Professors: Matt Liebmann & Dan Smail
T, TH - 12:00pm to 1:15pm 

When does history begin? To judge by the typical history textbook, the answer is straightforward: six thousand years ago. So what about the tens of thousands of years of human existence described by archaeology and related disciplines? Is that history too? This introduction to human history offers a framework for joining the entirety of the human past, from the long ago to the present day, in a single narrative that stretches across many disciplines. We will explore a series of interrelated themes...

Professors: Tiya Miles & Walter Johnson
Th - 12:45pm to 2:45pm

This seminar will convene scholars, public-facing intellectuals, writers, and practitioners whose work falls under the broad umbrella of ecological study and care rooted in Black, and/or Indigenous, and/or feminist, and/or community-minded thought, culture, and history. This flexible thematic has been chosen to inspire new questions, highlight key issues, structure constructive dialogue, spark fresh ideas, and support works in progress in the academic arenas loosely deemed “black ecologies” and “...

Professor: Chris Pexa
M, W - 1:30pm to 2:45pm

“Indians are an invention,” declares an unnamed hunter in Gerald Vizenor’s (White Earth Ojibwe) 1978 novel, Bearheart. The hunter’s point, as Vizenor has explained in interviews and elsewhere, is not that Indigenous peoples don’t exist, but that the term “Indian” is a colonial fiction or shorthand that captures, essentializes, and thus erases a vast diversity of Indigenous lives and peoples. This course begins from the contention that other categories, and maybe most consequentially that of “nature,” have not only...