SPRING 2019: This seminar is suitable for graduate students in any discipline in which historical research may be relevant. We will work with both secondary and primary sources, and students will have the opportunity to visit and undertake research in an archive.

This course focuses on the historical and cultural relationship between Africans and their descendants abroad.

This course will investigate the relationships among women, gender, sexuality, and anthropological research. We will begin by exploring the trajectory of research interest in women and gender, drawing first from the early work on gender and sex by anthropologists like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; moving through the 1970s and 1980s arguments about gender, culture, and political economy; arriving at more current concerns with gender, race, sexuality, and empire. For the rest of the semester, we will critically read contemporary ethnographies addressing pressing issues such as nationalism, militarism, neoliberalism and fundamentalism. Throughout, we will investigate what it means not only to "write women's worlds", but also to analyze broader socio-cultural, political, and economic processes through a gendered lens. We will, finally, address the various ways feminist anthropology fundamentally challenged the discipline's epistemological certainties, as well as how it continues to transform our understanding of the foundations of the modern world.

Topics may draw on methodologies derived from jazz studies, chant studies, and ethnomusicology. Please see department website www.africana.upenn.edu for current term course description.

The Accelerated Elementary Zulu course is intensive, and can be taken to fulfill a language requirement, or for linguistic preparation to do research on South Africa, Southern Africa/Africa-related topics. The course emphasizes communicative competence to enable the students to acquire linguistic and extra-linguistic skills in Zulu. The content of the course is selected from various everyday life situations to enable the students to communicate in predictable common daily settings. Culture, as it relates to language use, is also part of the course content. Students will acquire the speaking, listening, and writing skills at the ceiling of low intermediate level and floor of high novice level, based on the ACTFL scale. The low intermediate level proficience skills that the students will acquire constitute threshold capabilities of the third semester range of proficiency to prepare students for Intermediate Zulu I course materials.

Offered through the Penn Language Center

Continuation of Elementary Amharic I.

Topic varies Spring 2019: Between the medieval metropolitan capitals of Constantinople and Paris lay the dynamic connecting sea -- the Mediterranean. This course begins by looking in depth at the birth and development of those two key capital cities, and their competitive interactions. Urban centers around the Mediterranean littoral contributed significantly to the networks linking and provisioning those two key metropoli: Venice, Palermo, Tunis, Sijilmasa, Acre, Cairo and Cordoba. This seminar will examine the urban fabric and the objects produced in an array of Mediterranean cities thriving in the Middle Ages, revealing the unexpected ways that they were connected by the sea. This seminar is limited to graduate students only, and permission must be sought from the instructors before enrollment.