Topics vary semester to semester. Specific topics may satisfy different Core Program requirements.
Dis/Ability and Care Cultures in the U.S
In this introduction to dis/ability studies, we will examine constructions and understandings of disability and ability in the United States, and the ways in which questions of dis/ability reflect national understandings of identity and embodiment. We will think through theories of normativity as related to conceptions of an idealized able-bodied, productive subject, reading histories of disability in the U.S., such as Susan Marie Schweik’s The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (2009) that establish how disability has been historically criminalized in the U.S. in racialized, gendered, and sexed ways. We will continue into the twentieth century to think about cultural constructions of disability after WWII through David Serlin’s Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (2004) and Ruth O’Brien’s Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace (2001). To think through intersections of queer theory and queer of color critique with disability studies, we consider work by Eli Clare, Jasbir Puar, Mel Chen, Paul B. Preciado, Robert McRuer, Ellen Samuels, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Alison Kafer, and Sami Schalk. In the second half of the course, we will focus on contemporary questions of disability activism and disability justice, looking at work from the Disability Justice Collective, the Disability Visibility Project, Bay Area-based performance project Sins Invalid, and writings by disability justice activists such Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Alice Wong, and others. And finally, we will connect disability justice to other movements for justice, thinking about care in a broader sense, both the administration of care and care networks established by vulnerable communities to care for one another. We will look to care interventions made through harm reduction and mutual aid, detailed in texts like Dean Spade’s Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During this Crisis (and the Next) (2020), to consider how these approaches seek to provide both aid in the immediate and re-imagine care cultures in the long-term.
Origins of the New Right
This course studies the twentieth century origins and myriad manifestation of the “New Right” in U. S. politics and culture. Starting in the 1920s with the rise of the second Ku Klux Klan and Christian Fundamentalism and homing in on the New Right’s various stages of development from the Cold War to the present, we will examine film, news media, television, critical theory, and historical analyses.
Latino/a Experience
This course will explore the history and experience of Latino/a immigrants in the United States, paying particular attention to how race, ethnicity, identity, politics, class, and gender influence the lives of Latino/a immigrants. We will also examine how they have influenced historical developments in different regions of the country, especially in terms of U.S. demographics.
Black Literary History and the Archive
How do we resurrect the lives of people who were considered unimportant, those whose contributions were dismissed and buried? What does the existing historical archive tell us about what is considered valuable and about what constitutes "memory"? This class examines the lives of two of the most important 19-century Black women writers, Harriet Jacobs and Harriet Wilson, as a means to develop the tools of literary recovery. As we expand the contours of the historical canon, we will also reflect on our own sense of the scope and shape of African American historical memory and the ways in which we organize history. How do we interpret religion, resistance, and labor activities that that fall "outside" of the most recognized narratives about African American experience? This class will take on these larger questions as we also engage in archival work in newspapers, census records, and beyond.
African American Literature: Race/Gender/Sexuality
This course is designed as a survey of African American literature. We will examine a multitude of genres, including: oral forms (spirituals, ballads, work songs), poetry, fiction, drama, and essays by authors such as: Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Langston Hughes, Nella Larson, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, Jessie R. Faucet, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ann Petry, and Gwendolyn Brooks. Beyond strictly a "greatest hits" or "major authors" course, this class will also consider the ways African American writers interrogate complex categories of personal identity, which requires an in-depth investigation into the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic class. Through lectures, class discussions, and student presentations, we will highlight the critical impact of African American literature on American culture.