The Cultural Studies program uniquely positions graduate students to explore courses related to their fields of interest across a wide range of departments and programs. The minor consists of four courses totaling a minimum of 12 credit hours. These include C601: Intro to Cultural Studies and 3 sections of C701: Special Topics in Cultural Studies or C790: Independent Readings in Cultural Studies. C601 will be offered through a different instructor and department each year. We also offer a range of courses through the C701 rubric. Course descriptions for Fall 2026 are listed below. Please follow enrollment procedures according to your home department’s guidance. Feel free to reach out to us at any time with questions via our email (cstudies@iu.edu).

Students must officially declare the minor during the early phase of their Ph.D. studies by completing the minor declaration form posted on the website and consult with the director of the Cultural Studies program.

If there is a course being offered that you feel may qualify for the minor that is not listed here, you are welcome to petition the program to have it count towards your minor progress. To do so, please reach out to us via email.

This page lists courses for which you can earn credit towards a graduate minor in Cultural Studies for Fall 2026. Former course listings can be accessed by looking at the course archive.

Minor Course Offerings

C601 Introduction to Cultural Studies (4 credits). Survey of main issues, theories, and methods in cultural studies. Topics may include communications and mass culture; gender, race, and the social construction of identity; historiographic and ethnographic approaches to modern cultures and societies.

C701 Special Topics in Cultural Studies (3-4 credits). Prerequisite: C601 or consent of instructor. Advanced exploration of a specific issue in cultural studies.

C790 Independent Readings in Cultural Studies (3-4 credits). Prerequisite: consent of the instructor. Open only to students minoring in Cultural Studies. Click on the link above for instructions on arranging and registering for C790.

Fall 2026 Cultural Studies Courses

CULS-C 701: Special Topics in Cultural Studies

Environmental Rhetorics

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0001 (#34726)
• Meeting Information: W 11:10 PM–2:10 PM in BH 018
• Joint Listed with: ENG-L756/ENG-L602
• Instructor: Scot Barnett
• Course Description:

  • In this seminar, we will explore foundational as well as recent work in Environmental Rhetorics and the Environmental Humanities more broadly. In addition to examining how language and our modes of communication inform perceptions of the natural world, we will also consider how environments themselves speak and what they might be trying to communicate to us and other species, especially in the context of the current climate crisis. The guiding principle of the course is that humans and the natural environment are not separate or distinct spheres of being but are entangled with one another in deeply complex and fundamental ways that have bearing on how we communicate, legislate, and craft meaning about the environment and our more-than-human worlds. Readings may include, but will not be limited to, Debra Hawhee’s A Sense of Urgency: How the Climate Crisis is Changing Rhetoric, Phaedra Pezzulo’s Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Pollution, Travel, and Environmental Rhetoric, Janell Johnson’s Every Living Thing: The Politics of Life in Common, Jennifer Clary-Lemon’s Nestwork: New Material Rhetorics of Precarious Species, Joshua Trey Barnett’s Mourning in the Anthropocene: Ecological Grief and Earthly Coexistence, Ira Allen’s Panic Now?: Tools for Humanizing, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, and Bruno Latour’s Facing Gaia. Assignments will include short response papers, a book review, a culminating seminar-length essay (or conference paper, pedagogical application, or creative work for those enrolled in W602), and lively participation in class discussions.

Material Culture

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0002 (#34870)
• Meeting Information: T 9:30 PM–12:00 PM in C2 272
• Joint Listed with: FOLK-F514 and ANTH-E600
• Instructor: Jason Baird Jackson
• Course Description:
  • From a simple piece of string to a sprawling city, the category of "material culture" encompasses the vast array of products and outcomes arising from human interactions with their environments. This course introduces both the concept of material culture and a range of theories and methods used in its study.

MUSIC AND ITS POETICS

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0003 (#34871)
• Meeting Information: T/TH 9:35 AM-10:50 AM in BH 106 
• Joint Listed with: ENG-L646
• Instructor: Alberto Varon
• Course Description:
  • This course is a transdisciplinary and multimedia Cultural Studies course on the poetics of sound. It is a class on sound studies and verse: poems and lyrics as living cultural texts that whisper to us (or sometimes shout) about the world we live in. Accordingly, we're going to jump between music and poetry and fiction and theory and back again. Focused primarily on the late twentieth century to the present, we will read (and listen to) work by writers, artists, and critics whose work crosses genre and media to depict the contemporary American experience. Topics that we will explore include: narrative and storytelling; contemporary writing; sound studies; lyric, music, verse, poetics; migration/immigration; diaspora and globalization; NAFTA, neoliberalism, free trade; race, racialization, and mestizaje; nation, transnationality, and borderlands; the urban experience; gender and sexuality; cultural adaptation, copyright, sampling; and others. We will examine critical work in Sound Studies, Performance Studies, contemporary Poetics, New Media, and narrative studies.

Power, Subjectivity, and the State

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0006 (#33825)
• Meeting Information: Th 1:55 PM–4:25 PM in SB 231
• Joint Listed with: ANTH-E 648
• Instructor: Sara Friedman
• Course Description:
  • This seminar will explore the relationships among culture, power, subjectivity, the state, and governing practices more generally through close readings of theoretical and ethnographic texts. It is structured around different theories of power and their consequences for our understanding of governance, state violence, sovereignty, and bordering practices. We will put these conversations in dialogue with theories of subjectivity and human agency, approaching from various angles questions of what constitutes the political, the human, and the affective and social bonds that create human collectivities or violently divide us. The course readings will address these questions from the perspective of diverse locations, communities, and historical contexts. An eclectic range of approaches will be intentionally selected to foster conversations about method, historical legacies, intellectual genealogies, and writing style.

Dramatic Theory

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0007 (#32432)
• Meeting Information: T/Th 9:25 AM–10:40 AM in TH A300
• Joint Listed with: THTR-T 675
• Instructor: Jennifer Goodlander
• Course Description:

  • This course will examine the different uses and discourses of critical and dramatic theory as they apply to the interpretation and creation of performance globally. Theory informs and describes the way that artists and scholars think about and think through performance and theatre—it is a tool, a conversation, and an inspiration. 

    Dramatic theory describes the process and/or purpose of theatre or performing arts. Critical theory crosses many disciplines, including literature, history, social sciences, and area studies. Thus, the material and ideas covered in this class will stretch the definition of theatre and introduce performance as both a field of study and a method of study. Students in this class must embrace interdisciplinarity and are encouraged to explore connections between and amongst scholarship and artistic practice. 

Religion, Textuality, and Cultural Imagination: The Music of Conversion

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0004 (#35408)
• Meeting Information: T 4:00 PM–6:30 PM in SY 224
• Joint Listed with: REL-R 667 and REL-R 767
• Instructor: Cooper Harriss
• Course Description:
  • This seminar considers music as an expressive dimension of religious conversion. Drawing on four case studies (Gustav Mahler’s conversion to Catholicism to appease antisemitic leaders of the Vienna State Opera; John Cage’s embracing of Zen Buddhism; Alice Coltrane's movement from an Afro-Protestant-influenced jazz background to Vedantic Hinduism; and Bob Dylan’s turn to evangelical Christianity and Gospel music) we’ll consider the politics of conversion and its vagaries, religious and cultural dimensions of sincerity and authenticity, questions of appropriation, and religious and theological significations of word and sound. Weekly assignments will include readings in primary and secondary sources and listening to musical examples. Students are encouraged to develop a term paper that addresses issues from the course in their own areas of interest or specialization.

Teaching something you'd like to see listed? Contact us at cstudies@iu.edu!