This course invites students to explore how sexuality has been central to power and resistance in the Middle East. When and how have empires, colonial powers, and nation states tried to regulate intimacy, sex, love, and reproduction? How have sexual practices shaped social life, and how have perceptions of these practices changed over time? The course introduces theoretical tools for the history of sexuality and explores how contests over sexuality, reproduction, and the body shaped empires, colonial states, and nationalist projects.

Same as MES 208. This course examines the history of the modern Middle East from a global perspective. How have gender, economy, ecology, and religion shaped Middle Eastern empires and nation-states within a broader world? The course begins with transformations in Egypt, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire between 1800 and World War I. Next, it turns to experiences of colonialism, the rise of independent nation-states, and the birth of new political movements.

Same as MES 208. This course examines the history of the modern Middle East from a global perspective. How have gender, economy, ecology, and religion shaped Middle Eastern empires and nation-states within a broader world? The course begins with transformations in Egypt, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire between 1800 and World War I. Next, it turns to experiences of colonialism, the rise of independent nation-states, and the birth of new political movements.

Advanced seminar on research design. Students refine their research methodologies and develop an academic and co-curricular plan with the goal of securing placement in a graduate program. Emphasis on the development of public speaking skills, peer-to-peer pedagogies across disciplines, peer mentoring. Limited to recipients of Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowships in their senior year. Normally, students enroll concurrently in a special studies course (minimum 4 credits) or departmental honors thesis on their research topic. S/U only. Instructor permission required.

Seminar on research design and conduct. The development of research projects including question definition, choice of methodology, selection of sources and evidence evaluation. Participants present their research design and preliminary findings, study pedagogy and research methodologies across disciplines, develop professional skills to prepare for graduate study, and participate in weekly peer progress reports. Limited to recipients of Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowships in their junior year. Course cannot be repeated for credit. S/U only. Instructor permission only.

Offered as SWG 245 and CCX 245. This course is designed to introduce students to key concepts, debates and provocations that animate the world of community, labor, and electoral organizing for social change. To better understand these movements’ visions, we will develop an analysis of global and national inequalities, exploitation and oppression. The course explores a range of organizing skills to build an awareness of power dynamics and learn activists’ tools to bring people together towards common goals.

Conservation biology combines ecological and evolutionary principles with resource management, the social sciences, and ethics to understand, manage and maintain biodiversity. This seminar is designed to familiarize students with the questions conservation biologists ask and the methods they use to conserve life on Earth. Students engage in problem-solving exercises that examine conservation-related questions at the genetic, population, community, landscape or ecosystem levels and employ suitable analytical techniques or strategies to address the questions.

This course focuses on American southern old-time string band music, bluegrass, and early country song. We draw on cultural theory to explore the development of these musics throughout the 20th/21st centuries as well as the influences of African-American musical expression, class, gender, and music revivalism. We will consider old time and bluegrass both from a historical perspective and ethnographically as vital forms of folk expression in communities today.

Across the world, humans have viewed animals as: ancestors, teachers, friends, members of the family, meat, workers, pests, and threats. Everywhere, the 'human' is defined in relation to the 'animal.' Yet this relation is construed in diverse and contradictory ways. Ideas about what it means to 'be (an) animal' have long structured visions of belonging and otherness, as well as violence, racism, and oppression. As animals vanish or recede from human settlements, their images proliferate around us.