Courses and other Teaching & Learning Opportunities
Explore WashU & Slavery and contribute to project research, teaching, and creative work through courses, capstones, and internships.
Black Slavery in Latin American Novels
Black Slavery in Latin American Novels (L38 Span 405W)
This seminar explores the topic of Black slavery in four Latin American novels: Francsico, Sab, Santa Lujuria, and Cielo de Tambores. As these novels span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this course engages in questions of the endurance of narrative representations of Afro-Latin American slavery and their connections to issues of abolitionism, national identity, and justice, among others. Students engage in critical readings of these novels and lead discussions on primary and secondary sources.
Rethinking WashU’s Relation to Enslavement
Rethinking WashU’s Relation to Enslavement (L61 2721)
Explore Washington University’s entanglement with the institution of slavery over its 168-year history. This full-year course guides students into independent research that engages the distortions, erasures, and silences of the "slavery archive," especially as they pertain to Black lives in St. Louis whose stories shape the University’s long and important tradition. Use textual and digital methods in an endeavor to understand this past, learn how it shapes our present, and consider how it ought to shape our institutional future.
Historical Racial Violence: Legacies & Reckonings
Historical Racial Violence: Legacies & Reckonings (L90 AFAS 4601)
Area histories of enslavement, lynching, and other racial terror and dispossession relate to inequality, conflict, and violence in the same places today - these legacies include health disparity, homicide rates, voter suppression, and corporal punishment in schools. Many communities and institutions are moving to acknowledge and address legacies of historical racial violence in various ways. We engage several responses including the WashU & Slavery Project and the broader consortium of Universities Studying Slavery. The course combines seminar readings, discussion and writing on legacies of racial violence with a practicum where students conceptualize and develop interventions intended to facilitate contemporary reckoning. The practicum supports a broad range of interventive efforts, including research and policy-focused projects, archival development, and interventions through visual art, design, film, digital projects, and other creative approaches.
Researching Cultures: Making Latin America Popular
Researching Cultures: Making Latin America Popular (L38 Span 3604)
"Despacito," futbol, telenovelas: All of these are forms of Latin American popular culture that are increasingly part of our everyday reality here in the United States. All are also inseparable from stories of inequality, ethnic tensions and celebrations, understandings of gender relations, and notions of hope that blend ideas of nation with cultural consumption. While popular culture in Latin America is often considered a contemporary phenomenon linked to the 20th century and the mass production of cultural goods -- film, books, and music -- it has deeper roots. We can trace these back to the 19th century, where people, cultural processes, and phenomena literally began making Latin America popular. This course will survey the emergence and variety of modern popular culture in Latin America, from the 1800s to the present.
Monumental Antiracism
First Year Seminar: Monumental Anti-Racism (L90 AFAS 144)
This course examines the racial politics of commemorative objects and practices, and commemorative intervention as a strategy of anti-racist activism. We survey various ways that racism has been inscribed on the commemorative landscape, and use readings in history, political theory, cultural studies, and other fields to gain insight on these contested commemorative objects, their development, and social significance. We then turn to a critical assessment of efforts to remove, recontextualize and erect new commemorative objects intended to dismantle structural racism. Through our study and engagement with contested commemorative landscapes using a series of case studies, a collaborative digital project, and student design interventions, we explore the interdisciplinary field of memory studies, diverse forms and sites of commemoration, and local and global efforts to advance reparative commemorative practices.
Memory for the Future
Memory for the Future
Fall 2022 - Spring 2023
Memory for the Future (M4F) is a year-long studiolab opening Fall 2022 in the Lewis Collaborative with support from the Redefiing Graduate Education initiative of the Center for the Humanities. Co-led by Professors Geoff Ward (AFAS; Sociology; AMCS) and Anika Walke (History; WGSS), M4F will combine collaborative study of representations of the interlinked histories of colonialism, slavery, and genocide with development of curatorial skills and public educational projects facilitating reparative memorial practices in and around St. Louis. M4F engages participants in a co-taught interdisciplinary seminar, a practicum, and an integrated series of public discussions modeled after earlier “history workshop” movements designed to facilitate more participatory, inclusive and transformative interventions in history and memory. Partners in the studiolab include the Griot and Vashon Museums, the Kaplan Feldman Holocaust Museum, and the WashU & Slavery Project.
Humanities Digital Workshop
Humanities Digital Workshop
The Humanities Digital Workshop (HDW) supports teams working on an array of projects, and focusing on various digital methodologies and problems, such as learning to code, build databases, analyze complex datasets. The faculty and staff at the HDW teach these skills in a collaborative, lab environment over the summer with participants working together for eight weeks. Summer fellows work closely with faculty on ongoing digital humanities research projects, with participants including undergraduate students, graduate students, and library staff. The WashU & Slavery Project will partner with the Humanities Digital Workshop (HDW) to develop its digital archive and other applications of digital humanities. Learn more about the Humanities Digital Workshop at the HDW website.
Kemper Museum Internships
Kemper Museum Internships
The Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum at Washington University offers a number of opportunities for students to volunteer, intern in the education department, and in curation. The WashU & Slavery Project and Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Equity (CRE2) are partnering with the Kemper Art Museum in supporting an undergraduate internship specifically focused on race, ethnicity and the arts. Learn more about WashU student opportunities at the Kemper website.
Slavery and Public History
Slavery and Public History (L90 AFAS 4008)
Spring 2023
Public history, or applied history, encompasses the many and diverse ways in which history is put to work in the world and applied to real-world issues. This course teaches public history practice with particular emphasis on engaging in the public history of slavery through research and interpretation on the regional histories of enslavement within St. Louis and at Washington University. Students will learn by engaging critical scholarship on public history, debates about how public history is practiced, and learning core tenets of public history interpretation, museum best practices, oral history, preservation, and material culture and their particular application to public history interpreting slavery. This includes grappling with the politics of memory and heritage that shape, limit, and empower public history practice on slavery, and how white supremacy has shaped what histories we absorb in the public. Students will learn established and emerging ethics, standards, and best practices within the field of public history, especially as they relate to the public interpretation of slavery.
The format of the course is lecture combined with seminar-style discussion with immersive participatory activities that engage students in the real-world practice of public history by applying the methods and theory they have learned. Students will apply their learning by completing one of two well-researched, relevant, engaging, and creative group public history projects that interpret the history of slavery in St. Louis. The projects will model professional public history practice as students will complete projects requested by two clients from public history institutions in the St. Louis area.