For decades, the question of what ethnography is—both as a method and a genre—has sparked heated debates about its boundaries, possibilities, and limitations. This seminar approaches ethnography through the lens of Black feminist thought, exploring the Black feminist ethnographic eye: what it sees, what it does, and how it operates. Together, we will rethink the boundaries of art, literature, and ethnography, asking how these domains, when intertwined in method and practice, can offer powerful critiques of society and culture through themes of race, gender, and sexuality in diverse global contexts. We will engage in visual analysis and close reading, bringing excerpts from autoethnographies, novels, “travel literature,” and art into conversation with each other. The following central questions will guide our inquiry: What is the Black ethnographic self? What work can the ethnographic “I” do? How do the boundaries between ethnographer, artist, and author become blurred—and what powerful results might this yield? Finally, what does it mean to think across the boundaries of art, literature, and ethnography in our contemporary moment?

Sex, gender, and sexuality sit at the interface of culture and biology and illustrate the interrelationships between living bodies, social lives, symbol systems, and ecological systems. In this seminar, we will discuss readings from bioarchaeology, medical anthropology, primatology, and developmental psychology in an effort to develop an integrative framework for thinking about sex and gender. As we explore the science of sex, we will simultaneously interrogate its methodological limitations and consider how its tools can help us navigate and reform our social reality. The course will be structured in two parts: during the first part of the semester, we will read a handful of seminal works that establish the theoretical foundations for our ongoing discussion. In the second half, we will transition to a student-led seminar in which students will be tasked with choosing readings, leading discussions, and determining the direction of the course.

This course is an interdisciplinary analysis of the aesthetics and politics of the US through a focus on Black popular music since WWII with an emphasis on the “Black Awakening” of the 1960s. With the African American experience at the center, this course will explore constructions of whiteness through the lens of jazz, disco and hip hop identity formation, as well as works of members of the Asian American and Latinx musical communities in the US as they impacted and were influenced by the Black music world.

Special Topics on race and law will vary each semester.

Topics will vary each semester.

The Italian popular imagination has been haunted by spirits, demons, and myriad creatures that continue to both frighten and entertain. Yet tales of the supernatural can also engage some of the most profound human inquiries such as mortality, grief, commemoration, spirituality, ethics, human imagination, and the violations of "proper" societal behavior. This course examines the many forms of supernatural belief that people express through traditional genres and popular media in Italy. From folk tales to films, we will look at a wide survey of the various employments of the supernatural tale across Italy's complex, varied geography and belated identity-formation. Key concepts will include belief and visibility: in this case, the conviction that experiences of the supernatural are genuine and have important implications not only about life after death, as well as the existence of spirits, magic, and related topics on the nature of social and personal hauntings. In addition to a foundational survey knowledge of some of the earliest works of ‘Italian’ literature and oral history, we will discuss how the introduction of modern technology has shaped to resist, satirize, and indulge in the paranormal into the 20th and 21st centuries, and how these phenomena have shifted our relationship with the supernatural. Through specific case studies, we will explore the forms supernatural tradition and belief take in everyday life and develop models for understanding how these beliefs relate to other aspects of worldview and culture (including deconstructing the binaries of tradition-modernity, backwardness-progress) and highlight the diverse ways in which supernatural storytelling can function in our lives. Ultimately, we will also examine functions of place-based supernatural narratives to discuss how this type of storytelling can be mobilized to make powerful political claims and change the contours of our everyday reality. This is a reading and composition course that fulfills the University's R5B requirement. Students of this course will develop an understanding of the potentials of authorial power and rhetorical strategies that storytellers use to convince or manipulate the beliefs and emotions of their readers, and will interrogate the literary and cultural meanings of these uncanny encounters through a close study of primary and secondary texts. We will be focused equally and simultaneously on the interrelated skills of close reading, intensive writing, and research. All texts and other materials will be provided, and will include: Pliny the Younger's haunted house story Criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso's writings on Eusapia Palladino Dario Argento's Suspiria Selected texts on Tarantismo

Dante's afterlife journey through Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso serves not only as a metaphor for the human experience of overcoming inner obstacles, but it also symbolizes the formidable challenge of composing such an intricate text like the Divine Comedy. Similarly, in a reading and composition class, students embark on a journey like Dante, starting from a place of writerly disorientation when facing academic writing (a sort of Dantean dark forest) and gradually gaining confidence as they progress. Like Dante, and alongside him, in our R5B class, we will delve into our inner dark forest, which in this class means dealing with our demons, fears and insecurity as writers within an academic setting. In this journey we will meet several notable figures, both historical and mythological, such as the lovers Paolo and Francesca, the controversial Conte Ugolino, and Ulysses, as well as guiding characters like the poet Virgil and Dante's beloved Beatrice. From the dark forest, with commitment and courage, together with your R&C instructor and your classmates, you will overcome obstacles and push forward until reaching Paradise, which in our class means Confidence as writers! Although the main text will be Dante's Divine Comedy, other texts will be provided by the instructor via bCourses as PDFs. Some texts relate to postcolonial reimaginings of the Divine Comedy, while others are revisitations by cartoonists, as well as various forms of art, including video games. In this class, we will spend a significant amount of time writing in class, as well as discussing in groups. There will be discussion posts on the reading of the day to publish on bCourses and two longer projects during the semester, including their rewriting. Students should purchase the following book: Inferno / Dante Alighieri ; Translated, with an Introduction and Notes, by Mary Jo Bang ; Illustrations by Henrik Drescher. Minneapolis, Minn: Graywolf Press, 2012. Print. SBN: 1555976549 ISBN : 9781555976194 Other materials and PDFs will be provided by the instructor via bCourses.

This course explores the way fate and fortune has been portrayed in Italian art and literature. Despite the best laid plans, fate has a way of intervening. How have Italian writers and artists considered the role of luck or fortune in their subjects? How are references to nature employed to represent fate, for example, when painters include a storm at the edge of their horizons, or map makers include a reference to the wind gods at the edge of their globes? These depictions of fortune acknowledge the limits of human control, often in the same spaces that depict humans striving to exercise complete control. Through an examination of symbols of fortune embedded in novels, but also excerpts of key texts from history, and works of art and architecture, we will consider the legacy of these perspectives on luck. This is a writing-intensive course that fosters skills in literary analysis, including close reading, critical thinking, and articulate writing. In this class, you will use your critical reflections on the texts as starting points for writing several papers, including one research paper. Essential to the writing process will be workshopping one another’s work through peer review. You will also complete shorter weekly reading responses and assignments devoted to specific elements of essay writing. This course fulfills the university’s second-semester Reading and Composition requirement. Key Texts: The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Additional excerpts may include: The Prince by Machiavelli The Decameron by Boccaccio Orlando Furioso by Ludovico Ariosto

Among the most fertile and resource-rich regions of the Italian peninsula, the former Kingdom of Naples (the modern regions of Campania, Basilicata, Calabria, and Apulia) and Sicily have long been the sites of conquest and rebellion. Over the centuries, the cities of Naples and Palermo have served as the seats of independent regional powers, as governing outposts for the Kingdoms of Spain and Aragon, and as hotspots of political and social unrest. As important centers for the maintenance of political hegemony that were also hubs for intellectual and popular resistance, the Kingdoms of Naples and Sicily were crucial yet problematic cornerstones to economic and military primacy in the Mediterranean. This course explores the roles played by Naples and Sicily in the European and, eventually, global exchange of goods and power by considering the literary, visual, and material culture of Southern Italy. In doing so, it will explore how the arts of this region shaped and were shaped by the complex shifting regional and international dynamics that characterized Southern Italy from the 12th to 19th centuries. This course is a writing-intensive class which fulfills Part B of the university’s requirement for Reading and Composition and teaches students to read and reflect critically about literary texts and works of art and to express their own, original ideas in an argumentative academic essay. Assignments will focus on visual analysis, close reading, and written composition. Students will also learn to develop their own ideas and respond to those of their classmates through class discussion and peer review. COURSE READINGS Primary Texts include (readings will be in English; subject to change): Antonio Beccadelli, Hermaphroditus, 1425 Giovanni Pontano, De Principe, 1493 Jacopo Sannazaro, Arcadia, 1504 Benedetto Croce, Storia del Regno di Napoli, 1925 Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Il Gattopardo, 1958 Secondary Texts include (readings will be in English; subject to change): David Abulafia, Sicily and the Mediterranean in the Late Middle Ages Henry Kamen, Empire: How Spain Became a World Power 1492-1763 Jennifer D. Selwyn: A Paradise Inhabited by Devils. The Jesuit’s Civilizing Mission in Early Modern Naples, Aldershot 2004. Thomas Dandalet and John A. Marino, Spain in Italy: Politics, Society, and Religion 1500-1700, 2007 Francesco Benigno, Mirrors of Revolution: Conflict and Political Identity in Early Modern Europe, 2010 Tommaso Astarita, A Companion to Early Modern Naples, 2013 Frank Fehrenbach, Nature and the Arts in Early Modern Naples, 2020 Selected Artworks (subject to change): Cappella Palatina, 12th century, Palermo, Sicily Tino da Camaino, Anjou tombs, 14th century, marble, Santa Chiara, Naples Antonello da Messina, Virgin Annunciate, 1476, oil on wood, Palermo, Sicily Caravaggio, Seven Works of Mercy, 1606-1607, Pio Monte della Misericordia, Naples Chapel of San Gennaro, Naples, 17th century Giuseppe Sanmartino, Veiled Christ, 1753, Sansevero Chapel, Naples

History 7B explores the making of a modern and globalized America by providing an introduction to the history of the United States between 1865 and the present. Lectures, Readings and Sections Assignments will call attention to the role of democracy in the nation’s history, and to the political, economic, and social freedoms and their limitations. We will consider the​ larger set of practices and ideals by which ordinary people have participated in the public life of the nation. ​How have different multiple perspectives on what it means to be an American shaped the nation’s history since the mid-nineteenth century? How has the right to participate in democratic institutions further defined political freedom and its limitations? What have societal and gendered expectations such as “the American Dream” meant for an increasingly diverse population? How and why have the power of the Courts, Congress, and the Presidency shifted? What role has freedom of the press played in that story? In what ways have transformations in the U.S. economy altered how Americans work and where they live? What forms of political culture have Americans practiced and what does this tell us about the American experience? We will explore, amongst others, the debates around the role of government and civil liberties; the shifting political ideologies of liberalism and conservatism; how the U.S. emerged as a world power in the twentieth century; systemic racism; freedom movements; the culture wars; and globalization. Instructor bio: Sandra Weathers Smith is a faculty member of the History Department at The Spence School and a Lecturer in U.S. History at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research and teaching interests include cultural history, urban history, immigration, civil rights, and political culture. Sandra earned her doctorate in American History from U.C. Berkeley, where she also served as a U.C. Faculty (postdoctoral) Fellow. She worked as Senior Researcher for theater artist, Anna Deavere Smith, and the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue.