Courses
This page displays the schedule of 51¶ÌÊÓÆµ courses in this department for this academic year. It also displays descriptions of courses offered by the department during the last four academic years.
For information about courses offered by other 51¶ÌÊÓÆµ departments and programs or about courses offered by Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges, please consult the Course Guides page.
For information about the Academic Calendar, including the dates of first and second quarter courses, please visit the College's calendars page.
Students must choose a major subject and may choose a minor subject. Students may also select from one of seven concentrations, which are offered to enhance a student's work in the major or minor and to focus work on a specific area of interest.
Concentrations are an intentional cluster of courses already offered by various academic departments or through general programs. These courses may also be cross-listed in several academic departments. Therefore, when registering for a course that counts toward a concentration, a student should register for the course listed in her major or minor department. If the concentration course is not listed in her major or minor department, the student may enroll in any listing of that course.
Spring 2026 Gender and Sexuality Studies
| Course | Title | Schedule/Units | Meeting Type Times/Days | Location | Instr(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GSST B390-001 | Gender & Sexuality Studies Research Seminar | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 7:10 PM-10:00 PM T | Dalton Hall 2 |
Gurtler,B. |
| AFST B250-001 | Black Beauty Cultures | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 8:40 AM-10:00 AM TTH | Dalton Hall 6 |
Pinto,S. |
| AFST B320-001 | Race and Reproductive Health | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 1:10 PM-4:00 PM T | Carpenter Library 15 |
Pinto,S. |
| ANTH B102-001 | Introduction to Cultural Anthropology | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 1:10 PM-2:30 PM MW | Dalton Hall 119 |
McLaughlin-Alcock,C. |
| COML B213-001 | Theory in Practice: Critical Discourses in the Humanities | Semester / 1 | LEC: 2:40 PM-4:00 PM TTH | Dalton Hall 25 |
Zipoli,L. |
| EALC B315-001 | Spirits, Saints, Snakes, Swords: Women in East Asian Literature & Film | Semester / 1 | LEC: 8:40 AM-11:30 AM TH | Old Library 129 |
Kwa,S., Kwa,S. |
| Film Screening: 6:30 PM-9:30 PM W | Old Library 224 |
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| ENGL B175-001 | Queer American Poetry | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 11:40 AM-1:00 PM TTH | English House I |
Shollenberger,J. |
| ENGL B215-001 | Early Modern Crime Narratives: Vice, Villains, and Law | Semester / 1 | LEC: 2:40 PM-4:00 PM MW | English House Lecture Hall |
Gordon,C. |
| ENGL B237-001 | Cultural Memory and State-Sanctioned Violence in Latinx Literature | Semester / 1 | LEC: 2:40 PM-4:00 PM TTH | English House Lecture Hall |
Harford Vargas,J. |
| ENGL B266-001 | Oscar Wilde and His Circle | Semester / 1 | LEC: 11:40 AM-1:00 PM MW | English House II |
Thomas,K. |
| ENGL B270-001 | American Girl: Childhood in U.S. Literatures, 1690-1935: Childhood in US Literatures, 1690-1935 | Semester / 1 | LEC: 11:40 AM-1:00 PM MW | English House Lecture Hall |
Schneider,B. |
| ENGL B305-001 | Early Modern Trans Studies | Semester / 1 | LEC: 11:40 AM-1:00 PM MW | English House I |
Gordon,C. |
| ENGL B337-001 | Modernism and the Ordinary | Semester / 1 | LEC: 2:40 PM-4:00 PM TTH | English House I |
Shollenberger,J. |
| FREN B105-001 | Directions de la France contemporaine | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 11:10 AM-12:00 PM MWF | Taylor Hall E |
Peysson-Zeiss,A. |
| FREN B105-002 | Directions de la France contemporaine | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:00 AM MWF | Taylor Hall D |
Ragueneau,C. |
| GERM B217-001 | Representing Diversity in German Cinema | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 1:10 PM-2:30 PM MW | Old Library 104 |
Shen,Q., Shen,Q. |
| TA Sessions: 4:15 PM-6:05 PM TH | Old Library 102 |
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| HIST B219-001 | LGBTQ+ History in the United States | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM TTH | Bettws Y Coed 127 |
Vider,S. |
| HIST B226-001 | Topics in 20th Century European History: History of Fascism: Then & Now | Semester / 1 | LEC: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM TTH | Dalton Hall 300 |
Kurimay,A. |
| HIST B237-001 | Themes in Modern African History: Public History in Africa | Semester / 1 | LEC: 1:10 PM-2:30 PM MW | Taylor Hall, Seminar Room |
Ngalamulume,K. |
| HIST B243-001 | Topics: Atlantic Cultures: Maroon Communities - New World | Semester / 1 | LEC: 11:40 AM-1:00 PM MW | Old Library 116 |
Gallup-Diaz,I. |
| HIST B337-001 | Topics in African History: Cities, Epidemics, Pandemics | Semester / 1 | LEC: 1:10 PM-4:00 PM T | Old Library 104 |
Ngalamulume,K. |
| ITAL B217-001 | Gendered Violence and Femicide | Semester / 1 | LEC: 4:10 PM-5:30 PM TTH | Old Library 116 |
Ricci,R. |
| ITAL B325-001 | Literature and Film, Literature into Films and Back | Semester / 1,10 | Lecture: 2:10 PM-4:00 PM F | Old Library 116 |
Ricci,R. |
| PHIL B252-001 | Feminist Theory | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 7:10 PM-10:00 PM M | Dalton Hall 212E |
Bell,M. |
| POLS B346-001 | Gender & International Organizations | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 1:10 PM-4:00 PM T | Taylor Hall B |
Corredor,E. |
| SOCL B102-001 | Society, Culture, and the Individual | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM TTH | Taylor Hall D |
Baldor,T. |
| SOCL B225-001 | Women in Society | Semester / 1 | LEC: 11:40 AM-1:00 PM TTH | Dalton Hall 300 |
Montes,V. |
| SOCL B262-001 | Public Opinion | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 2:40 PM-4:00 PM MW | Dalton Hall 1 |
Wright,N. |
| SPAN B205-001 | Escritoras en la España contemporánea | Semester / 1 | LEC: 2:40 PM-4:00 PM MW | Taylor Hall B |
Penalba,N. |
Fall 2026 Gender and Sexuality Studies
| Course | Title | Schedule/Units | Meeting Type Times/Days | Location | Instr(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| GSST B108-001 | Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 7:10 PM-10:00 PM T | Gurtler,B. | |
| AFST B101-001 | Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM MW | ||
| AFST B202-001 | Black Queer Diaspora | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 12:10 PM-1:30 PM MW | ||
| AFST B300-001 | Black Women's Studies | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM MW | ||
| AFST B320-001 | Race and Reproductive Health | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM MW | ||
| ANTH B246-001 | The Everyday Life of Language: Field Research in Linguistic Anthropology | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM TTH | Weidman,A. | |
| ANTH B354-001 | Political Economy, Gender, Ethnicity and Transformation in Vietnam | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 1:10 PM-3:30 PM T | Pashigian,M. | |
| ENGL B215-001 | Early Modern Crime Narratives: Vice, Villains, and Law | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 1:10 PM-2:30 PM MW | Gordon,C. | |
| ENGL B217-001 | Narratives of Latinidad | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM TTH | Harford Vargas,J. | |
| ENGL B305-001 | Early Modern Trans Studies | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 11:40 AM-1:00 PM MW | Gordon,C. | |
| ENGL B339-001 | Latina/o Culture and the Art of Migration | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 1:10 PM-2:30 PM TTH | Harford Vargas,J. | |
| ENGL B343-001 | Sex, Sin, and the Sacred in Medieval Literature | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 2:40 PM-4:00 PM TTH | Dept. staff, TBA | |
| ENGL B372-001 | Black Ecofeminism(s): Critical Approaches | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM TTH | Alston,A. | |
| GERM B245-001 | Interdisciplinary Approaches to German Literature and Culture | Semester / 1 | LEC: 2:40 PM-4:00 PM TTH | Strair,M. | |
| GREK B201-001 | Plato and Thucydides | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 9:10 AM-10:00 AM MWF | Edmonds,R. | |
| HIST B102-001 | Introduction to African Civilizations | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM TTH | Ngalamulume,K. | |
| HIST B242-001 | American Politics and Society: 1945 to the Present | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM MW | Vider,S. | |
| HIST B292-001 | Women in Britain since 1750 | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 2:40 PM-4:00 PM TTH | Kale,M. | |
| ITAL B255-001 | Mafia and Organized Crimes | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 4:10 PM-5:30 PM TTH | Ricci,R. | |
| Film screening: 6:30 PM-8:30 PM TTH | |||||
| POLS B221-001 | Gender and Comparative Politics | Semester / 1 | LEC: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM TTH | Corredor,E. | |
| POLS B290-001 | Power and Resistance | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 2:40 PM-4:00 PM MW | Schlosser,J. | |
| SOCL B102-001 | Society, Culture, and the Individual | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 10:10 AM-11:30 AM TTH | Cox,A. | |
| SOCL B201-001 | The Study of Gender in Society | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 11:40 AM-1:00 PM TTH | Zhou,X. | |
| SOCL B235-001 | Mexican-American Communities | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 11:40 AM-1:00 PM MW | Montes,V. | |
| SOCL B307-001 | Transnational Queer Politics | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 1:10 PM-4:00 PM W | Zhou,X. |
Spring 2027 Gender and Sexuality Studies
| Course | Title | Schedule/Units | Meeting Type Times/Days | Location | Instr(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| AFST B250-001 | Black Beauty Cultures | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 8:40 AM-10:00 AM TTH | Pinto,S. | |
| AFST B320-001 | Race and Reproductive Health | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 1:10 PM-4:00 PM T | Pinto,S. | |
| ANTH B102-001 | Introduction to Cultural Anthropology | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 2:40 PM-4:00 PM MW | McLaughlin-Alcock,C. | |
| ANTH B102-002 | Introduction to Cultural Anthropology | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 1:10 PM-2:30 PM TTH | Weidman,A. | |
| ANTH B213-001 | Anthropology of Food | Semester / 1 | Lecture: 1:10 PM-2:30 PM MW | Fioratta,S. |
2025-26 Catalog Data: Gender and Sexuality Studies
GSST B108 Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies
Fall 2025
This course will introduce students to major approaches, theories, and topics in gender and sexuality studies, as a framework for understanding the past and present-not only how societies conceive differences in bodily sex, gender expression, and sexual behavior, but how those conceptions shape broader social, cultural, political, and economic patterns.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
GSST B390 Gender & Sexuality Studies Research Seminar
Spring 2026
This course is designed as a research seminar for Gender and Sexuality Studies minors and concentrators in their junior or senior year, with a focus on developing and workshopping an independent project, performance, exhibit, or curriculum plan. Students will review various methodologies and theories in gender and sexuality studies and think critically about how practices and experiences of gender and sexuality intersect with racial, ethnic, class, and national identities in the U.S. and the world. We will also consider the politics of scholarship itself and how various disciplines investigate questions of gender and sexuality. For their final projects, students will bring together various modes of research, analysis, and theory from gender and sexuality studies with questions and methods from their major discipline to develop a project geared to their interests and knowledge. This project will enable students to reflect on their interests and goals in the minor/concentration, either in preparation for a senior project or other future work. Suggested preparation: GSST B108 Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies and/or GSST 250Theories and its Uses in LGBTQ+ Studies
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
AFST B101 Black Matters: Introduction to Black Studies
Fall 2025
This interdisciplinary course situates the study of Black lives, known interchangeably as African American Studies, Black Studies, Africana Studies, or African Diaspora Studies, within the context of ongoing struggles against anti-Black racism. We will explore the founding principles and purposes of the field, the evolution of its imperatives, its key debates, and the lives and missions of its progenitors and practitioners. In doing so we will survey, broadly and deeply, the diverse historical, political, social, cultural, religious/spiritual, and economic experiences and expressions of the African Diaspora in the Americas and beyond.
Writing Intensive
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; Latin American Iberian Latinx.
AFST B202 Black Queer Diaspora
Fall 2025
This interdisciplinary course explores over two decades of work produced by and about Black Queer Diasporic communities throughout the circum-Atlantic world. While providing an introduction to various artists and intellectuals of the Black Queer Diaspora, this course examines the viability of Black Queer Diaspora world-making praxis as a form of theorizing. We will interrogate the transnational and transcultural mobility of specific Black Queer Diasporic forms of peacemaking, erotic knowledge productions, as well as the concept of "aesthetics" more broadly. Our aim is to use the prism of Blackness/Queerness/Diaspora to highlight the dynamic relationship between Black Diaspora Studies and Queer Studies. By the end of this course students will have a strong understanding of how systems of power work to restrict the freedoms of Black Queer and Trans communities, and how Black LGBTQ people have lived, organized, and created in spite of and in response to these oppressions. This interdisciplinary undergraduate upper-level course will utilize academic texts accompanied by poetry, fiction, film, television, and visual art to understand Black Queer and Trans subjectivities.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; History of Art.
AFST B250 Black Beauty Cultures
Spring 2026
Why is Black beauty important, across different historical periods and geographies? This course answers this through a deep engagement with Black visual culture, from diaspora histories of Black hair cultures to anthropological studies of Black beauty salons to digital engagement with Black beauty culture on You Tube and Instagram. We'll do comparative magazine analyses of 20th century Black fashion coverage and today's celebrity-driven brands like Fenty. Black Beauty is foundational to how we understand the construction of value in art, politics,and society. We'll also study different Black-studies approaches to visual culture including those from art history, museum studies, film & media studies, communication, popular culture, disability studies, performance studies, feminist theory, and queer studies. Students will walk away with strong training in visual and communication methods and in the aesthetic and political history of Black beauty. The course will culminate with a collective digital exhibition on Black Beauty Cultures that we assemble and annotate as a class.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Visual Studies.
AFST B300 Black Women's Studies
Not offered 2025-26
Black Feminist Studies, which emerged in the 1970s as a corrective to both Black Studies and Women's Studies, probes the silences, erasures, distortions, and complexities surrounding the experiences of peoples of African descent wherever they live. The early scholarship was comparable to the painstaking excavation projects of an archaeologist digging for hidden treasures. A small group of mainly black feminist scholars have been responsible for reconstructing the androcentric African American literary tradition by establishing the importance of black women's literature going back to the nineteenth century. In this interdisciplinary seminar, students closely examine the historical, critical and theoretical perspectives that led to the development of Black Feminist theory/praxis. The course will draw from the 19th century to the present, but will focus on the contemporary Black feminist intellectual tradition that achieved notoriety in the 1970s and initiated a global debate on "western" and global feminisms. Central to our exploration will be the analysis of the intersectional relationship between theory and practice, and of race, to gender, class, and sexuality. We will conclude the course with the exploration of various expressions of contemporary Black feminist thought around the globe as a way of broadening our knowledge of feminist theory.
Writing Intensive
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.
AFST B320 Race and Reproductive Health
Spring 2026
This course will focus on the history, present, and future of race and reproductive health across the Black Diaspora. We'll look at historical documents, literature, and historiography of the Early Americas to trace the development of Black reproduction and birth during chattel slavery and colonialism. Then we will turn to 20th and 21st century movements for reproductive justice, including the development of reproductive care in Nigeria, the contemporary push to address Black maternal mortality rates in the US, and the politics of assisted reproductive technology in relationship to race, gender, and sexuality. Medical studies, feminist studies, sociology, and anthropology will work alongside journalism, art, literature, and culture to illuminate and interpret Black reproductive health experience, including artists and writers such as Linda Villarosa, Angelina Weld Grimke, Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, Tlotlo Tsamaase, LaToya Ruby Frazier, and Jamaica Kincaid. At the end of the course, students will be able to connect Black medical and cultural histories of reproduction, and they will develop research projects related to race and reproduction based on their own interests and expertise.
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Health Studies.
ANTH B102 Introduction to Cultural Anthropology
Fall 2025, Spring 2026
This course explores the basic principles and methods of sociocultural anthropology. Sociocultural anthropology examines how many of the categories we assume to be "natural," such as kinship, gender, or race, are culturally and socially constructed. It examines how people's perceptions, beliefs, values, and actions are shaped by broader historical, economic, and political contexts. It is also a vital tool for understanding and critiquing imbalances of power in our contemporary world. Through a range of topically and geographically diverse course readings and films, and opportunities to practice ethnographic methodology, students will gain new analytical and methodological tools for understanding cultural difference, social organization, and social change.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Counts Toward: Child and Family Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.
ANTH B213 Anthropology of Food
Not offered 2025-26
Food is part of the universal human experience. But everyday experiences of food also reveal much about human difference. What we eat is intimately connected with who we are, where we belong, and how we see the world. In this course, we will use a socio-cultural perspective to explore how food helps us form families, national and religious communities, and other groups. We will also consider how food may become a source of inequality, a political symbol, and a subject of social discord. Examining both practical and ideological meanings of food and taste, this course will address issues of identity, social difference, and cultural experience.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Counts Toward: Child and Family Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies; International Studies.
ANTH B246 The Everyday Life of Language: Field Research in Linguistic Anthropology
Not offered 2025-26
This course provides hands-on experience in linguistic anthropological methods of data collection and analysis. We will explore various methods employed by linguistic anthropologists, including: ethnographic observation of language use in context; audio-recording of spoken discourse; working with a linguistic corpus; online research methods; conducting linguistic and ethnographic interviews; and learning how to create a transcript to use as the basis for ethnographic analysis. This is a Praxis 1 course. For the praxis component of the course, in the first half of the semester, the class will work with a high school language arts teacher to design a lesson and project for a high school language arts class that incorporates linguistic-anthropological concepts and student-driven research on language. The purpose of this is to move beyond the prescriptivist approach to language commonly taken at the high school level, toward a more descriptive, ethnographic approach that learns from young people's creativity and agency as speakers of language. In the second half of the semester, the class will work collaboratively on a research project that we develop as a class. Class time will be used to discuss the results of student work, read and discuss relevant literature in linguistic anthropology, synthesize insights that develop from bringing different ethnographic contexts together; and work collaboratively on a way of presenting the findings.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Linguistics; Praxis Program.
ANTH B322 Anthropology of Bodies
Fall 2025
This course examines meanings and interpretations of bodies in anthropology. It explores anthropological theories and methods of studying the human body and social difference via a series of topics including the construction of the body in medicine, identity, race, gender, sexuality and as explored through cross-cultural comparison. Bodies and their forms are intertwined in debates both in academia and in current affairs and politics. These concerns range from surveillance and movements of bodies, disappearance and erasure of some bodies and fortification of others, to biological and technological modification of individual bodies that arise in moral and political debates and action. Although "the body" is frequently assumed to be "natural," indeed it appears unstable and destabilizing, especially in particular times and in particular places. We will discuss, for instance the body as a focus of the biomedical gaze, as commodity, in creative expression, in relations to non-human primates, across the age spectrum, and in historical political, economic, and colonial and post-colonial regimes, among other topics. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing and higher.
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Child and Family Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Health Studies; Health Studies.
ANTH B354 Political Economy, Gender, Ethnicity and Transformation in Vietnam
Not offered 2025-26
Today, Vietnam is in the midst of dramatic social, economic and political changes brought about through a shift from a central economy to a market/capitalist economy since the late 1980s. These changes have resulted in urbanization, a rise in consumption, changes in land use, movement of people, environmental consequences of economic development, and shifts in social and economic relationships and cultural practices as the country has moved from low income to middle income status. This course examines culture and society in Vietnam focusing largely on contemporary Vietnam, but with a view to continuities and historical precedent in past centuries. In this course, we will draw on anthropological studies of Vietnam, as well as literature and historical studies. Relationships between the individual, family, gender, ethnicity, community, land, and state will pervade the topics addressed in the course, as will the importance of political economy, nation, and globalization. In addition to class seminar discussions, students will view documentary and fictional films about Vietnamese culture. Prerequisite: Sophomore standing or higher or first years with ANTH 102.
Writing Attentive
Counts Toward: Environmental Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; International Studies; International Studies.
COML B213 Theory in Practice: Critical Discourses in the Humanities
Spring 2026
What is a postcolonial subject, a queer gaze, a feminist manifesto? And how can we use (as readers of texts, art, and films) contemporary studies on animals and cyborgs, object-oriented ontology, zombies, storyworlds, neuroaesthetics? By bringing together the study of major theoretical currents of the 20th century and the practice of analyzing literary works in the light of theory, this course aims at providing students with skills to use literary theory in their own scholarship. The selection of theoretical readings reflects the history of theory (psychoanalysis, structuralism, narratology), as well as the currents most relevant to the contemporary academic field: Post-structuralism, Post-colonialism, Gender Studies, and Ecocriticism. They are paired with a diverse range of short stories across multiple language traditions (Poe, Kafka, Camus, Borges, Calvino, Morrison, Djebar, Murakami, Ngozi Adichie) that we discuss along with our study of theoretical texts. We will discuss how to apply theory to the practice of interpretation and of academic writing, and how theoretical ideas shape what we are reading. The class will be conducted in English, with an additional hour taught by the instructor of record in the target language for students wishing to take the course for language credit.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Africana Studies; East Asian Languages & Culture; English; French and Francophone Studies; Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; German and German Studies; History of Art; Italian and Italian Studies; Philosophy; Russian; Spanish.
CSTS B246 Eros in Ancient Greek Culture
Fall 2025
This course explores the ancient Greek's ideas of love, from the interpersonal loves between people of the same or different genders to the cosmogonic Eros that creates and holds together the entire world. The course examines how the idea of eros is expressed in poetry, philosophy, history, and the romances.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Counts Toward: Classical Culture and Society; Classics; Gender Sexuality Studies; Greek; Latin.
EALC B264 Human Rights in China
Fall 2025
This course will examine China's human rights issues from a historical perspective. The topics include diverse perspectives on human rights, historical background, civil rights, religious practice, justice system, education, as well as the problems concerning some social groups such as migrant laborers, women, ethnic minorities and peasants.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Counts Toward: East Asian Languages & Culture; Gender Sexuality Studies; History; International Studies; International Studies.
EALC B315 Spirits, Saints, Snakes, Swords: Women in East Asian Literature & Film
Spring 2026
This interdisciplinary course focuses on a critical survey of literary and visual texts by and about Chinese women. We will begin by focusing on the cultural norms that defined women's lives beginning in early China, and consider how those tropes are reflected and rejected over time and geographical borders (in Japan, Hong Kong and the United States). No prior knowledge of Chinese culture or language necessary.
Counts Toward: Comparative Literature; East Asian Languages & Culture; Film Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.
ENGL B175 Queer American Poetry
Spring 2026
What does poetry have to say about the history of sexuality? How do queer voices, expansively defined, disrupt poetic norms and forms? How has poetry been congenial to the project of imagining and making queer communities, queer spaces, and even queer worlds? In this course, we survey the work of queer American poets from the late nineteenth century to the present, as we touch on major topics in the history of sexuality, queer studies, and American cultural history. This course provides an overview of American poetry as well as an introduction to queer studies concepts and frameworks; no prior experience with these fields is necessary.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
ENGL B215 Early Modern Crime Narratives: Vice, Villains, and Law
Spring 2026
This course taps into our continuing collective obsession with criminality, unpacking the complicated web of feelings attached to crime and punishment through early modern literary treatments of villains, scoundrels, predators, pimps, witches, king-killers, poisoners, mobs, and adulterers. By reading literary accounts of vice alongside contemporary and historical theories of criminal justice, we will chart the deep history of criminology and track competing ideas about punishment and the criminal mind. This course pays particular attention the ways that people in this historical moment mapped criminality onto dynamics of gender, race, sexuality, disability, religion, and mental illness according to cultural conventions very different from our own. Authors may include Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, Middleton, Dekker, Webster, and Behn.
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
ENGL B217 Narratives of Latinidad
Fall 2025
This course explores how Latina/o writers fashion bicultural and transnational identities and narrate the intertwined histories of the U.S. and Latin America. We will focus on topics of shared concern among Latino groups such as struggles for social justice, the damaging effects of machismo and racial hierarchies, the politics of Spanglish, and the affective experience of migration. By analyzing a range of cultural production, including novels, poetry, testimonial narratives, films, activist art, and essays, we will unpack the complexity of Latinidad in the Americas.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Comparative Literature; Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Praxis Program; Spanish.
ENGL B223 The Help: Asian American Literature & Care Work
Fall 2025
This course surveys Asian American literature and cultural productions that feature the work of care: jobs, whether official or unofficial (such as mothering, nursing, and nannying) that are essential, yet so often undercompensated and overlooked. We will examine how Asian American immigration history has led to the burgeoning of industries around care work. We will see how narrative and fiction portray the troubling entanglements between economic structures, race and gender roles, and personal feeling in the labor of care. This course operates under the premise that an attentiveness to how care unfolds is essential to creating a more just world. Collectively, we will not just talk about care as an abstract set of ideas but concretely practice it with one another in the space of our classroom.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Counts Toward: Asian American Studies; Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.
ENGL B237 Cultural Memory and State-Sanctioned Violence in Latinx Literature
Spring 2026
This course examines how Latinx literature grapples with state-sanctioned violence, cultural memory, and struggles for justice in the Americas. Attending to the histories of dictatorship and civil war in Central and South America, we will focus on a range of genres-including novels, memoir, poetry, film, and murals-to explore how memory and the imagination can contest state-sanctioned violence, how torture and disappearances haunt the present, how hetereopatriarchal and white supremacist discourses are embedded in authoritarian regimes, and how U.S. imperialism has impacted undocumented migration. Throughout the course we will analyze the various creative techniques Latinx cultural producers use to resist violence and imagine justice.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Counts Toward: Comparative Literature; Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Spanish.
ENGL B261 Colonizing Girlhoods: L.M.Montgomery and Laura Ingalls Wilde
Fall 2025
This class explores what we can see anew when we juxtapose two iconic figures of North American children's literature: L.M. Montgomery's Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder's fictionalized self-portrait, Laura Ingalls. Both characters have risen to mythic proportions in their respective countries, and are powerful signs in an international culture industry. After setting up key eighteenth-century concepts and contexts for what French historian Philippe Ariès calls the "invention of childhood", we will explore the ways in which images of young girls have been deployed as the benign faces of ruthless imperialism, reading through the entirety of each original series. We will track the geographical movement of both heroines, with particular attention to different spatial narratives of nationhood and empire-building, whether manifest destiny in the U.S., or what critic Northrop Frye has termed the "garrison mentality" of Canadian culture. Here we'll be especially attentive to commonalities in how both authors produce class-stratified and racialized notions of girlhood, as well as divergences in how both countries, each still framed to varying degrees as the "infant nation" of Great Britain, yield new and evolving discourses of girlhood.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Counts Toward: Education Studies; Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.
ENGL B266 Oscar Wilde and His Circle
Spring 2026
Oscar Wilde embodied contradictions. He was an Irishman who embraced English life, a husband to a woman and a lover to many men, an author who wrote in all genres, a celebrity, a wit, a journalist and editor, a socialist and a decadent, a beloved and loathed exile and martyr. At his height, he was one of the most celebrated writers on both sides of the Atlantic, and he played a huge role in the shaping of the literary and cultural aesthetics of the 1890s. Then, after a brutal and sensational trial for "acts of gross indecency" with men, followed by 2 years in a prison cell, he became a byword for homosexuality and its perils. Everyone knew, or knew about, Oscar. This course will trace his artistic and sexual networks, his friendships, his rivalries, and his afterlives. Topics will include: Wilde, feminism and fashion; Wilde, aestheticism and America; Wilde and incarceration; Wilde and race. Alongside selections from his drama, poetry, essays and fiction, we will read work by the women who formed part of his literary circle (Ouida, Amy Levy, Michael Field), the sexual philosophers who influenced or were influenced by him (Walter Pater, Aleister Crowley, Walt Whitman, Edward Carpenter), and learn why Henry James was an enemy, and Lord Alfred Douglas a very bad boyfriend indeed.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
ENGL B270 American Girl: Childhood in U.S. Literatures, 1690-1935
Section 001 (Spring 2026): Childhood in US Literatures, 1690-1935
Spring 2026
Long before the "American Girl" dolls debuted in 1986, the "girl" (and what is a "girl?") served as a particularly potent figure of cultural fantasy. The vexed and contradictory question of what it means to be "American" has been played out over and over again through fictions of girlhood. This course looks at those fictions, from the 1770s through the 1910s - from the founding of the nation to suffrage. While real girls and women suffered and disappeared behind the laws of coverture and enslavement, fictional girls had gripping adventures in the pages of American novels, adventures that insisted that the growing up of a female child was the best story for tracing what it means to be free, to be good, to be self-determining. Focusing on questions of race, gender and sexuality, we will read, among other texts, Rowson's Charlotte Temple, Sedgwick's Hope Leslie, Southworth's The Hidden Hand, Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Alcott's Little Women, and Zitkala-Sa's Impressions of an Indian Childhood.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Counts Toward: Child and Family Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.
ENGL B305 Early Modern Trans Studies
Spring 2026
This course will consider the deep histories of transgender embodiment by exploring literary, historical, medical, and religious texts from the Renaissance. Expect to read about alchemical hermaphrodites, gender-swapping angels, Ethiopian eunuchs, female husbands, trans saints, criminal transvestites, and genderqueer monks. We will consider together how these early modern texts speak to the historical, theoretical, and political concerns that animate contemporary trans studies. We will read texts by Crashaw, Donne, Shakespeare, Lyly, and Dekker as well as Susan Stryker, Dean Spade, Mel Chen, Paul Preciado, and Kadji Amin. Prerequisite: Students must have completed at least one 200-level class.
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
ENGL B331 Queer Theory
Fall 2025
Queer theory emerged in the early 90s as an academic field committed to studying queer experiences of gender, sexuality, and desire. Early queer theorists established the field's opposition not just to heterosexual privilege, homophobia, and the normal but also to so-called proper objects of analysis and critique. In this class, we study the history, present, and future of this field, and we interrogate its power at a moment when some of its basic assertions are being disregarded and teachers in some states risk their jobs if they acknowledge the existence of LGBTQ+ people. Texts will include movement documents, manifestos, poems, artworks, and films in addition to works of theory by writers like Anzaldúa, Berlant, Butler, Ferguson, Halberstam, Love, Muñoz, Puar, Rubin, Sedgwick, Spillers, Warner, and others.
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.
ENGL B337 Modernism and the Ordinary
Spring 2026
Modernism is consistently aligned with innovation: making things new and making things strange. Yet modernist writing is preoccupied with habit, repetition, sameness, boredom, and the banal-with "things happening, normally, all the time," as Virginia Woolf once put it. This course explores the modernist fascination with the ordinary, from the objects in a kitchen to the rhythms of a day. Our primary task will be to understand the stakes of paying attention to the ordinary world for queer and women modernist writers, whose work reveals the ordinary as a site of deep ambivalence as well as possibility. Likely authors include: Woolf, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, and Jean Rhys.
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
ENGL B339 Latina/o Culture and the Art of Migration
Not offered 2025-26
Gloria Anzaldúa has famously described the U.S.-Mexico border as an open wound and the border culture that arises from this fraught site as a third country. This course will explore how Chicana/os and Latina/os creatively represent different kinds of migrations across geo-political borders and between cultural traditions to forge transnational identities and communities. We will use cultural production as a lens for understanding how citizenship status, class, gender, race, and language shape the experiences of Latin American migrants and their Latina/o children. We will also analyze alternative metaphors and discourses of resistance that challenge anti-immigrant rhetoric and reimagine the place of undocumented migrants and Latina/os in contemporary U.S. society. Over the course of the semester, we will probe the role that literature, art, film, and music can play in the struggle for migrants' rights and minority civil rights, querying how the imagination and aesthetics can contribute to social justice. We will examine a number of different genres, as well as read and apply key theoretical texts on the borderlands and undocumented migration.
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.
ENGL B343 Sex, Sin, and the Sacred in Medieval Literature
Not offered 2025-26
Rather than being at odds with the church, sex and sexuality was an integral part of medieval concepts of sanctity. Even as the church attempted to regulate sexual behavior, it was also deeply invested in the relationship between the divine and the corporeal, including meditation upon the frankly erotic Song of Songs; the question of Mary's virginity and motherhood; hagiographic accounts of cross-dressing saints; and the feminization of Christ's body. This course will explore three concepts-- sex, sin, and the sacred-- and their interrelationship during the medieval period. We will investigate the complex and often contradictory ways that sex was understood, exploring how medieval people conceptualized the sacred and profane -- and then troubled the very binaries such a system established. Broadly interpreting the term "sex," we will explore issues of sexual and romantic desire; sexual acts and behaviors; medieval versions of gender identity; pre-modern understandings of "biological" sex; love and courtship; and more. Readings will be mostly literary (both canonical and non-canonical) but will also include some excerpts from religious texts and both medieval and early modern medical treatises, including work from Geoffrey Chaucer, Alain de Lille, Christine de Pizan, St. Augustine, Margery Kempe, Thomas Mallory, John Gower, and Marie de France. We will pair these primary source texts with commentary and essays from critics such as Judith Butler, Caroline Walker Bynum, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Robert Mills, and Carolyn Dinshaw. While texts will be presented in their original form where possible, knowledge of Middle English is not a prerequisite for the course. Prerequisite: One 200-level English course or permission of instructor
Course does not meet an Approach
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
ENGL B372 Black Ecofeminism(s): Critical Approaches
Not offered 2025-26
How have Black feminist authors and traditions theorized or represented the ecological world and their relationship to it? How does thinking intersectionally about gender(ing) and racialization expand or challenge conventional notions of "nature," conservation, or environmental justice? In what ways does centering racial blackness critically reframe a host of practical and philosophical questions historically brought together under the sign "ecofeminism?" Combining history and theory, the humanities and the social sciences, this interdisciplinary course will use the work of Black feminist writers (broadly defined) across a range of genres to approach and to trouble the major paradigms and problems of contemporary Euro-American ecofeminist thought. The course uses fiction and poetry by Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Countee Cullen as a gateway to a range of critical work by Jennifer Morgan, Sylvia Wynter, Maria Mies, and Val Plumwood as it attempts to define and deconstruct what Chelsea Frazier calls "Black Feminist Ecological Thought."
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Africana Studies; Environmental Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.
FREN B105 Directions de la France contemporaine
Spring 2026
Ce cours se donne pour but de vous faire goûter à la culture française actuelle, mais aussi de vous donner une idée claire de la société où elle naît. Nous en aborderons des aspects très variés en nous concentrant sur ces institutions dont le fonctionnement la distingue d'autres pays (école, hôpital, etc.). Les films que nous allons voir nous permettront d'analyser ces particularités françaises. Il s'agit également de vous encourager à vous exprimer aisément en français : les discussions seront privilégiées et nous réviserons régulièrement des points de grammaire afin d'améliorer votre expression tant écrite qu'orale. Au terme de ce cours, vous pourrez vivre en France sans vous sentir sur une planète étrangère. Prerequisite: FREN 005 or 101.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Museum Studies; Visual Studies.
GERM B217 Representing Diversity in German Cinema
Spring 2026
German society has undergone drastic changes as a result of immigration. Traditional notions of Germanness have been and are still being challenged and subverted. This course uses films and visual media to examine the experiences of various minority groups living in Germany. Students will learn about the history of immigration of different ethnic groups, including Turkish Germans, Afro-Germans, Asian Germans, Arab Germans, German Jews, and ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. We will explore discourses on migration, racism, xenophobia, integration, and citizenship. We will seek to understand not only the historical and contemporary contexts for these films but also their relevance for reshaping German society. Students will be introduced to modern German cinema from the silent era to the present. They will acquire terminology and methods for reading films as fictional and aesthetic representations of history and politics, and analyze identity construction in the worlds of the real and the reel. This course is taught in English. Additional hour taught in German for German credit.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Film Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities.
GERM B245 Interdisciplinary Approaches to German Literature and Culture
Not offered 2025-26
This is a topics course. Taught in German. Course content varies. Previous topics include, Women's Narratives on Modern Migrancy, Exile, and Diasporas; Nation and Identity in Post-War Austria.
Writing Attentive
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Counts Toward: Comparative Literature; Gender Sexuality Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities.
GREK B201 Plato and Thucydides
Fall 2025
This course is designed to introduce the student to two of the greatest prose authors of ancient Greece, the philosopher, Plato, and the historian, Thucydides. These two writers set the terms in the disciplines of philosophy and history for millennia, and philosophers and historians today continue to grapple with their ideas and influence. The brilliant and controversial statesman Alcibiades provides a link between the two texts in this course (Plato's Symposium and Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War), and we examine the ways in which both authors handle the figure of Alcibiades as a point of entry into the comparison of the varying styles and modes of thought of these two great writers. Suggested Prerequisites: At least 2 years of college Greek or the equivalent.
Writing Attentive
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Counts Toward: Classical Culture and Society; Classical Languages; Classical Studies; Classics; Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin.
HIST B102 Introduction to African Civilizations
Fall 2025
The course is designed to introduce students to the history of African and African Diaspora societies, cultures, and political economies. We will discuss the origins, state formation, external contacts, and the structural transformations and continuities of African societies and cultures in the context of the slave trade, colonial rule, capitalist exploitation, urbanization, and westernization, as well as contemporary struggles over authority, autonomy, identity and access to resources. Case studies will be drawn from across the continent.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies.
HIST B219 LGBTQ+ History in the United States
Spring 2026
This course traces the history of LGBTQ+ identities, relationships, and politics in the United States from the late 18th century to the present. We will consider, in particular, the shifting meanings of sexual and gender variance and LGBTQ+ identities; changing forms of romantic and sexual relationships; the emergence and policing of LGBTQ+ communities, as shaped by class and race; the history of LGBTQ+ activism and its intersections with broader movements for social and economic justice; and the relationship between LGBTQ+ people and the state. Students will learn to read and analyze a range of historical scholarship, as well as primary texts in the history of gender and sexuality including memoirs and letters, periodicals, photographs, and political manifestos.
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
HIST B226 Topics in 20th Century European History
Section 001 (Fall 2025): Revolution in European History
Section 001 (Spring 2026): History of Fascism: Then & Now
Fall 2025, Spring 2026
This is a topics course. Course content varies.
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies.
HIST B237 Themes in Modern African History
Section 001 (Spring 2026): Public History in Africa
Spring 2026
This is a topics course. Course content varies
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; International Studies; International Studies; Museum Studies.
HIST B242 American Politics and Society: 1945 to the Present
Fall 2025
This course examines transformations in American culture, politics, and society from World War II to the present, focusing on flashpoints of government policy, popular culture, and social activism. We will trace this history with a focus on four central themes: (1) U.S. domestic and foreign policy and the fear of annihilation, from the Cold War, the specter of nuclear warfare, and the War in Vietnam to the War on Terror and climate change; (2) the growth and convergence of movements for social justice, including African American, Latinx, Asian American, indigenous, feminist, and LGBTQ+ rights and liberation; (3) the rise of the New Right, neoliberalism, the reshaping of party politics, and their impact on social welfare, healthcare, and the environment; and (4) the politics of popular culture, especially television, music, and digital media. Across these themes, we will consider where government leaders and popular culture have worked to reinforce social norms and sharpen political divides and how social movements have reshaped American politics and society.
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies; International Studies.
HIST B243 Topics: Atlantic Cultures
Section 001 (Spring 2026): Maroon Communities - New World
Spring 2026
This is a topics course. Course content varies.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.
HIST B292 Women in Britain since 1750
Not offered 2025-26
Focusing on contemporary and historical narratives, this course explores the ongoing production, circulation and refraction of discourses on gender and nation as well as race, empire and modernity since the mid-18th century. Texts will incorporate visual material as well as literary evidence and culture and consider the crystallization of the discipline of history itself.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies; International Studies.
HIST B303 Topics in American History
Section 001 (Fall 2025): Histories of Homelessness
Fall 2025
This is a topics course. Course content varies. Recent topics have included medicine, advertising, and history of sexuality. Course may be repeated for credit.
Counts Toward: Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Health Studies.
HIST B337 Topics in African History
Section 001 (Spring 2026): Cities, Epidemics, Pandemics
Spring 2026
This is a topics course. Topics vary.
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Health Studies; Health Studies; International Studies; International Studies.
ITAL B217 Gendered Violence and Femicide
Spring 2026
How many women are killed in Italy? How many women suffer abuse at the hands of their partner? Data shows one in seven in Italy have suffered gendered abuse. In many regions, victims have nowhere to turn for shelter. This course will examine domestic and sexual assault in intimate relationships from a feminist analysis. Historical, theoretical, and sociological perspectives on gender violence will be critically analyzed through criminology research, literature, and theory. Course context will focus on dominance and control as a co-factor of gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic class, age, sexuality, nationality, and other variables. Therefore, the course will highlight the differential impact of gender violence on women of color, lesbians, older women, adolescent girls, immigrants and marginalized and disenfranchised women. Domestic and sexual violence in contemporary Italy will also be reviewed and analyzed in the context of international contexts. This course will be taught in Italian. Prerequisite: ITAL 102 or permission from instructor
Writing Intensive
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Praxis Program.
ITAL B255 Mafia and Organized Crimes
Fall 2025
This course will be a study of the mafia in its historical, social, economic, cultural, and political dimensions. A wide range of novels, films, testimonies and TV series will offer different representations of the Mafia: its ethics, its relationship with politics, religion and business, its ideas of friendship, family, masculinity and femininity. The Associazione Libera was established in 1995 with the purpose of involving and supporting those who are interested in the fight against mafias and organized crime. Thanks to Italian Law n. 109/96, the Italian government is able now to seize property from Mafiosi and give it to co-operations such as Libera. Specialized sectors of mafia activities explored include prostitution, drugs, finance, and human trafficking. Ecomafia receives special attention, examining the implications of mafia for the environment, agriculture and food markets.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Film Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.
ITAL B325 Literature and Film, Literature into Films and Back
Spring 2026
This course is a critical analysis of Modern Italian society through cinematic production and literature, from the Risorgimento to the present. According to Alfred Hitchock's little stories, two goats were eating the reel of a movie taken from a famous novel. "I liked the book better," says one to the other. While at times we too chew on movies taken from books, our main objective will not be to compare books and films, but rather to explore the more complex relation between literature and cinema: how text is put into film, how cultural references operate with respect to issues of style, technique, and perspective. We will discuss how cinema conditions literary imagination, and how literature leaves its imprint on cinema. We will "read" films as "literary images" and "see" novels as "visual stories". Students will become acquainted with literary sources through careful readings; on viewing the corresponding film, students will consider how narrative and descriptive textual elements are transposed into cinematic audio/visual elements. An important concern of this course will be to analyze the particularity of each film/book in relation to a set of themes -gender, death, class, discrimination, history, migration- through close textual analysis. We shall use contemporary Film theory and critical methodology to access these themes.
Counts Toward: Comparative Literature; Film Studies; Film Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Hebrew and Judaic Studies.
PHIL B221 Ethics
Fall 2025
An introduction to ethics by way of an examination of moral theories and a discussion of important ancient, modern, and contemporary texts which established theories such as virtue ethics, deontology, utilitarianism, relativism, emotivism, care ethics. This course considers questions concerning freedom, responsibility, and obligation. How should we live our lives and interact with others? How should we think about ethics in a global context? Is ethics independent of culture? A variety of practical issues such as reproductive rights, euthanasia, animal rights and the environment will be considered.
Writing Attentive
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies; International Studies.
PHIL B252 Feminist Theory
Spring 2026
Beliefs that gender discrimination has been eliminated and women have achieved equality have become commonplace. We challenge these assumptions examining the concepts of patriarchy, sexism, and oppression. Exploring concepts central to feminist theory, we attend to the history of feminist theory and contemporary accounts of women's place and status in different societies, varied experiences, and the impact of the phenomenon of globalization. We then explore the relevance of gender to philosophical questions about identity and agency with respect to moral, social and political theory. Prerequisite: one course in philosophy or permission of instructor.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Political Science.
POLS B221 Gender and Comparative Politics
Fall 2025
This course explores the dynamic intersection of gender and politics within a comparative framework. Through a feminist and intersectional lens, students will engage in major debates in the field of comparative politics, including but not limited to the State, social movements, authoritarianism, populism, democracy, institutions, and backlash. The course maps the trajectory of feminist work across various areas of comparative research, using examples from different world regions and periods to analyze similarities and differences across global cases. This course fulfills a 200-level requirement for both Comparative Politics and American Politics for Political Science majors. Prerequisite: Students must have taken either Intro to International Politics, Intro to Comparative Politics, or Introduction to Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
POLS B290 Power and Resistance
Not offered 2025-26
What more is there to politics than power? What is the force of the "political" for specifying power as a practice or institutional form? What distinguishes power from authority, violence, coercion, and domination? How is power embedded in and generated by cultural practices, institutional arrangements, and processes of normalization? This course seeks to address questions of power and politics in the context of domination, oppression, and the arts of resistance. Our general topics will include authority, the moralization of politics, the dimensions of power, the politics of violence (and the violence of politics), language, sovereignty, emancipation, revolution, domination, normalization, governmentality, genealogy, and democratic power. Writing projects will seek to integrate analytical and reflective analyses as we pursue these questions in common. Writing Intensive.
Writing Intensive
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
POLS B346 Gender & International Organizations
Spring 2026
Employing a multi-disciplinary feminist lens, this course examines how gender shapes and is shaped by global peace and security governance. With a particular focus on the United Nations Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, students will engage with theoretical, institutional, and empirical perspectives to analyze how global organizations translate gender norms into policy and practice. Through case studies and critical debates, the course interrogates both the promises and limitations of global gender governance in contexts of conflict and peacebuilding. Prerequisite: One Political Science or Gender & Sexuality Studies course.
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
RUSS B265 Queer Russias
Fall 2025
This course presents an alternative vision of Russia's cultural legacy with a focus on queer writing, film, and art from the early nineteenth century to the present day. We consider key moments in this history by examining texts that explore what it has meant to be queer in Russia under different regimes with various levels of tolerance, while centering their power as works of protest art, personal expression, and creative exploration and experimentation. Topics includes: queer masculinities and femininities, reproductive rights, pop and Internet cultures, queer joy, homophobia and protest, trans rights, queerness and disability, marriage, among others. Taught in English. No knowledge of Russian language/culture necessary. Open to all.
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
SOCL B102 Society, Culture, and the Individual
Fall 2025, Spring 2026
Sociology is the systematic study of society and social interaction. It involves what C. Wright Mills called the "sociological imagination," a way of seeing the relationship between individuals and the larger forces of society and history. In this course, we will practice using our sociological imaginations to think about the world around us. We will examine how social norms and structures are created and maintained, and we will analyze how these structures shape people's behavior and choices, often without their realizing it. After learning to think sociologically, we will examine the centrality of inequality in society, focusing specifically on the intersecting dimensions of race and ethnicity, gender, and class, and the role of social structures and institutions (such as the family and education) in society. Overall, this course draws our attention toward our own presuppositions-the things we take for granted in our everyday lives-and provides us with a systematic framework within which we can analyze those presuppositions and identify their effects..
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies.
SOCL B201 The Study of Gender in Society
Fall 2025
The definition of male and female social roles and sociological approaches to the study of gender in the United States, with attention to gender in the economy and work place, the division of labor in families and households, and analysis of class and ethnic differences in gender roles. Of particular interest in this course is the comparative exploration of the experiences of women of color in the United States.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Counts Toward: Child and Family Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies.
SOCL B225 Women in Society
Spring 2026
In 2015, the world's female population was 49.6 percent of the total global population of 7.3 billion. According to the United Nations, in absolute terms, there were 61,591,853 more men than women. Yet, at the global scale, 124 countries have more women than men. A great majority of these countries are located in what scholars have recently been referring to as the Global South - those countries known previously as developing countries. Although women outnumber their male counterparts in many Global South countries, however, these women endure difficulties that have worsened rather than improving. What social structures determine this gender inequality in general and that of women of color in particular? What are the main challenges women in the Global South face? How do these challenges differ based on nationality, class, ethnicity, skin color, gender identity, and other axes of oppression? What strategies have these women developed to cope with the wide variety of challenges they contend with on a daily basis? These are some of the major questions that we will explore together in this class. In this course, the Global South does not refer exclusively to a geographical location, but rather to a set of institutional structures that generate disadvantages for all individuals and particularly for women and other minorities, regardless their geographical location in the world. In other words, a significant segment of the Global North's population lives under the same precarious conditions that are commonly believed as exclusive to the Global South. Simultaneously, there is a Global North embedded in the Global South as well. In this context, we will see that the geographical division between the North and the South becomes futile when we seek to understand the dynamics of the "Western-centric/Christian-centric capitalist/patriarchal modern/colonial world-system" (Grosfoguel, 2012). In the first part of the course, we will establish the theoretical foundations that will guide us throughout the rest of the semester. We will then turn to a wide variety of case studies where we will examine, for instance, the contemporary global division of labor, gendered violence in the form of feminicides, international migration, and global tourism. The course's final thematic section will be devoted to learning from the different feminisms (e.g. community feminism) emerging out of the Global South as well as the research done in that region and its contribution to the development of a broader gender studies scholarship. In particular, we will pay close attention to resistance, solidarity, and social movements led by women. Examples will be drawn from Latin America, the Caribbean, the US, Asia, and Africa.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Counts Toward: Africana Studies; Child and Family Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.
SOCL B235 Mexican-American Communities
Not offered 2025-26
For its unique history, the number of migrants, and the two countries' proximity, Mexican migration to the United States represents an exceptional case in world migration. There is no other example of migration with more than 100 years of history. The copious presence of migrants concentrated in a host country, such as we have in the case of the 11.7 million Mexican migrants residing in the United States, along with another 15 million Mexican descendants, is unparalleled. The 1,933-mile-long border shared by the two countries makes it one of the longest boundary lines in the world and, unfortunately, also one of the most dangerous frontiers in the world today. We will examine the different economic, political, social and cultural forces that have shaped this centenarian migration influx and undertake a macro-, meso-, and micro-levels of analysis. At the macro-level of political economy, we will investigate the economic interdependency that has developed between Mexico and the U.S. over different economic development periods of these countries, particularly, the role the Mexican labor force has played to boosting and sustaining both the Mexican and the American economies. At the meso-level, we will examine different institutions both in Mexico and the U.S. that have determined the ways in which millions of Mexican migrate to this country. Last, but certainly not least, we will explore the impacts that both the macro-and meso-processes have had on the micro-level by considering the imperatives, aspirations, and dreams that have prompted millions of people to leave their homes and communities behind in search of better opportunities. This major life decision of migration brings with it a series of social transformations in family and community networks, this will look into the cultural impacts in both the sending and receiving migrant communities. In sum, we will come to understand how these three levels of analysis work together.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Growth and Structure of Cities; Latin American Iberian Latinx; Praxis Program.
SOCL B262 Public Opinion
Spring 2026
This course will assess public opinion in American politics: what it is, how it is measured, how it is shaped, how it relates to public policy, and how it changes over time. It includes both questions central to political scientists (what is the public, how do they exercise their voice, does the government listen and how do they respond?) and to sociologists (where do ideas come from, how do they gain societal influence, and how do they change over time?). It will pay close attention to the role of electoral politics throughout, both historically and in the current election. It is focused primarily on the United States, but seeks to place the US in global context. If this course is taken to fulfill an elective in the Data Science minor, students will conduct hands-on analyses with real data as a key component to both their Midterm and Final Essays.
Cross-Cultural Analysis (CC)
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Political Science.
SOCL B307 Transnational Queer Politics
Fall 2025
As people and ideas traverse national, cultural, and social borders, how are gender and sexuality negotiated and redefined? This course uses queer politics and practices as an entry point to examine transnational processes such as global diffusion, international organizations, colonialism, global capitalism, and neoliberalism. Instead of taking gender and sexual categories like "gay," "lesbian," and "trans" for granted, we will use a feminist and queer sociological approach to interrogate how gender and sexual categories are produced, maintained, and reconfigured in non-western societies. Furthermore, we will consider how to address the limits of global LGBT rights discourse, social movements, and politics through postcolonial and intersectional lenses. Together, we will cultivate critical tools to assess the relationships between gender, sexuality, and globalization and how these processes influence the lived experiences of queer/trans individuals worldwide. Prerequisite: At lease one course in the social sciences.
Counts Toward: Gender & Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; Gender Sexuality Studies; International Studies.
SOCL B350 Movements for Social Justice
Fall 2025
Throughout human history, powerless groups of people have organized social movements to improve their lives and their societies. Powerful groups and institutions have resisted these efforts in order to maintain their own privilege. Some periods of history have been more likely than others to spawn protest movements. What factors seem most likely to lead to social movements? What determines their success/failure? We will examine 20th and 21st-century social movements to answer these questions. Prerequisite: At least one prior social science course or permission of the instructor.
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Peace Justice and Human Rights.
SPAN B205 Escritoras en la España contemporánea
Spring 2026
The course will focus on fiction written during the 20th and 21st century by women writers in Spain. We will study how the female subject is represented and constructed in these texts along historical events that have changed the country. Taking into account the political and social paradigms that dominate Spanish modern history and culture, we will explore how twentieth and twenty-first-century women writers negotiate the female subject in relation to earlier models of narration, identities (both self and regional), and social relationships. We will also look how these models have been challenged by a new wave of immigration and how it affects the social landscape of Spain. We will bring into the analysis and discussion of literary texts some of the issues addressed by feminist literary theory, such as language, canon formation, gender, and class. Finally, we will pay attention to the recovery of the country's feminist tradition, as well as current topics of social and political conflict that concern women in Spain.
Writing Intensive
Critical Interpretation (CI)
Inquiry into the Past (IP)
Power, Inequity, and Justice (PIJ)
Counts Toward: Gender Sexuality Studies; Latin American Iberian Latinx.
Contact Us
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Anita Kurimay
Director of Gender and Sexuality
Associate Professor of History
Old Library 205
Phone: 610-526-5040
akurimay@brynmawr.edu
Stephen Vider
Associate Professor of History and Gender and Sexuality at 51¶ÌÊÓÆµ
Old Library 242
Phone: 610-526-5034
svider@brynmawr.edu
Gina Valasco
Associate Professor and Director of Gender and Sexuality Studies
370 Lancaster Avenue
Phone: 610-526-5034
gvalasco@haverford.edu