Course Catalog

AMST 201

American Identities

The central focus of this course will be American identities—the various ways in which Americans have defined themselves, and have been defined. We will proceed chronologically, looking at contact between Amerindians, Puritans, and Cavaliers; the creation of a national identity; the contested meanings of race, class, gender, and ethnicity; and the role played by such forces as religion, region, technology, and empire. The course will also serve to introduce students to some of the central themes, theories, and sources of American studies, and interdisciplinary approach to the study of American culture. Readings will include poems, essays, autobiographies, novels, images, films, and the interpretive work of scholars in a number of disciplines.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 202

Hist of American Educatn

A survey of precollegiate education from the colonial period to the present. The development of church-affiliated, independent and public schools will be examined within the context of larger patterns of political, social and intellectual history.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 203

Conflicts and Cultures In American Society

Focusing on a key decade in American life—the 1890s, for example, or the 1850s—this course will examine the dynamics of race, class, gender, and ethnicity as forces that have shaped, and been shaped by, American culture. How did various groups define themselves at particular historical moments? How did they interact with each other and with American society? Why did some groups achieve hegemony and not others, and what were—and are—the implications of these dynamics for our understanding of American culture? By examining both interpretive and primary documents—novels, autobiographies, works of art, and popular culture—we will consider these and other questions concerning the production of American culture.

1.00 units, Lecture

ENGL 203

Conflcts & Cultures Am Society

Focusing on a key decade in American life - the 1890s, for example, or the 1850s - this course will examine the dynamics of race, class, gender and ethnicity as forces which have shaped and been shaped by American culture. How did various groups define themselves at particular historical moments? How did they interact with each other and with American society? Why did some groups achieve hegemony and not others, and what were - and are - the implications of these dynamics for our understanding of American culture? By examining both interpretive and primary documents - novels, autobiographies, works of art and popular culture - we will consider these and other questions concerning the production of American culture.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 204

Intro Amer Literature-I

A survey of literature, written and oral, produced in what is now the United States from the earliest times to around the Civil War. We will examine relationships among cultural and intellectual developments and the politics, economics, and societies of North America. Authors to be read include some who are well known-like Emerson, Melville, and Dickinson-and some who are less familiar-like Cabeca de Vaca, John Rollin Ridge, and Harriet Jacobs.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 206

US Col Thru Civil War

An examination of the developing American political tradition with emphasis on economic and ideological factors.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 207

Homosexuality & Hollywood Film

The twentieth century is generally understood as a crucial period for the emergence and consolidation of modern lesbian and gay identities and practices. A case can be made for the special role of Hollywood in this historical process. Stars such as Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Clift provided lesbians and gays with powerful models of gender and sexual nonconformity, and Hollywood genres such as the musical and the domestic melodrama informed the camp sensibility in crucial ways. Beginning with the 1930s and ending with the 1990s, this course examines how Hollywood contributed to the formation of lesbian and gay subcultures. It pays particular attention to the representation of lesbians and gays in Hollywood films and how this representation did and did not shift over the course of the twentieth century. In addition, it engages recent theoretical and historical work on gender and sexuality. Mandatory weekly screenings.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 208

Comic Art and Culture in the U.S.

This course provides an introduction to comic art and culture in the U.S., from the beginnings of the newspaper comic strip through the development of comic books, the growth of graphic novels, and current developments in electronic media. It focuses on the history and aesthetics of the medium, and the social, cultural and historical contexts in which comic art is created and consumed. Course requirements will include a midterm, final, and two short papers.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 209

Afro-Amer Experience

No Course Description Available.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 210

Doing Culture: Methods in Cultural Analysis

Culture is not something we simply consume, inhabit or even create. Culture is serious business: pun both intended and upended. We have a dynamic relationship with the world around us and in this class we will use culture, both elite and popular, to help bridge the gap between what we do here in the “ivory tower” and how we live out there in the “real world,” hopefully changing both in the process. Here we will not take culture for granted but engage culture as a method, a tool by which to engage, analyze and critique both historical narratives and contemporary events. In this course, street life, advertisements, popular media, and clothing are interrogated as archives of dynamic meaning, arenas of social interaction, acts of personal pleasure, and sites of struggle. We will also explore what happens when a diversity of forces converge at the intersection of commerce and culture. Present day notions of popular culture, and topics such as authenticity and selling out, will be interrogated both socially and historically.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 212

History of Sexuality

Sexuality is commonly understood as a natural or biological instinct, but as scholars have recently shown, it is better understood as a set of cultural practices that have a history. Starting with the ancient Greeks, this course examines the culturally and historically variable meanings attached to sexuality in Western culture. It pays particular attention to the emergence of sexuality in the nineteenth century as an instrument of power. It also considers how race, class, gender, and nationality have influenced the modern organization of sexuality. Topics covered include sex before sexuality, sexuality and colonialism, sexuality and U.S. slavery, and the emergence of the hetero/homosexual binarism in the late nineteenth century. Primary readings include The Symposium, A Passage to India, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The Well of Loneliness, and The Swimming Pool Library. Secondary readings include work by Michel Foucault, David Halperin, Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, Martin Duberman, George Chauncey, and Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Kennedy.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 213

20th C Afr Amer Lit

No Course Description Available.

1.00 units, Lecture

ENGL 213

20th C Afr Amer Lit

No Course Description Available.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 217

Intro African-Amer Lit

A broad survey of African-American writing from the 18th century to the present, with an emphasis on issues of voice, identity and canonicity. Possible readings in Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, Harriet Jacobs, Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Gayl Jones, and others.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 219

America in the World: Perspectives on 9/11

A study of the economic, ideological, and geo-political impetus for US foreign policy and military interventions abroad and their impact on the world. The emphasis of the course is on the trajectory of US foreign relations since 1945. Topics include, World War II and the changing conduct of war, the Cold War, the relationship between guerrilla war and terrorism, Vietnam, the oil crisis of the 1970s, Latin America, and the Middle East. The course aims to make sense of the current state of global conflict, through a study of the historical antecedents of our contemporary crisis.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 222

Tech & W Cult Indust Age

An examination, through selected case studies, of machine technology's impact on the Transatlantic world from the 18th century to the present. This course will focus on the interaction of technological innovation with the society in which it occurred, so that the student 1) may understand the specific problems, technical considerations, choices, limitations, possibilities, and consequences involved in technological innovation, and 2) may comprehend the societal response to such innovation, as it appeared in fiction, poetry, art and related forms of contemporary popular expression.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 226

Music of Black Am Women

A broad survey of the music of black American women that focuses largely on the work and lives of the classic blues singers of the 1920s, but also discusses the jazz singers of the 1940s and 1950s, black women in the classical arts, the girl groups of the 1960s, and women in rap. Musicians to be studied include Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Marian Anderson, Leontyne Price, Kathleen Battle, Florence Price, Jessye Norman, Billie Holiday, Ethel Waters, Dinah Washington, the Supremes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, the Marvelettes, Queen Latifah, Lil'Kim, Lauryn Hill, and Bahamadia. Students will write several 4-6 page papers based on the assigned reading and do a final project/interview with a local black woman active as a composer, teacher, or performer.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 227

Blacks & Amer Nat'l Pol

This course will introduce students to the experience of black Americans in the national political arena during the 20th century. We will analyze black involvement in clientage politics (Booker T. Washington), interest group politics (NAACP) and electoral politics (the Jackson campaigns). We will also examine black involvement in radical or reform-minded political movements (the gay rights movement, feminist politics, etc.). The intent of this course is to enable students to render reasonable assessments of historical and current black political strategies.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 228

Black Politics In Urban America

This class will introduce students to the history of black involvement in city politics during the 20th century. Because most of the early 20th century politicization of blacks took place in northern urban areas, we will analyze in depth the involvement of northern blacks in machine politics. We will also compare the political situation of blacks in cities with those of white ethnic groups.

1.00 units, Lecture

WMST 229

The Newest Minority

The emergence of the lesbian-gay minority, its politics, its culture and its distinctive institutions in Europe and North America during the late 19th and 20th centuries. Major readings: James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room; John D'Emilio, Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities: The Making of a Homosexual Minority; Madeleine Davis, Elizabeth Kennedy, Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold; Martin Duberman, et al. (eds.), Hidden From History; Henry Abelove, et al. (eds.), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader; Frank O'Hara, Selected Poems; Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest; Willa Cather, Stories; Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness; Nella Larsen, Passing; John Rechy, City of Night.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 231

Presley, Dylan, Springsteen, and the Poetics of Rock and Roll

This course examines the musical and social meaning of three icons in the history of rock 'n' roll and American culture. It has been said that Presley freed a generation's body, Dylan unlocked a generation's mind, and Springsteen has been working on a generation's soul. We will delve deeply into the music and lyrics of each artist and study each figure as someone who shaped the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. In addition to an intensive exploration of the music, sources will include published interviews, documentaries, and interpretive works by scholars and critics such as Peter Guarlnick, Greil Marcus, Christopher Ricks, Dave Marsh, and June Sawyers.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 241

Women in Theater & Dance

This course will explore 20th century women playwrights, choreographers and performers in context of theatrical expression and its relationship to gender. Topics of study will include the juxtaposition between traditional representation of women in theater and women as they represent themselves; the role of women in the shaping of American modern dance; and contemporary feminist performance theory.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 247

Latinos/Latinas in Amer

Who are "Latinos"/"Latinas" and how have they come to constitute a central ethnic/racial category in the contemporary United States? This is the organizing question around which this course examines the experiences of major Latino/Latina groups-Chicanos/Mexicanos, Puerto Ricans and Cubans-and new immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean. We study U.S. colonialism and imperialism in the Old Mexican North and the Caribbean; migration and immigration patterns and policies; racial, gender and class distinctions; cultural and political expressions and conflicts; return migrations and transnationalism; and inter-ethnic relations and the construction of Pan-Latino/Latina diasporic identities.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 248

Female Bodies in 19th Century American Literature & Culture

Corsets, bloomers, hysteria, mammy, jezebel, gynecology, angel on the hearth, suffragette: these are just a few of the garments, labels, cures, and stereotypes applied to women's bodies during the last century. By reading women's fiction and autobiography, we will explore how race, class, ethnicity, and gender operated in 19th century America and examine moments of resistance to prevailing definitions of femininity. For English majors, this course satisfies a requirement of a course emphasizing cultural content.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 255

Culture Clash

What is culture, and how do we go about studying it? When did the idea of culture come into being, and how has it changed over time? What kind of politics are cultural politics, and are they real politics or a distraction from real politics? Do we still have an American culture today? Is there a difference between culture and entertainment? What happens when cultures conflict or collide? These are just a few of the questions students will wrestle with in this introduction to cultural studies. Combining historical and theoretical accounts with readings of music, visual culture, and literature, this course will give students the tools they need to think critically about the increasingly complex world they inhabit.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 258

Law in United States Society

“The law is made for the times, and it will be made or modified by them,” declared a jurist in 1839. This course will examine the ways in which the law is constructed. What are the connections between legal rules and larger social transformations? Who makes the law and how do legal norms change over time? We will study such questions by focusing on three case studies—the criminal law of slavery, the law as it related to economic development in the 19th century, and the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, following the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). We will probe these issues through a close examination of case materials, memoirs, analytical essays, and historical accounts.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 260

Exploring Asian American Experiences

This course examines the historical experiences and cultural expressions of the nation’s diverse Asian American communities and places them within a broader discussion of identity formation, community building, social mobility, immigration policy, naturalization rights, and race relations. It also reveals how ethnicity, race, gender, class, and generation influence the daily lives of Asian Americans. Readings include historical monographs, political pamphlets, literary works, oral histories, and social commentaries.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 270

Intro to Film Studies

A study of film as a genre and of the critical and technical concepts needed to analyze it. The study is undertaken largely through the examination and discussion of feature films chosen for a variety of technique, style and cultural context. Film screenings will be scheduled accordingly.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 272

American Architecture

No Course Description Available.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 275

The West in American Culture: Symbols, Myths, and Realities

This course investigates the cultural meanings and the lived experiences associated with the American West. Themes for the course include Frederick Jackson Turner’s notion of the frontier and American exceptionalism, the use of Western myths and symbols in American culture, race relations and the historical experiences of racial minorities, regional development and its relationship to federal power, and political movements such as women’s suffrage, environmentalism, and conservatism.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 276

The (Long) Civil Rights Movement

In recent years, historians have begun to reconsider the traditional 1950s-1960s civil rights movement timeline. Exciting new scholarship has begun to explore both the early roots of the modern civil rights movement and its many offshoots. This course will cover the depth and breadth of the civil rights movement from early twentieth century civil rights activism through the high point of the civil rights era to the social justice activism of our contemporary moment.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 277

Law Gender & Supreme Crt

This course introduces students to contemporary gender issues as they are treated both in the law and in the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. We will explore some of the historical antecedents to contemporary legal gender questions and then examine in detail the following areas of controversy: affirmative action, the equal rights amendment, surrogate parenthood, abortion, and sex discrimination, including AIDS-related questions. For background, the following courses are recommended but not required: Political Science 102, 307, 316, Women's Studies 301, or a course in U.S. history since the Civil War. The format of the course is primarily discussion. Enrollment limited.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 279

American Autobiography

With its scandals, rags-to-riches tales, and liberal attitude toward the truth, autobiography has long enjoyed a reputation as America's favorite literary genre. In this class, we will examine the ways in which a diverse group of Americans has used autobiography to present stories of individual self-fashioning and group experience. Our readings will be eclectic in the extreme, ranging from canonical works by Ben Franklin, Frederick Douglass, and Gertrude Stein, to more recent work by Maxine Hong Kingston, Samuel Delany, and Vogue magazine's editor-at-large, Andre Leon Talley.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 280

Baseball and American Culture

Walt Whitman called baseball "America's game" and said it "belongs as much to our institutions...as our constitutions." And the critic Jacques Barzun claimed "whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball." Focusing on literature, history, and film, this course examines the origins and meanings of baseball in America. We will examine such topics as the game's 19th-century beginnings and its connections to urban and rural life, its role as an agent of social and legal change (desegregation and free agency), the globalization of the game, and the controversy over steroids. Throughout, we will think about baseball as an expression of the American dream.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 282

From Bing to Whoopi

Cinematic images of Catholicism provide a point of departure for the study of the mutual influence of Catholic and urban life in the United States during the past fifty years. The course will combine the use of film with textual studies in history, theology, and sociology to explore the Catholic experience of immigration, labor movements, racism, sexual revolution, and social change.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 283

Native Amer Religions

An anthropological study of the religions of the Americas' indigenous peoples. Emphasis will be given to their ethnohistory, oral traditions, myths, symbols and ritual performances. The course will also consider culture change and the rise of modern nativistic movements among American Indians.

1.00 units, Lecture

ENGL 296

Homosxlty & Amer Culture

Since World War II lesbians and gays in the United States have struggled to gain recognition as an oppressed minority with their own distinct history and culture. Focusing on such practices as camp, the gay macho style, and butch-femme role playing, this course examines the cultural aspects of this struggle. How have lesbians and gays challenged the dominant representation of homosexuality in American culture? How has American culture responded to this challenge? Texts include the films "Laura," "All About Eve," "Marnie," "The Children's Hour," "The Boys in the Band," "Cruising," and "Philadelphia"; the plays Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Children's Hour, The Normal Heart, and Angels in America; the novels The City and the Pillar, Giovanni's Room, Rubyfruit Jungle, and Zami: A New Spelling of My Name; and selected short stories from Hard Candy. Supplemental readings include essays by Susan Sontag, Esther Newton, Adrienne Rich, Elizabeth Kennedy and Madeline Davis, and Leo Bersani.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 298

Introduction to Hip Hop Music and Culture

This course will examine the evolution of hip hop music and culture (Graffiti art, B-boying [break-dancing], DJ-ing, and MC-ing) from its birth in 1970s New York to its global and commercial explosion during the late 1990s. Students will learn how to think critically about hip hop culture, and also about the historical, commercial, and political contexts in which hip hop culture took, and continues to take, shape. In the broadest sense then, this is a course explores what happens when art, capitalism, identity, and democracy all run headlong into one another, illuminating, in the process, some of the specific limits, contradictions, and possibilities of what, at one time, mistakenly, one might have called this very American collision. Particular attention will be paid to questions of race, masculinity, authenticity, consumption, commodification, globalization, and good, old-fashioned funkiness.

1.00 units, Lecture

WMST 298

Homosxlty & Amer Culture

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 301

Junior Seminar: American Texts

This course, required for the American studies major and ordinarily taken in the fall of the junior year, examines central texts in American history and culture. Through intensive discussion and writing, the class will explore the contexts of these works as well as the works themselves, paying particular attention to the interrelated issues of race, class, gender, and other similarly pivotal social constructs. Course is open only to American studies majors.
Prerequisite: Students must have completed American Studies 203 or enroll in 203 with 301.203

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 302

Junior Seminar II: Studies in American Culture

This course, required for the American Studies major and ordinarily taken in the fall of the Junior year concurrent with American Studies 301, examines a particular cultural institution in its changing social, political and economic contexts. It considers the way race, class, gender and other constructions shaped the institution, as well as the ways those constructions were themselves shaped by each other and by larger social forces. Examples of cultural institutions include minstrelsy, romance fiction, Hollywood, jazz, and the Black press. Students will examine the forces that created the cultural institution under discussion, and how they change it over time. Course open only to American Studies majors.
Prerequisite: Course open only to American Studies majors and required for the major. Ordinarily taken in the fall of the junior year concurrent with American Studies 301. Students must have completed American Studies 203 or enroll in 203 with 302.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 309

Music and Culture in the Postwar City

What do we make of musical proliferation in U.S. cities after 1945? Rhythm and blues, country music, rock and roll, experimental jazz, soul, funk, salsa, hip hop, and punk are just some of many musical styles that took shape in urban and suburban settings. The postwar city ushered in new musical styles and vocabularies that gave voice to, and provided expression from, for, and about urbanized sectors of the United States. How did migrant waves of people and their rural cultures change music in the city? How did the city change their music? What did the newly configured city do for cultural forms? Through various readings in primary and secondary sources, we will explore how cities helped fashion certain musical styles over others and investigate the local and cultural politics that shaped them.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 311

Colonial America

A selective exploration of the history of Colonial America from the early settlements through 1763. The course will focus on political ideals and practices, the emergence of a dynamic capitalist economy, and essential aspects of the cultural and religious life of the colonies. Special attention will be given to the relationship between European settlers and native Americans and to the rise of plantation slavery in the South. The course will attempt to strike a judicious balance between intellectual, politicial, and cultural history.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 322

Sr Sem:Democ & the Poor in America

An examination of the varied experiences of poverty in American history and the intersection of poverty and democracy. The course considers both the limits on democracy faced by the poor and their efforts to challenges those limits.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 323

The Trouble With Normal: An Introduction to Queer Theory

This course provides an introduction to queer theory, a set of theoretical and critical practices that have recently transformed the study of gender and sexuality. Reading rebelliously within the canon, it stages an encounter between some of the most influential queer theorists (Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Eve Sedgwick, and Michael Warner) and a series of canonical texts drawn from nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. The purpose of this encounter is to bring greater historicity to queer theory while deepening students' understanding of the place of sexuality in the American literary past. Novels include Billy Budd, The Awakening, The Ambassadors, The Professor's House, Passing, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, and Nightwood.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 326

Representations of Miscegenations

The course examines the notion of miscegenation (interracial relations), including how the term was coined and defined. Using an interdisciplinary approach, we will consider the different and conflicting ways that interracial relations have been represented, historically and contemporaneously, as well as the implications of those varied representations. Examining both primary and secondary texts, including fiction, film, legal cases, historical criticism, and drama, we will explore how instances of interracial contact both threaten and expand formulations of race and “Americanness” in the U.S. and beyond. How is miscegenation emblematic of other issues invoked, such as gender, nation, and sexuality? How do enactments of interracial contact complicate the subjects that they “stage”?

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 330

Labor, Workers, and American Culture

This course examines the histories and cultures of working people-women and men of various racial and ethnic groups who perform paid and unpaid forms of labor in diverse economic regions. It begins with theoretical and historical analyses of seriocomic class and labor, both in the United States and in a global context. It traces the rise, peak, and decline of the modern U.S. labor movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, as well as shifts in labor activism into the 21st century. It pays particular attention to struggles for better wages, hours, working conditions, and benefits, as well as struggles to represent all workers equitably. It also examines work and workers in the public imagination and popular culture over time. In so doing, this course explores issues of class, race, gender, and sexuality as categories of analysis for understanding "work" in America.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 331

Polit&Socty 20th C South

This class will introduce students to the broad centuries of political life in the American South during the 20th century. We will discuss the proliferation of demagogues within the electoral arena of the one-party South as well as movements which opposed them (e.g., populism). We will also study the centrality of race, religion, and regionalism in southern life. In addition we will explore the troubled history of organized labor in the region and its relationship to the macmro-economic changes that took place in the region as urbanization and industrialization made an agrarian economy less central. Finally, we will discuss the idea of the South as marketed in films and television. The course will consist of lectures, class discussions, and regularly scheduled films/documentaries that will be viewed during special evening sessions.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 332

Road Trip: Travel and Migration in the American Novel

Whether figured as a search for identity, a search for freedom, or a search for work, the road novel has been among the most popular genres in American literature. Although the means of conveyance have changed from the schooner and the horse to cars, airplanes, and the Internet, movement in American literature has served as a metaphor for American freedom, and proof of its denial. Divided evenly between the 19th and the 20th centuries, this course will feature authors including Parkman, Douglass, Melville, and Twain to Steinbeck, Kerouac, Morrison, Cormac McCarthy, and Junot Diaz.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 333

Women of Color in the United States

Focusing primarily on African American, Native American, Latin American, and Asian American women, this course will examine the cultural, economic, and political histories of women of color in the United States. Major themes will include immigration, labor, family, education, social movements, and civil rights.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 334

Sr Sem: Slavery & American Historical Memory

No Course Description Available.

1.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 335

Seafaring America

The development of United States maritime and naval enterprise from the Colonial Era to the present. Emphasis on: patterns of commerce and trade; technological innovation afloat and on the waterfront; the transition from sail to steam power; changing conditions of life at sea and of seaport communities; the development of internal waterways; the relation of private enterprise to public policy and government involvement; naval strategy and the experience of American seapower in theory and practice.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 336

Globalization(s): "America" in the Modern World

This course is an unabashed and hopeful "history of the present." By situating a history of “America” within the larger world, we will collectively explore a global vision for the future. Throughout modern history, arguments for global advance have been premised on the proliferation, and equal distribution, of freedoms. In this class, through a series of pairings and conversations that cut across the world, we will rethink the very notion of global freedom. Here, property and piracy, free labor and freedom from labor, nation states and colonies, prosperity and underdevelopment, the political and the personal all coexist as the collective building blocks for competing, yet connected visions of global social relations. From Democratic Nationalism to Soviet Internationalism to Bandung Humanism, globalization has expressed itself in various guises. Let’s look at them all. This class is an invitation to come and explore something more, to reclaim the possibilities for competing visions of worldwide freedom in the present.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 337

Sexual Labors in the United States

This course will analyze and examine the intersection of sex and work in the United States. We will explore sexual labors—prostitution, sexual acting and performance, forced and voluntary sexual labor—in the contexts of U.S. history, culture, economy, politics, and society. We will examine efforts to criminalize and decriminalize sex work, subcultures of sex workers, and dynamics of power in sex work through the lenses of socioeconomic class, gender, and sexuality. To do so, we will trace historical and current constructions of sex (as) work through a blend of sources—diaries and letters, film, music, popular literature, and secondary analysis.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 338

Political Rhet&Media

George Orwell called political language "the defense of the indefensible," and yet democracies need a lively public culture of argument and debate in order to come to terms with complex issues, define values, make decisions, and solve problems. This course will explore the contemporary state of our political rhetoric in the United States, with a focus on the dynamic interactions of television, radio, print, and cyberspace. Students will participate in electronic discussions with peers across the country as they debate current issues generated by national election campaigns.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 345

The Vietnam Experience

No Course Description Available.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 347

Issues & Controversies in Contemporary Black Life

The course examines racial inequality in the post-civil rights era as it is manifested in American culture, society, and policy and analyzes the politics surrounding the major public debates that affect black Americans and the nation today. Topics include: the origins of the urban crisis; welfare reform and the black family; drug legislation, crime, incarceration, and capital punishment; immigration; education; affirmative action; class stratification; and rap and censorship. Divisions within the black community as well as between black and white Americans will be addressed.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 348

Thought and Culture in American Society

This course offers a survey of American intellectual and cultural history in the 19th century, from the decades following the Revolutionary War to the early years of the 20th century. Among the various “isms” we will unpack are republicanism, evangelicalism, transcendentalism, individualism, populism, pragmatism, and progressivism. Readings will include works by Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, William James, Ida Wells, Jane Addams, Jack London, and others.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 351

Slav & Race Am 1790-1865

No Course Description Available.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 352

The Culture of Cold War America

This course encourages students to critically analyze the relationship between the Cold War and developments in American culture. Discussion topics include the roots of the Cold War, the anxieties concerning nuclear annihilation, the fear of global and domestic communism, representations of the Cold War in social memory, political dissent and cultural politics during the Cold War, and the impact of the Cold War on gender norms, civil rights, and labor relations. In addition to reading historical monographs, students will interpret the era’s popular culture.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 353

Cannibals in American Imagination

This course examines cannibalism in the Americas from the 15th through the 20th centuries. While we devote several weeks to understanding different forms of cannibalism - survival, ritual, and psychotic - the empahsis is on American constructions of cannibalism with attention to "native" ideas and responses. From traveler accounts to Vampire movies, we will examine the role of cannibalism in identity construction, colonization, social power, and cultural critique. This course is highly interdisciplinary and draws on history, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, literature, and film.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 354

Working, Buying, and Becoming: Human Rights, Race, Labor & the High Life from Plantation to Internt

How do we talk about what we do for a living, what we buy and what race we give ourselves? Does our skin color, our job or our Jeep Cherokee define us? We seek to understand how these factors influence our perceptions of who we are, how we fit into society and the rights we enjoy in society. Race, gender and the market economy - and the ways these concepts change throughout American history - will become key issues for us to consider. Our reading will cover a broad swath of time, from Crevecoeur and Equiano in the 18th century to Thoreau, and Frederick Douglass in the 19th century and Francisco Jiménez and "Rivethead" in the 20th century.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 355

Urban Mosaic: Migration, Identity, and Politics

This course focuses on ethnic and racial communities in 20th-century urban areas. Readings allow students to assess and to compare the ways in which ethnicity and race impacted how people lived and worked in the city (e.g., ethnic neighborhoods, segmented labor, and racially exclusive unions). They also reveal how ethnic and racial communities defined their interests when they engaged in political activities. Discussion themes include identity politics, intergroup relations, cultural life within ethnic and racial communities, employment discrimination, and residential segregation.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 356

American Working Class

A lecture-discussion course which surveys the experience of American wage-earners, with emphasis on their efforts to control their own lives in and out of the workplace. The course will pay particular attention to racial, religious, gender, and skill divisions in the working class and efforts to overcome those divisions by unions, political parties, commercial mass culture, and other means. Roughly equal time will be given to the economic, political, and cultural dimensions of workers' experience. Readings will include works of fiction and autobiography along with many primary documents. There is no prerequisite, but students will benefit from having taken History 202-01 prior to enrolling in History 356-01. This is one of the core courses for the Studies in Progressive American Social Movements minor.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 357

Race and Urban Space

Scholars and now even the larger public have conceded that race is a social construct. However, many are just beginning to fully explore how the specific dimensions and use of space is mediated by the politics of racial difference and racial identification. Therefore, this course seeks to explore how racism and race relations shape urban spatial relations, city politics, and the built environment and how the historical development of cities has shaped racial identity as lived experience. Covering the 20th century, the course examines three critical junctures: Ghettoization (1890s-1940s); Metropolitan Formation (1940s-1990s); and Neo-Liberal Gentrification (present).

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 358

Voices of Freedom, Voices of Desperation: American Reformers, 1760-1960

This course examines the public and private works of select American reformers. From Tom Paine and Ida Wells to Rachel Carson and Bob Dylan, reformers have been selfless and selfish in their quest to better America. Noble activist? Attention-starved loon? In this class, you will judge individual musicians, politicians, and writers while exploring how changing views on religion, economy, gender, science, and race, time and again, reshaped the trajectory of American social reform.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 359

Violence in the American Imagination

"We have front row seats for the theater of mass destruction," said the narrator of the 1999 film, Fight Club. This course examines the ways in which violence has constructed America and America has constructed violence. How has the definition of violence changed over time? What are the connections between cultural understandings of pain and suffering and the larger social dynamics of the nation? We will study these important questions in a variety of settings from the 19th to the 20th century. Readings will include Andrew Jackson, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, Tillie Olsen, Ralph Ellison, James Welch, Chuck Palahniuk, and others.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 360

American Anthems: An Exploration in Music, Protest, and Culture

Music has seemingly played a role in American events from the 1760s to the 1960s. But what has music actually accomplished? Is it capable of changing the world? Or is it simply a sideshow of political activism? This seminar traces mainstream and radical musical response to social and cultural upheaval in the American past from the Revolution to the post-9/11 age. Using the likes of William Billings, Jesse Hutchinson, George Root, and Scott Joplin to Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, Prince, and Tupac Shakur, we will look to understand the many messages embedded in American protest music and the American music as an icon of social reform.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 361

Interpreting the American Dream

A critical inquiry into the ways in which Americans of diverse characteristics have thought about the promise of America

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 362

Religion in American Society

The historical role of religion in shaping American life and thought, with special attention to the influence of religious ideologies on social values and social reform. (May be counted toward American Studies.)

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 366

Relocating America in the World: American Culture in a Global and Trannational Context

This seminare examines american culture in a global and transnational context to understand the ways inwhich cultural experiences transcend national borders. We will probe how Americans envision their relationship to the global community, the integral role of cultural exchange in the ongoing shaping of cultures here and abroad, and how immigrants and foreigners perceive and experience American society. In addition to reading secondary literature on American borderlands, diasporic identies, and cultural hybridity, we will analyze a variety of primary texts including fiction, autobiography, and film.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 372

Mobs, Masses, and Democracy in America

“There are in fact no masses,” writes the cultural critic Raymond Williams. “There are only ways of seeing people as masses.” This intellectual and social history course will examine ways of “seeing people as masses” in the United States since the American Revolution. By studying changing interpretations of mobs, masses, and social movements, we will inquire into changing ideas about American democracy, the character of “the people,” and ways of communicating with them. Particular topics will include the role of “the crowd” in the era of the Revolution; images of riots, strikes, lynch mobs, theater audiences, and other kinds of collective behavior in the 19th century; criticism of the mass society, mass culture, and the mass media (movies, radio, TV, advertising) in the 20 century; and ideas about the causes and effects of social movements. Course materials will include novels and films in addition to more traditional types of primary documents. This is a core course for the Studies in Progressive American Social Movements minor.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 374

American Remix

This course pairs canonical works and themes drawn from American culture with contemporary works that reimagine the originals in especially exciting ways. For instance, we might examine how Jose Feliciano (in 1968), Jimmy Hendrix (in 1969), and Marvin Gaye (in 1983) all reinterpreted the national anthem, how Gordon Parks's photograph "American Gothic" revised Grant Wood's famous painting of the same name, or how author Ishmael Reed and choreographer Bill T. Jones responded to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. In doing so, students will develop a better understanding of the ways in which Americans have perpetually reinvented themselves by revisiting and revising the touchstones of their culture.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 375

Self and Society in American Culture

This course will examine the various ways in which Americans have conceptualized selfhood. Every bookstore today has an expansive “self-help” section, but the very conception of the self has a history that continues to change over time. We will examine that history while thinking about such issues as the public versus private self, the shift from character to personality, and the relationship of the individual to the community. Our goal is to understand the process by which conceptions of selfhood and identity are culturally constructed. Particular attention will be paid to issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. We will read widely in primary and secondary sources, including autobiography, fiction, sermons, poems and speeches by such writers as Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, W.E.B. DuBois, Toni Morrison, and Richard Rodriguez, and the analytical work of such scholars as Warren Susman, Charles Taylor, Clifford Geertz, and Carol Gilligan

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 377

Toni Morrison

Reading the novels of a major American writer

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 379

Character & Conditions

Horatio Alger's books for boys set the ground rules for American upward mobility: hard work, honesty, and a little luck led to success. This course examines the American premise through the lens of novels written by men and by women, by blacks and by whites, and by immigrants and first-generation Americans as well as by members of old established families. Prerequisite: English 260. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature after 1800 or a course emphasizing cultural context.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 392

The Harlem Renaissance

In this course we will read a selection of novels, essays, short fiction, and poetry by African American writers of the period, including Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Jesse Fauset, and Jean Toomer. Emphasis will be on identifying the characteristics that unify this body of literature and on investigating the significance of the Harlem Renaissance within the African American literary tradition. This course satisfies the requirement of a course emphasizing literature after 1800 or a course emphasizing cultural context.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 399

Independent Study

Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar's Office, and the approval of the instructor are required for enrollment.

1.00 units min / 2.00 units max, Independent Study

AMST 401

American Travel Narratives

This senior seminar will focus on travel to and across America from the colonial period through the present, expanding how we think of travel and its place in American literature and consciousness. Readings will cover a broad sweep of topics and time periods, including: Native traditions of migration, colonial encounters in the “New” world, slave narratives of the middle passage, narratives of western exploration, and European immigrant narratives. We will explore a full range of media: written forms, oral traditions, and consider the extent to which film, television, and the internet have provided new forums for recounting travel. At the core of the course will be a consideration of how stories of travel confirm or challenge individual, local, and national identities.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 402

Senior Project

Students undertake projects on American studies topics of their own choosing. The projects will be supervised by a faculty member in an American studies-related field. Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office, and the approval of the project adviser and director, are required for enrollment.

1.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 409

Senior Seminar: Harlem Renaissance Revisited

At some point in studies of U.S. history, students are at least briefly introduced to the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Yet few know that this "Renaissance" represents only one small piece of a much larger New Negro Movement. In this class, the more well-known literary and visual art expressions of Harlem are situated within a wider spectrum of social movements and popular cultures of film, music, sports, and public behavior that spanned the globe from Harlem to Chicago, from Paris to Port au Prince. This more comprehensive vision of the New Negro Movement serves as a lens through which to better understand U.S. national identity, urbanization processes, industrial capitalist developments, and imperial expansion in the early 20th century.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 416

Culture and Politics in Mid-20th-Century America

What role does culture play in determining who wins and loses presidential campaigns? Did Harry Truman defeat Thomas E. Dewey in 1948 because Dewey wore a mustache? Did Adlai E. Stevenson lose in 1952 and 1956 because he was an egghead? Did Richard M. Nixon’s television image of a man who needed a shave contribute to his defeat to the well groomed and younger looking John F. Kennedy in 1960? We will examine the changing cultural narrative of post-World War II America delivered to Americans by the print and electronic media. We will examine how that narrative affected voter decision-making in the elections of 1948, 1952, 1956, and 1960. We will also attempt to understand what cultural messages persuaded American citizens to vote for or against their own economic and civic interests. References to the current cultural climate and the election of 2008 will constitute an important part of our ongoing discussion.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 423

The History of American Sports

This course will examine American sports from their beginnings in Puritan-era games to the multi-billion-dollar industries of today. We will begin by looking at the relationship between work, play, and religion in the colonies. We will trace the beginnings of horseracing, baseball, and boxing, and their connections to saloons, gambling, and the bachelor subculture of the Victorian underworld. We will study the rise of respectable sports in the mid- and late 19th century; follow baseball as it became the national pastime; see how college football took over higher education; and account for the rise of basketball. We will look at sports and war, sports and moral uplift, and sports and the culture of consumption. Finally, we will examine the rise of mass leisure, the impact of radio and television, racial segregation and integration, the rise of women’s sports, battles between players and owners in the last 25 years, and the entrance of truly big money into professional sports. Readings in primary and secondary sources will emphasize the historical experience of sports in the United States so that students can develop a framework for understanding current events, including the NHL lockout, the Kobe Bryant affair, and the controversies over steroids.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 427

Body Art in Fiction, Film, and Practice

Body art is the most common of arts, and yet the least explored. People throughout history have times painted, marked, and pierced their bodies, but only recently have such practices been studied by serious scholars. This class will explore the ways in which various body-art practices have developed and evolved, especially as they are portrayed in literary texts, historical documents, and films. We will examine such interpretations of body art in order to ponder how and why people mark themselves (and others), how that has changed in significant ways over time, and how literary and visual representations of body art affect the character of the practices themselves.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 431

Scribbling Women: American Women's Literary Culture, 1850-1920

This course will trace the rich and diverse tradition of women's writing in 19th-century America. We will consider the contexts that influenced women's writing and evaluate women authors' contributions to literary, political, and social movements during the 1800s through the turn of the century. We will pay particular attention to representations of race, class, ethnicity, region, and gender in women's writing. African American, Euro-American, Hispanic, Native American, middle- and working-class women authors will be studied. Authors studied will include: Louisa M. Alcott, Lillie Devereux Blake, Grace MacGowan Cook, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Fanny Fern, Frances E. W. Harper, Nella Larsen, Elizabeth Keckley, Zitkala-Sa, and Maria Cummins.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 435

Museum Exhibition

Students are introduced to the issues and processes involved in developing exhibitions, and explore different approaches to cultural and historical interpretation at a range of museums. Class sessions and exercises will examine the basics of exhibit planning and development. Topics include the conceptualization of exhibit themes and educational goals; learning in museums; visitor needs and accessibility; design elements; technology in museums; and audience evaluation methods. Through critical readings of course literature and site visits, students will also consider the various interpretive methods utilized at living history museums, historic houses and historical sites, history and cultural museums, and urban historical parks. Includes some field trips, guest speakers, and student projects.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 443

Spectacle, Social Control, and the Spaces of Display

This course will analyze a range of built spaces, elite ones like museums and vernacular ones like shopping malls and casinos, to see how they reflect and shape our changing ideas of spectacle and display. Beginning with an examination of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and the 1939 World’s Fair, we will analyze how buildings exercise authority and shape our behavior. We will consider how displays of culture and commerce encode the agendas of capitalism, both literal and cultural, by looking at the packaging of commodities and of the materials within museums; retail entertainment architecture like those of Las Vegas and Disney and their fusion with the museum; and memorial museums and structures, particularly the Holocaust Museum.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 449

The Culture of Americanism in the 20th Century

In 1894, Teddy Roosevelt published "True Americanism" in Forum Magazine, declaring the absolute necessity of applying a "fervid Americansim" to the solution of every problem and evil facing the country, including "Americanizing" newcomers to our shore. Nearly 50 years later, the rhetoric of Americanism proposed by Time publisher Henry Luce in his February 1941 editorial in Life Magazine, "The American Century," aimed to persuade Americans that the country's involvement in World War II and in the post-war world were not only necessary but inevitable. The Luce publications after the war publicized the culture of Americanism that was an essential part of the anti-communism that supported the Cold War for over half a century. Leaving aside the idea of American exceptionalism—"the notion that the United States has had a special mission and virtue that makes it unique among nations"—our focus will be on the culture of Americanism as it was promulgated in the Luce publications and other media outlets during and after World War II, and the extent to which it encouraged postwar homogeneity while discouraging the expression of dissent and non-conformist ideas.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 450

The Social Conscience and American Photography, 1839-1946

“The camera never lies,” but it certainly can persuade. From its inception, photography has been employed in the cause of social change in the United States. During the Civil War, the images from the Brady studio helped persuade the Union of the justice of its cause. Anthropological images made from the 1860s to the 1880s helped define the vanishing Native American communities of the West, and the romantic images of photographers like Edward Curtis created sympathy among white Easterners for their plight. In the later 19th century, photography became the handmaid of Progressive reform in the hands of Jacob Riis, whose book, How the Other Half Lives, convinced the public of the need for urban reform. Sociologist Lewis Hine found his photographs of child labor far more effective than text alone in stimulating change. And in what may be the most comprehensive photographic project yet undertaken, the Farm Services Administration under FDR’s New Deal program created a body of iconic images of the Great Depression that abide to today. In the hands of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, and Gordon Parks, among others, the FSA body of work remains the visual definition of the Depression. We will examine how it served the agendas created by the agency head, Roy Stryker, and the photographers themselves. Two papers during the term, one final paper or project and presentation. Texts will include Liz Wells, Photography: A Critical Introduction; Alan Trachtenburg, Reading American Photographs; Fleischhauer and Brannan, Documenting America: 1935-1943.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 453

Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage: Early Latino Literature 1820-1940

This course aims to provide students with an introduction to the Recovering the U.S. Hispanic Literary Heritage Project and with an understanding of the historical Latino presence in United States literature, culture and history. We will examine a mix of Spanish language periodicals, corridos, poetry, short stories, novels, and biography, and authors will include Felix Varela, José Martí, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, María Cristina Mena, Jesus Colón, and Luisa Capetillo. The course will focus on three groups: Cubans in Florida and New York, Mexicans and Mexican-Americans in the Southwest, and Puerto Ricans on the island and in New York; and on four themes: the construction of literary canon and history, the intersections of history and memory, the translation of culture, and the nature of resistance literature. Spanish reading ability is helpful but not required.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 455

Agency and Agenda: Commercial American Photography Since 1914

This course investigates how photography has described and constructed consumer culture and current events, from selling the American Dream to the events of September 11, 2001. We will examine how advertising photography uses news imagery for its own agenda and creates enduring icons that in turn become part of the imagery of news. We will consider ethics and the roles of the image-maker; tactics of display; the creating agencies and their agendas; the manipulation of images (physical and interpretive); and how race, gender, and ethnicity are constructed in commercial and news images.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 456

American Landscape Photography: Aesthetics and Ideology

The course considers the iconic photography of the American West made for railroad and government surveys in the 19th century; the idealized and iconic 20th-century landscapes constructed by Ansel Adams; recent photography whose purpose is aesthetic, political, and environmental; and ways in which photography helped created the industry of tourism. Readings drawn from history of photography, anthroplogy, social history, environmental science, theory, and environmental activism.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 461

American Globetrotters: Travel Writing and Tourism

This graduate-level seminar will analyze the American fascination with travel and tourism and examine the literary strategies employed by travel writers. Our exploration will begin with the quintessentially masculine figure of the traveler and then turn to women travel writers who question traditional femininity and African American authors who challenge racism and social injustice in their travel writing. We will consider the perspective of the "natives" and their response to travel accounts written by tourists and colonists. Considering journeys undertaken to reclaim cultural "roots," students will read contemporary travel writing that questions the meaning of multi-cultural identity. We will also study the growing field of travel criticism and address issues of imperialism, globalization, and tourism. Authors studied include Washington Irving, Caroline Kirkland, Herman Melville, Matthew Henson, Nancy Prince, June Jordan, W.E.B. DuBois, Jamaica Kincaid, Paisley Rekdal, and others.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 464

Witnessing Slavery: Literature of Slavery and Abolition

This graduate-level seminar will trace Nineteenth-century ideas about slavery, freedom, race, and identity through the writings of abolitionist reformers, slave narratives and cultural artifacts (newspapers, photographs, fine art images, and icons). For the second half of the course we will turn to the Twentieth Century and examine how these ideas continue to impact American culture and literature (including film). Authors studied will include: Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Gilmore Simms, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, Henry Bibb, William and Ellen Craft, George Fitzhugh, Henry "Box" Brown, Nikki Giovanni and Toni Morrison.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 465

Post-War/Postmodern: American Design from Retro to Neo-Retro

This course explores the specifics of design in postwar America from a variety of perspectives, particularly social history. We will consider the growing phenomenon of postwar design templates as re-invented by contemporary designers in an attempt to understand why these icons of the Baby Boom have come to roost in contemporary culture. Topics include automobile design and history; housing and the creation of the American suburb; taming the exotic in tiki bars; kitchen debates and the feminine mystique; and domestic ideals and queering domesticity.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 466

Teaching Assistantship

Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office, and the approval of the instructor are required for enrollment.

0.50 units min / 1.00 units max, Independent Study

AMST 490

Research Assistantship

No Course Description Available.

1.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 494

Connecticut Historical Society Internship

The Connecticut Historical Society offers graduate internships to matriculate American Studies students in five key areas: Museum Collections, Library, Public Programs, Exhibitions, and Technology. Interested students should contact the Office of Graduate Studies for more information.

1.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 497

American Studies

No Course Description Available.

1.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 498

Senior Thesis Part 1

Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar’s Office, and the approval of the thesis adviser and the director are required for enrollment. The registration form is required for each semester of this year-long thesis. (The two course credits are considered pending in Part I of the thesis; they will be awarded with the completion of Part II.)

2.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 499

Senior Thesis Part 2

Submission of the special registration form, available in the Registrar's Office, and the approval of the thesis adviser and the director, are required for each semester of this year-long thesis. (The two course credits are considered pending in Part I of the thesis; they will be awarded with the completion of Part II.)

2.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 801

Approaches to American Studies

This seminar, which is required of all American studies graduate students, examines a variety of approaches to the field. Readings may include several “classic” texts of 18th- and 19th-century American culture and several key works of American studies scholarship from the formative period of the field after World War II, as well as more recent contributions to the study of the United States. Topics will include changing ideas about the content, production, and consumption of American culture; patterns of ethnic identification and definition; the construction of categories like “race” and “gender”; and the bearing of class, race, gender, and sexuality on individuals’ participation in American society and culture. Undergraduates who wish to enroll in this course must obtain permission of their adviser and the instructor.

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 805

American Literature: The Remix

In this course, students will examine the ways in which a series of books are in direct and indirect conversation with another. We will do so by reading several "classics" of 19th- and 20th-century American literature side-by-side with both contemporary and modern authors whose own work echoes or rewrites those "classics" in especially startling or suggestive ways. Given these concerns, we will be as interested in issues of continuity as we will be in matters of distinction. Another aim of this course will be to challenge insufficiently dynamic understandings of culture and the artificial barriers that have together served to separate "American literature" from various ethnic American and African American literatures.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 806

Globalizing America

Long before the present age of "globalization," the United States was a nation with global political, economic, and cultural aspirations. It has variously claimed for itself, or had thrust upon it, the missions of embracing, decolonizing, colonizing, and transforming the world. This seminar will explore the universalist ideology of the revolutionary founders; of America as an immigrant "nation of nations;" multiculturalism; the international effects of American economic power, military power, pop culture, and mass media; and the dynamics and prospects of the capitalist/digital revolution that is today said to be Americanizing the planet. Texts will include titles by Paine, Tocqueville, Melville, Bourne, Kallen, Wildie, Lind, Hollinger, Greider, and others.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 811

Hartford Architecture 1790-1960

A seminar on the architecture of Connecticut’s capital city from the end of the American Revolution to the advent of mid-20th century urban renewal, as an expression of the artistic, economic, social and political forces that have shaped Hartford and New England. Changing architectural styles and building types will be examined in the broader context of Hartford’s transformation from a mercantile to an industrial economy. The contributions of important architects who are represented by works in Hartford will be integral to the study. The course includes two Saturday walking tours.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 816

Culture and Politics in Mid-20th-Century America

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 819

From Decorum to Sensation: Varieties of Museum & Archive Experience

Decorum—or what is deemed proper to a genre, a form, a character—is a term most often applied to literary texts. But notions of propriety maintain an important place in museums and in the field of museum studies, as reactions to the “Sensation” exhibition at New York’s Brooklyn Museum of Art, “Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art” at the Jewish Museum, and proposals for memorials in the aftermath of September 11, 2001 have demonstrated. In this course we will trace the evolving concept of and pressures exerted by “decorum” in 19th, 20th and 21st century museums and their constituencies, an inquiry which will generate questions about governing bodies, societal and cultural norms, censorship, free speech, memory and tolerance. We will look at cabinets of curiosity in America’s earliest museums, controversial exhibitions in our own time, innovative exhibition venues, including Exploratorium in San Francisco, Dia Center for the Arts in New York City, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum in Connecticut, and the evolution of “virtual museums”/museums on the web. American Studies 825 is recommended but not required.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 823

The History of American Sports

1.00 units, Seminar

ENGL 823

Sports in Amer Life&Cltr

Work, play, ritual, obsession: sports holds a sacred spot in American culture. In this seminar, we will scan an array of sports (professional, amateur, high school, recreational) through a variety of media (fiction, film, journalism, comic art). How do local team help to build - and to rend - communities? How do exports (baseball) and imports (soccer) shape national identity in an international context? How do athletic fashions translate on the street and in the workplace? How does America construct its sports heroes, how do those heroes construct themselves, and how are participants and observers both enmeshed in myths of race and gender? Undergraduates who wish to enroll in this course must obtain permission of their adviser and the instructor.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 825

Museums, Visual Culture, and Critical Theory

This course aims to examine the issues brought up in key theoretical readings by applying their insights to case studies, particularly cases of museum exhibitions and programs. Issues to be addressed include: reproduction and spectacle; gender and display; ethnicity, 'primitivism,' and race; and sexuality, sexual practice, and censorship. Case studies will vary each year and will range from exhibitions focusing on consumption, to ethnicity and race (such as the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Pequot Museum), and sexuality (The Museum of Sex; the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibitions). Each class will combine theoretical readings with considerations of museum practice. By the end of the semester, students shall be able to analyze exhibitions using both the tools of postmodern theory and practical observation and history.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 827

Body Art in Fiction, Film, and Practice

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 830

Practicum in Museum Studies

This course will combine elements of a classroom-based seminar and a site-based internship in museum work. Arrangements will be made to coordinate these internships with the research, exhibition planning, and installation schedules at participating institutions in the Hartford area. Students will have an opportunity to work with museum professionals and to share their experiences with each other in the seminar. The seminar will meet as a group on a schedule to be arranged, both to report on field work and to discuss the assigned readings. Each student’s internship schedule will be arranged to accommodate the needs of the student and the institution. American Studies 825 and/or American Studies 833 are recommended but not required. Permission of the instructor is required for undergraduates only.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 831

Scribbling Women: American Women's Literary Culture, 1850-1920

This course will trace the rich and diverse tradition of women's writing in 19th-century America. We will consider the contexts that influenced women's writing and evaluate women authors' contributions to literary, political, and social movements during the 1800s through the turn of the century. We will pay particular attention to representations of race, class, ethnicity, region and gender in women's writing. African American, Euro-American, Hispanic, Native American, middle- and working-class women authors will be studied. Authors studied will include: Louisa M. Alcott, Lillie Devereux Blake, Grace MacGowan Cook, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Fanny Fern, Frances E. W. Harper, Nella Larsen, Elizabeth Keckley, Zitkala-Sa, and Maria Cummins.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 832

Amistad&Other Rebellions

No Course Description Available.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 833

The Work of Museums

These days the business of museums is as closely analyzed as magazines, movies, and similar products, but the work of museums remains a mystery. To understand the choices involved in creating exhibitions, it is helpful to know how the museum functions from mechanics to ethics. This course will take students beyond the stanchions to explore issues and challenges involved in managing the museum. Along with methodological and theoretical readings, students will visit a range of Hartford-based museums and cultural centers to establish background in the structure that supports a museum. Presentations by professional staff from local institutions will provide a unique perspective on the joys, frustrations, responsibilities, and the necessary qualifications for work in museums. Course not open to undergraduates. American Studies 825 is recommended and interested students should contact the Graduate Studies Office for more information.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 834

Museum Representations of Native American Cultures

This course will consider factors that have influenced varied approaches to the exhibition and representation of Native American objects and cultural history in North American museums. Students will examine the ways in which Native American objects have been collected, interpreted, and presented for museum display, using a comparative approach, through field trips to the American Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center. Current trends will be studies in the context of changing theoretical approaches to cultural history studies as well as recent social and political changes in Native American communities. Field trips, some guest speakers, exercises/project. Course not open to undergraduates.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 835

Museum Exhibition

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 836

Foundational Texts in American Studies

Intensive examination of selected history-making texts in their cultural contexts, from the Revolution through the early 20th century. Among the works to be examined: Tom Paine, "Common Sense;" Ben Franklin, Autobiography; Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America; Henry David Thoreau, Walden; Frederick Douglass, Narrative; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Jane Addams, Twenty Years at Hull-House.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 838

Body Art: Museums, Magazines and Media

For millennia, people throughout the world have marked their bodies with signs of civilization, individuality and social identity. People in every culture modify and decorate their bodies by painting, scarring, tattooing, reshaping or simply wrapping and adorning their bodies. Within the past 25 years or so there has been a proliferation of interest throughout the United States in the practices of tattooing and piercing. The spread of these phenomena from the margins to the mainstream of American culture is the subject of this course. We will focus on the ways in which these practices are “embodied” -- displayed, represented and defined -- in museum exhibitions and the burgeoning number of magazines devoted to these subjects. Through an analysis of specific museum and media depictions of tattoo and piercing we will consider the multiple meanings of these still controversial but ubiquitous visual and (generally) visible cultural statements. We will examine the ways in which body art has been simultaneously used to signal both cultural difference and belonging and the complex reasons why it currently is so widespread and why it is so acutely interesting a practice and subject for representation.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 839

Literary Losers

Why is it that certain writers, very well-known in their own times, later disappear from view or are trivialized as, for example, “The Sweet Singer of Hartford” or “stuff for boys who don’t read”? In this course we will examine a number of case studies of such writers: Lydia Sigourney, Alice Cary, Jack London, Amy Lowell, and, happening right now, Tillie Olsen. We will also consider the extent to which such writers have come back into view. And we will look at one or two contrary cases: writers who were not seen as terribly important in their own times but who later became central to American literary study, like Herman Melville. In other words, we will study the question of “canon formation” in depth.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 840

Cold War Culture in the US

This course examines the relation between politics and culture in the Cold War era. In the United States the Cold War was marked by a virtually unprecedented campaign to marginalize and contain political and sexual nonconformity, a campaign that threatened to transform the nation into a mirror image of its political and cultural other, the Soviet Union. Americans who failed to conform to the emerging political and sexual consensus, such as communists, homosexuals, and career women, were construed as the "enemy within" and relentlessly persecuted. How did postwar American culture both contribute to and undermine this campaign? To answer this question, the course emphasizes the complexity of Cold War culture, focusing in particular on the construction of racical and gendered identity in the postwar period. Texts will include the films Mildred Pierce, I Was a Communist for the FBI, Imitation of Life, Vertigo, and The Misfits; the plays Death of a Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and A Raisin in the Sun; the novels Maud Martha, Invisible Man, On the Road, Another Country, and The Bell Jar. Supplemental readings include essays by James Baldwin, Irving Howe, Ralph Ellison, and Betty Friedan. Undergraduates who wish to enroll in this course must obtain permission of their adviser and the instructor.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 841

Museology Meets the Museum

This course will combine our analysis of key theoretical texts in museum studies with visits, as a group, to museums themselves. We will consider in historical perspective (from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first century) the arguments of museum founders, practitioners and theorists as they address: nation-building and national and cultural identities; the representation of histories -- including histories of human suffering; the status of the visitor; ongoing negotiations between the museum and its intended, excluded, alienated, and combative publics. We will pay particular attention to the evolving notion of museum innovation – the topic of this year’s annual conference of the American Association of Museums.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 843

Spectacle, Social Control, and the Spaces of Display

This course will analyze a range of built spaces, elite ones like museums and vernacular ones like shopping malls and casinos, to see how they reflect and shape our changing ideas of spectacle and display. Beginning with an examination of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and the 1939 World’s Fair, we will examine how buildings exercise authority and shape our behavior. We will consider how displays of culture and commerce encode the agendas of capitalism, both literal and cultural, by looking at the packaging of commodities and of the materials within museums; retail entertainment architecture like those of Las Vegas and Disney and its fusion with the museum; and memorial museums and structures, particularly the Holocaust Museum.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 849

The Culture of Americanism in the 20th Century

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 850

The Social Conscience and American Photography, 1839-1946

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 852

Cultural Studies:Race,Nation,Culture-Remapping Modern American Fiction

This course examines the relationship between modernism and nativism in the United States. In the 1920s nativist fervor provoked a redefinition of American national identity, one grounded in an essentialist understanding of race. At the same time, the myth of the American melting pot was vigorously attacked by cultural progressives who celebrated the racial and ethnic diversity of American society. How did modern American writers contribute to these debates over national identity? What understandings of race and national identity did they help to promote or undermine? Primary readings will include novels by Toomer, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Lewis, Faulkner, Cather, Glasgow, McKay, Larsen, and Hurston. Secondary readings will include essays on race and national identity by Frank, Kallen, Locke, Boas, and Dewey. This course satisfies the requirement of a literary history course.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 853

Agency and Agenda: Commercial American Photography Since 1914

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 856

American Landscape Photography: Aesthetics and Ideology

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 857

Miseums and Electronic Technologies

This class takes an expansive view of the current state of technology in museums, both from the inside (the use of technology to manage and administer daily operations) and from the outside (the use of technology to educate, market to, and develop one’s audiences). By carefully considering both the latest scholarship and a wealth of real-world examples, students will begin to confront the issue of how technology mediates and changes the way in which the public interacts with a museum and its physical objects. Drawing on established concepts of technology in education, the course will offer a critical perspective on specific computer-based technologies in museums, and will also supply students with an attractive set of computing skills – still rare in many museums – that will help them in their professional endeavors.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 861

American Globetrotters: Travel Writing and Tourism

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 862

Religion in American Society

1.00 units, Lecture

PBPL 862

Religion in American Society

1.00 units, Lecture

AMST 864

Witnessing Slavery: Literature of Slavery and Abolition

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 865

American Popular Music: Milestones of the 1920s-1950s.

This course explores the music of the blues singers of 1920s through the jazz singers of the 1950s. Along the way we will consider the blues of Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith; the protest music of Woody Guthrie; the jazz of Billie Holiday; and the new paths forged by Elvis Presley. By concentrating on these performers and stylistic periods, we will be able to focus on the important social and political events that shaped the music. Students will write a final paper that examines the music of one of the musical decades discussed during the course.

1.00 units, Seminar

AMST 890

American Radio Relay League

No Course Description Available.

1.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 894

Connecticut Historical Society Internship

1.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 940

Independent Study

Selected topics in special areas are available by arrangement with the instructor and written approval of the graduate adviser and program director. Contact the Office of Graduate Studies for the special approval form.

1.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 953

Research Project

Under the guidance of a faculty member, graduate students may do an independent research project on a topic in American studies. Written approval of the graduate adviser and the program director are required. Contact the Office of Graduate Studies for the special approval form.

1.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 954

Thesis Part I

(The two course credits are considered pending in Part I of the thesis; they will be awarded with the completion of Part II.)

2.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 955

Thesis Part II

(Continuation of American Studies 954.)

2.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 956

Thesis

(Completion of two course credits in one semester).

2.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 999

American Radio Relay League Internship

The American Radio Relay League (ARRL) founded in 1915 and located at 225 Main Street in Newington, Connecticut offers a unique internship opportunity for graduate credit this summer, with the possibility of continued research in the fall and/or spring terms. The ARRL is a not for profit organization that promotes interest in amateur radio communication, communication in the event of disasters for the furtherance of public welfare, the advancement of the art of radio, the fostering of non-commercial intercommunication by electronic means throughout the world, and the dissemination of technical, educational, and scientific information relating to electronic communication. The internship involves the organization, labeling and cataloguing of a large collection of historically significant radio-related objects, books, photographs, and documents that have been stores in the attic of the ARRL headquarters for many years. On going advice and necessary materials and equipment, such as the use of a laptop or computer, would be provided by the ARRL.

1.00 units, Independent Study

AMST 999

Connecticut Historical Society Internship

1.00 units, Independent Study