Fall 2023
Fall 2023 Course Schedule
*The Fall 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.
Fall 2023 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Fall 2023
AMER_ST 301-2-30: Seminar for Majors:
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 390-1-21: Senior Project
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.
AMER_ST 310-0-10: Sex & The American Empire: Journalism and Frames of War (co-listed )
This course will be an intensive study in understanding the relationship between American journalism and the U.S. military in creating an American empire. By focusing on how the U.S. military has segregated service members by race, sexuality, gender and gender identity—and on how U.S. media has covered the military—students will study how identity roles have been formed by both the military and the media in American society. Readings will include primary sources, works of journalism, and scholarship. Topics covered will include the histories of LGBTQ rights; “pinkwashing” and “homonationalism”; “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; racial segregation; the development of the condom; access to birth control; government management of HIV/AIDS; subjectivity/objectivity; critical theory; critical race theory; transgender studies; and, essentialism. In groups, students will study coverage of a single contemporary story in the news. The course is intended for journalism majors and non-majors alike, and will be centered on helping both analyze news media critically in order to better understand how race, gender, sexuality and American identity are constructed.
AMER_ST 310-0-20: History of the American Family (co-listed HIST 215-0-22)
Families are not ahistorical categories of population; they have a history that has been crucial to the colonization and development of the United States as a nation and they continue to shape social and political life. This course traces the evolution of family ideals and practices from pre-colonial through modern America, with a particular emphasis on the roles of gender, race, and class in shaping family experiences. Considering both how the state regulated families as well as the many functional families and kinships that existed without state sanction, this course highlights the importance of families in societies and political thought, as well as the lived experience of families in America. As we range over diverse family experiences, we will also follow specific families through time in order to understand how historical changes shaped their family structures. Moving chronologically, the course will touch on topics like gender, economics, political theory, religion, race, and class through the lens of the family.
AMER_ST 310-0-30: Immigration Politics and Policy (co-listed POLISCI 336-0)
This course introduces students to the reasons behind this variation in attitudes toward immigrants. It is designed to introduce immigration politics and policy in the United States. We will cover policies that have affected immigration politics, focusing on the more recent ones. In addition, we will go over some of the principal analyses of public opinion, participation, incorporation, and mobilization, emphasizing how the notion of race/ethnicity shapes each group's experience differently. Lastly, we will touch on the different ways in which natives and immigrants interact in the economic and social spheres.
AMER_ST 310-0-40: Contemporary Issues in Asian American Communication (co-listed ASAM 225-0)
Critical examination of post-1965 Asian American communities in light of demographic, social, racial and economic trends in the U.S. and Asia.
WCAS Class Descriptions can be found here.