Courses
winter 2023 Course Schedule
*The Winter 2023 course schedule is subject to change. Please check CAESAR for all up to date course information, including day/times, course descriptions, and mode of instruction.
Winter 2023 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Winter 2023
AMER_ST 301-2-20: Seminar for Majors: True Love & Perfect Union
The Seminar for Majors course aims to provide a "how-to" of American Studies from an integrative, multiracial, and socio-cultural perspective. Taking U.S. American cultures as a site for testing classic and contemporary theories about how society works, this seminar in American Studies serves to introduce resources and techniques for interdisciplinary research. Students will be exposed to and experiment with a wide range of current theoretical and methodological approaches applied in American Studies and contributing disciplinary fields. The goal of the course is not only for students to develop knowledge of main currents in the field of American Studies but also to become practitioners through a series of assignments that will permit students to exercise their newfound skills. For instance, as students develop rhetorical analyses, describe and evaluate visual culture, or conduct and analyze interview data, they will also examine themes such as national narratives, civil rights and immigration, and the historical and social meanings of work, discipline, and justice.
This course Winter Quarter considers the social and political history of marriage as an institution in the United States. It is not primarily about love or about the ways in which people make their marriages work (or not), although those themes will inevitably enter the conversation. Our major focus, though, will be the extraordinary degree to which contests over who can and cannot legally marry have overlapped, undergirded, or disguised struggles over equality on the basis of race, gender, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, and other social categories.
AMER_ST 310-0-10: Bad News (co-listed POLI_SCI 390-0-22)
Bad news is what Americans are experiencing as a result of corporate media mergers that took place in the closing years of the last century. Today major companies control much of what people read, hear, and see. As many firms passed from largely family-owned to publicly traded companies, the pressure for profit from Wall Street has led to cutbacks in the size of news divisions and a change in news story values that have "softened" the types of news that people see on television. This course will begin with an examination of the monetary forces that are driving the news industry away from its primary mission of information. Critics, of whom the professor is one, contend that the drive for increasing profits is coming at the expense of both the quality and quantity of news that appear on television and radio, newspapers and magazines, and the Internet. The ever-diminishing number of news providers is also threatening democracy by limiting the number of voices that can be heard in our society.
AMER_ST 310-0-70: Intro to Critical Mixed Race Studies (co-listed AF_AM_ST 251-0-20)
This course examines the history and major ideas about multiracial people in the United States through the lens of the emerging academic field of Critical Mixed Race Studies. How have laws constructing and regulating race, gender, sexuality, and immigration led to national ideas about who “mixed race” people are? What accounts for the national obsession about inter-racial marriage and multiracial people? And how do people who identify with more than one racial category navigate life in this society? Critical Mixed Race Studies is a field that interrogates these discourses and analyzes them within the context of society.
AMER_ST 390-2-21: Senior Seminar
The purpose of this course is to provide a framework within which you can pursue your own interests and develop your own ideas, rather than to introduce a series of texts or a corpus of concrete information. This course is a hybrid of the research seminar and the writing workshop, and we will confront the challenges of both researching and writing in a collaborative manner. To that end, some of our sessions will be devoted to reading and responding to one another's work. While it can be difficult and intimidating to publicly present your work, and to publicly critique or question another's work, we will undertake both in the spirit of support and assistance in the hopes of creating a community of researchers, writers, and scholars. Becoming a careful reader, responder, and recipient of constructive criticism are invaluable skills that fundamentally inform the process by which virtually all scholarly work is produced.