Course Descriptions

PIC 601A/AFST 481E/ANTH 480J/COLI 601/ENG 593S/PHIL 601V: Feminism in African Philosophy of Culture
[NKIRU NZEGWU M 9:40-12:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course explores the development of feminist discourses in Africa in the articulation of key problems in contemporary African sociopolitical and judicial life. Some of the key concerns will center on the manipulation of tradition, family and gender relations, the role of law and the judiciary. We will examine some of the compelling issues that have engaged African women scholars as they battled the gender discrimination of the postcolonial state as well as of African men.

PIC 601B/HIST 560E: Gendering German History
[JEAN QUATAERT T 7:00-10:00]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: By now, the extraordinary power of the gender perspective to challenge existing interpretations and rewrite mainstream arguments in the human sciences is well known. This course offers something different: it explores the impact of gender analysis on one national historiography, German history, with its venerable traditions of writing history and structuring research (in archives) and teaching (in seminars). Through distinct topics from the early modern and modern eras, the course examines the impact of gender analysis on ‘mainstream’ German historiography over the last several decades. Topics include war and nationalism; politics and social protest; empire; welfare and citizenship; sexuality and the body; Jews and the Holocaust; post World War II reconstruction and life after l989. How comparative is this work? Do German gender historians use methods and insights drawn from the work of non-European historians?
FORMAT: weekly seminar discussion; more detailed historiographical paper on one of the topics. Books include Abrams and Harvey, eds., Gender Relations in German History; Quataert, Staging Philanthropy; Wildenthal, German Women for Empire; Kolinsky and Nickel, eds., Reinventing Gender and required readings on reserve.

PIC 604A/AFST 385E: The African American Heritage in Poetry and Jazz
[ISIDORE OKPEWHO TR 4:25-5:50]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This course traces the parallel development of two art forms that enable us to explore African American history by way of its cultural achievements. Essentially, we shall read the poems, hear the songs and the music (in CDs and tapes), and watch the videos that trace the growth of black poetry and jazz through the key moments of black history. The aim of the course is to understand the intersection of artistic forms as they reflect the social and political climates around them. Special attention will be given to the contributions of African American women to these art forms as well as the growing phenomenon of "jazz poetry." In this seminar course, students will be encouraged to shape and articulate their individual as well as group responses to the poetry and the music. Graduate students taking the course should expect to do, as a final paper, a substantial and wellresearched treatment of a key theme as revealed in the arts of a chosen era: e.g., through an exploration of the careers of at least one poet and one jazz musician.

PIC 605A/PHIL 605N: Virtue Ethics
[LISA TESSMAN T 1:15-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Virtue ethics focuses on an evaluation of moral character and on the connections between moral goodness and human flourishing. This course is not so much a straightforward study of virtue ethics as it is an exploration of how a virtue ethics framework can provide a useful approach to understanding the self in the context of contemporary societies characterized by unjust social structures. For background, we will read parts of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics; we will then examine some standard literature in the neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics tradition and some related literature such as work on moral dilemmas. We will draw on feminist philosophy to raise questions about how the relationships between character, virtue, and flourishing are affected by conditions of oppression.

PIC 606H/ENG 650M: Melville, Adams and Pynchon
[WILLIAM SPANOS]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In a letter dated 3 Feb 1911 to Edward H. Davis, a professor of economics at Purdue Henry Adams wrote: "I am really grateful for [your letter]. Because to that extent, it contradicts my contention that nobody really cares about the problem of our modern society. Five hundred years ago, I should have been burned, -- and justly, for such a book, which tends to destroy the confidence of society in itself, as well as in all truth and science; but I think I owe you, at least, to say that my object is, and has always been, merely my student's mind, not his conception of truth. When I went to Harvard College in 1870 to teach history, I started with the idea that my business was, not to teach history, but to exercise minds like bodies. I held that mediaeval notion that education was primarily dialectics. I hold it still. There can be no activity of mind, any more than of the stock-exchange, with a counter-party. The mind must have contradictions in order to act at all. My object had always been to supply the contradiction which should compel the mind to fight. The American mind to-day is altogether passive. It threatens to be atrophied. Only a tremendous shock can give it life."
In this course we will examine or rather think the major texts of these three affiliated American writers, Melville, Adams, and Pynchon, who span the history of American literature, in the light of Adams' despair at the atrophying of thinking in America, largely the result of the dominance of the Puritan ethic and the capitalism to which it gave rise. Since this kind of predatory thoughtless thinking could be called "graceless" (the Greek word for "grace" is "Haris"), an important aspect of this course will be to think the "meaning" of grace.
FORMAT: Lectures and discussion.
Requirements: Attendance; a mid-term (possibly take-home examination) and a 15-25 page terminal scholarly essay that, in the writing, should be oriented towards publication.

PIC 606R/COLI531E/331M: Modernisms II
[GISELA BRINKER-GABLER M 4:40-7:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: An exploration of some experiences and experiments of 20th century literature, art and theory, with focus on movements like Cubism, expressionism, dadaism and surrealism, some shorter works of different genres: essays, short stories, novellas, lyrical dramas, letters, art criticism, manifests. There will be specific discussions e.g. on the relationship of women and modernism(s), the relations between visual and verbal modernism(s), and the (dis)juncture of modernism/postmodernism. In this second course of the sequence the focus is on movements and works after WWI. Authors and artists will include F. Kafka, R.M. Rilke, V. Woolf, M. Loy, G.B. Shaw, E. ONeill, D. Barnes, M. Moore, M. Ernst, A. Breton, W. Benjamin, B. Brecht, R. Ellison.
FORMAT: The course will be conducted as a seminar. Required work for Undergraduates: response papers and final take home exam; for Graduates: oral presentation, and one substantial final paper.

PIC 606E/AFST 363: The African Novel
[ISIDORE OKPEWHO TR 11:40-1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Course will explore development of the novel in Africa both historically and thematically. On one hand, we shall trace formal growth of genre, beginning with its emergence from oral narrative traditions of the continent, through its attachment to certain European trends and techniques, to its present achievement in blending various traditions (African and nonAfrican) in articulation of key problems in contemporary African socio political life. On the other hand, we shall examine some of the key concerns that have engaged one generation of writers after another: e.g., confrontation with European presence, critique of postcolonial leadership, Apartheid, and the place of women in African society. FORMAT: This course will be based partly on teaching and partly on group presentations by students. Regular class attendance is mandatory and will count in the overall assessment. There will be one midterm and one final examination: each is a takehome paper of at least 10 pages in length. Graduate students taking this course will be expected to submit a substantial, well researched final paper on a chosen issue from the course.

PIC 606Q/COLI 541A/480C: Irony and Gender: Sand, Eliot, Flaubert.
[MARILYN GADDIS ROSE M 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: George Sand (1803-76), George Eliot (1819-80), and Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) were contemporaries who constructed what is now considered a “traditional novel.”Eliot read and admired Sand but probably knew Flaubert only through reviews of Madame Bovary(1857). Sand and Flaubert, close friends as it happened, were too absorbed in their own projects to have read Eliot. Yet Sand could have recognized in Eliot a kindred spirit, and Flaubert could have seen in Eliot’s work other representations of women damaged by social expectations. The three together illustrate the arbitrary in literary history. Eliot, who used a male pseudonym and wrote natively in a language that began to dominate culture in the 20th century, has a secure niche. Flaubert has been canonical, almost since the scandal of Madame Bovary ; his novels have received multiple translations into English. Sand, on the other hand, upon her death became an author for beginning French students and has required retranslation for recovery. Featured works will be Eliot's Felix Hull; Flaubert's Sentimental Education, and Sand's Horace. Although prior reading of Madame Bovary will be assumed, the seminar will allow time for review.
BOOKS: English translations will be ordered. All original-language texts are in Bartle Library. Any edition and any translation is acceptable.

PIC 608H/ARTH 450D/ARTH 550D: Academies, Discipline, State
[KAREN BARZMAN M 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar focuses on the role of academies in the consolidation of early modern, modern, colonial, and post-colonial states. The course will examine 1) the historical circumstances within which academies emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, during the formation of autocratic or princely rule in Italy, France, Spain, England, Sweden, the Hapsburg Empire, Poland, and Russia; 2) the institution of academies in colonial contexts and their subsequent use as part of a larger technology of modernization in the Americas, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia; 3) the transformation of academic theory and practice from the early modern through contemporary periods, and the shifting epistemological and political circumstances within which these transformations took place; 4) the effects of academic forms of discipline on cultural production, and on relations among artists and between artists and patrons, including the state, with attention to specific case-studies.
FORMAT: A class presentation (30%) during the last weeks of the semester and a written paper (40%) of the same topic - double-spaced with notes and bibliography - are worth 70% of the final grade. Topics will be selected in consultation with the instructor; individual research interests will be accommodated. An annotated bibliography for the research project (10%) is due mid-semester, at the time of individual appointments with the instructor. Oral presentations of assigned readings will be taken into consideration for the final grade, as will overall participation in seminar discussions (20%).
No prerequisites. All are welcome.

PIC 608I/SOC 610: Anti-Systemic Movements
[WILLIAM MARTIN R 10:05-1:05]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Examines the emergence and transformation of anti-systemic movements on a world scale, from the late 18th century to the present. Encompasses labor, nationalist, socialist, feminist and environmental movements, among others. Particular attention is given to relations within and across movements as they shape, and are shaped by, world-historical and worldwide processes of the capitalist world-economy, including the degree to which ruptures occur in movement forms, strategies and objectives.

PIC 612F/COLI 580: Translation and Power
[ROSEMARY ARROJO]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: The seminar will focus on the asymmetrical power relations that have always determined the practice of translation at the same time that they have underestimated the translator's role in the formation of cultures and the constitution of identities. Special attention will be devoted to the interfaces between translation and colonialism, and translation and gender issues.

PIC 615K/ENG 593F: Feminism and Globalization
[DONETTE FRANCIS]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Nannies, domestics and sweatshop workers, chambermaids, "mules" and sex workers--who are these invisible women that service our global economy? And, what happens when we center such women in our study of globalization? Beginning with the Atlantic Slave trade, in this class we read narratives of women's labor migrations to explore the historical and contemporary implications of the globalization process for women's disparate experiences in pursuit of citizenship. Paying particular attention to how race, class and sexuality further complicate our understandings, we combine theory, literary and film texts along with personal experience to both raise and answer questions about our increasingly globalized world.
BOOKS: Texts May Include: Cynthia Enloe, Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Kamala Kempadoo and Jo Doezema, eds. Global sex workers: rights, resistance, and redefinition, Saskia Sassen, Globalism and its Discontents, Bruce Robbins, Feeling Global, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, "A Blackymore Maide Named Francis" from The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, Patricia Powell, Pagoda, Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place, Edwidge Danticat, Breath Eyes Memory, Nellie Rosario, Song of the Water Saints, Angie Cruz, Soledad, Oonya Kempadoo, Tide Running.
FILM TEXTS: Stephanie Black, Life and Debt & H2 Workers, My American Girls, Dirty Pretty Things

PIC 615J/SOC 618: Rethinking Global Labor Formation, 16TH TO 20TH Centuries
[KELVIN SANTIAGO VALLES M 9:40-12:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Discussion of recent world-historical research on how the laboring classes have been socially constituted within the locally disputed context of global capitalism in general and regimes of accumulation in particular within both "core" and "peripheral" spaces. Course material includes but is not limited to slavery and emancipation, other forms of coerced labor (past and present), partial proletarianization, the social control of laboring populations and disciplinary institutionalities, Sub-altern studies perspectives, the feminization and racialization of work (past and present), new labor process and regulationist debates, analyses of coloniality, resistances (from everyday forms to systemic transformation), and the conflicting morphologies of labor movements and related social expressions (economic, political, cultural).

PIC 616D/HIST : Women, Class and Color in the Atlantic World
[Tiffany Patterson R 3:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar will examine the history of Black women in the United States and Black and East Indian women in the British Caribbean in the post-emancipation period through the early twentieth century. Topics will include class and color issues in women's social and political relations, family life, religious experiences, institutional life, and issues of sexuality. Students will read theoretical essays, monographs, biographies, novels, and cultural materials.
BOOKS: TBA
FORMAT: Discussion
Assignments: Three Critical Essays.

PIC 621C/HIST 473/576B/AAAS 473: Imperialism in East Asia. [JOHN CHAFFEE M 3:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: A study of three varieties of imperialism in East Asia in modern times. First, Western imperialism in China: the Opium War, unequal treaties and the treaty port in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Second, Japanese imperialism: from its early manifestations in Korea and Taiwan through the Second World War. Third, American and Russian imperialism in Korea, especially in the Korean War. The seminar will explore both the historical events associated with these forms of imperialism and the different methodological approaches employed by scholars in this field. The seminar will also make use of films and novels.
BOOKS: TBA
FORMAT: The seminar will meet once a week and will consist primarily of discussions with occasional slide presentations, movies and lectures to provide historical background and to make the readings intelligible. One 5-7 page book review will be required during the course of the semester and a 14-16 page research will be due at the end of the semester. Drafts of the book reviews will be evaluated by fellow students and the instructor prior to the submission of a revised version. Grades will be based upon papers and class participation. Enrollment is restricted to seniors majoring in History or taking the Asian Studies concentration.

PIC 622F/COLI 331R/535B: Borges, Colonialism, Deconstruction
[BRETT LEVINSON T 1:15-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Via the works of Jorge Luis Borges this course will examine three intersections: between literature and philosophy, between Western and peripheral cultures, and between postcolonial studies and deconstrcution. We will also address the direction of Latin American literature/studies. Texts to be read include the complete stories and essays of Borges, plus writings by Plato, Freud, Benjamin, Derrida, Laclau, Kristeva, Guha, Balibar, Said. Many of the texts will be taken from the Comparative Literature MA and Ph.D reading lists, but one need not be a graduate student nor a student in Comparative Literature to take the class.

PIC 643B/PHIL 456U/508: Just War Theory
[BAT AMI BAR ON W 1:10-4:10]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Just war theory attempts to answer two related yet independent questions of which the first addresses the conditions under which recourse to war is just or the justice of a war and the second addresses the conditions under which the various actions that constitute a war are just or justice in a war. Just war traditions exist in all societies and in this course we will critically compare the Western version with a South East Asian version and an Arab-Islamic version while pondering the codification of the theory in military and international law and the extent of its usefulness under present conditions.

PIC 645F/PHIL 480_/601U/COLI 608D/ENG 674P/WOMN 480Q/AFST 480H: Intervals: Transcultural & Transdiasporic Practices
[JEFFNER ALLEN M 3:30-6:30]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Analytic and creative processes of representing experiences across contexts that invoke global and local issues of nation, diaspora, and sexuality will be the focus of the class. The exposure of imperial frameworks of fixed individual locations enables release from the easy moralism that limits relations to those of above or below, or to coextensive complementarity. Yet, secession from such Enlightenment logics yields confusing encounters with unrecognizable forms, uncertain and impossible figures. It draws, and draws one to, the unfamiliar and unexpected.
Theorizing, literary writing and visual representation wobble precariously amid non-insular circulations, disjunctive linkages, dimensions and dis/connections indefinite yet precise. How to witness, attend, attune the clamorous intervals, the inarticulate (and perhaps necessarily so) intervals, the demanding exacting intervals between?
The class will emphasize recent transnational feminist and diasporic mixed genre writing, artistic productions, and activist practices. Transdisciplinary productions, the book, the new media, street protest, film, etc., will be taken up not as one subordinated to or folded into the other, but as enmeshed without duplication in the intervals between.

PIC 647D/COLI 321C/COLI 535S/ENG?: Translating Culture: Writing Exile and Migration
[BRINKER-GABLER W 4:40-7:40]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: In the last decade increased attention has been directed toward cultural practice that crosses and re-crosses cultural borderlands. Interest in such writing derives in part from the current climate of geographical mobility and instability. But it also derives from debates around identity politics and the privileging of authentic voices. Tales of exile and migration offer the opportunity to think differently about culture, memory, language, and nation. They cultivate an appreciation for the translatability of languages and cultures as well as for the untranslatability of certain forms of cultural specificity. They also imagine forms of communities not bound by conventional commonalities, those of territory, history, language and religion.
The class takes its departure from the literal meaning of trans-latio, change from one place, position or condition to another. It examines contemporary art and literature that crosses cultures with focus on the representation of the complex dynamics of cross-cultural exchanges and interactions, of language and communication, and culture and human rights. What kind of translation takes place under the specific conditions of exile and migration? What forms of immersion, conversion or other possibilities emerge? How does the reader of cross-cultural creative production experience culture? How does cross-cultural work resist normative reading ideologies?
FORMAT: Lectures and discussions. oral presentation, and one substantial final paper.

PIC 650B/PHIL 451: Continental Philosophy
[MARTIN DILLON TR 2:50-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: Survey of major writings of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida.
BOOKS: (list subject to change) Husserl, Cartesian Meditations; Heidegger, Basic Writings; Sartre, Being and Nothingness; Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception; Derrida, Margins of Philosophy; Recommended: Dillon, Semiological Reductionism.
FORMAT: Seminar format. Requirements include seminar presentation, 15-page term paper, final exam.

PIC 655A/COLI 331X/691B: A Thousand Plateaus
[WILLIAM HAVER R 1:15-4:15]
COURSE DESCRIPTION: This seminar is devoted to a patient reading of A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Our reading will be governed by three questions: (1) What, in "control societies," can thinking do? (2) Is there an experience of thinking that exceeds the concept of thinking an experience that would be something other than reflection? (3) Are we thinking yet? Although sessions will concentrate almost entirely on ATP, you are encouraged to read widely in collateral texts--by D&G of course, but also Stengers, Negri, De Acosta, Massumi, Nietzsche, DeLanda, Lucretius, Read, Spinoza, etc.
FORMAT: Seminar. Attendance obligatory. A substantive and substantial project, academic and/or aesthetic, required at end of term.

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