This course introduces students to cinematic representations of religion in feature and documentary films. Films about religion are cultural documents in and through which individual artists, religious and nonreligious groups, and nations symbolically construct their conceptions of themselves and the world. They are also the occasion for political, social, and cultural debates about ethnic and national identities. This course adopts a cultural studies approach to the study of films about religion and invites students to investigate the public debate and interdisciplinary questions and issues raised by the release of films such as Avatar, Schindler’s List, The Passion of the Christ, Daughters of the Dust, and The Hurt Locker.

In this course students explore the question "what is performance?" and how this informs their understanding of an increasingly mediated and globalized world. They examine the broad spectrum of performance in its many forms including theater, dance, visual art, performance art, everyday life, folklore, rituals and celebrations, and protests as well as the processes of each. Students apply readings on performance theory to performance events and sites on campus and beyond. In addition, they engage in an in-depth exploration of both global and intercultural performances and the growing international importance of this field.

This course examines the relationship of culture to politics. It introduces the study of struggles to acquire, maintain, or resist power and gives particular attention to the role culture plays in reproducing and contesting social divisions of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Lectures and discussion incorporate film, music, and fiction in order to evaluate the connection between cultural practices and politics.

This course explores the connections between sports and a broad range of anthropological concerns, including colonialism, resistance and domination, race, and gender. Students consider questions such as: Why do we play the sports we do? Why are sporting performances socially significant, and how have groups and political regimes used this significance to suit their needs? What can teams, players, and brands tell us about how we (and others) see the world? Addressing topics from cricket in the Caribbean to boxing in Chicago, students reappraise conventional sporting narratives and use sports to analyze the social and historical conditions in which they occur. In doing so, students think critically about their own sporting experiences and develop a deeper and subtler understanding of the ways that societies make sports and sports make societies.

During the nineteenth century, the United States experienced one of the most dramatic political transformations in world history, rising from an imperiled post-revolutionary state to become a global empire. This course examines the diverse experiences of those who lived through this era of dizzying change and confronted the forces that shaped a restless nation: slavery, capitalism, patriarchy, expansionism, urbanization, industrialization, and total warfare. Whether fighting for recognition or resisting the encroaching state, they struggled over the very meaning of American nationhood. The outcome was ambiguous; its legacy is still being contested today.

This course introduces students to the different methods and perspectives of cultural studies within an American context. Students consider the separate evolution of American studies and cultural studies in the academy, and how cultural studies provides a lens through which to investigate dynamic American identities, institutions, and communities. Of particular concern is how differences such as race, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality are constructed and expressed in diverse settings, and how they connect to the deployment of power.

The computational humanities comprise a fast-growing and exciting field that is changing the way scholars work and think. This course provides an opportunity for students with some experience with programming to immerse themselves in semester-long projects in digital environments, moving from "analog" archives, through data structuring, and quantitative analysis, and culminating with a project that makes both the humanities and quantitative analyses legible for people from diverse backgrounds. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level digital and computational studies course.

Surveys the development, distribution, and use of technology in the United States, drawing on primary and secondary source material. Subjects treated include racialized and gendered divisions of labor and the ecological consequences of technological change.

This course explores the relationship between the North American environment and the development and expansion of the United States. Because Americans' efforts (both intentional and not) to define and shape the environment were rooted in their own struggles for power, environmental history offers an important perspective on the nation's social history. Specific topics include Europeans', Africans', and Native Americans' competing efforts to shape the colonial environment; the impact and changing understanding of disease; the relationship between industrial environments and political power; and the development of environmental movements.

This course introduces students to the major themes and movements in American religious history from the colonial period to the end of Jacksonian reform. Among the topics discussed are Reformation "churches" and "sects," Puritanism and secularism in seventeenth-century America, ethnic diversity and religious pluralism in the Middle Colonies, slavery and slave religion, revivalism, religion and the American Revolution, and social reform.

This course considers the intertwining of theatre and performance with things. Theatre productions often rely on and make deft use of objects. Costumes and scenery can transform actors and stages, conjuring other times and places. Props can drive the action of the play or reveal the nuances of a character. Performances can also leave material traces as numerous theatre scrapbooks, souvenirs, fan mail, and reviews might attest. Objects can disclose their makers’ and users’ values, relationships, and the memories that haunt and hold onto them. We will explore how theatrical things – the material culture of theatre and performance -- can offer important perspectives on queerness, race, disability, migration, displacement, collectivity, care, and memory. We will also examine how theatre and performances can use objects to shape spectatorship, to recall histories of objectification and exhibition, and to work toward preservation, repair, and worldmaking.

This course examines the history of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. It examines invisibility and spectacle in black death, voyeurism, and the destruction of the black body in the new public square. Is it true that black lives are more easily taken and black bodies destroyed with less legal consequence than others? What are the ways in which black lives do not matter? This course analyzes media coverage and debates on social media about black death. Students place these discussions in conversation with the critique of race and racialized violence offered in literature, music, film and social theory.

This course introduces students to the problematic and colonial histories upon which museums were built. Beginning with an introduction to postcolonial theory and institutional critique, students critically examine the containment of colonial objects and related efforts to control colonial bodies. By acknowledging colonial records and structural racism as the foundation upon which the modern museum was built, students grapple with historic and exploitative systems of power that formed the world’s first collections and still govern modes of display and interpretation today. Through experiential learning, the class engages with cases of repatriation and the marginalization of art histories from the Global South, and analyzes museum practice in relation to global migration, COVID-19, the racial justice movement, climate change, and wars in the Middle East and Ukraine. The course uses the Bates College Museum of Art and Lewiston Middle School for community engaged projects.

This course explores race and the history of tobacco in North America. With a primary focus on the intersection of tobacco capitalism and African American history and settler colonialism the course introduces students to the impact of tobacco on the formation of racial ideologies and lived experiences through a consideration of economic, cultural, political, and epidemiological history. Recommended background: at least one course on the study of race, settler colonialism, US history, capitalism, and/or gender and sexuality.

An appreciation and analysis of what it means to speak French and to be "French" or Francophone in the local and regional context. Students examine questions of language, ethnic identity, and cultural expression through novels, short stories, autobiographies, film, and written and oral histories. Visits to local cultural sites enhance students' understanding of the Franco-American community and its heritage as well as other French speaking communities in Maine. Prerequisite(s): FRE 207, 208, or 235.

A survey of Native American peoples from the centuries just before European contact to the present, this course addresses questions of cultural interaction, power, and native peoples' continuing history of colonization. By looking at the ways various First Nations took advantage of and suffered from their new relations with newcomers, students learn that this history is more than one of conquest and disappearance. In addition, they learn that the basic categories of "Indian" and "white" are themselves inadequate for understanding native pasts and presents. Much of this learning depends on careful readings of Indigenous American writers.

This course studies Arab American literature from 1990 until the present. Students examine novels, short fiction, memoirs, or poetry in an effort to understand the major concerns of contemporary Arab American authors. Students are expected to engage theoretical material and literary criticism to supplement their understanding of the literature. In addition to a discussion of formal literary concerns, this course is animated by the way authors spotlight gender, sexual orientation, politics, and history. Prerequisite(s): one 100-level course in English.

Interdisciplinarity involves more than a meeting of disciplines. Academic practitioners stretch methodological norms and reach across disciplinary boundaries. Through examination of a single topic, this course introduces students to interdisciplinary methods of analysis. Students examine what practitioners actually do and work to become contributing practitioners themselves. Prerequisite(s): AFR 100, AMST 200, or GSS 100, and one other course in Africana, American studies, or gender and sexuality studies.

A lecture and studio practice course intended to generate a living definition of embodying activism to be performatively personified. Through a series of social justice lensings, student artists determine for themselves what they consider activist and how they would engage that distinction throughout their creative process.

Places recent popular and scientific discussions of human heredity and genetics in broader social, political, and historical context, focusing on shifting definitions of personhood. Topics include the commodification of human bodies and body parts and the emergence of new forms of biological citizenship and belonging.

The goal of this course is for you to acquire a global perspective on Islam in the Western hemisphere—its origins, the manner of its dissemination, and the varied experience of Muslims in the Americas, particularly the differences between Islam’s arrival in Anglophone and Hispanophone contexts. We will begin with Muslim life in West Africa on the eve of the Atlantic slave trade, focusing particularly on Muslim intellectual and spiritual history. We will then move to the Iberian peninsula, its role in the slave trade, and the Spanish empire’s regulation of Black and Muslim bodies in its colonies. We will then explore the experiences of the first Muslims in the US and their descendants; the first immigrant Muslims from south Asia and the middle east; and the formation of distinct threads of Islam in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We will end the course with a series of discussions on the implications of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Doctrine of Discovery have had on the history of Black life, Muslim life, and Black Muslim life in the US.

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" encapsulates the belief that the United States is a nation of immigrants, yet that can be an oversimplification of a deeply complex issue. This course explores the various reasons people migrate, acculturate, and what it means to be an "American" and an immigrant. Students review immigration records to examine how issues of poverty, sexual orientation, gender, race, and political affiliation affected how people "breathe free" and navigated the US immigration regime from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

This course examines the special expectations we have for documentary images—to tell the truth. Over the semester, students study the changing uses, definitions, and archives of documentary photography from 1839 to the present. Through lecture and discussion, students explore the ongoing nature of the documentary's core controversies involving objectivity, advocacy, and bias. While scholarly discussions of the documentary are rooted in Euro-centric assumptions about lens-based media, this course includes international practices, concepts, and histories of documentary photography, engaging with the complex relationship between photographic neutrality, racial hierarchies, and colonial control. Readings and assignments concentrate on theoretical approaches to the documentary, raising ethical questions about the medium’s aesthetic practice and everyday popularity. Students utilize archival resources at area institutions and Bates college for research opportunities.

This course offers students an introduction to Arab American poetry from the early works of Khalil Gibran to the present. The course develops an appreciation of Arab American poetic forms, craft, voice, and vision within a transnational and diasporic framework. Surveying the poems and critical work of an expansive array of poets such as Lauren Camp, Hayan Charara, Suheir Hammad, Marwa Helal, Mohja Kahf, Philip Metres, Naomi Shihab Nye, Deema Shehabi, students examine the complex, personal, communal, national, cultural, historical, political, and religious realities that manifest themselves at home and elsewhere in the Arab American literary imagination. Prerequisite(s): one course in Africana, American studies, English, or gender and sexuality studies.

This course considers visual constructions of race in art and popular culture, with a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. General topics include the role of visual culture in creating and sustaining racial stereotypes, racism, white supremacy, and white-skin privilege; the effects upon cultural producers of their own perceived race; and the relations of constructions of race to matters including but not limited to gender, ability, class, ethnicity, citizenship, sexuality, ability, and colonialism/settler colonialism.

This seminar examines the intersections of gender with Black racial and ethnic identities as they have been and are constructed, expressed, and lived throughout the anglophone and francophone African/Black diaspora. The course not only pays special attention to U.S. women and the movements where they lead or participate; but it also devotes substantial consideration to African, Caribbean, Canadian, European, and Australian women of African descent. The course combines approaches and methodologies employed in the humanities, social sciences, and arts to structure interdisciplinary analyses. Using Black feminist (womanist), critical-race, and queer theories, students examine Black women’s histories; activism; resistance; and cultural, intellectual, and theoretical productions, as well as digital literacy. Prerequisite(s): one course in Africana, American studies, or gender and sexuality studies.

This course combines scholarly inquiry and research of historical and contemporary social practice with practical studio experience and collaborative practice within the community with attention to issues of, social justice, racial justice, environmental justice and issues of power and privilege. Students study the history of socially-engaged art, looking at historic political posters and woodblock prints, murals, and other modes of socially engaged art as well as contemporary artists and collectives that utilize similar methods for their work. Students work with a community partner to understand strategic goals and concerns and collaboratively create an action plan that utilizes art making as a form of collaborative activism and support. The course focuses on the design and production of a collaborative studio project such as relief prints, a mural, or a community workshop; the course culminates in the performance, exhibition, and/or distribution of the collaborative work within the community.

This course mines the topic of justice while explicitly focusing on the concept of decolonization. In doing so, it identifies various iterations of coloniality, such as colonialism, settler colonialism, and postcolonialism. It traces decolonial sentiment through previous anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements. It then examines the multiple conceptualizations of decoloniality that are determined to sever colonial ties. In doing so, the course allows students to envision decolonial futures.

This course explores the interconnections among race, liberation, and theology in the Americas. We begin with a historical study of the material and ideological relationship between Christian theology and the formation of racial consciousness, from the advent of the global colonial period to the establishment of the United States. This study will enable us to examine the interrelated processes of racial and religious formation in the US, Caribbean, and Latin America during the 18th and 19th centuries. Focus will be given to the social, economic, and political dimensions of these processes; that is, on issues of colonialism, patriarchy, racism, and capitalist extractivism. We then consider the ways theology has served as a means to critique and resist these processes during the 20th and 21st centuries throughout the Americas. We will especially attend to how Black, Womanist/Mujerista, and Latinx theological frameworks contribute to struggles against these forms of injustice. Recommended background: one course in Religious Studies or American Studies.

From antebellum slavery through twentieth-century struggles for civil rights, black Americans have resisted political violence, economic marginalization, and second-class citizenship using strategies ranging from respectability to radicalism. Engaging with both historical and modern scholarship, literary sources, and other primary documents, this course explores the diverse tactics and ideologies of these resistance movements. By considering the complexities and contradictions of black resistance in American history and conducting source-based research, students develop a deep understanding of the black freedom struggle and reflect on the ways that these legacies continue to shape present-day struggles for racial justice.

Language Death and Revitalization explores linguistic diversity among the world’s 7,000 languages, one of which dies every two weeks. The course addresses the question of what is lost in terms of bodies of knowledge, world view, and identification of the limits of variability among human languages when languages die out. The local and global causes of extinctions are explored, including genocide, natural disaster, dislocation and population absorption and language shift, or linguistic suicide. Planning strategies for revitalization at local, national, and international levels are studied. Strategies for successful revitalization movements are deduced throughout the course of the semester. Recommended background: prior coursework in anthropology.

American art history has historically neglected the Islamic world. Yet, the long-standing relationship between the fields of American and Islamic art demonstrates a history of encounter and exchange. By examining the transnational circulation of modernisms across the Atlantic, this class highlights implicit biases in both fields. It explores an insidious Islamophobia and connects Orientalisms across the Atlantic in both Indigenous and Islamic contexts, investigating a deeply-rooted belief that outside of Europe and America, the 18th and 19th centuries were an age of stagnation, and decidedly unmodern. More specifically, by putting these art histories into conversation with one another, students will learn that the cross-cultural circulation of modernisms is critical to our understanding of American, Indigenous, and Islamic art. Course lecture and discussion will follow historical case studies, emphasizing the intersection of national frameworks and imperial contexts—many of which still today engineer a neo-Orientalist fervor in the American art market.

This course introduces students to the historical contributions of Latina/o/xs in the emergence of Hip-Hop culture in New York City. To do so, students will be engaging with a contextual approach that depicts migration processes and settlements of Latinx communities within the five boroughs, particularly Uptown and the Bronx where Hip-Hop culture erupted during the 1970s. This course will show how Latina/o/xs have empowered themselves through artistic performances and expressions in the midst of social struggle and industrial decline. In addition, the course critically addresses how Latina/o/xs Hip-Hop artists constantly navigate the ethno-racial politics of Blackness and Latinidad that are crucial within discourses on Hip-Hop legitimacy and pioneerism. A wide variety of sources will be used to analyze Latina/o/xs’ involvements in the different elements of Hip-Hop culture (Mcing/Rap, Djing, Graffiti, Breaking, Beatboxing) in order to understand racial, ethnic and gender dynamics. Recommended background: prior coursework on race and ethnicity.

This multidisciplinary seminar explores the origins and iterations of the Ku Klux Klan in the United States from 1866 to the present. In so doing, the course makes larger claims about the core relationship between the centuries-long white power movement and the making of "America." Drawing on the concepts, paradigms, and intellectual traditions of American Cultural Studies and Black Studies, we will consider the shifting narratives, contested ideologies, and the regional and temporal convergences/divergences of the Klan from its violent founding to our contemporary moment. We will learn how to theorize the Klan through frameworks that prioritize the concepts of racialization, patriarchy, cultural hegemony, citizenship, resistance, and counterrevolution.

Critical theory is about the unraveling of streams of repressive discourses and hierarchies in our contemporary world, and it has been artists who have fostered ruptures and fissures in everyday life. This seminar ponders the concept of "cultural worker" and laments the domain of theory by exploring the intersections between critical theory, art, and cultural and queer politics. Students engage in the ruptures, the fragments of knowledge, and the making sense of the residue of "social change" while not forgetting the problematization of the aesthetic. They consider U.S.-based interdisciplinary artists such as Fusco, Ana Mediata, Tania Bruguera, David Hammon, Vanessa German, Pope.L, and Dianne Smith, and Jelili Atiku with critical theorists such as Fanon, hooks, Foucault, Mbembe, Muñoz, Moten, Hartman, and Benjamin. This seminar is based on close readings of theoretical texts and connecting those texts with contemporary cultural politics.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester.

This course explores how psychology might be transformed in order to realize people’s liberatory potential. The course introduces liberation psychology methods, such as participatory action research, community building, QuantCrit (Quantitative Critical Theory), arts, testimonios, storytelling, and critical self-reflection and dialogue. Topics include the ways that psychology has been dehumanized (as Martín-Baró says, psychology "erases the very real thing of life that make up what we are as human beings"); how to embed human experiences within the historical, sociopolitical, and ecological context; and how to place psychology in the service of human liberation, especially for those who have hitherto been ignored or relegated to the margins of consideration. Recommended background: PSYC 261 or 262. Purposeful Work Infusion. Only open to juniors and seniors.

The "frontier" has long been a controlling idea for U.S. national identity. A vestige of our settler colonialist past, the American frontier persists ideologically as an imagined “meeting point between savagery and civilization." This course examines the history of this concept and its role in American literary history. We trace its influence upon more recent configurations of the nation as territory—namely, discourses of “the border” and “the homeland.” Course readings include literature, law, and history from the nineteenth century through the post-9/11 era and relevant works of scholarship and critical theory. This course gives particular attention to Chicanx and Native American literatures and these traditions’ critical perspectives on the contested paradigms that lend this course its title. Prerequisite(s): Any American Studies or 100-level English course.

Under the supervision of a faculty advisor, all majors write an extended essay that utilizes the methods of at least two disciplines. Students register for AMST 457 in the fall semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both AMST 457 and 458.

Under the supervision of a faculty advisor, all majors write an extended essay that utilizes the methods of at least two disciplines. Students register for AMST 458 in the winter semester. Majors writing an honors thesis register for both AMST 457 and 458.

This course combines an emphasis on visual culture with political concerns and ethical theory. We ground our study in the work of artists LaToya Ruby Frazier, Will Wilson (Navajo/Diné), Fazal Sheikh, and Alicia Grullón, who deploy photography and performance work to contest the ongoing problem of environmental racism in the United States. Students read studies of intersections of racism, economic policy, and pollution in the violence that is environmental racism, including texts by Rob Nixon and Dorceta Taylor. Our goal is to understand how art conveys lived experiences of environmental racism and also to frame the problematic of this pattern of pollution through discussions of ethics and politics.

This course introduces students to the issues, politics, and the methodologies of Black genealogy. It begins and centers exploration with Africana texts and films that represent lineages of people of the Black Atlantic. It augments these texts with cookery books and historical texts about diasporic arts and crafts. Recommended background: coursework in Africana, American studies, gender and sexuality studies, or American or African histories or literatures.

Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study during a Short Term.

Through engagement with archives, scholarly literature and Bates's history, students in this curricular innovation course will help to re-imagine AMST/DCS 204: Archives, Data and Analysis. This re-imagining will include considering new archives and/or data that can help inform our understanding of Bates College in the past and the present, incorporating innovative work in critical archival and data studies, and considering which computational methods and approaches might be added to enhance the course. This re-designed course will center the operation of race, power, privilege and/or colonialism in the context of Bates College. At the end of this short-term course, students will have a grounding in the scholarly work on data analysis, critique and archives, as well as in computational methods necessary to complete those analyses. Recommended background: prior coursework in DCS beyond AMST/DCS 204. Prerequisite(s): AMST 204, DCS 104, or 204.