Spring 2025 Courses

Instructor: Layla Brown

CRN: 40265

Days, Time: WF 11:45AM-1:25PM

Description: Explores the broad interdisciplinary spectrum of African American and Africana studies. Provides an introductory overview of the field and offers an opportunity to identify areas for more specific focus.

Instructor: Fadeke Castor

CRN: 40266

Days, Time: MR 11:45AM-1:25PM

Description:Surveys U.S. and international Black popular culture from the mid-1950s to the present through music, movies, music videos, and other forms of multimedia, paying close attention to social commentary, political critique, economic inference, cultural formation, explications of religious and spiritual beliefs, and the like. Discusses and ponders issues of representation, identity, values, and aesthetics. Offers students an opportunity to rethink and reexamine the intent, impact, and circulation of Black popular culture as a method and means of expression and communication.

Also listed with LACS and HIST

Instructor: Kris Manjapra

CRN: 38153

Days, Time: MW 2:50-4:30PM

Description: A course on the culture and history of Caribbean societies.  Seen through the lenses of literature, art, music, food, technology, and performance, we will explore Caribbean creativity and resilience across English, French, and Spanish linguistic and political spheres.   We consider the global reach of Caribbean diasporas, and hthe long local histories of Caribbean communities in Boston. We pay attention to four key themes throughout:  Indigeneity, Blackness, Diaspora, and Creolization.  The Caribbean region constitutes a unique point of entry for the study of gender, race, nation, and sexuality in the Americas, and the vibrant responses and resistances to colonial and imperial power.

Also listed with WMNS

Instructor: Tiffany Bailey

CRN: 40267

Days, Time: T 11:45AM-1:25Pm, R 2:50-4:30PM

Description: Invites students to study the history and contemporary landscape of Black feminist scholarship. Covers a range of disciplines and historical periods to introduce students to important texts and theoretical developments in this vast and interdisciplinary field.

Also listed with HIST

Instructor: Caleb Gayle

CRN: 40268

Days, Time: TF 1:35-3:15PM

Description:  Step into the fierce resilience, ambitions, and complex realities that shaped African American life in the crucial decades before and after the Civil War. With a distinct focus on the 19th and early 20th centuries, this course traces how Black Americans navigated the landscape of enslavement, emancipation, and systemic opposition in the evolving American nation. From the antebellum years, marked by both overt resistance and subtle acts of survival, through the volatile Reconstruction period and the dreams it briefly inspired, we will examine how racial constructs were not inherent truths but crafted social forces, wielded to sustain systems of power and control. Against this backdrop, we’ll investigate the ways in which Black communities fought not only to survive but to assert their own place in a nation grappling with its own notions of freedom and equality. Through key events, influential figures, and often-overlooked grassroots movements, students will uncover the ways Black Americans redefined community, challenged oppressive structures, and built legacies that resonate across time. In exploring these histories, we will better understand and contextualize efforts to achieve equity today.

Also listed with SOCL

Instructor: Anjanette Chan Tack

CRN: 39666

Days, Time: TF 9:50-11:30AM

Description: Focuses on the social construction of race and ethnicity and the nature of dominant/minority relations in the United States. Emphasizes the peculiar evolution of race relations in U.S. history, the political and economic conditions that have transformed race relations, and the nature of contemporary racial and ethnic relations in the United States. Topics include immigration, ethnic and racial identity, discrimination, and race-based policies (e.g., residential restrictive codes, Jim Crow segregation). Offers students an opportunity to develop a critical lens from which to observe and interpret contemporary debates over structural racism.

Also listed with HUSV and SOCL

Instructor: Matthew Lee

CRN: 40269

Days, Time: MR 11:45AM-1:25PM

Description: Examines racism, racial identity, and theories of social change and racial empowerment primarily within the U.S. context. Highlights different ways in which racism and racial privilege have been experienced by different racial communities, more specifically at the micro-, meso-, and macro-levels. Offers students an opportunity to learn ways to promote racial empowerment and equity. Using theory from primarily psychology and sociology, the course investigates the impact of social systems and institutions on individual-level and group experiences of racism. Investigates students’ own racial identities, a deeper understanding of institutional inequalities and intersectionality, and practical skills in leadership and community building that can promote positive social change and racial equality.

Instructor: Régine Jean-Charles

CRN: 40603

Days, Time: MR 11:45AM-1:25PM

Description:  This service-learning class introduces students to the breadth of Black women’s leadership throughout the African Diaspora with a local focus on the city of Boston. Inspired by the Black Women Lead initiative for which 212 portraits of Black women were placed along Blue Hill Avenue in Roxbury, this course focuses on the how, why, and what of Black women’s leadership. Students will work directly with local Black women leaders in various environments and organizations. To complement these experiences they will be assigned course materials in literature, history, and film that represent Black women as leaders. Students will explore the diverse perspectives and range of experience of these Black women leaders. They will examine the challenges encountered by Black women leaders and analyze them through an intersectional lens.

Instructor: Korey Tillman

CRN: 40271

Days, Time: TF 1:35-3:15PM

Description: Analyzes how Black people have resisted carcerality in social and political organizing from the 16th century to the present. Explores historical understandings of abolition as the end of slavery and the current abolition project of ending prisons, policing, and other institutions that are shaped by the legacy of slavery. Offers students an opportunity to critically analyze and engage contemporary social movements and political discourse in their everyday lives. Topics include the Haitian Revolution, maroon communities, 19th-century slavery abolitionists, anti-lynching organizing, chain gangs, Black political prisoners, contemporary carceral abolition, and abolitionist texts and films.

Also listed with CRIM

Instructor: Patrice Collins

CRN: 40050

Days, Time: TF 3:25-5:05PM

Description: Provides students with an overview of the role and treatment of racial/ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system. Covers historical and theoretical frameworks for understanding the relationship between race, crime, and criminal justice. In so doing, students become familiar with trends and patterns in criminal offending by racial/ethnic minorities, as well as system response to such behavior.

Also listed with CRIM

Instructor: Korey Tillman

CRN: 40051

Days, Time: TF 9:50-11:30AM

Description: Provides students with an overview of the role and treatment of racial/ethnic minorities in the criminal justice system. Covers historical and theoretical frameworks for understanding the relationship between race, crime, and criminal justice. In so doing, students become familiar with trends and patterns in criminal offending by racial/ethnic minorities, as well as system response to such behavior.

Also listed with PHIL

Instructor: Fadeke Castor

CRN: 40272

Days, Time: MW 2:50-4:30PM

Description: Engages the intersections of religion, race, and political power through cultural history, ethnography, and lived religions. Explores the social and cultural categories of our historical and contemporary worlds. Examines how some peoples’ histories have been centered, while others’ histories have been marginalized. Explores religion as a social category that reproduces existing relations of power while alternatively supporting social revolution and change. Class engagements are centered on theories of power, understandings of difference, and changes in social structures over time, from the colonial period to the present (1500s–2000s).

Instructors: Margaret Burnham and Alex Stein

CRN: 40469

Days, Time: MW 2:50-4:30PM

Description:Explores the various questions, relationships, and connections between the law and racial issues and concepts. Each offering focuses on a special topic such as reparations, civil rights, gender, or the environment and energy policies. May be repeated up to three times for a maximum of 16 credits.

Also listed with SOCL

Instructor: Anjanette Chan Tack

CRN: 40385

Days, Time: TF 1:35-3:15PM

Description: This course introduces students to the social construction of race and ethnicity and the nature of dominant/minority relations in the United States. We examine the peculiar evolution of race relations in U.S. history, the political and economic conditions that have transformed American race relations, and the contemporary features of ethno-racial inequality in the US. Topics include Jim Crow segregation, restrictive residential codes, ghettoization, and discrimination in access to work, welfare, healthcare, and labor protections. The course will equip students with an historically informed and data-based lens from which to observe and interpret contemporary debates about ethno-racial inequality in American society.

• Introduction to African American and Africana Studies

• Early African American Literature
• African American History Before
• Gender and Black World Literature

• Race, Identity, Social Change, and Empowerment
• Afro-Asian Relations in the Americas
• Afro-Latin American Studies
• Introduction to Global Health
• Black Feminist Studies
• Beyond the Binary: Race, Sex, and Science
• Epidemiology of Pandemic Diseases & Health Disparities in the African Diaspora

All courses listed.