Comparative Studies
This list is current as of August 13, 2024. Course schedule and descriptions are subject to change. We are adding here course-specific descriptions, as well, as they become available. Please refer to SIS for the most up-to-date information. Contact arceno.1@osu.edu if you notice any discrepancies or have any questions.
COMPSTD 5240 / PUBAFRS 5240 / AFAMAST 5240 Race and Public Policy in the United States
MW 9:35-10:55 | Emily Krichbaum | Page 60
This course explores Race and Public Policy in the United States from Reconstruction to the present. In particular, the class is designed to look at the long list of "hot topics" in the current policy landscape, including policing, housing, wealth gap, immigration, voting, political representation, and others. Cross-listed in African American and African Studies and Public Affairs. Not open to students with credit for AFAMAST 5240 or PUBAFFAIRS 5240.
COMPSTD 5957.02 Folklore in Circulation: Cultures of Waste and Recycling
TR 2:20-3:40 | Katey Borland | Hagerty 451
This course explores the notion of the residual: what is left over, useless, unclassifiable. We will explore the customary management of communal resources, both human and material, in scarce-resource societies. We’ll consider processes of symbolic classification through which phenomena can be labelled as out of place or out of phase. We'll examine the creation of waste (and its converse, deprivation) with the codification of custom in modernity, and look at strategies by which waste is recuperated as a matter of necessity, aesthetics, or ideology. We'll look at how different kinds of leftover move in and out of systems of value: for example, the labelling of things as "junk" or "antiques," people as "trash," or ideas as "folklore." Finally, we'll think about the status of residues in social and cultural theory.
COMPSTD 6300 Foundations: Comparative Analysis and Sociocultural Theory
W 11-1:45 | John Brooks | Hagerty 451
This course aims to help students become more lucid about the role that comparison plays in their thinking and doing while also introducing them to a range of social and cultural theory. We will read and critique sociocultural theory by a range of thinkers (bell hooks, Stuart Hall, Clifford Geertz, Raymond Williams, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, among others) situated within different disciplinary and inter-disciplinary contexts (including but not limited to Reason, History, National Cultures and Decoloniality, Blackness, Feminism, Queer Theory, Transhumanism, Posthumanism, Animal Studies, and Affect Theory). Assignments are designed to prepare students for a successful conference presentation and journal publication on a topic of their choice in their own field of inquiry.
COMPSTD / ENGLISH 7350.03 Theorizing Folklore III: Differentiation, Identification, and the Folk
T 9:15-12 | Mintzi Martinez-Rivera | Denney Hall 447
In this course, and moving among, besides, and beyond the Western Folklore Studies canon, we will explore the history of how "the folk" (as an object of study) was imagined and theorized. The first part of the semester will provide a historical overview of how the field of folklore constructed "the folk," while the second part will provide current theorizations grounded in Critical Race and Ethnic studies, Queer studies, Disability Studies, and Decolonization approaches. Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for 870 or CompStd 7350.03 (792). Cross-listed in CompStd.
COMPSTD 8100 Interdisciplinary Learning Lab I
TR 3:55-5:15 | Barry Shank and Ryan Skinner | Hagerty 451
COMPSTD 8100 is part of a two-part year-long course that seeks to give participants opportunities to engage in sustained interdisciplinary research, to workshop their research projects in conversation with one another, and to share their projects with broader publics. (COMPSTD 8200, the second part, will be offered SP 25.)
This year’s sequence develops from studies of critical cultural musicology to the design and delivery of a series of performances from local and regional musicians whose work might be said to engage and embody some of the themes that we have read about.
During the first semester (AU 24), students will read a series of works that engage classic and current debates in critical cultural musicology along with some works in performance or sound studies more generally. The second semester (SP 25) will be devoted to identifying local or regional musical acts that seem in some way to exemplify important elements of the previous semester’s readings and organizing performances by a set of them.
Enrollment in Spring 2025's COMPSTD 8200 is encouraged but not required for students outside Comparative Studies.
COMPSTD 8791 Seminar in Interdisciplinary Theory: Race, Nation, and Empire
W 2:15-5 | Zachary Morgan | Hagerty 451
This graduate seminar examines the global constructions of race in the modern era, from the Age of Conquest/Discovery through the present day, and the various ways that race, racial hierarchy, and racialized labor extraction have shaped colonies, nations, and empire within imperial contexts, past and present. Themes will include slavery, abolition, gender, sexual reproduction, subject formation, citizenship, military service, forced labor, criminal justice, migration, and race relations. The general focus of our readings is the Americas, but readings will also address these themes in Asia, Europe, and Africa. The goal is not to build a cohesive historical narrative; but to comparatively analyze disciplinary methodologies including anthropology, geography, history, sociology, as well as cultural, Africana, Indigenous, and Asian/Asian-American studies.
COMPSTD 8791 Seminar in Interdisciplinary Theory: Theorizing Bad Feelings
R 9:15-12 | Melissa Curley | Hagerty 451
This seminar examines bad feelings as emergent historical phenomena. Together, we’ll look at the affective, aesthetic, phenomenological, and political dimensions of feeling bad, thinking in conversation with theorists such as Byung-Chul Han, Sianne Ngai, Jack Halberstam, Ann Cvetkovich, Lee Edelman, and Sara Ahmed, about a host of bad feelings: feeling sad, feeling mad, feeling bored, feeling like a failure, feeling anxious, and feeling burned out. Taking up cases and texts from a wide range of times and places, we’ll bring a comparative approach to bear on illuminating the social meanings and radical possibilities of our own bad moods.
COMPSTD 8890 / Dissertation Writing Workshop
T 12-2 | Miranda Martinez | Hagerty 451
Since the dissertation is often your first effort to construct a complex, original, and extended argument, interpretation and/or analysis, this writing workshop will assist you in developing concrete strategies for tackling this major task, hold you accountable for making progress on the dissertation, and contribute to the creation of an intellectual community among Comp Studies graduate students. Repeatable to a maximum of 9 cr hrs or 9 completions. This course is graded S/U.