Courses for Gender and Race Studies

An examination of selected African American topics.

Independent study on any subject pertaining to women. Projects are conducted under the supervision of a professor in the chosen field and must be approved in advance by the program director.

This course explores pedagogical theories and practices advanced by feminist and cultural studies scholars and teachers. Students read pedagogical works, attend sections of WS 200 and AAST 201, develop teaching modules and pedagogical philosophies, perform teaching demonstrations, and construct syllabi for courses. Meetings with other discussion leaders and supervisors are required in addition to written work.

Course Description: This interdisciplinary graduate seminar explores the ways in which memory and the past construct political identities and the interplay of race, class, gender, and ethnicity in its social construction through readings, discussion, and student research. Reading selections include core theoretical texts on memory studies and specific case studies on topics, including not but exclusive to the American Civil War memory, U.S. South, slavery, and Reconstruction. Issues and questions are: how memories are constructed, translated into identities and political action; bases of shared memories and contested memories; political memorialization and the effects of collective amnesia; and how “communities of memory” are developed, sustained, and dissolved.

Seminar format. The course offers an interdisciplinary approach to topics, which vary by semester. Active student engagement, such as conducting an interview, is required. Sample topic: women in the world.

This course offers students an introduction to the main approaches to the study of race. Students begin by exploring the early approaches to sociology, both that of DuBois and the Chicago school. Students then develop an understanding of the work done by scholars in the Harlem Renaissance, the 1960s, and the contemporary period. The goal of the course is to provide students with the foundation for further research in the field of critical race theory.

Seminar consists of close readings in feminist theory, with an emphasis on primary texts. Intellectual, cultural, and political theory.

Considers major economic, social, psychological, and philosophical approaches to the study of women. Emphasis is on the formulation of theories and mastery of primary works in the field.

This seminar focuses on interdisciplinary research and problems in methodology in Gender and Race Studies.

This upper level undergraduate/graduate seminar exposes students to the key figures texts and concepts that constitute black feminist thought.

Topics vary each semester. Graduate students are required to conduct original research. The courses focus on such topics as language and gender, Southern women's culture.

The course provides students with an understanding of the important research interests within the discipline of Women's Studies. Concepts and problems in Women's Studies are addressed, with the goal of providing students with a history of the discipline as well as knowledge of contemporary debates in the field. The course is considered an overview and introduction for first year MA students.

Transnational Feminisms is a contemporary paradigm of study that moves beyond international conceptions of feminism to think across national borders by interrogating the intersections of nationality, race, gender, class, and sexuality in the context of global capitalism. This field works to decolonize the contested terrain of knowledge production upon gendered subjectivites are constituted and reconstituted within global relations of power and privilege. While globalization relies upon the heightened mobility of bodies, capital, commodities, technologies, and conceptual imaginaries across borders, it simultaneously requires the reconfiguration and reconstitution of the state, its bordering practices, and colonial and national hierarchies of social-spatial relations and their attendant binaries—self-other, first world-third world, traditional-modern, private-public, citizen-noncitizen. While a richly theoretical field, transnational feminisms provocatively engages with a feminist politics and practice attentive to feminism as both a liberatory formation and one with longstanding ties to colonialism, racism and imperialism. As such, it resists utopic ideas about "global sisterhood" while simultaneously working to lay the groundwork for more productive and equitable social relations among women across borders and cultural contexts.

This seminar is designed for the advanced study of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Students should expect to read the most complex of theoretical texts, a basic knowledge of some of the following: Hegel, Foucault, Marx, Liberal theory, Black feminist thought, feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism is expected of each participant. The course will offer students the opportunity to develop their training in the topical area of choice by the professor.

The focus of this research may involve traditional or community-related research on the student's approved thesis topic in Gender and Race Studies.