Courses

This course will examine race and ethnic relations between Whites, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians in the United States. The goal of this course is for students to understand how the history of race and ethnicity in the U.S. affects opportunity structures in, for example, education, employment, housing, and health. Through this course students will gain a better understanding of how race and ethnicity stratifies the lives of individuals in the U.S.

Full details for AMST 1104 - Race and Ethnicity in the United States: Social Constructs, Real World Consequences

A policy-centered approach to the study of government in the American experience.  Considers the American Founding and how it influenced the structure of government;  how national institutions operate in shaping law and public policy; who has a voice in American politics and why some are more influential than others; and how existing public policies themselves influence social, economic, and political power.  Students will gain an introductory knowledge of the founding principles and structure of American government, political institutions, political processes, political behavior, and public policy.

Full details for AMST 1115 - Introduction to American Government and Politics

This course offers an introduction to the study of Africa, the U.S., the Caribbean and other diasporas.  This course will examine, through a range of disciplines, among them literature, history, politics, philosophy, the themes - including race/racism, the Middle Passage, sexuality, colonialism, and culture - that have dominated Africana Studies since its inception in the late-1960s. We will explore these issues in the attempt to understand how black lives have been shaped, in a historical sense; and, of course, the effects of these issues in the contemporary moment. This course seeks to introduce these themes, to investigate through one or more of the disciplines relevant to the question, and to provide a broad understanding of the themes so as to enable the kind of intellectual reflection critical to Africana Studies.

Full details for AMST 1500 - Introduction to Africana Studies

Focusing on political and social history, this course surveys African-American history from Emancipation to the present. The class examines the post-Reconstruction "Nadir" of black life; the mass black insurgency against structural racism before and after World War II; and the Post-Reform Age that arose in the wake of the dismantling of legal segregation. The course will familiarize students with the basic themes of African-American life and experience and equip them to grasp concepts of political economy; class formation; and the intersection of race, class and gender.

Full details for AMST 1595 - African American History From 1865

This course provides an interdisciplinary introduction to the diverse cultures, histories and contemporary situations of the Indigenous peoples of North America. Students will also be introduced to important themes in the post-1492 engagement between Indigenous and settler populations in North America and will consider the various and complex ways in which that history affected - and continues to affect - American Indian peoples and societies. Course materials draw on the humanities, social sciences, and expressive arts.

Full details for AMST 1600 - Indigenous North America

This course seeks a fuller recounting of U.S. history by remapping what we understand as "America." We will examine traditional themes in the teaching of U.S. history—territorial expansion and empire, migration and nation building, industrialization and labor, war and revolution, and citizenship and transnationalism—but we will examine this "American experience" in a broader hemispheric context and include as actors americanos of Spanish, Mexican, Caribbean, and Central/South American ancestries.

Full details for AMST 1802 - Introduction to Latinos in U.S. History

This course introduces students to the growing field of academic Food Studies, providing historical perspective into the development of American culinary culture. Discussions of American cuisine will lead directly into larger concepts of American identity: is there a uniquely American menu? How have restaurants shaped American patterns of sociability and civil rights? What are the 19th century origins of tipping? Students will actively engage with 19th and early 20th century primary source material, including recipes, advertisements, cookbooks, and nutrition manuals.

Full details for AMST 1886 - Introduction to Food Studies: History and Culture

Punk Culture–comprised of music, fashion, literature, and visual arts–represents a complex critical stance of resistance and refusal that coalesced at a particular historical moment in the mid-1970s, and continues to be invoked, revived, and revised. In this course we will explore punk's origins in New York and London, U.S. punk's regional differences (the New York scene's connection to the art and literary worlds, Southern California's skate and surf culture, etc.), its key movements (hardcore, straight edge, riot grrrl, crust, queercore), its race, class and gender relations, and its ongoing influence on global youth culture. We will read, listen, and examine a variety of visual media to analyze how punk draws from and alters previous aesthetic and political movements. No previous experience studying music is necessary.

Full details for AMST 2006 - Punk Culture: The Aesthetics and Politics of Refusal

This seminar examines America during the overlapping eras of segregation & immigration exclusion.  Beginning with contests over the weaning of freedom during reconstruction and running through the institution of Jim Crow legislation and immigration exclusion, the course ends with an evaluation of mid-20th century movements for civil rights and equality.  Themes include the links between racial and economic oppression, legal and defacto restriction, everyday resistance, and struggles for equality.

Full details for AMST 2042 - Jim Crow and Exclusion Era in America

In recent years, poverty and inequality have become increasingly common topics of public debate, as academics, journalists, and politicians attempt to come to terms with growing income inequality, with the increasing visibility of inter-country differences in wealth and income, and with the persistence of racial, ethnic, and gender stratification. This course introduces students to ongoing social scientific debates about the sources and consequences of inequality, as well as the types of public policy that might appropriately be pursued to reduce (or increase) inequality. These topics will be addressed in related units, some of which include guest lectures by faculty from other universities (funded by the Center for the Study of Inequality). Each unit culminates with a highly spirited class discussion and debate.

Full details for AMST 2225 - Controversies About Inequality

Americans are conflicted about immigration. We honor and celebrate (and commercialize) our immigrant heritage in museums, folklife festivals, parades, pageants, and historical monuments. We also build fences and detention centers, and pass more and more laws to bar access to the United States. Polls tell us that Americans are concerned about the capacity of the United States to absorb so many immigrants from around the world. How often have we heard the laments "Today's immigrants are too different. They don't want to assimilate" or "My grandparents learned English quickly, why can't they?" The assumption is that older generations 'Americanized' quickly but that today's immigrants do not want to assimilate. Did 19th century immigrants really migrate to the United States to "become Americans"? Did they really assimilate quickly? Are today's immigrants really all that different from the immigrants who arrived earlier? Why do these particular narratives have such power and currency? This seminar will explore these issues and help students discern fact from fiction. 

Full details for AMST 2251 - U.S. Immigration Narratives

This course attempts to reconcile the split between art and science through a pluralistic perspective of environmental artistic processes. What is the role of visual culture in sustainable development? Cataclysmic change in the world has forced a turn in environmental art from isolated practices to having a fundamental role in shaping the transformation of our relationships to nature. Informed by Western and Indigenous philosophies, trace how artists enact ecological micro-utopias from earth art to ecological art as a catalyst for social change.

Full details for AMST 2255 - Ecocriticism & Visual Culture

In this class, we will examine how musicians working in such genres as rock, jazz, folk, classical, soul, and experimental music responded and contributed to the major themes of the 1960s in the US: the counterculture, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, women's liberation, and the space race. We will examine written texts, recordings, and films from the period. The ability to read music is not required.

Full details for AMST 2260 - Music of the 1960s

This introductory course surveys archaeology's contributions to the study of American Indian cultural diversity and change in North America north of Mexico. Lectures and readings will examine topics ranging from the debate over when the continent was first inhabited to present-day conflicts between Native Americans and archaeologists over excavation and the interpretation of the past. We will review important archaeological sites such as Chaco Canyon, Cahokia, Lamoka Lake, and the Little Bighorn battlefield. A principal focus will be on major transformations in lifeways such as the adoption of agriculture, the development of political-economic hierarchies, and the disruptions that accompanied the arrival of Europeans to the continent.

Full details for AMST 2350 - Archaeology of North American Indians

This seminar examines some of the political and cultural visions of Africa and Africans held by African-American intellectuals and activists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Emphasis is placed on the philosophies of black nationalism, Pan Africanism and anticolonialism and the themes of emigration, expatriation, repatriation and exile. Awareness of Africa and attitudes toward the continent and its peoples have profoundly shaped African-American identity, culture and political consciousness. Notions of a linked fate between Africans and black Americans have long influenced black life and liberation struggles within the U.S. The motives, purposes and outlooks of African-American theorists who have claimed political, cultural, or spiritual connection to Africa and Africans have varied widely, though they have always powerfully reflected black experiences in America and in the West. The complexity and dynamism of those views belie simplistic assumptions about essential or "natural" relationships, and invite critical contemplation of the myriad roles that Africa has played in the African-American mind."

Full details for AMST 2354 - African American Visions of Africa

The importance of sports to American society and popular culture cannot be denied, and this seminar will study sports films' vital significance in representing the intersection of sports, history, and social identities.  This seminar explores how the role of competition between individuals and teams in sports films relate to the competing discourses on race, gender, class, and sexuality in society at large. Additionally, we will examine how social issues are understood in sporting terms and concepts, such as: the hero and the underdog; urban and rural; natural talent versus hard work; and the individual versus team identity.

Full details for AMST 2505 - Playing out Difference: History and Identity in Sports Film

This course explores the social, cultural and communal lives of black women in North America, beginning with the transatlantic slave trade, and ending in 1900. Topics include Northern and Southern enslavement, first freedoms in the North, Southern emancipation, color consciousness, gener-cross racially and issues of class.

Full details for AMST 2511 - Black Women to 1900

An introductory history of Chinese, Japanese, Asian Indians, Filipinos, and Koreans in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1990s. Major themes include racism and resistance, labor migration, community formation, imperialism, and struggles for equality.

Full details for AMST 2640 - Introduction to Asian American History

As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, this course provides students with a comprehensive understanding of the origins, character, and results of the American Revolution, as well as engaging the enduring significance of its memory in contemporary American life - why do we choose to remember the American Revolution in ways that occlude its divisive and bloody events? This course explores many of the key themes of this critical period of American history: the rise of colonial opposition to Great Britain, the nature of the Revolutionary Wars, and the domestic "republican experiment" that followed the Treaty of Paris in 1783. The course emphasizes student interpretations with an eye toward analyzing the comparative experiences of women and men, "everyday people" and famous leaders, Native Americans, African-Americans, and those who opposed the Revolution.

Full details for AMST 2665 - The American Revolutionary Era

This lecture course explores the dramatic cultural, economic, and social upheavals in U.S. society during the 1960s and 1970s. It will primarily focus on the dynamic interactions between formal politics, the state, the economy, and the era's mass movements on the right and the left. Among other things, we will explore the history and legacy of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, the Vietnam War, deindustrialization, "white flight," the War on Poverty, the War on Crime, Watergate, the "rise of the right," and women's changing roles.

Full details for AMST 2682 - The United States in the 1960s and 1970s

This course is a blending of the Sociology of Education and Public Policy. Front and center in this course is the question of why consistent differential educational and economic outcomes exists in American society. We explore the broad sociological functions of schooling (socialization, sorting, caretaking, training) as well as local, state, and federal policies and court decisions.

Full details for AMST 2710 - America's Promise: Social and Political Context of American Education

Representation is basic to anthropology. In the process of translating societies and cultures, anthropologists produce authoritative accounts about other people, their lives, and their communities. We will here examine, from a critical perspective, the production of representations on Latino culture[s] in anthropological texts. Issues to be explored include the relation between the ethnographer and the people s/he is studying, the contexts in which ethnographic texts are produced, the ways these texts may contribute to the position that different cultural groups have within the United States, and the implications emanating from these processes.

Full details for AMST 2721 - Anthropological Representations: Ethnographies on Latino Culture

Designed for the general student population, this course specifically appeals to students traveling abroad, or who in the future will work with diverse communities (for example, students with interests in medicine, law, labor, government, business, the hospitality industry, or in the fields of gender, queer, or ethnic studies). Serving as an introduction to the critical inquiries and scholarly fields of the English department,   the course uses literature and popular culture, alongside literary, social, and cultural theory to consider how people from different cultures encounter and experience each other. Exploring travel and tourism from multiple perspectives including dark, disaster, and eco- tourisms, the course examines a history of racial representation, dating to the colonial era and that resonates in twenty-first century depictions of race, class, gender, and other markers of "difference."

Full details for AMST 2770 - Representing Racial Encounters/Encountering Racial Representations

Poverty is a phenomenon of enduring importance with significant implications for democratic governance. This course explores contemporary poverty in America, with a particular emphasis on its political causes and consequences. What is the proper role of government in addressing poverty? Under what conditions are the poor able to gain power despite their relative lack of privilege? What is the relationship between race and poverty? How do notions of "culture" shape conceptualizations of the poor? We will tackle these questions by drawing on insights from seminal texts in political science and sociology, supplemented with journalistic accounts of poverty.

Full details for AMST 3012 - The Politics of Poverty in the U.S.

This course examines both mainstream representations of and independent media made by, for, and about Asians and Asian Americans throughout U.S. cultural history. In this course, we will analyze popular cultural genres & forms such as: documentary & narrative films, musical theatre & live performance revues, television, zines & blogs, YouTube/online performances, karaoke & cover performances, stand-up comedy, and popular music. Employing theories of cultural studies, media studies, and performance studies, we will discuss the cultural, discursive, and political impact of these various popular cultural forms and representations from the turn of the 20th century to the present.

Full details for AMST 3025 - Asian Americans & Popular Culture

This course focuses on political campaigns, a central feature of American democracy. We will examine how they work and the conditions under which they affect citizens' decisions. The course looks at campaign strategies and attributes of candidates, as well as how and whether they affect key outcomes such as the decision to turn out, who to vote for, and whether to spend money and volunteer time helping favored candidates win.

Full details for AMST 3082 - American Political Campaigns

This course will explore and seek explanations for the performance of the 20-21st century presidency, focusing on its institutional and political development, recruitment process (nominations and elections), relationships to social groups, economic forces, and "political time."  We will also analyze the parameters of foreign & domestic policy making.

Full details for AMST 3161 - The American Presidency

Surveys problems in American economic history from the first settlements to early industrialization.

Full details for AMST 3230 - American Economic History I

This course investigates the United States Supreme Court and its role in politics and government. It traces the development of constitutional doctrine, the growth of the Court's institutional power, and the Court's interaction with Congress, the president, and society. Discussed are major constitutional law decisions, their political contexts, and the social and behavioral factors that affect judges, justices, and federal court jurisprudence.

Full details for AMST 3281 - Constitutional Politics: The U.S. Supreme Court

Based on indigenous and place-based "ways of knowing," this course (1) presents a theoretical and humanistic framework from which to understand generation of ecological knowledge; (2) examines processes by which to engage indigenous and place-based knowledge of natural resources, the nonhuman environment, and human-environment interactions; and (3) reflects upon the relevance of this knowledge to climatic change, resource extraction, food sovereignty, medicinal plant biodiversity, and issues of sustainability and conservation.  The fundamental premise of this course is that human beings are embedded in their ecological systems.

Full details for AMST 3330 - Ways of Knowing: Indigenous and Place-Based Ecological Knowledge

This is a seminar course on urban inequality in the United States.  The first half of the semester will be dedicated to understanding the political, historical, and social determinants of inequality in America's cities. Politically and socially, cities face unique challenges. Municipalities lack much formal authority to resolve issues that arise within their borders, and their populations are highly heterogeneous in terms of ethnicity, race, and social class. In the second half of the course, we will investigate a number of contemporary facets of urban inequality in-depth, such as residential segregation, urban schooling, immigration, and suburban sprawl.

Full details for AMST 3380 - Urban Inequality

This course considers issues, approaches, and complexities in the contemporary television landscape. As television has changed drastically over the past fifteen years, this course provides students with a deeper understanding of the changes in narratives, technologies, forms, and platforms that structure/restructure the televisual world. Students will grapple with how "new media" forms such as web-series and on-demand internet streaming services have changed primetime television. We will balance our look at television shows with nuanced readings about the televisual media industry. By watching, analyzing, and critiquing the powerful medium of television, students will situate their understanding within a broader consideration of the medium's regulation, production, distribution, and reception in the network and post-network era.

Full details for AMST 3463 - Contemporary Television

This course explores Caribbean literary, sonic, and visual cultures in New York City from the late 19th century to the present, and examines the ways in which Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Dominican diasporic artists experience New York, whether as tourists, residents, or exiles.  We will read about and visit places like Coney Island, Wall Street, Chinatown, Harlem, the Bronx, the Village, and Washington Heights.  Through the work of José Martí, Julia de Burgos, Manuel Ramos Otero, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Josefina Báez, and others, we will focus on such topics as immigration, transnationalism, imperialism, modernity, Latinx Caribbean influences on Bronx hip hop, gender, race, and sexuality.  Course readings and discussions in Spanish, English, and Spanglish.  Includes a 2-day trip to New York City in Week 3.

Full details for AMST 3475 - Nueva York: Caribbean Urbanisms

Blaxploitation films of the 1970s are remembered for their gigantic Afros, enormous guns, slammin' soundtracks, sex, drugs, nudity, and violence. Never before or since have so many African American performers been featured in starring roles. Macho male images were projected alongside strong, yet sexually submissive female ones. But how did these images affect the roles that black men and women played on and off the screen and the portrayal of the black body in contemporary society? This interdisciplinary course explores the range of ideas and methods used by critical thinkers in addressing the body in art, film, photography and the media. We will consider how the display of the black body affects how we see and interpret the world by examining the construction of beauty, fashion, hairstyles and gendered images as well as sexuality, violence, race, and hip-hop culture.

Full details for AMST 3515 - Blaxploitation Film and Photography

The Western nation-state has failed to solve the two most pressing, indeed catastrophic, global problems: poverty and climate change. This failure is due to the inability of national policy to imagine a world beyond a boundary drawn by the formative capitalist ideas of property, production, and profit. The course will begin by discussing the historical origin and continuing force of these ideas while raising questions about their limits. Then it will look at a range of alternative ideas about how the world should work if we want to keep it socially, economically, and ecologically in balance. The alternatives we will query come from a range of Indigenous writers of fiction, poetry, and theory, who locate themselves in Native American (north and south), Aboriginal, and Maori communities.

Full details for AMST 3562 - Thinking from a Different Place: Indigenous Philosophies

Powerful voices emerged in the United States' first hundred years that continue to reverberate and to shape the ways in which we understand ourselves as Americans.  We will give special attention in this course to the groundbreaking poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and to the visionary prose of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.  We'll consider the central place of slavery, abolitionism and the Civil War in the development of American ideals of freedom, selfhood, and political resistance, as reflected in writings by Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Margaret Fuller among others.  And we will explore the wide variety of verse produced by popular poets like William Cullen Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Full details for AMST 3650 - Envisioning America: Nineteenth-Century US Poetry and Prose

In the twentieth century, American fiction had an outsize impact on world literature as well as popular culture in the United States. This course will explore particularly important moments in its development, from the emergence of avant-garde modernism and the persistence of naturalism to the diversification of fictional aims and methods that distinguished American literature from most others through much of the century.  Attention will also be given to relationship between popular culture and literature. We will read novels as well as short stories. Authors will include Toomer, Hemingway, Faulkner, Hurston, Larsen, O'Connor, Welty, Bellow, Ellison, Vonnegut, Silko, and Morrison.

Full details for AMST 3670 - Modern American Fiction

Review of architecture, building, and responses to the landscape from the prehistoric period to the Civil War. Architecture and building as social and collaborative arts are emphasized and thus the contributions of artisans, clients, and users as well as professional architects and builders are examined. The architectural expressions of Native Americans, African Americans, women, and others are treated in addition to those of European colonists and settlers.

Full details for AMST 3810 - American Architecture and Building I

This course addresses pertinent issues relative to the subject of regional development and globalization. Topics vary each semester.

Full details for AMST 3854 - Special Topics in Regional Development and Globalization

Affords opportunities for students to carry out independent research under appropriate supervision. Each student is expected to review pertinent literature, prepare a project outline, conduct the research, and prepare a report. Topic and credit hours TBD as arranged between faculty and student.

Full details for AMST 3980 - Independent Research

Individualized readings for junior and senior students. Topics, requirements, and credit hours will be determined in consultation between the student and the supervising faculty member.

Full details for AMST 3990 - Readings in American Studies

American conservative thought rests on assumptions that are strikingly different from those made by mainstream American liberals.  However, conservative thinkers are themselves committed to principles that are both quite varied and sometimes contradictory.  This course examines the assumptions upon which rest the libertarian, market/economic, and cultural/traditional strains of American conservatism and asks whether the tensions between them weaken or strengthen conservative thought as an alternative to mainstream liberalism.

Full details for AMST 4021 - American Conservative Thought

This course focuses on the American South in the nineteenth century as it made the transition from Reconstruction to new forms of social organization and patterns of race relations. Reconstruction will be considered from a sociopolitical perspective, concentrating on the experiences of the freed people. The New South emphasis will include topics on labor relations, economic and political changes, new cultural alliances, the rise of agrarianism, and legalization of Jim Crow.

Full details for AMST 4039 - Reconstruction and the New South

Computers and digital technologies including robotics, machine learning, artificial intelligence (AI), internet-enabled platforms, and other "high-tech" drivers of automation have revolutionized the nature and organization of work in the U.S., with material implications for workers and their families, among others.  This upper-level seminar begins with a rhetorical inquiry into whether and when the technological change engendered by digitization and the so-called "Information Technology (IT) Revolution" benefits workers.  We then consider the broader impact of recent technological advances on manufacturing and fabrication, low- and semi-skilled service work, i.e., restaurant servers and bus drivers, and even on expert and professional work like that to which most of you presumably aspire.  Among the central themes is the notion that technology does not unilaterally act upon workers, their employers, or society-at-large.  Rather, workers, managers, customers, institutions, and policymakers shape which advances take hold and which do not, the ways that these technologies are deployed in the workplace, and the ways that society can actively mitigate the costs to technological advancement while harnessing its benefits.

Full details for AMST 4066 - Technological Change at Work

It is almost a truism that the United States is the world's most litigious society. As a polity founded on an almost sacralized constitutional foundation, it is no surprise that law and the legal system are quite central to life, its conceptions, and its manifestations, as understood and led by most inhabitants of the country. This, in turn, engenders a faith in law and its attendant justice on the part of Americans. This faith encompasses certain attitudes on the part of different segments of the American populace towards legal discourse, the operation of the legal system, the justice promised by law, and so forth. In this class, we shall be exploring these diverse issues from the standpoint of Critical Race Theory. We seek to establish what CRT is and its genesis; what it does and how it does what it does, and what justification we might have or can provide for studying it. At the end of the class, participants should have a fairly robust idea of CRT, its fundamental claims, its applicability, and what insights it provides regarding the nature, function, and aims of law and the legal system in the United States of America.

Full details for AMST 4104 - Critical Race Theory: What Is It? What Does It Do? Why Should It Matter?

This advanced seminar traces transformations in citizenship and the franchise throughout U.S. history. Through readings, frequent short writings, discussion, and a final paper, the class examines the struggles over who can claim full citizenship and legitimate voice in the political community. It examines the divergent, often clashing, visions of legitimate democratic rule, focusing particularly on the debates over who should vote and on what terms.  We examine the dynamics that have shaped the boundaries of citizenship and hierarchies within it, paying attention to changes in the civic status of Native Americans, property-less white men, paupers, women, African Americans, various immigrant groups, residents of U.S. colonies, felons, and people with intellectual disabilities. A significant portion of the class focuses on debates about U.S. democracy in the decades after the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Full details for AMST 4203 - Contesting Votes: Democracy and Citizenship Throughout U.S. History

This seminar uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models.  We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples. 

Full details for AMST 4272 - Archaeology of Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement

Hip hop has been dependent on women's contributions, yet female artists have had to work hard to contest their marginalization and objectification in the music and culture. Some of the most heated debates surrounding feminism, identity politics, and Black women are framed within the broad contours of hip hop. This course will explore how women are portrayed in hip hop music and culture, addressing women both as consumers and producers. We will draw on texts that analyze misogyny in hip hop music and music videos, while also looking at how both mainstream and peripheral female artists use hip hop to affirm their sexual power, articulate Black feminism, and create spaces for their artistic expression. We will utilize Black feminist theory, performance studies, and queer of color critique to complicate the ways in which women, gender, and sexuality are represented in hip hop music. While our analyses will center on music and on the United States, we will also consider art, fashion, and dance within Black, Latina, and Caribbean interactions with hip hop. We will investigate how youth construct gender and ethnic identities as they negotiate notions of African Diasporic belonging vis-à-vis hip hop. We will employ ethnographic, historical, sociological, literary, and interdisciplinary texts to explore these topics.

Full details for AMST 4402 - Women in Hip Hop

This seminar will investigate the narrative uses of history and memory in US fiction, focusing particularly on the impact of gender on these representations. How do US writers use history in their fiction, and to what ends? What are the effects on drawing on received historical narratives and what are the effects of constructing one's own history to fill a void in the received historical narrative? What's the difference between history and fiction, anyway? We will start from such questions in order to explore the extent to which history—personal or public—is produced by memory and reshaped by fiction. Authors under consideration may include: Julia Alvarez, Alison Bechdel, Pat Barker, Joy Kogawa, Toni Morrison, Monique Truong, and August Wilson.

Full details for AMST 4521 - Gender, Memory, and History in Twentieth Century Fiction

The movement of things like narcotics and of people like laborers has been a profoundly compelling subject for artists of every form. This course will study television series such as Weeds and The Wire as well as a number of recent films, hip-hop hits, narco-corridos, novels, legal cases, and visual art in which the subject of traffic and trafficking play an important role. We will work across centuries to consider how various forms of trafficking and stories of captivity and treasure hunting help tell the modern tale of nation, race, sex, and gender. Artists and authors may include Toni Morrison, Junot Diaz, Faith Ringgold, Alan Ginsburg, Ernesto Quiñonez, Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton, Frederik Douglass, and Francisco Goldman.

Full details for AMST 4565 - Traffic: Drugs, Bodies, Books

This seminar surveys contemporary political theories of disobedience and resistance. We will examine liberal, republican, and radical perspectives on the logic of political protest, its functions, justifications, and limits, as well as how transformations in law, economy, and technology are redefining dissent in the twenty-first century. Topics to be discussed will include the terms of political obligation, the relationship between law-breaking and law-making, conceptions of justice, resistance and popular sovereignty, the politics of civility, violence and self-defense, public space and privatization, the digitalization of protest, resistance in non-democratic regimes, as well as deviance and refusal as modes of dissent.

Full details for AMST 4626 - Disobedience, Resistance, Refusal

How should anti-racist people respond to the new racialized white identities that have emerged recently in Europe and the United States?  What alternative conceptions of whiteness are available? How can we form cross-racial progressive coalitions? How should we understand the nature of our social identities and what they make possible?  This course is a wide-ranging introduction to these questions with readings drawn from social and cultural theory, as well as literature and film. Films include Get Out and I Am Not Your Negro, as well as such Hollywood classics as Imitation of Life. Texts by such writers as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Danzy Senna and Dorothy Allison, as well as relevant anthropological and social-theoretical work (Strangers in Their Own Land, Whiteness of a Different Color) and memoirs of anti-racist activists.  A central text will be the recent book The Future of Whiteness by the Latina feminist scholar Linda Martin Alcoff.

Full details for AMST 4733 - The Future of Whiteness

To graduate with honors, AMST majors must complete a senior thesis under the supervision of an AMST faculty member and defend that thesis orally before a committee. Students interested in the honors program should consult the AMST director during the junior year and submit an honors application by May 1 of the junior year.

Full details for AMST 4993 - Honors Essay Tutorial I

Examines the goals, roles, inputs, and outcomes of schooling in American society, and the policy environment in which schools operate. Analyzes controversies and tensions (e.g., equity, market forces, state control) surrounding public education at local, state, and federal levels. Includes current and historical, urban, and rural issues and problems.

Full details for AMST 5710 - America's Promise: Social and Political Context of American Education

This seminar uses archaeology to examine engagements between settlers and indigenous peoples throughout world history. Archaeology provides a perspective on settler-indigenous encounters that both supplements and challenges conventional models.  We will assess the strengths and weaknesses of various theories of cultural engagement, examine methodologies, and explore a series of archaeological case studies, using examples from both the ancient world and the European expansion over the past 600 years. The seminar provides a comparative perspective on indigenous-colonial relationships, in particular exploring the hard-fought spaces of relative autonomy created and sustained by indigenous peoples. 

Full details for AMST 6272 - Archaeology of Colonialism and Cultural Entanglement

This course takes a theoretical (what are some of the key understandings of capitalism?), methodological (how should we study it?), and case study approach to the history of capitalism in the United States and beyond. The History of Capitalism has become a major research field in the last decade and in this course we will examine the new historiography, as well as the older scholarship (Polanyi, Braudel, and other works) on which it is built.  While the main focus will be on the history of the United States, we will examine this development comparatively and in the context of the rich literature in other parts of the world. We will examine the strengths and weaknesses of the history of capitalism approach to analyzing and understanding American history. Along the way we will examine how it relates to other topics such as the history of slavery and work, consumerism and identity, neoliberalism and political economy, and intellectual and cultural history.  Students in other departments and history graduate students who are not specialists in US history are encouraged to take this course.

Full details for AMST 6531 - The History of Capitalism: The US Case in Perspective

This seminar surveys contemporary political theories of disobedience and resistance. We will examine liberal, republican, and radical perspectives on the logic of political protest, its functions, justifications, and limits, as well as how transformations in law, economy, and technology are redefining dissent in the twenty-first century. Topics to be discussed will include the terms of political obligation, the relationship between law-breaking and law-making, conceptions of justice, resistance and popular sovereignty, the politics of civility, violence and self-defense, public space and privatization, the digitalization of protest, resistance in non-democratic regimes, as well as deviance and refusal as modes of dissent. 

Full details for AMST 6627 - Disobedience, Resistance, Refusal

How should anti-racist people respond to the new racialized white identities that have emerged recently in Europe and the United States?  What alternative conceptions of whiteness are available? How can we form cross-racial progressive coalitions? How should we understand the nature of our social identities and what they make possible?  This course is a wide-ranging introduction to these questions with readings drawn from social and cultural theory, as well as literature and film. Films include Get Out and I Am Not Your Negro, as well as such Hollywood classics as Imitation of Life. Texts by such writers as James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Danzy Senna and Dorothy Allison, as well as relevant anthropological and social-theoretical work (Strangers in Their Own Land, Whiteness of a Different Color) and memoirs of anti-racist activists.  A central text will be the recent book The Future of Whiteness by the Latina feminist scholar Linda Martin Alcoff.

Full details for AMST 6733 - The Future of Whiteness