This course introduces students to American Studies, the interdisciplinary study of US culture. Students will be exposed to the three main categories of American Studies methods, historical analysis, close analysis, and fieldwork and to a broad variety of cultural forms, including films, photographs, music, sermons, journalism, fiction, speeches, court decisions, government documents, and web-based materials including social media sites.

This course treats a range of contemporary English language literatures about girlhood. Our comparative analyses of texts will pay particular attention to their play with genre and their use of literary devices -- e.g., structure, voice, point of view, dialogue, temporality, language ¿ to render narratives about girlhood in contexts of (im)migration, loss, displacement, violence, revolution, war, and trauma.

New Course in subject of American Studies.

This seminar course will introduce majors to various theories and methods for the practice of American Studies. The three goals of the seminars are (1) to make students aware of their own interpretive practices; (2) to equip them with information and conceptual tools they will need for advanced work in American Studies; and (3) to provide them with comparative approaches to the study of various aspects of the United States. Prerequisites: American Studies Major

This course studies modern racial protest expressed through African American narrative art from the 1930s to 1980s, focusing on Civil Rights, Black Power, Black Panthers, womanism, black gay/lesbian liberation movements, and black postmodernism. We begin our study with the most famous protest novel, Richard Wright's Native Son. Then we examine other narratives including works by Angelo Herndon, Ann Petry, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr.

AMST 3300 offers students close study of significant texts and other cultural forms representing the perspective and contributions of the main Latinx populations in the United States--including those of Puerto Rican, Chicano, Dominican, Central American and Cuban American origin--in historical context and within a theoretical, analytical framework.

This course offers a survey of Latinx literature and film from a hemispheric perspective. Engaging texts from colonial times to the present day, we explore how the histories of the US, Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia come together to produce novels, poems, essays and films that are now referred to as distinctly Latinx.

This course analyzes 'point-of-view' journalism as a controversial but credible alternative to the dominant model of 'objectivity' in the U.S. news media. It will survey point-of-view journalists from Benjamin Franklin to the modern blog.

New Course in the subject of American Studies

Asian Americans and Popular Culture surveys a history of Asian American racialization, experiences, and subject formation in the United States through film, comics, TV, theatre, music, public protest, sports, and social media. Students will learn how to analyze and develop creative work to respond to and re/frame debates on the politics of representation, exoticization, cultural appropriation, transnationalism, hybridity, and US immigration laws.

In the US, Vietnam signifies not a country but a lasting syndrome that haunts American politics and society, from foreign policy to popular culture. But what of the millions of Southeast Asian refugees the War created? What are the lasting legacies of the Vietnam War for Southeast Asian diasporic communities? We will examine literature and film (fictional and documentary) made by and about Americans, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians, and Hmong.

This class examines the history of voluntary, coerced, and forced migration in the U.S., tracing the paths of migrating groups and their impact on urban, suburban, and rural landscapes. We'll dig for cultural clues to changing attitudes about migration over time. Photographs, videos, books, movies, government records, poems, podcasts, paintings, comic strips, museums, manifestos: you name it, we'll analyze it for this class.

This seminar is intended to focus study, research, and discussion on a single period, topic, or issue, such as the Great Awakening, the Civil War, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, or the 1960s. Topics vary.

New Course in the subject of American Studies.

An elective course for students in the Asian Pacific American Studies minor. Students will work with an APAS core faculty member to support the student's own research. Topics vary, and must be approved by the APAS Director. 

An elective course for American Studies majors who have completed AMST 3001-3002. Students will work with an American Studies faculty member to support the student's own research. Topics vary, and must be approved by the Program Director. Prerequisite: AMST 3001, 3002, Instructor Consent.

The course is run as a workshop, a space for students to learn oral history methodologies in a hands-on manner. In partnership with local/regional organizations, students will learn to conduct interviews and related research, which may include completing historical surveys, doing genealogical work, & completing archival or database research. Students will learn new skills while helping expand historical archives and knowledge of regional history.

New Course in the subject of American Studies.