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

Reading and discussion course on selected topics in Transregional History See the Africana Studies Department's website at https://africana.sas.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.


Comparative Slavery and Emancipation: What do historians gain by approaching the past with an awareness of the body as a material and historically contingent entity? In this course we consider several different ways of imagining historical bodies and the body in history. Our readings will explore how events and new social, racial, economic and political formations influence how contemporaries imagined and described bodies and their capacities. We will also explore whether the body itself might be a dynamic source of historical change. Among the topics we will discuss are: medical theories about bodies, epidemics and their impact; sensory capacities; capacities for physical labor; cultures of violence; reproductive capacities and politics; coerced migration; fashion, beauty, and grace; and the state's interest in mobilizing bodies to serve imperial, economic, and military agendas. This course complements but does not duplicate "Race and Gender in Comparative Perspective" offered in Spring 2012. It is an intensive readings course with written assignments: short papers throughout the semester and a synthetic final paper.

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

This advanced seminar analyzes the connection between race, crime, punishment, and politics in the United States. The primary focus is on the role of race in explaining why the country's prison population increased six-fold since the early 1970s and why the United States today has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Topics to be covered include: the early history of race in the development of the criminal justice system, including an examination of lynchings and the convict-leasing system; the relationship between the crime rate, patterns of offending and arrests, and the incarceration rate; public opinion and law-and-order" politics; U.S. penal policies compared with other industrialized countries; capital punishment; the growth of the prison-industrial complex; the "war on drugs"; the courts, prisoners' rights, and political prisoners; felon disenfranchisement, elections, and democracy; and the future of penal reform. This seminar is designed for advanced undergraduates, as well as graduate students. The readings and assignments will be adjusted accordingly for graduate students. The class will likely take field trips to a maximum-security jail in Philadelphia and to a state prison in the Philadelphia suburbs.

Topics vary.


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

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 draw on methodologies derived from jazz studies, chant studies, and ethnomusicology.

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.