Featured Courses for Spring 2025

LIT 301S Theory Now

drawing of a pipe that says "ceci n'est pas une pipe"
Image credit: Rene Magritte's "La Trahison des Images" ("The Treachery of Images") (1928-1929)

Taught by Professor Christina Leon

MW 10:05 – 11:20am, Friedl 102

This seminar functions as an introduction to key theoretical concepts and debates that animate theory historically and in our current moment. Concentrating on the legacies and relevance of critical and literary theory for the now, this course will look at canonical texts and, also, current theorizations. We will read across several traditions of critical theory that allow us to think about questions of language, difference, power, subjectivity, and political economy. Moving into contemporaneous concerns, we will see how such historical theorizations emerge and shift in current theories of gender, race, coloniality, materiality, and the environment.

 



LIT 331/PHIL 331 Kant

Imanuel Kant book cover "Critique of Pure reason"
Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason"

Taught by Professors Maya Kronfeld & Andrew Janiak

T/TH 3:05 - 4:20pm, Friedl 107

An introduction to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with an emphasis on the enduring relevance of Kant’s thought for current debates in epistemology, aesthetics and critical studies of race and gender. Discussion of Kant’s relation to his most important interlocutors, especially Émilie Du Châtelet and David Hume.

 

 

 

LIT 390S-01 Algorithms of (Anti)Blackness

lime green room with caped creatures

Taught by Professor Zakiyyah Jackson

T/TH 4:40 – 5:55pm, Friedl 102

This course investigates how (anti)blackness informs the design and implementation of computation and automation as they pertain to pressing issues such as discoverability and data discrimination to mineral mining. Histories and contexts of AI and robotics, machine learning, software development and code-based media, such as search engines like Google, apps, and social networks will be closely examined.

 

 

LIT390S-02 Reading Islands

art collection of different color and shaped inner tubes
Image Credit: Scherezade Garcia, "In My Floating World, Landscape of Paradise" from the series Theories on Freedom, 2011.

Taught by Professor Christina Leon

MW 1:25 – 2:40pm, Friedl 102

The Caribbean is an archipelago made up of islands that both link and separate the Americas—islands that have weathered various waves of colonization, migration, and revolution. Looking to the many abyssal histories of the Caribbean, this course will explore major issues that have shaped Caribbean literature, art, and thought: colonialism, indigeneity, iterations of enslavement, creolization, migration, diaspora, revolution, tropicality, and climate crisis. How do narratives of the Caribbean represent the collision of political forces and natural environments? How do island-writers figure this space and forge a poetics of relation that exceeds tourist desire and forceful extraction? How do island-writers reconcile (mis)representations of tropicality and address the existential threats of rising sea levels and increasing temperatures? During our readings, we will be attentive to the Caribbean as a space of first colonial contact, as a place where the plantation system reigned, and as the site of the first successful slave revolt (Haiti). We will consider how these past legacies haunt contemporary conditions across the Caribbean. In the mode of translation, we will read across the Anglophone, Hispanophone, and Francophone islands and see how they are, at once, related and singular.


LIT690S-02 Darkness

black and yellow abstract

Taught by Professor Zakiyyah Jackson

T 10:05am – 12:35pm, Branson 202

This course investigates the concept and phenomenon of darkness in relation to, and in distinction from, blackness, shadow, obscurity, blindness, invisibility, and opacity as ideas and experiences. We will trace the development, and complex nature, of dualist, kaleidoscopic, and gradational representational frameworks pertaining to darkness in the history of transnational literary and filmic narrative form and contexts. Exploring the evolving role of color and form as elemental forces in global artistic, cultural imaginations will enable us to identify their dynamic inextricability with historical relational hierarchies in U.S. society pertaining to race, complexion, gender, class, ability, and national origin. Course thematics will include the interrelation of vision and dreamscapes, fantasy and illusion, chromaticity and blanching, transparency and opaqueness, absence and presence, and part and whole.


LIT690S-4-01 Water & Media

image of rusted round object under the sea

Taught by Professor Negar Mottahedeh

TH 8:30 – 11:00am, Classroom Building Room 106

This seminar explores the "elemental turn" in the humanities, drawing on foundational works in literature, film and media studies. Elemental thinking links media studies to infrastructural and ecological phenomena, including mines, oceans, and the clouds, underscoring the fact that media, whether analog or digital are not essential but relational and transformative; media create bonds, transmute, and affect change. Our discussions in this seminar will underscore that the strength of elemental thinking lies in its ability to destabilize and expand existing environmental thinking, offering new perspectives on infrastructure, hardware, and molecular transitions.

 

See all Global Culture & Theory Program in Literature Spring 2025 Courses.