Offered as AMS 351mn and ENG 351mn. This nonfiction writing course cultivates creative work that takes inspiration from the discoveries, controversies, crimes, and unsolved mysteries of the sciences. Students’ writing is artful as well as informative, and the emphasis is on craft and creative process. Students read a wide range of writers who explore social issues through the lens of science, from Susan Sontag and Jamaica Kincaid to Elizabeth Kolbert and Anna Tsing.

Offered as AMS 267 and SWG 267. This course examines interrelationships of race, sex, sexuality, gender, queerness, disability, class, embodiment, nation, Indigeneity, nature, and sustainability through critical engagement with a body of scholarship known as Queer Ecologies, e.g. anti-racist feminist and queer scholarship on science, labor, popular culture, cultural and environmental preservation, politics, bodies, and sexual and reproductive practices.

Comedy has been a primary site for enacting and contesting citizenship in the United States. This course presents a history of comedy from the nineteenth century to the present to analyze the role of humor in shaping racial and gender stereotypes, as well as expressions of solidarity, resistance and joy among marginalized groups. Case studies include blackface minstrelsy, stand up comedy, sit-coms, satirical news, social media posts and cancel culture debates.

A seventeenth-century engraving imagines an encounter between two men wearing feathers and holding onto the same string of shells: depending on your perspective, this image looks like a scene of trade or one of theft at knife-point. In understanding moments from the past, representation and perspective shape not just interpretation, but sources themselves. Seeing moments as both trade and theft opens them to tellings and analyses from multiple perspectives, exposing overlooked elements and revealing the ways in which histories are made.

This course looks closely at a series of canonical black texts. The intention is to examine these texts in their specific historical context with careful attention to their place within Africana intellectual history. This course either focuses on a series of intensive investigations of a set of major texts within Africana studies, or it operates thematically.

What does it mean to imagine the world otherwise? What does it mean to imagine place, time, space, beingness, and knowingness outside and beyond the realm of the real – beyond the supposed certainty of the known and knowable world?

Designed to introduce students to the methods of inquiry used for research in Africana Studies. Through intensive study of a single topic (past examples: Toni Morrison's Beloved, the American South, The Black Seventies) students consider the formation of the field, engage canonical texts, attend lectures and learn from scholars whose work is based in a variety of disciplines. Focus is on the challenges and opportunities made possible by doing multi- and interdisciplinary research: how and why scholars ask and approach research questions and have conversations with each other.