Fall 2025 Course Offerings

Also ENGL 4706/6705, FGSS 4705/6705, LGBT 4705/6705, VISST 4706/6706

Teagan Bradway
3 Credits
Fall 2025
Tuesdays 2-4:30pm

Suddenly, queer kinship is everywhere, from New York Times profiles of polycules to Kamala Harris’s afirmation of “family by love” not “blood.” What accounts for the uptake of queer kinship now? How do communities practice queer kinship, and to what extent can these practices be scaled upwards to broader forms of political collectivity? To answer these questions, this course examines the resurgence of kinship as a primary concern in gender, sexuality, and critical race studies. We will put kinship theory in conversation with queer kinship narratives across a range of popular genres, including literature, film, and television. Through these narratives, we will examine queer kinship’s relationship to capitalism, white supremacy, and colonialism, paying special attention to the ways queer communities challenge the violence of kinship.

Also ARKEO 4706/6706, ARTH 4706/6706, MEDVL 4706/6706, RELST 4706/6706

Luke Fidler
3 credits
Fall 2025
Thursdays  11:15am-1:45pm

How can a small sculpture produce monumental effects? Recent shifts in metal-detecting and excavation practices have transformed our understanding of the scope of figural art after the Roman empire’s collapse; the field is newly flooded with evidence of toys, puppets, and other tiny bodies. Working across the disciplines of anthropology, archaeology, art history, philosophy, and gender studies, this course investigates how figurines shaped space, ritual, and concepts of personhood in the early medieval world.

Also ASIAN 4707/6707

David Leheny
3 credits
Fall 2025
Mondays 11:15am-1:45pm

When Beijing hosted the summer Olympics in 2008, its opening ceremony left viewers, journalists, and visitors impressed and sometimes alarmed by its enormity, encompassing a massive cast of dancers, musicians, and other performers led by iconic film director Zhang Yimou. It was judged as not just a celebration or an artistic achievement, but as a message: China was ready to overwhelm the world. Size mattered, likely in the moment’s design, and certainly in its reception and interpretation. This interdisciplinary seminar takes an innovative approach to politics in Asia, considering size and its meanings: from the small and the close-knit to the expansive and powerful. We will consider especially the varied techniques of their political, public, and pop cultural representations.

Also ARKEO 4712/6712, ARTH 4711/6711, COML 4711/6711, VISST 4711/6711

Benjamin Anderson
3 Credits
Fall 2025
Tuesdays 11:15am-1:45pm

“Staffage” is a term in the history of landscape painting. It refers to little figures who populate the scene, invariably dwarfed by their surroundings. The few critics who noticed them assigned them various roles: to illustrate “the benefits which nature affords to creatures living in the region” (Goethe, 1800); or, alternatively, “to lend the landscape its specific poetic character” (Fernow, 1806). From landscape, staffage migrated into archaeological documentation and architectural illustration. Here, tiny figures gain additional roles: to convey the scale of the monuments depicted, and the societies that inhabit them. Our study of staffage alternates between close looking at a wide range of pictures, and readings from the historical and theoretical literatures on the aesthetics and politics of landscape painting.

Also FGSS 3555, GERST 3555, LGBT 3555, PMA 3555, VISST 3555
Liz Schoppelrei
3 Credits
Fall 2025
TR 10:10-11:25am
 

What is a comic? How might comics attend to complex historical, social, and political topics? How do comics facilitate a coming to terms with the past or function as an activist medium—spurring on political and cultural shifts? Given this great variety of comics from Germanophone locales this course engages with comics as a key literary form and one that provides a deep engagement with histories, cultures, activisms, and representations thereof. Our readings will include queer/trans comics and zines, early text/image works preceding the comic form, and webcomics on decolonization projects and fantastical places. We will also read comics scholarship and historical texts that will provide a solid foundation from which to approach these literary works. As a way of immersing ourselves into the world of comics, each student will create their own comic over the course of our class—building upon the formal components we locate in class texts. (Drawing skills are not required! Come as you are.) As comics have their own medium-specific vocabulary for visual and textual analysis, we will also spend time building the skills and vocabulary necessary for analyzing the comics we read. Taught in English.

Aditya Bhattacharjee
3 Credits
Fall 2025
TR 1:25-2:40

This course serves as an introduction to key concepts in the study of the Fantastic, a fundamental analytic category in several academic disciplines, including literature, psychology, anthropology, art, and religion. Asia, the continent with the world’s largest population and the birthplace for several major religious traditions, is replete with narratives, beliefs and artistic practices which traverse the Fantastic’s diffuse aspects and explore its myriad dimensions.  Our encounter with such phenomena will be concentrated on three of its key genres with roots in Asian and Asian-inspired religious movements: gods, ghosts, and gurus. Accordingly, course readings will discuss case studies from Hinduism, Buddhism, Traditional Chinese Religions, Vietnamese Cao Đài, and other such sectarian perspectives. Beyond gaining an empirical understanding of how each of these traditions has interpreted the classifications of god, ghost, and guru, we will also consider how religious practitioners have articulated their ideas about these entities in storytelling, visual objects, cinematic productions and other arenas of cultural expression. Overall, these inquiries will encourage students to critically engage with the following question: “How can studies of Fantastical Figures affirm and expand conventional notions of religion?”

Amanda Martin
3 Credits
Fall 2025
TR 1:25-2:40pm

This class will explore how access to the outdoors has been impacted by social inequalities related to race, class, and gender throughout U.S. history. The idea of “the outdoors” and its synonyms (whether “wilderness” or “nature”) has sustained lasting cultural resonance in the United States. Since the nineteenth century’s development of American Romanticism, “nature”—or the idea of a landscape not manipulated by humans—has become a powerful cultural symbol and one of the nation’s most cherished attributes. However, this course will examine how this strong reverence for natural places in the United States has been overlaid by racist ideologies.