This course surveys the working roles women occupied (voluntarily or forcibly) in American history, from plantation mistresses, enslaved women, and “Republican Mothers” to factory girls, activists, and the modern-day working-woman. Units in this course will discuss how competing notions of gender, sexuality, and womanhood informed, dictated, and advanced a woman’s “proper” place in the sphere of work. From the 1700s to the present, America has witnessed profound developments in women’s spaces, extending them from the confines of the household to the worlds of industry and commerce. How did women, through their labor, conceive of and subvert their femininity? Who were the men who allied with women to fight for women’s autonomy? In securing their positions, what power dynamics in the workplace and political resistance did women encounter? To answer these questions, we will be examining primary sources such as newspapers, labor laws, advertisements, and documentaries, along with important secondary works.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 540

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary scholarship of Gender, Sexuality and Women's studies and will be team taught by Tanya Bakhmetyeva (Lecturer of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies) and Kristin Doughty (Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of GSW). As a survey course, this class is designed to give students from diverse backgrounds and disciplines a basic understanding of debates and perspectives discussed in the field. We will use gender as a critical lens to examine some of the social, cultural, economic, scientific, and political practices that organize our lives. We will explore a multitude of feminist perspectives on the intersections of sex, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and other categories of identity. In this course, we will interrogate these categories as socially constructed while acknowledging that these constructions have real effects in subordinating groups, marking bodies, and creating structural, intersectional inequalities.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 540

Exploration of anthropological interpretation, research, and writing on the ways different peoples understand and deal with issues of illness and disease.

BUILDING: GAVET | ROOM: 301

In this course we will examine approaches to the body and gender as described and manifested in Jewish texts, rituals, and communal practice from the biblical period to the present. We will look at interpretations of the body, and its effect on the status of women in particular, in the Bible and Talmud, paying close attention to the historical and cultural contexts of these interpretations. There will be a strong focus on modern reevaluations of gender and the body and how such revaluations have transformed what it means to be “Jewish.” Topics include rites of passage, images of women in the Bible, feminist theology, as well as theories and depictions of the “Jewish body.”

BUILDING: B&L | ROOM: 270

The study of issues surrounding human sexuality as it has been treated in world religions. Issues, such as homosexuality, transgender/transsexual, marriage, family, sexual ethics, gender in world religions will be covered. Also, the role of Eros in mystical traditions of various world religions (Sufi, Christian Mysticism, Hinduism) will be examined in those instances where the erotic and the spiritual have been manifested together. Classroom discussion about what is the connection between sexuality and spirituality and how have religious traditions dealt with that connection? College hook-up culture is also examined in light of the study of spirituality and sexuality.

BUILDING: CHAPL | ROOM: 200

Improve Strength, Flexibility and Self-awareness of the body. This class will explore Traditional forms of Middle Eastern Dance such as Egyptian Raks Sharqi, Turkish, Tunisian and Moroccan. History, Costuming, and Culture from these countries will be experienced. Class will include meditative movement, dance technique, improvisation and rhythm identification through music and drumming. Discourse and research topics will explore issues of gender, body image, historical perspectives and Orientalism. Clusters: Movement and Culture, Dance and Performanc

BUILDING: SPURR | ROOM: DANCE

This course explores the relationship between the environment and social inequality, focusing specifically on issues of gender, race, and class. Is there a connection between sexism, racism, class exploitation, and environmental destruction? Using intersectional feminist analysis, we will investigate the historical roots of modern dualist constructions that juxtapose humans and the environment, men and women, creating an anthropocentric, racialized, and gendered framework that produces and maintains social inequalities and a destructive attitude toward the environment. Topics may include the following: historical ideas about nature and environment; eco-imperialism; eco-feminism; climate change and its connection to issues of race, gender, and class; justice and sustainability; poverty and natural resources; food justice; natural disasters (such as Hurricane Katrina) and their context, and others. The course features an optional three-day excursion to the Adirondack High Peaks Wilderness.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 540

This course explores the relationship between the environment and social inequality, focusing specifically on issues of gender, race, and class. Is there a connection between sexism, racism, class exploitation, and environmental destruction? Using intersectional feminist analysis, we will investigate the historical roots of modern dualist constructions that juxtapose humans and the environment, men and women, creating an anthropocentric, racialized, and gendered framework that produces and maintains social inequalities and a destructive attitude toward the environment. Topics may include the following: historical ideas about nature and environment; eco-imperialism; eco-feminism; climate change and its connection to issues of race, gender, and class; justice and sustainability; poverty and natural resources; food justice; natural disasters (such as Hurricane Katrina) and their context, and others. The course features an optional three-day excursion to the Adirondack High Peaks Wilderness.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 540

This seminar will examine the representation of Orthodox Jews by American Jews on both page and screen. This course should equip you to understand—historically and critically—the core factors in this contemporary culture war such as (gender, religious authority, political affiliation) as well as to empathetically appreciate current concern over acculturation, Americanization, and Jewish continuity.

BUILDING: RRLIB | ROOM: 442

This course is a discussion-based learning experience that explores the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, transgender, and intersex (LGBTQI) history, communities, and identity through theory, pop culture, literature, and intersectional analysis. Topics include the emergence of subcultures and the organized activist movements from the 1920's through today, early sexuality theory and poststructuralist queer theory, and major historical events including the AIDS epidemic and Stonewall Riots. Course will be taught by KaeLyn Rich, Assistant Advocacy Director (Chapters) of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

BUILDING: LATT | ROOM: 540

What makes a rebel author? This course will examine the works and lives of 20th century German women writers – Rosa Luxemburg, Hannah Arendt, Ulrike Meinhof and Christa Wolf, and others – who stand out as individuals who rebelled against socio-political and discursive-artistic norms of their respective times. Our readings will be clustered around dominant themes borrowed from our authors – suffrage, sexuality, socialism, fascism, war and family – which serve as textual as well as historical foci. This course will introduce students to close reading methods across diverse genres (fiction and non-fiction) and media. All readings and discussion will be in English.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 161

Emblem and metaphor of vices and virtues, the female body has been the undisputed protagonist of ancient and modern art. But how profound was the feminine influence in Italian art from the 14th to the 20th century? More specifically, what importance did female artists have in the visual arts, art collecting, art-related business, and patronage? This course will address this theme along three lines of inquiry: female portraiture and self-portraiture, body anatomy (the nude), and women’s role in the practice of the visual arts. While examining fashion as a way of understanding social conventions regulating women’s public and private life, we will also analyze how powerful and influential women artists like Isabella d’Este and Artemisia Gentileschi, or American art collectors in love with Italian culture, like Isabella Stewart Gardner and Peggy Guggenheim were, in fact, not merely ‘objects’ of (male) inspiration but real agents of innovation in the business world, in society, and in the artistic environment.

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This course traces the development of the fantasy literature genre from ETA Hoffman’s The Golden Pot to JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Particular attention is devoted to the tropes and structures of fantasy narratives as they offer the reader an escape from a mundane or threatening world and provide intricate social critiques. Topics addressed include: wizards, witches, talking cats, flights of fantasy, new worlds, and social consructions of work, class, others, families, mothers, fathers, masculinity, femininity etc. Authors include: Hoffmann, Rowling, Shelley, Orwell, Tolkien, Kafka, Atwood etc.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 163

This course will explore various concepts of mobility and encounters within ethnographic films and texts. Questions we will investigate include: How does one represent a culture? What notions of race, gender, sexuality and national identities are reinforced and challenged in these works? Who speaks for whom and what are the consequences? What kinds of power relationships are hidden or made visible in these films and texts?

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Dance/Movement Therapy Foundations examines the field’s approaches to (1) enhancing personal, professional, and creative development, and (2) treating a wide range of challenges (e.g., autism, anxiety, eating disorders, abuse, developmental challenges, and psychosis). To these ends, students will learn how Dance/Movement Therapy integrates natural movement, formal elements of dance, music, language, psychology, counseling, neuroscience, and concepts drawn from Asian approaches to healing. Improvisational dance, music-making, role plays, live music, and videotapes of actual sessions highlight these concepts. Dress comfortably. Be prepared to move. Participation in 3 labs during the semester will be required.

BUILDING: SPURR | ROOM: DANCE

An isolated country parsonage. A half mad father. A profligate brother addicted to drugs. Three uniquely gifted sisters who burned their hearts and brains out on the moors, but not before leaving us some of the most passionate and revolutionary literature of the 19th c. This is the stuff of the Brontë legend. This course will explore the continuing appeal of the Brontës and the peculiar fascination that they have exercised on the literary imagination. Looking intensively at some of the best-loved novels of all time, we will explore the roots and reaches of the Brontë myth. We will also consider the Brontës’ legacy in in some of the many adaptations (and continuations) of their work in print and on the screen. And we will look at our seemingly insatiable appetite for new tellings of the Brontës’ life stories. The course, then, will consider not the only the Brontës’ literary productions, but also our culture’s production and reproduction of “the Brontës” over the years.

BUILDING: GRGEN | ROOM: 110

In recent years, we have seen a virtual explosion of writing by women, with women’s novels constituting some of the most widely read and critically admired work being produced today. The global reach of both its authors and audiences has made contemporary women’s writing a truly international phenomenon. We will examine what makes this work especially innovative: its experimentation with new voices and narrative forms and its blurring of genre boundaries. We will look at the dialogue it has established with the past, where it often finds its inspiration, self-consciously appropriating earlier literary texts or rewriting history. We will also consider what special challenges this work poses for its readers. Looking at works originating in a wide range of geographic locations, this course, will explore the diverse shapes of contemporary women's imagination and attempt to account for the compelling interest of this new body of fiction.

BUILDING: MOREY | ROOM: 502

Eve let the Devil through the door, and her punishment was terrible pain in childbirth: for the vagina is a crossroad between the external and the internal. This course examines medieval and later texts where the feminine and the monstrous intersect: the female body is porous, secretive, associated with the abject, the messy, the sinful, the incomplete, and all the more horrifying when it’s not constrained socially and politically—a mindset that persists even now. We'll look at the “monstrous feminine” in the evil mother, the temptress, the hag, the witch, the fairy and the shapeshifter in Eve, Medea and Melusine; the vetula, the “loathly lady”; Sheela na Gig, Malleus Maleficarum, De Secretis mulierum, “Duessa” and “Error” in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, “Sin” in Milton’s Paradise Lost, films and social media about monstrous mothers, and articles from Cohen, Kristeva, Miller, Urban and Creed.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 148

The category of “guilt” floats between theology, psychology, and criminology. Sometimes as a feeling, sometimes as a purported objective condition, guilt stars in big stories moderns tell about what it is to be a member of a society, what it is to be a religious person, and how it feels to be a creature with sexual appetites. Meanwhile, for legal and mental health professions, proof of guilt is used to sort the good from the bad, the normal from the deviant, and the socially respectable from the socially disposable. Not all is so dour, however. Guilt lives in confession, denunciation, and in criminal sentencing, but it is also the stuff of jokes, of ethnic pride, and of eroticism. Toward an anatomy of guilt, in this course we will draw on the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Arendt, Foucault, Janet Malcolm and Sarah Schulman, and we will wrestle with the films—and complicated legacies—of Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen, two filmmakers who are preoccupied with (and implicated by) guilt, as feeling and as fact.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 104

Exploration of the ways males and females differ in interaction, theories of development of sex differences, consequences for social change.

BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 203

In a narrow sense, this is a course on the legacies of two famous British novels, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and how these works inspired generations of Caribbean writers to create worlds (seemingly) far removed from the north of England. But in a larger sense, it’s a course on colonialism and its afterlives, and the way 20th century writers revised and played off of the Brontës to expose the enduring effects of imperialism and slavery in the West Indies. We’ll read both Brontë novels, as well as fiction by Jamaica Kincaid, Jean Rhys, Maryse Condé, and others, paying close attention to their formations of race, gender, class, spirituality, and the environment. We’ll examine how they reconfigure iconic features of the Brontëan gothic—the desolate moors, the ghostly mansions, suggestions of madness and the supernatural—to create West Indian worlds at once haunting and beautiful, all while laying bare the violence of Europe’s historical presence in the Caribbean.

BUILDING: LCHAS | ROOM: 161

What kinds of power do words really have? What does it mean to be a writer-activist? How can we use writing as a tool for social change? Drawing on social and political concepts like community, power, justice, and democracy, and scholars who reflect on these issues, this course will engage with a variety of texts (scholarship, blogs, documentary films) as we consider how the political can inform what we believe and impact the choices we make as writers. Through experiential learning and reflective writing, students will explore the power of writing to elicit equity, inclusion, and change. Research projects may include traditional academic source material, primary research such as fieldwork, surveys, and interviews, and direct work with local community organizations. Class time will include visits from community speakers and off-campus events. This is a community-engaged course that meets the requirement for the citation in community-engaged scholarship.

BUILDING: MEL | ROOM: 219

PREREQUISITES: Completion of Primary Writing Requirement

Recently, women have collectively mobilized to announce and describe their anger to the public. We ask how to locate anger in social relations as well as in individuals. We try to distinguish between the behaviors emerging from men’s and women’s anger. We read Mercy and other works by Andrea Dworkin, graphic stories by Phoebe Gloeckner and Isabel Greenberg, the off-genre What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life by Marie Calloway, The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh, Vox by Christina Dalcher, autobiographical/documentary films by Michelle Citron, Su Friedrich, and Cheryl Dunye, the TV series “The Handmaid’s Tale, and political writings such as Good and Mad by Rebecca Traister, Eloquent Rage: a Black Feminist Discovers her Superpower by Brittney Cooper, and Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Chemaly. Weekly essays, final essay, no exams.

BUILDING: HYLAN | ROOM: 306

In this course students will investigate the following questions: What is argument? What is evidence? To answer these questions, students will also think deeply about how context does or does not shape our understanding of these concepts. For instance, what do arguments in STEM fields have in common with those in the humanities? Do different fields such as philosophy, psychology, and biology share evidence and argumentative strategies? Is the meaning of evidence static across these fields? We will begin by investigating different models of argument from philosophy and argumentation theory, and then students will use these broad models to investigate and analyze argument in academic contexts of their choice. We will also explore how these theoretical accounts of argument apply to popular contexts such as advertising, public deliberation, and journalism. Students will explore these issues through reflective writing, several short papers and a research project of their own design.

BUILDING: HYLAN | ROOM: 203

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