Critical Race & Ethnic Studies (CRES)

This course focuses on Indigenous speculative fiction from North America. We will read novels by Native American writers to explore their perspectives on apocalypse, monstrosity, horror, myth, ceremony, and survival. What does apocalyptic fiction look like for a community that has been living in a post-apocalyptic world since the arrival of Europeans? How do distinct cultural figures impact horror and fantasy fiction written by Indigenous novelists? And how can a young adult novel teach its readers about Native American history and life? These are just some of the questions we will explore together this semester

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Literature

This intermediate, Frameworks course draws together modes of multimodal composition online and analysis of the role of race and the rhetorics of anti-racism in online media, social media, and digital storytelling (including podcast and video), among other forms. With a focus on corporate and citizen journalism, students write two short analysis papers on the role of race in online news coverage, produce a multimodal project that contributes to fairer more balanced coverage of an issue related to race in society, and create a plan of action for future online engagement.

GPA units: 1

By turns tragic and triumphant, racial passing in the African American tradition has a long history. Passing for white could offer social and financial stability, and even freedom, for those whose complexions allowed it. But did those who passed find safety, security, or comfort? This CRES Frameworks course will examine complex experiences and representations of racial passing in poetry, fiction, and film as we explore racial passing as tragedy, satire, comedy, and revenge fantasy in different works of African American cultural production. Authors may include James Wheldon Johnson, Nella Larsen, Mat Johnson, and Britt Bennett; films may include Imitation of Life and Undercover Brother. As a CRES Frameworks course, we will also review foundational essays and critical vocabulary for the study of structures of race, ethnicity, and racism. Assignments will include a group presentation, literary analysis paper, midterm, and final project with a choice of format.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Literature

Once a marginalized and discredited artform, comics and graphic novels has enjoyed a cultural resurgence and aesthetic renaissance in the 21st century. Concomitantly, questions of social justice and equity have resurfaced in both U.S. and global culture and have begun to be addressed in long overdue ways. Perhaps unsurprisingly, contemporary comics and graphic novels have become a favorite medium (among others) for intervening in conversations on racial justice, sexual justice and economic justice. Therefore, this class will balance a literary perspective on the artistic contents of this exciting body of literature while simultaneously embracing a social science approach to its contexts. We will explore a growing canon of key authors and texts growing increasingly visible on college syllabi and popular best-seller lists. At the core of this class, we will ask what the graphic narrative form offers seekers of social justice and how can social science enrichen our understanding of the relationship between art and equity.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Literature

This course focuses on the rhetoric and practice of abolition. First, we will look at tactics in speech, writing, and direct action taken up by nineteenth-century abolitionists John Brown, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, William Lloyd Garrison, and Harriet Tubman. Then, we will explore contemporary activists use of abolitionist frameworks to advance the cause of racial justice in work by Michelle Alexander, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Adrienne Marie Brown, Angela Davis, and Alex Vitale. It fulfills Group B and Group D requirements for the English major. Also counts toward Africana Studies. It does NOT fulfill the literature common area requirement.

GPA units: 1

Typically Offered: Annually

This semester, we will consider how Indigenous nations in the Americas create, share, and preserve their stories. We will approach Native American texts through a rhetorical lens, considering the media through which Native American peoples make meaning, and how expressive forms sustain indigenous cultures, relations, and histories despite the ongoing colonization of the American continent. This course takes a hemispheric approach, meaning we will learn about Indigenous texts from North, Central, and South America. By the time you leave CRES 311, you will have engaged with a broad spectrum of indigenous media, from the Cherokee syllabary to Incan Khipus. You will also learn key terms in Native American/Indigenous Studies that will deepen your understanding of your own relations with settler colonialism and Indigenous worldviews and cosmologies.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies

This course examines the trajectories of Toni Morrison's literary career, including books from her early, middle and late stages, as well as some of her own literary and cultural criticism. This course is an opportunity to engage in depth with a single author and to gain a deeper understanding of Morrison's style, form, and representations of American communities and histories.

GPA units: 1

Common Area: Cross-Cultural Studies, Literature

Typically Offered: Alternate Years

Histories of Race and Education in the United States will model active and critical pedagogies that future educators can consider and implement in their profession. It will also transform the ways that students think about their educational experiences and the myth of education as social advancement that permeates our society. Ultimately, this course will give students an interdisciplinary lens through which to ask questions and find answers about the interlocking developments of education and race relations in the United States. This course focuses on Indian education movements (both colonial and decolonial), the common school movement, educational models developed by and for immigrants, and the fugitive pedagogies of Black teachers during segregation in the Jim Crow South.

GPA units: 1