This course examines the relationship between Latinx and Indigenous communities and the environment from a sociocultural, anthropological and historical perspective.Texts encompass the fields of history, anthropology, sociology, environmental studies, and often require thinking and analysis that questions understandings of land, development, race, science, health, and wellness on a state, local, and international level.

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.

This class explores the political connections between race, gender, and music. The course considers questions of representation, the practice and politics of listening, the political and economic modes of production, and racial formation. In order to explore these topics, this version of the course is broken into three thematic sections: Sound, Score, and Structure. The course is taught intersectionally, meaning we will deal with issues of race, gender, sexuality, labor, and national identity. 

In the 1930s, many people employed in the German film industry whose lives were threatened by Nazism took refuge in Hollywood. This course examines the contributions exiled directors, writers, actors, and others made in genres ranging from comedy and melodrama to film noir. In addition to indicting fascism and reflecting on the trauma of forced migration these films often turned a critical eye on the U.S..

This course offers a fast-paced history of popular music in the United States since 1970.  Instead of following a chronological time-line of a half a century, the course is organized around the sounds and stories of seven major genres: rock, R&B, country, punk, hip hop, dance music, and pop.  We will pay particular attention to the shifting meanings of these genres over time, to how they change, collude, collide, and create continuity in both sound and community.  

Topics vary according to instructor.

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.

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.

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.