This interdisciplinary seminar aims to introduce students to the countries of North Africa, with a focus on the Maghreb and Libya (1830-present). It does so while examining the region's close economic and cultural connections to sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. Readings will include histories, political analyses, anthropological studies, and novels, and will cover a wide range of topics such as colonial and postcolonial experiences, developments in Islamic thought and practice, and labor migration. This class is intended for juniors, seniors, and graduate students.

This course is cross-listed with HIST 610 (Colloquium in American History) when the subject matter is related to African, African American, or other African Diaspora issues.


See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edufor a description of the current offerings.

Topics may include the intellectual history of ethnomusicology, current readings in ethnomusicology, a consideration of theoretical principles based upon the reading and interpretation of selected monographs, and area studies. Please see department website for current course term description.

This graduate seminar examines the dynamic relationships among empires, nations and states; colonial and post-colonial policies; and anti-colonial strategies within a changing global context. Using the rubrics of anthropology, history, cultural studies, and social theory, we will explore the intimacies of subject formation within imperial contexts- past and present- especially in relation to ideas about race and belonging. We will focus on how belonging and participation have been defined in particular locales, as well as how these notions have been socialized through a variety of institutional contexts. Finally, we will consider the relationships between popular culture and state formation, examining these as dialectical struggles for hegemony.

Spring 2018: The aim of this seminar can be described as trying to figure out how poetry and poetics figure into the effort to theorize the African American subject in the 21st Century. At a time when the sheer number of African American poets publishing today (to say nothing of the major prizes they are winning) has exploded exponentially, why does poetry continue to be so marginalin African American literary and cultural studies? As we make our way through recently published anthologies of African American poetry, then turn to works of individual poets, we will consider issues of influence,intertextual periodization, stylization, and tradition as they impact approaches to form, structure, and craft. Ultimately, however, we will focus on the question of why are these poets writing these poems at this particular time? Technologies like PennSound and You Tube will provide time? Technologies like PennSound and You Tube will provide important critical tools in our endeavors and at various points during the term, guest lecturers will join our discussions.

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.

The craft of ivory carving around the Mediterranean is contingent upon the availability of imported elephant tusks, from either South East Asia or, more frequently, from the African continent. The shifting winds of trade routes offer an interpretive paradigm with which to analyze ivory objects from a variety of different cultural groups: the lack or abundance of ivory and the resulting desire for or surfeit of the material shapes its meaning and use around the Mediterranean basin. The study of ivory objects as they migrate around the Mediterranean allows us to investigate the rich intercultural interactions between Eastern and Western Christians, and both of these with the Islamic world. This course focuses on an object oriented knowledge of ivory artefacts, with a strong emphasis on the collections at the PennMuseum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other area collections.

This graduate-level seminar surveys the relationship between race, class, and corporate and financial interests at key junctures in American political development, including the founding, the "Age of the Common Man," ," the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, the Progressive era, the New Deal, World War II, the Cold War, the Great Society, and today's era of neoliberalism, the "dark state," and Trumpism. It will have a particular institutional focus on the presidency. This course is open to undergraduates with the permission of the professor.