Courses
Photo Credit | © Afia Ofori-Mensa
How to Win a Beauty Pageant
African American Studies, American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies & U.S. History Survey Course
Designed and Taught at the University of Michigan and Oberlin College
In the past few years, beauty queens have appeared with increasing regularity in mainstream U.S. media. In 2007, Miss South Carolina Teen USA’s 30-second response about Americans and maps grew to such heights of popularity that it became one of the most watched YouTube clips of its time. Three years later, the crowning of the first Arab American immigrant Miss USA drew criticism from some conservative bloggers who questioned her abilities to represent the nation. In the summer of 2012, the successful entry of a transwoman in the Miss Universe Canada Pageant pushed the U.S.-owned Miss Universe organization to lift its worldwide ban on transgender contestants, for the first time in the pageant’s sixty-year history. And at this very moment, a Change.org petition is circulating to encourage the Miss Universe organizers to move their November 2013 pageant away from Russia, because of that country’s retrograde anti-LGBTQ laws. Since the Miss America Pageant began in 1921, the popularity of beauty pageantry in the United States has ebbed and flowed. In that time, hundreds of other pageants have sprung up around the country, each with its own title and its own kind of claim on representative Americanness. This course examines that history, from the 1920s through the present, by focusing on a variety of pageants—from Miss America and Miss Universe to Miss Gay America and Miss Black USA—and key moments in 20th- and 21st-century pageantry. The aim of this course will be to use pageants as our case studies to understand the changing identity of the United States of America over time. We will travel through U.S. pageant history by decade, considering contemporaneous cultural happenings and applying relevant academic theories. Our investigations as a class will also consider what it takes to win a pageant and how notions like “beauty,” “poise,” “fitness,” “the full package,” and “the girl next door” relate to concepts of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nation. In addition, we will learn about cultural studies methodology, including literary close reading, cultural history, critical discourse analysis, and ethnography, and use those methods to “read” beauty pageantry intellectually, as a pop culture phenomenon that tells us stories about ourselves.
Narratives of Passing
African American Studies, American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies & English Literature Research Seminar
Designed and Taught at Oberlin College
If individuals can undetectably pass through social boundaries meant to keep those individuals—and others categorized with them—out, then the act of passing calls into question the nature both of the boundaries and of the categories they delineate. This course uses passing as a paradigm to destabilize normative notions of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality and to illustrate how those phenomena are produced. In doing so, we will consider questions like: How does passing operate in the specific context of the United States of America? Is passing about pretending to be someone you are not, or is it about becoming someone different than you were before? What is the relationship between passing and assimilation? To answer those questions, we will analyze narrative literature and film about passing in the 20th-century U.S. alongside theoretical texts about identity, in order to understand relationships between inequality and privilege, performativity and representation, normativity and difference, and visible and invisible identities.
Never Been Home: Immigrant and Second-Generation American Narratives
African American Studies, American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Gender Studies & English Literature Survey Course
Designed and Taught at Oberlin College
With immigration at the center of key political debates in the contemporary United States of America, it is important for those of us in the U.S. to know and understand the stories of the people most affected by the rhetoric and outcomes of those debates—immigrants themselves and, in the current political climate, especially immigrants of color. Within that population, individuals who grow up not outside of the country but rather in immigrant families in the U.S., hold a unique position with respect to identity and belonging. In this course, we will examine narratives of those who immigrated at a young age (the 1.5 generation) and of American-born children of immigrants (the second generation) of African, Asian, Caribbean, Latin American, and Middle Eastern descent. Through fictional and nonfictional texts, we will explore issues confronting immigrant families of various ethnic backgrounds in different decades of recent U.S. history: language, ethnicity, class, race, place, violence, intergenerational conflict, and diaspora. In addition, we will build knowledge about literary genres—the novel, the memoir, and the semi-autobiographical narrative—by using methods of creative writing, oral history, and close reading to focus on conventions of narrative voice used in immigrant literatures. Ultimately, our goal will be to take a distinct look at American literature, one that uses common experiences of immigration to see beyond boundaries of race traditionally drawn in the U.S.
Histories and Theories of the Academic Humanities
Interdisciplinary Humanities Seminar
Co-designed and taught at Princeton University with Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Aditi Rao
This course introduces students to the humanities as a field of knowledge within the academy. What are the forms of inquiry that have traditionally defined the humanities, and what is the place of these forms within the architecture of the modern research university? In pursuit of answers, we will range from histories of individual humanistic disciplines to publications within the expanding field of critical university studies. We will also examine the local history of humanistic study on Princeton's campus, and its alignment with (and divergence from) national and international trends in the development of the humanistic disciplines.
Power and the Professoriate
Interdisciplinary Humanities Seminar
Co-designed and Taught at Princeton University with Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta and Aditi Rao
This course familiarizes students with the various features of academic careers in the humanities. The course considers histories and current debates around labor and resource allocation within the academic humanities, with units on research, teaching, service, and mentorship. We will focus on power, identity, and the "diversification" of the professoriate within U.S. institutions of higher education in the past 50 years, with special consideration of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and its longstanding PhD pipeline effort, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program.