Spring 2025 Courses 

David Skarbek
POLS 0821: How to Think in an Age of Polarized Politics
Americans today live in a time of deep political polarization, cultural tribalism, and self- segregation. Those with whom we have deep disagreements, assuming we interact with them at all, are often viewed as not just wrong but as irrational, immoral, or even contemptible. What are the causes and costs of these trends? What remedies might exist? Are there habits of mind that we might cultivate to build better citizens and a healthier democracy? This course develops and applies these habits of mind through conversations on a series of political topics. As a first-year seminar with discussion, this course will provide students with the tools of critical thinking and civil discourse that allow scholarly engagement and intellectual growth at Brown and beyond.

Jeremy Mumford
HIST 0590: The Age of Revolutions, 1760-1824
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the Americas belonged to a handful of European monarchies; within a few decades, most of the Americas was composed of independent republics, some of the European monarchs were either deposed or quaking on their thrones. Usually considered separately, revolutions in British North America, France, Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and Spanish America had diverse local circumstances yet composed a single cycle of intellectual ferment, imperial reform, accelerating violence and forging of new political communities. We will examine revolutions that helped create the world we live in. Enrollment limited to 19 first year students.

Kaitlyn Chriswell
POLS 1825: Contemporary Challenges to Democracy
As a whole, the world is more democratic than at nearly any point in history. Yet the news is full of countries, including democracies, experiencing crises: migration, disinformation, insecurity, inequality, corruption. To what extent do current events pose a threat to democracy? In this class, students will learn what constitutes a democracy. After briefly reviewing how we came to this current period in world history, we will then spend most of the semester identifying and assessing various potential threats to contemporary democracy. Students will then apply these same analytical tools in their final papers, combining in-class readings with additional sources.

Kim Gallon
AFRI 1510: Making and Remaking Blackness in the Western World
This course is an interdisciplinary survey of cultural, social, and political expressions of Blackness among people of African descent in the Western World, primarily the United States, and the social forces that create various understandings of this identity. Black experiences of and reflections on what it means to be Black are articulated in writing, visual and performing arts, music, and social media. Students will read, listen, and view a wide of set of materials that reflect people of African descent and their negotiation, rejection, and reimagination of different forms of Blackness in affirmative and complex ways from the 18th century to the present. Primary and secondary texts will comprise the course readings and range from cultural studies, philosophy, critical race theory, sociology, political science, literature, and history, among other areas.

Oliver Graham 
CLAS 0320: 21^st century Classics
The changing face of Classics, the study of Greek and Roman culture and literatures, and their receptions, has never been more turbulent than in the early 21st century. Why do we study these cultures, and what do they mean to us? Who is us? This course grapples with these questions of relevance and has been designed with input from Brown undergraduate and graduate students to try to bridge the multiple divides that can separate those who are already engaged in Classical studies from the majority who may never have thought about studying these cultures. This introductory course considers literature, art, fine arts, history, and culture; embraces historiography and ideology, critical race theory and meets head on the exclusive past with which Classics has been associated.

Corey Brettschneider
POLS 0290: Civil Liberties
What is the relationship between democracy and free speech? Does religious freedom mean that some general laws must have exemptions? Are rights to religious freedom and free speech retained by those who are convicted of crimes? Should they be? In this class, we look at these questions and others at the center of the Bill of Rights, with readings from Supreme Court cases and historical and contemporary political theory.

Sharon Krause
POLS 1015: Politics and Nature
Examines the relationship between human beings and the earth as it has been conceived in the tradition of Western political thought from the ancient Greeks to the present day. The first part of the course draws from the history of political thought to understand the background against which our contemporary environmental problems have evolved and the conceptual resources that current theory draws from. The second part of the course investigates environmental political theory at the cutting edge today, engaging a wide range of perspectives and methods in the field.

Tracy Steffes
EDUC 0610: Brown v. Board of Education and the History of School Segregation 
Using primary and secondary sources in history, education, and law this course will explore the landmark Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education which ruled school segregation was unconstitutional and the legal and policy efforts to desegregate schools and promote educational equity that followed it. We will consider the meaning, successes, and failures of school integration, the legacy of Brown for education, and consider the meaning of “equal educational” opportunity in the past and present.

Claudia Elliott 
IAPA: Democratization and Autocratization
Since the 1970s studies of democratization have shifted from a "global resurgence of democracy" to an "authoritarian resurgence." This course covers the conceptual tools for understanding these developments. We pay particular attention to the assumptions, biases, knowledge structures, and inferences produced by language and imagery--e.g., oilfields and greenhouses, pendulums and waves, pacts, and backsliding--in our understanding of new and emerging threats to democracies across the globe. Includes single case, cross-national comparisons, and big data set studies. IAPA Capstone/Sr Seminar

Francoise Hamlin 
HIST 1090: Black Freedom Struggle Since 1945
This lecture course unpacks the history of the black mass civil rights movement in the United States using a range of sources and methods. Moving thematically and focusing primarily on the South, the course considers the roles of the courts, the government, organizations, local communities, and individuals in the ongoing struggle for social, political, and economic equality. Sources include photographs, documentaries, movies, letters, speeches, autobiography, and secondary readings. By the end of the course, students will have a grasp on how to critically analyze primary sources but also develop tools for more general critical analysis and writing. Moreover, students will understand why history matters.

Deva Woodly
POLS 1825: The Politics of Futurity
Futurity is the quality or state of being of or concerned with the prospects and possibilities of a future time, event, or continuing and renewed existence. It is an approach, a perspective, and framework for thought and action. In this course we explore some of the conceptual elements and political methods that can be used toward a politics of futurity. We will examine approaches in political theory and practice that go beyond both liberalism and 20th century socialisms and seek to understand what a 21st century paradigm that centers the politics of care might include. We will discuss how political horizons are constructed in popular discourse and political action; the structural relations of race, coloniality, and indigeneity and what it would take to change those relations; abolition democracy; the politics of gender; disability justice; and the political economy of degrowth.

Phil Gould 
ENGL 1512: Freaks of Nature: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists 
Who were the Transcendentalists--and who cares? This course focuses on American literature's obsessions with Nature in the decades before the Civil War. Reading in Emerson's essays and Thoreau's autobiography Walden, we will read in a wide array of writers associated with the Transcendentalist movement, as well as those who opposed and satirized them. Our readings include spiritual narratives, essays, lyric poetry, antislavery writings, and include Margaret Fuller and Frederick Douglass among others. It will introduce students to Romantic literature and culture, sentimentalism, the search for absolute and universal truths, the role of the professional author, and the ideal of artistic genius.

Christopher Grasso 
HIST 0254: Reconstruction and the Politics of Violence 
Examines Reconstruction (conventionally, 1863-1877, and often called the first civil rights revolution in the United States), and the political violence used to combat it. The course places the events of this period in the broader American history of civil rights and the American penchant for political violence, with particular attention to antebellum mobbing, the Civil War, and Jim Crow lynching, but also looking at other forms of political violence such as Native American dispossession and labor unrest.

Tarisa Little
HIST 0691: Indigenous Education
This course examines contemporary Indigenous issues through the lens of education. Why were colonial schools established? What was the legacy of colonial schooling? How has reconciliation been sought? How have Indigenous communities responded? Students will examine current issues and how they relate to historical processes such as Indigenous epistemologies; the origins, development, decline, and legacy of the federal residential, boarding, and day school system; the meaning of apologies; and the importance of language revitalization. Additionally, students will study how Indigenous activists, storytellers, and artists have used colonial mediums to combat colonialism and resist epistemicide: the eradication of Indigenous knowledge. Students will use discussion periods to analyze and reflect on their own lives and how their gender, ethnicity, and privilege relates to, contributes to, or challenges, Indigenous issues. Topics/themes include colonization, treaties, justice, truth and reconciliation, Indigenous leadership, and Indigenous resistance.

Debbie Weinstein 
AMST 1905: War and the Mind in Modern America
This course examines how the crucible of war has shaped modern conceptions of human nature. Moving from the Civil War to the present, we will consider questions such as changing theories of combat trauma, evolutionary and social scientific explanations for why people fight wars, and the role of memory in individual and collective understandings of violent conflicts. Students will analyze representations of war in film and literature in addition to reading historical and theoretical texts.

Sarah Pearlman Shapiro
HIST 1902: American Women’s History
This course uses gender and sexuality as a category of analysis to delve into American history between the sixteenth century and the present. We will ask how gender and sexuality were conceptualized and constructed throughout American history to explore large historical themes and individuals’ daily lives. Using an intersectional approach, the course begins with the convergence of Africans, Europeans, and Indigenous peoples, through the violence surrounding the nation’s founding, the expansion of the nation-state and slavery, the Civil War and its reverberations, the US in the world, the Civil Rights Movement, Roe vs Wade, and concludes in the present moment.

Michael Steinberg
Hist 1956: Antisemitism and Modern History
A new course in the history and theory of antisemitism from 1850 to the present with an emphasis on Europe and attention to the United States and the Middle East.

Samuel Zipp 
AMST 1906: Culture as History: Making the 20^th Century United States 
This interdisciplinary course explores selected currents in U.S. cultural history from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. Thematic explorations trace the historical development of American cultural forms and practices, showing how transformations in communications, media, and consumption shaped Americans’ experience of capitalism and market expansion, ideas of self and society, social conflict around questions of race, class, gender, nationalism, and empire, as well as immigration, migration, and social movements of both the left and right. Our broad goal will be to understand how culture came to shape how historical change unfolded in this period.

Michael Vorenberg 
HIST 1570: American Legal and Constitutional History
History of American law and constitutions from European settlement to the present. Not a comprehensive survey but a study of specific issues or episodes connecting law and history, including morals and marriage laws, slavery, contests over Native American lands, delineations of race and gender, economic regulation, and the construction of a right to privacy.

Lucia Hulsether
RELS 0842: Religion, Sex, and Citizenship 
An exploration of the relationship between religion, sex, and citizenship with a focus on the United States. What has been the role of religion in the creation of sexual norms in United States history? How has this relationship changed over time, in relation to intersecting systems of class and race? What are “family values” and where did they come from? What is secularism, and does it promote sexual freedom? This course takes up questions like these, anchoring its inquiry in interdisciplinary feminist theories of gender and sexuality. Linking theoretical texts to range of grounded contexts—from Court rulings on religious freedom, to fights over sex education in schools, to militarized sexual violence, to capitalism’s regimes of gendered labor—students will develop critical vocabularies for analyzing intimacies between religion, sex, and politics in American empire.

Faiz Ahmed 
Islam in America: A Global History
This course explores the history of Muslims in America — and American discourses about Islam — from 1492 to the present. We follow five historical contexts bridging Spain and Portugal, West Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and North America, including: (1) Iberian-Ottoman rivalry from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and European colonization of the Americas; (2) transatlantic slave trade and the roots of African-American Islam; (3) the U.S. Founders’ ideas about Muslims and religious freedom, plus diplomatic engagement with Morocco, the Ottoman Empire, and Persia; (4) large-scale immigration of Asian Muslims following the 1965 Civil Rights Act; and (5) racialization of Muslim Americans — and oft-misidentified minorities including Arab, Iranian, Sikh, Jewish, Black, and Latinx Americans — before and after 9/11 and U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Tarisa Little
HIST 0691: Indigenous Education
This course examines contemporary Indigenous issues through the lens of education. Why were colonial schools established? What was the legacy of colonial schooling? How has reconciliation been sought? How have Indigenous communities responded? Students will examine current issues and how they relate to historical processes such as Indigenous epistemologies; the origins, development, decline, and legacy of the federal residential, boarding, and day school system; the meaning of apologies; and the importance of language revitalization. Additionally, students will study how Indigenous activists, storytellers, and artists have used colonial mediums to combat colonialism and resist epistemicide: the eradication of Indigenous knowledge. Students will use discussion periods to analyze and reflect on their own lives and how their gender, ethnicity, and privilege relates to, contributes to, or challenges, Indigenous issues. Topics/themes include colonization, treaties, justice, truth and reconciliation, Indigenous leadership, and Indigenous resistance.