Spring 2023
Spring 2023 Course Schedule
*The Spring 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.
Spring 2023 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Spring 2023
AMER_ST 301-2-30: Seminar for Majors: Work and Labor
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.
AMER_ST 310-0-20: Press and Presidential Elections (co-listed POLI_SCI 390-0-22)
AMER_ST 310-0-40: Latino and Latina History (co-listed HIST 218-0-20/LATINO 218-0-20)
The growth of the Latino population has transformed the U.S. and has led to heightened debates about their political power, cultural influence, citizenship, civil rights, and ethnic and racial categorization. Yet as the 2020 election demonstrated, many Americans still don't understand who Latinos are or who Latinos have been and will become. Latino communities have played a pivotal role in U.S. history for centuries. In this course, students will explore the 500 year history of Latinos in the U.S. and across the Americas. In its broadest sense, Latino History offers a reinterpretation of the U.S. history that focuses on race, migration labor, and empire. It is also the history of a community that represents a growing percentage of the U.S. population as a whole and one that will increasingly influence the politics, social life, culture and economy of the U.S. The course will also examine the movement of Latino peoples within and between the U.S., Latin America and the Caribbean using a variety of media including literature, film, and music as well as more traditional historical interpretations. Students will gain a deeper understanding of the issues and histories that bring Latinos together, those that continue to divide them, their multiple and shifting racial classification, and the long struggles for equality and belonging that have animated their histories.
AMER_ST 310-0-50: American Religious History from WWII-Present (co-listed RELIG 265-0-20)
This course examines major developments, movements, controversies and figures in American religious history from the 1920s, the era of excess and disillusionment, to the 1980s, which saw the revival of conservative Christianity in a nation becoming increasingly religiously diverse. Topics include the liberalism/fundamentalism controversy of the 1920s; the rise of Christian realism in the wake of the carnage of World War I; the making of the "tri-faith nation" (Protestant/Catholic/Jew); the supernatural Cold War; the Civil Rights Movement; the revolution in American Catholicism following the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) and the rise of Catholic political radicalism in the 1960s; religion and the post-1965 immigration act; the religious politics of abortion; and the realignment of American religion and politics in the 1970s and 1980s.
AMER_ST 310-0-70: The Chicago Way: Urban Spaces and American Values (co-listed ENGLISH 378-0-22)
Urbanologist Yi Fu Tuan writes, "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with values." In The Untouchables, Sean Connery tells Kevin Costner, "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get Capone. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way." In this class, we will examine "the Chicago way" from many different angles in order to interrogate the values with which various artists have endowed Chicago. We will read in a broad range of media: journalism, poetry, song, fiction, film, and sequential art to see how a sense of Chicago as a place works over time. We will pay close attention to depictions of the construction of American identity, and to the role of the artist and intellectual in the city.