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 Spring 2025 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@indiana.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 Spring 2025. 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.

Spring 2025 Cultural Studies Courses

 CULS-C 601: Introduction to Cultural Studies

Not available in Spring 2025–check back in Fall 2025!

CULS-C 701: Special Topics in Cultural Studies

Ritual Ecologies in Literature and Performance

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0007 (#13863)
• Meeting Information: Th 1:00PM-3:30PM in C2 272
• Joint Listed with: FOLK-F734/ GNDR-G701
• Instructor: Solimar Otero
• Course Description: This graduate seminar explores ritual ecologies found in literature and performance.  By focusing on how interactions between the natural and supernatural world are represented in course materials, we will see the ways that folklore provides a foundation for the form and content of these expressions.  The class also examines how authors and artists engage with yet also demystify preconceptions about ritual contexts and practices. Many of the theoretical and creative works consulted will offer the consideration of metaphysics, especially as modes of action in the world with specific social, environmental, and cultural purposes. As such, questions about materiality, time, and scientific and historical taxonomies will arise with the interest of providing opportunities for dynamic discussions about race, gender, sexuality, class, and colonialism in relation to ritual ecologies. Some of the authors and artists we consult include: Erna Brodber, Lisa McInerney, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Sara Gómez, Joy Harjo, Lysley Tenorio, Ben Okri, Laura Pérez, and Sylvia Wynter, among others.

Introduction to Post-Colonial Studies

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0010 (#34528)
• Meeting Information: MW 7:05PM-8:20PM in BH106
• Joint Listed with: ENG-L643
• Instructor: Purnima Bose
• Course Description:
  • The term “post-colonialism” emerged in the 1980s, signifying an impulse among scholars to periodize history and to identify colonialism as central to an understanding of international/global configurations of power. Less a unified body of interpretive practices than a series of engagements with concepts such as colonialism, the state, nationalism, colonial and native subjectivity, dependency and uneven development, and subalternity, post-colonial studies has involved different forms of analysis, ranging from Marxist analyses of the political economy of colonialism and resistance to post-structuralist elaborations of subjectivity and representation to assessments of the impact of colonialism on the environment. The intellectual and disciplinary reach of post-colonialism has included Literary Studies, Anthropology, Political Theory, History, and Geography, spanning studies of past and present nation-states to colonial discourse analysis and representation.
    
    The capacious nature of the field makes it impossible to cover its key insights in one semester. Consequently, this class should best be approached as an introduction to some debates in the field, which have their own regional complexity and variations. The first third of the course will focus on four foundational texts in the field such as Aime Cesaire’s A Discourse on Colonialism, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and A Dying Colonialism, and Edward Said’s Orientalism. The remaining two thirds of the class will consist of clusters that cohere around one or two central text(s) from different regions of the world to introduce you to a variety of writers, the rich creative traditions to which they belong, and their geopolitical contexts. We will, in other words, read fiction, graphic novels, nonfiction, and theory (whenever possible, we will supplement our readings with film). Central texts include Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Malik Sajad’s graphic novel Munnu: A Boy from Kashmir; Nathan Thrall’s A Day in the Life of Abed Salama and Joe Sacco’s graphic novel Footnotes in Gaza; Manlio Argueta’s One Day of Life; and Bessie Head’s When the Raid Clouds Gather. Because our discussion of Head’s novel will coincide with a symposium to honor Byron Santangelo, we will also read his Different Shades of Green, along with keynote speaker Cajetan Iheka’s African Ecomedia.
    
    Our discussions will take up some of the seminal issues which define the history of post-colonial  studies, such as the status of the subaltern and the challenges of archiving subaltern consciousness, the relationship between colonialism and the intimate sphere of domesticity and desire, political violence and contemporary constructions of terrorism, the impact of colonialism on non-human life forms and the environment, and partition and its ongoing legacies in conflict.
    
    Students should expect to approach our readings with an open mind, participate in class discussion, write a 5-6 summary of a lecture of their choice, attend a session of the symposium in honor of Byron Santangelo, submit a 500 word abstract of their final paper, and write a 10-12 page paper.

Hormones & Somatic Knowledge in Contemporary Art & Curation, Or: Hormonal Art History, A Manifesto

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0011 (#34529)
• Meeting Information: Tu 1:30PM-4:30PM in LH 328
• Joint Listed with: ARTH-A691
• Instructor: Faye Gleisser
• Course Description:
  • This experimental graduate course takes up a set of nested questions as its point of departure: Where does the contemporary concept of hormonal management come from? Who is perceived as hormonal and why? Whose hormonality is productive in a hegemonically white hetero-patriarchal capitalist society? Whose hormonality is criminalized and to what ends? And how has a hormonal sensibility manifested materially, visually, sonically, temporally in contemporary art, curation, and exhibition history? Simultaneously, how have artists, curators, and art critics participated in, reproduced, questioned, or disrupted the idea of a “hormonally constructed body” (Oudshoorn) and its biopolitical implications for knowledge, embodiment, and being? What might an aesthetics or discourse forged through the alliance of hormonal consciousness in art and curation, environmentalism, and social justice organizing look like, or do?
    
    This graduate course begins from an understanding that hormones don’t merely regulate our bodies. It posits instead that hormones and the ways they are managed—through state-authorized laws or by means of fugitive, collective aid—both reveal hormonal management as a regulatory technology through which the biopolitics of wellness and health is governed, while also offering a site and shared vocabulary for potential reworlding. From here, this course considers artworks, theories, and exhibitions that put pressure on how hormonality and somatic knowledge are at once integral to the making of art history, and—yet—historically marginalized within its discourses and exhibitions. With a focus on contemporary art, course topics will address biohacking, xenofeminism, eco-criticism, the financialization of hormonal management, glandular eugenics, medical apartheid, neurodivergent curatorial methods, decolonial concepts of health, queer abolitionist somatic art practice, and more. Weekly readings combine art historical and curatorial discourse with critical visual carceral studies, science studies, critical trans studies, critical disability studies, gender studies, and Black studies’ critiques of Western enlightenment embodiment, biomedicine, and institutions of state power.
    
    Students from all disciplines are welcome, and especially those interested in the possibilities of somatic knowledge for a reframing of discourses of visuality, embodiment, and temporality in research, art practice, and curation. Ultimately, this course strives towards collectively reimagining an art history that aligns more closely with the radical vulnerabilities of artists who make art as a way of connecting, building knowledge, and living otherwise.

Globalization, Media, and Social Change

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0012 (#34531)
• Meeting Information: Tu 9:00AM-11:30AM in FF 017
• Joint Listed with: MSCH-J614
• Instructor: Radhika Parameswaran
• Course Description:
  • Globalization—often the subject of news and policy discourse—remains an imperfect, but ubiquitous term that is widely used in academia and in other such arenas as business, international relations, NGOs, and philanthropy to define, explain, contest, or justify the economic, political, and technological forces that shape the lives of citizens across the world. This course seeks to critically examine the phenomena that comprise globalization and explore the role that different media forms and genres (news, episodic entertainment, social media texts and productions, and fictional and documentary cinema) play in constituting our identities as global audiences, citizens, workers, consumers, and activists.
    
    Conceived as a broad introduction to the topic of globalization and media, this seminar course is organized in three units that aim to expose students to a broad swath of ideas, theories, and empirical research. The first unit of the course is designed to give you an expansive understanding of globalization and its different dimensions. Hence course materials in this unit flesh out definitions of and perspectives on globalization writ large, economic, and political globalization, and a few important topics such as migration, religion, and the environment. A brief second unit takes up a key hot/current topic in global political formations, namely, the rise of political autocracies and authoritarianism in many parts of the world and the challenges these regimes pose for global democratic governance. The last and major unit of the course concentrates on media culture in relation to globalization, while addressing a range of topics: global media theory, cultural imperialism, issues of hybridity and national identity, new media and social movements, globalization and film industries of the Global South, and gender, media, and global sports. Aiming to be as inclusive as possible in coverage of geographic terrain, the course materials touch on media in multiple locations, including China, India, Japan, United Kingdom, Turkey, South Korea, Nigeria, and other nations.

Sexuality and the Arts

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0013 (#34537)
• Meeting Information: TuTh 12:45PM-2:00PM in SE 010
• Joint Listed with: CMLT-C546
• Instructor: Jennifer Goodlander
• Course Description:
  • Critical sexuality studies emerged as a way to study the many ways power and the body collide, including race, gender, sexuality, and size. In this class we seek to understand sex/sexuality and how it is represented and functions within literature, art, music, theatre, and film. Even though we are going to examine various genres, our inquiry will be grounded within the discipline of performance studies as a means to center the body as the key signifier and actor of sexuality. We will read and examine texts from a variety of cultures and historical contexts; students will be encouraged to put course materials in conversation with their own specialties and interests. 
    
    NOTE: Students should be aware that many of the texts in this course are sexual in nature, sometimes explicit or violent, and often deal with difficult situations, viewpoints, histories, and traumas.

Perspectives in American Studies

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0014 (#34538)
• Meeting Information: We 9:35AM-12:05PM in LH201H
• Joint Listed with: AMST-G604
• Instructor: Micol Seigel
• Course Description:
  • As the second half of the first-year course offerings in the American studies doctoral program, this graduate seminar is designed to refine an understanding of the vibrant, swiftly-moving field of American studies conveyed initially in AMST G603.  It works with and from the material conveyed in the last two years’ AMST G603 offerings, building on the conceptual toolkit prepared in those seminars.  It reviews the development of threads in American Studies, Ethnic Studies and Cultural Studies in the context of the Cold War and shifts provoked by decolonization, U.S. postwar social movements, and related struggles, and spins them forward to the present.  This iteration of G604 will focus on the developments of Critical Ethnic Studies, Critical University Studies, decolonial method, Critical Prison Studies and other adjacent strands of critical theory, with special emphasis on mushrooms.  Nota Bene, the course is not intended to be exhaustive; complete review is the job of the Ph.D. examination process.  It aims instead to convey the excitement of this brash, broad field, site of some of the most sophisticated interdisciplinarity in the world of ideas.  Readings alternate between clusters of journal articles and recent monographs.  In addition to genuine scholarly engagement, which includes active participation on several levels, all seminar members will be expected to complete a substantial, original, 15- to 25-page research paper by the end of the term.

Coming into Visibility: History and Theory of Criticism

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0015 (#34572)
• Meeting Information: MW 11:10-12:25 in BH306
• Joint Listed with: CMLT-C601
• Instructor: Carlos Colmenares Gil
• Course Description:
  • What happens when something becomes visible? What do we gain and what do we lose? How are the terms and experiences of clarity and legibility related to the sensorial event of visibility? These questions will guide our exploration in this course, where we will move across philosophy, psychoanalysis, art criticism, black studies, indigenous studies, literature, and film/video to think about strategies of presenting or hiding something from the senses, and more specifically, from view.
    
    The class dynamics will combine lectures, discussion, and student presentations. The major assignments are a weekly class journal, presentation of a text, and a final research paper or creative project + reflection.
    
    Some of the authors we will study: Frantz Fanon, Davi Kopenawa, Andrea Soto Calderón, John Berger, Hito Steyerl, Georges Didi-Huberman, Saidiya Hartman, Harun Farocki, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Albertina Carri, and others.

NEW! Utopian Religion

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0016 (#35451)
• Meeting Information: W 3:10-5:40 PM in AC C103
• Joint Listed with: REL-R664
• Instructor: Constance Furey
• Course Description:
  • Utopia, a "good place" that is "no place," was invented by Thomas More in 1516, as a described an ideal society on an island off the coast of South America, narrated by a fictional European traveler. Utopia's paradoxical mix of realism and fantasy has inspired extraordinary theoretical work, most of it motivated by the conviction that utopia is a modern and, crucially, secular expression of human creativity. Utopia is also, however, a religious genre, invented by a man who would become a Catholic martyr; deeply informed by Christian monasticism as well as apocalypticism; and conceived as Christian corporations funded European exploration and conquest in the Americas. The purpose of the course will be to better understand the relationship between religion and utopian imagination. Readings will include the theoretical work of Fredric Jameson and Ernst Bloch as well as utopian writings by More and female utopian authors including Aemilia Lanyer, Margaret Cavendish, and Christine de Pisan. Students will be encouraged to research utopian writings from their own areas of specialization, to expand our collaborative, comparative framework.

NEW! Ecomusicology and Environmental Justice

• Registration Information: CULS-C701-0017 (#35604)
• Meeting Information: Tu 11:00AM-1:30PM in C2 272
• Joint Listed with: : FOLK-F722
• Instructor: Rebecca Dirksen
• Course Description:
  • As the urgency of climate change and ecological devastation around the world has become increasingly difficult to ignore, scholars in the humanities have rigorously turned toward articulating questions about the Anthropocene. Music scholars have equally become engaged with these questions both as scholarship and activism. Intertwined efforts in musicology and ethnomusicology and other adjacent disciplines over the past several decades have thus led to the definition of the subdiscipline or subfield of ecomusicology. During this seminar, we will trace the historical trajectory leading to current work in ecomusicology and environment related music research, while also taking time for broad interdisciplinary exploration of some of the most compelling work to emerge in environmental health and justice.

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