AFAM 505a, Theorizing Racial Formations  Marlene Daut

A required course for all first-year students in the combined Ph.D. program in African American Studies; also open to students in American Studies. This interdisciplinary reading seminar focuses on new work that is challenging the temporal, theoretical, and spatial boundaries of the field.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 510a / ENGL 938a, Black Geographic Thought  Elleza Kelley

This seminar focuses on classic and recent scholarship that constitute the interdisciplinary subfield of “black geographies.” Bearing in mind that black studies is not merely the study of black people but, as Alexander Weheliye puts it, “a substantial critique of Western modernity and a sizable archive of social, political, and cultural alternatives,” this seminar explores the critiques and alternatives that black studies brings to bear on the feeling, knowledge, representation, and politics of space and place. While we study scholarship across discipline (by geographers, architectural theorists, historians, etc.), we pay particular attention to how cultural production, like literature and visual art, articulates black geographic and spatial thought and how it might engage with, challenge, and enrich the fields of critical and literary geographies. Along the way, our study of literature is transformed by careful attention to the geographic, architectural, and ecological. We read the work of scholars like Katherine McKittrick, Clyde Woods, and AbdouMaliq Simone alongside creative works by poets, novelists, artists, filmmakers, architects, and more, from Toni Morrison and Dionne Brand to Torkwase Dyson and Mati Diop.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 522a / AMST 721a / ENGL 935a, The Beautiful Struggle: Blackness, the Archive, and the Speculative  Daphne Brooks

This seminar takes its inspiration from concepts and questions centering theories that engage experimental methodological approaches to navigating the opacities of the archive: presumptively “lost” narratives of black life, obscure(d) histories, compromised voices and testimonials, contested (auto)biographies, anonymous testimonies, textual aporias, fabulist documents, confounding marginalia. The scholarly and aesthetic modes by which a range of critics and poets, novelists, dramatists, and historians have grappled with such material have given birth to new analytic lexicons—from Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to José Estaban Muñoz’s “ephemera as evidence” to Tavia Nyong’o’s “Afrofabulation.” Such strategies affirm the centrality of speculative thought and invention as vital and urgent forms of epistemic intervention in the hegemony of the archive and open new lines of inquiry in black studies. Our class explores a variety of texts that showcase these new queries and innovations, and we also actively center our efforts from within the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where a number of sessions are held and where we focus on Beinecke holdings that resonate with units of the course. Various sessions also feature distinguished guest interlocutors via Zoom, who are on hand to discuss the specifics of their research methods and improvisational experimentations in both archival exploration and approaches to their prose and poetic projects.
HTBA

AFAM 695b / MUSI 695b, The Study of African American Music  Braxton Shelley

This seminar explores the musical objects, critical debates, and scholarly methodologies that have shaped the study of African American music. How do artists, critics, and theorists differently define “Black music”? How do competing conceptions of Black musical traditions reflect and resist commercial and academic modes of categorization? In this course, we attend to the intersections and divergences that emerge from myriad attempts to define and discipline the musical products of black experience, converting Blues, Funk, Gospel, Hip-Hop, House, Jazz, Reggae, R&B, Soca, Soul, the Spiritual, and many other idioms, into a single knowledge-object. We investigate the intellectual genealogies and scholarly disagreements that arise from the interdisciplinary scope of Black music studies, including: cultural history, cultural studies, ethnomusicology, literary studies, historical musicology, music theory, sociology, and theology. Required for students in the Joint Ph.D. Program in Music and African American Studies, this reading-intensive graduate course brings together texts that have defined the interdisciplinary study of Black music and new work that is remaking the field.
HTBA

AFAM 707b / CPLT 707b / MHHR 707b, What Is An Archive?  Melissa Barton

This graduate seminar seeks to answer the question in the course’s title by looking closely at professional archival descriptive practices and broader, looser uses of the term in cultural and literary studies, art history, history, and beyond. By looking at these distinct but curiously, even suspiciously, concurrent genealogies, we seek to explain why the term “archive” has become so demonstrably popular, in multiple senses of the word, even as archival practice has become more professionalized and specialized. Put differently, many humanistic fields have undergone “archival turns” in recent decades, and many cultural and performance theorists, critics, and historians have advanced arguments about “the archive” as a monolithic concept, perhaps “the archives” as an abstract location where the work begins (e.g., “I’ve been in the archives”), or perhaps “my archive” as the group of texts I interpret and cite. Meanwhile, professional archivists regularly publish tweets, articles, and blog posts asking them to stop it. This course hopes to ponder and maybe even find a way toward an answer to the question: What is up with this? We explore archives in theory and practice, as both figurative and literal, both concrete and abstract, repositories for “primary” inquiry into the past. We consider theories of archives from humanities fields and the archival profession (including the emerging subfield “critical archival studies”), and we discuss how archives are made, how they are used, how they are made usable, what may be assumed or elided in the making and use of archives, and the popularity of, and tensions around, “the archive” as a concept. Topics and keywords include: what is primary or original? What is order or process? What is a trace, and how is it made distinct from the great mass of human traces? What does it mean to collect, to curate? What is an archival silence, and what might be comparable notions of archival noise? What does it mean to recover or discover? In addition to readings, students complete two assignments: a provenance research assignment and a descriptive project in the form of a survey of an existing collection at Yale or a subject guide to a collection or group of collections.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

AFAM 709a / HIST 709a / HSHM 763a, Readings in Race and Racism in Medicine, Science, and Healthcare  Carolyn Roberts

This graduate reading seminar invites students to study historical and contemporary texts related to race and racism in medicine, science, and healthcare. Our primary focus is anti-Black racism, and we study connections between the period of slavery and present-day issues in healthcare, biomedical research, reproductive justice, and medical and nursing education and practice. Students from any department and discipline are welcome to join this small seminar, which privileges deep listening, close reading, community, and care.
F 9:25am-11:15am

AFAM 719a / HIST 945a / HSHM 771a, Researching and Writing Histories of Health, Medicine, and Science  Carolyn Roberts

This small graduate seminar is for students currently researching and writing histories of health, science, and medicine. Students learn about slow scholarship, the politics of the archive, and research organization and management and explore the craft of writing. Preference is given to graduate students in history, the history of science and medicine, and African American studies.
F 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 752b / AMST 937b / HIST 937b / HSHM 761b, Researching and Writing Medicine, Health, and Empire  Carolyn Roberts

This graduate research course is limited to a small number of graduate students who are currently involved in research projects that touch on any issues related to health, medicine, and the body in the context of slavery, colonialism, or neocolonialism. The course includes visits to diverse archives on campus, discussions of archival best practices, and digital organizational tools. The course provides graduate students with a balance of support and independence as they carry out their research. Graduate students in any discipline are warmly welcomed to participate in a compassion-based research community that prioritizes values of deep listening, presence, and care.
F 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 766b / AMST 691b / HIST 737b, Research Seminar in U.S. Political Economy  Jennifer Klein

Research seminar oriented around themes and issues in U.S. political economy from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth. Readings in the first part of the term look at various approaches to writing about political economy: for example, business history, intellectual history, labor history, biography, local monograph, or transnational history. Research projects explore new possibilities for writing about labor, business, the state, and capitalism.
T 9:25am-11:15am

AFAM 773a / SOCY 630a, Workshop in Urban Ethnography  Elijah Anderson

The ethnographic interpretation of urban life and culture. Conceptual and methodological issues are discussed. Ongoing projects of participants are presented in a workshop format, thus providing participants with critical feedback as well as the opportunity to learn from and contribute to ethnographic work in progress. Selected ethnographic works are read and assessed.
M 11:30am-1:20pm

AFAM 778a / PSYC 728a, Research Topics in Racial Justice in Public Safety  Phillip Atiba Solomon

In this seminar, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows have a chance to present their research, and undergraduate research assistants learn about how to conduct interdisciplinary quantitative social science research on racial justice in public safety. The course consists of weekly presentations by members and occasional discussions of readings that are handed out in advance. The course is designed to be entirely synchronous. Presenters may request a video recording if they can benefit from seeing themselves present (e.g., for a practice talk). This course is intended for graduate students, postdocs, and undergraduates interested in conducting original quantitative social science research about race and public safety. Permission of the instructor is required.
T 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 797b / AMST 797b / HIST 797b, Atlantic Abolitions  Marcela Echeverri Munoz

This readings course explores the historiography on the century of abolition, when the new states of the Americas abolished racial slavery. Beginning with the first abolitions in the U.S. North during the 1780s, we consider the emergence and process of abolition throughout the Atlantic world, including the Caribbean, Spanish America, and Brazil, through the 1880s.
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

AFAM 817a / HIST 741a, Research Seminar on the Early Atlantic World  Edward Rugemer

This research seminar explores various approaches to writing the history of the early Atlantic world, with particular emphasis on race and slavery, from 1500 to about 1850. Every student writes a publishable article based upon original research.
M 9:25am-11:15am

AFAM 850b / AFST 937b / ENGL 6137b, African Urban Cultures: Mediations of the City  Stephanie Newell

This course approaches the study of African cities and urbanization through the medium of diverse texts, including fiction, nonfiction, popular culture, film, and the arts, as well as scholarly work on African cities. Through these cultural “texts,” attention is given to everyday conceptualizations of the body and the environment, as well as to theoretical engagements with the African city. We study urban relationships as depicted in literature and popular media in relation to Africa's long history of intercultural encounters, including materials dating back to the 1880s and the 1930s. Previously ENGL 937.
Th 9:25am-11:15am

AFAM 860b / ENGL 6157b / MHHR 708b, Ecologies of Black Print  Jacqueline Goldsby

A survey of history of the book scholarship germane to African American literature and the ecosystems that have sustained black print cultures over time. Secondary works consider eighteenth- to twenty-first-century black print culture practices, print object production, modes of circulation, consumption, and reception. Students write critical review essays, design research projects, and write fellowship proposals based on archival work at the Beinecke Library, Schomburg Center, and other regional sites (e.g., the Sterling A. Brown papers at Williams College). Previously ENGL 957.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

AFAM 895a, Dissertation Prospectus Workshop  Shane Vogel

A noncredit, two-term course, which graduate students in their third year of study must satisfactorily complete. This workshop is intended to support preparation of the dissertation proposal.  0 Course cr
W 9:25am-11:15am