fall 2017

English 167: 20th Century African American Poetry (undergraduate lecture-seminar). This class will focus on the Black Revolutionary Tradition, and particularly on poets and writers thinking through the relation of anticapitalist and black struggles, from poets such as Claude McKay, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka, to revolutionaries such as George Jackson, Assata Shakur, and Huey Newton.

History 102x: The Production of History (undergraduate seminar). This course asks students to reflect on the ways in which contemporary forces shape what we study as history and why. We will consider how archives are assembled, whose stories are told and preserved, and who gives and is given access to them. We will question why projects to organize and partition evidence from the past can produce both knowledge and ignorance. We will examine historical representations in narrative and visual media, through case studies that include secret police archives in Guatemala, the bureaucracies of contemporary Pakistan, the colonial offices of the nineteenth-century British Empire, and social description on the frontiers of ancient Greece. This course is geared toward history majors across regional specializations, as well as students in the humanities and social sciences interested in thinking carefully and creatively about the past. Emphasis is on reading from multiple disciplines, including artwork and film. Required texts: Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995); Kirsten Weld, Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala (2014); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015); and Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (2015).

winter 2018

English 262: Cultures of Racial Capitalism (Graduate Seminar, Neil Agarwal and Mark Jerng)

Course will read foundational work in the history and concept of racial capitalism such as DuBois and Robinson, while paying particular attention to the role, function, and domain of “culture.”

History 201 Slavery and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Graduate Seminar, Justin Leroy)

DRA 155 Representing Race in Performance (Jon Rossini)

Primarily an investigation of contemporary plays but it should have some intersections with the production of race and related issues