2020-2021

WRTNG-UG 1295 Creative Nonfiction: From Idea to Essay

09/02/2020 - 12/13/2020 Mon 6.20 PM - 9.00 PM at ONLI with Bolick, Kathleen

Some of the strongest nonfiction writing out there—whether cultural criticism, the reported personal essay, or an historical nonfiction narrative—grew from the flimsiest of tendrils: a hunch, a spark, an enthusiasm. In this advanced creative nonfiction writing course, you’ll learn how to harness these responses to the world around you, and use them to turn your personal passions and interests into compelling prose.Course readings will include essays by great practitioners past and present, among them Hilton Als, James Baldwin, Eula Biss, Annie Dillard, Barbara Ehrenreich, Richard Rodriguez, Rebecca Solnit, Alice Walker, Ellen Willis, and Virginia Woolf. We will analyze these works to figure out how each idea was brought to fruition, and learn tricks of the trade that will in turn fuel your idea-generator. The class will be a combination of class discussions, lectures, and workshops.

SCA-UA 306/ENGL-UA 716 Asian American Literature

09/02/2020 - 12/13/2020 Tue, Thu 2.00 PM - 3.15 PM at ONLI with Parikh, Crystal

This overview begins with the recovery of early writings during the 1960s-1970s and proceeds to the subsequent production of Asian American writing and literary/cultural criticism up to the present. The course focuses on significant factors affecting the formation of Asian American literature and criticism, such as changing demographics of Asian American communities and the influence of ethnic, women?s, and gay/lesbian/bisexual studies. Included in the course is a variety of genres (poetry, plays, fiction and nonfiction, literary/cultural criticism) by writers from diverse ethnic backgrounds. The course explores the ways in which the writers treat issues such as racial/ethnic identity; immigration and assimilation; gender; class; sexuality; nationalism; culture and community; history and memory; and art and political engagement.

SCA-UA 230 Intersect: Race, Gender, & Sexuality in U.S. Hist

09/02/2020 - 12/13/2020 Mon, Wed 12.30 PM - 1.45 PM at ONLI with Gopinath, Gayatri; Duggan Lisa

Drawing on the histories of African, Asian, Latino, European, and Native Americans of both genders and many sexualities, explores the complex and important intersection of gender, race, and sexuality in the United States from the 17th century through the 20th, in historically related case studies. Starting in the period of European imperialism in the Americas, it examines the ways that gender, race, and sexuality shaped cultural and political policies and debates surrounding the Salem witch trials; slavery, abolition, and lynching; U.S. imperialism in Puerto Rico and Hawaii; the politics of welfare and reproduction; cultural constructions of manliness, masculinity, and citizenship; and responses to the AIDS pandemic in a global context.

IDSEM-UG 1674 Politics of Food

01/31/2020 - 05/10/2020 Thu 3.30 PM - 6.10 PM at 1 Washington Pl with Priest, Myisha

Food is political. What we eat and the ways that we imagine and narrate the acts of feeding and eating, reflect historical and contemporary mechanisms of power. This seminar will examine representations of food as a central, overlooked, and deeply contested terrain of raced and gendered power. Second only to escape, the enslaved wrote and spoke about food as a central experience of domination. The absence of food, its uses as an instrument of punishment, the transformation of Black life into edible bodies, and food’s utility as an expression of resistance, escape, and dreaming otherwise, have been central features of the stories told by those working in a variety of forms to express and to contest power. Alternatively, edible Black bodies, in the forms of the butler, the mammy, and the maid, have remained a crucial trope through which American cultural production reifies meanings of race and gender, remaking foundational forms of power and at the same time imagining change and reconciliation. In this seminar we explore the workings of power through food, using its seemingly benign and private face to alter our understanding of where violence and domination reside and how they operate. We will engage these core concerns through a variety of forms. Some of the genres we may consider are the novel, the critical essay, the autobiography, the cookbook, and more. Our texts will include not only familiar forms but also the neighborhoods of NYC and of course, food itself. By considering questions embedded within these texts-- how do representations of food reify or breach the boundaries of race and gender? How do these hidden ways of shaping power affect the way we understand and represent food justice, one of the central struggles of our time? And finally, who is food for? We will stay close to our broader concerns with how cultural work, in this case the representation of food, functions as a domain of the political, and how it simultaneously enables and forecloses the work of reimagining political community.

IDSEM-UG 1641 Health and Human Rights in The World Community

01/28/2021 - 05/10/2021 Tue 6.20 PM - 9.00 PM at ONLI with Keller, Allen

This course focuses on the relationship between health and human rights. First, it provides an overview of human rights violations in the world and it offers an analysis of the health consequences of human rights abuses. Second, it explores how individual and community health can be improved by protecting and promoting human rights. Third, it evaluates the ethical obligations of health professionals in the face of human rights violations, and it explores their role in caring for the victims. Intended for non-science as well as science majors, we use presentations and discussion to explore the link between health and human rights. Readings include Claude and Weston, Human Rights in the World Community: Issues and Actions, and Martin and Rangaswamy, eds., Twenty Five Human Rights Documents.

IDSEM-UG 1535 Narrating Memory, History and Place

01/28/2021 - 05/10/2021 Tue,Thu 9.30 AM - 10.45 AM at ONLI with Cruz Soto, Marie

This course examines how people imagine places through narrations of the past. It takes as central premises that the past is a contested terrain open to divergent interpretations and that interpretations of the past shape common understandings of places. The meanings bestowed on places dictate who can use them and how. Thus, how people narrate the past matters. It impacts places and thereby the ability of humans to survive and thrive. While this course explores the broad interplay between narrations of memory, history and place, it focuses on the struggles of disempowered communities to narrate history and claim a place of their own. Course readings include literary and other scholarly texts like Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place, Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past and Michel De Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life as well as writings by Edward Said, William Cronon, Diana Taylor, Steven Hoelscher and Doreen Massey.

IDSEM-UG 1735 American Narratives II

09/02/2020 - 12/13/2020 Tue 6.20 PM - 9.00 PM at ONLI with Shulman, George

The goal of this course is to create a conversation between post world war two American literature and political thought. We focus especially on the relationship between theorists making arguments using the genre of the treatise or monograph, and literary artists dramatizing protagonists acting in fictional worlds. What theoretical and political difference do differences of genre make in how readers (and citizens) apprehend and act in the world? But we also pursue more substantive questions. First, how is politics (and the meaning of democracy) represented in both theory and fiction? Second, how do literary artists represent and rework the dominant idioms and tropes of American politics - especially ideas of the frontier, self-making, freedom, and related claims to American exceptionalism? Third, how are the politics of race and gender addressed in and by literary art in comparison to works of theory? Lastly, do critics and writers repeat the pervasive and unquestioned attachment to the idea of "America," or do they trouble it by offering anti-national or diasporic identifications? Our theorists include C. Wright Mills, Norman O. Brown, Sheldon Wolin, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, Kimberlee Crenshaw, Gloria Anzaldua, and Eve Sedgwick; our literary artists may include Thomas Pynchon, Norman Mailer, Allan Ginsberg, Phillip Roth, James Baldwin, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison.

IDSEM-UG 1827 Justice, Tragedy, and Philosophy: Politics in Ancient Greece

05/27/2020 - 07/01/2020 Mon, Wed 5.30 PM - 9.00 PM at ONLI with Han, Irene

This course is an introduction to the tragedy and philosophy of ancient Athens. We are especially interested in exploring concepts of guilt, justice, and the good, as these are developed in diverging ways by tragedians and philosophers. What role does free will play in politics? What does the invention of philosophy tell us about changing attitudes toward politics? Can justice be decided by a political body or must humans conform to an eternal standard? What is the correct way to educate the young? Is the good attainable and what is its relationship to happiness and pleasure? Is democracy possible or must we be ruled by the virtuous and the wise? What place does divinity and revelation have in politics? Does philosophy have a unique vantage point to discuss political questions? Is the emphasis in tragedy on imperfect knowledge a legitimate political concern? These issues will be considered by reading the following works: Aeschylus’ Oresteia, Sophocles’ Three Theban Plays, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and Plato’s Republic.

UPADM-GP 101 The Politics of Public Policy

09/02/2020 - 12/13/2020 Tue 4.55 PM - 7.25 PM at ONLI with Brayton, Jenna

This course provides an introduction to the political institutions and processes through which public policy is made and implemented in the United States (although the key concepts are applicable to other political systems as well). The course also introduces students to the tools of policy analysis. The first half of the course presents the major models of policymaking and policy analysis. The second half of the course applies these concepts to specific policy areas such as health, education, and environment, as illustrated by real-world case studies. The course emphasizes written and oral communication through the development of professional memo-writing and presentation skills.

IDSEM-UG 1726 The Novel and Society: Victorian Secrets

01/28/2021 - 05/10/2021 Wed 3.30 PM - 6.10 PM at ONLI with Foley, June

In the twenty-first century, the Internet arguably makes secrecy impossible, but the exposure of secrets is already an important theme in many 19th-century British novels. In part, this reflects a society in which identity seems increasingly malleable through greater social class mobility, the questioning of traditional gender roles, and imperialist opportunities. In these novels, fake identities conceal a murderer and a madwoman, among others. And the societal constraints inspiring the fictional secrets also led the authors to keep secrets of their own. Beloved author Charles Dickens, the father of 10, had a 13-year love affair with a woman who was 18 when they met. But does the novel genre, particularly the "realist" Victorian novel, with its emphasis on an omniscient narrator and intersecting plots, have a special relationship to secrets? We attempt to uncover the answer by studying Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte (1847), Great Expectations (1861), by Charles Dickens, George Eliot's Middlemarch (1871-2), and Arthur Conan Doyle's first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet (1887). Theory and criticism include selections from Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Freud's "The Uncanny," Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism, and Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic.

POL-UA 336 Gender in Law

09/03/2019 - 12/13/2019 Mon, Wed 3.30 PM - 4.45 PM at SILV 414 with Harrington, Christine; Easterling, Zachary

Examines the relationship between gender politics, legal theory, and social policy. Studies the role that the legal arena and certain historical conditions have played in creating, revising, and protecting particular gender identities and not others and examines the political effects of those legal constructions. Analyzes the major debates in feminist legal theory, including theories of equality, the problem of essentialism, and the relevance of standpoint epistemology. In addition to examining how the law understands sex discrimination in the workplace and the feminization of the legal profession, also addresses to what extent understandings of the gender affect how law regulates the physical body by looking at the regulation of reproduction and of consensual sexual activity. In light of all of the above, considers to what extent law is or is not an effective political resource in reforming notions of gender in law and society.

SCA-UA 366 Constitution and People of Color

09/03/2019 - 12/13/2019 Tue,Thu 4.55 PM - 6.10 PM at 20CS 4CONF with Ouyang, Elizabeth

Notes: SAME AS LWSOC-UA 327. Counts as SCA faculty elective for these majors/minors: AFRI, AMST, APA, LAT, SCA. Spaces reserved for majors/minors in the 7 SCA programs the first week of registration. If spaces are open, others will be enrolled via the wait-list week two.

Examines how the American legal system decided constitutional challenges affecting the empowerment of African, Latino, and Asian American communities from the 19th century to the present. Topics include the denial of citizenship and naturalization to slaves and immigrants, government-sanctioned segregation, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the prison industry, police brutality, post-9/11 detention issues, and voting rights. Course requirements include attendance at a community function involving constitutional issues, a midterm, and an interactive oral and written final.

POL-UA 330 American Constitution

09/03/2019 - 12/13/2019 Mon 5.00 PM - 7.30 PM at MEYR 121 with Rajsingh, Peter; Pankow, Jacob

Offered every semester. 4 points. Interpretation of the U.S. Constitution through the reading of Supreme Court opinions. Distribution of constitutional power among Congress, the president, and the federal courts; between the national government and the states; and among the states. Constitutional law and American political and economic development. Cases are read and discussed closely for their legal and philosophical content.

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