Syllabi

This page contains syllabi for a variety of courses on issues related to mobility. These syllabi are Creative Commons License. All the courses are undergraduate courses but can be adapted for graduate level and advanced students.

  1. “Latin America and the United States” This writing intensive history seminar explores the history of the intimate but often conflictual relationship between the US and Latin America from the early 19th century to the present. Key texts include,  Judith Adler Hellman’s  The World of Mexican Migrants: The Rock and the Hard Place. AND Ngai’s  Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America.
  2. “Identity, Mobility and Migration”. This course is an introductory literature and visual arts course. It investigates what happens to identity when we move to another place. How do we remember where we came from, what memories do we have of our families and ancestors, of the history of our native country, and how do we reconfigure our identities in a new place? What happens to language? Key texts include: The Speckled People by Hugo Hamilton, Lost in Translation, by Eva Hoffman, The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri and The Arrival, Shaun Tan.

  3. “Far Away from Home: Exiles and Migrants in Literature and Film”. This course examines a series of transnational literary texts and films that illuminate how people are forced or choose to become mobile, leaving their homelands, and remaking home away from their native countries. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries have produced massive displacements due to wars, genocides, racial, ethnic and religious conflicts, economic and climate change, among other factors. Our course focuses on several texts that explore questions of mobility, home, nation, and self, in the context of specific historical events Key texts and films include: Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying, Mengestu’s. The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears, Sattouf’s  The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East 1978-1984, Jade Chang’s The Wangs Vs. The World, and I Am Not Your Negro a film Directed by Raoul Peck.

     These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.