This course will explore heterogeneous responses to ancient Greek and Roman Classics in the literature, art, and political thought of Africa and the Black Diaspora, ranging from the late eighteenth century to the present day and encompassing Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. We will analyze how African and black diasporic writers, artists, and thinkers have engaged with and re-imagined Greco-Roman Classics, both to expose and critique discourses of racism, imperialism, and colonialism, and as a source of radical self-expression. Throughout, we will consider the reciprocal dynamic by which dialogues with ancient Greek and Roman classics contribute to the polyphony of black texts and these same texts write back
to and signify on the Greek and Roman Classics, diversifying the horizon of expectation for their future interpretation.
Writers and artists whose work we will examine include Romare Bearden; Dionne Brand; Gwendolyn Brooks; Aimé Césaire; Austin Clarke; Anna Julia Cooper; Rita Dove; W.E.B. Du Bois; Ralph Ellison; Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona; C.L.R. James; June Jordan; Toni Morrison; Harryette Mullen; Marlene Nourbese Philip; Ola Rotimi; William Sanders Scarborough; Wole Soyinka; Mary Church Terrell; Derek Walcott; Booker T. Washington; Phillis Wheatley; and Richard Wright. We will study these writers in the context of national and transnational histories and networks and in dialogue with relevant theoretical debates. Work for assessment will include a 15-page research paper and the preparation of a teaching syllabus for a course on an aspect of Black Classical Receptions.

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, Asian Americans and multiracials.

This course examines the field of Black Feminism—or, the political, social, and economic forces that shape Black diasporic people’s gendered lives. Exploring iterations of Black feminism over time, it necessarily pluralizes feminism, paying attention to its meanings, uses, and applications across the African diaspora. Together, we'll ride the three waves of Black feminism to explore the ways Black women and Black femme’s political and cultural work has been consequential to notions of citizenship, belonging, culture and liberation. Drawing from Black Studies, Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies, and Performance Studies we will ask:
— How do Black women and Black femme's lives, labor, and cultural productions lay bare the limits of maleness and whiteness as dominant frames?
— How have/do their lives suggest other modalities of living, knowledge production, relations of being, and critiques of power/violence?
— How might we learn from the past in order to envision and build nourishing spaces for Black femmes today?

This is a course for students who are looking for ways to use their writing to participate in electoral politics. Student writers will use many forms--short essay, blogs, social media posts, mini video- or play scripts, podcasts--and consider lots of topics as they publish work, in real time, with #VoteThatJawn. Imagine a Creative Writing class that answers our desire to live responsibly in the world and to have a say in the systems that govern and structure us. Plus learning to write with greater clarity, precision, and whatever special-sauce Jawn your voice brings. The course is designed as an editorial group sharing excellent, non-partisan, fun, cool, sometimes deadly earnest content for and about fresh voters. In addition, you will gain experience in activities that writers in all disciplines need to know: producing an arts-based event, a social media campaign, working with multi-media content, and collaborating with other artists. We will sometimes work directly with diverse populations of youth from other colleges and high schools throughout the city. Because you will engage with a common reading program about the ground-breaking Voting Rights Act of 1965, the class is cross-listed with Africana Studies. In addition, the work of #VoteThatJawn performs a civic service; therefore it is listed as an an Academically Based Community Service (ABCS) course with the university. Don't sit out this momentous electoral season because you have so much work. Use your work to bring other youth to the polls.

This research seminar provides students with instruction in basic historical methods and an opportunity to conduct collaborative primary source research into the University of Pennsylvania's historic connections to slavery. After an initial orientation to archival research, students will plunge in to doing actual research at the Kislak Center, the University Archives, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company, and various online sources. During the final month of the semester, students will begin drafting research reports and preparing for a public presentation of the work. During the semester, there will be opportunities to collaborate with a certified genealogist, a data management and website expert, a consultant on public programming, and a Penn graduate whose research has been integral to the Penn Slavery Project.

This course examines how the slave trade was understood, justified, contested, and represented in British literature. The rise of Britain as a world power went hand in hand with its exploitation of African labor, as tens of millions of human beings were shipped across the ocean to work the plantations of the Americas. What kinds of activist strategies, on both sides of the Atlantic, aided the British abolition of the slave trade, and, eventually, emancipation? What role did women and the fight for women’s rights play in the anti-slavery movement? Why was interracial romance such a prevalent theme in anti-slavery fiction and poetry? We will explore these questions beginning with Aphra Behn’s novella of a kidnapped African prince, Oroonoko(1688), and ending with Elizabeth Heyrick’s sugar boycott pamphlet, "Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition" (1824). Other readings will include philosophical and economic justifications for slavery by Aristotle and Locke, Afro-British slave narratives (Equiano, Cugoano), influential plays (Southerne, Coleman) and poetry (Day, More, Yearsley, Wheatley), and political treatises (Clarkson, Wilberforce).

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.

Southern culture and history from 1607-1860, from Jamestown to seccession. Traces the rise of slavery and plantation society, the growth of Southern sectionalism and its explosion into Civil War.

Over the past two decades there has been an explosion of research into Afro-Latin American populations in South America and the Caribbean. During this period a generation of scholars who were largely unsatisfied with the research methods and normative agendas of many scholars, activists and politicians of prior eras began to pose distinct research questions and methodological approaches to various subject matter. Afro-Latin identification and identity ( as both separate from and entangled with national identity) is a major theme in the new literature. Race, racism and inequality, Afro-Latin involvement in social movements, political parties and other forms of political articulation have also been prominent themes. In previous eras, scholars largely emphasized various iterations of purportedly racial and ostensibly cultural mixture such as Mestizaje and Democracia Racial to explain why race and racism did not play a prominent role in social and political mobilization. Contemporary sociologists and anthropologists, however, have found ways to identify attitudes, behaviors , demographic and socio-economic indicators that belie imagery and ideologies of social and political equality achieved through miscegenation (cultural and physical) in Latin America.

This course provides an introduction to the study of Africa in all its diversity and complexity. Our focus is cultural, geographical, and historical: we will seek to understand Africa s current place in the world political and economic order and learn about the various social and physical factors that have influenced the historical trajectory of the continent. We study the cultural formations and empires that emerged in Africa before European colonial invasion and then how colonialism reshaped those sociocultural forms. We ll learn about the unique kinds of kinship and religion in precolonial Africa and the changes brought about by the spread of Islam and Christianity. Finally, we ll take a close look at contemporary issues such as ethnic violence, migration, popular culture and poverty, and we'll debate the various approaches to understanding those issues.