Politics

The Council on Foreign Relations has succinctly noted: “The future is African.” This course offers a comprehensive introduction to international politics from the perspective of African states and societies. We will consider how states on the continent are shifting global politics from economic relations and consumer trends to humanitarian interventions and international justice. We will begin our exploration by considering the dramatic changes that African societies have experienced from colonialism to decolonization and the present. We will engage key questions regarding postcolonial governance and popular demands for democracy. How have Africans engaged their governments to call for reform or revolution? Where has this led to effective democracies? Why have some states experienced civil wars? What role have external influences, from Western aid to the expansion of Chinese influence, played on the continent? We will consider the demands of protesters and the causes for rebellion and seek to understand both pressure for and resistance to reform. At the end of the fall semester, students will simulate the US President’s National Security Council to debate a US response to an imagined political crisis on the African continent. In the second semester, we will consider cases of humanitarian crises and conflict. What are the appropriate responses to widespread human-rights violations as they are occurring? Are there cases in which military intervention is warranted? If so, who should intervene? What else can be done? Once the violence has subsided, what actions should the international community take to support peace and justice? We will explore critical ethical, legal, and political questions by considering key cases of intervention and nonintervention, including Rwanda, Darfur, and Libya. Finally, we will evaluate different pathways in pursuing truth, justice, and reconciliation in the aftermath of gross violations of human rights. Cases include the domestic processes established by South Africa’s pioneering Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Rwanda’s Gacaca, as well as the ongoing work of the International Criminal Court. Toward the end of the second semester, students will conduct a UN Security Council simulation to debate possible actions in a simulated humanitarian crisis. Finally, we will end the academic year with an exploration of what an “African future” will mean not just for Africans but also for societies across the globe. During the year, students will engage ideas, readings, and debates in class conversations, in short posts to the class, and in papers. Students will also conduct research projects both on their own and with a partner.

Many of us are struck by the growing irrationality of contemporary democratic politics to the point where we despair of our capacity to address problems like global climate change or pandemics that could pose existential threats to our species, to fashion constructive foreign policy as wars rage, or to face a whole range of urgent but more mundane policy issues. In this class, we will seek to understand disturbing trends like populism, polarization, disinformation, and self-injuring or -defeating politics, as well as the resurfacing of nativism, xenophobia, and racism in contemporary politics—in part on their own terms but also by asking whether they are deeply rooted in human nature, at least on our current best understandings of ourselves. More specifically, democracy seems to rely on at least a minimum degree of rationality, learning, openness to argument and difference, and self-control on the part of the citizens whose votes and opinions guide government policy. But is this reliance foolhardy in light of what recent history, psychology, evolutionary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science teach? Do aspects of our current social and technological circumstances make us less able to manifest these qualities of character today than our Enlightenment progenitors hoped in the era of democratic revolutions—the era from which many of the ideas and institutions that continue to inform our politics today emerged? In this course, we will survey aspects of the political history of recent centuries, as well as our own historical moment, to ask if they should temper confidence in the power of reason in politics. We will also examine recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy that conclude that it is hard to sustain a model of human behavior that places reason and rationality in the driver’s seat. What alternative accounts of human nature are emerging from recent research? And what are their political implications, especially for democratic societies? By bringing together political science, history, and theory with cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, we should be able to occupy the intersection of distinct but equally relevant disciplines to ask whether the Enlightenment’s faith in democracy was misplaced. Or, instead, are there reasons to believe that democracy can maintain its claim to legitimacy, even after reason has been demoted in our understandings of human nature? To address this final question, we will also examine proposals for 21st-century democratic reforms that either seek to adjust downward the expectations on the capacity of citizens to engage in deliberative politics or to refashion political institutions to better summon the better angels of our nature.

For the first time in history, it is not only conceivable but likely that human action will result in the extinction of our species. We transformed our planet from remarkably resilient to deeply vulnerable in a flash, whether time is measured geologically or in terms of cultural evolution. So, we struggle to determine how to cope and what to do about our newly vulnerable world. We face, especially in climate change, an impending global catastrophe beyond the ethical imaginations of all but the most recent generations. Many of the very same forces (especially capitalism and the energy-intensive technology and civilization it spreads on a global scale) that produce planetary peril tend—either directly and intentionally or simply by their further effects—to make it difficult to become more intentional about planetary stewardship at the pace and on the scale required. But just as human activity rendered our world vulnerable, only concerted human action can save it. This means that climate change and other crises of the Anthropocene can only be tamed politically; i.e., through collective action on a global scale of a kind without precedent in human history. Global political action, in turn, requires not-yet-developed ethical resources and political capacities if it is to succeed in saving our planet in ways that avoid unjust and inhumane distributions of costs and suffering. Developing the normative and imaginative resources to grasp the enormity of the advancing climate and environmental crises is an essential first step in creating the capacity for collective action required to respond. While traditional concerns with topics like distributive justice offer partial guidance as we notice, for instance, the overlap between environmental and racial injustice domestically as well as globally, many of the normative issues raised by our rapidly advancing, world-altering powers are simply unprecedented. To develop the normative resources required to navigate this new world, we need simultaneously to seek new orienting ideas while also examining Western, non-Western/indigenous, and contemporary conceptions of social justice, responsibility, relatedness, and ethics anew. Which, if any, can be adapted to incorporate global, intergenerational, and interspecies obligations? Do revisions in received understandings of risk and agency necessitate corollary changes in ideas like democracy, power, responsibility, privacy, and our relation to the natural and built worlds? To address these issues, this course divides into three main units, in turn: 1) We will examine the novel forces at work in the Anthropocene and the unprecedented questions of justice and ethics that they raise (e.g., Is it morally permissible to have a child in a world that may become rapidly uninhabitable? Should we engage in ubiquitous surveillance as the capacity for, perhaps, inadvertent mass destruction becomes more readily available to ordinary persons?). 2) We will also examine the tradition of Western philosophy to survey the resources it contains or lacks for answering these kinds of novel questions. 3) In light of the limited resources that this tradition contains, we will turn to other sources—briefly surveying recent work on non-Western traditions (especially indigenous cultures) and concentrating on contemporary political philosophy and ethics. Students should emerge with a sharper understanding of the political and ethical dimensions of the climate crisis and other environmental issues and the normative resources available to them in determining how to respond personally and politically. This course will fully participate in the spring 2025 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster.

Despite frequent pleas from President Biden and even (former) Speaker McCarthy for national social and political unity and the rise of groups like Bridge USA, Third Way, and No Labels, the seemingly never-ending sociopolitical polarization appears to be the new norm in American political life—and it may not have reached its violent peak back in January 2021. To many politicians, pundits, and others alike, the social and political scene in the United States in the 21st century appears to be one of turmoil, disagreement, division, and instability. We regularly hear about a polarized and deadlocked political class; we read about increasing class and religious differences—from the alleged divides between Wall Street and Main Street to those who are secular and those who are religious; and we often see disturbing, dangerous, and violent images and actions from various politically-oriented groups. This seminar will explore the puzzle of how to move on from this divided state. While the course will briefly examine the veracity of these recent impressions of the American sociopolitical scene, we will center our course on the question: Is policymaking forever deadlocked, or can real political progress be made? Moreover, what are the social and policy implications of polarization? How does President Biden govern in this Trumpian political epoch, and are the political parties representing the will of the people? What about the impact of the 2022 elections? What are we to make of the frequent calls for change and for healing America’s divisions? This seminar seeks to examine these questions and deeper aspects of American political culture today. After reviewing some basics of the political economy, we will study American political cultures from a variety of vantage points—and a number of different stories will emerge. We will cover a lot of ground—from America’s founding to today. We will look at numerous aspects of American social and political life—from examining the masses, political elites, Congress, and policymaking communities to social movements, the media, and America’s position in a global community—all with a focus on policy and moving the country forward. This course will be driven by data, not dogma. We will use modern political-economy approaches based in logic and evidence to find answers to contemporary public-policy problems and questions of polarization. We will treat this material as social scientists, not as ideologues.

It is often said that all politics is economics. The aim of this course is to show that all economics is politics. Though economists and policymakers often present their economic policy decisions and views as neutral—based solely on abstract mathematical models, guided by the laws of nature (or the “invisible hand” of the market)—they are, in fact, driven by transparent political ends and ideology. In this class, we will question the frequently proclaimed universality, neutrality, and inevitability of economic principles and policies through a close examination of liberal and neoliberal ideology and the ways in which it limits political discourse, reforms, and development. We will look at the origins of capitalism. We will examine the economic and political origins and consequences of shock therapy in Latin America and Eastern Europe, structural adjustment policies in countries suffering from economic crisis, and austerity measures imposed by the Troika on Greece and other states in the European Union. We’ll also look at socioeconomic explanations for the recent rise of populist parties and politicians and, especially, popular support for the far right. Some of the questions that we will explore include: What is the role of international economic institutions in domestic and international affairs? How do the interactions between international and domestic institutions and actors determine the production and distribution of scarce resources? And what is the relationship between capitalism and democracy and between international financial institutions and national sovereignty?

The President is the most prominent actor in the US government, and developing an understanding of how and why political leaders make the choices that they do is the goal of this course. Presidents must make countless decisions while in office and, as presidential scholars George C. Edwards III and Stephen J. Wayne explain, “Executive officials look to [the presidency] for direction, coordination, and general guidance in the implementation of policy...Congress looks to it for establishing priorities, exerting influence...the heads of foreign governments look to it for articulating positions, conducting diplomacy, and flexing muscle; the general public looks to it for...solving problems and exercising symbolic and moral leadership....” This course will examine and analyze the development and modern practice of presidential leadership in the United States by studying the evolution of the modern presidency, which includes the process of presidential selection and the structure of the presidency as an institution. We will then reflect on the ways in which presidents make decisions and seek to shape foreign, economic, and domestic policy, which will be based on a variety of literatures, ranging from social psychology to organizational behavior. We will look at the psychology and character of presidents in this section of the course. We will also explore the relationship of the presidency to other major governmental institutions and organized interests. We will pay particular attention to how presidents have attempted to expand presidential power and the various struggles that the White House has had with the ministry, Congress, the Judicary, and global institutions such as the United Nations. We will pay particular attention to a particular set of presidents: Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Donald Trump. We will conclude by examining the post-9/11 era of Bush, Obama, and Trump, where each of these presidents have greatly sought to increase the power of the Oval Office relative to other branches of government. While the course is open to all students, the workload is intense and prior background in American history and politics is preferable.

The 21st-century political economy is often blamed for backsliding and outright decay in many of the world’s democratic societies. An increasingly global, financialized, deregulated, information-intensive, and automated economy tends to produce high levels of inequality in wealth and income, accompanied by growing resentment at the unfairness of the distribution of resources. This resentment, in turn, feeds populist politics, often with an authoritarian drift and a nativist tendency to scapegoat immigrants, minorities, and/or (liberal) elites for the growing precariousness experienced by many. At the same time, unresponsive political institutions that seem powerless to regulate economic forces produce growing disenchantment with traditional democracy and mainstream political parties, reinforcing democratic decay. This diagnosis begs the question: What does 21st-century democracy require of its political economy? Posing the question from this perspective directs attention to the reasons that many democratic theorists have viewed democratic capitalism as dilemmatic rather than oxymoronic. They have simultaneously embraced two ideas. First, a capitalist economy—in which investment decisions remain largely at the control of private owners of capital and others’ need to sell their labor to firms organized to produce profit while goods and jobs are distributed by markets and regulated by pricing mechanism—has so far proved an essential prerequisite to the successful institutionalization of modern, constitutional, representative democracy (due, for instance, to the way in which it diffuses social power, supports the emergence of a sizable middle class, democratizes via commodifying culture, and incentivizes constructive cultivation of individual capacity and social innovation). But second, this kind of economy also unleashes powerful social forces that predictably distort or undermine fuller democratization; for instance, by generating levels of social inequality incompatible with the normative requirements of equal citizenship and, more generally, by allowing one of the main social systems via which society is reproduced to operate autonomously and, therefore, often in tension with the distinct logic of democratically formed opinion and will. In this course, we will examine these issues by attempting to identify: (1) the most defensible conceptions of democracy for the 21st century, (2) the most important and politically relevant trends of the contemporary economic epoch, and (3) whether recent economic developments are contributing to contemporary democratic decay. We will then (4) ask whether capitalism’s antidemocratic drives have ever been successfully tamed in the past and (5) seek to evaluate the prospects of some current proposal for taming capitalism’s antidemocratic impulses.

Thomas Hobbes believed that the State, or what he called the Leviathan, was the necessary result of individuals trying to escape from a state of nature, where existence was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Charles Tilly compared states to racketeers; Vladimir Lenin, following the lead of Marx and Engels, wrote that the State exists to maintain the domination and oppression of one class by another. John F. Kennedy famously proclaimed, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country,” demanding Americans’ unquestioning, altruistic loyalty to the State. And for about two centuries, communists, socialists, anarchists, and social democrats have debated whether the State must be reformed, overthrown, or abolished in the name of democracy, equality, and popular sovereignty. These different and often contradictory approaches reveal that there is no common agreement on the nature or role of the State. So, what is the State? Where did it come from? What are the sources and limits of its power? Why does it have so much control over our lives? These are the questions that we’ll ask in this class. We will pay special attention to the relationship between the development of the modern state and capitalism; the rise of the welfare state, the epitome of modern state power; and state violence. We’ll discuss alternative visions of the State’s role and responsibility and ask: Do we need the State, and can we make the State work for us?

How does a chronic illness affect a person’s orientation to the everyday? What are the social and political forces that underpin life in a homeless shelter? What is the experiential world of a blind person, a musician, a refugee, or a child at play? In an effort to answer these and like-minded questions, anthropologists have become increasingly interested in developing phenomenological accounts of particular lived realities in order to understand—and convey to others—the nuances and underpinnings of such realities in terms that more general social or symbolic analyses cannot achieve. In this context, phenomenology offers an analytic method that works to understand and describe in words phenomena as they appear to the consciousnesses of certain peoples. The phenomena most often in question for anthropologists include the workings of time, perception, selfhood, language, bodies, suffering, and morality as they take form in particular lives within the context of any number of social, linguistic, and political forces. In this course, we will explore phenomenological approaches in anthropology by reading and discussing some of the most significant efforts along these lines. Each student will also try their hand at developing a phenomenological account of a specific social or subjective reality through a combination of ethnographic research, participant observation, and ethnographic writing.

From hit television shows such as CSI, Bones, and Forensic Files, to newspaper headlines that breathlessly relate the discovery of a murder victim’s remains, and to Amanda Knox, the Golden State Killer, and other real-life courtroom cases, it is clear that the world of forensic science has captured the public imagination. Forensic science describes the application of scientific knowledge to legal problems and encompasses an impressively wide variety of subdisciplines and areas of expertise, ranging from forensic anthropology to wildlife forensics. In this course, we will specifically focus on the realm of forensic biology—the generation and use of legally relevant information gleaned from the field of biology. In an effort to move beyond sensationalism and the way it is portrayed in the public media, we will explore the actual science and techniques that form the basis of forensic biology and seek to understand the use and limitations of such information in the legal sphere. Beginning with the historical development of forensic biology, selected topics will include death and stages of decomposition; determination of postmortem intervals; the role of microorganisms in decomposition; vertebrate and invertebrate scavenging; wound patterning; urban mummification; biological material collection and storage; victim and ancestral identification by genetic analysis; the use of genealogical and DNA databases such as CODIS; and the biological basis of other criminalistics procedures, including fingerprinting and blood-type analysis. Finally, we will consider DNA privacy and Supreme Court rulings, including the 2013 decision, Maryland v. King, that established the right of law enforcement to take DNA samples from individuals arrested for a crime. In all of these areas, the techniques and concepts employed are derived from some of the most fundamental principles and structure-function relationships that underlie the entire field of biology. No background in biology is required; indeed, a primary objective of this course is to use our exploration within the framework of forensic biology as a means to develop a broader and more thorough understanding of the science of biology.

Economics has a profound impact on all of our lives, from where we live and go to school to what we do for a living, what we eat, and how we entertain ourselves. Economics is also crucially intertwined with the social and political issues that we care about, from global climate change to poverty and discrimination. In this course, we will examine the role of economics and economists in a range of key policy issues, such as money, taxation, governmental spending, finance, international trade, antitrust, labor market, education, environment protection, and climate change. We will focus on how economics has been used and, perhaps more importantly, misused in these policy issues. We begin this course with a brief history of the United States and the global economy. We then introduce a variety of approaches to economic analysis, including neoclassical, Keynesian, behavioral, Marxian, and feminist. Finally, we’ll apply these contrasting theoretical perspectives to current economic issues and controversies. Requirements will include frequent, short writing assignments and participation in small-group projects.

This yearlong course, based on the professor’s new book—Legal and Political Foundations of Capitalism: The End of Laissez Faire?—introduces students to the emerging Law and Political Economy tradition in economics. The course will deal with four interrelated questions: (1) What does economic regulation mean? (2) What is the relationship between institutions, legal ones in particular, and the economy? (3) How does one theoretically analyze the nature of property rights, money, corporations, and power? (4) How does rethinking the relationship between law and the economy challenge conventional ideas about the nature of economic regulation? The course will seek to understand the nature of power and its relationship to institutions, especially legal ones, by considering property rights and money, the business corporation, constitutional political economy, the links between “free markets” and authoritarianism, colonialism and race, and inequality as it intersects across class, race, and gender lines. We will deal with these questions by focusing on the insights of the Original Institutional Economics and American Legal Realists and their relationship to the classical political economy tradition (especially Adam Smith and Karl Marx). The Law and Political Economy framework will be contrasted with the insights of New Institutional Economics, with the latter’s basis in neoclassical economics. Core questions that will be addressed include: What is laissez faire, and does legal-economic history show any proof of its existence? What is assumed when dueling perspectives advocate “more” or “less” government intervention; and are these, in fact, false binaries that distract from core questions of public policy and key challenges such as climate instability, growing inequality, and threats to democracy? No prior background in economics is required.

What assumptions, methodologies, values, vision, and theoretical foundations do microeconomists incorporate and rely upon for analyzing economic behavior at the individual level? What insights, knowledge, inferences, and/or conclusions can be gleaned through examining characteristics of individual firms, agents, households, and markets in order to understand capitalist society? How do our theories of individual and business behavior inform our interpretation of distributional outcomes? Among other topics, this yearlong seminar in microeconomics will offer an inquiry into economic decision-making vis-à-vis: theories of demand and supply, the individual (agents), households, consumption (consumer choice); theories of production and costs; theories of the firm (business enterprise, corporations); theories of markets and competition; prices and pricing theory; and public policy. This course will provide a rigorous analysis of theory and policy in the neoclassical and broad critical political economy traditions. A central theoretical issue will be an engagement of the “governments versus markets” dichotomy, which is at the heart of neoclassical economics. This important theme will be addressed by investigating the rival treatments of institutions in neoclassical economics (New Institutional Economics) and the Law and Political Economy tradition. Among other topics, we will analyze how these different approaches to institutions and the economy study cost-benefit analysis, Pareto optimality, business competition, and the Coase Theorem. The spring semester will incorporate the study of business history.

In this yearlong seminar course, we will explore the history of the US labor movement from its beginnings in the colonial society of the 1600s to the “globalized” cities of the 2020s. Beginning with the involuntary labor arrangements that structured the continent’s economy from the 1600s to the Civil War, we will focus on the international workers’ movement against slavery: abolitionism. The abolitionist struggle will take us from the first rebellions of involuntary workers to the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. From there, we will consider the strikes, uprisings, and organizations of the late 19th- and 20th-century industrial labor movement, beginning with the Great Upheaval of 1877 and ending with the postindustrial urban uprisings of 1967. We will consider the peak of “big labor” during the mid-20th century, alongside the peak in Cold War-era US imperialism that structured the economy during that time. We will begin the spring semester by thoroughly considering the major structural shifts in the US economy that began in the 1970s, generally referred to as a combination of “globalization” and “neoliberalism.” These shifts degraded job quality and worker power, relegating the working class to service positions in the “global city” structure. In responding to these shifts, we will consider numerous autonomous unions and “worker centers” that have sprung up to address the new issues of this new economy in the past 20 years. We will also focus on broader 21st-century people’s struggles—like the Anti-Globalization Movement, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter—and how these movements relate to the ongoing workers’ movement. Requirements for the course include discussion posts, short papers, and a group presentation. For the course’s major project, students will have two options. The first is writing two connected final essays, one for each semester. The second is engaging in a yearlong research project, which can be focused on service learning and in-the-field placements with local worker centers and unions, if students wish. Students will meet with the instructor every other week for individual conferences, depending on the student’s needs and the progress of their conference projects. Required texts may include: Strike! by Jeremy Brecher, The Many-Headed Hydra by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, An African-American and Latinx History of the United States by Paul Ortiz, The Global City by Saskia Sassen, New Labor in New York by Ruth Milkman and Ed Ott, and Labor Law for the Rank and Filer by Staughton Lynd and Daniel Gross.

Feminist economics arose as a critique of the androcentric and Eurocentric assumptions underlying mainstream (neoclassical) economics. But over the past 30 years, feminist economics has developed into a coherent perspective in its own right. Feminist economics acknowledges and investigates power differentials in both the home and the market on the basis of race/ethnicity, gender, class, sexual orientation, nation, and disability status. Feminist economics takes seriously the crucial economic impact of caring labor (both paid and unpaid) in the home and the broader community. And feminist economics proposes alternate measures of economic success that emphasize bodily integrity, human agency, sustainability, and human rights. We will begin this course with a brief exploration of the historical context for the development of feminist economics; i.e., the rise of feminist movements in both the developed world and the Global South. We’ll then examine the differences between feminist and mainstream neoclassical economics by examining questions such as: What do we mean by “the economy”? Do transactions and activities have to be monetized to be “economic”? How is caring labor (both paid and unpaid) conceptualized in economics, and how does the performance of this labor impact one’s status in both the labor market and the household? The answers to these and similar questions will help us reconceptualize economics to take account of all of the labor necessary to reproduce individuals and social/economic structures. Finally, we’ll apply this reconceptualized, feminist economics to questions of economic policy. We’ll examine a number of case studies, including: the persistence of occupational segregation and wage differentials by gender and race and policies to mitigate these inequalities; the impact of domestic violence and other forms of nonmarket coercion on economic outcomes; the impact of reproductive control (or the lack thereof) on the economic trajectories of both individuals and societies; and the (re)conceptualization and measurement of economic development and growth. In addition to class participation, requirements for the course will include frequent short papers on the readings, leading class discussions (in pairs), participation in group presentations, weekly participation in a service-learning project, and a placement journal. Possible service-learning placement sites include a domestic violence shelter, a group promoting healthy relationships in local high schools, a local LGBT support and advocacy organization, a reproductive-rights group, or an organization advocating for the rights of domestic workers.

What should monetary policies focus on? How should governments decide on taxation and fiscal spending? How do monetary policies and fiscal policies work? What factors impact income and employment in the short run and in the long run? Why are there economic and financial crises? Who is responsible for financial crises? What does modern finance do? Has the financial market grown too big? How big is too big? What’s the relationship between the economy and the environment? In this course, we will examine the fundamental debates in macroeconomic theory and policymaking. The standard analytical framework of GDP determination in the short run will be used as our entry point of analysis. On top of that, we will examine multiple theoretical and empirical perspectives on money, credit and financial markets, investment, governmental spending, unemployment, growth and distribution, crisis, technological change, and long swings of capitalist economies. For each topic, we will not only examine and discuss the theories but also use multiple in-class, hands-on activities to learn tangible, intuitive, and accessible methods for analyzing up-to-date economic data and simulating the macroeconomy in Excel or Google Sheets.

Environmental injustice is both an outcome and a process. As an outcome, environmental injustice is the unequal distribution of environmental burdens (or benefits) in a society. As a process, environmental injustice is the history and institutions that project political, economic, and social inequalities into the environmental sphere. In this course, we will discuss the broad environmental justice literature and connect it with our immediate community: Yonkers, NY. We will first measure the disproportionate environmental burdens in the city’s low-income and minority neighborhoods. Then, we will utilize economics to examine the causal mechanisms of environmental injustice. We will focus on the evolution of the housing market, the changing demographics of Yonkers, the location choice of major pollution sources, political representation and power, exclusionary and expulsive zoning policies, etc. We will draw knowledge from multiple fields—economics, politics, sociology, geography, etc. We will examine the issue using multiple methodologies and assess different policy options for improving environmental and climate justice in Yonkers. We will also examine the policy implications of each environmental injustice issue. For each topic/issue, we will have in-depth discussions based on the readings, followed by in-class collaborative research activities that produce qualitative and quantitative evidence of environmental injustice in Yonkers. To visualize environmental injustice, we will use a geographic information system (GIS) to make maps. You will then be asked to write about the issue in an assignment and discuss potential policy recommendations.

As we want to engage in individual and collective efforts toward sustainable and climate-change mitigating solutions, this workshop offers an opportunity for students to explore the multiple ways in which “sustainability” can be fostered and developed at an institution like Sarah Lawrence College. Students will work in small groups on a variety of projects and produce research and educational material that can lead to concrete and actionable proposals for the College and our community to consider. Students will determine their own areas of interest and research, from energy and water-usage monitoring to composting solutions, recycling/reusing and consumer sobriety, landscaping choices, pollinators and natural diversity, food growing, natural and human history of the land, and community collaborations, to name a few. As part of their project effort, students will engage with College administrators who are actively working toward sustainable solutions, as well as student, staff, and faculty groups such as the Warren Green vegetable garden, the Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collective on the Environment (SLICE), and the Sustainability Committee. We will also explore the possibility of writing grants in coordination with other actors at the College. This workshop will meet once a week for one hour. It is offered as pass/fail based on attendance and a group project that will mostly be developed during our meeting time. It is open to all students, including first-year students. All skills and areas of expertise are welcome, from environmental science to writing and visual and studio arts—but any interest in issues of sustainability and a strong sense of dedication will suffice!

Environmental injustice is both an outcome and a process. As an outcome, environmental injustice is the unequal distribution of environmental burdens (or benefits) in a society. As a process, environmental injustice is the history and institutions that project political, economic, and social inequalities into the environmental sphere. In this course, we will discuss the broad environmental justice literature and connect it with our immediate community: Yonkers, NY. We will first measure the disproportionate environmental burdens in the city’s low-income and minority neighborhoods. Then, we will utilize economics to examine the causal mechanisms of environmental injustice. We will focus on the evolution of the housing market, the changing demographics of Yonkers, the location choice of major pollution sources, political representation and power, exclusionary and expulsive zoning policies, etc. We will draw knowledge from multiple fields—economics, politics, sociology, geography, etc. We will examine the issue using multiple methodologies and assess different policy options for improving environmental and climate justice in Yonkers. We will also examine the policy implications of each environmental injustice issue. For each topic/issue, we will have in-depth discussions based on the readings, followed by in-class collaborative research activities that produce qualitative and quantitative evidence of environmental injustice in Yonkers. To visualize environmental injustice, we will use a geographic information system (GIS) to make maps. You will then be asked to write about the issue in an assignment and discuss potential policy recommendations.

This is an open course designed to enlighten our creative consciousness, using music and nonfiction filmmaking as tools for liberation. Music and other sonic experiences are intrinsically connected to how we witness, experience, and tell nonfiction stories. In this course, we will examine work where the score itself plays a character while also creating films of our own inspired by the soundtrack as a living piece of our form. Broken into groups, students collectively will create a five-minute film that invites the viewer into subjects that are engaging and new, while also challenging the binary and often Western notion of what storytelling can be. The role that music and sound can play as a form of protest, meditation, and transformation are at the heart of our visual experience. In the spirit of global movements toward a more just and sustainable world, this course infuses a cinematic quest for truth in storytelling with the undeniable power that music brings to our understanding of a moment in time, a scene, a relationship, and ourselves. From American Utopia to Amazing Grace and Gimme Shelter, students will screen, discuss, and be inspired to create work that challenges all of the senses.

In this yearlong seminar, we will begin by examining competing paradigms and approaches to understanding “development” and the “Third World.” We will set the stage by answering the question: What did the world look like 500 years ago? The purpose of this part of the course is to acquaint us with and to analyze the historical origins and evolution of a world political economy of which the "Third World" is an intrinsic component. We will thus study the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of merchant and finance capital, and the colonization of the world by European powers. We will analyze case studies of colonial "development" to understand the evolving meaning of this term. These case studies will help us assess the varied legacies of colonialism apparent in the emergence of new nations through the fitful and uneven process of decolonization that followed. The next part of the course will look at the United Nations and the role that some of its associated institutions have played in the post-World War II global political economy, one marked by persistent and intensifying socioeconomic inequalities as well as frequent outbreaks of political violence across the globe. By examining the development institutions that have emerged and evolved since 1945, we will attempt to unravel the paradoxes of development in different eras. We will deconstruct the measures of development through a thematic exploration of population, resource use, poverty, access to food, the environment, agricultural productivity, and different development strategies adopted by Third World nation-states. We will then examine globalization and its relation to emergent international institutions and their policies; for example, the IMF, World Bank, AIIB, and WTO. We will then turn to contemporary development debates and controversies that increasingly find space in the headlines—widespread land grabbing by sovereign wealth funds, China, and hedge funds; the “global food crisis”; epidemics and public-health challenges; and the perils of climate change. Throughout the course, our investigations of international institutions, transnational corporations, the role of the state, and civil society will provide the backdrop for the final focus of the class: the emergence of regional coalitions for self-reliance, environmental and social justice, and sustainable development. Our analysis of development in practice will draw upon case studies primarily from Africa but also from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the United States. Conference work will be closely integrated with the themes of the course, with a two-stage substantive research project beginning in the fall semester and completed in the spring. Project presentations will incorporate a range of formats, from traditional papers to multimedia visual productions. Smaller creative projects are also a component of the course, including podcasts, videos, art, music, and other forms. Where possible and feasible, students will be encouraged to do primary research during fall study days and winter and spring breaks. Some experience in the social sciences is desired but not required.

Where does the food we eat come from? Why do some people have enough food to eat and others do not? Are there too many people for the world to feed? Who controls the world’s food? Will global food prices continue their recent rapid rise; and, if so, what will be the consequences? What are the environmental impacts of our food production systems? How do answers to these questions differ by place or by the person asking the question? How have they changed over time? This course will explore the following fundamental issue: the relationship between development and the environment—focusing, in particular, on agriculture and the production and consumption of food. The questions above often hinge on the contentious debate concerning population, natural resources, and the environment. Thus, we will begin by critically assessing the fundamental ideological positions and philosophical paradigms of “modernization,” as well as critical counterpoints that lie at the heart of this debate. Within this context of competing sets of philosophical assumptions concerning the population-resource debate, we will investigate the concept of “poverty” and the making of the Third World, access to food, hunger, grain production and food aid, agricultural productivity (the Green and Gene revolutions), biofuels, the role of transnational corporations (TNCs), the international division of labor, migration, globalization and global commodity chains, and the different strategies adopted by nation-states to “‘develop” natural resources and agricultural production. Through a historical investigation of environmental change and the biogeography of plant domestication and dispersal, we will look at the creation of indigenous, subsistence, peasant, plantation, collective, and commercial forms of agriculture. We will analyze the physical environment and ecology that help shape but rarely determine the organization of resource use and agriculture. Rather, through the dialectical rise of various political-economic systems such as feudalism, slavery, mercantilism, colonialism, capitalism, and socialism, we will study how humans have transformed the world’s environments. We will follow with studies of specific issues: technological change in food production; commercialization and industrialization of agriculture and the decline of the family farm; food and public health, culture, and family; land grabbing and food security; the role of markets and transnational corporations in transforming the environment; and the global environmental changes stemming from modern agriculture, dams, deforestation, grassland destruction, desertification, biodiversity loss, and the interrelationship with climate change. Case studies of particular regions and issues will be drawn from Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and the United States. The final part of the course examines the restructuring of the global economy and its relation to emergent international laws and institutions regulating trade, the environment, agriculture, resource-extraction treaties, the changing role of the state, and competing conceptualizations of territoriality and control. We will end with discussions of emergent local, regional, and transnational coalitions for food self-reliance and food sovereignty, alternative and community-supported agriculture, community-based resource-management systems, sustainable development, and grassroots movements for social and environmental justice. Films, multimedia materials, and distinguished-guest lectures will be interspersed throughout the course. One farm/factory field trip is possible if funding/timing permits. The lecture participants may also take a leading role in a campus-wide event on “the climate crisis, food, and hunger,” tentatively planned for spring. Please mark your calendars when the dates are announced, as attendance for all of the above is required. Attendance and participation are also required at special guest lectures and film viewings in the Social Science Colloquium Series approximately once per month. The Web Board is an important part of the course. Regular required postings of short essays will be made here, as well as follow-up commentaries with your colleagues. There will be occasional short, in-class essays during the semester and a final exam at the end. Group conferences will focus on in-depth analysis of certain course topics and will include short prepared papers for debates, the debates themselves, and small-group discussions. You will prepare a poster project on a topic of your choice, related to the course, which will be presented at the end of the semester in group conference, as well as in a potential public session.

Why this course and speaker series/community conversations now? The rise of the New Right is a critically important phenomenon of our time, shaping politics, policies, practices, and daily life for everyone. The insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, is only one egregious expression of long-term ideas and actions by a newly emboldened collective of right-wing ideologues. The violent challenges to the realities of a racially and ethnically diverse America is not a surprise. Nor is the normalization of White Power politics and ideas within mainstream politics and parties. The varied nature of the New Right’s participants—their ideologies, grievances, and goals—requires deep analysis of their historical roots, as well as their contemporary manifestations. The wide range of platforms and spaces for communicating hate, lies, and calls for violence against perceived enemies require their own responses, including the creation of platforms and spaces that offer analysis and alternatives. Seriously engaging the New Right, attempting to offer explanations for its rise, is key to challenging the authoritarian drift in our current political moment and its uncertain evolution and future. To do so requires our attention. It also requires a transdisciplinary approach, something inherent to our College and to geography as a discipline, be it political, economic, cultural, social, urban, historical, or environmental geography. The goal of this seminar, one that is accompanied by a planned facilitated speaker series and community conversations, is to build on work in geography and beyond and engage a wide array of thinkers from diverse disciplines and backgrounds, institutions, and organizations. In addition to teaching the course itself, my hope is that it can be a vehicle to engage our broader communities—at the College and in our region, as well as by reaching out to our widely dispersed, multigenerational alumni. Pairing the course with a subset of facilitated/moderated speaker series, live-streamed in collaboration with our Alumni Office, offers the chance to bring these classroom conversations and contemporary and pressing course topics, grounded in diverse readings and student engagement, to a much wider audience and multiple communities. In this class, we will seek to understand the origins and rise of the New Right in the United States and elsewhere as it has taken shape in the latter half of the 20th century to the present. We will seek to identify the origins of the New Right and what defines it, explore the varied geographies of the movement and its numerous strands, and identify the constituents of the contemporary right coalition. In addition, we will explore the actors and institutions that have played a role in the expansion of the New Right (e.g., courts, state and local governments, Tea Party, conservative think tanks, lawyers, media platforms, evangelical Christians, militias) and the issues that motivate the movement (e.g., anticommunism, immigration, environment, white supremacy/nationalism, voter suppression, neoliberal economic policies, antiglobalization, free speech). This is a reading-intensive, discussion-oriented, open, large seminar in which we will survey a broad sweep of the recent literature on the New Right. While the class focuses most specifically on the US context, conference papers based on international/comparative case studies are welcome. Students will be required to attend all associated talk and film viewings; write weekly essays and engage colleagues in conversation online the night before seminar; and write two short research papers that link the themes of the class with their own interests, creative products, research agenda, and/or political engagement. Students will also do two associated creative projects/expressions. Transdisciplinary collaborative activities across the College and community are encouraged. Film, performance, written commentary, podcasts, workshops, and other forms of action can provide additional outlets for student creative projects and engagement.

Qualified students will attend the twice-weekly group conferences for Intermediate Greek (see course description) and complete all assignments required for those conferences.

Qualified students will attend the twice-weekly seminar meetings for What Should I Do? Democracy, Justice, and Humanity in Ancient Greek Tragedy (see course description under Literature) and complete the reading assignments for that course. Students will also meet in group conference twice a week to read (in Greek) and discuss one ancient Greek tragedy selected by the group. 

What are the distinctive features of our “modern” civilization? A partial list would include representative democracy, political parties, nationalism, religious pluralism and secularization, mass production, rapid technological change, consumerism, free markets, a global economy, and unceasing artistic experimentation. All these characteristically modern things became established in the 19th century, and most of them were pioneered by Europeans. Yet in Europe, with its ancient institutions and deeply-rooted traditions, this new form of civilization encountered greater resistance than it did in that other center of innovation, the United States. The resulting tensions between old and new in Europe set the stage for the devastating world wars and revolutions of the 20th century. In this course, we will examine various aspects of the epochal transformation in ways of making, thinking, and living that occurred in Europe during what historians call the “long 19th century” (1789–1914). We will also survey the political history of the period and consider how the development of modern civilization in Europe was shaped by the resistance it encountered from the defenders of older ways. During the first semester, we will consider events and developments that transpired between 1760 and 1860: the French Revolution and conquests of Napoleon, the flourishing of Romanticism, the appearance of modern industry in Great Britain, the emergence of the principal modern political ideologies (conservativism, liberalism, socialism), and the revolutions of 1830 and 1848. In the spring, we will look at subsequent developments up to 1914: the unification of Italy and Germany, the rise of mass politics, imperialism, and the outbreak of World War I. We will also examine trends in thought and in the arts, such as French Impressionism, fin de siècle irrationalism, and the post-1890 avant-garde.

Can the biography of Black leaders replace the history of African Americans? Or does biography raise of the problem of the "Great Man" theory of history? In terms of history, what is gained and what is lost in the biographical approach? In this lecture, students will consider this question as they examine the recent award-winning biographies of Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Rosa Parks, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali, and so forth. Students will look at the lives of several artists and writers to explore different definitions of leadership. The weekly readings will be complemented by weekly film screenings, placing Black leadership in historical context.

This course examines Latin America in the making. From the time of Andean ayllus to the contemporary battles between the populist left and the populist right, this lecture course offers a survey of the more than five centuries of the history of the region that we know as Latin America. The course will examine the rise and fall of the Aztec and Inca empires, the colonial order that emerged in their stead, independence from Iberian rule, and the division of the empire into a myriad of independent republics or states searching for a “nation.” In the second part of the course, by focusing on specific national trajectories, we will then ask how the American and Iberian civilizations shaped the new national experiences and how those who made claims on the “nation” defined and transformed the colonial legacies. In the third and final portion of the course, we will study the long 20th century and the multiple experiences of, and interplay between, anti-Americanism, revolution, populism, and authoritarianism. We will ask how different national pacts and projects attempted to solve the problem of political inclusion and social integration that emerged after the consolidation of the 19th-century liberal state. Using primary and secondary sources, fiction and film, the course will provide students with an understanding of historical phenomena such as mestizaje, caudillismo, populism, reformism, corruption, and informality, among other concepts key to the debates in contemporary Latin America. The course meets for one weekly lecture and one weekly group conference. Aside from mandatory attendance and participation, the requirements for the course include an individual exam, a collaborative research project, and a primary source analysis.

South Asia, a region at the geographic center of the world’s most important cultural, religious, and commercial encounters for millennia, has a rich history of cultural exchanges. Its central location on the Indian Ocean provided it with transnational maritime connections to Africa and Southeast Asia, while its land routes facilitated constant contact with the Eurasian continent. The region has witnessed numerous foreign rules, from the early Central Asian Turkic dynasties to the Mughals and, finally, the British. After gaining independence from British colonial rule, the region was eventually partitioned into three different nations—India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh—each with its distinctive form of government. South Asia has produced a significant diaspora worldwide, preserving its cultural heritage and creating further cultural exchanges with the adopted nations, thereby influencing global culture. Despite facing development challenges and political instability, South Asia is rapidly developing within the capitalistic world economy and becoming an important player on the global scene, both politically and culturally. This course will provide students with a survey of South Asia from the era of the early Indus Civilization to the present. Lectures and sources will trace major political events and the region’s cultural, ecological, and economic developments that have significantly shaped South Asian history. Students will analyze both primary and secondary sources, enhancing their understanding of this diverse society. They are expected to engage in lectures, reading, class discussions, group work, and writing to examine the major themes and debates in South Asian history and develop sound arguments.

Close your eyes and listen. The human experience is highly sonic. Along with touch, hearing is among the most personal of our bodily senses. Now, you may hear the sound of passing cars, a lawnmower outside, or the murmur of voices from the hallway. But does race have a sound? What does Jim Crow sound like? Are there sonic dimensions to Black Power? Can popular music propel social movements, or can we hear social change? This lecture guides students through a survey of color and sound. We will explore historical case studies where concepts of race and recorded music collide. Through a careful analysis of a variety of cultural texts—including memoirs from specific artists and critical reviews of albums—and a consideration of contextual historical events and phenomena, students will consider how popular culture and music have shaped concepts of race and ethnicity over the 20th century.

History is replete with rabid pogroms, merciless religious wars, tragic show trials, and even genocide. For as long as people have congregated, they have defined themselves, in part, as against an other—and have persecuted that other. But history has also yielded systems of constraints. So how can we hope to achieve a meaningful understanding of the human experience without examining both the wrongs and the rights? Should the human story be left to so-called realists, who claim that power wins out over ideals every time? Or is there a logic of mutual respect that offers better solutions? This lecture examines the history of international human rights and focuses on the claims that individuals and groups make against states in which they live.

This community-partnership course will bring students closer to Latin American oral history writing in order to write their own community-based narratives. Since the advent of military and repressive regimes in late 20th-century Latin America, social scientists and historians have turned to oral histories. By interviewing eyewitnesses to reconstruct the past and act upon the present, oral histories originally served to document the stories of both oppressors and oppressed but, since then, have expanded in scope and purpose. Building on existing rich oral traditions in the region, this course will first explore the methodologies of Latin American colonial chroniclers, popular educators, activists, and professional historians to understand the historical origins and context of production of different oral histories, as well as their academic and political use. Then, focusing on the history of late 20th-century Chile and its transition from socialism to neoliberalism, students will read, view, or listen to different oral history-based narratives, including life histories, documentaries, biographies, and truth and reconciliation commissions, among others. By doing so, the course will help students both get a glimpse of Latin American history and assess and develop skills to craft their own narratives based on the observation of, and participation in, the Yonkers community. The third and final part of the course will be devoted to workshop the narratives produced by students. Throughout the semester, students will have the opportunity to work with a particular community organization in Yonkers. Students are expected to develop a conference project based on their work with the community, using the oral-history questions, tools, and problems learned and discussed in the seminar. The conference project may take any format, including essays, podcasts, short videos, timelines, and interactive maps.

This course aims at improving and perfecting the students’ speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills, as well as their knowledge of Italy’s contemporary culture and literature. In order to acquire the necessary knowledge of Italian grammar, idiomatic expressions, and vocabulary, a review of all grammar will be carried out throughout the year. As an introduction to modern Italian culture and literature, students will be introduced to a selection of short stories, poems, and passages from novels, as well as specific newspaper articles, music, and films in the original language. Some of the literary works will include selections from Umberto Eco, Italo Calvino, Natalia Ginzburg, Gianni Rodari, Marcello D’Orta, Clara Sereni, Dino Buzzati, Stefano Benni, Antonio Tabucchi, Alberto Moravia, Achille Campanile, and Elena Ferrante. In order to address the students’ writing skills, written compositions will be required as an integral part of the course. All material is accessible on MySLC. Conferences are held on a biweekly basis; topics might include the study of a particular author, literary text, film, or any other aspect of Italian society and culture that might be of interest to the student. Conversation classes (in small groups) will be held twice a week with the language assistant, during which students will have the opportunity to reinforce what they have learned in class and hone their ability to communicate in Italian. When appropriate, students will be directed to specific internship opportunities in the New York City area, centered on Italian language and culture.

This is an introductory queer and feminist studies course that centers the intellectual work of theorists within the traditions known as Black Feminism and Queer of Color Critique with the US academy. Each week, we will take up a key debate or concern within the interdisciplinary field of women, gender, and sexuality studies, pairing influential works from the past alongside contemporary scholarship. We’ll visit work by scholars including, but not limited to, Sara Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldúa, Joshua Chambers-Letson, Barbara Christian, Cathy Cohen, the Combahee Collective, Roderick Ferguson, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Saidiya Hartman, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Vivian Huang, E. Johnson Patrick, Audre Lorde, Cherríe Moraga, José Muñoz Esteban, Jennifer Nash, C. Snorton Riley, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams. Some topics will include survival, loss, care, “the academy,” archives, identity politics, respectability, and language. Conference projects will be based on archival research at the Sarah Lawrence College Archives. Students will meet every two weeks at the SLC library in one of four conference groups organized around overarching topics of concern and debate from the class, including “identity and intersectionality,” “institutionality and the academy,” “violence, resistance, and care,” and “emotion.” Alongside individual seminar projects, these four research groups will each produce a co-authored archival “finding aid,” a guide for future scholars who visit the SLC Archives.

Queer theory emerged in the United States, in tandem with Queer Nation, at the beginning of the 1990s as the intellectual framework for a new round in ongoing contests over understandings of sexuality and gender in Western culture. “Queer” was presented as a radical break with homosexual, as well as heterosexual, pasts. Queer theorists and activists hoped to reconstruct lesbian and gay politics, intellectual life, and culture; renegotiate differences of gender, race, and class among lesbians and gay men; and establish new ways of thinking about sexuality, new understandings of sexual dissidence, and new relations among sexual dissidents. Nevertheless, queer theory had complex sources in the intellectual and political work that had gone before. And it has had, predictably, unpredictable effects on subsequent intellectual and political projects. This class will make the history of queer theory the basis for an intensive study of contemporary intellectual and political work on sexuality and gender. We will also be addressing the fundamental questions raised by the career of queer theory about the relations between political movements and intellectual movements, the politics of intellectual life, and the politics of the academy—in the United States, in particular—over the past half-century.

In this practicum-style class—meeting weekly at the Yonkers Public Library (YPL) Riverfront Branch—we will pursue projects that will directly support efforts at the library to build and publicize an LGBTQ+ archival collection. Class readings will discuss the risks, challenges, and rewards of building queer history through archival collections, especially in the context of a public institution like YPL. For conference work, students will participate in one of three group projects at YPL. The Oral History Project group will run public dialogue circles on LGBTQ+ issues in Yonkers and conduct oral histories to be housed in YPL’s public digital archives. The archives acquisition project will build physical and digital collections at the library and develop archival finding aids to assist patrons with archival research. The exhibition group will develop a small exhibition at YPL, sharing Yonkers and Westchester-area history and showcasing existing materials in YPL’s archival collection, including materials developed by the first two project groups. Students will ideally have have some level of experience with queer studies as an academic discipline, archival research, or applied work at nonprofits or other archives, libraries, and/or museums.

This course will examine literature written by late 19th- and 20th-century Italian women writers. In the newly unified Italy, middle-class women began in great numbers to access and contribute to literature as both readers and writers. The increasing presence of women writers caused great upheaval, as the male literary establishment viewed the potential for a disruption to the canon. The anxiety caused by their presence is visible in the manner in which they were dismissed as imitating male literary models, accused of excessive sentimentality and self-disclosure, or dubbed by critics il pericolo roseo, “the pink danger” (L. Zuccoli, Corriere della sera, March 24, 1911). Yet, many of these women writers reveal sophistication in their ability to experiment with genres and styles and engage with some of Italy’s literary movements (e.g., verismo, futurism, magic realism, neorealism) and intellectuals, as well as crucial historical events such as fascism and World War II. As we will see, they often question or reverse traditional depictions of femininity. They show an awareness of the social roles and expectations demanded of them and often interrogate such roles and some of the tropes present in the works of the time (e.g., the femme fatale, the self-sacrificing wife and mother). Many of them assert their own defiant voice and their own perspective as women writers, (re)claiming a place in the canon of Italian literature. In this course, we will explore how their works address social issues related to family, marriage, and women’s changing roles, as well as the place of women’s writing in the Italian literary canon. Our readings will include works by Marchesa Colombi (M. A. Torriani), Sibilla Aleramo, Grazia Deledda, Ada Negri, Rosa Rosà, Paola Masino, Renata Viganò, Joyce Lussu, Anna Banti, Anna Maria Ortese, Alba de Céspedes, Elsa Morante, Natalia Ginzburg, and Dacia Maraini. These works will be examined in dialogue with the literary production and ideas of male or canonical authors. Primary sources will range from fiction (novels, short stories, and fictional diaries) to autobiographical texts, poems, plays, and newspaper articles; these sources will be supplemented by secondary readings on women’s literature and history and on occasion by films. No previous knowledge of Italian is required. Students proficient in Italian may opt to read sources in the original. Conference topics may include the study of a particular author, literary text, or topic relevant to the course and that is of interest to the student. As an FYS course, students will meet individually in conference with the instructor/don every week until October Study Days and every two weeks after that.

War is one of the great themes in European literature. The greatest works of Greco-Roman antiquity are meditations on war; and as an organizing metaphor, war pervades our attempts to represent politics, economics, and sexuality. Efforts to comprehend war were the genesis of the disciplines of history and political science; and the disaster of the Peloponnesian War forms the critical, if concealed, background to the first great works of Western philosophy. We’ll begin the first semester with readings from the Iliad, Thucydides, Plato, and Augustine and go on to study the Aeneid, Machiavelli, Shakespeare’s Second Tetralogy, and Hobbes. In the second semester, we’ll look at the origins of political economy, among other things a discipline that sought to transcend the military metaphor; at Marxism, which remilitarized the language of political economy; at Byron’s mock epic, Don Juan; and at two 19th-century novelists, Stendhal and Tolstoy—one of whom described war directly, and the other used it as an organizing metaphor for erotic, economic, and political life. We’ll conclude with a look at some 20th-century literary, artistic, historical, and critical attempts to represent war with an allegedly unprecedented accuracy.

Are human beings capable of self-government? What does that require? As modern authoritarian movements imperil democratic institutions, norms, and the rule of law, ancient Greek tragedies illuminate values and aspirations underpinning democracy and modern liberal ideals of justice, equality, and universal human rights. Tragedy and democracy emerged simultaneously in ancient Athens in the late 6th century BCE and flourished throughout the 5th century BCE. Ancient Greece never achieved egalitarian politics or anything close to universal human rights, but Athenian tragedies emphasize the essential equality of all human beings in our vulnerability to suffering and death. Surviving plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides dramatize the costs of tyranny, anger, vengeance, and cruelty—to perpetrators, as well as to victims. Commending honesty, generosity, and compassion, tragedies locate nobility not in genetic inheritance, group affiliation, socioeconomic status, numerical superiority, or even moral or ideological convictions but, rather, in our conduct as individuals. Tragedies expose the consequences of human words and actions, as characters make choices conducive to success or failure for themselves and their communities. State-sponsored and publicly performed, tragedies made self-reflection and self-criticism a fundamental feature of Athenian democratic politics and society. “What should I do?” encapsulates the central question of every ancient Greek tragedy and every moment of our own lives. This course is designed for anyone interested in understanding the false promise of authoritarianism and appreciating the origins, goals, and possibilities for a free, humane, equitable democratic society.

Variance, correlation coefficient, regression analysis, statistical significance, and margin of error—you’ve heard these terms and other statistical phrases bantered about before, and you’ve seen them interspersed in news reports and research articles. But what do they mean? How are they used? And why are they so important? Serving as an introduction to the concepts, techniques, and reasoning central to the understanding of data, this lecture course focuses on the fundamental methods of statistical analysis used to gain insight into diverse areas of human interest. The use, misuse, and abuse of statistics will be the central focus of the course; and specific topics of exploration will be drawn from experimental design theory, sampling theory, data analysis, and statistical inference. Applications will be considered in current events, business, psychology, politics, medicine, and many other areas of the natural and social sciences. Statistical (spreadsheet) software will be introduced and used extensively in this course, but no prior experience with the technology is assumed. Group conferences, conducted in workshop mode, will serve to reinforce student understanding of the course material. This lecture is recommended for anybody wishing to be a better-informed consumer of data and strongly recommended for those planning to pursue advanced undergraduate or graduate research in the natural sciences or social sciences. Enrolled students are expected to have an understanding of basic high-school algebra and plane coordinate geometry.

Many of us are struck by the growing irrationality of contemporary democratic politics to the point where we despair of our capacity to address problems like global climate change or pandemics that could pose existential threats to our species, to fashion constructive foreign policy as wars rage, or to face a whole range of urgent but more mundane policy issues. In this class, we will seek to understand disturbing trends like populism, polarization, disinformation, and self-injuring or -defeating politics, as well as the resurfacing of nativism, xenophobia, and racism in contemporary politics—in part on their own terms but also by asking whether they are deeply rooted in human nature, at least on our current best understandings of ourselves. More specifically, democracy seems to rely on at least a minimum degree of rationality, learning, openness to argument and difference, and self-control on the part of the citizens whose votes and opinions guide government policy. But is this reliance foolhardy in light of what recent history, psychology, evolutionary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science teach? Do aspects of our current social and technological circumstances make us less able to manifest these qualities of character today than our Enlightenment progenitors hoped in the era of democratic revolutions—the era from which many of the ideas and institutions that continue to inform our politics today emerged? In this course, we will survey aspects of the political history of recent centuries, as well as our own historical moment, to ask if they should temper confidence in the power of reason in politics. We will also examine recent research in cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy that conclude that it is hard to sustain a model of human behavior that places reason and rationality in the driver’s seat. What alternative accounts of human nature are emerging from recent research? And what are their political implications, especially for democratic societies? By bringing together political science, history, and theory with cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, we should be able to occupy the intersection of distinct but equally relevant disciplines to ask whether the Enlightenment’s faith in democracy was misplaced. Or, instead, are there reasons to believe that democracy can maintain its claim to legitimacy, even after reason has been demoted in our understandings of human nature? To address this final question, we will also examine proposals for 21st-century democratic reforms that either seek to adjust downward the expectations on the capacity of citizens to engage in deliberative politics or to refashion political institutions to better summon the better angels of our nature.

Philosophy began with the Greeks as the pursuit of freedom of mind—as a rebellion against bondage to conventional belief. But is freedom of mind possible? And to what does it amount? This course, the first half of a yearlong sequence, focuses on the different ways the Greek philosophers and their Roman heirs understood freedom of mind. We will travel from the pre-Socratics through Plato, the Stoics, the Epicureans, and the Skeptics. Students will be expected to come to each class with a written question on the reading, which I may ask them to read aloud at the beginning of class in order to stimulate discussion. They may also be asked to participate in brief group presentations of the reading. The writing requirements for the class will have two components. The first of these will be made up of a short paragraph on the reading for each class and each group conference and should include the written question on the reading; the rest of the paragraph should either develop this question further or pose a further question or questions about the reading. At the end of the semester, you will be expected to submit a log of these short paragraphs, with your three favorites at the beginning of the document. The second writing requirement will be for a paper, or papers, outlining a portion of the reading and posing questions along the way. Through discussion, we will decide on the focus of these papers.

This course will continue the investigation undertaken in the fall course. For a description, see Freedom of Mind: Ancient Philosophy, fall semester; theme and writing requirements will be the same as for that course. Our focus will shift, however, to medieval and modern philosophy, with attention to Averroes (Ibn Rush’d), Montaigne, Descartes, and Shaftesbury. Either course may be taken independently, but students are, of course, invited to take both.

For the first time in history, it is not only conceivable but likely that human action will result in the extinction of our species. We transformed our planet from remarkably resilient to deeply vulnerable in a flash, whether time is measured geologically or in terms of cultural evolution. So, we struggle to determine how to cope and what to do about our newly vulnerable world. We face, especially in climate change, an impending global catastrophe beyond the ethical imaginations of all but the most recent generations. Many of the very same forces (especially capitalism and the energy-intensive technology and civilization it spreads on a global scale) that produce planetary peril tend—either directly and intentionally or simply by their further effects—to make it difficult to become more intentional about planetary stewardship at the pace and on the scale required. But just as human activity rendered our world vulnerable, only concerted human action can save it. This means that climate change and other crises of the Anthropocene can only be tamed politically; i.e., through collective action on a global scale of a kind without precedent in human history. Global political action, in turn, requires not-yet-developed ethical resources and political capacities if it is to succeed in saving our planet in ways that avoid unjust and inhumane distributions of costs and suffering. Developing the normative and imaginative resources to grasp the enormity of the advancing climate and environmental crises is an essential first step in creating the capacity for collective action required to respond. While traditional concerns with topics like distributive justice offer partial guidance as we notice, for instance, the overlap between environmental and racial injustice domestically as well as globally, many of the normative issues raised by our rapidly advancing, world-altering powers are simply unprecedented. To develop the normative resources required to navigate this new world, we need simultaneously to seek new orienting ideas while also examining Western, non-Western/indigenous, and contemporary conceptions of social justice, responsibility, relatedness, and ethics anew. Which, if any, can be adapted to incorporate global, intergenerational, and interspecies obligations? Do revisions in received understandings of risk and agency necessitate corollary changes in ideas like democracy, power, responsibility, privacy, and our relation to the natural and built worlds? To address these issues, this course divides into three main units, in turn: 1) We will examine the novel forces at work in the Anthropocene and the unprecedented questions of justice and ethics that they raise (e.g., Is it morally permissible to have a child in a world that may become rapidly uninhabitable? Should we engage in ubiquitous surveillance as the capacity for, perhaps, inadvertent mass destruction becomes more readily available to ordinary persons?). 2) We will also examine the tradition of Western philosophy to survey the resources it contains or lacks for answering these kinds of novel questions. 3) In light of the limited resources that this tradition contains, we will turn to other sources—briefly surveying recent work on non-Western traditions (especially indigenous cultures) and concentrating on contemporary political philosophy and ethics. Students should emerge with a sharper understanding of the political and ethical dimensions of the climate crisis and other environmental issues and the normative resources available to them in determining how to respond personally and politically. This course will fully participate in the spring 2025 Sarah Lawrence Interdisciplinary Collaborative on the Environment (SLICE) Mellon course cluster.

Nietzsche, in the Preface to The Genealogy of Morals, begins by attacking “English moralists.” By “English moralists” he means, I propose, David Hume in his An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. After reading the Preface and Part One of the Genealogy, we shall turn to Hume’s Enquiry in order to understand Nietzsche’s criticism and to see whether we think it is justified. Students will be required to bring a written question to each class and to present short sections of the reading. Writing requirements will consist of a log of the written questions, two outlines of portions of the reading that they present in class with questions and objections, and a conference paper.

By nature, humans need something more than nature—custom or convention, or what we nowadays call “culture”—to constitute a community. What is this something more, and why do we need it? Are “cultures” completely sealed off from each other and mutually incomprehensible, or can they be understood as responding to universal human needs? Are they pure products of freedom and creativity, always subject to modulation and transformation, or are they like a kind of inescapable fate? We shall tackle this topic with the help of Plato’s Laws.

One of the most important aspects of our lives is the web of group affiliations in which we engage. Groups are an inescapable aspect of our existence. From the very beginning of one’s life, the idea of group pervades most dimensions of our existence, from family structures to nation-states. Not only is the individual defined on the basis of his or her group memberships, but (s)he also learns most facets of socialization within the confinements of groups; for example, school, committees, gangs, or work. Groups orient, guide, and shape individual perceptions, interpretations, and actions in the social world. While social psychology has maintained an individuo-centered approach to the analysis of groups, several classic studies have demonstrated that there is no individual who is not essentially and entirely a product of the various groups to which (s)he belongs. This seminar explores the defining characteristics of groups and the extent to which we are indeed shaped by our groups. We are primarily concerned with people’s thoughts and behavior as group members, both from within one’s own group as well as vis-à-vis other groups.

In this FYS seminar, students will be introduced to the field of borders and migration studies based in the social sciences. We will start by reading some key sociological theories that provide students with an overview of sociology as a discipline and its relevance both within a liberal-arts education and to a wider social and political context. We will then focus on readings that provide students with foundational knowledge in border studies, globalization, the role of nations, nation-states, nationalism in society, and, finally, migration and displacement studies. The readings and discussions for the seminar adopt a “social problems” approach, looking at themes such as dimensions of inequality (race, class, and gender), labor, forced migration, and religious conflict through a transnational lens. As part of the seminar’s “practicum” dimension, students will learn the basics of initiating, designing, and carrying out sociological research using various methods of data analysis, including surveys, statistics, interviews, and field research. Throughout the year, students will have opportunities to engage in new and ongoing research projects related to the themes of nationalism, borders, and mobilities by engaging with cross-campus organizations and community partners in the City of Yonkers and wider Westchester County. During the second semester (spring 2025), students will be expected to engage in fieldwork, either independently or volunteering with community partners such as the Yonkers Public Library, Hudson River Museum, Wartburg, CURB, Center Lane, ArtsWestchester, or another organization. The fieldwork component will form the basis for the sociological research and writing that students produce for their conference work in the seminar. Starting in the fall, students will be introduced to some of the resources on campus that are essential for their learning and academic progress at Sarah Lawrence, such as the library and the writing center. Students will be expected to take advantage of these resources as they learn the ropes of conducting research in the social sciences and refining their academic writing skills. In addition to our regular class sessions, students will meet with the faculty instructor weekly during the fall semester for individual conferences. Conference meeting times will be used to discuss the students' progress in the class and, more generally, during their first semester at Sarah Lawrence. In the subsequent spring semester, we will move to a biweekly conference meeting schedule, depending on the student’s ongoing progress and needs.

Why do certain social groups have higher rates of morbidity and mortality than others? How are these differences driven by our social environments, as well as by social practices within health and medicine? These are some of the many questions addressed by sociologists of medicine. Unlike the physical sciences, which primarily study the physiological causes and effects of illness, sociology addresses health as a practice that is: 1) shaped by social processes; and 2) constructs differences between social groups. This yearlong lecture will overview major themes within the sociology of health and medicine, including (among others) the fundamental causes of disease, medicalization, contested illnesses and experiences of illness, and health social movements. Our lecture will ground these concepts through the lens of disability studies to better understand how health and medicine create social differences and shape lived, embodied experiences. During these conversations, we will also attend to the intersection of disability with other social categories, such as sex/gender, race, and class. For conference, students will choose a theoretical concept to guide their investigation into a specific empirical context. For example, students may choose to use Talcott Parsons’ concept of the “sick role” to better understand the varying perceptions of what it means to contract COVID-19 as a vaccinated or unvaccinated person.

In this lecture, students will be introduced to key areas of study in the sociology of “deviance,” detention, and illegality. We will be taking a global and transnational perspective on examining the ways in which social groups define, categorize, and reinforce deviance and illegality, from the treatment of minority and persecuted groups to the detention and expulsion of populations such as undocumented migrants and refugees. Students will learn about foundational theories and concepts in the field, starting with a reading of Émile Durkheim’s classical study of suicide and the idea of anomie, followed by Robert Merton’s strain theory and then contemporary ones such as conflict theory, labeling theory, and the infamous “broken-windows” theory. The class will take a critical approach to reflecting and challenging ideas about deviance and illegality by examining global and transnational forms of population governance, such as ongoing mutations to human rights and the technocratic management of displaced populations through humanitarianism around the world. We will be reading about major sectors of transnational deviance and crime, including industrial fishing and trafficking on the high seas (Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean), exploitation and profiteering through international logistics (Carolyn Nordstrom’s Global Outlaws), and transnational sex work and trafficking (Christine Chin and Kimberly Hoang). This critical lens is intended to help us understand how different groups and populations are rendered “deviant” or “illegal” for the purposes of management and control (or political leverage) and to what extent groups themselves are able to resist or challenge those categorizations. Finally, we will be looking at how social movements and acts of resistance can produce widescale changes in societies toward the treatment and categorization of people seen as “deviants,” “criminals,” or “illegals”—including struggles against apartheid, hunger strikes in prisons, and protest movements for undocumented groups. Additionally, we will be discussing how social transformations wrought by three years of living under a global pandemic has led to the emergence of new forms of deviance related to biopolitical and biotechnological notions of population health and well-being. For conference work in this lecture, students will work in groups to produce portfolios of research on an area of study related to deviance, detention, and illegality. Each portfolio will include presentations and discussions of the chosen area of study, as well as critical essays written by each student that bring in conceptual and theoretical discussions drawn from the class.

In public discourse, we are bombarded with assertions of the newly “global” nature of the contemporary world. This assertion assumes that former stable categories of personhood, ideational systems, nation, identity, and space are now fragmented and transcended by intensified travel, digital technology, and cross-cultural contact. This seminar is based on the premise that people have traveled throughout history; current global moves are but the most recent manifestation of a phenomenon that has historically occurred in many forms and places. This long(er) view of mobility will allow us to rethink and reexamine not only our notions of travel but their shifting connotations and significance across time and space. We will explore how supposed stable categories—such as citizen, refugee, nation, and commodity—are constructed and consider several theoretical approaches that help us make sense of these categorizations, the processes accompanying their normalization and dissemination, and their underlying assumptions. Our questions will include: What are the political, navigational, and epistemological foundations that go into mapmaking and schemas of classification? How do nomads change into settled city dwellers or wageworkers? How does time become disciplined? How does travel change into tourism? How do commodities travel and acquire meaning? What is the relationship between legal and illicit moves? How do technologies of violence, such as weapons and drugs, circulate? What is the meaning of their circulation in different contexts? How do modern technologies enable time/space compression? What are the shifting logics of globalization? What is their relationship to our notions and constructions of authenticity, subjectivity, and identity? During the fall semester, we will begin by developing an analytical approach toward our topic (which we will continue to develop throughout the year). We will then consider the implications of classification, categorization, and mapping. For the remainder of the semester, we will follow the travel(s) of ideas, commodities, and people. In the process, we will begin to think about questions of time/space compression. In the spring, we will return to some of the themes of the fall semester but examine them in a different context and through a different lens. Among our concerns in the spring semester will be issues of fusion and hybridization in cultural practices regarding people and things (e.g., food, music, romance, families); shifting places (e.g., borders, travel, and tourism); time/space compression through new technologies of travel and communication; and drugs, terror, violence, and poverty. As our sources, we will rely primarily on interdisciplinary analytical writings but will also include travel narratives, literature, and films.

What does it mean to be “beautiful”? Whose bodies qualify as beautiful? This seminar will explore the social construction of beauty as a process imbued with power and violence. Our investigation begins by overviewing Michel Foucault’s concepts of “biopower” and “biolegitimacy” to understand how the state manifests social hierarchies and control through the construction of the idealized, beautiful body. We will subsequently explore in what ways beauty standards are deployed to create gendered and raced distinctions that uphold colonial powers and white supremacy. Moreover, students will study the transformation of beauty standards across time with the goal of understanding how these changes reflect broader sociohistorical transformations and political interpretations of gender and race. Our seminar will subsequently study the impact of beauty standards on a microsocial level, including to what degree individuals come to internalize or resist notions of biolegitimacy and beauty. Within this conversation, we will study various forms of body modification and plastic surgery, as both an ontological tool for self-construction and as a means for pathologizing deviance from beauty standards. For conference, students may choose to trace the historical roots and evolution of a specific beauty standard. Alternatively, conference work might focus on how individuals collectively resist a given beauty standard, potentially within the context of subcultures that substitute alternative notions of biolegitimacy.

The concept of space will serve as the point of departure for this course. Space can be viewed in relation to the (human) body, social relations and social structures, and the physical environment. In this seminar, we will examine the material (social, political, and economic) and metaphorical (symbolic and representational) dimensions of spatial configurations in urban settings. In our analysis, we will address the historical and shifting connotations of urban space and urban life and their material dimensions. In our examination of spatial relations within urban settings, we will also examine practices and processes whereby social “space” is created, gendered, revisioned. “Space,” in this latter sense, will no longer be seen solely as physical space but also be (re)viewed through the construction of meanings that impact our use of and relations in both physical and social settings. While economic factors will continue to be of significance to our analysis, we will emphasize extra-economic relations and constructs—including power, gender, and sexuality. The focus will encompass both macroanalyses and interrogation of everyday life, including the significance of public-private distinctions. In the latter part of the seminar, particular attention will be paid to attempts by scholars and activists to open up space both theoretically and concretely. Although the analytical questions at the core of this seminar lend themselves to an analysis of any city, our focus in class will be largely, although not exclusively, on New York City. Students are encouraged, however, to examine the relevance of our readings to other spaces, including places in which they have lived. In their conference work, students can elect to study space- and place-making in different contexts and/or with respect to themes that are of particular interest to them.

This seminar offers a deep dive into the multifaceted world of social connections that span across national borders, challenging the traditional notions of space, identity, and community. The seminar’s core focus is on understanding how transnational networks operate within and influence various spheres of global society, including migration, economic practices, digital communication, and social movements. Through a critical examination of these networks, the course aims to shed light on the complexities of global interconnectedness, the role of technology in facilitating transnational ties, and the implications of these networks for social change and policy-making. In order to become equipped with a nuanced understanding of global social dynamics, students will engage with contemporary sociological theories and methodologies to analyze the formation, evolution, and impacts of transnational social networks in order. The seminar will incorporate a range of scholarly articles, book chapters, and case studies to explore topics such as the dynamics of diaspora communities and their influence on homeland politics; the economic ramifications of transnational remittances; the role of social media in fostering transnational activism and solidarity; and the impacts of transnational networks on cultural identity and integration processes. Readings include works by Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou on the concept of “social capital” within immigrant communities, Arjun Appadurai's theories on the cultural dimensions of globalization, Faranak Miraftab's notion of “transnational relationality,“ and Manuel Castells’ insights into the network society.

This is a course about sports as practice, which is used here in a multiple sense. As an embodied activity, sporting practice is felt and experienced in and through the body, which is its primary but not sole “habitus”—a term the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu popularized when elaborating on his notion of “cultural capital.” In this course, taking the sporting body and Bourdieu’s concept of habitus (taste, habits, skills, dispositions) as our point of departure, we will examine sports and its habitation of worlds that reach far beyond the individual (body) in both time and space. We will examine sports along multiple axes: as a collective and/or individuated activity; as a source of leisure and recreation; as a source of profitable employment; as a site of identity and nation-building projects; and as a space that engenders transnational mobilities and interconnections, as well as ruptures. In its commoditized contemporary form, sports is more often than not controlled by big money and/or the state and is part and parcel of what Debord refers to as the “society of the spectacle,” a site of production, consumption, and entertainment. The complex relationship between sports as experienced through the body and as a set of disciplinary practices will allow us to think through the relation of the individual, the collective, and institutionalized power, linking these to questions of body politics. Taking seriously the internal dynamics and meaning of sports, we will engage sports as a contradictory field, as both a productive space and a space of consumption. Our readings will include scholarly works, sports journalism, films, documentaries, and other primary sources. Possible conference topics include sports and politics; analysis of particular sports events (e.g., Olympics, women’s basketball, World Cup); (auto)biographies and/or oral histories of athletes; sports and protest; “fitness,” health, and the body; gender, race, sexuality, (dis)ability and sports; nationalism(s), national “styles” and sports; and the phenomenology of sports.

In the 1600s, political leaders in Salem, Massachusetts, infamously executed more than 25 members accused of witchcraft. Almost 400 years later, the “satanic panic” swept across America, as parents feared for the spiritual well-being of their children. More recently, protestors in the 2017 Women’s March brandished signs reading, “We are the daughters of the witches you could not burn.” What do these disparate examples have in common? This seminar will study the “witch” as a shared cultural symbol. We will explore why the witch emerges into the American cultural zeitgeist at particular moments in history and what their emergence (and public reception) tells us about the cultural and sociopolitical contexts of our time. We will draw upon the works of theorists like Karl Marx, Antonio Gramsci, Emile Durkheim, Sylvia Federici, and Stanley Cohen to guide our discussions and explore the capitalist, hegemonic, and gendered meanings of the witch. In the latter half of the semester, students will explore contemporary literature within the sociology of culture, as well as the sociology of social movements, to understand how the witch has been simultaneously co-opted and used as a figurehead of collective resistance to these very same systems. Throughout these conversations, we will also discuss the ways in which the witch has been strategically racialized, consequently villainizing women of color and misrepresenting indigenous practices such as Voodoo or Santería. For conference, students may unpack a particular moment in history when magic or witchcraft emerged in the public discourse. Alternatively, students may explore how the witch—or another shared cultural archetype—has been used to express group identity during moments of resistance. Finally, students are encouraged to think about these topics in non-American contexts, if they so choose.

What might it mean for a writer to be useful to a state? How have states used writers, witting and unwitting, in projects aimed at influence and hegemony? How might a state make use of language as a weapon? What might it mean for a writer to attempt to avoid being useful to a state? How might a state inflect and influence the intimacy between a writer and what we may write? In this class, we’ll discuss an array of choices that writers have made in relation to state power, focusing particularly on the United States from just after World War II until the present. You'll be asking to read excerpts from five books: Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers; Frances Stonor Saunders’s The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters; Eric Bennett’s  Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing During the Cold War; Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism; and Peter Dale Scott’s long poem, Coming to Jakarta. Group conferences will function as writing workshops and to offer feedback on your letters in progress, in addition to various writing exercises. This is not a history or a literature class; our lens will be that of a writer, using deep study and playful practice to figure out the dilemmas and best practices of the present.

The Iowa Writers Workshop was founded by Wilbur Schramm in 1936. Schramm went on to a many-faceted career, which included writing a postwar manual for the Army, called The Nature of Psychological Warfare. He saw the writing workshop as a way to train “the kind of young persons who can become the kind of writers we need” in a future framed by the dominance of the United States. In much American poetry, the consequences of this project of domination are unseen. As is often not true elsewhere, the prison is seen (or unseen) from the point of view of the free. This course looks for the traces of this project of domination and asks what might happen for writers when the domination is seen from the point of view of the dominated and the free from the point of view of the prison. Why are censorship and incarceration such central facts of what it’s meant to be a poet elsewhere? Why hasn’t that been true in the United States? How does Archibald MacLeish’s “a poem should not mean but be” or T. S. Eliot’s “like a patient etherized upon a table” sound beside Adam Wazyk’s “how many times must one wake you up before you recognize your epoch?” or Suzanne Césaire’s surrealism as a tool to recover stolen power, “purified of colonial stupidities”? What is real freedom? What are its ways? What might the poetry be that comes from it? Our text will be an anthology and workbook, The Most Beautiful Sea: Poems & Pathways Toward Poems, including the work of Nas, Elizabeth Bishop, Refaat Alareer, Nazim Hikmet, Marie Howe, Joshua Bennett, Lucille Clifton, Nipsey Hussle, Mahmoud Darwish, Dionne Brand, and the greatest of all poets: Anonymous. You’ll be asked to do in-class writing exercises, write letters with a partner, and bring drafts to conference. Each term, you’ll be required to make an anthology and a chapbook. In the words of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, we’ll look together for “The most beautiful sea” that “hasn’t been crossed yet”—aka “the most beautiful words I wanted to tell you/I haven’t said yet.”