This course examines how writers use the genre of the memoir as a tool for articulating and constructing personal and collective identities. In reading, discussing, and writing about memoirs by writers such as Alison Bechdel, Myriam Gurba, Kiese Laymon, Maggie Nelson, and Claudia Rankine, among others, we will explore how writers from a range of backgrounds use the form of the memoir to challenge dominant cultural and historical narratives.

Antigone's confrontation with the power of the state and her political dissent have made her one of the central global literary figures for political struggle. Reading plays, novels, and poems from Ancient Greece to 20th century Germany, Ireland, and South Africa and 21st Century Britain, Pakistan, and the United States, we will explore the question of a person's conflicted relationship with the demands of state law, family bonds, individual conscience, and collective justice and think about the role of literary representation as a form of historical witness.

The reorganization of production across national borders has transformed labor markets around the world, with profound effects on workers' lives. What role have social constructions of gender played in shaping employment outcomes in different countries? What has been the impact of these employment dynamics on gender relations? This course will engage with these questions by examining the impact of labor market transformations on women's work in the global economy.

Are societies beyond the turning point of preventing mass ecological collapse? This course explores what it means to live in times of increasing eco-anxiety, with environmental degradation leading to a host of social and economic ills that threaten all life, but especially the most precarious people and other life-forms. Students will analyze climate displacement and migration, mass extinction of species, and the possibility of widespread societal collapse, among other issues.

This course examines the discursive relationship between race, power and law in contemporary U.S. society. Readings examine the ways in which racial bodies are constituted in the cultural economy of American society where citizens of African descent dwell. We explore the rules and social practices that govern the relationship of race to gender, nationality, sexuality, and class in U.S. courts and other cultural institutions. Thinkers covered include W.E.B. DuBois, Kimberle Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, and Richard Delgado, among others.

This class aims to raise student awareness of and exposure to different cultural backgrounds and contributions of Black feminist thought, womanism, and afro feminism across the Caribbean and the Americas. We will take a historical journey exploring the roles of cisgender Black women and gender-non-confirmative Black people in the formations of Black feminist thought, highlighting their contributions and struggles in dismantling the Western matrix of domination, but also in the radical building of new societies.

This reading- and writing-intensive course draws upon the intellectual traditions of African American, African, and African diasporic studies in order to explore the connections and disjunctures among people of African descent. While the course pays attention to national, regional, and historical contexts, it asks this question: what do African descended people have in common and when and how are their experiences and interests different? What can we glean from contemporary discourses grounded in the consideration of global black lives?

The course is an overview of the social conditions of Latinx people within the US. It addresses laws, policies and institutions that shape the complexity of Latinxes' social location and activism as well as legal constructions of race, citizenship, nomenclature, border politics, public health, education, and labor. We will consider the intersections of class, gender and sexuality as well as inequality in relation to other persons of color. Students will develop a firm sense of the importance and breadth of the Latinx political agenda and acquire skills to think across social issues.

This course offers an interrogation of overt and embedded narratives of migrants and the migration process in popular and documentary film, paying specific attention to cinematic representations of non-citizen bodies confronting migration, deportation, labor, acculturation, and anti-immigrant hysteria. Film screenings and class discussions comprise the interpretative lens through which students will examine the aesthetic, cultural, economic, gendered, historical, political, racial and sexual dimensions of cultural texts.

This course will explore the history of Latina/o/x populations in New York City. Students will learn about histories of migration and settlement, urban inequality, community building, and urban transformation with particular focus on the Puerto Rican population in New York City. The course will examine the many ways Latinas/os/x have transformed New York City and built vibrant communities.