PROGRAM IN AMERICAN STUDIES

This 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.

This is the Winter 2022 Seminar for Majors. A general description:

This 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.

Imagining the end of the world is an ancient human enterprise, at once political, psychological, and religious. But in the last decade it has become a strategic imperative. Amid converging political and climate crises, humans everywhere are compelled to reconsider how they will live in an apocalypse that is already now. The course begins with Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and ends with Camus’ The Plague. In between, we will consider the things humans are doing—and the stories they are telling, to themselves and each other—in the U.S. today and around the world. Readings to include Lisa Wells, Believers: Making A Life at the End of the World; Richard Lloyd Parry, Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan’s Disaster Zone; Kate Brown, A Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future; selections from Estes and Dhillon, eds., Standing with Standing Rock: Voices from the #NODAPL Movement; Barbara F. Walters, How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them;

Co-listed with POLI_SCI 390-0-21.

Bad news is what Americans are experiencing as a result of corporate media mergers that took place in the closing years of the last century. Today major companies control much of what people read, hear, and see. As many 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 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 news 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 ever-diminishing number of news providers is also threatening democracy by limiting the number of voices that can be heard in our society.

Co-listed with Asian American Studies 303

From daily communications to magisterial announcements, from classrooms to war zones, from health records to national legislation, from labor to entertainment, and from dating to marriage, how do electronically mediated technologies shape our lives? How have screens, code, and algorithms become so dominant in our lives, and how does this impact Asian American identities, communities, movements, and experiences? We will explore the multiscalar formations of Asian American digital cultures in the following ways: social media platforms, video games, advertising, viral videos and memes, “hook-up” apps, surveillance, privacy, and activism.

Co-listed with RELIGION 364-0-20.

Amish Rumspringa, the Apache ‘Isanaklesh Gotal, Jewish bar and bat mitzvah, the quinceañera, and high school senior prom. What do all of these have in common? They are all teenage rites of passage. Drawing from anthropological and sociological case studies, we will examine various rites of passage experienced by teens in the U.S.  In analyzing these rites, students will become conversant with theories of ritual, contemporary surveys of teen demographics and cultural trends, media and cultural studies. We will examine teen popular media and consumption related to rites of passage as well as historical literature on the rise and development of the American teenager as a cultural phenomenon. Students will be asked to generate original research for their seminar final project, applying the tools from the course to a case study of their own choosing. This seminar will make use of multimedia materials and will feature multi-source digitized media viewing, analysis, and some mediamaking as part of course assignments.

Co-listed with Journalism 390 and Gender Studies 390

This course will be an intensive study in understanding the relationship between American journalism and the U.S. military in creating an American empire. By focusing on how the U.S. military has segregated service members by race, sexuality, gender and gender identity—and on how U.S. media has covered the military—students will study how identity roles have been formed by both the military and the media in American society. Readings will include primary sources, works of journalism, and scholarship. Topics covered will include the histories of LGBTQ rights; “pinkwashing” and “homonationalism”; “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; racial segregation; the development of the condom; access to birth control; government management of HIV/AIDS; subjectivity/objectivity; critical theory; critical race theory; transgender studies; and, essentialism. In groups, students will study coverage of a single contemporary story in the news. The course is intended for journalism majors and non-majors alike, and will be centered on helping both analyze news media critically in order to better understand how race, gender, sexuality and American identity are constructed.

Co-listed withHUM 325-4-20 and ENVR_POL 390-0-27.

This seminar explores how the relationship between the United States and Indigenous people has shaped the environments, ecosystems, and physical landscapes we live in today. Through engagement with a variety of digital resources including maps and digital media, we will learn how the environment of what is now the United States was managed by Indigenous people before and throughout colonization, how Indigenous people have been impacted by the environmental policies of the United States, and how Indigenous resistance and activism have shaped both the environmental movement in the U.S. as well as contemporary Indigenous political thought. In discussion, we will break down the politics, economics, and ethics of this history, challenging ourselves to think critically about the land we live on and its future. In lieu of a final paper, this course will include a digital, public-facing final assignment.

Co-listed with HISTORY 300-0-20.

Why does American medicine look the way it does? The United States spends more on health care than any other country in the world, but is almost singular in its lack of universal health care. American medicine is at once distinguished by its capacity for research and innovation and by its inability to resolve the profound health inequalities that shape this country. Which historical processes produced this unique set of circumstances? When and how have activists, patients, and politicians agitated for change? What alternate futures might we imagine? This course traces the history of American medicine from the nation’s founding to the present day. We will learn about the formation of the medical profession, track changing understandings of health and disease, discuss the development of drugs and medical technologies, and investigate the role of professional organizations in combatting efforts to nationalize healthcare. At the same time, we will hear about efforts to reform American medicine in the name of anti-racism, gender equality, decolonization, disability rights, and social justice. By studying these complex histories, we will ask questions about the relationship between health, power, bodies, and knowledge and consider what it has meant to provide care and pursue health throughout American history.

For the past thirty years, reality television – a genre of programming that aims to give us a view into the “unscripted” actions of our peers – has been a dominant force in U.S. entertainment.  Many of us watch these shows to relax, to turn off our critical thinking, and to immerse ourselves wholly into some manufactured drama and schadenfreude.  Considered as a cultural text, though, reality television can illuminate some profound truths: about how we decide what is right and wrong, about the tension between written and unwritten rules, and whether anyone can simply be “here to make friends.” 

In this course, we ask what reality TV can teach us about the nature of law.  We’ll read and discuss key works in the philosophy of law from H.L.A. Hart, Lon Fuller, Ronald Dworkin, Scott Shapiro, and others, and then see how their ideas stand up to the test of shows like Survivor, The Bachelor, FBoy Island, Ink Master, and Bachelor in Paradise.  By the end of the quarter, students will be able to explain the main currents of thought in legal philosophy with reference to elimination ceremonies, confessionals, alliances, and other fundamentals of reality TV gameplay.

Co-listed with JWSH_ST 279-0-1 and COMP_LIT 202-0-23.

This seminar consists in modern Jewish American literary text analyses in point of their cultural markers, focusing on the relations between collective and individual memory, mainstream and minority tensions, identity and ethical dilemmas. We will assess how significant moments in the life of early twentieth century Eastern European Jews in America (e.g., the fusgeyer emigration movement from 1900 Romania, the 1903 Kishinev pogrom from the Russian Empire, the original “Bintel Brief” column in The Forward or the 1911 Triangle Fire in New York) were represented in early twentieth century literary works (by Abraham Cahan, Mary Antin, Anzia Yezierska, M.E. Ravage) and how they are represented in contemporary, twenty-first century literary works (by Liana Finck, Margot Singer, Leela Corman, Jill Culiner, Barbara Kahn, Aleksandar Hemon, Julia Alekseyeva). By examining moments of struggle and power imbalance, the seminar also explores the fundamental role of literature in mourning and historical reparation.