Undergraduate Courses Spring 2026

AMST 0029 (20546) / ENGL 0729 / HUMS 0320

Michael Warner

TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU

Henry Thoreau played a critical role in the development of environmentalism, American prose, civil rights, and the politics of protest. We read his writing in depth, and with care, understanding it both in its historical context and in its relation to present concerns of democracy and climate change. We read his published writing and parts of the journal, as well as biographical and contextual material. The class makes a field trip to Walden Pond and Concord, learning about climate change at Walden as revealed by Thoreau’s unparalleled documentation of his biotic surroundings. Student’s consider Thoreau’s place in current debates about the environment and politics, and are encouraged to make connection with those debates in a final paper. Previously ENGL 029. Enrollment limited to first-year students.

 

AMST 0051 (22270) / HUMS 0501 / ENGL 0015 / HIST 0015

Lincoln Caplan

TTh 1-2:15pm

Areas HU

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans, is a classic of American documentary work. The book is about three white tenant farmers and their lives and families—about their subsistence yet survival during the Great Depression, the worst economic disaster in American history, which started in 1929 and ended during World War II. This seminar concentrating on Agee’s nonfiction—Praise and journalism of his—is a vehicle for learning about the range of skills and sensibilities that the most effective and affecting nonfiction writing calls on: powers of observation; the ability to recognize and tell a story; insight in portraying people, places, objects, and history; precision in word choice; a sense of music in language; and more. Agee’s range as a writer—as an award-winning poet and fiction writer and a celebrated film critic as well—strongly reinforces that lesson. A semester spent reading, thinking, talking, and writing about Agee and related subjects is an opportunity for immersion in the work of a great, now generally obscure, American writer and his world. 

 

AMST 3313 (22935) / ENGL 4458 / ARCH 3118

Cynthia Zarin

W 9:25-11:15am

Areas HU, WR

An exploration of reading and writing about place. Definitions of home; different meanings and intent of travel. Readings include exemplary contemporary essays from the eighteenth century to the present. Workshop for assigned student essays. Formerly ENGL 478.

 

AMST 3389 (22922) / ENGL 3825

Caleb Smith

MW 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU, WR

A seminar in gothic literature and culture from the U.S. South, exploring haunted houses, dismal swamps, and fearsome wilderness; reflecting on conjure, possession, and metamorphosis; and encountering monsters, spirits, and so-called freaks. We consider how Southern histories of settlement, slavery, and religion find expression in the gothic mode, from at least the 1830s through the present. Readings may include works by Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor, Jesmyn Ward. 

 

AMST 4459 (20133) / ANTH 4865

Kathryn Dudley

Th 1:30-3:20pm

Areas SO

This seminar explores the relational and material worlds that humans create in concert with other-than-human species. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the problematic subject of anthropology—Anthropos—we seek to pose new questions about the fate of life worlds in the present epoch of anthropogenic climate change. Our readings track circuits of knowledge from anthropology and philosophy to geological history, literary criticism, and environmental studies as we come to terms with the loss of biodiversity, impending wildlife extinctions, and political-economic havoc wrought by global warming associated with the Anthropocene.  A persistent provocation guides our inquiry: What multispecies worldings become possible to recognize and cultivate when we dare to decenter the human in our politics, passions, and aspirations for life on a shared planet?

 

ANTH 3075 (20057) / ANTH 7075 / ARCG 3075 / ARCG 7075

William Honeychurch

F 9:25-11:15am

Areas SO

The social and cultural significance of the ways that hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, maritime traders, and members of our own society traverse space. The impact of mobility and transport technologies on subsistence, trade, interaction, and warfare from the first horse riders of five thousand years ago to jet-propulsion tourists of today.

 

ANTH 3185 (20050) / ARCG 3185

Anne Underhill

M 1:30-3:20pm

Areas SO

Archaeological methods for analyzing and interpreting ceramics, arguably the most common type of object found in ancient sites. Focus on what different aspects of ceramic vessels reveal about the people who made them and used them.

 

ANTH 3858 (20063) / SAST 3040

Jane Lynch

Th 1:30-3:20pm

Areas HU, SO

Can communities redefine corporations? How do corporations shape everyday life? To whom are they responsible? This course examines the relationship between commerce, society, and culture through a diverse set of case studies that are rooted in both global and local histories. Students learn about Henry Ford’s rubber plantations in the Amazon, family firms in Italy, how the East India Company shaped the modern multinational, the first company town to be established and run by an Indian firm, transnational “stakeholder” arrangements to compensate injured garment workers in Bangladesh, and the rise of “corporate social responsibility” culture. The goal of this course is not to define the relationship between corporations and communities as singular or obvious, but rather, to draw out the variety of factors—economic, historical, social, and cultural—that shape commercial interactions, institutional cultures, and claims about market ethics and social responsibility.

 

ANTH 3873 (20064) / SAST 3830 / EVST 3873

Lav Kanoi

W 9:25-11:15am

Areas HU, SO

Water has become an urgent theme not just in current anthropology, but in development studies and environmental studies more generally. Beyond questions of scarcity and sustainability, water allows human life to flourish, and without water, there would be no civilization. Yet water is not equitably distributed across time or space, leading to contestation and conflict around water. Against such a background of strife, this course examines how human beings have related to water, to other life forms, and to each other through the control of water, in different historical moments and different parts of the world. The seminar is organized around four porous thematic clusters: (i) “urban water”, to do with cities and urban industrial life; (ii) “agrarian water”, to do with rivers, irrigation systems, and agrarian life; (iii) “rural water”, to do with coasts, lakes, dams and rural life; and (iv) and “living water”, to do with social, cultural and political values, and human and more-than-human life. This seminar introduces students to the everyday values of water, as well as the everyday politics of water, including the production of water and its attendant politics at the level of the nation-state as well as the city municipality while also being attentive to the moral ecologies of water. By studying water in different ways through the lens of culture, environment, social justice, and spirituality or faith, students develop a nuanced understanding of development, urbanization, environmental justice, and climate change.

 

ANTH 4818 (21560) / WGSS 4518 / ER&M 4518 / SPAN 4618 / WGSS 7718 / ER&M 6606 / ANTH 7818 / SPAN 9718

Eda Pepi and Ana Ramos-Zayas

Th 1:30-3:20pm

Areas HU 

ritical to colonial, imperial, and capitalist expansion, the Atlantic offers a dynamic setting for adapting ethnographic practices to address questions around interconnected oppressions, revolts, and revolutions that are foundational to global modernity. Anchored in a Spanish and a Colombian port city, this course engages trans-Atlantic ‘worlding’ through a multi-sited and historically grounded ethnographic lens. Las Palmas—the earliest mid-Atlantic port and Europe’s first settler colony in Africa—and Cartagena—once the principal gateway connecting Spain and its American empire—illuminate urgent contemporary issues such as climate, displacement, inter-regional subjectivities, and commerce. During a spring recess field experience (March 8–16, 2026), students immerse themselves for four nights each in Las Palmas and Cartagena, developing critical “tracking” skills that bridge ethnographic practice with cultural theory. Preparation for fieldwork includes an on-campus curriculum, organized around Cartagena and Las Palmas, and sessions with Yale Ethnography Hub faculty, covering different methodologies. As part of this broader programming, the curriculum delves into trans-Atlantic migrations from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa that have transformed port cities, labor and aesthetic practices, class-making racial formations, and global geopolitics. After recess, the course shifts toward independent work, as students synthesize field-collected data and insights into a collaborative multimodal group project and individual ethnographic papers. Interested students must apply by November 1st via the course website. Students may withdraw by the university deadlines in April. Prerequisite: Conversational and reading proficiency in Spanish. Readings are in English and Spanish, with assignments accepted in either language.

 

ARCG 1170 (22995) / HSAR 3250 / CLCV 1751

Alexander Ekserdjian

TTh 1:30-2:20pm

Areas HU

The Roman Empire stretched from Spain to Syria, Scotland to the Sahara. This course treats the architecture, painting, and sculpture from this vast geographical area thematically. The Roman world encompassed many different cultures and traditions, but exhibits shared elements in artistic and architectural production across the empire. These points of contact, and the reasons behind them, will be explored through a thematic approach which looks across geographies in every session, comparing monuments and artworks on the basis of their functions. Students are asked to engage with key works in the history of Roman Art, but also are exposed to objects from beyond the canon that reorient our focus on understudied elements of ‘Roman Art’. Some readings introduce students to the material under discussion, while more focused scholarly texts offer insight into recent research in the field. This course is intended for those with an interest in the ancient world or in art history, but no specific disciplinary knowledge or prior coursework is required.

 

ARCG 2242 (20839) / NELC 2440 / NELC 7440 / ARCG 6242

Gregory Marouard

Th 1:30-3:20pm

Areas HU

​​This seminar investigates in detail ancient Egyptian materials, techniques, and industries through the scope of archaeology, history, and socioeconomical, textual as well as iconographic data. When possible ethnoarchaeological and experimental approaches of the antique chaine-operatoire are discussed in order to illustrate skills and professions that have now completely disappeared. This class is organized according to various themes within a diachronical approach, from the 4th millennium BC to the Roman Period. Copper and precious metals, construction stones, hard stones and gems, glass and faience production, imported wood or ivory, we explore multiple categories of materials, where and how they were collected or exchanged, the way these products were transported, transformed, refined or assembled and the complex organization of the work involved and administration that was required in order to satisfy the tastes of Egyptian elites or their desires to worship their gods. Some other vernacular savoir-faire linked to the everyday life and the death is explored, through food production and mummification practices. The aim of this seminar is not only to give an overview of the history of techniques for this early civilization but, beyond how things were made, to acquire a more critical view of ancient Egyptian culture through the material culture and as well the strong economic and sociologic implications linked to their objects and constructions–rather than the usual focus on its temples and tombs.

 

ARCG 2294 (20044)

Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos

TTh 11:35-12:50pm

Areas SO

Introduction to the archaeological study of ancient Maya civilization in southern Mexico and northern Central America. Maya origins and modes of adaptation to a tropical forest environment; political history of the Classic Maya and competing theories about their collapse; overviews of Maya art, calendar, and writing.

 

ARCH 1600 (12683) / URBN 1300

Ana Duran

MW 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU, SO

An introduction to key topics, research methods, and practices in urban studies, an interdisciplinary field of inquiry and action rooted in the experience of cities. As physical artifacts, the advent of large cities have reflected rapid industrialization and advanced capitalism. They are inseparable from the organization of economic life; the flourishing of cultures; and the formation of identities. They are also places where power is concentrated and inequalities are (re)produced. Debates around equity are filtered through urban environments, where struggles over jobs, housing, education, mobility, public health, and public safety are front and center. The course is organized as a colloquium with numerous guests. Accessible entirely online, there will also be live, in-person events, with social distancing and face masks/shields, available to students in New Haven.

 

ARCH 2003 (23029) / HSAR 3312 / HUMS 3050

Craig Buckley

TTh 2:30-3:20pm

Areas HU

Architects, movements, and buildings central to the development of modern architecture from the mid eighteenth century through to the present. Common threads and differing conceptions of modern architecture around the globe. The relationship of architecture to urban transformation; the formulation of new typologies; architects’ responses to new technologies and materials; changes in regimes of representation and media. Architects include Claude Nicolas Ledoux, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, John Soane, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lina Bo Bardi, Louis Kahn, and Kenzo Tange. 

 

ARCH 3108 (22441)

Ife Vanable

T 1:30-3:20pm

Areas HU, SO, WR

Groundlessness offers an extra-disciplinary interrogation and analysis of histories, theories, and inventions of zoning, land use classification, property valuation, and air rights in the making and imagining of territories deemed urban and otherwise from the late nineteenth century (following Reconstruction in the United States) to the present. Working across media from policy to poetry, film to form, memoir to historiography, fiction to finance, Groundlessness troubles and complicates the grounds and grounding(s) of urban and environmental imaginaries. Attending to cultural, aesthetic, technological, legal, economic, and environmental conditions, this course asks how these factors shape the work of the racial as visually and spatially performed (and in part, contribute to disdain for housing the black and poor in tall towers; the difficulty with imagining folks racialized as black holding a position up in the sky). Groundlessness explores the many ways the work of constructing the built environment occurs well before and beyond the involvement of any architect; and ultimately seeks out the promise and freedoms of leaving the land behind (and below), living untethered from the land, on invented lands, unstable ground, off the ground, and up high.

 

ARCH 3109 (21733) / ER&M 1638 / WGSS 3334

Joel Sanders

Th 1:30-3:20pm

Areas HU

BLM and COVID-19 have underscored the imperative for public institutions like art museums to reckon with a longstanding dilemma: museum architecture, working in relationship with the art it displays, perpetuation of white supremacy, heteronormativity, and ableism. This seminar uses the resources of the Yale University Art Gallery and the Yale Center for British Art to situate this contemporary challenge in a cultural and historical context by tracing the intertwined histories of art and gallery architecture from the 16th century to today. Looking back allows us to imagine alternative futures: we consider the work of contemporary scholars, artists, designers, and public health experts who are developing strategies for making 21st-century museums inclusive environments that promote multi-sensory experiences among people of different races, genders, and abilities. Instructor permission is required based on the submission of an Expression of Interest with the following info: Name, Class year, Major/Concentration, Email and a paragraph describing relevant experiences that would allow you to make a meaningful contribution to the class.

 

ART 0517 (20754)

Yaminay Chaudhri

MW 9-10:15am

Areas HU

This class looks at “space” from the perspective of the outsider; it lingers in the margins, peripheries, and shadows of contemporary urban space to encourage a critical analysis of everyday experience. Each week we will unpack normative and dominant spaces by developing a keen understanding of the marginal and invisible spaces that hold them up. Sara Ahmad’s book, Queer Phenomenology, and Bell Hooks’ essay, Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness, provides the guiding framework for our inquiries as we move through various spatial formations. We scale our inquiries: from the orientation of our bodies in the classroom, to space-making walks in New Haven, to historical analysis of exclusionary zoning policies along coastal Connecticut. Throughout the semester, readings and artwork connect students to struggles for space in different parts of the world, highlighting invisible infrastructures, inequities, and voices of resistance. Classes center student discussions of weekly themes built up using a host of readings, art works, and urban typologies.

 

CLCV 3350 (21178)

Egbert Bakker

Food is more than carbohydrates and proteins. It is about culture and identity, both collective and individual, and it has symbolic value. In this course we study the political, symbolic, and poetic importance of food and wine in Ancient Greece. We see how food defines humans with respect to the gods, Greeks with respect to non-Greeks, and how food is a central component of the meaning of entire epic poems, such as the Odyssey. But we also look at the reality of food consumption and production and how food and drink was studied by the physicians and scientists of the ancient world. Readings in translation.

 

CLCV (23003) / HSAR 4423 / HUMS 2270

Milette Gaifman

W 1:30pm-3:20pm 

Areas HU

Artifacts of Greek art and architecture made in honor of Dionysos, the god of wine and theater, whose worship involved ecstatic experiences. The Great Dionysia, a festival where theatrical productions were performed, as the source of inspiration for artifacts and architectural monuments. Objects and structures such as painted vases and theaters as means of keeping the realm of Dionysos present in daily experience.

 

EALL 2050 (22443) / EAST 3204 / HSAR 4477

Pauline Lin

F 1:30-3:20pm

Areas HU

An introduction to Chinese philosophical, poetic, and visual explorations of landscape and the changing relationship between human beings and nature. Through texts, archaeological materials, visual and material culture, and garden designs from the 2nd c. BCE to modern times, we learn about the Chinese conception of the world, relationship to and experiences in nature, and shaping of the land through agriculture, imperial parks, and garden designs. We conclude with contemporary environmental issues confronting China, and how contemporary parks can help regenerate our ecosystem.

 

EAST 4401 (20703) / HSAR 4393

Instructor TBA

Time TBA

Areas HU

From production to circulation and consumption, the life of an artifact often unfolds across multiple geographic locations and varied environments. The movement of things in space and time offers valuable insights into the waxing and waning of maritime and terrestrial networks that fostered transregional connectivity. This course introduces students to a variety of objects from premodern East Asia with a view to understanding the histories of intercultural exchange inscribed into their designs, materials, and itineraries. It begins by familiarizing students with methodologies, interpretive frameworks, and critical vocabulary for studying interconnected material cultures. The rest of the course is organized as a series of case studies on specific object types and structured into four modules, each focusing on a different sphere of exchange defined by shared geography, trade, religion, or ecosystem. Through this diverse group of objects, we will explore the entanglement of material culture with evolving structures of power, networks of interregional and long-distance exchange, and the physical environment in East Asia.

 

ENGL 0763 (20558)

Heather Klemann

TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU, WR

What happens when a mirror held up to our world reflects back something ominously and unreasonably distorted? How do the sublime, the uncanny, and the supernatural fashion and fracture our sense of self? Examining gothic novels from the 18th and 19th centuries—the stuff of craggy cliffs, mysterious dungeons, and their paranormal inhabitants—alongside 20th and 21st-century films, this course explores the historical origins and deep cultural legacy of literary responses to the so-called Age of Reason. As we tour medieval monasteries, shadowy back alleys of London, and abysmal realms of the subconscious, we consider how literary representations of unreason affirm and unsettle our understanding of lived experience and our faith in laws of science and logic. Gothic fiction has long provided fertile ground for cultivating ideas about race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism—special attention is given to these topics throughout the course. Readings include Frankenstein, Mexican Gothic, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula. Films include Peele’s Get Out, Bong’s Parasite, and Hitchcock’s Rebecca. Formerly ENGL 063. Enrollment limited to first-year students.

 

ENGL 1014 (22824)

Alison Coleman

MW 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas WR

Instruction in writing well-reasoned analyses and academic arguments, with emphasis on the importance of reading, research, and revision. Using examples of nonfiction prose from a variety of academic disciplines, individual sections focus on topics such as the city, childhood, globalization, inequality, food culture, sports, and war. Formerly ENGL 114.

 

ENGL 1015 (22866)

Maeva O’Brien

TTh 11:35am-12:50pm

Areas HU, WR

How does the Anthropocene, the period in planetary history defined by human influence on the environment, cause us to rethink what it means to be human? How does it affect the feeling of being human? Conversely, how do competing ideas about what it means to be human influence the definition and plausibility of the Anthropocene? Finally, how does literature help us answer these questions? This course will approach these wide-ranging issues via two distinct but complementary lenses. First, we will consider the nature of human life jeopardized by toxified environments that are themselves the result of human history, politics, and economics. Second, we will attend to the relationship between human and animal life, assess how each is valued in a few specific contexts, and ask what might be gained by thinking of the human less as an exceptional form of life (as in the notion of “human rights”) and more as a figure embedded in a vast and complex ecosystem that is both biological and cultural. Along the way, we will read powerful works of literature, engage with histories of capital and empire, examine contrasting cultural and intellectual traditions, and explore the political, economic, and emotional linkages between ourselves and our world. Possible authors include Don DeLillo, Amitav Ghosh, Linda Hogan, Ruth Ozeki, Indra Sinha, Stacy Alaimo, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sylvia Wynter.

 

ENGL 2846 (23240) / ER&M 3046

Tarren Andrews

MW 2:30-3:45pm

Areas HU, WR

This course focuses on developing critical readings skills grounded in the embodied and place-based reading practices encouraged by Indigenous literatures. Students are expected to think critically about their reading practices and environments to consciously cultivate place-based reading strategies across a variety of genres including: fiction and non-fiction, sci-fi, poetry, comic books, criticism, theory, film, and other new media. Students are required to keep a reading journal and regularly present critical reflections on their reading process, as well as engage in group annotations of primary and secondary reading materials. This course is offered during the fall and spring term and may be taken both terms for credit. During the fall term the focus is on Indigenous literatures and new media from North America produced primarily in the 21st century. Critical readings include some historical context, both pre- and post-contact, as well as Indigenous literary theory. During the spring term, the focus becomes Indigenous literatures and games in a global context with emphasis on Indigenous land relations and ecocriticism across the 20th and 21st centuries. 

 

ENGL 3467 (20643) / EVST 3224

Alan Burdick

T 9:25-11:15am

Areas WR

Exploration of ways in which the environment and the natural world can be channeled for literary expression. Reading and discussion of essays, reportage, and book-length works, by scientists and non-scientists alike. Students learn how to create narrative tension while also conveying complex—sometimes highly technical—information; the role of the first person in this type of writing; and where the human environment ends and the non-human one begins. Previously ENGL 418. Admission by permission of the instructor only. Students interested in the course should email the instructor at alan.burdick@gmail.com with the following information: 1.) A few paragraphs describing your interest in taking the class. 2.) A non-academic writing sample that best represents you.

 

ENGL 3711 (22912) / AMST 3337 / ER&M 3611

Lloyd Kevin Sy

MW 2:30-3:45pm

Areas HU, WR

What does it mean to be sovereign on this land? This course explores how Indigenous writers—and a few settler ones—confront the idea of sovereignty across a formative century of U.S. expansion. We’ll ask: How is sovereignty asserted in oral and written forms? How do treaties, land, and kinship shape literary expression? Can U.S. sovereignty ever be disentangled from dispossession? And how do Native authors navigate, subvert, or refuse the frameworks imposed on them? Through texts by Indigenous writers across genres—memoir, sermon, fiction, petition—we’ll trace how literature mediates questions of land, law, and identity from the U.S. Constitution to the Indian Citizenship Act. Authors may include William Apess, Zitkala-Ša, Samson Occom, Black Hawk, Mourning Dove, John Rollin Ridge, Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Walt Whitman.

 

Deborah Coen

TTh 11:35am-12:25pm

Areas HU

This is a course about how humans have come to know what we know about our impacts on the earth’s climate and our vulnerability to climate change. When did humans first know that their actions, in the aggregate, could transform the planet? Did scientists bear responsibility to warn of these consequences? In what ways has the modern science of climate both appropriated and undermined traditional and indigenous forms of climate knowledge? Students learn to work with the methods of history of science: we analyze science as a social and material process bound to the cultural and epistemological particularities of its historical context, and we examine the political dimensions of historical narratives about the emergence of the theory of global warming. Via hands-on experience with Yale’s historical collections, students learn to analyze maps, artifacts, and instruments as historical sources. They also gain familiarity with the methods of environmental history, learning to attend to historical evidence of shifting relationships between humans and non-humans. Finally, students become more attuned to the evidence of climate change around them and more confident in their ability to make climate knowledge for themselves.

 

ER&M 3036 (22115)

Leigh-Anna Hidalgo

Th 1:30-3:20pm

Areas SO

This course explores Latinx experiences of urban life, politics, and geographies. We understand “the urban,” in many different ways as cities where urban spaces are lived, negotiated, and transformed. Urban scholars continue to grapple with the ways racial violence and multiple intersecting oppressions are woven into the very fabric of cities, as they are navigated and contested by racialized political actors who enact alternative ways of making place and home. In this course, we engage with scholarship and learn how Latinx people, organizations, scholars, and activists address key urban issues in the U.S., from segregation, gentrification, policing, labor, and migration.

 

HSHM 2140 (20383) / HIST 1752

Ivano Dal Prete

MW 10:30am-11:20am

Areas HU

The notion of extraterrestrials and “radical others” in history and culture from antiquity to the present. Topics include other worlds and their inhabitants in ancient Greece; medieval debates on the plurality of worlds; angels, freaks, native Americans, and other “aliens” of the Renaissance; comet dwellers in puritan New England; Mars as a socialist utopia in the early twentieth century; and visitors from space in American popular culture.

 

HSHM 2270 (20384) / HIST 12755

Elaine Ayers

TTh 1:30-2:20pm

Areas HU

Plants weave their way into every aspect of our lives. From the food that we eat to our growing obsession with houseplants, from the pharmaceutical industry to recent meditations on queerness and reproductive freedom, plants are inescapable, offering both practical and metaphoric roots, tendrils, and blossoming ideas about our own bodies and our engagement within changing social, political, and cultural structures. This course considers the ways that plants (and fungi) have shaped ideas about gender, sexuality, race, health, medicine, capitalism, power, and consciousness from the early modern period to the present, moving chronologically to examine our complicated relationships with the natural world. Working within the (broadly construed and ongoing) colonial context, we follow plants and their collectors, cultivators, and stewards across oceans and continents, charting the rise of plantation agriculture and specious ways of classifying species to twentieth-century focuses on breeding and genetics, attempts to patent plants as medicines, and, in recent years, calls to use plants as models for new (or, perhaps, very old) models for kinship that upturn these very systems of power.

 

HSHM 4430 (23058) / HIST 3751

Gourav Krishna Nandi

T 1:30-3:20pm

Areas HU, WR

How have today’s global megacities, the majority of which are based in erstwhile colonized countries, come to function the way they do? Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, colonial cities emerged as pivotal conduits for the flow of global capital and commerce that was threatened during periods of conflict and disorder, such as wars or outbreaks of epidemics. This seminar explores the history of public health in today’s megacities throughout the Global South. In the first part of the course, students examine colonial public health interventions and disease control measures–such as anti-plague measures, vaccination campaigns, slum clearance, and health education–to better understand how colonial, and later, postcolonial states planned urban spaces, and managed and restricted the movement of populations. In the second part, we explore how colonial and postcolonial states have attempted to govern the urban poor and migrant communities and the diverse ways in which migrant and urban poor communities have actively contested and reclaimed urban spaces. Using case studies of Global South cities from Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, the Philippines, Senegal, and South Africa, we pursue a comparative examination of how colonial and postcolonial states have variously utilized outbreaks of epidemics in cities to create newer strategies to control and manage urban populations and spaces, and how marginalized communities have challenged state interventions and assert their belonging in urban spaces.

 

HIST 1335 (23157) / AFST 3335 / ER&M 1625

Daniel Magaziner

TTh 11:35-12:25pm

Areas HU

An introduction to the history of southern Africa, especially South Africa. Indigenous communities; early colonial contact; the legacies of colonial rule; postcolonial mismanagement; the vagaries of the environment; the mineral revolution; segregationist regimes; persistent inequality and crime since the end of apartheid; the specter of AIDS; postcolonial challenges in Zimbabwe, Angola, and Mozambique.

 

HIST 3214 (23160)

Maria Jordan

T 9:25-11:15am

Areas HU, WR

This seminar is dedicated to the reality and the perception of the night across time and in different cultures. We explore how religious and philosophical beliefs, political and economic forces, changes in technologies of lighting, human biology, and the shift from rural to urban and agrarian to industrial societies affected attitudes toward time in general and the night in particular. These changes influenced the perceptions, uses, and the ways different groups experienced nocturnal time, and how we act, sleep, work, interact, and even dream. The traditional binary view of day and night is questioned by presenting a more complex “and dynamic face” of the night. Nightfall provides multiple opportunities for dissent and rebellion and becomes an ideal space for marginal and subordinate people. Historical analysis, literary texts, medical and scientific writings, and primary sources provide the class with a cross-disciplinary approach to examine how the night became the abode of the ghost, the devil, the witch, and the dead, and how the night became criminalized, commercialized and even politicized. In our time, improvements in lighting changed the nocturnal world, but also had detrimental effects on sleep and dreams, and caused contemporary movements–aesthetic and scientific–to “rescue” the night.

 

HIST 3364 (20363)

Robert Harms and Allegra Ayida

W 1:30-3:20pm

Areas HU, WR

This junior seminar features case studies that focus on an epoch or episode in Africa’s history that was influenced or shaped by the riverine ecosystem in which it was embedded. Chronologically, the case studies range from the Nile in early dynastic ancient Egypt to the discovery of vast peatlands in the Congo River Basin in 2017. Geographically, the course looks at histories that developed in four of Africa’s major river basins: the Nile, the Niger, the Congo, and the Zambezi.

 

HIST 3525 (23811)

Instructor TBA

T 3:30-5:20pm

Areas HU, WR

This seminar offers students the opportunity to develop further reading, writing, and research skills in the environmental history of domesticated and built landscapes in Colonial Latin America. The course questions colonial tropes of pristine wilderness and environments untouched by mankind in Latin America, the Caribbean, and parts of the world with historic ties to these regions during colonial times (15th-19th centuries). By adopting the notion of engineering, this course emphasizes correlated human and nature interventions in the shaping colonial societies and already domesticated environments in Latin America by Indigenous peoples and Afro-descended communities. On top of that, engineering allows us to rethink technological tools concerned with the design, building, and use of engines, machines, structures, and policies for colonization, dispossession, enslavement, environmental degradation, but also adaptive usages of emancipatory technical knowledge to navigate exploitation and unfreedom regimes. Therefore, this course adopts various scales of analysis, from local and regional to hemispheric, to approach key themes of Colonial Latin American historiography from an environmental lens, including Indigenous histories; colonialism, extractivism, and slavery; Afro-Latinx histories; environmental humanities and justice.

 

HIST 3770 (21046)

Alan Mikhail

W 1:30-3:20pm

Areas HU, WR

This course begins with advent of colonialism in the Americas in order to rethink the ways in which race and religion comingled in histories of conquest, genocide, and slavery that bridge, but also to sort through the differences between the Atlantic, Caribbean and Mediterranean worlds. The course examines and conceptualizes how the Middle East figured in European imperial projects in the Western Hemisphere. It starts with the Papal sanction of Spanish and Portuguese colonial projects in the Americas as a continuation of their expulsion of the Moors from Iberia and proceeds to examine the histories of enslaved Black Muslims. A visit to the Beinecke Library and the Yale Archives to examine Ezra Stiles’ collection of Hebrew and Arabic texts and the ‘moorish’ identity of the boy he enslaved brings our inquiry closer to home. Additional visits to the archives of American missionary societies active in the Middle East, which are housed at the Yale Divinity School, invites students to examine primary sources linking Yale and New Haven to the Middle East. Our class ends in 1887 with Frederick Douglass’ visit to Egypt and the concurrent histories of officers in the US Confederacy who served in the Egyptian military. By examining how the Middle East came to appear in European imperial projects in the Americas, we can more critically understand how American and European colonizers, missionaries, and travelers came to appear in the Middle East. Topics include toleration and violence, women and gender, settler colonialism, slavery, ecological and climatic changes, and the birth of financial capitalism. The study of the Mediterranean, Caribbean, and the Americas. 

 

HSAR 3285 (22992) / ITAL 2343

Morgan Ng

TTh 11:35am-12:25pm

Areas HU

This course surveys the art of Renaissance Italy (c. 1420–1550) in its full breadth, including architecture, sculpture, and painting. Lectures situate artworks within broad cultural themes, while sections include the first-hand study of objects in the Yale University Art Gallery. Topics include the display of art in civic space; the influence of Roman antiquity on monumental architecture; the conception of nature in paintings and gardens; the representation of the human body in portraiture and heroic sculpture; the rise of women artists and patrons. The course scrutinizes acknowledged masterworks by Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and Raphael, in the artistic centers of Florence, Rome, and Venice. At the same time, it considers lesser known yet no less vibrant artistic sites, such as those in Southern Italy. It also draws map connections beyond Europe, revealing rich cultural exchanges with the Ottoman empire and the Americas.

 

HSAR 4352

Ivana Dizdar

W 9:25-11:15am

From Chardin’s dead stingray to Delacroix’s roaring lions to Manet’s black cat, the history of French art is also a history of animals. As we rethink approaches to French art history, what would it mean to turn our attention toward animal subjects? This seminar examines animals across a broad range of French visual and material culture, from Rococo to Impressionism. Paintings, panoramas, sculptures, print materials, photography, fashion, decorative art, and the display of real animals (dead and alive) tell a complex story of what it was to encounter, study, exploit, consume, wear, live with, love, and mourn our non-human counterparts. We will consider how animal representations reflected, mediated, and informed the period’s social transformations and geopolitical currents, including colonization, slavery, science, industrialization, and global trade.

 

HSAR 4457 (23005)

Mimi Yiengpruksawan

W 1:30-3:20pm

Areas HU

Arts and theory of the Japanese garden with emphasis on the role of the anthropogenic landscape from aesthetics to environmental precarity, including the concept of refugium. Case studies of influential Kyoto gardens from the 11th through 15th centuries, and their significance as cultural productions with ecological implications.

 

URBN 2000 (21864) / ARCH 2000 / EVST 2000

Bimal Mendis

Th 11:35am-1:25pm

Areas HU

Exploration of architecture and urbanism at multiple scales from the human to the world. Consideration of how design influences and shapes the material and conceptual spheres through four distinct subjects: the human, the building, the city, and the world. Examination of the role of architects, as designers, in constructing and shaping the inhabited and urban world. Lectures, readings, reviews and four assignments that address the spatial and visual ramifications of design.Not open to first-year students. Required for all Architecture majors.