At the end of the course students will be at Level 2 on the ILR (Interagency Language Roundtable) scale.

This course examines the coming to pass of trap music from several perspectives: 1) that of its technological foundations and innovations (the Roland 808, Auto-tune, FL Studio (FruityLoops), etc.); 2) that of its masters/mastery (its transformation of stardom through the figures of the producer (Metro Boomin) and the rock star (Future)); 3) that of its interpretability and effects (what does the music say and do to us). We will thus engage with this music as a practice of art and form of techno-sociality that manifests uncanny and maximal attunement with the now.

This research seminar provides students with instruction in basic historical methods and an opportunity to conduct collaborative primary source research into the University of Pennsylvania's historic connections to slavery. After an initial orientation to archival research, students will plunge in to doing actual research at the Kislak Center, the University Archives, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company, and various online sources. During the final month of the semester, students will begin drafting research reports and preparing for a public presentation of the work. During the semester, there will be opportunities to collaborate with a certified genealogist, a data management and website expert, a consultant on public programming, and a Penn graduate whose research has been integral to the Penn Slavery Project.

This seminar/studio course introduces students to theories, debates, and critical frameworks in African Diaspora Dance Studies. It asks: What role does dance play throughout the African diaspora? What makes a dance 'black'? How do conceptualizations of gender and sexuality inform our reading of dancing bodies? Using African diaspora, critical dance, performance, and black feminist frameworks, we will examine the history, politics, and aesthetics of "black dance". Through a keywords format, we'll construct both a vocabulary: a body of words used to describe a phenomena, and a grammar: a body of rules that lay bare the operations between terms. This course recognizes the fluidity of meaning between words depending on the context, geography, and circumstance of their evocation. Our key terms will allow us to examine a number of dancers, choreographers, companies, and movement practices. Moving across an African diasporic map, this course explores the politics of black choreography, and the political significance of black bodies in motion.

Continuation of Elementary Amharic I. Amharic belongs to the southern branch of Hemeto-Semitic languages, which is also referred to as "Afrasian." Amharic is the official language of Ethiopia and is spoken by 14 million native Amharas and by approximately 18 million of the other groups in Ethiopia. This course continues to introduce basic grammar, vocabulary, and the reading and writing of Amharic to new speakers.

The course circulates around ships and boats. The course combines methods from environmental humanities, visual arts and history to consider multi-modal practices of black freedom and escape. From free black sailors in the eighteenth century Caribbean Sea, to twentieth and twenty-first century West African fishing boats, notions of Haitian "boat people," Parliament Funkadelic's mothership, and sinking boats with Somali and Ethiopian migrants off Yemen's coast, ships have been and remain technologies of containment and freedom for communities of African descent. In the face of environmental vulnerabilities and the reality of water ways as systems of sustenance and imminent death, this course asks: how do black people use the ship and the process and practice of shipping as vessels for freedom, escape, and as a site to experiment with futures? Using the city of Philadelphia and the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers as our primary site of interrogation, the course attends to the threats that black people experience following natural disaster (New Orleans, Haiti, Puerto Rico) and everyday engagement with the local and global state structures regarding water (Flint, MI). In this context, we also look to shipping as a site to theorize and account for black innovation, meanings of (non-)sovereignty, and alternative futures.