2025-2026

These two philosopher-teachers, Mengzi (Mencius) in 4th century BCE China and Epictetus in the 2nd century CE Greco-Roman world, both foregrounded an embodied ethics, and both were concerned with questions of living in harmony with nature, achieving freedom from external constraints, and dealing with the disruptive turbulence of passionate emotions. This course is a literary and philosophical comparative study of Mengzi’s writings alongside the Handbook and Discourses of Epictetus. Course readings are all in English, and no knowledge of classical Chinese or Greek language or philosophy is needed, but separate meetings can be scheduled for students interested in reading either of these texts in the original language.

The Jordanian artist Sulaïman Majali writes that Arabfuturism/s is part of “a growing counterculture of thought and action that through time will be found and used in the construction of alternative states of becoming” (2015). For Majali, like many contemporary artists interrogating the possibilities and limits of futurity amidst territorial, existential, ecological, and ideological states of crisis, Arabfuturism, Gulf Futurism, and Muslim Futurism—like their sister projects of Afrofuturism/s, Sinofuturism, and Indigenous Futurism—speak to how speculative cultures turn to sites of historical or present rupture in order to envision alternate, possible, or impossible worlds. These speculative projects can be understood as a critical mode of reading assemblages of colonialism, capitalism, and biopolitics that theorize other ways of being, knowing, and imagining. These counter-futures disrupt the geo-spatial logics of the past, present, and assumed future to not only “write alternative histories but also articulate counterfuturisms as imaginaries of times-to-come” (Jussi Parikka, 55).

Beyond the toll of US-backed “forever wars,” recent years have cast the MENA region into unprecedented turmoil. We have also witnessed the promise of revolutions sweeping the region following the 2010 Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia that catapulted the Arab Spring across Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain, and more recently, Lebanon. While moments of catastrophe, crisis, and collapse may seem antithetical to imaginaries of the future, the capacity to dream or speculate is essential to undoing to sites of epistemic and ontological violence, while also charting possible paths forwards. Moreover, speculative acts of world-building can realize the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination that empower us to envision entirely new archeologies of the future.  

This seminar reflects on questions of speculation, imagination, and futurity across modern works of literature, film, and art from the Middle East and North Africa. It asks: how can representations of apocalypse, eschatology, dystopia, science fiction, (non)futurity, or fantasy help us grapple with the very real existential threats to communities across the MENA region? How are dystopian technologies or aesthetics being mobilized in our current geopolitical landscape? What are the existing and emergent formal, critical, or conceptual vocabularies for such times of crisis, and what do they tell us about the present-future? How do they shape questions of representation, mediation, and aesthetic value? Finally, what are the political and ethical stakes of futurity as an existential, epistemic, and aesthetic project? 

The Japanese word kawaii (commonly translated as "cute" or "adorable") has long been a part of Japanese culture, but, originating from schoolgirl subculture of the 1970s, today's conception of kawaiihas become ubiquitous as a cultural keyword of contemporary Japanese life. We now find kawaii in clothing, food, toys, engineering, films, music, personal appearance, behavior and mannerisms, and even in government. With the popularity of Japanese entertainment, fashion and other consumer products abroad, kawaii has also become a global cultural idiom in a process Christine Yano has called "Pink Globalization". With the key figures of Hello Kitty and Rilakkuma as our guides, this course explores the many dimensions of kawaii culture, in Japan and globally, from beauty and aesthetics, affect and psychological dimensions, consumerism and marketing, gender, sexuality and queerness, to racism, orientalism and robot design.

Non-human animals are ubiquitous in India’s literary and visual cultures, whether as characters in epics, fables and moral tale; as objects of study by court scholars and painters; as pets and hunting companions; as part of the Hindu pantheon (such as the elephant-headed god Ganapathi, or the monkey god Hanuman) or as symbols and metaphors. This course explores the complex interactions among human and non-human animals and the realms of   animals/mortals/immortals through examples from India’s literatures, Indian painting and film - across times, places, spaces and religious traditions. It will conclude with contemporary debates on animal activism and provide a non-Western entry point into the field of animal studies. Naisargi Dave’s Indifference will be a key text for us throughout the quarter. 

This course offers a foundation in queer theory. In order to understand the contested definitions of the term “queer” and explore the contours of the field’s major debates, we will work to historicize queer theory’s emergence in the 1980s and 1990s amidst the AIDS crisis. Reading texts by key figures like Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, Lorde, Bersani, Crimp, Warner, Halperin, Dinshaw, Edelman, Anzaldúa, Ferguson, and Muñoz in addition to prominent issues of journals like GLQ, differences, and Signs, we will approach these pieces as historical artifacts and place these theorists within the communities of intellectuals, activists, and artists out of which their work emerged. We will, thus, imagine queer theory as a literary practice of mournful and militant devotion, trace queer theory’s relationship to feminism and critical race theory, critique the hagiographic tendency of the academic star system, and interrogate the assumptions of queer theory’s secularity.

This course explores cinematic and literary works of horror (the uncanny, gothic, sci-fi, paranormal, psychological thriller, killer/slasher, gore) from around the world. As a mode of speculative fiction, the genre envisions possible or imagined worlds that amplify curiosities, dreads, fears, terrors, phobias, and paranoias which simultaneously repel and attract. Horror frequently explores the boundaries of what it means to be human by dwelling on imaginaries of the non-human and other. It often exploits the markers of difference that preoccupy our psychic, libidinal, and social lifeworlds—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality, but also the fundamental otherness that is other peoples’ minds and bodies. Interrogating the genre’s tension between desire and fear, our course will focus on the centrality of abjection and the monstrous feminine—as both thematic and aesthetic tropes—to works of horror. Films and fiction will be paired with theoretical readings that contextualize the genre of horror while considering its critical implications in relation to biopolitical and geopolitical forms of power. 

Content Warning: Course materials will feature graphic, violent, and oftentimes disturbing images and subjects. Enrolled students will be expected to watch, read, and discuss all course materials. 

Elective writing workshop for PhD students in Comparative Literature to develop and refine skills in various modes of writing, editing, and revision. Writing assignments may include developing conference papers, writing the dissertation prospectus, generating a chapter draft, reformulating a paper for submission as a journal article, and other professional writing development to prepare students for writing in the academy and communicating with readers. 

This seminar explores the diverse spiritual and sentient lifeforms within Islamic cosmology that exist beyond the human-from jinn, angels, and ghosts to demons and devils. We will focus on theological, scientific, philosophical, anthropological, and historical accounts of these creatures across a variety of texts, as well as their literary and filmic afterlives in contemporary cultural representations. In so doing, we consider the various religious, social, and cultural inflections that shape local cosmological imaginaries. We ask how reflecting on the nonhuman world puts the human itself in question, including such concerns as sexuality and sexual difference, the boundaries of the body, reason and madness, as well as the limits of knowledge.

This course will examine the themes of exile, migration and diaspora in a variety of literary texts from the late 20th and early 21st centuries in dialogue with recent cultural theoretical work. The texts to be studied will include novels, poetry, short stories, essays, and films from three sets of locations: authors of South Asian (Indian and Sri Lankan) origin in North America and Europe; writers of Turkish, Japanese and Indian origin in Germany; and Latin American-born writers writing from abroad, in addition to Johny Pitts' ethnographic book Afropean. Notes from Black Europe (2020). Besides charting the theoretical coordinates of exile, migration and diaspora studies, we will explore questions such as: How has the accelerated movement of people, ideas, goods, and cultural practices affected literary authors of different racial, class, gender, religious, and national origins? What is the meaning of belonging, home and homeland? How do authors relate to concepts of the nation, national identity, and nationalism? What happens to the physical body, affect, love and intimacy, the family, and intergenerational relations in migration? What are the narrative and lyric patterns and tropes of writing between worlds? Is there a "poetics of dislocation"? How do writers handle issues of language, the mother tongue and bi- or multilingualism? All texts will be read in English translation, but we will also make translation a central issue of discussion by examining original texts whenever possible.