The Cultural Studies program uniquely positions graduate students to explore courses related to their fields of interest across a wide range of departments and programs. The minor consists of four courses totaling a minimum of 12 credit hours. These include C601: Intro to Cultural Studies and 3 sections of C701: Special Topics in Cultural Studies or C790: Independent Readings in Cultural Studies. C601 will be offered through a different instructor and department each year. We also offer a range of courses through the C701 rubric. Course descriptions for Spring 2026 are listed below. Please follow enrollment procedures according to your home department’s guidance. Feel free to reach out to us at any time with questions via our email (cstudies@iu.edu).

Students must officially declare the minor during the early phase of their Ph.D. studies by completing the minor declaration form posted on the website and consult with the director of the Cultural Studies program.

If there is a course being offered that you feel may qualify for the minor that is not listed here, you are welcome to petition the program to have it count towards your minor progress. To do so, please reach out to us via email.

This page lists courses for which you can earn credit towards a graduate minor in Cultural Studies for Spring 2026. Former course listings can be accessed by looking at the course archive.

Minor Course Offerings

C601 Introduction to Cultural Studies (4 credits). Survey of main issues, theories, and methods in cultural studies. Topics may include communications and mass culture; gender, race, and the social construction of identity; historiographic and ethnographic approaches to modern cultures and societies.

C701 Special Topics in Cultural Studies (3-4 credits). Prerequisite: C601 or consent of instructor. Advanced exploration of a specific issue in cultural studies.

C790 Independent Readings in Cultural Studies (3-4 credits). Prerequisite: consent of the instructor. Open only to students minoring in Cultural Studies. Click on the link above for instructions on arranging and registering for C790.

Spring 2026 Cultural Studies Courses

 CULS-C 601: Introduction to Cultural Studies

INTRO TO CULTURAL STUDIES: CULTURE, POWER, RESISTANCE

• Registration Information: CULS-C601-0001 (#32522)
• Meeting Information: M 4:20 PM–6:50 PM, BH 123 
• Joint Listed with: HISP-S 695
• Instructor: Patrick Dove
• Course Description: This course will explore the idea and the concept of cultural studies both as it took shape in Great Britain in the early 1960s (the "Birmingham School") and as it has since been adopted and transformed in other latitudes and by various area studies fields (the United States, Latin America, etc.). Cultural studies concerns itself with how culture shapes social spaces while inquiring into how cultural production relates to power, ideology, politics, and the formation of historical consciousness. By the same token, its critical practice expands the semiotic tradition of textual analysis beyond print medium and high literature. While the influence of Marxist thought on this tradition is very clear, cultural studies is-as its name would suggest-resolutely opposed to orthodox Marxism's insistence that economic relations constitute the foundation of all social organization (and hence too the starting point for any possibility of substantive or radical change). By inviting in concerns about race and racism, gender and sexuality, coloniality and empire, the Birmingham School of the mid 1960s showed to itself to be an early avatar of interdisciplinarity-or even antidisciplinarity. Beginning in the last decades of the 20th century, the "globalization" of cultural studies has helped to bring new concerns to bear on the interrogation of culture and its relation to power. We will delve into some of the "classics" of cultural studies by Richard Hogart, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, together with works from the Marxist tradition (Marx and Engels, Gramsci, Lukács, Althusser), media studies, as well as more contemporary reflections on race, coloniality, gender and sexuality.
  
  

CULS-C 701: Special Topics in Cultural Studies

EXPERIENCE/EXPERIMENT: MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY INTERSECTIONS OF ART AND SCIENCE - Hormones and Perception 

• Registration Information: CULS-C701 (#33165)
• Meeting Information: T/Th 2:20 PM–3:35 PM, WH 008
• Joint Listed with: ARTH-A 584
• Instructor: Faye Gleisser
• Course Description:
  • Where does the contemporary concept of hormonal management come from? Whose hormones count? And how have artists, curators, and art critics contributed to or challenged these ideas? This hands-on, experimental course will focus on the ways in which we come to know our bodies, sensorial knowledge, and perception via hormones and the management of hormonal fluctuations and surges through the study of 20th and 21st century art and discourses of embodiment.  The word "hormone," coined in 1905, describes chemical messengers that animate the body's functionality across its organs, tissues, and processes. Simultaneously, artists, social scientists, and sociologists have come to define hormones as biosocial cultural artifacts that manage ideas of health and productivity in relationship to power, labor, and governance. Readings in this course combine art history and critical theory with texts from the sociology of science, Black studies, gender studies, feminist science studies, and legal studies, to address how hormones not only regulate and shape our senses, sleep cycles, fertility, and experiences with illness, depression, and joy, but are also manifestations of culturally-conditioned notions of hygiene, citizenship, wellness, and futurity. We will study contemporary art and curatorial practices attuned to a range of relevant topics, such as performance art, bioart, biohacking, pirate care, decolonial eco-criticism, xenofeminism, and more, and make class visits to the Grunwald and Eskenazi Museum of Art to see art and learn about how its curation, handling, and preservation intersects with discourses of medicine, toxicity, and biotechnology. We will also make use of campus archives, such as the Kinsey archives, Moving Image Archives, and the Lilly library to view cultural materials, from 16th and 17th century anatomical drawings, to 21st century activist zines expanding trans and queer health networks and DIY hormone management. Over the course of the semester, students will develop research-based projects, with the option to write either a formal research paper or design and complete an "un-essay" assignment, such as a pop-up exhibition, podcast series, zine project, etc.

The Culture of the Neo-Baroque

• Registration Information: CULS-C701 (#33164)
• Meeting Information: T 12:00 PM–2:00 PM, BH 331 
• Joint Listed with: FRIT- M605
• Instructor: Marco Arnaudo
• Course Description:
  • This class analyzes the critical category of Neo-Baroque that was pioneered by the Italian critics Dorfles, Longhi, Calabrese, and Raimondi. We then apply that category to a range of cultural products from the 20th- and 21st-century in a comparative and intermedia perspective. Authors under discussion include Gadda, Zanzotto, Caproni, Eco, and Philip K. Dick. We will also look at games and interactive fiction as a particularly lively focus to gain Neo-Baroque insights. 

Counter/Insurgency in Latin American and US Literature and Culture 

• Registration Information: CULS-C701 (#33171)
• Meeting Information: Th 5:30 PM–8:00 PM, ED 3004 
• Joint Listed with: HISP-S 688
• Instructor: R. Andrés Guzmán
• Course Description:
  • Are insurgencies merely momentary acts? Do counterinsurgencies constitute exceptional periods that last as long as is needed to defeat insurgencies? The present course answers these questions in the negative, proposing instead to see in the dialectics of insurgency and counterinsurgency a motor for the accumulation of both state power and capital. Focusing on the US and Latin America, our perspective will be hemispheric, while also endeavoring at times to venture beyond. We will trace the operations of counterinsurgency, from the colonial period to the near present, as not simply a set of techniques for maintaining social order, but as something foundational and inherent to order itself. Counterinsurgency thus emerges as something that does not just develop after and in reaction to insurgency, but rather precedes, anticipates, and conditions it. Combining theoretical and historical material with analyses of literature, film, photography, and architecture, along with other media, we will delve into how counterinsurgency produces regimes of intelligibility and visibility in symbolic and material ways. Our inquiry will be guided by questions such as: How can we approach counterinsurgency as cultural form? How might we relate it to the value-form and to the epochality of capitalism? And, relatedly, what is the political, epistemological, and cultural status of insurgency if its function is to interrupt or dislocate constituted order and its attendant social form? Despite the limited temporality and often sporadic nature of insurgencies, what connections might we find among them across different times and places?  Whether the course is taught in Spanish or English will depend on student enrollment. Students from outside the Department of Spanish and Portuguese are encouraged to enroll.
    

Queer Media Histories

• Registration Information: CULS-C701 (#33825)
• Meeting Information: Th 3:55 PM–6:25PM, TV 226; W 5:30 PM–7:30PM, LI 048 
• Joint Listed with: MSCH-C 594
• Instructor: Ryan Powell
• Course Description:
  • From Weimar Cinema and its role in conceptualizing "homosexuality" to liberation-based film experiments and events of the 1960s and 1970s, film, television, video and radio have been taken up as complex sites of queer world-making. This seminar will stress the importance of historiographic inquiry as a means of interrogating relations between media, gender, sexuality and society. We will investigate how notions of conflict, continuity, fissure and persistence inform both popular and micro-cultural ways of thinking about desire, media and historical narrative. Areas of study may include: trans cinema, postwar queer underground film and photography, lesbian and gay documentary, narrative in gay liberation-era film and television drama, AIDS activist video, new queer cinema, queer pornographies, and camp performance and production.

Research in Aesthetics, Genre & Form: “Indelible Memories: Race and Ethnicity in the American Graphic Memoir” 

• Registration Information: CULS-C701 (#33165)
• Meeting Information: Thursday 3:55 PM–6:55 PM, WH 108 
• Joint Listed with: ENG-L 740/ -L 646
• Instructor: De Witt Douglas Kilgore
• Course Description:
  • This seminar is concerned with the graphic memoir, a dominant genre in contemporary comics. We will explore autobiographies written and, mostly, drawn by Jewish, African, and Asian American writer/artists. By retelling their experiences, they reveal the complexities of lives shaped by our nation’s construction of race and ethnicity, its history of negotiating immigration and nationality, its practices of exclusion and belonging. Since these artists are socialized as men and women, we will also pay heed to how gender and sexuality is entangled with ethno-racial experience. In addition, because our memoirists are creators working in the comics medium, we will consider how they challenge its iconography and reform its procedures.  

    We situate our inquiry in the decades following the Second World War.  In this period, American comics are marked by and struggle with the racial caricatures that were a commonplace of the nation’s visual culture. How does a medium so indebted to ethnocentric abstraction (the humorous imbricated with the hateful) reform itself, breaking new aesthetic ground? 

    This course also constitutes an introduction into the scholarly fields of visual culture and comics studies. 

Teaching something you'd like to see listed? Contact us at cstudies@iu.edu!