Graduate Courses Spring 2025

AFAM 584 / SOCY 584 (23103)

Inequality, Race, and the City

Elijah Anderson

M 11:30am-1:20pm

Urban inequality in America. The racial iconography of the city is explored and represented, and the dominant cultural narrative of civic pluralism is considered. Topics of concern include urban poverty, race relations, ethnicity, class, privilege, education, social networks, social deviance, and crime.

AFAM 850 / ENGL 6137 / AFST 937 (22388)

African Urban Cultures: Mediations of the City

Stephanie Newell

Day/Time TBA

This course approaches the study of African cities and urbanization through the medium of diverse texts, including fiction, nonfiction, popular culture, film, and the arts, as well as scholarly work on African cities. Through these cultural “texts,” attention is given to everyday conceptualizations of the body and the environment, as well as to theoretical engagements with the African city. We study urban relationships as depicted in literature and popular media in relation to Africa’s long history of intercultural encounters, including materials dating back to the 1880s and the 1930s. Previously ENGL 937.

AFST 839 / HIST 839 (21411)

Environmental History of Africa

Robert Harms

W 9:25-11:15am

An examination of the interaction between people and their environment in Africa and the ways in which this interaction has affected or shaped the course of African history.

AMST 762 / ANTH 764 (20063)

Anthropology in the Anthropocene

Kathryn Dudley

T 1:30-3:20pm

This research seminar examines the anthropological project in the context of the Anthropocene and its intertwined histories of agriculture, empire, slavery, and capitalism. Drawing on transdisciplinary readings that open up multiple ways to conceptualize anthropology’s evolving relationship to our planetary predicament, students develop critical approaches to ecological and governmental problematics produced, as Agamben suggests, by anthropological machines that produce the human and nonhuman within perpetually updated spaces of exception. Throughout we pay close attention to ethnographic analytics and writing practices that trouble such binaries in favor of affective or relational modes of knowing and being. In-class workshops offer opportunities to share term papers in progress.

ANTH 964 / HIST 964 / HSAR 842 / HSHM 692 (21416)

Topics in the Environmental Humanities

Paul Sabin 

M 11:30am-1:20pm

This is the required workshop for the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities. The workshop meets six times per term to explore concepts, methods, and pedagogy in the environmental humanities, and to share student and faculty research. Each student pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities must complete both a fall term and a spring term of the workshop, but the two terms of student participation need not be consecutive. The fall term each year emphasizes key concepts and major intellectual currents. The spring term each year emphasizes pedagogy, methods, and public practice. Specific topics vary each year. Students who have previously enrolled in the course may audit the course in a subsequent year. This course does not count toward the coursework requirement in history. Open only to students pursuing the Graduate Certificate in Environmental Humanities. This course does not count toward the coursework requirement in history.

ARCH 1213 (23436)

Books and Architecture

Luke Bulman

W 11am-12:50pm

For architects, the book has been a necessary (if not essential) tool for clarifying, extending, and promoting their ideas and projects. This seminar examines the phenomenon of the book in architecture as both an array of organizational techniques (what it is) and as a mediator (what it does). Arguably, outside of the artifice and material fact of the building itself, the book has been the preferred mode of discourse that architects have chosen to express their intellectual project. This seminar is part lecture, part workshop where the experience of making a series of books helps to inform the development of ideas about the projective capacity of the book. Through case studies, this seminar examines the relationship book production has with a selection of contemporary and historical practices, including each project’s physical and conceptual composition as well as how each project acts as an agent of the architect within a larger world of communication. The second part of the seminar asks students to apply ideas in a series of three book projects that emphasize the book as an instrument of architectural thinking. Most projects are individual efforts, but work in pairs or groups is also explored. Limited enrollment.

ARCH 1247 (23438)

Animal Houses

Trattie Davies

W 11am-12:50pm

The course studies the nature of animal occupation on Earth, then focuses on a method or system of occupation by a single species. Species selection and methods of representation are governed by individual interests based on an introductory series of exercises focused on the primary categories of land, sea, and air. Work is realized in the form of visualizations that collect and re-present discoveries. Given the nature of the research, visualizations push the boundaries of traditional and contemporary architectural drawings and imagery by incorporating process, time, and material reconstitution into the presentation of spatial language. The seminar allows for in-depth individual research and practice in the transformation of information. Understanding the material nature of occupied space, the research further allows for an expanded understanding of alternate building practice and methodologies.

ARCH 1260 (23439)

Beauty, Wonder & Awe

Mark Gage

11am-12:50pm

This seminar explores the role of beauty, wonder, and awe in the design and experience of our world. For most of the 20th century, these subjects were either entirely ignored in academia, or worse, cast exclusively as nefarious mechanisms of control used only by those in power. And yet who among us has not been uplifted by a scene in a film, a piece of music, an object, a work of art or architecture—or perhaps even something as unassuming as a beautifully cascading pile of laundry? This course will work under the assumption that such positive human experiences are needed more now than ever in a world increasingly defined by pessimism, criticism, and division. As such we will work under the assumption that beauty, wonder, and awe exist, and that they are worthy of a contemporary re-assessment, especially in the context of creative practices that are interested in producing a more equitable, beautiful, and just human future. Through both philosophical and popular readings, the study of physical objects, and engaged discussion and lively debate, we will examine beauty, awe, and wonder from all possible angles- what they mean today, their history, why they are desired, how they might be produced, the motivations of those that promote them, and how they are being reconsidered not as the nefarious enemies of function or equality, but rather essential and ethically significant aspects of human experience. In order to address these subjects beyond an abstract academic setting, we will have visitors from various creative industries come to class to discuss these subjects relative to their own work and disciplines- including Jessica Diehl, the former creative director of Vanity Fair magazine, and Michael Young, a practicing architect deeply engaged with the subjects of aesthetics and representation. Students in the course will also (pending confirmation) visit New York City to explore and discuss these subjects at multiple scales, live and in person with the instructor, by viewing everything from architectural facades and urban monuments to medieval armor and Faberge eggs. This course will resist the inherited lore of academia that casts beauty, wonder, and awe only elitist or oppressive, in favor of asking how they can be better understood and incorporated into the design of a more humane world. In doing so we will explore the work of contemporary thinkers who offer nourishment to this endeavor including but not limited to Elaine Scarry, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, bell hooks, Nick Zangwill, Dacher Keltner, Georgio Agamben, Susan Magsamen, and others, including recent writings on aesthetics by the course instructor. Limited enrollment

ARCH 3075 (23451)

A Land Reparations Network

Keller Easterling

Th 11am-12:50pm

With support from Yale’s ASCEND initiative, this seminar shares sessions with Morgan State and other HBCUs to explore precedents and potentials for land reparations in the U.S. The ownership of land as property has been a central mechanism for generating staggering wealth inequality. The seminar considers a broader history of mutualism, care, maintenance, and kinship that are at the heart of Indigenous, Black, abolitionist, feminist, and anarchist thinking. It pays particular attention to an underexplored, 150-year tradition of Black land cooperatives—from reconstruction to the civil rights era to today. Generating community economies that avoid the automatic harm of financial abstractions, cooperative land holding organs are treated as spatial infrastructures as worthy of public investment as those of concrete and conduit with compounding values that can begin to address the incalculable debt of reparations. Considering reparations and climate change as inseparable, the seminar also studies solidarities to deal with climate injustice at a planetary scale. Guest speakers, shared between MSU and YSOA, strengthen a consortium of HBCUs and prepare to pursue design studios at the northern and southern ends of a proposed spine of existing public land called the ATTTNT. The ATTTNT is created from the Appalachian Trail (AT), the water route of the Trail of Tears (TT) on TVA land, and the Natchez Trace Parkway (NT). Continuous from Maine to the Mississippi, this three-thousand-mile linear formation, often scripted by narratives of white supremacy, here receives another reckoning with the under-told histories of Black and Indigenous resistance and survival.

ARCH 3112 (23707)

Poetic Technologies: Luis Barragan’s Modern Mexican Architecture

Luis Carranza

F 11am-12:50pm
This course looks at the work of the Mexican architect Luis Barragán focusing, principally, on his early works in Guadalajara and Mexico City. It aims to contextualize it within the broader architectural explorations occurring in Mexico at the time and in reaction and relation to architectural developments in the US and Europe. The intention is to closely study the work’s theoretical and historical underpinnings, their architectural character and formal innovations, and the context of their production. The investigations will result in written documents, models, drawings, etc. that will form part of an exhibition of this work at the Barragán Gallery at the Vitra Design Museum in Germany. The class, as a result, will be in contact with the Barragán Foundation and archive and be partially responsible for helping organize the exhibition layout and curate the material to be presented.  

AMST 3113 / AMST 753 (23453) 

Field Methods in American Architectural and Urban History

Elihu Rubin

W 2pm-3:50pm

The built environment both reflects and (re)produces social, economic, and political relationships and indicates cultural values from the smallest lawn ornament to the most ambitious urban plans. Even the most modest individual structures and vernacular building types represent evidence in larger narratives about power, equity, and urban change. We can learn to read common or typical urban landscapes (a streetcar-era residential sub-division; lowrise commercial buildings on Main Street; central city office towers; parks and public spaces, for example) as a palimpsest of agency over time: who has the power to author and to rewrite the built environment, at what scale, and for what purposes? This graduate methods class examines theories and practices of research in the built environment with a focus on interdisciplinary field work and archival documentation in which we interrogate what information can be observed in the field and what must be gleaned from the archives. Mixed methods introduced include walking, durational observation, mapping, drawing, photography, video, sound, oral history, and survey. We learn to interpret historical and contemporary maps, city directories, public records, physical artifacts, and personal and institutional archives. Course readings include guidance on methodology as well as models of contemporary scholarship. Over the course of the semester, students develop a piece of public scholarship or academic journal article that advances a narrative framework drawing on original research.

ARCH 3307 (23710)

Adaptive Reuse in Karachi: History, Documentation, & Intervention

Sunil Bald & Kishwar Rizvi

M 11am-12:50pm

This seminar will consider the challenges of adaptive reuse in a global mega-city and will explore and enact the potential of cultural preservation to resist mechanisms of erasure that stem from capital-driven development. Karachi will be considered as an interdisciplinary case-study and working site, bringing together graduate students from History of Art, Architecture, and South Asian Studies. This multi-disciplinary collective of students and faculty with diverse backgrounds and skills in research, documentation, analysis, and design will work as a team to both learn from, and contribute to, ongoing work that is being led by The Heritage Foundation of Pakistan (HFP). The HFP, established by Sohail and Yasmeen Lari in 1980, has been documenting the British Colonial era buildings of Karachi and Lahore for several years. At present, Yasmeen Lari has designed a pedestrian pathway through Kharadar, with the help of local shop-owners, on the principals of community engagement and participatory design. Countering urban decay and climate change, the aim of this seminar is to consider how future architects, urbanists and historians may approach the issues facing the region. From this vantage point, we will consider the manners in which urban space is instrumentalized towards narratives of imperial and national identity; how gentrification and ex-urbanization effects historical city-centers; how revitalization projects must be understood ad critiqued; and what role collaborative and interdisciplinary study may play as a conduit and conveyer of positive solutions. Starting with a comparativist approach, the seminar will dig deep into the histories and cultures of Sindh, Pakistan, foregrounding how culture is made manifest through buildings and cities. We will then move to contemporary Karachi and how these histories confront the dynamics of a city of over 20 million inhabitants per the 2023 census. Finally, the group will take an in-depth look at Kharadar, its urban form and the forces that are shaping the context that HFP is working with and responding to. These three inputs will inform a mid-semester report integrating text and drawings collectively compiled by the student group in preparation for on-site fieldwork in Karachi. In Karachi, we will collaborate with the HFP, using the Kharadar pedestrian pathway project as both site and substrate to directly participate in an ongoing cultural preservation project. This fieldwork will include - collection of contextual documentation (architectural, oral, and historical); engagement with community stakeholders, policymakers, and urban designers; and collaboration with the shop-owners, craftspeople, and designers creating the pathway. Finally, we will work with HFP to outline envisioning a project that the students will undertake over the second half of the semester that contributes to the Kharadar pedestrian pathway, while also identifying strategies for its expansion in the old city. On return to New Haven, the student group will synthesize material from the fieldwork, articulate the scope of the project, and again work collectively to craft a design proposal, in text, drawings, and models, that is theoretically and materially responsive to the context of the old city and the contemporary forces that it is negotiating. The results will be presented to a group of academics, architect, preservationist, and Mrs. Lari herself, whose travel to Yale will be supported by the School of Architecture as part of a presentation and celebration of her career and work.  

ARCH 3315 (23454)

The Challenge of the Classical

Kyle Dugdale

W 2pm-3:50pm

This course examines the problem of “the classical” in its contemporary context—not only as an exercise in the study of architectural history, but also as an attempt to come to terms with the claims of history upon the present, and of the present upon history. Recognizing that the unusually vivid architectural images that have impressed themselves upon the public imagination of America over the past few months are only the most recent evidence in a longer list of charges, the course examines accusations of Eurocentrism and elitism, of obsolescence, irrelevance, and historical naivete, and associations with totalitarianism and whiteness, along with questions of language, tectonics, and sustainability—aiming to introduce a range of new voices into a conversation that is, today, more critical than ever.

ARCH 3329 (23455)

Writing and Criticism: Restaging Criticism

Christopher Hawthorne

W 4pm-5:50pm

This course examines the relationship between practice and publication in architecture. Its foundation is a survey of architecture criticism over the last century. It also considers how a select number of architects have written about their own work and that of other practitioners; the focus in this section is on those architects who use writing not for its descriptive or promotional value but as a critic or historian might, which is to say as a means of sharpening or expanding their own architecture or of reframing or even unsettling their place in the profession or larger culture. Class discussions focus to a large degree on the intersection of these two tracks: the process by which the architect moves from subject to author and back again, and what is gained (and perhaps sometimes lost) by that traffic.

ARCH 3332 (23456)

Laboring for Architecture

Jordan Carver

Th 11am-12:50pm

Architecture—as a profession and pedagogy—has always had a complicated relationship to labor. As a practice, architecture requires inputs, time, and effort from many people with many different types of knowledge. From the design and development of architectural drawings in office settings, to the construction of buildings on site, to the production of architectural materials across the world, building projects are accumulations of different forms of labor, manufacturing capacities, and expertise. This seminar analyzes and investigates the labor(s) required to create architecture, from design through construction. We locate the laboring bodies that produce building projects and the knowledge that surrounds them. And we interrogate how the profession understands its past, present, and possible future relations to labor. The first half of the semester considers architecture’s shift from a building practice to a knowledge practice. We frame the architect as a worker and closely analyze the types of worker inequality found within the office and profession. The second half of the semester focuses on the long history of forced and enslaved labor on construction sites and the persistence of it in the material supply chain.

ARCH 4233 (23457)

Introduction to British Landscape and Architectural History: 1500 to 1900

Warren Fuermann

F 11am-12:50pm

This seminar examines chronologically the history of landscape architecture and country-house architecture in Britain from 1500 to 1900. Topics of discussion include the history of the castle in British architecture and landscape architecture; Italian and French influences on the seventeenth-century British garden; military landscaping; the Palladian country house and British agricultural landscape; Capability Brown’s landscape parks; theories of the picturesque and of the landscape sublime; Romanticism and the psychology of nature; the creation of the public park system; arts and crafts landscape design; and the beginnings of landscape modernism. Comparisons of historical material with contemporary landscape design, where appropriate, are made throughout the term. The collection of the Yale Center for British Art is used for primary visual material, and a trip to England over spring break, partially funded by the School, allows students to visit firsthand the landscape parks studied in this seminar. Limited enrollment.

ARCH 4297 (23458)

Historic Preservation in the 21st century

Norma Barbacci

W 2pm-3:50pm

This seminar explores the evolution of historic preservation from a narrow focus on monumental properties to its broader, more complex, and more inclusive current purview. The course begins by learning about the history of the field of preservation through the understanding of its theoretical roots, definitions, professional practice, and the basics of material conservation. This introduction serves as a preamble to the second part of the course which focuses on the expanding role and potential future of historic preservation as it aligns its objectives with the principles of sustainability, social inclusion, and decolonization. At the end of this seminar, the students should have a working understanding of the theory and practice of historic preservation, the wide array of its concerns and sub-specialties, and its potential as an agent for sustainable development and social inclusion; the basic concepts of material conservation and documentation of existing conditions; and the challenges and opportunities presented by a preservation project in an underserved community.

ENV 613 (22188)

Writing for a Changing Environment

Stephanie Hanes Wilson

Day/Time TBA

This course is an advanced nonfiction writing workshop with a focus in journalistic storytelling, designed to help environmental scholars and practitioners write for a broad, lay audience. In other words, this is not just a class for writers—although those with an interest in journalism will find it useful. This is a course for students who recognize the importance of reaching broad audiences in a time of rapidly transforming climate, technology, science, and culture. We learn and practice the tools of journalism—the ability to listen, communicate, research, capture hearts, spread ideas, and explain complexity— and study writings that exemplify these attributes. Our focus topic in this course is climate and other environmental changes, with an intentional look to the global south as well as the US and global north. Students write multiple pieces of their own, from short research “explainers” to reported profiles to first person reportage. By the end of the course, students have refined at least one of their pieces to a quality to submit for publication.

ENV 620 (2219)

History of Environmental Thought and Activism

Dorceta Taylor

Day/Time TBA

This course uses a race, class, and gender approach to examine the history of American environmental ideology and activism from the 1600s to the present. The course is divided into three units. The first unit examines environmental conditions in the city (health, sanitation, housing, overcrowding, occupational safety, and open space), the rise of urban American environmental consciousness, and activism related to urban issues. Unit II examines the rise of the conservation and preservation movements. It analyzes the relationship between hunting, wildlife extinction, and the rise of conservation ethics. This unit also examines the role of the countryside, frontier, and wilderness in environmental thought and activism. It examines conquest, conservation, primitivism, Transcendentalism, and Romanticism and the emergence of the preservation/conservation movement. Unit III focuses on contemporary environmental thought; it examines the birth of the modern environmental movement and the emergence of reform environmentalism. The course also examines the way in which a person’s social class, race, gender, environmental, and labor market experiences influence their environmental perceptions and the kinds of environmental ideologies they develop. The course examines the rise of major environmental paradigms and the factors that make them influential.

ENV 775 (22228)

Federal Indian Law

Gerald Torres

MW 1:35-3:00pm

This course covers the basics of federal Indian law. It does not address the substantive content of tribal law. Tribal law is a specialized study arising from the exercise of the legal authority that the tribes retain. This course is designed to lay the groundwork for a deep understanding of what kinds of sovereignty Indian nations may exercise within the framework of our legal system. Normally, courses of this type begin with an historical exploration of the foundations of the relations between Indian and non-Indian peoples. Instead, we begin with questions that are current and sketch out, roughly, where we are now. Typically, we start with cases pending before or recently decided by the Supreme Court. We use the Marshall Trilogy to build from the present back to the origins to see how the doctrines reflect the positive aspects of the legal expression of contact between Europe and the native nations of the Western hemisphere as well as the more malign aspects. We also situate the doctrinal evolution of federal Indian law with the struggle over colonialism as expressed in the insular cases. We do not neglect the history; it proves critical for understanding the ways in which federal Indian law is sui generis in domestic jurisprudence, but we see how that history is always haunted by the specter of colonialism, extra-legality, and finally, international legal norms. Every student must complete the discussion question requirements to sit for the examination or to submit a paper.

ENV 794 (23183)

Climate Equity: Principles and Applications in Global Climate Futures

Narasimha Rao

Day/Time TBA

This course covers principles and applications of climate justice, with a focus on distributive justice in climate mitigation. In the first half, we discuss burden-sharing principles put forth by philosophers in academic literature and in the text of international agreements. In the second portion, we review a number of papers that implement equity in integrated assessment models to discuss their implications for how mitigation efforts would need to be distributed between countries. We also discuss the consistency/disconnects between equity implementation in models and philosophy, as well as proposals to move forward.

ENV 796 (22233)

Biopolitics of Human-Nonhuman Relations

Michael Dove

Th 1pm-3:50pm

Seminar on the “posthumanist” turn toward multispecies ethnography. Section I, introduction. Section II, perspectivism: the posthuman turn and multispecies ethnography; ecology and consciousness; and hunters and prey. Section III, entanglements: indigenous knowledge; Natural History; and conflicted views of conservation. Section IV, metaphors: the animal speaking for the human; and human and geological perturbation. Section V, pedagogy: plants as teachers; student readings; student presentations. Three hours lecture/seminar. Enrollment capped

ENV 824 (22236)

Environmental Law and Policy

Robert Klee

Day/Time TBA

This course provides an introduction to the legal requirements and policy underpinnings of the basic U.S. environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and various statutes governing waste, food safety, and toxic substances. Students examine and evaluate current approaches to pollution control and resource management as well as the “next generation” of regulatory strategies, including economic incentives, voluntary emissions reductions, and information disclosure requirements. This course investigates mechanisms for addressing environmental issues at the local, regional, and global levels, and explores the intersection between environmental and energy law and policy. Students gain an understanding of overarching legal and policy concepts, such as federalism, administrative procedure, separation of powers, environmental justice, judicial review, and statutory interpretation.

ENV 975 (22264)

Field Craft: Writing Society, Science, and Nature

Justin Farrell

Day/Time TBA

This course develops students’ skills in writing and publishing, with a mandatory field trip at its core. Students complete a self-driven writing project aimed at publication, with work both before and after the trip. The course welcomes projects from any field, including but not limited to social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. The course fulfills the M.E.M. capstone but is open to all students. In prior years, students have published scholarly journals articles, op-eds in reputable news outlets (e.g. NYT in 2024), thesis chapters, book manuscripts, documentaries, podcasts, and creative non-fiction essays. The course emphasizes narrative craft for both scholarly and general public writing.

FREN 917 (23157)

Railway Lines

Morgane Cadieu

Th 1:30-3:20pm

The seminar examines trains in literature, cinema, and theory, from the end of the nineteenth century and the first locomotives to the subway in contemporary Paris. The readings and discussions will focus on: the representation of French historical events through trains (industrialization, colonization, deportation, decolonization, immigration); the railroad as an anthropological tool; the aesthetics of trains; and the tracks as metaphors for determinism and free will. We visit the Beinecke collections and the Yale University Art Gallery. Corpus can include Augé, Chéreau, Delbo, Djemaï, Dongala, Ernaux, Renoir, Sebbar, Sembène, Verne, Wajsbrot, and Zola. Conducted in English. Reading knowledge of French is not a requirement.

HSAR 756 (22718)

Slavery and Visual Culture in Jamaica

Tim Barringer

W 1:30-3:20pm

This seminar examines takes a historiographic perspective on the visual culture of Jamaica from the late-seventeenth century to today. It discusses the representation of the plantation and plantation labor; material cultures of slavery; the transformation of Jamaican visual culture in the period after emancipation—the early years of photography; and legacies of slavery in modern and contemporary art including the work of contemporary Jamaican artists of the diaspora in the U.K. and the United States. A particular focus is the masquerade form Jonkonnu, whose multiple origins, manifestations, and representations are explored. Permission of the instructor is required.

MUSI 635 (23238)

Spatial Aspects of Music Performance, Composition, and Research

Elliot Canfield-Dafilou

M 1:30-3:20pm

This course serves as an introduction to spatial audio concepts and technologies. Topics include perception of spatial auditory cues, binaural sound, microphone techniques for recording stereo and surround sound material, and spatialization techniques for multichannel sound diffusion, among others. In addition to a theoretical overview, assignments and in-class demonstrations focus on using tools to compose and produce spatial audio material. Each week, we explore a topic related to spatial hearing or rendering. As class, we read relevant scholarly papers on binaural hearing, spatial audio, and 3D sound composition practice. We  listen to music written to be diffused for spatial audio systems. There are several small homework assignments throughout the course and a final project. This course is designed to appeal to students with various interests and backgrounds. While there are no specific prerequisites, it is assumed that students have a working familiarity with digital audio workstations (e.g., Pro Tools, Logic, Reaper, Ardour) and some musical training.

REL 935 (24485)

Environmental and Multispecies Justice

Ryan Darr

M 1:30-3:20

The central aim of this seminar is to explore the question of whether and how the notion of justice, especially as it has been understood in the Christian tradition, can be expanded to include environmental factors and more-than-human entities. The course is divided into three parts. The first part offers a brief survey of the history and present state of Western philosophical and theological work on justice. The second part covers important works on environmental justice, climate justice, and multispecies justice written across several disciplines in recent years. The final part returns to Christian theology and ethics, asking whether and how it can make sense of issues related to environmental, climate, and multispecies justice. It focuses on the work of two theologians—Tink Tinker and Pope Francis—as well as a fictional eco-Christian sect depicted by Margaret Atwood. The nature and scope of justice will be the central theoretical question of the course. While exploring the possibilities for an expanded vision of justice, the course also keeps open the possibility that justice is an inadequate concept for thinking ethics beyond the human. We discuss other possibilities, including notions of love, kinship, relationality, reciprocity, and balance developed especially in Indigenous and feminist thought. This class is an ethics seminar centered on conceptual questions about the possibilities and limits of justice. Given its relevance to present issues facing policymakers, activists, and other practitioners, the course includes an option for engaging in a more practical register. Students choosing the practical “track” are involved with an environmental, climate, or animal justice organization during the semester and have modified assignments that engage their work with the organization.

REL 949 (22756)

Spiritual Topographies in Modern Poetry and Fiction

David Mahan

Th 3:30-5:20pm

This course examines the role of place, and physical space, as both setting and trope in modern/postmodern poetry and fiction. Beginning with notions of sacred space(s) from Scripture, we examine works of poetry by a range of modern and contemporary poets that explore natural, domestic, and sacred spaces (including Native American poetry) and the novels Home by Marilynne Robinson, Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, and the urban maze of Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy. Through close readings of these works, we consider how meaning is conveyed through the author’s development of physical locations and spaces as images of spiritual longing, journey, and presence, as well as windows into the human condition. Themes of the sacred and the profane, the material and the transcendent, good and evil, home and homelessness, identity and transformation, are among the theologically important questions that arise from this study. Area V.

SPAN 835 (24689)

Latin American Energy Humanities

Santiago Acosta

T 1:30 pm–3:20pm

The “energy humanities” is a growing interdisciplinary field that examines the cultural, social, and political significance of energy systems. In the Global North, it has gained prominence by questioning the values underpinning imaginaries of easy access to energy, technology, and transportation. This seminar, however, offers a counterpoint through the lens of Latin American cultural production, environmental history, and socio-environmental thought. In contrast to the common notion of “petromodernity” as marked by excessive consumption and resource overabundance, Latin American contexts reveal realities shaped by colonialism, extraction, uneven development, scarcity, and socio-environmental crises. These challenges, including eco-territorial conflicts and anti-extractivist resistance, are becoming increasingly urgent as the region faces the transition to renewable energy sources like wind and lithium. This seminar provides a critical overview of key approaches and debates in the energy humanities, focusing on Latin America and the Caribbean. By engaging with these topics, students will develop a robust understanding of how the energy humanities intersect with political ecology, environmental history, cultural studies, art history, and critical theory, grounded in both Global North and South perspectives. Course requirements include weekly writing assignments, class discussions, presentations, and a final research paper. Taught in Spanish.