piercem

piercem@arizona.edu

Office

Learning Services Building

Office Hours

Please email professor to schedule a meeting or refer to class syllabus.

Pierce, Mary L

Lecturer

Mary Lynn Pierce is currently an Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Africana Studies, and History Department, at the University of Arizona, Tucson. She graduated with a Ph.D. in History (Early Modern and Modern Europe, and World History) at the University of Arizona. Her research focuses on early modern and modern England, British and French colonialism in Africa, and the Ottoman Empire. She is currently working on completing a monograph “Controversy in Seventeenth-Century English Coffeehouses: Transcultural Interactions with an Oriental Import.” In addition to writing reviews of books on religious and cultural practices in early modern Britain, she has also published several journal articles, including "Coffee made Cuckolds and Eunuchs: Emergence of an Ottoman Drink in 17th-Century English Society," Food Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

Currently Teaching

AFAS 200 – Introduction to Africana Studies

Course provides a comprehensive understanding of the African American experience as grounded in the humanities. A broad investigation of Africana history and culture and its subsequent evolution in the United States.

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AFAS 306 – African-American Autobiographies: Women and Their Histories

Students will gain insight into the historical and cultural factors that have created, and continue to perpetuate gender and ethnic inequity. Students will come to understand African American writers, particularly women, as historical agents and self-defined individuals. While the course will emphasize the multiple roles of African American women, as portrayed autobiographically it also incorporates the historical struggles of those around them. It is my goal that through the course material students will see how African Americans are constantly recreating themselves in the face of adversity.

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AFAS 209 – African American History (1440-1877)

This course evaluates the early experiences of peoples of African descent in North America. The culture of African captives, their daily lives under different slave regimes, slave resistance, free blacks, and emancipation are the main subjects addressed in this class.

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AFAS 441 – The History of African American Women from Slavery to Freedom

The objective of this course is to provide students with a comprehensive knowledge of the history of Black people in American with a particular eye towards the experiences of Black women. The course will review some of the major historiographical issues presented by scholars of African American Women's History.

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AFAS 304A – The Social Construction of Race: Whiteness

In constructing this course, the recognition of Whiteness/Blackness is not solely a reactionary response to challenges from persons of color; it is also a reflection of the need to provide a narrative of Whiteness/Blackness that intends an understanding of the notion of Whiteness/Blackness as a racial category and the implications of this categorization and association. For example, naming Whiteness displaced it from the unmarked, and unnamed status that is itself an effect of dominance. Within the particular disciplines of Anthropology and Ethnic Studies, Whiteness, Blackness and Race have come to be earnest subjects of study. Being White or Black in the 21st Century, however, is far from straightforward. It is riddled with ambiguity and marked by a general sense of racial angst as to what it means to be White or Black. This course will attempt to respond to the question: What does it mean to be Black/White in our global climate?

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