Over the past two centuries, women have achieved remarkable progress, including increased access to education and widespread participation in the formal labor market and political institutions. Yet significant challenges to gender equality remain. This course provides an overview of key theories that help explain these advances as well as their limitations. It will cover issues including reproduction, labor, social movements, political representation, public opinion, elections, and intersectionality. The course aims to deepen students’ understanding of gender and politics by engaging with scholarship from across comparative research traditions.

Are men okay? It’s a question on many peoples’ minds these days. Men still earn more than women and dominate the leadership of our corporations and governments. And yet, by many measures, boys and men are struggling. In this course, we will dig into the data to examine the changing experiences of men in the labor market, the education system and in society more broadly. To make sense of these trends, we will explore various theoretical perspectives on the meaning of masculinity, critically examining the idea that masculinity is “in crisis.” Through close reading, spirited discussion and independent research, students will develop evidence-based perspectives on the social forces shaping masculinity and gender inequality today.

In this freshman seminar, we’ll delve into texts and films produced by Iranian women writers and filmmakers. We will explore a diverse range of genres and periods—from the early modern era to the present day. Through these works, we’ll examine how female authors and filmmakers assert agency, autonomy, and dissent in the face of social injustices.
Our weekly sessions will be grounded in critical, film, and literary theory, drawing on influential women thinkers to deepen our understanding. Together, we’ll ask thought-provoking questions: What defines “women’s writing”? What are the strengths and limitations of categorizing literature by gender? How do women portray their lived experiences, and how does their storytelling intersect with politics, class, and race?
Through close readings and discussions, we’ll gain insight into the dreams, struggles, and resilience of Iranian women writers and artists—viewing the world through their own perspectives and voices.

The concept of “sex” has meant multiple things to science and medicine over the last few hundred years: a way of sorting bodies, a behavior to observe, a driving force behind reproduction and evolution, and a yardstick by which to measure normality. It has been both a binary of male and female, and a spectrum; both separate from gender, and inseparably entwined with it. It has been defined at different moments by anatomy, hormones, chromosomes, and even metabolism. In this course, we will explore how scientists have studied—and perhaps produced—the many-faceted thing called sex, and how historians have come to understand that past. This first-year seminar introduces students to primary source research; historical writing; and methods from both Science and Technology Studies (STS), and queer, trans, and feminist studies. Course materials will focus mainly on the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries.

This class will examine the intellectual legacy that James Baldwin left to present-day writers such as Toni Morrison, Charles Johnson, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Thulani Davis, Caryl Phillips, and others. We will spend time reading and discussing Baldwin's novels, short stories, plays and essays, and students will research subjects of their own choosing about Baldwin's life and art.

How have gender and sexuality been historically constructed and shifted in modern and contemporary Korea? How did terms like “new woman,” “t'ibu,” or “soybean paste girl” enter the popular discourse at different points of its capitalist modernity? This graduate seminar investigates gender/sexuality at large in relation to heteropatriarchal kinship system, ableist national biopolitics, and normative citizenship on the Korean peninsula from late Chosŏn to current times. Moving through the eras of Japanese occupation, the Korean War and division, developmental dictatorships, to the current millennia, we focus on the critical role that gender and sexuality played—and continue to play—in the political, social, cultural, and economic dimensions of nation-building, democratization, and neoliberalization that shaped the contemporary Korean societies. In this discussion-based seminar, we will read a broad range of secondary sources and explore different methods in interdisciplinary Korean studies including historiography, feminist cultural anthropology, queer and crip theories, among others.