This seminar will explore writing in both the academic and public domains. How do we write about the subjects we study and love, and engage a larger audience? We will read and critique a number of genres including academic analyses (in the natural and social sciences, as well as cultural studies), travel accounts, memoir, creative non-fiction, and fiction. We will pay attention to narrative choices, as well as the social and cultural dimensions of the writing. These readings will also help develop some criteria for peer review of written work.

Each culture defines childhood according to their own values and beliefs. These definitions of childhood change over time. Since the nineteenth century, racial ideologies have shaped dominant conceptualizations of childhood in the U.S. In this course, students will examine the history of race and childhood. The guiding questions of the course include: How do racial ideologies effect the concepts of childhood, dependency, and age? How have defining historical moments in race relations such as U.S. slavery, the Brown vs.

This course is a critical introduction to international development history and theory, through the lens of population, or "overpopulation." "Overpopulation" has been seen as a fundamental impediment to nations' economic and social development and a global environmental and security crisis requiring an emergency response on an international scale. We will upend this account of population drawing from feminist and critical race theorists, as well as global South perspectives on development.

Rivers are sites of contention surrounding how they can best serve the people living along them and the nations through which they flow. For some, they provide cultural meanings and livelihoods; for others, they represent progress in how they are developed and used. We will critically examine several case studies to unpack the cultural, environmental, economic, and identity conflicts that arise worldwide as people's concepts of rivers collide.

This course explores narratives of black girlhood from the nineteenth century to our contemporary moment. Students will analyze black girlhood through a diverse collection of sources including young adult literature, street lit, personal narratives, and recent scholarship in Black Girlhood Studies. We will consider the following questions: How do the intersections of race, class, gender, and geography impact the ways we understand girlhood? How have black girls defined girlhood and the transition from black girl to black woman?

This course explores past and current debates over the role of religion and science in public policy in the areas of reproductive rights, health and justice. We will explore the broader societal debates over the teaching of creationism and intelligent design in public schools and ongoing challenges to claims about the objectivity of science. We will consider arguments that science and religion are inevitably in conflict, as well as arguments for their compatibility.

Too often 'Western' historical narratives consider Africans and African Diasporans as 'People Without History'. Such a notion also refers to people who possess few or no formally written histories. Employing historical archaeology, this class examines the material traces individuals and communities in the past left behind as important, alternative historical resources for interrogating the European colonial library, and re-writing the histories of slavery and the slave trade.

Who decides which places are important for us to remember? How do we go about remembering them? And how do other places or other stories get pushed aside or silenced in the process? In this course we will explore how certain places and histories come to be important to us and our sense of local and national belonging. We will critically examine specific sites of national and local memory such as Plymouth Rock, Mt. Rushmore, and Historic Deerfield. We will examine the processes through which narratives of nationalism are created and distributed from contested histories and places.

Africa is known as the continent of orality. Notions of African antiquity as quintessentially pre-literate, non-literate or illiterate remain decidedly intact in the Western imaginary. What is more, the widely held perception Africa's lack of written traditions as known in other societies is seen as evidence of Africa's lack of history, and in turn civilization.

Many people have learned and are accustomed to thinking of history as an authoritative account of the past, based on indisputable facts. Scholars of history, by contrast, understand history as a matter of contested and evolving interpretation: debate. And they argue not just over the interpretation of facts, but even over what constitutes a relevant fact. This course will use some representative debates to show how dynamic the historical field is. Topics may include: Did women have a Renaissance? How did people in early modern France understand identity?