Course Catalog
AMER_ST 301-1 (11743) – 1968: Visuality and Protest
"Chicago 1968" typically refers to the tumultuous events surrounding the Democratic National Convention, but this is not the full story of this momentous year. This course studies 1968 (defined broadly as the late 60s/early 70s) through political events and cultural production, with a particular focus on the Black Arts Movement (an interdisciplinary movement in the visual arts, literature, music, theater, and film) along with the Chicago Imaginists and Chicago Surrealists, media activism, the women's movement, and the community mural movement. We will examine primary texts (novels, poetry, newspaper articles) images, film and video, and archival materials. Students should expect to work collectively and individually and to do rigorous primary historical research (with guidance).
AMER_ST 310-0 (cross-listed with AF_AM 380-2) – Studies in American Culture: Black Feminist Theory
This course is an interdisciplinary examination of the ways that black women theorize about the world, and create and advance analyses around the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality. We will explore the intellectual, social, and political conversations and activism that black feminists engage, inform, and animate. Through films, plays, poems, manifestos, articles, books, and other forms of knowledge production, we will explore how black feminists theorize issues confronting black communities, both past and present. Some of the specific issues we will focus on are gender and sexual identities and politics, queerness, kinship, reproductive health/justice, HIV/AIDS, incarceration, pornography, sex work, sexual violence, and desire and pleasure, among many other topics and debates.
AMER_ST 310-20 – Studies in American Culture: Bad News
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)
AMER_ST 310-21 – Studies in American Culture: US Health: Illness & Inequality
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 310-21 – Studies in American Culture: Storytelling in American Jewish Literature
The achievement of a select group of American Jewish writers is dependent in in large measure on the way in which their writing reveals a Jewish past. Their treatments of Jewish tradition and Jewish history are the particulars which, paradoxically often give their best work its most distinctive claim to universality. This course will focus on stories by American Jewish writers such as Anzia Yezerska, I.B. Singer, Grace Paley, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Lore Segal, Philip Roth, Rebecca Goldstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Woody Allen, who have reshaped the Jewish tradition of storytelling to their own individual talents. (JWSH_ST 379-20)
AMER_ST 310-24 – Studies in American Culture: Cultural Criticism in the Digital Age
What is the history of cultural criticism in the United States? Where is it headed? How do its past and future relate to each other? This "methods seminar" for 15 students combines historical examination with fieldwork at contemporary art museums and performance spaces. Students read extensively in the history of cultural criticism, meet with museum and arts professionals, and experiment with new, digital modes of critical writing. (HUM 325-6-21, HIST 393-0-26)
AMER_ST 310-25 – Studies in American Culture: The Politics of Ranting
This course takes up the uncontrolled, crude, hysterical forms of minority political speech summarily dismissed as "ranting" to ask what does one do with "bad subjects"? For every foundational manifesto or inspirational speech that followed U.S. civil rights movements, there were rants considered too threatening, paranoid, or overemotional to be appropriate for mainstream democratic debate. We will recuperate some of these rants as political documents with their own strategic purposes as well as viewing them as speculative literature that reimagines who gets to say what, when, and how. Texts will include writing from Valerie Solanas, Amiri Baraka, David Wojnarowicz, and Jarett Kobek; artworks from Jenny Holzer and Adrian Piper; and films from Sidney Lumet and Spike Lee.
AMER_ST 390-1,2,3 – Senior Project
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.
AMER_ST 301-3 – Seminar in American Studies: Global 68 and its Afterlives
1968 was a year of revolt, reaction, and global disruption as cities and campuses around the world plunged into social and political unrest that cut across divides between East and West, North and South, young and old, black and white, rich and poor, communist and non-communist. This class will examine key moments and movements that defined the year and explore what they shared, how they differed, and what became of them; it will consider how and why popular and youth protests spread across diverse societies; it will revisit the arguments, aims, achievements, and limits of the '68 generation; and it will ask what happened to the people, ideas, and sensibilities of 1968, investigating how and why the ferment the '68ers represented evolved and faded. Throughout we will maintain a dual focus on the national origins, aims, and context of the '68 rebellions and the transnational structures and dynamics that shaped them as we reflect on the interplay of the local, national, and transnational contemporary politics. In so doing we will explore how American political culture looks differently when viewed from an international perspective.