MAPH Courses

While MAPH students are free to select from a wide range of courses across the Arts & Humanities departments (and beyond), our faculty do offer MAPH-specific courses, many of which are cross-listed in related departments (meaning that students can register for them under one of a number of different department headings). Some courses taught by MAPH professors may also only be available in their respective departments.

The following list details courses being taught by MAPH professors in the 2026-2027 school year. For more information, please email the course instructor. For registration questions, please email maph-registration@lists.uchicago.edu.
 

Autumn 2026

21st Century Ethnic American Literature – Megan Tusler
The question of “race” and racial others in US fiction has troubled the form since its emergence, but in the 21st century fiction has tackled particularly thorny issues. The debates in contemporary critical race theory have both criticized and maintained the categories of race and ethnicity in novels and short fiction, and longstanding debates in canonization have demanded rethinking what ethnic fiction is capable of achieving. This class will read US novels and short stories by African American, American Indian, Asian American, and Latinx writers from the last twenty-five years to conceptualize the shifting categories of race and ethnicity, paired with critical and theoretical works in cultural race studies. In this class, you will learn to produce readings on the current moment in a way that accounts for historical events; how to read fiction through a series of generic lenses; and how to work with established and emerging methodologies in critical race studies and literature. [MAPH/English]

Faeries, Demons, and Alchemists: Science, Magic, and the Supernatural in Early Modern England – Sarah Kunjummen
This course aims to explore the messy territory between the scientific, the magical and the religious in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Readings will draw on scholarship in the history of science, by writers such as Frances Yates and Steven Shapin, and on period reflections on the pursuit of knowledge by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Browne Margaret Cavendish and Robert Boyle, as well as representations of occult knowledge in the period's literature. Readings may include Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Jonson's The Alchemist, selections from Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and Bacon's The New Atlantis. [MAPH/English]

"Unnatural" Mothers: Reproduction on the Margins – Agnes Malinowska
Who is allowed to reproduce, under what conditions, and at what cost? This course examines how reproduction is structured, contested, and reimagined across literature, film, and theory. We focus on texts that explore the entanglement of reproductive embodiment with gendered divisions of labor and political struggle under capitalism. Together, we will analyze stories, ideas, and histories that decenter reproduction from its ostensibly “natural” location within the heteronormative nuclear family and the privatized home. Our key protagonists include “bad” moms, “welfare queens,” gestational laborers, queer kin, sex workers, migrants, and women who refuse reproduction altogether. We situate these figures alongside legal and political histories—such as eugenics, chattel slavery, and neoliberal globalization—that shape oppressive reproductive structures and animate feminist struggles to reproduce otherwise. By tracing “reproduction on the margins,” the course develops tools for analyzing the intimate terrain of family, pregnancy, motherhood, sexuality, and gender as sites of labor, crisis, struggle, and potential transformation. Literature and film may include works by Lizzie Borden, Alfonso Cuarón, Gayl Jones, Barbara Loden, Maggie Nelson, Jordy Rosenberg, and others. Theory readings may include Lauren Berlant, Cathy Cohen, David Eng, Saidiya Hartman, Sophie Lewis, Poulomi Saha, Dorothy Roberts, and others. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities. [MAPH/English/Gender and Sexuality]
 

Winter 2027

Literature and Citizenship – Megan Tusler, Tristan Schweiger
What we think of as modernity can be said to begin with the birth (or rebirth) of the citizen. During the 17th and 18th centuries, revolutions in Britain, France, and North America sought to recast political society as a structure built upon social contracts and natural rights of the people rather than the divine right of kings. But this same era also saw the rise of transoceanic empires and chattel slavery. Its new republican governments generally excluded all but white men (and often all but white men who owned property) from the vote or from most spheres of political agency and authority. Indeed, the category of citizen was (and remains) exclusionary as well as inclusive, frequently deployed to mark those outside its boundaries and protections. During the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, the constructions of race, gender, and nation continued to shift into new forms, and many literatures of these centuries focus on how “the citizen” is conceived and reinvented into the present. This course will discuss how these tensions and debates influence literature and political discourse over four centuries, a breadth that will allow us to trace the concepts and critiques of citizenship as they have come to shape our contemporary world. [MAPH/English]

Fictions of Personhood – Darrel Chia
We consider how literary works reflect and shape historically shifting cultural and legal conceptions of personhood in the 20th century. What does literary character look like within a longer history of the novel, and what does it make of notions of free will, responsibility, and synthetic personhood. We read selections from Locke, Charles Taylor, Marya Schechtman, Galen Strawson, Joseph Slaughter, and Nihad Farooq, alongside novels by Laclos, Henry James, Somerset Maugham, HG Wells, Vita Sackville-West, Ralph Ellison, and Han Kang. [MAPH/English]

Rocks, plants, ecologies: science fiction and the ‘more-than-human’ – Hilary Strang
Science fictional worlds are full of entities more familiar and perhaps less noticeable than the aliens that are often thought to typify the genre. Rock formations, plants, metallic seams, plastics, crystalline structures, nuclear waste and oozing seepages are among the entities that allow SF to form estranging questions about what it means to be in relation to others, what it means to live in and through an environment, and what it means to form relations of sustenance and communal possibility with those who do not or cannot return human care and recognition. Such questions about are urgent ones for thinking about climate catastrophe, capital, settler colonialism and endemic pandemics, as well as for thinking substantively about resistance and what life and livable worlds beyond the bleak horizons of the capitalocene could be. This class will engage science fiction (authors may include Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Kim Stanley Robinson, Nalo Hopkinson, Jeff Vandermeer and more) and environmental and social theory of various kind (authors may include Elizabeth Povinelli, Katherine Yusoff, Andreas Malm, Eduardo Kohn, James C. Scott, David Graeber, Jasper Bernes, Mike Davis and more). [MAPH/English]

Early Modern Metaphysics – Andrew Pitel
In this seminar we will read, write, and think about central metaphysical concepts – concepts such as substance, essence, quantity, identity, part and whole, causation, and infinity – as they develop in the early modern period. Figures we are likely to read include Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Malebranche, and Leibniz. We will occasionally look to the medieval tradition to which these thinkers are indebted, and against which they are reacting, as well as to recent scholarship on the period. [Philosophy]

1990s Videogame History – Chris Carloy
This course will trace developments in the videogame medium and videogame cultures in the final decade of the 20th century, discuss the unique possibilities and difficulties arising from the study of recent history, and put these discussions into practice through research- based assignments. Questions that will guide our study include: what was the relationship between technological innovations and stylistic changes in the videogame medium? How did the entry of new corporate and creative players into the business affect industrial structures and strategies? What do we make of "freedom," "realism," and other concepts that dominated videogame press coverage - and how were they connected to broader cultural discourses? How did understandings of what it meant to play videogames, and the types of experiences that videogames could offer, change over the course of the decade? What was the relationship between developments in the videogame medium and other media - from film and fiction to virtual reality and the Internet? How has this decade been remembered, conceptualized, preserved, and repackaged in subsequent decades? [MAPH/Cinema and Media Studies]

In a Queer Time and Place – Agnes Malinowska
In this class, we orient ourselves around the so-called “temporal turn” in queer and trans studies, which has produced some of the most exciting and influential queer theory of the last twenty years. We investigate queer theory’s bold interventions into the political and ideological workings of temporality alongside important works of queer and trans literature and film spanning the 1990s to the present. Our texts collectively interrogate the assumed naturalness of straight time and question the ways that heteronormative imperatives around things like maturity, generation, marriage, and progress dictate what counts as a good life, a future worth having, or a history worth remembering. Together we chart queer modes of engagement with history, the archive, the temporality of gender and sex performance, the pace and rhythm of human development, and the times and spaces of sex and intimacy. This class offers students a graduate-level introduction to queer theory and a good starting point for academic inquiry into c20-21 queer and trans literature and cinema. Theorists include Berlant, Cvetkovich, Edelman, Freeman, Halberstam, Keeling, Muñoz, and others; fiction and film by Jean Carlomusto, Samuel Delany, Cheryl Dunye, Isaac Julien, Torrey Peters, Justin Torres, Virginia Woolf, and others. Instructor consent only. Open to graduate students and 3rd-/4th-year undergraduates with majors in the humanities. [MAPH/English/Gender and Sexuality/American Studies]

The Radical 1790s – Tristan Schweiger
What constitutes a truly free society? Does revolution and liberatory struggle primarily aim to change a government, or must it encompass more sweeping transformations? Who is included – and to what extent – in the new political community that follows? And how might literature and art contribute to the way political change unfolds? The revolutions that shook the Atlantic in the 1790s confronted precisely these questions and in doing so profoundly shaped what became the modern world. In France, absolute monarchy was toppled and a republic was proclaimed. Across the ocean, a rebellion of enslaved people in Saint-Domingue became the Haitian Revolution, abolishing slavery and striving for full racial equality. And in Britain’s near colony of Ireland, although the United Irishmen’s rebellion was ultimately crushed, an independence struggle that would last into the present day was born. At the same time, the 1790s were a decade of reaction – when extant hierarchies fought against these transformations with increasing anxiety, and empire and imperial capital continued to rapidly expand. This course will read widely in English literature and political theory from the late 18th and early 19th centuries that attempted to represent, and produce, revolutionary change, as well as modern theory and scholarship in anti-racism/postcolonialism, feminism and gender theory, carceral studies, and Marxist analysis to better understand the legacies of this remarkable political moment. [MAPH/English]

Spring 2027

Crafting Modernity in America – Erica Warren
This course proposes that craft defined artmaking in the United States during the period after World War I and through to the post-World War II era. For the purposes of the course, craft will be broadly understood to encompass handmade items designed for practical use as well as artworks that, through concepts, materials, and/or processes, trace their lineage to a functional and handmade past. In framing this modernist history through craft, and discussing pedagogy, practitioners, objects, and theories of making, the course positions craft as a primary propagator of modernity. Artists with diverse material practices, such as Anni Albers, Emma Amos, Ruth Asawa, Faith Ringgold, and Lenore Tawney, will be central to the discussion and will foster an assessment and interrogation of craft’s role in producing and popularizing modern art more broadly.  

In addition to foregrounding the ubiquity of craft and its wide-reaching impacts on culture and society (including educational initiatives and programs, exhibitions and museum collections, and publications), this course will also question craft’s relative absence (until recently) in narratives of twentieth-century modernism in the United States. Furthermore, while craft has the potential to surface the classism, sexism, and media hierarchies in modern art historical discourse, the need to critically examine craft’s relationship with colonialism, racism, and sexism will also be addressed. [Art History]

Hobbes's Leviathan – Andrew Pitel
While the focus of this course will be on reading Leviathan, our broader ambition will be to understand how the account of the human being and the political developed in that text fit within Hobbes's broader philosophical and intellectual project. As such, we will also consult a number of other texts (e.g., the Elements of Philosophy) to get a sense of that project. [Philosophy]

Art and World Making in the 1890s – Alexandra Fraser
While the final decade of the nineteenth century is often heralded as the cradle of artistic modernism, this seminar will take a more expansive view of artistic practices in the larger world of the 1890s. We will consider the ways in which painters, designers, architects, and art theorists developed a range of formal and technically innovative techniques to engage and represent a new global order beset by nationalist and populist fervor, technological and scientific discovery, new forms of labor and social belonging, legal definitions of personhood and property, and the combined force of global conquest and attempts to resist it. Following a case-study approach grounded in Europe yet reaching out to its entanglement with the wider world (including West Africa, North America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia), students will dive deeply into artists’, designers’, and architects’ bids to meaningfully represent experience of this extraordinary period while also reflecting on remarkable parallels with our own moment of global transformation. Participants need not be specialists in the period to enroll, but should be broadly interested in dissecting the variety of ways in which art might meaningfully engage with a larger landscape of social, political, and conceptual concerns, often in unexpected ways. Assignments will include short writing assignments that engage objects from university archives, local collections, and a traveling exhibition. This course fulfills the following requirements in the ARTH major and minor: European and American post-1800, and instructor permission is required to register. [MAPH/Art History]

Science fiction against the state – Hilary Strang
Ursula Le Guin’s anarchist utopia, The Dispossessed, was published 50 years ago, but its complex imagining of a whole way of life without law, police, money or sovereignty, and its investment in thinking that way of living in relation to environment, gender, freedom and work offers a science fictional horizon for what it might be to live communally in our own moment. This course will read The Dispossessed and other science fiction that imagines what it might mean to live against, beyond or without the state, alongside theorizations that may help us formulate our own visions of other possible worlds. We will pay particular attention to questions of environment and ecological relations, race, gender and social reproduction, and feminist utopias. We’ll also spend some time thinking about actually existing forms of living against the state (including blockades, encampments, autonomous zones). SF authors may include Le Guin, Samuel Delany, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tade Thompson, Sally Gearhart, Iain Banks, and ME O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi. Other authors read may include Saidiya Hartman, Monique Wittig, Fredy Perlman, James Scott, Pierre Clastres, and David Graeber. [MAPH/English]