Courses

This two-course sequence assumes no previous knowledge of Arabic and provides a thorough grounding in the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. It starts with the alphabet and the number system and builds the four skills gradually and systematically through carefully selected and organized materials focusing on specific, concrete and familiar topics such as self identification, family, travel, food, renting an apartment, study, the weather, etc.). These topics are listed in the textbook's table of contents.  The student who successfully completes the two-course sequence will have mastered about 1000 basic words and will be able to: 1) understand and actively participate in conversations on a limited range of practical topics such as self-identification, family, school, work, the weather, travel, etc., 2) read and understand, with the help of a short list of words, passages of up to 180 words written in Arabic script, and 3) discuss orally in class and write a 50-word paragraph in Arabic.  The two-course sequence aims to take the student from the Novice to the Intermediate Mid level according to the ACTFL proficiency guidelines.

Full details for ASRC 1202 - Elementary Arabic II

Full details for ASRC 1210 - Elementary Twi Jumpstart

This course offers an introduction to the study of Africa, the U.S., the Caribbean and other diasporas.  This course will examine, through a range of disciplines, among them literature, history, politics, philosophy, the themes - including race/racism, the Middle Passage, sexuality, colonialism, and culture - that have dominated Africana Studies since its inception in the late-1960s. We will explore these issues in the attempt to understand how black lives have been shaped, in a historical sense; and, of course, the effects of these issues in the contemporary moment. This course seeks to introduce these themes, to investigate through one or more of the disciplines relevant to the question, and to provide a broad understanding of the themes so as to enable the kind of intellectual reflection critical to Africana Studies.

Full details for ASRC 1500 - Introduction to Africana Studies

This course offers an introduction to the philosophy of race. It canvasses key debates in the field concerning the metaphysical status of race, the relationship between the concept of race and racism (and the nature of the latter), the first-person reality of race, and the connections and disconnections between racial, ethnic, and national identities.

Full details for ASRC 1650 - Philosophy of Race

Full details for ASRC 1819 - FWS: Literature and Sport

Full details for ASRC 1856 - FWS: Fighting/Writing for One's Children

Full details for ASRC 1857 - FWS: Race, Sex, and Anxiety in the American Novel

This course dispenses with Eurocentric approaches to the study of Africa. Instead, it centers Africans as knowledge producers. We will ask such questions as: Did philosophy begin in Africa? Are there unique "African worldviews" that can be contrasted with "European worldviews"? Students will develop the ability to write clearly and succinctly through writing assignments that focus on critical engagement with texts from ancient Egypt, including The Teachings of Ptah-Hotep, and The Story of Sinuhe, as well as texts by African theologians such as Augustine. Students will also be studying the work of philosophers such as Ahmed Baba from Timbuktu, and Zar'a Ya'aqob from Ethiopia, as well as more contemporary figures such as Kwame Nkrumah, Amílcar Cabral, Julius Nyerere, and Cheikh Anta Diop. 

Full details for ASRC 1858 - FWS: Modern Afr Intellectual History: From the Nineteenth Century to Contemporary African Philosophy

The digital revolution has made an enormous amount of information available to research scholars, but discovering resources and using them effectively can be challenging. This course introduces students with research interests in Latino and Africana Studies to search strategies and methods for finding materials in various formats (e.g., digital, film, and print) using information databases such as the library catalog, print and electronic indexes, and the World Wide Web. Instructors provide equal time for lecture and hands-on learning. Topics include government documents, statistics, subject-specific online databases, social sciences, the humanities, and electronic citation management.

Full details for ASRC 1900 - Research Strategies in Africana and Latino Studies

Apartheid was a brutal system of segregating every aspect of life for different racial groups in South Africa. This notorious system of racial oppression survived for four and a half decades before it officially came to an end with South Africa's first democratic election in 1994. However, the long-term effects of apartheid still shape the everyday life in the country. This course will explore the history and memory of apartheid in South Africa by using memoir as a genre of historical source. Simultaneously, we will read primary historical sources and historiographical debates to understand the politics of remembering and forgetting the history of apartheid. The course will begin with a broad overview of apartheid state and society and historians' attempts to find meaning of it. In the second part of the course, we will explore the afterlife of apartheid through a collection of memoirs written by key anti-apartheid activists. Alongside, we will examine the politics of representation in sites of public commemoration such as museums, memorials, and exhibitions.

Full details for ASRC 2025 - Apartheid's Afterlife

According to the 2019 Trafficking in Persons Report released by the U.S. State Department, 24.9 million people worldwide are currently the victims of human trafficking and modern-day slavery. This upper-division course explores the roots of this modern crisis, focusing on human trafficking and slavery in the early modern Atlantic world, a region that encompasses Western Europe, the Americas, and Western Africa. Slavery and human trafficking in this region involved the interactions of three cultural groups, European, African, and American Indian, but within those broad categories were hundreds of different cultural, linguistic, and ethnic groups. Through readings focused on the conditions and cultures of slavery in the western hemisphere from the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, the course will explore how slavery was defined, who was vulnerable to enslavement, what slavery meant socially and legally in different times and places across the Atlantic world, and why human trafficking and forced labor continued well past the legal abolition of transatlantic slavery. The course is divided into five parts: an introductory section on definitions of slavery and human trafficking, followed by sections on American Indian slavery, African slavery in West Africa and the Americas, servitude and captivity in the Atlantic world, and concluding with an analysis of the legacies of early modern slavery today.

Full details for ASRC 2091 - A History of Human Trafficking in the Atlantic World, ca. 1400-1800

In this two-course sequence learners continue to develop the four language skills of listening, speaking, reading, and writing and grammar foundation through the extensive use of graded materials on a wide variety of topics.  While more attention is given to developing native-like pronunciation and to grammatical accuracy than in ARAB 1201 and ARAB 1202, the main focus of the course will be on encouraging fluency and facility in understanding the language and communicating ideas in it.  The student who successfully completes this two-course sequence will have mastered over 1500 new words and will be able to: 1) understand and actively participate in conversations related to a wide variety of topics beyond those covered in ARAB 1201 and ARAB 1202, such as the history and geography of the Arab world, food and health, sports, economic matters, the environment, politics, the Palestine problem, etc. 2) read and understand, with the help of a short list of words, passages of up to 300 words, and 3) discuss orally in class and write a 150-word paragraph in Arabic with fewer grammatical errors than in ARAB 1202.  The two-course sequence aims to take the student from the Intermediate Mid to the Advanced Mid level according to the ACTFL proficiency guidelines.

Full details for ASRC 2200 - Intermediate Arabic II

This course is designed for students who are interested in reading the language of the Qur'an with accuracy and understanding. The first week (4 classes) will be devoted to an introduction of the history of the Qur'an: the revelation, collection, variant readings, and establishment of an authoritative edition. The last week will be devoted to a general overview of "revisionist" literature on the Qur'an. In the remaining 12 weeks, we will cover all of Part 30 (Juz' 'Amma, suuras 78-114) and three suuras of varying length (36, 19, and 12).

Full details for ASRC 2204 - Introduction to Quranic Arabic

This course examines the development of the Caribbean since the Haitian Revolution.  It  will focus on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and our readings pay particular attention to the ways in which race, gender, and ethnicity shape the histories of the peoples of the region.  The course uses a pan-Caribbean approach by focusing largely on three islands - Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba - that belonged to competing empires.  Although the imperial powers that held these nations shaped their histories in distinctive ways these nations share certain common features. Therefore, we examine the differences and similarities of their histories as they evolved from plantation based colonies to independent nations.

Full details for ASRC 2308 - Modern Caribbean History

This seminar will introduce students to the expanding and dynamic historiography of the African diaspora. The most astute scholars of the African diaspora argue that diaspora is not to be conflated with migration for diaspora includes the cultural and intellectual work that constructs and reinforces linkages across time and space. Much of the early historiography of the African diaspora disproportionately focused on Anglophone theorists whose intellectual output engaged thinkers and communities in Anglophone West Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and the United States. Recent interventions in the historiography of the African diaspora has significantly broadened its geographical conceptualization by including a larger segment of Western Europe, Latin America and Asia. In addition, scholars of Africa are increasingly exploring topics in the African diaspora. Using a range of archival and secondary sources, students will explore the material, cultural and intellectual factors that are remaking the historiography of the African diaspora.

Full details for ASRC 2317 - Histories of the African Diaspora

This seminar examines some of the political and cultural visions of Africa and Africans held by African-American intellectuals and activists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Emphasis is placed on the philosophies of black nationalism, Pan Africanism and anticolonialism and the themes of emigration, expatriation, repatriation and exile. Awareness of Africa and attitudes toward the continent and its peoples have profoundly shaped African-American identity, culture and political consciousness. Notions of a linked fate between Africans and black Americans have long influenced black life and liberation struggles within the U.S. The motives, purposes and outlooks of African-American theorists who have claimed political, cultural, or spiritual connection to Africa and Africans have varied widely, though they have always powerfully reflected black experiences in America and in the West. The complexity and dynamism of those views belie simplistic assumptions about essential or "natural" relationships, and invite critical contemplation of the myriad roles that Africa has played in the African-American mind."

Full details for ASRC 2354 - African American Visions of Africa

This course focuses on African American women in the 20th century. The experiences of black women will be examined from a social, practical, communal, and gendered perspective. Topics include the Club Woman's movement, suffrage, work, family, black and white women and feminism, black women and radicalism, and the feminization of poverty.

Full details for ASRC 2512 - Black Women in the 20th Century

This course examines major trends in the evolution of the Middle East in the modern era. Focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries and ending with the  "Arab Spring," we will consider Middle East history with an emphasis on five themes: imperialism, nationalism, modernization, Islam, and revolution.  Readings will be supplemented with translated primary sources, which will form the backbone of class discussions.

Full details for ASRC 2674 - History of the Modern Middle East

These seminars offer an introduction to the humanities by exploring historical, cultural, social, and political themes. Students will explore themes in critical dialogue with a range of texts and media drawn from the arts, humanities, and/or humanistic social sciences. Guest speakers, including Cornell faculty and Society for the Humanities Fellows, will present from different disciplines and points of view. Students will make field trips to relevant local sites and visit Cornell special collections and archives. Students enrolled in these seminars will have the opportunity to participate in additional programming related to the annual focus theme of Cornell's Society for the Humanities and the Humanities Scholars Program for undergraduate humanities research.

Full details for ASRC 2750 - Introduction to Humanities

In this two-semester sequence, learners will be introduced to authentic, unedited Arabic language materials ranging from short stories, and poems, to newspaper articles dealing with social,  political,  and cultural issues. Emphasis will be on developing fluency in oral expression through discussions of issues presented in the reading and listening selections. There will be more focus on the development of native-like pronunciation and accurate use of grammatical structures than in the previous four courses. A primary objective of the course is the development of the writing skill through free composition exercises in topics of interest to individual students.  This course starts where ARAB 2202 leaves off and continues the development of the four language skills and grammar foundation using 18 themes, some new and some introduced in previous courses but are presented here at a more challenging level.  The student who successfully completes this two-course sequence have mastered over 3000 new words and will be able, within context of the 18 new and recycled themes to: 1) understand and actively participate in conversations, 2) read and understand, with the help of a short list of words, authentic, unedited passages of up to 400 words, and 3) discuss orally in class and write a 300-word paragraph in Arabic with fewer grammatical errors than in ARAB 2202.  The two-course sequence aims to take the student from the Advanced Mid to the Superior level according to the ACTFL proficiency guidelines.

Full details for ASRC 3101 - Advanced Arabic II

Fall topic: Cicero's Pro Caelio and Pro Milone; Spring topic: African Writers.

Full details for ASRC 3222 - Rapid Reading in Latin

Put into questions, the aims of this course are as follow: Should anyone worry about China's presence in Africa? Is China's presence part of the recolonizing of the Continent? Alternatively, is China's foray part of a global struggle for positioning between an emergent China and Africa's so-called traditional allies in the West?

Full details for ASRC 3330 - China-Africa Relations

The Beyoncé Nation course at Cornell, which has been requested regularly over the past several years, is finally back by popular demand!  Beyoncé's trajectory from Houston, Texas as a member of the group Destiny's Child to international fame and superstardom and a successful career as a solo singer, actress, clothing designer and entrepreneur holds important implications for critical dialogues on the U.S. South and national femininity. One aspect of this course examines themes related to her intersectional identity as a model of black and Southern womanhood that have recurred in her song lyrics, performances and visual representations, which have also been foundational for her development of more recent productions, including "Formation" and the larger Lemonade album.  In this course, we will examine the related film and its adaptation by black queer and trans women in the Glass Wing Group's Lemonade Served Bitter Sweet. Moreover, we will examine the Homecoming documentary, along with Beyoncé's newer projects such as The Lion: King:  The Gift, Black Is King and Netflix productions.  We will also consider Beyoncé's early career in Destiny's Child, including the impact of projects such "Independent Women, Part I" and popular icons such as Farrah Fawcett in shaping her Southern discourse.  We will carefully trace Beyoncé's journey to global fame and iconicity and the roles of the music business, social media and technology, fashion, and film in her development. We will consider her impact on politics and contemporary activist movements, as well as her engagement of black liberation discourses from the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Panther Party to Black Lives Matter, #SayHerName and #TakeAKnee. Furthermore, we will consider Beyoncé's impact in shaping feminism, including black feminism, along with her impact on constructions of race, gender, sexuality, marriage, family, and motherhood.  In addition to her body of work in film and video, we will draw on popular essays and critical writings on Beyoncé that have been produced from journals to books, along with visual materials and several biographies.  We will draw on the growing body of critical research and writing in Beyoncé studies, taking up book-length studies such as Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley's Beyoncé in Formation: Remixing Black Feminism, and essays from collections such as Adrienne Trier-Bieniek's The Beyonce Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race and Feminism, Kinitra D. Brooks's The Lemonade Reader:  Beyoncé, Black Feminism and Spirituality, Veronica Chambers's Queen Bey: A Celebration of the Power and Creativity of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, and Christina Baade and Kristin A. McGee's Beyoncé in the World:  Making Meaning with Queen Bey in Troubled Times.  Additionally, we will draw on works such as Michael Eric Dyson's JAY-Z:  Made in America, and Destiny's Child:  The Untold Story by Mathew Knowles, who will visit to discuss his books and backgrounds related to the music business and entrepreneurship.

Full details for ASRC 3350 - Beyoncé Nation: The Remix

Full details for ASRC 3401 - The Whites are Here to Stay: US-Africa Policy from Nixon to Date

In the early 1590s, a mysterious cartographer drew a map of the Americas for eager and curious European audiences. The orientation of the map was from the perspective of a ship crossing the Atlantic and arriving in the Caribbean, with Newfoundland marking the northern boundary and the islands of the Caribbean marking its southern boundary. The mapmaker knew what he was doing, an entire literary genre in sixteenth-century Europe was devoted to the islands of the Americas. Sixteenth-century Europeans' obsession with all things maritime and insular point to an important historical fact often overlooked in more land-based histories of colonies and empires: West and West Central Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans encountered one another initially from the bows of canoes, the decks of ships, or sandy beaches. And maritime cultures and technologies continued to influence the development of colonial societies—and resistance to colonization—throughout the colonial period. This course explores the history of Early America from the deck of a ship. Through lectures and readings, we will analyze how the Caribbean Sea and Atlantic Ocean created opportunities for some and cataclysmic misfortune for others. Self-liberated African and Afro-descended mariners, women running port towns in the absence of men, Kalinago pilots, and impressed European sailors will serve as some of our guides through a maritime history of early America.

Full details for ASRC 3405 - A Maritime History of Early America, ca. 1450-1850

This course will look at how literature based at sea helps both shape and challenge concepts of freedom and capital. By looking at the relationship between the sea-faring economy and its relationship to American Expansion and the history of enslavement we will explore how literature based at sea provided both a reflection and an alternate reality to land-based politics. While the main focus of the course will be nineteenth-century literature, we will also be exploring maritime literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its analogues in speculative fiction.

Full details for ASRC 3440 - Merchants, Whalers, Pirates, Sailors: American Maritime Literature from the 19th Century and Beyond

Frederick Douglass (1818?-1895) and France Harper's (1825-1911) careers as activists, orators, writers, and suffragists spanned the better part of the nineteenth century, from the age of enslavement through Reconstruction and the dawn of Jim Crow. We might say that the narrative of the life of Douglass is the narrative of the life of democracy and citizenship in the United States, as told by a man who often found himself characterized as an intruder, a fugitive, and an outlaw. Harper was a poet, lecturer, novelist, orator, and suffragist who challenged her white sisters to face their racism and her black brothers to face their misogyny. How do these two writers expand and challenge our understandings of citizenship and democracy?

Full details for ASRC 3625 - Frederick Douglass and Frances E.W. Harper

What impact did Africa's involvement in the slave trade and its colonization by Europe have on its long-term economic health? What role have post-independence political decisions made within Africa and by multinational economic actors (the World Bank and the IMF, for example) had on altering the trajectory of Africa's economic history? Does China's recent heavy investment in Africa portend a movement away from or a continuation of Africa's economic underdevelopment? These questions and others will be addressed in this course. 

Full details for ASRC 3652 - African Economic Development Histories

After the violent events in Charlottesville in 2017, and especially the January 6th insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021, most people have become aware of the extreme form of white political identities that are now a visible presence in our society. What can we learn about the history of "whiteness" from literature and popular culture?  What alternative conception of whiteness, including a consciously anti-racist white identity, can we glean from novels and plays, movies and TV shows?  This introductory course uses works by prominent writers (James Baldwin, Toni Morrison) as well as movies (including Get Out and Blindspotting) plus TV shows (Mad Men, Sopranos) to explore these questions.

Full details for ASRC 3734 - Whiteness in Literature and Popular Culture

When an African and an African American meet, solidarity is presumed, but often friction is the result.  In this course, we will consider how Africans and African Americans see each other through literature.  What happens when two peoples suffering from double consciousness meet?  We will examine the influence of historical forces including slavery, colonialism and pan-Africanism on the way writers explore the meeting between Africans and African Americans. Specifically we will look at how writers and political figures such as Maya Angelou, Chimamanda Adichie, Richard Wright, Eugene Robinson, Philippe Wamba, Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X have understood the meeting.

Full details for ASRC 3742 - Africans and African Americans in Literature

Rates of chronic disease and other health conditions, including mental illness and substance use disorders, have surged over the past three decades, owing largely to structural factors associated with the fragmentation of national healthcare systems, diminished social support networks, and government subsidization of unhealthy foods and hazardous pharmaceuticals. These issues are especially amplified in ethnoracial communities: for example, Blacks and Latinos typically have higher rates of disease in comparison to their non-Black counterparts, even after adjusting for factors such as income and education level. This course investigates the complex political, economic and cultural forces which contribute to health inequities. Students will be exposed to case studies throughout various diasporas—from Harlem to Cape Town—to understand the intricate ways in which race and health interact.

Full details for ASRC 4002 - Diasporic and Indigenous Health

Full details for ASRC 4113 - August Wilson: the Cycle of Black Life

In 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law that made African slavery inheritable through matrilineal descent. Partus sequiter ventrem codified the economic and legal value associated with the reproductive labor of enslaved women and shaped the social and power dynamics of slavery in distinctive ways. The gendered contexts of enslaved women's lives began to take shape throughout the Atlantic world and well into the mid-nineteenth century in the antebellum South. The lives of enslaved women, however, can be understood in a variety of contexts that we have yet to fully understand. In this graduate seminar, we will read and think deeply about the historiography of slavery and gender. This body of work boasts a unique genealogy and invites questions about the methodologies of our guild as we seek to understand these transformations with a limited archive. This seminar will examine the experiences of enslaved women but will also consider how gender configures in the lives of enslaved men, and white women and men.

Full details for ASRC 4155 - Slavery and Gender in the Atlantic World

There are two contrasting views of the status and role of women in Africa. One view portrays African women as controlled by men in all social institutions. Another view projects women as having a relatively favorable position in indigenous societies where they were active, with an identity independent of men's; in they were not clustered in a private sphere of the home while men controlled the public sphere. This course examines critical gender theories and African women in historical and contemporary periods. The topics covered include: women in non-westernized/pre-colonial societies; the impact and legacy of colonial policies; access to education and knowledge; political and economic participation in local and global contexts; women's organizations; armed conflicts and peace; same-gender love and evolving family values; the law and health challenges; the United Nations and World Conferences on Women: Mexico 1975, Copenhagen 1980, Nairobi 1985, Beijing 1995, post-Beijing meetings, the 2010 superstructure of UN Women, and Beijing +20 in 2015 with the UN Women's slogan "Empowering Women, Empowering Humanity: Picture it!"

Full details for ASRC 4602 - Women and Gender Issues in Africa

Historical biographies are one of the most popular forms of historical writing. In this course we will examine the challenges and opportunities of writing biographies set in the pre-1800 world by focusing on people in the black Atlantic (individuals of African descent who traveled between and lived in West Africa, Europe and the Americas).  What makes for a good historical (as opposed to a literary or simply glorifying) biography? How can one add depth and context to the often limited nuggets of information about an individual life in ways that can reveal so much more? These are questions at the heart of this course.

Full details for ASRC 4653 - Biography and the Black Atlantic, 1400-1800

This course takes up literatures and arts of Black speculation in the broadest terms, from science fiction and fantasy to Afrofuturism and Afropunk to Phillis Wheatley's and Outkast's poetics. We'll give special attention to speculation in African American literature to think through how Black people used art in the midst of anti-blackness to imagine worlds otherwise and for the pleasure of the craft. We'll read Black speculation through multiple forms, including novels, graphic novels, film, and music. Figures for consideration include William J. Wilson ("Ethiop"), Pauline Hopkins, Frances E. W. Harper, W. E. B. Du Bois, Octavia Butler, Ryan Coogler, Eve Ewing, N.K. Jemisin, Sun Ra, and Erykah Badu.

Full details for ASRC 4655 - Black Speculative Fiction

This seminar will examine the theoretical, critical, and practical methods necessary for the identification and interpretation of archives through the lenses of Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-diasporic afterlives. We will discuss traditional, nontraditional, and radical archives, the study and collection of alternative archival materials, and various forms of archival refusal and disappearance. This transdisciplinary seminar will traverse theory, poetics, photography, film, and digital cultures to bring fore the precarity and urgency of the quotidian in the wake of slavery, colonialism, and racialization. The course will engage Afro-Latinx/Afro-diasporic studies, decolonial feminisms, sexuality, and theories of the human that impact our approach to archives and often-overlooked histories. Students will curate an anthology and produce digital projects with the aim of communal outreach and engagement. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ASRC 4668 - Afro-Diasporic Afterlives: The Archive, Refusal, and the Disappeared

This course examines the history of policing in Black communities from its origins in slavery, through the Civil Rights/Black Power eras and the War on Drugs, to the present day. Specifically, it reveals how Black people's desire for freedom from slavery led fearful local, state, and federal authorities to establish a complex web of laws, policies and social practices that monitored and governed Black people's lives in sickening detail. This system ultimately laid a durable foundation for systems of racial and social control that continue to exist in modified forms in contemporary society. Using an array of sources—including film, legal codes, government documents, oral histories, newspaper reports, and personal letters—this course explores the legacy of slavery in modern-day policing and mass incarceration. For longer description and instructor bio, visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ASRC 4669 - From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: A History of Policing in Black Communities

DNA has become a pervasive feature of our lives, and a critical object through which race and justice are imagined and contested. DNA shapes how we think about ancestral pasts, medical futures, identity, citizenship and belonging, and standards of evidence. This course considers how each of these concepts articulates with DNA, investigating each in turn as a form of genetic afterlives that reconfigures race, justice, and the relationship between them. For longer description and instructor bio, visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ASRC 4670 - Race and Justice After DNA

This course focuses on issues of conflict, peace, and reconciliation in Israel and the Palestinian Territories as well as Sub-Saharan Africa. Both regions exemplify how issues ranging from nationalism and ethnocentrism to land, water and resource management, climate change and migration, as well as socio-psychological dynamics, can exacerbate conflicts. At the same time, these regions also exemplify how trans-border collaboration and regional integration, civilian peace building efforts, strategies for achieving historical justice, as well as science education and science diplomacy can become crucial tools for long-term peace-building, reconciliation and development. In this course we will work with and discuss issues of peace and conflict with policy-makers and local stakeholders involved in peace-building efforts.

Full details for ASRC 4721 - Peace Building in Conflict Regions: Case Studies Sub-Saharan Africa Israel Palestinian Territories

For senior Africana Studies majors working on honors theses, with selected reading, research projects, etc., under the supervision of a member of the Africana Studies and Research Center faculty.

Full details for ASRC 4901 - Honors Thesis

For students working on special topics, with selected reading, research projects, etc., under the supervision of a member of the Africana Studies and Research Center faculty.

Full details for ASRC 4903 - Independent Study

This course covers the basic epistemology for social sciences research, integrating an explicit focus on applied mixed methods approaches (quantitative and qualitative) for conducting original "real world" research on humans. While these cognates will be approached theoretically, the course's concentration will be on the praxis of quantifying and contextualizing the experiences, attitudes, and outcomes of historically marginalized and "hidden" populations, including people who are Black, Latinx and indigenous, LGBTQ+,  and individuals with a mental illness or substance use disorder, with an intersectional lens. While not offering an exhaustive review of individual quantitative and qualitative methodologies, students will learn the fundamentals of curating a research framework on marginalized and hidden populations, engaging and recruiting people into their studies, collecting and analyzing data, and disseminating research findings.

Full details for ASRC 6003 - Doing Research With Marginalized Populations

In 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law that made African slavery inheritable through matrilineal descent. Partus sequiter ventrem codified the economic and legal value associated with the reproductive labor of enslaved women and shaped the social and power dynamics of slavery in distinctive ways. The gendered contexts of enslaved women's lives began to take shape throughout the Atlantic world and well into the mid-nineteenth century in the antebellum South. The lives of enslaved women, however, can be understood in a variety of contexts that we have yet to fully understand. In this graduate seminar, we will read and think deeply about the historiography of slavery and gender. This body of work boasts a unique genealogy and invites questions about the methodologies of our guild as we seek to understand these transformations with a limited archive. This seminar will examine the experiences of enslaved women but will also consider how gender configures in the lives of enslaved men, and white women and men.

Full details for ASRC 6155 - Slavery and Gender in the Atlantic World

There are two contrasting views of the status and role of women in Africa. One view portrays African women as controlled by men in all social institutions. Another view projects women as having a relatively favorable position in indigenous societies they were active with an identity independent of men's and no concentration of women in a private sphere while men controlled the public sphere. This course examines critical gender theories and women in historical and contemporary periods. The topics covered include: non-westernized/pre-colonial societies; the impact and legacy of colonial policies; access to education and knowledge; women in politics and the economy in local and global contexts; women's organizations; armed conflicts and peace; same gender love and evolving family values; the law and health challenges; the United Nations and World Conferences on Women: Mexico 1975, Copenhagen 1980, Nairobi 1985, Beijing 1995 and post-Beijing meetings, and the 2010 superstructure of UN Women.

Full details for ASRC 6602 - Women and Gender Issues in Africa

Historical biographies are one of the most popular forms of historical writing. In this course we will examine the challenges and opportunities of writing biographies set in the pre-1800 world by focusing on people in the black Atlantic (individuals of African descent who traveled between and lived in West Africa, Europe and the Americas).  What makes for a good historical (as opposed to a literary or simply glorifying) biography? How can one add depth and context to the often limited nuggets of information about an individual life in ways that can reveal so much more? These are questions at the heart of this course.

Full details for ASRC 6653 - Biography and the Black Atlantic, 1400-1800

This seminar will examine the theoretical, critical, and practical methods necessary for the identification and interpretation of archives through the lenses of Afro-Puerto Rican and Afro-diasporic afterlives. We will discuss traditional, nontraditional, and radical archives, the study and collection of alternative archival materials, and various forms of archival refusal and disappearance. This transdisciplinary seminar will traverse theory, poetics, photography, film, and digital cultures to bring fore the precarity and urgency of the quotidian in the wake of slavery, colonialism, and racialization. The course will engage Afro-Latinx/Afro-diasporic studies, decolonial feminisms, sexuality, and theories of the human that impact our approach to archives and often-overlooked histories. Students will curate an anthology and produce digital projects with the aim of communal outreach and engagement. For longer description and instructor bio visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ASRC 6668 - Afro-Diasporic Afterlives: The Archive, Refusal, and the Disappeared

This course examines the history of policing in Black communities from its origins in slavery, through the Civil Rights/Black Power eras and the War on Drugs, to the present day. Specifically, it reveals how Black people's desire for freedom from slavery led fearful local, state, and federal authorities to establish a complex web of laws, policies and social practices that monitored and governed Black people's lives in sickening detail. This system ultimately laid a durable foundation for systems of racial and social control that continue to exist in modified forms in contemporary society. Using an array of sources—including film, legal codes, government documents, oral histories, newspaper reports, and personal letters—this course explores the legacy of slavery in modern-day policing and mass incarceration. For longer description and instructor bio, visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ASRC 6669 - From Slavery to Mass Incarceration: A History of Policing in Black Communities

DNA has become a pervasive feature of our lives, and a critical object through which race and justice are imagined and contested. DNA shapes how we think about ancestral pasts, medical futures, identity, citizenship and belonging, and standards of evidence. This course considers how each of these concepts articulates with DNA, investigating each in turn as a form of genetic afterlives that reconfigures race, justice, and the relationship between them. For longer description and instructor bio, visit the Society for the Humanities website.

Full details for ASRC 6670 - Race and Justice After DNA

Urban Justice Labs are innovative seminars designed to bring students into direct contact with complex questions about race and social justice within the context of American urban culture, architecture, humanities, and media. Drawing from Cornell's collections, such as the Hip Hop Collection, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, the Human Sexuality Collection, holdings on American Indian History and Culture, the John Henrik Clarke Africana Library, and the Johnson Museum of Art, students will leverage archival materials to launch new observations and explore unanticipated approaches to urban justice. Urban Justice Labs are offered under the auspices of Cornell University's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Collaborative Studies in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities grant. For current special topic descriptions and application instructions, visit our urban seminars website.

Full details for ASRC 6819 - Urban Justice

Independent study course in topics not covered in regularly scheduled courses. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course work.

Full details for ASRC 6901 - Independent Study

The seminar is coordinated and supervised by one professor but team taught by three or four faculty members per semester. Each participating faculty member is responsible for a topical segment of the course related to her or his areas of specialization or an area of interest pertaining to theory and methodology of Africana Studies.

Full details for ASRC 6903 - Africana Studies Graduate Seminar

Elementary Swahili provides a foundation in listening, speaking, reading, and writing the basic grammatical structures and vocabulary. No prior knowledge of the language is required. Swahili (Kiswahili) is spoken in the East and Central parts of Africa. It is an official and national language in Tanzania, and in Kenya. During a first semester course, students engage in short conversation and communicative tasks, such as, greetings, introduction, daily routines, shopping, etc. Students learn to comprehend short and simple utterances about topics pertaining to basic personal information and immediate setting in day to day life. A Swahili second semester increases your oral fluency, grammar, vocabulary, writing, reading, and listening skills. All listening exercises will aim at preparing students to speak. Be ready to actively participate in conversations, to express yourself orally, and write stories/compositions. Literature and Cultural materials are incorporated into the course, along with audio, video, and web-based materials.

Full details for SWAHL 1101 - Elementary Swahili II

This course is intended for students who will be spending the summer in Tanzania for the Global Health Program.  To prepare students to live and learn in Tanzania, this course will provide an introduction to and foundation in basic Kiswahili.  Students will develop the capacity to communicate with Tanzanian peers and home stay families, as well as develop the competency to navigate community life in Tanzania. Since this is a one credit seminar, this course does NOT fulfill a language requirement for colleges or majors. This course is intended for students whom will be spending the summer in Tanzania for the Global Health Program.  To prepare students to live and learn in Tanzania, this course will provide an introduction to and foundation in basic Kiswahili.  Students will develop the capacity to communicate with Tanzanian peers and home stay families, as well as develop the competency to navigate community life in Tanzania.

Full details for SWAHL 1107 - Elementary Swahili for Global Health

Full details for SWAHL 1108 - Elementary Swahili Jumpstart

Intermediate Swahili levels I and II in general impart speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills beyond Swahili elementary level to participate with ease and confidence in familiar topics and exchange information on unfamiliar topics. Students are assigned communicative tasks such as respond to a situation with a short text and take part in a discussion after viewing short video clips and prompts to elicit speaking and listening competence and cultural awareness responses beyond elementary level. The language and cultural scenarios practiced are designed to help students demonstrate language responses beyond familiar topics, and to feel comfortable conversing with Swahili native speakers, as well as to blend in and feel welcomed as part of the community while exploring different topics such as acquaintanceship, relationships, health, festivals, education, sports, housing, politics, commerce, travel, etc. Short stories are used to depict cultural aspects such as cultural expressions, proverbs, sayings, and riddles. Literature and cultural materials are incorporated into the course, along with audio-visual and web-based material. In this course, students have an opportunity to participate in language conversation outside the classroom and explore the opportunities for study abroad in East Africa. Swahili Elementary I and II are prerequisite for this course. By the end of this course, students should be able to reach proficiency level Intermediate High according to the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages (ACTFL) www.actfl.org

Full details for SWAHL 2102 - Intermediate Swahili II

This course is a continuation of the basic introductory Wolof course. It aims to build students' basic understanding of the sentence structure of the language. It combines written and oral practice based on major cultural aspects of traditional and modern Wolof society.

Full details for WOLOF 1118 - Elementary Wolof II

This course will further your awareness and understanding of the Wolof language and culture, as well as improve your mastery of grammar, writing skills, and oral skills. Course materials will incorporate various types of text including tales, cartoons, as well as multimedia such as films, videos, and audio recordings.

Full details for WOLOF 2119 - Intermediate Wolof II

Full details for WOLOF 3114 - Advanced Wolof II

A two-semester beginner's course in Yoruba Language and Culture. Organized to offer Yoruba language skills and proficiency in speaking, reading, listening, writing, and translation. Focus is placed on familiar informal and formal contexts, e.g., home, school, work, family, social situations, politics, etc. Course uses Yoruba oral literature, proverbs, rhetoric, songs, popular videos, and theater, as learning tools for class comprehension. First semester focuses on conversation, speaking, and listening.  Second semester focuses on writing, translation and grammatical formation. Through the language course students gain basic background for the study of an African culture, arts, and history both in the continent and in the diaspora. Yoruba language is widely spoken along the west coast of Africa and in some African communities in diaspora.  Yoruba video culture, theater, music, and arts has a strong influence along the west coast and in the diaspora.A two-semester beginner's course in Yoruba language and culture. Organized to offer Yoruba language skills and proficiency in speaking, reading, listening, writing, and translation. Focus is placed on familiar informal and formal contexts, e.g., home, school, work, family, social situations, politics. Course uses Yoruba oral literature, proverbs, rhetoric, songs, popular videos, and theater as learning tools for class comprehension. First semester focuses on conversation, speaking, and listening. Second semester focuses on writing, translation, and grammatical formation. Through the language course students gain basic background for the study of an African culture, arts, and history both on the continent and in the diaspora. Yoruba language is widely spoken along the west coast of Africa and in some African communities in diaspora. Yoruba video culture, theater, music, and arts have strong influence along the west coast and in the diaspora.

Full details for YORUB 1109 - Introduction to Yoruba II

Intermediate Yoruba II is a follow-up to Intermediate Yoruba I. It is a fourth-semester Yoruba language course. The course assists students to acquire advanced level proficiency in reading, speaking, writing, and listening in Yoruba language. Students are introduced to grammatical and syntactic structures in the language that will assist them in describing, presenting, and narrating information in the basic tenses. At the end of the course, students will be able to listen to, process, and understand programs produced for native speakers in media such as television, radio, and films. They will be able to read and understand short stories, novels, and plays written for native speakers of the language.

Full details for YORUB 2111 - Intermediate Yoruba II

This course will help students expand their understanding of the Yoruba language through the communicative approach. We will focus on the four skills, speaking, listening, learning, and writing.

Full details for YORUB 3111 - Advanced Yoruba II

Development of communication skills through dialogues and role play. Texts and songs are drawn from traditional and popular literature. Students research daily life in selected areas of South Africa.

Full details for ZULU 1116 - Elementary Zulu II

Students read longer texts from popular media as well as myths and folktales. Prepares students for initial research involving interaction with speakers of isiZulu in South Africa and for the study of oral and literary genres.

Full details for ZULU 2117 - Intermediate Zulu II

Readings may include short stories, a novel, praise poetry, historical texts, or contemporary political speeches, depending on student interests. Study of issues of language policy and use in contemporary South Africa; introduction to the Soweto dialect of isiZulu. Students are prepared for extended research in South Africa involving interviews with isiZulu speakers.

Full details for ZULU 3114 - Advanced Zulu II