Category: Archive courses

Explores desire and the politics of sexuality as gendered, raced, classed, and transnational processes. Intimacies and globalization, normality and abnormality, and power and relationships as sites of inquiry into the constitution of “queerness.” Students interrogate queer and sexuality studies using varied media – films, activist writing, scholarly articles.

Examines how Indonesia, the world’s fourth most-populous country, with the largest Islamic population, weaves together local practices and influence from India and Persia. Offers ways of understanding modern Indonesian performing arts, religion, and politics.

Petty fights. Bad blood. Dyke drama. Ideological warfare. Political impasses. This class explores how conflict has always bee central to feminist thinking, and to the disciplinary formations of feminism with the academy. We examine how fights – interpersonal, ideological, and the lines that blur the two – are often the mechanisms through which feminism’s political imaginations are configured. We pay particular attention to how feminist fights across the 20th and 21st centuries are laced with (over)determinations of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation that produce endlessly more fights.

Addresses the usefulness of Foucault for thinking about history and thinking historically. Discusses questions of method, politics and ethics of critique, and overview relationships among power, knowledge, and subjectivity in context of modernity that undergirds Foucault’s writings. Focuses on a set of Foucault’s lectures on war, race, security, biopolitics, and on ethics of truth-telling in lectures he gave at the College de France.

Performing Black Queer Gender(s) considers how black feminist philosophers, queer & trans theorists, and performance theorists approach the historical production of racialized sexuality, situating performance as an optic through which the evolving visibility of, and politics that inhere in, black queer/ness takes shape more broadly.
The course pays particular attention to the strains of black feminist theory by Hortense Spillers and others who, in their historical, materialist approaches to the (co-)construction of categories of race, gender, and sexuality—as well as Body, Human, Subject, and Citizen—pose trenchant critiques of queer and performance studies that implicitly stabilize the liberal humanist subject. We read these texts in conversation with contemporary documentary films such as The Aggressives, Out in the Night, and Kiki, as well as performance ethnographies such as Butch Queens Up in Pumps, that demonstrate the construction, negotiation, and politics surrounding black queer gender(s) challenge the utopian enterprise of queer theory and performance theory alike.

Introduction to gender as category of historical analysis, examining the impact of feminist theory within the discipline of history. Course traces historiographical debates in women’s and gender history and explores, through cross-cultural comparisons, how scholars have conceived the relationship between gender and categories such as class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.

This course studies the modern Hindi-Urdu theatrical tradition that has developed in North India since the mid-nineteenth century. We trace its evolution from a strong reformist phase during the colonial period to fully-fledged “National Theatres,” expressing the aspirations of the independent nation-states of India and Pakistan, both trying to come to terms with their shared past. We also study how it continues to exert significant influence on the popular movies best known as Bollywood, which form such an important part of contemporary popular culture of South Asia. We will read drama scripts in the original Hindi/Urdu, watch theatrical performances, combined with study of the theoretical underpinnings as developed in secondary literature. Evaluation: class work, mid-term creative project, and final project with paper. Prerequisite: advanced Hindi/Urdu or instructor permission

Introduction to gender as category of historical analysis, examining the impact of feminist theory within the discipline of history. Course traces historiographical debates in women’s and gender history and explores, through cross-cultural comparisons, how scholars have conceived the relationship between gender and categories such as class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.

Introduction to gender as category of historical analysis, examining the impact of feminist theory within the discipline of history. Course traces historiographical debates in women’s and gender history and explores, through cross-cultural comparisons, how scholars have conceived the relationship between gender and categories such as class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality.
Please note there are several articles to read IN ADVANCE OF THE FIRST meeting. These are posted as pdf’s on the Catalyst Site for this course.

“Thinking through Things:  Objects, Desire, and the Birth of Globalization”
This seminar takes a simultaneously traditional yet insistently innovative approach to the study of the past.  On the one hand, history has been broadly understood through and commonly embodied by objects, an approach that has guided churches and temples, courts and collectors, for ages:  to grasp an object from the past has been, in a fundamental way, to grasp the past itself.  On the other hand, professional historians have been preoccupied over the last few centuries (since the Renaissance, in fact) with the texts of the past—with the words recorded in Assyrian inscriptions and Egyptian papyri, in Greek and Latin “classics,” in Chinese and Sanskrit documents, in state and local archives, and so on—and scholars have, by and large, privileged writing as a gateway to historical research.  Recently, however, history has taken a material turn.  By deploying new techniques and methods, and by approaching their subject from fresh and previously unexplored perspectives, historians have lately endeavored to study the past through its material remnants—not so much archeological remains (which have always been and will continue to be a viable source for history) as the very “things” that have come down to us over time.  This has afforded a more nuanced and wider ranging history, one that extends beyond the text.  This has also granted historians a terrific narrative opportunity, as things tell marvelous stories in ways that can be richer, more layered, and more rewarding than mere text.
The things of history span an enormous range of material artifacts.  They might fall under the rubric of high “art,” derive from religious practices or pertain to the business of the state, or simply reflect the myriad things pertaining to everyday life.  Things from the past, furthermore, mark not only a moment and “history” situated in time and space; they can also mediate history.  They can serve as vital go-betweens for cultural, commercial, and colonial transactions (to name just a few possibilities).  And they can be global, since material objects can also move:  from the past to the present, from producers to consumers, from distant cultures to imperial museums, and so on.  It is precisely these material mediations, these global itineraries, and these distinct moments that furnish us with the “things” of history:  the stuff that we, as historians, try to investigate and interrogate to recover the past.  This seminar introduces students to a range of things from a variety of media.  It also introduces a number of key archives that house these artifacts—libraries, collections, museums.  And it tries to tease out stories from these archives and artifacts—from curious things and their histories.  The ultimate goal of the seminar is for its participants to identify, research, and compose a history of an artifact of their choosing.  In doing so, it is the hope that we will collectively learn not only how to analyze the objects of history, but also how to question the things that have reached us and to narrate some of the many stories they convey.