Fall 2024 Course List

• Instructor: Dr. Malinda Lowery
• Meeting Days/Times/Location: TTh 11:30am-12:45pm ONLINE

This course is co-taught with the College of the Muscogee Nation. It explores overlapping cultural environments and multiple legal sovereigns within the historical and present-day territorial jurisdictions of the Muscogee Creek Nation, the state of Oklahoma, and the United States. Through legal concepts and policies, these multiple sovereigns have personal impacts on individual Tribal and/or national citizens. As part of the partnership between CMN and Emory to co-develop Native American and Indigenous Studies, these classes are held concurrently online (via Teams) and have the same curriculum and schedule, with additional in-person enrichment opportunities for students. Emory and CMN students will partner to create semester/trimester-long projects linking historical and legal issues to Muscogee homelands, Muscogee reservation lands, and each student's home communities.  

• Instructor: Dr. Emil’ Keme
• Meeting Days/Times/Location: Tuesday and Thursday 8:30-9:45am.

This course offers a hemispheric overview of Indigenous literatures in the Americas before 1850, with attention to visual, oral, pictographic, and alphabetic Indigenous writings produced before and after European invasions, as well as these literatures historical, political, and cultural contexts. Students will read and discuss Indigenous creation stories, Wampum Belts, Mesoamerican codices, Andean Quipus, and works by Indigenous authors such as William Apes, Handsome Lake, and Samson Occom.The class can be thought of as a journey that through the critical analysis of diverse literary texts, will reveal to the student the incredible diversity of Indigenous peoples and their societies, the complications and challenges that arose after European invasions, divergent spiritual and religious worldviews, the ingenuity of Indigenous adaptations, and the persistence of Indigenous peoples and their respective cultures in different geopolitical and historical contexts.

• Intructors: Dr. Emil’ Keme (Emory) and Dr. Craig Womack (Emory/ College of the Muscogee Nation)
• Meeting Days/Times/Location: Tuesday and Thursday 1:00-2:15 pm.

In this hybrid course, that will include students from Emory and the College of the Muscogee Nation, we critically analyze Muscogee (Creek) literary written and oral traditions by examining Creek history in relation to Creek literature. Students will read and discuss short stories, poetry, letters, essays, and a novel by Muscogee Creek authors in relation to both their pre-removal history in Georgia and Alabama and their post-removal history in Indian Territory, the present-day state of Oklahoma. 

• Instructor: Dr. Heidi Senungetuk
• Meeting Days/Times/Location:  M/W 2:30pm-3:45pm BRB307.

Course Description: 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.

• Instructor: Dr. Mandy Suhr-Sytsma
• Meeting Days/Times/Location: Tues/Thurs 2:30-3:24 in Math & Science Center - W307C.

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, Angeline Boulley, 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 women?

*This four-credit course fulfills Emory’s Continued Communication, Humanities & Arts, and Race & Ethnicity general education requirements. The class will include a field trip to the Ocmulgee Mounds Indigenous Celebration.

• Instructor: Dr. Megan O'Neil & Dr. Giovanni Lovisetto
• Meeting Days/Time:  T 1:00pm-3:45pm

This seminar focuses on Picture Worlds: Greek, Maya, and Moche Pottery, the exhibition on view at the Carlos Museum in Fall 2024. By juxtaposing Greek, Maya, and Moche traditions, the exhibition invites conversation about the ways in which three unrelated cultures visualized their society and foundational stories through their pottery and used painted ceramic vessels in storytelling and social engagement. The seminar will explore the vessels, their narrative scenes, and the social contexts in which they were made and used.

The seminar also will address the complexities of organizing an exhibition involving major international loans and models for collaboration and consultation in exhibition development and execution. For their research projects, students will study individual pieces and questions of historiography, or the modern histories of ancient ceramics.

• Instructor: Dr. Debra Vidali
• Meeting Days/Time: M, W; 11:30 AM - 12:45 PM

This course is about listening to and engaging with a range of Indigenous perspectives from Turtle Island (aka North America). We will focus on theatrical works and performance projects by Native scholars, artists, and wisdom holders. Performance genres and styles span from historical documentary to modern day comedy, to decolonial praxis, and everything in between.

We will read and view work by these and other performance artists: Joy Harjo, Muscogee (Creek) Nation citizen and 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States; Mary Kathryn Nagle, playwright, lawyer, and citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma; The 1491s, a sketch comedy group; Guillermo Gómez-Peña, 'performance artist, writer, radical pedagogue...fighting colonialism since 1492' (GGP artist website); Marie Clements, a Métis playwright, performer, director, producer and screenwriter; and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist.

We will be challenged to sharpen our listening and our awareness of the importance of relationality, voice, care, and ethics in this work. Major themes this semester include: sovereignty, dispossession, decolonization, human rights, political activism, social justice, creativity, respectful engagement, futurity, and connections to land.

• Instructors: Dr. Lauren Klein and Dr. Sarah Salter
• Meeting Days/Times/Location: Thursdays 10am-12:45pm, Callaway C201.