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Graduate Courses

Current Graduate Courses that fulfill LACS Cluster Requirements

Note: This is a preliminary list. Please check CAESAR for up-to-date course information. Please note that in addition to graduate courses, some 300-level undergraduate courses are approved for TGS credit; these are included in the list of TGS courses: https://catalogs.northwestern.edu/tgs/courses-az/If you are interested in taking a 300-level course that counts toward the certificate or cluster, please check that it is approved for TGS credit and if it is, please contact the LACS DGS for approval.

Spring 2024

ANTHRO 490-0-4 Slow Seeing: Art from the Ancient Indigenous Americas T 2pm-4:50pm Mary Weismantel
HISTOY 405-0-24 Revolution W 2pm-4:50pm Paul Gillingham
HISTORY 492-0-24 The Caribbean in World History F 2pm-4:50pm Lina Britto
PERF_ST 515-0-26 Transnational Flows of Performance W 2pm-4:50pm Marcela A. Fuentes

ANTHRO 490-0-4: Slow Seeing: Art from the Ancient Indigenous Americas

The focus of this class is new work by art historians and anthropologists on the art of the Indigenous ancient Americas. Traditional ‘Pre-Columbian' art history took an iconographic approach, in which images were treated as texts to be interpreted. In contrast, some recent studies use a multi-modal approach that incorporates materialist, relational, phenomenological, Indigenous, and other perspectives that consider the work in its entirety, in the present and in its original social context. We will read recent publications by Weismantel and Hamilton on ancient South American sculpture and ceramics; Finegold and Brittenham on ancient Maya ceramics; and Fowles on ancient and modern rock art of the US Southwest. We then turn briefly to contemporary art that takes inspiration from ancient Indigenous art, looking at the works of Kukuli Velarde and Tanya Tagaq. Students will develop their own projects, based either on these works or others chosen in consultation with the professor.

HISTORY 405-0-24: Revolution

This course introduces major debates in the comparative history of revolution. The global analysis starts in France; proceeds with the spread of revolutionary ideologies in the Americas; returns to Europe for 1848 and 1917; tacks back to the Americas for peasant revolutions in Mexico and Cuba; and then migrates to China before ending in a consideration of the revolutions that never happened. En route we will explore the intellectual history of revolution in the works of Tocqueville, Marx, Lenin, James, Guevara and Scott, juxtaposing these texts with more recent scholarship to shed light on their multiple qualities: primary sources, political prescriptions and analytical frameworks.

HISTORY 492-0-24: The Caribbean in World History

 For generations of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and cultural critics, the Caribbean has been a heated topic of debate and research—not to mention a source of inspiration and inquiry for fiction writers, essayists, poets, filmmakers, and artists. The depth and intricacy of Caribbean history, and its centrality to world history is one of the reasons for this fascination. Slavery and emancipation; colonialism and imperialism; republicanism and revolution; nationalism and decolonization, are some of the historical categories of analysis that from a Greater Caribbean perspective complicate easy periodizations, clear-cut imperial boundaries, and ready-made gender and racial constructs. This course introduces graduate students to this historical/historiographical complexity, and the generations of scholars who have contributed to Caribbean studies with a profusion of theoretical and interpretative lenses. We will start with the cornerstone of the scholarship: What is the Caribbean? Then, we will consider specific topics, and the variety of approaches in their study in order to examine multiple frames and bridge the different linguistic, and imperial areas.

PERF_ST 515-0-26: Transnational Flows of Performance

This course explores transnationalism through the lens of performance studies. While transnationalism refers to the rapid flow of goods, information, and capital across fluid geographical borders, performance studies contributes a rich conceptual understanding of embodied culture, local/global synergies, border politics, and mediated alliances that account for other flows that involve memory, diasporic identities, and (dis)belonging. The class thus offers a unique methodology that combines social and aesthetic theory in the analysis of performance practices that animate transnational aesthetic, social, and political processes. Investigating practices of transnational artistic and cultural production, we'll define the ways in which performance as a local, embodied event engages with the scale of the global and the transnational. Students will be encouraged to use performance as an object of study, analytic lens, and method, and explore their topics through their own performance-making approaches. 

Previous Graduate Courses