Why and how do interest groups participate in electoral politics? What are the benefits of this activity, and the drawbacks? Do groups really influence outcomes? We look past conventional wisdom and examine data to help us understand the more complex answers to these questions that don't get covered on cable news.

In this course, you will learn about language, race, and inequality in the contemporary United States. The course will cover theories of how and why languages and speakers come to be associated with racialized stereotypes, as well as how linguistic discrimination continues to be perpetuated in the U.S. today. We will read a variety of case studies in order to learn about the ways in which language and race are intertwined in education, mass media, material culture, and our everyday interactions.

The political, social, and legal problems confronting societies after periods of mass human rights violations or war have attracted increasing attention from policymakers and scholars in the last two decades. In this course we will examine transitional justice as both an idea and a set of specific processes. We will focus on truth commissions as one tool that governments may use to redress violence.

What is the role of law in shaping basic and taken-for-granted social meanings? How does legalism generate social categories of analysis, attribute particular qualities to persons and property, and define relations between states and individuals? In this course, rather than approaching law as a set of constraints around which rational individuals can strategize, we focus on the symbolic dimension of legality and critically examine the relation of law to structures of power and subordination.

An intensive study of the history of the blues. The nature of blues music and lyrics in an African and African American social, political, and musical context, and the use of the blues tradition in literature. No reading knowledge of music required or expected.

Examination of a representative sampling of poetry, prose and/or drama by American writers -- black and white, male and female -- depicting African-American characters and issues related directly to the lives of African Americans. Texts chosen from the works of such authors as Jefferson, Poe, Stowe, Melville, Douglass, Delany, Dunbar, Eliot, Faulkner, Hurston, Wright, Baldwin, Styron, Baraka, and Morrison.

This course examines key moments and processes in the historical trajectories of colonial Latin America, with particular emphasis on the territories ruled by Spain. The principal focal point of discussion is the era of Iberian conquest and the nearly three centuries of Spanish and Portuguese colonial rule (ca. 1530 to 1809). Our conversations begin, however, by focusing on indigenous societies prior to European colonization (before 1492) and conclude with reflections on continuity and change between the colonial era and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

This course focuses on the ideological origins of the American Revolution and the political theory underlying the Constitution. We will also study American political thought comparatively, with reference to England and France. Primary source readings will include Blackstone, Montesquieu, Paine, Madison, Jefferson, and the Anti-Federalists. But the main primary source will be Madison's notebook capturing the speeches at the Constitutional Convention, which we will read in its entirety. Secondary sources will include Akhil Amar, Peter Baehr, Joan Landes, and Gordon Wood.