Courses offered for the upcoming semester are listed below. A collection of previous semester offerings is listed here. Faculty interested in crosslisting their courses can read more about the process here. The program typically sends out information about crosslist requests in late-September for the spring term, and mid-February for the fall. Please feel free to contact us if you have questions or have submissions that come after these windows.
Spring 2027
Category A: Text and Theory
RUSS 2750 - FORMS OF SOVEREIGNTY: AESTHETICS AND POLITICS IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE
Thursdays, 2:30 - 5:00 pm. This course invites participants to contemplate the relations that obtain between the arts broadly construed (foregrounding literature and including such others as music, sculpture, and painting) and politics understood in both an historical and contemporary theoretical key. Treating Russian imperial culture as a case study the course explores the interplay between aesthetics and politics, with discussion of such concepts as absolutism, representation, subject, citizen, nation, empire, republic, rule of law, and constitutionalism, among others. In each unit works of literature (with forays into the other arts) are read in relation to works of historical and contemporary political theory, with sustained attention given to concerns of genre and form (e.g., elegy, novel) and artistic movement (e.g., classicism, realism). Primary texts drawn from a wide range of cultural producers such as Lomonosov, Derzhavin, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov; Bryullov, Fedotov, Repin, Kramskoi; M. Glinka, the Mighty Five, Tchaikovsky; Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel. All course discussions in English; all readings available in English (as well as in the original languages for those who want them).
THEA 2216 - Returns of Ghost
Wednesdays, 3:00 - 5:30 pm, CL 1627. What happens when a ghost returns? A ghost is what remains when something is supposed to be gone; what appears when disappearance fails. It belongs neither fully to the past nor the present, neither to life nor death, neither to presence nor absence. What, then, happens when we take the ghost seriously, as Herbert Blau might have put it, not as an instrument of thought, but as thought?
This PhD seminar places Theatre and Performance Studies in conversation with theories of spectrality, hauntology, the uncanny, trauma, memory, mourning, embodiment, and temporality. We will encounter ghosts as ancestors, spirits, revenants, doubles, memories, traumatic repetitions, historical residues, and afterlives but also as methodological figures through which to rethink performance's relation to time. Haunting unsettles linear temporality: the past does not remain behind us but presses into the present, while the future may arrive as something already anticipated, inherited, or remembered. We will therefore take ghosting as a theatrical operation: the lingering presence of the dead; the repetition of a prior experience; the afterlife of a performance; the persistence of an inherited memory; the return of a repressed history; or the sudden appearance of another time and space within the present. The governing question of this seminar is: What might it mean to live with and to be lived through what refuses to stay gone?
Category B: Disciplines and Intellectual Movements
ANTH 2782 - Science, Technology, and Medicine: Anthropological Perspectives
Emily Wanderer. Mondays, 12:15 - 2:45 pm. This course explores the social study of science, technology, and medicine. The associated knowledge, technique, and materials are integral to contemporary culture and economies. Through classic and contemporary readings in the field, we will consider the emergence and present-day contours of science studies or STS. Readings will include historical and ethnographic approaches to understanding science, technology, and medicine, and case studies addressing innovation, affect, embodiment, data and algorithms, risk, the Anthropocene, environmental, and multispecies approaches.
ENGFLM 2455 - Film and Media Historiography
Mark Best. Mondays, 6:00 - 9:50 pm. Media historians do the same things as other historians. Film history developed in relative isolation from the work of other historians. As a scholarly practice, film history is a relatively new endeavor, one that has yet to establish clear goals, research methods, or even objects of study. The film histories that have been written over last the last ninety years show such a consistency of concerns and approaches that it is now possible to talk about the traditions of film historical practice.
While it is quite possible to consider all these statements as simultaneously true, or at least to view each of them as accurate descriptions of the field, their juxtaposition also points to a set of tensions currently structuring film historical knowledge and media historiography.
Because film history has a history, it is itself subject to historical scrutiny and debate. This seminar is a moment in that meta-historical project, one that uses the history of film and media history to further map out those tensions that seemingly prevent the formation of any stable disciplinary identity or any long-term projects. Of course, a principal question to consider is whether or not the history of film history is really singular after all. As so many have insisted, it might be more productive to talk about the histories of film history, the histories of media history.
If these historiographical ruminations sound too rarefied, their significance becomes immediately apparent in the concrete work of the film historian, and in the everyday problems of reading and writing film history. Therefore, this seminar asks that we continually put our own work on the table, as a means of 1) solving practical problems of research and method, 2) situating our historical work in relation to other critical fields and to communities of investigators, and 3) teasing out some of those disciplinary and institutional tensions that both limit and advance our production of historical knowledge.
THEA 2202 - Queer Methods and Methodologies of Research and Performance
Mina Kawahara. Monday, 3:00 - 5:30 - 1627 CL. Queer methods can reveal and critique skewed power dynamics within academic research and destabilize normative categorizations of both identity and research. This course continues these investigations with an emphasis on embodied research and performance, empowering students to construct their own queer methodologies. Students will learn to evaluate and adapt queer methods to analyze and/or create performance. The course brings together a conversation between major theoretical works of queer theory with performance and media, traversing key concepts such as queer temporalities, affect, and failure, through case studies such as the musical Fun Home and the video game Undertale, and mediums such as popular music and film. As a result, students will use theory to analyze performance, experiment with practice-based research methods, and develop their own queer methodologies.
HAA 2008 - Visual and Material Histories 50 Years (Almost) After Orientalism
Thursdays, 2:30 - 5:00 pm. This graduate seminar explores the concept of Orientalism as it has impacted the writing of visual and material histories over 50 years almost. Often credited with launching the field of postcolonial studies, Edward Said's 1978 book, Orientalism, offered a critical perspective on the representations of place (Orient), identities "Orientals" as subjects to be studied by Orientalist experts), and knowledge systems (Orientalism as a discourse). Historians have since mobilized Orientalism as a methodology to investigate painted images, photography, film, urbanism and architecture, print culture, and mass media. The discussion of postcolonial theories in this seminar will necessary unfold alongside more contemporary debates regarding decolonial and decolonizing perspectives especially Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang's influential 2012 essay, "Decolonization is Not a Metaphor" to both recognize but also recalibrate older modes of thinking in this field. This class is configured around dedicated and close reading of texts, sustained class discussion, and writing throughout the semester.
HAA 2008 - Land, Ecology, and Material Systems in the Built Environment
Tuesdays, 2:30 - 5:00 pm. Throughout history and across diverse landscapes, built environment maintained an intricate relationship with the natural world, one shaped by extraction, transformation, manipulation, and, at times, destruction. Yet architectural history's longstanding emphasis on cultural, aesthetic, and technological dimensions has often obscured the material and ecological conditions from which our building practices had emerges. This graduate seminar shifts attention from style, symbolism, and formal characteristics to our built environment's embeddedness within earth systems and labor regimes, examining how buildings and infrastructures arise from the interaction between natural processes and human work. Drawing on recent scholarship associated with the land turn and eco-critical approaches, the course explores how architectural production engages geological, hydrological, and climatic systems, as well as the labor practices through which matter is extracted, processed, and assembled. In doing so, the seminar considers architecture as a site of territorial transformation, environmental change, and materially grounded human effort.
To that end, the seminar brings together theoretical readings with case studies of the built environment in both modern and pre-modern contexts, and across different geographies, with a focus in pre-industrial conditions. We will engage materials from architectural history, art history, geography, environmental history, and beyond to expand our horizon in imagining possible paths forward for thinking through the intersection of human-built systems and natural environments. Our collective aim is to make visible the labor, resource extraction and management, flows of materials, seasonal cycles, agency of matter, agency of nature, nature-culture dialogues, and socio-natural imaginaries that shape architectural production. In some readings, methodology is foregrounded; in others, it remains implicit but offers paths to imagine alternative ways of writing these histories when we center land, ecology, and material systems.
ENGLIT 2385 - Postcolonial Discourse and Cultural Critique
Tuesdays, 2:00 - 4:50 pm. This course will introduce students to current debates and directions in Postcolonial Studies. Students will spend 1-2 weeks contextualizing these debates by reading some of the core texts and early debates within the field (such as the Marxism vs post-structuralism debates and the tensions amongst nationalist, subaltern, and post-nationalist frameworks). But the bulk of our time together will be spent exploring what kinds of re-thinking of earlier postcolonial models are necessary and adequate to this moment.
MUSIC 2611 - Consuming Popular Music
This course surveys approaches to popular music and popular music culture over the last century. It will particularly focus on works treating the relationship between popular music and the formation and contestation of individual and group subjectivities. It moves from the Frankfurt School through Bourdieu to the Birmingham School and its legacy in British Cultural Studies, and treats sociological, musicological, ethnomusicological, feminist, Black studies and Latin American Critical Theory texts which have examined popular music as a cultural activity and a product of consumption intertwined with broader social, political and economic processes. After taking the course students will have a firm grasp of key intellectual traditions and approaches to popular music and the broader study of popular culture.
Category C: Cultural Antagonisms and Cultural Crises
HIST 2743 - The African Atlantic: Comparing Slavery Across Time and Space
Assan Sarr. Tuesdays, 6:00 - 8:30 pm. This course is about debates surrounding and the historiography of African and Atlantic slavery. We will explore the origins of "slavery" in Africa; the rise of the Atlantic Ocean trade; the impact of that trade on Atlantic societies, cultures, economies, and politics; the African origins of enslaved people in the Americas; and the knowledge that captives brought with them from Africa. We will also examine sources and methodologies for studying slavery and the Atlantic trades. Throughout the semester, we will seek to understand how and why the institution of slavery changed over time and why it was different from place to place. In addition, the course seeks to improve students' skills in written and oral communication and critical and historical thinking.
HIST 2541 - Race in the Americas
Keila Grinberg. Wednesday, 3:00 - 5:25 pm. This course introduces students to key concepts and critical discussions about race in the Americas from the 16th through the 21st centuries. It examines the historical development and theoretical foundations of racial ideologies, as well as the role of colonialism and slavery in constructing racial hierarchies, and the emergence and sustenance of concepts of whiteness and racism. Additional topics include racial silence and the myth of racial democracy. Students will explore how race has shaped views of religion, citizenship, and immigration over time. The course also explores the persistence of racial inequalities and the diverse forms of strategies and public policies aimed at confronting racial injustices across historical periods.
ITAL 2610 - Sicily, Writing and Written
Lina Insana. Thursday, 3:00 - 5:25 pm. This graduate-level seminar takes a spatial theory and spatial rhetoric approach to the study of post-Unification Sicily. In this course, we will examine the cultural production of/about the island from the perspective of the performative spatial tropes that locate and position it, and determine to which larger configurations it belongs: proximity, distance, connection, stasis, flux, tremor, and the simultaneous piling up of time and experience. We will find that it is through the deployment of these tropes that artists and texts (literary, cinematic, theatrical, journalistic, and otherwise) have contributed to the creation of the many Sicilies described by the writer Gesualdo Bufalino, who (in one well-known essay) identified so many different versions of the Mediterranean island that he felt he could never possibly finish the task of counting all of them. In our readings/screenings we will track the cultural, political, and geographical contexts that shape these myriad constructions of Sicilian belonging: the Italian nation, the Italian Empire, the South (or Meridione), Europe, and especially the Mediterranean. After a brief introduction to the canonical works of modern Sicilian literature and film (a module which will treat such cultural producers as Giovanni Verga, Maria Messina, and Luigi Pirandello), the seminar will focus on two particularly rich case studies of Sicilian polyvalence: Sicily under Fascism and Sicily in the Schengen (EU) era.
HIST 2520 - Science and Technology in Asia
Raja Adal. Wednesday, 12:00 - 2:25 pm, 3701 WWPH. What does Asia bring to the study of science and technology? On the other hand, what does science and technology studies (STS) bring to our understanding of Asia? This course explores these two questions through a close reading of some of the latest and most influential works on STS in Asia. The first hour of every class is about the readings, while the second hour helps students develop their own research. Students will come away from the course with a grasp of the field of STS and a paper or dissertation chapter that they wrote and revised based on feedback from their classmates and the instructor.
COMMRC 3326 - Seminar in Media Studies - Technology & Society
Technology does not have a straightforward impact on society: it reflects, shapes, and disrupts our experience of the world we share with one another. In this seminar, graduate students will be introduced to foundational science & technology studies (STS) theories and will explore their various applications within communication research. In Spring 2027, we will pay specific attention to three topical areas: digital identity, digital labor, and digital infrastructure. The seminar will be intentionally interdisciplinary and is designed to help graduate students ground their independent research projects in the social, political, and cultural contexts of technological artifacts.