Spring 2020 Undergraduate Courses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Professor Claire Payton

Th 3:30 - 6:00PM

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

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.

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   

Professor Njelle Hamilton

MoWe 3:30 - 4:45PM

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

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

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

Professor Anne Rotich

(12743) MoWeFr 10 - 10:50AM

(12129) MoWeFr 11 - 11:50AM

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.

Professor Kirt von Daacke

Fulfills: Social Science or History

Professor Lawrie Balfour

New Course in the subject of American Studies.

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

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

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

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

Professor Theresa Davis

TBA

A directed project-based study offered to upper-level students. Prerequisite: Instructor permission.

Fulfills: Humanities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Professor Penny Von Eschen

MoWe 2:00pm - 3:15pm

Fulfills: Social Science or History; Race and Politics in the US

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Professor Larycia Hawkins

MoWe 11:00am-11:50am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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