This course explores the evolution of representations of the Black femme body in French and francophone imaginaries, tracing a chronological arc that begins with early colonial imagery and ends with the rise of a 2018 movement spearheaded by a collective of Black comediennes, denouncing exclusionary practices in the French entertainment industry. We will first focus on the male gaze — European, Caribbean and African — and the way it constructed the Black femme body, to better understand how Black female authors undermine, resist, parody, or continue to bear the weight of these early images when they take control of their own representation. While our primary readings will be authored by French-writing women, including Mayotte Capecia (Martinique), Marie Vieux-Chauvet (Haiti), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe), Mariama Bâ (Senegal) and Marie Ndiaye (France), our theoretical foundation will include anglophone thinkers, such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Saidiya Hartman, and others. Readings and discussions will be in English.

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 introduction to literary study examines a compelling literary theme related to questions of gender and sexuality. The theme's function within specific historical contexts, within literary history generally, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, 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.

A creative writing workshop devoted to the art of documentary forms. Assignments may include working with found materials; research, observation and reportage; documentary work in literary and art genres; and learning from documentary film. To learn more about this course, visit the Creative Writing Program at https://creative.writing.upenn.edu.

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 introduction to literary study examines a compelling literary theme related to questions of gender and sexuality. The theme's function within specific historical contexts, within literary history generally, and within contemporary culture, will all be emphasized. In presenting a range of materials and perspectives, 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 examines the formation of the modern notions of human, humanity, and human rights as well as the emergence of institutions of humanitarianism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The course begins with a theoretical study of religious and secular implications of human and humanitarianism as well as social relief and charity in diverse historical settings from the pre-modern and modern times around the world. Following the conceptual analysis, it delves into the historical and social circumstances of humanitarian politics and discourses that shaped human (and environmental) stories of conflict and survival in the contexts of modern war-making, displacement, public health and epidemic diseases as well as natural disasters. It moves from the “long” nineteenth century into twentieth-century political, social, medical, and natural events by analyzing the emergence of a new and global vocabulary of humanitarianism such as refugee, asylum, settlement, and trafficking. Students explore the connections and distinctions between national and supra-national, colonial and postcolonial, metropole and colony.  The course will cover the humanitarian role of Red Cross/Crescent, League of Nations, missionary networks as well as Cold War initiatives such as USAID, PathFinder Fund, UNHCR, Rockefeller Foundation,  as well as post-Cold War initiatives such as Physicians without Borders and their impact on local practices of education, medical assistance,  and public health networks, gender dynamics as well as natural resources and  refugee settlement architecture.