Undergraduate Programs

Changes by semester

Location

(R 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary scholarship of Gender, Sexuality and Women's studies. 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.

Location

(M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course provides an overview of the interdisciplinary field of medical anthropology. Using a range of ethnographic case materials (including graphic novels, documentaries, and texts), we will explore how cultural, biological, and political contexts variously shape understandings and experiences of health and illness. Key topics include cultures of medicine, medical pluralism, medicalization, social suffering, and ethics in medical research, medical technologies, and global health. This introductory survey in medical anthropology is open to first- and second-year undergraduate students.

Location

(MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

For as long as there have been movies, filmmakers have used the medium of film to explore concerns central to the study of religion: how does (or doesn’t) God act in the world? What worlds do “religious” institutions engender, and what room do these worlds afford for individual will and desire? Within and without these structures, how is one to be good? Special attention will be paid to questions of representing metaphysics, of ethics, and of power and agency, particularly vis-à-vis gender and sexuality.

Location

(TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

In this colloquium we will look at the history of international feminism and explore its many faces. We will examine the various factors that have contributed to women’s historically lower status in society; will look at the emergence of women’s rights and feminist movements as well as the distinctions among various feminist theories, and will discuss the relevance of feminism today.

Location

(T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

In this colloquium we will look at the history of international feminism and explore its many faces. We will examine the various factors that have contributed to women’s historically lower status in society; will look at the emergence of women’s rights and feminist movements as well as the distinctions among various feminist theories, and will discuss the relevance of feminism today.

Location

(T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

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.

Location

(T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Every day we rarely pause to consider how our understanding of what is ?normal? influences how we understand the present and how we imagine futures. This course centers the experiences of multiply-marginalized disabled people and introduces students to a transnational framework that considers how our thinking about disability is rooted in settler colonialism, Christian hegemony, capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. From an intersectional, interdisciplinary multimedia perspective students will learn to critically examine the history of Western medicine, law, politics, and culture. This class offers a space in which we approach disabilities, from depression and anxiety to autism to spina bifida, as well as Deaf culture, chronic illnesses, body size, sexual orientation and gender identity, and many other forms of difference as complex sites of social expectations, personal experiences, state interventions, knowledge production, and exuberant life.

Location

(TR 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course surveys women’s literature in East Asia from the classical to the contemporary period. Through a diverse selection of women’s writings that encompass classical poetry, proletariat literature, war novels, and science fiction, students explore how women writers actively engaged with their respective societies during various points in history. Students will also gain critical insights into the issue of how “women’s literature” can be constructed within different frameworks such as history, social-political freedom, gender identity, commercial publishing, and artistic expression. While studying their writings and diverse voices, we meditate on these underlying questions: what is “women’s literature”? When and how can it be a productive category, and when is it not?

Location

(R 3:25PM - 6:05PM)

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.

Location

(MW 11:50AM - 1:05PM)

Exploration of the ways males and females differ in interaction, theories of development of sex differences, consequences for social change.
Prerequisite: PSYC 101

This is a social science course.

Location

(TR 2:00PM - 3:15PM)

Biographies of Emancipation in the Black World explores the sites and emblematic figures who contributed to the emancipation of the Black world, understood here as the African continent and peoples of African descent. Ghana, under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah, assumed a decisive role in the articulation of the narrative of black emancipation. The course introduces students to charismatic figures such as Kwame Nkrumah, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela who all have articulated a powerful network of black international to counter racism in the United States of America, apartheid in South Africa or colonialism on the African continent. Cultural producers, activists and writers such as Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Billie Holiday, Lorraine Hansberry, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, and Maryse Condé have contributed advance the global struggle for the emancipation of the Black world.

Location

(MW 12:30PM - 1:45PM)

This course will examine the varieties of thought about, and practice of, civil disobedience within social movements, with an emphasis on contemporary activism. When, why, and how do communities choose to push back against structures of violence and injustice? Throughout the semester, we will study canonical texts? of modern resistance history speeches, writing, direct action protests, art and will consider the role of this form of counter-conduct within larger campaign strategies to build power from below and get free.

Location

(T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

This course examines the contemporary interplay among gender, war, and militarism through engagement with feminist international relations and critical masculinities scholarship on these themes, as well as an exploration of their representation in media and popular culture, such as Pearl Harbor (2001) and television news coverage. We will identify the historical and sociopolitical conditions that enable the militarization of a society and give rise to war by considering examples from around the world, including 20th and 21st century conflicts in Cambodia, Somalia, Guatemala, Serbia, and Afghanistan. We will pay particular attention to the social construction of femininity, masculinity, and gender relations in a militarized culture. Topics will include security, foreign policy, development, peacekeeping, and human rights.

Location

(MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

This course examines the interplay among gender, war, and militarism through engagement with feminist international relations and critical masculinities scholarship on these themes, as well as an exploration of their representation in media and popular culture. We will identify the historical and sociopolitical conditions that enable the militarization of a society and give rise to war or peace by considering examples from around the world. We will pay particular attention to the social construction of femininity, masculinity, and gender relations in a militarized culture. Weekly topics include security, foreign policy, development, peacekeeping, and human rights.

Location

(MW 10:25AM - 11:40AM)

Feminism has had a powerful impact on the developing field of film theory from the 1970s to the present. This course will examine the major feminist work on film, moving from the earlier text-based psychoanalytic theories of representation to theories of feminine spectatorship to studies of reception contexts and audience. We will also give attention to the very important role of feminist theory in television studies. Weekly screenings, keyed to the readings, will allow us to test the value of these positions for close critical analysis of the film or television text. Readings to include: Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Constance Penley, Judith Mayne, Linda Williams, Jacqueline Bobo, Valerie Smith, Lynn Spigel, Lynne Joyrich, Julie D'Acci.

Location

(T 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

For GSWS majors completing an honors project in their fourth year, typically taken in the fall to be followed by 393H in the spring. The time of the class is flexible and will be decided by those enrolled in collaboration with the instructor.

Location

(M 2:00PM - 4:40PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed through the Independent Study Form​

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed through the Independent Study Form​

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed through the Internship Registration Form

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)

Registration for Independent Study courses needs to be completed through the Independent Study Form​

Location

( 7:00PM - 7:00PM)