How is our understanding of U.S. history transformed when we place African American women at the center of the story? This course will examine the exclusion of African American women from dominant historical narratives and the challenge to those narratives presented by African American women's history through an investigation of selected topics in the field.

Exploration of the history of Afro-Latin American populations since Independence within and outside the nation-state. We will question why and how to study those whose governments define them not as peoples of African descent but as part of a mixed-race majority of Hispanic cultural heritage, who themselves may often have supported this policy, and who may have had compelling reasons to avoid official scrutiny.

This course will focus on the writings of Black political thinkers in the Americas, Africa and Europe. Through critical examination of the conditions against, and contexts within, which the discourses of these thinkers are situated, this course hopes to arrive at some understanding of the principles, goals and strategies developed to contest and redefine the notions of citizenship (vis-a-vis the imperatives of race/racism and the global colonial formation), humanity, development, democracy, and freedom.

"Black Metropolis" refers to the more than half a million black people jammed into a South Side ghetto in Chicago at mid-twentieth century that featured an entrenched black political machine, a prosperous black middle class, and a thriving black cultural scene in the midst of massive poverty and systemic inequality. This course will follow the political, economic, and cultural developments of what scholars considered to be the typical urban community in postwar United States.

This reading- and writing-intensive course draws upon the intellectual traditions of African American, African, and African diasporic studies in order to explore the connections and disjunctures among people of African descent. While the course pays attention to national, regional, and historical contexts, it asks this question: what do African descended people have in common and when and how are their experiences and interests different?

Perhaps no other novelist has delved as deeply into the psychological and metaphysical dimensions of evil as the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky. This course will be devoted to a close reading of Dostoevsky's landmark novel of murderous passion and parricide, The Brothers Karamazov. Why should crime and transgression be a privileged avenue of access into the human interior? How is psychology tied to the metaphysical aspect of human existence? What are the sources of evil--and redemption?

Mephistopheles in Moscow? The Gospel retold? At turns both wildly comic and metaphysically profound, Bulgakov's novel has been a cult classic since its unexpected discovery in 1967. This course will consider Bulgakov's masterpiece together with some of its literary, historical, and social contexts. Additional readings from Goethe, Gogol, E.T.A.Hoffman, Akhmatova, and others.

Emphasis on increasing active command of grammar while focusing on conversational topics. Readings include poetry, short stories, and magazine and newspaper articles. Students watch and discuss Russian films. Classes are conducted mostly in Russian.

Continuation of Russian 101. A four-skills course, with increasing emphasis on reading and writing, that completes the study of basic grammar. Major topics include: predicting conjugation patterns, unprefixed and prefixed verbs of motion, complex sentences, time expressions, and strategies of vocabulary building. Students watch Russian films, read and discuss authentic texts.

This course will include all of James Joyce's major works: Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake (extracts). Students will be encouraged to explore the oral, interpretative, performative, and musical aspects of Joyce's writing. The texts will be explored in the context of politics and colonialism, and will be contextualized through discussions of modernism, postmodernism, and the Irish literary tradition.