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

This course examines the development and cultural significance of rock music from its origins in blues, gospel, and Tin Pan Alley up to alternative rock and hip hop. The course concludes with the year 2000.

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

Full details for AMST 1312 - History of Rock Music

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

America is finishing up two wars, one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. They have been the longest wars in American history and have ended amid much ambivalence about the US engagement in each place and the results. They are part of a series of wars that America has fought as a global power, with a global reach, sending its forces thousands of miles from home. That global reach is not new, and goes back all the way to 1898 and the Spanish-American War. This course will look at the American military experience from our first tentative steps onto the global stage in 1898, to the earth-spanning conflicts of World War I and II, to the nuclear tension of Cold War conflicts, and finish with the current Long War against terrorism, and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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

Full details for AMST 1571 - American Defense Policy and Military History from the Two World Wars to the Global War on Terror

This course attends to the contemporary issues, contexts and experiences of Indigenous peoples. Students will develop a substantive understanding of colonialism and engage in the parallels and differences of its histories, forms, and effects on Indigenous peoples globally. Contemporary Indigenous theorists, novelists, visual artists and historians have a prominent place in the course, highlighting sociocultural and environmental philosophies, critical responses to and forms of resistance toward neocolonial political and economic agendas and the fundamental concern for Indigenous self-determination, among other topics. We will not only examine the history of victimization of indigenous peoples through colonial oppression, but we will also study their response as agents of change in providing alternative paradigms and insights to humanity in the third millennium.

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

Full details for AMST 1601 - Indigenous Issues in Global Perspectives

On August 9-10, 1969, ex-convict, aspiring rock star, and charismatic leader Charles Manson ordered his so-called Family to brutally murder a few of LA's rich, white, "beautiful people" and leave clues implicating black radicals. The idea was to trigger an apocalyptic race war he called "Helter Skelter" (after a song by The Beatles). Today, these murders stand as the most infamous in twentieth-century U.S. criminal history and as synecdoche for the "end of the Sixties." They have also spawned a veritable Manson Industry in the popular realm: there are now Manson books, movies, TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, websites, music, comics, t-shirts, and even a tourist attraction (the Hollywood "Helter Skelter" tour). This course analyzes the history of the Manson murders as well as their incredible resonance in American culture over the past half century. Who was Charles Manson and who were the members of the Family? What was the Family's relation to the counterculture, to Hollywood, Vietnam, the Black Panther Party, and environmentalism? How might we fit the Manson murders into the long history of apocalyptic violence and terror? And what does it mean that the Manson murders have occupied our collective imagination for fifty years? To answer these and other questions, we will analyze a variety of sources including television and newspaper reports, trial transcripts, true crime writing, memoirs, interviews, novels, films and documentaries, podcasts and pop songs.

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

Full details for AMST 1850 - Thinking about History with the Manson Murders

This course provides an overview of disastrous attempts at colonization in the Americas from ca. 1500 through ca. 1760. Over thirteen weeks, we will engage with the question of why some attempts at colonization failed and why some succeeded. We will also explore other early modern failures, from bankrupt monopoly trade companies to ill-fated buccaneer communities and entire cities destroyed by earthquakes and hurricanes. Exploring failures, rather than successes, will help students understand the contingent process of colonial expansion as well as the roles of Indigenous dispossession, African slavery, and inter-imperial trade networks to the success or failure of early modern colonies. Over the course of the semester, my lectures will cover broad themes in failed enterprises, while students will read several monographs and primary-source collections on specific disasters. Some central questions include: Why did some colonies fail and other thrived? What role did social factors like gender, race, and class play in colonial failures? What can we learn about colonialism and imperialism through a focus on when those processes ended in disasters?

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for AMST 1986 - Disasters! A History of Colonial Failures in the Atlantic World, 1450-1750

This course provides an introduction to modes of vision and the historical impact of visual images, visual structures, and visual space on culture, communication, and politics. It examines all aspects of culture that communicate through visual means, including 20th-century visual technologies—photography, cinema, video, etc., and their historical corollaries. The production and consumption of images, objects, and events is studied in diverse cultures. Students develop the critical skills necessary to appreciate how the approaches that define visual studies complicate traditional models of defining and analyzing art objects.

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

Full details for AMST 2000 - Introduction to Visual Studies

Educational historian Frederick Rudolph called Cornell University "the first American university," referring to its unique role as a coeducational, nonsectarian, land-grant institution with a broad curriculum and diverse student body. In this course, we will explore the history of Cornell, taking as our focus the pledge of Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White to found a university where "any person can find instruction in any study." The course will cover a wide range of topics and perspectives relating to the faculty, student body, evolution of campus, and important events and eras in Cornell history. Stories and vignettes will provide background on the current university and its administrative structure, campus traditions, and the names that adorn buildings and memorials throughout campus. Finally, the course will offer a forum for students to address questions on present-day aspects of the university.

Full details for AMST 2001 - The First American University

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

How are migration dynamics produced? How do states and communities respond to and shape complex migration processes? This course will draw on the United States as a case study, focusing on Latino immigrants. Latinos are by far the largest immigrant group in the U.S., representing about 50% of all immigrants. Additionally, the U.S. has historically received the largest number of immigrants in the world. The class will examine the main debates around migration in fields such as Latino studies, migration studies, and political science. We begin with a historical and contemporary survey of global and regional migration trends. Next, we will review theories explaining why people migrate and how countries manage migration processes. We then focus on the U.S. immigration apparatus, examining past and present changes, including migration public policies. Central to this class is the exploration of multiple systems of marginalization that shape the opportunities, material conditions, and lived experiences of immigrants in the U.S. We conclude with an exploration of historical and contemporary migrant-led forms of resistance, such as the Immigrant Rights Movement, and its linkages to other transnational struggles for social justice.

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

Full details for AMST 2152 - (Im)migration and (Im)migrants: Then and Now

What is the American empire? Is empire even the right word to describe U.S. power in the world today or in the past? If so, is the American empire formal or informal, and is the United States a reluctant superpower or a belligerent hegemon? When did the empire begin? And is it in decline today? In addressing these questions, this seminar will offer an in-depth look at key moments in the history of the United States and its foreign relations, ranging from the American revolutionary war and historians' debates about the founders' thinking in relation to empire; the "imperial moment" of 1898, when the United States acquired overseas colonies for the first time; the beginnings of the national security state in 1917 with the entry of the United States into the First World War; the "American Century", or the post-World War II years when the United States was the most powerful nation in the world; and the era of unipolarity after the end of the Cold War and which culminated in the Wars on Terror. Throughout, we will draw upon primary and secondary sources to examine the ideas and practices which have shaped U.S. foreign relations, including continental expansion, the frontier, imperial anticolonialism, the open door, covert operations, extraordinary rendition, police action, and more. Taking both a chronological and thematic approach, this class offers an examination of the past in order to understand some of the key issues facing the United States, and the world, today.

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

Full details for AMST 2212 - The U.S. Empire

In August 1945, Japan was a devastated country; its cities burned, its people starving, its military and government in surrender. World War II was over. The occupation had begun. What sort of society emerged from the cooperation and conflict between occupiers and occupied? Students will examine sources ranging from declassified government documents to excerpts from diaries and bawdy fiction, alongside major scholarly studies, to find out. The first half of the course focuses on key issues in Japanese history, like the fate of the emperor, constitutional revision, and the emancipation of women. The second half zooms out for a wider perspective, for the occupation of Japan was never merely a local event. It was the collapse of Japanese empire and the rise of American empire in Asia. It was decolonization in Korea and the start of the Cold War. Students will further investigate these links in final individual research projects. 

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

Full details for AMST 2315 - The Occupation of Japan

How does literary language depict the experience of physical suffering? Can a poem or a novel palliate pain, illness, even the possibility of death? From darkly comic narratives of black plague to the rise and fall of hysteria to depictions of the AIDS crisis, this course examines literature centered on medical practices from the early modern period through the twentieth century. Why have medical practices changed, and how do writers address their political, social, and ideological implications? Readings will include a broad range of genres, including poetry (Dickinson, Whitman, Keats), fiction (McEwan, Chekhov, Gilman, Kafka, Camus), theater (Kushner), nonfiction prose (Woolf, Freud), and critical theory (Foucault, Scarry, Canguilhem, Sontag).

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

Full details for AMST 2330 - Literature and Medicine

Corruption in politics and economics has become a significant issue in the modern world. This course introduces students to the study of corruption and collusion from the perspective of early America and the Caribbean from 1500 through 1800. By examining the historical evolution of corruption, the course addresses questions such as: What is corruption and, by contrast, what is good governance? Who creates law and when is it enforced? Can societies be corrupt or only institutions? And, does economic corruption help or hurt financial development? Our readings and discussion will examine the intersection of politics, culture, gender, and economics. We will reflect on how early Americans understood corruption and collusion and what that can tell us about similar modern issues. In the end, the course focuses on the concept of corruption as a complex social function through the lens of bribery, piracy, sex crimes, and other forms of social deviancy.

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

Full details for AMST 2381 - Corruption, Collusion, and Commerce in Early America and the Caribbean

The international boundary between Canada and the United is the longest, straightest border in the world. Although frequently cast as "boring" in juxtaposition to its southern counterpart, this viewpoint overlooks the U.S.-Canada border's longstanding history as a site and engine of trans-national tensions and controversies. This course addresses the complex histories of the 3,500 mile boundary separating the United States from Canada from its eighteenth century colonial antecedents to contemporary challenges related to drug smuggling, border fence construction, pandemic-related travel restrictions, immigration, commerce, environmental issues, Indigenous peoples' rights, and national identity construction. The instructor, a dual citizen of Canada and the United States, brings not only life experience of border-crossing, but also a recent background in legal testimony on border-related issues.

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

Full details for AMST 2392 - Where Fire Meets Ice: Histories of the U.S.-Canada Border Across Four Centuries

This lecture course serves as an introduction to the historical study of humanity's interrelationship with the natural world. Environmental history is a quickly evolving field, taking on increasing importance as the environment itself becomes increasingly important in world affairs. During this semester, we'll examine the sometimes unexpected ways in which "natural" forces have shaped human history (the role of germs, for instance, in the colonization of North America); the ways in which human beings have shaped the natural world (through agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization, as well as the formation of things like wildlife preserves); and the ways in which cultural, scientific, political, and philosophical attitudes toward the environment have changed over time. This is designed as an intensely interdisciplinary course: we'll view history through the lenses of ecology, literature, art, film, law, anthropology, and geography. Our focus will be on the United States, but, just as environmental pollutants cross borders, so too will this class, especially toward the end, when we attempt to put U.S. environmental history into a geopolitical context. This course is meant to be open to all, including non-majors and first-year students.

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

Full details for AMST 2581 - Environmental History

One thing many Americans think they know is their Indians: Pocahontas, the First Thanksgiving, fighting cowboys, reservation poverty, and casino riches. Under our very noses, however, Native American history has evolved into one of the most exciting, dynamic, and contentious fields of inquiry into America's past. It is now safer to assume, as Comanche historian Paul Chaat Smith has pointed out, that everything you know about Indians is in fact wrong. Most people have much to "unlearn" about Native American history before true learning can take place. This course aims to achieve that end by (re)introducing students to key themes and trends in the history of North America's indigenous nations. Employing an issues-oriented approach, the course stresses the ongoing complexity of Native American societies' engagements with varieties of settler colonialism since 1492 and dedicates itself to a concerted program of myth-busting. As such, the course will provide numerous opportunities for students to develop their critical thinking and reading skills.

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

Full details for AMST 2660 - Everything You Know About Indians is Wrong: Unlearning Native American History

This course introduces students to major American poets from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. It is designed for anyone wanting to deepen their knowledge of and appreciation for poetry while also addressing its relationship to modern American social and cultural history. It addresses questions about what poetry is for, why it is often "difficult," how it is related to language-play as a basic human drive that engages with personal anxieties, bodily rhythms, social and existential tensions, and the riddles of existence. Another through-line of this course is the relationship of poetry to democracy in the United States.

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

Full details for AMST 2690 - American Poetry Since 1850

This course aims to explore and answer a single question about America's promise-of success if you work hard and do well in school: Why do we have such substantial and long-standing inequality in the U.S.? In answering this central question, we will investigate the goals, roles, and outcomes of formal educational institutions in American society and the legal and policy environment in which they operate. Specifically, we will review historical state and federal policy, trace the $700 million spent, and interrogate the sociological functions of public and private K12 schools, including the successes, failures, and enigmas of school organization and policy at the local, state, and national level.

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

Full details for AMST 2710 - US Education System: Courts, Data, Law and Politics

Who lived in the Ithaca area before American settlers and Cornell arrived? Where do these indigenous peoples reside today? This class explores the history and culture of the Gayogoho:no (Cayuga), which means people from the mucky land. We will read perspectives by indigenous authors, as well as archaeologists and historians, about past and current events, try to understand reasons why that history has been fragmented and distorted by more recent settlers, and delve into primary sources documenting encounters between settlers and the Gayogoho:no. We will also strive to understand the ongoing connections of the Gayogoho:no to this region despite forced dispossession and several centuries of colonialist exclusion from these lands and waters. 

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

Full details for AMST 2729 - From the Swampy Land: Indigenous People of the Ithaca Area

An historical study of children's literature from the 17th century to the present, principally in Europe and America, which will explore changing literary forms in relation to the social history of childhood. Ranging from oral folktale to contemporary novelistic realism (with some glances at film narrative), major figures may include Perrault, Newbery, the Grimms, Andersen, Carroll, Alcott, Stevenson, Burnett, Kipling, the Disney studio, E. B. White, C. S. Lewis, Sendak, Silverstein, Mildred Taylor, and Bette Greene. We'll also encounter a variety of critical models—psychoanalytic, materialist, feminist, structuralist—that scholars have employed to explain the variety and importance of children's literature. Finally, we will consider how the idea of "the child" has evolved over this period.

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

Full details for AMST 2735 - Children's Literature

In this course, we will learn about the history of the West. We will deconstruct popular myths about the West, as we engage with the major themes and significant debates that define the historical scholarship. This course will begin with Native origin stories and end with the 20th century. As a class, we will study the west from a multitude of perspectives, such as race, gender, and ethnicity, the environment, labor, politics and culture. This course is designed to increase our knowledge of the social, political and intellectual developments that have shaped our understanding of the West.

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

Full details for AMST 2775 - The North American West

What does it mean to call a film is "Jewish"? Does it have to represent Jewish life? Does it have to feature characters identifiable as Jews? If artists who identify as Jews—actors, directors, screenwriters, composers—play significant roles in a film's production does that make it Jewish? Our primary point of entry into these questions will be Hollywood, from the industry's early silent films, through the period generally considered classical, down to the present day. We will also study films produced overseas, in countries that may include Israel, Egypt, France, Italy, and Germany. Our discussions will be enriched by contextual material drawn from film studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, American studies, and other related fields. Students will be expected to view a significant number of films outside of class—an average of one per week—and engage with them through writing and in-class discussion. The directors, screenwriters, composers, and actors whose work we will study may include: Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Billy Wilder, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Aviva Kempner, Joan Micklin Silver, the Marx Brothers, and the Coen Brothers.

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

Full details for AMST 2790 - Jewish Films and Filmmakers: Hollywood and Beyond

The course examines the historical political landscape of American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States and the interplay between tribal interests, politics, and the federal government. The course also looks at contemporary Native issues, federal policy and programs, tribal governance, relations between Tribal Nations and states and between Tribal Nations and the federal government. Finally, the course will explore Indigenous pop-culture and its influence on federal policy.

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

Full details for AMST 3024 - Being Native in the 21st Century: American Indian and Alaska Native Politics, History, and Policy

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.

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

Full details for AMST 3025 - Asian Americans and Popular Culture

The course will be a lecture course on Congress, introducing them to the political science literature on the topic and the major research questions and approaches. We will examine the development of the institution, including formal theories for congressional organization as well as historically and politically oriented accounts of rule changes, committee power, and party influence. We will also look at the determinants of legislative productivity and gridlock, approaches to measuring and analyzing congressional behavior, the changing role of the electoral connection, and the causes and consequences of polarization.

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

Full details for AMST 3112 - Congress and the Legislative Process

A general-education course to acquaint students with how our legal system pursues the goals of society. The course introduces students to various perspectives on the nature of law, what functions it ought to serve in society, and what it can and cannot accomplish. The course proceeds in the belief that such matters constitute a valuable and necessary part of a general education, not only for pre-law students but especially for students in other fields. Assigned readings comprise legal materials and also secondary sources on the legal process and the role of law in society. The classes include discussion and debate about current legal and social issues, including equality, safety, the environment, punishment, and autonomy.

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

Full details for AMST 3131 - The Nature, Functions, and Limits of Law

The body has been crucially important to Black liberation politics. Not only has it been a site of contestation and control, but it has also served as a productive site of protest, alliance, and collective action, in ways both real and imagined. This course explores the historical debates and theories surrounding the body with a particular focus on how blackness informs bodily meanings and negotiations across the African diaspora. Weekly topics will allow students to consider the metaphorical and material dimensions of the body while also interrogating the very concept of embodiment, the ways in which individual bodies are constituted and reconstituted over time.

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

Full details for AMST 3334 - Black Body Politics: Histories, Theories, and Debates

How has theatre shaped our notion of America and Americans in the second half of the 20th century and beyond? What role has politics played in the theatre? How has performance been used to examine concepts of identity, community, and nationality? And how and why have certain plays in this era been translated to the screen? In this course we will examine major trends in the American theatre from 1960 to the present. We will focus on theatre that responds directly to moments of social turmoil, including: the Vietnam and Iraq Wars, the Civil Rights and Black Lives Matter Movements, Women's and Gender Equality Movements, and the AIDS epidemic. We will also explore the tensions between Broadway and alternative theatre production.

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

Full details for AMST 3370 - American Theatre on Stage and Screen II (1960-Present)

This course explores research on race, ethnicity and language in American education. It examines historical and current patterns of school achievement for minoritized youths. It also examines the cultural and social premises undergirding educational practices in diverse communities and schools. Policies, programs and pedagogy, including multicultural and bilingual education, are explored.

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

Full details for AMST 3405 - Multicultural Issues in Education

A survey of the turning point of US. history: The Civil War (1861-1865) and its aftermath, Reconstruction (1865-1877). We will look at the causes, the coming, and the conduct, of the war, and the way in which it became a war for freedom. We will then follow the cause of freedom through the greatest slave rebellion in American history, and the attempts by formerly enslaved people to make freedom real in Reconstruction. And we will see how Reconstruction's tragic ending left questions open that are still not answered in U.S. society and politics.

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

Full details for AMST 3430 - History of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction

This course will look at how literature based at sea helps both shape and challenge concepts of freedom and capital. By looking at the relationship between the sea-faring economy and its relationship to American Expansion and the history of enslavement we will explore how literature based at sea provided both a reflection and an alternate reality to land-based politics. While the main focus of the course will be nineteenth-century literature, we will also be exploring maritime literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and its analogues in speculative fiction.

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

Full details for AMST 3442 - Merchants, Whalers, Pirates, Sailors: Early American Sea-faring Literature

Mainstream media would have us believe that driving a new Toyota Prius, recycling, and shopping "clean" at Whole Foods would make us all food environmentalists, right? Additionally, climate change and environmental degradation are often discussed as if they are phenomena that affect us all equally. Despite these dynamics, research in recent years tells us that while there might be some general ways that we experience our constantly changing physical environments—race, gender, and location very much affect how we experience "Nature." In this course we will use literature from across the African diaspora to investigate how looking at race, gender, and location produces very different ideas about environment, environmentalism, and "Nature" itself.

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

Full details for AMST 3565 - Black Ecoliterature

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 examines the history of culture in North America from the pre-contact era to present. We will examine how Native, African, European, Asian, and Latino/a influences, along with colonization, immigration, urbanization, industrialization, and consumerization, reshaped the development of American culture, including its architecture, literature, music, visual art, and practices of religion, leisure, and consumption. We will also gain a basic familiarity with the theory and methods of cultural history. Intended for upper-division undergraduate students, the course provides practice in the analysis of historical sources, historiography, and written and oral expression.

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

Full details for AMST 3602 - Cultural History of North America

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

This seminar overviews political theories of colonialism and empire, and in doing so, allows us to pose questions about the constitutive elements of our modernity, such as slavery, racism, dependency, and dispossession.  Throughout the semester, we will examine the relationship between former colonies and political and economic configurations (nationalism, internationalism, capitalism, socialism), as well as philosophical and epistemological questions about the relationship between the universal and the particular, and the imperatives of history-writing.  The course material will give us an opportunity to conclude with questions about whether or not the process of decolonizing our world and our study of it is complete or an ongoing project.

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

Full details for AMST 3715 - Colonialism and Anticolonialism

What can lawyers and judges learn from the study of literature? This course explores the relevance of imaginative literature (novels, drama, poetry, and film) to questions of law and social justice from a range of perspectives. We will consider debates about how literature can help to humanize legal decision-making; how storytelling has helped to give voice to oppressed populations over history; how narratives of suffering cultivate popular support for human rights; the role played by storytelling in a trial; and how literature can shed light on the limits of law and public policy.

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

Full details for AMST 3764 - Law and Literature

As globalization draws the Americas ever closer together, reshaping our sense of a common and uncommon American culture, what claims might be made for a distinctive, diverse poetry and poetics of the Americas? How might we characterize its dominant forms and alternative practices? What shared influences, affiliations, concerns and approaches might we find and what convergences and differences emerge? Ranging across North and South America, Central America and the Caribbean, this course will place in conversation such figures as Poe, Pound, Stein, Williams, Neruda, Vallejo, Borges, Parra, Bolaño, Césaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.

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

Full details for AMST 3820 - Poetry and Poetics of the Americas

This course examines war and revolution as drivers of migration from Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean to the United States and Canada. From the War of 1898 to the wars in Central America, war and revolution have displaced millions of people, prompting internal and cross-border migration. This history underscores how migration is multicausal—that is, produced by a wide and complex range of intersecting drivers. War and revolution disrupt livelihoods, produce scarcity, and create the insecurity that makes it impossible to exercise a basic human right to stay home. The course also examines how Latinos have become actors in U.S. wars and interventions in their countries of ancestry.

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

Full details for AMST 3831 - War and Revolution in 20th Century Latino History

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

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.

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

Full details for AMST 4021 - American Conservative Thought

The death penalty has gotten increased media attention due to high profile death row exonerations, and has long been under siege for other reasons, such as racial disparities in its imposition and the prevalence of very poor representation by defense counsel. This course surveys the legal and social issues that arise in the administration of the death penalty. The reading will be largely comprised of reported death penalty cases, but will be augmented by a variety of other sources, including empirical studies of the death penalty and the litigation experience of the professors. Although the focus will be on capital punishment as practiced in the United States, we will also consider international and comparative perspectives. Guest speakers will provide a range of views, and law students with experience working on capital cases will lead discussion sections.

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

Full details for AMST 4051 - Death Penalty in America

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.

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

Full details for AMST 4066 - Technological Change at Work

This course provides students with a challenging and interdisciplinary examination of race and space in North American history. It engages public history and critical geographic study through the lens of African Diasporic place-making from the early national period to the present day. How did Afro-descendant people in North America come to know the landscape and fashion communities around wilderness, swamps, urban cores and other "undesirable" areas? What material elements of black spaces came to define what is meant by slums and ghettos? This course illustrates how ongoing struggles that Black communities face with displacement and gentrification are part of a long history that developed alongside territorial expansion and nation building that charted uneven paths to prosperity based on race, gender, and class. This course is timely given that there are about 1,912 sites listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places Database as having significance to "Black" heritage and will help students develop their facilities for assigning meaning to these identified sites and what place these spaces have in the understanding of American history.

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

Full details for AMST 4111 - The Historical Geography of Black America

At this time of planetary instability, all politics are environmental politics. But all environmental politics are not the same. Contemporary movements diverge around key questions: Is technology an environmental boon or an environmental bad? Can sustainable ends be achieved through capitalist means? Who should be endowed with the power to intervene? At what scale, in what ways, on whose behalf? Reading across different ecopolitical formations—conservation, green capitalism, ecosocialism, ecofascism, and more—we ask how "the environment" manages to contain such a capacious field, why it so thoroughly deranges usual political coordinates. Then, we hone tools for thinking critically and hopefully within the mess.

Catalog Distribution: (SSC-AS)

Full details for AMST 4417 - Ecopolitics

In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels. Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language. As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the "love trilogy" on which she focused her repertoire for several years. The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study. By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.

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

Full details for AMST 4519 - Toni Morrison's Novels

This seminar examines long-term colonialist processes of erasing Indigenous histories, and recent attempts to bring this heritage back to visibility. We will read texts by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Jean O'Brien, Patrick Wolfe, Keith Basso, Andrea Lynn Smith, and others. Students will engage in critical analysis of primary sources, Indigenous histories, and monuments related to the American 1779 Sullivan-Clinton invasion of Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) territory and also the post-1779 Haudenosaunee reoccupations after the devastation. Student projects will focus on local Indigenous heritage and can include artwork, videos, counter-monument designs, poetry, and prose fiction, as well as more traditional academic research papers.

Catalog Distribution: (HST-AS)

Full details for AMST 4555 - Indigenous Erasure and Resurfacing

Exploring a genealogy of Latinx, Afro-Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and Chicana/o/x theorizations of modernity and identity, the course asks, what is the decolonial? Is it a space between the colonial and post-colonial? Is it a creative process, an intellectual theorization, or a historical period? Is it a performance, intervention, or embodied experience? Tracing a historical trajectory of the decolonial in poetry, performance, installation, and visual art, the course examines decolonial modes of making and being from the sixteenth to the twenty first century. 

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

Full details for AMST 4556 - Decolonial Poetics and Aesthetics: Arts of Resistance in the Americas

As Latinx studies continues to expand beyond its nationalistic origins and re-examines its geographical bounds, nuancing the role of borders within the field becomes urgent. This course probes at the primacy of the border in Latinx studies by centering Caribbean waters. As a liquid that refuses to succumb to the violence of fragmentation and instead embodies iterations of radical wholeness, water has an innate capacity to "undo" borders, a quality epitomized by the Spanish verb "desbordar" (to overflow). Through discussion and analysis of key Latinx cultural products we will gain an appreciation for the multiple ways in which water sustains provocative contradictions across borders regarding representations of historical memory, gender and sexuality, migration, race, and religion and spirituality, among others.

Full details for AMST 4577 - Desbordando: Reading Caribbean Waters in Latinx Studies

This course explores the increasing presence of all the arts in prisons throughout the country and examines the increasing scholarship surrounding arts programs and their efficacy for incarcerated persons. The course uses video's, archival material, reading material and in-person or Zoom interviews to investigate how and why art is taught in prisons. The course will also look at art produced by incarcerated artists as well as art by those who are still practicing after going home. And finally, the course will explore the increasing scholarship around the impact practicing the arts while incarcerated has on recidivism rates and preparation for re-entry.

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

Full details for AMST 4681 - Cages and Creativity: Arts in Incarceration

This course explores nightlife as a temporality that fosters countercultural performances of the self and that serves as a site for the emergence of alternative kinship networks. Focusing on queer communities of color, course participants will be asked to interrogate the ways in which nightlife demonstrates the queer world-making potential that exists beyond the normative 9-5 capitalist model of production. Performances of the everyday, alongside films, texts, and performance art, will be analyzed through a performance studies methodological lens. Through close readings and sustained cultural analysis, students will acquire a critical understanding of the potentiality of spaces, places, and geographies codified as "after hours" in the development of subcultures, alternative sexualities, and emerging performance practices.

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

Full details for AMST 4705 - Nightlife

This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.

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

Full details for AMST 4792 - Latinx Education Across the Americas

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 4994 - Honors Essay Tutorial II

This course aims to explore and answer a single question about America's promise-of success if you work hard and do well in school: Why do we have such substantial and long-standing inequality in the U.S.? In answering this central question, we will investigate the goals, roles, and outcomes of formal educational institutions in American society and the legal and policy environment in which they operate. Specifically, we will review historical state and federal policy, trace the $700 million spent, and interrogate the sociological functions of public and private K12 schools, including the successes, failures, and enigmas of school organization and policy at the local, state, and national level.

Full details for AMST 5710 - US Education System: Courts, Data, Law and Politics

Contemporary politics raise profound questions about the American past and how aspects of it have traveled across time and into the present, shaping US government and politics. This PhD-level seminar uses historical and institutional lenses to examine analytical questions about the origins and development of the American state as well as processes of political change. In Spring 2021, we will explore American political development with an eye toward understanding how threats to democracy have waxed and waned and combined over time, and the implications for the present. We will focus on topics such as political parties and polarization; conflict over belongs, with respect to race and gender; economic inequality; and executive aggrandizement. We will read some classic texts as well as new and recent ones. 

Full details for AMST 6011 - The American State

This course provides students with a challenging and interdisciplinary examination of race and space in North American history. It engages public history and critical geographic study through the lens of African Diasporic place-making from the early national period to the present day. How did Afro-descendant people in North America come to know the landscape and fashion communities around wilderness, swamps, urban cores and other "undesirable" areas? What material elements of black spaces came to define what is meant by slums and ghettos? This course illustrates how ongoing struggles that Black communities face with displacement and gentrification are part of a long history that developed alongside territorial expansion and nation building that charted uneven paths to prosperity based on race, gender, and class. This course is timely given that there are about 1,912 sites listed in the U.S. National Register of Historic Places Database as having significance to "Black" heritage and will help students develop their facilities for assigning meaning to these identified sites and what place these spaces have in the understanding of American history.

Full details for AMST 6111 - The Historical Geography of Black America

This seminar explores the international and transnational dimensions of the Black Power Movement, broadly defined. Beginning with an examination of transnationalism in the early 20th century, it examines the thought and political activities of African-American intellectuals and activists who crossed national boundaries, figuratively and literally, in the quest for black freedom. We will focus on the postwar era, particularly the 1950s through the 1980s, exploring transnationalism in the context of black feminism, Marxism, black nationalism, Pan Africanism, and other political traditions. We will examine the meeting and mingling of transnational discourses, ideologies, and activists in North America, the Caribbean, and Africa. 

Full details for AMST 6321 - Black Power Movement and Transnationalism

In this course, we will engage in close and reflective critical readings of Toni Morrison's eleven novels. Morrison's writing style is characterized by highly distinctive strategies in the development of narrative and in the use of language. As we journey across her body of work as readers, we will examine a range of recurring themes, along with the "love trilogy" on which she focused her repertoire for several years. The course, through a comprehensive, chronological and focused look at Morrison's body of novels, will help students who entirely lack familiarity with it to gain a strong foundation for further research and study. By the end of the course, even students who already know Morrison's work will walk away with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of it. The course will help students to reinforce their skills in reading fiction, and more astute and exacting readers of the novel as a genre.

Full details for AMST 6513 - Toni Morrison's Novels

This seminar is an intensive study of the political thought of Martin Luther King, Jr. Approaching texts in contexts, we will seek to recover King the political thinker from his mythologization in American political culture by carefully reading his books, speeches, sermons, interviews, notes, and correspondence as illocutionary interventions into the major crises and ideological disputes of twentieth century American politics. Topics we will explore include the politics of dignity, leadership and mass politics, rhetoric and democratic persuasion, law and direct action, nonviolence, loss and mourning, race and political economy, global justice, and the practices of prophetic critique. Along the way, we will study King in dialogue with both his contemporaries as well as more recent interventions in the study of civil disobedience, racial capitalism, and Afro-modern political thought.

Full details for AMST 6865 - Martin Luther King, Jr.

At this time of planetary instability, all politics are environmental politics. But all environmental politics are not the same. Contemporary movements diverge around key questions: Is technology an environmental boon or an environmental bad? Can sustainable ends be achieved through capitalist means? Who should be endowed with the power to intervene? At what scale, in what ways, on whose behalf? Reading across different ecopolitical formations—conservation, green capitalism, ecosocialism, ecofascism, and more—we ask how "the environment" manages to contain such a capacious field, why it so thoroughly deranges usual political coordinates. Then, we hone tools for thinking critically and hopefully within the mess.

Full details for AMST 7417 - Ecopolitics

This seminar examines long-term colonialist processes of erasing Indigenous histories, and recent attempts to bring this heritage back to visibility. We will read texts by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Jean O'Brien, Patrick Wolfe, Keith Basso, Andrea Lynn Smith, and others. Students will engage in critical analysis of primary sources, Indigenous histories, and monuments related to the American 1779 Sullivan-Clinton invasion of Haudenosaunee (Six Nations Confederacy) territory and also the post-1779 Haudenosaunee reoccupations after the devastation. Student projects will focus on local Indigenous heritage and can include artwork, videos, counter-monument designs, poetry, and prose fiction, as well as more traditional academic research papers.

Full details for AMST 7555 - Indigenous Erasure and Resurfacing

This course examines Latinx education in comparative perspective, with a focus on transnational communities and cross-border movements that link U.S. Latinx education with Latin American education. We ask: how do legacies of colonialism and empire shape the education of Latinx and Latin American communities? How are race, language, gender, cultural and national identity, and representation negotiated in schools? Drawing on ethnographic studies of education in and out of school, we explore how families and youths create knowledge, do literacy, and respond to cultural diversity, displacement, migration, and inequality. Throughout, we inquire into the potential for a decolonial and transformative education.

Full details for AMST 7792 - Latinx Education Across the Americas