In this workshop-based course, students will continue to learn and hone the basic elements of writing for the stage: voice, craft, and process.  Playwriting work will be augmented by a focus on studying full-length plays and perspectives from global playwrights to expose students to a variety of forms, genres, structures, and narratives. A central goal of this course will be understanding the wide possibilities of creating a theatrical work from outside of a Western Naturalism perspective.

This course explores the power of writing and performance as tools for civic dialogue, community engagement, and social justice. Students will investigate documentary and participatory theatre practices, drawing from real-world issues, interviews, and local communities to collaboratively develop performance pieces rooted in lived experience. Through fieldwork, archival research, and group devising processes, students will create original solo and ensemble performances that respond to pressing social and political themes.

(Offered as SWAG 400 and POSC 407) The topic will vary from year to year.

(Offered as ASLC 321, FAMS 321, and SWAG 321) Bombay cinema, popularly known as “Bollywood Cinema,” is one of the largest film industries in the world. This course focuses on Bollywood cinema and its local and global offshoots to think about questions of gender, sexuality and agency. The course considers questions such as: What beauty standards are imposed on women in Bollywood and how do they connect to colonialism, race and empire? Do LGBTQ romances in Bollywood endorse homonormative narratives? How do we read the sexualization of the female body in song and dance numbers?

(Offered as ASLC 321, FAMS 321, and SWAG 321) Bombay cinema, popularly known as “Bollywood Cinema,” is one of the largest film industries in the world. This course focuses on Bollywood cinema and its local and global offshoots to think about questions of gender, sexuality and agency. The course considers questions such as: What beauty standards are imposed on women in Bollywood and how do they connect to colonialism, race and empire? Do LGBTQ romances in Bollywood endorse homonormative narratives? How do we read the sexualization of the female body in song and dance numbers?

(Offered as SWAG 301 and BLST 301[US]) This interdisciplinary methods course explores the emergent field of Queer of Color Critique, a mode of analysis pioneered by LGBTQ people of color. Using theories and approaches from the discipline of performance studies, the explicit mission of the seminar is to acquaint students with the history, politics, art, and activism of queer and trans people of color while also strengthening student research skills in four overlapping areas: archival research, close-reading, performance analysis, and community engagement.

(Offered as HIST 258 and SWAG 258) This course will examine the history of medicine in the U.S. with a focus on the roots and persistence of structural violence, discrimination, and stigma. The history of medicine was long viewed as the study of the development of new approaches to disease prevention and treatment. However, pathbreaking scholarship on the racist roots of American medicine has called for an examination of how broader social, cultural, and political norms and values shaped medical training and practices. Slavery and colonialism transformed early modern medicine.