CHUM141 Depicting Death in Literature

This course analyzes the theme of death primarily within French and francophone writing (in English translation), tracing the evolution of death imagery over time in literary texts. The curriculum will investigate various contexts related to the environment and language usage, offering a nuanced understanding of how the portrayal of death has changed in literature.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CGST
Identical With: CGST141, RL&L211
Prereq: None

CHUM202F Deconstructing Democracy (FYS)

What role does democracy play in the narratives that political philosophers tell themselves about the moment human beings pass from the state of nature into civil society? Why is it that almost all political philosophies have almost nothing good to say about democracy? And how did it happen that democracy has come to be one of the most debated concepts straddling the borderline of the literary and the political, the real and the ideal? Seeking to answer these and other questions, this course will follow the concept of democracy through some canonical and non-canonical texts in or relating to political philosophy. We shall attempt to understand why democracy gives rise to the complications and paradoxes that are definitive of the conceptual space of political society.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Prereq: None

CHUM204F Performance and Authenticity between Race and Gender (FYS)

This seminar is a cultural and intellectual history of fraudulence, fiction, and faking it. To deride a person or phenomenon as "all a performance" is to make an accusation of artificiality or inauthenticity. How do colloquial uses of language reflect long-standing cultural suppositions, and how do connotations of performance as fakery or fabrication intersect with the actual work of performers themselves? In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore questions of performance, affective labor, subjectivity and self-making (and re-making), both onstage and off. We study performances found equally in everyday life, popular entertainment, and avant-garde art, and center the contributions of Black, feminist, and queer studies.



Topics include illusion, ventriloquism, and sleight of hand, as well as mimetic acting and the manufacture of "emotion," dance technique and the concealment of effort, and musical improvisation and the politics of invention. We consider the potent complexities of drag, camp, and minstrelsy--and historicize their surrounding discourses of fraudulence and authenticity. Looking at a range of (predominantly U.S.-based) practices from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth, this course is not a comprehensive survey, but rather, examines key episodes in the history of modern "performers."



Together, we will grapple with the ways that artifice and theatricality have been historically reviled as qualities inherent to femininity and queerness, respectively; the historically complex entwinement between ideas of race and authenticity; and how hiding, fabulation, exaggeration, and duplicity have been mobilized as strategies of freedom and resistance--from the spectacular escape act of Henry "Box" Brown to the sensational camp and hyperbolic glamour of the East Los Angeles art collective Asco.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Prereq: None

CHUM206F Art and the Global Contemporary (FYS)

This course introduces students to a range of artistic practices from the mid-20th-century to the present. We will consider the work of artists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Japan, Yugoslavia, Serbia, Germany, Poland, Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Nigeria, China, Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, Haiti, Cuba, Mexico, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, India, the Indigenous U.S. and the African Diaspora, among others.



We will not take our central terms for granted. Rather, we will ask: When, precisely, is the contemporary? How do different nations and cultures have varying notions of the present and the past? How do questions of tradition and futurity resonate in artworks, particularly in non- Western and postcolonial contexts?



Together, we will consider the status of the global and the role of the local. In the context of late modernity, can the "global," only ever name the circuits of capitalist exchange? We will consider how artists are both deeply attentive to local contexts, as well as engaged in a practice of diaspora; and how artists engage the politics of land, borders, the nation-state, and the violence that upholds them. That is, we will orient ourselves via a notion of cultural identity that, in Stuart Hall's terms, is "not an essence but a positioning."
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Prereq: None

CHUM214 The Modern and the Postmodern

In this course we will examine how the idea of "the modern" develops at the end of the 18th century and how being modern (or progressive, or hip) became one of the crucial criteria for understanding and evaluating cultural change during the last 200 years. Our readings will be drawn from a variety of areas--philosophy, novels, music, painting, and photography--and we will be concerned with the relations between culture and historical change. Finally, we shall try to determine what it means to be modern today and whether it makes sense to go beyond the modern to the postmodern.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-HIST
Identical With: HIST214, COL214
Prereq: None

CHUM228 Virtue and Vice in History, Literature, and Philosophy

Examines the long, complex and sometimes contradictory associations of virtue with piety, salvation, righteousness, intensity, strength, and, more recently with vulnerability and suffering. Beginning with Confucius and Aristotle, and winding our way through Christianity, humanism, postmodernism until the present, we will explore the ethics, power, and politics of the ideas of virtue and vice.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-COL
Identical With: COL228, PHIL112, HIST140
Prereq: None

CHUM233 All Ah We: Contemporary Afro-Caribbean Drama & Performance

What are the dramatic utterances of Afro-Caribbean artists? How do Afro-Caribbean playwrights and other narrative-based performance artists present "Caribbean" and/or "West Indian" subjectivities in ways that are shared, yet critically different? In what ways are Afro-Caribbean dramas and performance pieces repositories for the practical, the theoretical, the sociological, the political, the imagined, and the lost? In answering these questions and more, we examine these textual and embodied expressions from the complicated crossroads of class, creolization, diaspora, ethnicity, folklore, gender, history, indentured servitude, isolation, language, race, religion, and slavery. At all times, this course revels in the polyphony that is Afro-Caribbean drama and performance.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL233, AFAM233, THEA233
Prereq: None

CHUM248 Shakespearean Revolutions

Shakespeare's works emerged during a period of revolutionary social, political, religious, economic, and cultural change, including the Protestant Reformation, the rise of print culture, the transition from feudalism to mercantile capitalism, early colonialism, global trade, and the emergence of the first, purpose-built, commercial playhouses. Innovations in dramatic form and genre, which Shakespeare helped craft, sought in varying ways to make sense of these momentous shifts for diverse theater publics. Revivals and adaptations of his works on stage and screen during times of revolutionary change have rendered the Shakespearean canon a site of subsequent social and cultural contestation. This class considers the "revolutionary" dimension of four Shakespeare plays both in their own time and place, and in later theatrical and filmic productions and adaptations. We will trace first-, second-, and third-wave feminist reimaginings of "The Taming of the Shrew"; Second World War- and Vietnam War-era renderings of "Henry V"; civil rights and anti-apartheid era restagings of "Othello"; and attempts to decolonize "The Tempest."
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL248
Prereq: None

CHUM250 Sociology of Knowledge

To map power-knowledge relationships, the sociology of knowledge grounds an analysis of knowledge in terms of social structures, the sets of patterned practices that define and give meaning to social life at individual, communal, and institutional levels. In the broadest sense, the sociology of knowledge is concerned with the relationship between the (epistemic) content and the social context of knowledge. How was knowledge produced and with what institutional resources? Who produced knowledge and why did they produce it? Who benefits from the circulation of knowledge? What effects in the world does knowledge engender? Our basic course objectives are to a) introduce sociology of knowledge as a form of critical inquiry, b) describe and distinguish the approaches and research methods associated with the sociology of knowledge, and c) learn how to analyze knowledge and knowledge-making practices in their social context using these methods.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-SISP
Identical With: STS250, EDST250, SOC281
Prereq: None

CHUM278 Visualizing Firearms History: An Applied Quantitative and Archival Approach for a Project-Based Expl

This project-based course provides a unique cross-disciplinary opportunity to study important historical questions surrounding firearms. Combining quantitative methodology in data science with qualitative research methods in history, students will answer questions they are passionate about based on existing datasets. Students will read, discuss, and write responses to the latest historical scholarship on the technological development of guns, firearms in media, gun violence statistics, and advertisements. Students will choose one of four datasets to research and analyze. These include data sets related to firearms patents since the 1820s, firearms in media (film, television, anime, games), firearms-related deaths, and advertisements of firearms. Students will develop skills in hypothesis testing and inferential statistical analysis alongside qualitative research methods used in history. The course offers one-on-one support and training in the skills required to complete a team-based final project. The final project will be hybrid between a research paper and also an exhibit (e.g., film, website, media, art installation). Students will present their work at the center's third annual undergraduate research conference (Spring 2025). Select students can apply to continue on as QAC summer apprentices and Baker Collabria Fellows in Data Analysis, and as CSGS NEH-funded summer history research fellows and as History thesis researchers.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST278, QAC204
Prereq: None

CHUM281 Political Fantasies of Zion

Palestine, Zion, Judah, the Promised Land. A small piece of land in the Middle East has a very long and contested history full of religious meaning for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Some imagine the State of Israel as an island--"the only democracy in the Middle East" or the only Western state in the region--surrounded by a hostile environment. The geographical area, by contrast, has often been portrayed as a crossroad, a place where cultures clashed, merged, and exchanged ideas.



In this class, we will examine this tension between a physical and imagined space, between political reality and idea, by recovering alternative Zionist, non-Zionist, and anti-Zionist visions of the Zion. Jewish statehood is a very recent phenomenon. Throughout the modern period, the vast majority of Jews lived under empires, whether Habsburg, French, Romanov, British, or Ottoman. How did the imperial experience shape Jewish religious and political views? What role does the imagination of Zion play in today's political context? Reading political pamphlets, poetry, maps, artworks, and utopian fiction, we will pay attention to the construction of the Zionist idea not just in political Zionism but also in contrasting visions including Canaanism, cultural Zionism, diaspora nationalism, a Jewish-Arab federation, a binational state, and the rejection of statehood as heresy. In the last part of the class, we will look at recent contemporary issues from the news, e.g., the agreements between the State of Israel and the United Arab Emirates, or government corruption in Israel, in order to see how these ideas of Zion are still present in today's discourse.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CJST281, RELI281
Prereq: None

CHUM288 Literary Perversions: Revolution, Democracy, Identity

The Federalist Papers wrote under the strong impression that the American Revolution was imperiled by an overwhelming debt and the lack of a national authority and identity to bind the States together. Public fear of moral degeneration via the replacement of the "Old World" symbolic order with a "New World" order under the aegis of "representative democracy" loomed over the republic.



Taking these concerns and the dissemination of The Federalist Papers as our point of departure, this course will examine how representations of "non-normative" identities in several major 19th-century works relate to the problems of representing democracy in the aftermath of the American Revolution. Many of the most famous canonical literary texts in the United States during the 19th century write about "non-normative" topics such as maternity, slavery, bestiality, and gender inequality in the context of narratives that attempt to rewrite the legacy of the American Revolution. By focusing on the literary treatment of these "perverse" topics, we shall attempt to understand whether the authors we will undertake close readings of in this course were successful in their endeavors to not only amend the shortcomings of the Revolution, but also to think more rigorously about the history of slavery and gender inequality.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENGL284
Prereq: None

CHUM289 Staging Race in Early Modern England

This course analyzes the dramatic representation of race in the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. We will examine the historical emergence of race as a cultural construct in relation to related conceptions of complexion, the humoral body, gender, sexuality, and religious, ethnic, and national identity. Readings focus on three racialized groups: Moors, Jews, and Native American "Indians." After reading the play-texts in relation to the historical moment in which they were first produced (using both primary and secondary sources) we will then consider their post-Renaissance performance histories, including literary, theatrical, and film adaptations.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL280, FGSS320, THEA290
Prereq: None

CHUM298 (Un)Sound Projections: When Spaces Resist Recording

The class would involve a series of discussions around field recordings and site-specific compositions. This would involve a survey of landmark and recent recordings in this vein (e.g., Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, and Paniotis [Deep Listening Band] at the Dan Harpole Cistern; Chris Watson's "Outside the Circle of Fire"; Sylvi MacCormac's "Voices and Wheels"; Peter Cusack's "Sounds from Dangerous Places"; and works by Jacob Kirkegaard, among other sound artists and composers).
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Prereq: None

CHUM301 Flaunting: Extreme Fashion on the Early Modern Stage

Frilly ruffs and cuffs, bulging codpieces, towering "chopines" (platform shoes)--oh my! This course considers the early modern stage as an engine of fashion and the forms of sartorial ostentation to which it gave rise. How did fashion contribute the rise of the commercial theater? How did clothing shape gender, sexuality, class and race in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, which were performed by adult men and gender-fluid, "boy" actors? How did sartorial excess and the sumptuary laws that sought to control it affect social status and mobility during the rise of capitalism? And how were early modern fashion trends updated in later productions of these plays?
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENGL352
Prereq: None

CHUM304 Entangled Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments of Central Asia

Musical instruments exist at the intersection of material, cultural, and social worlds. Entangled in webs of human and non-human relationships, they are at once tangible and symbolic sounding objects that hold significant meanings for the communities they serve. This course will explore the social roles and cultural meanings of musical instruments in Central Asia, a region once traversed by the Silk Road, which extends from the borderlands of China in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west, and from Russia in the north to the frontiers of Afghanistan in the south.



Drawing on theories and ideas derived from interdisciplinary studies of material and sound culture, the course will examine how instrument making and performance are shaped by and entangled with social systems of value and cosmology, political ideology, ecology, and economy. Class meetings will focus on case studies of bowed and plucked lutes, zithers, mouth harps, end-blown flutes, and frame drums among historically nomadic and sedentary peoples of Central Asia. Through these case studies, students will learn about the origins and historical trajectories of individual musical instruments from the pre-modern period to the Soviet and post-Soviet eras; consider the social and political connotations of various performance configurations and repertoires; discuss the status of instruments in Islam and indigenous spiritual belief-systems, and the roles of musical instruments as symbols of national identity, objects of cultural heritage, and global commodities.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ANTH304, REES204, FGSS346
Prereq: None

CHUM310 The Agent

A curious feature of contemporary North Atlantic culture is its concern to discover, describe, obtain, and distribute something called "agency." In tandem with with CHUM's Spring 2026 theme, Doing Nothing / Nothing Doing, this course critically re-examines the cultural metaphysics of agency and action that captivates modernity in general and liberalism in particular. Reading widely across anthropology, STS, philosophy, literary studies, political theory, religious studies, and aesthetics, we will critically explore the peculiar form of life whose protagonists and critics alike are transfixed by the figure of the Agent.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Prereq: None

CHUM312 Theory and Practice of Torture: From Middle Age to Modern Times

This course is centered around the analysis of the theory and practice of torture during wartime, in prisons, under political dictatorship, and in civil life. It includes examples from visual art, cinema, and literature around the world.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CGST312
Prereq: None

CHUM314 The Corpse as Critique

From Ancient Greece to present-day Sri Lanka and Palestine, literary works have turned to the figure of the corpse in order to articulate critiques of domination and authority. In these texts, the dead human body, despite or perhaps because of its inertness, poses potent problems to the exercise of statist and racist violence, the depredations of plantation slavery and industrial capitalism, and the abuses of empire. What is this strange form of critique, rooted in mere matter that, itself, does nothing but decompose? And what might it teach us as we attempt to survive and thrive in a world defined by spiraling inequality, rising authoritarianism, and environmental catastrophe? In this course, we will begin to answer these questions by examining literary texts from authors including Sophocles, Nadine Gordimer, and Michael Ondaatje, as well as works of philosophy, history, anthropology, political theory, and literary theory from thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, and Katherine Verdery. In tracking invocations of the corpse at various historical junctures and in various literary genres, we will investigate what makes the dead human body such a compelling figure with which to expose and subvert the exercise of coercive power and violence. At the same time, we will attend to the unique affordances and limitations of literature, drama, and film in expressing this critical potential.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Prereq: None

CHUM316 Advanced Research Methods in Science Studies

This course exposes students to qualitative research methods in science and technology studies. Methodology describes a process for conceptualizing, collecting, and organizing evidence. Part of this new course will be a survey of methodological traditions in science and technology studies and associated fields (sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, feminist and critical race studies, performance and design studies, philosophy and history of science) that guide the collection and interpretation of evidence about scientific knowledge and practices, the relationships between users and technologies, and broader scientific institutions and technical infrastructures. Specific methodologies include ethnography, archival and discourse analysis, social worlds analysis, comparative historical and genealogical analysis, abductive analysis, and visual culture and media analysis. The other main part of the course will culminate in presentation-ready small-scale individual and group research projects utilizing qualitative research methods.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-STS
Identical With: STS337
Prereq: None

CHUM317 Why Literary History?

Why should poems, novels and plays written centuries ago engage our attention? Why should we care? And how have answers to these questions themselves changed over the course of literary history? We will dwell, in particular, on two key historical turning points: eighteenth-century Britain, when influential canonizing projects in print worked to define a native "English" tradition at the same time as the country pursued imperial expansion, and mid-twentieth-century America, when New Criticism institutionalized certain modes of reading historical literature just as English as a discipline was taking something like its modern shape. And, of course, we will grapple with the purposes, the pleasures, and the possibilities of literary history now. Throughout, we will also be attending to the practical work of doing literary history - students will work in Special Collections to produce their own edition of a historical text.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENGL354
Prereq: None

CHUM318 Empathy and Radical Care

This course will explore the philosophical and perceptual issues that empathy

generates by focusing on specific contexts of both human and nonhuman captivity. Philosophical explorations will be supplemented with political insights of activists engaged in mutual aid, abolition, and animal and eco-justice.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: PHIL341
Prereq: None

CHUM320 Staging the Real in Early Modern England

The stage in Shakespeare's time was by modern standards "relatively bare," lacking illusionistic sets that would later be relied upon to conjure the reality of a particular time and place onstage. What, then, defined the "real" prior to the emergence of modern theatrical realism and the illusionistic conventions associated with it? What representational strategies (of text, costume, props, sound, stage machinery, etc.) were used to convey "realness" onstage at the Globe and other early English theaters, which lacked the "fourth wall" of the proscenium arch that separated the realities of the play-world from those of everyday life?



This course explores the dramaturgy of the "real" in early modern England in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities Spring 2024 theme of "Get Real," in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries that experimented with new ways of bringing to life the realities of war, true crime, sex and gender "deviance," street life and lingo in London's underworld, serendipitous wealth gleaned from capitalistic enterprise, and other sensational news ripped from the headlines.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENGL323
Prereq: None

CHUM321 Secrets, Lies, and Fictions in the Americas

In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter underlined the spread of a "paranoid style" in American politics. Although Hofstadter's description seems more appropriate today than ever, in an increasingly interconnected global order the role of misinformation, uncertainty, manipulation, and conspiratorial imaginaries in shaping and limiting democracies and public spheres cannot be exclusively assigned to any particular locale. From a continental standpoint, this course offers analytical tools to explore the political complexity of lies, secrets, and fictions in both the United States and Latin America since the mid-twentieth century to this day. By studying a series of cases--including the Guatemalan civil war, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Pentagon Papers, the U.S. intervention in the Middle East, the "dirty war" in Latin America, censorship in socialist Cuba, the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London, Wikileaks, hacker practices in the early days of internet, or Cambridge Analytica--we will address the relations between surveillance, spectacle, and conspiracies (both factual and imagined) in the contemporary techno-political landscape. Moreover, the course emphasizes the speculative and theoretical potentials of art and literature when it comes to understanding socio-political phenomena. Beyond distinctions between truth and falsehood, fictional constructions are key to our collective capacity to imagine alternative worlds. By mapping out the ways in which fictions circulate as such or rather as truthful versions of reality, we will problematize the limits and uses of truth, lies, and official and alternative narratives, as well as the power of states, corporations, individuals, and collectives to direct attention and frame information.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: AMST222, LAST321
Prereq: None

CHUM322 Visions of the Future: Capitalism and Colonialism in the World's Fairs

This course will explore the history of the world's fairs from the 1851 Great Exhibition in London to the 1939 New York World's Fair. These events showcased the newest technologies that would revolutionize life and labor for millions of human beings around the world. They also presented to the public new consumer goods and forms of entertainment such as music, dances, and sports. Moreover, they were sites of competition for rising nations and empires. Each participant country brought artifacts that demonstrated their (often idealized) national characteristics and development. Western powers displayed colonial products and peoples to show how they had been advancing in their expansionist enterprises. The students will read works on the humanities and social sciences that delve into the meanings of the world's fairs. They will also analyze primary sources (texts, paintings, film, songs, cartoons, and more) which will allow them to ask their own questions about these events.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: AMST322, HIST398
Prereq: None

CHUM325 The Work of Art Against Work: Art, Labor, Politics

Understandings of late 19th- and early 20th-century avant-gardes are tied inextricably to leftist theory, particularly that of the Frankfurt School. This advanced seminar will consider the legacies of that entwinement, while focusing more specifically on its transformations from the late 20th century to the present: We will examine how artists have engaged the "work" of art in relation to the rise of post-Fordism, a globalized economy, and new theories of work and anti-capitalism. We will pay special attention to gendered notions of work and the division of labor (including "craft," affective labor, domestic work, care work, sex work, and more), to debt and racial capitalism, and to the rise of speculative finance and its links to the art market and the patron class.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS335
Prereq: None

CHUM329 Using Drugs: Race, Drugs, and the Colonial Present

This course addresses a variety of issues ranging from the social variation in and construction of drug experiences; the nature of scientific knowledge regarding drug use and the brain; the global trade in drugs and its relationship to histories of colonialism and contemporary forms of Western hegemony; notions of health, harm, and rehabilitation; and the various strategies that contemporary states rely upon in addressing issues pertaining to drug use (particularly criminal justice measures and interventions focused on harm reduction). The course places particular emphasis on the ways drug use is framed in relation to questions of freedom, justice, and the self, ultimately forming a part of a disciplinary apparatus that impacts everyone, whether we directly use drugs or not. Ultimately, drug use is often framed as an issue of "lost productivity" and/or "lost reproductivity," with "rehabilitation" framed as a way of restoring productive activity and eugenic reproduction.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS326, AMST328
Prereq: None

CHUM334 Native Matters: Materiality in Indigenous Literatures Across the Pacific

This seminar contemplates the function and representation of materiality in contemporary indigenous literatures. It highlights the centrality of embodied practices in indigenous cultural lives. The primary texts for the course will be literary texts (novels, short stories, essays, and poems) from different indigenous communities, including from North America, East Asia, Austrasia, and Oceania. We may also deal with non-textual materials such as artifacts, maps, clothes, video games, etc. Readings will also include theoretical or philosophical works from indigenous and non-indigenous thinkers on the subject of materials and materiality.



The course will thematize materiality in two ways: the first is to understand materiality as a way for indigenous authors to represent or construct various understandings of indigeneity, either in traditional lifeways, modern indigenous realities, or indigenous futurisms, both within and between specific indigenous communities. The second is to engage with thing theory and materiality as a method of literary analysis.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CEAS334, WLIT325
Prereq: None

CHUM336 Black Texts, Lost and Found

This course examines histories of loss and recovery of black texts in the US and the Atlantic world more broadly. We will bring a three-pronged approach to our subject matter. We will analyze first the constitutive silences of the archive: epistemic and material neglect, or what Michel Trouillot has termed the "silencing of the past"; second, the preservation efforts of black newspaper editors, librarians, and bibliophiles; and third, the "counter-archiving" work of Afro-diasporic historical and speculative fiction. As we traverse different periods and empires we will consider what the concepts of the "black archive" and "black ephemera" mean to different disciplines. We will study the repressions of black Arabic writing practices in the US South and our fragmentary recovery of them in the late 20th century, unfinished novels about Black Atlantic revolutions such as Martin Delany's "Blake," incomplete runs of historic black newspapers, debates about the illusions and desires of "recovery," and the criteria that determine what counts as ephemeral and when.



We will move across different media, from print--"I, Tituba," "M Archive," "Blake," "(Dis)forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narratives and the Vernacular"--to films--"The Watermelon Woman," "Looking for Langston," "The Last Angel of History"--and from digitized databases of photographs at the ongoing archiving project The Missing Chapter: Black Chronicles to digitized newspaper archives.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENGL357, AFAM336
Prereq: None

CHUM337 Insubstantial Pageants: Late Shakespeare

This seminar examines the Center for the Humanities' Spring 2020 theme of "Ephemera" through the lens of four late plays by Shakespeare ("Hamlet," "King Lear," "The Winter's Tale," "The Tempest") and their preoccupation with the time, temporality, belatedness, and the ephemerality of theater (and the world-as-stage).



In addition to considering the mutability of the play-texts themselves (several of which exist in multiple versions), we will consider how they refashion their sources, and how they are themselves refashioned in later productions and adaptations.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENGL321, THEA337
Prereq: None

CHUM338 Building Nothing: Design After Progress

The built environment is responsible for over 40% of humanity's greenhouse gas emissions, but despite attaching words like "sustainable" and "resilient" to their products, design and construction practices remain fundamentally unchanged. This seminar considers the possibility of a design philosophy that doesn't take the goal of creation as a given. Topics include the lifespan of buildings and products, their maintenance and care, the unintended consequences of making, relationships with and obligations to materials and resources, and strategies for degrowth found in indigenous and vernacular design precedents. We read and discuss a key text each week that examines the history of technology and critically evaluates shifting theoretical perspectives on nature and human development as they relate to design.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ARHA217, STS333
Prereq: None

CHUM339 Catching Glimpses: Perceiving Infinitesimals in the Scientific Revolution

The rise of mathematical natural science in the early modern period marked the dissolution of objective reality as it had previously been known. Since Aristotle, perceptible objects had been understood to be enduring substances whose identities were inscribed in their very being and which retained these identities through change. The mechanistic worldview of the 17th and 18th centuries exploded this stable order into a telescoping multiplicity of material systems, from the infinitesimally small to the infinitely large. Rather than encountering a world of enduring and identifiable substances--animals, vegetables, and minerals; people and artifacts--the perceiver was instead confronted with fleeting constellations of homogeneous matter in a perpetual flux, no sooner glimpsed than gone. This metaphysical picture of infinitary flux was complemented by a new branch of mathematics, the infinitesimal calculus, which proved immensely successful both in uncovering new theorems and in modeling empirical phenomena.



Both the metaphysics and the mathematics of the new science were, however, rife with paradox. If material objects not only harbor a microscopic substructure but are, in fact, divisible without end, then we are faced with pluralities of pluralities without any underlying unities--parts of parts of parts...and not a whole among them. Conceptual instability afflicted the infinitesimals used in calculus, as well. In some contexts they were treated as very small but non-zero quantities, in others as strictly zero--provoking one critic to call them "ghosts of departed quantities."



In conjunction with the CHUM theme "Ephemera," this class will study the philosophical turbulence induced by the new science--in particular, by the mechanical philosophy and infinitesimal calculus. We will pay special attention to its consequences for the philosophy of perception. Aristotle compared perceptible objects to signet rings impressing their distinctive forms on the receptive wax of the human sensorium. But if there are no enduring substances or determinate forms, how are we to understand our perceptual relation to the world? How must perceptual experience be reconceived so as to accommodate the fleetingness and flux of material phenomena? And how is it that, though we are awash in ephemera, we nevertheless enjoy an (illusory?) impression of endurance and stability?
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: COL351, GRST249, PHIL302, STS339
Prereq: None

CHUM340 Action and Inaction in Social Movements

This is a class on contentious politics that examines how the action-inaction binary shapes our understanding of social movement strategies, life cycles, resilience, and success. We will examine activity and inactivity in the context of a variety of social movements, diaspora groups, and rebel organizations, at various stages of their lifecycle. When is inactivity a failure of mobilization or a sign of weakness, and when is it an intentional strategy? What does "doing nothing" look like? Can it ever be an effective strategy for a group? When is inactivity a form of organizational defeat? To address these questions, we will look at different forms of "nothing doing": social movements that choose disengagement or tactics such as hunger strikes, exiled movements that focus on internal bonding and capacity building rather than overt activism, and rebel groups that intentionally abstain from violence or mobilization for prolonged periods.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: GOVT340
Prereq: None

CHUM341 Global Histories: Problems in Scale, Scope, Depth, and Time

How big is too big? How far back in time can historians go? How best to understand the relationship between science and history? What counts as evidence? What accounts for the rise (or return, some would argue) of macro-history? What does it portend for the future of microhistory? This advanced seminar will examine the history and historiographical implications of macro-historical frameworks, including comparative history, world history, global history, deep history, and big history.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST315
Prereq: None

CHUM343 Imitations of Life: Experimental Bodies at the Interface of Science and Culture

This seminar will examine scientific and cultural practices of corporeal simulation, or, practices of bodily substitution, imitation, and re/modeling. Topics examined will include: reproductive surrogacy; gender reassignment surgeries; experimental subject protocols; prosthetic enhancements; xenotransplantation; biometrics and alternative forms of bodily imaging; the use of nonhuman animals as human proxies; the rise of personalized medicine, and more. Students will engage with a wide range of case studies and theoretical materials from interdisciplinary perspectives. Special attention will be paid to the relationship between scientific discourses of "universality" and "particularity," where socio-cultural forms of difference (e.g., race, gender, disability, etc.) are at once ignored and exacerbated. While most of the material addressed in the class will relate to recent phenomena, we will also be attentive to relevant histories of corporeal differentiation and reimaging.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM, SBS-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS343, STS343
Prereq: None

CHUM345 Historicizing Early Modern Sexualities

This course will examine recent historical and theoretical approaches to the history of sexuality in early modern English literature (ca. 1580-1680). Our focus will be the historical construction of sexuality in relation to categories of gender, race, religion, and social status in a variety of sources, both literary and nonliterary, verbal and visual, including poetry, plays, masques, medical treatises, travel narratives, and visual media. Topics covered include intersecting constructions of the sexed/gendered/racialized body; diverse sexual practices; sexual identities prior to the homo/hetero divide; and the histories of pornography and masturbation.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL349, FGSS350
Prereq: ENGL201

CHUM346 Absences, Archives, and Adjudicating Criminalities in Settler Colonial States

Absence can refer to either distance or nonexistence. Archival inquiry embodies the former and can yield the latter. Both positions pose ethical, interpretive, and political problems. In this course, we will critically approach the archive to ask questions about how its evidentiary forms are used to narrate social relations of power, territorial claims, criminality, and adjudicate past wrongs. What genres of proof do archives produce and naturalize, and how do historical claims corroborate, refuse, or reinterpret "truth" and "knowing"? Readings span Native and Indigenous Studies, American Studies, History, Anthropology, and Postcolonial and Literary Studies, exploring how these approaches address the adjudication of individual and state crimes. The course focuses on settler colonialism and Indigenous politics in North America but engages other global examples.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: AMST347
Prereq: None

CHUM348 Plague and Care-Work in Shakespeare's England

Plague exerted an enormous influence on the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and indeed on theater as a commercial enterprise. Pandemic theater closures and quarantines were frequent throughout his career, and it is likely that his son Hamnet died of plague. This seminar examines four Shakespeare plays (Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, The Winter's Tale) and their preoccupations with time, temporality, belatedness, mortality and ephemerality (of theater and the world-as-stage) and with an ethics and recognition of the work of care, as these are shaped by the recurrence of plague-a perspective that will allow us to draw connections and discern differences between Shakespeare's time and our own.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENGL345, THEA347
Prereq: None

CHUM350 Facts, Counterfactualisms, and the Historical Novel

The aim of this course is to explore "the fact" as the site of contradictory desires and investments in nineteenth-century fiction. Charting two paths through both foundational examples of historical novel and through early counterfactual work (Uchronie, Aristopia: A Romance History of the New World), this course will trace the versions of historical thinking made possible within these traditions. As part of the course, we will explore some of the ephemera materials novelist's working notebooks, research sources, and unpublished manuscripts. Seminar work will include both theoretical readings on historical fiction, philosophy of history, and critical archival studies. We will read novels and narrative fiction from the Brontë siblings, George Eliot, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, Charles Renouvier, and Thomas Hardy, alongside critical work by Georg Lukács, Catherine Gallager, Roland Barthes, Frederic Jameson, Michel Foucault, Saidiya Hartman, Hayden White, Dipesh Chakrabartky, Paul Ricouer, Carolyn Steedman, Natalie Zemon Davis, Kumkum Sangari, Elaine Freedgood, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL330
Prereq: None

CHUM353 Media Revolutions: Color Television and the Humanities in the 1960s and 1970s

This course visits some of the groundbreaking TV series that presented humanities and sciences to global mass audiences in the 1960s and 1970s. Television emerged as a powerful cultural presence and with remarkable speed. From the late 1960s, the British Broadcasting Company, in partnership with PBS in America, created a series of television programs (partly to widen the audience market for new color television programming). This course focuses on the role of television as a still new, and potentially disruptive, medium. We will look at and discuss a range of British TV series from Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation" and "Monty Python's Flying Circus" (both 1969) to Jacob Bronowski's "The Ascent of Man" (1973) and Alistair Cooke's "America" (1972), John Kenneth Galbraith's "The Age of Uncertainty" (1977), and David Attenborough's "Life on Earth" (first aired in 1979). We will read and discuss works of art and media criticism around this time that laid the groundwork for major conceptual and theoretical remappings of the fields of cultural and visual studies. We also will explore the impact of television on art worlds and museums, looking at how 1960s' color television documentaries influenced the way that humanities are presented televisually up to today. This course satisfies requirements for the "Visual and Material Culture" module in history and major requirements for the Science in Society Program.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: HIST345, STS352
Prereq: None

CHUM355 Social Movements Lab

What can we learn from social justice activists about the economic, political, and environmental struggles facing us today, including mass incarceration, immigration, economic precarity, and the violence of the state? Where are the critical sites of queer, trans, left, feminist, black, indigenous, disability, and environmental struggle? How do these movements converge, and where do they diverge? This participatory, interdisciplinary research seminar enables you to embark on an independent, semester-long research project on the social movement or activism of your choice. We'll start with some foundational reading on multidisciplinary social movement research; archival, ethnographic, and participatory methodologies; and histories of social justice struggles in the U.S. The remainder and majority of the seminar is laboratory style, taking shape around your particular projects. Each week, we will collaboratively analyze one or two projects, mapping out and comparing methods, goals, visions, struggles, and contexts of the movements under study. Our goal is to understand a range of social justice activisms in their economic, political, and historical context, with an eye toward integrating activist scholarship and social change. The activism you research can be contemporary or historical; local, national, or global; and can take any shape: direct action, community organizing, activist philanthropy, art as activism, etc. You do not need previous experience or activist contacts for this course--just passion and the desire to learn collaboratively!
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-CHUM
Identical With: ANTH355, FGSS355
Prereq: None

CHUM360 The Environmental Crisis and Nuclear Testing Narratives in Global Francophone and Arabic Cultures

This interdisciplinary course examines nuclear themes, with a particular focus on nuclear testing as depicted in novels, film documentaries, and poetry within Francophone and Arabic cultures. It emphasizes the profound impact of nuclear testing on human life and the environment. The course analyzes literature in French and English as well as visual materials (photography and films), archival materials, political writings, news articles, and websites. Students must possess reading ability in French and an interest in North African culture.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CGST316, ENVS314
Prereq: None

CHUM364 Shakespeare's Islands

How did England's insularity and expansionist ambitions on the world's stage shape Shakespearean dramaturgy in his many plays with island settings? This course, taught in conjunction with the Center for the Humanities' spring 2022 theme of "Islands as Metaphor and Method" considers how Shakespeare's island locales (e.g., in ancient and medieval Britain, the Mediterranean, and the Americas) transformed the Globe theater into a physical and conceptual site for imagining the utopian and dystopian potential of early English nation-building and colonial expansion, and for exploring the poetics of relation and alterity, peripherality and centrality, archaism and futurity. In addition to studying the play-texts themselves, we will consider how their island settings are explored in subsequent theatrical and film productions and adaptations.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENGL377, THEA346
Prereq: None

CHUM366 Ecologies of Attention: Biosemiosis, Attunement, and Ethics

We consider variants on biosemiotic accounts of meaning, following one thread through Emerson to Nietzsche, another from Peirce and James to Bateson (Ecology of Mind, 1972) and Gibson (Ecological Approch to Visual Perception, 1979), and a third through contemporary indigenous thinkers and anthropologists attempting to bridge scientific ecology and animist panpsychism--Kimmerer, Whyte, Kohn, Ingold, Strathern. While most of the texts here focus on the nature of meaning as a living process, they are also in constant dialogue with normative concerns, being both motivated by subversive or non-humanist ecological values and inspiring distinctive insights about how to lead meaningfully connected lives.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENVS247, PHIL354
Prereq: None

CHUM369 Evidence: A History

What counts as evidence and proof has changed and varied over time. This class will introduce students to the changing nature of evidence and proof in history, science, law, medicine, and news media. Topics include histories of trial by ordeal, trial by jury, photography, the footnote, fact checkers, expert testimony, the polygraph, statistics, DNA, and AI. Students will read amicus briefs, watch films, write papers, create evidence for mock trials, and study the rise and political effects of "alternate facts" discourse.We will also explore the ways that historical narratives, museums, and commemorations use evidence to tell stories through exhibits, monuments, plays, textbooks, and markers. The class will also discuss the history of landmark legal trials where new forms of evidence were central, and discuss the different ways that films handle evidence in genres such as true crime documentary. This is a discussion-based course that aligns with the Center for Humanities theme for Fall 2025: "Genres of Proof. Assignments include oral and written reports, a creative visual assignment, and a final research paper.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST360
Prereq: None

CHUM371 Afro-pessimism, Gender, and Performance

This class engages African and African diaspora critical thought and aesthetic production (dance, visual art, performance art, installation, film) to think about colonial dispossession, objectification, and reparation. We will address topics such as the repatriation of artifacts and other ephemera taken from Europe's colonies that are housed in the archives of European cultural institutions. The objects in question have been described as either artwork, artifacts, or anthropological fetish objects (depending on which field one engages with). How can we rethink our understanding of objecthood as irreducible to "inanimate" things but as also signaling a regime of imperial domination and enslavement that violently turned African personality into a status of objecthood? What does it mean to think about the object (broadly defined) in relation to loss and the (im)possibilities of repatriation and reparation? How does the Black performer's body's disappearance/remains endow the Western art institution? The course will encourage students to think about repatriation as well as certain losses that can neither be repaired/repatriated nor evidenced in conventional ways. In those instances, how do contemporary critical thinkers and/as contemporary artists help us rethink loss, mourning, as well as the promises and ends of reparation? The assigned readings offer ways to think about colonial archives not merely as neutral repositories of past events, but also as performances; as enactments of power, aesthetic value judgment, and hierarchical arrangements of knowledge production. The theoretical, art historical, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and creative reading materials engage contemporary scholars', artists', and activists' response to both the recorded and ephemeral archives of Black dispossession. Students are encouraged to engage in events and workshops outside of the classroom, such as visiting library archives, attending performances, gallery exhibits, and film screenings.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: AFAM370, FGSS381, THEA373
Prereq: None

CHUM374 Abolition and Social Praxis

This course will examine some of the analyses of society, social power, and societal reform advanced and practiced by diverse activists who organize their work around the theme of abolition. Inspired by activist efforts to eliminate prisons and policing, abolition is here understood as an attempt to link a worldview that advocates for the disassembly of existing, oppressive social structures combined with efforts to generate new, more liberatory forms of social relationship in the here and now. As a form of activism, abolition thus brings utopian dreams to bear upon concrete practice, seeking to generate new structures of agency and pointing toward ways in which liberal notions of consent occlude deep forms of structural power and implicit constraint. Students will be asked to take on an activist project as part of the course.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS374, SOC280
Prereq: None

CHUM375 Censorship, Culture Wars, and Controversy in Art

Art history is marked by various forms of state, community, or institutional censorship. Such events can be flash points in culture wars, as in the United States in 1989, when four artists--most of them queer--were denied funding from the National Endowment for the Arts after their work was deemed "obscene." Sometimes art that unearths sensitive cultural histories can lead to calls for destruction, as in Sam Durant's 2012 work Scaffold, which referenced state violence against the Dakota people, leading tribe members to protest what they felt was Durant's insensitive handling of the subject. Events like these raise key questions within art and broader society: Who should have the authority to decide which art should be exhibited, and to what audiences? What constitutes censorship? When might censorship, or the curtailing of speech, be justified?

This course will examine these questions focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries in the United States, but also global contemporary art. We will consider such issues in the wake of a recent spate of museum exhibitions canceled due to controversial content, the dismantling of monuments to colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade, as well as today's culture wars as conservative book bans make headlines and hate speech abounds. We will also explore new channels for arts funding, exhibition, and publishing that emerge in response to censorship. In addition to important texts by art historians including Sarah Parsons, Aruna D'Souza, and Rosalyn Deutsche, among others, we will also read interdisciplinary legal scholars like Sonya Katyal and Amy Adler who write from the perspective of law and policy. We will also read the landmark Supreme Court case NEA v. Finley. Assignments include an in-depth case study of a canceled exhibition.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CSPL374, ARHA262
Prereq: None

CHUM378 Decolonizing Indigenous Gender and Sexuality

This seminar focuses on the politics of decolonization in Indigenous contexts with regard to gender and sexuality. The seminar examines a variety of settler colonial contexts in North America and Oceania. Beginning with an historical exploration of gender and colonialism, students will examine how colonial processes, along with other forms of domination that include racializing technologies, have transformed gender and sexuality through the imposition of definitions and models of normative (often binary) gender subjectivity and relations, "proper" sexual behavior, preoccupations with "sexual deviance," sexual expression as a territory to be conquered, legacies of control, legal codification, and commodification. We will then assess how diverse modes of self-determination struggles negotiate gender and sexual decolonization, including feminist interventions in nationalist productions that sustain masculinist and homophobic agendas. In relation to these dynamics, we will study the growing body of work on Native feminisms and decolonial feminisms, as well as Two-Spirit and queer Indigenous studies.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: AMST378
Prereq: None

CHUM380 Exploring Personhood in the 20th and 21st Centuries (CLAC 1.0)

The goal of this course is to provide a thorough examination of the concept of personhood in the 20th century by studying how it has been portrayed and understood in diverse cultural contexts across Arabic, English, and Francophone cultures. Through the use of comparative analysis and an interdisciplinary approach to cultural artifacts--such as works of literature, art, and religious texts as well as current debates around AI and personhood--students will explore how different cultures have approached the question of what it means to be a person and how this has evolved over time. By the end of the course, students will have a deeper comprehension of the various ways in which personhood has been created and perceived throughout different cultural and historical contexts.



The impact of historical occurrences and cultural movements on the construction of personhood, the influence of religion and politics or the fictional writing on conceptions of personhood, the representation of personhood in literature and art, and the emergence of AI as a new frontier in the investigation of personhood are some of the major topics covered in the course. This will open up new discussion topics about posthuman beings and persona status, particularly in science fiction.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CGST334, RL&L280
Prereq: None

CHUM381 Student Fellowship

The student fellowship entails full participation in the lectures and colloquia. Student fellows read, hear, and converse on the common themes. They are to work on their research projects and give a presentation to the Center for Humanities fellows.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Prereq: None

CHUM382 Politics, Revolutions and Visual Culture in the Post-Revolutionary Arab Societies

The course "Politics, Revolutions, and Visual Culture in Post-Revolutionary Arab Societies" critically investigates the interaction of politics, social revolutions, and visual culture in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. This course examines the dynamic interaction between political transformation, revolutionary movements, and the various forms of artistic expression in Arab countries.



Students will delve into the complex interplay between politics and visual culture through a combination of theoretical discussions, case studies, and visual analysis, gaining a nuanced understanding of how images, art, photography, film, and other visual media have shaped and reflected sociopolitical changes in post-revolutionary Arab contexts.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: CGST335, RL&L382
Prereq: None

CHUM383 Reading Between Freedom and Necessity

Mostly the culture of literacy has taken shape within a realm of freedom, seemingly distant from the needs of the body and the demands of sustenance. At the same time, the world represented within so much of the world's narratives, both truth and fiction, has been saturated in struggle and deprivation. In this seminar we will try to make some sense of this juxtaposition, freedom on one side and necessity on the other, to explore the flip side of the drama of revolution in modern times. For us, revolutions, those great upheavals that unite hope with practical action, will be the background against which we will try to understand the gravity and persistence of dispossession itself: the pull of past or residual forms of unfreedom in the sphere of cultural representation, within and against new or emerging expressions of emancipation, themselves accompanied or countered in modern times by ever-novel styles of exploitation.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-ENGL
Identical With: ENGL382
Prereq: None

CHUM385 Race, Capital, and Sexual Consent

Race, Capital, and Sexual Consent will focus on the early 19th century through to the Progressive Era. It will explore racialized sexual markets, from what Black feminist historian Adrienne Davis has called "The Sexual Economy of American Slavery," to the Victorian-era marriage market, to continuing and emerging sex work and pleasure economies. This course will focus on areas of overlap, tension, and reinforcement within and between these racialized sexual markets. Fundamental to this class will be the question of if/how sexual consent is configured within these markets, and what this means in the broader evolution of American liberalism in the 19th- and early 20th-century U.S.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: FGSS385, AFAM385, HIST332
Prereq: None

CHUM386 Is History True?: The Genealogies and Genres of Facts

History, as both genre and discipline, has a complicated relationship with truth. As a genre, it is popularly understood to be factual -- a reflection of what really happened; as a discipline, it constructs the very reality that it claims to represent. History, in short, is based on the "facts" that it constitutes as real. This is not to say that our world is "post-truth" or unreal or that all "facts" are equally true. Rather, it is to suggest that to access historical reality we need to investigate the genealogies and genres of "facts," since facts (even "alternative facts") are the building blocks that make reality politically, socially, and culturally meaningful. So how does a "fact" become real? What genres of proof are used to constitute historical truth, and by whom? In this class, we will use historical approaches to understand how "facts" gain meaning and agency and analyze the (often porous) boundaries between history, memory, myth, rumor, and conspiracy. To do this, we will consider case studies -- political tropes like "Godless Communism" or "Judeo-Bolshevism"; legal categories such as "genocide" and "crimes against humanity"; and historical frameworks like "the Holocaust" and the "end of history" -- to consider how they structure our worldviews. The format of the course will combine discussion seminar with independent research projects.
Offering: Crosslisting
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: SBS-HIST
Identical With: HIST349, REES249
Prereq: None

CHUM388 Beyond Growth: Agrarian Visions

The era of endless growth has reached a point of crisis. In the face of climate catastrophe and widening inequality, of the proliferation of pointless work and spiraling burnout, it has become increasingly common to question the idea that human progress comprises ever-increasing levels of production and consumption. And yet in spite of a slew of attempts to transform the situation, from the Occupy movement to the recent mainstreaming of degrowth economics, it seems that things are only intensifying. How did we come to inhabit this world in which labor and economic growth are seen as ends in themselves? And how might we begin not just to refuse such understandings of labor and growth, but to imagine different forms that they might take? In this course we will confront these questions, exploring the relationship between labor, production, and human flourishing. We will begin by studying foundational articulations of this relationship from thinkers like Max Weber, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt, looking as well at the unique place that agricultural production, cultivation, has been understood to occupy therein. We will then turn to the agrarian realm as a particularly potent site from which to trouble and extend our conceptions of labor and growth, examining visions of spiritual labor, anticolonial resistance, and more-than-human entanglement in theoretical and literary texts from Leo Tolstoy, M.K. Gandhi, Mahasweta Devi, J.M. Coetzee, and others. Through our readings and discussions, we will learn to identify and critique the normative claims on which our current energy-intensive, exhaustion-inducting circumstances are based. At the same time, we will cultivate the skills required to seek out and imagine alternative forms of work, community, and the good life.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENVS388, COL387, ENGL334
Prereq: None

CHUM395 Creative Writing, Post-Modernism, and Future Theories

Two main lines of inquiry will guide this class. First, what historically has been the place of creative writing workshops and the products they have galvanized? Second, how has post-modernism been defined in the past and how is it defined now? With various strategies and daily practice alongside long-term goals, we will think and write to create assemblages of compositions that go beyond traditional expectations, and potential exhaustion with generic form, towards renewed inspiration and commitments.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENGL378
Prereq: None

CHUM396 Bored in the House: Work, Leisure, and the Domestic Mundane

At the beginning of the COVID epidemic, Detroit rapper Curtis Roach released an instant classic on TikTok, a fifteen second ditty capturing the zeitgeist of the coming wave of domestic isolation: "Okay I'm bored in the house, and I'm in the house bored." The recent waves of mass quarantine, both forced and quasi-voluntary, have crystallized our focus on the domestic, and its attendant crises. More than ever, we must confront the vanishing material and psychic separations between work and leisure, the badly needed reimagining of public and private not anchored in a spectral domestic privacy, and the foundational dynamics of class, race, sexuality, gender, capacity, and institutionalized violence that structure where we can live, work, and play. This course has a special focus on the exhausting digital, which sucks up ever more energy (both in terms electric power--see the astounding energy use to train and deploy generative AI--and human attention and engagement) while leaving us with sleeping problems, carpal tunnel, and phantom vibrations. This course seeks to be not just an academic study of the themes of this course, but an ongoing experiment in boredom praxis. We will think about what we do when we are bored, and why, and we will try to sit with and direct our boredom in gently investigational ways. This also extends to critically thinking about how we do work in this class, and our techniques and tactics of maintaining leisure time in academia.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: SOC278
Prereq: None

CHUM397 Difficult Women: Post/Feminism in Television Comedies and Dramedies

Although postwar family sitcoms represented women as homemakers, one of the first and most popular sitcom wives also articulated discontent with domestic femininity. Lucy Ricardo became the prototype of the "unruly woman," a figure with feminist potential whose desires exceed and disrupt dominant gender norms. As those norms have shifted, so have TV's unruly women. Second-wave feminism, anticipated in I Love Lucy, was incorporated into a 1970s cycle of comedies centered on single working women whose career aspirations were rewarded. Over the following decades, a postfeminist sensibility dominated television comedies and dramas and became central to a gendered neoliberalism in which energetic individuals "empower" themselves. In recent years, a new type of female protagonist has emerged. Alongside the can-do optimism of single-women comedies from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Sex and the City to 30 Rock and Parks and Rec, a stream of comedies and dramedies, made largely by and for women, have depicted a variety of flawed, difficult, unruly women coming of age under conditions of socioeconomic precarity, whose less focused energies seem to articulate a more uncertain, downbeat, post-recessional mood. In this course we will situate the latter cycle in relation to both the longer history of televisual representations of women and to the current state of feminist politics. Among the shows we will look at are: I Love Lucy, Bewitched, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Sex and the City, Ally McBeal, Girlfriends, The Mindy Project, 30 Rock, Parks and Rec, Girls, Insecure, Broad City, Better Things, Two Broke Girls, New Girl, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, Unreal, Abbott Elementary, Fleabag, Dear White People, and Somebody Somewhere.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: AMST391, ANTH397, FGSS397, FILM202
Prereq: None

CHUM398 Marxism and Climate Crisis

Since the Communist Manifesto of 1848, the notion of "crisis" has played a prominent role in Marxist theorizing. Today's intensifying climate crisis is lending new theoretical and political weight to the Marxist critique of extractive, productive, and consumptive practices that transform nature into a means of production for ensuring ceaseless economic growth through the accumulation of capital. The consequences of this are not only the exhaustion of human labor-power and human sociality but also of non-human nature (fossilized carbon, wild animal biomass, topsoil, clean water, forests, etc.). Our perspective for studying and understanding this destructive transformation of nature will primarily be informed by a set of recent "eco Marxist" writings that oppose eco-modernist technocracy and instead reconceptualize capitalism as "a way of organizing nature" (J. Moore); extend the notion of social alienation to a "metabolic rift" between the labor process and the natural environment (Saito's "degrowth communism"); and explore the economic and ideological drivers behind the current expansion of fossil fuel extraction (Malm and the Zetkin collective). In light of the Center's semester theme of Energy and Exhaustion, we will ask three kinds of questions: historical (about the origins of the "Capitalocene" and of "fossil capital"); theoretical (how is Marx's "general law of accumulation" also a law of environmental depletion and planetary limits?); and political (traditional "Promethean" Marxism envisioned revolution as the full actualization of productive forces -- what is the meaning of social revolution in our age of emerging fascism and overshooting climate limits?).
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: COL398, STS398, GRST298
Prereq: None

CHUM399 Burnout

Moderns have excelled at exhausting themselves, their others, and the planet. In this seminar we will explore the disposition toward depletion as a constitutive problem of life and thought in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Why do we wear the world out and who do we become in so doing? We will examine "burnout" as a condition connecting psychic, political, aesthetic, and ecological distress in the simultaneously listless and overexcited present. Convening resources from philosophy, history, anthropology, political theory, literary studies, and contemporary art, we will consider, among other things: fossil fuels, neoliberal economic thought, enervation and nervous over-animation, stimulants, thermodynamics, empty calories, extravagant gift-giving, geological science, secular finitude, the "End of History," the loss of utopias, and deficits of attention.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT
Credits: 1.00
Gen Ed Area: HA-CHUM
Identical With: ENVS398, COL399
Prereq: None

CHUM401 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

CHUM402 Individual Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

CHUM407 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

CHUM408 Senior Tutorial (downgraded thesis)

Downgraded Senior Thesis Tutorial - Project to be arranged in consultation with the tutor. Only enrolled in through the Honors Coordinator.
Offering: Host
Grading: A-F

CHUM409 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

CHUM410 Senior Thesis Tutorial

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

CHUM411 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

CHUM412 Group Tutorial, Undergraduate

Topic to be arranged in consultation with the tutor.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

CHUM420 Student Forum

Student-run group tutorial, sponsored by a faculty member and approved by the chair of a department or program.
Offering: Host
Grading: Cr/U

CHUM491 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT

CHUM492 Teaching Apprentice Tutorial

The teaching apprentice program offers undergraduate students the opportunity to assist in teaching a faculty member's course for academic credit.
Offering: Host
Grading: OPT