Exterior at night

The Center at night

Side Entrance

The entrance of the CSGS

Heather Love audience

The audience listens as Lauren Berlant introduces Heather Love in 2014

Class discussion

Students participate in a classroom discussion at the Center

Héctor Carrillo

Héctor Carrillo talks with students after his book talk in 2018

Joan Scott

Joan Scott speaking at the Center in 2017

panel

Students listen to panelists present in 2017

Community room

The Community Room at 5733 S University

center door

Center entrance

5733 exterior

The exterior of 5733 S University

Bhanu Kapil

Poet Bhanu Kapil at the Center in 2016

Courses

Undergraduate Courses 

AUTUMN 2023

WINTER 2024

SPRING 2024

 

Graduate Courses

AUTUMN 2023

WINTER 2024

SPRING 2024

 

Undergraduate Course Descriptions

AUTUMN 2023

GNSE 12120 Gender, Sexuality and Sport
Instructor: Zoya Sameen
This course will examine how the categories of gender and sexuality have shaped the contemporary life of sport. We will begin by unpacking the complexity of gender and sex as concepts in the study of sport while also considering the origins of gender-based segregation in sport. Major topics in this course include: Title IX protections; intersectionality and race; sexuality, homophobia, and sport; hyperandrogenism; trans inclusion; and cultural nationalism and sport. This is an interdisciplinary course that will draw on methods in philosophy, history, bioethics, and the study of gender and sexuality. Our texts will comprise of readings as well as visual media across multiple regions, including India, South Africa, and the United States. Students will broadly learn to critically think about sport in relation to concepts of gender, sexual orientation, and race along with the ideals of law, social justice, and inclusivity.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12123 Global Perspectives on Reproductive Justice Theory and Practice
Instructor: Malavika Parthasarathy
The US Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has sharpened our awareness of the perils that besiege our reproductive futures. This course offers a deep dive into comparative reproductive justice theory and practice rooted both in unique cultural particularities and in globally resonant issues and challenges. While exposing students to the foundational texts shaping the reproductive justice movement, the course shall engage critically with the possibilities and limitations of a rights based framework and the challenges and liberatory potential of a justice based approach to reproductive decision-making. Drawing from literature and media from across the world, the course shall provide global perspectives on issues as varied as contraception, assisted reproductive technology, mass sterilization, and family leave, along with scholarship and resources from the US. While engaging critically with theory, the course shall also provide practitioners’ perspectives through guest lectures by ethnographers, lawyers, and healthcare professionals working in the field.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12124 Queering God
Instructor: Olivia Bustion
Can God be an ally in queer worldmaking? Is God queer? What does queerness have to do with Judaism, Christianity, or Islam? This course introduces students to foundational concepts in queer and trans studies by focusing on queer Jewish, Christian, and Islamic theologies. We will analyze the ways that contemporary artists, activists, and scholars are using theology to reimagine gender and experiment with new relational forms. Our readings will include a variety of genres: memoir, letters, scriptural interpretation, and a novel. There will be no presumption of previous acquaintance with any of the readings or topics discussed, or indeed with any academic theology or queer theory at all.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 12159 Reading as a Writer: The Bad Girls Club
Instructor: Julie Iromuanya
Jezebels, witches, femme fatales, nasty women, sirens, madwomen, and murderesses: the world over, these women of many names—whom we’ll collectively refer to as the Bad Girls Club—have alternately inspired the disdain and delight of multitudes. Whether jailed, expelled, excommunicated, or burned at the stake, their (anti)heroic antics have challenged, critiqued, or, some might say, corrupted the laws, mores, and sensibilities of societies. If it is true that polite, well-behaved women rarely make history, then what do impolite, badly-behaved women teach us about the construction of (his) story? In this course, we’ll examine literature from around the world featuring members of the Bad Girls Club, who in opposing complimentary constructions of femininity, femaleness, and power invite introspection on the gendered nature of story and storytelling. In short critical papers, we’ll analyze the tropes, features, and conventions of literature featuring these bad characters, and in short exercises, you’ll write stories, poems, and essays inspired by them.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 13001 Introduction to Gender Studies
Instructor: Red Tremmel
This course invites students to take an empirical and theoretical approach to understanding gender. Drawing on scholarship from across the natural and social sciences, as well as the humanities, we begin the course by learning about the questions, methodologies, foundational concepts, research findings, and theoretical frameworks that comprise the field of gender studies. Next, we delve into the diverse ways that gender emerges and operates in our everyday lives, including our own embodiment. We then identify the historical and socioeconomic forces that animate, construct, regulate, and transform gender from one generation to the next. And we end by analyzing the relationship between gender and systems of power. All of our inquiries will consider the complex ways that gender operates at the intersection of sexuality, race, class, age, ethnicity, religion, ability and other emerging categories of difference.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 15002 Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations I
Instructors: Various
The first quarter of the GNSE Civ sequence offers a historical examination of bodies, sex, and gender. Through a series of readings that include historical primary sources and examples of cultural production from antiquity to the present, we will investigate how bodies across a variety of cultures become sexed and gendered. In particular, we will ask how the very categories of sex and gender not only produce social meaning from bodies and their anatomical differences but may also be complicit in acts violence, oppression, and colonization. Thematically we will pay attention to the emergence and critique of the distinction between sex and gender; resistances to the gender binary; the relationship between gender, power, and authority; feminism and critiques of Western feminism; the category of woman as an object of scientific knowledge; and the flourishing of and violence against trans life. Finally, while we will be dealing with historical accounts in this course, the aim is to understand how the regulation of bodies in the past has informed and may challenge our understanding of the diversity of embodied experience in the present.

GNSE 17501 Art and Feminism
Instructor: Maggie Borowitz
How has feminism changed the landscape of artistic practices over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries? What does a history of feminist art look like and how does it relate to a feminist history of art? In this course, students will consider the relationship between art and feminism, focusing upon artwork produced in the Americas over the last century. Through course readings, seminar discussions, and the close analysis of artworks, the course will be structured around a series of thematic investigations across the geographical space of the Americas, focusing especially upon the U.S. and Mexico. We will consider texts by feminist art historians such as Linda Nochlin and Anne Wagner alongside key texts by feminist theorists such as Judith Butler, bell hooks, and Laura Mulvey; we will explore the work of artists who have identified as feminists (e.g., Judy Chicago, Howardena Pindell) as well as those who have complicated or even resisted such identification (e.g., Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Martin, Yayoi Kusama). Key themes will include: representations of bodies, eroticisms, domestic space and labor, the relationship between the personal and the political, and the politicization of materials and making processes.

GNSE 17915 Women’s Work
Instructor: Kindon Mills
As a haptic art, an art experienced through touch as well as the other senses, architecture operates at multiple scales: that of hand, building, city. The scale of the hand gives the most direct access to architecture and its furnishings: think of a handrail, a chair, a textile, a brick pattern, a wood detail. This is the realm of craft in architecture and was, for decades, the realm inhabited and ruled by women practitioners. Women designed furniture, made drawings, wove textiles, produced pottery and glasswork as a means of expression within the male world of architectural practice. As an introduction to the study of architecture, craft entails applying principles of proportion, scale, tactility, precision, materiality and assembly; in this way, craft is a microcosm of architecture. Through a series of projects and readings centered around the craft arts and the women who advanced them, this studio course will introduce students to small-scale making and translate that process to larger scales. Students will undertake three projects: (1) a small work of craft and a set of orthographic drawings describing the making process, (2) a design for a work space for a craft, and (3) a series of analytical drawings linking a work of architecture back to a traditional craft. PQ: Consent Only

GNSE 20001 Theories of Sexuality and Gender
Instructors: Kristen Schilt and Melina Davis
This is a one-quarter, seminar-style course for undergraduates. Its aim is triple: to engage scenes and concepts central to the interdisciplinary study of gender and sexuality; to provide familiarity with key theoretical anchors for that study; and to provide skills for deriving the theoretical bases of any kind of method. Students will produce descriptive, argumentative, and experimental engagements with theory and its scenes as the quarter progresses. This course is required for GNSE majors. Previous coursework in gender/sexuality studies required.

GNSE 20118 Gender, Agency, and Power in 19th C Russian Literature
Instructor: Anne Eakin Moss
When members of Pussy Riot performed their “Punk Prayer” at the Cathedral of Christ Our Savior in Moscow in 2011, heads covered with neon balaclavas, it was as much the scandal of their female bodies in front of the iconostasis as the words of their song that constituted their protest against state and church. This course focuses on similarly scandalous provocations and quieter acts of resistance against normative gender expectations in 19th-century Russian literature. We read narratives of rebellion by individuals and collective actions by groups of women, and consider the surprising agency attributed to women’s cooperative work in Russian literature as well as the heavy burdens placed on women by family, state, and church. Readings include primarily short fiction in a variety of genres (sentimental, romantic, realist, and gothic) by canonized male writers and by women writers of the 19th C who are less often taught and translated, but were widely read in their own day. These works expand our understanding of the narrative possibilities for sexuality and gendered subjectivity in the Russian literary sphere, and of the ways in which possibility itself was made and remade by literary expression. The course also introduces students to methods of literary analysis informed by critical theories of gender, and asks how Russian literary and cultural history may offer new ways of thinking about gendered bodies, performance, and interrelations in the 19th C and today.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20127 Black Women Work: The labor of Black women in communities, families, and institutions
Instructor: Lisa Moore
This multidisciplinary course will explore the labor of Black women in three distinct arenas-communities, families, and institutions. Students will explore these areas through engaging with historical and contemporary narratives, research, and popular media, heavily drawing in a U.S. context, but not exclusively. Through an engagement of Black women in the U.S. labor force, this course will explore three questions. How has the labor of Black women contributed to the sustainability of communities, families, and institutions? What are the choices Black women make to engage and sustain their work? What is the future of the labor of Black women? Is the future one that is liberatory or not? Students will leave this course with an understanding of the ways intersectional experiences of oppression contribute to complex conditions and decision-making, that shape the labor of Black women, the function of certain labor decisions as sites of resistance, as well as the generative resources that support the professional success and well-being of Black women.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 20129 Writing Gender
Instructor: Sophie Salvo
In German, even if you are not writing about gender, you are always writing gender: the grammatical categories “masculine,” “feminine,” and “neuter” are implicated in every noun declension and personal pronoun. How have writers negotiated this in their constructions of gender identity? In this course, we will examine how gender has been thought within and beyond the masculine/feminine binary in German intellectual history. We will study historical conceptions of grammatical gender as well as recent attempts to make German more inclusive for genderfluid and trans people (e.g., neopronouns). Finally, we will consider how authors use literature as a space for gender exploration, such as in Kim de L’Horizon’s recent award-winning novel Blutbuch. Readings and discussions in German.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20132 Gender, Race, and Horror
Instructor: AE Stevenson
This course will contend with the ways that horror as a film genre constructs and deconstructs notions of gender and race in society. We will attend to texts across decades and subgenres that will illustrate how gender and race are made and regulated through notions of confusion, fear, and repulsion. By attending to these universal human feelings, students will learn how emotions are evoked through the construction of the text, its portrayal of the disruption of gender norms and its construction of racial boundaries. Students will learn the necessary vocabulary and methodologies to be able to critically analyze (audio)visual texts. In order to do this, students will be guided through how to construct argumentative critical papers through proper utilization of grammar, syntax, and vocabulary. By the end of the course, students will be well versed in cinematographic terms such that they will be able to critically analyze texts to understand the impact of perspective, interpretation, and judgment. This course is meant to help students navigate and make sense of an increasingly scary world by learning to appreciate fear as a necessary human expression. Finally, and most importantly, students will be able to engage with the age-old notion of terror to be able lead a more ethical and intellectually richer life.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20135 Divas, Idols, Material Girls: Gender and Sexuality in Music Videos
Instructor: Paula Harper
The stark black and white of Madonna’s “Vogue” and the pinks and sparkles of “Material Girl.” The explosive surprise releases of Beyoncé's BEYONCÉ and Lemonade visual albums. The lavish cinematic spectacle of Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” and the fanbait intertextuality of SM Entertainment’s Aespa. Since MTV’s advent in 1981, hit music videos have made a number of pop songs inextricable from iconic imagery and choreography; ubiquitous digital devices and the rise of platforms like YouTube and TikTok have only increased pop music’s audiovisuality. Looking at and listening to female pop icons raises fraught questions of agency, representation, race, sexuality/sexualization, bodies, commodification, and capital. In this course, students will gain a vocabulary for talking about both the audio and visual parameters of music video, and they will use this vocabulary to engage with critical frameworks for examining meaning, circulation, and reception in contemporary music videos. Assignments across the course will allow students to experiment with a range of writing and media genres, including critical close readings, micro-reception histories, thinkpieces, podcast episodes, and video essays.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 21001 Cultural Psychology
Instructor: Richard Shweder
There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of "normal" psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a single or uniform fundamental psychology for all peoples of the world. Research findings in cultural psychology thus raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. In this course we analyze the concept of "culture" and examine ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning. PQ: Third or fourth years only.

GNSE 21111 History of Death
Instructor: Katie Hickerson
This course introduces students to the historical study of death and the methods and approaches scholars have developed to understand the roles death has played in shaping societies across time and space. Drawing from the rich scholarship on the history of death, it will demonstrate the methodical diversity (textual, visual, and material culture studies) and analytical approaches (history of the body, religious studies, and the study of slavery and colonialism) used to examine the multivalent ways the dead have been sources of meaning-making for individuals, institutions, religious communities, and nations from early Islam to the aftermath of the Vietnam War. It examines how ruptures in ways of death through military encounters, epidemics, and colonialism have shaped and transformed societies. While the history of death is strongly situated in narratives of the rise of the West, students will consider case studies from across regional scholarly specializations, including Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, North America, Europe, and Southeast Asia.

GNSE 21303 Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation
Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the two hundred years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries – not to mention a thriving “Janeite” fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. For example, feminist scholars have long been fascinated by Austen for her treatments of feminine agency, sociality, and desire. Marxists read her novels for the light they shed on an emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of industrialization. And students of the “rise of the novel” in English are often drawn to Austen as a landmark case – an innovator of new styles of narration and a visionary as to the potentials of the form. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen’s completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include pieces by Shoshana Felman, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams. Open to 3rd and 4th years with consent of instructor.

GNSE 21304 Medieval Romance
Instructor: Mark Miller
Medieval romance is one of the main ancestors of fantasy and SF. This course examines the speculative work of fantasy in medieval romance's explorations of aesthetics, desire, and politics.

GNSE 21650 Kafka’s The Trial
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
This very close reading of Kafka's arguably most well known work after The Metamorphosis, means to move away from megalithic glosses of Kafka as a writer of allegory and instead to look deeply at Kafka's considerations of power—the power of women, built space, and language as wound and axe.

GNSE 22035 The Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Pastoral Epistles
Instructor: Margaret Mitchell
In the early second century there were bitter battles over the legacy of Paul and his preserved letters in terms of gender, sexuality, family life, asceticism, church administration, and theological vision. We can see these well by reading the narrative text The Acts of Paul and Thecla alongside the “Pastoral Epistles” (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus), the former championing a female, cross-dressing ascetic Christ-missionary and the latter, in pseudepigraphical epistolary texts written in the dead Paul’s name, insisting on patriarchal family life and women’s adherence to traditional roles. In this course we shall read both sets of texts carefully in Greek, noting points of similarity and contestation, and test various models of how these sources—each of which seeks to “fix” the Pauline legacy in its own way—are related to one another. Time allowing, we shall also look at the later reception of the cult of Saint Thecla and late antique interpretations of “the apostle,” Paul, on these issues of sexuality and gender roles, and their perduring influence in contemporary debates. PQ: At least one year of Greek, or equivalent.

GNSE 22323 The Family in the Greek and Roman World
Instructor: Georgios Tsolakis
This course examines how family was conceptualized and manifested in the Greek and Roman world. In this class, we will begin by examining key terms related to family (household, kinship, ancestors, descendants) and scholarly approaches to familial studies under the light of different theoretical perspectives. Through the examination of written sources (literary texts, inscriptions, and papyri) and archaeological evidence, we will adopt a thematic approach exploring the ways in which family intersected with several fields of public and domestic life, such as law, adoption, heirship, religion, rituals, education, politics, and public honors.

GNSE 22333 Cassandras: Truth-Telling in Times of Crisis
Instructor: Demetra Kasimis
In public life, why and how are some people accepted as truth-tellers while others are not? Is truth simply a problem of and for “correct" reasoning? What assumptions about argumentation and evidence go unexplored in this way of framing the problem? What if truth were a problem of truth-telling instead? When and how do social, racial, and gender hierarchies authorize received understandings of a (credible) truth-teller? What is credible telling usually thought to sound like? What are the conditions for listening and hearing the truth? To think through these questions, we take as a lens the archetype of Cassandra, the babbling prophetess of classical Greek myth and tragedy doomed not to be believed. Cassandra has served as a resource and source of inspiration for a range of critical thinkers, including but not limited to theorists, feminists, poets, and novelists. What is a "Cassandra"? Does her "deranged" way of seeing the world - her prophetic speech - disorient or destabilize? We will consider how, in her different representations, Cassandra places questions of language, patriarchy, and sexual violence at the center of general discussions of credibility and critique. Readings range from ancient Greek thought to 21st century theory.

GNSE 22705 Abortion: Morality, Politics, Philosophy
Instructors: Jason Bridges, Dan Brudney
Abortion is a complex and fraught topic. Morally, a very wide range of individual, familial, and social concerns converge upon it. Politically, longstanding controversies have been given new salience and urgency by the Dobbs decision and the ongoing moves by state legislatures to restrict access to abortion. In terms of moral philosophy, deep issues in ethics merge with equally deep questions about the nature of life, action, and the body. In terms of political philosophy, basic questions are raised about the relationship of religious and moral beliefs to the criminal law of a liberal state. We will seek to understand the topic in all of this complexity. Our approach will be thoroughly intra- and inter-disciplinary, drawing not only on philosophy but also on the contributions of a series of guest instructors in law, history, and medicine.  PQ: Third or fourth-year standing 

GNSE 23145 Queer South Asia
Instructor: Nisha Kommattam
This course explores representations of queerness, same-sex love, sexualities and debates around them by introducing students to a variety of literary texts translated from South Asian languages as well as films, geographically ranging from India and Pakistan to Sri Lanka. We will also read scholarship that will help us place the production and reception of these primary sources in historical, political, cultural and religious contexts. In particular, we will examine questions of history and continuity (recurrent themes and images); form and genre (differences of representation in mythological narratives, poetry, biography, fiction, erotic/legal/medical treatises); the relationship of gender to sexuality (differences and similarities between representations of male-male and female-female relations); queerness as a site for exploring other differences, such as caste or religious difference; and questions of cross-cultural and transnational dialogue and cultural specificity.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23151 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Politics in the United States
Instructor: Andrew Proctor
This course surveys academic research on sexuality and gender in American politics. Drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives, it focuses on key arguments and debates about how politics shapes and is shaped by sexuality and gender relations. We will pay particular attention to the development of sexuality and gender identity as analytic and political concepts; the role of the State and political institutions to the formation of sexuality and gender; the relationship between social movements, counter-movements, and political parties; the political behavior and attitudes of LGBT people; and the ways in which intersectional inequalities structure LGBT politics.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23153 Feminist Film Histories
Instructor: Aurore Spiers
This course explores global film histories by surveying the contributions of women directors and screenwriters, actresses, and movie workers from the silent era to the 1990s. It also addresses historiographical questions about women’s erasure, feminist recovery, and the archive. Films discussed will include works by Chantal Akerman, Dorothy Arzner, Jacqueline Audry, Maya Deren, Alice Guy Blaché, Sarah Maldoror, Esfir Shub, Kinuyo Tanaka, and Mai Zetterling.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23156 Empowering the Solo Voice: A Feminist Exploration of Francophone Theater Performance
Instructor: Khouloud Gargouri
In this course, we will delve into the world of contemporary Francophone theater, focusing on the genre of solo performances, or "seules en scène''. We will examine the lineage, history, and practice of this genre, with a special emphasis on feminist playwrights and performers, such as Typhaine D, Jalila Baccar, Fanny Cabon, and Florence Foresti. We will study the underlying components of solo performances and learn how to integrate them into different modes, including storytelling, one-woman or one-man shows, and standup. The selected plays will illustrate how the art of the solo voice can empower under-represented communities and minorities to share powerful narratives and create a new space for visibility and listening. The class will combine history, practice, and creative writing, and will afford students the opportunity to apply this knowledge in a series of live performances that will allow them to creatively connect to the issues raised in the readings and draw from their own experiences, inspirations, and questions. Students will develop creative and critical tools to fully explore the solo voice as a form of artistic expression, honing their talents in writing, devising, composing, producing, and creating work. Performance recordings will be obtained and shared with the class to further enhance the learning experience. One of the unique opportunities of this course is the opportunity to work with texts obtained directly from the playwrights. PQ: Reading knowledge of French. Class will be conducted in English. Readings will be in French and in English.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23157 Alone in the Mountains: Tales of Freedom and Violence in Contemporary Catalan Literature
Instructor: Bel Olid
From witches to "goges" ("water women"), Catalan folklore shows a tradition of women living on their own in the mountains, liberated from societal conventions. These women are portrayed as fascinating yet threatening figures. This ancient imagery has permeated contemporary literature, manifested in novels that depict women who remove themselves from "civilization" to inhabit rural areas of Catalunya, seeking freedom and having to confront at the same time societal norms, abusive partners or even their own personal demons. The mountains, far from ideal and peaceful, are an untamed and often brutal space in which human lives hold no greater value than those of goats, mushrooms, rivers. In this course we shall engage with four novels authored by women: "Solitude" (1904) by Victor Català, "Stone in a Landslide" (1984) by Maria Barbal, "When I Sing Mountains Dance" (2019) by Irene Solà, and "Alone" (2021) by Carlota Gurt. Through the analysis of these literary works, we aim to delve into Catalan culture and explore its literary archetypes, while establishing significant connections among these texts and their place in modern and contemporary literature. Taught in English, but students seeking credit for the HLBS major/minor must do part of the readings and written work in Catalan or Spanish as necessary for their degree.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23158 “Que otros sean lo Normal”: Pertinencia y otredad en la literatura trans en español
Instructor: Bel Olid
¿Qué nos dicen de una sociedad sus alteridades? Es decir, ¿cómo nos informa de la norma lo que queda fuera de ella? A partir de la lectura y análisis de obras escritas por autores trans, conoceremos más a fondo la actualidad de algunos países hispanohablantes, centrándonos en un elemento básico de cualquier identidad: el género. El curso está organizado a partir de la lectura y visualización de materiales reales y con actividades orales y escritas dirigidas a ampliar el conocimiento de la literatura contemporánea en español (y las sociedades en las que florece), y también a reforzar las habilidades de expresión oral y escrita de les participantes. Taught in Spanish.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors. 

GNSE 23159 Alternative Feminisms: Gender, Agency, and Liberation in the Middle East
Instructor: Sevda Numanbayraktaroglu
This course critically examines gender, agency, and liberation in the Middle East. The course will begin with a discussion of human agency, its relation to sociocultural context, and the feminist literature on the issues of agency, resistance, and liberation. Then, we will explore these relationships in non-Western contexts by drawing examples from Turkey, Iran, and Northern Syria. In the cases of Turkey and Iran, we will focus on the feminist movements and women’s collective actions for the right to wear and take off the headscarf. In the case of Northern Syria, we will explore the agencies of Kurdish female guerrillas and their conceptions of empowerment. In each case, we will focus on the moral and ethical principles that guide women’s choices and trace their sociohistorical foundations.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23645 Body And The Digital
Instructor: Crystal Beiersdorfer
As digital technology advances, the separation between IRL and URL blurs. Participants enrolled in this course will explore techniques that will help them create thought-provoking work, learn how to create a research-based digital artwork, strengthen their ability to give and receive critique, and build an understanding of how the corporeal interacts with the digital. Students will offer and receive constructive feedback during instructor-led critiques on peers' works throughout this course. Students will also explore the intersection of gender and digital spaces through weekly readings and discussions. By the end of this course, students will feel comfortable utilizing different processes of development to create digital artwork and speaking about digital spaces, including how different social identities affect our relationship with them.

GNSE 24103 Nature and the Natural in the Middle Ages
Instructor: Daisy Delogu
In this course we will undertake a study of nature and ideas about what is “natural” centered around three main axes, and will adopt a variety of relevant critical perspectives (e.g., ecocriticism, studies of gender and sexuality, political theory) to support our analyses. First, we will explore nature as the created world of which humans are a part (as one of God’s creations), yet from which they also stand apart (as sovereign caretakers). Second, we will examine how the diffusion of Aristotelian works (notably the Politics) in the later Middle Ages provided a justificatory framework for social and political hierarchies and practices of economic exploitation. Third, we will consider the intersection of nature with gender, sexuality, and reproduction, a topic complicated by the fact that Nature is itself represented, in allegorical terms, as a woman.

GNSE 24903 Religion and Human Rights
Instructor: John Sianghio
Religion played a crucial, but often overlooked, role in the development of post-World War II conceptions of human rights, providing principles and ideas that continue to influence contemporary human rights debates in the fields of law, public policy, and international relations. This no-prior-knowledge-necessary course explores the complex, sometimes fraught, relationship between religion and human rights from World War II to the present. We will begin by juxtaposing the role religious ideas played in the drafting of core post-war human rights documents (e.g. the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, etc.) with the decision by drafters to omit direct references to the divine or the beliefs of specific religious communities. Using case study analysis and close reading of primary religious texts, scholarly commentary, and historical accounts, we will examine the ways in which individuals and groups from multiple religious (and non-religious) traditions both apply and push back against existing human rights norms. Throughout the course we will discuss the role religion might play in debates surrounding emerging, but still contentious, conceptions of human rights. This includes: universal healthcare, gender and LGBTQIA+ rights, ever more complex manifestations of religious freedom, as well as whether human rights as conceived of in the mid-20th Century can be reconciled with decolonial and post-colonial perspectives.

GNSE 26311 Worlding Otherwise: Speculative Fiction, Film, Theory
Instructor: Hoda El Shakry
This course examines literary and cinematic works of speculative fiction in a comparative context. An expansive genre that encompasses science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, as well as utopian and dystopian literature, speculative fiction envisions alternate, parallel, possible, or imagined worlds. These worlds often exhibit characteristics such as: scientific and technological advancements; profound social, environmental, or political transformations; time or space travel; life on other planets; artificial intelligence; and evolved, hybrid, or new species. Speculative works frequently reimagine the past and present in order to offer radical visions of desirable or undesirable futures. We will also consider how this genre interrogates existential questions about what it means to be human, the nature of consciousness, the relationship between mind/body, thinking/being, and self/other, as well as planetary concerns confronting our species. Fictional works will be paired with theoretical readings that frame speculative and science fiction in relation to questions of gender, race, class, colonialism, bio-politics, human rights, as well as environmental and social justice. In addition to studying subgenres—such as Afrofuturism—we will explore speculative fiction as a critical mode of reading that theorizes other ways of being, knowing, and imagining.

GNSE 26313 Judaism, Medicine, and the Body
Instructor: Ranana Dine
For centuries the “Jewish doctor” has existed as an archetype, but is there such a thing as Jewish medicine? Does Judaism teach a distinct approach to the body, illness, and healing? And more significantly, why should religion have anything to do with one’s health today? In this course we will grapple with our assumptions regarding modern Western medicine by discussing topics in Jewish medical thought and ethics. We will study how Judaism – its texts, history, laws, and traditions – intersect with issues of science, medicine, and the body. In particular we will think about how a Jewish approach to medicine, and more broadly a religious approach, might complicate contemporary assumptions about the body and healing. We will also consider how Jewish bodies have been imagined and stereotyped, and think about how that might affect Jewish approaches to disease and medical ethics. This course will thus offer students a way to think about alternatives to assumptions about medicine, the body, and ethics in the secular West, which will be explored both in class materials and in personal projects. No prior work in Jewish studies, medical ethics, or religious studies necessary.

GNSE 27608 Women and Islam
Instructor: Maliha Chishti
This course is an introduction to the field of women, gender and Islam. We will examine the literature on Islamic legal, historical, Quranic and sacred textual constructs of women as well as critically explore the lived realities and experiences of Muslim women living in Muslim-majority societies and in the west. In centering the work of Muslim feminist scholars, students will gain an understanding of the contemporary debates around women’s rights, sexuality, roles, responsibilities and gender relations in the context of Islamic law and the hadith literature. The discursive constructions and social realities of Muslim women are critically examined through historic and literary representations, ethnographic accounts, human rights discourses, sexual politics and secular and Islamic feminism(s). Moreover, this course situates Muslim women as complex, multidimensional actors engaged in knowledge production and political and feminist struggles, as opposed to the oppressed, victim-centered images that have regained currency in the representation of Muslim women in the post 9/11 era.

GNSE 28498 Women, Development and Politics
Instructors: Maria Bautista and Maliha Chishti
This course will explore the dominant and emerging trends and debates in the field of women and international development. The major theoretical perspectives responding to global gender inequities will be explored alongside a wide range of themes impacting majority-world women, such as free market globalization, health and sexuality, race and representation, participatory development, human rights, the environment, and participation in politics. Course lectures will integrate policy and practitioner accounts and perspectives to reflect the strong influence development practice has in shaping and informing the field. Course materials will also include anti-racist, postcolonial, and post-development interruptions to dominant development discourse, specifically to challenge the underlying biases and assumptions of interventions that are predicated on transforming “them” into “us”. The material will also explore the challenges of women participating in politics and what are the consequences when they do or do not.  

GNSE 29003 Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts
Instructors: Alireza Doostdar and Hoda El Shakry
This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human—from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge. Enrollment by Consent Only (for both grads and undergrads). Students should send the instructors a paragraph explaining their interest and prior preparation or familiarity with the themes in the course.

GNSE 29117 Theater and Performance in Latin America
Instructor: Danielle Roper
What is performance? How has it been used in Latin America and the Caribbean? This course is an introduction to theatre and performance in Latin America and the Caribbean that will examine the intersection of performance and social life. While we will place particular emphasis on performance art, we will examine some theatrical works. We ask: How have embodied practice, theatre, and visual art been used to negotiate ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality? What is the role of performance in relation to systems of power? How has it negotiated dictatorship, military rule, and social memory? Ultimately, the aim of this course is to give students an overview of Latin American performance, including blackface performance, indigenous performance, as well as performance and activism.

 

WINTER 2024

GNSE 12103 Treating Trans-: Practices of Medicine, Practices of Theory
Instructor: Paula Martin
Medical disciplines from psychiatry to surgery have all attempted to identify and to treat gendered misalignment, while queer theory and feminisms have simultaneously tried to understand if and how trans- theories should be integrated into their respective intellectual projects. This course looks at the logics of the medical treatment of transgender (and trans- more broadly) in order to consider the mutual entanglement of clinical processes with theoretical ones. Over the quarter we will read ethnographic accounts and theoretical essays, listen to oral histories, discuss the intersections of race and ability with gender, and interrogate concepts like "material bodies" and "objective science". Primary course questions include: (1) How is “trans-” conceptualized, experienced, and lived? How has trans-studies distinguished itself from feminisms and queer theories? (2) What are the objects, processes, and problematics trans-medicine identifies and treats? How is “trans-” understood and operationalized through medical practices? (3) What meanings of health, power, knowledge, gender, and the body are utilized or defined by our authors? What relations can we draw between them?
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 13002 Introduction to Sexuality Studies
Instructor: Red Tremmel
This course introduces students to foundational concepts and emerging questions that animate the interdisciplinary field of sexuality studies. Using an intersectional and transnational lens, we will examine research, films and artistic practices to better understand the social, historical, and cultural dimensions of sex, sexuality, and the erotic. Zooming in and out, from the personal to the global and back again, students will gain a new understanding of how sexual fantasies, arousals, desires, and relations mutually constitute economic, political and ecological systems.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 15003 Gender and Sexuality in World Civ II
Instructors: Various
The second half of the civ sequence will extend our earlier interrogation of bodies, sex, and gender into an examination of sexualities and socialities. Through an encounter with theoretical texts, literature, and art, we will investigate a series of important critiques of biopower, or statist strategies for regulating bodies and controlling populations. These interventions include critiques of nationalism, colonialism, capitalism, and heteronormativity, all of which, as we will see, contribute to our understanding of sexuality. Throughout the course, feminist and queer critique will fundamentally frame our analyses of power, desire, and sexuality. PQ: GNSE 15002

GNSE 18124 Poverty, Crime, and Character: 18th Century and Now
Instructor: Jacob Biel
From highwaymen and vagrants to thieves and murderers, this course will look at fictional representations of crime and criminology from the 18th century and the present. We will ask how changing concepts of character, literary and legal, shape a society’s understanding of what criminality is and how it should be managed. Looking first at how the early British novel asks us to think about literary and personal character by way of crime and confession, we will then turn to the 20th- and 21st-century afterlives of these 18th-century crime narratives, attending to how configurations of moral constitution and personal identity—especially relating to class, gender, and race—become intertwined in more recent fiction and film. Syllabus may include fiction by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, William Godwin, James Hogg, Richard Wright, Patricia Highsmith, Philip K. Dick, and Jordy Rosenberg; films by Steven Spielberg, Bong Joon-ho, Horace Ové, Hirokazu Koreeda, and Richard Linklater; and theoretical texts by David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, Patrick Colquhoun, and recent criminologists.

GNSE 20007 Africa in the Middle East and the Middle East in Africa
Instructor: Katie Hickerson
From Mansa Musa’s Hajj in 1324 to the contemporary Afrobeats scene in Dubai, African and Middle Eastern societies share long histories of interconnection. This course examines these interconnections from the early modern to the contemporary era through a series of case studies ranging from traditions of exchange on the Swahili Coast, to the Ottoman Scramble for Africa, to the creation of a long-standing Lebanese diaspora in West Africa and a more recent Ethiopian Jewish community in Israel. Students will examine debates that animate this field of scholarship including conversations about race; histories of slavery and its legacies; conceptions of indigeneity, nativism, and settler colonialism; religious encounters; gender and society; shared and divergent experiences of European colonialism and struggles for independence; and transnational collective-building projects such as Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism. In addition to scholarship based on textual analysis, students will develop skills to investigate cultural sources such as music, photography, film, fashion, literature, and sports. No prior coursework in Middle Eastern or African studies is required. However, a background in African Civ, Islamic History and Society Civ, or Islamic Thought and Literature Civ is recommended.

GNSE 20117 Feminist Theory and Political Economy
Instructor: Sarah Johnson
This course has two related aims: to consider how the regulation of economic life—from the household to the global economy—has figured as an object of analysis within feminist thought; and to examine how this analysis, together with the conceptual resources of political economy, has informed feminist theories of domination, freedom, equality, rights, and justice. Readings may include works by Simone de Beauvoir, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Iris Marion Young, Catharine MacKinnon, Nancy Fraser, and Aihwa Ong. The course includes a substantial research requirement, which invites students to draw upon the insights of these theorists as they use archival sources to conduct their own analyses of economic life. Enrollment is limited to undergraduates who have completed their Social Sciences Core requirement.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20133 Trans Genre
Instructor: C. Riley Snorton
This course explores genres of writing and cultural production concerned with transgender life and politics. Students will engage genre's relationship to gender, as they will read across memoir, fiction, poetry, and criticism.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20555 The Sociology of Work
Instructor: Kristen Schilt
From the Great Depression to the Great Resignation, paid work has played a central role in American life. The average American spends 1/3 of their life at work – making it an area of the social world heavily examined by politicians, journalists, and social scientists. In this course, we will look at the structural and interpersonal dynamics of work to consider the questions of what makes a “good job” in America and who gets to decide? Our topics will include low-wage work, the stigma of “dirty jobs,” gender and racial inequality at work, physical and emotional labor on the job, side hustles and the gig economy, and life after retirement. Students will be required to write a 15 page research paper that draws on interview data they will collect over the quarter. No prior background in doing interviews is required!

GNSE 21404 More than Human Ethnography
Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
In this course we explore the growing field of multispecies ethnography. We will focus on examples of multi-species work emerging primarily from anthropology in recent decades, reading foundational texts on interspecies engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Deborah Bird Rose, Eduardo Kohn, Anna Tsing, and Augustin Fuéntes among many others. We will consider the role other species played in early ethnographic and archaeological work, will examine ethnoprimatological studies, and will contemplate recent examinations of “becoming with” other animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, ‘aliens,’ and mutants—encountering complex ecological kin relationships, examining naturalcultural borders, and examining the legacies of decolonial scholarship. The course is a discussion-based seminar, with significant time devoted both to understanding the theoretical potentials of multispecies work and its logistical or methodological aspects—querying how multispecies studies have been conducted in practice. As multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional methodologies, we will also couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, philosophers and at least one novelist.

GNSE 22182 Early Modern Loss and Longing
Instructor: Sarah Kunjummen
This course examines depictions of early modern desire and loss in genres including the essay, lyric, drama and fiction. The class will also have substantial engagement with affect theory as well as period theorizations (Neoplatonic accounts of desire, humoral accounts of melancholy, etc).

GNSE 22266 Coming of Age: Autobiography, Bildungsroman, and Memoir in Victorian Britain and its Empire
Instructor: Elaine Hadley
In this course, we will consider the broad generic category of “coming of age” stories that characterized the literary writing of the nineteenth century. Across several different kinds of writing, a focus on the growth and development of the child into adulthood became an obsessive focus. We will read autobiographies by Mill and Martineau, Bildungsroman by Bronte and Eliot, memoirs by Dickens but also lesser known figures: working class autodidacts, women in childbirth, colonial subjects. We will, along the way, learn more about Victorian childhood, the emergence of developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, and the socio-psychological “invention” of adolescence.

GNSE 22805 Cinematic Sicily: Exploring the Island and its Otherness through Film
Instructor: Veronica Vegna
This course explores portrayals of Sicily in Italian films and their relationship with the social, cultural, and political realities of the island. Students will analyze how these films construct the "otherness" of Sicily, enforcing or challenging stereotypes and preconceptions about the island and its people. This course will also examine Sicily's criminal underworld and its impact on society, as well as women’s emancipatory efforts and achievements against patriarchy and misogyny. The class will reflect on the historical and cultural context in which the films were made, giving students a deeper understanding of the ways in which cinema shapes our perception of Sicily in relation to the rest of Italy. The course will include films from different genres and references to TV series set in Sicily. Vocabulary to discuss formal cinematic elements will be provided throughout the quarter. Films will be available with subtitles in English and Italian.

GNSE 23138 Queer Modernism
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
This course examines the dramatic revisions in gender and sexuality that characterize Anglo-American modernity. Together, we will read literary texts by queer writers to investigate their role in shaping the period's emergent regimes of sex and gender. We'll consider queer revisions of these concepts for their effect on the broader social and political terrain of the early twentieth century and explore the intimate histories they made possible: What new horizons for kinship, care, affect, and the everyday reproduction of life did modernist ideas about sex and gender enable? At the same time, we will seek to "queer" modernism by shifting our attention away from high literary modernism and towards modernism's less-canonical margins. Our examination will center on queer lives relegated to the social and political margins-lives of exile or those cut short by various forms of dispossession. This class will double as an advanced introduction to queer theory, with a particular emphasis on literary criticism.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23150 “Dark Stairways of Desire”: Lusting beyond the Norm in Contemporary Catalan Literature
Instructor: Bel Olid
Although we can find a significant number of authors exploring queer desire and identities throughout the history of Catalan Literature (from lesbian scenes in Joanot Martorell’s "Tirant lo blanc" to expanding gender identities in Maria Aurèlia Capmany’s "Quim/Quima"), more recent Catalan Literature is blooming with queerness and non-normative lust. This course will give an overview of contemporary Catalan works influenced by feminist and queer debates from the seventies on. Beginning with renowned poet Maria Mercè Marçal’s only novel, "The Passion According to Rennée Vivien," winner of several of the most prestigious literary awards for Catalan Literature, we will go on to discover 21st-century works by Eva Baltasar and Anna Punsoda. We will also read poems, short stories and excerpts from authors such as Maria Sevilla, Mireia Calafell, Raquel Santanera, Sebastià Portell, Sil Bel and Ian Bermúdez, among others.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 24520 Postcolonial Openings: World Literature after 1955
Instructor: Darrel Chia
This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey the trajectories and self-criticisms within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie).

GNSE 24526 Forms of Autobiography in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Instructor: Christine Fouirnaies
This course examines the innovative, creative forms autobiography has taken in the last one hundred years in literature. We will study closely works written between 1933 and 2013 that are exceptional for the way they challenge, subvert and invigorate the autobiographical genre. From unpublished sketches to magazine essays and full-length books, we will see autobiography take many forms and engage with multiple genres and media. These include biography, memoir, fiction, literary criticism, travel literature, the graphic novel and photography. Producing various mutations of the autobiographical genre, these works address some of the same concerns: the self, truth, memory, authenticity, agency and testimony. We will complement discussions of these universal issues with material and historical considerations, examining how the works first appeared and were received. Autobiography will prove a privileged site for probing constructions of family narratives, identity politics and public personas. The main authors studied are Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, Marjane Satrapi and W.G. Sebald.

GNSE 25702 Climate Justice
Instructor: Sarah Fredericks
Climate injustice includes the disproportionate effects of climate change on people who benefit little from the activities that cause it, generally the poor, people of color, and people marginalized in other ways. Given the complex economic, physical, social, and political realities of climate change, what might climate justice entail? This course explores this complex question through an examination of classical and contemporary theories of justice; the gendered, colonial, and racial dimensions of climate change; and climate justice movements.

GNSE 27605 US Legal History
Instructor: Amy Stanley
This course focuses on the connections between law and society in modern America. It explores how legal doctrines and constitutional rules have defined individual rights and social relations in both the public and private spheres. It also examines political struggles that have transformed American law. Topics to be addressed include the meaning of rights; the regulation of property, work, race, and sexual relations; civil disobedience; and legal theory as cultural history. Readings include legal cases, judicial rulings, short stories, and legal and historical scholarship.

GNSE 29000 The American Culture Wars
Instructor: William Scultz
Should we tear down statues of Confederate soldiers? Should religious institutions be exempt from public health regulations? How (if at all) should we regulate abortion? These questions are only the latest battlefields in the “culture wars,” the long-running conversation—or, more often, shouting match—about how Americans ought to live. This seminar will explore how Americans have wrestled with questions of morality and national identity since the country’s founding. Two questions will drive our discussion. First, why do certain issues become the subject of fierce cultural conflict? Second, do these conflicts enrich or undermine American democracy?

 

SPRING 2024

GNSE 12121 Contemporary Feminist Politics: From the Sex Wars to Beyonce
Instructor: Rhiannon Love Auriemma
This course offers a survey of feminist politics and texts on feminist action from the 1980s to now. We look to texts and media from feminist scholars, activists, and scholar-activists in order to tackle questions of what feminism is and should be in theory and practice. This course will focus on key contentions and debates amongst feminists on questions of politics and culture, demonstrating that disagreement is characteristic and generative for feminist politics. With this in mind, we will cover topics such as the Sex Wars, the rise of Third Wave Feminism, #MeToo, and Beyonce in order to trace the contours of disagreement in our feminist present. Readings include works from bell hooks, Susan Faludi, Roxane Gay, Sara Ahmed, and Judith Butler.
This course counts as a Foundations course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 15005 Gender and Sexuality in World Civ III: South Asia
Instructor: Zoya Sameen
Course description to come
PQ: GNSE 15002-15003

GNSE 16004 Jewish Civilization III - Mothers and Motherhood in Modern Jewish Culture
Instructor: Jessica Kirzane
Jewish Civilization is a three-quarter sequence that explores the development of Jewish culture and tradition from its ancient beginnings through its rabbinic and medieval transformations to its modern manifestations. Through investigation of primary texts—biblical, Talmudic, philosophical, mystical, historical, documentary, and literary—students will acquire a broad overview of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness while reflecting in greater depth on major themes, ideas, and events in Jewish history. The Spring course in 2022 will focus on mothers and motherhood in modern Jewish culture. From sentimentalized keepers of Jewish tradition to objects of ridicule burdened by stereotypes of overbearing, guilt-inducing behavior, Jewish mothers hold a prominent role in Jewish self-representations. Writing alongside or against these stereotypes, Jewish mothers themselves have struggled with the obligations and expectations of Jewish motherhood. Engaging with a variety of literary, theological, historical, and pop culture texts, this class explores Jewish feminisms in relation to motherhood, Jewish fictions of motherhood, and the role of motherhood in Jewish religious life and thought. This course includes material from a variety of different contexts for modern Jewish life, but places particular emphasis on American Jewish history and culture.

GNSE 16404 Criminal, Police, and Citizen in Latin America
Instructor: Keegan Boyer
Crime and policing are intensely debated today around the world, but perhaps nowhere are these debates felt more sharply than in Latin America, the site of both high rates of crime and violence and widespread distrust of the police and criminal justice institutions. This course delves into the history of these issues in the region. In the process, it sheds light on broader themes of Latin American history from the late colonial period to the present day. As the course shows through topics ranging from crimes against honor, to the policing of street vending, to the drug war, crime and policing in Latin America have been crucial spaces for the construction and contestation of social and legal hierarchies, the voicing of political protest and social critique, and the making and unmaking of citizenship. Through the use of diverse readings, including primary sources such as court records, satirical poems, and blockbuster films, students will trace how ideas of crime, and of the role of the state in attempting to define it and respond to it, changed over time with broader social, economic, and political developments. In doing so, they will examine how crime and policing have intersected with class, race, and gender, and how debates over crime and the practices of policing have shaped the boundaries of citizenship.

GNSE 18120 Contemporary Fiction
Instructor: Lily Scherlis
How do we approach literature that’s being made at the same time we’re studying it? Keeping an eye on how factors including race, gender, class, prestige, corporate structures, and social media inflect how books get made, read, and acclaimed, we will read “mainstream” “literary” hits and cult darlings of the past five years, likely including Sally Rooney, Brandon Taylor, Torrey Peters, Otessa Moshfegh, Ling Ma, and Helen DeWitt; as well as experimental/small-press fiction. This course explores how literary fiction is embedded in a complex economic ecosystem; we will analyze how recent literature reflects, dissents from, or dodges the politics of the publishing industry. In doing so, we cover theories of cultural production from the Frankfurt School through the present, and recent popular literary criticism. Throughout, we aim to develop strategies for keeping up to date with the landscape of literature. Course assignments will include the chance to develop a review essay for a popular audience.

GNSE 20130 Queer Theory
Instructor: Kris Trujillo
This course aims to offer a foundation in queer theoretical texts. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term “queer” and explore the contours of the field’s major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory’s emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis. Reading texts by key figures like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lorde, Bersani, Crimp, Warner, Halperin, Dinshaw, Edelman, Anzaldúa, Ferguson, and Muñoz in addition to prominent issues of journals like GLQ, differences, and Signs, we will approach these pieces as historical artifacts and place these theorists within the communities of intellectuals, activists, and artists out of which their work emerged. We will, thus, imagine queer theory as a literary practice of mournful and militant devotion, trace queer theory’s relationship to feminism and critical race theory, critique the hagiographic tendency of the academic star system, and interrogate the assumptions of queer theory’s secularity.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20131 Gendering Slavery
Instructor: Mary Hicks
This reading seminar will introduce students to the key questions, methods, and theories of the burgeoning field of gendered histories of slavery. Global in scope, but with a focus on the early modern Atlantic world, we will explore a range of primary and secondary texts from various slave societies. Assigned monographs will cover a multitude of topics including women and law, sexualities, kinship, and reproduction, and the intersection of race, labor, and market economies. In addition to examining historical narratives, students will discuss the ethical and methodological implications of reading and writing histories of violence, erasure, and domination. Learning to work within and against the limits imposed by hegemonic forms of representation, the fragmentary nature of the archive, and the afterlives of slavery, this course will examine how masculinity and femininity remade and were remade by bondage.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20134 Special Topics in Criticism and Theory: Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Sianne Ngai
An introduction to classic texts in feminist and queer literary criticism.
This course counts as a Problems course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 20580 Health and Society
Instructor: Linda Waite
A long and healthy life is a widely sought after human goal.  But not everyone has equal chances of achieving this goal.  This course focuses on the role played by society in differential access to physical, psychological, cognitive health and well-being. We will discuss the role of parental characteristics and childhood circumstances in later-life health, differences in health and well-being for men and women, for racial and ethnic groups, by sexual minority status, by characteristics of our neighborhoods and communities, and by regions or countries.  We will examine the role of social policies.  The format will be lectures and a series of short exercises.

GNSE 21400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the proliferation of “new social movements” such as feminism and gay liberation, this seminar explores the key debates around which gender and sexuality were articulated as tenacious but open structures of power subject to political critique and social transformation. The relatively stable yet dynamic character of what Gayle Rubin in 1975 famously called “the sex/gender system” raises basic questions of structure and event: (1) how are systemic relations of domination and rule historically constituted and sustained over time?; and (2) how can that which is regularly reproduced be not only momentarily interrupted, but fundamentally altered through both quotidian and extraordinary forms of action and worlding? The unexpected character of the new social movements called for a radical rethinking of structures and their transformation. Haunted by unpredictable forms of resistance, heteropatriarchal structures challenged theorists and activists to forge new frameworks of critique that refigured basic concepts of power, subjectivity, and agency. These frameworks are examined with an eye to how racialized sexuality and gender are created and contested in the context of modern biopolitical capitalism and its constitution of naturalized conceptions of rule. Undergraduates by Consent Only

GNSE 21771 Three Comedies of Sexual Revolution
Instructors: Nathan Tarcov and Glenn Most
This seminar will discuss three comedies of sexual revolution from three different times and places. Aristophanes’s Assemblywomen recounts how under the leadership of the able Praxagora the women of Athens take over the Assembly and legislate a new regime in which private property is replaced by communism and sexual equity is achieved in favor of the old and unattractive at the expense of the young and attractive. Machiavelli’s Mandragola dramatizes the tricks by which young Callimaco manages with the aid of the trickster parasite Ligurio to have sex with Lucrezia, the beautiful young wife of the elderly lawyer Nicomaco, with the consent of both her and her husband, ushering in a new regime in which all are satisfied. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure Angelo the interim duke of Vienna institutes a repressive sexual regime in which the brothels are closed and extramarital sex is a capital crime. What might we learn about sexual relations from these diverse plays? Why are they comedies? Undergraduates by consent of instructor.

GNSE 23154 Is It Ethical to Have Children?
Instructor: Kristi Del Vecchio
Climate change is not just an urgent environmental crisis for scientists, engineers, and policy makers: it is a moral problem that also informs individual and intimate aspects of human life, including choices about reproduction and parenting. For example, a 2018 survey published in the New York Times found that young adults in the U.S. are having fewer children than they would otherwise prefer, in part due to concerns about climate change and overpopulation. In this course, we examine the moral dimensions of having and raising children in an era shaped by climate change, looking closely at two main questions: 1) Is it ethical to have children in light of the world that the next generation will inherit, which may include more extreme weather events, unvoluntary human migrations, diminished access to resources, and heightened insecurity? 2) Is it ethical to have children in the context of the affluent West, where consumptive human populations disproportionately contribute to the effects of climate change that impact the world’s most vulnerable? We will examine various points of view on these questions, engaging material from the disciplines of environmental studies and ethics, science and technology studies, and religious and philosophical ethics. Responses from feminist, queer, Indigenous, Black, and religiously diverse authors (and intersections therein) will shape our course readings and discussions.
This class counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23155 Reproductive citizens: sex, work, and embodiment
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we focus on the centrality of debates around women’s reproductive capacity in shaping the culture of modernity in the U.S. in the first few decades of the twentieth century. We look at the way that feminist politics, in conjunction with broader developments in industrial capitalist society, disrupted traditional pathways of reproduction, as these have revolved around women’s crucial role in sustaining the biological family and the home. We will read fiction, essays, and political tracts around “women’s work” and working class women, the birth control movement, feminist emancipation, marriage and the politics of the home, the rise of consumer culture, and the demands placed on both Black and white women during this period in reproducing “the race.” Most generally, we will focus on texts that both trouble and shore up motherhood as the central means of reproducing the biological life and social fabric of American culture. And we will likewise be interested in writers and political figures that sought to dramatically alter or even dismantle the reproductive social order altogether.
This course counts as a Concepts course for GNSE majors.

GNSE 23702 Sexual Health: Identity, Behavior, and Outcomes
Instructor: David Moskowitz
Sexual health is a growing component of public health outreach. The goal of this course is to provide students with a foundational understanding of sexual health from a public health perspective. Through participation in this course, students will increase their knowledge about the history of sexual health promotion in the public health sphere. They will delve into sexual and gender identity construction and explore identity-behavioral expressions. They will critically examine and discuss common sexual health issues addressed by public health practitioners, their epidemiology, and their underlying social determinants; a global health lens will be applied to such examinations. Additionally, recognition of the key methodological considerations in the measurement of sexual behavior and sexual health outcomes will be elucidated (including strengths and limitations of various methodological approaches –quantitative, qualitative, clinical, and biomedical). By the completion of the course, students should be able to demonstrate knowledge and application of key theoretical foundations of sexual health promotion and sexual health behavior change and be able to promote sexual health messages through marketing and dissemination. From a policy perspective, students can expect an increased knowledge about issues related to social and legislative policy analyses, their applications, and implications.

GNSE 23750 Race, Gender and Religion in Medieval and Early Modern France
Instructor: Pauline Goul
From the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, France sees the development of several genres and literary movements that are foundational to the French literary tradition: the epic, the fable, the narrative genre, the essay, poetry, tragedy, comedy, and the fable are the various genres of premodern France that we will study. What was France at the time? Most of these texts are not originally written in a version of French you would recognize easily. How to build a nation, and how to live together, were also key questions for medieval and early modern writers. Some of the concepts developed in those texts undeniably led to a version of France that made Versailles but also the Code Noir – which defined the conditions of slavery in the French colonial empire – possible. In addition to race, gender, and class, we will discuss the themes that were important to premodern French authors and cultures, not least of them medievalism, Renaissance, and classicism. What makes these texts classics, and what do they still have to say for our time?

GNSE 24299 Topics in Medical Anthropology: Troubling Adolescence
Instructor: Paula Martin
Many theories of “adolescence” have often emphasized it as a development period of rapid change, risk taking, and experimentation. This course will take on some of key health-related concerns of adolescence, such as mental health (e.g. depression, anxiety) and risk behaviors (e.g. substance use, sexuality) asking after the phenomenological experience of such concerns as well as exploring their cultural specify. Furthermore, this course will review key historical and development frameworks for understanding “adolescence,” reading them alongside anthropological and queer theories of temporality. Ultimately, the course asks, how do the troubles of adolescence play out in different contexts? And what happens if we trouble the concept of adolescence itself?

GNSE 25020 Opera Across Media
Instructor: Martha Feldman
Over the course of the last 120 years, opera and cinema have been sounded and seen together again and again. Where opera is commonly associated with extravagant performance and production, cinema is popularly associated with realism. Yet their encounter not only proves these assumptions wrong but produces some extraordinary third kinds--media hybrids. It also produces some extraordinary love affairs. Thomas Edison wanted a film of his to be “a grand opera,” and Federico Fellini and Woody Allen wanted opera to saturate their films. Thinking about these mutual attractions, “Opera across Media” explores different operatic and cinematic repertories as well as other media forms. Among films to be studied are Pabst’s Threepenny Opera (1931), Visconti’s Senso (1954), Powell and Pressburger’s Tales of Hoffmann (1951), Zeffirelli’s La traviata (1981), DeMille’s Carmen (1915), Losey’s Don Giovanni (1979), Bergman’s The Magic Flute (1975), and Fellini’s E la nave va (1983). No prior background in music performance, theory, or notation is needed. Students may write papers based on their own skills and interests relevant to the course. Required work includes attendance at all screenings and classes; weekly postings on Canvas about readings and viewings; attendances at a Met HD broadcast and a Lyric Opera live opera; a short “think piece” midway through the course; and a final term paper of 8-10 pages.

GNSE 25403 The Bible in U.S. Politics: The Use and Abuse of Sacred Texts in the Public Sphere
Instructor: Doug Hoffer
People across the political spectrum continue to cite the Bible to justify their viewpoints. Black Lives Matter protestors carried signs citing scriptural support for the rights of African Americans to life and justice, while some of those who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6th first marched around their state capitols in recreation of biblical Israel’s circling of the doomed city Jericho. How can the same book serve the political ends of such ideologically distinct movements? In this course, we will explore the variety of ways in which the Bible, especially the Christian New Testament, informs contemporary political discourse. We will discuss what the Bible is and where it comes from, and how an interpreter’s social location and culturally and historical-bound assumptions shape their interpretation. We will build upon this foundation by examining several contentious political issues in which the Bible is commonly invoked, including abortion, immigration, gender and sexuality, and gun rights. We will analyze the key passages used by supporters of various policy positions to support their claims, situating these texts in their original contexts and highlighting the historical distance that problematizes their use today. Prior familiarity with biblical literature is not required.

GNSE 26504 Renaissance Demonology
Instructor: Armando Maggi
In this course we analyze the complex concept of demonology according to early modern European culture from a theological, historical, philosophical, and literary point of view. The term 'demon' in the Renaissance encompasses a vast variety of meanings. Demons are hybrids. They are both the Christian devils, but also synonyms for classical deities, and Neo-platonic spiritual beings. As far as Christian theology is concerned, we read selections from Augustine's and Thomas Aquinas's treatises, some complex exorcisms written in Italy, and a recent translation of the infamous "Malleus maleficarum," the most important treatise on witch-hunt. We pay close attention to the historical evolution of the so-called witch-craze in Europe through a selection of the best secondary literature on this subject, with special emphasis on Michel de Certeau's "The Possession at Loudun." We also study how major Italian and Spanish women mystics, such as Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi and Teresa of Avila, approach the issue of demonic temptation and possession. As far as Renaissance Neoplatonic

GNSE 29610 Pale Fire
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
This course is an intensive reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov.

 

Graduate Course Descriptions

AUTUMN 2023

GNSE 31000 Cultural Psychology
Instructor: Richard Shweder
There is a substantial portion of the psychological nature of human beings that is neither homogeneous nor fixed across time and space. At the heart of the discipline of cultural psychology is the tenet of psychological pluralism, which states that the study of "normal" psychology is the study of multiple psychologies and not just the study of a single or uniform fundamental psychology for all peoples of the world. Research findings in cultural psychology thus raise provocative questions about the integrity and value of alternative forms of subjectivity across cultural groups. In this course we analyze the concept of "culture" and examine ethnic and cross-cultural variations in mental functioning with special attention to the cultural psychology of emotions, self, moral judgment, categorization, and reasoning.

GNSE 32020 Alternative Feminisms: Gender, Agency, And Liberation in the Middle East
Instructor: Sevda Numanbayraktaroglu
This course critically examines gender, agency, and liberation in the Middle East. The course will begin with a discussion of human agency, its relation to sociocultural context, and the feminist literature on the issues of agency, resistance, and liberation. Then, we will explore these relationships in non-Western contexts by drawing examples from Turkey, Iran, and Northern Syria. In the cases of Turkey and Iran, we will focus on the feminist movements and women’s collective actions for the right to wear and take off the headscarf. In the case of Northern Syria, we will explore the agencies of Kurdish female guerrillas and their conceptions of empowerment. In each case, we will focus on the moral and ethical principles that guide women’s choices and trace their sociohistorical foundations.

GNSE 32323 The Family in the Greek and Roman World
Instructor: Georgios Tsolakis
This course examines how family was conceptualized and manifested in the Greek and Roman world. In this class, we will begin by examining key terms related to family (household, kinship, ancestors, descendants) and scholarly approaches to familial studies under the light of different theoretical perspectives. Through the examination of written sources (literary texts, inscriptions, and papyri) and archaeological evidence, we will adopt a thematic approach exploring the ways in which family intersected with several fields of public and domestic life, such as law, adoption, heirship, religion, rituals, education, politics, and public honors.

GNSE 32333 Cassandras: Truth-Telling in Times of Crisis
Instructor: Demetra Kasimis
In public life, why and how are some people accepted as truth-tellers while others are not? Is truth simply a problem of and for “correct" reasoning? What assumptions about argumentation and evidence go unexplored in this way of framing the problem? What if truth were a problem of truth-telling instead? When and how do social, racial, and gender hierarchies authorize received understandings of a (credible) truth-teller? What is credible telling usually thought to sound like? What are the conditions for listening and hearing the truth? To think through these questions, we take as a lens the archetype of Cassandra, the babbling prophetess of classical Greek myth and tragedy doomed not to be believed. Cassandra has served as a resource and source of inspiration for a range of critical thinkers, including but not limited to theorists, feminists, poets, and novelists. What is a "Cassandra"? Does her "deranged" way of seeing the world - her prophetic speech - disorient or destabilize? We will consider how, in her different representations, Cassandra places questions of language, patriarchy, and sexual violence at the center of general discussions of credibility and critique. Readings range from ancient Greek thought to 21st century theory.

GNSE 33805 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Politics in the United States
Instructor: Andrew Proctor
This course surveys academic research on sexuality and gender in American politics. Drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives, it focuses on key arguments and debates about how politics shapes and is shaped by sexuality and gender relations. We will pay particular attention to the development of sexuality and gender identity as analytic and political concepts; the role of the State and political institutions to the formation of sexuality and gender; the relationship between social movements, counter-movements, and political parties; the political behavior and attitudes of LGBT people; and the ways in which intersectional inequalities structure LGBT politics.

GNSE 34103 Nature and the Natural in the Middle Ages
Instructor: Daisy Delogu
In this course we will undertake a study of nature and ideas about what is “natural” centered around three main axes, and will adopt a variety of relevant critical perspectives (e.g., ecocriticism, studies of gender and sexuality, political theory) to support our analyses. First, we will explore nature as the created world of which humans are a part (as one of God’s creations), yet from which they also stand apart (as sovereign caretakers). Second, we will examine how the diffusion of Aristotelian works (notably the Politics) in the later Middle Ages provided a justificatory framework for social and political hierarchies and practices of economic exploitation. Third, we will consider the intersection of nature with gender, sexuality, and reproduction, a topic complicated by the fact that Nature is itself represented, in allegorical terms, as a woman.

GNSE 36080 Technologies Of The Body
Instructor: Melanie Jeske
From models and measures to imaging technologies and genomic sequencing, technologies have profoundly shaped how we know and understand human bodies, health, and disease. Drawing on foundational and contemporary science and technology studies scholarship, this class will interrogate technologies of the body: how they are made, the ways in which they have changed understandings of the human condition, their impact on individual and collective identities, and the interests and values built into their very design. Course readings will examine how technologies render bodies knowable and also construct them in particular ways. We will also focus on how technologies incorporate, and reinforce, ideas about human difference. Students will conduct an independent, quarter-long research project analyzing a biomedical technology of their choice. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and explain the social, political and economic factors that shape the design and production of biomedical technologies, as well as the impact of these technologies on biomedicine and the social world more broadly. This course provides students with an opportunity to conduct a quarter-long research project, using a biomedical technology as a case study. Students will be introduced to foundational and cutting-edge scholarship in science and technology studies, and will use this scholarship to conduct their independent research.

GNSE 37608 Women and Islam
Instructor: Maliha Chishti
This course is an introduction to the field of women, gender and Islam. We will examine the literature on Islamic legal, historical, Quranic and sacred textual constructs of women as well as critically explore the lived realities and experiences of Muslim women living in Muslim-majority societies and in the west. In centering the work of Muslim feminist scholars, students will gain an understanding of the contemporary debates around women’s rights, sexuality, roles, responsibilities and gender relations in the context of Islamic law and the hadith literature. The discursive constructions and social realities of Muslim women are critically examined through historic and literary representations, ethnographic accounts, human rights discourses, sexual politics and secular and Islamic feminism(s). Moreover, this course situates Muslim women as complex, multidimensional actors engaged in knowledge production and political and feminist struggles, as opposed to the oppressed, victim-centered images that have regained currency in the representation of Muslim women in the post 9/11 era.

GNSE 39117 Theater and Performance in Latin America
Instructor: Danielle Roper
What is performance? How has it been used in Latin America and the Caribbean? This course is an introduction to theatre and performance in Latin America and the Caribbean that will examine the intersection of performance and social life. While we will place particular emphasis on performance art, we will examine some theatrical works. We ask: How have embodied practice, theatre, and visual art been used to negotiate ideologies of race, gender, and sexuality? What is the role of performance in relation to systems of power? How has it negotiated dictatorship, military rule, and social memory? Ultimately, the aim of this course is to give students an overview of Latin American performance, including blackface performance, indigenous performance, as well as performance and activism.

GNSE 41303 Gender, Capital, and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation
Instructor: Tristan Schweiger
Today, Jane Austen is one of the most famous (perhaps the most famous), most widely read, and most beloved of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British novelists. In the two hundred years since her authorial career, her novels have spawned countless imitations, homages, parodies, films, and miniseries – not to mention a thriving “Janeite” fan culture. For just as long, her novels have been the objects of sustained attention by literary critics, theorists, and historians. For example, feminist scholars have long been fascinated by Austen for her treatments of feminine agency, sociality, and desire. Marxists read her novels for the light they shed on an emergent bourgeoisie on the eve of industrialization. And students of the “rise of the novel” in English are often drawn to Austen as a landmark case – an innovator of new styles of narration and a visionary as to the potentials of the form. This course will offer an in-depth examination of Austen, her literary corpus, and her cultural reception as well as a graduate-level introduction to several important schools of critical and theoretical methodology. We will read all six of Austen’s completed novels in addition to criticism spanning feminism, historicism, Marxism, queer studies, postcolonialism, and psychoanalysis. Readings may include pieces by Shoshana Felman, Frances Ferguson, William Galperin, Deidre Lynch, D.A. Miller, Edward Said, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Raymond Williams.

GNSE 41304 Medieval Romance
Instructor: Mark Miller
Medieval romance is one of the main ancestors of fantasy and SF. This course examines the speculative work of fantasy in medieval romance's explorations of aesthetics, desire, and politics.

GNSE 42035 The Acts of Paul and Thecla and the Pastoral Epistles
Instructor: Margaret Mitchell
In the early second century there were bitter battles over the legacy of Paul and his preserved letters in terms of gender, sexuality, family life, asceticism, church administration, and theological vision. We can see these well by reading the narrative text The Acts of Paul and Thecla alongside the “Pastoral Epistles” (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus), the former championing a female, cross-dressing ascetic Christ-missionary and the latter, in pseudepigraphical epistolary texts written in the dead Paul’s name, insisting on patriarchal family life and women’s adherence to traditional roles. In this course we shall read both sets of texts carefully in Greek, noting points of similarity and contestation, and test various models of how these sources—each of which seeks to “fix” the Pauline legacy in its own way—are related to one another. Time allowing, we shall also look at the later reception of the cult of Saint Thecla and late antique interpretations of “the apostle,” Paul, on these issues of sexuality and gender roles, and their perduring influence in contemporary debates. PQ: At least one year of Greek, or equivalent.

GNSE 49003 Islam Beyond the Human: Spirits, Demons, Devils, and Ghosts
Instructors: Alireza Doostdar and Hoda El Shakry
This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human—from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge. Enrollment by Consent Only (for both grads and undergrads). Students should send the instructors a paragraph explaining their interest and prior preparation or familiarity with the themes in the course.

GNSE 50102 The Problem with Theory
Instructor: Leah Feldman
This graduate course offers a critical introduction to comparative theoretical methods by attending to theory’s political and epistemological antagonisms and how they have shaped the ways in which we read literature and art. The seminar begins by tracing critical theory’s historical contours—from the high theory boom of the 70s and 80s and the rise of postcolonial, performance, and queer theory in the 90s and 2000s to contemporary critical theory in a comparative context. The course thus attends to problems in thinking about critical theory’s scope, boundaries, and canons, as not only as a mode of doing thought but as a site for disciplinary and institutional critique. The seminar explores how theory has both emerged from and animates the worldliness of literature and art as textured imprints of historicity, imagination, and experience across social, cultural and political contexts.

GNSE 50112 Seminar: Health and Society
Instructor: Linda Waite
A long and healthy life is a widely sought after human goal.  But not everyone has equal chances of achieving this goal.  This course focuses on the role played by society in differential access to physical, psychological, cognitive health and well-being. We will discuss the role of parental characteristics and childhood circumstances in later-life health, differences in health and well-being for men and women, for racial and ethnic groups, by characteristics of our neighborhoods and communities, and by regions or countries.  Each class meeting we will read and discuss three or four journal articles or sections of a book, with class participants presenting each reading, summarizing it, and then critiquing it.  The class will then discuss.  We will add to and subtract from the readings to match the interests of participants on each topic; the syllabus will list readings as a starting point for this process. PQ: Some Social Science Background

GNSE 62705 Colloquium: Approaches To Atlantic Slavery Studies
Instructor: Raushana Johnson
We are witnessing an outpouring of scholarship on Atlantic slavery even as some historians are increasingly critical of the archival method. This course uses select theoretical readings and recent monographs and articles to examine this conceptual and methodological debate. Topics to be examined include histories of women, gender, and sexuality; dispossession and resistance; urban and migration history; and interdisciplinary and speculative techniques.

 

WINTER 2024

GNSE 31404 More than Human Ethnography
Instructor: Ella Wilhoit
In this course we explore the growing field of multispecies ethnography. We will focus on examples of multi-species work emerging primarily from anthropology in recent decades, reading foundational texts on interspecies engagements, exploitations, and dependencies by Deborah Bird Rose, Eduardo Kohn, Anna Tsing, and Augustin Fuéntes among many others. We will consider the role other species played in early ethnographic and archaeological work, will examine ethnoprimatological studies, and will contemplate recent examinations of “becoming with” other animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, ‘aliens,’ and mutants—encountering complex ecological kin relationships, examining naturalcultural borders, and examining the legacies of decolonial scholarship. The course is a discussion-based seminar, with significant time devoted both to understanding the theoretical potentials of multispecies work and its logistical or methodological aspects—querying how multispecies studies have been conducted in practice. As multispecies and posthumanist approaches encourage a decentering of traditional methodologies, we will also couple ethnographic examples with literature by biologists, philosophers and at least one novelist.

GNSE 34520 Postcolonial Openings: World Literature after 1955
Instructor: Darrel Chia
This course familiarizes students with the perspectives, debates, and attitudes that characterize the contemporary field of postcolonial theory, with critical attention to how its interdisciplinary formation contributes to reading literary works. What are the claims made on behalf of literary texts in orienting us to other lives and possibilities, and in registering the experiences of displacement under global capitalism? To better answer these questions, we read recent scholarship that engages the field in conversations around gender, affect, climate change, and democracy, to think about the impulses that animate the field, and to sketch new directions. We survey the trajectories and self-criticisms within the field, looking at canonical critics (Fanon, Said, Bhabha, Spivak), as well as reading a range of literary and cinematic works by writers like Jean Rhys, E.M. Forster, Mahasweta Devi, Derek Walcott, Arundhati Roy, and Salman Rushdie).

GNSE 34526 Forms of Autobiography in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
Instructor: Christine Fouirnaies
This course examines the innovative, creative forms autobiography has taken in the last one hundred years in literature. We will study closely works written between 1933 and 2013 that are exceptional for the way they challenge, subvert and invigorate the autobiographical genre. From unpublished sketches to magazine essays and full-length books, we will see autobiography take many forms and engage with multiple genres and media. These include biography, memoir, fiction, literary criticism, travel literature, the graphic novel and photography. Producing various mutations of the autobiographical genre, these works address some of the same concerns: the self, truth, memory, authenticity, agency and testimony. We will complement discussions of these universal issues with material and historical considerations, examining how the works first appeared and were received. Autobiography will prove a privileged site for probing constructions of family narratives, identity politics and public personas. The main authors studied are Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Roland Barthes, Paul Auster, Doris Lessing, Marjane Satrapi and W.G. Sebald.

GNSE 36080 Technologies of the Bodies
Instructor: Melanie Jeske
From models and measures to imaging technologies and genomic sequencing, technologies have profoundly shaped how we know and understand human bodies, health, and disease. Drawing on foundational and contemporary science and technology studies scholarship, this class will interrogate technologies of the body: how they are made, the ways in which they have changed understandings of the human condition, their impact on individual and collective identities, and the interests and values built into their very design. Course readings will examine how technologies render bodies knowable and also construct them in particular ways. We will also focus on how technologies incorporate, and reinforce, ideas about human difference. Students will conduct an independent, quarter-long research project analyzing a biomedical technology of their choice. By the end of this course, students will be able to identify and explain the social, political and economic factors that shape the design and production of biomedical technologies, as well as the impact of these technologies on biomedicine and the social world more broadly. This course provides students with an opportunity to conduct a quarter-long research project, using a biomedical technology as a case study. Students will be introduced to foundational and cutting-edge scholarship in science and technology studies, and will use this scholarship to conduct their independent research.

GNSE 37605 US Legal History
Instructor: Amy Stanley
This course focuses on the connections between law and society in modern America. It explores how legal doctrines and constitutional rules have defined individual rights and social relations in both the public and private spheres. It also examines political struggles that have transformed American law. Topics to be addressed include the meaning of rights; the regulation of property, work, race, and sexual relations; civil disobedience; and legal theory as cultural history. Readings include legal cases, judicial rulings, short stories, and legal and historical scholarship.

GNSE 42182 Early Modern Loss and Longing
Instructor: Sarah Kunjummen
This course examines depictions of early modern desire and loss in genres including the essay, lyric, drama and fiction. The class will also have substantial engagement with affect theory as well as period theorizations (Neoplatonic accounts of desire, humoral accounts of melancholy, etc).

GNSE 42350 George Eliot's Fiction and Non-Fiction
Instructor: Jo McDonagh
This course will examine the works of George Eliot in their intellectual and print contexts. We will look at selected works from across her oeuvre including some of her translations from German, her journalism, short fiction, poetry and novels, as well as letters and journals. During the course we will emphasize her immersion in contemporary debates by considering her exchanges with friends and associates, people like, for example the writer, George Henry Lewes, the evolutionary philosopher and biologist, Herbert Spencer, feminists such as Barbara Bodichon and Edith Simcox, and legal theorist, Henry Sumner Maine.

GNSE 47702 Queer Modernism
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
This course examines the dramatic revisions in gender and sexuality that characterize Anglo-American modernity. Together, we will read literary texts by queer writers to investigate their role in shaping the period's emergent regimes of sex and gender. We'll consider queer revisions of these concepts for their effect on the broader social and political terrain of the early twentieth century and explore the intimate histories they made possible: What new horizons for kinship, care, affect, and the everyday reproduction of life did modernist ideas about sex and gender enable? At the same time, we will seek to "queer" modernism by shifting our attention away from high literary modernism and towards modernism's less-canonical margins. Our examination will center on queer lives relegated to the social and political margins-lives of exile or those cut short by various forms of dispossession. This class will double as an advanced introduction to queer theory, with a particular emphasis on literary criticism.

GNSE 62705 Approaches to Atlantic Slavery
Instructor: Rashauna Johnson
We are witnessing an outpouring of scholarship on Atlantic slavery even as some historians are increasingly critical of the archival method. This course uses select theoretical readings and recent monographs and articles to examine this conceptual and methodological debate. Topics to be examined include histories of women, gender, and sexuality; dispossession and resistance; urban and migration history; and interdisciplinary and speculative techniques.

 

SPRING 2024

GNSE 31400 Advanced Theories of Gender and Sexuality
Instructor: Linda Zerilli
Beginning with the fraught legacy of the New Left and the proliferation of “new social movements” such as feminism and gay liberation, this seminar explores the key debates around which gender and sexuality were articulated as tenacious but open structures of power subject to political critique and social transformation. The relatively stable yet dynamic character of what Gayle Rubin in 1975 famously called “the sex/gender system” raises basic questions of structure and event: (1) how are systemic relations of domination and rule historically constituted and sustained over time?; and (2) how can that which is regularly reproduced be not only momentarily interrupted, but fundamentally altered through both quotidian and extraordinary forms of action and worlding? The unexpected character of the new social movements called for a radical rethinking of structures and their transformation. Haunted by unpredictable forms of resistance, heteropatriarchal structures challenged theorists and activists to forge new frameworks of critique that refigured basic concepts of power, subjectivity, and agency. These frameworks are examined with an eye to how racialized sexuality and gender are created and contested in the context of modern biopolitical capitalism and its constitution of naturalized conceptions of rule.

GNSE 31771 Three Comedies of Sexual Revolution
Instructor: Nathan Tarcov
This seminar will discuss three comedies of sexual revolution from three different times and places. Aristophanes’s Assemblywomen recounts how under the leadership of the able Praxagora the women of Athens take over the Assembly and legislate a new regime in which private property is replaced by communism and sexual equity is achieved in favor of the old and unattractive at the expense of the young and attractive. Machiavelli’s Mandragola dramatizes the tricks by which young Callimaco manages with the aid of the trickster parasite Ligurio to have sex with Lucrezia, the beautiful young wife of the elderly lawyer Nicomaco, with the consent of both her and her husband, ushering in a new regime in which all are satisfied. In Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure Angelo the interim duke of Vienna institutes a repressive sexual regime in which the brothels are closed and extramarital sex is a capital crime. What might we learn about sexual relations from these diverse plays? Why are they comedies? Undergraduates by consent of instructor.

GNSE 36855 Queer Theory
Instructor: Kris Trujillo
This course aims to offer a foundation in queer theoretical texts. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term “queer” and explore the contours of the field’s major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory’s emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis. Reading texts by key figures like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lorde, Bersani, Crimp, Warner, Halperin, Dinshaw, Edelman, Anzaldúa, Ferguson, and Muñoz in addition to prominent issues of journals like GLQ, differences, and Signs, we will approach these pieces as historical artifacts and place these theorists within the communities of intellectuals, activists, and artists out of which their work emerged. We will, thus, imagine queer theory as a literary practice of mournful and militant devotion, trace queer theory’s relationship to feminism and critical race theory, critique the hagiographic tendency of the academic star system, and interrogate the assumptions of queer theory’s secularity.  

GNSE 39105 Gendering Slavery
Instructor: Mary Hicks
This reading seminar will introduce students to the key questions, methods, and theories of the burgeoning field of gendered histories of slavery. Global in scope, but with a focus on the early modern Atlantic world, we will explore a range of primary and secondary texts from various slave societies. Assigned monographs will cover a multitude of topics including women and law, sexualities, kinship, and reproduction, and the intersection of race, labor, and market economies. In addition to examining historical narratives, students will discuss the ethical and methodological implications of reading and writing histories of violence, erasure, and domination. Learning to work within and against the limits imposed by hegemonic forms of representation, the fragmentary nature of the archive, and the afterlives of slavery, this course will examine how masculinity and femininity remade and were remade by bondage.

GNSE 39610 Pale Fire
Instructor: Malynne Sternstein
This course is an intensive reading of Pale Fire by Nabokov.

GNSE 43155 Reproductive citizens: sex, work, and embodiment
Instructor: Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we focus on the centrality of debates around women’s reproductive capacity in shaping the culture of modernity in the U.S. in the first few decades of the twentieth century. We look at the way that feminist politics, in conjunction with broader developments in industrial capitalist society, disrupted traditional pathways of reproduction, as these have revolved around women’s crucial role in sustaining the biological family and the home. We will read fiction, essays, and political tracts around “women’s work” and working class women, the birth control movement, feminist emancipation, marriage and the politics of the home, the rise of consumer culture, and the demands placed on both Black and white women during this period in reproducing “the race.” Most generally, we will focus on texts that both trouble and shore up motherhood as the central means of reproducing the biological life and social fabric of American culture. And we will likewise be interested in writers and political figures that sought to dramatically alter or even dismantle the reproductive social order altogether.

GNSE 43501 Contemporary Models of Theology
Instructor: Dwight Hopkins
This course compares various systems and methods in contemporary theologies. By contemporary, we mean theological developments in the USA from the late 1960s to the present. Specifically, we reflect critically on the following models: progressive liberal, post liberal, black theology, feminist theology, womanist theology, and postcolonial theology. In the process, we lay out the political, economic, and cultural factors that gave rise to these models.

 

Course Archive