* WGSS 0028b / AMST 0028b / HIST 2140b, US Queer History  Talya Zemach-Bersin

This interdisciplinary course offers a critical overview of queer history in the United States from the colonial era to the present, exploring the lives and experiences of LGBTQ individuals and emphasizing the broader historical evolution of ideas about sex, sexuality, and gender that constitute the ever-changing landscape of queer history. Through an intersectional lens, students analyze how gender, sexuality, race, and class have shaped LGBTQ identities, cultures, and political movements. Drawing heavily from primary sources including historical texts, literature, visual culture, and popular media, we investigate how queer lives and experiences have been represented, constructed, and contested across time.  HU
TTh 4pm-5:15pm

* WGSS 0038a / HUMS 0235a / TDPS 0007a, Six Global Perspectives on The Voice  Westley Montgomery

Do I sound… Authentic? White? Foreign? Poor? Gay? Human? In this course, we explore the voice—spoken, sung, screamed, and written. Treating the voice not as a neutral biological function, but as a cultural object shaped by history, media, race, gender, class, and power, we explore how voices are produced, altered, disguised, replicated, aestheticized, fetishized, and politicized across film, music, literature, and digital media. Through six transhistorical “perspectives” on the voice, we examine: voices that lie, pass, or perform authenticity; voices that emerge from bodies, machines, and collectives; voices imagined as beautiful, dangerous, alien, or divine; voices that are appropriated, synthesized, or refused entirely. This class combines close reading, comparative analysis, and creative-critical inquiry to develop your skills as a listener, reader, writer, and thinker. Enrollment limited to first-year students. Students enroll concurrently with HUMS 0299, Six Global Perspectives Lab.  HU  RP
MW 4pm-5:15pm

* WGSS 1171b / CPLT 1760b / ENGL 3576b, Medieval Women Writers and Readers  Jessica Brantley

This course explores writings by and for women in medieval Britain, with attention to questions of authorship, authority, and audience. Readings include the Lais of Marie de France, Ancrene Wisse, The Life of Christina of Markyate, the Showings of Julian of Norwich, The Book of Margery Kempe, the Digby Mary Magdalene play, and the Paston letters. Formerly ENGL 202.  WR, HU
MW 1:05pm-2:20pm

* WGSS 2161a / FILM 2161a / LAST 2161a / PORT 2161a / SPAN 2095a, Love in the Lens? Romance and Resistance in Latin American and Iberian Cinema  Giseli Tordin

Is love truly captured through the lens? Whose desire are we witnessing - the characters’, the audience’s, or the male gaze? How do films shape representations of gender through the camera’s gaze, and how can cinema subvert these ways of looking? This course, taught in Portuguese and Spanish, explores these questions through Luso-Brazilian, Latin American, and Iberian cinema while allowing students to use the languages to interpret scenes, describe characters’ perceptions and emotions, compare films, and analyze dialogue, visual composition, and cinematic techniques. Students read critical texts and film analyses, discuss ideas in class, and produce essays, scripts, and video essay projects in Portuguese or Spanish, demonstrating the ability to construct arguments, present evidence, and reflect on cultural and historical context. Themes such as unrequited love, emotional emptiness, and longing are examined not simply as romantic failure but as experiences intertwined with memory, trauma, and societal pressures, often against the backdrop of authoritarian regimes. The course considers how these films challenge a cinematic tradition shaped by Victorian ideals, where early cinema framed love as individual fulfillment and moral triumph. Postwar cinema further dramatized love through predominantly white, heterosexual relationships, reinforcing patriarchal visual norms. Through close analysis of discourses and cinematic techniques - framing, sound, spatial composition, sequence, and camera angles - students examine how film language constructs or challenges norms of gender, sexuality, and class. Students may speak and submit assignments and projects in either language (Portuguese or Spanish), creating a multilingual space for critical engagement with Ibero-Latin American visual culture and the politics of the gaze. Prerequisite: PORT 1400 (or equivalent) or SPAN 1400 (or equivalent). Conducted in Portuguese and Spanish.  L5, HU
TTh 4pm-5:15pm

WGSS 2200b / AMST 2200b / HUMS 1650b / SOCY 2300b, Topics in Human Sexuality  Staff

In 1970, Yale professors and sexuality scholars Lorna and Philip Sarrel introduced what came to be their wildly popular lecture, “Topics in Human Sexuality.” The course, offered at the height of the sexual revolution and shortly after Yale University admitted women undergraduates, was multipurpose: to teach students about pressing, contemporary social problems around sex, gender, and sexuality; to help students learn about their bodies, sexualities, and relationships; to direct students to resources and information about their sexual and reproductive health; and to advance the mission of a liberal arts education, namely, the cultivation of well-rounded, critically engaged, curious, participatory young citizens. This iteration of the course is inspired by the Sarrels’ ambitions, even if we are unlikely to realize them in full. The course is offered in the spirit of a critical sexuality education, critical as in 1) theory- rather than practicum-driven, but nonetheless 2) urgent. As political movements that endanger transgender children, suppress sexual expression, and rescind reproductive rights gain traction, the course offers candid, careful focus on: abortion, sexual education, queer and trans kids, pornography, university sexual politics, hooking up, and breaking up.  Along the way, we watch a season of Netlfix’s “Sex Education” together. The class (nonexclusively) focuses on social and political problems in the contemporary United States, and examines those problems by drawing upon scholarship in Gender & Sexuality Studies, American Studies, Sociology, Psychology, and Public Law.  HU, SO  0 Course cr
TTh 10:30am-11:20am

* WGSS 2205b / ER&M 1681b, Bodies and Pleasures, Sex and Genders  Regina Kunzel

This seminar explores questions of embodiment -- its pleasures, perplexities, and pains - to interrogate sex, sexuality, and gender as analytical categories. Its aim is to evaluate formative concepts, theories, and debates within feminist, gender, and queer studies, critical race studies, and history. We will consider how terms like “women” and “men,” “femininity” and “masculinity,” “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality,” and “gender” and “transgender” have structured people’s experiences and perceptions of bodies – their own and others’.  We will interrogate the dynamic and often contested relationship between “gender” and sexuality,” and their constitution through other axes of power and difference, including race, class, and (dis)ability.  SO
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 2206a / ER&M 257 / ER&M 3657a, Transnational Approaches to Gender & Sexuality  Jiya Pandya

Are gender and sexuality universal, or do they change based on context? What does this mean for feminist, queer, and trans movements as they reckon with geopolitics and global governance? How have transnational historians, theorists, anthropologists, and artists approached contextual differences around gender and sexuality in a globalized world? This course begins to pose and answer these questions to expose to students to the rich and textured scholarship of Third World, transnational, and anti-colonial feminist, queer, and trans thinkers. No pre-requisites (except an open mind and a willingness to make mistakes) are needed, and all students interested in questions of empire, global governance, gendered violence, and transnational activism are encouraged to apply.  WR
MW 1:05pm-2:20pm

WGSS 2207b / ER&M 2607b / PLSC 2322b, Gender, Justice, Power, Institutions  Staff

Welcome to Gender, Justice, Power & Institutions, a mouthful of abstractions that we work together to comprehend and critique throughout the semester. In this course, students consider feminist, queer, and trans studies perspectives on some flashpoint debates around sex, gender, sexuality, and the body in the contemporary world. We examine debates surrounding both transnational and U.S.-based institutions ranging from global governance to bathrooms, from development to sports, from the military to the university. Recognizing that these are complex, philosophically loaded, and emotionally challenging topics, we develop skills in writing, speaking, and reflection that helps us provide thoughtful and nuanced arguments on these themes.  SO  0 Course cr
MW 10:30am-11:20am

* WGSS 2208b / TDPS 2021b, Performance And/As Gender  Westley Montgomery

This course introduces students to the field of gender studies through performance, and the field of performance studies through gender. We examine performances spanning several genres—performance art, ballroom, hyperpop, musical theater, and more. Grounding these case studies, we also read theory from an array of thinkers including J.L. Austin, Judith Butler, Tavia Nyong'o, Gayle Salamon and Nina Sun Eidsheim, to name a few.  WR
W 4pm-5:55pm

WGSS 2212a, Monogamy and its Discontents  Evren Savci

While monogamy is central to Michel Foucault’s formulation of normative sexuality that arose in the 19th century (the Malthusian couple as adult, monogamous, heterosexual, married, and reproductive), little attention has been paid to it as a particular historical form of intimacy. We investigate this structure of intimacy through theoretical, historical, ethnographic, literary, and visual materials and think about the various meanings of monogamy historically as well as transnationally. Monogamy is entangled with relations of private property, with colonial civilizational narratives, with scientific theories about human nature. Polygamy in return has historically been understood as religious and/or cultural difference, and as a remnant of pre-modernity. The course weaves together theoretical readings that equip students with the tools to understand some key concepts that we need for our discussion, such as private property; the private family; colonialism and (cultural) imperialism; law and liberalism; and bourgeois morality with readings that more directly address some of the key ways in which monogamy is imagined, understood and framed. We discuss the turn to a recent rise in nonmonogamy in the “West” as a radical and “liberated” alternative to life-long or serial monogamy, at times featuring a critique of the private family, which constitutes a curious contrast to the nonmonogamy of religious and cultural Others of the West. Understanding the contemporary discourses and industries (books, podcasts, therapists’ youtube channels) around polyamory and nonmonogamy as a 21st century strategic unity, we analyze how liberalism has framed our understanding of sexual liberation and discuss alternative approaches to freedom.  HU  0 Course cr
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 2221a, Neoliberalism and Sexuality  Evren Savci

Sexuality is often imagined as a private and intimate affair, experienced individually, marked by personal histories and preferences. This course argues otherwise. Specifically, we consider the intersections between the current dominant political economic mode, referred to as neoliberal capitalism, and sexuality as a field of power. We analyze how subjectivities are formed under this current system, how desires are produced and discourses incited, and how the particular moralization of economic behavior has implications for a range of issues including reproductive justice, definitions of kinship, sexual liberation movements, and contemporary states of war and emergency. Thinking of sexuality as a field of power that is predicated on notions of normality and abnormality enables us to see what other “undesirable” subjects are produced under conditions of neoliberal capitalist modernity with whom sexual others are always in kinship. Students previously enrolled in WGSS 030 are not eligible to enroll in this course.  SO
W 4pm-5:55pm

WGSS 2230a / ANTH 2530a, Evolutionary Biology of Female Bodies  Claudia Valeggia

Evolutionary, biosocial, and situated perspectives on the female body. Physiological, ecological, social and cultural aspects of the development of female bodies from puberty through menopause and aging, with special attention to lived experiences. Variation in female life histories in a variety of cultural and ecological settings. Examples from both traditional and modern societies.  SC  0 Course cr
TTh 2:35pm-3:50pm

* WGSS 2232a / AMST 2232a / ER&M 3686a, Latine Queer Trans Studies  Deb Vargas

This course provides an introduction to Latinx queer trans* studies. We approach the field of Latinx queer trans* studies as an ongoing political project that emerges from social justice activism, gay/lesbian/queer/trans studies, critical race feminism, cultural practitioners, among other work. We pay particular attention to the keywords “trans,” “queer,” “Chicanx,” and “Latinx” by placing them in productive tension with each other through varied critical genealogies.    HU, SO
M 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 2233a / FILM 3417a / HELN 2380a, Weird Greek Wave Cinema  George Syrimis

The course examines the cinematic production of Greece in the last fifteen years or so and looks critically at the popular term “weird Greek wave” applied to it. Noted for their absurd tropes, bizarre narratives, and quirky characters, the films question and disturb traditional gender and social roles, as well as international viewers’ expectations of national stereotypes of classical luminosity–the proverbial “Greek light”–Dionysian exuberance, or touristic leisure. Instead, these works frustrate not only a wholistic reading of Greece as a unified and coherent social construct, but also the physical or aesthetic pleasure of its landscape and its ‘quaint’ people with their insistence on grotesque, violent, or otherwise disturbing images or themes (incest, sexual otherness and violence, aggression, corporeality, and xenophobia). The course also pays particular attention on the economic and political climate of the Greek financial crisis during which these films are produced and consumed and to which they partake.  HU
Th 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 2238b, Foucault and the Sexual Self  Igor De Souza

This course explores the main ideas and influence of Foucault's History of Sexuality. Alongside the methods and conclusions of the HS, we examine the implications of the HS for feminist studies and queer theory, and the approach of the HS towards ancient Greek sexuality.  HU
HTBA

* WGSS 2239a / AMST 2239a / EDST 1235a, Education and the Culture Wars  Talya Zemach-Bersin

Examination of the historical development and politics of the “culture wars” with a focus on how battles over the “soul of America” have focused on the American education system. Conflict over "American values” issues like patriotism and religion are compounded by legal battles over federal funding, parental rights, and school choice. Study of interdisciplinary readings from law, political science, history, and education studies. EDST 1110 recommended.
T 4pm-5:55pm

* WGSS 2251b / ENGL 3751b, Experiments in the Novel: The Eighteenth Century  Jill Campbell

The course provides an introduction to English-language novels of the long eighteenth century (1688-1818), the period in which the novel has traditionally been understood to have "risen." Emphasizing the experimental nature of novel-writing in this early period of its history, the course foregrounds persistent questions about the genre as well as a literary-historical survey: What is the status of fictional characters? How does narrative sequence impart political or moral implications? How do conventions of the novel form shape our experience of gender? What kind of being is a narrator? Likely authors include Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding, Laurence Sterne, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, and Richard Powers.  WR, HU
HTBA

* WGSS 2291b / HIST 2787b / RLST 3470b / SOCY 3331b, Sexual Minorities from Plato to the Enlightenment  Igor De Souza

This interdisciplinary course surveys the history of homosexuality from a cross-cultural, comparative  perspective. Students study contexts where homosexuality and sodomy were categorized, regulated, and persecuted and examine ancient and medieval constructions of same-sex desire in light of post-modern developments, challenging ideas around what is considered normal and/or natural. Ultimately, we ask: what has changed, and what has remained the same, in the history of homosexuality? What do gays and lesbians today have in common with pre-modern sodomites? Can this history help us ground or rethink our sexual selves and identities? Primary and secondary historical sources, some legal and religious sources, and texts in intellectual history are studied. Among the case studies for the course are ancient attitudes among Jews, early Christians, and Greeks; Christian theologians of the Middle Ages; Renaissance Florence; the Inquisition in Iberia; colonial Latin America; and the Enlightenment’s condemnation of sodomy by Montesquieu and Voltaire, and its defense by Bentham.  HU
HTBA

* WGSS 2293a / CLCV 3691a / HELN 3000a / HIST 3242a, The Olympic Games, Ancient and Modern  George Syrimis

Introduction to the history of the Olympic Games from antiquity to the present. The mythology of athletic events in ancient Greece and the ritual, political, and social ramifications of the actual competitions. The revival of the modern Olympic movement in 1896, the political investment of the Greek state at the time, and specific games as they illustrate the convergence of athletic cultures and sociopolitical transformations in the twentieth century.  HU
W 9:25am-11:20am

* WGSS 2808a / EALL 2808a, Sexual Cultures in East Asia  Kyunghee Eo

This course explores how sex and sexuality have been discussed, regulated, and represented across East Asia and its diaspora, with particular focus on non-normative sexualities and gender variance. Course materials are organized in roughly chronological order, moving from scholarship on homoerotic practices in premodern East Asia; the introduction of modern sexological discourse in the early twentieth century; literary expressions of sexual deviance from the Cold War era (1945-1987); and LGBTQ subjectivities, cultures, and social movements since the 1990s. All class materials will be in English translation, and no previous knowledge of East Asian languages is required.
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 3002a / HSAR 4405a / HUMS 3386a / ITAL 3386a, The Dark Side of The Italian Renaissance: Sex, Scandals, and Secrets  Simona Lorenzini

The course explores the more controversial, hidden, and overlooked aspects of the Italian Renaissance. While this period is celebrated for its artistic, cultural, and intellectual achievements, it also had its fair share of intrigue, corruption, and moral complexities. Through love poems, secret letters, intricate networks, and political conspiracies, the course paints a vivid picture of the social and cultural landscape of Renaissance and early modern Italy. We look at the complex figure of Michelangelo, both as an artist and poet, focusing on his queer relationship with Tommaso de’ Cavalieri and his friendship with Vittoria Colonna. We then discuss how Renaissance art, often commissioned by powerful individuals–such as Isabella D’Este’s patronage of Leonardo da Vinci–was used to promote political or social agendas. We examine the alliances, betrayals, and murders that took place in Renaissance courts and how they shaped the political arena. Topics include the assassination of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s brother, Caterina de’ Medici’s agency, and Borgia’s rise to power as well as the use of poison as a political instrument in power struggles and schemes to eliminate rivals. The course highlights radical and sharp-witted women writers, such as Moderata Fonte and Arcangela Tarabotti, who protested against a patriarchal society, and gave voice to those who challenged gender norms. By uncovering these compelling narratives through the intersection of literature, religion, history, art, and sexuality, the course offers a more nuanced and critical view on this acclaimed era. This course counts as language across the curriculum (LxC).  HU
MW 1:05pm-2:20pm

* WGSS 3258a / PLSC 3258a / SOCY 3358a, Bodies, Labor, and Politics  Isabelle Aboaf

Work is never “just work.” It is a deeply political phenomenon, moralized and regulated by states and societies alike. For those occupations that feature the physical body – such as professional athletes, fashion models, or sex workers – these politics are especially heightened. This course asks how labor politics and power operate through at the most intimate level: the body. When can we consider a job to be truly “embodied” —and with what consequences? How do these professions complicate the very idea of what constitutes “work”? Why are certain forms of embodied labor considered valuable by the state, and others cast as disposable or dangerous? We think critically about concepts such as bodily autonomy, public health, and beauty, and ask how these can (or should) factor into laws that affect the workplace. Drawing on feminist political theory and labor studies, we examine more closely the politics of different kinds of embodied work. Across these cases, we examine the deeper ethical questions and political stakes underlying their regulation. As a Writing in the Discipline course, we also develop practical approaches to writing and demystify the process of producing evidence-driven academic arguments.  SO
TTh 2:35pm-3:50pm

* WGSS 3312a / AMST 3302a / ER&M 3512a / HSHM 4930a, Technology, Race and Gender  Kalindi Vora

In this course, we discuss technology and the politics of difference through a survey of topics including artificial intelligence, digital labor (crowdsourcing), and robotics and computer science. Materials for study include humanistic and social scientific critique, ethnographies of technology, technical writing and scientific papers, as well as speculative art practices including design, visual art and fiction. What assumptions and politics of imagination govern the design and development of new technologies? What alternative imaginaries, politics, or even speculations, can be identified with a feminist analytic lens? The seminar also includes a practicum component where we practice the politics of speculation through writing and design projects. To do this we study everything from active STEM projects at Yale to speculative fiction and film to think about how structures of race, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, and religious difference inform how we "speculate" or imagine the future through the ways we design and build technological worlds in practice and in fiction.  HU, SO
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 3340a, Feminist and Queer Theory  Westley Montgomery

Historical survey of feminist and queer theory from the Enlightenment to the present, with readings from key British, French, and American works. Focus on the foundations and development of contemporary theory. Shared intellectual origins and concepts, as well as divergences and conflicts, among different ways of approaching gender and sexuality.  WR, HU
MW 2:35pm-3:50pm

* WGSS 3350a / AMST 3300a, The Invention of Love  Igor De Souza

This course proposes a historical, theoretical, and cultural investigation of what we call “romantic love,” the kind of love we tend to associate with courtship, with relationships that include a sexual-erotic component, and with marriage. We begin with Denis de Rougemont’s controversial thesis that romantic love was invented around the 1200s in the courtly culture of Southern France. We examine manifestations of romantic love in medieval Arab cultures as precedents to the invention of courtly love. In the second part of our course, we turn to modern humanistic theories about romantic love. Among the questions that critical theorists and philosophers have posed, we consider: How is love related to desire? Is sexual desire an indispensable component of romantic love? Is romantic love ultimately a selfish, exclusionary act, or is it about renouncing the self, losing the self in the other? In the third part of our course, we apply the insights of parts 1 and 2 to discuss case studies of romantic love in the contemporary United States. In this section, we explore reining assumptions between romantic love and: marriage; monogamy; dating; the digital environment; queerness; age; and transnationalism.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 3354b / HIST 3191b, Women, Gender, and Grassroots Politics in the United States after World War II  Jennifer Klein

American politics and grassroots social movements from 1945 to the present explored through women's activism and through gender politics more broadly. Ideas about gender identities, gender roles, and family in the shaping of social movements; strategies used on the local, regional, national, and international levels. Connections between organizing and policy, public and private, state and family, and migration, immigration, and empire.  WR, HU
M 4pm-5:55pm

* WGSS 3372a / AMST 3382a, Theory and Politics of Sexual Consent  Joseph Fischel

Political, legal, and feminist theory and critiques of the concept of sexual consent. Topics such as sex work, nonnormative sex, and sex across age differences explored through film, autobiography, literature, queer commentary, and legal theory. U.S. and Connecticut legal cases regarding sexual violence and assault.  SO  RP
W 9:25am-11:20am

* WGSS 3467a / ER&M 3576a / HIST 3467a / SAST 4200a, Feminist and Queer Histories of Modern South Asia  Jiya Pandya

Beginning from the recognition that gender, sexuality, and the body are contextually specific and historically produced, in this upper-level history seminar, we chart a feminist and queer trajectory of South Asia's history in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. Unpacking the roles of femininity, masculinity, family, and reproduction as sites of power in imperial, nationalist, and postcolonial politics, we investigate how our narratives of history deepen when we make the gendered and sexed body central to them. To understand the complex negotiations of various imperial, nationalist, and subaltern historical actors in this period, we consider the perspectives of multi-disciplinary scholars and engage with essential textual and multimedia primary sources. Together, we work to foster ethical engagement with historical subjects and to understand the lasting legacies of colonial and postcolonial engagements with gender and sexuality on the social and political worlds of South Asia today.  WR, HU
MW 4pm-5:15pm

* WGSS 4407a / ANTH 3808a, Feminist & Queer Ethnographies: Borders and Boundaries  Eda Pepi

This seminar gives students a storm’s eye view of contemporary crises, where borders are as volatile as the ring of a wedding bell or the birth of a child. Feminist and queer ethnographies explore the geopolitical lines and social divides that define and confine us. Manifesting through laws, social norms, and physical barriers, borders and boundaries shape our identities, turning the intimate act of living into a fiercely political one. We consider them as lived experiences that cross militarized lines—as the everyday realities of families, detention centers, workplaces, universities, and even nightclubs. Our readings trace the fluidity of borders, the extension of the global north's influence, and the internal colonialism that redraws the landscapes of nations. Contemporary ways of bridging time and space are profoundly gendered, sexualized racialized, and class-specific, capable of materializing with sudden intensity for some and remaining imperceptible to others, morphing from ephemeral lines to seemingly permanent barriers. The course is an invitation to think beyond the map – to understand borders as something people live, challenge, and transform. Our intellectual battleground is the liminal space where geopolitics meets the raw human struggle for recognition, peeling back the layers of political theatre to witness the making and unmaking of our borderlands. Anchored by a “radical hope for living otherwise,” the seminar also aims to expand the intellectual horizons necessary for dreaming of, and working towards, the world to come.  HU, SO
T 4pm-5:55pm

* WGSS 4430b / ANTH 441 / ANTH 4841b / MMES 4430b, Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East  Eda Pepi

This seminar invites students to explore how gender and citizenship intersect across the Middle East and North Africa, examining how these identities shape—and are shaped by—forces like nationalism, migration, capitalism, family, and religion. Drawing from ethnography, history, and literature, we trace how gender and sexuality simultaneously reify and trouble colonial legacies that uphold racialized ideas of “modernity.” And ask: How do global border regimes and the political economy of intimacies that sustain them reshape what it means to be—or not to be—a citizen? Our approach extends beyond laws to include everyday acts of citizenship across national and cultural divides. Readings highlight how people navigate their lives in the everyday, from the ordinary poetry of identity, love, and belonging to the spectacular drama of war and conflict.  SO
W 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 4463b / AMST 4462b / ER&M 4062b, The Study of Privilege in the Americas  Ana Ramos-Zayas

Examination of inequality, not only through experiences of the poor and marginal, but also through institutions, beliefs, social norms, and everyday practices of the privileged. Topics include: critical examination of key concepts like “studying up,” “elite,” and “privilege,” as well as variations in forms of capital; institutional sites of privilege (elite prep schools, Wall Street); living spaces and social networks (gated communities, private clubs); privilege in intersectional contexts (privilege and race, class, and gender); and everyday practices of intimacy and affect that characterize, solidify, and promote privilege.  SO
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 4471a or b, Independent Directed Study  Igor De Souza

For students who wish to explore an aspect of women's, gender, and sexuality studies not covered by existing courses. The course may be used for research or directed readings and should include one lengthy or several short essays. Students meet with their adviser regularly. To apply for admission, students present a prospectus to the director of undergraduate studies along with a letter of support from the adviser. The prospectus must include a description of the research area, a core bibliography, and the expected sequence and scope of written assignments.
HTBA

* WGSS 4490a, The Senior Colloquium  Dara Strolovitch

A research seminar taken during the senior year. Students with diverse research interests and experience discuss common problems and tactics in doing independent research.
T 1:30pm-3:25pm

* WGSS 4491b, The Senior Essay  Igor De Souza

Independent research on, and writing of, the senior essay.
HTBA

* WGSS 4518b / ANTH 4818b / ER&M 4518b, Multi-Sited Ethnography Methodological Pivoting Under Duress  Eda Pepi and Ana Ramos-Zayas

In the face of resurgent authoritarianism, nativism, and assaults on academic freedom, this course examines ethnographic pivots under conditions of duress that are not exceptions but constitutive of the method itself. “Fieldsites choose us” as much as we choose them, pressing ethnographers to move with the currents of empire, capital, and knowledge production while reckoning with their limits. We retrace the genealogies of ethnographic practice and “turns” tethered to geopolitical demands: from the long shadow of “the native,” carried forward in avatars such as “the welfare queen” and “the terrorist,” to World War II–era area studies, Cold War intelligence collaborations, and the backlash against codified ethics in fieldwork and classrooms. Equally formative are the bureaucracies of academia—funding cycles, time-to-degree mandates, thematic calls, and the logics of publishing and tenure—that shape how ethnographers pose questions and frame methods. As some field sites become foreclosed and others newly thinkable, the very concept of “the field” splinters across multiple scales. What is “multi-sited” is not only movement across places but the doubleness of sites themselves—at once local and global, discrete and imbricated in imperial and transnational formations. Securitized borders, shrinking budgets, and the weaponization of academia leave open the question of whether these frictions will consolidate into a new “Americanist turn,” yet they press us to imagine the ethnographic otherwise. What becomes possible when archives, digital platforms, and mapping technologies are brought into conversation with participant observation and thick description? How might studies of diaspora, migration, enclaves, personhood, and neoliberal subjectivities be pursued not as fallback designs but as deliberate strategies? A flagship offering of the interdisciplinary Yale Ethnography Hub, the course welcomes graduate and undergraduate students across the humanities and social sciences—those preparing dissertations, senior essays, or fieldwork-driven projects, as well as those curious about ethnography’s possibilities and limits.  HU
T 4pm-5:55pm