Fall 2026 Course Offerings

Lucy Alford
3 Credits
R 2-4:30pm
A.D. White House

The notion of precarity has been theorized in terms of environmental, class, race, and gender vulnerabilities. But how do these vulnerabilities—these complexly layered precarities—play out in poetic form? This course will consider the forms language takes in unstable economic, political, and environmental conditions. We will ask into the relationships between dislocation and scarcity, between language and the (disparately vulnerable) body, and between the human voice and modes of dwelling. Through the lens of diverse works by Octavia Butler, Gloria Alzaldúa, Ilya Kaminsky, Claudia Rankine, Ling Ma, and Cecilia Vicuña, we will explore stabilities and instabilities of form, experimentations in vulnerability and dehabituation, and practices of making in contexts of survival.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/FA26/class/SHUM/4715 

J. Andrew Dufton
3 Credits
T 11:15am-1:45pm
A.D. White House

To live in a city is to reckon with the physical remains of history. Earlier buildings, streets, and public spaces shape daily movements and experiences. This material backdrop of urban life is not neutral but created, a constant negotiation between buildings that have survived rather than being demolished, people and events that were actively commemorated rather than erased or forgotten. How do we choose what endures through development, disaster, and political upheaval? What things does a city remember and what is left to fade from memory? And how does the past influence the present in city life? How Cites Remember explores how the built spaces of cities, and the people who live in them, construct and interact with memories of what came before.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/FA26/class/SHUM/4718 

Rei Magosaki
3 Credits
T 2-4:30pm

This seminar engages with the wide range of perspectives and imagination in recent Japanese American literature to think through the changing possibilities and responsibilities of survivance and memory work in the twenty-first century. Our focus will be on works of poetry collections, narrative fiction, graphic novels, and creative nonfiction from selected U.S. writers who are descendants of Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II. The selections center around Topaz (UT), which was, from the beginning, a particularly vibrant site of cultural production, but will also engage with lesser-known sites like Gila River (AZ) and Missoula (MT). These works display an array of literary sensibility reflecting their collective cultural inheritance of memory, taking agency in providing their readers with critical consciousness about the way in which descendant lives are complicated in the twenty-first century.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/FA26/class/SHUM/4720 

Amanda Gaggioli
3 Credits
M 2-4:30pm
A.D. White House

This course introduces the rapidly developing field of political geology, which examines how geological processes — earth, soil, and subterranean dynamics — interact with human social, political, and cultural systems. Students will explore geosocial formations, the entanglements of social and geological forces, and consider how these shape power, knowledge, and practices of survival, resilience, and negotiation in human-environment relationships across historical and contemporary contexts. Students will debate and develop frameworks for understanding how communities endure, transform, and sustain themselves amid environmental, political, and social upheavals.

https://classes.cornell.edu/browse/roster/FA26/class/SHUM/4727