The Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity (RDI) offers graduate-level courses through its core and affiliated faculty. Those taking classes or seeking advising at all levels of graduate studies in RDI can expect to be trained rigorously in approaches to situated knowledge and experience in modern and contemporary contexts. This involves attending to particular categories of race, diaspora, and indigeneity, as well as connecting these categories in comparative and intersectional ways.
Relatively, the faculty, students, and staff of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture (CSRPC) have worked for years to establish a new type of research institute devoted to the study of race and ethnicity, one that seeks to expand the study of race beyond the black/white paradigm while exploring social and identity cleavages within racialized communities. Scholars affiliated with the Center have also endeavored to make race and ethnicity central topics of intellectual investigation at the University of Chicago by fostering interdisciplinary research, teaching, and public debate. Fundamentally, the Center is committed to contributing intellectually challenging and innovative scholarship that can help people transform their thinking and their lives. Towards those goals, the Center provides funding and other types of support for projects initiated by faculty affiliates, graduate students, undergraduates, artists-in-residence and visiting fellows.
Selected Faculty
Sample Courses
RDIN 40100 - Proseminar in Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity: Core Works (Eve L. Ewing)
This graduate proseminar serves as an introduction to the concepts and categories that orient the study of race, diaspora, and Indigeneity. This includes repertoires of Black and Indigenous worldmaking alongside histories of plantation slavery, settler colonialism, and their afterlives in the Americas; circuits of racialized labor in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans; and the construction of race and Indigeneity as categories of scientific and occult origins. Students will consult the works of Toni Morrison, W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Audra Simpson, Amitav Ghosh, Kim Tallbear, Audre Lorde, and Frantz Fanon, among others. Instructor consent required. (Winter 2027)
RDIN 32301. Formations of Indigeneity (Jodi Byrd)
Whose land are we on? What does it mean to be "Indigenous" for generations past and in the twenty-first century? From debates over claims to Indigenous ancestry and pretendians to land-based struggles to protect sacred sites from development and resource extraction, understanding the stakes of these concerns for Indigenous Peoples is more relevant than ever. This seminar-part of the undergraduate major sequence in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity-introduces students to core terms, texts, and tiffs in the field of Critical Indigenous Studies. Topics will include: settler colonialism; imperialism; sovereignty; recognition; blood,racialization, and self-indigenization; Indiannesses and the nation; land, property, and the environment; feminism and queerness; diasporas; internationalism and self-determination; and radical relationalities for solidarity, decolonization, and liberation. (Winter 2027)
RDIN 32350 Black Game Theory (Ashlyn Sparrow & Patrick Jagoda)
This course explores games created by, for, or about the Black diaspora, though with particular emphasis on the United States. We will analyze mainstream "AAA" games, successful independent and art games, and educational games. Beyond video games, we will take a comparative media studies perspective that juxtaposes video games with novels, films, card games, board games, and tabletop roleplaying games. Readings will be drawn from writing by Frantz Fanon, Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Lindsay Grace, Saidiya Hartman, Sarah Juliet Lauro, Achille Mbembe, Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson, and others. (Winter 2027)
RDIN 33900 The Art of Revolution (Tanima Sharma)
This interdisciplinary course introduces theories of aesthetics and politics within the realms of popular culture, art, and revolutionary praxis. Traversing theatre, film, literature, visual art, dance, and music, it examines debates about revolutionary art that emerged within anticolonial struggles for national liberation, left political movements, and agitations against fascism, patriarchy, race and caste in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How do capitalism and allied systems of domination attempt to control creative life? How have radical movements theorized cultural consumption and production, or grappled with representing vs. shaping reality? What is the role of the artist in times of revolutionary ferment? We will address these questions and more, as well as themes of audiences, sensuous life, revolutionary subjectivity, and utopian futures in contexts that include FRELIMO choral songs in Mozambique, Brecht's epic theatre, the cinema of the Cuban revolution, and the graffiti art of the Arab Spring. Students can expect to read widely, make weekly Canvas posts, and have the option of creating their own revolutionary art as a final project. (Spring 2027)
A full list of courses from the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity is available here.
Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity Specialization and Certificate
The MAPH Specialization and Graduate Certificate in Race, Diaspora and Indigeneity allows students to structure their coursework and thesis around the study of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity within MAPH (The RDI Certificate is equivalent to the MAPH RDI Specialization).
Students who complete the following requirements will receive an RDI transcript notation:
- MAPH Core course (Foundations of Interpretive Theory).
- RDIN 40100 and RDIN 40200, two course proseminar sequence offered Winter and Spring.
- Two additional RDIN courses.
- A thesis project, or, if not completing a thesis, a final RDI course project, on a theme or topic related to race, diaspora, and/or indigeneity. This project/paper must be advised by a faculty member in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity or approved for that purpose by the RDI Director of Graduate Studies.
- Presentation of capstone research paper or project at the end of the year symposium. Each spring, RDI will host a half-day symposium in which specializing and certificate students will present their research.
- Specializing students are encouraged to attend and participate in RDI’s public workshops and lectures.
Find more information about the Specialization and Graduate Certificate in RDI here.
Recent Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity Thesis Projects
"Measured by Blood, Sold by the Swab: Scientific Racism Rebranded through DNA Testing and the Racial Capitalism of 23andMe"
Isabelle Wheat, MAPH '26
Advisor: Danielle Roper
"Policing the Womb: Surveillance, Abjection, and Native Womanhood in Settler Cinema and Television"
Gaby Fernandez, MAPH '26
Advisor: Megan Tusler
"Black Migration in the Black Lives Matter Framework"
Tara Guillame, MAPH '20
Advisor: Sarah Jessica Johnson
"Fragmentations of the Black Maternal in Gayl Jones’ Corregidora"
Kaitlyn Rudney, MAPH '20
Advisor: Kaneesha Parsard