This course examines how France and Francophone West Africa have shaped each other throughout the past three centuries. Beginning with the French Atlantic of the eighteenth century, the course traces Franco-African encounters through informal and formal colonial rule, decolonization, and the postcolonial period. It closes by examining current controversies over race, literature and museum rights engendered by this complex history.

Over the last century, religionists have labored to discover the meaning of African dispersal beyond the continent and its accompanying spiritual lineages. What theories of encounter sufficiently adjudicate the synthetic religious cultures of African-descended persons in North America, South America, and the Caribbean? What are the cross-disciplinary methodologies that scholars utilize to understand African religious cultures in the Western hemisphere? Firstly, this course will introduce the field of Africana religious studies.

This course introduces students to the critical study of media, focusing on electronic media, digital technologies, and network cultures. We will analyze the aesthetics, politics, protocols, history, and theory of media, paying attention to the ways they create and erase borders; affect how we form and articulate identities; invade privacy while providing a platform for exploration; foster hate speech and progressive movements alike; and participate in capitalist economies and the acceleration of climate change.

This capstone course brings seniors together to think through relationships among empirical research, theory, activism, and practice in gender studies and critical social thought. Majors with diverse interests, perspectives, and expertise will have the opportunity to reflect on, and share with each other, the significance of their major education in relation to their current and past work, their capstone or senior projects, their academic studies as a whole, and their engagements outside of academia.

The course provides an historical and topical overview of Latina/o migration to the United States. We will examine the economic, political, and social antecedents to Latin American migration, and the historical impact of the migration process in the U.S. Considering migration from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, we will discuss the social construction of race, the gendered nature of migration, migrant labor struggles, Latin American-U.S. Latino relations, immigration policy, and border life and enforcement.

Housing is closely tied to quality of life and the health of neighborhoods and communities. As a main goal of the "American Dream," homeownership has important significance on an individual and societal level. For immigrants, this goal is often out of reach as a result of racism and discriminatory housing policies. This interdisciplinary seminar explores Latinas/os/x relationship to housing and homeownership by examining: 1. the history of housing policy in the United States; 2. national identity, assimilation, and housing; and 3.

Reading across a spectrum of disciplinary focuses (e.g. philosophies of aesthetics, post-structural feminisms, Black cultural studies, and queer of color critique) this course asks the question what is the nature of aesthetics when it negotiates modes of difference? This course explores the history and debates on aesthetics as it relates to race, gender, and sexuality with particular emphasis on Black diaspora theory and cultural production.

We will read a number of key feminist texts that theorize sexual difference, and challenge the oppression of women. We will then address queer theory, an offshoot and expansion of feminist theory, and study how it is both embedded in, and redefines, the feminist paradigms. This redefinition occurs roughly at the same time (1980s/90s) when race emerges as one of feminism's prominent blind spots. The postcolonial critique of feminism is a fourth vector we will examine, as well as anti-racist and postcolonial intersections with queerness.

This course will examine a range of ways in which Islam has constructed women--and women have constructed Islam. We will study concepts of gender as they are reflected in classical Islamic texts, as well as different aspects of the social, economic, political, and ritual lives of women in various Islamic societies.

This course analyzes the concepts of race and racism from an interdisciplinary perspective, with focus on Latinas/os/x in the United States. It explores the sociocultural, political, economic, and historical forces that interact with each other in the production of racial categories and racial "difference." In particular, we focus on racial ideologies, racial formation theory, and processes of racialization, as well as the relationship between race and ethnicity.