GC       F 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Carrie Hintz [68314] [Cross listed with Eng. 83300]

The course will explore life writing in the long eighteenth century (biography, autobiography, and pseudobiography) and novels from the period that draw on the conventions of life writing. There will be less emphasis on the definition of genres than on the rhetorical strategies of individual authors and their navigation of public and private discourses. We will, however, engage with a number of life writing genres, including conversion narratives, criminal biographies, diaries, captivity narrative, letters, pornography, “secret histories” hagiography, and travel writing. Possible texts include John Aubrey’s Brief Lives [selections]; John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners; The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson; The Case of Madam Mary Carleton, lately stiled the German Princess; Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and/or Moll Flanders; A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke; Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets [selected]; John Cleland’s Fanny Hill; Henry Fielding’s Jonathan Wild; The Life of Olaudah Equiano, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark; William Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of ‘The Rights of Woman,’ and Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater.
The course is designed for potential specialists in Restoration and eighteenth-century literature but also for students reading for their comprehensive examinations. Our reading should appeal to anyone interested in theories of auto/biography by writers such as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Paul John Eakin, Leigh Gilmore, Richard Wendorf and Paula R. Backscheider (among many others). We will also be looking at theories of authorship, narrative and of the historical development of the private sphere. Course requirements include class participation, an oral presentation, and a final paper [about 15-20 pages].

WSCP 81000 -Reading the Underread: Victorian Women’s Noncanonical Novels

GC       M 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Talia Schaffer [68315] [Cross listed with Eng. 74300]

John Sutherland has pointed out that “the tiny working areas of the ‘canon,’ the ‘syllabus,’ and the

paperbacked ‘classics’ are poor reflections of what the Vict orian novel actually meant to Victorians.”

In spite of the fact that roughly 60,000 works of fiction were published between 1837 and 1901, “generations of students have left their academies thinking that this richest of literary fields comprises

half-a-shelf's length of works by Dickens, two Brontes, George Eliot and Hardy.” What happened to the rest, and what can we learn by re-examining a few of them? This course interrogates the processes of

canon formation and canon revision, inquires about the politics and genres traditionally excluded from the canon, investigates the potential problems of constructing of a category called the 'noncanonical,' and monitors case studies of Victorian women's novels with interestingly vexed relations to canonicity. We will start with popular fiction, trying to figure out what accounted for the enormous appeal of this work and how popularity might mitigate against a work's survival as the literary marketplace altered and academic needs developed in the early twentieth century (Corelli, Ouida, Braddon). We will read domestic realism by Yonge, Craik, and Oliphant, investigating feminist modes of recovery work and asking just how (and if) feminism can read work whose politics are either reactionary or indecipherable.

Finally, we will end with two major novels by Malet and Ward, once considered the two central novelists of the 1890s, now both forgotten, and we will try to figure out what accounted for the radical decline of

these novelists' reputations by reading contemporary reviews, looking at changes in the profession of authorship, and thinking about the literary criteria associated with the advent of modernism. Criticism

may include work by John Guillory, Barbara Herrnstein-Smith, Francis O'Gorman, Gaye Tuchman and Nina Fortin, Peter Keating, Kate Flint, Deirdre David, Elaine Showalter, Barbara Leah Harman and Susan Meyers, Ann Ardis, Lyn Pykett. Students give a presentation and a final paper of 20-25 pages. In that final essay, students will be encouraged to investigate a case study of their own choosing, either writing about how a canonical figure like George Eliot maintained her status or else exploring, through period reviews and other primary documents, just why a given text became obscure.

WSCP 81000 -The American Renaissance

GC       R 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Neal Tolchin [68316] [Cross listed with Eng. 75100]

The writers of the mid-19^th century American period F. O. Matthiessen named the American Renaissance were engaged in a fascinating search for form. The range of experimentation is remarkable: from Emerson and Thoreau’s use of the journal to capture what Thoreau called “living poetry,” to Whitman’s realization of Emerson’s call for a truly American form of writing poetry, to Melville’s playful mixing of genres in fiction and Hawthorne’s intense gothic explorations of the human heart, to Margaret Fuller and Frederick Douglass’ struggles to find a prose voice that could approximate their verbal brilliance, to Harriet Jacobs use of domestic realist fictional devices in representing the unrepresentable horrors of slave life, to Louisa May Alcott’s use of Emerson and Thoreau as characters in her adult novel Moods, to Stowe and Dickinson’s transformations of the sermon and hymn forms into secular works of art. What is often at stake in the experimental work of these writers is the effort to find release from limiting social and codes and literary conventions in order to expand the range of feeling available to literary representation. We will explore both canonical and non-canonical texts. Requirements: oral reports on recent scholarship, research paper, and participation in the seminar discussions.

WSCP 81000 -Tony Morrison and the African American LiteraryTradition

GC       T 11:45 a.m.-1:45 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Barbara Webb [68317] [Cross listed with Eng. 75700]

This course will examine the development of Toni Morrison’s artistic vision from the publication of her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970) through Paradise (1998) and Love (2003). In our critical reading and analysis of these novels, we will pay particular attention to her explorations of language and form, her use of African American folk traditions, and her concept of history as a creative act of memory. We will also discuss the importance of her role as editor and cultural critic. Special emphasis will be given the critical reception of her work and the revisionary strategies that have characterized her literary project. Requirements: An oral presentation and a research paper (15-20 pages). This course will be conducted as a seminar with class discussion of assigned readings and oral presentations each week.

WSCP 81000 -Art and Texts: Portraits and Self Portraits

GC       M 4:15 -6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mary Ann Caws [68567] [Cross listed with Eng. 87400]

The representation of persons to themselves and to others is what we will be looking at, including group and individual portraits. We will cast a deliberately wide net, among the immense possibilities in photographs, paintings, and writing,. from periods early to contemporary, but with an emphasis on modernism, broadly conceived.

Among the topics considered are face and body, clothing and costume, nudity and disguise, self and other, gender and transgendering, set pieces of description and fragmentary suggestions, youth and aging, and differentiation by region and epoch.

Some of the subjects that leap to mind as examples may enter our deliberations: on the visual side, Rembrandt’s self-portraits over the years, portraits and self-portraits by Cézanne and Picasso , Claude Cahun’s and Cindy Sherman’s self-posings as the other, Avedon’s portraits and those of Man Ray, and on the literary side, various descriptions and workings out of character by George Eliot, Herman Melville, Nathanael Hawthorne, Henry James, Marcel Proust, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Wallace Stevens.Class presentations about the visual and the verbal, a short and a long paper.

WSCP 81000 -Writing Women’s History

GC       W 6:30- 8:30 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Blanche Wiesen Cook [68318] [Cross listed with Hist.74300]

Writing Women's Lives will be devoted to the study of eminent women in US and world history. With an emphasis on biography and memoir, politics and controversy, movements for peace, justice, liberation, the reading list will be determined in part by class members. A preliminary reading list will be available shortly.

WSCP 81000 -Religion and Modernity in the Middle East

GC       W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Samira Haj [68319] [Cross listed with Hist.77900]

The course will explore the question of secularism and the boundaries that define relations between the domains of private/public, sacred and profane in the modern Middle East. Since the course will benefit from a comparative approach, readings will cover areas and subjects not limited to the Middle East or exclusively Islamic. Whether modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion is best understood comparatively, especially in the context of the resurgence of religion in both the northern and southern hemispheres. The course will touch on questions such as what is secular and what is religious; is religion fundamentally irrational; is the relegation of religion to the private sphere a necessary condition for modernity? What about those communities that insist on granting religion some role in regulating social morality? Are they to be considered non-modern and traditional, or are they modern and reactionary? Are such binaries as modern/traditional; rational/irrational; secular/profane, private/public useful analytical tools? As gender is key to all these questions, a special attention will be given to the subject.

WSCP 81000 -Citzenship Embodied: Studies in Gender, Race, Class and Colonial Status in Great Britain, the U.S. and Their Colonies

GC       W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg [68320] [Cross listed with Hist.70200]

WSCP 81000 -The Politics of Identity

GC       W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Alyson M. Cole [68321] [Cross listed with Pol. Sci. 80601]

In this class we will explore the meanings, problems and possibilities of contemporary identity politics. “Identity politics” is typically associated with the political mobilization of marginal groups since the 1960s, that fought against oppressions based on race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and disability. Beyond the struggle for inclusion in conventional forms of the political process, identity politics reconfigured the basis of political affiliations and transformed the scope of politics itself.

This course combines a macro-historical inquiry into the rise of identity politics as a challenge to liberal universalism with an examination of how individuals and groups have interpreted, contested, and negotiated their "identities". We will begin by pursuing the following questions: How important is identity to political action? How is political subjectivity forged? Do different political identities function similarly? How might the subject be both a discursive product and an existential necessity? During

the semester, we revisit central debates about identity politics – the problem of essentialism, the challenge of representation, recognition versus redistribution, and the hazards of ressentiment. Our readings will include works by Hegel, Freud, Foucault, Fanon, Iris Young, Charles Taylor, Judith

Butler, Linda Alcoff, William Connolly, Anne Chen, Wendy Brown, among others.

WSCP 81000 -Citizen Participation and Community Organization

GC       T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Marilyn Gittell [68322] [Cross listed with Pol. Sci. 73908]

An in-depth analysis of democratic theory and its relevance to the creation of responsive public policies, especially as regards excluded populations. Issues of race and gender will be of primary concern. The single most important question to be addressed by the seminar is how policies which undermine the democratic process and marginalize large segments of the population can be changed. Emphasis will be on the role of democratic localism, citizen participation and community organization and their effect on the building of social capital and civil society. How these concepts and practices contribute to policies which work towards inclusion and social change will be discussed. Although a major portion of the reading will be on the U.S. political experience the course will also include comparative readings on other political systems. The syllabus will be available on the web.

A research paper will be required.

WSCP 81000 -Home, Homelessness, and Homeland

GC       T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Leanne Rivlin [68324] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103]

The focus of this seminar is on people’s connections to places, particularly to their homes, their homelands and the implications of their loss. We will begin with an analysis of theories of home, its meanings and functions, its changes over time and its roles in people’s lives. We then will consider the implications of the loss of home and explanations for the increases in contemporary homelessness. Finally, we will address homelands, raising questions regarding contestations over territories, and the significance of homelands in light of increasing global concerns. Through readings on history, theory and research, exploration of the interests of class members, as well as the work of outside guests who have studied theses issues, we will try to clarify the implications of place meanings and place attachments.

WSCP 81000 -Psychology, Gender and Law

GC       T 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Profs. Kay Deaux and Maureen O’Connor [68325] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103]

In this course we will analyze the intersection of psychology, gender and the law from a number of vantage points. We will consider how psychological theory and research influence (or fail to influence) the formulation of law, including its inclusion in expert testimony and amicus briefs. We will examine the impact of the law on gendered practices, such as those affecting education, family structure, and relevant topics in civil and criminal law, such as gender discrimination, sexual harassment, affirmative action, pregnancy and parental leave, pension and social security policies, family and child custody, divorce law, domestic violence, and single-sex institutions

WSCP 81000 -Ethnography of Space and Place

GC       W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Setha Low [68326] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103 & Anthro 72300]

The study of the city has undergone a transformation during the past ten years integrating ever wider theoretical perspectives from anthropology, cultural geography, political economy, urban sociology, and regional and city planning, and expanding its attention to the city as physical, architectural and virtual form. An emphasis on spatial relations and consumption as well as urban planning and design decision-making provides new insights into material, ideological and metaphorical aspects of the urban environment. Reliance on ethnography of space and place allows researchers to present an experience-near account of everyday life in urban housing or local markets, while at the same time addressing macro-processes such as globalization and the new urban social order.

This course sketches some of the methodological implications of the ethnographic study of the contemporary city using anthropological tools of participant observation, interviewing, behavioral mapping, and discourse analysis, and theories of space and place to illuminate spaces in modern/post-modern cities and their transformations. In doing so, I wish to underscore links between the shape, vision and experience of cities and the meanings that their citizens read off screens and streets into their own lives. It begins with a discussion of spatializing culture, that is the way that culture is produced and expressed spatially, and the way that space reflects and changes culture. The concepts of culture and space are then materially and theoretically linked through an exploration of six areas of focus: Embodied Spaces (proxemics, phenomenology of space, language and space, and spatial orientation), Gendered Spaces (female and male spaces, and evolution of the house and home), Contested Spaces (spaces of resistance and conflict, and hierarchies expressed in space and place), Transnational and Translocal Spaces (markets, nations, and ethnoscapes), Inscribed Spaces (places of memory and longing), and Spatial Tactics (heterotopias, gated communities, and historically preserved spaces).

The course also explores a number of special topics including how urban fear is transforming the built environment and the nature of public space both in the ways that we are conceiving the re/building our cities, and in the ways that residential suburbs are being transformed into gated and walled enclaves of private privilege and public exclusion. The privatization of public space first signaled the profound changes that American cities are undergoing in terms of their physical, social and cultural design. Currently, however, increased fear of violence and others particularly in urban areas is producing new community and public space forms; locked neighborhoods, blank faced malls in urban areas, armed guard dogs on public plazas, and limited access housing developments are just some examples of how the cultural mood is being "written" on the landscape.

The readings drawn from The Anthropology of Space and Place (Low 2003 edition, Blackwell Publishing) and from a series of ethnographies selected based on students’ interests. Students will participate in a fieldwork project related to the course using data collected and analyzed as part of the course content. The analysis will be presented at the conclusion as part of the final requirement to write a final paper. Students will also be required to present and write-up an analytic report on an ethnography of their choosing, as well as direct class discussion at least once during the semester. Students will be asked to use theoretical materials from the course to recast or rethink their research projects for their final papers. Weekly meetings will utilize student fieldwork experience and data collected as the basis for discussion of the readings.

WSCP 81000 -Theories of Space and Time

GC       W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Cindi Katz [68327] [Cross listed with Psych. 80103]

This seminar will examine an eclectic range of theories concerning the social construction and lived experience of space and time from a range of disciplines. We will explore theories of the production of space, scale, place and the everyday, and the making (and unmaking) of biographical time, historical time, work time, memory, past and future. Our texts will be attentive to alternative temporalities and spatialities, and their representations in registers other than the social sciences including film and the visual arts. The work of M.M. Bakhtin, Walter Benjamin, Henri Bergson, Susan Buck-Morss, Johannes Fabian, John Gillis, Judith Halberstam, David Harvey, Stephen Kern, Henri Lefebvre, Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, Charlotte Salomon, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, E.P. Thompson, Anna Tsing, and Paul Willis among others will be addressed.

WSCP 81000 -Consumer Society & Consumer Culture

GC       M 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Sharon Zukin [68329] [Cross listed with Soc. 86800]

This interdisciplinary course examines the historical and institutional development of consumption in modern societies by connecting it with large-scale social changes and ideologies. Looking closely at the institutions of consumer society—including symbols, sites, languages, and texts, we will develop a critique that relates consumption to the development of the market economy, civil society, and conceptions of the self. After several weeks of common reading and discussion, with weekly short responses, each student will develop an independent project of empirical research on either a consumption site (store, website, marketplace, provision of services) or a specific commodity, which will result in a 15-page final paper. Readings from authors both classical (W. Benjamin, J. Baudrillard) and contemporary (L. Cohen, S. Mintz, S. Zukin). Enrollment strictly limited to 14 students.

WSCP 81000 -The Social Construction of Illness: Consumption, Production and the Medicalized Body

GC       T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Barbara Katz Rothman [68330] [Cross listed with Soc. 83100]

Illness writes the body: our sense of self, of health, of our physical being, takes meaning from the contrast with illness. And the social world writes illness: what it is to be ill; what categories of illness are acknowledged; how illness is defined, treated, managed, and determined. The study of illness places us at the intersection of agency and social control; body and society; the "natural" and the "technological"; the self and the social world.

This course is an introduction to some of the basic concepts of Medical Sociology, beginning with the theoretical perspective that grew out of Symbolic Interactionism and labeling theory to offer a sociological understanding of illness. The first topics to be explored will be birth and death, then AIDS, a variety of 'mental disorders,' as we more generally consider social epidemiology, the social causation of disease, or disease as written in race, sex, and class; illness as performance and as representation; and medicalization, placing more and more areas into the medical frame.

Course requirements: Discussion of weekly readings for the first six or seven sessions, then student presentations of work-in-progress; final paper on "The Social Construction of X," topics to be chosen in consultation with members of the seminar.

WSCP 81000 -Sociology of Culture

GC       W 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein [68331] [Cross listed with Soc. 86800]

The theme of culture and empirical work on culture has grown in the last 20 years. Such topics as cultural practices and processes, symbolic and classificatory systems, repertoires of action, of contention, and webs of significance, and cultural structures are topics comprising the “cultural turn.” in sociology. We shall read the work of scholars who have conceptualized these topics, sought research sites and methodologies for exploring them in such arenas as music, art, fashion, communications, celebrity culture, sexuality, conceptions of gender distinction and politics. For example, we shall read DiMaggio and Diana Crane on the institutionalization of cultural categories, Zerubavel on cognitive sociology, Alexander on myths and narratives, Mary Douglas and (Alexander) on the sacred and profane, Bourdieu on cultural capital, Brubecker on groups and ethnicities, Geertz on thick description and a webs of significance, Schwartz and Wagner-Pacifici on contested meanings of memorials, Lamont on symbolic boundaries and status, Friedland on religious ideology and kinship, and Kunda on corporate cultures.

A background in both classical and contemporary sociological theory would be helpful for students considering taking this course.

WSCP 81000 -Selected Topics: Gender and Health

GC       W 4:15-6:15 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. Mary Clare Lennon [68332] [Cross listed with Soc. 83300 and Pysc.h 80103]

This interdisciplinary seminar series will provide an in-depth exploration of several key topics in women's health. The focus will be on how gender shapes the definitions and experiences of health and health care. Topics may include mental health, reproductive health, domestic violence, caregiving, and coronary heart disease.  Four topics will be the focus on readings and discussion for a 3-4 week portion of the seminar. Students will be expected to participate in the discussions and prepare a response paper on each topic.

WSCP 81000 -Social Welfare Policy and Planning II

H          T 2:00-4:00 p.m., Room TBA, 3 credits, Prof. S.J. Dodd [68333 [Cross listed with SSW 71100] Permission of the Instructor is required.

The course applies historical, ideological and theoretical models (including feminism) to the study of social problems and social welfare policies. In a seminar fashion, students critique various definitions of social problems; examine the impact of race, class, gender and heterosexist power relationships on the definitional process; and explore the implications of social problem definition for social welfare policy analysis and application. Using the intellectual frameworks developed in class students study and analyze a social problem of their choosing in class presentations and in a final paper.