Fall 2026
Fall 2026 Course Schedule
*The Fall 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.
Fall 2026 course descriptions
Please check CAESAR for full course descriptions, including required texts and modes of instruction.
Fall 2026
AMER_ST 201-0-10 Visions of America
This course introduces students to the recent history and culture of the United States using the interdisciplinary methodology of American Studies. We will engage present-day and recent cultural production (books, art, movies, graphic novels, photographs, memes, and more) as well as recent history (focused on the application of historical thinking to ongoing social problems such as war, racism, border policy, pollution, religion, politics, and media).
The focus of this course will vary depending upon the instructor's field of study, and may delve more deeply into History, English, or affiliated disciplines. But all versions of the class will explore the evolution of American Studies through the combination of major humanistic and social science fields, and its reshaping by Asian American Studies, Black Studies, Latina and Latino Studies, Native American and Indigenous Studies, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Journalism, Sociology, Legal Studies, and Environmental Studies. Students from these majors will find relevant content and approaches in this course.
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 310-0-10 Religion and the Arts
Religion and the Arts is a variable-topics course that explores the dynamic relationship between religious traditions and artistic expression across cultures, historical periods, and mediums. The curse will examine how religious traditions, practices, materials, and communities have shaped, and been shaped by, the arts, including visual culture, architecture, literature, theatre, ritual performance, museum curation, and other expressive forms.
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 397-0-1 American Realized
This seminar builds upon the foundation of American Studies 201, Visions of America, by offering broader and deeper engagement with the same themes. Enrolled students are Peer Assistants for 201. In addition to running sections of 201, teaching discussion skills, and engaging their peers, they will also learn more deeply about the historical and literary material in the class. Rather than repeating content as a Peer Assistant, in other words, this course asks students to delve more ambitiously into the material and to aid other students in their understanding. We expect a graduate level of seminar engagement in this course, with deep reading and thinking about all course materials. This class enrolls by permission only and is normally open only to advanced students in American Studies who have completed: Visions of America (American Studies 201) and the 300-level seminar series in American Studies. Exceptions may be made at the discretion of the American Studies director and the 201 instructor. American Studies 397 runs concurrently with American Studies 201, and 397 students must be available to attend all meetings of both courses.