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. (HC)

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.

Full details for AMST 1500 - Introduction to Africana Studies

This course studies the history of American capitalism. It helps you to answer these questions: What is capitalism? Is the U.S. more capitalist than other countries? How has capitalism shaped the history of the United States? Has it been a force for freedom, or is it a system of exploitation? What is its future? Through lectures, readings, and discussions, we'll give you the tools to win all your future arguments about capitalism, pro and con. And we won't even charge you the full market price.

Full details for AMST 1540 - American Capitalism

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

Full details for AMST 1595 - African American History from 1865

This course 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.

Full details for AMST 1601 - Indigenous Issues in Global Perspectives

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.

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

As a country, we are what we remember. But who decides what facts and stories about the past are important enough to memorialize? What does that decision tell us about power and truth? This class will discuss how the attacks of September 11 are remembered in the United States and the rest of the world.

Full details for AMST 2012 - September 11 and the Politics of Memory

This course provides an overview of public opinion in the United States. We will learn how opinions affect and are affected by politics. This course is divided into two sections where we will answer two questions. First, what is public opinion and how is it reported in the news? Students will learn how the design and implementation of surveys affects survey outcomes, and why this means we sometimes see different statistics about the public's opinion across news sources. Second, what shapes public opinion? In the second half of the course, we will turn to the different political and personal forces that shape how the public thinks about different issues. For example, how do our friends, family, and elected officials change how we think about current events?

Full details for AMST 2162 - US Public Opinion

This course surveys research on inequalities in education, income, wealth, prestige, occupation, political power, and health in the U.S. and other rich countries. How much inequality exists and why is it rising in some places? Do we live in a class society (and what does that mean)? How do families, aspirations, schools, social networks, employers, neighborhoods, and government policies shape who gets ahead and who falls behind? Why are education, jobs, and income distributed unequally by race, immigrant status, and gender? Throughout the course, we’ll discuss and evaluate evidence from administrative data, surveys, experiments, and qualitative studies.

Full details for AMST 2208 - Social Inequality

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

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

This course examines the evolution of modern rational legal capitalism as the dominant economic order of the global economy. It explores the question of capitalism and socialism through the lens of the new institutionalism in economic sociology. Why and how has American capitalism shaped the emergence of dynamic capitalism in China? What enables and guides the emergence of a global high-technology knowledge economy in the 21st century? What is the relationship between capitalism as an economic order and democracy?

Full details for AMST 2280 - Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

This course explores the changing meaning of American freedom and citizenship in the context of the long struggle for black liberation. Relying on social and political history, it confronts the promise, possibilities, and limitations of civil rights and human rights in the twentieth century. We examine various “rights” discourses and their role in reconfiguring our legal landscape and cultural mores, molding national and group identity, bestowing social and moral legitimacy, shaping and containing political dissent, reinvigorating and redefining the egalitarian creed, and challenging as well as justifying the distribution of wealth and power in the U.S. We examine the attempts of subjugated groups to transcend narrow social definitions of freedom, and we confront the question of formal political rights versus broader notions of economic justice in a national and international context.

Full details for AMST 2353 - Civil Rights vs. Human Rights in the Black Freedom Struggle

Public policy is a fundamental mechanism for addressing the most vexing and important social problems of our time. Racial inequality and structural racism are chief among such problems. Policy is thus widely understood and frequently touted as a means for redressing the harms of racism. Yet, public policy has also been identified as a channel through which racism flows. These seemingly paradoxical understandings of the relationships between racism and public policy raise critical questions about equality, democracy, the economy, and politics. This course examines such questions. questions. We begin by theoretically grounding key concepts such as race racism and public policy. We then consider the historical record, highlighting the fundamental role of racism in shaping politics and policy. Next, we build on these conceptual and historical foundations through thematic investigation of core policy elements (e.g., policy design, policy implementation, policy feedback), key policy institutions (e.g., legislatures, parties) and significant policy actors (e.g., social movement organizations, interest groups). Finally, the class wraps up with a series of policy deep dives involving close examination of specific policy domains (e.g., housing, health, the enviornment). This course provides students with the knowledge and analytical tools necessary to better understand the realities and complexities of race, racism, and public policy in the United States.

Full details for AMST 2365 - Race, Racism, and Public Policy

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

Full details for AMST 2640 - Introduction to Asian American History

This course will introduce students to African American literary traditions in the space that would become North America. From early freedom narratives and poetry to Hip-Hop and film, we will trace a range of artistic conventions and cultural movements while paying close attention to broader historical shifts in American life over the past three centuries. We'll read broadly: poetry, fiction, speculative fiction, newspapers, and the like. We will ask: How do authors create, define, and even exceed a tradition? What are some of the recurring themes and motifs within this tradition? Authors may include: Phillis Wheatley, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, W.E.B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Toni Morrison, and Eve Ewing. This course satisfies the Literatures of the Americas requirement for English majors.

Full details for AMST 2650 - Introduction to African American Literature

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.

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

This course focuses on African American and African Diaspora visual art from the 1800s to the present. It introduces significant artists and artworks as well as key movements, social, political, and economic issues, and critical discourse that mark this body of work. We will begin with an overview of African art and experiences of the Middle Passage, slavery, and colonialism that inform global blackness and our definition of diaspora. Then, we will address a range of topics central to African diasporic artmaking including representational struggle and visual capture, commodification, institutional and political critique, queered black gender and sexuality, spatial instability and reclamation. The core of the course is centered in the 20th century with a focus on painting, sculpture, installation art, performance, photography, film, and new media.

Full details for AMST 2700 - Introduction to African American and African Diaspora Art

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 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.

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

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.

Full details for AMST 2775 - The North American West

This course examines controversies in the theory and history of civil disobedience. Do citizens have obligations to obey unjust laws? Can law breaking ever be civil rather than criminal? Do disruptive protests endanger democracy or strengthen the rule of law? How do acts of protest influence public opinion and policy? How is the distinction between violence and nonviolence politically constructed and contested? We will study classical writings and contemporary scholarship in pursuit of answers to these questions and related debates concerning the rule of law, conscientious objection, the uses of civility and incivility, punishment and responsibility, as well as whistleblowing, direct action, strikes, sabotage, hacktivism, and rioting.

Full details for AMST 2785 - Civil Disobedience

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.

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

Full details for AMST 2801 - Social Movements

Provides an introduction to the role computing and information technologies played in political public life, from tabulating machines used to calculate the census to Big Tech's impact on democratic procedures, the future of labor, and the environment. Though organized around four thematic units (Recognizing and Representing, Knowing, Working, and Belonging), the course pays attention to the chronological trajectory of technologies and political practices and students will develop the skills necessary for historical analysis. While focusing on the US experience the course also highlights the international flow of labor, materials, and ideas. By studying the development of computing historically, we will grapple with the effects of computing and data sciences on society today, paying special attention to critiques of economic, racial, and gender injustice. The course will meet twice a week, and each meeting will include a lecture followed by a discussion.

Full details for AMST 2980 - Inventing an Information Society

In his work "Black Reconstruction in America," Du Bois glosses over a key moment in American revolutionary thinking. Senator Wade of Ohio, among three Whig politicians impatient with Abraham Lincoln's acccommodationism in relation to the defeated South, proposes a certain radical policy. That is, the newly liberated slaves must be willing to act their former oppressors. Du Bois, in cursory parliamentary fashion, makes mention of Wade's radicalism but never engages it. However, in his biography of John Brown, we find Du Bois' thinking of a piece with Wade's. This course will chart the unfolding of Du Bois's critique: from his non-engagement to what we might take to be an almost full embrace of Wade's proposal through the radical actions of John Brown.

Full details for AMST 3029 - Revolutionary John Brown: As Figured by W.E.B. Du Bois

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.

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

This course examines compelling and complementary philosophies, pieties, and consequences of the Black Power era to the present. With an eye to the history that precedes this era, we chart the liberatory visions, evolving out of the persistent struggles and massive organizing of African Americans in the 1950s and 60s, and trace their far-reaching impact throughout the last half of the 20th century. We examine what is arguably the most significant social movement of the first quarter of the 21st century, #BlackLivesMatter Movement—particularly its aim, development, and effects, as well as its complex relationship to previous Black freedom movements and Black radicalism in general. After taking stocking, we will ask: What’s after Black Lives Matter? We also explore how the idiom of Black Power takes on spiritual meaning and translates into a Black Liberation Theology and into new Black religions like the Nation of Islam. Our aim is to keep in view the significance of the Black Power era for understanding social change and why “freedom is a constant struggle.” We will give special attention to relevant contemporary movements, debates, and issues (e.g., Cooperation Jackson, pan-Africanism, intersectionality, nationalism, the role of Black churches, politics of representation, racial capitalism, electoral politics).

Full details for AMST 3237 - Black Power, Black Theology to After Black Lives Matter

In this course, we will examine one of the most important documents in American history - our Constitution. Course topics will include the historical background of the document from the Magna Carta to the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. We will look at the creation of the Constitution, including the conflict between strong supporters of this proposed new Constitution (Federalists) and their opponents (Anti-Federalists). How did the Founders resolve their differences and what led the States to adopt a document limiting and balancing the powers of the President, Congress, and the Judiciary? We shall look at the constant tension (from the beginning to the present) over the balance of power between the three co-equal branches. We shall discuss the role of the Constitution from both empirical and theoretical perspectives and look at how it has evolved from 1788 to the present day. Special attention will be paid to the use of Amendments, particularly the Bill of Rights, to address events/circumstances unforeseen by the drafters. Finally, the course will discuss critical cases where the Supreme Court defined and redefined what the Constitution meant.

Full details for AMST 3271 - Constitutional Law: An Introduction

In her pathbreaking text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval Saidiya Hartman writes that young Black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise. This two-semester course endeavors to travel through those worlds using the cultural and musical forms of gospel and the blues as our compass. The first semester is guided by the work of scholars and writers like Angela Davis, Hazel Carby, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones and artists like Ethel Waters, Bessie Smith, Victoria Spivey, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Together we will interrogate the spectrum of lived experiences making for a kaleidoscopic sonic history of joy, pleasure, sorrow, resistance, and everything in between. (HC)

Full details for AMST 3322 - Gospel and The Blues: A Black Women's History I, 1900-1973

At the conclusion of World War II, the United States ushered in a new international order based on the principles of the Atlantic Charter, which became the basis for the United Nations Charter: including but not limited to the right to self-determination and global economic cooperation. All this changed when Henry Kissinger proclaimed that The whites are (in Africa) to stay and the only way that constructive change can come about is through them. There is no hope for the blacks to gain the political rights they seek through violence, which will only lead to chaos and increased opportunities for the communists. This course examines how US Foreign policy toward Africa has been formulated and executed since the Nixon years.

Full details for AMST 3401 - The Whites are Here to Stay: US-Africa Policy from Nixon to Date

Social Justice highlights refugee-led organizing and its intersections with un/documented and Indigenous beyond borders activism. We will work with and learn from refugee and asylum seekers led organizations that are started by and run by members of formerly displaced groups. These organizations build collectives and coalitions to organize communities across identities and legal categories and advocate for access to mobility and social justice. We will closely collaborate with these organizations and work on joint research projects.

Full details for AMST 3420 - Social Justice: Special Topics

Is the U.S. college system a great equalizer or a cause of growing inequality? Improved access to higher education has brought millions of Americans into the middle class, and yet rising selectivity has meant that a disproportionate share of the economic elite come from a few top colleges. This course will explore the three big parts of the college experience --- (1) admissions and the college-going decision; (2) education while in college; and (3) college completion and labor market entry --- and ask how each part contributes to inequality in economic outcomes. Lectures and readings will focus on simple economic theories of higher education as well as the empirical methods used to test these theories.

Full details for AMST 3445 - Inequality in U.S. Higher Education

In 1940, with the publication of his novel Native Son, Richard Wright helped to launch the protest era in African American literature. This course focuses on the development of key fiction and nonfiction genres that have shaped the development of African American literature from the mid-20th-century to the contemporary era. Genres that we will consider include poetry, fiction, the essay, the speech, autobiography, and the novel. We will explore the main periods in this literature's development such as the Black Arts movement of the 1960s and the black women's literary renaissance of the 1970s, and consider the rise of science fiction writing. Authors who will be considered include Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Malcolm X, Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ishmael Reed, and August Wilson. We will also incorporate discussion of works in film and art that have been the outgrowth of writing from African American authors. The course will include screenings of scenes from the class film A Raisin in the Sun, along with the films Dutchman and Beloved.

Full details for AMST 3508 - African American Literature: 1930s-present

Our focus in this course will be on the vibrantly varied body of poetry produced in the United States during the 20th century. Encompassing strains of worldly celebration and prophetic rage, visionary ecstasy and minute attention to ordinary life, this poetry breaks new ground in every decade, mixing formal and stylistic innovation with a continuously expanding sense of the national landscape in all its demographic and cultural diversity. Poets to be studied include Robert Frost, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, A. R. Ammons, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, and others.

Full details for AMST 3525 - Howls and Love Songs: Twentieth Century American Poetry

America has fought two wars in the 21st century, in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were the longest wars in American history and ended badly, amid much ambivalence about the defense policies that created them. Those wars and policies are part of the long history of the war that America has fought as a global power and the policies that shaped those wars and shaped that global power. This course will look at US defense policies and military experience over the long 20th century, from the earth-spanning conflicts of World War I and II, to the nuclear tension of Cold War conflicts, to the global war on terror, and finally to current conflicts like Ukraine and the Middle East. Though this course is primarily about the United States, it draws in the critical global events and actors as well so as to understand the entire history — as much as possible.

Full details for AMST 3571 - American Defense Policy & Military History from the World Wars to the Global War on Terror

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.

Full details for AMST 3602 - From Witchcraft to K-Pop Crossover: A 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. (PL)

Full details for AMST 3617 - Cornell Hip-Hop Collective

In 1968, amongst cultural and political turmoil, the American film industry adopted the ratings system, which helped usher in the kinds of cinema we know today. This course focuses on developments in U.S. cinema since then: its politics, technological and economic transformations, relationship to other media, and changing ways in which people consume it. A main focus will be the aesthetic developments of films themselves: new and changing genres, new visual styles, new ways of storytelling, and ways in which new voices and visions have emerged. Weekly screenings will include mainstream, independent, and documentary films. The course can be taken as a complement to "American Cinema" (AMST 2760) or independently.

Full details for AMST 3760 - American Cinema since 1968

In this course we will explore the origins and consequences of mass incarceration- extraordinarily high incarceration rates within particular demographic groups above and beyond historical levels in the United States. We will examine theories of social control and deviance to uncover how institutions and individuals use power to shape societies. This course also engages theories of state power to understand and to analyze how labeling is deployed to control groups of people, and, in doing so, we will conduct a genealogy of a contemporary driver of social inequality: the prison industrial complex. Current policy debates around the movement to reduce the number of men and women in American jails and prisons will also be covered. Contemporary social problems like homelessness and food insecurity will be discussed in detail, as well as how mass incarceration contributes to growing gaps in labor force participation, wealth accumulation, and familial instability.

Full details for AMST 3808 - Mass Incarceration and Social Inequality in America

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, Bola?Cesaire, Nourbese Philip, Hong, Long Soldier, Rankine, Lamar, Kaminsky, and Xie.

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

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 seminar will explore the relationship between diversity and democracy in American political thought and in the social sciences more broadly. In the US, understandings of what “diversity” means have fundamentally revolved around ideologies and ideas about “racial difference,” ie. racism. Diversity has at various points been constructed as a limit to democracy’s extensiveness, as an enriching and even necessary feature of democratic life, or as a source of friction that should be dampened through regulations and management. The course will explore historical and contemporary debates about diversity and democracy, treating as contributors to these debates social scientific studies that have sought to empirically assess the relationship.

Full details for AMST 4011 - Diversity, Racism, Democracy

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

Full details for AMST 4021 - American Conservative Thought

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.

Full details for AMST 4051 - Death Penalty in America

How did the U.S. and China reach this precarious moment? Are they on the brink of a hot war, or can diplomacy still prevent the worst? Is a cold peace even possible? This course critically examines the history of U.S.-China relations from 1949 to 2025, exploring the key diplomatic, economic, military, social, and ideological developments that have shaped bilateral ties. Beginning with early Cold War hostility (1949–1972), the Korean War (1950–1953), and the prolonged diplomatic estrangement (1953–1972), the course traces pivotal moments such as Nixon’s historic rapprochement (1972-1979), the cautious engagement of normalization (1979–1989), China’s economic rise and global integration (1990s–2008), and the evolving tensions of interdependence often described as ‘One Bed, Two Dreams’ (2008–present), shifting security dilemmas, and ongoing trade and technological competition. Special attention will be given to the contemporary landscape of strategic containment, rivalry, and the price of competition and cooperation. Through a multidisciplinary approach, students will analyze primary sources, academic literature, government reports, and firsthand accounts to assess how U.S.-China relations have evolved within a broader global context. Discussions will engage with pressing issues, including military tensions in the Indo-Pacific, economic decoupling, and the future trajectory of the bilateral relationship in an era of geopolitical uncertainty.

Full details for AMST 4076 - History of US-China Relations, 1949-2025

This course explores poverty and inequality in American society through the lens of ethnographic and other field-based research. We will read classic and contemporary texts which have shaped our understanding of how social inequality and exclusion constrain people's daily lives and how groups develop innovative responses to these constraints.

Full details for AMST 4160 - The Ethnography of Poverty and Inequality

This seminar brings together work in critical black studies and psychoanalysis with recent black art histories to examine black abstraction and conceptualism. Blackness can be understood as a concept made material through the violence of racialization. This concept is endlessly mutable and variously signifies a wide range of psychoaffective phenomena associated with difference, Otherness, abjection, dependency, and much more. We will track the permutations of black conceptualism through conceptual art and visual abstraction, investigating the pressure blackness places on the assumptive logics of conceptual art as well as the potential the genre holds for understanding black being differently. Artists and thinkers will include: Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, W.E.B. DuBois, Huey Copeland, Hortense Spillers, David Marriott, Senga Nengudi, Steve McQueen, Cameron Rowland, Robert Morris, Clement Greenberg.

Full details for AMST 4515 - Black Abstraction and Conceptual Art

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 seminar will explore the extraordinary literature, music, art, and film emerging from and about Los Angeles. As a global city, Los Angeles offers a glimpse of a world in transit; one that challenges preconceptions and established forms. Paying special attention to the work of Latinx creators, but also engaging with the many communities, including Indigenous, African American, and Asian American, that make art in LA, this course will offer students a chance to study and enjoy a wide variety of creative forms while also learning about resilience, innovative resistance movements, and the complexity of collaboration.

Full details for AMST 4612 - LA Stories: Literature, Film, and Music from Los Angeles

The dispossession of Indigenous nations by Europeans represents the foundation of the past five centuries of North American history. Yet the truth of that history remains cloaked behind various Western legal-religious justifications for the dispossession of lndigenous American populations by Europeans (i.e., terra nullius, the Doctrine of Discovery, the right of conquest, and Manifest Destiny). Through analysis of primary texts and up-to-date historical and legal scholarship, students in this course will unpack these still-thriving tropes of settler-colonial justification for dispossession, assess the true impact of the taking of Indigenous lands, and explore prospects for meaningful reconciliation in the present.

Full details for AMST 4674 - Dispossession, Truth, and Reconciliation

This course focuses on works that exemplify environmental consciousness-a sense that humans are not the center of the world and that to think they are may have catastrophic consequences for humans themselves. Environmental literature is not just a major strand of American literature but one of its most distinctive contributions to the literature of the world. We will be reading works mainly from the 19th and 20th centuries, both poetry and fiction, confronting the challenges of thinking and writing with an ecological consciousness in the 21st. Cornell being a rich environment in which to pursue such investigations, creative projects will be encouraged. Inspiration is assured.

Full details for AMST 4675 - The Environmental Imagination in American Literature

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.

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.

Full details for AMST 4705 - Nightlife

This course is a theoretical exploration of digital biopolitics, a convergence of how digital technologies mediate, govern, and regulate life, particularly within frameworks of power and control. Extending the concept of biopolitics—the governance of populations through the imbrication of life processes into political calculations to enhance the former—the course foregrounds how computational systems, algorithms, and data practices shape and are shaped by cultural, political, and economic forces. The interdisciplinary course, linking political philosophy, media theory, and race studies, thinks with a wide range of scholars for whom digitality, as it encounters biopolitics, is generative for a deeper understanding of the datafied world. This exploration follows sections, including data as a resource, digital embodiment and corporeality, digital labor and necropolitics, and biopolitical resistance in digital spaces. Foundational to the course are inquiries about posthumanism and ethics, such as: How does the digital reconfigure traditional boundaries between human and non-human, self and other? As technology mediates biopolitical power, who holds systems accountable for harm and injustice?

Full details for AMST 4944 - Digital Biopolitics

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

In his work "Black Reconstruction in AMerica," Du Bois glosses over a key moment in American revolutionary thinking. Senator Wade of Ohio, among three Whig politicians impatient with Abraham Lincoln's acccommodationism in relation to the defeated South, proposes a certain radical policy. That is, the newly liberated slaves must be willing to act their former oppressors. Du Bois, in cursory parliamentary fashion, makes mention of Wade's radicalism but never engages it. However, in his biography of John Brown, we find Du Bois' thinking of a piece with Wade's. This course will chart the unfolding of Du Bois's critique: from his non-engagement to what we might take to be an almost full embrace of Wade's proposal through the radical actions of John Brown.

Full details for AMST 6029 - Revolutionary John Brown: As Figured by W.E.B. Du Bois

How did the U.S. and China reach this precarious moment? Are they on the brink of a hot war, or can diplomacy still prevent the worst? Is a cold peace even possible? This course critically examines the history of U.S.-China relations from 1949 to 2025, exploring the key diplomatic, economic, military, social, and ideological developments that have shaped bilateral ties. Beginning with early Cold War hostility (1949–1972), the Korean War (1950–1953), and the prolonged diplomatic estrangement (1953–1972), the course traces pivotal moments such as Nixon’s historic rapprochement (1972-1979), the cautious engagement of normalization (1979–1989), China’s economic rise and global integration (1990s–2008), and the evolving tensions of interdependence often described as ‘One Bed, Two Dreams’ (2008–present), shifting security dilemmas, and ongoing trade and technological competition. Special attention will be given to the contemporary landscape of strategic containment, rivalry, and the price of competition and cooperation. Through a multidisciplinary approach, students will analyze primary sources, academic literature, government reports, and firsthand accounts to assess how U.S.-China relations have evolved within a broader global context. Discussions will engage with pressing issues, including military tensions in the Indo-Pacific, economic decoupling, and the future trajectory of the bilateral relationship in an era of geopolitical uncertainty.

Full details for AMST 6076 - History of US-China Relations, 1949-2025

This seminar brings together work in critical black studies and psychoanalysis with recent black art histories to examine black abstraction and conceptualism. Blackness can be understood as a concept made material through the violence of racialization. This concept is endlessly mutable and variously signifies a wide range of psychoaffective phenomena associated with difference, Otherness, abjection, dependency, and much more. We will track the permutations of black conceptualism through conceptual art and visual abstraction, investigating the pressure blackness places on the assumptive logics of conceptual art as well as the potential the genre holds for understanding black being differently. Artists and thinkers will include: Adrian Piper, Lorna Simpson, W.E.B. DuBois, Huey Copeland, Hortense Spillers, David Marriott, Senga Nengudi, Steve McQueen, Cameron Rowland, Robert Morris, Clement Greenberg.

Full details for AMST 6515 - Black Abstraction and Conceptual Art