Fall 2024
Fall 2024 Course Schedule
*The Fall 2024 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 2024 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Fall 2024
AMER_ST 301-1-20: 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: Fear of Robots (co-listed LEGAL 376-0-22 )
Originating in Slavic words for forced labor, the term “robot” evokes for many an image of blocky metallic humanoids beeping their way through a set of tasks. Yet robots also carry the specter of revolt. We tend to fear the automated tools we design to mechanize labor, even as we continue creating more of them. In this class, we will investigate U.S. popular culture’s treatment of robots from early cinema’s “mechanical men” to the modern controversy over generative AI. Along the way, we will survey U.S. law’s responses to the spread of technology, with particular attention to the problems raised by cutting-edge innovations like self-driving cars and AI-generated artwork. We will read fiction by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, and Naomi Kritzer; analyze films like The Iron Giant and The Stepford Wives; and engage with the work of scholars like Donna Haraway, Dennis Yi Tenen, Scott Selisker, and others. By the end of the course, students will develop a more nuanced understanding of what it means to fear robots and what that fear obscures about them (and us).
AMER_ST 310-0-20: Museums Seminar: Black Art and Ecology (co-listed ART HIST 3950-0-1)
In conjunction with several exhibitions and public installations on view in the fall of 2024, this course will study the ways in which Black artists in Chicago have engaged with environmental justice, social and natural ecologies, and the space of the city over the past 80 years. We will study artists' use of sustainable practices and reclaimed materials, the critique of spatial inequality and the space of the city itself as an artistic medium through urban farming, public art, and community engagement. Readings include theoretical and historical texts, but the primary object of study will be the artworks, exhibitions, and installations themselves. As a museum seminar, we consider the methods of institutions of different scales and types, including alternative galleries and artist-led projects, as they collect and present work by contemporary and historical Black artists. Students must be able to attend site visits that will often extend 1-2 hours past class hours on Fridays because of transportation time.
WCAS Class Descriptions can be found here.