Fall 2023 Course List

• Instructor: Dr. Debra Vidali
• Meeting Days/Time: Mondays & Wednesdays; 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM

In this freshman seminar we will learn to listen and engage with a range of contemporary accounts about the connections between Life, Land & Place. We will do close readings of ethnographic, philosophical, fiction, and non-fiction works by scholars, writers, artists, and knowledge producers from a range of Native American, Indigenous, and Euro-American cultures, nations, and locations, including:  Anishinaabe, Dakota, Italy, Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk), Muscogee, Onöndowa’ga:’ (Seneca), U.S, and Western Apache. Through periodic fieldtrips, excursions, and outdoor work, we will experience land-based learning. Our main themes are people's lives in relation to land, non-human species, the natural environment, care, sovereignty, social responsibility,#landback, Indigeneity, and ethics. 

• Instructor: Dr. Mandy Suhr-Sytsma
• Meeting Days/Time:  Section 11: Tuesdays and Thursdays; 10:00 AM - 11:15 AM; Section 12: Tuesdays and Thursdays; 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM

In this interdisciplinary writing course, we will read the 2019 non-fiction book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States for Young People and engage several shorter works by Indigenous creators. In addition to readings, class activities, regular short writing assignments, and the portfolio/cover letter required in all first-year writing classes, students will complete three major projects: a paper analyzing a Native news media text, a multimodal presentation on a contemporary Indigenous leader, and a narrative nonfiction essay reflecting on personal experiences learning about or with Indigenous peoples. 

• Instructor: Dr. Mandy Suhr-Sytsma
• Meeting Days/Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays; 2:30 PM - 3:45 PM

This course focuses primarily on recent writing (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and drama) by Native American women: Joy Harjo, Mary Kathryn Nagle, Layli Long Soldier, Natalie Diaz, Gwen Westerman, and others. We will read this literature in relation to both historical and contemporary concerns. How do Native women writers deploy diverse literary styles? How do they illuminate Indigenous women’s experiences with colonization, sexual violence, and intergenerational trauma as well as with resistance, healing, and empowerment? What can we all learn by centering the experiences and voices of Native American women? 

• Instructor: Dr. Loren Michael Mortimer
• Meeting Days/Time: Mondays & Wednesdays; 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM

This course introduces students to the histories of Native peoples in North America before 1868. Integrating the materials and methods of Native American and Indigenous Studies, the class takes an interdisciplinary approach to the past and considers themes such as resistance to colonialism, maintenance of political sovereignty, and adaptation to cultural change. Because Emory University occupies Muscogee (Creek) land, this course grounds its panoramic investigation of diverse yet interconnected Native American histories with a special focus on the Indigenous peoples who lived, worked, produced knowledge on, and nurtured the land where the university’s Oxford and Atlanta campuses are now located. Course lectures, assigned media, primary sources, class discussions, and experiential learning opportunities developfoundational knowledge of Native North American histories while also contributing to campus-wide efforts to (re)establish meaningful and improved relations with Southeastern tribal nations. 

• Instructor: Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery and  Dr. Yanna Yannakakis
• Meeting Days/Time: Thursdays; 2:30 PM - 5:30 PM

How do we define Indigenous history? How has it been colonized, and why decolonize it? This course addresses communities in the Americas in a thematic way, emphasizing theories and methodologies from ethnohistory, collaborative and engaged scholarship, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Rather than looking at Indigenous history in isolation, we begin with the assumption that Native people have encountered, negotiated and changed their societies in collaboration with other Native groups and peoples from other continents. Translation, diverse knowledges, and alternate forms of recording history will therefore be central themes, as we consider how Native peoples forged new economies, societies, forms of spirituality, and legal norms through diverse encounters. 

We will explore current debates about the definitions and uses of terms such as decoloniality, indigeneity, empire, migration, and sovereignty. As we consider these concepts, we will bring a critical eye to them, taking stock of whose voices are louder than others and who offers paradigms that we can share as scholars working in different disciplines, time periods, and places. 

The scope of the course is broad, and as such, does not pretend to cover the whole hemisphere. We will seek out hemispheric comparisons, putting Indigenous histories of South America, Mesoamerica, and North America into conversation. We will read across different spaces, and across broad chronologies, inclusive of deep time and more recent pasts. The course will include scholarship and narratives produced by Indigenous scholars and scholars working in collaboration with Indigenous communities. Indigenous narrative forms and historiography will be featured with an eye to how people have recorded their histories. 

• Instructor: Dr. Heidi Senungetuk
• Meeting Day/Time: Mondays & Wednesdays: 2:30 PM - 3:45 PM

This course is an introduction to a diverse selection of Indigenous musics of North America. Particular attention will be paid to ways in which music articulates and shapes issues of tradition and modernity, place and identity, revitalization and resurgence, and sovereignty and self-determination. Ethnomusicological and interdisciplinary methods will be used to examine historical and social dynamics behind Indigenous musical and cultural arts in the 21st century.

Music majors: this course counts as a Category B or C.

ITAL190: Social Justice in Italy and Beyond Through Memoir 

• Instructor: Dr. Christine Ristaino 
• Meeting Day/Time: Monday and Wednesday, 11:30 PM - 12:45 PM

We find ourselves at a critical point in the world’s history, where illness, violence, immigration, climate change, protest, poverty, and innovation pose questions we all need to explore in order to find solutions to the world’s greatest challenges. Studying social justice movements and struggle in Italy, the United States, and beyond will help us become more knowledgeable about these issues in order to pursue solutions in our global world. In this class we will go deep into Italy’s social justice movements and make comparisons with social justice movements in the US, globally, and in our own communities. We will study topics such as Indigenous communities and rights, immigration, the environment, #Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, poverty, Healthcare, colonialism, and more.