2015-2016-Course-Catalogue.Pdf
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The Curriculum . 3 Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Africana Studies . 3 Studies . 59 Anthropology . 3 Literature . 61 Architecture and Design Studies . 7 Mathematics . 74 Art History . 7 Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies . 77 Asian Studies . 11 Modern and Classical Languages and Biology . 14 Literatures . 77 Chemistry . 17 Music . 78 Chinese . 18 Philosophy . 89 Classics . 19 Physics . 92 Cognitive and Brain Science . 20 Political Economy . 93 Computer Science . 20 Politics . 94 Dance . 23 Psychology . 98 Development Studies . 27 Public Policy . 107 Economics . 28 Religion . 109 Environmental Studies . 31 Russian . 112 Ethnic and Diasporic Studies . 33 Science and Mathematics . 113 Film History . 34 Pre-Health Program Filmmaking, Screenwriting and Media Social Science . 114 Arts . 36 Sociology . 114 French . 37 Spanish . 118 Games, Interactivity, and Playable Theatre . 121 Media . 40 Urban Studies . 135 Gender and Sexuality Studies . 40 Visual Arts . 135 Geography . 41 Architectural Design German . 42 Drawing Greek (Ancient) . 44 Filmmaking Health, Science, and Society . 45 New Media History . 45 Painting International Studies . 54 Photography Italian . 55 Printmaking Japanese . 56 Sculpture Latin . 57 Visual Fundamentals Latin American and Latino/a Studies . 58 Writing . 152 Faculty . 165 THE CURRICULUM 3 African Diasporic Dance (p. 26), Efeya Ifadayo M THE CURRICULUM Sampson Dance African American Sports History and Black Cultural The Curriculum of the College as planned for Revolution (p. 48), Komozi Woodard History 2015-2016 is described in the following pages. All Education and Social Change in Africa (p. 52), Mary courses are planned as full-year courses, except as Dillard History otherwise indicated. Where possible, seminar The City and the Grassroots: The Urban Crisis and descriptions include examples of areas of study in Social Movements (p. 51), Komozi Woodard which a student could concentrate for the History conference portion of the course. In a seminar The Urban Crisis and the Black Revolt: The Origins of course, each student not only pursues the main Civil Rights and Black Power in the Jim Crow course material but also selects a related topic for North (p. 47), Komozi Woodard History concentrated study, often resulting in a major paper. African Classics of the Postcolonial Era (p. 85), In this way, each seminar becomes both a shared Andrew Algire Music and an individual experience. West African Percussion Ensemble Faso Foli (p. 86), Andrew Algire Music, Niko Higgins Music African Politics (p. 95), Elke Zuern Politics The Promise of the City: Urbanism and Black AFRICANA STUDIES America (p. 53), Nadeen M. Thomas History Africana studies at Sarah Lawrence College embrace a number of scholarly disciplines and subjects, ANTHROPOLOGY including anthropology, architecture, art history, dance, economics, film, filmmaking, history, Islamic studies, law, literature, philosophy, politics, The study of anthropology traditionally covers four psychology, religion, sociology, theatre, and writing. fields: sociocultural anthropology, linguistic Students examine the experience of Africans and of anthropology, biological anthropology, and people of African descent in the diaspora, including archaeology. At Sarah Lawrence College, we those from Latin America, the Caribbean, North concentrate on sociocultural and linguistic America, and beyond. Study includes the important anthropology. cultural, economic, technological, political, and Behind almost every aspect of our lives is a social intellectual interplay and exchanges of these cultural realm, a shared construction that shapes peoples as they help make our world. Students will assumptions and determines much of how we explore the literature of Africans and peoples of perceive and relate to the world. Sociocultural African descent in various languages, including anthropology is the study of that realm—its extent Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English. The and its effects. As students learn to approach with dynamics of immigration and community formation an anthropological eye what they formerly might are vital in this field. Students will examine the art have taken for granted, they gain insight into how and architecture of Africa and the diaspora, along social forces govern the ways in which we relate to with their history, societies, and cultures; their ourselves and to each other: how we use words, how economy and politics; the impact of Islam and the we define ourselves and others, how we make sense Middle East; the processes of slavery; the slave trade of our bodies, even how we feel emotions. Through and colonialism; and postcolonial literature in Africa, examining the writings of anthropologists, viewing Latin America, and the Caribbean. The program also ethnographic films, and discussing these and other includes creative work in filmmaking, theatre, and materials in seminar and conference sessions, writing. students develop a comprehensive and multipatterned sense of the cultural dimensions of Courses offered in related disciplines this year are human lives. By studying the underpinnings of listed below. Full descriptions of the courses may be language, symbolic practices, race, gender, sexuality, found under the appropriate disciplines. policy and advocacy, medical systems, cities, modernity, and/or social organization across a range Colonialism, Anthropology, Politics (p. 5), Mary A. of Western and non-Western settings, students come Porter Anthropology to understand better how meaning is made. With Queering Africa: Gender and Sexuality Across the seminar dynamics and content characteristic of Continent (p. 6), Mary A. Porter Anthropology 4 Anthropology graduate-level work, Sarah Lawrence’s anthropology born to individuals who will not parent them for a courses take students in often unexpected and wide variety of reasons. This seminar examines the challenging directions. meanings and processes, cross-culturally, of adoption—defined here as the placement of The Anthropology of Images children to be raised permanently by others. We will Robert R. Desjarlais explore this process anthropologically in countries Open—Fall and cultures across the globe, including the United A few cartoons lead to cataclysmic events in Europe. States, Australia, Hawaii, Tanzania, China, Argentina, A man’s statement that he “can’t breathe” ricochets Sweden, Chile, Nigeria, and Korea. As well as looking across North America. A photograph printed in a within particular ethno-local sites, we will pay newspaper moves a solitary reader. A snapshot considerable attention to the global movement of posted on the Internet leads to dreams of fanciful children to adoption. There is great variety in the places. Memories of a past year haunt us like ghosts. circumstances of transnational adoption from What each of these occurrences has in common is Swedish people seeking adoptive daughters in Chile that they all entail the force of images in our lives, to the Kindertransports at the start of World War II be these images visual or acoustic in nature, made and to the North American Orphan Trains of the 19th by hand or machine, circulated by word of mouth, or and 20th centuries. Questions we will examine simply imagined. In this seminar, we will consider include: What is the difference between fostering the role that images play in the lives of people in and adoption? Why do people talk about “giving up” various settings throughout the world. In delving into a child for adoption? Why is adoption welcomed in terrains at once actual and virtual, we will develop some cultures and hidden in others? When and why an understanding of how people throughout the do adoptive parents attempt to expose their children world create, use, circulate, and perceive images and to their cultures of origin? Why is adoption discourse how such efforts tie into ideas and practices of more about parents getting children than children sensory perception, time, memory, affect, getting parents? Why are the legal records of an imagination, sociality, history, politics, and personal adoption sealed? How do race, class, and gender play and collective imaginings. Through these out in adoption scenarios? The materials for this engagements, we will reflect on the undamentf al class include literature, scholarly articles, human need for images, the complicated politics and ethnographic accounts, historical documents, and ethics of images, aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, film. onfC erence work may be done on any aspect of dynamics of time and memory, the intricate play the class, as well as on other topics in the between the actual and the imagined, and the anthropology of kinship or in the ethnographies of circulation of digital images in an age of cultures and places encountered in the course globalization. Readings will include a number of materials. writings in anthropology, art history, philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, and critical theory. Language, Politics, and Identity Images will be drawn from photographs, paintings, Deanna Barenboim sculptures, drawings, films, videos, graffiti,eligion, r Open—Spring rituals, tattoos, inscriptions, novels, poems, road This course will ask how words do things in the signs, advertisements, dreams, fantasies, world, exploring the complex linkages between phantasms, and any number of fabulations in the language, politics, and identity in both past and worlds in which we live and imagine. present contexts. We will pose a range of questions, such as: How does language enable