Winter 2025
winter 2025 Course Schedule
*The Winter 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.
winter 2025 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Winter 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 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: U.S. Health: Illness, Environment, Gender, Race and Inequality (co-listed Global Health)
In this course students will examine themes in the history of health in the United States, particularly in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Readings will focus on the intersections between health and environment, gender, race, law, and region. We will consider questions such as what’s the impact of environmental change in transforming medical, scientific, and lay understanding and experience of health and illness? What’s the role of illness in shaping changing perceptions of the environment? How has race been central to the construction and treatment of disease? How has gender shaped conceptions of and approaches to health? What historical role have issues of gender, race, and class played in the inequitable distribution of pollution and in activist involvement in combating environmental hazards? How has changing food production and culture shaped health? This course assumes no previous coursework in the field, and students with a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines are encouraged to participate.
AMER_ST 310-0-20 Reality TV and Legal Theory (co-listed Legal )
For the past thirty years, reality television – a genre of programming that aims to give us a view into the “unscripted” actions of our peers – has been a dominant force in U.S. entertainment. Many of us watch these shows to relax, to turn off our critical thinking, and to immerse ourselves wholly into some manufactured drama and schadenfreude. Considered as a cultural text, though, reality television can illuminate some profound truths: about how we decide what is right and wrong, about the tension between written and unwritten rules, and whether anyone can simply be “here to make friends.” In this course, we ask what reality TV can teach us about the nature of law. We’ll read and discuss key works in the philosophy of law from H.L.A. Hart, Lon Fuller, Ronald Dworkin, Scott Shapiro, and others, and then see how their ideas stand up to the test of shows like Survivor, The Circle, and Bachelor in Paradise. By the end of the quarter, students will be able to explain the main currents of thought in legal philosophy with reference to elimination ceremonies, confessionals, alliances, and other fundamentals of reality TV gameplay.
WCAS Class Descriptions can be found here.