The following is an incomplete list of courses that count for the Graduate Certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. If you are teaching or taking a course that should be listed, please contact Brett Kaplan

SPRING 2025

 

AIS 503 : Seminar in Indigenous Studies
Angela Calceterra
This course examines North American Indigenous literatures from before 1900 with an eye to both their content and how they have been compiled, preserved, arranged, interpreted, and framed in both Indigenous and settler archives. Beginning with a remarkable Indigenous-language book in the UIUC library’s special collections, will consider the significance of Indigenous literary archives for Indigenous communities, for scholars, and for the broader public. We will critically examine the history of ethnographic collection of Indigenous texts, objects, and knowledge alongside histories of Indigenous language and literary preservation. Students will hone their research skills as they gain knowledge in Indigenous Studies methods and conscientious analysis of Indigenous literary archives.
https://courses.illinois.edu/schedule/2025/spring/AIS/503

AFRO 597 : Problems in African-Am Studies
Faye V Harrison
This course examines the multiple streams, sites, and positionalities of contestation, rethinking, and renewed knowledge production that have contributed to the theory, methodology, praxis, politics, and poetics associated with the “decolonizing generations.” Anthropologists around the world, in dialogue with each other and with thinkers from other fields, are probing the interplay of knowledge and power in light of problems germane to modernity/coloniality, including white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and accumulation by exploitation and expropriation in racial capitalism. These scholars dare to re-imagine possibilities for knowledge otherwise beyond the confining boundaries of the cognitive empire toward regenerative landscapes for epistemic equity. Course meets with ANTH 515.
https://courses.illinois.edu/schedule/2025/spring/AFRO/597

FR 579 : Seminar in French Literature
Julie Gaillard
FR579 French feminisms This course explores various aspects of the lives of women and their empowerment in France after 1950 through the lens of their representation in literature, cinema, and other forms of cultural production. The term “French feminism” is often associated with a series of feminist theoreticians who, in the wake of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes, drew on psychonalysis to denounce phallogocentrism and foreground a feminine difference. While also addressing this common understanding and its historical context, this course centers the vitality and diversity of French feminisms in the 21st century. Course participants will learn to situate a series of key feminist claims critically with respect to various trends of feminist thought. We will discuss essays, literature, and films engaging topics and/or approaches such as reproductive rights, reproductive work, gender-based and sexual violence, afrofeminism and movements for intersectional justice, ecofeminism, or transfeminist deconstructions of heterosexuality. Throughout the semester, we will ask how the symbolic order can be a site for the perpetuation or on the contrary the subversion of gender inequalities. Readings and discussion in French, students outside of French studies might choose to participate in English.
https://courses.illinois.edu/schedule/2025/spring/FR/579

JS 501 : Grad Intro to Jewish Culture
Anastasiia Strakhova
Topic: What is a history of emotions? How does the environment shape history? Can smell serve as a historical source? Can you write a contemporary history of a place where Jews no longer live and still present a Jewish perspective? “Historical Methods in Jewish Studies” covers these and many more research methodologies, concepts, and categories of analysis, covering territories from the Far East to the United States and from South Africa to Great Britain. Although the main focus is Jewish history and culture, the course will be of interest to all graduate students in humanities preparing to work on their dissertations.
https://courses.illinois.edu/schedule/2025/spring/JS/501

GER 575 : 20th c. German Studies
Anna Hunt
The Frankfurt School is a school of “social thought” and, at the same time, is known for its programmatic emphasis of “critical theory.” It was, however, above all an experimental initiative designed to foster new forms of interdisciplinary research in the humanities and social sciences. Because the full interdisciplinarity of this project exceeds the scope of a single course, this seminar will engage social, political and theoretical dimensions through the critical analysis of literature, culture, art and aesthetics. This course is not designed according to historical chronology, nor is it a systematic inventory of all authors who might possibly be included in the Frankfurt School. Instead, the primary purpose of the course is to build familiarity and comfort-level with the notoriously difficult “lingo” of twentieth-century German social, political and aesthetic theory. Key questions and problems will be developed in a handful of the most crucial mid-twentieth century texts and authors. Chronology and historical contexts will inform all of the readings. Examples of such backgrounds include two World Wars, the Holocaust, the Frankfurt School’s exile in the Unites States, the political and intellectual dynamics of post-War Germany, as well as the increasing modernization, industrialization and “rationalization” of society. Meets with CWL 551, JS 502, and ENGL 581.
https://courses.illinois.edu/schedule/2025/spring/GER/575

 

SPRING 2023

 

 

Fall 2022

 

ANTH 499/ AFRO 498 Anthropology of the Gullah/Geechee (and the Black South)

Professor Krystal Smalls, Thursdays, 5:00-7:50

From Nickelodeon’s Gullah Gullah Island to Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust to Beyonce’s Lemonade, several representations have helped shape how Gullah/Geechee people and culture are widely imagined. These representations push us to ask: How do the Gullah/Geechee help integrate Africa and the Americas – constituting what many consider to be “the missing link” between an African past and a Black American present? How have anthropologists, historians, linguists and others imagined them? And, who are they, really? This course will introduce students to the Gullah/Geechee people of the coastal "lowcountry" of US South and to the “Black South” more generally. We will suss out the winding political and cultural histories and ever-changing contemporary cultural practices of Black people throughout the region. From worship to foodways to language to traditional medicine, numerous practices help distinguish the Gullah/Geechee as a vital and vibrant cultural community, but many comparable practices can be found throughout the US South and the Global South, so this course considers regional connections as well as sprawling connections throughout Black Diaspora. We also pay particularly close attention to constructions of Gullah/Geechee women and Black Southern women and their real-life experiences, and we will center Black women’s scholarship on the community throughout the course.  

CWL 561 Reading World Literature

Professor Kaplan, Thursdays 3:30-5:50

German 576 Open Seminar in German Studies

Professor Niekerk, Wednesdays 3:00-4:50

Flight, migration and integration: Narrative negotiations of post-migration identities in German literature We will review historical and actual political, cultural and sociological debates in German literature on flight and exile, migration and integration. We will discuss the challenges of existence in multilingual and multicultural contexts and we will analyze the transcultural poetics of migration in German literature. We will examine in detail narrative practices of negotiating intercultural identities in post-migrant societies: the narrative poetics of recognition as well as literary strategies of narrative representation and mediation of post-migrational identities including possible discursive alliances, ambivalences and antagonisms.

 

French 543 French Cultural Studies: Gender, Race and Modernity

François Proulx Tuesdays 2-3:50pm

This seminar is an introduction to interdisciplinary research in cultural studies, drawing on history and art history, literary studies, Black studies, Jewish studies, and gender and sexuality studies. Taking 19th-century Paris as our focus, we will survey recent scholarly work examining popular artifacts or events for all that they reveal about issues of gender and race against the backdrop of the emergence of modernity, in a period marked by political upheaval and colonial imperialism. Case studies will include places (the department store, the omnibus, the restaurant), objects (newspapers, clothes, cosmetics) and phenomena (celebrity culture, the music-hall, the World Expositions). Taught in English; advanced reading knowledge of French is required.

 

French 576 Seminar in Francophonie

Professor Reynolds, Wednesday 3:00-4:50PM

FREN 576 is a graduate level course and will be an in-depth study of the Guadeloupian author Maryse Condé, starting with her first novel Heremakhonon (1976) and proceeding chronologically until coauthored manifesto Pour une littérature-monde (2007). We will analyze her writings in the area of theory, theater, novel and auto/biography. Additionally we will consider the role played by colonization and the subsequent post-colonial era, and its influence on her writing. Readings are in French and the course will be conducted in French. This course is reading intensive.

HIST 575 Problems in African American History

Professor Cha-Jua, Thursdays 2:00-3:50

Explores the core themes, ideas, and strategies for Black liberation articulated by Black thinkers and activists throughout the African American sociohistorical experience. It examines the construction and development of the Black Intellectual Tradition(s) in the United States. This course interrogates the main ideas developed or adopted by Black scholar activists to analyze the historic and contemporary social, political, and economic conditions, the psychological state, the cultural representations of African Americans, and to organize social movements. It interrogates the ideologies and strategies constructed and used by African Americans in their struggle for justice, freedom, self-determination, or social transformation. This semester the course focuses on the ideas of five black scholar activists, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Malcolm X, and Kwame Ture/Stokely Carmichael.

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Fall 2021

GER 575 - 20thC German Studies

"Sites of Grief: the Politics of Mourning and Forgiveness" Americans are stubbornly unmoved by death,” so ran a Washington Post opinion piece on March 23, 2021. Between the pandemic, mass shootings, and the systemic racism highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement, the US has ample cause for mass mourning. Accordingly, on April 12, 2021, the NYT published the opinion that “The Grief Crisis is Coming.” But what if it doesn’t? The nation seems to be trapped in melancholic stasis. What if this unmourning persists? What if – instead of a coming grief crisis – the crisis is the unmourning that grips us already? Since the turn of the millennium, mourning and melancholia’s potential political power has attracted increasing scholarly attention. To probe critical theory’s interest in the political potential of mourning and melancholia, this class will turn from Freud and Benjamin to Eng and Kazanjian and to Butler and Moten. Central to these conversations will be the problem of reconciling a community torn asunder by unmourning – or paving the way for the community to come. Antigone will be an important figure in our discussions on state-imposed unmourning. We will read Sophocles, Hölderlin, Brecht, and Fugard’s adaptations and watch Antigone in Ferguson.

 

 

Spring 2021

GER 575 | GER 473 - Protest Memory: Post-1989 Literature, Film, and Theory

In this seminar we discuss a diverse archive of post-1989 literature, film, and memorials in order to reexamine the so-called Peaceful Revolution and the interval year of ’89-90. More specifically, we ask what kind of cultural memories of street activism, resistance, and alternative social vision were left behind by the uprising in the GDR. Most scholarship in the last two decades has associated the legacies of 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s reunification, viewing this historical break in terms of trauma, defeat, and takeover. Instead, we take our cue from memory studies which is currently shifting from a focus on violence and trauma to more hopeful legacies of social justice and political responsibility. Accordingly, in this course, we will explore how cultural archives (attuned to language, images and so forth) render the protest memory of 1989. Reading post-1989 literature and film, alongside theory, we also move further back into the 20^th century to trace how specters of earlier progressive movements and utopian ideas impacted the unrest in ‘89-90. We conclude with the novel Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, which deals with the long aftermath of 1989 through the lens of memory and the protests during the so-called refugee crisis in 2015.

SPAN 535 - (Graduate Seminar): Cabinet of Curiosities: Theorizing the Spectacular Cinema of Guillermo del Toro 

This course explores the transnational cinema of Mexican director Guillermo del Toro as a complete oeuvre with a particular aesthetic, technical and ideological project. It is a comprehensive study of a prominent filmmaker with a distinctly recognizable style that has captivated global audiences. Del Toro’s production has been described as a kind of filmic “alchemy” that deftly combines elements from horror, gothic, fantasy, sci-fi, b-movies, noir, Japanese animation, comic books and other “lesser” cultural genres into eminently hybrid works of art – assembling a filmic cabinet of curiosities. Roughly divided into Spanish and English language works, del Toro’s films will be chronologically studied in their geographic and cultural specificity (at once Mexican, Spanish, Latin American, and Transnational) and from a variety of film theoretical perspectives, centered on, but not limited to auteur theory. In that sense the course will also serve as an introductory study of film theory, offering a foundation in classical film theory through the pairing of each of del Toro’s films with seminal criticism analyzing film form and ideology. Theoretical approaches will include early film theory (Munsterberg, Balazs), montage theory (Eisenstein, Pudovkin), realism (Kracauer, Bazin, Benjamin), auteur theory (Wollen, Sarris), structuralism (Metz, Heath), apparatus and psychoanalytic theory (Baudry, Metz), feminist theory (Mulvey, Modlesky), critical race theory (Dyer, Diawara), audience studies (Reinhard and Olson), decoloniality (Mignolo and Vasquez), and phenomenological film theory (Sobchack, Marks), among other approaches. The course will study all 10 major films by del Toro [Cronos (1993), Mimic (1997), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), Blade II (2002), HellBoy (2004), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), HellBoy II: The Golden Army (2008), Pacific Rim (2013), Crimson Peak (2015) and The Shape of Water (2017)], as well as some of his television work Trollhunters (2016), The Strain (2014-).  

 

 

Fall 2020

CWL 571 - Seminar in Literary Relations

Foundations of Postcolonial Theory This course will provide a detailed introduction to the origins, development, and various transformations of postcolonial theory. The course will be structurally divided into three parts. The first part will cover the theoretical and political roots of postcolonial theory, ranging from the Frankfurt School, the work of Eric Hobsbawm, to the non-western responses to the bipolar rhetoric of the Cold War. The second part will follow the trajectory of the pedagogy of postcolonial theory and criticism, focusing on selections of key texts by Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee et al., and end with a discussion on Subaltern Studies. In the third part, students will work on more contemporary manifestations of postcolonial theory and its dialogs with memory studies, theories of globalization etc. Coursework will include one long term paper, 2 shorter projects and 2 short class presentations

GER 572 - Early Modern German Studies

Transgressions: Money, Knowledge, Sex, and Violence in German Literature 1450 - 1750 The aim of this course is to explore various kinds of transgressive behavior surrounding themes of money, knowledge, sex, and violence in early modern German literature by reading and discussing key works from the period before 1800. We will employ several interpretative models and engage in current scholarly debates. The course will be conducted in German. Class format consists of discussions, response papers, and a final project. Framing our discussions in this way allows us to examine further concepts shaping the pre-modern social imaginary. In addition to primary texts spanning the entire pre-modern period of German literature, critical and theoretical investigations will inform our study. A key aspect of our investigations is to examine how social, political, and literary discourses are mapped on the transgressive behavior, with a particular focus on the body and figures of exchange. There is a strong visual studies component as we analyze texts and images in context. The course will be conducted in German. Class format consists of discussions, presentation of close readings and secondary literature, response papers, and a final paper. Some sessions will take place in the Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Meets with GER 470 and GER 572.

ENGL 553 - Seminar Later American Lit

Speculative Pessimisms - This course will engage with the literary and cultural movement called Afrofuturism, as well as black speculative fiction more broadly, alongside theories of Afro-Pessimism. Our project will be to consider how these two movements might have both a similarly pessimistic and a similarly imaginative provenance. The Afro-Pessimist position insists that the violent exclusion of black non-being creates the conditions for the existence of the Human, and indeed that civil society’s structuring around anti-blackness, and the position of the black subject vis-a-vis that society, is one of irreconcilable antagonism. How might we understand this analysis as a speculative one—in Jared Sexton’s words, how might we unpack “the rhetorical dimensions of the discourse of Afro-Pessimism [. . .] and the productive theoretical effects of the fiction it creates”? Conversely, how might we consider the increasingly wide reach of the speculative, writ broadly, in 21st century black literature and culture, concomitantly with the evident pessimism about the world, as it exists, that would elicit such imaginative projects? Throughout this semester, we will unpack not only what possibilities thinking Afro-Pessimism and Afrofuturism/the black speculative together might open up for the analysis of 21st century African American literature and culture, but also what we might learn from this juxtaposition about both the potential and the pitfalls of each mode of theorizing contemporary black life. Primary texts and other media will include work by, among others, Jesmyn Ward, Ryan Coogler, N.K. Jemisin, Victor LaValle, Colson Whitehead, and Jordan Peele; secondary readings will include work by scholars including Frank Wilderson, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Calvin Warren, Fred Moten, Terrion Williamson, Hortense Spillers, Kara Keeling, and Jared Sexton. Attendance/participation, short papers, presentation, final seminar paper.

ENGL 547 - Seminar Earlier American Lit

Environmental Humanities and the Long U.S. 19th Century - Description: This course surveys foundational and emerging research in the environmental humanities, with a special focus on how the field speaks to and emerges from the literature and cultural history of the United States in the long nineteenth century. As a class, we will explore topics including energy, infrastructure, extinction, settler colonialism, resource systems, extraction, climate change, and oceans. Students will learn and practice different genres of academic writing, including abstracts, conference papers, journal articles, and essays for wider public audiences

SPAN 528 - Sem 20thC Spanish Lit

Seminar in 20th Century Spanish Literature, Professor Delgado "Alienated Hearts: Affects, Subjectivities and Identities in Modern Spanish Culture."

MUSE 500 - Core Prob Museum Theory & Prac

A critical examination of both historical and current theoretical issues in museum practice. Addresses the development of museums within varied social, cultural and intellectual contexts, and the conceptualizations and criticisms of museums in terms of paradigmatic, institutional, symbolic and other theories. In addition to surveying the broad range of theoretical frameworks adopted in contemporary museum scholarship, students will examine and evaluate curatorial and institutional strategies for responding to the myriad external pressure (including multiple constituencies, standards and best practices) currently placed on museums.

 

FALL 2019

ANTH 561 - Archaeological Theory

Contemporary theory in archaeology. Different theoretical approaches are examined by critically analyzing seminal literature within the contexts of paradigmatic shifts in archaeology and general developments in the discipline of anthropology, focuses on materiality and corporality

JS 501 - Grad Intro to Jewish Culture

Interdisciplinary graduate-level introduction to the study of Jewish culture and society. Focuses on the significations of Jewishness in modern history through a wide range of recent writings by historians, anthropologists, philosophers and cultural theorists. Key themes will include the relationship of Judaism to the other monotheistic religions, the varied pathways of Jewish modernization, the construction of Jewish Otherness in Europe and beyond, and responses to the Holocaust and the creation of the state of Israel.

LLS 596 - Graduate Seminar in LLS

Examination of specific topics in Latina/Latino Studies. Topics vary.

MACS 503 - Historiography of Cinema

Seminar on historical perspectives on cinema as an institution, a body of signifying practices, a product to be consumed, a phenomenon of modernity, and a cultural artifact, and on cinema in relation to other screen media.

MUSE 500 - Core Problems in Museum Theory and Practice

A critical examination of both historical and current theoretical issues in museum practice. Addresses the development of museums within varied social, cultural and intellectual contexts, and the conceptualizations and criticisms of museums in terms of paradigmatic, institutional, symbolic and other theories. In addition to surveying the broad range of theoretical frameworks adopted in contemporary museum scholarship, students will examine and evaluate curatorial and institutional strategies for responding to the myriad external pressure (including multiple constituencies, standards and best practices) currently placed on museums.

REL 515 - History of Jewish Theology

Study of Israelite and Jewish thought from the biblical to modern period. Particular attention will be paid to theological matters and to the historical, cultural and intellectual challenges that engendered a re-thinking and re-conceptualization of the Jewish faith.

SPAN 535 - Seminar in Spanish-American Literature

Special problems in methodology and research; includes other prose fiction.

 

Fall 2018

CWL 571: Seminar in Literary Relations

"Literature, Violence, and the Archive" will explore concepts and practices of witnessing, documentation and the archive, especially as they pertain to mass, public violence in periods of political upheaval. Theoretical works from a number of disciplines, including visual studies, and non-fiction and fiction texts will be the main focus. Consideration will also be given to the biopolitical concept of "creaturely life."

MUSE 500: Core Issues in Museum Theory and Practice

A critical examination of both historical and current theoretical issues in museum practice. Addresses the development of museums within varied social, cultural and intellectual contexts, and the conceptualizations and criticisms of museums in terms of paradigmatic, institutional, symbolic and other theories. In addition to surveying the broad range of theoretical frameworks adopted in contemporary museum scholarship, students will examine and evaluate curatorial and institutional strategies for responding to the myriad external pressure (including multiple constituencies, standards and best practices) currently placed on museums.

 

Spring 2019

CWL 581/SPAN 590: Borders

Professor: Eric Calderwood
Meets: Tuesdays, 3:00-5:30pm, G20 Foreign Languages Building

Our world is filled with borders. Borders and borderlands play a key role in the production and contestation of national and cultural identities. They offer insights into the status of citizenship and the nation in the age of globalization, and they also shape long-standing debates about cross-cultural encounter, exchange, and conflict.

This course will offer a critical introduction to border studies, an interdisciplinary field that draws upon cultural studies, anthropology, geography, and political science in order to reflect on the cultural, political, social, and economic impact of geopolitical borders. The course will begin with readings from recent theoretical work on borders, and then it will be divided into three units devoted to the cultural production from and about three significant border spaces: U.S./Mexico, Spain/Morocco, and Israel/Palestine. All literary texts and films will be taught in English translation, but students will be encouraged to read the texts in their original languages: Spanish, Arabic, Hebrew, Catalan, and English

ENGL 581: The Settler Colonial Turn

Professor: Jodi Byrd
Meets: Mondays, 1:00-2:50pm, 135 English Building

Settler colonialism now circulates as a critical orientation across a range of disciplines as it reorients how we understand arrival and dispersal, possession and dispossession in the global north and south. This class will offer an intersectional analysis of settler colonial studies as it has developed through postcolonial studies. Readings will draw from and situated through interventions from indigenous studies, queer studies, feminist studies, technology studies, and theories of antiblackness as they shape the political, historical, and contemporary understandings of race, place, and nation within the United States and Canada in particular, with attention given to other geographies as well.

ENGL 553: Speculative Pessimisms: Social Death and the Afro-Future

Professor: Candice Jenkins
Meets: Thursdays, 3:00-4:50pm, 135 English Building

This course will engage with what has been described as the genre turn in 21st century African American cultural production—the literary and cultural movement called Afrofuturism, as well as black speculative fiction more broadly—alongside a school of thought that has garnered, recently, a great deal of both positive and negative attention in the field: Afro-Pessimism. The latter argues that the position of the black subject in Western society is synonymous with that of the Slave, a condition of non-being—absolute fungibility and subjection—based in the slave’s status not as worker, but commodity. Our project will be to consider how these two movements might have both a similarly pessimistic and a similarly imaginative provenance. The Afro-Pessimist position insists that the violent exclusion of black non-being creates the conditions for the existence of the Human, and indeed that civil society’s structuring around anti-blackness, and the position of the black subject vis-a-vis that society, is one of irreconcilable antagonism. How might we understand this analysis as a speculative one—in Jared Sexton’s words, how might we unpack “the rhetorical dimensions of the discourse of Afro-Pessimism [. . .] and the productive theoretical effects of the fiction it creates”? Conversely, how might we consider the increasingly wide reach of the speculative, writ broadly, in 21st century black literature and culture, concomitantly with the evident pessimism about the world, as it exists, that would elicit such imaginative projects? Might we understand contemporary Afrofuturism and the speculative both as tending towards the pessimistic, either in inspiration—turning to the future, and to other sorts of alternative timelines, in response to a painful and disappointing present—or in narrative outcome, wherein these speculative works depict dark, dystopian futures or dwell within and bring to life an unbearable past? Throughout this semester, we will unpack not only what possibilities thinking Afro-Pessimism and Afrofuturism/the black speculative together might open up for the analysis of 21st century African American literature and culture, but also what we might learn from this juxtaposition about both the potential and the pitfalls of each mode of theorizing contemporary black life.

Primary texts may include fiction by Jesmyn Ward, Colson Whitehead, Octavia Butler, Victor LaValle, Nnedi Okorafor, and N.K. Jemisin, and films by Jordan Peele, Ryan Coogler, and Janelle Monae; critical texts will include selected work from, at minimum, Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, Saidiya Hartman, David Marriott, Terrion Williamson, Kinitra Brooks, Tina Campt, Hortense Spillers, Alex Weheliye, and Fred Moten. Participation, two short critical response papers, oral presentation, final seminar paper.

EPS/MEDIA 570: Pro-seminar in Postcolonial Theory and Methodology

Professor: Cameron McCarthy
Meets: Thursdays, 12:00-2:50pm, 382 Education Building

Settler colonialism now circulates as a critical orientation across a range of disciplines as it reorients how we understand arrival and dispersal, possession and dispossession in the global north and south. This class will offer an intersectional analysis of settler colonial studies as it has developed through postcolonial studies. Readings will draw from and situated through interventions from indigenous studies, queer studies, feminist studies, technology studies, and theories of antiblackness as they shape the political, historical, and contemporary understandings of race, place, and nation within the United States and Canada in particular, with attention given to other geographies as well.

GWS 580: Queer Theories and Methods

Professor: Ghassan Moussawi
Meets: Tuesdays, 9:30am-12:20pm, 1205 W Nevada 102

While a relatively new field of inquiry, queer theories have opened up new and multiple ways for us to think of power and knowledge production in the constitution of the social world. This interdisciplinary graduate seminar focuses on a number of key debates in the formation of what came to be known as “queer theory.” Rather than thinking of a singular queer theory, this course rethinks queer theories and methods by focusing on silences, meeting points, and tensions between queer theory, queer of color critique, women of color feminisms, and transnational queer studies. Topics include racisms, precarity, borders, immigration, transnational (im)mobilites, policing, affect and hauntings, empire, and settler colonialism. In addition, we will discuss queer methodologies by asking: what are queer methods? How does one conduct “queer” research? We will queer research by considering topics including: collaboration, (bad) feelings, (auto) ethnographies, solidarities, and our own positions with regards to our research.

REL 511: Modern and Post-Modern Theories of Religion: Feuerbach, Marx, Bergson, Freud, Lacan, Derrida

Professor: Bruce Rosenstock
Meets: Tuesdays, 3:00-4:50pm, 319 Gregory Hall

The Enlightenment saw a number of critiques of dogmatic religion in favor of a “religion of reason.” The French Revolution installed a new “Goddess of Reason” as the object of the state’s veneration. But Reason proved to be too abstract and sterile to inspire religious fervor. In the nineteenth century, new theories of religion arose that argued that the real object of religious fervor should be the human species in its bodily reality. The love for the species should replace the love for God. The culmination of human religion was no longer thought to be the
replacement of superstition by Reason as in the Enlightenment, but the replacement of the alienated image of the human species with the human species itself. But what is the “essence” of the human species? What drives the species to alienate its essence into a divine being? If the species is the product of evolution (as Darwin in midcentury taught), what evolutionary forces are at work in the creation of religion? Is the preservation of the species advanced or hindered by religion? How does religion relate to the human unconscious, the seat of the species drives (libido and death drive)? Is religion an autoimmune response of the species to itself? Our course will begin with a brief text of the Enlightenment writer Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (The Education of the Human Race), then we will turn to Ludwig Feuerbach  (Essence of Christianity), Karl Marx (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts), Henri Bergson (Two Sources of Morality and Religion), Sigmund Freud (Beyond the Pleasure Principle), Jacques Lacan (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), and Jacques Derrida (Acts of Religion).

PHIL 414: Major Recent Philosophers: Hannah Arendt

Professor: Helga Varden
Meets: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 11:00-12:20pm, 327 Gregory Hall

Hannah Arendt was one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. The importance of her work and influence on political philosophy cannot be overestimated. In this course we take a closer look at three of her major works: On the Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The focus throughout the course will be on Arendt’s engagements with the questions of the nature of power and evil. 

 

Fall 2017

JS 502: Introduction to Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies

This seminar will provide a graduate-level introduction to the field of Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies. We will survey some of the significant theorists of memory from the last century. Topics will include the relations between history, memory, and identity; power, politics, and contestation; media, generational change, and modes of transmission; and remembrance, justice, and globalization. Students will have the opportunity to design research projects in their own areas of interest. Requirements will include active participation, an oral presentation, one short response paper, and a final research paper. This course is recommended (but not required) for those contemplating the Certificate in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies and will be of interest to students across a broad range of disciplines and interests including but not limited to those working on the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Rwandan genocide, Cambodia, Indonesia, and/or memory and violence more generally.

LIS 590MMM: Memory Media, Memory Institutions, T 2-4:50

This seminar takes a broad, interdisciplinary look at the concept of memory. We examine personal memory, family memory, memory institutions, and cultural memory, drawing on theories and perspectives from neurocognitive psychology, cognitive sociology, library and information science, archival theory, history, and other disciplines. We will consider a wide range of materials such as memoirs, photography, memorials, genealogy and digital memory. This course will be applicable to a variety of fields of study and will be of particular interest to students studying intersections among some or all of culture, technology, media, social practices, and information.

 

Fall 2016

CWL 571: Seminar in Literary Relations, M 2-4:50

At the beginning of the 20th century moderns and modernists announced their break with the past and launched various artistic, philosophical, political, and social experiments that claimed to construct society and the individual anew. The machine, speed, technology, and the future were the watchwords of Futurists and other modernist groups. Revolutionary transformation on all fronts was the way forward. In the same period advances in science and technology radically changed the horizon of possibility. Yet other important artists and thinkers offered the contrasting view that the past remains alive in the present—both in individuals and in human cultures. Memory was key to the future. CWL 571 focuses on the second tendency by examining the work of three theorists—Henri Bergson, Viktor Shklovsky, and Walter Benjamin—and three literary authors—David Bergelson, Virginia Woolf, and Osip Mandelshtam. Selected readings from the critical literature serve as points of departure.

Spring 2017

ARTH 540: Collective Memory and Material Culture, T 2-4:50

This seminar explores the role of material culture in the formation of collective memory.  Part of the course will be devoted to examining leading theories of collective memory (Halbwachs, Nora, etc.) and their applicability to material culture past and present.  A second emphasis shall be the changes historically in collective memory from the early modern to the modern period. Much current scholarship on collective memory gives a central place to the twentieth century, and particularly to such traumatic, horrific, and deadly events as World War I and the Holocaust. We shall explore the applicability of ideas formed in relation to such twentieth-century events to earlier periods, and particularly to the Napoleonic wars. Case studies in the course will emphasize collective memory in relation to the fine arts in nineteenth-century France, and especially in relation to memories of the Napoleonic wars, but students in the seminar may explore research topics related to any period, place, or medium.  Students from all disciplines are welcome.

LIS 588: Research Design in LIS, M 9-11:50

This class provides an introduction to the philosophy and design of research. It is a required class for PhD students in the Library and Information Science ("LIS") program, but open to other PhD students as well. Because students in LIS come from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, including history and other humanities, the course will potentially be useful to students in memory studies. It may be particularly useful for students with humanities backgrounds who are considering broadening their methodological approach to include social science or data science techniques. The course will begin with an in-depth consideration of the philosophical and logical underpinnings of research. We will then briefly survey different methods used in LIS research. Throughout the class the emphasis will be on research design choices, especially the connections between research questions and research methods.