Music, Sound, and Law
MUSC 3810/7810
T 3:30–6:30pm
Instructor: Derek Baron

This course explores a broad array of approaches to the complex relationship between music, sound, and law. While the relationship between music and law typically focuses on matters of copyright and intellectual property, this course widens the frame, investigating how sound and listening (and the senses more broadly) help us reframe law not simply as a set of rules imposed from above, but as a dynamic set of political and cultural practices, including sonic and other sensory practices. To this end, we will investigate topics including Indigenous approaches to sound/law, oral testimony, repatriation, acoustic ecology, labor, digital mediation, automation, surveillance, and more. Drawing readings from musicology, Indigenous studies, literary studies, philosophy, critical legal studies, anthropology of law, and other scholarly areas, the course will consider not just how the law regulates music and sound but how music and sound shape law. Considering law as a site of musical interpretation—and music as a site of jurisgenesis—this course will develop a critical vocabulary for exploring the relationship between sound, music, and law.

The Art and Practice of Ecstasy
ENGL 1160
TR 3:30–5:00pm
Instructor: Landon Reitz

The otherworldly, out-of-body experience of ecstasy has a long history stretching at least from ancient cults to medieval philosophers and to modern raves. These moments of absolute, unmitigated joy, indescribable pleasure, or transcendent insights are often seen as unpredictable and fleeting. But from the sibyls of the ancient world to the techno fans in modern mega-cities, people and societies have constructed practices to train and manipulate the senses of perception to achieve these supernatural experiences and the express them in art. Achieving ecstasy is a practice, often held under strictest secrecy, expounded by religious leaders and heretics alike, and used, abused, and controlled by the politically powerful. In this course, we will explore historical forms of ecstasy and the practices devised to train the mind and induce the body into euphoria. By analyzing representations of ecstatic experiences, we will ask how and to what ends ecstasy was induced, under what circumstances, in which communities, and with what social, religious, even medicinal meaning. We will pay particular attention to works produced across Europe that attempt both to capture and incite such indescribable experiences, including medieval mystical poetry and philosophy, Renaissance art, and modern literature and film.

Women and Gender in Buddhism: Theory, Text, Practice
RELS 0170
MW 12:00–1:29pm
Instructor: Katherine Scahill

This course takes as its point of departure questions of women’s roles in Buddhist thought and practice, with a primary focus on women’s monastic orders. The history of the female monastic order (bhikkhunī sangha), in turn, opens onto the diverse, ambivalent, and contested roles women have taken in Buddhist institutions. More broadly, these concerns reflect the ways in which gender and sexuality have been theorized in Buddhist texts, traditions, and practices. To investigate these themes, the course begins with an introduction to the development of the bhikkhuni order. Why were women initially excluded from the Buddhist monkhood (sangha)? What doctrinal and practical amendments had to be made to allow for women’s ordination? Why did the order die out in some cases? From the development of the bhikkhuni order as recorded in early Buddhist literature, we turn to constructions of gender in Buddhist texts and practice, examining Buddhist masculinities and motherhood. We then turn to case studies of women’s monastic orders across Buddhist traditions, times, and places, investigating how doctrine and philosophy interact with lived reality. Case studies will be drawn primarily from Theravada traditions of South and Southeast Asia, but we will also consider doctrine and practice as related to women’s roles in East Asian and Tibetan Buddhist traditions. Buddhism is multivocal far more than monolithic, and part of the aim of this course is to show how there is no single approach to gender and sexuality, even within what might seem like a single tradition. Along the way, our discussions will open onto themes including: sexuality, celibacy and monasticism; representations of the feminine in Buddhist literature; Buddhist masculinities; motherhood; gender normativity and dis/ability; perspectives of queer, trans and nonbinary Buddhists; non-duality and not-self. We will explore these themes through close reading and analysis of texts as well as other media including music, film, artwork, and material culture. Experiential and participatory learning will also be important as we attend to the practices—such as meditation, chanting, pilgrimage, art-making, and more—that Buddhists undertake in the case studies we encounter.

Dissenting Subjects, Dissident Forms: Architecture in the Afro-Asian City
ARTH 3699
W 10:15am–1:14pm
Instructor: Shivani Shedde

How do people imagine urban space? More importantly, how do they realize these imaginations into concrete proposals for making the city under conditions of colonial occupation? This interdisciplinary course examines key topics, themes and analytic methods in the study of urbanity and the social worlds of Afro-Asia, from late colonization to post-independence. Moving between various cities in these two continents, it will consider how everyday people: activists, guerrillas, suffragists, and cultural producers (artists, filmmakers, architects amongst others) addressed questions of urban control and domination, presenting strategies and ideas to rectify systems of coloniality in the city. Highlighting the importance of space to shaping democratic futures, this course draws on established and emerging scholarship to show cities arose as sites of critique, refuge, and resistance in the twentieth century. Charting the many instances of localized anti-colonialism activism in cities like Bombay (Mumbai), Cairo, Lourenco Marques (Maputo), Rangoon (Yangon), or Dar-es-Salaam, it will also consider how cities such as Conakry, Lagos, Beirut, Algiers, Tashkent, and Almaty were influenced by transnational exchanges and internationalist influence in the Cold War years. In doing so, it will explore how colonial subjects circumvented rigid colonial authority through modes of strike, protest and insurgent action, but also through architectural, cultural, and literary production that simultaneously contemplated urban life and demanded reform. The latter weeks of the semester will ruminate on how post-colonial citizens saw the benefits of repeating these tactics once independence was achieved, voicing their discontent against the nation state. Most broadly, therefore, this course explores the question, what is the relationship between practices of dissidence, and space making? Highlighting the importance of reimagining the traditional archive to focus on ephemera generated within the city, whether zines, political circulars, posters, but also artistic production such as film, painting and architecture, students will grapple with urban political transformation and social change in an era of global significance.

Asian American Popular Culture
ASAM 1990
TR 8:30–10:00am
Instructor: Allan Zheng 

We consume and engage with popular culture everyday through memes, reels, videos, images, music, shows, etc. In this class, we will examine how popular culture intersects with the experiences, politics, and challenges in Asian America. What is Asian American culture? How has it been shaped by technology, migration, citizenship, gender, and racialization? How have Asian Americans been represented in popular culture? And how do Asian Americans represent themselves today? Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this class invites students to explore a range of scholarly, literary, and visual materials to understand Asian American cultural expression. This course introduces students to and applies themes, key scholarly texts, theories, and frameworks common to scholarly discourse in Asian American Studies including migration, memory, citizenship, American empire, race, and social justice.