Spring 2026
spring 2026 Course Schedule
*The Spring 2026 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 2026 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Spring 2026
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: "Designing American Studies: Theory, Practice, and Pedagogy” is, at its core, a course about how to reconceptualize, build frameworks, and enable best practices for discussion section. Engaging the historiography of American Studies as field—including the “Nationalizing Imperative,” “Myth and Symbol,” “Comparative Ethnic Studies,” and “The Transnational Turn,” among other nodal points—this course will explore different ways to craft the discussion section as a pedagogical site enabled by a shared ethos of mobilization, peer exchange, and learning as a collective enterprise.
AMER_ST 310-0-20 The Modern American Presidency: Once negligible in size and power, the American presidency has grown to employ four million people worldwide and come to possess the ability to intervene in anything anywhere at any time while countervailing forces like Congress, the 50 states, and foreign governments have declined in independence. Paradoxically, as the American presidency grew, historians lost interest in it. Presidents and the presidency once loomed large in historical research and writing. But with the rise of social history, then cultural history, then the turn toward global history, presidents and the presidency fell out of fashion among professional historians, even as it remained ubiquitous in our lives. Fortunately, political history has recently reemerged in ways that invite new attention to the presidency and suggest new approaches to its study. This seminar will introduce students to classic and more recent scholarship on the history of the presidency.
AMER_ST 310-0-40 Coming of Age in Latinx Studies: Scholars, Writers and Artists on Growing Up and Grown Old 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.