WGSS 741a / AMST 7740a / FILM 6810a, The Photographic Memory Workshop  Laura Wexler

This seminar considers landmark examples of photography’s cultural work in producing, cementing and erasing individual and collective memory.  Topics to be considered include but are not confined to “memory, post-memory and counter-memory”; “the biopolitics of images”; “the visuality of violence”; “photography’s place and space”; and the “potential history of photography.” Students are invited to develop and present their own case studies on topics of interest. Readings encompass: The Unseen Truth by Sarah Lewis; Camera Geologica by Siobhan Angus; The Unintended by Monica Huerta; Race Stories by Maurice Berger; Through a Native Lens by Nicole Dawn Strathman; When a Photograph is Home by Leigh Raiford; From These Roots by Tamara Lanier; and Collaboration: A Potential History of Photography by Ariella Azoulay, Wendy Ewald, Susan Meiselas, Leigh Raiford, and Laura Wexler. Guest lectures and travel to exhibitions are anticipated.
T 9:25am-11:15am

WGSS 6310a / AMST 8808a / FILM 6310a, Media, Embodiment, and the Senses  Neta Alexander

This graduate seminar examines the intersections of critical disability studies and media theory to challenge conventional understandings of communication, technology, and culture. Through critical engagement with contemporary film, media, art, and design, this course explores how all technology functions as “assistive” technology and interrogates the pervasive idealization of able-bodiedness. Readings, screenings, discussions, and practice-based assignments encourage students to rethink normative assumptions about the body, ability, and accessibility, moving beyond audio-visual approaches to media.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 6600a, Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies  Joseph Fischel and Linn Tonstad

Introduction to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies as a field of knowledge and to the interdiscipline’s structuring questions and tensions. The course genealogizes feminist and queer knowledge production, and the institutionalization of WGSS, by examining several of our key terms.
M 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 6608b, Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East  Eda Pepi

This seminar explores the complex interplay between gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the Middle East and North Africa. We examine how they are both shaped by and shape experiences of nationality, migration, and statelessness. Highlighting how gender and sexual minorities, and the gendered regulation of life, more broadly, both animate and contest colonial legacies tied to a racialized notion of “modernity.” Through ethnography, history, and literature, students confront a political economy of intimacies that continuously reshape what it means to be or not to be a citizen. Our approach extends beyond borders and laws to include the everyday acts of citizenship that rework race, religion, and ethnicity across transnational fronts. We discuss how people navigate their lives in the everyday, from the ordinary poetry of identity and belonging to the spectacular drama of war and conflict. Our goal is to challenge orientalist legacies that dismiss theoretical insights from scholarship on and from this region by labeling it as focused on exceptional cases instead of addressing “universal” issues. Instead, we take seriously that the specific historical and social contexts of the Middle East and North Africa reveal how connections based on gender and sexuality within and across families and social classes are deeply entwined with racial narratives of state authority and political sovereignty on a global scale.
Th 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 6620a / AMST 6619a / ER&M 6520 / HSHM 7920a, Enduring Conditions: Chronic Illness, Disability, Care, and Access  Kalindi Vora

This interdisciplinary course brings together scholarship on access and care that bridges concerns in the fields of disability studies and humanistic approaches to chronic illness. Scholarly texts are drawn from the fields of critical race and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, anthropology and sociology of medicine, history, and feminist science and technology studies (fSTS). Seminar participants also engage with the arts and media as critical sites for understanding culture work bringing together knowledge in disability and chronic illness spaces. To embrace community-based research and knowledge sharing, the course features regular guest lectures from grassroots disability justice organizers and culture workers. The course is offered in a hybrid format. To consider what disability studies and work on chronic illness can build together, we explore the work of Moya Bailey, Aimi Hamraie, Jina B. Kim, Sami Schalk, Akemi Nishida, Ryan Cartwright, and Arthur Kleinman, among others. Permission of instructor is required. Undergraduates may also enroll with permission of instructor.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 7700b, Feminist and Queer Theories  Evren Savci

This course is designed as a graduate introduction to feminist and queer thought. It is organized by a number of key terms and institutions around which feminist and queer thinking has clustered, such as the state, the law, religion, family and kinship, capitalism and labor, the body and language, knowledge and affect, globalization and imperialism, militarism and security. The “conversations” that happen around each term speak to the richness of feminist and queer theories, the multidimensionality of feminist and queer intellectual and political concerns, and the “need to think our way out of these crises,” to cite Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty. The aim is to leave students appreciating the hard labor of feminist and queer thought, and understanding the urgencies out of which such thinking emerges.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 7718b / ANTH 7818b / ER&M 6606b / SPAN 9718b, Multi-Sited Ethnography: Trans-Atlantic Port Cities in Colombia and Spain  Eda Pepi and Ana Ramos-Zayas

Critical to colonial, imperial, and capitalist expansion, the Atlantic offers a dynamic setting for adapting ethnographic practices to address questions around interconnected oppressions, revolts, and revolutions that are foundational to global modernity. Anchored in a Spanish and a Colombian port city, this course engages trans-Atlantic “worlding” through a multi-sited and historically grounded ethnographic lens. Las Palmas, the earliest mid-Atlantic port and Europe’s first settler colony in Africa, and Cartagena, once the principal gateway connecting Spain and its American empire, illuminate urgent contemporary issues such as climate, displacement, inter-regional subjectivities, and commerce. During a spring recess field experience (March 8–16, 2026), students will immerse themselves for four nights each in Las Palmas and Cartagena, developing critical “tracking” skills that bridge ethnographic practice with cultural theory. Preparation for fieldwork includes an on-campus curriculum, organized around Cartagena and Las Palmas, and sessions with Yale Ethnography Hub faculty, covering different methodologies. As part of this broader programming, the curriculum delves as well into trans-Atlantic migrations from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa that have transformed port cities, labor and aesthetic practices, class-making racial formations, and global geopolitics. After recess, the course shifts toward independent work, as students synthesize field-collected data and insights into a collaborative multimodal group project and individual ethnographic papers. Instructor Permission: Interested students must apply by November first via the course website. This course does not have a shopping period, but students may withdraw by the university deadlines in April. Prerequisite: Conversational and reading proficiency in Spanish. Readings are in English and Spanish, with assignments accepted in either language.
Th 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 7730b / HIST 8932b / HSHM 7360b, Health Politics, Body Politics  Naomi Rogers

A reading seminar on struggles to control, pathologize, and normalize human bodies, with a particular focus on science, medicine, and the state, both in North America and in a broader global health context. Topics include disease, race, and politics; repression and regulation of birth control; the politics of adoption; domestic and global population control; feminist health movements; and the pathologizing and identity politics of disabled people.
W 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 7757a / ANTH 7853a, Feminist Anthropology  Eda Pepi

This seminar explores the impact of feminist theory on anthropology and interdisciplinary ethnography, charting its influence from the decline of structural functionalism to the embrace of poststructuralist and post-colonial perspectives. It engages feminist contributions on pivotal debates over the universality of women's subordination, the denaturalization of kinship, and the reframing of gender and sexuality as performative, highlighting the intersection of the “sex/gender system” with other analytical categories on a global scale. Through the feminist reevaluation of kinship studies, once the bedrock of anthropology, the course takes up how traditional analyses of biological, social, and societal reproduction that treat politics, economy, kinship, and religion as distinct cultural domains naturalize power and inequality. This paradigm shift inspired empirically informed interdisciplinary analyses across the social sciences and humanities—including in women’s studies, Black and Latina studies, queer studies, masculinity studies, affect theory, and science and technology studies. As such, the seminar is also an invitation to participate in both hopeful and skeptical new visions of anthropology—to dream of an “otherwise” future for our and other fields.
F 3:30pm-5:20pm

WGSS 7769b / ENGL 6742b, Fiction, Didacticism, and Political Critique: 1789–1818  Jill Campbell

A study of writings that seek a specific effect in their reader—whether didactic instruction and moral formation, or an instigation to take action toward political change—and their uneasy alliance in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with the literary genre of prose fiction. How do writings that seek to inform or reform the real person or the real world put fictional narratives to use? How is the genre of the novel shaped, explicitly or implicitly, by writing to a specific “end”? Texts include novels, tales for children, life-writing, poetry with a “cause,” polemical essays; possible authors include Olaudah Equiano, Edmund Burke, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Inchbald, Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Anna Barbauld, and Mary Shelley.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 7779a / AMST 8805a / HSAR 6720a / RLST 6990a, Sensational Materialities: Sensory Cultures in History, Theory, and Method  Sally Promey

This interdisciplinary seminar explores the sensory and material histories of (often religious) images, objects, buildings, and performances as well as the potential for the senses to spark contention in material practice. While course content focuses on United States things and religions (given the professor’s areas of expertise and academic appointments), the course also considers broader geographical and categorical parameters so as to invite intellectual engagement with the most challenging and decisive developments in relevant fields, including recent literatures on material agencies. The goal is to investigate possibilities for scholarly examination of a robust human sensorium of sound, taste, touch, scent, and sight—and even “sixth senses”—the points where the senses meet material things (and vice versa) in life and practice. Topics include the cultural construction of the senses and sensory hierarchies; investigation of the sensory capacities of things; and specific episodes of sensory contention in and among various religious traditions. In addition, the course invites thinking beyond the “Western” five senses to other locations and historical possibilities for identifying the dynamics of sensing human bodies in religious practices, experience, and ideas. Course is by permission of instructor; qualified undergraduates are welcome. In order to request permission, please email the professor (sally.promey@yale.edu) with responses to the following questions: (1) Why are you interested in taking this seminar?; (2) what educational, intellectual, artistic, or other experiences do you bring to the seminar’s subjects?; (3) how does the content of this course relate to your own career and/or personal aspirations?
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 8500a, The Genealogies of Our Now  Roderick Ferguson

This course investigates the often unread genealogy of contemporary scholarship around gender and sexuality in classic and canonical writings coming from psychoanalysis, political theory, philosophy, cultural studies, ethnic studies and so on. The course is designed to give students a sense that interdisciplinary scholarship is built on the works and inquiries from earlier intellectual debates and struggles. Likely authors are Immanuel Kant, Freidrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Anna Julia Cooper, W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone De Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Stuart Hall, etc.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm

WGSS 9900a or b, Colloquium and Working Group  Scott Herring

The course is made up of two components: the WGSS Graduate Colloquium, in which graduate students present ongoing research (meets every two to three weeks); and the WGSS Working Group, in which faculty present pre-circulated works-in-progress for critical feedback from the WGSS community (meets every two to three weeks).  ½ Course cr
HTBA

WGSS 9960a / CPLT 8810a / ENGL 6860a, Literary Theory  Caleb Smith

What is literary theory today, and what is its history? The aim of the course is to introduce students to central concepts in theory and explore their relation to method. We examine the variety of approaches available within the field of literary studies, including older ones such as Russian formalism, Critical Race Theory, New Criticism, deconstruction, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, as well as newer ones like actor-network theory and digital humanities research. We explore the basic tenets and histories of these theories in a way that is both critical and open-minded, and discuss their comparative advantages and pitfalls. The focus is on recurrent paradigms, arguments, and topics, and on transhistorical relations among our various schools of literary-theoretical thought. Readings might include work by René Wellek, Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Spivak, Bruno Latour, Judith Butler, Northrop Frye, Fred Moten, and many others.
W 1:30pm-3:20pm