Spring 2024 Course List

• Instructor: Dr. Debra Vidali
• Meeting Days/Time: Mondays & Wednesdays; 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). This semester 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: 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 based in the wooded ghettos of Minnesota and buffalo grass of Oklahoma" (1491s website); NYC-based Spiderwoman Theater, whose "work bridges the traditional cultural art forms of storytelling, dance, and music and the practice of contemporary Western theater" (Spiderwoman Theater website); and Guillermo Gómez-Peña, "performance artist, writer, radical pedagogue, Public Citizen & activist against all borders. Intellectual Coyote (Nanabush)...fighting colonialism since 1492" (GGP artist website). 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.

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

Louise Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, is among the most prolific and highly acclaimed authors of our time. This course focuses on her fiction, especially her novels Tracks, The Round House, and The Night Watchman, along with her children's novel The Birchbark House. We will also engage some of Erdrich's poetry and non-fiction prose, interviews with her, and scholarship about her work. Erdrich depicts Indigenous people's experiences with boarding schools, sexual violence, land theft, anti-colonial resistance, Indigenous feminisms, and Anishinaabe teachings. We will discuss these topics and consider how Erdrich's craft contributes to her portrayal of them. We will also explore the impact of Erdrich's work for law, politics, pop culture, and education.

• Instuctor: Dr. Emil’ Keme
• Meeting Days/Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays; 2:30 - 3:45 PM

In his book, Can Poetry Save The Earth? (2009) John Felstiner asks: Can poems help, when times demand environmental science and history, governmental leadership, corporate and consumer moderation, nonprofit activism, local initiatives? Why call on the pleasures of poetry, when the time has come for an all out response? (xiii). In this course, we will address the potential answers to these questions by critically examining contemporary Indigenous and Black writings on Nature. Our critical readings and discussions will allow us to reflect on the historical relationships between Indigenous and Black peoples to lands, waters, plants, and animals, and how such relationships manifest within settler colonial contexts. Among other authors, we will spend time with Sherwin Bitsui, Joy Harjo, Langston Hughes, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and Ofelia Zepeda.

Required Texts

• Camile T. Dungy ed., Black Nature. Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry (2009)
• Joy Harjo, LeAnne Howe, and Jennifer Elise Foerster, Eds., When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through (2020)
• Kimberly Smith, African American Environmental Thought: Foundations.

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

• Instructor: Dr. Loren Michael Mortimer
• Meeting Days/Time: Mondays & Wednesdays; 10:00 AM - 11:15 AM

This course introduces students to the histories of Native peoples in North America after 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 surviving assimilation, maintaining political sovereignties, revitalizing languages, restoring communities, reclaiming land, and envisioning self-determined futures. 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. Loren Michael Mortimer 
• Meeting Days/Time: Wednesdays, 1:00 PM - 3:45 PM

This digital history course answers the call to action in Emory University's Indigenous Land Acknowledgement to honor the Muscogee Nation and other Indigenous caretakers of this land by humbly seeking knowledge of their histories and committing to respectful stewardship of the land.

Experiential learning combines training in historical archival research, digital mapping usinggeographical information systems (GIS), and engagement with the materials and methods of Native American and Indigenous Studies.

This course investigates Atlanta's history in relation to Native American nations of the Southeast, with special attention to entangled histories of Native dispossession, slavery, segregation, and Indigenous erasure in the built environment of present-day Atlanta.

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

Indigenous Musics of the Arctic studies music and dance of Indigenous peoples of the Arctic and how they reflect languages, social structures, philosophies, and the geography and history of each region. Examines changing historical and social dynamics and cultural traditions. Introduces ethnomusicology theory and research methods.

English 389W-3: Special Topics: Youth Literature and the We Need Diverse Books Movement

• Instructor: Mandy Suhr-Sytsma 
• Meeting Day/Time: Tuesdays & Thursdays, 1:00 PM - 2:15 PM. 

The long-running fight for increased diversity in children’s literature entered a new chapter in 2014 with the emergence of We Need Diverse Books (WNDB). #WeNeedDiverseBooks launched as a social media campaign in response to an all-white BookCon panel of 30 youth literature authors. WNDB quickly developed into a non-profit organization and powerful social movement. In her highly influential 1990 work, Rudine Sims Bishop contends that children need books to serve as “windows,” “mirrors,” and “sliding glass doors.” Uma Krishnaswami adds “prisms” to that list. Christopher Myers adds “maps.” How do diverse children’s and young adult books enable readers to see themselves, empathize with others, see their intersectional realities in a fresh light, and map the course of their futures? This question will guide our course. We will focus primarily on recent youth literature by US-based writers directly involved with WNDB. While we will read several literary titles together, students will have opportunities to select titles independently based on their own interests, too. We will also enter broader conversations about youth literature and diversity in literary/cultural studies scholarship, the publishing industry, public libraries, K-12 schools, and communities.