Spring 2025
spring 2025 Course Schedule
*The Spring 2025 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 2025 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Spring 2025
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 310-0-10: Coming of Age in Latinx Studies: Scholars, Writers, and Artists on Growing Up and Growing Old (colisted Latino Studies)
This seminar centers age as a significant social and analytical category in the study of everyday
life and creative expressions within self-identified Latina, Latino, and Latinx communities.
Students will engage with a variety of materials, including historical studies and narratives,
ethnographic texts, nonfiction essays, short stories, visual art, and popular culture. Our objective
is to question common assumptions about how individuals and communities experience
growing up and growing old. Discussions will highlight political and economic dimensions that
affect life trajectories within communities, as well as how other categories of social difference
inform ideas about age and age relations.
AMER_ST 310-0-20 African American Politics (colisted PoliSci)
This course takes stock of Black politics in the U.S. in the decades since the Civil Rights Movement. We will explore Blacks' ongoing and still fitful quest for racial equality and democratic responsiveness. Our review will pay close attention to the internal dynamics of Black politics. As we chart Blacks' political gains and setbacks, we will focus on class, gender, and other cleavages in the population to see how different groups have fared. We also will examine Blacks' fraught relations with whites, their engagement with mainstream political institutions, and their efforts to secure their rights and advance their interests from within and outside these institutions at the national and local level. The course materials cover a mix of topics that have occupied students of race and American politics since the Civil Rights Movement. These include: ongoing intergroup conflict and prejudice; segregation; social provision and criminal justice policies; systemic anti-Black racism in law enforcement; racial dynamics in voting and access to the ballot; partisan politics; and Blacks' electoral fortunes, including the election of the country's first Black president and the ensuing political developments. The overarching goal of the course is to shed light on the state of American democracy by studying the contemporary political experiences of Blacks.
WCAS Class Descriptions can be found here.