ALICE KAPLAN INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMANITIES

Co-listed with HISTORY 395-0-24.

This digital humanities course has two areas of focus, one historical and one technological: 1) We will research and write about how African Americans in the Midwest, particularly in Illinois, mobilized for freedom and equality in the 1840s and. Many of the historical themes we’ll examine—including forms of racial inequality in a post-slavery society, African Americans’ strategies for social and political mobilization, and Black activists’ relationships with white allies—are enduring topics in U.S. history and resonate with present-day questions and challenges. 2) We will participate in a major collaborative digital humanities enterprise, the Colored Conventions Project. This means exploring practices of digital history, conducting basic work with digitized documents, and designing a web-based exhibit. Prior experience in digital humanities is not required, but patience and curiosity are essential!

Co-listed with ANTHRO 390-0-27

This seminar, which plays on Federico Fellini’s film of the same title, and the famous 13th century Italian feminist poem “The Treasure of the City of Ladies,” explores the variations across positionality, time, and space in women’s American urban experiences. We will establish some basic urban-studies concepts and, with a special focus on Chicago, will then read together literary work, historical and social science studies, and contemporary journalism in order to consider misogyny/racism/xenophobia/classism and their effects on women’s lives, and issues of women’s employment, reproductive rights, sexuality, and violence against women. And, of course, women’s own agency in attempting to live their urban lives, pursue their goals, and claim their equal rights and pleasures. We will also consider common representations—and misrepresentations--of varying women’s urban lives. 

American women live in cities, work in cities, but have had to wage a fight that is by no means over to be accommodated in the urban world. From hostile built environments (e.g., lack of sufficient public women’s bathrooms), ongoing lower salaries than men’s, to the lack of subsidized childcare, to omnipresent harassment and sexual violence at work, at home, and in the public world, American cities are far more challenging environments for women than for men.

We are living in a strange new cultural and political-economic arena, in which daily horrific racist/misogynist attacks and policies, from the White House down, jostle up against vibrant, active backlash and organizing by grassroots and other feminist and antiracist movements. I encourage students who are interested in unpacking the present to choose some element of the current national conjuncture and gender to research as your topic.

Co-listed with HISTORY 300-0-30.

In 2016, thousands of Indigenous water protectors and their non-Native allies camped at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in an effort to block the construction of the DakotaAccess Pipeline. That movement is part of a long history of Native activism. In this course, we will examine the individual and collective ways in which Indigenous people have resisted colonial domination in the U.S. and Canada since 1887. In addition to focusing on North America, we will also turn our attention to Hawai‘i and the U.S. territories. This course will highlight religious movements, inter-tribal organizations, key intellectual figures, student movements, armed standoffs, non-violent protest, and a variety of visions for Indigenous community self-determination.

Co-listed with RTVF 377-0-20.

Animation and non-fiction filmmaking seem contrary to one another, though relationships between animation and documentary practices date all the way back to the origins of cinema. This course will trace the history of that interplay, focusing on aesthetic interventions in animated documentaries, especially over the last twenty years (Waltz with Bashir, Persepolis). Parallel examples of non-fiction themes in comic art and video games will also be considered.  These forms will be considered alongside readings that explore the rhetoric of design, aesthetics, semiotics, and anthropology.  Through these readings, screenings, writing assignments and class discussions, students will explore the contours of this emerging genre.