This course surveys the art and architectural history of China, Korea, and Japan, emphasizing cultural and artistic contact between these cultures. Periods of focus include the Shang, Han, Tang, Song, and Qing dynasties in China; the Jōmon, Nara, Heian, Kamakura, Edo, and Meiji periods in Japan; and the Three Kingdoms period, Goryeo, and Joseon dynasties in Korea. The course highlights collections of Asian art at Yale University and in New York City, incorporating special exhibitions of East Asian art relevant to the course.

This course is an introduction to art and architecture of Africa, the Caribbean islands, and Central America, South America, and North America. Major works of art and architecture will be examined to understand the respective cultures and traditions of these regions. Cultures designated by their geographical locations will provide a frame of study for African visual culture. Art of Caribbean islands and the influence of the African diaspora will be explored. The Americas will be represented by Pre-Columbian and Native American visual arts. Students will be introduced to different art historical approaches and vocabulary used to study art from each of these areas.

This course introduces major monuments of the arts of Asia, including architecture, painting, sculpture, ceramics, and prints. Following a roughly chronological progression spanning over three millennia, the course emphasizes contact between Asian civilizations, including South, Southeast, Central, and East Asia, as well as artistic exchanges between Asia and the West. Areas of focus include: ancient funerary arts, the development of Buddhist art throughout the continent, and secular arts associated with imperial courts and the rise of cities. The course highlights collections of Asian art at the Fairfield University Art Museum, Yale University, and in New York City.

This course explores black art and culture in the twentieth century. We will focus on the artworks themselves and, when possible, the artist's dialogue. Events in United States history such as the emancipation from slavery and the Civil War Era, the Harlem Renaissance, Jazz Age, Great Depression, Civil Rights Movements, AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and the Los Angeles race riots of the 1990s are used as context to understand black art and culture. While art works created by African-American artists are the primary focus, Cuban and Haitian art and artists are also considered. Throughout the course there is a focus on thinking critically when looking at art as well as how to articulate ideas in writing.

Why is there such variety in the way people live, dress, speak, eat, love and fight? This course explores the shared patterns of thought, behavior, and feelings - that is, the cultures - of a number of peoples and presents explanations for the forms they take and the differences between them. The course helps students develop a new perspective on the values and institutions of Western culture.

Through a comparison of selected Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and Native American societies, this course explores the ways that culture can mold the biological facts of sexual difference into socially accepted behavior, creating two, and sometimes more, genders. Topics include the allocation of work, power, and prestige between men and women, the belief systems that legitimate gender roles, and some possible causes for the wide variation that exists among cultures.

This course examines the ways in which global political economic dynamics impact local cultures. Students will begin with classic texts in social theory, examine how this theory informs contemporary debates, and look to small-scale societies in the Global South for an intimate, ethnographic perspective of our global era. Crosslisted with INST 1052.

This course provides students with an overview of refugee movements with a focus on cultural encounters across the world. Students will focus on the social integration and identity adjustments of refugees in their host communities and/or country. The course will also allow students to learn about cultural adjustments of both refugees and host communities whether it is in the United States, Europe, Middle East, or Africa. Students will explore how features of the specific societies serve to inhibit or augment cultural adjustments and meet the new needs and realities of populations in movement.

This course examines the economy from philosophical and anthropological perspectives. We will investigate why people produce and exchange things, why they seek to amass things in some circumstances and give them away in others, and how our modern understandings of value, debt, and rationality emerged.

This course focuses on the concepts of "culture" and "inequality," two terms employed to deal with "difference" in a range of intriguingly different and morally charged ways. The course explores recent work in anthropology, economics, and sociology using culture and/or inequality as a lens through which to view various issues in contemporary social theory. In the process, students work to discover what kind of lens culture and/or inequality provides, how our implicit understandings of these ideas shape how we think about the world, and how we might better use such ideas to do our thinking.

This course introduces human genetics to the non-science major. Topics of discussion include the structure and function of genes, modes of inheritance, gene editing, sex and gender, race, and human genetic diversity. Special emphasis is placed on ethical, legal and social issues related to the knowledge and application of genetic information. Note: This course counts as a natural science core but does not satisfy requirements for the biology major or minor.

This course is a study of various cultural aspects of modern China in the 20th century through reading translated fiction as well as films. Students explore topics such as modernity, nationalism, individualism, gender, and cultural identity in the modern cultural-historical context. Also will be discussed are issues particular to fiction and film as representational modes: How do fiction and film narrate history and the complex Chinese experience? How have they both been shaped by and contributed to the socio-cultural transformations? And how do they represent the increasingly diversified cultural and social landscape of contemporary China? Crosslisted with ENGL 1180.

This course examines the impact of race, class, and gender differences on decisions made in households and in the workplace. It begins with an in-depth analysis of labor supply decisions and responsibilities of households, moving to an examination of labor demand decisions and wage-rate determination. The course reviews applications of theoretical predictions as they relate to important public policy issues such as child and elder care, social security, pay equity, the glass ceiling, affirmative action, sexual harassment, and poverty.

This course considers the nature and causes of problems facing low-income nations, with a focus on the impact that various economic policies have on promoting economic development.

This course allows students to develop ways of reading, analyzing, and interacting with texts in English from around the globe. You will focus on such questions as: How are literary texts produced? How do local, national, and global cultures and events affect the way authors fashion their texts? Do literary works produced in different cultures at the same time "speak to each other" across time and space? The course will be run as a combination of lecture and small group discussion and will make use of web-based background materials to provide context and depth to the readings.

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the African Diaspora, incorporating texts from Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Beginning with colonization in Africa and representations of the Middle Passage, the course covers historical topics such as enslavement and the plantation system, abolition movements, migration within and out of the Caribbean, resistance movements, the Harlem Renaissance, and independence struggles. As we study the Atlantic world and globalization across several centuries, we will examine cultural syncretism, commodity culture rooted in the Triangle Trade, and creative endeavors in literature and the arts (painting and sculpture, film, music, dance, theatre).

This course is a study of various cultural aspects of modern China in the 20th century through reading translated fiction as well as films. Students explore topics such as modernity, nationalism, individualism, gender, and cultural identity in the modern cultural-historical context. Also will be discussed are issues particular to fiction and film as representational modes: How do fiction and film narrate history and the complex Chinese experience? How have they both been shaped by and contributed to the socio-cultural transformations? And how do they represent the increasingly diversified cultural and social landscape of contemporary China? Crosslisted with CHIN 2250.

This course explores the long tradition of non-violent social protest in American literature. We examine how many writers have challenged their contemporaries to become aware of important issues - race, women's rights, Native American activism, the environment, war, and poverty. Students keep a journal in which they reflect on the literature and develop strategies for changing themselves and the world around them. A final project asks students to consider ways to raise awareness about a social issue at the University or in the larger community. Selected writers include Stowe, Davis, Thoreau, Crane, Douglass, Steinbeck, King, Wright, and Ginsberg.

This study of transatlantic, post-1800 literature by women will adopt Virginia Woolf's notion that "books continue each other." The course will be anchored in such touchstone texts as Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Each touchstone work will be grouped with a number of subsequent literary texts responding to and/or revising the earlier work. Readings will reach across centuries and continents. Topics include the social constructions of race, sexuality, gender, class, and beauty, intertextuality, influence, and canon formation.

This survey course examines the development of African American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present, with a focus on issues of literacy, authority, and identity. The course traces this tradition's history from Phillis Wheatley's role in defining American poetry and Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative, to the narratives of enslavement by authors such as Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass, to the New Negro Renaissance, the Civil Rights Movement, and contemporary African American fiction and poetry.

This course examines the concept of literacy as it is represented in fiction and non-fiction texts. Reading widely, in memoirs, essays, fiction, creative non-fiction, and drama, we will consider individual experiences with literacy, language, and schooling, as well as the relationship between literacy and power. The course includes a service learning experience that connects issues from the course to the real context of a local elementary school.

In this course, students engage with different expressions of "global cinema": films intended for international audiences. This course pays attention to key films, filmmakers, and moments in film history, across Europe, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa. With a particular focus on international art cinema, this course gives students the historical context and critical tools to appreciate and analyze diverse cinematic styles. Dedicated weekly screenings create the theatrical experience for which these films were intended.

How can we provide a non-Eurocentric explanation of the rise of the modern world that has European and American features? We can do so by examining the encounters between the West and other parts of the world and by beginning and ending the story of the rise of the modern world not in Europe but elsewhere. This course surveys the history of Europe and the Atlantic world and their encounters with East Asia from the 1400s to the 1800s.

This course is an introduction to the discipline of history through a survey of American women's experiences from the pre-colonial era to the 1960s. Weighing the impact of gender with race and class on everyday life, we explore the intersectional features of identity from multiple perspectives.

This course surveys the history of Jewish-Christian interaction in Europe from late antiquity until the Dreyfus Affair, with emphasis on the 10 centuries between the ninth and the 19th. Using primary and secondary sources, literature, and film, students explore the complex relationships between Jews and Christians in these years, including often overlapping instances of persecution, segregation, disputation, coexistence, assimilation, and cooperation. The major political events, social shifts, and intellectual trends that profoundly altered European society in this extended period provide the backdrop against which the changing lives of Jewish and Christian Europeans are studied.

This course introduces students to some of the fundamental concepts of International Studies. Major world regions and selected countries within them are discussed with respect to the people, and their physical, demographic, cultural, political, and economic characteristics. Several concepts and global issues are explored, among which the physical environment, conflict, inequality, global interconnectedness, and the movement of goods and people across borders are central. This course will emphasize contemporary events, particularly as they relate to the fundamental themes covered. Previously INST 1050.

This course allows questions to be framed, and answers sought, with regard to the challenge of diversity in the work environment. The course uses readings, exercises, and real-world projects to formulate the following: a definition of diversity; an awareness of its impact on businesses and their managers; the identification of the challenges that diversity presents and the opportunities it allows for even more productive workplace interactions; and the necessary skills, attitudes, and patterns of critical thinking needed for effective leadership in this important area. The course presents issues in the specific real-life context of ethnic, racial, gender, and class groups.

This course traces the development of American jazz from its origins in African-American musical traditions. Students examine the roots of jazz in ragtime, blues, work songs, and march music and study the development of different jazz styles such as Dixieland in the '20s, swing in the '30s, bop in the '40s, and continuing to the present. The course emphasizes the connection between historical periods and the music of jazz: America's original art music.

This course surveys the musical and social trends that resulted in the emergence of rock and roll as an important musical and cultural force in America. The course traces the roots of rock, blues, and country styles, showing how they merged with popular music. Students examine periods from the 1950s to the present, along with Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Beatles, the British invasion, folk music, Bob Dylan, jazz and art rock, Jimi Hendrix, the west coast movement, and the music industry. Students learn to understand, discuss, and differentiate between stylistic periods and their historical relevance to American culture.

This musical and historical survey of African-American music and its important contributions to American culture examines African heritage, slave songs, and the colonial era, followed by the role of African-Americans in the music and culture of the Revolutionary and Civil War periods. Students examine the evolution of spirituals, minstrel songs, and ragtime as they relate to dance forms; the role of African-Americans as performers and composers in classical music and music of the theatre; and the blues as it evolves into jazz, soul, reggae, funk, disco, and rap. This course takes a look at racism and issues of gender in America, and how musicians of diverse backgrounds have collaborated and contributed to the evolution of American music despite prejudice and adversity.

This course provides an in-depth look at the important musical, social, and racial issues in American popular music, from the media exploitation of the blues in the 1920s through current issues in hip hop. Subject areas will include blues and its origins, jazz and modernism, the obstacles of race in music, the death of rhythm and blues, rock's evolution in the 1950s, rap and hip hop culture, and issues in both postmodernism and perverse as seen by many music and art critics.

This class explores the musical, cultural, political, and aesthetic foundations of hip-hop. We will trace the corporeal, visual, spoken word, literary, and musical antecedents to and manifestations of hip-hop in American cultural. Students will investigate specific black cultural practices that have given rise to its various idioms. Students create material culture related to each thematic section of the course. Scheduled work in performance studio helps students understand how hip-hop is created and assessed. We will analyze the effects of corporate America and examine the images and ideas presented by an industry driven by profit. Are we really in a post-racial society? How does hop-hop help us understand race, class, gender, power, and oppression? Artists studied will not be those with the highest number of albums sold, but those with significant musical or lyrical content and impact on hip-hop as a whole.

The health care delivery system is explored from a historical, economic, political, and health information technology perspective. Emphasis is given to social, ethical, and legal aspects of the current system that remain unresolved, such as access to care, health disparities, and equity. The history and progression of healthcare reform and its influence on our current healthcare system performance will be analyzed. Global health issues and their impact on the delivery of health care services are discussed, along with consumer use of complementary and alternative therapies. This course is designed to give an inter-professional perspective to students interested in health care from any field of study. 42 theory hours.

This course analyzes the writings of leading social and political thinkers, with special consideration of the movements of protest and dissent.

Bosnia, Somalia, Guatemala, the Holocaust: The notion of human rights and accusations of human rights violations are a constant presence in our political environment and in the formulation of U.S. foreign policy. This course follows the emergence of this concept from the political and ethical thought of the Greeks, to the Enlightenment, to the explicit formulation of "human rights" in the 20th century as a guiding principle of international relations.

This course examines the economy from philosophical and anthropological perspectives. We will investigate why people produce and exchange things, why they seek to amass things in some circumstances and give them away in others, and how our modern understandings of value, debt, and rationality emerged.

This course approaches the problem of colonialism and coloniality, as well as the task of decolonization from a philosophical perspective. As such, attention will be paid to generating the problem space and question sets needed to de-naturalize the everyday colonial structures that shape our human condition.

Although race can be considered as one of several physical features of an individual, this course will investigate the recent research and literature in the field of Critical Race Theory that critiques this purely biological conception. For the purpose of understanding how race functions in our socio-political world, this body of work treats the concept as a social construction, drawing heavily on the phenomenological and existential traditions.Pertinent themes like lived experience, authenticity, and racial privilege will be explored using key texts (by Jean-Paul Sartre, Franz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, and Robert Bernasconi, to name a few). Previously PHIL 3360.

This course examines contemporary Latin American politics, with particular attention to the challenges and opportunities for democracy and human rights in the region. The course explores key historical developments, the challenges and opportunities presented by domestic and international dynamics in the region, the causes and consequences of democratic breakdowns in the past, the transition to democracy in the later part of the twentieth century, the difficulties several young democracies face today, and the continuous and uneven efforts to advance human rights in the region.

Despite claims that we live in a ‘postracial’ nation, our race, class, and gender identities still systematically shape our experiences, resources, and life chances. But where did those categories come from and how have they been adapted to sustain systems of power and privilege? This course focuses on contemporary works in political theory to analyze the ongoing social construction of racial categories and their intersections with class, gender, and sexuality in American political life. We explore these processes through the distinct-but-interrelated experiences of white, Black, Indigenous, Asian, and Latin Americans.

This course surveys the major areas of concern in social psychology, emphasizing current issues and research in the fields of social influence and conformity, human aggression, prejudice, interpersonal attraction, propaganda, and persuasion.

This course will familiarize students with basic and applied social psychological research on stereotyping, prejudice, discrimination, and minority experience. After considering the cognitive and motivational factors that contribute to stereotyping and prejudice, students will proceed to examine prejudice in the "real world," exploring literature on discrimination-related policies, effects of stereotyping, prejudice, and identity on achievement and status, and prejudice reduction programs. The course will take a primarily empirical approach, focusing on the ways in which scientific methods and empirical evidence can inform our understanding of these emotionally-charged and socially consequential issues.

This course introduces students to the history, core functions, and essential services of public health and serves as a foundation for further study in the discipline. During this course, students will gain an understanding of the social, ecological, and environmental determinants of health; recognize the roles of public policy and cultural values in maintaining health inequities in the U.S. and globally; and develop the ability to advocate for solutions to public health problems using a social justice approach.

This course explores the story of religion in America from a multicultural, multi-faith perspective. Students will examine how different religious peoples and traditions have interacted across time and how these interactions and exchanges have both complicated and enriched the American religious landscape. Much attention will be paid to those voices often left out of the master narrative of American religion for reason of race, gender, ethnicity, class, or even peculiarity. The course is a survey, thus students will encounter a variety of topics varying from indigenous religious practices, revivalism, the early roots of traditions like Judaism and Islam, new religious movements, to secularization.

This course examines the basic religious systems of India and China, including their fundamental differences, performative functions, and worldviews. The course evaluates Euro-American theories of religion in light of Asian religious expressions.

This theological examination of contemporary moral problems considers selected ethical issues in contemporary society and leading approaches to moral decision-making. The course investigates moral problems such as euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, the death penalty, violence and just war theory, bioethics, sexual and reproductive ethics, global poverty, environmental ethics, and issues in business and legal ethics.

This course examines the modern teachings of the Catholic Church on peace and justice; Christian/humanist attitudes towards war; pacifism and the just war theory; and changes in global political and economic structures that seem necessary to ensure a peaceful and just world order.

This course examines the evolution and innovation of the religions of African people as they were shaped through the middle passage, merged with other religions during the institution of slavery, and created anew on the American continent and throughout the Caribbean Sea. Students will examine how Caribbean traditions like Vodou and Santeria and American iterations of Christianity and Islam arose out of and against institutions and cultures that sought to subjugate them. Further, students will explore how elements of black religious life, from preaching style to music to liturgy to religious thought, have left an indelible mark upon American and Caribbean religious cultures and traditions.

With a special emphasis on the public speeches and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., this course will consider the role black religious leaders, institutions, culture played in shaping the modern Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s.

This course is a survey of Muslim life and religious movements connected to Islam in North America. The course traces the history of Islam on the continent from the Atlantic slave trade to the post-9/11 era. We will investigate the many ways in which Islam, as both a religion and idea, has appeared on the American horizon and in the American imagination. The historic diversity of Muslim communities on the continent will be explored through their respective beliefs, cultures, and sense of identity. Special attention will be paid to the African-American and Immigrant Muslim communities.

Students will undertake a critical investigation of race and ethnicity within Islam from the classical period to the present. The course examines how different Muslims approached the concepts as well as how those concepts were applied to or imposed upon particular Muslim communities. The historical experience of Black Muslims serves as a recurring case study. Moreover, the relationship of race to power is also a central analytical theme. Topics to be discussed include the construction of race, slavery and its abolition, the Black American Muslim experience, and Muslim theologies of liberation and resistance. This course is research and writing intensive.

This course provides an introduction to the study of gender through a feminist lens. The central themes of the course are the changes and continuities of gender roles within the United States, the social processes that influence our gender identities, and the connections between gender, power, and inequality. The course addresses the ways in which the media, popular culture, work, and schools have been pivotal sites for the creation and maintenance of gender performances, and explores sites of resistance in art and activism. The course pays special attention to the ways in which race, class, and sexualities intersect processes of gender relations and social change.

This course analyses sociological and social psychological dimensions of race relations, ethnic interaction, and the changing role and status of women. It focuses on the American scene but also examines problems of women and minorities in other parts of the world and their importance for world politics. It also considers what sociologists and social psychologists have learned about improving dominant/minority relations.

This course examines the causes, processes, and concerns of international migration, which are explored through the use of case studies that include a wide range of countries from different world regions. These case studies include international migrants, such as refugees, labor migrants, and undocumented migrants. In addition to studying the migrants and the reasons for their international movement, participants have the opportunity to discuss opposing perspectives on the immigration policies of developed countries.

The geography of cities is in constant flux. People move in and out, businesses open and close, city government institutes social policy in response to existing changes in different communities. Many of the changes in cities have been influenced by racial-ethnic and economic dynamics. In this course we will examine the ways race has shaped our perceptions of and responses to community. Why are urban areas "racialized"? Why does talk of the underclass imply Black Americans and Latinos? We will focus primarily on Black Americans, but will also consider white ethnic groups and other ethnic groups in discussion. In our examinations we will focus on case studies of urbanization and race such as post-Katrina New Orleans, southern migration to Chicago, and Bridgeport. Graduate equivalent: SOCI 5110.

This team-taught course explores the construction of race throughout the Americas. Course readings and assignments focus on Brazil, Dominican Republic, Mexico, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, among others. These places are emphasized as sharing overlapping concerns with the US, based on geography, common histories, and patterns of migration. We use an interdisciplinary approach integrating theory and research methods from history, sociology, politics, Latin American and Caribbean Studies, and Black Studies. We explore essential questions related to difference that all human societies have encountered over time. We deepen our understanding of why we categorize people, how we label them, and who decides. Crosslisted with HIST 2235.

This course is an in-depth analysis of capital punishment. The history of the death penalty and its contemporary status in the U.S. is explored. Public opinion and the decisions of the courts, prosecutors, and juries are addressed. Some of the questions raised include the following: Is the death penalty a deterrent? Is it racially biased? Does it victimize the poor? Are the innocent ever convicted and executed? What sociological factors influence clemency decisions? How is the U.S. position on the death penalty perceived by the international community?

This course introduces students to sociological perspectives on education. We will focus on the structure, practices, content, and outcomes of schooling in contemporary society. Throughout the semester, we address three fundamental questions. What are the primary goals of American education? Why are there systematic patterns of race, class, and gender inequality in education? How can we use the sociological lens to understand, contextualize, and alleviate educational problems in the real world? Drawing upon readings dealing primarily with American education, we discuss how educational experiences influence important life outcomes including lifetime earnings, health status, and interaction with the criminal justice system. Graduate equivalent: SOCI 5300.

This course presents a general view of Spanish-American civilization from pre-Columbian times to the present. Participants study the culture, social history, and politics of Spanish-America through select literary readings, articles, documentaries, films, newspapers, and Internet research. The course includes a special topic covering the globalization in Latin America and its impact in the 21st century. Students complete exams, oral presentations, written papers, and a final paper.

In this course we examine Latin American and Latinx films to see how artists use cinema to capture their realities, create worlds, challenge stereotypes and social norms, and further complicate stories beyond commercial cinemas. Through consistent practice with the written word and manipulating film images, we examine the crucial importance of self-representation, and diversity of perspectives in front of and behind the camera. Through analysis and application, we explore Latin American cinemas as highly political and culturally-entrenched vehicles as they circulation in the world film landscape.

While the increased visibility of Spanish has surprised some in recent decades, people have been speaking Spanish in what is now the US for hundreds of years. This course offers an introduction to sociolinguistics, i.e., the study of the language in relation to social factors, with a focus on Spanish in the US. Particular emphasis is placed on social and political issues that impact the use and representation of Spanish. Taught in Spanish.

This study and explanation of distinctive elements of Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, and Central American countries focuses on the fusion of indigenous, Black, and Hispanic as manifestation in the Spanish-American Caribbean Region. Students will read, study, and critically analyze relevant documents, and cultural materials from pre-Columbian populations until the contemporary period.