Fall 2025 Creative Ecologies: American Environmental Narrative and Art, 1980-2020 (SA) Subject associations AMS 354 / ART 355 / ENV 373 This seminar connects contemporary American literature, media and visual culture with environmental movements--focusing on the work of animators, filmmakers, photographers, novelists, poets, and other artists. Several organizing questions will guide our work together: How do creators respond to--and sometimes catalyze social movements around such issues as climate change, biodiversity loss, food and water justice and pollution? How do individual writers and artists apprehend today's environmental crises and imagine livable, just futures? Instructors Allison Carruth View additional detailsfor American Environmental Narrative and Art, 1980-2020 Sacred Worlds of Early Native America: Mexicas and Algonquians (HA or LA) Subject associations AMS 390 / LAO 390 / REL 394 This course looks at the religious traditions as a source of what Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe) calls survivance, the active presence, continuance of stories, and renunciation of dominance by indigenous peoples. Our comparative approach will examine the pre and post contact traditions of the Mexicas in the Valley of Mexico followed by the Algonquian communities of early New England (e.g. Wampanoag, Mohegan, Narragansett, Pequot, et al). Sources will include the wide range of ways religion was preserved and augmented including rituals, texts, oral tradition, and material culture. Instructors Laura Arnold Leibman View additional detailsfor Mexicas and Algonquians Introduction to Indigenous Literatures (LA) Subject associations ENG 229 / AMS 229 This course reads Indigenous Literatures of North America to reflect on, critique, and contest settler colonialism, or the dispossession of land and waters in the attempt to eliminate Indigenous people. It will consider the broader history of Indigenous literary traditions, including alternative forms of literacy such as oral traditions and craftwork, as well as the ongoing cultural resurgence seen in the literary and art worlds. Readings by Native American and First Nations Canadian authors will connect Indigenous histories across time and space invite new ways of thinking about the past, present, and future of the Americas and the World. Instructors Robbie Richardson View additional detailsfor Introduction to Indigenous Literatures American Literary Traditions: Archives and Ecologies of the Early Americas Subject associations ENG 555 In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, how did Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans experience the land and Atlantic littoral from Barbados to Boston? The course disrupts assumed connections between writing and empire to foreground the embodied experience of Europeans and Africans in an unprecedented Atlantic migration. Alongside these arrivals, we examine how Indigenous people adapted to and survived this cataclysmic change. Considering people, non-human animals, plants, earth, and water relationally, we form a critical practice of unsettlement that reimagines the colonial archive as a contingent set of historical futures. Instructors Sarah Rivett View additional detailsfor Archives and Ecologies of the Early Americas Colonial Latin America to 1810 (HA) Subject associations HIS 303 / LAS 305 Through the lens of Latin America, this course explains how colonization worked in Early Modernity and what were its consequences. We study how the Aztec and Inca empires subdued other peoples before Columbus, and how Muslim Iberia fell to the Christians. Then, we learn about European conquests and the economic, political, social and cultural trajectory of the continent over more than 300 years, shaped by a deepening connection to an evolving Atlantic capitalist system, by Indigenous and slave resistance, adaptation, and racial mixing, and by insurrectionary movements. This is a comprehensive view of how Latin America became what it is now. Instructors Vera S. Candiani View additional detailsfor Colonial Latin America to 1810 Modern Brazilian History (HA) Subject associations HIS 333 / LAS 373 / AAS 335 This course examines the history of modern Brazil from the late colonial period to the present. Lectures, readings, and discussions challenge prevailing narratives about modernity to highlight instead the role played by indigenous and African descendants in shaping Brazilian society. Topics include the meanings of political citizenship; slavery and abolition; race relations; indigenous rights; uneven economic development and Brazil's experiences with authoritarianism and globalization. Instructors Isadora M. Mota View additional detailsfor Modern Brazilian History History of the American West, 1500-1999 (CD or HA) Subject associations HIS 430 / AMS 430 This course will examine the U.S. West's place, process, idea, cultural memory, conquest, and legacies throughout American history. The American West has been a shifting region, where diverse individuals, languages, cultures, environments, and competing nations came together. We will examine the West's contested rule, economic production, and mythmaking under Native American Empires, Spain, France, England, individual filibusters, Mexico, Canada, and United States. Instructors Rhae Lynn Barnes View additional detailsfor History of the American West, 1500-1999 California History (HA) Subject associations HIS 466 This class will cover the broad sweep of California History. How did the "Golden State" come to loom so large in the global consciousness? How did it come to wield such economic and political power? Who built the state, and at what cost? As we look for historical answers to those questions, we will discuss topics such as: Indigenous sovereignty, Spanish colonization, the Gold Rush, Pacific immigration, urbanization, Prop 13, agriculture, Silicon Valley, surfing and more. Instructors Wendy Warren View additional detailsfor California History Languages of the Americas (CD or EC) Subject associations SPA 233 / LIN 233 / LAS 233 This course explores the vast linguistic diversity of the Americas: native languages, pidgins, creoles, mixed languages, and other languages in North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean. We will examine historical and current issues of multilingualism to understand the relationship between language, identity, and social mobility. We will discuss how languages played a central role in colonization and nation-building processes, and how policies contribute to language loss and reclamation. Students will work with members of the Munsee Delaware Nation to develop community relationships and collaborate in a small project. Instructors Dunia Catalina Méndez Vallejo View additional detailsfor Languages of the Americas Indigenous Peoples of Latin America (CD or LA) Subject associations SPA 251 / LAS 251 Ever since Europeans arrived in the Americas in the late 15th century, Indigenous peoples have faced marginalization, domination, and exploitation. Europeans often believed that these communities lacked a history because they did not use a Western alphabetic writing system. In this course, we will explore key themes, such as: Pre-Hispanic knowledge; religious conversion through images; Indigenous knowledges, Indigenous resistance to colonial rule and the shifting transcultural and political dynamics of Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities; and contemporary Indigenous thought, focusing on decoloniality and oral history. Instructors Staff View additional detailsfor Indigenous Peoples of Latin America