Featured Courses

This interdisciplinary graduate seminar gives students an overview of the theoretical, epistemological, and methodological foundations of feminist pedagogy. We will examine theoretical frameworks of teaching and learning that promote justice and social change (i.e. praxis), as well as feminist pedagogical strategies that can be utilized within and beyond the classroom (i.e. practice). Students can expect to engage with various critical and liberatory pedagogies, pedagogies of identity and difference, and signature pedagogies. They will learn how feminist epistemologies shape (and are shaped by) ethical classroom practice, focusing on specific ways in which to cultivate and nurture feminist teaching and learning. In addition, students will also learn how to develop a syllabus and teaching philosophy.

A history of transgender struggle has fomented intellectual formations that interrogate racial and gendered logics and proffer alternative structures of engagement, but commitment to any conceptualization of trans critique has often fallen back on assumptive ascriptions to non-racial analysis. Gathered at the concomitant study of race, gender, sexuality, class, and socio-spatiality, Trans of Color Critique provides an opportunity to (re)consider the analytical and material possibilities and tensions tendered by the articulation of transgender and non-white. Engaging with trans (and queer) of color theory as a particular approach to the political and as its own mode of knowledge production, we will not only take up the mutual constitution of race and gender, but center how whiteness has come to construct the burgeoning field of trans studies. In this graduate seminar we will consider the ways in which these multiply marginalized knowledges aim a critical challenge at our Western knowledge traditions. The course considers how race as a modality of analysis and trans of color critique as a praxis can in turn amplify, extend, and complicate the framework and analytical interventions offered by trans studies. Rather than attempt to be exhaustive, we will focus on the urgent interventions offered by trans of color critical theory, especially as it relates to foundational disruptions of Western epistemologies, medicalization, humanism, movement and displacement, decolonial critique, carcerality, violence and death, and futurity.

This course traces concepts of gender in the West from Classical understandings of sexual difference that foreground gender hierarchy, to the multiple gender imaginaries formulated in the premodern period (one sex model, Galenic humors, Christian and Jewish interpretations), to Enlightenment period reconfigurations reliant on the conceptual frameworks of degeneracy, atavism, and race science, up to modern articulations of sex/gender/sexuality indebted to nineteenth and twentieth-century sexology and psychoanalysis. Contemporary articulations of sex and gender by feminist and trans studies writers will be woven into the course throughout the semester.

This seminar explores educational implications in popular texts created for and by girls across time and cultures. The study of girls and their relationship with popular culture lies within the interdisciplinary field of Girlhood Studies which draws on established areas of Women’s Studies, Children’s/Childhood studies, Cultural Studies and Educational Studies. This seminar explores girls cultures in different textual and material forms including books, toys, magazines, and new media. Students will employ feminist cultural theories to compare historical and contemporary girls cultures in relation to educational research and practice. This will provide a framework to locate girls at the center of research and action in order for graduate students to engage in methodologies that are not simply about girls but “for” “with” and “by” girls. Key topics include the misperception of girls (popular) culture as only a contemporary phenomenon, the role of girls as consumers plus producers of culture, and recurrent issues in girls cultures such as sexualization and hyperfeminity.

This course aims at introducing key historical and contemporary Latina/x feminist theories, including Chicana/x, Afro-Latina/x, and diasporic Latin American feminist theories. Given that these theories are informed by a strong tradition of “theory in the flesh,” intellectual production informed by lived experience, this course highlights the relationship between experience and identity formation. Special attention will be given to writings underscoring the construction of identity at the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, ability, religion, and nationality. In addition, the course considers how Latina/x aesthetic production is connected to self-formation, transformation, and resistance.