CoursesMiddle Passages and Returns (NEW)
ANTH 3100/ANTH5100

Middle Passages and Returns (NEW)

This course will engage students in questions of slavery, indentured labor, migration, and repair through the conceptual frameworks of middle passages and returns. We will collectively investigate the routes and roots through which and from which people have traveled back and forth between African, Asian, and American sites in order to ask complicated questions about travel, conscription, labor, spirituality, and self-narration. How do we think about the complex trajectories that brought Africans and Asians to the Americas?  How do we excavate lesser known inter- and intra-continental circulations? In what ways is return theoretically and methodologically im/possible? How has repair been envisioned?

Instructor(s)
  • Deborah Thomas
Semester

Fall 2025

Register

We will focus our attention throughout the semester on narrative texts (slave narratives, autobiographies, memoirs, and travel journals), considering these as ethnographic offerings which we will contextualize with anthropological and historical material.  During the break after the semester, we will enact our own “return” by traveling to South Africa and St. Helena, a small island in the South Atlantic to which “liberated Africans” from intercepted slaveships were redirected after Britain abolished the slave trade.   Students in the class will join their counterparts in Cape Town (taught by my colleague Kelly Gillespie at University of the Western Cape) to think together about the legacies of these histories for all of us.

Faculty: Deborah Thomas

Related Content

Other Courses of Interest

COMM 2898

The Art and Ethics of Communication in Times of Crisis

Instructor(s)

  • Amy Gutmann
  • Sarah Banet-Weiser

Semester

Fall 2026

Along with many advances in our country and world, we also face crises with inescapable ethical dimensions where communication plays a key role. Communication can contribute to aggravating and to resolving most crises, creating an urgent need for us to understand the art and the ethics of communication. How can we responsibly use our powers of communication, personhood, and citizenship to deal constructively with crises?

Faculty: Dr. Amy Gutmann and Dean Banet-Weiser

Learn More

Philosophy and Children (NEW)

Instructor(s)

  • Karen Detlefsen

Semester

Fall 2026

We sometimes see philosophy as an inaccessible subject and the philosopher a solitary academic musing about abstract concepts from her office chair. However, philosophical thinking lies at the heart of many aspects of human life. Anyone who has pondered over questions regarding goodness, value, friendship, fairness, how to live well, or how to determine the right course of action has thought philosophically. These issues are of great interest and importance not just to adults, but also to children and teenagers. Introducing younger students to philosophical thought consists, in part, of showing them the ways in which they are already thinking philosophically.  

Learn More