. Finally, we will consider the kinds of policies that could have a bigger impact, and the potential explanations for why they have not been pursued.

 

 

AAS 3500.003 Race, Class, Politics, and Environment

Instructor:  Kimberly Fields; Wed 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm

This course explores the relationships between ‘race,’ socio-economic status, interest group politics and environmental policy. Through a variety of analytical and contextual lenses and via selected case studies, we will examine fundamental environmental problems faced by individuals and communities of color and the policies and initiatives designed to address them. Topics will include: theories of racism and justice, the conceptual history and definitions of environmental racism, the historical development and goals of the environmental justice movement, the social, political, economic and environmental advantages and drawbacks of current systems of production and consumption, stakeholder responses to environmental inequities, the impact of environmental justice policies on environmental inequities as well as their impact on subsequent political behavior, pollution in developing nations and, indigenous peoples. Students can expect to evaluate recent environmental policy proposals, and weigh arguments concerning the perceived failures of political elites and interest groups to provide a politically viable vision and remedial strategy to address environmental injustice.

 

AAS 3810.001 Race, Culture, and Inequality

Instructor:  Sabrina Pendergrass; Tu Thu 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm

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, collective memory, and racial grammar. The course will draw on disciplines such as sociology, political science, anthropology, and more.

 

AMST 3200 / PLPT 3200.001 African American Political Thought

Instructor:  Lawrie Balfour; Mon Wed 2:00 pm - 2:50 pm

This course explores the critical and the constructive dimensions of African American political thought from slavery to the present. We will assess the claims that black Americans have made upon the polity, how they have defined themselves, and how they have sought to redefine key terms of political life such as citizenship, equality, freedom, and power.

 

 

AMST 3300 Introduction to Latinx Studies

Instructor:  Lisa Cacho; Tu Thu 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm

 

“Latina/o/x” has become a “commonsense” racial identifier to label (and sometimes to characterize) a diverse and heterogeneous group of people. In this course, we will challenge that “commonsense” perception by looking at the ways in which “race” and “Latina/o/x” change meanings during different historical moments. We will examine how race has been deployed by various institutions to both deny and grant material and social resources to U.S. Latinxs and Latina/o/x immigrants. Along these lines, we will contextualize the responses of Latina/o/x ethnic groups to historicize how “Latina/o/x” has become a “panethnic” racial identity in the United States. In short, what is often mistaken as “commonsense” has been and continues to be part of a long, on-going struggle not just over the ability to make and remake racial meaning, but also over the economic and social resources that have been assigned along racial, ethnic, and national lines.

 

MDST 3306.001 Gender, Class, Race in Teen Film

Instructor:  Andrea Press; Mon 5:00 pm - 7:30 pm

 

MDST 3510.003 Race and Sound in American Culture

Prof. Jack Hamilton; Tu 5:00 - 7:00pm

 

WGS 3500.002 Race, Gender, and Social Movements

Instructor:  Domale Keys; Tu Th 12:30 pm -1:45 pm

This course offers a study of race and racialization in relation to gender and sexuality.  We will consider how the concept of race shapes relationships between gendered selfhood and society, how it informs identity and experiences of the erotic, and how racialized gender and sexuality are created, maintained and monitored. Applying an interdisciplinary perspective, we will consider how race and power are reproduced and resisted through gender and sexuality, individually, nationally, and internationally.  Topics may include media, religion, sport, literature, family and politics.

 


 

Africa

All majors must take at least one Africa course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement can double count with any other distribution.

 

AAS 2500.001 Introduction to African Languages and Literatures

Instructor:  Anne Rotich; Mon Wed Fri 1:00 pm - 1:50 pm

This course is a survey of literary texts in English by contemporary African writers. Students will develop an appreciation for literatures and languages of Africa and an understanding of issues that preoccupy African writers and the literary strategies that they employ in their work. Students will read a variety of texts including novels, short stories, poetry, film and songs and critically analyze the cultural and aesthetics of the literary landscape. Particular attention will be on how authors engage themes such as identity, patriarchy, gender, class, and politics in post-colonial structures. Students are expected to actively engage in an analysis and exploration of the required literary works and to express their responses through class discussions, reflections, group presentations and the writing of analytical digital stories.

 

AAS 3710.001 African Worlds through Life Stories

Instructor:  Lisa Shutt; Thu 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither.

 

HIAF 2001 Early African History

Instructor:  James La Fleur; Tu Thu 11:00 am -12:15 pm

Studies the history of African civilizations from the iron age through the era of the slave trade, ca. 1800. Emphasizes the search for the themes of social, political, economic, and intellectual history which present African civilizations on their own terms

 

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa

Instructor:  John Mason; Tu Thu 9:30 am - 10:45 am

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times.

 

 

HIAF 3112 African Environmental History

Instructor:  James La Fleur; Tu Thu 12:30 pm - 1:45 pm

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.

 

 

MEST 3492 / MEST 5492 Afro-Arabs, Africans/MENA

Instructor:  Nizar Hermes; Mon 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm

This course offers an in-depth exploration of the literary representation and cultural construction of Black Afro-Arabs and Africans in premodern Arabic sources ranging from boasting epistles

(mufākharāt) and travel literature to poetry and popular sagas/ folktales (siyar shaʿabiyyah) which turned into pseudo-historical literary and cultural epics/ romances. We will sample the works of some of the most “Arab-washed,” literary and intellectual icons in the history of MENA (SWANA), featuring Black heroes, poets, and knights. We will situate these texts in such contexts as the Zanj rebellion (869–883) in Iraq; the reign of Abū al-Misk Kāfūr (946-968), the black slave turned into vizier then sultan of Ikshīdid Egypt and the Levant; the Saharian Afro-Amazigh dynasties of North Africa and al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) and their eleventh century invasion of the West African empire of Ghana; the sixteenth-century Moroccan imperial forays into the Songhai realms and the invasion of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, the elite African army of the Afro-Arab sultan Mulāy Ismāʿīl of Morocco (r.672 to 1727), the great Swahili city-Sultanates of East Africa (Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Mombasa), the richly symbiotic Afro-Arab Swahili language and culture, and the pioneering 1846 abolition of slavery in the regency of Tunisia.

 

 

RELA 2800.001 Introduction to Yoruba Religions

Instructor:  Oludamini Ogunnaike; Tu Thu 12:30 pm -1:45 pm

 

 

RELA 3890.001; RELC 3410.001 Christianity in Africa

Instructor:  Cindy Hoehler-Fatton; Tu Thu 11:00 am - 12:15 pm

Historical and topical survey of Christianity in Africa from the second century c.e. to the present. Cross listed with RELC 3890. Prerequisite: A course in African religions or history, Christianity, or instructor permission.

 


 

4000 Level Research

All majors must take at least one course at the 4000-level that requires a 20-page research paper or its equivalent. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Race and Politics, or Social Science/History. For courses outside of AAS, kindly confirm with the instructor before/at the start of classes that the course meets the research requirements.

 

AAS 4570.001 Self-Reflective Writing in the Black Diaspora

Instructor:  Lexi Smith; Mon Wed 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm

Between the “traditional” genres of essays, speeches, poems, autobiography, and novels, and newer forms of biomythography, autoethnography, autofiction, and autotheory, Black writers have a rich history of merging life writing with other forms of knowledge production. “Life Writing in the Black Diaspora” will closely read works of life writing by contemporary Black authors including Saidiya Hartman, Dionne Brand, and Audre Lorde among others, and put these primary texts in conversation with scholarly literature that helps us to identify what life writing teaches us about how Blackness, the African diaspora, gendered embodiment, and erotic intimacy are lived across spaces and times.

 

 

AAS 4570.002 Black Feminisms, Gender, and Sexuality in Latin America and the Caribbean

Instructor:  Nicole Ramsey; Tu Thu 9:30 am - 10:45 am

From Mamá Tingo in the Dominican Republic to Rihanna in Barbados, this course will look at the theories and gendered racial politics and sexuality within a Latin American and Caribbean context. In using visual culture, ethnography, biography, and oral history, we will explore, interrogate and analyze these topics as they intersect with empire, enslavement, freedom(s), state formation, labor, and popular culture.

 

AMST 4500.002 / ENGL 4570.001 Reading Black College Campus

Instructor:  Ian Grandison; Tu 5:00 pm – 7:30 pm

How does the discourse that posits the UVA Lawn as a seminal architectural legacy of a United States founding father help to distinguish the Lawn’s residents from passers-by, who must admire it from a respectful distance?  “Reading the Black College Campus” is a student-centered, sensing/ interpreting/ communicating course that explores how built environments are entangled with the negotiation of power in society. In particular, we focus on how the campuses of HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) were shaped by (and shaped) the struggle to democratize education in the United States especially during the Jim Crow Period.  Rather than the still dominant approach in architectural and landscape architectural criticism to emphasize art-historical interpretations, we foreground interpretations that engage built environments, such as college campuses, as arenas of cultural conflict and negotiation. With this interrogation as a model, students are encouraged to engage our own campus more critically. Through discussion of readings and field trips (including one to the campus of a Virginia HBCU), lectures and workshops, and student-group presentations, we explore ideas, concepts and methods to read built environments by synthesizing knowledge gained from sensing them, studying them through maps and diagrams and primary and secondary written and oral accounts.

 

 

AMST 4559.001 Race, Criminality, and Abolition

Instructor:  Lisa Cacho; Tu Thu 2:00 pm - 3:15 pm

In this course, we will be examining how populations are criminalized due, in part, to race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and immigration status. To do so, we need to question how laws are created and normalized. To do this effectively, I will ask you to suspend your moral judgments, so that you can approach crime, criminals, and criminal activity analytically.  Additionally, we will be exploring abolitionist alternatives to the police state.

 

 

AMST 4559.002 Visualizing Racial Capitalism

Instructor:  Janet Kong-Chow; Wed 3:30 pm - 6:00 pm

 

ENGL 4560.004 Harlem Stories

Instructor: Sandhya Shukla; Tu Thu 12:30pm - 1:45pm

Harlem has been many things to many people: capital of a global African diaspora, an early instance of Italian and Jewish immigrant communities, home to an important el barrio, a representative site of contemporary gentrification and, above all, a place for racial and ethnic minoritization. This course will explore many of those lived and symbolic Harlems from the early twentieth century to the present.  It will closely consider representations that both open up a paradigmatic case of race and class in the United States and dwell in the possibilities of cross-cultural exchange across regional divides. We will employ the language and structure of globality to understand the heterogeneity of blackness – African/American, Caribbean, Puerto Rican and more – and variegations of whiteness, in a range of novels, films, memoirs and essays that interrogate identity and community. The mix of approaches across fields will build an interdisciplinary inquiry into the production of social space and suggest that forms – narrative structures and modes, styles of description – are crucial for understanding the power of this place.  Key texts may include fictional and non-fictional works such as Nella Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing, Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, Ernesto Quinones’s Bodega Dreams, Sharifa Rhodes-Pitt’s Harlem is Nowhere, Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred, Monique Taylor’s Harlem Between Heaven and Hell, and Piri Thomas’s Down These Mean Streets, as well as cultural historical and theoretical materials. Students will be required to present on one week’s materials for class, submit regular reading responses and complete one critical essay and a longer research paper on a chosen topic.

 

 

ENGL 5700 Contemporary African American Literature

Instructor:  Lisa Woolfork; Tu Thu 8:00 am - 9:15 am

This course for advanced undergraduates and master’s-level graduate students surveys African American literature today. Assignments include works by Everett, Edward Jones, Tayari Jones, Evans, Ward, Rabateau, and Morrison.

 

 

 

MDST 4510.004 Civil Rights Movement and the Media

Instructor: Aniko Bodroghkozy; Tu Th 11:00Am - 12:15pm

 

 

MDST 4670.001 White Out: Screening White Supremacy

Instructor:  William Little; Tu Th 12:30 pm – 1:45 pm

This course entails critical examination of white supremacy through study of film and photography. Students analyze how cinema has traditionally privileged the property of whiteness and white patriarchal power through narrative and formal conventions: e.g., by framing white spaces, white bodies, and the white male gaze as superior; by objectifying, seizing, and rendering invisible people of color and women; by manipulation of lighting and color; by racially charged construction and projection of the face. This analysis is amplified by consideration of links between white supremacist cinema and the history of photographic portraiture. Students study how photography, like film, has been instrumentalized and archived to honor—to monumentalize—white experience, while abjecting, invalidating, and erasing the experience of others. Against this backdrop, the course organizes exploration of films and photographs that challenge white supremacy. Special attention is given to visual texts that expose the dynamics of white supremacy through nuanced dramatization of its underpinnings: the violent erotics, religious longings, and binary logic that inform racist thought; anxiety about colorful elements coded as threats to the integrity of white spaces and white bodies; media infrastructures, such as surveillance systems, designed to protect white power. Horror film affords important cinematic illustrations of these underpinnings. The course includes several examples, such as recent films Green Room (2016) and Get Out (2017).  The syllabus also includes revisionary photographic work that outs white supremacy, such Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series and Carrie Mae Weems’ Roaming series. Students are required to produce an extensive project at end of term. The outcome may be a creative project with an accompanying extensive critical reflection.

 

 

MUSI 4065 The Black Voice

Instructor:  A.D Carson; Tu Th 9:30 am – 10:45 am

This course focuses on critical analyses of and questions concerning the ‘Black Voice’ as it pertains to hip-hop culture, particularly rap and related popular musics. Students will read, analyze, and discuss a wide range of thinkers to explore many conceptions and definitions of ‘Blackness’ while examining popular artists and the statements they make in and about their art.

 

 

SOC 4559-001 Race, Racism, and Democracy: Sociology of DuBois

Instructor:  Ian Mullins; Tu Th 9:30 am – 10:45 am

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963) was a uniquely American scholar and activist whose work has continued significance today. His analysis of the United States reveals both the social causes and consequences of racial stratification, while his political activism offers possible solutions. A controversial figure in his time, he helped to found the American sociological discipline and yet was marginalized within it; he was a founding member of the NAACP but eventually became one of its fiercest critics. He was deeply committed to both the scientific study of society and a form of democracy that others considered too radical. In this class, students will read Du Bois’s major works to better understand the framework through which he investigated inequality in the United States, the problems of racism that he attributes to the color-line, and whether we can look to his radical form of democracy in order to finally overcome what he referred to as “the problems of the color-line.”

 

 

WGS 4900 Black Geographies

Instructor:  Kat Cosby; Thu 3:30 pm – 6:00 pm

How are geographies imagined and created? How are traditional geographies organized and are there other ways to think about these spaces? This course will interrogate Black geographies in the Americas and the ways in which traditional geographies adhere to a racial-sexual logic. Through an interdisciplinary approach, we will examine Black thinkers' and scholars’ concepts of geography and how their interventions allow us to think differently about place, space, gender, and Blackness. Topics include maroon communities, abolition geography, plantation geographies, and demonic grounds.

 


Languages and Other Electives

 

SWAH 1010 Introductory Swahili I

Section I—Instructor, Leonora Anyango; Mon Wed Fri 10:00 am - 10:50 am

Section II—Instructor: Anne Rotich; Mon Wed Fri 11:00 am - 11:50 am

This course is intended for students with no previous experience with Swahili. The course provides an introduction to basic Swahili language skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing. Swahili is the most widely spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits.

 

SWAH 2010.001 Intermediate Swahili I

Instructor:  Anne Rotich; Mon Wed Fri 12:00 pm - 12:50 pm

This is an intermediate level course designed for students who have taken SWAH 1010 or prior Swahili language experience to further enhance grammatical skills, and an emphasis on speaking and writing through a reading of Swahili texts.

 

Fall 2023

 

AAS Course Page - Fall 2023

 


These course listings are subject to change. Courses with low enrollment may be canceled. The official system of record at the University of Virginia is the Student Information System (SIS). www.virginia.edu/sis. Make sure to discuss your curricular plan and academic progress report with your AAS major advisor during Advising Period, March 27 to April 7.

 


 

Core Courses

All majors and minors must complete the 1010 and 1020 core course sequence.

 

 

 

AAS 1010 Introduction to African American and African Studies I 

Instructor: TBA. Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Minor 125.

 

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.  

 

AAS 7000 Introduction to Africana Studies

Instructor: Nasrin Olla. Mon Wed 3:30-6:00pm, Warner 110.

 

This is an introductory course that will survey selected recent and classic texts in the interdisciplinary fields of African American, African, and Caribbean Studies. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to identify and understand major themes that have shaped the development of the discipline of Africana Studies. (For graduate students only)

  

 


 

Social Science or History

All majors must take at least one SSH course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Race and Politics, or 4000 research.

 

 

AAS 2500.001 The Souls of Black Folk

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass; TuTh 11-12:15pm, Gibson 241

 

In this course, we will examine the social organization of African American communities. The intellectual context for the issues we will study come from the foundational work of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and others. We will discuss African Americans’ social status and experiences at the intersections of class, color, gender, and sexuality. We also will study institutions within the community, and we will consider social issues that African Americans face today and will face in the future.

 

AAS 3500.001 The Health of Black Women & Children

Instructor: Liana Richardson TuTh 9:30-10:45pm New Cabell 407

 

In this course, we will consider why it is the case that Black women and children have higher rates of adverse health outcomes, including but not limited to maternal and infant mortality, than their white counterparts. Applying both life course and intersectionality perspectives on health, we will examine how social factors structure the lived experiences of Black women and their children and, in turn, influence mental and physical health throughout the life course and across generations. We will review and evaluate evidence from research on the adverse mental and physical health effects of historical trauma, adverse childhood experiences, cumulative social stress (“weathering”), and the “strong Black woman” archetype, among other social phenomena. Then, we will discuss what medicine and public health can (or should) do to improve the health and well-being of Black women and children and, therefore, to halt the intergenerational reproduction of health and social inequality.

 

 AAS 3500.004 Race and America’s ‘Good War’

Instructor: Anna Duensing, Wed 6:00-8:30pm New Cabell 132

 

World War II is often commemorated in the United States as "The Good War," a conflict of good versus evil dedicated to preserving and spreading democracy around the world. This mythic framing not only fails to account for the reality of the war itself but also reveals much about postwar memory politics. This course explores the history of U.S. involvement in World War II and its aftermath with a focus on questions of race and racism, citizenship and national belonging, U.S. militarism, U.S. imperialism, and the politics of the past.

 

HIAF 2001 Early African History 

Instructor: James La Fleur; Tu Th 3:30-4:45, Nau 211

 

Studies the history of African civilizations from the iron age through the era of the slave trade, ca. 1800. Emphasizes the search for the themes of social, political, economic, and intellectual history which present African civilizations on their own terms. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa

Instructor:  John Mason; Mon Wed 3:30-4:45pm, McLeod 1004

 

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times. Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

 

HIAF 3112 African Environmental History

Instructor:  James La Fleur; Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, New Cabell 368

 

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. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

HIAF 3559 Muslim Societies in African History

Instructor: Amir Syed; Tu Th 11:00-12:15pm, New Cabell 232

 

 

HIUS 3490 From Motown to Hip-Hop

Instructor: Claudrena Harold; Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Gilmer 390

 

This survey traces the history of African American popular music from the late 1950s to the current era. It examines the major sonic innovations in the genres of soul, funk, and hip-hop over the course of the semester, students will examine how musical expression has provided black women and men with an outlet for individual expression, community building, sexual pleasure, political organizing, economic uplift, and interracial interaction.

 

HIUS 3671 African American Freedom Movements 1945-Present

Instructor: Kevin Gaines; TuTh 3:30-4:45, Gibson 141

 

This course examines the history and legacy of the African American struggle for civil rights in twentieth century America. It provides students with a broad overview of the civil rights movement -- the key issues, significant people and organizations, and pivotal events -- as well as a deeper understanding of its scope, influence, legacy, and lessons for today.

 

MEST 3492 The Afro-Arabs and Africans of the Middle East and North Africa

Instructor: Nizar Hermes, Mon 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell 338

 

This course offers an in-depth exploration of the literary representation and cultural construction of Black Afro-Arabs and Africans in premodern Arabic sources ranging from boasting epistles

(mufākharāt) and travel literature to poetry and –-chiefly—popular sagas/folktales (siyar shaʿabiyyah) which turned into pseudo-historical literary and cultural epics/romances. We will sample the works of some of the most “Arab-washed,” literary and intellectual icons in the history of MENA (SWANA), featuring Black heroes, poets, and knights. We will situate these texts in such contexts as the Zanj rebellion (869–883) in Iraq; the reign of Abū al-Misk Kāfūr (946-968), the black slave turned into vizier then sultan of Ikshīdid Egypt and the Levant; the Saharian Afro-Amazigh dynasties of North Africa and al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) and their eleventh century invasion of the West African empire of Ghana; the sixteenth-century Moroccan imperial forays into the Songhai realms and the invasion of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, the elite African army of the Afro-Arab sultan Mulāy Ismāʿīl of Morocco (r.672 to 1727), the great Swahili city-Sultanates of East Africa (Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Mombasa), the richly symbiotic Afro-Arab Swahili language and culture, and the pioneering 1846 abolition of slavery in the regency of Tunisia. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

 

 


Humanities

All majors must take at least one Humanities course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Social Science/History, Race and Politics, or 4000 research.

 

 

AAS 2224.001 Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Section I: Instructor—Lisa Shutt; Tues 2-4:30pm New Cabell 111  

Section II: Instructor—Lisa Shutt; Wed 2-4:30pm New Cabell 291

 

This course 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 2500-002 Introduction to African Languages and Literatures

Instructor:  Anne Rotich; Mon Wed Fri 1:00 pm - 1:50 pm, Wilson 238

 

This course is a survey of literary texts in English by contemporary African writers. Students will develop an appreciation for literatures and languages of Africa and an understanding of issues that preoccupy African writers and the literary strategies that they employ in their work. Students will read a variety of texts including novels, short stories, poetry, film and songs and critically analyze the cultural and aesthetics of the literary landscape. Particular attention will be on how authors engage themes such as identity, patriarchy, gender, class, and politics in post-colonial structures. Students are expected to actively engage in an analysis and exploration of the required literary works and to express their responses through class discussions, reflections, group presentations and the writing of analytical digital stories. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

AAS 3500.002 Reading Black Digital Culture

Instructor: Ashleigh Wade-Green. Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, New Cabell 332.

 

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. Topics we will cover include: 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.

 

AAS 3710.001 African Worlds through Life Stories

Instructor:  Lisa Shutt; Th 2:00-4:30pm. Warner 113

 

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

FREN 3032 Writing Black Francophone Literature and Performances 

Instructor: Rashana Lydner, Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, New Cabell 209

 

This course looks at the literary, political, and artistic works of Black francophone writers, theorists, and performers. Together, we will read and discuss how Black people across the francophone world express themselves through poetry, theater, novels, comics, film, and music. Students will develop interpretative and analytical skills with broad applicability and practice writing in French in a clear and persuasive manner. 

 

 

MUEN 2690 / 3690 African Music and Dance Ensemble Level 1 and 2

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk; Tu Th 5:00-6:15pm, Old Cabell 107

 

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. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required.  (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

  

 

RELA 2400 Introduction to Africana Religions

Instructor:  Ashon Crawley; Mon 2:00-4:30pm, Warner 113

 

This is an introductory survey course exploring the topic of Africana religions generally, including the practices of spirituality of black people in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and on the continent of Africa. Particular attention will be paid to the relations between these various locations, and their similarities and differences. We will listen to music, watch film, read fiction, poetry, sacred texts and works of criticism. 

 

 

RELA/ RELI 3900 Introduction to Islam in Africa through the Arts

Instructor: Oludamini Ogunnaike; TuTh 12:30-1:45pm; Gibson 141

 

This course will survey the history of Islam and Muslim societies in Africa through their arts. Covering three periods (Precolonial, Colonial, and Post-colonial), and four geographic regions (North, East, West, and Southern Africa), the course will explore the various forms and functions of Islamic arts on the continent. Through these artistic works and traditions we will explore the politics, cultures, and worldviews of African Muslim societies. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

 

RELC 3222 From Jefferson to King

Instructor: Mark Hadley; Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm; Nau 141

 

A seminar focused upon some of the most significant philosophical and religious thinkers that have shaped and continued to shape American religious thought and culture from the founding of the Republic to the Civil Rights Movement, including Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jane Addams, William James, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr. We will explore how their thought influenced the social and cultural currents of their time.

 

WGS 3125 Transnational Feminism

Instructor: Tiffany King, Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Bryan 235

 

This course places women, feminism, and activism in a transnational perspective, and offers students the opportunity to examine how issues considered critical to the field of gender studies are impacting women's lives globally in contemporary national contexts. We will look closely at how violence, economic marginality, intersections of race and gender, and varied strategies for development are affecting women in specific geographical locations.

 

 

 


 

Race and Politics

All majors must take at least one Race & Politics course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Social Science/History, or 4000 research.

 

 

 

AAS 3500.003 Black & Indigenous Power in the US 

Instructor: Amber Henry, Tues 6:00-8:30pm; New Cabell 309

 

How does it feel to be empowered? How does it feel to have that power taken away? Mobilizing the concept of "dreams" as a way of imagining an alternate future, this course contemplates the ways in which Black & Brown people create political projects, social networks and strategies of care to dream a life beyond the legacies of colonialism and Trans-Atlantic slavery. Engaging recent theories of sovereignty (personal autonomy and self-governance), the first half of the course explores how Black & Indigenous people create community in ways that challenge the power of the modern nation-state. The second half of the class examines how Black & Indigenous people are disenfranchised in ways that echo the historical legacies of colonialism, Trans-Atlantic slavery, genocide and anti-Blackness. Rather than adapt a purely historical, economic or political perspective, this course places strong emphasis on affect, or the critical study of feelings, in order to explore what power--as well as its absence-- feel likes. In this way, this course locates the individual body as the site at which claims to power are contemplated, contested and creatively envisioned.

 

AAS 3853 From Redlined to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the US

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl; Mon Wed 9:00-9:50am, Wilson 301

 

This course examines the history of housing and real estate and explores its role in shaping the meaning and lived experience of race in modern America. We will learn how and why real estate ownership, investment, and development came to play a critical role in the formation and endurance of racial segregation, modern capitalism, and the built environment.

 

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Instructor: Milton Vickerman; MoWe 2-3:15pm, New Cabell 232

 

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 4078  Racism and Democracy

Instructor Ian Mullins; TuTh 9-910:45am, New Cabell 415

 

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (Feb 23, 1868-Aug 27, 1963) was a uniquely American scholar and activist whose work has renewed significance today. His analysis of the US reveals both the social causes and consequences of racial stratification, while his political activism offers possible solutions. A controversial figure in his time, he helped to found the American sociological discipline and yet was marginalized within it.

 

WGS 2125 Race & Power in Gender & Sexuality

Instructor: Lisa Speidel; Mon Wed 1:00 -1:50pm, Warner 104

 

Offers a study of race-racialization in relation to gender-sexuality. We will consider how the concept of race shapes relationships between gendered selfhood & society, how it informs identity & experiences of the erotic, & how racialized gender & sexuality are created, maintained and monitored. With an interdisciplinary perspective, we will consider how race & power are reproduced & resisted through gender & sexuality, individually-national-international.

 

 

 


Africa

All majors must take at least one Africa course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement can double count with any other distribution.

AAS 2500.002 Introduction to African Languages and Literatures

Instructor:  Anne Rotich; Mon Wed Fri 1:00-1:50 pm, Wilson 238

 

This course is a survey of literary texts in English by contemporary African writers. Students will develop an appreciation for literatures and languages of Africa and an understanding of issues that preoccupy African writers and the literary strategies that they employ in their work. Students will read a variety of texts including novels, short stories, poetry, film and songs and critically analyze the cultural and aesthetics of the literary landscape. Particular attention will be on how authors engage themes such as identity, patriarchy, gender, class, and politics in post-colonial structures. Students are expected to actively engage in an analysis and exploration of the required literary works and to express their responses through class discussions, reflections, group presentations and the writing of analytical digital stories.

  

AAS 3710.001 African Worlds through Life Stories

Instructor:  Lisa Shutt; Th 2:00-4:30pm. Warner 113

 

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither. 

 

 

HIAF 2001 Early African History 

Instructor: James La Fleur; Tu Th 3:30-4:45pm, Nau 211

 

Studies the history of African civilizations from the iron age through the era of the slave trade, ca. 1800. Emphasizes the search for the themes of social, political, economic, and intellectual history which present African civilizations on their own terms.

 

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa

Instructor:  John Mason; Mon Wed 3:30-4:45pm, McLeod 1004

 

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times. 

 

 

HIAF 3112 African Environmental History

Instructor:  James La Fleur; Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, New Cabell 368

 

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 3559 Muslim Societies in African History

Instructor: Amir Syed; Tu Th 11-12:50pm, New Cabell 232

 

 

MEST 3492 The Afro-Arabs and Africans of the Middle East and North Africa

Instructor: Nizar Hermes, Mon 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell 338

 

This course offers an in-depth exploration of the literary representation and cultural construction of Black Afro-Arabs and Africans in premodern Arabic sources ranging from boasting epistles

(mufākharāt) and travel literature to poetry and –-chiefly—popular sagas/folktales (siyar shaʿabiyyah) which turned into pseudo-historical literary and cultural epics/romances. We will sample the works of some of the most “Arab-washed,” literary and intellectual icons in the history of MENA (SWANA), featuring Black heroes, poets, and knights. We will situate these texts in such contexts as the Zanj rebellion (869–883) in Iraq; the reign of Abū al-Misk Kāfūr (946-968), the black slave turned into vizier then sultan of Ikshīdid Egypt and the Levant; the Saharian Afro-Amazigh dynasties of North Africa and al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) and their eleventh century invasion of the West African empire of Ghana; the sixteenth-century Moroccan imperial forays into the Songhai realms and the invasion of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, the elite African army of the Afro-Arab sultan Mulāy Ismāʿīl of Morocco (r.672 to 1727), the great Swahili city-Sultanates of East Africa (Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Mombasa), the richly symbiotic Afro-Arab Swahili language and culture, and the pioneering 1846 abolition of slavery in the regency of Tunisia.

 

MUEN 2690 / 3690 African Music and Dance Ensemble Level 1 and 2

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk; Tu Th 5:00-6:15pm, Old Cabell 107

 

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. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required.

 

 

 


4000-Level Research

All majors must take at least one course at the 4000-level that requires a 20-page research paper or its equivalent (digital, audio or other creative project with substantive research and scaffolded assignments). Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Race and Politics, or Social Science/History. For courses outside of AAS, kindly confirm with the instructor before / at the start of classes that the course meets the research requirements listed above.

 

AAS 4570.02  Black Performance Theory

Instructor: Ashon Crawley Wed 3:30-6:00pm, Warner 113

 

In this course we will discuss the concepts performance, performativity and authenticity with regard to race, gender, sexuality and class. We do so by considering the various theoretical histories and trajectories for the word performance and how it has been taken up by thinkers in Black Studies.

 

ENGL 5700 Contemporary African-American Literature

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork, Tu Th 8:00-9:15am,  New Cabell 042

 

This course for advanced undergraduates and master’s-level graduate students surveys African American literature today. Assignments include works by Everett, Edward Jones, Tayari Jones, Evans, Ward, Rabateau, and Morrison.

 

HIUS 4501.002 The History of Black Education in the US

Instructor: Erica Sterling; Wed 2:00-4:30pm, Gibson 241

From clandestine education during the Antebellum era to the student movement for Black studies programs in the 1960s and 1970s, education has been at the center of social and political reform in the United States, particularly in the Black community. However, the structure of their education has been influenced and shaped by several debates: public vs. private, masculine vs. feminine, secular vs. non-secular, and liberal arts vs. industrial, which has, for better or worse, shaped the Black experience. The goal of the seminar is to introduce the history of education for Black Americans and unpack various events and perspectives in the community to show not only how education influenced their lives but how they used their institutions as workshops for economic, political, and social equity. A variety of topics will be covered, including gender, education, race, religion, social movements, policies, and politics. Primary and secondary sources, as well as movies, images, and short films, will be discussed in this course. Students are expected to complete an independent project.

 

HIUS 5559 Urban History

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl; Mon 2:00-4:30pm, Gibson 241

 

 

MEST 5492 The Afro-Arabs and Africans of the Middle East and North Africa

Instructor: Nizar Hermes, Mon 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell 338

 

This course offers an in-depth exploration of the literary representation and cultural construction of Black Afro-Arabs and Africans in premodern Arabic sources ranging from boasting epistles

(mufākharāt) and travel literature to poetry and –-chiefly—popular sagas/folktales (siyar shaʿabiyyah) which turned into pseudo-historical literary and cultural epics/romances. We will sample the works of some of the most “Arab-washed,” literary and intellectual icons in the history of MENA (SWANA), featuring Black heroes, poets, and knights. We will situate these texts in such contexts as the Zanj rebellion (869–883) in Iraq; the reign of Abū al-Misk Kāfūr (946-968), the black slave turned into vizier then sultan of Ikshīdid Egypt and the Levant; the Saharian Afro-Amazigh dynasties of North Africa and al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) and their eleventh century invasion of the West African empire of Ghana; the sixteenth-century Moroccan imperial forays into the Songhai realms and the invasion of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, the elite African army of the Afro-Arab sultan Mulāy Ismāʿīl of Morocco (r.672 to 1727), the great Swahili city-Sultanates of East Africa (Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Mombasa), the richly symbiotic Afro-Arab Swahili language and culture, and the pioneering 1846 abolition of slavery in the regency of Tunisia.

 

MDST 4670  White Out: Screening White Supremacy

Instructor: William Little; Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Gibson 242

 

This course entails critical examination of white supremacy through study of film and photography. Students analyze how cinema has traditionally privileged the property of whiteness and white patriarchal power through narrative and formal conventions: e.g., by framing white spaces, white bodies, and the white male gaze as superior; by objectifying, seizing, and rendering invisible people of color and women; by manipulation of lighting and color; by racially charged construction and projection of the face. This analysis is amplified by consideration of links between white supremacist cinema and the history of photographic portraiture. Students study how photography, like film, has been instrumentalized and archived to honor—to monumentalize—white experience, while abjecting, invalidating, and erasing the experience of others. Against this backdrop, the course organizes exploration of films and photographs that challenge white supremacy. Special attention is given to visual texts that expose the dynamics of white supremacy through nuanced dramatization of its underpinnings: the violent erotics, religious longings, and binary logic that inform racist thought; anxiety about colorful elements coded as threats to the integrity of white spaces and white bodies; media infrastructures, such as surveillance systems, designed to protect white power. Horror film affords important cinematic illustrations of these underpinnings. The course includes several examples, such as recent films Green Room (2016) and Get Out (2017).  The syllabus also includes revisionary photographic work that outs white supremacy, such Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series and Carrie Mae Weems’ Roaming series. Students are required to produce an extensive project at end of term. The outcome may be a creative project with an accompanying extensive critical reflection. 

 

 

MUSI 4065 The Black Voice

Instructor: A.D. Carson; Tu 2:00-4:30pm, New Cabell 398

 

This course focuses on critical analyses of and questions concerning the ‘Black Voice’ as it pertains to hip-hop culture, particularly rap and related popular musics. Students will read, analyze, and discuss a wide range of thinkers to explore many conceptions and definitions of ‘Blackness’ while examining popular artists and the statements they make in and about their art.

 

RELA 4085 Christian Missions in Contemporary Africa 

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler Fatton; Tu 3:30-6pm, Gibson 142

 

An examination of Christian missions in Africa in the 21st Century. Through a variety of disciplinary lenses and approaches, we examine faith-based initiatives in Africa--those launched from abroad, as well as from within the continent. What does it mean to be a missionary in Africa today? How are evangelizing efforts being transformed in response to democratization, globalization and a growing awareness of human rights?

 

WGS 4820 Black Feminist Theory 

Instructor: Lanice Avery; Tu 3:30-6:00pm, Wilson 244

 

This course critically examines key ideas, issues, and debates in contemporary Black feminist thought. With a particular focus on Black feminist understandings of intersectionality and womanism, the course examines how Black feminist thinkers interrogate specific concepts including Black womanhood, sexual mythologies and vulnerabilities, class distinctions, colorism, leadership, crime and punishment, and popular culture.

  

 


Languages and Other Electives

 

 

SWAH 1010 Introductory Swahili I

Section I—Instructor: Leonora Anyango; Mon Wed Fri 10:00 am – 10:50 am (Web)

Section II—Instructor: Anne Rotich; Mon Wed Fri 11:00 am - 11:50 am, Wilson 238

 

This course is intended for students with no previous experience with Swahili. The course provides an introduction to basic Swahili language skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing. Swahili is the most widely spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits.

 

 

SWAH 2010 Intermediate Swahili I 

Section I—Instructor:  Anne Rotich. MoWeFr 12-12:50pm, Wilson 238

Section I—Instructor:  Anne Rotich. MoWeFr 12-12:50pm, Web

 

This is an intermediate level course designed for students who have taken SWAH 1010 or prior Swahili language experience to further enhance grammatical skills, and an emphasis on speaking and writing through a reading of Swahili texts.

 

 

 

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Fall 2023 Semester, courses begin

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Fall Convocation

Robert Fatton

Robert Fatton

Professor

Faulkner's "Negro"

English

Feb 10 Talk on African American Women in the Criminal Justice System

February 4, 2011 — The University of Virginia series, "Class Matters: Race, Labor and Public Policy in Contemporary America," will feature Cheryl D. Hicks from the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, speaking on "Engendering Justice: African-American Women, State Punishment and the Criminal Justice System." The forum, free and open to the public, will be held on Feb. 10 at 5:30 p.m. in Minor Hall Room 125

Feeding Desire

Anthropology
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Test Fellow

Fellowship cohort 2018 - 2020

Northwestern University

Dreams of Flight: Literary Mappings of Black Geographies through Air, Airplanes and Airports in Black Literature

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Fellows Orientation

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Fellowship Capstone and Celebration

Fellowship Program

The Woodson Institute’s Residential Fellowship Program has attracted outstanding scholars in the humanities and social sciences who work on a wide array of topics in African-American and African Studies, as well as related fields. These two-year fellowships—offered at the pre-doctoral and post-doctoral levels—are designed to facilitate the writing of dissertations or manuscripts and provide successful applicants the opportunity to discuss and exchange works-in-progress both with each other and the larger intellectual community of the University. Preference is given to applicants whose research is substantially completed, thus providing them the maximum amount of time to complete their manuscripts within the fellowship term.

Post-doctoral fellows are expected to teach one upper-division seminar each year within the African-American and African Studies Program on a topic chosen in consultation with the Director of Undergraduate Studies. For more information about preparing your application to the Fellowship program, please review the following pages: 

Apply to Program

 


Pre-Doctoral Fellowship:

For advanced PhD students completing dissertation projects, the program exposes pre-doctoral fellows to other emerging scholars from Universities across the nation, offering the space, guidance, and intellectual exchange necessary to complete one's research and successfully defend one's dissertation.

Delali Kumavie (Fellowship cohort of 2018-2020) reflects on the pre-doctoral fellowship

 


Post-Doctoral Fellowship:

Post-doctoral fellows take up residence in the Minor Hall Annex to compose their book manuscripts. These newly minted PhDs also have the opportunity to develop their teaching portfolios by instructing one course per year in the Department of Africana Studies. 

Jermaine Scott (Fellowship cohort of 2018 - 2020) discusses the importance of the Woodson's community of fellows

 


Please visit the pages for the pre- and post-doctoral fellowship program and review the application instructions page for information about important deadlines, application guidelines, review procedures, and frequently asked questions:

The application deadline for the fellowship program is always the same: December 1st at 11:59 PM (Eastern Standard Time). We are unable to review applications submitted after this date. 

Please note: due to the large number of applications we receive each year, we are unable to provide feedback for unsuccessful applicants.

 


Learn more about the Woodson Fellowship program

Browse the list of our Current Fellows, including each fellow's home institution, research project title, and description.

Review the ranks of Woodson Fellowship Alumni who comprise a distinguished group of scholars working in the field of global black studies, many of whom have pioneered new trends in scholarship.  

Look back video recordings from our annual "Meet the Fellows" event, where we introduce the University of Virginia community and broader Woodson network to the current fellowship cohort

Many former fellows speak highly about the benefits of the interdisciplinary nature of the program. Most especially, the feedback and commentary provided during the fellowship workshop

 

Fellowship Program

The fellowship program has supported the work of over 180 emerging scholars who have gone on to shape the field of black studies scholarship.

Kimberly Fields headshot

Kimberly Fields

Assistant Professor (AAS)

230 Minor Hall

Kimberly Fields earned her Ph.D. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania, and obtained her B.A. in political science from Temple University.  Kimberly's research interests include the political construction and maintenace of race, inequality, environmental policy, state and local politics, political behavior, and government responsiveness.  She has current or forthcoming publications in Environmental Justice and the Midwest Journal of Social Science on state environmental justice efforts and anti-discrimination ordinances.  Kimberly is working on a book-length manuscript, Just States: Evaluating State Approaches to Environmental Justice.  The book will present the first in-depth analysis of state efforts to address the racial dimensions of environmental inequality through public policy. It also evaluates the development, implementation and political consequences of these efforts and analyzes the role of political discourse, issue framing and policy-making processes in shaping government responses, institutional outcomes and political participation. 

 

Filmmaker to discuss Twiga Stars: Tanzania's Soccer Sisters

October 19, 2011 — The documentary "Twiga Stars: Tanzania's Soccer Sisters," will be presented Oct. 24 by the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, part of the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia.
 

Finding Afro-Mexico

History

Fire This Time

History
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First day of classes

Julius Fleming, Jr.

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: Technologies of Liberation: Performance and the Art of Black Political Thought

Post-fellowship placement: University of Maryland, College Park

English
University of Maryland, College Park

Former fellow Vânia Penha Lopes publishes new book

Vânia Penha-Lopes, 1996-1998 Woodson Fellowship cohort, published a new book The Presidential Elections of Trump and Bolsonaro, Whiteness, and the Nation (Lexington Books 2021)

Former Post-Doctoral Fellow, Deirdre Cooper Owens joins the Department of History at University of Nebraska-Lincoln!

Former Post-Doctoral Fellow, Deirdre Cooper Owens joins the Department of History at University of Nebraska-Lincoln as the Linda and Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and the Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program! 

 

We're pleased to announce that Dr. Deirdre Cooper Owens will join our faculty in August 2019 as the Linda and Charles Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine and the Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program. Welcome, @dbcthesis2002! pic.twitter.com/P3DHaa3fz4

— Neb. History Dept. (@UNLHistory) December 6, 2018

Congratulations Dr. Owens!!

Forum Examines Lower Numbers of Black Students at UVA

Two panelists at a forum Monday night said a recent apparent decline in the number of African-American students coming to the University of Virginia is primarily due to financial conditions, along with related factors.

 

B, Brian Foster

Associate Professor

Fraser

Gertrude Fraser

Faculty

Department of Anthropology
Brooks Hall, 310A

Freedom Summer

Freedom Summer

African-American Studies

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: The application requires 3 letters of reference. Must the 3 references be the people sending in your recommendation letters or three different individuals?

A: The same three individuals completing your recommendations should be listed as your three references in the application document.  Only three letters are required. Applicants should instruct 3 individuals to send letters of reference to a designated email address that corresponds to each application year. That email address is available on the application instructions for each fellowship position. Applicants should not submit the letters themselves. 


 

Q: Must the working bibliography be annotated?

A: A bibliography of scholarship informing your project.  It need not be annotated.


 

Q: To whom should I direct my cover letter?

A: Cover letters and recommendation letters may be directed to: CGWI Fellowship Search Committee


 

Q: Are recommendation writers permitted to upload PDF letters with electronic signatures? 

A: Yes, recommendations may be electronically signed and emailed in PDF form to the email address listed in the application instructions and WorkDay posting. 


 

Q: I am experiencing technical difficulties submitting my application and will miss the submission deadline, can you make an exception for me?

No. We recommend that you not wait until the last day to submit the application. Technical difficulties often arise, if you do wait until the last day to submit, please allow for 3-4 hours to fill out and submit the full application. 


 

Q: Can I mail my application materials and/or recommendation letter? 

A: No. Only electronic application materials will be accepted. 


 

Q: Is the fellowship applicable for Ph.D. graduate students in the sciences?

A: The fellowship is restricted to scholars in the humanities and social sciences.


 

Q: Is the Fellowship program open to international candidates?

A: Yes. The Fellowship does consider and accept foreign Ph.D. applicants.


 

Q: What are the eiligibility requirements for a post-doctoral fellowship?

A: There are two conditions for eligibility for the post-doctoral fellowship: 

1) Post-doctoral applicants must have been awarded their Ph.D. no earlier than 2017.​

2) Post-doctoral fellows must have Ph.D in-hand by the July prior to the fellowship start date, which is July 15, 2023 for the current application period

 

Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching

A roundtable discussion on Jarvis R. Givens new book: Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching. Panelists include Francille Wilson, University of Southern California; Pero Dagbovie, Michigan State University. The event was moderated by Derrick Alridge, University of Virginia

Funding Opportunities for DMP

Grants and Fellowships for Thesis Research in Africana Studies

The department has grant and fellowship funding available to students who are accepted into the Distinguished Majors Program in African American and African Studies for the 2024-2025 academic year. This funding is provided with support from the Mellon Foundation.

Distinguished Majors Thesis Grants


Each student accepted into the Distinguished Majors Program in African American and African Studies will have a $300 research allowance available to cover expenses associated with their thesis work.  Research expenses might include the costs of specialized software; supplies and materials for creative arts projects; participation incentives for qualitative research; books for the thesis unavailable from UVA libraries; photocopies; and research-related travel.  The research allowance may not be used for cost-of-living expenses or general equipment and software unrelated to the thesis (e.g., computer or laptop). This funding is only available during the academic year. Students must submit a budget proposal with supporting documentation to the program director for approval. Students who need more than the research allowance provides are welcome to submit a larger budget request for consideration.

 

Summer Fellowships for Preliminary Thesis Research in Africana Studies


Each student accepted into the Distinguished Majors Program in African American and African Studies can request to receive a summer fellowship that enables them to work part-time during the summer conducting preliminary research for their thesis.  Students will be expected to work independently on their research for seven hours per week between June 3 and August 2.  Students will receive $560 in June and $700 in July for a total of $1260 for the summer. Fellowship awardees must submit progress reports with an excerpt from work completed for the month by June 25 and August 2.  More information about how students can request to receive the fellowship and requirements to maintain eligibility for it will be provided to students after their acceptance into the program.

 

Focus and Enhancement Grants for Thesis Research in Africana Studies


Each student in the Distinguished Majors Program in African American and African Studies can request to receive a $500 Focus and Enhancement Grant for Thesis Research in the spring semester of their fourth year.  These grants can be used for research or cost-of-living expenses.  Students can use the funding to free up time from other work obligations so they can spend more time focusing on the final stages of thesis completion. Students also could use the funding to support any enhancements to the final thesis project beyond what they would otherwise be able to complete. To receive this funding, students must have completed all assignments for the fall semester AAS 4070 course. They also must be enrolled to finish all required courses for the DMP and must have submitted the first 25 pages of their thesis to the program director by February 1.

 

 

 

 

 

Gabriel's Conspiracy

History
Kevin Gaines headshot

Kevin Gaines

Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice (AAS/History)

Specialties:
African American history in global perspective, The Civil Rights Movement, Black Diaspora Music and Cultural Production

102 Minor Hall

Kevin K. Gaines is the Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice, with a joint appointment in the Corcoran Department of History and the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies. The new professorship was created to honor the legacy of Bond, the civil rights champion and former University of Virginia professor. Gaines’ current research is on the problems and projects of racial integration in the United States during and after the civil rights movement. 

He is author of Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture During the Twentieth Century (University of North Carolina Press, 1996), which was awarded the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Book Prize. His book, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (UNC Press, 2006), was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title.  Gaines is a past president of the American Studies Association (2009-10). 

His current research is on the integrationist projects of African American activists, artists and intellectuals, interventions that redefined blackness and acknowledged the relationship of structural and ideological forms of racism to racial capitalism, patriarchy, and homophobia.

Ghetto Images in Twentieth-Century American Literature

Amanda Gibson

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Credit Is Due: African Americans as Borrowers and Lenders in Antebellum Virginia

Dissertation title: Credit Is Due: African Americans as Borrowers and Lenders in Antebellum Virginia

Amanda White Gibson is a doctoral candidate at the College of William and Mary. Her research uncovers the credit market experiences of those most vulnerable to the externalities associated with the slavery-based capitalist economy. It describes enslaved and free African Americans’ use of credit from the American Revolution to the Civil War; how enslaved individuals borrowed to free themselves, what happened when they did not pay debts imposed on them by the jail system, and free and enslaved African Americans’ employment of credit at stores and banks. It also attempts to describe how African Americans in Virginia conceived of debt in their own lives, for example using debt, with varying degrees of success, as a tool to distance themselves from slavery and racial oppression.

Post-fellowship placement: Post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study for American Democracy at Kenyon College

History
College of William and Mary
Goluboff

Risa Goluboff

Dean, Arnold H. Leon Professor of Law Professor of History

WB319 School of Law

Graduate Certificate

Graduate Certificate Program in Africana Studies

The Department of Africana Studies and the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African American and African Studies are pleased to announce that we now offer graduate students in M.A .or Ph.D. programs at the University of Virginia the opportunity to acquire a graduate certificate in Africana Studies.

The purpose of this certificate is to provide foundational training in graduate-level research in the interdisciplinary field of African American, African, and Caribbean Studies.  Students will be mentored by faculty from across the humanities and social sciences who are appointed in or formally affiliated with the Department of Africana Studies and/or the Woodson Institute. Students will gain knowledge of the content and methods necessary to conduct comparative and transnational analysis of the African diaspora from both a theoretical and historical perspective. Areas of study might include critical race studies, gender and sexuality, the history of slavery and abolition, immigration, carceral studies, environmental studies, literary and cultural studies, social justice, intellectual history, economic history, media studies, and international politics.

Curriculum Requirements: 

Students will complete a core course titled “Introduction to Africana Studies” (offered inaugurally in spring 2020 by Professor Kevin Gaines) that surveys key texts and major themes that have shaped the development of African American, African, and Caribbean Studies. 

Students must complete an additional three elective courses – with offerings in African, African American, and Caribbean Studies – from a roster approved by the faculty in the Department of Africana Studies. The graduate advisor will also review requests from students to take relevant courses with faculty in other departments, which may fulfill the elective requirements. The particular combination of electives should be sufficiently flexible to align the breadth of our faculty’s expertise with the range of our students’ intellectual interests and prospective professional applications of the certificate.  Students must take at least one of these electives outside of their home department.

Students will consult regularly with an advisor drawn from the faculty of the Department of Africana Studies in addition to coordinating course selection with the director of graduate studies or advisor for his or her master’s or doctoral program.  The Africana Studies advisor will participate on the examination or thesis committee for master’s students and on the dissertation proposal and defense committees for a doctoral student.

 

Certificate Program Requirements 

Total Number of Credit Hours: 12 graduate-level credits

Courses:

Core Course – 3 credits 

AAS 6XXX – Introduction to Africana Studies (3 credits)

Electives – 9 credits 

Students will be encouraged (but not required) to select at least one course from each of three subfields: African Studies, African American Studies, and Caribbean Studies.

 

Eligibility and Time to Completion

Participants who are enrolled in master’s and doctoral degree programs at the University of Virginia. In consultation with the Africana Studies faculty and the graduate advisor in the student’s home department,  completion of the credit requirement for the certificate will be integrated with coursework for the student’s terminal degree. 

All doctoral students who are enrolled full-time should complete the certificate requirements within four semesters, typically during their second and third years of study.  Full-time master’s students can complete the certificate requirements in one semester, but may take up to three semesters.  Part-time master’s students may take up to four semesters to complete the certificate.

 

Admission: 

Applications will be accepted on a rolling basis.

Applicants must be currently enrolled in a master’s or doctoral degree at the University of Virginia and submit:

  • A two-page statement of their intellectual and professional goals for the proposed program
  • Their UVA graduate-level transcript
  • A 20-page writing sample
  • An endorsement of their participation in the certificate program from the director of graduate studies for their degree program.

Please send all application materials to Debbie Best at: woodson@virginia.edu

 

Faculty:

Faculty teaching in the certificate program are all full-time tenured or tenure-track members of the graduate faculty in Arts & Sciences whose research interests are related to Africana Studies.

The roster of current faculty can be accessed here: http://woodson.as.virginia.edu/faculty

 

Core course Description:

AAS 6XXX: Introduction to Africana Studies (3 credits)

Spring 2020

Professor Kevin Gaines

This is an introductory course that will survey key texts in the interdisciplinary fields of African American, African, and Caribbean Studies. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to identify and understand the major themes that have shaped the development of the discipline of Africana Studies. Assignments in the course will help students to develop an understanding of both the methodological and theoretical challenges that prevail in studies of the African Diaspora, such as learning to evaluate sources and to acquire an awareness of, as well as to question, the silences, repressions, omissions, and biases involved in interpreting writing both from and about the African diaspora. Some of the key terms that students will become familiar with are: ethnocentrism, white privilege, race, racism, hegemony, colonialism, imperialism, agency, diaspora, power, identity, modernity, nation, citizenship, sovereignty, and globalization, as well as how these concepts intersect with ideas of both gender and class.

For more information, please visit us on the web: http://woodson.as.virginia.edu/

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Graduation - AAS Virtual Diploma Ceremony

Ashleigh Greene Wade

Assistant Professor (AAS/Media Studies)

Minor 229

Ashleigh Greene Wade is Assistant Professor of Digital Studies, jointly appointed in Media Studies and African American Studies. Broadly speaking, her work traverses the fields of Black girlhood studies, digital and visual media studies, Black Feminist theory, and digital humanities. Wade has a Ph.D. in Women’s and Gender Studies from Rutgers University and is an alumna of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies Fellowship Program. Her work on digital Blackness appears in The Black Scholar, National Political Science Review, Women, Gender, and Families of Color, Visual Arts Research, and Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies. Wade’s forthcoming monograph, Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency and Possibility in Everyday Digital Practice (Duke University Press), explores the role of Black girls’ digital practices in documenting and preserving everyday Black life.

Ashleigh Greene-Wade

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
To Be Girl, Digital, and Black: Black Girls’ Digital Media Production as Cultural Discourse

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of English at Penn State University (Tenure Track)

English
Rugters University
Matthew Greer headshot

Matthew Greer

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Assembling Enslaved Lives: Labor, Consumption, and Landscapes in the Northern Shenandoah Valley

Matthew Greer is a Ph.D. Candidate in Anthropology at Syracuse University, where his studies focus on the archaeology of enslaved life.  His dissertation project, Assembling Enslaved Lives: Labor, Consumption, and Landscapes in the Northern Shenandoah Valley, uses historical archaeology, Black studies, and assemblage theory to write the stories of enslaved people in back into the history of Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. By analyzing some of the objects, practices, and institutions that affected, and were affected by enslaved people as they labored, bought and used commodities, and inhabited local landscapes, the project assesses what life was like for those enslaved in the Valley and how enslaved Shenandoahans shaped the region’s political economies. The latter point is especially important because to demonstrate that enslaved people mattered in the Valley is to demonstrate that any history that ignores them is incomplete.

 

Post fellowship placement: National Science Foundation SBE Postdoctoral Research Fellow, affiliated with the University of Missouri

Anthropology
Syracuse University

Haitian Revolutionary Fictions

Caribbean Studies
Hale

Grace Hale

Associate Professor

306 Cabell Hall

Hamilton

Njelle Hamilton

Associate Professor (AAS/English)

Specialties:
Caribbean and African Literatures, Caribbean Popular Music, Afrofuturism, Trauma and Memory, Narrative Theory

101A Minor Hall

Njelle W. Hamilton is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies and convener of UVa’s Greater Caribbean Studies Network. She specializes in twentieth and twenty-first century Caribbean literary and cultural studies, with particular focus on narrative innovations in the contemporary Caribbean novel. Her first monograph, Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel (Rutgers, 2019), investigates how Caribbean subjects turn to nation music when personal and cultural memory have been impacted by time, travel, or trauma. She’s at work on two projects: a novel; and a monograph tentatively titled The Physics of Caribbean Time, which reads recent time-bending novels through the lens of physics, phenomenology, and Caribbean theory. Her essays on sound studies, trauma theory and the physics of time have appeared in Anthurium, Journal of West Indian Literature, Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature, and sx salon. She serves on the editorial board of Caribbean in Transit: An Arts Journal and is the book review editor for Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal.

 

Fall 2022 Office Hours:

Tu Th 11:30am - 1:30 pm

101A Minor Hall or via Zoom by request.

 

Kindly make an appointment for office hours ahead of time at: njhamilton.youcanbook.me

 

 

SELECT COURSES OFFERED

• Musical Fictions

• Currents in African Literature

• Routes, Writing, Reggae

• Narrating the Caribbean

• Being Human: Race, Technology, and the Arts.

• Marcus, Marley, and McKay: From Jamaica to the World

 

 

Kimberly Ann Harris

Assistant Professor

Amber Henry

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Fugitive Self-Making: Palenquera Women and Marronage in the Colombian Caribbean

Amber M. Henry earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in Latin American & Caribbean studies from Rutgers University. Her research interrogates women’s activism, embodied forms of placemaking, and Black & Indigenous critiques of sovereignty in Latin America. Her current project, which explores how Afro-Colombian women mobilize traditions of marronage to envision lifeworlds beyond the Colombian nation-state, draws upon documentary film, archival research, and over a decade of ethnographic engagement with women from the maroon community of San Basilio de Palenque. Amber’s work has been supported by research & writing fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at Harvard University.  

Anthropology and Africana Studies
University of Pennsylvania

Historian Kevin Gaines is UVA's First Julian Bond Professor

On a bright autumn afternoon in Cleveland more than 50 years ago, 6-year-old Kevin Gaines waited for a rally at his neighborhood playground to see a visitor he already knew was important: a minister named Martin Luther King Jr.

Alas, hearing the civil rights icon was not to happen that day for Gaines. King’s arrival was delayed so long that at sunset, the boy decided to head home and not be late for dinner.

Today, Gaines describes himself as a product of the civil rights era. Even when very young, it was hard not to be affected, he said. His parents were “thoughtful citizens who made sure I had access to what was going on.”

Gaines became a professor of African-American history. And now, after several previous posts at other prestigious universities, he has arrived at the University of Virginia as the inaugural Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice.

“It’s a great honor to be the inaugural holder of the Julian Bond Professorship. It’s a really exciting time to be at UVA, when the institution is redoubling efforts to strengthen Africana studies,” he said from his office in Nau Hall. “I look forward to working with the many outstanding colleagues in history and at the Woodson Institute.

“The civil rights movement was so transformative for people’s lives,” said Gaines, who came to UVA from Cornell University and holds appointments in the Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies and the Corcoran Department of History. He previously taught at Princeton University; the University of Texas, Austin; and the University of Michigan.

Historically Black

History
Hoehler Fatton

Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Associate Professor

S-061 Gibson Hall

Homepage

How a Summer Internship Helped Me Find My Calling

Cameron Brickhouse is a fourth-year University of Virginia student majoring in African-American and African Studies. Her essay appears in the fall e-newsletter from the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.
 

How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind

African-American Studies

Corey Hunter

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: The Politics of Real Spirituality and its Embodiment in Gospel Music Discourse and Performance

Post-fellowship placement: Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Brandeis University

Musicology
Princeton University
Hurd

Noelle Hurd

Professor of Psychology

201 Gilmer Hall

Zalika Ibaorimi headshot

Zalika Ibaorimi

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Haunted Femmes, Haunting Spectators: Modalities of Black Desire, Pleasure & Sexual Shame

Zalika U. Ibaorimi is a multidisciplinary artist and doctoral candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation, "Haunted Femmes, Haunting Spectators: Modalities of Black Desire, Pleasure & Sexual Shame," engages Black material and digital publics as the landscape to trace the human sexual geographies between the relation of the Black femme and spectator.

African-American Studies
University of Texas at Austin

In Case You Missed It:

Ashon Crawley creates a temporary monument on the U.S. National Mall in Washington, D.C. as part of the "Beyond Granite" initiative.

In Memoriam: Reginald Butler, Former Woodson Director

In Memorium: Julius Scott III

It is with great sadness that we mourn the passing of Julius Scott, III. Scott began his illustrious career as a Woodson pre-doctoral fellow in one of the first cohorts where he worked on an early version of his seminal book "The Common Wind." Read this tribute to Julius Scott in the New York Times

In Virginia, reopening a 125-year-old case rights a historical injustice

Robert Trent Vinson quoted in radio story about the lynching of John Henry James

Independent Study

Independent Study

Guidelines and Requirements


AAS independent study courses (AAS 4993) are student-driven. They entail the approximate amount of reading and writing that an upper-level seminar would require: 1500-2000 pages over a semester. Most students carry out an academic research project, which involves writing and submitting a 20-page research paper. However, students may propose a creative research project, an applied research project, or a design-based research project with approval of a faculty supervisor.  These various types of research projects are described in the document, Defining Undergraduate Research (from the Office of the Vice Provost for Academic Programs), which can be found among the forms collected on the Carter G. Woodson website. Students should decide on their own topic, and then approach an appropriate faculty member to request that s/he direct the independent study. Faculty who supervise independent studies in AAS must be either AAS core or affiliate faculty.

A student must have earned a 3.0 overall GPA in order to qualify to enroll in an independent study.  If a student does not have a 3.0, she or he may petition the AAS Curriculum Committee to enroll, after having obtained the approval from a faculty supervisor.  The petition form is available among the forms assembled on the Carter G. Woodson website.  A filed petition is not to be understood as, or guaranteeing, an approval to enroll in an independent study.

Only one independent study can count toward the AAS major, the AAS minor, or the AS minor and it will count as an elective course.  No independent study can fulfill a distribution requirement for the major.  AAS 4993 cannot fill the 4000-level seminar requirement.

Students are strongly encouraged to obtain approval of the supervising professor prior to the semester when the independent study will begin. The student should obtain the supervisor’s signature on a course action form and submit it to the attention of the Director of Undergraduate Programs, Lisa Shutt.

.

AAS Independent Study Guidelines

 

 

 

“The information contained on this website is for informational purposes only. The Undergraduate Record and Graduate Record represent the official repository for academic program requirements. These publications may be found at http://records.ureg.virginia.edu/index.php.” 

Inside A&S: "Volunteers Gather in Classrooms and Coffeeshops to Transcribe Julian Bond’s Work"

Inside A&S: This week’s effort – dubbed “#TranscribeBond” by its organizers from UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies and its partners, the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, the Center for Digital Editing, the Scholars’ Lab and Virginia Humanities – launched with Stewart and other volunteers assembling at locations on and off Grounds for a one-day, crowdsourced push to begin transcribing Bond’s work for a new public, digital archive.

Institute

At a Glance


The Woodson Institute has earned international acclaim as a magnet for some the world’s best graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, creating a collaborative, supportive, and interdisciplinary environment for innovative scholarship. The fellowship program provides scholars time to complete their research before they jump into the responsibilities of teaching full time; at the same time, Woodson Fellows are immersed in a community of scholars who bring the perspectives of their various disciplines to bear on advancing each other’s scholarship during monthly workshops. In these regular workshops, pre and post-doctoral fellows receive feedback on dissertation or manuscript chapters from a guest interlocutors , the director of Fellowships, and their colleagues in the fellowship program. 

As the crown jewel of the research Institute, the Woodson takes pride in the spirit of being at the cutting edge of scholarship in Africana Studies as articulated by Deborah McDowell, Woodson Director from 2009 - 2021.

"If you want to find out where scholarship is going in African American and African Diaspora scholarship, across the disciplines, find out who is at the Woodson Institute.”

Since its inception, the fellowship program has supported over 180 emerging scholars (and counting!). Its high rate of success has placed its fellows in tenure-track positions and post-doctoral fellowships at colleges and universities across the nation, including: 

For more information about the Woodson fellowship program, please browse the following pages: 

 

Pre-Doctoral Fellowship

For advanced PhD students completing dissertation projects, the program exposes pre-doctoral fellows to other emerging scholars from Universities across the nation, offering the space, guidance, and intellectual exchange necessary to complete one's research and successfully defend one's dissertation. 

Post-Doctoral Fellowship

Early career scholars take up residence in the Minor Hall Annex, working alongside pre-doctoral fellows, to complete their book manuscripts. These newly minted PhDs also have the opportunity to develop their teaching portfolios by instructing one course per year in the Department of Africana Studies. 

Current Fellows

A list of the current fellowship cohort, including each fellow's project title and description

Fellowship Alumni

A directory of all former Woodson Fellows, searchable by name, area of expertise, and fellowship year.

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Institute for Recuitment of Teachers (IRT)

Please take a look at this excellent opportunity for students committed to diversity who wish to attain advanced degrees in the humanities, social sciences, education, and math and then pursue careers in education, administration, or counseling at K-12 schools or colleges and universities.

 

There are no classes on Monday, January 19th in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, but please consider coming out to the presentation at 10:30 in Minor 130 and also signing up for an interview that day with Ms. Davis. Many of our students have participated in this program in the past and have benefited in profound ways.

Interrogating Digital Blackness Keynote: André Brock

Keynote address by André Brock, Associate Professor of Media Studies at Georgia Tech, for the Interrogating Digital Blackness symposium

sponsored by the Page Barbour Lecture series. 

 

Inventing Masks

Anthropology

Sebastian Jackson

Assistant Professor

Jeffery Ahlman, 2011 fellowship cohort, published Kwame Nkrumah: Visions of Liberation

Jeffery Ahlman, 2009-2011 fellowship cohort, published Kwame Nkrumah: Visions of Liberation (Ohio University Press)

Jenifer Barclay, 2011 fellowship cohort, published The Mark of Slavery from University of Illinois Press

Jenifer Barclay, 2009-2011 fellowship cohort, published The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America (University of Illinois Press)

Micah Jones

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Jim Crow Prerogatives: Race and Consumption in the United States South, 1890-1980

Micah Jones completed a PhD in African American Studies and History at Yale University. Her project, "Jim Crow Prerogatives: Race and Consumption in the United States South, 1890-1980," examines Black southerners’ experiences grocery shopping in the Jim Crow South. It contends that groceries, as racially mixed spaces amidst segregation, were key sites of race-making. It demonstrates how grocery stores laid the groundwork for a facially race neutral, but functionally racist, post-Jim Crow racial regime.

African-American Studies
Yale University
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Julian Bond Papers Project Launch Event

The Julian Bond Papers Project Website Launch

On February 22nd, 2023, the Julian Bond Papers Project will officially launch its project website. The project received a grant from the U.S. National Archives National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to create a digital edition of the Julian Bond speeches housed in UVA Special Collections Library.

To date, the team has digitized close to 13,000 images, transcribed over 10,000 pages, engaged 400 volunteers, and employed 12 student research assistants. 

To frame our discussion, we have invited panelists to meditate on key speeches in the collection, which engage topics that preoccupied Julian Bond throughout his 50-year career as a crusader for civil rights and social justice. These include: voting rights and restrictions, race in American history, the racial symbolics of public monuments, economic justice, the fragility of democracy, and the importance of student activism. 

The event will include a showcase of the website and a panel discussion moderated by Project Director, Deborah E. McDowell and featuring: 

Kevin Gaines,  Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice, Associate Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute

Derrick P. Alridge, Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education, Director, Center for Race and Public Education in the South

Jalane Schmidt, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, Director of the Memory Project

Please join us to celebrate this significant milestone!

 

Visit the links below for a "sneak peek" of documents from the collection: 

Speech at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Social Change Conference on the 1965 Voting Rights Act, 1975 January 13 (2 of 2) 

Speech--"What's Next?" before the Psychiatric Association Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, 1978 May 10 

Speech concerning Flags as Powerful Symbols before the Southern Historical Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1995 November 10 

Speech concerning Youthful Activism and the Role They Play in the Struggle for Better Conditions, 1971 August 21   

 

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Julian Bond Symposium begins

"Keep the Movement Coming On"

For more information, please visit the Symposium Website

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Julian Bond Transcribe-a-Thon

Second Annual Julian Bond Transcribe-a-Thon

10:00 am - 4:00 pm*

Join us to contribute to this historic project by transcribing a wide and varied sample of Bond’s papers!

Locations:

  • The Woodson Institute, 110 Minor Hall, UVA
  • The Scholars’ Lab, Alderman Library, UVA
  • The Virginia Center for the Book at the Jefferson School, 233 4th St. NW, Charlottesville, Va.
  • Shenandoah Joe, 945 Preston Ave., Charlottesville, Va.
  • McCue Center, Virginia Athletics, 290 Massie Rd, Charlottesville, Virginia 22903

 

RSVP here

In addition to the transcribe-a-thon, UVA's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library will hold an exhibit of original materials related to Julian Bond. The exhibit will be held on Thursday, Aug. 15 from 12:00 pm to 2:00 p.m. in the Byrd-Morris Room of the Special Collections Library.

Julian Bond's Time To Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Panel discussion on the new book "Julian Bond's Time To Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement" with co-editors Pamela Horowitz and Jeanne Theoharis. Moderated by Kevin Gaines, Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice at UVA

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Julian Bond's Time To Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement Book Launch

Julius Fleming named the 2018 Nancy Weiss Malkiel Scholar, by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation

Outgoing post-doctoral fellow, Julius Fleming, has been named the 2018 Nancy Weiss Malkiel Scholar, by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation.  The award is granted to ten “emerging faculty leaders who represent both research excellence and an extraordinary commitment to mentoring students and serving their campuses and professions,” said Stephanie J. Hull, executive vice president and chief operating officer of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.  Julius has also received a second “Emerging Scholar” award from  Comparative and International Education Society.

Just My Soul Responding

award-winning

African-American Studies
Kahrl

Andrew Kahrl

Professor (AAS/History)

Specialties:
African American , 20th Century US, Urban, Environmental

282 Nau Hall

Andrew Kahrl is a professor of History and African American Studies. He specializes in the history of race and inequality in the twentieth-century US, with a focus on housing and real estate, land use and ownership, and local tax systems. He is the author of The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (Harvard UP, 2012), which received the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award; Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline (Yale UP, 2018); and The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America (U. Chicago Press, 2024). Kahrl served as the Principal Investigator and co-author of the African American Outdoor Recreation National Historic Landmark Theme Study for the National Park Service. His research and writing appears regularly in media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and Boston Review. Kahrl teaches courses on the history of race and real estate in the US, local politics in America, US urban history, Black landownership, and African American history since 1865.

The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America
Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press in 2024
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo213447492.html

Keep On Keeping On The NAACP and the Implementation of Brown v. Board of Education in Virginia

History

Darren Kelly

Associate Vice President and Dean Office of African-American Affairs

Luther P. Jackson House, #4 Dawson's Row

Nzingha Kendall

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: Imperfect Independence: Black Women & Experimental Filmmaking

Post fellowship placement: Assistant Professor, Film and Screen Studies Department at Pace University (Tenure-track)

American Studies
Indiana University Bloomington

Kevin Gaines quoted in Virginia Mercury article on Glen Youngkin's campaign rhetoric

I reached out to Kevin Gaines, associate director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University of Virginia.

Kevin Gaines published in the Journal of Transnational American Studies

Kevin Gaines published "Reflections on Ben Okri, Goenawan Mohamad, and the 2020 Global Uprisings" in the Journal of Transnational American Studies. The essay addresses the Black Lives Matter movement and international press coverage on the murder of George Floyd.

Gaines' reflection is accompanied by commentary from Nigerian novelist and poet Ben Okri and Jakarta-based editor and writer Goenawan Mohamad. Read Prof. Gaines' essay here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8361f9wq

Tiffany King

Barbara and John Glynn Research Professorship in Democracy and Equity and Associate Professor

Kisliuk

Michelle Kisliuk

Associate Professor

204 Old Cabell Hall

Delali Kumavie

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dreams of Flight: Literary Mappings of Black Geographies through Air, Airplanes and Airports in Black Literature

Post-fellowship placement: post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard's Mahindra Center; tenure-track position at Syracuse University 

Comparative Literature
Northwestern University

Kwame E. Otu awarded a 2018 National Humanities Center Fellowship

Kwame E. OtuAssistant Professor of African-American and African Studies, awarded a 2018 NCH Summer Fellowship from the National Humanities Center at Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. Otu will continue work on his book project Amphibious Subjects: Sassoi and the Contested Politics of Queer Self-Making in Neoliberal Ghana.

Kwame E. Otu awarded the Richard and Nancy Guerrant Global Health Equity Professorship

Otu will use the inaugural Center for Global Health Professorship to begin work on his project “Scenes of Toxicity.”

Kwame Nkrumah

African Studies
Laviolette

Adria LaViolette

Associate Professor

Department of Anthropology
Brooks Hall B010

Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin

English
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Lecture by Imani Perry

The Carter G. Woodson Institute and the Office of African American Affairs, with generous support from the Frank Batten School for Leadership and public Policy, the Office of Diversity and Equity, the Office of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs, Curry School of Education Department of Leadership, Foundations and Policy, and the Luther P. Jackson Black Male Initiative, announces an upcoming lecture by Princeton University Professor Imani Perry, who teaches in the Center for African American Studies.  She holds a B. A. from Yale, a Ph.D. from Harvard in the Program in the History of American Civilization, and a J. D. from Harvard Law School.  She is the author of More Beautiful and More Terrible:  The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States (New York University Press, 2011), Prophets of the Hood:  Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop (Duke University Press, 2004), and numerous scholarly articles and editions.

Left of Black | Dr. Julius B. Fleming, Jr. on "Black Patience" and the Struggle for Civil Rights

Julius Fleming, Jr., Woodson fellowship class of 2018, was interviewed on the Left of Black web series about his new book Black Patience: Performance, Civil Rights, and the Unfinished Project of Emancipation

Legacies of the New World Avenger, with Laurent Dubois, Julia Gaffield, and Grégory Pierrot

2019 marks the 15th-anniversary of the publication of Laurent Dubois’s Avengers of the New World (2004), the first narrative history of the Haitian Revolution to be published in the English language since the landmark appearance of C.L.R. James’s The Black Jacobins in 1938. Dubois' book heralded a new era of interest in the Haitian Revolution among Anglophone scholars. Several newer books that were published in the wake of these earlier works include Julia Gaffield’s Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition After Revolution (2015) and Grégory Pierrot’s The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (2019). In this, the inaugural event of the Conversations in Caribbean Studies Colloquium, these authors will discuss the broad impact of studies of the New World Avenger on the fields of Haitian, Caribbean, Atlantic, and American historical, literary, and cultural studies.

Limits of Anarchy: Intervention and State Formation in Chad

Lindsey Jones, former Woodson fellow, received the 2019 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize

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Listening Party with A.D. Carson

Thursday, September 28th
5:00 pm - 8:00 pm
Minor 125, reception to follow

V: Illicit: “A mixtap/e/ssay about what it means to be dope. Dope is not only a measure of quality or coolness, it is rooted in the experiences of Black people in the U.S. since its beginnings.”

Dopeness predates this focus on drugs and the people projected as their primary sellers, users, and abusers. It is also about permission and sanctioning.

Dope is distinct from drugs like illegal is distinct from legal and illicit is distinct from licit. Dopeness relates to the histories of people treated as property, chattel, technology—labeled legal or illegal, human or something other than.

The listening party and panel discussion will be held from 5:00 - 6:30 PM in Minor Hall 125, followed by a reception in the Minor Hall Foyer from 6:30 - 8:00 PM.

Listening Roundtable on A.D. Carson's "SLEEPWALKING 2 [a mixtape/e/ssay | OTR]"

Listening Roundtable on A.D. Carson's "SLEEPWALKING 2 [a mixtape/e/ssay | OTR]"

Thursday, Feburary 21, 2019

Introductory remarks by Njelle Hamilton, Assistant Professor at the Carter G. Woodson Institute and UVA's Department of English. 

Panelists included: 

Lanice Avery, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Women and Gender Studies, UVA

Marcus Fitzgerald, Music Producer and Recording Artist

Jack Hamilton, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, UVA

Njelle Hamilton, Assistant Professor of African-American and African Studies and UVA's Department of English

Guthrie Ramsey, Professor of Music & Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania 

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Listening Roundtable with A.D. Carson

LISTENING ROUNDTABLE for "SLEEPWALKING 2 [a mixtape/e/ssay | OTR]"

Featuring:

Lanice Avery, Assistant Professor of Psychology and Women and Gender Studies, UVA

Marcus Fitzgerald, Music Producer and Recording Artist

Jack Hamilton, Assistant Professor of Media Studies, UVA

Njelle Hamilton, Assistant Professor of African-American and African Studies, UVA

Guthrie Ramsey, Professor of Music & Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania 

 

Mahaliah Little cover

Mahaliah Little

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Hushed Articulations: Theorizing Representations of Black Women’s Post-Violence Sexuality

Mahaliah Ayana Little is an American Association of University Women (AAUW) Dissertation Fellow at Ohio State University. After graduating from Spelman College in 2013 as an English major, she attended Rutgers University, New Brunswick, for her master's in Women's and Gender Studies. As an alumna of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Mahaliah is committed to diversifying the professoriate and serving underrepresented students. Her dissertation project, "Hushed Articulations: Theorizing Representations of Black Women’s Post-Violence Sexuality," analyzes representations of Black women's sexuality in the aftermath of sexual violence in literature, memoir, and documentaries.

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of California, Irvine

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Ohio State University

Little Richard Documentary In Theaters Friday April 21st

Ashon Crawley interviewed in new documentary about Little Richard in theaters on April 21

Living the Hiplife

Anthropology

Local People

History

London is the Place for Me

Africana Studies

Pablo Lopez-Oro

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: Queering Garifuma: The Diasporic Politics of Black Indigeneity in New York City

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at Smith College (tenure-track)

Africana Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Love and Theft

African-American Studies

Love Songs from Lonely Letters

Composer Joel Thompson debuted a composition based on Ashon Crawley's writings entitled, Love Songs from Lonely Letters

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Lunch with Adom Getachew

A lunch with Adom Getachew (University of Chicago Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College) -- students are invited to join us for a discussion and informal advising session with Professor Getachew regarding identifying graduate programs that fit, applying to graduate schools and the student experience once admitted.

Anne Garland Mahler headshot

Anne Garland Mahler

Associate Professor

Anne Garland Mahler is an interdisciplinary scholar focused on South-South political and cultural movements, particularly among Latin American, African American, and U.S. Latinx writers. Her research draws on the fields of cultural studies, history, and critical theory of racial capitalism and globalization. An Associate Professor with a PhD in Latin American cultural studies (Emory University, 2013), her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Ford Foundation, and the Mellon Foundation.

Mahler is author of From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity (Duke, 2018), which has been reviewed more than twenty times in a wide range of interdisciplinary venues. She currently has three books in progress: She is co-editor of The Comintern and the Global South: Global Designs/Local Encounters (Routledge, forthcoming) and The Oxford Handbook of the History of the Global South (under contract); and her monograph in progress, South-South Solidarities: Racial Capitalism and Political Community from the Americas to the Globe, was supported by a 2020-21 ACLS Fellowship and has been committed to Duke UP.

Mahler has done significant work to support the growth of the interdisciplinary field of Global South studies. She is the creator and director of Global South Studies; author of "Global South" for Oxford Bibliographies in Literary and Critical Theory; guest editor, with Magalí Armillas-Tiseyra, of two special issues of CLS: Comparative Literature Studies on "New Critical Directions in Global South Studies"; and co-editor of a special issue of the journal The Global South. She was also a founding executive committee member of the Global South forum of the Modern Languages Association.

At UVA, Mahler serves as director of Global South Studiesco-coordinator of the Internationalism project with the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory; co-coordinator for the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship in Caribbean Literatures, Arts, and Cultures; and as the director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for her department.

For more on her publications, interviews, and public scholarship, visit: https://annegarlandmahler.com

Mahmood Mamdani: Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

Keynote Lecture by Mahmood Mamdani for the Religion and Democracy on the African Continent Conference. The two-day event featured scholars of Africana Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, History, Sociology, Law, and Politics, who shared their expertise on religion and democracy, its colonial legacies and post-colonial possibilities. 

Alysia Mann Carey headshot

Alysia Mann Carey

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
‘I felt the hand of the government in my womb’: Black women, state violence, and the transnational struggle for life in Brazil and Colombia

My dissertation is an ethnographic and community-engaged study investigating the impacts of state violence on black women and communities in Brazil and Colombia. Centering the grassroots leadership of Black women, I examine how they organize and resist the myriad forms of state oppression that intersect and interact in their everyday lives. I use a framework of intimacy as a way to understand Black women’s political thinking and action by articulating how intimacy and activism intersect, through emotions, grief, homes as organizing sites, and the politicization of motherhood and care. In centering the leadership of Black women in Brazil and Colombia, my dissertation will contribute to literature on race and politics, feminist theory and African diaspora studies by examining how Black women are creating networks of support and autonomous organizing by leading movements that resist systems responsible for the violence against themselves, their families, and their communities. Drawing on 18 months of qualitative, ethnographic, participatory, and Black feminist research, I not only explore these movements’ use of a framework of intimacy to understand state violence, but also examine the extent to which their collective repertoires of contention are also rooted in (re)claiming and (re)creating autonomous Black intimate spheres and practices.

Political Science
The University of Chicago

Marlene Daut awarded 2019 American Council for Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship

Marlene Daut featured in Slate Magazine's Podcast A Word with Jason Johnson 

Sept. 04, 2021 - Haitians Can’t Trust Aid From NGOs or Their Own GovernmentSlate Magazine's A Word with Jason Johnson podcast. 

Marlene Daut featured in the TED-Ed video "The First and Last King of Haiti"

Marlene Daut provides expert analysis during Haiti's recent political upheaval

Marlene Daut publishes article in Garnet News

Will the Laquan McDonald case prove to be a beginning?

Marlene L. Daut

Friday’s conviction of former police officer Jason Van Dyke for the murder of Laquan McDonald may not bode well for Amber Guyger. She is the off-duty Dallas police officer who fatally shot St. Lucian native Botham Shem Jean on September 6 in his own apartment. The conviction of Van Dyke, the first of its kind in Chicago in several decades, signals a change. Police officers typically get away with killing Black men, often citing their fear for their life as the reason. This time it didn’t work.

http://garnetnews.com/2018/10/09/fear-black-men-may-no-longer-defense/

Marlene Daut publishes in Essence Magazine

"Haiti Isn't Cursed. It Is Exploited." The mistreatment of Haitian migrants at the Del Rio border underscores the intersecting crises affecting Haitians, and "bad luck" has nothing to do with it, says historian Marlene L. Daut.

Marlene Daut publishes “Becoming Full Professor While Black” in the Chronicle of Higher Education

Marlene Daut in the Chronicle of Higher Education 

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Becoming-Full-Professor-While/246743

 

 

Marlene Daut awarded 2021 Ford Foundation Fellowship 

Marlene Daut awarded 2021 Ford Foundation Fellowship for her project: Dreaming Freedom: The Story of the First and Last King of Haiti , which details the little known history of heroism and strife, triumph and betrayal that characterizes the life of Haiti's first and last king, Henry Christophe. 

Marlene Daut wrote a review for Harper's Bazaar: Resurrecting a Lost Palace of Haiti

Marlene Daut reviewed Firelei Báez'srecent installation of the Palace of the King of Haiti for Harper's BazaarResurrecting a Lost Palace of Haiti

Marlene L. Daut launches digital resource for early 19th century Haiti

Marlene L. Daut, Associate Professor of African-American and African Studies and American studies, launches digital resource for early 19th century Haiti: The La Gazette Royale project, which Daut first began to develop in 2014, is designed to gather together and in one place for the first time all of the known issues of the two newspapers published during Henry Christophe’s rule of northern Haiti, as well as the six different versions of the Almanach Royal d’Hayti issued by the royal press. The most comprehensive collection of La Gazette Officielle d’Hayti and La Gazette Royale d’Hayti to appear in a single repository, there are 81 separate issues gathered on this website. 

Martin Luther King Day: The song that changed the US

Kevin Gaines featured in a BBC Culture article on Stevie Wonder's role in making the MLK national holiday a reality.

Mason

John E. Mason

Associate Professor

Nau 353

Masquerading Politics

Anthropology
Jillean McCommons headshot

Jillean McCommons

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
The Black Appalachian Commission: Regional Black Power Politics and the War on Poverty, 1969-1975

Jillean McCommons is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Kentucky. My dissertation project, “The Black Appalachian Commission: Regional Black Power Politics and the War on Poverty, 1969-1975,” is a social history of the Black Appalachian Commission (BAC), a Black-led grassroots organization created to address the specific needs of Black people in the thirteen states that comprise the Appalachian region. My dissertation highlights the intersections of Black Power Studies and Appalachian Studies by examining Black Appalachian demands for structural change during Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty through Richard Nixon’s subsequent dismantling of liberal policies after 1972. To understand Black conceptualizations of regional identity, my dissertation also draws on theories from the field of Geography, including Black Geographies and Black Ecologies, to uncover Black Appalachian epistemologies of land, identity, and place.

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of History and Africana Studies, University of Richmond

University of Kentucky
McDowell

Deborah E. McDowell

Alice Griffin Professor of English

Specialties:
African-American Literature; Women's Literature; American Literature; Theories of Race and Emotion

Deborah E. McDowell was Director of the Woodson Institute from 2008-2021, serving the longest term as director in the Institute’s 40-plus year history. During this period of significant growth, the African American and African Studies program became a department, expanded its curriculum and faculty roster, established a Study-Abroad program in Ghana, a certificate in Africana Studies, and secured the endowment of the fellowship program. 

She is currently Director of the Julian Bond Papers Project, which began in 2013 as “The Movement in the Archive.” Currently in its third year of funding from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), the project is making available to students, scholars and the public nearly 50,000 documents Bond bequeathed to the University of Virginia. The project work completed to date is freely available at this digital archive

A scholar of African American/American literature, is the Alice Griffin Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Virginia, where she has been a member of the faculty since 1987. Her publications include 'The Changing Same': Studies in Fiction by African-American Women, Leaving Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin, as well as numerous articles, book chapters, and scholarly editions. She is co-editor (with Claudrena Harold and Juan Battle) of The Punitive Turn: Race, Inequality, and Mass Incarceration. Extensively involved in editorial projects pertaining to the subject of African-American literature, she founded the African-American Women Writers Series for Beacon Press and served as its editor from 1985-1993. This project oversaw the reissue of fourteen novels by African American women writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She also served as a period editor for the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, now in its third edition; contributing editor to the D. C. Heath Anthology of American Literature, and co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery and the Literary Imagination. Her service on various editorial boards has included Publications of the Modern Language AssociationAmerican Literature, Genders, and African-American Review, Modern Fiction Studies, and Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature.

Professor McDowell has been the recipient of various grants, including the Mary Ingraham Bunting Fellowship (Radcliffe), the National Research Council Fellowship of the Ford Foundation, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship. She was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by Purdue University in 2006.

Robin Means Coleman

Professor (AAS/Media Studies)

Wilson Hall 202

Robin R. Means Coleman, PhD is a Professor of Media Studies and of African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. She is Director of the Black Fantastic Media Research Lab. An accomplished, prizewinning administrator, she has held several senior leadership positions. Before joining the University of Virginia, Dr. Coleman was the Vice President & Associate Provost for Institutional Diversity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, and the Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand Barnett Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University.

Previously, Dr. Coleman was on the faculty at Texas A&M University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh, and New York University. At Texas A&M, she was the Vice President and Associate Provost for Diversity. At Michigan, she served as the Associate Dean of Social Sciences in the Rackham Graduate School, as well as Chair of the Department of Communication Studies.

An award-winning scholar-teacher, Dr. Coleman’s research focuses on media studies and the cultural politics of Blackness. Dr. Coleman is the author of Horror Noire: A History of Black American Horror from the 1890s to Present, 2nd ed. (2023); Horror Noire: Blacks in American Horror Films from the 1890s to Present (2011); and, African American Viewers and the Black Situation Comedy: Situating Racial Humor (2000).  She is co-author of The Black Guy Dies First: Black Horror from Fodder to Oscar (2023) and Intercultural Communication for Everyday Life (2014). She is the editor of Say It Loud! African American Audiences, Media, and Identity (2002) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Black Horror Film (2024) and Fight the Power! The Spike Lee Reader (2008). She is also the author of many other academic and popular publications.

Dr. Coleman is featured in, and co-executive produced, the critically acclaimed, award-winning documentary film Horror Noire. The film features a ‘who’s who’ cast, including Jordan Peele (Get Out), Tananarive Due (The Reformatory), Ashlee Blackwell (graveyardshiftsisters.com), William Crain (Blacula), Rusty Cundieff (Tales from the Hood), Rachel True (The Craft), Ernest Dickerson (The Walking Dead), Keith David (The Thing), Mark Harris (The Black Guy Dies First) and a host of other horror experts.

Dr. Coleman holds a certificate in Leadership and Performance Coaching from Brown University/ACT. She completed the Foundations of Organizational Ombuds Practice training course. She was a Fellow in the Institute for Educational Management at Harvard University. She was also a Fellow in the NADOHE Standards of Professional Practice Institute. She earned a Certificate in Diversity and Inclusion from Cornell University. She is a graduate of the American Council on Education Leadership Academy, the University of California-Berkeley Executive Leadership Academy, and the National Intergroup Dialogue Institute at the University of Michigan.

Speaker Request Form

Medical Bondage

award-winning

History
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Meet the Fellows

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Meet the Fellows

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Meet the Fellows

Meet the Fellows 2016

Video from the annual event "Meet the Fellows" to welcome new members of the Carter G. Woodson's distinguished fellowship program.

Extended description of the Fellows and their projects (in order of appearance):

Tiffany Barber Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Art and Art History) University of Rochester "Undesirability and the Value of Blackness in Contemporary Art"

Lyndsey Beutin Pre-Doctoral Fellow University of Pennsylvania (Annenberg School for Communication) "If Slavery’s Not Black: The stakes of the U.S. State Department’s campaign against human trafficking"

Cory Hunter Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Musicology) Princeton University "The Politics of Real Spirituality and its Embodiment in Gospel Music Discourse and Performance"

Ebony Jones Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History) New York University “Enslaved Convicts in Imperial Spaces: Race and Penal Transportation during the Abolition Era”

Lindsey Jones Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Social Foundation of Education) University of Virginia ‘Not a Place of Punishment’: the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1915-1940.”

Tony Perry Pre-Doctoral Fellow (American Studies) University of Maryland "To Go to Nature’s Manufactory’: The Material Ecology of Slavery in Antebellum Maryland"

Xavier Pickett Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Religion & Society) Princeton Theological Seminary "Black (Ir)religious Fire: The Literary and Moral Imagination of James Baldwin and James Cone"

Ashley Rockenbach Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History) University of Michigan “Home Exile: Banyarwanda Settlers and the Making of the Ugandan State, 1911-Present”

Petal Samuel Post-Doctoral Fellow Vanderbilt University (English) "Polluting the Soundscape: Noise Control, The Colonial Ear, and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Writing"

Julius Fleming Jr. Post-Doctoral Fellow (Africana Studies) University of Maryland, College Park

 

For a full description of the fellows' project, visit: http://woodson.virginia.edu/woodson-fellows

Meet the Fellows 2017

Minor Hall 110

Video from the annual event "Meet the Fellows" to welcome new members of the Carter G. Woodson's distinguished fellowship program. During the 2017 Meet the Fellows event, the Carter G. Woodson Institute also celebrated its new departmental status.

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Meet the Fellows 2018

Reception to follow! 

Meet the Fellows 2018

During the Woodson Institute's annual event "Meet the Fellows," we welcome new pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellows to the Carter G. Woodson's distinguished fellowship program.

Meet the Fellows 2019

The 2019 edition of our annual "Meet the Fellows" event was hosted in Minor 110

we welcome new pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellows to the Carter G. Woodson's distinguished fellowship program.

Meet the Fellows 2020

During the Woodson Institute's annual event "Meet the Fellows," we welcome new pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellows to the fellowship program

 

 the Carter G. Woodson's distinguished fellowship program. This is the first virtual "Meet the Fellows" event.

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Meet the Fellows 2021

Join us for our annual "Meet the Fellows" event. Register via the link below:

 

https://virginia.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_R3KeX2xjTtyznT0p2F_BAQ

 

 

Meet the Fellows 2021

The Woodson's annual "Meet the Fellows" event showcases the current research projects of our residential pre-and post-doctoral fellows. For a full list of the current Woodson Fellows, including each fellow's project title and bio, visit the Carter G. Woodson Institute website: https://woodson.as.virginia.edu/woodson-fellows

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Meet the Fellows 2022

Wednesday, October 5th
5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
Minor Hall 110 (reception to follow)

Our annual event returns to an in-person format on Wednesday, October 5th! Join us to learn about the work of the new and returning Woodson fellows. Each fellow will provide a brief overview of their current research project.

Topics range from the concept of night-time in Lagos, Nigeria to sensual worldmaking in literature written by diasporic black queer subjects; from the anti-fascist tradition within black freedom movements to boxing in colonial Zimbabwe. 

Watch the livestream via YouTube: https://youtu.be/T2_-hn_mSxA

 

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Meet the Fellows 2023

Meet the Fellows 2023

Our annual event returns on Wednesday, October 4th! Join us to learn about the work of the new and returning Woodson fellows. Each fellow will provide a brief overview of their current research project.

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Meet the Fellows, 2017

Meet the Fellows: 2022

Our annual event returns to an in-person format for the first time since 2019! Join us to learn about the work of the new and returning Woodson fellows. Each fellow will provide a brief overview of their current research project.

Mentore

George Mentore

Associate Professor

Department of Anthropology
Brooks Hall, 307

Migrants Against Slavery

History

Militant Mediator

History

Nicole Gantt Mitchell

Professor (Composition & Computer Technologies)

Kelsey Moore

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
What the Dead Witnessed: Clearing Black Knowledges in Jim Crow South Carolina

Between 1938 and 1942, the South Carolina Public Service Authority sought to displace 901 black families and dig up and flood over 9,000 graves for rural redevelopment. This dissertation challenges government and capitalist conceptions of value by conceptualizing and documenting a “conjure value” among South Carolina’s African-descended people.

 

History
Johns Hopkins University

Jameelah Morris

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Contesting Colombia’s Paradise: Youth, Violence, and the Struggle for Black Life Across Generation

Jameelah Imani Morris is a PhD Candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. She received her B.A. in International Relations and Spanish from Tufts University and M.A. in Anthropology from Stanford University. Her research centers on anti-Black state violence, social movements, youth political cultures, and urban displacement across the Americas. Her current project is an interdisciplinary and ethnographic study investigating the impacts of state violence on Black communities, and responses to them, across generations in Colombia. Against the backdrop of neoliberal tourism development in Cartagena, it examines gendered anti-Black state violence and intergenerational social movements as processes that produce Black youth as political subjects. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council and Fulbright-Hays Program.

Anthropology
Stanford University
Janee A. Moses headshot

Janée A. Moses

Post-Doctoral

Dissertation Title:
A House to Sing In: Extra/Ordinary Black Women’s Narratives about Black Power

Under the direction of Michael Awkward, “A House to Sing In” considers the lives, times, and cultural expressions of Amina Baraka, Nina Simone, and Elaine Brown. By studying these three black revolutionary women together, I consider the extent to which they simultaneously complied with and resisted gendered formulations of revolutionary identities. I challenge African American Studies’ dichotomous misrecognition of black women as either extraordinary because they are, as Joy James states, “not bound to a male persona,” or ordinary because they are publicly bound to a male persona. I deploy the term “Extra/Ordinary” to argue that the reality of black women’s experiences comprises both the extraordinary and the ordinary. My scholarship differs from case studies of black revolutionary women as solely exceptional warriors on the front lines of the black freedom struggle in that I highlight considerations of their day-to-day experiences as wives, mothers, and lovers.

 

Post-fellowship placement: Post-doctoral fellow in English Department at CUNY Graduate Center

American Studies
University of Michigan

Move over, monuments: The Mall gets first curated multi-artist exhibit

Ashon Crawley's art exhibition featured in the Washington Post

Music, Performance and African Identities

African Studies
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Nancy MacLean Lecture on Democracy in Chains

Co-sponsored by the Department of History, Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, will discuss her new book Democracy in Chains: The Deep Hisotry of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
Thursday October 12, 7:00 pm
108 Clark Hall

National Mall Commissions 6 Artists for Monument Exhibition

Ashon Crawley commissioned as one of six artists to take part in temporary exhibition on the US National Mall

National Park Service publishes two historical studies surfacing tragedy and resilience in Black recreation

Andrew Kahrl and UVA History PhD students contribute to U.S. National Parks Service released the National Historic Landmark Theme Study on the history of African American Outdoor Recreation 

National Program Brings Diverse Faculty Fellows to Arts & Sciences

October 10, 2011 — A specialist on African women writers and an interdisciplinary scholar of literature, music and history are new faculty members in the University of Virginia's College of Arts & Sciences, thanks to a program sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies. 

New Directions in Civil Rights Studies

New York Times Journalist Charles M. Blow to speak at UVA

Charles M. Blow, the New York Times’ visual op-ed columnist whose articles appear on Saturdays, will talk about “Demographics and Destiny: How America’s Rapidly Changing Demographics are Changing our Politics” on Oct. 25 at 4 p.m. in the Garrett Hall Great Room at the University of Virginia.

New York Times: "Black People's Land Was Stolen" by Andrew Kahrl

Andrew Karhl publishes article in the NYT: "Black People's Land Was Stolen"

New York Times: "Hurricane Florence and the Displacement of African-Americans along the Carolina Coast"

Andrew Karhl publishes article in the NYT: "Hurricane Florence and the Displacement of African-Americans along the Carolina Coast"

News

News on Fellows: Lyndsey Beutin (Pre-Doc) publishes article in Open Democracy

Lyndsey Beautin (Carter G. Woodson pre-doctoral fellow) is the author of an essay on how sensational, sexualized imagery is often held up as the greatest sin of anti-trafficking awareness campaigns, but that bad data masquerading as authoritative fact is far more insidious. The essay was published on the Open Democracy media platform:

News on Fellows: Congratulations Post-Doc Fellow Talitha LeFlouria!

Our own post-doctoral fellow, Talitha LeFlouria was awarded the Leticia Brown Woods book prize last month at the 100th anniversary of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the organization founded by our namesake, Carter G. Woodson (it was then the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History).  Today’s edition features substantial coverage of Talitha and her prize-winning book, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (University of North Carolina Press). I paste the link for those who may have not have seen the story.  CONGRATULATIONS again to Talitha!

News on Fellows: Congratulations Post-Doc Talitha LeFlouria!

We are pleased to announce that Talitha Leflouria has received awards for Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South   

2016 PHILIP TAFT LABOR HISTORY AWARD for the most outstanding book  on American labor history, awarded by Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations and the Labor and Working-Class History Association

2016 DARLENE CLARK HINE AWARD FROM THE ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS

 

BLOOMINGTON, IN—During its annual meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) presented Talitha L. LeFlouriaUniversity of Virginia, with their prestigious 2016Darlene Clark Hine Award, which is given annually for the best book in African American women’s and gender history.

 

Darlene Clark Hine Award

Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South (University of North Carolina Press). With the use of numerous multilayered methodologies, Chained in Silence deconstructs and re-creates prison life and the convict-camp experience among black Georgia women in the era of the first New South, from Emancipation to the end of World War I. Like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Talitha L. LeFlouria’s study employs a reformist approach to help readers understand the history of mass incarceration among African American women in the U.S. South. The real strength of the extraordinary community study, however, is its ability to provide southern African American women with multifaceted voices. These women, whose responsibilities included coal mining, steelmaking, blacksmithing, unskilled industrial work, railroading, laundering, milling, domestic service, and cotton farming, helped rebuild postwar Georgia. Often seen as invisible, even in the terrain of black convict leasing and prison life, women of African descent found themselves routinely victimized by a system predicated on social control and profit. By placing black women at the center of the early modern prison movement and New South industrial revolution, LeFlouria makes them even more impressive and salient as survivors and activists. This work is also relevant as an interdisciplinary study that borrows from and builds upon the scholarship of sociologists, criminologists, and historians in an attempt to resurrect the lives of Georgia African American women convicts. With the use of astonishing sources, including slave narratives, jail and prison records, manuscripts, sermons, women’s club records, and census data, Chained in Silence formulates a new historiographical paradigm that challenges prevailing schools of thought on the subject matter, particularly the held belief that black men alone in the convict lease and chain-gang systems principally helped shape the New South economy.

 

The award was presented on April 9 by OAH’s 2015–16 President Jon Butler and 2016–17 President Nancy F. Cott.
 

For more information, visit oah.org or call 812.855.7311.

 

ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN HISTORIANS
Founded in 1907, the Organization of American Historians (OAH) is the world's largest professional association dedicated to American history scholarship. With more than 7,500 members from the U.S. and abroad, OAH promotes excellence in the scholarship, teaching, and presentation of American history, encouraging wide discussion of historical questions and equitable treatment of history practitioners. It publishes the quarterly Journal of American History, the leading scholarly publication and journal of record in the field of American history for more than nine decades. It also publishes The American Historian magazine. Formerly known as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association (MVHA), the association became the OAH in 1965 to reflect a broader scope focusing on national studies of American history. The OAH national headquarters are located in the historic Raintree House on Indiana University's Bloomington campus. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
 

 

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Date: 

Thursday, April 14, 2016

News on Fellows: Former Fellow Tera W. Hunter writes on Confederate Memorialization

Published in the December 2017 Issue of Princeton Alumni Weekly

Both the creation of the memorial wall and the alumni donation marked significant departures in tone and substance from Princeton’s initial memorialization of the Civil War, honoring only the dead soldiers of the United States. What transpired in the intervening years? A national political, economic, and cultural reckoning helps to explain the revived controversy about Civil War monuments today. 

News on Fellows: Lindsay Jones Publishes Piece on White Nationalism in Teen Vogue

News on Fellows: Tony Perry (Pre-Doc) published an article in Slavery & Abolition

Tony C. Perry (Carter G. Woodson Institute pre-doctoral fellow) published an article in Slavery & Abolition – A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies this month on how slaves and slaveholders mobilized cold weather against each other in contests over power:

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Njelle Hamilton Book Launch

Description:

Phonographic Memories is the first book to perform a sustained analysis of the narrative and thematic influence of Caribbean popular music on the Caribbean novel. Tracing a region-wide attention to the deep connections between music and memory in the work of Lawrence Scott, Oscar Hijuelos, Colin Channer, Daniel Maximin, and Ramabai Espinet, Njelle Hamilton tunes in to each novel's soundtrack while considering the broader listening cultures that sustain collective memory and situate Caribbean subjects in specific localities. These "musical fictions" depict Caribbean people turning to calypso, bolero, reggae, gwoka, and dub to record, retrieve, and replay personal and cultural memories. Offering a fresh perspective on musical nationalism and nostalgic memory in the era of globalization, Phonographic Memories affirms the continued importance of Caribbean music in providing contemporary novelists ethical narrative models for sounding marginalized memories and voices.

 

Panel includes:

Njelle Hamilton, AAS/English, UVA

Njelle W. Hamilton specializes in 20th and 21st century Caribbean literary and cultural studies, especially the impact of orality, music, and trauma on the Caribbean postcolonial novel. Her first monograph, Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel (Rutgers, 2019), investigates how Caribbean subjects turn to nation music when personal and cultural memory have been impacted by time, travel, or trauma. Her current project, tentatively titled Caribbean Chronotropes: The Politics, Physics, and Poetics of Time in Contemporary Fiction, reads recent time-bending novels through the lens of physics, phenomenology, and Caribbean theory. She serves on the editorial board of Caribbean in Transit: An Arts Journal, and her essays on sound studies and trauma theory have appeared in Anthurium, Journal of West Indian Literature, Critical Perspectives on Indo-Caribbean Women’s Literature, and SX Salon. 

 

Carolyn Cooper, Professor (Emerita), University of the West Indies Mona

Carolyn Cooper is a recently retired professor of literary and cultural studies who taught at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica for thirty-six years. She is the founder of the University’s embryonic Reggae Studies Unit, and the author ofNoises in the Blood: Orality, Gender and the ‘Vulgar’ Body of Jamaican Popular Culture (Duke University Press, 1993) and Sound Clash: Jamaican Dancehall Culture at Large (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Professor Cooper frequently contributes to debates on cultural politics in the local and international media. She currently writes a weekly column for the Sunday Gleaner which she irregularly translates into the Jamaican language for her blog, Jamaican Woman Tongue. Professor Cooper is a public intellectual committed to broadening the audience for vital conversations about culture and identity across the Caribbean region and beyond.

 

Norval (Nadi) Edwards,  Senior Lecturer, UWI Mona (Literatures in English)

Nadi Edwards teaches in the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica. He is a member of the editorial collective Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, and has published articles on Caribbean literature and criticism, travel writing and Jamaican popular culture.

 

Carter Mathes, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Rutgers University (English). 

Carter Mathes is a specialist in African American Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, and African Diaspora Studies. His first book, Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) focuses on the relationship between sound and literary innovation during the 1960s and 1970s.  Currently, he is working on a second book project that examines practices of improvisation and formations of black radical thought in literature and music as they move between Jamaica and the United States during the second half of the twentieth-century. He has published essays in Small Axe, Contemporary Literature, Callaloo, and African American Review.

 

Jack Hamilton, Media Studies/American Studies, UVA 

Jack Hamilton is a cultural historian who studies sound, media, and popular culture, and his other areas of interest include film, sports, television, and journalism. His first book, Just around Midnight: Rock and Roll and the Racial Imagination (Harvard UP, 2016), received Honorable Mention for the Woody Guthrie Award (Outstanding Book) from the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, won a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Award, and been chosen as one of the three best non-fiction books of 2016 by Splice Magazine. In 2017 PopMatters named Just around Midnight one of the “10 Conversation-Shifting Books about Music” of the past ten years. Prof. Hamilton is currently working on a book about music and technology since the 1960s. Since 2013 he has also been the pop critic for Slate magazine where he writes about music, sports, and other areas of culture, and in 2016 he hosted the Slate podcast series “Pop, Race, and the ‘60s”. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, NPR, ESPN, Transition, L.A. Review of Books, and many other venues.

Njelle Hamilton Book Launch Panel

Phonographic Memories is the first book to perform a sustained analysis of the narrative and thematic influence of Caribbean popular music on the Caribbean novel. Tracing a region-wide attention to the deep connections between music and memory in the work of Lawrence Scott, Oscar Hijuelos, Colin Channer, Daniel Maximin, and Ramabai Espinet, Njelle Hamilton tunes in to each novel's soundtrack while considering the broader listening cultures that sustain collective memory and situate Caribbean subjects in specific localities. These "musical fictions" depict Caribbean people turning to calypso, bolero, reggae, gwoka, and dub to record, retrieve, and replay personal and cultural memories. Offering a fresh perspective on musical nationalism and nostalgic memory in the era of globalization, Phonographic Memories affirms the continued importance of Caribbean music in providing contemporary novelists ethical narrative models for sounding marginalized memories and voices.

Panelists include:

Njelle Hamilton, AAS/English, UVA

Carolyn Cooper, Professor (Emerita), University of the West Indies Mona

Norval (Nadi) Edwards,  Senior Lecturer, UWI Mona (Literatures in English)

Carter Mathes, Associate Professor and Associate Chair, Rutgers University (English). 

Jack Hamilton, Media Studies/American Studies, UVA 

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Njelle Hamilton: IHGC Mellon Fellows Seminar

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Nobody's Free until Black Women are Free

“Nobody's free until Black Women are free”

Fellow Soldiers,

This Upcoming Monday, November 9th at 5:00pm in Ern Commons, the African American and African Studies Majors Union will be collaborating with the Woodson Institute to host the following program:

"Who Has Our Back?: A Town Hall Meeting on Black Women and Girls." 

 

In the spirit of the recent report, "Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Over-policed and Underprotected," which analyzes the ways in which black women and girls have been either erased, underrepresented, or violated in discussions of racial inequality and state violence, this event encourages open dialogue about the pressing challenges facing Black communities that are entangled in race, class, gender and sexuality.

 

Women and girls from the UVA and Charlottesville community are invited to attend and speak freely about the violence and challenges facing Black women and girls as well as the grievances, joys, strategies and concerns we face as Black women. (Men are also encouraged to attend.)

 

The Town Hall Meeting will serve as a precursor to “Engaging Race--A Carter G. Woodson Forum: Black Girls Matter," which will take place on November 12th at 4:30 pm in 123 Robertson Hall.

Non-Sovereign Futures

Caribbean Studies

Notes on the State Launch Party

On February 15, 2019, the Carter G. Woodson Institute hosted a launch party for the "Notes on the State" podcast series at the Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative in Charlottesville, VA. The podcast explores Thomas Jefferson's legacy at the moment of the University's Bicentennial and asks: how do we get Jefferson beyond Jefferson?

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Notes On The State — Launch Party

NOTES ON THE STATE PODCAST SERIES RELEASE PARTY
FEBRUARY 15TH 7:00 PM
THE BRIDGE PROGRESSIVE ARTS INITIATIVE (209 Monticello Rd, Charlottesville, Virginia 22902)

Help us celebrate the release of the "Notes on the State" series, a podcast that engages with Thomas Jefferson's complexities, contradictions, and legacies. 

During this event, we'll showcase the podcast and bring together all the people who have contributed to the success of this project. We'll also load up the Bridge's "StoryStream" trailer with clips from our episodes and person-on-the-street interviews. Join us!

The first episode of the podcast drops on Presidents' Day, February 18th. So, get ready to hit "subscribe" and stay tuned! The following episodes will be released monthly. If you can't make it to the event, please follow our pages on social media to keep up to date with the series (Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram)

More information about the series: 
Episodes will feature a wide range of topics pertaining to Jefferson's history, including: Jefferson's writing on race, the institution of slavery at Monticello and UVA, Sally Hemings and the Hemings Family, Jefferson's role in the history of prisons, and his views on Haiti. 

Notes on the State is supported by UVA’s Bicentennial Fund and produced at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies.

Ayodeji Ogunnaike

Assistant Professor (AAS)

Specialties:
Afro-Brazilian Studies, Africana Religion, Folklore & Mythology, Islam in Africa, Christianity in Africa

Minor Hall 230

Professor Ogunnaike is a scholar of African and Afro-diasporic religious traditions, primarily in Brazil and Nigeria, with a keen interest in the ways each region has influenced the practice of religion in the other. He studied Ifa divination with high priest Ifarinwale Ogundiran in Modakeke, Nigeria, and while his main areas of research are Brazilian Candomblé and oriṣa worship in Nigeria, he also studies Islam and Christianity on the continent and in diaspora as well as other Afro-diasporic traditions.

His most recent book project, Forms of Worship: How Oriṣa Devotion Became Religion in Nigeria and Brazil analyzes how the worship of traditional Yoruba deities originally differed greatly from Western notions of “religion” but eventually became the most widespread and celebrated indigenous African religion through experience in the Atlantic diaspora, contact with modernity, and Christian mission activity. His work has been supported by grants from the Ford Foundation and American Philosophical Society among others. He is currently working on Yoruba Mythology: Stories of the Oriṣa, Ijapa and Yoruba Heroes, the first major anthology of Yoruba mythology, with his brother and fellow member of UVA faculty, Oludamini Ogunnaike, and curates an online library of Ifa orature. Ogunnaike is also part of The Islamic Worlds Initiative at UVA whose goal is to be a meeting point for scholars from around Grounds who are studying regions and/or communities where Islamic ways of life play an important role. 

Nasrin Olla

Assistant Professor (AAS/English)

Specialties:
African Diasporic & African Literature, Anglophone and Francophone African Thought, Ethics & Critical Theory, Gender Studies & Queer Theory

Bryan Hall 440

Nasrin Olla is an Assistant Professor of English and African & African American Studies. Nasrin completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Cape Town and her PhD in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Nasrin is currently completing her first book project, The Right to Opacity, which engages with the theme of alterity across a range of contemporary African and African diasporic literature. Nasrin’s work has appeared in b2o, the History of the Present, and the LA Review of Books. For more information please visit Nasrin’s website.

 

Office Hours: M 3:00PM-5:00PM & By Appointment

Class Schedule: MW 5:00PM-6:15PM

 

 

Chrystel Oloukoi

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Black Nocturnal: Ecologies of the Night in Lagos

This project explores the historical and ongoing conditions that make nighttime one of the most embattled terrains of life in Lagos as well as the quotidian ways people reclaim and inhabit nighttime as a site of possibility in the shadow of the ongoing catastrophe of racial capitalism.

African and African American Studies
Harvard University

Opportunities

Below we provide a list of annual undergraduate opportunities for internships, fellowships, and other funding opportunities. For more regular updates, please email Debbie Best (dab8s[at] virginia [dot] edu) to request access to the African-American Studies listserv.  

Internship and Fellowship Opportunities:

  • UC-HBCU Fellowship 
    • University of California, Irvine summer research program for (Black) Digital Humanities
    • Deadline(s): end of October

Other opportunities for Student Funding:

  • UVA College Council-- Scholar Award
    • Award from the College Council to fund scholarly projects of students in the College of Arts and Sciences
    • Up to $1,000;
    • Deadline mid-November
    • Application form

Chinwe Oriji

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Race in Africa, Africa as Diaspora: Racialization of Post-Independence Nigerians in the U.S.

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of Sociology at Weslyean University 

Africana Studies
University of Texas at Austin

Otherwise Worlds

Africana Studies

Our Living Manhood

English

Out of the Shadows

March 31, 2011 — A community of African-Americans who lived near the Grounds of the University of Virginia in the 19th and early 20th centuries will be remembered during "Celebrating Catherine Foster and the Canada Neighborhood" on April 8 from 5 to 7 p.m.
 

Seth Palmer

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

 

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of Sociology at Christopher Newport University (tenure-track)

Anthropology
University of Toronto

Panel will discuss 'politics of the debt ceiling crisis'

September 13, 2011 — If there is a cap on eligibility for unemployment benefits, who will feel the impact and its reverberations most acutely? If food stamps are reduced, who will feel the greatest impact? And what about Pell Grants for education? Or health insurance for the children of the poor and the working poor?

Panel: the Politics of the Debt Ceiling Crisis

This panel discussion, "The Politics of the Debt Ceiling Crisis," held at the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia was free and open to the public. 

Giulia Paoletti

Assistant Professor, Art History

Paradise and Plantation

Angel Adams Parham

Associate Professor

James Parker headshot

James Parker

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
The Fluidity of Late Colonial Development: Water Management, State Building, and Rural Resistance in Kenya 1938-63

My current research positions rural East Africa within a broader global narrative of environmental management and social change by examining the role that access to water played in colonial Kenyan statecraft between 1938 and 1963. I study three development projects in the arid and semi-arid landscapes of Kenya, where the colonial government invested thousands of pounds expanding water access into the hinterland to spur agricultural production. Rather than benefiting rural groups, these centralized projects altered the ecological properties of the land with dire consequences, as the rerouting and redistribution of water left entire regions parched and barren, and communities fighting for access to dwindling resources. By comparing policy proposals and implementation with the protestations and resistance of community groups, I foreground communal attempts to push back against their exclusion from water resources while examining how development policy altered local production and modes of survival. Based on extensive English and Swahili archival sources in Kenya, the United Kingdom, and the United States, my project ultimately argues that the colonial Kenyan state’s obsession with profits over rural lives cut off communities from water, leading to drought, famine, and dispossession on an enormous scale. That the British government were frequently unaware of these outcomes further demonstrates the disconnect between global policy makers and localized experiences and demands the centering of rural voices. As such, my approach offers a new historical perspective on the implementation of development policies and provides a localized socioenvironmental perspective to a topic dominated by top-down political and economic analyses. Reinserting water, and the human relationship to it, is vital to understanding the role of economic policy in shaping environments in the global south. Centering the experiences of resistors and rural populations further draws attention to the inequitable distribution of resources and the role of capital and race in development ideologies.

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of History at Texas Women's University

History
Northeastern University

Claire Payton

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: "And We Will Be Devoured’: Construction and the Politics of Dictatorship in Haiti (1957-1986) Women’s Writing"

Post-fellowship placement: Fellowship at the John W. Kluge Center at Library of Congress. 

History
Duke University
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PEN America Forum:

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Sabrina Pendergrass

Associate Professor (AAS)

Specialties:
Race, Inequality, Migration, Culture, Regional Identities

228 Minor Hall

Sabrina Pendergrass is an Associate Professor of African American and African Studies.  Her research and teaching interests include race, inequality, internal migration, cultural sociology, and the U.S. South. She has published on these topics in Poetics, the Du Bois ReviewRace and Social Problems, and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. She is working on a book manuscript about the African American reverse migration to the South.  The manuscript, under contract with Oxford University Press, examines the economic, social, and cultural experiences of blacks who were born and raised in the North and West and are now moving to the South. Work from this project has received awards from the Association of Black Sociologists and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.

 

Peripheral Migrants

Anthropology
James Perla headshot

James Perla

Special Assistant

108 Minor Hall

Tony Perry

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: To Go to Nature’s Manufactory’: The Material Ecology of Slavery in Antebellum Maryland

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia (tenure-track)

American Studies
University of Maryland, College Park

Phenomenal Fellows: Woodson Fellows Bring International Prestige to Arts & Sciences

Phonograpic Memories

Caribbean Studies

Physicians, Colonial Racism, and Diaspora in West Africa

Xavier Pickett

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: Black (Ir)religious Fire: The Literary and Moral Imagination of James Baldwin and James Cone

Post-fellowship placement: Visiting Assistant Professor, New York University

 

Religious Studies
Princeton Theological Seminary

Olivia Polk

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
"We Can Dream the Dark": Black Lesbianism and the Ethic of Black Queerness

Olivia Polk is a doctoral candidate in the departments of American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University. Polk's project, “We Can Dream the Dark,” excavates the archive of Black lesbian cultural production since 1977. It argues that this archive’s experiments in aesthetic form yields a robust social ethic— Black lesbianism— that has shaped Black queer radical politics from the early HIV/AIDS pandemic to contemporary responses the climate crisis.

 

African-American Studies
Yale University

Post-Doctoral Fellowship

Overview


The Carter G. Woodson Institute's distinguished fellowship is a two-year residential fellowship for post-doctoral students whose work focuses on Africa and/or the African Diaspora including but not limited to research pertaining to African American, Carribean, Latin American, African, and Diasporic contexts. Scholars selected for the fellowship are required to relocate to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia to join a cohort of interdisciplinary scholars.

Fellows receive funding for two years teaching (beginning August 1, 2024, and ending July 31, 2026). In addition to research, post-doctoral will have teaching responsibilities. The fellowship carries the title of Lecturer and pays an annual (12 month) salary of $50,000, plus full-time benefits.

Deadline


December 1, 2023 at 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time

 

Application Materials


  • C.V/Resume (file naming protocol: LASTNAME_CV)
  • Cover Letter (file naming protocol: LASTNAME_COVER LETTER)
  • Writing Sample 1 (file naming protocol: LASTNAME_SAMPLE1)
    • Please submit 1 attachment containing the following information (for proper formatting, please refer to the sample image in the "formatting" section below)
      • Project title
      • Abstract or short-description of project (should not exceeed 50 words)
      • Project description (should not exceed 7 double-spaced pages or 1,750 words)
  • Writing Sample 2 (file naming protocol: LASTNAME_SAMPLE2)
    • Please submit 1 attachment containing the following:
      • Bibliography (should not exceed 4 double-spaced pages)
      • Syllabus for a previously taught or prospective course
  • 3 Letters of Recommendation by persons qualified to evaluate the proposals for which support is being sought
  • N.B.: The application does not require an additional academic writing sample (a paper or dissertation chapter). The review committee will assess the abstract and project description as an example of one's writing.   

 

Submission Information


TO APPLY:

Please visit UVA job board in WorkDay

Search for the requsition number: R0053685

Letters of recommendation should be sent separately to the following email address: woodsonfellows-recommendation-letters@virginia.edu

***All letters of recommendation must be received by December 7, 2023***

*** Please note multiple documents can be submitted in the CV/Resume Box..***

***Applications that do not contain all the required documents will not receive full consideration.***

 

Timeline


Deadlines


Application deadline: December 1, 2023

Recommendations deadline: December 7, 2023 

Review Period


December 2023 - January 2024

Notification of Awards


March 2024

Fellowship Residency Begins


August 2024

 

Eligibility and Terms/Conditions


The fellowship is open to qualified candidates without restriction as to citizenship or current residence. Applicants for the post-doctoral fellowship must have been awarded their Ph.D. by the time of application or furnish proof from the relevant registrar that all documentation required for the Ph.D. has been submitted by July 15, 2024. Post-doctoral applicants must have received their Ph.D. no earlier than six-years prior to the application deadline. 

Please note: Individuals may not apply for the Woodson pre-doctoral and post-doctoral fellowships at the same time.

The post-doctoral fellow must be in residence at UVa in Charlottesville, Virginia for the duration of the award period, and must agree to teach one course per year in the African-American and African Studies program during the Fall or Spring semester. Woodson fellows are expected to participate in the series of workshops (about twice monthly) and to make at least one formal presentation of their work to the University community.

The selected candidate will be required to complete a background check at time of offer per University Policy.

 

Formatting: "Writing Sample" document


Power and the Praise Poem: Southern African Voices in History

Pre-Doctoral Fellowship

Overview


The Carter G. Woodson Institute's distinguished fellowship is a two-year residential fellowship for pre-doctoral students whose work focuses on Africa and/or the African Diaspora, including but not limited to research pertaining to African American, Carribean, Latin American, African, and Diasporic contexts. Scholars selected for the fellowship are required to relocate to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia to join a cohort of interdisciplinary scholars.

Fellows receive funding for two years (beginning August 1, 2024, and ending July 31, 2026). This includes an annual stipend of $30,000, plus health insurance.

Deadline


December 1, 2023 at 11:59 PM Eastern Standard Time

Application Materials


  • C.V/Resume (file naming protocol: LASTNAME_CV)
  • Cover Letter (file naming protocol: LASTNAME_COVER LETTER)
  • Writing Sample 1 (file naming protocol: LASTNAME_SAMPLE1)
    • Please submit 1 attachment containing the following information (for proper formatting, please refer to the sample image in "formatting" section below)
      • Project title
      • Abstract or short-description of project (should not exceeed 50 words)
      • Project description (should not exceed 7 double-spaced pages or 1,750 words)
  • Writing Sample 2 (file naming protocol: LASTNAME_SAMPLE2)
    • Bibliography (should not exceed 4 double-spaced pages) 
      • The working bibliography must be attached through the WorkDay application under "Writing Sample 2"
  • 3 Letters of Recommendation by persons qualified to evaluate the proposals for which support is being sought. 
  • N.B.: The application does not require an additional academic writing sample (a paper or dissertation chapter). The review committee will assess the abstract and project description as an example of one's writing.   

 

Submission Information


TO APPLY:

  1. Please visit UVA's Apply Central Application Management website
  2. Create an account as a first time user or as a returning user
  3. Start a new application (for 2024 term)
  4. Select "Woodson Fellowship" under drop-down menu
  5. Create application
  6. Upload necessary documents*
  7. Complete background information, in-state and military status (if applicable)
  8. Add names for 3 recommenders**
  9. Review and submit application

*Statement on personal background is entirely optional, declining to do so will not negatiely impact your application package. 

**Letters of recommendation may be requested prior to the submission of the full applciation. Once you input the recommender's information, an automated message will invite the recommender to submit a letter on your behalf. This can take place prior to the submission of the full application. Please note: all letters of recommendation must be received by December 7, 2023

Applications that do not contain all the required documents will not receive full consideration.

 

Timeline


Deadlines


Application deadline: December 1, 2023

Recommendations deadline: December 7, 2023 

Review Period


December 2023 - January 2024

Notification of Awards


March 2024

Fellowship Residency Begins


August 2024

 

Eligibility and Terms/Conditions


The Woodson Institute fellowship is open to qualified candidates without restriction as to citizenship or current residence.

The pre-doctoral fellows must be in residence at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia for the duration of the award period. Fellows are expected to participate in the series of workshops held during the academic year and to present their work periodically to the larger academic community.

Fellows may accept no employment, fellowships, or consulting obligations during the Woodson fellowship period without the approval of the Director.

The selected candidate will be required to complete a background check at time of offer per University Policy.

 

Formatting: "Writing Sample" document


Pre-doctoral fellow Zalika Ibaorimi's textual essay and visual essay published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies

Zalika Ibaorimi's textual essay and visual essay "The (Ho)rror of It All: Ganja & Hess, Summer Walker and the Soundtrack of Ho Ontologies" was recently published in the December 2021 issue of the Journal of Popular Music Studies

Professor Andrew Kahrl featured in UVA Today

Professor Andrew Kahrl published article in The Washington Post

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Professor Andrew Karhl - Lecture

Lecture and book signing

Andrew Karhl
Assistant Professor Department of History, Carter G. Woodson Institute

Castles Made of Sand:
The Rise and Demise of African American Beaches in the Mid-Atlantic South

In the 1950s the coasts and waterways of Virginia and Maryland were home to scores of African American beach resorts, amusement parks, country clubs, and summer vacation communities. Servicing the leisure and recreational needs of a segregated black public and spawning a host of businesses and enterprises, African American-owned coastal properties played an important, if often overlooked, role in shaping black culture and economic life under Jim Crow. And yet, by the 1970s, most of these resorts were gone and much of the land was being lost to land speculators and real estate developers. Award-winning historian Andrew W. Kahrl will reveal the hidden history of black beaches in the segregated South and tell the remarkable story of how African American families, businessmen and women, and investors acquired land along the Chesapeake and Atlantic and helped to create a vibrant black leisure economy during the first half of the twentieth century. He will recount their struggles to keep these communities intact and businesses afloat following desegregation. Finally, Kahrl will discuss how the meteoric rise of coastal real estate values made black landowners in these areas the victims of a variety of predatory and exploitative schemes that resulted in the loss of their land and the chance to share in the region’s prosperity. It is a story, he will argue, that offers important lessons for understanding the development and persistence of the racial wealth gap in America today.

After lecture Dr. Kahrl will sign copies of his book The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South (2012)

This event is free and open to the public. Cost of book is $40, members receive 10% discount.

This lecture and book signing is made possible through the generous support of the Blue Moon Fund and Hampton Inn and Suites.

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Professor Claudia Rankine, Award-Winning Poet

Born in Jamaica in 1963, Claudia Rankine earned her BA in English from Williams College and her MFA in poetry from Columbia University.

She is the author of four collections of poetry: Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric(Graywolf Press, 2004); PLOT (Grove Press, 2001); The End of the Alphabet (Grove Press, 1998); and Nothing in Nature is Private (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1995), which received the Cleveland State Poetry Prize.

Rankine has edited numerous anthologies including American Women Poets in the Twenty-First Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (Wesleyan University Press, 2002) and American Poets in the Twenty-First Century: The New Poetics (Wesleyan University Press, 2007). Her plays include Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue, commissioned by the Foundry Theatre and Existing Conditions, co-authored with Casey Llewellyn. She has also produced a number of videos in collaboration with John Lucas, including "Situation One.”

Of her book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, an experimental multi-genre project that blends poetry, essays, and images, poet Robert Creeley said: “Claudia Rankine here manages an extraordinary melding of means to effect the most articulate and moving testament to the bleak times we live in I’ve yet seen. It’s master work in every sense, and altogether her own.”

In 2013, Rankine was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Mark Doty has praised her selection, saying: “Claudia Rankine’s formally inventive poems investigate many kinds of boundaries: the unsettled territory between poetry and prose, between the word and the visual image, between what it’s like to be a subject and the ways we’re defined from outside by skin color, economics, and global corporate culture. This fearless poet extends American poetry in invigorating new directions.”

Her honors include fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowments for the Arts. In 2005, Rankine was awarded the Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement by the Academy of American Poets. She is currently the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.

Hear Claudia Rankine read from Citizen. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3NwwP4w4wI

229 Bryan Hall--English Faculty Lounge

Free and Open to the Public

Professor Kevin Gaines featured in Washington Post article

Professor Talitha Leflouria "Chained in Silence: A History of Black Women and Convict Labor" Lecture

Lecture by award-winning historian Talitha L. LeFlouria (University of Virginia) on the plight of post-Civil War black women prisoners and their day-to-day struggles to overcome work-related abuses and violence, based on LeFlouria's award winning book. This event was the 2016 UMass/Five College Graduate Program in History Distinguished Annual Lecture and a part of the 2016-2017 Feinberg Family Distinguished Lecture Series. October, 2016.

https://youtu.be/blj6QyfpeEY

Professor, UVA Library Team Explore Black Roots Local Farm

Lisa Shutt's work with Ivy Creek Natural Area and Historic River View Farm showcased in UVA Today

Projects

The Institute's Public Outreach Mission

As a major research institute, the Woodson prioritizes public outreach through events, grant-funded projects, and workshops with K-12 teachers. Our mission emphasizes the importance of sharing knowledge and advancing black studies scholarship in the spirit of our namesake Carter G. Woodson. As such, public engagement has been at the heart of the Institute since its inception. The following projects have been launched at the Woodson Institute: 

Event series and symposia: Throughout its 40 year history, the Woodson Institute has organized a wide range of lecture series and symposia that share black studies scholarship with the general public. Our full event archive includes the Currents in Conversation Series, the African Studies Colloquium Series, and the Conversations in Caribbean Studies Series. In conjunction with the major symposia organized under the auspices of the Institute, our events have addressed the following topics: mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex; the question of reparations; race and taxes; citizenship and democracy; black feminist history; black girlhood studies; the Charleston Masscre; public schools and higher education; racism and immigration; pop culture, music studies, and digital blackness.

Africa Day: Organized by Swahili Professor Anne Rotich, Africa Day is designed to increase awareness and knowledge of Africa and its cultures among high school students through presentations on African cultures, languages, historical, social and political knowledge of Africa. The event typically brings attendance numbers of between 100-200 students and teachers from Albemarle High School, Charlottesville High School, Monticello High School and Western Albemarle High School. 

The Julian Bond Papers Project: a digital editorial project in collaboration with UVA's Center for Digital Editing that is working to make Bond's speeches publicly available on a digital archive and three-volume print series. 

Repair Lab, UVA Democracy Initiative: Spearheaded by Woodson faculty members Andrew Kahrl and Kimberly Fields, the Repair Lab focuses on repairing issues of racial injustice and climate change through collaborative solutions informed by historical, political, environmental, and local knowledge. The Repair Lab will bring together this expertise, and, in so doing, produce novel research, teaching, and public programming that deepens our understanding of the causes, consequences, and countermeasures of environmental and climate injustice locally and around the world. 

K-12 Teacher's Institute: This collaborative effort between the Woodson Institute, the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), and the Center for Liberal Arts (CLA), provides cutting-edge, accessible African and African Diaspora scholarship to K-12 educators. Through engaging and informative discussions, practical suggestions for curricular implementation, and resource guides, the Institute, which took place in October 2021 and is scheduled to continue in ensuing summers, helps K-12 educators to accurately and effectively teach their students the rich histories and cultures of African and African-descended peoples. 

Holsinger Portraits Project: In the early 1990s, the Woodson Institute first exhibited the portraits from the Rufus W. Holsinger Collection of black Charlottesville residents during the Jim Crow era. The collection, housed in UVA's Special Collections Library, has hundreds of portraits of black Virginians taken by photographer Rufus W. Holsinger between the year 1912 and the start of World War I. History Professor and Woodson Faculty affiliate John Edwin Mason revived the effort in 2014 to collect and display these portraits for the general public. The project is supported by the Jefferson Trust and in collaboration with The Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and the University’s Corcoran Department of History. For more information, follow the project on social media. 

"Notes on the State" podcast and oral history: A project created for the University's Bicentennial focused on themes in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. The Notes on the State team collected over 14 interviews with scholars at UVA and across the nation on various topics including: Jefferson’s role as an enslaver, his diplomatic record on Haitian Independence, and writing on racial difference. A full interview archive can be found on the project website. 

The Citizen Justice Initiative: a summer internship program exposed high school students and university undergraduates to academic research, public history, and African American Studies. In four consecutive summers, the CJI supported over 30 undergraduates and high school students who gained experience working on digital storytelling projects and completing archival research. The project collaborated with the Center for Digital Editing, Virginia Humanities, and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. The Citizen Justice Team also published the multi-media essay: The Illusion of Progress: Charlottesville's Roots in White Supremacy in August 2017, which has gone on to be used in K-12 and University classrooms alike. 

The Race & Place archive: created by the Woodson's second Director Reginald Butler and Scot French, the Race & Place archive has been a fixture of black studies scholarship at UVA since it was released in 2002. The site focuses on the racial segregation laws, or the 'Jim Crow' laws from the late 1880s until the mid-twentieth century in Charlottesville, VA. At the forefront of digital humanities scholarship, the Race & Place archive features oral histories, maps, newspaper transcriptions, digital exhibitions, city documents, and other images of black life in Charlottesville.

Race and Democracy

History

Race on the Road in the Automotive Age, Mia Bay

Lecture by Mia Bay Roy F. and Jeannette P. Nichols Professor in American History at the University of Pennsylvania-- Wednesday, January 23, 2019 in Minor 110 at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies

Rambles of a Runaway from Southern Slavery

African-American Studies
Nicole Ramsey headshot

Nicole Ramsey

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Sub Umbra Floreo (Under the Shade I Flourish): Performing the Belizean Nation

Nicole Ramsey completed her Ph.D. in the department of African American & African Diaspora Studies at the University of California Berkeley. Originally from Los Angeles, California, she holds an MA in African American Studies from UCLA and a BA in American Studies from UC Santa Cruz. Nicole’s interdisciplinary approaches to blackness, indigeneity, migration and popular culture are grounded in a diasporic and transnational framework. Her dissertation, "Sub Umbra Floreo (Under the Shade I Flourish): Performing the Belizean Nation," explores performances of nation, blackness, and cultural production in Belize and its diaspora.

Africana Studies
University of California, Berkeley
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Rap on Trial

Thursday October 27 - Friday October 28th
Harrison Small Auditorium, Caplin Pavilion (UVA School of Law), and
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center

Rap on Trial is a two-day conference on the use of rap lyrics as evidence in criminal trials. The conference will involve artists, lawyers, and academics, responding to research and advocacy by Andrea Dennis, University of Georgia School of Law and Erik Nielson, University of Richmond.

Dennis and Nielson are co-authors of the groundbreaking book, Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America (2019: The New Press). Events will include a book panel discussion, a creative writing workshop, performances, and a legal practitioners’ panel.

For a full schedule of events, visit: 

https://soundjusticelab.org/narrating-rap-/-narrating-law-symposium

Register for the Thursday panels at Harrison Small Auditorium and the Caplin Pavilion (UVA Law)

 

Register for the Friday showcase with performances by Waterloo Hampton, Bakari Kennedy, Lady Taij, & others

Reading Julian Bond Panel Discussion

As a virtual edition of our annual "Transcribe-a-thon," this panel culminated a day-long program in which participants read Julian Bond's speeches.

 

brought members of the public together for a day-long read-a-thon of Bond's speeches. The topics ranged from voter education to South Africa, from LGBTQ rights to school desegregation. After the marathon reading, we hosted a panel discussion with a formidable series of guests, including Michael Julian Bond, Julian Bond's son and current Atlanta Council member, scholars who focus on civil rights history, and current student activists at UVa and Duke University. 

Panelists include:

Deborah E. McDowell, AAS/English, UVA

Michael Julian Bond, Julian Bond's son and Atlanta Council-memeber

La TaSha Levy, University of Washington, Seattle

Jeanne Theoharis, Brooklyn College

Zyahna Bryant, UVA student activist 

Rebekah Barber, Duke student writer/activist

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Reading Sula: A Tribute to Toni Morrison

Reading Sula: A Tribute to Toni Morrison is an event dedicated to engaging with Morrison’s second novel “Sula.” From 9:30 am to 4:30 pm in Minor 110, volunteers will read passages from the novel. Drop in at any point during this window to listen to or to participate in reading the novel! We will have light refreshments during the event.

Following the reading, there will be a roundtable discussion from 5:00 pm to 6:00pm in Minor 125. 

The full event will be live-streamed on the Woodson Institute’s Facebook page. You can also listen to a live broadcast on the radio at 100.1 fm or online at wxtj.fm

Reading Sula: A Tribute to Toni Morrison

'Reading Sula: A Tribute to Toni Morrison' brought together volunteers to read Toni Morrison’s second novel “Sula.”

 

From 9:30 am to 4:30 pm in Minor 110, volunteers will read passages from the novel. Drop in at any point during this window to listen to or to participate in reading the novel! We will have light refreshments during the event.

Following the reading, there will be a roundtable discussion from 5:00 pm to 6:00pm in Minor 125. 

Panelists include:

Deborah E. McDowell, Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute and Alice Griffin Professor of English, UVA

Eleanor W. Traylor, Professor Emerita of English at Howard University 

Caroline Rody, Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English, UVA

Lisa Woolfork, Associate Professor of English 

Rearing Wolves to Our Own Destruction

African-American Studies

Sean Reid

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Continuity, Transformations, and Rupture in the Forests of Gold African History
Anthropology
Syracuse University
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Religion and Democracy on the African Continent: Colonial Legacies and Postcolonial Possibilities

Join us for a two-day virtual conference, featuring scholars of Africana Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, History, Sociology, Law, and Politics, who will share their expertise on religion and democracy on the African continent. The event will feature a keynote address by Mahmood Mamdani, the Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University and author of the book, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities, (Harvard University Press, 2020), and result in the publication of an edited volume to be made freely available next year. 


 

Registration

The conference will be hosted on Zoom; attendees must register separately for each session. Click on the orange ‘Zoom Registration’ buttons or linked session titles below to register and to learn more about the sessions and speakers.

(Note: the above button redirects to the Zoom registration page for the first conference session, “Historical Formations of Religion and Democracy.”)

All sessions will be recorded and made available on the Religion, Race & Democracy Lab’s Vimeo channel.

Schedule of Events

Saturday, May 7: Looking Back

9–11 AM EST

Historical Formations of Religion and Democracy

 

11:30 AM–1:30 PM EST

African Religious Movements & Democracies

 

2–4 PM EST

Keynote Lecture: Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities 

 

 

Sunday, May 8: Looking Forward

10 am–12 PM EST

Contemporary Conflicts, the State, and Religion in Africa

 

1–4 pm EST

New Theories and the Future of Religion and Democracy in Africa (followed by Closing Remarks)

Intellectual Focus

The modern categories of “democracy” and “religion” both took shape through processes in which the continent of Africa and its people often served as constitutive others—foils against which these modern Euro-American concepts were defined. Thus conceptualization was used to justify the exclusion of Africans and African-descended peoples and their traditions from democratic processes of governance and the legal and academic categories of “religion” well into the 21st century. All the while, the imperial conquest and exploitation of the African continent and its people was deemed vital to the maintenance of European democracy at home and its spread abroad.

Scholars such as Daniel Dubuisson, David Chidester, and Jacob Olupona have shown how indigenous African traditions were originally excluded from the modern category of “religion,” then gradually included as “primitive” varieties of religion, and later, “minor” or “indigenous” varieties of “religion” in the World Religions paradigm. Similarly, African traditions also sit at the boundaries of the legal category of “religion” in the Americas, Europe, and the African continent itself. For example, only one of Nigeria’s 36 states recognizes “African traditional religion” as an official religion alongside Islam and Christianity and the Church of Lukumi Babalu Aye vs. Hialeah is a landmark religious freedom case studied by nearly all U.S. law students. 

Given these historical and colonial legacies, scholars of Africa and African traditions are uniquely suited to understand not only the “underside” of democracy, religion, and their interactions and imbrications in processes of racialization and imperialism, but also to develop new or highlight under-appreciated theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding the complex relationships between “religion” and “democracy.” Because African traditions of governance, politics, and religious practice have long exceeded and/or been excluded from the categories of “religion” and “democracy,” the continent is not only important place to think about these issues, but also to think from in order to understand the entangled history of religion and democracy and their possible futures. 

REPAIR Lab: Norfolk Community-Engaged Research with Kim Sudderth, Practitioner, and Kimberly Fields, UVA Politics

Kim Fields leads a conversation on their community-engaged research within the city of Norfolk, VA

Research Spotlight

The Woodson Institue's faculty is pushing the field of Africana Studies in new directions with their cutting edge research. As a complement to our world-renowned fellowship program, the Institute is engaged in the following research initiatives: 

The Papers of Julian Bond Project:

 

Faculty research project #2

 

Faculty Research project #3 

 

 

Review Procedures

 

Review Procedures for Admission to the Woodson Residential Fellowship Program


All applications and supporting documents will be reviewed by a committee constituted of Woodson Institute Faculty and Affiliates according to the following research and teaching missions of the Institute:

1) We value research that is at the cutting edge of the fields of African American Studies, African Studies, and Afro-Caribbean Studies, and in those disciplines within the humanities and social sciences traditionally attuned to these fields.

2) Although candidates may be positioned critically in traditional disciplines, their work must be rigorously interdisciplinary without diminishing intellectual depth.

3) Such work should advance received scholarship in the fields of African American, African, and Afro-Caribbean Studies – its key theories, methods, themes, and problems.

3) We especially seek work that elucidates the trans-continental experiences and discourses related to the social, historical, and cultural construction of people of African descent through both traditional and recent approaches -- Pan-Africanism, Afrocentrism, Trans-Atlantic Studies, African Diaspora Studies, critical race theory, and cultural studies.

4) We seek work that advances theories on the construction of race, and race in relation to other social identities – class, gender, sexuality, nationality, disability – as well as that which focuses on refining methods of interdisciplinary scholarship on race.

5) We encourage research in these fields that engage the professions -- law, medicine, social work, public policy, education, architecture and planning -- in innovative ways.

6) We will favor candidates whose research can be readily adapted for the creation of courses and pedagogies directly pertinent to the Institute's curriculum in African American and Diasporic studies.

Proposals will be judged on the basis of the following criteria:

  • The significance of the proposed work
  • The qualifications of the applicant
  • Familiarity with existing relevant research literature
  • The research design of the project
  • The promise of completion within the award period

Preference will be given to applicants whose field research is already substantially completed.

The University will perform background checks on all new hires prior to making a final offer of employment. The University of Virginia is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, equity, and inclusiveness.

Liana Richardson headshot

Liana Richardson

Assistant Professor (AAS)

Specialties:
Health Disparities, Intersectionality, Sociology of Health and Illness, Medical Anthropology, Quantitative, Qualitative, and Mixed Methods

Minor 227A

Dr. Liana Richardson is an interdisciplinary health scholar whose research focuses on the social determinants and consequences of racial inequalities in maternal and child health. She also evaluates policies and programs designed to address these phenomena and improve health among the mothers and children most negatively impacted by them.  Dr. Richardson’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in peer-reviewed journals, such as the Journal of Health & Social BehaviorAnnals of Epidemiology, and SSM-Population Health. She was also a contributing author for two edited books on maternal and child health problems, programs, and policies. 
 

At UVa, Dr. Richardson teaches several upper-level courses on the social determinants of health and health care inequalities, and an introductory course on race, class, and gender. She is also a Research Affiliate for the Equity Center, a member of the Advisory Board for the Distinguished Majors Program in Human Biology, and a Faculty Advisor for the College of Arts and Sciences. She simultaneously maintains Research Affiliate status at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Carolina Population Center.

 
Before embarking on an academic career, Dr. Richardson spent over a decade conducting applied public health research, program evaluations, and policy assessments for federal public health agencies and nonprofit organizations, including the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the American Cancer Society.  She earned a Ph.D. in public health and an M.A. in medical anthropology from UNC-Chapel Hill, where she subsequently completed postdoctoral fellowships in demography and sociology and held a faculty position. She also earned a Master of Public Health (MPH) degree from Emory University and a B.A. in human biology from Stanford University. 

Righteous Propagation

History

Rituals of Race

African-American Studies

Gerard Robinson

Professor of Practice in Public Policy and Law

Ashley Rockenbach

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: Home Exile: Banyarwanda Settlers and the Making of the Ugandan State, 1911-Present

University of Michigan
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Ronit Bezalel's Screening of 70 ACRES In Chicago: Cabrini Green

Ronit Bezalel's Screening of 70 ACRES In Chicago: Cabrini Green

Wednesday, March 1, 2017 | 3:30 - 5:30 pm

Location: Open Gounds-1400 University Ave.

Ronit Bezalel has been producing and directing films since 1990. Her films cover a wide range of topics, from the dismantling of Public Housing to Professional Women’s Tackle Football (co-directed with Laurie Little and Sree Nallamothu). Her documentaries have been broadcast internationally, played in festivals, and used as a teaching tool in educational institutions worldwide. Newsweek Magazine has honored Bezalel as one of the Top 15 Women of the 21st Century.

 

Her current film is about a Chicago public housing community known for 70 years as Cabrini Green. Home to thousands, misunderstood by millions, Cabrini Green once towered over Chicago’s most valuable neighborhoods. A looming reminder of inequality and poverty, Cabrini’s high-rises were demolished and an African-American community cleared to make room for another social experiment: mixed-income neighborhoods. Shot over the course of 20-years, 70 Acres in Chicago documents this upheaval, from the razing of the first buildings in 1995, to the clashes in the mixed-income neighborhoods a decade later. 70 Acres in Chicago tells the volatile story of this hotly contested patch of land, while looking unflinchingly at race, class, and who has the right to live in the city.

Anne Rotich headshot

Anne Rotich

Associate Professor

Specialties:
Swahili Language and Culture

139 Minor Hall

 

 

 

 

Sabrina Pendergrass quoted in NBC5 story "Fort Worth Among US Cities With Largest Growth in Black Population"

Petal Samuel

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: Polluting the Soundscape: Noise Control, The Colonial Ear, and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Writing

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (tenure-track)

English
Vanderbilt University

Scars of Conquest/Masks of Resistance

African-American Studies
Schmidt

Jalane Schmidt

Associate Professor

S-364 Gibson Hall

Jermaine Scott

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: Black Teamwork: Football, Diaspora, Politics

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of History at Florida Atlantic University

History
Northwestern University
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Screening of Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am

Abraham Seda headshot

Abraham Seda

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
A Contested Ring: African Boxing, Social Control and Subversive Culture in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1910 to 1985

Abraham T. Seda is a Doctoral candidate in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. His dissertation project “A Contested Ring: African Boxing, Social Control and Subversive Culture in Colonial Zimbabwe, 1890-1980” examines how boxing and the boxing ring were appropriated by African men and used as platforms for cultural expression. Using oral and archival sources, his research illuminates how indigenous medicines used by African boxers for performance enhancement and as “power objects,” came to be seen as subversive by the colonial government, leading to their regulation. The research project also underscores how ideas of white racial superiority within the British empire led to colonies such as Zimbabwe and apartheid South Africa working together to ban interracial fights and regulate the sport.

History
University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
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Selma Screening

The Carter G. Woodson Institute and the Office of African American Affairs, with generous support from the Virginia Film Festival, and the Lambda Zeta chapter of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc., is sponsoring a special screening of Ava DuVernay’s film, SELMA on Thursday, February 5 at 6:30 in Stonefield Cinema 14.  In keeping with the theater’s policies regarding special screenings, we cannot distribute tickets ahead.  Those wishing to attend the screening should show up by 6:30 p.m. on February 5 and will be admitted on a first come, first served basis, at no charge.  Please note that a section of the theater will be roped off  for students currently enrolled in African American Studies classes in which SELMA and/or the Civil Rights Movement are considered.  We regret that the theater only seats 202 patrons and thus apologize in advance for those who can’t be accommodated

Eshe  Sherley

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Care in Crisis: Black Women and the Politics of Labor in Atlanta, 1968-1984

Eshe Sherley holds a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. Her fellowship project, "Care in Crisis: Black Women and the Politics of Labor in Atlanta, 1968-1984," argues that a network of working poor Black women in Atlanta demanded that national and state governments invest in infrastructures of care. Through their organizing, Sherley shows that they developed a Black feminist politics of social reproduction.

History
University of Michigan

Sandhya Shukla

Associate Professor

Lisa Shutt

Associate Professor and DUP

Specialties:
Francophone Central Africa, Transnational Migration, Urban Africa, National Identities

227B Minor Hall

 

 

 

 

Silver Rights

Simple Decency and Common Sense

Singing Yoruba Christianity

Religious Studies

Fatima Siwaju

Assistant Professor (AAS)

Minor Hall 107

Fatima Siwaju is a cultural anthropologist whose research centers on Islam in the Americas, citizenship and the politics of belonging, and Africana intellectual traditions. She is currently working on her first book manuscript, which explores the nexus of race, religion, and citizenship as they pertain to the spiritual and sociopolitical trajectories of Afro-descendant Muslims in the Colombian Pacific. 

Professor Siwaju's research has been supported by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the International Institute of Islamic Thought, and the Crossroads Project on Black Religious Histories, Communities, and Cultures in collaboration with the Henry Luce Foundation. She also served as a 2022-2023 Dissertation Scholar in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 

Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. Siwaju earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology with a concentration in African American Studies from Princeton University in 2023. She holds a Master of Arts in Religion from Syracuse University and a Master of Philosophy in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge. She also received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Modern and Medieval Languages (French and Spanish) from the University of Cambridge. 

Slavery and Identity

History

Slavery Since Emancipation Series: Susan Burton

This final event of the Slavery Since Emancipation Series welcomes Susan Burton, an activist, formerly incarcerated person, and founder of A New Way of Life. Susan Burton will discuss her book: Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women.

Alexandria Smith

Assistant Professor (AAS)

Minor Hall 231

Alexandria Smith (she/her) is Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality in the Department of African American and African Studies. She works in the areas of Black feminist and queer literature and theory, writing and thinking about the roles of embodiment in life writing and theory, the ways that Blackness interacts with and disrupts conceptions of gender and sexuality, and how gendered discourses are constructed in Black cultural work. Alexandria is at work on her first book project, an exploration of the distinct and sometimes competing conceptions of Black womanhood produced within Black feminist, queer, and trans studies. 

Alexandria earned a PhD in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Rutgers University and a BA in Comparative Women’s Studies and International Studies from Spelman College. She was a 2021 - 2023 Postdoctoral Fellow in the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.

Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies JournalThe Journal of Feminist ScholarshipCultural StudiesBlack PerspectivesThe New Inquiry, and elsewhere. 

Photo credit: Melody Robbins

Brian Smithson headshot

Brian Smithson

Post-Doctoral

Dissertation Title:
Aesthetics of Praise: Making Movies Religious in Bénin

Brian C. Smithson is a cultural anthropologist who studies the audiovisual cultures and religions of West Africa. As a Woodson Research Associate, Brian is completing a book titled Aesthetics of Praise: Making Movies Religious in Bénin—a story about cash-strapped movie producers, Christian–Muslim animosities, and professional rivalries in Yorùbá-speaking Bénin. The book shows how moviemakers overcome these hurdles by championing Yorùbá indigenous religion, its ethical principles, and its moral demands. The movies they make borrow from African art cinema and Nigeria's Nollywood alike. Yet it's in producing these movies—in those moments when Muslims and Christians work together on sets and in studios—that video filmmakers come up with a common language to appeal to potential patrons and honor shared religious attachments. In the process, they champion a religious field where Yorùbá indigenous religion provides an essential resource to shape political possibilities across religions, borders, and oceans in the face of global trends that lead to religious division and economic insecurity in Africa. 

Brian's work draws from his experience as an apprentice video filmmaker in Bénin, and his co-production of a full-length, Yorùbá-language movie under the guidance of several Yorùbá filmmakers. Brian earned a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University and a master's degree in African Studies at UCLA. He has taught at Duke, Bowdoin College, and UVA.

Post-fellowship placement: Assistant Professor of Anthropology at St. Mary's College of Maryland

Anthropology
Duke University

Social Death and Resurrection

History

Soldiers, Traders, and Slaves

History

Halimat Somotan

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation title: "In the Wider Interests of Nigeria as a Whole: Lagos and the Making of Federal Nigeria, 1949-76"

Post-fellowship placement:  post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton University's Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities

History
Columbia University

Soundscapes of Liberation

African-American Studies

Spectral Grounds, Black Experimental Film

Chrystel Oloukoï, a current Woodson pre-doctoral fellow, co-curated an online film program featuring "experimental moving image works by Black women and non-binary filmmakers."

Spend an evening with Poet Nikki Giovanni Feb. 13

As part of the University of Virginia’s Black History Month celebration, acclaimed poet and activist Nikki Giovanni will give a talk, free and open to the public, on “The Politics of Love, Defining the Need for Student Activism.” The talk will be held Wednesday at 6 p.m. in Newcomb Theater.

Spirituality and Abolition, a new book from the Abolition Journal

Ashon Crawley's new co-edited book reviewed on BoingBoing.net

Spring 2010

View current course listings page

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 1020 - Introduction to African-American and African Studies (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

12:30-1:45PM Tu/Th, Minor Hall 125

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 1559 - Black Feminist Theory and Praxis (3)

Instructor: Joy James

9:00-11:00AM F, Wilson 141A

This course examines contemporary black feminist theory in the United States, and the civil rights, anti-war, student and second wave feminist movements that influenced and inspired its growth during the 1960s, 70s, 80s. This class explores the ideological distinctions between state and counter-state feminism, socialist feminism, “womanism” and “black feminism, and black lesbian and transgendered feminisms. The works of black women artists and the role of activism, anti-racism, and internationalism in the formation of black feminist thought will also be examined.

Texts include: Angela Y. Davis: An Autobiography; Assata: An Autobiography; Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider; Delores Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness; K. McKittrick, Demonic Grounds.

Course requirements: Attendance and participation: 25%; group presentations: 25%; research paper and presentation: 50%

 

AAS 3000 - Women and Religion in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

12:30-1:45PM Tu/Th, Gibson 242

This course examines women’s religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women’s agency in indigenous religious movements, Muslim communities and Christian congregations in Africa.

Cross-listed as RELA 3000

 

AAS 3500 - Race and Urbanism in Postwar American Culture (3)

Instructor: Anoop Mirpuri

5:00-6:15PM Tu/Th, New Cabell 134

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to 20th century black urban studies. We will examine a variety of literary and scholarly texts concerned with representing, shaping, and contesting the government and organization of postwar US cities. Particular attention will be paid to the relation between the economy, the black freedom movement, the production and development of space, and the formation of racial identity. We will ask, in particular, what has been the relation between the black freedom movement and contestations over the production, use, and development of urban space? How has the American city been represented and experienced in relation to key political and economic changes that have occurred since World War II? The goal will be to generate a broad theoretical and historical understanding of postwar urbanism and its relation to the African American experience. Second, we will engage with recent scholarship on race and racism so as to develop an understanding of these concepts adequate to the study of late 20th century identity formation. Course assignments will be geared toward asking students to explore, through close reading and historical analysis, the political stakes of different approaches to the study and representation of black culture. Assessment criteria will include course participation in discussion, close engagement with readings evinced in short weekly writing assignments, and a mid-term and final essay.

 

AAS 3559 - Social Issues and Development in Africa (3)

Instructor: Jason Hickel

9:30-10:45 Tu/Thu, Pavillion VIII 103

This course draws on insights from critical theory to examine social issues and development in Africa. As part of a broader introduction to the history and politics of the continent, it explores the general contours of European colonialism, national independence, and the position of African states in today's global economic order. Against this backdrop, the course teaches students to handle various theories of underdevelopment and draws attention to specific case studies – such as Sudan, Rwanda, and South Africa – to discuss issues related to race, class, labor, gender, trade, and HIV/AIDS.

 

AAS 4080 - Directed Reading and Research (3)

Students in the DMP enroll under this number for thesis writing.

 

AAS 4500 - Racial Geographies (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

6:30-9:00PM Th, New Cabell 134

Notwithstanding the amorphous boundaries of geography as a discipline—especially at its intersection with such discourses as environmentalism, urban planning, and landscape studies—there are several ideas that readily conjure “geography.” Geography, for instance, is a scientific inquiry; geographers are interested in the attributes of places; geographic discourse has as its central—though unspoken—commitment to catalogue the earth’s surface according to perceived opportunities and constraints for human exploitation. Here is the question of this seminar: How does “race,” as a concept of critical culture, fit into this empirical investigation and documentation of places? Do such geographical headers as “demography,” “population,” “people,” or “occupation,” enumerated along with such headers as “physical characteristics,” “climate,” “transport,” or “towns,” allow us to engage race critically? Emphasizing the case studies that draw mainly from “Virginia,” we will together attempt to develop themes and concepts to elucidate the notion of “Racial Geography.” Consider, for example, the implications of such a race-inflected exploration in urban geography. Quantitative and geometrical theories of urban distribution and location are of little use in helping us to understand the location of Washington DC. No consideration of the “rank” and “size” of adjacent urban centers or of proximity to natural and cultural advantages, such as deep water harbors, mountain passes, or potential sources of energy, can explain why the nation’s capital was sited in a swampy backwater of the Chesapeake. Indeed, Washington DC’s location is best explained by the energetic but stealthy campaign of powerful Virginia slave holders to site the capital of the young nation in territory that was firmly committed to the institution of slavery? Consider how this determined the fate of rival cities such as Quaker Philadelphia or even the definition of North and South as geographical subdivisions on the United States. We may even consider how this explains why the Chesapeake still, from time to time, fills some of the most official parts of the city with briny flood waters. Requirements of the seminar will include a midterm and final exam and a research paper of 15 pages. Students will be asked at the beginning of the semester to explain their motivations for wanting to participate in the seminar.

 

AAS 4570-1 - Insufficient Blackness in African American Literature and Culture (3)

Instructor: Alisha Gaines

3:30-6:00PM Tu, Wilson 215

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Margaret Carlson of Bloomberg News penned an op-ed piece with a seemingly tongue-in-cheek question as its title: “Is Obama Guilty of Insufficient Blackness?” As Barack Obama began to dominate both political and popular discourses, questions over his racial legitimacy took hold in the cultural imagination. These debates remind us that blackness is not, and has never been, a bounded or agreed upon category, and often what is considered “real” and/or “authentic” leaves some on the margins of the community. Taking cues from these still lingering and poignant debates, this course seeks to interrogate the “facts” and “fictions” of blackness by moving those on the margins (queers, “oreos,” those that “talk white,” the upper-class, race traitors, passers, and “wiggers”) to the center. Through several different media including literary texts, film, television, music, and performance art, we will begin to think critically about authenticity, community, appropriation, performance, and belonging.

Questions to be considered in this course include: How does thinking about blackness inflect our understanding of (supposedly stable) categories of identity other than race including gender, class, and sexuality? Do we really know blackness when we see it? Hear it? How (and why) is blackness performed and for (and by) whom? In what ways is identity shaped by who can and can’t pass? How has globalization made blackness an even more accessible commodity? How has hip hop? And finally, just what does it take to be down?

 

AAS 4570-2 - Violence, Genocide and Africa (3)

Instructor: Cassie Hays

3:30-6:00PM Th, New Cabell 234

Via the historical and sociological study of violence in Africa, this course poses and attempts to resolve a variety of questions. First, what are the patterns and policies of colonial governance that manifest in expressions of violence? In what ways can we see modern actions as originating in the colonial era? How are race and ethnicity solidified, reinforced, or reconfigured through the lens of violence? How and why does gender, and particularly violence against women, become a meaningful way for perpetrators to articulate control or degrade their opposition? What, then, is the role of the racialized, gendered, or youthful body in postcolonial war? How can we begin to move beyond contemporary media representations and ‘read’ the politics of violence in Africa as unexceptional?

This course will focus on the colonial origins, postcolonial manifestations, and public culture depictions of violence in Africa. We will begin with a broad overview of the concepts of colonialism, imperialism, and postcolonialism and a brief history of genocide around the world. Building from this foundation, we will spend several weeks examining case studies from the era of European colonialism in Africa by reading books and watching films on the Belgian Congo, British Kenya and French Algeria. We will then move to analyses of the contemporary examples of Uganda, Rwanda, South Africa, and Sudan. Authors to be read include: Robert J.C. Young, Samantha Powers, Arjun Appadurai, Mahmood Mamdani, Frantz Fanon, Adam Hochschild, and Philip Gourevitch.

A 20-page research paper is expected at the conclusion of the semester.

 

AAS 4570-3 - Prosecuting Rape and Race (3)

Instructor: Joy James

12:00-2:30PM F, New Cabell 324

Although FBI crime statistics inform that the vast majority of rapes are intraracial, media sensationalism of rape, both real and alleged, often centers on interracial sexual assault cases. This seminar explores American memory concerning sexual violence and racial constructions. Beginning with the height of lynching and anti-lynching crusades led by Ida B. Wells in 1892, we examine key cases throughout the twentieth century that marked American consciousness concerning race relations and racial repression, and Americans’ conventional understandings of human sexuality and violence against women. This graduate seminar examines representations of sexual assault in trial cases/legal text ,popular culture, journalistic discourse, and scholarship. Cases studied include: Scottsboro Boys, Jack Johnson, Mike Tyson, Harlem Six, Willie Horton, Central Park Case, Ben LaGuer, Jeffrey Dahmer.

Texts include: D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters; The Scottsboro Boys; William Patterson, ed., We Charge Genocide; Ida. B. Wells, Southern Horrors.

Course requirements: Attendance and participation: 25%; group presentations: 25%; research paper and presentation: 50%.

 

AAS 4845 - Black Speculative Fiction (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

11:00-12:15 Tu/Th, Maury 113

This course seeks to explore the world of African American “speculative” fiction. This genre of writing largely includes science fiction, fantasy fiction, and horror. In this class, we will read, watch, and discuss narratives by black writers of speculative fiction to better understand the motivation, tone, and agenda in the work of black writers. We will also consider the role of black culture and representation in the larger field.

Cross-listed as ENAM 4500

AAS 4993 - Independent Study (1-3)

Allows students to work on an individual research project. Students must propose a topic to an appropriate faculty member, submit a written proposal for approval, prepare an extensive annotated bibliography on relevant readings comparable to the reading list of a regular upper-level course, and complete a research paper of at least 20 pages.

AAS 5528 - Queer Race Theory (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

6:30-9:00PM Tu, Bryan Hall 310

How have subjects identified as queer been constituted and understood in relation to racial formations and ideologies? Focusing especially on African American same-gender loving men and women and others viewed as outside of gender or sexual norms, this course investigates the emerging theories developed to address the intersection of race and sexual orientation in structures of cultural identity, psychic subjectivity, artistic production, political economy, and social history. The course is divided into four topics: 1) We begin with the queer body politic, examining political coverage of the Proposition 8 controversy as a way of seeing how different racial groups (blacks, Latinos, whites) are currently positioned in dominant discourses related to sexual orientation. 2) We move backward to examine the historical representation of minoritized sexuality through the concept of the queer token, focusing on the writings by and about three celebrated figures: James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Cherríe Moraga. 3) The next section takes up the emergence of black queer theory in concert with related minoritized sexual orientations, particularly Asian-American and Chicano/a, focusing on readings from the following volumes: E. Patrick Johnson’s Black Queer Studies, Dwight McBride and Jennifer deVere Brody’s Plum Nelly, Syliva Molloy and R. M. Irwin’s Hispanisms and Homosexualities, Phil Harper’s Private Affairs, Jose Muñoz’s Disidentifications, and David Eng’s Racial Castration. 4) Finally, we examine mass media representations (especially film and t.v.) of minoritized queerness, focusing on Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, David Henry Hwang and David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, and Partik-Ian Polk’s Logo tv series Noah’s Arc. Requirements include several brief commentary papers, an annotated bibliography, and a 20-page term research paper.Restricted to 4th years and Graduate Students.

Cross-listed as ENCR 5559

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 3559-05 - French Caribbean Cultural and Intellectual Currents (3)

Instructor: Yarimar Bonilla

3:30-6:00PM T, Cocke Hall 115

This interdisciplinary co-taught course will combine historical, anthropological, and literary approaches to the study of the French Caribbean islands. We will examine important periods in the history of French territorial expansion (including colonialism, slavery, decolonization, and the transformation of empire) with an eye towards how these histories informed the cultural and intellectual world of life in the Caribbean Colonies. We will also examine how varying ideological currents and philosophical projects (such as Negritude, Antillanité, Creolité, and the Tout-Monde) have sought to navigate the complicated relationships of alterity, political community, and national belonging that have shaped the French postcolonial world. Throughout the course we will examine the French Caribbean as an important analytical site for the study of racial hierarchies, colonial histories, and postcolonial projects.

Cross-listed as FREN 4559

 

ANTH 4559-03 - Anthropology of Dissent (3)

Instructor: Yarimar Bonilla and Stephanie Berard

3:30-6:00PM Th, Clark Hall 101

This course will investigate various processes of opposition, resistance, and revolution. The first half of the course will survey foundational works of revolutionary theory, while the second half will examine political practice from an ethnographic perspective, with an eye towards the lived experience of political participation and the formation (and transformation) of resisting subjects. We will consider these themes across a wide spectrum of movements and moments: from early Marxist, nationalist, and anti-colonial models of struggle to the more recent uprisings against global capitalism and neo-liberal policies in the US, Latin America, and Europe. The geographical focus will be global, emphasizing connections and influences across borders and epochs, while highlighting the connections between cultural politics in "the margins" and "the center".

ANTH 4991-04 - Ethnography of Blacks in the Twentieth Century (3)

Instructor: Wende Marshall

11:00-12:15 Tu/Th, McLeod Hall 2006

We will explore the discursive construction of black life in works of anthropology, sociology, theology and fiction. Beginning with Du Bois's Philadelphia Negro, the course will examine the theoretical underpinnings and analytic frames through which black life is variously understood and map how conceptions of black life shift across the century. A specific focus of the course is the fraught relationship between blacks and modernity, and the struggle for civil rights.

ANTH 5430 - African Languages (3)

Instructor: Ellen Contini-Morava

2:00-3:45PM Tu/Th, Brooks Hall 103A

An introduction to the linguistic diversity of the African continent, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. For about three-fourths of the course we will discuss linguistic structures (sound systems, word-formation, and syntax) among a wide variety of languages; the classification of African languages; and the use of linguistic data to reconstruct prehistory. For the last fourth of the course we will address a range of sociolinguistic topics, including language and social identity, social functions of language, verbal art, the politics of language planning, and the rise of “mixed” languages among urban youth. While lectures address general and comparative topics, each student will choose one language to focus on, using published materials available in the library. This language will be the basis for the major assignments. Some prior experience with linguistics is desirable (such as LNGS 3250/7010, ANTH 2400 or ANTH 7400), but the course will also be accessible to highly motivated students who have not taken a previous linguistics course. The course fulfills the Language Structure requirement for Linguistics majors and graduate students.

Department of Drama

DRAM 3070 - African American Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

2:00-3:15PM Tu/Th, Drama Education Bldg. 217

This course 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.

Department of English

ENAM 3140 - African-American Literature II(3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

9:30-10:45AM Tu/Th, New Cabell 119

A continuation of ENAM 3130, African American Literature I, this course concentrates on twentieth and twenty-first century African American novels, short stories, prose essays, and poetry. This lecture and discussion based class will address literature from pivotal cultural and political moments in African American life, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Writers include, but are not limited to, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and several contemporary authors. Mandatory assignments include response paragraphs, papers, quizzes, midterm and final exams.

ENAM 4500 - Black Speculative Fiction (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

11:00-12:15 Tu/Th, Maury 113

This course seeks to explore the world of African American “speculative” fiction. This genre of writing largely includes science fiction, fantasy fiction, and horror. In this class, we will read, watch, and discuss narratives by black writers of speculative fiction to better understand the motivation, tone, and agenda in the work of black writers. We will also consider the role of black culture and representation in the larger field.

Cross-listed as AAS 4500

ENCR 4500- Race in American Places (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

7:00-9:30PM Tu, Bryan 332

How do assumptions about race operate when we consider the idea of an “American Place?” This interdisciplinary seminar interrogates this question by exploring place in America within the context of the “Culture Wars,” especially as these are catalyzed by the notion of race. We consider, for instance, how place is embroiled in the ideological work of distinguishing people according to identity and, then, of fixing identity groups within unyielding hierarchies. Consider, for example, how the seemingly innocuous story of The Three Little Pigs leads us to assume racial attributes of each pig based on materials and architectural styles. Thus, it seems so natural, so correct to identify groups of people as “primitive” and “destitute” versus “civilized” and “successful” based on assumptions about their housing. What are the implications of our culture’s insistence on promoting the notion that “Africans,” say, live in huts of mud or straw. We are interested in how such assumptions linking race and place are reinforced by planning, design, and preservation concepts and practice. How does the increasing popularity of Homeowners’ Associations maintain racial territories against the spirit of legal desegregation? Does the concurrency of homelessness and home-owners-associations in American society suggest anything about prevailing assumptions about a relationship between the right to privacy and racial and class identity? We study these questions with the help of targeted discussion of readings, required field trips to places around Charlottesville, informal workshops especially to develop the ability to interpret maps, plans, and other graphic representations of places, and student delivered presentations in class. Requirements include three informal small group exercises, an individual site-visit comment paper, a mid-term and final exam, and a group research project. The last requirement is presented in a symposium that represents the culmination of the semester.

ENCR 5559- Queer Race Theory(3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

6:30-9:00PM Tu, Bryan Hall 310

How have subjects identified as queer been constituted and understood in relation to racial formations and ideologies? Focusing especially on African American same-gender loving men and women and others viewed as outside of gender or sexual norms, this course investigates the emerging theories developed to address the intersection of race and sexual orientation in structures of cultural identity, psychic subjectivity, artistic production, political economy, and social history. The course is divided into four topics: 1) We begin with the queer body politic, examining political coverage of the Proposition 8 controversy as a way of seeing how different racial groups (blacks, Latinos, whites) are currently positioned in dominant discourses related to sexual orientation. 2) We move backward to examine the historical representation of minoritized sexuality through the concept of the queer token, focusing on the writings by and about three celebrated figures: James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Cherríe Moraga. 3) The next section takes up the emergence of black queer theory in concert with related minoritized sexual orientations, particularly Asian-American and Chicano/a, focusing on readings from the following volumes: E. Patrick Johnson’s Black Queer Studies, Dwight McBride and Jennifer deVere Brody’s Plum Nelly, Syliva Molloy and R. M. Irwin’s Hispanisms and Homosexualities, Phil Harper’s Private Affairs, Jose Muñoz’s Disidentifications, and David Eng’s Racial Castration. 4) Finally, we examine mass media representations (especially film and t.v.) of minoritized queerness, focusing on Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman, Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning, David Henry Hwang and David Cronenberg’s M. Butterfly, and Partik-Ian Polk’s Logo tv series Noah’s Arc. Requirements include several brief commentary papers, an annotated bibliography, and a 20-page term research paper. Restricted to 4th years and Graduate Students.

Cross-listed as AAS 5528

Department of French Language & Literature

FREN 3046 - African Literatures and Cultures (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

3:30-4:45PM M/W, Astronomy Bldg. 265

This course will explore aspects of African literatures and cultures. It will focus on selected issues of special resonance in contemporary African life. Oral literature and its continuing impact on all other art forms. Key issues in French colonial policy and its legacy in Africa: language, politics, education. The course will examine the image of the postcolonial state and society as found in contemporary arts, paintings, sculpture, music, and cinema. Selections from painters like Cheri Samba (Democratic Republic of Congo), Werewere Liking (Cameroun) and sculptors like Ousmane Sow, including such popular icons as Mamy Wata and forms such as Souwere glass painting; from musicians like Youssou Ndour (Senegal), Cheb Khaled (Algeria), Seigneur Rochereau, Tshala Muana (DRC), Salif Keita (Mali), and Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); from Mande, Peul, and Kabyle oral literatures in French translation; from filmmakers D.D. Mambety, Moussa Sene Absa, and Ngangura Mweze. Visit to National Museum of African Arts depending on availability of funding. The final grade will be based on contributions to discussions, a mid-term exam, 2 papers, and a final exam.

Selections from the following texts will feature among the required reading list:
Wéréwéré Liking - Statues colons
A. Sow - La Femme, la Vache, la Foi
D.T. Niane - Soundjata ou l'épopée mandingue
Amadou Hampaté Ba - Koumen

FREN 4559 - French Caribbean Cultural and Intellectual Currents (3)

Instructor: Yarimar Bonilla and Stephanie Berard

3:30-6:00PM Tu, Clark Hall 101

This interdisciplinary co-taught course will combine historical, anthropological, and literary approaches to the study of the French Caribbean islands. We will examine important periods in the history of French territorial expansion (including colonialism, slavery, decolonization, and the transformation of empire) with an eye towards how these histories informed the cultural and intellectual world of life in the Caribbean Colonies. We will also examine how varying ideological currents and philosophical projects (such as Negritude, Antillanité, Creolité, and the Tout-Monde) have sought to navigate the complicated relationships of alterity, political community, and national belonging that have shaped the French postcolonial world. Throughout the course we will examine the French Caribbean as an important analytical site for the study of racial hierarchies, colonial histories, and postcolonial projects.

Cross-listed as ANTH 4559

FREN 4581- The Rewriting of History through Words and Images in Caribbean and African Cinema and Literature (3)

Instructor: Stephanie Berard

2:00-3:15PM Tu/Th, New Cabell 234

This course examines how contemporary Francophone Caribbean and African writers and filmmakers attempt to reevaluate the history written on slavery and colonialism by “official” historians from the Western world. Analysis of works by poets, novelists, essayists, and filmmakers from Martinique, Guadeloupe, Haiti, Algeria and Senegal.

FREN 4811- Francophone Literature of Africa (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

10:00-10:50AM M/W/F, Astronomy Bldg. 265

Introduction to the Francophone literature of Africa; survey, with special emphasis on post- World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights of Africa. The role of cultural and literary reviews (Légitime Défense, L'Etudiant noir, and Présence Africaine) in the historical and ideological development of this literature will be examined. Special reference will be made to Caribbean writers of the Negritude movement. Documentary videos on African history and cultures will be shown and important audio-tapes will also be played regularly. Supplementary texts will be assigned occasionally. Students will be expected to present response papers on a regular basis.
In addition to the required reading material, 2 essays (60%), regular class attendance, and contribution to discussions (10%), and a final exam (30%) constitute the course requirements. Papers are due on the dates indicated on the syllabus.
Required reading:
Diop, Birago. Les contes d’Amadou Koumba .
Chevrier, J. Anthologie Africaine: Poésie
Bâ, Mariama. Une si longue lettre.
Assia Djebar. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Toolkit).
Boudjedra, Rachid. L'escargot entêté

Prerequisite: French 332

Department of History

HIAF 2002 - Modern African History (4)

Instructor: John Mason

9:30-10:45AM Tu/Th, Minor 125

HIAF 2002 explores the history of Africa from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade, in the early nineteenth century, to the present. Our goal is to examine the historical roots of the continent's present condition. We look at the slave trade and its consequences, the European conquest of most of the African continent, African resistance to colonial rule, and the reestablishment of African independence.

We will concentrate on three regions: West Africa, especially Nigeria; Central Africa, especially the Congo and Rwanda; and southern Africa, especially South Africa. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and with the various strategies that Africans employed to resist, subvert, and accommodate European domination.
HIAF 2002 is an introductory course and assumes no prior knowledge of African history. There will be two blue book exams--a mid-term and a final--and periodic quizzes on the readings.

 

HIAF 2031 - The African Diaspora (4)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

12:30-1:45PM Tu/Th, Ruffner GOO4C

This class examines the history of the forced migration of Africans throughout the Atlantic from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. We will begin by analyzing the background to the European exploration of the Atlantic and will focus on the intellectual and ideological underpinnings of slavery in the Iberian Peninsula. We will then move to Africa and explore the interaction of Europeans and Africans along the West Coast of Africa, centering on the Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, and Bight of Biafra. The class will also pay considerable attention to the early development of the slave trade in Kongo, considering Kongolese appropriation of Christianity and diplomatic relations with Portugal. Angola will provide the last case study in Africa before we cross the Atlantic to Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico. In Angola, particular attention will be paid to the formation of the Portuguese colony of Angola, the rise of the slave trade, and the social and cultural milieu of the slave trade from Angola to Brazil. In the Americas, we will focus particularly on Brazil, Cuba and Mexico, providing a broad overview of the social History/lives of African and African-descendent people, with special attention to religion and culture.

HIAF 3091 - Africa and World History (3)

Instructor: Joseph Miller

9:30-10:45AM Tu/Th, Wilson 216

HIAF 3091 explores “world history” from the perspective of Africa, for advanced undergraduates. The Department of History at the University of Virginia has offered courses placing Africa in broader “Atlantic” frameworks, mostly in the modern era but has not otherwise considered Africa’s place in the long-term history of the human race – even though genetic and other evidence establishes that all modern humans descend from ancestors who lived in Africa. Conversely, “world history”, a very recent addition to the UVa history curriculum, characteristically finds only the most marginal of roles for Africa – mostly as a continent victimized and colonized by others, Muslims and modern Europeans. Hegel, founding philosopher of the modern historical discipline, specifically excluded Africa from his schema of universal history as the continent lacking meaningful change.

HIAF 3091 tackles all these challenges: (1) to historicize an African past (all 50,000 years of it) still commonly seen in static, quasi-ethnographic terms; (2) to place this narrative of the challenges Africans faced and the changes they made in the broader story of human history throughout the world; and (3) to take their perspectives, strategies, and experiences as a basis for a fresh look at the familiar narrative of world “civilizations”. Additionally, historicizing Africa presents a rich opportunity to consider what makes history historical, among the many ways of contemplating the past. If you want to think again about what you thought you knew, about any part of the world (including the modern US), this should be the course for you. I hope to leave no one in the room unchallenged.

This course provides the narrative framework of Africa’s past through reading a current text (John Reader, Africa: A Biography) but develops significantly different interpretive emphases; the contrast will reveal the assumptions underlying the way that historians think – or should think, since surprisingly few of them actually do. We will also read a recent world-history text (Armesto, The World: A History) and critique its narrative through the argument to be developed in the course. We will also read technical articles on concepts and processes integral to understanding Africa and history. You need not have taken either HIAF 2001 or 2002 (Introductions to early and modern Africa), but if you have not you will need to take responsibility for grasping the basic narrative of Africa’s past from which the course will build.

Students will write short analytical “take-home points” at the conclusion of every class. Frequent, short map quizzes will encourage useful awareness of the geographical contexts of all human history. Written requirements will include periodic short “position papers” reflecting on the course content as it develops. There will be no in-class examinations. All student writing will be considered intensely and analytically. The final exercise will be a take-home essay responding to a single question: “Having spent a semester looking at the history of the world from the perspective of Africa, and vice versa, how do you now see the similarities and the differences between Africans’ experiences and those of other people elsewhere around the globe?”

 

HIAF 4501 -Seminar in African History – “Africa and the Atlantic World” (4)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

3:30-6:00PM Tu/Th, Randall 212

This seminar investigates the relationship between Africa and the Atlantic World between the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. The class begins by undertaking a critical reading of the historiography of the Black Atlantic/African Diaspora (Gilroy, Matory, Mann, among several others), then moving on to analyze contemporaneous accounts by Africans, including Equiano. Key issues that will be treated are the circulation of ideas in the Atlantic through the rise of the Afro-Brazilian religion, Candomblé, the conceptualization of slavery and the Atlantic world by Africans, as well as both failed and successful reverse migration movements. Students will write a research paper based on the accounts analyzed in class.

 

HIUS 3231 - Rise and Fall of the Slave South (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Nicoletti

11:00-12:15 Tu/Th, New Cabell 118

This course will cover the history of the American South from the founding of Jamestown and the introduction of slavery in the early seventeenth century to the end of Reconstruction in the late nineteenth century, paying particular attention to the ways in which southern society was shaped by race. We will explore the Atlantic slave trade and the rise of slavery in the United States, gentrification and the colonial South, the role of religion in southern history, the emergence of the plantation system, the impact of the law on the creation of racial categories and hierarchy, westward expansion in the nineteenth century, the South and the sectional crisis, the experience of the Civil War, the promise of Reconstruction, and the emergence of a new South at the end of the nineteenth century. The course format will consist of two lecture meetings a week, and the readings will average about 150 pages per week. Students will write an original research paper based on the extensive material on southern history at the University of Virginia, as well as two other short papers based on the reading. There will also be a final exam.

Possible readings may include: Anthony Parent, Foul Means, Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, Gary Gallagher, The Confederate War, Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage, Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, C. Vann Woodward, The Burden of Southern History, and John Reed Shelton, “The South: Where is it? What is it?”

 

HIUS 3671 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Julian Bond

3:30-5:30PM Tu, Maury Hall 115

"History of the Civil Rights Movement", a lecture course, will examine the origins, philosophies, tactics, events, personalities and consequences of the southern civil rights movement from 1900 to the mid-‘1960s. Readings, lectures and out-of-class videos will be the basis for the final examination.Texts required: Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, Thompson Learning Custom Publishing; Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press; Wilkins, Roy with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo.
Viewing Required: “Eyes on the Prize”, America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965, # 1-6, America at the Racial Crossroads, 1965-1985, # 1 & 2, PBS Video, Blackside Inc., Boston; “The Road to Brown”, William Elwood, California Newsreel.

Students will be required to write two short papers. The final grade will be determined on the basis of the two papers (25% each), the final examination (30%), and discussion section participation (20%).

 

HIUS 4501- History Seminar – “Black Power” (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

3:30-6:00PM Tu, Nau 141

Over the course of the semester, students will examine the dynamic ways people of African descent in the United States have struggled for cultural, economic, and political empowerment within the context of a white supremacist culture. Much of the class will focus on the 1960s and the 1970s; however, previous and subsequent periods will also be analyzed. Students should leave this class with not only a broader knowledge of “Black Power” as a cultural, political, and ideological movement, but also with a more nuanced understanding of the research methods and interpretive frameworks utilized by historians, as well as other social scientists, interested in Black Power in particular and the Black freedom struggle in general. Students will also have the opportunity to further develop their research skills and techniques through a series of assignments designed to assist them in identifying research topics and questions, interpreting primary and secondary texts, and substantiating arguments with “sound” evidence.

HIUS 4591 - Topics in United States History - UVA History: Race and Repair (3)

Instructor: Phyllis Leffler and E. Dukes

4:00-6:30PM W, New Cabell 325

This special topics class will focus on the university and the surrounding community of Charlottesville with a special emphasis on issues of race. Students will explore the history of the University from its founding and construction to the late twentieth century, exploring both the documented history and the community’s perception of that history. Topics include: the early role of the enslaved in both building and maintaining the quality of life for students and faculty; U.Va.’s position and role during the Civil War; the evolution of the student body and surrounding communities in the era of Reconstruction and Jim Crow; the values of southern Progressivism; the place of eugenics at U.Va.; early efforts at racial and gender diversity and administrative responses; the acceptance of African American students and the responses of the Black Charlottesville community; employment practices during the twentieth century; issues of growth and their impact on communities; and how that history has and has not been represented on grounds and throughout the built environment.

This course will invite and encourage community members who have worked or lived in the surrounding area to help construct the forgotten or buried histories of university/community relations from their perspective. Students enrolled in the course will develop projects that actively engage members of the community, and will develop final products that serve the wider community needs for revealing and understanding this history.

U.Va. History: Race and Repair is directly connected with the University-Community Racial Reconciliation project. The course will be team taught and will be cross-listed with ARH 4500 and PLAN 4500. A maximum of 15 History students will be allowed to enroll, along with 15 from other disciplines.

Readings and Projects: Web-based readings of articles and essays for each weekly session of the class, along with projects designed by students and community members will structure the class. Students will be expected to keep a journal, write response papers, and produce a final project.

Department of Music

MUEN 3690 - African Music and Dance Ensemble (2)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

5:15-7:15PM Tu/Th, TBA

By audition first day of class, no experience expected; A practical, hands-on course focusing on the singing, drumming, and dance from West Africa (Ewe Ghana/Togo) and Central African Republic (BaAka).

MUSI 2120 - History of Jazz (4)

Instructor: Scott Deveaux

1:00-1:50PM M/W/F, Maury Hall 209

A 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 3090 - Performance in Africa (4)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

4:00-4:50PM Tu/Th, Old Cabell Hall 107

Explores music/dance performance in Africa through reading, hands-on workshops, discussion, and audio and video examples. The course covers both 'traditional' and 'popular' styles, through discussion and a performance lab. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

Department of Politics

PLCP 4810 - Politics of Sub-Saharan African

Instructor: Robert Fatton

2:00-4:30PM M, Halsey Hall 123

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; not open to students who have taken PLCP 381.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 2850 - Afro-Creole Religions (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

9:30-10:20AM Tu/Th, McLeod Hall 1004

This course will examine primarily those religions practiced in the Caribbean and Latin America which feature an African-derived pantheon, as well as significant other New World religions (Roman Catholic devotions, Protestant revivalism) which have been deemed exemplars of religious "creolization" among African-descended populations.

RELA 3000 - Women and Religion in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

12:00-1:45PM Tu/Th, Gibson 242

This course examines women’s religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women’s agency in indigenous religious movements, Muslim communities and Christian congregations in Africa.

Cross-listed as AAS 3000

RELC 5230 - Pentecostalism (3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

3:00-6:00PM Tu, Pavillion VIII 108

This course will study the history, theology, and practices of Pentecostalism, the fastest growing Christian movement in the world, from its origins among poor whites and recently freed African Americans to its phenomenal expansion in places like South America, Asia, and Africa. We will explore Pentecostalism's theological and historical relationship to the Methodist, Holiness, Apostolic, and Charismatic movements, as well as Pentecostal belief in phenomena like speaking in tongues, healings, miracles, and prophecy. During the course of the semester, we will ask how Pentecostalism has come to encompass one in every four Christians worldwide in the space of little over a century. Finally, the course will use race, class, and gender analysis to evaluate the cultural influences and future trajectory of Pentecostalism in the US and elsewhere in the world.

RELG 2800 - African American Religious History (3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

1:00-1:50 Tu/Th, Ruffner Hall GOO4C

This course will explore African American religious traditions in their modern and historical contexts by combining an examination of current scholarship and contemporary worship. Over the course of the semester, we will explore the religious life and religious institutions of African Americans from their African antecedents to contemporary figures and movements in the US. While the course will emphasize the growth and spread of Evangelical Christianity among African Americans, it will also consider non-Christian influences-like Islam and African traditional religion-upon black churches and black communities. In considering the wide variety, popularity, economic strength, political leadership, and ubiquity of religious institutions in the African American community, we will ask what role religion plays for black people, and what role African American religious life plays in the broader scheme of American life.

RELG 3360 - New World Religions (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

11:00-12:15 Tu/Th, Monroe Hall 118

A history course which examines Latin American and Caribbean religions from the 1400s through the 1830s. We will proceed topically (in rough chronological order), studying religious encounters during the pre-Columbian era, the Spanish conquest and colonial eras, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, Latin American independence (1820s), and slave emancipation in the anglophone Caribbean (1830s). The class will focus primarily upon the signature religious episodes, devotions, personalities and institutions of indigenous, African, Afro-creole, and mestizo communities, since these "gente de color" constituted the majority population in the New World during this historical epoch. We will consider issues of historiography?specifically, the problem of interpreting (sometimes hostile) extant archival sources and the use of such primary material in the writing of secondary literature. Students will develop their abilities to evaluate primary sources (in translation), and to identify the interpretive choices which scholars make in the crafting of historical narratives.

Department of Sociology

SOC 2442 - Systems of Inequality (3)

Instructor: Tara Tober

9:00-9:50AM M/W, Clark 107

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.

SOC 3060 - Sociological Perspectives on Whiteness (3)

Instructor: Paul Shlossberg

3:30-4:35PM Tu/Th, New Cabell 341

This course investigates the social construction of race through an exploration of white identity, both theoretically and empirically. It includes an investigation of the historical genesis of white identity, its intersection with political movements and organizations, the relation of whiteness to race, ethnicity, class, gender, nation, and how whiteness is understood in popular culture, and the sociological mechanisms by which it is reproduced, negotiated, and contested.

SOC 3410 - Race & Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

2:00-3:15PM M/W, New Cabell 134

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 4870 - Immigration (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

4:00-5:15PM M/W, New Cabell 216

This course examines contemporary immigration into the United States from the point of view of key theoretical debates and historical circumstances that have shaped current American attitudes toward immigration.

Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

POTR 4270 - Brazilian and Afro-Brazilian Civilization (3)

Instructor: David Haberly

11:00-11:50AM M/W/F, New Cabell 430

Anintroduction—in English, with all readings in English—to Brazilian literature, history, and culture; about a third of the lectures and readings focus on Afro-Brazilian history and culture.

Studies in Women and Gender

SWAG 2224 - Black Femininities and Masculinities in US Media (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

7:00-9:30PM M, New Cabell 325

This course 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 media 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.

Spring 2011

View current course listings page

African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 1020 - Crosscurrents in the African Diaspora (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

AAS 3000 - Women and Religion in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM, Gibson Hall 341

Combined with RELA 3000

This seminar examines women’s religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women’s agency in indigenous religious movements, Muslim communities and Christian congregations in Africa.

AAS 3500-1 Health and Healing in Africa (3)

Instructor: Amy Nichols-Belo

Mon/Weds. 2:00-3:15PM, Wilson Hall 215

Health and Healing in Africa examines the historical, social, political, and economic issues that produce poor health outcomes for many Africans. Exploring such topics as HIV/AIDS, maternal/child health, malaria, andmalevolent witchcraft, we will examine local understandings of what it means to be healthy and to be ill. Finally, we will investigate biomedical, 'traditional', and religious healing as practiced in a variety of African contexts. Course content will include ethnographic and historical texts, as well as feature films and documentaries.

AAS 3500-2 Development and Culture in Africa (3)

Instructor:Clare Terni

Mon/Weds. 3:30-4:45PM, Brooks Hall 103

Combined with ANTH 3500

This class examines a series of African development projects (including large dams in Lesotho and Mozambique, Tanzania's Ujamaa program, and South Africa's One Million Homes initiative). We question the impact of cultural difference on development and vice versa, as well as considering whether or not "development" might be a culture unto itself. We draw on ethnography, contemporary development theory, and critiques of development approaches.

AAS 3500-3 Afro-Brazilian History (3)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM, Nau Hall 141

Combined with HILA 3071

Surveys the history of Brazil from early Portuguese colonization in the sixteenth century to Brazilian Independence in 1822. It analyzes the social, political, cultural, and religious underpinnings of colonial Brazil by seeking to integrate Brazilian history into the broader Atlantic World, primarily Africa and the Spanish colonies in the America.

AAS 4080 - Directed Reading and Research (3)

Students in the DMP enroll under this number for thesis writing.

AAS 4500-1 Critical Race Theory (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues. 6:30-9:00PM, Bryan Hall 310

Combined with ENCR 4500

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? Using Winston Napier’s text African American Literary Theory: A Reader, supplemented with readings from other disciplines, this course surveys major trends in black literary theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing especially on these movements: the Black Aesthetic, womanism and feminist critique, post-structuralism, Afrocentrism, cultural and postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, Diaspora and trans-Atlantic studies, and queer theory. Although theoretical writings comprise the heart of the course, discussions will take up several literary works and other kinds of materials (film, music video, architecture, political speech) as applicable case studies. While concentrating on theories of race deriving from African American studies, we’ll also touch on some key texts from Native American, African, Asian American, and Chicano/a studies. Beyond literary theory, the class will take up readings in Birmingham cultural studies, legal theory, vernacular studies, mass media and film studies, architectural critique, and hip hop studies. The goal of the course is to give you a solid grounding in the vocabulary, key figures, concepts, debates, discursive styles, genres, and controversies that have been taken up in the broad sweep of theoretical race studies from the mid-twentieth century to the present, and to nurture your own theorizing about race and its deep cultural impact.

AAS 4500-2 Racial Geographies (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

Thurs. 6:30-9:00PM, Bryan Hall 310

Combined with AMST 4500

This course focuses on how geographic knowledge has been shaped by the negotiation of power among social groups. It delineates the notion of "racial geography" using the state of Virginia—in its past and present configurations—as a frame of reference. How have concepts of race shaped the rise of Virginia, as a crown colony and a commonwealth? Assignments include readings; map interpretation; individual and group projects; midterm & final essay.

AAS 4501-1 Africa and the Atlantic (4)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

Thurs. 3:30-6:00PM, New Cabell Hall 340

Combined with HIAF 4500-1

This reading and discussion seminar problematizes the notion of the “Black Atlantic”/Africa Diaspora/Atlantic History as a conceptual framework to analyze the forced migration of Africans throughout the Atlantic. The class will analyze the development of the concept of the Black Atlantic against the backdrop of work by African-American and Caribbean intellectuals that argued for a pan-Africanist standpoint while analyzing the history of the African diaspora. The class combines readings in theory and methodology with readings dealing with the actual experiences of cultural and social interaction between Africans and Europeans around the Atlantic. It deals with issues such as mestiçagem, the formation of creole societies in Africa, and identity. The class will also draw on examples from the Latin America – mainly Brazil – and Lusophone Africa. Readings include Herman Bennett, “The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the ‘History’ of the Black Atlantic”, African Studies Review, 43 (2000); Charles Piot, “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic”. The South Atlantic Quarterly 100:1, Winter; Kristin Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture”, Slavery and Abolition, 2001.

AAS 4501-2 Black Power (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues. 3:30-6:00PM, New Cabell Hall 324

Combined with HIUS 4501-8

Over the course of the semester, students will examine the dynamic ways people of African descent in the United States have struggled for cultural, economic, and political empowerment within the context of a white supremacist culture. Much of the class will focus on the 1960s and the 1970s; however, previous and subsequent periods will also be analyzed. Students should leave this class with not only a broader knowledge of “Black Power” as a cultural, political, and ideological movement, but also with a more nuanced understanding of the research methods and interpretive frameworks utilized by historians, as well as other social scientists, interested in Black Power in particular and the Black freedom struggle in general. Students will also have the opportunity to further develop their research skills and techniques through a series of assignments designed to assist them in identifying research topics and questions, interpreting primary and secondary texts, and substantiating arguments with “sound” evidence.

It bears mentioning that this course will devote significant attention to the local dimension of Black Power by engaging student activism on UVA’s campus between 1968 and 1984. Significant attention will be given to students’ fight for a Black Studies department at UVA, their massive demonstrations against racial apartheid in South Africa, and their general struggle to make the University a more egalitarian place.

AAS 4570 - Passing in African-American Imagination (3)

Instructor: Alisha Gaines

Tues. 3:30PM - 6:00PM, New Cabell Hall 319

This course considers the canonical African American literary tradition and popular culture textsthat think through the boundaries of blackness and identity through the organizing trope ofpassing. We will engage texts that representpassingas a liberating performance act, a troubling crime against authenticity, an economic necessity, and/or a stunt of liberal heroics.By the end of the course we will evaluate how our thinking aboutpassinginflects our understanding of supposedly stable categories of identity including gender, class, and sexuality as well as begin to think critically about the relationships between blood and the law, love and politics, opportunity and economics, and acting and being.

Questions to be considered include:What do we make of a literary tradition that supposedly gains coherence around issues of racial belonging but begins by questioning race itself? What work does the highly gendered depictions of the “tragic mulatta” figure (a mixed-race woman undone by her periled existence between two racialized worlds) do for, and to, African American literature? What happens when the color line crosses you? Or in other words, where is agency in this discussion? Do we really know blackness when we see it? Hear it? How (and why) is blackness performed and for (and by) whom? In what ways is identity shaped by who can and can’t pass? How has globalization made blackness an even more accessible commodity? How has hip hop? And finally, aren’t we all passing for something?

AAS 4845 - Black Speculative Fiction (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues/Thurs. 9:30-10:45AM, New Cabell Hall 335

Combined with ENAM 4845

This course seeks to explore the world of African American “speculative” fiction. This genre of writing largely includes science fiction, fantasy fiction, and horror. In this class, we will read, watch, and discuss narratives by black writers of speculative fiction to better understand the motivation, tone, and agenda in the work of black writers. We will also consider the role of black culture and representation in the larger field.

AAS 4993 - Independent Study (1-3)

Allows students to work on an individual research project. Students must propose a topic to an appropriate faculty member, submit a written proposal for approval, prepare an extensive annotated bibliography on relevant readings comparable to the reading list of a regular upper-level course, and complete a research paper of at least 20 pages.

American Studies

AMST 2753 - Arts and Cultures of the Slave South (4)

Instructor: Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson

Mon./Weds. 2:00-3:15PM, Clark Hall 108

Combined with ARTH 2753 and ARH 2753

“Arts and Cultures of the Slave South” is an undergraduate, interdisciplinary course that 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. The course will cover subjects ranging from African American spirituals to creolization and ethnicities in Louisiana, from the plantation architectures of both big house and outbuildings to the narratives of former slaves. In the process, students will be introduced to the interpretive methods central to a wide range of disciplines, from archaeology and anthropology, to art and architectural history, to material culture, literature, and musicology. In addition to two weekly lectures by co-faculty Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson, students will also attend weekly discussion sections and special events including guest lectures, field trip, a movie night, and samplings of traditional southern foods.

AMST 4500 - Racial Geographies (3)

Instructor: K. Ian Grandison

Thurs. 6:30-9:00PM, Bryan Hall 310

Combined with AAS 4500

This course focuses on how geographic knowledge has been shaped by the negotiation of power among social groups. It delineates the notion of "racial geography" using the state of Virginia—in its past and present configurations—as a frame of reference. How have concepts of race shaped the rise of Virginia, as a crown colony and a commonwealth? Assignments include readings; map interpretation; individual and group projects; midterm & final essay.

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 3500 - Health and Healing in Africa (3)

Instructor: Amy Nichols-Belo

Mon/Weds. 2:00-3:15PM, Wilson Hall 215

Combined with AAS 3500-1

Health and Healing in Africa examines the historical, social, political, and economic issues that produce poor health outcomes for many Africans. Exploring such topics as HIV/AIDS, maternal/child health, malaria, andmalevolent witchcraft, we will examine local understandings of what it means to be healthy and to be ill. Finally, we will investigate biomedical, 'traditional', and religious healing as practiced in a variety of African contexts. Course content will include ethnographic and historical texts, as well as feature films and documentaries.

ANTH 3500 - Development and Culture in Africa (3)

Instructor: Clare Terni

Mon/Weds. 3:30-4:45PM, Brooks Hall 103

Combined with AAS 3500-2

This class examines a series of African development projects (including large dams in Lesotho and Mozambique, Tanzania's Ujamaa program, and South Africa's One Million Homes initiative). We question the impact of cultural difference on development and vice versa, as well as considering whether or not "development" might be a culture unto itself. We draw on ethnography, contemporary development theory, and critiques of development approaches.

Architectural History

ARH 2753 - Arts and Cultures of the Slave South (4)

Instructor: Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson

Mon./Weds. 2:00-3:15PM, Clark Hall 108

Combined with AMST 2753 and ARH 2753

“Arts and Cultures of the Slave South” is an undergraduate, interdisciplinary course that 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. The course will cover subjects ranging from African American spirituals to creolization and ethnicities in Louisiana, from the plantation architectures of both big house and outbuildings to the narratives of former slaves. In the process, students will be introduced to the interpretive methods central to a wide range of disciplines, from archaeology and anthropology, to art and architectural history, to material culture, literature, and musicology. In addition to two weekly lectures by co-faculty Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson, students will also attend weekly discussion sections and special events including guest lectures, field trip, a movie night, and samplings of traditional southern foods.

Art History

ARTH 2753 - Arts and Cultures of the Slave South (4)

Instructor: Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson

Mon./Weds. 2:00-3:15PM, Clark Hall 108

Combined with AMST 2753 and ARH 2753

“Arts and Cultures of the Slave South” is an undergraduate, interdisciplinary course that 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. The course will cover subjects ranging from African American spirituals to creolization and ethnicities in Louisiana, from the plantation architectures of both big house and outbuildings to the narratives of former slaves. In the process, students will be introduced to the interpretive methods central to a wide range of disciplines, from archaeology and anthropology, to art and architectural history, to material culture, literature, and musicology. In addition to two weekly lectures by co-faculty Maurie McInnis and Louis Nelson, students will also attend weekly discussion sections and special events including guest lectures, field trip, a movie night, and samplings of traditional southern foods.

Department of Drama

DRAM 3070 - African American Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Tues./Thurs., 2:00-3:15PM, Drama Education Bld. 217

This course 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.

Department of English

ENAM 3140 - African-American Literature II (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM, New Cabell Hall 119

A continuation of ENAM 3130, African American Literature I, this course concentrates on twentieth and twenty-first century African American novels, short stories, prose essays, and poetry. This lecture and discussion based class will address literature from pivotal cultural and political moments in African American life, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Writers include, but are not limited to, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and several contemporary authors. Mandatory assignments include response paragraphs, papers, quizzes, midterm and final exams.

ENAM 4845- Black Speculative Fiction (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45AM, New Cabell Hall 335

Combined with AAS 4845

This course seeks to explore the world of African American “speculative” fiction. This genre of writing largely includes science fiction, fantasy fiction, and horror. In this class, we will read, watch, and discuss narratives by black writers of speculative fiction to better understand the motivation, tone, and agenda in the work of black writers. We will also consider the role of black culture and representation in the larger field.

ENCR 4500- Critical Race Theory (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues. 6:30-9:00PM, Bryan Hall 310

Combined with AAS 4500

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? Using Winston Napier’s text African American Literary Theory: A Reader, supplemented with readings from other disciplines, this course surveys major trends in black literary theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing especially on these movements: the Black Aesthetic, womanism and feminist critique, post-structuralism, Afrocentrism, cultural and postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, Diaspora and trans-Atlantic studies, and queer theory. Although theoretical writings comprise the heart of the course, discussions will take up several literary works and other kinds of materials (film, music video, architecture, political speech) as applicable case studies. While concentrating on theories of race deriving from African American studies, we’ll also touch on some key texts from Native American, African, Asian American, and Chicano/a studies. Beyond literary theory, the class will take up readings in Birmingham cultural studies, legal theory, vernacular studies, mass media and film studies, architectural critique, and hip hop studies. The goal of the course is to give you a solid grounding in the vocabulary, key figures, concepts, debates, discursive styles, genres, and controversies that have been taken up in the broad sweep of theoretical race studies from the mid-twentieth century to the present, and to nurture your own theorizing about race and its deep cultural impact.

Department of French Language & Literature

FREN 3040 - African Literatures and Cultures (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45PM, Monroe Hall 110

This course will explore aspects of African literatures and cultures. It will focus on selected issues of special resonance in contemporary African life. Oral literature and its continuing impact on all other art forms. Key issues in French colonial policy and its legacy in Africa: language, politics, education. The course will examine the image of the postcolonial state and society as found in contemporary arts, paintings, sculpture, music, and cinema. Selections from painters like Cheri Samba (Democratic Republic of Congo), Werewere Liking (Cameroun) and sculptors like Ousmane Sow, including such popular icons as Mamy Wata and forms such as Souwere glass painting; from musicians like Youssou Ndour (Senegal), Cheb Khaled (Algeria), Seigneur Rochereau, Tshala Muana (DRC), Salif Keita (Mali), and Cesaria Evora (Cape Verde); from Mande, Peul, and Kabyle oral literatures in French translation; from filmmakers D.D. Mambety, Moussa Sene Absa, and Ngangura Mweze. Visit to National Museum of African Arts depending on availability of funding. The final grade will be based on contributions to discussions, a mid-term exam, 2 papers, and a final exam.

Selections from the following texts will feature among the required reading list:
Wéréwéré Liking - Statues colons
A. Sow - La Femme, la Vache, la Foi
D.T. Niane - Soundjata ou l'épopée mandingue
Amadou Hampaté Ba - Koumen

FREN 4811 - Francophone Literature of Africa (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15PM, Monroe Hall 110

Prerequisite: French 3320

Introduction to the Francophone literature of Africa; survey, with special emphasis on post- World War II poets, novelists, and playwrights of Africa. The role of cultural and literary reviews (Légitime Défense, L'Etudiant noir, and Présence Africaine) in the historical and ideological development of this literature will be examined. Special reference will be made to Caribbean writers of the Negritude movement. Documentary videos on African history and cultures will be shown and important audio-tapes will also be played regularly. Supplementary texts will be assigned occasionally. Students will be expected to present response papers on a regular basis.
In addition to the required reading material, 2 essays (60%), regular class attendance, and contribution to discussions (10%), and a final exam (30%) constitute the course requirements. Papers are due on the dates indicated on the syllabus.
Required reading:
Diop, Birago. Les contes d’Amadou Koumba .
Chevrier, J. Anthologie Africaine: Poésie
Bâ, Mariama. Une si longue lettre.
Assia Djebar. Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement (Toolkit).
Boudjedra, Rachid. L'escargot entêté

Department of History

HIAF 2002 - Modern Africa (4)

Instructor: John Mason

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45AM, Claude Moore Nursing Edu. G010

HIAF 2002 explores the history of Africa from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade, in the early nineteenth century, to the present. Our goal is to examine the historical roots of the continent's present condition. We look at the slave trade and its consequences, the European conquest of most of the African continent, African resistance to colonial rule, and the reestablishment of African independence.

We will concentrate on three regions: West Africa, especially Nigeria; Central Africa, especially the Congo and Rwanda; and southern Africa, especially South Africa. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and to the various strategies that Africans employed to resist, subvert, and accommodate European domination.

HIAF 2002 is an introductory course and assumes no prior knowledge of African history. There will be two blue book exams--a mid-term and a final--and periodic quizzes on the readings.

HIAF 3091 - Africa and World History (3)

Instructor: Joseph C. Miller

Tues/Thurs, 9:30-10:45AM, Ruffner Hall G004B

HIAF 3091 explores “world history” from the perspective of Africa, for advanced undergraduates.

The Department of History at the University of Virginia offers courses placing Africa in broader “Atlantic” frameworks, mostly in the modern era but does not otherwise considered Africa’s place in the long-term history of the human race – even though genetic and other evidence establishes that all modern humans descend from ancestors who lived in Africa. Conversely, “world history”, a recent addition to the UVa history curriculum, characteristically finds only the most marginal of roles for Africa – mostly as a continent victimized and colonized by others, Muslims as well a modern Europeans. Hegel, founding philosopher of the modern historical discipline, specifically excluded Africa from his schema of universal history as the continent lacking meaningful change.

HIAF 3091 tackles these challenges: (1) to historicize an African past (all 50,000 years of it) still commonly seen in static, quasi-ethnographic terms; (2) to place this narrative of the challenges Africans faced and the changes they made in the broader story of human history throughout the world; and (3) to take their perspectives, strategies, and experiences as a basis for a fresh look at the familiar narrative of world “civilizations” that turn out, upon examination, to celebrate unsustainably high levels of militarization. Additionally, historicizing Africa presents a rich opportunity to consider what, among the many ways of contemplating the past, makes history historical. If you want to think again about what you thought you knew, about any part of the world (including the modern US), this should be the course for you.

HIAF 3091 provides the narrative framework of Africa’s past through reading a current text (Gilbert and Reyolds, Africa in World History) but develops significantly different interpretive emphases; the contrast will reveal assumptions underlying the way that historians think – or should think, since surprisingly few of them actually do. We will also read a recent world-history text (Armesto, The World: A History) and also critique its narrative through the argument to be developed in the course. We will also read technical articles on concepts and processes integral to understanding Africa and history. You need not have taken either HIAF 2001 or 2002 (Introductions to early and modern Africa), but if you have not you will need to take responsibility for grasping the basic narrative of Africa’s past from which the course will build.

Students will write short analytical “take-home points” at the conclusion of every class. Frequent, short map quizzes will encourage useful awareness of the geographical contexts of all human history. Written requirements will include periodic short “position papers” reflecting on the course content as it develops. There will be no in-class examinations. All student writing will be considered intensely and analytically. The final exercise will be a take-home essay responding to a single question: “Having spent a semester looking at the history of the world from the perspective of Africa, and vice versa, how do you now see the similarities and the differences between Africans’ experiences and those of other people elsewhere around the globe?”

HIAF 4501 - Africa and the Atlantic (4)

Instructor: Roquinaldo Ferreira

Thurs. 3:30-6:00PM, New Cabell 340

Combined with AAS 4501

This reading and discussion seminar problematizes the notion of the “Black Atlantic”/Africa Diaspora/Atlantic History as a conceptual framework to analyze the forced migration of Africans throughout the Atlantic. The class will analyze the development of the concept of the Black Atlantic against the backdrop of work by African-American and Caribbean intellectuals that argued for a pan-Africanist standpoint while analyzing the history of the African diaspora. The class combines readings in theory and methodology with readings dealing with the actual experiences of cultural and social interaction between Africans and Europeans around the Atlantic. It deals with issues such as mestiçagem, the formation of creole societies in Africa, and identity. The class will also draw on examples from the Latin America – mainly Brazil – and Lusophone Africa. Readings include Herman Bennett, “The Subject in the Plot: National Boundaries and the ‘History’ of the Black Atlantic”, African Studies Review, 43 (2000); Charles Piot, “Atlantic Aporias: Africa and Gilroy’s Black Atlantic”. The South Atlantic Quarterly 100:1, Winter; Kristin Mann, “Shifting Paradigms in the Study of the African Diaspora and of Atlantic History and Culture”, Slavery and Abolition, 2001.

HIUS 3671 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Julian Bond

Tues. 3:30-5:30PM, New Cabell Hall 138

This course will examine the origins, philosophies, tactics, events, personalities and consequences of the southern civil rights movement from 1900 to the mid-‘1960s. The movement, largely composed of grass-roots unknowns, was based on a culture of resistance instilled by racially restrictive laws and customs institutionalized by the resistant white South following the demise of Reconstruction. By employing a variety of tactics, at the end of the ‘60s decade, it had won impressive victories against state-sanctioned discrimination. Readings, lectures and videos will be the basis for the final examination. Students will be required to write two short papers. The final grade will be determined on the basis of the two papers (25% each), the final examination (30%), and discussion section participation (20%).

Texts required: Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, Thompson Learning Custom Publishing; Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press; Wilkins, Roy with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo.

Department of Music

MUSI 2120 - History of Jazz (4)

Instructor: Scott DeVeaux

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15PM, Maury Hall 209

A 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 3090 - Performance in Africa (4)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Tues./Thurs 4:00-4:50, Seminar in Old Cabell Hall107 or School Visit

This course explores performance in Africa through reading, discussion, audio and video examples, hands-on practice, and -- new this semester -- teaching and performing with local school children. The course meets together with MUSI 3690 (African Drumming and Dance Ensemble), but is a full academic course. Students in Music 3090 are automatically part of the UVA African Music and Dance Ensemble. Your role in the Ensemble as learner and performer is crucial to your overall work in the course. This semester, the Community Engagement initiative will involve students participating once a week in an after-school club, teaching and mentoring children from two area schools.

We will explore African music/dance styles – focusing on Ewe music from Ghana and Togo and BaAka music from the Central African Republic, but branching to other forms and genres-- their sociomusical circumstances and processes, as well as performed resistances and responses to the colonial and post/neo-colonial encounter. In addition, we will address the politics and processes involved in translating performance practices from one cultural context to another. Each students’ personal relationship to the material/experience will be integrated into study. Readings, discussions, and written work will focus heavily on topics and issues related to the main music/dance traditions that we are learning to perform this semester, though we may venture beyond those areas from time to time. The course will explore both "traditional" and "popular" styles, leading us to question those categories.

There is an informal audition for this course. No experience is expected, just come to the first evening class meeting (5:15) ready to sing and dance (in groups).

Department of Politics

PLCP 4810 - The Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa (3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Mon. 3:30-6:00PM, Pavilion VIII 108

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; not open to students who have taken PLCP 381.

PLPT 3200 - African American Political Thought (3)

Instructor: Lawrie Balfour

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15PM, Gibson Hall 342

This course aims to introduce you to both the critical and the constructive dimensions of African American political thought. Through our readings and discussions, we will assess the claims that black Americans have made upon the polity, how they have defined themselves, and how they have sought to redefine the basic terms of American public life. Among the themes that we will explore are the relationship between slavery and democracy, the role of historical memory in political life, the political significance of culture, the connections between “race” and “nation,” and the tensions between claims for black autonomy and claims for integration, as well as the meaning of such core political concepts as citizenship, freedom, equality, progress, and justice. As we focus our attention on these issues, we will be mindful of the complex ways in which the concept of race has been constructed and deployed and its interrelationship with other elements of identity such as gender, sexuality, class, and religion. Authors include Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Angela Davis, Marlon Riggs, Cathy Cohen, and Toni Morrison.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 3000 - Women and Religion in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM, Gibson Hall 242

Combined with AAS 3000

This seminar examines women’s religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women’s agency in indigenous religious movements, Muslim communities and Christian congregations in Africa.

RELC 5230 - Pentecostalism (3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

Thurs. 3:30-6:00PM, New Cabell Hall 242

This course will study the history, theology, and practices of Pentecostalism, the fastest growing Christian movement in the world, from its origins among poor whites and recently freed African Americans to its phenomenal expansion in places like South America, Asia, and Africa. We will explore Pentecostalism’s theological and historical relationship to the Methodist, Holiness, Apostolic, and Charismatic movements, as well as Pentecostal belief in phenomena like speaking in tongues, healings, miracles, and prophecy. During the course of the semester, we will ask how Pentecostalism has come to encompass one in every four Christians worldwide in the space of little over a century. Finally, the course will use race, class, and gender analysis to evaluate the cultural influences and future trajectory of Pentecostalism in the US and elsewhere in the world.

RELG 2559 - Religion and Race in Film (3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM, Chemistry Bldg. 303

This course will explore themes of religion, race, and relationship to the religious or racial "other" in films from the silent era to the present. It will consider film as a medium and engage students in analysis and discussion of cinematic images, with the goal of developing hermeneutic lenses through which these images can be interpreted. The films selected all deal with issues of race, religion, gender, and relationship, and ask the ultimate question, "How should we treat one another?"

RELG 2800 - African American Religious History (3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

Mon./Weds. 1:00-1:50PM, Gibson Hall 211

Why are churches still segregated when every other American institution has made relatively successful efforts at integration? RELG 2800, “African American Religious History” will explain the history of the color line that still separates US churches. This course explores African American religious traditions by combining an examination of current scholarship and contemporary worship. While the course will emphasize the growth and spread of Evangelical Christianity among African Americans, it will also consider non-Christian influences like Islam and African traditional religions upon black churches and black communities. In considering the wide variety, popularity, economic strength, political leadership, and ubiquity of religious institutions in the African American community, what role does religion play for black people? Why, after hundreds of years, is 11 am on Sunday morning still the most segregated hour of the week in the US?

Department of Sociology

SOC 2442 - Systems of Inequality (3)

Instructor: Hephzibah Strmic-Pawl

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15PM, Minor Hall 125

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.

SOC 3410 - Race & Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon./Weds. 2:00-3:15PM, New Cabell Hall 122

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.

Spring 2012

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African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 1020 - Introduction to African-American and African Studies II

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

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

AAS 3250 - Motherlands: Landscapes of Hunger, Futures of Plenty(3)

Instructor: Kendra Hamilton

Mon/Wed. 11:00-11:50, Clark Hall 101

AAS 3500-1 Intermediate Seminar in African American & African Studies(3)

Instructor: Barbara Boswell

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Bryan Hall 330

AAS 3559-1 African Worlds in Biography (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Thurs 3:30-6:00, 521 New Cabell Hall

AAS 3359-2 Black Protest Narrative (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues/Thurs. 9:30-10:45, 2006 Mcleod Hall

AAS 3359-3 M.L. King's Political Thought (3)

Instructor: Justin Rose

Tues/Thurs. 2:00-3:15, 215 Wilson Hall

AAS 3359-4 Insiders & Outsiders in Africa (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 3:30-6:00, 345 New Cabell Hall

AAS 3359 - 5 Popular Cultures in Black Atlantic (3)

Instructor: Tyler Fleming

Mon. 3:30-6:00, 141B Wilson Hall

AAS 4080 -Thesis (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

TBA

AAS 4501 -Black Power (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues. 3:30-6:00PM, 341 Nau Hall

Combined with HIUS 4501-8

Over the course of the semester, students will examine the dynamic ways people of African descent in the United States have struggled for cultural, economic, and political empowerment within the context of a white supremacist culture. Much of the class will focus on the 1960s and the 1970s; however, previous and subsequent periods will also be analyzed. Students should leave this class with not only a broader knowledge of “Black Power” as a cultural, political, and ideological movement, but also with a more nuanced understanding of the research methods and interpretive frameworks utilized by historians, as well as other social scientists, interested in Black Power in particular and the Black freedom struggle in general. Students will also have the opportunity to further develop their research skills and techniques through a series of assignments designed to assist them in identifying research topics and questions, interpreting primary and secondary texts, and substantiating arguments with “sound” evidence.

It bears mentioning that this course will devote significant attention to the local dimension of Black Power by engaging student activism on UVA’s campus between 1968 and 1984. Significant attention will be given to students’ fight for a Black Studies department at UVA, their massive demonstrations against racial apartheid in South Africa, and their general struggle to make the University a more egalitarian place.

AAS 4570 -That's Ghetto! Blackness and the Modern American City (3)

Instructor: Kwame Holmes

Tues. 3:30PM - 6:00PM, 543 New Cabell Hall

AAS 4570 - Popular Cultures Black Atlantic (3)

Instructor: Tyler Fleming

Mon. 3:30-6:00, 141B Wilson Hall

AAS 4993 - Independent Study (1-3)

Allows students to work on an individual research project. Students must propose a topic to an appropriate faculty member, submit a written proposal for approval, prepare an extensive annotated bibliography on relevant readings comparable to the reading list of a regular upper-level course, and complete a research paper of at least 20 pages.

American Studies

AMST 2220 - Race Identity and American Visual (4)

Instructor: Carmenita Higginbotham

Tues/Thurs. 9:30-10:45, 141 Nau Hall

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 2156 - People and Cultures of Africa(3)

Instructor: Ivan Hultin

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:20, G0048 Ruffner Hall

Department of Drama

DRAM 3070 - African American Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Tues./Thurs., 2:00-3:15PM, Drama Education Bld. 217

This course 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.

Department of English

ENAM 3559 - Black Protest Narrative(3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, 2006 Mcleod Hall

ENCR 4500- Race in American Places(3)

Instructor: Kenrick Grandison

Mon. 6:30-9:00AM, 242 Gibson Hall

ENLT 2547-001- Black Migrations (3)

Instructor: Sonya Donaldson

Mon/Wed. 5:00-6:00, 102 Dell1

ENLT 2547-002 - Black Women Writes (3)

Instructor: Jean Franziro

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15, 242 Nau Hall

Department of History

HIAF 2002 - Modern Africa (4)

Instructor: John Mason

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Claude Moore Nursing Edu. G010

HIAF 2002 explores the history of Africa from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade, in the early nineteenth century, to the present. Our goal is to examine the historical roots of the continent's present condition. We look at the slave trade and its consequences, the European conquest of most of the African continent, African resistance to colonial rule, and the reestablishment of African independence.

We will concentrate on three regions: West Africa, especially Nigeria; Central Africa, especially the Congo and Rwanda; and southern Africa, especially South Africa. We will pay particular attention to the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and to the various strategies that Africans employed to resist, subvert, and accommodate European domination.

HIAF 2002 is an introductory course and assumes no prior knowledge of African history. There will be two blue book exams--a mid-term and a final--and periodic quizzes on the readings.

HIUS 3671 - History of the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Julian Bond

Tues. 3:30-5:30PM, New Cabell Hall 138

This course will examine the origins, philosophies, tactics, events, personalities and consequences of the southern civil rights movement from 1900 to the mid-‘1960s. The movement, largely composed of grass-roots unknowns, was based on a culture of resistance instilled by racially restrictive laws and customs institutionalized by the resistant white South following the demise of Reconstruction. By employing a variety of tactics, at the end of the ‘60s decade, it had won impressive victories against state-sanctioned discrimination. Readings, lectures and videos will be the basis for the final examination. Students will be required to write two short papers. The final grade will be determined on the basis of the two papers (25% each), the final examination (30%), and discussion section participation (20%).

Texts required: Bond, Julian and Andrew Lewis, Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table, Thompson Learning Custom Publishing; Forman, James, The Making of Black Revolutionaries, University of Washington Press; Wilkins, Roy with Tom Matthews, Standing Fast, Da Capo.

HIUS 4501 - Black Power (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues. 3:30-6:00, 341 Nau Hall

Department of Music

MUEN 3690 - African Music & Dance Ensemble Level 2

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Tues./Thurs. 5:00-7:15, 107 Old Cabell Hall

MUEN 3690 - African Music & Dance Ensemble Level 3

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Tues./Thurs 5:00-7:15, 107 Old Cabell Hall

Musi 2120 - History of Jazz Music

Instructor: Scott Deveaux

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15, 209 Maury Hall

Musi 3090 Perforance in Africa

Instructor: Elizabeth Sapir

Tues/Thurs. 4:00-4:50, 107 Old Cabell Hall

Department of Politics

PLAP 3700 - Racial Politics(3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

Mon/Wed. 11:00-11:50, 101 Nau Hall

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 2850 - Afro-Creole Religions in Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15, 211 Gibson Hall

RELG 2260 - Religion, Race and Relationship in Film (3)

Instructor: Valerie Cooper

Mon/Wed, 141 Gilmer Hall

This course will explore themes of religion, race, and relationship to the religious or racial "other" in films from the silent era to the present. It will consider film as a medium and engage students in analysis and discussion of cinematic images, with the goal of developing hermeneutic lenses through which these images can be interpreted. The films selected all deal with issues of race, religion, gender, and relationship, and ask the ultimate question, "How should we treat one another?"

Department of Sociology

SOC 3410 - Race & Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon./Weds. 2:00-3:15PM, New Cabell Hall 122

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 African - American Community

Instructor: Hephzibah Strinic-Pawl

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45, 242 Nau Hall

Spring 2013

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African-American and African Studies Program

AAS1010 Introduction to African-American and African Studies II (4)

Instructor: Kenrick Grandison

Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45, Wilson 301

AAS 3000 Women and Religion in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cindy Hoehler-Fatton

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

This course examines women's religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women.

AAS 3456 The Supreme Court and the Civil Rights Movement (3)

Instructor: Joseph Hylton

Tues. 6:30-9:30

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. We will pay particular attention to the religious dimensions of these various types of social criticism.

AAS 3500-001 Insiders & Outsiders in Africa (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 415

AAS 3500-002 African Worlds in Biography (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 3:30-6:00, Maury Hall 113

AAS 3500-003 Race, Culture and Inequality (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues/Thurs 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 430

AAS 3500-004 Women Writing Africa  (3)

Instructor: Barbara Boswell

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Wilson Hall 235

AAS 3500-005 African American Health Professionals (3)

Instructor: Pamela Reynolds

Tues. 3:30-6:00, Pavilion VII 103

AAS 3500-006 Afrofuturist Fiction (3)

Instructor: Zakiyyah Jacskon

Time: Wed 6:30-9:30, Bryan Hall 334

AAS 3559 Sounds of Blackness (3)

Instructor:Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs 12:30-1:45, Glimer Hall 190

AAS 4500 Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues/Thurs 11:00-12:15, Bryan 330

AAS 4570-001 The Black Body in Translation (3)

Tues 3:30-6:00, Wilson Hall 215

AAS 4570-002 Afrofuturist Fiction (3)

Wed 6:30-9:00, Bryan Hall 334

English

ENAM 3140 Africna American Literature II(3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 8:00-9:15, Gibson Hall 341

ENAM 4500-001 Fictions of Black Identity (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15,  Bryan Hall 330

ENMC 3500-002 Women Writing Africa (3)

Instructor: Barbara Boswell

Tues/Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Wilson Hall 235

FRENCH

FREN 3559-001 Caribbean/ African Theatre(3)

Instructor: Stephanie Berard

Wed. 3:30-6:00, Wilson Hall 140

FREN 3570 Africna Oral Traditions(3)

Instructor: Kandioura Drame

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15,  Wilson Hall 235

MEDIA STUDIES

MDST 4559-004 Civil Rights Movement & Media (3)

Mon 3:30-6:00, Bryan Hall  235

[accordion]

POLITICS

[accordion]

PLAP 3820 Civil Rights and Civil Liberties(3)

David Klein

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15

Studies judical construction and interpretation of civil rights and liberties reflected by Supreme Court decisions. Includes line-drawing between rights and obligations.

PLCP 2120 Politics of Developing Areas (3)

Robert Fatton

Mon./Wed. 9:00-9:50

Surveys patterns of government and politics in non-Western political systems. Topics include political elites, sources of political power, national integration, economic development, and foreign penetration.

PLCP 4500-001 Imperialism and Globalization(3)

Robert Fatton

Thurs. 3:30-6:00

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

RELIGIOUS STUDIES

RELA 3000 Women and Religion in Africa

Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

This course examines women's religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa. Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women.

RELA 3890 Christianity in Africa(3)

Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45

Historical and topical survey of Christianity in Africa from the second century c.e. to the present. Cross listed with RELC 3890. Prerequisite: A course in African religions or history, Christianity, or instructor permission.

RELC 3890 Christianity in Africa(3)

Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mon./Wed. 1:00- 1:50

Historical and topical survey of Christianity in Africa from the second century c.e. to the present. Cross listed with RELA 3890. Prerequisite: A course in African religions or history, Christianity, or instructor permission.

RELG 2700, Festivals of the Americas(3)

Jalane Schmidt

Readings will include contemporary ethnographies of religious festivals in the Caribbean ans South, Central, and North America, and increase their knowledge of the concepts of sacred time and space, ritual theory, and the relationships between religious celebration and changing accounts of ethnicity.

RELG 3200, Martin, Malcom and America(3)

Mark Hadley

An analysis of African-American social criticism centered upon, but not limited to, the life and thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X.

RELG 3800, African American Religious History

Valerie Cooper

This course will explore African American religious traditions in their modern and historical contexts, combining an examination of current scholarship, worship and praxis. It will examine the religious life and religious institutions of African Americans from their African antecedents to contemporary figures and movements in the US.

SOCIOLOGY

SOC 2442 Systems of Inequality

Sabrina Pendergrass

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.

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Milton Vickerman

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 4420, Sociology of Inequality

Paul Kingston

Surveys basic theories and methods used to analyze structures of social inequality. Includes comparative analysis of the inequalities of power and privilege, and their causes and consequences for social conflict and social change. Prerequisite: Six credits of sociology or instructor permission.

Women and Gender Studies

WGS 3450, Presenting & Representing African American Women in 20th Century Visual Arts

Jacqueline Taylor

Through the twentieth century, African-American women challenged gender constraints on their political, social and economic rights. This course explores the role of the visual arts in reinforcing and countering images of African American women's identity. We will examine women in visual art, architecture, film and popular culture within the context of cultural, political and social change

Spring 2014

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African-American and African Studies Program

AAS 1020, Introduction to Africna Americn and African Studies II

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45PM, Minor Hall 125

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, Black Femininity and Masculinity in the US Media

AAS 3456, The Supreme Court and the Civil Rights Movement

AAS 3500-001, Race, Culture & Inequality

AAS 3500-002, African American Health Professionals

AAS 3559-001, Black Fire

 

AAS 4109, Civil Rights Movement & the Media

AAS 4500, Critical Race Theory

AAS 4501, Black Power

AAS 4559-001, Heard it on the Radio

AAS 4570-002, Women & Muslim Culture in Africa

AAS 4570-003, Black Conservatism & its Critics

Anthropology

ANTH 4590, Women & Muslim Culture in Africa

English

ENAM 3140, African American Literature II

ENAM 4840, Fictions of Black Identity

ENLT 2547, Black Writers in America

History

HIAF 2002, Modern African History

HIAF 3559-001, African Decolonization

HIME 2002, History of the Middle East and North Africa, ca. 1500-Present

HIST 4501-005, Religion in Africa and the Mideast

Linguistics

LNGS 2220, Black English

Music

MUSI 3090, Performance in Africa

Politics

PLCP 3410, Politics of the Middle East and North Africa

PLAP 4810, Class, Race and the Environment

PLCP 4810, Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

Religion

RELA 3900 – Islam in Africa

RELI 3900 – Islam in Africa

Sociology

SOC 3410, Race and Ethnic Relations

SOC 4550, Race & Ethics

Studies in Women and Gender

WGS 3130, Geographies of Desire: Race, Gender, Place, Identity

Spring 2015

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

AAS 1020 - Introduction to African American and African Studies II (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45, Minor Hall 125

 

AAS 2224 - Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Tues. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 207

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 3500-1 Currents on African Literature(3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Mon./Wed. 3:30-4:45, Maury Hall 113
 

What is the state of literatures from the African continent today? In this course, we will read a sampling of some of the exciting new works of fiction, poetry, and drama, from the continent’s young and established authors. This semester our theme will be “Re-Dreaming the Modern African Nation State,” and authors will include: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Teju Cole (Nigeria); Maaza Mengiste and Dinaw Mengistu (Ethiopia); Aminatta Forna (Sierra Leone); Nuruddin Farah (Somalia); and J.M. Coetzee (South Africa). We will examine the literary innovations that writers use to narrate nations in continued turmoil, as we discuss issues such as dictatorship, the lingering effects of colonization, the postcolonial nation state, the traumas of war and geo-politics, religion, gender and sexuality, and migration, among others. Requirements include: short literary reviews, African news forum posts, a historical presentation (in pairs), and a final essay.

AAS 3500- 2 Runaways and Rebels, Afro-Atlantic (3)

Instructor: James La Fleur

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, New Cabell Hall 132

AAS 3500- 3 Slavery and Literary Imagination (3)

Instructor: Maurice Wallace

Tues./Thurs. 2:00 -3:15, Cocke Hall115

AAS 3500- 4 African American Health Professionals (3)

Instructor: Pamela Reynolds

Wed. 1:00-3:30, New Cabell Hall 115

This course addresses important issues of race and health disparities, as well as offering students an introduction to the understudied history of black medical professionals. Over the past three centuries, African American physicians, dentists, nurses and public health professionals have made major contributions to eliminating health disparities, offering, in many instances, the only source of medical and dental care available. Many of our majors consider a career in medicine--either as physicians, nurses or public health workers--and this course will surely be relevant for them. Students will also have the valuable experience of examing an array of primary documents pertaining to African American health care professionals in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the South.

AAS 3749 Food and Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Mon./Wed. 1:00-3:30, Brooks Hall 103

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 or have been forced to move. 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. Topics will include symbol, taboo, sexuality, bodiesm ritual, kinships and beauty among others.

AAS 4080 -Thesis (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

TBA

Advance Research Seminar in History & African American and African Studies

AAS 4501- Politics, Prisons and Punishment (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 066

Advanced Research Seminar in African American and African Studies

AAS  4570 -1 The Black Studies Movement (3)

Instructor: Latasha Levy

Wed. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 168
 

AAS 4570-2 Race, Culture and Inequality (3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Gibson Hall 341

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

AAS 4993 Independent Study

Department of Anthropology

ANTH 3590-1 Care in Africa (3)

Instructor: China Scherz

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 058

In this course we will draw on a series of classic and contemporary works in history and anthropology to come to a better understanding of current debates concerning questions of care in contemporary Africa. Moving out from a set of conversations on slavery and patronage that emerged in the 1970s this course will examine the ways in which care and power cut across discussions three sets of themes: (1) corruption and witchcraft, (2) kinship, marriage, and sexuality, and (3) medicine and health.

Department of History

HIAF 1501 Africa and Virginia (3)

Instructor: James La FLeur

Tues. 3:30-6:00, Nau Hall 341

This seminar explores relationships between Africa and Virginia in the very long run, from earliest arrivals of Angolans near Jamestown in 1619, through Jefferson’s view of the continent and its people, to mass emigration to Liberia after 1820, through dialogues and commerce during colonial overrule in Africa and after independence, and finally to the resurgence in trans-Atlantic families and experiences in the 21st century.

No prior experience studying Africa is expected nor is previous college-level study of History required.

As a first-year and new-student seminar, the course uses a broad topic to provide opportunities to learn and improve skills – in research, analysis, and written and oral communication – broadly applicable towards success at the University and beyond.  As a course in History, it introduces learners to how people (and not just scholars) interested in the past think, and how academic historians do their work with never-straightforward sources (or “evidence”).  To that end, seminar participants will learn through doing, and this will surely include some meetings at the University’s “Special Collections Library,” where we will handle and engage primary sources (e.g., old books and private letters).  Depending on student interest and practicalities, it may also include some site visits to places of significance on Grounds and nearby, as well as interaction (or “fieldwork”) with fellow UVa students whose life experiences transcend any notion of separation between “Africa” and “Virginia.”

Modern African History (3)

Instructor: John Mason

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, Claude Moore Nursing Education G120

Modern African History, explores the history of Africa from the decline of the Atlantic slave trade, in the early nineteenth century, to the present.  Our goal is to examine the historical roots of the continent's present condition.  We will look at the slave trade and its consequences, the growth of African states, the spread of Islam, the European conquest of most of the African continent, African responses to colonial rule, and the reestablishment of African independence.

We will concentrate on three regions: West Africa, especially Nigeria; East Africa, especially Kenya and Ethiopia; and southern Africa, with an emphasis on South Africa.  We will pay particular attention to the ways in which colonialism affected ordinary Africans and to the various strategies that Africans employed to resist, subvert, and accommodate European domination.

HIAF 2002 is an introductory course and assumes no prior knowledge of African history.  There will be two blue book exams -- a mid-term and a final -- and periodic quizzes on the readings.

HIAF 4501 Environment, Health, and Development in Africa (3)

Instructor: James La Fleur

Mon. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 303

This is a discussion- and writing-intensive seminar that explores the changing relationships between people in Africa, their environments (ecological, epidemiological, political, economic, cultural, and more), and their global neighbors from early times to present. Students will discuss issues such as the Columbian exchange, imperialism, wildlife conservation, HIV/AIDS, petroleum oil in Africa, KONY 2012, growing Chinese roles in the continent's future, and the rapidly maturing Ebola crisis.  Emphasis will also be placed on critical appraisal of the role of historic and emerging media in understanding (and sometimes misunderstanding) these problems and in engaging Africans’ own aspirations.  Experience studying Africa and/or any of the course themes is welcomed but not strictly required.  The seminar’s focus is on Africa, but the issues are global and comparative, and therefore course learning is applicable to other places.

Students should have the ability and the motivation to work independently.  They will find that the majority of their efforts are spent outside of the classroom as they prepare for meetings (to read, reflect, and formulate ideas to contribute) and as they make progress on research papers.  Students will indentify research interests and possible resources in the early weeks of the course, and then develop their writing through a series of successive stages, including: topic declaration, working bibliography, two-page précis, rough draft, and ultimately a final draft of approximately 25 pages.  This progressive architecture is supported through continual feedback from the instructor and from peers designated as “writing partners.”  Class meetings are then occasions to share, collaborate, negotiate, develop oral communication skills, and generally enjoy a collegial and intellectually stimulating atmosphere.

This course can be used to fulfill the College’s “second writing requirement,” as well as requirements in “historical perspectives” and “non-Western perspectives.”

 

Department of Politics

Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, Gibson Hall 241

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; not open to students who have taken PLCP 381.

Department of Religious Studies

RELA 2850 Afro Creole Relg in Americas (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, New Cabell Hall 058

This survey lecture course investigates African-inspired religious practices in Latin America and the Caribbean, particularly in those religions--such as Haitian Vodou, Cuban Regla de Ocha (aka "Santería"), and Brazilian Candomblé. By reading ethnographies, we will compare features common to many of these religions-such as polytheism, initiatory secrecy, divination, possession trance, animal sacrifice-as well as differences-such as contrasting evaluations of the devotional use of material objects, relations with the dead, and the commoditization of ritual expertise.  We will consider how devotees deploy the history of slavery and re-interpret African influences in their practices, and evaluate practitioners' and anthropologists' debates about terms such as "Africa," "tradition," "modernity," "creole," and "syncretism.

RELA 3000 Women and Religion in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler- Fatton

Tues./Thurs. 12:30-1:45, Gibson Hall 341

This course examines women’s religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts.  Drawing on ethnographic, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa.  Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the construction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women’s agency in indigenous religious movements, Muslim communities and Christian congregations in Africa.

RELA 3890 Christianity in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler- Fatton

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 332

This course examines the history of Christianity in Africa from its roots in Egypt and the Maghreb in the 2nd c. CE, to contemporary times when nearly half the continent's population claims adherence to the faith. Our historical overview will cover the flowering of medieval Ethiopian Christianity, 16th- and 17th- century Kongolese Christianity, European missions during the colonial period, the subsequent growth of independent churches, the emergence of African Christian theology, and the recent examples of charismatic and Pentecostal “mega-churches.”   We will consider the relationship between colonialism and evangelism; assess efforts in translation and inculturation of the gospel; reflect on the role of healing, prophesy and spirit-possession in conversion, and explore a variety of ways of understanding religious change across the continent.  We will attempt both to position the Christian movement within the wider context of African religious history, and to understand Africa's place in the larger course of Christian history.

Department of Sociology

SOC 4420 Sociology of Inequality (3)

Instructor:  Milton Vickerman

Mon./Wed. 3:30-6:00 New Cabell Hall 115

SOC 4550 Race and Ethics(3)

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15 New Cabell Hall 364

This course will survey theories, concepts, and empirical evidence in sociology that contribute to public debates about race and ethics.  We will consider issues such as affirmative action, deathe penalty sentencing, abortion, race-based medicine, manadatory DNA testing, the legacies of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, the story of of Henrietta Lacks, and more.

SOC 4640 Urban Sociology (3)

Instructor: Ekaterina Makarova

Tues./ Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Dell 2-102

The course explores changing urban live in different cultural, social and historical settings.  It examines both classic and contemporary debates within urban sociology and relates them to the wider concerns of social theory.  Among the topics to be discussed are theories of the everyday developed ins social segregation and urban inequality, cultural meanings of the city, problems of urban policy and planning.

Spring 2016

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

AAS 1020 - Introduction to African American and African Studies II (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Tues/Thurs. 12:30-1:45, Minor Hall 125

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 - 1 Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 2:00-4:30, Physics Bldg 218

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 -2  Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media(3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Wed. 6:00-8:30, New Cabell Hall 383

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 2559 Historical Roots of Black Lives Matter: The NAACP, 1909-1965(3)

Intructor: Latasha Levy

Tues./Thurs 9:30 - 10:45, New Cabell 168​

The contemporary Black Lives Matter movement represents yet another phase in the protracted struggle for Black freedom and human dignity in the African Diaspora. This course explores the history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), founded in 1909, as foundational to understanding the various campaigns to combat anti-Black violence and racial inequality over the course of the twentieth century. Students will examine the ways in which the NAACP's anti-lynching campaigns, civil rights advocacy, and publications provided the foundations of the modern civil rights movement, which raised national consciousness around a fundamental notion that Black lives matter. The course also unpacks the ideological debates within Black political culture that shaped the NAACP's organizational and legislative strategies.

AAS 2559 Swahili Cultures (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon/Wed. 3:30-4:45 - Monroe Hall 118

This is an introductory course to the Swahili cultures. This course offers an in depth understanding of the Swahili people, their cultures, and history. The course will bring to the fore the diversity of issues concerning the Swahili people and the Swahili coast including music, food, clothing, trade, and social and political issues. Students will actively engage in the analytical examination of required readings and express their responses through class discussions and group presentations.

 

Intermediate Seminar in African American and African Studies

AAS 3500-1 Currents on African Literature(3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues/Thurs. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell 303
 

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.

AAS 3500- 2 Slavery to Freedom (3)

Instructor: Giuliana Perrone

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, New Cabell Hall 042

Exactly 150 years ago, the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in the United States. But it also signaled a new beginning for African Americans who would soon be considered citizens for the first time. How should we think about this event in American history? What were its consequences? How was black freedom conceived, and what did it look like once realized? What role did African Americans play in ending the peculiar institution? In what ways did emancipation succeed and in what ways did it fail? Using primary and secondary sources, we will explore these questions.

Beginning with the antebellum period and ending with the arrival of Jim Crow, this course will focus on emancipation as a moment of transition – as one step in the long and difficult process of transforming the nation from “half slave” to fully free. We will address several key themes from this period, including (1) the experience of African Americans as slaves and freedpeople; (2) the role of American law in defining slavery and shaping citizenship; and (3) the politics and economics of slavery, secession, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.

AAS 3500- 3 Race, Medicine and Incarceration (3)

Instructor: Talitha LeFlouria

Mon 3:30-6:00, Wilson Hall 238

The social history of medicine in the black experience has a long and seedy background. This course offers a three tiered approach to understanding the history of black incarceration (broadly defined) and the ways in which the captive black body has functioned as a site of medical exploitation and profit from the period of slavery to the present. Using medicine, race, and gender as critical categories of analysis, this course is designed to help students better understand how the male and female slave, prisoner, asylum “inmate,” and unclaimed “indigent” black body contributed to the development of modern medicine, as experimental subjects and autopsy specimens. Some of the subjects discussed include: the history of slavery and medicine in the American South, the post-Civil War medical crisis in the black community, the rise of convict leasing and the New South penal medical economy, Jim Crow and medical (in)justice in late 19th century America, the rise of the early 20th century eugenics movement and its impact on incarcerated subjects, prison photography and the black body as spectacle and specimen in the modern era, and a host of other related topics. This course is tailored to students interested in the sciences and humanities, and will prove useful for those pursuing careers in the medical profession.

AAS 3500- 4 African American Health Professionals (3)

Instructor: Pamela Reynolds

Wed. 1:00-3:30, New Cabell Hall 064

This course addresses important issues of race and health disparities, as well as offering students an introduction to the understudied history of black medical professionals. Over the past three centuries, African American physicians, dentists, nurses and public health professionals have made major contributions to eliminating health disparities, offering, in many instances, the only source of medical and dental care available. Many of our majors consider a career in medicine--either as physicians, nurses or public health workers--and this course will surely be relevant for them. Students will also have the valuable experience of examing an array of primary documents pertaining to African American health care professionals in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the South.

AAS 3749 Food and Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora (3)

Instructor: Lisa Shutt

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, Shannon House 109

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 or have been forced to move. 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. Topics will include symbol, taboo, sexuality, bodiesm ritual, kinships and beauty among others.

AAS 4080 -Thesis (4)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

TBA

Advance Research Seminar in History & African American and African Studies

AAS 4500-Africa & Mapping Global Blackness (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 395

AAS 4501-The Black Metropolis: African Americans and the City (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon. 1:00-3:30, New Cabell Hall 064

In the first six decades of the twentieth century, over 6 million African Americans left the South in search of a better life in cities in the North.  This course will explore the urbanization of black America and its impact on American culture, politics, and society from the early twentieth century to the present.  We will learn how the urban experience shaped African Americans’ racial identities and struggles for equality.  We will look at how the massive demographic changes to American cities during this period also transformed the nation’s political and social geography, and how the black urban experience changed over time and in relation to larger changes in America’s political economy.  In examining the many facets of the black urban experience, we will pay close attention to: work, employment, and the struggle for economic opportunity; housing, real estate, and residential patterns; schools and education; music, the arts, and expressive culture; law enforcement and police-community relations; and movements for social, political, and economic justice.

AAS 4993 Independent Study

Swahili

Swah 1020 - Introductory Swahili II (3)

Instructor: Anne Rotich

Mon./Wed./Fri. 10:00-10:50 New Cabell Hall 332

Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa.

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00-11:50 New Cabell Hall 332

Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa.

American Studies

AMST 1559 – Slavery and its Legacies(3)

Instructor: Kelley Deetz

Tues./Thurs 2:00-3:15, Clark Hall  101

Slavery and Freedom at UVA and in Central Virginia:  History and Legacies

This course examines the history of slavery and its legacy at UVA and in the central Virginia region.  The course aims to recover the experiences of enslaved individuals and their roles in building and maintaining the university, and to contextualize those experiences within Southern history.  The course is thus an exploration of slave and free black communities, culture and resistance, and an examination of the development of the University of Virginia.  We will put the history of slavery in the region into political context, tracing the rise of sectional tensions and secession, the advent of emancipation, the progress of Reconstruction, and the imposition of Jim Crow.

The course is interdisciplinary in nature, as we will draw on a wide range of fields, such as art history, architecture, and archaeology.  A major focus will be on how we know what we know:  on what archives and other repositories of historical sources hold; on how they were constructed; on what they leave out or obscure; and how scholars overcome the gaps, distortions and silences in the historical record.

The last weeks of the course will focus on 20th century UVA and Charlottesville, and on the issues of segregation and integration, reconciliation and repair; we will connect current initiatives at UVA to represent the history of slavery with initiatives at other universities.

AMST 2559 – Racial Performances

Instructor: Sylvia Chong

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45, Bryan Hall 328

Anthropology

ANTH 2589 – Ancient African Cities (3)

Instructor: Adria Laviolette

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 168

This course surveys current archaeological knowledge about ancient African cities and states, from the Nile Valley civilizations to the Swahili coast to Kongo Mbanza. In addition to presenting the results of archaeological research, we will deal critically with changing historiographic trends about African large-scale societies.

 

ANTH 3310 – Controversies of Care in Contemporary Africa  (3)

Intructor: China Scherz

Tues./Thurs., Ruffner Hall 175

In this course we will draw on a series of classic and contemporary works in history and anthropology to come to a better understanding of current debates concerning corruption and patronage, marriage and sexuality, and medicine in Sub-Saharan Africa.

 

ANTH 5590 – Ethnography of Africa (3)

Instructor: James Igoe

Tues. 4:30-7:00, Nau Hall 341

This seminar will survey important ethnographic from the African Continent, including Madagascar. While we will explore a number of classic works, emphasis will be on works published since 1990. The seminar is aimed at gradua This seminar will survey important ethnographic from the African Continent, including Madagascar. While we will explore a number of classic works, emphasis will be on works published since 1990. The seminar is aimed at graduate students from anthropology and related disciplines. However, advanced undergraduates may also enroll with instructor permission. The students from anthropology and related disciplines. However, advanced undergraduates may also enroll with instructor permission.

 

ANTH 5885 – Archaeology of Colonial Expansion (3)

Instructor: Adria Laviolette

Thurs 4:30-7:00, Wilson Hall 244

Exploration of the archaeology of frontiers, expansions and colonization, focusing on European expansion into Africa and the Americas while using other archaeologically-known examples (e.g., Roman, Bantu) as comparative studies. Prerequisite: For undergraduates, ANTH 4591 senior seminar or instructor permission.

Drama

DRAM 4592 – Hip Hop Theatre (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Tues./Thurs. 2:00- 3:15, Drama Education Bldg 206

 

DRAM 4593 – Poetry in Motion (3)

Instructor: Theresa Davis

Tues./Thurs. 2:00- 3:15, Drama Education Bldg 217

English

ENAM 3140 – African-American Literature II (3)

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 8:00-9:15, Nau Hall 142

This course concentrates on twentieth and twenty-first century African American novels, short stories, and prose essays. This lecture and participation-based class will address literature from pivotal cultural and political moments in African American life, such as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement. Writers include, but are not limited to, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler and Martha Southgate. Mandatory assignments include weekly responses, quizzes, midterm and final exams.

           

ENAM 4840 – Fictions of Black Identity (3)
 

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, Nau Hall 142

This advanced undergraduate seminar will explore the dual meaning of its title “Fictions of Black Identity.” The first implication suggests the literary inventions (novels, essays, critical works) that address the meanings of blackness in an American context. The second meaning is heavily invested in the first: that black identity is a fiction, not necessarily in the sense of falsity, but in its highly mediated, flexible, and variable condition. Questions to consider include: how does one make and measure black identity? Can one be phenotypically white and still be black? What is the value of racial masquerade? What does it mean to be legitimately black? Readings include, but are not limited to, Percival Everett’s Erasure, Rebecca Walker’s Black, White and Jewish, Paul Beatty’s White Boy Shuffle, and a range of critical essays. Mandatory assignments include leading class discussion, midterm project and seminar paper. This class is designed for students majoring in English, African American studies, and/or American studies.

 

ENCR 4500 – Critical Race Theory (3)

Instructor: Marlon Ross

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45, Bryan Hall 310

How has the notion of race shaped, and been shaped by, changing relations to other experiences of identity stemming from gender, sexuality, class, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism?  This course surveys major trends in black literary theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing on a series of critical flashpoints or controversies that have occurred over the last several decades: 1) the crisis over black authenticity during the Black Power/Black Arts movement, focused on the music of James Brown and the poetry of Amiri Baraka; 2) the schisms related to womanism (or women of color feminism), focused on Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple and the reception to its Steven Spielberg film adaptation; 3) the debate over the social construction of race, focused on the work of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Percival Everett’s postmodern novel Not Sidney Poitier; 4) the controversy over the so-called downlow and queer of color critique, focused on two films, Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman and Rodney Evans’ Brother to Brother, 5) the debate over “post-racialism” focused on Afro-optimism/pessimism and the Black Lives Matter movement. While concentrating on theories of race deriving from African American studies, we’ll also touch on key texts from Native American, Chicano/a, Asian American, and postcolonial studies. In addition to the materials listed above, the readings will include a variety of theoretical essays drawn from different disciplines, including legal theory; film and media studies, sociology, history, political theory, and hip hop studies. The goal of the course is to give you a solid grounding in the vocabulary, key figures, concepts, debates, and discursive styles comprising the broad sweep of theoretical race studies from the late-twentieth century to the present, and to nurture your own theorizing about race and its deep cultural impact.  Graded assignments include two class presentations, two short position papers, and a 15-page term paper.

 

ENAM 4500 – Race in American Places (3)

Instructor: Ian Grandison

Tues.5:00-7:00, Nau Hall 241

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 launchour 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.

 

ENLT 2513: Crossings: Race and Trans-Atlantic American Literature (3)

Instructor: Sarah Ingle

Mon./Wed./Fr. 10:00-10:50, New Cabell Hall 309

This course will explore American literature from a trans-Atlantic perspective, focusing on "crossings" both literal and metaphorical. We will examine how works of American literature both reflect and respond to the construction and the permeability of racial and national boundaries. Assigned readings will include texts by authors such as Olaudah Equiano, Thomas Jefferson, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Pauline Hopkins, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Derek Walcott, Barbara Kingsolver, Caryl Phillips, and Edwidge Danticat. Students are encouraged to take advantage of the fact that Caryl Phillips will be at UVA in April as the Kapnick Distinguished Writer-in-Residence by attending his readings and lectures on campus. Our discussions will explore how the texts on our syllabus interrogate concepts such as race, ethnicity, culture, gender, and citizenship and how they represent the complex web of history, memory, and myth that ties them to the past. Class requirements include three essays, weekly email responses, an oral presentation, a final exam, and active participation in class discussions.

 

ENMC 3310 – Major African Americans Poets (3)
 

Instructor: Marvin Campbell

Mon./Wed./ Fri., 11:00-11:50, Gibson Hall 242

This course will explore the category, history, and development of African-American poetry over the course of the twentieth and twenty first centuries, spanning from the Harlem Renaissance to our contemporary moment, to examine how long poems of the tradition challenge distinctions between genres and interact with the musical forms of jazz, blues, and hip-hop, as well as reflect the aesthetic, cultural, and critical legacy of African-American poetics.  We will also consider the myriad ways in which these poets have responded to the pressures of history, situating their investigations of literary form and oral traditions in the context of the emergence of "the New Negro," the Civil Rights Movement, the rise of black feminism, and the #BlackLivesMatter movement.  Authors will include: Langston Hughes, Robert Hayden, James Weldon Johnson, Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks, Claude McKay, Melvin Tolson, and Claudia Rankine.

In addition to active class discussion, assignments will include two shorter papers, various unconventional class exercises, and a longer research paper.

 

ENMC 3500 – Currents in African Literature (3)

Instructor: Njelle Hamilton

Tues./Thurs. 2:00-3:15, New Cabell Hall 303

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.

French

FREN 3570 – African Literatures and Cultures (3)

Instructor: Kandioura Dramé

Tues./Thurs. 3:30-4:45, New Cabell Hall 207

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

HISTORY

HIAF 3559 – Slavery in the Atlantic World (3)

Instructor: Christina Mobley

Mon./Wed./Fri. 11:00-11:50, New Cabell Hall 058

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new topic in the subject area of African History.

 

HIAF 4501 – African Atlantic World History (3)

Instructor: Christina Mobley

Mon. 1:00-3:00, Nau Hall 241

 

HIUS 3072 – The Civil War and Reconstruction (3)

Gary Gallagher

Examines the course of the Civil War and Reconstruction in detail and attempts to assess their impact on 19th century American society, both in the North and in the South.

 

 

HIUS 3231 - Rise and Fall of the Slave South (3)

Instructor: Elizabeth Varon

Mon./Wed. 10:00-10:50, Nau Hall 211

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.

 

HIUS 4501 - Black Power (3)

Instructor: Claudrena Harold

Thurs. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 027

Over the course of the semester, students will examine the dynamic ways people of African descent in the United States have struggled for cultural, economic, and political empowerment within the context of a white supremacist culture. Much of the class will focus on the 1960s and the 1970s; however, previous and subsequent periods will also be analyzed. Students should leave this class with not only a broader knowledge of “Black Power” as a cultural, political, and ideological movement, but also with a more nuanced understanding of the research methods and interpretive frameworks utilized by historians, as well as other social scientists, interested in Black Power in particular and the Black freedom struggle in general. Students will also have the opportunity to further develop their research skills and techniques through a series of assignments designed to assist them in identifying research topics and questions, interpreting primary and secondary texts, and substantiating arguments with “sound” evidence.

It bears mentioning that this course will devote significant attention to the local dimension of Black Power by engaging student activism on UVA’s campus between 1968 and 1984. Significant attention will be given to students’ fight for a Black Studies department at UVA, their massive demonstrations against racial apartheid in South Africa, and their general struggle to make the University a more egalitarian place.

HIUS 4501 – African Americans and the City (3)

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl

Mon. 1:00-3:30, New Cabell Hall 064

In the first six decades of the twentieth century, over 6 million African Americans left the South in search of a better life in cities in the North.  This course will explore the urbanization of black America and its impact on American culture, politics, and society from the early twentieth century to the present.  We will learn how the urban experience shaped African Americans’ racial identities and struggles for equality.  We will look at how the massive demographic changes to American cities during this period also transformed the nation’s political and social geography, and how the black urban experience changed over time and in relation to larger changes in America’s political economy.  In examining the many facets of the black urban experience, we will pay close attention to: work, employment, and the struggle for economic opportunity; housing, real estate, and residential patterns; schools and education; music, the arts, and expressive culture; law enforcement and police-community relations; and movements for social, political, and economic justice.

Music

MUSI 3090 - Performance in Africa (3)

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk

Tues., Old Caebll Hall 107

This course explores performance in Africa through reading, discussion, audio and video examples and hands-on practice. The course meets together with MUSI 3690 (African Drumming and Dance Ensemble), but it is a full academic course. Students in 3090 are automatically part of the UVA African Music and Dance Ensemble. Your role in the Ensemble as learner and performer is crucial to your overall work in the course. We will explore African music/dance styles – focusing on Ewe music from Ghana and Togo and BaAka music from the Central African Republic, but branching to other forms and genres – their sociomusical circumstances and processes, as well as performed resistances and responses to the colonial and post/neo-colonial encounter. In addition, we will address the politics and processes involved in translating performance practices from one cultural context to another.

Politics

PLAP 3700 Racial Politics (3)

Instructor: Lynn Sanders

Tues./ Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Gibson Hall 341

 

PLAP 4810 Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa(3)

Instructor: Robert Fatton

Thurs 3:30-6:00, Gibson Hall 341

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; not open to students who have taken PLCP 381.

Religion

RELA 3559 – Magic and Witchcraft (3)

Instructor: Jalane Schmidt

Tues./Thurs. 9:30-10:45, Gibson Hall 141

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of African Religions.

 

RELA 3900 – Islam in Africa (3)

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Mon./Wed. 1:00-1:50, Gilmer Hall 141

This course offers an historical and topical introduction to Islam in Africa.  After a brief overview of the central tenets and rituals of the Muslim faith, our chronological survey begins with the introduction of Islam to North Africa in the 7th century.  We will trace the transmission of Islam via traders and clerics to West Africa.  We will consider the medieval Muslim kingdoms; the development of Islamic scholarship and the reform tradition; the growth of Sufi brotherhoods; and the impact of European colonization and de-colonization upon African Muslims. We will also consider distinctive aspects of Islam in East Africa, such as the flowering of Swahili devotional literature, and the tradition of saint veneration. 

Readings and classroom discussions provide a more in-depth exploration of topics and themes encountered in our historical survey.  Through the use of ethnographic and literary materials, we will explore issues such as the translation and transmission of the Qur'an, indigenization and religious pluralism; the role of women in African Islam; and African Islamic spirituality. This course meets the Historical Studies requirement, as well as the Non-Western Perspectives requirement.  One prior course on Islam or African religions is recommended.

 

RELA 4085 – Christian Missions in Contemporary Africa (3)

Instructor:Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton 

Tues. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 309

An examination of Christian missions in Africa in the 21st Century. Through a variety of disciplinary lenses and approaches, we examine faith-based initiatives in Africa--those launched from abroad, as well as from within the continent. What does it mean to be a missionary in Africa today? How are evangelizing efforts being transformed in response to democratization, globalization and a growing awareness of human rights?

RELG 3800 – African American Religious History (3)

Instructor: Heather Warren

Wed. 3:30-6:00, New Cabell Hall 303

This course will explore African American religious traditions in their modern and historical contexts, combining an examination of current scholarship, worship and praxis. It will examine the religious life and religious institutions of African Americans from their African antecedents to contemporary figures and movements in the US.

Sociology

SOC 3410 - Race and Ethnic Relations (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon./Wed. 2:00-3:15, Maury 115

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 4640 - Urban Sociology (3)

Instructor: Ekaterina Makarova

Tues./Thurs. 11:00-12:15, Nau Hall 142

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.

 

SOC 4750 – Racism (3)

Instructor: Milton Vickerman

Mon./Wed. 5:00-6:00, New Cabell Hall 068

Racism, the disparagement and victimization of individuals and groups because of a belief that their ancestry renders them intrinsically different and inferior, is a problem in many societies. In this course we will examine the problem of racism by investigating the workings of these sociological processes theoretically, historically, and contemporaneously.

Spring 2017

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

AAS 1020 – Introduction to African American and African Studies II

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.

 

AAS 2224 – Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

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.

 

AAS 3500-001 – Currents in African Literature

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.

 

AAS 3500-002: History of the Civil Rights Movement

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.

 

AAS 3500-003: Slavery Since Emancipation

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.  

 

AAS 3500-004: Being Human: Race, Technology, Performance

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.

 

AAS 3500-005: African American Literature

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. 

 

AAS 3500-006: Black Fire

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.

 

AAS 3500-007: Race, Culture and Inequality

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

 

AAS 3652: African American History since 1865

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.

 

AAS 3749: Food and Meaning in Africa and the Diaspora

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.

 

AAS 4109: The Civil Rights Movement and the Media

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.

 

AAS 4570-001: Queer Africas

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.

 

AAS 4570-002: Black Radicalism and the Artistic Imagination

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?

American Studies

AMST 2155-001 Whiteness and Religion: Religious Foundations of a Racial Category

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.

 

AMST 2753: Arts and Cultures of the Slave South         

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

AMST 3559- 2 -  Hip-Hop As Technology

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.

AMST 3559 - 3 - Cultures of Hip-Hop (3)

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.

 

AMST 3559-003 Multimedia Harlem Renaissance

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.

 

AMST 4500-1 Race and Sound

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.

 

AMST 4559-1 Race in American Places

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.

AMST 4500 - 3  Race, Space, and Culture (3)

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.

 

Anthropology

ANTH 2625-001 Imagining Africa

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

 

ANTH 3455-001, ANTH 7455 African Languages

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.

Swahili

SWAH 1020- Introductory Swahili II

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

WAH 2020-001 Intermediate Swahili II

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.

 

DRAMA

DRAM 3070-001 African-American Theatre

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

ENGLISH

ENAM 3140-001 African-American Literature II

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

 

Black Power and the Bildungsroman: From Richard Wright’s Black Boy to Marvel’s Luke Cage

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

 

FRENCH

FREN 3570-001 Topics in Francophone African Studies

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

 

 

FREN 4743-001 AFRICA IN CINEMA

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.

History

HIAF 2002 Modern African History

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.

 

HIAF 4511-001/ HIAF 5559-001 Colloquium in African History

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.

 

HIUS 3231 Rise and Fall of the Slave South

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.

 

HIUS 3652-001 Afro-American History Since 1865

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.

 

HIUS 3671-001 History of the Civil Rights Movement

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.

 

HIUS 4501-005 Seminar in United States History: Capitalism and Slavery

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.

 

Politics

PLCP 4500-002 Inequalities

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.

 

PLCP 4652-001 Markets, Inequality and the Politics of Development

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.

 

PLCP 4810 Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

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.

                                                            

Religion

RELA 2750 African Religions

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.

 

RELA 3351-001 African Diaspora Religions

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

 

 

 

RELA 3730-001 Religious Themes in African Literature and Film

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.

Sociology

SOC 2442-100 Systems of Inequality

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.

 

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

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.

 

SOC 4640 Urban Sociology

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.

Spring 2018

View current course listings page

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.

Spring 2019 Undergraduate Courses

View current course listings page

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 1010. 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 2559-002 – Introduction to African Languages and Literature

Professor Anne Rotich

MoWeFr 1-1:50pm

This course is a survey of literary texts in English by contemporary African writers. Students will develop an appreciation for different languages and an understanding of issues that preoccupy African writers and the literary strategies that they employ in their work. Students will read a variety of texts including novels, short stories, poetry, film and songs and critically analyze the cultural and aesthetics of the literary landscape. Particular attention will be on how authors engage themes such as identity, patriarchy, gender, class, and politics in post-colonial structures. Students are expected to actively engage in an analysis and exploration of the required literary works and to express their responses through class discussions, group presentations and the writing of analytical essays. 

AAS 2559-003 – Remixing Slavery: Radical Retellings of Enslavement through Music, Comedy, and Other Arts

Professor Tony Perry

Time TBA

When it comes to the story of slavery in the U.S., scholarly studies continue to dominate how this narrative is told and by whom. While much knowledge has come from such scholarship, academics represent one of several groups who have taken up the history of slavery and narrated some dimension of it. In this course, we will engage the work of musicians, visual artists, comedians, authors, and others who have remixed, reworked, and retooled traditional narratives of slavery. In their radical retellings, these storytellers confront, sit with, and sort through a past very much present in the world. In doing so, these individuals go beyond the scholar’s effort of making knowledge to provide a range of possibilities for reckoning with the present history of American slavery. Looking to people such as Octavia Butler, Jay Electronica, Dave Chappelle, Ava DuVernay, and Kara Walker, we will examine many of these representations against the backdrop of more traditional academic narratives and find our own ways to tell these not-so-old stories anew.

AAS 2740 – Peoples and Cultures of Africa

Professor Lisa Shutt

Wed 2-4:30pm

In this course, students will gain an understanding of the richness and variety of African life.  While no course of this kind can hope to give more than a broad overview of the continent, students will learn which intellectual tools and fundamental principles are necessary for approaching the study of the hundreds of cultural worlds that exist today on the African continent.  This course will draw from ethnographic texts, literary works and film.

AAS 3000 -- Women and Religion in Africa

Professor Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

This course examines women's religious activities, traditions and spirituality in a number of different African contexts. Drawing on ethnographis, historical, literary, and religious studies scholarship, we will explore a variety of themes and debates that have emerged in the study of gender and religion in Africa.  Topics will include gendered images of sacred power; the constuction of gender through ritual; sexuality and fertility; and women.

AAS 3500-001 -- "Who you calling a B**CH?!?: Queen Latifiah to Nicki Minaj and the Sexual Politics of Hip Hop."

Professor Dionne Bailey

Tu 6-8:30pm

This course, through a close examination of critical feminist and queer theory, will explore the cultural and political implications of hip hop music and culture – specifically its impact on Black sexual politics and gender performance from the origins of early artist like Salt-n-Pepa, MC Lyte, and Queen Latifah to today's leading artist including Kash Doll, Cardi B, and Nicki Minaj. 

AAS 3500-002 -- Black Women Makes Movies

Professor Nzingha Kendall

Mo 6-8:30pm

Does it matter who directs the films we watch? When black women are behind the camera what do they see? When black women are the audience what do they see? What is different about watching films through black women’s perspectives? This course will tackle these questions and more. An overview of the exciting and varied work of black women filmmakers from across the diaspora, Black Women Make Movies offers an exploration of how the films black women makedefy easy categorization. In this course we will develop a collective practice of critique in order to understand how black women’s films might reshape our conceptions of the world.

AAS 3500-004 -- Being Human: Race, Technology, Performance

Professor Njelle Hamilton

MoWe 2-3:15pm

This course is an introduction to Afrofuturism, exploring race and alienness, race and technology, and race and modernity through global futuristic representations of blackness in TV (Star Trek, Extant, Almost Human), film (Black Panther, Hidden Figures), music (Janelle Monáe, Sun Ra), art (Kehinde Wiley, Ebony Patterson), and literature (Nalo Hopkinson, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor). In this discussion-based seminar, we will trace “like race” tropes in sci-fi, including aliens, monsters, and invisibility. We will query the ways that science and technology played a part in the dehumanization of blackness, and how artists and author of color employ science/technology/sci-fi to grapple with contemporary and historical issues and to imagine places and conditions where blackness can thrive. Assignments will include literary essays and creative work (short films, artwork, poetry, performance pieces, web-content etc) that reimagine and interrogate representations of race and science/technology in contemporary media. Creative writers, artists, and performers are especially welcome, but no creative background is required for success in the course.

AAS 3500-005 -- African American Health Professionals

Professor Pamela Reynolds

Mon 3:30-6pm

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

AAS 3500-006 -- Introduction to Caribbean Studies

Professor Claire Antone Payton

Th 3:30-6pm

The Caribbean is both a tranquil beach paradise and the origin of some of the most radical revolutionary movements in the history. It supplied the West with one the world's most delightful substances, sugar, but only at the cost of enormous suffering of millions of enslaved Africans. The Caribbean is where concepts of racial difference were invented. It is where the world’s wealthiest can store billions in off-shore bank accounts and where, a few miles away, people can die of hunger and curable diseases. Despite their small size, more than a dozen languages are spoken across the islands, a linguistic indicator of their lasting global connections. It is where centuries of structural and physical violence produced some of the most startlingly creative and dynamic cultures in the world.

Where is the Caribbean among all these contradictions? That is the question that will guide us through this course.  Is it in “the United States' backyard?” Is it at the meeting point of different cultures, an “estuary of the Americas?” Is it tiny or vast? Is it in the center or on the periphery? In this class, we will use nonfiction, fiction, and visual materials as transportation to travel through different Caribbean spaces. We will visit its tourist resorts and shantytowns, its cane fields and sports fields, its oceans and forests. We will learn about its history, geography, environment, the spatial organization of its societies, and its places of cultural meaning. These different itineraries will introduce students to the dynamics of race, capitalism, domination, revolution, and cultural innovation that, when braided together, make our modern world. By the end of the semester, student will be able to locate Caribbean islands not just on a map, but at the center of some of today's most burning political, cultural, and economic issues. 

AAS 3500-008 – African American Literature II

Professor Maurice Wallace

MoWeFr 10-10:50am

Students need not have taken African American Literature I in order to take this course. African American II is a cross-genre survey of African-American literature from the close of the Harlem Renaissance to the present. We will pay close attention to significant formal innovations and thematic preoccupations that define this literature. The primary goal of this course is to provide students with a broad knowledge of African American literature and cultural production after 1940. We will trace and critically analyze the social, cultural, and political environments that informed the production and circulation of these works.  

AAS 3500-009 -- Afro-Latino Literature

Professor Ethan Madarieta

MoWe 3:30-4:45

This courses focuses on novels by Africans, Latinxs, or Afro-Latinxs, and about Afro-Latinxs: people of both African and Latin American descent living in the United States. In one novel, A Nigerian Salvadoreño artist in Los Angeles becomes the Virgin of Guadalupe. In another, an Afro-Puertoriqueña navigates life in Brooklyn with the help of her ancestors. In a third, a young Dominicano grows up in New Jersey with the help of SciFi in his search for decolonial love. 

Through these works we will explore representations of Afro-Latinidad in order to better understand the complexities of blackness and race in transnational frame—in Latin America and the United States more broadly. We will use this understanding to imagine the ways in which everyday practices work to dismantle colonial systems of power and dominance

AAS 3652 – African American History since 1865

Professor Andrew Kahrl

TuTh 2-3:15pm

This course surveys the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Through an engagement with various primary and secondary texts, and multimedia, students examine African Americans' endeavors to build strong families and communities, create socially meaningful art, and establish a political infrastructure capable of bringing into existence a more just and humane world.

AAS 3810 – 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 4570 -- African American Political Writing

Professor Kevin Gaines

MoWe2-3:15pm

In this seminar we will read and discuss several classic nonfiction and fiction books by African American writers that, in various ways, sought to counter the assault on U.S. black lives, livelihoods, and political rights after Reconstruction, a period that historians have called the Nadir, or low point, in African American history.  These writings established the major political and ideological strategies for black protest and social advancement before the militant political and cultural movement known as the "New Negro," and we can discern in them the origins of such past and contemporary discourses as Black Lives Matter, African American nationalism, radicalism, pan-Africanism, conservatism, and feminism.   Authors include W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sutton E. Griggs.

AAS 4725 – Queer Africas

Professor Kwame Otu

Tu 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.   

SWAHILI

SWAH 1020--Introductory Swahili II

Professor Anne Rotich

(13997) MoWeFr 10 - 10:50AM

Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa

(12859) MoWeFr 11 - 11:50AM

Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa

 

SWAH 2020 -- Intermediate Swahili II

Professor Anne Rotich

MoWeFr 12 - 12:50PM

 

ANTHROPOLOGY

ANTH 3310 -- Controversies of Care in Contemporary Africa

Professor China Scherz

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

In this course we will draw on a series of classic and contemporary works in history and anthropology to come to a better understanding of current debates concerning corruption and patronage, marriage and sexuality, and medicine in Sub-Saharan Africa.

ANTH 3455 -- African Languages

Professor Samuel Beer

TuTh9:30-10:45am

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.

HISTORY OF ART

ARTH 2559 -- African Art

Professor Giulia Paoletti

TuTH 11am-12:15pm

DRAMA

Dram 4592--001 Performing Race and Citizenship

Professor Katelyn Wood

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

Dram 4592-- 002 Hip Hop Theatre

Professor Theresa Davis

TuTh 2-3:15pm

A directed study in dramatic literature, history, theory or criticism offered to upper-level students. Prerequisite: Instructor permission

Dram 4593--002 Poetry in Action: Say Word!

Professor Theresa Davis

A directed study in acting or performance offered to upper-level students. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

ENGLISH

ENAM 3559 -- Conjuring Race and Gender

Professor Sarah Ingle

TuTh 2-3:15pm

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

ENCR4500 -- Critical Race Theory

Professor Marlon Ross

Tu 5:30-8pm

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, religion, disability, multiculturalism, nationality, and globalism? This course surveys major trends in black literary and cultural theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing on a series of critical flashpoints that have occurred over the last several decades. These flashpoints include: 1) the crisis over black authenticity during the Black Power/Black Arts movement; 2) the schisms related to womanism (or 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’ 2016 film Moonlight; 5) the inequitable consequences of design and planning decisions that perpetuate racial, social, and economic segregation; 6) controversies over hip hop culture; 7) racial violence and the law, focused on the Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement; and 8) the aesthetic movement called Afrofuturism. Other reading will include a variety of theoretical essays and chapters drawn from different disciplines, including legal theory, film and media studies, sociology, history, political theory, and hip hop studies. While concentrating on theories of race deriving from African American studies, we’ll also touch on key texts from Native American, Asian and Asian-American, and Chicanx studies. The goal of the course is to give you a solid grounding in the vocabulary, key figures, concepts, debates, and discursive styles comprising the broad sweep of theoretical race studies from the late-twentieth century to the present, and to nurture your own theorizing about race and its deep cultural impact. 

ENLT 2547 -- Black Writers in America

Professor Dionte Harris

TuTh 12:30-1:45pm

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 2555 -- Landscapes of Black Education

Professor K. Ian Grandison

TuTh 5-6:15pm

This course examines how seemingly ordinary spaces and places around us, “landscapes,” are involved in the struggle to democratize education in the United States. It focuses on African American education. We explore how landscape is implicated in the secret prehistory of Black education under enslavement; the promise of public education during Reconstruction; Booker T. Washington’s accommodation during early Jim Crow; black college campus rebellions of the 1920s; the impact of Brown v. Board of Education, the rise of black studies programs at majority campuses in the 1960s and ‘70s; and the persistence of separate and unequal education in our current moment. We also touch on the experience of other marginalized groups, especially Native Americans and women. For example, women’s college campuses, such as those of Mount Holyoke and Smith College, were designed to discipline women to accept prescribed gender roles at the height of the women’s suffrage movement. There is a mandatory day-long field trip to the historically black Virginia State University and to Petersburg. Some of the materials include excerpts from the following: Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery, W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, Raymond Wolters’ The New Negro on Campus, James D. Anderson’s The Education of Blacks in the South, and Helen Lefkowitz’s Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges. Films include With All Deliberate Speed and Honey-Coated Arsenic. We’ll learn to read and use historical and contemporary maps, plans, and other design-related materials. Assignments include a midterm, team-led student discussions, a team research project, a critical field trip reflection paper and revision, and a final critical reflection on the team project.

ENLS 3559 -- From the Margins to the Center--African American English

Professor C. Chic Smith

TuTh 11:00-12:15PM

Black English, Negro dialect, Ebonics, Black English, slang, and African American English Vernacular (AAEV) are just a few of the names that have been used historically to describe the form of communication that occurs among and between many African Americans.  Rickford & Rickford (2000) define AAEV as the informal speech of many African Americans.  The belief that AAEV is a derogatory or demeaning manner in which to speak has been ingrained in the psyche of America and Americans.  This ideology has remained intact until recently.

This course examines the communicative practices of AAEV to explore how a marginalized language dynamic has made major transitions into American mainstream.  AAEV is no longer solely the way Black people speak; it is now the way Americans speak.

ENLT 2555 -- Performing Race and Ethnicity

Professor Sarah Ingle

TuTh 9:30AM - 10:45AM

Usually an introduction to non-traditional or specialized topics in literary studies, (e.g., native American literature, gay and lesbian studies, techno-literacy, Arthurian romance, Grub Street in eighteenth-century England, and American exceptionalism). For more details on this class, please visit the department website at http://www.engl.virginia.edu/courses.

ENWR 3500 -- Black Women's Writing and Rhetoric

Professor Tamika Carey

TuTh 12:30PM - 1:45PM

This class explores how writing can be used for social action through an exploration of the rhetorical strategies and arguments of Black women writers, a group that has consistently used pen and voice to empower themselves and their communities, address injustices, advocate for civil and human rights, spark social movements, and tell their own stories. Students will read a combination of scholarship in rhetorical theory by writers that include Jacqueline Jones Royster, Gwendolyn Pough, and Elaine Richardson and primary works by such figures as Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Anna Julia Cooper, Claudia Jones, Angela Davis, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Joan Morgan, and the Crunk Feminist Collective. They will also deliver an oral-presentation, write two short essays, and complete an end of the semester research project. This work will enable students to grapple with questions about the role of representation and power systems in shaping group subjectivity and life, which rhetorical situations and exigencies inspire these writers to take action, which topics they invoke when taking up matters of social justice, which genres, tropes, discourse strategies, and arguments Black women writers find most useful, and which literacies and theories they develop and rely on to do this work. By addressing these questions, students will fulfill the goal of this course, which is to learn how cultural groups such as Black women employ rhetoric as techne, or an artistic skill, to meet their needs, and how these rhetorics can be used to interpret, critique, and intervene in negative social conversations and conditions shaping their lives.

FRENCH

FREN 4743 Africa in Cinema

Professor Kandioura Dramé

TuTh 2 3:15PM

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.

FREN 5581 Francophone African Literature

Professor Kandioura Dramé

Th 3:30- 6:00PM

Topics may include: Francophone novel, colonial literature and visual culture, postcolonial literature and cinema, Francophone Theater & Poetry,

 

HISTORY

HIAF 1501 -- Runaways and Revolutionaries

Professor James La Fleur

Th 3-6:00PM

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.

HIAF 1501--Introductory Seminar in African History

Professor Christina Mobley

Mo 3:30 -6:00PM

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.

HIAF 2002 -- Modern African History

Professor John Mason

TuTh 9-10:45AM

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 3031-- History of the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

Professor Christina Mobley

MoWe 2-3:15PM

This course concerns the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with an emphasis on African history. Through interactive lectures, in-class discussions, written assignments and examinations of first-hand accounts by slaves and slavers, works of fiction and film, and analyses by historians, we will seek to understand one of the most tragic and horrifying phenomena in the history of the western world.

HIAF 3112--African Environmental History

Professor James Le Fleur

TuTh 2-3:15PM

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.

HIUS 2053--American Slavery

Professor Justene Hill

MoWe 11-11:50AM

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

HIUS 3231--Rise and Fall of the Slave South

Professor Elizabeth Varon

MoWe 9-9:50AM

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

HIUS 3654 --Black Fire

Professor Claudrena Harold

TuTh 11AM - 12:15PM

This course examines the history and contemporary experiences of African Americans at the University of Virginia from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the present era.

 

HIUS 3671 -- History of the Civil Rights Movement

Professor Kevin Gaines

MoWeFr 9-9:50AM

This course examines the history and legacy of the African American struggle for civil rights in twentieth century America. It provides students with a broad overview of the civil rights movement -- the key issues, significant people and organizations, and pivotal events -- as well as a deeper understanding of its scope, influence, legacy, and lessons for today

 

MEDIA STUDIES

MDST 3406 -- The Wire: Understanding Urban America Through Television at Its Best

Professor Bruce Williams

TuTh 11AM - 12:15PM

This class explores HBO's The Wire as an examination of race, class, and economic change in urban America. We examine the series as a creative work which balances a commitment to realism with the demands of television drama. Students will view episodes of The Wire and read material on urban America, the changing contours of television, and the series itself. Requisites: Permission of Instructor

MDST 3740 --Cultures of Hip-Hop

Professor Jack Hamilton

MoWe 2 - 3:15PM

This course explores the origins and impacts of American hip-hop as a cultural form in the last forty years, and maps the ways that a local subculture born of an urban underclass has risen to become arguably the dominant form of 21st-century global popular culture. While primarily focused on music, we will also explore how forms such as dance, visual art, film, and literature have influenced and been influenced by hip-hop style and culture.

MDST 3760 -- #BlackTwitter and Black Digital Culture

Professor Melissa Clark

We 6 - 8:30PM

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 Media

Professor Aniko Bodroghkozy

TuTh 12:30 - 1:45PM

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.

PAVILION SEMINARS

PAVS 4500--Inequality in America

Professor Justene Hill

MoWe 2:00PM - 3:15PM

N.B for AAS Majors and Minors: this course counts toward the Race and Politics in the US requirement for the AAS Major/Minor.

The Pavilion Seminars are open, by instructor permission, to 3rd and 4th year students. They are 3-credit, multidisciplinary seminars, focused on big topics and limited to max. 15 students each. For detailed descriptions of current offerings, see http://college.artsandsciences.virginia.edu/PAVS.

POLITICS

PLAP 3500--Race and the Obama Presidency

Professor Larycia Hawkins

TuTh 12:30 - 1:45PM

Religious Studies

RELG 1500 -- Religion, Race, and Democracy

Professor Larycia Hawkins

TuTh 2 - 3:15PM

These seminars introduce first- and second-year students to the academic study of religion through a close study of a particular theme or topic. Students will engage with material from a variety of methodological perspectives, and they will learn how to critically analyze sources and communicate their findings. The seminars allow for intensive reading and discussion of material. Not more than two Intro Seminars may count towards the Major.

Sociology

SOC 2442--Systems of Inequality

Professor Milton Vickerman

MoWe 12-12:50PM

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.

 

SOC 3410 -- Race and Ethnic Relations

Professor Milton Vickerman

MoWe 3:30- 4:45PM

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 11:00AM - 12:15PM

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

SOC 4750 -- Racism

Professor Rose Buckelew

TuTh 12:30PM - 1:45PM

Racism, the disparagement and victimization of individuals and groups because of a belief that their ancestry renders them intrinsically different and inferior, is a problem in many societies. In this course we will examine the problem of racism by investigating the workings of these sociological processes theoretically, historically, and contemporaneously.

SPANISH

SPAN 4500 -- Afro-Latinidad

Professor Anne Mahler

TuTh 2-3:15pm

Prerequisite: SPAN 3010, 3300, and 3 credits of 3400-3430, or departmental placement.

Spring 2020 Undergraduate Courses

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

 

AAS 1020 Introduction to African American and African Studies II

Professor Ashon Crawley

TuTh 12:30PM - 1:45PM

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

Fulfills: 1020 requirement

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

Professor Lisa Shutt

Tu 2:00 - 4:30PM

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.

Fulfills: Race and Politics in the US

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

We 2:00 - 4:30PM

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.

Fulfills: Race and Politics in the US

AAS 2224-003 Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Professor Lisa Shutt

Th 2:00 - 4:30PM

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.

Fulfills: Race and Politics in the US

AAS 2559-001 Reckoning with Slavery

Professor Tony Perry

We 3:30 - 6:00PM

It’s one thing to study slavery. It’s something altogether different to confront, sit with, and absorb this foundational experience in African-American, American, and global history. While much knowledge has come from the scholarly study of slavery, academics represent only one of several groups who have taken up this history and narrated some dimension of it. In this course, we will engage the work of musicians, visual artists, comedians, authors, and others who reckon with this difficult past by remixing, reworking, and retooling traditional narratives of enslavement.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

AAS 2559-002 The Souls of Black Folk

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 11:00AM - 12:15PM

This course places W.E.B. Du Bois’s classic text, The Souls of Black Folk, and other writings by Du Bois in dialogue with historical and contemporary research about the social organization of African Americans’ lives. We will discuss African Americans’ social status and experiences at the intersections of class, color, gender and sexuality. We also will study institutions within the community and consider social issues that African Americans will face in the future. 

Fulfills: Social Science or History

AAS 3200 Martin, Malcolm and America

Professor Mark Hadley

TuTh 9:30 - 10:45AM

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.

Fulfills: Humanities

AAS 3300 Social Science Perspectives on African American and African Studies

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 8:00 - 9:15AM

This course will focus on major debates, theories, and methodological approaches in the social sciences that contribute to African American Studies. The course helps students to consider how a multidisciplinary approach enriches efforts to analyze such issues as health disparities, education, and incarceration as they relate to the African Diaspora.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

AAS 3500-001 Race in Early America

Professor Tony Perry

We 3:30 - 6:00PM

As a category of social difference and identity, race has a long and complex past in the U.S. This class will explore the emergence and impact of race from the pre-colonial period through much of the 19th century, focusing in particular on different points of contact between indigenous Americans, African and African-Americans, and Europeans. In this course students will study the early history of race in America utilizing multiple theories of race as well as analyzing race as necessarily informed by gender, class, and ethnicity.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

AAS 3500-002 Aesthetics of Black Cinema

Professor Nzingha Kendall

Mo 6:00 - 8:30PM

In this course we will explore the look and feel of Black films from around the world.

AAS 3500-003 Enviornmental Justice Across the Globe

Professor Kimberly Fields

We 3:30 - 6:00PM

This course examines from multiple perspectives issues of environmental quality and social justice across the globe. We will start from the premise that all people have a right to live in a clean environment free from hazardous pollution or contamination, and to the natural resources necessary to sustain health and livelihood. We will investigate how and why the resources people need to flourish varies across the globe. In some cases, these resources are air, soil or water. In other instances they may include healthy fisheries, forests, or land to farm or graze animals on. With this as our starting point, we will question why, and through what social, political and economic processes, some people are denied this basic right. How is it that certain groups of people do not have access to basic resources, or are systematically burdened with pollution or environmental hazards to a greater extent than other groups? To what extent  is environmental inequality a global phenomenon? What explains the patterns in environmental inequality observed throughout the world? What are the social relations of production and power that contribute to these outcomes? What can be done? We begin by examining the relationship between environmental justice and globalization, and the global distribution of environmental benefits and burdens and explanations for that distribution. We then examine struggles for environmental justice in diverse regions of the world, as well as government responses to those struggles. We will explore these issues through a series of case studies of environmental (in)justice in South America, Africa, Asia and the Carribbean. Through these case studies we will examine environmental justice issues in urban and rural settings; the strategies and politics of poor peoples’ environmental justice movements.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

AAS 3500-004 Race, Law and the American Consitution

We 6:30 - 9:00PM

Professor Kimberly Fields

This course will explore the relationship between race, the American Constitution and the law. We will read original documents, including excerpts of trial transcripts, appellate opinions, treatises, codes, and first-person narratives.  We will study the way law, politics and culture interact(ed) to shape the Constitution, various laws and development of modern conceptions of race. Course lectures and discussions will focus on questions such as: In what ways did slavery influence the U.S. Constitution? How has race shaped citizenship in the U.S and laws around privacy, free speech, gun rights, religion, association, voting rights, and commerce.

Fulfills: Race and Politics in the US; Social Science or History

AAS 3500-005 African American Health Professionals

Professor Pamela Reynolds

Mo 6:00 - 8:30PM

This course will explore race and its impact on health disparities from the 19th century to the prsent, focusing on the history of African American doctors, dentists, nurses, lay midwies, and public health professionals.  Students will learn about the role and importance of the Black hospital system, brriers to professional training and service experienced by African American health professionals and their effots to overcome racism in providing medical, dental, nursing and midwifery care.  The movement to end discrimination in medicine and health professions education will be explored as students investigate the persistence of health disparities today.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

AAS 3500-006 Introduction to Caribbean Studies

Professor Claire Payton

Th 3:30 - 6:00PM

The Caribbean is both a tranquil beach paradise and the origin of some of the most radical revolutionary movements in the history. It supplied the West with one the world's most delightful substances, sugar, but only at the cost of enormous suffering of millions of enslaved Africans. The Caribbean is where concepts of racial difference were invented. It is where the world’s wealthiest can store billions in off-shore bank accounts and where, a few miles away, people can die of hunger and curable diseases. Despite their small size, more than a dozen languages are spoken across the islands, a linguistic indicator of their lasting global connections. It is where centuries of structural and physical violence produced some of the most startlingly creative and dynamic cultures in the world.

Where is the Caribbean among all these contradictions? That is the question that will guide us through this course.  Is it in “the United States' backyard?” Is it at the meeting point of different cultures, an “estuary of the Americas?” Is it tiny or vast? Is it in the center or on the periphery? In this class, we will use nonfiction, fiction, and visual materials as transportation to travel through different Caribbean spaces. We will visit its tourist resorts and shantytowns, its cane fields and sports fields, its oceans and forests. We will learn about its history, geography, environment, the spatial organization of its societies, and its places of cultural meaning. These different itineraries will introduce students to the dynamics of race, capitalism, domination, revolution, and cultural innovation that, when braided together, make our modern world. By the end of the semester, student will be able to locate Caribbean islands not just on a map, but at the center of some of today's most burning political, cultural, and economic issues.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

AAS 3500-009 Practice of Black, Indigenous and Latinx Performance

Professor Ethan Madarieta

MoWe 2:00 - 3:15PM

From 2001 to 2009 William Pope.L crawled 22 miles up Broadway in Manhattan dressed in a Super Man costume with a skateboard strapped to his back in his performance The Great White Way. Nao Bustamante sits before you with her eyes closed, her entire head inside a bag of water which she has secured tightly at her neck with packing tape. A video camera focuses in on her submerged face. After a minute and twenty seconds she tears the bag open, gasping for breath, as a man stands beside her holding a bag full of water. Carlos Martiel remains held down by a metal collar for 22 hours while the flags of 22 Latin American countries that endured dictatorships supported by the U.S. Army School of the Americas (a.k.a. Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) are raised for an hour each. Anishnaabeg filmmaker and scholar Cara Mumford films a young Minowe Simpson picking leaks, dancing hoop in jingle dress, and walking with her mother near Odenabe – an epiphany of the importance of land in Indigenous feminism. What connects all of these performances? Why did these artists perform and document such acts? What and how do these performances mean? What can they tell us about ourselves, race, culture, social relations, and even existence? And what effects do these, and other performances have in the world?

This course considers theory and/as performance through multiple critical lenses such as Performance and Theatre studies, History and Memory studies, and Race, Gender, Queer, and Sexuality studies. Through these critical lenses this course addresses multiple, shifting, perspectives by Indigenous, Black, Latinx, and Latin American artists/theorists in the 20th and 21st centuries in order to, first, understand what performance is, and second, how to effectively mobilize it as political practice. Throughout the course we will explore the foundations of Performance Studies and Performance Theory and put pressure on what has largely been a white and Western discipline by engaging works by Black, Indigenous, Latin American, and Latina/o/x scholars and performers. Rather than attempting to understand performance and performance practice through theory alone, we will look directly to performance and performance artists as a profound site of anticolonial knowledge. Through close reading, performance practice, critical writing, and discussion, we will expand our performance/theory vocabularies, hone our practice of critique, cultivate our own performance practice, and apply all this work to our practice and understanding of performance within and outside the university. 

Fulfills: Humanities

AAS 3500-012 The Look and Sound of Race

Professor Brian Smithson

TuTh 11:00AM - 12:15

This course explores the roles vision and hearing, sight and sound have played in shaping the lives of people in Africa and the African Diaspora. We will consider vision and hearing as key tools in the creation of race and the imposition of global white supremacy as a historical, cultural, political, and social force around the world. Our inquiries will range across time and cultures as we seek to understand how seeing and hearing, showing and sounding have been weapons of empire in the Black Atlantic, but also tools for self-fashioning and liberation. In the process, we will touch on a broad range of topics: aesthetics, history, the body, performance, technology, and media, among others.

AAS 3810 Race, Culture and Inequality

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh 2:00 - 3:15PM

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. The course will draw on disciplines such as sociology, political science, anthropology, and more.

Fulfills: Social Science or History   

AAS 3830 Being Human: Race, Technology, and the Arts

Professor Njelle Hamilton

MoWe 3:30 - 4:45PM

What makes us human? How did science and technology play a part in racism and the dehumanization of blackness? And how have artists of color re-appropriated science, technology, and science fiction to subvert and resist dehumanization? This course is an introduction to Afrofuturism, exploring the intersections of race and alienness, race and technology, and race and modernity through global futuristic representations of blackness in TV (Extant, Luke Cage), film (Star Trek, Hidden Figures), music (Scratch Perry, Janelle Monaé), art (Wangechi Mutu), and literature (Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor). In this discussion-based seminar, we will trace “like race” tropes in sci-fi, including aliens, monsters, enslavement, and invisibility. We will think about the various ways that black artists/writers/creators displace or “dimension-shift” the African Diaspora experience to grapple with contemporary and historical issues, and employ science/technology/sci-fi to invent places and conditions where blackness can thrive. Assignments will include literary essays and creative work (short films, artwork, mashups, web-content etc) that reimagine and interrogate representations of race and science/technology in contemporary media. (No artistic talent of experience required)

Fulfills: Humanities

AAS 4570 Caribbean Sci Fi and Fantasy

Professor Njelle Hamilton

MoWe 2:00 - 3:15PM

Superheroes, space operas, time travel, futuristic tech — the stuff of dreams and the subject of countless popular literary and cultural works over the past century. Far too long featuring mainly white male heroes and US or European settings, sci-fi and fantasy (SF/F) have become increasingly diverse in recent years, even as reframed definitions open up archives of previously overlooked black and brown genre writing from across the globe. Still, the Caribbean is often ignored, imagined either as a rustic beach or a technological backwater. In this undergraduate seminar, however, you will encounter Caribbean writers working at the cutting edge of SF/F, and discover novels, stories, artwork and film that center Caribbean settings, peoples, and culture, even as they expand the definition of genre. Authors and auteurs from the English-, Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean might include: Nalo Hopkinson, Tobias Buckell, Karen Lord, Junot Díaz, Rita Indiana, Marcia Douglas, Ernest Pepin, René Depestre, and Agustín de Rojas. We will also discuss supporting turns by Caribbean actors in mainstream works such asStargate SG-1 and Black Panther. Assignments will include short critical essays and a long research paper where you think through how Caribbean texts redefine, expand, or critique mainstream SF/F. Meets the Second writing requirement.

Fulfills: Humanities

AAS 4725 Queer Africas

Professor Kwame Otu

Mo 3:30 - 6:00PM

 How does “Africa” shape the contours of queerness? Might “Africa” as geography and the “African” 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 circum-atlantic world. Importantly, we will examine the extent of the afterlife of slavery in the Americas and its intersection with what we will regard in the course as the afterlife of colonialism. We will contend with, for instance, how blackness and queerness get constituted at this intersection by familiarizing ourselves with the works of various artists, activists, and intellectuals in both Africa and its myriad diasporas. Drawing on “afro-queer” as a useful optic, we will complicate how black queer embodiments are themselves radical aesthetics that simultaneously drive imaginations and projects that disrupt racialized gendered normativities dictated by white supremacist and heteropatriarchal capitalist regimes. Hence, how do queer political projects perpetuate anti-blackness in both liberal and neoliberal scenes of empire? How are we to locate black queer subjects in mainstream queer political projects in the era of the Black Lives Matter? In sum, we will interrogate the transnational and transcultural articulations of race, sex, and gender to highlight the dynamic relationship and tensions between African and African Diasporic studies and Queer Studies in late capitalism.

Fulfills: 4000-level seminar; Africa

AAS 5559 Introduction to Africana Studies

Professor Kevin Gaines

Tu 2:00 - 4:30PM

This is an introductory course that will survey key texts in the interdisciplinary fields of African American, African, and Caribbean Studies. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to identify and understand the major themes that have shaped the development of the discipline of Africana Studies. Assignments in the course will help students to develop an understanding of both the methodological and theoretical challenges that prevail in studies of the African Diaspora, such as learning to evaluate sources and to acquire an awareness of, as well as to question, the silences, repressions, omissions, and biases involved in interpreting writing both from and about the African diaspora. Some of the key terms that students will become familiar with are: ethnocentrism, white privilege, race, racism, hegemony, colonialism, imperialism, agency, diaspora, power, identity, modernity, nation, citizenship,sovereignty, and globalization, as well as how these concepts intersect with ideas of both gender and class.

Graduate Students Only

SWAHILI

SWAH 1020-001--Introductory Swahili II

Professor Anne Rotich

(12743) MoWeFr 10 - 10:50AM

Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa.

SWAH 1020-002--Introductory Swahili II

Professor Anne Rotich

(12743) MoWeFr 11 - 11:50AM

Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa

(12129) MoWeFr 11 - 11:50AM

Swahili, or Kiswahili is widely spoken in East Africa and worldwide. It is estimated that about 70 million people speak Kiswahili globally. It is also widely spoken in Africa especially in Tanzania and Kenya as a national language. It is also spoken in Uganda and the Comoros Islands, Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Burundi, Somalia, and Mozambique.  It is also spoken in some Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Oman.  The course is designed to help you learn enough about Swahili to enable you to handle your needs adequately in basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk about yourself and your preferences, needs, and interests in the past, present and future time. You will learn to greet others, introduce yourself, handle basic social conversations, and talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will learn to read and write Swahili in past, present, and future time and how to understand written and spoken Swahili well enough to carry out routine tasks and engage in simple conversations. You will also learn about some aspects of everyday culture in East Africa.

 

SWAH 2020 -- Intermediate Swahili II

Professor Anne Rotich

MoWeFr 12 - 12:50PM

Further develops skills of speaking, listening, reading and writing, and awareness of the cultural diversity of the Swahili-speaking areas of East Africa.

AMERICAN STUDIES

AMST 1559 -- The Aftermath of Slavery at UVA and in Virginia

Professor Kirt von Daacke

Fulfills: Social Science or History

AMST 4559 -- Politics and Literature

Professor Lawrie Balfour

New Course in the subject of American Studies.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

ANTHROPOLOGY

ANTH 2250 -- Nationalism, Racism, Multiculturalism

Professor Richard Handler

MoWe 4:00pm - 4:50pm

Introductory course in which the concepts of culture, multiculturalism, race, racism, and nationalism are critically examined in terms of how they are used and structure social relations in American society and, by comparison, how they are defined in other cultures throughout the world.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

History of Art

ARTH 4591 -- Reading History: Recovering Lost Narratives in the context of 20th c Black Art and Advocacy

Professor Elizabeth Turner

We 3:30pm - 6:00pm

Twentieth century painter Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was a well-known chronicler of the American struggle for equity and justice. Lesser known or widely understood is the complex evolution of Lawrence’s philosophy and inclusive representational strategies. Lawrence was not a conventional story teller or history painter. Convinced the telling of history tied up to the present, he never felt strictly bound to sequences of chronological time but preferred instead to operate within the space of historical elision where past collides with the perception of present circumstances. Trained in the art workshops of Harlem, Lawrence’s motivation to paint sprang from a desire to depict the lives of African-Americans whose stories were excluded by the conventions of the dominant cultural regime. Whether he found his subjects on the street or in the library, his series format proved a useful vehicle for contesting the eye with new metaphoric configurations of line-space-color and word. When read all together in any given situation, in print or on exhibition, they revealed neglected histories to wide audiences. This course examines Lawrence's methods of reading history and narrativizing within the context of Black Art and Advocacy from the 1930s to the 1990s.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

DRAMA

DRAM 3070 -- African-American Theatre

Professor Theresa Davis

TuTh 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

Fulfills: Humanities

DRAM 4590 -- The Black Monologues

Professor Theresa Davis

TBA

A directed project-based study offered to upper-level students. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

Fulfills: Humanities

ENGLISH

ENGL 3025 -- African American English

Professor Connie Smith

TuTh 11:00am - 12:15pm

This course examines the communicative practices of African American Vernacular English (AAEV) to explore how a marginalized language dynamic has made major transitions into American mainstream discourse. AAEV is no longer solely the informal speech of many African Americans; it is the way Americans speak.

Fulfills: Humanities

ENGL 4570 -- Seminar in American Literature since 1900: James Baldwin

Professor Marlon Ross

Th 3:30pm - 6:00pThis seminar focuses on the tumultuous life and diverse works of James Baldwin, whose intellectual influence is still palpable in today’s discourses about race, sexuality, social activism, national belonging, and exile. We’ll study major works from each of the genres that Baldwin engaged, including the novel, short story, drama, poetry, journalism, and the essay. In addition to Baldwin’s works, we’ll explore him as a “spokesman” of the Civil Rights movement, and how his high visibility as a public intellectual whose appearances on the new medium of television helped to shape his “celebrity” status. Among the works to be examined are the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Just Above My Head (1979); plays The Amen Corner (1954) and Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964); selected poems from Jimmy’s Blues (1983); selected short stories from Going to Meet the Man (1965); essays from Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976); and the children’s book Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976). To comprehend Baldwin’s impact in his time and in our own, we’ll sample some works where his influence is especially compelling, including: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1965); eulogies for Baldwin by Toni Morrison and Ossie Davis (1987); Darieck Scott’s 1996 novel Traitor to the Race; Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 nonfiction book Between the World and Me; the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2017); the 2018 feature film based on his 1976 novel If Beale Street Could Talk; and a variety of critical essays on Baldwin’s works. Assignments include: two short critical essays, a team class presentation, and a final research paper.

Fulfills: Humanities

 

ENGL 4580 -- Race in American Places

Professor K. Ian Grandison

Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm

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.

Fulfills: Humanities; Race and Politics in the US

ENWR 3500 -- Black Women's Writing & Rhetoric

Professor Tamika Carey

TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

A course for students who are already proficient academic writers and wish to develop their writing skills further in a workshop setting.

Fulfills: Humanities

FRENCH

FREN 3570 -- African Literatures and Cultures

Professor Kandioura Drame

TuTh 3:30pm - 4:45pm

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

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

HISTORY

HIAF 1501 Seeing Africa in the American Century

Professor John Mason

Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm

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.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Africa

HIAF 2002 -- Modern African History

Professor John Mason

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

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.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Africa

HIAF 3112 -- African Environmental History

Professor James LeFleur

TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

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.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Africa

HIEU 1502 -- Immigration, Race, and Islam in Paris

Professor Jennifer Sessions

Tu 2:00pm - 4:30pm

In Paris, 2015 began and ended with major terrorist attacks by men claiming to act in the name of Islam. The attacks shocked the world and ratcheted up political tensions over questions about immigration, race, and Islam in France. In this course, we will work to understand the causes and meanings of these events in the history of Paris itself. What role has immigration played in the growth of Paris as a global metropolis? How have immigrants and their descendants experienced and contributed to life in one of the world’s most diverse cities? How have Parisians of all backgrounds responded to newcomers of different races and religions, in an officially secular and color-blind country?

In exploring these questions, we will also develop critical skills that will help prepare you for academic success at UVA, as well as for civic, professional, and intellectual life after college, whether you major in History or not: historical and contextual thinking, critical analysis of primary and secondary sources, analytical writing and communication, and research and information literacy. We will delve into a broad range of materials, such as memoirs, newspapers, magazines, novels, films, and scholarly works by historians. Course requirements include ongoing class discussion (25%), short papers (40%), presentations (10%), and an 8-10-page independent research paper (25%). All readings and discussions will be in English.

Possible readings include: the memoir of Algerian-French feminist and anti-racist activist, Fadela Amara, Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto; Didier Daeninckx, Murder in Memoriam, a mystery novel about the Algerian War and the Holocaust in France; Jennifer Boittin, Colonial Metropolis: The Urban Grounds of Anti-Imperialism and Feminism in Interwar Paris, a history of colonial immigrant activists in the 1920s and 1930s; Janet MacGaffey and Rémy Bazenguissa-Ganga, Congo-Paris: Transnational Traders on the Margins of the Law, an ethnography of Congolese immigrant merchants in 1980s Paris; as well as the films Princess Tam-Tam (1935); Hate (1995).

Fulfills: Social Science or History

HIUS 3559 -- Race, Gender, and Empire: Cultures of US Imperialism

Professor Penny Von Eschen

MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

HIUS 3652 -- African American History since 1865

Professor Kevin Gaines

MoWe 12:00pm - 12:50pm

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

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

HIUS 5000 -- African-American History to 1877

Professor Justene Hill Edwards

Th 2:00pm - 4:30pm

This course will introduce graduate students to the differing interpretations, methodologies, and analyses of African-American History to 1877.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

MEDIA STUDIES

MDST 3740 -- Cultures of Hip-Hop

Professor Jack Hamilton

MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

This course explores the origins and impacts of American hip-hop as a cultural form in the last forty years, and maps the ways that a local subculture born of an urban underclass has risen to become arguably the dominant form of 21st-century global popular culture. While primarily focused on music, we will also explore how forms such as dance, visual art, film, and literature have influenced and been influenced by hip-hop style and culture.

MDST 3760 -- #BlackTwitter and Black Digital Culture

Professor Meredith Clark

We 5:00pm - 7:30pm

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.

Fulfills: Humanities

MUSIC

MUSI 2120 -- History of Jazz Music

Professor Scott DeVeaux

MoWe 2:00pm - 2:50pm

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.

Fulfills: Humanities

MUSI 3090 -- Performance in Africa

Professor Maria Guarino

Th 3:30pm - 5:30pm

Explores music/dance performance in Africa through reading, hands-on workshops, discussion, and audio and video examples. The course covers both 'traditional' and 'popular' styles, through discussion and a performance lab. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

MUSI 3374 -- Composing Mixtapes

Professor A.D. Carson

TuTh 9:30am - 10:45am

The craft of writing rap songs and the collection, selection, and integration of other media to collaborate toward the composition of a class mixtape. Experience writing raps or producing beats will be helpful, but it is not necessary to take this course. Students will listen to, attempt to deconstruct, create, and evaluate a broad range of music and literature while collaborating on the mixtape.

Fulfills: Humanities

POLITICS

PLAP 3500 -- Race and the Obama Presidency

Professor Larycia Hawkins

MoWe 11:00am-11:50am

PLCP 3012 -- The Politics of Developing Areas

Robert Fatton

MoWe 9:00am - 9:50am

Surveys patterns of government and politics in non-Western political systems. Topics include political elites, sources of political power, national integration, economic development, and foreign penetration. This class replaces PLCP 2120 therefore you will not get credit for the course twice.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

PLCP 4810 -- Politics of Sub-Saharan Africa

Professor Robert Fatton

Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm

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.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Africa

PSYCHOLOGY

PSYC 4500-- The Psychology of Black Women

Professor Seanna Leath

Mo 6:00pm - 8:30pm

Enrollment not allowed in more than one 4000-level or 5000-level PSYC course. Restricted to 3rd or 4th PSYC majors.

Fulfills: Social Science or History

RELIGIOUS STUDIES

RELA 2750 -- African Religions

Professor Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm

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.

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

RELA 3559 -- Introduction to Islam in Africa through the Arts

Professor Oludamini Ogunnaike

TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of African Religions.

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

RELA 3559 -- Religion and Inequality in Africa

Professor Julie Jenkins

Th 3:30pm - 6:00pm

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of African Religions.

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

RELA 4085 -- Christian Missions in Contemporary Africa

Professor Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Tu 3:30pm - 6:00pm

An examination of Christian missions in Africa in the 21st Century. Through a variety of disciplinary lenses and approaches, we examine faith-based initiatives in Africa--those launched from abroad, as well as from within the continent. What does it mean to be a missionary in Africa today? How are evangelizing efforts being transformed in response to democratization, globalization and a growing awareness of human rights?

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

RELA 5559 -- Religion and society in Nigeria

Professor Oludamini Ogunnaike

We 3:30pm - 6:00pm

This course provides the opportunity to offer a new course in the subject of African Religions

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

SOCIOLOGY

SOC 3410 -- Race and Ethnic Relations

Professor Milton Vickerman

MoWe 12:00pm - 12:50pm

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.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

SOC 4260 -- Race, Crime, and Punishment

Professor Rose Buckelew

TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm

This course is an exercise in critical thinking and writing. We will investigate connections between race and crime in contemporary America. To do so, we will explore constructions of crime and race and patterns of victimization, criminality and punishment. We will uncover shifting definitions of crime and the ways that institutions, policies and practices shape patterns of punishment.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

Spring 2021 Undergraduate Course

View current course listings page

African American and African Studies Program

 

AAS 1020 Introduction to African American and African Studies II

Professor Ashon Crawley

TuTh 12:30PM - 1:45PM

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.

Fulfills: 1020 requirement

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

Professor Lisa Shutt

Tu 2:00 - 4:30PM

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.

Fulfills: Humanities

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

We 2:00 - 4:30PM

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.

Fulfills: Humanities

AAS 2559-001 Introduction Race, Class, Politics and the Environment

Professor Kimberly Fields

We 3:30-6:00PM

This course introduces students to the adoption and implementation of environmental policy in the United States and examines issues of environmental quality and social justice. We will concentrate on federal, state and local governance and relations across these levels. In turn, we will compare the abilities of state and federal governments to develop and implement environmental efforts and policy, as well their consequences. The course takes as axiomatic the premise that all people have a right to live in a clean environment free from hazardous pollution or contamination, and to the natural resources necessary to sustain health and livelihood. With this as our starting point, we will question why, and through what social, political and economic processes, some people are denied this basic right. How is it that certain populations of people do not have access to basic resources, or are systematically burdened with pollution or environmental hazards to a greater extent than other populations? What are the social relations of production and power that contribute to these outcomes? What can be done?
We begin by examining the philosophical foundations and history of the environmental justice movement and foundational concepts such as justice, race and class. We then explore these concepts through a series of case studies of urban environmental (in)justice in the U.S. Through these case studies we will examine environmental justice issues in urban and rural settings; the strategies and politics of poor peoples’ environmental justice movements; and climate justice.

Fulfills: Race and Politics in the US; Social Science/History

AAS 2559-002 The Souls of Black Folk

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass

TuTh

In this course, we will examine the social organization of African American communities. Some of the intellectual framing for the issues we will study come from writings by the pioneering sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois. We will discuss African Americans’ social status and experiences at the intersections of class, color, gender, and sexuality. We also will study institutions within the community, and we will consider social issues that African Americans will face in the future.

Fulfills: Social Science; History

AAS 2740 Peoples and Cultures of Africa

Professor Lisa Shutt

Th 2:00-4:30pm

In this course, students will gain an understanding of the richness and variety of African life. While no course of this kind can hope to give more than a broad overview of the continent, students will learn which intellectual tools and fundamental principles are necessary for approaching the study of the hundreds of cultural worlds that exist today on the African continent. Drawing from ethnographic texts, literary works and documentary and feature films, specific examples of the lives people are living on the African continent will be examined in order to sample the cultural richness and diversity of the African continent

Fulfills: Africa; Social Science/History

AAS 3500-001 Race, Law & the American Constitution

Professor Kimberly Fields

We 6:00-8:30pm

We should always be aware of the stark consequences of constitutional decisions for society, especially as it pertains to marginalized populations. Law is everywhere, in our lives and in our society.  It is a dominant force in our culture. Each of us is likely to feel the heavy hand of the law in one form or another at some point in our lives – some more than others.  Our focus in this course is on the individual rights and freedoms enumerated in the Bill of Rights, the government’s authority to limit those freedoms, and the consequences for all of us and the general good of society. As we proceed, think about the circumstances under which it is right for the government to limit personal freedoms, ignore or side step or intervene in inequality and its racial dimensions. Should the Supreme Court be the one to decide how far governments can or cannot go, as opposed to the legislature? How does the protection of rights square with policy making? Is the Court clear and sensible in how it approaches these questions and the impacts of its decisions on the lives and experiences of the marginalized? This course will introduce the student to the substance of the Constitution, the conditions under which it was developed, what it means, how its meaning has been determined, changed, interpreted and the ways in which it has shaped and has been shaped by ideas about and considerations of race. Our goal in this course is not only to understand the features of the Constitution, but also to appreciate the role(s) ideas about and considerations of race have played in shaping and influencing the ongoing processes of interpreting and applying constitutional law to our lives, our society, and our politics. 

Fulfills: Race and Politics; Social Science/History

AAS 3500-002 Seeing Race

Profesor Brian Smithson

TuTh 9:30-10:45am

What role do vision and hearing, sight and sound play in creating race? How have these senses shaped the lives of people in Africa and the African Diaspora? How have vision and hearing been tools of white supremacy and Black resistance? We will take up these and other questions in this course. Our inquiries will range across times and cultures as we seek to understand how seeing and hearing, showing and sounding have been weapons of empire in the Black Atlantic, but also tools for self-fashioning and liberation. In the process, we will touch on a broad range of topics, including the direct link between plantation slavery and present-day surveillance technologies, the aesthetics of hip hop videos as a strategy of global Black liberation, and techniques used in African religions to protect secrets from the gaze of non-Black outsiders. 

Fulfills: Social Science/History

AAS 3500-003 African American Health Professionals

Professor Pamela Reynolds

We 3:30-6:00pm

This course addresses important issues of race and health disparities, as well as offering students an introduction to the understudied history of black medical professionals. Over the past three centuries, African American physicians, dentists, nurses and public health professionals have made major contributions to eliminating health disparities, offering, in many instances, the only source of medical and dental care available. Many of our majors consider a career in medicine--either as physicians, nurses or public health workers--and this course will surely be relevant for them. Students will also have the valuable experience of examing an array of primary documents pertaining to African American health care professionals in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the South.

Fulfills: Social Science/History

AAS 3500-004 From Blues Women to Black Feminists: African American Women’s Performances and Life Writing 

Professor Janée Moses

TuTh 12:30-1:45

What do Bessie Smith and Beyoncé have in common? Are blues performances the origin of black feminism(s)? How has each, in her own times, shaped black women’s conceptions of identity? Their negotiations with race, gender, sexuality, and class? Through the lenses of music, performances, and fiction, this course will explore these questions, examining the tradition of early blues women such as Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Billie Holiday and the impact of their feminist legacies on artists and writers in the 20th and 21st centuries. The course is divided into four parts: Part 1 provides the theoretical foundation for our examination of the blues as both sound and language practice, or song and text. Part 2 explores the method of the blues tradition in novels and performances to examine how black women give language to complex circumstances in their romantic and familial relationships. Part 3 examines the legacies of blues women in black feminist rhetoric and scholarship of the late 20th-century, focusing specifically on the emergence of new black radicalisms and hip-hop culture. Part 4 interprets popular formulations of Black Feminism with 21st century performer, Beyoncé and such writers as Roxane Gay and Chimamanda Adichie. 

Fulfills: Humanities

AAS 3500-005 Caribbean Cultural & Literary Studies 

Professor Marlene Daut

We 2:00-4:30pm

Beginning with national literary developments in Haiti, this course expands to consider writing from Barbados, Cuba, Trinidad, Jamaica, Antigua, and Bermuda. We will examine these writings, both fictional and non-fictional, to help us to think about whether and/or how a coherent Caribbean literary tradition exists across geographical, linguistic, national, and indeed, imperial lines.

Fulfills: Humanities

AAS 3500-006 Development and the Environment in Modern Africa

Professor James Parker

Tu 3:30-6:00pm

Focusing largely on east and central Africa, this class studies ideologies of economic development towards Africa, and the localized responses of rural communities across the continent. Fusing histories of imperialism and capitalism alongside works of literature, philosophy, and activism, the class explores how the West has sought to exploit the natural resources of the continent alongside the attendant social and ecological consequences of these ideologies. Further, the class will foreground responses to such initiatives in rural communities in order to demonstrate how the exigencies of global capitalism have affected populations and clashed with diverse ecological understandings of the environment. Finally, we will explore a diverse number of continental environmental justice movements and their intersections with global environmental movements.

Fulfills: Africa; Social Science/History

AAS 3500-007 The Imperial Encounter in Africa

Th 3:30-6:00pm

Professor Sarah Balakrishnan

This course studies colonial rule in Africa: what it involved, who it exploited, and why today we still grapple with its legacies. Over five hundred years, a handful of powers in Western Europe radically changed the ways that most people in sub-Saharan Africa now live their lives. How did this situation come about? When white people met black people on the African continent, what processes and events led this relationship to becoming one of colonial domination? This class analyzes the imperial encounter in Africa in the period between 1450 and 1900 using a variety of sources: literature, poems, films, maps, voyagers’ accounts, artwork, and scholarly works by historians. 

Fulfills: Africa; Social Science/History

AAS 3652 African American History since 1865

Professor Andrew Kahrl

MoWe 10:00-10:50am

This course surveys the major political, economic, and cultural developments in black America from the end of the Civil War to the present. Through an engagement with various primary and secondary texts, and multimedia, students examine African Americans’ endeavors to build strong families and communities, create socially meaningful art, and establish a political infrastructure capable of bringing into existence a more just and humane world.

Fulfills: Social Science/History

AAS 3745 Currents in African Literature: Adichie and Okorafor

Professor Njelle Hamilton

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

This undergraduate seminar takes the form of an in-depth study of the literary works of two brilliant, prolific young Nigerian women writers: feminist and social realist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and African-futurist Nnedi Okorafor, two of the most globally well-known and -loved authors the continent has produced. Through close analysis of their novels and other writings we will consider broad questions such as: How applicable are Western feminist theories to non-Western experiences? How are traditional literary forms such as the bildungsroman subverted by race, gender, and postcoloniality? How do sociopolitical realities inform literary expression? How does trauma affect narrative? How is Nigeria depicted in international news in contrast to how locals perceive and narrate their own reality? And how can these novels help us understand the contemporary African novel within the contexts of larger historical and cultural forces, events, and movements? Beyond affording you a deeper appreciation for African and Nigerian literature, history, and current events, this course will lead you through the process of crafting a sophisticated argument and writing about literary texts in their cultural and historical contexts.

Fulfills: Humanties; Africa

AAS 3810 Race, Culture and Inequality

Professor Sabrina Pendergrass

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 news 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, collective memory, and racial grammar. The course will draw on disciplines such as sociology, political science, anthropology, and more.

Fulfills: Social Science/History

AAS 4570-001 Caribbean Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Professor Njelle Hamilton

TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

Superheroes, space operas, time travel, futuristic tech — the stuff of dreams and the subject of countless popular literary and cultural works over the past century. Far too long featuring mainly white male heroes and US or European settings, sci-fi and fantasy (SF/F) have become increasingly diverse in recent years, even as reframed definitions  open up archives of previously overlooked black and brown genre writing from across the globe. Still, the Caribbean is often ignored, imagined either as a rustic beach or a technological backwater. In this undergraduate seminar, however, you will encounter authors and auteurs from the English-, Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean working at the cutting edge of SF/F, and discover novels, stories, artwork and film that center Caribbean settings, peoples, and culture, even as they expand the definition of genre. We will also discuss supporting turns by Caribbean actors in mainstream works such as Star Trek and Black Panther. Assignments will include short critical essays and a long research paper where you think through how Caribbean texts redefine, expand, or critique mainstream SF/F. Meets the Second writing requirement.

Fulfills: Humanities; 4000

AAS 4570-002 Age of the Haitian Revolution

Professor Marlene Daut

Tu 2:00-4:30

The Haitian Revolution (1791-1804)—a thirteen-year series of slave revolts and military strikes— resulted in the abolition of slavery in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1793 and its subsequent independence and rebirth in January 1804 as Haiti, the first independent and slavery-free nation of the American hemisphere. To this day, Haitian independence remains the most significant development in the history of modern democracy. The theories undergirding it – that no human beings could ever be enslaved – continue to define contemporary political ideas about what it means to be free. But in the early 19th century, Haiti was the only example in the Americas of a nation populated primarily by former enslaved Africans who had become free and independent. Other nations, including France, England, and the United States, were determined to prevent abolition and their colonies from becoming free and thus refused to recognize Haitian sovereignty. While still one of the least well known events in modern history, this course explores the global repercussions of Haiti’s revolution for freedom.

Fulfills: Social Science/History; 4000

AAS 4725 Queer Africas

Professor Kwame Otu

Mo 3:30-6:00pm

How does "Africa" shape the contours of queerness? 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.

Fulfills: Africa; Humanities; 4000

Swahili

SWAH 1020 Introductory Swahili II

Professor Anne Rotich

MoWeFr 10:00-10:50am

This course is a continuation of SWAH 1010. The course is designed to advance your knowledge of Swahili from the SWAH 1010. It is expected that you will build your Swahili lexicon and Swahili grammar to enable you to adequately contribute to basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk more deeply about your work, studies, country and your preferences, needs, and interests following the correct grammar rules. You will learn how to handle basic social conversations at the market, in the hospital, and also talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will also learn about more cultural aspects of everyday culture in East Africa from class and from engaging virtually the Swahili community in Charlottesville.

SWAH 2020 Intermediate Swahili II

MoWeFr 11:00-11:50am

This is an intermediate Swahili course that is intended to equip you with more language skills in speaking, reading, writing, listening and cultures. It’s an opportunity for you to enhance your language skills gained from SWAH 2010. At the end of this course you will have increased your Swahili vocabulary, speak Swahili with more ease and less errors, understand and interact with Swahili speakers. You will be able to write and analyze texts and essays in Swahili on different topics and appreciate more the cultures of the Swahili people. You will also be able to express yourself, your everyday activities, discuss politics or current events in Swahili. To achieve this we will utilize Swahili short story texts, multi-media resources, the internet, magazines, and news broadcast stations to enhance your learning. 

American Studies

AMST 2559-002 Commodifying Race and Gender

Professor David Coyoca

TuTh 2-3:15

Fulfills: Humanities

AMST 3221 Hands-On Public History: Slavery and Reconstruction

Professor Lisa Goff

Tu 3:30-6

This course introduces the issues and debates that have shaped public history as a scholarly discipline, but the focus of the course will be on the contemporary practice of public history. Students will work with Special Collections to produce their own public history exhibits. Readings and field trips will provide a foundation for students’ hands-on engagement with public history.

Fulfills: Social Science/History

AMST 3740 Culture of Hip Hop

Professor Jack Hamilton

MoWe 2-2:50

This course explores the origins and impacts of American hip-hop as a cultural form in the last forty years, and maps the ways that a local subculture born of an urban underclass has risen to become arguably the dominant form of 21st-century global popular culture . While primarily focused on music, we will also explore how forms such as dance, visual art, film, and literature have influenced and been influenced by hip-hop style and culture.

Fulfills: Humanities

AMST 4500-006 Critical Race Theory

Professor Marlon Ross

Th 5-7

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 black literary and cultural theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing on a series of critical flashpoints that have occurred over the last several decades. These flashpoints include: 1) the crisis over black authenticity during the Black Power/ Black Arts movement; 2) the schisms related to womanism (or 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’ 2016 film Moonlight; 5) racial violence and the law, focused on the Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement; and 6) the aesthetic movement called Afrofuturism. Other reading will include a variety of theoretical essays and chapters drawn from different disciplines, including legal theory, film and media studies, sociology, history, political theory, and hip hop studies. 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. The goal of the course is to give you a solid grounding in the vocabulary, key figures, concepts, debates, and discursive styles comprising the broad sweep of theoretical race studies from the late- twentieth century to the present, and to nurture your own theorizing about race and its deep cultural impact.

Fulfills; Humanities; 4000

Anthropology

ANTH 2590-001 Race and Representation

Professor Cory-Alice Andre-Johnson

TuTh 12:30-1:45

Fillfuls: Social Science and History

ANTH 5528 Race and Racism in Comparative Perspective

Professor Ira Bashkow

TuTh 12:30-1:45

This course examines theories and practices of race and otherness, in order to analyze and interpret constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions of race from the late 18th to the 21st centuries. The focus varies from year to year, and may include 'race, 'progress and the West,' 'gender, race and power,' and 'white supremacy.' The consistent theme is that race is neither a biological nor a cultural category, but a method and theory of social organization, an alibi for inequality, and a strategy for resistance. Cross listed as AAS 5528. Prerequisite: ANTH 1010, 3010, or other introductory or middle-level social science or humanities course.

Fillfuls: Social Science and History

Architectural History

ARTH 2753 Arts & Cultures of the Slave South

Professor Louis Nelson

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.

Fulfills: Humanities

Drama

DRAM 3070 African-American Theatre

Professor Theresa Davis

 TuTh 2-3

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.

Fulfills: Humanities

DRAM 4590 - The Black Monologues

Professor Theresa Davis

A directed project-based study offered to upper-level students. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

Fulfills: Humanities

English

ENGL 2599-001 Uncovering 19th and 20th Century British Writers of Color

Professor Indu Ohri

MoWeFr 9-9:50

In your high school English classes, I am sure you heard of and read books by Victorian and Modernist English authors like Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, and Virginia Woolf. But have you heard of Mary Prince (the author of a famous British slave narrative), Rabindranath Tagore (the first Asian winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature), or Lafcadio Hearn (the most famous “interpreter” of Japan for the West)? This class will invite you to learn more about the lives and writings of these fascinating non-Western Victorian and Modernist writers by metaphorically visiting different parts of the British empire. During your global voyage, you will read British writers of color from the Caribbean, Asia, and Africa, who wrote about their experiences living under imperial rule in published novels, essays, and poetry. You will look at the counternarratives these authors produced, in which they explore encounters with the English from the perspective of the Other.

Along the way, you will join in the recent calls to “undiscipline” Victorian and Modernist studies by studying, researching, writing about the literature and theory of British people of color. Besides reading these authors, you will examine literary criticism that discusses the need to diversify scholarship and college curriculums to be more inclusive and embrace the voices of non-Western writers. In this course, you will uncover a rich literary tradition and make a significant contribution to this emerging scholarly conversation in Victorian and Modernist studies. Toward the end of our global journey, you will possibly collaborate with scholars to “undiscipline” Victorian studies for students, academics, and others. Tentative authors include Mary Prince, Mary Seacole, Joseph Conrad, Rabindranath Tagore, Sarojini Naidu, Lafcadio Hearn, Setsuko Koizumi, Chinua Achebe, and others.

Fulfills: Humanities

ENGL 3025 African American English

Professor Connie Smith

TuTh 11-12:15

This course examines the communicative practices of African American Vernacular English (AAEV) to explore how a marginalized language dynamic has made major transitions into American mainstream discourse. AAEV is no longer solely the informal speech of many African Americans; it is the way Americans speak.

Fulfills: Humanities

ENGL 3560 Currents in African Literature: Adichie and Okorafor

Professor Njelle Hamilton

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

This undergraduate seminar takes the form of an in-depth study of the literary works of two brilliant, prolific young Nigerian women writers: feminist and social realist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and African-futurist Nnedi Okorafor, two of the most globally well-known and -loved authors the continent has produced. Through close analysis of their novels and other writings we will consider broad questions such as: How applicable are Western feminist theories to non-Western experiences? How are traditional literary forms such as the bildungsroman subverted by race, gender, and postcoloniality? How do sociopolitical realities inform literary expression? How does trauma affect narrative? How is Nigeria depicted in international news in contrast to how locals perceive and narrate their own reality? And how can these novels help us understand the contemporary African novel within the contexts of larger historical and cultural forces, events, and movements? Beyond affording you a deeper appreciation for African and Nigerian literature, history, and current events, this course will lead you through the process of crafting a sophisticated argument and writing about literary texts in their cultural and historical contexts.

Fulfills: Humanties; Africa

ENGL 4500-002 Sally Hemings’ University

Professor Lisa Woolfork

TuTh 9:30-10:45

This course is “Sally Hemings University.” Its objective is to prepare students to examine and reconfigure the status quo. This course seeks to help students appreciate the shift from euphemisms (“racially-charged” or “racially-tinged”) to vocabularies of consequence (“racist” or “white supremacist”), to foster a facility for talking capably and comfortably about “uncomfortable” topics such as systems of domination and their influence upon university and daily life. “Sally Hemings University” is a site where the adverse effects of overt and subtle forms of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism and other systems of dominance are scrutinized. As a course, “Sally Hemings University” explores questions generated by re-framing “Mr. Jefferson’s University” (and universities generally) as a site that destabilizes the dominant narrative of the university as Jefferson’s primary property and by extension that of similarly entitled white men.

Fulfills: Humanities; 4000 with instructor permission

ENGL 4560-004–Literature of West Africa

Professor Steve Arata 

MoWe 5-6:15

In this seminar we will read widely and deeply in Anglophone West African literature of the last 60 years, with roughly equal attention given to prose fiction, drama, and poetry. Likely candidates for our reading list include Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Chimananda Adichie, Kofi Awoonor, Christopher Okigbo, Ama Ata Aidoo, Helon Habila, Inua Ellams, Ben Okri, Helen Oyeyemi, Emmanuel Iduma, Chigozi Obioma, and Yaa Gyasi. Requirements will include two essays and a handful of shorter writing assignments.

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

ENGL 4570-003 Caribbean Sci-Fi & Fantasy

Professor Njelle Hamilton

TuTh 3:30-4:45pm

Superheroes, space operas, time travel, futuristic tech — the stuff of dreams and the subject of countless popular literary and cultural works over the past century. Far too long featuring mainly white male heroes and US or European settings, sci-fi and fantasy (SF/F) have become increasingly diverse in recent years, even as reframed definitions  open up archives of previously overlooked black and brown genre writing from across the globe. Still, the Caribbean is often ignored, imagined either as a rustic beach or a technological backwater. In this undergraduate seminar, however, you will encounter authors and auteurs from the English-, Spanish- and French-speaking Caribbean working at the cutting edge of SF/F, and discover novels, stories, artwork and film that center Caribbean settings, peoples, and culture, even as they expand the definition of genre. We will also discuss supporting turns by Caribbean actors in mainstream works such as Star Trek and Black Panther. Assignments will include short critical essays and a long research paper where you think through how Caribbean texts redefine, expand, or critique mainstream SF/F. Meets the Second writing requirement.

Fulfills: Humanities; 4000

ENGL 4580-001 Race in American Places

Professor K. Ian Grandison

Tu 5-7:30

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.

Fulfills: Humanities; Race and Politics

ENGL 4580-002 Critical Race Theory

Professor Marlon Ross

Th 5-7:30

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 black literary and cultural theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing on a series of critical flashpoints that have occurred over the last several decades. These flashpoints include: 1) the crisis over black authenticity during the Black Power/ Black Arts movement; 2) the schisms related to womanism (or 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’ 2016 film Moonlight; 5) racial violence and the law, focused on the Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement; and 6) the aesthetic movement called Afrofuturism. Other reading will include a variety of theoretical essays and chapters drawn from different disciplines, including legal theory, film and media studies, sociology, history, political theory, and hip hop studies. 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. The goal of the course is to give you a solid grounding in the vocabulary, key figures, concepts, debates, and discursive styles comprising the broad sweep of theoretical race studies from the late- twentieth century to the present, and to nurture your own theorizing about race and its deep cultural impact.

Fulfills: Humanities; 4000

French

FREN 3570 African Literatures and Cultures

Professor Kandioura Drame

MoWe 2-3:15

This course addresses various aspects of Francophone African Culture including, oral traditions, literature, theatre, cinema, and contemporary music and visual arts.

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

FREN 4580 – Philosophes Noirs/ Black Philosophers in French

Professor Boutaghou

MoWe 3:30-4:45

Fulfills: Humanities

FREN 5581 Francophone African Literature

Professor Kandioura Drame  We 3:30-6:00

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

History

HIAF 2002 Modern African History

Professor John Mason

TuTh 9:30-10:45

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.

Fulfills: Social Science and History; Africa

HIAF 3112  African Environmental History

Professor James La Fleur

TuTh 2-3:15

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.

Fulfills: Social Science and History; Africa

HIUS 2053 American Slavery

Professor Justene Hill Edwards

MoWe 9-9:50

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

Fulfills: Social Science and History

HIUS 3132 Race, Gender, and Empire: Cultures of U.S. Imperialism

Professor Penny Von Eschen

TuTh 2-3:15

In this course we emphasize how U.S. power has been exercised in the world with focus on intersections of cultural, political, and economic power. We analyze how power is produced and contested through language and media, and how hegemonic discourses -- the dominant and most powerful blocs defining U.S. society and empire -- are produced. We are equally concerned with cracks and contradictions in these discourses, and people who challenge them.

Fulfills: Social Science and History

HIUS 3232-100 Jefferson's America: Race, Politics, Law

Professor Haigler

Fulfills: Social Science and History; Race and Politics

HIUS 3559-002 Race, Charlottesville, and Making of Public Memory

Professor Gillet Rosenblith

TuTh 4:00-5:15

Fulfills: Social Science and History

HIUS 3652 Afro-American History since 1865

Professor Andrew Kahrl

MoWe 10-10:50

Fulfills: Social Science and History

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

HIUS 3654 - Black Fire

Professor Claudrena Harold

TuTh 12:30-1:45

This course examines the history and contemporary experiences of African Americans at the University of Virginia from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the present era.

Fulfills: Social Science and History

HIUS 4501-001 Slavery and the Founders

Professor Christa Dierksheide

Mo 2-4:30

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.

Fulfills: Social Science and History; 4000

Media Studies

MDST 3740 - Cultures of Hip-Hop

Professor Jack Hamilton

MoWe2-2:50

This course explores the origins and impacts of American hip-hop as a cultural form in the last forty years, and maps the ways that a local subculture born of an urban underclass has risen to become arguably the dominant form of 21st-century global popular culture. While primarily focused on music, we will also explore how forms such as dance, visual art, film, and literature have influenced and been influenced by hip-hop style and culture.

Music

MUSI 3090 Performance in Africa

Explores music/dance performance in Africa through reading, hands-on workshops, discussion, and audio and video examples. The course covers both 'traditional' and 'popular' styles, through discussion and a performance lab. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

MUSI 4523 Issues in Ethnomusicology Topic: African Electronic Music

Professor Noel Lobley

MoWe 2:00pm-3:15pm

African cities and urban areas have long been places for some of the most futuristic music being created, diverse sounds that reverberate between local identities and international avant garde music scenes. Explosive, hypnotic and ultra-modern electronic sounds meld stunning dance forms with musical theatre and fashion, articulating the urban youth experience in cities as diverse and vibrant as Jo'Burg, Nairobi, Kinshasha, Lagos and Durban.

We will engage multiplex genres of futuristic music, including Congotronics, Shangaan Electro, and Gqom apocalyptic bass music, paying close attention to innovations in artistic practice, remix culture and Afrofuturism. We will explore the histories and futures of the sounds linking African beat making, technology, guitars, and the dynamics of twenty-first century amplified African cityscapes.

Blending critical and contextual work with exciting opportunities for creative practice, we will imagine and co-design project work with a collective network of African artists from The Black Power Station, a Pan-African arts collective in Makhanda, South Africa. No prior musical experience is required.

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

Politics

PLAP 3820 Civil Liberties and Civil Rights

Professor James Todd

 MoWe 3:30pm-4:45pm

Studies judicial construction and interpretation of civil rights and liberties reflected by Supreme Court decisions. Includes line-drawing between rights and obligations. (No CR/NC enrollees.)

PLAP 4500-003 The Political Psychology of White Supremacy

Professor Nicholas Winter We 3:00-5:30

Investigates a selected issue in American government or American political development. Prerequisite: One course in PLAP or instructor permission.

Fulfills: Social Sciences and History; Race and Politics

Religious Studies

RELA 2750 African Religions

Professor Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

TuTh 9:30-10:45

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

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

RELA 2850 Afro-Creole Religions in the Americas

Professor Kara Skora

A survey course which familiarizes students with African-derived religions of the Caribbean and Latin America.

Fulfills: Humanities

RELA 3890 Christianity in Africa

Professor Cindy Hoehler-Fatton

Historical and topical survey of Christianity in Africa from the second century c.e. to the present.

Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

RELA 4100 Yoruba Religion

Professor Oludamini Ogunnaike

Studies Yoruba traditional religion, ritual art, independent churches, and religious themes in contemporary literature in Africa and the Americas.

Fulfills: Humanities; 4000

Sociology

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Professor Milton Vickerman

MoWe 4:00pm-5:15pm

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.

Fulfills: Social Science and History

SOC 4260 Race, Crime, and Punishment

Professor Rose Buckelew

TuTh 11:00am-12:15pm

This course is an exercise in critical thinking and writing. We will investigate connections between race and crime in contemporary America. To do so, we will explore constructions of crime and race and patterns of victimization, criminality and punishment. We will uncover shifting definitions of crime and the ways that institutions, policies and practices shape patterns of punishment.

Fulfills: Social Science and History

SOC 4420 Sociology of Inequality

Professor Milton Vickerman

MoWe 2:00pm-3:15pm

Surveys basic theories and methods used to analyze structures of social inequality. Includes comparative analysis of the inequalities of power and privilege, and their causes and consequences for social conflict and social change. Prerequisite: Six credits of sociology or instructor permission.

Fulfills: Social Science and History; 4000

SOC 4559-001 Race, Medicine, and Health

Professor David Skubby

MoWe 3:30pm-4:45pm

Fulfills: Social Science and History

SOC 4559-003 Race, Racism and Democracy: Socology of DeBois

Professor Ian Mullins

TuTh 11-12:15pm

Fulfills: Social Science and History; Race and Politics; 4000 with intructor permission

 

Spring 2023

These course listings are subject to change. Courses with low enrollment may be canceled. The official system of record at the University of Virginia is the Student Information System (SIS). www.virginia.edu/sis. Make sure to discuss your curricular plan and academic progress report with your AAS major advisor during Advising Period, October 24 to November 4.


 

Core Courses

All majors and minors must complete the 1010 and 1020 core course sequence.

 

 

AAS 1020 – Introduction to African-American and African Studies II.

Prof. Ashon Crawley. Tu, Th 12:30-1:45pm , Nau 101 

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century. Fulfills: 1010/1020 requirement

 

 

HIAF 1501 Introductory Seminar in African History: Runaways, Rebels, and Revolutionaries.

Prof. James La Fleur; 

Th 4:00-6:30pm, Bryan Hall 235

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. Fulfills: African Studies Minor requirement

 

AAS 7000 – Introduction to Africana Studies.

Prof. Nasrin Olla

 Mon 3:30-6:00pm. New Cabell 068.

This is an introductory course that will survey key texts in the interdisciplinary fields of African American, African, and Caribbean Studies. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to identify and understand the major themes that have shaped the development of the discipline of Africana Studies. Assignments in the course will help students to develop an understanding of both the methodological and theoretical challenges that prevail in studies of the African Diaspora, such as learning to evaluate sources and to acquire an awareness of, as well as to question, the silences, repressions, omissions, and biases involved in interpreting writing both from and about the African diaspora. Some of the key terms that students will become familiar with are: ethnocentrism, white privilege, race, racism, hegemony, colonialism, imperialism, agency, diaspora, power, identity, modernity, nation, citizenship, sovereignty, and globalization, as well as how these concepts intersect with ideas of both gender and class. NB: For Graduate Students Only

 

 


 

Social Science or History

All majors must take at least one SSH course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Race and Politics, or 4000 research.

 

 

AAS 3300 Social Science Perspectives on African American and African Studies

Prof. Sabrina Pendergrass. Tu Th 2:00-3:15. New Cabell 183

This course will focus on major debates, theories, and methodological approaches in the social sciences that contribute to African American Studies. The course helps students to consider how a multidisciplinary approach enriches efforts to analyze such issues as housing, education, and incarceration as they relate to the African Diaspora. Fulfills: SSH

 

AAS 3500.001 Race and Medicine in America from 1960-Present

Prof. Liana Richardson. Tu Th 11:00-12:15. New Cabell 064

In this course, we will examine the medical practices involved in the social construction of racial difference and the persistence of racial health inequities in the U.S. during the last 50 years. Drawing from relevant scholarship in sociology, anthropology, and history, we will discuss the origins and consequences of medical racism, as well as the continued role of medicine in racial meaning-making. Case studies and historical accounts about the (mis)use of race in the clinical encounter and in diagnostic and treatment algorithms, as well as the racialization of various health issues (e.g., obesity, heart disease, and mental illness), will provide illustrative examples. We will also consider why the medicalization of social issues—from collective violence to drug addiction—is often a racialized process, focusing especially on how contrasting schemas of medicalization and criminalization result in the differential labeling and treatment of racial groups as either victims or villains. Lastly, we will discuss the consequences of these phenomena for health equity, social justice, and human/civil rights, as well as the potential strategies for addressing them. Fulfills: SSH

 

AAS 3500.002 Environmental Justice Across the Globe

Prof. Kimberly Fields. 

Wed 6:30-9pm. New Cabell 332

This course examines from multiple perspectives issues of environmental quality and social justice across the globe. We will start from the premise that all people have a right to live in a clean environment free from hazardous pollution or contamination, and to the natural resources necessary to sustain health and livelihood. We will investigate how and why the resources people need to flourish varies across the globe. In some cases, these resources are air, soil or water. In other instances they may include healthy fisheries, forests, or land to farm or graze animals on. With this as our starting point, we will question why, and through what social, political and economic processes, some people are denied this basic right. How is it that certain groups of people do not have access to basic resources, or are systematically burdened with pollution or environmental hazards to a greater extent than other groups? To what extent  is environmental inequality a global phenomenon? What explains the patterns in environmental inequality observed throughout the world? What are the social relations of production and power that contribute to these outcomes? What can be done? We begin by examining the relationship between environmental justice and globalization, and the global distribution of environmental benefits and burdens and explanations for that distribution. We then examine struggles for environmental justice in diverse regions of the world, as well as government responses to those struggles. We will explore these issues through a series of case studies of environmental (in)justice in South America, Africa, Asia and the Carribbean. Through these case studies we will examine environmental justice issues in urban and rural settings; the strategies and politics of poor peoples’ environmental justice movements. Fulfills: SSH

 

AAS 3810. Race, Culture and Inequality

Prof. Sabrina Pendergrass. 

Tu Th 11:00-12:15. New Cabell 036

This course will examine how culture matters for understanding race and social inequality. It 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. Fulfills: SSH

 

AMST 2559 Afro-Latinx Histories in the Americas

Prof. Christina Proenza-Coles; 

Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm, Brice Hall 235

ADD course desc. Fulfills: SSH

 

HIAF 2002  Modern African History

Prof. John Mason; 

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, Gibson 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. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3031  History of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

Prof. Amir Syed; 

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, Clark Hall G004

This course concerns the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with an emphasis on African history. Through interactive lectures, in-class discussions, written assignments and examinations of first-hand accounts by slaves and slavers, works of fiction and film, and analyses by historians, we will seek to understand one of the most tragic and horrifying phenomena in the history of the western world. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3051  West African History

Prof. James La Fleur; 

Tu Th 11:00-12:15am, Clark Hall 101

History of West Africans in the wider context of the global past, from West Africans' first attempts to make a living in ancient environments through the slave trades (domestic, trans-Saharan, and Atlantic), colonial overrule by outsiders, political independence, and ever-increasing globalization. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3112  African Environment History

Prof. James La Fleur; 

Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm, Nau Hall 141

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. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 4501  Photography and Freedom in Africa 

Prof. John Mason; 

Mo 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell Hall 032

Photography and Freedom in Africa, blends African history, American history, and the history of photography to explore the ways in which both African and western photographers shaped and misshaped the world's understanding of Africa during the era of anti-colonial struggles and the Cold War.  Fulfills

 

HIST 3501 Introductory History Workshop: Race, Religion, & Resistance in Atlantic History

Prof. Amir Syed; 

Th 2:00-4:30pm, The Rotunda Room 150

This course introduces students to how historians conceptualize the Atlantic World and approach the entangled histories of Europe, Africa, and the Americas from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Students will learn how to ask historical questions, examine issues on the production of historical narratives, and interpret documents. Fulfills: SSH

 

HIUS 3232 The South in the Twentieth Century

Prof. Grace Hale; 

Mo We, 1:00pm-1:50pm John Warner Hall 104

Studies the history of the South from 1900 to the present focusing on class structure, race relations, cultural traditions, and the question of southern identity Fulfills: SSH

 

HIUS 3501 Race, Place, and the Schoolhouse 

Prof. Erica Sterling; 

We 2:00-4:30pm, Memorial Gym 213

Few things evoke more emotion from the U.S. electorate than assertions of state control over how and where children are educated. Using 20th century black educational history as our guide, students will learn how urban, gender, or cultural historians, for example, use different methodologies to answer similar questions about access, equity, and power. Fulfills: SSH

 

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Prof. Milton Vickerman; 

Mo We 2:00-3:15pm, New Cabell Hall 032

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.  Fulfills: SSH

 

SOC 4260 Race, Crime and Punishment 

Prof. Rose Buckelew; 

Mo We 2:00-3:15pm, New Cabell Hall 032

This course is an exercise in critical thinking and writing. We will investigate connections between race and crime in contemporary America. To do so, we will explore constructions of crime and race and patterns of victimization, criminality and punishment. We will uncover shifting definitions of crime and the ways that institutions, policies and practices shape patterns of punishment. Fulfills: SSH

 

 


Humanities

All majors must take at least one Humanities course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Social Science/History, Race and Politics, or 4000 research.

 

 

AAS 2224. Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Prof. Lisa Shutt. 

Wed 2:00-4:30pm, New Cabell 395

This course 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. Concentrating on media texts that have influenced and ‘set the stage’ for today’s media, we will primarily examine media texts from the 1970s through the first decade of the 21st century. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, 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. Fulfills: Humanities.

 

AAS 2500. Swahili Cultures & Stories

Prof. Anne Rotich

This is an introductory course to the Swahili cultures. The course offers an in-depth understanding of the Swahili people, their cultures and history. The course will bring to the fore the diversity of issues concerning the Swahili people and the Swahili coast including music, food, clothing, trade, and the social and political issues. We will also pursue a range of basic questions such as:  How have issues of identity, class, ethnicity and race informed Swahili people experiences?  How, and in what contexts, did Swahili people confront—and overcome— historical challenges brought by the Arabic and European settlement in East Africa? How have Swahili cultures crossed international borders through the Indian Ocean trade and through globalization? Students will actively engage in an analytical examination of stories from east Africa and other required readings and then express their responses through class discussions, group presentations and write an analytical final paper.  Fulfills: Humanities; Africa Requirement

 

AAS 2559 Black Girlhood and the Media 

Prof. Ashleigh Wade. 

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, New Cabell 338

How do movies, viral videos, and memes impact the material lives of Black girls? This course offers an introduction to the emergent and growing field of Black Girlhood Studies, especially in relation to media representation and engagement. The course will cover foundational texts about Black girlhood alongside a range of media – newspapers, magazines, film, and Internet/social media content – to explore the ways in which Black girlhood has been constructed and portrayed through these platforms. We will use these explorations as a way of 1) understanding the tenets of Black girlhood studies and 2) identifying what is at stake in documenting and representing Black girls’ experiences. As part of the course, students will have an opportunity to create their own media/text (YouTube video, website/blog, essay collection, chapbook, etc.) about Black girlhood. Fulfills: Humanities

 

AMST 2753/ARTH 2753 Arts and Cultures of the Slave South 

Prof. Louis Nelson; 

Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Gilmer Hall 301

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. Fulfills: Humanities

 

AMST 3321 Race and Ethnicity in Latinx Literature

Prof. Carmen Lamas 

Mo 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell Hall 323

Surveys transformations in Africa from four million years ago to the present, known chiefly through archaeology, and focusing on Stone and Iron Age societies in the last 150,000 years. Prerequisite: ANTH 2800 or instructor permission. Fulfills: Humanities

 

AMST 3407 Racial Borders and American Cinema 

Prof. Shilpa Dave; 

Mo We  2:00-3:15pm, Brice Hall 235

This class explores how re-occurring images of racial and ethnic minorities such as African Americans, Jews, Asians, Native Americans and Latino/as are represented in film and shows visual images of racial interactions and boundaries of human relations that tackle topics such as immigration, inter-racial relationships and racial passing. Fulfills: Humanities

 

AMST 3427 Gender, Things, and Difference

Prof. Jessica Sewell; 

Mo We 2:00-3:15pm, Gibson Hall 242

This class explores how material culture, the physical stuff that is part of human life, is used to help to construct and express gendered and other forms of difference. We will look at how bodies and clothes shape our understanding of our own and others’ identities, how we imbue objects with gender, how the food we cook and eat carries cultural meanings, and how the design of buildings and spaces structures gender. Fulfills: Humanities

 

AMST 3559.001 Mapping Black Landscapes

Prof. Lisa Goff; 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell Hall 323

Course description pending: Fufills

 

ANTH 3880 African Archaeology

Prof. Zach McKeeby; 

Mo We Fr 10:00-10:50am, New Cabell Hall 383

Surveys transformations in Africa from four million years ago to the present, known chiefly through archaeology, and focusing on Stone and Iron Age societies in the last 150,000 years. Prerequisite: ANTH 2800 or instructor permission. Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

DRAM 4590.002 The Black Monologues

Prof. Theresa Davis; 

TBA, TBA Hall TBA

A directed project-based study offered to upper-level students. Fulfills: Humanities

 

ENGL 3025 African American English

Prof. Connie Smith; 

Tu Th 11:00-12:15pm, New Cabell Hall 287

This course examines the communicative practices of African American Vernacular English (AAEV) to explore how a marginalized language dynamic has made major transitions into American mainstream discourse. AAEV is no longer solely the informal speech of many African Americans; it is the way Americans speak. Fulfills: Humanities

 

FRT 3559 Black France Musicscape: Race, Space, Gender and Language Across The French-Speaking World

Prof. Rashana Lydner

Tu Thur 3:30 - 4:45pm

This interdisciplinary course examines the impact of music and language use in the Black Francophone world. It provides students an opportunity to explore, think critically, and discuss issues on cultural expression from multilingual communities in West and Central Africa, the French Caribbean, and mainland France. We will engage with key terms such as the Black Atlantic, la francophone, authenticity, creolization, globalization, and multilingualism. To do this, we will read various texts, listen to and analyze music and music videos from genres such as coupé décalé, ndombolo/soukous, afro beats, pop, hip hop/ rap, zouk, dancehall and reggae. Throughout the semester, we will think about the importance of race, space, gender and language in the formation of a Black France Musicscape. Fulfills: Humanities

 

MDST 3407 Racial Borders & American Cinema 

Prof. Shilpa Dave; 

Mo We 9:00-9:50am, Gilmer Hall 390

The history of American cinema is inextricably and controversially tied to the racial politics of the U.S. This course will explore how images of racial and ethnic minorities such as African Americans, Jews, Asians, Native Americans and Latino/as are reflected on screen and the ways that minorities in the entertainment industry have responded to often limiting representations. Prerequisite: MDST Major. Fulfills: Humanities

 

MDST 3510.003 Topics in Media Research: Race and Digital Media Studies

Prof. Pallavi Rao; 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm, Bryan Hall 325

This hands-on course prepares students to read, evaluate, and design research in media studies. Drawing on critical, historical, administrative, and industrial traditions in the field, students will learn to assess the validity and anticipate the ethical requirements of various methods & data collection procedures. Following a theme selected by the instructor, the course culminates with each student proposing a new, original research study. Fulfills: Humanities

 

RELA 2750 African Religions 

Prof. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton; 

Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Gibson Hall 141

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. Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

RELA 3730 Religious Themes in African Literature and Film

Prof. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton; 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm, Gibson Hall 142

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. Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

RELG 3405 Introduction to Black and Womanist Religious Thought 

Prof. Ashon Crawley; 

Mo 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell Hall 168

Is thought always already racialized, gendered, sexed? This Introduction to Black and Womanist Thought course argues that thought does not have to submit itself to modern regimes of knowledge production, that there are alternative ways to think and practice and be in the world with one another. An introduction to major thinkers in both religious thought and traditions with attention to theology, philosophy, and history. Fulfills: Humanities

 

RELG 3713 Black Religion and Criminal Justice System

Prof. Kai Parker; 

Tu Th 3:30-4:45pm, Nau Hall 141

ADD course desc. Fulfills: Humanities

 

 


 

Race and Politics

All majors must take at least one Race & Politics course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Social Science/History, or 4000 research.

 

 

AAS 2500.002 Introduction to Race, Class, Politics & the Environment 

Kimberly Fields. Wed 3:30-6:00pm. New Cabell 489

This course introduces students to the adoption and implementation of environmental policy in the United States and examines issues of environmental quality and social justice. We will concentrate on federal, state and local governance and relations across these levels. In turn, we will compare the abilities of state and federal governments to develop and implement environmental efforts and policy, as well as their consequences.  The course takes as axiomatic the premise that all people have a right to live in a clean environment free from hazardous pollution or contamination, and to the natural resources necessary to sustain health and livelihood. With this as our starting point, we will question why, and through what social, political and economic processes, some people are denied this basic right. How is it that certain populations of people do not have access to basic resources, or are systematically burdened with pollution or environmental hazards to a greater extent than other populations? What are the social relations of production and power that contribute to these outcomes? What can be done? We begin by examining the philosophical foundations and history of the environmental justice movement and foundational concepts such as justice, race and class. We then explore these concepts through a series of case studies of urban environmental (in)justice in the U.S. Through these case studies we will examine environmental justice issues in urban and rural settings; the strategies and politics of poor peoples’ environmental justice movements; and climate justice. Fulfills: Race and Politics

 

AAS 2500.003 Race, Class and Gender

Prof. Liana Richardson

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am,  New Cabell 323

While many people in the United States embrace the rhetoric of equality, “the American Dream,” and “the land of opportunity,” social inequality by race, class, and gender is a persistent feature of our society.  The overall goal of this course is to examine the social, political, and economic forces that cause and are produced by this inequality, paying particular attention to how race, class, and gender intersect to shape lived experiences and life chances. First, we will discuss how power and privilege are patterned by race, class, and gender. Then, we will examine how the resultant inequalities are perpetuated and reinforced by social institutions such as the labor market, housing, health care, media, and criminal justice system. Finally, we will consider potential strategies for disrupting these linkages, and the social justice politics associated with them. Fulfills: Race and Politics/SSH.

 

AAS 3853. From Redlined to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the US

 

Prof. Andrew Karhl

Mon Wed 9:00-9:50. Ridley G008

This course examines the history of housing and real estate and explores its role in shaping the meaning and lived experience of race in the United States.  We will learn how and why real estate ownership, investment, and development came to play a critical role in the formation and endurance of racial segregation, modern capitalism, and the built environment.  We will look at how homeownership and residential location shapes the educational options, job prospects, living expenses, health, quality of life, and wealth accumulation of Americans.  We will study the structure and mechanics of the American real estate industry, the formation of federal housing policy, and the political economy of housing and development from the New Deal through the civil rights movement to the present.  We will explore the dynamic relationship of race and space in twentieth-century cities and suburbs.  As we do, we will acquire a deeper knowledge and understanding of how real estate shapes our lives and lies at the heart of many of the most vexing problems and pressing challenges facing America today. 

 

ANTH 2270 Race, Gender, and Medical Science

Prof. Gertrude Fraser; 

Mo We 3:00-3:50pm, Minor Hall 125

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.. 

 

 


Africa

All majors must take at least one Africa course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement can double count with any other distribution.

 

 

AAS 2500. Swahili Cultures & Stories

Prof. Anne Rotich

This is an introductory course to the Swahili cultures. The course offers an in-depth understanding of the Swahili people, their cultures and history. The course will bring to the fore the diversity of issues concerning the Swahili people and the Swahili coast including music, food, clothing, trade, and the social and political issues. We will also pursue a range of basic questions such as:  How have issues of identity, class, ethnicity and race informed Swahili people experiences?  How, and in what contexts, did Swahili people confront—and overcome— historical challenges brought by the Arabic and European settlement in East Africa? How have Swahili cultures crossed international borders through the Indian Ocean trade and through globalization? Students will actively engage in an analytical examination of stories from east Africa and other required readings and then express their responses through class discussions, group presentations and write an analytical final paper.  

 

AAS 3500.003. Traveling While Black: Tourism in Africa and Diaspora 

Prof. Amber Henry. 

Tu 2:00-4:30. New Cabell 383

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 3559. Africulture: From the African Roots of US Agriculture to Black Farmers in the 21st Century

Mr. Michael Carter, Jr. (with Prof. Lisa Shutt)

Tu 2:00-4:30. New Cabell 303

Led by a practicing farmer-activist, (Michael Carter, Jr. of Carter Farms in nearby Orange County, VA) we will examine how principles, practices, plants, and people of African descent have shaped US agriculture and thus, the lives of all Americans. By examining a wide range of history, laws, attitudes, cultures and traditions, we will see how many US staple commodities and practices have their roots in Africa and observe cultural similarities between indigenous cultures around the world. While evaluating realities of today’s Black farmers and the innovations they devise to survive in a system stacked against them, we will look for solutions to an array of challenges in environmental and agricultural sciences faced by today’s Black farmers. 

 

HIAF 2002  Modern African History 

Prof. John Mason; 

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, Gibson 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. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3031  History of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade

Prof. Amir Syed; 

Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, Clark Hall G004

This course concerns the trans-Atlantic slave trade, with an emphasis on African history. Through interactive lectures, in-class discussions, written assignments and examinations of first-hand accounts by slaves and slavers, works of fiction and film, and analyses by historians, we will seek to understand one of the most tragic and horrifying phenomena in the history of the western world. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3051  West African History

Prof. James La Fleur; 

Tu Th 11:00-12:15am, Clark Hall 101

History of West Africans in the wider context of the global past, from West Africans' first attempts to make a living in ancient environments through the slave trades (domestic, trans-Saharan, and Atlantic), colonial overrule by outsiders, political independence, and ever-increasing globalization. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 3112  African Environment History

Prof. James La Fleur; 

Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm, Nau Hall 141

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. Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

HIAF 4501  Photography and Freedom in Africa

Prof. John Mason; 

Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm, Nau Hall 141

Photography and Freedom in Africa, blends African history, American history, and the history of photography to explore the ways in which both African and western photographers shaped and misshaped the world's understanding of Africa during the era of anti-colonial struggles and the Cold War.  Fulfills: SSH; Africa

 

RELA 2750 African Religions 

Prof. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton; 

Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Gibson Hall 141

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. Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

RELA 3730 Religious Themes in African Literature and Film

Prof. Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton; 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm, Gibson Hall 142

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. Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

 


4000 Level Research

All majors must take at least one course at the 4000-level that requires a 20-page research paper or its equivalent. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Race and Politics, or Social Science/History. For courses outside of AAS, kindly confirm with the instructor before/at the start of classes that the course meets the research requirements.

 

 

AAS 4501. Engaging Local Histories: River View Farm

Prof. Lisa Shutt. 

Tu 2:00-6:00. New Cabell 068 (and off-grounds location at Ivy Creek Natural Area – we will arrange transportation)

 This course aims to encourage students to situate and shed light on various aspects of Black history and culture in Albemarle County and the surrounding regions through the lens and example of River View Farm and those who created it, lived there, farmed there, and led local and regional communities in a number of ways. We will often hold class meetings on site at the farm (not far from grounds in Albemarle County) and engage various sources to become knowledgeable about Hugh Carr, whose earnings as the farm manager of the nearby Woodlands plantation enabled him to establish the farm with a 58-acre tract in the late 1860s. By examining the lives of Carr’s daughter, Mary Carr Greer, who was the first female principal of the Albemarle Training School and her husband, Conly Greer, Albemarle County’s first Black agricultural extension agent, we will follow students’ interests to examine topics ranging from the early post-emancipation lives of formerly enslaved men and women, the Black Extension Service and Land Grant University system, Black 4-H youth programs, women’s “Demonstration Clubs,” the history of African American education in the region between 1840 and the mid-20th century, Black agricultural history, local Albemarle County histories of the Civil Rights Movement, African American communities such as Hydraulic Mills and Union Ridge (and the flooding of Albemarle Black communities to build a reservoir), the impact of global forces on local experiences, African American foodways, the importance and format of kitchen gardens, museum studies, the history of historicizing River View Farm and other local sites related to Black history, and many more possible topics. Part of the work of this class involves actively working with the Ivy Creek Foundation to support their mission of providing education about local Black histories to the public. Students will produce a 20-page paper on their original research using archival materials (including a wealth of recorded interviews), material culture, and of the landscape/built environment. 4.0 credits
Fulfills: 4000-level research

 

AAS 4570.001 IIlegal & Second Slavery in Age of Revolutions

Instructor TBA

Mon Wed 3:30-4:45. New Cabell 209

ADD course desc. 

 

AAS 4570.002 Black Reconstruction

Prof. Anna Duensing. 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm New Cabell 064

This seminar offers an in-depth study of W.E.B. Du Bois’ 1935 magnum opus Black Reconstruction. In addition to a close reading of major selections from the book, our work will focus on the national and international sociopolitical contexts in which Du Bois researched and wrote, the historiographical terrain he challenged and ultimately overturned through his analysis, and the long-term impact of Black Reconstruction within historical scholarship, political thought, radical activism, and U.S. political culture. We will read Du Bois in conversation with his major influences and interlocutors alongside scholars who built on his foundational insights, ideas that were revolutionary at the time but are far more commonplace today. This includes his challenge to dominant historiography and still-persistent myths about slavery and Reconstruction; his analysis of the lost opportunities of Reconstruction; his framing of entanglements of race and class oppression; the centrality of Black labor to the entire social and economic structure of the modern world; the inequalities and racial violence essential to the maintenance of capitalism; the role of whiteness in relation to U.S. citizenship; and the revolutionary possibilities of abolition democracy. Our other readings will include work from C.L.R. James, Claudia Jones, Cedric Robinson, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, David Roediger, Robin Kelley, and Thulani Davis. Fulfills: 4000-level research

 

AMST 4559 Race, Criminality, and Abolition 

Prof. Lisa Cacho; 

Tu Th 11:00-12:15pm/ 2:00-3:15, Wilson Hall 214

ADD course desc. Fulfills: 4000

 

AMST 5559 Mapping Black Landscapes

Prof. Lisa Goff; 

Tu 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell Hall 323

ADD course desc. Fulfills: 4000

 

 

ENGL 4500 Sally Hemings University

Prof. Lisa Woolfork; 

Tu 5:30-8:00pm, John W. Warner Hall 110

This course is “Sally Hemings University.” Its objective is to prepare students to examine and reconfigure the status quo. This course seeks to help students appreciate the shift from euphemisms (“racially-charged” or “racially-tinged”) to vocabularies of consequence (“racist” or “white supremacist”), to foster a facility for talking capably and comfortably about “uncomfortable” topics such as systems of domination and their influence upon university and daily life. “Sally Hemings University” is a site where the adverse effects of overt and subtle forms of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism and other systems of dominance are scrutinized. As a course, “Sally Hemings University” explores questions generated by re-framing “Mr. Jefferson’s University” (and universities generally) as a site that destabilizes the dominant narrative of the university as Jefferson’s primary property and by extension that of similarly entitled white men. Fulfills: 4000 with instructor permission

 

ENGL 4580.001 Critical Race Theory

Prof. Marlon Ross; 

Th 5:00-7:30pm, New Cabell Hall 064

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 black literary and cultural theory from the 1960s to the present, focusing on a series of critical flashpoints that have occurred over the last several decades. These flashpoints include: 1) the crisis over black authenticity during the Black Power/ Black Arts movement; 2) the schisms related to womanism (or 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’ 2016 film Moonlight; 5) racial violence and the law, focused on the Ferguson and the Black Lives Matter movement; and 6) the aesthetic movement called Afrofuturism. Other reading will include a variety of theoretical essays and chapters drawn from different disciplines, including legal theory, film and media studies, sociology, history, political theory, and hip hop studies. 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. The goal of the course is to give you a solid grounding in the vocabulary, key figures, concepts, debates, and discursive styles comprising the broad sweep of theoretical race studies from the late- twentieth century to the present, and to nurture your own theorizing about race and its deep cultural impact. Fulfills: 4000

 

ENGL 4580.002 Race in American Places

Prof. K. Ian Grandison; 

Tu 5:00-7:30pm, Bryan Hall 323

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. Fulfills: 4000

 

HIAF 4501 Seminar in African History: Photography and Freedom in Africa.                  

Prof. John Mason; 

Mo 3:30-6:00pm, Clark Hall 101

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. Seminar work 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. Fulfills: 4000

 

HIUS 4501 Seminar in the United States History: Slavery and Founders

Prof. Christa Dierksheide; 

Th  2:00-4:30pm, New Cabell Hall 038

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. Seminar work 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. Fulfills: 4000

 

MUSI 4090 Concepts of Performance in Africa 

Prof. Michelle Kisliuk; 

Th 3:30-5:00pm, Old Cabell Hall S008

ADD course desc. Fulfills: 4000; Africa

 

MUSI 4523 Issues in Ethnomusicology: Electronic Music in Africa

Prof. Noel Lobley; 

Mo We 9:30-10:45am, Wilson Hall 142

An intensive experience with ethnomusicology and performance studies, this seminar explores musical ethnography (descriptive writing), experiential research, sociomusical processes, and other interdisciplinary approaches to musical performance. Addresses issues involving race, class, gender, and identity politics in light of particular topics and areas studies. Prerequisite: MUSI 3070 or instructor permission. Fulfills: 4000; Africa

 

 


Languages and Other Electives

 

SWAH 1020.001. Introductory Swahili II 

Prof. Leonora Anyango.

Mon Wed Fri 10:00am - 10:50am; Online

This course is a continuation of SWAH 1010. The course is designed to advance your knowledge of Swahili from the SWAH 1010. It is expected that you will build your Swahili lexicon and Swahili grammar to enable you to adequately contribute to basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk more deeply about your work, studies, country and your preferences, needs, and interests following the correct grammar rules. You will learn how to handle basic social conversations at the market, in the hospital, and also talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will also learn about more cultural aspects of everyday culture in East Africa from class and from engaging virtually the Swahili community in Charlottesville.

 

SWAH 1020.002 Introductory Swahili II

Prof. Anne Rotich; Section 002, 

Mon Wed Fri 11:00-11:50, Brooks 103

This course is a continuation of SWAH 1010. The course is designed to advance your knowledge of Swahili from the SWAH 1010. It is expected that you will build your Swahili lexicon and Swahili grammar to enable you to adequately contribute to basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk more deeply about your work, studies, country and your preferences, needs, and interests following the correct grammar rules. You will learn how to handle basic social conversations at the market, in the hospital, and also talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will also learn about more cultural aspects of everyday culture in East Africa from class and from engaging virtually the Swahili community in Charlottesville.

 

SWAH 2020 Intermediate Swahili II

Prof. Anne Rotich; 

Mon Wed Fri 12:00-12:50am, Brooks 103

This is an intermediate Swahili course that is intended to equip you with more language skills in speaking, reading, writing, listening and cultures. It is an opportunity for you to enhance your language skills gained from SWAH 2010. At the end of this course you will have increased your Swahili vocabulary, speak Swahili with more ease and less errors, understand and interact with Swahili speakers. You will be able to write and analyze texts and essays in Swahili on different topics and appreciate more the cultures of the Swahili people. You will also be able to express yourself, your everyday activities, discuss politics or current events in Swahili. To achieve this we will utilize Swahili short story texts, multimedia resources, the internet, magazines, and news broadcast stations to enhance your learning.

 

 

 

People Placeholder

Start of the Semester

Statement after Nov. 13th shooting

It is with a heavy heart that we mourn the loss of Devin Chandler, D'Sean Perry, and Lavel Davis, Jr...

Statements from the Carter G Woodson Institute

In Remembrance: Reginald D. Butler, 1944 - 2019 

IN REMEMBRANCE: REGINALD D. BUTLER, 1944 - 2019

I am deeply saddened to report that Reginald Butler, Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute from 1996 to 2005, passed away on July 5th after a long illness. Reginald, who also taught in the History department, was a scholar of early African American history.  A quiet, thoughtful man, Reginald was a dedicated teacher who mentored dozens of students and steered many into graduate studies through the Institute’s Emerging Scholars Program, which he founded.  

Appointed director of the Institute the year after Armstead Robinson, its founding director, passed away, Reginald brought creative energy and expansive purpose to the position.  He established and oversaw many significant initiatives during his tenure at Woodson, including the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge, supported by a generous, multi-year grant from the Ford Foundation. He also conducted the Chesapeake Regional Seminar in Black Studies, a collaboration with faculty at a number of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, along with other institutions in the region, organizing workshops and seminars focused on new directions in research and teaching of African-American studies. He convened and coordinated the Central Virginia Social History Project, a group of area scholars examining race and ethnicity in central Virginia from the 17th to the early 20th century. Reginald worked with faculty and staff members across the university on the initial archaeological research that led eventually to the Katherine Foster Memorial, now installed at the South Lawn. The Woodson Institute owes Reginald a debt of gratitude for his long years of service and leadership.  He will be sorely missed, but his work and influence live on in the students he taught and mentored and whose lives he deeply touched. Kirt von Daake, current Association Dean in the College, was one of those students, who wrote, “He pushed me hard, held me to incredible high standards, but supported me at every step.  His voice has guided me my entire career.”

A memorial service is being planned for September 14th in Goochland County, where Reginald spent the summers of his formative years. Details will be posted on a Facebook Page created in his honor "Celebrating the Life of Reginald D. Butler."

Reginald Butler obituary in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, published July 17, 2019. 

Back to School: Lessons After #Charlottesville

BACK TO SCHOOL: LESSONS AFTER #CHARLOTTESVILLE

LETTER FROM THE DIRECTOR

 

             I greet you at the beginning of a new semester, ecstatic to announce that this past June, after decades of petitioning, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies finally became a department!  Such was the welcome news of June.  That which followed two months later was none so bright,  thanks to the “Unite the Right” rally, and the protests and counter-protests it provoked. The violence, terror, and brutality witnessed over August 11th and 12th, thrust Charlottesville into the headlines globally, leaving us with the unenviable task of reckoning with the fallout and plotting our way forward.  These have not been easy times, not least because what happened to this city cum hashtag has punctured its much vaunted image as one of the nation’s “best places,” winning distinction in multiple categories. Previously, it had been dubbed one of the “15 Best Places to live in the U. S;” one of the “Top 10 Best Places to Retire;” one of the “Top Five Destinations” in the country; and the “Best College Town in America.”  In the shocking aftermath of those two days in August, it became crystal clear that many Charlottesville residents viewed the city in this very light, and were thus quick to claim, “This is not us!” “This is not Charlottesville!” But just as readily others rejoined, “This is not new.” As a Charlottesville native responded to one of the many reporters who flocked to the city for the Alt-Right rally, “Our ancestors been through this before.”  

       Not surprisingly, as with so many crises our country has witnessed historically, these instantaneous responses were polarized, though not neatly, along the perennial fault lines of race and class, of status and location, of privilege and privation. What both sides held in common, however, was the mutual recognition that we must all go back to school. We must all become students again. Having been “mis-educated,” to riff on The Miseducation of the Negro, written by our namesake, Carter G. Woodson, we must now open ourselves to re-education. We must all become students of history, most especially: the history of the United States, of Charlottesville, and the broader Commonwealth of Virginia. And for those of us who teach, study, and lead at the University of Virginia, we must first be students of our institution, looking its history squarely in the face.

            In a recent address to the students enrolled in the newly instituted College Fellows Program, Woodson Institute Faculty Affiliate Robert Fatton posed the critical question, “What . . . can we do as faculty and students in the aftermath of Heather Heyer’s tragic death and the chilling and frightening presence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in our midst?”  He answered his question with a challenge to us all:  “We need to do much more than walk down the Lawn to ‘take back our University.’  In my view, the point is not so much to reclaim our University, but to change it.”  That change, he went on to say, must “begin by acknowledging the university’s complicity in the creation and preservation of white supremacy.”

            This history, which begins properly with the labor extracted from black captives, who built the famed “academical village,” has been reflected across the years in the professors it has hired, the ideas and ideologies some have propounded from the lectern and the pages of their publications; in the policies of exclusion once decreed by its Board of Visitors, which have, in turn, shaped and determined the demographics of its faculty and student body, past and present, as well as circumscribed the possibilities of advancement for so many of its workers. Like so many of its his peer institutions, UVA has owned up to its origins in slavery, but far more self-assessment is in order.

            As is often the case, students in our universities are often the goads and harbingers of change, and many young people at UVA have taken up this mantle. The demands issued by the Black Student Alliance and undersigned organizations are but one example of the position our students have taken on the front lines of change. Among the growing list of documents circulating around the country— including, “the Charlottesville Syllabus”, which is the product of the UVA Graduate Student Coalition for Liberation— the work of students, fellows and alumni of the Carter G. Woodson Institute is well represented.  I am pleased to refer you to a selection of their responses to the events of August 11th and 12th; let’s call it “Selections from the Woodson Institute’s Syllabus on Charlottesville and the University of Virginia.”

            “The Illusion of Progress: Charlottesville’s Roots in White Supremacy,” produced by the Institute’s “Citizen Justice Initiative,” between May and July 2017, had already helped to lay much of the foundation for a university self-study, perhaps knowing uncannily that a survey of the roots of white supremacy in Charlottesville, as well as in the university, would be needed barely two months hence. 

            Although neither could have foreseen what ultimately came to pass, Aryn Frazier, a Rhodes Scholar, who graduated as an African American Studies Major just this past May, wrote wisely with fellow student and alumus, Martese Johnson, to caution us against “a society duped by [the] distractions” created by the organizers of “Unite the Right.”  In “Why the Upcoming Alt-Right Rally in Charlottesville May be Less Important than We Think,” they argued that the KKK and its ilk are but “a spawn of that real, quiet, but deadly injustice” of white supremacy—in other words, the invisible "monuments" not cast in bronze or installed in parks and squares, or lining boulevards and thoroughfares.  

            In the wake of the August crisis, Woodson Institute Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Lindsey Jones, wrote to remind us that “Just Calling the White Nationalists at Charlottesville ‘Nazis’ Erases America's Own Racism.” In answer to those who would argue that the members of the alt-right should be termed “Nazis,” and thus deemed “not us,” she counters, “I call them white supremacists, domestic terrorists, Virginian neighbors, and fellow Americans."

            Finally, perhaps we can all say “Amen” to the response of J. T. Roane, another graduate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute, recently awarded a Columbia PhD in history. In the thick of the turmoil, he chose to focus, not on white supremacist terror in Charlottesville, but instead, on Black love and the community of students and faculty who sustained him in his years at UVA.

            Each of these pieces is shaped by and steeped in the intellectual assumptions and canons of African American and African Studies.  At no time has the work of this field been needed more urgently than now amid the din and chaos unleashed by the racist clamoring of those determined, by any means necessary, to “take [their] country back.”  It is fitting that I leave you to ponder, not only how longstanding are these references to “my country,” but also how one of the giants of African American Studies challenged them in The Souls of Black Folk (1903):

Your country? How came it yours? Before the Pilgrims landed we were here. Here we have brought our three gifts and mingled them with yours: a gift of story and song—soft, stirring melody in an ill-harmonized and unmelodious land; the gift of sweat and brawn to beat back the wilderness, conquer the soil, and lay the foundations of this vast economic empire two hundred years earlier than your weak hands could have done it; the third, a gift of the Spirit.

Around us the history of the land has centered for thrice a hundred years; out of the nation’s heart we have called all that was best to throttle and subdue all that was worst; fire and blood, prayer and sacrifice, have billowed over this people, and they have found peace only in the altars of the God of Right.

Nor has our gift of the Spirit been merely passive. Actively we have woven ourselves with the very warp and woof of this nation,—we fought their battles, shared their sorrow, mingled our blood with theirs, and generation after generation have pleaded with a headstrong, careless people to despise not Justice, Mercy, and Truth, lest the nation be smitten with a curse.

Perhaps, if only on the lower frequencies, DuBois speaks for you—speaks for us all.

 

Studiously yours,

Deborah E. McDowell

Director,
The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies,
College and Graduate Schools of Arts and Sciences 
University of Virginia

 

Faculty Affiliate Robert Fatton's Address on the Events of August 11th and 12th

Faculty Affiliate Robert Fatton's Address on the Events of August 11th and 12th

August 24, 2017

I was asked by some of my colleagues to say something personal about the ugly and violent events of the past two weeks. The invasion of our community by neo-Nazis and white supremacists armed with guns and blazing torches has left me with a very mixed sense of anger, outrage, bewilderment, and sadness. This sadness was compounded by the devastating loss of Heather Heyer who was killed when a Nazi terrorist drove his car into a crowd of protesters. Heather was a brave and forthright individual, who, as I learned at her memorial service last Wednesday, was not afraid of uncomfortable conversations and of calling people out on their prejudices. Heather exemplified human decency, she simply told us that we should not put up with ugliness and injustice. 

 

We should celebrate her simple and brave form of resistance. In fact, Heather was not alone; a multiplicity of organizations, clergy of all denominations, and individuals of different ideologies and faiths confronted the Ku Klux Klan and the neo-Nazis with fierce determination. I found this anti-supremacist and anti-fascist movement empowering.  It embodied human decency and it compelled the racists to retreat.

 

And yet, the question remains: what else can we do as faculty and students in the aftermath of both Heather Heyer’s tragic death and the chilling and frightening presence of white supremacists and neo-Nazis in our midst? 

 

While I appreciated last Wednesday’s candlelight march, it seems to me that we need to do much more than walking down the Lawn to “take back our University.”  In my view the point is not so much to reclaim our University, but to change it. 

 

Let me explain. In my view, change must begin by acknowledging the university's complicity in the creation and preservation of white supremacy.  For starters, Thomas Jefferson’s “academical village” was built by slave labor. As a native of Haiti, I am all too familiar with the views of UVA’s slave-owning founder. Many students are not aware that Haiti was the world’s first independent black nation, the result of a slave revolution against French colonialism.  Thomas Jefferson feared that the example of the Haitian revolution might embolden blacks in the United Sates to rise up. As President, he refused to recognize Haiti making it an outcast, a position it has struggled to overcome.

 

It is not just Jefferson’s slave-holding past with which we must contend. At the turn of the 20th century Dr. Paul Barringer, who served as Chairman of the Faculty—the last to hold that office before the University started having Presidents—promoted eugenics—a racist pseudo-science. In 1921, UVA President, E. A. Alderman welcomed and thanked the KKK for a large donation. We thus need to acknowledge the role of racist donors in the growth of our university. We also need to remember that African-Americans and women were not even admitted to the college until the late 1960s and early1970s.

 

It is only when we know this history, that we can understand how the torch-bearing white supremacists who invaded the Lawn on August 11, saw themselves as “reclaiming” the University.  In other words, if we do not forcefully confront and condemn this racist legacy, we cannot truly claim the University as a place that is welcoming to all.

 

I do not mean to dismiss recent efforts to uncover the hidden and ugly parts of our University, but only to say that more work must be done. Our current moment provides an excellent opportunity to raise awareness and create a genuine community.  We need a University that is not only culturally and ethnically diverse, but also economically inclusive. For whether we like to admit it or not, most of us at UVA are privileged. We need to reflect on how as an institution, and as individuals, we treat and reward those who are neither faculty nor students. I am talking about the custodial staff, grounds keepers, office staff and hospital workers, people whom we often ignore, but whose work is indispensable for our own flourishing. 

 

Most universities and colleges like to think of themselves as special places. And indeed, they are. We are. UVA is a special place where, if we faculty do our jobs well, you will grow into thoughtful and perceptive citizens. But UVA is also part of a wider world and reflects the problems of our times. You are entering adulthood in an epoch when the global economy has produced massive wealth and obscene inequalities that feed social insecurities and xenophobic sentiments. To paraphrase the Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci, we are living in times when “the old is dying, and the beautiful has yet to be born.”

 

Resolve to be part of that new birth!  Mobilize, organize, and work for the beautiful.  In the process, take a frank look at the past in order to better grasp the present. Study hard, debate vigorously, and think critically about how best to advance the common good. And then move forward with conviction and humility.

 

Thank you and welcome to UVA and Charlottesville.

                                                                                 August 24, 2017


Center for Teaching Excellence: "Responding to Critical Incidents"

Center for Teaching Excellence: "Responding to Critical Incidents"

August 21, 2017

In the wake of violent attacks in Charlottesville from white supremacist organizations on August 11-12, the Center for Teaching Excellence compiled a list of resources to help faculty and instructors address critical inicidents in their classrooms. In support of the Center for Teaching Excellence's response, the Woodson Institute reprints its list of resources below, the original link can be found here.

Responding To Critical Incidents


Following the hateful and violent display of racism, bigotry, white supremacy, and Neo-Nazism that occurred in Charlottesville on August 11-12, we offer the following resources to help instructors address this and other critical incidents in their classrooms. Formal research and UVA students tell us that students want faculty to acknowledge critical incidents in the classroom. If we don’t, students may assume that we do not care about them and/or the issue. A simple acknowledgement can normalize feelings of distress, ease a sense of isolation, and signal that you care. Here are a few things to consider.

  • It is important to acknowledge the violence of August 11-12 and that we are all likely to be upset and affected in different ways. Communicate your care through a gentle tone and manner and by being clear that you condemn the aggression displayed in our city and the University. We encourage you to be specific and name racism, bigotry, white supremacy, and Neo-Nazism while expressing your commitment to the values of diversity, inclusion, and civic discourse.
  • Be honest and humble. You can admit that you are also muddling your way through this and are unsure what to say. Explain why you may not have an in-depth conversation (e.g. “routines such as going to class can be helpful as we process”) and point to resources for students.
  • Indicate your interest for students’ well-being. Tell them that they should feel free to take care of themselves in whatever ways they need to do. Offer to speak with students during office hours, particularly encouraging students whose work may be affected by the incident. Consider offering flexibility regarding assignment deadlines. You might also review student safety guidelines and support offices.

Beyond Acknowledgment

There are many additional ways to support students and turn the incident into a teachable moment. Your strategy will likely depend on factors such as your personality, experience, and comfort level with the issues at stake, as well as class size and subject matter. Possibilities include:

  • Consider inviting your students at the beginning of class to free-write about a prompt such as the following: “How do you make sense of the current events and your emotions in light of your values? Who do you want to reach out to later in the day for more processing and support?” Such reflections allow students to intentionally process the incident and plan to seek support if needed.
  • Depending on students’ inclination and your comfort level, you can devote class time to discussing the incident, also being sure to let students who choose to process less publicly know that they are free to leave and take care of themselves. Consider the resources below as you plan to discuss critical incidents.
  • Explore different philosophical approaches to difficult classroom dialogues. Adopting and communicating to students a particular pedagogical stance can guide your decisions and the conversation.
  • Be proactive. Plan for inclusion. Review your syllabusCreate classroom community. Set ground rules.
  • Tend to your own self-care needs and remember that different members of our community are doing different kinds of emotional labor. Support those who experience a disproportionate strain for supporting students in this challenging time.

The following select resources can help equip you to respond in your classrooms to critical incidents affecting the community:

We would be happy to talk with you about further strategies within the context of your particular teaching setting. Call us at 434-982-2815 or request a confidential consultation online.

The CTE is committed to the values of diversity, inclusion, social justice, and education.


 

Director's Statement in Response to the Events of August 11th and 12th

Director's Statement in Response to the Events of August 11th and 12th

August 15, 2017

To Students, Faculty, Alumni, and Friends of the Carter G. Woodson Institute:

 

Still reeling from and wrestling with the aftermath of the “Unite the Right” rally of this past weekend, I write as Director of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, to join others in condemning the unspeakable terror and brutality unleashed on our community.  Along with my colleagues, I extend my heartfelt condolences to the families and friends of those who will be long remembered for sacrificing their lives in defense against this latest iteration of bigotry and white supremacy.  In the name of free speech and the right to assemble and protest, the rally’s organizers—both graduates of the University of Virginia—drew on time-worn tactics of terrorism and intimidation.

 

While we do not seek to inflame the tensions of this moment, it helps to be reminded of the words and work of the African American, Ida B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), who devoted her life to campaigning against the racist violence and terrorism of lynching.  Writing in Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All its Phases (1892)she makes two instructive points, which may serve to guide us in the days ahead: 1) “the people must know before they can act” and 2) “the way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”  As an investigative journalist, Wells-Barnett was advocating in these passages for the role and power of the press as “educator,” but also for the importance of an informed citizenry. Armed with knowledge of Charlottesville and its history, we need not resort to the simplistic question posed by journalists, politicians, and pundits alike over the last 48 hours--“How did we get here?” Rather, we must ask, “What next?”  Answering the latter question often requires that we “know” before “we act.”  On behalf of my colleagues, I wish to assert the fact that we are a unit of African American and African Studies within an academic institution, believing in the transformative power and value of knowledge.  As we have done time and time again in the face of national and local crises, we reaffirm the moral and intellectual value of our commitment to diversity, tolerance, civility, and justice, both at the University of Virginia and beyond.

 

In the spirit of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, we append to this statement a series of links to suggested resources for further study and future action, beginning with “The Illusion of Progress:  Charlottesville’s Roots in White Supremacy.”  In preparation throughout the summer of 2017, we share this document, still in progress, which was produced by the “Citizen Justice Initiative” of the Carter G. Woodson Institute.  Sponsored by the Strategic Investment Fund of the University of Virginia,  it represents the research conducted by a team of student interns from Charlottesville-area high schools and undergraduates from the University of Virginia, along with the director and managing editor of the project.  Their work establishes that the legacies of slavery, segregation, and white supremacy in our community are yet to be conquered, despite signs of incremental progress.  In the days and weeks ahead, we must do our part, individually and collectively, to battle those forces that bid to set us further back, working in solidarity with groups and coalitions on initiatives already underway.  Following this document are links to other resources pertinent to the work that lies ahead.

 

Yours in struggle,

Deborah E. McDowell

for the Carter G. Woodson Institute,

College and Graduate Schools of Arts and Sciences 

University of Virginia

The Illusion of Progress: Charlottesville’s Roots in White Supremacy

A Dark & Constant Struggle: 25 Years of Right-Wing Terrorism in the United States

Alt-Right Campus Guide

The Charlottesville Syllabus

 


 

Statement from the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies Regarding President Trump's Executive Order on Immigration

Statement from the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies Regarding President Trump's Executive Order on Immigration

January 31, 2017

   All inhabitants of the globe are now neighbors.      

                                                  --Martin Luther King, Jr. “The World House”

 

At this moment of distress and consternation, in the wake of President Trump’s executive order on immigration of last Friday, it is useful to turn to “The World House,” the final chapter of King’s last book, Where do we Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967). There King began by referencing the papers of a famous novelist, containing a list of possible plots for future stories. The most prominent on the list, King noted , was this: “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.” He goes on to say, “This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great ‘world house’ in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interests, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”  

 

The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies affirms King’s statement, along with his famous axiom that “Together we must learn to live as brothers [and sisters] or together we will be forced to perish as fools.” We further affirm the moral and intellectual value of our commitment to diversity, tolerance, civility, and justice, both at the University of Virginia and around the world. As scholars, researchers, and teachers of race, ethnicity and culture across the African Diaspora, we have a special understanding of the wide variety of cultural, historical and religious experiences that make up and bind together the human family globally—and inextricably. For this reason, we denounce any policy or plan, whether at local, state or federal level, that bids to sever this connection, whether through word or deed. Therefore, as citizens of the Commonwealth and scholars of the university, we assert our commitment to the creation and cultivation of a just society where intolerance, injustice, prejudice, and hate will not prevail. We believe we are all the richer by that racial, ethnic, religious, and linguistic pluralism that has distinguished and sustained the American experiment since its founding. 

 


In Response to the Brutal Arrest of Martese Johnson - from the Woodson Institute

In Response to the Brutal Arrest of Martese Johnson - from the Woodson Institute

March 21, 2015

We—the faculty, faculty affiliates, students, fellows, and staff—of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies express our outrage at the brutal arrest of third-year student Martese Johnson by agents of the Virginia Alcohol Beverage Control Department.  We want you to know that we share the frustrations and pain expressed by the broader black student community.  We want you to know that we stand steadfast with you, our students, in your desire to create a just, inclusive and socially conscious university. 

 

We are well aware that many of our students are also calling on the Woodson Institute for greater support. As faculty members, we want to assure you that we remain resolute in our mission and that we remain faithful to longstanding principles anchoring the Black Studies tradition.  Our commitment to these principles often operates outside the public eye.  But while our advocacy may not always be visible, rest assured that it expresses itself on various fronts.  Moreover, that advocacy is always motivated by our fundamental desire to support you while advancing the broader imperatives and legacies of Black Studies.

 

In these times when anti-black violence, whether physical, psychological or intellectual, wracks and divides our nation and finds a home at our very University and its back door, it is critical that we work together to unify our fractured community.  Such unity begins with mutual respect, dialogue and cooperation.  We invite our students to partner with us in our quest for healing and justice.  We will be working diligently in the upcoming weeks on action items to repair our community.  In the meantime, please do not hesitate to contact us, to let us know how we can best support you at this terrible time.  Our doors are open.


Tracey Stewart

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
"Being Maroon: Music, Memory and Power in Articulations of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Jamaican Maroonage"

My dissertation, “Being Maroon: The Role of Music in the Definition and Socio-Cultural, Economic, and Political Development of Jamaican Maroon Communities,” is an ethnographic project that draws from over two years of field research in Jamaica. I examine music as integral to economic and political mobility; to socio-cultural conceptualization, education, and preservation; and I identify it as a veritable historical archive that offers readings of colonialism from the point of view of Jamaican Maroons and other colonized communities influenced by ongoing present-day colonialist encounters. Jamaican Maroon music and cultural icons such as Grandy Nanny of the Maroons are used to make and to contest claims of being and entitlement that are linked to two eighteenth century treaties between Jamaican Maroons and British colonialists. These treaties are at the crux of often opposing conceptualizations of Maroon nationhood that are informed—in large part—by complicated historical trajectories which foment conflict in the socio-economic and political realms of present-day Jamaican Maroons, non-Maroon Jamaicans, and the Jamaican State. 

     This study was developed within the context of historical and current debates over issues of sovereignty, the definition and designation of indigeneity and marronage, the pre-emancipation and pre-independence extra-legal negation of what are inarguably legally binding and ratified treaties, and the post-independence question of the validity and enforceability of those treaties on and within the borders of a newly independent Jamaica. My work offers an innovative, comprehensive, and historically rooted ethnomusicological analysis of these present-day debates in contemplation of the possibilities for Jamaican Maroon futures and the futures of the colonized, worldwide. It lets music tell these very important histories. 

Post-fellowship placement: Visiting Professorship at Swarthmore College

Musicology
University of Virginia

Stones of Contention

History

Strategies for Survival

African-American Studies

Study Abroad

Launched in 2017,  the Woodson facilitates a study abroad program through the International Studies Office during the January Term. Called A Tour of the Book: Homegoing and the Challenge of Diasporas, the course allows students to interact with some of the specific sociohistorical, cultural, and political contexts discussed in Yaa Gyasi’s award winning novel, Homegoing.

Directed by professor Kwame E. Otu and co-taught with Deborah E. McDowell, the J-Term study abroad program has brought over 20 students to Ghana since its inception. During the course, students rigorously engage with the text, travel to the scenes and sites referenced in the book. The on-site activities give students the opportunity to experience first-hand the continuing effects of what many scholars describe as the “afterlives of slavery and colonialism.” Along with readings and site-visits, students in the course record their experiences daily in a travel journal. By being in these scenes and reflecting critically on their experience, students develop skills in articulating the ways in which history writes itself back into the present moment, a process, which Yaa Gyasi thematizes in her novel.

Visit the International Studies Office page for more information on how to apply. 

J-Term class outside the Kwame Nkrumah Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana

Students in an African drumming class in Accra, Ghana

J-term class with Kwame Otu and Deborah McDowell

Statue of W.E.B Du Bois at the Kwame Nkrumah Institute for African Studies

Subscribe

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Susan Burton: Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women

Bio

Susan Burton is a widely recognized leader in the national criminal justice reform movement.

Ms. Burton will be discussing her book and work as an activist and advocate for incarcerated women. 

She is author of the NAACP Image Award-winning book, Becoming Ms. Burton: From Prison to Recovery to Leading the Fight for Incarcerated Women, and founder of A New Way of Life Re-Entry Project. 

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Swahili Cultural Night

Swahili Cultural Night:

Date: Friday, April 29th from 4-6:30pm
Venue: Minor Hall 130 

 

Students from our Swahili classes will be performing some Swahili poems and songs. We will also have some East African food!!

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SWAHILI CULTURAL NIGHT

Please come out for SWAHILI CULTURAL NIGHT.

 

When: April 27,2017

Where: 110 Minor Hall

Time: 5:00-6:30PM

 

You are invited to the Swahili Cultural Night event organized by Swahili Students at UVA. Students will be presenting skits, songs and poems. They also welcome you to taste some delicious Swahili food.

 

See you there!

Swahili Program

Spearheaded by professor Anne Rotich, the Swahili program has trained over 200 students since its inception in 2007. In addition to rigorous language instruction courses, Professor Rotich also encourages students to learn experientially through cultural activites, volunteering experience, and practical translation exercises. Throughtou, UVA Swahili students build relationships with the local Swahili community and enhance their Swahili language and cultural skills.

 

In 2021, for example, Swahili 1010 and 2010 classes met with Charlottesville Swahili refugees and immigrants from East Africa into engage with them about their journeys, cultures and also practice their Swahili. Students participated in these conversations in-person at the UVA Language Commons Lab and online. Students were also able to participate virtually with some fluent Swahili speakers who also could not participate in-person. Later in the semester, students visited the Madison House kitchen where they learned how to make East African Samosas and traditional chai tea using imported Kenyan tea! Ending the semester strong, Swahili students and community members were invited to watch a Swahili film and discussed the socio-cultural and political themes in the movie as they related to themes they had learned in class about East Africa.

 

Besides attending community events, Swahili students have the opportunity to strengthen their speaking and conceptual language skills every week at Swahili Tables in Minor Hall. These are informal conversation sessions with a dedicated Swahili TA. Applying their skills to practical uses, Swahili students have used their language training to translate documents for the local Charlottesville community. Working with several international and East African groups in Charlottesville, the students help to translate documents such as the DMV test questions, COVID-19 Safety/Informative documents, and other documents at the request of local organizations. Students also volunteer their time to create resource guides for Swahili speakers and their families who are new to the Charlottesville area. Finally, Swahili students also help plan to the annual “Africa Day” event which is a community-engagement day where local high schools bring students (either in person or virtually) to learn more about Africa! 

Students working on grammar at Swahili Tables

Students making samosas at Madison House

 

 

Story by Alexis Haskiell and Professor Anne Rotich

Randy Swift headshot

Randy Swift

Business Manager

105 Minor Hall

Symposium on National Museum of African American History and Culture to be held at UVA

January 11, 2012 — "Re-Imagining the Public Realm: The Design of the National Museum of African American History and Culture," a multidisciplinary symposium being organized as part of the University of Virginia's Martin Luther King Jr. observance,  will be held Jan. 23 at U.Va.'s  School of Architecture.

Symposium Traces History of African American Studies at the University

April 11, 2011 — It took the efforts of several generations of students and faculty members to establish African-American and African studies at the University of Virginia. Members and guests of the University and local community came to the Grounds April 7-9 to recognize, review and reflect on the fruits of their labors in a symposium marking the 30th anniversary of the Carter Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences. 

Talitha LeFlouria wins prestigious Carnegie Fellowship

Talitha LeFlouria has been awarded a coveted and prestigious fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation for her new project, “The Search for Jane Crow: Black Women and Mass Incarceration in America.” 

About the Fellowship:
Building on a century-old, philanthropic tradition of investing in creative scholarly research, Carnegie Corporation of New York today announced the 2018 class of Andrew Carnegie Fellows. As part of the so-called “brainy award,” 31 extraordinary scholars and writers will each receive up to $200,000, making it possible for them to devote their time to significant research, writing, and publishing in the humanities and social sciences.

A distinguished panel of jurors selected the fellows based on the quality of their proposals. As part of the criteria, they looked for high-caliber scholarship that applies fresh perspectives to some of the most pressing issues of our times, shows potential for meaningful impact on a field of study, and has the capacity for dissemination to a broad audience. For more information visit carnegie.org

Talk with You Like a Woman

award-winning

African-American Studies

Telisha Dionne Bailey awarded the 2018 Medgar and Myrlie Evers Research Scholarship

Telisha Dionne Bailey, Woodson post-doctoral fellow, was awarded the 2018 Medgar and Myrlie Evers Research Scholarship, a collaboration between the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (MDAH) and the Medgar and Myrlie Evers Institute, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. Bailey will continue work on her book manuscript: “Please Don't Forget About Me:" African American Women, Mississippi, and the History of Crime and Punishment in Parchman Prison, 1890-1980."

Ten Years of Expanding the Reach of Language Instruction

Anne Rotich's work on Swahili Language Instruction as part of a inter-University Consortium was featured in the College of Arts and Sciences "Ten Years of Expanding the Reach of Language Instruction"

Terror in the Heart of Freedom

History

The Adventures of Amos 'N' Andy

History
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The African American Great Migration Reverses Course

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The African Studies Colloquium

African Studies Colloquium Series: Dr. George Mentore, University of Virginia Deptartment of Anthropology

“Evans-Pritchard and Lienhardt Reconsidered”

Decades after their deaths, two Oxford anthropologists, E.E. Evans-Pritchard and his student Godfrey Lienhardt, have lost much of their relevance for many scholars. Dr. Mentore, whose  own work focuses on Amazonia and the Antilles, offers a re-reading of these once-canonical Africanists, and considers what their work might still mean for anthropologists today.

Please join us on

Wednesday, Sept. 17th, 2014

in 299A New Cabell Hall

3:30pm – 5:00pm

This event is free and open to the public

McFadden

The African Studies Colloquium Series Presents Professor Patricia McFadden

The African Studies Colloquium Series proudly presents a talk by the African Feminist and Anti-apartheid activist Professor Patricia McFadden, entitled Contemporarity in Africa: Feminist Perspectives of an Alternative Future. The event is going to held on November 16, between 3:30pm and 5pm, at Minor Hall 110.

 

Professor McFadden is currently a Visiting Professor at the Thabo Mbeki African Leadership Institute, UNISA, Pretoria, South Africa. Over the past four decades, she has published in newspapers, magazines, academic and activist journals, anthologies on subjects ranging from Feminist Theory and the conceptualisation of gender within the African and Global women’s Movement to issues of Appropriate Technology and Alternative Lifestyles in local journals, magazines and newspapers. Professor McFadden’s focus has tended to be around struggles over power between those who occupy the State and the instruments of repression (the military and resources) and the re-definition of Feminism at the personal and public/political levels within African societies; Reproductive Health and the struggle for Reproductive and Sexual Rights; Sexuality and Pleasure, and more recently, Post-Coloniality and the contested notions and practices relating to Human Rights and Citizenship, as well as the necessity of re-imagining African Feminism, issues of Dignity, Wellness and Pleasure  within Southern African societies in particular.

The Americans Are Coming!

History

The Annex

A brief video tour of the Fellows Workshop space and Fellows' Annex in Minor Hall


 

At a fundamental level, the Woodson Fellowship provides a space, intellectual and physical, for emerging scholars to bring their research to fruition. While this work necessarily happens individually, the Fellows' Annex in Minor Hall provides a dedicated place where fellows can complete this work in community with one another. Over the years, it has become clear that the residential aspect of the program, the camaraderie, the water-cooler conversations, the fellowship, is just as important as the intellectual exchanges and formal mentoring built into the program. 

 

At the beginning of their two-year residencies, we assign fellows to individual carrels in the Annex, each of which is furnished with a workstation and ample room for library books. Post-doctoral fellows who have teaching responsibilities during their time at the Institute, take up residence in discrete offices connected to the larger fellows annex. 

 

The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation

History

The Claims of Kinfolk

award-winning

History

The Color of Their Skin: Education and Race in Richmond, Virginia 1954-89

The Common Wind

Caribbean Studies

The Difference a Department Makes: Woodson Institute Determines its Destiny

The creeping re-segregation of public schools. Consequences of recent changes to voting rights laws. The widening gap between the wealthy and the poor. The effects of incarceration on families. Charlottesville’s history of race relations.

These are just a few examples of topics to which the academic discipline of African-American studies brings valuable, necessary perspectives, according to University of Virginia English professor Deborah McDowell, director of UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.

The Forgotten Voices of Democracy Black Political Activism under Brazil’s Military Rule

João Batista Nascimento Gregoire, current Woodson pre-doctoral fellow, published an article in the Journal of Black Studies and Research

The Institute

At a Glance


The Woodson Institute has earned international acclaim as a magnet for some the world’s best graduate students in the humanities and social sciences, creating a collaborative, supportive, and interdisciplinary environment for innovative scholarship. The fellowship program provides scholars time to complete their research before they jump into the responsibilities of teaching full time; at the same time, Woodson Fellows are immersed in a community of scholars who bring the perspectives of their various disciplines to bear on advancing each other’s scholarship during monthly workshops. In these regular workshops, pre and post-doctoral fellows receive feedback on dissertation or manuscript chapters from a guest interlocutors , the director of Fellowships, and their colleagues in the fellowship program. 

Since its inception, the fellowship program has supported over 180 emerging scholars (and counting!). Its high rate of success has placed its fellows in tenure-track positions and post-doctoral fellowships at colleges and universities across the nation, including: 

As the crown jewel of the research Institute, the Woodson takes pride in the spirit of being at the cutting edge of scholarship in Africana Studies as articulated by Deborah McDowell, Woodson Director from 2009 - 2021.

"If you want to find out where scholarship is going in African American and African Diaspora scholarship, across the disciplines, find out who is at the Woodson Institute.”

 

Apply 

Visit the fellowship program page for more information about how to apply to the Woodson Fellowship program. Applications are due on the 1st of December by 11:59 pm.


Meet the Woodson Fellows

Find a list of our Current Fellows, including each fellow's home institution, research project title, and description.

The Woodson Fellowship Alumni comprise a distinguished group of scholars working in the field of global black studies, many of whom have pioneered new trends in scholarship.  

Each year, we introduce the University of Virginia community and broader Woodson network to the current fellowship cohort during our annual "Meet the Fellows" event. 

 


The Annex

At a fundamental level, the Woodson Fellowship provides a space, intellectual and physical, for emerging scholars to bring their research to fruition. While this work necessarily happens individually, the Fellows' Annex in Minor Hall provides a dedicated place where fellows can complete this work in community with one another. Over the years, it has become clear that the residential aspect of the program, the camaraderie, the informal conversations, the fellowship, is just as important as the intellectual exchanges and formal mentoring built into the program. 

 

At the beginning of their two-year residencies, we assign fellows to individual carrels in the Annex, each of which is furnished with a workstation and ample room for library books. Post-doctoral fellows who have teaching responsibilities during their time at the Institute, take up residence in discrete offices connected to the larger fellows annex. 

 

A brief video tour of the Fellows Workshop space and Fellows' Annex in Minor Hall


 

The Workshop

The Workshop is the foundation of Fellowship Program because it encourages the kinds of collaborative intellectual exchanges that shape, deepen, and expand an individual's scholarship. The workshop, in practice, yields results. Key to its sucess is: immersion and interdisciplinarity. 

 

Amanda Gibson (Fellowship cohort 2019-2021) on the fellowship workshop


 

The workshop provides an opportunity for each fellow to request a guest interlocutor from their respective field to provide feedback on their dissertation or manuscript chapter. Prior to the workshop, the fellow circulates a chapter of their choosing to all of the fellows in the program, the guest interlocutor, and the director of fellowships. During the workshop itself, the group weighs in on the individual's work in a seminar-style discussion moderated by the guest interlocutor. 

These exchanges allow for each individual fellow to gain experience presenting. The experience exposes the group to the research that their colleagues in the program are undertaking, immersing Woodson Fellows in their scholarship as well as the scholarship of their peers. Most importantly, the interactions and insights come from fellows who have differing disciplinary backgrounds and methodologies. Time and time again, former Woodson Fellows have stressed the importance of this interdisciplinarity on their resulting research. This is why the workshop what makes the Woodson work. 


The Institute's Public Outreach Mission

As a major research institute, the Woodson prioritizes public outreach through events, grant-funded projects, and workshops with K-12 teachers. Our mission emphasizes the importance of sharing knowledge and advancing black studies scholarship in the spirit of our namesake Carter G. Woodson. As such, public engagement has been at the heart of the Institute since its inception. The following projects have been launched at the Woodson Institute: 

The Julian Bond Papers Project: a digital editorial project in collaboration with UVA's Center for Digital Editing that is working to make Bond's speeches publicly available on a digital archive and three-volume print series. 

K-12 Teacher's Institute: This collaborative effort between the Woodson Institute, the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), and the Center for Liberal Arts (CLA), provides cutting-edge, accessible African and African Diaspora scholarship to K-12 educators. Through engaging and informative discussions, practical suggestions for curricular implementation, and resource guides, the Institute, which took place in October 2021 and is scheduled to continue in ensuing summers, helps K-12 educators to accurately and effectively teach their students the rich histories and cultures of African and African-descended peoples. 

"Notes on the State" podcast and oral history: A project created for the University's Bicentennial focused on themes in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia. The Notes on the State team collected over 14 interviews with scholars at UVA and across the nation on various topics including: Jefferson’s role as an enslaver, his diplomatic record on Haitian Independence, and writing on racial difference. A full interview archive can be found on the project website. 

The Citizen Justice Initiative: a summer internship program exposed high school students and university undergraduates to academic research, public history, and African American Studies. In four consecutive summers, the CJI supported over 30 undergraduates and high school students who gained experience working on digital storytelling projects and completing archival research. The project collaborated with the Center for Digital Editing, Virginia Humanities, and Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. The Citizen Justice Team also published the multi-media essay: The Illusion of Progress: Charlottesville's Roots in White Supremacy in August 2017, which has gone on to be used in K-12 and University classrooms alike. 

Event serires and symposia: Throughout its 40 year history, the Woodson Institute has organized a wide range of lecture series and symposia that share black studies scholarship with the general public. Our full event archive includes the Currents in Conversation Series, the African Studies Colloquium Series, and the Conversations in Caribbean Studies Series. In conjunction with the major symposia organized under the auspices of the Institute, our events have addressed the following topics: mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex; the question of reparations; race and taxes; citizenship and democracy; black feminist history; black girlhood studies; the Charleston Masscre; public schools and higher education; racism and immigration; pop culture, music studies, and digital blackness.

Africa Day: Organized by Swahili Professor Anne Rotich, Africa Day is designed to increase awareness and knowledge of Africa and its cultures among high school students through presentations on African cultures, languages, historical, social and political knowledge of Africa. The event typically brings attendance numbers of between 100-200 students and teachers from Albemarle High School, Charlottesville High School, Monticello High School and Western Albemarle High School. 

Black Fire archive: created by Professor Claudrena Harold for her course "Black Fire," which began as an AAS course, this multimedia initiative documents the struggle for social justice and racial equality at the University of Virginia. The extensive archive contains years of independent research, video, film, oral history interviews, and student projects featuring UVA Alumni, documents from the Black Student Alliance, and original film projects.

The Race & Place archive: created by the Woodson's second Director Reginald Butler and Scot French, the Race & Place archive has been a fixture of black studies scholarship at UVA since it was released in 2002. The site focuses on the racial segregation laws, or the 'Jim Crow' laws from the late 1880s until the mid-twentieth century in Charlottesville, VA. At the forefront of digital humanities scholarship, the Race & Place archive features oral histories, maps, newspaper transcriptions, digital exhibitions, city documents, and other images of black life in Charlottesville.

 

 

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education: "University of Virginia to Launch a Crowdsourced Transcription Effort of Julian Bond’s Papers"

Julian Bond, the civil rights icon who taught at the University of Virginia for two decades, died in 2015. Now the university has mounted an effort to make his collection of papers, speeches, and other documents available to the world through a crowdsourced transcription effort, which will be the first step in the creation of an online digital archive.

The Land Was Ours: How Black Beaches Became White Wealth in the Coastal South

History

The Lonely Letters

award-winning

Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

The Mark of Slavery

African-American Studies

The Muse is Music

​award-winning

African-American Studies

The Nature of Entrustment

Anthropology

The Novels of Alex LA Guma

English

The Predicament of Blackness

award-winning

Anthropology

The Problem of Punishment: Race, Inequality and Justice

Organized by faculty members in the Departments of English (Deborah McDowell), History (Claudrena Harold) and Politics (Vesla Weaver), this multi-disciplinary symposium, sponsored by the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies, will examine the historical, political, economic, and socio-cultural roots, as well as the myriad implications of the rise in incarceration in the United States.

Participants include:

Angela Y. Davis, Political Activist and Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz

Michelle Alexander, Ohio State University, Associate Professor of Law

Heather Thompson, University of North Carolina- Charlotte, Associate Professor of History

Marc Mauer, Executive Director, The Sentencing Project

Ruth Gilmore, Director, Program in American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California

Click here for a reproduction of the symposium program 

To listen to audio recordings of the every panel view the symposium's YouTube playlist 

The Properties of Violence

African-American Studies

The Punitive Turn: New Approaches to Race and Incarceration

African-American Studies
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The Race Tax: Economic Predation in Black America

Exorbitant rent for inferior housing.  Payday lenders on every block. Police forces that see your neighborhood as a source of municipal revenue rather than a community in need of protection.  In America today, low-income minority neighborhoods suffer not only from a shortage of economic opportunity but also from an abundance of predatory industries and practices.  While forms of economic exploitation have helped cities balance their budgets and businesses and investors amass fortunes, it has compounded the struggles of African American communities and contributed, in no small measure, to the racial wealth gap in America today.   Critics call it the “race tax,” and its roots are buried deep in the soil of America’s segregated cities.  This spring’s Woodson Forum will bring together four of America’s leading scholars on economic predation in Black America’s past and present for an engaging, informative discussion of the devastating effects of often hidden practices.  By shining a light on enterprises and institutions that prey on the urban poor, this event aims to generate greater awareness of the challenges facing many Black Americans today and a deeper understanding of issues informing the BlackLivesMatter movement.

The Rebellious Slave

History

The Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, civil rights activist to speak at UVA

September 3, 2008 — The Rev. Dr. Calvin O. Butts III, civil rights activist and pastor of the nationally renowned Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City, will visit the University of Virginia Sept. 16 and 17 to participate in the Explorations in Black Leadership series. He will speak on "Integrity and Leadership" Sept. 16 at 6 p.m. in the Newcomb Hall Art Gallery. 

The Segregated Scholar

African-American Studies
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The Slave and the Language of Death

"The Slave and the Language of Death," a lecture by Simon Gikandi of Princeton University.

Where: Minor Hall Auditorium
When: Monday, 02/09/2015 at 5 p.m.

Free and Open to the Public

Coffee and refreshments will be served from 4:45 p.m., a little before the start of the event.

Professor Gikandi will be delivering the Rushton lecture hosted by the Department of English and the Carter G. Woodson Institute.

Simon Gikandi is Professor of English at Princeton University and the author of the much awarded book, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (2011), among many others:

https://english.princeton.edu/research/slavery-and-culture-taste

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The Slavery Since Emancipation Speaker Series

Talk Description: This lecture will explore the history of slavery and racial oppression from a policy standpoint. Discussion will focus on how systemic oppression has historically led to the current factors tied to the exploitation of minority and immigrant populations for commercial sex and labor. The lecture will take a human rights approach with a racial justice lens.

Speaker Bio: Dr. Melissa Irene Maldonado Torres is Director of the Human Trafficking Research Portfolio at the Institute on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault at the University of Texas at Austin. She served as the Subject Matter Expert on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ healthcare professional’s response to human trafficking program, an initiative of President Obama’s Federal Strategic Action Plan on Services for Victims. She teaches classes on human trafficking at both the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Houston. She serves as the human trafficking expert for various academic studies in the U.S. and Latin America. Over the last 10 years, her research has included the trafficking of women from Latin America for sexual exploitation, policy analysis on the protection of domestic minor sex trafficking survivors, labor abuse and exploitation faced by undocumented immigrants, assessments on displacement and knowledge of trafficking risks in indigenous communities, and exploring the demand side of sex trafficking.

Reception to follow in Minon Hall, Rm.108.

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The Slavery Since Emancipation Speaker Series

Talk Description: Four "peculiar institutions" have served to define and confine African Americans in U.S. society over the past four centuries: racialized slavery, the Jim Crow system of caste terrorism, the urban ghetto, and the hybrid formed by the concatenation of the hyperghetto and the carceral system. In this lecture, Professor Wacquant will discuss their similarities and differences and draw out the consequences of this historical model for the current scholarly and policy debates around race and citizenship.

Speaker Bio: Loïc Wacquant is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Researcher at the Centre de sociologie européenne, Paris.

A MacArthur Prize Fellow, member of Harvard’s Society of Fellows, and recipient of the 2008 Lewis Coser Award for theoretical agenda-setting from the American Sociological Association, his interests span comparative urban inequality, the penal state, ethnoracial domination, embodiment, social theory, and the politics of reason. His books are translated in twenty languages and include Body and Soul: Notebooks of An Apprentice Boxer (2004, new expanded edition 2017) and the trilogy Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (2008), Punishing the Poor: The New Government of Social Insecurity (2009), and Deadly Symbiosis: Race and the Rise of the Penal State (forthcoming). His most recent book is The Two Faces of the Ghetto (forthcoming with Polity Press).

 

The Underneath of Things

Anthropology

The Union League Movement in the Deep South

History

The Virginia Roots of Today's Radical Right & the Crisis of American Democracy

The Virginia Roots of Today's Radical Right & the Crisis of American Democracy

Clark Hall Room 108

In a presentation co-sponsored by the Department of History, the Power, Violence, and Inequality Collective, and the American Studies Program, Nancy MacLean, the William H. Chafe Professor of History and Public Policy at Duke University, discusses her new book "Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America."

The Workshop

The Annex

At a fundamental level, the Woodson Fellowship provides a space, intellectual and physical, for emerging scholars to bring their research to fruition. While this work necessarily happens individually, the Fellows' Annex in Minor Hall provides a dedicated place where fellows can complete this work in community with one another. Over the years, it has become clear that the residential aspect of the program, the camaraderie, the informal conversations, the fellowship, is just as important as the intellectual exchanges and formal mentoring built into the program. 

At the beginning of their two-year residencies, the CGWI administrative staff assigns fellows to individual carrels in the Annex, each of which is furnished with a workstation (with iMac computers), a filing cabinet, and ample room for library books. Post-doctoral fellows who have teaching responsibilities during their time at the Institute take up residence in individual offices within the fellows annex. 

A brief video tour of the Fellows Workshop space and Fellows' Annex in Minor Hall


The Workshop

The Workshop is the foundation of Fellowship Program because it encourages the kinds of collaborative intellectual exchanges that shape, deepen, and expand an individual's scholarship. The workshop, in practice, yields results. Key to its sucess is: immersion and interdisciplinarity. 

Amanda Gibson (2021 Fellowship cohort) speaking about the format of the fellowship workshop

 

The workshop provides an opportunity for each fellow to receive feedback from a guest interlocutor from their respective field about a dissertation or manuscript chapter. Prior to the workshop, the fellow circulates a chapter of their choosing to all of the fellows in the program, the guest interlocutor, and the Woodson Director and Associate Director. During the workshop itself, the group weighs in on the individual's work in a seminar-style discussion moderated by the guest interlocutor. 

These exchanges allow for each individual fellow to gain experience presenting and discussing their work. The experience exposes the larger group to the work of their colleagues in the program, immersing Woodson Fellows in a range of disciplinary perspectives, backgrounds, and methodologies. Time and time again, former Woodson Fellows have stressed the importance of this interdisciplinarity on their resulting research. This is why the workshop is what makes the Woodson fellowship program work. 

 

This Little Light of Mine

Through a Black Girlhood Lens

Ashleigh Greene Wade publishes blog on UVA'sThoughts from the Lawn about her forthcoming book Black Girl Autopoetics: Agency and Possibility in Everyday Digital Practice

Hunter

To 'Joy: A Symposium on Black Feminist Histories

 

Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War has had an immeasurable impact on a number of dynamic overlapping areas of inquiry including black feminist history, African American Studies, Southern History and Labor History. This work’s crucial interventions, innovative methods and eloquent prose continue to inform and inspire intersectional studies in these and other fields. The anniversary of its 1997 publication presents a unique opportunity for a forward-looking consideration of the generative dynamism of these fields, generously hosted by the University of Virginia. This intimate symposium invites scholars to reflect upon Hunter’s pivotal intervention through presentations of their own in-progress work, and insights on new directions in black feminist scholarship.

For information and registration visit https://en.tojoy.com/investor-symposiums/

December 1st

4:00pm: Premiere screening of the film, The Washing Society (2018) and discussion with filmmakers Lizzie Olesker, Lynne Sachs and artist Jasmine Holloway.

6:00pm: Reception

December 2nd

9:15am: Registration and Breakfast

10:00am-5:30pm: Conversations and Presentations with Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Justene Hill Edwards, Crystal Feimster, Corinne Field, Kali Nicole Gross, Sarah Haley, Cheryl Hicks, Jennifer D. Jones, Robin D.G. Kelley, Rebecca Kluchin, Talitha LeFlouria, Lisa Levenstein, Deborah McDowell, Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Jessie Ramey, and Tera Hunter.

 

To Joy My Freedom

History

To Joy My Freedom: A Symposium on Black Feminist Histories

To Joy My Freedom: A Symposium on Black Feminist Histories

December 1-2, 2017

Minor Hall

Tera W. Hunter’s To ‘Joy My Freedom: Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil War has had an immeasurable impact on a number of dynamic overlapping areas of inquiry including black feminist history, African American Studies, Southern History and Labor History. This work’s crucial interventions, innovative methods and eloquent prose continue to inform and inspire intersectional studies in these and other fields. The anniversary of its 1997 publication presents a unique opportunity for a forward-looking consideration of the generative dynamism of these fields, generously hosted  by  the University of Virginia. This intimate symposium invites scholars to reflect upon Hunter’s pivotal intervention through presentations of their own in-progress work, and insights on new directions in black feminist scholarship.

For a full list of participant bios and program sponsors visit: https://www.tojoysymposium.com

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TRANSCRIBE BOND Reception

Join the Woodson Institute and the Center for Digital Editing to discuss goals and significance of the Essential Julian Bond digital edition. Reception to follow. 

RSVP here

Alexis Trouillot

Pre-Doctoral Fellow

Dissertation Title:
Mathematics in the Desert: Computing Texts and Intellectual Authority in 19th century Sahara

My project is the first study of West African history to consider its Arabic tradition of arithmetic texts. It presents an intellectual history of 19th century Saharan West Africa focusing on manuscripts on arithmetical calculations (ḥisāb) and their applications to the elaborated system of rules of Muslim inheritance shares (farāʾiḍ).

History
Universite de Paris

Two Teams Garner First UVA Arts in Action Project Grants

December 6, 2011 — The Office of the Vice Provost for the Arts at the University of Virginia has awarded the first Arts in Action Project Grants to two collaborative teams of faculty artists. 

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Ukuphazama iNatali: Thinking Through Queer and Indigenous Studies Approaches to South African History

Professor T.J. Tallie, Washington and Lee University

In my research I propose a reading of colonial South African history that relies upon critical indigenous and queer theoretical approaches.  Settler colonialism itself often functions as a form of orientation, of making a recognizable and inhabitable home space for European arrivals on indigenous land. As a result, native peoples and their continued resistance can serve to ‘queer’ these attempted forms of order.  In such circumstances, the customs, practices, and potentially the very bodies of indigenous peoples can become queer despite remaining ostensibly heterosexual in orientation and practice, as their existence constantly undermines the desired order of an emergent settler state.

Undergraduate Courses

Fall 2023 Courses


These course listings are subject to change. Courses with low enrollment may be canceled. The official system of record at the University of Virginia is the Student Information System (SIS). www.virginia.edu/sis. Make sure to discuss your curricular plan and academic progress report with your AAS major advisor during Advising Period, March 27 to April 7.

 


 

Core Courses

All majors and minors must complete the 1010 and 1020 core course sequence.

 

AAS 1010 Introduction to African American and African Studies I 

Instructor: TBA. Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Minor 125

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century.  

AAS 7000 Introduction to Africana Studies

Instructor: Nasrin Olla. Mon Wed 3:30-6:00pm, Warner 110.

This is an introductory course that will survey selected recent and classic texts in the interdisciplinary fields of African American, African, and Caribbean Studies. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to identify and understand major themes that have shaped the development of the discipline of Africana Studies. (For graduate students only)

  


Social Science or History

All majors must take at least one SSH course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Race and Politics, or 4000 research.

 

 

AAS 2500.001 The Souls of Black Folk

Instructor: Sabrina Pendergrass; TuTh 11-12:15pm, Gibson 241

In this course, we will examine the social organization of African American communities. The intellectual context for the issues we will study come from the foundational work of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and others. We will discuss African Americans’ social status and experiences at the intersections of class, color, gender, and sexuality. We also will study institutions within the community, and we will consider social issues that African Americans face today and will face in the future.

AAS 3500.001 The Health of Black Women & Children

Instructor: Liana Richardson TuTh 9:30-10:45pm New Cabell 407

In this course, we will consider why it is the case that Black women and children have higher rates of adverse health outcomes, including but not limited to maternal and infant mortality, than their white counterparts. Applying both life course and intersectionality perspectives on health, we will examine how social factors structure the lived experiences of Black women and their children and, in turn, influence mental and physical health throughout the life course and across generations. We will review and evaluate evidence from research on the adverse mental and physical health effects of historical trauma, adverse childhood experiences, cumulative social stress (“weathering”), and the “strong Black woman” archetype, among other social phenomena. Then, we will discuss what medicine and public health can (or should) do to improve the health and well-being of Black women and children and, therefore, to halt the intergenerational reproduction of health and social inequality.

HIAF 2001 Early African History 

Instructor: James La Fleur; Tu Th 3:30-4:45, Nau 211

Studies the history of African civilizations from the iron age through the era of the slave trade, ca. 1800. Emphasizes the search for the themes of social, political, economic, and intellectual history which present African civilizations on their own terms. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa

Instructor:  John Mason; Mon Wed 3:30-4:45pm, McLeod 1004

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times. Also fulfills Africa requirement)

HIAF 3112 African Environmental History

Instructor:  James La Fleur; Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, New Cabell 368

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. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

HIAF 3559 Muslim Societies in African History

Instructor: Amir Syed; Tu Th 11:00-12:15pm, New Cabell 232

HIUS 3490 From Motown to Hip-Hop

Instructor: Claudrena Harold; Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Gilmer 390

This survey traces the history of African American popular music from the late 1950s to the current era. It examines the major sonic innovations in the genres of soul, funk, and hip-hop over the course of the semester, students will examine how musical expression has provided black women and men with an outlet for individual expression, community building, sexual pleasure, political organizing, economic uplift, and interracial interaction.

HIUS 3671 African American Freedom Movements 1945-Present

Instructor: Kevin Gaines; TuTh 3:30-4:45, Gibson 141

This course examines the history and legacy of the African American struggle for civil rights in twentieth century America. It provides students with a broad overview of the civil rights movement -- the key issues, significant people and organizations, and pivotal events -- as well as a deeper understanding of its scope, influence, legacy, and lessons for today.

MEST 3492 The Afro-Arabs and Africans of the Middle East and North Africa

Instructor: Nizar Hermes, Mon 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell 338

This course offers an in-depth exploration of the literary representation and cultural construction of Black Afro-Arabs and Africans in premodern Arabic sources ranging from boasting epistles

(mufākharāt) and travel literature to poetry and –-chiefly—popular sagas/folktales (siyar shaʿabiyyah) which turned into pseudo-historical literary and cultural epics/romances. We will sample the works of some of the most “Arab-washed,” literary and intellectual icons in the history of MENA (SWANA), featuring Black heroes, poets, and knights. We will situate these texts in such contexts as the Zanj rebellion (869–883) in Iraq; the reign of Abū al-Misk Kāfūr (946-968), the black slave turned into vizier then sultan of Ikshīdid Egypt and the Levant; the Saharian Afro-Amazigh dynasties of North Africa and al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) and their eleventh century invasion of the West African empire of Ghana; the sixteenth-century Moroccan imperial forays into the Songhai realms and the invasion of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, the elite African army of the Afro-Arab sultan Mulāy Ismāʿīl of Morocco (r.672 to 1727), the great Swahili city-Sultanates of East Africa (Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Mombasa), the richly symbiotic Afro-Arab Swahili language and culture, and the pioneering 1846 abolition of slavery in the regency of Tunisia. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 


Humanities

All majors must take at least one Humanities course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Social Science/History, Race and Politics, or 4000 research.

 

 

AAS 2224.001 Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Section I: Instructor—Lisa Shutt; Tues 2-4:30pm New Cabell 111  

Section II: Instructor—Lisa Shutt; Wed 2-4:30pm New Cabell 291

This course 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 2500-002 Introduction to African Languages and Literatures

Instructor:  Anne Rotich; Mon Wed Fri 1:00 pm - 1:50 pm, Wilson 238

This course is a survey of literary texts in English by contemporary African writers. Students will develop an appreciation for literatures and languages of Africa and an understanding of issues that preoccupy African writers and the literary strategies that they employ in their work. Students will read a variety of texts including novels, short stories, poetry, film and songs and critically analyze the cultural and aesthetics of the literary landscape. Particular attention will be on how authors engage themes such as identity, patriarchy, gender, class, and politics in post-colonial structures. Students are expected to actively engage in an analysis and exploration of the required literary works and to express their responses through class discussions, reflections, group presentations and the writing of analytical digital stories. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

AAS 2500-006 Introduction to Afro-Latin America

Instructor: Fatima Siwaju, TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm, Monroe Hall 113

This course surveys the cultural, intellectual and political trajectories of Afro-descendant peoples in Latin America. From the period of colonial expansion and enslavement to the ongoing struggle of Afro-Latin American activists and scholars against systemic anti-Blackness, this course foregrounds Latin America as a critical site from which to explore the complexities of the Afro-American experience. This course includes modules on Afro-Latin American social movements, music and popular culture, and religion and spirituality. 

AAS 2500-008 Introduction to Life Writing in the Black Diaspora 

Instructor: Alexandria Smith, TuTh 12:30pm - 1:45pm Shannon House 119

What can we learn from the stories people tell about their own lives? This class proposes that life-writing, the various types of literature which draw from personal and familial experiences, provides important insights not only about “exceptional” individual lives, but also about how personal, political, and cultural structures exist in relation to each other. We will explore life writing produced in different time periods, geographic sites, and genres to build an understanding of the diversity of experiences contained within Black diasporic worlds. A yellow house in late 20thcentury New Orleans tells us something about Black life before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Teju Cole choose different ways to respond to James Baldwin’s narrations of his life and travels. A queer studies scholar draws parallels between her family history in the U.S. South and Beyonce’s visual album Lemonade.Zora Neale Hurston’s writings pioneered what would later be called autoethnography, paving the way for 21st century Black anthropologists to critically self-reflect during their studies in Cuba and Brazil. A Black professor travels from the United States to Ghana and learns hard lessons about belonging and desire. These, among other more-and-less-fictionalized narratives, will push at the boundaries of what is considered life writing and what is considered scholarship, while helping us learn to mine their rich intersections. This is an introductory seminar, appropriate for students at any level.  

AAS 2500-009 Black Genders

Instructor: Alexandria Smith, TuTh 2:00pm - 3:15pm Shannon House 119

In this class, we will develop a strong foundation for understanding Blackness as a set of gendered experiences and gender as a set of racialized experiences. In addition to experience, we will think about gender, sexuality, race, nationality, and class as shifting positions with different levels of access to power, and as ideas which are (re)produced and circulated throughout our cultures. Using a set of interdisciplinary academic and literary readings, we will explore these topics via four main themes: Definitions and Frameworks, Histories, Diasporic Experiences, and Media & Culture. These readings will take us through Black feminist theory, Harlem in the 1920s and the 1950s, the Caribbean and its US diasporas, Washington DC in the late 70s, and early 20th century visual media, among other times and places. We will learn primarily through seminar-style discussions about course readings, with some lectures as well. This class is appropriate for students with any level of experience in African American, Black, and gender or feminist studies. By the end of the course, students will be prepared for further study in the fields of Black and gender studies, and will be able to apply their analyses to other socially constructed categories.  

AAS 3500.002 Reading Black Digital Culture

Instructor: Ashleigh Wade-Green. Tu Th 9:30-10:45am, New Cabell 332.

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. Topics we will cover include: 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.
 

AAS 3500-002 - Brazil and Yoruba Religion

Instructor: Ayodeji Ogunnaike, M, 3:30-6:00, Ridley 125

While the worship of Yoruba deities (oriṣa/orixá) is the most widely practiced, celebrated, and recognizable of indigenous African-based religious traditions in the world today, in many ways its roots lie as deeply in Brazil as they do in West Africa. This course will introduce students to new ways of theorizing homeland and diaspora as well as the process of how various indigenous Yoruba traditions became forged into a highly successful Black religion. In stressing the perpetual and dynamic interplay between Brazil and West Africa, it will also address how Yoruba people influenced and engaged in the practice of Catholicism and Islam in Brazil, and Brazilian returnees subsequently heavily influenced the practice of these traditions in Yorubaland as well.

AAS 3500 - Black Islam in the Americas

Instructor: Fatima Siwaju, TuTh, 9:30am - 10:45am, Pavilion V 109

This course foregrounds the religious histories, intellectual pursuits, and cultural practices of Black Muslims in the Americas. The syllabus includes modules on Islam in West Africa, the experiences of enslaved Muslims in the “New World,” and the role of racial consciousness in Black conversion to Islam in the twentieth century. This course adopts an interdisciplinary approach to the examine the various theological and ideological currents that have defined Black Islam in the Americas. 

AAS 3710.001 African Worlds through Life Stories

Instructor:  Lisa Shutt; Th 2:00-4:30pm. Warner 113

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

FREN 3032 Writing Black Francophone Literature and Performances 

Instructor: Rashana Lydner, Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, New Cabell 209

This course looks at the literary, political, and artistic works of Black francophone writers, theorists, and performers. Together, we will read and discuss how Black people across the francophone world express themselves through poetry, theater, novels, comics, film, and music. Students will develop interpretative and analytical skills with broad applicability and practice writing in French in a clear and persuasive manner. 

MUEN 2690 / 3690 African Music and Dance Ensemble Level 1 and 2

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk; Tu Th 5:00-6:15pm, Old Cabell 107

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. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required.  (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

 

RELA 2400 Introduction to Africana Religions

Instructor:  Ashon Crawley; Mon 2:00-4:30pm, Warner 113

This is an introductory survey course exploring the topic of Africana religions generally, including the practices of spirituality of black people in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and on the continent of Africa. Particular attention will be paid to the relations between these various locations, and their similarities and differences. We will listen to music, watch film, read fiction, poetry, sacred texts and works of criticism. 

RELA/ RELI 3900 Introduction to Islam in Africa through the Arts

Instructor: Oludamini Ogunnaike; TuTh 12:30-1:45pm; Gibson 141

This course will survey the history of Islam and Muslim societies in Africa through their arts. Covering three periods (Precolonial, Colonial, and Post-colonial), and four geographic regions (North, East, West, and Southern Africa), the course will explore the various forms and functions of Islamic arts on the continent. Through these artistic works and traditions we will explore the politics, cultures, and worldviews of African Muslim societies. (Also fulfills Africa requirement)

RELC 3222 From Jefferson to King

Instructor: Mark Hadley; Tu Th 2:00-3:15pm; Nau 141

 

A seminar focused upon some of the most significant philosophical and religious thinkers that have shaped and continued to shape American religious thought and culture from the founding of the Republic to the Civil Rights Movement, including Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jane Addams, William James, Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King, Jr. We will explore how their thought influenced the social and cultural currents of their time.

 

WGS 3125 Transnational Feminism

Instructor: Tiffany King, Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Bryan 235

 

This course places women, feminism, and activism in a transnational perspective, and offers students the opportunity to examine how issues considered critical to the field of gender studies are impacting women's lives globally in contemporary national contexts. We will look closely at how violence, economic marginality, intersections of race and gender, and varied strategies for development are affecting women in specific geographical locations.

 


Race and Politics

All majors must take at least one Race & Politics course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Social Science/History, or 4000 research.

 

 

AAS 3500.003 Black & Indigenous Power in the US 

Instructor: Amber Henry, Tues 6:00-8:30pm; New Cabell 309

How does it feel to be empowered? How does it feel to have that power taken away? Mobilizing the concept of "dreams" as a way of imagining an alternate future, this course contemplates the ways in which Black & Brown people create political projects, social networks and strategies of care to dream a life beyond the legacies of colonialism and Trans-Atlantic slavery. Engaging recent theories of sovereignty (personal autonomy and self-governance), the first half of the course explores how Black & Indigenous people create community in ways that challenge the power of the modern nation-state. The second half of the class examines how Black & Indigenous people are disenfranchised in ways that echo the historical legacies of colonialism, Trans-Atlantic slavery, genocide and anti-Blackness. Rather than adapt a purely historical, economic or political perspective, this course places strong emphasis on affect, or the critical study of feelings, in order to explore what power--as well as its absence-- feel likes. In this way, this course locates the individual body as the site at which claims to power are contemplated, contested and creatively envisioned.

 

AAS 3853 From Redlined to Subprime: Race and Real Estate in the US

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl; Mon Wed 9:00-9:50am, Wilson 301

 

This course examines the history of housing and real estate and explores its role in shaping the meaning and lived experience of race in modern America. We will learn how and why real estate ownership, investment, and development came to play a critical role in the formation and endurance of racial segregation, modern capitalism, and the built environment.

 

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Instructor: Milton Vickerman; MoWe 2-3:15pm, New Cabell 232

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 4078  Racism and Democracy

Instructor Ian Mullins; TuTh 9-910:45am, New Cabell 415

 

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (Feb 23, 1868-Aug 27, 1963) was a uniquely American scholar and activist whose work has renewed significance today. His analysis of the US reveals both the social causes and consequences of racial stratification, while his political activism offers possible solutions. A controversial figure in his time, he helped to found the American sociological discipline and yet was marginalized within it.

 

WGS 2125 Race & Power in Gender & Sexuality

Instructor: Lisa Speidel; Mon Wed 1:00 -1:50pm, Warner 104

 

Offers a study of race-racialization in relation to gender-sexuality. We will consider how the concept of race shapes relationships between gendered selfhood & society, how it informs identity & experiences of the erotic, & how racialized gender & sexuality are created, maintained and monitored. With an interdisciplinary perspective, we will consider how race & power are reproduced & resisted through gender & sexuality, individually-national-international.

 

 


Africa

All majors must take at least one Africa course. Courses taken to fulfill this requirement can double count with any other distribution.

AAS 2500.002 Introduction to African Languages and Literatures

Instructor:  Anne Rotich; Mon Wed Fri 1:00-1:50 pm, Wilson 238

This course is a survey of literary texts in English by contemporary African writers. Students will develop an appreciation for literatures and languages of Africa and an understanding of issues that preoccupy African writers and the literary strategies that they employ in their work. Students will read a variety of texts including novels, short stories, poetry, film and songs and critically analyze the cultural and aesthetics of the literary landscape. Particular attention will be on how authors engage themes such as identity, patriarchy, gender, class, and politics in post-colonial structures. Students are expected to actively engage in an analysis and exploration of the required literary works and to express their responses through class discussions, reflections, group presentations and the writing of analytical digital stories.

AAS 3710.001 African Worlds through Life Stories

Instructor:  Lisa Shutt; Th 2:00-4:30pm. Warner 113

This course examines an array of African cultural worlds from the perspective of a variety of different life story genres. We will be addressing biography, autobiography, autofiction, memoirs, diaries, biographical documentary film and various artistic representations. Some critics claim that such genres, concentrating on the “individual” in Western terms, are not appropriate for representing African experiences of personhood. While critically examining these genres as well as the authorship of texts, we will also be examining representations of worldviews, social and political structures and organization, conceptualizations of time and space, social change, gender, kinship, ritual, etc. through the lens of each life history and joined by supplemental historical and ethnographic readings. For each life narrative we examine, we will ask what authors are seeking to transmit. Reality? Truth? Or something else? We will also ask what reading audiences expect to receive from such narratives. We will discuss whether the narratives we address are stories expressing the uniqueness of particular individuals or whether they are representative lifeways of members of particular socio-political groups – or both – or neither. 

HIAF 2001 Early African History 

Instructor: James La Fleur; Tu Th 3:30-4:45pm, Nau 211

 

Studies the history of African civilizations from the iron age through the era of the slave trade, ca. 1800. Emphasizes the search for the themes of social, political, economic, and intellectual history which present African civilizations on their own terms.

 

HIAF 3021 History of Southern Africa

Instructor:  John Mason; Mon Wed 3:30-4:45pm, McLeod 1004

 

Studies the history of Africa generally south of the Zambezi River. Emphasizes African institutions, creation of ethnic and racial identities, industrialization, and rural poverty, from the early formation of historical communities to recent times. 

HIAF 3112 African Environmental History

Instructor:  James La Fleur; Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, New Cabell 368

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 3559 Muslim Societies in African History

Instructor: Amir Syed; Tu Th 11-12:50pm, New Cabell 232

MEST 3492 The Afro-Arabs and Africans of the Middle East and North Africa

Instructor: Nizar Hermes, Mon 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell 338

This course offers an in-depth exploration of the literary representation and cultural construction of Black Afro-Arabs and Africans in premodern Arabic sources ranging from boasting epistles

(mufākharāt) and travel literature to poetry and –-chiefly—popular sagas/folktales (siyar shaʿabiyyah) which turned into pseudo-historical literary and cultural epics/romances. We will sample the works of some of the most “Arab-washed,” literary and intellectual icons in the history of MENA (SWANA), featuring Black heroes, poets, and knights. We will situate these texts in such contexts as the Zanj rebellion (869–883) in Iraq; the reign of Abū al-Misk Kāfūr (946-968), the black slave turned into vizier then sultan of Ikshīdid Egypt and the Levant; the Saharian Afro-Amazigh dynasties of North Africa and al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) and their eleventh century invasion of the West African empire of Ghana; the sixteenth-century Moroccan imperial forays into the Songhai realms and the invasion of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, the elite African army of the Afro-Arab sultan Mulāy Ismāʿīl of Morocco (r.672 to 1727), the great Swahili city-Sultanates of East Africa (Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Mombasa), the richly symbiotic Afro-Arab Swahili language and culture, and the pioneering 1846 abolition of slavery in the regency of Tunisia.

MUEN 2690 / 3690 African Music and Dance Ensemble Level 1 and 2

Instructor: Michelle Kisliuk; Tu Th 5:00-6:15pm, Old Cabell 107

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. Concentration, practice, and faithful attendance are required.

 

 


4000-Level Research

All majors must take at least one course at the 4000-level that requires a 20-page research paper or its equivalent (digital, audio or other creative project with substantive research and scaffolded assignments). Courses taken to fulfill this requirement cannot double count as Humanities, Race and Politics, or Social Science/History. For courses outside of AAS, kindly confirm with the instructor before / at the start of classes that the course meets the research requirements listed above.

 

AAS 4570.02  Black Performance Theory

Instructor: Ashon Crawley Wed 3:30-6:00pm, Warner 113

In this course we will discuss the concepts performance, performativity and authenticity with regard to race, gender, sexuality and class. We do so by considering the various theoretical histories and trajectories for the word performance and how it has been taken up by thinkers in Black Studies.

ENGL 5700 Contemporary African-American Literature

Instructor: Lisa Woolfork, Tu Th 8:00-9:15am,  New Cabell 042

This course for advanced undergraduates and master’s-level graduate students surveys African American literature today. Assignments include works by Everett, Edward Jones, Tayari Jones, Evans, Ward, Rabateau, and Morrison.

HIUS 4501.002 The History of Black Education in the US

Instructor: Erica Sterling; Wed 2:00-4:30pm, Gibson 241

From clandestine education during the Antebellum era to the student movement for Black studies programs in the 1960s and 1970s, education has been at the center of social and political reform in the United States, particularly in the Black community. However, the structure of their education has been influenced and shaped by several debates: public vs. private, masculine vs. feminine, secular vs. non-secular, and liberal arts vs. industrial, which has, for better or worse, shaped the Black experience. The goal of the seminar is to introduce the history of education for Black Americans and unpack various events and perspectives in the community to show not only how education influenced their lives but how they used their institutions as workshops for economic, political, and social equity. A variety of topics will be covered, including gender, education, race, religion, social movements, policies, and politics. Primary and secondary sources, as well as movies, images, and short films, will be discussed in this course. Students are expected to complete an independent project.

HIUS 5559 Urban History

Instructor: Andrew Kahrl; Mon 2:00-4:30pm, Gibson 241

MEST 5492 The Afro-Arabs and Africans of the Middle East and North Africa

Instructor: Nizar Hermes, Mon 3:30-6:00pm, New Cabell 338

This course offers an in-depth exploration of the literary representation and cultural construction of Black Afro-Arabs and Africans in premodern Arabic sources ranging from boasting epistles

(mufākharāt) and travel literature to poetry and –-chiefly—popular sagas/folktales (siyar shaʿabiyyah) which turned into pseudo-historical literary and cultural epics/romances. We will sample the works of some of the most “Arab-washed,” literary and intellectual icons in the history of MENA (SWANA), featuring Black heroes, poets, and knights. We will situate these texts in such contexts as the Zanj rebellion (869–883) in Iraq; the reign of Abū al-Misk Kāfūr (946-968), the black slave turned into vizier then sultan of Ikshīdid Egypt and the Levant; the Saharian Afro-Amazigh dynasties of North Africa and al-Andalus (Islamic Iberia) and their eleventh century invasion of the West African empire of Ghana; the sixteenth-century Moroccan imperial forays into the Songhai realms and the invasion of Gao, Timbuktu and Djenné, the elite African army of the Afro-Arab sultan Mulāy Ismāʿīl of Morocco (r.672 to 1727), the great Swahili city-Sultanates of East Africa (Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Mombasa), the richly symbiotic Afro-Arab Swahili language and culture, and the pioneering 1846 abolition of slavery in the regency of Tunisia.
 

MDST 4670  White Out: Screening White Supremacy

Instructor: William Little; Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm, Gibson 242

This course entails critical examination of white supremacy through study of film and photography. Students analyze how cinema has traditionally privileged the property of whiteness and white patriarchal power through narrative and formal conventions: e.g., by framing white spaces, white bodies, and the white male gaze as superior; by objectifying, seizing, and rendering invisible people of color and women; by manipulation of lighting and color; by racially charged construction and projection of the face. This analysis is amplified by consideration of links between white supremacist cinema and the history of photographic portraiture. Students study how photography, like film, has been instrumentalized and archived to honor—to monumentalize—white experience, while abjecting, invalidating, and erasing the experience of others. Against this backdrop, the course organizes exploration of films and photographs that challenge white supremacy. Special attention is given to visual texts that expose the dynamics of white supremacy through nuanced dramatization of its underpinnings: the violent erotics, religious longings, and binary logic that inform racist thought; anxiety about colorful elements coded as threats to the integrity of white spaces and white bodies; media infrastructures, such as surveillance systems, designed to protect white power. Horror film affords important cinematic illustrations of these underpinnings. The course includes several examples, such as recent films Green Room (2016) and Get Out (2017).  The syllabus also includes revisionary photographic work that outs white supremacy, such Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching series and Carrie Mae Weems’ Roaming series. Students are required to produce an extensive project at end of term. The outcome may be a creative project with an accompanying extensive critical reflection. 

 

MUSI 4065 The Black Voice

Instructor: A.D. Carson; Tu 2:00-4:30pm, New Cabell 398

This course focuses on critical analyses of and questions concerning the ‘Black Voice’ as it pertains to hip-hop culture, particularly rap and related popular musics. Students will read, analyze, and discuss a wide range of thinkers to explore many conceptions and definitions of ‘Blackness’ while examining popular artists and the statements they make in and about their art.

 

RELA 4085 Christian Missions in Contemporary Africa 

Instructor: Cynthia Hoehler Fatton; Tu 3:30-6pm, Gibson 142

An examination of Christian missions in Africa in the 21st Century. Through a variety of disciplinary lenses and approaches, we examine faith-based initiatives in Africa--those launched from abroad, as well as from within the continent. What does it mean to be a missionary in Africa today? How are evangelizing efforts being transformed in response to democratization, globalization and a growing awareness of human rights?

 

WGS 4820 Black Feminist Theory 

Instructor: Lanice Avery; Tu 3:30-6:00pm, Wilson 244

This course critically examines key ideas, issues, and debates in contemporary Black feminist thought. With a particular focus on Black feminist understandings of intersectionality and womanism, the course examines how Black feminist thinkers interrogate specific concepts including Black womanhood, sexual mythologies and vulnerabilities, class distinctions, colorism, leadership, crime and punishment, and popular culture.

  

 


Languages and Other Electives

 

 

SWAH 1010 Introductory Swahili I

Section I—Instructor: Leonora Anyango; Mon Wed Fri 10:00 am – 10:50 am (Web)

Section II—Instructor: Anne Rotich; Mon Wed Fri 11:00 am - 11:50 am, Wilson 238

 

This course is intended for students with no previous experience with Swahili. The course provides an introduction to basic Swahili language skills in listening, speaking, reading and writing. Swahili is the most widely spoken language in eastern Africa.  SWAH 1010 provides a foundation for listening, speaking and writing basic Swahili grammatical structures and vocabulary. By the end of this course you will be able to construct simple Swahili sentences, identify with various cultural aspects and customs of Swahili speakers, and have a basic level of oral proficiency. We will have fun learning the language as we engage in dialogues, group activities and perform some cultural skits.

 

 

SWAH 2010 Intermediate Swahili I 

Section I—Instructor:  Anne Rotich. MoWeFr 12-12:50pm, Wilson 238

Section I—Instructor:  Anne Rotich. MoWeFr 12-12:50pm, Web

 

This is an intermediate level course designed for students who have taken SWAH 1010 or prior Swahili language experience to further enhance grammatical skills, and an emphasis on speaking and writing through a reading of Swahili texts.

 

 

Undergraduate Courses

View current course listings page

 

AAS 1020 – Introduction to African-American and African Studies II

Prof. Ashon Crawley. Tu Th 12:30-1:45pm. Wilson 301. 

This introductory course surveys the histories of people of African descent in Africa, the Americas, and the Caribbean from approximately the Middle Ages to the 1880s. Emphases include the Atlantic slave trade and its complex relationship to Africa; the economic systems, cultures, and communities of Africans and African-Americans in the New World, in slavery and in freedom; the rise of anti-slavery movements; and the socio-economic systems that replaced slavery in the late 19th century. Fulfills: 1010/1020 requirement

 

AAS 2224. Black Femininities and Masculinities in the US Media

Prof. Lisa Shutt. Section 001 Tu 2:00-4:30pm, New Cabell 332; Section 002 Wed 2:00-4:30pm, New Cabell 315

This course 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. Concentrating on media texts that have influenced and ‘set the stage’ for today’s media, we will primarily examine media texts from the 1970s through the first decade of the 21st century. We will explore how different media, including feature films, popular television, documentaries, 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. Fulfills: Humanities.

 

AAS 2500.001 Music, Politics and Social Movements

Prof. Kevin Gaines. Mon Wed 2-3:15pm, Maury 104

The course introduces students to the history of the United States over most of the twentieth century through a focus on the cultural soundscape of popular music. Special attention will be paid to the relation of popular music genres to the social movements of the postwar U.S. and to the global circulation and influence of American popular music and culture. We will also examine the broader social and cultural significance of various genres of popular music, including blues, folk music, jazz, gospel, country, rhythm and blues, soul, fusion, disco, funk, reggae, punk, and hip hop. Students will gain a basic knowledge of the main social, political, and intellectual issues, concepts, and transformations—we will pay close attention to social and cultural change—of 20th century U.S. history. Readings will include both primary and secondary sources and contain concepts and content that will be examined in quizzes and midterm and final exams. Fulfills: SSH

AAS 2500.002 Introduction to Race, Class, Politics & the Environment

Kimberly Fields. Wed 6-8pm. Maury Hall

This course introduces students to the adoption and implementation of environmental policy in the United States and examines issues of environmental quality and social justice. We will concentrate on federal, state and local governance and relations across these levels. In turn, we will compare the abilities of state and federal governments to develop and implement environmental efforts and policy, as well as their consequences.  The course takes as axiomatic the premise that all people have a right to live in a clean environment free from hazardous pollution or contamination, and to the natural resources necessary to sustain health and livelihood. With this as our starting point, we will question why, and through what social, political and economic processes, some people are denied this basic right. How is it that certain populations of people do not have access to basic resources, or are systematically burdened with pollution or environmental hazards to a greater extent than other populations? What are the social relations of production and power that contribute to these outcomes? What can be done? We begin by examining the philosophical foundations and history of the environmental justice movement and foundational concepts such as justice, race and class. We then explore these concepts through a series of case studies of urban environmental (in)justice in the U.S. Through these case studies we will examine environmental justice issues in urban and rural settings; the strategies and politics of poor peoples’ environmental justice movements; and climate justice. Fulfills: Race & Pol; SSH.

 

AAS 2500.004 Stories in Swahili

Prof. Anne Rotich. Mon, Wed, Fri 10-10:50, Brooks 103. 

Who are the Swahili people? Why is their identity complex? Are they Arabs or Africans? In this course we shall uncover the forgotten story of the Swahili people. You will learn about the rich culture and diversity of issues concerning the Swahili people and the Swahili coast including music, food, clothing, trade, and the social and political issues. This course will also provide you with a captivating tour of the Swahili region through examination of stories, texts, videos, and real-life engaging experiences.

AAS 2500.005 The Souls of Black Folk 

Prof. Sabrina Pendergrass. Tu Th 11-12:15, New Cabell 207. 

In this course, we will examine the social organization of African American communities. The intellectual context for the issues we will study come from the foundational work of sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and others. We will discuss African Americans’ social status and experiences at the intersections of class, color, gender, and sexuality. We also will study institutions within the community, and we will consider social issues that African Americans face today and will face in the future. Fulfills: SSH

AAS 2740 Peoples and Cultures of Africa 

Prof. Lisa Shutt. Th 2:00-4:30pm, New Cabell 332.

In this course, students will gain an understanding of the richness and variety of African life. While no course of this kind can hope to give more than a very broad overview of the continent, students will learn which intellectual tools and fundamental principles might be necessary for approaching the study of the thousands of cultural worlds that exist today on the African continent. Drawing from ethnographic texts, literary works and documentary and feature films, specific examples of African peoples and their lifeways will be examined in order to sample the cultural richness and diversity of the African continent. Fulfills: Africa; Humanities

 

AAS 3200 – Martin, Malcolm & America 

Prof. Mark Hadley.  Tu, Th 9:30-10:45, Gibson 211.

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. Fulfills: Race & Pol; SSH

 

AAS 3300 Social Science Perspectives on African American and African Studies 

Prof. Sabrina Pendergrass. Tu Th 2:00-3:15. New Cabell 066

This course will focus on major debates, theories, and methodological approaches in the social sciences that contribute to African American Studies. The course helps students to consider how a multidisciplinary approach enriches efforts to analyze such issues as housing, education, and incarceration as they relate to the African Diaspora. Fulfills: SSH

 

AAS 3500.001 African American Health Professionals 

Prof. Pamela Reynolds. Mon 6:00-8:30pm, New Cabell 407

This course addresses important issues of race and health disparities, as well as offering students an introduction to the understudied history of black medical professionals. Over the past three centuries, African American physicians, dentists, nurses and public health professionals have made major contributions to eliminating health disparities, offering, in many instances, the only source of medical and dental care available. Many of our majors consider a career in medicine--either as physicians, nurses or public health workers--and this course will surely be relevant for them. Students will also have the valuable experience of examining an array of primary documents pertaining to African American health care professionals in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the South. Fulfills: Social Science/History

 

AAS 3500.002 Development and the Environment in Modern Africa 

Prof. James Parker. Tu Th 3:30-4:45. New Cabell 395

Focusing on Sub-Saharan Africa, this class studies ideologies of economic development towards Africa, and the localized responses of rural communities across the continent. Fusing histories of imperialism and capitalism alongside works of literature, philosophy, and activism, the class explores how the global economy has sought to exploit the natural resources of Sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, we will grow to understand the multiple social and ecological consequences of development doctrines, showing how race, economy, and environment are deeply intertwined. By foregrounding the experiences of rural communities and activists, the class offers an insight into how the exigencies of global capitalism have affected populations and clashed with diverse ecological understandings of the environment. Finally, we will explore a diverse number of continental environmental justice movements and their intersections with global environmental movements. Rather than treating modern Africa as separate from global economic networks, or as somehow environmentally deficient and in need of developing, the class above all else will highlight the myriad alternative ways of understanding development and the environment that lay outside the western and extractivist mindset. Fulfills: Africa; SSH

 

AAS 3500.003. Cultures of African Cinema

Prof. Brian Smithson. Tu Th 2:00-3:15. Wilson 214 

What roles does cinema play in the lives of people in Africa and its diasporas? What does film mean to African audiences, and to the producers, funders, and superstar actors who make the movies they watch? How do we define “African cinema,” and what are the political, racial, and cultural ramifications of our definitions? We will consider these questions by watching African movies from different production cultures, including art cinema, the melodramas of Nigeria’s Nollywood, and the big-budget blockbusters of “New Nollywood.” We will place these movies into their cultural context. In the process, we will touch on a broad range of topics, including African filmmakers’ struggles for artistic independence, African movies’ capacity to speak back to power, and the digital era’s Netflix-ization of African film. Fulfills: Humanities; Africa

 

AAS 3500.004. Race and Medicine in America from 1960-Present 

Prof. Liana Richardson. Tu Th 9:30-10:45. New Cabell 283

In this course, we will examine the medical practices involved in the social construction of racial difference and the persistence of racial health inequities in the U.S. during the 20th and 21st centuries. Drawing from relevant scholarship in sociology, anthropology, and history, we will discuss the origins and consequences of medical racism, as well as the continued role of medicine in racial meaning-making. We will also consider why the medicalization of social issues—from collective violence to drug addiction—is often a racialized process, focusing especially on how contrasting schemas of medicalization and criminalization result in the differential labeling and treatment of racial groups as either victims or villains. Case studies and historical accounts about the racialization, medicalization, and/or criminalization of various health and social issues, including obesity, heart disease, drug addiction, and other “problem” behaviors, will be used as illustrative examples. Attention will also be given to the consequences of these phenomena for health equity, social justice, and human/civil rights. Fulfills: SSH; Race & Pol

 

AAS 4109. Civil Rights Movement and the Media 

Prof. Aniko Bodroghkozy. Mon 5:00pm - 7:30pm, Nau 142

 

AAS 4570.004 Race-ing Gender: Black Theories of Sex, Race, and Queerness

Prof. Alexandria Smith. Tu, Th 12:30-1:45pm Shannon House 108

Is gender imposed on Black people, or is it denied them? Black writers and cultural producers have long been attentive to the ways that Blackness as a socially produced and experienced identity is also informed by sex, gender, and sexuality. U.S. Black feminist scholarship traces a long tradition of writing by Black women, in particular, who articulated the ways that they understood the implications of being socialized as women as inextricable from being marked as Black. Outside of the U.S., Black scholars and scholars of color have paid attention to the impacts that slavery and (settler)colonialism have had on imposing and violently enforcing Western gender logics. In this course we will examine a range of texts which will illuminate the ways that Blackness and gender, as both concepts and experiences, interact. Some of the questions which will guide our reading, thinking, and discussions in this seminar are: What difference does race make for gender? What difference does gender make for race? Are the concepts of manhood, womanhood, and gender relevant for Black people? Have they ever been? Are the concepts of manhood and womanhood worth saving for Black people? Who is interested in saving, revising, or abolishing these concepts? Fulfills: Humanities; 4000-level research

 

AAS 4570.003 Race, Nation, and Popular Culture in Latin America and the Caribbean 

Prof. Nicole Ramsey. Tu Th 3:30-4:45, New Cabell 064. 

This course draws on interdisciplinary approaches to introduce students to a range of topics, methodologies and experiences that lay the foundation of Black study in Latin America and the Caribbean. We will closely examine the extensive and diverse histories, cultures, social and political movements of Black people in Latin America, the Caribbean and the U.S through popular culture. By offering a multimodal approach to understanding the relationship between race, national identity and the state, students will critically engage with and reconsider how blackness is articulated, performed and lived within Black Latin American and Caribbean national imaginaries. Fulfills: Humanities; 4000-level research

 

AAS 7000  Introduction to Africana Studies 

Prof. Robert Trent Vinson, Wed 2-4:30pm. New Cabell 407.

This is an introductory course that will survey key texts in the interdisciplinary fields of African American, African, and Caribbean Studies. By the end of the course, students will be prepared to identify and understand the major themes that have shaped the development of the discipline of Africana Studies. Assignments in the course will help students to develop an understanding of both the methodological and theoretical challenges that prevail in studies of the African Diaspora, such as learning to evaluate sources and to acquire an awareness of, as well as to question, the silences, repressions, omissions, and biases involved in interpreting writing both from and about the African diaspora. Some of the key terms that students will become familiar with are: ethnocentrism, white privilege, race, racism, hegemony, colonialism, imperialism, agency, diaspora, power, identity, modernity, nation, citizenship,sovereignty, and globalization, as well as how these concepts intersect with ideas of both gender and class. NB: For Graduate Students Only

 

SWAH 1020.001. Introductory Swahili II

Prof. Asmaha Heddi; Mon Wed Fri 10:00am - 10:50am; Online

This course is a continuation of SWAH 1010. The course is designed to advance your knowledge of Swahili from the SWAH 1010. It is expected that you will build your Swahili lexicon and Swahili grammar to enable you to adequately contribute to basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk more deeply about your work, studies, country and your preferences, needs, and interests following the correct grammar rules. You will learn how to handle basic social conversations at the market, in the hospital, and also talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will also learn about more cultural aspects of everyday culture in East Africa from class and from engaging virtually the Swahili community in Charlottesville.

 

SWAH 1020.002 Introductory Swahili II 

Prof. Anne Rotich; Section 002, Mon Wed Fri 11:00-11:50, New Cabell 066 

This course is a continuation of SWAH 1010. The course is designed to advance your knowledge of Swahili from the SWAH 1010. It is expected that you will build your Swahili lexicon and Swahili grammar to enable you to adequately contribute to basic conversations with Swahili speakers. You will be able to talk more deeply about your work, studies, country and your preferences, needs, and interests following the correct grammar rules. You will learn how to handle basic social conversations at the market, in the hospital, and also talk about a variety of topics of common interest. You will also learn about more cultural aspects of everyday culture in East Africa from class and from engaging virtually the Swahili community in Charlottesville.

 

SWAH 2020 Intermediate Swahili II 

Prof. Anne Rotich; Mon Wed Fri 12:00-12:50am, New Cabell 066

This is an intermediate Swahili course that is intended to equip you with more language skills in speaking, reading, writing, listening and cultures. It is an opportunity for you to enhance your language skills gained from SWAH 2010. At the end of this course you will have increased your Swahili vocabulary, speak Swahili with more ease and less errors, understand and interact with Swahili speakers. You will be able to write and analyze texts and essays in Swahili on different topics and appreciate more the cultures of the Swahili people. You will also be able to express yourself, your everyday activities, discuss politics or current events in Swahili. To achieve this we will utilize Swahili short story texts, multimedia resources, the internet, magazines, and news broadcast stations to enhance your learning.

American Studies

AMST 3222. Hands-On Public History II: Reconstruction, the Black Church & the Black Press 

Prof. Lisa Goff. Tu 3:30-6:00pm. Bryan 235.

This course investigates how the history of slavery and Reconstruction in central Virginia are presented to the public at historic sites, museums, archives, and on digital platforms. In the fall semester, we collaborated with our community partner, One Shared Story, to critique historic sites of enslavement in the Charlottesville area and to produce digital “story maps” that filled in some of the gaps in the public history of slavery in Fluvanna County, Virginia—contributing, in some small way, to a more just and comprehensive public history. This spring we will continue our study of white supremacy by focusing on Reconstruction. In addition to the brutal realities of that historical period we will also focus on three areas of Black achievement and empowerment during that era: politics, religion, and media. We will continue our work with One Shared Story, contributing specifically to two of their initiatives: georeferencing and documenting African American cemeteries at Black churches in central Virginia; and assisting community members conducting genealogical research. This is designed as a year-long course, but you are welcome to join us in the spring as long as you're willing to do a little catching up re: using Ancestry.com, and StoryMaps. You can see the work students have done in previous classes here: https://hoph-2020-f-oss.hub.arcgis.com/.  Fulfills: SSH

 

AMST 3740 Cultures of Hip-Hop

Prof. Jack Hamilton. Tu Th 3:30pm - 4:45pm, Clark 107. 

This course explores the origins and impacts of American hip-hop as a cultural form in the last forty years, and maps the ways that a local subculture born of an urban underclass has risen to become arguably the dominant form of 21st-century global popular culture . While primarily focused on music, we will also explore how forms such as dance, visual art, film, and literature have influenced and been influenced by hip-hop style and culture. Fulfills: Humanities

 

AMST 4500.002. Race in American Places 

Prof. Ian Grandison. Th 5:00pm - 7:30pm; New Cabell 036

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.  Fulfills: Humanities; Race & Pol; 4000

 

AMST 4559.003 James Baldwin 

Prof. Marlon Ross. Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm; New Cabell 036. 

This seminar focuses on the tumultuous life and diverse works of James Baldwin, whose intellectual influence is still palpable in today’s discourses about race, sexuality, social activism, national belonging, and exile. We’ll study major works from each of the genres that Baldwin engaged, including the novel, short story, drama, poetry, journalism, and the essay. In addition to Baldwin’s works, we’ll explore him as a “spokesman” of the Civil Rights movement, and how his high visibility as a public intellectual whose appearances on the new medium of television helped to shape his “celebrity” status. Among the works to be examined are the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Just Above My Head (1979); plays The Amen Corner (1954) and Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964); selected poems from Jimmy’s Blues (1983); selected short stories from Going to Meet the Man (1965); essays from Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976); and the children’s book Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976). To comprehend Baldwin’s impact in his time and in our own, we’ll sample some works where his influence is especially compelling, including: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1965); eulogies for Baldwin by Toni Morrison and Ossie Davis (1987); Darieck Scott’s 1996 novel Traitor to the Race; Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 nonfiction book Between the World and Me; the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2017); the 2018 feature film based on his 1976 novel If Beale Street Could Talk; and a variety of critical essays on Baldwin’s works. Assignments include: two short critical essays, a team class presentation, and a final research paper. Fulfills: Humanities; 4000

 

AMST 4559.001 Racial Geographies, Environmental Crises

Prof. Kong-Chow. Tu Th 11:00am - 12:15pm, New Cabell 395.

This research seminar explores the significance of American race and ethnicity within environmental humanities, crisis, and activism. Beginning in the mid-20 th century, we will consider the emergence of contemporary U.S. environmentalism, and relationships between space, landscape, built environments, and identity formation, belonging, as well as public health, legislation, and sustainability.

Drama

DRAM 3070. African-American Theater

Prof. Theresa Davis. Tu Th 2:00pm - 3:15pm, Drama Education Bldg 217. 

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. Fulfills: Humanities

English

ENGL 4500 Sally Hemings’ University

Prof. Lisa Woolfork. Wed 5:30pm - 8:00pm, Bryan 203

This course is “Sally Hemings University.” Its objective is to prepare students to examine and reconfigure the status quo. This course seeks to help students appreciate the shift from euphemisms (“racially-charged” or “racially-tinged”) to vocabularies of consequence (“racist” or “white supremacist”), to foster a facility for talking capably and comfortably about “uncomfortable” topics such as systems of domination and their influence upon university and daily life. “Sally Hemings University” is a site where the adverse effects of overt and subtle forms of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism and other systems of dominance are scrutinized. As a course, “Sally Hemings University” explores questions generated by re-framing “Mr. Jefferson’s University” (and universities generally) as a site that destabilizes the dominant narrative of the university as Jefferson’s primary property and by extension that of similarly entitled white men. Fulfills: Humanities; 4000 with instructor permission.

 

ENGL 4570 Seminar in American Literature: James Baldwin

Prof. Marlon Ross. Tu 5:00pm - 7:30pm; New Cabell 036. 

This seminar focuses on the tumultuous life and diverse works of James Baldwin, whose intellectual influence is still palpable in today’s discourses about race, sexuality, social activism, national belonging, and exile. We’ll study major works from each of the genres that Baldwin engaged, including the novel, short story, drama, poetry, journalism, and the essay. In addition to Baldwin’s works, we’ll explore him as a “spokesman” of the Civil Rights movement, and how his high visibility as a public intellectual whose appearances on the new medium of television helped to shape his “celebrity” status. Among the works to be examined are the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), Giovanni’s Room (1956), and Just Above My Head (1979); plays The Amen Corner (1954) and Blues for Mr. Charlie (1964); selected poems from Jimmy’s Blues (1983); selected short stories from Going to Meet the Man (1965); essays from Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name (1961), No Name in the Street (1972), and The Devil Finds Work (1976); and the children’s book Little Man Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1976). To comprehend Baldwin’s impact in his time and in our own, we’ll sample some works where his influence is especially compelling, including: Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice (1965); eulogies for Baldwin by Toni Morrison and Ossie Davis (1987); Darieck Scott’s 1996 novel Traitor to the Race; Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2015 nonfiction book Between the World and Me; the documentary film I Am Not Your Negro (2017); the 2018 feature film based on his 1976 novel If Beale Street Could Talk; and a variety of critical essays on Baldwin’s works. Assignments include: two short critical essays, a team class presentation, and a final research paper. Fulfills: Humanities; 4000

History

HIUS 2053 American Slavery 

Prof. Justene Hill Edwards. Mon Wed 12:00pm - 12:50pm, Maury 104

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

 

HIUS 3654 Black Fire

Prof. Claudrena Harold. Tu Th 9:30am - 10:45am; McLeod 1020

This course examines the history and contemporary experiences of African Americans at the University of Virginia from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to the present era. Fulfills: SSH

Religious Studies

RELG 3200. Martin, Malcolm and America

Prof. Mark Hadley. Tu, Th 9:30-10:45, Gibson 211. 

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. Fulfills: Race & Pol; SSH

Sociology

SOC 3410 Race and Ethnic Relations

Prof. Milton Vickerman. Mon Wed 4:00pm - 5:15pm,     New Cabell 168

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. Fulfills: SSH

Undergraduate Program

The African American and African Studies curriculum exposes students to the lives and experiences of people in the global African diaspora. 

Undergraduate Program

The Carter G. Woodson Institute was established in 1981 in response to student and faculty demands for a more coherent African-American and African Studies program and a more aggressive program of minority recruitment at the University.  The Institute offers several interdisciplinary undergraduate programs including:

 

Students should select their courses from the approved list posted on the Woodson Institute web site each semester.

Further questions may be directed to the Director of Undergraduate Programs.

Uplifting the Race

History

UVA and History Race, Property and Power

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UVA January Term in Ghana: A Tour of the Book: Homegoing and the Challenge of Diasporas

UVA Panel will pay Respect to Aretha Franklin on Oct. 1

September 16, 2010 — "R-E-S-P-E-C-T" – that's what the University of Virginia will give to Aretha Franklin before her Oct. 1 Charlottesville concert, when the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies hosts a panel of noted music historians who will discuss her significance.

UVA Symposium will examine Haiti since 2010 Earthquake

The University of Virginia will hold a symposium April 29 and 30 to examine the situation in Haiti more than a year after it was struck by a deadly earthquake.
 

UVA Today: 'Trailblazer' Deborah McDowell Chosen for Zintl Leadership Award

Deborah E. McDowell’s colleagues at the University of Virginia call her a “trailblazer,” note her collaborative activities and point to her commitment to diversify not only the faculty on Grounds, but throughout the nation. The University’s Maxine Platzer Lynn Women’s Center will give McDowell the 2018 Zintl Leadership Award this fall for these and other long-time efforts.

UVA Today: You Can Help Put Julian Bond's Papers in an Online Archive

Civil rights icon Julian Bond fought for social justice and equality from the time he co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 until his death in 2015. In between those years he served in the Georgia legislature, co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, served as chairman of the NAACP, engaged in political activism on various fronts – and taught more than 5,000 students as a University of Virginia professor.  

UVA's Carter G. Woodson Institute Celebrating its 25th Anniversary

April 19, 2007- When the University of Virginia established the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies in 1981, it was the first such research center at a southern university. Now approaching its 25th anniversary, the institute will be recognized at a symposium to be held on April 20 and 21, “Celebrating the Legacy, Scholarship and Future of the Woodson Institute.” Featuring a series of panel discussions and a keynote address by economist and professor William A. Darity, the symposium is free and open to the public. Events will be held in Newcomb, Maury and Minor halls.

UVA's Woodson Institute to hold symposium on the NAACP

October 19, 2009 — The nation's oldest, largest and most widely recognized civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, is 100 years old this year.

Valerie Cooper's New Book Looks at Pioneer Abolitionist's use of the Bible

March 1, 2012 — Maria Stewart, a free black woman born in Hartford, Conn., in 1803, is thought to be the first American woman to give a political speech before a "promiscuous" audience, in 1832.

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Vice Presidential Debate—Viewing Party

Vickerman

Milton Vickerman

Associate Professor

320 Dynamics Building

Videos

Robert Trent Vinson headshot

Robert Trent Vinson

Commonwealth Professor (AAS)

101 Minor Hall

Robert Trent Vinson is the Commonwealth Professor of African American & African Studies, Director & Chair of the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American & African Studies at the University of Virginia, and a Research Associate at Stellenbosch University in South Africa.  He is a scholar and teacher of 19th and 20th century African & African Diaspora history, specializing in the transnational connections between southern Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean.

Vinson’s first book was The Americans Are Coming!: Dreams of ’American Negro Liberation’ in Segregationist South Africa (2012) and his second book was Albert Luthuli: Mandela before Mandela (2018).  He has also published many articles, including in the Journal of African History, the African Studies Review, and the Journal of Southern African Studies. Vinson is currently completing two co-authored book projects, Zulu Diasporas: Africa and Africans in Black Nationalist Histories & American Popular Culture and Crossing the Water: African Americans and South Africa, 1890-1965: A Documentary History, contracted with Ohio University Press

Vinson currently serves as President of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD), the world’s premier professional organization of African and African Diaspora scholars. He also serves on the Board of Directors of the African Studies Association and on the editorial board of Michigan State University Press and of Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies.

Vinson earned his Ph.D. in African History from Howard University. Prior to his appointment at UVA, Vinson taught at Washington University in St. Louis and more recently, William & Mary, where he was Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of History & Africana Studies.  At William & Mary, Vinson was also the first Chair of the Lemon Project, which documents, preserves and disseminates scholarship that uncovered the College’s long histories of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. 

 

Virginia Landmarks of Black History

African-American Studies

Virginia Landmarks of Black History Sites on the Virginia Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places

Visiting Woodson Professors Bring Diverse Perspectives

May 4, 2010 — The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American & African Studies at the University of Virginia hosted two visiting professors this semester who are well-known in the study of African-American literature and related topics. 

Walsh

Denise Walsh

Associate Professor

S454 Gibson Hall

Wandering a Gendered Wilderness

Religious Studies
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Wanuri Kahiu in conversation with Kwame Otu

We Face the Dawn

African-American Studies

What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do

award-winning

History

When Private Beaches Served as a Refuge for the Chesapeake Bay’s Black Elite

Andrew Kahrl featured in article in Smithsonian Magazine

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Where do we go from here?

 

 

The AAS Majors' Union and the Carter G. Woodson Institute will be hosting a discussion about this week's election results, to be facilitated by Professor Andrew Kahrl (AAS & History). Please join us  in this discussion tomorrow (Friday), November 11 from 2:30 - 4:00 p.m. in the Minor Hall auditorium.

Whispers of Rebellion: Narrating Gabriel's Conspiracy

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White Fear and Race War in the time of Dred Scott

White Fear and Race War in the time of Dred Scott: The Supreme Court's pronouncement that African Americans had "no right which the white man was bound to respect" as the legal codification of the history of slavery and white supremacy in St. Louis, the city in which the case was first filed.

Walter Johnson is the author of Soul by Soul:  Life inside the Antebellum Slave Market and, most recently, River of Dark Dreams:  Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Francis B. Simkins Award from the Southern Historical Association, the John Hope Franklin Prize from the American Studies Association, the SHEAR Book Prize from the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, and the Frederick Jackson Turner and the Avery O. Craven Prizes from the Organization of American Historians. He is currently writing a book about the central role of St. Louis in the imperialist and racial capitalist history of the United States, from Lewis and Clark to Michael Brown. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship; as well as awards from the American Philosophical Society, the Radcliffe Institute, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences; and a Mellon Fellowship in Cultural Studies at Wesleyan University

This event is free and open to the public.

White Women, Rape, and the Power of Race in Virginia, 1900-1960

History

Why Major in AAS?

You wanted to know what the Woodson community would say if asked, “With my degree in AAS/AS, what am I qualified to do?” Your faculty and fellows put a great deal of thought into this question. Their replies are found below.

MAURICE O. WALLACE, WOODSON FACULTY

The students' question about the utility of an AAS or African Studies major/minor is not unique to AAS or African Studies. It is a question on the minds of all of the humanities, frankly. "What does an English, History, Art, Anthropology, Women's Studies, Sociology major/minor qualify one to do" is the anxious question of many. My answer is: virtually anything. Admittedly, if one expects her major or minor to translate directly and immediately into a professional career, then the most obvious options for an AAS or African Studies major include education, activism, politics, and religion with their direct need for persons intimately knowledgeable about the social, political, and cultural meaning of black life and expression. The AAS and African Studies major/minor is also excellent preparation, of course, for advanced study in a variety of humanities fields and in law and medicine. I would invite students and their families to think about the utility of an AAS or African Studies major/minor in more imaginative, less reductive ways, however. The AAS or African Studies curriculum is far-reaching—a near world of neglected accomplishments, ideas and views of human survival and, often, flourishing. It, thus, prepares our students for life and work in places and in positions beyond traditional expectations. Research, broadcast journalism, public office, museum and cultural center leadership, entrepreneurship, Peace Corps, White House staffing, even independent film-making, then, are among several other post-graduate pursuits I've known my past AAS/African Studies students to follow, many to distinction.

KIRT VON DAACKE, WOODSON FACULTY AFFILIATE

My few words would be: first, you can do anything with a degree in AAS. Your employability after college is not really connected to your major. Instead, you’ll be a graduate of the University of Virginia, itself a powerful calling card. What’s most important is really where you went to school and how well you did—school and GPA are the key indices potential employers will first encounter and use to assess you. The second important factor is skill development—can you critically read? Do research? Perform analysis? Communicate clearly in writing and in person? Do you have a broad base of knowledge about the world (are you a global citizen in some way?)? And last, are you teachable/trainable/flexible? The AAS major at an elite liberal arts & sciences curriculum school is the perfect place to develop those skills—it is an inherently interdisciplinary and globally-focused discipline that has trained you to read critically, to research, to analyze, and to communicate effectively. Your opportunity to demonstrate those skills comes through your professional resume, your interest/cover letter for a position, and how you present yourself in-person during an interview. Those are the moments when you will demonstrate just how powerful your skills are.

CLAUDRENA HAROLD, WOODSON FACULTY

Our alum and NFL player, Laroy Reynolds, tells me that whenever folks ask him what can he do with Black Studies he proudly responds: "Change the world."

Thanks in part to the broad intellectual training offered through AAS, our graduates have excelled in a variety of fields, from education to business. We have students working as teachers/educators, policy analysts, lawyers, public health professionals, and writers (for example, Joshua Adams, a 2012 graduate who is getting his masters at USC writes for Ebony.com). If students want to continue their intellectual pursuits at the graduate level, they should know that our alums have done pretty well on that front. This fall semester alone, our graduates have started doctorate/MA programs at Georgetown, Ohio State, UPenn, Vanderbilt, UNC-Chapel Hill, NC A&T, Howard, Wake Forest, and Syracuse, among others. For those who want to stay with AAS, they should know we have students at Berkeley, Yale, and Michigan State. Not all but many of these students have benefited immensely from IRT, which has looked out for many of our majors. Completing a DMP in AAS or another related discipline should also be on the radar of those who want to do graduate school.

Our placement in terms of graduate school has been a blessing and a curse. I think students know this is an excellent route to the doctorate, at the same time folks wonder what you can do if you DON’T want to go to graduate school. In terms of moving straight into the job force, we've done pretty well on that front.

Like their counterparts in the social sciences and humanities, students with AAS degrees have been able to pursue the traditional post-UVA career routes like consulting and marketing and working in the field of education. This does require that they are thinking about life after UVA before their last year and that their devote a little more time to securing an internship.

Fortunately, many of our alums have been able to help. Students should know that several alums have specifically targeted AAS majors in their recruitment endeavors for their respective companies (Accenture, Cravath Swaine, and Moore, and Goldman Sachs). This semester, for example, one of our alums who double majored in AAS and Commerce did some recruiting for Accenture, a management consulting firm, and specifically reached out to Black studies folks. She spent an entire day at the University. Another alum recruiting for her law firm carved out time away from the law school and met informally with our students.

I have issues with some of these companies, but students should know that these outreach initiatives are happening and that majoring in the liberal arts doesn’t foreclose certain opportunities in the business world. With AAS—as with any major—it’s how you “work” the internship game and fortunately through our growing network of alums we are trying to improve our students’ ability to get internships.

I should also note that some faculty have been able to hire folks through the USOAR program as research assistants. So for the past two years, I’ve had about 3 research assistants hired through grants. These are opportunities that our students should be pursing since companies are looking for folks with research experience. This USOAR program is also good for students in AAS who double major in the sciences.

Words of Advice Keep that GPA up so that you have options Look at what AAS alums are doing… Think about internships and ask faculty for assistance Get to the know the center for undergraduate excellence look at research opportunities through USOAR understand that aas gives you an expertise that is quite valuable in our increasingly diverse world keep that GPA up so that you have options.

NJELLE W. HAMILTON, WOODSON FACULTY

When thinking about what your major/ college education qualifies you to do, don't think about jobs or singular pathways, but about what we used to call a vocation — a calling or life path that corresponds to the issues, questions, practices, and values that you hold dear. Then think about career paths that will fulfill that vocation, and then how the unique combination of coursework, extracurricular activities, and hobbies that you pursue in college contribute to constructing that identity and pathway. So, as to what you can do with a degree/ minor in AAS: — Ask yourself what sensibilities have you been developing by learning about systematic injustices and inequalities that have plagued African Diaspora peoples, and in what fields you might place yourself to begin to work towards eradicating them. — Ask yourself what careers and professions you can infuse with your training in the historical and contemporary issues that impact African Diaspora peoples. — Ask yourself what fields could benefit from a revalorizing of African Diaspora languages, histories, and cultures, and from having experts with those skills, competencies, and sensibilities. So then that includes:

  • medicine
  • medical anthropology
  • social policy
  • development
  • education
  • education policy
  • politics
  • international relations
  • linguistics and translation
  • health policy
  • religion
  • archaeology
  • creative writing and the arts ….

In other words, every job, and every career. The question is: what do you want to do with an AAS major or minor?

ELLEN CONTINI-MORAVA, WOODSON FACULTY AFFILIATE

What do you gain with a major in AAS? Expertise in cultural diversity is a great asset both in the U.S. workplace and in the context of globalization. [You gain] experience analyzing issues from several disciplinary perspectives, hence familiarity with multiple types of research methodology and ways to frame and answer complex questions

SABRINA PENDERGRASS, WOODSON FACULTY

Nations are dealing with the challenges of Ebola in West Africa. An American city is undergoing weeks of protests because of ongoing police shootings of its unarmed African American men. 'The color line,' as W.E.B. Du Bois called it, continues to define our legal, educational, medical, and political systems and the neighborhoods and broader world in which we live. The "emotional wealth" of black folks as Du Bois phrased it--through literature, music, theater, dance, film, the visual arts--has transformed cultures and crosses the globe. Any career path a student might take would be enhanced by the knowledge and skills they would obtain through an AAS major or minor.

LISA SHUTT, WOODSON FACULTY

Your curriculum in AAS and AS does not simply prepare you for the particular career(s) that you will later pursue. We are taught to imagine that each college major lines up neatly with a small number of possible career choices. Not true! This major does provide you with very marketable skills: excellent writing skills, public presentation skills, the ability to constructively work both independently and within teams, critical thinking and the ability to quickly digest and reproduce complex ideas, the ability to work with people from diverse backgrounds, the skill to craft arguments and persuade others, a focus on using a variety of methods and considering a variety of perspectives, and the ability to conduct research and analyze different kinds of data, among many others. These are all marketable skills. However, some of the most helpful pieces you put together from this area of study are not simply about career preparation, but about creating yourself as an individual living in the world with presence and purpose. African American and African Studies helps you assemble a general orientation to the world that is critical, constructive, active and political. It is an orientation to the world that helps you see through some of the haze that hangs over this nation and the global community beyond – and that ultimately will help you to cut through it and find your own ways to effect change.

LINDSEY JONES, WOODSON FELLOW & FORMER WOODSON TEACHING ASSISTANT / CURRY Ph.D. Candidate

An AAS major/minor will prepare you both to investigate the historical roots of contemporary social challenges and to look at the past as a source of ideas to address these challenges. Whether you build a career as an entrepreneur, activist, teacher, or in any other field, the habit of learning historical context will allow you to innovate in meaningful and inspired ways.

KWAME EDWIN OTU, WOODSON FACULTY & FORMER WOODSON FELLOW

I think students should be passionate about the courses they enroll in. They must feel the need to invest time, energy, and joy in them, too. The absence of either one or all of these makes their aspirations meaningless. For to be able to gauge one's competence and preparedness for the job market they must learn to appreciate the multiple benefits they stand to offer from these Majors. So I outline below:

1. AAS and African Studies are useful disciplinary and practical tools that can allow students to work in both corporate worlds and in the fields of science and technology. The increasing pressure on corporations to recognize the significance of corporate social responsibility, for example, strategically positions AAS/AS students,i.e makes them employable. Increasingly, employers are seeking potential employees with the intellectual wherewithal, as well as the necessary familiarity with the populations that their decisions and projects affect. Hence, students must be made aware that the knowledge they acquire from enrolling in these courses, or having them as their majors, affords them those skills needed in these corporate worlds.

2. In a world where diversity has become an epitome of transnationalism, AAS/AS students unlike students in other fields in the Social Sciences, have the benefit of interdisciplinarity. For AAS/AS allows students to do an admixture of courses that allows them to apply different disciplinary theories and methods to what they study. Therefore, the transdisciplinary dimension of AAS/AS puts students in the position to handle sociological, anthropological, political, religious, economic, to give but a partial list, tasks. Knowledge acquired from these domains adds to their competitiveness. So, they may be graduating with a Major in AAS/AS, however their specialization in the latter gives them an added impetus to get a job.

3. And for those considering academic jobs, there has been, in recent years, an upsurge in programs in these fields i.e. AAS/AS. These programs often mix applied and theoretical and approaches. Thus, students who wish to enroll in graduate programs, not only have the option of becoming academics, but also have the potential of becoming consultants and experts on social, political, and economic issues should they consider doing so. There's also the option of law and social work. Students have increasingly used AAS/AS as a gateway towards pursuing law.

AVA PURKISS, WOODSON FELLOW

I have jumped around from discipline to discipline in ways that may seem incoherent, but have worked well in terms of making me a better scholar. I majored in psychology as an undergraduate student. In the middle of earning my degree, I took part in a study abroad program that invigorated my interest in African American and African Diaspora Studies. I chose not to change my major but I supplemented my coursework with as many classes in African American history and literature as I could. After graduating I went on to pursue an MA in African and African Diaspora Studies. During that time, I found that African American history is what I wanted to study, so after completing my M.A. I entered a Ph.D. program in American history. I am now a pre-doctoral fellow at the Woodson Institute, so in a sense I have come full circle.

I tell this story about my trajectory to show that sometimes the route toward your eventual profession or career is not always predictable, rational, or typical. Even if I could, I would not change the way things transpired. My psychology background makes me a more empirical researcher, and my experience with African Diaspora Studies makes a more rigorous historian, so I am grateful for my background in these fields. At each step I refined what I liked and made changes at the next step, and this has worked well for me. Therefore, my advice is to cultivate a curiosity for things you might like, and when you find what it is you enjoy, adjust your plan accordingly. And if it does not work out, it is OK to change your mind!

I wish you all the best in your academic and professional careers!

LAURA E. HELTON, WOODSON FELLOW

Two things I'd share about "what to do with that degree":

1) Becoming a good writer will serve you perhaps more than anything else you can do to prepare for future careers. Even if you don't think of yourself as a "writer," or someone who likes writing, it is a craft that you end up using almost no matter what kind of work you do in the future. You'll inevitably be writing scouting reports, research reports, grant proposals, business proposals, campaign strategy reports, emails, marketing materials, and so on and so on. Potential employers can spot good writers from their cover letters and emails, and they will value that skill almost as much as any other particular kind of training or experience. I have been surprised multiple times by how a finely-crafted cover letter won me a hearing for a potential job even if it seemed like a long shot. This was true of jobs in government, the non-profit sector, fundraising, and higher education. Another thing I was surprised by after college was how often in the job search process I was asked for a "writing sample." Not just for grad school applications, but for regular jobs. So I would advise making sure that by the time you graduate you have some piece of writing--a research paper, a position paper, a piece of journalism, a review essay, etc.--that you feel good about and which represents your voice, so that you'll have something ready if a potential employer asks for a sample of your writing skills. Don't be afraid to ask one of your professors to help you revise/edit a piece to make it ready to serve as a writing sample. Most professors will be delighted to work with a student who is taking the initiative and taking seriously the art of writing.

2) Volunteer and internship work: An important way to connect your academic work to your political and social concerns, to learn about how organizations work and where you might fit into them, and to give you experience within a particular field. As an undergrad, I volunteered with two different AIDS service organizations and also interned at an arts non-profit. Working in the HIV/AIDS field gave me a lot of knowledge about public health, sexuality, LGBT organizations, and health care activism. I cared about the work and had the chance to learn a lot about an issue that I was passionate about, but it also made me qualified for jobs at a wide range of organizations and directly led to interviews and a job in the years right after graduation. I didn't know going into the arts internship what kind of work I would be doing there, but I ended up helping put together grant proposals, which turned out to be incredibly valuable and marketable later.

So, the upshot: in your college career, focus on learning about subjects and issues you care about, rather than worrying about how a particular field of study is going to get you a job or not. Plans for your career can change and most people end up in jobs through a certain degree of serendipity and contacts made outside of school. And once you land in the job you want, you'll need all the skills from college--writing, thinking, and expressing your ideas clearly and persuasively--to help you do well.

 

Williams: Harry Belafonte's bold and generous activism embodied the 'artist as citizen'

Kevin Gaines quoted in article honoring the late Harry Belafonte, Jr. 

Wilson

Melvin Wilson

Professor

306 Gilmer Hall

Women of Fire and Spirit

Religious Studies

Women's Theater Collective, the Saartjie Project to Perform at UVA

October 21, 2011 — The Washington, D.C.-based women's theater collective, the Saartjie Project, will present "Deconstructing the Myth of the Booty" on Nov. 13 at 7 p.m. in the University of Virginia's Old Cabell Hall Auditorium. Admission is free, but tickets must be reserved in advance of the event, which is sponsored by U.Va.'s Carter G. Woodson Institute of African-American and African Studies in the College of Arts & Sciences.

Woodson 40th Anniversary Highlighted in UVA Today

Educating new generations of scholars in Black history and politics. Exploring Black authors like Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright. Examining urgent issues, such as the August 2017 violent white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville or mass incarceration and racism in the U.S. The University of Virginia’s Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies is celebrating its 40th year on Grounds.

People Placeholder

Woodson at the Virginia Film Festival

Freedom Summer

2014, USA, 112 min
Director: Stanley Nelson Cast: Julian Bond, Taylor Branch, Ben Chaney

In the hot and deadly summer of 1964, the nation’s eyes were riveted on Mississippi. Despite concerted efforts of local civil rights activists, the state remained steeped in segregation, underscored by racial hate crimes and the systematic exclusion of African Americans from the political process. Award-winning director Stanley Nelson captures this volatile period with remarkable historical footage and firsthand accounts from volunteers whose lives changed in those long summer months. Fifty years later, this film highlights an overlooked but essential element of the Civil Rights Movement: activists’ patient and long-term efforts to organize communities and register black voters — even in the face of intimidation, physical violence and death. Discussion with Julian Bond, Lynn French, Joyce Ladner, and Deborah McDowell (U.Va.)

Supported by U.Va. Office for Diversity and Equity and The Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at U.Va.

 

UVA  Newcomb Hall Theater

Adults: $11.00 Discounted:$9.00

http://virginiafilmfestival.org/films/freedom-summer/

Woodson Fellow Nzingha Kendall received 2020 UNDO Fellowship at UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art

Woodson Fellows to Give Talks This Spring

January 28, 2008 — Offering topics as varied as the lives of diamond miners and the meanings of drum songs, residential fellows at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for Afro-American and African Studies will present their research in three separate talks this spring, beginning Wednesday. 

Woodson Fellowship Alumni

2019-2021

Sarah Balakrishnan

Post-Doctoral Fellow (African History) 

Harvard University

Public Land and the People’s Power: Colonialism, Community, and Mass Politics in the British Gold Coast (Southern Ghana), c. 1807-1957

Dana Cypress

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (English)

The University of Pennsylvania

In the Time of Disaster: Representations of Hurricane Katrina in African American Literature and Culture

Amanda Gibson

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History) 

The College of William and Mary

Credit Is Due: African Americans as Borrowers and Lenders in Antebellum Virginia                               

Tracey Stewart

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Music) 

University of Virginia

Being Maroon: Music, Memory and Power in Articulations of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Jamaican Maroonage

2018-2020

F. Delali Kumavie

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (English) 

Northwestern University

Dreams of Flight: Literary Mappings of Black Geographies through Air, Airplanes and Airports in Black Literature

Paul Joseph López Oro

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (African and African Diaspora Studies)

The University of Texas at Austin
Queering Garifuma: The Diasporic Politics of Black Indigeneity in New York City

Sean Reid

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology) 

Syracuse University
Continuity, Transformations, and Rupture in the Forests of Gold African History, Columbia University

Halimat Somotan                               

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (African History) 

Columbia University

In the Wider Interests of Nigeria as a Whole: Lagos and the Making of Federal Nigeria, 1949-76

 

Nzingha Kendall

Post-Doctoral Fellow (American Studies)

Indiana University Bloomington
Imperfect Independence: Black Women & Experimental Filmmaking

 

Claire Antone Payton

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History) 

Duke University
And We Will Be Devoured’: Construction and the Politics of Dictatorship in Haiti (1957-1986) Women’s Writing

Jermaine Scott

Post-Doctoral Fellow (African American Studies) 

Northwestern University
Black Teamwork: Football, Diaspora, Politics

 

2017-2019

Chinwe Ezinna Oriji 

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (African and African Diasporic Studies)
University of Texas at Austin

“Race in Africa, Africa as Diaspora: Racialization of Post-Independence Nigerians in the U.S.”

Seth Palmer

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology/ Women and Gender Studies)
University of Toronto

"In the Image of A Woman: Saran Vaaji Subject Formation and Embodied Interpolation on the Betsiboka River"

Ashleigh Wade-Green

Post-Doctoral Fellow (Women’s and Gender Studies)
Rugters University

T. Dionne Bailey 

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)

2016-2018

Tiffany Barber

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Art and Art History)
University of Rochester

"Undesirability and the Value of Blackness in Contemporary Art"

Lyndsey Beutin

Pre-Doctoral Fellow
University of Pennsylvania (Annenberg School for Communication)

"If Slavery's Not Black: The Stakes of the Anti-Trafficking Discourse"

Julius Fleming Jr.

Post-Doctoral Fellow (Africana Studies)
University of Maryland, College Park

Lindsey Jones

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Social Foundation of Education)
University of Virginia

‘Not a Place of Punishment’: the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, 1915-1940.”

Tony Perry

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (American Studies)
University of Maryland

"To Go to Nature’s Manufactory’: The Material Ecology of Slavery in Antebellum Maryland"

Xavier Pickett

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Religion & Society)
Princeton Theological Seminary

"Black (Ir)religious Fire: The Literary and Moral Imagination of James Baldwin and James Cone"

Petal Samuel

Post-Doctoral Fellow (English)
Vanderbilt University

"Polluting the Soundscape: Noise Control, The Colonial Ear, and Afro-Caribbean Women’s Writing"

 

2015-2017

Cory Hunter

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Musicology)
Princeton University

"The Politics of Real Spirituality and its Embodiment in Gospel Music Discourse and Performance"

Ebony Jones

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
New York University

"Enslaved Convicts in Imperial Spaces: Race and Penal Transportation during the Abolition Era"

Ashley Rockenback

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Michigan

"Home in Exile: Banyarwanda Settlers and the Making of the Ugandan State,  1911-Present"

 

2014-2016

Talitha LeFlouria

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
Howard University

"Doctoring Captivity: Prison Physicians and Incarcerated Patients in the Post-Civil War South"    

Taneisha Means

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Political Science)
Duke University

"Race, Representation, and the U.S. Judiciary: The Perceptions, Treatment and Behavior of Judges"

E. Kwame Otu

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
Syracuse University

"Reluctantly Queer: Sassoi and the Shifting Paradigms of Masculinity and Sexual Citizenship in Postcolonial Ghana"

Tammy Owens

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (American Studies)
University of Minnesota

"Making Black Girls Real: The Invention of Queer Black Girlhood in the U.S., 1861-1963"

Giuliana Perrone

Post-Doctoral (History)
University of California, Berkeley

"Litigating Emancipation:  Salvery's Legal Afterlife, 1865-1877"

Ava Purkiss

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
The University of Texas at Austin

"Mind, Soul, Body, and Race: Black Women’s Purposeful Exercise, 1900-1939"

2013-2015

Nicole Burrowes

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center

 

"The 1935 Labor Rebellions and the Politics of African-Indian Solidarity in British Guiana"

Laura Helton

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
New York University

 

“Remaking the Past: Collecting, Collectivity, and the Emergence of Black Archival Publics, 1915-1950”

LaTasha Levy

Post-Doc Fellow (Philosophy)

 

NorthernWestern University

"Strange Bedfellows: The Rise of the New Black Right in Post- Civil RIghts"

David Morton

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Minnesota

 

“The Construction of Home in Maputo, Mozambique, 1940s to the Present”

Ellen Tani

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Art History)
Stanford University 

 

"Black Conceptualism and the Atmospheric Turn, 1968-2008"

2012-2014

Jonathan Forney

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Politics)
University of Virginia

 

“Community Control over Civil Militias in Sierra Leone, 1991-2002"

Zakiyyah Jackson

Post-Doctoral Fellow (African Diaspora Studies)
University of California-Berkeley
Current Affiliation
Assistant Professor English
George Mason University

 

Alexandra Moffett-Bateau

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Political Science)
University of Chicago

 

“‘The Development of Political Identity in Public Housing Spaces”

Celeste Day Moore

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Chicago
"Race in Translation: Producing, Performing, and Selling African-American Music in Greater France, 1944-1974"
Current Affilation
Assistant Professor History
Hamilton College

 

Erin Nourse

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Religious Studies)
University of Virginia

 

“Birth is our Spear Battle’: Pregnancy, Childbirth and Religion in a northern Malagasy Port Town"

Katherine Wiley

Post-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
Indiana University
Current Affilation
Assistant Professor Anthropology
Pacific Lutheran University

2011-2013

La Marr J. Bruce

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (African American Studies and American Studies)
Yale University
" The Domain of the Marvelous':  Madness, Blackness, and Radical Creativity."
Current Affiliation
Assistant Professor
Department of American Studies
University of Maryland, College Park

 

Theodore W. Cohen

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Maryland-College Park
“In Black and Brown: Intellectuals, Blackness, and Inter-Americanism in Mexico after 1910”

 

Tyler D. Fleming

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Virginia
“King Kong, Bigger than Cape Town’: A History of a South African Musical and the World’s Beyond”

 

Elina I. Hartikainen

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Antropology)
University of Chicago
"Ritual Hierarchy, Secrecy, and Public Discourse: Forming an African Religious Public in Brazil"

 

Kwame Holmes

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Illinois-Champaign/Urbana
"Chocolate to Rainbow City: Branding Black and Gay Washington, D.C., 1954-1978"

 

Rebecca Keegan VanDiver

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Art History)
Duke University
“‘ Blackness in Triplicate: Lois Mailou Jones, Black Diasporic Art Practice, and Africa in the 20th Century"

2010-2012

Tshepo Monongwa Chéry

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History and Africana Studies)
University of Pennsylvania
"Kingdoms of the Earth: Coloureds, Religious Insurgency, and the Practices of Black Nationalism in South Africa between 1900-1948"
Current Affiliation
Post-Doctoral Fellow
University of Texas-Austin

Z'étoile Imma

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (English Literature)
University of VIrginia
"Intimate Men/Intimate Spaces: (Re)Locating African Masculinities and the Postcolony in Contemporary Feminist Fiction and Film"
Current Affiliation
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Notre Dame University

Herbert Timothy Lovelace

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Virginia
"Legal History from Below: The Black South and the International Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), 1958-1964"
Current Affiliation
Assistant Professor Law and History
Indiana University

Anita Wheeler

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (African Studies)
Howard University
"The Diplomatic and Economic Value of Chinese Language in Africa"
Current Affiliation
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Univeristy of California, Los Angeles

Dennis Tyler

Post-Doctoral Fellow (English Literature)
University of California, Los Angeles
"Disability of Color: Figuring the Black Body in American Law, Literature, and Culture"
Current Affiliation
Assistant Professor of English
Fordham University

 

2009-2011

Jeffrey Ahlman

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Illinois
“Fording the Pan-African Nation: Kwame Nkrumah, the CPP, and the Politics of Pan-African Nationalism in Ghana, 1949-1966”
Current Affiliation
Assistant Professor History
Smith College

Jennifer Barclay

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
Michigan State University
“Cripples All! Or, the Mark of Slavery:The invisible Link between Disability and Race in the Old south and Beyond ”
Current Affiliation
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Case Western Reserve University

Benjamin Fagan

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (English)
University of Virginia
“Righteousness Exalteth a Nation: Practices of Nationalism in the Early Black Press”
Current Affiliation
Post-Doctoral Fellow
American Academy of Art and Science

Jonathan Fenderson

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Afro American Studies)
"Journey towards a Black Aesthetic: Hoyt Fuller, the Black Arts Movement and the Black Intellectual Community, 1923-1981"
Current Affiliation
Assistant Professor
African and African American Studies

Alisha Gaines

Post-Doctoral Fellow (English)
Duke University
“Spectacle of American Liberalism; Narratives of Racial Im/posture”
Current Affiliation
Assistant Professor of English
University of Florida-Gainesville

Cassie Hays

Post-Doctoral Fellow (Sociology)
Yale University
“A Sociology of Safari; Native, Nature and Nomos in Tanzanian Conservation.”
Current Affiliation
Department of Sociology
Gettysburg College

 

2008-2010

Olubukola Gbadegesin

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Art History)
Emory University
"Picturing the Modern Self: Politics, Identity, and Self-Fashioning in Lagos, 1861-1944”
Current Affiliation
Post-Doctoral Fellow
Bowdoin College

Anna Lim

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
University of Virginia
"Population Politics and the Production of Citizens in the French Antilles”

Rosemary Millar

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (English/American Literature)
University of Virginia
"A Livable Place: (Anti) Utopianism and the African-American Literary Imagination"
Current Affiliation
Department of English
University of North Carolina School of the Arts

Anoop Mirpuri

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (English)
University of Washington
"Slated for Destruction: Race, Black Radicalism, and the Meaning of Captivity in the Postwar Exceptional State"
Current Affiliation
Assistant Professor of English
Portland State University

John Willis (Thabiti)

Post-Doctoral Fellow (African History)
Emory University
"Masquerading Politics: Community, Power, and Authority in a Yoruba Town"
Current Affiliation
Department of History
Carleton College

 

2008-2009

Deirdre Cooper Owens

Post-Doctoral Fellow (U.S. History)
University of California, Los Angeles
"Courageous Negro Servitors' and Laboring Irish Bodies: An Examination of Antebellum Experimental Sexual Surgeries"
Current Affiliation
Department of History
University of Mississippi

 

2007-2009

Brandi Hughes

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (African American Studies and American Studies)
Yale University
"Middle Passages: African America and the Missionary Movement Throught West Africa, 1850-1930"
Current Affiliation
Department of History and the Program in American Culture
University of Michigan

Kristin Phillips

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology/Educational Policy Studies)
University of Wisconsin-Madison
"Building the Nation from the Hinterlands: Poverty, Participation, and Statecraft in Rural Tanzania"
Current Affiliation
Department of Teacher Education
Michigan State University

 

2007–2008

Edwina Ashie-Nikoi

Post-Doctoral Fellow (Caribbean/African Diaspora History)
New York University
"Drumbeats of History: Reading African Diaspora Ritual Documents”
Current Affiliation
Department of Black Culture
Schomburg Center for Research

 

2006–2008

Yarimar Bonilla

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
University of Chicago
“A Striking Past: Loabro and the Politics of Memory in Postcolonial Guadeloupe”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology
University of Virginia

Todd Cleveland

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Minnesota
“Stones and Strategies: African Laborers on the Diamond Mines of the Companhia de Diamantes de Angola”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Augustana College

 

2006–2007

Regine Jean-Charles

Post-Doctoral (Romance Languages and Literature)
Harvard
“Gendering Violence: Francophone Women Writers, Representations of Violence, & the Violence of Representation”
Current Affiliation:
Romance Language and Literature Department--French
Boston College

 

2005–2007

Brian Brazeal

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
University of Chicago
“Blood, Money and Fame: Nago Magic in the Bahian Backlands”
Current Affiliation: Department of Anthropology
California State University at Chico

Kennetta Hammond Perry

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
Michigan State University
“Presenting Race, Representing Reality: Black Migrants and The Racial Politics of British Foreign Affairs, 1945–1962”
Current Affiliation: Department of History (Scholar in Residence)
Duke University

 

2005–2006

Jamillah Karim

Post-Doctoral Fellow (Religious Studies)
Spelman College
'Class-Color Lines in the American Ummah: African American and South Asian Muslim Women in Chicago and Atlanta"
Current Affiliation: Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
Spelman College

 

2004–2006

Vicki Brennan

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
University of Chicago
“Singing the Same Song: Music, Migration, and Translocality in Yoruba Churches” Current Affiliation:
Department of Religion
University of Vermont

Sarah Silkey

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (American History)
University of East Anglia
“Evolving Morality in a Translantic Society: Ida B. Wells, Anti-Lynching Activism and British Interest in American Race Relations, 1877–1920”
Current Affiliation
Department of History
Lycoming College

 

2004–2005

Cheryl Hicks

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
Williams College
“Confined to Womanhood: Women, prisons, and Race in the State of New York, 1890–1935”
Current Affiliation:
History
University of North Carolina

 

2003–2005

Sandy Alexandre

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (English)
University of Virginia
“Strange Fruits in the Orchard: Pastoral Paradigms in the African-American Literary Traditions"
Current Affiliation:
Department of Literature
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Mieka Brand

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
University of Virginia
“Mapping Race, Erasing Histories: The Politics of Making “Historic Black Communities” in the U.S”
Current Affiliation: Department of Anthropology
University of Virginia

 

2003–2004

Davarian Baldwin

Post-Doctoral Fellow (American Studies)
Boston College
“Chicago‘s New Negroes: Race, Class and Respectability in the Midwestern Black Metropolis, 1915–1935”
Current Affiliation: Department of History
Boston College

 

2002–2004

Candice Lowe

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
Indiana University-Bloomington
“Speaking Our Name: Multiculturalism and the Struggle for National Belonging Among Afro-Creoles in Mauritius”
Current Affiliation: Department of Anthropology
Vassar College

Tyrone Simpson

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (American Studies)
Indiana University-Bloomington
“Under Psychic Apartheid: Literary Ghettos and the Making of Race in the American Metropolis”
Current Affiliation:
Department of English
Vassar College

 

2002–2003

Ethan Blue

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
“Hard Time in the New Deal: Racial Formation and the Cultures of Punishment in Texas and California”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
The University of West Australia

 

2001–2002

Jeffrey B. Fleisher

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
University of Virginia
“Viewing Stonetowns form the Countryside: An Archeological Approach to Swahili Coast Regions"
Current Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology
Rice University

Jesse W. Shipley

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
University of Chicago
“Performing Ethnicity, Race, and the Nation: A Political Genealogy of the Performing Arts in Ghana from Colonialism to the Neo-Liberal Moment”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Africa and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology
Haverford College

Bryan E. Wagner

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (English)
“Disturbing the Peace: Black Vagrancy and U.S. Cultures of Racial Formation”
Current Affiliation:
Department of English
University of California, Berkeley

Frederick Knight

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
Colorado State University
“Seeds of Change: West African Workers and the Making of the British Americas, 1650–1850
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Colorado State University

 

2000–2002

Charles M. Bwenge

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
Princeton University
“Codeswitching in Political Discourse in Tanzania: A Case Study of National Legislatures”
Current Affiliation:
Department of African Languages and Literature
University of Florida

Meta DuEwa Jones

Post-Doctoral Fellow (Philosophy)
Loyola University Chicago
“African American Jazz Poetry: Orality, Prosody and Performance”
Current Affiliation:
Department of English
University of Texas at Austin

Jemima Pierre

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
University of Illinois, Chicago
"African Immigrants in the U.S. and the Dynamics and Politics of Socialization”
Current Affiliation:
Departments of African-American Studies and Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin

 

2000–2001

Isabel Mukonyora

Post-Doctoral Fellow (Religious Studies)
University of Virginia
“Womenhood in Conceptualizations of the African Landcape: A Study of the Wilderness Movement”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Religion
Western Kentucky University

Olufemi Taiwo

Post- Doctoral Fellow (Philosophy)
Loyala University Chicago
“Modernity and Colonialism”
Current Affiliation:
College of Arts and Sciences
Seattle University

 

1999–2001

Adrian T. Gaskins

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (American Studies)
University of Colorado at Boulder
“Colonization or Colonialism? African Americans in the Philippines, 1898–1918”
Current Affiliation
Department of Ethic Studies
University of Colorado, Boulder

Joseph R. Hellweg

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
Florida State University
“Dozoya: Hunting Ethics in Ivorian Civil Society”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology
Florida State University

 

1999–2000

Roseanne M. Adderly

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
Tulane University
“Middle Passage Voices: New Stories and Insights from the Nineteenth Century Slave Trade”
Current Affiliation:
Department of African American and Diaspora Studies
Vanderbilt University

 

1998–2000

Lisa Lindquist Dorr

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Alabama
“Messin‘ White Women‘: White Women, Black Men, and Rape in Virginia 1900–1960”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Alabama

Rolland D. Murray

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (English)
Ohio State University
“Beyond Macho: Fiction, Black Masulinity and Black Power (1964–1975)”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Brown University

 

1998–1999

Dylan Penningroth

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
John Hopkins University
"The Claims of Kinfolk: African American Property and Community in the Nineteenth Century South"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Associate Professor at Northwestern University

Ian G. Strachan

Post-Doctoral Fellow (English)
University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth
“Paradise and Plantation: Metaphor, Ideology and Economics in Caribbean Discourse”

 

1997–1999

Greta DeJong

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Nevada, Reno
“We Were Constantly Trying to Do Something: The African American Freedom Struggle in Rural Louisiana 1930–1970”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Nevada, Reno

Natasha Gray

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
Lawrence University
“Witchcraft and Sorcery Control in Colonial Ghana: The Case of Akyem Abuakwa 1912–1943”

Phillip Troutman

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
Duke University
“Masters and Markets: Slave Labor and Slave Capital in Virginia, 1815–1865”
Current Affiliation:
University Writing Program
George Washington University

 

1997–1998

John Gennari

Post-Doctoral Fellow (American Studies)
University of Vermont
“Critiquing Jazz: The Politics of Race and Culture in American Jazz Discourse”
Current Affiliation:
Department of English
University of Vermont

 

1996–1998

Eve Agee

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
“Race, Class, and the Change: African American Women‘s Narratives on Menopause and Medical Science”

Vania Penha-Lopes

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Sociology)
Bloomfield College
“Make Room for Daddy: A Study of Black Men‘s Involvement in Families”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Sociology
Bloomfield College

 

1996–1997

Samuel Martinez

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Connecticut
“Unfree Labor After Slavery: The Haitian Immigrant in the Dominican Economy and Imagination”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology
University of Connecticut

 

1995–1997

Stephanie Johnson Rowley

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Developmental Psychology)
University of Virginia
“Culture, Context, and Racial Identity: An Ecological Study of the Educational Attitudes and Performances of African-American Students”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Psychology
University of Michigan

Cornelia Sears

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Canterbury, New Zealand
“Africa in the American Mind, 1870–1495 5: A Study of Mythology, Idwolaogy and the Reconstruction of Race”
Current Affiliation:
Department of American Studies
University of Canterbury

Kara Ellis Skora

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Religious Studies)
University of Virginia
“Funerals and Ancestorhood in Modern Ghana: Meaning and Identity in Asante Life through Death”
Current Affiliation
Department of Religious Studies
Hiram College

 

1995–1996

Brian Ward

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Florida
“Just My Soul Responding: African-American Popular Music and Civil Rights, 1954–1994”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Florida

 

1994–1996

Scot French

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Virginia
“Remembering Nat Turner: The Southhampton Slave Uprising in Collective Memory, 1831 to the Present”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Digital History
University of Virginia

Michele Mitchell

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Michigan
“To Possess a Manly Spirit: Gender, Eugenics, and Empire in the U.S. Black Nationalism”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
New York University

 

1993–1995

Emily Crosby

Pre-Doctoral (History)
SUNY, Geneseo
“Common Courtesy: The Civil Rights Movement in Port Gibson, Mississippi”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
State University of New York, Geneseo

Shelly Leanne

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (International Relations)
Harvard University
“African American Protest Against Minority Rule in South Africa: A Case Study of Disaporas and Transnationalism in World Politic”
Current Affiliation
Author

Rebecca Popenoe

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
University of Chicago
“The Fatting of Girls, Sexuality, and Society among Awawagh Arabs in Niger”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Social Anthropology
Linkoping Universitet, Sweden

 

1993–1994

John Mason

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Virginia
“Slavery and Freedom in South Africa, 1820–1854”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Virginia

 

1992–1994

Cynthia Blair

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
Harvard University
“Modernizing the Black Body: African-American, Dress and the Politics of Public Space, 1910–1940”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Illinois-Chicago

David Murray

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Anthropology)
University of Virginia
“Martiniquais: The Construction and Contestation of Cultural Identity”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology
York University-Toronto

Hannah Rosen

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (History)
University of Michigan
“Interracial Rape and the Politics of Reconstruction”
Current Affiliation:r
Department of American Culture
University of Michigan

 

1992–1993

Mary Johnson Osirim

Post-Doctoral Fellow (Sociology)
Harvard University
“Women and African Entrepreneurship”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Sociology
Bryn Mawr College

Jeanne Whayne

Post-Doctoral (History)
“Reshaping the Rural South: Land, Labor, and Federal Policy in Poinsett County, Arkansas”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Arkansas

 

1991–1993

Michael Bennett

Pre-Doctoral (English)
University of Virginia
“Democratic Discourse: A comparative Study of Mid-Nineteenth Century African American and European America Culture”
Current Affiliation:
Department of English
Long Island University-Brooklyn

Cynthia Hoehler-Fatton

Pre-Doctoral Fellow (Religious Studies)
University of Virginia
“Female Leadership in Roho Religion”
Current Affiliation:
Department of Religious Studies
University of Virginia

Doris Smith Witt

Pre-Doctoral (English)
“A Cookbook for Cultural Shelving”
Current Affiliation:
Department of English
University of Iowa

 

1991–1992

Carol George

Post-Doctoral (History)
“The Ideology of Non-Violence: The Civil Rights Movement”

Gerald Horne

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
Columbia
“Fire this time: Uprising and the Meaning of the 1960s”
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Bruce Nelson

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
“Class and Race in the United States: Industrial Workders, Organized Labor, and the Struggles for Black Equality Since World War II”
Current Affiliation
Department of History
Dartmouth College

 

1991

Adell Patton

Post-Doctoral (History)
"African Physicians and Diaspora: Imperial Power and the Struggle for Professionalism, ca. 1800-1975"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Missouri-St. Louis

Marshall Stevenson

Post-doctoral (History)
"Friends and Enemies: The Ebb and Flow of Black-Jewish Relations in Detroit"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Dillard University

Linda Reed

Post-Doctoral (History )
University of Houston
“Simple Decency and Common Sense: The Southern Conference Movement, 1938-1963”
Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer
Current Affiliation
Department of History
University of Houston

Daryl Scott

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"In the Gaze of Experts: The African-American in Social Science Imagery, 1890-Present"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Howard University

 

1990

Constance Curry

Post-doctoral (History)
"Silver Rights: A Story of School Desegregation in Mississippi"
Current Affiliation:
Author

Mary Ellen Curtin

Pre-Doctoral (History)
Duke University
"Enclosed in a Shell of Self-Importance: Black Prisoners and their Struggles to Survive in Alabama Prisons, 1870-1900"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Essex

Adam Fairclough

Post-Doctoral (History)
University of Keele
"A History of the Civil Rights Movement in Louisiana, 1940-1970"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Leiden University

Penny Russell

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"Bound by Ties of Race and Sex: Mary Church Terrell, the First Fifty-Seven Years (1836-1920)"
Columbus, Ohio

Zoe S. Strother

Pre-Doctoral (Art History)
"Demystifying the Fetish: The Art of the Pende People of Zaire in Context"
Current Affiliation:
Art History & Archaeology
Columbia University

 

1989

Charles Dew

Post-Doctoral (History)
"The Lives of the Slaves: The Ironworkers of Buffalo Forge"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History.
Williams College

Raymond Gavins

Post-Doctoral (History)
"Black Carolina: A Profile History of the Negro in North Carolina"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Duke University

Janette Greenwood

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"New-South Middle Class: Race and Class in Charlotte, North Carolina, 1865-1900"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Clark University

Eric Lott

Pre-Doctoral (English)
"Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy, Cultural Production and the American 1848"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Virginia

Mieko Nishida

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"Gender, Ethnicity and Kinship in Urban Slavery, Bahia, Brazil, 1808-1888"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Hartwick College

Kay Mills

Post-Doctoral Fellow (History)
“Biography of Fannie Lou Hamer”
Current Affiliation:
Author

Tejumola Olaniyan

Pre-Doctoral (English)
"Cross Currents: Contemporary Black Drama and the Poetics of Cultural Identity"
Current Affiliation:
Department of English
university of Wisconsin

Parker Shipton

Post-Doctoral (Anthropology)
"Private Property and the Limits of Individualism in Africa"
Current Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology
Boston University

 

1988

John Dittmer

Post-Doctoral (History)
"In the Name of Freedom: The Civil Rights Movement in Mississippi"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
DePauw University

Terrence Epperson

Pre-Doctoral (Anthropology)
"Thus in the Beginning All the World was America: Class Formation and the Social Construction of Race in the Chesapeake 1675-1740"
Current Affiliation:
School of Culture and Society
The College of New Jersey

Mariane Ferme

Pre-Doctoral (Anthropology)
"Making People and Transmitting Knowledge: The Construction of Gender Among the Mende of Sierra Leone"
Current Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology
Univ. of California, Berkeley

Julia McDonough

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"Clearinghouse for Change: The Southern Regional Council, 1944-65"
 

David Throup

Post-doctoral
"The Social, Economic and Political History of the Kikuyu People of Kenya, 1860-1990"
Current Affiliation
Center for Strategic and International Studies

Michelle Wagner

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"Community and Collective Representation: A Social History of Buragane, Burundi, c. 1850-1955"
Current Affiliation
Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies
University of Minnesota

 

1987

Dennis Dickerson

Post-Doctoral (History)
"The Man in Between: Whitney Young, 1921-1971"
Current Affiliation:
Department of Religion
Vanderbilt University

Michael W. Fitzgerald

Post-Doctoral (History)
"The Union League and Agricultural Labor in the Deep South"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
St. Olaf College
 

Tera W. Hunter

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"Afro-American Female Household Workers in the Urban South from 1865-1920"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Princeton University

Saba Jallow

Pre-Doctoral (Political Science)
"The Impact of Food Aid on Food Production in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Pooled Cross-Sectional Time Series"
Current Affiliation:
Department of Political Science
Georgia Southern University

Deborah Kaspin

Pre-Doctoral (Anthropology)
"History and Structural Transformations of Rural Malawi"
Current Affiliation:
Departmet of Anthropology
Yale University

Jean B. Lee

Post-Doctoral (History)
"Black Life and Labor at Mt. Vernon Plantation"
Current Affiliation:
History Department
Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison

Veronique McNelly

Pre-Doctoral (French)
"Senghor’s African Aesthetics and its Implications"
Current Affiliation
Department of Romance Languages
Wake Forest University

J. Mills Thornton, III

Post-Doctoral (History)
"The Montgomery Boycott of 1955-1956"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Michigan

 

1986

Trevor Hall

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"Reconstructing the Web of Activities Between Europeans of the Cape Verde Archipelago and Africans of the Guine of Cape Verde 1460-1600"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Bethune-Cookman College

Jack Johnson-Hill

Pre-Doctoral (Religious Ethics)
"Elements of an Afro-Caribbean Social Ethic: A Disclosure of the World of the Rastafari as Liminal Social Process"
Current Affiliation:

Timothy Luke

Post-Doctoral (Political Science)
"States and Social Revolutions in Modern Africa"
Current Affiliation:
Department of Political Science
Virginia Tech

Stephanie Shaw

Post-Doctoral (History)
"Black Women in White Collars: A Social History of Lower Level Professional Black Women Workers, 1870-1955"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Ohio State University

Christopher Taylor

Pre-Doctoral (Anthropology)
"Social Innovation and Therapy in Rwandan Popular Medicine"
Current Affiliation:
Department of Anthropology
Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham

 

1985

Yahya Affinnih

Pre-Doctoral (Sociology)
"Occupational Commitment and the Myth of Self-Employment Among Lagos Port and Dock Workers"
Current Affiliation:
Department of African-American Studies
CUNY – John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Frances Ash

Pre-Doctoral (French)
"Caribbean Discourse on History: Nationalism vs Exile"

Melvin Ely

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"Amos ‘n’ Andy: Their Lineage, Life and Legacy, 1890-1966"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
College of William & Mary

Janet Ewald

Post-Doctoral (History)
"Soldiers, Traders and Slaves: The Origins and Growth of a Greater Nile Valley System, 1780-1884"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Duke University

Gertrude Fraser

Pre-Doctoral (Anthropology)
"Medical Belief Systems in Rural Afro-American Communities"
Current Affiliation:
Office of Vice Provost for Faculty Advancement
University of Virginia

Gordon Thompson

Pre-Doctoral (English)
Symbols of Escape in the Works of Melvin B. Tolson, Charles W. Chesnutt, and James Baldwin
Current Affiliation:
Department of English
City College of New York

 

1984

Marcellus Blount

Pre-Doctoral (English)
"A Singer of Tales: The Afro-American Poet as Storyteller"
Current Affiliation:
Depart of English & Comparative Lit
Columbia University

Lynda Morgan

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"The Transition from Slavery to Freedom in Piedmont, Virginia, 1850-1880"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Mt. Holyoke College

Charles Rowell

Post-Doctoral (English)
"That Southern Thing: Black Fiction of the Civil Rights Era and After"
Current Affiliation:
Department of English
Texas A&M

Julius Scott, III

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"A Breathing of the Common Wind: The Sea, Politics, and Communication in the Era of the Haitian Revolution"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Michigan

Patricia Sullivan

Post-Doctoral (History)
"New Deal Politics and Civil Rights Reform in the South, 193-1948"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of South Carolina

John Thornton

Post-Doctoral (History)
"The History of the South Atlantic: The African Perspective, 1450-1650"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Boston University

 

1983

Yvonne Jones

Pre-Doctoral (Political Science)
"Technological Intervention or Community Development: The Formation of Rural Development Policy in Senegal, 1960-1978"
Current Affiliation:
World Bank

Linda Reed

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"The Southern Conference Educational Fund, 1938-1963"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Houston

J. Scott Strickland

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"African-American Culture and Social Change in South Carolina, 1680-1880"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Syracuse University

Diana Wylie

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"The Center Cannot Hold: The Decline of the Bamangwato Chieftainship, 1925-1950"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
Boston University

 

1982

Thadious Davis

Post-Doctoral (English)
"Race and Reputation in the Fiction of William Faulkner and Richard Wright"
Current Affiliation:
Department of English
University of Pennsylvania

Kathleen Fatton Balutansky

Pre-Doctoral (English)
"Aesthetics and Politics in the Novels of Alex La Guma"
Current Affiliation:
St. Michael's College
 

Alexis Gardella

Pre-Doctoral (Anthropology)
"The Process of Social Formation on the Island of Rodrigues"
Current Affiliation:
Indian Ocean Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture, Haiti

Mary Rayner

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"Slaves, Slave Owners and the British Cape Colony, 1806-1834"
Current Affiliation:
Amnesty International

Julie Saville

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"The Reorganization of Agricultural Labor in South Carolina after the Abolition of Slavery, 1860-1900"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Chicago

H. Leroy Vail

Post-Doctoral (History)
"The Art of Being Ruled: Poetry and Power in South Central Africa, circa 1800-1980"
Current Affiliation:
History Department
Harvard University
(Deceased -3/27/99)

 

1981

Leslie Rowland

Pre-Doctoral (History)
"Self-Emancipation: The Destruction of Slavery in Kentucky, 1861-1866"
Current Affiliation:
Department of History
University of Maryland

Richard Ralston

Post-Doctoral (AAS)
"The Life and Times of Dr. A.B. Xuma: Meditation on Twentieth Century South African Intellectual Social and Political History"
Current Affiliation:
African-American Studies
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Catherine Macklin

Pre-Doctoral (Anthropology)
"Garifuna Identity in Belize"
Current Affiliation:
Anthropology
Univ. of California, Berkeley

Ira Lowenthal

Pre-Doctoral (Anthropology)
"Culture, Economics and the Family: Domestic Organization in Rural Haiti"
Current Affiliation:
Haiti Democracy Project

Woodson Fellowship Pipeline Produces Strong Additions to UVA Faculty

One is an award-winning historian who researches the labor and medical treatment of black prisoners in the post-Civil War South. The other is an anthropologist who has written – and starred in – a documentary. New additions to the University of Virginia faculty, Talitha LeFlouria and Edwin Kwame Otu are bolstering the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.

Woodson Fellowships Making Widespread Impact on the Academy

December 7, 2011 — The University of California, Berkeley; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the University of Michigan; Princeton University – these are just a few of the schools where former fellows from the University of Virginia's Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies have secured academic positions. 

Woodson Institute leaders emphasize importance of celebrating Black history beyond February

Black History Month, a time of pride, celebration and remembrance during the month of February, was first recognized in the U.S. in 1976 under former president Gerald R. Ford. It began as a way to commemorate efforts of the African diaspora, and was developed from the efforts of Carter G. Woodson — a Virginian scholar who sought to dedicate a week in February to the coordinated teaching of Black history in public schools. 

Woodson Institute marks 75 years of "Their Eyes were Watching God"

University of Virginia English professor Deborah McDowell was in graduate school when she first read Zora Neale Hurston. Women on college campuses and in living rooms in the mid-1970s were passing around out-of-print, dog-eared copies of her books, especially “Their Eyes Were Watching God.”  

Woodson Institute Series Fulfills Students' 'Thirst' for Civil Rights History

In “1964,” a seminar offered this spring, University of Virginia students examined the papers of civil rights activist Julian Bond, a U.Va. history professor emeritus. In a companion course, “1963,” offered last fall, they spoke with U.S. Rep. John Lewis via Skype about his experiences working with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This summer, students will study aspects of the curriculum taught in the “Freedom Schools” of July 1964 and recreate a slice of that summer’s campaign to register voters and teach literacy.

Woodson Institute welcomes seven new residential fellows into class of 2024 cohort

Each year since 1981, the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies has welcomed a collection of pre-doctoral and postdoctoral fellows into the institute’s Residential Fellows program. This fall, seven scholars will set roots in Charlottesville to begin the two-year program.

Woodson Institute's 'August in Perspective: Creative Responses' Calls to Body and Soul

Writing and performing original plays and hip-hop. Learning African dances that enslaved people brought with them from regions of Africa to the American South. Making collages with “found” poetry. Putting broken pottery back together – showing the cracks – using the Japanese kintsugi repair method.

The University of Virginia and local community have reacted in various ways to the white supremacists’ Aug. 11 and 12 marches on UVA’s Lawn and downtown Charlottesville. This month, which also coincides with Black History Month, UVA’s Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies takes an approach focused on the arts, offering “August in Perspective: Creative Responses” a series culminating March 2.

Woodson Institute's Influence Transcends UVA

October 10, 2008 — The lobby of Minor Hall at the University of Virginia is adorned with poster-sized covers of books written by previous fellows at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies.

Lisa Woolfork

Lisa Woolfork

Associate Professor

106 Bryan Hall

Word. Sound. Power. A listening session in honor of Lee "Scratch" Perry

Following the death of the pioneering dub musician, Lee "Scratch" Perry, this panel brings together scholars and musicians who have worked with him and whose work is inspired by him.

 

together leading Jamaican and international dub/’Scratch’ Perry scholars, producers and musicians who have worked with him and whose work is inspired by him. In the lead up to the event, be sure to check out the Spotify playlist curated by the panelists: spoti.fi/3FIEbhm.

Njelle Hamilton (moderator) Associate Professor of African American and African Studies and English at the University of Virginia Dr. Njelle W Hamilton is a Jamaican singer, songwriter, storyteller and scholar. As a literary scholar and associate professor at the University of Virginia, she specializes in narrative innovations in the contemporary Caribbean novel. The author of Phonographic Memories: Popular Music and the Contemporary Caribbean Novel, her essays on contemporary Caribbean literary and cultural studies have appeared in Anthurium, Journal of West Indian Literature, and sx salon, and her short fiction has appeared in Pree: Caribbean Writing. She is currently working on a book about Caribbean time travel narratives, as well as a novel, Everything Irie.

Isis Semaj-Hall, Lecturer at Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona Campus Dr. Isis Semaj-Hall is the Riddim Writer, a disruptive dub doctor with a creative practice that is grounded by sound and nurtured by word power. She is the Caribbean literature and pop culture specialist for the Department of Literatures in English at the University of the West Indies, Mona. She is a co-founder and editor of PREE: Caribbean Writing and has works published in print and to the cloud via Public Books, Caribbean Quarterly, Cultural Dynamics, sx salon, and elsewhere.

 

Emch, Subatomic Sound System NYC’s Subatomic Sound System has been on a 2 decade mission forging a future foundation style built on the bass heavy, spacious soundscapes, and live improvisational remixing of classic 1970s Jamaican dub and conscious reggae music in the context of electronic music. Using the latest technology, they pioneered a unique performance style that blurs the lines between DJing and a live band. These efforts gained the attention of dub and reggae pioneer Lee "Scratch" Perry, the genius producer and song writer behind Bob Marley, who for a decade has employed Subatomic Sound as his go to band for re-inventing his Black Ark Studio sound live on stage. Subatomic is spearheaded by producer, DJ, and multi-instrumentalist Emch, who arranges and manipulates both prerecorded music instruments and effects with the live musicians to create a real time musical dialogue. The core live musicians include percussion legend and Black Ark veteran Larry McDonald and Troy Shaka Simms on sax.

 

David Katz, Author, documentary producer, DJ Born in San Francisco and long resident in London, David Katz is the author of People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee 'Scratch' Perry and Solid Foundation : An Oral History of Reggae and a contributor to The Rough Guide to Reggae, A Tapestry of Jamaica, Keep On Running : The Story of Island Records and Mashup : The Birth Of Modern Culture, among other books. His writing and photographs have appeared in many international periodicals, including the Guardian, Newsweek, Mojo, Wax Poetics, Caribbean Beat and Riddim and he has compiled and annotated over 100 retrospective collections of Jamaican music. Katz has produced documentaries on the music and culture of Jamaica and Brazil for PRX and contributed to documentaries and feature films for the BBC, Channel 4, Arte and other entities, and released original records. He has chaired panel discussions with performers and practitioners in diverse settings, performed as a deejay on four continents, and has become a fixture in the London music scene Gavin Blair, Gavsborg, Founder of Equiknoxx/Equiknoxx Music Hailing from East Kingston, Jamaica, Gavsborg is the founder of Equiknoxx/Equiknoxx Music.

 

Gavsborg has been producing under the Equiknoxx Music imprint for over ten years, with his first success being the Billboard charting single, “Step Out” by Busy Signal. Gavsborg’s left-field approach to production has afforded him the opportunity to work with a wide variety of artists and labels from different corners of music such as: Mavado, Aidonia, Dirty Projectors, Palmistry, Addis Pablo, De La Ghetto, Busy Signal, Spice, Missy Elliott DDS, Swing Ting, Domino Records and more. Outside music production duties, Gavsborg has toured extensively with the Equiknoxx Collective as a DJ & live music performer making stops all over Europe, the Americas, the United Kingdom & Asia

Words, Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans

Religious Studies

Working the Diaspora

History

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, 2014 fellowship cohort, published the award-winning book Becoming Human

The book has won: the Harry Levin First Book Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association, the Gloria Anzaldúa Book Award from the National Women’s Studies Association, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Studies and featured in Art Forum magazine's “Best of 2021” issue.

‘Beacon of Hope, Blueprint for Activism’: Sample Julian Bond’s Speeches Online

Deborah E. McDowell quoted in article about the Julian Bond Papers Project launch event

‘Thanks for visiting Florida’: one Black family’s road trip to a ‘hostile’ tourist trap

Andrew Kahrl quoted in article about tourism in Florida

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“Fragile Universals: The Making of Racial Hierarchy in the League of Nations”

Adom Getachew (University of Chicago Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College) will be speaking on

“Fragile Universals: The Making of Racial Hierarchy in the League of Nations.”

In both historiography and popular imagination, Woodrow Wilson and his brand of liberal internationalism remain deeply associated with the rise of self-determination in the twentieth century. Tracing Wilson’s domestic and international reflections on race and self-government alongside those of Jan Smuts, the South African statesman and fellow founder of the League, this talk illustrates how the universal principles of the League of Nations were shot through with commitments to racial hierarchy. It traces the implications of fragile universals through an examination of Liberia and Ethiopia’s racialized and burdened membership in the League.

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“Returning to the Slave’s Song”

Lecture by Chris Freeburg, Conrad Humanities Scholar and Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Tuesday, September 26th, 4:30 pm
110 Minor Hall