This course examines the processes by which African peoples have established epistemological, cosmological, and religious systems both prior to and after the institution of Western slavery.

From wax cylinders to reel-to-reel to digital video, recording technologies expanded the historical profession dramatically during the twentieth century, a process that is ongoing in the present. We will read some classics, such as Barbara Myerhoff's Number Our Days and Alessandro Portelli's Death of Luigi Trastulli, as well as scholarly pieces aimed at working historians, and we will discuss public history approaches, such as the video recordings collected by the Library of Congress's Civil Rights History Project and other internet-based collections. This course centers on methodology - students will learn about 'best practices' in the field and will work toward creating an interview record that can be housed in an archive and accessed by other researchers. All students will use digital video and will practice creating accessible links to both video and audio material, although the interviewees involved may choose an audio-only format. NOTE: Each person interviewed maintains rights to the interview material unless she or he explicitly donates those rights to an archive. Interviewees' privacy and intellectual property rights will be respected by all seminar participants.

This course critically examines stereotype threat and impostor phenomenon as they relate to African Americans. Both stereotype threat and impostor phenomenon negatively affect African Americans. The apprehension experienced by African Americans that they might behave in a manner that confirms an existing negative cultural stereotype is stereotype threat, which usually results in reduced effectiveness in African Americans' performance. Stereotype threat is linked with impostor phenomenon. Impostor phenomenon is an internal experience of intellectual phoniness in authentically talented individuals, in which they doubt their accomplishments and fear being exposed as a fraud. While stereotype threat relies on broad generalization, the impostor phenomenon describes feelings of personal inadequacy, especially in high-achieving African Americans. This course will explore the evolving meanings connected to both stereotype threat and impostor phenomenon in relation to African Americans.

This course is designed to introduce students to innovative approaches to the psychology of education, especially with regard to populations from at-risk contexts, sociocultural dimensions of education, and social-emotional learning.

This course is an introduction to the language of the Egyptian Old Kingdom. The grammar of the period will be introduced during the early part of the semester, using Ededl's ALTAGYPTISCHE GRAMMATIK as the basic reference. Other grammatical studies to be utilized will include works by Allen, Baer, Polotsky, Satzinger, Gilula, Doret, and Silverman. The majority of time in the course will be devoted to reading varied textual material: the unpublished inscriptions in the tomb of the Old Kingdom offical Kapure--on view in the collection of the University Museum; several autobiographical inscriptions as recorded by Sethe in URKUNDEN I; and a letter in hieratic (Baer, ZAS 93, 1966, 1-9).

This course deals with various religious topics, such as Mass Religious Conversion.

This course is designed to be an exploration of the rise of the new Black elite and their contributions to business in America, their lifestyles, and the intraracial diversity of their socioeconomic origins. Little social science research has considered the unique location of Black American professionals within America's racialized class structure. Despite marked gains since the Civil Rights Movement, American Blacks still comprise just 2% of executives and senior manager-level employees, and just a handful (<1%) of Fortune 500 companies are led by Black CEOs. Notably, Black women currently account for only 1.6% of vice presidents and 1.4% of C-suite executives compared to white men who hold 57% and 68% of those positions, respectively. Together, we will examine the origins and worldviews of the old Black elite compared to the new Black professional class and how their variegated racial, ethnic, and class experiences in corporate America remain tethered to the "peculiar" history of Black slavery and our enduring racial stratification system. Whatever their socioeconomic origins, Black professionals are well-credentialed to assume leadership roles both inside and outside the Black community in the U.S. The use of the delimiter 'Black' nonetheless recognizes how race interacts with social class to prevent Black Americans from attaining social and economic parity with whites even at the top of the class hierarchy; for Blacks, social class is racialized concept intrinsically linked to the legacy of structural racism in all its economic, political, cultural, and social manifestations Bearing all this in mind: Who is the new Black professional class? What are their origins and how do they reflect the ideals and attitudes of 21st Century Black America? What are their contributions to corporate America? In what ways does structural racism differentially impact their career trajectories and structural integration into the corporate mainstream? How do they cope with white racism and lack of representation beyond middle management? And, what lessons can we learn from their professional and personal experiences to shed light on the enduring legacy of Black inequality and the structural impediments all Blacks in the U.S. face as they strive to acquire intergenerational mobility? We will study the historical presence of Blacks in certain industries since 1865, how racial, ethnic, gender, and class diversity within Black America have affected access and opportunities for advancement, as well as the legacy of deliberate federal programs and policies that have stymied Black professional advancement. Particularly salient to our discussion here is the steering of Blacks into

In his 1995 documentary Black Is, Black Ain t Marlon Riggs traces a black cultural tradition while simultaneously destabilizing the very notion of blackness itself. He testifies that: Black is black, and black is blue. Black is bright. Black is you. Black can do you in. In Riggs configuration, black is a color, black is a feeling, black is a sound, black is materiality, and black is a life sentence. In an effort to raise critical questions around blackness, performance, race, and feeling, this course follows in the tradition of Riggs work. In other words, this graduate level course examines the notion of blackness through theorizations of performance. It pursues the following questions: What is blackness? How is blackness embodied, felt, heard, represented, and seen through performance? How is black performance political? Discussions and written work will interrogate the slipperiness of, desire for, and policing of blackness in order to trouble conceptions of race as a biological essence. Organized by keywords in the field of Black Performance Theory - and exploring varying performance forms (the play, the dance, the film, the photograph, the performance of everyday life, the television program, the exhibit, and even the tweet) - This course foregrounds the micro-politics through which black racialized subjects are shaped in the realm of culture. Performances will be consulted each meeting which we will use to interpret and complicate the day's readings. In examining blackness through a number of performance mediums, we will consider the politics of black creative labor and the processes of racialization produced through black bodies.

The Indian Ocean region represents an area with interwoven centuries of interactions, politically, historically, geographically and culturally. This area has witnessed continuous migrations of peoples, the circulation of goods and ideas, and the interaction with foreign forces. The Indian Ocean world has served as an epicenter of global economy in pre-modern world and as such, it gave rise to trading networks and political empires. As part of the Indian Ocean World, the eastern and southern shores of Africa are both the recipients and the transmitters of cultural and political icons. The existence of many islands that separate Africa from Asia stand as hybrid cultures that are influenced by forces from different continents. Political and cultural relations between African regions and the rest of the Indian Ocean world are evident with the presence of African-descent populations in these places, as well as the prevalent of cultural practices of African origin. Signs of interaction between the Indian Ocean world and the African shores are apparent in several archeological sites, as well as in the cultural practices of religion, language, architecture and modes of dress. The European colonial expansion, has allowed the populations in the Indian Ocean world to share strategies during their independence movements to thwart western political hegemony. With the current advanced forms of globalization, this region is moving more towards economic and political cooperation and in addressing the transnational natural and man-made threats.