Comparative Studies
This list is current as of October 6, 2025. 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
Tuesdays and Thursdays 12:45-2:05 | Michael Fisher | Mendenhall 185
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
M 9-11:45 | Liam Waters | Hagerty 451
Folklore in Circulation: Memes, Conspiracies, and Digital Traditions focuses on the movement and transformation of vernacular culture in online environments. From memes to viral rumors, internet legends to conspiracy theories, we will investigate how folklore circulates through digital networks, mutates across platforms, and gains new resonance in political and popular discourses. We will begin with digital case studies, then situate them within core folkloristic theories of transmission, performance, and tradition. Throughout the course, we will pay special attention to how digital folklore functions as a bottom-up, communal process of meaning-making while also noting how it is frequently appropriated by political actors, ideologies, and corporate interests.
A central theme of the course explores the recycling of traditional motifs and narratives in digital contexts: how tradition is reassembled, parodied, or hybridized in memes, copypasta, and internet legends, to name a few. In exploring this theme, we will consider the role of generative AI as a new agent in the circulation of digital folklore, questioning how algorithmic re-composition challenges assumptions about authorship, authenticity, and the human-centered nature of folklore.
Assignments for this course include weekly readings, discussion, and a hands-on project in which students will collect and document examples of digital folklore currently in circulation. Through this work, students will gain grounding in folklore theory while applying it directly to contemporary digital traditions.
COMPSTD 6400 Critical Foundations: Interdisciplinary Methods and Collaborative Practices
Tuesdays 9:30-12:15 | Liliana Gil | Hagerty 451
This graduate seminar introduces students to methodological approaches across the humanities and interpretive social sciences, with a special focus on interdisciplinarity and collaboration. It explores method as both technique and politics, tracing classic debates in ethnography, discourse analysis, genealogy, and visual and digital research. The course also emphasizes collaborative approaches, including participatory action research, feminist and decolonial methodologies, co-design, and digital humanities. Questions of ethics, power, and responsibility are considered throughout. In the final weeks, students will practice translating methodological debates into academic genres such as grant proposals and journal articles. Requirements include weekly readings and reflection posts, active participation in seminar discussions, one class facilitation, and a final methods brief related to the student’s dissertation research.
COMPSTD 6425 / SPANISH 6705 Introduction to Latinx Studies
Thursdays 12:45-3:30 | Paloma Martinez-Cruz | Hayes 12
This course introduces graduate students to the broad themes, concepts, and questions raised in the interdisciplinary field of Latina/Latino studies. Cross-listed in SPANISH.
COMPSTD 6500 Teaching Seminar in Interdisciplinary Studies
Thursdays 9:15-12 | Melissa Curley | Hagerty 451
This course introduces graduate students in the Humanities to a range of approaches to teaching in interdisciplinary settings. This course addresses practical concerns, such as creating an effective syllabus, selecting material, pacing, and facilitating in-course experiences. It also engages the class community in reflection on our roles as teachers and learners in the classroom, the power dynamics that are part of institutionalized learning, and our opportunities to employ our human and material resources to create transformative learning experiences.
COMPSTD 6750.02 / ENGLISH 6751.02/.22 Ethnography of Speaking
Tuesdays 12:15-3 | Galey Modan | Denney Hall 419
This Folklore GIS course serves as an introduction to fieldwork & ethnology in the humanities: interviewing, participant observation, ethics, ethnographic representation. Here, we practice ethnography of communication as an approach to community-based expressive forms. Prereq: Grad standing, or permission of instructor. Not open to students with credit for 770.02, 770.03, 6751.22, CompStd 770.02, 770.03, or 6750.02. Cross-listed in CompStd 6750.02.
COMPSTD 7320 Theorizing Race & Ethnicity
Thursdays 2:15-5 | Instructor: Franco Barchiesi | Hagerty 451
The main goal of this graduate seminar is to critically analyze and discuss the role of racial thinking and the politics of ethnicity in the making of the modern world. "Race" is here primarily understood not so much in terms of cultural identity (which is the how we will discuss ethnicity) but as a strategy and structure of power operating on a global scale. Western modernity has, in particular, deployed racial and ethnic difference as modes of knowledge to define humanity through often violent hierarchical and excluding modalities. Central to critical reflections on racialized power are Black studies' ethical and theoretical confrontations with anti-blackness. The course will provide critical tools for addressing the problematic place of race in modernity by focusing on topics that include: modern philosophies of race; the role of racial thinking and institutions in shaping global capitalism and the nation-state; intersections of race and gender; how modern ideas of race are defined in relation to enslavement, genocide, and settler colonialism; racial imaginaries in anti-colonial movements, Black radicalism, and Black feminism; connections between the critique of race and abolitionist movements; the significance of race and blackness in current debates on posthumanism and the anthropocene.
COMPSTD 8200 / Interdisciplinary Learning Lab 2
Wednesdays 9-11:45 | Maya Cruz + fabian romero | Hagerty 451
The Comparative Studies Interdisciplinary Learning Laboratories are two-part courses that seek 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. This year’s CS 8200 continues CS 8100's study of Indigenous and People of Color Theories, Methods and Practices, as we focus on integrating the theories/methods/practices from seminar into an academic deliverable (article, conference presentation, dissertation work, etc.) and/or public scholarship (creative work, public facing, etc.).
Having taken Autumn 2025's COMPSTD 8100 is not a pre-requisite for enrollment in Spring 2026's COMPSTD 8200.
COMPSTD 8791 Seminar in Interdisciplinary Theory: Queer Indigenous Theory
Wednesdays 2:15-5 | fabian romero | Hagerty 451
This interdisciplinary seminar delves into the growing filed of queer Indigenous studies. The seminar will provide an overview of the origins of feminist and queer Indigenous studies in the 1980s, the term “Two-Spirit,” constructions of sexuality, gender and their relation to structures of power, and movements for social justice by queer Indigenous people. There are two main objectives, first to learn about gender and sexuality before contact, and secondly to understand how Indigenous queer joy, pleasure and relational practices are intertwined with contemporary struggles for abolition and decolonization. Students will be encouraged to self-reflect on their relationship to course materials and their role within social change. Texts will include creative and scholarly works by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Deborah Miranda, Jodi Byrd, Smokii Sumac, Joseph Pierce, Dian Million, Luana Ross, Christos and many more.
COMPSTD 8990 / Dissertation Writing Workshop
Mondays 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.