Fall 2024 registration is now open! Make sure to check out our exciting, upper-division electives in African American and African Diaspora Studies, American Indian and Indigenous Studies, Asian and Asian American Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and Latinx and Latin American Studies.
Our undergraduate degree majors and minors provide students with the skills they need to address real-world issues and succeed professionally in an increasingly diverse world. For more information, please email iges@unlv.edu
African American and African Diaspora Studies (AAS)
AAS 105-1001 African American Music & Culture: R&B and Masculinity
TTH 11:30 - 12:45 pm
Dr. Javon Johnson
This course, "R&B and Black Masculinity," delves into the profound yet often under-explored influence of Rhythm and Blues (R&B) on the construction and perception of Black masculinity, especially during the critical decade of the 1990s. While R&B's origins trace back to the 1940s, created by African Americans as a distinct genre, it has continuously evolved, interweaving elements of funk, disco, pop, hip hop, and more. The 1990s, a pivotal era for R&B, offered a rich tapestry of sounds and themes that contrasted with the growing prominence of hip-hop. This course examines how R&B, particularly in the '90s, provided alternative narratives to the prevailing discourses that often mischaracterized Black men as pathological or hypermasculine, influenced by factors such as gangster culture, the War on Drugs, and socio-political upheavals. Through an interdisciplinary approach, we will explore how R&B artists of this era presented themes of consent, respect, vulnerability, and love, thereby offering counterpoints to the stereotypes of Black male "super predators" prevalent in the same period. Our exploration will not only focus on the sounds and lyrics of '90s R&B but will also critically engage with the broader socio-cultural contexts. We will analyze how R&B served as a medium for Black male artists to express nuanced aspects of Black masculinity, challenging and reshaping the narrative around Black male identity. The course will juxtapose these R&B representations with contemporary hip-hop and its portrayal of Black masculinity, drawing from various scholarly works in hip-hop studies. Despite the lack of book-length critical studies exclusively dedicated to R&B's impact on Black masculinity and sexuality, this course aims to fill that gap.
AAS 330-1001 From Civil Rights to Black Power and Beyond
Online
Dr. Kendra Gage
From Civil Rights to Black Power and Beyond is a course based on the interdisciplinary study of African American Studies that began with the Civil Rights Movement and continued to the present day. The course will focus on the transition from civil rights to the emergence of the Black Power Revolution, the continued push for inclusion in the areas of education, employment, and the political arena, all the way to the present with the current and continuing struggles for Black equity and protection were highlighted by the Black Lives Matter Movement. We will pay special attention to how the larger African American freedom movement has both intersected and influenced past and current debates about gender, labor, sexuality, and politics of hierarchy.
AAS 350/HIST 350 History of Modern Africa
TTH 11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Dr. Jeffrey Schauer
Concentrates on the distinct social, cultural, intellectual, political, and economic changes in sub-Saharan Africa during the colonial and post-independence periods. Concerned primarily with internal transformations in local societies and how Africans perceived and experienced these changes. Special attention was given to the slave trade, the development of interior states, the European partition, the colonial period, and the rise of independent Africa.
AAS 432/HIST433 African American History: Organizing for Equality
MW 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm
Dr. Christopher Willoughby
Issues of labor have been central to the African American experience. From the fight to abolish slavery to the rise of the Black left during the Jim Crow era, African Americans have seen struggles over work as critical to gaining equality in the United States. This course traces this history from the age of slavery to the present, examining how African Americans have organized to create better labor conditions for themselves and all Americans.
AAS 440-1001 - Black Las Vegas
TTH 10:00 am - 11:15 am
Dr. Tyler Parry
This course will explore how people of African descent helped build and shape one of the world’s most famous cities. Though Las Vegas’ history is most often associated with its connections to mob funding and the corporate takeover of the gaming industry in the late twentieth century, Black people were present in the valley as early as the late nineteenth century. As the Black population grew between 1930-1960, city leaders imposed Jim Crow-style restrictions to isolate and marginalize this community. Recognizing these expressions of anti-Black racism, African Americans nicknamed Las Vegas “the Mississippi of the West” and mobilized community activists to fight against segregation and systematic discrimination. Using oral histories, news reports, audiovisual media, and historical monographs, this course explores the tragedies and triumphs of the Black experience in southern Nevada, prioritizing the voices of the community in defining its own history. The topics explored in this course include: The “Great Migration” to the Las Vegas Valley; the development of the Historic Westside and other Black communities in Southern Nevada; racism in law enforcement; Black political leadership and representation; Segregation in the West; Civil protest; Black entertainment; and assessing the future of Black life in Sin City.
AAS 492/ENG495B Modern African American Literature
MW 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm
Dr. Jessica Teague
Study of recent and contemporary works of African-American literature.
American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS)
AIIS 260 Introduction to Native American History
MW 8:30 am - 9:45 am
Dr. William Bauer
An examination of significant events and trends in Native American history. The course will focus on the contributions made by American Indians to the development of North American history and contemporary society.
AIIS 438B/HIST 438B American Indian History Since 1851
MW 10:00 am - 11:15 am
Dr. William Bauer
Examination of Indian peoples from 1851 to the present. Focuses on the impact of Indian culture on Indian-white relations, allotment, reservation life, the Indian Reorganization Act, Termination, the struggle for civil rights, self-determination, and economic development (gaming).
Asian and Asian American Studies (AIS)
AIS 323/CHI 323 Chinese Popular Culture
MW 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm
Dr. Ying Bao
Introduction to contemporary Chinese culture and society. Focuses on popular literature, contemporary Chinese cinema, soap operas, political pop in the arts, pop music, and Internet literature in China. Taught in English.
AIS 402 Asian American Sporting Cultures
TTH 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm
Dr. Constancio Arnaldo
“Really, you play sports?” is a common question asked of some Asian Americans. AIS 402 uses an interdisciplinary approach to examine the racial and gendered politics of Asian American leisure, pleasure, and play in everyday sporting spaces like basketball courts and football fields, and in global sporting spectacles like the Olympics and boxing matches. Asian Americans’ relationship to sports can provide important understandings of their identities beyond the Black/white (and male) racial paradigm and how they use sports to challenge what it means to be called a “forever foreigner” or “model minority.”
AIS 485A/ENG 485A Asian Literature
TTH 10:00 am - 11:15 pm
Dr. Wendy Chen
Study of modern and contemporary Asian literature, including comparison and contrast with Western literature and culture.
Gender and Sexuality Studies (WMST)
WMST 295: Gender and Popular Culture
TTH 11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Dr. Susana Sepulveda
What is popular culture and what is its relationship to gender? How does popular culture shape our understanding of gender and vice versa? How does gender intersect with race, class, and sexuality within popular culture? Addressing these questions, this course engages a variety of interdisciplinary and intersectional theories and methods based in feminist and queer theory, critical theory, popular culture studies, and cultural studies. We will examine how various forms of popular culture such as films, television, music, literature, social media, and fanzines or zines, shape our understanding of who we are and how the world works. The course is based on the premise that popular culture is never simply diversion or entertainment. Rather, we will approach popular culture as a site where social norms and relations of power such as gender, race, class, and sexuality are (re)imagined, (re)constructed, and (re)negotiated.
WMST 424-1001: Gay Plays
TTH 11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Instructor: TBA
Study of selected gay plays, including examining appropriate themes and issues.
WMST 427B-1001: Gender & Literature: Queer Literature and Theory
MW 11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Dr. Beth Rosenberg
The vocabulary used to talk about gender and sexuality is no longer as simple as traditional heterosexual binaries of man/woman and masculine/feminine. What does it mean to be lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and/or nonbinary? We will investigate historical representations of queer identity and sexuality by reading novels from the beginning of the twentieth century to the present. By the end of the semester, we will have a more nuanced and detailed sense of what we mean when we use the acronym, LGBTQ+.
WMST 453-1001: Gender & Society
TTH 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm
Dr. Cassaundra Rodriguez
Examines the micro-social and political aspects of gender, including socialization into gender roles, same-sex, and cross-sex communications, interactions, and long-term relationships.
WMST 490/690-1002: Sex and Gender in Las Vegas
MW 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm
Dr. Lynn Comella
This course will explore Las Vegas’s past and present through the lens of gender and sexuality studies, with the goal of deepening students’ understanding of the city’s history, economic organization, and prevailing cultural myths and narratives. Using an interdisciplinary and intersectional approach, we will focus on local activism, entertainment, labor, tourism, sports, queer culture, and resistance. Students will read oral histories about Black mothers organizing for rights on Las Vegas’ historic Westside; discuss ethnographic studies of strip club culture and Nevada brothels; and engage with questions of public history and sociology in regard to the city’s LGBTQ community. We will analyze the construction of masculinity and femininity in the city’s entertainment and service industries and examine representations of Las Vegas in film and popular culture. Students will visit UNLV Special Collections and Archives and consider how ideas about sex and gender have changed over time while also remaining central to the ways both locals and outsiders imagine and make sense of Sin City.
WMST 490/690-1002: Black Sexualities
Tuesday 1:00 pm - 3:45 pm
Dr. Javon Johnson
When Marlon Bailey stood in front of the audience at the Black Studies Conference at Northwestern University and said, “It's time to talk about sex,” he did so while incredibly aware of the pernicious notions of black sexual deviancy, homophobia within Black Studies, racism within queer studies, and the robust history of white sexualized violence enacted on black people. Following Bailey and of course, Salt- N-Pepa who urged us in 1990 to “talk about sex, baby…and…all the good things and all the bad things that may be,” this course makes use of black feminist theory, black queer theory, black masculine studies, black pop culture, and black literature to examine black sex and sexuality. While we will indeed explore scholarship that illuminates the history of sexual violence enacted on black people (and black women in particular), this course also takes its cue from a more recent cohort of black sexual scholars who write about black sexual agency and pleasure. In so doing, we will examine the nasty and neat, the political and personal, as well as the pleasures and pains of black sex and sexuality as theory, method, and object.
For more information, contact the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies: iges@unlv.edu
For information about IGES degree programs: https://www.unlv.edu/interdisciplinary/degree
Wilson Advising Center: https://www.unlv.edu/liberalarts/wac
Registration Instructions: https://www.unlv.edu/registrar/registration-guide