This course is an introduction to interdisciplinary considerations of American culture. Specific topics may change from year to year and may include questions of national consensus versus native, immigrant and racial subcultures and countercultures; industrialization and the struggles over labor; the rise of leisure; the transformation of (the frequently gendered) public and private spheres; the relationship between politics and culture; the development and distinctions among consumer culture, mass culture and popular culture. These themes will be examined through a variety of media, such as literature, historical writing, music, art, film, architecture, etc. The course will also give attention to the many methods through which scholars have, over time, developed the discipline of American Studies.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 1101 - Introduction to American Studies

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.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

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

Full details for AMST 1332 - (Intro) To Black Music: Listening, Sounding, and Studying Black Radical Possibility

At the inception of this department at Cornell University in 1969, the Africana Studies and Research Center became the birthplace of the field "Africana studies." Africana studies emphasizes comparative and interdisciplinary studies of Africa, the U.S., the Caribbean and other diasporas. In this course, we will look at the diverse contours of the discipline. We will explore contexts ranging from modernity and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and plantation complex in the New World to processes of decolonization and globalization in the contemporary digital age. 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 an 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, investigate through one or more of the disciplines relevant to the question, and provide a broad understanding of the themes so as to enable the kind of intellectual reflection critical to Africana Studies.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SSC-AS) (CA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for AMST 1500 - Introduction to Africana Studies

Is war a "way of life" for Americans, as some historians have suggested? In recent years, many Americans have come to think about war as something that happens "over there", away from our own shores, but war – the act of fighting itself, as well as the political, economic and social demands of mobilisation, and the foreign and domestic consequences of military violence – has shaped the United States in countless ways. This course explores both the shadow of war – the seen and unseen effects it has on people and societies – and the substance – the wars themselves – to explore America's relationships with the rest of the world, from the revolutionary period to the present day. At the same time, we we'll also examine non-military and quasi-military encounters between Americans and peoples abroad, including tourism, romantic entanglements, business relationships, and religious proselytising, asking "what is war?", and even whether the United States has ever been at peace. Through this multi-layered focus we will discover some of the many ways in which Americans have thought about, engaged with, impacted, and been impacted by, the world beyond the country's borders, and the extent to which war and violence have played a prominent role in those interactions.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for AMST 1576 - War in U.S. History: From the Frontier to the Wars on Terror

This course will explore the relationship between sports and politics over the course of American history since the 19th century.  Sports and politics have come together surprisingly frequently in the last two centuries and this course will take a "case study" method to examine particular episodes of politicized sports.  In the course of our investigations, we will the following questions: How do we define politics?  How have sports acted as a place for subversion and resistance? Conversely, how have sports reflected the power structure? No background knowledge is necessary.   Course materials will include memoirs, articles, and a variety of visual sources, including film and photography.   Course requirements will include a research paper.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for AMST 1585 - Sports and Politics in American History

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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for AMST 1600 - Indigenous North America

To what extent does the ideal of the US as a vanguard for democracy and freedom in the world match up with other aspects—military, economic, and humanitarian—of US foreign policy? This same question about the degree to which discourses and practices correspond might be asked of other countries, like the Soviet Union, China, and Britain, but this course examines the ways in which US foreign policy has been deployed over the course of the twentieth century and the ways those policies have been perceived and received by people living in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Particular case studies will be addressed stemming from the faculty's specializations (for example, Vietnam, Cambodia, Guatemala, and Chile) and the emphasis is on the role of the United States in Latin America and Southeast Asia. Prominent themes will include forms of subversion, from military muscle to economic coercion, and how and why they have changed over time; meanings of liberty, democracy, freedom, and sovereignty in different places and times; popular responses to policies and actions of foreign administrations; the relationships between sovereign states and transnational corporations; the uses and abuses of History in the formulation and justification of policy initiatives and in local responses to them; and the complexities involved in discerning internal and external forces in an increasingly transnational world.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for AMST 1951 - Foreign Policy as Subversion

This seminar will explore Asian American history through the methodology of oral history. Students will read Asian American historical scholarship that has relied on oral history methods, but they will also engage with theoretical and methodological work around the use of oral sources. Students will develop, research, and present oral history projects.  Themes include power and knowledge production, the role of oral history in documenting the Asian American past, and local and family histories as avenues through which to explore oral history methods.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2043 - Asian American Oral History

Some of the best novels of the last 75 years were written by people who were students or professors at Cornell. Reading a selection of these great Cornell novels, we will also be tracing the history and development of post-WWII American fiction. Readings will include classic works by V. Nabokov, K. Vonnegut, J. Russ, T. Morrison, T. Pynchon, and W. Gass, as well as several more recent (some very recent) works by your fellow Cornellians. Perhaps in a few years your work will be on the list.

Full details for AMST 2060 - The Great American Cornell Novel

"Social Problems in the U.S." teaches students how to think like a social scientist when encountering claims about major contemporary issues. Through readings and assignments, students develop an analytical toolkit for evaluating the scope, causes, consequences, and proposed solutions to a wide range of complicated social problems, such as: childhood poverty, racial segregation and discrimination, job insecurity, family instability, discrimination by sexual identity, unequal pay for women's work, gender imbalances in family life, health disparities, food insecurity, drug abuse, and educational inequality. Rather than cover all of these (and other) social problems in depth, the course emphasizes a conceptual framework that can be applied broadly. The semester culminates with a written proposal examining a social problem and developing an approach to address it with public policy.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2070 - Social Problems in the United States

Full details for AMST 2105 - The American Musical

This course is an introduction to Latina/o Studies, an interdisciplinary field of knowledge production that focuses on historical, sociopolitical, cultural, and economic experiences of Latinx peoples in the United States—both as a nation and as a geopolitical location in a larger world. We will survey and analyze the arts, histories, cultures, politics, and sociological landscapes of Puerto Ricans, Dominican Americans, Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, Central Americans, as well as other Latinx peoples who have made communities within the United States for centuries, and who are part of Latinx diasporas. Intersections of U.S. Latinx identities are also explored in this course by asking questions related to the fields housed within Latina/o Studies: How is Latina/o/x identity defined and performed? What does the use of an 'x' in Latinx mean or do? How do histories of race, class, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. impact one's Latina/o/x identity?  Many of these questions will be answered by using scholarship produced by the Latina/o Studies Program faculty at Cornell, familiarizing students with the breadth of research and expertise of program.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2106 - Introduction to Latinx Studies

In this introductory course, participants will study the economic and technological history of the television industry, with a particular emphasis on its manifestations in the United States and the United Kingdom; the changing shape of the medium of television over time and in ever-wider global contexts; the social meanings, political stakes, and ideological effects of the medium; and the major methodological tools and critical concepts used in the interpretation of the medium, including Marxist, feminist, queer, and postcolonial approaches. Two to three hours of television viewing per week will be accompanied by short, sometimes dense readings, as well as written exercises.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2160 - Television

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.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS, SSC-AS) (D-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2225 - Controversies About Inequality

Full details for AMST 2232 - Queer Pop from the Stonewall Uprising to the Millennium

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 and Visual Culture

This course engages the rich cartographic record of colonial North America via an in-depth analysis of two dozen iconic maps. Integrating visual and textual analysis, students will assess human representations of space across cultural boundaries, explore change over time in the mapmaking practices of indigenous peoples and various European intruders, and study the evolving relationship between cartography and power, attending particularly to the process by which mapping promoted a revolutionary new understanding of American geography as composed of the bounded territories of nation-states.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2391 - From Terra Incognita to Territories of Nation-States: Early American History in Two Dozen Maps

Latina/os have always been part of U.S. history, yet the media often represents Latinx as only recent immigrants or as stereotypes that reduce rich cultures into a single, unified category or group of people. This practice hides the many unique and varied voices, stories, experiences, and ideas produced by Latinx expressive practices in forms ranging from novels and poetry to podcasts, tiktoks, films, theater, comics, memoirs, visual arts, and dance. This course will sample all of these forms while considering how artists meditate on their experiences of home, friendship, languages, love, migration, education, racialization, within the contexts of histories of colonization, discrimination, war, invasion, revolution, and ongoing activist organizing for resistance, sustainability, and thriving futures. In addition to common material, students will also have the chance to explore specific expressive practices that interest them.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2401 - Introduction to U.S. Latinx Literature

This course will introduce both a variety of writings and media by Asian North American authors and some critical issues concerning the production and reception of Asian American texts. Working with a variety of genres, we will be asking questions about the relation between literary forms and the socio-historical context within which they take on their meanings, and about the historical formation of Asian American identities. 

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2620 - Introduction to Asian American Literature

An introduction to Asian American performance, this course will consider both historical and contemporary examples and forms through the analytics of Asian American studies, theatre studies, and performance studies. Throughout the semester, we will pay equal attention to various forms of performance — plays and other staged performances, performance art, as well as everyday performances — as well as both primary sources and theoretical/critical readings. Students will be introduced to key concepts of Asian American performance studies, such as Orientalism, yellow face, radicalized accents, and the performing body, and will begin to not only map a history of Asian American performance but also situate contemporary examples within this tradition.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2622 - Introduction to Asian American Performance and Media

This course looks at the American Gothic tradition as showing us the fissures in early American political life specifically around the issues of slavery and Native American land rights. While Gothic literature is often relegated to the role of entertainment, it also reveals the ways in which American culture was, as Toni Morrison writes in Playing in the Dark, "shaped by the presence of the racial other." The Gothic also offers a space through which to offer not just clever observations but scathing critiques by augmenting the sense of the monstrous underlying grand sentiments of American Exceptionalism.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2635 - A Haunted House Divided: The American Gothic Tradition in Nineteenth-Century Literature

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.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2665 - The American Revolutionary Era

This course offers a survey of American political thought from the colonial period to the present. We will read Puritan sermons, revolutionary pamphlets, philosophical treatises, presidential orations, slave narratives, prison writings, and other classic texts, in order to understand the ideas and debates that have shaped American politics. Topics to be discussed will include the meaning of freedom, the relationship between natural rights and constitutional authority, the idea of popular sovereignty, theories of representation and state power, race and national identity, problems of inequality, and the place of religion in public life. Lectures will be organized around both historical context and close reading of primary texts.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2669 - American Political Thought

Roots of the United States' most vexing problems can be traced to the 1960s and 1970s. This class explores the struggles to explain these turbulent decades in both popular memory and historical scholarship and the consequences of our interpretations for understanding today. Students will use movies and oral history to investigate the role of perspective, framing, and agency in historical analysis. We will examine the era's struggles over issues such as racial hierarchy, gender roles, abortion, climate change, economic inequality, war, drugs, crime, and democracy.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SCD-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2682 - Sex, Drugs, and Experimenting with Democracy in 1960s and 1970s America

This course is an introduction to Latina/o/x Performance investigating the historical and contemporary representations of Latina/o/xs in performance and media. Throughout the semester, students will critically examine central themes and issues that inform the experiences and (re) presentations of Latina/o/xs in the United States. How is latinidad performed? In situating the class around "Latina/o/x," as both an umbrella term and an enacted social construction, we will then turn our attention to (re) presentations of latinidad within different genres of cultural expressions.

Full details for AMST 2725 - Introduction to Latina-o-x Performance

Donald Trump and Biden give us two visions of America and of the world: xenophobic nationalism and pragmatic cosmopolitanism. America and the world are thus constituted by great diversity. The first half of the course seeks to understand that diversity in American politics and foreign policy viewed through the prisms of region, ideology, region, race, class and religion. The second half inquires into the U.S. and American engagement of different world regions and civilizations: Europe, Russia, North America, Latin America, China, Japan, India and the Middle East. U.S. hard power and American soft power find expression in far-reaching processes of American-infused globalization and U.S.-centered anti-Americanism reverberating around the world. Advocates of one-size-fits-all solutions to America's and the world's variegated politics are in for great disappointments.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SSC-AS) (CA-AG, SBA-AG)

Full details for AMST 2817 - America Confronts the World

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.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for AMST 3161 - The American Presidency

This course uses artifacts, spaces, and texts to examine the emergence of the modern world in the 500-plus years since Columbus.  This is a distinctive sub-field of archaeology, not least because modern attitudes toward economic systems, race relations, and gender roles emerged during this period.  We will read classic and contemporary texts to unearth the physical histories of contemporary ideas, including coverage of the archaeologies of capitalism, colonialism, gender relations, the African diaspora, ethnogenesis, and conflicts over the use of the past in the present.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS, SSC-AS)

Full details for AMST 3200 - Historical Archaeology: Capitalism, Colonialism, Race, Gender

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.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for AMST 3281 - Constitutional Politics

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.

Catalog Distribution: (ETM-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, KCM-AG, SBA-AG)

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

Explores major American playwrights from 1900 to 1960, introducing students to American theatre as a significant part of modern American cultural history. We will consider the ways in which theatre has contributed to the construction and deconstruction of a national identity. Similarly, we will examine the influence of the American Theatre on and in film. We will pay special attention to the social, political, and aesthetic contexts of the time period and discuss the shifting popularity of dramatic forms, including melodrama, realism, expressionism, absurdism, and the folk play, in the American theatre canon. Authors include O'Neill, Glaspell, Odets, Rice, Hellman, Hughes, Miller, Williams, and Albee, among others.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 3360 - American Drama and Theatre

Full details for AMST 3418 - Environmental Justice Studio

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.

Catalog Distribution: (SCD-AS) (D-AG, LA-AG)

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

This course provides a critical historical interrogation of what Black Marxism author Cedric Robinson called "the Black Radical Tradition." It will introduce students to some of the major currents in the history of black radical thought, action, and organizing, with an emphasis on the United States after World War I. It relies on social, political, and intellectual history to examine the efforts of black people who have sought not merely social reform, but a fundamental restructuring of political, economic, and social relations. We will define and evaluate radicalism in the shifting contexts of liberation struggles. We will explore dissenting visions of social organization and alternative definitions of citizenship, progress, and freedom. We will confront the meaning of the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality in social movements.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (D-AG, HA-AG)

Full details for AMST 3590 - The Black Radical Tradition in the U.S.

This course is open to experienced rappers, beatmakers, and vocalists interested forging collaborative relationships with other students. Taking as a foundation hip-hop's relationship to social justice, each semester we will work together to plan and record an EP on a theme or keyword chosen as a group. We will construct and analyze playlists of inspirational material, identifying specific hip-hop compositional strategies for creating beats and rhymes on a theme, and will use these tools to create and workshop our own collaborative tracks in weekly meetings. Please contact the instructor to audition.  

Full details for AMST 3617 - Cornell Hip-Hop Collective

"Foreign in a domestic sense" is the perplexing way that the Supreme Court of the United States chose to define Puerto Rico's status in the so-called "Insular Cases" of the early 20th century. Written over 100 years ago, this contradictory ruling looms large over Puerto Rico's precarious legal standing, despite the fact that there are now more Puerto Ricans living on the US mainland than in the island itself. Seeking to counter the obfuscation of Puerto Rico in the US imaginary, in this course students will analyze how key historical, political, and social moments connected to diasporas, disasters, and dissent have galvanized Puerto Rican cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG)

Full details for AMST 3679 - Diasporas, Disasters, and Dissent: Re-Thinking Puerto Rican Studies in the 20th and 21st Centuries

The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a natural and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. Asians overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the Asians? On what basis can we label Asians an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category Asian itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for AMST 3703 - Asians in the Americas: A Comparative Perspective

When an African and an African American meet, solidarity is presumed, but often friction is the result.  In this course, we will consider how Africans and African Americans see each other through literature.  What happens when two peoples suffering from double consciousness meet?  We will examine the influence of historical forces including slavery, colonialism and pan-Africanism on the way writers explore the meeting between Africans and African Americans. Specifically we will look at how writers and political figures such as Maya Angelou, Chimamanda Adichie, Richard Wright, Eugene Robinson, Philippe Wamba, Martin Luther King Junior and Malcolm X have understood the meeting.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, HST-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG, HA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 3732 - Africans and African Americans in Literature

This introductory course introduces students to issues and debates related to international migration and will provide an interdisciplinary foundation to understanding the factors that shape migration flows and migrant experiences. We will start by reviewing theories of the state and historical examples of immigrant racialization and exclusion in the United States and beyond. We will critically examine the notions of borders, citizenship/non-citizenship, and the creation of diasporas. Students will also hear a range of perspectives by exposing them to Cornell guest faculty who do research and teach on migration across different disciplines and methodologies and in different world areas. Examples include demographic researchers concerned with immigrant inequality and family formation, geographic perspectives on the changing landscapes of immigrant metropolises, legal scholarship on the rights of immigrant workers, and the study of immigrant culture from a feminist studies lens. Offered each fall semester.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for AMST 3800 - Migration: Histories, Controversies, and Perspectives

Full details for AMST 3812 - Edge Cities: Celluloid New York and Los Angeles

Across twentieth-century history, race and war have been dynamic forces in shaping economic organization and everyday livelihoods. This course will approach labor and working-class history, through a focus on global war as well as 'wars at home.' Racial and warfare events often intersect—in the histories of presidents and activists, business leaders and industrial workers, CIA agents and police, soldiers and prisoners, American laborers abroad and non-Americans migrating stateside. In this course, we'll consider how race and war have been linked—from the rise of Jim Crow and U.S. empire in the 1890s, to the WWII 'Greatest Generation' and its diverse workplaces, to Vietnam and the civil rights movement, to the Iraq wars and immigrant workers, to debates about what has been called a 'military-industrial complex' and a 'prison-industrial complex'.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for AMST 3885 - Race and War in History: Workers, Soldiers, Prisoners, Activists

This course reviews the changing relations between science, technology, and the state in America, focusing on the period from 1960 to the present. We will explore science-intensive policy controversies. We will also look at how science and technology are used in different institutional settings, such as Congress, the court system, and regulatory agencies. Among other issues, we will examine the tension between the concept of science as an autonomous system for producing knowledge and the concept of science as entangled with interest groups.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS) (SBA-AG)

Full details for AMST 3911 - Science in American Politics

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

This course focuses on three major and interrelated themes within Filipino/Filipino American history: war/empire, labor/migration, and culture/imaginaries. How do we account for the overwhelming number of Filipinos in nursing, domestic work, and the U.S. military? How do filmmakers, visual/theatre artists, and writers continue to remember the oft-forgotten history of U.S.-Philippine relations? In what ways have diasporic and immigrant Filipinos as well as Filipino Americans created their own culture as well as engaged with their counterparts in the Philippines? By reading historical and sociological texts alongside popular cultural texts and artistic examples, this course considers the politics of history, memory, and cultural citizenship in Filipino America.

Catalog Distribution: (GLC-AS, SCD-AS) (CA-AG, D-AG)

Full details for AMST 4052 - Critical Filipino and Filipino American Studies

While the purpose of Hollywood films is to entertain, when those films are set in the past, they offer a critical lens onto how and why we remember and memorialize certain historical events. This course analyzes a series of films set in colonial North America and the Atlantic world in order to ask bigger questions about the meaning of our colonial past to the ways in which we think about the present. During the course, we will read and discuss articles and books in order to learn about the time periods and contexts presented in several different films, and we will use that knowledge to understand what each filmmaker chose to include or exclude and why, paying specific attention to representations of race, gender, and class. Over the course of the semester, we will also meet virtually with various historians who have worked in the film industry to discuss their experiences making academic history relevant for Hollywood. This course will provide students with a clear understanding of specific times and places in early American history, while also encouraging them to think about when, why, and how that past remains relevant (or irrelevant) today.

Full details for AMST 4205 - Early American History through Film, ca. 1500-1800

This seminar explores the intertwined histories of sex, sexuality, and gender at the intersection of major themes in American transnational and global history: race, labour, empire, and the state. What would a queer history of American foreign relations look like? How has the legacy of sexual violence in plantation slavery underwritten the systems – such as private property, police power, white supremacy, and carcerality -- that structure modern American society and its international entanglements? How can a focus on gender help us to better understand the contemporary challenges of globalisation and the Anthropocene? Uncovering the pasts of the most marginalised historical actors – enslaved women, rape victims, trans and queer people – requires innovative methodologies and new relationships to the archive. In this seminar, then, we will also think about how we do gender history, and develop tools for reading, writing and researching that take us beyond the boundaries of the written record and into the realm of the speculative, the spectral, and the imaginary.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS) (HA-AG)

Full details for AMST 4264 - Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World

This seminar explores one of the most consequential movements in African American cultural history, a movement of transnational impact. It was empowered in part by new social and institutional developments, including the Great Migration of African Americans, immigration from the Caribbean, and Pan-African contacts in Paris. It also benefited from new pluralistic theories of American culture and developments in the publishing industry centered in Manhattan. African American cultural vitality surged in the context of modern mobility and the rise of new publishing enterprises and technologies of sound reproduction. While chiefly centered on literature, the seminar will also touch on visual art, music, and performance.

Full details for AMST 4506 - The Harlem Renaissance, 1919-1937

Full details for AMST 4548 - The Bible in America

If you haven't read contemporary U.S. American Indian fiction, then it might be fair to ask how much you know about the United States, its origins and its current condition. Since the 1960s, American Indians have been producing a significant body of award-wining novels and short stories. In 1969, for example, N. Scott Momaday, from the Kiowa nation, won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel House Made of Dawn and in 2012 Louise Erdrich, who is Anishinaabe, won the National Book Award for her novel The Round House. In between these two notable moments and since we can list an impressive number of Native storytellers whose work is aesthetically powerful, offering us a narrative of the United States that counters the official history. Centrally the course will focus on the various formal approaches Native writers take from surrealism to realism in representing the (post)colonial situation of Indian country and the ongoing resistance in Indian country to the U.S. legal and political regime.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS) (CA-AG, LA-AG)

Full details for AMST 4627 - Contemporary Native American Fiction

What are the limits and possibilities for Asian American longing and belonging? Asian Americans have been variously understood as immigrants, refugees, "forever foreigners," and "model minorities." These ideas emerge from and shape US understandings of nation, empire, rights, and citizenship. Native and Indigenous studies scholars have asked how and whether immigrants—including exploited workers—are complicit with settlement and occupation. In this course we will read Asian American literary texts from the Americas through Asian American and Indigenous cultural critique to consider the overlapping dimensions of militarism, carcerality, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and dispossession in order to learn what comparative and relational approaches can teach us.

Catalog Distribution: (ALC-AS, SCD-AS)

Full details for AMST 4632 - Rethinking Asian American Literature: Indigeneity, Diaspora, Settler Colonialism

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 of Undergraduate Study 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

This course will explore the relationship between popular belief, political action, and the institutional deployment of social power. The class will be roughly divided in three parts, opening with a discussion of how the material world influences the culture of a society. The middle section will connect culture to political ideology, including symbolism and the construction of group identity. The last part of the course will consider ways in which cultural symbols and ideology can be manipulated in order to legitimate government authority. We will then, coming full circle, trace how political regimes can influence the social practices from which culture originates.

Full details for AMST 6202 - Political Culture

This course uses artifacts, spaces, and texts to examine the emergence of the modern world in the 500-plus years since Columbus.  This is a distinctive sub-field of archaeology, not least because modern attitudes toward economic systems, race relations, and gender roles emerged during this period.  We will read classic and contemporary texts to unearth the physical histories of contemporary ideas, including coverage of the archaeologies of capitalism, colonialism, gender relations, the African diaspora, ethnogenesis, and conflicts over the use of the past in the present.

Full details for AMST 6210 - Historical Archaeology: Capitalism, Colonialism, Race, Gender

This seminar explores the intertwined histories of sex, sexuality, and gender at the intersection of major themes in American transnational and global history: race, labour, empire, and the state. What would a queer history of American foreign relations look like? How has the legacy of sexual violence in plantation slavery underwritten the systems – such as private property, police power, white supremacy, and carcerality -- that structure modern American society and its international entanglements? How can a focus on gender help us to better understand the contemporary challenges of globalisation and the Anthropocene? Uncovering the pasts of the most marginalised historical actors – enslaved women, rape victims, trans and queer people – requires innovative methodologies and new relationships to the archive. In this seminar, then, we will also think about how we do gender history, and develop tools for reading, writing and researching that take us beyond the boundaries of the written record and into the realm of the speculative, the spectral, and the imaginary.

Full details for AMST 6264 - Gender, Sexuality, and the U.S. in the World

This graduate seminar will explore major currents in historical writing about African-American life and culture in the twentieth century. Focusing on social, intellectual, and labor history, we will identify key themes in recent studies of the formation of modern black communities and politics before and after World War Two. The course will place special emphasis on class, gender, social movements, and migration.

Full details for AMST 6322 - Readings in 20th Century African-American History

Full details for AMST 6418 - Environmental Justice Studio

The first half of the 20th century saw an unprecedented wave of poetic innovation, much of it produced by American poets living both in the United States and abroad.  This course will explore crucial texts and movements that range widely in their aesthetic and formal orientations, but that share in the expansive and experimental spirit of modernism.  We'll consider key volumes by Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane, and Langston Hughes, as well as major poetic sequences produced in the shadow of World War II.  We'll also attend to varying modes of poetic circulation, including periodicals, small presses, and radio.  Our primary focus will be on individual poems and their powers to illuminate our lives.

Full details for AMST 6632 - Modern American Poetry, 1910-1950

In contemporary political contexts "democracy" is often invoked as the very ground of political legitimacy. There is very little agreement, however, on what democracy means or how it is best embodied in state institutions and law. This seminar will introduce students to select debates in contemporary democratic theory over the normative meaning of democracy and the limitations of contemporary democratic practice. Beginning with the work of Rousseau and ending with debates over "radical democracy," we will explore the following themes: How do democratic theorists and democratic actors negotiate the paradoxes of collective self-rule? What is the relationship between liberalism and democracy? Do rights suspend democracy or establish its preconditions? What are the best procedures for democratic decision-making? How does democracy deal with difference? Is democracy best understood as a form of government or a practice of resistance to domination?

Full details for AMST 6645 - Democratic Theory

The common perception of ethnicity is that it is a natural and an inevitable consequence of cultural difference. Asians overseas, in particular, have won repute as a people who cling tenaciously to their culture and refuse to assimilate into their host societies and cultures. But, who are the Asians? On what basis can we label Asians an ethnic group? Although there is a significant Asian presence in the Caribbean, the category Asian itself does not exist in the Caribbean. What does this say about the nature of categories that label and demarcate groups of people on the basis of alleged cultural and phenotypical characteristics? This course will examine the dynamics behind group identity, namely ethnicity, by comparing and contrasting the multicultural experience of Asian populations in the Caribbean and the United States. Ethnographic case studies will focus on the East Indian and Chinese experiences in the Caribbean and the Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, and Indian experiences in the United States.

Full details for AMST 6703 - Asians in the Americas: A Comparative Perspective