Courses - Fall 2025

AFRAMER 91R: Supervised Reading and Research

Instructor: Contact the ADUS (Carla Martin cdmartin@fas.harvard.edu)

-TBA

· Class Number:10515 Course ID:110605

Description:

Students wishing to enroll must petition the Director of Undergraduate Studies for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the permission of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some coursework as background for their project.

· Course Component: Tutorial

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER 98: Junior Tutorial-African American Studies

Instructor: Contact the ADUS (Carla Martin cdmartin@fas.harvard.edu)

-TBA

· Class Number:11862 Course ID:118023

Description:

Students wishing to enroll must petition the Director of Undergraduate Studies for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the permission of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some coursework as background for their project.

Recommended Prep:

Completion of African and African American Studies 10, or a substitute course approved by the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

· Course Component: Tutorial

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER 98A: Junior Tutorial-African American Studies

Instructor: Contact the ADUS (Carla Martin cdmartin@fas.harvard.edu)

-TBA

· Class Number:11079 Course ID:119818

Description:

Students wishing to enroll must petition the Director of Undergraduate Studies for approval, stating the proposed project, and must have the permission of the proposed instructor. Ordinarily, students are required to have taken some coursework as background for their project.

Recommended Prep:

Completion of African and African American Studies 10, or a substitute course approved by the Director of Undergraduate Studies.

· Course Component: Tutorial

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER:99A Senior Thesis Workshop

Instructor: Contact the ADUS (Carla Martin cdmartin@fas.harvard.edu)

-TBA

· Class Number:11390 Course ID:124132

Description:

Thesis supervision under the direction of a member of the Department. Part two of a two-part series.

Course Notes:

Enrollment is limited to honors candidates.

· Course Component: Tutorial

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER 86: Race and Public Health Crises: From TB to AIDS to COVID-19

Instructor: George Aumoithe

Tuesdays & Thursdays 12:00pm - 2:45pm

· Class Number:19026 Course ID:222126

Description:

This course explores the complex interplay between race and public health crises, from tuberculosis to AIDS and COVID-19. Students will examine the visual culture of epidemics, critically analyze systems of racial classification, and study the work of influential sociologists, political scientists and historians of medicine and public health. The course challenges students to question the racial epistemology underlying epidemiological research and practice, fostering a deeper understanding of how race has shaped and has been shaped by public health responses from the 19th century to the present. By engaging with diverse materials and perspectives, students will develop critical tools to analyze racial health disparities and their societal implications, both in historical contexts and amid contemporary health challenges.

Jointly Offered with: Faculty of Arts & Sciences as HIST 86

· Course Component: Lecture

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER 112X: Transition(s)

Instructor: Tinashe Mushakavanhu

Mondays & Wednesdays 10:30am – 11:45am

· Class Number:19809 Course ID:226573

Description:

In this introductory course, we examine and question the sameness often ascribed to African literature as a sociological and anthropological archive. We will explore stories of mobility, movement, and exchange, drawing from the archives of Transition, a magazine founded in 1961 in Kampala, Uganda, and now housed at Harvard. Transition fostered some of the most engaging intellectual debates of its time, introducing a critical idiom that shaped a generation's postcolonial and postnational critiques. Many of its contributors were young, ambitious thinkers who used the magazine to express and refine their ideas (e.g., Bessie Head, Ngugi waThiong'o, Wole Soyinka). Through Transition, and with the understanding that 'the archive is a very important place to go' (Simon Gikandi), students will learn to engage with primary sources, critically analyze historical and literary materials, and examine the evolution of African literature. The course emphasizes close reading, archival research, and contextual analysis, equipping students with the tools to understand how African literature has been formed and how it continues to evolve. By exploring the transitions, transformations, and translocations in African literature, we will experience genre formation and establish key foundations: Where did African literature come from? How, when, and why did the idea of literature in the modern sense emerge in Africa? What is the utility of a term like 'African literature' and the idea of a field of African literary studies.

· Course Component: Seminar

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER 133Y: The Politics of Paradise: Tourism in Latin America & the Caribbean

Instructor: Amber Henry

Tuesday 12:00pm - 2:45pm

· Class Number:15920 Course ID:224623

Description:

What does tourism sell? How do destination images condition our perceptions of native people, public space and collective memory? This seminar explores tourism beyond its facile association with leisure to consider its implications for development, environmental protection, heritage conservation, and the commodification of history. Treating tourism as an enterprise that trades in everything from sensory fantasies to cheap cosmetic surgeries and pictures of tropical paradise, this course contemplates the role of the imaginary in the political and the political in the imaginary. Through careful analysis of travel journals, audiovisual material and first hand accounts from culture brokers and travelers alike, we’ll explore the industry’s colonial past in relation to Black, Indigenous and queer people’s efforts to bend tourism towards a more libratory future. While geographically situated in Latin America and the Caribbean, the course draws from comparative contexts in continental Africa and the United States to critically analyze tourism in relation to colonialism, the plantation economy, African diasporic kinship and the afterlives of slavery. Readings include classic texts such as Jamaica Kincaid’s (1988) A Small Place, Kamala Kempadoo’s Sun, Sex and Gold (1999) Paulla Ebron’s Performing Africa (2002), Mimi Sheller´s Consuming the Caribbean (2003) and Saidiya Hartman’s Loose Your Mother (2008). These works will be paired with Florence Babb’s The Tourism Encounter (2010) Jemima Pierre’s Predicament of Blackness (2009) Krista Thompson’s An Eye for the Tropics (2016), and recent ethnographies such as Christen Smith’s Afro-Paradise (2016), Megan Rivers-Moore’s Gringo Gluch (2016) Patricia Pinho’s Mapping Diaspora (2018), Bianca Williams’s The Pursuit of Happiness (2018), Corinna Campbell’s The Cultural Work (2020), and Anadelia A. Romo’s Selling Black Brazil (2022).

· Course Component: Lecture

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER 134Y: The Philosophy and Politics of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Instructor: Brandon Terry

Wednesday 12:00pm - 2:45pm

· Class Number:19172 Course ID:226521

Description:

This seminar for graduate students and undergraduates with backgrounds in political theory, philosophy, or African American Studies undertakes a rigorous examination of the political lives and philosophical thought of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Through their speeches, writings, debates, and unpublished texts, we will engage critically with their evolving visions of justice, democracy, and social transformation. We will read both figures in dialogue with their intellectual influences and critics to evaluate their views of liberalism, nationalism, civil disobedience, political violence, self-defense, internationalism, political theology, democracy, war, and economic justice among other themes. By studying these towering figures side by side, this course will

illuminate fundamental questions about political ethics, racial justice, and the possibilities and limits of radical social change in the past and present.

· Course Component: Seminar

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER 146X: A Black History of Electronic Dance Music

Instructor: George Aumoithe

Wednesdays 12:00pm - 2:45pm

· Class Number:15947 Course ID:222657

Description:

Electronic dance music. Mentioning the genre elicits questions over origins and boundaries. While oft forgotten, Black queer, femme, and non-binary people invented the modern-day genre’s arrangement, composition, production, and distribution, undergirding distressed communities’ sonic landscapes, enlivening social movements, and seeding multibillion-dollar markets. From disco to house to techno, each seminar will crisscross wide-ranging geographies including Chicago, Detroit, New York, and Manchester, United Kingdom. We will pair essential LPs, EPs, singles, and bootleg recordings with thematically linked texts in history, musicology, and theory to ask how Black electronic musicians responded to history’s unfolding.

· Course Component: Seminar

· Divisional Distribution: Arts and Humanities

AFRAMER 166X: African Language Archives in disciplines and professions

Instructors: John Mugane

Mondays & Wednesdays 10:30am – 11:45am

· Class Number:15209 Course ID:224461

Description:

Language is a fundamental for thought and communication, playing a vital role in human achievements and societal progress. This course explores African languages as rich sources of knowledge that require collection and cataloguing using current AI technologies. By examining archives of African thought and life, students will delve into how archival information can be shared across languages. The course emphasizes the significance of African languages as instruments of thought, expressed through signs and sounds, in various domains such as constitution writing, food production, governance, religion, and environmental use/protection. Students will critically engage with the organic sociality of vernacular spaces, including church rooms, courtrooms, classrooms, hospital rooms, and entrepreneurial spaces, where African languages are linguistically accessible.

Course Objectives:

- Understand the role of language as an instrument of thought and communication in African societies.

- Explore African languages as archives of knowledge and their importance in preserving cultural heritage.

- Gain knowledge of AI technologies and their application in collecting and cataloguing African language archives.

- Examine the significance of archival information sharing across different African languages.

- Analyze the critical engagements that take place in vernacular spaces and their impact on African communities.

- Understand the linguistic accessibility of African languages in various social contexts.

· Course Component: Lecture

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER 197: Poverty, Race, and Health

Instructor: David Williams

Tuesdays 12:45pm - 2:45pm

· Class Number:13718 Course ID:123435

Description:

This course critically examines the health status of the poor, and of African Americans and other socially disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups in the US. Attention will be focused on the patterned ways in which the health of these groups is embedded in the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts, and arrangements of US society. Topics covered include the meaning and measurement of race, the ways in which racism affects health, the historic uses of minorities in medical research, how acculturation and migration affects health, and an examination of the specific health problems that disproportionately affect nondominant racial groups.

· Course Component: Lecture

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER 201: Theory and Race in Africa

Instructor: Daniel Agbiboa

Thursdays 3:45pm - 5:45pm

· Class Number: 17065 Course ID: 222201

Description:

This course focuses on theoretical debates and frameworks in African studies from the past to the postcolony. The course strives to open up a critical, open-ended discussion that treats Africa as People, and reclaims the epistemic freedom and virtue of African people through a double-consciousness of deprovincializing Africa and provincializing Europe. The course will examine the lines of knowledge production in Africa, beyond hegemonic Eurocentric knowledge-production, with the aim of achieving what the writer Chinua Achebe calls a “balance of stories.” What, for instance, does a decolonized, African-centered approach to knowledge production look like? Ultimately, the course belies entrenched and racialized notions of Africa as a residual category, the study of which adds nothing (theoretically) meaningful to world knowledge or the human condition.

· Course Component: Lecture

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER 219A: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America

Instructor: Alejandro de la Fuente & Paulina Alberto

Thursdays 12:45pm - 2:45pm

· Class Number: 17069 Course ID:213432

Description:

This yearlong seminar introduces students to current questions and debates in the study of race and ethnicity in Latin America, from the colonial period to the present. Our seminar answers the call, issued by anthropologist Peter Wade (1997), to produce scholarship integrating the study of Africans and their descendants, along with indigenous peoples, as participants in shared processes of racial formation, nation making, and state building. Through the systematic comparison of several cases, the course discusses how ideas of race have shaped processes of nation and state formation in Latin America, shaping opportunities for mobilization and public policies; how racial identities have been formed and invoked for different cultural and political purposes; and how ideas of race and ethnicity have contributed to the stratification of Latin American societies, which are among the most unequal in the world.

· Course Component: Seminar

· Divisional Distribution: Social Science

AFRAMER 221: Comparative Slavery & the Law: Africa, Latin America, & the US: Seminar

Instructor: Emmanuel Akyeampong & Alejandro de la Fuente

Wednesdays 12:45pm – 2:45pm

· Class Number:18711 Course ID:110499

Description:

This seminar surveys the booming historiographies of slavery and the law in Latin America, the United States, and Africa. Earlier generations of scholars relied heavily on European legal traditions to draw sharp contrasts between U.S. and Latin American slavery. The most recent scholarship, however, approaches the legal history of slavery through slaves' legal initiatives and actions. These initiatives were probably informed by the Africans' legal cultures, as many of them came from societies where slavery was practiced. Our seminar puts African legal regimes (customary law, Islamic law) at the center of our explorations concerning slaves' legal actions in the Americas.

Jointly Offered with:

Harvard Divinity School as HIST 2707

· Course Component: Seminar

· Divisional Distribution: Social Sciences

AFRAMER 224: African Postcolonial State

Instructor: David Glovsky

Wednesdays 9:45am - 11:45am

· Class Number: 17084 Course ID:226221

Description:

This course, primarily for graduate students, is designed to analyze the form and function of the postcolonial state in Africa. Decolonization left African states and policymaker with many decisions regarding what states should do politically, economically, socially, and culturally. How should states create a national identity out of an emerging anti-colonial consciousness? Given the challenges of colonial rule, how could postcolonial state create vibrant economies and durable political systems, especially given the damage done by colonial rule. This seminar will engage with the newest works by historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and other scholars who have analyzed the postcolonial state in Africa, drawing on case studies from across the continent.

· Course Component: Seminar

· Divisional Distribution: Social Science

AFRAMER 225: People of Print

Instructor: Tinashe Mushakavanhu

Tuesdays 12:00pm - 2:45pm

· Class Number: 19808 Course ID:226572

Description:

When does an African book begin or end? This course investigates new and experimental African book forms that have emerged in recent years. Since 2000, a new generation of writers, readers, and publishers has moved away from the African Writers Series model toward a more artisan approach—one that integrates design, print, and aesthetics. Our primary focus will be the Chimurenga Library (based in Cape Town, South Africa), which, in its rhizomatic way, references contemporary and past systems of knowledge. The history of print in Africa has largely been shaped by the logic of colonial control and mission education. Here, we will explore how African literary production has undergone radical reformulations in the 21st century, transforming both the literary canon and the archive as conceptual and physical spaces—sites where memories are preserved, history is decided, and possibilities for reactivation emerge. We will consider the African text as a performative and participatory event that extends the book beyond its traditional boundaries and into dynamic modes of engagement.

· Course Component: Seminar

· Divisional Distribution: Arts and Humanities

AFRAMER 234: Black Classicisms: A Research Seminar and Pedagogy Workshop

Instructor: Emily Greenwood

Wednesdays 3:00pm - 5:00pm

· Class Number: 19065 Course ID:220551

Description:

rom the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley writing in Boston in the 1760s and 1770s, to contemporary authors and artists in Africa, the Caribbean, and the US, this lecture course will explore uses of ancient Greek and Roman Classics in the literatures, arts, and thought of Africa and the Black Diaspora. We will analyze how African and black diasporic authors and intellectuals have engaged with, revised, and re-imagined the classics of ancient Greece and Rome, both to expose and critique discourses of racism, imperialism, colonialism, and white supremacy, and as a rich source of radical self-expression.

The course will be arranged thematically, taking in uses of Classics in literature, art, journalism, and politics. Writers, artists, and politicians whose work and ideas we will study include Phillis Wheatley, William Sanders Scarborough, Anna Julia Cooper, Pauline Hopkins, Mary Church Terrell, Edmonia Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, Aaron Douglas, Romare Bearden, Bob Thompson, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Fran Ross, Toni Morrison, Rita Dove, Harryette Mullen, Spike Lee, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, Ola Rotimi, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, Wole Soyinka, Njabulo Ndebele, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Austin Clarke, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Dionne Brand. In addition to works by individual authors, lectures will also attend to the circulation of Greek and Roman classical myths, history, and thought in vernacular cultures. Throughout, we will be attentive to the relationship between national contexts and transnational histories and networks, and the phenomenon of classical appropriation in invented modern traditions.

Jointly Offered with: Faculty of Arts & Sciences as CLASPHIL 2234 Faculty of Arts & Sciences as COMPLIT 234A

· Course Component: Seminar

· Divisional Distribution: Arts and Humanities

AFRAMER 245: Pedagogies of Liberation: Race, Gender, and Class(rooms)

Instructor: Doris Sommer & Adriana Gutierrez

Tuesdays 12:00pm - 2:45pm

· Class Number: 19233 Course ID:226215

Description:

This course is meant as preparation and accompaniment for new teachers of language and literature. It is designed for anyone dedicated to developing a pedagogical praxis that alternates between theory and implementation. The objective is to achieve a rigorous theoretical framework for the formative work of language instruction that supports literary analysis. The exemplary teachers featured in this course display a remarkable coherence of good practices that remain "alternative" to normalized approaches that are less effective intellectually and less supportive socially. For the final project, students will present a potential series of lessons inspired by one or more of the featured theorists.

For graduate students of literature in RLL, language arts are the featured vehicle for language instruction. Learning and teaching Romance languages combines technical mastery with creative and critical skills. To develop this interlocking range of skills we count on foundational pedagogies from Romance Language territories and beyond. Our pedagogical pioneers share a mission to democratize societies marked by legacies of slavery, extractionism, and patriarchy.

Class Notes:

There will be an additional 1-hour clinic with Dr. Gutierrez, time to be arranged.

Jointly Offered with: Faculty of Arts & Sciences as ROM-LANG 205

· Course Component: Seminar

· Divisional Distribution: Social Science

AFRAMER 310: Individual Reading Tutorial

Instructor: Contact the Course Coordinator (Keirsten_Melbourne@fas.harvard.edu)

-TBA

· Class Number:13623 Course ID:115731

Description:

Allows students to work with an individual member of the faculty in a weekly tutorial.

Course Notes:

Students may not register for this course until their adviser and the faculty member with whom they plan to work have approved a program of study.

· Course Component: Reading Course

· Divisional Distribution: None

AFRAMER 390: Individual Research

· Class Number:13624 Course ID:115732

Description:

Requires students to identify and carry out a research project under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Graduate students may use this course to begin work on the research paper required for admission to candidacy.

· Course Component: Reading and Research Course

AFRAMER 391: Directed Writing

Instructor: Contact the Course Coordinator (Keirsten_Melbourne@fas.harvard.edu)

-TBA

· Class Number: 13625 Course ID: 119827

Description:

Requires students to identify a major essay and carry it out under the guidance of a member of the faculty. Graduate students may use this course to begin to work on the research paper that is a requirement of admission to candidacy.

· Course Component: Reading and Research Course

AFRAMER 392: Teaching, Writing, and Research

Description:

Allows students to meet necessary credit threshold while completing fellowship work and the like.

· Class Number:13622 Course ID:210981

· Course Component: Reading and Research

· Divisional Distribution: None

AFRAMER 398: Reading and Research

-TBA

· Class Number:14514 Course ID:122706

Course Notes:

Permission of the instructor and the Director of Graduate Studies is required for enrollment.

· Course Component:Reading and Research

· Divisional Distribution:None

AFRAMER 399: Direction of Doctoral Dissertations

-TBA

· Class Number:13626 Course ID:115733

· Course Component: Reading and Research

· Divisional Distribution:None