Black American Grand Tour: Black Women in Italy

This interdisciplinary course will explore the experiences of nineteenth-century Black American women in Italy. During the course students will examine the ways in which race, gender, class, age, nationality, and other social categorizations may intersect in Black women?s experiences. Students will come to understand how for Black women, travel equaled freedom and crossing the ocean meant leaving restraining norms of the home society behind. Through in-class discussions, lectures, cultural experiences and field studies, students will learn and reflect on the experience of nineteenth-century Florence and its foreign visitors.