Global Arc

Advanced seminars bring students into spaces of collaborative exploration after pursuing their individual paths of study in American studies, Asian American/diasporic studies, and/or Latino studies. To students culminating programs of study toward one or more of the certificates offered by the Effron Center for the Study of America, advanced seminars offer the important opportunity to integrate their cumulative knowledge.

Creation stories from Turtle Island foreground an integral connection between land and story. "Sky Woman Falling" contains key ecological and environmental knowledge. This course explores the relationship between land and story, emphasizing seeds as sources of sovereignty and repositories of knowledge across generations. We focus on Native New Jersey while understanding the history of this land in the context of global indigeneity and settler colonialism. Course literature engages seeds, land, and the environment from a perspective that crosses the disciplines of literature, American Studies, Ecology, and Environmental Studies.

For agrarians, farms and fields are prized over boardrooms and shopping malls. Agrarianism values hard work, self-sufficiency, simplicity and connection with nature. For some today, it is a compelling antidote to globalization and consumerism. This course examines American agrarianism past and present and its central role in our national imaginary, tracing the complex and contradictory contours of a social and political philosophy that seeks freedom and yet gave way to enslaving, excluding, and ignoring many based on race, immigration status, and gender. A focus will be on new agrarianism and movements for food, land, and social justice.

For over two centuries, Lower East Side tenements have housed immigrant and migrant families. Since 1988, the Tenement Museum has researched and told the stories of Jewish, German, Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Black and Chinese families, connecting individual family stories to larger historical questions. This course offers the unique opportunity to dive deeply into the research and methodology. What sources can we use to tell the story of "ordinary people," and how do those sources change over time? How do contemporary questions of American identity connect to the stories that we tell?

Yorùbá is a West African language spoken by about 50 million native speakers. Most of its speakers live in Nigeria. There are also Yorùbá speakers in Togo, Benin Republic, and the Caribbean. This course offers students an intensive training and practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing Yorùbá. Initial emphasis is on spoken language and conversation all rooted in the culture of the people. During the second term students read and listen to texts that provide an introduction to independent search in the Yorùbá culture.

This course is a continuation of Beginning Yoruba I. It continues to offer students intensive training and practice in speaking, listening, reading, and writing Yorùbá. In Beginning Yoruba II, students read and listen to texts that provide an introduction to independent research in the Yorùbá culture.

This course will further your awareness and understanding of the Wolof language and culture, as well as improve your mastery of grammar, writing skills, and oral skills. Course materials will incorporate various types of text including tales, cartoons, as well as multimedia such as films, videos, and audio recordings.

This course offers a refinement of the student's speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills. It prepares the student for further work in literary, language, and cultural studies as well as for a functional use of Yoruba. Study of structure and vocabulary is based on a variety of cultural documents including literary and nonliterary texts.

This course will further develop students' awareness and understanding of the Wolof language and culture, as well as their mastery of grammar, writing skills, and oral skills. Course materials will incorporate various types of text including tales, cartoons, as well as multimedia such as films, videos, and audio recordings.

An exploration of the past, present, and future of Africa in a multidisciplinary setting. A dozen Africanist faculty members collaborate in an effort to shed light on both the huge potential of Africa and its peoples and the enormous challenges the continent faces. Topics vary from politics, economics, conservation, biodiversity, climate change, the environment, health and disease, and written and oral literature, to the impact of the world on Africa as well as Africa's contributions to and place in worlds present and past. Two lectures, one preceptorial.