This team-taught course introduces students to the History of Art as a global and interdisciplinary field. Led by a selection of professors from the department, in collaboration with staff and faculty of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, its primary aim is to familiarize students with the most significant geographical areas, epochs and works of art, as well as with methods employed in their study and analysis. The course will be organized around a changing selection of themes central to the history of art. The theme for fall 2024 is "Materiality." Considering how artists and artisans from antiquity to the present have mobilized a broad range of materials and processes to create works of art, we will explore the intimate relationship between makers, matter, and meaning.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 1100 - Art Histories: An Introduction

Ancient Rome was a village the size of Ithaca that grew into a world empire. In this course students will be introduced to some of its literature, art, and famous personalities in the classical period (2nd c. BCE – 2nd c. CE) and will read some of the greatest masterpieces of Latin literature. Special attention will be given to the late republic, Augustan, and Hadrianic periods, to Roman ethics, and to the rise of Christianity. No prior knowledge of the ancient world is necessary. All readings are in English.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 1615 - Introduction to Ancient Rome

How might we engage with communities, whether here in Ithaca or across the globe, in our diverse histories, experiences, and perspectives? What structural forces shape inequalities and how do communities go about addressing social and racial injustice? This course is designed to help students bring global engaged learning into their Cornell education with a focus on community engaged learning in Ithaca. It introduces skills that are vital for intercultural engagement, including participant-observation research, ethnographic writing, and the habits of critical reflexivity. Through readings, film, and community partnerships, we will learn about global/local issues including the gendered and racialized aspects of labor, food and housing insecurity, structural violence, and migration. Students will complete projects that help them learn with and from Ithaca community members and organizations.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for SHUM 1900 - Global Engagements: Living and Working in a Diverse World

Punk Culture–comprised of music, fashion, literature, and visual arts–represents a complex critical stance of resistance and refusal that coalesced at a particular historical moment in the mid-1970s, and continues to be invoked, revived, and revised. In this course we will explore punk's origins in New York and London, U.S. punk's regional differences (the New York scene's connection to the art and literary worlds, Southern California's skate and surf culture, etc.), its key movements (hardcore, straight edge, riot grrrl, crust, queercore), its race, class and gender relations, and its ongoing influence on global youth culture. We will read, listen, and examine a variety of visual media to analyze how punk draws from and alters previous aesthetic and political movements. No previous experience studying music is necessary.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2006 - Punk Culture: The Art and Politics of Refusal

As a country, we are what we remember. But who decides what facts and stories about the past are important enough to memorialize? What does that decision tell us about power and truth? This class will discuss how the attacks of September 11 are remembered in the United States and the rest of the world.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2011 - September 11 and the Politics of Memory

This interdisciplinary course (with an emphasis in anthropology) will introduce students to the multiple routes/roots, lived experiences, and imagined worlds of South Asians who have traveled to various lands at different historical moments spanning Fiji, South Africa, Mauritius, Britain, Malaysia, United States, Trinidad, and even within South Asia itself such as the Tamil-speaking population of Sri Lanka. The course will begin with the labor migrations of the 1830s and continue up to the present period. The primary exercise will be to compare and contrast the varied expressions of the South Asian Diaspora globally in order to critically evaluate this transnational identity. Thus, we will ask what, if any, are the ties that bind a fifth-generation Indo-Trinidadian whose ancestor came to the New World as an indentured laborer or "coolie" in the mid-19th century to labor in the cane fields, to a Pakistani medical doctor who migrated to the United States in the late 1980s. If Diaspora violates a sense of identity based on territorial integrity, then could "culture" serve as the basis for a shared identity?

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, GLC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2101 - South Asian Diaspora

What is Southeast Asia? How does this faraway, "exotic," region intersect with our realities? This course introduces key questions in the study of Southeast Asia (which includes Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam) and its diasporas using cinematic, literary, historical and scholarly materials. This introduction to Southeast Asia's historical, religious, literary, visual, and political traditions -- and the ways in which scholars have thought about them -- addresses a variety of themes  including notions of kinship, gender, political conflict, colonialism, media and the arts, sexuality, textual and visual genres, and forms of belief and belonging. Students will have an opportunity to investigate topics of interest to them, in the form of research essays as well as small-scale fieldwork, curatorial, or media projects.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2208 - Introduction to Southeast Asia

The organ is an interdisciplinary wonder where mechanics, architecture, acoustics, religion, philosophy, literature, as well as the musical arts and sciences meet. This course uses the organ to explore music's relation to technology, history and culture, and in turn traces the technical and mechanical mysteries, and expressive possibilities, of the 'King of Instruments' across its long history. Students will gain 1) an understanding of some key aspects of musical history and repertoire; 2) a sense for the historical relation between music and technology; 3) a new knowledge of (and enthusiasm for!) the organ; and 4) an insight into the ways in which musical instruments and the musical practice associated with them are cross-cultural and interdisciplinary. With a key focus on the music of J. S. Bach, as well as on the reception of Bach's music in the 19th and 20th centuries, topics include the mechanics of organ construction, the North German organ art and the toccata, virtuosity and the use of the feet, the symphonic organ in the 19th century, 20th-century experimentation with organ sound, the organ and film. The course combines lectures with sessions at the organs as well as regular organ recitals. No prior musical experience necessary, although those interested (and with some keyboard skills) will have the opportunity for an introduction to learning to play – with both hands and feet.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2244 - The Music, Art, and Technology of the Organ

This seminar examines some of the political and cultural visions of Africa and Africans held by African-American intellectuals and activists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Emphasis is placed on the philosophies of black nationalism, Pan Africanism and anticolonialism and the themes of emigration, expatriation, repatriation and exile. Awareness of Africa and attitudes toward the continent and its peoples have profoundly shaped African-American identity, culture and political consciousness. Notions of a linked fate between Africans and black Americans have long influenced black life and liberation struggles within the U.S. The motives, purposes and outlooks of African-American theorists who have claimed political, cultural, or spiritual connection to Africa and Africans have varied widely, though they have always powerfully reflected black experiences in America and in the West. The complexity and dynamism of those views belie simplistic assumptions about essential or "natural" relationships, and invite critical contemplation of the myriad roles that Africa has played in the African-American mind."

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2354 - African American Visions of Africa

How do humans organize production, distribution, exchange, and consumption? What social, political, environmental, and religious values underlie different forms of economic organization? And how do they produce racial, ethnic, class, gender, and sexual inequalities? This course uses a range of historical and contemporary case studies to address these questions, in the process introducing a range of analytic approaches including formalism, substantivism, Marxist and feminist theory, critical race studies, and science and technology studies. Course themes include gifts and commodities; the nature of money, markets, and finance; credit and debt relations; labor, property, and value; licit and illicit economies; capitalism and socialism; development and underdevelopment.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2437 - Economy, Power, and Inequality

This course will introduce students to African American literary traditions in the space that would become North America. From early freedom narratives and poetry to Hip-Hop and film, we will trace a range of artistic conventions and cultural movements while paying close attention to broader historical shifts in American life over the past three centuries. We'll read broadly: poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, newspapers, and the like. We will ask: How do authors create, define, and even exceed a tradition? What are some of the recurring themes and motifs within this tradition? Authors may include: Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Eve Ewing. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (D-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2650 - Introduction to African American Literature

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for SHUM 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

This course examines Near East's rich and diverse literary heritage. We will read a selection of influential and wondrous texts from ancient to modern times, spanning geographically from the Iberian peninsula to Iran. We will explore a range of ancient myths of creation and destruction. We will also trace encounters with otherness in travel narratives. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the "The Story of Sinuhe" and "The Epic of Gilgamesh," as well as selections from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur'an. We will explore medieval works such as the "Travels" of Ibn Battuta, the "Shahnameh" of Ferdowsi, and "The Arabian Nights." We will also read Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and Sonia Nimr's Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, as well as excerpts from Yochi Brandes's The Orchard. Students will also have the opportunity to research and analyze primary source materials in the collections of Cornell Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, and the Johnson Art Museum. All material is in English translation.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2754 - Wondrous Literatures of the Near East

In this course we will examine how we have come to narrate social, cultural, and political history in the United States, investigating the ways scholarly, curatorial, archival, and creative practices shape conceptions of the American past, in particular understandings of racial, gender, sexual, and class oppression and resistance. Students will build skills in historical interpretation and archival research and explore possibilities and challenges in preserving and presenting the past in a variety of public contexts—monuments, memorials, museums, historical sites, movies and television, and community-based history projects.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 2792 - Monuments, Museums, and Memory: An Introduction to Public History

Human-animal relationships are often seen in utilitarian, nutritional terms, particularly in archaeology. But animals and meat have significance far beyond their economic value. This course focuses on a broad range of these non-dietary roles of animals in human societies, past and present. This includes the fundamental shift in human-animal relations associated with domestication; the varied meanings of wild and domestic animals; as well as the importance of animals as wealth, as objects of sacrifice, as totems or metaphors for humans, and as symbols in art. Meat can be used in feasting and meat sharing to create, cement, and manipulate social relationships. This course is open to students of archaeology, cultural anthropology, and other disciplines with an interest in human-animal relations.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 3230 - Humans and Animals

What are comics? While it's easy to identify a cartoon, graphic novel, or comic book, it's hard to understand the wide world of comics. As a medium, comics are part of a global tradition of visual storytelling and sequential art, including premodern tapestries, early modern pamphlets, and modern children's books, political cartoons, and animated films. With a focus on the German-speaking world, we will examine a wide range of comics genres (e.g., fiction, history, autobiography, journalism, comix) and formats (e.g., books, strips, pamphlets, zines). Our discussions will address questions of taste, aesthetics, materiality, censorship, representation, and word-image relations. While we will primarily be reading and writing about comics and comics studies, students will also gain some exposure to making comics.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 3555 - Comics as a Medium

This course engages classical antiquity and its reception through the prism of queer studies. Cruising Homer, Sappho, Euripides, Plato, Ovid and more, we will explore how queer theoretical frameworks help us account for premodern queer and trans bodies, desires, experiences, and aesthetics. We will trace how people historically have engaged with the classical past in political and affective projects of writing queer history and literature, constructing identities and communities, and imagining queer futures. We will unpack how classical scholarship might reproduce contemporary forms of homophobia and transphobia in its treatments of gender, sexuality, and embodiment in the classical past, and in turn how modern uses of the classical might reinforce or dismantle exclusionary narratives around 'queerness' today as it intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and class. Finally, we will consider how the work we are doing in this class (where the 'Queer' in 'Queer Classics' may be taken as an adjective or an imperative) relates to the ways that contemporary writers, activists, artists, and performers have animated the classical past with queer possibilities. All readings will be in translation; no knowledge of Latin and Greek is required.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 3635 - Queer Classics

When an African and an African American meet, solidarity is presumed, but often friction is the result.  In this course, we will consider how Africans and African Americans see each other through literature.  What happens when two peoples suffering from double consciousness meet?  We will examine the influence of historical forces including slavery, colonialism and pan-Africanism on the way writers explore the meeting between Africans and African Americans. Specifically we will look at how writers and political figures such as Maya Angelou, Chimamanda Adichie, Richard Wright, Eugene Robinson, Philippe Wamba, Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X have understood the meeting.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 3742 - Africans and African Americans in Literature

Community-engaged archaeology brings together knowledgeable communities located within and beyond academic institutions who collaborate to produce higher-quality accounts of the past. In this course, students will build their archaeological fieldwork and laboratory skills while contributing to strong university-community relationships in the local area. Drawing on historical documents, previous scholarship, expert collaborators, and archaeological investigation, students in this course contribute to the understanding of regional sites and landmarks. The topic for Fall 2022 addresses the Underground Railroad through a partnership between Ithaca's historic St. James AME Church, the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and local schools. Students in this course will study archaeological evidence related to the everyday experiences of people who formed part of a congregation active in the Underground Railroad during the early- to mid-19th century.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 4200 - Field Methods in Community-Engaged Archaeology

Black women first began to shape the genre of autobiography during antebellum era slavery. They were prolific in developing the genre of autobiography throughout the twentieth century, to the point of emerging as serial autobiographers in the case of Maya Angelou. Significantly, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings(1970), the first autobiography of six by Angelou, along with autobiographies by a range of other black women writers, helped to launch the renaissance in black women's literature and criticism in African American literature during the 1970s. In this course, we will focus on how black women have continued to write and share their personal stories in the new millennium by examining autobiographies that they have produced in the first years of the twenty-first century. More broadly, we will consider the impact of this writing on twenty-first century African American literature, as well as African diasporan writing in Africa and the Caribbean. In the process, we will draw on a range of critical and theoretical perspectives.  We will read memoirs and autobiographies by a range of figures, including Michelle Obama, Jennifer Lewis, Monica Coleman, Serena Williams, Gabrielle Union, and Tiffany Haddish, among others. 

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 4212 - Black Women's Autobiography in the 21st Century WritingHerStory

This seminar will look broadly at challenges to democratic institutions in the United States and Europe. To think about the present, we will delve into historical fascism as well as nationalism and populism. We will (1) respond to contemporary political events in the US and beyond; (2) explore the terms "fascism" and "populism" which in the last few years have come to dominate our political vocabulary in the media and the academy; (3) mobilize the instructor's area of academic expertise (fascism and populism) in the service of broad liberal arts concerns. The course focuses upon themes and readings. It is not chronological—rather it looks at different iterations of the same ideas, concepts, and fears as they emerge in different historical contexts. Seminar materials draw upon various sources: scholarly articles, films, and if possible, an occasional guest lecturer.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 4540 - Fascism, Nationalism and Populism

This course is an historical introduction to the study of borders, race, and migration in the modern Middle East and North Africa. We will explore the fundamental migration events that have shaped the Middle Eastern and North African history, including global settler movements, enslavement and forced migration, partitions and population transfers, and contemporary refugee crises. We will discuss how race and migration shaped successive border regimes and competing world orders from the 19th century to the present. Analyzing a diverse array of primary sources from legal texts and maps to poetry and literature, we will pursue answers to questions such as: What are the legal, social, and political structures which govern international migration? What laws, ideas, and affects construct political borders? What happens to those who breach them? How do the legacies of racial slavery, settler colonialism, and ethno-nationalism unsettle the borders of contemporary Middle East and North Africa?

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 4584 - Bordering Humanity: Race and Migration in the Modern Middle East and North Africa

Disabilities, broadly defined, are not exclusively clinical phenomena that belong to the realm of healthcare professionals and rehabilitation specialists. Instead, disability is a lived human experience that is always already embedded in a set of socially constructed ideas that change over time, across cultures, and in relation to race, gender, class and sexuality. Disability is embodied but also discursively constituted, shaped by social injustice and the built environment, and often rendered paradoxically visible and invisible in an ableist and audist world. This seminar explores these complex dynamics and the ways that disability – as an experience and a category of analysis – illuminates new interpretations of major themes and developments in American history like labor, citizenship, immigration, medicine, and activism.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 4693 - Silent No More: Deaf and Disability History in the United States

This course examines contemporary works of fiction that depict episodes of political violence between WWII and today. During this period, there have been 344 conflicts that have killed 500 or more people, but the public attention they receive varies tremendously. New novels and stories disclose and challenge silences surrounding events neglected in global public memory. What role can these works play in altering the kinds of stories heard within and beyond the university? Which voices do they portray as empowered or neglected? How can silence around violence be both compassionate and complicit? What are the ethics of storytelling related to different forms of silence, and what does it mean to read in a way that is compassionate or complicitly silent?

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 4694 - Political Violence in Contemporary Fiction: Silence as Compassion or Complicity

This course contemplates challenges associated with researching and representing LGBTQ+ pasts. We approach this topic from several angles: 1) by asking what constitutes "queer" and "trans" in different historical contexts and different geographical locations, when sexuality and gender are by their nature fluid; 2) by training in LGBTQ+ archival methods; and 3) by engagement with queer and trans artivists who make archives central to their praxis. We will visit Cornell's Human Sexuality collection, explore online repositories and academic databases (e.g., ONE and Cengage), and consider archive-based artistic projects (e.g., Killjoy's Castle and MOTHA).

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 4695 - Queer Archives and Archiving Queerness

Thoreau, in 1841: "Nature is always silent and unpretending as at the break of day." He had just contrasted the robin's song with "the bustle and impatience of man." Why could silence contain birdsong but not human noise? This course explores the idea and representation of nature's silence—as a positive ideal; as soundlessness; as wordlessness; and as extinction. Heeding the environmental criticism that interrogates the contrast between silent "Nature" and noisy humanity, we will remain curious about what compels us in accounts of nature's multivalent silence. Concurrently, we will examine writings that attend to natural sound. Investigating silence, we will also strive to better understand what we mean, and what could be meant, by nature.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for SHUM 4697 - Is Nature Silent?

This course is designed to support seniors in the Humanities Scholars Program working on their capstone projects. Students in the course will be guided in their project research and writing. The course aligns with the following HSP learning goals.

Full details for SHUM 4750 - Senior Capstone Seminar for Humanities Scholars

Community-engaged archaeology brings together knowledgeable communities located within and beyond academic institutions who collaborate to produce higher-quality accounts of the past. In this course, students will build their archaeological fieldwork and laboratory skills while contributing to strong university-community relationships in the local area. Drawing on historical documents, previous scholarship, expert collaborators, and archaeological investigation, students in this course contribute to the understanding of regional sites and landmarks. The topic for Fall 2022 addresses the Underground Railroad through a partnership between Ithaca's historic St. James AME Church, the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and local schools. Students in this course will study archaeological evidence related to the everyday experiences of people who formed part of a congregation active in the Underground Railroad during the early- to mid-19th century.

Full details for SHUM 6200 - Field Methods in Community-Engaged Archaeology

This seminar will look broadly at challenges to democratic institutions in the United States and Europe. To think about the present, we will delve into historical fascism as well as nationalism and populism. We will (1) respond to contemporary political events in the US and beyond; (2) explore the terms "fascism" and "populism" which in the last few years have come to dominate our political vocabulary in the media and the academy; (3) mobilize the instructor's area of academic expertise (fascism and populism) in the service of broad liberal arts concerns. The course focuses upon themes and readings. It is not chronological—rather it looks at different iterations of the same ideas, concepts, and fears as they emerge in different historical contexts. Seminar materials draw upon various sources: scholarly articles, films, and if possible, an occasional guest lecturer.

Full details for SHUM 6540 - Fascism, Nationalism and Populism

This course is an historical introduction to the study of borders, race, and migration in the modern Middle East and North Africa. We will explore the fundamental migration events that have shaped the Middle Eastern and North African history, including global settler movements, enslavement and forced migration, partitions and population transfers, and contemporary refugee crises. We will discuss how race and migration shaped successive border regimes and competing world orders from the 19th century to the present. Analyzing a diverse array of primary sources from legal texts and maps to poetry and literature, we will pursue answers to questions such as: What are the legal, social, and political structures which govern international migration? What laws, ideas, and affects construct political borders? What happens to those who breach them? How do the legacies of racial slavery, settler colonialism, and ethno-nationalism unsettle the borders of contemporary Middle East and North Africa?

Full details for SHUM 6584 - Bordering Humanity: Race and Migration in the Modern Middle East and North Africa

Ever-increasing global interconnection drives some of the most pressing political and ethical questions of our time. This seminar centers on two intersecting areas of inquiry. The first deals with the nature of global movements: how people, ideas, arts, and capital move through world. Engaging postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary migration and transnationalism, we will interrogate the idea of borders and nations as well as those categories—like diaspora—that surpass or circumvent them. The second addresses how and why we might study these processes ethnographically. Here we will consider the potential and limitations of multi-sited and global ethnography, and question the possibility of an activist ethnography of global interconnection.

Full details for SHUM 6639 - Global Currents: Immobility and Multi-Sited Ethnography

Disabilities, broadly defined, are not exclusively clinical phenomena that belong to the realm of healthcare professionals and rehabilitation specialists. Instead, disability is a lived human experience that is always already embedded in a set of socially constructed ideas that change over time, across cultures, and in relation to race, gender, class and sexuality. Disability is embodied but also discursively constituted, shaped by social injustice and the built environment, and often rendered paradoxically visible and invisible in an ableist and audist world. This seminar explores these complex dynamics and the ways that disability – as an experience and a category of analysis – illuminates new interpretations of major themes and developments in American history like labor, citizenship, immigration, medicine, and activism.

Full details for SHUM 6693 - Silent No More: Deaf and Disability History in the United States

This course examines contemporary works of fiction that depict episodes of political violence between WWII and today. During this period, there have been 344 conflicts that have killed 500 or more people, but the public attention they receive varies tremendously. New novels and stories disclose and challenge silences surrounding events neglected in global public memory. What role can these works play in altering the kinds of stories heard within and beyond the university? Which voices do they portray as empowered or neglected? How can silence around violence be both compassionate and complicit? What are the ethics of storytelling related to different forms of silence, and what does it mean to read in a way that is compassionate or complicitly silent?

Full details for SHUM 6694 - Political Violence in Contemporary Fiction: Silence as Compassion or Complicity

This course contemplates challenges associated with researching and representing LGBTQ+ pasts. We approach this topic from several angles: 1) by asking what constitutes "queer" and "trans" in different historical contexts and different geographical locations, when sexuality and gender are by their nature fluid; 2) by training in LGBTQ+ archival methods; and 3) by engagement with queer and trans artivists who make archives central to their praxis. We will visit Cornell's Human Sexuality collection, explore online repositories and academic databases (e.g., ONE and Cengage), and consider archive-based artistic projects (e.g., Killjoy's Castle and MOTHA).

Full details for SHUM 6695 - Queer Archives and Archiving Queerness

Thoreau, in 1841: "Nature is always silent and unpretending as at the break of day." He had just contrasted the robin's song with "the bustle and impatience of man." Why could silence contain birdsong but not human noise? This course explores the idea and representation of nature's silence—as a positive ideal; as soundlessness; as wordlessness; and as extinction. Heeding the environmental criticism that interrogates the contrast between silent "Nature" and noisy humanity, we will remain curious about what compels us in accounts of nature's multivalent silence. Concurrently, we will examine writings that attend to natural sound. Investigating silence, we will also strive to better understand what we mean, and what could be meant, by nature.

Full details for SHUM 6697 - Is Nature Silent?