This course focuses on the history of anti-colonial revolutions. Students will watch Star Wars films, engage with anti-colonial theorists and intellectuals like Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Amilcar Cabral, and analyze the philosophies and politics of resistance movements in both the Star Wars Universe and conflicts like the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, the Congo Crisis, the Algerian War, and the struggle for independence in Lusophone Africa. By engaging with a range of works by historians, film studies scholars, journalists, and political scientists, students will develop critical thinking and writing skills, understandings of epistemological and methodological cultures, and an appreciation for the practice of scholarly inquiry in a liberal arts environment. This class will hold the historical perspectives and global equity and power designations.

This course will explore environmentalism and environmental movements from a critical historical perspective. From Thoreau to Carson, Bullard, Thomas, Kimmerer, and Thunberg, we will cover the most prominent (and silenced) voices encouraging collective action for the earth and its people. We will mostly focus on mainstream and marginalized environmentalism in the United States but will also explore international movements, foreshadowing the global, place-based contexts of the Fall Semester Abroad. As the first course in the Shaping the Landscape FSA series, we will introduce questions addressed from many epistemological perspectives throughout the semester. How have local and global landscapes impacted students’ lives and the lives of others throughout history? How will they, as students and young adults, shape the landscapes of their futures? Following David Orr’s words that “all education is environmental education,” students will explore how “the environment” and the ways we think about it influence their academic and personal lives. As a place-based CC100 experience, the course will encourage new undergraduates to reflect on their sense of place as CC students, new (or continuing) Colorado residents, and young adults in this inevitably climate-focused 21st century.

The course explores the complex place we call the Greater Southwest, including Greater Mexico, and the varied peoples who have lived, fought, traveled, written, raised families, farmed, ranched, and survived here. Using interdisciplinary epistemologies and methodologies from Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Geography, Environmental Studies, Chicanx/Latinx, Critical Indigenous, and Literary Studies, we investigate strands of culture (indigenous and imported) that have intertwined in this region over the last thousand years. We begin by examining (pre)historical, geographic, and anthropological records and debates over whose voices get to define the region, proceed to a series of primary and secondary texts to examine physical geographic, historical, and literary traditions of the region, and assess the enduring impacts of conquests. We explore how people have constructed and articulated sense of place over time, and discuss implications of these decisions for relationships people develop between themselves, the environment, and others. The course considers relationships between Indigenous nations, Hispano/Latinx/Chicanx populations, and Euro-American groups in the natural setting of the Southwest to better understand the conflict, cooperation, and cultural blending among these groups; the ways they understand and affect the biophysical landscape; and how land/nature has forged relationships within and between these groups.

This course is an introduction to food as a serious subject/object of analysis, beginning with investigations of the earliest American food systems and ending with the ecological problems associated with industrial agriculture today. In learning about the history of food in North America this class will encounter diverse perspectives across a number of academic disciplines. Our inquiry will be both historical and contemporary with a focus on present-day issues relating to social justice and sustainability. In exploring these ideas the course will engage a broad range of materials, including history, documentary film, fiction, photography, advertisement, government legislation/regulation, architecture, and... food itself. This class will be both interesting and delicious!

Colonialism figures in one of two ways in contemporary narratives. On the one hand, we are urged to think of it as a problem situated in the past, a problem that is said to have been swept away in the twentieth century by the great wave of decolonization after World War II. On the other hand, colonialism features as an object of nostalgia. It is celebrated for the benefits (parliamentary democracy, the market economy, rule of law, modern infrastructures, modern education, etc.) it brought to the colonized. This course, however, asks different questions: has the problem of colonialism disappeared? How are we to think about the legacies of colonialism in the postcolonial states and societies (many of them three generations old) that have emerged from the great wave of decolonization that followed in the wake of World Warr II? Almost everywhere in the postcolonial world the project of building independent states, economies and societies has faltered and sometimes run aground. Indeed, one might argue that the anti-colonial dream of emancipation has evaporated. In this course, we will carefully explore the works of key anti-colonial thinkers from Asia, Africa and the Caribbean (Mahatma Gandhi, CLR James, Aimé Césaire, Albert Memmi and Frantz Fanon) in order to inquire into colonialism as a structure of domination and into their visions of its anticipated aftermaths: What were the perceived ill-effects of colonial power? What harms did colonialism do to the colonized that required repair and rectification? In what ways did the critique of colonial power that these thinkers elaborated shape the longing for emancipation and ideas of freedom? How do these thinkers help us better understand contemporary struggles for social and economic justice in the United States and abroad?

Renaissance scholars were in search of knowledge, beauty, and truth. Our main task in the course will be to see the parallels between the viewpoints, the inspirations, and the works produced by both artists and scientists (and even artist-scientists!) and why the city-states in Italy in the 14th century were the fertile ground for this cultural revolution. Along the way, we will consider renaissance arts and letters, the impact of politics, the relationships between individuals, society, and culture, and how the “liberal arts” still shape and influence our current world.

As the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote almost one-hundred years ago, the march of progress is like a storm that leaves only ruins in its wake – ruined environments, ruined cultures, ruined bodies. Whereas some have sought refuge from these storms of progress in nostalgic attempt to retrieve – and, in some cases, return to– lost times, others have eschewed such romantic pursuits, seeking instead to forge alternative ways of being in the world, some modicum of a right life in the wrong one. After examining the destructive dynamics associated with capitalist modernity, this course will turn its attention to the oppositional milieus and defiant voices that have flourished in modernity’s ruins. Although the course makes occasional forays into global history, the primary focus will be on 19th- and 20th-century Europe.

This art history course has a two-fold purpose. We will examine in depth particular case studies of art from diverse traditions from the 15th to the 20th century. In addition, we will consider exchanges between these traditions in still life, landscape, and figurative art. A number of the case studies will pertain to Europe, but we will also cover selected artists and art movements from China, Japan, and the Islamic world. To provide a point of reference for later material, we begin with a week comparing the Greco-Roman tradition in sculpture, religion, and philosophy with early Chinese pictorial art in tombs, considering the very different visual and intellectual emphases. Following weeks turn to Renaissance art in relation to humanism, Jesuit art in the Far East, women artists in the Netherlands, the global circulation of Chinese bird and flower motifs and visions of the East in the Enlightenment, and Dutch trade in blue and white ceramics.

This course introduces students to the formation and varying historic trajectories of African American religious traditions in the U.S., with some brief engagement with African-derived religions in the Caribbean. Although some studies of African American religion begin with the period of slavery and the Christianization of diasporic Africans, this course locates the origin of Black religion on the continent of Africa. From this starting point, this course will examine West African religions, religions of the enslaved, the formation of Black Christian denominations, and the origin of Black Pentecostalism. Students will also be exposed to often overlooked historical periods and religious expressions including the arrival of Black religio-racial movements during the Harlem Renaissance and the African derived religions of Haitian Vodou and U.S. Voodoo.

Every person has a body. But how do we know what we know about bodies? Where do bodies begin and end, and how do categories of personhood—such as race, gender, disability, or even being alive or dead—affect the meaning of having a body? This course explores the ways that historians, sociologists, and body studies scholars have developed ways of thinking, writing, and arguing about the meaning and significance of human bodies across time. It introduces students to the humanistic study of the body, and the different ways that historical actors have classified and organized bodies and body parts, often to the detriment of underprivileged individuals and groups. It illustrates the methods that humanities scholars use to develop knowledge about the human body. Students will develop an understanding of how different disciplines organize knowledge-making and knowledge about the body itself, and how they can use these methods in their own future scholarship.

This course is an introduction to food as a serious subject/object of analysis, beginning with investigations of the earliest American food systems and ending with the ecological problems associated with industrial agriculture today. In learning about the history of food in North America this class will encounter diverse perspectives across a number of academic disciplines. Our inquiry will be both historical and contemporary with a focus on present-day issues relating to social justice and sustainability. In exploring these ideas the course will engage a broad range of materials, including history, documentary film, fiction, photography, advertisement, government legislation/regulation, architecture, and... food itself. This class will be both interesting and delicious!