PROGRAM IN AMERICAN STUDIES

1968 was a convulsive, world-shaking and world-making year. Assassinations, street riots, protests against a seemingly endless war, cultural experimentation, new forms of art, music, and film…and on and on. This was true for the US and around the world. Rock and roll was eating at the roots of Communism. Men and women of various religious commitments and inheritances contributed to the year’s excitements and dramas. This course will look at religious innovation, protest, and moral and social commitments during this difficult year. Readings include the visions of a South American mystic; antiwar documents; African American radical Christianity; the liturgies of Catholic war protesters; and the plays of a famous Czech rebel. We will also look at examples of the year’s cinema, including the little appreciated and much reviled (and rightly so!) “Wild in the Streets,” which stars, among others, a very young Richard Pryor.

Bad News. That is what Americans are experiencing as a result of the corporate media mergers that took place in the closing years of the last century. Today there are six major companies that control much of what people read, hear and see. Those firms are AOLTime Warner, General Electric, Walt Disney, News Corporation, Viacom/CBS, and Bertelsman. As the firms passed from largely family owned to publicly traded companies, the pressure for profit from Wall Street has led to cutbacks in the size of the firm's news divisions and a change in news story values that have "softened" the types of news that people see on television. This course will begin with an examination of the monetary forces that are driving the industry away from its primary mission of information. Critics, of whom the professor is one, contend that the drive for increasing profits is coming at the expense of both the quality and quantity of news that appear on television and radio, newspapers and magazines, and the Internet. The everdiminishing number of news providers is also threatening democracy by limiting the number of voices that can be heard in our society. (POLI-SCI 390-0-25)

When Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States, many felt that a new era of precarity for women had begun. The defunding of Planned Parenthood, the Muslim ban, assault on pro-choice legislation, rescinding of protections for transgender students, the President's own history of sexual assault - to name only a few - all seemed to present an unprecedented dystopia for women across the political spectrum. Indeed, this course begins by asking how we can talk about feminism in a Trump era? Taking an historical approach to feminism this course asks how many of the issues facing American women today are familiar ones; and what might a Trump administration mean for feminism, both broadly speaking in its global iterations and on more local, micro levels of quotidian experience? How has the conception, performance, politics, embodiment and circulation of feminism been reconceived? (GNDR_ST 350-3-22, GNDR_ST 371-0-21, COMM_ST 395-0-25)

Unlike most courses, the purpose of this course is to confront the challenges of both researching and writing in a collaborative manner. To that end, some sessions will be devoted to reading and responding to one another's work. While it can be difficult and intimidating to publicly present one's work, and to publicly critique or question another's work, we shall undertake both in the spirit of support and assistance. Becoming a careful reader, responder, and recipient of constructive criticism are also invaluable skills that fundamentally inform the process by which virtually all scholarly work is produced.