Title	Instructors	Location	Time	Description	Cross listings	Fulfills	Registration notes	Syllabus	Syllabus URL
GSWS 0002-401	Gender & Society			TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM	This course will introduce students to the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality mark our bodies, influence our perceptions of self and others, organize families and work like, delimit opportunities for individuals and groups of people, as well as impact the terms of local and transnational economic exchange. We will explore the ways in which sex, gender, and sexuality work with other markers of difference and social status such as race, age, nationality, and ability to further demarcate possibilities, freedoms, choices, and opportunities available to people.	ENGL0159401	Cultural Diversity in the U.S. Society Sector
GSWS 0003-401	Intro to Queer Studies	Melissa E Sanchez		TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM	This course will introduce students to the historical and intellectual forces that led to the emergence of queer theory as a distinct field, as well as to recent and ongoing debates about gender, sexuality, embodiment, race, privacy, global power, and social norms. We will begin by tracing queer theory's conceptual heritage and prehistory in psychoanalysis, deconstruction and poststructuralism, the history of sexuality, gay and lesbian studies, woman-of-color feminism, the feminist sex wars, and the AIDS crisis. We will then study the key terms and concepts of the foundational queer work of the 1990s and early 2000s. Finally, we will turn to the new questions and issues that queer theory has addressed in roughly the past decade. Students will write several short papers.	COML0030401, ENGL0160401	Cultural Diversity in the U.S.
GSWS 0092-401	Italian Film and Media Studies	Julia Heim		TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM	Topics vary. See the Department's website at https://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses for a description of current offerings.	CIMS0092401, ITAL0092401	Arts & Letters Sector Cross Cultural Analysis
GSWS 0118-401	Feminism & Surveillance	Jessica Florence Lingel		MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM	Living with surveillance has become a predictable feature of contemporary life. From work to school to online dating, surveillance shapes many facets of our daily behaviors and activities. What can feminist theory bring to questions of surveillance? How have feminist tactics been used to resist surveillance? And can surveillance ever be a form of feminist caregiving? In the first part of this course, we analyze different forms of feminist thinking, including Black feminism, indigenous feminism, crip feminism and more. From there, we turn to legal, political, cultural and activist case studies related to surveillance. Putting them together, we consider how feminist frameworks can help us to analyze practices and technologies of surveillance. This is an interdisciplinary First Year Seminar that brings together internet studies, queer theory, science and technology studies, human computing interaction, surveillance studies and cultural studies in order to understand the social and historical dimensions of feminism and surveillance.	COMM1018401	Arts & Letters Sector
GSWS 0168-301	Gender, Power and the Archive	Alicia J Meyer		TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM	Feminist writers use the term reproductive justice to describe bodily autonomy, especially the right to have children, the right to not have children, and the right to parent children in safe and sustained communities. This first-year seminar examines popular writing in newspapers, magazines, books, posters, reports, and manifestos that reflect the history of reproductive justice. Students will read a wide range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century texts that analyze the role of gender, power, and reproduction. We will look at popular representations of pregnancy and motherhood, queer parenting, and other forms of kinship. Our class will be held in Penn’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, and each week we will work with archival and primary source materials that reflect this history and allow us to analyze the evolution of reproductive justice in the context of their original print culture. Through our engagement with archival sources, this seminar will also introduce debates in archival studies, with special attention paid to how archival silences, unrecorded histories, and institutional gaps can be understood not simply as absences but as active sites for theoretical reflection. Rather than positioning feminism against the archive, we will explore how archival methods and feminist theory mutually enrich one another and help us access new knowledge and perspectives on gender and power. Students will be asked to read assigned texts carefully, and assignments will include in-class participation, short presentations, and several short writing assignments on their independent research with archival sources.		Arts & Letters Sector
GSWS 0700-401	Iranian Cinema: Gender, Politics and Religion	Fatemeh Shams Esmaeili		TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM	This seminar explores Iranian culture, society, history and politics through the medium of film. We will examine a variety of cinematic works that represent the social, political, economic and cultural circumstances of contemporary Iran, as well as the diaspora. Along the way, we will discuss issues pertaining to gender, religion, nationalism, ethnicity, and the role of cinema in Iranian society and beyond. Discussions topics will also include the place of the Iranian diaspora in cinema, as well as the transnational production, distribution, and consumption of Iranian cinema. Films will include those by internationally acclaimed filmmakers, such as Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, Asghar Farhadi, Bahman Ghobadi, Abbas Kiarostami, Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Dariush Mehrjui, Tahmineh Milani, Jafar Panahi, Marjane Satrapi and others. All films will be subtitled in English. No prior knowledge is required.	COML0700401, MELC0700401	Cross Cultural Analysis
GSWS 1011-401	The Family	Paula W Fomby		MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM	Family life is deeply personal but at the same time is dramatically impacted by social forces outside of the family. In this course we will examine how families are organized along the lines of gender, sexuality, social class, and race and how these affect family life. We will consider how family life is continually changing while at the same time traditional gender roles persist. For example, how "greedy" workplaces, which require long work hours, create work-family conflicts for mothers and fathers. We will also examine diverse family forms including single-parent families, blended families, families headed by same-gender parents, and families headed by gender non-conforming parents. The lectures will also examine how economic inequality shapes family life. Students will have the opportunity to apply key concepts to daily life.	SOCI1010401	Society Sector
GSWS 1027-401	Sex and Representation	Leo James Hugo Tidmarsh		TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM	This course explores literature that resists normative categories of gender and sexuality. By focusing on figures writing from the margins, we will explore how radical approaches to narrative form and subject-matter invite us to think in new ways about desire and identity. We will read texts that blur the boundaries between fact and fiction, hybridizing the genres of poetry, drama, and autobiography to produce new forms of expression, such as the graphic novel, auto-fiction, and prose poetry. From Viriginia Woolf's gender-bending epic, Orlando, to Tony Kushner's Angels in America, this course traces how non-normative desire is produced and policed by social and literary contexts - and how those contexts can be re-imagined and transformed.	CIMS1027401, COML1027401	Arts & Letters Sector
GSWS 1042-401	Population & Society	Iliana V Kohler		TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM	The course serves as an introduction to the study of population and demography, including issues pertaining to fertility, mortality, migration, and family formation and structure. Within these broad areas we consider the social, economic, and political implications of current trends, including: population explosion, baby bust, the impact of international migration on receiving societies, population aging, racial classification, growing diversity in household composition and family structure, population and environmental degradation, and the link between population and development/poverty.	SOCI1040401	Society Sector
GSWS 1101-401	Sociology of Gender	Kimberly C Torres		MW 1:45 PM-3:14 PM	Gender is an organizing principle of society, shaping social structures, cultural understandings, processes of interaction, and identities in ways that have profound consequences. It affects every aspect of people's lives, from their intimate relationships to their participation in work, family, government, and other social institutions and their place in the stratification system. Yet gender is such a taken for granted basis for differences among people that it can be hard to see the underlying social structures and cultural forces that reinforce or weaken the social boundaries that define gender. Differences in behavior, power, and experience are often seen as the result of biological imperatives or of individual choice. A sociological view of gender, in contrast, emphasizes how gender is socially constructed and how structural constraints limit choice. This course examines how differences based on gender are created and sustained, with particular attention to how other important bases of personal identity and social inequality--race and class-interact with patterns of gender relations. We will also seek to understand how social change happens and how gender inequality might be reduced.	SOCI1100401	Society Sector
GSWS 1122-401	Witches, Rebels, and Prophets: People on the Margins in Early America	Kathleen M Brown		TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM	This course explores the lost worlds of witches, sexual offenders, rebellious enslaved people, rebellious colonists, and Native American leaders from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Using the life stories of unusual individuals from the past, we try to make sense of their contentious relationships with their societies. By following the careers of the troublemakers, the criminals, the rebels, and other non-conformists, we also learn about the foundations of social order and the impulse to reform that rocked American society during the nineteenth century. The lives of these unique “movers and shakers” help us to understand the issues that Americans debated in the years leading up to the Civil War.	AFRC1122401, HIST1122401	Cultural Diversity in the U.S. History & Tradition Sector
GSWS 1201-401	Introduction to African American Literature	Dagmawi Woubshet		TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM	An introduction to African-American literature, ranging across a wide spectrum of moments, methodologies, and ideological postures, from Reconstruction and the Harlem Renaissance to the Civil Rights Movement. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.	AFRC1200401, ENGL1200401	Arts & Letters Sector Cultural Diversity in the U.S.
GSWS 1351-401	Contempor Fiction/Film-Japan	Ayako Kano		R 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	This course will explore fiction and film in contemporary Japan, from 1945 to the present. Topics will include literary and cinematic representation of Japan s war experience and post-war reconstruction, negotiation with Japanese classics, confrontation with the state, and changing ideas of gender and sexuality. We will explore these and other questions by analyzing texts of various genres, including film and film scripts, novels, short stories, manga, and academic essays. Class sessions will combine lectures, discussion, audio-visual materials, and creative as well as analytical writing exercises. The course is taught in English, although Japanese materials will be made available upon request. No prior coursework in Japanese literature, culture, or film is required or expected; additional secondary materials will be available for students taking the course at the 600 level. Writers and film directors examined may include: Kawabata Yasunari, Hayashi Fumiko, Abe Kobo, Mishima Yukio, Oe Kenzaburo, Yoshimoto Banana, Ozu Yasujiro, Naruse Mikio, Kurosawa Akira, Imamura Shohei, Koreeda Hirokazu, and Beat Takeshi.	CIMS1351401, COML1351401, EALC1351401, EALC5351401	Arts & Letters Sector Cross Cultural Analysis
GSWS 1400-401	Asian Am Gendersexuality	Rupa Pillai		TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM	This course explores the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race in Asian America. Through interdisciplinary and cultural texts, students will consider how Asian American gender and sexualities are constructed in relation to racism while learning theories on and methods to study gender, sex, and race. We will discuss masculinities, femininities, race-conscious feminisms, LGBTQ+ identities, interracial and intraracial relationships, and kinship structures.	ASAM1400401, SAST1400401	Cultural Diversity in the U.S.
GSWS 1530-401	Women and the Making of Modern South Asia	Ramya Sreenivasan		MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM	This course on women in South Asian history has four objectives - 1. To acquaint ourselves with the historiography on South Asian women. 2. To gain an understanding of evolving institutions and practices shaping women's lives, such as the family, law and religious traditions. 3. To understand the impact of historical processes - the formation and breakdown of empire, colonialism, nationalism and decolonization - upon South Asian women between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. 4. To become familiar with some of the significant texts written about and by women in this period. We will read a wide variety of primary sources including a Mughal princess' account, devotional verse authored by women, conduct books, tracts, autobiographies and novels.	HIST1530401, SAST1530401
GSWS 1761-401	Sex and Empire	Secil Yilmaz		MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM	This course explores the historical narratives surrounding modern empires and colonialism, with a specific focus on the role of sex and gender. Modern empires as complex political and social structures built upon and operated on the basis of difference—racial, religious, sexual. Colonial encounters not only produced unequal and uneven conditions for the colonized, but also in the construction of racialized and gendered structures in the formation of modern capitalism, market economies, political regimes, citizenship, everyday violence and so on. This course examines the historical literature on the intersections of power and historical experience in the framework of a variety of themes including modern family, marriage, slavery, property, labor, incarceration, sex trafficking, science of sex, displacement, and reproduction as they relate to sexuality, race, and religion categories in imperial contexts. The course spans the early nineteenth century to the present and is framed around global and cross-cultural perspective to analyze how scholars have engaged with sexuality and gender to explore broader themes pertaining to formation of modern empires and colonialism.	HIST1761401	Cross Cultural Analysis
GSWS 1800-401	The Sexuality of Modern Art	Jonathan D Katz		MW 12:00 PM-1:29 PM	It's no exaggeration to note that queers have long been at the forefront of innovation in the arts, and that the arts, generally, have been a comfortable home for queers, even at moments when society at large was distinctly hostile. In fact the concepts of modern art and homosexuality that we use today are twins, for they were both founded in the third quarter of the 19th century and grew up together. Introduction to Queer Art thus begins with the coining of the word "homosexual" in 1869, and surveys how a range of mediums including painting, sculpture, poetry, music, and film shifted in response to new definitions of sexuality. Along the way, we will work towards answering two related questions: 1) Why were queer creators largely responsible for the introduction of modernity in the arts, and 2) why do we find so often that queer social and political dissent found form in, and as, aesthetic dissent as well? In creating new forms for art that often seem far removed from any traditional definition of sexuality, including non-objective and abstract art, queer artists pushed the boundaries of normativity, leading to new ways of seeing, hearing, feeling and thinking that often dared to encode queer meanings as part of their formal innovation. We will look into the politics of queer art, and how and why in the US, even amidst often dangerous homophobia, it was queer artists who represented America to itself. Thus, we will cover such key cultural figures such as Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Georgia O'Keeffe, Frank O'Hara, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Agnes Martin. Throughout, new methods informed by queer, gender, and critical race theory will be utilized.	ARTH1800401	Cultural Diversity in the U.S.
GSWS 2092-401	Kelly Writers House Fellows	Simone White		M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	This seminar features visits by eminent writers as "Fellows" of the Kelly Writers House, the student-conceived writing arts collaborative at 3805 Locust Walk. Throughout the semester we will study the work of these writers—and some of the materials "around" them that make the particular contemporary context in which each operates so compelling. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.	ENGL2092401
GSWS 2105-401	Beyond Tradwives: Religion, Family, and the Domestic in North America	Anca Wilkening		TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM	In Caro Claire Burke’s 2026 novel Yesteryear, a tradwife influencer who has built her brand around an idealized vision of traditional American domesticity suddenly finds herself confronted with the realities of life in 1855. What happens when fantasies of the “traditional” family collide with the histories they claim to recover? Long before “tradwives” took over social media, religious communities in North America were already creating, practicing, debating, and disrupting different ways of making families, households, and lives together. This course explores these histories from the early colonial period to their contemporary reverberations, asking how religion has shaped—and been shaped by—the everyday practices of marriage, kinship, gender, sexuality, intimacy, home, and belonging. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, theories, and methods, as well as primary sources and diverse media, we will move from early settler and Indigenous kinship systems to monasticism and polygamy; slavery and the separation and reconstitution of Black families; communal households and queer intimacies; Victorian domestic ideology; and the making of the nuclear family and modern religious visions of family life. Along the way, we will ask: Who gets to count as family? What makes a household respectable, deviant, sacred, or dangerous? How have slavery, racialization, and colonialism shaped whose kinship ties were recognized, protected, disrupted, or denied? How have people made and remade home and belonging under conditions of coercion, displacement, and exclusion? And what role has religion played in all of this?	HIST2105401, RELS2105401
GSWS 2171-401	Bodies, Borders, Catastrophes	Ailin Reeba Jain		TR 10:15 AM-11:44 AM	This course investigates constructions of gender and sexuality adjacent to environmental catastrophe. We will read the fluid movements between human and nonhuman bodies to reframe our ideas of queerness and gender. We will study ecofeminist literature from the US, Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean to interrogate the sexual and racial formations that emerge around imperial violence and extraction ecologies. We will examine monstrosity, hybridity, mechanicality, and animality; we will trace how the slow and fast violences of environmental collapse degrade, fragment, and reorganize gendered bodies. How might we read the relationships between human, nonhuman, animal, and machine bodies in the context of environmental disaster? How might we understand disease and disability in relation to the global movements of resources? What might be “trans” about this environmental interflow of bodies? As we aggregate postcolonial, indigenous, and ecofeminist literature, we will map the queer networks that interlink the diseased, fractured, and mutable bodies of climate collapse. Assignments will include class presentations, short writing exercises, and peer reviews; students may choose between a creative or critical final project.	ENGL1171401
GSWS 2220-401	African Women Lives Past/Pres	Pamela Blakely		T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM	Restoring women to African history is a worthy goal, but easier said than done.The course examines scholarship over the past forty years that brings to light previously overlooked contributions African women have made to political struggle, religious change, culture preservation, and economic development from pre-colonial times to present. The course addresses basic questions about changing women's roles and human rights controversies associated with African women within the wider cultural and historical contexts in which their lives are lived. It also raises fundamental questions about sources, methodology, and representation, including the value of African women's oral and written narrative and cinema production as avenues to insider perspectives on African women's lives.	AFRC2220401	Cross Cultural Analysis
GSWS 2230-301	Unruly Bodies, Contested Spaces: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Schooling	Shea Martin		TR 1:45 PM-3:14 PM	How do schools teach us which bodies belong and which are marked unruly for disrupting the order of things? Unruly Bodies, Contested Spaces examines K–12 schooling as a key site where racial, gender, and class order is taught, enforced, and challenged. From dress codes and discipline to bathrooms and curriculum, schools’ culture and policies have historically signaled which bodies and behaviors are rendered normal/abnormal, safe/dangerous, and aligned/disruptive. In the wake of continued battles over gender-affirming care, censorship, equity, and the role of public education, this course will ask how these political struggles are lived in the everyday spaces and lives of schooling. Grounded in women of color feminisms, trans studies, queer theory, and geographies, we will use theoretical, legislative, and literary texts to examine how youth navigate, refuse, and dream beyond the terms schools set for them. What might their unruliness reveal about the limits and possibilities of schooling in the past, present, and future?
GSWS 2350-401	Growing Up Queer: Coming of Age in Contemporary Literature	Javier Samper Vendrell		TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM	We typically describe youth, puberty, or adolescence as the period of transformation from childhood to adulthood. This process doesn’t come without its challenges. Young people famously argue with their parents and have been in constant generational conflict with their elders. More importantly, youth is the period when we develop our own sense of identity and personality, feel deeply misunderstood, make our first friends, wonder about the meaning of life for the first time, and when we discover love and sex. Youth has not always been the same, of course. In fact, adolescence as such did not exist until the early nineteenth century. Since then, authors have been trying to describe the intense emotions as well as the intellectual and moral growth experienced by people during this period of life. Needless to say, the Bildungsroman, as this literary genre came to be known, focused on the experiences of young, white male protagonists and was deeply normative. In the end, the main character in these stories is supposed to find comfort in fitting in and accepting the world around them as it is. What does it mean to grow up queer, then? In this course, we’ll consider how contemporary queer authors and filmmakers have turned this genre upside down to include the lived experiences of people who don’t “fit in.” We’ll focus on coming out as the moment of self-recognition, self-acceptance, and disclosure of one’s sexuality or gender identity, but also as a deeply political act that promotes new ways of being in the world beyond binaries and norms. All along, we’ll consider how family, class, race, ethnicity, and religion shape these experiences. Novels as well as examples from films and television series will help us generate ideas about this topic and consider how authors are developing original narrative and aesthetic strategies to describe what growing up queer is like. You will write several short essays and give an oral presentation. This course will help you reflect on queerness and youth as you develop sophisticated writing and analytical skills.	ENGL2380401
GSWS 2353-401	Sovereignty and Sexuality: Gender and Power in Society	Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet		T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM	Women in Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) – then as now – lived far less glamorous lives than what some writers, visitors, and “Orientalists” imagined. To understand their actual experiences, this course will grapple with this regional history through global networks and processes. We will consider positionality and identity, including race, ethnicity, and economic status. This was an era in which Western women traveled more frequently to parts of SWANA. We will gauge women’s attitudes (both indigenous and non-indigenous) toward veiling, politics, and secular change while avoiding generalizations. To what extent did family dynamics and sexuality inform social interactions? This course considers such questions by offering a comparative perspective on women’s lives, primarily through memoirs, travelogues, photography, other first-hand accounts, and secondary sources. It combines historical accounts with select fictional works to study women’s social and cultural milieux under colonialism, the evolution of women’s roles in politics and society as the global map changed, and how local communities tied themselves to global solidarity networks. By crossing national boundaries, this course highlights the rich diversity of women's experiences. We will examine the importance or imposition of motherhood; LGBTQ experiences and forms of activism; and women’s roles in revolutionary upheavals.	HIST2353401, MELC2567401, SOCI2947401	Cross Cultural Analysis
GSWS 2522-401	Modern Italian Culture	Alessandra Fumagalli		TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM	Please check the website for a current course description at: http://www.sas.upenn.edu/italians/courses	CIMS2522401, ITAL2522401	Cultural Diversity in the U.S.			https://coursesintouch.apps.upenn.edu/cpr/jsp/fast.do?webService=syll&t=202710&c=GSWS2522401
GSWS 2537-401	Gender and Health	Beans Velocci		TR 12:00 PM-1:29 PM	Women's health is a constant refrain of modern life, prompting impassioned debates that speak to the fundamental nature of our society. Women's bodies are the tableaux across which politicians, physicians, healthcare professional, activists, and women themselves dispute issues as wide-ranging as individual versus collective rights, the legitimacy of scientific and medical knowledge, the role of the government in healthcare, inequalities of care, and the value of experiential knowledge, among many others. Understanding the history of these questions is crucial for informed engagement with contemporary issues.	HSOC2537401
GSWS 2610-401	The Asian Caribbean	Rupa Pillai		TR 3:30 PM-4:59 PM	Although Asians have lived in the Americas for centuries, the Asian American community and experience tends to be defined by the post-1965 wave of immigration to the United States. In an effort to correct this narrative this course will explore the histories, experiences, and contributions of some of the forgotten Asians of the Americas. In particular, we will focus on the earlier labor migrations of Chinese and South Asian individuals to the Caribbean and the United States. The experiences of these individuals, who built railroads, cut sugarcane, and replaced African slave labor, complicate our understandings of race today. By examining the legal and social debates surrounding their labor in the 19th century and exploring how their experiences are forgotten and their descendants are rendered invisible today, we will complicate what is Asian America and consider how this history shapes immigration policies today.	ASAM2610401, LALS2601401, SAST2610401	Cultural Diversity in the U.S.
GSWS 3246-401	The Tale of Genji	Linda H. Chance		MW 10:15 AM-11:44 AM	"Crowning masterpiece of Japanese literature," "the world's first novel," "fountainhead of Japanese literary and aesthetic culture," "a great soap opera in the vein of Jacqueline Susann." Readers over the centuries have praised the Tale of Genji, the monumental prose tale finished just after the year 1000, in a variety of ways. In this course we will read the latest English translation of Murasaki Shikibu's work. We will watch as Genji loses his mother at a tender age, is cast out of the royal family, and begins a quest to fill the void she left. Along the way, Genji's loyalty to all the women he encounters forges his reputation as the ideal lover. We will consider gender issues in the female author's portrayal of this rake, and question the changing audience, from bored court women to censorious monks, from adoring nationalists to comic book adaptors. Study of the tale requires consideration of poetry, imagery, costume, music, history, religion, theater, political and material culture, all of which will be components of the course. We will also trace the effect of the tale's many motifs, from flora and fauna to murderously jealous spirits, on later literature and conceptions of human emotions. All material is in English translation. There are no prerequisites.	EALC3246401, EALC7246401	Cross Cultural Analysis
GSWS 3300-401	The Global Film Theory Club	Karen E Redrobe		T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	This device-free, seminar-style discussion class seeks to cultivate a film club community as we grapple with some key contemporary film theory debates, framed within the context of recent interventions as well as earlier critiques that seek to challenge film theory’s geopolitical biases and blind spots. Together, we will examine how film theorists as well as filmmakers from different countries, communities, and (primarily) 21st century moments have attempted to make sense of the changing phenomenon known as “cinema,” to think cinematically. Topics under consideration include: spectatorship, authorship, the apparatus, translation and subtitles, archives and preservation, festivals, blockbusters and the popular, animation, corporeality, virtuality, the national / transnational / global, decolonization, and what “counts” as film and film theory in different contexts. No knowledge of film theory is presumed. In the first part of the 3-hour class we will watch a film or some short films together and develop skills for taking notes on your responses to films while watching, with the goal of thinking actively across theoretical texts and the shared film experience. In the second part of the class, we will work through the assigned texts together using a variety of approaches to build skills and confidence with reading, writing, talking about and contextualizing film theory and to deepen our collective understanding of the films we watch together.	ARTH2952401, CIMS3300401, COML3303401, ENGL2902401
GSWS 4000-001	GSWS Honors Thesis Seminar	Gwendolyn A Beetham			This course is for senior undergraduate GSWS majors who will be completing an honors thesis. The seminar helps students decide on the most appropriate methodologies to use and topics to include in their thesis. Other topics include thesis organization and drawing conclusions from primary and secondary sources of data.
GSWS 5087-401	Race, Nation, Empire	Deborah A Thomas		T 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	This graduate seminar examines the dynamic relationships among empires, nations and states; colonial and post-colonial policies; and anti-colonial strategies within a changing global context. Using the rubrics of anthropology, history, cultural studies, and social theory, we will explore the intimacies of subject formation within imperial contexts- past and present- especially in relation to ideas about race and belonging. We will focus on how belonging and participation have been defined in particular locales, as well as how these notions have been socialized through a variety of institutional contexts. Finally, we will consider the relationships between popular culture and state formation, examining these as dialectical struggles for hegemony.	AFRC5087401, ANTH5087401, LALS5087401
GSWS 5505-401	The Gothic	Michael C Gamer		W 3:30 PM-6:29 PM	Part of the reason the Gothic remains compelling lies in its opaque origins and opportunistic nature. It's a term we use for speaking about a body of writing anchored in multiple literary traditions, uncannily present whether we are speaking of power, desire, identity, or the numinous. Less a genre than an aesthetic that crosses them -- or both at once -- it seems to move effortlessly, almost virally, across media, ideologies, and national traditions. This seminar, therefore, will double as a seminar on genre, and will consider post-structural, affective, queer, and sociological approaches to Gothic's identities, histories, and tendencies. We'll ask less what Gothic is that than where it has resided (and resides) and what it has signified (and can signify). We’ll take a two-step approach. For the first 8-10 weeks of the seminar, we’ll move through key texts from gothic's first meteoric rise, 1760-1830. Possible authors include Jane Austen, Joanna Ballie, Charles Brockden Brown, Edmund Burke, Lord Byron, Samuel Coleridge, George Colman the Younger, Olaudah Equiano, James Hogg, John Keats, Matthew Lewis, Edgar Allan Poe, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and William Wordsworth, which we’ll read these alongside short works by Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jack Halberstam, Anna Barbauld, the Marquis de Sade, Sigmund Freud, and others. Depending on the size and interests of the seminar, we may then move beyond these historical confines to other periods, media, and national traditions, from Saxon spells, medieval mysteries, and early modern revenge tragedies to Victorian sensation fiction, fin-de-siecle decadence, early silent film, Hollywood Cinema, and more recent works of fiction (Piranesi, Zone One, Mexican Gothic, Lovecraft Country), film (Alien, Ringu, Thirst, Get Out, Tumbbad, Us, His House), and TV (Penny Dreadful, Dead Loch, How to Get to Heaven from Belfast). Assignments will include at least one short presentation, a few responses, an annotated bibliography, and a final conference presentation and essay.	CIMS5505401, ENGL5505401
GSWS 5520-401	Affect Theory and Power	Donovan O. Schaefer		M 1:45 PM-4:44 PM	This seminar will examine contemporary affect theory and its relationship with Michel Foucault's theory of power. We will begin by mapping out Foucault's "analytics of power," from his early work on power knowledge to his late work on embodiment, desire, and the care of the self. We will then turn to affect theory, an approach which centralizes the non-rational, emotive force of power. No previous knowledge of theory is required.	COML5520401, COMM5520401, RELS5520401
GSWS 5890-401	Sex on Screen	Filippo Trentin		T 3:30 PM-6:29 PM	For much of the twentieth century, moviegoing brought strangers into bodily proximity in a dark, anonymous space, an arrangement that early anti-cinema campaigners regarded as sexually dangerous. What forms of desire did this ritual of shared proximity in the dark produce? Was moviegoing itself, as its earliest critics feared, a kind of perversion—and what changes when public, collective looking becomes solitary and private? How has film theory drawn on psychoanalysis to grasp the desire at work in looking? And how has Italian cinema, from the silent diva to Guadagnino, staged sex and desire as its subject? As streaming platforms progressively displace the shared experience of the darkened movie theater, this seminar asks what happens to the forms of looking and desire that cinema has historically produced. This course has two main aims: 1) to offer a genealogy of Italian film history from the silent era to the present, focusing on those films that contribute to our knowledge of the mechanics of looking as connected to gender and sexuality; 2) to introduce students to crucial texts and topics in film theory, feminist theory, and queer theory such as scopophilia, voyeurism, and fetishism (Freud, Lacan, Metz); the apparatus and the dark hall as dream-space (Barthes, Baudry); the male gaze and its feminist and queer revisions (Mulvey, Doane, Silverman, Bersani, Edelman). Throughout, Italian films will be placed alongside key global art films, so that the questions at the heart of the course are pursued across cinematic traditions rather than confined to a single national frame. Films may include Love Everlasting (Mario Caserini, 1913), Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966), Death in Venice (Luchino Visconti, 1971), Amarcord (Federico Fellini, 1974), Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmüller, 1975), and Suspiria (Dario Argento, 1977), alongside international works such as Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954), Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997), Beau Travail (Claire Denis, 1999), and Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Tsai Ming-liang, 2003), among others. Films will be shown at in-person group screenings scheduled outside class hours. No knowledge of queer theory, film theory, or Italian is required.	CIMS5890401, FIGS5890401, ITAL5890401
GSWS 5982-401	Guilt and Rage	David L Eng Melissa E Sanchez		T 12:00 PM-2:59 PM	This seminar will consider the political and cultural significance of guilt and rage through readings in psychoanalysis, philosophy, Black and women of color feminism, and queer of color critique.	ENGL5982401
GSWS 7904-401	New Directions in Black Thought and Literature	Dagmawi Woubshet Margo N. Crawford		T 5:15 PM-8:14 PM	This course explores contemporary Black thought through a set of literary, visual, and theoretical texts. Our theoretical repertoire will include concepts like love, quiet, fabulation, and gaze to explore Black interiority in relation to political movements, aesthetic experimentation, gender and sexual identity, and African continental and diasporic practices. The course will draw on a range of genres (including films, photo portraits, personal essays, and criticism) and also take a comparative approach (including works from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States). See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a complete description of the current offerings.	AFRC7904401, COML7904401, ENGL7904401