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

PPE 4900-301

Advanced Seminar in PPE: Cooperative Altruism

Instructor(s)

  • Jaron Cordero

Semester

Fall 2026

Cooperative altruism is the intention to benefit sentient beings and work together to accomplish this. Students in this interdisciplinary course will collectively explore cooperative altruism, both in theory and in practice. By engaging with a variety of approaches and perspectives — from microeconomics and experimental psychology to contemplative sciences and North American indigenous philosophy — each student will develop a robust vocabulary to support their capacity to learn about and practice cooperative altruism in dialogue.

Learn More
LAWM 5060

Technology, Law & Ethics (New)

Instructor(s)

  • Justin (Gus) Hurwitz

Semester

Fall 2026

What makes for a responsibly designed product? What duties do technologists have to ensure system security and protect user privacy? Who should be held accountable when artificial intelligence misbehaves? What constraints does intellectual property law place on product design and technologists’ latitude to experiment with technologies? As new technologies continue to emerge and shape both our lives and the world around us, they also raise novel, complex ethical questions that today’s engineers, tech entrepreneurs, other technology professionals are forced to confront. This course will introduce the legal frameworks and principles of ethical decision-making that enable technologists to identify their societal responsibilities, and to think critically through difficult issues. 

 

Learn More