Sophomore seminars are small interactive courses offered by faculty members in departments all across the campus. Sophomore seminars offer opportunity for close, regular intellectual contact between faculty members and students in the crucial second year. The topics vary from department to department and semester to semester. Enrollment limited to 15 sophomores.

This sophomore seminar is organized around the Gender and Women’s Studies Department’s spring 2023 lecture series, which will focus on contemporary feminist art, theory, and praxis. The seminar takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of feminist art practice in the fields of performance art, photography, film, and multimedia art. It considers how how feminist art, theory, politics, protest and praxis circulate in the public sphere and how artists intervene in critical feminist debates over a range of issues including gender violence, embodied freedom, reproductive justice, authoritarian state violence, militarism, displacement, and the production of the refugee. The series invites scholars, artists, and activists studying visual art and the discursive impact of feminist artmaking. Each of the talks and guest lectures is designed to demonstrate how a feminist analysis can enliven and expand our understanding of the political implications of visual art practice and representations. Each of these speakers will give a lecture discussing one theoretical aspect or empirical case of contemporary feminist visual art and activism. The semester will culminate with a day-long symposium celebrating the work of the groundbreaking Vietnamese feminist filmmaker Trinh Minh-ha on April 29. The class will meet weekly for an hour. Each week we will either read and discuss an essay in preparation for an upcoming lecture, attend a “live” lecture, or visit an art exhibition connected to our course content and discussions. Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual/conceptual artist and an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She teaches courses on critical race theory, feminist theory, black social movements in the Americas, women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as race and environmental politics in the African Diaspora. She is a social anthropologist and is currently completing a book entitled To Defend this Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Geography of Race in Nicaragua, which examines how black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression from the 19th century to the present. She is currently developing a new project on the racial politics of energy production and dispossession in the US Gulf South and South Africa. Her work has been published in American Anthropologist, the Bulletin of Latin American Research, the Journal of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, make/shift: feminisms in motion, and Asterix. To see her art work visit

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