LIT 499-01 Seminar in Research and Theory: The 1980s: Politics, Art & Protest
Professor: Abdur-Rahman
Monday/Thursday 3:30-4:50pm
This seminar will engage with the intersections between literature, politics, visual culture, music, theory and protest during the Reagan and Thatcher era. We will explore how artists and activists responded to the apartheid regime in South Africa, the AIDs crisis, houselessness, environmental crises and the acceleration of global inequality. Students in this course will complete a final research essay.
LIT 499-02 Seminar in Research and Theory: Melville and Disability
Professor: Blake
Monday/Thursday 2-3:20pm
This seminar will explore the writings of Herman Melville from the perspective of disability studies. Works will include “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Moby-Dick, The Confidence Man, and Billy Budd.
LIT 499-03 Seminar in Research and Theory: The Beatles and Their World
Professor: Venturo
Tuesday/Friday 11am-12:20pm
The lives and musical careers of the Beatles reflect profound cultural changes that took place in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II. In particular, the extraordinary transformation of this group in a decade and a half from one of many local Liverpool bands to the most influential popular music group of all time and an international cultural arbiter offers insight into the modern cultural world. With the Beatles as its focus, this seminar will explore such topics in modern cultural history as race relations, women’s rights and gender issues, youth culture, consumerism, counterculture and protest, mass media and public relations, as well as, of course, developments in popular music.
LIT 499-04/AAS 499-01 Seminar in Research and Theory: Afrofuturism in the 21st Century: Interdisciplinary Approaches and Possibilities
Professor: Williams
Monday/Thursday 11am-12:20pm
This seminar topic will focus on the ways Afrofuturism is revealed in literature, history, sociology, feminism and political science, the awakening of personal black consciousness can be found. There is consensus among theorists and scholars that the term Afrofuturism was coined in 1994 by Mark Dery, a Professor at the Yale School of Art. Dery coined the term in his essay, “Black to the Future.” Viewing Afrofuturism as an analytic framework is essential to the interdisciplinary nature of this AAS 499 Capstone.
A number of contemporary writers and thinkers are invested in the complex interpretation of Afrofuturism as both an idea as well as a lived reality and it is this more complex rendering of black identity and thought that informs the theoretical work we will focus on during the semester. In this course, students will be expected to research and investigate the critical debate that has surrounded the idea of Afrofuturism over the last twenty years. Students will be expected to do two, interrelated things in this course: to contribute actively and thoughtfully to class discussions of assigned materials, and to devote the bulk of their time to the formulation of their own research project on Afrofuturism.
**Please note that this section is by department consent only. To obtain permission please email steele@tcnj.edu.**
LIT 499-05 Seminar in Research and Theory: Medical Humanities
Professor: Halpern
Tuesday/Friday 9:30-10:50am
An interdisciplinary introduction to literary, cultural, critical, and historical texts about physical and mental illness, disability, and medical care in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, with a particular emphasis on the U.S. This class requires consistent, active, and engaged participation, short writing assignments, and an extended research paper.