Topics vary according to instructor.

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.

Students will learn to use digital mapping and narratives as tools of reparative history. The class will partner with community organizations documenting Black history in Virginia. Students will do research in historical archives and public records; interview community members; and participate in field work. Readings will address ethical aspects of doing community history and explore approaches to the history of slavery and Reconstruction.

This course explores the origins and impacts of American hip-hop as a cultural form in the last forty years, and maps the ways that a local subculture born of an urban underclass has risen to become arguably the dominant form of 21st-century global popular culture. While primarily focused on music, we will also explore how forms such as dance, visual art, film, and literature have influenced and been influenced by hip-hop style and culture.

Iconic American sites such as Monticello, Walden Pond, and our network of national parks have inspired generations of Americans. But displacement is just as much a part of our national identity. In this class we will analyze fiction, journalism, film, paintings, photographs and other elements of visual culture that document the stories of Indigenous dispossession, housing discrimination, Japanese internment, redlining, gentrification, and homelessness. 

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.

In this course we will read texts by Latinx writers from Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Dominican Republic. We will explore how their works speak to issues of race, colonialism and imperialism based on their individual and shared histories. We will discuss their different political histories and migration experiences and how these in turn impact their literary and artistic productions in the US.

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.