professor
Manijeh Moradian

Professor Moradian is a genuine, kind, empathetic educator and a good lecturer. The syllabus is great and I'm glad I had an excuse to read all of the texts. I didn't think there was too much valuable information in the lectures, but they were definitely still enjoyable. One day a week we had a lecture with Professor Moradian and one day a week we had a "discussion section" with a TA. However, there were only two discussion sections/TAs, which meant each one had around 30 students. I don't know who would think that's a good idea. It's not engaging, it's usually the same 8 people making comments and I didn't feel like I learned much from them. I think the class would be a lot better if it was normal lecture content on both days.

This class was amazing. The readings were so fascinating, and completely changed the way I think about race, power, sex, gender, and colonialism. We read some truly incredible theorists. I love the field, and I love the ideas we were brushing up against. It was also incredibly frustrating. The readings were maddeningly inconsistent - sometimes they would be well-written, readable, and easy to understand, sometimes they would be dense and written in so much jargon that they were unreadable. I still don't understand Hortense Spillers. It often felt like we didn't really have time to unpack what we were doing, and that we were missing out on a lot of context for the readings. This isn't really the professors' fault - almost all social theory writing is unreadable, because that's how academia is. But the course was rushed, and we didn't properly unpack a lot of the complex ideas. That made the course a lot harder than it needed to be.