Mini-Syllabus

“Memory loss is one way of coping with damage.” – Jeanette Winterson, author of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?   In this course, we focus on the…

Course Overview This course looks at the history of girls within the juvenile justice system—including forced sterilization, racial segregation, institutional labor, and domestic servitude—and considers the ways in which that…

Did all friendships … involve this discreet and mysterious exchange of qualities, this exchange of power? –Zadie Smith, Swing Time   My friendship with Lila began the day we decided…

Yet had I been alone I would not have done it—I remember my state of mind to be thus at the time—alone I would never have done it. – St.…

First, we end up with paradoxes if we believe that we encounter difference and newness only or primarily intellectually, especially if we believe that the intellect is distinct from perception,…

How one walks through the world, the endless small adjustments of balance, is affected by the shifting weights of beautiful things. – Elaine Scarry   This work was like no…

“What really exists is not things made but things in the making.” – William James “Recognizing isn’t at all like seeing; the two often don’t even agree.” – Sten Nadolny,…

“It’s about a man that is ‘apart from,’ at the beginning; he becomes a part of only at the end. The premise of it was that what’s broken is healed…

How do we educate ourselves with a broken history primarily written and translated by people who do not care about us? As Ann Matter says, we must learn ‘to read…

We live in a genre-obsessed literary culture, but there have always been border-crossers among us. Some of the most powerful prose of the 19th and 20th centuries was written by…

Anthropological representations of black women, sexuality and families in the African Diaspora (early-mid 20th century)   This course will emphasize the history of women anthropologists, especially women from ethnic or…

Most syllabi I know start from a confident assumption of objectivity. These compilations of sources usually assure us of their realness, their solidity, their rationality. I appreciate them, I really…

“We are living in the apocalypse. The first moment of life was the first moment of the apocalypse and death. Please, don’t fear the apocalypse.” –László Krasznahorkai “We’re all the…

Course Description Our society’s relationship with animals is rapidly changing: courts are considering giving chimpanzees personhood, more than 200 U.S. cities and counties have banned the sale of dogs from…