This summer institute is a week long opportunity that takes place abroad with a theme focused on the healing arts. Grounding this theme is the pursuit of reparatory justice in the Rastafari faith. The summer school will integrate learning activities with existing community projects, for instance, the School of Vision and Rastafari Indigenous Village. Students will study Rastafari as an African-centered ethos, inclusive of culture and economic sustainability.

• Days/Times:
• Instructor: Shilliam, Robbie
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/14
• PosTag(s): n/a

Deirdre Cooper Owens argues that the experimental and pioneering work performed on enslaved Black women such as Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy, by Dr. James Marion Sims, who is known as the father of gynecology, has been overshadowed in America’s understanding of American gynecology. In this writing intensive course, we will explore the role of Black enslaved women in the formation of the field of American gynecology. We will examine the writing about enslaved Black midwives, nurses, and Black women whose medical practices and bodies were deemed inferior and flawed yet provided foundational knowledge for white practitioners in the mid-1800s. Potential readings include Deirdre Cooper Owens’ Medical Bondage: Race Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology, Deborah Gray Whites’ Ar’nt I a Woman?, and Marie Jenkins Schwartz’s Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South. Throughout the term, students will conduct their own research and write to combine these conversations with contemporary discussions surrounding Black maternal health, Black midwives, birthing justice, and reproductive justice more broadly. This course will culminate with an academic conference where students will present their research to an audience of their peers. All undergraduates at sophomore level and above are welcome.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Wright, Lisa E.
• Room: Gilman 219
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/19
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

An emerging body of literature argues that cities in the Global South work differently than Eurocentric theories of the city and urbanization suggest. This course will focus on such issues as the important role of cities in the nation’s economy, politics, and culture and interrogates the relationship between the city and its “outside.” This seminar interrogates the numerous ways that African cities, as an urban form, concept, and geography have been generative in anthropology, as well as in history, sociology, and urban studies. Africa has long existed as a crucial “other” in European culture. But how do we think of an African city outside of this limiting history? In this course, we explore the different histories, futures, and potentialities of African cities as an urban form, and lived experience, re-sorting its geographies and theorizations. We will explore issues of urban planning, (de)industrialization, urban race/ethnic relations, movement, and other issues important to the urban experience.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Mohamed, Sabine
• Room: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/10
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL, CES-CC

Introduction to the grammar and writing system of the classical language of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (ca. 2055-1650 B.C.). In the second semester, literary texts and royal inscriptions will be read. Course meets with AS.133.600.

• Days/Times: TTh 3:00PM - 4:15PM
• Instructor: Wilkinson, Alison Michelle
• Room: Gilman 238
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/6
• PosTag(s): n/a

The word for “medicine” in Malagasy, fanafody, can also mean “charm” or “magic.” This seminar uses that linguistic flexibility as a point of departure to explore practices for bodily healing and protection amid broader processes of social transformation, primarily in 20th- and 21st-century East Africa and the western Indian Ocean. How is the medical magical? How is the magical medical? How have separations between magic and medicine been erected, maintained, or questioned? From the role of faith healers to the region's experience of new "miracle drugs," class materials will integrate anthropology, history, and science and technology studies (STS) to examine various permutations of the magic/medicine duality over time. Topics will include facets of traditional medicine; encounters between indigenous and imported healing systems; medical pluralism; colonial and postcolonial conflicts; the rise of humanitarian global health; epidemic and pandemic politics; ritual and religious processes; and the roles of identity, inequality, and empire in healing and protection practices. Grounded in Madagascar, Mauritius, Réunion, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa, this course will also use magic/medicine to consider the region’s transcontinental and transoceanic connections.

• Days/Times: M 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Robbins, Gabrielle Lydia Marie
• Room: Bloomberg 176
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/12
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

This course is designed to introduce and advance perspectives on radical approaches and analyses on the state of food and food systems, while learning about historic and contemporary examples of movement toward freedom and self-determination through land and food. The course is co-taught by author, organizer, educator, and filmmaker Eric Jackson (Black Yield Institute) and anthropologist Nicole Labruto (Johns Hopkins University). Black Yield Institute (BYI) is a Pan-African power institution based in Baltimore, serving as a think tank and collective action network that addresses food apartheid. The Black Land & Food Sovereignty Praxis course is BYI’s flagship popular political education course. The course immerses budding movement contributors in a theory- and practice-based classroom experience. Participants will develop new questions, challenge their beliefs, develop a critical analysis, learn skills, and build relationships that will prepare them for growth in movement toward Black land and food sovereignty. We will also offer a 3-credit spring semester project-based course that will continue work done in the fall course. Open to undergraduate and graduate students. The course builds on the model of the Sustainable Design Practicum (2021 and 2022) and the Environmental Justice Workshop (2023). Class sessions will take place each week in Cherry Hill in south Baltimore. Meeting times include transportation to and from the Homewood campus. Admission by permission of instructors. Email [email protected] to receive application.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Labruto, Nicole; Staff
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 17/20
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

Recommended Course Background: AS.190.214

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Spence, Lester
• Room: Shaffer 202
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/20
• PosTag(s): INST-AP, CES-RI

Designed to sharpen students’ abilities in contemporary spoken and written Portuguese. This third-year course fosters the development of complex language skills that enhance fluency, accuracy and general proficiency in Portuguese and its appropriate use in professional and informal contexts. Students will briefly review previous grammar structures and concentrate on new complex grammar concepts. Using a variety of cultural items such as current news, short stories, plays, films, videos, newspaper articles, and popular music, students discuss diverse topics followed by intense writing and oral discussion with the aim of developing critical thinking and solid communication skills. Successful completion of Advanced Portuguese I will prepare students for the next level, Advanced Portuguese II, AS.210.372. May not be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prereq: AS.210.272 or (old AS.210.278) or placement test. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.

• Days/Times: MWF 10:00AM - 10:50AM
• Instructor: De Azeredo Cerqueira, Flavia Christina; Nagasawa, Ellen
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

Did you know that Brazil is very similar to the United States? This course is intended as an introduction to the culture and civilization of Brazil. It is designed to provide students with basic information about Brazilian history, politics, economy, art, literature, popular culture, theater, cinema, and music. The course will focus on how Indigenous, Asian, African, and European cultural influences have interacted to create the new and unique civilization that is Brazil today. The course is taught in English. No Prereq. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: De Azeredo Cerqueira, Flavia Christina
• Room: Latrobe 107
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/31
• PosTag(s): INST-GLOBAL

Over the last three decades Italy, historically a country of emigrants—many of whom suffered from discrimination in the societies they joined—became a destination for hundreds of thousands of migrants and refugees from various countries, and particularly from Africa. Significant numbers of these immigrants came to Italy as a result of the country’s limited, though violent colonial history; others arrive because Italy is the closest entry-point to Europe. How have these migratory flows challenged Italian society’s sense of itself? How have they transformed the notion of Italian national identity? In recent years, growing numbers of Afro- and Afro-descendant writers, filmmakers, artists and Black activists are responding through their work to pervasive xenophobia and racism while challenging Italy’s self-representation as a ‘White’ country. How are they forcing it to broaden the idea of ‘Italianess’? How do their counternarratives compel Italy to confront its ignored colonial past? And, in what way have Black youth in Italy embraced the #Blacklivesmatter movement? This multimedia course examines representation of blackness and racialized otherness, whiteness, and national identity through literary, film, and visual archival material in an intersectional framework. Examining Italy’s internal, ‘Southern question,’ retracing Italy’s colonial history, and recognizing the experiences of Italians of immigrant origins and those of immigrants themselves, we’ll explore compelling works by writers and filmmakers such as Igiaba Scego, Gagriella Ghermandi, Maza Megniste, Dagmawi Yimer, and others.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Di Bianco, Laura
• Room: Hodson 315
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): INST-CP, INST-GLOBAL, MLL-ITAL

This course will introduce students to the application of statistical techniques commonly used in sociological analysis. Topics include measures of central tendency and dispersion, probability theory, confidence intervals, chi-square, anova, and regression analysis. Hands-on computer experience with statistical software and analysis of data from various fields of social research. Special Note: Required for IS GSCD track students.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 12:50PM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM
• Instructor: Reese, Mike J
• Room: BLC 5015
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course will introduce students to the application of statistical techniques commonly used in sociological analysis. Topics include measures of central tendency and dispersion, probability theory, confidence intervals, chi-square, anova, and regression analysis. Hands-on computer experience with statistical software and analysis of data from various fields of social research. Special Note: Required for IS GSCD track students.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 12:50PM, F 11:00AM - 11:50AM
• Instructor: Reese, Mike J
• Room: BLC 5015
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course introduces students to the field of Africana Studies. It focuses on the historical experience, intellectual ideas, theories, and cultural production of African-descended people. We will consider how people of the black diaspora remember and encounter Africa. We will explore, too, how such people have lived, spoken, written, and produced art about colonialism and enslavement, gender and mobility, violence and pleasure. This course will be thematically organized and invite you to center your own stories about black people within your understanding of the modern world and its making.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Stocks, Shawntay
• Room: Gilman 217
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/15
• PosTag(s): CES-ELECT, CES-RI

This introductory course will examine policing and prisons in the United States and beyond, with a focus on racial inequality. It will consist of three parts. First, we will define key concepts in police and prison studies. Then, we will explore the contemporary state of prisons and policing in the United States and look at debates around the rise of “mass incarceration” and aggressive forms of policing in the final third of the 20th century. Third, we will explore policing and prison in other parts of the globe in the contemporary moment, highlighting similarities and differences from the U.S. case. What can studying the instruments of social control in other societies reveal about our own? Students will develop an understanding of major trends, keywords, and debates in the literature on policing and prisons, with particular reference to race and racism.

• Days/Times: TTh 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Schrader, Stuart Laurence
• Room: Croft Hall G02
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores “critical university studies” through the lens of abolitionist thought, from W.E.B. DuBois to Ruth Wilson Gilmore. It historicizes universities’ growth within U.S. cities during the twentieth century.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Cumming, Daniel
• Room: Wyman Park N105
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 17/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Examines the history of African art in the Euro-American world, focusing on the ways that Western institutions have used African artworks to construct narratives about Africa and its billion residents.

• Days/Times: M 6:00PM - 8:30PM
• Instructor: Tervala, Kevin
• Room: Gilman 10
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/12
• PosTag(s): ARCH-RELATE

This course follows twentieth and twenty-first century artistic projects that imagine, propose, or navigate Afro Asian pasts and futures. We will follow artists of African and Asian descent, several of them diasporic, in considering imaginaries of the world that precede our present. We will also engage, collaboratively, in a speculative exercise: what happens when we are given the material grounds to think the world differently? Covering significant epistemic passages in world history—the Afro Asian conference in Bandung, the origins of modernism, Négritude, comparative studies in caste, and the art history of race—and a variety of parallel primary sources (maps, music, cinema, and archival journals), we will think Afro Asia to speculate art history and think art history to speculate Afro Asia. Our work together draws heavily on local collections and specifically the Baltimore Museum of Art.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Ballakrishnen, Meghaa Parvathy
• Room: Gilman 177
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): HART-MODERN

This seminar examines epic literature’s entanglements with empire, colonialism, ethnicity, indigeneity, and slavery via critical readings of Vergil’s Aeneid. Students will gain methodological and pragmatic familiarity with movements to ‘decolonize’ and globalize the study of antiquity. As a counterbalance to Classics’ historical service to imperialism, we will read Vergil alongside other literary epics on race, identity, and belonging, representing diverse global languages, belief systems, geographies, and positionalities. We will also survey classics of postcolonial thought, from Fanon to Hartman, and apply their theories and methods to primary sources. Our hope is to incubate reparative approaches to the Aeneid and epic literature while also evaluating novel methodologies of comparison, reception, resistant interpretation, and critical fabulation. Classics graduate students will read the Aeneid in Latin. Undergraduate and non-Classics graduate students may read in translation but should plan on substantial engagement with an additional epic of their choice. All will hone professional skills as they produce a final research paper suitable for conference presentation or open-access web publication on race-time.net.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Pandey, Nandini
• Room: Gilman 108
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

How did ancient civilizations around the Mediterranean basin (Greece, Rome, Egypt, Persia, Carthage) understand and represent their own and others’ identities and ethnic differences? How did notions and practices around race, citizenship, and immigration evolve from antiquity to the present? How have culture and politics informed artistic, literary, and museum representations of ethnic ‘others’ over time, along with the historical development of ethnography, biological science, and pseudo-sciences of race? What role did “Classics” (the study of Greco-Roman cultures) play in modern colonialism, racecraft, and inequality? And what role can it play in unmaking their legacies, through the ongoing Black Classicism movement, the practice of Critical Race Theory, and the development of more global and interconnective approaches to premodern cultures? RAP provides an opportunity for Hopkins undergraduates and graduate students from a wide variety of disciplinary backgrounds to engage in project-based research toward building an open-access, grant-winning educational resource (OER) on “Race in Antiquity.” Participants learn, share, and practice advanced research methods; examine and discuss the history and modern implications of the teaching and study of their fields; test-drive and collaboratively edit OER pilot materials; and create new content based on their own research, for eventual digital publication.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Pandey, Nandini
• Room: Greenhouse 000
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, ARCH-RELATE

This course explores the history, politics, and culture of legalized racial segregation in the United State between the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries – a regime commonly known as “Jim Crow.”

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Connolly, Nathan D
• Room: Gilman 186
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/20
• PosTag(s): HIST-US

This course surveys the literary and cultural productions of Black and Latinx science fictioneers and their generative confrontations with the sci-fi genre’s fraught colonial, gendered, and racialized technoscientific origins. By engaging works of the Afrofuturist and Latinxfuturist imagination (ex. film, short stories, novels, and visual art) alongside science fiction criticism, and readings spanning the subfields of feminist, queer, and postcolonial science and technology studies, we’ll consider how Black and Latinx science fictioneers, past and present, appropriate the idioms of science and technology to upend essentialist accounts of gender, race, and sexuality, and fashion radical remappings of “gendered,” “raced,” and “sexed” bodies. Throughout the course of the semester, we'll also be interrogating how (and to what end) Black and Latinx sci-fi writers and creators such as Octavia E. Butler, Nalo Hopkinson, Janelle Monáe, Firelei Báez, E.G. Condé , and Silvia Moreno-Garcia, among others, complicate, reconceptualize, and expand the contours of the “science” in science fiction. In so doing, we will assess the implications (be these social, political, epistemological, etc.) of positioning Black and Latinx peoples, who have more often than not been made the objects of science (and scientific racism), as key interlocutors, producers, and critical surveyors of technoscientific knowledge.

• Days/Times: W 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Vado, Karina A
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/18
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

This project-based course will provide training and skills in movement building through radical analyses of and approaches toward the state of food and food systems. The course immerses budding movement contributors in a theory- and practice-based experience. Students will engage in guided projects that support the movement toward freedom and self-determination through land and food. The course is co-taught by author, organizer, educator, and filmmaker Eric Jackson (Black Yield Institute) and anthropologist Nicole Labruto (Johns Hopkins University). Black Yield Institute (BYI) is a Pan-African power institution based in Baltimore, serving as a think tank and collective action network that addresses food apartheid. Participants will learn new research and design skills, contribute to projects relevant to BYI’s work, develop a critical analysis, and build relationships that will prepare them for growth in movement toward Black land and food sovereignty. The course builds on AS.145.400 Black Land & Food Sovereignty Praxis: An Environmental Justice Workshop, though the course is not a prerequisite. Open to undergraduate and graduate students. Class sessions will take place each week in Cherry Hill in south Baltimore. Meeting times include transportation to and from the Homewood campus. Admission by permission of instructors.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:30PM
• Instructor: Labruto, Nicole
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR

This course focuses on the economics of poverty and inequality. It covers the measurement of poverty and inequality, facts and trends over time, the causes of poverty and inequality with a focus on those related to earnings and the labor market, and public policy toward poverty and inequality, covering both taxation and government expenditure and programs. By the nature of the material, the course is fairly statistical and quantitative. Students should have an intermediate understanding of microeconomic concepts. Basic knowledge of regression analysis is also helpful.

• Days/Times: MW 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Husain, Muhammad Mudabbir
• Room: Gilman 186
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): CES-PD, CES-LC, CES-RI, INST-ECON

Designed to sharpen students’ abilities in contemporary spoken and written Portuguese. This third-year course fosters the development of complex language skills that enhance fluency, accuracy and general proficiency in Portuguese and its appropriate use in professional and informal contexts. Students will briefly review previous grammar structures and concentrate on new complex grammar concepts. Using a variety of cultural items such as current news, short stories, plays, films, videos, newspaper articles, and popular music, students discuss diverse topics followed by intense writing and oral discussion with the aim of developing critical thinking and solid communication skills. Successful completion of Advanced Portuguese I will prepare students for the next level, Advanced Portuguese II, AS.210.372. May not be taken on a satisfactory/unsatisfactory basis. Prereq: AS.210.272 or (old AS.210.278) or placement test. THERE IS NO FINAL EXAM.

• Days/Times: MWF 9:00AM - 9:50AM
• Instructor: Nagasawa, Ellen
• Room: Gilman 10
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

In this course we will read work by Toni Morrison, Dorothy West, Nella Larsen, Jesse Redmon Fauset, Suzan-Lori Parks, Deesha Philyaw, Shannon Sanders, Dawnie Walton and others. We will consider how to read Black women behaving “badly”, or resisting respectability politics, in a historical and contemporary context. How have writers balanced a desire for complexity, agency, and artistic freedom with practical and ethical questions about representation and stereotypes? Students will write one midterm paper on the assigned reading and complete one creative writing project. Students may choose the subject of their creative assignment, but it should engage the broad questions of the course: what makes protagonists behaving badly interesting, and what ethical or structural questions are relevant to how we portray them?

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Evans, Danielle V
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): WRIT-FICT, WRIT-READ

Race and ethnicity have played a prominent role in American society and continue to do so, as demonstrated by interracial and interethnic gaps in economic and educational achievement, residence, political power, family structure, crime, and health. Using a sociological framework, we will explore the historical significance of race and its development as a social construction, assess the causes and consequences of intergroup inequalities and explore potential solutions.

• Days/Times: TTh 4:30PM - 5:45PM
• Instructor: Greif, Meredith
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Reserved Open
• Seats Available: 19/20
• PosTag(s): INST-AP

Recent national conversations about racial segregation, inequality and the affordable housing crisis raise many important questions—this course focuses on several of these questions, through the lens of urban sociology and housing policy. There are three main areas we will focus on in the course: 1) Understanding the role of racial segregation, neighborhood and housing effects on children and family life; 2) Research methods for studying urban poverty and neighborhoods; and 3) Programs, policies and initiatives designed to house the poor, alleviate concentrated spatial poverty, and increase residential choice. We will primarily focus on issues related to urban poverty in large cities, comparing the patterns of residential mobility and neighborhood characteristics for white and Black Americans. We will utilize archival data, qualitative interviews, census data, and quasi/experimental data to gather evidence about neighborhoods, housing, and policies, as well as their impacts. We will also explore interactive online applications that facilitate the study of neighborhoods (e.g. American Community Survey, GIS with Social Explorer). A statistics/public policy background is helpful, but not required.

• Days/Times: T 3:00PM - 5:30PM
• Instructor: Deluca, Stefanie
• Room: Mergenthaler 526
• Status: Reserved Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course provides "hands on" research experience applying sociological research tools and a sociological perspective to problems of substance. Qualitative observational and/or interviewing methods will be emphasized. Students will design and carry out a research project and write a research report. Introduction to Social Statistics (230.205) and Research Methods for the Social Sciences (230.202) are prerequisites. This course is restricted to Juniors and Seniors only. Instructor permission required for prerequisite exemptions for all students (majors and non-majors). Sophomores require instructor permission.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Calder, Ryan
• Room: Maryland 309
• Status: Reserved Open
• Seats Available: 17/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course explores the complex interplay between race, class, and the politics of decolonization and national independence in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean and Latin America. Through diverse theories, primary sources, and comparative case studies, students will analyze how racialized and exploited groups have challenged systems of imperial and colonial domination while seeking to assert different meanings of freedom. The course moves beyond traditional decolonization narratives that restrict frameworks spatially to the boundaries of the nation-state and temporally to the post-World War II period. By historicizing decolonization struggles and emphasizing the transnational and comparative dimensions of the ideologies and practices of decolonization, we will explore how race and class dynamics within countries intersect with global power relations to shape the politics and processes of decolonization.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Edwards, Zophia
• Room: Shriver Hall Board Room
• Status: Reserved Open
• Seats Available: 14/15
• PosTag(s): CDS-SSMC, INST-CP, INST-GLOBAL

The core methods class in Critical Diaspora Studies, this course prepares students to conduct secondary source reading and primary source research on topics pertaining to the comparative study of racism, immigration and colonialism.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Connolly, Nathan D
• Room: Gilman 186
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 20/20
• PosTag(s): HIST-US, HIST-EUROPE, HIST-AFRICA, HIST-ASIA, HIST-LATAM

Examines the history of Black Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Feminist Studies, among other interdisciplines. How did these movements transform the university? What were their political-economic aspirations beyond the academy?

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Staff
• Room: Gilman 75
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 25/25
• PosTag(s): CDS-SSMC

Maryland had the largest pre-Civil War population of free African Americans who were intent on creating the educational means necessary to maintain their own freedom and uplift. Education and land ownership was tantamount to securing standing in society and to forging an early, even if fraught, sense of social citizenship and its benefits. In this course, students will support the research efforts of a local Maryland school house museum to develop immersive, experiential learning and engagement tools. Drawing on material and documents specific to the museum such as objects, curricular texts, original letters, newspaper accounts, experiences of the first teachers, and contemporaneous accounts of teaching in Freedmen’s schools, students will engage in a speculative history that will serve as the foundation for creative reenactment of freedom education in early 1800s Maryland.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Staff
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): CDS-SSMC

This Humanities Research Lab will examine the Black Panther Party, placing this much-discussed radical organization in context. It will focus on how the Party developed an analysis and critique of colonialism, and how anti-colonial movements around the globe adopted perspectives of the Panthers. The course will entail original research projects by students using JHU’s collection of original Black Panther Party newspapers and other materials.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Schrader, Stuart Laurence
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/16
• PosTag(s): CDS-SSMC, CDS-SSMC, CDS-SSMC, CDS-SSMC

Transnational Birthing Justice - Ghana I is a place-based writing-intensive Experiential Research Lab. Students will write to reflect on and respond to literary fiction, nonfiction writing, and scholarly articles on historical and contemporary Black women’s birthing experiences throughout the African diaspora, particularly in West Africa. Students will research the intersections between Ghana’s colonial history, culture, environment, local government, education system, policies, and maternal and reproductive health. To prepare to travel to Ghana students will curate public-facing writing to amplify Ghana’s maternal and reproductive health challenges. While in Ghana students will partner with international-based public health agencies, The University of Ghana School of Public Health, and Accra-based partners, to utilize their writing, research, and public health skills to develop a framework to address maternal health challenges in Ghana. Students will engage with Ghanaian practitioners focusing on community health to participate in a Hopkins-sponsored community health screening and maternal health kit giveaway to support local individuals. Students will visit three cities, Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast, and sites like Kakum Rain Forest, and Elmina Slave Dungeon. Students will build a portfolio of writing that will include writing for themselves, social media, community, and scholarly audiences. This class will be co-taught with Tanay Lynn Harris, the co-founder and director of Bloom Collective.  By permission only. Application required; email [email protected]. Commitment to AS.360.407 in Summer 2025 required.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Wright, Lisa E.
• Room:  
• Status: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

This course introduces students to the field of Africana Studies. It focuses on the historical experience, intellectual ideas, theories, and cultural production of African-descended people. We will consider how people of the black diaspora remember and encounter Africa.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Makalani, Minkah
• Room: Gilman 381
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 15/15
• PosTag(s): CES-ELECT, CES-RI

Focusing specifically on the representation of Black music in U.S feature films from 1900-2000, this course explores the ways in which race and power are negotiated in two interconnected spaces – behind the camera and within the narrative of the film. This seminar introduces participants to film analysis as well as an overview of several Black music genres. Assignments will include weekly responses as well as a final creative project.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Staff
• Room: Gilman 381
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 12/12
• PosTag(s): n/a

In this course, we will read literary and historical texts that present visions of black utopia. Authors include “Ethiop” (William J. Wilson), Marcus Garvey, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and others.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Nurhussein, Nadia
• Room: Gilman 400
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 18/18
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course introduces students to concepts of social justice and practices of community-engaged artmaking. It also provides students an opportunity to explore the history and legacies of the Black Arts Movement, and contemporary intersections of art and social justice in Baltimore City. Local artists and scholars will share their expertise using art to challenge social injustice. In turn, students will examine their personal creative practices and how they can be used to create and advocate for change. Throughout the semester, students will develop individual art projects that respond to course topics and are rooted in the principles and process of social practice art.

• Days/Times: TTh 6:00PM - 7:15PM
• Instructor: Stocks, Shawntay
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 9/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

This course addresses the historic role of the African American cemetery as sacred and political space, with important links to other Black institutions. Operating in partnership with Mount Auburn Cemetery in Baltimore, owned and operated by the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church, we will visit the cemetery and related locations in Baltimore throughout the semester. Our collective goal is to research and share stories that further the interests of these important and vulnerable sites.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Dean, Gabrielle
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/8
• PosTag(s): PMUS-PRAC, ARCH-RELATE