Spring 2026 Course List

• Instructor: Dr. Mandy Suhr-Sytsma
• Meeting Days/Time: T & Th 10:00am - 11:15am

Louise Erdrich, a citizen of 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 Endrich'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. We will also explore the impact of Erdrich's work for law, politics, pop culture, and education.

• Instructor: Dr. Vani Kannan 
• Meeting Days/Time: T & Th 10:00am – 11:15am

This course offers an introduction to various nonfiction genres(including flash nonfiction, photo-essay, and personal essay) and approaches to writing that destabilize standard academic English (including Indigenous language reclamation, multilingualism, and translingualism). We will read and discuss a range of scholarship in Black, Indigenous, Asian/American, and Latinx/Latine rhetoric, writing, and literacy; ground ourselves in our shared contexts of Atlanta and the larger Southeast; and develop shared practices of land- and place-based writing.

*ELL section; permission required to enroll.

• Instructor: Dr. Emil’ Keme
• Meeting Days/Times: T 1:00-3:45pm

• Instructor: Dr. Malinda Lowery
• Meeting Time: M & W 11:30-12:45pm

This course will focus on two questions: What do the histories of African-American and Indigenous peoples share in North America? And why do we often discuss them separately? The course will include readings, discussions, presentations, written assignments and a research project that engages Emory's work to fulfill its land acknowledgment and honor the enslaved persons whose labor contributed to the life of Emory College and Emory University. Students will get comfortable with and practice advanced historical analysis, practice interpreting evidence about the past to appreciate the importance of different perspectives on the past, and explain the impact of this history today.

• Instructor: Dr. Heidi Senungetuk
• Meeting Days/Times: T & Th 1:00-2:15pm

This continuing communications course focuses on the ideas Race and Ethnicity through the study of music and dance of Indigenous peoples of the Arctic. This course examines how these art forms reflect Indigenous languages, social structures, philosophies, and the geography and history of this region, and changing historical and social dynamics and cultural traditions due to colonial influences. This course introduces ethnomusicology theory and research methods.

In Spring 2026, this course is a LINC (Learning through InclusiveCollaboration) course with “Indigenous Literature Since 1850” (ENG 271W). The purpose of LINC courses is to highlight connections among ways of knowing and doing across disciplines and to create inclusive intellectual learning communities. This course will involve three joint activities with students in the course “Indigenous Literature Since 1850.” Class meeting time will be the same for LINC sessions, but class meeting location for those three sessions is TBA.

• Instructor: Dr. Mandy Suhr-Sytsma
• Meeting Days/Times: T & Th 10-11:15am

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. We will read many literary titles together, and students will have opportunities to select titles independently based on their 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. 

*This four-credit course includes attention to Indigenous youth literature and fulfills Emory’s Continued Communication and Humanities & Arts general education requirements.

• Instructors: Dr. Heidi Senungetuk
• Meeting Days/Times: T & Th 2:30-3:45pm

This course surveys a broad array of Native American musical practices across North America.

• Instructor: Dr. Megan Massa
• Meeting Days/Times: M & W 1:00-2:15pm

Students will build historical understandings of interrelatedness of colonization and Western science before delving into indigenous approaches to neuroscience and medicine. By engaging with concepts such as "two-eyed seeing" and speaking with Muscogee guests active in science, medicine, and art, the class will also directly engage with contemporary interactions and synergies across indigenous and Western perspectives.