Climate change affects everyone, but Black, Indigenous and low-income populations are especially vulnerable to its impact. These populations have also led the efforts to combat climate change by protesting capitalist extraction, building food sovereignty and leading ecological restoration projects. This course centers Indigenous and Black climate action, especially efforts to restore traditional, anti-capitalist and decolonial practices of land and water stewardship, fishing and farming.

This class explores the contemporary “remix culture” to ask pressing questions about creativity, originality and identity. Students explore the remix as a necessary tool for cultural transformation and look at their own experience of race, gender, sexual orientation, class and ability as an opportunity to reimagine and transform old ideas. Students make a case for the remix as a place for critical updates to the culture and discuss the possibilities of how remixing contributes to a richer production of cultural ideas.

The human relationship with nature is one of the most important questions in the world. Are humans part of nature? Are humans destroying it? Can humans save it? Can nature save humanity? And what is nature, anyway? Is it the opposite of “human” or is it the truth at the core of humanity?

How people speak – the words they choose, the way they structure their sentences, the pitch of their voices, even their gender while speaking – is constantly judged by those around them. Examining the interaction of gender and language leads to questions, such as how does gender shape the way people use language, how does gender affect others’ perceptions of speech (both written and verbal), what variation occurs across cultures with regards to gender and language? This course uses the topic of language and gender to expand upon and improve rhetorical and writing skills.

How people speak – the words they choose, the way they structure their sentences, the pitch of their voices, even their gender while speaking – is constantly judged by those around them. Examining the interaction of gender and language leads to questions, such as how does gender shape the way people use language, how does gender affect others’ perceptions of speech (both written and verbal), what variation occurs across cultures with regards to gender and language? This course uses the topic of language and gender to expand upon and improve rhetorical and writing skills.

Nietzsche called maturity the rediscovered seriousness of a child at play. What is the meaning of comedy in light of this “seriousness of the child at play?” Why do people laugh, at what and in what way? How does one distinguish silly comedy from serious comedy? This course examines such questions on comic platforms including film, music, videos, short stories and cartoons.

As instruments of white supremacy, police and prisons disproportionately target Black and Brown people. The abolition movement, which gained more mainstream support after the 2020 George Floyd protests, demands to defund and ultimately abolish prisons and police, instead investing in communities to eliminate the conditions that lead to violence. But abolition is primarily about building, not just dismantling. It offers a vision of a liberated world in which everyone can thrive and justice does not equal punishment.

This course presents a variety of practices and positions within the field of literary theory. Approaches include structuralism, poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, gender and queer studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies. Emphasis on the theory as well as the practice of these methods, their assumptions about writing and reading and about literature as a cultural formation. Readings include Freud, Lacan, Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Bakhtin, Gramsci, Bhabba, Butler, Said, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Zizek.

Offered as RES 264 and WLT 264. Focuses on close reading of the major novels, short fiction and journalism of Dostoevsky, one of the greatest writers in modern literature. Combining penetrating psychological insight with the excitement of crime fiction, Dostoevsky’s works explore profound political, philosophical and religious issues, in a Russia populated by students and civil servants, saints and revolutionaries, writers and madmen.

A study of the major writers and diverse literary traditions of Africa, with emphasis on the historical, political, social and cultural contexts of the emergence of writing, reception and consumption. The course pays particular attention to several questions: in what contexts did modern African literature emerge? Is the term "African literature" a useful category? How do African writers challenge Western representations of Africa? How do they articulate the crisis of postcoloniality? How do women writers reshape our understanding of gender and the politics of resistance?