The Slavery Debate in the Atlantic World
AS.060.668 (01)

This graduate seminar will trace the historical development of the slavery debate in the Atlantic world through examination of key texts from a host of genres and locations—Quaker religious tracts, political documents like the Haitian Declaration of Independence, Cuban antislavery novels, slave narratives, and “classics” of “American” literature like Melville’s Benito Cereno. Our historical investigations into the rhetorical field of anti- and proslavery will be framed by a theoretical interest in political theology. How might critical reflection on sovereignty, recent and not so recent—from Derrida back to Bodin (widely acknowledged as having provided one of the first philosophical defenses of antislavery)—help us recast the intellectual history of the slavery debate and Atlantic radicalism, more generally?

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Reading
AS.060.894 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 10/10
• PosTag(s): n/a

Dream: Thought, Theory, Writing, Architecture
AS.060.632 (01)

In this course we will examine works of literature which present themselves as psychological curiosities by using dreaming as a modality of displaced, unintentional, or even reluctant authorship. What is it to write in, of, or like a dream? We will focus on the forms - lyric, narrative, dramatic, Gothic, confessional - which evolve in course of dream elaboration, examining interdisciplinary as well as intergenre experimentations. Through the foci of race, class, and gender, the course will lead us to interrogations of who has the right to dream and who, conversely, is burdened with the nightmare of history. Themes to be considered include: dream-composition and the composition of dreams; the mediation of colonial commodities like opium or travelogues as what Nigel Leask calls "psychotropic technology"; artistic autonomy vs. discursive and cultural formations of dream mentation; the yoking of opposites, extremes, and moral binaries in the compacted economy of the dream. The syllabus will allow us to read literary and critical works in their historical context as well facilitating comparative investigations. Texts which may be discussed include: Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of An English Opium-Eater; Charles Dickens's "An Italian Dream"; Charles Kingsley's Alton Locke; Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (selections); Jean Ingelow's Mopsa the Fairy; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece; Virginia Woolf's "A Haunted House"; Derek Walcott's Dream on Monkey Mountain; Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses; Alexis Wright's Carpentaria.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 1/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.060.800 (02)

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.060.800 (01)

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 4/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Medieval Materialities: Objects, Ontologies, Texts and Contexts
AS.100.672 (01)

We will use the meanings and methodologies of “materiality” to examine the medieval world, by analyzing objects, texts, networks, patterns of circulation and appropriation, aesthetics and enshrinement, production and knowledge communities.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Waitlist Only
• Seats Available: 0/13
• PosTag(s): HIST-EUROPE

Individual Work
AS.060.893 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 2/20
• PosTag(s): n/a

Independent Study
AS.060.800 (03)

This course is a semester-long independent research course for graduate students. Students will have one-on-one assignments and check-in's with designated faculty throughout the semester.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Sex and Slavery II
AS.100.725 (01)

Research and methods in the field of sexuality and slavery studies. Part 2: Caribbean & African Continent.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Closed
• Seats Available: 0/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Journal Club
AS.060.696 (01)

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 5/5
• PosTag(s): n/a

Billie Holiday's Baltimore
AS.060.635 (01)

This course will use the tools of the historical archive, autobiography, memoir, biography, narrative, poetry, film and music to etch a social history of Billie Holiday (1915-1959) in Baltimore, between roughly 1900 and 1960. Holiday’s remarkable and unique art has earned her the title of the premier jazz singer of all-time. Her voice and experience was strongly connected to Baltimore City, its pattern of black migration, its musical culture, urban density, as well as its narcotics and violent crime. Although she was born in Philadelphia, she deliberately falsely claimed in her candid memoir, “I was finally able to prove I’d been born in Baltimore.” As revealing as her willed connection to a particular geography of nativity was her determined claiming of vernacular knowledge outside of the arts. Holiday also insisted, in 1956, “ask them if they think they know something about dope that Lady Day don’t know.” The Baltimore conjunction between her experience of prostitution, crime and violence and her stirring sound also begs the question of the city’s infamous participation as a major site of the global heroin trade. What was the artist’s relationship to her urban geography? How did it change over space and time? What dimension of shared fate did she have with the community of black domestic workers, laborers, artisans, and small business people from the first half of the twentieth century? In what manner did Baltimore’s racial segregation and racism define her life and art? How was her consciousness as a vocal opponent to segregation shaped by her grooming in the city?

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Canceled
• Seats Available: 8/8
• PosTag(s): n/a

The Critical Unconscious
AS.211.777 (01)

Criticism in the 21st century has tended to relegate psychoanalysis to a dustbin of fads that proliferated at the end of the prior century but that today are of interest only to balkanized cliques of devotees. Bucking this trend, this seminar will examine the intellectual history and abiding influence of psychoanalysis’s key critical concept: the unconscious. Basing our discussions on in-depth readings from key thinkers in the analytic tradition such as Freud, Lacan, and Klein, as well as the post-analytic philosophical tradition, including Zizek, Butler, Laclau and Mouffe, Deleuze and Guattari, and Jameson, we will work to distill an understanding of the unconscious as essential to the practice of criticism tout court, and as inhering even in those discourses that have sought most stridently to distance themselves from it. Seminar discussions will take place in English; readings will be available in the original as well as in translation.

• Credits: 0.00
• Level: Graduate
• Status: Open
• Seats Available: 4/20
• PosTag(s): GRLL-ENGL