Spring 2019 Class Schedule: Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

Spring 2019 Class Schedule

Course	Title	Instructor	Lecture
HUM 325-4-20	Bulldozed: São Paulo and Chicago	Andrew Britt	TuTh 2:00 - 3:20pm
HUM 325-4-20 Bulldozed: São Paulo and Chicago Fulfills Distro 4 (Historical Studies) Co-listed with PORT 396-0-1 and HISTORY 392-0-28. What stories does rubble tell? This course examines the histories of São Paulo (Brazil) and Chicago (USA) through the demolitions that remade them over the twentieth century. Today among the most populous and ethnically-diverse global cities in the Americas, São Paulo and Chicago grew up as transportation gateways to the West and hubs of industry. The compelling shared and comparative histories of these two cities will serve as the basis for questions like: How do demolitions change places and the meanings attached to them? Why do authorities bulldoze certain structures and not others? Where do dislocated residents go? How have demolitions contributed to segregation, economic immobility, and racialized inequities across space and time? Course sections will follow the razing of singularly meaningful sites along with broad patterns of demolition related to housing and transportation projects (to take two examples). Source material will span from historical maps and city plans to samba and blues music that preserve razed spaces in popular memory. The course will include a collaborative research project. Students will use a digital mapping application to document, analyze, and visualize social and spatial change related to demolitions over time. No prior experience with mapping applications is required, and students interested in learning programming basics in a supportive and structured environment are welcome.The course will be taught in English, however Portuguese-language students will practice reading and communicating in Portuguese.
Bio coming soon
HUM 370-3-20	Heterosexualities: Past, Present, Future	Héctor Carrillo	TuTh 9:30 - 10:50am
HUM 370-3-20 Heterosexualities: Past, Present, Future Fulfills Distro 3 (Social and Behavioral Sciences) Co-listed with GNDR_ST 331-0-20 and SOCIOL 376-0-22. How and when did the identities that we know today as “straight” or “heterosexual” come into existence? And how have those identities differed across time and space? Drawing on the academic literature, literary pieces, and representations in film and other popular media, we will examine the “invention of heterosexuality” and its transformation and diversification over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries. By paying attention to multiple definitions of heterosexuality—including those that coexist within a single historical moment and location—we will problematize the notion that heterosexuality can be simply conceived as a single, unitary sexual identity. Among other topics, we will discuss the increasingly blurring boundaries between heterosexuality and other sexual identities; heteroflexibility, sexual fluidity, and other challenges to conventional definitions of heterosexuality; the power associated with heterosexuality, masculinity, and femininity; the effects of sexual inequality; contemporary problems and issues, including hookup culture and definitions of sexual consent; and imagined futures of the notions of sexual identity and sexual orientation.
Bio coming soon
HUM 370-4-20	Varieties of Racial Thought	Jonathon Glassman	MW 11:00am - 12:20pm
HUM 370-4-20 Varieties of Racial Thought Fulfills Distro 4 (Historical Studies) Co-listed with HISTORY 300-0-28. It is now widely understood that racial boundaries are not biological phenomena but are the products of social and historical processes. And yet, despite the demise of racial science in the final decades of the twentieth century, racism and the belief in racial difference persist. We will approach the roots of this conundrum by examining the diverse manifestations racial thought has assumed in a variety of historical and global settings. Topics will include the rise of Western racial thought and the idea of whiteness; the links between concepts of progress, civilization, and racial difference; antisemitism and the Aryan myth; genocide and the Hamitic myth in central Africa; race, medicine, and the abuse of genetic science in the twenty-first century.
Bio coming soon
HUM 370-5-20	What is Obscenity?	Erica Weitzman	TuTh 11:00am - 12:20pm
HUM 370-5-20 What is Obscenity? Fulfills Distro 5 (Ethics and Values) Co-listed with GERMAN 326-0-20 and COMP_LIT 383-0-21. “I know it when I see it”: at least since U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s infamous statement on obscenity in the 1964 case Jacobellis v. Ohio, obscenity has been an ambiguous, not to say, an undefinable concept. And yet, from movie ratings and parental controls to banned books and images to “vulgar remarks,” we are constantly surrounded by ideas about what can and cannot be shown, what is and is not appropriate for the eyes and ears of this or that population. But what is obscenity, exactly? What do we mean when we call something “obscene,” or remove it on grounds of its obscenity from public consumption? Are obscene images the same thing as immoral acts, and if not, what does the act of representing something add or take away from the thing represented? Finally, does the concept of “obscenity” even mean anything any more in an era of shock art and internet porn, of free speech and “grab ‘em by the pussy,” an era in which, supposedly, “nothing is shocking”? This course will examine the topic of obscenity from a variety of angles, including questions of law, governance, and public morality; sexuality and psychoanalysis; affect theory; visual culture; phenomenology; art history; and literary and media studies. We will seek to go beyond the discussion of particular case studies and look at the big-picture history and cultural assumptions that underlie the idea of “obscenity” in all its forms.
Bio coming soon
Hum 370-6-21	Black Ecology	Rebecca Zorach	Th 2:00 - 4:50pm
Hum 370-6-21 Black Ecology Co-listed with ART_HIST 369-0-01 and ENVR_POL 390-0-23. Taking inspiration from Nathan Hare’s 1970 essay “Black Ecology” and Félix Guattari’s 1989 essay “The Three Ecologies” (which discusses ecology in relation to environment, society, and human consciousness and also includes a memorable comparison of Donald Trump to invasive algae), this course addresses the question of eco-aesthetics in relation to environmental justice with a focus on the experiences, political struggle, and art making of people of color in the U.S. and internationally. We will read fiction and scholarly writings, view artworks, and participate in one or more environmental projects. The class will also host several guest speakers (artists, scholars, and activists). It will also involve several field trips during class time—potentially extending into the early evening—and/or on weekends.
Bio coming soon
HUM 370-6-22	Shakespeare and Early Modern Race Studies	Peter Erickson	TuTh 9:30 - 10:50am
HUM 370-6-22 Shakespeare and Early Modern Race Studies Co-listed with AF_AM_ST 380-0-21. This course will focus on close reading of five plays with a view to analyzing Shakespeare’s dramatic and verbal expressions of race. We will explore the representations of black figures. But we will also pursue racial whiteness and the enactment of interrelations and conflicts between black and white characters. Special emphasis will be placed on how the impact and outcome of Shakespeare’s endings are constructed in each play. What happens if we are left at the end with problems instead of solutions? How do we address this complexity?
Bio coming soon
HUM 395-0-20	Grad Seminar: The Anthropocene and The Environmental Humanities	Lydia Barnett	Thursdays 3:00 - 5:50pm
HUM 395-0-20 Grad Seminar: The Anthropocene and The Environmental Humanities Note: This is a GRADUATE SEMINAR! The concept of 'the Anthropocene' has sparked tremendous interest across the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, forging trans-disciplinary connections and sparking disciplinary debates as few other topics in recent scholarship have. The aim of this graduate seminar is twofold: to survey the richly interdisciplinary literature on the Anthropocene from the last two decades and to consider how humanists in particular (including practitioners of the qualitative social sciences) have intervened in these conversations. How have the environmental humanities adopted, challenged, and contributed to evolving understandings of the relationship between humanity and the global environment? What kinds of interventions are humanistically-oriented scholars uniquely able to make to environmental scholarship and activism?
Bio coming soon