This freshman seminar examines the homelessness problem from a variety of scientific and policy perspectives. Contemporary homelessness differs significantly from related conditions of destitute poverty during other eras of our nation's history. Advocates, researchers and policymakers have all played key roles in defining the current problem, measuring its prevalence, and designing interventions to reduce it. The first section of this course examines the definitional and measurement issues, and how they affect our understanding of the scale and composition of the problem. Explanations for homelessness have also been varied, and the second part of the course focuses on examining the merits of some of those explanations, and in particular, the role of the affordable housing crisis. The third section of the course focuses on the dynamics of homelessness, combining evidence from ethnographic studies of how people become homeless and experience homelessness, with quantitative research on the patterns of entry and exit from the condition. The final section of the course turns to the approaches taken by policymakers and advocates to address the problem, and considers the efficacy and quandaries associated with various policy strategies. The course concludes by contemplating the future of homelessness research and public policy.

In this First Year Seminar we will use coming-of-age autobiographies to explore some of the most significant historical developments of the 20th century. By coming of age I mean autobiographies in which the author focuses primarily on the periods of childhood and adolescence into young adulthood. We will read books by people who lived during segregation in the South, the Great Depression, Japanese Internment during World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. We will consider many issues, including: race, racism, immigration, religion, social class, and gender. We will contemplate questions about identity, family, honesty, and memory. As we read each book we will examine an individual life in a particular place and time, and we will move out beyond the confines of a person, family, or town to explore the broader historical moment in which the individual lived. To make this deeper contextualization possible, the course is divided into segments that will allow us to study the historical context of the autobiography as well as engage in focused discussion of the texts themselves.

The course will focus on race and ethnicity in the United States. We begin with a brief history of racial categorization and immigration to the U.S. The course continues by examining a number of topics including racial and ethnic identity, interracial and interethnic friendships and marriage, racial attitudes, mass media images, residential segregation, educational stratification, and labor market outcomes. The course will include discussions of African Americans, Whites, Hispanics, and Asian Americans and Multiracials.

The course will focus on race and ethnicity in the United States. We begin with a brief history of racial categorization and immigration to the U.S. The course continues by examining a number of topics including racial and ethnic identity, interracial and interethnic friendships and marriage, racial attitudes, mass media images, residential segregation, educational stratification, and labor market outcomes. The course will include discussions of African Americans, Whites, Hispanics, and Asian Americans and Multiracials.

The course will focus on race and ethnicity in the United States. We begin with a brief history of racial categorization and immigration to the U.S. The course continues by examining a number of topics including racial and ethnic identity, interracial and interethnic friendships and marriage, racial attitudes, mass media images, residential segregation, educational stratification, and labor market outcomes. The course will include discussions of African Americans, Whites, Hispanics, and Asian Americans and Multiracials.

The aim of this course is to provide an interdisciplinary examination of the complex array of African American and other African Diaspora social practices and experiences. This class will focus on both classic texts and modern works that provide an introduction to the dynamics of African American and African Diaspora thought and practice. Topics include: What is Africana Studies?; The History Before 1492; Creating the African Diaspora After 1500; The Challenge of Freedom; Race, Gender and Class in the 20th Century; From Black Studies to Africana Studies: The Future of Africana Studies.

An advanced topics course in American literature, with the curriculum fixed by the instructor.


In 1963, James Baldwin wrote, the future is going to be worse than the past if we do not let the people who represent us know that it is our country. Hoping to appeal to legislators and readers alike, Baldwins essay, We Can Change the Country captured the insurgent spirit and democratic sensibility that defined the Civil Rights era. While the Civil Rights Movement is remembered as the one of the most significant events in twentieth-century American political and social history, it is rarely regarded, however, as a a turning point in American art and culture. Unlike the Black Arts Movement that fashioned itself as the cultural arm to the Black Power Movement, the idea of a civil rights aesthetics that emerged alongside formal Civil Rights politics has only recently become the subject of academic inquiry. This interdisciplinary course study the emergence of a civil right aesthetic as produced by writers James Baldwin, Frank London Brown, Lorraine Hansberry; musicians like the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, Max Roach, Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone; actors Harry Belafonte, Diahann Carroll, Abbey Lincoln, and Sidney Poiter; and visual artists and groups such AFRICOBRA, Spiral, Sam Gilliam, Gordon Parks, and Faith Ringold. The goal of this class is also to move past the single artist model to think about how collaboration as artistic


practice and political ideal in collectives, friendships, and co-authorship also contributed to Civil Rights aesthetics. Finally, we will examine the the afterlife of this civil aesthetic and how recent retrospectives on these artists, such as the Brooklyn Museums exhibit Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, John Legend and The Roots cover album, "Wake Up!," Charles Johnsons novel, "The Dreamer" and Rita Doves poetry collection, "On the Bus With Rosa Parks."

This seminar treats selected aspects of the history, aesthetics, criticism and historiography of African-American music.


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

SPRING 2016: This graduate research seminar is created to explore the history of slavery in the Middle East and parts of Africa, from the reign of the Ottoman ruler Suleiman the Magnificent, through the spread of Ottoman rule to the Arab world, to Iran and the Gulf, and throughout the Nile Valley, to the legacies of many different trades in slavery in the contemporary Middle East. Students will be asked to think seriously about how slavery impacted Middle Eastern societies, and how this phenomenon has been studied. The material we will use will draw from historians of the Middle East, the narratives of slave-owners and former slaves, and from the historiography of other fields of study, notably Africana and African Studies. We will also begin to explore the visual culture of slavery, in art, in photography and in film.