The Balkans, Winston Churchill famously said, "produce more history than they can consume." This course offers an introduction to the complex histories of this little-known yet diverse and fascinating part of Europe that has been subject to many myths. Starting in the eighteenth century, we will focus on the emergence of modern Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, and Albania and end our journey in the late twentieth century.

One-third of South Asia's population, or approximately 500 million people, currently live and work in cities. This course explores the history of urban life in the subcontinent from the mid-eighteenth century to the present. Cities have long been sites of economic opportunity, but also of profound inequality. They offer a unique spatial perspective on large-scale transformations such as industrialization and globalization. The course addresses the ongoing challenges of mass urbanization, especially the negotiation of ethnic, class, gender, and religious differences.

Caligula was a god (or so he thought); Nero fiddled while Rome burned; Commodus dressed as a gladiator and fought man and beast in the arena. The history of the Roman empire is replete with scandalous stories about eccentric and even insane emperors whose reigns raise questions about the nature of the emperor's power and his role in administering the empire.

This course examines the lives of women in imperial China (221 BCE-1911). How did Confucian didactic texts define women and their place in the family? Seen as the core of the family in a patrilineal, patrilocal, and patriarchical society, men prescribed women's roles in family life. How did women understand and respond to the social expectations imposed on them? What changed over the long history of imperial China? Students consider writings by and about women alongside the evidence of material culture.

How do labor relationships and the social construction of what work means affect our lives as well as our communities? How do they contribute to shape our identities? In which ways can our gender, sexual orientation, race, social class or migratory status define our working possibilities? How do the concepts of marginality and informality emerge to identify the precarious Latin American labor conditions? Through Latin American films, students will problematize the idea of service, worker, industry, classic and non-classic work, sexual and affective work, and child labor, among others.

Dragon ladies, lotus blossoms, geisha girls--the U.S. cultural imaginary is saturated with myths regarding Asian sexuality and gender.

Since the 1990s Latin America has witnessed increasing societal and political debates over sexual and reproductive rights. Issues such as abortion, gay marriage, transgender rights, sexual education and assisted reproductive technology have risen to the top of some countries' agendas after decades of silence, taboos, and restrictive or non-existent legislation. The course aims to provide a survey of sexual and reproductive rights in the region as a whole while at the same time highlighting the disparities that exist within it.

What do we mean when we say "queer writing" or "trans writing"? Are we talking about writing by queer and/or trans authors? Writing about queer or trans practices, identities, experience? Writing that subverts conventional forms? All of the above? In this course, we will engage these questions not theoretically but through praxis. We will read fiction, poetry, comics, creative nonfiction, and hybrid forms. Expect to encounter work that challenges you in terms of form and content. Some writers we may read include Ryka Aoki, James Baldwin, Tom Cho, Samuel R.

This course examines the history of American avant-garde film, paying special attention to the alternative cultural institutions that have facilitated experimental cinema's emergence and longevity in the U.S. since the 1940s. We will consider how the avant-garde's interest in creating an alternative cinema necessitated a dramatic reorganization of existing modes of filmic production, distribution, exhibition, reception, and preservation.

Discussing both canonical and lesser-known films from the Weimar and Nazi period, we explore various artistic tendencies, movements and genres in order to define cinema's complex role in representing social and historical experience. We pay special attention to the modes of constructing cinematic spaces, and the social utopias and catastrophes which cinema came to represent.