Undergraduate Courses

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prof. Aniko Bodroghkozy. Mon 5:00pm - 7:30pm, Nau 142

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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