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: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Pandey, Nandini
• Room: Gilman 108
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/12
• PosTag(s): CDS-EWC

This discussion-based seminar will survey science fiction written by indigenous authors in what are now the United States, Canada, and Australia. We will investigate by what means and to what ends this particular genre has been taken up by indigenous peoples both to reflect on their settler-colonial pasts and presents and to imagine decolonial futures. Texts may include: Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead; William Sanders, "The Undiscovered"; Daniel Heath Justice, The Way of Thorn and Thunder; Blake Hausman, Riding the Trail of Tears; Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow; Claire Coleman, Terra Nullius; Tanya Tagaq, Split Tooth. Fulfills the Global and Minority Literatures requirement.

• Days/Times: TTh 9:00AM - 10:15AM
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room: Latrobe 107
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/15
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL, CDS-GI

This seminar offers an introduction to a key concept in contemporary critical theory and literary and cultural studies: settler colonialism, understood as a specific form of colonialism undergirded by the expropriation of land and resources rather than the exploitation of labor and thereby involving the attempted elimination and replacement of Indigenous polities and societies by an invading force. The course will have a dual focus: 1) tracing the theoretical distinction of settler colonialism from other forms of colonialism and tracking the critique implicit in this distinction of dominant forms of leftism that arguably presuppose a settler-colonial frame of reference; 2) tracking the history of what James Belich has called the “Anglo settler revolution” of the nineteenth century and engaging in a comparative analysis of the literatures produced in the course of that revolution in what are now Ireland, the United States, Canada, and Australia. Open to both undergraduate and graduate students.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Hickman, Jared W
• Room: Gilman 130D
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12
• PosTag(s): ENGL-GLOBAL, CES-BM, CES-PD, CDS-GI

Tom Jobim, best known as the composer of the bossa nova classic “Girl from Ipanema,” once quipped, “Brazil is not for beginners.” Beyond enduring stereotypes, the complexities and contradictions of Brazilian society have long been fertile ground for anthropological inquiry. This seminar offers close readings of classic and contemporary ethnography that interrogate Brazilian society as a set of questions and paradoxes.  We will also explore, conversely, how studies in Brazil have deeply shaped core anthropological thought.

• Days/Times: M 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Angelini, Alessandro
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/10
• PosTag(s): INST-CP

The Korean War from the dominant U.S. perspective is seen as a “forgotten war”, one that today registers in caricatures of the predicament of the two Koreas. This course will explore the entangled histories of empire in the Korean War. It will seek to shift our understanding of Korean War from a U.S. dominated Cold War perspective to the Inter Asian contexts in which war unfolded. Further, it will examine closely how scholars in Korea and diasporic scholars have engaged an ongoing war and partition and moved beyond ethnonationalist frameworks. As a study of war, we will consider how techniques of punishment and torture came to be justified and refined in specific sites, the role of the Korean War within multiple other wars, such as Vietnam, and in mass atrocity (such as Gwangju Uprising and Massacre) and the figure of the political prisoner and the subject of humanitarianism.

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

Take a moment to reflect on the present and future, and it is difficult to escape a sense of things breaking down in a fundamental way. But cycles of breakdown and repair are an ecological reality. And human communities, especially those marginalized and exploited by prevailing social and political structures, have long pursued repair and reparation as matters of both survival and justice. This course thinks through ideas of repair as means of engaging with contemporary social and ecological impasses in a spirit of restitution. Drawing from environmental anthropology, materialist philosophy, and abolitionist thought, we will work to chart the ethical and strategic promise of repair as a mode of engagement with toxic and unlivable circumstances. We will also work in the manner of a collective studio, each of us pursuing and charting a specific practice of repair.

• Days/Times: F 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Pandian, Anand
• Room: Mergenthaler 426
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/10
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM

Jewish history 1750-present in Europe, the Near East, the US, Israel; the challenges of modernity and new forms of Jewish life and conflict from Enlightenment and emancipation, Hasidism, Reform and Orthodox Judaism to capitalism and socialism; empire, nationalism and Zionism; the Holocaust. Extensive attention to US Jewry and State of Israel.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 9:00AM - 9:50AM
• Instructor: Loeffler, James
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 11/20
• PosTag(s): HIST-EUROPE, HIST-MIDEST, HIST-US, INST-GLOBAL

Jewish history 1750-present in Europe, the Near East, the US, Israel; the challenges of modernity and new forms of Jewish life and conflict from Enlightenment and emancipation, Hasidism, Reform and Orthodox Judaism to capitalism and socialism; empire, nationalism and Zionism; the Holocaust. Extensive attention to US Jewry and State of Israel.

• Days/Times: MW 9:00AM - 9:50AM, F 10:00AM - 10:50AM
• Instructor: Loeffler, James
• Room: Gilman 55
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 17/20
• PosTag(s): HIST-EUROPE, HIST-MIDEST, HIST-US, INST-GLOBAL

From 1565 to 1815, the Manila galleons sailed between Spanish colonies in the Philippines and Mexico. Thousands of free and enslaved Asians from all over coastal Asia disembarked these ships at Acapulco and, within decades, could be found throughout Mexico, Central America, and Peru. A second and larger migratory wave of Chinese and South Asian contract laborers arrived in the Caribbean and South America during the nineteenth century. This course examines these two waves and their entanglements to chart the trajectories of the earliest Asian diasporas in the Americas. In the evaluation of these topics, we will pay close attention to racialization, cross-cultural exchange, lived experience, and unfree labor.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Luis, Diego Javier
• Room: Gilman 130G
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/12
• PosTag(s): HIST-LATAM, HIST-ASIA, CDS-MB, INST-GLOBAL

This class reassesses the history of the Cold War through sports. We will investigate how the Cold War has shaped sports, the Olympic movement, the role of athletes at home and abroad. We will discuss how sports intersected with domestic and foreign policy, and how sports constructed, reinforced, and challenged notions of race, gender, and class. We will also interview JHU alumni and former athletes who made a career out of sports.

• Days/Times: W 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Harms, Victoria Elisabeth
• Room: Hodson 313
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/20
• PosTag(s): HIST-EUROPE, HIST-US, INST-GLOBAL, CDS-MB, MSCH-HUM

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: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/20
• PosTag(s): HIST-US, CES-LSO, CES-RI

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: Mergenthaler 439
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/12
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, CDS-SSMC

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: Approval Required
• Seats Available: 6/12
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, ENVS-MAJOR, ENVS-MINOR, CES-LE, CES-RI

This course examines Latinos and the American political landscape – taking seriously the political lives of Latinos to sharpen accounts of American political development. In Part I: Latinos and American Empire, we will examine how American state building, American racial capitalism, and American empire created a varied set of racialized citizenship regimes that shaped the legality and membership of Latinos – depending on the interplay between domestic racial hierarchies and international projects. In Part II: Latinos and the Administrative State, we will examine how the regulation of Latino immigrants and asylum seekers from Latin America and the Caribbean have been an engine for American political development – including the making of border bureaucracies, networked policing that harnesses the institution of federalism, and the development of ocean-spanning detention infrastructure. In Part III: Latinos as Targets, we will examine how Latinos became racialized as ‘illegals’ and became the prime targets of state action – and how state efforts have led to the suppressing of political agency, mobilization of collective action, and even integration of Latinos into the enforcement apparatus. In Part IV: Latinos, Hierarchies, and Power, we will examine the political power of those most marginalized among the Latino population – including Black, Trans, Queer, Immigrant, and Undocumented Latinos – to learn about how these groups contend with intragroup and intergroup hierarchies, their role in intersectional movements, and their organizing under repressive conditions. In Part V: Latinos and Placemaking, we conclude with Latino placemaking across the United States to examine how Latinos – in relation with and to, and in coalition with Black, Indigenous, and Asian organizing – are cultivating and asserting political and policy influence in the face of climate change, policing, detention, and gentrification.

• Days/Times: TTh 1:30PM - 2:45PM
• Instructor: Bautista-Chavez, Angie M.
• Room: Bloomberg 276
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 1/19
• PosTag(s): POLI-AP, INST-AP, CDS-MB, CDS-SSMC, CES-LSO, CES-PD, CES-RI

This course examines the intersection of speculative fiction, horror, science fiction, and hauntings with latinidad. Reading a variety of short stories, novels, and films, we investigate how genre fiction addresses the unique experience of Latinxs in the Americas, compelling us to reimagine what the speculative can be as it intersects with race and ethnicity.

• Days/Times: MW 12:00PM - 1:15PM
• Instructor: Gil'Adí, Maia
• Room: Gilman 75
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/15
• PosTag(s): MLL-ENGL, MLL-SPAN, MSCH-HUM

The United States incarcerates more people than any other democratic country in the world; Baltimore City has the highest incarceration rate in Maryland, with 1 in every 100 residents locked up in a state prison. In this publicly-engaged course, students will learn about mass incarceration in the United States—its history, its dysfunction, and its current impact on the Baltimore community. In addition to reading and reflecting on personal narratives from the American Prison Writing Archive (housed at the JHU Sheridan Libraries), we will interact with organizers, activists, educators, and writers working with and on behalf of currently and formerly incarcerated people. In partnership with a Baltimore reentry program serving formerly incarcerated women, students will perform interviews and assist individual memoir projects.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Robinson, Shannon L
• Room: Gilman 277
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 1/12
• PosTag(s): CSC-CE, CDS-EWC

An introduction for students unfamiliar with the Korean language but interested in Korean culture / literature. Students will read a variety of translated texts, especially of works written in the 20th and early 21st centuries by authors including Kim Tong-in, Hwang Sun-wŏn, Pak Wansŏ, Hwang Sŏk-yŏng and Han Kang; there will also be classes on traditional sijo poetry. Students will become familiar with Korean literary genres and formal features, and develop a broad understanding of the historical and sociocultural context of Korean literature.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Kim, Kyeong-Soo
• Room: Gilman 79
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/15
• PosTag(s): WRIT-FICT, WRIT-READ, CDS-MB

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: Open
• Seats Available: 2/15
• PosTag(s): CDS-SSMC, INST-CP, INST-GLOBAL, CES-LE, CES-RI

There are almost 500 million Indigenous people in the world. They speak a variety of languages, produce knowledge in their mother tongues, and have deep connections to their lands and cultures. Indigenous people have been at the helm of a Global Indigeneity Movement that has mobilized both scholarship and activism in search of a better world. Despite their best efforts, the rich indigenous cultural production and their worldviews remain confined to very limited circles. Building on the notion of "indigenous ecologies," which spans a wide range of approaches and fields, this course will interrogate some of the salient questions related to literature, translation, extraction, environmentalism, and social justice from the perspective of Indigenous creators. The students will engage with materials produced by Indigenous thinkers, filmmakers, activists, and academic scholars to gain a deeper understanding of indigeneity across cultures and continents as well as the myriad critical ways in which its proponents approach knowledge production, climate change, and many other pressing questions.

• Days/Times: T 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: El Guabli, Brahim
• Room: Gilman 208
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 6/12
• PosTag(s): ENVS-MAJOR, CDS-GI, MSCH-HUM

This course introduces students to a selection of optimal methods for researching the dynamics of racism, colonialism, and mass migration. It focuses on power and resistance, and it explores academic treatments of both from interdisciplinary, comparative, and transnational perspectives. It provides practical foundations for students interested in pursuing research in Critical Diaspora Studies and other fields.

• Days/Times: TTh 10:30AM - 11:45AM
• Instructor: Connolly, Nathan D
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 16/20
• PosTag(s): HIST-US, HIST-EUROPE, HIST-AFRICA, HIST-ASIA, HIST-LATAM, CES-BM, CES-PD, CES-RI

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: Hines, Andy
• Room:  
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 25/25
• PosTag(s): CDS-SSMC, CES-BM, CES-GI, CES-RI

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: Blanks Jones, Jasmine
• Room: Greenhouse 113
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 7/12
• 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: Mergenthaler 526
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/16
• PosTag(s): CDS-SSMC, CDS-SSMC, CDS-SSMC, CDS-SSMC

Oral Histories are a means by which history is both generated and preserved. Talking to and recording people in their own voices is immensely valuable, but also brings challenges. This course equips students with the ideas, theoretical framework and methods of making and interpreting oral histories and provides hands-on experience researching, designing and creating an archival record of our time to professional standards. Our project focuses on Baltimore's Confederate monuments. We will interview key stakeholders in debates that led to their removal and in ongoing conversations about what to do with them now.

• Days/Times: Th 1:30PM - 4:00PM
• Instructor: Roome, Kristine
• Room: Gilman 75
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 8/15
• PosTag(s): MSCH-HUM, CDS-SSMC

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: BLC 5017
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 3/8
• PosTag(s): PMUS-PRAC, ARCH-RELATE, MSCH-HUM, CDS-SSMC