Fall 2025
Fall 2025 Course Schedule
*The Fall 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.
Fall 2025 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Fall 2025
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: Military Industrial Complex
Since 1942, the United States has been engaged in permanent war - from World War II and the Cold War to the ongoing War on Terror. We will explore how this society emerged from complex entanglements between racism, militarism, capitalism, and empire: the military-industrial complex. Through historical, cultural, and social analysis, we will examine how war is waged in our everyday lives: in our workplaces, classrooms, laboratories, and local communities. And along the way, we will learn from anti-war movements driven by visions for more just and decolonial worlds
WCAS Class Descriptions can be found here.