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 will familiarize students with histories of African enslavement throughout the Americas. We will explore critical aspects of the roots and routes of enslavement and consider the "displacement, dislocation, dispossession, exploitation and dehumanization in the New World." This course, designed for first and second-year students with an interest in diaspora studies, will pursue several questions: What is the world that slavery made? What strategies of survival did enslaved people employ?

Writing World War II: World War II defined an era and transformed the lives of all who endured it. In doing so, the war has become a growing source of stories, and these tellings will be the subject of the discussions, writings, and projects in this course. Stories, above all, provide clues to the meanings we have attached to the politics and experience of the war, and the resulting social transformations within the United States, particularly with regard to matters of race, gender, and class.

In this course we will first analyze traditional philosophical perspectives on punishment along side critical genealogical descriptions of how it is that certain penal mechanisms emerged and determined our present-namely, the prison industrial complex and the militarization of police forces. We will then take up the abolitionist question and reflect on how things could be otherwise. That is, we will spend a great deal of time in this class discussing restorative or community approaches to issues of justice as a viable alternative to those methods currently being deployed.

The question of how to resist, survive and challenge retaliatory violence directed against African American communities has always been central to the history of African decedents in the U.S. The extent to which the active role of women had been central to this history has been rarely acknowledged.

This course explores how cultures and religions influence theoretical and social concepts of nature and the environment. Efforts to preserve, protect and/or define natural spaces around the world shed insight into the development of the concept of environmentalism. Often equated in the global north with nature conservation and sustainable development, environmentalism takes different forms in various social and cultural settings.

This course examines the transnational history of Koreans in the United States and beyond beginning in 1903 when the first-wave of Koreans arrived in Hawai'i as sugar plantation laborers. We will examine the history of Korean immigration to the United States in the context of larger global labor migrations.

This course will cover land conservation issues relating to the Connecticut Valley and nationally. The course will focus on the ecology and politics of land conservation and management, historical land loss and current land recovery efforts of Native American tribal groups, and indigenous land law including related Supreme Court cases and federal and state legislation. We will examine case studies in the use of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) by indigenous peoples and its relevance to climate change, energy policy, wildlife management, species protection, and cultural survival.

Cities are primarily understood through their key physical attributes, which include rail and bus systems, mixed-use re-development projects, athletic stadiums, and highway systems. Through a diverse set of projects such as Robert Moses' ambitious and contentious plans in modernizing New York City, efforts in Curitiba, Brazil to create a systematic public bus system, and the World Cup's expeditious construction of stadiums in the name of global common good, the course will examine the political, economic, and social entanglements explicitly tied to the exercise of urban development.

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.