Pierce, Mary L | Africana Studies

piercem@arizona.edu

Office

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Office Hours

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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 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 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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