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.

This course is cross-listed when the subject matter is related to African, African American, or other African Diaspora issues. Courses recently offered are, "Political Culture and American Cities, Social Movements and Social Change, Critical Race Theory. See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.


This course brings together the vantage points of urban political economy, history and urban anthropology. Readings and discussions will cross those literatures, folding in considerations of race, ethnicity and gender in the American city life, with a focus on the relation between culture and political economy. We will reconstruct the history of the different tracks of urban studies in the U.S., beginning with its roots in sociology and anthropology in the Chicago School and in political science in reform-oriented studies of public administration. We will revisit the community power debate of the 1950s-1970s, which shook out significantly along disciplinary lines, and will examine the development of the urban political economy perspective in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as developments within U.S. urban anthropology since the 1960s. We will employ local case study materials, and at every point we will try to understand the intellectual trajectories of the urbanist discourses in relation to dynamics contemporaneously shaping urban politics and policy. Course requirements are seminar preparation which includes each student's leading discussion around specified reading assignments -- and a research paper, the topic of which must be approved by week 5.

This course is cross-listed with SWRK 528 (Advanced Topics) when the subject matter is related to African, African American, or other African Diaspora issues. Recent topics include, "Religion, Youth and Popular Culture" and "Anxious Identities."


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

Using the Afro-centric philosophical understanding of the world, this course will focus on psychological issues related to African Americans, including the history of African American psychology, its application across the life span, and contemporary community issues.

The main objective of this course is to further sharpen the Yoruba linquistic knowledge that the student acquired in level I. By the end of the course, the student should be able to (1) read, write, and understand simple to moderately complex sentences in Yoruba; and (2) advance in the knowledge of the Yoruba culture.

Arabic language is used by many societies not only in communication but also in correspondence and in documenting the affairs of their daily lives. Arabic script is adopted by many groups whose native languages are not Arabic, in writing their languages before some moved to the Roman alphabet. In many historical documents specific style of writing and handwriting are dominant. This specificity is influenced by the dialectical variations, the historical development of each region and the level of Arabic literacy and use. The aims of this course which will focus on the Arabic writing tradition of Africa and the Middle East are as follows: (1) Reading and interpreting hand-written Arabic documents from Africa and the Middle East with focus on different historical eras. (2) In-depth understanding of the historical and language contexts of the selected documents. (3) Examining different handwriting styles that are in vogue in Africa and the Middle East.