Spring 2023
Alain Locke – Philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance
PHIL 5050 -- 001 | T/Th 1:00-2:15pm | Dr. Pearce
This course is a deep dive into the philosophy of Alain LeRoy Locke, most famous as editor of The New Negro (1925), which collected the work of writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance. After spending the first third of the class learning about Locke's intellectual background, we will read most of his philosophical work.
Queer/Trans Latinx Studies
PHIL 5050 - 002 | W 2:30-5:15pm | Dr. Pitts
This course offers a survey of several major philosophical trajectories within U.S.-based queer and trans Latinx studies, including analyses of desire, selfhood, coalition building, aesthetics, embodiment, land-based politics, transnational borders, and historiography, with a focus on knowledge-building praxes.
Mysticism|Pornography|Subjectivity
PHIL 5050-090 | T 5:30-8:15pm | Dr. Brintnall
Why do writers who attempt to record religious and erotic experiences so frequently appeal to the category of the inexpressible? Why are such experiences so frequently understood as disturbing to the fixity and coherence of the self? We will explore these questions through a reading of mystical texts, pornographic novels, and literary theory.
Disability, Technology, and Artificial Intelligence
PHIL 5050-091 | Th 5:30-8:15pm | Dr. Williams
Why do facial recognition systems have problems with certain features and movements? Why can’t autonomous vehicles recognize wheelchair users? Why do some people think there’s a “right kind” of mind or body? In this course, we will seek the origins of these and other questions, and how the answers can have life or death results.
Theories of Resistance
PHIL 6050-091 | W 5:30-8:15pm | Dr. Paquette
In this course, we consider the ways in which cartography and archives broadly construed operate either as perpetuating dominant structures, or as creating resistant terrains. Specifically, we consider the ways in which identity and place are co-constituted through conceptions of what it means to be human and various kinds of relations. With these tools in hand, we will critically interrogate the spaces and places through which we move, collectively and individually, and how we participate in the construction of these spaces, or resist them. Finally, we question the role monuments serve in maintaining or resisting the construction of spaces and identities. We will focus on the works of Katherine McKittrick, C. Riley Snorton, and Tiffany Lethabo King.
Ethical Theory
PHIL 6110-001 | M 4:00-6:45pm | Dr. Souffrant
Examination of major normative and meta theories that undergird our practical judgments about morally right actions and morally good persons, organizations, or policies. This examination may include central problems and issues concerning morality's: requirements (e.g., utility, duty, virtue, care), authority (e.g., absolutism, relativism, pluralism, multiculturalism), scope (e.g., deceased or future human beings, animals, environment), justification (e.g., rationality, intuition), source (e.g., reason, sentiment, disagreement), and nature (e.g., realism/antirealism, objectivity/subjectivity).
Feminist Theory and its Applications
PHIL 6320-091 | Th 5:30-8:15pm | Dr. Ergun
This course is an interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transnational survey of the diverse body of feminist theories that analyze gender as a performative social construct in its intersections with other structures of power such as race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, nationality, ability, and religion. Conceptualizing feminism as a plural and heterogeneous political platform, the course examines the significant conversations and debates in contemporary feminist theory. Students will have the opportunity to engage with both foundational and cutting-edge works by a transnational body of feminist thinkers, analyze the complex theoretical perspectives they propose, discuss the commonalities and differences between them, and situate them within a wider social/historical/intellectual terrain.