HISTORY, CULTURE AND SOCIETY COURSES

ALL COURSES ARE ONLINE AND ARE IN EASTERN TIME ZONE.

OPEN FOR APPLICATIONS

  • Time/Date: 6:00 - 8:00 pm (Eastern Time Zone), Thursdays, Dec 11th, 2025 - Feb 12th, 2026 (no classes on Dec 25th, 2025 and Jan 1st, 2026)

    Course fee: 250 - 360 USD (sliding scale, pay what you can)

    Course description:

    • Are you aware that there is a rigorous debate among Muslim scholars over gender and sexuality that goes back centuries?

    • Do you know that non-binary and non-cisgendered ways of being have existed in all Muslim societies, from Arabia to Persia to Southeast Asia?

    • Are you curious about transgender and queer Muslims and the canonical textual sources they cite and the organizations they have established around the world?

    • Do you want to arm yourself with robust knowledge to combat Islamophobia, Orientalism, and rainbow-washing/pinkwashing that are being deployed to justify the ongoing genocide and ethnic cleansing in Palestine?

    This course will draw on primary sources, historiographical work, and ethnographies of Islam. We will read Muslim scholarly views of gender and sexuality against key texts in Western feminism. We will identify the key issues at stake, and how these issues have been addressed. We will also explore the intersection of religion, race, and gender, and ask to what extent what we learn in this class can speak to the fight for the liberation of Palestine and the collective freedom of us all.

    Instructor: Dr. Sulayman

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ONGOING COURSE(S)

  • Time/Date: 6:30 - 8:30 pm (EST), Tuesdays, November 11th - January 6th (no class on December 30th)

    Course fee: 250 - 360 USD (sliding scale, pay what you can)

    Course description: How did imperial China imagine love, virtue, and desire before modern ideas of sexuality or gender equality emerged?

    This course explores how gender and power were organized and contested across China’s imperial past, with a focus on the Ming–Qing period to the late Qing, when new colonial and global encounters began to reshape the meanings of intimacy and modernity. We move from the cut-sleeve tales of emperors and courtiers to the ambiguous status of eunuchs in the Qing court, from family laws that defined virtue and deviance to the practice of footbinding as beauty, discipline, and a site of civilization and shame.

    Drawing on historiography as well as primary literature, art, and legal and medical texts, students will trace how Confucian ideals, bodily practices, and everyday intimacies shaped social order, and how these traditions collided with the pressures of empire and modern reform. By the end of the course, we uncover the complex worlds of gender and desire that predated, and helped give rise to, modern debates over sexuality, morality, and national identity.

    Instructor: Luna