Fall 2025

ANT 437 / AAS 437 
Gaming Blackness: The Anthropology of Video Games and Race
Akil Fletcher

This course is an anthropological and experience-based exploration of video games in a global age. We consider scholarship in Digital Anthropology, Game Studies, and African American Studies to scrutinize the design of games and engage in gameplay, with a particular focus on Black experiences within U.S. and Japanese media. Throughout the course, we probe how video games utilize race, advancing an intersectional approach that accounts for class, gender, and sexuality.

POL 300
Theories of Democracy: Junior Practicum
Dimitrios Halikias

This practicum will introduce students to a range of theoretical approaches to democracy. We will raise the question of what kind of a regime or government "democracy" is. Where does democracy derive its legitimacy? What (if anything) gives democracy special value or authority? What role do deliberation, participation, and individual rights play in a democratic society? Is democracy a system of government or, more ambitiously, a comprehensive way of life? Our readings will survey some of the most influential articles and books written on democracy in recent decades. Some of these readings reconstruct historical approaches to democratic theory. Others offer more abstract and conceptual treatments of the connection between democracy and liberalism, equality, and majority rule.

AAS 430 / AMS 388 / HIS 226 
Advanced Topics in African American Culture & Life: Black Disability Studies, Black Disability Histories
Kelsey Henry

This course challenges the racial parameters of disability studies and disability history by asking how persistent conditions of antiblack violence, including mass incarceration, state divestment, medical neglect, and environmental racism, destabilize assumptions about what constitutes an "able body." Surveying scholarship in Black studies, disability studies, African American history, and the history of science and medicine, we will study the construction of disability as a racialized category. Students will also recover disability theories that are already intrinsic to the Black radical tradition, postcolonial studies, and Black feminisms.

ENG 403 / AFS 402 / COM 470 
Forms of Literature: Reading the World Bank
Lauren Horst

What does postcolonial literature have to do with economic development? How can literature and literary analysis help us better understand global economic inequality? This course examines the role that literature and literary thinking have played in legitimating, critiquing, and revising the 20th and now 21st century project of "development." Reading global works of literature and film alongside documents such as the World Bank's first "mission" report and its 2000 World Development Report, we'll study how narrative shapes issues like poverty and industrialization, international aid and (neo)colonialism, and economic justice and debt relief.

COM 466 / ENG 466 / ECS 466 / HLS 466 
Refugees, Migrants and the Making of Contemporary Europe
Chloe Howe Haralambous

Why are borders so central to our political, moral and affective life? Examining legal theory, novels and films of 20th- century migrations alongside poetry and forensic reports of recent border-crossings, this course traces how mobile subjects - from stowaways to pirates and anticolonial militants - have driven the formation of new ethics, political geographies and radical futures. We will situate borders in relation to practices of policing the colonies, the plantation, the factory and, finally, we will ask: why did we stop relating to migrants as political subjects and begin treating them as the moral beneficiaries of humanitarianism?

ANT 261 / HUM 262 
Differences: The Anthropology of Disability
Timothy Y. Loh

Disabled people are the largest minority in the world. Attention to the lived experiences and discourses of disability is crucial to our understanding of what it means to be human in an ever-changing world. This course moves beyond a medicalized view of disability and develops an historical and ethnographic critique of ableism with a focus upon the diverse forms of impairment and their social, economic, and technological contexts. What are the moral and political stakes of an anthropology of disability today?

NES 325 / HUM 332 / MED 325 / CDH 325 
Digital Humanities for Historians and Other Scholars
Tobias Scheunchen

What are Digital Humanities? What does the library of the future look like? Will the single-author peer-reviewed article survive the DH storm that is coming? How will the DH impact the ways we do historical research? And what ethical and legal problems arise from the use of DH methods? In this course, we will familiarize ourselves and experiment with a variety of Digital Humanities tools, such as network analysis, geospatial mapping, text mining, and crowdsourcing, interrogating how the DH reshape the ways we approach textual and material culture, ask research questions, process data, publish, and store academic scholarship.

HIS 454 / GSS 454 
'Spare change for a starving queen?' Race and Gender Nonconformity in U.S. History
Daniela Valdes

Although the queer and trans activist Marsha P. Johnson is well-known in popular media for her middle name, "pay it no mind," among her contemporaries she is better remembered for lingering on street corners and asking passersby "spare change for a starving queen?" Using a racial capitalist framework, this course examines the history of gender and sexual diversity in the United States from the pre-colonial period to the present. We will read work by historians of sexuality and gender alongside scholars of Black and Brown labor as we ask how U.S. history looks different when we center sexual and gender nonconforming working-class populations.

HUM 216 / 217 
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Western Culture I: Literature and the Arts
Katie Chenoweth, Beatrice Kitzinger, Mirjam E. Kotwick, Simone Marchesi, D. Vance Smith, Louis Zweig

Humanistic Studies 216-219 is an intensive yearlong exploration of landmark works in the Western intellectual tradition. With a team of faculty drawn from across the humanities and social sciences, students examine pivotal texts, events, and artifacts of European civilization from antiquity forward. The course is enhanced by guest lectures and museum excursions. This double-credit course meets for six hours a week and fulfills distribution requirements in both LA and HA. Students must enroll in both 216 and 217.