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Many people assume race is a biological fact鈥攕omething encoded in our DNA that allows the sorting of humanity into natural categories. It is not. Race is a relatively recent idea and one that is the product of human invention. This course traces the evolution of the race concept from its origins in ancient philosophy, to the colonial encounter and the Atlantic slave trade, through scientific racism, eugenics, and IQ testing, to the way racial categories continue to organize access to resources, wealth, security, and dignity today.

Participants in the course will engage with critical and timely questions: Where did racial categories come from? Who made them, and why? If race isn鈥檛 biologically real, why does it have such real consequences? How did science get recruited to make racial categories look natural and inevitable? If racial categories were invented, why can鈥檛 we uninvent them?

This is a course about one of the most consequential ideas in human history, and we will examine where it came from, how it has been used, and why it persists long after the science that invented it has been thoroughly discredited. By the end of the course, participants will have a clear, evidence-based account of the race concept. No academic background is required鈥攐nly a willingness to question what you thought you knew about race.

• Week 1 鈥� Before Race: How the Ancient World Organized Human Difference
• Week 2 鈥� Colonialism, Slavery, and the Need for a Cover Story
• Week 3 鈥� Scientific Racism: From Linnaeus to The Bell Curve
• Week 4 鈥� The Racial Contract: White Supremacy as a Social System
• Week 5 鈥� Unmaking Race: Toward and Anti-Racist Society

Why have images of "dangerous women" haunted art history for so long?

From early modern witch trials to the seductive femme fatale, artists have repeatedly portrayed women who exist outside social control as monstrous, mystical, or deadly. This five-week course will explore how the figures of the witch reflect cultural anxieties about aging, sexuality, labor, and power. 

Drawing on feminist scholar Silvia Federici's influential book Caliban and the Witch, we'll examine how the persecution of witches coincided with the rise of capitalism and the regulation of women's bodies. Moving through Renaissance paintings and prints, Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite painting, film noir, feminist performance, and contemporary art, participants will discover how artists have both demonized and reclaimed the "monstrous feminine.鈥�

Rather than treating the witch as a fixed image, we'll trace how she shifts across time: from persecuted crone to eroticized seductress, from grotesque body to reclaimed feminist symbol. We'll examine how visual culture repeatedly constructs women outside patriarchal control as monstrous鈥攁nd how artists have reimagined that monstrosity as power. 

Participants will acquire skills in visual analysis, feminist art history, and the critical examination of how images influence political narratives and ideologies. 

Course Outline:

Week 1: Burn Her: The Invention of the Witch: Capitalism, Labor, and the Aging Body [Witch hunts and primitive accumulation] Core Question: What historical and social conditions lead to the emergence of the witch? Visual Focus: Albrecht D眉rer, Hans Baldung, Illustrations from the Malleus Maleficarum 

Week 2: Paint Her as Grotesque: The Grotesque and the Abject: Making the Crone Monstrous Core Question: How does visual culture make aging female bodies unbearable? Key Artists: Francisco Goya, Salvator Rosa, Artemisia Gentileschi (counterpoint)

Week 3- Desire her: The Beautiful Witch: [The erotic threat: femme fatale] Core Question: What if danger looks seductive? Key Artists: Gustave Moreau, John William Waterhouse, Henry Fuseli, Film noir femme fatales Key Figures: Salome, Circe, Medusa, Judith 

Week 4: Confine Her: Hysteria, Asylum, and the Medicalization of the Witch [Hysteria and institutional control (the scientific witch hunt)] Core Question: What happens when female deviance becomes medical instead of supernatural? Key Figures & Artists: Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, Andr茅 Brouillet 

Week 5: Reclaim Her: Reclaiming the Witch: Feminism, Ecology, and Radical Power [feminist and contemporary responses] Core Question: Can monstrosity become liberation? Key Artists: Judy Chicago, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Smith, Wangechi Mutu, Cecilia Vicuna

The class is all levels with handbuilding and throwing on the potter's wheel. The clay we will be working with is Laguna #403 Speckled Buff Cone 5 (mid-fire stoneware clay). The glazes will be Cone 5 and will be fired in the electric kiln.