Course Catalog
AMER_ST 301-0-1 – Seminar for Majors
AMER_ST 301-0-1 – An Emerging Guidebook to Apocalyptic Living
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;
AMER_ST 301-2-20 – Seminar for Majors
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.
AMER_ST 301-1-20 Seminar for Majors – Peoples, Nations, and Worlds (Fall)
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.
AMER_ST 301-2-20 – Peoples, Nations, and Worlds (Winter)
This course explores how the peoples of the United States imagined and constituted themselves as a nation through engagement with the world, and considers how the circulation of people, ideas, and goods within and beyond U.S. borders presented opportunities to consolidate, challenge, and change American culture and citizenship over the course of the 20th century. Surveying war and empire, immigration and nativism, and various movements for social democracy, it examines encounters at the edges of the nation and in its interstices that helped to define its center. The discussion-based class will be reading and writing intensive and combine recent and classic scholarship with select primary sources to highlight the interplay of local, national, and global forces in the making and remaking of American culture.AMER_ST 301-2-20 – Remapping American Studies Through Black Chicago
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.
AMER_ST 301-3-20 – Peoples, Nations, and Worlds (Spring)
This course explores how the peoples of the United States imagined and constituted themselves as a nation through engagement with the world, and considers how the circulation of people, ideas, and goods within and beyond U.S. borders presented opportunities to consolidate, challenge, and change American culture and citizenship over the course of the 20th century. Surveying war and empire, immigration and nativism, and various movements for social democracy, it examines encounters at the edges of the nation and in its interstices that helped to define its center. The discussion-based class will be reading and writing intensive and combine recent and classic scholarship with select primary sources to highlight the interplay of local, national, and global forces in the making and remaking of American culture.AMER_ST 310-0-10 – The Chicago Way
Urbanologist Yi Fu Tuan writes, "What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with values." In The Untouchables, Sean Connery tells Kevin Costner, "You want to get Capone? Here's how you get Capone. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He puts one of yours in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue. That's the Chicago way." In this class, we will examine "the Chicago way" from many different angles in order to interrogate the values with which various artists have endowed Chicago. We will read in a broad range of media: journalism, poetry, song, fiction, film, and sequential art to see how a sense of Chicago as a place works over time. We will pay close attention to depictions of the construction of American identity, and to the role of the artist and intellectual in the city.AMER_ST 310-0-10 – Bad News
Co-listed with Political Science 390-0-26
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.
Bad News – Bad News
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.
AMER_ST 310-0-20 Studies in American Cultures – The Viral Underclass: How Journalists Cover Outbreaks, Depict Humans as Viruses, and Make News Go Viral
What are viruses? Are they living or dead? How does news media affect their influence on the world? And why do we say news "goes viral?" Designed for Medill and non-Medill students alike, The Viral Underclass will study how viruses intersect with race, sexuality, disability, economics and the news media. Historically and contemporarily, the course will look at how actual viruses and infectious diseases (such as tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, Ebola, Hepatitis C and the novel coronavirus) have been covered in the global press. We will consider how certain groups of humans have been depicted as viruses themselves, such as how Jewish/disabled/queer/Roma people were described by the German and US press circa WW II; how African Americans were described in the US press circa Jim Crow; and how Muslim, Mexican and migrant people are described in press and social media now. We will also consider why popular news "goes viral." Students will work in research groups to study viruses and virality in the news throughout the term. Syllabus and books will be posted the week before class; for now, please plan to watch the film "Parasite" the week before. (Cross listed for Medill Journalism, Gender and Sexuality Studies, American Studies and African American Studies).
AMER_ST 310-0-20 – Asian American Digital Cultures
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.
AMER_ST 310-0-20 – Natural Disasters
Co-listed with Environmental Policy and Culture 390
From earthquakes to hurricanes, fires to floods, we tend to think of natural disasters as spontaneous occurrences. The word disaster originates in the idea of being born under an unlucky constellation or struck down by an uncaring universe. When homes are flooded or crops are destroyed, we see the natural world encroaching on lives and livelihoods in seemingly unpredictable and certainly unwanted ways. But are these disasters truly a product of nature? In this class, we will engage with the complex history of natural disasters: how people experience and rationalize these events, how communities respond to them, and how the causes of disaster are explained by various stakeholders, from victims to insurance companies. By the end of the quarter, students will have developed historical, cultural, and theoretical tools for understanding the nature of the natural disaster.
AMER_ST 310-0-20 – Press and Presidential Elections
Presidential elections are hard fought and can be controversial. In the 2016 election polls showed Hillary Clinton would win yet Donald Trump emerged victorious in the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. In 2000 George W. Bush also lost the popular vote but he was ultimately chosen the victor. The fallout from the recount and the Supreme Court decision that gave Bush the victory is still being debated and studied. In 2008 America elected its first African American President, Barack Obama and reelected him in 2012.This class will examine presidential elections and how they have evolved since 1952 the first year TV advertising began to have an impact on the races. This class will challenge some of the myths about elections and their outcomes. We will also examine the 2008 campaign, which was dubbed the "YouTube" election and was historic by virtue of its outcome, the candidates who ran and the impact the Internet and new technologies had on the race. In 2012 the Obama campaign had the most intense "ground game" of any campaign in history, we will examine how the campaign succeeded in this effort. In 2016 Donald Trump bypassed typical advertising methods of reaching voters by unleashing a torrent of Twitter messages, and finding a willing press that was, at least in the primaries, willing to give him uncritical or challenging coverage.
AMER_ST 310-0-20 – Passing
Co-listed with African American Studies 380-0-20
In this course, we explore how people move within and between categories of race and gender in the United States, with particular attention to the role of law in the formation and policing of those boundaries. In addition to conventional legal texts, we will draw upon literature, social theory, and cultural ephemera. Readings will include work by Nella Larsen, Charles Chesnutt, Allyson Hobbs, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Talia Mae Bettcher, Toby Beauchamp, and others.
AMER_ST 310-0-20 – American Teenage Rites of Passage
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.
AMER_ST 310-0-20 – Sex and the American Empire: Journalism and Frames of War
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.
AMER_ST 310-0-21 – Cyborg Environmentalism: Technology and the Natural World
Co-listed with Humanities 325-4 and Environmental Policy and Culture 390
When was the last time you hiked without a smartphone? What can playing video games teach us about interacting with nature? If you didn’t post a picture of a tree in the forest, did you really see it? In this course, digital humanities theory and practice are taught through the lens of environmental studies and political ecology, using cyborg theory to explore how the relationship between humans and the natural world is increasingly shaped by and mediated through digital technologies. This course explores theoretical concepts like connective memory, our relationship to social media and mobile photography, and digital colonialism, grounding them in tangible examples of digital humanities projects. This course will primarily use seminar style discussion with some lecture and workshops.
AMER_ST 310-0-22 – US Media Representations of the Middle East
Co-listed with Asian American Studies 303
In this course, we will explore the evolving ways in which the Middle East is visually represented in the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the present, post-9/11 era. Through discussing film, television, and photographic journalism alongside critical works of cultural analysis, we will work through how cultural objects come to function as salient social and political texts that pervade U.S. publics and how they deploy issues of race, gender and sexuality. We will begin with foundational theoretical texts that will shape our readings of representations of Southwest Asia/North Africa throughout the course. The majority of the term will then revolve around cultural objects and critical texts that shape meanings of Southwest Asia/North Africa in the United States. We will then end with a look at ways in which Southwest Asians/North Africans in the diaspora use visual culture to counter these monolithic representations.
AMER_ST 310-0-30 – U.S. Gay and Lesbian History
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This course explores the history of homosexuality as a legible social and cultural category; of lgbt individuals and communities as self-aware social and political actors; and of lgbt/anti-lgbt politics as arenas in which modern Americans have debated fundamental questions about human rights, personal autonomy, and citizenship. We will map the frameworks within which individuals have sought out, enjoyed, and understood sexual activity with others of the same sex; trace the growth of gay and lesbian communities over the course of the twentieth century; and survey the dramatic shifts and turns from the emergence of an organized gay and lesbian political movement to the traumas of the AIDS epidemic and the increasingly bitter fights over lgbtq citizenship and personhood of the last few decades. |
AMER_ST 310-0-30 – Transnational Asian American Activism
Combined with Asian American Studies 320-0-1
Both Asian American and Asian immigrant activism in the United States has been critical to resistance against systems of racial oppression in this country and its transnational, imperial connections abroad. This course is meant to provide students with a greater understanding of Asian diasporas in the United States and strategies of activist resistance from the beginning of the twentieth century into the present. Special attention will be paid to the role of student activism—both Asian American and Asian immigrant—as well as the role of historical and ethnographic methodologies in studying such paths for change. As a final project, students will create their own digital zines that discuss some aspect of Asian American activism that is rooted in scholarship but still accessible to the larger community.
AMER_ST 310-0-30 – Parks and Pipeline: Indigenous Environmental Justice
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.
AMER_ST 310-0-40 – Reality TV and Legal Theory
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.
AMER_ST 310-0-40 – The History of American Medicine
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.
AMER_ST 310-0-50 – Modern Jewish American Literature: Ethnicity, Assimilation, Performance
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.