Would not recommend this class. The professor is very nice, but otherwise I found the lectures very boring, repetitive, and hard to follow. I found myself falling asleep every class. The readings are usually upwards of 60 pages a night, and are either online, or in novels that seem to only have one relevant piece of information max per page. The class is organized around studying a different region's religion every two weeks or so, but because all of the religions are derived from the same one, I found it incredibly repetitive. The tests are pretty doable though.

Professor Schmidt is really nice, clearly very passionate about her field of study and has a lot of first-hand experiences observing Afro-creole religious practices, but teaches in a very disorganized manner that made it difficult to really have a sense of what we were supposed to know in the class. It always took her weeks to return papers and tests and it wasn't til a month after the semester was over that she finally released class grades. I will say that the grading was fairly easy, but because the expectations were pretty vague for all assignments and very few things we learned were hard and fast it was really difficult to write essays and prepare for tests in this class and the material which had potential to be fairly interesting was mostly confusing, vague, and not fun.

Its not as interesting as it sounds, really.

Lectures are indeed unorganized. Very interesting material! Lots of reading, sometimes very dense. Papers graded by the TA.
Final counts for 30%. Not a gut class!

AWFUL CLASS! DO NOT TAKE IT!!

The material in this class is very interesting. However it is presented very poorly by Professor Schmidt. She doesn't present information clearly and at times she will go off topic. It's very important to read before you come to class or else you won't understand what she's talking about. Also, go to discussion and take GOOD notes because those notes will help you pass the exams.

horrible! horrible! horrible! worst class i have ever taken!