Courses
Fall 2026 Course Offerings
Africana Studies American Studies Asian American Studies Colonialism Studies Latinx Studies Native American and Indigenous Studies Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora Studies Archives
Course Descriptions
The list below includes descriptions of undergraduate courses offered by the core faculty of the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora (RCD) for Fall 2026. For a complete list of cross-listed and affiliate courses, check out our Fall 2026 Course Booklet.
For up-to-date information on course offerings, schedules, room locations and registration, please visit the Student Information System (SIS).
AFR 0092 Introduction to Africana Studies. (Cross-listed as AMER 94-01, CST 94-01, RCD 94-05). A wide-ranging survey of the history, culture, and politics of people of African descent on the African continent and in the diaspora. Issues of colonialism, migration, slavery, revolution will be emphasized. The formation and growth of black communities in the New World and in the former colonial capitals.
RCD 50 Introduction to Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora. Introduction to the study of race, colonialism, and diaspora within and beyond the United States. Examines the major themes and interdisciplinary approaches across these intersecting fields: Africana studies, Native American studies, Colonialism studies, Latinx studies, Asian American studies, and American studies. Materials span the Americas, Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and Europe. Provides opportunities for place-based study of the historical and cultural impact of slavery, colonialism, and diaspora on greater Boston.
RCD 53 Introduction to American Studies. (Cross-listed as AFR 47-01, AMER 94-04). Rethinking the concepts “America” and “American” to explore foundational myths and images, counter archives, and undocumented (forgotten, erased) knowledges. Using various media (historical documents, literary, legal and scholarly texts, visual and aural media, material artifacts, archival ephemera) and the broad interdisciplinary methods of the field of American studies to excavate the historical, ideological, and structural underpinnings of the “American” project. Situating the history and politics of the United States within broader hemispheric and global contexts.
RCD 56 Introduction to Native American & Indigenous Studies. (Cross-listed as AMER 94-05, CST 94-04). Key themes and methods in Native American and Indigenous studies including Indigeneity as both a grounded and global category of critical analyses; race, ethnicity, and blood quantum; settler colonialism and sovereignty; land, geography, and Indigenous ecological knowledge; gender and sexuality; and Indigenous activism and politics.
RCD 70 Colonial Schooling in Comparative Perspective. (Cross-listed as AMER 94-02, CST 94-02, ED 91-03). The history and practice of colonial schooling in comparative perspective across the United States, Canada, Australia, the Philippines, and parts of Africa, tracing the circulation of ideas, practices, and institutional forms in historical and contemporary contexts. Examines how colonial governments in the late 19th and early 20th centuries established assimilationist school systems to extend territorial, political, and cultural influence. Themes include colonial education policy, assimilation, techniques of social management and control, and Indigenous adaptations, responses, and resistance.
RCD 94-01 Introduction to Carceral Studies. (Cross-listed as AFR 47-03, AMER 94-03, SOC 94-11). This course critically engages the political, economic, and social histories of the contemporary criminal legal system. Together, we will historicize and theorize the advent of the US prison in a genealogy of surveillance, captivity, and punishment constitutive of racial slavery. Thematics including abolition, resistance and revolt, state repression, borders, gendered violence, and Black radicalism will be at the heart of the coursework. Students can expect to gain a better understanding of the key terms of the developing disciplines of Carceral Studies and Prison Studies using primary and secondary source material, film, poetry, and other new media.
RCD 94-02 History of transAtlantic Slavery. (Cross-listed as AFR 47-04, AMER 94-06). This course broadly considers Atlantic slavery through its multiple geographies, temporalities, and institutions of emergence. Through an engagement with canonical and contemporary historiographic texts of slavery that consider themes and problematics like political economy, gendering, and intellectual history, students will encounter a range of perspectives on Atlantic Slavery, not as an historical event of the ‘past,’ but as a condition of possibility for our modern world. Using primary archival sources to supplement vital secondary literature, the course offers access to resources that are held in hard-to-access libraries and archives to prompt curiosity regarding the nature of historiographic evidence, the predicament of experience, and the complexity of ‘official records.’
RCD 94-04 Introduction to Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. (Cross-listed as CVS 72-01, WGSS 72-01). Interdisciplinary survey of major issues in the study of women, gender, and sexuality. Emphasizes intersections with race, class, ethnicity, culture and other categories of identity and difference, including a strong global or transnational perspective.
RCD 110 Beyond the Human: Creative & Critical Ecologies. (Cross-listed as AFR 147-03, AMER 194-04, ENV 148-01). Comparative ecologies that attend to the climate crisis’ relation to the legacies of colonialism, slavery and other forms of extraction, eradication, and racialized oppression. How does rethinking or decentering the human, and sustained attention to nonhuman life and the animacy of water and land reshape our ideas about responsibility, freedom, solidarity? Emphasis on black, indigenous and queer ecologies, relying on models of wild thought and imagination. Recommendations: RCD 50.
RCD 161 Asian American Mobilities & Transpacific Movements. (Cross-listed as AAST 194-01, AMER 194-03). Asian American history (ca. 1800–present) through the interdisciplinary lens of mobility studies. Focus on Asian and Asian American perspectives and forms of agency. How “Asian America” has developed through movement across local, national, imperial, and transpacific scales. Topics include lecture and world’s fair circuits, gendered labor migrations, cultures of travel and tourism, the figure of the sojourner, international student exchange, and transportation infrastructures such as steamship and railroad networks. Transnational and diasporic frameworks to analyze core themes in Asian American and transpacific studies, including immigration and exclusion, labor, cultural representation, militarism, disability/immobility, gender and sexuality, settler colonialism, and political movements and ideologies. Possibilities and challenges of studying race, colonialism, and diaspora across disciplinary boundaries. Original research projects that situate students’ emerging scholarly interests within interdisciplinary debates. Recommendations: RCD 50.
RCD 179-01 W.E.B Du Bois and the Problem of the Color Line. (Cross-listed as AFR 147-02, AMER 194-02, CST 194-01, HIST 173-01, SOC 149-03). In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that "the problem of the twentieth century is the color line." By that time, Du Bois had already published multiple works examining the lived experiences and political struggles of Black people in the United States. He continued to write on these topics for the nearly sixty years. This course examines the interdisciplinary scholarship of W.E.B. Du Bois. Reading across his sociological, historical, and literary works, we will study how he employed multiple research methods and genres of writing to explore how Black people in the United States understood, experienced, and sought to redress "the color line." Readings will include fiction and non-fiction books, essays, poems, and newspaper articles written by Du Bois.
RCD 179-02 Serve the People: Asian/Black American Anti-Colonial Struggle. (Cross-listed as AAST 194-02, AFR 147-04, AMER 194-08, CST 194-05). In the structure of American racial hierarchies, a durable legacy of colonialism, Asian Americans and African Americans have long been pitted against one another—in education, labor, social standing, political objectives, and, always, in their perceived relation to whiteness. Yet, for at least a century, strong Black and Asian/American inter-influences and alliances have existed in political movements, intellectual thought, and cultural productions: from Ho Chi Minh’s anti-lynching writings; Paul Robeson’s and W.E.B. Du Bois’ visits to China; the 1955 Bandung Conference; through to the influence of Maoist thought on the Black Panthers; Black Power and Yellow Power movements; Bruce Lee as global masculine (non-white) icon; coalitions against the Vietnam War; and up to current alliances in various anti-racist and anti-imperialist endeavors (George Floyd, Gaza), Black and Asian/Asian diasporic peoples have refused Western colonial strategies of divide-and-conquer and have repeatedly challenged white supremacy and racial capitalism through acts of political solidarity and ideas and movements whose praxis was (and is) rooted in making concrete material change “for the people,” in this country and abroad. We will examine political and theoretical writings, literature, film, and music by Du Bois, Hughes, Richard Wright, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Bruce Lee, Huey Newton, Fred Hampton, George Jackson, Yuri Kochiyama, Fred Ho, Grace Lee Boggs, and Jackie Wang, among others.