Art in the Arab World from Revolution to Revolution
ARTH 2699/6699
TR 5:15-6:44
Alessandra Amin

This course provides an introduction to the visual art of Arabic-speaking societies in the modern MENA region through the lens of revolution. Focusing most closely on the visual cultures of Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Morocco, the class explores stylistic and thematic developments that arose over 140 tumultuous years of regime changes, popular movements, military coups, and cultural upheavals. In addition to artwork, students will engage with contemporary articles, manifestos, correspondence, and artist interviews in translation, developing analytical historical skills as they learn about the burgeoning field of modern and contemporary Arab art history.

Carceral Crisis: The Question of Abolition
AFRC 2130
W 1:45-4:44pm
Timothy Malone

In the summer of 2020, the nation witnessed the extra-legal police executions of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Subsequent civil disobedience actions rocked the country from coast to coast with calls to “defund the police” and “end mass incarceration.” As a result, the notion of police/prison abolition has entered mainstream political discourse to a remarkable degree not witnessed in generations. The aims of this seminar are twofold. First, we will engage a set of interdisciplinary texts to develop an understanding of why we have such a large prison system in the United States. What work does the prison do on behalf of civil society and why does it deleteriously impact communities of color, most profoundly?  Secondly, this seminar will work to develop a broad familiarity with abolitionist discourse and its perspectives on what we can, should or even must do about prisons, policing and carcerality – “mass” incarceration - more broadly.

Fertile Bodies: A Cultural History of Reproduction from Antiquity to the Enlightenment
HIST 3849/HSOC 3549
MW 10:15–11:44am
Melissa Reynolds

The ancient Greeks imagined a woman’s body ruled by her uterus, while medieval Christians believed in a womb touched by God. Renaissance anatomists hoped to uncover the ‘secrets’ of human generation through dissection, while nascent European states wrote new laws to encourage procreation and manage ‘illegitimate’ offspring. From ancient Greece to enlightenment France, a woman’s womb served as a site for the production of medical knowledge, the focus of religious practice, and the articulation of state power. This course will trace the evolution of medical and cultural theories about women’s reproductive bodies from ca. 450 BCE to 1700, linking these theories to the development of structures of power, notions of difference, and concepts of purity that proved foundational to ‘Western’ culture. Each week we will read a primary source (in translation, if necessary) alongside excerpts from scholarly books and articles. We will begin in classical Greece with Hippocratic writings on women’s diseases, move through the origins of Christian celibacy and female asceticism in late antique and medieval Europe, follow early anatomists as they dissected women’s bodies in Renaissance Italy, explore the origins of state regulation of women’s fertility in early modern England, Germany, and France, and finally, learn how Enlightenment ideals were undergirded by new “scientific” models of anatomical sexual and racial difference. 

Islam and Revolution
RELS 5445-301
T 1:45-4:44pm
Alex Kreger

Islamic history is typically told as a history of continuity. A range of otherwise sharply divergent Muslim communities shape themselves in terms of an unbroken tradition stretching back to the Prophet Muhammad. In this course we will adopt a different approach, reading Islamic history in terms of rupture. A basic premise of this course is that directing our focus in the study of Islam to models and moments of radical political change will necessarily reorient our understanding of Islam in the present. In particular, we will focus on messianism and the figure of the Mahdi in an effort to understand how this figure was deployed differently in three broad periods of Islamic history: the formative period beginning with Muhammad’s initial revolution in seventh-century Arabia through the Mongols’ destruction of the caliphate in 1258, the millennial period of post-Mongol Sufism through the colonial era, and the postcolonial period through today. While we will address famous cases such as Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, a key aim of the course will be to think about revolution beyond the framework of the state and its overthrow, and Islam beyond its currently most visible forms of scripture-mediated piety. How do Islamic ritual practices prefigure and create political change, broadly construed? How do revolutions and their aftermaths negotiate and articulate difference within Islam? How have Muslim rulers and revolutionaries approached the problem of violence; what have they considered legitimate violence and on what terms? We will ask these and related questions in conversation with a variety of historical, anthropological, and theological texts.

Topics of Insurgency in Latin American Culture
SPAN 3800-401
TR 10:15–11:44am
José Carlos Díaz Zanelli

This course examines Latin American cultural productions (literature, photographs, and films) that address questions of revolution, insurgency, resistance, and cultural emancipation from the early twentieth century onwards. With a special emphasis on materials related to indigeneity: the advent of indigenista/indianista discourses and their tensions with Latin American Marxism, the emergence of indigenous decolonizing movements, and cultural (re)presentations of eco-social activism, we will work through a close analysis of novels, short stories, essays, photographs, fiction films, and documentaries, along with a review of the socio-political context in which these materials were created. Throughout this course, we will also consider how these cultural productions can be used to challenge dominant narratives and imagine alternative futures in Latin America.