Global Cultures Undergraduate Course Descriptions
Winter Quarter
| Dept | Course No and Title | Instructor |
|---|---|---|
| GLBLCLT (W26) | 103A ABOLITIONIST WORLDS | HARVEY, S. |
| This course traces the emergence of race and gender as technologies of surveillance within the U.S. context. We focus on the emergence of blackness and its gender formations. Students will examine the institutions of chattel slavery, prisons, capitalism, and the law as key institutions in the development of surveillance regimes. Further, we will examine the ways that surveillance and imprisonment are productive—that is, in its performance it produces different sorts of binaries including humans/nonhumans, cisgender/transgender people, good workers/surplus laborers, and the ways these subjects respond. Finally, we ask: “What is to be done?” | ||
| GLBLCLT (W26) | 103A MYTHOLOGIESOFPARIS | AYOUTI, T. |
| Few cities have been as relentlessly estheticized, romanticized, and theorized as Paris. Across literature, cinema, photography, advertising, and tourism, the French capital has been imagined less as a lived space than as a symbolic surface: a screen for projecting fantasies of love, style, freedom, modernity, or revolution. This course explores how Paris functions as a dense cultural signifier, structured by what Roland Barthes called mythologies—narratives and images that transform historical, social, and political realities into self-evident truths. Rather than treating these representations as secondary to urban experience, we will analyze them as central to how the city is perceived, inhabited, and consumed. Our focus will be on five intersecting myths that organize the global imaginary of Paris: the city of love and romance; the capital of fashion; the bohemian and artistic haven; the city of exiles and outsiders; and finally, the city of light, whose universal ideals often obscure its racialized and postcolonial realities. Through close readings of literary texts, visual media, and critical theory, we will ask how these myths emerge, circulate, and persist. The course invites students to read the city not only as a physical space but also as a semiotic and ideological construction in which beauty often masks violence and desire coexists with exclusion. | ||
| GLBLCLT (W26) | 103B PERS EMP AND GREECE | BRANSCOME, D. |
| This course surveys the history of the ancient Persian Empire from 550-330 BCE, from the empire’s founding by Cyrus II to the death of the last Achaemenid Persian king, Darius III. Much of what we know about the Persian Empire comes from what ancient Greek authors, such as the historians Herodotus andXenophon, the tragedian Aeschylus, and the biographer Plutarch, had to say about it; when relying on the work of these authors, we are forced to some extent to view the Persians and their empire through a Greek lens. And yet, whenever possible in this course, we will also consider what the ancient Persians themselves thought about their empire. Thus, the readings for the course will not only be Greek literary sources, but also Persian written and visual sources, including inscriptions, seals, coins, and archaeological sites and monuments. | ||
| GLBLCLT (W26) | 103B INTL RELATIONS | MOURAD, G. |
| This course explores the culture of international relations, diplomacy, and humanitarian organizations in France and the French-speaking world with an emphasis on oral communication usually through the completion of simulated professional tasks in a professional context. The course is taught entirely in French. | ||
| GLBLCLT (W26) | 103B ECHOES OF EMPIRE | BROADBENT, P. |
| European colonial expansion reached its peak between 1880 and 1914 with the conquest and colonization of large regions of Africa and Asia, where European ideas about race, civilization, and cultural superiority were systematically employed to justify imperial rule. This course begins by examining the ideological foundations of this period—often referred to as the era of "New Imperialism"—and explores the systems of governance and administration implemented within colonized territories. Following the collapse of Europe’s empires after the Second World War, decolonization movements significantly reshaped European societies. We will investigate the domestic impact of demographic shifts, immigration policies, cultural identities, and societal debates in Europe. Finally, the course addresses ongoing controversies surrounding Europe’s colonial past and examines how colonial histories continue to inform contemporary politics, memory cultures, and national identities. Through case studies drawn from Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, students will gain insight into how European societies continue to confront—and at times avoid—the complex legacies of their imperial histories. | ||
| GLBLCLT (W26) | 191 TENTATIVE | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
| GLBLCLT (W26) | 199 INDEPENDENT STUDY | STAFF |
| No detailed description available. | ||
