The Books I Read My First Semester of Grad School
The reading list of a Global Humanities Master’s Degree student for one semester.
My first semester of graduate school at Towson University has come to a close, and I finally topped off the year with over two hundred books read because of the sheer amount of reading I did.Thankfully I go to a school that doesn’t make reading books your entire life, so I didn’t become consumed by research and the to-do lists, but I did end up getting quite a bit done and making a dent on my reading goals for the year. Let’s do a breakdown of what I read, shall we?
For my Power class:
This was taught by an English professor who specialized in literature, so the workload in this class was a blend of theory and comparative literature. This was honestly the hardest class I took out of the three, and it was because I struggle to read books with an analytical lens that I can then articulate in a class seminar. I can analyze through writing, on this blog, but I often have difficulty putting what I’m thinking, especially in academic contexts, to words. Here’s what we read for this class. Some were excerpts, but I kept going all the way and read them through.
A Tempest by Aime Cesaire.
On Discipline and Punishment by Michel Foucault.
Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga.
The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga.
What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J.A. Chancy.
Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis
Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Pauline Gumbs
The Wretched of the Earth, Franz Fanon
For my Colonialism, Decolonization, and Postcolonialism Class:
Unlike my Power class, this was taught by a Native American history professor and thus the reading was adjusted to reflect a typical course in graduate school for history. That meant reading a ton of different sources, firsthand and secondhand, and synthesizing how they all blended together to create a specific kind of meaning in the context of time it was discussing. Fascinating work, especially as I had never managed to take a class that touched on Native American history, and I learned a lot. For this course, though, we got to choose our topic at the end. I ended up picking cultural genocide during the process of Japanese colonialism on Korea, and found a ton of threads between the American treatment of natives and how the Japanese imported these ideas from the US and Europe.
American Settler Colonialism: A History by Walter L. Hixson.
Surviving Genocide by Jeffrey Ostler.
Bead on an Anthill: A Lakota Childhood by Delphine Red Shirt
The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson
For my research I read:
The Construction of Racial Identities in China and Japan by William Dikköter.
Cuisine, Colonialism, and Cold War: Food in Twentieth Century Korea by Katarzyna J. Cwiertka.
Colonial Modernity in Korea by Kyeong-Hee Choi.
Primitive Selves: Koreana in the Japanese Colonial Gaze, 1910–1945 by E. Taylor Atkins.
Under the Black Umbrella: Voices from Colonial Korea by Hildi Kang
For my Women, Environment, and Health class:
Political Feminist Ecologies edited by Dianne E. Rocheleau
