Spring 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: Hip-Hop
Mon 2:30 pm - 5:15 pm (Web Live)
Dr. Javon Johnson
This course is an introduction to African American music and its relationship
to politics and society.
AAS 310-1001: Black Women in America
Mon & Wed 10:00 am - 11:15 am
Dr. Kendra Gage
This course will cover the variety of Black women’s experiences throughout the United States and will examine how Black women were engaged in grassroots, national and international movements while also navigating their identities as leaders, mothers, partners, workers, and citizens. We will pay special attention to how Black women have been at the core of mobilizing, organizing and leading the many movements for freedom throughout America. In addition, we will interrogate the differences in experiences based upon class, geography, and organizational lines.
NOTE: Gender and Sexuality Studies majors and minors have permission to take this class for GSS credit.
AAS 433-1001: Contemporary Issues in African American Studies:
Legacies of Slavery in the 21st Century
Mon & Wed 11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Dr. Tyler Parry
This course examines the historical context of chattel slavery throughout the Americas and its modern legacies. It shows how, despite the abolition of Atlantic slavery in the 19th century, the legacies of the institution remain relevant to the socio-political developments of all countries involved into the 21st century. Students will explore various interconnected topics, including: the perpetuation of racial segregation throughout the Americas and Europe; reparations debates; environmental racism; multiculturalism; policing and incarceration; monuments and historical memory; international representations of slavery in film and popular culture; Heritage Tourism; and the rise of social justice movements in this age of social media.
AAS 440-1001: Select Topics African American Studies:
African American Medical History
Tue & Thu 10:00 am - 11:15 am
Dr. Christopher Willoughby
This course takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of African American medical history. From the American Revolution to the present, African Americans have faced racism from the medical profession just as they fought to reform and enter it. In this course, we will examine these two threads. First, students will study the development of the scientific race concept, which physicians and politicians have used to exclude Black people from entering the medical profession and to justify preventable health disparities. Second, we will examine how African Americans have challenged medical racism from nineteenth-century attempts to integrate medical schools to the Black Panther Party’s work to oppose medical racism and establish community clinics in the late twentieth century.
NOTE: History majors and minors have permission to take this class for history credit. Anthropology majors and minors also have permission to take this course for Anthropology credit.
American Indian and Indigenous Studies (AIIS)
AIIS 260: Introduction to Native American History
Tue & Thu 11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Josh Coleman
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 494A: Native American Literature
Tue & Thu 10:00 am - 11:15 am
Dr. Steven Sexton
Literature of Native American peoples, oral traditions through contemporary works.
Asian and Asian American Studies (AIS)
AIS 301-1001: Asian Americans in Sin City
Tue & Thu 11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Dr. Mark Padoongpatt
This course explores race, space, and placemaking through the histories and experiences of Asian American and Pacific Islanders in Las Vegas. It will examine the many ways AA and PI communities use cultural practices and pathways—food, sports, art, music, digital media—to make a home for themselves and, in the process, remake Las Vegas. In turn, we will explore how Las Vegas reshapes not only these practices, but what it means to be Asian American and Pacific Islander today. Together, we’ll consider how and why the most pressing concerns confronting AAPI communities and Asian American Studies as a field–suburbanization, undocumented and temporary labor migration, settler colonialism and decolonization, and much more–play out right here in “Sin City.” Our goal will be to uncover new and compelling stories about AAPIs to the wider public using an interdisciplinary and intersectional placed-based approach. Thus, the course will strengthen community engagement and relationships between students and the local AAPI population. This course is part of the “Neon Pacific Initiative,” a Mellon Foundation grant-funded project that aims to expand, enhance, and elevate the placemaking and public-facing scholarship activities happening in UNLV’s Asian and Asian American Studies Program. Students enrolled in the class will be eligible for Neon Pacific internship and mentoring awards.
AIS 402-1001: Asian American Sporting Cultures
Tue & Thu 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm
Dr. Constancio Arnaldo
This course is an interdisciplinary study of sports to understand the historical, social, and cultural aspects of Asian American life. Participation in sport is never an isolated incident but one that involves engagement with mainstream U.S. popular cultural forms, an understanding of the contours of “Asian America” and how Asian American athletes and fans perform their own social location as racialized subjects. Students will investigate the politics and poetics of Asian American sporting cultures by examining everyday sports, spectacles, fandom, and rituals. Their relationship to sports can provide important understandings of their identities beyond the Black/white racial (and male) paradigm, experiences of U.S. society, and identity formation as it intersects with gender, sexuality, class, and nation.
AIS 485A: Asian Literature
Mon & Wed 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm
Dr. Amy Green
Study of modern and contemporary Asian literature, including comparison and contrast with Western literature and culture.
Gender and Sexuality Studies (WMST)
AAS 310-1001: Black Women in America
Mon & Wed 10:00 am - 11:15 am
Dr. Kendra Gage
This course will cover the variety of Black women’s experiences throughout the United States and will examine how Black women were engaged in grassroots, national and international movements while also navigating their identities as leaders, mothers, partners, workers, and citizens. We will pay special attention
to how Black women have been at the core of mobilizing, organizing and leading the many movements for freedom throughout America. In addition, we will interrogate the differences in experiences based upon class, geography, and organizational lines.
NOTE: Gender and Sexuality Studies majors and minors have permission to take this class for GSS credit.
WMST 473-1001: Chicana Feminism
Mon & Wed 11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Susana Sepulveda
This course examines Chicana/Latina experiences as they intersect with race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation. Students will engage the work of Chicana/
Latina writers, feminists, scholars, performers, artists, filmmakers, and activists. This course will focus on issues such as patriarchy, racism, homophobia, identity, immigration, labor, language, education, spirituality, and culture.
WMST 490/690-1001: Special Topic: The Sonic Politics Gender & Race
Mon & Wed 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm
Susana Sepulveda
This course examines the intersections of race, gender, and sound. Students will engage the interdisciplinary field of Sound Studies to examine social, historical, and cultural contexts of race and gender in the U.S. The course explores topics such as silence, voice, listening, noise, music, and soundscapes.
WMST 424-1001: Gay Plays
Tue & Thur 11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Douglas Hill
Study of selected gay plays which includes an examination of appropriate themes and issues
WMST 427B-1001: Gender & Literature: New Women & Other Monsters of
the 1890’s
Tue & Thur 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm
Dr. Kelly Mays
Modern, Western forms of gender, sexuality, and fiction arguably emerged out of what novelist George Gissing dubbed the “sexual anarchy” of the 1890s, a time when the laws governing all three were literally re-written. The same decade that produced “the homosexual” and the “best-seller” also produced the “New Woman,” “the feminist,” and that most famous of modern monsters, Dracula. In this course, we’ll together explore those creatures, their contexts, and their connections by reading — mostly British — fictional works by champions of both the “new realism,” on the one hand, and the “(b)romance revival,” on the other — in literary terms, among the most intense and intensely gendered polarities among the many that defined the 1890s. Key texts will likely include: Kate Chopin, The Awakening (1899); Marie Corelli, The Sorrows of Satan (1895); Ella Hepworth Dixon, The Story of a Modern Woman (1894); Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897); Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).
WMST 453-1001: Gender & Society
Mon & Wed 1:00 pm - 2:15 pm
Dr. Annaliese Grant
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.
For more information, contact the Department of Interdisciplinary, Gender, and Ethnic Studies: iges@unlv.edu
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