Professor: Ann Braude
TH - 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Approaching 20th-century abstract art through the lens of religious studies, this course explores alternatives to twentieth-century narratives of modern art centered on the existential crisis of a heroic-- usually male, Caucasian and secular—individual.  In contrast, we will center paths to abstraction in which a departure from or repurposing of the figure emanates from spiritual sources not usually associated with modernity.  Locating the artists’ work within their biographies and their communities, the course focuses...

Professor: Chris Pexa
M, W - 1:30pm to 2:45pm

“Indians are an invention,” declares an unnamed hunter in Gerald Vizenor’s (White Earth Ojibwe) 1978 novel, Bearheart. The hunter’s point, as Vizenor has explained in interviews and elsewhere, is not that Indigenous peoples don’t exist, but that the term “Indian” is a colonial fiction or shorthand that captures, essentializes, and thus erases a vast diversity of Indigenous lives and peoples. This course begins from the contention that other categories, and maybe most consequentially that of “nature,” have not only...

Professors: Tiya Miles & Walter Johnson
Th - 12:45pm to 2:45pm

This seminar will convene scholars, public-facing intellectuals, writers, and practitioners whose work falls under the broad umbrella of ecological study and care rooted in Black, and/or Indigenous, and/or feminist, and/or community-minded thought, culture, and history. This flexible thematic has been chosen to inspire new questions, highlight key issues, structure constructive dialogue, spark fresh ideas, and support works in progress in the academic arenas loosely deemed “black ecologies” and “...