First-Year Seminar: Women of the Black Atlantic

This course examines constructions of gender and individual and collective responses to developing systems of inequality in the Atlantic World shaped by sex, race, and class. Students analyze and compare how African, European, and American societies constructed the category of "woman" and the constraints and liberties these constructions imposed. Course readings survey societies from the early modern period to the twentieth century focusing on power, kinship, labor, and sexuality in daily life. Students will engage travel writing, visual art, and historic Afro-Atlantic spiritual traditions as critical source materials for the course.