The Window at Montgomery Place |
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Course
Number: HIST 123 |
CRN Number:
90230 |
Class cap: 22 |
Credits: 4 |
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Professor: |
Myra Armstead
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Schedule/Location: |
Mon Wed 10:10 AM
– 11:30 AM Olin 204 |
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Distributional Area: |
HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: Africana Studies; American Studies |
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In 1802, Janet Montgomery began to convert her 380-acre riverfront
property from a “wilderness” into a “pleasure ground.” This transformation
reflected prevailing ideas about the ideal aesthetic relationship between
humans and nature as well as emerging notions regarding scientific agriculture.
Development of the property also mirrored contemporary social and cultural
conventions, as the estate was populated by indentured servants, tenants,
slaves, free workers, and elites. This course approaches Montgomery Place as a
laboratory for understanding social hierarchies, cultural practices, and
evolving visions of nation and “place.”
In Fall 2022, we will focus on Montgomery as a case study of slavery and
slaveholding in the antebellum Hudson Valley.
Migrants and Refugees in the Americas |
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Course
Number: HIST 225 |
CRN Number:
90227 |
Class cap: 18 |
Credits: 4 |
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Professor: |
Miles Rodriguez
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Schedule/Location: |
Mon Wed 11:50 AM
– 1:10 PM Olin 301 |
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Distributional Area: |
HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: American Studies; Architecture; Global & International Studies;
Human Rights; Latin American/Iberian Studies |
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The Border. The Ban. The Wall. Raids. Deportations. Separation
of Families. Immigrant Rights. Sanctuary. Refugee Resettlement. These words –
usually confined to policy, enforcement, and activism related to migrants and
refugees – have recently exploded into the public view and entered into
constant use. The current political administration made migratory and refugee
enforcement, and of migration more generally, a centerpiece of its electoral
campaign and the subject of its first executive orders, generating broad public
controversy. Most migration to the US is from Latin America, by far the largest
single migrant population is from Mexico, and the rise of Central American
migration has proved enduring. Focusing on south-north migration from these
Latin American regions, this class argues that it is impossible to understand
the current political situation in the US without studying the relatively
lesser-known history of migrant and refugee human rights over the last three
decades, including massive protests, movements for sanctuary, and attempts at
reform and enforcement. The class takes into account shifting global
demographics, changing reasons for migration, rapid legal and political
changes, complex enforcement policies
and practices, and powerful community movements for reform, which are often
forgotten with the opening and closing
of a given news cycle. The class also argues that migrant and refugee voices
matter and are critical to understanding migration as an historical and current
problem. The course includes migrant, refugee, and activist narratives, and an
array of historical, legal, political, and other primary sources. Its goal is
to create a more complete historical understanding of Latin American-origin
migration in the contemporary US context. This course is part of the Liberal
Arts Consortium on Forced Migration, Displacement and Education initiative.
This course is part of the Racial Justice Initiative, an interdisciplinary
collaboration among students and faculty to further the understanding of racial
inequality and injustice in the United States and beyond.
Latin America: Race, Religion and
Revolution |
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Course
Number: HIST 331 |
CRN Number:
90240 |
Class cap: 15 |
Credits: 4 |
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Professor: |
Miles Rodriguez
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Schedule/Location: |
Tue 12:30 PM
– 2:50 PM Olin 303 |
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Distributional Area: |
HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: American Studies; Global & International Studies; Human Rights;
Latin American/Iberian Studies; Study of Religions |
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This research seminar will study the violent interactions
between race, religion, and revolution in Latin America from the early
twentieth-century to the present, to understand how these interactions have
mattered to the region’s history and how they explain some of its most violent
current conflicts. The very name “Latin America” derived from and became
associated with specific racial, religious, and revolutionary meanings through
a history of violence. The seminar will begin by studying how racial concepts
formed and became fixed ideas through distinct revolutionary-inspired
intellectual debates on interracial mixture and indigenous rights. Based in
Mexico and Peru, the formation of concepts like global mestizaje, a “cosmic
race,” and indigenismo involved rival valuations of each nation’s indigenous
and colonial histories and cultures, with lasting effects. The seminar will
then explore the simultaneous rise of wars and conflicts over radically
different religious meanings and faiths, within and outside of Catholicism,
including native religions and the rise of Evangelical Protestant Christianity.
The latter part of the seminar will focus on Guatemala, which dramatically
combined extreme violence over race, religion, and revolution, and focused
global attention on indigenous rights and human rights. These histories will
allow for a deeper understanding of the rise of different forms of violence in
Central America today, and therefore of the current human rights, migrant, and
refugee crisis centered there and involving other parts of Latin America and
the US. This seminar emphasizes the narratives, interpretations, and voices of
participants in the history, and critical engagement with these primary sources
in the writing of the history. This course is part of the Racial Justice
Initiative, an interdisciplinary collaboration among students and faculty to
further the understanding of racial inequality and injustice in the United
States and beyond.
Human Rights to Civil Rights |
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Course
Number: HR 189 |
CRN Number:
90244 |
Class cap: 22 |
Credits: 4 |
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Professor: |
Kwame Holmes |
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Schedule/Location: |
Mon Wed 10:10 AM
– 11:30 AM Olin Language Center 118 |
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Distributional Area: |
HA Historical Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: Africana Studies; American Studies |
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(HRP Core course) For much of the 20th century,
Civil Rights activists and Human Rights advocates worked hand-in-hand. Their shared
target: state actors and global systems that exploited human bodies and denied
human dignity in the name of prejudice, nationalism and profit. Yet in the
1960s, a new wave of social movements representing Black, Feminist, LGBTQ,
Chicano, Indigenous and Disabled perspectives shattered this consensus,
demanding an identity-based approach to civil rights advocacy and pushing
against notions of universal human rights. This seminar will introduce students
to the history of this conflict, and allow them to explore for themselves the
benefits and/or costs of advocating for social justice through the figure of
“the human” or through the filter of identity. Students will be introduced to
the foundational writings of identity-based movement leaders, with an eye for
their applicability to contemporary struggles over immigration, anti-trans
violence, mass incarceration and police violence. We will consider the relative
efficacy of direct action, lawsuits, media campaigns and civil disobedience.
Introduction to Multicultural
Philosophy |
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Course
Number: PHIL 104 |
CRN Number:
90257 |
Class cap: 22 |
Credits: 4 |
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Professor: |
Yarran
Hominh |
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Schedule/Location: |
Mon Wed 11:50 AM
– 1:10 PM Hegeman 308 |
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Distributional Area: |
MBV Meaning, Being, Value D+J Difference and Justice |
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What does it mean to be human? What should we do in life?
Does anything we do REALLY matter? We will examine these and other fundamental
philosophical questions, drawing on a diverse range of traditions from across
the world. Readings will be selected from African, Arabic, Hindu, Buddhist,
Confucian, and Western thought.
Theories of Racial Capitalism |
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Course
Number: PS 397 |
CRN Number:
90276 |
Class cap: 12 |
Credits: 4 |
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Professor: |
Lucas Pinheiro
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Schedule/Location: |
Tue 3:10 PM
– 5:30 PM Olin 304 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis |
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Crosslists: Global & International Studies; Human Rights; Philosophy |
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This seminar explores theories of the historical relationship
between ideologies of racial difference and practices of capital accumulation since
the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Students will examine the ways in which a
host of thinkers, critics, and historians have formulated and employed the
concept of “racial capitalism” to reimagine and confront the entanglement of
race and capitalism in two central ways: first, as a theory of capitalism in
which the movement, settlement, and economic exploitation of people of color is
seen as indissociable from regimes of capital accumulation; and second, as a
critique of standard accounts of capitalism that view racism as a cultural
deviation from the market’s economic logic. We will begin by engaging
contemporary theories of racial capitalism since the 1970s, paying particular
attention to the theoretical arguments and historical methods scholars have
used to think about racism as an internal and structural feature of capitalist
development. We will then turn to key texts and constitutive moments in the
histories of Black political thought and global capitalism that will invite us
to reflect on “racial capitalism” as a conceptual and historical category for
critically understanding the convergence of race and capitalism in a long-range
international context. In addition to reading classic texts by Fredrick
Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, W.E.B. Du Bois, Cedric Robinson, Angela Davis, bell
hooks, Barbara Fields, Saidiya Hartman, and others, we will focus on the
socioeconomic transformations to which their works responded, including racial
slavery, settler colonialism, Jim Crow, the underdevelopment of Africa,
neoliberal economic reform, and mass incarceration. Through readings, in-class
discussions, presentations, and a final research paper, students will be
introduced to a wide range of theoretical and historical approaches to
interpreting race and capitalism while also learning about key concepts and
debates in critical race theory, Black feminist thought, and the history of
political economy.
Sociology of Race & Ethnicity |
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Course
Number: SOC 122 |
CRN Number:
90280 |
Class cap: 22 |
Credits: 4 |
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Professor: |
Jomaira Salas Pujos |
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Schedule/Location: |
Tue Thurs 1:30 PM
– 2:50 PM Olin 203 |
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Distributional Area: |
SA Social Analysis D+J Difference and Justice |
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Crosslists: Africana Studies; American Studies; Human Rights; Latin
American/Iberian Studies |
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The Movement for Black Lives, the rise of white nationalist
groups, and U.S. racial demographic changes have put issues of race and racism at
the forefront of national conversations, but what is race and how did it become
so important? This course introduces students to sociological approaches to
race and ethnicity. We will examine race as a socially constructed category by
engaging with multiple sociological theories and accounts of contemporary
racial problems. We will answer questions such as, what is meant when we say
race is socially constructed and not biological? What are the sociohistorical
processes that have cemented racial stratification? And how does the lived
experience of being racialized intersect with other social categories such as
gender, immigration status, and socioeconomic class? Together, we will also
tackle the task of defining, deconstructing, and connecting concepts such as
racism, discrimination, anti-Blackness, and intersectionality. At the end of
the course, students will discuss the consequences of race and ethnicity and
consider alternatives for social change.