Global Arc

This course will explore the causes and manifestations of housing insecurity and instability in the United States today. It will look at the ways that this contemporary housing crisis affects race, class, and gender dynamics in American cities and suburbs. This class will examine the barriers to safe, sound, and affordable housing. In doing so, we will also look at how social activism and movements have attempted to secure housing as a human right while rejecting its commodified status. We will examine how equitable housing policies can reconfigure urban spaces, combat climate change, and reimagine community governance.

A historical overview of Black literary expression from the 19th century to present day. Will emphasize a critical and analytical approach to considering the social, cultural, and political dimensions of African American literature.

In this course, we will develop a history of concepts in Black Studies and explore concepts that are often taken for granted - like freedom, revolution, culture, and politics. We will throw them into crisis to better understand the liminal underpinnings of many of our long-held theoretical and conceptual assumptions. By placing pressure on the concepts upon which we rely, we offer ourselves and those around us alternate terrains of thought and struggle. Much of our exploration and interrogation of these concepts will mobilize the creative theoretical and literary conceptual articulations of Sylvia Wynter.

Why are some events from the past widely recalled, memorialized, and taught in school, while others are consigned to obscurity? How do acts of historical erasure play in processes of exclusion? How have acts of remembering figured in struggles for justice? Using scholarship, memoirs, visual art, and music, this course examines the relationship between "history" and "memory," focusing on the different ways that race and social power have shaped the relationship in the US and across the African diaspora. We will link representations of the past to debate about issues like public monuments, legal redress, and reparations. AAS Subfield: AACL, GRE

African thought continues to be marginalized, even though radical Black intellectuals have shaped a number of social movements and global intellectual history. African youths are innovating new models that are revolutionizing the sciences, law, social and visual media, fashion, etc. In this class, we read classics of African thought and study contemporary African youth culture together to theorize what is happening in Africa today. This includes reading such African theorists as Frantz Fanon, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Achille Mbembe, and researching innovations in contemporary African urban popular culture.

This course critically examines the development of the southern Civil Rights Movement and the rise of the Black Power insurgency from the end of World War II through the end of the 1960s. We will examine historical research, oral histories, literature, documentaries and other kinds of primary and secondary documentation. AAS Subfield: AACL

Examines the formation and transformation of the Black Atlantic World from the 18th century to the present. Through an examination of a range of literary texts, historical documents, and visual media, the course will consider how the Atlantic Ocean, often associated with the violence and pain of slavery, also became the stage in which new black identities were constructed. How did blacks in the new world imagine themselves as modern subjects? How have African, African American, and Caribbean writers and intellectuals imagined global citizenship? There will be a visit to Ghana during the spring break.

Musical instruments reside at the intersection of varied topics: sound, perception, embodiment, music theory, social values, and more; how has their design influenced the development of music and how might they be reinvented to spur new ideas? We will explore these questions through readings, listening, analysis, labs, and composition. Specific topics include: harmony and the keyboard; tuning and temperament; preparing the piano, digital and analog. More generally, we will consider the productive tension between qualitative and quantitative understandings of musical concepts.

STC209 examines transformations between visuals, sound, structure, and movement. This course explores the notion of generative art, and investigates the parallels between design processes in engineering and the arts. Students learn to work as artists and engineers, and create ambitious open-ended design projects exploring these themes. Transformations in Engineering and the Arts is taught by faculty from CST, COS, MAE, MUS, CEE along with visiting artists, and guest faculty from the Lewis Center for the Arts.

STC209 examines transformations between visuals, sound, structure, and movement. This course explores the notion of generative art, and investigates the parallels between design processes in engineering and the arts. Students learn to work as artists and engineers, and create ambitious open-ended design projects exploring these themes. Transformations in Engineering and the Arts is taught by faculty from CST, COS, MAE, MUS, CEE along with visiting artists, and guest faculty from the Lewis Center for the Arts.