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.

This seminar will examine the theme of power as it engages questions of sex andgender. Subsidiary themes that will be developed over the course of the semester include: the modernism/ postmodernism debate as it particularly relates to feminism; the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and class and how feminists can and do talk about "women"; the relevance of feminist theory to policy issues, and which theoretical approaches are the most appropriate or have the most powerful potential. The readings will start with "foundational" texts in feminist theory-- texts that anyone who wants to work in or teach feminist theory needs to have in their repertoire, they set out the background and history of contemporary feminist theory, and they operate from a variety of disciplinary frameworks. We then will move onto some newer scholarship and some more specific political issues and topics, depending on what students in the course are interested in studying. This course is open to undergraduates who have had some prior course work in feminist theory, gender and sexuality studies, and/or political theory, in consultation with the professor.

This seminar examines the entangled histories of religion, race, sexuality through literature. Rather than treating devotion and desire, faith and embodiment, or theology and politics as separate domains, we will examine how their intersections have historically produced categories of identity, difference, and community. How are spiritual and secular discourses of desire mutually constitutive? Is the experience of religious devotion— with its gender-fluid identifications, erotic raptures, and bodily disciplines —ever anything but queer? To what extent do monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) depend on, and even construct, racialized hierarchies? By situating these questions within early modern theology as well as modern and contemporary contexts, the seminar challenges the presumed stability of selfhood, morality, and monogamy that are often taken as normative in definitions of faith. Our approach will interrogate how theological discourse not only regulated but also destabilized emergent formations of race, sexuality, and gender. Bringing together literary texts, theological writings, ethnographies, and critical theory, the course advances a comparative and transhistorical framework. In doing so, the seminar positions religion as a generative archive for rethinking how categories of race and sexuality take shape. It also underscores the methodological stakes of reading devotion and desire together: attending to their entanglement unsettles the boundaries of periodization, resituates canonical works in broader transnational contexts, and opens the study of literature to comparative religious and queer frameworks.

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.

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.

Surrealism in the Americas is a workshop focused around the reading, writing and production of surrealist manifestos, plays, performances, poems and fiction. Taking the stance that surrealist literary production is at its base a left aesthetic engagement with form and politics, the course will survey North American, South American, and Caribbean engagements with what is largely misunderstood as a European aesthetic and movement. The works of Aime Cesaire, Adrienne Kennedy, Leonora Carrington, Martin Ramirez, and Grupo Etcetera, among many others, will be studied and used as models for students' own writing and performance. Work will be both individually and collectively generated and the opportunity to work on public performances of surrealist plays will be part of the workshop.

This is a Public Interest Ethnography workshop (originally created by Peggy Reeves Sanday - Department of Anthropology) that incorporates an interdisciplinary approach to exploring social issues. Open to graduate and advanced undergraduate students, the workshop is a response to Amy Gutmann's call for interdisciplinary cooperation across the University and to the Department of Anthropology's commitment to developing public interest research and practice as a disciplinary theme. Rooted in the rubric of public interest social science, the course focuses on: 1) merging problem solving with theory and analysis in the interest of change motivated by a commitment to social justice, racial harmony, equality, and human rights; and 2) engaging in public debate on human issues to make research results accessible to a broader audience. The workshop brings in guest speakers and will incorporate original ethnographic research to merge theory with action. Students are encouraged to apply the framing model to a public interest research and action topic of their choice. This is an academically-based-community-service (ABCS) course that partners directly with Penn's Netter Center for Community Partnerships.

Long before the internet discourse of transfluencers (a la Nikita Dragun) and celebrities (a la Ariana Grande), popular genres of expressive culture and mass entertainment have long been sites of raced and sexed performance. This course explores the persistence of appropriation as convention and charge of popular performance. Taking one genre of vernacular/lowbrow performance as its focus—drag performance—this course will engage an array of disciplines to approach a racial history of cross-gender performance, from Harvard’s Hasty Puddings Club to contemporary Halloween parties and the early 2000s camp classic, White Chicks.
Grounded in Hortense Spillers’s concept of grammar as the symbolic organization of social institutions, this course will track cross-racial and cross-gender performance across two centuries of popular/lowbrow performance and mass entertainment, to blackface minstrelsy and what Danielle Roper calls “hemispheric blackface” across Latin America. What grammars underlie performances of racial and sexual impersonation, historically? And how does that relate to contemporary performances of (dis)identity? Coursework will consist of several short writing opportunities and a creative piece.