In the last decade, queer scholars have turned away from the study of identity and textuality to consider the role of affect and emotion in the production, circulation, and regulation of sexuality, race, and gender. This course examines a new body of work in queer studies, feminist studies, and sexuality studies that explores emotion and affect as central to operation of social, political, and economic power. Topics will include, mental illness, hormones, happiness, sex, trauma, labor, identity, and social movements, among others.

The last thirty years have witnessed a resurgence in political and economic cooperation among the developing nations of the South. This course examines recent changes in the international economy, with a special focus on South-South relations. Some questions we will consider are: What will be the impact of the rise of Third World Capitalism on the global economy? What will the global economy look like when we emerge from the current financial crises?

Since 1990 overdose deaths in the United States have increased five-fold, resulting in what is best described as an overdose crisis. Many of the states with the highest prescription opioid overdose deaths-and the greatest harms from crystal meth-also vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. In this course we will consider the historical contexts for the parallel rise of Trumpism and the overdose crisis.

How do we explain the long history of treating people differently based on race in a nation formally committed to equality of "all persons"? Slavery, Indian "removal", Asian exclusion, Jim Crow laws, the illegalizing of Latino/a workers and today's disproportionate police killings of people of color suggest that the American legal system has hardly been color-blind. How has the judiciary participated in racializing the nation's "non-white" populations, and what ideological and material effects have its decisions produced?

This course explores central topics in contemporary Latin American society and politics by reading recent ethnographic works. The course does a very brief historical introduction to the region and then moves on to analyze current issues by focusing on how historical landscapes of difference and inequality are challenged and reproduced. Our entry point will be the neoliberal turn, which began in the 1970s Chile and continued throughout most of Latin America in the 80s and 90s.

We will analyze early modern art in its global context and local specificities. Field trips to local private collections and college art museums as well as the Metropolitan Museum in N.Y. (and/or the MFA in Boston) will be an important component of the course. We will use textbooks, museum catalogues, and research articles to learn about and discuss connectivities, mutual influences and global exchange as well as specific indigenous and local visual traditions, media, and techniques.

How do perceptions about language affect how people create, recognize, and negotiate social difference? In other words, how are perceptions about language linked to ideas about class, race, ethnicity, and gender? In this course, we will consider how language is used to discriminate while developing a basic understanding of the anthropological study of language, including some of the key ideas, methods, and findings in this field. This course aims to demonstrate how concepts used by linguistic anthropologists are broadly applicable.

This course will explore the work of scholars, essayists, and creative writers in order to use their prose as models for our own. We'll analyze scholarly explication and argument, and we'll appreciate the artistry in our finest personal essays and short fiction. Students will complete a series of critical essays in the humanities and natural sciences and follow with a personal essay and a piece of short fiction. Students will have an opportunity to submit their work for peer review and discussion; students will also meet individually with the instructors.

This is an intermediate creative writing course that explores narrative structure. The focus will be on works (mostly fiction, but also non-fiction) that have pushed the boundaries of conventional "girders" by using as building materials visuals, verse, and radical space/time-shifts, all while maintaining a clear cohesive whole.

Using collage, students will produce two-dimensional projects with found imagery, drawn imagery, and collage making materials, i.e. painted paper, cardboard, plastic and other media, to produce an ambitious body of work. The history of collage, including its role in Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Pop Art, Digital Art and Contemporary Art will be covered through slides and readings. Both representational and abstract imagery will be produced.