Courses at Yale

Course closed to further enrollment. In-person Course. This course offers an introduction to the transnational history of education in relation to the development of U.S. empire both at home and abroad. By bringing together topics often approached separately -- immigration, education, race, colonialism, and the history of U.S. empire -- we will interrogate the ways that education has been mobilized to deploy power: controlling knowledge, categorizing and policing difference, administering unequal paths to citizenship/belonging, forcing assimilation, promoting socio-economic divides, and asserting discipline and control. Topics to be covered include American Indian education and self-determination, African American education in slavery and freedom, U.S. colonial education in the Philippines/Cuba/Puerto Rico, immigration and forced Americanization schooling, Latinx fights for educational access and autonomy, State Department experiments in educational diplomacy and child socialization, educational missions abroad, and national security and the war on terror. Throughout, we will draw links between the past and the present and ask what it might mean to “decolonize” education today. 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. An examination of configurations of space and place in Caribbean thought. We will explore how space and place have been represented, constructed, and imagined in literary and theoretical texts. We will focus on issues concerning the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, and the postcolony, with particular attention to race, gender, and sexuality. Main topics include imperial conquest, the plantation, the slave ship, the Black Atlantic, the ocean, fugitivity, the urban, indenture, nature, tourism, and diaspora. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Online Course. Survey of the plantation, ghetto, and prison. Three spatial forms as foundations for the American project, aligned with colonialism and domination. Theoretical and historical considerations of how production of space and racial differences have been articulated together in United States. Topics include political economy of slavery, ghetto origins, and prison abolition. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 - June 30. Tuition: $4850. Technology Fee: $85. (View syllabus)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. This course reconsiders the complex arguments and activities that have characterized the civil rights movement, thinking beyond the master narrative of Montgomery to Memphis, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. to understand Black agency, actions, and politics through historiography, documentary film, and art. Students read primary sources alongside secondary scholarship, focusing each week on an individual case study.  Each week builds upon the past week to understand the civil rights movements in the United States, including in the urban North, the Midwest, and elsewhere. This course will answer the questions: did the Civil Rights Movement really just happen in the South? What was happening in other parts of the country? What made local movements similar or different? How can we use these movement histories to understand how we got to where we are today? 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Course closed to further enrollment. In-person Course. This course offers an introduction to the transnational history of education in relation to the development of U.S. empire both at home and abroad. By bringing together topics often approached separately -- immigration, education, race, colonialism, and the history of U.S. empire -- we will interrogate the ways that education has been mobilized to deploy power: controlling knowledge, categorizing and policing difference, administering unequal paths to citizenship/belonging, forcing assimilation, promoting socio-economic divides, and asserting discipline and control. Topics to be covered include American Indian education and self-determination, African American education in slavery and freedom, U.S. colonial education in the Philippines/Cuba/Puerto Rico, immigration and forced Americanization schooling, Latinx fights for educational access and autonomy, State Department experiments in educational diplomacy and child socialization, educational missions abroad, and national security and the war on terror. Throughout, we will draw links between the past and the present and ask what it might mean to “decolonize” education today. 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. An examination of configurations of space and place in Caribbean thought. We will explore how space and place have been represented, constructed, and imagined in literary and theoretical texts. We will focus on issues concerning the transatlantic slave trade, colonization, and the postcolony, with particular attention to race, gender, and sexuality. Main topics include imperial conquest, the plantation, the slave ship, the Black Atlantic, the ocean, fugitivity, the urban, indenture, nature, tourism, and diaspora. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Course closed to further enrollment. In-person Course. This course will take a hard, imaginative, speculative, and poetic look at U.S. history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the lens of film and video. In a time where we are awash with moving images in our environments on a daily, if not minute-by-minute basis, this course will be a space to meditate upon the sights, sounds, and texts around us.  We will interrogate how we have been trained to read a moving image. We will place the image historically, aesthetically, politically. We will learn how to see history as a series of discontinuities, yet with unconscious repetitions, thematic overlaps, and eternal returns — not simply as a single thread of greatest hits and milestones moments. Topics will include: Empire, Language, Love (viz. the Screwball Comedy), Class, War and Empire, Politics, Communism, Ideology, Youth, Revolt, Postmodernity, the Network, and Memory. Periods and events covered include: The Black Freedom Struggle, The Jazz Age, the Great Depression, World War II, the Long 1960s, the U.S. failure in Vietnam, the Dot Com Boom and Silicon Valley, and contemporary activist/revolutionary movements. We will not consider the U.S. in isolation: films and discussions will inevitably take us to Latin America, to France, to Senegal, to Iran, and to the Soviet Union. We will have mandatory Monday night screenings as well; these will include moving-image work by Julie Dash, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Tashlin, Douglas Sirk, Barbara Loden, Jane Schoenbrun, Anthony Banua-Simon, Kevin Jerome Everson, Don Hertzfeldt, Vincente Minnelli, Chuck Jones, Michelangelo Antonioni, Abbas Kiarostami, Frédéric Da, Spike Lee, Walt Disney, Warren Beatty, Brian De Palma, Richard Lester, and Eric André, among a host of others. This course seeks to expand students' knowledge of the history of film, of U.S. culture, and the society in which they exist. 1 Credit. Session B: July 3 – August 4. Tuition: $4850. (View syllabus)

Course cancelled. In-person Course. An exploration of the archaeology of the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, and other peoples of ancient Mesoamerica, with emphasis on current debates and queries. Students will be introduced to new discoveries aided by scientific methods, theoretical and methodological insights, and advances in the interpretation of writing and symbolic systems that challenge traditional interpretations. The course also explores the links with contemporary peoples in Mexico and Central America, who still preserve significant aspects of ancient Mesoamerican cultural traditions. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850.

Online Course. Blends urban history with educational and housing policy to explore how spatial relationships have shaped opportunity since the groundbreaking supreme court decision, Brown V. Board of Education. Investigates a range of historical, legal, and contemporary issues relevant to both the segregation and desegregation of American cities and their public schools in the twentieth century. Uses Atlanta, GA as a case study in how race, cities, schools and space have been differently understood in the South as compared to the North, and to Atlanta as compared to other “Deep South” cities. 1 Credit. Session A: May 29 – June 30. Tuition: $4850. Technology Fee: $85. (View syllabus)