Courses

With an emphasis on critical reading and writing in an academic context, this course will examine the role of sports in American politics and social organizations. The course pays attention to the African American experience, noting especially the confluence of race and sports. What can sports tell us about freedom, equality, and the pursuit of happiness? How has the Black community contributed to our appreciation of these American virtues? We will read short texts and biographies, and we will watch movies such as King Richard and The Blind Side. Students will produce short writing exercises aimed at developing their critical thinking and clear writing.

This course focuses on the histories, ideas, experiences, and dreams that have shaped the lives of people of African descent. Then and now perspectives will define our exploration of incarceration and freedom; migration and emigration; separatism versus integration; race and class; art and politics. Discussion topics and seminal ideas will be drawn from texts including the following: the anthology Call and Response (on key debates in Black studies); the historical memoir Lose Your Mother (chronicling a journey along the Atlantic slave route); a work of fiction Middle Passage (that tells a story of enslavement, revolt, and redemption).

This course examines motifs of Black Heroism throughout the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and Early America. We take an interdisciplinary and Black Studies approach to topics like slave life and maroonage, freedom suits, military enlistment, and more. The course material will include fiction like Frederick Douglass' The Heroic Slave as well as theoretical texts like Neil Roberts Freedom as Maroonage. The aim of the course is to provide a look at the multifacted lives of Black people in the diaspora and early America with an emphasis on complex and quotidian resistance to domination.

This course examines blackness and whiteness as constructs outside the U.S.  Racial categories and their meanings will be considered through a range of topics: skin color stratification, nationalism, migration and citizenship, education, popular culture and media, spatial segregation and others.  Central to the course will be considering how racism and anti-blackness vary across societies, as well as the transnational and global flows of racial ideas and categories. Examples will be drawn from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Africa.  

For every defining moment in black history, there is a song. Every genre of black music makes a statement not only about the specific historical epoch it was created but also about the people’s dreams. For black people, songs are a means of resistance to oppression and an expression of the will to live. Through the analysis of black music, this course will expose students to black people’s struggles, hopes, and aspirations, and also American history, race relations, and much more. The class will read insightful texts, listen to songs, watch films, and engage in animated discussions.

This course considers Black social movements from around the globe, with an emphasis on non-U.S. contexts.  Examining multiple movements both past and present, it takes a comparative approach to understanding the unique and variable ways that Black communities have articulated the Black condition, and mobilized and resisted oppression.  Central to the course is the question of Blackness as a global and transnational identity; as well as the extent to which movements themselves form ties and mutually inform each other across national boundaries. 

Race and racism played a significant role in the construction of the United States of America. But so did the quest for a more perfect union and the beloved community. This course introduces students to the complexity of racial ideology and the ways it privileges one group of people while placing others at a disadvantage. We shall examine the experiences of all racialized groups (Blacks, Asians, American Indians, Latinos) and how they resisted the injustice against them. Most importantly, we shall analyze how their quest for liberation brought America closer to its foundational ideal that all humans are created equal and are endowed with unalienable rights.