While mainstream conversations tend to frame “transgender” as a perpetually new phenomenon, this introduction to trans studies will contextualize present-day gender expansiveness within a longer intellectual history. We will be guided by the following questions: What does trans mean and how has its meaning been shaped by regimes of gender, race, colonization, ability, and medical and legal regulation? What are the main concerns of trans studies/activism, particularly in relation to more established academic fields? How have trans artists, activists, and scholars imagined other, more just worlds? By engaging with scholarship from multiple fields as well as a range of creative work, we will consider the emergence of “transgender” as both an object of knowledge and a way of knowing.

This graduate seminar is an examination of the scholarship on Black women in the United States, as well as the development of the field of Black women’s history, in order to interrogate canon formation, shifts in academic and public history, and changes in source material and research tools.

What does it mean to be Latinx in the United States? This introductory course examines how Latinx communities have developed critical consciousness about their histories, identities, and experiences from the sixteenth century to the present, with particular attention to the often-erased perspectives and knowledge production of Afro-Latinx peoples. Students will explore how communities, including Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, Cubans, Mexican Americans, Central Americans, and others have theorized their experiences of colonialism, migration, racialization, and belonging in the US context.
Grounded in a scholar-practitioner approach that bridges academic research with community-based cultural work, this course centers the ways Latinx communities have generated their own frameworks for understanding their realities. We will examine how Afro-Latinx communities have developed consciousness about anti-Black racism within Latinidad while articulating solidarities across difference and how this critical awareness has shaped both scholarly inquiry and grassroots organizing. The course investigates how consciousness emerges through cultural practices—from spiritual traditions that encode historical memory and resistance, to contemporary music, literature, and digital media that articulate new political possibilities.
Key themes include the development of racial consciousness and the theorization of Blackness within latinidad, feminist and queer consciousness, language as a site of critical awareness, transnational political consciousness, and the role of cultural spaces in cultivating collective understanding. We will explore how Latinx communities have created knowledge about themselves through testimonios, cultural production, and community practice, and how this consciousness has fueled movements for labor rights, citizenship, reproductive justice, and educational access.
Students will engage diverse materials, including historical documents, ethnographic research, testimonios, film, and creative expressions, to develop their own critical frameworks for analyzing the heterogeneity of Latinx experiences and the ongoing work of building liberatory consciousness.

Can we deploy a comparative lens to understand the categories of caste and race better? Does their juxtaposition illuminate new facets of these two structures of ‘global inequalities’? The course seeks to explore these questions by systematically studying how both caste and racial institutions, structures, and identities were historically produced, transformed, and challenged through their global circulation from the nineteenth-century to the present. Caste and race have been old co-travelers, and their various points of intersection can be traced at least to the nineteenth century. And so, in this course we will embark upon a historical adventure, one replete with stories of violence, political intrigue, intense emotions, as also episodes of incandescent resistance. Together, we will trace the genealogy of how modern categories of ‘caste’ and ‘race’ were systematically composed by colonial knowledge production, orientalist writings, and utilitarian discourse, both in Europe and the colonies. While colonialism and the global hegemony of European modernity were crucial to the co-constitution and the circulation of caste and race, anti-caste and anti-race politics too have historically brought a unique comparative lens to these two categories. And so, this course will also include a close analysis of critical works on caste and race by activists and intellectuals from the nineteenth century to the present from all over the world.

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.

What does it mean to be a gendered individual in a Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Christian, or Buddhist religious tradition? How important are gender differences in deciding social roles, ritual activities, and spiritual vocations? This course tackles these questions, showing how gender - how it is taught, performed, and regulated - is central to understanding religion. In this course we will learn about gendered rituals, social roles, and mythologies in a range of religious traditions. We will also look at the central significance of gender to the field of religious studies generally. Part of the course will be focused on building a foundation of knowledge about a range of religious traditions and the role of gender in those traditions. This course focuses on religious traditions with origins outside the West. Although it is beyond the scope of this class to offer comprehensive discussions of any one religious tradition, the aim is to provide entry points into the study of religious traditions through the lens of gender. This course will train you in historical, anthropological, and theoretical methodologies. We will also read religion through feminist and queer lenses - we will explore the key characteristics of diverse feminist and queer studies approaches to religion, as well as limits of those approaches.

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.

This course introduces students to literary study through the works of a major woman writer Reading an individual author across an entire career offers students the rare opportunity to examine works from several critical perspectives in a single course. How do our author's works help us to understand literary and cultural history? And how might we understand our author's legacy through performance, tributes, adaptations, or sequels? Exposing students to a range of approaches and assignments, this course is an ideal introduction to literary study. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

This course will introduce students to key works of English literature written before 1660. It will explore the major literary genres of this period, as well as the social and cultural contexts in which they were produced. The course will examine how literature texts articulate changes in language and form, as well as in concepts of family, nation, and community during the medieval and early modern periods. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

How do people make sense of the multiple experiences that the simple words "love" and "loss" imply? How do they express their thoughts and feelings to one another? In this course, we will explore some means Japanese culture has found to grapple with these events and sensations. We will also see how these culturally sanctioned frameworks have shaped the ways Japanese view love and loss. Our materials will sample the literary tradition of Japan from earliest times to the early modern and even modern periods. Close readings of a diverse group of texts, including poetry, narrative, theater, and the related arts of calligraphy, painting, and music will structure our inquiry. The class will take an expedition to nearby Woodlands Cemetery to experience poetry in nature. By the end of the course, you should be able to appreciate texts that differ slightly in their value systems, linguistic expressions, and aesthetic sensibilities from those that you may already know. Among the available project work that you may select, if you have basic Japanese, is learning to read a literary manga. All shared class material is in English translation.