What is a play and how do you write one? In this course, students will be introduced to the basic principles of writing for the stage (voice, craft, and process), and study short plays. Students will gain an understanding of foundational aspects such as conflict, character, objectives, obstacles, and stakes. In parallel to learning elements of playwriting, students will read plays reflecting various periods, cultures and narratives, as well as critical theories around the craft of playwriting and theatrical forms.

(Offered as SWAG 348 and HIST 348) This seminar will explore the intersections of gender, migration, and labor, with a particular focus on Asian American women in the United States (broadly defined to include the U.S.’s territories and military bases), from 1870 to the present. Through transnational and woman-of color feminist lenses, we will investigate U.S.

(Offered as SWAG 277 and POSC 277) This course depicts dissent as a defining and contested feature of democratic life and explores the complex relationship between democracy and dissent. Drawing on theories of democracy and protest, as well as a range of historical and contemporary case studies, it analyzes how dissent can both strengthen and erode democratic systems. It also studies the diverse strategies that states employ to manage, redirect, criminalize, and suppress dissent.

Limited to 25 students. Priority given to sophomores. Fall semester. Professor Basu.

(Offered as SWAG 252 and HIST 252) What can we learn about MLK and Malcolm X and from Magneto and Professor X? What can we learn about gendered and racialized depictions within comic books? As a catalyst to encourage looking at history from different vantage points, we will put comic books in conversation with the history of race and empire in the United States. Sometimes we will read comic books as primary sources and products of a particular historical moment, and other times we will be reading them as powerful and yet imperfect critiques of imperialism and racial inequality in U.S.

(Offered as SWAG 233 and FAMS 373) In this course we pay close attention to historical conjunctions in the development and dispersion of information technologies as they relate to women and the feminist movement. Our class consists of three interrelated strands: women’s labor history in the design, production, and use of computing machines; feminist methods for the study of history; and speculative, theoretical texts and media concerned with women identifying with and/or functioning as computing machines.

(Offered as SWAG 188 and BLST 288[US, D]) How might we connect the U.S.’s current economic, social, and military dominance over much of the world to empires of the past such as the nineteenth century British empire in India, Africa and the Caribbean? What does the existence of human zoos of the nineteenth and early twentieth century tell us about how empires thought of colonized peoples? How might we connect imperial legacies to the current immigrant crisis in the U.S.?