Spring 2026 Courses
UNDERGRADUATE COURSES - SPRING 2026
African American Studies UN3001 - Section 001
Blackness and Frenchness: A Radical Gene
Call Number: 10536 Points: 4
Day/Time: Monday, 12:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Veronique Charles
How have Black radicals embraced the French language and, at times, Frenchness without espousing France’s dominance and its doctrines of assimilation? This course explores the watershed moments from the past three centuries that redefine the articulations of blackness in French, in France and beyond—from revolutionary or constitutional independence in the post-colony to recent social movements in continental Europe. In addition to the opening inquiry, guiding questions for this course include but are not limited to the following. What kinds of state-sanctioned backlash in France have ensued in the face of affirmative reclamations of blackness (e.g. Négritude and Afroféminisme)? And, what are the historical linkages between Black radicalism in France and the United States? Through an intra-imperial and inter-imperial lens, this course will center contributions from Black writers, artists, and intellectuals of divergent colonial histories with especial consideration to those for whom French and France is their native language and land.
African American Studies UN3001 - Section 001
Sing a Black Girl's Song: The Non Fiction Writing of Ntozake Shange
Call Number: 10540 Points: 4
Day/Time: Thursday, 2:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Edwidge Danticat
This undergraduate seminar offers an in-depth exploration of the nonfiction work of the renowned African-American poet and playwright Ntozake Shange, whose archives are at Barnard College, her alma mater. Through readings, discussion, and visits to her archives, students will probe this lesser-examined aspect of Shange's oeuvre, including her essays on her life, the arts, food, and other artists and creators. This course invites participants to engage critically with Shange's essays and personal writings while delving into her archive.
Course Objectives:
Students will identify key themes and literary techniques in Shange's nonfiction and the historical and cultural context in which she wrote these works. We will examine how Shange's nonfiction contributes to her broader work and her perspectives on history, gender, feminism, and race as they intersect in her life as a Black woman artist. Students will develop critical thinking skills through close reading, analysis, and discussion of Shange's nonfiction and will improve their writing skills by composing reflections and essays on Shange's works. They will develop research skills and gain insights into Shange's creative process through firsthand engagement with Shange's archive at Barnard.
African American Studies UN3004 - Section 001
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: Introduction to Black Geographies
Call Number: 10540 Points: 4
Day/Time: Thursday, 2:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Brandi T. Summers
This course will introduce students to Black geographies as a spatial expression of Black studies. Black scholars have long recognized the complex spatialities of Black life, developing theories of diaspora, racial capitalism, and anti-/post-colonialism that are inherently geographical. In this course, we will think about space, place, landscape, and ecology through a Black geographic framework, paying attention to how scholars, activists, and artists engage the poetics and materiality of Black life to explore ideas about repair, inequality, resistance, and liberation. The questions that animate this course are: what are Black geographies? What is the future of Black geographies outside of academia? How can centering a “Black sense of place” in turn transform the way we think about space, place, and power? How does Black Studies account for and understand Black spatial condition, experience, and imaginaries?
The course will begin with an engagement of key works on Black geographies. We will come to see institutional Black geographies as concerned with the Black spatial imaginaries formed in the aftermath of enslavement and colonialism in the Western hemisphere. As such, our readings will center experiences in the United States. We will cover such topics as Black method(s), racial capitalism, regional geographies, carceral geographies, and Black home and infrastructure.
Ultimately, students will be introduced to central themes, concepts and approaches that highlight the spatialization of race and the racialization of space through various technologies that signify places according to new rules of inclusion and exclusion. In this way, we will examine historical and contemporary macro-community and micro- sub-community (e.g., neighborhood) issues shaping the social, economic and political lives of Black people.
African American Studies UN3451 - Section 001
Latinx Artists Coast to Coast
Call Number: 15977 Points: 4
Day/Time: Wednesday, 4:10pm - 6:10pm
Instructor: Kellie Jones | Rachel Grace Newman
This course takes a close look at visual art and performative culture by artists of Latin American descent in the U.S. or Latinx, Latina/o art. The artists we will study trace their heritage to Mexico, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, along with other countries in Latin America. We will consider how these wide-ranging and diverse creative expressions come to signify Latinidad while in the process transforming U.S. culture. This means examining colonial era histories that inform the work of contemporary Latinx artists including, but not limited to, histories of race and botanical illustration. We will also look at the histories and visual expressions of Afro-Caribbean and Taíno spiritual practices that have had a great influence on Latinx art production. Course themes include: physical and psychic borders, indigeneity, colonialism and racialization, gender and sexuality, and expanding notions of American art and identity. Class discussions will focus on close examination of theoretical approaches and individual works along with shifting ideas of representation.
African American Studies UN3011 - Section 001
Spirit of Justice
Call Number: 17123 Points: 4
Day/Time: Monday, 10:10am - 12:00pm
Instructor: Nyle Fort
Progressive social movements are often read as critiques of systemic injustice and calls to transform social arrangements. In this framework, activism is largely - if not exclusively - a political project that addresses issues of housing, education, employment, healthcare, elections, labor, sexual violence, immigration, war, and climate, to name a few. Of course, these efforts are central to the long history of freedom struggles. Largely missing from such mainstream conceptions of activism, however, is serious attention to its spiritual work. That is, the ways social movements can transform hearts, minds, and spirits as much as material conditions, public policies, and political arrangements.
This course explores the intersection of social liberation and spiritual transformation, with particular focus on black and multi-racial freedom struggles in the Americas from the 19th century to today. Conceptually, it covers scholarship that speaks broadly to questions of love, spirituality, ethics, and religion in progressive political movements. Practically, it considers how this rich tradition of spiritual activism may help us confront legacies of injustice and struggle toward a liberated world.
African American Studies UN3940 - Section 001
Senior Thesis Seminar
Call Number: 11372 Points: 4
Day/Time: Tuesday, 2:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Kellie Jones
Note: AFAM majors and concentrators ONLY
The Senior Seminar will afford thesis writers the chance to workshop their idea, conduct research and/or interviews, work with the IRB protocols (if necessary), learn to work with archival materials, and perform other research activities prior to writing the thesis. Students who choose to write a capstone paper or conduct a capstone project can choose an elective course the following semester. The Thesis Seminar, conducted in the spring semester, is a workshop-oriented course for Senior Thesis writers organized around honing their writing skills while providing guidance to students in their field/disciplinary-specific projects. For example, a student may choose to write a historical biography of an artist while another may pursue a sociological study of the effects of mass incarceration on voting rights. The instructor of the Thesis Seminar, working with a faculty adviser (dependent on the specific field of inquiry in the thesis), will provide feedback and supervise the writing schedule of the students.
GRADUATE COURSES - SPRING 2026
African American Studies GU4004 - Section 001
Turn the TV Off: Black Performance Studies
Call Number: 15974 Points: 4
Day/Time: Thursday, 12:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Johanna F. Almiron
Note: Open to junior and seniors
In this seminar, students will learn how to interpret Black Performance through historical, social, and political theory. In studying Black Performance, students will engage strategies of subversion and resistance to dominant ideologies throughout the African diaspora. With a focus on the blues and its other-worldly iterations, we will cover theorists and topics from the Black Radical tradition such as Zora Neale Hurston and American South gothic folklore; Amiri Baraka and the blues; Greg Tate and hip-hop; bell hooks and queering the Black gaze; Fred Moten and abstraction; Angela Davis and imagining abolition, and more. We will pair theory with praxis by engaging masterpieces by Black performing artists in music, dance, comedy, theatre, as well as film and television.
As a seminar, students should prepare to participate in in-depth discussions weekly by completing the reading and viewing assignments. Since the central subject matter is performance studies and visual culture based in African-American studies, an interdisciplinary field, the course has a strong multi-media element. Students should expect to view films regularly, both online and in class. Students are also strongly encouraged to attend outside exhibitions and performances for extra credit. Syllabus is subject to change.
This syllabus has drawn from the research of a community of social justice scholars, including the writers of the #Trans-Justice Syllabus, #Immigration Syllabus, #Black Lives Matter Syllabus, and #The Charlottesville Syllabus.
African American Studies GU4005 - Section 001
Frantz Fanon: Disenchantment, Existential Self-Revision, and Resistance
Call Number: 15795 Points: 4
Day/Time: Wednesday, 12:10pm - 2:00pm
Instructor: Vivaldi Jean-Marie
Note: Open to junior and seniors
Through close reading of Frantz Fanon's early, mid-career, and late texts, the lectures of the course aim at presenting Fanon's intellectual trajectory starting with his engagement to fight for France as a tirailleur during the second World War and how his experience of racism in the French military disenchanted him about his standing within the French empire. Like most people from the French colonies, Fanon grasped from his military service that he is a second class citizen.
The lectures, then, engage Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks as both a memoir which chronicles his disenchantment with France's promise of liberté égalité, et fraternité for all its citizens and a testament of France's anti-black racist practices which is informed by his experience of anti-black racism.
The lectures then engage with Fanon's writings about how his experiences as a psychiatrist caring for the patients of colonial mental illnesses led to his existential self-revision.
Finally, the lectures focus on Fanon's magnum opus, The Wretched of the Earth (Les damnés de la terre) to draw out that it was the culmination of Fanon's disenchantment and existential self-revision as the mature expression of his philosophy that violence is a series of practices that French colonizers instilled in the colonies to engage with colonized people and that the logic of revolution requires that colonized people engage in these practices with the colonial establishment.
African American Studies GU4006 - Section 001
The African American Prophetic Political Tradition from David Walker to Barack Obama
Call Number: 15976 Points: 4
Day/Time: Tuesday, 12:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Obery Hendricks
Note: Open to junior and seniors
The classical prophetic political tradition derives from the biblical prophets who, with strong words, courageous deeds and abiding faith in the righteousness of their cause, struggled to transform oppressive, exploitive regimes of power into just and equitable political institutions that would “let justice roll down as water and righteousness like a mighty stream.” For millennia this tradition has been a touchstone for peoples throughout the world in their struggles for freedom.
This course will explore the particular role of the prophetic political tradition in the ongoing struggle of African Americans for political equity and justice. Its purview will range from the earliest days of the American republic to the close of the Civil Rights and Black Nationalist eras. Persons and movement that will be considered include the [???] poems of Phyllis Wheatley; David Walker’s revolutionary Appeal; Frederick Douglass and the abolition movement; the accommodationism of Booker T. Washington; modes of black political resistance during the Reconstruction period; the radical historiography of W. E. B. DuBois; Ethiopianism in the nineteenth century black church; Ida B. Wells and the anti-lynching movement; A. Phillip Randolph and radical labor politics; historically black religious denominations and cults (including African Methodism, the Nation of Islam and the Shrine of the Black Madonna); Adam Clayton Powell’s radical legislative agenda; Black Liberation Theology; Martin Luther King, Ella Baker and the Civil Rights movement; Amiri Baraka and the Black Arts movement; and the prophetic literary expressions of James Baldwin and Toni Morrison.
African American Studies GU4080 - Section 004
TOPICS IN THE BLACK EXPERIENCE: The Freedom School
Call Number: 11741 Points: 4
Day/Time: Monday, 2:10pm - 4:00pm
Instructor: Nyle Fort
Note: Open to junior and seniors
Freedom School is an experimental praxis course where students engage the histories, theories, and practical tools of social justice organizing. Our central purpose is to explore how to fuse study with collective action.
The course is rooted in a rich legacy of youth-led organizing popularized by the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee during the 1964 Freedom Summer. Freedom Summer was an experiment that sought to, among other things, increase black voter registration and establish civic education in the rural south. While the effort consisted of over 40 initiatives, an educational program - “Freedom Schools” - endured through generations and represented a novel approach to activism. What began as an effort to educate high school students became one of the country’s largest initiatives in intergenerational community organizing as students ranged from seven to seventy. Freedom School courses varied from history and civics to math and foreign languages, but the fundamental lessons were deep democracy, self-determination, and grassroots leadership.
Freedom School carries on this tradition of student activism and community organizing as we face persistent patterns of racial oppression and social injustice. Throughout the semester students will (1) study social movement histories and theories, (2) learn practical organizing skills, (3) engage in community-based research, (4) build relationships with activist organizations, and (5) participate in social justice events in Harlem.
*An at least intermediate knowledge of and experience with social justice is highly recommended.
African American Studies GU4007 - Section 001
Writing in the Subjunctive Mood Poetry in the Black Archive
Call Number: 18053 Points: 4
Day/Time: Thursday, 4:10pm - 6:00pm
Instructor: Erica Hunt
Note: Open to junior and seniors
Poetry and Writing in the Black Archive is a practicum in poetics, and a reading and writing workshop inviting us to turn our attention to the construction of memory into literary art that speaks to contemporary Black life. Despite myriad and ongoing attempts of erasure, Black life and creativity can be discerned through the archival record, physical artefacts and images, and even our bodies’ gestures and sustenance.
We will consider poetic methods for reconstituting the paths that led us to our current situations, predicaments and imaginaries. In the practicum, we will read diverse archival material—scrutinizing, sifting and transforming the worlds we recognize, the worlds we believe are silenced, and evidence of worlds that need our words to begin to take shape.
We will write work that considers a new poetics of the “archive,” studying methods for making literary texts pay productive attention to the partially recorded incident, emotion, image and music.
Our reading and writing will focus discussion on using literary and aesthetic techniques as a means to listen or “interview” the gaps in the archival record and to write against the aporia and expand the footnote and passing reference. One of the several consequences of our writing experiments, based on “what if” and “as if,” is to teach us to re-see, and look critically at received knowledge.
We will be helped along the way by writers such as Robin Coste Lewis, John Keene, M. Nourbese Philips, Ashon Crawley, Saidiya Hartman, Alison Rollins, Keven Quashie, Fred Wilson and others. In close readings of their works, we will discuss their techniques for bringing the writer and reader and the historical subject in a shared space of inquiry. In workshops, we will write from exercises and transform research into poetry and other writing, practicing our ability to listen closely to the past and dialog with it respectfully and fearlessly.
African American Studies GR6999 - Section 001
THESIS RESEARCH-GRADUATE
Call Number: 10504 Points: 4
Instructor: Brandi T. Summers
Note: AFAM masters students ONLY