Joseph Slaughter

This class is so good, I truly cannot recommend it enough. Professor Slaughter is an incredible teacher and the entire class was consistently engaged and excited. The syllabus was amazing, and I learned so much about so many different resistance movements all over the world. He is so knowledgeable about these global contexts, especially when it came to Latin America and Africa (his particular areas of focus), and he also has incredible personal anecdotes about many of the authors on the syllabus. I wish I had started taking classes with him earlier because he is genuinely so incredible as a professor. Despite his clear expertise and the fact that he knows many of the experts in the field, he is extremely humble and kind as well. Even as a junior undergrad in a graduate seminar full of PhD students and an expert professor, I never felt anything but an environment of respect and collective learning, which I think is a testament to how hard he works to create a productive learning environment. If you can take this class, please do. You won't regret it.

Wonderful class!!!! I took this as a poli sci major (never took a comp lit class in college), and loved it! Really fruitful discussions and everything Slaughter has to say is so interesting. Also props to him and the TAs for moving onto zoom so well and still allowing for so much class discussion. Pretty light workload, and super interesting essay topics that I honestly really enjoyed writing.

while nothing is fed to you...you are made to think and come away with interesting questions on the readings. joey's comments on your papers (while they might upset you) are incrediably intelligent. joey is lay back and really easy going, which makes class amazing.

This class focuses on very abstract concepts of the sort of narrative and storytelling around human rights violations.

1 presentation, 1 short paper (5-6 pages) on same topic as presentation, 1 12-page final paper, weekly discussion posts. 1 book + a couple scholarly articles every week -- it can be long, but they are genuinely so interesting that I didn't mind and was actually excited to do the readings, even with similar workloads for all my other classes.

Professor Slaughter is one of the best professors I've had at Columbia. While this class was taught as a lecture, Slaughter always encourages his students to ask questions, to challenge his interpretation and to participate in dialogue. He knows that some of the material he covers is difficult to grasp, and always makes sure students are following before he moves on to the next topic. If you are taking notes by hand, you'll come out of each class with cramps in your fingers from writing so much: everything he has to say is relevant and fascinating. The readings he assigns are equally great. Each class is centered around 1 or 2 legal texts along with a literary or creative work (novel, graphic novel, film, comic strip etc etc), with occasionally some responses to submit on line (approx every 2 weeks). There is definitely a lot of reading, but Slaughter knows you might not be able to get to all the secondary texts. Professor Slaughter's course helped me in all my classes, and has really challenged the way I understand literature, story-telling and human rights. TAKE THIS CLASS.

After reading the previous review of Prof. Slaughter's LitHum class, I went straight to my dean to switch out. Lucky for me, I was unable to do so. Prof. Slaughter deserves a lot more credit than many give him- yeah, he's not the Columbia diehard who's going to convince you that these books are the greatest thing ever written- but he'll challenge you to make that decision for yourself. This class is totally what you make of it- if you're interested, he'll engage you and challenge you. If you want to sleep through class, you can do that, too.

This was my first real introduction to high-level critical literary analysis. The ideas that Professor Slaughter explained in lecture made me question the assumptions I had entered class with.

This was easily the best class I've taken at Columbia. Professor Slaughter is absolutely brilliant, and he chose varied and interesting readings, tying together everything from international law to documentaries to novels, plays and literary theory. His lectures are mindblowing: be ready to take comprehensive notes, because he manages to draw from tons of material every class. He also managed to somehow make his large lecture class feel like a small discussion. The best part about the class, though, was that Professor Slaughter introduced as many questions as he answered, and he was legitimately interested in his student's creative interpretations. He gave us enough material to draw from, but left it open for discussion.

Run... run far, FAR away. This man couldn't care LESS about Lit Hum. If you're actually interested in exploring the texts in a meaningful way, don't stay in this section. Sure, he's not the hardest grader in the world and he's an INCREDIBLY nice guy (one of the nicest professors you'll ever meet), but you literally will not learn a thing for 2 semesters. His expertise is post-colonial literature (which he will repeat several times). Sure, sucks for him that he has to teach Lit Hum, but it sucks more for YOU! Leave now!