Fall 2025 Course Offerings

Also ENGL 4706/6705, 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 ASRC 4708/6708

Ng’ang’a Wahu-Muchiri
3 credits
Fall 2025
Tuesdays 11:15am-1:45pm

The 2 Congos, especially Congo-Kinshasa, are central to any contemporary discussions of digital humanities, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Our course will transcend the “twin colonization of time and space” by engaging the Congo region in 3 key aspects: the geological timeline of the Congo River; the lives of the indigenous Congo forest inhabitants; and the migration of Bantu communities over the last two millennia. Alternative forms of marking time deliberately counterbalance the digital economy to which the region has been unwillingly, and irrevocably, yoked.

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

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

Short Course Description: “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.