CRE2 Rotating Graduate Studio (Credits, variable)
Studio Description
This graduate-level seminar will be offered by a CRE2 Faculty Affiliate. Team-taught courses are also eligible and encouraged to apply. CRE2 will fund the Studio in an amount up to $5,000. Studio funding may be used to create a dynamic, innovative, and collaborative graduate experience. Examples include invitations to leading scholars from across the country and world to engage with their course; creating a lab experience with local organizations and stakeholders; generating a range of collaborative outcomes that go beyond the traditional seminar paper, such as a Black Paper, an exhibit, media (podcasts, op-eds, revised Wiki entries), a database, etc. The Studio should follow the mission of CRE2 to develop insurgent methodologies, new vocabularies and grammars, and expand conversations about the study of race, ethnicity, and/or equity.
The application cycle for Rotating Graduate Studios is closed.
Fall 2022 Rotating Graduate Studio
The Literature of Black Lives Matter

Stephanie Li
Lynne Cooper Harvey Distinguished Professor of English
- Email: stephanie.li@wustl.edu
American Literature
Blackness
Gender and Sexuality
Popular and Political Culture
Racial Representations
Whiteness
Course description:
Black Lives Matter has emerged as the most consequential social movement of our time. This course will explore African American writing published since the hashtag blacklivesmatter galvanized a global uprising following the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman. As we read contemporary Black essays, memoirs, and poetry, we will consider how aspects of BLM as a political movement are reflected in the literature of this period, specifically its decentralized leadership structure, intersectional approach to identity and social justice, and emphasis on memorializing the dead. This course will also draw upon the experience and expertise of local BLM activists as we engage with issues at the forefront of racial justice in the St. Louis metro area.
Spring 2021 Rotating Graduate Studio
Alternative Atlas: St. Louis

Linda C. Samuels
Associate Professor of Urban Design
- Email: lcsamuels@wustl.edu
Alternative metrics, Mapping, Resilience, Spatial Justice, Urban Design

Geoff Ward
Director, WashU & Slavery; Professor of African and African American Studies; Sociology (Affiliate); American Culture Studies (Affiliate)
- Phone: 314-935-9884
- Email: gward@wustl.edu
Histories of Racial Violence, Legacies, and Reckonings; Visual Redress; Youth Justice; Policing and Courts
Walter Johnson
Winthrop Professor of History and African and African American studies at Harvard University
Course Description:
This collaborative seminar will intentionally combine diverse epistemological frameworks to broaden the understanding of race and spatial relationships in each of the partner disciplines, and to inform our collaborative development of an Alternative Atlas for St. Louis. Whereas traditional atlases claim some degree of neutrality and objectivity – clearly impossible in any mapping – the Alternative Atlas overtly exposes, decodes and displays silenced truths. Content shared across the three courses will fuel projects and partnerships that emerge from the collaboration. Students in the Sam Fox course will be responsible for mapping the core of the Alternative Atlas project.

Sites of Wounding / Sites of Healing is the “first page” of an Alternative Atlas for St. Louis, leading to new ways of thinking, seeing, being and thus making the city through fugitive mapping. It accumulates the violent injustices (red) and liberator memory-work (yellow) and overlays them on the changing racial composition of the city to expose the palimpsestic urban landscape of St. Louis.
Sites of Wounding / Sites of Healing illustrates how the history of St. Louis consists of more than just points on a timeline or locations on a map. By collapsing both the past and future into the present, this juxtaposition of sites of racial meaning shows how inheritances of violence, oppression, and pain commingle with the emergent possibilities for liberation, growth, and joy.
Mapping credit: Bomin Kim