Current Course Offerings

Women’s power in the ancient world was compromised from the outset, and we explore the root causes and consequences of this social inequality. How did women negotiate their limited leadership roles? Were they able to rule "behind the throne" so to speak? How are we to find a woman’s power when it was so habitually cloaked by a man’s dominance? This class will use bioarchaeological evidence to address those questions and examine the breadth of women’s roles and agency in past societies.

Section 1
Instructor: C. Lee
MWF 10-10:50 AM, Barnard Obs 105

Exploration of the growing body of research available from many disciplines (humanities, social sciences, sciences) for the study of women and men in the United States and abroad. Investigation of femininity and masculinity and the intersection of gender with other categories of identity.

In-Person

Section 1
Instructor: P. Gordon
TTH 1-2:15, S Res Coll 113

Section 2
Instructor: S. Ilinskaya
MWF 12-12:50 PM, N. Res Coll 113

Section 3 - Honors
Instructor: O. Njoku
TTH 8-9:15 AM, Lamar 214

Section 4
Instructor: P. Gordon
MWF 1-1:50 PM, Bishop 102

Section 5
Instructor: S. Ilinskaya
MWF 2-2:50, S. Res. Coll 113

Online and Independent Study

OnHy 1
Instructor: J. Enszer
W 1-1:50 PM, Zoom

Online 1
Instructor: E. Venell

Online 2
Instructor: E. Venell

Online 3
Instructor: J. Enszer

Online 4
Instructor: A. LaGrotteria

Online 5
Instructor: A. LaGrotteria

Online 6
Instructor: A. LaGrotteria

Online 7
Instructor: J. Venable

Online 8
Instructor: J. Venable

Online 9

Instructor: J. Venable

Online 10

Instructor: A. Mixon

Online 11

Instructor: A. Mixon

Independent Study Sec 4
Instructor: E. Venell

This course is an introduction to the interdisciplinary field of queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) studies with a particular focus on the queer south. This course examines the historical and social contexts of personal, cultural and political aspects of queer/LGBT life, and it explores LGBT liberation movements in relation to families, religion, laws, and society using intersectional lenses that consider gender, ethnicity, race, class, and ability. We consider the status, roles, and experiences, of lesbians, gay men, bisexual, and transgender people, using a variety of sources from fields such as anthropology, history, literature, sociology, southern studies, and women’s studies. Through the readings, discussions, and assignments, students develop critical analytical skills to consider social change movements with particular attention to how sex, gender, race, class, sexuality, sexual orientation, and other systems of power shape people’s everyday lives.

Online 1
Instructor: J. Enszer

Section 1
Instructor: P. Gordon
TTh 9:30-10:45, Bishop 102

A study of gender roles within traditional and popular culture. The specific content of the course may vary in different semesters. Possible emphases might include women in the arts, women in film, women in the media, and women in popular culture.

Section 1 - Honors
Instructor: T. Starkey
TTH 2:30-3:45 PM SRC 123

Section 2
Instructor: T. Starkey
TTH 1-2:15 PM - TBA

Topic: Gender and Ghost Story

The home, castle, graveyard, and lonely highway represent the types of places ghosts haunt in the cultural imagination. The ghost’s tethering to a place, object or person is a familiar trope, one that opens up questions about what it means: to haunt; to be haunted, and to occupy spaces of liminality; to move between worlds and to exist without one’s body (or gender) as an otherworldly figure. 

The ghost story has always been a peculiarly gendered form, one ripe for deeper investigation.   The 19th-century spiritualist movement in America is an interesting case study of the ways that new technologies like the camera were used to capture the image of the ghost. Women were practitioners who acted as mediums with the power to bridge worlds. Their new position allowed them to speak with authority and be heard in a moment when gender roles were being contested. 

Today, reality TV shows like Ghost Hunters, Kindred Spirits, and Ghost Adventures provide audiences with tales of the supernatural. The medium is a staple in such shows–as is the ghost hunter who uses EMF meters,  voice recorders, video cameras, and night vision goggles with the  goal of exposing the existence of the supernatural (or dispelling the haunting as something mundane as the rattling of old pips in a home). The latter is more anchored to technology and the sciences than the medium whose material body functions as a receptor. What does this shift reveal about constructions of knowledge or being the expert on paranormal encounters?

In this interdisciplinary course, we will work across different disciplines as we consider gender and the ghost story and the pursuit of new kinds of knowledge in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first century that emerge when working at the margins of different academic fields. We will look at novels, history, film, television, and fantasy as we consider the connection of ghost stories and gender. Students will write weekly responses and complete a final research project, which may be a paper, a podcast, a website, or another medium.

Online 1
Instructor: A. LaGrotteria
Contemporary US Feminist Literature

This Gender Studies course explores complexities of human identities and relationships as they are portrayed in contemporary US novels. Of particular interest are the ways in which power, privilege, oppression, empowerment, and resistance are demonstrated in the novels. Using intersectional feminist theory as a supplemental lens, we will pay particular attention to characters’ positionalities (i.e., race, gender, class, sexuality, region, and more). Students will be asked to frame their own experiences with identities, relationships, and feminism in relation to the novels and supplemental theoretical pieces.

Online 2
Instructor: J. Hovey
Gender and Zombies

This course will look at post-apocalyptic fiction, films, and games, most of which feature actual zombies or zombie-like figures, to ask what zombies mean at different historical moments, including our own.  Although there are several prototypical zombie novels in the nineteenth century, the zombie as we know it today is a creature of late capitalism, representing twentieth and twenty-first century popular anxieties about gender, labor, immigration, disease, class, sexuality, technology, race, national identity, and consumer culture.  Beginning with the origins of the zombie in Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein, following imperialist anxieties about whiteness, gender, and Haitian voodoo in 1930s films, we will trace the evolution of the apocalyptic zombie during the Cold War and Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, and look at recent zombie apocalypse fiction and games to analyze how zombie literature, films, and games criticize sexism, racism, imperialism, capitalism and consumer culture, ecological carelessness and destruction, and the exploitation of the poor. Texts will include Frankenstein, The Magic Island, I Am Legend, The Zombie Survival Guide, Deadlands, and The Road. Films will include Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and the television series The Walking Dead, as well as White Zombie, Zombieland, 28 Days Later, and The Road. We will also look at how video games developed from Dawn of the Dead, and look briefly at some popular zombie games such as the 2002 game Resident Evil, the 2013 game The Last of Us, and The Walking Dead tie-in games. Students should expect to write 2 papers, complete a final project, and participate in regular discussion forum posts and some online meetings.

IS Section 32 Independent Study
Instructor: E. Venell
Queer Cinema

Examines the social and cultural construction of gender differences in contemporary U.S. society, focusing on the social history of gender roles and gender inequality in current cultural and institutional practices.

Section 1
Instructor: A. McDowell
TTh 9:30-10:45, Lamar 518

A survey of holy figures within Christianity and Islam with an emphasis on gender and the body.

Section 1
Instructor: M. Thurlkill
W 2-4:30 PM, Isom 303

Feminist writers and thinkers have developed a multiplicity of theories to explain sex and gender as well as power and domination. Feminist theory is not limited to these concepts, however; feminists also theorize race, identity, nation, sexuality, bodies, work, citizenship, activism, and women’s position in the family, the workplace, and society. This course examines feminist theories about these topics, and more, in the context of the historical moment and the intellectual traditions to which they relate. 

In Gender Theory, we interrogate theories in two ways. First, we ask, how are theories generated and constructed? Second, we ask, what does theory mean? We examine key words in feminist theory, including history, sex, gender, standpoint epistemology, situated knowledges, intersectionality, poststructural epistemology, nation, transnational, economics, sexuality, lesbian, and queer. Through readings that elucidate the meanings of the key words and examine how theory is generated, we consider the tensions within the key words and within the generation of theory. We also consider poetry and stories in our intensive thinking about feminist theory. Throughout the class, we ask these questions: 

• how does feminist theory comes into being?

• how do feminist activists use theory? 

• how does theory travel between and among feminist communities? 

• what does theory offer feminists?

• what limitations does theory present for feminists? 

• who is recognized as a feminist theorist? 

• who is not recognized as a feminist theorist? 

• why? 

Ultimately, through readings and engagement with feminist theory, we seek to understand what feminist theories are meaningful and useful to each of us in our life work. In the course, students complete a weekly discussion board posts, write a belief’s paper, and write their own feminist manifesto.

Online 1
Instructor: J. Enszer

Students will study the ways in which the South has been constructed through depictions of sexuality, especially forms of sexuality deemed marginal, perverse, and dangerous.

Online 1
Instructor: E. Venell

This course examines representations of femininity, masculinity, and sexuality across different modes of film practice in the history of popular US cinema, with specific attention to how these representations intersect with race, ethnicity, nation and class. Using analytical approaches from gender and sexuality studies, film and media studies, and cultural studies we will investigate the ways in which popular US cinema critically engages in the historical, social, and cultural construction of gender and sexuality. This course teaches basic concepts of film analysis so that students can apply them to the films we watch.

Online 1
Instructor: L. Delassus

Online 2
Instructor: L. Delassus

This course teaches students to examine and analyze how representations of gender and sexuality have or have not changed over time. This exploration will include theoretical readings and analysis of television, film, music & music videos, broadcast and print journalism, magazines, advertising, social media, comic books, graphic novels, anime, user-generated online content, and online gaming.

Online 1
Instructor: K. Cozart

Framing Gender, Selling Sexuality

This course will examine and analyze how representations of gender and sexuality aligned with or countered cultural norms over time. Students will use gender and communications theories to explore representations through a survey of visual media genres including television, film, theatre, music videos, broadcast and print journalism, magazines, advertising, social media, comic books, graphic novels, anime, and user-generated online content.

This class explores interconnections between the exploitation of nature and subjugated peoples, while examining ecological philosophies, spiritualities, and strategies for social and environmental change. Through readings, films, discussion boards, and papers, we’ll ask questions about the meanings of environmental justice, while studying ecofeminist, and indigenous perspectives on such topics as environmental degradation, environmental racism, our duties to nonhuman animals, reproductive justice, and belonging. More generally, this term’s study of theory, social injustices, and activism will prompt us to examine assumptions about how we come to understand the world and whose knowledge counts; and how we envision the nature of the universe, including the relatedness of beings and entities in the world. 

This course takes an interdisciplinary approach, and integrates insights from literature, history, philosophy, theology, and social sciences. My hope is that this course will stimulate you to ask new questions and to engage in future studies of ecological philosophy and multicultural-feminist theorizing, spirituality, and activism.

Online 1
Instructor: J. Venable

Beyond LGBTQ

This course will explore the “+” in LGBTQ+ by focusing on non-binary, two-spirit, intersex, and asexual experiences and identities. The course will be divided into three interwoven units as follows: explorations and representations of asexuality in new critical works and in popular media; intersex and “DSD” (differences of sexual development) experiences, especially through the lens of recent controversies in athletics and memoirs by intersex individuals; and non-binary and 2S identities as documented in art, film, documentary, and social commentary that complicate and/or move beyond westernized and medicalized concepts of gender and sexuality. This course seeks to push into the new frontiers for how we articulate and describe social and personal experiences of self in the radical forefront of queer studies. Students will compose regular response papers, including options for creative nonfiction responses, exploring texts from each unit as well as a final research paper commensurate with the expectations of an upper-divisional advanced studies course.

Section 1
Instructor: P. Gordon
TTH 2:30-3:45 PM, N. Res. Coll