Spring Semester 2027 Graduate Courses
Comparative Studies
This list is current as of October 17, 2026. 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 125
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 6400 Critical Foundations: Interdisciplinary Methods and Collaborative Practices
Tuesdays 12-2:45 | John Brooks | Hagerty 451
The Department of Comparative Studies is an interdisciplinary program that attends to the construction of knowledge and the dynamics of power across a range of historical discourses and practices -- social, religious, literary, aesthetic, technological, scientific, political, and material. Our disparate interests are bound by a shared investment in comparison as a critical practice.
Comparison is not simply identifying differences or similarities, but rather a mode of inquiry that aims to understand more comprehensively the political, social, economic, and aesthetic dimensions of the discourses and practices that constitute social and individual life. It is through acts of comparison, within and across cultures and borders, that we come to know the world.
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. Accordingly, much of our time together will be spent discussing a wide range of well-known thinkers, critical movements, and texts situated within different disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts. In our meetings, we will attend to the ways that key texts constitute a “canon” but also how they refute and reinvent extant knowledges and traditions so that new perspectives can become tangible.
While practicing comparison and discussing social and cultural theory, students will develop and pursue their own comparative project. It might draw among several discourses and practices of a single society, group, geographic region, or historical era; or it might draw into conversation specific genres and/or media — textual, performative, material — across cultures. Both approaches to comparison are encouraged in this class and department, which recognizes that most projects worth pursuing will involve elements of both since contextualization is integral to all such studies.
COMPSTD 6425 / SPANISH 6705 Introduction to Latinx Studies
Tuesdays 12:45-3:30 | Paloma Martinez-Cruz | Hagerty 255
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 7320 Theorizing Race & Ethnicity
Wednesdays 11-1:45 | Zachary Morgan | 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 2:15-5 | Melissa Curley + Liliana Gil | 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 Improvisation in Context and Practice, 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 2026's COMPSTD 8100 is not a pre-requisite for enrollment in Spring 2027's COMPSTD 8200.
COMPSTD 8858: Seminar in Folklore - The Ethnography of Belief
Tuesdays 9-11:45 | Jesse Fivecoate | Hagerty 451
Description forthcoming
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 and is required for all ABD graduate students in Comparative Studies