First-Year Seminar. In this course we will trace the economic development of India from 1947 to the present. Independent India started out as a centrally planned economy in 1949 but in 1991 decided to reduce its public sector and allow, indeed encourage, foreign investors to come in. The Planning Commission of India still exists but has lost much of its power. Many in the U.S. complain of American jobs draining off to India, call centers in India taking care of American customer complaints, American patient histories being documented in India, etc. At the same time, the U.S. government encourages highly trained Indians to be in the U.S. Students are expected to write four one-page response papers and one final paper. Twenty percent of the final grade will be based on class participation, 20 percent on the four response papers and 60 percent on the final paper.

The course approaches the history of modern South Asia as a story of global connections. While the region has long been in contact with geographies, communities, and polities across the world, colonial processes roped the Indian subcontinent into the global circulation of capital, commodities, ideas, and people at an unprecedented scale by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. An expanding British Empire established connections of unparalleled domination, exploitation, and migration between the metropolis and the colony, as well as cross other colonies. The course explores the history of this contact by studying the political and epistemic technologies of colonial governance, the imperial trade of opium, tea, and cotton, the movement of indentured laborers and Indian soldiers, and the circulation of anticolonial ideas and political strategies across colonies. The course will complement chapters from monographs and scholarly articles with literary genres such as novels, films, and short stories to understand how global historical events shaped social relations, spaces, and the lives of ordinary South Asians.

This course introduces the foundations of linguistics - the scientific study of language - through exploration of multilingualism in the USA and in different societies around the world. Contacts between groups of people speaking different languages are documented from earliest records, and around the world it remains the norm to find more than one language in regular use in a single community. In this course we will see that multilingualism is a catalyst for linguistic change: sometimes languages are lost; sometimes new languages are created; sometimes the structure of a language is radically altered. We will consider: Which parts of linguistic structure are most susceptible to change under conditions of bilingualism? Does language contact - whether a result of trade, education, migration, conquest, or intermarriage - influence language structure in predictable ways? How do individual speakers handle multiple languages? How have attitudes to speakers of multiple languages changed through history? How have socio-historical events shaped the linguistic situation in the USA?

Jews in China??? Who knew??? The history of the Jews in China, both modern and medieval, is an unexpected and fascinating case of cultural exchange. Even earlier than the 10th century. Jewish trader from India or Persia on the Silk Road, settled in Kaifeng, the capital of the Northern Song Dynasty, and established a Jewish community that lasted through the nineteenth century. In the mid-nineteenth century, Jewish merchants, mainly from Iraq, often via India, arrived in China and played a major role in the building of modern Shanghei. After 1898, Jews from Russia settled in the northern Chinese city of Harbin, first as traders and later as refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War. In the first decades of the twentieth century, a few Jews from Poland and Russia visited China as tourists, drawn by a combination of curiosity about the cultural exoticism of a truly foreign culture and an affinity that Polish Jewish socialists and communists felt as these political movements began to emerge in China. During World War II, Shanghai served as a port of refuge for Jews from Central Europe. In this freshman seminar, we will explore how these Jewish traders, travelers, and refugees responded to and represented China in their writings. We will also read works by their Chinese contemporaries and others to see the responses to and perceptions of these Jews. We will ask questions about cultural translation: How do exchanges between languages, religions, and cultures affect the identities of individuals and communities? What commonalities and differences between these people emerge?

This first year seminar presents African Americans who have created religious and spiritual lives amid the variety of possibilities for religious belonging in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty-first century. By engaging an emerging canon of memoirs, we will take seriously the writings of Black spiritual gurus, theologians, hip hop philosophers, religious laity, activists, LGBTQ clergy, religious minorities, and scholars of religion as foundational for considering contemporary religious authority through popular and/or institutional forms of African American religious leadership. Themes of spiritual formation and religious belonging as a process—healing, self-making, writing, growing up, renouncing, dreaming, and liberating—characterize the religious journeys of the African American writers, thinkers, and leaders whose works we will examine. Each weekly session will also incorporate relevant audiovisual religious media, including online exhibits, documentary films, recorded sermons, tv series, performance art, and music.

This first-year seminar provides a critical introduction to Black Queer literature, art, and politics. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.

This first-year seminar examines the homelessness problem from a variety of scientific and policy perspectives. Contemporary homelessness differs significantly from related conditions of destitute poverty during other eras of our nation's history. Advocates, researchers and policymakers have all played key roles in defining the current problem, measuring its prevalence, and designing interventions to reduce it. The first section of this course examines the definitional and measurement issues, and how they affect our understanding of the scale and composition of the problem. Explanations for homelessness have also been varied, and the second part of the course focuses on examining the merits of some of those explanations, and in particular, the role of the affordable housing crisis. The third section of the course focuses on the dynamics of homelessness, combining evidence from ethnographic studies of how people become homeless and experience homelessness, with quantitative research on the patterns of entry and exit from the condition. The final section of the course turns to the approaches taken by policymakers and advocates to address the problem, and considers the efficacy and quandaries associated with various policy strategies. The course concludes by contemplating the future of homelessness research and public policy.

This course provides an in-depth examination of theories of race and different kinds of social struggles for freedom around the globe. We will critically engage the latest scholarship from a variety of scholars and social movement actors. From anti-slavery revolts to struggles for independence to anti-apartheid movements, this course will emphasize how racialized peoples have employed notions of rights and societal resources grounded in cultural differences. Though much of the readings will highlight the experiences of African descendant peoples in Africa and its diaspora, the course will also explore the intersections of Black struggles with social movements organized by indigenous peoples in the Americas. Students will also have the unique experience of accessing readings primarily written by primarily Black scholars, some of
whom have participated as key actors in the social movements they describe. Key concepts include power, resistance, subaltern, hegemony, identity politics, consciousness, and intellectual activism.
The course will be organized around the following objectives:
1. To explore a range of contemporary theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to the
study of social movements;
2. To focus on the relationship between race, gender, class, culture, and politics in the African diaspora;
3. To study the historical development of organized struggles, social protests, uprisings, revolutions,
insurgencies, and rebellions;
4. To examine the political agency of African descendant peoples in the global struggle for liberation and citizenship.

The course will begin with and historical introduction to Sephardic Jewry. It will discuss the history and language of the Jews in Spain prior to their expulsion in 1492 and follow up with their history in the Ottoman Empire. It will then introduce the students to the phonology of the language both in a descriptive and historical perspective. There will also be discussion of the contrast with Castillian Spanish. After a discussion of the grammar, there will be lessons designed to teach the students conversational Judeo-Spanish, using dialogs, pictures, videos, music, visits with native speakers and other interactive methods.

PhD Exam Preparation