This course examines the history of slavery and its legacy at UVA and in the central Virginia region. The course aims to recover the experiences of enslaved individuals and their roles in building and maintaining the university, and to contextualize those experiences within Southern history.

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.

This course examines foodways (the ideas, practices, and material realities surrounding food) through the interdisciplinary lens of American Studies. Focusing on borderlands as sites of cultural exchange, conflict, and creativity, we will explore how food shapes and is shaped by histories of migration, empire, race, class, gender, and labor.

Topics vary according to instructor. The goal of the course is to introduce students to interdisciplinary work in American Studies by juxtaposing works across disciplinary boundaries and from different methodological perspectives.

New Course in subject of American Studies.

What does "spiritual but not religious" mean, and why has it become such a pervasive self-description in contemporary America? This interdisciplinary course surveys spirituality in America, with a particular eye for the relationship between spirituality and formal religion, on the one hand, and secular modes of understanding the self, such as psychology, on the other.

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

An interdisciplinary introduction to the culture and history of Asians and Pacific Islanders in America. Examines ethnic communities such as Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Asian Indian, and Native Hawaiian, through themes such as immigration, labor, cultural production, war, assimilation, and politics. Texts are drawn from genres such as legal cases, short fiction, musicals, documentaries, visual art, and drama.

This course explores the critical and the constructive dimensions of African American political thought from slavery to the present. We will assess the claims that black Americans have made upon the polity, how they have defined themselves, and how they have sought to redefine key terms of political life such as citizenship, equality, freedom, and power.